Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (2 page)

When Anne-Marie became tired, her eyes would close halfway and her words would stop midsentence. That was my cue to leave, to let her rest with her books and the newspaper. I kissed her and told her I loved her and I'd see her tomorrow. “Tell me again about Martin's new shoes,” she asked, her eyes opening wide for a minute. I told her about my three-year-old's new shoes, pink Merrells. He loved everything pink. She nodded.

“See you tomorrow,” she said.

One hour later, my sister died. She handed my mother a folded-back piece of her
New York Times
, said, “Read that. It's interesting,” and then attempted to rise from the bed. Blood gurgled up from her throat, and she fell back. The nurse pushed past my mother, and told her to go find Marvin, who had gone out into the hall. But it was too late. Anne-Marie was gone.

I was driving over the Henry Hudson Bridge with Martin belted into his car seat behind me when my cell phone rang. I carried it wedged between my legs so I could answer it quickly, and I did. Jack interrupted my words about what a great visit I'd had.

“Nina, you have to come back.”

“Why? Why do I have to come back?” I started to feel sick to my stomach. Jack didn't answer me.

“Tell me, why do I have to come back? What's wrong?”

“Anne-Marie is dead.”

I screamed. And screamed again. I pulled the car over and continued screaming, my throat raking itself bloody and sore. Martin sat speechless behind me. He must have been terrified. When I stopped screaming, I started crying. I turned the car around and drove back into New York City, back to the hospital.

Anne-Marie had been laid out in the bed with her arms crossed over her body. A cloth was wrapped around her head, holding her mouth closed. My mother stood beside her, crying quietly, holding on to the cloth that covered her body. Marvin paced the room. Jack talked with the nurse, who was urging us to move out so that the body could be taken down to the morgue. I'd left Martin in the waiting room with another nurse, drawing pictures. Natasha cried on the couch, sitting next to my father. She held his arm as tears trembled down his cheeks, shaking along with his body as he weaved back and forth. “Three in one night,” he kept mumbling to himself, repeating over and over, “Three in one night.”

I tried to pull my mother away from the bed. “Let's go, Mommy. That's not Anne-Marie anymore.”

“Yes, she is,” my mother corrected me. “Yes, this is Anne-Marie.” She turned back to my sister, back to stroking her cheek, holding on to her hand above the sheet.

But that body was no longer my sister. Anne-Marie was gone. We could still have her with us in words and memories and photos. She was ours to remember and talk about and dream about. But she was gone from herself, never to know or feel or talk or dream, ever again. That was the first horror of losing Anne-Marie: she lost herself. She lost life and all its wondrous, incalculable possibilities. While the rest of us would live on, she would not. It was all over for her. Even if I thought the spirit of her person might persist in another dimension or another space—and how could I know this or deny this?—her place on earth as she felt it, tasted it, knew it, was gone. Lights-out, over, forever.

As horrible as losing her life was, there was even more horror for me in that Anne-Marie knew it was happening. I had failed to protect Anne-Marie from knowing her death was coming. All my books and foolery and stupid clothes could not stop her from knowing. She was too smart to ignore the truth that came with the doctors' visits and the test results and what she felt inside.

From the time she was a child, Anne-Marie had used intelligence and intuition to see through lies and bullshit. She quit the Brownies after two weeks because the mothers running the troop just could not explain the arts and crafts. Anne-Marie did not see the point of making lanyards, and until the mothers could justify the wrapping of plastic strings around and around, she was out of there. As an adult, she eviscerated long-held assumptions about Renaissance architecture and constructed whole new ways of looking at societal and civic impacts on church construction in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She knew Jack was the man for me before I did, and she knew my kids would be beautiful before they were even born. She had the very rare ability to see and understand all sides of any situation or problem or endeavor, clearly and without prejudgment. When her doctors used clinical terms and a calm, quiet tone to discuss the usual course of bile duct cancer and the possibilities of treatment, she understood, long before any of us did, that the treatment was palliative only. She felt the cancer moving inside, strangling life out of her with every step. Death was on its way.

Only once did I see my sister break down during the three months of her illness. One Saturday in March I went in to see Anne-Marie at her apartment while Jack took the boys to the Museum of Natural History. We sat next to each other on the couch in her book-lined study. I remember how suddenly she reached over to hold on to me, to hug me close to her, pulling me up into her thick gray cardigan so that my face was buried in her hair and her face was buried in my hair. She wanted to be close, but she could not look me in the eye as she said what she knew.

“It is so unfair.”

