Princess of Passyunk Read online

  “I got a new rabbi.”

  “You’ve been here a long time, huh?” said Ganady. “In America, I mean. In Philly.”

  The boy was an old man again, turning a dilapidated baseball in arthritic fingers. He nodded. “A long time, yes.”

  “You must’ve come over when you were a kid.”

  “Not so much a kid, no. But come. Let us see if the stream of time will allow us to swim in it today.”

  They went back up to the roof then, Mr. O clutching his talisman. Once there, he made a circuit of the rooftop, describing a square with halting footsteps, singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in a quavering tenor.

  No, not a square, Ganady realized, following him bemusedly. A diamond—with the back of home plate aimed at the spite fence.

  At each corner Mr. Ouspensky paused to assume an infielder’s posture—half-crouched, facing home plate. When he had completed his tour of the imaginary diamond, the old man led his acolytes to the invisible pitcher’s mound where they faced Connie Mack.

  “Take first,” he told Ganady, then to Yevgeny: “Take third.”

  The boys moved to their invisible bases. Mr. O struck a pose—a pitcher getting ready to go into the windup.

  They waited. The inevitable pigeons waited with them, perched on the new clothesline, on the edge of the roof, on the clutter of little smokestacks, on an empty pigeon cote. Their cooing threw a soft blanket over the other Saturday afternoon sounds. In the street below, cars and trucks purred and rumbled, muted cheers floated from the stadium across the street, farther away on the river, boats hooted at each other over the water.

  Ganady’s nose itched. He withstood the itch as long as he could before reaching up surreptitiously to scratch it. At once, he felt Mr. Ouspensky’s eyes on him and turned the scratch into the Sign of the Cross, hoping Mr. Ouspensky would think he was merely adding to the ritual.

  He chanced a glance at the old man. Mr. O’s eyes were trained on the stadium wall, large and bright and hopeful. The torn baseball revolved in his hands, over and over, round and round.

  Ganady held his breath, straining to hear the stadium sounds—crowd noise, the hawkers shouting, the crack of the bat. Suddenly, that was all he could hear; pigeons, river, and street traffic all dissolved into the game. Sparks floated before Ganady’s eyes, and across the street, Connie Mack’s great wooden ramparts seemed to shimmer and blur in the afternoon Sun. Was that a bit of emerald green he glimpsed through the heavy boards? Were those bright flecks of color the spring vestments of the people in the stands?

  Across from him, Yevgeny let out a long, sighing breath as if he, too, saw...something.

  The ball in Mr. O’s hands turned and turned and turned, and the old man murmured a jumbled litany of names and stats. The spite fence wavered, melted, faded. Verdant green seeped through its filmy fabric. A pattern began to emerge.

  “Hey, what are you guys looking at?”

  At the sound of Nick’s voice, the pigeons rose up in a great flutter of wings. In an instant, Ganady’s view of the ballpark was lost in a flight of tiny angels. In the wake of their leave-taking, Connie Mack’s spite fence was as solid as the day it was put up.

  Ganady exhaled.

  “Your brother,” said Mr. O, “is a klutz.”

  oOo

  “You don’t really believe you were about to see through that fence, do you?” Nick asked as they made their way home.

  “No,” said Ganady, “because the fence wasn’t there then.”

  “Then when?”

  “In 1932. The year Mr. Ouspensky got a Jimmie Foxx home-run ball.”

  Nick smote his forehead with the heel of one hand. “Oh, yeah! How could I forget? You were going to travel back in time to catch the game. C’mon, Ganny. You can’t travel in time by hugging a baseball and staring into thin air. You need a machine. Anybody knows that. Didn’t you read Jules Verne?”

  “H.G. Wells,” said Yevgeny and Ganady added, “Maybe baseball is the time machine. That’s what Mr. O thinks.”

  “Mr. O is a lonely old meshuggener who likes to play jokes on dummies like you two.”

  “He wasn’t joking, Nikolai,” said Ganady. “He meant it. He had a whole ritual and everything. It was like...like...”

  “Like mass,” said Yevgeny. “Like sabes.”

  Nick shook his head and whistled. “I wouldn’t let Father Z hear you say that. You could end up doing a thousand ‘Hail Marys’ standing on your head.”

