She turned back to Alfred. What had happened? The day had grown cold; she saw the sun set through the trees, dazzling her vision. “I’ve got to go home,” she said. “I’ll be late for dinner.”
“Oh. I hope I have not bored you terribly. I don’t get much of a chance to talk.”
“No,” she said. “Oh, no.”
She hurried down the path, shivering in the first real cold of the year. Once she looked back but Alfred had vanished among the shadows of the trees and the carousel.
Her parents and Joey were already eating dinner when she got home. “Where do you go on Fridays?” her mother said as she sat down. “Doesn’t Laura have her Girl Scout meeting today?”
“I don’t go anywhere,” Alison said.
“You know you’re not supposed to be late for dinner. And what about your homework?”
“Come on, Mom—it’s Friday.”
“That’s right, it’s Friday. Remember how long it took you to do your math homework last week? If you start now you’ll have it done on time.”
“We didn’t get very much. I can do the whole thing on Sunday.”
“Can you? I want to see it after dinner.”
Her father looked at her mother. Sometimes Alison thought her father might be on her side in the frequent arguments she had with her mother, but that he didn’t feel he had the right to interrupt. Now he laughed and said to her mother, “What would you know about math homework? You told me you didn’t understand anything past addition and subtraction.”
“Well, then, you look at it,” her mother said. “I want to make sure she gets it done this time. And maybe you can ask her where she goes after school. I don’t think she’s telling me the truth.”
Alison looked down at her plate. What did her mother know? Sometimes she made shrewd guesses based on no evidence at all. She said nothing.
“Mrs. Smith says she saw you talking to an old man in the park,” her mother said.
Alison didn’t look up. Didn’t Mrs. Smith have anything better to do than spy on everyone in the neighborhood?
“When I was your age I knew enough not to talk to strangers,” her mother said. “The Gestapo came after my father—did I ever tell you that?”
Alison nodded miserably. She didn’t want to hear the story again.
“They came to our house in Germany and asked for my father,” her mother said. “I was twelve or thirteen then, just about your age. This was before they started sending Jews to the camps without a reason, and someone had overheard my father say something treasonous about Hitler. My mother said my father wasn’t home.
“But he was home—he was up in the attic, hiding. What do you think would have happened if I’d talked to the Gestapo the way you talk to this man in the park? If I’d said, ‘Oh, yes, Officer, he’s up in the attic’? I was only twelve and I knew enough not to say anything. You kids are so stupid, so pampered, living here.”
It wasn’t the same thing, Alison thought, realizing it for the first time. Germany and the United States weren’t the same countries. And Alfred had been in the camps too; he and her mother were on the same side. But she felt the weight of her mother’s experience and couldn’t say anything. Her mother had seen so much more than she had, after all.
“We escaped to Holland, stayed with relatives,” her mother said. “And eight years later the Nazis invaded Holland and took us to concentration camps. My father worked for a while as an electrician, but finally he died of typhus. All of that, and he died anyway.”
Her mother’s voice held the bitterness Alison had heard all her life. Now she sighed and shook her head. Alison wanted to do something for her, to make everything all right. But what could she do, after all? She was only twelve.
She took the bus back to the park the next day. Alfred sat on his usual bench, his eyes closed and turned toward the sun. She dropped down on the bench next to him.
“Tell me a story,” she said.
He opened his eyes slowly, as if uncertain where he was. Then he smiled. “You look sad,” he said. “Did something happen?”
“Yeah. My mother doesn’t want me to talk to you anymore.”
“Why not?”
This was tricky. She couldn’t say that her mother had compared him to the Gestapo. She couldn’t talk about the camps at all with him; she never wanted to hear that note of bitterness and defeat come into his voice. Alfred was hers, her escape from the fears and sadness she had lived with all her life. He had nothing to do with what went on between Alison and her mother.
He was looking at her with curiosity and concern now, expecting her to say something. “It’s not you. She doesn’t trust most people,” Alison said.
“Do you know why?”
“Yeah.” His eyes were deep brown, she noticed, like hers, like her mother’s. Why not tell him, after all? “She—she has a number on her arm. Like yours.”
He nodded.
“And she—well, she went through a bad time, I guess.” It felt strange to think of her mother as a kid. “She said last night the Gestapo came after her father when she was my age. She said he had to hide in the attic.”
To her surprise Alfred started to nod. “I bet it was crowded in that attic too. Boxes and boxes of junk—I bet they never threw anything away. Probably hot too. But then who knew that someday someone would have to hide in it?”
At first his words made no sense whatsoever. Then she said, slowly, “You’re him, aren’t you? You’re her father. My—my grandfather.” The unfamiliar word felt strange on her tongue.
“What?” He seemed to rouse himself. “Your grandfather? I’m a crazy old man you met in the park.”
“She said he died. You died. You’re a ghost.” She was whispering now. Chills kept coming up her spine, wave after wave of them. The sun looked cold and very far away.
He laughed. “A ghost? Is that what you think I am?”
She nodded reluctantly, not at all certain now.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re right about your mother—she went through a bad time. And it’s hard for her to understand you, to understand what you’re going through. Sometimes she’s jealous of you.”