The words filtered through to me. It was unfair that she had to die. She said it only once. I understood. I held her to me, and there was nothing I could say, except over and over again that I loved her. I have that gray sweater now, and I wear it in the winter. I know how unfair life is. But while we all know life is not fair, Anne-Marie knew it more. And it horrifies me that I could not take that knowledge away from her and bear it myself, for her.

In
The Master of Petersburg
, author J. M. Coetzee imagines Dostoyevsky feeling the same horror. Dostoyevsky's son has just died in a fall. The death saddens Dostoyevsky, but what haunts him is that his son knew his own death was coming and there was nothing he could do to spare his son that knowledge: “What he cannot bear is the thought that, for the last fraction of the last instant of his fall, Pavel knew that nothing could save him, that he was dead. . . . It is from knowing that he is dead that he wants to protect his son. As long as I live, he thinks, let me be the one who knows! By whatever act of will it takes, let me be the thinking animal plunging through the air.”

I was the one left knowing, but I knew too late, and my knowledge never helped my sister. What good could my knowing do me now? I had more questions every day, and no wisdom to provide the answers. What had my father meant with his repeated incantation of “three in one night”? How could I have denied my mother so soon, telling her that body was not her daughter? How could I explain death to my children without taking away their innocence? How would any of us ever be able to go back out into the world and live, smile, talk, plan ever again?

The questions formed in my mind, and no answers came. Piling up, one on top of the other, the questions came down heavier and heavier until my head ached and my back bowed from the weight. The questions dug in deep, anchoring me to the fact and to the sorrow of losing my oldest sister.

Sorrow for me became the ceaseless pain of knowing I could not protect my sister from death. All I wanted was to be the one who knew: “Let me be the one who knows!” I wanted to be the one who bore the death, and leave all the others, Anne-Marie included, free to go on.

Chapter 2
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Words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

CYRIL CONNOLLY,

The Unquiet Grave

AFTER ANNE-MARIE'S DEATH, I BECAME A WOMAN OF TWO PARTS
. One part of me was still in her hospital room, the afternoon she died. The room with its reclined bed, easy chair, TV, and piles of books. The silver tripods holding bags of fluid, painkiller, and horrible brown liquid that drained from my sister's blocked stomach. The tray overflowing with newspapers and Jell-O packs. The balled-up socks I'd brought in that were too small to pull onto my sister's swollen and blue feet. The brush with strands of dark blond hair.

Then there was the other part of me, the part that left the hospital room at a gallop and never looked back, for fear of what I would see. I began a race the day Anne-Marie died, a race away from death, away from my father's pain and my mother's sorrow, away from loss and confusion and despair. I was scared of dying, scared of losing my own life. I was scared of what dying did to family left behind, the loneliness and the helplessness. The horrible second-guessing: Should we have tried other doctors, other treatments, other methods?

I was scared of living a life not worth the living. Why did I deserve to live when my sister had died? I was responsible now for two lives, my sister's and my own, and, damn, I'd better live well. I had to live hard and live fully. I was going to live double if my sister couldn't live at all. I was going to live double because I had to die too, one day, and I didn't want to miss anything. I set myself to a faster and faster speed. I drove myself through action and plans and trips and activities. I wanted to make my parents smile again and keep my kids from thinking about death. I wanted to love Jack and walk for miles with Natasha. I had to make up for everything that everyone around me lost when Anne-Marie died.

I began coaching Martin's soccer team, and offered to help out with Peter's Lego robotics team. I took on leadership of a PTA committee. I set myself on a fitness regime and went to see every doctor with any authority over a region of the body: ear, nose, and throat; vagina and breast; eye; knee (arthritis from an old soccer injury); and colon. Two years before Anne-Marie died, I'd quit working, and there was no way I was going back to work now. I had to be available to everyone in my family, from the youngest (Martin) to the oldest (my father). I tried to anticipate every need and offer all kinds of encouragement.

Three years at increasing speed, and then I realized I couldn't do it. I couldn't get away from the sorrow. I could not guarantee my own life span, or anyone else's. I could not make everyone around me safe and happy. My forty-sixth birthday was looming, and suddenly all I could think about was how my sister had died at forty-six. I had always heard that middle age catches a person wondering, Is this all there is? But for me it was the question posed by my sister's death three years earlier that banged harder and harder against my brain.

Why do I deserve to live?

My sister had died, and I was alive. Why was I given the life card, and what was I supposed to do with it?

I had to stop running. The answer to those questions would not be found in constant activity. I had to stand still and take time to merge my two parts back together again, the one caught in my sister's hospital room and the one stuck on a treadmill set to the highest speed. There was a link between the life I had before and the life I had now. My sister was the link. In that link I would find my answers.

