Found and Lost Read online

  Yours,

  Alison Leslie Gold

  Bending to pet my neighbor’s spaniel, I see a detail from a Poussin pastoral

  HI ALISON,

  Leon Prinz is not interested in an interview or in having any further contact. To use his words – or my translation of them – ‘The war is a closed book to me’. Disappointing it may be, but there it is. At the moment my mother is not all that fine, it varies from day to day. I shall of course keep you updated. For the rest, everybody is well here.

  Regards, Paul

  Bronze women, quartz men

  DEAR PAUL,

  After a delay, my father finally saw the cardiologist and received a green light to have surgery. It’s a three-to-four-hour surgery, dangerous, but the alternative is even more dangerous. It is necessary for me to cancel my travels and so I shall not be arriving in Holland on Wednesday.

  Please tell your mother that I am very sad about delaying my visit and that I shall write to her. Will keep you abreast of how things go here and I hope you’ll let me know how things are there. I’m disappointed that I won’t meet Leon Prinz but (of course) respect his wishes.

  Regards to all,

  Alison

  ALISON,

  It is a tough story about your father. There is nothing else than waiting.

  On the 4th of October the astronomic union in the US has named a small planet or planetoid after my mother. It seems to be an honor. Your father is far more important.

  Regards and strength,

  Paul & Lucie

  Vague tuba, dim trombone

  DEAR LILY,

  A coal-black butterfly with your green eyes flutters continually overhead. ‘Lily,’ I tell it, ‘now it’s my father.’ He underwent surgery on the 24th. It lasted for six hours and has been touch and go since. He is now in intensive care. Since the surgery, he has had an incident with his heart, problems with his lungs, and more. It’s all grave and complex given his age – almost eighty-eight – and the extent of the cancerous melanoma on his neck, that was removed after it was discovered to be much more extensive then imagined (once the surgeon saw what was inside). It’s further complicated by the fact that my mother refuses to sign a DNR, having made a pact with my father (in 1942) that if something happened to the other, the remaining one would keep him/her alive as long as possible no matter what. (My mother, by the way, is still on a feeding tube, neither food nor drink having passed her lips in five years; though she lives a relatively normal life.) All in all, a mess. My sisters and I wait to see how it will play itself out. During the surgery, a nerve was cut that has affected his speech, another nerve affecting his eye, still another affecting his shoulder, also severed, so he cannot raise his arm anymore. (The worst for me is the thought that his beautiful voice that sang tenor in college, German lieder and songs from Vienna, like that of the great tenor Richard Tauber whom he tirelessly listened to while I was growing up – this voice now lisps or warbles.) He is tormented, also disorientated, does not know where he is, nor why he is there. The dementia that he gracefully lived with at home, that became something of a joke with us and with him, has gone haywire. Today he shouted at my mother with his now damaged voice: ‘Get me out of here or I’ll never forgive you!’

  When I think of him as the young father he was, with that beautiful tenor voice often in song, three strong memories come to mind.

  One: Strolling with him, seeing a blind man walking toward us holding a cup filled with yellow pencils. My father handing me a dime to put in the cup. I drop the coin into the cup and take a pencil. My father tells me, ‘You don’t take the pencil.’ So I put the pencil back in the cup.

  Two: He’s teaching me to cross the street by myself. His instructions are: ‘Look left. Look right. Look left again. If it’s all clear, run like hell.’

  Three: He’s teaching me to ride a bicycle. He’s holding on to the back of the bike’s seat, steadying it, running behind. I’m peddling as hard as I can. One moment he is holding the bike and the next moment he is not. He has stopped running, and I haven’t fallen over. I’m riding by myself. I ride away.

  Like your borscht that’s still frozen (or better be) in the freezer compartment in my little Hydra house, your voice is preserved on my answering machine from the last time you phoned, leaving the meandering, scolding message, in your heavily accented, whisky voice. Also preserved on that tape, also dead, my neighbor Kathleen, among various living voices; my father’s voice is not among them.

