City of Girls

It is with a heavy heart that I write to tell you that my father passed away ten days ago. It was a sudden death. He was out walking one night around our neighborhood, as he was wont to do, and he collapsed on the sidewalk. It would appear that he had a heart attack, although we did not ask for an autopsy. This has been a great shock to me and to my mother, as I’m sure you can imagine. My father had his frailties, to be sure, but they were never of a physical nature. He had such stamina! I thought he would live forever. We held a small service for him at the same church where he was christened, and he has been buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, next to his parents. Vivian, I apologize. It was only after the funeral that I realized I should have contacted you immediately. I know that you and my father were dear friends. Surely, he would have wanted you to be alerted. Please forgive this tardy note. I’m sorry to be the bearer of such bad news and I’m sorry that I didn’t get word to you sooner. If there is anything that I, or my family, can ever do for you, please let me know.

Sincerely, Angela Grecco

—

You had kept your maiden name.

Don’t ask me why, but I noticed that right away—before I had even fully registered that he was gone.

Good for you, Angela, I thought. Always keep your own name!

Then the news hit me that Frank was gone, and I did just what you might imagine I would do: I dropped to the floor and I wept.

—

Nobody wants to hear about anybody else’s grief (there’s a level at which everyone’s grief is exactly the same, anyhow), so I won’t go into details about my sadness. I will say only that the following few years were a very hard time for me—the hardest and loneliest I ever experienced.

Your father had been a peculiar man in life, Angela, and he was peculiar in death, too. He remained so vivid. He came to me in dreams, and he came to me in smells and sounds and sensations of New York itself. He came to me in the scent of summer rain on hot macadam, or in the sweet perfume of wintertime sugared nuts sold by street vendors. He came to me in the sour, milky odor of Manhattan’s ginkgo trees in springtime bloom. He came to me in the bubbling coo of nesting pigeons, and in the screaming of police sirens. He was everywhere to be found across the city. Yet his absence weighted my heart with deep silence.

I went on about my life.

So much of my day-to-day routine looked exactly the same, even after he had gone. I lived in the same place, I did the same job. I spent time with the same friends and family. Frank had never been part of my daily routine, so why would anything change? My friends knew that I had lost someone important to me—but they hadn’t known him. Nobody knew how much I had loved him (how would I have explained him?), so I wasn’t warranted the public grieving rights of a widow. I didn’t see myself as a widow, in any case. That was your mother’s position, not mine. How could I be a widow when I had never been a wife? There had never been a correct word for what Frank and I were to each other, so the absence I felt after his death was both private and unnamed.

Mostly, it was this: I would wake up late at night, and lie in my bed, waiting for the phone to ring so that I could hear him say, “Are you awake? Do you want to go for a walk?”