A Reunion of Ghosts

Copyright

Fourth Estate

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London SE1 9GF

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This EBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

First published in the United States by HarperCollins Publishers in 2015

Copyright © 2015 by Judith Claire Mitchell

Judith Claire Mitchell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Linda Hogan for permission to reprint, as an epigraph, an excerpt from Dwell: A Spiritual History of the Living World, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY. Copyright © 1995 by Linda Hogan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Photographs © Getty Images. Jacket design by Anna Morrison.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007594344

Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007594368

Version: 2015-12-07

Dedication

For my parents,

Leo and Claire Mitchell

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

Suddenly all my ancestors are standing beside me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

—LINDA HOGAN, Dwell: A Spiritual History of the Living World

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Family Tree

Epigraph

Part One: The Ghosts

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Two: The Reunion

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part Three: Last Words

December 2010

Author’s Note

Names Mentioned in A Reunion of Ghosts

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Also by Judith Claire Mitchell

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

From a distance the tattoo wrapped around Delph’s calf looks like a serpentine chain, but stand closer and it’s actually sixty-seven tiny letters and symbols that form a sentence—a curse:

the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the 3rd & 4th generations

We are that fourth generation: Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter, three sisters who share the same Riverside Drive apartment in which they were raised; three women of a certain age, those ages being, on this first day of summer 1999, forty-nine, forty-six, and forty-two. We’re also seven fewer Jews than a minyan make, a trio of fierce believers in all sorts of mysterious forces that we don’t understand, and a triumvirate of feminists who nevertheless describe ourselves in relation to relationships: we’re a partnerless, childless, even petless sorority consisting of one divorcee (Lady), one perpetually grieving widow (Vee), and one spinster—that would be Delph.

When we were young women, with our big bosoms and butts, our black-rimmed glasses low on the bridges of our broad beaky noses, our dark hair corkscrew curly, we resembled a small flock of intellectual geese in fright wigs, and people struggled to tell us apart. These days it’s less difficult.

Lady is the oldest, and now that she’s one year shy of fifty, she’s begun to look it, soft at the jaw, bruised and creped beneath her eyes. She’s the one who wears nothing but black, not in a chic New York way, but in the way of someone who finds making an effort exhausting. Every day: sweatshirt, jeans, sneakers, all black. “I work in a bookstore,” she says, “and then I come home and stay home. Who do I have to dress up for?” She wears no bra, hasn’t since the 1960s, and these days her breasts sag to her belly, making her seem even rounder than she is. “Who cares?” she says. “It’s not like I’m trying to meet someone.” Her hair, which she wears in a long queue held with a leather and stick barrette, is freighted with gray.

Vee is the tallest (though we are all short), and the thinnest (though none of us is thin). Her face is unlined as if she’s never had any cares, which (she says with good reason) is a laugh. She doesn’t like black, prefers cobalts and purples and emeralds, royal colors that make her look alive even as she’s dying. “Isn’t that what fashion is?” she says. “A nonverbal means of lying about the sad, naked truth?” She wears no bra either, but in her case it’s because she has no breasts. She has no hair either. Chemo-induced alopecia, they call it. No hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. Her underarms, her legs—they’re little-girl smooth. As is the rest of her. Little-girl smooth.

Delph is still the baby. Even now, two years into her forties, she looks much younger than the other two. She’s the smallest, barely five foot one, and the chubbiest, and she still wears girlish clothes: white peasant blouses with embroidery and drawstrings; long floral skirts that sometimes skim the ground, the hems frayed from sidewalks. As for her hair, it’s always been the longest, the wildest, the curliest, those curls bouffanting into the air, rippling down her back, tendriling around her big hoop earrings, falling into her mouth, spiraling down into her eyes. She says there’s nothing to be done about it; it’s just the way her hair wants to be. “There’s plenty to be done about it,” Vee has said more than once. “Just get me a pair of hedge clippers, and I’ll show you.”

So: black-clad, gray-haired, saggy, baggy Lady. Pale-skinned, bald-headed, flat-chested Vee. And little Delph. Three easily distinguishable women. And yet people still mix us up. The aged super who has known us since we were children. Our neighbors, old and new. We don’t resent it. Even our mother used to get jumbled up and call us by the wrong names. Sometimes we do it ourselves.

“I’m Delph,” Delph will say to Lady, who has just called her Vee for the third time in an evening. Most of the time, though, we let it go.

And sometimes one of us, sleepy or tipsy, catches a glimpse of herself in a mirror, and for a moment even she mistakes herself for one of the others.

Also, sometimes we confuse things by wearing each other’s clothes.

