At the airport, Seigl parked his car in a high-rise garage and made his way across a pedestrian bridge into the terminal. With new security regulations, he couldn’t wait for Jet at the gate but at baggage claim; she wouldn’t know Seigl had come for her, and would have some minutes to regret her outburst on the telephone. Damned if he would be blackmailed by his sister’s emotions, Seigl thought.
In the terminal, amid so many fast-walking individuals, Seigl was conscious of walking with a slight limp, as if he’d strained a tendon. In his khaki jeans and corduroy jacket, his Irish tweed cap on his stiff springy hair, he resembled a fortyish ex-athlete, tall and broad-shouldered with a thick torso and thighs and a way of holding himself that was alert, vigilant. In the heedless past Seigl would have strode along the walkways brooding and indifferent to others; now he was cautious not to collide with anyone, for he couldn’t risk being jarred or injured. He’d left his cane in the car. (In the trunk, not the backseat where Jet would see it.) In mirrors and reflecting surfaces along the concourse he had glimpses of his fleeting likeness, the bristling whiskers, flushed skin and deep-set searing eyes.
You wouldn’t single out such an individual, Seigl thought, as suffering from a mysterious nerve disease.
The plane from Miami was delayed by forty minutes. Seigl waited apprehensively. He knew it was absurd but he’d begun to worry about the flight. If something should happen to Jet . . . Seigl knew he wouldn’t feel relief. Nor would he have felt as he’d felt when his parents died, that nothing unnatural or unjust had occurred. Jet was young still, only just forty years old. Maybe she hoped to begin her life anew, as Seigl was hoping for himself.
At last the plane landed, without incident. Seigl realized he’d been clenching his fists, lightly sweating. What was happening to him? He’d become a mass, a mess of psychosomatic symptoms. He who was urged to think so highly of himself! He waited expectantly as passengers began to swarm into the baggage claim area. Jet would certainly have flown first-class and should have been among the first passengers to appear. Seigl was trying to prepare a plausible defense of his choice of an assistant: why he’d hired someone barely educated . . . He wondered if he could forestall Jet meeting Alma. Or explain Alma away as a cleaning woman . . .
“Joshua.”
Seigl couldn’t at first locate who had spoken his name. The woman’s voice was low, throaty, elated. Out of a crowd of strangers the figure rushed at him with her arms outspread, like an elegantly black-garbed bird of prey, claiming him, hugging him hard. His confused impression was of a glamorous woman with dark-tinted sunglasses and a cherry-red cloche hat pulled down onto her forehead. Was this Jet? But how could Jet, who was older than Seigl, look so much younger?
“Josh! Act like you hardly recognize me, your own sister.” Jet laughed accusingly, kissing Seigl wetly at the edge of his startled mouth.
Like ashes, Jet tasted. A smell of cigarette smoke on her breath.
Seigl stammered, “Jet, hello. You’re looking—wonderful.”
Jet’s arms around Seigl were unexpectedly strong. She pressed her warm cheek against his chest as if she’d stumbled into his arms out of a situation of grave danger. There was an explosive smell of expensive perfume. Jet drew back, and removed her dark glasses in a sweeping gesture. Her eyes were uncannily like Seigl’s though not so dark, shiny as if laminated with a golden-tawny film, and thickly lashed; of course, Seigl realized she’d outlined her eyes in mascara, the lashes were separate and darkly bold as a spider’s legs. Her lipstick was a dark purple-red suggestive of the retrograde 1940s, sexy and sullen, ironic. Her hair beneath the stylish cloche hat had been smartly scissor-cut and lightened, streaked with ash. Her appearance suggested a costume, selected with care: layers of fine dark wool cashmere, kidskin gloves and shoes with spike heels that looked, to Seigl’s uneasy male eye, dangerous as hooves.
In her husky smoker’s voice Jet was saying, marveling, “But—you look very well, Joshua. You drove to the airport—by youself?”
Jet stared at Seigl, perplexed. Afterward, recalling this awkward moment, Seigl would wonder if his sister hadn’t felt cheated, just slightly.
It was then that Seigl realized: it hadn’t been the issue of his assistant that so upset Jet, but the issue of his health after all.
His health! And he’d believed he had kept his secret so guarded.
