Through my daze, I tried to understand the strange spell that had enveloped me. The house had a thereness: people had come and gone from its rooms, but the house itself had not moved or changed. It had a presence so palpable, I felt I could grip it with my hands. Its walls felt safe, cool, and beautiful, as if no memory or sad event could ever perturb them. In my mind’s eye, living there would be like diving into a still, subterranean universe immune to the changeful, hot, dry, catastrophic world above. I imagined its stones were a plain, strong exoskeleton into which I could fold my soft and confusing existence.
I was startled by the sound of my grandfather’s voice. Reluctantly, I stepped outside; he moved forward and turned the key twice in the lock; and we left.
“What do you think of it, my dear?”
“It’s lovely.” I searched for adequate words and failed to find them. I didn’t dare say that walking into the house made me feel like I was coming home. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,” I told him instead.
“It might have been lovely,” he conceded. “I’ll tell you about it someday. Come along now.”
I left Geneva just a month later. I was so happy the year was ending, I didn’t realize until the day I departed that I, in all my isolation, had constituted nearly the whole of my grandfather’s society. My grandfather hated separations and usually picked a fight the day someone left to distract himself from the pain of parting. There was none of that this time. “Il y aura un vide,” he said as we got ready to go to the airport. There will be an emptiness. He embraced me, then pulled back and touched my cheek. He had tears in his eyes. I imagined his deep green carpets with no more scuffs, his polished wooden bowls with no more fruit in them. The breadth of his solitude frightened me. As my plane took off, I wondered, Had my grandmother known it would be like this? Was the loneliness that replaced me when I left a form of revenge? Was I sent to teach him a lesson, to show him all it is to love?
CHAPTER FIVE
WHEN I CAME HOME FROM GENEVA, AT FIFTEEN and a half years old, I was eager to set aside the rigidity and lonesomeness that had defined my life there and have a real go at being a teenager, that useless and wasteful American contrivance my grandmother so deplored. I relegated the house in Alba and my grandparents’ mysteries to the back of my mind, bought a fake fur coat and purple high heels, and dyed my hair blue. I learned to drive and pasted bumper stickers all over my ’86 Toyota Cressida. I made new friends, drank coffee downtown, and skinny-dipped in the Warren Wilson pond; I dated boys, stayed up late reading aloud bad poetry, and tasted my first White Russian.
But the past is not so easily set aside. I began to suffer from panic attacks and depression. I’d be sashaying along just fine in those purple high heels when, with no warning, sinewy fingers of sadness would reach up from some old, dark part of my consciousness and clamp down on me with strangling force. Once the invisible hair trigger for those panic attacks was tripped, I’d hurtle at warp speed through a cosmos of despair; I tapped into the grief aorta of the entire world. I’d come to and find myself slumped in the bathtub, or covered in scratches, or driving on the wrong side of the road.
No one in my family thought to connect these incidents to our family history, not immediately at least. “Hot shower,” my grandmother advised when I came to her hoping she’d prescribe an antidote to my misery. “When my patients seized up like that, I always put them under hot water. Very hot. Relaxes the muscles. And then go to bed.”
Then one of my friends started working for a man who claimed to be a psychic and a medical intuitive. He spent an evening showing off his skills on me to a group of friends. I don’t remember exactly what happened, except that the room went dark and I spiraled down into my pit of desolation. “Your past is calling you,” he announced when I recovered, as if we were both connected to some sidereal switchboard. “Did you have a tragedy in your family? Something to do with the Holocaust, I’d bet.” He looked smug and unremorseful about the terror he’d just caused me. “Check into that.”
“This will all come down to you,” my father said to me, when I visited him in Knoxville and brought up my panic attacks and my encounter with the psychic, just as he had when I was younger and woke up from those nightmares or voiced one of my odd fears. “Each of us has our own ways of connecting with the world of the dead. You’re the only grandchild. You’re the one who’s going to have to carry it.” I wondered how a locum tenens pathologist who subscribed to the Skeptical Inquirer could make such pat statements about the world of the dead. And I wondered how I could possibly carry a thing whose outlines I couldn’t even see.
On May 23, 1998, two years almost to the day after my grandfather first showed me the house, the phone rang. We were celebrating my stepfather’s birthday with a Sunday brunch on the back porch, eating sticky buns from the farmer’s market and watching the carpenter bees chew holes in the rafters.
My mother, as she told me later, was surprised and a little nervous to hear her father’s voice when she answered the phone, in the way we were always surprised and a little nervous when he called. She wondered whether he might be calling for my stepfather’s birthday but dismissed that as unlikely, and when she heard the casual tone he reserved for discussing potentially controversial things, she braced herself. He opened with a few niceties, then cut to the chase. “You may recall I have a house in the South of France?”
My mother did her best to sound extra polite and extremely neutral as she searched her memory for a house. “Only vaguely.” She thought she recalled a conversation from a visit with him in 1979.
I doubt Grandpa cared one way or the other, but he paused in acknowledgment of her response. “Well, I no longer go there myself—it needs too much work—but I often lend it to people of modest means who could not otherwise afford a vacation.”
“How nice,” my mother said. “How nice for them, I mean—how nice of you.”
“Quite so,” allowed my grandfather. “Well, in any case, a nice Dutch woman I know would like to buy it from me, and I would like to sell it.”
My mother searched for a response my grandfather could not interpret as offensive in any way and settled on “Ah.”
“Yes, well …” My grandfather paused. Doubt and regret filled my mother’s mind: Should she have been more enthusiastic? Or less so? Was ah too casual? Too inarticulate? She was still pondering the prudence of elaborating on her response when my grandfather resumed talking. “The thing is, it turns out that your mother’s name is on the deed, and I need a power of attorney from her.” His voice dropped all pretense of pleasantness when he said the word mother. It slid out of his mouth, acrid and bitter, and hovered in the ether while my mother held her breath. “So I just wondered if you might call her and explain to her that I need her signature. I cannot think why—no, even she could not possibly cause trouble. I took care of it all these years. The bills, the taxes. A frightful expense.”