Free The Altar Girl by Orest Stelmach Page A

next door in his former rental home. I’m not knowledgeable on the subject, but there was a ton of old and simple-looking stuff. Tables, cabinets, and chests. The utilitarian style of most of the pieces made me think it was early American. That made more sense than people might have guessed. Ukrainian immigrants owed their lives to America, and I could see my godfather specializing in its vintage furniture. I also remembered reading somewhere that prices had gone through the roof, and given my godfather had possessed a savvy eye, that also made sense.
    I didn’t see anything in either house that suggested my godfather had been anyone other than a retired antique dealer who didn’t like to part with his acquisitions, not even an old newspaper. After we finished looking through the second house, we returned to the main house to turn off the lights.
    “I knew you wouldn’t find anything,” Roxy said.
    “Give me a minute to go through his study one more time,” I said.
    Leather-bound books, Dutch-looking paintings, and old maps in equally ancient frames packed my godfather’s office. I had to walk sideways to get behind his desk. I sat down in a high-backed green leather chair. A banker’s lamp with ornate gold hardware occupied one corner. Across from it stood two pictures in elegant black lacquer frames with Asian lettering on the side. Roxy and her family posed in one picture. The other one was a photograph of my godfather and me when I was still a child.
    The sight of myself knocked the wind right out of me and brought memories flooding back. He was holding me over his head in the picture. I remembered my father screaming at him to put me down, and my brother snapping the picture with my father’s old box camera. To those who didn’t know me, my expression would have conveyed giddy joy. After all, what kid wouldn’t have enjoyed getting twirled around in the air? I wouldn’t have. To those who knew me, they would have spied the lie in my eyes and realized I was putting on the face that was expected of me, all the while praying I would wake up the next day an adult and on my own.
    But as Roxy said, my godfather meant well, and overhead twirling aside, his arrival had always been a welcome sight. My father and he were friends in Ukraine, and he was one of the few people with whom my father socialized. Once I got my job and moved to New York, I’d let our relationship drift. I hadn’t even sent him a Christmas card in as long as I could remember. I was always too busy. I never made the time to tell him that I appreciated his kindness and that he was an important person to me. Now I had all the time in the world, but he was gone. There was nothing I could do to bring him back, but perhaps I could find out exactly how and why he’d left this world.
    I forced myself to lift my eyes off the picture, and they fell upon another striking image hanging on the wall directly in front of me. It was a framed poster depicting two exhausted prisoners in gray uniforms wearing a yoke made out of an enormous block of lumber. One held a hammer in his hand, the other a sickle. A uniformed guard brandished a gun behind them, the Cyrillic version of USSR splattered on the concrete floor beneath their feet. The caption read This Was Soviet Freedom !
    The poster reminded me of the ordeal my godfather had doubtlessly suffered to escape the Nazis and the Soviets and start a new life in America. I didn’t know the details, but I was sure his early life had been harrowing, and now it appeared his end had been the same. He deserved better.
    Roxy’s voice carried from the kitchen. “You find anything in there?”
    “No,” I said, and began opening the drawers to his desk.
    “I told you there was nothing there. You almost done? I’m going to call home and tell my kids I’m on the way.”
    “Yup.”
    The drawers contained the usual office supplies, a slide rule and a calculator, a flashlight and three vintage copies of Playboy that