After Melanie

by Gloria Goldreich

‘Yes. Reidenberg,’ he repeated as he brewed their coffee, and Judith, familiar now with the kitchen that was not her own, poured milk into the blue ceramic creamer and placed their mugs on the table. He sat opposite her, took the letter from his pocket and placed it on the table.

  ‘It was Camp Reidenberg, actually. A displaced persons camp in Austria where Luba’s family and Sylvia’s were interned. It was supposed to be a transit camp for Holocaust survivors, but some families, like Sylvia’s, stayed there for years.’

  ‘Sylvia was a Holocaust survivor?’ Judith asked and immediately regretted the question. She did not want him to retreat into silence.

  He did not. He breathed deeply, and when he spoke, it was in a monotone, a slow and reluctant recitation.

  ‘Actually, her parents were survivors. Tzvika and Henia Makover. They had both been slave laborers at Auschwitz. Her father’s first wife and his three children were killed there. Her mother’s first husband and her small daughter also died there. Of typhus, Sylvia’s mother thought, but it could just as well have been pneumonia or malnutrition. Or even gas.’ He spat the words out, his fists clenched.

  Judith stared at him, her heart pounding, her thoughts tumbling over each other. Three children killed – no, four. They would have been Sylvia’s siblings. No, her half-siblings.

  She closed her eyes against the invasive image of small, lifeless bodies and felt overwhelmed by questions that she dared not ask. How had Sylvia’s mother, Sylvia’s father, survived such bereavement? There were days when she marveled that she herself had survived the loss of her Melanie, one cherished child. How courageous, then, that Sylvia’s parents, death-haunted as they were, had had the courage to bring another child into the world.

  She thought suddenly of the words the very young doctor had spoken in the hospital corridor.

  ‘It was a gentle death,’ he had said.

  He had intended to comfort them but they had not been comforted. The death of a child, she might have told him, is never gentle.

  It is an end to life, an end to hope and dream, frightening in its dark incomprehensible finality. All parents of such vanished children share a mutual bereavement, a mutual identity. Children who lost their parents were orphans, but there was no word in any lexicon for parents who lost their children.

  She shivered and looked at Jeffrey, grateful that, absorbed as he was in arranging a plate of pastries, he had not taken note of her distraction and her dark imaginings. He added a wheel of cheese and resumed his narrative as he sliced it.

  ‘Her parents met at Reidenberg where they were placed when the war ended,’ he continued. ‘They married and Sylvia was born there a year later. There were many such marriages in those camps – widows and widowers clinging to each other in loneliness and desperation. Second families were created, babies born. Births after so many deaths. Sylvia had only one faded snapshot of herself as a child in Reidenberg. Spindly-legged, skeletally thin, her eyes, her beautiful eyes, weakened by incipient trachoma which an American army doctor thankfully cured. Many families left, some after weeks, some after months – they went to Palestine, to America, to England, to Australia – but her parents were inert. They stayed and stayed. The camp was crowded, moldy shacks, huts where small businesses were conducted. Her father called himself a shoemaker and earned a couple of coins repairing the heels and soles of boots that were beyond repair. They lived in a hovel that stank of urine and feces because it was next to a shared bathroom. Sylvia slept on a mattress with her cousin Luba until Luba’s family went to Israel. She didn’t remember much about Reidenberg, but she never forgot the stench. She said that it was so crowded that when she breathed she was afraid she was stealing someone else’s air. They cooked on coal braziers and the sky was always dark with smoke. That too she remembered. Finally some cousins in Baltimore traced them, sent affidavits and tickets. Sylvia was six years old when they came to America. She had never had a new dress. She had never owned a doll. Her parents sometimes called her by the names of their dead children. They were exhausted. They had forgotten how to be parents. They had forgotten how to live. She never had a childhood, my Sylvia. Her parents, she told me, were absent presences in her life, ghosts who barely spoke. She cared for them and fended for herself. Which she did quietly, bravely.’

