A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  Even so our lives struck her as nothing to shout about. “Well, you’re certainly Alters,” she’d said when they were done. She’d crossed her legs, reached over, appropriated Delph’s cup of half-finished, very cold coffee. “This is a very bad-luck family. Always has been. Although if you want to know the truth, until recently my own luck was pretty good, knock wood. I’m the exception that proves the rule. I had a perfect marriage. Nothing but fun and games, I kid you not, until the morning Jack died. And how does he go? In his sleep. The cake death, that lucky SOB. Too young, but wonderful for him anyway. If you can have the cake death, you take the cake death whenever it comes. But it was hard on me. Not that I’m complaining. The only thing better would be if I’d gone first. But to be honest, I wasn’t ready to go. I was perfectly healthy. Meanwhile he was already starting with the chest pains and the dizzy spells and the me-me-me-me’s. You know what I say? I say may he rest in peace, my darling Jack, and then I go on and live my life. I’ve got a boyfriend at Whitman, you know.”

  Her kids, she said, were perfect. Ivy League colleges. Prestigious grad schools. The twins, both married with kids and also running businesses, Sharon in San Francisco, Margo in London. Everyone—daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren—perfectly happy and happily perfect.

  Her youngest, her boy, her Danny—he was in the arts. A very accomplished musician. After Jack died, he moved back into the house on Long Island to be with her. So devoted. They were like friends. Like best friends. And he was very handy when things went wrong with the plumbing, that sort of thing. And when her health became a problem, he did extensive research, day and night, never resting until he found the perfect home for her, which, amazingly, turned out to be in the same town they lived in.

  “So now he lives in the house alone,” she said, “but so close to me. It couldn’t be more perfect. I go to him. He comes to me. Unless he’s on the road doing his gigs. Otherwise, he visits so often, I have to say, Danny, go out, have some fun. For a boy to be so devoted to his mother, it’s very unusual.”

  “He must be worried to death about you right now,” Lady said.

  Violet shrugged. “He probably thinks I’m safe and sound and playing cards with the old ladies in the day room. He probably knows the phones are down, and he figures I’ll call when I can.” She looked at the clock. She was cheerful and reasonable. “Lunchtime,” she declared.

  “We just finished breakfast,” said Lady.

  “It’s noon,” she informed us. “Where I come from, that’s lunchtime. I’m going to make us tuna fish salad.”

  “We don’t have any tuna,” Lady said.

  Violet smiled. She had transformed somehow, was suddenly more carefree, a younger woman on a lark, having an adventure. “Look,” she said, indicating the clock. “It’s already after noon. Time for lunch. I think I’ll make us a nice tuna fish salad.”

  “We just ate,” Lady said.

  Violet got up and went into the kitchen. She began opening cabinets. She frowned disapprovingly, as she took out all the cans in them, decades-old cans of pinto beans, succotash, cranberry sauce, cans of food we disliked but had bought and saved for some reason. She looked at the can in her hand. S&W green beans, so old the company no longer existed. She frowned. She sighed. She smiled broadly. “You must be starving,” she said. She put the can down. “We’ll have tuna salad,” she said, “and then you can tell me all about yourselves.”

  After lunch, Delph dialed Danny Smoke’s number, and for the first time the call went through. Contrary to Violet’s optimistic conjecture, he’d been out of his mind with worry, and it took more than a little effort for Delph to get him to stop asking questions so she could answer them, could explain where Violet was and who we were.

  Yesterday, Danny said, he called the nursing home to find out what precautions were being taken in light of the impending storm. “We’re on top of it,” the person who answered his call said. The residents were being taken to a nearby hotel. Beds were being set up in the ballrooms. There was food, blankets, a generator. “Games, books, everything they could want,” the voice said. “It’ll be like a pajama party.”

  Danny thought about offering to come by Walt Whitman. He thought about picking Violet up and taking her home with him. He even mentioned it to the voice. “Maybe I should swing by—,” he said, but the voice detected his reluctance and placated him. “You know going home does a number on your mother’s equilibrium,” the voice said.

