When my mother raised her eyebrows but didn’t say anything, I realized I must have the elements of an answer that she was waiting for me to deduce for myself.
The response, when it occurred to me, seemed absurd in a contradictory, confusing sort of way: absurd because it was so obvious, or absurd because it seemed so unlikely—I wasn’t sure which, but I ventured it anyway. “Because of Grandma?” My mother nodded, and I considered the two of them, Anna and Armand, holding them beside each other in my mind for the first time. I could easily imagine my grandfather being bothered by my grandmother, but when could they have met? “Have they ever been in the same room together?” I asked.
My mother laughed. “Well, look at me and your uncle.”
“They were married?”
“Of course they were married.”
“So they’re divorced from each other? When did they get divorced?”
My mother couldn’t say. She didn’t know when they’d gotten married, and though she remembered her parents’ separation, which had occurred sometime between 1950 and 1953, the divorce had dragged on for nearly two decades, until around 1970. All she could tell me was that they hadn’t spoken in nearly forty years, since 1955.
Forty years seemed ridiculously, even impossibly, long to me. And like most children that age, my sense of my own importance in the world was inaccurately large. “But I’m his only granddaughter, and it’s my bat mitzvah.” My mother looked dubious. “Besides, if it’s been that long, maybe they’ve forgotten about it. I’m going to invite him.”
My grandfather responded to my invitation almost immediately, which was very rare for him. Though his answer had been written in haste, his words had the same dry and measured quality they always had, so that it was difficult at first to understand the operatic turn of events he was predicting—essentially, that being in the same place as my grandmother would cause them to have simultaneous heart attacks and die. In a postscript, he asked me to think about what I would like as a bat mitzvah present—what about a safari? We could go on a safari in Kenya, if I liked.
“Kenya would be about the distance he prefers to maintain between himself and your grandmother,” I remember my mother observing when I read her the letter. Nowadays I marvel at how calmly she discussed a phenomenon that had wrought havoc on her and her brother’s childhoods, but back then I thought it was the way all mothers discussed all things.
“What happened? What happened to make them be like that?”
“Who knows? No one has ever figured that out.” My mother had only vague memories of her parents’ marriage and separation. She recalled their passage from France to America on the USS America in December 1948, eating in the ship’s nearly empty dining room with her father while her mother, pregnant with my uncle, lay suffering from nausea in their cabin, where all the furniture not bolted down slid back and forth across the floor as the ship pitched and tossed on the stormy Atlantic. Of those first years on Long Island, she remembered a kitchen table topped with red Formica, a redhandled grapefruit knife my grandmother took with her when she left, frequent fights, and not much else. And then, after the separation, the housekeeper, whom we’d now call the nanny, trying to persuade Anna to return to Armand.
“So why did they get married?”
My mother had no satisfying explanation for that, either: “Your grandmother was brilliant and beautiful, and your grandfather was brilliant and handsome. They met in Strasbourg, when they were students. I imagine it must have been quite electric.”
I was left to flip through the few old photos we had from the years my grandparents had spent together, lovely little black-and-white windows from which a woman and a man named Anna and Armand looked out of the past, silent, enigmatic, and lost. The captions that accompanied my grandmother’s photos were tantalizing: “Anna holding a cat whose leg she had splinted”; “Man on left wanted to marry Anna”; or, my favorite, written for a snapshot of her sitting in a field of narcissus, the flowers like wave caps in the grassy sea around her: “Anna picked bouquets for all 185 patients in the sanatorium.” That was Anna all over. Her love of beauty was militantly democratic. The few pictures of my grandfather had no captions, or very cryptic ones, with no mention of his name, though I recognized his Roman nose, high cheekbones, and wry smile. There was one of him sitting at a desk, his arm flung over the back of the chair, his white shirt peeking out from under his suit jacket, at once elegant and diffident. Another showed him at the summit of a mountain, looking tanned, determined, and very thin. Brilliant, beautiful, and electric: what more could a young girl ask of her grandparents’ long-ago youth?
But then a week or so later, my mother returned from the mailbox with an envelope for me. It contained a single photocopied page of text, with a note from my grandfather:
A friend sent me this poem, which reminds me of something in my own life. I thought you might like it.
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.
You promised me, and you said a lie to me,
that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked;
I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you,
and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.
My mother said to me not to be talking with you today,
or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;
it was a bad time she took for telling me that;
it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.
My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
or as the black coal that is on the smith’s forge;
or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
it was you put that darkness over my life.
You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
you have taken God from me, and my fear is great.
“Well, there you go,” said my mother, when I showed her the poem. “He’s not coming. He can’t come.”