Like many of the Alter women in the generations before ours, we were named for flowers—but Lady is how Lily pronounced her name as a toddler, and it stuck; Vee is as much of Veronica as anyone has ever bothered to utter; and Delph is short for Delphine, which our mother thought was the name of the vivid blue perennial, but actually means “like a dolphin.” We don’t mind the nicknames. You might even say we’ve cultivated them. The flower names our mother picked never thrilled us. The funereal lily. The purple veronica, known for its ability to withstand neglect. Delph’s name that isn’t quite what it was supposed to be. “Neither the gods of flora nor the gods of fauna knew who had jurisdiction over me,” Delph likes to declaim. “No wonder I fell through the cracks.”

The truth is, we all fell through the cracks, and that’s where we’ve stayed. Our father left when Lady was seven, Vee four, Delph swaddled. Our mother … well, that’s another sad story. But life between the cracks isn’t so bad when you’ve got sisters. It can be cozy and warm, when that’s what you want. It can be filled with in-jokes and conversational shorthand and foolishness, if that’s what’s needed. Or it can be silent and still, which we tend to appreciate these days, given that, in addition to everything else, we’ve grown ever more introverted, even a touch agoraphobic.

All of which makes us well suited to the project we embark upon tonight, namely writing this whatever-it-is—this memoir, this family history, this quasi-confessional.

Our subject is the last four generations of Alters, up through and including our own. We plan to record all the sorrows and stumbles as well as all the accomplishments and contributions. We’re sorry to say there’ve been many of the former, far fewer of the latter. This is especially true when it comes to our own generation. We’re the entirety of the fourth generation; we’re the last of the Alter line; we’re “that’s all there is, there ain’t no more”; and we’ve brought the family name no glory.

On the other hand, we’ve brought it no shame either, which is more than certain preceding generations can say. That first generation, for instance, which starred our infamous great-grandfather, Lorenz Otto Alter, World War I hero, World War I criminal. Genius and monster. He was the sinner who doomed us all.

Still, he accomplished things. Good things, bad things, Nobel Prize–winning things. Not so the three of us. We’ve accomplished nothing, contributed even less, and we fear for the poor sap who’ll someday be saddled with our eulogies. What will this hapless orator say? Delph Alter, the youngest sister, never left a filing cabinet less organized than she found it. Vee Alter, the benighted monkey in the middle, spent her entire adult life as a paralegal at a law firm where she drafted wills and settled estates—a deadly occupation. Lady Alter, the eldest, stood behind a cash register, ringing up purchases of paperbacks and magazines, saying little all day besides thank you and do you need a bag for that and romance is the third aisle on your left.

Clearly all three died of excruciating boredom.

Yit’kadal v’yit’kadash. Requiescat in pace. Th-th-that’s all, folks.

We’ve been thinking about our eulogies lately because this is not only our memoir, it’s also our suicide note. It’s true: we’ve set the date at last. Midnight, December 31, 1999. New Year’s Eve.

We’ve always known we’d die by our own hands sooner or later. Sooner has now come a-knocking.

“Six months to a year.” That’s what Vee’s doctor said.

We talked it over at dinner. We slept on it that night. The next morning we made a pact. All for one and one for all. If one of us goes, all of us go. Everybody out of the pool.

We have a joke. Well, not a joke. A riddle:

Q: How do three sisters write a single suicide note?

A: The same way a porcupine makes love: carefully.

Also, tenderly and slowly and by pressing on even when it hurts.

We also have a chart. A week or so after our mother died, Delph, who was then eighteen, drew it up. She made it pretty and tacked it onto the back of her bedroom door, where some girls hang pictures of teen idols. There it remains, our great-grandfather, the curse’s catalyst, near the top, and our mother, the hapless Dahlie, down at the bottom, bearing his weight and the weight of all the others who went before her.

We like the chart. We like the tidiness of the rows and columns. We like the repetitions and subtle variations. We’re fascinated by the emergent narrative.

It’s said that descendants of suicides view life as forever chaotic, but when we look at this chart, we see the opposite of chaos. We see order and routine. We see soothing predictability and reassuring inevitability.

Without the rows and columns, all you’d have is a crazy game of Clue. Great-Grandma Iris in the garden with a gun. Aunt Violet in the bedroom with a plastic bag. Mom in the river with rocks in her socks.

But with the rows and columns, you have our family tree. Every family’s got one. This one is ours.

CHAPTER 2

While all three of us have previously contemplated suicide, only Lady has given it a serious go. Several serious goes, as a matter of fact, and the first one took place almost twenty-three years ago, the long Fourth of July weekend of 1976.

