Princess of Passyunk (10 page)

“You don't think she'd give it back?” asked Ganny, when he realized Yevgeny's tongue had gone lame.

“I don't think so.”

Ganny sighed. “I guess I'll just have to go up and get it, then.”

The girl looked at him for the first time, her princess-perfect face showing wide-eyed concern. “Oh, but how dangerous of you!”

Ganady shrugged, squared his shoulders and tucked his glove into the waist of his pants. He took one step toward the brownstone, eyeing the basement railing, when Yevgeny, coming suddenly to his senses, said, “No,
I'll
get it!” He blushed violently. “After all, I hit it over here, didn't I?”

Seconds later, while Ganady and the princess looked on, he was teetering on the wrought-iron railing.

“Your friend is very brave,” said the princess. “Or very foolish, yes?”

Ganny glanced at her and was surprised by the glint of humor in her eyes. He grinned. “Yeah, well, he's kind of a show-off, I guess.”

She laughed. It was a bubbling rill of sound that reminded Ganady of his mother.

“Show-off, yes,” she repeated, her eyes on Yevgeny. “What are your names?”

“That's Eugene,” said Ganny wickedly, and felt a very tiny stab of contrition. “A lot of people call him ‘Gene.'”

“Gene,” she repeated, watching ‘Gene' climb from the railing to the first floor window sill.

“Yeah. My name's Ganady. Everybody calls me Ganny, though.”

She favored him with a direct appraisal.

“Nadezhda Chernenko,” she said and wrinkled her nose again. “I like to be called ‘Nadia.' I live right there.”

She pointed to a house of mellow golden brick two doors up. The golden-haired princess lived in a golden castle.

Yevgeny was now perched atop the first-floor window and was reaching up for the flower box.

“We live on the
zibete
,” said Ganady, watching his progress.

“The...the
zee-bett
?” asked Princess Nadia. She shook her head.

“Seventh Street. The
zibete
, that's—em—that's Yiddish for ‘seven.'”

“Oh. Are you Jewish?” She glanced from him to Yevgeny, a tiny furrow creasing her brow.

“We're Catholic. But my Baba is Jewish, so...” He shrugged.

“Oh, me too. Catholic. We go to Saint Stanislaus.”

“Us too,” said Ganny. “I wonder we've never seen each other.”

“Oh, we go to early mass and always sit in the back because my little brother cries sometimes.”

“I've got it!” proclaimed Yevgeny. He clung to the window box by one hand. The other was raised, triumphantly, fingers wrapped around the baseball.

At that exact moment, the window was flung open, a frizzled gray head popped out and a voice like the dead of winter demanded, “What are you doing, you
zle
(children)?
Stój
!
Odejdz
! Go away!”

A broom issued forth from the window then, flailing at the baseball in Yevgeny's hand.

Startled, Yevgeny slipped and fell, skidding down the wall and landing, feet first, in the flower box one floor below. The broom withdrew as swiftly as it had appeared.

“
Zawolam policje
!” cried the old woman and brought the window down on a spate of Polish invective.

Ganny and Nadia ran to where Yevgeny was attempting to extricate himself from the window box. He had managed to do this by the time they reached him. The three quickly withdrew to the sidewalk to examine Yevgeny's wounds. He had scraped the palms of both hands thoroughly and had gone through the knee of his chinos.

“Oh, dear!” said the Princess Nadia, her brow puckered with sweet concern. “You have hurt yourself. If you come to my house, you can wash and put some ointment on it.”

“Well...yeah...sure,” said Yevgeny and sent Ganady a significant look.

“Uh, I gotta go,” Ganady said. “My, um, my brother is waiting for me in the park.”

Yevgeny nodded vigorously. “Oh, yeah. That's right. Uh, see you later, okay?”

“Sure.” Ganny bent to pick up the baseball bat his friend had left lying on the sidewalk.

Nadia tugged lightly at Yevgeny's sleeve. “Come on, Eugene,” she said. “My house is right there.” She drew him gently away toward the golden castle. “Can I please call you ‘Gene?' I am Nadia.”

“Uh. Oh, sure, Nadia. ‘Gene' is fine.”

