A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  She turned back to Violet. “My mother said no, I take it. She wanted to keep me.”

  “She said yes. She was angry and hysterical and paranoid, accusing your father of every crime under the sun, but she said yes. But then after seven months, that’s when she says no. Your father calls. She wants you back. Immediately. She’s hysterical. She’s talking about calling the police. Jack and I talked, too, believe me. We talked about going to court. We even talked about moving away in the dead of night, packing everyone up and starting over someplace else. But it wasn’t practical. Jack’s business was in the city. And legally, what could we do? We had a deal, but we didn’t have any papers. We should have, but we said to ourselves, Who has their sister sign papers? It seemed cruel. Salt in the wound. But it turned out to be our big mistake.”

  Delph imagined our mother coming for her, and Violet saying no. Violet saying, You can’t have her. She’s staying with us. Delph had never thought about the King Solomon story from the baby’s point of view before—the baby all grown up, with a phantom pain in her side where the sword was going to slice her in two. “Is that when our father left her?” she asked.

  “First he came and took you back. Next thing I heard was from your mother. Nate’s gone and she’s moving to Germany. What happened to him, who knows? He wasn’t a happy man, that’s for sure. All I know is, after he left, no one ever heard from him again. I sure didn’t. But you know how your mother picked the river? When I saw that on that crazy chart of yours, the first thing I thought was it would not surprise me one bit if she was looking for him there . . . if you get my drift.”

  “Drift,” Delph murmured. “He’d have thought that was a good one.”

  Violet looked confused. She didn’t get it. She just went on. “My kids all remember you. They talk about you sometimes. Even Danny remembers. He liked to hold you. You were such a little fatso. It’s nice in a baby. A little bundle. It was very hard on him when they took you away. He used to cry. My baby, my baby. You’d just started to creep.”

  This was too much; Delph had to turn the subject away from a tearful four-year-old longing for her own little hairy fat baby self. “You said you’d have changed my name,” she said. “Did you?”

  Violet smiled, a full smile, a warm smile, the smile of a woman who fell fiercely in love the very first second she held her child in her arms. “Of course,” she said. “The minute you arrived. Julie, we called you. Not after anyone special. Just a name I liked.”

  “Julie Smoke,” Delph said, and thought: Julie. Dahlie. Not sound-alikes. But look-alikes.

  The story was finished. The train pulled into Floral Park. It waited a brief moment. People got on. People got off.

  There are times, Delph believes, when the gods are so afraid you’ll miss the point that they stop being subtle. They just shove the meaning of it all in your face. So: Good-bye, Floral Park. Good-bye, all things floral. Delph was off to visit Julie Smoke’s brother and Julie Smoke’s house and Julie Smoke’s swimming pool. “Built in,” Violet assured her. “Gorgeous.” And it was a warm day, nearing seventy-five degrees, and, Violet said, there were swimsuits that once belonged to her daughters. Any one of them would fit Delph fine.

  But seventy-five degrees in September isn’t as warm as seventy-five degrees in July, and while Violet and Danny talked inside the house, the three of us only rolled up our jeans and sat at the edge of the pool, the water lapping at our calves. Delph pushed her hair behind her ears. She tilted her head back, let the sun do its damage. It never ceased to amaze her how everything bad for you feels so goddamn good. And vice versa. (Exercise. Vegetables.) It’s as if life is constantly issuing a warning: Don’t trust anything, especially yourself.

  “This is the life,” Lady said.

  Vee had her head on Lady’s shoulder. Her woolen coat was draped over her shoulders. Her turban had slid back. In the bright light Lady and Delph could see how haggard and gaunt her face had become, in a way they never could inside our apartment.

  “It’s someone’s life,” Vee said.

  Danny Smoke, that awkward bar mitzvah boy, had turned into a handsome man. Alter has always looked better on men than women, and Danny wore it especially well. He’d tidied his eyebrows. His hair was blue-black: either he had not yet gone gray or he’d resorted to dye. He had the Emanuel eyes, pale blue, to counter all the dark. And his nose appeared to have been broken multiple times. There was a divot, then a slight twist to the right. You had to absorb it in sections. It was better, less overwhelming, that way. It was less coming at you.

