by Rita Gabis
“Mercedes,” one said.
“Black BMW,” said the other.
A baby wailed, the sound traveling from the indoor deck upstairs.
The familiar rumble of the engine, the slight pitch of the hull against the swells, always reminded me of the family summer crossing, of being young. Was Aunt Karina nervous about seeing me? Did Aunt Agnes remember what I looked like?
I’d thought I would never see my mother’s sister Karina again. Every once in a while, I fantasized about a final meeting with her at my mother’s funeral. I’d heard she’d put on weight. I imagined we would nod to one another, separate in our grief. She would be large and still lovely, wearing a big woolen coat. She would be alone because I wouldn’t have allowed her to bring Uncle Alan. We would say nothing to each other.
Out the window, the churn and spread of the sea, dark blue with winter, was comforting. What would Aunt Karina really look like? She had been a surrogate mother to me during my eleventh year, when our family left Columbia, Missouri, and moved in with her and my uncle Alan, who was a successful contractor in Hammond, Indiana—a relatively short train ride from Chicago. My father’s sabbatical necessitated research at his alma mater, the University of Chicago. He was writing a book on secrecy in politics that he wouldn’t finish. He got his book contract shortly before Watergate and perhaps would have made a name for himself in academia, worthy of his beloved mentor Leo Strauss, but he was not a man given to completion.
He loved to study and hypothesize. He was a dreamer, my father. He should have been walking with Emerson or Wordsworth while Dorothy Wordsworth was at home making soap and stew and darning socks and transcribing poems and giving William bits of her diary he could make poems out of. He liked ambulating with silent, thinking men. He liked being alone in the spare bedroom, turned into a makeshift study for him in Aunt Karina and Uncle Alan’s apartment, a room littered with pipe ash and spent matches and stacks of books and legal pads covered with his small, inscrutable handwriting. He liked pondering the idea of secrecy in, well, secret.
He was not able to grasp that stocky, gregarious Uncle Alan’s attentions toward me were a signal of something other than familial affection. The long photography sessions during which I arranged myself on the couch in clothes that Uncle Alan picked out, usually dark—black turtlenecks, tights—while he fussed with lenses and lighting; the weekly all-day Saturday outings. My increasing attachment to his compliments and our physical closeness and jokes were noted by everyone as a sign of a mutual devotion that was perhaps a bit excessive but also enviable—a club no one else belonged to.
While my father was busy with Machiavelli, Uncle Alan and I roamed the city and ate salty french fries and the best hot dogs in the small city. Not that year, but earlier, when I was perhaps eight or nine, one outing had ended with Uncle Alan requesting I straddle him in the car and “hug him very tight.” After the protracted hugging session he asked me to make it our secret, and I remember being surprised by his request; he was my uncle. I loved him; he loved me—this was common knowledge, wasn’t it? I complied, of course, because even before the sabbatical year, I adored him.
When my father’s sabbatical was ending, I let it be known that I didn’t want to go back to Missouri. I don’t remember if Uncle Alan and Aunt Karina first suggested that I stay on with them, or if I started to campaign to stay. They both doted on me. My school year with them had been the happiest of my life. I started writing, and received accolades from my trim, energetic fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Laws. I had many friends. I loved Hammond.
Aunt Karina was as steady as my mother was volatile. She read out loud beautifully, without the heavy Lithuanian accent my mother would never lose—The Hobbit, The Wind in the Willows, Jane Eyre. I loved the luxury of nights spent listening—a gift that has endured my whole life—in the small back room off their kitchen, in the trundle bed, with my sister beside me, the vague odors of the night’s meal still in the air, rain beading on the sill that was always a little gritty from the Midwestern wind. A few blocks away, the red neon light of a hotel shone. Perhaps it flashed off and on, I don’t remember—just that it was part of the theater of the stories my aunt read with such engagement and authority.
