A Reunion of Ghosts. Judith Mitchell Claire
information, it says:
The fastener invented after the button was a snap
So when Lady says our father gave her plenty a closure, but never any closure, she can’t be scorned. When Vee says that the reason Natan Frankl left us may have been his palindromic first name (“Coming or going, it was all the same to him”) or maybe his German surname (“He probably left to find the missing e”) or that maybe the reason had nothing to do with his name at all, that maybe the reason he left was all those months he spent in that relocation camp before coming to New York (“Looks like relocating became his thing”), she must not be judged harshly.
And when each of us—Vee upon her marriage, and Lady after her separation, and Delph as soon as she came of age—ditched his surname to go by our matronymic, and Delph repeatedly described the name change as no big deal, just a slight Alter-ation, you can’t punish her for being punnish. You can’t roll your eyes when we’re speaking Frankly. It’s all that the man who left us left us. In no other way did he provide for us or, apparently, care about us. In fact, you might say that Frankl, our dad, didn’t give a damn.
All right, all right; we’ll stop. That’s our entire repertoire anyway. We have nothing more to say about him, no idea where he went. A business trip, our mother told Lady, the others too young to ask, but after a while, because even kids know that business trips end and the businessman comes home, often with presents, our mother had to admit the unsatisfying truth, or at least what she maintained was the truth: she hadn’t a clue where he’d gone. One day he never came home from work, and the next day, the same thing happened, then etcetera, etcetera, until she stopped expecting him. She called the cops—a good citizen, she did that much, or so she said—and they nosed around a bit and reported that nothing untoward had befallen him, that wherever he was, it was where he, a grown man, wished to be, and it was no longer their, or, we supposed, our, business.
Even so, over the years Lady continued to press. Soon Vee and Delph joined in. Then our mother would offer up possibilities. Maybe he sailed back to Germany. Maybe he was still living in New York, but with a different wife, tidier daughters who didn’t have to be nagged to make their beds. He might be dead, you never knew, the cops could have been wrong. It’s not like cops weren’t wrong all the time. Or he could be alive somewhere and—again, who knew?—he might decide to come home someday. When we least expected it, he might walk right back through that door.
“Which would you prefer?” she asked, as if his fate could be determined by popular vote.
We won’t deny that we grew up father-hungry. But over the years we’ve come out the other side. No one has had more therapy than the three of us, that ineffectual if gratifying institution—me! for fifty whole minutes let’s talk about me!—but really, we didn’t need therapy when it came to our father. At a certain point when we were still children, each of us cycled through the kiddie version of the five stages of grief, namely, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and crazy-ass conspiracy theories.
Leaving his office one evening, he’d fallen down the stairs and now had amnesia!
Because he spoke German, he’d been recruited as a spy for the CIA and was now skulking heroically behind the Berlin Wall!
Suffering from some terrible and highly contagious disease, he’d had no choice but to remove himself from our presence. Now he rented a room in the apartment across the side street that both our mother’s and Lady’s bedroom windows faced. Every night, through powerful infrared binoculars, he watched over us all as we slept, our mother in her bed and the three of us sardined in Lady’s.
But of all our theories, our favorite, or at least the one we kept coming back to, was that our mother had killed him. Vee had proposed this possibility one night with a wicked smile, and we all liked it. We enjoyed speculating how our mother, that little woman, that lonely and abandoned waif, would have accomplished it, and what she’d have done with the body. We eyed the hallway incinerator with suspicion and a newfound respect.
Let us be clear. Our mother did not murder our father. Even as we entertained the notion, we knew we were doing just that: entertaining ourselves. There was something cathartic in imagining our father dead and our mother a powerful killer. It was far more satisfying than the fantasy of him watching us sleep, which, to be honest, had begun to feel creepy and sometimes gave Delph bad dreams. But the idea of a woman like our mother—another short, bosomy, and luckless ugly gosling—dragging a man to the incinerator late one night was rather invigorating. Therapeutic, one might say.
One final thing about Natan Frankl, and then we won’t mention him again. It really doesn’t matter whether he went back to Germany or found himself a second, superior family or was chopped into his component parts and fed to the incinerator. All that’s relevant now is that he was years older than our mother, closer to her father’s age than her own, and if he didn’t die back then, he’s surely dead now.
So no matter which version of the Father Stories you or we like best, the ending’s the same. We may not know the details, but we promise he won’t be showing up at any point in our story. We urge you to forget all about him. We assure you, as we were assured, it’s all for the best.
So back to the basement, back to no noose is good news. Back to Lady standing on that folding chair, Lady smiling a self-consciously wry smile as if she were on a stage and wished to signal her state of mind to the audience. She imagined that audience to consist of both our parents. She saw them smiling back at her, but warmly, encouraging her. She’d often thought about—had dreams about—how willingly and quietly each had left her. Now she found herself thinking about how willingly and quietly she was leaving Vee and Delph. Although the difference was, Vee and Delph didn’t need her. Vee had Eddie. Delph had Vee and Eddie.
Perhaps each of our parents had thought the same thing. The girls don’t need me. They have each other. Or perhaps—a new thought was coming to Lady—they hadn’t meant to leave us at all. Perhaps they’d meant for us to follow them. As Lady was doing now. Perhaps she hadn’t been abandoned after all; she’d just gotten lost for a while.
DNA as a trail of bread crumbs. Suicide as salvation. She felt awash with sorrow for herself, and it was this self-pity, that most delicious of emotions, that made the tears come.
To avoid these emotions, she distracted herself by reviewing her reasons again. She was alone. She was lonely. This was her daily dilemma: she wanted no one in her life; she couldn’t bear to live life alone. Also, she was tangled up with a dentist who seemed not to like her, and she was engaging in behavior that would cause the dentist’s wife pain—Patty, the woman’s name was Patty—were she to find out about it. To punish herself for hurting Patty—that was reason enough to do what she was about to do.
Not to mention the fact that she’d bloodied a Holocaust survivor’s nose with a screwdriver.
And then there was the rest of it. She was fundamentally incapable of taking care of herself or even, it seemed, of answering a phone or crossing a busy intersection or buying a simple hand tool. Her apartment had roaches and a switch plate as suicidal as she was. Also, it was definitely possible that she was an alcoholic, which would mean she should give up drinking, and why would she want to live like that?
But though the reasons were endless, the reasons were also meaningless. She was back to that again. There was something else driving her, something unsayable, just a feeling, just an urge, but a something that was so very strong. It was a something that Joe and the dentist and the dentist’s wife and the hardware store owner hadn’t a thing to do with.
She regretted this. She wished it were grief or guilt propelling her. She wished she were about to commit an act of heartfelt atonement. But that wasn’t what she was doing, not really. It was something else.
We’ve all struggled with this: how to explain the desire to do something most people find pathological at best, selfish at worst, incomprehensible always. We sometimes describe it as a chit we were each handed at birth, a card to get out of jail free, if one thinks of her life as jail.
Or we talk about the horizontal light, which is how we refer to the light that sometimes replaces