A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  We’d long known of Long Island’s Walt Whitman shopping mall in Huntington, one of the first enclosed malls in America, but it was a revelation that when the shoppers of Long Island grew infirm, they moved on to Walt’s nursing home. Our first impulse was to make jokes—I sing the body decrepit—but our second and abiding impulse was to feel appreciative of whoever bestowed the name on such a place. Walt Whitman was a nurse himself during the Civil War; we knew that; we rather loved that. We were fairly certain he’d have preferred his name to be associated with a nursing facility than with a shopping mall, especially an enclosed shopping mall.

  We allowed ourselves to picture the Walt Whitman Assisted Living and Long-Term Care Facility as a modern institution, but one incongruously staffed by Civil War nurses, not only men like Whitman but plain women like ourselves, women wearing white aprons over their long brown dresses, their hair parted in the middle and pulled straight back. We imagined these nurses—we imagined ourselves—proceeding from bed to bed, stopping for a while beside each one, reciting the poet’s verse:

  Old age, calm, da da da da da

  Old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

  We were a bit ashamed we couldn’t summon all the words. All summer we’d understood the calm that can precede death if only you let it. All summer we’d contemplated the freedom of delicious death.

  But old age? That we didn’t know from. We would never get old, and now, after spending a single evening with Violet, we added never growing old to the things-for-which-we-are-grateful column.

  Because what was there about Violet’s condition that was enviable? Why would we aspire to her stage of life, why would we desire to stand in her soggy shoes?

  At the same time, if we were feeling a knot of guilt about our decision re: dying, it might have been because we regretted our failure to achieve a certain kind of wisdom born from certain kinds of life experiences. Our squeamishness in bathing Violet. Our skittishness when it came to dealing with her showing up on our doorstep. Our skittishness when it came to any crisis, the preference we had for deflecting important conversations with jokes, rather than facing them head-on. It was fine, we agreed, not to want to grow old. Fine, too, to take steps to ensure we didn’t grow old. But we’d also avoided growing up. We’d lived our lives like perpetual children, hiding in corners, never knowing what to say, never knowing what to do. If our plan to die was problematic, it was problematic in that it eliminated the possibility of our ever becoming serious, capable women.

  We were sorry about that. Sorry that we’d spent our lives so selfishly, so narrowly. Sorry we’d never done anything useful or selfless. We were embarrassed we’d laughed at Delph’s silly little rhyme. We rued all the time we spent as shy fearful homebodies.

  We wished we’d never watched a minute of TV. We were distressed we hadn’t risked more, that we hadn’t figured out a way to love more. We admitted that our greatest sin might have been failing to fall in love again after losing our first loves, whether those loves were worthy or whether they were callow dentists or loud bike messengers who were never romantically interested in us in the first place.

  We refilled our glasses. We regretted doing that, we regretted the sips we took. There was so much to regret. In fact, there was only one thing we could think of that we did not regret—that it was too damned late for us to change in any meaningful way.

  Thank God for that! we said. Thank God we’d never have to change! Thank God there was no time left for us to become better people, to become grown-ups.

  The truth is, we’re shy. The truth is that for at least two decades now, we’ve been truly at ease only in this apartment with each other. The truth is that we live at the low end of the introversion scale. We are not people persons.

  “You know who was a people person?” Lady said. “Lenz Alter. He loved parties, he loved being front and center, he loved performing for others. He had tons of friends and loads of lovers. He was such a people person that he couldn’t abide the way soldiers got killed, bullet by bullet, one by one. He had to make dying for one’s country a group sport.”

  Also this: a person can only fall in love with the person she falls in love with.

  We all agreed: our wish to be better people was superseded only by our wish never to have to change.

  “I hate a cognac buzz,” Vee said. “It’s so headachy and maudlin. Where’s the singing? Where are the jokes?” But she was talking full voice and hadn’t yet complained about a fist grinding into her spine.

  We returned Violet’s belongings to her bag, everything but the business card. “Someone should call the nursing home,” Lady said.

