The Stranger Behind You

by Carol Goodman

  My grandmother looks down into her hand and gasps. She cradles the drop of gold as if it were a fledgling bird and touches two fingers to its worn surface. She looks up at me, her eyes bright and shining. “My locket—it kept Lily safe?”

  “Yes,” I tell her, “it did.”

  Epilogue

  MY GRANDMOTHER DIED two days later in her sleep, holding the locket her best friend had given her and she’d given back over seven decades ago. When we found her in the morning she looked more peaceful than she ever had in life. My mother burst into tears.

  “I thought I was ready!” she wailed.

  I knew exactly what she meant.

  I stayed for three weeks, helping with the funeral arrangements. My grandfather Joseph was buried in the old family cemetery beside the apple orchard, but the ground was frozen, so we couldn’t bury her yet, and my mother didn’t like the idea of her body lying in cold storage until spring, so we had her cremated.

  When my publisher paid me for the delivery and acceptance of my book I gave my mother half the money to fix up the old farmhouse. “Unless you want to sell it and take a trip,” I suggested.

  “Not yet,” she told me, “but why don’t we use some of it to take a trip together this summer. I’ve been thinking I’d like to go to Ireland to look up our ancestors.”

  I said I’d love to go. I could do some research for the book on Magdalen laundries I was planning to write next. I spent the rest of the winter “researching” with Enda over pints at the Black Rose, listening to him singing Irish songs (he played with a band called the Fighting McGlynns) and songs he had written based on his aunt’s letters about the laundries.

  In the spring we held a memorial service for my grandmother. I rode up on the train with Enda, AJ, Hector, and Melissa. Melissa carried a heavy package on her lap that she refused help with.

  “You have no idea the bureaucratic nightmare I had getting hold of this,” she told us all. “I’m not letting go.”

  It contained the cremated remains of the two bodies found below the Refuge.

  “How did you do it?” I asked. “Did you steal them the way you stole my locket?” I touched the locket at my throat. My mother had given it to me after my grandmother died. I was debating whether to bury it with her in the apple orchard.

  “You’re lucky I grabbed that when I did! If I’d let the forensics team have it, you’d never have gotten it in time to show your grandmother. But for this”—she looks down at the box—“I had to do some digging. No pun intended.”

  Melissa had arranged for a car to pick us up at the station to spare my mother the trouble. When we arrived at the house I was surprised to see the driveway and roadsides full of cars. I hadn’t thought of my grandmother as having many friends, but it was a tight-knit community and my mother had taught at the local high school for thirty years. There were teacher friends and former students and neighbors filling the house and the porch and spilling out into the apple orchard. We’d gotten lucky with the weather. It was a mild day and the apple trees had just begun to bloom. I thought about what Lillian—my Lillian—had said about the apple orchard being the peaceful place she liked to imagine herself in. I was glad that her ashes would lie here, beside her friend.

  As soon as we arrived my mother announced it was time to walk to the cemetery. She waved me over and deputized me to escort an elderly man with a cane. A younger man—his grandson I guessed from their similar builds—said if I walked on his granddad’s right side he’d take his left.

  “And I’ll be in Scotland before ye,” the old man joked in an amiable voice that had a trace of a Brooklyn accent.

  “It’s not so far as that,” I reassured him. “Just to the cemetery on the ridge.”

  The old man grunted and I saw that he needed to save his breath for the walk, so I chatted with the grandson, whose name was Will, asking how far had they come (from Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, where the grandfather lived), where he lived (Philadelphia), and what he did for a living (history professor at Drexel). He told me he’d read my recent article in The New Yorker about the traumatic impact on survivors of sexual assault. It was a congenial conversation but I was a little sorry not to have the quiet to think about my grandmother on this, her farewell procession. Maybe I’d never have enough time for that. Finding out about my grandmother’s turbulent youth had made me understand her better. She had all the symptoms of PTSD—anxiety, claustrophobia, and panic attacks. I could understand how she struggled for the rest of her life to find some elusive sense of safety and why she worked so hard to keep my mother—and then me—safe. I could even understand how in rebelling against her chronic anxiety and the way it had narrowed my mother’s life, I had become reckless in my own life and made some bad choices. I could understand, but I still felt torn in two when I thought about my grandmother, unable to find any resting place in my own heart for her.