“Jealous?”
“Sure, jealous. You never had to distrust people, or hide from them. You never went hungry, or saw anyone you loved killed. She thinks it’s easy for you—she doesn’t understand that you have problems too.”
“She called me stupid. She said I would have talked to the Gestapo, would have told them where my father was. But I never would have done that.”
“No. It was unfair of her to say that. She wants you to think of the world the way she does, as an unsafe place. But you have to make up your own mind about what the world is like.”
She was nodding even before he had finished. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I thought, only I couldn’t say it. Because she’s been through so much more than I have, so everything she thinks seems so important. I couldn’t tell her that what happens to me is important too.”
“No, and you might never be able to tell her. But you’ll know it, and I’ll know it too.”
“What was your father’s name?” Alison asked her mother that night at dinner. Joey stopped eating and gave her a pleading look; he was old enough to know that she was taking the conversation in a dangerous direction.
“Alfred,” her mother said. “Why do you ask?”
There were probably a lot of old men named Alfred running around. Did she only think he was her grandfather because she wanted what Laura had, wanted someone to tell her family stories, to connect her with her past?
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, trying to keep her voice casual. “I was wondering about him, that’s all. Do you have a picture of him?”
“What do you think—we were allowed to take photographs with us to the camps?” The bitterness was back in her mother’s voice. “We lost everything.”
“Well, what did he look like?”
“He was—I don’t know. A thin man, with black
hair. He brushed it back, I remember that.”
“Did he wear glasses?”
Her mother looked up at that. “Yah, he did. How did you know?”
“Oh, you know,” Alison said quickly. “Laura’s grandfather has glasses, so I thought.… What did he do?”
“I named you after him,” her mother said. “I wanted a name that started with A.” To Alison’s great astonishment, she began to laugh. “He told that story about the attic all the time, when we lived in Holland. How crowded it was. He said my mother never threw anything away.” She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes. “He made it sound like the funniest thing that ever happened to him.”
Alison walked slowly through the park. It was Sunday, and dozens of families had come out for the last warmth of the year, throwing frisbees, barbecuing hamburgers in the fire pits. Joey held her hand tightly, afraid to let go.
She began to hurry, pushing her way through the crowds. Had she scared Alfred off by guessing his secret? She knew what he was now. He had drifted the way Laura’s grandfather sometimes drifted, had forgotten his own time and had slipped somehow into hers. Or maybe this was the one wish the angel had granted him, the wish he hadn’t known he wanted. However it had happened, he had come to her, singled her out. She had a grandfather after all.
But what if she was wrong? What if he was just a lonely old man who needed someone to talk to?
There he was, up ahead. She ran toward him. “Hey,” Joey said anxiously. “Hey, wait a minute.”
“Hi,” Alison said to the old man, a little breathless. “I’ve decided to tell you my name. My name’s Alison, and I was named after my grandfather Alfred. And this is my brother Joey. Joey’s afraid of things. I thought you might talk to him.”
AFTERWORD
“Alfred” is in some ways sheer wish fulfillment. My grandfather’s name was Alfred, and he looked like the man in the story; he escaped from Germany to Holland with his family, my grandmother and my father. He was a mechanic, though he didn’t have the glamorous profession I gave him here. I find, reading the story over, that I even made the character who stands in for me a year younger than I am, though that was mainly to get in the reference to John Lennon glasses.
The pocket watch was my grandfather’s and is now mine, the only thing I have of his. It sat on my desk while I wrote the story.
In another sense, of course, “Alfred” is not wish fulfillment at all. It’s about the healing power of history and family and imagination.
CASSANDRA’S PHOTOGRAPHS
“The best car to smuggle reptiles in is a Subaru station wagon,” Aurora said at the wheel of the car. “Because it’s got four-wheel drive, and great brights so you can see them on the road at night, and because the panels come out easy. So you can hide the snakes and stuff behind them. I’m gonna get one when I can afford it.”
I was sitting in the back seat of the car (which was, unfortunately for Aurora, only an old VW squareback) wondering how things had progressed this far. We had been on our way to get burgers when Aurora decided that, since it was such a nice summer day and everything, we should go down to Mexico and see if we could find some snakes to round out Aurora’s collection. After all, she said, it was only a few hundred miles away. So we made a stop at the corner J.C. Penney’s to buy pillowcases to put the snakes in, and headed out on Highway 5 to Baja California.
Cassie, Aurora’s sister, was sitting up front next to Aurora. Cassie was the reason I was on this trip in the first place. I had noticed her the minute she walked into my class in beginning calculus at the college. Everyone says you shouldn’t date your students, and everyone is probably right, but within a month we were going out two or three times a week. And since I was just the teaching assistant, and not responsible for grades, we had nothing to quarrel about at the end of the semester when Cassie got a C in the class. She didn’t even seem to mind all that much.
I sat still and looked at Cassie’s orange-red hair flying out the window and tried to figure out if there was something I needed to do in the next few days. School was over, so I didn’t have classes. I badly wanted to take out my small pocket diary and flip through it, but I knew what Cassie would say if I did. “Stop being so responsible all the time,” she’d say. “We’re on vacation. Put that book away.”
