The Lost Family

by Jenna Blum

  Peter felt he was shriveling within his own skin. He wanted to lash out. He kept walking, looking for landmarks. On their left was an open field—the MacGregors’ estate, where they kept a stable and horses as if they were landed gentry and not a banker who worked in the city and his wife. On the other side, trees, a rock wall, more houses. Eventually they came to a street sign that announced Slippery Elm Lane.

  “This way,” said Peter.

  They turned left onto an even narrower lane, beneath a canopy of branches. Peter could feel June staring at his face. He wished she would fucking stop that.

  “Please understand,” he said. “It’s not you. I won’t discuss them with anybody.”

  “But why?”

  “I can’t.”

  “But why?”

  “I just can’t.”

  Peter crunched through the dead leaves, smelling the dampness in the bottom layer as they started to rot. He looked for a white boulder stenciled 101, and when he saw it he lifted the chain attached to it. A sign swung from the chain: private property, it said, no trespassing.

  June hesitated as Peter put out his hand to help her over the chain. “Won’t the owners be mad?”

  “It’s all right. They know me. They know Sol.”

  They walked down a long driveway, over gravel and oyster shells. At the end of it, the trees opened up to a vast lawn that sloped down to the Sound. On their left was the garage, a structure disguised as an English cottage that could have housed a family of ten; on their right, the house, a colossal version of the garage, sat on a rocky outcropping, surveying the sea.

  “Sol keeps a boat near here,” said Peter. “He likes to bring some of his catch to these people—the Reinholdts. And in return they let him fish off their shore.”

  Between the lawn and water was another low stone wall. They climbed up three steps to the top of it and onto a dock. June’s boot heels clopped along the boards like a horse’s hooves, and Peter suddenly remembered Vivi galloping along the Ku’damm in wooden-soled shoes, calling, “Mutti! Papa! I’m a pony!” while Ginger, ever shyer, held back and stared at the streetcars and clung to Peter and Masha’s hands.

  Peter sat down on the bench on the platform at the end of the dock. He felt weak and a bit nauseous. He passed a palm over his face. It came away damp. Gulls cawed and buoys clanged out in the Sound.

  “I’m sorry you had to find out in such a way,” he said. “It must have been a shock.”

  “Yes,” June agreed. “Ruth showed me their picture. It’s the only picture left, she said. She thought I might want to know what they looked like.”

  Peter made a little noise as if somebody had punched him in the stomach.

  “Please don’t be mad at her, Pete,” said June. “I genuinely think she thought I knew.”

  Peter snorted. “I doubt that. She knows I never discuss them.”

  “Well, maybe,” June said tartly, “Ruth thought we were serious enough for you to have told me.”

  She lit a cigarette without waiting for Peter’s lighter, the sulphur smell of the match sharp in the wind. Peter got up and walked to the railing, his fists balled in his pockets. He looked at the shoreline opposite, the houses there with their own docks and boats; at the line, gray upon gray, where the Sound emptied into the open ocean.

  “June,” he said, “please understand. It has nothing to do with serious or not serious. I do care for you, very much. But I don’t discuss them with anyone.”

  “Yes, I’m starting to get that message,” said June. After a moment she said, “They were beautiful. Twins?”

  “Yes.”

  Vivian and Ginger, Peter thought, and would have told her, but speaking their names aloud hurt too much. His double miracle, his pair of golden coins; his daughters. Vivi and Gigi. Named by Masha, of course; she with her unquenchable penchant for films and their stars, so pronounced that on a couple of occasions she had almost lost her job over it, had quite forgotten herself and snuck into the Adlon’s dining room to peer at some of the more famous patrons from behind the mirrored columns. “Petel, it was Clark Gable! Nobody else is as dashing—except you. I could tell it was Clark by the mustache and the smile—what a rascal! And do you know, they say he has false teeth?” Or: “Marlene Dietrich—I swear it was her, Petel, what other woman wears a tuxedo? And those eyebrows!” Masha, who never bought clothes, whose dresses had holes in them and whose soles flapped right off her shoes, but who saved every pfennig for matinees—at least until the signs appeared: Juden Verboten! Then she would no longer attend the theater, in solidarity with Peter, although with her perfect Aryan lineage she certainly could have. “Magazines are good enough for me,” she said with a sniff, “and it’s so stupid—ironic. Keeping you out, and you’re the one who looks like a movie star!” Masha, with her long Modigliani face and straw-white hair, no pretensions toward vanity herself but obsessed with Vivien Leigh’s cat-slanted eyes and Ginger Rogers’s dazzling long legs—gams, Masha called them, pronouncing the slang with a careful American accent. Hence the names of their girls, born into the dark year 1940, a total surprise and terror to their young parents, who were barely into their twenties themselves.

