The Ghost of Hannah Mendes

by Naomi Ragen

  Old bag.

  She reached up and adjusted her warm mink hat, carefully patting down the hairspray-armored gray curls, immovable on her forehead. Old but still rich, she bristled, walking indignantly down Fifth and pushing open the doors of Cartier with a strange defiance. She was met with the delighted smiles of all and a familiar surge of power ran through her, electric, as she sat down and pulled off her gloves. What would it be? A ring, perhaps? Ruby with diamonds? Or maybe a bracelet? Or perhaps that watch she’d had her eye on for some time. What was it called in those lovely ads with the famous opera singer? The “Diamond Flame”? Deciding she was in no rush, she leaned back comfortably and asked to see all three.

  The gold was forgiving against the veiny whiteness of her skin. She held up her hand and peered at herself in the mirror. The bejeweled hand of a rich dowager empress, she thought cynically, even a bit amused. The hand of a woman whose expensive doctor has just gently, and with many protestations, informed her that she is going to die.

  She stared at herself in the mirror, then thanked the salesman and took off the jewelry, laying it carefully back on the thick velvet tray.

  Back outside, she hugged herself against the mannerless wind and walked toward Central Park. A dirtied snow still smeared the pavement, but up ahead, she noted with a faint, hopeful stir, some of the trees were already in early blossom. She walked toward them.

  When she got there she stopped a moment, shrugged, then walked inside.

  She couldn’t believe it. Catherine da Costa, seasoned New Yorker wearing a mink hat and carrying a purse, risking a walk through Central Park! Might as well wear a sign, “Available for muggings, wildings, and all sorts of other inner-city sports,” she thought, pulling up her glove to hide her watch and shaking her head in amazement and disapproval. But then another wave of feeling washed over her, half bravado, half despair: Do whatever you want. Who really gave a good goddamn now?

  Lifting her chin bravely, she continued on her way.

  She walked slowly until her toes began to tingle with the cold of the pavement. Stamping her feet, as if in protest against the worthless thin soles of her expensive designer boots, she suddenly felt the pain. It ripped up through her bowels, slicing through her stomach and chest, worse than any mugger’s blow.

  She laid her palm against her chest in a gesture that was at once impatient and importunate; a gesture which said: Please, all right, that’s enough now. I get the point.

  If only I could bribe it, she thought, groping for the nearest bench. Give it my watch and my wallet and ask it to go away and not bother me anymore. If only I could make it ashamed of itself, and demand it have a little mercy, a little decency for a good, elderly woman who had lived a perfectly respectable, harmless life, who, indeed, had even done some good….

  She sat down with dignity, her arms trembling. Far too cold to be sitting, she thought irritably, fumbling in her purse for the green pills that might discourage the rude stranger pressing into her flesh, or at least mollify it. With some difficulty, she swallowed one.

  Seventy-four years old. It was a reasonable age, she reminded herself, thinking of her sister, Esperanza, dead of influenza at nineteen, and of Carl, dead of a heart attack at sixty-eight. And even Dr. Emil Weinsweig, Sr. with his decades of exercise and lectures on the evils of smoking, red meat, and sunshine, long gone.

  How much easier it would have been to hear the news from Dr. Emil Weinsweig, Sr. than it had been to hear it from his son! There would have been no lowered eyes, no pen tapping nervously against the side of his stethoscope. And no encouraging litany of statistics followed by a recitation of recommendations phrased in such a way as to convince a fabulously rich, spoiled old lady that she would live forever if she spent enough money and endured enough medical tortures. Emil, Sr. would have spared her that, at least.

  She had no intention of suffering. None whatsoever. She shook her head adamantly, as if attempting to impress some unseen power with her firm negotiating stance. No operations. No horrible chemical poisons. She touched her hair nervously.

  How many months, weeks, days, hours to go, then? she wondered with an odd sense of detachment. And how would she spend them? It was a strange idea. Time had always seemed like those bank accounts she could never seem to empty no matter how much she withdrew. Her father’s and grandfather’s trust funds, Carl’s endless investments, and her bankers and brokers had seen to that. She would leave a great deal behind.