  “I’ll do it,” Delph said. She hated the phone almost as much as Lady did, but making Vee get up, totter to the dinette, was too cruel, so she rose and she did it. The ghastly beeping and squawking when she finished dialing was so loud that Lady and Vee could hear it back in the bedroom. The hurricane, it turned out, had focused its energy not on the city but on Long Island. The phone lines there were down. If anyone at the Whitman nursing home was worrying about Violet, they would have to continue worrying until the next day.

  As for us, what with the weather, the unexpected guest, the hot bath by proxy and the cognac, what with the bout of self-loathing, what with one of us riddled with cancer and the other two grieving for her, we were each of us exhausted. On her way from the phone back to Vee’s room, Delph had the presence of mind to take our enormous suicide note from the top of the sideboard and hide it in a drawer, but when she returned to Lady and Vee, and Lady suggested a few minutes of meditation, Delph shook her head. She was too tired to do anything but crawl on her hands and knees to the head of the mattress and wriggle between her sisters and sleep.

  We all slept, soundly and dreamlessly. By the time we opened our eyes the next morning, Hurricane Floyd had gone out to sea, our building was enveloped in a preternaturally bright white fog, and our aunt was bringing us coffee in bed.

  Sundowning. It was another condition that Vee recognized from her work with elderly clients. The sun begins to descend, the light changes, the shadows grow, and the vulnerable client goes mad. Later, the sun comes up, and a semblance of sanity returns.

  “Dementia,” Vee said, “but on a part-time basis.”

  When she brought us the coffee, our aunt, for the first time, introduced herself. “My name is Violet Smoke,” she said. “Today is Friday, September 17, 1999. The president is William Jefferson Clinton.”

  This, it turned out, was the information she was required to give her caretakers every morning to prove she had regained her grip on reality. Now she looked around, shrugged with a single shoulder. It was very Jewish, this one-shouldered shrug, more dismissive, more resigned than if she’d shrugged with both.

  “I’m not sure whether I’m where I think I am or if I’m having hallucinations today,” she said. She sounded nonchalant about it, as if she’d accept whatever answer she received, but we could tell she was faking. Her pinched face betrayed worry. She needed us to reassure her. She was dependent on us, we three possibly illusory women beneath the blankets of a mattress on the floor of her old bedroom.

  “You’re not hallucinating,” Lady said. “You came here last night. In the middle of a hurricane. You let yourself in with your key. How is it you have that key after all these years?”

  “I gave you a bath,” Delph said.

  “I let myself in with my key?” Violet considered this. “I guess I’m lucky you didn’t shoot me.”

  “Do you know who we are?” Lady asked.

  “Dahlie’s girls?” She pronounced Dahlie the German way. Her own German accent was faint, but still stronger than our mother’s had been. “Aren’t you? Who else could you be?”

  We helped her sort out which of us was which. She knew our names and nicknames. She leaned against the door frame, arms folded across her chest, and addressed each of us in turn, like a teacher going down the row on the first day of class, getting to kn
ow her charges. “Do you remember me?” she asked Lady. “You were so little when I last saw you. You and your parents had come out to visit. First time in years, and what happens? You almost drown in our pool. Do you remember? Your mother was having words with your father for a change, and she took her eyes off you, which who does that? A toddler near a pool and the mother looks away? The next thing anyone knows, you’ve marched right into the water and gone under. All we see is your hair floating on the surface. Your father jumped in and hauled you out. She just stood there.”

  “I don’t remember any of this,” Lady said.

  “You probably do,” Vee said. “In some faraway recess of your mind. It’s probably affected your entire life. It probably explains everything.”