“You love Uncle Alan more than you love me,” my father said, emerging from his temporary study one afternoon after school, during the time when I was to make my decision about where I wanted to live. It was a pronouncement, not a question. His glasses were pushed up. His hair, bristly and thick, stuck out. His shirt pocket was stained with ink. He looked at me with both sadness and absentmindedness—as if he couldn’t quite place who I was but knew that I was on the verge of abandoning ship. “No, I don’t,” I told him, not knowing how I really felt.
I ended up going back to Missouri. My father, perhaps in an effort to reclaim my deepest affections, began to talk with me on a regular basis about Aristotle and Plato, and then quiz me on our discussions, in the dialectic mode of one of the other eras he should have been born into.
And then, of course, it vanishes: those fictions of childhood in which heroes and enemies are clearly identified and love is inviolable. Several months later, during a much-anticipated holiday visit back to Hammond, Uncle Alan molested me on a night when we were alone in the house—though one could argue that the hugging event in the car a few years before fell into the same category.
When he slipped his large hand under my turtleneck and started circling my still-flat left breast, asking, over and over, “Will you be my baby?” I remember, aside from the overwhelming panic, wanting to shake him, to wake him. His actions in the hours as they unfolded felt practiced, rote—acts committed by someone to whom I was suddenly a stranger. Not even an anonymous child. Not even, somehow, there.
I told my parents everything several weeks later when we were home again, burst out with it as I was coming down the stairs from my bedroom because, hand on the wooden banister, I’d heard them in the living room below, planning the next visit to Chicago. I wept, even shouted as I spoke, but all the time I felt as if it was someone else, not me, talking, weeping, explaining when my father called me to him and insisted, detail by detail, I tell him all of it.
My mother was outraged. I was a liar. No, my father reasoned, a child wouldn’t lie about such a thing.
I would ruin Aunt Karina’s life if I said anything! my mother declared.
They had already lost so much in the war!
My father listened and then said, “I want you to understand that some men have a kind of sickness. They can’t help it.”
The next visit to Indiana, when I refused to leave the house with Uncle Alan for our ritual day in the city, my mother hissed in my ear, “Go.” She didn’t want Aunt Karina to think anything was amiss. It was my father who very quietly entered the kitchen where we were having our showdown and said, softly, firmly, slowly, after taking his pipe from his mouth, “She doesn’t have to go if she doesn’t want to.”
I loved Aunt Karina, but understood that my rejection of Uncle Alan, my unwillingness to ever be alone in a room with him, broadcast something not to be delved into. I held knowledge that could destroy her, and because wherever she was, Uncle Alan was too, we were through.
At fifteen, in part but not exclusively because of this turn of events, I decided to leave home. Shortly after my mind was made up, I found a boarding school in Massachusetts that gave me a scholarship. (As it happened, the school’s founders and a certain portion of the faculty were Jews who had fled different parts of Europe, Germany in particular, when the war broke out. The family histories of some of my teachers would become increasingly meaningful to me the more I learned about Senelis.)
YEARS AFTER BOARDING school, when I was grown, during a visit with my mother on the Vineyard, Aunt Karina called the house and began to sob, begging my mother to tell her why I would not come to the phone, why, for all these years, I had refused her affections when we had been so close, in the old trundle-bed days. My mother put the phone down. She
came upstairs to my father’s study, where I was looking through his books. He was at the beach, walking the tide line with one of his philosopher friends, Stanley Burnshaw, a poet and one of the early editors of the the New Masses, a Marxist magazine that attracted, in the 1920s and ’30s, writers like Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker. He was sharp and bent like a gnome and loved my father for one of the reasons intimacy was difficult for him: his preference of books over people.
My mother asked if I would give her permission to tell my aunt why I had pulled away from her all these years. My mother was now willing, perhaps because of her sister’s distress, to let the secret out. I agreed and immediately wished I hadn’t, though part of me went on bird-dog alert. Would my aunt be mine again? Would she hold her husband accountable? In graduate school I had written him a letter threatening to kill him if he hurt another child. Of course there was no way I could know if he had done to others as he did to me.
I was too anxious to go downstairs and listen to my mother’s side of the conversation, but later, with a paucity of detail, in her own words, she related my aunt’s understandable shock and then her attempt to seal her husband off from my wild claims.
