The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (18 page)

Crazy in love
, she thought, the phrase running through her head like a show tune.

Nothing opens in this place before ten. It was dreadful, Suzanne thought, kicking off her shoes and picking at the cold remains of her breakfast tray, which she’d polished off long before. She’d been up and about for hours.

First, she’d taken an early jog. It was a great area: The British Museum and University of London were around the corner, and Dickens’s house was down the block. After that, just on a lark, she’d taken the Underground down to the Women’s Crisis Center, which was in a very unlovely part of the city. It had been closed, but there’d been a name and number on the door. When she tried it, an alert female had answered and, within thirty seconds they’d achieved the warm tingle of sisterhood. They’d agreed to meet at the center in the next few days to compare notes.

She leaned back on the bed. London. It really was so similar to New York, she thought, despite all its airs: all the gorgeous, rich people in their princely homes overlooking lovely, verdant parks, and then those horrible contrasting pockets of poverty right out of Dickens. Street crime, muggings, rapes, robberies, all just festering below the regal surface. And those housing “estates,” full of dog shit and broken glass and depressingly dirty back gardens; it didn’t fool her a minute, London.

Still, they had the best theater in the world, no question. Even the most minor British actor on any British stage made any Hollywood “legend” look like a high-school amateur. And they had Mayfair and Regent’s Park, and Buckingham Palace, and those glorious mansions in Hampstead Heath and St. John’s Wood, and the most beautiful art galleries and museums anywhere.

There was so much to enjoy, so much to learn, Suzanne thought excitedly. She hoped that “manuscript hunting” (or whatever it was they were supposed to be doing—it wasn’t exactly clear to her) wasn’t going to occupy too much of her time.

The truth was, she found it hard to take the whole enterprise seriously. Anyone with the slightest perception could see that it wasn’t an old manuscript Gran was really after. She was just lonely, Suzanne guessed, and this was a perfect way to get them to spend some time together talking over the past, discussing the future. Why couldn’t she just come right out and say that was what she wanted? All this game-playing was so difficult and demanded so much insincerity and double-thinking—not to mention wasted time. But that’s the way old people were, especially Europeans. Frankness was not a highly rated virtue, if they put it on the list at all.

It was just as well, Suzanne thought, since she couldn’t imagine they stood any kind of chance of actually finding anything. Even if it hadn’t been in a fire or lost at sea, it could be anywhere: an attic in Moscow, an old bookstore in Istanbul…. Where in heaven’s name would anyone even begin to look?

She turned over, picking at the pillow threads. There was only one thing she hadn’t yet figured out and it bothered her immensely: the actual state of her grandmother’s health.

She slammed her fist into a pillow. Damn! What in heaven’s name did she think she was doing, flying across an ocean in her condition? Did her doctor know? Or maybe, just maybe, Mom was right. She wasn’t really as ill as she’d let on and that whole pitch had been a giant con job. She certainly didn’t look ill. In fact, she looked younger and more vital than she had in a long time.

Maybe the old girl was going to be all right after all, she thought hopefully.

Catherine gathered her pink silk bed jacket around her shoulders, lifting her chin to swallow a handful of pills. They came in all shapes and all uniforms, she noticed, a little army with the generals (painkillers, mostly) and then the corporals, sergeants, and foot soldiers, all slogging through her weary corpuscles, prodding the exhausted battalions longing to surrender to keep on fighting. It wasn’t time to give up. Not yet, she thought, swallowing with determination. The water was invigoratingly cool in her throat.

The girls looked so young and so lovely. Yet, just beneath the surface, she sensed their unhappiness. What did anyone so young and so lovely have to be unhappy about? If only they knew what happens to you when you age. If only they understood that life could be measured in finite quantities that were used up and couldn’t be replaced. Seconds, minutes, hours. You could calculate exactly how many were given to the average person. Twenty-four hours a day equaled 1,440 minutes times 365 days a year for, let’s say, 80 years, gave you—well…. She took out a calculator: 42,048,000 minutes a lifetime. And no more. And probably less.

