I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant when he said I was tempting him, but I knew he blamed me for his son’s death. After all, my former husband had crashed his car while doing a special favor for me. Rus had blamed me for every moment of unhappiness in his son’s life. There was no reason for his death to have been any different. We’d never talked about it, primarily because we’d never had a private conversation about anything.
“This will be quick,” I said. “Trust me. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me here. But I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Questions?” He tried to laugh as though it were an absurd proposition but burst into a fit of coughing instead.
I waited for him to regain his breath.
“Questions about my godfather,” I said. “About your brother.”
“I just buried him. And now you’re coming around asking questions? Who are you to ask any questions about him? Do you hear what I’m asking you? Who are you?”
“Did you have an appointment to meet with him on the day he died?”
Rus didn’t answer. Instead, he locked eyes with me and ground his lips in a circle as though he was cranking up his hatred for me to a higher level.
“My son was a good boy,” he said.
Normally I would have let the remark slide, waited a moment, and repeated my question. After all, my one and only goal was to get the answers I needed and leave. Wasn’t it?
“No, he was not a good boy. Your son was a brilliant man. A brilliant professor of religion at Yale University. But everything had to be his way, and when that became impossible, he became impossible. No. He most definitely was not a good boy.”
Rus’s right palm crushed my cheek.
I could have stopped him. I could have blocked it with my arm. But I didn’t. There’s an unwritten rule in Ukrainian society that you never, ever, under any circumstances raise your hand to an elder. Even if you want to shake hands with someone to say hello, you wait for the older person to extend his hand first.
Had I reverted to the instincts my parents had honed, or did I actually want to get hit? Had I wanted to become a victim so I could prove to myself that I was a better person than my father-in-law? Whatever my reason for standing there and taking his blow, I couldn’t have hated myself any more at that moment. I could feel myself shaking, my thoughts running away from me, as happened in those rare instances when I lost control.
My eyes watered and my nose stung. An acrid taste of blood and onions filled my mouth.
I inhaled my tears. “Like son, like father,” I said.
I curled my hands into fists. No, I wasn’t a cop, a former soldier, or a trained fighter, but I didn’t care. Nor did it matter to me that he was an ailing old man, my elder, and my former father-in-law. If he raised his hand to me again I was going to hit him. The only question was whether I would have enough self-control to stop pummeling him once I started. I honestly wasn’t sure.
Disdain shone in his face. His hand shook. He started to raise it again.
“Good,” I said, barely recognizing my voice, which made me sound like someone who needed an exorcism. “Do it.”
I must have looked the part, too, because he hesitated. His eyes fell to my fists. After a few more seconds of teeth grinding, he returned his hands to his side.
“He was a terrible husband but I stayed with him. I never threatened to leave. I never uttered the word ‘divorce.’ And I was prepared to stay with him the rest of my life no matter what it cost me. Because I’m Ukrainian Catholic. Because that’s what I said I’d do when we took our vows.”
“He’d be alive if he hadn’t married you.”
“Don’t be so sure. Another woman in my shoes… Like one of those graduate students he slept with. I don’t know what one of them would have done. He’s gone and I’m sorry. I cried at his funeral. But it’s not my fault. You want to think otherwise? That’s your business. But don’t put your own guilt on me. I’m not interested.”
My former father-in-law had dropped his cane before hitting me. I picked it up and gave it back to him. He shuffled toward his recliner and sat down. Reached over and drained the rest of the amber liquid in his tumbler.
“Maybe if you’d stood up to him like that, things would have been better,” he said, staring into space.
That was a new one. Now I could add timidity to my list of spousal flaws. It was the perfect counterpart to one of my other deficiencies, namely my stubborn insistence on having a career. They pretty much covered the gamut of personalities. On the surface, this latest remark left no doubt that I was and always would be a loser in his eyes. And yet, there was something forgiving in his tone. At a minimum, he was implying his son had issues. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have suggested his wife should have stood up to him.
I decided to seize the moment and return to my original agenda. I sat down on the couch across from him. When interviewing company executives, it’s sometimes useful to test their mettle with a shocking question, rather than slowly leading into it. The current conditions were ripe for such a strategy.
“Do you think your brother’s death was an accident?”
Rus’s head snapped upward. His eyes stretched wide momentarily before he could control his expression. “The police said it was an accident. Did they say they were wrong?”
“He was afraid of stairs. He never went down to the basement at night, did he?”
“Do you know something I don’t?”
“If it was raining, and he knew the basement floor and the last couple of stairs would be wet, why would he have gone down there?”
Rus slammed his fist on his armrest. “Have the police told you something? Why would they tell you and not me?”
“You’re acting as though you wouldn’t be surprised if they had told me they’d made a mistake.”
“Did they? Did they admit they were wrong? Do they know who killed him?”
“Then you admit you think it wasn’t an accident, and that he was murdered.”
“Of course he was murdered! He never went down the stairs at night. Never!”
“Hallelujah. We agree on something.”
“How do you know this? Did the police—”
I stood up. “No. I haven’t talked to the police. It’s just my theory, and I’m pleased you agree. No one knew him better than you. And in answer to your next question, I have my own reasons for caring, not the least of which is that I loved my godfather, and I’m angry someone took him away before I could tell him that. Now, my last question is my first question, and it’s very important. Did you have an appointment to see him on the day he died?”
He threw his hands up in the air. “Appointment? What appointment? He was my brother. We didn’t make appointments. If I needed to see him, I picked up the phone and called. If he needed to see me, he showed up at my doorstep. He didn’t need to call ahead, like some other people would, if they had manners.”
“How can you possibly expect me to have manners when I’m such a hideous person to start with? So you didn’t have an appointment.”
He answered me with such venom I was afraid he might try to bury his cane in my eye. “No. I had no appointment.”
“That’s strange because I found the initials DP in his calendar for that day. In big letters. I don’t know of any other Ukrainians in the community with those initials, do you?”
He sneered as he sat thinking about it. He confirmed my suspicions by saying nothing. Then his eyes brightened as though something had occurred to him. “How do you know it wasn’t written in English? How do you know the appointment wasn’t with an American?”
“I don’t know. There was no one with the initials DP in his address book—”
“For that matter,” Rus said, “how do you know it was a person at all?”