“It’s Oprah’s fault,” my aunt had cried. “All that recovered-memory stuff Oprah started, all those crazy people coming on her show saying this happened and that happened, things they pretended to forget and then imagined they remembered. They just made it up because they’re sick and confused and Oprah took advantage—look what she’s caused.” And my mother, though the elder sister, couldn’t muster a rebuttal. So afraid of losing her Karina, she couldn’t insist on the truth—that I had revealed what occurred with my uncle several weeks after the event, not years later. When I told my father and mother about Uncle Alan, Oprah was still a girl living in Kosciusko, Mississippi.
THE LOUDSPEAKER BLARED; drivers should return to their vehicles. We were getting ready to dock. The announcement was flat, crackly like the static on one of my father’s old radios. I zipped up my coat and went in search of my husband, climbed the stairs against the stream of passengers, climbed with a little shrine to Aunt Karina inside me. I was eleven, in the steamy kitchen, and she was making me a grilled cheese sandwich. Christmas Eve, before midnight mass, she was showing me the right way to put on my special white gloves. Her stockings made a sound when she was dressed up. Her fur hat, in the fierce Midwestern winters, felt alive and soft. At church; the processional, white smoke, wool coats, candles, singing echoing up to the vaulted ceiling—the gathering only mattered to me because it mattered to my aunt, whose face was radiant. She squeezed my hand to keep me from falling asleep.
My husband and I walk through the slightly rickety side door of my mother’s house, bringing the cold into the warm kitchen with us. Aunt Agnes and I embrace, her face just as I remember it, only ringed by gray. Aunt Karina prefers to greet us from a distance. She has a cold, she says, and doesn’t want us to catch it. I thank her for being willing to talk about my grandfather, and after she hunches over briefly with a deep, rumbling cough, she straightens up, with the impeccable posture I recall so vividly from childhood.
“Of course,” she says. “I remember everything.”
CHAPTER 6
* * *
INTRODUCTIONS
“Do you keep a kosher house?” Aunt Karina asks.
My secular husband looks down and smiles.
Nervous, I strain not to laugh at the formal politeness of the question. Welcome the stranger from the strange land, the half-Jew with the Jewish husband. Is there something beyond politeness in Aunt Karina’s deference? I feel it; it’s an echo, hardly there, nothing Aunt Karina is conscious of. The villager taking note of the oddly dressed neighbor who speaks in a soft, volatile gibberish and doesn’t go to church, and if a child happens to go missing from some ruined farm or a town an hour down the road, well, maybe we better take a closer look. What do they do on Friday nights? What’s beneath the long shawls, the stinky broad-brimmed hats?
I chide myself for my paranoia. Aunt Karina is just being gracious and I’m just used to New York City, where I’m rarely asked this question.
Aunt Karina coughs again. The dark, soft wools she wears shift, settle; an autumn forest I want to lose myself in, back in the shadows of childhood. An elegant strictness rules over her old beauty; the full mouth, lavish deep green eyes. As she stands, she crosses her arms over her broad chest as if I might rush for her, disassemble what the years demanded she guard herself with; sheets of tin, boards nailed one over another, prayers, the on-goingness of life itself.
Her husband—ask anyone—he’s devoted to her, and that other thing, that thing that this meeting threatens to provoke, is something she’s never seen or perhaps witnessed only in the rarest of moments. And this woman before her who had been a girl once, why did she suddenly refuse to even look at a man she’d adored, clambered on as if he were a jungle gym, secluded herself with for hours on end in the small city full of grit and paper flowers and ruin and good well-meaning people like themselves?
The air in the kitchen is thick, stultifying. We all stand slightly frozen, wait, as if for an explosion. The old farmhouse odors assail: lemon oil, a smear of it still bright on the kitchen table. The pungency of an oversize rosemary plant drifts in from the other room. Four feet from me, my mother’s huge dog half barks, growls.
