A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  In the attic room her employers have barely decorated for her—as is appropriate for a stoic, she writes Lily, she lives like a Spartan—she drinks in bed. She’s learning the tricks of watering down their scotch, of concealing their English gin in her morning coffee.

  She tries never to utter his name out loud. Sometimes she slips. “What have you heard from our friend Alter?” she asks a mutual acquaintance one spring day. Is he married yet? Does he have children?

  “Who, Lenz?” the friend says. “You haven’t heard? His engagement ended some time ago.”

  When getting ready to seduce a man, some women buy new dresses or change their hair. Iris Emanuel converts to Christianity. She was going to have to get around to it eventually anyway. Now she has reason to write Lenz.

  He writes back, singing the praises of Jews who commit one hundred percent to Germany and telling her all about his newest fiancée.

  “A whirlwind romance,” he writes, “which, as you know, is my style. I see what I want. I think, Why should I wait? You’ll like her, I’m sure.”

  Before she can throw herself in the Oder—that, or cut off her hair, don a suit, change her name to Heinz, and try to gain admission to university as a man—she learns that ice-skating in hell has commenced: Breslau has decided to permit women to take the new and even more brutal entrance exam designed for female applicants only. Mere auditors no more, they can pursue degrees. Iris is the first woman to take the exam, the first woman to pass it, the first woman to matriculate into the doctoral program in chemistry. There’s an article in the paper about this accomplishment, and with it a photograph: Iris looking down at her feet as if she’s at Frau Geist’s, while Zindel Emanuel looks straight at the camera and grins. Zindel cuts out the article, frames the photograph. He places it, gray and grainy, on the mantel between Rose and Lily’s respective wedding portraits.

  “Father and Son,” Lily calls it.

  Her mother is ten years dead by now, so Iris, like Lenz, is motherless. Also like Lenz, she has more than just a biological father to please. Not Bismarck in her case, and certainly not God. Her other father is, aptly, her Doktorvater, the valence theorist Richard Lehrer.

  Lehrer is nothing like Bismarck. If Bismarck’s the Iron Chancellor, then Lehrer’s the Silken Professor. Sweet and smooth. You accede to his will not because he’s powerful, but because he makes you think you’re exercising your own.

  He’s a handsome man, too, Richard Lehrer, tall and lean, a Jew who appears so Aryan he hasn’t bothered to convert. He wears his fair hair close-cropped and his mustache thick and waxed and curled up at the ends. He has a pink dueling scar from his left earlobe to the place where his mustache stops and his lips part. He’s only a year and a half older than she is, yet he’s so many years ahead of her in every way. Career, reputation, published books, spouse, babies.

  At their first meeting he takes both her hands and says, “Promise me you’ll never marry.”

  She’s taken aback. She has, until this moment, assumed that of course she’ll marry. First the doctorate, then the prestigious position at Berlin or Charlottenburg or even here under Lehrer. Then, at last: the spouse, the family, the complete life—just like his. Although only one child. She’ll have work to do outside the house, after all.

  But now, her hands in his, she blushes at her own limited vision, at the conventionality she never realized till now she’s succumbed to. Also, the act of his taking her hands, looking into her eyes, making a heartfelt request for a lifetime commitment—it’s like a marriage proposal itself.

  “I won’t,” she swears. “I’ve waited my whole life to come here. I want to be a scientist more than anything else.”

  She’s sincere, and yet he doesn’t believe her. “Or,” he continues as if she hasn’t said a word, “if someday you feel absolutely compelled to marry, then promise me you won’t make it worse by marrying a scientist less talented than yourself.”

  “That’s easy to promise,” she says. “I would never find such a man interesting.”

  He smiles. Her hands remain clasped in his. “You and I have an acquaintance in common,” he says. “Lenz Alter was briefly my classmate in Berlin.”

  She feels herself redden again. “Lenz Alter,” she says. “Now there was a catastrophe avoided.”

  Only then does he let her go. He invites her to his home for dinner. She becomes friends with his wife. She isn’t jealous of Marthe. She has no plans to seduce Richard Lehrer. All she wants is to be his favorite student, his indispensable lab assistant, his adored colleague, the coauthor of his papers, his occasional drinking companion, and the person he talks to late into the night about valence theory and her own fascination: soluble salts.

