Styx & Stone (23 page)

“It’s after ten, miss,” said Sean McDunnough. “Come on, give us a seat.”

I shook the nightmare from my eyes, happy to see a dry, ruddy face, and stood to stretch my back.

“Sorry if I startled you,” said McDunnough, unfolding a paperback copy of
Ulysses—
of all things—as he assumed his position on the chair. “See you in the morning.”

I headed straight for 26 Fifth Avenue and a warm bed. My back hurt and my head ached, perhaps due to the weather, or maybe the dream of cold water and treachery.

“A young lady dropped by to see you earlier, Miss Eleonora,” said Rodney as we rode up the lift. “Left this number for you.” He handed a slip of paper to me. “Said her name was Ruth. She wants you to phone her tomorrow.”

“I see.” Then, I absently muttered aloud that I thought it might have been Miss Jaspers. I figured I was due a visit from her.

“Oh, no,” said Rodney. “I haven’t seen Miss Jaspers in more than a week.”

FRIDAY, JANUARY 29, 1960

The following morning, I lay in my father’s bed, thinking about Ruth Chalmers. I had first met her at a Columbia family picnic sixteen or seventeen years earlier. She was a precocious girl of six—a year younger than I—with light-brown hair pulled into two brain-tugging pigtails behind her ears. She wrestled with her blue chiffon party dress, trying to disengage some of the hooks to free herself to roughhouse with the boys at the party. Her mother, Helen, slapped her hard on the cheek to stop her. It was a sharp crack that startled everyone within earshot. Silence descended upon the gathering, as everyone turned in horror to watch. But Ruthie didn’t cry. She pinched her reddening face together, brave in her pain, as she teetered on the brink of tears. I thought she was a remarkable child, even then, when I was no more than seven. In subsequent years, Ruth and I often ran into each other at university functions. Then, when I was a sophomore at Riverdale Country School, a precocious freshman named Ruth Chalmers enrolled and became the toast of the English and Art Departments. Ruth was a poetess and painter; quite a good one, if the faculty of Riverdale was to be believed. She edited the
Riverdale Philomathean
that year, and later on, so I heard, founded an alternative review that published students’ poetry and art work. From Riverdale, Ruth shipped out to Wellesley, where she graduated in May 1959. I understood she had published some poems in several literary journals whose names I didn’t recognize. I didn’t know what she was up to now.

After a shower and a cup of coffee, I called the Chalmers residence and asked for Ruth.

“Who’s calling?” asked a male voice—Billy, I presumed.

“This is Ellie Stone. Is that Billy?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Hi.” He was an odd one.

“Hi, Billy. Is Ruth in?”

He put down the phone, and a few moments later I heard another extension pick up.

“Hello, Ellie,” came the clean, measured voice from the other end. “Thank you for calling.”

“How’ve you been?” I asked. “You seemed a little under the weather the other night.”

She spoke slowly and deliberately—she always had—as if every word were precious to her.

“It was so horrible. I was very upset by the whole thing, and after what happened to your father . . . How is he?”

“The doctors don’t know yet.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Then I suppose you wouldn’t be interested in meeting me this afternoon. I need to talk to someone.”

I wondered why she didn’t speak to her family, but then I remembered her insufferable parents and strange brother.

“Sure, I’d love to meet,” I said. “I’d like to talk to someone, too. Just say where and when.”

“Your place,” she said abruptly. “Let’s make it five thirty. Good-bye, Ellie.” And she hung up.

I held the phone in the crick of my neck for another few seconds as I jotted down the appointment. As the moments passed, I realized there was no new dial tone. I listened a few moments longer, waiting for it. Ten, fifteen seconds, then a quiet click from the other end of the line, and a fresh dial tone.

Miss Little informed me by phone that Professor Bruchner had called to say he would not be in the office this day. I asked for his telephone number and address.

“He lives in midtown, in one of those big apartment houses. Let me check his card.” A rustling of papers. “Here it is: 145 East Thirty-Eighth, apartment 2210. MUrray Hill-6-2391. Any other numbers you need, Miss Stone?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Bernie Sanger’s, Hildy Jaspers’s, and Roger Purdy’s. And do you still have Professor Petronella’s number?”

