by Alice Nelson
They were oddly formal, their first encounters in California: Jacob regarding her from behind his desk as if she were one of his patients come to spread her life out before him. He was a visiting professor, she was a graduate student in the final throes of her doctoral work on the Romani. Marina had written to him after the public lecture he had given on psychotherapy and grief, asking if he would meet with her. She would like to interview him, she wrote, about his work on fairy tales and psychoanalysis for a paper she was writing on the improvised storytelling of the Romani. She slipped the letter under the door of his office late one afternoon. The audacity of it had amazed her; it was not in her nature to be so bold. All week she waited in a kind of nervous suspension for his reply. Five days after she delivered her letter, a folded note appeared in her pigeonhole in the departmental office. He would be happy to meet with her to assist with her project, Jacob wrote in the unruly, looping handwriting that was now so familiar to her. She had manufactured the research paper as an excuse to meet with Jacob; she could think of no other way to get close to him, but later on she did write it after all.
Jacob was almost forty when she walked into his borrowed office at Berkeley. She saw the curiosity on his face as he watched her walk across the room, the grace of his movement as he stood up to shake her hand. What did she know about him then? Marina researched him obsessively after that first lecture, hurriedly read his two books, looking for fragments of biography, as well as all the articles she could find. She sat in the library for hours, a stack of journals in front of her, the Californian light streaming in through the window and illuminating her tiny study carrel. In an interview Jacob had said that the stories of his ancestors in Poland struck him so deeply because they sounded like fairy tales themselves. A family hidden in a forest; a great-uncle who walked barefoot a hundred miles to save his only pair of shoes; a cousin who travelled halfway around the world, only to meet and marry a girl from his own village; a prescient rabbi who had spirited his grandfather to safety in America.
And then there was his childhood in Israel. It was not included in any of the official biographies on his book jackets, but she had found an early essay about childhood and community in which he said that his American-born parents had made Aliyah in 1948, that he was born on a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley in the north of the country the following year, but that his parents returned to New York when he was four years old. It seemed portentous to Marina that they were both born in Israel. That they were bound together in some way by this biographical coincidence.
That first day, although she was supposed to be interviewing him, Marina found herself telling Jacob about the fairy tales that had surrounded her as a child. The old collection of Grimms’ tales that Dov had found at the Brooklyn Library the year they came to New York, the only stories that her mother could ever be persuaded to read to them. Bones that sing tales of hidden deaths; children who set out into the world to discover what fear is; stolen babies; brothers transformed into deer. Their mother’s own history, in those childhood nights under the tilting spread of light from the lamp, was wayward and mysterious to them, but in the stories Marina and Dov sensed something slipping out of her. It was the only time she would let them come near her, sitting between them on the old sofa by the window, the heavy book balanced on her knees. The nearness of her, the rise and fall of her jutting collarbone as she read, the curtain drawn against the sleeve of ice at the window – all of these things would burn in Marina in the years after Gizela left. A mother reading to her children. Surely she had loved them. Surely.
It was the small tales that had haunted Marina the most. A handful of words spinning out a kind of confused despair, a bewilderment at the way the world was. She told Jacob about the tale of the obstinate child – in German das eigensinnige kind, which means literally ‘the child with its own mind’. No mention in the story if the child was a girl or a boy, no name, no reassuring stroke of detail. All the reader was told was that the child would not do what its mother wanted and, because of that, God had no goodwill towards it and let it become sick and die. When the child was buried, it kept pushing its little arm up through the earth until finally its mother came and knocked the arm down with a stick. After that it was peaceful under the earth for the first time.
‘My mother told us that the story was a warning to naughty children. I think she was hoping we would see it as a parable about obedience. But to me it always felt like a glimpse into the horror of things. There was something about it that terrified me: the anonymous, unloved little child under the earth, its hand pushing up through the damp soil. And then there was the ruthlessness of the mother. And the malevolence of God, too, I suppose. All pretty bleak. But it was the story I asked for over and over.’
Jacob was watching her closely as she spoke, his head slightly bent, his cup of coffee untouched in front of him. He looked bemused, and suddenly Marina was embarrassed at having said so much. The words had come out at the wrong angle, making the story seem odd, perhaps casting her as strange and dark. A perverse child, haunted by loss. Of course he would be analysing her, judging her, thinking her damaged and peculiar. This was supposed to be an interview, not a therapy session.
‘I suppose it’s a silly story really,’ she said, looking down at her hands.
‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘I think there are stories like that because we have always been haunted by the unmanageable. By things that are vast and dangerous. We don’t know how to approach them, so we tell stories around the edge of them. It’s one of the oldest impulses in the world.’
She looked up at him then. He had allocated an hour for their meeting. An hour for them to take the first steps into each other’s lives. Even now, years later, she still felt the strange shadow of what might never have happened if she had not slipped her letter under Jacob’s door, if he had not responded so graciously to a stranger’s request. It would rise up unnervingly at times. A sudden pang; the knowledge she might never have had this.
