Princess Of Passyunk Part 17

Ganady put out a hand to stop her. "I'm going to find you," he said, and meant: I will always find you.

She was looking at him again, her eyes bright and soft at once. "You already have."

"I mean really find you. In the real world. While I'm awake," he added.

She blessed him with a brilliant smile and skipped away toward the plate. She reached it, crossed it, and vanished.

"Lana! Don't go!" he called, and dashed after her.

The stadium lights went out. Ganady stopped, staggered, and fell back into his bed.

The bedroom was dark, and for a moment, he couldn't think why. Then, out of the darkness to his right, a m.u.f.fled voice said,"When'd you start talking in your sleep?"

"Huh?"

"You were talking in your sleep. I hope you're not going to do that every night."

"I was reading a Superman comic and fell asleep." Ganady hoped that would sufficiently explain the phenomenon.

"You were dreaming about Superman?"

"Yeah."

"Well, don't make a habit of it, okay? A guy's gotta sleep."

"Uh-uh."

Ganady felt about for the comic. He found it, slid it back into the top drawer of his nightstand, and shimmied down under his sheet.

"So, who's 'Lana'?"

"Huh?"

"You were calling to someone named 'Lana.' That's what woke me up. You said, 'Lana, don't go.' What's that all about?"

"She was...just someone in the story. A girl."

"A girl, huh? I thought the girl in the comic book was Lois."

"Well, there was a Lana too. She's a-a friend of Lois Lane's."

"Oh," Nikolai said, then fell silent.

Ganady was on the verge of sleep when he heard a m.u.f.fled, singsong voice from the other bed.

"Ganny's got a girlfriend. Ganny's got a girlfriend."

Thirteen: The Sausage King of Philly.

Sat.u.r.day, at loose ends, Ganady wandered down to Pa.s.syunk Square and carefully-not to say reluctantly-approached the butcher shop on the corner of Thirteenth and Reed.

He needn't have bothered with care; the shop was closed for sabes. But he did notice that the window had been repaired. Arcing across it in gold letters were the words Sausage King: Gusalev and Sons, and in very small white letters beneath, Kosher.

He meant to try again on Sunday, but could not-or did not. Instead, he let himself be distracted by the fact that with Nadia and her parents out of town for the day to visit relatives in Trenton, Yevgeny sought him out to go to a ballgame.

Over Yevgeny's half-hearted protests, Ganny insisted they invite Mr. O along, but the old man was under the weather. The boys went alone.

It was a peculiar afternoon, for Ganny found himself suddenly tongue-tied with Yevgeny as if he had not been his best friend for almost as many years as either boy had been alive. Yevgeny wanted to speak of nothing but Nadia-and did. Ganady wanted to speak of nothing but Svetlana-and didn't.

What could he say? That he dreamed most nights of a girl who might be a ghost? Who popped out of comic books and spirited him away to empty baseball diamonds? And who had been so disobedient her father had disowned her?

So, he let Yevgeny prattle on about Nadia, until he couldn't stand any more.

"Hey," he said, when Yevgeny had paused to stuff popcorn into his mouth, "you want to go see that new Humphrey Bogart movie?"

"Oh, we've already seen it. It was great. Kind of mushy, but great. We went with Nikolai and Antonia."

Ganady was stunned. His best friend and big brother, double-dating, while he...dreamed.

"Oh," Ganady said. "Well, I guess Lana and I will go see it alone then."

Yevgeny stopped chewing his popcorn. "Lana?"

Ganny shrugged. "A girl I met...in church."

That was all Ganady said, but he felt as if he had let the world's biggest true lie fall from his lips. When he failed to dream that night of Svetlana, he was sure it was the lie that had kept her away.

She did not enter his dreams once during the entire week.

The following Sunday morning he went to Saint Stan's with the rest of the family and had used up every bit of patience he possessed before Subdeacon Savitzky had even begun to intone the Epistle. By the time he had gotten home, changed out of this Sabbath clothes and walked back to Pa.s.syunk Square, he had made the journey in his head no less than a dozen times.

The butcher shop was open and several patrons waited at the long gla.s.s counter while the butchers filled their orders. There were only two men behind the counter. One of them was older-perhaps in his fifties-the other not much older than Nick. The older fellow's white ap.r.o.n bore a red nametag that proclaimed him to be 'Joe.' The younger man was 'Mik.'

Ganady loitered in the background, appearing to study a selection of kielbasa, until the shop was empty of customers. Then the older of the two men spoke to him.

"Hey, boy-you need something?"

Ganady blinked, looked up at the butcher and said,"Are you Mr. Gusalev?"

"That would be me."

"Well sir, I..." Do you have a daughter? That was the question he was supposed to ask, but instead he said,"I'm the one who broke your window a while back. With my baseball."

"That was you, eh?" Joseph Gusalev regarded him through wintry eyes above which s.h.a.ggy brows of brown and gray went through a series of exclamatory expressions. "I suppose you want that old baseball back, is that it? Well, I tossed it out-"

"Yes sir. I know. I found it out back in the alley. With a big old c.o.c.kroach sitting on it."

He was careful to accord the word 'c.o.c.kroach' the weight of a t.i.tle and watched the butcher's expression closely, but the man did not slap his hands to his face and cry out in consternation or disgust. He simply crossed his arms over his barrel chest and continued to stare Ganady into the green and black tile floor of his shop.

"I...I wanted to come back sooner, but I guess I was afraid to. I thought you'd be pretty mad."

Gusalev tilted his head to one side and shrugged. "Actually, not so much as you'd think. I'd meant to get that sign repainted and having it broke was as good an excuse as any. Cost me a pretty penny, though."

