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The librarian left me alone with the microfiche machine, after explaining how to access the different periodicals by date and keyword. I had used those machines on occasion in college when working on term papers, maybe eight years ago, and I never liked them. I spent an hour putting in one rectangular film after another under the small warm bulb, searching for the name Sitteroff in medical and scientific journals. I found a half-dozen references to people whom I couldn’t imagine would be related to me, but it wasn’t until I started in on the newspapers that I came across something odd.
A contributed article in The Washington Post, dated only eight months earlier, mentioned the name Nathan Sitteroff. I skimmed through the piece and nearly discarded it—something to do with mothers and abusive husbands and custody battles. A woman named Mandy Glessman wrote it, apparently an attorney who was going through a bitter divorce offering practical advice for abused wives. My eyes were tired from the strain of reading small type in bad lighting, and my recent fitful sleeping combined with the stuffy room made it difficult to concentrate. In my excitement to get to the library, I had skipped lunch, and my stomach, now free of nausea, cried out for food. Yet, a secondary glance at the author’s byline showed her to be from New York, so that made me stop and reread.
I woke from my ennui when I found the sentence with my father’s name.
“I named my son after an uncle I’d never met—Nathan Sitteroff. My father used to tell me stories of how he and his protective older brother were moved from one foster home to another during the Great Depression. How they survived starvation and poverty and cruelty. Often the agency would try to place them in separate homes, because no one wanted to take on two children at once. Yet, my uncle Nathan refused to let his little brother Samuel—”
I drew in a breath. Sam Sitteroff. I knew that was my uncle’s name. And there was the bit about the foster homes.
“—be taken away from him. How he’d cry and cling to my father, until the agency relented. Finally, one kind couple, with two sons of their own, agreed to take them in. Those sweet people were the grandparents I knew growing up. They raised Sam and Nathan as their own, putting them through school and eventually adopting them.”
The article went on to discuss how Mandy had married a violent man and the legal steps she’d had to go through to gain custody and protect her son, Nathan, from his father. The article filled three columns, and nothing more was said about Nathan Sitteroff. But that was enough proof for me.
The whole time I sat hunched over in that room, Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” ran through my head. Raff had always been enamored with Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He had spent a hefty sum on a large illustrated and annotated edition of the book that featured richly colored drawings alongside commentary and text. I kept picturing Raff, the brave but foolhardy champion, stalking the fearsome Jabberwocky with the jaws that bite and the claws that catch. He and Neal used to act out the poem, replete with foppish costumes made from sheets belted around the waist and tied around his neck for a cape, old Halloween attire, and illustrative cardboard embellishments, such as chest armor and a woeful dragon-type mask that sported bright red eyes drawn in our mother’s lipstick.
Surely, Raff’s current mental nemesis was not unlike this colorful fabrication of Carroll’s mind, a phantasm of evil with eyes of flame, something unsettling and horrifying that whiffled through the tulgey wood of Raff’s brain to haunt and torment him in his darkest hours, burbling as it came. What Raff needed was a true vorpal blade to fight the Jabberwocky, a blade that, according to the poem, went snicker-snack as the fearless hero fought the beast. ”One two! One two! And through and through . . . He left it dead, and with its head, he went galumphing back.”
I printed out the article and moved on to the AMA Journals. It didn’t take long for me to find contact information for Samuel Sitteroff MD, with a license to practice in the state of New York. As I sat in the hard-back wooden chair, a sudden memory came to mind—of a small apartment inside a dark building that smelled musty, of dust and exhaust. A dank and creaking elevator with an iron grate that slid closed over the opening, entrapping me like a prison gate—and I could still hear the deep whirring sound the elevator made as it slugged upward, passing pale yellow metal doors with large black numbers for each floor.
Whenever I thought of New York, those were the images and smells I associated it with, but why? I strained to recall that apartment, a room that made occasional appearance in my dreams, with heavily upholstered couches covered with clear plastic. Plastic runners over the carpet. A tall glass cabinet filled with ceramic figurines. The smell of chicken soup? Stale cigar smoke. Two short, rotund people. The man hacking with a deep chest cough, sitting in an armchair and staring at a TV with the sound way up. The woman with tight white curls pinned to her head, in a pale blue floral housedress and clunky brown orthopedic shoes on her feet. European accents, hard to understand. Reserved smiles, polite, but no sense of feeling comfortable or welcome.
