A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  He’s climbing a hill when he feels a poke in the back. He turns, smiling, expecting to see a colleague playfully jabbing at him with the tip of an umbrella. Instead he finds himself grinning foolishly at a young Japanese nationalist brandishing an antique Samurai sword.

  From the autopsy report:

  Wound 1: scalp entirely pierced through

  Wound 7: carotid artery completely severed

  Wound 11: entire elbow joint completely severed

  It goes on. Twenty-two wounds in all. Twenty-two fully pierced or completely severed pieces of Rudi Alter.

  The nationalist says that the gods came to him in a dream. They sent him to the park to kill the first foreigner he ran into. That turned out to be Rudi. The nationalist saw him from behind, took in the European garb, perhaps the scant height as well, and the gods said yes, go ahead. They said what are you waiting for? The young assassin has composed a poem about the whole thing, which he recites from memory at the police station. He recites it again at his trial. He’s declared insane. They behead him anyway.

  At the foot of the path where Rudi died—a young man of thirty-three—the port city erects a granite monument shaped like a giant headstone. On its base the words Our Brother are engraved in German. Our is misspelled.

  On the day that Rudi Alter dies in Japan, the temperature drops dramatically in Breslau. People stop strangers in the streets to comment on it. “This is the kind of weather that causes influenza,” they inform one another. They say, “This morning I had to take off my jacket, I was so hot, and now I’m wearing it buttoned to my chin and I’m still chilled to the bone.”

  By the time Heinrich and Lenz leave the house for their mandatory evening stroll, the sky over Breslau is the sleek gray of an iced-over lake and the streets are shadowed in wintry violets. Because it’s so cold, Lenz is less amazed than he should be when several snowflakes waft down and alight on his father’s outstretched palm.

  “Look closely,” says Heinrich. “Each one different,” but by the time Lenz looks, the snowflakes have melted. Heinrich wipes his wet hand on his trousers. He cranes his neck, searching for more drifting flakes. There aren’t any. It’s May, after all.

  What there is, though, is an inky slash along the horizon that makes Heinrich’s heart lurch. He points to the slash with such energy he feels the gesture in his shoulder socket.

  “Look!” he cries. “Look. Lenz, do you see that? There! Now, that—that’s ours!”

  The color of the slash between earth and sky is rich and complex, pure and poignant. It’s the precise shade Newton observed on the day he understood that the spectrum contained not six colors, as everyone believed, but seven, and this color, this purple-blue, the one too long overlooked.

  In a moment Lenz will also see the ribbon of indigo, but for now he completely misunderstands. He thinks his father is pointing to the entire sky. “That’s ours,” his father has declared, and Lenz believes his father means the whole canopy, the boundless firmament, every square inch of the heavens. For a fleeting, confusing, yet immensely gratifying and possibly life-changing instant, Lenz Alter believes his father has declared himself heaven’s landlord.

  And here is Lenz, son and sole heir.

  Death in childbirth. Evisceration among the cherry trees. Typos on your tombstone. These were the stories our mother told us. Bedtime stories, we called them, though we were talking her bedtime, not ours. The three of us tended to stay up long after she went to sleep. But though she turned in shortly after dinner, she slept in fits and starts, as we often do now, and she’d wake up throughout the night and sometimes she’d shout our names, and we’d leave our beds or, more likely, whatever late-night movie we were watching in the living room and troop in. By then she’d be sitting up, cigarette already lit. We’d take our positions at the end of her mattress, Lady in the middle, the younger ones on either side of her, Vee a smaller version of Lady, Delph a smaller version of Vee. “The nesting dolls,” our mother called us, and we could tell she found this off-putting rather than cute.

  Even we found it a little unnerving to look at each other. So that’s what I looked like when I lost my front teeth. So that’s what I’ll look like when I’ve entered adolescence. And yet this resemblance was also the only reliable and reassuring thing in our lives. There was the sense that we would always have each other. There was, to be honest, a never-articulated belief that we actually were each other, just at different stages of a single life. When our mother called us for bedtime stories and we arranged ourselves at her blanketed feet, each of us heavy-lidded, Vee and Delph lolling their heads against Lady’s arms, we must have looked on the outside as we felt on the inside: a single creature, strange and many-limbed, and in desperate need of a good night’s rest.