  Now, on the phone, he sighed. “That was my big mistake,” he said. “I should have gone there and picked her up and brought her home.” Still, he said, he suspected nothing until the nursing home manager called him earlier this afternoon.

  “I have some news that will cause concern,” the manager said, “so I’m requesting that you listen to me as calmly as possible.”

  “‘As calmly as possible,’” Danny told Delph. “Can you believe that?”

  At some point on Thursday, an hour or so after all the nursing home residents were settled in the hotel, someone mentioned that they hadn’t seen Violet Smoke in a while. Perhaps the reason they thought Danny could remain calm upon hearing such news was that they themselves had remained calm.

  Has anyone seen Violet Smoke? they called out. No one had, but still they didn’t worry. They knew she’d arrived at the hotel. How far could she have gone? The storm was working in their favor, they assured each other. No one would actually leave the safety of the hotel in such weather. Even if she’d tried, the winds would have blown her back the moment she opened the door.

  They kept an eye out for her, of course. Then again, they only had so many eyes, and those eyes were focused on dozens of old folks in a vast and strange room with quavering chandeliers and a garish carpet that disoriented everyone. They were a skeleton staff trying to organize medications and keep everyone busy, all the while yelling, “Don’t look at the rug! Don’t look at the rug!” Danny had to understand it wasn’t easy to attend to every last thing. They had tried, though. They’d done their best. Every now and again someone called out, “Any sign of Violet Smoke?” and after a while when the answer was still no, they deputized two of the staffers to find her.

  “And really,” the manager said, “we couldn’t spare one much less two of our people. We had other residents to care for besides your mother. But we did it anyway.”

  Danny was sputtering as he told the story. His voice scaled octaves. “I said, ‘Do me a favor and stop previewing your defense for when I sue your asses off and just cut to the chase.’”

  The chase consisted of the deputized nurses, along with a hotel staffer, knocking on the door of every guest room in the merely three-storied hotel. They checked the kitchen and indoor pool. They peered inside the walk-in refrigerators.

  By now they supposed she might have left the premises after all. But if she had, what could they do about it? There was a hurricane out there. The hotel had a generator, but the rest of Melville was as dark as a forest at midnight. The phones were dead, meaning they couldn’t call the police or local hospitals.

  “And it’s not like we could go drive around the block,” the manager said. “For one thing, we had no vehicle; the bus we rented to drop us all off was long gone. And even if we had a car, what were we supposed to do? Drive down streets at random, hollering her name? Even if we did, she wouldn’t have been able to hear us over the rain and the winds.”

  “So that cheered me up,” Danny said.

  This morning the hotel van driver, a teenage kid who’d been sitting in the lobby reading The Old Man and the Sea while the winds battered the atria glass above him, noticed the commotion.

  “Hey,” he said, “this lady you’re looking for? You don’t think she’s the one I drove to the train station yesterday, do you?”

  Danny called the Long Island Railroad. “I don’t know what I thought they’d tell me,” he told Delph. “‘Oh, yes, sir, now that you mention it, we did have a deranged little old lady on the four thirty-five to New York
.’”

  “What we’ve noticed is, she’s got her good hours and bad,” Delph said.

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “Emphasis on the bad.”

  He wanted to drive into the city, he said. He wanted to get Violet and bring her home. He wouldn’t mind seeing our fabled apartment, either. “I never knew which pissed Mom off more,” he said, “the idea that your mother moved back to Germany and told my mother basically to fuck off, or the horror of losing the family’s rent-controlled apartment.”

  He would also like to meet us, he added. The fabled cousins. Delph especially. “Because of our brief shared history,” he said.

  “What brief shared history?” Delph asked.

  “What?” he said. “No—I just meant, we’re both the youngest.”

  Trouble was, though, while he wanted to get in the car this very instant, he couldn’t. Not today. Maybe not until Monday. There was a tree trunk—not quite a sequoia, but damn, from where he was standing it was close—at the bottom of his driveway. A half dozen other trees were strewn across his street.

