Читать книгу: «A Reunion of Ghosts»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Family Tree

Epigraph

Part One: The Ghosts

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Two: The Reunion

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part Three: Last Words

December 2010

Author’s Note

Names Mentioned in A Reunion of Ghosts

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Also by Judith Claire Mitchell

About the Publisher

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

From a distance the tattoo wrapped around Delph’s calf looks like a serpentine chain, but stand closer and it’s actually sixty-seven tiny letters and symbols that form a sentence—a curse:

the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the 3rd & 4th generations

We are that fourth generation: Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter, three sisters who share the same Riverside Drive apartment in which they were raised; three women of a certain age, those ages being, on this first day of summer 1999, forty-nine, forty-six, and forty-two. We’re also seven fewer Jews than a minyan make, a trio of fierce believers in all sorts of mysterious forces that we don’t understand, and a triumvirate of feminists who nevertheless describe ourselves in relation to relationships: we’re a partnerless, childless, even petless sorority consisting of one divorcee (Lady), one perpetually grieving widow (Vee), and one spinster—that would be Delph.

When we were young women, with our big bosoms and butts, our black-rimmed glasses low on the bridges of our broad beaky noses, our dark hair corkscrew curly, we resembled a small flock of intellectual geese in fright wigs, and people struggled to tell us apart. These days it’s less difficult.

Lady is the oldest, and now that she’s one year shy of fifty, she’s begun to look it, soft at the jaw, bruised and creped beneath her eyes. She’s the one who wears nothing but black, not in a chic New York way, but in the way of someone who finds making an effort exhausting. Every day: sweatshirt, jeans, sneakers, all black. “I work in a bookstore,” she says, “and then I come home and stay home. Who do I have to dress up for?” She wears no bra, hasn’t since the 1960s, and these days her breasts sag to her belly, making her seem even rounder than she is. “Who cares?” she says. “It’s not like I’m trying to meet someone.” Her hair, which she wears in a long queue held with a leather and stick barrette, is freighted with gray.

Vee is the tallest (though we are all short), and the thinnest (though none of us is thin). Her face is unlined as if she’s never had any cares, which (she says with good reason) is a laugh. She doesn’t like black, prefers cobalts and purples and emeralds, royal colors that make her look alive even as she’s dying. “Isn’t that what fashion is?” she says. “A nonverbal means of lying about the sad, naked truth?” She wears no bra either, but in her case it’s because she has no breasts. She has no hair either. Chemo-induced alopecia, they call it. No hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. Her underarms, her legs—they’re little-girl smooth. As is the rest of her. Little-girl smooth.

Delph is still the baby. Even now, two years into her forties, she looks much younger than the other two. She’s the smallest, barely five foot one, and the chubbiest, and she still wears girlish clothes: white peasant blouses with embroidery and drawstrings; long floral skirts that sometimes skim the ground, the hems frayed from sidewalks. As for her hair, it’s always been the longest, the wildest, the curliest, those curls bouffanting into the air, rippling down her back, tendriling around her big hoop earrings, falling into her mouth, spiraling down into her eyes. She says there’s nothing to be done about it; it’s just the way her hair wants to be. “There’s plenty to be done about it,” Vee has said more than once. “Just get me a pair of hedge clippers, and I’ll show you.”

So: black-clad, gray-haired, saggy, baggy Lady. Pale-skinned, bald-headed, flat-chested Vee. And little Delph. Three easily distinguishable women. And yet people still mix us up. The aged super who has known us since we were children. Our neighbors, old and new. We don’t resent it. Even our mother used to get jumbled up and call us by the wrong names. Sometimes we do it ourselves.

“I’m Delph,” Delph will say to Lady, who has just called her Vee for the third time in an evening. Most of the time, though, we let it go.

And sometimes one of us, sleepy or tipsy, catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror, and for a moment even she mistakes herself for one of the others.

Also, sometimes we confuse things by wearing each other’s clothes.

Like many of the Alter women in the generations before ours, we were named for flowers—but Lady is how Lily pronounced her name as a toddler, and it stuck; Vee is as much of Veronica as anyone has ever bothered to utter; and Delph is short for Delphine, which our mother thought was the name of the vivid blue perennial, but actually means “like a dolphin.” We don’t mind the nicknames. You might even say we’ve cultivated them. The flower names our mother picked never thrilled us. The funereal lily. The purple veronica, known for its ability to withstand neglect. Delph’s name that isn’t quite what it was supposed to be. “Neither the gods of flora nor the gods of fauna knew who had jurisdiction over me,” Delph likes to declaim. “No wonder I fell through the cracks.”

The truth is, we all fell through the cracks, and that’s where we’ve stayed. Our father left when Lady was seven, Vee four, Delph swaddled. Our mother … well, that’s another sad story. But life between the cracks isn’t so bad when you’ve got sisters. It can be cozy and warm, when that’s what you want. It can be filled with in-jokes and conversational shorthand and foolishness, if that’s what’s needed. Or it can be silent and still, which we tend to appreciate these days, given that, in addition to everything else, we’ve grown ever more introverted, even a touch agoraphobic.

All of which makes us well suited to the project we embark upon tonight, namely writing this whatever-it-is—this memoir, this family history, this quasi-confessional.

Our subject is the last four generations of Alters, up through and including our own. We plan to record all the sorrows and stumbles as well as all the accomplishments and contributions. We’re sorry to say there’ve been many of the former, far fewer of the latter. This is especially true when it comes to our own generation. We’re the entirety of the fourth generation; we’re the last of the Alter line; we’re “that’s all there is, there ain’t no more”; and we’ve brought the family name no glory.

On the other hand, we’ve brought it no shame either, which is more than certain preceding generations can say. That first generation, for instance, which starred our infamous great-grandfather, Lorenz Otto Alter, World War I hero, World War I criminal. Genius and monster. He was the sinner who doomed us all.

Still, he accomplished things. Good things, bad things, Nobel Prize–winning things. Not so the three of us. We’ve accomplished nothing, contributed even less, and we fear for the poor sap who’ll someday be saddled with our eulogies. What will this hapless orator say? Delph Alter, the youngest sister, never left a filing cabinet less organized than she found it. Vee Alter, the benighted monkey in the middle, spent her entire adult life as a paralegal at a law firm where she drafted wills and settled estates—a deadly occupation. Lady Alter, the eldest, stood behind a cash register, ringing up purchases of paperbacks and magazines, saying little all day besides thank you and do you need a bag for that and romance is the third aisle on your left.

Clearly all three died of excruciating boredom.

Yit’kadal v’yit’kadash. Requiescat in pace. Th-th-that’s all, folks.

We’ve been thinking about our eulogies lately because this is not only our memoir, it’s also our suicide note. It’s true: we’ve set the date at last. Midnight, December 31, 1999. New Year’s Eve.

We’ve always known we’d die by our own hands sooner or later. Sooner has now come a-knocking.

“Six months to a year.” That’s what Vee’s doctor said.

We talked it over at dinner. We slept on it that night. The next morning we made a pact. All for one and one for all. If one of us goes, all of us go. Everybody out of the pool.

We have a joke. Well, not a joke. A riddle:

Q: How do three sisters write a single suicide note?

A: The same way a porcupine makes love: carefully.

Also, tenderly and slowly and by pressing on even when it hurts.

We also have a chart. A week or so after our mother died, Delph, who was then eighteen, drew it up. She made it pretty and tacked it onto the back of her bedroom door, where some girls hang pictures of teen idols. There it remains, our great-grandfather, the curse’s catalyst, near the top, and our mother, the hapless Dahlie, down at the bottom, bearing his weight and the weight of all the others who went before her.

We like the chart. We like the tidiness of the rows and columns. We like the repetitions and subtle variations. We’re fascinated by the emergent narrative.

It’s said that descendants of suicides view life as forever chaotic, but when we look at this chart, we see the opposite of chaos. We see order and routine. We see soothing predictability and reassuring inevitability.

Without the rows and columns, all you’d have is a crazy game of Clue. Great-Grandma Iris in the garden with a gun. Aunt Violet in the bedroom with a plastic bag. Mom in the river with rocks in her socks.

But with the rows and columns, you have our family tree. Every family’s got one. This one is ours.

CHAPTER 2

While all three of us have previously contemplated suicide, only Lady has given it a serious go. Several serious goes, as a matter of fact, and the first one took place almost twenty-three years ago, the long Fourth of July weekend of 1976.

Times were fraught. Over the previous twelve months New York City had been through stagflation and gas lines and “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” while we’d been through Vee’s first bout of cancer, plus our mother’s swan dive into the Hudson, plus Lady’s swan song for her five-year marriage to the egregious Joe Hopper, an ill-conceived enterprise that had not only caused her unhappiness but also forced her to go by the name Lady Hopper, which, she maintained, sounded like something you’d call a cartoon frog wearing pearls and a diadem. It didn’t help to use her given name, either. Lily Hopper was even worse: same frog, less jewelry.

We tried to look on the bright side. No more Joe Hopper, for one. No more Richard Nixon, for two. Vee had been cured. (That’s what her doctor had said. That’s the word he used. Cured.) And now it was the Bicentennial, a three-day weekend when incensed New Yorkers took time out from their calls for Ford’s impeachment to cheer the whistling comets and fiery chrysanthemums bursting above the World Trade Center.

Oh, that summer. Delph, nineteen, had a scholarship to Barnard, the women’s college just a few blocks uptown that all three of us attended, though only Vee and Delph graduated. Vee and her husband, the faultless Eddie Glod, were living in Vee’s bedroom. They were both twenty-three. Eddie worked several part-time, dead-end jobs while trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Vee had begun her job as a paralegal. She’d bought two used business suits at a thrift shop, along with one clunky pair of broken-in, broken-down heels. Only her several pairs of pantyhose were new, packaged for reasons we will never understand inside large plastic eggs.

She enjoyed her job. Each will she prepared was like an allegory, where this everyman called Testator gives away his house and his furniture, his cars and his cash until there’s nothing left but his kids. He takes a deep breath and gives them away, too, hands them over to some guardian who will never love them like he does. Now bereft of all he’s ever held dear, he signs his name and admits it at last: he’s going to die. Vee found the whole process romantic and literary. Also, there was medical and dental and a fully vested retirement plan.

As for Lady, in 1976, she was twenty-six and living alone on Amsterdam Avenue in the slummy fifth-floor walk-up she’d once shared with Joe. The weekend she decided to kill herself, she was nearing the end of a ten-day vacation that had been neither her idea nor her desire. It was the dentist she worked for who’d suddenly decided to take some time off and shut the place down. “Spontaneity is the word of the day,” the dentist had said, a line he’d clearly rehearsed.

The hygienist had been thrilled, but not Lady. She was the one who had to call the patients, reschedule appointments. “Something’s come up,” she had to say. “An emergency,” she’d add if a patient got testy. Or, if a patient grew concerned, “A less-than-dire emergency.”

The patients weren’t really the problem, though. The problem was that she didn’t know what to do with a vacation. Ten days. New York in late June, early July. It wasn’t as though she had a little place in the Hamptons.

