A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  She was willing to entertain the possibility that the beckoning figures standing where her toilet and tub should have been might be inventions of a failing mind. But the people at her bedside—they were demonstrably real. If she spoke to them, they responded appropriately. If she touched them, she felt them, their skin as warm as her own. They touched her too. They took her hand, clasped it. They brought it to their lips and kissed it. When her hands shook and she couldn’t manage a spoon, they fed her as if she were a cherished baby. They smoothed her blankets. They made her lean forward so they could pummel her pillows, make them fat for her. When she tried to get up to carry the empty bowls to the kitchen, to ferry the bare greasy plates and the steins, each one with just a puddle of beer sloshing at the very bottom, they wouldn’t allow it. They took the dishes from her, carried them beyond the scrim, where they must have had their own kitchen. They cleaned up after her.

  It isn’t fear of death, then, that has made her believe in God and in heaven. It’s the fact that she isn’t a mule, that she can’t deny what she’s seeing with her own eyes. When Karin dies less than a month after VE Day, her whimpering husband and dry-eyed youngest daughter at her bedside, God will also be with her, just one of the crowd, just another casualty of war, whooping and hollering and spilling beer on her blanket.

  September 1945

  Three months after Karin dies, our grandfather Richard asks our mother not to disturb him while he takes a nap.

  Dahlie isn’t surprised that her father wants to be left alone. It’s not the first time he’s asked for this particular favor. He’s having trouble sleeping at night, he tells her, not that he has to spell this out for her. Her own sleep is often disturbed by the sound of his pacing through the long hallway of the apartment. Sometimes—many times—she hears him crying. It makes her cringe, that he’s become such a crybaby. She herself is doing a heroic job of getting on despite her mother’s passing. Her mother’s death occurred on a Tuesday in June, her sisters arrived home on Thursday, the funeral her mother begged them not to hold was on Friday. By Monday, her sisters were back in Chicago and she was back in homeroom.

  Now it’s the start of the new school year, her final school year.

  “You’re so brave,” her teachers keep telling her, and she supposes she is, although maybe not as much as everyone thinks. It’s not that she’s unfazed by the loss of her mother. It’s more that the death was so long in coming, so drawn out, that Dahlie came to accept it a long time before it actually happened. Her mother was sick for years. The final decline seemed anticlimactic and—Dahlie hates to say this, but it’s true—overdue. By which she only means that a kinder universe would have taken Karin sooner, and a kinder society would have let Karin decide when it was time to leave. Not that Karin showed any signs of wanting to go any sooner than she did. “I’m a fatalist,” Karin used to say of herself. “My philosophy is, let nature take its course.”

  Dahlie, it’s turned out, is a fatalist too. She agrees with her mother—let nature take its course. Also, don’t fight city hall. Although sometimes Dahlie does wonder if maybe she’s just a horrible human being incapable of caring about others. That’s always a possibility.

  Or maybe her lack of emotion is to be expected. A youthful heart can ache for only so long. She told herself that at the funeral. Then, to her surprise, she choked up—it was the words heart and ache, their applicability to herself.

  Her father, on the other hand, is suffering because, unlike Dahlie, he held on to unrealistic hope throughout the whole ordeal. This is why he’s so unraveled, why he’s left the high school where he has long taught German and, especially during the war when no one wanted to take German, French. Now, the first day of school for him too, he calls in, sobbing. “I can’t do it,” he says. The principal says he understands. There’s some kind of arrangement. Sick leave. Sick pay. “Thank God for unions,” says Richard.

  It’s Dahlie who doesn’t understand why he can’t go to work. She wishes she could push him out the door, back into the world. She’s worried about him, of course, but more than that, he’s driving her crazy. Not only his refusal to keep busy, keep going. But his constant references to the optimism that seeded his current, miserable pessimism. Somehow, even though no one ever recovers from the illness Karin had, Richard believed she would. It was as if he thought his need for her would be enough to keep her alive, as if he thought some caring force would look out, if not for her, then for him. Despite every awful thing that’s happened to him during his godforsaken life, he still thought he was special enough to warrant that kind of concern and protection. This baffles Dahlie, it really does. Because if you want to know the truth, no one has watched out for her father since he was a twelve-year-old boy. Dahlie’s heard enough family stories to know this. And yet somehow he’s only figuring it out now, and he’s devastated. He seems boneless, unable to support his own weight.

  “I know I should be nicer to him,” Dahlie whispers to Rose over the phone, long distance and pricey, “but I can’t stand having to comfort him all the time as if I’m the parent. I have to pat his hand all day long. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

  It’s a strain to be with him, and so she welcomes these naps of his. On this day, for instance, while he sleeps, Dahlie stretches across her bed in what today is Delph’s room, no longer having to be the parent, getting to be just a bobbysoxer with the very faintest of German accents doing her math homework.

