I retrieved the long note we’d written together from the drawer where I’d stashed it when Violet showed up. I added the pages I’d scribbled at the hotel. Soon I’ll add these last few pages, the ones I’m writing now. And then I’ll bind the entire thing together with the black plastic clip. I’ll seal the whole thing inside a FedEx envelope and address the envelope to Danny Smoke. I’ll go downstairs and lay the envelope against the super’s door. “Pls Mail ASAP,” I’ll write on a Post-it.
And then I’ll go back upstairs. I’ll make myself a drink.
And then . . . and then . . . and then
PART THREE
Last Words
DECEMBER 2010
How do three sisters write a single suicide note that is also intended to be a memoir of sorts? With the knowledge that someone else will write the ending, that someone else will have the last word. That someone turns out to be me, Dan Smoke.
On Tuesday, September 21, 1999, after Lady Alter had failed to show up at work for the fourth day in a row, the owner of the bookstore where she worked did something she’d never done before: she stopped by the building on Riverside Drive and rang the bell. When she got no answer, she buzzed the super. He used his passkey to enter the apartment. He found the sisters in their mother’s old bed. Lady and Vee were holding hands. Delph lay at the foot, holding on to Lady’s left and Vee’s right ankles.
The super became hysterical; it was the bookstore owner who plugged the disconnected phone into the jack and called the police. The police came and called my friend Freddie; his home number was on a card in Delph’s pocket. Freddie called me. The FedEx package containing the tome that Delph and her sisters referred to as a note arrived an hour or so later. I stayed up all night reading. The next day, full circle, I called the bookstore owner to ask who should be notified, who should come to the memorial I’d decided to hold. I don’t know why. I just felt there should be a memorial.
The note, I have to say, confused me. Parts of it filled in a lot of blanks when it came to my own family history. Parts of it made me laugh. But all of it made me sad. I’d known my cousins for only a few hours, when you got right down to it, but in some ways, it seemed, I’d known them better than they’d known themselves. They were not unattractive, not at all. Nor had they seemed awkward or unable to fill silences. They’d actually seemed delightful, even Vee, who I now realize should never have left her own bed that weekend.
And I’d really dug Delph’s hair.
It was, of course, disconcerting to read about myself and disheartening to read Delph’s version of our encounter. Just as she hadn’t told me she was a virgin, so she failed to tell the full truth of that night in her (incredibly difficult to decipher) last pages. What she omitted was this: before I drove them to the train station on that Sunday morning, I’d taken Delph aside. I said that I regretted giving in to my impulses the night before. I’d been fuzzed up from booze—my mother was right; none of us should drink, and I’m trying to stay sober or at least more sober these days, though that’s another story. But, I told Delph, the night before, the night together—that had been a mistake.
“I love you,” I said, and that was the truth. I’d loved her immediately, the way you might a new niece. She has your blood. She’s part of you. You recognize her. “But I don’t see me loving you in that way.”
“Oh, thank God,” she’d said, entirely convincingly. “I feel the exact same way.”
She must have known, then, that I wouldn’t have been thrilled if she’d come boomeranging back to me the very same day she’d left. Still, you can imagine how I feel now. If only I’d kept my mouth shut. Because certainly I’d have preferred her to come back to me by train than the way that she ultimately returned. “I can ship them to you,” the guy at the funeral home said of what he called my cousins’ cremains, but I told him I’d drive into the city, pick up the three cardboard boxes myself. When I arrived, the package wasn’t quite ready. I had to wait in a hallway by a coffee cart with an urn and a large brown jar of—I swear to God—Cremora. I have to admit I let myself wonder if my cousins’ comical spirits had placed the jar there. Cremains. Cremora. The jab of a ghostly elbow in the ribs. One final pun for the road.
Now the cremains are comingled in a single urn that stands on the mantel in my living room. For a while the urn shared the space with my mother’s porcelain shepherdesses, but when my mother died shortly after the turn of the century—peacefully, in her sleep, the only Alter of her generation and the two before hers to achieve what she called the cake death; the only Alter of those generations to be buried in a cemetery (alongside my father, alongside another plot where someday I’ll be)—I wrapped up the maidens and their lambs and their delicate crooks and stuck them in a box and mailed them to Margo who has a fondness for them that I don’t share at all.
