My grandmother lived alone in a way that seemed natural, inevitable, and inviolable, and for all our closeness, it never occurred to me to wonder with whom she had managed to produce her two children, my mother and uncle. She seemed perfectly capable of doing such a thing unassisted, and where in her life would a companion have fit in? Still, I remember a day when I was about five years old, and my mother handed my grandmother a photograph of me posed with my grandfather in a Sears, Roebuck studio, taken that summer on one of his infrequent visits to Asheville.
My grandmother examined the picture. “What a nice photo. Who’s that with Miranda?”
My mother replied, “That’s Daddy.”
My grandmother’s smooth forehead wrinkled into a map of sadness. She looked carefully at the picture, as if searching for a sign. Then she set the photo on the table in front of her.
“I would never even have recognized him.” She sounded the words out slowly, shaking her head. “I wouldn’t know him if I met him on the street.” She picked it up and looked again. “May I keep this?” she asked.
“Sure,” my mother said, sounding surprised.
Later I found the photograph tucked into a picture frame beside my grandmother’s bed, where it remained until her death. At the time I wondered why she wanted to keep a picture of me with someone she didn’t know. I was too young to put one and one together and realize my grandparents might once have been two, to discern they might ever have been anything but strangers to each other.
CHAPTER TWO
HOW COULD I, AT THAT AGE, HAVE THOUGHT TO match my grandmother to my grandfather? He wasn’t apples to her oranges; he was pine cones or prickly pears: a remote and vaguely terrifying figure who noted corrections in the margins of his dictionaries, sent my letters back marked up with red pencil, and occasionally appeared in our house with tasteful gifts and an inclination to take umbrage in toxic doses. He was retired from the UN civil service and had been an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials. I didn’t know what the Trials were (we called them “the Trials,” as if they were some kind of kissing cousin or family vacation spot), except that they added to his aura of prestige and authority.
Yes, he and my grandmother were more than opposites, or perhaps less; they were like the north poles of two magnets, impossible to push close enough together in my mind to make any kind of comparison, let alone a connection. The idea that they might be linked first came to me on the day we began addressing invitations to my bat mitzvah, and I pointed out to my mother that my grandfather hadn’t been included on the guest list.
“I guess you could send him an invitation,” she replied. “But he’s not going to come.”
“Why?”
“Think about it.”
I could think of a number of reasons my grandfather would choose not to attend my bat mitzvah: for one, he was an avowed atheist; for another, he only came to America when work brought him here, never just to see his family. Or he might be taking silent exception to an undisclosed inventory of offenses and injuries suffered during his last visit. Really, the possibilities were limitless. I chose the most likely among them. “Is he mad at us?”
My mother shook her head. “He didn’t come to your uncle’s bar mitzvah. I didn’t have a bat mitzvah, but I’m sure he wouldn’t have come to it if I had. He didn’t come to either of my weddings. He didn’t come when you were born.”
“Why?”
When my mother raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything, I realized I must have the elements of an answer that she was waiting for me to deduce for myself.
The response, when it occurred to me, seemed absurd in a contradictory, confusing sort of way: absurd because it was so obvious, or absurd because it seemed so unlikely—I wasn’t sure which, but I ventured it anyway. “Because of Grandma?” My mother nodded, and I considered the two of them, Anna and Armand, holding them beside each other in my mind for the first time. I could easily imagine my grandfather being bothered by my grandmother, but when could they have met? “Have they ever been in the same room together?” I asked.
My mother laughed. “Well, look at me and your uncle.”
“They were married?”
“Of course they were married.”
“So they’re divorced from each other? When did they get divorced?”
My mother couldn’t say. She didn’t know when they’d gotten married, and though she remembered her parents’ separation, which had occurred sometime between 1950 and 1953, the divorce had dragged on for nearly two decades, until around 1970. All she could tell me was that they hadn’t spoken in nearly forty years, since 1955.
Forty years seemed ridiculously, even impossibly, long to me. And like most children that age, my sense of my own importance in the world was inaccurately large. “But I’m his only granddaughter, and it’s my bat mitzvah.” My mother looked dubious. “Besides, if it’s been that long, maybe they’ve forgotten about it. I’m going to invite him.”
My grandfather responded to my invitation almost immediately, which was very rare for him. Though his answer had been written in haste, his words had the same dry and measured quality they always had, so that it was difficult at first to understand the operatic turn of events he was predicting—essentially, that being in the same place as my grandmother would cause them to have simultaneous heart attacks and die. In a postscript, he asked me to think about what I would like as a bat mitzvah present—what about a safari? We could go on a safari in Kenya, if I liked.
“Kenya would be about the distance he prefers to maintain between himself and your grandmother,” I remember my mother observing when I read her the letter. Nowadays I marvel at how calmly she discussed a phenomenon that had wrought havoc on her and her brother’s childhoods, but back then I thought it was the way all mothers discussed all things.