  Two: Only at Yonkiper

  Fridays were stressful for Ganady Puzdrovsky. This was because Baba Irina must go to synagogue and someone from the family must accompany her.

  Friday supper, Baba held court at table, performing a ritual that was at least as old as Ganady himself. She would turn to Da first. This was because Da was the One Who Had Caused It. ‘It’ being his mother’s defection from Judaism. Da had been raised a Catholic and wouldn’t enter a synagogue, nor would he allow his wife to do so, had he any say in the matter. He hadn’t, for Rebecca Puzdrovsky had no qualms about entering a synagogue. To her, the shul was as much a house of God as Saint Stanislaus.

  Sometimes she and Da would argue the point. Mother would say, “Look, Vitaly, the Mayflower got here with sails and your family’s boat got here with steam. They’re both boats—where’s the problem?”

  This did not mean that Rebecca Puzdrovsky (née Ravke Kutshinska) would actually go to shul, for she would not. And this had only to do with the fact that most of the members were landslayt; she’d known them her entire life from Keterzyn; some of them had even come to the States on the same boat. They would look at her with their heavy eyes and she would feel crushed. Ganady had heard her say so to Da.

  “Like being stoned,” she’d said, “but with grapes.”

  Having laid her guilt blessing upon Mama and Da, Baba would look to Nick, who always had too much homework, or a need to go to library to study (though it was Friday) or suddenly recalled that he must do Izzy’s windows. More often, it was a dance at the Catholic Youth Center.

  Ganady knew that Nick found Sunday mass intolerable enough. To have to go to synagogue as well was more than he could bear; he preferred guilt. And on those Fridays that the distraction was a dance at the Center, the guilt would get especially deep, because then Baba’s eyes would reveal her agony that the grandchildren had lost their yiddishkeit, to her, something even more fundamental than a change of religion.

  At this point, the most sumptuous of meals would taste like sawdust. And at this point, Ganady would volunteer to take Baba to shul and would be her golden boychik and his parents would allow it just so they could eat. Mama believed that it was both sinful and dangerous to allow a meal to end in discord.

  Ganady wasn’t sure why this ritual must play out every week, but it must. He had tried circumvention once, offering his services as escort the moment Baba Irina sat down at table and said, “Well, it’s sabes,” as if everyone didn’t know.

  “I’ll take you, Baba,” he’d said.

  It was as if she hadn’t heard him. She’d paused for only a beat, patted his hand, then turned to her son-in-law and said, “Is it too much to ask, you and Ravke should come with, Vitaly? If not you, at least my own daughter...”

  Everyone had then assumed his or her customary role, and the guilt had fallen about in its usual pattern. Ganady had never attempted to break the Ritual again.

  How Ganady and his Baba got to synagogue depended entirely on upon the amount of guilt that had accumulated at table and upon whom it had fallen most heavily. Ganady found it bemusing that, though the words were almost always the same, the dynamics of guilt were subtly different from week to week, so that some sabes they walked, some they were given bus fare, and some Da would call a cab.

  Whatever manner of conveyance they took, Yevgeny Toschev would most likely be waiting for them at the bottom of the front stoop (if he had not been at supper) and would go with. And so, most sabes, Irina Kutshinska entered shul Megidey Tihilim with a goo
d Polish Catholic boy on each arm.

  Ganady knew that Baba imagined they were interested in Judaism—Ganady because of his heritage and Yevgeny because of his heart—but the truth was that they were both interested only in Baba.

  Ganady loved his grandmother. But mixed with that love was a peculiar sadness that felt like guilt, though there was nothing to do with Baba for which Ganady Puzdrovsky should feel guilty. He was aware, however, that in Poland, faith and family had been synonymous. Here, they were ambiguously adjacent, sometimes uneasily sharing the same household. To Baba, it must seem as if the life she had so carefully packed up and carried to America had begun to dissolve, its glue lost to the melting pot.

  Ganady did not know how to reassure her—how to tell her that the family was fine, really, and would endure, even if, God forbid, some of them were to become Protestants. So, in lieu of reassurances, he came to shul.

  Yevgeny also loved Baba, and it was a love of wonder. Baba was a piece of a homeland Yevgeny had never seen—a place of roots and heritage and history that his parents were loath to speak of; a place whose very mention drew snickers in school.