So now the urn is the only thing up there. Each afternoon the setting sun comes through the picture window and spotlights it.
I scheduled the memorial on a weekend several weeks after their deaths. It was held in a public room off the lobby of their building. They’d made it sound as if they hadn’t any friends in the world, but the gathering was not ill attended. I met neighbors who’d liked them, even one who remembered Dahlie. I met the super, who could not stop weeping. “I knew them since they were born,” he said, rocking an imaginary baby in his arms. “They were like my own little girls.”
I met two men Lady had dated at different times, long after the affair with the dentist. These men were similar in appearance, somewhat scrawny and pale, both balding and bland. Each said he’d wanted a serious relationship with Lady. Each had been rejected. Now they were meeting each other for the first time, and they agreed that, despite the many years that had passed, they still remained wounded. For each of them, she was, and would always be, the one who got away.
“She told me there was no chemistry,” one of them said.
The other nodded. “No chemistry,” he repeated. “Exactly. That was her line.”
I met a coterie of paralegals, four middle-aged women who considered Vee an integral part of their gang. “We used to go out all the time,” one said. “Well, not all the time. We all have kids; it’s hard. But sometimes we’d go out. We’d do brunch—light on the eggs, heavy on the bloody marys. We’d go to readings and galleries. We’d talk about the three m’s: men, makeup, and menses.”
“We didn’t really talk about that,” another one said. “It’s a joke.”
“She’d taken off her scarf. We thought it was a good sign. It seemed healthy, you know? It seemed strong. We didn’t realize it meant it was over. And then she calls in and quits just like that. She never came to work again, not even to clean out her cubicle.”
“We called and called. No one answered. We thought she’d moved.”
“We read the obits every day just in case.”
We ate greasy croissants and drank increasingly lukewarm coffee. Delph’s boss, sans cowboy hat and sporting a valiant comb-over, called for quiet. He wanted to give a eulogy, he said. He got up and spoke at length about Delph, which irritated the paralegals who wanted equal time for their friend. They flapped at him when he was finished, telling him all their Vee stories. Meanwhile the two men whose hearts Lady had broken bonded over sports. I’d called Vee’s oncologist to let him know what had happened, and he wound up stopping by too. He was ripshit. “She wouldn’t let us even try to help her,” he said. I asked if there had been options available, interventions that might have saved her. “We’ll never know, will we?” he said. “There are always experimental therapies out there. She didn’t give us the chance to try any of them out.” He was shaking with anger. The crumbs from his croissant fell to the floor as he gestured with it. “I could kill her,” he said. “I really could kill her.”
Later, while I was cleaning up, throwing paper plates and paper cups into a trash bag, a PhD dissertator from Columbia who’d seen the announcement in the Times came by. She asked if the sisters possessed any prim
ary materials regarding the life of Iris Emanuel Alter. “It would be such an important breakthrough if I could get my hands on Iris’s suicide note,” she said.
“No one in the family left suicide notes,” I said. I knew this from reading the sisters’ suicide note, though I didn’t tell that to the scholar. If I were going to tell anyone about the sisters’ note, I sometimes joked to myself, it would be the people at the Guinness Book of World Records.
Lady, I knew, had once had a will, but there was no sign of it now, and I didn’t say anything about it. For the state’s purposes, then, they died intestate. “Imagine that,” the paralegals said, and Delph’s boss, who now knew everything there was to know about Vee, said, “The cobbler’s children go barefoot.” The court appointed me to administer their estates, which were larger than one would have guessed. Although their respective group insurance policies did not pay out, they’d socked away quite a bit in savings and the market and their 401(k) plans. I paid their last bills and the expenses of cremation, and after the probate process, I distributed their combined assets as I thought might please them: 75 percent divided among several international charities dedicated to ending chemical warfare and 25 percent to the Center for Great Apes.