  His voice broke. He mourned his wife’s death, he mourned her lost childhood. He was, Judith realized, doubly burdened. She reached across the table and, weeping, she placed her hand over his. He looked at her, encased her hand in his own and lifted it to his lips. His eyes were closed but tears continued to fall. Bonded by sorrow, they sat silently in the gathering darkness. At last he rose and lit the small table lamp so that their faces were bathed in light. Their coffee was tepid and he refilled their cups.

  Judith understood now why Sylvia Kahn had hung sachets in her closet, why the atomizers breathed out their fragrance, why the wide windows opened out to a garden planted with a hedge of sweet-smelling roses whose scent surely wafted into the house throughout the spring and summer months. Of course, she had wanted a large house set high on a hilltop where she could see the sky. After a childhood spent in the crowded camp, she craved isolation. It was understandable that the small girl who had never had a new dress became a woman obsessed with the clothing she could now buy with ease. And, of course, she, who had never known a mother’s care, would want to be with her own children every hour of every day.

  Jeffrey had made everything clear and that stark clarity humbled Judith. She understood Sylvia Kahn who had been determined to nurture and protect her daughters, just as Judith herself had been so fiercely determined to nurture and protect her own children.

  She remembered the long nights of Brian’s childhood when she and David had stood vigil beside his bed, regulating the nebulizer as he struggled for breath in the throes of an asthma attack. She had wanted to offer him her own breath, her own life, and had wept with relief in David’s arms when color at last returned to their son’s face and he breathed with ease.

  Her sabbatical year had been planned to offer Melanie ballast against the inevitable perils of adolescence. A thwarted determination, a foolish effort. But Sylvia at least had succeeded. She had guided her two daughters into young womanhood, into independence, imbued them with her love. Their faces, in their commencement portraits and in Amy’s bridal photo, beamed confidence.

  ‘I’m sorry that I didn’t know Sylvia better,’ she said, compensatory words but true enough. During the years when they had been neighbors, she had had little time for intimacy.

  ‘She was a very private person.’ Jeffrey offered words that were at once apologetic and forgiving.

  ‘I understand.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s getting late,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to hurry.’

  Brian and Denise were coming for dinner. She wanted to be home in time to heat up the cassoulet she had prepared that morning.

  Jeffrey’s solitary meal was already on the kitchen counter. A chicken breast, a small potato, a slice of tomato resting on a bright green lettuce leaf. She wondered if he listened to music as he ate. Was he addicted, as David was, to haunting requiems and mournful sonatas? The vagrant thought suffused her with sadness. They walked to the door together. He heaved the cartons laden with Sylvia’s clothing into her car, lifted her hand to his lips.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said softly. ‘Thank you for everything.’

  She did not answer. She dared not confront his gratitude.

  ELEVEN

  Driving home, her car crowded with the cartons of clothing, it occurred to her that somehow, they had inadvertently violated the privacy that had been so important to Sylvia Kahn. But then the tables of the thrift shop overflowed with similar violations.

  Death ended all sequestration. Judith thought of the woman, her eyes still red from days of weeping, her face pale, who had brought in a large white box that contained pastel-colored negligees of the finest batiste, each with a pair of matching satin slippers.

  ‘My mother’
s,’ she had said. ‘She never let my sister or me touch them. She wasn’t a vain woman, but this was her private treasure.’

  That private treasure, of course, was, of necessity, violated. Set out for sale on a trestle table with other sleepwear, the delicate negligees were fingered, a slipper was lost, a pearl button loosened.

  But that was as it should be, Judith thought, turning into her own street. The possessions of the deceased were passed on and life went on. The thrift shop offered the comfort of continuity, the affirmation of usefulness. Sylvia Kahn’s cape draped the shoulders of a pale, sad-eyed young girl, just as Nancy’s daughter now sat at Melanie’s desk, placed her own secret treasures in the drawer that had once contained Melanie’s diary. Belongings migrated into new homes, new lives, affording usefulness and pleasure.

  The thought comforted her. She wondered if it would comfort Jeffrey Kahn, if she would dare offer it to him. But of course she would not. Their intimacy had its dangers. Boundaries, however fragile, had to be observed. She understood that they had, that afternoon, crossed into dangerous territory.