  Love,

  Alison

  Red and black carpenter ants infest a tree below

  DEAR MIEP AND PAUL,

  I write to let you know that my father died on Friday, October 9th. After two awful weeks of suffering, the final day was peaceful. My two sisters, my brother-in-law, my mother and I, were with him from 9 in the morning until 7:30 in the evening, when he stopped breathing. We stayed with his body afterwards for some time. The funeral will be on Monday. Crushed as we are, we’re relieved that his suffering has ended.

  Alison

  DEAR SIMON,

  As promised, here’s my account of how it all played out: my father’s funeral at Redden’s on West 14th Street (the same place that handled my Aunt Dorothy’s). His college photo had been blown up, three feet by two, in which he looks like a movie star; it hung above the pine coffin chosen by my mother. The casket was open at first for those who wanted to see him ‘in repose’, which I did and did and did, though the people at Redden’s had not done a very expert job of covering his battered face and neck – also, the way they combed his hair would have made him laugh; they had at least shaved him – something that mattered greatly to him as he hated being unshaven. A few viewed him in the coffin, but not many. Finally, the coffin was closed and a short service began. We’d hunted down the same rabbi who spoke at Dorothy’s graveside. He said Kaddish prayers, then several family members also spoke. I read from my book Love in the Second Act: a chunk of an interview conducted with him and my mother three years ago. The extract I read was from when they spoke about their visit to the Blue Grotto on Capri:

  Mother: ‘The other thing that was great fun was that we enjoyed traveling. We first went to Europe in ’62. We were old by then, we were forty. We borrowed from my retirement.’

  Father: ‘We had ten weeks.’

  Mother: ‘Eight weeks. We got to Italy and I schlepped him to the Blue Grotto because I remembered the pictures in my geography book.’

  Me: ‘You had to schlep him? He wouldn’t go voluntarily?’

  Father: ‘I didn’t know what it was.’

  Mother: ‘He never went voluntarily.’

  Father: ‘One minute! I took a picture. We went in a boat. We came to a place where there was sort of a mountain. There was something carved out and you had to bend back – lie down – to go under. I was astonished because anything you put in the water shone blue … luminescent.’

  Mother: ‘I can picture the geography book … the blue of it.’

  Father: ‘We had a good time in every place we went.’

  Mother: ‘Every trip we found a beach. He wrote three textbooks and one thing on housing … and with a cat sitting on the table while he was working, typing.’

  Father: ‘With two fingers. When I typed I could only use two fingers. But I was a fast typist. Also about forty articles.’

  My mother goes into their bedroom to take various medicines. My father and I go downstairs together, he to the cash machine at Citibank to check his balance, me to catch the E train back up to Chelsea.

  ‘Dad, do you remember the words to “Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long”?’

  He sings:

  ‘Sam, you made the pants too long,

  You made the coat and vest

  Fit the best,

  But Sam, you made the pants too long.’

  His voice is a resonant tenor.

  ‘I don’t recall the rest.’ He lights a cigarette, looks very, very tired and battered by life. Once a man who sped down the st
reet with the whole family running behind him to catch up, slowness is especially hard for him to accept. He stops for breath. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Are your legs hurting?’

  ‘No. It’s my legs. They feel like they just won’t carry me. Old age is a bitch. Your mother gets mad at me when I say it but it’s true. Trivial things have become complex.’ He reaches into his pocket and peels a twenty off the other bills. ‘Don’t take the subway today. Here. Take a taxi!’

  He holds out the twenty to me. And, as we’ve lately done many times, we stand at the corner of Third Street and LaGuardia Place and argue about it.

  After my reading, teary Thor spoke with great emotion, as did both of my sisters and others. We ended our makeshift service with a tape of Richard Harris singing music from Camelot, the last musical DVD I’d watched at home with my parents shortly before he went into hospital. While the music played, the coffin was carried out to the hearse.

