“Daddy?” Lucy repeated, her voice small and lost.
“I’m coming in now, dumpling.” The pet name reminded him of the dumplings Krystyna had planned to make them for supper tonight, but he pushed the thought from his head and went inside. The reminders would be everywhere for a long, long while, and he must not give in to weeping every time they surfaced.
After Romaine and Rose went home he closed the doors against the night chill and turned to find the girls hovering a footstep away, looking up at him as if fearing he, too, would disappear from their lives. “Girls...” he said, and dropped down to their level. They moved into his open arms the way floodwaters move into riverbanks, pushing and burrowing and eroding his substructure. What to say to them, how to fill this immense void, how to be strong for them when he felt annihilated. He couldn’t offer any of the usual platitudes—Do you want to color? How about a cookie?—they didn’t want color crayons or cookies. What they wanted was their mother, and he couldn’t bring her back.
“I was thinking...” He struggled to think of a diversion for his children, then extemporized. “... you don’t have to go to school tomorrow if you don’t want to. Maybe you’d like to go out to Grandpa and Grandma Olczak’s for a while.”
“We want to stay with you,” Lucy said, clinging.
“Well, Daddy’s going to have some things to do.” Picking out cemetery plots and coffins.
“I don’t want to go to Grandma’s. I want to stay with you!” She started to cry.
“All right. All right.” He’d handle it tomorrow.
He picked them up and carried them into the kitchen, where the women had obliterated any dear little remainders Krystyna might have left behind this morning—her coffee cup in the sink, the pot with the grounds on the cold stove, the last dish towel she’d touched, her chair maybe angled out from the table as if she’d just risen. Whatever domestic traces she’d walked away from when she left for her mother’s, the women had unwittingly bulldozed with their kitchen fervor. Momentarily he resented it, then immediately felt guilty; after all they’d meant well and he had been grateful to have them here.
He snapped out the bright fluorescent light and carried the girls upstairs, pausing at the bottom for Lucy to pull the string that dropped clear down from the light in the upstairs hall ceiling, and was weighted with a metal washer at the bottom. Krystyna had tied that string on for them when they grew old enough to go up to bed by themselves.
His house was very small, only a kitchen, living room and a little entry hall downstairs; two bedrooms upstairs, plus the bathroom he’d made out of a closet. At the top of the steps he passed the door to the girls’ bedroom and asked, “How would you like to sleep in Daddy’s bed tonight?”
Another night they would have squealed, “Yes! Yes!” Tonight Anne nodded her head without speaking a word, and Lucy asked somberly, “Will we sleep with you all the time from now on?”
“No,” he answered. “Just for the time being.”
He stood them on the bed Krystyna’s folks had given them for a wedding present. It was made of tubular tin that chimed as the mattress took the girls’ weight. A reading light was clamped onto the headboard; Krystyna had put it there. He turned it on and pulled down the covers that she had washed last Monday and put on the bed fresh off the line, the way she loved to do. “Get in and I’ll be here in a minute, soon as I get washed up, okay?”
He left them sitting on the bed staring after him as he went into the bathroom and closed the door.
Krystyna’s nightie was hanging on the back of it. Her face powder had left a dusting around the faucets on the sink that she had chosen when he’d converted the room last year. Her toothbrush hung on the chrome-and-glass holder along with the other three. He’d installed some cupboards for towels and blankets, and she’d painted them pink, and had crocheted a pink-and-white doily for the top of the toilet tank. On the doily sat a bottle of her Avon perfume. He lifted it and read the label. Forever Spring. He opened it and smelled it, and dropped down to sit on the closed lid of the toilet with the bottle in one hand, the cap in the other, his head hanging so his tears dropped straight as a plumb line from his eyelids to the pink rug between his boots. A tornado of weeping swirled out of him suddenly, and he opened his mouth and pointed his face toward the ceiling, suppressing the sound for his children’s benefit. He cradled his ribs with both arms as his body was wracked with torment. He writhed, letting the misery inundate him, holding silent all the while lest his little girls carry away any memories that would haunt them further. And when he could contain it no longer, he got up and ran the tub water full force to cover the sound, and muffled his sobs in a towel that was hanging on a rack and still smelled of Krystyna’s dusting powder.
