Found and Lost Read online

  Lily’s green marbled eyes burnt with delight while she peeled a large, bone-yellow garlic clove, then folded it into a fat slice of bread. This was something she had done all her life: either rub garlic on bread, or fold it inside to swallow it whole.

  As usual, when I left she stood on the terrace and blew kisses to me while I waved and blew kisses to her, walking slowly backward toward the corner. She was wearing an overly large metal-grey second-hand man’s Armani jacket that I had arrived wearing and had given to her. As we had for all thirty-nine years of our friendship, I turned the corner, paused, then unturned the corner, went back, to wave again. Of course she had not moved, stood waving, looking like a young woman. She had always outwaved me; I was always the one to leave first.

  The next morning, September 30th, I took the first hydrofoil to Hydra. At 11 a.m. Lily’s husband Alan telephoned to say that a few hours after I’d left, Lily had felt an intense pain in her stomach. She had toughed it out through the night but at dawn he’d called an ambulance. She died in the ambulance: ‘With no fear,’ he told me.

  My first thought was: Death by garlic. It occurred to me that, having been in the hospital for two weeks hardly eating because she did not want the indignity of a bedpan, she knew perfectly well that gorging all day, as we had, would be lethal to her system. Since she would be forever attached to an oxygen tank, she might have swallowed a garlic clove as big as the Ritz so as to die at a time of her own choosing. This would have been in her Russian character.

  The coffin was brought by boat to the harbor of Kamini, our little village on Hydra, below the house we knew so well that she inhabited for more than sixty years; a house which, I was once told, she had bought for a single gold sovereign. She had retreated to the island because, she said, the war had made the world unfit to inhabit (unless it was that the war had made her unfit to inhabit the world). The Orthodox service took place at the church ten steps from her house. She was buried in the graveyard along the road that stretches to Vlichos, the final village on the west side of the island.

  Alison

  Was awakened by music coming from next door. In the morning I saw my neighbor who was born in Tashkent waiting at the elevator, and asked her the name of the music I’d heard. ‘Schubert’s “Expectation”,’ she told me, asking, ‘Was it too loud?’ ‘Not at all,’ I assured her.

  Natalie Wood, wearing a belted raincoat with upturned collar, was standing in the elevator when the door opened. But because my neighbor had not finished talking, I could not get in and the door slid shut, taking Natalie downstairs to the wet street

  DEAR ALEKSY NOWAK,

  Thanks for your efforts. Miep’s birthday is on February 15th. She will be one hundred on that day. If you turn up any information in the short time left before her birthday that might help us locate Leon Maximilian Prinz, it would be immensely appreciated. I can be reached by email even the day before I leave for Amsterdam.

  Alison Leslie Gold

  DEAR LILY,

  Did I ever tell you that when I was in grammar school a volunteer was solicited to organize an ever-growing collection of unclaimed objects that had become too large to be contained in its bag. I volunteered.

  I rounded up several cardboard boxes, made labels with blue and black Magic Markers, sorted the items, mostly single mittens, sweaters, bits of costume jewelry, hats, galoshes that were fitted onto and peeled off shoes on days of rain or snow. There were yo-yos, bus passes, once or twice one of those fancy new ballpoint Paper Mate pens, eye glasses, notebooks, assignment books. When my Lost and Found system was complete, a monitor or minder was sought. The duty of the volunteer was to sit in a straight-backed chair in the empty room and wait, in case someone came looking for a lost item.

  No one volunteered, so I took the position, began sitting on the chair for an hour or two at a time, missing class. I began to miss so much class that when I left my house in the morning it was as if I were not going to school (third grade) but to my job as CEO of Lost and Found. In this grade we were taught spelling, began geometry and French, among other subjects. I missed much of what was taught that year and then much the next and the next, as I continued to refine and run my Lost and Found.

  Love,

  Alison

  DEAR DENNY,

  Am pleased that your back has improved. Glad it’s not sciatica again as I remember well the bout you suffered when we first met, while you were editing fiction, agonizing over too many ellipses and slapdash grammar.

