Cobwebs (7 page)

It’s the way she tells it,
thought Nancy.
It’s almost as if
she handed me down this memory along with high cheekbones and the knitting gene. Yeah, well, what if I don’t want it?

Why shouldn’t she want it? It was just a picture, just words. She made herself breathe. She could see the West Virginia evening, see Granny’s green-and-white-checked dress. “And then Josie came with the pie,” she said.

“That dear love Josie,” Granny said, sighing. Nancy was just a hair away from being in that loft herself. “But, oh, it was a day of reckoning in more ways than one.”

The front door light of the house where Grandpa was doctoring switched on, and then abruptly off. Granny’s face was turned back toward Nancy, and she didn’t notice the light.

“I spied on Papa when he was teaching George to drive,” said Josie. That was Josie, always so dramatic.

“So what?” I said. “Anybody can drive a horse.”

“But they were hiding up in the woods,” Josie said.

“You can’t learn to drive in the woods,” I said through a mouthful of pie.

Oy,
thought Nancy, and sat on both her feet.

The little fibber went right on with her crazy yarn. “George did, with no wagon. He ran along holding the reins.”

George was a fast runner. For a second I almost believed in this cuckoo picture I had of him running along behind a horse, towed by the reins. “Which horse? Bunny or Bounce?”

“Papa was the horse,” said Josie.

“Now I know you’re lying,” I said.

“Papa had the reins around him like this—” Josie used a hand to circle her chest and shoulders, the reins running back over the shoulders to George’s hands. “And he tied his hanky around his eyes and ran in and out of the trees. George had to run behind him with the reins. Papa made him use them to tell him which way to go.”

“What, gee and haw?” I asked.

“No. George wasn’t allowed to talk,” said Josie. “Papa said if George yanked his neck, he’d make him chop every tree he hit.”

What a family,
thought Nancy.
How could he not hit trees?

“How many did he hit?” I asked drily.

Josie put up her thumb and finger and made an O.

“Josephine. What actually did Papa tell George to do?”

Josie’s eyes were big and dark. “To tell Papa what to do just by using his hands.”

“Did he?”

“That’s how it looked to me,” said Josie.

That’s how it had looked to me, too, watching George drive Bump that morning. He was a natural.

Granny stopped talking. Nancy thought,
The End.

“What about you?” Nancy asked Granny. “Didn’t you drive?”

“Papa’d have let me drive earlier than sixteen if I could talk with my hands like George,” Granny said.

“And did he?”

She looked down at her hands, and closed them into soft fists. “I was gone by sixteen, came here to New York.”

The sky behind the house had faded, and the front of the house stayed shadowed.

“Granny?” Nancy asked. “Why’d you tell me that?”

“To get you thinking, girl,” said Granny.

“Thinking about what?”

“Anything!” Granny sounded bleary again, as if she’d already forgotten the story, as if it had gone right out of her mind.

Well, it has,
thought Nancy.
Now it’s in my mind, whether I like it or not: people running around blindfolded in the woods behind horses!
She asked, “You don’t think I think?”

“Don’t talk nonsense!” Granny sputtered.

This was the night when Nancy started to feel as if Granny’s stories were unraveling and then raveling again, knitting themselves into a new shape, and that she, Nancy, was getting knitted right in. It was unsatisfying: she wanted to know why that man wanted the doctor, and instead she got driving lessons in the woods.
Don’t talk nonsense.

“What’s keeping Giacomo?” Granny asked indignantly. “I’ve been sitting too long. Go on up and tell him I’m ready.”

Nancy and Granny usually waited in the car until Grandpa Joke came, but Nancy’s itchiness now increased so that she jumped out of her seat and through the car door, trailing knitting yarn. Why had the man turned the light off? Or had Grandpa done it? She wanted to get everything moving. She felt furious with Grandpa Joke for owing anyone enough money to get into this mess, but she was curious about him, too. What had Granny come to New York for? Just to
marry Grandpa Joke? Nancy didn’t even think Granny had known Grandpa when she came to New York.

She rolled her knitting around itself like a meatball and threw it through the open door onto the car seat. As if she were the grandmother and Granny were the grandchild, she said, “When you’re finished visiting, we’ll go get ice cream.” Granny didn’t say a word when Nancy slammed the door and walked to the house.