“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” she asked the dentist after the hygienist had left for the day. She’d been working for him for four years by then, ever since she dropped out of school to marry Joe. It had been a wretched idea—the marriage, not the job. The job she liked. Office manager slash receptionist was not the sort of occupation Barnard wished for its girls, which, bewilderingly, was how that self-proclaimed bastion of second-wave feminism referred to its students, but Lady was as aspirational when it came to career as she’d been when it came to finding a life partner—that is, not very. She’d married Joe because he’d trusted her with his deepest darkest secret, a secret that had caused him such shame he’d bitten his lower lip as he revealed it, until a few discreet drops of blood dribbled into his Frank Zappa–esque lip beard. He wasn’t aware that he’d nibbled himself bloody, that’s how wrapped up he’d been in confessing this secret—and stoned, he’d also been extremely stoned—but Lady had seen the self-inflicted cut in his trembling lip, and it had touched her heart. Such a vulnerable boy behind the layers of sarcasm and arrogance, and of all the women he knew, he’d unburdened himself to her. How could she resist? She didn’t even mind that he was unemployed. He had a higher calling: he was working away on his master’s, after which he’d be getting a PhD in literature. Then a professorship somewhere Ivy Leaguish. His area of specialty was Victorian female poets. How could Lady not support this? He was a feminist! He wanted women artists to take their rightful place in the academy! They’d tied the knot in Central Park, and she’d willingly left school and taken the first job that allowed her to cover the rent on the apartment they were already sharing.

Joe Hopper, lanky and hairy, with a penchant for fringed suede vests over bare skin. He disliked Lady’s job, found it personally humiliating. Dentistry. It was so bougie, he said, so middle class. Even a minimum-wage job would have been better. The store on 112th that sold cheap sundresses and paper parasols was hiring. Ta-Kome always needed someone to make sandwiches. Or, if it was all about money, then what about waitressing at some Midtown dance club where lawyers and bankers tipped beaucoup? She said that she preferred the receptionist job—she liked getting to sit down all day—and reminded him about the benefits and free fillings. Their dental was even better than Vee’s, she said. Why didn’t he just lie to his friends about what she did, if he was so embarrassed by it? She wouldn’t care if he made up a story. “Tell them I man the ovens at Ray’s Pizza,” she said. “Tell them I drive a cab in the Bronx.” She’d go along with it, she assured him. She’d lie too.

“I’m not as comfortable with lying as you seem to be,” he said.

She didn’t take offense. How could she, when he wasn’t wrong? And he didn’t know the half of it, had no idea how much of her life was a lie—although she wasn’t lying when she said she liked the receptionist job. She did; she was content—fulfilled, even—to help the dentist build his practice. She was the woman behind the throne, which in her case, was a dentist’s chair. That was her joke.

It was true, too, that she liked the dentist himself. He’d been just out of dental school when she joined him. He’d talk to her about his hopes for the business as well as his worries. He told her about his love for his slimy work in painstaking and mildly disgusting detail. He gave her generous Christmas bonuses that, in those first years, she knew he couldn’t afford, the amounts of which she had to swear never to reveal to the hygienist, an older woman with a belly slack from four pregnancies and a tight gray bun pierced with the extra chopsticks the delivery boys from Nos Gusta La Comidas China included in their lunch orders.

Lady loved that they shared a work ethic, the dentist and she. His involved never taking more than a long weekend off. Hers involved never taking even that much. What would have been the point? If she stayed home, Joe Hopper would be there, working on his thesis at the coffee table. The title of his thesis was “‘Lips—That Like Bruised Pomegranates Blush’: Victorian Woman Poets and the Sapphic Gaze.”

“His field is vaginas,” Vee finally explained to Lady, who’d been misinterpreting the reference to lips. “Vaginas and lesbian sex, and not in a political way. If I come by and you’re not home yet, he insists on reading from it to me. He stands really, really close.” She made a face. “It’s pretty porny.”

Lady’d told Vee to stop flattering herself, but she’d also gone home and reread the thesis, and she had to admit she saw Vee’s point. She tried to look on the bright side. Joe loved what he was doing. He was always engrossed in his research when she returned home. He’d gesture at her, a sweep of his hand. It meant be quiet, take off your shoes, keep your greetings, footsteps, breathing, basal metabolism rate, to a minimum. Or he’d be waiting for her, wanting to take her to bed as soon as she came through the door, some poem he’d been explicating having turned him on.

“It was my wife’s idea,” the dentist said of the vacation. He momentarily averted his eyes; at least he had the decency to do that. “She put her foot down. She goes, ‘All work and no play.’” He shrugged as if he hadn’t an idea in the world what that meant. Then he grinned, something he was good at. “You know what you should do?” he said. “You should go to one of those Club Med places. Guadalupe! Spontaneity! You could run around naked. No one’s in the city now anyway.”

“Then why not run around naked here?” said Lady.

The dentist’s face was wide and boyish. He looked like Rootie Kazootie, like Howdy Doody, like Opie Taylor—all those redheaded, apple-cheeked, freckle-faced goyishe icons of our youth. But now the face grew stern. It was as if he thought Lady was making a suggestion, offering him an alternative.

Which she supposed she was. That’s where her being a liar came in. Lady and the dentist had been screwing around on his raspy office carpet after the hygienist went home pretty much since she’d been hired. Oh, maybe for the first six months or so, flattered but loyal to Joe, Lady had gently discouraged the dentist’s advances. But when her marriage had quickly begun going south, so, with the dentist, had she.

His own recent marriage hadn’t changed anything. The woman he’d married had a name—it was Patty—but he never spoke it in Lady’s presence. He used the generic term instead. The wife’s coming in for a cleaning. If the wife calls, tell her I’m doing a root canal and can’t be disturbed. Yeah, the wife bought me this jacket; it’s not my taste, but what are you gonna do?

Lady never mentioned or even hinted at her relationship with the dentist to anyone, not to the hygienist over shared egg foo yung, not to Vee or Delph during her frequent visits home. Not even to the dentist himself. He and she had agreed upon conducting an utterly wordless affair. Their very agreement had been wordless.

Once, only once, had Lady tried to talk to him about what it was they were doing. This was soon after he’d announced his engagement, although announced wasn’t quite right; it had been more like an aside at the end of a busy day. She hadn’t even known he’d been seeing anyone. She felt knocked for a loop, stunned and disbelieving, like those women you sometimes hear about who go to the doctor with a stomachache and learn they’re not only pregnant, they’re in the end stages of labor. Still, she hadn’t said a thing other than the pleasantries anyone would utter in response to such wonderful news—the same pleasantries the hygienist had just offered.

But a few days after he’d confessed to the engagement, the two of them in his office, Lady straightening her skirt, the dentist hanging up his white tunic, Lady thought it would be nice to reassure him, to let him know she would not be falling apart or making a scene, which, while sobbing in the shower that morning, she’d decided would have to be the case. Her reassurance, she thought now, would be a type of engagement present. What else could she do? She’d long known she had no rights. She’d always known what she’d signed up for. She wanted to tell him that. “You know,” she said, pulling her sweater back over her head, “the thing about our relationship is—”

He was zipping his trousers. “We don’t have a relationship,” he said.

She made the mistake of plowing on. “Well, of course we do,” she said, “and the thing about it is—”

“We don’t have a relationship.”

Now she was considering making a scene. Although, having never made one before, she wasn’t sure how to go about it. “I agree we don’t have a relationship,” she said, “but we have a relationship.”

He put on the jacket he allegedly hated, tawny suede, expensive, indisputably gorgeous, and popped the collar.

“What I mean,” Lady said, “is that we may not have a romantic relationship with any kind of future. I get that. But we do have a relationship. I’m your receptionist. I’m your coworker. Any two people who know each other have a relationship. It’s what the word means. The kid I buy snow peas from at the Korean market—I don’t know his name, but we have a relationship.”

“Maybe you and snow pea boy have a relationship,” he said, “but you and I don’t.”

By then she couldn’t remember what she’d wanted to say in the first place. She’d forgotten what the thing about their relationship was. She said, “You know what? I’ll see you tomorrow,” and went home. She was exasperated, but only because he’d refused to admit she was right. Even at the time, even in the middle of whatever it was you’d call what they had, what they were doing, what they were to each other, she knew she didn’t love him, not really. She certainly didn’t count on him, not ever. She never initiated anything with him, although sometimes she dropped hints.

Just as she told nobody she was screwing the dentist—even after her divorce, she’d told no one—so she told no one about her mandatory vacation. Day after stifling day she remained indoors with the shades pulled, a futile attempt to stay cool. Even now she remembers the oily sweat between and under her breasts, how she’d pull up her T-shirt, baring her chest, the T-shirt absorbing the sweat on her forehead and cooling her nape and covering her hair like the veil of a topless nun.

She also remembers the small rabbit-eared TV in her bedroom—her entire divorce settlement, the retention of that little TV—that she watched almost nonstop during those interminable days. One afternoon she tuned into Bill Boggs to find an impressively drunk Tennessee Williams slouched on the couch while Rich Little did impressions of Johnny Carson and John Wayne. Right after Boggs, Walter Matthau appeared on Dinah Shore, and, right after Dinah Shore, Walter Matthau showed up again, this time on Mike Douglas. Lady had nothing against Walter Matthau—who didn’t like Walter Matthau?—but his reappearance, his repeated gags, the same clip from The Bad News Bears, made her feel unhinged. Then night fell with its soothing reruns of Rhoda, Phyllis, and Maude, and later an appearance by the Happy Hooker on Tom Snyder. Lady was beginning to understand how this could become your life, how it could make you feel like you had companions with whom you’d chatted and done things that day. Rhoda, Phyllis, Maude, Xaviera, Tennessee. Girlfriends.

Each day she told herself that she’d do something productive, that she’d watch no more TV, but each day she’d stay in bed, dozing on and off until midafternoon. Then she’d break, she’d crack, she’d turn on the set. Also she’d drink. And sometimes there might be some eating, might be some showering, might be some teeth brushing with the Oral-B extra-firm and sample-size Crest she got free from the office. But most often there was none of the above, just TV and cocktails and her T-shirt pulled over her head like a snood.

Not a day went by that she didn’t order herself to call Vee or Delph or even Eddie—maybe just Eddie, the most compassionate of the lot—to say that perhaps she hadn’t mentioned it, but she was on vacation, and she seemed unable to get out of bed, and could they please come over and yank her to her feet and make her get dressed. Maybe bringing some food would also be a good idea. A pizza. A turkey sandwich. An entire pound cake.

But she didn’t call, she couldn’t, because that was the week her fear of talking on the phone materialized as suddenly and surprisingly as a paper bouquet from a magician’s sleeve. All at once: poof, you’re telephobic.

The unanticipated phobia was accompanied by nausea and nerves and stomach adventures, and it escalated rapidly. At the beginning of the vacation she just ignored the ringing phone, a taupe standard Ma Bell table unit that could, if properly wielded, kill someone. By the end she was skittering across the hall, hiding in the bathroom, where she kept an extra bottle of vodka so she could calm herself until the jangling stopped. She would drink directly from the bottle, one glug, then two, call it a dry martini—which it was, sans olives—or an extra-dry Gibson—which it was, sans cocktail onions. Also sans ice bucket and stemware. She was a self-proclaimed hippie; she didn’t much care about elegance or ritual, which was good, given that she kept the crystal clear bottle of Popov on the sweating top of the toilet tank, alongside the green container of pHisohex and blue jar of Noxzema and brown vial of Miltown, the latter prescribed by the dentist.

