10. Room 206

ROOM 206

I didn't answer, of course. I never did. Because, as I mentioned, up until a few days before, I hadn't spoken in years.

Remembering what Julio had told him, the boy knocked once more, counting to thirty, hoping it might give me enough time to pull up my pants or finish pooping. (For the record, I would have needed much more time for either.)

He found me, to his great relief, not on the toilet, or half-naked, or singing Rigoletto , but propped up in my bed, darning a sweater that Etta had dropped off.

I still did that, even at my age: mended things for people at Shady Glen. I wasn't sure how it happened. I must've been sewing something of my own in the common area one day—I sewed like other people knitted, to occupy my mind, to calm my nerves; I never felt safer than I did with a needle in my hand. The next thing I knew, things started showing up: dresses with hems that had come half undone, or trousers that needed to be taken in because of weight loss or let out because of weight gain. Etta, now pregnant, had an endless supply of things for me to fix, though sometimes I suspected she was ripping seams and popping buttons on purpose just to give my old hands something to do.

Tentatively, the boy came inside, and came face-to-face with me in all my glory. My back stooped and bulged; I was bald in all the places you'd want hair and bushy in places you didn't. My hands crabbed into half fists and I had to wear special gloves to keep them open. My eyes had a milky film and produced an impressive amount of gunk.

On the plus side, I didn't wear a diaper. At 107, this was not nothing.

I put down the sweater and tapped the bedside tray where I had been taking my meals. He was in such a hurry to get away from my decrepitude that after he dropped the box, he spun on his heel and tripped on the bed frame, grabbing the nearest thing he could find to steady himself.

Which happened to be you. Or rather the portrait of you that Babci had painted almost eighty-five years ago. The one that had watched over me for eight decades: above the pallet in my hideaway in the Tatra Mountains, propped against my metal bunk bed in the Austrian displaced-persons camp, in the third-class berth of the USS Saratoga buffeting me across the Atlantic, in the Orchard Street rooming house where Adek and I first lived, in the first house I bought, and the last house I sold, and finally to my room here in the Antechamber of Death, on the wall next to my bed. With my eyes crapped out, I could no longer make out the details, but what my eyes couldn't see didn't matter anymore. I could see your face as clearly as that summer day Babci had painted you.

The boy let go of the frame, but it was too late. The wire had come loose, and the painting shuddered and then began to fall.

"Olka!" I cried out.

"It's okay," the boy said. "I caught it."

And he had. He was gripping the frame on both sides, hugging it almost as if it were a human. "The wire came loose. I'm really sorry. I can fix it. If you want me to."

"Please," I whispered. "I can't see so good."

He rewired the picture with practiced expertise. I didn't know it yet, but he and his mother had moved fourteen times over a period of ten years, and he had become expert at hanging pictures and spackling plaster.

He took pains to make sure it was straight. When he was satisfied with his work, he stepped back and said, "Good as new, Olka."

Olka. Hearing your name, spoken aloud by a voice full of life… It had been years. It shocked me.

"What did you say?" I asked, my voice sputtering like an unused engine.

"Olka." He said the name again. "Isn't that what she's called?"

"How did you know that?"

"You just said it. When she fell."

So I had.

"I never heard that name before," he added.

"It's Polish."

"Is that where you're from?"

"Not for a long, long time." I paused. Olka. It felt so good to hear your name again. It had been so long. "It's short for Oleksandra," I told the boy. "Or Alexandra, here."

He was quiet for a long moment and then he said, "My mom's name is Alexandra. And mine, too, kind of. Not Alexandra but Alexander. Or Alex, really. My mom named me that because she didn't think it was fair that boys are always named after their fathers. And anyway, I don't even know my father."

The boy looked back at the painting, feeling a strange shiver. "Olka." He repeated the name. It was not so unusual—Alexandra is not such a rare name in the United States—but it was coincidence enough to spark his curiosity. "What was she like?"

