The Ghost of Hannah Mendes

by Naomi Ragen

  She sat quietly, turning page after page holding the rich history of her family—births, deaths, and marriages, the golden boughs growing barer and barer with time. She stared at Suzanne and Francesca’s names. Two golden leaves left, she thought, and then—the dead, bare branch.

  She felt a chill, like a cold piece of steel, tap across her forehead.

  They were both in their twenties—beautiful girls—with a trail of broken relationships behind them. Suzanne considered herself a widow, even though she’d never been married. And Francesca had some mathematical formula for deciding exactly which kind of man she’d even deign to go out with. She suspected the right numbers did not often come up for Francesca. Catherine had no idea if there were any men in their lives now at all….

  In this obscene age, when middle-aged men cast off the wives of their youth because their breasts sagged; when men considered marriage only in their late thirties, and then to high-school seniors; when women began to consider marriage and children only after finishing graduate school, working, and taking a trip around the world…what were the chances of her granddaughters marrying at all? And even if they did, what were the chances of their staying married?

  And what could she do about any of it?

  Why was it old people weren’t respected in our society? she thought peevishly, remembering the hateful face of the cabbie. It was a surprising thing, wasn’t it? The wrinkles and the white hair were, after all, signs of having accumulated knowledge and experience distilled into precious wisdom and insights that should be sought after and valued. Some cultures did. She thought vaguely of the Chinese and Japanese…. But somehow the picture of a Japanese boy in a punk haircut and earrings she’d seen near Bloomingdale’s came to mind.

  The Japanese had their problems, too.

  What had Janice once told her and Carl soon after starting college? “Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experiences have been so partial and their lives have been such miserable failures…Old deeds for old people, new deeds for new.” It was from Thoreau, a text assigned to Janice in an enormously expensive college class at an enormously expensive university.

  Thoreau. She imagined with distaste the bearded, disheveled young philosopher in his dirty clothes as he sat writing those lines in his unheated shed by some stagnant pond full of dreadful mosquitoes. You handed over thousands and thousands of trust-fund dollars for tuition, room and board, clothes, books, travel—and then they quoted you Thoreau.

  She shook her head, thinking of Kenny Barren, second husband of her only daughter, driving his blue Porsche wearing English tweeds. He was a tall, blond Californian who’d grown up climbing pear trees in a little farming town in northern California where the biggest cultural event of the year had been the annual Pear Festival. His parents had once been farmers, good Methodists, who counted the Vikings among their forebears. After a brief fling in the theater, Kenny had finished his master’s in business at the University of California. He was now a bank vice-president in charge of personal finance.

  He was the kind of person who never missed an opening night at Lincoln Center or the Metropolitan Opera, but at home never listened to music and in his car had John Denver tapes. He was the kind of person who attended SoHo gallery openings whenever possible, but in Paris or Florence skipped the Musée D’Orsay and the Uffizi, preferring to shop for clothes or antiques instead. He was the kind of person for whom a family Bible would be as meaningful as a crèche in a department store window.

  Janice had met him right after her divorce from Craig Abraham, at one of those art-appreciation courses at N.Y.U. She’d run off with him to the Caribbean for three weeks, leaving Suzanne and Francesca with Catherine.

  There had been stormy, tearful, long-distance arguments that had ended with enormous phone bills and Janice’s threats to get married in Las Vegas. Finally, someone had found a Reform rabbi willing to perform the ceremony even if Kenny didn’t convert—which he had no intention of doing, and which Janice thought was stupid anyway, since both of them had no interest at all in (as Janice liked to call it) “mumbo-jumbo.”

  They’d been married—happily, as far as Catherine knew—for nearly fifteen years now.

  Mixed marriages, diminishing births, broken families…It wasn’t just her family. It was everyone’s.

