My grandmother would tell me stories, her quiet voice sometimes hard to hear above the insects’ drone. “We met far from this place”, she said once, speaking of her husband, my grandfather. Her father had forbidden her to date but they were allowed to meet in public, each evening, on a bench in Christopher Park. “I would sit there anxiously waiting for him every night, at ease only when I saw him approach in the distance”. They would sit there happily, feeding the pigeons, holding hands when they could. “His hands were always warm”.
She pursed her lips slightly and she continued, “I thought my heart would break when he told me he had to leave our neighborhood to find work”. On their last night he held her closely, ignoring the disapproving old women who sat nearby. He told her he would return for her. “Wait for me”, he said. “I will come back for you”.
We rocked a long time after those words had left her lips. She said nothing more, lost in thought. Finally I asked her, “Did he come back”? She looked down at me, startled by even my small voice. She stopped the swing and adjusted her shawl around us. It was growing dark. She started to swing again and we rocked, the creaking of the chains above our heads melding with the other usual sounds of the night. “No”, she said, “he never came back”. Then she sat again in silence.
I was confused and she knew it but there was no point in asking more questions. I knew to wait. After a time she rose and we went into the warmth of her small house. For whatever reason, she never did tell me how they had come to be reunited. I heard brief accounts from others of course, but the real version, the only version worth hearing, would have had to have come from her. And she never spoke of it again.
Sometimes I wonder, if she was reluctant to share her story, why she chose to bring it up in the first place, especially to a child. Had it been a cautionary tale for my benefit? Had she tried to tell me that the fine lives we imagine may take different paths than we could ever foresee? Or had it simply been an unguarded moment, a reverie that impulsively took voice?
Many years later, at her funeral, I met cousins and nieces of whom I had only previously heard. Many seemed both familiar and strange. Sometimes I could determine which features seemed familiar, but the strangeness always seemed more prominent. We were like sister stars traveling from the center of the universe, of common origin, but on our own separate paths. We had gravitated here, again to the center, to say our goodbyes to her, but would then resume our separate treks, our separate lives.
It was twelve years after her funeral that I found myself in New York City on a rare business trip. On Saturday I took the subway to Greenwich Village, stopped at a market to buy some grapes and cheese and a cool bottle of lemonade. Though I had checked a map beforehand, it took me a while to find what I sought. I wandered among the throngs, looking for the park, noticing and admiring each store front, each bodega, each restaurant. After several minutes of walking, I found myself standing next to my destination, Christopher Park.
I was surprised at how small the park was, but recognized its unique shape at once from her description. I found a vacant spot on a bench in the park and sat, watching the people around me. There were lovers here still, lovers of all types, lovers with warm hands and warm hearts still. From my seat I looked up each nearby street and wondered from which he had arrived each day. These benches were replacements of course. No bench of wood could stand up for seventy five years.
As the evening wore on and daylight began to dim, I took two small stones from my pocket, stones I had gathered from their homestead and had carried with me all those dozen years. I placed the first of them under a tree near the bench where I had been sitting. Then I carefully put the second stone next to the first. I leaned a small framed black and white picture of my grandmother and my grandfather against the tree. I sat down again and admired them, their smooth young faces, their Sunday clothes, their strength and confidence together. At long last I rose from the bench, took one last long look at the sacred mother park, then walked away. I had a flight to catch.
As I followed the sidewalk back to the steps of the subway, my sister stars winked to me, twinkling in the night sky above me. They too had paused in their journeys to see this thing, this correction, this rewriting of the tale we had never heard.
My grandparents were together again now. After almost eighty years, as he had promised, he had come for her again. And as she had promised, when he arrived, she had been waiting for him in the park.
The End