Now she was the one calling for her mother. Her voice was disconcerting, a child’s voice, lisping and cloying. “Mama,” she called, and she sounded like the old Chatty Cathy doll our mother once brought us from Woolworths: pull the string at the back of its neck and it talks, but mechanically, robotically, not like any person you’ve ever known.
We didn’t have the first idea how to help her. Lady tried words of comfort, but the stranger didn’t hear her. Vee, emerging from her bedroom, took a few steps toward her, but the stranger’s cries for her mother increased in rapidity and volume until Vee backed away.
Delph lowered her head, let her hair fall forward, hung back. The angel of death, she was thinking. The devil hath power to assume a pleasing—or, if not exactly pleasing, then a familiar—shape.
We continued like this a while longer, the three of us useless and baffled, the old woman yelling for her mother. But when her mother didn’t come and she realized she was on her own, the old woman did what any little girl, soaked through and frightened and lost, would do. She slid to the hallway floor, held her knees against her chest, pressed her forehead to her kneecaps, and sobbed.
Delph was the first of us to realize who she was. “Violet?” she asked, and as if a spell had been broken, the stranger on the floor, suddenly able to hear us, looked up to see who had spoken her name.
Our apartment is rent-controlled. Not rent-stabilized. Rent-controlled. Rent control began after World War II and is just about a thing of the past, but so long as a lineal member of our family lives here, our place remains subject to it. It’s a good thing, a source of envy, a security blanket. On the other hand, it sometimes feels oppressive, especially when you run into the landlord who has stopped being polite about your continued existence. Then rent control is like the brother in the eighteenth-century British novel who inherits the entire family estate but allows his unmarried sisters to reside in one of the property’s cottages until they finally do the right thing and die.
Rent control is what made it possible for our mother to live here on her own after her parents died. She was sixteen. As children, we could never envision it. How was it that no one found it unacceptable, a girl that age, a recently orphaned young girl, living by herself? How was it that no one intervened?
“Who cared about me?” our mother would say. “Rose killed herself six months later, that’s how helpful Rose was. And Violet . . . well, Violet always looked out for Violet.”
But what about teachers? we’d ask. What about the landlord? What about Arthur Kram, who lived across the hall (and still does)?
“Young people were older then,” she’d say. “It was a different time.”
It was a different time. Go argue with that. But different how? Our questions were endless. How had she supported herself? Had there been a nest egg? Proceeds from an insurance policy? A stash of cash under the mattress? Did she work odd jobs after school? Did she shoplift?
And what about the apartment itself? Did she keep it tidy or, a teenager, did she let dishes pile up, dust bunnies roam free? Did she invite girlfriends over for unsupervised pajama parties, playing records all night, smoking cigarettes, getting sick from cheap wine until their mothers forbade them to have anything more to do with her?
And if so, was this when she began to drink? And did she perhaps start inviting boys home instead of girls? Or did she prefer grown men, soldiers recently back from Europe, obvious father figures to everyone but herself? And did she cry herself to sleep after they’d gone back home, some perhaps to wives? And had she met our father then, had he been one of those much older men?
Or did none of this happen? Were these actually happy years, maybe even the best years? No crazy parents, no selfish sisters, no lousy husband, no pesky daughters. Just a girl playing house, preening before mirrors in her older sisters’ forgotten clothes, Suzie-Q’ing through the hallway in her dungarees and socks, staying up late every night and and skipping school when she felt like it, and eating nothing but cake and cookies and smoking her Luckys and drinking her Cuba Librés?
She never said, and we’ll never know. The mother we knew was morose, melancholy, almost always self-medicated, and no doubt certifiable, though she sought no medical help, so no certificate was ever issued, no name ever attached to what ailed her. The one thing we have to give her, though, is that she never seemed daunted by the history of this apartment. When she and our father married, they blithely inhabited the master bedroom; that is, she slept in the bed where her mother had died and next to the window from which her father had leaped. Perhaps she couldn’t afford superstition or sentiment, given the postwar housing shortage, or perhaps this was just how it was done in those different times when, more frequently than they do now, people died at home. Or more likely she knew and he knew they’d never find such a bargain anywhere else in the city. Rent control.
