A Fifty-Year Silence by Miranda Richmond Mouillot
What do you think? Do you also believe that what gives our lives their meaning is the passion that suddenly invades us heart, soul, and body, and burns in us forever, no matter what else happens in our lives?
—SANDOR MARAI, Embers
(translated from the Hungarian by Carol Brown Janeway)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A Fifty-Year Silence is a true story, but it is a work of memory, not a work of history. I relied on historical sources—primary, secondary, and historiographical—in the writing of it, but for the most part I based it on conversations and letters with my grandparents and on my own memories of and reflections about them. I have done my best to verify these memories and reflections by checking them against those of others and against historical documents.
As I dramatized key scenes from my grandparents’ lives in the pages of this book, I sought to maintain the vertiginous sense of poetry that their silence provoked in my own life. In so doing, I have tried to be as faithful as possible both to their recollections and to the historical facts that informed those moments. Any inaccuracies I may have unwittingly introduced are due to the inherent difficulties of writing about a subject no one is willing to discuss.
A Fifty-Year Silence seeks to confront and illuminate a shadow that haunts every family: the past, which is at once sharply present and maddeningly vague. Indeed, I originally intended to call the book Traveling Shadows, after a line in Speak, Memory, in which Vladimir Nabokov compares the act of reconstructing the past to studying shadows on a wall. Shadow watching is a solitary and subjective practice, and my observations of my grandparents’ shadows inevitably have been tinged by my own nature and experience; they cannot hope to be exact transcriptions of the people who cast them. As my grandmother said when I finally showed her a draft of this manuscript, “Mirandali, it’s so long ago now, who can remember?” Grandma, all I can say is, I certainly have tried.
PREFACE
In the ten years it took to write everything down, my grandmother died and my grandfather lost his mind. I got married and had a child. I abandoned my intended career, moved to another country, and spent my savings. And the house, which may or may not have started it all, continued to fall down.
But still I was afraid to begin, for this is a story about a silence, and how do you break a silence that is not your own?
I turned the question over in my head for what felt like an eternity. I wondered if I had any business—any right, even—to speak of it. And yet, unbroken, it was a burden, one that grew with every passing year. What would I do if I never succeeded in laying it down? Finally, I gave up and prayed.
Please, could you give me a hint?
The next day my daughter and I went for a walk behind our hamlet, in the shadow of Alba’s castle, along the path that skirts the Escoutay River. It was the path I looked down the first time I saw this place, and thought, This is my home. The path my grandmother looked down in 1948, the first time she saw this place, and thought, Someday this will be someone’s home.
And there, among the dandelions and primroses, was what the French would call a clin d’oeil—a wink. It was a clump of four-leaf clovers, a whole posy of them. Finding four-leaf clovers is something my grandmother passed down to me, along with ungraceful ankles and the ability to read fortunes with cards. We find them wherever we go, whenever we most need them. No doubt these days my grandmother, who always preferred agitation to tranquility, has taken up some position as parliamentary delegate or shop steward in the big social movement in the sky, so when I sent that prayer up, she didn’t even bother to pass my petition along. She just made her signature noise, halfway between a snort and a sigh, the sound she always made right before she stepped in and sorted the matter herself, and rippled a message to me through the clover. Knowing her so well for so long, I understood it as clearly as if she had written it out for me in the mud of the riverbank: “Stop putzing around and begin at the beginning.”
So here I go.
PART I
The hamlet of La Roche and the Escoutay River, with Alba’s castle in the background, circa 1960.
CHAPTER ONE
WHEN I WAS BORN, MY GRANDMOTHER TIED A red ribbon around my left wrist to ward off the evil eye. She knew what was ahead of me and what was behind me, and though she was a great believer in luck and the hazards of fortune, she wasn’t about to take any chances on me, her only grandchild.
My grandmother had fled or lost countless homes in her lifetime, and though she never fully resigned herself to living in America, she was determined to die in her house in Pearl River, New York, to which she had retired from her job as a supervising psychiatrist at Rockland State Mental Hospital. She would tell me this with some frequency, because my grandmother viewed death as an interesting dance step she’d eventually get around to learning, or perhaps a pen pal she’d come awfully close to meeting several times—no doubt this intrigued equanimity was part of the reason she managed to live so long.
My grandmother told me many things over the years, in a jumbled and constant flow of speech. I hung on to her every sentence, fascinated and admiring. Each word she said was like a vivid, tangible object to me, a bright buoy, a bloodred lifeline:
MY Godt
musckle
VEG-eh-tayble
sourrwvive
That was her favorite word. She rolled it out of her mouth with Carpathian verve, inflected with Austro-Hungarian German and French.
You’re like me, Mirandali, she’d say. You’ll sourrwvive.
This was immensely comforting, because outside the reassuring confines of my grandmother’s presence, I was never too sure about that.