Love,
Your Bernie
This fourth and final letter was paper-clipped to a folded-up article from a May 1945 issue of Life titled “End of War—an Episode,” and in smaller print, “Americans Still Died.” This article included Robert Capa’s photograph of two American soldiers at the machine gun on the balcony of the apartment building in Leipzig, their eyes redacted by solid squares of gray, and also Capa’s triptych that showed the sequence of moments immediately after pfc Raymond Bowman was shot and killed; time is marked by the spreading pool of his blood. My mother had written in pencil: One day before Bernard was shot and killed.
Family Life
Mrs. Hamelin and Mrs. Brevittmore came for dinner on March 1. Martha had been back at work for two days. My mother apologized for the food. “This is a simple meat loaf and mashed potatoes and salad,” she said. “I’m a touch out of practice.” But we all thought it was a grand meal. Nora Elizabeth was in her crib in the dining room and slept through much of dinner. Afterward, Mrs. Hamelin presented her with a gift that almost made us fall apart with surprise and gratitude. It was a specially printed promise to send her, all expenses paid, to Paris for a month upon her graduation from high school. “I won’t be around to see that wonderful day, I’m quite sure,” Mrs. Hamelin said. “But you can rest assured, Nora Elizabeth is now mentioned in my last will and testament.”
“Knowing Esther as we all do,” Mrs. Brevittmore said, “you won’t be surprised it’s more will than testament.”
“I have lived a very willful life, haven’t I?” Mrs. Hamelin said.
Nora Elizabeth woke up then, gurgled and cried a little, formed a crooked smile, and waved her arms about. Martha nursed her while the rest of us cleared the dishes, and I carried out the platter of tiramisu that Mrs. Brevittmore had prepared. Martha propped Nora Elizabeth against a pillow and held her hand across her body to keep balance, and we all had the baby in view while we talked. But soon enough, Martha said, “She’s nodded off, I’ll be right back.” Martha took our daughter into her bedroom, came back, and served herself a helping of dessert.
“I’ve brought my own gift,” Mrs. Brevittmore said. She handed a wrapped package to Martha, who opened it excitedly. “A friend of mine took up knitting a year ago, which is the closest thing to me taking it up as I’ll ever get.” The gift was a hat, mittens with sleeve clips attached, and a pair of pajamas that looked like a tuxedo, which made everyone laugh. “I want one of these!” Martha said.
“I’m sure a commission can be arranged,” Mrs. Brevittmore said.
“These are terrific, thank you so much—these are so thoughtful,” Martha said.
“As you can see,” Mrs. Brevittmore said, “they’re for a couple months from now.”
Mrs. Hamelin and Mrs. Brevittmore stayed until about 8:30. The moment they left the house, my mother said, “I need to speak with you both.” We sat back down on the sofa. “I don’t really want to change the mood,” my mother said, “on such a lovely evening. But I’m not sure there’s any perfect time. Simply put, I want you to know I’m really all right. I know you know I am. But I need to say it in my own way to you.”
“Nora,” Martha said. She sat next to my mother and held her hands.
My mother shook Martha’s hands up and down quickly, but then folded her own hands on her lap, as if to begin a rehearsed, if not formal, speech. “It has not been easy for you both,” my mother said. “I would have given anything to have been available all along. Through your courtship, I mean. And before that, of course, for you, Jacob. And it seems that my whole early life—I’m not proud of so many things I did as a young woman. Like the television courtroom dramas say, ‘Let the record show, she was unfaithful to her husband while he was at war.’” She took a moment to regain her composure. “But here we all are. Here we all are together, and what is done is done. I cannot forgive myself for certain things, and won’t. But if you forgive me, Jacob, then I can continue. I’m hardly a sentimentalist, as you know. I carved out a dignified life as a librarian, a life I lost and now will never have fully back. My years of experience apparently are still needed a few hours a week. But I don’t feel that I’m charity at the library. I don’t feel I’m seen that way in the least. I have some savings. You will tell me when it’s time for me to find an apartment of my own. Or I will know when the time is right. But I cannot continue in the house without telling you what happened. What happened to me at the auction. At the Lord Nelson Hotel.”