  Of all the stories our mother told us when we were girls, the story about Lenz and the snowflakes and the sky was our favorite. We were children ourselves; we empathized with a little boy’s failure to understand an adult’s message. We got why his misapprehension was cute and silly, but we also got why it was wonderful, why his was a glorious way to see the world: not reduced to one of its component colors, but broad and encompassing and mystical, and the whole thing revolving around little old you.

  As time went on, though, when we requested this story our mother began adding new details. When Heinrich and Lenz left home, they were led through the city streets by an eerie light that was an iridescent silver like mother-of-pearl. When Heinrich looked up, it was because a clap of thunder or shooting star or roaring voice had called his attention to the horizon.

  In these new versions, on the day Heinrich caught the snowflakes in his palm, he understood at once that they weren’t snowflakes. (Snowflakes in May, our mother said. Did you actually believe that?) He knew immediately that they were Rudi Alter’s essence, fragments of Rudi’s very soul making their way to his brother on that day: Rudi’s deathday. Heinrich Alter had no way of knowing his brother was dead at the time he saw that indigo slash. But, said our mother, Heinrich Alter knew.

  Eventually even the punch line was no longer a punch line, Lenz’s conclusion no longer the funny misunderstanding of a little boy but a genuine revelation. In these new versions, when Heinrich pointed upward and proclaimed, “That’s ours!” he did mean the entire sky, he did mean everything the human eye could see. He meant everything the human eye couldn’t see too.

  Soon, when our mother told us the story, she was no longer looking at us, her purported audience, but gazing upward with confusion and wonder just as her great-grandfather and her little-boy grandfather had done all those years ago. Perhaps she was addressing the faces that we, too, could see in the swirls of ceiling plaster when we softened our vision. Perhaps she was talking to someone only she could discern. Maybe it was the ghost of one of her gone-by relatives: her mother Karin, her father Richard, her great-uncle Rudi. Or maybe it was Lenz, who she’d known briefly when she was a very young girl, her grandfather Lenz who told her some of these bedtime stories before Hitler came and the family fled. Or maybe she thought she was talking to Der Alter, that is, to the God she’d always told us did not exist.

  “What does it mean?” our mother asked the ceiling or the ghost or God. “If my great-grandfather owned heaven and my grandfather inherited it from him, what does that mean for me now? Shouldn’t it be mine? Isn’t that the law?”

  At first we tried to persuade ourselves that she was clowning, trying to amuse us. She wasn’t, though. Wasn’t clowning. Wasn’t amusing.

  Sometimes it seemed as if the ceiling was responding to her. For us it was like listening to one side of a phone call. “Yes,” she’d say, and then a long pause. “Well, yes,” and another silence. Finally, “I understand your argument, but I think some of your basic premises are incorrect.”

  Sometimes she remembered that we were sitting there, and she frowned as if we’d interrupted or voiced disapproval when we hadn’t said anything at all. “Don’t worry,” she’d say with exhaustion. “When I die, it wi
ll all pass to you. No one’s going to deny you your potage.”

  She never said this with passion or conviction or joy. She said it as if she were recalling one more tiresome chore on her life’s to-do list. She managed the jewelry and cosmetics department at Woolworth’s, and if we never were well off, we always had rent money and food and a substantial supply of lipsticks and plastic clip-on earrings. She took care of us as best she could. If she said she’d get us our potage, we believed her. Of course, we thought potage meant porridge, and we wanted no part of it. We made faces. She chafed at our lack of gratitude. “Don’t look so stricken,” she’d say. “This is the good news. It’s the only good news anyone unlucky enough to be part of this family’s going to get.”