  Baba was conjurer and wise woman. She was a favorite book. The boys had learned once, by Kismet, that after synagogue that book might open and its pages give up stories filled with the sounds and sights and aromas of Poland and of times that likely never were and never would be, except in Baba’s memory. Ganady didn’t care and suspected Yevgeny didn’t either. Baba was always a good read.

  Ganady had asked Yevgeny once if he remembered anything at all of the actual sabes service. He was surprised to find that Yevgeny could not only chant the prayers, but understood them—at least, in the literal sense. If you asked him, though, what this or that meant, he would speak of candlelight and spirit and the rise and fall of the cantor’s voice and the supreme sense of sorrow that filled the heart with a slow, throbbing fever and hung deliciously in the sanctuary mingled with the incense.

  The sorrow was so deep and wide, it was almost joy, Yevgeny said, and Ganady, who could almost feel it, but not quite, thought that must be the meaning of ‘bittersweet.’ On the heels of that epiphany came the realization that forever after, his favorite flavor of ice cream would remind him of Baba Irina’s shul and the sadness of old and displaced Jews. Bitter-sweet.

  Yevgeny spoke Yiddish. He spoke it as flagrantly and stubbornly as he used his given name—not ‘Gene,’ not ‘Eugene,’ but ‘Yevgeny.’ This endeared him greatly to Baba and perpetuated her personal myth that he would someday convert to Judaism.

  Ganady, who was privileged to know such things about Yevgeny, thought it far more likely that he would become a monk or a priest so he could imagine himself to be Copernicus, who was both wizard and saint in Yevgeny’s cosmos. Yevgeny believed fiercely in Christ and the Church; perhaps even more fiercely than he believed Baba’s tales of places and people and culture lost. Ganady thought perhaps he was a monk already, or perhaps a curator.

  There were sabes when Yevgeny could not, for one reason or another, come to shul. On those Friday evenings, Ganady was surprised at how alien the service seemed and how indecipherable the experience. It was as if Yevgeny were a filter or a translation device—like a Captain’s Courageous Code-O-Graph. Yevgeny, though, rarely missed synagogue—something for which Ganady was very grateful, for his own sake as well as Baba’s.

  Ganady was glad of Yevgeny’s fixation with the homeland. It allowed him to hear of it, smell it, see it, know it, without having to betray the depth of his own interest. At home, he was expected to be American. It was as if his family’s history had begun with their first footfalls upon the Philadelphia pier. What had come before was not discussed, nor were questions asked. And if, by chance, a word or two of a prior life slipped from his mother’s memory into her conversation, a look from her husband would cause her to pack it away again. Everything Ganady knew of Poland, he knew from his grandmother, who did not have to be so much asked as prompted.

  One Friday night, as Ganady and Yevgeny sat upon the Puzdrovskys’ front stoop waiting for Baba Irina to come down for shul, Yevgeny asked, “Does Baba know the story of Jesus?”

  “I suppose so,” Ganady answered, but wasn’t at all sure. “Mother must’ve told her,” he guessed.

  “I don’t understand how she doesn’t believe. It’s like she doesn’t even think of it.”

  Ganady didn’t suppose she did think of it. He shrugged. “She has her ways. She’s had them all her life. Her parents were Jewish and their parents. It’s who she is.”

  Yevgeny pondered this, his freckles puckered indecisively. “Saint Peter said that God wasn’t partial. That anybody who feared Him and did what was right would be acceptable to Him.”

  Ganady vaguely remembered having heard this, so he nodded.

  “Father Zembruski,” said Yevgeny as if the name was shoved from his open lips, “said that doing what’s right means believing in Christ, not just doing what’s right.”

  Ganady nodded again, supposing that Father Z, who had studied these things, should know.

  “Has your mother really tried to explain to Baba about Jesus?”

  “I don’t know,” Ganady said. “Are you afraid Baba’s going to hell?”

  Yevgeny’s fair skin flushed and his delft eyes looked suddenly bright and watery. “She couldn’t. I mean, she fears God, right?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “And that’s half of it.”

  Ganny nodded.

  “And if Father Zembruski is wrong and what Peter meant by doing right is just doing right, then that’s the other half.”

  Baba came out then, arresting any discussion of what it might mean to think that Father Z had been wrong about something.

