Found and Lost Read online

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  We discovered the original of a letter written by my grandfather’s sister from Russia thanking him for sending $20 that she used to buy medicines for her sick child. The letter was dated August 17th, 1939. Neither she nor any relative from Russia would ever be heard of again (but for one unknown cousin of my father’s who had fought with the Red Army and who appeared in New York unannounced, unearthing us, his only living relatives). The locations were listed of each of the other graves in the cemetery where Dorothy had been buried.

  Nancy (I wish you’d known her too) drove in from her B&B upstate. She arrived with large iced drinks and got to work. She and Maggie went through the clothes, dividing them into ‘vintage’ and ‘give away’ (a distinction I would not have been able to draw). When closets and dressers were opened, we realized that Dorothy had probably not thrown away a single article of clothing in her entire life. I found a pillbox containing gold in the shape of crowns that must have been removed from her teeth when the time had come to get false ones.

  I went through years of cancelled checks and bank registries, state and federal income tax returns. Finally, we stopped, planned several dates on which to return and continue. It seemed that though we’d worked the better part of the day we’d barely scratched the surface.

  I left wearing a gold deco ring with two stones: one mauve, one pale yellow. As someone who was also set against throwing anything away, Lily, you would have felt for my Aunt Dorothy.

  Love,

  Alison

  DEAR MOTHER TWITCHETT,

  Do you know of this lady? She is the ninety-eight-year-old Polish woman named Irena Sendler who just died. She once worked as a plumbing and sewer specialist in the Warsaw ghetto and smuggled babies out in the bottom of her toolbox, and larger children in burlap sacks. She saved 2,500 children, was caught, had both legs broken, but survived. In a jar buried under a tree in her yard she kept the names of the children she had carried out of the Ghetto. When the war ended she tried to find their parents, only to discover that most had been gassed.

  I think you should write about her. I realize from what you’ve told me of your own history that you have reasons to feel vulnerable, that you get entangled in these stories that are endangered by oblivion at every turn and have said that you won’t write about the Shoah again, but I think you should steel your nerve and try. Soon, all your primary sources will be dead. My grandchildren will most likely never set eyes on a single survivor.

  I hope you aren’t suffering any economic stress at this time. One gets less and less for a loonie all the time. I fear I may be too irascible and snarly, while none of my language skills will help me get a position as greeter at Tim Horton’s, and food these days is just too expensive so (short of becoming a snowbird), I may have to move to the wilderness and grow my own food or live on poutine made with fries covered with cheese curds and gravy. If you’ve never tried it while visiting Canada, you should. Awful as it sounds, it’s actually not a bad way to fend off hunger. Until next time.

  Simple Simon

  DEAR SIMON OF CYRENE,

  Simple Simon is the last nickname I’d use for you. In my book, you’re more a Simon of Cyrene, who carried Christ’s cross when it became too heavy for Christ to carry. Not that I think the stories you send are not worth remembering, they are indeed, it’s just that I fear I no longer have the ‘stomach’ to research and detail more of such stories. Nor have I taken the Jewish ideal of tikkun olam – the responsibility to repair the world – as my own; not because I would not like to repair the world but because I only know small ways I personally can make it better. (Perhaps my – as you phrase it – stick is no longer on the ice? Maybe my skates aren’t sharp any longer, though I keep an NHL hockey puck in my freezer left there by my son, once a Rangers fan, long ago. ‘Keeping it frozen,’ he told me, ‘makes it more lethal when in play.’)

  My present kinship is to the central character in a Japanese film from my youth that I once loved and have recently rediscovered – The Burmese Harp, directed by Kon Ichikawa – in which a Japanese soldier, traumatized by war, refuses to return home to Japan but remains in Burma disguised as a mute Buddhist monk in order to bury the dead.

  To think that in the space of a few months I’ve stood at the open graves of two women of Russian descent – a red and a white – whose long lives had entwined with mine (one Mandelstam, one Nabokov), have in near shock kissed two unfaded faces, my lips lingering as much in farewell as in an effort to decant their spirits.

