Styx & Stone (30 page)

“Ellie?” a voice called behind me in the hall as I jostled the key in the lock.

“Mrs. Farber,” I said, turning to see my father’s neighbor in the kimono from the day before, a drink in her hand.

Angela Farber fairly vibrated in her doorway. Her eyes gleamed, half-shut, and she teetered on her feet, slurring her words. She was gassed.

I opened the door and wished her good night, but she stepped into the hallway and followed me into my father’s apartment. With the door still open, she sashayed into the parlor and dropped into the sofa.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Farber?” I asked.

“Oh, God, Ellie, you don’t know what it’s like to be hungry when you’re still a flower, when your love is still thirsty for a companion.” Then she sipped her drink and looked up at me. “You’re so young, Ellie. Still young and attractive. I was young and attractive once.”

“You’re very attractive,” I said, removing my coat and folding it on a chair.

“It’s my own fault, I suppose,” she said. “I like men wild and mean. They break women’s hearts like cracking their knuckles. Love ’em and leave ’em, right, Elijah?”

“Ellie,” I croaked, looking for an out.

“I don’t want to be alone,” she moaned. “There’s nowhere to go to meet eligible men, if not to tacky bars for singles. The Sterling Room, The Crystal Palace, Capri Lounge . . . You know the kind: the sign with a tipped Martini glass and bubbles. Oh, it’s death, Walter,” she slurred.

It was the most fortuitous of circumstances that saved me from the sad narration Angela Farber had in store for me: she passed out ten minutes later. Huffing and puffing, I lugged her body from my father’s apartment back into her own, I managed to drag her to a sofa where I massaged her hand and waved air into her face until she came to about two hours later. I hadn’t dared leave her alone.

“Where am I?” she mumbled. “Who are you?”

“It’s me, Ellie. Ellie Stone,” I said to no effect. Then, blushing: “Ellie Jelly. You’re home. I helped you back from my father’s apartment.”

She tried to sit up, but I restrained her.

“You?” she said. “What was I doing there? Was I there when you came home?”

I shook my head. “Of course not. I met you in the hall. You’ve just had a little too much to drink. It’ll be all right.”

She struggled to sit up, alarmed. “Where’s your father? Did he see me?”

“Calm down, Mrs. Farber,” I said. “No one saw you. We all have a little too much once in a while.”

I made a pot of coffee in her kitchen and after a while she regained her composure. With time, her head cleared, and she smiled and giggled at herself.

“It wouldn’t be the first time I made a fool of myself, and it won’t be the last.”

“It’s Walter, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “He hasn’t called. And after all I’ve done for him.”

“What’s he like, this Walter?” I asked.

“He’s an intellectual,” she answered, running an absent hand through her hair. “But I’m beginning to think he’s a coward, too.”

“How’s that?”

She snickered. “You wouldn’t understand. He’s been trying to throw me over. He just doesn’t have the guts to come right out and say it, so he looks for excuses. ‘It’s not safe for your reputation; people will talk.’ You know the song. All men learn it when they’re young.”

I’d heard it.

“Why can’t they just say no? I’ll tell you why,” she said. “Because when their little things get stiff, their brains take the day off.”

“Why don’t you call Walter?”

“I’ve called a hundred times. He won’t answer the phone anymore. But I’ve taken other measures.”

“Forbearance?” I asked, remembering Joan Little’s strategy. “Or seduction?”

“That may be effective on a young man, but Walter is different. He’s a puritan; that’s why he enjoys the wickedness of sex when he gets the urge. But afterward, he hates me and he hates himself. He begins to shake when he’s finished, he quivers as if he’s cold, and once I saw him cry. He’s ashamed of his thing, you know. I think it’s because he’s not circumcised,” she whispered. “I’ve never known a man like him; it’s like making love to a priest, and that makes me want him more. Sex is rather complicated for him.”

(Not circumcised? Did she really have to tell me that?) “So what’s your plan?”

“He got himself into a jam, and I was the only person who could help him out of it. He’s indebted to me now.”

“What was it?”

She shook her head. “I’m sworn to silence.”

“Well, what makes you think he’ll honor his obligation to you? You’ve already done this favor for him; what’s to stop him from walking away?”

She smiled to herself. “He won’t do that. He can’t do that; without my help, he’s up the river without a paddle.”

The conversation was decidedly pessimistic, and I felt pity for her. She was a hanger-on, like Joan Little. But instead of trying to win her man with love, Angela Farber wanted to trap him. I was skeptical that she’d ever see Walter again, but she seemed confident. I wondered if he was worth trapping at all; he sounded like a creep, the kind of pervert who hates sex except when some pheromone has commandeered his wits. He considers himself the supremely evolved being, free of the base desires that erode character and rob dignity. He’s repulsed by the frenzied humping and perspiration, the vulgar act of copulation—bucking, panting, and spasmodic seizures that lower him to the level of a mongrel dog mounting a bitch with cataleptic oblivion. Ironically, disgust increases his arousal, once he has given in to desire. But the pleasure he derives is not the healthy sensuality of lovemaking; it’s the inflammation of genitalia, the debasement of self and the female on top of whom he performs his sin. Fun date.