Many of the questions we asked her back then had to do with the sister she rarely mentioned. Not Rose, the one they found facedown in a men’s bathroom in Chicago’s Washington Park, her head between two mint-choked urinals. But the other one, Violet. Where had Violet been during all this?
“I told you,” our mother said. “College. Chicago.”
“What about summers? Why didn’t she come visit you then?”
“She had a boyfriend. A very rich boyfriend. She preferred to stay with him.”
“Why didn’t you move to Chicago?”
“Because I lived here. Because we weren’t Siamese triplets like the three of you.”
We knew only a few more facts about Violet. The chemistry degree. The childless marriage to one Jack Smoke. The death by dry-cleaning bag.
How many of these facts were actually lies? Because that last one—the suffocation—that was clearly bullshit. For here was Violet, sitting on our floor live and in person, seventy-three years old if our math was correct, but apparently six or seven in her own mind. Violet Smoke in the hallway, calling for her mama, crying her eyes out.
How did Delph know the woman was Violet? “Thought bubbles,” she said, but that wasn’t really true. She knew from the way Violet reacted to Vee’s room, which had once been Violet’s room, which was still Violet’s room as far as Violet was concerned. Instead of opening the door to the comforting familiarity she’d expected, she’d been shocked and scared by a room emptied of her things, emptied of furnishings of any kind except for a big, saggy mattress on the floor on which sat a gaunt, jaundiced, bald woman who resembled her own young self. We felt bad about this. If we’d known she was coming, we’d have at least straightened the blankets, picked up the glassware and dirty T-shirts.
At least she’d now stopped crying. For the first time she seemed able to see us. She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her veiny hands. She looked at Vee, and we could see the wheels spinning in her head, could see her trying to make sense of it all, trying to figure out what to do, what to say. It turned out to be this: “I want my bath,” she said.
She removed her Keds and her socks. She struggled to her feet, ignoring Lady’s proffered arm. She took off her raincoat and housedress, took off her old-lady bra and underpants. She dropped every garment onto the floor. Naked now, she strode to the bathroom. We heard the bathtub’s taps groan as they opened. We heard the water rush. Violet had left the door open, and after exchanging glances meant to convey a blend of panic and resignation, we followed her in.
If our encounters with naked people over the course of our lives have been minimal, our encounters with naked old people have been nonexistent, unless you counted the elderly penises of exhibitionists flapped at us in subway stations and movie theaters. But, aged penises aside, none of us had ever seen an entirely naked old person before, and while we’d always declared that older women such as, oh, say, Louise Nevelson or Katharine Hepburn were as beautiful as any young starlet, now that we stood in the well-lit presence of an actual older woman, we realized we’d been full of shit. The old lady standing before us, with her wrinkles and brown blotches an
d raised hairy moles, with her warts and wattles and love handles and shrunken pendulous breasts and equally pendulous belly and varicose veins and thickened toenails the color of corn chips—there was no denying it, this was not beauty. This was disability. This was decay. The name of this painting was The Angel of Death before Her Bath.
We’d seen photographs of a much younger Violet—Violet in high school, Violet at her wedding to Jack Smoke, our mother pregnant and sullen among the background crowd—and while, like the rest of us, Violet was not what you’d call pretty, she’d had an energy about her that we could detect even in black-and-white stills. She looked right into the camera, her smile closemouthed and cockeyed, sardonic and smart-alecky. In almost every pose she gave you the feeling that she was pissed off at the photographer and didn’t care if he knew it. We’d always read that expression as the selfishness, the meanness, our mother spoke of. Now we suspected she’d just been young and itching to keep moving. Posing had put a crimp in her style.
She took a seat on the toilet lid, directly beneath the portrait of Otto von Bismarck. “Nurse,” she said to Delph, “test the water for me.”
