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GLIMPSE OF THE PAST

story by

Patrick Breheny

She was in Los Angeles, and knew no one was in that Bronx apartment. Her Aunt Tricia lived around the corner with her mother because that was a ground floor apartment, and Aunt Trish could no longer handle the stairs to the fifth floor at her own place, though of insecurity she kept paying the rent on it every month. Dianne had stayed there that last time she was in New York on business because, with Trish, there was no room in her mother’s apartment.

She knew ‘Definitely no one there’, and yet had the compulsion to call the number. She struggled against the urge. It was ridiculous. Why call to a phone nobody would answer? Yet the beckoning was persistent, like a craving for an ice cream you just have to have, the fulfillment of boding no terrible imminent consequences. She wouldn’t even have to pay for the call. What harm was there in doing it?

When she heard the old black rotary phone ringing, she was back in that apartment. It was depressing in only the way something can be that holds remnants of life. The bulb wattage was low, or seemed so, because even if not, light could only shine on what was. The milk coffee tan brown carpet was worn down into the runner that was blue grey. The faded beige paint on the walls was darkened by time.There was a black and white TV on a stand, snowy with wiggly horizontal diagrams when turned on. Her aunt’s large wedding picture in a gilded frame hung on a living room wall--- her near octogenarian aunt at 25 with Uncle Danny, long deceased. Another picture, a high school graduation photo of her first cousin Gene, younger than she and also deceased, sat on an end table beside the ancient but not antique sofa, his picture smaller and also in an ornate frame behind dusty glass. She had wiped the dust off with her sweater sleeve and held that portrait a long time. She'd wanted to bring it down to her mother's, but had to ask Trish first. Trish had said no, somehow still believed she had a home she was going back to.

Her brothers, her sister, cousins and a super looked out for the elderly sisters, and they’d managed some savings. Dianne was in New York every couple of months and stayed a week when she could, so it wasn’t that she felt they were abandoned.

Oppressed by loneliness and grief from family ghosts, as Aunt Trish must also have been, Dianne only used the apartment to sleep and shower in, after spending the evening at her mother’s. As she was locking the door for the last time that trip, the door to the next apartment opened, and a portly middle aged man appeared. His to- the- point greeting was, “She leaves the gas on.”

He’d have thought Aunt Tricia was Diane’s mother, but why explain? She was obviously connected. She simply said, “No more,” confident with that assertion. During a previous New York trip, she had walked Trish home one night, up the ceramic cavern of Bronx apartment building stairs that amplified their voices, heels and Trish’s gasping. She could see then that her aunt could not be climbing that fifth floor mountain much longer.

Going back to the Bronx after decades in Los Angeles, she always felt like a stranger in the place she came from. Paul, from Ireland, went with her one trip, and they stopped in a neighborhood bar. He ordered an Irish coffee for himself and a margarita for her, an ordinary enough selection in Los Angeles. The bartender said, “You have to break my chops?” There are working class people in L.A. The Bronx is working class. The order was pretentious. An Italian restaurant didn't serve cappucino, though as a challenge to pride, they did. (The bar couldn't be ethnically coerced that way. They had the Jameson's, but it wasn't a combined eatery, there was no coffee pot on premise) In the internet/ now, maybe cappucinos on menus, margaritas, Irish coffees. They're in Asia now, but not then in the Bronx.

Why had she wanted so much to make that call, to go back to a room where she’d been miserable and disconsolate and couldn’t spend a second more than necessary? And why, with so many more decades gone, more distance and cultures between, would she want to revisit?