2.

When Nicolette had asked Claire to talk about herself during their sessions, Claire had spoken about her father.

Ernest Gabelmacher stepped off a dewy boat named the Susquehanna in June 1922. It was the wettest crossing in a decade, or that’s what the captain, who’d taken a liking to Ernest, had told him portside on their one dry stargazing night. Ernest was likable in any language and was aware of this fact, but that did not mean the captain could help him find a job; it was not a good century to be German in America. But, the captain reminded him, there were steps one could take. “Soon you won’t be so German.”

Ernest had ten thousand Papiermark to his name—five thousand in his pocket, five thousand sewn into his suit. This, he learned his first night in Albany, rounded out to just over two dollars. He arrived in time to hear Warren G. Harding deliver the first ever presidential radio transmission. In a deli, customers gathered around a homemade crystal receiver. Ernest pretended his English was solid enough to understand, applauding when the others did, jeering when they jeered.

This was also the day Ernest met Elsa, the girl working the counter. A transplant herself, she could spot one of her own a mile away. She laughed loudly. “You cannot understand one word,” she said to him in English fringed with a southeastern German accent. The other men turned to Ernest and play-punched him in the gut. Ernest had no choice but to burst out into the only English song he knew: “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” beginning to end, making Elsa out to be the liar.

Elsa was seven months pregnant before Ernest had scrounged up enough money to rent a room in a farmhouse in Ovid, New York, a small town proud both of its working-class bent and newly built theater with a quaking chandelier. The owners of the farmhouse were off on fishing boats most of the year, and Ernest promised Elsa that someday the whole house would belong to them, maybe even the whole street.

Later, Ernest would tell Claire these stories while she did her arithmetic on scraps of wallpaper in the evenings. She knew his life by heart. But it was difficult for Claire to speak to Nicolette about her mother. Elsa was always closed and private, and Claire never thought of her outside of the confines of Claire’s own life, with brief cameos in her father’s. Elsa seemed not to exist until Claire was born.

For most of Claire’s school years, Ernest was out of a job because of one war and then another. He took work as a traveling salesman—trousers door to door—and as a talc worker until it proved poisonous and he watched his friends die. He couldn’t serve in the military with his talc-weakened lungs, and no one would hire him once tensions in Europe rose. He was naturalized, and all of his savings went to war bonds to prove his loyalty. They changed their name from Gabelmacher to Gabler. But none of it helped or hid his accent at job interviews, and the dream of the house, and the street, evaporated in the night. Elsa took the reins and found work as a silent seamstress, playing mute so no one would know she was German. When she came home each evening from the small factory, she would yell just to hear her own voice.

Every Sunday of Claire’s childhood (while Ernest got to stay home and listen to Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy), Elsa took Claire, dressed in their Sunday best, to visit her grandmother at the Willard Asylum. This was, to Claire, the opposite of a church. Claire’s grandmother had Huntington’s, or that’s what she’d been told—a hereditary, degenerative disease with the power to change your personality, to rob you of motor control, to riddle your mind with hallucinations. Black magic, she thought as a child. Her grandmother would often mistake Claire for Elsa. Whom she mistook Elsa for, Claire would never know. During each visit she would tell stories about training as an opera singer and she would sing an aria or two for Claire. On laundry duty, she would get into trouble for writing lines of poetry on the bands of other patients’ undergarments.

The hospital was a large site not far from Ovid, with Gothic-style buildings as old as any in this country but which somehow felt slap-dash, fake. Grass green enough it seemed painted on. While her grandmother’s personality changed shape, the hospital never altered. Time was different there. The grounds didn’t change with the years. There was no progress, no war.

When Claire was thirteen, she came to understand what the word “hereditary” meant. She began spending her days in the public library, missing school, hiding away in the stacks with texts on lobotomy and psychosurgeries newly discovered. It was at least warmer there than her classroom, where they couldn’t afford to fill the potbelly stove.