It wasn’t until the final Saturday of the vacation—the third of July—that Lady emerged from her apartment. She hadn’t left before then, not for companionship, not for exercise, not for fresh air or groceries, not for snow peas, not for nothing. But then something came up, or rather something came down. A switch plate in the bedroom had lost its top screw several weeks before. It now hung upside down from its bottom screw, exposing the electrical box and the unpainted wall behind it.

And what had she done? She’d thrown the screwdriver.

To this day, whenever Lady thinks of the hardware store owner—and she thinks of him more often than you’d imagine—she feels the same shame, the same painful scraping of threaded metal through her body. She has to stop what she’s doing. She closes her eyes. She focuses on her breath. She inhales. She exhales. She tries to envision the store owner, wherever he is—dead, she supposes, given that the store is long gone, and he was an old man even in 1976—and when she has conjured him, she does her best to bathe him in love or as close to love as a sinner like Lady can manage.

But back then, as the train carrying Lady home tunneled underground, she felt no love for anyone. She felt only the pain. She was mortified, and she didn’t use the word casually. You didn’t have to be a Latin scholar to figure out its derivation. She wanted right then and there to mort.

CHAPTER 3
1868

The American Civil War is three years over. Abraham Lincoln is three years dead. Jesse and Frank James have just joined the Cole Younger gang. And in the city of Breslau, in the Kingdom of Prussia, a pair of first cousins have fallen in love and eloped.

When the cousins return home and announce what they’ve done, the groom’s father and bride’s uncle declare the union unnatural. The bride’s father and groom’s uncle pour themselves stiff drinks. The mother-aunts embrace and sob.

“What kind of child do you think a marriage like this will produce?” the fathers and mothers, the aunts and uncles, demand.

We think it’s sad that the bride never gets to say, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe a Nobel Prize–winning kind of child.” She never gets to say it because she dies nine months later while giving birth to the future laureate. From the first, his head is exceedingly large.

1871

The Franco-Prussian Wars have ended. The unification of the German Empire is complete. The Second Reich has begun, though of course the real power remains with Prussia. The former Prussian king, Wilhelm I, is emperor. The former Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, is chancellor.

When affairs of the empire bring Bismarck to Breslau, the widower Heinrich Lorenz Alter leaves his dye factory to stand among the throngs waiting to see the champion of iron and blood emerge from his carriage, chest out, shoulders squared, head held high as if he’s a figure in a portrait by an artist enamored of the golden mean. As Bismarck passes, the crowd heaves like an unfettered bosom in a bodice ripper. Much of the attraction in coming to see Bismarck is being a part of this impassioned heaving, this surging forward—this element of danger, the possibility that one may be caught in a lustful stampede, may be knocked to the ground and literally perish from love of king and country.

The first time he brings his motherless son with him, Heinrich hoists the boy onto his shoulders. The child perches there stolidly, expertly. He’s a sober two-year-old who’s been left to the care of redoubtable nurses with quick tempers and paddles and switches. He’s well trained in the art of keeping still. Even when Bismarck arrives and a roar takes over the square as the crowd buffets Heinrich, the boy makes no sound. Heinrich has to twist his neck, look up at his son to make sure the boy isn’t frightened. When he does, he sees tears, but they are tears of joy; Heinrich’s certain of that. “Two years old,” Heinrich writes to his youngest brother, Rudi, the only member of the family he still speaks to. “Two years old, and such depth of feeling for his country.”

“You’re raising him well,” Rudi replies dutifully, “and under such difficult circumstances.”

Heinrich revels in Rudi’s praise. It’s true, he thinks. He has raised the boy well. There’s a small photograph of the dead mother, Line Alter Alter, in an oval frame on the boy’s bedroom dresser; the child is tasked with kissing it each night before getting beneath the blankets. But what dominates the nursery is the portrait of Bismarck that hangs on the wall facing the bed. It’s the same portrait that currently hangs over the toilet in our Riverside Drive apartment. The generations before ours hung it in the foyer, the centerpiece of an arrangement of old photographs and paintings. As soon as we could, we moved it.

The tragedy of unrequited love for the blond beast, Einstein will someday call the love that Jews like Heinrich Alter (and later, Lenz Alter too) harbored for Germany, but Heinrich Alter calls it patriotism. He calls it Heimat. Being Jewish is his culture, but being German is his faith. He’s determined that his child will embrace this faith too. Even the boy’s name is meant to play its part. Heinrich Lorenz Alter chose the name himself, no female sensibility involved, although he believes Line would have approved. The boy is called Lenz, but his full name is Lorenz Otto Alter. Lorenz to remind him of Heinrich. Otto to remind him of Bismarck. Alter—it implies age and wisdom, and who, Heinrich argues, is older and wiser than God?

No mother, but three fathers. This is what Heinrich tells the baby long before words have any meaning to it. Leaning over the cradle, his palm cupping the crown of the small head, Heinrich croons manifestos in lieu of lullabies. “Three fathers,” Heinrich says. “Me, Bismarck, God.” Lenz’s job is to disappoint none of them.

Meanwhile, across town, Zindel Emanuel is also teaching his children about Bismarck. When military parades pass by, he takes his two oldest girls, the five-year-old and the three-year-old, out onto the second-floor balcony. “You remember all the speeches about iron and blood?” he asks Rose and Lily, who stand on their toes and peer over the balustrade. “Well, those rifles the soldiers are holding—that’s what Bismarck meant when he said iron. And you see that sleeve pinned to that soldier’s shoulder—or there, the patch over that guy’s eye? That was the blood. You’ll notice, though, that while the iron’s still held high, the blood’s been washed away.”

He lifts them, one at a time, so they can more easily take note of the weapons and prettified gore.

“They love talking about blood,” Zindel Emanuel says. “It stirs the passions of the sheep. But they’ll never let the sheep see the blood. Sheep love talk of blood, but they faint dead away at the sight of it.”

“Baaa,” Lily calls to the soldiers below. The ones directly beneath the balcony look up, laugh, wave to her.

Emanuel’s wife joins them, new baby in her arms. “Lily,” she says. “Don’t make barnyard noises at the infantry.” She gives her husband a look that’s both reproving and affectionate. “Maybe we should try one more time to get you a son. You’re training these girls to behave like little boys. Yelling at people in the streets. Thinking all the time about politics.”

Emanuel takes the infant from its mother. Iris Emanuel is overwrapped in linen and lace; she looks like nothing more than a small, smiling doll’s head. “This was supposed to be my boy,” he says.

Iris beams at him, at the clouds, at the soldiers, at whatever her eyes land on. When she grows up, her father thinks, she will look like the goddess Isis: dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes. This doesn’t please him. He has no intention of raising an Isis, a goddess of domesticity, of weaving, of the moon. And he’s concerned about those blue eyes, so unusually pale. A curse in some cultures, the least sensitive of his acquaintances say. “They’ll darken,” his wife says defensively—though time will prove her wrong—but that’s not what bothers Zindel Emanuel. He’s unfazed by curses, he’s not superstitious. He doesn’t believe in mythology, not the myths of Egypt though he knows them all, not the myths of his own people—the Jews. Not even the myths of the Prussians. He enjoys pointing out that despite the infantry uniform the chancellor wears, Otto von Bismarck was merely a reservist. He never served a day in the active military. He neither carried iron into battle nor shed a drop of blood—or at least not a drop of his own blood.

No, what Zindel Emanuel dislikes about the toddler’s pale blue eyes is the attention they’re already commanding. He doesn’t want this girl to be admired for her appearance. He has high hopes for Iris, a disappointment by virtue of her sex, true, but a child who, he has already determined, will disappoint him in no other way. There’s something about her—how alert she is, how lively, her arms and legs churning even in her sleep as if she’s climbing or building something—that has convinced him she’ll be the person he’s already imagined.

“No more babies,” he assures his wife. “I’m going to work with the materials you’ve given me.” He lifts the little girl so she, too, can see the parade. He busses her on her cheek, his wife on the forehead, and, Iris still in his arms, leaves the balcony for the warmth of the house. The two older girls follow him: his acolytes, his ducklings.

Alone now, his wife looks down at the victorious soldiers parading by. They fall into two categories: the hobbled and maimed, and the unscathed and ashamed. Such a relief, she thinks, not to have sons.

1874

Heinrich Lorenz Alter’s dye factory is the most successful in western Europe. The dark blue of the Prussian infantry’s uniforms? The forest green worn by the Jaegers? The Prussian blue of Bismarck’s own tunic? The dyes for the cloth come from the Alter Dye Works. And if Heinrich has made the military’s uniforms rich, the military has returned the favor.

When Heinrich speaks of his exquisite dyes, it’s with tenderness, with genuine love. Mention his spring green, that precise shade of lettuce upon its first fragile leafing, and Heinrich’s suddenly as effusive as Keats encountering an old vase. Ask about his scarlet, and he’ll tell you it’s more vibrant than a cardinal’s feathered belly. Bring up Alter indigo, and he’ll describe it the way other men might their mistresses, praising her unparalleled beauty to people who smile and nod and glance at the nearest clock.

Because Heinrich wants Lenz, his son and sole heir, to begin working at the factory as soon as he completes his basic education, Lenz’s training begins early. “Never too young to start developing an eye for color,” Heinrich writes Rudi, “especially with a boy who seems already to have a natural aptitude for nothing.”

This has been a revelation: the number of things that Lenz, now five, is bad at. He’s clumsy with balls and bats, he’s slow at his letters, he still needs assistance in tying his shoelaces, and though he’s eager to spend time with other children, he seems to put them off. The once silent little boy has become a blabbermouth. He stands too close, tells long, tedious stories about war, his favorite subject. He’s fascinated by war. He corners little girls at birthday parties and expounds upon the campaigns of Napoleon.

“I’m going to be a general,” he tells his father.

A Jewish general. Heinrich winces. He pats the boy’s shoulder. He says, “You’ll be the general of Alter Dye Works. You’ll dress the generals in the military. You’ll give them the pride they need to win wars for Germany.”

Lenz may be socially awkward and dull and only five, but he knows when he’s being patronized. He also knows how he feels about the factory. All his biographers agree: from a very young age he dismissed the idea of taking it over. Still, that particular battle between father and son is more than a decade in the future. Now, his father not yet realizing it’s a waste of time, Lenz’s training takes place on the streets of Breslau. Every evening before dinner Heinrich insists that Lenz accompany him on a constitutional, and every evening Lenz, knowing what’s coming, sulks and grumbles, but ultimately obeys.

We have a photograph of him at that age. He’s the most mournful little boy we’ve ever seen, his tremendous noggin home to large dark eyes and lips that are pursed as if he had been about to cry when someone—Heinrich, probably, although maybe it was the photographer—ordered him not to move a muscle. And so he stands miserably and rigidly next to the ornate wooden chair that these days lives in our foyer (where it’s laden, sometimes to the point of tipping over, with our handbags and jackets and winter scarves and, back in the day when Vee still wore a wig, that luxuriant prosthesis slung on one of the uprights). In the photograph, though, only a boy’s beribboned boater lies on the chair’s seat.

