The Altar Girl: A Prequel

CHAPTER 12

We parked along the side of the road and walked up the steps. I hadn’t been in my godfather’s home since my early teens, when my father would come over occasionally to visit and bring me along. My godfather would mix me a non-alcoholic drink with a coconut flavor, and I’d sit in his parlor drinking it, thinking I’d died and gone to heaven.

There were two front doors, one for each of the attached houses. I waited beside Roxy on the stoop as she fished a key from her bag. There were no lights on in either house. Roxy gave me a penlight and asked me to shine it in her purse.

“Who are the tenants next door?” I said.

“There are none. He was using it as storage for the furniture he bought up.”

“You’re kidding me. Since when?”

“About six months ago.”

That surprised me because my godfather had relied on the rental income to help pay his bills. His earnings from his antique business were modest and unreliable, or so I had always been told. This news suggested his profits had grown recently. I could hear Donnie Angel’s voice in my ears.

Tell me what you know about your godfather’s business.

The house was a hoarder’s dream. Stacks of magazines and newspapers were piled four feet high on the floor, and on every seat in the living room. I saw an old copy of Look magazine from 1961 with a picture of an African-American girl walking among four uniformed white men. He appeared to have kept every issue ever printed of the Ukrainian-language newspaper Svoboda.

The kitchen resembled a storage closet for tableware and cutlery. Boxes upon boxes occupied every nook and cranny. Dirty dishes and glasses filled the sink. The two bedrooms on the second floor were no different. Every horizontal surface was covered with pottery or knickknacks. Dust clung to everything but the most frequently used surfaces.

I had no idea if any of the items I was looking at were valuable, but the state-of-the-art televisions in the kitchen, sitting room, and bedroom appeared expensive, as did the big daddy Cadillac in the garage.

After touring the house, we returned to the kitchen. I stood staring at the door to the basement.

“It’s creepy,” Roxy said. “I keep thinking, this man is gone forever. I’ll never see him again and that’s so sad. He was a good guy. A good uncle. He never preached or asked me for anything. He was just nice. And then you walk around looking at the stuff wondering what it’s all worth. Makes you feel cheap. You think somebody would actually pay for these old cutlery sets?”

“Yeah,” I said, eyes still glued to the basement entrance, wondering how my godfather had died, whether someone had pushed him down the stairs or walked him to the bottom and smashed his head in there.

“Really? You really think they’re worth something?”

“Yeah.” I was barely listening to Roxy’s questions. “It is creepy.” I took a deep breath. “Let’s go downstairs.”

A steep descent of narrow steps greeted us. To make matters worse, the center of the steps was covered with carpet so worn and weathered it had turned slippery. I found myself grasping the side railing out of fear I would slip and tumble.

“I can’t believe he didn’t replace these stupid steps given he was afraid of stairs,” I said.

Roxy slid effortlessly down the stairs like a ninja, unperturbed by their slope or width. “Tell me about it. He used to send me to get a bottle of wine when I visited. Said it saved him the risk of falling and breaking his neck. Drove me nuts. But he refused to fix them. That would have cost money, and he said he didn’t need luxuries at this point in his life.”

The new televisions and car suggested otherwise, but I kept my deductions to myself. I held my breath as I got to the bottom of the stairs, fearful I’d see visible signs of how my godfather had died, but there weren’t any. No chalk outline or tape, no garish bloodstain on the gray concrete floor or the strip of blue carpet at the bottom.

“The cops don’t outline bodies anymore,” Roxy said, after I told her of my surprise. “Our neighbor is a state trooper. He said they rely on digital photography. There was a small bloodstain on the floor. I got most of it out with grout cleaner. I couldn’t leave it there. It felt disrespectful. You can still see where his head landed if you look close.”

I saw what she was talking about. It looked like a coffee stain that had been washed a hundred times and had almost come out. The rest of the basement contained shelving with twenty or so cases of wine, a work area with tools, and a mountain of giant plastic containers filled with expensive-looking Christmas decorations, all in original boxes. The presence of plastic and absence of larger antiques made sense given the basement flooded during heavy rains.

We found his inventory of furniture next door in his former rental home. I’m not knowledgeable on the subject, but there was a ton of old and simple-looking stuff. Tables, cabinets, and chests. The utilitarian style of most of the pieces made me think it was early American. That made more sense than people might have guessed. Ukrainian immigrants owed their lives to America, and I could see my godfather specializing in its vintage furniture. I also remembered reading somewhere that prices had gone through the roof, and given my godfather had possessed a savvy eye, that also made sense.

I didn’t see anything in either house that suggested my godfather had been anyone other than a retired antique dealer who didn’t like to part with his acquisitions, not even an old newspaper. After we finished looking through the second house, we returned to the main house to turn off the lights.

“I knew you wouldn’t find anything,” Roxy said.

“Give me a minute to go through his study one more time,” I said.

Leather-bound books, Dutch-looking paintings, and old maps in equally ancient frames packed my godfather’s office. I had to walk sideways to get behind his desk. I sat down in a high-backed green leather chair. A banker’s lamp with ornate gold hardware occupied one corner. Across from it stood two pictures in elegant black lacquer frames with Asian lettering on the side. Roxy and her family posed in one picture. The other one was a photograph of my godfather and me when I was still a child.