  He was beautifully dressed, too, unlike us, each in jeans and tees. He was wearing a blue polo shirt tucked into belted khaki shorts, which he’d told us, when he’d picked us up at the station, he’d bought in the boys’ department.

  He was short. Very short. Taller than we are, yes, but that’s never been much of an accomplishment. At the station he’d greeted us with warm hugs plus a self-deprecating and obviously much-practiced joke: “Danny Smoke at your service,” he’d said, “unless you need something off a high shelf. Then you’re on your own.”

  “Like Great-Great-Uncle Rudi,” Delph said.

  “Who?” Danny said.

  “On Lenz’s side. He was a dwarf.”

  “Heigh ho,” Danny said mirthlessly.

  “Danny is hardly a dwarf,” Violet muttered. She was in the passenger seat next to him. The sun was bright. She pulled down the visor, recoiled at the sight of her face in the vanity mirror. She pushed the visor up again.

  “True,” Danny said. “I believe the technical term is ‘shrimp.’” No one said anything. “Five foot four,” he finally said. “And one-half. Taller than James Madison. Shorter than Tom Cruise.”

  “More handsome than both,” Violet said.

  “Well,” Vee said, “if we’re answering questions people are too polite to ask, then my answer is, ‘After chemo it never grew back.’” She patted the turban.

  We saw Danny’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Wow,” he said. “Man. Sorry to hear that. I’d just figured you were incredibly stylish. I thought you were rocking a look. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine now,” Vee said quickly and with finality. Even Violet said nothing.

  “Phew,” Danny said.

  We’d driven on in guilty silence. Later Lady would say that Danny’s Toyota had been like a hearse, not in appearance or color, but in that he’d been ferrying four bodies that might as well have been corpses—that would be corpses soon enough. “I have a joke,” Lady would say then. “What do you call a hearse transporting bodies that aren’t dead yet, but soon will be?” and Vee would guess the answer—a rehearsal—but none of us would laugh. Our hearts were no longer in it.

  It had been hard not to think in terms of hearses. Not only because Vee was so sick and Violet so frail. But in the car, even as Vee uttered her lie about her health, we were driving along a boulevard of cemeteries. Long Island National Cemetery, Beth Moses Cemetery, Pinelawn Memorial Cemetery, New Montfiore Cemetery, Saint Charles, Wellwood. One right after another. Delph and Vee exchanged glances. Coincidence, this route we were traveling? Or a pointed message from the gods?

  We should say that, unlike Cavalry, these cemeteries were suburban cemeteries, middle-class cemeteries. Each one was grassier, better groomed, less crowded, than the cemetery in Queens. The monuments tended to be white marble. There was a brightness, a prettiness, to these cemeteries.

  “When I was in high school,” Danny said, slowing down as if we were passing a well-known tourist attraction, “we’d hang out here. We’d drink beer or get stoned or, you know, do whatever. We didn’t think it was disrespectful. We were convinced the dead people would enjoy a bunch of kids doing kid things behind their graves. We had this theory the dead would be very pro make-hay-while-the-sun-shines.” He was slowing down, pulling over. “You know what they call a bunch of ghosts hanging out in a group?”

  We thought he was going for a joke, asking us to be straight men. “No, what?�
�� we said.

  But he was just passing along some interesting information. “A reunion of ghosts,” he said. “You know, like a litter of puppies or a herd of buffalo or a gaggle of geese.”

  “Or a murder of crows,” Vee said.

  He’d stopped the car by the Jewish cemetery. You could tell by the Stars of David in the iron gates’ scrollwork. He wanted to get out of the car, show us his father’s grave, but thick chains and locks were making sure that no one defiled the Sabbath by visiting a loved one. “Well, my dad’s over to the side there,” Danny said, pointing. We turned to look, as if we expected to see someone waving.

  “We have no idea where our dad’s buried,” Vee said, “or how he died, or where he was during most of our childhoods.”

  “God,” Danny said cheerfully. He pulled away from the grassy strip by the roadside, continued home. “You are so competitive, Vee. I’m getting a shellacking here.”