When your body was young and healthy and without pain or disease, and you had so many minutes, hours, days ahead of you to do anything you wanted, how could you feel anything but joy?

But no one is like that. I wasn’t. I was always anxious, always unhappy because things were never perfect. I kept thinking: When I grow up and leave my family, then I’ll be happy. When I meet my husband and marry, then I’ll be happy. When I give birth to this child, then…then…When all the while my life had been streaming through me, generous and full and seemingly without end. So much it had seemed immeasurable.

I never knew it was so finite, that it could be weighed and counted and measured like diamonds. And I spent it so freely and so unwisely. How many afternoons wallowing in the fashion pages of some silly magazine, or lost in some crossword puzzle, or watching a slick, bad movie or reading a false, poorly written but amusing book? Waste, waste, and more waste. And so many minutes worrying about impending tragedies that never happened, or plotting to prevent those that couldn’t be stopped. Only so many minutes, and no more!

If only I had known that then, I should have spent my minutes like the diamonds they were! I would never have been sad for a moment! I would have told myself: This minute, let me feel the warmth of the sun, the joy of learning, of being with my lover, my child, my grandchild, my dear friends.

It was odd that now, full of pain, with so little to look forward to, that she should have finally found joy; that it stared her in the face when she opened her eyes, and laid down next to her pillow each night she succeeded in forgetting the pain and falling asleep. Just the sight of her granddaughters filled her with it. And each minute seemed like a jewel and the spending so thrifty, so right.

No one understood, and you could not explain it without sounding like an old fool, or invoking those infuriating, indulgent winks: how a grandchild saved you, bringing you into a future you would never see or be a part of. How their young bodies and vital lives somehow relieved you of your tired hopelessness, giving you a new chance to correct all the old mistakes.

They were the most precious thing a human being had. You could understand that, the way you couldn’t when you had your own children. A child was wonderful, but also burdensome. You were responsible, somehow, for all the grinding details: the food, the clothing, the baths, the cleaning behind the ears and the checking of bowel movements, and the lecturing about report cards.

But a grandchild was something quite different. Yours, without any burden. Yours in the highest, most beautiful sense of being part of your flesh and bones. I nagged them, she lamented, and I shouldn’t have. That was their mother’s job, not mine. But I did take them traveling. Niagara Falls. Oh, their faces when they saw that great rush of water, oh, their wonder. That was what grandparents were for, she thought. To teach them about the wonder, the beauty, the possibilities. To explain to them how to use that most precious and irreplaceable gift each human has in such finite quantities.

I’ve been such a bad role model so far, she mourned. What have I taught them except to care about manners, food, clothes? And the
right
people to know. And to invest all those precious hours in chic causes when things that really mattered, life and death….

She touched her damp, hot forehead. NO! No more recriminations. Just joy. I have found the right teacher now. And it isn’t too late for either of us, she thought hopefully. She couldn’t wait to get them to Serouya and Company, Dealers in Rare Books and Manuscripts. To see their faces. Like Niagara Falls all over again, she thought with a thrill, pulling on her stockings.

And where would they eat dinner tonight? The River Room of the Savoy, of course. And the same table, too, where she had once sat with her fiancé, the heirloom diamond heavy and bright on her finger. The same seat where she had glimpsed for the first time that handsome, intense stranger with the large dark eyes who had transformed her life forever….

Crazy in love, she thought, swaying a moment, almost dizzy with rapture.

15

(In a suitcase in the attic of a house in Grindlewald, Switzerland, found in the mountains on the German side of the border, November 12, 1942. Owner unknown, presumed dead. Fifteen pages, handwritten, Portuguese. Several pages water-stained and unreadable, bound in two pieces of old leather and tied in rags. As yet undiscovered.)

…As is it written: “My face is red with weeping and on my eyelids deep darkness.”

And so, as I have written in those tear-stained pages that have taken up so much of my ink, my dearest mother died the most unexpected and unjust of deaths, leaving me and Brianda in the care of a father, who, nearly insane with grief, forgot me for a while
.

To my misfortune, I was placed in the care of my Aunt Malca, my mother’s younger sister
.