Delph felt mildly hysterical. If she didn’t count the old days in the clubs and the discos, it was the first time in her life she’d been singled out, had been chosen despite the presence of others. She looked at Lady the way one might look to a lifeguard. But Lady only nodded to her, and Delph sighed and knelt by the tub, dipped a hand in, fooled with the faucets, made the necessary adjustments, at which point, as if she’d mistaken Delph for a footstool, Violet pressed her wet hand on Delph’s back and climbed in. One leg in the water, then a moment of precarious balancing that afforded a view of her sparse white pubic hair, her goose-pimpled labia. Then the second leg in the water. She sat slowly, tested the temperature with her buttocks, sighed without pleasure, and sank down. She closed her eyes, waited. What could Delph do but soap a washcloth and get to scrubbing?
After the bath, Violet wrapped in a towel, sitting on the toilet lid again, Delph combed Violet’s wet hair. “That feels good,” Violet said of the comb raking her scalp. It was the first normal thing she’d said.
She still didn’t know who we were. She continued to call Delph “nurse.” She hadn’t acknowledged Lady or Vee at all. We’d introduced and explained ourselves several times, but she hadn’t reacted. We’d offered her food, something to drink, but she hadn’t heard.
Now she asked Delph for warm milk, a beverage request we’d never before heard from any other Alter, whether in person or in anecdotes. Delph warmed the milk, brought a mugful back to the bathroom. By then Lady and Vee had helped Violet change into a powder blue velour tracksuit that Vee had purchased eons ago and a pair of thick Kelly-green chenille socks that none of us remembered buying, though one of us clearly had. Now Delph, beginning to feel more at ease in the role, helped Violet take her seat atop the toilet and supervised as Violet sipped her milk. Bismarck, glossy and somber, stared at the opposite wall as if to avoid looking at any of us. Then Delph was taking Violet to our mother’s bedroom—or, no, to Violet’s mother’s bedroom, because Violet was again a young girl.
“Someone took my bed away,” she told Delph sadly, and it was true; someone had, a quarter of a century ago.
We fear it all sounds syrupy and precious. It was anything but. It was humiliating and obscene. Delph, especially, was shaken. She’d gotten past her fears that this was the angel of death, the devil in a housedress, but she felt that there was more to Violet than mere flesh and blood. Like the Kennedy plane crash, like the trees whipsawed in the park, Violet’s very existence seemed fraught with meaning. Delph sat on the edge of our mother’s bed—our mother’s and our grandmother’s bed—watching Violet drink her second glass of hot milk, and tried to tease out the message our aunt had been sent to deliver.
Acausal time, Delph thought. Events linked not by the sequence of passing hours, but by their meaning. The gods had directed Vee’s hand to a library book on the subject. Now they were showering us with illustrations. The logical conclusion was that we were meant to suss out the meaning. First a tempest. Next a visit by a ghost. Drama and disruptions.
Our lives were being disrupted. Someone, something, wanted to complicate our path.
Of course Delph was additionally concerned about Violet, the person. It occurred to her that the reversion to baby talk and bewilderment was nature’s way of protecting the elderly, of evoking sympathy in younger people who would otherwise be repulsed by the visibly rotting body. An old person naked: we turn away. A helpless baby: we open our arms. We scrub them clean. We put them to bed, smooth the blankets. We lock the latch to the window. Literally—we locked the latch to the window Richard Alter had jumped from, pushing it so hard to the right that it will take a pair of pliers to get it back to the unlocked position.
Violet handed Delph her empty glass. She closed her eyes. “Sweet dreams,” Delph said, and tiptoed out at last, flooded with a kind of tenderness adults rarely feel for other adults.
When Delph, in a fresh, dry T-shirt, joined Lady and Vee, who were damply stretched out on Vee’s mattress, she groaned dramatically to sum up the evening and said she was in the mood for cognac. The good cognac, she said, and it occurred to Lady and even to Vee that they were in the mood for the good cognac too. Neither of them moved, though.
“Don’t get up,” Delph said. “Please. Let me serve you. Let me serve everybody.”