  And, yes, there’s a part of her that wouldn’t mind if fate arranged things so that she wound up becoming his second wife—and she’s very aware which part of her that is—but how can she ethically wish for that? First, she promised him she wouldn’t marry. Second, it’s tantamount to wishing Marthe dead, because before she can allow herself to imagine his lips on hers, his hands beneath her honeymoon nightgown, she has to first fantasize Marthe dying. It isn’t any good otherwise; she can’t enjoy the fantasy if she has to imagine him unfaithful or divorced or never married to Marthe in the first place.

  No, if she wants to fantasize about Richard Lehrer—and nightly, it seems she does—she first has to imagine a tragic but efficient illness that ends things for Marthe rapidly and without too much suffering. Only then, after Marthe’s tragic but painless passing, can Iris go on and imagine, first, Lehrer’s proposal—“When I asked you never to marry that day, it was only because I knew from the moment I laid eyes on you I wanted you all for myself”—and, next, their year of decorous waiting, and finally their lovely wedding and finally, finally—the sex.

  In short, she has to lie in bed planning an elaborate funeral and imagining Richard mourning for a full year so that no one, not even any of the characters populating her private fantasies, will fault her for too quickly marrying Marthe’s husband. Sometimes getting to the place where they’re at last married and embarked on their wedding trip takes so long that she falls asleep before she boards the imaginary train to Italy or Spain. The next morning she wakes up disgusted with herself. What kind of freethinker is she, this woman who’s a virgin not only in life but in her sexual fantasies too?

  December 1900

  In the final month of what is technically the last year of the nineteenth century, but is generally considered the first year of the twentieth century, Iris Emanuel is awarded the PhD in chemistry. She’s the first woman to receive the degree from her university. She graduates with honors. There’s another article about her in the local paper. In the accompanying photograph, she and Richard Lehrer shake hands.

  “Father and Daughter,” Lily calls it.

  Iris can’t help demurring. “Lehrer and I have the same degree now. We work in the same field and on the same matters. We’re close in age. I don’t think of him as a father. He doesn’t think of me as a daughter.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Lily says. “And of course he does.”

  Her sister Rose has less to say. “Fräulein Doktor?” She shakes her head. “Let me know when I can call you Frau.”

  1901

  The following summer she boards a train that will take her to the electrochemistry conference in Freiberg. She’s interested in the lectures, but more so in one of the lecturers. She’s tried the usual ways to nab a university position. Now she’s resorting to sex.

  “How happy I am to hear that,” Lily said at the Breslau station.

  “I didn’t think you were so easily shocked.”

  “I’m not shocked,” Lily said. “But you’d better not let Papa or Rose find out.”

  Iris smiled. She’d turned thirty-one a few days before. “If they do,” she says, “just tell them to think of it as a modern job interview.”

  On the train Iris writes multiple letters to Richard Lehrer. “It’s no secret
why I accepted Alter’s invitation,” she says, “and it’s not because I plan to break my promise to you. It’s just that I’m so tired of lecturing about the chemical properties of household cleansers to ladies’ clubs. Here I am with my doctorate, and I’m still sipping tea and nibbling cakes in their suffocating parlors.”

  What she wants to add, but can’t: “And that’s why I’m going to prostitute myself in exchange for a lectureship at Karlsruhe.”

  Tea cakes and ladies’ clubs and her persistent virginity. She wants to be done with it all. And so her fine flyaway hair, usually piled on her head in a careless bun, has been braided and pinned just so. She’s bought a new dress. With the skill acquired from her frequent purloining of bottles of liquor from other people’s cabinets, she’s appropriated a vial of Lily’s White Heliotrope. Not that Lily wouldn’t have gladly given her the perfume had she asked. It’s just that Iris was too embarrassed to ask. She reels between defiance and shame.

  She mails the letters to Lehrer at the stations along the route. Standing on these platforms, she takes in the passengers on the trains going the other way, back toward where she began. But when the whistle blows, she returns to her car. She dabs on a bit more perfume.

