“It’s too bad Mamma’s in Norway now, but we could fly in on Friday night, stay at Andrews House, see Lisa on Saturday, and be back on Sunday night.”
“Inga, don’t you have enough to worry about? Do you really want to risk a wild-goose chase?”
“It’s about our father. Don’t you see?”
“I see,” I said.
“You’re afraid, aren’t you?”
“I’m busy.”
“You’ll regret it. You regretted that you weren’t there when Pappa died. You felt bad. You said so. It wasn’t your fault. You’d just been there for over a week. I know you couldn’t leave your patients. You have to plan way in advance. I know that, but still, you couldn’t be there. You didn’t see him die. Now you have a chance to know something about his life—a missing piece.”
I told her I would think about it, said good-bye, and hung up the phone. As I sat in the kitchen staring through the glass doors into the garden, I remembered an afternoon alone with my father in his room at the nursing home. He was sitting across from me in his wheelchair with his back to the door. After looking over the medication list, I asked him if he had any pain. “Discomfort,” he said, smiling for an instant. “My damned nostrils from the oxygen tubes, some itching here and there, but no pain.” I saw a nurse enter the room as my father cocked his head slightly at the sound of her steps.
“Friend or foe?” he roared, his voice resonant with mock-heroic thunder.
The pretty young woman leaned over him, her face only inches from his. She patted his shoulder, grinning affectionately, and said, “You decide.”
An unlikely combination of the stoic and the humorist, my father had been a favorite with the nurses, orderlies, and general staff. And his power to charm them had worked like an elixir on his mood. He had found his hospital smile. He knew that he was dying, that he would never go home, that he would never see more than what he could see from the narrow window in his room or a chair in the cafeteria with its fluorescent lights that illuminated his fellow geriatric patients, some of whom sat slumped over in their chairs, their blind eyes funnels to nowhere. Others were ambulatory but demented. I remembered the old woman who dropped her fork at lunch mid-bite, stood up, and emitted small high shrieks of distress that alternated with the words, “Help me! Help me!” One of my father’s table partners, Homer Petersen, had retained his mind but steadily dribbled food onto the bib he wore to protect his shirt, turning the textured white paper into a multicolored abstraction at every meal. Homer’s twin brother, Milton, a stony man of grunts and nods, was also a regular presence at the table. Neither brother had been blessed with a gift for conversation. “Homer and Milton,” my father said, shaking his head. “I’m afraid the great hopes their parents had for them have been sorely disappointed.” But despite his fellow inmates, a number of them on the brink of “sans everything,” my father maintained a buoyant dignity. He withdrew from me only once, during a lapse in our conversation. I had seen him retreat into a thought or memory many times. When I was a boy, I had been able to call him back. He would look a little surprised, his eyes would regain their focus, and then he would smile at me and launch into a discussion of weather patterns or an Icelandic saga or the life of an average mole. As I grew older, it became more difficult to pull him from those depths. I seemed to have lost the trick. Sometimes his eyes avoided mine, and sometimes I avoided his. That day, as he receded further from me, I asked him if it wasn’t time to turn on the game. He watched no movies at the end of his life and read little fiction, but his passion for football never diminished. The Vikings lost that afternoon, if I remember correctly. The score was 24 to 17. I called Inga and told her I would make the trip.
WHILE TRAVELING, I found out from Inga that she had visited Edie and Joel again. Edie still had the letters, and she still refused to tell my sister what was in them, but she swore she had not shown their contents to the Burger woman or to anyone else. She wasn’t ready to sell them to Inga. “I think she doesn’t want me to have them, because then I’d have control of all of Max’s papers and she resents the idea. Still, the better my relations with her are, the better it will be for all of us, Sonia especially, although she doesn’t want anything to do with them, and she still refuses to have a DNA test.” Inga also told me about Henry. He had sent her the final draft of Max Blaustein: Labyrinthine Lives.