I looked back to what the two of us had shared. Laughter. Words. Books.

Books. The more I thought about how to stop and get myself back together as one sane, whole person, the more I thought about books. I thought about escape. Not running to escape but reading to escape. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that “words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.” That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.

I had been reading a lot in the three years since my sister died, but the books I chose were closer to torture than to comfort. The raw clarity of pain in Joan Didion's
Year of Magical Thinking
, her account of her husband's sudden death, intensified my own sorrow. Then there were the weeks I read only the ridiculous but sweet and addictive Aunt Dimity mysteries by Nancy Atherton. Aunt Dimity may be dead, but she still has the power to communicate her very wise advice to the living. How I wished—I cried!—for such communion with Anne-Marie.

I read all the Barbara Cleverly novels starring Joe Sandilands because Anne-Marie had read them all and told me they were great, and I wanted to know her again; I wanted to understand what she loved and what she found worthy of her hard-to-get respect. I reread one of her favorite books from when she was just a little kid,
Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine
by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrashkin. I had her Scholastic Book Club copy, priced at fifty cents but priceless now with “Anne-Marie Sankovitch” written in her handwriting on the inner flap. The last pages of the book had been lost over the years. I hunted down a replacement copy on the Internet so I could finish the reading of it.

I've used books my whole life for wisdom, for succor, and for escape. The summer before I entered middle school was the year I began to step away from childhood and toward who I would become as an adult. I suffered my first heartbreak, my first death up close, and my first inkling that life was just not fair.
Harriet the Spy
by Louise Fitzhugh held me together during those bewildering and scary rites of passage.

The summer began with my best friend, Carol, moving away from my neighborhood. Throughout elementary school Carol and I played together after school, almost every day. I'd first noticed Carol in kindergarten. I'd noticed her because she had a thick, soft, woolly bath mat for her napping rug while I had a rag rug, thin and flat like a pancake. Carol allowed me to place my rug near hers during naptime, and even to rest my head on a fluffy corner of her mat. We became best friends, walking to and from school together every day. Afternoons were spent playing together at her house or mine. Fifth grade was our
Gilligan's Island
year. Every day after school we would watch a
Gilligan's Island
rerun on TV and then we would play, pretending we were the ones cast away on a deserted island. I was always Ginger, and Carol was always Mary Ann, and the gist of our play was how we both loved the Professor. All our adventures on the deserted island revolved around the Professor. Because we were friends, best friends, we both got to have him in our afternoon games, using the doorjambs of rooms as stand-ins for the straight and narrow Professor. We kissed those doorjambs and laughed like hyenas. The thought that he might prefer one or the other, Ginger or Mary Ann, or might find someone else (ha—not on a deserted island), never occurred to us. We were prepubescent, innocent, and happy.

And then one day we weren't. Carol moved to a street far enough away that we could no longer just drop in on each other. Our play had to be planned and involved parents and cars and schedules. When summer vacation began, I was left in the old neighborhood with old—but not best—friends while Carol moved on to new friends. And, very quickly, she found a new best friend. Carol was no longer interested in me or the Professor.

The only way I got through the loneliness of that summer was by reading
Harriet the Spy
. Harriet became my new best friend. I could not play Gilligan's Island alone, but I could spy on my own. In fact, that was one of Harriet's rules of spying! Suddenly, being alone was not so bad. I began to carry around a notebook and scribble my thoughts down in it. I didn't do much actual spying. My sisters caught on quickly to what I was up to with my notebook, my dime-store binoculars, and the copy of
Harriet the Spy
that I always had with me. They told my mother, and she gave me a quiet lecture on respecting the privacy of our neighbors. No big deal. I was more interested in writing my own thoughts in my notebook than in spying on boring suburban neighbors. Reading and rereading
Harriet the Spy
brought me somewhere new, to a place where a girl my age lived, a girl who loved to read and scribble and eat peculiar foods just like me. Harriet took me with her to her world, a place where Ole Golly talked to us kids as if we were smart and big, telling us all about writers like Henry James and Dostoyevsky and making them sound wonderful. It was a place of solitary freedom and tomato sandwiches. When Harriet found herself in deep trouble with her friends, I didn't want her to work things out with them. I wanted her to be alone, like I was.

