Conundrum (7 page)

I called my mother back, as instructed, and told her everything was fine and under control. I sobbed into the phone as the shock of the incident sent a
delayed
wave of fear through my heart.
My entire body shook in fits and starts.
Neal hugged my leg and wouldn’t let go.
I had tried to be so grown
-
up and was proud I had put the fire out. I asked my mother how soon she’d get home. Soon wasn’t soon enough for me.

She said she was sorry, but she couldn’t leave. Her manager insisted she stay and finish what they were doing.
Hours went by. I opened all the windows as the
quiet
dark of night
blanketed
the neighborhood, trying to make the smoke seep out. All the walls in the house were blackened
from the
ceiling
down about two feet, like a ring around a bathtub
.
After I tucked Neal in bed and waited until he was asleep,
I sat on the front porch
, huddled in a blanket
in the chill air
,
and watched for my mom’s car.

Finally, late into the night, she drove up. I don’t remember what she said, but her anger spilled out of her mouth as she walked from room to room, assessing the damage.
She bedded me down on the living room couch without a kind word. My bedroom was charred and
my bed
uninhabitable, but I
’d been
able to find a pair of
pajamas
in my partially scorched dresser by the door.

The next day, she
kept me
home from school and
demanded I
write one hundred times on lined paper
:
“The next time I decide to do something stupid like that, I will ask permission first.”
She made me get up on a ladder and scrub the smoke
residue
of
f
all the walls, something that took the better part of a week. I
never
could
abide the smell of Lysol
after that
incident
.
She must have gotten over her anger, because I recall thumbing through books of wallpaper patterns, and her letting me choose a design for my
bed
room
walls
.

I had no idea w
hy that memory rushed back at me as I stood next to my car
, my keys gripped in my hand.
But twenty years
after the fac
t
, the obvious question c
a
me
t
o mind
.

Why did
n’t my
mother
rush out of her manager’s house and hurry home? How could she have
stayed away all those hours
?
I always blamed it on
Harv Blake
.
“
He wouldn’t let me leave
,
”
my mo
ther
had
said.
“
I had to stay
.
”
It was his fault.

All those years, I
’d
never questioned
her excuse
.
Wasn’t something very wrong with that picture?
If I had been the parent and my daughter called to tell me the house was on fire, I would have been out the door with tires squealing before my business manager could say a word in protest.
Just what had she been doing with
Harv
that night? I began to doubt it had anything to do with investments.

As I drove over the bridge into the city,
through the crowded, traffic-ridden streets
heading for the massive gray brick library building on Powell, I replayed my conversation with Anne. Those two disparate images stuck in my mind—Anne’s mother pulling me from a watery grave and my mother turning her back
on
he
r
children
engulfed
in flames.
The images felt heavy, imposing, significant.
But they were isolated moments, only small pieces of the whole tapestry of my life. And had nothing to do with my
current
purpose—uncover
ing
the truth of my father’s death.

I shoved those lingering images to the back of my mind and let my father’s name roll over my tongue.
Nathan Sitteroff.

Hard as I tried, not one memory surfaced. His name drew a blank. And
, for some reason
, that distressed me even more than the recent revelations of the afternoon.

Chapter 4

The librarian left me alone with the microfiche machine, after explaining how to access the different periodicals by date and keyword.
I had used th
o
se machines on occasion in college when working on term
papers, maybe eight years ago, and I
never
like
d
them.
I spent an hour putting in one rectangular
film
after another under the small warm bulb, searching for the name Sitteroff in medical and scientific journals. I found a half
-
dozen references to people whom I couldn’t imagine would be related
to me
, but it wasn’t until I started in on the newspapers that I came across something odd.

A
contributed article
in
T
he
Washington Post
, dated only eight months earlier, mentioned the name Nathan Sitteroff. I skimmed through the piece and nearly discarded it—something to do with
mothers and abusive husbands and custody battles.
A woman named Mandy Glessman wrote it, apparently a
n attorney who was
going through a bitter divorce
offering practical advice
for abused wives
.
My eyes were tired from the strain of reading small type in bad lighting, and my recent fitful sleeping combined with the
stuffy
room made it difficult to concentrate.
In my excitement to get to the library, I
had
skipped lunch, and my stomach, now free of nausea,
cried out
for food.
Yet,
a secondary glance at
t
he
author’s
byline
showed her to be from
New York, so that made me stop and reread.

I woke from my
ennui
when
I found the sentence with my father’s name.

“I named my son after an uncle I’d never met—Nathan Sitteroff. My father used to tell me
stories of how he and his protective
older
brother were moved from one foster home to another during the Great Depression. How they survived starvation and poverty and cruelty
.
O
ften the agency would try to place them in separate homes, because no one wanted to take on two children at once. Yet, my uncle Nathan refused to let his little brother Samuel—”

I
drew
in a breath. Sam Sitteroff. I knew that was my uncle’s name. And
there was the bit
about the foster homes.

“—be taken away from him. How he’d cry and cling to my father, until the agency relented. Finally, one kind couple, with
two sons of
their own, agreed to
take them in. Those sweet people
were
the grandparents I knew growing up. They raised Sam and Nathan as their own, putting them through school and eventually adopting them.”

