And Sometimes I Wonder About You

5

I reached Tivoli Rest Home a few minutes past 7:30 that evening. I decided to walk up to East Eighty-fourth rather than take a subway or taxi because the meals were served at 6:00 and the staff, mainly nuns, were strict about allowing their patients to eat in peace.

“Mr. McGill,” Sister Alona Alfred said in greeting as I entered the admissions hall.

“Evenin’, Sister.”

“I haven’t seen you in a few days. I was wondering where you were.”

“Down in Philadelphia doing a job.”

“Were you successful?” she asked. Sister Alona was youngish, in her thirties, and had a complexion that a runway model would have slashed for. Her smile was both infectious and as far from seductive as one could get.

“I reunited a married couple,” I said.

“Bless you.”

Katrina’s private room was on the sixth floor of the nine-story building. I don’t think she’d left that floor since the day I delivered her six weeks earlier.

The door was open so I didn’t knock. She was lying in the bed; actually she was languishing there. Her left arm was thrown up over her eyes and her right hand hung over the side of the mattress. The blankets were on the bed but not over her because the small room was warm. There had been a cold snap and the heat had been turned on — high.

There was a chair and a window, pine flooring, gray-green walls, and a cream-colored ceiling that would not tolerate a very tall man. There was a vase of flowers, yellow pansies, on the writing desk she never used and a stack of fashion magazines that our daughter, Shelly, had brought a month before. They hadn’t been touched.

I went to stand over her but said nothing.

After a few moments she let the left arm fall to the side. Her pale eyes were staring at me. All I recognized was in that steady stare. Before she tried to kill herself Katrina’s beauty denied her fifty-five years. She could have been forty and, on her better days, thirty-five. She exercised and used all the right unguents to preserve the skin and eliminate wrinkles. But now her flesh seemed to sag and you could see all her years like Marley’s chains.

“Leonid.”

I sat. “Baby.”

“I vas vorried about you.” Usually her inexplicable Swedish accent didn’t come out unless she was drunk. Maybe the drugs they had her on also caused it.

“Just a job,” I said. “I told Twill to tell you that.”

“He did. He came tvice and sent Mardi once. She seems a little vorried.”

“How about Dimitri and Tatyana?”

“She comes every morning before school but D gets too upset to see me like this.”

The wounds from her attempted suicide were there on her wrists; jagged lacerations that had cut deep. She looked like she was dying, and our Dimitri loved her more than anything. Of course he’d stay away.

“We should talk, Katrina.”

Making a monumental effort, she pushed herself up until she could rest her back against the wall that abutted the head of her bed. In rising she seemed to shrug off a decade or so.

“What is it, Leonid?” she asked.

“I’m worried about you, baby. You don’t seem to be getting any better but the doctors all say that there’s nothing physically wrong.”

“They ask me how I feel every Tuesday and I tell them that I have lost interest in living. Then they go away and I fall asleep again. I’ve been dreaming about my parents and my brother.” Somehow sitting upright stripped her of the accent from a country that she had never even visited.

“So you still want to kill yourself?”

“No,” she said, looking toward the small, shaded window. “No. I don’t want to live but I don’t have the will to try suicide again.”

“Did you tell the doctors that?”

“They never ask.”

She turned her gaze to me. I wondered if I should take her home; maybe in familiar circumstances she might begin to feel better.

“Do you remember when we used to watch the television in the little front room after the children were in bed?” she asked.

“Whenever I wasn’t on a job.”

“I’d make you another supper and you would sometimes rub my feet.”

“I always liked that fourth meal. You’re the best cook in the world,” I said, and I meant it, too.

“Remember what you would say when we watched Law & Order and all those crazy crimes?”

“ ‘Sometimes I think that everybody in the world is crazy,’ ” I said, quoting myself, “ ‘except for me and you — and sometimes I wonder about you.’ ”

The smile that crossed her face brought back the old Katrina for a moment, surfacing in the gloom like the body of a whale breaking the surface and then disappearing beneath the waves.

“Would you like it if I brought you home, Katrina?” I asked. “Dimitri and Tatyana could move back in and I’d watch TV with you and rub your feet.”

She mustered only half a smile and said, “Sometimes I’m too weak or too sad to go to the bathroom by myself. I won’t be a burden.”

“Do they make you walk?” I asked.

“Every day at four. I spend an entire hour preparing for Sister Marie to come and pull me out of bed. We walk from here down to the elevator. She asks me if I want to go down to the recreation area in the basement and I tell her, ‘Maybe tomorrow.’ ”

I wanted to say something kind, to slap her and tell her to snap out of it. I would have torn out my hair if I wasn’t already bald.

Katrina looked down at her hands. “I’ve disappointed you.”

“No, baby,” I assured her. “You’re going through a hard time and we just have to see it through.”

“You are a good man, Leonid.”

“We both know that’s a lie, Katrina.”

“No, Leonid,” she said with conviction if not strength in her voice. “I strayed. Twill and Shelly are not your children. You have always known but you raised them with love and you never ran away. You were always there for us.”

“That’s like complimenting a beaver for having big buckteeth,” I said, “or a lion for his deep voice.”

“Or a man,” Katrina said, “for living by his nature.”

I felt uncomfortable receiving these accolades. Katrina and I had been alternately bickering and cheating on each other for decades, and now there she was speaking truth to me. We hadn’t been partners or lovers for so long that in a way we were strangers.

“You have anything you want me to do about the kids?” I asked. Maybe thinking about them would help her make it down to the recreation room.

“Twill is into something,” she said. “Do you have him on some case?”

“No. He’s just studying the tapes I recorded when I was following people.”

“When he came to see me he was too happy. You know when things are good with him he just acts, I don’t know, kind of cool. But when something is going on he gets that glitter in his eyes.”

I knew the look. The problem was I hadn’t seen my son in seven days.

“The Professor said he saw him wandering around the lower level of Penn Station, said he had his shirttails out.”

“You saw Drake?”

I’d forgotten that the academic ex-con had come to a picnic we once gave. He and Katrina talked for hours about ancient recipes he once studied. He might have even written a monograph on the subject as a footnote to his doctoral thesis.

“What about Shelly?” I asked.

“That man followed her up to SUNY.”

“Seldon Arvinil?”

“He left his wife and daughter to be with our little girl. I suppose she’s happy though. Who am I to deny her that?”

“You’re her mother.”

“If I was a good mother she wouldn’t have needed an older man to shelter her heart.”

Hearing these words reminded me of Sweet Lemon Charles for the second time that day. The next time I saw the prison-made poet I’d ask him what he knew about the poetry of despair.