Coralie brought her find up to her bedroom. She folded it beneath her featherbed mattress, then lay there with her eyes open, her pulse pounding. She was exactly what she had pretended to be on those nights when she waded into the Hudson, a monster and a monster’s daughter. If the man in the woods could see her now, distraught and lonely, weeping in her bed, he would think she had a heart. But a heart was not enough. She understood that now. What a monster needed most was a plan.
Coralie hurried to the locksmith in the morning, so nervous as she waited she thought she might faint. But in the end luck was with her. Upon returning home, she found her father’s jacket on the hook. She could replace the keys she’d taken before he was aware they’d been gone. She had her own keys now, and a way to unlock her fate.
SIX
THE BIRDMAN
**********
AFTER ALL these years I could still remember sleeping in the forest in Russia, there beside my father in the grass. Sometimes when I woke I was surprised by my current surroundings, the light of New York City that streamed in through the window, my dog on the floor, the chimes of the tubular church bells ringing in the Chapel of the Good Shepherd from inside the walls of the General Seminary. For a very long time I believed that when we left our home, we left my mother as well. Where our village had stood the burned fields would again become green and her flesh would be in every blade of grass. When we fled we abandoned the past, or so I then believed. My mother was called Anna, a name I still cannot say aloud.
I wept when we ran away from our home, because I was young, and because the forest was dark and I was afraid. There were so many birds in the forest at night, and I imagined they would carry me away. Night birds are predators, and we were easy prey. A man and a boy in black coats and hats, shoes worn, shirts frayed and unwashed, both lost and uncertain of what lay ahead. I held my father’s hand and led him through the trees because my vision was better, my step steadier. When darkness fell, he told me to close my eyes and dream, for in my dreams I would find another world, and in my waking life I would soon enough find such a world as well, far from the forests we knew, far from the fields of grass where my mother bloomed again. My father was a realist, I see that now, and a fatalist as well. He believed we were in the hands of God, and that it was best to accept our fate, and not to battle impossible odds.
I often saw that quality in him when I worked beside him in the factory. He was a good worker and didn’t complain, and I faulted him for that as well. The meeker he appeared to be, the more rebellious I became. I wished to be the opposite of all that he was, and hated every trait of his that I found in myself. He was raised under the rule of the Cossacks, the mad horsemen who burned our village and murdered our people and turned us to smoke. Because of this he had learned to keep himself small, like the mice that ran across the table, catching whatever crumbs they could. The conditions of factory workers in New York were so deplorable even a boy my age could tell this should not be the order of the world, that we should suffer so for the sake of our bosses, who lived in town houses and rode in polished walnut carriages and bought the first automobiles, which they treated like fine horses, caring for them tenderly while the children in their factories worked twelve hours a day for pennies and went to sleep hungry.
Perhaps my father saw a new order when he closed his eyes and dreamed, for in his dreams surely his fingers did not bleed from stitching all day, and his tired eyes were renewed. He went to labor meetings, but he stayed on the fringes, not wishing to cause trouble. A mouse. Nothing more. I was excited by the idea that men could take their fates in their own hands and could choose to strike. “We’ll see,” my father said with caution, and in fact new workers were quickly hired to replace our striking group, brought in one early morning in horse-drawn carts as if they were cattle. We were beaten back with bully clubs by policemen from the Tenth Precinct when we tried to get at the men who had taken our rightful jobs. I remember that my father had a bruise on his face. He didn’t even mention the pain it must have caused him. At home, I noticed he was spitting blood. A tooth had been knocked out, and he tucked a tea bag into his cheek so that the tannic acid would stop the bleeding.
At the next factory where we were employed the entire floor of workers was fired when there was a mild rumble of discontent; the bosses struck before we could, and newer, green men were brought in. That was when my father went to the docks, that patient, good man I had so little respect for, though we were of the same flesh and blood and he had saved my life more than a dozen times when we traveled over continents, finding us bread and shelter. He was a mouse who feared the forest, yet he had managed to take us into France and on to Le Havre, where he worked shoveling coal in a mill until we could afford steerage on a boat to New York, the only dream we ever shared.