A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  Our father, the aforementioned Natan Frankl, was born in Munich to a family of scholars. Like the rest of them, he was an excessively educated man, fluent in numerous languages. He loved language the way other little boys love dogs or yo-yos. He liked to play with language, he liked to make it do amusing tricks. English, he told Lady, was the best language to play with. Next came French. Italian was good, too, especially for poetry, since all the words rhymed. The worst was his native German. In fact, he told Lady, he could no longer stand the sound of it. He blanched even when he heard someone say gesundheit.

  Our point is this: we know no one likes the puns and wordplay. We’re sorry about them. But we can’t help it. They’re Natan Frankl’s fault.

  He’d been a chemist, too, our father. That’s how he’d known the Alters. But while our mother’s family left Germany early, our father’s remained until there was no getting out. He’d been a scientist unable to interpret the data all around him—there was a lot of that going around—and he ended up in one of the camps. We don’t even know which one. That’s how little any of this was discussed.

  We do know that after liberation he was moved to a displaced persons center, and that when he subsequently managed to get to America—not easy; America didn’t want any of the displaced persons—he looked up his old friend Richard Alter, i.e., our grandfather. But, given that our grandfather had already killed himself—that window in the Dead and Dying Room—he met only our mother.

  That’s their meet-cute story.

  In New York the only work he could find was among the other Jews on Seventh Avenue. He sold clothing fasteners to the trade: buttons and snaps, hooks and eyes, frogs and kilt pins. He used to bring discontinued samples home for Lady to play with. She turned them into little families. Brass peacoat buttons embossed with anchors were the fathers. Silk-covered buttons were the mothers. The tiny white buttons you find on collars were the babies, unnecessary and largely decorative, but cute.

  He’d been an observant Jew before the camps; he was a cynical atheist after. On Saturday mornings he took Lady and Vee to the Central Park Zoo. Vee doesn’t remember this at all—she was still in her carriage—but Lady does, though vaguely. Lady is Vee and Delph’s sole conduit to our paterfamilias. She’s the one who remembers what he looked like: fair and blue-eyed and nothing like us. She’s the keeper of his puns. She used to do an impression of his impression of the Central Park polar bear, our father and the bear lolling their big heads this way and that. “It’s as if he’s swaying to secret bear music,” our father would say. “He can bear-ly restrain himself.” She told us how hard the two of them laughed at that. Bear-ly restrain himself. They’d thought it was the funniest thing.

  In one of her dresser drawers—the same one in which she keeps the rubbery blue screwdriver—she has an old business card of his, soft and cottony from handling, and at the bottom, beneath his useless contact information, it says:

  The fastener invented after the button

  was a snap

  So when Lady says our father gave her plenty a closure, but never any closure, she can’t be scorned. When Vee says that the reason Natan Frankl left us may have been his palindromic first name (“Coming or going, it was all the same to him”) or maybe his German surname (“He probably left to find the missing e”) or that maybe the reason had nothing to do with his name at all, that maybe the reason he left was all those months he spent in that relocation camp before coming to New York (“Looks like relocating became his thing”), she must not be judged harshly.

  And when each of us—Vee upon her marriage, and Lady after her separation, and Delph as soon as she came of age—ditched his surname to go by our matronymic, and Delph repeatedly described the name change as no big deal, just a slight Alter-ation, you can’t punish her for being punnish. You can’t roll your eyes when we’re speaking Frankly. It’s all that the man who left us left us. In no other way did he provide for us or, apparently, care about us. In fact, you might say that Frankl, our dad, didn’t give a damn.

  All right, all right; we’ll stop. That’s our entire repertoire anyway. We have nothing more to say about him, no idea where he went. A business trip, our mother told Lady, the others too young to ask, but after a while, because even kids know that business trips end and the businessman comes home, often with presents, our mother had to admit the unsatisfying truth, or at least what she maintained was the truth: she hadn’t a clue where he’d gone. One day he never came home from work, and the next day, the same thing happened, then etcetera, etcetera, until she stopped expecting him. She called the cops—a good citizen, she did that much, or so she said—and they nosed around a bit and reported that nothing untoward had befallen him, that wherever he was, it was where he, a grown man, wished to be, and it was no longer their, or, we supposed, our, business.

