Aunt Sophie is the hollow-cheeked stick figure in the stained hospital gown staring at me from her cot—pink eyes squinting—as if I’m a hallucination. A scarlet woolen scarf is coiled around her neck, and her tiny right hand has vanished inside a gigantic black glove that is cupped on her lap, the leather palm facing up, like a grafted gorilla hand.
Though Sophie will hunt through her sheets and pillows for the missing left glove over the next week, and though she will insist on my demanding its return from every nurse on the floor, it will remain forever lost in the undergrowth of University Hospital.
It’s a Friday morning in mid-December in Mineola, New York, eighteen miles due east of Manhattan. Sophie had a heart attack four days ago. Her husband Ben—my mother’s older brother—is long dead, and they never had children. Sophie’s closest blood relative, a nephew named Hans, lives in Berlin, but I’ve had no luck reaching him or his wife. So it’s pretty much up to me to help out, especially since my mother is in her eighties and no longer driving. I’ve just flown in from my home in Boston without telling my aunt I was coming. I own a garden center in Lowell and business is slow in the winter; I can stay through Christmas if need be.
“Is that really you?” she asks with disbelief when I reach her doorway.
I rush to her with the urgency of a boy who learned—while sitting in her lap—that rose blossoms could be picked from behind my ear. Every childhood needs a magician, and Sophie was mine.
She doesn’t open her arms. Not even a smile. I press my lips to her cool forehead. In the past, even trembling with a fever, she would have held me tight.
“Ich bin …” She speaks German.
“English,” I tell her.
“Help me drink some orange juice. I’m dying of thirst.” She points to the white Styrofoam cup on her tray. Her skin is as pleated as crepe paper. She’s down to ninety-six pounds, the head nurse told me on the phone. Apparently, she’d stopped eating a week before her heart attack, her appetite taken away by one of her depressions. “Not an ounce of fat on her,” the nurse had added, as if she were describing the extra-lean turkey on a deli menu. “If she doesn’t eat more …”
What will I do without her? I began thinking then, and I’m still thinking it now.
I hand Sophie the cup. She rocks back and forth to try to sit upright, but she hasn’t enough force in her coat-hanger arms to make it. I wedge myself behind her, propping her up. She slurps through the straw. Her back presses into my chest, and it’s a relief to have her weight—the history of a woman who has lived through so much—against me. It’s like carrying a world. I want to say something heroic that is the measure of my love—I will hold you up as long as you need me … Instead, I comb my hands through her frazzled hair, which looks as if the ambulance medics set it on fire.
“You need a shampoo,” I tell her.
“I need a lot of things,” she replies, in that oy vey tone of hers.
I squeeze her bony shoulders and laugh; we’ve agreed many times before that a sense of humor in the hospital is essential. But amusement is not a rabbit she can pull from her hat right now. She makes a clucking noise and leans against me—my helpless eighty-nine-year-old child. In a minute, she is asleep and snoring, but with her hazel eyes wide open.
I wriggle gently out from behind her, but she sits up with a start and says harshly, “Why didn’t you meet me?”
I ease her head and shoulders back to her pillow. The sun, freed from the low-hanging winter clouds, chooses the gray tile floor, the metal frame of her cot, her feet … “Meet you where?” I ask.
“I waited all morning at Karls Keller. You were supposed to be there.”
Karl’s Cellar? Her eyes are moist in a strange, unseeing way as if filled with viscous glue. She’s obviously deep inside her childhood in Berlin.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. I know by now—her fourth visit to the hospital in nine months—that her delusions are the result of what the physicians call hospital psychosis. My own theory is that her mind has retreated from a situation she finds unbearable. My best strategy is simply to find a place for myself inside her mad scenarios—to join Alice across the looking glass. But this Alice turns out to be more of a Red Queen.
“You should be ashamed of yourself!” she snaps. “When you didn’t come, Isaac left.”
“Who’s Isaac?”
“He lives there.” She points a jutting finger toward the window and the brick building across the parking lot.
“Where’s he gone?”
She gives me a puzzled look. “I don’t know.”
“He’ll probably be back in a little while,” I say cheerfully.
“Don’t bet on it,” she retorts in a menacing tone. Then she talks German again.
