The Cross-eyed Gypsy, Barry Rachin [read the beginning after the end novel txt] 📗

Francine heard the sound as she was preparing for bed. A faint pitter-patter, more like the nocturnal scratching of a small rodent, filtered through the living room to the half-closed door of her bedroom. It was almost midnight. She went to the front door and peered through the peep hole; no one was visible in the hallway.
Tap, tap, tap. Francine looked a second time. 'Who's there?”
The security chain firmly latched, she cracked open the door. A dark-haired boy wearing feety pajamas and a somber expression was staring up at her. Francine undid the chain. Sauntering into the apartment, the toddler wrapped his arms around Francine's thighs and shouted, “Babussssshka!”
“And you are?” No reply.
Disengaging herself from the child's arms, Francine went out into the hallway. The building was absolutely still. She returned to the apartment to find the refrigerator wide open. The boy was sitting on the living room sofa munching a dill pickle. Francine reached for the pickle, but the child scowled, twisting his body away. He had a broad face and huge, brown eyes; the skin being unusually fair, the pallid complexion heightened the intensity of the eyes. “Where are your parents?” The boy hiccupped and, stuffing what remained of the pickle in his mouth, chewed at a perverse angle. “You're mother, father?”
The pickle gone, he wiped his vinegary hands on the flannel pajamas. “Babushka!”
“Babushka?” Francine repeated. Where had she heard the word before?
At Mary Mother of Mankind school where she worked, there was a lushly illustrated children's book, Baba Yaga - a Russian folk tale about an old woman, a babushka, who lived in the woods and communed with the animals.
Francine heard footsteps in the hallway. “Igor! Igor!” Mrs. Antonelli, the elderly lady who lived on the third floor, was yelling frantically. Francine went back out onto the landing. “Looking for the little boy?”
Mrs. Antonelli rushed into the apartment and, her chest heaving spasmodically, threw her arms around the child. The boy kissed the old woman on the cheek then buried his face in her faded, blue bathrobe. “I have no strength in my arms,” the old woman whispered apologetically. “Perhaps, you could help me get him back to bed.”
Lifting the child in her arms, Francine carried the boy up two flights of stairs into the old woman’s cluttered den where a single mattress had been thrown on the floor. She settled the child under the covers; as she straightened up, Igor reached out and grabbed her hair. She unballed the tiny fist, prying the fingers loose one by one, kissed the palm and turned away.
“Spahseebah.”
Francine turned to the old woman. What did he say?”
“He thanked you.”
For what?”
Mrs. Antonelli thought a moment. “He is very polite when it comes to food. Did you give him anything to eat while he was in your apartment?”
“He found a pickle in the refrigerator.”
“Well there you have it.” Mrs. Antonelli cupped the child's face in her mottled hands. “Go to sleep,” she said with mock severity. “And no more funny business!”
“Gdeh Atyets?” the little boy said.
“Your father’s working,” she replied and turned the light out.
In response to Francine's baffled expression, she noted, “A half dozen words of Russian I learned. No more no less.” Like a swaybacked horse tightly hobbled at the ankles, Mrs. Antonelli inched her way back into the kitchen and put the kettle on. A thick, gold crucifix hung from the old woman's neck. Statues of the Madonna and various saints were sprinkled through the apartment which smelled of garlic and tomato sauce. “Igor lives with his father in the apartment at the far end of the hall. Moved in the beginning of September. Come from Russia via Israel.”
Francine sat down at the kitchen table. On the chair next to hers was a brown teddy bear. One of the eyes was missing; the other hung from the socket by a single thread. The arms and torso of the toy animal were unnaturally thin, the bulk of the stuffing having collapsed into the animal's legs. Francine touched the solitary eye and it came loose altogether. She rolled the thin filament of yellow thread over in her fingers and watched it disintegrated into powdery fragments. A blind, edematous teddy bear of Russian parentage. Was the toy a metaphor for a way of life? Francine didn't think she would want to visit much less live in a country that produced such a physically challenged creature. “Where's the mother?”
Mrs. Antonelli raised a rheumatoid hand in a disparaging gesture. “A real pootan! After they'd been in Israel a few months, she ran off with a paratrooper.” The water began to boil. She poured two cups of tea and placed the sugar bowl on the table. “Since they'd already bought tickets to come to America, the husband left without her.”
“None of which explains what the boy doing in your apartment?”
“The father works at an all-night gas station. When the baby-sitter quit, he had no one to mind the child.”
“And you volunteered?”
The old woman shrugged. “How they live! A couple of folding chairs. Card table in the kitchen. No decent furniture, hardly any clothes.” She lifted the tea to her lips and blew several times before tasting. “I gave them bedroom curtains, a few towels and sheets, a spider plant.” The old woman shook several pills from a plastic bottle onto her outstretched hand. Placing one under her tongue, she washed it down with the hot tea. “Beta blockers. What a life!” She put the second pill in her mouth and took another sip. “Igor comes over after supper, watches a little television and goes to sleep. By sunrise, the father's home.”
Pointing at the plastic container, Francine said, “You're in poor health. It isn’t fair.”
“You of all people,” the old lady shot back, “should know life ain’t fair?”
Francine blushed and lowered her eyes. When the tea was done, she walked quietly back into the den. The boy was lying on his back with a thumb in his mouth, making a raucous, sucking sound that was both soothing and unnerving at the same time. A thin, blue vein coursed erratically across the underside of his chin. Francine knelt down, kissed the child and left the apartment.