Times were fraught. Over the previous twelve months New York City had been through stagflation and gas lines and “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” while we’d been through Vee’s first bout of cancer, plus our mother’s swan dive into the Hudson, plus Lady’s swan song for her five-year marriage to the egregious Joe Hopper, an ill-conceived enterprise that had not only caused her unhappiness but also forced her to go by the name Lady Hopper, which, she maintained, sounded like something you’d call a cartoon frog wearing pearls and a diadem. It didn’t help to use her given name, either. Lily Hopper was even worse: same frog, less jewelry.

We tried to look on the bright side. No more Joe Hopper, for one. No more Richard Nixon, for two. Vee had been cured. (That’s what her doctor had said. That’s the word he used. Cured.) And now it was the Bicentennial, a three-day weekend when incensed New Yorkers took time out from their calls for Ford’s impeachment to cheer the whistling comets and fiery chrysanthemums bursting above the World Trade Center.

Oh, that summer. Delph, nineteen, had a scholarship to Barnard, the women’s college just a few blocks uptown that all three of us attended, though only Vee and Delph graduated. Vee and her husband, the faultless Eddie Glod, were living in Vee’s bedroom. They were both twenty-three. Eddie worked several part-time, dead-end jobs while trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Vee had begun her job as a paralegal. She’d bought two used business suits at a thrift shop, along with one clunky pair of broken-in, broken-down heels. Only her several pairs of pantyhose were new, packaged for reasons we will never understand inside large plastic eggs.

She enjoyed her job. Each will she prepared was like an allegory, where this everyman called Testator gives away his house and his furniture, his cars and his cash until there’s nothing left but his kids. He takes a deep breath and gives them away, too, hands them over to some guardian who will never love them like he does. Now bereft of all he’s ever held dear, he signs his name and admits it at last: he’s going to die. Vee found the whole process romantic and literary. Also, there was medical and dental and a fully vested retirement plan.

As for Lady, in 1976, she was twenty-six and living alone on Amsterdam Avenue in the slummy fifth-floor walk-up she’d once shared with Joe. The weekend she decided to kill herself, she was nearing the end of a ten-day vacation that had been neither her idea nor her desire. It was the dentist she worked for who’d suddenly decided to take some time off and shut the place down. “Spontaneity is the word of the day,” the dentist had said, a line he’d clearly rehearsed.

The hygienist had been thrilled, but not Lady. She was the one who had to call the patients, reschedule appointments. “Something’s come up,” she had to say. “An emergency,” she’d add if a patient got testy. Or, if a patient grew concerned, “A less-than-dire emergency.”

The patients weren’t really the problem, though. The problem was that she didn’t know what to do with a vacation. Ten days. New York in late June, early July. It wasn’t as though she had a little place in the Hamptons.

“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” she asked the dentist after the hygienist had left for the day. She’d been working for him for four years by then, ever since she dropped out of school to marry Joe. It had been a wretched idea—the marriage, not the job. The job she liked. Office manager slash receptionist was not the sort of occupation Barnard wished for its girls, which, bewilderingly, was how that self-proclaimed bastion of second-wave feminism referred to its students, but Lady was as aspirational when it came to career as she’d been when it came to finding a life partner—that is, not very. She’d married Joe because he’d trusted her with his deepest darkest secret, a secret that had caused him such shame he’d bitten his lower lip as he revealed it, until a few discreet drops of blood dribbled into his Frank Zappa–esque lip beard. He wasn’t aware that he’d nibbled himself bloody, that’s how wrapped up he’d been in confessing this secret—and stoned, he’d also been extremely stoned—but Lady had seen the self-inflicted cut in his trembling lip, and it had touched her heart. Such a vulnerable boy behind the layers of sarcasm and arrogance, and of all the women he knew, he’d unburdened himself to her. How could she resist? She didn’t even mind that he was unemployed. He had a higher calling: he was working away on his master’s, after which he’d be getting a PhD in literature. Then a professorship somewhere Ivy Leaguish. His area of specialty was Victorian female poets. How could Lady not support this? He was a feminist! He wanted women artists to take their rightful place in the academy! They’d tied the knot in Central Park, and she’d willingly left school and taken the first job that allowed her to cover the rent on the apartment they were already sharing.

Joe Hopper, lanky and hairy, with a penchant for fringed suede vests over bare skin. He disliked Lady’s job, found it personally humiliating. Dentistry. It was so bougie, he said, so middle class. Even a minimum-wage job would have been better. The store on 112th that sold cheap sundresses and paper parasols was hiring. Ta-Kome always needed someone to make sandwiches. Or, if it was all about money, then what about waitressing at some Midtown dance club where lawyers and bankers tipped beaucoup? She said that she preferred the receptionist job—she liked getting to sit down all day—and reminded him about the benefits and free fillings. Their dental was even better than Vee’s, she said. Why didn’t he just lie to his friends about what she did, if he was so embarrassed by it? She wouldn’t care if he made up a story. “Tell them I man the ovens at Ray’s Pizza,” she said. “Tell them I drive a cab in the Bronx.” She’d go along with it, she assured him. She’d lie too.