This is what I kept for myself: The boxes under the bed in the Dead and Dying Room. The shoe box Vee had filled with newspaper articles about real-life coincidences that would have strained credulity had they not been published in the New York Times. The rubbery blue Philip’s head screwdriver. The painting of Otto von Bismarck. I had the latter appraised, and it wasn’t worth much. I hung it in my own bathroom. It seemed the right thing to do.
Although they died without wills, Lady, Vee, and Delph did leave me a legacy: I inherited their obsession with Lenz and Iris Alter. I’d never heard of Lenz Alter before I met my cousins, not from my mother, not from my sisters, not even in my tenth-grade chemistry class. After the memorial, though, I began asking about my great-grandparents. When my mother was lucid, she was able to answer some of my questions. She spoke about her grandparents with equal amounts of pride and shame, emotions that you’d think would be diametrically opposed and therefore confusing to the listener—that is, to me—but which actually helped me understand. It was like experiencing an exotic cuisine where sweet and bitter coexist in every spoonful. It made sense in a discomfiting way.
The scholar from Columbia called me a few times. On Mondays, when I came into the city to empty the apartment or deal with my cousins’ estates, she’d join me. She’d sit cross-legged on the floor while I packed up the sisters’ belongings, scheduled Goodwill pickups, shipped the antiques to my sisters, and had the rest hauled away by a guy with a battered truck on which he’d painted “The Junk Punk.” The only piece of furniture I hung on to, if just for a while, was the bed in the Dead and Dying Room. The scholar liked to have sex in it. Sometimes, after, she would sigh contentedly and say, “Can you believe we’re lying in the very same bed where Richard once slept?”
For this woman, it seemed, my ancestors were celebrities. She used their first names as if they were Oprah or Beyoncé. I wondered if, as we hooked up, she fantasized that I was Richard. No, that’s not true—I didn’t wonder. I assumed that she did; I was certain she did. I wondered what Richard would have made of this: an attractive and bright young woman driven sexually ravenous by the thought that at one time his atoms had bounced about this room.
Eventually, though, I got rid of the bed. I returned the keys and stopped seeing the scholar. I don’t know who eventually took the apartment. A very wealthy family, no doubt. Who else could afford such a place at market rent? Or, who knows, maybe it’s gone condo or co-op. I don’t know how those things work. All I know is that whoever they are, the new occupants must be immune to superstition. I sometimes amuse myself by imagining the ad the landlord placed: Pre-war, riv vu, 7 rms, 6 dths.
Maybe it was because my antennae were up, but in 2000 I began hearing more about Lenz Alter. Articles began appearing in both academic journals and popular magazines. In 2001, one of the biographies on my cousins’ bookshelf, Lenz Alter: Deutsch, Jude, Heiliger, Sünder, was updated and translated by an American publisher as Lenz Alter: German, Jew, Saint, Sinner. Five years after that a new biography was written by an American journalist. This bio contained much more information about Lenz’s personal life. It also addressed the link between his work and climate change. Let’s just say that the manna process will probably wind up being responsible for more deaths than either chlorine gas or Zyklon. It may be what finally does in all of us.
Grete Rosenthal’s slim memoir, Mein Leben mit Lenz Alter, was also reissued in 2005, although not in translation. After discovering how much professional translators charge, I spent weeks typing paragraphs into BabelFish and came up with a mangled version of the chapter that dealt with Iris. As best as I can tell, if you believe Grete, Iris was a shrill bitch, Lenz a screaming lunatic, Richard an unbearable brat, and Grete a put-upon martyr, not to mention a rare beauty who came this close to having a career as a Hollywood film star.
There was also a documentary on PBS. There was even an off-Broadway play about Lenz’s relationship with Einstein. The Times said it was The Odd Couple, but without the laughs. I didn’t bother going into the city to see it.
But though I missed the play, I read all the bios. I saw the documentary. I pored through the boxes from the Dead and Dying Room. I also began searching the Net. In early 2000 I was still asking Jeeves about Lenz, but then Google took off and then came Google Alerts, and quickly I was receiving all sorts of news about the Alters. Lenz first showed up on Wikipedia in 2003, Iris in 2005. A long, carefully researched piece about the murder of Rudi Alter popped up in 2007. I also came across a tourist brochure from the city where Rudi died that urges a visit to his memorial. There’s a photo of it—unser misspelled as unserer—and beneath it the caption says, “Many romantic couple come to enjoy picnic lunch and see cherry blossom.”