  When we get to the little cemetery on the edge of the apple orchard, just below the ridge, I suggest to Will that we sit his grandfather down on the stone wall, but the old man says he’ll stand “to show my respect.”

  So we stand, the old man leaning heavily on my arm, as the Unitarian minister says a few words and my grandmother’s and Lillian’s and Frank’s ashes are poured into a trench dug in between the roots of an old apple tree. I can feel the old man trembling and I realize he’s weeping.

  “How did you know her?” I ask as I help him to the overlook for the last part of the ceremony.

  “She was my sister,” he says in a choked voice.

  “Your sister?” I repeat, thinking he must be confused. “My grandmother May didn’t have a brother.”

  “Not May,” Will corrects. “My grandfather is Lily Anne O’Day’s brother. Your friend Melissa tracked us down on Ancestry.com by posting DNA from my great-aunt’s remains.”

  “She was my sister,” the old man repeats as we walk to the edge of the ridge. My mother has a bag that she offers to the old man. He takes it, and when my mother pours out the remaining ashes of my grandmother he gives his bag a surprisingly vigorous shake and releases a cloud of gray dust. It’s caught by the wind and eddies up, merging with the ashes of my grandmother and then floating down to the river below.

  Some of her will stay in the orchard, where she felt safe, my mother told me a few days ago to explain the proceedings, and some will go to the river, to be free.

  My mother turns to the old man. “Thank you, Tom. Lillian and Rose would both be glad you were here.”

  “Tom?” I repeat. “You’re . . .” I undo the locket from my neck and hold it out to the old man. My hands are shaking too much to open it, but his grandson is able to. Inside is a picture of a pretty smiling girl, hair braided on the crown of her head, her arms around a young boy.

  “That’s me!” Tom says, pointing at the boy. “And that’s my sister Lily . . .”

  His voice cracks. He looks up at me with sharp gray-green eyes that nail my heart to my spine. “She saved me,” he says.

  I see Lillian standing on the roof, red sneakers perched on the edge, her face tilted up to catch the light, breathing the open air at last. Free.

  “Yes,” I tell Tom. “She saved me too.”

  Acknowledgments

  I’D LIKE TO THANK Kate Nintzel, Liz Stein, Vedika Khanna, Camille Collins, Andie Schoenfeld, and everybody at William Morrow for their work on this book through difficult times. Thank you, too, to my wonderful agent, Robin Rue, and to Beth Miller of Writers House for holding things together during these fraught days.

  I’m indebted to all my early readers: Nathaniel Bellows, Connie Crawford, Gary Feinberg, Lauren Lipton, Wendy Gold Rossi, Scott Silverman, Lee Slonimsky, Nora Slonimsky, and most especially to my trio of Golden Girls, Ethel Wesdorp, Nancy Johnson, and Jan Zlotnick Schmidt for their encouragement and warm support.

  I’d also like to thank my cousins Benjamin McGuckin and Lisa Tumbleson McGuckin for their gathering of the McGuckin-McGlynn clan and their research into family his
tory, which filled in the gaps in my mother’s—and Lillian’s—history.

