The Ghost of Hannah Mendes

by Naomi Ragen

  She looked down listlessly at the brochures offering sensible advice and numerous useful phone numbers to London’s most fragile inhabitants, all the while waiting for the door to open again so she could make sure the vision wasn’t a mirage.

  The next patient, who looked like a sixteen-year-old who had been married for twenty years, was cradling a baby and had a two-year-old clinging with awesome tenacity to her milk-stained sari. But as hard as the mother pulled, and as vociferously as she insisted, the terrified child would simply not budge.

  “Problem?” The doctor leaned against the door frame, his upperclass elegance incongruously framed by its peeling, chipped wood. He looked at the mother and child with slanting blue eyes full of gently amused concern. Then he crouched, holding out large, beckoning hands to the child, whose fright had already mellowed into uncertainty. The doctor was saying something in low, coaxing tones, his face all the while serious and respectful. The child suddenly smiled. Magically, Suzanne watched him take small, but eager steps forward, finally placing his hand in the doctor’s.

  She found herself staring, mesmerized by the sight of the long white fingers wrapped around the small brown ones. And when the door closed behind them, she had a strange sense of emptiness and loss, as if she’d been somehow shut out.

  “So that’s the Baron?”

  “Who?” Regina murmured, still sifting through the papers.

  “Your Dr. Gabriel. Is he young, blond?” Suzanne finally asked, point-blank.

  Regina grinned knowingly. “Love at first sight, eh? Well, my dear. Take a number. Around here, we queue up for that, as well,” she said, laughing.

  Suzanne did something she hadn’t done since Gran had caught her with a naked stranger in her bed. She blushed.

  She said her good-byes soon after, curiously disturbed and eager to be alone. Outside, she noticed a red Alfa-Romeo convertible with a sign in the window: PHYSICIAN ON DUTY.

  She went straight back to the hotel, where she roamed aimlessly around her room, fingering the wallpaper and twirling her silver bracelet around her wrist. She paused in front of the mirror, staring. My eyes are desolate, she thought, frightened, getting into bed and hugging herself long and hard against an almost unendurable ache of loneliness.

  Lost, she thought, picking up the phone and dialing Paris.

  “Thierry, bonsoir! C’est moi. Suzanne. Ça va…? Moi? Bien, bien!” she said, trying to muster a little sincere enthusiasm. “A Londre en famille.” She got tired of the French. “Have you seen Renaldo lately? Really, how is he?…Good, good.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “What’s he teaching?…Ah, Impressionists. He’ll be in Paris, then, all summer…. Brazil? To see his children? Are you sure?…Oh, not definite…. No, no reason, I just wondered. If you see him…no. Nothing. Give Artur, Sylvan, and Cecilia my love. Tell them to call me? Here’s the number.” She read it to him quickly. “I’ll be here a few days at least, and then, I don’t know…. Thanks, Thierry. Au revoir, chéri.”

  She put the receiver down and held her face in her hands, squeezing the temples. Lost, she thought. Lost, lost, lost.

  She laid down and pulled the covers over her head, trying hard to picture Renaldo’s large, dark head, his unruly hair, and deep, laughing eyes. But the picture wouldn’t hold still. It kept getting displaced by long, thick, blond hair and gentle, white hands that beckoned with the promise of kindness.

  18

  They turned down The Strand, a busy London street lined with stores selling computers and cellular phones. Set back, and almost as removed in time as it was in space, was the Savoy hotel.

  A doorman in a gold-braided uniform opened the doors and tipped his cap. Inside, one expected to see Winston Churchill, or to hear a radio announcing the latest news from the front. Time seemed simply to have stopped in 1940.

  Overstuffed sofas and mahogany bookcases filled with leather-bound books framed a warming fireplace with blazing logs. Elsewhere, ladylike chairs clustered around small tea tables spread with pink-linen tablecloths and fresh flowers. In the center of the room was a white, trellised gazebo surrounded by baskets of fresh flowers.

  “Wow!” Francesca whistled.

  “Wait,” Catherine smiled.