  The cortège of three limos and a few private cars followed the hearse to the cemetery in Queens, near Flushing. The cemetery had been chosen by my mother years before, and, of course, agreed to, as he agreed to everything decided by my mother for sixty-eight years. This is where her Russian mother, her Russian father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, step-mother, et al. are all buried. Hence, my father of working-class origins is to rest with mother’s bourgeois family, not his own, for eternity. Of course, there’s space saved beside him, for Mother.

  Finally, the unadorned coffin of Professor William Greenwald, who taught Economics at City College in Harlem for sixty-three consecutive years without missing a day, who, when I would publish a book, would sit up all night reading it in one go, was lowered into the grave that he and his wife had purchased during a drive thirty years before. There were flowers distributed that Nancy had grown. These were dropped one by one onto the coffin by each of us, along with a shovelful of dirt. Flowers and dirt mixed on top of the coffin. Reluctantly leaving my father alone there, we were driven in the hired town cars back to Greenwich Village to eat bagels and lox, whitefish, sable and more from Russ and Daughters’ appetizing store on the Lower East Side, without our father sitting regally at the west end of the long table for the very first time in our lives.

  Until next time,

  Sad Mother Twitchett

  DEAREST MIEP,

  The open-air tennis club on 8th Avenue that I can see from my window has been roofed over. Now, rather than watching scrambling tennis singles and doubles on several courts, what I see is a great opaque dome. You would find the spectacle curious indeed. I can say for sure, even though these past months have sapped my energy and spirit, that I’ll be there to see you in February, following a visit to a friend in the south of France. After that, I’ll be going on to Paris and London for several book events. I’m planning to enjoy your 101st birthday with you. This time we can celebrate in our usual way with raw herring and raw onions, as you like. For dinner, as always, your favorite, I will get us chicken with mushrooms and rice from the Chinese restaurant near you. And we can top it all with our very favorite chocolate pudding with whipped cream – WITHOUT balloons, I promise. I haven’t forgotten that after the festivities marking your 100th birthday were finished last year and the door shut on the last special guest, the first thing you asked, even before coffee, was that I please remove the colored helium balloons stamped ‘100 YARS’ that had risen to the ceiling of your sitting-room. As on every visit, I anticipate you in your armchair, me on the couch drinking our first cup of hot coffee together with an entire week’s visit ahead of us. It won’t be long now.

  Love and friendship, now and always,

  Alison

  Neil Young’s plaintive voice drifts through the open bedroom window – ‘Out of the blue and into the black … And once you’re gone you won’t come back. The king is gone but he’s not forgotten, this is the story of Johnny Rotten.’

  HI ALISON LESLIE GOLD,

  I am a Californian who has been recently coming to Amsterdam for work. Is Mrs. Gies still alive? If so, where can I write to her? I just finished your book today, as I lay for two days sick and away from home here in Amsterdam. Please tell her, if you can, that the book is what made me stronger.

  With a thousand thanks.

  Anna Stein

  DEAR ANNA,

  Thank you for writing. Yes, Miep Gies is alive and relatively well. She was 100 years old last February 15th. Amazing, is it not? I’ll bring your letter with me to her when I visit, which will be soon, for birthday 101. I’m sure it will please her to know that our book helped you. I hope you get well and are able to enjoy the remainder of your time in Amsterdam.

  Alison Leslie Gold

  OH DEAR, OH DEAR. It’s a dark and unhappy time, dear Alison.

  Dr Johnson, writing to Rev Thomas Warton, an old Oxford friend, in 1754:

  You know poor Mr. Dodsley has lost his wife; I believe he is much affected. I hope he will not suffer so much as I yet suffer for the loss of mine. – OIMOI TI D’OIMOI; THNITA GAR PEPONTHAMEN – I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wild of life, without any direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on the world to which I have little relation. Yet I would endeavour, by the help of you and your brother, to supply the art of closer union, by friendship: and hope to have long the pleasure of being, dear Sir, most affectionately yours, Sam Johnson

  The quotation within the quotation should be written in the Greek alphabet, of course. It is, according to a footnote in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a fragment from the lost ‘Bellepheron’ of Euripides, and translates: ‘Alas! yet why alas? We have but suffered the common lot of mortality.’