“Are you well enough to be alone?” I asked.

She sat up, put herself back into her kimono, and followed me to the door. She thanked me, and I wished her goodnight. I wondered where Gigi was. I thought I knew.

My wanderings throughout Manhattan and the Bronx had proven enlightening, if exhausting. I resisted the urge to nap, however, figuring I could sleep all night at the hospital. I outlined in my pad the information I’d gathered that day and made a task list of people to corner the following morning. Then I called my editor, Charlie Reese, long distance to update him on my father’s condition. He reassured me, telling me again not to worry about work and concentrate on my own business.

“Who’s covering the high school basketball while I’m away?” I asked, teasing Charlie a bit.

“Now don’t laugh,” he said. “George Walsh. He’s been doing his homework on basketball.”

Walsh was the publisher’s son-in-law and a Grade A ass with a capital
A
.

“George Walsh? He thinks Wilt Chamberlain is the British prime minister.”

Charlie laughed, then lectured me on my attitude. But it was hard to take him seriously, as he was still sniggering.

I had some soup and saltines for a meager dinner, sitting at the dining table alone and staring at the building lights across Fifth Avenue. My mother had always insisted we take dinner at the table, never in front of the television or near the radio as Janey’s family used to. When we got our first television set in 1948, Elijah used to beg to watch the wrestling on Dumont during supper. My father backed up my mother on the dinnertime policy, pointing out that the wrestling was fake anyway. Elijah countered that theater was staged and fake as well, and yet my parents both enjoyed that. Mom and Dad presented a united front, and in the end, Elijah and I learned to eat faster.

At a quarter past nine, the intercom buzzed, just as I was just touching up my lipstick, preparing to leave for Saint Vincent’s.

“Miss Stone?” came the voice. “This is Raul, in the elevator. A Mr. Bruchner is here to see you.”

I was surprised, though not disappointed, to open the door to Gualtieri “Karen” Bruchner, not the ghoulish professor I had expected.

“Please come in,” I said, stepping aside to let the little man pass. He clutched his worn tweed cap in his hands and entered meekly, mumbling the perfunctory
permesso?
as he did. “What can I do for you, Mr. Bruchner?” I asked after offering him a seat in the parlor.

“I have considered your suggestion,” he said, his coal black eyes fixed on mine. “I want to meet the man who has my name.”

The cab ride through Union Square and up Fourth Avenue was a quiet one. (I can’t bring myself to call it Park Avenue South, despite the recent official change in name. My God, that’s exactly the sort of thing my father would say . . .) Karen Bruchner opened his mouth only slightly more often than the Sphinx. I did manage, however, to elicit some response.

“Why do they call you Karen?” I asked as the cab idled at a red light on Twenty-Third Street.

Bruchner looked out the window, away from my invasive stare. “I did not choose it,” he said. “They give it to me. They give it to me at the camp.”

“The Germans?”

He shook his head, face still in the window. “No, it was a Jew from Bremen,” he explained.

“What does the name mean?”

Again he shook his head, and I could discern the reflection of a bitter smile in the window. “Karen comes from a name in Italian:
Caronte
. Americans say it wrong. Should be Karon.”

I waited for elaboration.

“You know
Caronte
by his English name: Charon.”

I remembered Dad’s drawing: Charon, ferryman of the Styx and Acheron, who transports the damned souls from hell’s vestibule across the river to Limbo. But how did that apply to Karen Bruchner?

He wiped his eyes and bowed his head. His voice trembled as he spoke: “He named me
Caronte
because I took the Jews into the camp; I was the engineer of the train, the train from the station to the camp, from the camp to the mines. I took them to their doom.” A short squeal escaped his throat before he could swallow it, then he collected his anguish and packed it away. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost whispering.

“You don’t have to go on,” I said, half wishing he wouldn’t.

“It’s OK,” he said, shaking off my suggestion. “I have this name for sixteen years; I live with it. The man who give it to me, his name was Maschiewicz, a miner in my barracks. He was a student, about my age.”

“You must have hated him,” I said.

Karen Bruchner jerked his head to look at me in the dark as we passed Twenty-Eighth Street. “Oh, no. He didn’t realize. That was how he lived with the death: to make jokes.”

“How did the name stick? Why did you keep it when you came to America?”

He wiped the last of the tears from his eyes. “I don’t know how it happened,” he said. “Maybe I told someone the story, and he told others. I can’t remember now, but everyone calls me Karen.”

The cab turned at Thirty-Eighth Street and pulled to a stop near the corner of Lexington. I paid the driver, and Karen and I stepped out into the cold night. Professor Bruchner’s high-rise building soared twenty-nine stories above us, and my companion looked at it with no small measure of trepidation.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked.

He nodded.

“You know who we’re going to find up there, don’t you?”

Again the nod. “I think so.”

I gave the concierge my real name, and not only did Bruchner answer the phone, he agreed to see me. My anticipation was running high, though I confess the situation made me nervous. I buzzed Bruchner’s door, Karen standing by, looking old, desolate, and small, but determined to meet the man who had usurped his name. Just before the door opened, Karen remembered his manners and snatched the cap from his head.