Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

by Anne Raeff

  Since my grandfather died a year ago, we have seen even less of my grandmother than before. I think the last time was in the summer. She came out to New Jersey during a heat wave, but my parents couldn’t convince her to stay overnight in our air-conditioned house even though the outside temperature was something like one-hundred-four degrees with ninety-eight percent humidity. She said she couldn’t stand the quiet whirring sound of the air conditioner and that it was good to sweat, that it gets all the toxins out.

  Passing the Museum of the American Indian gave me the idea to visit her. It was a good solution because I wasn’t about to spend all night wandering around the city like a teenage runaway, nor could I return home to my mother’s stink and my father’s anxiety and the quiet of cars passing by in the night.

  The door to her building was open as usual because the neighborhood kids are always breaking the lock. I climbed the stairs in the dark. Someone must have smashed all the light bulbs. I held onto the banister really tightly and tried out each step before putting my weight on it because lots of them are broken. My grandmother’s apartment is on the top floor, which makes it quieter, but it’s hard for her to carry her groceries up that many flights.

  I rang the doorbell over and over and no one answered. (You have to ring the bell a lot, and when you call, you have to let the phone ring at least ten times because sometimes it takes her a while to make it to the phone or door.) Every once in a while someone came up the stairs, and I would say hello and ask if they’d seen my grandmother recently, but no one had. “Not in a few days,” they said.

  After I had been waiting for almost an hour, Mr. Claromundo, her next-door neighbor, came home and said he hadn’t seen her in a while, either. Then he told me about how their downstairs neighbor, this guy Jimmy, stabbed his girlfriend about a week ago and how my grandmother had seen Jimmy with the knife and had called 911. He said he was worried that maybe this Jimmy had come back for her, although he said Jimmy was a really nice guy and he and my grandmother had always been friendly. Then he started going on about how he only had two more years until he retired from the United States Post Office. That’s what he kept saying—United States Post Office. When he retired, he told me, he was moving back to the Dominican Republic for good. “Up to here, I have it with this city,” he kept saying, holding his hand up over his head.

  When he got tired of talking about what he was going to do when he retired from the United States Post Office, he suggested I could easily get into my grandmother’s apartment if I climbed out his kitchen window and stretched my leg over to the ledge of my grandmother’s kitchen window. “Easy. No problem for a young person like you,” he said. So I agreed to have a look to see how easy it really was. Sure enough, it didn’t look like it would be too difficult, and my grandmother’s window was open just a crack because she was a big believer in fresh air even in the winter. All I would have to do was step from his ledge to hers, open the window a little wider, and slip in. The only problem was that she lives on the sixth floor. Mr. Claromundo then suggested I might find it easier if I had “just one little glass of rum” first. So we sat down in his living room and drank a glass of rum. Mr. Claromundo used to be a dentist in the Dominican Republic but never got his license here, so now he just does a little dentistry on the side. His living room operates as his dentist’s office, and it has a very old-fashioned dentist’s chair, a little sink, and a table with all the instruments on top of it, ready to go.

  “You want your teeth cleaned?” he asked. “I’ll do it for free since you’re Mrs. Mondschein’s granddaughter.”

  “No thanks, I just had them cleaned a month ago.”

  “Let me see,” he said, and before I could protest, he was looking into my mouth.

  “Looking good. Very nice teeth. Clean and straight.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You want more rum?” he asked.

  “No, thank you. I think I’d like to try the window now.”

  We both went into the kitchen and he opened up his window and said, “Be careful now.” Now that I think of it, I must have been completely out of my mind, especially after having the rum, but I did it without being too scared. I moved really fast so there was no time to think too much.

  My grandmother’s apartment looked just the way it always did—immaculately clean and orderly. Everything had its place—the kitchen towels were hanging from their little hooks, the old copies of the New York Times were in the box near the door, ready to go out when she accumulated enough. The glass doors into the living room and bedroom were locked as they always are whenever she leaves the house.

  Mr. Claromundo rapped on the apartment door. “Hey, do you see anything?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Aren’t you going to let me in?” he asked, and though I didn’t want to, I unlocked the door for him. I made him put out his cigarette before he came in. My grandmother would have had a fit if anyone ever smoked in her apartment My grandfather had been a smoker, but he quit years before I was born. The story is that he used to smoke four packs a day, and then one morning he woke up and decided it was stupid to smoke, so he quit. Never smoked a cigarette again in his life. Mr. Claromundo stamped out his butt on the floor right in front of my grandmother’s door, which is another thing that would drive her crazy, but I didn’t say anything. He was carrying the bottle of rum.

  Since the doors to the living room and bedroom were locked, we sat down at the kitchen table, which was covered with an old Pennsylvania Dutch-style oilcloth. I got two glasses and Mr. Claromundo poured us each a shot four fingers high. Under different circumstances some rum in a nice warm apartment in the middle of the winter would have been just the right thing. Mr. Claromundo smiled and made that aaahhh sound that people make after taking a nice big gulp of a strong drink. He leaned way back in his chair, getting himself nicely settled in, and told me that my grandmother was “a great lady.”