  As soon as she enters the hotel lobby, tired and bedraggled but redolent at every pulse point, she spots Lenz. He’s sitting on a midnight-blue button-backed velvet sofa, his legs crossed. He’s pretending to be absorbed in a newspaper, pretending he hasn’t observed her arrival. Only when she raps her fingers against the back of the paper does he lower it and look up, feigning surprise. Only then does he rise and embrace her, kissing her on each flushed cheek. He recites what she is meant to take as a spontaneously composed heroic couplet.

  Later, the two of them in his bed, Iris trying to figure out how to initiate a conversation about career possibilities, Lenz proposes for the third time. She wasn’t expecting it. Really—she wasn’t. He hadn’t let on at all. He seemed startled and mildly flustered when she said she wanted to see his room, babbling some inanities about the view provided a conference speaker.

  Now, her head against his bare chest, he asks for her hand and she hears herself laugh. “There’s no need to buy the cow at this late date,” she says. “I come bearing free milk.”

  “Iris—” he says, wounded on her behalf.

  “It’s fine. I’m not one of those girls you used to take to parties,” she says.

  “I understand. You’re not a girl at a party. I understand that.”

  “I’m not even a girl.”

  What she doesn’t say is that she can’t possibly marry him. She’s pledged her troth to another. No husband. No lesser scientists.

  “It’s just that I don’t think I believe in marriage,” she says. “Though I’m not opposed to”—she fishes for a word—“alliances,” is what she comes up with.

  It surprises her to see how hurt and humiliated he is. His color rises, his cheeks turn scarlet, his eyes begin to fill. Tears and torment! He has to turn away, collect himself. But when he faces her again, he’s smiling, not broadly, not gaily, but a sweet smile, as if the whole afternoon has been nothing more than one of their dances around the sun. “Why is it,” he says, “that whenever I look up, there you are?”

  He confuses her, this mediocre chemist with his multiple fiancées, his many nervous breakdowns. “But you invited me here,” she says.

  He nods as if she’s missed the point—she has missed the point—and he changes the subject. “Shall we dress and go down for dinner?”

  She claims exhaustion. “Trains,” she sighs.

  “I know.”

  “It’s the coal soot. So irritating. My eyes.”

  “The fumes can make you dizzy for hours.”

  They agree they’ll each rest this evening. Apart. They’ll meet again tomorrow for coffee and cake before the morning’s first lecture.

  “Goodnight, Fräulein Doktor,” he says.

  And so she descends several floors to her own room, much smaller, much darker. She locks the door and with a washcloth sponges the journey off her face, the perfume off her wrists, Lenz off her thighs. What just happened? she wonders. And what’s her next move?

  The carpetbag she borrowed from Lily has been left on a chair by some bellman. Iris unpacks it. She sits on her mattress. She drinks the ounce of complimentary eau de vie in the crystal decanter on the bedside table. Carrying the decanter and pretty little cordial glass to the sink by the gray marble-topped bureau, she rinses both out, replaces them on the bedside table. She calls down for a salade de truite fumée and a bottle of Riesling. When a boy in a uniform gaudier than Bismarck’s on parade days delivers her tray, she points to the decanter.

  “It was empty when I arrived,” she says. “The last time I stayed here, it contained just a dab of some lovely eau de vie.”

  She’s worried the boy will inform her that he knows perfectly well she’s never been a guest of the hotel before, but of course he doesn’t. What he does is abase himself for the staff’s lapse. He leaves with the decanter, and when he returns, it’s filled to the halfway mark.

  “With our compliments and profound apologies,” he says.

  “Oh, that’s really too generous,” she says. “I’ll have to share it with colleagues. I’m here only two nights. I just wanted a small sip before dinner.”

  She gives him an excessive gratuity. It wasn’t frugality that prevented her from simply ordering a bottle.