Lately all our arguments had been about how obsessive (her word) I was, and how childish (my word) she was. She was constantly late, not just once or twice but every single time. I hadn’t seen the beginning of a movie since I started going out with her. So I didn’t say anything when Aurora suggested going to Mexico. I wanted to prove that I could be as open to adventure as the rest of Cassie’s crazy family. It occurred to me that Cassie had to go in to work tomorrow (she cleaned up at a day care center), but I said nothing and looked at her hair, brilliant in the sun. The sight of her hair made it all worthwhile.
“Did you bring the book?” Chris said. Chris was in Aurora’s grade in high school and, like half the class (if the phone ringing day and night was any indication), found it impossible to resist Aurora’s manic energy, her wild schemes. If Aurora was going to collect and trade illegal reptiles then she, Chris, was going to collect and trade illegal reptiles too. The book, The Field Guide to North American Reptiles and Amphibians, had become Chris’s bible.
“No, it’s at home,” Aurora said. “But don’t worry. I know the ones we want.”
On the other side of Chris sat Alan. Alan had said nothing for the past ten miles. Later it turned out that he was deathly afraid of snakes. But he was in love with Aurora, so what could he do? Poor boy. I knew exactly how he felt.
We stopped just this side of the Mexican border for our last hamburger and fries. It was 7:30. “We’re making good time,” Aurora said when we sat down to eat. “We should be at this place I know in a few hours. And we can spend the night driving up and down, and be back by tomorrow afternoon.”
“What about sleep?” I said. Immediately I cursed myself. Someone setting out on the grand adventure wouldn’t think of sleep.
“Who needs sleep?” Cassie said. I thought she looked a little disappointed in me.
“Certainly not you,” I said, trying to make a joke of the whole thing. “Or the rest of your crazy family.”
“What makes you think we’re crazy?” Cassie said.
I thought she was being reasonable. That was my first mistake. I looked across the table at her red hair and brown eyes, both tinted with the same shade of gold, and I started to relax and enjoy the trip for the first time. If I could be with her it didn’t matter where we were going. Anyway her eccentricities were only part of her charm. “Well, you know,” I said. “Your great-uncle, what’s-his-name, the one who thinks he’s an Egyptian.”
“He doesn’t think he’s an Egyptian,” Cassie said. Alan was watching us glumly. Chris drew pictures of snakes on her napkin. “He’s an Osirian. The cult of Osiris. He explained it all to you when you were over at the house.”
“He didn’t explain anything,” I said. “He asked me questions. ‘Knowest thou the name of this door, and canst thou tell it?’ And then the lintel, and the doorpost, and the threshold—”
“You weren’t listening,” Cassie said. She still sounded reasonable. “If you know all the names you can get past the door into the land of the dead. And if you don’t you’re stuck. He’s got to keep all that in his head. It’s a long list.”
“And you don’t think that’s a little strange,” I said. “That he believes all this.”
“Well, what if he’s right?” Cassie said. “I mean, millions of people used to believe in it. Maybe they knew something.”
“Well, what about your grandmother?” I said. “She stays in her room for weeks on end and then she comes out and makes these cryptic utterances—”
“Look, Robert,” Cassie said. Something passed between the two sisters then, something I was too much of an outsider to understand, and Aurora turned to Chris and started talking rapidly. The gold seemed to leave Ca
ssie’s eyes; they became flat, muddy. “Just because you came from a boring home doesn’t give you the right to pass judgment on other people’s families. Okay? I mean, I know your parents belonged to the right kind of religion and had the right kind of jobs and never said anything unusual or anything that would make you think, but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s family is like that. Some of us wouldn’t want to be like that, okay? So you can just keep your stupid opinions to yourself.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean—I was just joking around. I’m sorry.”
Cassie turned away from me to talk to Aurora and Chris. Alan looked at me sympathetically, but I refused to catch his eye.
The rest of the trip was a nightmare. To my surprise we made it past the border guards with no problems. Sometime in the middle of the night we reached the place Aurora had heard about with two snakes we had picked up along the way. Aurora and Chris were ecstatic, I didn’t know why. I’m afraid one snake looks like another to me. Alan, rigid and wild-eyed, was starting to look like a speed freak. We found one more snake, put it in a pillowcase, put the pillowcases in the trunk and headed back. Then Aurora fell asleep at the wheel.
The car swerved, bounced over a few rocks and stalled. Aurora hadn’t woken up. “Aurora?” Cassie said, shaking her. “Aurora?”
“Hmm. Mf,” Aurora said.
We pulled her out and set her in Cassie’s seat. I was hoping she didn’t have a concussion. Naturally no one in the car was wearing a seat belt. Cassie drove a few more miles and then said, “God, I’m sleepy,” and came to a dead stop in the middle of the one lane road.
“I’ll drive!” Alan said, a bright note of desperation in his voice. Then he looked over Cassie’s shoulder and leaned back, but not too far back. Ever since we put the snakes in the trunk his body hadn’t made contact with the back of the seat. “Oh. Stick shift. I can’t do it.”
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