The boy himself wears a child’s version of an infantry uniform, the brass buttons oversize, the collar flat, the trousers cuffed over knee-high boots. His hair is severely parted close to his right ear. He holds a rifle as if it’s a walking stick, its butt on the ground, its muzzle pointed at the ceiling.

And here’s another photograph of the young Lenz Alter, this one with his uncle, Rudi. According to the fat biography of Lenz Alter on our living room bookshelf (Lenz Alter: Deutsch, Jude, Heiliger, Sünder), Rudi Alter was a homosexual, malarial dwarf—that’s a quote—with delicate features and charm to spare, and we have to admit the description is supported by the photo, where Rudi, not much taller than Lenz, is matinee-idol handsome with kohl-rimmed eyes and the ornate and waxed facial hair of the times—the handlebar mustache, the scalloped muttonchops—not quite concealing a sweet smile. He also possesses a pair of sculpted, fine eyebrows.

This photograph must have been taken during one of Rudi’s brief visits home, because his work as a trade consulate keeps him mostly in Asia. In 1874 he’s Germany’s trade representative to Japan. This means that Rudi is either so competent and charming that he’s overcome what we assume must have been his government’s reluctance to have a quote unquote homosexual malarial dwarf represent it, or it means that the German government in the late nineteenth century was far less uptight than our own is today. We suspect the former is the truth, that Rudi’s charm overcame prejudice, but that could be because we have a collective crush on him. We love that in this photograph, he and his small nephew are both dressed in identical kimonos. We love that Rudi’s kimono is accessorized with several long strand of pearls.

Rudi is the person responsible for the dye factory’s indigo. He’s the one who negotiates the exclusive deals between Heinrich and the best ai farmers in Japan, the one who has arranged for hundreds of cases of sake to accompany the ai leaves as they’re transported from Hokkaido Province to Breslau in the damp holds of ships. That’s the heart of the recipe for Alter indigo: imported ai leaves and imported sake with some imported wheat bran tossed in. Heinrich also throws in some domestic lye because he doesn’t have it in him to turn his back on western techniques entirely. The mixture is then stirred for several days by the factory’s workers, those immigrants and day workers from Poland wielding wooden rakes also imported from Japan until the dye bath is the color of a fresh bruise and its fumes turn the sclerae of the workers’ eyes crimson.

That there’s nothing like Alter indigo anywhere else on the continent is one of the dominant themes accompanying the father and son’s constitutionals. “Look,” Heinrich says, loud, rudely pointing. “Do you see that worker’s uniform? That indigo is close to ours, but not as complex.”

Or, “Look at the eye of that peacock feather in that woman’s hat. That’s close to our indigo but not as rich.”

Or look at the blueberries on that vine or the violas in that field or the arc in that rainbow. Close but not as pure, not as perfect, not as poignant.

Every night, not only their neighbors’ clothes but nature herself are judged and found lacking.

Lenz is found lacking too. His mind wanders. He’s more interested in the dyeing process than the colors the process produces. He likes to imagine the moment when roots and petals and the carapaces of insects magically turn into cerulean or chartreuse or the vermilion that Uncle Rudi mixes with beeswax and daubs on his cheeks just above his muttonchops, brushes onto his lips just below his mustache. This—the process, not the cosmetics—holds a degree of fascination for the little boy. But his father’s lectures are those of an artist, not a manufacturer. His father carries on about aesthetics, about the general populace’s inability to distinguish muddy colors from crisp colors, their failure to appreciate natural colors, with their variations, their own personalities, from the monotony of the new chemically made dyes. Even at eight Lenz knows he’s part of that general populace. He’s inferior. He’s undiscerning.

Then—it’s still 1874—comes the afternoon in early May when Rudi Alter—he’s still in Japan—decides to take a walk through a park that, like the park across the street from our apartment, runs along the river of a port city. We imagine the Japanese park filled with bamboo fountains and cherry trees and miniature red maples, the latter pretty much the same height as Rudi. In our imagination he’s wearing native dress, but his own native dress. A suit, a straw hat.

He’s climbing a hill when he feels a poke in the back. He turns, smiling, expecting to see a colleague playfully jabbing at him with the tip of an umbrella. Instead he finds himself grinning foolishly at a young Japanese nationalist brandishing an antique Samurai sword.

From the autopsy report:

Wound 1: scalp entirely pierced through

Wound 7: carotid artery completely severed

Wound 11: entire elbow joint completely severed

It goes on. Twenty-two wounds in all. Twenty-two fully pierced or completely severed pieces of Rudi Alter.

The nationalist says that the gods came to him in a dream. They sent him to the park to kill the first foreigner he ran into. That turned out to be Rudi. The nationalist saw him from behind, took in the European garb, perhaps the scant height as well, and the gods said yes, go ahead. They said what are you waiting for? The young assassin has composed a poem about the whole thing, which he recites from memory at the police station. He recites it again at his trial. He’s declared insane. They behead him anyway.

At the foot of the path where Rudi died—a young man of thirty-three—the port city erects a granite monument shaped like a giant headstone. On its base the words Our Brother are engraved in German. Our is misspelled.

On the day that Rudi Alter dies in Japan, the temperature drops dramatically in Breslau. People stop strangers in the streets to comment on it. “This is the kind of weather that causes influenza,” they inform one another. They say, “This morning I had to take off my jacket, I was so hot, and now I’m wearing it buttoned to my chin and I’m still chilled to the bone.”

By the time Heinrich and Lenz leave the house for their mandatory evening stroll, the sky over Breslau is the sleek gray of an iced-over lake and the streets are shadowed in wintry violets. Because it’s so cold, Lenz is less amazed than he should be when several snowflakes waft down and alight on his father’s outstretched palm.

“Look closely,” says Heinrich. “Each one different,” but by the time Lenz looks, the snowflakes have melted. Heinrich wipes his wet hand on his trousers. He cranes his neck, searching for more drifting flakes. There aren’t any. It’s May, after all.

What there is, though, is an inky slash along the horizon that makes Heinrich’s heart lurch. He points to the slash with such energy he feels the gesture in his shoulder socket.

“Look!” he cries. “Look. Lenz, do you see that? There! Now, that—that’s ours!”

The color of the slash between earth and sky is rich and complex, pure and poignant. It’s the precise shade Newton observed on the day he understood that the spectrum contained not six colors, as everyone believed, but seven, and this color, this purple-blue, the one too long overlooked.

In a moment Lenz will also see the ribbon of indigo, but for now he completely misunderstands. He thinks his father is pointing to the entire sky. “That’s ours,” his father has declared, and Lenz believes his father means the whole canopy, the boundless firmament, every square inch of the heavens. For a fleeting, confusing, yet immensely gratifying and possibly life-changing instant, Lenz Alter believes his father has declared himself heaven’s landlord.

And here is Lenz, son and sole heir.

Death in childbirth. Evisceration among the cherry trees. Typos on your tombstone. These were the stories our mother told us. Bedtime stories, we called them, though we were talking her bedtime, not ours. The three of us tended to stay up long after she went to sleep. But though she turned in shortly after dinner, she slept in fits and starts, as we often do now, and she’d wake up throughout the night and sometimes she’d shout our names, and we’d leave our beds or, more likely, whatever late-night movie we were watching in the living room and troop in. By then she’d be sitting up, cigarette already lit. We’d take our positions at the end of her mattress, Lady in the middle, the younger ones on either side of her, Vee a smaller version of Lady, Delph a smaller version of Vee. “The nesting dolls,” our mother called us, and we could tell she found this off-putting rather than cute.

Even we found it a little unnerving to look at each other. So that’s what I looked like when I lost my front teeth. So that’s what I’ll look like when I’ve entered adolescence. And yet this resemblance was also the only reliable and reassuring thing in our lives. There was the sense that we would always have each other. There was, to be honest, a never-articulated belief that we actually were each other, just at different stages of a single life. When our mother called us for bedtime stories and we arranged ourselves at her blanketed feet, each of us heavy-lidded, Vee and Delph lolling their heads against Lady’s arms, we must have looked on the outside as we felt on the inside: a single creature, strange and many-limbed, and in desperate need of a good night’s rest.

Of all the stories our mother told us when we were girls, the story about Lenz and the snowflakes and the sky was our favorite. We were children ourselves; we empathized with a little boy’s failure to understand an adult’s message. We got why his misapprehension was cute and silly, but we also got why it was wonderful, why his was a glorious way to see the world: not reduced to one of its component colors, but broad and encompassing and mystical, and the whole thing revolving around little old you.

As time went on, though, when we requested this story our mother began adding new details. When Heinrich and Lenz left home, they were led through the city streets by an eerie light that was an iridescent silver like mother-of-pearl. When Heinrich looked up, it was because a clap of thunder or shooting star or roaring voice had called his attention to the horizon.

In these new versions, on the day Heinrich caught the snowflakes in his palm, he understood at once that they weren’t snowflakes. (Snowflakes in May, our mother said. Did you actually believe that?) He knew immediately that they were Rudi Alter’s essence, fragments of Rudi’s very soul making their way to his brother on that day: Rudi’s deathday. Heinrich Alter had no way of knowing his brother was dead at the time he saw that indigo slash. But, said our mother, Heinrich Alter knew.

Eventually even the punch line was no longer a punch line, Lenz’s conclusion no longer the funny misunderstanding of a little boy but a genuine revelation. In these new versions, when Heinrich pointed upward and proclaimed, “That’s ours!” he did mean the entire sky, he did mean everything the human eye could see. He meant everything the human eye couldn’t see too.

Soon, when our mother told us the story, she was no longer looking at us, her purported audience, but gazing upward with confusion and wonder just as her great-grandfather and her little-boy grandfather had done all those years ago. Perhaps she was addressing the faces that we, too, could see in the swirls of ceiling plaster when we softened our vision. Perhaps she was talking to someone only she could discern. Maybe it was the ghost of one of her gone-by relatives: her mother Karin, her father Richard, her great-uncle Rudi. Or maybe it was Lenz, who she’d known briefly when she was a very young girl, her grandfather Lenz who told her some of these bedtime stories before Hitler came and the family fled. Or maybe she thought she was talking to Der Alter, that is, to the God she’d always told us did not exist.

“What does it mean?” our mother asked the ceiling or the ghost or God. “If my great-grandfather owned heaven and my grandfather inherited it from him, what does that mean for me now? Shouldn’t it be mine? Isn’t that the law?”

At first we tried to persuade ourselves that she was clowning, trying to amuse us. She wasn’t, though. Wasn’t clowning. Wasn’t amusing.

Sometimes it seemed as if the ceiling was responding to her. For us it was like listening to one side of a phone call. “Yes,” she’d say, and then a long pause. “Well, yes,” and another silence. Finally, “I understand your argument, but I think some of your basic premises are incorrect.”

Sometimes she remembered that we were sitting there, and she frowned as if we’d interrupted or voiced disapproval when we hadn’t said anything at all. “Don’t worry,” she’d say with exhaustion. “When I die, it will all pass to you. No one’s going to deny you your potage.”