  “Look, June,” Peter said. “There is one thing you must know about me if we are to continue.” He heard how clipped his accent had grown, in his upset, but he couldn’t help it. “I will not talk about them,” he said.

  June finished her cigarette without answering, and when she was done she stamped out the butt, then put it in her leather jacket pocket rather than cast it into the water or onto the owners’ property. She joined Peter at the railing, all red and gold in the gray afternoon. Masha, he thought, might have been awed by her. The wind streaked water from the corner of June’s eye, or maybe a tear, back toward her temple. Ordinarily Peter might have lifted his thumb to brush it away.

  “I won’t,” he repeated. “Do you understand?”

  June nodded. She heaved a sigh. “Peter, I’m kind of scared to say this, but I’m going to anyway. I really like you. In fact, I think I’m falling for you. But I think”—and here she mocked his formal cadence, giving Peter a little smile—“if we are to continue, you should see somebody professional. An analyst. I’d be nervous to get more involved otherwise. Do you know what I mean?”

  Peter looked down at the dark water, at the flotsam bobbing and swirling around the pilings: seaweed, foam, Styrofoam, murk.

  “I do,” he said.

  “Then will you go see one?”

  Peter sighed. It was such an American idea—not analysis itself, for which the Austrian Freud had been responsible, but this optimism, the idea that lying on a couch fifty minutes a week and talking about one’s dreams and troubles would solve anything. Peter had tried therapy during his second year in America. When the sleepwalking had begun. When he wandered about Sol and Ruth’s house every night, waking in odd places like on the piano bench, or in the basement, without any idea of how he’d gotten there—on a couple of occasions, more disconcertingly, without knowing who he was. He had literally forgotten his own name. Sol’s doctor had said these episodes would conclude on their own, once Peter had recovered from malnourishment and shock and moved further away in time from the war. But when Peter had been found standing chest-deep in the pool one morning, terrifying Ruth when she looked out the window, Sol had the doctor recommend a guy. “That’s all he is,” he said, “a guy. Just go and see him.” And indeed, the guy was just a guy, a middle-aged gentleman with wire spectacles and a mole on his nose that very much bothered Peter—but that he didn’t mention because he was sure this would say something damning about his psyche. Peter had lain on the scratchy orange sofa in the analyst’s office, beneath a black-and-purple reproduction Rothko, listening to the traffic outside on Fifty-Seventh Street and the suck and burble of the analyst’s pipe, and he waited for the analyst to say something and the analyst waited for Peter to say something until one day, in the middle of their fourth session, Peter heard a snore, and realized t
he analyst was fast asleep. He had gotten up and walked out.

  But here was June, and if Peter had told the truth when he had said he would not talk about his daughters, he had also been honest about his feelings for her. And so, forgiving himself in advance for the lie, he said, “If that is what it takes to keep you, June Bouquet, I will see an analyst.”

  “Oh, good,” she said, “thank you,” and she kissed him.

  They kissed for a long time, and embraced, Peter sliding his hands into June’s jacket and then lifting the hem of her dress, her bare skin breaking into goose bumps when the wind reached it, her mouth in contrast very warm. Peter drew away.

  “Come,” he said, “I want to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Come,” Peter said.

  June rolled her eyes, then followed him down the metal ladder to the strip of sand beneath the dock. “Here?” she said doubtfully. “In that?” And she eyed the dinghy, half rotted out and with its green paint curling off, that butted up against the pilings.

