David Bezmozgis - Natasha and Other Stories

I was supposed to come back the next day so he could give me a picture of Choynski to copy. He could have had it ready that day but I also could have been full of shit and he didn’t like to waste his time on morons.

After that day with Charley I did my tour of San Francisco. I looked up 1209 Golden Gate Avenue, where the Choynski house used to be. It had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. A new development was there in its place, based on old photographs and a general idea but built along a modern formula. The candy factory at Third and Stevenson was nowhere to be found and nobody knew where to look for the Golden Gate Club, although in the late 1880s it had stood on that very corner.

I went to the San Francisco Public Library and looked again through the old San Francisco Call Bulletin microfilm. I read about a six-day bicycle race at the Mechanics’ Pavilion. The winner was a guy named Miller who rode an Eldridge-brand bicycle 18,000 times around the track for a total of 2,192 miles. This was February 1899, when Choynski fought Kid McCoy and lost the decision. After the fight Eddie Graney, “sportsman, politician, and Joe’s best friend,” suggested that Joe quit the fight game, since he was no longer the man he used to be.

Each day my grandmother lost something more of herself, as if the disease knew that one day had passed and the next had begun. One day she could sit in a chair in her bedroom, the next day she couldn’t get out of bed, and the day after that she couldn’t turn herself over. A nurse came every other day to look at her; another woman showed up every morning to clean the house and bathe her. Once, when everyone believed she could no longer get up, she walked halfway to the bathroom in the middle of the night, fell, and cut her cheekbone on the dresser.

I called and every word she said that day was reported to me, although, close to the end, she wasn’t saying very much. One day my mother heard her moan and asked where it hurt and my grandmother replied her heart. My mother panicked because the doctors hadn’t said anything about her heart. My grandmother said her heart hurt for what will happen to my grandfather after. As always, my mother assured her that she would get better. Idiot, my grandmother said, don’t laugh at your mother, soon enough you’ll be crying.

Charley had dedicated one bedroom entirely to his boxing memorabilia. He had an award from the Boxing Writers’ Association of America and a picture of him receiving it in 1982. He had press passes from fights in Atlantic City, Tokyo, Sacramento, and other places. There were autographed pictures and framed shots of old-timers. In his closet, he had a filing system of cigar boxes, plastic lunch pails, and tackle boxes. There were gaps on the walls where he’d sold some of his pictures — protruding nails and whitish rectangles denoted absence. Five shots of Tunney and Dempsey had paid his medical bills.

After he fished around for the right cigar box Charley suffered another stroke and dropped everything on the floor. I wasn’t fast enough to catch him on his way down, but his right shoulder hit the hardwood first and cushioned the blow to his head. He was still breathing but appeared unconscious. When he fell, Charley scattered some of his old press passes. One with a picture of him from the seventies landed on his right pajama leg. The picture testified to the fact that Charley had once been a handsome man.

Before her illness, I used to sit in my grandmother’s apartment and listen to her gossip on the phone to her friends in Yiddish. I used to sit with her, my grandfather, and the rest of them as they talked about the war. Before the war they knew how to make ice skates out of wire, wood, and rope. My grandfather made them exactly the same way in Latvia as my great-uncle in Lithuania. Before the war, my grandmother recalled there was character called a sharmanka who went from town to town. He had an accordion and a little white mouse and he could predict the future. (In Russian he was called a katarinshik, my grandfather interrupted.) When the sharmanka came to her shtetl all the children ran after him and gave him a few pennies. But my grandmother believed that even if she had asked the right questions, she couldn’t have changed the way things turned out.

Still, during the war they all saw miracles — which meant they remained alive while Germans died. God proved Himself to them even though there was more of the same kind of evidence against Him.

Since they offered, I rode along in the ambulance with Charley. I sat in the back with two attendants. Charley was in bad shape for most of the ride, but by the time they stabilized him he had his own room, and I found myself lingering around the hospital waiting for I wasn’t sure what. The doctor had started relying on me for information about Charley, and since I liked the idea of being a participant in the final drama of Charley’s life, I gave the doctor the impression that I knew Charley better than I did.

When I checked in on him later that night Charley was awake but he couldn’t speak. The doctor was asking him about his family. There were papers that the doctor needed signed, just in case. Charley could only communicate by writing things down on a pad with what was left of the motor functions in his right hand.

— Do you have anybody you want to contact?

Charley rolled his eyes to that. It was identical to a gesture that a perfectly healthy person would have made.

— Brothers, sisters? Children?

Charley moved his eyes away from the doctor to the other side of the room.

— If you have children, Mr. Davis, you should tell them. They would want to know about this. There may not be another chance.

Charley shook his head wearily. It didn’t mean there weren’t any children; it meant he wished the doctor would leave him alone. The doctor walked over to Charley’s right side with the pad and a pencil. He held it in front of Charley’s face and waited.

Charley wrote: JIM FRESNO.

— Is that his last name, Fresno, or is that where he is? Charley shut his eyes and turned his back on the doctor.

There were eight James Davises listed in Fresno and only three of them were home. None of these had a father named Charley Davis in San Francisco. I left five messages for the other James Davises — four on machines and one with a Mexican cleaning lady.

After dinner I got a call from one of my James Davises who said he had a father in San Francisco named Charley Davis.

— What did your father do for a living?

— He was a sportswriter for the Chronicle. He wrote about men trying to knock each other’s heads off.

— I think you should come to San Francisco.

Jim Davis wore khaki Dockers and a red golf shirt embroidered with the Promise Keepers logo. He had flakes of dry skin and an eyelash on the lenses of his glasses. He worked for a real estate brokerage, and he appeared at the hospital just after midnight.

Charley was sleeping when his son arrived and the doctor didn’t think it was a good idea to wake him. By this point I was very familiar with the locations of the snack and coffee machines.

One of the first things Jim asked me was if I belonged to a church. I told him I did not. He asked if I had a personal relationship with Christ. His father, he said, never allowed Christ into his heart; he had never come to accept Christ’s love.

We sat in the waiting area eating carrot muffins out of plastic packages and drinking coffee.

— I have a friend in my church group who was a troublemaker as a kid and his dad worried about what would happen to him. His dad wasn’t a religious man, he worked for the phone company in Sacramento. But his dad made a deal with him. He told my friend that if he went to church with him every Sunday for a year he’d get him anything he wanted. You know, within limits, but really anything. My friend, he agreed, except for Little League when that was on Sundays. And he did it. Both him and his dad, every Sunday for a year except Little League. And when the year was up his dad asked him what he wanted and you know what he said? He said I want you to promise to keep going to church with me. That the two of them would keep going to church together. Him and his dad.