“We talked about this years ago, James. This kind of moment of sitting along this beach after all our travels. To have a house down the block with a wraparound porch and big windows. You in one, writing books; me in the other, translating documents and files for the UN. That’s what I do now, James. But I live in New York, in a small apartment with a stunning view of the river, but no wraparound. We lived there together, but when you started slipping the doctors thought it’d be best to bring you back to Philly. They have the best care for your sort of problem. Maybe, they said, the streets and neighborhoods of your childhood would awaken memories beyond just Kurt and Vera. You remember your street, don’t you?”
“Clare Street. Fourteen-thirteen Clare Street. About midway down the block. The McMurphys on one side. The Kowalskys on the other. I know all that like yesterday. Fr. Heaney in his rectory window, reading murder mysteries and hearing confessions. That’s what I know. Kurt and Vera. That time. Like yesterday.”
“The beach is best like this. We used to make up games. We’d sit on this very bench in autumn. Nobody but us. We’d make up stories about marooned galleons and pirates. You’d start them and I’d add on and we’d switch the story back and forth, building it for hours.”
“I like it here. I like the stillness. Can we sit for a while?”
“As long as you like. Look what I have.”
She reaches into her big purse. “Vranac.”
“Wine?”
“Yes, James. It used to be your favorite. Sometimes when you drink it, you remember things. I forgot glasses, though. We’ll have to drink from the bottle.”
“Like winos. In Philly, we had winos.”
“We had them in Poland, too. But there they drank vodka and peed on the sides of buildings and froze to death in winter.”
“You’re from Poland?”
“A long time ago. I live in New York now.”
“Is it too early to drink wine?”
“Time doesn’t matter, does it?”
She rubs her hand over mine.
“You wrote a story on wine in Tuscany. We went from vineyard to vineyard, sampling, learning about the sun, the soil, the minerals. Quite an alchemy. And the Italians, ‘quote machines,’ you called them. The vineyard owners spoke for hours about land and harvest. So many things conspiring in the air and in the dirt to make a magnificent wine or a wondrous failure.”
The lady uncorks the wine and hands me the bottle, and for a second I think I remember something, but then I don’t. I look at the sea. The sun is behind us, the clouds low. Winter is coming. I like this wine.
“Let’s talk about news, James. Today’s news. Big change in the world again. A black man is running for president. His name is Barack Obama. He is eloquent, James. Eloquent the way leaders should be, not like most of them today. There is no grandeur in them. No romance. No dreams, like the dreams we had when the Wall fell. You should be there, writing about all this.”
“Nixon.”
“Nixon?”
“I remember Nixon. Those hearings in 1972, or was it ’73. Kurt said Nixon skulked. Kurt didn’t like politicians. He said Democrat or Republican, they were destined to disappoint. I like that word. Skulked.”
“He was a skulker, yes. He’s dead, James. A while now.”
“He used to be president. Watergate.”
“The one now is worse than Nixon. Bush.”
“Bush?”
“He’s a twit. He comes to the UN sometimes. He speaks English, but you wouldn’t know. Other translators tell me they can’t fit his syntax and imagery into their languages. He should be in jail.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
The lady takes another sip of wine. She hands me the bottle and puts her head on my shoulder. A man with fishing poles and a tin bucket walks past; a woman follows with two folding chairs. They descend the boardwalk steps to the beach. He’s heavyset with a ball cap and a windbreaker and green boots up to his knees. He is unsteady in the sand, favoring his left knee. The woman wears a ball cap, too; blue jeans, a big sweatshirt and long knitted scarf that snakes in the wind. The woman unfolds the chair. The man casts a line into the surf and hands the pole to the woman; he casts a second one and holds it himself and sits down next to her at the rim of the beach break. He kisses her on the cheek. They sit, two shadows in the sun, water misting around them, their chairs slightly sinking in the sand.
A man clatters down the boardwalk with a guitar. He stops and sits on the bench next to the lady next to me. The man strums and sings — his voice a ragged cough of words — of melting ice caps, butchered trees, dying rain forests, pollution, smog, warming oceans, Venice sinking, “a world gone mad, slipping from the palms of God.” He rolls his eyebrows and stands. “I’m just a messenger,” he says, spinning away in wide slow circles, a strange planet in a tattered coat.