She never said this with passion or conviction or joy. She said it as if she were recalling one more tiresome chore on her life’s to-do list. She managed the jewelry and cosmetics department at Woolworth’s, and if we never were well off, we always had rent money and food and a substantial supply of lipsticks and plastic clip-on earrings. She took care of us as best she could. If she said she’d get us our potage, we believed her. Of course, we thought potage meant porridge, and we wanted no part of it. We made faces. She chafed at our lack of gratitude. “Don’t look so stricken,” she’d say. “This is the good news. It’s the only good news anyone unlucky enough to be part of this family’s going to get.”

Other times she said nothing, just smiled wearily. This was worse than her conversations with the ceiling. We dreaded her smiles. They were time machines that carried her away, transported her to the distant past or the faraway future, left us with only her body, a hand with a cigarette dangling off her bed, hot ashes wafting down to the carpet fibers like snowflakes in Breslau, like cherry blossoms in a Japanese park. One night she came back from one of those trips and said, “If God owns heaven and I own heaven and there’s only one owner of heaven, what does that force you to conclude?”

It took us a moment to realize she was talking to us.

“That you’re God?” Vee said.

Our mother nodded as she considered that answer—hers had been a genuine, not a rhetorical, question—but Vee, upon reflection, glowered. “I thought we were atheists,” she said.

“I thought we were humans,” Delph said.

“We are atheists,” Lady said. “Which means, if (a) there’s no God and (b) Mom’s God, then (c) Mom’s nothing. That’s called the transitive property.”

Our mother looked at us as if we were all very wise, and being wise was a terrible burden she wished she could have spared us. Her eyes filled with tears. She drew on her cigarette, blew the smoke up toward the faces in the ceiling. She tried to be careful about us and her smoke.

“They’re right,” she said to the ceiling, tears dribbling down her face. “I’m God and I’m just some old bag of bones and I’m nothing, all three at once.”

God, bones, and nothing. Lady calls this the Alter version of the holy trinity. Delph says it’s the best definition of mortal man she’s ever heard. We are, at all times, all three.

Vee thinks that from God to bones to nothing is also a pretty good description of life. It’s sad, she thinks. It’s the opposite of the way she wishes life worked. From nothing to bones to God—that’s what she longs for, that’s what she wishes for—the fantasy, the fairy tale, the capacity for faith. But Vee can’t go there. None of us can.

CHAPTER 4

When she got home from Riverdale, Lady dropped the blue screwdriver on the kitchen counter—because, as bad as she felt about everything, she hadn’t relinquished it, she’d held on to it, clutching it the whole train ride home as if it were a wand or scepter; she has it even now, today, in a drawer in her bedroom—and not bothering with the switch plate, she headed straight to the bathroom for a drink. For many drinks. She sat on the tiled floor and she pulled her T-shirt up over her head, and she thought about how unhappy she was and how unloved and unlovable and how strange and, now, how violent, and she drank from the bottle, one glug, then two, and she called it drinking from the bottle. From time to time the phone rang, and she had another drink or she turned on the faucet to drown out the sound. She stared up at the peeling paint of the ceiling. And when the ringing stopped, she had another drink.

She toyed with the idea of a note. The fact that none of our family suicides had left one had always struck her as a dereliction of duty, or, if that was too strong, at least a missed opportunity.

She had always imagined that when the time came, she would leave an explanation behind. Just a few years before, an actor had killed himself (pills) and left a courteous note she’d admired: “Dear World,” he’d written, “I am leaving because I’m bored.” Ever since, Lady’d imagined leaving behind an equally pithy and frank declaration, a sentence unassailable and plucky and concise enough to fit inside a Hallmark card. But now, as she thought about it, she realized that if she were being honest, her note would have to say, “Dear World, I am leaving because Shine’s Hardware at B’Way and 242nd refused to honor its returns policy,” and so by the time she passed out, banging her head on the side of the tub in the process, doing more visible damage to herself than she’d done to that sad entrepreneur in Riverdale, she’d already ditched the note concept.

She woke up several hours later, headachy and parched. She chewed a handful of aspirins and drank the taste away with several glasses of fuzzy tap water. She washed her face.

In the tradition of Jews in the hours before the Cossacks arrive, she spent the rest of the day cleaning her apartment and packing her things. She filled a cardboard box with volumes of literature from her truncated college career, Reader, I married him crammed next to I can’t go on; I’ll go on. She put the box out by the staircase. Her hope was that one of the building’s families, immigrants all of them, would take the books for their children and perhaps think well of her.

The day latened, and she stopped to take in the sunset, that purple, magenta, and orange offspring of innocent nature and despoiling industry. It was beautiful, the sunset, in the way poisons sometimes are—the berries of the belladonna plant, shiny black as patent leather; the apple of the wicked stepmother, blood red and irresistible. An unnatural natural phenomenon, those dangerous and gorgeous colors, and she looked at them longer than she meant to. She had to shake her head, turn away from the window, before she could continue with her chores: fetching, bending, placing material things in boxes. It was as active as she’d been in weeks. The muscles along her spine, shocked at what was suddenly asked of them, twinged and chided.

She dragged a second box out into the hall, this one filled with cartons of Irish oatmeal and bags of brown rice and a dozen or so dented mini cans of soup. FREE TO A GOOD HOME, she’d printed on its side.

Her dented Campbell’s Soup for One Chicken with Stars. Her dented Campbell’s Soup for One Split Pea with Ham. “I would rather dump a gallon of soup gone bad,” Vee had said only a few weeks before, holding up one of those little cans, she and Delph laughing at Lady’s expense, “than buy something that informs the whole world, or even just the checkout girl, of my desperately lonely existence.”

Lady hadn’t minded the teasing, and it still made her smile to recall that evening. Eddie Glod was at his night job, mopping floors at Union Theological, so it had been just the three of us on Lady’s futon, wooden plates balanced on knees. She and Joe Hopper had bought the plates at Azuma, figuring that, wood being unbreakable, the set would last them forever. And certainly none of the plates had broken or chipped. Still, there was something about eating off wood that was like nails on a chalkboard, and there was a slightly rancid smell due to the vegetable oil Lady used to keep up their color, and eventually you had to watch out for splinters.

Lady hadn’t made soup that evening. Vee had come across the soup-for-one cans while searching Lady’s cabinets for the vodka. (“In the bathroom,” Lady had been required to say.) Lady’d made only spaghetti, pouring Kraft blue cheese dressing over it, a favorite meal of ours, one she’d been preparing for Vee and Delph since our childhoods.

“I don’t care what supermarket checkout girls think about me,” Lady told Vee, although this wasn’t true; she cared what everyone in the world thought about her, including impotent college boys and irritable hardware store owners. “But,” she added, “you know what those cans of soup make me think of? Men. All the men I meet, all the men I know. Not Eddie. We all love Eddie. I’m talking about Joe and his friends and the men who come into the office, all flirting and puffed up with themselves as if I don’t know about their tartar and bad breath and gangrenous wisdom teeth. Even the guy I work for. There’s something wrong with all of them, I swear it. An entire gender of dented soup cans, all damaged and marked down, and you have to wonder, is the dent just because it fell on the floor and you’re getting a bargain, or is it caused by something like botulism and it’s going to kill you? My feeling is, Why take the risk? What’s the best that can happen? A bowl of cheap soup? Better to go soupless, that’s what I think.”

“You’re twenty-six,” Vee said. “It’s too soon to give up on soup.”

Delph disagreed. “Who says? I’m only nineteen, and I have no interest in soup whatsoever.”

“Yes, honey,” Vee said, “and no offense, but that’s not normal. I’m not saying you have to run out and lap up the first bowl of soup you stumble across. You should wait for a variety you like. But you should at least be wanting soup. In fact, you should be craving soup. You should be dreaming about slurping it from bowls and drinking it from mugs and ladling it from the pot straight into your mouth.”

“I’ll have the salad,” Delph said.

It took Lady the rest of Saturday evening and all of Sunday, the actual Fourth of July, to finish packing. She owned so little; she was surprised it took as long as it did. But it was all the trips to the liquor store to mooch cardboard boxes. It was her sudden compulsion to fold the clothes she normally just stuffed into drawers, every black T-shirt, every black sweater, every pair of black jeans folded as if by a saleswoman in a luxury boutique. It was her decision, after she’d filled those boxes, to pile them neatly, geometrically, a waist-high room divider that was somehow both sturdy and flimsy.

When she was done, she took off her black T-shirt and jeans and changed into a black sundress she’d laid out on the sofa. She stepped into flip-flops and went to the kitchen and took her will from the otherwise empty junk drawer, where she’d kept it with the take-out menus and magnets from banks and broccoli rubber bands. A will at her age: it was a perk of having a paralegal for a sister. All the estate planning you could ever want. Who cared that you had no property to speak of? “Yes, but what if you get hit by a bus?” Vee had argued when Lady and Joe were newly separated, “and your executor sues the city for millions and wins? Don’t you want a say in who those millions go to? Or who they don’t go to?”

“You don’t have a will, though,” Lady pointed out.

“Because if you die intestate without kids, the law gives everything to your spouse,” Vee said, “which I don’t mind. But you should.”

The truth was that Lady didn’t care one way or the other. Let Joe inherit her rabbit-eared TV. Hell, let him inherit the fortune reaped by her estate after her imaginary collision with a bus. But Vee wasn’t having it. “Over my dead body,” she said, and she came by the next night with the document, ten legal-size pages although only two sentences in the entire thing mattered. The first of these sentences said, “I give and bequeath the rest, residue, and remainder of my property in equal shares to my surviving sisters.” The second one said, “It is my intention that this will shall not be revoked by my forthcoming divorce from Joseph Hopper.” All the rest was archaic gobbledygook.

Lady hadn’t looked at the document since she’d signed it. But now, given that it was soon to take effect—to mature, as Vee would have said—now, before folding it into thirds and slipping it inside her purse, Lady stopped to skim it. She wished she could blot out the reference to Joe. The divorce was no longer forthcoming. It was done, it was history. Why did he still have to be a part of her story?

She wished, too, she could cross out “the rest, residue, and remainder,” and replace it with a phrase that sounded like something she’d actually say. Something like “I give all my shit to Vee and Delph, although why they’d want any of it, I have no idea.”

“The rest, residue, and remainder,” she’d said the evening Vee had presented her with the document, Vee proud of herself the way a kid is when bestowing a handmade Mother’s Day card upon the kind of mom who gets off on such things. “Doesn’t that sound like what’s left after you kick? Ash residue? Skeletal remains? Eternal rest?”

Vee had been annoyed. “It’s just legalese.” She’d expected gratitude and admiration, not a bad review.

“Why can’t it just be English?” Lady asked.

“Jesus, Lady,” Vee said. “None of our clients who actually pay an arm and a leg for these things stop to read them. Why do you have to? Just sign whatever your name is these days.”

Her name then, as now, was Lily Alter. No longer Frankl, our father’s name. No longer Hopper, her husband’s name. The new name was such a recent acquisition it still felt like an alias. As she wrote it, she felt as though she were committing fraud.

