York Police Department’s Forensic Investigations Division is conducting an investigation.’”
He places the paper on the table and takes a sip of his coffee. He leans back in his chair, stretches his long legs out under the table, and waits, his unasked questions dangling in the air.
“I was there.” My voice sounds like it’s coming from a distance, like it’s not mine. “I... ” I swipe at the tears on my cheeks, close my eyes. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” I cover my mouth with my hands. I’m rocking back and forth.
J. B.’s voice is soft, hushed. “Sylvia, you know who the dead boy is, don’t you?”
TWO
Summer 1967
“Do you need help, Sylvia?” Frank’s offer was less than enthusiastic. “Otherwise, I’ll go and finish organizing my office.”
I looked up from the boxes scattered around me on the kitchen floor of our new apartment to see him standing with one foot pointed away from me like he was ready to bolt. “Go on,” I said with a flick of my hand.
His lips brushed my cheek in passing as he headed for the door. There was a smell of stale beer on his breath. I listened to him turning the three locks on the metal door, lifting up the steel pole that dropped into a hole in the floor, then opening the door and letting it slam shut on its own without being locked.
On the same day Frank and I were married, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were murdered in Mississippi. I sometimes wondered if that was why I was angry at Frank so much of the time. As if I held him accountable.
Now it was three years later, the summer of 1967 and hot. I was twenty-four years old, a passionate crusader for equal rights, civil rights, peace, and everything that small-town middle America had taught me, in subtle and not so subtle ways, not to be for, not to even think about. President Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act two years ago had encouraged me, Martin Luther King Jr. inspired me, and the Black Power and anti-Vietnam War movements called to me. In such a tumultuous and hope-filled time, I could think of no better place to be than the Bronx.
I was, in fact, the reason we were here. Frank was in the seminary, and when it came time for him to make a decision about where to serve his yearlong internship, I dug in my heels and declared I would not go to any small town or to any church where the minister and his wife were hired as a team or seen as a unit. We decided that an urban church would be our best bet, which left him, in our particular denomination, with one choice: a small church in the Bronx consisting of one-third white old-timers who had remained members even after the neighborhood changed and they moved to the suburbs, and two-thirds black and Latino members who lived nearby.
Our apartment across the street from the church faced its round stained glass window riddled with holes. There was a difference of opinion among the members as to whether these holes came from stray bullets or baseballs or both. I looked out the kitchen window and saw Frank lumbering along the sidewalk by the church, then disappearing through the side door to his office.
I grabbed a wet sponge and wiped off the layer of soot that had accumulated on the windowsill since yesterday, resigned already to the daily ritual. Then I turned to face a stack of still-to-be-unpacked boxes that we’d hauled from Chicago in a rented U-Haul trailer hitched to the back of our beat-up Volkswagen van. I bent my knees and lifted up a box labeled Dishes. I was stronger than my whisper-thin ninety-pound body suggested. A spit of a thing, some people were insensitive enough to say to my face. If you stood sideways, you’d disappear, they’d laugh. I didn’t find it funny.
I dropped the box on the kitchen counter and started to open it, but the box cutter slipped from my sweaty fingers. I grabbed a paper towel and wiped my hands, then my forehead, my neck, front and back, and between my breasts. That was when I realized that while I was good at picking up heavy things, I didn’t always know what to do with them. I had forgotten that I couldn’t put the dishes in the cupboards until I did something about the roaches that had swarmed across the floor when I turned on the light last night. I pushed the box to the side and started to make a shopping list. To keep the roaches at bay, some repellent spray. To sprinkle along the baseboards, some borax. To wash out the cupboards, a strong disinfectant soap. The heat was unbearable. We needed a fan. The hot, steamy air was scrambling my mind.
In the bathroom I added more items to the list. Shower curtain. Toilet bowl cleaner. Clorox. More sponges. There was a miniature mushroom growing between the shower wall tiles, but instead of digging it out, which is what I would normally do, I decided to leave it alone, see how big it would get. I wondered if it might be edible.
In the living room, two tall windows covered by heavy metal security bars opened to a fire escape. An array of dingy underwear, worn jeans, and T-shirts hung on a clothesline operated by a pulley system stretching between two buildings. I added laundry detergent to the list and told myself I would not be hanging our clothes on that line for everyone to see. Little did I know, there would be a lot of things I would do in my time in the Bronx that I couldn’t have imagined myself doing.
Playing the role of a good—meaning dutiful—preacher’s wife was one thing I knew I couldn’t do. I went into the bedroom, where Frank’s Bible on the bed stand provided more evidence to me of how impossible it was for me to see things the way he saw them. I didn’t pray. I didn’t read the Bible. I slept during church services, and I hated the songs in the hymnal because they didn’t have a gospel beat. I thought that requiring seminarians to learn the Greek language was the height of absurdity.
I didn’t know who or what God was, and I never had. I was too young and had too much of my life ahead of me to worry about whether there was a heaven or a hell, and as far as I was concerned, we should be worrying about the hell on earth that too many people were already being forced to live instead of worrying over an afterlife.
Maybe it was our religious differences that made me irritated with Frank so much of the time. It had been so different when we first met, as freshmen in college. I had been awed by his intelligence and his certainty about his place in the world. I liked the way he noticed things about me—the food I ate, the smell of the lavender soap I used in the bath, even when the split ends on my blond hair needed trimming. He noticed me like no one had before, and it was intoxicating. So when this superior being chose me, I married him, never stopping to think about whether or not I loved him.
I couldn’t pinpoint when it happened—I guess it was gradual—but at some point he stopped noticing me, and the things I had admired about him became an irritation. His inquiring mind started to feel like criticism, and in the face of his superior intellect and certainty, my own insecurity was magnified.
My reflections were cut short by the sounds of screaming children out in the street. I walked over to the window. Someone had opened the fire hydrant in front of the church full blast, and scores of kids, of all ages and in all kinds of dress and undress, were having the time of their lives running through the spray.
Frank and I would not be having any children. I’d thought it was my fault. So had Frank. He encouraged me to see a doctor, which resulted in both of us being tested, and it turned out it was his fault, not mine. I had thought I wanted kids, but now that I knew we couldn’t, I wasn’t sure anymore. Frank, on the other hand, didn’t take it well, and we stopped talking about it.
As I watched the kids outside now, I told myself it was all water under the bridge. Then I grabbed my keys, locked all the locks behind me, and went out to join in the fun, pinching my nose against the warring cooking smells in the hall. On the second-floor landing, I bumped against a hunched-over man who, in his heroin-induced nonexistence, didn’t notice. The first-floor foyer
