In a wild effort to stop the laughter that wanted to bubble up out of his throat, Ganady uttered a mangled hiccup.

Boris must have taken this peculiar sound as an expression of dismay or perhaps sympathy, for his mouth tugged down at its wide corners and his blue eyes a.s.sumed a look that was at once woeful and terrifying. He nodded and lowered his voice even further.

"This is what Mr. Joe wants. He tells me every day that this is what he has worked his life for. And she-that accursed girl-she is throwing it away for him. I ask you, how can a daughter do such a thing to her own father?"

Ganady had no idea. He also had no idea what Boris was talking about unless... "So, Svetlana doesn't want to inherit the-the empire-is that what you mean?"

"That is it. In a peanut sh.e.l.l. You see her, yes?"

Ganny nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

"Then you must tell her that Boris wishes above all things that she do her duty to her father, the Sausage King, and come home to her inheritance."

Ganady solemnly agreed to do this, though he did not agree that he would make the p.r.o.nouncement with any sort of solemnity. And when he saw Svetlana next, his sense of the absurd had not diminished one bit.

It was the following evening and he had been sent by his Da to help Father Zembruski replace all the used-up candles with fresh ones in time for late ma.s.s.

Father Z had bustled off to the sacristy for a moment, leaving Ganny alone at the altar with the candles, which he was dutifully arranging when he heard a soft sound behind him and felt a frisson of delightful antic.i.p.ation run up and down his spine.

He turned to find Lana standing below the altar in the central aisle of the sanctuary, her radiant hair blazing in the light of the braziers.

"You weren't in your room."

"I had to help out..." He waved a votive at the altar. "You look really nice."

She did, too. She was wearing a green blouse with little pearl beads upon the collar and a wide skirt of darker green wool. There was a soft yellow scarf tied about her neck and her head was completely uncovered.

"You look like spring," he told her.

She smiled. "You're back in school this week."

"Yeah. This is my last year. I get to graduate early."

"That's because you're so smart."

He shrugged, pleased that she thought so.

"And how are Mr. Joe's windows?" She didn't call him "Father," just Mr. Joe, or even "the Butcher."

Ganady realized with a start that they must be very much alike, these two-proud, stubborn-in a word, Polish.

"They're cleaner than they've ever been. I think I may have a promotion. He's been talking about having me come in after school and play clarinet for his customers."

Lana laughed and clapped her hands. "I would love to see that! Many of his customers are olreitnik-you know." She rubbed her fingers together. "They'd give you tips and you could make a lot of money."

"Would you like me to do that-make a lot of money?"

She blushed, coy, and looked aside at the brazier nearest the altar. "I don't care how much money you have, Ganny. Those things don't matter to me."

"Is that why you don't want to inherit the empire?" he asked, grinning.

"What?"

He made big eyes. "The Empire of Bagels and Sausages. Don't you want to be the-the Sausage Princess?"

"Who have you been talking to? Papa doesn't say such things."

"No. It was the Bagel Prince. He asked me about you-what we do together, how I came to know you, that sort of thing. Then he called you 'that accursed girl' and started going on about you 'doing your duty to your father' and empires built of bagels and sausages and-"

Ganady's laughter died in his throat for of all the varied expressions he had seen on Svetlana's beautiful face, he had never seen this one. It was very like his grandmother's Baba Yaga look, and it terrified him more than a hundred Borises. He swallowed, finding his throat suddenly parched.

"I'm sure he didn't mean what he said about you being accursed. I'm sure it was just a figure of speech."

"Oh, Ganny," she said. "What have you done?" And she turned and ran from the sanctuary, cutting through the rows of pews and exiting by a small side door at the far side of the nave.

He started after her, candles still clutched in his hands, but Father Zembruski emerged from the sacristy and asked, "Ganady? Who was that you were speaking to? Was that your sister Marija? Do you need to go home?"

"It was Lana, Father. And if I could go..."

The priest absolved him with a smile and a gesture and Ganady pelted after Svetlana. But of course, when he reached the street, she was nowhere in sight.

He called to her all the way home. He went up to his room and prayed, then talked to her, then played her favorite songs on his clarinet. She was gone. And The c.o.c.kroach was gone as well. It was neither in his glove, nor on the ball, nor hiding behind the Virgin as it sometimes did.

