Her own face relaxed into a smile. “Gosh, Vic, do you know how scary you look when you get mad? I hope I’m doing your coffee thingy the right way.”
I turned the flame off as the pot started to burble, and offered to lend her some clothes; her own were stained with coffee, both from the towel and her energy in diving in to clean up the kitchen. She took a T-shirt, and trailed after me into the living room.
I felt my temper rise again when I saw that she’d been rooting through my big walk-in closet. She’d pulled out my winter boots and my bike to get at the trunk, which stood open. She’d ripped apart the protective tissue in which I’d wrapped my mother’s velvet concert gown. The dress itself was flung over my armchair so that a sleeve and the skirt were on the floor; my dad’s dress jacket lay open on the piano bench.
“I guess I’m so used to living with my sisters and my roomie, I forgot not everyone wants to share,” Petra said in a small voice after a glance at my face.
“It’s not about sharing, it’s about consideration, empathy.” I picked up the evening gown and started to fold it back into the sheets of tissue, my hands shaking. “Do you know how many hours of lessons my mother gave so that she could buy this dress? How many evenings we ate pasta without sauce?
“Do you know what it’s like to live with so little that each possession has to be cared for and cherished? My mother started to rebuild her career in this gown. After each performance, I helped her hang it up, with dried apples and cloves to keep moths out of it. She could mend little tears in it, but, if it had been badly damaged, she couldn’t have afforded another. My mother died when I was sixteen. I don’t have much left to me that has her hands on it, her touch. I don’t want you near this trunk or her clothes.”
“I’m sorry, Vic. I was thinking about your dad, and you wanting to find something to show what he was doing in 1966. I didn’t think how this would look.”
I took a breath and tried to steady my voice. “I think it would be a good idea if you left now.”
“But aren’t you going to look at your dad’s stuff?” she asked as I started to fold Tony’s jacket.
“By myself. When I feel up to it. I’m late now for a meeting with a client.” I tried to find a lighter note. “Doesn’t the Chicago Strangler expect you to show up some time? Even if you were yesterday’s hero, you could be today’s goat. Campaigns aren’t forgiving places.”
She started to explain how relaxed her work atmosphere was. “. . . And, anyway, because Brian’s dad and my dad were, like, homeys, Brian knows that family comes first.”
“Brian told you to come look at my dad’s dress uniform because he and Peter grew up together?”
She turned red. “No, of course not. I just meant . . . Oh, never mind. I’ll see you tonight, okay? We can go look at Back of the Yards!”
I looked at her wearily. “I’ve had enough family for today, Petra. I’ll call you when I feel up to spending an evening with you.”
“I cleaned up your kitchen, I apologized for taking out your mom’s dress, I think you could show some kind of response.”
“Do you?” I was kneeling by the trunk to lay my mother’s gown inside but turned to look at Petra. “My response is that you are a wonderful young woman with a lot of energy and goodwill, but you’ve lived your whole life in a privileged bubble. Come back and see me when you’ve thought through how you’d feel if your mother was dead and your only memento of her was treated like . . . like a towel for mopping up coffee.”
She stared down at me, her face a mix of surprise and anger. Her cellphone rang. She pulled it from her shirt pocket, looked at it, looked at me, and bolted from my living room. I heard her cluntering down the stairs in her heavy shoes, the sound drowning her voice as she answered her phone.
I sat for a time on the floor, my mother’s dress still in my lap. I smoothed the tissue, my throat tight, remembering how Gabriella looked onstage at the old Athenaeum Theatre, her only major recital before she became too weak to perform. She had been luminous in this gown, and her voice had filled the theater.
I looked at my watch. I had about an hour to get downtown. Instead of replacing the gown and my dad’s dress uniform jacket, I started rummaging through the trunk myself. My mother’s music, a box of my old school report cards, my birth certificate, my parents’ marriage license, my mother’s naturalization papers.