Our Lady of the Prairie

by Thisbe Nissen

  “Bernadette?” I turned to her. The orderly stood by, ready to take her down if she tried anything funny. “Bernadette,” I said again, “who is this?”

  She’d busied herself with something in a closet. “Who’s who?”

  “These girls in the photo.” I sounded like a Law & Order cop, or a Jew-hunting Nazi—or, perhaps more accurately, a Nazi-hunting Jew.

  “How should I know?” Bernadette shrugged, blithely unconcerned. “No one I recognize.”

  It’s a good thing there was a witness; I really might have throttled her. “Then why,” I seethed, “were you trying to burn it?”

  When she finally faced me, her features were hard, her stare as scornful as the little girl’s, but without her pitiable sadness. “Why keep a picture of people I don’t know?”

  I was past propriety. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  She gazed at me, blank and blameless, and gave another exaggerated shrug to show her marvel at my gall. “You’re the one who asked me to look for photographs.”

  “These girls are members of your family?” I tried once more: “Who are they?”

  She threw her hands in the air. “I haven’t the foggiest idea, Phillipa.” She pronounced my name like a disease. “I’ve told you, it’s not mine.” If the photo had ever been connected to her life, she divested herself of it entirely now, excised it, scalpeled it out like a frontal lobe.

  Bernadette packed her own going-away bag. The orderly fled, and I stood outside like a hallway monitor, my backside still too sore to sit for long. While I waited, fuming, I studied the half-charred photograph, the three little girls dolled up in white cotton smocks, christening gowns, maybe. Bernadette’s is the fussiest, more layered and encumbering than her sisters’—and there’s no way they’re anything but sisters. Posed for some kind of angelic, churchy something: three little Aryans. In my anger it all made sense: her dissembling about her past, her disdain for me. I decided right then: Bernadette Maakestad was a Nazi. Her accent wasn’t French but German. She’d been in hiding since the war. And wasn’t it just like Murphy to make sure her American-born son went and married a dirty Jew? Bernadette probably lived in fear of being ushered to the gallows at Nuremberg. I stood in the hall relishing news-flash visions of sensational headlines—IOWA JEWESS UNMASKS NAZI MOTHER-IN-LAW—until a movement at the end of the corridor startled me and I shoved the photograph into my bag as if I’d stolen it.

  Coming down the hall was Bernadette’s neighbor, Vivvy Rehak, here to collect her own belongings, in the care of her meathead frat-boy grandson. We said hello, and she invited me in to visit. The kid, reeking of stale beer, plopped onto a recliner and promptly fell asleep, so I helped Vivvy pack her things. When she asked me about the wedding, I found I liked the story: my daughter was married in a tornado. Now the newlyweds were off to see Europe by rail. They started in Paris, which may just be where they found the cheapest airfare, but is also where Michael and I took our honeymoon. We went because I was twenty-four and still fully in thrall to my Francophilic upbringing—a romance I admit is not quite over—and because it seemed to be the place where one was supposed to honeymoon, but once we’d seen the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame and strolled the Left Bank, Michael was bored, so we crossed the channel and spent the week in the London theater. We saw two shows a day if we could. Back then, there was no place Michael and I would rather be than in a dark theater, side by side. It’s been so long since that was the case I have difficulty conjuring the feeling now, but once upon a time—before it was a job and a contractual obligation, semester after semester after semester—the theater was my favorite place in the world.

  Sometimes I fear my life looks like a series of decisions that have only led me away from my vocation. I went to school, fell in love, got married, was offered a job, took it gratefully. We had a child, and she had troubles, and so job security, insurance, and flexible schedules became all the more important. Time passed, and there you have it: a life. I once passionately loved the theater; my rib cage grew fluttery just thinking of the next show, the immersion, the possibilities, a darkened cavern we could turn into anything. I hadn’t felt like that for years. Until Lucius.