  We’d been expecting a manor, but the Smoke House was just a split-level on a quarter-acre lot. Violet went immediately upstairs, leaning heavily on the banister. “I want to get out of this rag,” she said of her housedress. Danny commenced another tour, this time of the house. In a corner of the living room, the furnishings done in hunter-green velvet, the walls papered with hunter-green flocking, there was a life-size porcelain pony mid-prance, all gleaming white, its body pierced with a brass pole that touched the floor and reached the ceiling. Across the fireplace mantel were at least a dozen porcelain shepherdesses, some with white porcelain lambs by their porcelain blue or pink gowns. A white porcelain fawn the size of a fawn slept underneath the glass coffee table.

  Once, in preparation for a painful procedure to determine the exact location of her second constellation of tumors, the hospital had doped Vee up and slapped some earphones on her. They’d promised soothing music, but what she’d gotten as she woozed in and out of consciousness was a series of love songs from Disney cartoons. She hadn’t objected entirely. A rerelease of Snow White had been the first movie she ever saw, and she retained a soft spot for “Someday My Prince Will Come.” But she came home joking that she’d had a revelation: she was certain that the heaven everyone seemed to aspire to would be just like her procedure—antiseptic, populated by the overly solicitous, and with Disney music piped directly into everyone’s ears. “That’s what people are hoping for,” she said. “That’s everyone’s idea of paradise.” Now, in Aunt Violet’s living room, she added a new element to the concept. Heaven would also share this decor. Everywhere you went, there’d be velvet and knickknacks. There’d be shining white creatures and demure maidens in pastel gowns, all without mobility, bodily functions, and eyeballs—but pretty. Pretty and sweet. And everyone would be happy about all this sweetness, all this pretty. Everyone would be happy but Vee.

  Lady, on the other hand, was most fascinated by the gallery of family portraiture on the wall along the staircase to the second floor. Along with countless framed photographs of varying sizes hung in no discernible order, there were three exceptionally large, glossy oil paintings, one of each of the Smoke children. The paintings were in the style of Vermeer, the children’s faces aglow with light, the backgrounds dark and moody. None of the extended family was included in the gallery, certainly none of the old European family. Just this family, the ordinary Smoke family, celebrated and memorialized as if they were royalty, as if their visages needed to be preserved for generations and perhaps biographers to come.

  Thus, while Vee was thinking warily of heaven, Lady was reassessing domesticity. This was how it was done in regular families, she realized. She hadn’t been fond of the white porcelain animals either, but she was struck by the fact that they were relatively new. Aunt Violet had gone to some store and purchased that pony, that fawn. They were tacky, but they’d spoken to Violet, they’d touched her. There was no antique furniture, dark and heavy, passed down and then passed down again. There were no old chairs and sideboards glowering like refugees. No ghosts on the walls from the late eighteen hundreds reminding you daily of who they were and what they did and, therefore, who you were. Nary a Prussian chancellor in the bathroom. In the bathroom were pastel cartoons of cherubic little boys peeing, each framed in ornate gold leaf.

  No daily reminders of what you could never escape. Here, Lady realized, you could escape. You did escape. You weren’t the suicide’s daughter. You were a shepherdess, you were a lamb, you were Cinderella in a pair of pretty shoes that fit you perfectly.

  Her attraction to the house frightened her. She was filled with a longing she couldn’t name or abide. She felt hot tears in her eyes. “Well,” she said when the tour was over, “I guess we ought to get going. We can just take a taxi back to the station. We know you have a lot to discuss with your mother. We don’t want to be in the way.”

  Danny gave her a look: you are being ridiculous. “Have something to drink,” he said. He gestured toward the kitchen. “Help yourself to whatever you find. I’ll be down in a minute.”