  But…to whom?

  She thought of her daughter, Janice, and her husband, Kenny. They would expect, no doubt, to move into her apartment on Fifth. Not, of course, before turning loose some deranged decorator with instructions to spare no expense (they would assume her money would see they didn’t have to) in making it over into a perfect showcase for their hideous collection of fabulously overpriced, bad modern art. She shuddered, imagining the results.

  They’d ask Suzanne to move back in. And her granddaughter would be insolent and stubborn and never agree. Why should she? Janice had never understood Suzanne, even though everything that had happened to the girl, every nuance of her life, had been predictable. Indeed, she herself had predicted it.

  She closed her eyes, made breathless for a moment by another stab from the stranger who had moved from rudeness to brutality. Despite the green pill, the pain chopped like a machete through her delicate nerve ends. But this time, it was accompanied by a sensation that, for a woman like Catherine da Costa, was much rarer and even more painful: guilt.

  She was not a person to rehash old decisions. Usually, she viewed anything she’d done in the past as not only perfectly correct, but quite inevitable. “What else could I have done…?” was one of her favorite mantras. Seldom did someone come up with an answer that convinced her there had been a viable alternative.

  Yet, thinking about Suzanne, she found her confidence shaken. She’d been as responsible as the rest of the family for what had happened to Suzanne, as relentless and wrongheaded. For a moment, she thought impulsively about leaving her granddaugher everything—the apartment on Fifth, the stone country cottage, the bank accounts, the jewels, the rare books and other priceless heirlooms….

  Oh, yes. Now the blame. Make it up to her. Let’s not skip that cliché, either, shall we? she thought irritably, taking off her hat and letting her carefully manicured fingernails ruin three hours at the hairdresser’s. In that case, why not give it directly to the rainforest-savers? Or the whale-defenders? Why not send the sables and minks straight to the animal shelters to keep stray cats warm? In fact, might as well turn it all into cash and throw it down from the rooftops of the South Bronx myself. Why burden Suzanne with it? So she could confuse giving away money with living? So she could keep bouncing around trying to find something to believe in?

  Well, if not her, then why not her sister? Why not sensible, honest, practical Francesca?

  Francesca. She closed her eyes, envisioning the result. The computer printouts of sensible money market funds and stock options. The commodities futures. The thrifty purchase of on-sale designer showroom samples at 50 percent savings. The vacation package tours to the overcrowded beaches on the Costa del Sol. And perhaps, perhaps, a husband, a fellow systems analyst at the bank. Someone just as levelheaded and earthbound as she.

  Janice and Kenny would show it off. Suzanne would give it away. And Francesca would probably double it.

  But who among them, she wondered, would truly cherish what she had to leave behind and find in it true joy? And who among them would understand that to be an heiress was not just a question of easy money or material possessions to squander or hoard, but a responsibility—burdensome in many ways—that demanded tutelary vigilance?

  She sat quietly, feeling suddenly quite drained and ready for sleep. A sound, like the chatting of old ladies at a bingo night, made her raise her eyes to where tiny, fawn-colored birds conversed on a brown branch completely bare of buds. She stared at them. They’ll be here next year, she thought. And I won�
��t.

  For a fraction of a second, the crazy idea of somehow trading with them entered her mind. The idea of giving up everything simply to retain some connection to the world, to still feel the sun, the cold, even the pain. To be part of the only kind of existence she could imagine.

  Yes, a bird, she thought. She considered it with all the weight and seriousness of a true option. A small, brown bird on a green branch, soaring with unconscious life, warm in the sun. And then she thought of the heavy, cold earth, and the unproven tales of heaven.

  Yes, she nodded, emphatically. Yes, I would trade.

  How strange, she realized, studying the tree. Not a single bud, not a hint of green when all the trees around it were bursting with new life. Was it simply a late-blooming species, she wondered, or was it dead?

