He seemed aware of my anger. “I’m sure she was an excellent mother,” he offered.
“Well, she didn’t name me Abbott Costello,” I said. “She gets points for that.”
We exited the bookstore. To our left, across the street, was the campus. To our right was Washington Park. It was almost sixty degrees now, aberrant weather that was frightening if you believed what climate scientists were saying, but delightful if you didn’t. I opened my jacket. Students in shorts and flip-flops padded by, kicking through leaves the color of Bosc pears. The leaves became caught between their toes, slipped under their soles with each step they took.
“That was the old chemistry building.” Professor Costello pointed. “And over there, across the park, is where I used to live. I’d leave Chemistry and cut through the park at night. It was safer then, although it had already started to turn.”
We entered the park, taking the first path we came to. I’d been picturing something vast like Central or Prospect Park, places where people could hide or get lost, thousand-acre expanses filled with woods and duck ponds and swan boats. This park was small enough and the trees sparse enough that I could see across it from where I stood. There was a museum to the north. There was a ghastly concrete sculpture and a fountain to the south. Mostly, though, there were lawns and paths. I didn’t see any people at all.
We walked for a few yards. At a fork in the path the professor pointed to a small cottage a few feet away. We headed toward it, and I saw that it wasn’t a cottage but a public washroom. Chains and padlocks had been threaded through the door handles to both the women and men’s sides of the building. I rattled the handle to the men’s room anyway. Of course the door failed to open. I was disappointed, and not a little angry. I’d come all this way but couldn’t get in. I’d wanted to see the very spot where Rose had lain. I was like all those dissertators, including the one I’d slept with. I wanted to stand right where Rose had stood. Right where she’d collapsed.
“Why did it have to be a men’s room?” my mother had cried when I finally got her to speak about Rose. My mother had been the one called to identify the body. All these years later, she had grown reconciled to the grim sight of her sister’s corpse—the skin decidedly pink, she said, the puncture wound on Rose’s arm encircled with bright purple blood—but she was still pained by what she saw as Rose’s perverse choice of location.
“A ladies’ room, no one would have said boo,” my mother bemoaned.
The location was still on Professor Costello’s mind too. “I don’t know how it is she stumbled into the men’s side,” he said.
And yet, standing there, it seemed so obvious. I longed to tell my mother. I longed to tell Delph. Instead I told the old man at my side. He, the object of Rose’s youthful passion, had lived in an apartment building directly across the park. When he left his office in the chemistry building at the end of the day and headed home, he’d take the path we’d just taken. If he’d needed to use a bathroom on the way, he’d have veered off as we had done. He’d have come here, found her, saved her.
She hadn’t meant to die. She’d been banking on Abbott Costello’s need to take a piss.
I was certain of this. She’d wanted him to find her, to stop her before she could stab the needle into a vein. She’d imagined him embracing her and sobbing with relief and from the realization that his foolishness, his head’s refusal to acknowledge what his heart had always known, had nearly cost him what his entire being now understood: that she was the woman he loved, the woman he’d marry.
And if he’d arrived at the washroom too late? Or if he’d taken a piss in the chem building and had no need for the washroom?
Better to die than live alone, Rose’s note had said.
But that had been her plan B. Her plan A, I was convinced, was rescue.
“The family always speculated it had to do with her guilt over Lenz Alter’s involvement with the concentration camp gas,” I said. “But now I’m wondering.”
“I never heard her say a word about the gas,” Costello said. “I didn’t even know he’d worked on it until the articles came out. It would have been absurd, anyway. Why would she feel bad about Alter’s work? She was training to be a scientist. Scientists have a duty to perform their best work, to go where their explorations take them. We understand that; she understood. What politicians do with that work is when the crimes occur.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“No,” Professor Costello said, sighing grandly. “You’re right. She did it because of me. I’ve always known that. I never figured out the men’s room connection, but there’d been the note. And I never told the papers, but she’d come to my apartment the day before, throwing herself at me, crying and embarrassing herself. Embarrassing me.”
