"Pauline gave me the books and then she died."
"Says he didn't kill her."
"Nope. I never killed anybody. I saw a dead dog once but that's not a person."
I gestured toward the door. Frannie got up and we left the room. Out in the hall I asked if he had found anything else at the Petangles house.
"Yeah, a lotta crucifixes and pictures of Dean Martin. Those houses down on Olive Street are like a fuckin' fifties time capsule, you go inside. It's strange he had the books, Sam, but I don't think he's involved. Maybe Pauline did give them to him for some cockeyed reason."
"Where did you find them?"
"On a bookshelf in his room. He asked me to come in and look at it. Place was as spick-and-span as a Marine barracks. Showed me all his comics and there they were, right up next to Little Lulu and Yosemite Sam."
"Did you look at them yet?"
"There's nothing there. Just scribbles and blah blah. I'll tell you one thing: It's an odd feeling seeing her handwriting all these years later. I'm going to copy them and give the originals to her mother. I'll give you a set too. You haven't talked to her mom yet, have you?"
"No, but this will give me a good excuse."
Back inside, Johnny was standing far across the room, glaring accusingly at Veronica. "She's not nice! I don't like her."
Frannie and I looked at her.
"He wanted to touch my hair. I said no."
"That's not true! You liar! That's not true!"
I wondered if she was telling the truth. Despite the warm, close afternoon we'd spent together and everything we had talked about, I realized I still didn't trust her.
Jitka Ostrova's house was a shrine to her dead daughter. The walls were crammed with framed awards, pictures of the girl at all ages, high school and Swarthmore pennants. Pauline's room, which we were shown almost immediately, was kept exactly as it had been thirty years before. Everything was dusted, all the figurines on the shelves arranged just so. On the wall above the bed was a giant yellowing poster of Gertrude Stein looking like a fire hydrant in a wig.
No shoes tossed left and right, no underwear draped over a chair or flung haphazardly onto the bed. I knew how it should look because I lived with a teenager. Kids and order rarely agree on anything. But no kid lived here, only ghosts and an old woman.
Outside that odd room, the rest of the Ostrova house was a cozy clutter. You liked being there, liked looking around and seeing this sweet woman's life in every nook and cranny. It was almost grandma's house from a fairy tale but that was impossible: Two of the people she loved most who had lived here were dead. They left an emptiness that was palpable, despite all the gemьtlichkeit.
Mrs. Ostrova was a gem. She was one of those people who had come to the United States early in life but had never really left Europe behind. She spoke with an accent, peppered her sentences with what I assumed were Czech words and phrases ("I took my five plums and left"), and rowed her little boat above a sea of bad fortune and pessimism a thousand feet deep. In everything she said, it was clear she loved her surviving daughter, Magda, but adored the dead Pavlina.
Magda was also there that day. She was a tough, attractive, tightly wound woman who looked to be in her early forties. She had the bad habit of watching you with the eyes of a museum guard who's convinced you're going to steal something. Very protective of her mother, she surprised me by speaking as reverently of Pauline as the old woman did. If there was any residual filial jealousy, I didn't see it.
When we handed over the notebooks, Jitka's face took on the expression of someone touching the Holy Grail. Until then very effervescent and chatty, she went silent for minutes while slowly turning the pages and sounding out some of the words her lost daughter had written so long ago.
When she was finished, she gave us a million-dollar smile and said, "Pavlina. A new part of Pavlina is back in our house. Thank you, Frannie."
She wasn't surprised when she heard where they'd been found. Johnny Petangles had told the truth: Throughout her senior year in high school and whenever she came home from college, Pauline had tried to teach him how to read.
"Poor Johnny! He's so simple in the head but he tried so hard for Pavlina. He loved her too. He don't take those lessons so he can learn to read – he wanted to sit next to her all those afternoons!"
Frannie said, "Tell about The Pirates of Penzance."
Jitka stuck out her tongue and gave him a raspberry. "Yeah, that's the story you like just so you can laugh at me every time! Frannie, I wish you the black cheek!
"You see, that was my lesson from Pavlina. She was teaching everyone sometimes. You understand, my terrible English always embarrassed her. She'd put her hands over her ears like this and scream, 'Ma, when are you gonna learn?' So she buys this nice record and makes me listen to it. This is Pirates of Penzance and after a while it is my lesson to try to sing along with it to make my English better. You know it?
I am the very model of a modern major general;
I've information vegetable, animal and mineral;
She sang it so badly, so offkey and with pronunciations so horrendous that it could have made the whole of England shift on its axis. But she also looked so happy and proud remembering it that we all clapped. To my great surprise, Frannie picked it up where she stopped.
I know the kings of England and I quote the
fights historical,
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.
"Impressive! Where'd you learn that?"
He pointed to Mrs. Ostrova. "Jitka gave me a copy for Christmas a few years ago. Now I'm a big Gilbert and Sullivan fan. You want to hear my favorite part?"
I was about to say no when he stood up and started singing again.
When the enterprising burglar's not a burgling –
When the cutthroat isn't occupied in crime. He
loves to hear the little brook a gurgling
And listen to the merry village chime.
Ah, take one consideration with another
A policeman's lot is not a happy one.
"Thanks, Fran." I cut him off. His voice was good, but a little Savoy Opera goes a long way. A look of great affection crossed Magda's face when she smiled at him. Were they lovers? Who did my friend, this sexy divorced man, sleep with? He never talked about it.
There was so much I could have asked about Pauline, but thought it better to simply let the two Ostrova women talk about her.
"I was her mother, but still I never really knew her, you know? This is something I still cannot get over. She came from right here in my stomach, but I did not know her because she changed and changed and changed and sometimes it was good and sometimes it was crazy. There was this old movie, Man of a Thousand Faces? This was Pavlina. A thousand faces. I don't know which girl she was when she died."
An hour later, Magda said, "My sister did her own thing and if you didn't like it, too bad. At the trial, it came out she had a lot of boyfriends. So? Big deal! A guy who has a lot of girls is a stud. A woman does the same thing and she's a slut. Know what I say to that? Bullshit! Pauline wasn't a slut – she was a individual and even I knew that when I was a kid. As a sister? She was okay, but mostly all I remember is her going in and out of our house in a hurry because she was always up to something, you know? She always had something going on."
Jitka came into the room carrying a plate full of Czech pastries – buchty and kolace. "Pavlina was a bird. That's what I say. She flew around and never landed anywhere too long. Then poof! Off she flies again."