A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  “You sound like my mother,” Delph said, although our mother never took such a harsh tone.

  Aunt Violet snickered. “God forbid,” she said. Then she did something no one had ever done to Delph, nor to Lady or Vee for that matter. She reached over, pinched Delph’s cheek, and gave it a wiggle.

  We’d never been to Long Island. On the train Delph was a tourist fascinated by everything she saw. There were factories huffing black smoke as if a bishop just lost the election for pope. There were enormous billboards featuring larger-than-life men wearing nothing but colorful briefs and newsboy hats. There was Cavalry Cemetery, where the monuments tended toward black and gray granite for the same reason people sometimes wear black or gray clothing: to hide the dirt.

  Because she was awkward and intimidated by Violet and because she was a terrible conversationalist and because she wanted to talk about the curse, was dying to get Violet’s take on the curse, Delph introduced the subject of Lenz Alter. “So,” she said nonchalantly, “did you know the manna process is responsible for all this pollution?”

  It didn’t work exactly the way Delph intended. She meant to generate a discussion, to encourage Violet to tell some family stories. Instead Violet took offense. “Not all the pollution,” she sniffed. “Only some of it.”

  Delph nodded, retreated. “That’s true,” she said, although she wasn’t sure it was.

  “My grandfather was a great man,” Violet said. “You judge people by the times they live in, not by the now they never got to see. In the times he lived in they had starvation. They didn’t have pollution.”

  Right, Delph thought. They didn’t have it because he hadn’t caused it yet. But she said nothing, just spent the next minute or so excoriating herself. Why did she ever open her mouth? Why did she try to engage? She was so bad at it. Lady would not have made this mistake. Lady would have realized that Violet had known Lenz Alter—not from family stories or books, but from playing under his feet and sitting on his lap and calling him whatever German Jewish children called their grandfathers. Not Zayde. Our mother had made it clear that her family did not do Yiddish. Maybe, like Shirley Temple in Heidi, Violet had called Lenz “the Grandfather.”

  Violet was the one who tried to rescue the conversation, steer it in a less personal direction. “Did you know this is the biggest cemetery in the country?” she asked. “Miles and miles of plant food.”

  “Maybe you should close your eyes again until we pass it,” Delph said. She was trying to be caring, nurturing. She was trying to be the nurse.

  Violet waved the effort away. “I don’t do so well with the dark, that’s true, but death doesn’t bother me. It’s getting to death, that’s the problem. Believe me, I know. I grew up in a family full of people busy dying. That was how they lived their lives. Should I die today? No? Okay, how’s about tomorrow? I spent my whole life trying to escape that craziness. And I did. I made it. And what’s my reward? I get old. My mind goes—and I once was so smart, quick as a whip, you ask anyone. Not that there’s anyone left to ask. Also, I get shoved into a warehouse full of nothing but people busy dying.” She rolled her eyes, made a face. “Life,” she snorted.

  Delph proceeded with caution, but she proceeded: “I thought you said it was the best nursing home in the area.”

  “Sure, and the dilapidated shack is the best home in the tent village.” She was done talking about herself now. “Tell me about Vee,” she said, abruptly maternal. “Is there really nothing they can do for her?”

  Delph turned her head, looked out the window at the thousands of begrimed tombstones. “That’s what she says.”

  “But you got a second opinion.”

  “She didn’t want one.”

  “Who cares what she didn’t want? You don’t let a depressed person make decisions like that.”

  “She’s not depressed.” It was our party line. Admit to depression, and your philosophies turn into pathologies. “And we would never drag her around to other doctors against her will. We wouldn’t want to fill her with false hopes. It would be too much like spouting bromides—don’t you think?”

  Violet didn’t think. “You have the best hospital for cancer in the city where you live, and you don’t go once?”

  “As far as Vee was concerned,” Delph said, “Sloan Kettering’s just another tent in the tent city.”

  When she looked out the window again, the cemetery was gone. Now there were rows of mom-and-pop stores, now strips of attached houses, each with a small lawn covered with lawn ornaments. The Virgin Mary looking much like the Blue Fairy from Disney’s version of Pinocchio. Gnomes. Large reflective blue orbs on pedestals.