  Music and quiet voices greeted her when she entered her home. Brian and Denise had arrived for dinner. Fragments of conversation drifted toward her. Brian and David spoke of meeting for lunch. Denise asked if David had chilled the wine.

  Judith hurried into the room and buried herself in her son’s embrace, delighted in his wet kiss upon her cheek. Even as a child, Brian’s affection had been exuberant. Denise smiled shyly and said that she had set the table and made a salad. David kissed her cheek. His lips were as soft as Jeffrey Kahn’s had been when they rested briefly on her hand.

  ‘You look tired,’ David said. ‘I hope helping Jeffrey Kahn isn’t too much for you?’

  ‘I am tired,’ she admitted. ‘I think I’ll leave it for a few days. I’ll call Jeffrey and explain that I need time to concentrate on furnishing your office. Which I do.’

  ‘It’s beginning to really take shape,’ Denise said brightly. ‘Brian and I peeked in. The bookshelves are almost finished and they look terrific.’

  ‘Terrific,’ Brian agreed. ‘It was a good idea to panel the walls.’

  ‘Yes,’ Judith said. ‘It’s working out well.’

  She did not tell them that she still hesitated before entering the room, that her heart stopped when she stood in the doorway to consult with the electrician or the carpenter. Always she was stung anew by the swiftness with which Melanie’s presence had been erased from their home.

  She turned to Denise and asked, too brightly, how her coursework was progressing. She listened attentively to her reply, aware that David had poured another Scotch which he did not lift to his lips but simply swirled as he stared into the glass. She thought of Jeffrey Kahn staring into the darkness from his kitchen window, waiting for nocturnal warblers to peck seeds from his feeder and ease his loneliness. She chided herself for such useless fanciful thoughts and, in mute atonement, she reached out and touched David lightly on the cheek. He stared at her in surprise and smiled that shy smile that had melted her heart the day of their very first meeting and so many years afterward.

  TWELVE

  She called Jeffrey the next morning. He was not surprised that she wanted a respite. He understood that she was busy. As he was. He had, in fact, been about to call her. He had been invited to a medical conference in California and would be away for a week. He would be in touch when he returned if that was all right.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk then.’

  ‘Yes. We still have a great deal to do.’

  ‘A great deal,’ she agreed. ‘Have a good journey.’

  ‘Take care,’ he said in turn.

  Their words were casual, lightly uttered. They were mutually aware of the need for caution. Judith wondered if he would, in fact, call her when he returned. She wondered too if it would matter if he did not and knew with absolute certainty that it would.

  She spent the morning at the thrift shop consulting with Suzanne about the prices they could charge for Sylvia Kahn’s winter suits and dresses.

  ‘It’s all such wonderful quality,’ Suzanne said. ‘Designer stuff, some of it.’

  She fingered the labels. Donna Karan. Ralph Lauren. A Prada jacket.

  ‘We ought to send some of it to a consignment shop. We got a very good price for that gray cashmere dress.’

  Judith recoiled at the suggestion. ‘But Jeffrey Kahn donated the clothing to us,’ she objected.

  ‘The consignment shop will give us a percentage of whatever they sell them for, which is more than we could get here. I’m sure your Doctor Kahn would understand the decision,’ Suzanne said impatiently.

  Judith flushed hotly. ‘He’s hardly my Doctor Kahn. But I suppose you’re right. The consignment shop does make sense.’

  She left the thrift shop earlier than usual, annoyed with Suzanne, annoyed with herself. She drove to the upholstery store to look at swatches for the couch and armchair in David’s office. She had settled on a couch which could be pulled open and become a bed, but she was torn between a brown tweed or a nubby gray. She deferred a decision and went home. It was time, she told herself, to return to her own work, to avoid what Evelyn called avoidance. The thought amused her. She opened her computer to the essay she had begun on George Eliot, tentatively entitled ‘George Eliot: A Childless Chronicler of Children’. She had, ironically enough, copied out a singular Eliot quote on the day before Melanie’s death. It confronted her as she opened the file, underlined and set in a bold font:

  Childhood is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

  She reread it and wondered if she would ever outlive her own sorrow? Did anyone? Could anyone? Had Sylvia Kahn’s parents ever outlived their sorrow for their dead and unburied children? The vagrant thought shamed her. Losses were not all weighed on the same scale.

  She thought suddenly of Evelyn’s harsh words during a very early session, when Judith, seated opposite her, had said again and again, ‘Melanie is dead. My Melanie is dead.’ She had used the repetition as a mantra that would force her to accept a grim, ineradicable reality. The wound of loss had been very raw then. No scab of the most reluctant acceptance, as Evelyn called it, had yet formed. No coping mechanisms had been in place.

  Evelyn had tapped her notebook impatiently, taken a long sip of water and sighed when Judith repeated the same words yet again. ‘Melanie is dead. My Melanie is dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ the therapist had finally said with uncharacteristic and perhaps unprofessional directness, ‘Melanie is dead but you are alive, Judith. Remember that. You are alive and you must start to live your life.’

  She wondered now what Evelyn would say to that simple sentence of George Eliot’s. Perhaps she would ask her, but then again perhaps not.

  She abandoned the computer and turned instead to her dog-eared copy of The Mill on the Floss. It was permissible for her to weep over Maggie Tulliver in the afternoon. Tears for Melanie were reserved for the evening hours.

  She began the new week with a surge of energy, telling herself that Jeffrey Kahn’s absence was a relief. David left for the city before she wakened and returned home later than usual.

  ‘That new arbitration,’ he said by way of explanation, and she did not press him for details.

  With all her afternoons now free, she adhered to a new schedule. Early each morning she dutifully sat at her computer, surrounded by neat piles of her carefully annotated Eliot novels. She had decided on a new theme and opened a file, taking pleasure in the title that had come to mind with a swiftness that surprised her. ‘Sorrow and Loss in the Work of George Eliot,’ she typed in. Her attention was focused on Middlemarch and she read slowly, uncertain as always about what she hoped to find in the narrative. That, she thought, was the mystery and miracle of literature. Numinous worlds sprang into life; all that was hidden was serendipitously revealed. She wrote nothing, yet when she closed the novel and turned her computer off, she had a sense of accomplishment.

&n
bsp; She took the long walks that Evelyn had so emphatically recommended and drove very slowly to her therapy appointment to proudly report that she had worked, she had walked, she was coping. A swift lunch and then the thrift shop.

  She was relieved that Suzanne rarely asked her to open the shop in the morning. Suzanne’s days, it seemed, began earlier and earlier and, accordingly, she opened the shop earlier and earlier.

  ‘It’s important to get an early start. There’s always so much to do here,’ she told Judith, perhaps officiously, perhaps apologetically or perhaps, Judith thought, both.

  Judith had simply nodded, but she suspected that Suzanne, like herself, was in retreat from the silence of her home and the aimless hours of a long and lonely morning. The thrift shop offered them entry into an alternate and absorbing world, populated by a roving cast of characters.

  Judith recognized repeat shoppers, some who offered her their names in shy bids for familiarity, others who refused to make eye contact. A very tall black man, sad-eyed, his thick hair pewter-colored, came often, sometimes in search of a woman’s nightgown, sometimes looking for a robe.

  He specified that they had to be blue. ‘She loves the color blue,’ he said.

  The nightgown had to be cotton because she hated the feel of polyester. The robe had to be soft because her skin was very sensitive.

  Judith found him a blue belted robe of soft velour and he smiled gratefully.

  ‘I’ll bring it to her in the hospital today,’ he said. ‘She’ll be glad of it. She’s sick, very sick.’

  A week later he returned and placed a shopping bag on the counter. ‘I give them back to you,’ he said. ‘My daughter washed and ironed them. After. You know … After …’

  He hurried out and Judith opened the bag and stared down at the impeccably laundered, neatly folded blue nightgown and robe. She did know. After. She recognized the monosyllabic language she herself had so recently abandoned.

  A smiling, full-figured woman, olive-skinned, her eyes very large and very dark, arrived regularly on the day hospital workers received their checks. She searched methodically through the children’s clothing. Her name was Consuela, she told Judith. She was from Guatemala where life was very hard and she was blessed to be in New York, to have a good job at the hospital. An important job.