  She thought of Carl and his three brothers, descendants of one of the most respected rabbis of the Sephardic Jewish community in Iraq, Rabbi Obadiah da Costa. One brother had died in World War II. A second had emigrated to South America and become fabulously wealthy in diamond mining. He’d married late—to a South American woman of Portuguese ancestry—and converted to Catholicism. They’d had one child, a daughter, who’d been killed in a freak waterskiing accident when she was only twenty-three. A third brother had wound up making films in Hollywood and never married. He was sixty-nine and living with a twenty-four-year-old starlet.

  She felt her heart contract as she closed the Bible, replacing it carefully. There was one other book kept in the safe. It, too, was a rare, old manuscript handed down through the generations. She picked up the pages, winey with age.

  Memorias de Doña Gracia Mendes

  Caminando de vìa en vìa

  Penando esta alma mìa

  esperando alguna alegrìa

  que el Dio me la de a mi

  She remembered her father’s finger tracing the words as she sat on his warm lap, his arms touching her shoulders as he translated: “‘From town to town I wandered, my soul suffering within. Yet I hope still for the joy that G-d will give me.’”

  “Who was she?” she’d asked him. Why had she suffered and where had she wandered? “It was the same Gracia as in the family Bible,” he’d said. “Your ancestor. Very beautiful and very brave. A heroine, in fact, who’d risked her life to save the lives of hundreds during the Inquisition. She’d lived like a queen in beautiful palaces in Lisbon, Antwerp, Venice, and Istanbul.”

  “Then why did she suffer?” she’d asked impatiently, looking into his smiling face. But he’d only continued smiling, shaking his head.

  “All we have are the first few pages. The rest of the story is lost.”

  “But what do they say, these pages?” she’d persisted, tugging at his tie and undoing the knot. “Do they say G-d granted her joy?”

  “They say that she has a secret, a secret weapon to protect her family.”

  “What’s the secret, Padre?”

  “I would love to know,” he’d told her, smoothing down her hair.

  She’d touched the manuscript, her childish finger tracing the flowery script, thinking, My hand touching her hand.

  Often, she’d dreamed of finding the rest of the manuscript hidden somewhere in the archives of some medieval library or on the shelves of a rare bookseller’s. She’d dreamed of learning the answers to her questions. And Carl had actually made several unsuccessful attempts to track down the missing pages. But then both of them had somehow lost interest.

  One thing was clear—Gracia’s weapon must have been potent. Despite the wars, the expulsions, the pogroms, the family had survived for hundreds of years, the tree flourishing, its branches thick with leaves. They’d managed to pass down the precious Bible, spice boxes, menorahs, etrog holders, silver candlesticks.

  She had never forgiven Janice for marrying out. Probably never would. But now, looking down at the precious, fragile parchment, she somehow felt she had no right to nurse any anger toward her daughter.

  After all, I raised her.

  And what has my family’s long history ever meant to me? How many arguments did I have with my own mother over outlandish, empty rituals?

  She remembered the bitter family fights just before her wedding, culminating in her refusal to immerse in the mikvah or to attend her mother-in-law’s traditional bogo de baño party that preceded immersion, or her mother’s cafe de baño party afterward, scandalizing them both.

  Carl had been more cooperative, enduring the
salidura de boda, making wearying rounds with his friends from house to house, in deference to the tradition that insisted the groom was never to be left alone before the wedding, lest the demons from the north, jealous of his happiness, spring upon him unawares.

  Yet, I’ve always known who I was, where I came from, and to whom I owed my loyalty, she bristled, as if in an argument with a nasty and unreasonable foe. I’ve taken good care of every single one of the family’s precious heirlooms! Look, just look at what wonderful condition they’re in! I had the silver polished; I kept the books in climate-controlled cabinets, I kept the embroidered linens fresh and immaculate….

  The anger suddenly left her, replaced by a terrible emptiness as she thought of Janice and Kenny and her granddaughters ransacking her things after she was safely buried. Janice might behave herself at first, but eventually that husband of hers, with his bespoke suits and custom-made shirts, would simply unload the silver and the books at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. He’d no doubt use the spoils to buy more bright red canvases with handwriting and bits of old china or plastic bottles pasted all over them.