According to Elsa, Claire’s grandmother had her first hallucination when she was twenty-four. This was what Claire decided she could expect as well. Elsa had not inherited it, and so it must have skipped a generation, making Claire an even more likely candidate. She imagined she would suffer doubly so. She would hear voices. She would be locked in an asylum, visited by people she didn’t know. She was the author of all the odds.

One very sunny day, when every book glinted back at her like tin, Claire realized how much time she’d wasted sitting inside a library. And how little time she had left. Time with her mind, before it became unrecognizable, before she was someone else, like her grandmother.

That was when Freddie, the golden-haired entrepreneur, came to town on business. Not quite seventeen, Claire would have been drawn to anything polished in her ashen little Ovid. She liked the way Freddie leaned forward, intimate with anyone who spoke to him. How he loosed his shoelaces rebelliously when he thought no one was watching. How he took the matter of making Claire smile very seriously and wasn’t afraid of the volume of his own laugh. When the draft call came, it did not take much convincing for her to make a home with him.

In this way she left her family for a man she was forbidden to marry before she turned eighteen. Her mother grew silent even at home. Her father was so hurt he fasted the day Claire left and refused to see her off. He blamed Freddie more than her, saying the boy should know better and that Freddie had a spoiled face. But Claire was intent on growing up then and there, wed properly or not. When her mother asked why—why so foolish, why so young—Claire could not tell them. None of them knew the fear whipping around inside her. She never knew how to explain.

They took a one-bedroom bungalow in Croton-on-Hudson, hemmed in by manors overlooking the river. Such urgency shaped their short time together before Freddie’s deployment, and he only knew the half of it. They were so new then, getting to know one another as quickly as two bodies could. She wanted him always, the thought flitting in the forefront of her mind, written across his arm as she kissed the length of it: would she still recognize him when he came back? Would she still be here?

Claire turned eighteen the week before Freddie was deployed and they married in a rush. “We’ll last through this war together,” Freddie said in his vows. “What more do we need to know?”

Claire did not tell her parents of the marriage until after he’d left.

Freddie’s yearlong service morphed into four and no one voiced any resentment. Armed with Ladies’ Home Journal, she made a home for the two of them by herself. And, like other women, Claire found work during the war. She was a bus driver, transporting men too old to serve from their bedroom community down to the Bronx, where they caught the train to the city. Her cheeks, and other parts, were raw from pinching. But she liked her job well enough. She wore a transit company cap that was far too big. She was quite a good driver.

The war was there, in the bus, because she was there. But the rides were jolly and no one ever spoke of what was happening abroad. If anyone questioned her, Claire was prepared to say her maiden name—Gabler—was English, not German. But no one ever asked. She played music in her bus on the transistor, never the news. She tried not to listen to the reports unless her friends, also military wives, told her she must hear a certain story. She frequented the movies and became a master at bridge. The war was an interruption to everyone’s plans, but Claire never had a plan. It had nothing to do with her—Freddie’s absence and her new job seemed somehow far removed from invasions and sneak attacks.

Freddie’s letters were full only of jokes he’d learned from the other boys. He spent most of the war in India. When Claire asked him about the war, he said sharply that he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. This would have made sense to Claire had it not been for the defensiveness in his voice, as if he were protecting himself from being scolded. It gave her the feeling that Freddie didn’t understand what he’d been doing, what he’d been fighting for.

When Claire had to give up her job, she thought of taking work elsewhere. But Freddie held her close and said she’d only been playing a role while he was away and now he wanted her home where he could find her. “Working seems unnatural, don’t you think?”

Through the war, Claire had lied to Freddie that she could not bear children, that she’d been warned it would pose terrible health risks and might even kill her. She did not tell him her real fear, that she would pass on a monstrous gene, and worse, not be around for her children, the way her own mother had been alone.