Later, when the worst had passed, he washed his face and hung up his soiled overalls over her nightgown as if it were he lying over her for the last time, and shut out the bathroom light and went in to the girls, dressed in his boxer shorts and undershirt.
Anne was sitting up in the middle of the bed, wide-eyed and motionless, the way she’d been so much of the time since it happened. Lucy was curled up on a pillow, awake, sucking her thumb. She popped up the minute he came out, as if to stop him should he try to go somewhere else in the house.
“We want you to sleep in the middle, Daddy,” Anne said.
So he got in between them, his head on the crack between the two pillows, and got them both snuggled up at his sides with their freshly washed hair close by for kissing. Oh, how she had fixed their hair, so many different ways. On Saturday nights she set it in pin curls for Sunday Mass. Plaited it in French braids when it was long enough. Gave them Toni’s a couple of times a year. Fussing with white ribbons and veils for the various feast days when they had to march in processions at church. How could a daddy learn to do all that? And when would he have time?
He reached up and switched off the bed lamp.
“Uh-oh, we left the hall light on. Will you turn it off, Annie?” She was closest to the outside.
“No,” she answered stubbornly, curling on her side and presenting her spine. “I don’t want to. Mommy always let us leave it on as long as we wanted to!”
But that was when Mommy put them to bed first, then came back downstairs to spend the rest of the evening with him. He climbed over Anne and went out to the hall to pull on the string. At the bottom of the stairs the washer bumped against the wall. He returned to bed and got between them and felt them move as close as they could against his sides.
Above the bed a high window faced east. Beside it a door with another window gave onto the railed roof of the downstairs porch. Moonlight flooded in over the linoleum floor and across the flowered chenille bedspread that Krystyna had saved her hair-setting money for. He remembered the first night they’d slept beneath the new spread, a little over a year ago, and how they’d made love and giggled softly afterward with their heads covered, so they wouldn’t wake up the girls.
Lucy sat up in the moonlight and said, “Daddy, isn’t Mommy really coming home anymore?”
He smoothed her silky hair and said, “No, baby, she’s not.”
“Mary Jean says that they’re gonna bury Mommy in the ground.” Mary Jean was her cousin, a sixth-grader, one of Romaine’s girls. “Are they really, Daddy?”
“Well, sort of, honey, but it’s not really Mommy, because she’s already gone to heaven.”
Lucy put her thumb in her mouth and considered for a full minute, sitting still as a stuffed doll. Then she began to cry. Anne, meanwhile, remained coiled up in a pinwheel of hurt with her backside to her daddy and her tears wetting the sheets on her mother’s side of the bed.
CHAPTER FIVE
The town knew when a body lay in repose because the purple neon light above the door of Iten & Heid’s Funeral Home would be turned on. For the next four days the light glowed for Krystyna Olczak. The door was never locked. Mourners could visit Krystyna at any hour of the day or night, and almost everybody in Browerville
did. People often went in alone, to kneel in the long, narrow wine-hued room among the stinging smell of carnations, and pray the rosary for her. Or they went to church and prayed the rosary in the evening, led by Father Kuzdek. They lit vigil lights and had Masses said for her, and the women made sure Eddie didn’t run out of food, while the men made sure his janitorial duties were taken care of at St. Joseph’s. Since Eddie was the one who usually dug the graves at St. Joseph’s Cemetery, his brothers saw to that job for him. Eddie, as honest as the day was long, offered to pay them the usual fifteen dollars for the work, but they made him put his money back in his pocket and took him uptown for a beer, which Eddie couldn’t finish. The beer, like all the other good things in Eddie’s life, had lost its appeal without Krystyna.