The article went on to
discuss
how Mandy had married a
violent
man and the legal steps she
’d
had to go through to gain custody an
d protect her son
,
Nathan
,
from his
father. The article filled three columns, and nothing more was said about Nathan Sitteroff. But
that was
enough proof for me.

The whole time I sat hunched over in that room, Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” ran through my head.
Raff had always been enamored with
Alice
in
W
onderland
and
Through the Looking Glass
. He
had
spent a hefty sum on a large illustrated
and
annotated edition of the book
that featured richly colored drawings alongside commentary and text.
I kept picturing Raff, the brave
but
foolhardy champion, stalking the
fearsome Jabberwocky with the jaws that bite and the claws that catch.
He and Neal used to act out the poem, replete with foppish costumes
made from
sheets
belted around the waist and tied around his neck for a cape
, old Halloween attire, and illustrative car
d
board embellishments, such as chest armor and a woeful dragon-type mask
that sported bright red eyes drawn in our mother’s lipstick
.

Surely,
Raff’s current
mental nemesis was
not unlike th
is colorful fabrication of Carroll’s mind, a phantasm of evil with eyes of flame, something unsettling and horrifying that whiffl
ed
through the tulgey wood of Raff’s brain to haunt and torment him in his darkest hours, burbling as it
c
a
me
.
What
Raff needed
was
a
true
vorpal blade to fight the Jabberwocky
, a blade that, according to the poem,
went
snicker-snack
as the
fearless
hero f
ou
gh
t
the beast.
”
One two! One two! And through and through
.
 
.
 
.
He left it dead, and with its head, he went galumphing back.
”

I printed out the article and moved on to the AMA Journals. It didn’t take long for me to find contact information for Samuel Sitteroff MD, with a license to practice in the state of New York.
As I sat in the hard
-
back wooden chair, a sudden memory came to mind—of a small apartment inside a dark building that smelled musty, of dust and exhaust.
A dank
and creaking
elevator with
an
iron grate that slid closed over the opening
, entrapping me like a prison gate
—
and I could still hear the deep whirring sound the elevator made as it slugged upward
,
passing pale yellow metal doors with large black numbers for each floor.

Whenever I thought of New York,
those
w
ere
the
images and smells
I associated it with, but why? I strained to recall that apartment,
a room that made occasional appearance in my dreams,
with heavily upholstered couches covered with clear plastic. Plastic runners over the carpet. A tall glass cabinet filled with ceramic figurines. The smell of chicken soup?
Stale cigar smoke.
Two short, rotund people. The man hacking with a deep chest cough, sitting in an armchair and staring at a TV with the sound way up. The woman with tight white curls pinned to her head, in a pale blue floral housedress and clunky brown
orthopedic shoes on her feet.
European accents, hard to understand. Reserved smiles, polite, but no sense of feeling comfortable or welcome.

Those were my grandparents, I now understood. West Gunhill Road. Bronx. Where
had
that bit of trivia come from
?
I couldn’t
dredge
up any other impressions, except for a strange New York skyline, one that had something like two spaceships hovering in the air next to a
giant
metal globe along the side of a busy
thoroughfare
.
Something incongruent, but so identifiable as New York
in my child
-
mind’s eye
. I don’t remember ever having been there, but perhaps I had.

Maybe Raff would remember; he was
four
years older.
Had
he even
been
with me there, at the time? I looked up the number for the New York Bar Association, figuring maybe I could call tomorrow, since it was too late
Eastern
Time
to do more that day. Maybe I could find Mandy, my cousin.

I rolled the word
cousin
around in my mouth. Unlike most people I knew
—
who had so
many
family
members
they couldn’t keep track of all the names
—
I had just my little arena of close relatives. My mother was an only child. She had aunts and uncles and cousins back east, but for some reason we never saw them
while
growing up. No one ever came out to California to visit us.
Man
d
y Glessman would be my only true firs
t cousin
on my father’s side
. Maybe there were more
cousins
I didn’t know about. Like little Nathan Sitteroff, five years old, named after my father.

A
strange
affection
entered my heart
for this long
-
lost cousin who thought to honor my own father by naming her son after him—something even my brother
hadn’t
care
d
to do
.
No doubt the thought had crossed
Raff’s
mind. But maybe by dismissing it, he meant it
as a slap in our father’s face.

A
tinge of
annoyance
stirred within me.
Mandy Glessman had been told more about my own father than I had. I felt deprived of something due me, and
hoped that
my uncle and cousin would
have stories to tell me
—
th
o
se keepers and caretakers of my father’s past
. Even if they only had a little light to shed on the person of
my father, I wanted to hear it.

Sometimes we walk into a restaurant and smell food cooking, and only then do we realize how starving we are, that we’d gone all day without eating. Every olfactory sense wakes up and sends an alarm.
That’s how I felt, holding the phone number of my uncle’s medical practice in my hand.
I had gone through my whole life never once thinking about my father. For how could I miss some
one
I didn’t remember?
I was always the odd kid at school, the
aberration
with only one parent attending PTA night or
the Christmas show
—back then in the days before divorce was the norm.
The principal of our elementary school
had
sat next to me at sixth
-
grade graduation as a surrogate father,
trying
to make up for my lack.
Kids who came over to play would remark
on
how
strange it was
our mother worked full-time and that we had Mexican maids living in our house and making us dinner.