by Lily Tuck
Once Liliane is ten years old she travels alone to visit her grandmother in Ithaca during her school holidays. From Pennsylvania Station, she takes the Lehigh Valley Railroad overnight Black Diamond Express, so named because the original train service was conceived to haul anthracite and other coal from Athens, Pennsylvania, to North Fair Haven, New York, on Lake Ontario. Liliane’s Pullman sleeping car consists of two rows of double-decker berths that are enclosed for privacy by thick dark green curtains. She always chooses an upper berth and Wyngate, always the same porter, brings out a little ladder he affixes to a rung at the bottom of the berth for Liliane to climb up. Once inside, Liliane half undresses and puts her toiletries and her book, a Nancy Drew mystery, in the little string basket that hangs from the wall; the reading light is right over her head and, on the train, she looks forward to reading for as long as she likes. As soon as the train leaves Pennsylvania Station, she carefully unwraps the pack of Life Savers her mother has given her for the journey and sucks on one—lemon, her favorite—at the same time that she listens for Wyngate to walk down the corridor of the sleeping car. When, at last, she hears him, Liliane sticks her arm through the curtains and holds out the pack of Life Savers for him to take one and he does.
Always, too, in the morning, Wyngate accompanies Liliane to the dining car and finds her a seat at a table. On one of her trips a heavyset man wearing thick black-rimmed glasses and reading a magazine sits across from her. The magazine has a picture of two butterflies on the cover and is French: Annales de la Société Entomologique de France. Putting down the magazine, the man smiles at Liliane.
“I recommend the scrambled eggs,” he tells her.
After Liliane has ordered breakfast, he asks her how old she is, what grade she is in, and what she studies in school.
He speaks with an accent that Liliane cannot place.
Then he asks, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A writer,” Liliane answers.
“How interesting.” Again the man smiles at Liliane. “I’m a writer. I tell you what,” the man continues, “I am going to write down my name and address on a piece of paper and when you are a little older and you have written something, you can send it to me.”
“I will, I promise,” Liliane says, pleased, as she takes the piece of paper the man hands her.
When Liliane gets off the train in Ithaca, her grandmother is waiting for her at the station.
“Did you have a good trip?” Emilie asks.
“Did you sleep on the train?”
“Have you had breakfast?”
When Liliane shows her grandmother the piece of paper with the name and address of the man she met on the train, her grandmother takes the piece of paper from Liliane and, without looking at it, rips it in half and throws it into a trash can.
In the Stewart Avenue apartment, Liliane sleeps on a fold-up bed in the same room as her grandmother. Emilie has strung two sheets on a line to divide the room and provide some privacy. The sheets are only partly effective. Through a crack, Liliane, who is pretending to already be asleep, can watch her grandmother undress. She watches as Emilie takes off her petticoat, her corset, her girdle—old-fashioned, faded pink garments that Liliane is not familiar with—and as, at the last moment, perhaps sensing that Liliane is watching her, Emilie slips her nightgown over her head without exposing any more bare flesh.
Liliane has no idea how old Emilie is. As far as Liliane is concerned, she could be any age—sixty, seventy. In fact, Emilie is nearly eighty. A plain-looking, opinionated, energetic woman, she grows an assortment of plants on her windowsills—she saves coffee grounds and eggshells to fertilize them—paints brilliant flowers in oils on shirt cardboards to save money, listens to a classical music station on the radio each afternoon, and insists, no matter what the weather, on walking several miles a day.
“It’s too cold, I’m tired, it’s boring,” Liliane tells her grandmother. She does not want to walk.
“I’ll tell you a story. You’ll see the time will go by quickly,” Emilie says, putting on her coat, her hat and gloves, and taking her cane, and Liliane has no choice but to follow her. As they start to cross the Stewart Avenue Bridge before heading up the steep hill toward Cayuga Heights, Liliane takes her grandmother’s arm and Emilie, as promised, begins to tell a story.
Emilie’s stories are all true.
“In 1848, my father, your great-grandfather, Rudolf Brach, left the village of Alzey where he was born and where he had always lived—”
“Alzey?” Liliane asks. “Where is that?”