In June, when Sophie had gastrointestinal bleeding caused by her blood thinner, she informed me she was staying in the White House. The only hitch was that Hillary Clinton had given her a maid’s room. Did Sophie add that indignity so she could complain about the uncomfortable bed and bland food? Perhaps our deepest emotional needs are the bricks and mortar of our delusions.
* * *
Mom and I visit Sophie the next day. While I’m holding open the hospital door, the harsh fluorescent lighting and the odor of disinfectant tempt us to race back to the car. We promise ourselves a nice lunch if we can stay with Sophie for two hours. The briberies of love.
“Be prepared for cuckoo land again,” I tell my mother as we’re in the elevator riding up to the Coronary Care Unit.
“Good for Sophie!” she replies, hunting in her bag for her lip balm. Mom’s lips get chapped when she’s upset. “Who’d want to know they were staying in this dump!”
“It’s a nice place,” I reply.
“If you want to meet the Angel of Death over a bowl of cottage cheese.”
Lack of sleep makes my aunt’s psychosis worse over the next few days. She twists and turns on the cot as if she’s on a bed of rocks. She claims she never falls asleep at night.
“Not efen a vink,” she informs my mother in a distraught voice.
Sophie and Mom commiserate with flapping hands. My mother is wearing her fuchsia beret and black cardigan. Everybody’s cold but me. She takes a blue enamel butterfly from her bag and pins it on Sophie’s gown.
“Doesn’t your aunt look cute?” I lower my magazine. The two of them are staring at me expectantly.
“Absolutely.”
Satisfied, Mom sits down again and moves on to George W. Bush. I love my mother for her unflagging energy in the face of all obstacles.
“I can’t understand how even an idiot could vote for that ignoramus!” she tells Sophie.
“Americans are as asleep as Germans when it comes to politics,” my aunt replies.
“They’re stupid bulvans!” meaning peasants, my mother bellows.
“So vat trouble is our Texan Führer making now?”
Mom laughs. Sophie doesn’t. Later that afternoon, she gives up on English. I decipher what I can and guess the rest. Mom sometimes translates. She assures me that Sophie’s Berliner German and her Yiddish are practically the same language, but I have my doubts.
My aunt never closes her eyelids in our presence. She swivels her head around and surveys the world with those gooey eyes like a refugee from a Beckett play.
Two days later, while I’m squatting next to her, untangling her catheter from around her leg, hoping I won’t accidentally pull it out—as I had the moist misfortune of doing the day before—she whispers in my ear. “I tried to kill him.”
Sophie says that in German, of course, but does me the favor of repeating it in English when I tell her I don’t know what she’s talking about.
“Who’d you try to kill?” I ask, not taking her seriously.
“Papa.”
She nods and holds her finger to her lips like a little girl. “Don’t tell anyone.”
I want to say, An Allied bomb dropped on your father, but I keep my mouth shut and get back to the catheter because bringing up anything to do with the real Führer may only make her retreat further.
“Enough of that,” I say, “it’s time to take a nap.”
I lift her foot, swollen twice its normal size with the fluids that her heart isn’t strong enough to pump around her body, and pass it gently through the plastic lasso. Success.
“What are you doing?” she demands.
“Testing your reflexes,” I lie as I stand up; informing her she’d been tangled would only start her criticizing the nurses for not paying enough attention to her.
“Will you stay with me if I nap?” she asks.
“Of course.”
She looks around as if searching for something she’s lost. She holds up her gorilla-grafted hand.
“Have you seen the left glove?” she asks.
“Not that again, please!”
She manages to sit up after several tries, then slides her leg over the side of the bed.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m going to my bedroom to look for my glove,” she replies.
The security belt tied around her waist keeps her from getting to her feet. Stymied, she sits with her shoulders hunched, staring at the white ribbon as if it’s from another dimension.
“Take this goddamn belt off of me!” she snarls.
I can feel my frustration as an ever-tightening knot in my chest. By now, it’s as big as a billiard ball—the sinister-looking black one.
“I’m not allowed,” I reply.
She glares at me. “You’re a bastard!”
I’m obviously now part of the plot to keep her here against her will. “Why don’t you close your eyes and get some sleep,” I tell her.
“Can you … can you take me upstairs?” She tugs on her earlobe. It’s her gesture of terror; I’ve known it for years.