“What did she see in you?” I meant it to be blunt and insulting, though I mitigated the insult by adding, “Obviously you didn’t like her. You weren’t even kind to her. She’d just lost both her parents, and you weren’t even kind to her.”
He glowered. The hoods of his eyes descended. “I was perfectly kind,” he said. “I was never anything but kind. That was my downfall. My kindness was the very thing that exacerbated the situation. I had to finally forget about being kind and become firm instead. You can’t have them ringing your doorbell at all hours of the night. This sort of thing happens often, students with crushes on their professors, and I must say I had more than my fair share. I was right out of Harvard. I was a good-looking young man. I was already regarded as a great scientist. I had to learn how to keep them at bay. But Rose Alter—there was no dissuading her. She was obsessive. She was not of sound mind. After all, none of the other women who fell in love with me took their own lives.” A thought came to him, and he brightened. “It’s just like blaming your great-grandfather for what happened in the camps. He was just doing a job. Synthesizing nitrogen. I was just doing a job. Teaching chemistry. What other people did—it had nothing to do with us.”
I thought about Delph, her death. I imagined myself some time in the future telling an inquisitive stranger, “It had nothing to do with me.”
I thought, Better to die than live alone.
Costello handed me the roses. “Crouching is no problem,” he said, laughing sadly, “but getting back up is nearly impossible.” I knelt down, placed the bouquet at the bottom of the padlocked door. While down there, I recited a blessing I’d not thought of since my Hebrew school days, when I’d studied for my bar mitzvah, the one rite Jewish boys from even secular households must endure. It was the blessing one says at the moment one learns about a death, which means I was reciting it almost sixty-five years too late. What the hell, I thought. I recited it anyway. Translated, the Hebrew words mean nothing more than “Blessed is God, Power of the Universe, the True Judge.” And the prayer itself meant nothing more or, I guess, less profound than: This is it. This is the way it works. We live, we die, and hopefully you know why, God, because it makes no fucking sense to us.
“Rest in peace, Rose Alter,” said Abbott Costello.
I walked him back to the garage where he’d parked his car. He suggested we have coffee. I recognized that this was the cost of doing business with a lonely old man. I recognized that this is the way it works.
I got in the passenger side. He drove to a Starbucks, adhering to a harrowing speed limit of roughly five miles per hour. At the coffee shop he ordered tea and a cookie. We sat by a window, looked out at a used car lot, and he asked if I’d heard the news about indigo.
I thought I’d misheard him, but I hadn’t. Rose, it seems, had told him some of the family history, and he knew that her great-grandfather—my great-great-grandfather—had perfected the hue in his dye factory.
“Whenever I hear mention of that particular color,” the professor said, “I find myself thinking of Rose.” Then he told me that scientific consensus now holds that Newton was wrong. Indigo wasn’t—it never had been—a distinct color unto its own. It should never have been considered par
t of the spectrum. It no longer was.
In the cab back to the hotel I found myself stewing over the ouster of indigo. Who the hell had that seventh arc been annoying, anyhow? And what were they trying to tell us, these self-appointed arbiters of refracted and reflected light? That we’d all been hallucinating whenever the sun shone through a crystal chandelier and we counted seven colors in the prismatic stack on the wall?
My reaction amused me, yet somehow that didn’t allay my anger. I was really pissed off. Indigo sheared from the rainbow! Indigo disappeared like an Armenian, a Chilean, a Jew! When will Roy G. Biv get political? How long until yellow says, “First they came for indigo, and I said nothing”?