I’d rescued him from a kill shelter in New York and brought him to the Island after my mother’s old black Lab died. He’d been dumped at the shelter on Thanksgiving, full of ticks, his thick russet fur matted, fear rife in his dark liquid eyes. My mother named him Homer.
“It’s me,” I whisper to him, then bend down, wanting to be known. He’s been out. His soft ruff is rank, cold. He sniffs my hands for a treat, licks at my palms with his large, mottled tongue, then grandly lumbers back to a spot between the small sink and the refrigerator. A photograph stuck on the white refrigerator door catches my eye. Uncle Roy—my mother and Aunt Karina’s brother. A summer barbecue. He’s scowling with tongs in his hand. He’s the spitting image of his father; wide face, a bit of hair over his upper lip.
The photograph socks a knot in my stomach, a small shock, as if any second Senelis could tramp in, blustering, shaking off winter, loud like his son. I look out the kitchen door we just shut behind us. The door hangs a little sloppily on its hinges, grimy, paint-peeled, the works of the lock liable to be undone by a strong wind. All those comings and goings! I resist the urge to slip on my coat, grab my husband’s elbow, beat it out of there, out of the past, out of the village huddle, away from the elderly gray women.
Aunt Agnes starts to cry. I move to embrace her.
“I never did think I would see you after all these years,” she says, flat gray curls like a little cap around her face.
She’s almost trembling. She has a certain way of speaking that I love, diction like a thumbprint. I’ve missed it. I’ve missed her. I hug her, shut my eyes, open them, responsible, suddenly, for her happiness.
My mother quickly points out a winter bouquet—a centerpiece on the large kitchen table—evergreens, bittersweet, something else—pink or white. Clematis maybe. Or maybe a bowl of oranges stuck with cloves; the punctured skin of the citrus and spice, the ache of an old perfume.
The central purpose of my visit begins to get fuzzy. No one else in the room, except my husband, wants to find out what I want to find out about Senelis. (And what is that exactly? What am I doing, striding in from the dark as if I have rights to other peoples stories?) Just be quiet—the refrain of my early life.
But there were at least two slaughters in the town where my grandfather had supposedly, presumably, most assuredly been chief of security police; eight thousand dead in the first, four hundred dead months later. I don’t have any particulars yet, only an intense need to know. During the killings, where was he? Who was he? Every time I ponder it, the same fantasy comes to me—right out of Casablanca. Oh, he was playing cards, in some curtained-off room, or the empty
office at the end of a gray hall. He and his cronies smoking—one with a bit of tobacco stuck to his upper lip. The slap of two jacks on the table. As if no other sound existed in the world. No stink of cordite. No little jingle of shell casings. No cry.
“Gosh, it’s already such-and-such o’clock,” I announce, gesturing toward the scrim of dusk at the windows, the slight warp in the old glass panes somehow appropriate to the moment. The room unfreezes. Quickly Aunt Karina takes the lead. There is a plate of sausage and crackers. Cheese. Water put on for coffee. A bottle of wine my husband brought. We make a little parade into the living room.
The wide, pitted floorboards haven’t been cleaned lately. This means my mother’s eyes have gotten worse. All weekend I’ll see cobwebs, little clouds of dust, small dead flies on a sill in the downstairs bathroom where once, in the last months of his life, my very ill father fell into the bathtub at night and, too weak to call or get up, lay there until morning.
“You might want to try it, sometime,” he had quipped to me over the phone the next day. “Quite comfortable.” His particular brand of stoicism.
“Darling, move over so your husband can sit by you,” Aunt Karina commands, and then seems to catch herself.
The old familiarity.
We sit.
I ask Aunt Agnes, on my right, who touches a sore on her leg that won’t heal, if she still bowls.
“I don’t bowl no more, not since Roy died.”
I look at the empty rocker where my Jewish grandmother used to hold forth in her old London silks and deep red lipstick. Gin and tonic in hand, she lambasted my father for voting for Bush, an ornate necklace heavy with semiprecious stones around her neck, that bit of a British accent in every word she spoke, even her Yiddish.