Lady and Vee did; they let her. It wasn’t often that Delph relinquished the position of the shy, frightened baby who needed to be indulged. If Delph was going to actually pour the cognac, Lady and Vee were going to let her.
She didn’t exactly pour it. When she returned, she was holding the entire bottle in one hand, and, with the fingers of the other, three of the gold-leafed snifters Karin had brought from Berlin. She also had Violet’s tote bag over one shoulder. “I have composed a verse,” she said, and without apology to Clement Clarke Moore, recited:
. . . and I in my jammies and Vee with her henna,
Were all just about to buy the farm when a,
Stranger arrived without chauffeur or pilot;
’Twas our not quite as dead as we thought Auntie Violet.
Not a heroic couplet, but Lady and Vee took it. From the first to the fourth generations, silly rhymes have amused our family of murderers and self-murderers, and on this night we were grateful that we, too, could be so easily distracted. We were grateful, we realized, for so many things. We were grateful for the cognac Delph was pouring. We were grateful for the hammering rain that was also distracting and, in its own way, soothing, especially compared to the emotional storm that had just gone to sleep. We were grateful that Violet was sleeping.
We drank the cognac too quickly. No matter. There was more. We were grateful for that. Even Vee, despite the burning, was grateful.
Delph, thinking of her poem, said, “Is anyone quite as dead as we think? Maybe there are degrees of dead.”
“No,” Vee whispered. “There’s dead and there’s not dead, and that’s it.”
Delph frowned. “Are you honestly saying the fact that Violet showed up just as we’re getting ready to check out has no meaning? You don’t think her appearing here is meant to tell us something?”
“Maybe it’s meant to remind us there’s nothing like a good, hot soak in a tub,” Vee said. “That actually might be life’s one true message. Nothing more, but nothing less.”
“What happened to your Jungian conversion?” Delph said.
“I don’t feel Jung tonight,” Vee said.
“I’m being serious,” Delph said.
“Me too,” said Vee.
“Let’s think about this rationally,” Lady said. “You’ve got an old lady with dementia. She sometimes reverts to her childhood. A hurricane comes along. It scares her, and so she gets it in her head to go home to her mother. There’s nothing remarkable about that.”
“It’s true,” Vee said. “It’s called wandering. I
see it with the law firm’s older clients sometimes. It’s what old people with dementia do.”
“I’m sorry,” Delph said. “I find it very remarkable. I refuse to believe it has no meaning.”
“It does have meaning,” Vee said. “It means that Mom lied to us about Violet being dead.”
“It means,” Lady said as she dumped out the contents of Violet’s tote bag onto the mattress, “that Delph is going to have to revise her beautiful chart.”
Contents of said tote bag: one pair old-lady cotton underpants; one pair well-worn socks; one package Poise Ultra-Thin Panty Liners; one well-worn toothbrush; one tube half-squeezed Colgate for tartar control; many vials of pills; and one red-checkered housedress that could double as a tablecloth at a cheap trattoria.
Also, one beaten-up Pepto-Bismol pink paperback of The Valley of the Dolls, and tucked inside said paperback, acting as a bookmark, a creased photograph of a fortyish Aunt Violet in a coral gown, a glittering tiara wedged into her black beehive. At her side stands a short, burly man in black tie who we assumed to be Jack Smoke. Flanking our aunt and uncle are a pair of twins: teenage girls, unattractive and with dark curly hair and bad posture, wearing identical pink gowns. These four surround one somber boy, all nose and eyebrows, who, in addition to a tuxedo and coral bow tie, wears a tallith and a velvet yarmulke.
We passed the picture around. We were like a group of adolescent boys seeing their first centerfold, except instead of whispering “Tits!” with awe, we were whispering “Cousins!”
The final item in the bag was a cloth pencil pouch shaped like a banana. When you unzipped it, it looked as if it were being unpeeled. Inside were several pennies, some loose Tums, and a business card for the Walt Whitman Assisted Living and Long-Term Care Facility in Huntington, Long Island. On the back of the card someone had printed “Violet: Helene W. has your tickets for Penzance. You owe her $9.99.”
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 25