The Narrow Gate

Chapter 3

Elise

Elise hadn’t intended to wander down to her old childhood home in Turntable. But by mid-morning, Nova had not returned her calls, and Noelle was driving her crazy with her drinking and her insinuations that the family still blamed Elise after all these years. Time had passed. Things were back to normal in McDonald. And Elise believed that would be proven at her father’s funeral. So she’d headed out, walking the familiar streets, and ended up here, at their old house on the tiny strip of company homes once inhabited by miners and railroad workers.

Now she stood on the sidewalk in front of four tired-looking tenement houses, struggling against memories good and bad, that she’d put behind her long ago. The click of a door latch and the squeak of a pair of old hinges startled Elise, and she looked up to the porch of the home she’d once shared with Noelle.

“Watcha doin’?” The boy who stood half in and half out of the door looked about ten, with smudged clothing and unkempt red hair. After eyeing her for a few seconds, he stepped outside. The door, its screens loosened in the corners, banged behind him as he shuffled his bare feet across the porch, green eyes surveying her cautiously.

“I used to live here. A long time ago,” Elise answered.

“Didja like it?”

“Sometimes.”

“No you didn’t.” He sighed as if disappointed that once again Elise, like other grown-ups, had lied to him.

“You’re right. I didn’t. Jeetyet?” Elise smiled, surprised at how good it felt to let the Pittsburgh way of speaking roll so easily off her tongue. She’d worked hard to sound like a native New Yorker for years.

“No. I’m hungry.” He looked tired and scrawny. He was bringing back some bad memories.

“Where’s your mum?” Elise asked. “You have any food in there?”

He just shrugged his thin shoulders, indicating with a small shift of his head that there was no food.

“I’m going to go get us some burgers, and I’ll be back soon.”

He stared at Elise, hope and disbelief rolling over his tiny face.

“What’s your name? How old are you?”

“Winston… My mum named me after a pack of cigarettes. Just call me Bub. Everyone does. I’m nine.” Winston-Bub gave her a tentative smile.

He seemed small for his age, undernourished. Elise knew he’d lived a thousand lives and a hundred sorrows in his short years. She looked across the park at the houses on Lincoln Street. Same view she’d had as a kid. Same big Delcroix home where she belonged and yet did not belong. How would it be the day after tomorrow when she had to see all of them again? Should she test the waters today? Elise turned back to the boy.

“Thirty minutes, Winston. I’d rather call you Winston. Time me. I’ll be right back.”

She headed to Main Street and ducked into a small diner there, ordering two burgers with fries and two chocolate milkshakes to go. Elise knew any normal person would call social services right now. They’d wonder who would leave a nine-year-old home alone with no food and the door unlocked. But she knew Noelle and any mother like her would do it. And she knew social services wouldn’t really help much anyway. Besides, in spite of it all, he probably loved his mother. Just like Elise loved hers. He would grow to resent her, unable to show her love, but deep down, he would always wait for her to come home and make his world stable and right. Just like waiting for a Christmas that never comes. The burger would be no more than a band-aid from a stranger, but Elise had had plenty of those in her time, mainly from Ralphie Scruggs, her neighbor and only friend in those days, and his mother. And she’d had the Delcroixes just across the way, up to their ears in food and money and judgments—dispersed randomly but more often than love, in her opinion.

All except Grandpa Jules. He’d loved Elise unconditionally. He’d filled the void. She could still feel the pain of his passing, still feel their eyes on her, their silent judgment that the stress of what they felt she’d done had caused his heart attack. She’d told them then that it was the stress of their accusations against her, the stress of standing up for her all those years against their disapproval, that had been too much for him.

Elise knew she’d said a lot of unkind things to her family back then. And they’d returned the volley. But over the years since she’d left, she had heard from some of the Delcroixes now and then. Uncle Zach, Aunt Sylvie, even Grandma Eugenie, although she’d ripped up both of her grandmother’s letters. Mainly, she’d heard from her half-sister, Nova. Nova had even come to see her a few times.

