and stopped. Only the man and the older woman got out and walked into the house.
Angie and I put our socks and shoes on and trudged back to our own world.
The following weekend was still warm—warm enough for the two of us to go hunting for soda-pop bottles and coins thrown into the nearby river. The deposits on the bottles were our only source of spending money at that stage of life. The coins paid by the local butcher/grocery-store owner were gifts from heaven, responses to our prayers as we knelt in the pews of the Catholic church attached to the grammar school we attended.
We walked down Fulton Street with its eponymous Fulton’s Tavern and numerous, decaying, antebellum clapboard houses, places that made our tenements look like luxury apartments. They flanked the banks of the river and, so I was told, it was not unusual for the entire bottom floors of those places to flood. Even now the lesson remains: There is always someone worse off, someone a rung higher on the pain ladder.
The warm weather had brought out the old folks in the neighborhood.
Angie stopped me.
“Berto, look at the Mustache Petes!”
We watched as the old men pretended to be boys like us, twisting and pirouetting like grotesque ballerinas, as they cast balls playing boccie. We giggled then laughed out loud, and some of them turned and directed evil eyes at us for being rude and, probably, for being young.
So we walked quickly past the men and headed down the alleyway between the tavern and its neighboring house. I looked at the window of the tavern and saw the incongruous ROOMS TO LET sign. Who lived in a tavern? It was one of those later-teen-year epiphanies when I learned who—and what. But when you are eight, “red-light ladies” and “back-room abortionists” mean nothing.
The riverbank was slightly muddy from the previous night’s shower. We slid and stumbled and finally arrived at a spot low enough to walk on the stones sticking up from the shallow water. It was a banner harvest, as we pulled out the casually discarded bottles, mentally adding up the two cents each would bring at the little shop run by the man everyone in the neighborhood called the Mad Russian.
Angie saw it first. I had bent over to pull out a buffalo nickel wedged in-between two river rocks. I was excited. A nickel went a long way then. I got ready to yell out my find, when Angie’s cry startled me into silence.
“Berto, look, over there!”
He was shaking and pointing, even forgetting to stand on the flat stone that had kept him relatively dry. I turned to where he was pointing—one of the pylons under the Central River Bridge—and saw it.
At first it seemed to be just a bundle of rags. Not unusual around here, something saved to clean or mend or fix other things with. Who would be so foolish as to discard something useful in the river?
Then I saw the arm sticking out.
I moved toward it, even as I heard Angie running away, the splashes of his panicked flight casting a spray. He reached the bank and scrambled up. From the corner of my eye I saw his wet and muddied pants disappear back into the alleyway.
The bundle lay there, river water covering and uncovering it with silt. As some of the mud washed away I saw the floral-print dress. I moved closer.
My lady stared at me with sunken, vacant, green eyes. Her blond tresses, waterlogged, swayed with the river current. Her long arms and slender legs looked like some mishandled rag doll, twisted in ways I did not think possible. The light-pink lipstick failed to conceal the blue-black discoloration of her lips and half-protruding tongue.
She was dead.
In some respects death was no stranger to our neighborhood. There was the dog hit by a car lying in the gutter, its hind legs stiffened and spread. There was the drunk who fell into that final, cheap, alcohol-induced coma and never woke up—lying in his own urine, feces, and vomit. There was the common-law wife choked and thrown out the window of a third-story walk-up, sprawled on the street like a distorted pretzel, while the police led her drunken, half-naked husband away. And, often, there was the young male killed in an ethnic clash down on Hamilton Street.
My lady was different.
She didn’t belong in the river. She shouldn’t be here, discarded. She shouldn’t have died. Someone like her belonged in a place of green and rainbow colors, running barefoot and letting the grass caress her toes.
Damn! I never realized that even as a kid I was a romantic.
I stared at her, taking in the cyans, fuscias, and browns of her hands and feet. I looked once more into those green eyes and thought, “I’m sorry, lady.”
Don’t leave me!
Yes, I heard it—no, not with my ears, in my mind.
Don’t leave me! I want to go home!
I heard myself reply out loud, “Okay, lady.”
I turned and walked back to the riverbank, the treasure trove of soda pop bottles Angie and I had collected splayed nearby. I left them. Maybe they would still be there later, maybe not. There were other enterprising kids in the neighborhood.
Papa went to the police station. I saw the wagon and heard the siren, as it headed toward the river. And then I waited.
I told Mama I was going out to play again. She patted my head. I could see she was worried about my experience.
I snuck in by the side door. In those days they took the accidentally and deliberately dead to the police station. The big door at the end of the ground floor beckoned me forward with its mysterious letters: MORGUE.
I opened that heavy oak door, and the odors from within caressed my olfactory nerves for the first time. The mixed perfumes of formaldehyde and decaying flesh became old friends in later years, as I made my way through medical school.
On that day my lady lay there in repose, her floral-print dress and undergarments resting in a box on the floor next to the table that had become her bedroom suite. She was the center of attention to the two men dressed in long, priest-like gowns and dark-brown, elbow-length gloves, their faces masked and their heads skull-capped.
I was eight years old and I was bold.
“Why did she die?”
They looked up, and one yelled for me to get out. The other paused then asked me the question that opened up the door to the rest of my life.
“Why do you want to know, kid?”
I didn’t hesitate. The answer was already within me—I just didn’t know it until then.
“I want to be like you.”
In the few seconds of silence that followed, I walked over to where my lady—my human marigold—lay. I looked at her, eyes now closed, face in sleep-like calm. No, she didn’t smile—she couldn’t. But my mind heard her once more.
Thank you!
The Mad Russian
They call it the Widow Maker, but I’ve been a widower twice, so it’s a moot point for me.
I lay there on the table in the special-procedures room, while my cardiologist and former student Dr. Salvatore Crescenzi threaded the catheter up from my thigh and into my heart. I watched the screen above my head, blurred by the slight haze of medication, as the catheter tip entered the left coronary artery and Sal injected the dye.
I must have said something out loud, because he stopped and asked if anything was wrong.
Forgive me, dear reader, but I almost giggled—I did giggle.
Damned medication!
“No, I just had three random thoughts run across my geriatric cortex.”
“You goin’ senile on me, Galen?”
“Hope not. I can still recognize a major blockage in my old friend,