  Other times she said nothing, just smiled wearily. This was worse than her conversations with the ceiling. We dreaded her smiles. They were time machines that carried her away, transported her to the distant past or the faraway future, left us with only her body, a hand with a cigarette dangling off her bed, hot ashes wafting down to the carpet fibers like snowflakes in Breslau, like cherry blossoms in a Japanese park. One night she came back from one of those trips and said, “If God owns heaven and I own heaven and there’s only one owner of heaven, what does that force you to conclude?”

  It took us a moment to realize she was talking to us.

  “That you’re God?” Vee said.

  Our mother nodded as she considered that answer—hers had been a genuine, not a rhetorical, question—but Vee, upon reflection, glowered. “I thought we were atheists,” she said.

  “I thought we were humans,” Delph said.

  “We are atheists,” Lady said. “Which means, if (a) there’s no God and (b) Mom’s God, then (c) Mom’s nothing. That’s called the transitive property.”

  Our mother looked at us as if we were all very wise, and being wise was a terrible burden she wished she could have spared us. Her eyes filled with tears. She drew on her cigarette, blew the smoke up toward the faces in the ceiling. She tried to be careful about us and her smoke.

  “They’re right,” she said to the ceiling, tears dribbling down her face. “I’m God and I’m just some old bag of bones and I’m nothing, all three at once.”

  God, bones, and nothing. Lady calls this the Alter version of the holy trinity. Delph says it’s the best definition of mortal man she’s ever heard. We are, at all times, all three.

  Vee thinks that from God to bones to nothing is also a pretty good description of life. It’s sad, she thinks. It’s the opposite of the way she wishes life worked. From nothing to bones to God—that’s what she longs for, that’s what she wishes for—the fantasy, the fairy tale, the capacity for faith. But Vee can’t go there. None of us can.

  CHAPTER 4

  When she got home from Riverdale, Lady dropped the blue screwdriver on the kitchen counter—because, as bad as she felt about everything, she hadn’t relinquished it, she’d held on to it, clutching it the whole train ride home as if it were a wand or scepter; she has it even now, today, in a drawer in her bedroom—and not bothering with the switch plate, she headed straight to the bathroom for a drink. For many drinks. She sat on the tiled floor and she pulled her T-shirt up over her head, and she thought about how unhappy she was and how unloved and unlovable and how strange and, now, how violent, and she drank from the bottle, one glug, then two, and she called it drinking from the bottle. From time to time the phone rang, and she had another drink or she turned on the faucet to drown out the sound. She stared up at the peeling paint of the ceiling. And when the ringing stopped, she had another drink.

  She toyed with the idea of a note. The fact that none of our family suicides had left one had always struck her as a dereliction of duty, or, if that was too strong, at least a missed opportunity.

  She had always imagined that when the time came, she would leave an explanation behind. Just a few years before, an actor had killed himself (pills) and left a courteous note she’d admired: “Dear World,” he’d written, “I am leaving because I’m bored.” Ever since, Lady’d imagined leaving behind an equally pithy and frank declaration, a sentence unassailable and plucky and concise enough to fit inside a Hallmark card. But now, as she thought about it, she realized that if she were being honest, her note would have to say, “Dear World, I am leaving because Shine’s Hardware at B’Way and 242nd refused to honor its returns policy,” and so by the time she passed out, banging her head on the side of the tub in the process, doing more visible damage to herself than she’d done to that sad entrepreneur in Riverdale, she’d already ditched the note concept.

  She woke up several hours later, headachy and parched. She chewed a handful of aspirins and drank the taste away with several glasses of fuzzy tap water. She washed her face.

  In the tradition of Jews in the hours before the Cossacks arrive, she spent the rest of the day cleaning her apartment and packing her things. She filled a cardboard box with volumes of literature from her truncated college career, Reader, I married him crammed next to I can’t go on; I’ll go on. She put the box out by the staircase. Her hope was that one of the building’s families, immigrants all of them, would take the books for their children and perhaps think well of her.

