Strangers (3 page)

They were underestimating Ginger.

To be fair, Ginger was only twelve, and even though she was already in tenth grade, she was still a child in most people’s eyes. No one could have foreseen that she would fill Anna’s shoes so quickly. She shared her mother’s love of cooking, so in the weeks following the funeral she pored through cookbooks, and, with the amazing diligence and perseverance that were her trademarks, she acquired what culinary skills she had not already learned. The first time relatives came for dinner after Anna’s death, they exclaimed over the food. Homemade potato rolls and cheese
kolacky.
Vegetable soup with plump cheese and beef
kreplach
floating in it. Schrafe fish as an appetizer. Braised veal paprika,
tzimmes
with prunes and potatoes, creamy macaroni patties fried in hot fat and served in tomato sauce. A choice of baked peach pudding or apple
schalet
for dessert. Francine and Rachel thought Jacob was hiding a marvelous new housekeeper in the kitchen. They were disbelieving when he pointed to his daughter. Ginger did not think she had done anything remarkable. A cook was needed, so she became a cook.

She had to take care of her father now, and she applied herself to that responsibility with vigor and enthusiasm. She cleaned house swiftly, efficiently, and with a thoroughness that defied her Aunt Francine’s sub rosa inspections for dust and grime. Although she was only twelve, she learned to plan a budget, and before she was thirteen she was in charge of all the household accounts.

At fourteen, three years younger than her classmates, Ginger was the valedictorian of her high-school class. When it became known that she had been accepted by several universities but had chosen Barnard, everyone began to wonder whether, at the tender age of fourteen, she had finally taken too big a bite and would choke trying to swallow it.

Barnard
was
more difficult than high school. She no longer learned faster than the other kids, but she learned as well as the best of them, and her grade average was frequently 4.0, never less than 3.8—and
that
was the semester in her junior year when Jacob was sick with his first bout of pancreatitis, when she spent every evening at the hospital.

Jacob lived to see her get her first degree, was sallow and weak when she received her medical degree, even hung on tenaciously until she had served six months of her internship. But after three bouts of recurring pancreatitis, he developed pancreatic cancer, and he died before Ginger had finally made up her mind to go for a surgical residency at Boston Memorial instead of pursuing a career in research.

Because she had been given more years with Jacob than she had been given with her mother, her feelings for him were understandably more profound, and the loss of him was even more devastating than the loss of Anna had been. Yet she dealt with that time of trouble as she dealt with every challenge that came her way, and she finished her internship with excellent reports and superb recommendations.

She delayed her residency by going to California, to Stanford for a unique and arduous two-year program of additional study in cardiovascular pathology. Thereafter, following a one-month vacation (by far the longest rest she had ever taken), she moved East again, to Boston, acquired a mentor in Dr. George Hannaby (chief of surgery at Memorial and renowned for his pioneering achievements in various cardiovascular surgical procedures), and served the first three-quarters of her two-year residency without a hitch.

Then, on a Tuesday morning in November, she went into Bernstein’s Deli to buy a few items, and terrible things began happening. The incident of the black gloves. That was the start of it.

•

Tuesday was her day off, and unless one of her patients had a life-threatening crisis, she was neither needed nor expected at the hospital. During her first two months at Memorial, with her usual enthusiasm and tireless drive, she had gone to work on most of her days off, for there was nothing else that she would rather do. But George Hannaby put an end to that habit as soon as he learned of it. George said that the practice of medicine was high-pressure work, and that every physician needed time off, even Ginger Weiss.

“If you drive yourself too hard, too fast, too relentlessly,” he said, “it’s not only you that suffers, but the patient as well.”

So every Tuesday she slept an extra hour, showered, and had two cups of coffee while she read the morning paper at the kitchen table by the window that looked out on Mount Vernon Street. At ten o’clock she dressed, walked several blocks to Bernstein’s on Charles Street, and bought pastrami, corned beef, homemade rolls or sweet pumpernickel, potato salad, blintzes, maybe some lox, maybe some smoked sturgeon, sometimes cottage cheese
vareniki
to be reheated at home. Then she
walked home with her bag of goodies and ate shamelessly all day while she read Agatha Christie, Dick Francis, John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, sometimes a Heinlein. While she had not yet begun to like relaxation half as much as she liked work, she gradually began to enjoy her time off, and Tuesday ceased to be the dreaded day it had been when she first began her reluctant observance of the six-day week.