Only a few years out of high school, Francine Spicuzza became a nun, joining an obscure order, the Sisters of Perpetual Devotion. The nuns lived separate from the community and supported themselves by manufacturing chocolates and jams which they sold in a monastery store. Unfortunately, even as a child Francine had a problem with chocolate; it made her skin break out.
Hives. Nettle rash. Urticaria. By whatever name, the malady raised itchy wheals on her back and chest. At first, she accepted her suffering as a form of spiritual penance, a mystical trial not unlike that of Job’s in the Old Testament. But after three years of semi-cloistered existence, of life dedicated to prayer and confectioneries, Francine asked to be transferred to an administrative position. Six months later, she left the convent altogether. There had been no crisis of faith, no spiritual, dark night of the soul. Francine returned to Rhode Island, took an apartment on Federal Hill and found work as secretary at Mary Mother of Mankind parochial school. No one ever doubted her sincerity or religious zeal. Simply stated, the chocolate did her in.
It had been jokingly suggested that God banished Francine from the convent for being an erotic - albeit, unwitting - temptress. Her body, a Minotaur’s maze of supple curves and angles, turned heads everywhere she went. The lips, too, were invitingly full with a suggestive pout. When she smiled or expressed even mild emotion, the malleable features seemed to pull at cross purposes giving her face an unpredictability that was as irresistible as it was unfathomable.


Before going to bed, Francine went to the kitchen. In a drawer, beneath a lumpy pile of dishtowels, was a gray brochure fashioned from ornate, deckled paper. For $16,000, a person could travel - air fare not included - to the Ukraine, Moldova, Saint Petersburg or the Ural Mountains and adopt a Russian child. Two months earlier, she'd contacted the non-profit, missionary group but done nothing since. Sixteen thousand dollars. Francine could work a dozen years and not save enough money to recoup the expense. Her meager salary barely covered rent and living expenses. Food, clothing, shoes, health care and entertainment - nothing came cheap. And would an agency even consider her, an unmarried woman with a marginal job?
An old maid cousin on her father's side got pregnant with donor sperm. The child - she was a teenager now - was energetic, a straight-A student and member of the debating society at school. Artificial insemination. Francine had briefly toyed with the idea. Very briefly. With her luck, the fertility clinic would match her with an escapee from Bridgewater, the state hospital for the criminally insane. Evil sperm. Deranged, psychopathic sperm torpedoed halfway up her vagina to the mouth of the cervix where, with predatory zeal, the flagellating monster would burrow, head first, into one of her unsuspecting ova. The grim thought sent waves of nausea knifing through her bowels.
A nun with The Sisters of Perpetual Devotion had done adoptions in an Eastern European country. Bulgaria or Rumania. Francine couldn't remember. The peasants, poor and uneducated dirt farmers, believed adoption was a sinister pretext. Foreigners 'bought' their children for body parts. The internal organs - kidneys, livers, hearts, bowels, spleens and lungs were harvested as organic replacements for the terminally ill. External organs such as eyes, hands, legs and ears were only slightly less valuable. In death as in life, the materially less-fortunate would benefit the rich.
Francine picked up the brochure again and held it to the light. Most of the two dozen youngsters pictured were orphans, abandoned at birth. Some were gypsies; others malnourished with glaring birth defects. In one picture, a darkly beautiful, kindergarten-aged child sat stiffly in a straight-backed chair, a cardboard sign draped around her neck. On the sign, which tilted at a crazy angle, was scrawled: Marina, age 6, Gypsy, severe cross-eyes.
But for the infirmity and languorous expression, the picture might have been comical - pathetically touching, even. A parody of the real thing. But crossed eyes were the sign of the devil. No self-respecting Slavic family would ever adopt a Gypsy child - certainly not one capable of the evil eye! Sixteen thousand dollars for a throwaway child no one wanted; a less-than-perfect creature possessed by demons. And her own kind, the Catholics, was serving as intermediaries, baby brokers! Francine tossed the brochure aside and went to draw a bath.

You of all people ...
Later that night in bed, Francine remembered Mrs. Antonelli's biting commentary, the brittle glint of consternation in her gray eyes. Earlier, as she was rinsing the teacups in the sink, Mrs. Antonelli asked, “What are your future plans?”
Since leaving the convent, Francine structured her life on the singular, guiding principal that complications were bad, routine and sameness the supreme good. “I'll stay with the school,” Francine replied. “Another ten years I'll have my pension.”
The old woman stared at her curiously, a queer smile tilting her wrinkled lips at an oblique angle. She scratched her ear and snorted through her nose, making a rather disagreeable sound. “You act like you're still married to God.”
Francine winced as though she had been soundly slapped. Mildred Antonelli grabbed Francine's wrist and held it firmly. “Sweet kid like