  When a gas experiment gone wrong blew a hole in the laboratory wall outside Berlin, the young Richard Alter feared it was an attack by the French. When Dahlie hears the screams outside her building, what comes to her mind is Japan. Japan, she thinks, must have roused itself for one final attack on America, this time the East Coast. She imagines the screams are coming from neighbors who are hanging outside their windows, pointing skyward, frantic and agape as turkeys in the rain, as they helplessly watch the fabled kamikazes shriek and eddy down from the skies. She imagines that in another moment the planes will hit Broadway and explode into flames, the wreckage demolishing buses and taxis and pedestrians and luncheonettes. She runs to the window on her western wall and sees nothing, but that doesn’t mean the planes can’t be coming from a different direction. The screams have come from the south, she believes.

  The apartment has only two southern windows, one in the room that most recently belonged to Rose and the other in her father’s room, directly across the hall. It’s Rose’s room she runs to. She presses her face to Rose’s window. Indeed, there’s a crowd on the sidewalk below, housewives in spring colors with baby carriages, all frantic and pointing upward. The sky, though, is clear.

  Something terribly wrong has occurred; she has no choice but to understand that. Still, as she barges into her father’s room, she doesn’t know what it is yet, and so it’s a shock to find the bed empty and the window open, its curtains swinging in the fragrant breeze.

  CHAPTER 9

  Veronica Frankl and Eddie Glod were married on May 17, 1974, the day after they completed their junior years at Barnard and Columbia, respectively. They’d told no one a thing about it, just took the subway to City Hall with their license and the happy results of their Wasserman tests tucked inside Vee’s olive-drab backpack, which was decorated with iron-on peace symbol patches.

  After the ceremony, such as it was, they went to another room in the same building and petitioned to legally change their last names to Alter. This, they’d been informed by a despotic clerk prior to the marriage, was the order in which they had to do it. First Vee had to get married and change her name to Glod. Then Eddie needed to sign a form granting her permission to change her name from Glod to Alter. He, on the other hand, could change his name to anything he wanted whenever he wanted.

  “Really?” Eddie said. “That’s what the law says?”

  The anger emanating from the clerk, a small, thin woman, was almost visible, as if she were a comic strip character surrounded by short, wavy lines. “That’s what I say,” she s
aid, “and I’m the one who can accidentally lose the papers on their way to the judge.”

  “Wow,” Eddie said. “Why would you perpetuate the patriarchal system like that? You’re a woman. Whose side are you on?”

  “Read your Bible,” the clerk said. “‘For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church.’” Her lipstick had come off, leaving only a ring of lip liner. Vee could see her coffee mug on her desk, a fire-engine-red kiss on its rim. “You want to live in a matriarchy, go join a tribe of Amazons,” the clerk said.

  They’d been speechless. They still thought of themselves as kids; they couldn’t get over the fact that an adult—a professional, a representative of the government for Christ’s sake—had said such a thing to them. They’d also been surprised that the woman, who’d they’d immediately written off as grandly uneducated, knew the word matriarchy.

  “I guess I shouldn’t have said anything,” Eddie said, as they made their way to city’s idea of an altar.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t start the revolution today,” Vee agreed.

  “Maybe I should apologize,” Eddie said. But he didn’t, which he regretted the next year, the two of them in the oncologist’s office after Vee’s first diagnosis. “Remember that clerk?” Eddie said. “That farbissenah at City Hall? What she said about Amazons? Women warriors with only one breast? Do you think she maybe jinxed you?”

  Vee said no. She said that while the clerk had been very powerful when it came to ferrying documents to a judge, she was probably less so when it came to doling out cancer. Still, she had to remind herself repeatedly that she didn’t believe in jinxes or curses, just in meaningless coincidences and random happenstance, the most mysterious forces of all. Which was not to say that the dyspeptic clerk hadn’t gotten to her, too. She had ruined their wedding day, that woman. After they’d become husband and wife and Glods, they’d had to go back to complete their name-change petitions, and the woman had offered the most anti-Semitic “mazel tov” they’d ever heard. By the time they reached their next stop, a small courtroom a few doors down the hall, they were depressed and wary. It had been a relief when the judge’s hooded eyes turned out to be a sign not of hostility but boredom. Vee explained she preferred to no longer bear the name of the parent who’d deserted her. Eddie explained that his last name was Glod. Both reasons made sense to the judge, who scribbled his own name on something and sent them to a cashier, where they forked over some dough, and it was done. Vee and Eddie Alter at last, though none of us have ever called Eddie “Eddie Alter.” None of us, not even Vee, has ever thought of him that way. He’s always been Eddie Glod to us, Lady and Delph often using both names as if he were a Billy Joe or a Bobby Lee.

  After the legalities were attended to, Vee and Eddie, with their assorted documents, headed back uptown, where they bought a cheap king-size mattress at the Spanish department store that used to be on Broadway near 96th. Only then did they return to the apartment to break the news to our mother and Delph: marriage, name change, and their plan to leave almost all of Vee’s bedroom furniture on the curb—how else to fit that mattress in Vee’s small room? Vee’s furniture had once belonged to our aunt Violet, she of the plastic dry-cleaning bag, but Vee thought of it as her own. She felt no fondness for the fussy writing desk, the rickety bureau missing several knobs, and if our mother did, Vee stopped her from saying so. “Attachment, Mom,” she said. “Materialism. You have to let go.”