  I didn’t dislike Mr. Claromundo and knew he was happy to be having this spontaneous little get-together, but he was the kind of man who liked to talk and didn’t really care if you were listening or not. He told me all about how Dominicans don’t take care of their teeth and about how you could tell a Cuban from a Dominican by their teeth because no matter how poor a Cuban was, he always took care of his teeth. If I had been sitting with George Liddy, I would have asked him if that meant that Cubans were more vain than Dominicans, but I didn’t think Mr. Claromundo would find that question amusing.

  “What about Puerto Ricans?” I asked.

  “What about them?”

  “Do they take care of their teeth?”

  “Some do and some don’t” was his answer.

  “How about Colombians?” I asked.

  “Colombians?” But he had lost track of the conversation.

  Then, luckily for me, his cell phone rang. It must have been a date because he was really happy when he got off the phone, did a little jig-like dance and was out the door. “Don’t worry about your grandma,” he said as he was leaving. Until he said that I wasn’t worried about her, but after he left me alone, I realized it was almost midnight. As far as I knew, ever since my grandfather’s death, she never came home after dark unless my parents had taken to a concert or dinner, which didn’t happen very often. My mother made her promise never to come home after dark like she was some kind of kid, but she’s not a night person and has always gotten up really early and gone to bed really early. This promise was only made after my mother agreed to stop trying to get my grandmother to move into one of those retirement homes. Right after my grandfather died, my mother got it into her head that my grandmother would be better off in one of those places. My father tried to pretend that we were really driving around to look at the leaves, but you would have to be crazy to spend every Saturday for two months looking at leaves. One of those Saturdays I very nonchala
ntly said that I felt like staying home and practicing and my mother nearly had a fit about how this was a family issue and how we all had to be involved. When we found a place my mother liked, my mother would make my grandmother come with us the next Saturday to check it out, but she was just humoring my mother. There is no way my grandmother is ever going to leave her apartment.

  I turned on the radio and made myself a cup of tea. I didn’t even have a book with me, so I practiced writing down the notes for the music I was listening to, but I couldn’t concentrate because they had their music on really loud in the apartment below me, so loud I could feel the thumping in my thighs. I guess it’s good all my grandmother has to do to stop the noise is take out her hearing aid because I don’t know how she would be able to stand it otherwise. She only likes classical music. I was getting tired of sitting in the kitchen with nothing to do but was stuck since leaving so late would have been dangerous. The bass thumping got louder and louder. It was almost two a.m. Why doesn’t she call? I thought and then remembered that she had no idea I was sitting at her kitchen table drinking my sixth cup of tea with her little mint-green radio turned up in a futile effort to drown out the noise.

  I thought of calling my parents, telling them where I was, crying, making them drive all the way to New York to pick me up, but I didn’t want to worry them. Should I call the police? I rang Mr. Claromundo’s bell, hoping he might be back, but no one answered, and then I was relieved because Mr. Claromundo was not the person I wanted to talk to.

  The person I really wanted to talk to was halfway across the world in Ireland, probably lying in bed by himself, the ceiling spinning and rain pouring down outside his window. It would have been nice to sit in my grandmother’s overly heated kitchen with George Liddy. I think he would like her apartment, the sparseness of it and the old stove that you have to light with matches. He might have even agreed to a teeth-cleaning by Mr. Claromundo. I could just hear him say, “I certainly have been neglecting my teeth and don’t suppose a little cleaning would hurt, do you, Deborah?” And then we would ring Mr. Claromundo’s bell and he would come to the door in a silk robe, but he would be so happy to have a customer that he would leave whomever it was in his bedroom with the door closed and set to work on George Liddy’s teeth.

  I tried to sleep, putting my head down on the kitchen table like they make you do in elementary school, but I never slept then either. I wonder if anyone does. The music from downstairs pounded through the table and straight into my ears. I tried to block it out, tried hard to think of something else like running or riding my bicycle down Clinton Avenue really fast. I wish I weren’t such a light sleeper, but I can’t sleep if there is the slightest unusual noise like a dripping faucet or someone breathing softly. I need to work on that, practice falling asleep with lots of noise all around me because when you travel a lot, you have to be able to sleep no matter where you are or what is going on around you.

  If I really had the guts, I’d buy a plane ticket to Ireland and go to Limerick. Wouldn’t George Liddy be surprised to see me on his doorstep? Would he be glad to see me, or would he just start talking a blue streak? When we were together, I often had the feeling that he would have been just as happy or unhappy to talk with Pilar as with me because, let’s face it, he did most of the talking anyway. But deep down I knew that he really did like talking to me, that we were close. Well, maybe close isn’t the right word to use about George Liddy, but it was something close to close.

