Annie and the Wolves

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Ruth’s irritation was making her drive too fast. The last thing they needed was to get stopped by the police. “You know that he could still have digital copies, right?”

  As soon as she said it, Ruth wished she hadn’t. But she was just so fed up at her sister’s naïveté, among other things.

  “Turn around,” Kennidy said.

  “I’m not turning around. What do you think, you can get his laptop and his phone and his cloud login?”

  “Believe me, he doesn’t know how to use the cloud. He doesn’t even have a laptop. His computer is this enormous desktop thing that’s almost as old as I am. Anyway, he has some other stuff of mine.”

  “Clothes?”

  “School stuff. Notes. Some things I’m working on. It’s mine, all right?”

  “Kennidy, don’t go back to that guy’s place.” Ruth wasn’t as worried about a physical fight as much as she was about her sister patching things up with the creep. “Forget the making up and breaking up. Forget the fireworks. All of it.”

  “See?”

  “See what?”

  “Your voice.”

  Ruth looked over at her sister. Ken had closed her eyes and slumped far down in her seat. “The judgy ‘you could do better, Ken,’ voice.”

  “You can do better.”

  “See?”

  “See what?”

  “Mom doesn’t say that.”

  “She doesn’t think you could do better?”

  “She doesn’t think I can do anything.”

  Ruth banged her hands on the steering wheel. “I don’t know what you want from me. Mom isn’t nice to you but she doesn’t judge? I’m being judgmental? I don’t even know what I’m judging, or whom.”

  “Or whom,” Ken said. “Oh my god, really? Or whom?”

  “Which douchebag. Is that better?”

  “People don’t say that anymore.”

  “They don’t say what? Whom or douchebag?”

  Kennidy shot her a withering look. “Either. Here, stop at the gas station. I’ve got to pee.”

  Minutes later, her face appeared in Ruth’s window. “You can take off. I called a friend to pick me up.”

  “Which friend? I’m not leaving you here. You’re still drunk.”

  Kennidy walked back the way she’d come, toward the door of the twenty-four-hour gas station, calling over her shoulder, “And you’re still a bitch.”

  With that word ringing in her ears, Ruth stubbed out the cigarette and looked around the garage. She shoved the old pack into her jacket pocket and leaned over to lift the suitcase lid. As she did, she felt her eyes fill, not for Kennidy at first but for their mother, who had arranged this little sarcophagus with care. In place of questionable, disjointed memories were concrete, indisputable objects.

  On top was a dress Ruth had never seen before, probably from some homecoming dance. Below that, a soccer uniform. Next, a pair of jeans that had provoked a family fight, because Kennidy had been sent to the mall to buy her fall school wardrobe and spent it all on this one overpriced item, then barely wore it.

  Below the clothing were several sports trophies and yearbooks from freshman and sophomore year. A thin spiral-bound notebook had a handful of handwritten poems followed by mostly blank pages. Behind that was a daybook from Kennidy’s junior year, the last year she’d completed: mainly homework assignments, but also lots of personal scrawl in the margins, little symbols that no doubt provided clues to that week’s party, missed period, weight gain, weight loss or hookup. In place of heartfelt confessions there were only codes and scribbles.

  Apparently, Kennidy hadn’t kept a traditional diary, as Annie Oakley hadn’t. The lives with whom Ruth’s own life was interwoven seemed to resist straightforward, reliable narratives or any kind of disciplined diarist’s impulse. Maybe most lives were that way, neither assured nor shame-free enough to risk leaving a trail for just anyone to follow.

  That didn’t mean Kennidy—or Annie—had taken everything with them, however. Maybe they were just choosy about with whom they shared their secrets.

  You tried to tell me before, but I wasn’t listening. Tell me now, Ken.

  The second suitcase was locked, but the lock was so flimsy and rusted, it flew open the moment Ruth kicked it.

  This one had fewer personal items, more correspondence and random detritus.

