It

from the living room — chimes that had always sounded to her like a Chinese name: Ching-Chong! Silence. No answer. She shifted on the porch from one foot to the other, suddenly needing to pee.
No one home, she thought, relieved. I can go now.
Instead she rang again: Ching-Chong! No answer. She thought of Ben’s lovely little poem and tried to remember exactly when and how he had confessed its authorship, and why, for a brief second, it called up an association with having her first menstrual period. Had she begun menstruating at eleven? Surely not, although her breasts had begun their first achy growth around mid –winter. Why . . . ? Then, intervening, a mental picture of thousands of grackles on phone lines and rooftops, all babbling at a white spring sky.
I’ll leave now. I’ve rung twice; that’s enough.
But she rang again.
Ching-Chong!
Now she heard someone approaching, and the sound was just as she had imagined: the tired whisper of old slippers. She looked around wildly and came very, very close to just taking to her heels. Could she make it down the cement walk and around the corner, leaving her father to think it had been nothing but kids playing pranks? Hey mister, you got PrinceAlbert in a can . . . ?
She let out a sudden sharp breath and had to tighten her throat because what wanted to come out was a laugh of relief. It wasn’t her father at all. Standing in the doorway and looking out at her was a tall woman in her late seventies. Her hair was long and gorgeous, mostly white but shot through with lodes of purest gold. Behind her rimless spectacles were eyes as blue as the water in the fjords her ancestors had perhaps hailed from. She wore a purple dress of watered silk. It was shabby but still dignified. Her wrinkled face was kind.
‘Yes, miss?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Beverly said. The urge to laugh had passed as swiftly as it had come. She noticed that the old woman wore a cameo at her throat. It was almost certainly real ivory, surrounded by a band of gold so thin it was nearly invisible. ‘I must have rung the wrong bell.’ Or rang the wrong bell on purpose, her mind whispered. ‘I meant to ring for Marsh.’
‘Marsh?’ Her forehead wrinkled delicately.
‘Yes, you see — ‘
‘There’s no Marsh here,’ the old woman said.
‘But — ‘
‘Unless . . . you don’t mean Alvin Marsh, do you?’
‘Yes!’ Beverly said. ‘My father!’
The old woman’s hand rose to the cameo and touched it. She peered more closely at Beverly, making her feel ridiculously young, as if she should perhaps have a box of Girl Scout cookies in her hands, or maybe some tags — support the Derry High School Tigers. Then the old woman smiled . . . a kind smile that was nonetheless sad.
‘Why you have fallen out of touch, miss. I don’t want to be the one who tells you this, a stranger, but your father has been dead these last five years.’
‘But . . . on the bell . . . ‘ She looked again and uttered a small, bewildered sound that was not quite a laugh. In her agitation, in her subconscious but rock-solid certainty that her old man would still be here, she had read KERSH as MARSH.
‘You’re Mrs Kersh?’ she asked. She was staggered by this news of her father, b ut she also felt stupid about the mistake — the lady would think her little more than illiterate.
‘Mrs Kersh,’ she agreed.
‘You . . . did you know my dad?’
‘Very little did I know him,’ Mrs Kersh said. She sounded a little like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, and Beverly felt like laughing again. When had her emotions gone whipsawing so violently back and forth? The truth was she couldn’t remember a time . . . but she was dismally afraid she would before much longer. ‘He rented the ground-floor apartment before
me. We saw each other, me coming and him going, over a space of a few days. He moved down to Reward Lane. Do you know it?’
‘Yes,’ Beverly said. Roward Lane branched off from Lower Main Street four blocks farther down, where the apartment buildings were smaller and even more desperately shabby.
‘I used to see him at the Costello Avenue Market sometimes,’ Mrs Kersh said, ‘and at the Washateria before they closed it. We passed a word from time to time. We — girl, you’re pale. I’m sorry. Come in and let me give you tea.’
‘No, I couldn’t,’ Beverly said weakly, but in fact she actually felt pale, like clouded glass that you could nearly look through. She could use tea, and a chair in which to sit and drink