All week Ganny had not one dream, not one glance, not one sign of Svetlana. And when the Sabbath rolled around again, and she still did not appear, he knew with all the pa.s.sion of his seventeen-year-old heart that in parroting back to her the things Boris had said, he'd hurt her feelings very badly. And now she was gone.

She had asked him-had begged him-not to talk to her father. She had begged him to stay away from Boris, but he hadn't listened. He had wanted only to hear more about her-to a.s.sure himself over and over that somewhere in this city or in this world, there was a real girl named Svetlana Gusalev who was neither ghost nor angel nor insect.

Fifteen: A Gift, a Girl and a Ghost.

Barely two months before Ganady's high-school graduation, he climbed to Mr. Ouspensky's rooftop sanctuary and found the old man lying unconscious across the home plate of their ritual diamond, his face turned toward Connie Mack Stadium.

Mr. O had no phone, so Ganady had to pound on a neighbor's door to summon help. The neighbor called the hospital; Ganady called his grandmother; his grandmother called Izzy.

Sometime later, he found himself standing in the middle of a hospital waiting room while his Baba fussed at the doctors and Izzy sat mumbling prayers as if he were practicing the kaddish. After a while, a doctor came to them and said that Mr. Ouspensky had had a heart attack.

None of them got to see Mr. O that night, but three mornings after-a Sunday-Baba Irina came to the door of Ganady's room and announced, "I'm going to see Ouspensky. You want to come with?"

"Sure, Baba," Ganny said, set aside his clarinet, and rose from his bed. His eyes fell upon the dresser, where the Eddie Waitkus baseball sat atop his mitt. The c.o.c.kroach was nowhere to be seen.

The good-luck ball. Mr. O could certainly use some luck, Ganny thought, and with Svetlana gone it no longer meant to him what it once had. He grabbed it and stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket.

Later, standing in Mr. Ouspensky's hospital room, he watched Baba fuss with the old man's blankets and pillows and thought how small and fragile he looked. His hand went to his pocket to caress the ball, to turn it over and over, whispering his baseball prayers and wondering why it seemed so difficult suddenly to find something to say to the man he'd spent so many Sat.u.r.day afternoons with.

He looked up to realize Mr. Ouspensky was watching him.

"So, Ganny, they say they gotta keep me here two weeks. Two whole weeks! We'll miss next Sat.u.r.day's game. Last time the Giants will be in town this year."

Ganny flushed. That game had been played the day before. Mr. O was mixed up in time, which Ganny supposed was only natural.

He smiled. "Don't worry about it, Mr. O. We'll go first Sat.u.r.day after you get out of here."

"Won't be the Giants, though," said Stanislaus Ouspensky wistfully. "You go this Sat.u.r.day. Maybe you can catch me a pop foul."

Ganny's hand tightened on the Waitkus ball. He took a deep breath and pulled it out of his pocket. "I already did, Mr. O."

The old man took the ball and turned it in his hands. "What's this? Why, this is your miracle ball, Ganny. You shouldn't give this to me."

"Yeah, I should. Now it's your miracle ball." Because a miracle is what you need.

Mr. Ouspensky's eyes misted and he held the ball over his damaged heart. "Thank you, Ganady Puzdrovsky. You're a good boy."

Later, as they stood awaiting a bus to take them home to the zibete, Baba Irina slipped her arm through his.

"That was a fine thing you did for Ouspensky, Ganady."

He shrugged. "It was nothing."

"It was something," she argued, shaking his arm. "He's wrong, though. You're not a good boy."

Ganady groaned inwardly, wondering what he'd done now.

"You're a good man. A mensch."

He flushed with embarra.s.sment and pride. "Oh, Baba," he muttered.

"But explain to me how it is that such a mensch spends most of his evenings playing clarinet for his grandmother, and most every Sat.u.r.day with a meshuggeh old man?"

"Mr. O isn't meshuggeh. He's just imaginative."

"Don't be a shlub. Why aren't you out with your friends?"

"My friends all have other things to do."

"Your friends all have girls," Baba corrected. "Why don't you have a girl, Ganny? I'd like to see you married before I die."

"Baba!"