"Do you really want to know?"

And then this boy, who did not want to be here, who thought that old people were gross, that Shady Glen was a punishment, that opportunities were a trick, a boy who trusted no one, liked no one, counted no one among his friends, said, "Yeah, why not?"

THE FIRST TIME I SAW her, I thought she was ugly. On the outside, she was pretty enough—blond hair, watery blue eyes, upturned nose—but if a smile can make an ordinary person beautiful, a scowl can make a beautiful person ugly.

And Olka, oof , was she scowling.

She did not want to be there.

There in her case was the tailoring department of the clothing store my family owned, where Olka had recently started working as a seamstress. And where I was standing on a pedestal, clapping.

Also, I should mention, I was almost naked.

The reason I was almost naked on a pedestal clapping was that I was getting a suit tailored. Pani Zuzana, the store's longtime seamstress, had seen me in every kind of ensemble, including my birthday suit, so it was nothing for me to be standing there in this state of undress.

The only problem was that Pani Zuzana had retired. I ought to have remembered this. I had attended her farewell party. I had toasted her with champagne and given her the small gold watch my mother had chosen as her gift. But like many twenty-two-year-old men, I had other things on my mind: school, friends, girls. Especially girls.

I had a date that weekend with a girl—a pretty girl who did not scowl—and I had a new suit and I wanted to get it altered for the date. Which was why I was standing on the pedestal in the tailoring room of my family's clothing store, in nothing but my underpants and socks, waiting to get measured.

Before she retired, Pani Zuzana sometimes fell asleep in between jobs, so, forgetting that she had retired, I clapped my hands to wake her up.

Olka had not been sleeping. She'd been hiding in the curtained changing area, so engrossed in a book that she had not noticed me entering the tailoring room and taking off my clothes until I clapped. After which she opened the curtains, saw me, and shrieked, "You're naked!"

"I'm not naked. I'm wearing undershorts. And socks. I'm here to get my suit altered." I pointed to the garment bag. It was a very nice suit: French, light gray, worsted wool with double cuffs. Mother had bought it for me in Paris.

"I can hardly pin it when you're naked. Put the suit on."

While I donned the suit, Olka returned to the changing area, yanking the curtain shut with such force that her book fell to the floor. She snatched it up quickly, but not before I saw what it was: Quo Vadis . I could not imagine Pani Zuzana reading a novel like Quo Vadis . To be honest, I doubted the old woman knew how to read. I doubted the young woman did either.

As if she could hear my thoughts, she scowled as she reemerged, holding a pincushion and some chalk. She knelt before me and began yanking at my trouser cuff. Looking down on her, literally and figuratively, I asked if she was enjoying the book. There was a mocking tone in my voice. She must have heard it, because she promptly stabbed me in the ankle with a straight pin.

"Ouch," I cried.

"Oh, I am so sorry," she said, not sounding very sorry at all.

As she began to pin my hem, I continued my inquisition. "Who is your favorite character?" An easy question but one that would require some knowledge of the book beyond the general summary.

Her skin colored with what I assumed was embarrassment at being caught out. Serve her right, I thought, pantomiming like that. Sure, at college some of the fellows walked around with pipes they never smoked and books they never read to impress girls or what have you. But those were university students, not seamstresses. Who exactly did she think she was fooling?

"Mine is Petronius," I continued, inviting her to fall into my trap. Petronius was not a good man.

She muttered something under her breath.

"I'm sorry, did you say something?"

She looked up at me, her eyes flashing. "I said that you would like Petronius best. He is a spoiled, two-faced brat who speaks out of both sides of his mouth."

I was shocked. Not just because she had aptly described Petronius but because she had so baldly insulted me.

"You don't even know me," I fumed.

"No, it is you who don't know me," she replied.

"How should I?"

She let out a very deep sigh. "We were at school together."

At this I started to laugh. It was just so inconceivable. And, oof , the look on her face. Murderous. If the shears had not been on the other side of the room, I might've feared for my life.