  The restaurant was at the far end of the lobby, set off by etched glass. It was almost dark, lit by flickering pink candles and a few wall sconces that bathed the room in a delicate, almost magical light. Pink-marble columns with gilded capitals divided the room, and gracefully draped mauve-satin curtains framed the windows. In the far corner stood a small silver gazebo beneath which a band played swing music.

  But the true beauty of the room was the stretch of windows overlooking the Thames. The lights of the National Theatre and Royal Festival Hall danced over the calm waters, joining the wall sconces and candles to bathe the large silver dessert carts and the enormous silver chafing dishes in a soft, charming glow.

  “There used to be a terrace,” Catherine said, suddenly remembering. “On a summer evening, you could sit outside and watch the boats along the Thames. There were fewer lights then—just Waterloo Station and the docks.”

  “But otherwise, is it really the same as you remember, Gran?” Francesca marveled, eying a slender woman in a backless black evening gown, wishing she had one just like it.

  Catherine nodded. “The most romantic place in the world. A perfect setting to talk about the memoirs.” She turned to them, her face suffused in a lovely, joyous glow. “Have you read it?”

  “Couldn’t put it down! It was…mesmerizing,” Francesca said, her eyes wide. “She seemed so near, somehow. Her problems, her attitudes. And what a love story! Fabulous!”

  A short, distinguished waiter with graying hair seated them immediately.

  “I’m glad.” Catherine nodded, very pleased. “What about you, Suzanne?”

  Suzanne picked up a fork and tapped it lightly, first the handle, then the prongs, in an irritable rhythm. She was wondering if she should be nice and lie, or tell the truth and get into enormous trouble. The former, probably. But, somehow, she couldn’t muster the necessary energy. She hadn’t read it and had only the slightest curiosity about what someone five hundred years dead had to say.

  Humanity was entering a new stage. The old ways of thinking were dismal failures. Just look at the world! All the old mechanisms that had separated people for so long had to break down. The answer was to cast off our failed history, the useless traditions that weighed us down, preventing us from coming together to ensure our survival on the planet….

  She looked around the room. After spending the afternoon listening to the problems of single mothers and new immigrants, crushed by Britain’s antediluvian class system, such a place made her want to sock someone in the mouth.

  “You know what’s the matter with this place?” she said, ignoring the question. “It hasn’t changed, but the world sure has. This is a dinosaur. I mean, evening gowns? And the prices. You could feed a family of five for two weeks.” She shook her head, staring at the menu.

  “A dinosaur,” Catherine repeated. “That’s what anything preserved out of the past is to you, isn’t it? Some useless old fossil to be buried, or used for fertilizer? I suppose it would be better if they’d renovated the hotel with the times. We could all be eating fast food out of Styrofoam containers, standing up by Formica counters, for the cost of a McDonald’s burger.”

  “Gran, really. I just meant…what has all this got to do with me?”

  “That’s really how you feel about the manuscript, too, isn’t it?” Catherine asked evenly.

  “In a way,” Suzanne answered defiantly.

  Catherine felt the waves of a monster headache begin at the back of her head. It was all such a farce, she thought hopelessly, just as she’d secretly feared it would be.

  “‘What does it have to do with me? Me, me, ME?’” Catherine mimicked in a rising crescendo of indignation. “That’s all you ever hear nowadays! Women living alone because they can’t find the perfect man for ‘me
’; married women refusing to put aside the ‘me’ for even a little while to care for others. Men out grabbing whatever’s dangling from the branches of Eden, no questions asked and anyone else but ‘me’ be damned!”

  “Look, Gran, I didn’t mean to upset…” Suzanne began contritely, startled by her anger.

  “No, let me finish! A generation of the damned, you all are! Everybody out for themselves, because ‘me’ is the only thing that matters. You’ve all forgotten…”

  “Please, Gran, calm down,” Francesca begged, glaring at Suzanne.

  “Forgotten what?” Suzanne demanded, sick and tired of the whole thing.

  “That you’re a link. And a link cannot pick itself up and walk off.”

  “Shackles,” Suzanne muttered to herself.