Eddie went to the funeral home to sit beside her casket two or three times a day. With everyone taking care of his chores for him, he had too much time on his hands. Even the girls seemed to be gone a lot, sometimes out to one of the farms, other times at their cousins’ houses around town. He had only to cross the vacant lot and Main Street to get to the door with the purple light above it. Inside, looking down at her peaceful face, at her hands folded around the blue beads of her own rosary, he tried to understand why God had taken her, but could not. Sometimes he would touch her cold cheek and worry about the children seeing her dead, but what could he do? She would be buried on Monday, and before the service everyone would gather here for the closing of the casket.
Eddie happened to be there alone on Saturday when the thumb latch on the door behind him clicked, the afternoon light momentarily flooded the maroon gloom, then the door closed once again. He remained as he was, seated, facing the casket, lost in reflection when Sister Dora and Sister Regina approached his side.
He rose immediately and whispered, “Good afternoon, Sisters.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Olczak,” they whispered in unison. They looked like bookends, their veils spread precisely to the tips of their shoulders, their hands tucked into their sleeves.
“It’s so good of you to come.”
“Your wife was as close to a saint as it’s possible to be on this earth,” Sister Dora said.
“She was a good woman, yes.”
“How are the children doing?” Sister Regina inquired.
“Not so good, not so bad. It’s hard to tell yet. They won’t sleep in their room alone and Anne has to have the light on. They’re out at my folks’ today. You know how they love it out at the farm.”
“Yes, Lucy has told me many times how she loves it, and so has Anne. They are very dear children, Mr. Olczack.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
“The schoolroom seemed so sad without them yesterday.”
“Yeah, I suppose it did. The rest of the kids, they all kind of feel it too, I suppose.”
“And how about you, Mr. Olczack?”
“Me? Oh, well...” His gaze moved toward the casket and tears gathered in his eyes. “It’ll take time.”
“I’ve been praying for you,” Sister Regina whispered.
“Thank you, Sister.”
The two nuns stepped back in unison. They had a way of nodding almost imperceptibly in deference to whomever they were addressing, and of moving in so smooth a fashion it appeared they were on wheels. Their angelic mien left an afterglow, a warmth that melted the sharp edges off Eddie’s sadness as they went to the casket and stood looking down at Krystyna. Though a velvet-padded prie-dieu was provided, they made the sign of the cross, then stood motionless with their hands folded, fingers pointing straight to heaven. From the back they again looked identical—same height, same outline of the same black clothing. Through Sister Regina’s veil Eddie could see the vigil light that burned in a red glass sconce on the wall. The thin black fabric dimmed its glow as the nuns stood silent, praying. Sister Regina reached into the folds of her habit, found a white handkerchief and dried her eyes, then tucked the hanky away and refolded her hands.
The nuns’ presence brought Eddie a measure of ease. It always had. Working among them at the church and the school, he’d often thought that their tranquillity somehow seeped into him and calmed him, too, for even during the most demanding days, when it seemed Eddie was needed in three places at once—and such days were many when a person worked around children—he remained unruffled.
After several minutes, the nuns turned in unison and moved several feet away from the coffin, where they knelt on the carpeted floor and took out their rosaries.
Eddie knelt, too, keeping a respectful distance, and closed his eyes and let his mind drift in prayer. Their presence beside him momentarily salved his wounded heart and wiped away his terrible suffering.
Many minutes later the nuns put away their rosaries and got to their feet. The faint rustle of their clothing opened Eddie’s eyes and he said the sign of the cross and got up, too.
“Thank you, Sisters, for coming. She liked all of you,” he said quietly.
“We’ll miss her very much,” Sister Regina said.
“Oh, I know. Everybody’s going to miss her.”