“What happened? What happened to make them be like that?”
“Who knows? No one has ever figured that out.” My mother had only vague memories of her parents’ marriage and separation. She recalled their passage from France to America on the USS America in December 1948, eating in the ship’s nearly empty dining room with her father while her mother, pregnant with my uncle, lay suffering from nausea in their cabin, where all the furniture not bolted down slid back and forth across the floor as the ship pitched and tossed on the stormy Atlantic. Of those first years on Long Island, she remembered a kitchen table topped with red Formica, a redhandled grapefruit knife my grandmother took with her when she left, frequent fights, and not much else. And then, after the separation, the housekeeper, whom we’d now call the nanny, trying to persuade Anna to return to Armand.
“So why did they get married?”
My mother had no satisfying explanation for that, either: “Your grandmother was brilliant and beautiful, and your grandfather was brilliant and handsome. They met in Strasbourg, when they were students. I imagine it must have been quite electric.”
I was left to flip through the few old photos we had from the years my grandparents had spent together, lovely little black-and-white windows from which a woman and a man named Anna and Armand looked out of the past, silent, enigmatic, and lost. The captions that accompanied my grandmother’s photos were tantalizing: “Anna holding a cat whose leg she had splinted”; “Man on left wanted to marry Anna”; or, my favorite, written for a snapshot of her sitting in a field of narcissus, the flowers like wave caps in the grassy sea around her: “Anna picked bouquets for all 185 patients in the sanatorium.” That was Anna all over. Her love of beauty was militantly democratic. The few pictures of my grandfather had no captions, or very cryptic ones, with no mention of his name, though I recognized his Roman nose, high cheekbones, and wry smile. There was one of him sitting at a desk, his arm flung over the back of the chair, his white shirt peeking out from under his suit jacket, at once elegant and diffident. Another showed him at the summit of a mountain, looking tanned, determined, and very thin. Brilliant, beautiful, and electric: what more could a young girl ask of he
r grandparents’ long-ago youth?
But then a week or so later, my mother returned from the mailbox with an envelope for me. It contained a single photocopied page of text, with a note from my grandfather:
A friend sent me this poem, which reminds me of something in my own life. I thought you might like it.
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.
You promised me, and you said a lie to me,
that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked;
I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you,
and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.
My mother said to me not to be talking with you today,
or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;
it was a bad time she took for telling me that;
it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.
My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
or as the black coal that is on the smith’s forge;
or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
it was you put that darkness over my life.
You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
you have taken God from me, and my fear is great.
“Well, there you go,” said my mother, when I showed her the poem. “He’s not coming. He can’t come.”
Dramatic as that poem sounded, it would be inaccurate to say I was astounded by the discovery of my grandparents’ marriage, divorce, and ensuing silence. Startled, yes, but at the same time, I’d grown up in a universe that revolved around an unspoken maxim: everything can fall apart.
As a child, I did not discern this principle ordering my life, though by the time I learned about my grandparents, I had begun to feel the contours of its presence. I knew it somehow related to my keeping my shoes by the door and thinking constantly about viable places to hide; to our always having candles and matches at hand; to my mother snapping off the radio or rattling the newspaper shut at the mention of certain things; and to my non-Jewish father remarking from time to time when I visited him and my stepmother, “This will all come down to you, Miranda. You’re going to have to figure out how to carry it all.”
But I digress in mentioning these phenomena, which I never thought to associate with my grandmother, not back then. I bring up this maxim only to say that in a world that revolved around the possibility that everything might fall apart at any second, the disintegration of my grandparents’ marriage was neither surprising nor spectacular.
Certainly, my grandmother didn’t treat her relationship with my grandfather—or lack thereof—as if it were anything special. If she deigned to talk about him at all, it was only very briefly, and then she’d veer off onto another topic entirely—obesity in household pets, or her thoughts on the U.S. Postal Service. I still remember the first time I tried to bring up the subject with her, the summer after I turned thirteen. If becoming bat mitzvah had made me a woman, then it was time for me to learn to tell fortunes. “Always have at least one skill to fall back on—it could save your life. It saved mine.”
“How?”
“On my last journey home … I was taking a train full of traveling salesmen. They were eying me, and I pulled out my pack of cards. It kept them distracted all night.”
I was too young to really comprehend the threat she was hinting at, nor how the skill she was offering me might guard against it.
“I remember another time,” Grandma went on, “in my first year of residency, one of the other residents followed me back to my room, he invited himself in, and he kept moving closer and closer, so I pulled out my deck of cards and proposed a reading! Of course he accepted. It was the strangest combination of cards—I forget what-all, about his family, trouble with an inheritance, a lawyer, or I don’t know what. He got quieter and quieter, and then he just left. Now pay attention, closely-closely, because I can’t teach you. You have to steal it from me.”