  “Yes, shackles. But also a golden chain, a lifeline that’ll keep you from stumbling off the cliff and falling into the vat of sleaze that some people are calling their lives these days!”

  “Hmm. So let me get this straight: vats of sleaze, that’s what you automatically dive into when you break with family tradition. Interesting. Let’s take this to its logical conclusion,” Suzanne continued with mock reasonableness, tapping her chin mildly with the tip of her finger. “Let’s say you’re from a tribe of headhunters and you decide you don’t want to follow Granddad’s footsteps and decapitate your neighbors and feast on their livers…”

  “Be serious!” Catherine demanded.

  She shrugged helplessly. “I am serious, Gran.”

  The rising tones were gathering odd stares around the room, Catherine noticed, taking a deep, calming breath. “I was once at a lecture given at Cambridge. ‘Christianity and History,’ I think it was called. I have no idea why I went, except perhaps to keep your grandfather company. And there was this marvelous, articulate don—Butterfield was his name, I believe—standing there very calmly presenting his learned case. For some reason, what he said made a great impression upon me. He said that there were many things you could do with the past. You could sing songs about it, or tell tales. And there were some people, like the Germans, who romanticized it until it became a national disease, and a terminal one at that. But what every person had to do, he insisted, was have an attitude toward it. He said, ‘You’ve got to examine your past and make a decision. Because it’s going to affect how you see the world, and your place in it.’”

  She felt hot tears sting her eyes as she looked at both her granddaughters. “And I’m telling you both,” she said fiercely, “that when you look at your history you’re going to be glad and proud. And if you’ve got any heart or intelligence, you’re going to want to do exactly what Gracia did—pass it on to those who’ll come after. She understood what I just recently learned, that it’s really the only way to protect them.”

  “Protect them from what, Gran?” Francesca asked, intrigued.

  “From the bottomless pettiness of an unattached and unexamined life! From waking up one morning and finding you’re seventy-odd years old and there’s nothing! Nothing in your life worth having or preserving or passing on! That you might as well not have been here at all,” she whispered, swallowing hard. “My two beautiful, precious grandchildren…. How can I make you understand before it’s too late? You think your life is your own, that you’re free to do anything, think anything you please, unconnected to what came before and what will come after. And you believe that it is a good thing, a wonderful thing, that freedom.

  “It isn’t. It’s a terrible illusion, the temptation to completely waste your life. Because if you’re not connected, your life is a fragment: a bit of cloth, a random page torn out of the middle of a book, useless, meaningless. We’re meant to be connected! We’re conduits. The past is supposed to pass through us, to connect us to the future.

  “Like trees,” she murmured, her mind suddenly focusing, her hands clasped hard in her lap. “We’re planted in old soil enriched by the lives and deaths of so many who came before us. The nourishment is meant to flow through us, on to the newest branches, so that every branch grows a little taller, and blooms more beautifully still. If you refuse to understand that, if you act as if the world began the day you were born and will end the day you die, then the branches wither, the tree dies….”

  She leaned back in her chair in utter exhaustion, closing her eyes.

  “Do you want to go lie down?” Suzanne suggested gently, wanting nothing more than to climb back into bed herself. She, too, felt suddenly exhausted. Nothing had been said that she hadn’t heard a million times, yet, nevertheless, she felt a particular anguish. It was the fright in her grandmother’s tired, almost desperate voice; the wretchedness in her fiercely loving eyes.

  I love her, she understood with sudden clarity.

  And she really is dying.

  Catherine opened her eyes and leaned forward with a brave, but weary, smile. “I don’t think bed rest is actually necessary right at the moment. But an aspirin would be helpful.” She reached into her purse and took out a vial of pills, popping several in her mouth and swallowing them with ice water. The thunderous crashing at the nape of her neck subsided into the lap of water at the river’s edge.

  Francesca cocked her head and rested it nervously on her fingertips. Those were no aspirins. Anyone could see that. And Gran suddenly looked terrible, the pink blusher almost comical on her floury-white cheeks.

