“I tell her, ‘Marcy, darling, you have to do something,’” Mrs. Kubiac said. “‘What about all the sacrifices, the practice, the lessons, teachers, awards? Look at rich people — they don’t let anything interfere with what they want.’”
Mrs. Kubiac told my mother these things in strictest confidence, her voice at first a secretive whisper, but growing louder as she recited her litany of troubles. The louder she talked the more broken her English became, as if her worry and suffering were straining the language past its limits. Finally, her feelings overpowered her; she began to weep and lapsed into Bohemian, which I couldn’t understand.
I would sit out of sight beneath the dining-room table, my plastic cowboys galloping through a forest of chair legs, while I listened to Mrs. Kubiac talk about Marcy. I wanted to hear everything about her, and the more I heard the more precious the smile she had given me on the stairs became. It was like a secret bond between us. Once I became convinced of that, listening to Mrs. Kubiac seemed like spying. I was Marcy’s friend and conspirator. She had spoken to me as if I was someone apart from the world she was shunning. Whatever her reasons for the way she was acting, whatever her secrets, I was on her side. In daydreams I proved my loyalty over and over.
At night we could hear her playing the piano — a muffled rumbling of scales that sounded vaguely familiar. Perhaps I actually remembered hearing Marcy practicing years earlier, before she had gone on to New York. The notes resonated through the kitchen ceiling while I wiped the supper dishes and Dzia-Dzia sat soaking his feet. Dzia-Dzia soaked his feet every night in a bucket of steaming water into which he dropped a tablet that fizzed, immediately turning the water bright pink. Between the steaming water and pink dye, his feet and legs, up to the knees where his trousers were rolled, looked permanently scalded.
Dzia-Dzia’s feet seemed to be turning into hooves. His heels and soles were swollen nearly shapeless and cased in scaly calluses. Nails, yellow as a horse’s teeth, grew gnarled from knobbed toes. Dzia-Dzia’s feet had been frozen when as a young man he walked most of the way from Krakow to Gdansk in the dead of winter escaping service in the Prussian army. And later he had frozen them again mining for gold in Alaska. Most of what I knew of Dzia-Dzia’s past had mainly to do with the history of his feet.
Sometimes my uncles would say something about him. It sounded as if he had spent his whole life on the move — selling dogs to the Igorot in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War; mining coal in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; working barges on the Great Lakes; riding the rails out West. No one in the family wanted much to do with him. He had deserted them so often, my uncle Roman said, that it was worse than growing up without a father.
My grandma had referred to him as Pan Djabel, “Mr. Devil,” though the way she said it sounded as if he amused her. He called her a gorel, a hillbilly, and claimed that he came from a wealthy, educated family that had been stripped of their land by the Prussians.
“Landowners, all right!” Uncle Roman once said to my mother. “Besides acting like a bastard, according to Ma, he actually was one in the literal sense.”
“Romey, shhh, what good’s bitter?” my mother said.
“Who’s bitter, Ev? It’s just that he couldn’t even show up to bury her. I’ll never forgive that.”
Dzia-Dzia hadn’t been at Grandma’s funeral. He had disappeared again, and no one had known where to find him. For years Dzia-Dzia would simply vanish without telling anyone, then suddenly show up out of nowhere to hang around for a while, ragged and smelling of liquor, wearing his two suits one over the other, only to disappear yet again.
“Want to find him? Go ask the bums on skid row,” Uncle Roman would say.
My uncles said he lived in boxcars, basements, and abandoned buildings. And when, from the window of a bus, I’d see old men standing around trash fires behind billboards, I’d wonder if he was among them.
Now that he was very old and failing he sat in our kitchen, his feet aching and numb as if he had been out walking down Eighteenth Street barefoot in the snow.
It was my aunts and uncles who talked about Dzia-Dzia “failing.” The word always made me nervous. I was failing, too — failing spelling, English, history, geography, almost everything except arithmetic, and that only because it used numbers instead of letters. Mainly, I was failing penmanship. The nuns complained that my writing was totally illegible, that I spelled like a DP, and threatened that if I didn’t improve they might have to hold me back.
Mother kept my failures confidential. It was Dzia-Dzia’s they discussed during Sunday visits in voices pitched just below the level of an old man’s hearing. Dzia-Dzia stared fiercely but didn’t deny what they were saying about him. He hadn’t spoken since he had reappeared, and no one knew whether his muteness was caused by senility or stubbornness, or if he’d gone deaf. His ears had been frozen as well as his feet. Wiry white tufts of hair that matched his horned eyebrows sprouted from his ears. I wondered if he would hear better if they were trimmed.
Though Dzia-Dzia and I spent the evenings alone together in the kitchen, he didn’t talk any more than he did on Sundays. Mother stayed in the parlor, immersed in her correspondence courses in bookkeeping. The piano rumbled above us through the ceiling. I could feel it more than hear it, especially the bass notes. Sometimes a chord would be struck that made the silverware clash in the drawer and the glasses hum.
Marcy had looked very thin climbing the stairs, delicate, incapable of such force. But her piano was massive and powerful-looking. I remembered going upstairs once with my mother to visit Mrs. Kubiac. Marcy was away at school then. The piano stood unused — top lowered, lid down over the keys — dominating the apartment. In the afternoon light it gleamed deeply, as if its dark wood were a kind of glass. Its pedals were polished bronze and looked to me more like pedals I imagined motormen stamping to operate streetcars.
“Isn’t it beautiful, Michael?” my mother asked.
I nodded hard, hoping that Mrs. Kubiac would offer to let me play it, but she didn’t.
“How did it get up here?” I asked. It seemed impossible that it could fit through a doorway.
“Wasn’t easy,” Mrs. Kubiac said, surprised. “Gave Mr. Kubiac a rupture. It come all the way on the boat from Europe. Some old German, a great musician, brang it over to give concerts, then got sick and left it. Went back to Germany. God knows what happened to him — I think he was a Jew. They auctioned it off to pay his hotel bill. That’s life, huh? Otherwise who could afford it? We’re not rich people.”
“It must have been very expensive anyway,” my mother said.
“Only cost me a marriage,” Mrs. Kubiac said, then laughed, but it was forced. “That’s life too, huh?” she asked. “Maybe a woman’s better off without a husband?” And then, for just an instant, I saw her glance at my mother, then look away. It was a glance I had come to recognize from people when they caught themselves saying something that might remind my mother or me that my father had been killed in the war.
The silverware would clash and the glasses hum. I could feel it in my teeth and bones as the deep notes rumbled through the ceiling and walls like distant thunder. It wasn’t like listening to music, yet more and more often I would notice Dzia-Dzia close his eyes, a look of concentration pinching his face as his body swayed slightly. I wondered what he was hearing. Mother had said once that he’d played the fiddle when she was a little girl, but the only music I’d even seen him show any interest in before was the “Frankie Yankovitch Polka Hour,” which he turned up loud and listened to with his ear almost pressed to the radio. Whatever Marcy was playing, it didn’t sound like Frankie Yankovitch.