In my room, I succumbed to the scotch in the minibar. I told myself to stop being so absurd, so emotional. I told myself to be a Smoke, not an Alter. I reminded myself I hadn’t even known these people, these Alters, for most of my life. And yet it still felt like a personal loss, the erasure of indigo. It felt like something of mine stolen while I slept. It felt like the adding of insult to injury, a disinheritance, a metaphorical reenactment of the slicing and dicing of my great-great-uncle Rudi. It made me think about what my great-great-grandfather Heinrich Alter must have felt when he gave in to the inevitable, and chemicals finally replaced ai leaves and sake in his factory, and, I’ll bet, not a single customer noticed the difference.
It’s funny, I thought, what causes you to grieve and what doesn’t.
If Lenz Alter were living today, I thought, would he feel this loss as sharply as I did? Or would he not have cared one way or the other?
Who knows? Maybe he was the eager beaver scientist; maybe it was Lenz Alter’s ghost come back to earth in the form of a contemporary naysayer for the sole purpose of arranging the coup and expelling indigo from the fellowship of colors. Lenz Alter grew up to be a chemist, after all. So perhaps that explains it. The ghost of Lenz Alter come back to oust his rival for his father’s devotion. A chemist’s and a son’s revenge.
It wasn’t until the flight home that the rest of it came to me. I had my head against the window and was dozing on and off. My dreams were filled with images from Auschwitz and Treblinka, those photos of naked women and their children lined up, waiting for the showers. Dreams for Beginners, I call such dreams. You don’t need Freud to tell you why you’re having them or what they mean.
I was awake, though, my seat upright for landing, when it hit me. The showers in the death camps. The women filing into those seemingly innocuous buildings ostensibly meant for cleansing, ablution. Their fear as they walk in, cognizant now of what is to come. Their deaths, quick but not quick enough, from Zyklon, that cyanide-based poison.
The plane descended. It landed, and everyone around me pulled out their phones, called the loved ones or friends who were poised to come pick them up. We just got in. Meet me in baggage. Love you. I remained in my seat. I imagined Rose entering the men’s room in the park. I didn’t envision stalls and urinals, not at first, but rather, just the sinks. Cleansing. Ablution. I imagined her fear, her knowledge of what was to come. I imagined the injection, the cyanide.
Then I let myself see the stalls and the urinals too. The humiliation of dying amid the stench of others. She’d re-created that too.
And I saw mirrors, reflective surfaces everywhere. I imagined the final confrontation with one’s own reflection, one’s self.
I still believe she was waiting for Professor Costello, hoping for rescue and love. But I saw now that the family had also been right. Even she may not have known it, but it seems undeniable—she’d also been trying to expiate Lenz’s sins by dying the same way his final victims had died. She’d looked at herself, seen echoes of the face that was responsible for the gas. She knew she was cursed. She believed the curse was justified.
Or maybe she’d been trying to divert the course of that curse. Maybe she’d hoped that if she died this way, the curse would be sated and would not set its sights on Violet and Dahlie and the nephews and nieces she’d never meet. Maybe she’d made herself the sacrificial lamb. (And, Jesus, God, only now as I write do I see the shepherdesses lined up, pure white, on the mantel. A frivolous hobby, I used to think of those saccharine figurines. “For pretty,” my mother said of them. But now I’m thinking of that mantel and seeing it anew, my mother’s unwitting altar, her subconscious shrine to the sister who’d died for our sins. Jesus, God—I take it back; Freud would have had a field day with my family.)
It was a good try on Rose’s part, I guess. A valiant effort. But the sins of the father are visited on the children to the third and fourth generations, and she couldn’t stop it from knocking on everyone’s doors.
Although . . . not my door. Not my mother’s door, not my sisters’ doors. This is not to say we’ve never known sorrow or grief. But we’ve known far less sorrow and grief than most people experience. Why were we spared?
Who knows?