  Violet turned to Vee. “You,” she said, “you, with the painting on your head. You don’t look well at all,” and when Vee didn’t deny it, when Vee told Violet the short version of the cancer saga, finishing up with the magic word inoperable—a word that led most people to mumble something, then make themselves scarce—Violet had plenty to say. “I knew it,” she declared. “First, the no hair. Second, I’ve seen that look before. You can tell by the cheekbones, how the skin clings and hangs, all at the same time. How old are you? Forty-something, no? Well, that just stinks. It does, it stinks. But you know what? I’ve stopped with the bromides. After a while you sound like a fool, with the oh-you’ll-be-fines and the oh-you’ll-outlive-us-alls. And who does it comfort? No one. Not the person saying it, not the person hearing it. You’re sick, not an idiot, am I right? You know what I say now when I see those cheekbones? I say I hope you feel better, and if you don’t, I hope you go easy.”

  She was done with Vee. “And you?” she said. “They still call you Delph? I never liked that name. No offense, but what kind of name is that? It was a mistake, you know. I said to your father, You give your baby a mistake for a name, you fix it.”

  “It ruined my whole life, my name,” Delph said.

  “All right, but on the other hand, it’s just a name,” said Violet. “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. Meanwhile, get up and get dressed like a person and come to breakfast. All of you. Yes, even you with the cheekbones. Although brunch is more like it by now. It’s what—eleven a.m. by now. I’ll make eggs. Is the coffee good? You don’t have the Mister Coffee. That makes it the best. I assumed milk and sugar. You keep everything in the same places in the cupboards like my mother. I open the cupboard and there’s the coffee, right where she’d have left it. I only hope it’s not the same package from then. Ha. Although—no. It’s one of those new brands, one of those Fatty Starbuckles. Don’t look so concerned; I’m joking; I know what the name is. Come to breakfast. You can explain to me why you spend so much money when it’s the same coffee as A&P. Also, why you all sleep in the same bed.”

  “We’re just sometimes too lazy to move,” Delph said.

  “Lazy? Lazy is not accepted in my world.”

  “Well, welcome to our world,” Vee muttered.

  Violet put her hand on her hip. She looked straight at Vee. Her smile was closemouthed and cockeyed. She had less than an hour of lucidity left for the day, but we didn’t know that yet. “I looked in those other rooms,” she said. “The one in the back, that’s where Rosie slept. The one in the middle was your mother’s. I looked around. Don’t worry, I didn’t go through your drawers. I’m not interested in your underpants. Half the furniture, though, I recognized. My parents’ furniture, but somehow Dahlie got to keep it all. You know what I didn’t recognize? You know what wasn’t there when I lived here? That chart on the back of Dahlie’s door.”

  “Oh, God,” Lady said. “If we knew you were coming, we’d have taken it down.”

  “Mostly it’s got everything right,” Violet said begrudgingly. “And I was sorry to see what it said about your mother. What a way for me to find out, by the way. I could have used some of whatever that is in those glasses you got all over the place. Not that I drink. It’s why I’m still walking around, the no drinking. But—did I already tell you I stopped with the bromides? When it turns out someone’s dead, you know what I say these days? I say, May she rest in peace, and I call it a day. What else can I do? Tear out my hair?” She heard what she’d just said and glanced at Vee, at the decorated canvas that was Vee’s skull. She shrugged a single shoulder. “But as for me? Me, on the chart? Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” The smug little smile again. “Mark Twain said that,” she informed us. “Or maybe Will Rogers. Who can keep those two straight? I’ve got enough on my mind these days. You think you have problems? Wait till we talk. We’ll see who has problems.”

  She left the room. “Jesus,” Vee said. She wasn’t hungry. She didn’t feel well. But at least she wasn’t whispering. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

  But Lady and Delph were obedient. They got dressed in clean clothes. They carried their coffee into the dinette. Violet had been up for hours, it seemed. The table had been cleared. All the papers and publications and bills were in piles on the sideboard. If Lady and Delph hadn’t already been on the verge of killing themselves, this would have been reason enough. They were certain they’d never find anything they needed ever again.

  “Sit,” Violet said.

  Lady and Delph sat and drank their coffee. Violet scrambled eggs in the kitchen, the bluish skin hanging from her upper arms flailing as she whipped the batter. Lady and Delph didn’t mind this either—her cooking for them, they meant. Violet was old, they should have been waiting on her, not the other way around. But anyone could see that the cooking gave Violet pleasure.

