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

you deserves better.” Her tone was strangely pleasant, confidential - like two girl friends having an intimate heart-to-heart. She didn't volunteer an explanation of the previous remark and Francine, still flustered and taken aback, never asked.


In the morning as she was leaving for work, Francine spotted Igor in the lobby next to a short, good looking man in his early thirties. The father had the same broad features and walnut-colored eyes. A blizzard of curly brown hair fell down below his collar in the back. When she approached, the child reached out and took Francine by the hand. The man quickly separated them. “So sorry,” he said with a thick, guttural accent and hurried the baffled boy away.
“Babushka!” Igor shouted hoarsely just before the heavy, oak door slammed shut behind her.

One Saturday in May, Francine was returning home with a bag of groceries. Three blocks from the building, she saw the Russian crossing toward her from the other side of the street. If the Russians in 3B were poor and the slutty mother ran off with an Israeli soldier, it was not Francine’s problem. She might feel sympathy - even say a few prayers - but their misfortune lay safely outside the scrupulously narrow margins of her life.
“For you I carry.” He relieved her of the bag. “I gipt you back apartment.”
Francine worked out a rough translation in her head and decided not to argue the point. “That’s very nice. Where's your son?”
“Igor wit Mrs. Antonelli. Goot woman. Very goot woman!” When they reached the apartment, he placed the bag on the kitchen table. “I say goodbye now.”
“Yes, goodbye and thank you.” He smiled and disappeared into the hallway.
Later that evening, Francine went to the Russian's apartment. The man fetched his son and followed her back downstairs. She dragged a 19-inch Sony Trinitron out of the closet. “Mrs. Antonelli tells me that you don't have a television, and it just so happens I have this nice set that no one ever uses.”
The Russian gawked at her with a muddled expression. “What means just so happens?”
“That's just an expression, an idiom. It doesn't mean anything.” She saw that the man was even more confused. “Do you have a television?”
“No television.”
“Then you take this one.”
“What for I take?”
Francine began gesticulating crudely, an impromptu, Cyrillic sign language. “For the boy.”
Only now, the Russian understood that Francine was literally giving him the television. “Why you gipt me?”
“I don't need it.”
Noticing the empty TV stand in the corner of the living room, he replied, “You have nice TV but keep in closet.” He wiped a thick glob of dust off the top of the Sony. “How long in closet you keep?”
“Two years.” Francine picked up the TV stand, carried it out the door in the direction of the stairs. Igor and his father, clutching the bulky set, trailed behind.
The only furniture in the living room of the Russian's apartment was a bean bag chair. Mrs. Antonelli came over with a roll of paper towels and bottle of Windex to supervise the cosmetic restoration. Plugged in, the reception was every bit as sharp as the day it arrived in Francine's apartment. “I am Vladimir.” The Russian extended his hand. “Is new television, no?”
“It hasn't been used very much.”
“I carry groceries and you gipt new television. Is very confusing.”
Francine shook her head violently from side to side. “No, this has nothing to do with the groceries.”
“Welcome to America,” Mrs. Antonelli quipped.
He turned to the old woman. “Is hard to understand American way.”
Francine nodded and backed slowly toward the door. “Every culture has its subtle nuances.”


The Sony Trinitron was a birthday present from Francine’s brother, Mickey. The following week, he was arrested for possession of stolen property - fourteen, large-screen televisions. All Sonys.
Francine was crushed. Mickey was no better than any of the scurrilous characters running around Federal Hill with their ‘hot’ goods - the gold jewelry and designer jeans that conveniently fell off the back of an eighteen wheeler. There were the house parties - usually at some ratty Charles Street walk up that smelled of stale beer and oregano - where people picked over a living room full of designer clothing, the manufacturer’s labels still in tact. Not that Francine was ever invited; she heard about them from friends and relatives. No one would ever think to invite Francine, the ex-nun.
“Lay down with dogs get up with fleas.” That’s what Francine used to tell Mickey when he went off to gamble and do whatever tough guys did at the clubs on Federal Hill. The morning after Mickey’s arrest, Francine called the local parish and made an appointment to meet with the priest. “What is this in regards to?” the secretary asked.
“A personal matter that requires spiritual attention.”
Later in the week she sat opposite Rather Rinaldi in the church Rectory. The faint scent of incense permeated the wood-paneled room; a huge, leather-bound volume, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, sat on the edge of the desk. “Father, I’d like to ask a hypothetical question.”
Father Rinaldi frowned. “We don’t live in a hypothetical world,” he returned in a slightly petulant tone, “but I’ll try to help you as best I can.”
“If a person received a gift and had reason to believe that the item might be stolen ...” Francine didn’t quite know where to go with her thoughts and left the sentence dangling in midair.
The priest sat in a straight backed chair with his hands folded in his lap. A young man with dark-framed glasses and an over serious manner, he pursed his lips and squinted at a point directly over Francine’s head where the far wall and ceiling converged. “Two questions,” Father Rinaldi responded after a brief silence. “What is the nature of the gift?”
“A television.”
“What type?” he pressed.
“Is that important?” The priest only lowered his eyes and examined the back of his hands to indicate the answer was non-negotiable. “A 19-inch Sony Trinitron.”
Father Rinaldi blinked violently. “That certainly is a nice gift, hypothetical or otherwise.” He rose and, with his hands clasped behind his back, began to pace back and forth in front of Francine’s chair.
“The word ‘might’ is a bit vague. Either the expensive TV was or was not stolen.” Now he set his clear brown eyes directly on Francine, skewering her with his piercing gaze like an etymologist's bug on a pin. “Was the TV stolen?” The priest resumed his pacing, but now, instead of moving laterally, he was circling the chair. “Your answer makes all the difference in the world.”
Francine hadn’t anticipated Father Rinaldi’s persistence and was beginning to feel like someone enmeshed in an unseemly act, a crime with spiritual and ethical dimensions. The only thing missing was the 40-watt bulb dangling from an overhead electrical cord. “But you see, Father, I don’t know.”
“There’s no way you can find out?”
“No, not really.” The priest momentarily passed in his perambulations. “I strongly doubt the party concerned will tell me the truth.”
“Then it’s a moot point,” Father Rinaldi said and stopped dead in his tracks. “You can use your hypothetical 19-inch Sony Trinitron without shame or personal guilt.” “In the event the set goes on the blink,” he added as an afterthought, “I wouldn’t advise taking it to a reputable dealer for repairs.”
“No, that wouldn't be wise.”
On the way out, Francine asked about the leather-bound book. The priest put a hand on Francine’s shoulder and smiled wistfully. “A Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides was a 12th-century Spanish Rabbi. He believed that only by becoming a slave to the a priori laws of God could a soul free himself from the temporal world.” Removing his hand from her shoulder, he pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his slender nose. “An intriguing thought, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes, it certainly is!” Francine thanked Father Rinaldi and left.