This is all I know: Life no longer feels like an imperative. Every day I live, it’s a choice I’m making. We’re all surrounded by people who see the horizontal light and the welcoming loom. Sometimes we are those people. When I think I can see that light or when I think of my cousins, I try to force myself to look around, to derive strength and pleasure from whatever it is I see: the ebony arteries and rounds in the tree bark, the burnt orange caps of acorns, the grass. Or if I’m in a dive bar in Hicksville or Plainview, I’ll buck myself up by singing one or two of my own songs. Sweet but forgettable, Delph wrote of my music. Probably so, but there are worse reviews of one’s work than sweet but forgettable. There are worse things for a person to be. Blessed is the Power of the Universe. Which means: go ahead, sing your forgettable songs. My small band of followers, those aging dancing suburbanites, don’t seem to mind when I do. In fact, they’ve come to know all the words.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The characters in A Reunion of Ghosts are fictional and not intended to resemble real persons. Certainly the three main characters, Lady, Vee, and Delph, and all the people they encounter throughout their lives, are products of my imagination. Any resemblance between these characters and actual persons are coincidental and unintended.
That said, some of the characters and events in the historical portions of the book were inspired by real people and events. Lenz, Iris, Richard, and Rose Alter were based, respectively, on the German-Jewish scientist Fritz Haber, his first wife, Clara Immerwahr Haber, their son Hermann, and Hermann’s eldest daughter Claire. The Einstein family was based on the Einstein family. John Updike once said: “Nothing in fiction rings quite as true as the truth, slightly arranged.” The truth (to the extent we can ever know the truth about people who lived long ago) regarding my historical characters has been arranged, sometimes slightly as Updike recommended, but more often significantly.
In the end, this is a novel, and it’s about an imaginary family. Yes, I did a lot of research to help me understand my characters and to establish a realistic chronological framework, but when I sat down to write, I wrote about Alters, not Habers.
To give just one example, while the aforementioned Claire Haber did commit suicide, her two sisters did not. The lives of Dahlie and Violet Alter are in no way based on the lives of any of Fritz Haber’s granddaughters. I purposely did not research his other granddaughters’ lives, thus allowing me to make those characters completely my own.
Which is not to deny that the novel occasionally quotes from or paraphrases historical material. The excerpts from Heinrich von Treitschke’s “A Word About Our Jews” and Theodor Mommsen’s “Another Word About Our Jews” have been edited for length and to conform better to my story, but most of the words are theirs, and I have not changed the original sentiments or arguments. The description of the appropriate dress for dancing the New Knickerbocker was adapted from an article by turn-of-the-twentieth-century dance master Alan Dodsworth that was quoted on Sonny Watson’s Streetswing.com, http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3knick.htm. (I admit I tried to inject some humor into Mr. Dods
worth’s original prose.)
Einstein’s conditions to Mileva can be read in full in the Walter Isaacson biography cited below. The excerpt from Lenz Alter’s letter of resignation is taken verbatim from the letter Fritz Haber wrote when he left the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute rather than fire his Jewish employees and associates, as required by new law. The excerpt from Max Planck’s “My Audience with Adolf Hitler” has been elided as indicated but otherwise has not been changed from the original. (The complete versions of these documents are in the Hentschel edited anthology.) The testamentary stipulations regarding the burial of Lenz Alter and the relocation of Iris’s ashes from Germany to a more hospitable burial site are from Fritz Haber’s will, as is the suggested epitaph: “He served his country in war and peace as long as was granted him.” (The full clause is in the biography by Dietrich Stoltzenberg.) Hermann Haber carried out his father’s wishes, and Fritz and Clara Haber are now buried side by side in Hörnli Cemetery in Basel.
Some (though certainly not all) of Iris Alter’s letters incorporate or paraphrase sentiments Clara Haber expressed in correspondence with her doctoral adviser and confidant, the chemist Richard Abegg. Abegg is very much fictionalized here as Richard Lehrer.
Also, in the novel I allude to Clara Haber’s very real letter to the Supreme War Staff, which she mailed shortly before her suicide. In it she decried her husband’s work as a “perversion of the ideals of science” and “a sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life.”
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