  Even so, over the years Lady continued to press. Soon Vee and Delph joined in. Then our mother would offer up possibilities. Maybe he sailed back to Germany. Maybe he was still living in New York, but with a different wife, tidier daughters who didn’t have to be nagged to make their beds. He might be dead, you never knew, the cops could have been wrong. It’s not like cops weren’t wrong all the time. Or he could be alive somewhere and—again, who knew?—he might decide to come home someday. When we least expected it, he might walk right back through that door.

  “Which would you prefer?” she asked, as if his fate could be determined by popular vote.

  We won’t deny that we grew up father-hungry. But over the years we’ve come out the other side. No one has had more therapy than the three of us, that ineffectual if gratifying institution—me! for fifty whole minutes let’s talk about me!—but really, we didn’t need therapy when it came to our father. At a certain point when we were still children, each of us cycled through the kiddie version of the five stages of grief, namely, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and crazy-ass conspiracy theories.

  Leaving his office one evening, he’d fallen down the stairs and now had amnesia!

  Because he spoke German, he’d been recruited as a spy for the CIA and was now skulking heroically behind the Berlin Wall!

  Suffering from some terrible and highly contagious disease, he’d had no choice but to remove himself from our presence. Now he rented a room in the apartment across the side street that both our mother’s and Lady’s bedroom windows faced. Every night, through powerful infrared binoculars, he watched over us all as we slept, our mother in her bed and the three of us sardined in Lady’s.

  But of all our theories, our favorite, or at least the one we kept coming back to, was that our mother had killed him. Vee had proposed this possibility one night with a wicked smile, and we all liked it. We enjoyed speculating how our mother, that little woman, that lonely and abandoned waif, would have accomplished it, and what she’d have done with the body. We eyed the hallway incinerator with suspicion and a newfound respect.

  Let us be clear. Our mother did not murder our father. Even as we entertained the notion, we knew we were doing just that: entertaining ourselves. There was something cathartic in imagining our father dead and our mother a powerful killer. It was far more satisfying than the fantasy of him watching us sleep, which, to be honest, had begun to feel creepy and sometimes gave Delph bad dreams. But the idea of a woman like our mother—another short, bosomy, and luckless ugly gosling—dragging a man to the incinerator late one night was rather invigorating. Therapeutic, one might say.

  One final thing about Natan Frankl, and then we won’t mention him again. It really doesn’t matter whether he went back to Germany or found himself a second, superior family or was chopped into his component parts and fed to the incinerator. All that’s relevant now is that he was years older than our mother, closer to her father’s age than her own, and if he didn’t die back then, he’s surely dead now.

  So no matter which version of the Father Stories you or we like best, the ending’s the same. We may not know the details, but we promise he won’t be showing
up at any point in our story. We urge you to forget all about him. We assure you, as we were assured, it’s all for the best.

  So back to the basement, back to no noose is good news. Back to Lady standing on that folding chair, Lady smiling a self-consciously wry smile as if she were on a stage and wished to signal her state of mind to the audience. She imagined that audience to consist of both our parents. She saw them smiling back at her, but warmly, encouraging her. She’d often thought about—had dreams about—how willingly and quietly each had left her. Now she found herself thinking about how willingly and quietly she was leaving Vee and Delph. Although the difference was, Vee and Delph didn’t need her. Vee had Eddie. Delph had Vee and Eddie.

  Perhaps each of our parents had thought the same thing. The girls don’t need me. They have each other. Or perhaps—a new thought was coming to Lady—they hadn’t meant to leave us at all. Perhaps they’d meant for us to follow them. As Lady was doing now. Perhaps she hadn’t been abandoned after all; she’d just gotten lost for a while.