Gene is fine
. Ganady Puzdrovsky mouthed the words incredulously. He tapped the bat against the sidewalk, glancing around for the ball. It was nowhere in sight.

He considered checking the first-floor flower box into which his friend had fallen, but the thought that The Broom might have really called the police dissuaded him.

He wandered back into Passyunk Square, bemused, feeling as if he had just stepped into Baba's story. Except, of course, that Annie and Nadia were not real princesses, but only regular girls, and there were no bows and arrows and no King of the Sea to turn his daughter into a frog.

Standing in the Square, gazing from Thirteenth to Reed, Ganady was overcome with a strange wistfulness. His brother and his best friend had both seemingly stepped into an enchantment, while he lacked the means to join them.

He wavered toward returning to the old woman's flower box, but then remembered what was snuggled at the bottom of his jacket pocket.

He dug The Baseball out and turned it in his hand. It was, perhaps, his imagination that the scuffed sphere grew warm in his palm or that the sky and trees and the fresh, spring grass glowed, but he knew the ball had its own peculiar magic. It must have, for it had found
his
glove among all the upraised and eager gloves at the Mack.

He did not stop to ask himself what he would do with a princess, were he to find one (or even a real girl). He knew only that the other two princes in this American fairytale had achieved their goal without even a magical ball to aid them. He held the Thompson-to-Waitkus miracle in his hand.

He did not stop to ponder or reason or calculate. He sucked up the sense of moment as if it were a chocolate malted elixir, then tossed the ball into the air. There it hung for a perfect, glowing, breathless instant before he swung the bat in a gleaming arc.

And missed.

Face flushed and tingling, Ganny glanced around to see if anyone had seen. The two old men were intent on their game, arguing a move, children played tag, birds flew, twittered and built nests; all were oblivious to his embarrassment.

Furtively, and without ceremony, he tossed the ball up a second time and hit it, then hurried after, lest there should be another window box waiting to receive it. It flew across the intersection of Thirteenth and Reed and ricocheted off the curving roof of a parked Buick.

Ganny heard the sudden music of shattering glass. He halted, teetering on the curb. The impulse to take flight warred with the urge to confess.

Flight almost won out, but then he remembered the Ball. He dropped the bat at the curb, pushed his glove around to the back of his waistband and trotted across the street, dodging a milk truck and a bicycle.

The broken window belonged to a butcher's shop. It was a large window, made up of six panes. “Sausage King,” said a paper sign taped to one pane. And above it in gold leaf, “Gus___ and Sons” was artfully lettered across two panes. He suspected there was more to “Gus” than now met the eye, for there was a gaping hole in that pane right after the letter “s” at which two white-garbed folk within the shop now gestured with great gusto.

Ganady swallowed and cautiously—not to say surreptitiously—crossed the street and approached the front of the store. He crammed his hands into his pockets, felt the emptiness with a pang of loss, and scoured his mind for the right, the most apologetic words.

As he peeked in through the door, he saw one of the butchers throw the beloved ball out the back door of the shop into the alley beyond.

He almost gasped aloud. He no longer needed to confront the butcher to claim his ball, but...

Father Zembruski would say, his conscience supplied with annoying predictability, that you should confess your sin and make reparations. He sucked up his fear and squared his shoulders.

“I tell you,” said a man's voice from within the shop, “if ever there was a sign from God we should replace that sign, here it is. I'm gonna call that glazier this minute.”

Ganady slunk away as far as the corner, then ran to find the entrance to the alley.

Behind the butcher shop was a jungle of trash and foul-smelling garbage, among which flies buzzed happily. Ganady did not see the ball. He sent a prayer heavenward that he would find it before he was overcome by the various aromas. He gave a glance to the back door of the shop. It was shut tight against the ferocious odor.

He stood, chewing his lip, trying to imagine the trajectory the ball would have taken from the butcher's hand, how it might have bounced, how far it could have rolled.

His calculations led him to a spot where one of a trio of large garbage barrels had tilted and overflowed, loosing an avalanche of refuse onto the cobbles. He moved reluctantly toward it. Flies scattered like startled birds; Ganny batted them away, wrinkling his nose.

Bread crusts, fruit rinds, and things he did not recognize—nor wanted to—were mounded beneath the barrel, along with wadded and torn scraps of butcher paper.