  That dear Miep continues so well after her centenary – clear headed, independent – boggles my mind. May the miracle continue while I gather strength. Miep’s son Paul and I and a few others had been trying to find a man who, as a three-year-old boy, was rescued by Miep and her husband, whom they never saw after the war. We wanted to find him and reunite him with Miep as a birthday surprise. Hard as we’ve searched, we’ve hit nothing but blank walls. Though it’s known that he survived, he has done so without a trace. It would have been astonishing to have found him, but we failed.

  In spite of what I say, don’t stop sending endangered stories to me, if you stumble on any, like that of Irena Sendler, for which I thank you and which of course inspires me.

  On the subject of money, suffice to say I’m okay only because I keep a low overhead and my vices do not include shopping or the acquisition of objects. I probably won’t sink unless the feeling of shame I have at living in a country where some have so much and some have so little, like a stone tied to my ankles, pulls me down into the depths.

  Went swimming in the ocean on Long Island for the first time this season. The cold was a shock; the tide was going out, I felt it tugging me – and I went.

  Until next time,

  Mother Twitchett

  Phone calls for Glenn Gould are coming here including a message from someone named Marcia (a name I have no connection with) left on my answering machine

  DEAR ALISON,

  I found Leon Maximilian Prinz!

  He lives in Israel and did e-mail my mother. We are now in contact with him.

  Paul

  – Interlogue I –

  I was very young (perhaps nine years old) when I chanced on my parents’ copy of John Hershey’s Hiroshima. Once I’d begun, I couldn’t stop, though every page brought more and more details of the grotesque aftermath of an atom bomb explosion – descriptions of the ‘noiseless flash’ that melted eyeballs and skin, the ‘huge drops of water the size of marbles’ that fell from the sky, fire storms, tongues that swelled in size, fierce thirst that couldn’t be quenched, babies burnt to a char. It was the 1950s: air-raid drills had been instituted in my grade school, during which we were instructed to remove sharp objects such as pencils from our pockets, when we ducked under our desks and covered our heads with crossed arms. If I happened to be working in my Lost and Found office during a drill, I was told to get under the table on which my Lost and Found box rested.

  Some folks built air-raid shelters in back yards that were filled with survival supplies, including loaded guns ready to shoot anyone uninvited who tried to enter. I asked my parents how they would protect us if there was a nuclear war. They admitted there was nothing they could do. I asked repeatedly; they couldn’t come up with a more reassuring answer, just entreated me not to worry. Around the same time, I chanced on a book of black-and-white photos at the public library depicting Ku Klux Klan members wearing floor-length white robes, from which only their shoes and hands protruded. Covering their heads and faces were pointed white hoods with eye-holes cut out. One photo depicted a group of KKKs surrounding someone who had been lynched, hanging by a rope, legs dangling like a rag doll. The victim’s face had been covered with what looked like a pillow case, but dark hands and feet indicated he was what we then referred to as a ‘negro’. The hanged man’s head had bent sideways, almost at ninety-degrees, away from the noose. On a hill nearby stood a flaming cross the size of a small house.

  The book explained that most KKK groups res
ided in America’s deep south, but that a few existed as far north as New York, where I lived. I tried my best not to panic about either the KKK or nuclear war, as my parents had urged, and, in the daytime the tension at being menaced sometimes ceased entirely. But, without fail, when bedtime came and the night shade was lowered, I would wonder if a nuclear attack might come at any moment, or if, perhaps, a KKK squad might light a cross in front of our house. After all, it wasn’t just blacks the KKK hated, they also hated Catholics and Jews. As Jews (even non-practicing secular ones – my parents at the time called themselves ‘atheists’), we were targets. Small and unprotected in my bed, my mind swarmed with uncontrolled projections: perhaps my eyeballs and skin were about to melt away? Maybe a bag would drop over my head and a noose would pull tightly round my neck? Might pee and poo empty out at the moment of death? If my skin melted, would it look like my grandmother’s chicken fat, bright yellow? At the mercy of these racing thoughts, I’d grip my chest, hold my breath, wish there was a God to care for me.