  She felt her whole body rise up in revulsion.

  I could leave them to a museum, she considered. She looked at the Renaissance display cabinet of rare, carved walnut that held the silver and gold heirlooms. For hundreds of years these items had been carefully used by some blood relative to sanctify the Sabbath, holidays, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and circumcision ceremonies. She imagined them in her grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s hands. And then she tried to imagine them mummified and lifeless inside glass cases surrounded by little typed-up informative notes, tended by indifferent guards in gray uniforms. With horror, she envisioned the dusty, long museum corridors filled with bored adults and rowdy children.

  For the first time since hearing the results of her tests, hot tears stung her eyes.

  She moved unsteadily across the room, settling herself once more before the fire and refilling her glass. The reflected firelight, blood red yet full of gold, lapped with an angry tongue against the cold glass.

  Suzanne had asked about the silver things once or twice when she was little. And Francesca had asked even more often, pointing curiously at the china closet and the bookcases, patiently sitting on Carl’s knees while he smoked his pipe. She distinctly remembered Carl telling them they must learn all about it when they were older. All about the family’s history…

  And do you remember what you told them?

  She fingered the cold, sharp grooves of the cut crystal. Yes, I remember.

  I told them not to touch.

  It doesn’t matter now, it’s the past! There was always the future. Each one of her granddaughters might eventually have a child. She tried to envision her great-grandchildren: pale, chubby replicas of Janice who would whine their way through F.A.O. Schwarz as toddlers, watch television through to adolescence, and then proceed to think about sex and money the rest of their lives.

  It was terrible, terrible, she thought, not sure if she meant the vision itself or the meanness of spirit that had conjured it. Maybe they will be perfectly darling! she cried out silently. Intelligent, polite, serious. The kind of people who cherish family heirlooms and family histories; who read family Bibles with pride, and found societies….

  She walked into the living room and peered through the glass at the lovely, priceless keepsakes. The problem was, it would be too late. The shelves behind the glass doors would be emptied long before her great-grandchildren had a chance to be curious, no matter what she wrote in her will. They would never see the magical, shimmering gold tree thick with leaves, or their place on it.

  IT ISN’T MY FAULT THAT THERE IS NO ONE TO LEAVE THEM TO!! I MARRIED, I HAD A CHILD. I DID MY BEST!!

  She threw back her head and drained the glass, completing her thorough disregard of Dr. Emil Weinsweig, Jr.’s careful orders.

  A drowsiness born of exhaustion and a certain deep melancholy washed over her. She felt her eyelids droop and the crystal glass grow suddenly unbearably heavy in her hand.

  A wind, like a gust from a door left rudely open in winter, chilled her hands and shoulders like falling ice.

  “Freezing,” she muttered, pulling her shawl more tightly around her. “Carlotta, there’s a window or a door open,” she protested to her unseen housekeeper.

  When she looked up, a woman stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a magnificent gown of russet, black, and cream brocade with an elaborate design that resembled paisley, but was far more imaginative and bold. A thick gold braid covered her shoulders on either side of her long white neck, and a matching gold hairnet restrained her thick, curly, reddish-brown hair. She wore enormous drop-pearl earrings and two strands of the largest pearls Catherine had ever seen.

  She stared at the woman, speechless. The woman stared back. She had a broad, clear forehead; a graceful, almost Roman, nose; and a sweet, small chin. Her eyes, large and dark, looked out from half-closed lids with curiosity and a profound sadness.

  “How did you get in? Are you one of Carlotta’s relatives?” Catherine finally asked her.

  “My feet are very cold,” the woman replied, lifting her skirts and sitting down in the second easy chair before the fire. She wore delicate slippers embroidered in gold thread.

  “Well, if you insist on wearing those kinds of flimsy, useless shoes in this weather, I’m not surprised….”