  Violet sat in the chair our mother used to sit in. She didn’t eat anything herself. “I already had,” she said. Every now and then she got up, dialed the phone. Beeping and squawking filled the room. Violet sighed and hung up.

  “Floyd,” Lady explained. She looked across the hall and through the living room’s windows. The fog was nearly blinding in its brilliance. It was the wrong consistency for fog. It was thin, like a runny sauce.

  But Violet wasn’t interested in Floyd. “So,” she said, “tell me how you got the apartment back after giving it up.”

  “What do you mean?” Delph said. “We’ve always lived here.”

  “Except for me,” Lady said. “I was married for a couple of years.”

  “Vee was married too,” Delph said. “But basically, we’ve lived here all our lives.” She smiled as if she were about to brag. “I’ve never once slept anywhere else.”

  Violet looked hard at Delph. She didn’t say anything. She scowled. Then she seemed to make a decision that let her plunge ahead. “But what about the years you lived in Germany?” she asked. “Which, by the way, is where I still thought you were.”

  “Germany?” Lady and Delph, two-part harmony.

  So this was the first story Violet told us: When Lady was seven, Vee four, and Delph learning to crawl, Violet received a call from Dahlie, who said she was returning to Germany and taking us with her. She would not say where in Germany she was going. She would not give any address. She said only that she didn’t want Violet to try to find her. She didn’t want to hear from Violet ever again.

  Oh, and Natan was gone. “But you know all about that,” Dahlie said.

  “Your mother,” Violet said. “She thought Natan and I were having an affair. Why I’d get involved with an old man who sold buttons when I had Jack Smoke, she could never explain.” She smirked, the sister who’d nabbed the superior man. “So I figured that was that,” she said. “You were all gone. The apartment was gone. I called the old number just to see, but it was disconnected. So I went on with my life. We weren’t close anyway. We were always fighting. We had a big fight after my wedding, right before the reception—she was out to here pregnant with that one”—pointing to Lady—“but she thought she should be my matron of honor anyway. I said, one, we never liked each other. Two, can you imagine the photographs, you with that belly? She didn’t care. Everything always ha
d to be about her, even my wedding. And then a couple of years later, after no talking, we tried to make up, but that was the time Lady almost drowned, so we had a big fight that day too. Somehow it was the pool’s fault, not hers. It all came down to she didn’t like that I had money. She was a very superficial person.”

  “She wasn’t, really,” Lady said. “She had a hard time of it. She saw her father’s body after he—”

  “Jumped,” Violet said. “You can say it. He was my father, too, the last time I looked. I know what he did. I know what they all did. Even without a chart I know it.”

  “She lived before they had medication for people with her problems.”

  “They have medication to prevent liars from lying? She told you I was dead. There weren’t enough tragedies in the family? She had to suffocate me? What kind of sister imagines such a thing, much less says it out loud and to children? And she told me she was taking you away. You think I wouldn’t have liked to have known my nieces?”

  To let us know she didn’t require an answer, didn’t want to hear excuses and justifications, she rose and dialed the phone again. Beeping, squawking. She hung up, sat down, glared.

  “The nursing home’s lines are down,” Delph said. She was finding the sane version of Violet harder to take than the sundowning version.

  “I’m not calling the nursing home,” Violet snapped. “What good would that do me? I’m calling my son. I need someone to come get me, unless you want me to stay here forever.” She looked right at Delph. “You don’t, do you?”

  We heard the bitterness, the sarcasm, but also the wish that she might be wrong, that we might want nothing more than to take her in, poor stray cat, and keep her and care for her and allow her to care for us.

  By now the peculiar fog had lifted and the world looked familiar again, though a dreary kind of familiar. Lady and Delph had told Violet all she needed to know about the three of us. Marital status, dates of cancer diagnoses, occupations. They omitted our tentative plans for the night before. They omitted a few other things. To tell our entire life stories except for ropes, razors, pills, and massacres: it took no time at all.