We watch, until she laughs, takes the bottle from me, and sips. The lady rises. She kisses me on the forehead, brushes my hair with her fingers.
“A wild sea, that hair.”
It feels good. The ocean. The wind. The lady’s fingers on my scalp, so brief. She sits and pulls an envelope from her bag. She unfolds a newspaper clipping; it rattles in the wind. The headline: MEMORY KEPT ALIVE, BRICK BY BRICK.
Walter Schmidt lived in Dusseldorf. He memorialized Jews killed in the Holocaust by painting their names on bricks across the city. The police told him to stop, but he wouldn’t; he went from neighborhood to neighborhood. His mission was to paint six million names. He was up to 726,000. He carried a thin sable brush and a small can of white paint in his valise. He was demure, whispery-voiced, dressed like a banker, a man you wouldn’t suspect of defacing property. He said: “We have atoned. Oh God, we have atoned, but we haven’t suffered to the extent of our victims. That is the paradox. We atone with sorrow that can never be as deep as the horror. This bothers me.”
The man lived with his wife and drove a subway train from dawn until two in the afternoon. He’d come home, change into a suit, and head back out to paint names until dusk; each brick, a tiny tombstone. He was occasionally beaten up by neo-Nazis, but the city came to know and admire his strange, fastidious mission, although, when some heard he was in their street, they stood guard over their homes and bricks. He said, “When you write your newspaper story, just use the names, one name strung after the other. Imagine the impact of names, but no other words. Don’t you think that would be powerful? Just names. Imagination can fill in the rest. That would be a story people would remember.”
He went to the same pub every day after his painting was done. He’d wash his face, clean his brush in the sink, comb his hair, and drink one beer alone before going home to his wife. “I won’t get to all the names before I die,” he said. “Isn’t that something?”
The lady says, “I liked that man the best, James. Of all the interviews we did over all those years, I liked that little man from Dusseldorf the best.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I know, but you were there, whether you remember or not.”
“It’s cold.”
“Should we go?”
“Let’s sit a little longer. I’m cold but I like it here.”
“This used to be one of your favorite places. Right here on this bench.”
“I can imagine. I do like it here. It makes me think of Kurt and Vera and the man from Marrakesh.”
twelve
Eva called. She’s going to keep James at the Jersey Shore another day. There was a brief moment when he came back and remembered her. Eva says there must be some way to hold that, to keep it centered, like the air bubble in a mason’s level. I think not. That flash of memory is incandescent, but not sustainable. I have heard enough doctors, read enough charts, changed enough diapers of confused men who can’t remember where or how to shit. James is headed there, maybe not for a while, but that is his slope. I like to think of miracles, though. Maybe. Perhaps. I’d like James to know me, not just as the woman in
white, but as his half sister, the daughter of Kurt and Vera. Will I ever tell him? I don’t know. He wouldn’t remember for more than a fleeting moment, anyway.