  Bernadette took another two hours to pack; I should have expected as much after the ordeal of moving her out of Carpathia. Even if she hadn’t shunned help, the East Prairie staff wouldn’t exactly have fallen over themselves to offer assistance. Her first week there, Bernadette so inundated the front desk with requisitions and demands that an amendment was made to the nursing home charter limiting residents to two service calls a day. At number three they started charging a buck a call. Which might have discouraged Bernadette—the woman was thrifty, if nothing else—except that she simply walked down to complain in person and avoided the call charge. That’s when her room assignment precipitously changed, and she was relocated to an alcove as far from the front desk as they could put her, about which she complained incessantly.

  Bernadette permitted me to carry everything to the car like a porter. She held her own pocketbook, and something wrapped in a Sam’s Club bag, its corners poking through. I reached for it and she nearly hissed, clutching the parcel. “I’ll show you at home. Then maybe you’ll stop haranguing me with this family tree nonsense,” and I realized then what it was she held.

  My voice glutinous with sarcasm, I said, “Oh, Bernadette, your family album!” but she didn’t acknowledge my tone. I wonder if she was simply unable to register such modulations. Unless they were grossly exaggerated, I don’t imagine I’d be able to detect nuanced cadences or inflections that alter or subvert a word’s meaning in a language not my native tongue.

  As we pulled into the driveway at home, Bernadette seemed anxious to get inside and suggested we leave the unloading to Michael, who hadn’t yet returned. The ensuing scene I now present, burdened with limited commentary so as to preserve the drama in its naked bizarreness. Bernadette and I sit on the living room sofa so closely you might think we liked one another.

  The velveteen album cover, once burgundy, is worn to a blotched, dusty rose, dull as weathered canvas; the only soft velvet is a bit of fuzz at the edges of the tin title, ALBUM, tacked on in cheap, ornate Victorian script. The book nearly crumbles at the touch. Bernadette perches primly on the center sofa cushion, the decomposing album propped on her lavender wash-and-wear knees. Taking a deep breath, she lifts the cover; it clings to the spine by a fraying strip of tape. She lays it open, but suddenly slams it shut again and leaps to her feet, coughing with forced intensity. She sputters the start of ten different sentences before settling on “Excuse me” and resuming her seat. With a phlegmy ahem—that grandiose signifier of frog-in-throat—she clasps the album to begin anew, the first page clamped to the cover with her thumb.

  “Wait.” I point. “You’re skipping a page there.”

  She gives no reaction at first, then seems to make a decision and lifts her thumb. The book falls open. Her gaze remains fixed ahead; there’s something on the first page she does not want to see. I present that page here. (I scanned it later.) Mea maxima culpa. I’m a terrible person.

  I read the words nearest me—“Compliments of Hazel”—then lean over Bernadette to see the dedication: “Ida M. . . . Wombold? Hormbold? Bernadette, how do you pronounce . . . ?”

  Bernadette will not even glance down, only mutters some variation of whatever I’ve just said. Before I can ask who Hazel and Ida are, she’s turning the page with a huff of annoyance. There is but one version of this guided family tour Bernadette’s willing to give.

  BERNADETTE: There’s my mother.

  ME: She was very beautiful.

  BERNADETTE: Yes.

  ME: What was her name?

  BERNADETTE: Ida.

  ME: So this book belonged to your mother?

  BERNADETTE: Yes. My mother.

  ME: And what was her maiden name?

  BERNADETTE: Hormbold. Ida Hormbold.

  ME: Hormbold? That’s how you pronounce . . . ?

>   BERNADETTE: (No answer.)

  ME: Ida M. Hormbold. And the M . . . ?

  BERNADETTE: Her middle initial.

  ME: Right. Which stood for . . . ?

  BERNADETTE: Mary.

  ME: Ida Mary Hormbold.

  BERNADETTE: My mother. (She turns the page.) Here. As a young girl.

  ME: She certainly was very pretty.

  BERNADETTE: Yes.

  ME: You’re sure that’s her?

  BERNADETTE: (Flipping the page quickly.) Perhaps it’s me as a girl.

  ME: There’s the same Ida!

  BERNADETTE: Yes.

  ME: And, with her, that’s . . . ?

