“You like it here?” Mr. Pawlowski asked. We were in his office after a week into my new position. The radiator was broken; I could see his words forming clouds in the cold air. He was planning to move up to my father’s office, which I’d wanted for my own. We were talking about how it would be better, in his opinion, if I took his soon-to-be-former room so that I could learn how to keep my eye on things.
“I like it fine.”
“Managing your school and work responsibilities all right?”
I resisted the urge to scoff and simply nodded. I was irritated that he wanted to take my father’s office. It was supposed to be mine, regardless of how little I knew or how much authority he commanded over the workers. At the time, I believed that were I really strong enough to be in charge, I would take control of the situation and tell him that he couldn’t have it—nonsense, in hindsight, for a young man following a full-grown adult every day like a mule.
“You’ll love this room,” he said. “Ah, the things I’ve done here. The conversations your father and I had. The decisions. You’re lucky to be getting a head start in the business world, Davy. You’ll learn a lot from me. I owe it to your father to help you out, same as he helped me out after your grandfather died. You do need help, you see. Running a business is no small potatoes. You don’t think it’s small potatoes, do you?”
“No.”
“Because that would be a mistake. Learn from me and you’ll learn from the best. I know you’re the one with the keys to the kingdom. Don’t think I don’t. I have to admit that I was a little bit hurt”—and here he held up his hand to indicate a centimeter of space between thumb and forefinger—“to know that you were taking over. But no hard feelings. You’re his only son—of course he would let you take over. Selling to me—well, he’d never do that, come to think of it—he’s too proud. The only thing—the only thing that surprises me—is that he gave you the company when you’re so young. That’s really the only thing. What other people say about your problems, your personality, that’s not something that I bother with. It’s really the life experience that I’m thinking about. But with me on your side, that won’t be a problem at all. I’ll guide you as though you were my very own son. Have I told you that I think of you as my very own son? If you like, I’ll tell Vicky to help you decorate your new office. She’s got an eye for the aesthetic. In fact,” he said suddenly, “since I think of you as my son, I want to ask you something. I don’t mean this to hurt you, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. I mean it in the way that your father would be caring for you if he could. Davy, you seem quite fond of that Orlich girl.”
I shrugged, though I was cringing inside. He meant well; I already knew this, but I suspected something unpleasant coming as he thumbed the underside of his chin in upward strokes.
“Because—and again, I hate to say this, hate to even suggest this—but the Orlichs are not, shall we say, the most trustworthy of people. You know that they aren’t on the same level as we are, financially, and they have a certain amount of envy.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“It isn’t even Marianne who is being devious, most likely,” Mr. Pawlowski said, “but her parents. At one point, none of us knew them. They were new to our neighborhood, and we gave them every opportunity to belong. But almost everyone sees their true selves at this point. They’re interested in—how shall I put this—what your family has, and what they do not. They live off of Mr. Orlich’s accounting income, which is serviceable, but they also live beyond their means. You can see this by the way they dress, the things they have. And the way that they can best get at a different life altogether is through Marianne. She seems like a good girl and loves her parents immensely, I would imagine, and probably would do anything that her parents tell her to.” He paused. “Do you see my point? You see my point. I don’t mean to burst your bubble. Your bubble isn’t burst, is it? Like I said, Marianne is a good girl. And that’s all I’ll say about that,” he said. “You just think about that. It’s part of growing up. You see eyes through the life of business and that’s when everything becomes business, everything as transaction. Are your hours up for the day? Should I drive you back home?”
I wanted to walk. The trip from Manhattan to Brooklyn, with all the public transportation included, would take a long time, but I didn’t want to be in the same small space with Mr. Pawlowski anymore, and especially not in his Rolls-Royce, which reeked of pipe smoke. As I walked, I was not following the rules of New York sidewalk etiquette; people practically shoved me into the street as they bustled by. But a movie reel was unspooling itself in my mind, with kisses and songs. I knew Marianne so well that I could summon, as though she were standing beside me, her reedy laugh. Frame by frame I asked myself, Is this a lie? Could it be possible that Mr. Pawlowski is right—if not wholly, then at least partially? He was a businessman. He’d acknowledged his own cynicism. He didn’t understand that Marianne accepted me without reservation, and so what if the piano company was a part of that? We gave and we took and we received mutually. We spent our afternoons running through alleys, chasing each other, the chaser always kissing the chased. The roof at St. Jadwiga, our second home and a safe haven. She wrote me letters, long letters, and signed them in slants and loops: May our hearts be ever blessed. I trusted her; I wanted to believe her, so I deliberately refused to believe that our love could be a lie.
My father died in November of my senior year. As the pallbearers lowered him into the ground I watched Matka shrink into herself like a blooming flower in reverse, nothing but a bud afterward. My mother took a three-month-long holiday in Minnesota, where she drowned her anguish in the twenty-below chill with her sister, the “Midwestern harlot,” as my father had called her. Who knows what he would have thought of his wife hiding in a snowdrift town called Monserrat, drinking vodka out of the bottle and swaddled in fur. It was after Peter died, everyone said, that she lost her grip on her natural eccentricity; after all, what kind of mother would leave her son for three months after such a tragedy?
She came back at the end of winter. Her suitcase was gone, and so was the coat. She’d given both of them to Penelope, she said, who had barely anything. Gosh, you’ve never felt that kind of cold, she said. She was wearing a lot of makeup, but I could tell that she looked awful underneath. Her foundation didn’t quite match her sallow neck. Have I mentioned that my mother’s once-placid face, after my father’s death, now had a perpetually bewildered expression, as though to say, How did I wind up here? After she came back from Minnesota I was under the impression that she had become absorbed in the cold there, and that it was impossible for her to materialize fully as flesh and not frozen, fluffy water.
I am confident this is where the true sorrow—sorrow? I lack the correct word—began, when I learned that it is possible for I hurt, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt to be my only heartbeat. Puh-lum. Puh-lum. Of course, it seemed natural for me to grieve. Matka, after all, was grieving. My peers and teachers at school knew that Peter Nowak had died, and his son, David, who had just inherited the Nowak Piano Company not so long ago, surely must be grieving as well. Marianne, God bless her, particularly mothered me. She had a gift for not making me feel like a child even as she sat with my head in her lap, stroking my hair in silence.
All of this in hindsight seems ordinary. It was ordinary and then—when I realized I was mourning something more than my father—it turned into something