  It was a terrible thought: a large, many-branched tree suddenly dying like that, especially when all the trees around it were budding and full of new leaves, flourishing and young again. And what happened when a tree died? Did you cut it down and turn it into ash in the fireplace? Or simply leave it there among the others until its dead roots gave up and it collapsed of its own weight?

  A woman wheeling a shopping cart filled with old canvas bags tied with pieces of filthy string passed by. The smell was overpowering and awful, even on such a cold day. Fat and ungirdled, she wore torn slippers and many sweaters and scarves. Her face, badly wrinkled, was both stoic and cunning.

  Where was her family, Catherine wondered. Why was there no one to take her in, to care…? And then she looked again at the brown, bare tree and shuddered.

  Suzanne, she thought. Francesca.

  2

  Later that evening, Catherine eased back into the luxurious down pillows of her favorite easy chair. Propped carefully on the side table next to her were invitations to benefits for the New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera; an engraved reminder of a special meeting of the Friends of the Forty-second Street Library; and two tickets to a Picasso preview at MOMA for major donors.

  She glanced at them listlessly. Dance, literature, art. Was there anything worthwhile in all these things, she wondered, in all her clean, easy, antiseptically correct good works? Should she have worked in soup kitchens or clothed poor children instead?

  Just…she really loved music and books. She got up and stared sadly at the glass wall unit holding hundreds of compact discs, tapes, and records. For a terrifying moment, she imagined interplanetary silence—dark, endless, and absolute. But then the phrase “music of the spheres” came into her head, and she felt slightly comforted. There was no way of telling what the afterlife would be like.

  Besides, she was still alive.

  Choosing her favorite disc, she sank back into her chair and abandoned herself to Dvoák’s matchless Eighth Symphony.

  There was the allegro con brio: birds singing, spring rampant, the theme soaring on youthful energy. And then the adagio, the theme returning, but echoed, almost mocked, by the deep despair of experience. Still, the lilting, youthful tune kept coming back, like the annoying “But why?” of a sweet, innocent child who refuses to be ignored. The adult answer, by the deep bassoons and the horns, the painful counterpoint to the strings, did its best to disillusion—but the child refused to believe. There was an argument, louder and louder, the soaring transcendent theme a battle between youthful joy and the painful middle age of experience.

  As always, she waited for the allegretto grazioso, where the battle would turn into a dance, the reconciling waltz of two lovers. When it came, she sighed, envisioning old, bitter age embracing youthful optimism, carried away and made young again with the soaring joy of it.

  Was such a dance possible? she wondered. Could partners, so mismatched, ever synchronize their steps and glide together in harmony? She mused on the idea, watching the firelight throw flickering shadows over her beautifully appointed rooms, her well-polished antiques, her china and crystal, until gradually she felt her mind empty of thought. It was magnificent, she considered, allowing herself a brief stab of happiness. The high ceilings, the elegant moldings, the rich, polished woodwork. Yet, years ago, when the wife of one of Carl’s business acquaintances had compared it to one of the stately homes of England, she’d been appalled, thinking of those huge, cold, lifeless rooms so meticulously maintained by descendants with a boundless reverence for the past that bordered on stupidity. All that useless, ugly bric-a-brac gathering dust in crumbling palatial estates and dusty museum corridors!

  But now she wondered if the woman (who had never been invited back) had been right, after all. Was her home lacking in the animating spirit of life, like the well-preserved—but meaningless and quite useless—merchandise of an antiques store?

  She found the idea devastating.

  It was a home, with character and life, she protested, her eyes nervously darting from the simple beauty of the William and Mary gateleg table to the handsome pair of Gainsborough armchairs to the richly carved seventeenth-century Spanish chest. Scandinavian-crystal vases filled with bouquets of spring flowers were everywhere. There was nothing chintzy. Nothing just for show, she bristled, fighting a bit frantically against the idea that she was hardly in a position to judge.

  After all, it was all so beloved, so familiar.

  And yet, she could not ignore the strange feeling that she had already left it all behind and was now viewing it with the critical, envious, and slightly adulatory eyes of the tourist. Why, then, should she feel so defensive, so vulnerable?

  So guilty.