  “I’ve got a gig in Hicksville tomorrow night,” he said, not without pride. “I don’t know how I’m going to get there, much less into the city.”

  “We’ll find a way to get your mother to you,” Delph heard herself say. So much for our weekend plans, she thought. So much for the literal Sturm, followed by our collective Drang. We’d have to live until at least tomorrow.

  Delph also thought this as she hung up the phone: a gig in Hicksville. She was fairly certain this was the most pitiful thing she’d ever heard in her life—and she was a woman who knew from pitiful.

  Even Vee agreed: we would postpone our weekend plans until Violet was back on Long Island. “So not tonight and probably not tomorrow,” she said. She sat up in bed, pulled the blanket to her chin. She looked like an old-timey photograph, her face tinted yellow, the chapped lips milky white, the hollows beneath her eyes so dark they seemed smudged with soot. “But Sunday. We’ll aim for Sunday.” And when Delph said, “Does anyone maybe think we should go back to the original plan—New Year’s Eve?” Vee looked at her with drowning eyes and said, “Delph, I don’t think I can wait that long.”

  “All right,” Delph said. “Of course.”

  “Delph, you know you can back out anytime,” Lady said, but Delph waved her words away. “It’s just,” Delph said, “I was wondering if now that she knows us, Violet might be upset if we—when we—”

  Vee was literally rolling out of bed, onto the small wedge of floor between the mattress and wall. “Violet, may be upset in the mornings,” Vee said, “but by the afternoons she’ll have forgotten our names and she’ll be playing cards and watching TV and ordering random strangers to give her a bath.”

  “Hold on,” Lady said. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Long Island,” Vee said, even as she reached around to rub her back.

  “Are you crazy? You’re staying here. You’re not going anywhere.”

  “I’m okay,” Vee said. “Violet had some Percocet with her. I’ll take a few. I’m not staying here by myself.”

  “I’ll stay with you, then,” Lady said.

  “Ha,” Vee said. “Delph’s going to do this alone?”

  And so we all went, the entire sisterhood, the triumvirate, the team. We wanted to get rid of Violet asap. It wasn’t only that with her around we felt sheepish about and began questioning the way we lived: our slovenly eating patterns, our embarrassing alcohol consumption, our predilection for dozing off in the same bed, our impending deaths that could not be accomplished with a houseguest occupying the Dead and Dying Room. It was also the sundowning. We couldn’t cope with it. Violet’s dementia had returned almost as soon as the fog lifted and the gray-green skies grew just the slightest bit grayer than green. Even as Delph was speaking to Danny, Violet had been ranting in the background. “Hang up, hang up,” she kept yelling. “Don’t you know who it is? You’re giving away our location.”

  “Ah,” Danny had said wearily. “I can hear my mom. I know this song. ‘The brown shirts are coming, the brown shirts are coming.’”

  “It’s so sad,” Delph said. “She must have been seven or eight when they had to leave Berlin. Of course she’s traumatized. How can that sort of terror ever go away?”

  “Yeah,” Danny said. “It’s all very sad. At least for the first couple of months. After that, when you hear it night after night and nothing you do or say helps, then, yeah, it’s still sad, but you also want to throw yourself out a window.”

  “Like Grandpa,” Delph said.

  “What do you mean?” Danny said. “What’s throwing myself out a window have to do with . . . you call him Grandpa? I mean, none of us were around when he was. He passed away so young. That’s sweet, you call him that anyway.”

  For a moment Delph wondered if it had all been lies. Everything our mother had ever told us, every sad story, everything that still haunted us—nothing but lies and more lies. That would be ironic, she thought. You spend your life thinking you’re cursed, and then it turns out it’s all based on the genetics and sins of some other family.

  But she knew this wasn’t the case. Violet had seen the chart, and the only death she’d questioned was her own. And there were the biographies on the bookshelf corroborating most of what our mother had told us. And not only that. We possessed some of the primary source materials. Iris’s letters to Lehrer, the ones she wrote him before he died. Karin’s diaries. Newspaper articles and obits.