Annoyed, Seigl said certainly he’d driven to the airport by himself, why not? He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t crippled. Hadn’t he tried to explain on the phone, there was no “emergency” in his life?
Jet continued to stare at him searchingly. Half-consciously she fumbled in her handbag for a pack of cigarettes. She said, “Yes, but you so rarely tell the full truth, Josh. You’re like an enigmatic character in a play. I have to read between your lines, and you’re so sparing with your lines.”
Seigl had to concede, this might be true. It never failed to surprise him, when they confronted each other, that his sister was so astute a judge of his character, while she seemed, in myriad other ways, so blind. Yet, he guessed it was with Jet as with many women of a contemporary type, who took their cues from stylized and exaggerated images of female behavior in the media: you never knew what was genuine, and what was invented. As a sexually precocious adolescent in the mid-1970s Jet had several times threatened to do violence to herself and others, and her parents had had to act upon the assumption that, yes Jet might be serious. (In boarding school she’d allegedly attempted suicide by swallowing two dozen barbiturates washed down with vodka, so many pills, so much vodka, she’d vomited everything back up within minutes.) Seigl had his doubts: he’d always believed that Jet was far too intelligent to mean much of what she said, but might be testing the limits of others’ credulity.
Playacting at exaggeration, hysteria. But a face can take on the contours of the mask pressed against it.
Jet raked her eyes from Seigl’s feet, in waterstained jogging shoes that contrasted pointedly with her own stylish shoes, to his face, which was flushed with annoyance. She said, bluntly, “I’ve been told that you walk with a cane now, like an old man.”
Seigl said, furious, “Who told you that?”
Within seconds, a sister-brother squabble. For there is no one with whom we can squabble, bitterly, ignominiously, absurdly, like a sibling.
“I’ve been led to believe that you’ve had some sort of ‘medical crisis,’ Joshua. That’s why I’m here. I need to see for myself what is going on. You have seen a neurologist for tests, haven’t you?”
Seigl was still smarting from the remark about the cane. That fucking cane! He said belligerently, “That’s my business.”
“But—is it true?”
Jet clutched at his arm anxiously. She didn’t seem to be play-acting but genuine. Her look of alarm unnerved Seigl: it was the alarm he hadn’t wished to acknowledge in himself.
“I won’t have you interfering in my life, Jet. I’ve warned you.”
Baggage from the flight began to tumble onto the circular belt. Jet pointed out her several suitcases, and bulky suitcases they were, which Seigl retrieved for her. He smiled: how like his sister to allow another to perform a task for her, though that other was said to be unwell.
As they left the terminal Seigl remained silent, annoyed. He paid little attention as Jet spoke rapidly, animatedly of her life in Palm Beach, her dissatisfaction with her living arrangements. He would have liked to rudely interrupt to ask how long she planned on staying in Carmel Heights but knew he wouldn’t get a direct answer. And very likely Jet didn’t know, just yet. Her campaigns were mostly improvised.
Seigl had to grant, his sister was a vivid presence. That large medallion face, her taut smooth skin glowing with a fierce interior heat. Seigl, too, in positions of authority, on a stage for instance, commanded attention, but in this public place, on the walkway, it was Jet at whom strangers stared with interest. Who’s that? A TV face? As if, carrying herself so extravagantly, Jet had to be a celebrity. There was someth
ing brutal and yet innocent about her, you were drawn to admire even as you disapproved. Jet had been the sort of child to squeeze a small pet to death, then weep inconsolably over the death.
Seigl wasn’t sure if he loved Jet. He was more certain, he feared the woman.
“Jet” who’d emerged from “Mary Beth” when she was fifteen. Insisting upon the new name which was her true name, given to her centuries ago in another lifetime, as the Hebrew “Jetimah.”
Of course this had to be magical thinking. Metaphorical thinking.
You did not, if you were the concerned parents of such a daughter, want to believe that it might be literal thinking for this was to admit that your daughter might be mad.
In the waning years of the twentieth century, when distinctions of sanity and madness were being recklessly, even gaily denied.
At twenty-one, Jet legally changed her name to “Jetimah Steadman-Seigl.” There was a time when she spoke provocatively of herself as a “Jewess.” It gave her power, she claimed: the power of inverted Jew-hatred.
