CHAPTER 52

“So tell me, what shape was the house in?” my mother said. She handed me a Kleenex.

I wiped my tears. “The garden’s a mess, overgrown, weeds everywhere,” I said.

“Did she rearrange the furniture?” she said.

“Inside it’s the same.”

I heard a snap, my mother’s ankle as she shifted her weight, and the familiar sound was a comfort. She folded her arms and sighed. “We should have realized Brenda knew about the check,” she said.

“She’s going to throw out all our stuff,” I said. I stood in front of the air conditioner with my arms out and let the frigid air cool my hot head and sweaty armpits. “His books and papers, everything.” I shivered and went and flopped onto the sofa and my mother came and sat next to me.

“Unless I give her the money,” my mother said.

“Yeah. Shit! Ma. The letters! I didn’t get to go into the attic.” My eyes filled with tears again.

“Don’t cry, Joanna. Really. It’s OK.”

“You took some letters, didn’t you? He doesn’t, I mean, she doesn’t have all of them.”

“I still have some in a shoebox.” She got up and went to her bedroom, came back and dumped a pile on the coffee table.

Somewhere in England

29 April 1945

Dear Evie,

I haven’t had a letter from you in weeks. You are not doing right by your boy. Just when victory is in sight you begin slacking off. From Stalingrad to Kiev to Warsaw, from St. Lo to Cologne to Liepzig you were OK, but now when the boys are in the Berlin subway and Himmler thinks he can decide to whom to surrender, you down tools and go on strike.

Yours,

Clyde

“Were you having second thoughts at this point? Is that why you weren’t writing to him?”

“I was scared about him coming home. And I was writing, just not as much as he wanted.”

“You really don’t have any of your letters to him?” I said.

“I told you, he lost them.”

“Asshole.”

“Oh, so you’re finally down on your father?”

“I blame him for this catastrophe. I blame both of you,” I said.

“Me? You blame me?”

I couldn’t stop crying. The fight with Brenda unleashed a torrent. “Where’s the letter that says ‘if the greatest catastrophe to befall mankind couldn’t keep us apart nothing else could?’”

“I don’t know. It’s in there somewhere.”

“Well, he was wrong,” I said. “He forgot about the catastrophe of regular life.”

“Yeah, it’s a catastrophe all right,” my mother said. “But let’s not equate it with the Holocaust.”

“You guys were much better on paper, that’s all.”

“It’s funny,” my mother said, “we were probably never closer, I mean soul-to-soul, than we were during the three years we were apart.”

London

1 May 1945

My own darling sweetheart,

I am not overcome with a great feeling of optimism at the outcome of the war. But we shall have accomplished certain things. We shall have turned back the “wave of the future,” which almost engulfed us and carried us back to a darker age. The material creations of modern man can indeed become a Frankenstein and destroy its creator. Witness the robot bomb, the rocket shell that rises 60 miles in the air and comes down without being seen or heard to destroy whole communities, or the scientific elimination of peoples by means of the gas chamber and incinerator. Truly we have beaten down a monster, a dark, degenerate foulness which lies buried in all people, in us no less than in those fascist beasts who brought it to the surface in their own people. With passionate emotion I can wish the death of all Germans, but with cold reason I can see that this is not the solution. To simplify it, I should say that when all the world is made to enjoy the 4 freedoms we shall finally be done with war. But the world is not ready to accept world peace.

Meanwhile, darling, my thoughts turn to you and our future together, although I’m beginning to feel like we’re Tchaikovsky and Madame Von Meck. They were strictly pen pals, you know, never getting together in the flesh. It was the same for George Bernard Shaw and the actress Ellen Terry, mocked because their affair was all on paper. Until you’re in my arms again, I’ll think of Shaw’s retort: “Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge and abiding love.”

Love always,

Clyde

“Too bad you didn’t know your father then, Joanna. He . . .” Her voice trailed off. She was reading to herself.

I would have liked knowing the twenty-something who imagined himself as Tchaikovsky, who wanted to achieve glory, truth, and beauty, who had the potential to be a great father. We failed each other, all of us, me just for being born. Less than a year after he returned from the war my mother left him for eight months. He was devastated. He seemed to have chosen my mother for how easily she was able to hurt him. It was many years later when she left for good, but even then she stayed entangled in his life, much like his own mother who left him not once, and not forever, but again and again.

Among the letters she tossed on the coffee table, a rare artifact—a single sheet from her to him that slipped from the pages of a longer letter and refused to be lost, as all of her other letters were lost. My mother never had a chance to find out who she was. He plucked her at sixteen, before she was fully formed, and she was robbed of childhood, as he was robbed, as I was, each in our own way. Only Susan remained unscathed.

1837 North Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

November 9, 1945

My darling Clyde,

What do I want now that the war is over? That’s quite a question, Aronson. But I’ll try to answer it. Besides wanting you, and I suppose children at some point, I want to give something to the world. And for having given, I want to belong to it.

Always and forever,

Evie

“How can you blame me after everything that’s happened? Isn’t that what I heard?” my mother said. “You blame me for this catastrophe?”

“In part. You always play the innocent.”

“That’s not true. I take responsibility for a lot.”

“You just proved my point.”

“Don’t take your anger at Brenda out on me,” my mother said.

“I’m sorry. You’re right, we have to stick together. But when I look back sometimes I can’t believe how oblivious you were.”

“I’m not oblivious. Don’t insult me. You’re just upset, so you’re giving me a hard time.”

“Right. You’re not oblivious. So how could you let him do that to me?”

“Let who? What?”

“Johnny. Let Johnny.”

“Oh, that.”

“God, Ma, I was thirteen, fourteen.”

“Jesus, you weren’t that young.”

“Yes I was.”

“Out of nowhere, you’re bringing this up?”

“Not out of nowhere. Not for me it isn’t.”

“You really want to talk about this now?”

“How could you?”

“I told you,” my mother said. “I didn’t know it was happening.”

“How could you not know?”

“I just didn’t.”

Inside the house it was the same. A portrait of the four of us still hanging on the wall. The same sofa by the window where I lay with the curtains open when Johnny delicately took off my glasses and kissed my eyelids, my hair. I could hear the melody of children’s voices in the street. He must have heard it, too. I thought I was lucky to be taught so gently by an older man. I didn’t have to deal with pimply boys groping blindly. And I was lucky, in that way. I didn’t know mine was an old story. I thought lying there with my tanned knees apart granted me access to the world of boys and men, but the opposite was true. I should have been outside playing, laughing and calling to my friends, joining the concord of their voices. I hadn’t read Nabokov’s Lolita yet, but I felt myself slipping under, losing something irrevocable, vaguely conscious that “the hopelessly poignant thing was the absence of my voice from that concord.”

My mother folded up the open letters and put them back into their envelopes, and then put them in order according to the postmarked dates. “I’ll give Brenda the money if you want me to,” she said. “I know how much the stuff in the house means to you.”

“No. I don’t want you to. That’s extortion. I’m not caving in to her blackmail just because he did.” My big, important father turned out to be as weak as those pathetic fathers in fairy tales—powerless to protect their children from the wicked stepmother. I was his Emile Zola, he said, his champion, but he was unable to be mine.

“If I keep the money, how will you get his books and papers?” my mother said.

“I don’t know. But I’m going to get my stuff somehow, you better believe it.”

“You know Joanna, if we don’t turn over the check to Brenda, or at least half of it, you’ll be breaking the promise you made to your father.”

“Don’t worry about it. I have no problem breaking the promise,” I said. “Just don’t think I’m doing it on your behalf. I’m not. I’m going to break the promise I made to my father because he was wrong to ask for it.”