  My overnight flight arrived in Amsterdam in the morning, Valentine’s Day, Feb 14th. I went directly to Miep’s apartment. Right away we ate raw herring and raw onions, as she likes. I commented on the big birthday, my amazement. ‘Yes,’ was all she said, ‘Yes’ – amazed herself, smiling.

  She returned to the armchair beside the coffee table where she now spends most of her day. Beside the chair is a zimmer frame which she never uses except for the basket attached to the handle in which she keeps copies of the two different newspapers she reads daily, also the remote control that operates the television that faces her chair, her house keys, pocketbook.

  Between us was the narrow coffee table on which sits the pile of correspondence she has received since my last visit six months ago. Attached to each was a Xerox copy of her response. Dozens of them. I was expected to read each and every one, while Miep looked on with satisfaction, pleased that even at her advanced age no letter has gone unanswered. It’s only in the past year that Miep has allowed me to carry the tray from the kitchen to the coffee table. She still insists on preparing the coffee herself.

  We caught up on news, both personal and about our book which will be reissued with a new epilogue, and then we returned to the dining table, covered with a Turkish carpet in the old Dutch manner. Half the table was piled with correspondence and other business. We spread a white tablecloth on the remaining half, set out plates and lunched on the usual bread, butter, liverwurst, salami, cheese.

  For the first time since I met Miep twenty-four years ago, in the evening, rather than watch the 8 o’clock Dutch news and televised political discussions until 11, she drew the curtains, said, ‘We go to bed!’ It was 7:40. She said she was tired. Now, as I write this, she is in her bedroom wearing pale peach-colored silk pajamas. The house is dark, the grandfather clock does not tick anymore.

  I hope we will have our usual breakfast together tomorrow morning – the cheese, buttered bread, tea, liverwurst, a glass of milk – before the festivities begin, when her son Paul, his wife Lucie, their three children, and the various special guests will arrive. I’ve brought her a bottle of Chanel No.5, her favorite, with the promise that when she uses it up, I’ll give her another. As usual, the oil portraits of Anne Frank (on the north wall beside the dining table) and Jan Gies, always an under-acknowledged hero (on the east wall overlooking the table) will make it seem as if they are with us.

  Yours,

  Alison

  DEAR LILY,

  Back in New York since late February after my brief visit to Amsterdam. Winter has been snowy and very cold, just as I like it. There has been no break in the weather even though spring has officially arrived. Once again the chance of a thumb’s smear of ash on my forehead has been forgone because I’m not Catholic and lack whatever it takes to impersonate a Catholic. Another Ash Wednesday has gone. Passover looms, Easter lurks.

  The Einstein lookalike who lives in my building has moved away.

  Love,

  Alison

  Dreamed Aunt Dorothy was playing on the piano while Miep, a music lover, sat in an armchair, her arm thrown across the back of the chair, absorbed in the music

  DEAR DENNY,

  Aunt Dorothy became ‘unresponsive’ while on the toilet and the aide phoned for an ambulance. Next she phoned me. By the time I got there, the attendants had her in the ambulance. In the hospital’s emergency room I asked her, ‘Do you want to go home?’ ‘Yes and no,’ she replied. A surprise. No chairs on which a visitor could sit, so I stoo
d for many hours at her bedside. At one point I scrunched down, laid my head and shoulder beside her hip and felt her hand caress my hair. This was my aunt who was in her thirties when I was born, who often took me to the penny arcades on 42nd Street to play skee ball, who never once let anyone except my father (her brother) pick up a tab even for a cup of coffee. An unrepentant Communist who had never been sick a day in her life, she suddenly developed a heart condition when the USSR crumbled. I think her heart broke. ‘I always believed a better person would emerge,’ she told me, sadly, many times.

  Got her out, home in a taxi which wasn’t easy because whenever she had to be lifted forward she would grab onto anything and cry out since she felt as if she was falling and her fingers had to be prized open since, strangely, she is still quite strong. Only the patient Afghani taxi driver, who spoke softly to her until she finally unclenched her fist, was able to get her out of the taxi.

  If no further crisis happens – though I’ll be without ballast, knowing that Lily is no longer waiting on the other side for me – I leave for Greece in two weeks.