Sister Regina could see how grief had ravaged his face. The skin beneath his eyes had turned violet, and his cheeks seemed to have sunk like a fallen cake. Lines that had been barely visible two days ago now cut deep grooves the shape of ice tongs beside his nose and mouth. Once again she felt the strong desire to comfort him with a touch, there, on his face, perhaps, to soothe it with her palm as she once soothed Grandma Rosella. The memory was vague, but Sister Regina knew it was the day they had buried Aunt Esther, who was Grandma Rosella’s second-youngest daughter. She had died of pneumonia in the spring of the year Regina was ten years old. After the funeral Regina had been with a number of her cousins who had gathered around their grandmother while she stood somewhere quiet and peaceful, away from the hustle and bustle of the women who were preparing food to be served to the crowd. She remembered that there’d been an apple tree in bloom and most of the blossoms had fallen and lay in a drift of white on the grass, and that the sun had been behind them as they looked down a hill toward the east. Her grandma had sat down on the grass and sighed, surrounded by her grandchildren, and her eyes had held a sadness so grave that the ten-year-old Regina had never forgotten it. Grandma Rosella had spoken as if to the red barn and silo that were visible at the bottom of the hill. “She used to bring me little bouquets of violets and harebells that she found in the woods, and the stems would all be squashed from her little hand, and her hand would be green. She was the sweetest little girl you ever saw.” It was then Regina had soothed her grandmother’s soft, fuzzy cheek and said, “Don’t be sad, Grandma. She’s with God now.”
The emotions that had run through her then ran through her now as she looked into the sorrowful eyes of Eddie Olczak. But instead of touching his face she hid her hands deep within her sleeves as all nuns were expected to do in the presence of seculars, particularly men. She noted, however, that his eyes were brown—something she had never noticed before—and that he kept his usual respectful distance as they spoke. In terms of condolences, never had she wished mankind had more to offer at times like these than she did at this moment. She could only say what she’d said to her grandmother all those years ago.
“Try not to be sad, Mr. Olczak. She’s with God now.” Her words, instead of consoling, brought his tears brimming. They spilled over the edge of his eyelids leaving a pair of shiny tracks that glowed molten, reflecting the light of the red wall sconces. He averted his head and nodded once as the tears fell and made two dark spots on the front of his plain blue shirt. She felt decimated to have made him feel worse.
“We shall have a Mass celebrated for the repose of her soul,” she told him.
With his head still lowered he ran a knuckle beneath his nose and whispered, so thick and low she could barely hear, “Thank you, Sister.”
The two nuns left the funeral home, squinting in the vivid autumnal sun that hurt their eyes. On their way back to the convent Sister Regina fe
lt an overpowering frustration pushing up, up from deep inside. It came out of nowhere, catching her by surprise, like the sun after the dimness. It clutched at her throat and beat against her mind as she thought of Krystyna and the senselessness of her death. It wasn’t exactly blame she felt toward God, more a vast disappointment in Him for His bad judgment in robbing Krystyna’s family of her.
She finally asked Sister Dora, “Does Krystyna’s death affect you more deeply than others have, Sister?”
“I think it does, yes.”
Sister Regina sighed and looked at the clear blue sky. “I’ve been struggling to understand the why of all this.”
“God has His reasons.”
“But what good reason could there be for this?”
Sister Dora glanced over and said, “It’s more than Krystyna’s death, isn’t it? I think you’ve been struggling with a number of things lately.”
Sister Regina made no reply. Instead she sighed deeply and kept in perfect step with Sister Dora, a soft afternoon breeze billowing their veils while from someplace on the southwest side of town came the sound of life continuing. A dog barking, a car engine droning, the Zigan boys sawing firewood. The familiar zz-zzing zz-zing of their rig drifted through the quiet afternoon as each piece broke and left the sawblade.
“I’ve been praying for you, Sister,” Sister Dora said. “I’ve asked the Holy Mother to intercede for you that you might be freed from this discontent you’ve been feeling.”