Princess of Passyunk by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff Page B

golden-haired, blue-sweatered Polish angel.
    â€œAnd your girl, Ganny?”
    He scratched his ear. “I didn’t find a girl.”
    She patted his knee. “Well, there’s time. There is always time.”
    He opened his mouth to tell of the great, glistening cockroach, but she sailed on.
    â€œWe both know Nick has chosen his princess, and as for Yevgeny, well, not to worry. He is still a boy; it’s unlikely he will marry anyone very soon. You will still be boys together for a while yet. And Ganady, his fate is his own. I’m sure he wouldn’t marry someone he didn’t want to. This is America, after all.”
    Ganady peered at her face, but she had turned away to gaze toward the Atlantic as if she could see all the way back to Keterzyn.
    Was she teasing him? Or chiding him? Was that wistfulness in her voice? Or was it amusement?
    He tried to say: “You’re a tease, Baba,” but she rose, shaking out her skirts.
    â€œTo bed with us,” she said, and went inside.
    In his room, Ganady went right to his dresser, telling himself the cockroach would surely be gone—this was America, after all. But she was there, silent and unmoving, unable to utter even the croak of Ivan’s frog.
    Ganady washed his face and brushed his teeth. Still the cockroach had not moved. He went to bed, realizing only belatedly that Nick, who had left in a hurry right after dinner, had still not come home.
    As a result, Ganady could not sleep. Through the darkness of his room, he could hear the house settling, mice in the wainscoting, pigeons in the eves above his bedroom window. Big-band music carried up the stairs from the parlor, occasionally punctuated by his parents’ muted voices and the rhythmic cadence of the clock in the front hall.
    He also heard, or imagined he heard, the tiny, furtive noises of Princess Cockroach upon her cowhide throne.
    He listened past all these sounds, both real and imaginary, for the squeak and clatter of the front door, willing Nikolai to come home with no broken bones or black eyes.
    After what seemed like hours, measured by the ticking of the clock and the increasing volume of Da’s voice, Ganady began to suppose that a black eye was really not such a big deal, if only God would send Nick home .
    He tried to imagine that his brother was just up the street, turning the corner from Wharton onto Seventh, walking homeward beneath the streetlamps and the moon. He willed it so hard that it suddenly seemed as if he was the one coming home in the moonlight.
    He looked up. The ceiling of his room was gone, replaced with a star-speckled sky. His bed was mysteriously absent; he stood upright with solid asphalt beneath his feet, just up the street from his house. He looked down reluctantly, fearing he would be wearing his blue-and-white-striped pajamas, and was relieved to find that he was fully dressed in chinos and his good wool jacket.
    He couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he began to walk home. He could already see the front stoop, and could also see that someone sat on the steps, waiting for him. He prayed it wasn’t Da.
    As he drew near, he saw that it was a woman, lamplight gleaming on her white hair. Baba Irina. Ganady relaxed. He relaxed so much, he began to whistle one of Baba’s favorite klezmer tunes, Zum Gali Gali . He had learned it on the clarinet just to please her.
    He whistled his way to the bottom of the steps, put his hand on the newel and stopped. The woman sitting on the stoop wasn’t his Baba. In fact, she wasn’t even a woman, strictly speaking. She was a girl about Ganny’s age, and her long hair, tied back in a ponytail, wasn’t white, but pale, red-gold. Titian, Mama would have called it. Yevgeny’s sister Zofia had hair of the same fine color.
    The titian-haired girl sat primly on the third step from the top, her hands clasped around her knees. She wore a full, dark skirt—Ganady couldn’t tell