  “Where I came from, it was lovely and warm.”

  “Have you come straight from Tijuana, then? Legally, I hope. Is the dress Mexican, too?”

  “I wear nothing. Your eyes deceive you.”

  “Who let you in? How did you get in?” Catherine repeated, with a faint stirring of fear.

  There was silence. The deep, dark eyes looked out at her, pityingly.

  “You did. You let me in.”

  “I don’t recall doing any such thing,” she said hotly, thoroughly frightened and defensive. “What is it you want?” she almost shouted.

  The head tilted, the eyes turned quizzical. “The question is: What is it you want?”

  “What I want? From you?”

  “You asked for something. I heard you clearly. I saw your tears…”

  She wiped her eyes, embarrassed. “I never cry.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “This is a dream, isn’t it? I’m dreaming. All that wine, and the painkillers…”

  “You have no reason to cry, you know. There is fate, and then there is destiny. It is foolish to cry over fate when you can plan and work toward changing destiny.”

  “Are you a dream, or are you real?”

  “Your tears are not for the unborn,” the woman continued, ignoring her. “They are for yourself. You thought your mother was a fool with her rituals, prayers, and incantations. And now you’re going to die, and you’re afraid. Your daughter, whom you think you don’t like, is just like you.”

  “Janice is nothing like me! Is that it? Did she send you? To check up on me?”

  “You could not have kept me away. Everything’s been squandered. Everything our lives were for…”

  “A bad, bad dream…” Catherine wept, covering her eyes. “I’m sorry, so sorry…It’s all too late. There is nothing I can do now. My life is almost over.”

  “No, Rivka. It isn’t.”

  Her mouth fell open. “Why did you call me that? Who told you that was my name?”

  Rivka. The name she’d been given in the synagogue the first Sabbath after she was born.

  “Tears are like little self-indulgent diamonds. We decorate ourselves with them to charm our way out of scandals and accidents. My sister was a great crier. I, on the other hand, cried only in secret, after I’d made my plans. There is always a secret way, a secret power, a plan that twists its way around enemies and obstacles.”

  Catherine wiped her face. “Do you have a plan? For me?” she suddenly asked.

  The woman nodded, as if that were exactly the point. “Here it is.”

  It
was an old map, as dark as calfskin, with elaborate cursive lettering. London. Toledo. Córdoba. The Bay of Biscay. Balearic Islands. Aix-la-Chapelle. Ragusa. Ferrara. Ancona. The Duchy of Naxos.

  “Where are these places?”

  “This is where we start. In London.”

  “Start?”

  “The journey.”

  “I am too old to travel. Too sick. Too tired.”

  “I thought that once. But my last journey was the best one of all.”

  “Was it?” Catherine looked up hopefully.

  “It was for me.” She nodded, the dark eyes shining, all sadness gone.

  “I can’t go,” she repeated.

  “You must. And you must take the others with you.”

  “The others?”

  “The young. Suzanne, Francesca.”

  “How do you know their names?”

  “They belong to me, too.”

  “They are too busy to take trips.”

  “All my life I traveled. I am still traveling…. You must make them, then. They have to get married. You have to help them find husbands.”

  Catherine snorted with startled laughter. “Match them up! Like Yentl in Fiddler?” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Dream or ghost, go away now! I’m a sick woman. I can’t have this! Carlotta!”

  “You’re afraid they won’t listen to you. That you have no power over them.”

  Catherine felt her heart freeze. She wrung her hands.

  “They will go. And at least one of them will find a husband, a good one. You will persuade them. You will hold your gold above their heads. Gold is a great persuader, I’ve always found.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s not like that. No one listens to parents or grandparents anymore. It’s too late.” She shrugged. “Their characters are set. A trip won’t solve anything. At best they’ll sightsee, buy some trinkets, and sip champagne with my money.”

  “A shroud has no pockets, Rivka.”