I was conceived in Virginia Beach. This is what Vera told me in her letter. She said she felt the moment it happened. The moon luring the tide, the waves distant. It’s a pretty way to be made. “A glorious conception,” she wrote. The letter came to me quite unexpectedly. The way things do, like hurricanes, wars, and tsunamis that whirl in out of nowhere and make us rebuild. The letter was yellow and worn. I unfolded it, pressed my face against its pages, and breathed in Vera, but there was no scent of her, only old air and old paper and the cursive strokes of her desperate life. I was working as a nurse in Boston at the time — strange fate that I should have chosen the profession my half brother so needs. I had no husband, no children. I was dating a botanist. We took excursions into gardens and forests and graveyards. He could identify the mosses growing in tiny blooms on the tombstones of those who fought in the Revolution. His name was Jacob Myerson. We still see each other occasionally, but now that I’ve moved to Philadelphia to be near James, not as often. Jacob doesn’t know about James. I told him I left Boston for a more challenging job. He believed me. When Jacob visits we walk the trails along the river and with an envelope and tweezers, he collects vegetation. Like me, he is meticulous; we have intense conversations about pollination, rain forests, savannas, and how trees store carbon dioxide deep in their cores. He fears the world is slowly dying. I tell him about hearts and veins and minds. We go to movies — mostly documentaries in foreign languages — and walk along South Street, window-shopping and listening to music rolling from doorways into the night. We eat pizza and drink cream soda along the water, and in the distance I see the gray hulks of old navy ships and their big white numbers, their strung lights pretty as stars. We return to my place with a bottle of wine and have sex; afterward, while Jacob sleeps, I trace the muscles of his body and think of the shore and the way waves crash against the pier and what it would have been like to have been born Chinese or Iranian. On Sunday mornings, Jacob rises early, leaves a pressed flower near the coffeemaker, and disappears out the door to the train that will carry him home to Boston. It’s a nice arrangement, shy of fulfilling, but then again not overbearing. I go jogging on those mornings. I am swift and lithe, always have been, even at this age when the knees need more coaxing than they once did. Through the peal of church bells, I run across Rittenhouse Square, past cut flowers, jars of apple butter, and bundles of newspapers; I glide through colonial streets, beyond men selling black felt triangle hats and Ben Franklin spectacles; I slip through history, breathing in oil and distant ocean, turning through alleys the sun has yet to reach; I push on, sweat on my brow, my legs rhythmic as pistons; I run with no music in my ears except the sound of my footsteps against the waking city; I whisk past the gleam and smoke of diners to the quiet warehouses on the outskirts; I think of Vera and Kurt, young and alive, falling in love, spirits and ghosts denied me; I run until I weep. I let the tears fall. It feels good to let them fall. I am my own mystery, an incomplete daughter, an unknown sister. After a few minutes, I turn, look back over the miles I have come, and begin the journey home.
James was easy to find. I typed his name in Google. It was like a research project on a plant, a name, a being I never knew existed, but was related to, growing out there in the world. There were seventy-three pages of hits on James. He was a journalist, but then, suddenly, he vanished. I called his old paper and tracked him to this nursing-home/convalescent-center/rehab-facility/or-any-other-name-that-makes-you-feel-comfortable-about-a-place-that-cares-for-those-losing-their-marbles.
James looks just like my father, Kurt. Vera left me a picture of her and Kurt; it’s black and white and was taken, I think, in one of those booths with a sliding curtain that are so popular at catching moments that don’t last beyond the beach. James doesn’t know me, but he is blood. The microscopic cells coursing through him are similar in patterns to mine. I think you need to know the person who is your blood. I never had that, and it’s funny, ironic, I guess, that the only person connected to me by molecular structures is a man who doesn’t know who I am from one day to the next.
I crave the memory he is losing.
I love it when he talks about my parents during that summer at the beach. But James’s stories don’t go all the way to the end when things turned nasty. And even hearing them, beautiful as they are, they are not flesh and bone; they cannot be caressed, whispered to; they cannot give a daughter, a sister, the touch, the warmth she needs. But they are all I have, words and words and words, stored and living in my mind.
What is in me? So many intricacies I do not know. Am I bound for a void like James? Or confusion like my mother? Was she confused? Or did she just see things others couldn’t? There are too many spaces between the lines, and perhaps something is hiding in me, a deformity of spirit or an odd permutation of cell. A voice yet unheard.
The sky outside James’s window fills with strands of blowing ash, thousands, maybe millions of them, twirling and swimming like slender black fish out of a sea of smoke rising from a fire at the city’s edge. A landfill? A refinery? The fire glows and mixes with the dusk. I watch. The smoke fattens; the ash shifts with the wind, toward James’s window, then away, then back again.
thirteen
Kurt and I went back into my room. Vera was still sleeping, her macramé purse, the one with the gun in it, lay beside her on the bed. Kurt went to the mirror and studied himself. He rubbed his hands under his eyes and through his hair.
“I found a gray one the other day, Jim. On my temple like a silver thread. The sunlight caught it when I was shaving. At first I thought it was paint from the shipyard.”