  BERNADETTE: My father.

  ME: He looks so much like your mother. They could be brother and sister.

  BERNADETTE: (Silence.)

  ME: Your father’s name was . . . ?

  BERNADETTE: Harmon.

  ME: And your maiden name, Bernadette . . . I’m forgetting . . . It’s . . . ?

  BERNADETTE: Harmon.

  ME: No, no, your maiden name—your last name before you married.

  BERNADETTE: Harmon.

  ME: Your father’s name was Harmon Harmon?

  BERNADETTE: Don’t be ridiculous. My father’s name was John. (She turns the page.) My mother . . . (She makes to turn again.)

  ME: (Trying to make her turn back to “Ida and John.”) Wait—that’s not the same person.

  BERNADETTE: (Keeping the book clamped open as it is.) Well, it must be Hazel. Always was hard to tell them apart.

  ME: Hazel? Hazel who gave the book to Ida?

  BERNADETTE: Twins.

  ME: Your mother was a twin? I didn’t realize there were twins in the family.

  BERNADETTE: Only two.

  ME: I see.

  BERNADETTE: Here I am. With my brother, John. He was killed in the war.

  ME: I didn’t know you lost both your brother and your husband in the war.

  BERNADETTE: (Flipping the page.) May they rest . . .

  BERNADETTE: So handsome.

  ME: Your father?

  BERNADETTE: My brother.

  ME: John? And that was your father’s name as well? And Michael’s father was Dave?

  BERNADETTE: (Moving on.) Such a beautiful towheaded child!

  ME: John?

  BERNADETTE: (Opens hands. Yes, John. Are you a moron?)

  ME: Then who’s that with him?

  BERNADETTE: Me.

  ME: But you were older than John in the last . . .

  BERNADETTE: (Flipping the page.) Well, I suppose that’s someone else, then. Here’s John with his puppy.

  ME: What was the puppy’s name?

  BERNADETTE: (Making a noise like a child’s imitation of a steam engine.)

  ME: Are you saying choo-choo? Like a train? Or shoe-shoe? (Pointing at my foot.) Or shoo-shoo? As in scat? scram? (Whisking out my hands.) Are you saying chou? Like Chou-chou? What is that, like, little cabbage?

  BERNADETTE: Yes, sure, probably . . . (Turns the page.) Me and John.

  BERNADETTE: (Turns the page.)

  ME: Whose family is that?

  BERNADETTE: Cousins . . . (Flipping quickly through a series of pages. All young men are “cousins killed in the war.” Babies “all look alike—who could tell them apart?” until, finally . . .) Me and John.

  ME: That is not the same boy who had the puppy back—

  BERNADETTE: I know my own brother, Phillipa. Rest his soul. (Turns the page.)

  ME: I suppose that’s also you and John, then?

  BERNADETTE: Oh, Phillipa, don’t be ridiculous. That’s Ida and Hazel.

  ME: I thought you said they were twins.

  BERNADETTE: They could have been, couldn’t they?

  AND WITH THAT, Bernadette slapped shut her album, wrestled it into the Sam’s Club bag, and stood. We’d been in the house ten minutes, max. I started to ask if I might copy down the relevant information, but didn’t get far. “I’ll write it up for you, dear.” Her tone made it clear that to insist would be to refuse her “generosity.” Press further and the “offer” would be rescinded, the subject placed off-limits evermore. Album clutched to her bosom, Bernadette got as far as the basement door and turned. “A stop at the market on the way home might have been nice.”

  My propriety was gone. “Bernadette, why exactly do you have a foreign accent?”

  Her reply issued forth with such calm disinterest you’d think this question got posed to her every day. “Well, from my father. You know he came over from France.”

  You know? How would I know anything? But I wondered if Ginny knew of this supposed French ancestry . . . Were she and Silas honeymooning in Grandma Ma’s homeland? Or was Bernadette copping to France because France was on our minds? If Ginny and Silas went on honeymoon to Australia, would Bernadette have claimed she descended from wallaby wranglers?