“There’s only more hospital wards upstairs,” I say gently.
She gazes down, forlorn. I go to the window. All the oak tree branches are bare and brittle-looking. New York turns into such a frigid wasteland in December. Maybe it’s the similarity to Berlin’s climate that takes Sophie’s thoughts back to her childhood. When I turn around, she throws down her arms, livid with anger. “Vye von’t you let me go up to my room?”
“You’ll be fine here.”
“But I’m not here!” she says despairingly. She scowls at me as if I don’t understand her deepest needs and never will.
“If you’re not here, then where are you?” I ask.
Stumped, she replies, “I don’t know, but I’m not here.”
This is the Zen-like declaration I will repeat to a dozen friends over the next few weeks. Now, it takes me a few seconds to think of a reply.
“Well, wherever you are,” I emphasize, “you need to sleep, so close your eyes and nap.”
She starts to speak, then looks at me as if she’s forgotten her lines.
“Trust me,” I tell her. “I’ll keep a watch out for you. They won’t get you.”
There’s no need to say who they are; there’s only ever been one they in my conversations with Sophie about life in Germany in the 1930s.
Four days later, I drive Aunt Sophie to her house in my rental car. She lives in Roslyn, just a few miles from my mom. I’ve already moved one of the guest beds into the dining room, along with her night table, since she won’t be able to navigate the stairs for a while. There’s no bathroom on the ground floor, so I’ve also bought a commode. A twenty-nine-year-old Filipino nurse named Maria will spend the first two weeks with my aunt. Then we’ll see how much home care she needs.
Maria and my mother help Sophie get from the driveway to the front door. She teeters behind her walker, her stiff, nervous arms holding the metal rim too far from her body to have much balance. Maria is gripping the belt loop of her pants in case she starts to tumble.
“Step up!” my mother keeps prodding, patting the empty fabric where Sophie’s rear end used to be.
“I’m stepping, I’m stepping …”
Sophie’s mind returns that afternoon. I know that for sure when she tosses her gorilla glove into the garbage.
“Two points!” I cheer.
I’m in the dining room eating strawberry ice cream out of the container. High-fat foods help keep me from getting depressed.
When she looks at me the glue is gone from her eyes. “Sit,” she says, pounding the bed beside her. As I sink into the mattress, she kisses my cheek and gives me the big hug I’ve been needing. “You feel good,” she says.
“I’m glad you’re back,” I tell her.
“Thank you for coming.” She kisses me again. “And for moving a bed downstairs.”
“You’re welcome. Where’d you get that glove anyway?”
“It was Ben’s.”
I give her a spoon of ice cream. She feigns a swoon like a silent-movie actress. “Delicious,” she says.
She looks around at her makeshift bedroom: the wooden cabinet where she keeps her china; the dark stain in the ceiling made by the water that leaked last summer from her thirty-year-old, gasping-for-breath air conditioner; a bilingual edition of Rilke’s poetry that I’ve put on her night table; the Otto Dix drawing of a gentlemanly poet with spidery hands on the wall behind her. She ends up focusing on the small mountain of unopened letters on the dining table, probably thinking, The same pile that would be there if I were dead …
She refuses another spoonful of ice cream and leans against me. Making it back across the looking glass only to be exiled from your own bedroom and find two dozen unpaid bills isn’t easy, and I hold her while she cries.
“Who’s Isaac?” I ask Sophie that evening.
She’s got on her big black-rimmed glasses and is trying, unsuccessfully, to thread a needle so she can sew the cuffs on my pants; a few minutes earlier, when I brought her a bowl of raspberry Jell-O, she noticed that the stitching was coming undone.
Only when she’s got the needle all ready and is satisfied with her length of thread do I repeat my question. She lowers her hands into her lap.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she replies.
“You mentioned an Isaac while you were in the hospital.”
She shrugs. “What did I say about him?”
“You said he disappeared. You implied that he wasn’t coming back any time soon.”
She pulls my pants across her lap and huddles over them, daunted by the prospect of the task ahead. She looks like a rabbit planning strategies for a leaf of lettuce too big to fit in its mouth.
“Was he a family friend?” I ask.
“He was my friend. A neighbor in Berlin.”
“Jewish?”
She nods.
“Do you know what happened to him?”
“More or less, but now isn’t the right time to talk about it.”