  When we parted, George Liddy told me that he was unable to write letters because they always sounded like bad prose poems to him. For that same reason, he never kept a diary even though he liked the idea of people reading all the sordid details of his life after he was dead. I wrote him a couple letters anyway, thinking he would break his habit and write back, but he didn’t. For all I know, he could be dead. I asked our health teacher Mr. Herr what the average life expectancy of an alcoholic was, and, without even thinking for a second, he said forty-three. (He’s the kind of person who has a statistic handy for every occasion. Ask him about teenage pregnancy in Norway and he’ll have an answer.) We were in the middle of discussing the high rate of diabetes among Native Americans. He had worked on a reservation in New Mexico or Arizona when he got out of college, so he was always trying to tie Native Americans into whatever it was he was teaching. I wonder what it is about New Mexico and Arizona that seems to attract my teachers. Actually, Mr. Herr was kind of obsessed with diabetes and we had already heard all about the problems Native Americans had with the disease, so I figured someone should change the subject, so I asked him about the life-expectancy of alcoholics.

  “Forty-three,” he said without blinking. “And what, may I ask, are you implying with that question?”

  “Implying?” I had no idea what he was talking about and was about to tell him that I had a friend in his sixties who was an alcoholic and I was worried he didn’t have much time left, but I didn’t want anyone to ask me about it afterwards. I could just picture him sending me to talk to the guidance counselor because a high school girl who has befriended an elderly alcoholic must certainly be off-kilter, to say the least, and might even be leaning towards suicide.

  “Yes, implying.” His voiced was raised now, almost to a screech. The class was quiet and he was staring at me.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to change the subject,” I said.

  “I’ll see you after class then,” he said, getting his composure back. He changed the subject too and started talking about self-love and how you can’t love anyone else unless you love yourself. Then he made us all stand up and put our arms around ourselves, reach back, and give ourselves big hugs like you do when you are trying to warm yourself up. “Tighter, tighter!” he shrieked at us and we all complied. Then he started doing it too, rubbing his hands up and down his shoulders and back. “Do that for at least ten minutes every day and your life will be filled with sunshine,” he said as we were leaving. I tried to slip out the door with everyone else, wondering how many kids in the class would actually go home and follow his advice. I could just see them holding themselves more and more tightly, feeling the self-love surging up inside them.

  “Where are you going, young lady?” He was calling me.

  “Oh, I forgot,” I said.

  “Forgot? Well, have a seat.” I sat down at one of the desks in the front row and he pulled up a desk and sat on it. Looking down at me from his perch, he said, “You know, not all Indians are alcoholics.” There were tears in his eyes.

  I didn’t know how to respond to his statement. All that came to mind was what George Liddy would say—“But the best of them are, I’m sure.” I said nothing.

  “Have you ever even met a Native American?” he asked.

  I hadn’t. It seemed ridiculous, but it was true. “No, actually I haven’t.”

  “So how can you pass judgment?”

  I tried to tell him that I had never really considered the drinking habits of Native Americans, that I had been thinking about a friend (I didn’t tell him he was Irish because that would have led to a whole other issue) when I asked the question, that I hadn’t really been paying attention in class and my question popped into my head, so I had asked it. I promised to think first before speaking in the future. I wanted to tell him that I knew so little about Native Americans that I didn’t even know they had the reputation of being alcoholics, but I kept my mouth shut.

  Then he started lecturing me about the hereditary nature of alcoholism and the next thing I knew I had been assigned a twenty-page research paper on the subject. He gave me the title: “Alcoholism, Genetic or Psychological?”

  “What if it’s both?” I asked, knowing that I would never write it.

  But our little session was over. He got up and started packing up his papers, putting them very neatly into a hand-tooled leather briefcase.

  I was starting to ge
t sleepy, but I didn’t want to fall asleep until I knew my grandmother was safe, so I started walking around the apartment. What would it be like living here with my grandmother, washing out my clothes in the bathtub, hanging my used paper towels to dry along the edge of the sink? We could get up early together and drink our coffees, looking out at the river. I could go down for the New York Times, save her the trouble. She would give me my mother’s old room, the room with the photo of all of us—the one with me on the donkey when I was two, my father on one side of me, my mother on the other. I asked her once whether it wasn’t time to put up something more recent and she said that’s how she thought of me, as a little girl on a donkey flanked by my parents. She said it made her feel I was safe. I don’t remember that day, though, or the donkey. In the room, on the same desk, next to the picture of me and my family, is a photo of my grandfather when he was young, before the war. His hair almost covers his eyes, longer on one side than the other. Even though it’s a black-and-white photo, you can tell his eyes are black. When he was really sick just before he died, his eyes shone like sea glass. When I was little, I always wanted to touch them and had the feeling they would be soft and smooth, not squooshy and wet like eyes really are. His hands were like that too, worn smooth like the wood on the banister in Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut.