A Reunion of Ghosts. Judith Mitchell Claire
she’d been lying in her dress. She stepped into her flip-flops, patted her hair back in place, and headed to the front door. She stopped before she opened it, took a moment to look into the living room, where her half-eaten peanut butter sandwich remained on the coffee table, where the empty bottle of Southern Comfort lay on its side on the carpet. She could hear Vee and Eddie and Delph snuffle and snort in their sleep. She gazed out the window and saw the park and the Hudson and, when she looked uptown, the George Washington Bridge, its necklace lights ablaze for the holiday after two years of energy-saving darkness.
But once she was downstairs in the laundry room, she didn’t dawdle. She headed straight to the rusted shelving units where tenants kept cardboard boxes of detergent with their apartment numbers marked on the sides and where the super kept old wooden soda boxes filled with hammers and nails, electrical cords and rags, things like that. A few Phillips-head screwdrivers. Lady recognized them now.
The box that interested her was the one containing a few old clotheslines. She chose a waxy white rope that seemed cleaner and stronger and less likely to burn her fingers or abrade her neck than the ones of brown hemp. She was also drawn to the obsessive tidiness with which it, of all the clotheslines, had been stored. It had been curled around and around itself until it lay in a flattened circle, a pretty coiling pattern like a sisal placemat.
Her head began singing. A pretty coil is like a melody. She questioned the lyric. Was melody right? Or was it memory? A pretty girl is like a memory? She was feeling a memory coming at her now, she was recalling Joe Hopper during their happier years, which had lasted from her freshman year of college right up to her weak-kneed decision to marry him spring semester of her junior year. She was remembering the way he used to cheese down the docking line of the small sailboats they’d sometimes rent on City Island. Cheese down. It meant to coil the tail of the line to give a neat appearance. He’d taught her the phrase, couldn’t believe she knew so little about sailing. “New Yorkers think they’re so sophisticated,” he’d said, “but the truth is, you’re all rubes in your own way.”
She thought he hadn’t minded that she was an unsophisticated New Yorker. She knew he liked educating her. “You’re probably wondering why I’m going to all this trouble,” he said the first time he wound the line so it lay on the sunny pier like a hairy snake nuzzling its own tail.
She hadn’t been wondering. She’d been gazing out at the bleached horizon, trying to distinguish the migrating strips of white that were clouds from the subdued circle of white that was the sun from the broad canvas of white that was the sky. But she listened as he explained. She knew that was her job. She didn’t mind it. She liked learning new things.
“It’s a seaman’s tradition,” he’d said of the whorled rope. “A gesture of courtesy for the next sailor.”
He said this as if he’d come from a long line of seamen rather than a long line of life insurance agents. He said it as if taking out an eight-foot dinghy once or twice a summer made him John Paul Jones or Popeye. When he’d been fifteen, his parents had made him transfer from his local public school to an all-male prep school in New England, the kind with mandatory chapel and a dress code involving navy blue blazers and rep ties and an impressive record of sending its students on to the Ivies. This was where he’d learned to sail. But, as he later told Lady, he’d also found himself having sex with his roommate, which had freaked him out, and he returned the next year to the coed high school in his hometown in Connecticut, a comfortable suburb on the outskirts of a moribund mill city.
This had been the shameful secret he’d told her that night, the secret that had been so hard for him to utter that he’d bitten through his lip trying to get it out. The sex with his roommate. She and Joe had been getting high on the roof of Lehman Hall on the small Barnard campus when he’d told her. He’d taken a hit off the joint, inhaled, exhaled, posed. Then he’d come out with it. He’d never told anyone else about it, he said. He teared up a little as he told her, not only because he was ashamed, but because he was relieved. And as he confessed, his front teeth tore into his lip and the blood dribbled into his lip beard, turning a few strands a deep, sticky mahogany. She blamed those mingy tears—the tears of saline, the tears of hemoglobin—for her accepting his proposal that night.
He had draped his arm over her shoulders. He had begged her to keep his secret. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone,” he said.
“Of course not,” she said. “Who would I tell?”
He cut her a look. They both knew perfectly well who’d she tell.
“My sisters wouldn’t care. Don’t lots of boys experiment that way?”
“I wasn’t experimenting,” he muttered. “I was doing what I had to do.” He looked grim and resolute, as if recalling a march into battle. “It wasn’t homo sex,” he said. “It was prison sex.”
Lady took the white clothesline to the long table where tenants folded warm clothes fresh out of the dryers. Sitting on the metal folding chair that she planned to stand on in a few minutes, she began to coil the rope, this time not a flat coil but a three-dimensional coil, a cobra-rising-from-a-basket coil, and not merely a pretty coil, but a coil with a purpose, a function, a goal.
When she was done, she looked at her creation and was pleased. At the same time she couldn’t squelch the thought: no noose is good news.
Our father, the aforementioned Natan Frankl, was born in Munich to a family of scholars. Like the rest of them, he was an excessively educated man, fluent in numerous languages. He loved language the way other little boys love dogs or yo-yos. He liked to play with language, he liked to make it do amusing tricks. English, he told Lady, was the best language to play with. Next came French. Italian was good, too, especially for poetry, since all the words rhymed. The worst was his native German. In fact, he told Lady, he could no longer stand the sound of it. He blanched even when he heard someone say gesundheit.
Our point is this: we know no one likes the puns and wordplay. We’re sorry about them. But we can’t help it. They’re Natan Frankl’s fault.
He’d been a chemist, too, our father. That’s how he’d known the Alters. But while our mother’s family left Germany early, our father’s remained until there was no getting out. He’d been a scientist unable to interpret the data all around him—there was a lot of that going around—and he ended up in one of the camps. We don’t even know which one. That’s how little any of this was discussed.
We do know that after liberation he was moved to a displaced persons center, and that when he subsequently managed to get to America—not easy; America didn’t want any of the displaced persons—he looked up his old friend Richard Alter, i.e., our grandfather. But, given that our grandfather had already killed himself—that window in the Dead and Dying Room—he met only our mother.
That’s their meet-cute story.
In New York the only work he could find was among the other Jews on Seventh Avenue. He sold clothing fasteners to the trade: buttons and snaps, hooks and eyes, frogs and kilt pins. He used to bring discontinued samples home for Lady to play with. She turned them into little families. Brass peacoat buttons embossed with anchors were the fathers. Silk-covered buttons were the mothers. The tiny white buttons you find on collars were the babies, unnecessary and largely decorative, but cute.
He’d been an observant Jew before the camps; he was a cynical atheist after. On Saturday mornings he took Lady and Vee to the Central Park Zoo. Vee doesn’t remember this at all—she was still in her carriage—but Lady does, though vaguely. Lady is Vee and Delph’s sole conduit to our paterfamilias. She’s the one who remembers what he looked like: fair and blue-eyed and nothing like us. She’s the keeper of his puns. She used to do an impression of his impression of the Central Park polar bear, our father and the bear lolling their big heads this way and that. “It’s as if he’s swaying to secret bear music,” our father would say. “He can bear-ly restrain himself.” She told us how hard the two of them laughed at that. Bear-ly restrain himself. They’d thought it was the funniest thing.
In one of her dresser drawers—the same one in which