She pulled out a deck of miniature playing cards, with a pink and red Art Nouveau pattern on the back. Half of them were like new, their gilt edges still shiny. The other half, from the sevens up, were battered and worn. “These were your mother’s cards. She foretold a bad fortune and got spooked and gave them back to me. Once you learn, you can have the ones my friend Cilli gave me before I took that last journey home. I used to eat at her house every day—she was a smart girl, at the top of our medical class, but then she had an affair with a doctor, a Romanian aristocrat, and got pregnant. He went home, he said he was going to sort of smooth the way with his family and then send for her, and she never heard from him again, except to send her the pension alimentaire. You know, the alimony—no, the child support. He was a nice little boy, the son, but she was so depressed. Always reading her own cards, which is bad luck, you know. Very bad luck. Never read your own cards.” She tapped them with her finger and commanded, “Cut them, twice now, with your left hand, toward your heart.”
Everyone in my family had some complaint about my grandmother’s incessant talking—“She’s not hard of hearing, she’s hard of listening,” my father once grumbled after a particularly long disquisition—and I was just old enough to have begun feeling embarrassed by it, by the way she jumped from topic to topic, by her extremely spotty sense of tact, by her refusal to pronounce her w’s correctly. But I still hung on her every word as she zigzagged from one memory to another.
For hours we counted out the cards together, my grandmother reading and me observing until I had memorized the different steps and layouts and begun to grasp the cards’ many meanings. “Very good,” she said. “You have to keep practicing, though. So you should have something to fall back on,” she repeated. “In case you need money, or what—you never know.”
She swept the cards off the table and shuffled. “Cilli, I don’t know what happened to her. I think she became a collabo.” I didn’t know what shocked me more, the story ending that way, or my grandmother’s casual use of that terrible word. Now I also wonder how I could already have been familiar with the term—and its implications—at such a young age.
It suddenly occurred to me that my grandmother might have known my grandfather then, so I ventured, “What about Grandpa? Did he know Cilli?”
“He met her, Cilli. But he didn’t like her. Maybe he’s the one who told me she was a collabo.”
“Did you tell his fortune?”
She laughed. “He never wanted me to. He said it was superstitious, or it made him nervous, or what—he never let me.”
“Were you together then?”
“Together … well, you know, I knew his sister, Rosie, and his mother—can you imagine Rosie had never washed her own hair until she got married? I ask you. The only girl of the family. Your grandfather was the baby. Do you know what he told me when we first met? He said he hated his father. Could you imagine, hating your father? I couldn’t believe it. Hating your father. He wouldn’t even say goodbye to him when they were evacuated. Never saw him again. But he was brilliant. Everyone said so. I was taught to admire brilliance.”
I tried to sift through all of the information tumbling at me, but Grandma was already in Samarkand, or maybe Australia, stressing the importance of “just talking to people,” a skill she claimed my grandfather did not have. “He never could get comfortable. Me, I always just got on a bus and there I was. Like in Russia, in the sixties, visiting the insane asylums.” She made air quotes around those last two words and chuckled. “Boy, did they get mad about that.” Vainly, I tried to steer her off the bus and back toward my grandfather, but she’d already flitted away on another tangent. “I’ve even been to see the—oh, what is it called—the fancy Hitler vacation ho
use.”
I abandoned my efforts and blinked. “The Hitler vacation house?”
“You know, where he went on holidays. Famous! Big gardens, paintings, sculptures … it’s on a lake … what’s the name … Berghof? Berchtesgaden? The Adlersnest? You know what I’m talking about. Ah ha!” This last comment was directed at the cards. “See, travel!” She pointed at the nine of diamonds. “And family.” She tapped the ten of hearts.
I ignored the ten of hearts. “Did you go inside?”
“Sure not!” She looked at me incredulously. “Go inside? With guards everywhere? Of course I didn’t go inside. But I did rent a little rowboat, and I rowed across to have a look at it. I got real close. I could see the guards. Pick a card,” she interjected, and I obeyed, imagining my grandmother in a little rowboat, the water reflecting on her milky skin and the wind blowing her black curls, watching tiny silhouettes of guards marching like toy soldiers up and down a tree-lined shore, more taken with the image of her than with the geographic location, expecting her to switch courses again and tell me some other tale. “Go inside,” she scoffed instead. “What do you think—he was going to invite me in?”
“Who?”
“When I got back I read in the papers that he was in the house at the time.”
As usual, it was hard to say whether she was ignoring my question or merely answering it sideways. “Hitler?” I persisted. “You mean this was while he was alive?”
She didn’t even give me a sideways answer this time, just looked at me as if to say, Excuse me, but why else would I go see the fancy Hitler vacation house?
I could never tell whether these digressions were a reflection of her overly busy mind or a clever feint to distract me from topics she preferred not to discuss.
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 2