  DNA as a trail of bread crumbs. Suicide as salvation. She felt awash with sorrow for herself, and it was this self-pity, that most delicious of emotions, that made the tears come.

  To avoid these emotions, she distracted herself by reviewing her reasons again. She was alone. She was lonely. This was her daily dilemma: she wanted no one in her life; she couldn’t bear to live life alone. Also, she was tangled up with a dentist who seemed not to like her, and she was engaging in behavior that would cause the dentist’s wife pain—Patty, the woman’s name was Patty—were she to find out about it. To punish herself for hurting Patty—that was reason enough to do what she was about to do.

  Not to mention the fact that she’d bloodied a Holocaust survivor’s nose with a screwdriver.

  And then there was the rest of it. She was fundamentally incapable of taking care of herself or even, it seemed, of answering a phone or crossing a busy intersection or buying a simple hand tool. Her apartment had roaches and a switch plate as suicidal as she was. Also, it was definitely possible that she was an alcoholic, which would mean she should give up drinking, and why would she want to live like that?

  But though the reasons were endless, the reasons were also meaningless. She was back to that again. There was something else driving her, something unsayable, just a feeling, just an urge, but a something that was so very strong. It was a something that Joe and the dentist and the dentist’s wife and the hardware store owner hadn’t a thing to do with.

  She regretted this. She wished it were grief or guilt propelling her. She wished she were about to commit an act of heartfelt atonement. But that wasn’t what she was doing, not really. It was something else.

  We’ve all struggled with this: how to explain the desire to do something most people find pathological at best, selfish at worst, incomprehensible always. We sometimes describe it as a chit we were each handed at birth, a card to get out of jail free, if one thinks of her life as jail.

  Or we talk about the horizontal light, which is how we refer to the light that sometimes replaces sunlight, the light we see for a brief moment virtually every day, the light that isn’t golden, but is as silver as the nacre inside a seashell, and comes not down from the heavens but from beyond the skyline, oozing and seeping until it lies over the day like an opalescent blanket inviting us to slide beneath it. There’s no telling when we’ll see the horizontal light; it appears at a different time every day, and most days we overlook it—it tends to come and go in an instant—and on other days we see it and it lingers, but we manage to ignore it, or at least, after a while, to look away from it.

  But then there are the days we can’t look away. “Man, the horizontal light was really strong today,” one of us will say, and the other two will say, “But you resisted,” and the first one will say, “Yeah, well, today I resisted. Who knows about tomorrow?” and we all say, “Who ever knows about tomorrow?” and we refresh our drinks.

  Lady kicked off her flip-flops, stood on the chair. She looped one end of the rope around a ceiling pipe the way you’d loop an identification tag around your bag’s handle before a trip. She looped the other end around her neck. Her legs were shaking, but she was doing well. True, she was still crying, but she wasn’t sobbing; the only reason she knew she was crying was by the feel of her tears, silky yet itchy. No noose is good news would be her last pun, and this would be her final pleasurable experience: the warmth of big fat tears sliding down her cheeks, tippling off her chin.

  Her feet were bare and sweating. She knew that by now they must be stuck to the chair’s metal seat and that it would require some effort to break the suction when she stepped forward. She would have to add this to her calculation when she made her move.

  This must be the way an Olympic diver felt. Observing the conditions of board, of pool, of body. Perfectly poised, needing only to achieve the perfect mind-set, the Zen focus, the courage of one’s convictions. And then, the ability to say one-two-three-now.

  She stood for what seemed like hours, sometimes getting to the one, sometimes getting to the two, but never getting to the three, never getting to the now. All she was getting was dizzy, so dizzy she began to worry she’d die of something else, something heart-related—a stroke or an aneurism. She didn’t want to die like that. She wanted her place on the chart.