  Peter laughed. “No, sex fiend. Though we can if you like—after.”

  “After what?”

  Peter beckoned her over and showed her the hundreds of dark-blue shells clinging to the underside of the dock, like butterflies with their wings closed. He pulled one off the splintered wood and opened it with his thumbs, exposing the soft innards, the pearl of flesh at the top.

  “Sweetest creature in the world,” he said, “except for you.”

  June crinkled her nose. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  But she helped him extract the mussels from the pilings, from the sea wall and rocks and nests of seaweed, making a quickly growing pile in the sand to take back to Masha’s; she even offered her own scarf when the plastic bag Peter had in his pocket grew full. Watching her as the afternoon grayed further and the tide started to come in, June clambering long-legged up and down the beach, as artless and focused as a child, Peter thought: Why would I need an analyst? I’m happy now. I have you.

  4

  Christmas 1965

  Two nights before Christmas, Peter took June to the Rainbow Room. June had cocktails at Masha’s while Peter worked the first dinner seating; then he changed, and they made their way to Rockefeller Center. The city had the feverish feel it always did during this season, New Yorkers shoving through intersections and trying to snatch cabs from tourists who clogged the sidewalks, craning up at the buildings, boggling at department-store displays. Peter was both mildly amused by all the hoopla—this was not his holiday; he had no holidays—and irritable because he was away more than usual from the restaurant, at such a highly trafficked time of year. Several times a day he felt he had forgotten something, and he was patting his pockets or checking his notebook before he remembered, guiltily: Ah. Masha’s. For the first time in two decades, he was not spending every waking hour there.

  But tonight he would make a special effort: June was leaving for Minnesota the next day, to spend Christmas with her mother, and therefore Peter found himself doing everything visitors to New York did and that he, as an inhabitant, had never done himself. They admired the holiday tableaux in Macy’s windows—June pointing out the mannequins with her face, which had been made, she explained, from a mold. “I had to lie on my stomach breathing through straws up my nose while the plaster hardened,” she said, and Peter tsked sadly and said, “And people think the life of a model is glamourous.” At Rockefeller Center they waited in line at the skating rink and ate chestnuts from a cart. Down on the ice June skated figure eights, giggling when Peter’s ankles bowed inward, and coaxed him off the encircling wall by gliding backward and holding his hands. Afterward, thawing, they had hot chocolate, and then they waited amid a crush of fur and wool in the Rockefeller Center lobby, where finally an elevator whisked them to the sixty-fifth floor.

  Peter had made arrangements, and they were seated at a window-side two-top with the Empire State Building as their candle. The city sprawled vertiginously at their elbows. They had martinis, and June ordered shrimp cocktail and Caesar salad, Peter a lobster Thermidor that he knew he would assess for industrial flavor—the Rainbow Room, unlike Masha’s, was a massive brigade kitchen, an assembly line serving hundreds and hundreds of people a day. Peter wished the executive chef no ill will, but he hoped he would be able to taste the butane of the warming tray his entrée had been kept in, discern the slightly chewy texture of a dish broiled under the salamander. He lit June’s cigarette and smiled at her as she surveyed the room: the red-clothed candlelit tables clustered around the dance floor, the massive chandelier suspended from the round ceiling famously aglow with rainbow hues; more shimmering prisms shooting from floor lights at the room’s periphery, and all Manhattan glittering beneath their feet.

  “You were right,” Peter said as the orchestra began a medley from The Nutcracker, “this is festive.”

  “You should have seen it during the Mod Ball last month,” June said. “It was crammed! Duke Ellington was playing.”

  “Ah,” said Peter, who, aside from his cooks’ transistor radio and the mandatory concerts at Carnegie, tried not to listen to music at all.

  “Who is that?” he asked, as June waved merrily to a man on the other side of the room, a bearded fellow in a turtleneck and candy-striped trousers.

  “That’s Roger, one of the photographers I work with.”