When Francine got home she went directly into the living room and sat down on the ottoman in front of the television. In truth, nothing had changed. She felt no special attachment to the Sony. It was a box filled with elaborate gadgetry and computer chips. Francine, who viewed so little TV, resolved to watch even less, a voluntary abstention like giving up meat during Holy Week.
The a priori laws of God. Most of the people Francine knew viewed the law as a rubber band that could be stretched many times its normal length. When the band broke, you copped a plea or, in the worse case scenario, went to jail. Only imbeciles and honest people (really one and the same) never stretched the band to see how far it would take them. Those Federal Hill types weren’t ‘perplexed by the law. They understood the law - judicial not ecclesiastical - with a broadness and clarity that would have put Maimonides to shame!

A week passed. One night, unable to sleep, Francine got out of bed and wandered into the living room. The Sony Trinitron rested on a walnut stand. She turned the television to face the wall. “There, that’s better.” She hesitated. Something else was needed. Dragging the bulky object to the opposite side of the apartment, she buried the Sony Trinitron in the hall closet under a two-foot stack of brown grocery bags.
Francine drank a cup of warm milk. She read an article in the most recent issue of the Catholic Digest about a Labrador retriever that saved the life of a little boy with a crippled leg. When the milk was finished, she put the cup in the kitchen sink, turned out the lights and went to bed. From the minute her head hit the pillow, Francine was engulfed in an utterly peaceful and restorative sleep. A blessed slumber.


In the evenings sometimes Francine went upstairs to sit with Mrs. Antonelli until the child was settled in for the night. She brought an Arthur, the Aardvark coloring book and crayons. “I saw Vladimir in the market earlier,” Francine said. “The man looked a wreck. Hardly spoke two words.”
Mrs. Antonelli, smelling faintly of Ben Gay, was putting the crayons away. “He got legal papers in the mail yesterday from his wife. She's divorcing him.”
“What grounds?”
“Desertion,” The old woman replied.
“But she ran off with an Israeli soldier.”
“Since Vladimir took the child out of the country, she's claiming he abandoned her.”
“What about Igor?”
“She doesn't care about the child. Just wants a quickie divorce so she can remarry.” From the other room came a light, musical laugh. “Someone's having pleasant dreams,” Mrs. Antonelli observed.

The following week, Vladimir was standing on the front steps of the apartment as Francine was leaving for work. His clothes were dirty and chin streaked with grease. “I am heppy man!”
“And why is that?” Francine asked.
Reaching into the pocket of his blue coveralls, he withdrew a 6-inch, rusty spring. The spring had a tight coil near the center with hooks on either end. Cupping the corroded metal in the palm of his hand, he pushed it under Francine's nose. “Is spring from rear brake shoe 99 Chevrolet. Lest night is slow to work. Boss teach me how change shoe.”
“Mechanics make good money,” Francine confirmed. “My brother, Mickey, is a mechanic.” Almost immediately, she regretted using her brother as a role model.
“Yes, today I heppy man!” He bounded up the stairs two at a time and disappeared into the building.
Vladimir's irreverent approach to the English language mystified Francine. He eliminated every bit of extraneous - and, often, essential - verbiage. Adjectives and adverbs he threw out wholesale; prepositions, connectors, participles and pronouns were intolerable