“A small town in Germany, between the cities of Worms and Mainz, in the Rhine wine-growing district. But let me continue.
“—where he lived with his widowed mother and his younger sister—”
“What were their names?”
“Stop interrupting—my grandmother’s name was Rachel and her daughter’s name was Friederike.”
“And what happened to them?”
“Friederike married a professor in Heidelberg. She died young.”
“Did she have any children?”
“Yes, she had two sons, Friedrich and Rudolph.”
“What happened to them?”
Emilie is shaking her head. “So many questions. They were raised by their stepmother. Friedrich was a respected rabbi in Heidelberg. His daughter went to live in Scotland, in Glasgow; his son was killed in World War I.”
“What about Rudolph?”
Emilie stops for a moment on the bridge and leans heavily on her cane. Not looking at Liliane, she says, “Rudolph also lived in Heidelberg, he was a lawyer. He and his wife died in Auschwitz. His daughter and her husband died in Bergen-Belsen.”
The deck truss bridge suddenly feels insubstantial and, below, the falling water in the gorge sounds unusually loud and rushed. Peering down, Liliane briefly contemplates what it might be like to jump.
Emilie resumes walking and Liliane does not say anything.
“As I was saying,” Emilie says after a few minutes.
“When Rudolf Brach left his home to go to America, he traveled by Rhine paddle steamer first to Rotterdam, then on to Le Havre, where he boarded an American ship called the Mayflower—”
“The Mayflower?” Liliane frowns.
“A different Mayflower,” Emilie answers, smiling.
“How old was Rudolf Brach?”
“He was young. Nineteen.”
“The steward on board the ship was black. Except for the colored men Rudolf had seen at country fairs, who ate live chickens, feathers and all, the steward was the first black man Rudolf had ever seen up close—”
“Is this true? Or are you making this up?” Liliane asks.
“It’s quite true,” Emilie says. “I promise.”
“The steward was lazy and did not make up Rudolf’s bed or clean his cabin the way he was supposed to. The captain, too, got impatient and angry at the steward. He once threw a chair at him. The sailors were a motley and surly lot. In addition to the cargo, there were over two hundred people in steerage, mostly Germans—men, women, and young children. The voyage to New Orleans took forty days and during a lot of the time, Rudolf was seasick. To make matters worse, the food on board was terrible. The passengers had to live on salt pork, black potatoes, almonds, and raisins.”
Liliane makes a face.
“Once he arrived in New Orleans, Rudolf went ashore and, as luck would have it, the first person he ran into turned out to be his uncle, Joseph Hernsheim, who, with his wife and children, had settled there and whom Rudolf was going to meet. Joseph Hernsheim owned a ready-made clothing business—mostly cheap cotton goods. This uncle gave Rudolf fifty dollars, more money than Rudolf had ever held in his hand, and made him a partner. Then Rudolf set off for Mexico to sell his wares.”
“Did Rudolf speak Spanish?” Liliane asks.
/> She has a horror of speaking another language in America: of drawing attention to herself and of being labeled a foreigner. She wants to fit in or else disappear—vanish into thin air.
If her mother speaks to her in French in public, Liliane refuses to answer. When they first arrive in New York City, Irène and Liliane mistakenly climb on the Madison Avenue bus by the rear door—the way they board the bus in Paris. Catching sight of them, the bus driver stops the bus, gets out of his seat, walks back to where Irène and Liliane are standing, and, in front of the other passengers, he calls them cheaters, he calls them dishonest; then, he makes them get off the bus.
“Damn stupid foreigners,” the bus driver yells after them.
In school, her first year, until she can manage a perfect English sentence, Liliane does not once open her mouth to speak. She is in third grade and the class is studying the Egyptians—that much Liliane can tell because student drawings of pyramids, Egyptian gods and goddesses, and hieroglyphs are pasted on the walls of the classroom. The teacher, too, ignores her.