Once my pants are sewn and I’ve modeled them to Sophie’s satisfaction, she heaves an exhausted sigh and tugs her shawl over her shoulders. “I can’t seem to get warm.”
“Put your beanie on.”
“Then my head itches.”
“That’s from not shampooing your hair for ten days. I’ll give you a shower later today. Put the hat on for now.”
It’s blue, with a white tassel. My mother dug it out from the nether regions of her closet. It looks like something a high school cheerleader would wear.
Sophie gazes around unhappily. “I must look ridiculous,” she says.
“You look fine. You’ll just have to forget about your career in high fashion for a while.”
“Oh, honey, I’m not long for this world. This is it.”
Turning away from emotional meltdown, my mind seizes on a plan: If I can just fatten her up she’ll be fine …
“What do you want for dinner?” I ask her.
“What have we got?”
“I bought tuna steaks. And potatoes for baking.”
She looks stymied. Maybe she’s weighing the advantages and disadvantages of fish. Protein and useful oils, but also mercury …
“I could go buy a barbecue chicken if you like.”
At length, she replies, “Tuna with a baked potato would be perfect. Can you stay for dinner?”
“Only if you don’t talk about dying again.”
“How can I promise that?”
“It’s easy,” I tell her. “You say, I promise to keep my Schnauze shut.”
Sophie giggles. A minor victory.
Slumb’ring deep in everything, dreams a song as yet unheard, and the world begins to sing, if you find the magic word … Aunt Sophie recites this poem to me—translating from German—while I’m giving her a shower. “I learned those verses when I was fourteen,” she tells me with an amused smile. Then she asks, “Did you ever see The Cabinet of Dr Caligari?”
“No.”
“See it sometime. It’s about a sleepwalker trained by a circus magician to commit murders. The movie is all shadows climbing up walls and irrational angles, and spaces that don’t make sense … a nightmare come to life. We Germans should have memorized every scene, but we didn’t have the courage.” She gives me a withering look. “Now, all your American films are comic books. The sleepwalkers have become little children.”
My aunt eats like a crocodile over the next few days—zucchini latkes, moussaka, salmon steaks, sweet potatoes, microwave popcorn, coffee yoghurt … Her mouth opens and the food disappears. Her favorite meal becomes spaghetti with Buitoni tomato sauce, and the moment she licks the last traces of pasta from her plate, she looks up at me, my mother, and Maria with famished, hopeful eyes and asks what’s next. She’d make a good Oliver Twist in an old-age-home production. In between meals, she snacks. I joke that she’s set Cinnamon Crisp stock soaring on Wall Street.
“Well, I’m hungry,” she replies by way of explanation.
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
Maria is patient and cheerful. She makes wonderful lumpia—Filipino spring rolls. Maria grew up in Manila and worked for a wealthy banker in Saudi Arabia before moving to New York. She also takes over Jell-O preparation from me.
One afternoon, while Sophie and I are sipping tea on her bed, she hands me a folded scrap of paper. “Open it,” she says.
I find an Istanbul address for her nephew Hans.
“But Hans lives in Berlin,” I say. “Don’t you remember?”
“No, he lives in Istanbul.”
“But you used to go to Berlin every year to see him.”
“I would fly to Berlin for a few days and then go on to Turkey. I never told you or your mother. The address and phone you have is for his summer place.”
“Why all the secrecy?”
She puts her tea down and breaks off a square of her Ghirardelli chocolate bar. Dark chocolate has become her new obsession—an inheritance from her father, she has told me. “It would take days to explain all the reasons to you, and even then … You didn’t live through the war, you wouldn’t understand.” She nibbles at her square.
“I might understand if you try to explain. I’m not an idiot.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it. The important thing is that if Hans doesn’t make it here in time, there are some things I’ll want you to tell him.”
“In time for what?” I demand, annoyed by her pessimism.
“You know what I mean. If … if something bad should happen.”
“All right, so what does Hans need to know?”
More nibbling. “I’m leaving three-quarters of what I have to him. The other quarter is for you and Ruthie.” Ruthie is my mother. “I’ve named you as the executor, and I want you to make it easy for Hans to collect his inheritance. Also, I’ve left 1,000 dollars to take care of my brother’s grave. It’s all in my will—you’ll find it upstairs in Ben’s file cabinets.”