  There was a manila folder with envelopes—some addressed to Kennidy, some addressed to Gwen or, more bureaucratically, to parent/custodian of, most opened and a few still sealed. According to the postmarks, some had arrived after Kennidy’s death.

  And then there were two Polaroids. Kennidy was on an old brown couch in a room Ruth didn’t recognize. Eyelids heavy, possibly drunk or stoned, wearing a neon orange bikini top and denim shorts. She was thin, but her pale belly bulged slightly over the shorts because they were so small. Her legs were open, and her head was tipped to one side, gaze fixed on whoever was taking the photo. It looked like a badly done modeling shot of a teenager trying to look sexy or trying to please someone who’d told her to look sexy.

  You know that he could still have digital copies, right? . . . Don’t go back. Forget the fireworks.

  When had Kennidy ever passed up fireworks?

  It was already two in the morning. Ruth gathered up an armful of reading material: assignment book, poetry notebook, sealed envelopes and everything else she hadn’t had time to study properly. With luck, she’d get three hours’ sleep, then spend most of the day on a bus with little to do and nowhere to turn, except toward a past she had always ignored.

  27

  Ruth

  The driver was late. The bus station was only six miles away. Ruth’s bag was already outside at the curb.

  “Are there any advantages to your post-accident condition?” Dr. Susan had asked.

  “Advantages?” Ruth had wanted to throw something at her therapist at that moment, but the room was bare of any stone sculptures or other convenient projectiles. Smart lady.

  But now, all these months later, waiting for her ride, Ruth thought about it again. Back in grad school, she hadn’t been the best at asking for help. Now, she couldn’t avoid it. Which was how she’d met Reece, by letting him optimize her slow laptop. It was why she regularly wrote emails and placed calls, asking for strangers to help her search even when she didn’t know exactly what she was searching for. Bad manners for a historian.

  While making her coffee that morning, Ruth had left a voicemail for an archivist she’d never met at a Vienna museum she’d never visited in a manner that suggested urgency, as if a person thousands of miles away had nothing better to do than to brainstorm on her behalf. She’d gotten the idea last night, after staring at Margarete Breuer’s last address before deportation on Google Maps. The Sigmund Freud Museum was close to where Margarete had lived; that would be the place to try if nothing else panned out. But Ruth didn’t really think that a set of confusing documents in English with no mention of Freud himself would end up there. She was betting on the Jewish Museum of Vienna, only a mile from Haasgasse 8.

  According to Nieman’s seller, the items had been offered to an Austrian museum many years ago. For lack of room, supposedly, they hadn’t been kept. A foreign archivist wouldn’t necessarily have recognized the “ZN” of the journal or made the Breuer connection if his name wasn’t present in the pages.

  Now, as Ruth stood in the doorway, watching for her ride, the call came in from Vienna, where it was just past the lunch hour.

  Ruth suffered through an embarrassing introduction using her terrible German and was then transferred to a young archivist by the name of Franziska, who spoke English beautifully. When Ruth explained what she was looking for—proof of a journal or letters that had been brought to a museum, possibly theirs, but which hadn’t stayed there, the archivist was helpful.

  “The documents wer
e found in a former Jewish residence, but made no mention of Jewish citizens?”

  “They were written by an American named Annie Oakley who might have visited Vienna to see a psychoanalyst, whose daughter was Margarete Schiff,” Ruth said. “It was in her house, I believe, that the documents were found. Certainly, the analyst and his daughter were both Jewish.”

  “Yes, but is his name in the letters, clearly?”

  “She might have addressed him at the top of each letter. But maybe not clearly. Or perhaps not using his proper name, if she was trying to obscure their relationship.”

  “The problem is quantity,” the archivist said. “People bring us hundreds of thousands of documents from their cellars and attics, whether it relates to the war or is something older that was only hidden away during the war—anything they find. This is no exaggeration. The Nazis kept fifty million records on seventeen million people. We have an obligation to decide what should be stored or sent to a more logical repository in Austria or anywhere else in the world, and what should be digitized, and in what order. Something could be here but not yet processed.”