  The word popped into her head unbidden, a balloon in a comic strip injecting a thought into a cartoon character’s head. She put down the glass and walked slowly over the thick, beautiful Persian carpets into the hushed quiet of the library. She stopped at the threshold, breathing in the masculine scent of teak oil and heavy leather bindings.

  It had been her grandfather’s, and then her father’s, favorite room. Carl, too, had loved it and spent many hours there. She ran her fingers over the dark, worn leather of the reading chair. She had been held in many arms and sat on many laps in this chair. She stared at the collection of valuable rare books, and then her eyes focused on the huge desk with its dozens of family photographs in pretty silver frames. She picked up one and then another, rubbing off the smudge mark of her slightly damp fingers with a caressing thumb.

  Carl. He’d been dead six years, yet she could still feel his presence in the room, smell the pipe smoke and the warm, pleasant scent of his Scottish wool sweaters. She hugged herself, almost feeling the pressure of his arms around her shoulders and back. Young people thought youth and beauty were necessary for passion. They didn’t understand….

  She walked to the wall behind the desk, swinging out the portrait that cleverly concealed a safe hidden deep inside the wall. She turned the combination lock, pulled back the heavy metal door, and carefully removed a large glass container. Inside was the priceless Bible that had been in her family for more than five hundred years, along with several other rare, handwritten manuscripts.

  Ever since she could remember, the Bible had filled her with feelings of deep confusion. On the one hand, it was one of those heirlooms that infuse memories with a particular form and substance, without which the past becomes as amorphous and characterless as smoke. She could not imagine the family without the Bible. Just its dark, tooled-leather cover was enough to evoke reminders of a real, solid world shrouded in mysticism, attuned to an older, wiser order of things. A world rough with physical deprivation and harsh discomfort, yet suffused with meaning.

  Yet, on the other hand, its very preciousness made it a burden. One was afraid to touch it, to look at it or show it. Not only because of its physical fragility, which was understandable, but because of the potent, yet indistinct power it held over the present. She had never been able to quite define that power—what it was supposed to mean to her, other than its simply existing. She existed, and it existed, and they were inextricably intertwined; this she had always accepted and und
erstood. But what she was supposed to do with that connection had always eluded her. More—it had been frightening and guilt-producing. It had been burdensome.

  She lifted out the Bible carefully. Published in 1475 in the tiny Aragonese city of Hijar by Eliezer ben Abraham ibn Alantasi, physician, scholar, and businessman, it was one of the first Hebrew Bibles ever printed, one of only ten copies. When Ferdinand and Isabella banished the Jews from Spain, printer and press had disappeared, along with thousands of other refugees and their belongings. As far as she knew, this was the only one of Alantasi’s Bibles to have survived.

  She gently caressed the brown-leather binding with its rectangular central panel and rosettes. Then, with extreme care, she opened it. Around the printed Hebrew letters, the loving craftsmanship of illumination still glowed: acanthus leaves painted in blue, green, and magenta curled around peacocks, dragons, and royal lions. On other pages, green scrolls with blue and green flowers opened to show their pistils of gold on backgrounds of wine red or Prussian blue. She feasted her eyes on the skilled handiwork, turning the pages until she reached the shimmering gold tree that held the family’s long history.

  Sketched in tempera and gold leaf, it had always seemed to her, even as a small child, to be a remnant of some enchanted forest, leaves thick on its golden boughs, where Midas and Danae walked arm in arm. At the top of the tree was Rabbi Yuda el Nasi (b. 1398), and his son, Dr. Samuel el Nasi (b. 1427), and daughter-in-law, Doña Hannah de Lyon el Nasi (b. 1432). They in turn had had Isaac (b. 1452), who also became a physician. Isaac and his wife, Rachel (b. 1456), who died on the day of the expulsion from Spain, had had two daughters, Esther (b. 1477) and Malca (b. 1492). Esther had one son, Miguel (b. 1500), and two daughters, Gracia (b. 1510) and Brianda (b. 1514). And so it went, on and on, uninterrupted for hundreds of years. Until now.