He kicked the paper aside hopefully. No baseball. He tiptoed among the garbage, further disturbing the flies, eyeing the gaping mouth of the barrel as if something terrifying might lurk within.

Then, Ganady Puzdrovsky swallowed his misgivings, held his breath, stepped up to the barrel and peeked inside. He caught a glimpse of yellow eyes before something big and black exploded into his face with the shriek of a demon.

Ganny threw his hands up and yelped, ducking to one side as the outraged cat flew past his ear. When his heart had stopped pounding and the roaring had left his ears, and he was certain there was no reaction from the butcher shop, he straightened and shook himself all over.

Then, he nearly laughed aloud. If the ball was in that trash barrel, he had just come perilously close to being wed to an alley cat.

Back to that gaping, smelly maw he went, and peered down inside.

The Baseball sat upon a pillow of crumpled, greasy butcher paper in a shaft of brilliant sunlight. And atop The Baseball sat the largest, shiniest cockroach Ganady Puzdrovsky had ever seen.

He stared at it in stunned revulsion. It wriggled long antennae at him, but did not scurry away.

After a moment of consternation, he reached down to flick it aside. His hand froze in the act. His mind had also frozen, caught in the moment like a butterfly in amber. But the thaw brought a flood of thought and feeling that was nearly as paralyzing.

Eventually, Ganady unfroze his hand. He nudged the ball. The cockroach did not move.

He picked the ball up and shook it gently. The cockroach stayed put.

He glared at the cockroach. It merely waved its antennae at him again, perhaps in curiosity.

In the end, Ganady Puzdrovsky made a ponderous journey homeward, baseball cradled in his glove, the gleaming insect perched unmoving over Eddie Waitkus's autograph.

No one saw him enter the house or, if they did, they saw nothing unusual in the reverence with which he carried The Baseball. Possibly, the cockroach was too small to be seen. Little did it matter.

He carried the ball upstairs and placed it carefully, gingerly, upon his dresser between the Virgin Mary and a box of marbles that had been Baba's gift at Hanukkah. The Virgin did not blink or take exception to this juxtaposition.

The highboy dresser came up to Ganady's chest. He slumped, resting his chin on its worn mahogany top, and watched the cockroach.

She—for it certainly must be a she—waved her antennae at him slowly, as if sizing him up. He thought of honor and duty and Old-World magic and felt as if he had walked into one of Baba's stories.

oOo

After dinner, he found Baba on the stoop, for the evening was unseasonably balmy.

“Baba,” he said, “were you and Papa happy?”

“Such a question!”

“Well, were you?”

“I haven't already answered this?”

“Sort of. And sort of not.”

“Ah, well, the answer is that it was a good marriage and your grandfather was a good man.”

“But that's not—” Ganny protested.

“That was how I felt at first. Just that. But, as the years passed and we grew together, I was very happy indeed, and so was he. Which is not to say that it didn't take some patience...and faith. And perhaps some stubbornness.”

“What if you hadn't married him?”

“What—you mean what if he hadn't asked after me?”

“No. I mean what if you said you didn't want to marry him?”

“Why should I have said such a thing? Never would I have said such a thing.”

Ganny believed her absolutely. “Just like Ivan wouldn't have said ‘no' to the Frog Princess, huh?”

Baba laughed. “Your grandfather was no frog, let me tell you! Every girl in Keterzyn batted lashes at him. But no, Ganny, Ivan wasn't honoring the frog. He was honoring his father's wishes.”

Something like relief flash-flooded through Ganady's heart. He'd certainly made no covenant with Vitaly Puzdrovsky to marry a cockroach.

“Of course,” Baba continued, “once he
found
Princess Frog, his duty was to her.”

“Oh.”

She turned slightly toward him on the stoop, her stiffening neck moving with her shoulders. “Now, why all this worry about duty and marrying frogs, hm?”

Ganady blushed, something his Baba's sharp eyes clearly saw, even by street lamp. They twinkled at him.

He told her a little about the boyish pact, then—the flight of the ball, Nick's Italian princess, Yevgeny's golden-haired, blue-sweatered Polish angel.

“And your girl, Ganny?”