  “I don’t know why I called him Grandpa just now,” Delph said to Danny. “I’ve never called him that before in my life.”

  Early the next morning, a warm, sunny Saturday, the sky the same gentle blue as that tracksuit we’d forced poor Violet to wear the night before—she was in her red-checkered housedress now—the three of us were on the train, returning Aunt Violet to our cousin. “Delph,” Lady said, “you sit with Vee, and I’ll sit with Violet,” but Aunt Violet said no. “I want that one to sit with me,” she said. That one was Delph, and there was no rescuing her. She and Violet sat together as Lady and Vee made their way up the aisle in search of another seat. Delph watched them go as if carried off by an unfeeling wave. She wasn’t quite ready to give them up, although she was grateful not to have to support Vee. Physically support Vee, she meant. A balmy September morning, but Vee, leaning heavily against Lady, wore her wool winter coat and a turban made from a jewel-colored scarf that she’d folded and twisted around her head like origami. “For warmth,” Vee said. “And for vanity,” Lady whispered to Delph. “We’re this close to shuffling off the mortal coil, and she still cares what le cousin thinks of her.”

  “Oh, come on,” Delph said. “You don’t know that’s why she’s wearing it.” Although the truth was that Delph had made an effort, too—a little mascara, a little blush.

  According to the LIRR’s timetable, the trip from Penn to Pinelawn Station took sixty-six minutes. If we’d given it any thought, we’d have realized that for the first five of those minutes, the train would shudder through the East River tunnel. But even if we’d focused on the tunnel, we wouldn’t have guessed that the lights in the car would flicker off and remain extinguished for those long five minutes, that the passengers would be enveloped in such darkness they’d be unable to see their own hands.

  Violet had been lucid—we had a sense of her rhythms by now and chose the early departure intentionally—but her disembodied voice became tremulous. “This much darkness is not so good for me,” she whispered. She took hold of Delph’s arm.

  “I’ll get Lady,” Delph said, but Violet didn’t let go.

  “My nurse,” Violet said. She may have been referring to the bath last night. She may have been bestowing a nickname. She may have already begun sundowning. “Don’t leave me, my nurse.”

  All her life, whenever Delph has been forced to talk at length, she’s grown self-conscious. She doesn’t recognize the timbre of her voice. It’s not her usual speaking voice,
certainly not her singing voice. It’s a strangled voice, and she imagines her vocal cords twisted and tangled, unable to thrum the way they’re meant to. Whenever she hears herself speaking like that, she reddens and then she clams up.

  But she didn’t have the option of clamming up that morning. She channeled Lady instead. “Okay, close your eyes,” she said. “Focus on your breath.” Those were the words Lady intoned when we did our beditation. Delph knew the script by heart. “Feel the breath and follow the breath, but don’t think about breath,” she said in a tight, stringy voice.

  As she recited the words, replicated Lady’s gentle tone, she felt, not to put too fine a point on it, like an idiot. She was certain the strangers in the seats in front of hers and behind hers were listening and rolling their eyes. She lowered her voice. She wondered if Violet could even hear what she was saying, this summons to do what Violet was already doing: to exhale, to inhale, to exhale again. Violet’s breath came loud and exaggerated. She inhaled and exhaled not like a meditator, but like someone getting a chest exam.

  But when the train emerged into the light of industrial Queens, and Delph told Violet to open her eyes—“Slowly. Only when you’re ready”—Violet was ready immediately. She blinked and gazed around the car as if she’d emerged into a strange new world. Delph couldn’t tell if she was ridiculing the experience or if she was unfazed or if she had achieved nirvana.

  She smirked at Delph. She said, “Feel the breath, but don’t think about the breath? This to you makes sense?” but she seemed calm. She seemed rescued.

  “It helped, didn’t it?” Delph said.

  “All right, my nurse, so it helped.” This was as much gratitude as Violet planned to express. “Could you do me a favor?” she said. “Could you please get all that hair out of your face? God gave you two ears for a reason. Stick your hair behind them.”