"What happened to that Svetlana you told me about? Where did she go, eh?"

"I don't know. She just...stopped coming around."

"That's it? She stopped coming around. Just like that-you did nothing to cause this?"

"Well, I...that is, we... Something I did made her mad. I guess I sort of bragged to a friend of hers that I knew her so well and then he said some things about her that weren't very nice, and I repeated them to her and...and I don't really understand why she's mad at me. I mean, Boris is the one who called her 'that accursed girl.' I just told her he'd said it."

"And why did you say this to her?"

He'd done much thinking about this very subject. "I think because I was afraid he was, you know, sweet on her and I wanted her not to be sweet on him."

Baba Irina's eyes opened very wide. "Oh?"

"I don't think she was sweet on him. I thought she liked me. But she sure didn't want me talking to this Boris. Or to her Da, either. But I did. I don't think she minded me washing his windows, but she didn't like to hear the messages they were always asking me to give her."

"What sort of messages?"

"Something about coming home and doing her duty to her family. Her Da owns these butcher shops. He calls himself the Sausage King of Philly. I think he wants her to learn the business, you know? Follow in his footsteps and become like...a Sausage Princess or something. She doesn't want to do that, I guess, and she got really upset with me when I tried to get her to go talk to her Da and this other guy."

"This other guy?"

"Boris. Boris Bzikov. The-the Bagel Prince." Ganny tried not to laugh or smirk or show mirth in any way. Truth to tell, he did not feel particularly mirthful, but the laughter still wanted to come.

"Ah. And so you think this Boris Bzikov is an old beau."

He dropped his eyes to the sidewalk. "I don't know."

"Ah. So, why aren't you going to Svetlana and apologizing for this?"

"I can't find her. I don't know where she lives...anymore. She sort of...moved."

"She moved out of your dreams? When did this happen?"

"Months ago, Baba. Right after school started. She's just not around any more."

"Ganady Puzdrovsky! Shame for you giving up so easily!"

"Baba, she's gone, okay? She's really gone this time. And I don't think I'll ever see her again."

Because I've just given away the one thing that connected me to her.

Baba looked at him hard, then shrugged. "So, this Svetlana is gone. If she's so easily gotten rid of, perhaps this is best, yes? There are other girls. Most of them are much easier to know than that one. You don't have to dream them up. They're just there. There are fine girls at Megidey Tihilim. I see the way they look at you in shul. I know what they're thinking, too, those girls: see how tall and straight he is-like a cedar of Lebanon. And how like a raven's wing his hair, and how clear and dark his eyes. They're thinking you're like King David, is what."

Ganady could see where this was going. Where the Opshprekher had failed, Baba Irina was hoping some nice girl from Megidey Tihilim would succeed.

There were pretty girls at temple and nice girls and girls that were both pretty and nice, and talented and smart as well. But, he realized with a start, none of them seemed as vivid or real as the quite literal girl of his dreams.

The girls from Saint Stan's and Saint Casimir pleased him no better. He supposed he would outgrow this, or perhaps he would find his dream girl some day in the real world. But for now, they smiled at him, they flirted, they giggled after him in the halls between cla.s.ses-all to no effect. There was even a girl named Rachel-daughter to his mother's best friend-who brought him plates of cookies when she and her mother came to the Puzdrovskys' for sewing circles, and who offered to help him with his history homework.

But the cookies failed to beguile him, and he was hopeless at history, for he did not reckon it the way the rest of the world did. While Rabbi Andrukh reckoned it from the Bible, and Father Zembruski from the Gospels and the history of the Church, and his teachers from disaster to disaster and war to war, he thought of history in terms of baseball. 1912 was not the year the t.i.tanic sank, it was the year Tiger Stadium and Fenway Park opened. 1914 might have marked the United States' entry into the First World War, but that was overshadowed by the first pitch thrown at Wrigley Field.

With his pa.s.sion for klezmer, he was also in strange musical territory, for the girls he knew, if they listened to music at all, favored Sinatra over Tarras and Presley over Brandwein. And not one of them had the slightest desire to go to a baseball game on a warm Sat.u.r.day afternoon.

Ganny let his breath out on a long sigh. With Mr. O laid up, it was going to be a lonely spring.