Seigl had asked his sister what that was: the “power of inverted Jew-hatred.” Jet said defensively that those who hate us hate us because they believe that we’re dangerous in some way. That danger, or the possibility of it, gives us “power” over them. And so, to anti-Semites, Jews possess power.
Even if, as Jet conceded, with little-girl coquetry, she wasn’t in fact a “Jewess.”
(Both Joshua and Jet had been baptized by their mother in the Presbyterian church in Carmel Heights in which, many years before, she had herself been baptized. Their father had avoided the topic of religion as one who has nearly died of food poisoning might avoid eating the specific food that has nearly killed him; yet he’d believed, as Seigl did, that the warring distinctions between religions have their biological origins in the wish to survive and to conquer, and are at the heart of much of human tragedy.)
As Jet’s younger brother, Joshua had been eclipsed by her through their childhood and adolescence. In that way, he’d been spared the over-zealous attention of their mother. He had made his own, somewhat idiosyncratic way, not neglected, only just not scrutinized by his parents. He’d never gotten into trouble at school, he’d been a friendly good-natured boy well-liked by his classmates and his teachers; he’d earned high grades without excessive work or worrying. By contrast, Jet had always merited concern. You could no more ignore Jet that you could ignore a screeching child.
Her first psychiatrist, to whom she’d been taken by her desperate parents when she was fourteen, had described her rather flatteringly as highly intelligent and imaginative but unstable: a “border-line” personality. Her second psychiatrist, to whom she was taken after the apparent suicide attempt, identified her problems as bio-chemical in origin, and diagnosed her, with gratifying trendiness, as “bipolar.” In her early twenties when Jet had been lavishly involved with drugs and had precipitated several violent episodes in Manhattan, she’d been diagnosed as “latent paranoid schizophrenic.” (“Schizophrenic”! That wasn’t so flattering.) Each of these diagnoses had involved medications, of course. Pharmacological poisoning, Jet called it: “A kind of genocide afflicted upon free souls by the rest of shackled mankind.”
It had long been Seigl’s opinion that his sister behaved impulsively because it attracted attention of a kind Jet would not otherwise attract, and because, with her good looks and personality, she could get away with it. Even her stabbing of a lover had been explained away, and eventually dismissed with the excuse that she was “under psychiatric care.” Jet was vain, self-centered, spoiled; skilled at manipulating others as a puppeteer. Yet, weirdly, you were drawn to her: you wanted Jet to like you.
After an episode at boarding school when Jet, then sixteen, had precipitated the dismissal of a thirty-year-old music instructor, and the breakup of his marriage, Seigl recalled her gloating over the sympathetic attention she was receiving. She’d told him, “I do what I want to do, Josh. What I want to do I do. Try it.”
Seigl shuddered recalling these words. What I want to do I do.
Watching his sister now, as, making his way up escalators and across the pedestrian bridge to his car, Seigl was trying not to limp. Watching her covertly, yet with a kind of admiration. He knew how Jet would seize upon the smallest evidence of weakness in him. He had shrewdly worked out beforehand how he would spare Jet seeing his cane, by placing her suitcases in the backseat of the car. More effort, but worth it. He then lowered himself into the driver’s seat carefully as one might lower a heavy, dead weight while, fortunately for him, Jet rummaged through her expensive handbag too preoccupied to take note.
As if she’d been overhearing Seigl’s thoughts, Jet said suddenly, “You see, Josh, compared to your life, your accomplishments and talent, my life is trivial. I’ve long been deluded. Until Daddy died, and Mother, and the veil was ripped away from my eyes, and I saw. Never do we see so clearly as at the death of a parent.”
Seigl mumbled something vaguely sympathetic. This was an extravagant claim, typical of his sister. But maybe she meant it.
As they drove from the airport, Jet lowered the window beside her and lit a cigarette. She hadn’t thought of asking Seigl if he minded; or if he’d have liked to smoke with her. She said, “I want us to collaborate, Joshua. My destiny is a simple one: to aid you in fulfilling your destiny. We can collaborate. Of course, my name wouldn’t appear on any book of yours. My dream is a sequel to The Shadows bringing the story of the survivors—and their children—into this new century. Looking forward as well as back. We owe it to the memory of our father and his people, and to ourselves. We are all Holocaust survivors.”