  Stay strong,

  Alison

  A peach-and-yellow lovebird escaped from my neighbor’s cage

  DEAR LILY,

  Dizzy and exhausted, arrived in Athens with my sister Nancy during the first heat wave of the year. I couldn’t find my hotel, a place I’ve bragged that I could find blindfolded, then got lost in Piraeus trying to cross over to the boat to Hydra. What has happened to me since you died? My mind is much on my Aunt Dorothy. Am very sad that it’s too late for Nancy and you to meet.

  I am holding onto walls when I stand up, crouching as I walk. White caps roll across the sea. On my way to the shop, I lifted the lid of the dumpster along the dry river bed, and a black garbage bag rose out of the bin like a jack-in-the-box. My phone rang at six this morning. On the line a crackling, whirring, choking. From it what might have been a voice could have been saying ‘ach’ (as in achtung) ‘choo … ach choo’ (as in train). ‘Lily?’ I asked. ‘Is that you, Lily?’

  Had to clutch the railing as I lowered the bucket to the bottom of the cistern, filling it with rainwater, tossing bucket after bucket on the dry geraniums in their broken, earthenware pots. Nancy, an expert gardener, took over the sad geranium pots, feeding with plant food, giving new topsoil.

  I held the thread while walking across the dry river bed and up the stone steps, bringing my sister and myself along the road towards the village of Vlichos and guiding us into the cemetery to drink morning coffee beside your grave. Needle in hand, I hoped you’d lick the thread, squinting as you always did.

  Across the top of your grave, on a slab of marble:

  Lily Mack

  1925–2008

  I poured coffee for us all, left yours with a piece of bread on the gravestone. My knees went out from under me as I walked to the bench beside the church – buckled, actually. I didn’t fall, just crumbled against the stone. Am hurt but did not drop the remaining coffee and bread. We sat eating and sipping, listening to someone chiseling rocks, then Nancy and I went to your house to take cuttings from your climbing rose bush on the terrace to take back to New York in the hope that they will root there.

  After I took Nancy to the Hydrofoil to begin her return journey alone, the town water went off. A couple of hours later, when it went back on, my hot water did not. The idea that I would have to deal with a plumber made me cry. My caulked hot water heater has brought the tears I needed to shed.

  The heat makes me so tired. When asleep, I dreamt that Miep let go of my hands and dropped out of a third-story window. ‘No! No! No! No!’ I screamed. I ran down to the street. She was alive. I was so shaken, I could not stop talking. All my secrets spilled out.

  Not one ant in my kitchen. You would shake your finger at me and tell me that we Americans wash too much, that I’d washed the vital bacteria out of my life. Dug two director’s chairs out of the street trash pile. The yellow canvas one is usable, the other not. Were you alive, we would share them as we did so many precious ‘finds’. One of my guests left a copy of Lermantov’s A Hero of Our Time in my house for me (in Nabokov’s translation). I can’t count the number of times you recommended I read Lermantov in this translation.

  Your

  Alison

  Both sets of double sheets are gone from the white lacquered trunk. The door to the little freezer compartment of the small refrigerator has broken off exactly as it did on the last refrigerator. The white plastic door is now propped across the compartment in which Lily’s year-old borscht soup and several Boss ice-cream bars are frozen solid

  DEAR DENNY,

  After my shortened stay in Hydra, shortened as Dorothy was failing, the plane touched down in Newark at 3:30 p.m. Dorothy ‘passed away’ at 3:55. It was June 9th. I made it to her place in time to kiss her many times, say goodbye, stay beside her until the men from the funeral home came to fetch her and the apartment was sealed by the police. My second sister, Maggie, had (by amazing chance) been with her when she died. Maggie, choosing clothes for the burial, found a pair of shoes, said, ‘Look! Only Dorothy would still have Hush Puppies in perfect condition.’

  My sisters and I spent Wednesday at the Redden Funeral Parlor on 14th Street making arrangements, and Thursday morning at Surrogate’s Court on Chambers Street submitting papers so that the apartment could be unsealed; Friday was the funeral. My father (Dorothy’s brother) would not be coming. We were told three versions: first, that he didn’t remember who she was when he was told; second, that he remembered, but did not react when he was told of her death (these told by our mother); third (told by the live-in nurse who heard him crying and asked what was wrong), his reply: ‘My sister died and they won’t let me go to the funeral.’