  At the Forest Hills station, the homes a little larger, many of them mock Tudor, Violet said, “I’m going to die soon too. I’ve got a bad heart, and I’m losing interest in all that hullabaloo out there. That’s the kiss of death. The no interest.”

  Delph couldn’t resist going for the bromide. “Oh, come now,” she said. “What about your boyfriend at the nursing home?”

  “Oh, him,” Violet said. And without a change in facial expression or inflection, but her glance suddenly dropping to her fingers, which were interlacing into this pattern, then that pattern, she said, “So, I want you to know the truth before I die. I think that must have been why I came to see you yesterday. I don’t think it was just my”—she made a fist, knocked on her head—“I think there had to be a reason.”

  Delph nodded. A reason. She leaned in to hear it. It wasn’t a terribly long story. Violet had finished it by the time the train reached the Floral Park station. It didn’t begin with once upon a time, but it might as well have. It began: One fine day in spring.

  One fine day in spring, about forty-two years ago, Aunt Violet received a call from our father. This, she said, was not entirely unusual. Though our mother and Violet hadn’t spoken in years, our father called from time to time to let her know what was going on with us girls and to borrow money. Violet and Jack Smoke had a rule. If the money was for us, they gave it to him. If the money was for our mother, they didn’t.

  Although her well-being affected ours, Delph is too cowardly to say.

  On this day our father wasn’t calling for money. Instead he said, in a sadder tone than the one most people use when uttering the phrase: “It’s a girl.”

  “Another girl,” Violet said. “And how does my sister feel about that?”

  “Good. Everyone’s healthy. Ten fingers. Ten toes.”

  “Good is good, but that’s not what I’m asking. How about is she happy?”

  “We’re talking about Dahlie,” said our father.

  A pause before Violet continued. “Did she give it a name yet?”

  A pause before he confessed. “Delphine.”

  She made him spell it. She said, “What is that? Is that French? I don’t know a single person in the world named that.”

  “She says it’s another flower. I think she meant delphinium. I’d have corrected her, but—Delphinium Frankl?—I didn’t think I’d be doing anyone a favor.”

  “Delphine Frankl’s no poem either.”

  Our father didn’t respond.

  “Nat?” Violet said. “Are you there?”

  “Listen,” he said. “I want to come out and talk to you.”

  “Really? She’s willing to visit the persona non grata?”

  “Just me. Are you kidding? She ordered me not to call you. She said, ‘And just in case you’re thinking of calling my sister, do me a favor and don’t.’”

  “Fine,” said Violet. “Come alone. And bring me a picture of that baby.”

  Our father took the same train line we’re on now. His seat faced Manhattan; he could see only what he was leaving, not where he was going. It made him nauseous. That was the first thing he told Violet when he got into her station wagon. “I rode backward the whole way. I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

  “Hello to you too,” she said.

  It was a weekday. Sharon and Margo were at s
chool. Danny, four, was down for his nap. Jack Smoke was at work. The New York branch of his brokerage house was in the financial district, not far from Vee’s office, as it turns out. For all we know they spent years eating at the same luncheonette counter, the two of them side by side, staring straight ahead. For all we know they boarded the same subway car at the end of the day. Maybe, after Jack Smoke got off at Thirty-Fourth Street, Vee rushed to take his vacated seat, felt the uncomfortable warmth left by the departing stranger. If she’d known who he actually was, it would have changed everything. The lunches would have been convivial, the warmth of the seat familial. In fact, had they known each other, he’d never have let her stand in the first place. He’d have given the seat to her right from the start. His little niece, after all.

  Natan Frankl and Violet Smoke sat on vinyl lawn chairs by the aqua-walled pool in the Smokes’ backyard. They drank iced tea from sweaty highball glasses.

  “Iced tea,” Violet said to Delph. “No alcohol in my house ever. Not even cooking wine.”