That evening she and Jacob walked over to 116th Street to buy tamales for dinner. The temperature had dipped slightly and there was a breeze coming off the river, a balminess to the evening. The streets seemed so much more forgiving under the blue summer twilight. The sidewalk stores along Second Avenue were humming. A flock of starlings rose up above the Capri Bakery, scattering and re-forming in a kind of ballet. On every corner people were selling things. Mexican women with thermoses of cold agua de horchata, tamales and plump gorditas. A Dominican man with neat rows of sugared churros lined up on his wooden cart. A young boy carrying a box of candy bars slung around his neck. Further along 116th Street the El Paso taco truck leaned in against the curb, a long line of people trailing down the sidewalk waiting to be served. People stood in doorways or in clusters outside the bodegas. It was like a vast, makeshift market.
‘It’s such a comfort to me, you know,’ said Marina, gesturing to the street in front of them. ‘All of this. The city. All this life.’
‘I know.’ Jacob smiled at her and took her hand as they crossed the road.
They always bought tamales from the young woman on the corner of Second Avenue. Marina was ashamed of her terrible Spanish, her fumbling attempts at conversation. The Mexican woman smiled patiently at her, counting the change into her hand and folding extra napkins and plastic forks into the bag. ‘Gracias, buenas tardes. Equalmente.’ Such a lilt to the language, a quiet graciousness to these women. She wondered what their lives were like.
She and Jacob walked home through Mount Morris Park, passing through the arc of trees and the beds of wild roses that lined the southern side of the park. There was an animated game of basketball taking place on the court, tall boys leaping around like young colts, with their thin legs and flailing arms. Ben used to come here sometimes to play, joining in with the neighbourhood boys in that gracious, easy way of his.
‘Have you seen Ben today?’ Jacob asked, as if he had read her thoughts. ‘How is he?’ When he spoke about Ben these day
s, Jacob’s voice took on a hushed, strained tone.
‘Okay, I suppose. I don’t know. He worked this morning, went up to his room when he got home. I haven’t seen him since.’
Actually, she had seen Ben. When she had taken her sandwich out to the garden at lunchtime she had looked up and seen him standing on the fire escape outside his bedroom on the fourth floor, staring at the building opposite theirs. For a terrified moment Marina wondered if he was going to jump. She walked out further into the garden, standing in the small rectangle of grass in the centre and waving up at him, trying for a casualness she did not feel. He must not see their fear, they must not hover over him; it would only drive him further away. Already he must find their confused watchfulness suffocating. Ben peered down at her from the fire escape and raised his hand in a sort of salute before climbing back through the window and pulling it closed after him. Of course he had not been going to jump. He was standing in the sun for a moment, that was all. She did not tell Jacob this.
‘Well, he’s working. I suppose that’s something.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It gets him out of the house, at least.’
Jacob had insisted on the job. He could not countenance Ben’s strange idleness, his slow drifting around the house, the hours he spent in his room. If Ben wasn’t going to study or do something else constructive then he could look for work and pay rent, Jacob told him. To their surprise, Ben had promptly found a part-time job at the Fine Fare supermarket on Lenox Avenue. It was not exactly a victory, but it was something. He got up and went to work every day. Once, Marina had stopped by to pick up some milk and glimpsed him through a doorway, sitting on an upturned crate with two young Mexican men, chatting animatedly in Spanish. She turned away before he could see her. The closed door of his secret life.
Later that night she and Jacob read in bed, their books propped up on their knees. She loved these moments of shared concentration, each of them immersed in their own reading, sometimes offering each other a few lines, a beautiful sentence. Jacob turned his page down and closed his eyes while she read him a quote from the book of essays by an Australian writer she was reading. It was about mothers, about the intense love that flows from mother to child not being returned in the same way.
‘But I’m not sure that’s always true,’ she said. ‘Dov and I loved our mother in a way that she could never love us. Everything that happened came from that love.’
‘Hmmm,’ Jacob said softly, and she could almost feel his quiet thinking, his deep concentration. It must be cultivated from his work, from all those hours of listening, this ability to absorb a thought without immediately needing to respond. ‘I think it’s often that way with damaged mothers,’ he said at last. ‘They inspire that kind of imbalance. The child has to do the greater share of the loving.’
He closed his book and put it on the bedside table. ‘Tell me something,’ he said, reaching his arm out for her. This was another one of their rituals, the slow unspooling of their thoughts late at night in bed. Marina found herself hoarding things for these moments before sleep, her head against Jacob’s shoulder, his hand in her hair. They had always brought each other these gifts: lines from books they had read; phrases overheard on the train or in line at the post office; a red leaf fallen from a tree in the park. It was a private currency, this careful noticing of the world, these whispered recountings late at night. If Jacob were gone, who would she narrate her days to? Who else would want to know the shape of her mind? She moved closer to him, the length of their bodies pressed against each other, his thigh sturdy and warm against hers.
Marina thought of the little boy she had seen on the street; his small luminous face, that tiny bare foot.
‘I met a child this morning. A little African boy,’ she said. ‘Well, not really met. He had a tantrum on the street and I went to check that he was okay.’