The sight of myself knocked the wind right out of me and brought memories flooding back. He was holding me over his head in the picture. I remembered my father screaming at him to put me down, and my brother snapping the picture with my father’s old box camera. To those who didn’t know me, my expression would have conveyed giddy joy. After all, what kid wouldn’t have enjoyed getting twirled around in the air? I wouldn’t have. To those who knew me, they would have spied the lie in my eyes and realized I was putting on the face that was expected of me, all the while praying I would wake up the next day an adult and on my own.

But as Roxy said, my godfather meant well, and overhead twirling aside, his arrival had always been a welcome sight. My father and he were friends in Ukraine, and he was one of the few people with whom my father socialized. Once I got my job and moved to New York, I’d let our relationship drift. I hadn’t even sent him a Christmas card in as long as I could remember. I was always too busy. I never made the time to tell him that I appreciated his kindness and that he was an important person to me. Now I had all the time in the world, but he was gone. There was nothing I could do to bring him back, but perhaps I could find out exactly how and why he’d left this world.

I forced myself to lift my eyes off the picture, and they fell upon another striking image hanging on the wall directly in front of me. It was a framed poster depicting two exhausted prisoners in gray uniforms wearing a yoke made out of an enormous block of lumber. One held a hammer in his hand, the other a sickle. A uniformed guard brandished a gun behind them, the Cyrillic version of USSR splattered on the concrete floor beneath their feet. The caption read This Was Soviet Freedom!

The poster reminded me of the ordeal my godfather had doubtlessly suffered to escape the Nazis and the Soviets and start a new life in America. I didn’t know the details, but I was sure his early life had been harrowing, and now it appeared his end had been the same. He deserved better.

Roxy’s voice carried from the kitchen. “You find anything in there?”

“No,” I said, and began opening the drawers to his desk.

“I told you there was nothing there. You almost done? I’m going to call home and tell my kids I’m on the way.”

“Yup.”

The drawers contained the usual office supplies, a slide rule and a calculator, a flashlight and three vintage copies of Playboy that appeared to have been perused three or four million times each. My godfather didn’t have a computer, which didn’t surprise me. My mother didn’t have one either, and many of the older generation wanted no part of the latest technology. What did surprise me was the complete absence of business records of any kind. I was about to ask Roxy if she knew who kept his books when I noticed a small pad of paper was elevated an inch off the desk.

I lifted the pad and found a small notebook bound with burgundy leather. The first few pages contained phone numbers. I scanned the names. They featured the requisite servicers any homeowner would need, such as plumber, electrician, and duct cleaner. Duct cleaner? The others were either friends or business associates, I guessed. Some of the names were in English, but most were in Ukrainian. I recognized some of the latter.

I heard the toilet flush so I stood up to leave. The rest of the notebook turned out to be a calendar. Various appointments appeared on the pages, most of them self-explanatory. Out of sheer logic, I turned to the date he’d died. While all the other entries in the calendar had been written in a normal font size, this one had been scrawled in blue ink with enormous letters that took up the entire page.

The entry consisted of two letters: “DP.” The “P” had a little curl at the top. It was impossible to tell which language my godfather had been using because the letters were written in cursive. In printed form, the English letter “D” corresponds to the Ukrainian “Д.” But in cursive form, the “D” looked the same in both languages. The letter “P” was the Ukrainian version of an “R.” Hence, if the note was in English, it was DP. If it was written in Ukrainian, it was DR.

People maintained calendars to keep track of meetings, which consisted of people and places. Hence, DP was most likely a person or a place. I skimmed through the calendar. Appointments pertaining to the Ukrainian community were noted in Ukrainian, details pertaining to those outside the community were written in English. They appeared evenly split with an average of one or two per week. Each entry contained a person’s name, and some contained a reference to a place, as well.

An eye doctor’s appointment was noted in English with the address and phone number beside it. As with other appointments in English, the doctor’s name and location were spelled out in English. In cases where the entry had been written in Ukrainian, he wrote the destinations out in longhand—“National Home, Credit Union, Church Hall”—but abbreviated the names of the people with their initials. There were sufficient Ukrainian entries containing Cyrillic letters for me to deduce that he used initials when he had appointments with Ukrainains: “lunch with БШ,” “bingo with ЮТ,” “fix gutter for ЄЖ.” That meant the letters DP were probably someone’s Ukrainian initials, which corresponded to DR in English.

The rest of the notebook provided no insight into his business. In fact, the calendar appeared to consist of his personal appointments, as though he kept his professional ones somewhere else, if not entirely in his mind.

I heard Roxy’s footsteps and slipped the notebook into my bag. I’m not one hundred percent sure why I didn’t want to share my discovery with her. Perhaps I wanted to trust her, but couldn’t afford to put my faith in anyone for the time being.

“You find anything?” she said.

“Nope,” I said, brushing aside my pangs of guilt. “Do you know who did your uncle’s books?”

“Some Uke accountant. I’ll get you the name.”

We walked outside. I shined the light and Roxy closed the door. As I drove away, I noticed that one of the Hondas was still there but the other one was gone. The ignition wasn’t on, however, and there didn’t appear to be anyone inside.

Roxy tried to talk me into staying the night with her but I refused. I told her I was going straight to a motel but it was a lie. I knew only one man in the Ukrainian community with the Ukrainian initials DP. His name was Danilo Rus and I’d been in his home before.

He was my former father-in-law.

He was Roxy’s father.