  In the fall of 1962, I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina. My childhood fear of the KKK had damped down by then, was in fact overridden by the allure of Tennessee Williams’s South that had brought me to a place where southern drawls were as thick as syrup and the earth was the color of red clay. My chronic sense of impending doom had not faded in the slightest, however, especially during the dangerous civil rights work done by some of us students to integrate two restaurants and a movie theater during my freshman year. When the Cuban Missile Crisis flared that October, it seemed to me that a nuclear exchange between the USA and the USSR, obliterating all, was inevitable.

  It was the middle of semester. After a biology lecture one afternoon, I went to the Registrar’s office and told the authorities I was quitting college. It seemed pointless, even absurd, to spend the final moments of my life withdrawn in study and learning, if I was never going to practice what I learned, so I packed my suitcase and took Greyhound buses through the Midwest, writing lengthy, confessional letters to an unconsummated secret love who had been at my side during the fraught civil rights protests the year before. After a while my money ran out, I made a collect call to my parents and confessed what I’d done. They told me to come home.

  When the world didn’t end, my parents insisted I return to college. I agreed. But the same itch for the exotic that had taken me to Williams’s South took me now further afield, further south, to a small institution called Mexico City College – also known as the University of the Americas – whose campus was located forty minutes by silver bullet bus along the Toluca Highway outside the city. I found a room in a divorcee’s apartment in the city, on wide stately Paseo de la Reforma. Every morning I would catch my bus at the statue of Winged Victory near Chapultepec Park and share it with chickens, birds in small cages, workers. The bus growled along the winding road that had many hair-pin turns and let me off on a hillside overlooking the volcanic mountain Popocatepetl (later to be encountered in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano).

  In Mexico City, I discovered Tequila and the magic of amphetamines. It seemed that Tequila, in large enough doses, could obliterate the childhood fear that was dogging me, of impending nuclear war. Amphetamines served to galvanize concentration and achieve a focus I otherwise lacked. I came to feel as if I no longer needed to sleep and could fulfill my student tasks while also filling my life with nocturnal adventure. I lost my virginity there – twice. First to a red-haired actress named Roberta, who earned her living working as a model for soap opera comic books. Second to a (married) Mexican man who performed magic on daytime television (he called himself ‘Pierre’ though his real name was Carlos). A Pekinese dog (I later learned that it belonged to his wife) kept watch at the bedside during the entire lackluster deflowering.

  One afternoon after class I missed my bus. Too impatient to wait for the next one, I stuck out my thumb. A dark blue Porsche convertible pulled up. The two handsome men inside were offering a ride. One was a Mexican with long eyelashes, hair cut short. The other, an American, had light-colored, inquisitive eyes, curly brown hair, a long pale sensitive face. I squeezed into the narrow space behind them in the car. As we raced down the winding road at top speed, the scent of aftershave reached me from one of their necks; which neck, I never knew. Reaching Mexico City, we parked in the Zona Rosa, found a café on Amberes Street where we drank Negra Modelo well into the evening.

  Two months later, Spring ’65, not many semesters away from graduation with a liberal arts degree, I crossed the border from Mexico to the US wearing a little wood-eating bug, a kind of beetle-as-jewelry. The bug’s hard shell was glittering with faux diamonds; the bug itself was attached to a gold chain pinned to my lapel. I was carrying a suitcase containing a large supply of Benzedrine and Dexedrine pills for my own use – they were available in Mexico over the counter – and I was accompanied by that handsome man with curly brown hair who had picked me up in his car. For his personal amusement, he carried a stash of Phenobarbital pills. What had been looming as a fate worse than death – graduation, return to New York to a nine-to-five job – was about to be averted.

