Neal Pollack

“No,” she said. “I did get the money. Herman told me to do it. He told me that that house is cursed, and that I should move.”

“Isn’t he in jail?”

“We write letters,” she said. “It’s time, Helen. It’s a terrible thing that He’'s in prison but now that my father’s dead, He’'s told me that his spirit isn’t in the way anymore. He can see my future!”

I couldn'’t do anything.

I went back to St. Louis and did not return to Chicago for almost a year, as Edward and I found out that I was expecting my first. I hadn'’t heard from Mary since I wrote to tell her. She wrote me, requesting a donation for a fund she was organizing to release Billik from prison. I wrote a rather forceful decline.

She did respond though when I sent her the announcement of our son early in 1909. She congratulated us, sent a rattle, and slipped it into her letter that Billik was granted life in prison, not the death penalty. I sent her a thank you note but didn'’t comment on the latter. I was sick of hearing about him. After that, our letters were terse, when they existed at all.

In June of the new decade, I got the bad news that my mother was quite ill, so we took the children (now two of them) and went back down to Chicago to see her one last time. I managed to speak with her right before she slipped away. We stayed for the funeral.

It was good to be with Ginny, and I saw Mary for the first time in a couple of years. She looked even older and her clothes seemed threadbare, which was surprising. I'’d heard that the sum her father had left behind for her was unexpectedly generous, and she was never a spendthrift. We embraced but did not speak beyond the formalities. She excused herself after the services.

“You’re not coming back to our house?” I asked.

“No,” she said quietly, but with an excited look in her eyes. “Her—

Billik? You remember him? He’'s been released from prison.”

“Good news,” I said.

“I promised him I'’d go meet him. I’m so sorry to leave,” she said, not seeming sorry at all.

I spent the rest of the day in a fury. Getting back home to St. Louis, I wrote to Ginny, “I’'ve had it with Mary. She couldn'’t even be there as family after Mother died.” I spent the next several days going about my business, but I could not stop thinking about how angry I was with my cousin, how she’d grown too selfish and foolish for even her own family.

“I’m sure she'’s sorry,” Ginny wrote back. “I'’ll tell her you say hello and maybe she’ll say something nice in return. I’m off to go visit her now, actually. It’ll be the first time I see this apartment of hers. She says that she’'s not feeling well.”

I looked up from my letter and stared at the wall for a few moments and then picked up the pen. I changed my mind, put it down, and rushed to the telephone, although I had a feeling I knew what I'’d hear when I reached Ginny.

“Her stomach’s been bothering her,” Ginny said. “Possibly a cold or something she ate.”

MAXIMILLIAN

BY ALEXAI GALAVIZ-BUDZISZEWSKI

18th & Allport

I have three memories of my cousin Maximillian. Two of them involve his fists.

My cousin was a short man. But like everyone else on the Mexican side of my family, he was built like a brick two-flat, heavy and hard, a cannonball, the way my grandmother on my mother’s side was a cannonball, the way my uncle Blas was a cannonball. They were all skull, impossible to hug, but warm blooded, steaming, like just standing next to them could get you through a winter’s day. My mother was like this. I miss her terribly.

But Max, my cousin, Maximillian, was young, sixteen or so when my memories of him first begin. His sister Irene celebrated her cotillion in the basement of St. Procopius Church on 18th Street and Allport. I don’t know much about the planning. I was eight years old. But I know my sister Juana stood up in it. She was a Dama, and my cousin on my father’s side, Little David, was her Chambalan. They went off doing their own thing, dancing, waltzing, the way they’d been practicing for weeks, my sister constantly fitting and refitting her dress, me calling her Miss Piggy because she was chubby and more queda than the rest of us darkies.

That night I sat with my mother and ate cake and people watched. My father, done with his shift at the basement door, hunched at a side table sharing a bottle of Presidente with his friend Moe. My cousin Chefa danced with my uncle Bernardo and my aunt Lola danced with her only son, my cousin, Maximillian. It was all beautiful, all quite nice. Then Stoney showed up.

I’m not sure my uncle Blas would’ve allowed any boyfriend of Irene’s to attend the cotillion, but Stoney didn'’t have a chance. He had issues, most noticeably the tattoo on his neck that said Almighty Ambrose.