“It’s strange to read the biography of someone you loved. It’s Max, and it’s not Max. It’s Henry’s Max. There’s nothing sensational or leering about it, and he spends a lot of time on the work. I skipped over much of it. I mean, I know he had all those women, that his first marriages were hard, and I know about Edie now. Henry says Max had an obsession with her, that she was an addict and that Max found desperate people fascinating. That’s certainly true. But you know, he argues that Lavinia in The Coffin Papers is based on me.”
I remembered the story. An old man, a famous composer, marries a much younger woman, a dancer, who was forced to stop after she broke her foot. They live happily together for ten years. Then he begins to suffer from physical problems—poor eyesight and gout among them—and his wife becomes his nurse. He decides it’s time to write his memoirs and begins the project. Every morning, for three or four hours, he scribbles his life story by hand into a notebook. Every afternoon, his wife types the manuscript. In the beginning, she records exactly what appears on the page, but as she continues working, she finds herself immersed in the project and begins to make changes in the text. She improves a sentence here and there, and then slowly, imperceptibly, she finds that she’s rewriting her husband’s life, making it more vivid, more “true.” Although he can write, he can’t read her pages. The old man dies shortly after he finishes the book. Lavinia places the handwritten notebook beside her husband in his coffin and sends her manuscript to the waiting publisher.
“The implication is,” Inga said, “that I’m an ambitious widow carefully guarding the Blaustein legacy.”
“Does he say that?”
“I said implication.”
“Inga, Max worried about being a burden to you as he got older, and that story may have been a subliminal way of recognizing both your work and the fact that you would go on without him. Lavinia is an ambiguous character. The old man’s story is dull, as I recall, and self-aggrandizing, and she reinvents it to save him. And then there’s Henry. He worships Max Blaustein the writer. As Max’s biographer, he may have displaced some of his own worries onto you. He’s the one writing a life, not you.”
Inga turned to me. “Yes,” she said. “He’s more like Lavinia than I am. That could be why he spends so much time on that late story.”
“And I’m sure he has no idea that’s what he’s doing.”
The conversation took place at LaGuardia Airport as we waited to board our plane. Inga folded her arms across her chest and hugged herself. Tears came to her eyes, and I was afraid they would fall in public.
“Why are you upset?” I asked in a low voice.
She sniffed. “Maybe it’s true that I’m trying to control the story of Max’s life. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe Edie should sell the letters and let it all go public, whatever it is, and I’ll keep a stiff upper lip. It’s just that I don’t want Sonia to be hurt more than she is already.” I looked down at my sister’s thin hand as it gripped the seat of the plastic chair. I noticed the blue lines of some protruding veins and a couple of brown age spots on her white skin. It must have been the position of her hands that brought it back to me. I remembered her sitting beside me in the church pew, her hands holding the seat, her eyes raised to the stained glass of the sanctuary window. As a girl, Inga had loved the benediction. She had waited for it every Sunday, had lifted her chin up and closed her eyes when the pastor made the sign of the cross and blessed the congregation. I had found her posture embarrassing, and when I elbowed her once and asked her why she did that every week, she said, “I like to hear the words about God’s face. I want to feel the light.”
&nbs
p; The Lord bless thee and keep thee.
The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious
unto thee.
The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee
peace:
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
THE SMALL GRAY house, with its sagging screen porch, was on a corner, its lawn clearly demarcated because on either side of it the neighbors had neatly raked their leaves. We opened the flimsy porch door, passed a ripped lawn chair and an aging plastic gnome, and rang the bell. As Inga stood in front of me, I noticed she was trembling. I knew she couldn’t control it, but I felt a wave of annoyance anyway. When Lorelei opened the door, her soft moon face was grave, and her eyes narrow and focused. The “Come in” she uttered rang with both ceremony and self-importance. Without another word, she pointed to a sofa covered with a plaid blanket in the small front room and disappeared through an inner door. Inga and I sat down. Lorelei was on her own turf now, however humble, and this had created a subtle but noticeable change in her demeanor. The woman had an officious streak, a quality that inevitably contains a hint of sadism. While we waited, I looked at the small plaster sculpture of praying hands that stood on the table in front of us, and I realized I hated that ubiquitous ornament of rural America. It evoked a glutinous piety I detested, not to speak of the fact that it always made me think of amputations.