"Yes sir. Well, um, I don't have any money to pay for it, but I could do some work for you, maybe."

"Yeah? You think? What kind of work?"

"I don't know. I wash windows for Mr. Davidov over at Izzy's. I could do something like that, I guess."

"Now that'd be poetic justice, wouldn't it-for you to wash the window you busted?" He turned to the younger butcher. "What d'you think of that, Mikhail? Would that be poetic justice?"

Mikhail ("poor Cousin Mikhail?") regarded Ganady with p.r.o.nounced disinterest. "I guess."

Joseph Gusalev turned back to Ganny. "Yeah. Okay. You got a deal. You wash the window every Friday afternoon-before sunset, mind you-you're forgiven for busting it. How's that?"

"For how long?"

"How long?"

"For how long do I wash the windows? A month, maybe?"

"How about you wash and we'll see?"

"Well, okay, but can I do it Sat.u.r.day? I have to go to shul with my Baba on Friday."

Gusalev's eyes lit up. "You're Jewish?"

"Catholic. But my Baba is Jewish and she likes for me to go to temple with her."

"I'll bet she does. We're closed Sat.u.r.day. It's the Sabbath. How about Sunday?"

"Mama doesn't like us doing stuff like that on Sunday. It's the Sabbath."

"Well, then? How are my windows to be clean and shiny for the new week?"

"If you left me a bucket and sponge I could clean them on Sat.u.r.day."

"Done," said Mr. Gusalev, as if he had just negotiated a fat deal for tenderloin.

Ganny nodded and hesitated and tried to make himself ask The Question, but could not. Well, he reasoned, he might have just arranged to have a year of Sat.u.r.days in which to get up his courage.

oOo That night he dreamed of Svetlana. He dreamed they went to a baseball game, then to an ice-cream parlor-the one over on 12th. They sat by the window, sharing a sundae with strawberries and hot fudge, and somewhere toward the bottom of the dish, Lana stopped in mid-bite and said, "Why'd you bring me here?"

He looked up at her, taking in the way the phantom sunlight reveled in her hair as if it wanted nothing more than to live there. The way her eyes, illumined by that same sunlight, were sea and sky at once. The way her skin seemed to glow as if it were the source of the light and not merely reflecting it.

He absorbed all of this in one deep breath, committed it to his heart and said, "Huh?"

She shrugged. "Why here? I know you'd rather go to Izzy's. Why don't we go to Izzy's?"

"I brought you here?" he repeated. "How'd I do that?"

"I don't know. You just did."

"Oh...well, Nadia didn't like Izzy's, so I thought-"

"That was Nadia. Not me. I think I'd like Izzy's."

"Okay. Maybe next time?"

"Why not this time?"

Ganady looked down at the empty sundae dish and the fudge-gooey spoon in his hand. "Well, we've already eaten the ice cream."

Svetlana threw back her head and laughed. "Are you full?"

He pondered that for a moment. "No."

"You could eat ice cream all day long and not get full here. Or you could not eat the whole time and not be hungry."

"Where is here?" Ganady asked, and Svetlana said,"Izzy's."

And indeed they were standing outside of Izzy's deli. They went in. They sat at the counter. They ate more ice cream. Bittersweet chocolate, which Izzy's had and the regular ice-cream shop did not.

They did not speak of ghost baseball games or butcher shops or alienated fathers. They talked to Izzy about the old country and listened to klezmer music on the radio. They talked about the season the Phillies were having and about their chances for going to the World Series. And Ganady came close to mentioning his trip to a certain butcher shop in Pa.s.syunk Square, but did not.

oOo It was odd, cleaning the windows in Joseph Gusalev's shop Sat.u.r.days. The shop was closed and all the meats put away in the cold room. Mr. Gusalev and his sons apparently did not begin sausage preparation until very early on Monday morning. And on that morning, at approximately five AM, the first new sausages of the week would be made.

But on Sat.u.r.day late in the morning, Ganny would come to the shop and find a bucket of soapy water, a bucket of clear water and a sponge awaiting him on the sidewalk outside the shop. He would clean the outside of the big plate gla.s.s window and the gla.s.s in the front door. By this time, the Gusalevs would return from synagogue and Mr. Joe, or so he liked to be called, would let him into the shop and sit behind the counter on a tall stool and watch as he washed the insides of the windows and the gla.s.s cases, which had inexplicably been added to his contract.

"I'm not called the Sausage King for nothing," Mr. Joe told him the third Sat.u.r.day of their arrangement.

He was sitting behind the counter reading a newspaper, and had caught Ganady staring at a trophy that sat enshrined in the front window.

"Best sausages in Philly-that's what that trophy is for. The best. That's why I own such a shop in such a location. And I'll tell you something else, Ganady Puzdrovsky. I'm going to open another store one block north of Market. One block!"

"You're going to move your business?"

"Not at all. I'm expanding again. In a few weeks, I'll have another trophy to go with that one. What with advertising in the newspaper, in a few years, I'll have an empire of butcher shops. This isn't my only shop, you know. I have another one four blocks over. That's the original. Not a prime location, though. And the flat upstairs-whew! What a dump that was. But now we can afford this one, and soon, I'll begin looking for a real house." He nodded, and his eyes seemed to be looking at something beyond the empty gla.s.s case they were focused on.

"So, your sons run the other shops?" Ganady buffed a smudge on the window near the trophy.

"My sons?" Mr. Joe blinked. "No. My wife runs the first shop, and she'll go to run the new one when it opens and Mikhail will take over the first one." He hesitated for a moment, then added: "I got no sons."