Jeff Rovin: Vespers

As he usually did, even in the most inclement weather, the thirty-three-year-old NYPD veteran walked downtown from the station house on West Thirty-fifth Street. It was nearly two miles to the West Village, and he enjoyed every block of it. He loved the half sentences of lives he heard as people passed. He loved the smells of restaurants and delis and roasted peanuts hawked by street-corner vendors. He loved the loud tabloid headlines and magazine covers he caught as he passed racks or shop windows. There was always something small to enjoy, and when small got boring there was always something big to savor: the Empire State Building over his left shoulder, the World Trade Center straight ahead. They were different every day, sunshine glinting off both like sequins or clouds hanging low over the tops. There were also old facades, a low-flying dirigible now and then, and the parade of automobiles and trucks and buses. Gentry especially enjoyed the Fashion Institute of Technology on Twenty-seventh Street, and he always slowed on the wide sidewalk to watch the young people coming and going with portfolios. There was life and energy among the young, not just the emaciation and death that he’d become accustomed to during those ten long years.

He walked, too, because he had nowhere to rush to.

There had been women for the first three or four months after he’d quit narcking. Women he met on the job, in coffee shops, on blind dates, at dances. Women who helped him forget, for a few hours, the loss of his wife and then the loss of his undercover partner. But sometimes, in the small hours of the night, he’d look at the woman sleeping next to him. He knew how to turn her on but notwhat turned her on. He’d try to remember her name. And he’d feel dirty inside.They were using each other the way they’d use a back scratcher. He’d spent enough time as a narc watching people destroy their spirits while they thought they were doing happy things to their bodies. So he put a stop to that. He hated being alone, but being with those ladies was worse. They were like mirrors that showed you your own scars. They were alone too.

Walking also gave him time to finish the serial thinking he’d started in his small office. To come to terms with the event that had ended his career as Nick Argento. It was tough, still.

Gentry was married to the Seventh Avenue route. It took him a little out of his way to the east, but Ninth Avenue was too sedate and Eighth Avenue was too damn crowded with people waiting to get into the trendy bar, jazz club, or café of the week. However, he did vary a key part of his routine each night. Sometimes he stopped for Thai takeout, sometimes he grabbed a salad, and sometimes he ate in at a sushi place on Hudson Street because he loved the monster-sized dragon rolls and there was a waitress who was simply the most elegant woman he had ever seen. Old Mrs. Bundonis who lived next door to Gentry warned him that he was going to die of malnutrition or worms. Also of not dressing warmly enough. He was actually glad she did that; he’d always wondered what it would be like to have a mother.

Tonight was Thai night, and Gentry stopped at his favorite hole-in-the-wall on Seventh Avenue. He got caught up on the saga of the counter guy and his four old aunts who had come to visit from Bangkok and showed very little interest in leaving. When Gentry got to his one-bedroom apartment on Washington Street-with a double-order of mei grob, since the portions were appetizer-small-he slipped off his navy blue blazer, white shirt, and cobalt blue tie, pulled on his gray NYPD sweats, and crashed in front of the tube.

For years, the Bronx meant only one thing to Nancy Joyce. It was the ultimate killer place to use in the game Geography, until her older brother Peter discovered there was a place called Xochihuehuetian, Mexico.

Her view of the borough changed when she moved there. What she discovered was that the past, the present, and the future all coexisted in the Bronx.

The past were the remnants of the thousands of families that had settled here in the first two decades of the twentieth century. That was when New York City ’s northernmost borough offered spacious apartments with central heating, refrigerators, and private bathrooms-amenities that were undreamed of in the older, more crowded Manhattan.

The present were the families that had moved here in the years following World War II, when affordable public housing went up and the exclusive nature of the borough ended.

The future were the families that had come to the Bronx, lured by fire-sale prices and a near-evangelistic desire to rejuvenate neighborhoods that had surrendered to drugs and crime and the homeless.

Twenty-nine-year-old zoologist Dr. Nancy Joyce was part of the past. The things that were real but foggy, just out of reach. Two years before, when she had been hired by the Bronx Zoo and became what her coworkers and school groups affectionately called “the bat lady,” she had moved into the three-bedroom Bronx apartment that belonged to her eighty-seven-year-old widowed grandmother. Nancy Joyce and her brother had spent very little time here as kids. They grew up in rural Connecticut, and more often than not Dad drove down to get Grandma Joycewicz and bring her up to the country.

When Joyce came to the Bronx after obtaining her Ph.D., the apartment was a revelation. The walls of the living room and dining room were almost entirely covered with browning, frame-to-frame photographs. They were a shrine to a lost world. Her grandmother’s family, the Cherkassovs, had been Russian aristocrats-starched men and formal women who stood or sat in studios, in salons, and on porticos of beach homes or country cottages. Her grandfather’s family had been Polish laborers, and the pictures of them showed rumpled, tousle-haired men and women holding scythes or working oxen in the fields. The Cherkassovs fled after the Russian Revolution, and they ended up sleeping in woods and fields where they were found one sunrise by Joseph Joycewicz. He took one of the refugees as his wife, and they sailed for America.

Even if she hadn’t heard that story when she was growing up, Nancy Joyce would have been able to read it in this picture diary, its fragile pages lovingly preserved behind glass.

There were also some newer pictures. Her father and his older sister as children. Joseph up in Westchester hunting with his son. The family at Coney Island and Atlantic City and on Forty-second Street taking in a double feature. Probably a Western, which her grandfather was said to have loved. He believed that westerns were accurate depictions of history. Just like the black-and-white photographs on the wall.

It wasn’t just the photographs that had a story to tell. There was the porcelain statue of the Greek hunter Orion holding a dead stag. The arrow had been broken off by her father, who had tried to pull it out and fire it from a homemade bow when he was three years old. There was the sofa that her grandfather had gone to lie on at night when the pain of the cancer that consumed him kept him awake. He went there to read the Polish novels he loved or to cry because he would be leaving his Anya far, far earlier than either was prepared for. He was forty-nine when he finally succumbed. There was the worn and faded rug that Joseph had bought Anya for their tenth wedding anniversary. The tattered seat cushion on the rocking chair, from the first cab that Joseph had driven. The radio that her father and his older sister had grown up listening to. Their schoolbooks on the shelf. The rifle with which Joseph had taught his son how to hunt. The old Victrola and the elderly woman’s large collection of 78s.

When Grandma Joycewicz died, her granddaughter kept the apartment but refused to change very much in it. She put cable TV and a VCR in the living room and added a CD player and small speakers. She also replaced the old black rotary phone on the nightstand with a cordless. And she put in an extra phone jack so she could go on-line with her laptop. Joyce had never found it strange to be on-line in “this old place,” as her grandmother used to call it. An on/off switch let the present in and then sent it back out again. The apartment remained a comforting retreat.