“It’s as if we were about to have an audience with the Queen,” I said to Inga.
“You’re in a savage mood,” she answered in a whisper. “What’s the matter with you?”
As I searched for a cause, I found only an amorphous blur, a vague consciousness that my sister and two spinster doll-makers had lured me into this misadventure, and I resented it, but I also had an uncomfortable feeling of reenactment. It wasn’t déjà vu, that curious sensation of having lived through an identical event. Rather, it was a form of parallelism. The word “revenant” appeared in my mind. Somewhere there was the faint smell of mildew. As I pondered the odor as a possible trigger for the experience of repetition, I felt Inga clutch my hand suddenly, and I looked up.
Lorelei was standing stiffly in front of the opened door. “Aunt Lisa is ready for you,” she said. “You will not be allowed to see the other legacy items.”
As my sister nodded, I quelled another fit of irritation at the woman’s pomposity. Lorelei let us pass in front of her as she held the door open with her back.
In front of us in a double bed lay Lisa Kovacek, née Odland. Only her small head and arms were visible. The rest of her was hidden under the sheets and several heavy blankets. I noticed that another sheet had been draped over some large rectangular object to the left of the bed. Aunt Lisa did not look friendly. Her lipless mouth had a tight, hard expression, and a thick pair of wire glasses covered her sunken eyes, making them illegible. Baggy skin hung from her chin and arms, which made me suspect that her illness, whatever it was, had precipitated sudden weight loss. What little remained of her hair was white and had been curled tightly into coils, which lent the top of her head an air of surprise that didn’t at all match the face beneath it. She moved her head toward me and, without lifting her arm or hand, motioned with her fingers for me to come closer. I felt Inga approach behind me. Lisa gestured again for me to sit in a chair beside the bed, which I did. She turned her face toward me, and I examined the deep crosshatched wrinkles of her sagging cheeks, her hugely magnified eyes, opaque with cataracts, and the long keloids that marred her neck. Those untreated eyes coupled with the scars made me remember the child in a burning house and brought a moment of genuine sympathy. When she groped toward me with her right hand, I put my hand near hers. She circled my wrist with her fingers, and I noticed both that her grip was strong and that she did not have a fever.
“Lars,” she said in an emphatic voice.
“I’m his son, Erik.”
“I know that,” she said sharply. “You think I’m soft in the head?”
“Not at all,” I said, and smiled. My response was automatic. I adopted the calm voice of the friendly physician I had used thousands of times before, but it seemed to please her.
“Yer dad was handsome,” she said in a clear voice.
Lisa tightened her fingers as she spoke, and then Inga put her hand on my shoulder. I guessed it was to steady herself. Neither my sister nor I answered this statement. When I glanced at Lorelei, who continued to stand against the opened door, she appeared to have gone rigid with concentration.
Lisa turned her face toward the ceiling. “Never said one word to nobody.”
At exactly that moment, I recognized that my irritability had taken the place of dread. I knew the old lady was going to confess, and the story she would tell might change how I felt about my father. As I looked at her in anticipation, I realized all at once that she was enjoying the scene, that it was a production. She had planned it, hairdo and all; perhaps even her sickbed was a charade. For a dying woman, she struck me as unusually robust. I watched as Lisa nodded to Lorelei, who walked across the room and lifted the sheet to reveal what I had expected: more dolls.
