I started to cry. It was all so crazy. Here I was, dealing with people like Al DiMartino, who couldn’t keep his family together, and Natalie Gordon, who had segmented her life and left a great chasm between the two parts so they would never meet, and in my own family a similar craziness had existed, a craziness my wonderful father had tried and failed to extinguish.

“It’s all right, honey,” Elsie said with dismay. “These things happen in every family. I just didn’t want you to think, God forbid, that your wonderful father was meeting some woman behind your mother’s back. It was your own aunt, Chris. She was your own flesh and blood.”

I took the tissue she pressed into my hand and cleaned up my face. “Thank you, Elsie. Thank you for telling me.”

She put another cake on my plate, as though I were a hurt child who would be comforted by the sweet taste of sugar and chocolate. My emotions were going so crazy, I couldn’t tell whether I felt more relieved that my father was a hero or shocked that my mother had severed relations with her own sister.

“I wonder if she’s still alive,” I said finally.

“Why not? Your own mother’d only be in her fifties if she was around today.”

“Do you know her name?”

“I think Francie said Olive. That doesn’t ring a bell, does it?”

I shook my head. If they had talked about her, it had been when I wasn’t around.

“You think you’ll call her?”

“I’ll try to find her. Was she married?”

“That’s part of it,” Elsie said, looking troubled. “But I don’t think she used her married name. I think she kept her maiden name, at least when your mother was alive.”

I didn’t want to ask for any of the sordid details, and it didn’t look like Elsie wanted to reveal them. I put myself back together and split the last cake with her—I think she wanted it more than I did—and then left, feeling overchocolated and still overwrought.

At home I pulled out the Manhattan directory that we kept in the house and looked up my mother’s maiden name, Cleaver. There were several, none with the first name Olive, but there was an O. A. Cleaver on West Sixty-fourth Street, exactly where I had expected to find her. With pounding heart, I dialed the number, but there was no answer.

Tomorrow I would find out once and for all.

25

The prospect of finding what was surely my last living blood relative besides my cousin Gene so consumed me that I lost all interest in staying home to await calls from Sandy Gordon. I had to get to New York and see if my aunt was in the apartment on Sixty-fourth Street, and I couldn’t wait. After I taught my class, I grabbed a very quick lunch in the cafeteria and drove directly to the city.

I found her name next to a button in the lobby and pressed it, waiting impatiently, keyed up, for any kind of response. None came. I rang again, feeling increasingly disheartened. She was at work, she was away on vacation, she was somewhere she would rather be and might not be back for a long time.

The lobby door opened and a well-dressed woman stepped out.

“Excuse me, do you know Miss Cleaver in 2B?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. I live higher up. The super should be around somewhere. Maybe he can help you.” She left without waiting for me to say anything, and I turned back to the list of names, finding SUPER at the last bell. I rang it.

A woman in jeans and a sweatshirt and carrying a young child opened the door. “You ring for the super?”

“Yes. I’m looking for Miss Cleaver in 2B.”

“She’s not there.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“They took her away to the hospital again. Last week sometime.”

“Do you know which hospital?”

She shrugged. “Same one as before, I guess.”

It didn’t look as though I was talking to a good or willing source of information. “Would you have any idea how I could find her?”

“You could leave a note in her mailbox or with me. If I see her, I’ll give it to her.”

That didn’t sound like a productive move. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll see if I can find the hospital.”

“Sure,” she said indifferently, and pushed open the door she had been holding off the latch.

I went outside, turned toward Broadway, and found a store that let me see a phone book. Roosevelt Hospital was only half a dozen blocks away, a likely place to be taken if you’re picked up by ambulance. I called and asked if Olive Cleaver was a patient.

“Yes, she is,” a Spanish-accented voice said. “You wanna be connected?”

“No, thank you. Are visiting hours in effect now?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I walked down and found the hospital. A pleasant woman checked her computer and found Olive Cleaver. They gave me a pass to insure that there would be no more than two visitors at one time. Clutching the pass like a child holding her mother’s hand in a hostile area, I made my way through the maze of corridors and elevators to the room where my aunt lay.

Most of the doors I passed were open, so I slowed as I approached hers, trying to calm myself, wondering what I would say, whether she would want to see me, how we would make up for a lifetime of being apart. I stopped just short of the room. That door, too, was open, an invitation to enter. Swallowing, I turned and went inside.

The first bed was occupied by a tiny sleeping figure, an ancient woman with thin white hair and hands that moved as she slept, as though she were shooing away flies or bad dreams. Between her bed and the next a curtain was drawn. I walked to it, looked around it, and set foot on Olive Cleaver’s territory.

“Olive?” I asked.

She was thin, maybe in her sixties but looking older, washed-out blond-gray hair too long to be kept in place on a pillow, skin so pale it might never have seen the light of summer. She turned from the window and fixed her gray eyes on me, holding them there, putting together all her memories, maybe even all her hopes and dreams.

“You’re her daughter,” she said.

I tried desperately not to cry. “I’m Christine.”

“I remember. Pull up a chair. How did you find me?”

I took the guest chair and sat between the bed and the window. “I remembered you at the Thanksgiving Day parade.”

She smiled a little, or at least her lips did. “I used to meet you and Eddie there. Then one year he didn’t come.”

“He died.” I could hardly speak, but she seemed totally unaffected, completely without emotion.

“She never told me.” There was a harshness to her voice. Her sister had disappointed her.

“My mother died seventeen years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It was very hard for her after Dad died.”

“What did you do? You couldn’t have been very old.”

“I went to live with my aunt Meg, Dad’s sister.”

“Eddie was a good man.” She said it as though he had cared for me, not his sister.

“And when I was fifteen, I went to live in a convent. I became a nun.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Is that what Francie wanted for you?”

“I think so. It was what I wanted for myself. I left almost two years ago. I’m married now.”

“Seems to be the way the world is going.” She pulled herself up so she was more sitting than lying, holding a hand up to keep me from helping her. “Did she leave you my name and address?”

I shook my head. “I talked to my mother’s friend. She knew about you. It took a while, but she told me yesterday. I guessed you lived in this area because we used to meet you on the street with the Statue of Liberty.”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “Kids remember things. I’ve lived here a long time.”

“Elsie—my mother’s friend—said there were problems between you and your parents.”