  Finally, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Steve Dunn for welcoming me to the Norton Island Residency in the summer of 2019, where the final edits of this book were completed. I wrote this book about seeking refuge in a time before I knew what a rare commodity that truly is. Thank you, Steve, for so selflessly providing a refuge to all the writers and artists of Norton Island.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  * * *

  Meet Carol Goodman

  About the Book

  * * *

  Behind the Book Essay

  Reading Group Guide

  Read On

  * * *

  An Excerpt from The Sea of Lost Girls

  About the Author

  Meet Carol Goodman

  CAROL GOODMAN is the critically acclaimed author of twenty-two novels, including The Widow’s House, winner of the 2018 Mary Higgins Clark Award, The Night Visitors, winner of the 2020 Mary Higgins Clark Award, and The Seduction of Water, which won the 2003 Hammett Prize. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and teaches writing and literature at SUNY New Paltz and the New School.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  About the Book

  Behind the Book Essay

  Courtesy of the Author

  The Sequelae

  Like many people watching Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony on September 27, 2018, I found myself crying at her description of the assault she had experienced and the psychological aftermath—what she called the sequelae—of that attack. Many women reported reliving their own traumatic experiences as they listened to Dr. Ford. I am fortunate enough not to have experienced sexual assault or rape; the person I cried for as I heard Dr. Ford describe the claustrophobia, panic attacks, and anxiety that she experienced for years was my mother.

  My mother slept with the light on her entire life. She shook when I took her to the doctor and had such bad claustrophobia that she needed to have the door to the examining room left open while we waited. I’d lived with my mother’s anxiety all my life but, only in her later years, when the anxiety worsened and she had trouble sleeping, did I realize she had an anxiety disorder. Even then I didn’t identify it as PTSD from a sexual assault.

  My mother, after all, had survived many traumas, as I learned listening to her stories of her Depression-era childhood. The eldest of six siblings, and the only girl, she grew up in cold-water tenement flats in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Her family was so poor they often had nothing to eat but bread and milk, but her father would cut up the crusts, soak them in milk and sugar, and call it a “treat.” Her father dug ditches for the WPA and she was grateful he had work and didn’t come home drunk like some of the other fathers on their street. There were tragedies—two baby brothers who died in infancy—but she felt loved and cared for. She didn’t think of herself as poor because “everybody was in the same boat.” Everyone wore the same uniform at her Catholic school and her mother starched and bleached her shirt so it was stiff and white. There were no books in her home, but she went to the library and read every book on the reading lists the nuns gave her. She was a good student. Her eighth-grade English teacher, Sister Agatha Dorothy (called Sister Aggie Dot by the children secretly) said she had a flair for writing.

  The relative comfort and safety of my mother’s childhood ended abruptly in April 1941 when she was seventeen. Her mother, who had had rheumatic fever as a child, collapsed on the kitchen floor and died in front of my mother. “I felt so helpless,” my mother would always say when she told this story. “I’ve always wanted to know what to do in an emergency since then.” After the funeral, her father sat in her mother’s rocking chair and it collapsed beneath him, providing an apt metaphor for what happened to the family. Her father, who had been sober through her childhood, began drinking and was unable to care for his children. Her brothers were placed in St. Vincent’s Home for Boys. She was sent to her aunts in Coney Island, who, she told me, were not kind to her. She thought it might have been because they were jealous of how pretty she was. By the time she was eighteen she was living in a boardinghouse by herself, making her living as a stenographer. She didn’t earn a high school degree until she got her GED in 1969 at the age of forty-five.

  Coney Island, only a few miles from Bay Ridge, was another world. She’d never met Jewish people before and laughed when she overheard someone ask in a deli for “sour cream.” The shopkeepers called her shayna maidelah—pretty girl. There were mobsters, too, organized crime syndicates like Murder Inc., with its notorious hit man Abe Reles, known as Kid Twist for his preferred method of execution by strangling. And my mother knew Evelyn Mittelman, the notorious Kiss-of-Death Girl. “She wasn’t much to look at by then,” she told me. “None of those girls were after they went with the wrong sort.”

  The fate of pretty girls who went with the wrong sort became a persistent theme as I entered my teens and started dating. “You had to stay on the right side of the tracks,” my mother warned me, “or men would take advantage of you.” One of the mobsters would walk her home from the subway station, but he never tried anything because he knew she wasn’t that kind of girl. She wouldn’t try drugs, either, although heroin was rampant in Coney Island (a cousin of my father’s later died of an overdose), and she was careful never to leave a drink unattended lest someone slipped a mickey in it. Meanwhile, her brothers were being recruited by local mobsters from the St. Vincent’s playground to do their errands. My mother often found herself going down to the police station or courthouse to speak on their behalf.

