4. We had money and health.
5. We had Imogen Goodfellow, Simon Green, and Mr. Kipling …
By the time I had reached six, we were standing to receive the host.
On our way out of church, someone called my name. I turned: it was Mickey Balanchine and his wife, Sophia. “Hello, cousins!” he greeted Natty and me warmly. Mickey kissed us both on our cheeks.
“Since when do you go to this church?” I asked Mickey, having never seen him there before. Natty and I attended a Catholic church because our mother had, but everyone on my father’s side of the family went to an Eastern Orthodox church if they went at all.
“Since he married a Catholic,” Sophia Balanchine replied in that strange accent of hers. Though she spoke English very well, it was obviously not her native language. “Good morning, Anya. Nataliya. We met, but only briefly, at the occasion of my marriage. It is good to see you both looking so well.” She, too, kissed us on our cheeks. “It’s hard to tell which of you is the older sister.”
Mickey pointed a finger at me. “You were supposed to come see me as soon as you got out.”
I told him that I’d only been home since Friday afternoon and had planned to visit him that week.
“Mickey, you must give the girl room,” Sophia said, and then she did just the opposite, hooking arms with Natty and me, and insisting that we join them for brunch. “You have not eaten,” she accused us, “and we live only blocks from here. We should cease making spectacles of ourselves on the front stoop of this cathedral.” She wasn’t Russian, but something about her reminded me of Nana. I took a moment to consider Sophia Balanchine. I remembered that I had thought her plain at the wedding but maybe that had been harsh. She had brown hair, brown eyes, a large, rather horsey nose. Indeed, everything about her was large—her hands, her lips, her eyes, her cheekbones—and she was several inches taller than her husband. (Mickey was so short I had always suspected him of wearing shoes with lifts.) Sophia Balanchine seemed powerful. I liked my cousin somewhat better knowing he was married to this woman.
Though Natty and I tried to demur, Sophia insisted we come to brunch and somehow we found ourselves at their town house on East Fifty-Seventh Street, not far from where Win’s family lived.
Sophia and Mickey occupied the bottom two floors of a three-story brownstone. The top floor was used by Mickey’s father, Yuri Balanchine, and his nurses. Any day now, they expected Yuri to die, Sophia Balanchine informed me. “It will be a mercy,” she said.
“It will be,” Natty agreed. I’m sure she was thinking of Nana.
Over lunch, we stuck to innocuous subjects. I found out the source of Sophia’s unusual accent—she had a German father and a Mexican mother—and Mickey and Sophia asked me about my plans for the following school year. I told them that I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. The third week of the semester was about to start, and I feared that I wouldn’t be able to find a suitable school that would also find me suitable. Considering my criminal record, I mean.
Natty sighed. “I wish you could just go back to Trinity.”
On some level, I was glad not to be going back to Trinity. It was a chance to make a break from old routines, old people. That was what I told myself, at least.
“After what you have been through, it is good to make a change, I think,” Sophia said, echoing my own thoughts. “Though it is also difficult to have to go to a new school in your senior year.”
“It’s an insult,” Mickey said. “Those bastards had no cause to throw you out.”
He was wrong. The administration had had perfect cause: I had brought a gun to school.
The discussion then turned to Natty’s time at genius camp, a subject I had heard very little about myself. She had spent the summer working on a project to strip water from garbage before it left people’s houses. As she described her work, Natty sounded smart, impressive, genuinely happy, and I knew all at once that I had done the right thing in making sure she had made it to camp. I was proud that this was my sister and even a little proud of myself for having done right by her. My throat closed up. I stood and offered to help clear the table.
Sophia followed me into their kitchen. She told me where to set the dishes and then she touched my elbow. “You and I have a mutual friend,” she said.
I looked at her. “We do?”
“Yuji Ono, of course,” Sophia said. “Perhaps you did not know that he and I went to an international high school together in Belgium. Yuji is my oldest and dearest friend in the world.”
It made sense. They were both the same age, twenty-four, and in point of fact, they did have a similar manner of speaking. And that was why he had been at her wedding, not merely to keep tabs on my family. I wondered how much she knew about the role her oldest and dearest friend had played in Leo’s escape. The thought of it made me uncomfortable. “It was Yuji,” she continued, “who introduced me to my husband.”
I hadn’t known that.
“He told me to give you his regards when I saw you.”
Hadn’t our meeting at the church been accidental? “But you didn’t know you would see me today?” I said after a pause.
“I knew I should see you eventually,” she explained without missing a beat. “My husband had visited you at Liberty, had he not?”
Who was this Sophia Balanchine anyway? I tried to remember her maiden name. Bitter. Sophia Bitter. I wished Nana were still alive so that I could consult with her. She knew everything about everybody.
Sophia laughed. “Yuji thinks so well of you that, at times, I have been jealous. I have been dying to meet Anya the Great.”
I reminded her that we had, in fact, met.
“The wedding? That is not really meeting!” she protested. “I want to know you, Anya.” She stared at me with her dark, dark eyes.
I asked her what she thought of me so far.
“The only impression I can have of you is physical, and physically, you are attractive enough but your feet are freakishly large,” Sophia said.
“And what do physical impressions really matter anyway?”
“You say that because you are pretty,” she replied. “I assure you that they matter very much.”
Sophia Balanchine was an odd woman.
“Were you and Yuji ever boyfriend and girlfriend?” I asked.
She laughed again. “Are you asking me if I am your rival, Anya? I am a married lady, don’t you know?”
“No, Yuji and I aren’t that way.” I could feel the blush spread across my face. “I just wondered. I’m sorry if it was rude,” I said.
She shook her head, but there was a smile on her face. “That is a very American question,” she said. I suspected I was being insulted. “I love Yuji very much. And all that interests him interests me as well. This is to say that I hope you and I will be very great friends.”
My sister and Sophia’s husband joined us in the kitchen. “My brilliant little cousin says she needs to get home to study,” Mickey informed us. “I wondered, Anya, if you’d like to say hello to Dad before you go.”
“You’ll come see me next week after you’ve got this school business sorted out,” Mickey said as we walked up the two flights of stairs to where my uncle Yuri was dying. “He had another stroke over the summer so he is difficult to understand,” Mickey continued. “He may not even be awake, and if he is, he may not recognize you. The doctors have him on so much medication.”
I was used to dealing with the dying and infirm.
The curtains were drawn, and the room smelled sweet and fetid, much like Nana’s had in the year before her death. Yuri’s eyes were open, though, and they seemed to light up upon seeing me. He held out one of his arms to me. “Ahhhhnuh.” He said my name with a tongue that was too thick. As I got closer to see him, I could see that half of his face was paralyzed and one of his hands was permanently flexed into a fist. He waved his good hand toward Mickey and the nurse who was in the room. “Goooo! Ahhhloh.”