But Freddie was determined they visit the best doctors to see what could be done. Claire obliged, and in the course of discovering that she was perfectly healthy, it became apparent that Freddie was not. Trauma he’d suffered during the war—in fact, a wrestling match with one of his Army buddies—had caused groin damage far worse than he’d previously thought. All of this, of course, came as a relief to Claire.

The closer Claire came to the dreaded age, the closer she grew to Freddie. She’d never felt so powerful as she did in bed with him. She moved as if she owned both their bodies. She loved sitting beside him in the cinema, the smell of his collar, how rare he liked his steak. But mostly, she loved doing nothing more than lying in bed with him and wasting the day away unclothed. She ignored the thoughtlessness of his late-night work meetings, how cold he could be, how forgetful of the parties she planned. How was he to know that her time was running out?

Every day after her twenty-fourth birthday, Claire performed a mental tally of her faculties. Everything was in working order. In fact, she was much quicker than Freddie at learning Spanish for a business trip to Cuba she didn’t have the heart to tell him they’d never take. But no initial signs presented themselves.

Though Claire assumed that the symptoms would appear soon enough, she thought it prudent to ask her mother, as nonchalantly as possible, to repeat the details of her grandmother’s health. The trip home would also be a chance to say goodbye. While Freddie was staying in the city on business, Claire returned to Ovid for the first time in many months.

Her father had never completely forgiven her for leaving against his wishes. Since the war, he’d managed to open his own woodworking and restoration shop, and when Claire returned, he spent most of his time there, away from home. Still, she visited him, and made a game of heckling the one old Irishman who still protested outside the shop. Ernest’s only response to him was to hang a sign in the window that read, “I’m an American-German so I know my wood,” even though Germans weren’t particularly known for woodworking.

When Claire asked Elsa how her grandmother was fairing, Elsa said, “She died. While you were busy.”

Why hadn’t her mother told her? Instead, she asked, “Was it her Huntington’s Disease or something else?”

Her mother gave a strange laugh. And then she said, “She never had Huntington’s.”

Apparently, they’d lied to the authorities so her grandmother would be allowed to remain in the hospital, a loophole for hereditary diseases. In fact, her condition was the result of a head injury she’d suffered on the ship that brought her to America. She died of pneumonia in the end.

Claire didn’t say a word. She walked over to Elsa. And she slapped her.

How quickly it all changed. Now she was frozen in Freddie’s arms. What was supposed to have been a fleeting handful of years was now a life.

Here was the man who didn’t move her. The transformation was like a loss of consciousness, but Freddie didn’t notice. She hated the smell of sweat under his collar, the way he sniffed his food before he ate it. She hated the way he moved against her, clammy and rough. His attraction to Claire petered off as well, connected as it was to hers. Now she turned a blind eye at how often he missed the last train north, stayed late at the office, slept weekly in the city.

Twice, Claire was caught shoplifting from the grocery store in Croton—potato chips, a magazine, peppermint-flavored chewing tobacco. Once, Freddie caught her skinny-dipping in a creek by their house. Claire splashed him as he stood on the bank in his suit.

“Why don’t you come in with me? Or are you scared?”

“Get out of there, Claire. You look mad. You’ll catch your death.”

“You’ll catch yours first,” Claire said. He turned to go. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“I’m going into work.”

“It’s Sunday.” Claire climbed out of the water. She was shivering. Freddie took off his jacket and draped it around her.

“I think we should move,” Freddie said.

Claire dropped his jacket to the dirt. “Because I’ve embarrassed you?”

Freddie sighed. “Where, tell me, will you stop acting like a child?”

To her parents, the city might as well have been another country. She spoke to Elsa and Ernest less and less, and only about the weather or Ernest’s health, resigned in the knowledge that her parents and Freddie would never know why she was the way she was.

But Nicolette knew. Humming over the portrait, the artist had said, as if diagnosing Claire, “You lived your life afraid you’d go mad.” She leaned in close to the painting. “And now you’re disappointed.”