  The rain poured down upon our small cortège – two limousines, one hearse – as it drove along Bleecker Street, just south of my parents’ apartment, where my father remained. The cortège then went over the Manhattan Bridge, through parts of Brooklyn where Dorothy and my father had spent their (impoverished) childhoods. Dorothy had been a member of my grandfather’s burial society, Zosmar Young Men’s Benevolent Association, his membership brought with him from Russia a century before. My grandfather, grandmother, great-aunt (whom my grandfather married when my grandmother died), and one uncle are buried in nearby graves in the cemetery, so near to the Belmont Race Track.

  Redden’s arranged for a Rabbi who met us at the puddled entrance to the cemetery. The grave was open, a mound of wet dirt and a shovel. The Rabbi said a few prayers, the twenty-third psalm, several short prayers in Hebrew, and finally Kaddish. Then my brother-in-law, David, played the Internationale on his violin while Maggie and I held a large black umbrella above the precious instrument.

  Stay strong,

  Alison

  DEAR DOROTHY,

  This would have made you smile: My neighbor’s lost love bird landed back on his terrace railing. When my neighbor carried its cage to the door of the terrace the love bird dropped a glistening tear of chartreuse shit on the railing, then hopped back into the cage.

  Love,

  Alison

  ALISON LESLIE GOLD SHALOM,

  By chance I found your book Fiet’s Vase at a bookshop on Be’eri Street and I was surprised by the photograph of the cover. For the woman on the left is my mother.

  I do not know if you are aware of the details. The photograph was taken by the American Army in the Gare de Lyon, Paris, when young Jews were sent to southern France in order to take a boat to Palestine. The photograph in your book is only half of the complete one, which shows the dreamed of Israeli flag made by my mother, Yetty Halperin, who was liberated from Bergen Belsen after spending two years there. My mother passed away in 1983. The woman on the right was liberated from Auschwitz and lives now in Tel Aviv. I know her, she was the best friend of my mother after Liberation, but she does not want her name publicized. The photograph belongs to the US Library of Congress.

  If you want more details
I am happy to help you.

  Kol Tov – Be Well

  Michael Beigel

  Jerusalem, Israel

  P.S. We think the photo was taken on 12 April 1945 because my mother told us that when the photo happened she spoke with an American soldier who was crying. She asked him, ‘Why?’ The answer was that his president had passed away that day, 12 April 1945, the day President Roosevelt died.

  DEAR LILY,

  Aunt Dorothy’s official Death Transcript was issued by the Surrogate’s Court on June 10th, 2009. The work of inventorying, separating, dispersing, discarding the contents of Dorothy’s entire apartment could now begin. Packing boxes, garbage bags, tape, black marker pens, sponges were assembled.

  Inside her apartment, it was peaceful, the light soft. Maggie (the film director sister I wish you had met) and I went into the bedroom. The bed was askew (probably from lifting the corpse) but the sheets showed no sign of violence. A garbage chute not ten feet from the front door meant that disposing of rotting food from the refrigerator was easy. I emptied what remained in the seven bottles of pills into the bathroom sink and kept the hot water running until the pills of various sizes and colors had dissolved. We filled dozens of plastic bags with surface junk, phone books, a thousand hoarded coat hangers. One packing box was unflattened, reinforced with tape, labeled ‘treasures’. Found Dorothy’s High School diploma (Franklin K. Lane High School, Brooklyn, New York, June 1932), a small prayer book, crude torn photos of my Russian great-grandparents looking like proper mujiks.

  Among the mass of papers there was information about Dorothy’s family that is no longer known by another living person. The birth date of my Russian grandfather Sam, as we knew him (or Zalmon as he was originally known), was April 15th, 1892; he arrived in America in June 1910 from Brody, Russia, via Trieste; his profession, broom-maker; race, Hebrew; date of death, November 8th, 1969. Papers showed that my grandmother Minnie’s date of birth was never known. Minnie’s profession was listed as ‘baker’.