  The next day she wakes at noon. The wine bottle is empty, the eau de vie nearly gone. Her temples and occipital lobes throb. Her tongue is furred. There’s a note slipped under her door, Lenz noting that she failed to appear not only for coffee but also for any of the morning’s lectures. He hopes she’s well. He asks if she would like to meet for the afternoon’s luncheon. She bathes and dresses, and now she’s missed luncheon too. At the desk in her room, gray marble-topped like the bureau, she writes her own note.

  “Dear Richard,” she begins. And ends, “Accordingly, I approach marriage as I would any scientific experiment. I plan to study the institution from within, to analyze it objectively, rationally, and with no preconceived expectations. I plan to be both subject and dispassionate observer, both lab rat and scientist. I plan to take copious notes and eventually publish the same.”

  There’s no mention of love in the letter, which currently lives in a box beneath our mother’s bed in the Dead and Dying Room, along with other letters from Iris to Lehrer. We believe there was a time when Iris truly loved Lenz, but by the time they got engaged, she loved him no more. Still, her mother had often advised her daughters to put more stock in a man’s intellect than in love. “Love and passion fade over time,” her mother had said before going off and dying young, “but a good man who enjoys sharing his ideas will sustain you forever.”

  Iris can see the wisdom in her mother’s advice. She can see how a collaboration with Lenz could be a happy one for a woman like herself. She will be his indispensable lab assistant, his adored colleague, the coauthor of his papers, his occasional drinking companion, and the person he talks to late into the night about his fascination with nitrogen fixation, and her own ideas about soluble salts.

  And so—here’s what looks like their happy ending or promising beginning—they find each other at the evening’s banquet and she says yes and he says, Do you mean it? and she says yes, and he takes a spoon to the rim of his wineglass, and forty male chemists grow silent. Then cheers, then toasts, more rounds of wine than anyone can count, and now forty drunken chemists know her name.

  “Frau Doktor,” her sister Rose will call her at last.

  At the end of the conference, after she kisses Lenz good-bye, waves at his receding carriage, returns to her room, packs Lily’s bag, and runs out of reasons to linger any longer in her room, she regards the now empty decanter. She takes Lily’s perfume from her traveling bag, pours its golden contents into the crystal carafe. “There,” she says out loud. “One ounce.” She tucks the empty vial in the bag.
Moments later she’s heading for the train station.

  One year later the only child of the Alter-Emanuel marriage is born. Richard Otto Alter. He’s named for their respective true loves.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Someday this will be funny,” said Lady from her hospital gurney, but it’s been twenty-four years since the flood in the laundry room (“Thank God nobody was down there at that hour, or someone might’ve been hurt,” said the neighbors), and mostly it still isn’t.

  Nor were Lady’s two additional attempts funny. The second effort, razor to wrists shortly after Eddie Glod died, did little damage to Lady, but made an astonishing mess of the bathroom. Vee and Delph spent days cleaning it, and yet for months afterward they kept finding additional splotches and splashes of blood behind the toilet, between the silver coils of the cast-iron radiator, on Otto von Bismarck’s frame. It was as if the blood were being replenished every night while we slept. It was like cleaning the bathroom of Lady Macbeth.

  The final effort took place in the shitty expanse of time known as the 1980s and involved one bottle, each, of Valium and vodka. Lady had tried to be more considerate that time, to choose a method that would spare Vee and Delph any cleanup, and in that she succeeded.

  She also succeeded in another way: she died. Not permanently, perhaps, which we admit is generally a critical component of dying, but for a harrowing thirty seconds. When the doctors shared that bit of news, it left Vee and Delph quivering. In fact, Delph felt her legs give out; she wound up on her knees in the hospital corridor. She hadn’t realized until then the melodramatic things her body was capable of.

  But it had been after that first effort, the mismanaged hanging, when Delph decided she wanted to do something special for Lady. The idea of the tattoo came to her right away, even though it was 1976, when women with tattoos tended to work in circus sideshows or belong to motorcycle gangs or perhaps had once spent time in Hitler’s death camps and now never went sleeveless. Still, Delph felt the idea was inspired. The tattoo would be a message of sympathy and a gesture of solidarity, indelible and heartfelt, a proclamation that Delph, too, was an Alter, that Delph, too, saw the horizontal light every day of her life, that Delph’s day would also come.