  “No, the originals aren’t there. I believe they ended up in the US, with a private buyer.”

  “That can happen if they seem to have little local relevance. If the clearest element was the author, and she was American, and especially if the documents were pre-Holocaust by many years, they might have been offered to someone who could do something with them—a museum, a library, a descendant.”

  “I was hoping you’d kept a digital copy before sending it onward.”

  “Unlikely. Even for digitization, there is a waiting list. Though sometimes we might log a donation before passing it on. Letters, you say?”

  “Yes.” Ruth gave the list of names or abbreviations that might appear in it: Annie Oakley, AO, ZN.

  “And I don’t have proof that there are letters going in the other direction—that the Vienna recipient kept copies of his replies, in other words. But in any case, his name is Josef Breuer.”

  The archivist paused. “There’s a name I recognize. I can tell you, certainly, that anything in his name, especially if it had American significance, would have gone to the Library of Congress. They have a finder’s aid for his correspondence, online.”

  “Yes, I’m aware.”

  “And they don’t have a Breuer-Oakley folder?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “That’s a shame. Before you go, let me just try Breuer for you.” In the background, Franziska typed and hummed pensively, then grew quiet. Under her breath, the archivist said, “Bugger.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “We used to have something, but the original was sent away, destination unknown, and we don’t even have a digital copy, just an internal note.”

  “Please, tell me.”

  “It’s logged as ‘Condolence card, Mrs. Annie Oakley Butler to Breuer Family, 1925. I’m guessing this was after Josef Breuer’s death, yes? But our museum received it only in the 1980s, before we had a proper reopening of the archives. We’ve been a start-and-stop operation many times through the wars, unfortunately.”

  Outside, the car pulled up. “That’s excellent, Franziska. Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry it couldn’t be more.”

  “It’s worth more than you realize. I’m immensely grateful.”

  It was a tiny thing, but it was everything. For Ruth, it was a set of leads: the Breuer family was put into contact with Annie Oakley in 1925, thanks to a card she’d sent upon Josef Breuer’s death. Having received her address, they might have decided to return Annie’s letters to their proper owner at that time; if they were tardy, they would have missed Annie herself, for she died in 1926, and Frank died of grief only weeks later. From there, the letters could have gone anywhere.

  Or perhaps the Breuer family didn’t return Annie’s letters, but instead kept them stored through the Holocaust and later. That meant whoever had donated the condolence card in the 1980s had also donated or sold the 1904 letters, which might not have had Breuer’s name on them at all.

  Anything that could narrow the search—time windows, possible reasons for donation—made it more plausible to establish chain of custody.

  But none of it mattered so much as this new proof that Annie Oakley had indeed known an obscure physiologist—and briefly, psychoanalyst—from halfway around the world named Josef Breuer. She’d known him well enough to note his death. To reach out with condolences to his family, despite being near the end of her own life. Which made a certain odd journal’s authenticity less preposterous.

  Annie knew Josef.

  From where did belief come? It started out as small as a seed: information, a feeling, or both. It didn’t take much. But it did require nourishment, attention—a kind of love, in other words. You had to love to believe.

  Ruth had always advocated for skepticism in all matters. She hadn’t thought to be skeptical about her own skepticism. How could she really know what she knew, when so much that was essential could exist out of her field of vision?

  The cost of hiring a private car had seemed excessive. Less so, after Ruth got on the bus and a man slid in next to her—large, grizzled, smelling of a long night spent drinking whiskey. She didn’t blame him for not being clean or being tipsy. She blamed him for insisting on talking to her, mile after mile. The only trick that worked was burying her face in her reading, pantomiming complete absorption.

  Ruth couldn’t choose to simply gaze out the window unless she wanted a long discourse on her seatmate’s struggle with his bad back and the fact that those jet contrails you saw in the sky were really chem-trails being laid down by the government to control the population. Also, the Holocaust had never happened.