  She continued, then, unprompted: “Since my mother was deaf, it’s my father’s voice we imitated, you know, learning to speak.”

  “Your mother was deaf?”

  “Of course.” Her face was a cipher of absolute boredom. “Runs in the family,” she said. “I’m lucky to have my ears at all. My mother—stone deaf before she was thirty, rest her soul.”

  When Michael returned that evening—five hundred miles the worse for wear, smelling of burnt coffee and restroom air freshener—he was reserved and cold. I knew how things probably looked to his eyes: I’d done what he asked to get through the wedding—submitted to spanking and sex, to gentleness and intimacy—and now that it was over, I’d absented myself, left him, again.

  Perfunctorily, he asked, “How was East Prairie?” Then he poured a scotch and sank into a chair as far from the couch where I sat as he could get.

  I craved, indecorously, to tell him how his mother—his French mother—had nearly burned down the nursing home, but just said, “We got it done.” He wasn’t really listening. When the silence got oppressive, I said, “Then, back here, she showed me her family album.”

  Tired, exasperated, and in no mood, Michael said, “Family album?”

  I nodded. “Old photos. Her and her brother. Her mother and aunt as children. Her mother and father . . .” I tried to express my skepticism without sounding like that’s what I was doing. Michael’s face was disconcertingly unreadable. When he nodded absently and began glancing through the mail, was he attempting to conceal the fact that I’d just told him more than he’d ever known of his mother’s family? How could he possibly have been uninterested? I kept thinking about the dedication, the elaborate fountain pen flourishes: December 25th. A Christmas present from Hazel to Ida, 1899. I’d always had the impression that Bernadette was young—maybe twenty—in 1945 when she had Michael, which would put her own birth around ’25. The handwriting on that dedication page was not a child’s penmanship, and whether Hazel and Ida were twins or not, even if they’d been teenagers in 1899, that would still have Ida giving birth to Bernadette when she was past forty. Which was possible, I suppose, though I think it’s more likely that Bernadette’s mother wasn’t yet born in 1899, or was only a baby. Maybe Hazel and Ida weren’t twins, and the gift was made to an infant Ida . . . ? But in the photos Hazel isn’t much older than Ida—a bit young to have mastered the art of calligraphy, no? Nothing added up. I thought about the clothes in those photographs, wondering what Lucius might know of historical fashion. The flouncy bow tie on Bernadette’s “brother” “John”? Was it the 1930s or ’40s? It all felt wrong. I wanted—and with, I’ll admit, an unseemly drive—to get another look at the album. Perhaps this is how strange obsessions are born: the semiconscious avoidance of problematic circumstances in one’s own life leads to a sudden overwhelming compulsion to work puzzles whose solution is (a) unlikely and (b) decidedly unimperative.

  Across the room, Michael had fallen asleep in his chair. He didn’t snore, just breathed deeply, head lolling on his chest. I went over, placed a hand on his arm. “Michael.” He woke smoothly—not the startling type, my husban
d—and gave a soft hmm, as if to express agreement. I started to say, Come to bed, but come implied with me, so I said, “Michael, before you get a crick in your neck . . .” He collected himself obediently and rose from the chair, then went upstairs, closing our bedroom door behind him. After the instant sting, I felt relieved.

  Under Ginny’s old duvet I huddled to the telephone receiver the way Ginny might have as a teenager, if there’d been anyone to whom she confided over the phone, late at night, the way teenagers should. There was Linda, later, but Linda’s no big talker. Their friendship began in the hospital, and continued in support groups until they went their separate therapeutic ways, Ginny to shock, and then Silas, Linda to NA and to Randall’s sponsorship. Now they did normal things together, like have coffee, or go for a walk, see a movie. But Ginny didn’t do those things as a teenager; she was too busy starving, or snorting, or fucking random methheads. That she’s free of horrific consequences—brain damage, organ damage, incurable STDs—is just stupid, dumb, blind luck. And grateful as I am, I do mourn the adolescence she missed out on, the way I imagine soldiers’ mothers mourn their children’s missing limbs. It’s a pain I keep to myself.