“Mother, I understand maybe more than you think I do,” I said.
“Martha kept me apprised in the hospital, Jacob,” my mother said. “The police files, everything. I knew your entire view of things had to be changing. I felt as this was occurring it was the reason you didn’t come visit me. Because you weren’t sure, given all the new information, whom exactly you would be visiting. I was afraid you now thought I was not the mother you thought you knew all your life. Which to some extent had to be true.”
“To some extent,” I said. “But that’s no excuse for not visiting.”
“To me it’s a very good excuse. But let’s leave it at that, shall we, for now?” my mother said. “As for the photograph, the photograph by Robert Capa. You both simply must have questions. The therapist assigned to me in the hospital had questions. And I’ll try and tell you what my understanding of what happened to me is.”
“This isn’t necessary, Mother. We can move on.”
“No, Jacob, I’m afraid that’s not true. I think we can’t move on, as you put it, unless I tell you what I need to tell you. As to the photograph, I mean. You see, in Bernard’s last letter—and I saw it open on the kitchen table two evenings ago. In his last letter, as you know, he described the incident captured by Robert Capa in Death on a Leipzig Balcony. And I remember like it was yesterday seeing the very article in Life. It was delivered to the library, you see.
“And I looked at that magazine long hours. In fact, I took it from the library. Me, a librarian, I took it from the library and hid it away, and I kept finding new places in the house to hide it, because I thought that if I hid it in enough different places, eventually I’d forget where I’d put it. As if Life wasn’t published in the hundreds of thousands, after all. But you see, that’s what I attempted anyway. I was under that delusion. But I could always find it. And I’d stare at it, wondering what Bernie felt at that very moment. Because I’d had his letter, you see.
“And I won’t reprise all the sessions with the doctors in the hospital. But if there was one thing that came from those sessions, something I firmly believe, it was that somewhere deep in my heart and mind, unlocatable places, perhaps, or I thought they were—like that issue of Life I kept trying to hide—what was always on my mind was that apartment balcony in Leipzig. And Bernard’s last letter. The letter I received from the War Department. That Bernard was killed on April 20, 1945, the day after his letter was dated. And it was all there. There all along in my mind. All those years.
“So that when, God forbid—but He didn’t forbid it, did He?—God forbid the cruel happenstance arrived one day. The cruel happenstance: notice of the auction. The list of works on auction. Just a ferry ride away.
“In my . . . my state. In my . . . ” My mother broke down a little here, and sobbed out some words. “Robert Emil was my punishment.” Then she sobbed heavily for quite a while. “And my punishment might have stopped Nora Elizabeth from even being born. If Robert Emil had somehow managed to get into the library. If somehow . . . ”
“That is not true at all,” Martha said, embracing Nora. But my mother gently pushed her away and said, “No, the truth is the truth. It is true.”
My mother blew her nose in a tissue and continued. “That day in March 1977, it was so easy to slip from the hospital. I knew the routines so well. Oh, just another goddamn day of making Chinese finger traps. I’d cut out the notice of the auction and taped it on the back of the mirror in my room. And for days before the auction I could scarcely brea
the. Still, it was so easy to slip away. I knew the hospital staff was always distracted during tea. I stole money from the tin box and walked free as a bird right out the food service door, just as you please. I made my way easily to the ferry. And once in Halifax I made my way easily to the Lord Nelson Hotel.
“I had my jar of ink from Arts and Crafts. But I wasn’t quite prepared for seeing the actual photograph. Once I did see it, even from a distance, I was pulled forward by it. It felt like a rope was attached to my chest pulling me forward. There it was, the thing itself. What this says about my mind, I don’t know. As I got closer and closer, it came alive, like a scene from a movie, I suppose. But not that, exactly. But I did hear it. I did hear the photograph. It had shouting voices and gunfire, and I was going deaf from it. And really that’s the last thing I remember, except for our beautiful young interlocutrix in the stifling room, now my beautiful daughter-in-law who’s given me a beautiful granddaughter. What C. S. Lewis—I read a little of him in the hospital. Just enough, I suppose, though hardly transfixed by his ideas, just enough. Somewhere or other he used the phrase “miracle trajectory,” and I’m letting it apply to what’s happened to me. And here I sit, unforgiven by myself but healthy of mind and a librarian again. I love you very much.”