  Our mother had been home that day. This was her blue period, when she began missing work, calling in sick, staying home to drink and smoke in bed: turning into the father she’d once disdained. She’d begun missing other things too. One day Vee fished something out from between the sofa cushions. A cola-stained bicuspid molar. She put it into a baggie and showed it to Lady over coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, which, by the way, was the only reason for anyone to go to Amsterdam Avenue in the 1970s.

  “We should call someone,” Vee said.

  “And say what?” Lady said, and Vee saw her point.

  Our mother had emerged from her bedroom when Vee and Eddie came home. She’d shrugged on her salmon robe, removed the black wire roller from her bangs so they lay like a tube on her forehead. She was touched by the name change, pleased by the marriage, hurt by the ditching of the furniture. Most of all, though, she was deeply wounded by the wedding.

  “Me, I understand you don’t invite,” she said. “When do you ever think about me? But your sisters? You don’t even invite your sisters?”

  “Don’t make a whole tsimiss out of it,” Vee said.

  “Don’t use that kind of language,” she said. “We’re not Polish peasants.” She remembered Eddie. “No offense,” she said.

  “None taken,” he said. “I’m not a Polish peasant either. I’m from Verona, New Jersey.”

  She smiled as if some things in this world were too complicated to explain, then turned back to Vee. “So why couldn’t your sisters be witnesses?” She v’d the w. Vitnesses. When she was very upset or very drunk or just wanted to remind us of how hard her life had been, her old accent would reassert itself.

  “It’s not a big deal,” Vee said. “It was just something we felt like doing.” Her vitnesses had been the Italian American couple who were marrying next and about whom Vee later would worry during the whole Son of Sam thing, so perfectly did they fit the killer’s doomed demographic.

  Vee’s desire to be free of the family during the wedding didn’t extend to the rest of her married life. There was no question that she and Eddie would live in the apartment, the newlyweds squished into Vee’s bedroom. There was no talk of contributing to the rent, of paying anything for board.

  “They don’t have two dimes to rub together,” our mother told Delph, as if Delph had objected.

  Our mother even offered to switch rooms with them. “What do me, myself, and I need with the big bedroom?” she said, and was hurt all over again when Vee laughed.

  “Are you kidding? Like I’d really conceive a child in the Dead and Dying Room.”

  “All you girls were conceived in that room,” our mother protested.

  “Yes, and look at us.”

  “What’s wrong with you? You’d all be perfect if Delph would just push her hair out of her face.”

  “You are all perfect,” Eddie said.

  Our mother looked up at him from beneath her tubular bangs. “Even me?” she said.

  “Dahlie,” Eddie said, mispronouncing it, as he always did. She preferred the German pronunciation, Dah-LEE-ah, but Americans were always calling her Dahlia or Dolly. She tended to forgive Eddie Glod, though. She forgave him the Polish roots he failed to understand made him a lesser, she forgave him his forays into Yiddish, she forgave him his inability to say her name. She forgave him because he said things like this: “Dolly, you are the perfection from whence perfection sprung,” joking but not joking. “The child she never had,” we’d say of her feelings for him. During the year or so they shared the apartment, she’d flirt with him. “You’re my favorite son-in-law,” she’d tell him, and he’d say, “Really? You honestly like me better than Joe? That’s like telling Loeb you like him better than Leopold.” And we’d laugh, even our mother.

  But our apartment was the place mirth went to die. Not long after Vee and Eddie lugged her bedroom furniture down to the curb, a couple of chain-smoking teenagers from the Spanish department store arrived to drag the cheap mattress up to Vee’s room, and our mother got upset all over again.

  “You’re going to sleep on the floor like hobos?” she asked.

  “Box springs and bed frames are capitalism run amok,” Vee said, “like weed-free lawns and vinegar douche.”

  “But it hides the carpet.”

  The carpet was shagged and beige. “I know,” Vee said. “That’s called a bonus. A fringe benefit.” Eddie smiled, but no one else did. “It’s a joke,” Vee said. “Fringe. Because rugs have fringe.”

  “But this rug doesn’t,” our mother said.


  “Dolly,” Eddie said. “It’s a Japanese look.”

  “Did I ever tell you,” she said, “how the Japanese killed my uncle?”

  “Great-uncle,” Vee said. “Someone you never knew.”

  There were times when even Eddie couldn’t move our mother. This was one of them. She shook her head. She returned to the Dead and Dying Room. It was hard to tell if she’d meant to slam the door or if it had slammed on its own from the pull of the spring breeze through her open window. She was on a peppermint schnapps kick at the time. She had bottles in the closet, dirty, sticky glasses on her bedside table. She’d sometimes emerge from her room slurring and staggering but with minty fresh breath.

  Delph said, “I only wish she’d close that window. I think we should nail it shut.”

  “We’re getting out of here as soon as humanly possible,” Vee assured Eddie. But Eddie said, “I’m fine with it here, Veezie. I’d worry about her even more if we left. And I do love this little Delph person.”

  Beneath the hair that veiled most of Delph’s face, she blushed and grinned. It was a happy moment.