Those were my grandparents, I now understood. West Gunhill Road. Bronx. Where had that bit of trivia come from? I couldn’t dredge up any other impressions, except for a strange New York skyline, one that had something like two spaceships hovering in the air next to a giant metal globe along the side of a busy thoroughfare. Something incongruent, but so identifiable as New York in my child-mind’s eye. I don’t remember ever having been there, but perhaps I had.
Maybe Raff would remember; he was four years older. Had he even been with me there, at the time? I looked up the number for the New York Bar Association, figuring maybe I could call tomorrow, since it was too late Eastern Time to do more that day. Maybe I could find Mandy, my cousin.
I rolled the word cousin around in my mouth. Unlike most people I knew—who had so many family members they couldn’t keep track of all the names—I had just my little arena of close relatives. My mother was an only child. She had aunts and uncles and cousins back east, but for some reason we never saw them while growing up. No one ever came out to California to visit us. Mandy Glessman would be my only true first cousin on my father’s side. Maybe there were more cousins I didn’t know about. Like little Nathan Sitteroff, five years old, named after my father.
A strange affection entered my heart for this long-lost cousin who thought to honor my own father by naming her son after him—something even my brother hadn’t cared to do. No doubt the thought had crossed Raff’s mind. But maybe by dismissing it, he meant it as a slap in our father’s face.
A tinge of annoyance stirred within me. Mandy Glessman had been told more about my own father than I had. I felt deprived of something due me, and hoped that my uncle and cousin would have stories to tell me—those keepers and caretakers of my father’s past. Even if they only had a little light to shed on the person of my father, I wanted to hear it.
Sometimes we walk into a restaurant and smell food cooking, and only then do we realize how starving we are, that we’d gone all day without eating. Every olfactory sense wakes up and sends an alarm. That’s how I felt, holding the phone number of my uncle’s medical practice in my hand. I had gone through my whole life never once thinking about my father. For how could I miss someone I didn’t remember? I was always the odd kid at school, the aberration with only one parent attending PTA night or the Christmas show—back then in the days before divorce was the norm. The principal of our elementary school had sat next to me at sixth-grade graduation as a surrogate father, trying to make up for my lack. Kids who came over to play would remark on how strange it was our mother worked full-time and that we had Mexican maids living in our house and making us dinner.
But in that moment at the library, standing there in the microfiche cubicle, I sensed a fresh loss, like I’d lost a limb I never knew I’d had. I ached for a father I’d never had the opportunity to know. Maybe my tumultuous emotions could be credited to my displaced grief due to my miscarrying. That was the likely culprit. And then I considered: What if my mother, in her grief, felt she had to shut every door that opened to a memory of my father? Maybe that was why she never talked about him. Why we stopped seeing relatives. Maybe that was the only way she could cope and get on with life, raising three children on her own. Who could blame her for that?
Maybe enough time had gone by, and perhaps once I spoke to my uncle and heard his story, I could offer something back to my mother, to my brothers—some gift of knowledge that would heal us and shed some light on the unspoken tragedy that defined and bound our family together, for ill or good. Here, perhaps, would be my vorpal sword.
I walked through the solemn halls of the library, imagining swinging my sword against myth and misconception. One, two! One, two! My sword would sing out with truth and revelation, banishing the dark and scary things hiding in the woods of the past.
I pondered how in “Jabberwocky” the reader is given a warning by an unidentified character “(Beware the Jabberwock, my son!)” and later: “Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Calloh! Callay! He chortled in his joy.” It never occurred to me before, but surely that voice belonged to the young champion’s father, who issued warning, and yet followed up with joyful praise over his son’s conquering of the loathsome beast with eyes of flame.
I had no doubt that Raff heard that pointed warning and quaked in fear as he faced down his foe. But he carried no vorpal blade, nor any weapon that he could fashion against his faceless assailant. And why did the young hero’s father issue such a warning—to beware the Jabberwock? Could it have been framed by his own disheartening experience of defeat?