Also, as of this writing there are 10,800,000 results if you search for “Chock full o’Nuts massacre victims,” though significantly fewer if you want to know anything about their surviving spouses.
In other news, the Walt Whitman Birthplace was gorgeously restored in 2000. Someone else prunes the lilac bush now. Deep Throat’s identity was revealed in 2005. He turned out to be some guy no one had ever heard of, and it was all very anticlimactic. Also in 2005 Miami Ink, a TV reality show about tattooing, debuted. It’s hard now to remember a time when a discreet little adage encircling one’s calf would be found shocking. I have several tattoos myself, including an iris like Vee’s, though mine is bolder and larger. Mine trellises down my entire right arm.
Last month I took a vacation to Chicago. Early November is not a great time for visiting a famously frigid city, but I’d recently made a discovery that compelled me to go right away.
Over the years I’d been regularly but futilely searching for information about my mother’s older sister, Rose. Suddenly, in October, I got a few hits. Someone had uploaded the archives of the long defunct Chicago Daily Tribune, and on my screen was this headline: “Coed Commits Suicide in Men’s Washroom: Girl Was Descendant of Inventor of Death Camp Poison.”
This is when I learned that my cousins had been wrong when they’d written that none of the family suicides left a note. Rose had. Reproduced in the article, her note was pithy and frank and concise enough to fit inside a Hallmark card. It said, “You don’t want me and nobody else gives a damn either. It’s better to die than to live without love.” She’d mailed it to her chemistry professor.
The professor’s name was also in the article. It was such a ridiculous name that I thought it must be a pseudonym or some sort of obnoxious joke. Even if it were his real name, I thought, the man had to be dead by now. But I searched for him anyway, and there he was, still listed as emeritus faculty at the University of Chicago: Professor Abbott P. Costello. I wrote to him in care of the school, and he agreed to see me, but suggested I come soon. He was
not a young man.
Chicago took pity on me: it was sunny and in the mid-fifties when the elderly professor and I met at the university’s bookstore. He was in his early nineties, but he strode in under his own steam, stooped yet still managing to thrust out his bony chest. If a popinjay and an old stringy rooster had procreated, their offspring would have carried themselves the way this man did.
His face was the color of a bad sunburn. The veins in his neck were prominent, the flesh there pimpled and hollowed. The only fleshy parts of him were his earlobes. And yet, despite the indignities of time, not only could you easily tell how handsome he’d once been, he remained handsome even now.
He was carrying a bouquet of limp yellow roses that, I was certain, had come from a supermarket. He extended his free hand.
“Abbott Costello?” I said. I wasn’t questioning his name. I was questioning whether he was the man I was meeting. But he assumed the former.
“I was named in nineteen eighteen,” he said. “My parents had no idea what I was in for.”
“If you had a nickel for every time you’ve said that, right?” I said.
“If I had a nickel for every time someone said if you had a nickel for every time you’ve said that,” he countered. He spoke with a slight British accent to which I knew he had no claim, although he’d also let me know right away that he was of the Irish, not the Italian, Costellos.
He told me to call him Ab. I said I would, but it turned out I couldn’t. I called him nothing at all.
He told me he not only remembered Rose, he also remembered my mother. Rose, he said, had been high-strung and skittish, but not so Violet. “Your mother wasn’t as bright as Rose,” he said. “She wasn’t as sensitive. She slept in class with her eyes wide open. That was memorable. I once asked her how Lorenz Otto Alter’s granddaughter—not to mention Rose Alter’s sister—could be so bad at chemistry. She laughed. She didn’t care. She was one of those girls who took up valuable space in the classroom to pursue the MRS degree.” If he hadn’t been so old, I might have socked him in the nose. There was a purple spot, probably a small cancer, on the tip that I could have aimed at.
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 33