“Okay, you can die now,” Vee said when Lady put down her pen.

The witnesses, a Korean mother and her adult daughters who lived in the apartment next door, had scowled. They understood more English than they spoke. They didn’t like Vee’s sense of humor. Smiling comfortingly at Lady, they sang out a Korean word that sounded like “muenster,” as in the cheese.

“Man-se,” the mother said, enunciating. “Means may you live ten thousand more year.”

The final thing Lady did before leaving the apartment that Sunday was gather the diaries she’d kept on and off through the years. She took those small spiral notebooks filled with her dull day-to-day and threw them into a black trash bag.

She knew that the most recent of the notebooks contained a recap of the soup conversation, and she considered stopping what she was doing to find it and read it over, see if she was remembering it correctly, but she forced herself to resist succumbing to nostalgia and fondness or anything else that might interfere with what she was planning to do later that night. Instead she slung the trash bag over one shoulder and left the apartment.

It was a little past midnight. She trudged west, pushing through the thick heat of the night, the black plastic sack sticking to her back. Standing on the broken concrete and exposed rebar that was the bank of the Hudson, she hurled the bag as far as she could. Not very far, but far enough. She watched as slowly it sank.

It was a relief to be rid of the weight of the journals. The literal weight, she meant. The contents of the notebooks weren’t weighty at all; she never wrote anything revealing. She rarely wrote anything that was true. She didn’t lie, per se. She just committed literary sins of omission. Sleeping with a married dentist? Who’s sleeping with a married dentist? She was drowning those notebooks not to prevent people from learning the discouraging facts of her life, but to prevent them from laughing at all she’d left out.

She reflected, too—how could she not?—on our mother’s leap into this river the year before. Vee had called her. Lady was answering phones then.

“Mom’s not here,” Vee said. “She hasn’t left the house in weeks, and now suddenly she’s not here.”

“Enjoy the time off,” Lady said.

“We thought she might be with you.”

“With me? When has she ever walked the four blocks to see me?”

Later in the day Vee called her again.

It was not Lady’s choice to die the same way our mother had. The method Lady preferred had come to her almost immediately. She would hang herself in the basement laundry room of the Riverside Drive building. She might have done it in her own building, where there was no chance that her sisters would be the ones to discover her, but she was being a little selfish: she didn’t want to die among roaches and rats. The basement in our building was cleaner.

But although she debated over which building to die in, she never wavered when it came to the method. She was actually good with ropes and knots; she’d made a number of intricate wall hangings and plant hangers from rope over the years: the macramé craze.

Walking away from the river, she saw few people. The professional pyrotechnics of the holiday were over and done with. All she heard now were the occasional explosions of cherry bombs in nearby Spanish Harlem. Tomorrow, the last day of the long weekend, the last day of this wretched vacation, there would be newspaper articles about the accidental mutilations of reckless boys by reckless boys, about the deliberate mutilations of cats. She was glad she wouldn’t have to read any of it.

It was already tomorrow—the early hours of Monday—when she reached our building. She let herself in with the key she’d had since always, and boarded the waiting elevator. Without thinking—a muscle memory—she pressed the button to our floor. It was only when the doors opened and she heard music seeping out from under our apartment door—Buffy Sainte-Marie, all that vibrato, and the volume much too loud considering the hour—that she realized she’d gone up when she’d meant to go down.

For a brief moment she stood in the elevator, annoyed and uncertain. When the doors started to close, though, instead of letting them, instead of pressing B as she should have done in the first place, she extended her hand, and the doors reopened.

She stepped into the hallway and stood on the welcome mat, a little rag rug that had lain before the door for three generations, the fibers frayed, the colors rubbed away. She was unsure what to do next. Then she made a decision: she reached into her purse, retrieved her keys again, and let herself in. Leaving the door ajar, she stood inside the foyer, just stood there, as if she had no idea how she’d come to be where she was.

Vee and Delph, on the other hand, reacted as if they’d been expecting her. They were both awake despite the hour, and in the kitchen, Vee in a ruby-red Gap T-shirt and cutoffs, Delph in a calico granny dress, both in bare feet.

“Hey,” Vee said. “There you are.”

Delph was leaning against the fridge, eating a peanut-butter-on-pumpernickel sandwich. “Want some?” she said, advancing toward Lady, holding the sandwich out. “I’m eating it, but I’m not even hungry.”

“No thanks, and don’t get peanut butter in my hair.”

That this is what came out of her mouth surprised Lady as much as any of the other surprising things she’d done that weekend. Concern for her hair, her terrible wiry hair. Although the truth was that Lady had made a bit of an effort with her hair that night. She was hoping to look halfway decent when she was discovered. There’d be the broken neck, the Basenji-blue tongue, the bulging eyeballs, maybe (she was sorry to say) a horrid mess on the floor beneath her, but at least she’d be wearing a nice dress and her hair would look attended to, restrained with one of her leather barrettes, her turquoise earrings gently undulating back and forth.

By way of apology she said to Delph, “That is one very brown sandwich.”

Delph smiled. “It’s really dry too.” She took another bite as she closed the front door with her ass.

Lady dropped her purse on the hall chair. She stepped into the living room. “Is that my album you’re playing?” she asked.

“You’re the one who left it behind,” Vee said. “That old saw about possession being nine-tenths of the law? It turns out to be true.”

“I don’t want it back,” Lady said. “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m happy you like it. Mi shit es su shit.” She looked around. “Where’s Eddie?”

“Exhausted. Asleep.”

“I’m going to make you a sandwich of your own,” Delph said. “With jelly. I think you’ve lost weight. You look terrible.”

“Especially the way she has her hair pulled back,” Vee said. “So tight. She looks like Olive Oyl.”

“Well, she’s not that skinny,” Delph said.

We ate in the living room, Delph transporting two sandwiches, two glasses, and a bottle of Southern Comfort, managing everything at once, though this meant she had to carry her sandwich in her teeth and wedge the bottle under her armpit.

“Since when Southern Comfort?” Lady said.

Vee shrugged. “We’re listening to Buffy and drinking like Janis.” And when we were situated, the sandwich-eaters on the couch, Vee on the floor, she said, “Delph’s right, Lady. You do look like crap.”

“I got it. I didn’t think the Olive Oyl comparison was a compliment.”

“Look at your eyes. It’s like you’ve been crying.”

“When have you known me to cry?”

“Well, you don’t cook, so I know you weren’t peeling onions.”

“I cook,” Lady said.

“Spaghetti’s not cooking.”

“I cook things requiring peeled onions all the time.”

“So you were peeling onions?”

“No.” The record had ended. We listened to the sound of the needle lifting, returning to the first track, same side. “They’re painting the halls outside my apartment,” Lady said when the music began again, the song about the sexy woman who was pursued by every man in town. The three of us used to sing it together in Lady’s room, wiggling our hips, using roll-on deodorant bottles as microphones. “What’s hoochy koochy mean?” Delph would ask. “What’s oversexed?”

“Really?” Vee said. “The slumlord’s painting the halls?”

“The fumes are killing me. My eyes keep watering.”

“So stay the night here,” Vee said.

“Maybe I will.”

“Stay two nights. Stay forever. Come home. Nobody understands why you don’t.”

Lady looked down the hall to the master bedroom’s ever-shut door. We’ve long called that bedroom the Dead and Dying Room. Our grandmother Karin died in it after many years suffering with an unnamed illness we assume was cancer—cancer back in the day when no one said the word out loud. And a couple of weeks after she died there, our grandfather Richard died there too—although technically speaking he didn’t die in there, but from there: he’d opened the window, hoisted himself up on the sill, wobbled for a moment, then propelled himself forward. Our mother had been in her bedroom across the hall doing math homework when she heard the screams from neighbors as his body passed each floor.

Like her father, our mother hadn’t literally died inside the Dead and Dying Room, but it had been her bedroom when she drowned herself across the street.

“I don’t know,” Lady said. “Sometimes I do think about moving back. But it’s a little haunted house-ish here.”

Delph nodded. “Tell me about it,” she said.

As botched as Lady’s attempt ended up, that’s how promising it had seemed at roughly four in the morning when she left her old bed where she’d been lying in her dress. She stepped into her flip-flops, patted her hair back in place, and headed to the front door. She stopped before she opened it, took a moment to look into the living room, where her half-eaten peanut butter sandwich remained on the coffee table, where the empty bottle of Southern Comfort lay on its side on the carpet. She could hear Vee and Eddie and Delph snuffle and snort in their sleep. She gazed out the window and saw the park and the Hudson and, when she looked uptown, the George Washington Bridge, its necklace lights ablaze for the holiday after two years of energy-saving darkness.

But once she was downstairs in the laundry room, she didn’t dawdle. She headed straight to the rusted shelving units where tenants kept cardboard boxes of detergent with their apartment numbers marked on the sides and where the super kept old wooden soda boxes filled with hammers and nails, electrical cords and rags, things like that. A few Phillips-head screwdrivers. Lady recognized them now.

The box that interested her was the one containing a few old clotheslines. She chose a waxy white rope that seemed cleaner and stronger and less likely to burn her fingers or abrade her neck than the ones of brown hemp. She was also drawn to the obsessive tidiness with which it, of all the clotheslines, had been stored. It had been curled around and around itself until it lay in a flattened circle, a pretty coiling pattern like a sisal placemat.

Her head began singing. A pretty coil is like a melody. She questioned the lyric. Was melody right? Or was it memory? A pretty girl is like a memory? She was feeling a memory coming at her now, she was recalling Joe Hopper during their happier years, which had lasted from her freshman year of college right up to her weak-kneed decision to marry him spring semester of her junior year. She was remembering the way he used to cheese down the docking line of the small sailboats they’d sometimes rent on City Island. Cheese down. It meant to coil the tail of the line to give a neat appearance. He’d taught her the phrase, couldn’t believe she knew so little about sailing. “New Yorkers think they’re so sophisticated,” he’d said, “but the truth is, you’re all rubes in your own way.”

She thought he hadn’t minded that she was an unsophisticated New Yorker. She knew he liked educating her. “You’re probably wondering why I’m going to all this trouble,” he said the first time he wound the line so it lay on the sunny pier like a hairy snake nuzzling its own tail.

She hadn’t been wondering. She’d been gazing out at the bleached horizon, trying to distinguish the migrating strips of white that were clouds from the subdued circle of white that was the sun from the broad canvas of white that was the sky. But she listened as he explained. She knew that was her job. She didn’t mind it. She liked learning new things.

“It’s a seaman’s tradition,” he’d said of the whorled rope. “A gesture of courtesy for the next sailor.”

He said this as if he’d come from a long line of seamen rather than a long line of life insurance agents. He said it as if taking out an eight-foot dinghy once or twice a summer made him John Paul Jones or Popeye. When he’d been fifteen, his parents had made him transfer from his local public school to an all-male prep school in New England, the kind with mandatory chapel and a dress code involving navy blue blazers and rep ties and an impressive record of sending its students on to the Ivies. This was where he’d learned to sail. But, as he later told Lady, he’d also found himself having sex with his roommate, which had freaked him out, and he returned the next year to the coed high school in his hometown in Connecticut, a comfortable suburb on the outskirts of a moribund mill city.