  The day latened, and she stopped to take in the sunset, that purple, magenta, and orange offspring of innocent nature and despoiling industry. It was beautiful, the sunset, in the way poisons sometimes are—the berries of the belladonna plant, shiny black as patent leather; the apple of the wicked stepmother, blood red and irresistible. An unnatural natural phenomenon, those dangerous and gorgeous colors, and she looked at them longer than she meant to. She had to shake her head, turn away from the window, before she could continue with her chores: fetching, bending, placing material things in boxes. It was as active as she’d been in weeks. The muscles along her spine, shocked at what was suddenly asked of them, twinged and chided.

  She dragged a second box out into the hall, this one filled with cartons of Irish oatmeal and bags of brown rice and a dozen or so dented mini cans of soup. FREE TO A GOOD HOME, she’d printed on its side.

  Her dented Campbell’s Soup for One Chicken with Stars. Her dented Campbell’s Soup for One Split Pea with Ham. “I would rather dump a gallon of soup gone bad,” Vee had said only a few weeks before, holding up one of those little cans, she and Delph laughing at Lady’s expense, “than buy something that informs the whole world, or even just the checkout girl, of my desperately lonely existence.”

  Lady hadn’t minded the teasing, and it still made her smile to recall that evening. Eddie Glod was at his night job, mopping floors at Union Theological, so it had been just the three of us on Lady’s futon, wooden plates balanced on knees. She and Joe Hopper had bought the plates at Azuma, figuring that, wood being unbreakable, the set would last them forever. And certainly none of the plates had broken or chipped. Still, there was something about eating off wood that was like nails on a chalkboard, and there was a slightly rancid smell due to the vegetable oil Lady used to keep up their color, and eventually you had to watch out for splinters.

  Lady hadn’t made soup that evening. Vee had come across the soup-for-one cans while searching Lady’s cabinets for the vodka. (“In the bathroom,” Lady had been required to say.) Lady’d made only spaghetti, pouring Kraft blue cheese dressing over it, a favorite meal of ours, one she’d been preparing for Vee and Delph since our childhoods.

  “I don’t care what supermarket checkout girls think about me,” Lady told Vee, although this wasn’t true; she cared what everyone in the world thought about her, including impotent college boys and irritable hardware store owners. “But,” she added, “you know what those cans of soup make me think of? Men. All the men I meet, all the men I know. Not Eddie. We all love Eddie. I’m talking about Joe and his friends and the men who come into the office, all flirting and puffed up with themselves as if I don’t know about their tartar and bad breath and gangrenous wisdom teeth. Even the guy I work for. There’s something wrong with a
ll of them, I swear it. An entire gender of dented soup cans, all damaged and marked down, and you have to wonder, is the dent just because it fell on the floor and you’re getting a bargain, or is it caused by something like botulism and it’s going to kill you? My feeling is, Why take the risk? What’s the best that can happen? A bowl of cheap soup? Better to go soupless, that’s what I think.”

  “You’re twenty-six,” Vee said. “It’s too soon to give up on soup.”

  Delph disagreed. “Who says? I’m only nineteen, and I have no interest in soup whatsoever.”

  “Yes, honey,” Vee said, “and no offense, but that’s not normal. I’m not saying you have to run out and lap up the first bowl of soup you stumble across. You should wait for a variety you like. But you should at least be wanting soup. In fact, you should be craving soup. You should be dreaming about slurping it from bowls and drinking it from mugs and ladling it from the pot straight into your mouth.”

  “I’ll have the salad,” Delph said.

  It took Lady the rest of Saturday evening and all of Sunday, the actual Fourth of July, to finish packing. She owned so little; she was surprised it took as long as it did. But it was all the trips to the liquor store to mooch cardboard boxes. It was her sudden compulsion to fold the clothes she normally just stuffed into drawers, every black T-shirt, every black sweater, every pair of black jeans folded as if by a saleswoman in a luxury boutique. It was her decision, after she’d filled those boxes, to pile them neatly, geometrically, a waist-high room divider that was somehow both sturdy and flimsy.