  “Ah, here are my good boychiklech,” she said, and Yevgeny didn’t mention Jesus to her, as much as Ganady knew he wanted to.

  They walked to shul this evening. The weather was mild, the streets and sidewalks still glistening with spring rain. Ganady wondered if the ballgame would be rained out tomorrow. Da had said they might go.

  He thought of Mr. O. “Baba, how long have you known Mr. Ouspensky?”

  “Well, when we came to Megidey Tihilim for our first sabes here, there was Stanislaus Ouspensky. I’ve known him since that day.”

  “Do you think he’s a...a meshuggener?”

  “Ganady! What sort of thing is that to say?”

  “I didn’t say it. Nikolai did. He said Mr. Ouspensky likes to play jokes on dummies like me and Yevgeny and that’s why he says...” He broke off, unable to think of a way to explain Mr. O’s theories of time to his grandmother.

  “I know what he says,” Baba said, her mouth prim. “Perhaps that makes him a meshuggener. Certainly, it’s not my place to say.”

  “Doesn’t he have any family?” Ganady asked.

  “Shouldn’t you ask him these things?”

  Ganady shrugged, looking around Baba Irina at Yevgeny, who peered back owlishly. “He just said he’d been here a long time. That he came here when he was almost a kid. But not quite.”

  “And he said he played baseball for some mill,” added Yevgeny.

  “He came over as a young man, I think,” Baba told them. “Perhaps he left his family in Poland. Or perhaps there was no one to come with him. So, what do you boys think? Do you think he’s a meshuggener?”

  Ganady thought about that for a moment. What was he supposed to think of someone who discussed time-eddies and windows with the same conversational tone as he discussed batting averages and ERAs?

  “No,” he said at last. “I don’t.”

  From Baba’s opposite side, Yevgeny shook his head and said nothing.

  oOo

  Synagogue was, above all, a place where Ganady Puzdrovsky exercised his imagination. Unlike Yevgeny, whose eyes and ears never ceased external surveillance, Ganady withdrew into his own spiritual sanctuary.

  Inside Ganady Puzdrovsky’s head was a baseball diamond. It was 334 feet from home plate to left fie
ld, 468 feet to center, 331 feet to right, 86 feet to the backstop. It had no spite fence and was the scene of many more home-team triumphs than the park at 21st and LeHigh.

  Ganady’s ballpark was always filled to its 35,000 capacity with fans wildly cheering or perched at seat’s edge in the hushed, tense, expectant silence that is only experienced by those who frequent ball games. While the cantor canted and Rabbi Andrukh prayed, play commenced, with Puzdrovsky at first instead of Waitkus.

  After shul, Izzy’s deli might be open for conversation and refreshment. Ganady had never asked his grandmother how she was able to reconcile herself to frequenting the business of a non-observant Jew on sabes, nor would he. But he did wonder. Baba invariably had hot tea and the boys hot chocolate or cold sodas, depending. And there, Baba would open her Book of the Old World and begin to spin tales.

  They did not start out as tales, to be sure; they started as reminiscences that someone—most often Izzy himself—would call up by saying something like, “So, what do you say, Irina Kutshinska? What do you think of such-and-such?” or “Do you remember so-and-so?”

  One sabes, Esther and Isak Isaacson were at the counter arguing when they came into Izzy’s, Irina and her two good Catholic boys, and Isak said, “So, Irina, you tell me—is it Rabbi Andrukh’s fault or no?”

  Baba sat herself down at the scarred old table by the window and arranged her shawl across the wounded back of the vinyl chair before even letting on that she’d heard. The boys were trying to decide whether it was to be hot chocolate or cold soda on this ambivalent evening in early April, when Baba said, “And what is it that you’re asking is the Rabbi’s fault?”

  “We’re losing our yiddishkeit, is what,” said Esther. “We are Jews who are ceasing to be Jewish.”

  “Esther says it’s the Rabbi,” noted Isak.

  Esther—all five-foot-four, 275 pounds of Esther—came rolling over to Baba’s table and sat herself down there, making the chair pop like a mad fire. “Only on yonkiper does Joshua Leved (and that wife of his) come home to shul.”

  “Maybe they go to shul in Cherry Hill,” said Baba.