  “Why did you turn out all right?” a police sergeant once asked her.

  “I had a strong survival instinct,” she told me years later.

  It wasn’t until I was much older that she told me she was sexually assaulted when she was eighteen. The incident occurred when she’d gone into the hospital to have her tonsils removed. During the night a nurse came onto the ward and took her to a darkened examining room. The doctor told her to take off all her clothes. Then, she told me, she started shaking all over. “He must have gotten frightened by how much I shook,” she told me, “because he let me go.”

  I asked her if she reported him; she told me no. Who would believe her? He was a doctor. Afterward, she said, she couldn’t walk on a street with a hospital on it without shaking. For over sixty years she kept this secret. Until she told me.

  My mother’s life by the time I came along in 1959 was pretty nice. She met my father on the subway a few months before Pearl Harbor. She liked how clean and neat he looked and that he didn’t drink. He introduced her to his sister Leah before he shipped out to the South Pacific, “so we’d stay in touch while he was away.” They married when he returned and he went to City College while selling TV antennas at night to support her and my newborn brother, Larry. They lived in Sea Gate, a pretty gated community at the end of Coney Island, had my brother Bob, and then my father took a job at an electronics company in Philadelphia, where I was born. My mother, as she often told me, loved being a housewife and a mother. She resented the 1960s for crashing into that safe world, but she was progressive enough to take us to peace demonstrations and buy the first Ms. magazine in 1971. She still slept with the light on and “worried a lot.” She seemed to be always planning for a disaster—buying extra food, hoarding pennies in salt boxes, keeping candles in case of blackouts. She was the worrier, the pessimist; my father was the calm one, the optimist. They balanced each other.

  When my father died in 1999 my mother grieved but seemed to manage all right. Because my father had traveled a lot she’d always been fairly self-sufficient and she had three grown children who lived nearby to help her. But during the next decade it became clear that her anxiety was growing worse. She became fearful that she was suffering some undiagnosed condition. I took her to a slew of specialists and
noticed she would tremble in their offices. When they couldn’t find anything I took her to a psychiatrist, who prescribed antidepressants. She lost weight. She didn’t sleep more than a few hours a night.

  “Mom,” I said, “maybe you should try turning out the light.”

  “No,” she told me, “I can’t do that.”

  In 2016, just a month shy of her ninety-third birthday, my mother died in her sleep with the light on. When I saw her the next morning she was curled on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek. She looked peaceful. I had thought I was ready to say goodbye. We’d been close. We knew we loved each other. She’d told me all her stories and I’d become the writer that Sister Aggie Dot had thought she could have become. I didn’t think she had anything more to tell me.

  Then two years later I listened to Christine Blasey Ford recount the story of her sexual assault and wept. My mother’s anxiety, claustrophobia, and fear of the dark suddenly appeared clearly as the sequelae of that moment in the hospital, standing naked in a dark room at the order of someone she trusted. Why had I never realized that? Dr. Ford’s eloquent and brave testimony enabled many women around the world to tell their stories and reckon with the long-term trauma of their experiences. For me, it opened a window into my mother’s past. I learned from her brother, whom she hadn’t spoken to for many years, that he and his brothers hadn’t been sent right away to St. Vincent’s. “Margie quit school to take care of us,” he told me. He also told me that their father hadn’t been so sober during their childhood. In fact, he used to go drinking with Bill O’Dwyer, the future mayor of New York City, when he was just a beat cop in Brooklyn. My cousin sent me the intake form for one of our uncles who was imprisoned at Sing Sing, in which his childhood home was described as “one of abject poverty,” which sounded a lot different from the stories of bread and milk my mother had told. How much else, I wondered, had my mother left out?