Liliane and Irène share a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in midtown with a Miss Beecroft. Miss Beecroft is a mystery. It is never clear what role Miss Beecroft plays in their lives or what her relationship to Irène is. Or how they met. Miss Beecroft is English and works in an office during the day and comes home in the evening. She is in her fifties, overweight, and a spinster. She and Liliane have supper together as Irène is often out. Liliane has no strong feelings of either like or dislike for Miss Beecroft. All she knows is that after Irène and Gaby get married, they never see Miss Beecroft again.
During that first year in New York, Irène works modeling coats for a fur company located downtown in the garment district. Since she does not have proper working papers or a green card, Irène is fortunate to have a job. Her employers, Lena and Niko, husband and wife, are of Russian descent and pride themselves on running a family business that has been in existence since 1910. Lena, jealous, is quick to chastise Irène if, after taking Liliane to school, she is late; Niko, on the other hand, adjusting a lapel as a pretext, fondles Irène’s breast. He also pays Irène in cash and lets her buy a mink coat at a discount.
Irène wears the mink coat when she goes to St. John’s, Newfoundland. She tells her employers that her visa for the United States has expired and she has to leave the country for a few days. The real reason she leaves is to get an abortion. She takes Liliane with her and they stay in a hotel. The only thing Irène tells Liliane is that she has to see a doctor and the doctor’s two teenage boys will look after her while Irène is gone. Liliane does not question what she is told. On the day of the abortion, the two teenage boys come to the hotel and take Liliane skating. The two boys look nearly identical; they both wear knitted caps pulled down tight over their foreheads. They are unrecognizable. Liliane has never skated before but she does not dare say anything. Instead of skating in a rink, they take her to skate on a river where the ice is thick, dark and uneven and where it is windy and cold. Without a word, the two boys each take Liliane by the hand and drag her along on the ice until it is time to go back to the hotel. Liliane vows that she will never go skating again.
Every week, on Sunday, Irène makes Liliane write a letter to her father in Rome.
Chèr Papa,
Aujourd’hui, j’ai—Today, I . . . is how she begins the letter, then pauses. She does not know what to tell him. Should she write how today she went to the park and swung by herself on the baby swings and how she saw a cute little brown-and-white dog and asked the owner if she could pet him—her, the dog was female—while Irène and Gaby sat on a bench talking to each other, not paying attention to her? Or should she write how she and Miss Beecroft had supper together (frankfurters and a baked potato again), and how, as a special treat, they listened to The Lone Ranger on the radio and how she did not understand what was happening and Miss Beecroft had to explain? Six Texas Rangers are ambushed by outlaws and the Lone Ranger, who is wounded, is the sole survivor. Tonto, the Apache Indian, finds him and when he recognizes that the Lone Ranger was the man who had once saved his life, he nurses him back to health. The two men dig six graves so that the outlaws will think there were no survivors. Among those killed by the outlaws is the Lone Ranger’s brother and the Lone Ranger cuts a piece of cloth from his brother’s black vest and, out of it, he makes a domino mask for his eyes to conceal his identity. He also vows to seek revenge for his brother’s killing. Even after the outlaws are brought to justice, the Lone Ranger and Tonto continue to fight evil.
Je t’embrasse, Liliane
She signs her name in cursive adding elaborate curlicues to the ls.
The following summer, Liliane is sent to camp. Camp Bueno is in New Hampshire. Before she leaves, Irène takes Liliane to a hairdresser who cuts her hair and gives her a permanent. For days after, every time Liliane catches sight of herself in a mirror or puts her hand up to touch her unfamiliar short frizzy hair, she cries.
“Short hair is more practical for camp,” Irène says to comfort Liliane. “And it will dry faster when you go swimming.”
“Also, it will grow,” Irène adds, touching her own long blonde hair.
Camp Bueno is on a lake and the lake is full of leeches. Each time Liliane swims in it, a leech attaches itself to one of her legs or to an arm—a dangling bloated brown worm.
“If you wait a few minutes, the leech will drop off by itself,” the camp counselor says.
Liliane shakes her head, she wants to scream.
“Okay then, I’ll try and remove it.”