Dion hid on the roof of his own house. His father, Niko, didn’t know he was up there, and his sister, Mina, didn’t know, and his mother, Rose, didn’t know, so they didn’t try to make him come inside. He slipped down the fire escape, though, got as near as he could to Rose’s window. There were people around his mother’s bed: his father’s back, broad shoulders in a blue shirt; the doctor’s back, his suit jacket over the chair nearby; and Mina’s eyes, at the window.

He snapped back against the wall. Had Mina seen him? Someone was buzzing at the apartment door.

Nancy hit the buzzer again. She stood in the dark and waited. When no one came, she tried knocking.
After about twenty-five knocks the door opened a crack. No light came on.

“Yes?” asked a polite voice, a man’s voice. Nancy saw no one in the darkness, but she recognized the voice—or the hair on the back of her neck did.

She made her own voice strong and sure. “I need to talk to the doctor. Please tell him it’s Nancy.”

The door banged shut. There were voices inside, whispering. She thumped the door with her fist. Furious. Curious. It opened. Grandpa Joke was there, nobody else. Nancy reached for his hand and he stepped out. The door shut behind him. “What’s taking so long?” she demanded. “Granny wants to come up.”

“Hush, Nancy.” He gripped her shoulder. “I’m trying to guess if he saw your face. It’s bad enough he’ll know your voice.”

Nancy didn’t ask who. She didn’t ask why. She said, “I’m bringing her.” Her voice shook now.

“Stay hidden,” he said.

She whirled and dashed down the steps to pull open Granny’s car door. Grandpa Joke came to walk on the other side of Granny and help her up the steps. The front door swung open onto a hallway with a dim light.
Now there was another face in the doorway: a girl with long black hair.
Josie,
thought Nancy irrationally.

“You come, too.” The girl took Nancy’s hand.

Nancy stopped in the doorway and bent down. “What’s your name?”

“Wilhemina,” the child said.

“You have wings.” Red ones, made out of a clothes hanger or some other piece of wire, covered with sheer red material (maybe from a sexy nightie or ballet costume) and, on one wing, a sleek layer of red feathers. “How did you—”

“Hot glue.” Wilhemina pulled Nancy into the hall and said, “You’ve got angels on your tights.”

They were cupids, left over from Valentine’s Day. Rachel had sent Ned to buy them at Ricky’s. There was a commotion down the hall. “Where’s Mina?” called a woman’s voice. “I found the other bag of feathers—”

“That’s my mom!” The girl seemed surprised. She turned and ran toward a door at the end of the hall.

Just then a man came out. Nancy dropped back onto the stoop, eased the door almost shut. “Mina,” the man said, “Mama’s too sick to do more feathers now.”

“It’s already taken a week to do that one,” Mina said.
Nancy thought she sounded sympathetic, not snotty.

“Where’s your brother?”

“How am I supposed to know? Nobody tells me anything.”

Nancy could still feel Mina’s hand pulling her in. A warm hand. Good she wasn’t the sick one. Then who was? Her mother?

Nancy stayed outside, hidden like a spider under a tree. There was not a soul on the sidewalk to see her.
This is why we waited until dark. This is why they don’t tell me anything. So I won’t know.

T
he stories said it was hard to watch for the Angel if you didn’t know what you were looking for. It was easy to miss the Angel if you were looking somewhere else.

Dion stood at the front edge of the roof of his house, watching Nancy go down the steps and disappear under the trees. Whether or not his father knew Nancy’s voice, Dion already knew it, recognized the girl from the Promenade in his bones and veins the instant he heard her on the front stoop.

He sped down from the roof. From the shelter of an alley near the corner, he watched the doctor’s car drive away under the trees and around the curve, the
old man and woman and the girl inside it. It was definitely the girl from the Promenade.

Not that he hadn’t known she might be there. Hadn’t he seen her from this very roof, watching the doctor this afternoon? They had both heard the same intercom-to-stoop conversation. Dion wondered what it meant that the doctor hadn’t gone inside right then to see his mother. Money, that was it. The doctor hadn’t had enough money. Wasn’t that what his father had asked for on the intercom?