  “Ah,” said Peter again. He watched June blow smoke rings toward this Roger, visible signatures of her lips on the air. Was it Peter’s imagination, or was June drifting a bit? He didn’t have any fact to hang the feeling on; when she wasn’t working, she was always available to him, in fact a little too available for Peter’s schedule, ceaselessly cajoling him to places he never would have sought on his own: ElMo, the Copa, the Factory to see Mr. Warhol. Her attention wandered more to gossip and future plans, other clubs and cities they would visit, than to other men. But Peter was sharply aware that the women in her circle dated tycoons or sporting figures; he had experienced some rueful amusement at being, as a restauranteur, one of the lower totems on the pole. Surely he was jealous, and that was a good sign, wasn’t it? He couldn’t locate the source of his unease, and he feared it was that at the prospect of losing June, along with the dismal sense of having woken from a wonderful dream, there was another slight one of relief.

  He tried to shake this off—after all, one couldn’t ask for a more charming companion. “You are especially dazzling tonight,” he told June, “like the Snow Queen.” Indeed June was all in white, her dress a sparkling sheath that brushed the tops of her thigh-high silver boots, around her head a white turban fastened by a diamond snowflake.

  “Thank you,” said June. She swayed confessionally toward Peter. “I’m not wearing any underwear.”

  So much for drift. Peter raised his eyebrows. “Happy Christmas to me.”

  “I thought you didn’t celebrate Christmas,” June said.

  “I do now,” said Peter.

  He took her hands across the table and considered bringing out the velvet jeweler’s box, but then their food arrived. It was just as well, Peter thought; the gift would be better presented over dessert—a Floating Island Peter had preordered, hoping June would eat at least a few bites of low-calorie meringue.

  The orchestra segued into “Moon River.” June tucked the croutons of her salad beneath the romaine, then lifted a lettuce leaf to her mouth and nibbled the edges. She did the same to another, and a third; then she sat back and rubbed her nonexistent stomach. “I’m stuffed,” she said. Her shrimp glistened untouched, clinging like inverted commas to the rim of their frosted silver dish.

  “But you barely ate a thing,” Peter said. It made June happy when he said this, and Peter had thought he had gotten used to her eating so little—but now, quite unbidden, there came to his mind the recollection of standing next to a man in the Auschwitz kitchen, and the man sneaking a bit of potato peeling into his mouth, and then the peeling dropping out of it, half chewed, when the
man was shot in the head. His blood had spattered on Peter’s pile of potatoes, so that Peter had been punished too. The man’s name had been Merckel. Merckel’s family had once owned a chain of beer halls in Munich. This memory shrapnel was surfacing more and more for Peter lately; it was beyond disturbing. Peter stuck his fork in the mottled flesh of his lobster and pushed it away.

  The orchestra went on intermission; their waiter cleared their plates. “Was the food not to your liking, sir?”

  “Quite the contrary,” said Peter, “my compliments to the chef.”

  “He will be pleased, Mr. Rashkin,” said the waiter and cleaned their tablecloth with a silver crumb-catcher. “May I bring coffee? Cordials?”

  “I’m impressed,” said June, when Peter had ordered a port for himself, a White Russian for June. “You’re famous!”

  Peter waggled his eyebrows. “Shtick with me, kid,” he said in his best Humphrey Bogart accent. Being recognized wasn’t really a remarkable achievement; most of Manhattan’s chefs of a certain level knew of each other. Nonetheless, Peter was pleased; it was always nice to receive another chef’s salute, and their dessert would probably be comped as well.

  June extracted another cigarette, and Peter lit it. “Are you excited about your trip?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “No?”

  “Oh, I suppose,” she said. “It’s always good to see my mom. But the place—blech,” and she made a face. “It’ll be all one color this time of year, hip-deep in snow, and all anyone’ll talk about is their husbands and kids and what brand of laundry detergent works best.”

  “That sounds . . . restful,” said Peter carefully.

  “You mean stultifying.”

  “Well, yes,” he admitted, and June snorted smoke through her nose like a dragon.

  “There must be something festive about it,” Peter said. “What will you do for your Christmas?”

  “Go to church. Eat dinner. My mom is a terrible cook, she lives mostly out of cans, but every year on Christmas Eve she and her friends make about a thousand cookies and serve all the traditional Norwegian foods. Lefse, rommegrot—”