  “I know that Richard and Karin—”

  “Drank. They were drunks. You can say it. Why don’t you girls just say things when you have things to say? They drank and they fought. When they got tired of that, they fought first and drank later. They fought over money, they fought over his lousy job, they fought over his family, how if my father had any foresight at all he’d have slipped poison into his father’s schnapps. That was at the end, when they found out about the gas. The Zyklon—see? I’m not afraid to say things out loud. She called me at college to make sure I heard the news, my mother. First she called Rosie and then she called me. I said to her, ‘What does it have to do with Pop or you or any of us?’ But my mother, who according to herself was never wrong a day in her life, she says, ‘If they’d used the Zyklon to cure cancer, believe me, the Alters would be taking the credit.’”

  Violet interrupted the story to think about this for a moment. After all those years she was still trying to formulate a withering comeback. When she couldn’t, she said, “She also threw things at him. Dinnerware mostly, like in the movies. Though never the good china from Germany. But here’s the difference.” Her voice was prideful. “She never threw things at us girls.”

  “Our mother never threw things at us girls either,” Delph said.

  “Sure,” Violet said. “That would have required her to look at you for five minutes. Please—don’t think I don’t know what went on.”

  “Nothing went on,” said Delph.

  By the pool, Natan Frankl sipped his iced tea. The water’s surface was strewn with pink filaments—the decaying strands of mimosa blossoms—and half-inflated rafts and plastic swimming tubes with the heads of laughing turtles. Our father made his usual joke: “So, how are things here at the Smoke House?” Delph immediately heard the double meaning—Smoke House—but she wasn’t thinking hams, she was thinking people, the naked bodies lined up, heading to the small, stark building—how did their legs not buckle?—soon to fill with the smoke of our great-grandfather’s invention.

  Violet, however, seemed never to have made that connection. “Things are fine,” Violet told Natan. “Wonderful. Perfect as ever. And how are things at the Loony Bin?”

  He grimaced. “She’s right when she says she can’t handle three of them.” He fished for and lit a cigarette. “She can’t even handle one of them. I swear Vee thinks Lady’s her mother. Only Lady can feed her, only Lady can dress her. She cries her head off when Lady has to leave for school. And I’m no help, I admit that. I don’t know what the hell to do with them. We’ve been to the Central Park Zoo I don’t know how many times. I can’t look at those goddamn apes anymore. I’m pretty sure they can’t stand looking at me anymore either. They turn their backs when I show up. And there’s this ice bear there. Its cage is too small. Its pool is filthy. People throw cigarettes into the water. The poor thing just stands there swinging its head back and forth, back and forth. It’s been driven insane. It hits a little too close to home. It makes me think about the war, all of us behind the barbed wire. I’m afraid someday I’m going to go to the zoo and tear down the bars.”

  “I wouldn’t worry. You’re not exactly Hercules.”

  “I thought, maybe if it was a boy this time, I could do something with him. But even if it had been a boy . . . I mean, look at me. I’m too old. I’m too”—he searched for the word, first in English, then in French, then in German; nothing came to him—“shell-shocked,” he finally said, the old word from the Great War, but that’s not what he meant. They hadn’t come up with the word he was searching for then. They’d only just recently come up with the word genocide.

  He took out his wallet, removed the picture he’d brought along. Violet laughed. Never had she seen so much hair on a baby.

  “I begged her to get rid of it,” Natan said, and at first Violet thought he was talking about the hair. “But she wouldn’t do it, and now here it is.”

  This was when he made his proposition.

  “Well,” Violet said after a few minutes passed, “I’ve never known Dahlie to give away something that belongs to her, even if she doesn’t want it. Especially not to me.”

  “If we can figure out how to handle it. Maybe if we make her think it will make you miserable.”

  “Have you felt her out on it yet? The sooner the better with this kind of thing. I have a friend who adopted. They didn’t let the real mother hold the baby, not even once. Whisked it away, and that was that. Better for everyone.”

  “I wanted to feel you out first. If you say no, I wouldn’t go any farther. I wouldn’t give it away to a stranger.”

  “Not it,” Violet said. “Her.”