“I’m not as comfortable with lying as you seem to be,” he said.

She didn’t take offense. How could she, when he wasn’t wrong? And he didn’t know the half of it, had no idea how much of her life was a lie—although she wasn’t lying when she said she liked the receptionist job. She did; she was content—fulfilled, even—to help the dentist build his practice. She was the woman behind the throne, which in her case, was a dentist’s chair. That was her joke.

It was true, too, that she liked the dentist himself. He’d been just out of dental school when she joined him. He’d talk to her about his hopes for the business as well as his worries. He told her about his love for his slimy work in painstaking and mildly disgusting detail. He gave her generous Christmas bonuses that, in those first years, she knew he couldn’t afford, the amounts of which she had to swear never to reveal to the hygienist, an older woman with a belly slack from four pregnancies and a tight gray bun pierced with the extra chopsticks the delivery boys from Nos Gusta La Comidas China included in their lunch orders.

Lady loved that they shared a work ethic, the dentist and she. His involved never taking more than a long weekend off. Hers involved never taking even that much. What would have been the point? If she stayed home, Joe Hopper would be there, working on his thesis at the coffee table. The title of his thesis was “‘Lips—That Like Bruised Pomegranates Blush’: Victorian Woman Poets and the Sapphic Gaze.”

“His field is vaginas,” Vee finally explained to Lady, who’d been misinterpreting the reference to lips. “Vaginas and lesbian sex, and not in a political way. If I come by and you’re not home yet, he insists on reading from it to me. He stands really, really close.” She made a face. “It’s pretty porny.”

Lady’d told Vee to stop flattering herself, but she’d also gone home and reread the thesis, and she had to admit she saw Vee’s point. She tried to look on the bright side. Joe loved what he was doing. He was always engrossed in his research when she returned home. He’d gesture at her, a sweep of his hand. It meant be quiet, take off your shoes, keep your greetings, footsteps, breathing, basal metabolism rate, to a minimum. Or he’d be waiting for her, wanting to take her to bed as soon as she came through the door, some poem he’d been explicating having turned him on.

“It was my wife’s idea,” the dentist said of the vacation. He momentarily averted his eyes; at least he had the decency to do that. “She put her foot down. She goes, ‘All work and no play.’” He shrugged as if he hadn’t an idea in the world what that meant. Then he grinned, something he was good at. “You know what you should do?” he said. “You should go to one of those Club Med places. Guadalupe! Spontaneity! You could run around naked. No one’s in the city now anyway.”

“Then why not run around naked here?” said Lady.

The dentist’s face was wide and boyish. He looked like Rootie Kazootie, like Howdy Doody, like Opie Taylor—all those redheaded, apple-cheeked, freckle-faced goyishe icons of our youth. But now the face grew stern. It was as if he thought Lady was making a suggestion, offering him an alternative.

Which she supposed she was. That’s where her being a liar came in. Lady and the dentist had been screwing around on his raspy office carpet after the hygienist went home pretty much since she’d been hired. Oh, maybe for the first six months or so, flattered but loyal to Joe, Lady had gently discouraged the dentist’s advances. But when her marriage had quickly begun going south, so, with the dentist, had she.

His own recent marriage hadn’t changed anything. The woman he’d married had a name—it was Patty—but he never spoke it in Lady’s presence. He used the generic term instead. The wife’s coming in for a cleaning. If the wife calls, tell her I’m doing a root canal and can’t be disturbed. Yeah, the wife bought me this jacket; it’s not my taste, but what are you gonna do?

Lady never mentioned or even hinted at her relationship with the dentist to anyone, not to the hygienist over shared egg foo yung, not to Vee or Delph during her frequent visits home. Not even to the dentist himself. He and she had agreed upon conducting an utterly wordless affair. Their very agreement had been wordless.

Once, only once, had Lady tried to talk to him about what it was they were doing. This was soon after he’d announced his engagement, although announced wasn’t quite right; it had been more like an aside at the end of a busy day. She hadn’t even known he’d been seeing anyone. She felt knocked for a loop, stunned and disbelieving, like those women you sometimes hear about who go to the doctor with a stomachache and learn they’re not only pregnant, they’re in the end stages of labor. Still, she hadn’t said a thing other than the pleasantries anyone would utter in response to such wonderful news—the same pleasantries the hygienist had just offered.