The camp counselor pushes her fingernail under the leech’s sucker, slides the leech off, then flicks it away quickly.
“See,” she says, “that wasn’t so bad.”
“What if a leech gets up your nose or your ear or up your you-know-what?” Liliane asks the camp counselor.
“Then we take you to the hospital,” the camp counselor answers, grinning.
Besides swimming, Liliane canoes on the lake, plays tennis, takes archery but never hits the bull’s-eye, does some woodworking—she makes a box for her mother and paints a brown deer on the lid, little Rehlein—weaves pot holders, roasts marshmallows, and learns how to sing camp songs:
She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes,
She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes,
She’ll be drivin’ six white horses when she comes,
Who will be coming around the mountain? Who will be driving six white horses? Liliane wants to know.
She hates Camp Bueno.
At the end of August, Gaby drives up in his 1948 black Ford Deluxe convertible. The top is down and Irène is sitting next to him. She has spent the summer at a dude ranch in Reno, Nevada, getting a divorce from Rudy, Liliane’s father. She is wearing a red-and-white sleeveless striped dress Liliane has never seen before and she looks different—slimmer, tanner, blonder. When Irène catches sight of Liliane, she jumps out of the car and runs toward her.
“Ma chérie,” she calls out. “Ma petite chérie!
“I have wonderful news,” Irène says, kissing Liliane. “Gaby and I got married. We got married last week. I am so happy.
“Chérie,” Irène says again, putting her tan arms around Liliane, “you’ll see it will be fine. You’ll be happy and I know you will like Gaby. Already, I know he loves you.”
Liliane looks past Irène at Gaby. His back turned to her, he is pointing out a feature of his Ford Deluxe convertible to one of the camp counselors.
VI
Liliane never knew her two grandfathers. Waldermar, Louise’s husband, died of lung cancer in Innsbruck during the Second World War. The only things she knows about him is that he was a Prussian officer and a severe disciplinarian and what she once overheard Aunt Barbara ask Irène: “Do you remember the song Papi used to sing?” and what Irène replied in a high sharp voice, “Oh, p
lease, don’t remind me. It’s something I want to forget!”
Hoppe hoppe Reiter
wenn er fälit, dann schreit er,
fãlit er in den Teich,
find’t ihn keiner gleich.
Bumpety bump, rider
if he falls, then he cries out,
should he fall into the pond,
no one will find him soon.
As for Felix, Emilie’s husband, who died in 1911 long before Liliane was born—apart from knowing that his name in Latin means “happiness”—Liliane has been told that he was a well-known and much admired professor of comparative linguistics at Bonn University, where he studied the grammar, phonetics, and etymology of Greek and Roman languages. Felix was killed when he was only forty-five-years old, accidentally falling out of a moving train, leaving his widow with three small children and a modest pension to live on.
Emilie does not speak of Felix and Liliane does not like to ask. However, she cannot help but speculate about the accident, trying to imagine how or why it happened. Overlooked for a prestigious chair in his department, had Felix committed suicide? Or distracted by a faculty dispute over his research—the number of occurrences, for instance, per thousand lines of enclitics in Hesiod’s Hymns?—he lost his footing on the uneven metal couplings that join the cars? Or, and Liliane imagines a still more improbable scenario (in a photo Felix, dressed in a stiff shirt and high collar, looks stern and unapproachable), did an irate father—Felix was having an affair with a pupil, the man’s daughter—stalk Felix and, while blows were being exchanged, push him off the speeding train?
What happens to Emilie and her three children during the First World War? The only clue is a sepia photo of Emilie and several other women wearing nurses’ uniforms, standing among a group of German officers. No one is smiling and, staring straight at the camera, Emilie looks particularly severe. Liliane would like to imagine her grandmother as kind:
All night, instead of going home, Emilie sits by the bedside of a wounded soldier. He is seventeen years old and his Christian name is Ludwig—like Beethoven, she wants to tell him. From time to time, she puts a cold wet cloth to his face—to what is left of it. By morning, Emilie knows, Ludwig will be dead.