  He went up to see Violet, we poked into the fridge. We weren’t pleased, but we knew we had no choice other than to stay. We could not have felt more trapped if we’d been in our coffins—which, ironically, perhaps even amusingly, had been our original weekend destination. Still, when we opened the refrigerator expecting pitchers of iced tea and lemonade, gallons of milk, there was only beer and half-drunk bottles of white wine and jars of half-eaten salsa, inside each jar a mélange of tomatoes and peppers and mold. A refrigerator, in other words, not unlike our own, not in the precise nature of the contents—we do not drink beer; we do not buy salsa—but in the ethos, the culture, the way of life, and it did make us feel at home, so much so that Lady, hopeful and emboldened, opened the small freezer compartment and found a frosted bottle of orange-flavored vodka among the crystallized cardboard cartons of sorbet and piles of Hungry Man frozen dinners. She poured a few fingers of the vodka into plastic coffee mugs—she couldn’t find any stemware—and filled the mugs to the top with flat tonic water. One for herself, one for Delph, who sipped the liquid down until she could transport her mug to the pool without spilling, and one for Vee. Vee, her pain diminished from the Percocet, was drinking again.

  A swimming pool and cocktails. It was the closest thing to a Hawaiian vacation we’d ever experience. Vee, determined and stalwart, drank in quick, wincing gulps. We all got mildly drunk in near record time. Is it shameful to say that we were happy, there in that suburban backyard? Everything was bland but easy. The afternoon began to feel like a send-off, like the going-away party we hadn’t expected anyone to throw us.

  We shared the jokes and observations that had come to us on the train, in the car, on the tour. We caught up with each other. “Lady,” Delph said. “I’ve got a question for you. Was there a seven-month interval between Mom giving birth to me and me coming home that you’ve maybe forgotten to mention to me?”

  Lady wrinkled her brow and dredged her memory as if it were a swamp full of old tires and lost shoes and discarded weapons. “So much of my childhood is in shadows,” she finally said.

  “You always say Dad left when I was swaddled,” Delph said.

  “Mom used to say that. Why? Did Violet know something I don’t? Were you too small to come home for a few months?”

  “Here comes Danny,” said Vee.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Delph said.

  Danny carried a baby monitor and a bag of chips and a beer. He dropped the monitor onto the grass. He joined us at the pool’s edge. He opened the beer, then the chips, each with his teeth. He smiled, aware that we were aware he was showing off for us. He passed the chips around. “You should have seen it yesterday,” he said. “Trees in the road everywhere. But now, it’s like Floyd never happened.”

  He told us that Violet was sleeping. “She’s finally down” was what he actually said, the way you would of your cranky child or, in different circumstances, your old dog. “She says she wants to go back to the nursing home. I told her to sleep first. Hence, the m
onitor.” He sighed. “She’s in and out,” he said.

  We tried to bring him up to speed on our lives. Again, we omitted most of the sad stuff. Again, it did not take long. Next we filled him in on his own family history. Delph, especially, was grateful that she felt so at ease with him. He was one of those men: her old teacher, her old therapist, her cowboy-boots-wearing boss, her Joshua. Also, the blend of vodka lazing through her bloodstream and the warm chlorinated water licking at her calves didn’t hurt. There was such pleasure, she thought, in slowly lifting one’s submerged feet until they broke through the blue surface, then dunking them under again. We were all doing this, Danny included, as we talked. Drown the toes. Save the toes. Drown the toes. Save the toes.

  “This is mind-blowing,” Danny said of our family stories. “Mom told me our grandfather got hit by a car.”

  “Maybe he did,” Lady said. “He landed in the street. A car could have been coming. Who knows? What about Rose? Do you know about what happened to her? Or our mother?”

  “I know your mother moved to Germany when you guys were kids. But who’s Rose?”

  We laughed. We said, “Have we got a chart for you.”

  But after we’d finished the narrative and he’d finished saying wow and expressing his sympathy and carping a little because he bet both of his sisters knew all of this, and it drove him crazy sometimes, how his family still thought of him as the baby who needed to be coddled and protected from bad or even interesting news, so no one ever told him anything—and after he said, “Too bad Lenz Alter didn’t invent Prozac instead of chlorine gas; that probably would have saved them all,” reducing our family’s moral drama and compromised souls to an easily remedied chemical imbalance—and, who knew, he was probably right—after all that, he hadn’t much else to say on the subject.