  “I’m sorry I got so upset. I suppose you’re right, Suzanne. This place is rather an extravagance. But I’d wanted this to be such a memorable occasion. A celebration.” Catherine smiled ruefully, looking around the warm, glowing room. “And it had to be here. You see, this is such a special place for me. The place I fell in love.”

  The girls looked at her, startled.

  “There,” Catherine said, pointing across the room at a table near the windows. “Right there. That’s where he was sitting the first time I saw him.”

  “Saw who?” Suzanne asked.

  “Why, Carl, of course.”

  She didn’t say “Grandpa Carl,” they thought, surprised and oddly disturbed.

  But it wasn’t their elderly, beloved grandfather Catherine was seeing as she stared across the room. It was a young RAF pilot, impossibly handsome, full of dash and charm, whose slanting black eyes peered at her with mesmerizing intensity from his lean, dark face. He smiled at her, and waved his jaunty wave. Her face lit up and she almost waved back when the vision suddenly vanished. She felt her skin rise in small, cold bumps.

  “Were you here alone?” Francesca asked, trying to picture it.

  “No.” Catherine passed her palm over her welling eyes, baptizing the vision now lost to her. “I was here with my fiancé. It was three weeks before our wedding.”

  There was a stunned silence.

  “Do you mean to say you broke your engagement three weeks before your wedding and ran off with Grandpa instead?” Suzanne tittered with glee.

  “There is no reason to laugh!” Catherine frowned. “It was wildly romantic and—I would have to add if it all hadn’t worked out so well—impetuous and foolish. I was sitting here with Alex Serouya…”

  “What?” Francesca gasped.

  “But you just said that you were here with your fiancé. What does Alex Serouya have to do…?” Suzanne interjected. “Wait a second! You can’t mean that you and Alex Serouya—”

  “YOU WERE ONCE ENGAGED TO ALEX SEROUYA?!” Francesca exclaimed, choking on her wine.

  “Quiet, Francesca, manners, please!” Suzanne mocked, doing a perfect imitation of Francesca the Level-Headed.

  “Sorry.” Francesca gasped, trying to catch her breath.

  “Yes. Alex Serouya and I were once engaged to be married.” Catherine paused, the light in her eyes deepening. “We’d known each other since we were children. Our families were very close. It was always assumed that he and I would marry. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t love him. He was—is—a very intelligent, warm, kind-hearted person. And he loved me.” She looked down into her lap, where her
fingers were twisting a napkin into knots. “As I was saying, we were sitting here, Alex and I, discussing our wedding plans, our new home. I had his beautiful engagement ring on my finger—a family heirloom over two hundred years old, little rubies surrounding a perfect three-carat diamond—when I looked up and saw Carl.

  “He was sitting with my cousin Blanche on the terrace. It was summer. He was in uniform, the handsomest man I’d ever seen in my life,” she said dreamily, winding a lock of gray hair idly around her finger.

  The contrast between that gesture, so young and girlishly sweet, and the drooping, creased flesh of those aged arms made Suzanne want to weep. And she would have, were not the lecture on the joys of tradition and adherence to the hallowed past now coupled with her grandmother’s sudden admission of flagrant disregard for both not so deliciously amusing.

  Way to go, Gran! Seize the day! Suzanne thought, exhilarated. But could it be seized? Any more than you could seize a wave and prevent it from turning into mist? she wondered, studying her grandmother’s sagging chin.

  This, she realized, not death, was her deepest fear. This slow, irreversible decay where your young, vital self simply vanished irretrievably into tired layers of aging flesh….

  “I just can’t picture you doing it, Gran. Dumping a fiancé and running off with a stranger right before your wedding!” Francesca declared, unsettled.

  “I…uh…suppose one might put it that way,” Catherine admitted, squirming. And then, strangely, she giggled, her eyes sparkling. “I know it sounds shocking. How can I make you understand?”

  She closed her eyes.

  There was music, wasn’t there? Violins? No! That’s old movies. A pianist in a white evening gown. Chopin. An étude? And Alex’s warm hand cupped over hers. And then her eyes suddenly looking up as the music filled the room like sparkling Champagne.