My mother sat for a cup of tea and then went to her bedroom. I heard her radio. But it wasn’t tuned to Detective Levy Detects, as the radio next to Martha’s and my bed was. It was more than halfway into the episode titled “The Apology.” Martha and I took off our clothes, Martha all but a T-shirt, and got into bed and listened. There was a gunshot and then a body fell to the floor. A woman said, “I’m so sorry, baby.” The narrator said, “It was the first time in the marriage of Maggie King and Orlando Wisteria that Maggie had apologized for anything. But then again, she had just murdered her husband.”
That effectively ended the episode. Martha switched off the radio. “Not to worry, darling,” she said. “I’ll never be like that.”
“Me neither,” I said.
With those assurances shared, our love and humor intact, with our legs entwined and our bodies pressed together, we closed our eyes. Yet as Martha told me later—and she thought this occurred around 3 a.m.—my mother called out in great alarm in her sleep, “Do not go up to that balcony! Turn back! Do not go up there!” Three, four, five times, which finally woke the baby, who began to softly cry, at which point Martha woke me and we went to Nora Elizabeth’s crib. Martha lifted her up, and by the time the three of us were under our bedclothes, Nora Elizabeth’s crying had stopped. So had my mother’s alarmed cries, but how could we know how the battle for Leipzig turned out in her dream?
And thus our normal family life continued.
Acknowledgments
Thanks go to Melanie, Tom, and Alexandra for reading drafts along the way.
Elizabeth Church
AFTER MY WIFE, Elizabeth Church, was murdered by the bellman Alfonse Padgett in the Essex Hotel, she did not leave me. I have always thought a person needs to constantly refine the capacity to suspend disbelief in order to keep emotions organized and not suffer debilitating confusion, and I mean just toward the things of daily life. I suppose this admits to a desperate sort of pragmatism. Still, it works for me. What human heart isn’t in extremis? The truth is, I saw Elizabeth last night, August 27, 1973. She was lining up books on the beach behind Philip and Cynthia Slayton’s house, just across the road. I’ve seen her do the same thing almost every night since I moved, roughly thirteen months ago, from Halifax to this cottage. I’m now a resident of Port Medway, Nova Scotia.
At three-thirty a.m., sitting at my kitchen table, as usual I made notes for Dr. Nissensen. I see him at ten a.m. on Tuesdays in Halifax, which is a two-hour drive. I often stay at the Haliburton House Inn on Monday night and then travel back to Port Medway immediately following my session. Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Nissensen is helping me a lot. But we have bad moments. After the worst of them I sometimes can’t remember where I parked my pickup truck. Then there are the numbing redundancies. Take last Tuesday, when Dr. Nissensen said:
“My position remains, you aren’t actually seeing Elizabeth. She was in fact murdered in the Essex Hotel on March 26 of last year. And she is buried in Hay-on-Wye in Wales. But her death is unacceptable to you, Sam. You want so completely to see her that you hallucinate—and she sets those books out on the sand. It’s your mind’s way of trying to postpone the deeper suffering of having lost her. One thing books suggest is, you’re supposed to read into the situation. To read into things. Naturally, it’s more complicated than just that. It can be many things at once. My opinion has not changed since the first time you told me about talking with Elizabeth on the beach”—he paged back through his notebook—“on September 4, 1972, your first mention of this. My position remains that, as impressively creative as your denial is, and to whatever extent it sustains you, it’s still denial.”
“My God,” I said. “A life without denial. How could a person survive?”
Nissensen smiled and sighed deeply: Here we go again. “What’s on the piece of paper you’re holding? You’ve been holding it in clear view since you arrived.”
I had copied out from a dictionary the definition of “Bardo.” “Let me read this to you: ‘Bardo—a Tibetan concept meaning intermediate state.’ It’s when a person’s existing between death and whatever’s next. And during this state, certain of the usual restraints might not be at work, in some cases for a long, long time.”