  That last part was ironic, considering that between reading the pages in Kennidy’s notebook, Ruth had emailed a quick thank-you to the kind Vienna archivist, whose very job involved digging through mountains of Nazi extermination records. Ruth couldn’t imagine a more difficult assignment, or so she told herself before regretting her self-deception. If it were harder to think about the Holocaust than her own dead sister, she wouldn’t keep looking at her phone, hoping the pleasantly chatty Franziska would follow up.

  On a global scale, the Holocaust was overwhelming. But the thing was, Ruth McClintock had played no part in it. Not even a tangential role, like that of the quiet shopkeeper or non-Jewish neighbor who, in the late 1930s, hadn’t spoken out against the Nazis. Americans loved weeping over tragic Holocaust movies, just as Germans were among the world’s greatest fans of early novels featuring Indian braves. Joe Grandlouis had accused Ruth of exactly this: indulging in the darkness of history, but only as long as it was distant, as long as it was something in which her nearest and dearest had not been complicit.

  The hardest part of thinking back to Kennidy’s high-school years wasn’t realizing that her sister was endlessly sad; it was that she’d been, once upon a time, briefly happy. In her freshman year, when she was fourteen, Kennidy had started the school year with optimism, eager to leave eighth-grade drama behind. That carefree spirit lasted about three months. In the margins of Kennidy’s assignment books, Ruth read the shorthand notations that hinted at boy crushes, a countdown to soccer tryouts, and names of BFFs who came and went: Jessica and Brittany and Piper, girls who had scrawled their own messages next to Kennidy’s, as if every page was a banal yearbook in miniature: Never change, YOLO and Class of 2014!!!

  And then there was Christmas: Ruth here 23rd. Snowmobile trip or x-c ski?

  Ruth didn’t remember renting a snowmobile—not even the mention of it. She didn’t remember skiing. Her memory of Christmas featured hitting a bar that night with some former high-school friends—anything to get away from the gloom of the house and her mother’s heavier holiday drinking.

  On the 27th, Kennidy had written only Mall.

  Ru
th hated the mall. Unless she was returning an ugly sweater from her mother, she would have skipped that outing.

  From that particular winter holiday, Ruth could remember only one fight with Kennidy, in which she blamed her sister for constantly baiting their mother. Ruth had never had a hard time getting along with Gwen. She’d signed her own sick notes from the third grade on, earned her own “allowance” at side jobs since she was thirteen, and lied as necessary, omitting whatever her mother wasn’t ready to hear. “She’s easy to handle. Just tell her what she wants, Kennidy!” That was the unfortunate truth about Gwen. She was both narcissistic and easily distracted. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t expect deep conversations. She didn’t book her daughters their first gynecology appointments, broach topics like sex or drugs, or review college catalogs. She was a mother who could be easily handled, as long as you didn’t actually need anything from her, whether it was a signed permission slip or a heart-to-heart.

  Ruth had opted to parent herself. Kennidy was a different story. She wanted lots of hugs as a toddler and got into more arguments as a teen. She’d accept conflict over being ignored. She’d find someone to demonstrate affection if Gwen didn’t.

  On the 29th, R left.

  On the 31st, Joey party with Troy, watch out new year here I come.

  Ruth wanted to ask their mother, “Do you even know where Ken’s going on New Year’s? She’s only fourteen.”

  She wanted to say to herself, What was so goddamned important that you had to go back to campus on the 29th? You couldn’t have stuck around three more days? You couldn’t have taken Kennidy skiing or gone off to a cabin just by yourselves to drink hot chocolate and play board games? You couldn’t have been the one to take her to the mall?

  And these were the relatively easy parts. When things got harder by late sophomore year, Kennidy seemed to have turned to poetry. There were poems about desert dunes and moonlight, coyotes and hawks, railroad tracks and broken factory windows, Arctic landscapes and Atlantic hurricanes, though Kennidy had never been north or east of Minnesota. And there were even more poems about mystery girls—repulsive or waiflike and sad but potentially lovable—who were clear stand-ins for how Kennidy saw herself on any given day.