  “We’d keep it if you said no. So I wanted to see what you said. You and Jack, I mean. You’d have to check with Jack.”

  “Well, yes. No kidding. It’s expensive enough raising our three.”

  “That’s why I didn’t say anything to her yet. There’s a lot for the two of you to talk about. You and Jack, I mean.”

  “So she doesn’t suspect anything?”

  “All I said to her was the truth. It’s the same thing I said after the other two were born. The lesson from the camp. I tell it to Lady and Vee too. When they’re asleep. ‘Never love anyone too much. You never know when they might be taken away.’ I whisper it in their ears. Every night, I whisper it.”

  “You didn’t have to be in the camps to learn that lesson,” Violet said. “My mother. My father. Rosie. One right after the other. Gone, gone, gone. Boom, boom, boom.”

  “True. Although your father . . . It was because of what he found out about the camps, right? The gas. And maybe that’s why Rosie too. So in those cases, we’re back to square one: it all comes back to Hitler.”

  “Boom, boom, boom,” Violet said, “and you tell yourself, that’s it. I’m done. No one’s going to get to me ever again. Then Jack comes along. Then the girls. The first time I held them—the very first second—all my wisdom flew out the window. The brick wall I built around my heart, gone forever. Boom.”

  “Dahlie is wiser than you are, then. No one’s going to knock down her brick wall. When I told her not to love the baby too much, she told me it was way too soon for her to love it. She said, ‘You don’t love them at first. It takes time. A few years.’”

  “Well, that’s my sister. With me, I’m telling you, the very first second I held my girls, that was it. I’d have ripped out Jack’s throat with my teeth if he’d tried to take one of them from me. If he even suggested it. Not that he would. But Dahlie. Yes. I can see how it would take Dahlie years to love her own kid. If then.”

  If then, Delph thought. Like but then and and then, it was a phrase Vee might like.

  “That’s when the idea came to me,” Natan said to Violet. “When she said that she doesn’t love them at first. I said to myself, Natan, you’ve got a window of opportunity here. It would be better for the baby. It would be better for Dahlie. It would be better for the other two. And let’s be
honest, it’s probably better for me too. And, who knows? She could surprise us. Maybe she’d be relieved.”

  “Maybe. You never know with her.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t be so easy on you. Danny’s only what? Four?”

  “It would be a handful. But that’s not what I’m worried about.”

  Violet finished her tea. She was thinking she’d like to get up, skim the pool’s surface. After that she would go inside, clean up the kitchen. She was feeling a need to get her home in order, clean out some closets, put scattered toys onto the shelves where they belonged. Another little baby, and Danny not yet in school. If the house wasn’t picked up to begin with, she’d have no fighting chance.

  “I’ll have to talk to Jack,” she said. “And the girls. Margo would have to move into Sharon’s room. I’m not sure how they’d feel about that. Although they both love babies. And look at this one.” She showed him the photograph of Delph as if she were the one who’d taken it, as if he’d never seen it before. “Is that a real-life doll or what? Also,” she said, “there would be a condition. My condition would be none of you—you, Dahlie, the girls—none of you can see her. Not for a few years at least. Not until I say when. She has to know who her family is. She has to know her mother.”

  The train whistled past Hollis Station. The people waiting there were teenage girls mostly, their shirts cropped, their pierced belly buttons glinting, their hair straightened and slicked back into high ponytails. They wore hoop earrings as big as salad plates. They didn’t look at the train rushing by them. They could tell by its speed that it wasn’t going to stop for them. Only a scrawny boy wearing a pink seersucker suit with an oversize purple bow tie watched the cars tear past. His hair, bleached white and shaved on the sides, popped up thick and curly on top. He seemed young, and Delph wondered if he’d put this look together with bold, idiosyncratic care—a fashion statement, a queer boy’s flair—or if it was the doing of his mother. Whatever the pink suit’s provenance, the boy seemed at ease with himself. He beamed at the train. He seemed to be beaming at Delph. He waved. Then the train had whizzed by and he was gone. Or was she the one who was gone?