Malca was childless and newly widowed, but not pitied overmuch, the consensus being that her poor husband had found the shortest and easiest route out of a bad bargain. It was whispered that having squandered her wealth during her husband’s lifetime, his death had necessitated the sale of all their property to pay tax and debt collectors. She was now rather destitute, which is why my father—out of respect for my dear mother’s memory—had taken her in. More than once have I pondered how the pure seed of such loving-kindness should have sprouted into such a bitter, poisonous weed!

Malca was not a soft bosom to cry upon, nor a pair of motherly arms. To Malca, I was a great, spoiled girl, untutored in the ways of the world, whom it was her awesome and distasteful responsibility to mold into a new image
.

I was thirteen, and my sister Brianda eight, when Aunt Malca descended upon us from Evora. Before that, we had seen our aunt only once or twice a year, on holidays, and always her ridiculously gaudy, richly embroidered but tasteless gowns and sour, pinched face had made us giggle and call her “The Golden Lemon” behind her back
.

I can almost see her now descending from the large, black coach my father had sent to fetch her. Her eyes, narrow, suspicious, and full of envy, peered up at the tall, curtained windows of our salon, catching my own. As she looked at me I saw a small, crafty, almost wicked smile flash out from the corners of her mouth. There we stood, locked in combat as I stared down and she up, until finally her gaze shifted to my father and brother, who had come out of the house to greet her. I saw her lower her gaze, transformed into the most fragile, modest, and almost embarrassingly servile of creatures
.

With Brianda and me, however, she showed quite a different character. Very soon she made it clear who would rule
.

Before our sleepy rooster had roused himself for his first triumphant song, Aunt Malca was already tapping at my door. “As it is written, ‘slumber is the first step to failure,’” she called out, exhorting me to dress and begin learning my household duties. Thereafter, she used a different proverb a day to rob me of my sleep. “Love not sleep lest you be beggared”; or “Sleepiness will robe a man in rags.” And when she wanted to be particularly severe (or when I was particularly tired), she would thunder, “Sleep on, then! Is it not written that: ‘The sleep of the wicked is a benefit to them and a boon to the world?’”

There was nothing, it seems, I could do right. I ate too quickly, and not enough, of foods that would not put the beautiful plumpness on my body she said men found so desirable. I was, she declared, jading my palate with unwholesome foods: garden vegetables meant to feed livestock and cheap fresh fish that was servants’ fare
.

It was not long before she was in the kitchen insisting the cook prepare fried breads with honey frostings, almond-paste cookies, and egg-yolk confections called
yemas.
In addition, she insisted that with my father’s wealth, it was fitting for us to feast upon all the delicacies of the New World: coffee, cocoa, sweet potatoes, and maize. Of course, Aunt Malca never dared demand such fare for herself directly from Father, who, together with my brother, Miguel, continued to enjoy “merchant class” foods: roast capon, saffron-scented rice, and heavenly bean and lamb stews
.

Since Malca, Brianda, and I often dined together—Father and Miguel supping at the odd hours their medical practice required—Malca bullied our poor cook mercilessly into preparing the delicacies she fancied. When she saw that I would partake of no part of that rich, indigestible fare, she declared I was deliberately fasting, and even hinted that she had heard me whispering incantations over the food pots to ruin their taste
.

She was not far wrong. For I found all her pretensions and demands mocking to the memory of my dear mother, who had exhorted us to live simply and give much to the poor. I would have gone to any length to thwart her. It was only Miguel’s, and then Father’s, intervention that stopped me from becoming a rattling bag of bones
.

She never forgave me
.

Or perhaps she was just one of those people I have encountered so frequently, particularly among women who lack the love of husband and child, who cannot stand to see another happy. She redoubled her efforts to somehow see me miserable
.

My days consisted of endless lectures on house and husband-care: The rooms in a house were best kept dark and wet, with no tables or chairs, well sealed against fleas. And if, despite this, there be evidence of fleas, spread alder leaves and trenches smeared with turpentine and leave a candle burning in the middle so that fleas will stick
.