  Having reached San Antonio, Texas, we married in front of a judge – while his car was being serviced. I, in a salmon-colored silk sheath that had thin spaghetti straps; he, in an expensive Brooks Brothers’ suit, sans tie. I was nineteen, he, twenty-four. He came from a well-off family in Michigan and had never worked a day in his life. We should have had the world by the tail – youth, good looks, bright minds, affection, plenty of money (his) – but we only managed to subsist under the same roof for a few short months. Two years later (two years spent in lawyers’ offices, living mostly apart), we travelled back to Mexico, to Juarez, where a divorce could be obtained without the accusations of adultery that would have been necessary in New York. My husband offered a generous lump-sum settlement, more money than I’d imagined I’d make in a lifetime. Needless to say, I did not resist. My lawyer thought it apt, as I would now be considered ‘damaged goods’.

  I was, by the stroke of a pen, rendered financially independent, even flush, while I chose to take the lawyer’s assessment with a pinch of salt. When I crossed back over the bridge to El Paso, after the divorce decree had been signed, stamped, finalized, I threw my gold wedding ring into the Rio Grande. The five-pound alabaster baby boy I’d produced, born nine months to the day after my Texas wedding, was in New York with a nanny and his grandparents, awaiting my return. Awaiting his mother.

  The dread of motherhood now joined hands with the old daunting fear of impending doom. The twin thorns in my side dug in, and dug in deep.

  So far, I have not married again.

  Part II

  – Gone but Not Forgotten –

  DEAR LILY,

  Late last night fierce winds shook the drooping branches on the Bradford pear trees along my street. Since my windows were open, papers, jigsaw puzzle pieces, 44¢ stamps with pictures of King and Queen playing cards were all blown about. A photo of Miep reading Anne Frank’s diary fluttered under my glass table. That it had singled itself out from a knee-high pile of papers I had started to file – this startled, then worried me. It seems something of a visitation, when, at Miep’s point in late life, such a visitation does not give comfort. My helpful neighbor Kathleen Suarez (originally from the English Midlands, who married an American G.I. of Spanish origin in 1945 and came with him to New York) died last week, July 23rd. Except for Miep’s birthday celebration, my life continues as a parade of funerals. Kathleen (an Anglican active in Holy Apostles around the corner on 9th Avenue, the site of our local soup kitchen) was given a grand service by her church, the coffin covered with an off-white flag, a crimson cross at its center. I’ve heard a rumor that Stanley, a childhood pal of mine, has gone down in a plane crash in the wilds of Alaska. Stanley used to hang out with me at my Lost and Found depot in grade school, trying to match up lost mittens. I was taken by Stanley’s parents to one of the first (and saddest) plays I ever sa
w, Come Back, Little Sheba. For years after, until I fell out of touch with him after I moved abroad, he liked to call me ‘Little Sheba’.

  At this point only my father, my mother (both of whom have had dozens of health crises in recent years, as you know), and Miep (who has had none) remain alive and kicking. My parents still dwell in apartment 16B overlooking Washington Square Park where they’ve lived for ever. Father is sweet though not all there; Mother is all there though not at all sweet. I can’t remember the last time I saw her smile. Really don’t know why or when she stopped smiling. It’s a mystery. (Also, though they called themselves atheists during my first twenty years, and agnostics during the second, they’ve begun insisting they’ve always believed in God. Go figure.)

  My darling Lily. How can I forget you? How can I un-remember unwavering Dorothy? And now Kathleen, who sat in the park below my window from 3 to 4 every day before returning home for tea – she too is gone. I could have set my watch by her comings and goings. And Stanley, who could make me laugh with just a look? These deaths remain indigestible. No metaphorical belch is lowering their heat. I can still smell the fragrance of beeswax tapers round your coffin and see your grave on the Hydra hilltop under the fleeting moon – to phengari to the Greeks, who celebrate it in so many of their songs – with our shimmering sea below on two fronts.

  Alison

  Wind-blown tulip petals on the floor, stems & stamens remaining in the vase

  DEAR ALISON,

  I was saddened to hear of your aunt’s passing; and empathize with you and your sisters in the heavy task of clearing. There must be a lot of that going on in the world, but until it happens to oneself, as it happened to me when Lily went, it is not much noticed. The husband’s role, in this case, was to do the clearing.