I pictured our father, dying in a hospital bed, racked with disease, the monster’s flaming eyes pursuing him through his cold-sweat nightmares. My father, impotent in rage and valor, wallowing in failure, and my brother standing at his bedside, smelling camphor and death, seeing firsthand the horror of the beast and his own ineluctable fate rushing toward him out of the tulgey wood.
My father’s voice called out from the grave in challenge and warning: “Has thou slain the Jabberwock?” But Raff’s answer of “not yet, perhaps never” gave no guarantee he’d be welcomed into anyone’s joyful arms. Or so Raff believed?
I drove home in the dusk, my mind full of imaginings, full of dialogue between me and my cousin, as I pictured a wellspring of information that could fill in the blanks of my life. I pulled up to the house and opened the car door, the invitation for Buster and Angel to leap on me, their faces overwrought with the nuances of anxiety characteristic of dogs that sense a shift in the security of their home. Usually Jeremy would be there by this time of evening. My menagerie at the barn bellowed and baaed and neighed, a dozen stomach alarms ringing in distress—as if I ever forgot to feed them.
With the dogs at my heels, I made my rounds, filled feeders with hay and scattered grain on the dirt. I checked on Sassy and watched her triplets push each other off the makeshift teeter-totter Jeremy had built out of a two-by-six plank and a piece of split firewood. The kids looked robust and energetic, and Sassy seemed settled happily in motherhood, lying with her hooves tucked under her and chewing her cud.
I set my purse down in the kitchen and flipped on lights, trying to discount the ominous silence that filled the house like a thick fluid. Why was silence so much louder than sound? The small noises—the clock ticking, the hum of the refrigerator—seemed magnified by Jeremy’s absence, the house a cavernous echo chamber that hungered for vibration. This would be my third night apart from my husband. We’d taken trips in the past that separated us, but that loneliness was always tempered by the assurance of reuniting.
I noticed the red dot flashing on the answering machine and pressed the Play button, my eyes catching on the phone number Jeremy had scribbled on the notepad for me, in case I needed to reach him at Daniel’s house. Hearing Jeremy’s voice choked me up, but I bit my lip and listened as I spooned dog food into two bowls. His tone sounded tired and harried. I heard people talking in the background. Customers in the store. He wanted to let me know he had swung by at noon and dropped off my ring. He didn’t want to risk putting it somewhere and forgetting.
Forgetting what? The ring, or our relationship?
I pressed Stop, walked over to the sink, and took the ring off the windowsill, where it lay next to the soap dish. I slipped it on my finger as I walked over to the TV in the living room, where I flipped channels until I found something innocuous on the Turner Classics station. I recognized Marilyn Monroe and Richard Widmark, talking in hushed voices in a hotel room. I turned the sound up, then settled onto the couch—open invitation for my dogs to flank me. They hopped onto the comfy cushions, smelling like Alpo Beef, and made sure my arms received lots of slobbery licks before they squirmed around and settled with sighs by my side.
Marilyn Monroe grew dreamy, lost in memory over her fiancé, who had disappeared in a plane over the ocean. Apparently she was a bit confused, thinking Richard Widmark—a total stranger she had invited into her room—was her lost love. I watched the rest of the movie, which involved some nosy, suspicious neighbors; a little girl bound and tied in the next room; and a smarmy house detective. In the end, though, Marilyn’s mental state had deteriorated such that the police had to cart her off to the loony bin. The apparent result of living in denial. If only she had just accepted the truth—that she would never see her lover again—then she wouldn’t have lost her marbles. I decided I really disliked that movie, whatever it was called.
Fortunately, The African Queen was on next. At least Humphrey Bogart took fate in both hands, albeit in the shape of a bottle, drinking whiskey until he passed out. And this movie had a happy ending, despite his ship blowing up. In the wreckage and flotsam, he had at least found love. I liked to believe he and Kate lived happily ever after, now that the Germans had been thwarted.
See, I told myself, giving a nod to Bogey, love can survive untold tribulation—even Nazis. Surely, Jeremy and I would work all this out.
Surely.