"I'm sorry," I continued. Now I was the one who didn't sound remotely sorry. "But you must be confused. I went to…" I named my school, an elite private academy. It's different now, but you must understand that in Poland at that time, only wealthy families bothered to educate girls. The girls who had attended my school were the daughters of doctors, lawyers, or merchants, who went on to become the wives of doctors, lawyers, or merchants, and in a few instances became doctors or lawyers or merchants themselves. Needless to say, they did not go on to become seamstresses.

Olka stabbed me again with a pin. This time she did not even pretend it was an accident.

"I am not confused," she said. "I was two years behind you."

"I don't think so."

"I was. And I was the top student."

Aha. I'd caught her in a blatant lie. I happened to know that Adek Dworkowicz was the top student that year. Adek was a pompous twit who happened to be the son of my mother's friend, and so occasionally we were forced to dine together. At one such dinner, the conversation had focused on brilliant Adek, who had made top student. He'd smirked at me, because I had graduated two years earlier with no such honors. But so what if I was a mediocre student? I would inherit the family business no matter what marks I'd earned.

"You, top student?" I said. "No, that's impossible."

Impossible. Was that ever the wrong word to use with her. She had been hearing it for much of her life, starting after her mother died and she went to live with her mother's brother, who said it was impossible for her to continue her schooling, even though she had been such an excellent student in primary school that the teachers pulled her aside at the end of each year to extol her intellect and curiosity. But intellect and curiosity did not pay for bread or coal, her uncle said, and just because his sister was dead shouldn't mean he had to feed another mouth. Olka had to contribute to the family's coffers. So at the age of twelve she was sent to work with her uncle's wife, who cleaned the homes of Krakow's wealthiest families.

It was at the home of one of those families that a fourteen-year-old Olka was caught reading a book while dusting. The matron of the house accused Olka of stealing. Olka had explained she was not stealing, merely borrowing the book to pass the time as she cleaned. The matron had responded with a haughty "Impossible." There was no way a cleaning girl could read such a complex novel. Olka went on to detail the plot and themes with such accuracy and insight that the matron, who happened to be on the board of a well-regarded private school, arranged for Olka to be tested and when the results came in—a perfect score, unheard of for well-educated girls, much less housemaids—she used her position to have Olka admitted to the school and receive a four-year scholarship.

When Olka told her uncle the news, he responded with yet another "Impossible!" The school might be free, but if Olka was studying rather than working, it would take zlotys out of his pocket. Besides, his uppity niece was already too smart for her own good. Only after the matron insisted that Olka must go to school because it was already arranged, and after the aunt intervened, saying she would lose the matron's and all her wealthy friends' business if Olka refused the offer, did the uncle relent.

Olka outsmarted impossible until she graduated from high school. She wanted to go to university but discovered there would be no scholarship to pay for it. There would be no loan from the matron. Her uncle now insisted she get a job and pull her weight or leave the house. Having nowhere to go, she surrendered to impossible and applied for the job at our family's store, where she was hired because Olka sewed like she did everything in life, with full intensity and effort. She could let out a skirt in half the time it once took Pani Zuzana, which afforded her a fair amount of spare time between tasks to read. Which was what she'd been doing when I interrupted her. And insulted her. And threw another impossible at her.

She called me a name then. A terrible if not unfamiliar one. It was a name I had been called before. As had my father and his father. Any time a person had a gripe with the way my father conducted business—the furrier whose counterfeit mink coats my father refused to carry, a customer who tried to return a clearly worn dress from two seasons earlier—the name would get hurled out.

Once she said it, I was almost happy. She was a liar and a bigot. I had been right all along.

Olka withered like a popped balloon, seeming to understand the error of blurting out such a word to a customer, even if she still did not realize that this customer was the future owner of the store that employed her. Had she known, perhaps her manner would've been more civil. But if her manner had been more civil, I might not be alive to tell you this story.