This had been the shameful secret he’d told her that night, the secret that had been so hard for him to utter that he’d bitten through his lip trying to get it out. The sex with his roommate. She and Joe had been getting high on the roof of Lehman Hall on the small Barnard campus when he’d told her. He’d taken a hit off the joint, inhaled, exhaled, posed. Then he’d come out with it. He’d never told anyone else about it, he said. He teared up a little as he told her, not only because he was ashamed, but because he was relieved. And as he confessed, his front teeth tore into his lip and the blood dribbled into his lip beard, turning a few strands a deep, sticky mahogany. She blamed those mingy tears—the tears of saline, the tears of hemoglobin—for her accepting his proposal that night.

He had draped his arm over her shoulders. He had begged her to keep his secret. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone,” he said.

“Of course not,” she said. “Who would I tell?”

He cut her a look. They both knew perfectly well who’d she tell.

“My sisters wouldn’t care. Don’t lots of boys experiment that way?”

“I wasn’t experimenting,” he muttered. “I was doing what I had to do.” He looked grim and resolute, as if recalling a march into battle. “It wasn’t homo sex,” he said. “It was prison sex.”

Lady took the white clothesline to the long table where tenants folded warm clothes fresh out of the dryers. Sitting on the metal folding chair that she planned to stand on in a few minutes, she began to coil the rope, this time not a flat coil but a three-dimensional coil, a cobra-rising-from-a-basket coil, and not merely a pretty coil, but a coil with a purpose, a function, a goal.

When she was done, she looked at her creation and was pleased. At the same time she couldn’t squelch the thought: no noose is good news.

Our father, the aforementioned Natan Frankl, was born in Munich to a family of scholars. Like the rest of them, he was an excessively educated man, fluent in numerous languages. He loved language the way other little boys love dogs or yo-yos. He liked to play with language, he liked to make it do amusing tricks. English, he told Lady, was the best language to play with. Next came French. Italian was good, too, especially for poetry, since all the words rhymed. The worst was his native German. In fact, he told Lady, he could no longer stand the sound of it. He blanched even when he heard someone say gesundheit.

Our point is this: we know no one likes the puns and wordplay. We’re sorry about them. But we can’t help it. They’re Natan Frankl’s fault.

He’d been a chemist, too, our father. That’s how he’d known the Alters. But while our mother’s family left Germany early, our father’s remained until there was no getting out. He’d been a scientist unable to interpret the data all around him—there was a lot of that going around—and he ended up in one of the camps. We don’t even know which one. That’s how little any of this was discussed.

We do know that after liberation he was moved to a displaced persons center, and that when he subsequently managed to get to America—not easy; America didn’t want any of the displaced persons—he looked up his old friend Richard Alter, i.e., our grandfather. But, given that our grandfather had already killed himself—that window in the Dead and Dying Room—he met only our mother.

That’s their meet-cute story.

In New York the only work he could find was among the other Jews on Seventh Avenue. He sold clothing fasteners to the trade: buttons and snaps, hooks and eyes, frogs and kilt pins. He used to bring discontinued samples home for Lady to play with. She turned them into little families. Brass peacoat buttons embossed with anchors were the fathers. Silk-covered buttons were the mothers. The tiny white buttons you find on collars were the babies, unnecessary and largely decorative, but cute.

He’d been an observant Jew before the camps; he was a cynical atheist after. On Saturday mornings he took Lady and Vee to the Central Park Zoo. Vee doesn’t remember this at all—she was still in her carriage—but Lady does, though vaguely. Lady is Vee and Delph’s sole conduit to our paterfamilias. She’s the one who remembers what he looked like: fair and blue-eyed and nothing like us. She’s the keeper of his puns. She used to do an impression of his impression of the Central Park polar bear, our father and the bear lolling their big heads this way and that. “It’s as if he’s swaying to secret bear music,” our father would say. “He can bear-ly restrain himself.” She told us how hard the two of them laughed at that. Bear-ly restrain himself. They’d thought it was the funniest thing.

In one of her dresser drawers—the same one in which she keeps the rubbery blue screwdriver—she has an old business card of his, soft and cottony from handling, and at the bottom, beneath his useless contact information, it says:

The fastener invented after the button was a snap

So when Lady says our father gave her plenty a closure, but never any closure, she can’t be scorned. When Vee says that the reason Natan Frankl left us may have been his palindromic first name (“Coming or going, it was all the same to him”) or maybe his German surname (“He probably left to find the missing e”) or that maybe the reason had nothing to do with his name at all, that maybe the reason he left was all those months he spent in that relocation camp before coming to New York (“Looks like relocating became his thing”), she must not be judged harshly.

And when each of us—Vee upon her marriage, and Lady after her separation, and Delph as soon as she came of age—ditched his surname to go by our matronymic, and Delph repeatedly described the name change as no big deal, just a slight Alter-ation, you can’t punish her for being punnish. You can’t roll your eyes when we’re speaking Frankly. It’s all that the man who left us left us. In no other way did he provide for us or, apparently, care about us. In fact, you might say that Frankl, our dad, didn’t give a damn.

All right, all right; we’ll stop. That’s our entire repertoire anyway. We have nothing more to say about him, no idea where he went. A business trip, our mother told Lady, the others too young to ask, but after a while, because even kids know that business trips end and the businessman comes home, often with presents, our mother had to admit the unsatisfying truth, or at least what she maintained was the truth: she hadn’t a clue where he’d gone. One day he never came home from work, and the next day, the same thing happened, then etcetera, etcetera, until she stopped expecting him. She called the cops—a good citizen, she did that much, or so she said—and they nosed around a bit and reported that nothing untoward had befallen him, that wherever he was, it was where he, a grown man, wished to be, and it was no longer their, or, we supposed, our, business.

Even so, over the years Lady continued to press. Soon Vee and Delph joined in. Then our mother would offer up possibilities. Maybe he sailed back to Germany. Maybe he was still living in New York, but with a different wife, tidier daughters who didn’t have to be nagged to make their beds. He might be dead, you never knew, the cops could have been wrong. It’s not like cops weren’t wrong all the time. Or he could be alive somewhere and—again, who knew?—he might decide to come home someday. When we least expected it, he might walk right back through that door.

“Which would you prefer?” she asked, as if his fate could be determined by popular vote.

We won’t deny that we grew up father-hungry. But over the years we’ve come out the other side. No one has had more therapy than the three of us, that ineffectual if gratifying institution—me! for fifty whole minutes let’s talk about me!—but really, we didn’t need therapy when it came to our father. At a certain point when we were still children, each of us cycled through the kiddie version of the five stages of grief, namely, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and crazy-ass conspiracy theories.

Leaving his office one evening, he’d fallen down the stairs and now had amnesia!

Because he spoke German, he’d been recruited as a spy for the CIA and was now skulking heroically behind the Berlin Wall!

Suffering from some terrible and highly contagious disease, he’d had no choice but to remove himself from our presence. Now he rented a room in the apartment across the side street that both our mother’s and Lady’s bedroom windows faced. Every night, through powerful infrared binoculars, he watched over us all as we slept, our mother in her bed and the three of us sardined in Lady’s.

But of all our theories, our favorite, or at least the one we kept coming back to, was that our mother had killed him. Vee had proposed this possibility one night with a wicked smile, and we all liked it. We enjoyed speculating how our mother, that little woman, that lonely and abandoned waif, would have accomplished it, and what she’d have done with the body. We eyed the hallway incinerator with suspicion and a newfound respect.

Let us be clear. Our mother did not murder our father. Even as we entertained the notion, we knew we were doing just that: entertaining ourselves. There was something cathartic in imagining our father dead and our mother a powerful killer. It was far more satisfying than the fantasy of him watching us sleep, which, to be honest, had begun to feel creepy and sometimes gave Delph bad dreams. But the idea of a woman like our mother—another short, bosomy, and luckless ugly gosling—dragging a man to the incinerator late one night was rather invigorating. Therapeutic, one might say.

One final thing about Natan Frankl, and then we won’t mention him again. It really doesn’t matter whether he went back to Germany or found himself a second, superior family or was chopped into his component parts and fed to the incinerator. All that’s relevant now is that he was years older than our mother, closer to her father’s age than her own, and if he didn’t die back then, he’s surely dead now.

So no matter which version of the Father Stories you or we like best, the ending’s the same. We may not know the details, but we promise he won’t be showing up at any point in our story. We urge you to forget all about him. We assure you, as we were assured, it’s all for the best.

So back to the basement, back to no noose is good news. Back to Lady standing on that folding chair, Lady smiling a self-consciously wry smile as if she were on a stage and wished to signal her state of mind to the audience. She imagined that audience to consist of both our parents. She saw them smiling back at her, but warmly, encouraging her. She’d often thought about—had dreams about—how willingly and quietly each had left her. Now she found herself thinking about how willingly and quietly she was leaving Vee and Delph. Although the difference was, Vee and Delph didn’t need her. Vee had Eddie. Delph had Vee and Eddie.

Perhaps each of our parents had thought the same thing. The girls don’t need me. They have each other. Or perhaps—a new thought was coming to Lady—they hadn’t meant to leave us at all. Perhaps they’d meant for us to follow them. As Lady was doing now. Perhaps she hadn’t been abandoned after all; she’d just gotten lost for a while.

DNA as a trail of bread crumbs. Suicide as salvation. She felt awash with sorrow for herself, and it was this self-pity, that most delicious of emotions, that made the tears come.

To avoid these emotions, she distracted herself by reviewing her reasons again. She was alone. She was lonely. This was her daily dilemma: she wanted no one in her life; she couldn’t bear to live life alone. Also, she was tangled up with a dentist who seemed not to like her, and she was engaging in behavior that would cause the dentist’s wife pain—Patty, the woman’s name was Patty—were she to find out about it. To punish herself for hurting Patty—that was reason enough to do what she was about to do.

Not to mention the fact that she’d bloodied a Holocaust survivor’s nose with a screwdriver.

And then there was the rest of it. She was fundamentally incapable of taking care of herself or even, it seemed, of answering a phone or crossing a busy intersection or buying a simple hand tool. Her apartment had roaches and a switch plate as suicidal as she was. Also, it was definitely possible that she was an alcoholic, which would mean she should give up drinking, and why would she want to live like that?

But though the reasons were endless, the reasons were also meaningless. She was back to that again. There was something else driving her, something unsayable, just a feeling, just an urge, but a something that was so very strong. It was a something that Joe and the dentist and the dentist’s wife and the hardware store owner hadn’t a thing to do with.

She regretted this. She wished it were grief or guilt propelling her. She wished she were about to commit an act of heartfelt atonement. But that wasn’t what she was doing, not really. It was something else.

We’ve all struggled with this: how to explain the desire to do something most people find pathological at best, selfish at worst, incomprehensible always. We sometimes describe it as a chit we were each handed at birth, a card to get out of jail free, if one thinks of her life as jail.