With Lisa’s fingers still around my wrist, I shifted my position in the chair to get a clear view, and Inga moved away from me to crouch down and examine what had been exposed. On a low table there were three dioramas. That was the only word that came to mind—three wooden boxes about three feet by four feet with the familiar small figures inside them. I saw immediately that the scenes all took place at night outside. Fields, sky, stars, and a small white house had been painted onto the back of the box. The floor was covered with dirt, which I could smell from where I sat. In the first, a blond female doll was squatting on the ground in a blue dress. The doll’s mouth had been stitched with red thread in imitation of a full-throated scream. After patting Lisa’s hand, I gently removed her fingers from my arm and leaned forward. A dark string that came from between the doll’s legs was attached to a tiny gray figure, a skinny infant that had been painted with red blotches. In the next box, I saw the tall, thin figure of a boy in overalls. His hair was dark and curly, and he was bent over the girl in the dirt, a small knife in his hand. He was about to cut the umbilical cord. In the last box, with no house, only trees and fields in the background, the male figure wielded a spade, his foot pressing it into the dirt. The girl lay curled up on the ground, hugging her knees. The tiny figure beside her was wrapped in gray cloth.
“That’s Lisa and Lars,” she said. “That’s the story.”
“The baby?” Inga asked in a small voice.
“Was stillborn,” Lisa said to the ceiling. “Dead.”
“The baby was our father’s?” Inga said, her voice rising.
Lisa jerked her head toward Inga. “No, was Bernt Lubke’s.”
“Who was Bernt Lubke?” I asked.
“Nobody,” she said bitterly. “Wasn’t connected to yer family. Blue Wing trash. Lars kept his promise to me.”
Inga walked toward the bed. “Where did you go after that? Why were you out in the field to begin with?” She paused. “Wasn’t it obvious that you were pregnant? How could you have hidden it?”
“Wasn’t obvious,” she snapped. “And it’s not part of it. None of yer business.” Her voice took on a hysterical squawk.
Lorelei stepped away from the door, her eyes alive with emotion: a mixture of satisfaction and cruelty, I thought.
I turned toward the woman in the bed and put my hand on her arm. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She didn’t turn her head but kept on staring at the ceiling. “Don’t matter. Didn’t want it. That’s the truth.” She paused. “Yer dad heard me, was what it was. He heard me and come running. That’s a fact. I wouldn’t let him get his mother. I made him swear. The labor pains was bad, real bad, but after it was over, it wasn’t me no more. I was looking on. Saw the blood, the little thing, saw it all from afar. Just like when it was made. Was just like I had nothin’ to do with it.”
Inga moved to the
end of the bed. “Why did you go to Obert’s to talk to our father?”
Lisa closed her eyes. “He lent me three dollars that day. Never paid him back. He was handsome, yer dad, and a gentleman.” She lifted her glasses and rubbed her right eye. “I was afraid they’d think I kilt it, you know. Lars told me it was a girl. He put it in the ground.”
Nobody said a word. I imagined my father kneeling over the hole he had dug, burying the dead newborn. I found myself wondering about the unmarked grave, where it was on the property. The landscape I saw in my mind was gray.
For the first time, Lisa pointed to Inga. “You have Les Rostrum, don’t you?”
Inga nodded. She wasn’t shaking anymore. “The boy at the funeral.”
“He was a bad boy,” she said brusquely. She made a clicking sound with her tongue, took a breath, and kept talking. “Was way back I found I could do it—make them people. Was before Walter came and told me about the fire. I made up the legacy—going to Lorelei when I’m dead. I started making her—the burnt Lisa—and them others. Can’t remember the fire. Just have this.” The woman’s hand wandered to her neck. “Don’t even know how it happened.” She solemnly folded her hands across her chest as if she were arranging her final position, closed her eyes, then opened them. “Found my mother and my little brother’s graves growed over. We cleaned ’em up real nice, didn’t we, Lorelei?”
“Yes, we did.” Lorelei’s voice was crisp. “We sure did.” She walked forward and adjusted the pillow beneath Lisa’s curls, a gratuitous gesture that must have given her a chance to move. “You’re tired,” she said. The old woman smiled faintly. Lorelei smoothed the blankets and then, with an abrupt, violent gesture, lifted up the mattress and thrust the sheets and blankets under it, after which she leaned over her aunt and said, “Tight enough?”
Lisa closed her eyes and smiled again.
Lorelei turned to us. “My aunt will sleep now,” she said, her eyes on the door.
The Sorrows of an American Page 25