“Your brother? I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“When did he die?”
“A long time ago. My son was named after him.”
“Sophie, I think maybe you’re getting confused. You and Ben … you never had children.”
“A great deal happened before the war. Forget it.” She twirls her hand in the air as if explaining is useless.
Did Sophie really have a son and did he die during the war? “Talk to me,” I plead, an ache opening in my gut. “I’m worried about you.”
“I can’t—not now,” she replies. “Give me time.”
Sophie has put on nine pounds by Christmas and has the beginnings of a rear end again, which is good since she no longer has to use a cushion every time she sits down. But her feet are swollen like water balloons. She can hardly hobble around, even with her walker.
Maria coats my aunt’s feet with moisturizer at night to keep the reddened skin from tearing. Sophie wears my slippers, size ten and a half.
She has me sit with her one afternoon and asks, “What did I tell you in the hospital about before the war?”
“Mostly gibberish. You told me you tried to kill your father.”
“Odd.”
“Do you remember what you were thinking?”
“No.”
We sit in silence. On her request, I rub her back, which hurts constantly—the result of being permanently arched into a letter C.
“Oh, shit!” she suddenly says.
She’s peeing on herself, and not for the first time since she’s come home. She can’t control her bladder because of the double dose of diuretic she’s on—the cardiologist’s attempt to shrink the swelling in her feet. I help her hobble over to the commode, then get her pants and underwear down as quick as I can.
“I’m a mess,” she says, starting to cry. “I can’t take any more of this. This is not a life.”
I clean her up with paper towels. Maria helps her change her clothing. When she’s under the covers again, her beanie back on, I sit next to her.
“Sophie, you said you were friends with that neighbor of yours, Isaac, implying that maybe your parents didn’t like him.”
“They didn’t.”
“You haven’t ever told me much about your childhood, you know—just a few stories about your mother. I want to hear more.”
She rolls over away from me. “No, I think I’d better keep my Schnauze shut.”
I’ve coaxed Sophie out of the house for the first time since her return from the hospital, and we’re sitting around the table in my mom’s kitchen watching River of No Return, a movie we haven’t seen in years. I’d forgotten completely that the doe-eyed boy in the film was Tommy Rettig, who later played the kid in the Lassie television series. This is the sort of trivial revelation that somehow helps me fight off despair.
Sophie’s wearing her shawl around her shoulders and eating her Cinnamon Crisp. After a while, Mom yawns. “I’m beat,” she tells us. “I’m going up to nap.” To Sophie, she adds, “You can lie down with me if you want—or take a snooze on the sofa.”
“Thanks, but I’m not sleepy.”
Once we hear Mom close her door, Sophie points the remote at the television and turns off Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum being attacked by Hollywood Indians.
“I’m not Jewish,” she announces. “My parents were Christians.”
This confession bursts out of her. “Sophie, I think maybe you need to take a nap after all,” I reply. “You’re overtired.”
“Ben and I let your mother and everyone else think I was Jewish. After the war, it was easy to remake my identity. A bit … a bit like Andre now that I think about it. Though in his case he was able to become himself again once he fled Germany. Not me.” She shakes her head bitterly. “I think a part of me died when I left Berlin.”
“Who’s Andre?” I ask.
“Someone I knew when I was young. And a character in an old silent movie, The Student of Prague. It’s about a sorcerer who brings a young man’s reflection to life.”
“You’re confusing me.”
“Sorry. I really only meant to apologize to you for lying about my father the other day.”
“Lying? You hardly said anything about him.”
“I said it was odd that I’d told you I tried to kill him, but it wasn’t odd at all.” She takes off her beanie and heaves it angrily at the television, as if it has been preventing her from thinking. She scratches her head with both hands, raising her hair into a tangled gray crest. “I’ve got a lot of things I need to tell you before I get any worse. The problem is that there’s just too much to say.” She leans toward me and knocks her fist on the tabletop between us, as if she’s just played her hand at poker and is waiting for my move.
“We can talk anytime you like,” I say.
“When do you have to get back home?”
“I should go in another few days.”
“Do you have a tape recorder?”
“Upstairs, in my old desk.”
“Come over to my house with it tomorrow.” She struggles to her feet and takes my hand. “Not a word of this to anyone for now!”