Or we talk about the horizontal light, which is how we refer to the light that sometimes replaces sunlight, the light we see for a brief moment virtually every day, the light that isn’t golden, but is as silver as the nacre inside a seashell, and comes not down from the heavens but from beyond the skyline, oozing and seeping until it lies over the day like an opalescent blanket inviting us to slide beneath it. There’s no telling when we’ll see the horizontal light; it appears at a different time every day, and most days we overlook it—it tends to come and go in an instant—and on other days we see it and it lingers, but we manage to ignore it, or at least, after a while, to look away from it.

But then there are the days we can’t look away. “Man, the horizontal light was really strong today,” one of us will say, and the other two will say, “But you resisted,” and the first one will say, “Yeah, well, today I resisted. Who knows about tomorrow?” and we all say, “Who ever knows about tomorrow?” and we refresh our drinks.

Lady kicked off her flip-flops, stood on the chair. She looped one end of the rope around a ceiling pipe the way you’d loop an identification tag around your bag’s handle before a trip. She looped the other end around her neck. Her legs were shaking, but she was doing well. True, she was still crying, but she wasn’t sobbing; the only reason she knew she was crying was by the feel of her tears, silky yet itchy. No noose is good news would be her last pun, and this would be her final pleasurable experience: the warmth of big fat tears sliding down her cheeks, tippling off her chin.

Her feet were bare and sweating. She knew that by now they must be stuck to the chair’s metal seat and that it would require some effort to break the suction when she stepped forward. She would have to add this to her calculation when she made her move.

This must be the way an Olympic diver felt. Observing the conditions of board, of pool, of body. Perfectly poised, needing only to achieve the perfect mind-set, the Zen focus, the courage of one’s convictions. And then, the ability to say one-two-three-now.

She stood for what seemed like hours, sometimes getting to the one, sometimes getting to the two, but never getting to the three, never getting to the now. All she was getting was dizzy, so dizzy she began to worry she’d die of something else, something heart-related—a stroke or an aneurism. She didn’t want to die like that. She wanted her place on the chart.

It was that thought—fierce pride, family loyalty—that got her to the three, to the now, that got her to inch her feet off the chair, first just her right foot, then the left. When her toes felt nothing but air beneath them, her heel kicked the chair away.

This was when she remembered Beef.

She’d meant to return the framed photograph of the dog to the dentist’s office. She’d forgotten entirely. It was still in her purse, and her purse was upstairs in our foyer.

In the fascinating slowing of time that occurred as the chair skittered away, right before her second heel felt nothing beneath it, she realized she needed to stop what she was doing. She needed to deal with that photo, put it back on the shelf. Posthumous humiliation was not what she was after. The dentist going through life citing the purloined photo as incontrovertible proof that she’d died for want of him—this was not her goal.

She reached out, trying to grab hold of something to prevent her body from dropping any farther, but there was nothing to grab, no solid surface to stand on. There was nothing for her to do, no way out, no means of saving herself. She was going to die. And in that briefest, yet longest moment of her life, before she began to flail and kick, she understood she’d been wrong, that this wasn’t her time after all, but it was a realization that made no difference whatsoever. She dropped completely, the rope taut and intransigent.

She hadn’t counted on the building management’s years of neglect. She hadn’t realized that the pipe to which she tied the rope was hardly a pipe, was pretty much nothing but rust in the shape of a pipe. It snapped in two as soon as it felt her full weight. She fell hard, not to her death but to the concrete floor, where she landed awkwardly, heard the snap of a bone in her left calf, screamed from the shock and the physical pain. At the same time a downpour of cold water fell onto her from the broken ends of the so-called pipe, a continuous brutal waterfall.

To get to the elevator she had to drag herself through what was quickly becoming a shallow but numbingly icy lake populated not with fish but with clumps of multicolored dryer lint and sodden stray socks. In the elevator she had to reach up, grab the rail, and exert all of what little upper arm strength she possessed to pull herself to one foot and push the button to our floor.

When Delph, half asleep, responded to the pounding on the door, she found Lady prone on the old welcome mat, drenched, shivering, writhing, large flakes of rust in her sopping hair and a noose encircling her neck, its white tail running along the floor like some sort of soggy leash. Delph felt herself begin to shake. She was as unnerved as she’d ever been, though less unnerved than she would be in a few hours, five in the morning, when she took a taxi to Riverdale and, consulting the scrap of paper on which Lady had written an address and alarm code, broke into a dentist’s office to return a photograph of a dog. Delph trembled uncontrollably during the decommissioning of her sister’s crime, certain the dentist, wanting an early start to the day following his first-ever vacation, would suddenly show up. But he hadn’t, and she’d gotten away with it. She got back into the waiting cab, directed the driver to St. Luke’s Hospital.

“I did it,” she told Lady, who lay on a gurney in a hallway while waiting for a room to free up. Vee and Eddie sat on the floor by the gurney’s wheels, Vee’s head on Eddie’s shoulder, the two of them snoozing.

Woozy from painkillers, her neck chafed red, her leg in a cast, Lady looked up at Delph. She managed despite everything to speak.

“Someday this will be funny,” she said.

CHAPTER 5
1878

It’s in Frau Geist’s dance class where the boy who will become our great-grandfather first places his hand on the waist of the girl who’ll become our great-grandmother. Naturally, they’re paired: nine-year-old Lenz Alter is the smallest boy in the class, seven-year-old Iris Emanuel is the smallest girl. Even so, when they converse, he has to look up. And conversing is mandatory. Conversing while dancing—preferably in French—is as important as knowing the steps. It’s part of doing it well.

Also, the boy must begin the conversation. Lenz has his opening line at the ready. “Bonjour,” he says. “I hate this stupid dance.”

The girls are encouraged to ask the boys questions. “Quelle danse do you prefer?” Iris asks.

“I hate them all.”

“Even the polka?”

“Maybe not the polka.”

“All the boys like the polka. And the mazurka.”

“En français,” Frau Geist sings out.

“It’s all boring,” Lenz says. He turns her, turns her again. “Ennui,” he says.

“I pretend we’re Earth,” Iris says. “I’m the Western Hemisphere, and you’re the east. We revolve in a circle as we rotate around the room.”

Lenz glances to the center of the circle. “That makes Frau Geist the sun,” he says. This is very funny if you’ve ever seen Frau Geist, and they snicker through a few more turns.

Before the dance ends, Lenz has made two requests: one, that the next time they’re partnered, he gets to be the Western Hemisphere, and two, that Iris marry him. All the other boys are doing it—proposing—although what one does after one becomes engaged, he’s not entirely sure.

Iris seems not to know this game at all. “I’m too young,” she says, frowning, perplexed.

He rolls his eyes, though he, too, is perplexed. Improvising, he says, “Not now. Later.”

“When?”

He does some calculations. “Eighteen eighty-six,” he says. He’ll be seventeen, done with gymnasium.

“But what about university?”

“I’m not going. I’m going into my father’s business.”

She says, “I meant moi. What if I want to go?”

None too gently, he apprises her of the fact that girls can’t go to university. She shakes her head. She knows all that, she says. But her father says the rules will change by the time she’s sixteen, and if they don’t, her father says, well, then, by God, the two of them will change them.

“All right,” Lenz says. “We won’t get married until after you finish university.”

“Ça va,” she says.

The music stops. They’re back to the spot on the floor where they began. He bows. She curtsies. Frau Geist applauds. Lenz leans over to the couple nearest them, the second shortest boy, the second shortest girl. “Iris and I are engaged,” he confides.

“Good show,” says the boy.

When Iris returns home, she announces her betrothal at dinner. “That’s it,” her father says. “No more dancing for you.”

1879–1881

From the essay “A Word about Our Jews” by Heinrich von Treitschke, professor, historian, deputy to the Reichstag, and archconservative:

Year after year, out of the inexhaustible Polish cradle there streams over our eastern border a host of hustling, pants peddling youths, whose children and children’s children will someday command Germany’s stock exchanges and newspapers … What we have to demand of our Israelite fellow citizens is simple: they should become Germans. They should feel themselves, modestly and properly, German.

From the pamphlet “Another Word about Our Jews” by Theodor Mommsen, professor, classical scholar, Nobel laureate, and ultraliberal:

Remaining outside the boundaries of Christendom and at the same time belonging to the German nation is possible, but difficult and risky … He whose conscience does not permit him to renounce his Judaism and accept Christianity will act accordingly, but he should be prepared to bear the consequences … The admission to a large nation has its price. It is the Jews’ duty to do away with their particularities … They must make up their minds and tear down all barriers between themselves and their German compatriots.

From the mind of Lenz Alter, age twelve: Where’s the problem? Everyone’s taking sides, von Treitschke versus Mommsen, but it seems to Lenz the two men are in agreement. Yes, it’s true that von Treitschke hates the Jews, while Mommsen only suspects them, but they both advocate the same solution: hatred and/or suspicion will vanish if the Jews become truly, completely German. What’s there to debate, then? Where’s the disagreement? Where’s the conflict?

And given that both of these men, respected and learned men, German patriots, agree that what the Jew must do to become truly German is simply give up Judaism—well, Lenz doesn’t understand why it hasn’t already been done. En masse, as a celebration, a festival. Has a less onerous task ever been asked of a people? It’s not as if he or his father or his uncles or any of the Jews he knows use their Judaism for anything.

Heinrich and Lenz sit at the polished walnut table in the dining room, draperies drawn, observing their usual prandial silence. The new housekeeper sashays in, seventeen if a day, her soup tureen held low by her hip as if she’s a milkmaid coming in from the cow barn. Heinrich observes the excessively long and somewhat perilous arc of her ladle as it carries the hot broth from tureen to bowl. He’s wondering if he should correct her form when Lenz unexpectedly speaks.

“I have a question of philosophy and conduct,” he says.

“Do you?” says Heinrich.

“Oh, my,” says the housekeeper.

“I’ve been wondering, given the general consensus that two of my three fathers cannot happily coexist, which of those two should I please: Chancellor Bismarck or God?”

“I thought Bismarck was God,” the housekeeper says. Heinrich, who likes his housekeepers quiet and reverent especially vis-à-vis Bismarck, decides he will fire this one later that evening. As it turns out, though, after dinner he’ll become distracted rereading his Mommsen and will forget all about her. Then one thing will lead to another, and within a year he and the housekeeper will be married, and Lenz will have a stepmother a mere five years older than himself, which will require extensive revision to the fantasies he’d been enjoying since she arrived.

“It’s not a matter of either/or,” Heinrich says. “In this house we stick to our own flag. You’re a Prussian Jew who does what I say. And thus do your fathers coexist.”

It’s not until the next evening that Heinrich suddenly puts down his knife and fork and says, as if no time has passed since Lenz brought it up, “I’ll say only this and I’ll say it only once. Convert, and you no longer have this father.” He picks up the utensils again, attacks his dinner, the only violence life allows him.

The man who practices nothing of his faith clings to it nonetheless. It makes no sense to Lenz; it never will. For now, though, he backs down. “I didn’t say I was going to convert,” he mutters. What he wants to say, but can’t, not yet, is that if he converts, yes, he may lose Heinrich. And of course this Yahweh he’s heard so much about but has never really been introduced to—he would also go by the boards. But Lenz wouldn’t be completely orphaned. He’d still have the best of the lot.

Sometimes we picture it carved into the bark of a tree:

Otto von B. + Lenz A. = true luv 4-ever.