Seigl gritted his teeth. What utter absolute bullshit.
“I know, you’re offended with me. You’re very sensitive about your work. But I’ve had such premonitions about you lately, Joshua. I’ve been in fear of . . .” Jet’s voice trailed off ominously. “You seem to have lost faith in your talent. Or the courage of youth, which comes to the same thing.”
“You know all about me, don’t you? I’m a transparency held up to the light.”
“Don’t be sarcastic. That was your adolescent defense, as painful as acne.”
Acne! Seigl was forced to recall his broken-out, boiled-looking face. Pimples the size of boils on his cheeks and neck. A few scars remained, hidden by his beard.
Adulthood was itself a kind of beard, a shield held up before him. And here was his sister plucking and pulling at it, threatening to expose him.
Seigl said, “Jet, The Shadows belongs to the past. The young man who wrote it is no more. I think now that we have no right to appropriate the Holocaust. We’re two generations removed. We’re Americans, for Christ’s sake. It’s sick.”
There was another reason, too. But Seigl wasn’t about to share this reason with his impassioned sister.
“Sick! You’re the one who’s sick, to say such things! This is our heritage, Joshua. Our duty. In America, we have every right to our own family history. Jewish and gentile combined. It’s our way of honoring the—deceased.”
Seigl was touched: his sister couldn’t bear to utter the blunt word dead.
“Jet, you’ll have to write your own morbid history. I’m trying to get out from under my own.”
Jet said, hurt, “That’s ridiculous. You’re Karl Seigl’s son. You know what his history was. His family. Hundreds of thousands of families! And Daddy adored you, he had such faith in you, Joshua. As he never had in me. You can’t ‘get out from under’ your destiny.”
“I’ve told you, I have my work. I care deeply about my work. I’m involved in translating—”
“Anyone can translate some old Greek—Latin?—poem! But not anyone can write a sequel to The Shadows.”
Seigl thumped both hands against the steering wheel. He laughed, incredulous. “Jet, that remark has got to be one of the most ignorant, uninformed—”
“—truth! It’s the truth, and you know it.”
Seigl drov
e in silence. Better not to reply.
Always it was like this: in Jet, you confronted not a storm of wayward emotions but a fierce and implacable will disguised as a moral principle, tightly wound as a cyclone at its base.
A little later, Jet tried another tack. Her voice was subdued, pleading. “Joshua? Don’t be angry with me. I only want to know: is something wrong with you?”
Seigl refused to answer.
“You haven’t seen a—neurologist? At the medical school?”
Seigl drove in silence. He’d swung along the lake shore, wanting to take a circuitous route to Carmel Heights. The winter sky was ridged with storm clouds like rippled, sullied cement. A north wind rocked the car. Jet blew her nose, as if she’d been weeping. She said, not as a question but as a statement, “The name ‘Morris Friedman’ means nothing to you.”
Seigl gripped the steering wheel tighter. He drove on, unable to speak. His bones were dissolving to water with the shock of what he believed must be betrayal.
But who had told Jet? Surely not Friedman? Wasn’t that a violation of medical protocol?
After a tense several minutes Seigl heard himself say, “Nerves quite literally fray in some people. No one knows why.”
“ ‘Nerves’?”
“ ‘Sclerosis,’ it’s called. A scarring of the insulating tissue that covers the nerve fibers.”
Seigl felt his sister stiffen. Sclerosis?
He waited for her to utter the dread term multiple sclerosis.
But Jet surprised him, only asking if his condition had yet been diagnosed.
“No. I’m ‘inconclusive.’ ”
A coughing sound issued from Seigl’s throat, which was feeling raw as sandpaper. Possibly the sound was laughter, or a muffled sob.
Abruptly, Seigl was telling Jet about his symptoms of the past several weeks. Falling in Mount Carmel Cemetery. Dizziness, weakness in his limbs. Double vision. The battery of tests, the steroid tablets. The possibility of “remission.” All that he’d vowed he would not, he was telling the very person he vowed he would not tell, and Jet was listening with a bowed head, not interrupting for once. Serious illness, death, the exigencies of love: only for these would Jet remain silent, respectful.
The Tattooed Girl Page 11