That bad Tuesday in November started out fine—cold with a gray winter sky, brisk and invigorating rather than frigid—and her routine brought her to Bernstein’s (crowded, as usual) at ten-twenty-one. Ginger drifted from one end of the long counter to the other, peering into cabinets full of baked goods, looking through the cold glass of the refrigerated display cases, choosing from the array of delicacies with gluttonous pleasure. The room was a stewpot of wonderful smells and happy sounds: hot dough, cinnamon; laughter; garlic, cloves; rapid conversations in which the English was spiced with everything from Yiddish to Boston accents to current rock-and-roll slang; roasted hazelnuts, sauerkraut; pickles, coffee; the
clink-clank
of silverware. When Ginger had everything she wanted, she paid for it, pulled on her blue knit gloves, and hefted the bag, going past the small tables at which a dozen people were having a late breakfast, then headed for the door.

She held the grocery bag in her left arm, and with her free hand she tried to put her wallet back in the purse that was slung over her right shoulder. She was looking down at the purse as she reached the door, and a man in a gray tweed topcoat and a black Russian hat entered the deli at that moment, his attention as distracted as hers; they collided. As cold air swept in from outside, she stumbled backward a step. He grabbed at her bag of groceries to keep it from falling, then steadied her with one hand on her arm.

“Sorry,” he said. “That was stupid of me.”

“My fault,” she said.

“Daydreaming,” he said.

“I wasn’t looking where I was going,” she said.

“You all right?”

“Fine. Really.”

He held the bag of groceries toward her.

She thanked him, took the bag—and noticed his black gloves. They were obviously expensive, of high-grade genuine leather, so neatly and tightly stitched that the seams were hardly visible, but there was nothing about those gloves that could explain her instant and powerful reaction to them, nothing unusual, nothing strange, nothing threatening. Yet she
did
feel threatened. Not by the man. He was ordinary, pale, doughy-faced, with kind eyes behind thick tortoiseshell glasses. Inexplicably, unreasonably,
the gloves themselves were what abruptly terrified her. Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart hammered.

The most bizarre thing was the way every object and all the people in the deli began to fade as if they were not real but merely figments of a dream that was dissolving as the dreamer woke. The customers having breakfast at the small tables, the shelves laden with canned and packaged food, the display cases, the wall clock with the Manischewitz logo, the pickle barrel, the tables and chairs all seemed to shimmer and slip away into a niveous haze, as if a fog was rising from some realm beneath the floor. Only the portentous gloves did not fade, and, in fact, as she stared at them they grew more detailed, strangely more vivid, more
real,
and increasingly threatening.

“Miss?” the doughy-faced man said, and his voice seemed to come from a great distance, from the far end of a long tunnel.

Although the shapes and colors of the delicatessen bleached toward white on all sides of Ginger, the sounds did not dwindle as well but, instead, grew louder, louder, until her ears filled with a roar of meaningless jabber and with the jarring clatter of silverware, until the clinking of dishes and the soft chatter of the electronic cash register were thunderous, unbearable.

She could not take her eyes off the gloves.

“Is something wrong?” the man asked, holding up one leather-clad hand, half-reaching toward her in an inquisitive gesture.

Black, tight, shiny…with a barely visible grain to the leather, neat little stitches along the fingers…taut across the knuckles…

Dizzy, disoriented, with a tremendous weight of indefinable fear pressing down on her, she suddenly knew that she must run or die. Run or die. She did not know why. She did not understand the danger. But she
knew
she must run or perish where she stood.