“And you feel this is what you’re experiencing with Elizabeth?”
“Yes. Which I hope lasts until I die.”
“So, you’ve recently found this word in a dictionary and now you’re embracing it,” Dr. Nissensen said. “Okay, let’s go with this a moment. What do you think it means that certain—what was it?—usual restraints might not be at work?”
“Well, to start with, obviously a person who’s died is usually restrained to being invisible, right? They usually don’t show up on a beach and hold conversations.”
“Yes, I’ve got quite a notebook filled with your and Elizabeth’s conversations.”
“That makes two of us, then.”
“I’ve been curious, Sam. Do you jot these down as they occur? Like a stenographer?”
“Like a stenographer, yes, sometimes. But sometimes I just listen closely and write things down the minute I get back to the cottage.”
“Week after week, you attempt to convince me you’re actually having real conversations, rather than, for instance, composing them. At your writing desk. The way you might when writing a novel, say.”
“Do you consider me a stupid man?” I asked.
“Of course not.”
“A liar?”
“Of course not.”
“No matter whether or not it’s called Bardo, the word’s not that important. The thing is, I talk with Elizabeth almost every night. And talking with Elizabeth is a reprieve from suffering. After all this time, you still don’t get it.”
“No, no,” Nissensen said, “I get it.”
“Yet you insist on calling what’s happening to me an—what was it?”
“An advent of mourning.”
“Advent of mourning. But I despise the word ‘mourning.’”
“And why is that, Sam?”
“Because it implies a certain fixed duration, a measurable time frame, and it also relates to my most hated word: closure. If you love someone and they suddenly disappear—say they die—there is no closure. It’s like, it’s like—what?—it’s like a Bach cello composition playing in your head that doesn’t let up. You can’t predict for how long. What if it’s for the rest of your life? You don’t just get closure. You don’t just come to terms and then move on. And not even a lobotomy could change my mind about this. And I’ve read C. S. Lewis, that book of his—A Grief Observed. I’ve read some theology and philosophy, advice-to-the-bereaved stuff, and I don’t give a goddamn who says what or how dramatic or limited or self-destruct
ive I sound. Closure is cowardice. When you lose someone you love, the memory of them maintains a tenacious adhesiveness to the heart—I quote Chekhov there. See, if you don’t feel very articulate, it’s useful to find people like Chekhov to help you out.”
“I don’t think being inarticulate is your—”
“Look, if I ever said ‘Oh, I’ve found closure with Elizabeth,’ please push me in front of a taxi on Water Street—I’d be dead to feeling anyway. You have my permission ahead of time. Shoot me in the head.”
“I’m your therapist. You’d have to ask someone else.”
Silence a moment, then he said, “‘Dead to feeling.’ So the pain keeps you alive to feeling.”
There was silence for maybe three or four minutes. This seldom bothers me. I just study the room. It is a basement refurbished as an office. Against three walls are shelves of books. Also, there are books crowded and piled haphazardly on tables. Mostly books on psychology, but I’ve noticed a few novels, too. Dostoyevsky. Thomas Mann. Virginia Woolf. Conrad. Charlotte Brontë. Little that’s contemporary. There is a small Van Gogh drawing of a village; I’ve wanted to ask if it’s an original. I’ve wanted to ask if it was inherited. There are five framed charcoal drawings of various women, not nudes. I know that his wife, Theresa, drew them because there are two others in the exact same style in the waiting room, each bearing her signature. There’s his overstuffed chair he sits on, and a sofa his clients sit on. On the table between the chair and the sofa, a box of tissues, a glass, and a pitcher of water. There are five ground-level windows, allowing for plenty of light, but also three floor lamps and one table lamp. The house is in a neighborhood of some of the oldest buildings in Halifax. Dr. Nissensen’s is a late-nineteenth-century townhouse. Winter mornings I occasionally hear the clanking echoes of the radiators. A car horn. On rare occasions a voice from the street.
My Darling Detective Page 22