She waited a moment, as if she expected me to ask for someone else. “Why, no. When he left Columbia he moved from his address on the Upper East Side. I think he’s living somewhere in the Bronx, but he didn’t give us a new address.”

She dictated Bernie Sanger’s address: 110th Street, near campus; Purdy lived on East Eighty-Second, just off the park. Hildy lived in Chelsea on Nineteenth Street.

“Anyone else? she asked, her voice loaded with suggestion. “Oh, but you must already have Mr. Lucchesi’s telephone number.”

“Thanks, I’ve interviewed him already,” I said, ears burning from the censure.

I rang off and dialed Bruchner’s number. No answer. I buttoned a cardigan sweater over my white blouse, wriggled into my tweed overcoat, and grabbed my purse and camera. Then I made for the elevator.

When I was a girl, I used to gaze in awe at the lions guarding the entrance of the New York Public Library. I still give them a smile when I climb the stairs. They sit serenely, with majestic bearing, their proud heads raised, giant paws posed so tidily before them. I had spent many afternoons in the cavernous reading room, digesting the first volumes of the education that stretched out before me. The public library had been for me a kind of cathedral—like Yankee Stadium—different only by virtue of its custodial responsibility for Knowledge. Lined up like bricks in some colossal wall, millions of volumes waited for the next pair of hands to pluck them from their shelves and open their wisdom to the light.

The library also has an impressive collection of telephone directories. I wasn’t looking for anything exotic, like Bombay or Peking; just the Bronx.

I located an Anthony Petronella on Garrison Avenue in Hunts Point, the Bronx. Fishing for a dime, I sat down in a phone booth and tried the number. An elderly Italian woman answered, and after some word wrangling, I established that Anthony Petronella was her son.

I asked if he was in, speaking deliberately, as if she had suffered some horrible aphasia.

“No, Antonio, he teach now.
È a scuola a quest’ora
. At school.”

“Which school?” I asked, sure it was but the first of many attempts to get the name.

“Che?”

“Scuola? Quale?”
I said, dredging up the little Italian I had picked up along the way; one of the benefits of having spent a summer in Florence with my father.

“PS
Cinquantadue
,” she said finally.

I thanked
Signora
Petronella, hung up, then reached for my notepad to write down the information. It wasn’t in my purse, however, and I remembered having left it near the phone in my father’s apartment. I tore a corner of a page out of the phonebook instead and jotted down a note.

I dropped another dime into the phone, intending to try Bruchner’s number, but I again remembered it was in the pad I’d left at my father’s place. I hung up and grabbed the bulging phonebook underneath the Bronx, and opened to the
B
s. Bruchner, G., 1306 East Sixteenth Street, ESsex 3-5861.

I shook my head: 1306 East Sixteenth Street? I couldn’t remember the address Miss Little had given me, but I knew it was in Murray Hill, and Sixteenth Street was not. Besides, there was no 1300 block of any east–west street in Manhattan. I flipped the book closed, my hand marking the page, to see if the book was current. 1958–59,
BROOKLYN
, New York.

If “G.,” by some chance, belonged to a Gualtieri Bruchner, this was an unexpected development. Either the rarest of coincidences, or the visiting professor from Padua was an odder fellow than people suspected. I am, by nature, curious, and saw no reason to change my spots now. I tried the Brooklyn number but got no answer. Jingling the subway tokens in my change purse, I wrote down the address and phone number, calculating in my head which train I would need to take and where I would have to transfer.

East Sixteenth Street in Brooklyn runs southeast from Prospect Park to Brighton Beach, flanked by the stilted legs of the elevated train line. I got off at Avenue M and climbed down to Sixteenth Street, where the rumbling of the trains above seemed to shake the very earth. I found 1306 East Sixteenth: a five-story tenement, indistinguishable from its neighbors on either side of the El track. A black fire escape zigzagged down its dull, brown-bricked face, and another passing train rattled the metal as I watched. I climbed the steps to the entrance, searched the mailboxes for Bruchner’s name. No luck. I thought I’d made a long, dreary trip for nothing, but rang the super just to be sure.

“Bruchner?” asked the fat lady in a green housedress. “He’s in the walk-down, just outside to the right. Got his own mailbox.”