“It only took you twenty minutes. Did they cook ’em?” Winston was waiting on the porch steps, anxious.

“Yes, Mr. Connoisseur, they cooked them.”

“What does that mean?” He hunched his shoulders defensively. He scrunched his eyebrows when he asked questions, and there was something so familiar about him. Nothing exact, and yet, he reminded Elise of someone.

“It means you’re a burger expert,” she said. “Want to eat inside?”

He shrugged and opened the door. Elise looked around. It was as dilapidated as it had been when she was a child. Two empty gin bottles sat on the coffee table. Newspapers were strewn about the kitchen table and floor. It needed more than a good cleaning. It needed an overhaul.

“Let’s grab these two kitchen chairs and sit on the porch and eat.”

Winston looked relieved. Maybe the gin-sucking mother had given enough thought to tell him not to let strangers in or even not to take food from them. But hunger overshadowed the rules. Hunger overshadows everything, whether it is for food or love or recognition. No one knew that better than Elise.

She let him eat for a while. She was surprised that she was so hungry and even more surprised she could slide back onto this dirty front porch as if she were a snake slithering back into old skin, long discarded, and finding it, if not comfortable, then an easy fit.

“When’d you live ’ere?” Winston was giving her that suspicious look again.

“You’re thinking I don’t look like someone who lived in Turntable, right?”

“Right.” He slugged down some of his milkshake and let out a little burp.

“Look at me and know you can get out.”

“How’dja do it?”

“A little luck. My father’s family had money. And a lot of hard work.”

“Do you live in one a those houses now?” He was pointing right to her grandmother’s house.

“No, I live on Long Island…in New York. But Jules Delcroix was my grandfather, and one day he came to this house to get me and took me to live over there. Part-time at first, then full-time.”

“I wish someone’d come ’n get me.”

“Where’s your dad? Your grandparents?”

Elise remembered the day Grandpa Jules had taken the morning off from his business—unheard of, she would realize later—and walked the short distance from West Lincoln Street to Turntable, where the houses sat on the other side of a lush, green park, directly across from the Delcroix home, just past the railroad tracks. Jules had come to face Noelle and try to take Elise home with him. It was only the second time he’d been to Turntable that Elise could remember. The first was when he came to tell Noelle that Elise’s father, Emil, had enlisted and gone off to Vietnam to fight in the war. Usually when Grandpa Jules wanted to see her, he sent Grandma Eugenie, Aunt Julia, or Aunt Philly. Elise was still too small then to walk over and cross the street on her own. Like Winston, she’d had some rules amidst the chaos. That day, Elise had watched Grandpa Jules from this very porch as he crossed the tiny, rickety bridge that passed over a thin, trickling creek in the park and surveyed the small string of rundown homes that included the end unit Noelle was renting. In the days when a railroad ran from Pittsburgh out through McDonald and on to Burgettstown and beyond, Turntable received its name from the town folk because the great, coal-burning engines had used its special tracks to turn around and head back in the other direction if needed. The houses were not dirty or badly built, just plain, poor, and beneath Jules’s standards for Elise. He’d offered Noelle several rooms in his home, but she’d insisted on living in Turntable, renting the rundown house from a landlord who did little to improve it. Noelle often told Elise that her grandmother didn’t really want either of them in the Delcroix home. Elise wondered now how Grandma Eugenie would feel when they saw each other for the first time in so many years.

“My dad just got outta jail.” Winston’s little-boy voice broke in, stopping Elise’s mind from wandering. “My grandma says I’m the penance for his sin.”

“Hmmmm… Do you know what that means?”

“No, not really. I think it means she doesn’t like me much.”

“My grandmother never liked me much either.” Elise patted his little shoulder. He had eaten a bit too quickly, and he was burping now and then.

“What’s your...