  It was that thought—fierce pride, family loyalty—that got her to the three, to the now, that got her to inch her feet off the chair, first just her right foot, then the left. When her toes felt nothing but air beneath them, her heel kicked the chair away.

  This was when she remembered Beef.

  She’d meant to return the framed photograph of the dog to the dentist’s office. She’d forgotten entirely. It was still in her purse, and her purse was upstairs in our foyer.

  In the fascinating slowing of time that occurred as the chair skittered away, right before her second heel felt nothing beneath it, she realized she needed to stop what she was doing. She needed to deal with that photo, put it back on the shelf. Posthumous humiliation was not what she was after. The dentist going through life citing the purloined photo as incontrovertible proof that she’d died for want of him—this was not her goal.

  She reached out, trying to grab hold of something to prevent her body from dropping any farther, but there was nothing to grab, no solid surface to stand on. There was nothing for her to do, no way out, no means of saving herself. She was going to die. And in that briefest, yet longest moment of her life, before she began to flail and kick, she understood she’d been wrong, that this wasn’t her time after all, but it was a realization that made no difference whatsoever. She dropped completely, the rope taut and intransigent.

  She hadn’t counted on the building management’s years of neglect. She hadn’t realized that the pipe to which she tied the rope was hardly a pipe, was pretty much nothing but rust in the shape of a pipe. It snapped in two as soon as it felt her full weight. She fell hard, not to her death but to the concrete floor, where she landed awkwardly, heard the snap of a bone in her left calf, screamed from the shock and the physical pain. At the same time a downpour of cold water fell onto her from the broken ends of the so-called pipe, a continuous brutal waterfall.

  To get to the elevator she had to drag herself through what was quickly becoming a shallow but numbingly icy lake populated not with fish but with clumps of multicolored dryer lint and sodden stray socks. In the elevator she had to reach up, grab the rail, and exert all of what little upper arm strength she possessed to pull herself to one foot and push the button to our floor.

  When Delph, half asleep, responded to the pounding on the door, she found Lady prone on the old welcome mat, drenched, shivering, writhing, large flakes of rust in her sopping hair and a noose encircling her neck, its white tail running along the floor like some sort of soggy leash. Delph felt herself begin to shake. She was as unnerved as she’d ever been, though less unnerved than she would be in a few hours, five in the morning, when she took
a taxi to Riverdale and, consulting the scrap of paper on which Lady had written an address and alarm code, broke into a dentist’s office to return a photograph of a dog. Delph trembled uncontrollably during the decommissioning of her sister’s crime, certain the dentist, wanting an early start to the day following his first-ever vacation, would suddenly show up. But he hadn’t, and she’d gotten away with it. She got back into the waiting cab, directed the driver to St. Luke’s Hospital.

  “I did it,” she told Lady, who lay on a gurney in a hallway while waiting for a room to free up. Vee and Eddie sat on the floor by the gurney’s wheels, Vee’s head on Eddie’s shoulder, the two of them snoozing.

  Woozy from painkillers, her neck chafed red, her leg in a cast, Lady looked up at Delph. She managed despite everything to speak.

  “Someday this will be funny,” she said.

  CHAPTER 5

  1878

  It’s in Frau Geist’s dance class where the boy who will become our great-grandfather first places his hand on the waist of the girl who’ll become our great-grandmother. Naturally, they’re paired: nine-year-old Lenz Alter is the smallest boy in the class, seven-year-old Iris Emanuel is the smallest girl. Even so, when they converse, he has to look up. And conversing is mandatory. Conversing while dancing—preferably in French—is as important as knowing the steps. It’s part of doing it well.

  Also, the boy must begin the conversation. Lenz has his opening line at the ready. “Bonjour,” he says. “I hate this stupid dance.”

  The girls are encouraged to ask the boys questions. “Quelle danse do you prefer?” Iris asks.

  “I hate them all.”

  “Even the polka?”

  “Maybe not the polka.”

  “All the boys like the polka. And the mazurka.”

  “En français,” Frau Geist sings out.