Dion rubbed his sore hands together. Shouldn’t
Dad
be paying the doctor? Maybe there was some special medicine the doctor needed to buy; maybe he had come back this evening to bring it. But it had sounded like the doctor owed Niko money.

Dion shivered, and it wasn’t from the cold wind on his hairless head. Why should there be a girl involved with the Wound Healer—and why should it be the girl he’d seen on the Promenade, the girl he’d been goofing on and flirting with from the playground dome? He had associated nothing so messy and scary with her. He’d thought she was more like the Angel of Brooklyn might be.

Dion slipped through the dark back alley and up the
fire escape to the window of the room he shared with Mina. He scratched his fingernails along the glass until she appeared and pushed up the window. “Meens,” he whispered. “Is she better?”

Mina shrugged, a one-shouldered shrug that clearly meant
not much better.
“We’ve got Oreos,” she said, and disappeared. Dion leaned on the wall and listened to himself breathe.

And then his father grabbed him by the arm. “Get yourself in here,” Niko said. But the angle was wrong from the window, and Dion sprang back. For once he was the faster jumper.

“What are you doing?” his father demanded. Dion pulled his baseball cap low over his eyes and his coat collar around his neck. He didn’t want Dad to notice his hair was gone.

Niko didn’t reach for him again. He leaned out the window and said, “You’re surviving, then?”

Just about,
thought Dion. “Where’d you find that doctor?”

Niko shrugged. “Connect the knots,” he said. It was what he always said about reporting, how it was just a matter of making connections from one person who’d
heard some information to another person who’d heard something else.

“Where?” Dion asked again patiently.

“In the OTB on Flatbush.”

“Come on, Green Medicine is not in the phone book.” Niko Papadopolis knew how to trace a story. Dion used to listen to him putting connections together, before, back when he admired his father and was proud of him and thought maybe he himself would like to be some kind of writer or investigator.
Green Medicine is not in the phone book.
How many times had Dion heard his father say that? Niko had muttered it to himself as he dialed the phone or walked the bars and betting parlors and bocce courts and coffee shops and Curley’s diner and the other places where the kind of people who interested him congregated, swapping tall tales about themselves, spreading rumors.

“You won’t come in?” It wasn’t like Niko to ask for anything; he usually just ordered Dion to do things. But Dion thought his father seemed nervous, jumpy in a new way. He didn’t mind the feeling it gave him, as if he, Dion, might have the upper hand. He shook his head and said, “That old man?”

“Joke is what they call him,” said his father. He lit a cigarette, and leaned on the windowsill. “‘That your real name?’ I asked him. We were at the OTB window that day.

“‘Giacomo,’ the guy says.

“‘An Italian? What’s your last name?’

“He says, ‘Verdi, up to the moment we came through immigration. Then we made a translation.’” Dion waited.

“Greene. With a silent
e.

“So I go with him into Curley’s and sit beside him at the counter. He gives his order: grilled mozzarella sandwiches and curly fries with extra paprika.”

Dion started to chuckle, turned it into a cough. “Enough with the journalistic detail.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s detail that saves the day, my friend.”

It was almost like a nice conversation, except for the fact that Dion was outside freezing, while his Dad stood in the bedroom, which was warm and had Dion’s bed in it. Dion stood up.

“Listen here,” his father said. He reached a hand toward his son. Dion stood still. “Details. Good shoes, Italian shoes, worn down at the heels. Baggy pants, as
though he’d lost some weight. And his wallet seemed baggy, too.”

“So what?”

“So I thought maybe he was low on funds, that’s so what. And I knew he didn’t know what I knew about him.” This kind of convoluted sentence was typical of Niko Papadopolis in speech, if not in writing. “I asked him if he was retired. He was still a doctor, he said. I already knew it. So I say—you know what I said?”

Dion was silent. A doctor without a hospital? A doctor with a failing practice? How did that happen?

“I say, ‘Once a healer, always a healer.’ He says he doesn’t treat insured people. He’s a hero. He’s here to help the poor. He thinks I’m too smooth. But I tell him, ‘I recognize you.’ He doesn’t ask what I recognize about him.”