For years, the Bronx meant only one thing to Nancy Joyce. It was the ultimate killer place to use in the game Geography, until her older brother Peter discovered there was a place called Xochihuehuetian, Mexico.
Her view of the borough changed when she moved there. What she discovered was that the past, the present, and the future all coexisted in the Bronx.
The past were the remnants of the thousands of families that had settled here in the first two decades of the twentieth century. That was when New York City ’s northernmost borough offered spacious apartments with central heating, refrigerators, and private bathrooms-amenities that were undreamed of in the older, more crowded Manhattan.
The present were the families that had moved here in the years following World War II, when affordable public housing went up and the exclusive nature of the borough ended.
The future were the families that had come to the Bronx, lured by fire-sale prices and a near-evangelistic desire to rejuvenate neighborhoods that had surrendered to drugs and crime and the homeless.
Twenty-nine-year-old zoologist Dr. Nancy Joyce was part of the past. The things that were real but foggy, just out of reach. Two years before, when she had been hired by the Bronx Zoo and became what her coworkers and school groups affectionately called “the bat lady,” she had moved into the three-bedroom Bronx apartment that belonged to her eighty-seven-year-old widowed grandmother. Nancy Joyce and her brother had spent very little time here as kids. They grew up in rural Connecticut, and more often than not Dad drove down to get Grandma Joycewicz and bring her up to the country.
When Joyce came to the Bronx after obtaining her Ph.D., the apartment was a revelation. The walls of the living room and dining room were almost entirely covered with browning, frame-to-frame photographs. They were a shrine to a lost world. Her grandmother’s family, the Cherkassovs, had been Russian aristocrats-starched men and formal women who stood or sat in studios, in salons, and on porticos of beach homes or country cottages. Her grandfather’s family had been Polish laborers, and the pictures of them showed rumpled, tousle-haired men and women holding scythes or working oxen in the fields. The Cherkassovs fled after the Russian Revolution, and they ended up sleeping in woods and fields where they were found one sunrise by Joseph Joycewicz. He took one of the refugees as his wife, and they sailed for America.
Even if she hadn’t heard that story when she was growing up, Nancy Joyce would have been able to read it in this picture diary, its fragile pages lovingly preserved behind glass.
There were also some newer pictures. Her father and his older sister as children. Joseph up in Westchester hunting with his son. The family at Coney Island and Atlantic City and on Forty-second Street taking in a double feature. Probably a Western, which her grandfather was said to have loved. He believed that westerns were accurate depictions of history. Just like the black-and-white photographs on the wall.
It wasn’t just the photographs that had a story to tell. There was the porcelain statue of the Greek hunter Orion holding a dead stag. The arrow had been broken off by her father, who had tried to pull it out and fire it from a homemade bow when he was three years old. There was the sofa that her grandfather had gone to lie on at night when the pain of the cancer that consumed him kept him awake. He went there to read the Polish novels he loved or to cry because he would be leaving his Anya far, far earlier than either was prepared for. He was forty-nine when he finally succumbed. There was the worn and faded rug that Joseph had bought Anya for their tenth wedding anniversary. The tattered seat cushion on the rocking chair, from the first cab that Joseph had driven. The radio that her father and his older sister had grown up listening to. Their schoolbooks on the shelf. The rifle with which Joseph had taught his son how to hunt. The old Victrola and the elderly woman’s large collection of 78s.
When Grandma Joycewicz died, her granddaughter kept the apartment but refused to change very much in it. She put cable TV and a VCR in the living room and added a CD player and small speakers. She also replaced the old black rotary phone on the nightstand with a cordless. And she put in an extra phone jack so she could go on-line with her laptop. Joyce had never found it strange to be on-line in “this old place,” as her grandmother used to call it. An on/off switch let the present in and then sent it back out again. The apartment remained a comforting retreat.
Her handful of semiclose friends thought Joyce was being trendily retro. It didn’t matter. The place had an air of the melancholy that suited her fascination with things dark and haunting. “This old place” was a reminder of a time when lives that had been upheaved by chaos were set right by love. A time where the pace was slower but hopes were much, much higher. A time when each day was precious because twentieth-century medicine was still in its adolescence.
On her days off, like today, the young woman thoroughly enjoyed staying at home and catching up on current research and reports about bats, answering E-mail from former classmates and other scientists, and then relaxing by reading trashy novels, planning hunting trips, or talking on the phone with her mother or her sister-in-law, Janet.
For reasons she couldn’t quite pinpoint, those calls always left her feeling as if she’d done something wrong.
Both her mom and Janet worried about her living alone and also-more so, she suspected-about herbeing alone. No husband. No boyfriend. No prospects of one. As Joyce had told them both many times, it wasn’t that she was uninterested in meeting men. It was that she was uninterested in seeing most of the men she did meet. Except for a couple of five- and six-year-old gentlemen she’d caught smiling at her from school groups, most of them were aggressive and charmless.
Joyce had been in an unusual relationship during school, followed by years of fieldwork abroad, so she’d missed the “window” of the early twenties that both her mother and sister-in-law had caught. And then she’d been with Christopher, who had heard her give a talk at the zoo. That relationship went from chummy to kinky-it was the only way he could stay interested-and made her question the entire concept of trust. Today, the men who asked her out were either single men in their late twenties or early thirties who were interested in relationships that lasted until the next prospect came along; divorced men who were like concrete, poured and set in bizarre ways; or married men who were interested only in sucking up some passion before going home to familiarity and comfort. None of which was for her. She’d rather stay home or go to a movie or work late. Occasionally she’d have dinner with her mentor, Professor Kane Lowery. She had always been alone, and she functioned just fine that way. Not that she felt her mother or Janet believed her. Joyce could imagine the conversations the two women had with each other.
The telephone rang while Joyce was heating some lentil soup and reading about computer simulations that proved that bats, like dogs, see in very sharp black and white. The caller was Kathy Leung, a TV reporter who covered the Westchester County beat. There had been a large-scale bat attack at a small-town park an hour north of the city. It had sent two people to the hospital in very serious condition. Kathy had gotten Dr. Joyce’s number from the zoo and was calling from the broadcast truck. If they swung by, would she be interested in coming up to provide some professional commentary from the site?
Not really, Joyce admitted, but that’s what she’d do if it were her ticket to the scene of the attack. Kathy said they’d be there in ten minutes. Turning off the burner and covering the soup pot, Dr. Joyce was out the door and on the curb as the van pulled up.