Her heartbeat, already fast, became frantic. The breath that was snagged in her throat now flew free with a feeble cry, and she lunged forward as if in pursuit of the pathetic sound that had escaped her. Amazed by her response to the gloves but unable to be objective about it, confused by her own behavior even as she acted, clutching the grocery bag to her breast, she shouldered past the man who had collided with her. She was only vaguely aware that she almost knocked him off his feet. She must have wrenched open the door, though she could not remember having done so, and then she was outside, in the crisp November air. The traffic on Charles Street—car horns, rumbling engines, the hiss-sigh-crunch of tires—was to her right, and the deli windows flashed past on her left as she ran.

Thereafter she was oblivious of everything, for the world around her faded completely away, and she was plunging through a featureless grayness,
legs pumping hard, coattails flapping, as if fleeing across an amorphous dreamscape, struck dumb by fear. There must have been many other people on the sidewalk, people whom she dodged or shoved aside, but she was not cognizant of them. She was aware only of the need to escape. She ran deer-swift though no one pursued her, with her lips peeled back in a grimace of pure terror though she could not identify the danger from which she fled.

Running. Running like crazy.

Temporarily blind, deaf.

Lost.

Minutes later, when the mists cleared, she found herself on Mount Vernon Street, part of the way up the hill, leaning against a wrought-iron railing beside the front steps of a stately redbrick town house. She was gripping two of the iron balusters, with her hands curled so tightly around them that her knuckles ached, her forehead on the heavy metal balustrade as if she were a melancholy prisoner slumped against the door of her cell. She was sweating and gasping for breath. Her mouth was dry, sour. Her throat burned, and her chest ached. She was bewildered, unable to recall how she had arrived at this place, as if washed onto an alien shore by moon-timed tides and waves of amnesia.

Something had frightened her.

She could not remember what it had been.

Gradually the fear subsided, and her breathing regained an almost regular rhythm; her heartbeat slowed slightly.

She raised her head and blinked her eyes, looking around warily and in bafflement as her tear-blurred vision slowly cleared. She turned her face up until she saw the bare black branches of a linden and a low, ominous gray November sky beyond the skeletal tree. Antique iron gas lamps glowed softly, activated by solenoids that had mistaken the wintry morning for the onset of dusk. At the top of the hill stood the Massachusetts State House, and at the bottom the traffic was heavy where Mount Vernon intersected Charles Street.

Bernstein’s Delicatessen. Yes, of course. It was Tuesday, and she had been at Bernstein’s when…when something happened.

What? What had happened at Bernstein’s?

And where was the deli bag?

She let go of the iron railing, raised her hands, and blotted her eyes on her blue knit gloves.

Gloves. Not hers, not
these
gloves. The myopic man in the Russian hat. His black leather gloves. That was what had frightened her.

But why had she been gripped by hysteria, overwhelmed by dread at the sight of them? What was so frightening about black gloves?

Across the street, an elderly couple watched her intently, and she wondered what she had done to draw their attention. Though she strained to remember, she could not summon the faintest recollection of her journey up the hill. The past three minutes—perhaps longer?—were utterly blank. She must have run up Mount Vernon Street in a panic. Evidently, judging by the expressions on the faces of those observing her, she had made quite a spectacle of herself.

Embarrassed, she turned away from them and started hesitantly down Mount Vernon Street, back the way she had come. At the bottom, just around the corner, she found her bag of groceries lying on its side on the pavement. She stood over it for long seconds, staring at the crumpled brown bundle, trying to recall the moment when she had dropped it. But where that moment should have been, her memory contained only grayness, nothingness.

What’s wrong with me?

A few items had spilled from the fallen parcel, but none was torn open, so she put them back in the paper sack.

Unsettled by her baffling loss of control, weak in the knees, she headed home, her breath pluming in the frosty air. After a few steps she halted. Hesitated. Finally she turned back toward Bernstein’s.

She stopped just outside the deli and had to wait only a minute or two before the man in the Russian hat and the tortoiseshell glasses came out with a grocery bag of his own.

“Oh.” He blinked in surprise. “Uh…listen, did I say I’m sorry? The way you stormed out of there, I thought maybe I’d only
meant
to say it, you know—”