In mid-July of that summer my mother and I left for Belgium. My grandmother was in the final stages of cancer, and my mother was going to care for her. I was brought along because at age ten I was too young to be left unsupervised at home, and maybe because my mother had noticed my sadness over losing Carol. She wanted to keep an eye on me. My father and older sisters would join us in August, when we would head east to visit relatives in Poland. I was happy to be flying away to Belgium, unaware of just how ill my grandmother was. I sat on the plane feeling very safe, with my mother beside me, and my copy of
Harriet the Spy
, my notebook, and my stuffed Piglet—beloved Piggy—anchored in between our seats.

I remember sitting on the bed where my grandmother lay, very ill but still smiling, still eager to spoil me. “When I'm better, we'll go shopping, yes?” she asked in her lovely voice, her English accented and slightly warbling. But she didn't get better. I don't remember anyone telling me that she had died. I just remember my aunt taking me to buy clothes for the funeral, a plain blue skirt, white jersey, black shoes.

Just before the funeral I developed a brain-splitting headache, so bad that I vomited again and again. My grandfather, a doctor, gave me a sedative that made me feel better, and I went to the funeral. I sat beside my mother, waiting alone on the bench while she went up to the casket. My mother cried, the only time I saw her cry that summer, but I don't remember crying—I was half numb with the headache medication.

In the days that followed, my mother took me all over Antwerp. We walked everywhere. It was wonderful being with her, going to the zoo, down to the port by the river, and to Rubens's house, filled with his paintings. I liked the blue-and-white tiles encircling the kitchen fireplace in Rubens's house, each tile presenting a different tiny scene from life. Afternoons we would sit at a café and share sugared waffles, my mother drinking coffee while I had hot cocoa. I would scribble away in my notebook, poems and thoughts and notes about what we'd seen that day. Harriet was always with me. My mother and aunt bought me new books to read, but I always went back to favorite pages of
Harriet the Spy
, like the scene where Harriet describes how she first began to listen in on other people's conversations while drinking her egg cream at the counter of her local diner. I had no idea what an egg cream was, but I understood the fun when Harriet “would play a game and not look at the people until from listening to them she had decided what they looked like. Then she would turn around and see if she were right.”

My mother was good at eavesdropping, but I was even better, picking up the English conversations going on around us in those cafés and reporting the funny stuff I heard. Then my mother and I would both turn around and peek at the overheard couples and families, and laugh behind our hands.

In August my father and sisters arrived in Belgium. We left for Poland, driving eastward across Europe to visit brothers my father hadn't seen for thirty years, since World War II. There was a dramatic change as we drove into Eastern Europe from Germany. Well cared for brick and stone buildings, clean cobblestone streets, and the sleek Autobahn gave way to a drab and gray symmetry of cement block buildings interspersed with crumbling roads and long banks of fields being worked by rusty machinery or by hand.

We stayed first with my father's oldest brother, who lived and worked on an old estate that was now a large flower nursery. Despite the shabbiness of the once-grand house, the property was impressive, with gorgeous wide rows of flowers spreading out in all directions. There was also a small vegetable garden next to the house. We ate salads of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers during long meals with everyone smiling and talking in a language that, for once, my mother didn't understand. She just nodded and smiled, and we girls followed along.

We drove on after a few days to Kraków, to visit another brother. His two-room house was jam-packed with vases, photographs, bowls, paintings, and books. Mismatched pieces of furniture pushed up against each other, fighting for space. Again there were long meals (bread and sausage) and lots of smiling and talking in a language that I didn't understand. I stuck to talking with my sisters and rereading
Harriet the Spy
. At night, my sisters and I slept in the back room of the house, sharing the larger of the two beds with our aunt. My parents slept in the other bed, a narrow twin.

My aunt was a large woman, and when she shifted on the bumpy mattress, my sisters and I tumbled and rolled. Anne-Marie reached out with her arm to hold me in the bed. I might have fallen onto the floor without her steadying hand. I clutched Anne-Marie with one hand and held tightly on to Piggy with the other. None of us girls slept much.

We left Poland, driving north into East Germany, with the idea of crossing back over into Western Europe through Berlin. But tourists were supposed to enter West Berlin from the south, avoiding East Berlin altogether. The reason for this became obvious as we drove through the streets of East Berlin. Our shiny Western car stuck out like a display of fireworks in a gloomy sky. The few people we passed on the crumbling streets stopped to stare at us. All talk in the car ceased, and we made our way silently along entire blocks of bombed-out buildings, under the dim lights of weak streetlamps. Only Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point to West Berlin, was lit up, bright and big against the dark sky. Firing out from the roof of the long shed, which spanned the roadway, were what seemed like hundreds of spotlights, crisscrossing back and forth across our car as we approached.