  Love,

  Alan

  – Interlogue II –

  In October 1968, after a four-month barefoot idyll with my two-year-old son on car-less Fire Island (a thin barrier island in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island), learning the ins and outs of vodka and gin, seduction, dancing around the clock (‘C’mon Baby Light My Fire’), the season changed and I had no choice but to find my old shoes and quit the island. I’d named my tiny son Thor after the Norse God of Thunder, wishing to start him off in life with a strong, forceful name – in lieu of a father. A few weeks further into autumn, Thor, my sister Nancy (aged nineteen, shy, dark, beautiful, taking a break from college), and I (aged twenty-three) sailed on Cunard’s ocean liner the RMS Queen Elizabeth. This ship had been built in the 1930s as a luxury liner and had carried troops during World War II. In 1968 it was about to make its final eastward journey before being retired. We had an inside room in Cabin Class.

  After docking in Cherbourg, we sailed on to Southampton where we disembarked, and on by bus to London where we three spent a month in a hotel. While in London I hired a young man (half- Norwegian, half-English, named Olav, also on a break from university), as an au pair. We four then sailed to Copenhagen. After a month in the city center near the King’s Palace, we moved outside the city alongside the King’s Deer Park in Klampenberg on whose beach, a few streets away from our pension, Danish Resistance heroes had risked their lives to ferry Jews marked for death across the water to safety in Sweden. (I like to imagine, now, that this adumbrated a later me, that I would walk on the beach and imagine the Danish boats ferrying Jews into the night.)

  After two months in Klampenberg we sailed in dead of winter on several white ferries around Scandinavia, eventually returning to New York after the New Year. The song that went with that trip was:

  Once upon a time there was a tavern

  Where we used to raise a glass or two

  Remember how we laughed away the hours

  And dreamed of all the great things we could do

  Those were the days my friend

  We thought they’d never end

  We’d sing and dance for ever and a day

  We’d live the life we choose

  We’d fight and never lose

  For we were young and sure to have our w
ay.

  Not one of my more elevated lyrical fixations. Mary Hopkin did the singing, but the lyrics were drawn from the Russian romance ‘Dorogoi Dlinnoyu’ – ‘By the Long Road’ – and the words of Konstantin Podrevsky. The song had practically become my anthem. Shortly before leaving Scandinavia, while sitting in a movie theater in Stockholm waiting for a film to begin, it began to play. At that moment I had everything that could have made for a bright, shining, useful life; but my days of civil rights work, political protest, altruistic custodianship of Lost and Found, had been trumped by the idea that the world owed me a good time. I dwelled on the final stanza:

  Just tonight I stood before the tavern

  Nothing seemed the way it used to be

  In the glass I saw a strange reflection

  Was that lonely woman really me.

  Yes, I thought, one grows old, people die, I’ll die too … I’m not that young anymore. But I do still have a chance to have a good time … Don’t I?

  By the end of the 1960s (Vietnam War raging, child turned toddler turning into a boy), what could have been a privileged, rounded life, was spiralling downward. My thirst for alcohol and other intoxicants was harder and harder to quench. My travels from one exotic place to the next were looking more like a fuite en avant – a Lolita-like dash from motel to motel: try to keep moving so as to outrun the inevitable. In 1970, Thor and I sailed from New York on the Greek ocean liner Queen Anna Maria that landed in Piraeus ten days later under a full moon – June 21st. The same au pair, Olav, who was free for the summer, came to meet us at the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens. Inspired by fantasies of meeting (or being?) Alan Bates or Anthony Quinn from Zorba the Greek, I had planned on spending a month on a Greek Island with whitewashed houses, a burning sun, and chose Hydra because it was said to be another island without cars. We boarded a ferry in Piraeus that meandered through the Saronic Gulf for four and a half hours. I was wearing red and white bowling shoes and very dark glasses, getting acquainted with the taste of retsina that, at first, tasted like turpentine. I could have been described as dissolute, adrift, drunk, irreverent on principle.