“One girl threw herself out of a third-floor window and was left half paralyzed, but she still had to keep working,” Radmila told Irina in the half-melodramatic, half-didactic tone she used to refer to this wretched episode in her life. “As she couldn’t control her sphincter and constantly soiled herself, men could go with her for half price. Another girl became pregnant and performed on a mattress with a hole in it to fit her belly into; in her case, the clients paid more, because they thought that fucking a pregnant woman cured gonorrhea. When the pimps wanted new faces, they sold us to other brothels, and so we went down and down until we reached the depths of hell. I was saved by fire and a man who took pity on me. One night there was a blaze that spread to several houses in the neighborhood. Journalists arrived with their cameras, and so the police couldn’t turn a blind eye; they arrested us girls shivering in the street, but not one of the damned pimps or clients. We appeared on TV, where we were accused of being depraved and responsible for all the filth that occurred in Aksaray. They were going to deport us, but a cop I knew helped me escape and got me a passport.” Eventually, Radmila reached Italy, where she worked as an office cleaner and then in a factory. She had kidney problems, and was worn out from her experiences, drugs, and alcohol, yet she was still young and her skin had some of the translucent quality of her youth, similar to her daughter’s. An American technician fell for her, they got married, and he took her with him to Texas, where some years later her daughter also arrived.
The last time Irina saw her grandparents, one morning in 1999 when they left her at the train that was to take her to Chisinau on the first stage of her long journey to Texas, Costea was sixty-two and Petruta a year younger. They were much more decrepit than any of the residents of over ninety at Lark House, who aged slowly and with dignity, with full sets of their own teeth or proper dentures. Irina had discovered that the process was the same: they advanced step by step toward the end, some more quickly than others, and lost everything along the way, for we cannot take anything with us to the other side of death. A few months after Irina left, Petruta’s head slumped over a plate of potatoes and onion and she didn’t wake up again. Costea had lived with her for forty years and concluded there was no point going on alone. He hanged himself from the beam in the barn, where the neighbors found him three days later, drawn by his barking dog and the bleating of the goat, which had not been milked. Irina learned this years later from a judge at the juvenile court in Dallas. But she never talked about it.
* * *
Early that autumn, Lenny Beal came to live in one of the independent apartments at Lark House. The new guest came with Sophia, his white dog with a black patch over one eye that gave her the air of a pirate. His arrival was a memorable event, as none of the few other male residents could compare to him. Some of them were married, others were in diapers on the third level, about to pass on to Paradise, and the rare available widowers held no interest for any of the women. Lenny was eighty years old, but nobody would have said he was more than sixty. He was the most desirable specimen seen at Lark House in decades, with a mane of white hair that ended in a small ponytail, his astonishing lapis lazuli eyes, his youthfully cut crumpled linen trousers, and the rope-soled sandals he wore without socks. He almost caused a riot among the ladies; he filled all the empty space, as if someone had let a tiger loose in this world of female longing.
Even Voigt, with all his years as an administrator, wondered what Lenny was doing there. Mature, well-preserved men like him always had a much younger woman—their second or third wife—to look after them. He greeted Lenny with all the enthusiasm he could muster between spasms from his hemorrhoids which were still torturing him. Despite the fact that Catherine Hope had been trying to help him at her clinic, where a Chinese doctor came three times a week to perform acupuncture, his progress was slow. The director calculated that even the most damaged ladies, the ones who sat staring into space as they delved into their past because the present was slipping away from them, would stand a chance of coming back to life thanks to Lenny Beal. He wasn’t wrong. Overnight blue-rinse wigs appeared, together with strings of pearls and varnished nails—all of which were a novelty for these ladies who despised artifice and had a tendency toward Buddhism and ecology.
“Good grief! It looks like a geriatric home in Miami,” Voigt told Cathy.
Bets were laid as to what the newcomer had been in his previous life: actor, fashion designer, an importer of Oriental art, professional tennis player. Alma put a stop to all this speculation when she told Irina to pass on the news that Lenny had actually been a dentist, although none of the residents could quite believe he had earned a living poking around other people’s teeth.