I stepped to the mirror.
“Where?”
“I yanked it out.”
“It’ll come back.”
“Nah, I got the root and all.”
“It’s pigment. We learned it in biology class. Your body’s losing its color. Sister Hanrahan says the body’s more complicated than the universe.”
“When’d you get so smart?”
I shrugged. “Simple biology.”
Even though we were whispering, Vera stirred. She rolled over, curling around her purse, drooling like a child, at peace.
“Should we wake her?”
“Let her sleep a little more. I don’t think she’s slept much in days. Let’s go for a swim. I’ll write her a note.”
“What about the gun?”
“I told you I took the bullets out.”
“What if she wakes and sees the man from Marrakesh.”
“She doesn’t usually see him in the mornings. C’mon let’s swim.”
The beach was quiet. It was too early for day-trippers. Kurt sprinted toward the water and dove, a spear cutting through a wave and rising beyond. He stood and shook the water out of his hair and dove again. I followed. The ocean was cold, sharp, stinging my sunburn. Kurt jumped on me; he wrestled and lifted me and threw me into a wave, and when I surfaced he did it again, and he kept laughing.
“When you were small I could throw you a mile.”
Another wave came and knocked us both down. The undertow pulled at my calves.
“Let’s get past these waves to deeper water.”
Kurt didn’t swim like he played tennis. On the tennis court, he was compact, quick, precise; every movement a burst. But in the water, he seemed big and languid, moving with a long crawl through the currents like a steamship. We were about seventy yards offshore, at the place where the water gathers just before it rises and rolls toward land. It was peaceful out there. My body lifted and dipped and I felt as if I were on a slow-motion roller coaster, a bobbing speck in what the Indians in this area once called “the Great Water.” The Indians were gone but there was a brochure in the hotel lobby advertising Indian tours and an Indian museum. The Indians pictured in the brochure didn’t look like Indians, though. Their skin was the oran
gey color of an indoor tan and their wigs and suede clothes looked as if pulled from a Halloween box; they seemed like dressed-up car salesman and undertakers standing around a tepee and a fake fire.
The water rose; I ascended. I was glad to be out here alone with Kurt. All sounds gone except our breaths, our words, our hands treading water, the currents below us running like icy slivers around my ankles.
“I wonder what we look like to a fish.”
“Weird.”
“Sometimes at the shipyard a school of fish swims in. I think they get lost and take a wrong turn where the ocean meets the river. They come up along the ships. You can see they’re panicked and want to escape to the sea. Their white bellies flash in the rusty water. They splash and suddenly it all goes silent and the water calms and you can see them skimming beneath the surface heading back to the wide water as if one of them had found the way and was leading the others. They look like a dark cloud of bees, moving fast through the jetty.
“You tired, Jim?”
“Not yet.”
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“Changes your perspective.”
“I’m going to have to take that dictionary away from you. Pigment. Perspective. You must have worked your way up to the P’s.”
“I jump around so it’s more interesting.”
Kurt stopped treading water and floated on his back. I did the same. My ears immersed, I heard only the pulse of the depths, but every now and then, when I’d lift with a gathering wave, my ears broke the surface and I’d hear, for a split second, the cry of a seagull or a kid shrieking on the beach. When my ears went back under, the moan of the deep returned with the sound of my beating heart. I heard my body from the inside, a fleshy machine doing its work, like a car hood sprung open in an alley garage, belts and pistons humming like music.
I thought about Alice, the girl at the front desk with cinnamon lip gloss and halter tops. She kissed me softly the other night. I liked that; there was no rush and I heard her breathe and I listened to the breeze on the balcony and a muted scream from the Creature from the Black Lagoon on the TV. What would happen to Alice? Would she become queen of the Crab Festival like her Baptist daddy wanted? Or maybe she’d just get old and fill out the hotel ledger page after page, year after year, smiling to vacationers and handing keys to her splay-footed uncle, the ancient, slumped bellboy with the stained jacket. How many other boys and men would she kiss? How many halter tops did she own? How many girls would I kiss? Would I learn all the words there were to know?
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