‘Where was the mother?’ Jacob’s voice was already drowsy, his eyes closed as he listened to her.
‘That’s the strange thing. She just turned and walked away. I wasn’t even sure at first if she was the mother, she seemed so disconnected from him.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I couldn’t just leave him. I took him over to her. He had such an unusual look on his face. Weirdly self-possessed. It made me think of Ben – how adult he seemed even when he was very small. The same gravity. The mother didn’t acknowledge me. But I thought about them all day. About what sort of life they might have together. What happens between them. I was thinking about how much we don’t attend to here in the city, how life bumps against us and slips past every day, unnoticed. I guess it’s probably linked to all those new lectures I wrote this semester on urban loneliness. The student feedback was good, by the way. They just sent me the surveys. They want to run the course again next year. I was thinking that I could get you in to do a guest lecture on psychiatric conceptions of loneliness. They seem to be much more relaxed about all the interdisciplinary stuff now that the feedback has been positive.’
Jacob’s breathing slowed as he slipped into sleep, a tiny quivering at the edge of his eyelid. Sleep always came swiftly to him. Marina reached across him to turn off the light and he took her hand and clasped it above his heart. He had begun to hold her this way early on in their relationship, in those first Californian days, when what was between them had a slightly illicit, provisional feel. A decade later there was still this gesture, this unspoiled core that sustained them through any arguments, through small resentments and divergences. Her hand against his heart.
Narrowsburg, Upstate New York
December, 1997
The old nun could hear the tamped-down gonging of the evening angelus bell. A smell of cooking in the air, something warm and bland. Somewhere a bishop had written that the bell must peal as the shades of night are falling. She had always liked the poetic turn of phrase. Behind the doors of the tiny convent bedrooms, or downstairs where the sisters gathered, there would be a whirr of prayers. When the bell tolled the faithful must fall to their knees and recite the ‘Ave Maria’. She buttoned up her cardigan and glanced out of the window at the fading midwinter light and the skeletons of trees lining the path. In spring there would be blackberries there, the old wild tangle of green. There was no groundsman at the convent now, no money for help. She would have to kneel there in the dirt herself, weeding and thinning, black-nailed and sweating. There was no want of work for her, no want at all.
How odd it was to be here in Narrowsburg; the damp and silence of the old convent, the creak of it at night, the mornings as bitter as those of her Irish childhood. She could feel the cold in her bones, winter as a dull ache in the joints. Pain in every socket, the rubbing of bone on bone. She had never felt it before she came here, this slide into old age, this growing brittleness of her usual sturdy self.
Vera’s order had come to America from Ireland more than a century ago – their first mission to the new world. Back then there was only a small band of twenty nuns scattered among the poor of the cities, their habit and veil guaranteeing them safety. A mission of mercy. All those unclaimed souls and lost children, all the wickedness of America. ‘Show me the poor,’ their found-ress had said. ‘Show me the poor and I will run to them.’
No running left in them now. The old nun could hardly imagine those early sisters fresh from Dublin, dragging their trunks ashore on the New York dock, the sea still moving in them. Renting rooms in a boarding house in Brooklyn, ministering to the poor Irish and handing out prayer cards and rosary beads to the men lined up to enter the muck and gloom of the new subway tunnel they were building under the harbour. Praying for Europe during the Great War, struggling along with everyone else through the Depression. Soup kitchens and food pantries, meals for shut-ins and vagabonds, prayer meetings and vigils for the sick. The slow spread of the sisters; a house in the South Bronx, then one in Harlem. A small convent and then another.
Peak and decline. It would all end here, upstate in the Catskills, their last bast
ion. The old retreat centre two hours north of New York converted hastily into a makeshift nursing home. Vera could never think of these as real mountains. She had grown up in the green shadow of the Derryveagh Mountains, by the edge of a wide lough. Just a sliver of her life spent there under the Atlantic sky. She had not been to Donegal for more than forty years, but here in Narrowsburg it came back to her in odd snatches: the sea cliffs, the dripping fields, a pair of brent geese coasting above the lake, the wind coming up and bringing a sea-smell with it. How she had missed the place in those early American years.
By the time she had joined the order the poor were not so pliable or reverent anymore. The ones who believed had their own storefront churches and charismatic preachers. There was gunfire in the street, a sister was threatened with a knife, another had her veil ripped off by a sneering gang of boys. Cars were torched, windows smashed, walls streaked with spray paint. A nun from another order was attacked when two men broke into her house through a roof shaft that had been left unlocked. They carved forty crosses over her body with a kitchen knife, sordid stigmata. Forty crosses. Hard to imagine. The nun had never recovered. She left the order and went back to her family in France. The word was that the local Italian mafia had ordered the men killed when they heard what had happened. Avenging angels, they must have felt themselves. Not too long after that a man with a drugged glaze to his eyes pushed Vera up against a wall in the stairwell of the Wagner housing projects, his hand at her throat. She had been sure he was going to murder her, had started whispering a Hail Mary. ‘Go home, sister.’ He spat it at her, and she felt the sharp snap of the gold chain with the cross around her neck. She was twenty-two years old.
