We lived from sense to sense. I can picture the neighborhood as if it were last evening. The street with the nineteenth-century name. The narrow, storefront scrap-metal emporia. The corner convenience grocer, hanging on by milk-quart markups and lottery tickets. The empty lots that did thousand-dollar days as instant baseball parking garages when summer still was. The abandoned warehouse that flourished briefly as a bar where youth in search of the chemically enhanced Authentic congregated and methodically slammed into itself, studying the dance floor as if meaning were there, in designer-drugged Arthur Murray footprint.
The neighborhood, the street, our apartment are still real. But the city where we spent those years gets more stylized, harder to see, the further I get from what the two of us used to call home.
And we did feel at home there, for a season. We could have pitched camp there forever. I belonged there more than in any of those toy-town props that loom like back-projection houses behind me and my brothers and sisters, in my album of faded black-and-whites.
And C.: C. lived there, too, for a while. For the first time since she'd learned how to plan, outcome didn't matter. It was all dress-up, in B. An oldies party. For two years — a long vacation — she found a fantasy that fit her.
But C. got homesick. It was inevitable. How could any town compete with a ghost? We'd lived in B. several months when we learned that C.'s parents were returning to Limburg. Both her folks had retired. The workday was over. A quarter century camping out on the South Side of Chicago was enough. It was time to give up and head home.
C. blamed herself. Had she stayed close, the folks might never have left. Twenty-some years had produced no permanent attachments; no tie kept them here. Only the children, and the three of them were already scattered all over the map. C.'s parents chose to see whether the little town of E. still existed, if it ever had.
The news devastated C. "I'm a miserable excuse for a daughter, aren't I?"
I was supposed to agree with her. I was supposed to tell her no.
Guilt was her move in the loop C. and her mother put each other through. The struggle was not over whether they loved each other, but over whether love was enough. They kept at one another, testing, accusing, defending. This endless attempt to determine who had betrayed the other put them both through hell. The kind of hell that would hurt far more, someday, when all scores were reconciled.
C.'s father, on the other hand: any flare-up, and Pap started whistling to himself, heading off to the nearest back room to fix things. I wondered how this old Dutch railroad man with his accented Chicago idioms—"Let's get the show on the road," "Now you're talkin'," "If it works, it works" — would ever fit back into a province whose chief industry since the shutting of the coal mines was geriatric care. He'd been away once before, in a German forced-labor camp. I always thought that first deportation was the reason he lit off for the States.
C. had been a bribe to keep her mother in this country. A baby, for a woman already middle-aged. "I'm responsible, Rick. I'm responsible for their dislocation in the first place. And now I'm responsible for their hauling up stakes again. It's too awful. They're old, Beauie. How are they supposed to put everything they own in a packing crate…? They'll never make it, once they're back there. Never."
"Don't be crazy," I said. "They never stopped living there."
Men are worthless; they always think the issue is what's at issue.
"They'll make it just fine," I reasoned. The last thing C. needed. "They have two dozen brothers and sisters. They have more nieces and nephews than we have cockroaches. In another five years, they'll forget this continent ever existed."
"That's what I'm afraid of."
C. took the rap for her own abandonment. Since my father's death, the bonds of my blasted family had mercifully weakened. So it surprised me to see how desolate someone could be at the prospect of seeing hers just once or twice a year. C. broke out in a rash and began vomiting. The doctor put her on a popular sedative. Nothing I did seemed to help at all. Except listening to the stories.
Frantic, C. dragged out all the stories that her mother raised her on. Stories invariably meant the war. All tales came back to that. How the Germans tried to steal the bell out of the church steeple to melt it down, and how something like God stymied them. How her mother nursed a teenage Wehrmacht conscript, a story that almost split C.'s parents before they were even married. How her father's friends in the labor camp joined together to grow parody Hitler mustaches. How he escaped, evading his pursuers by leaping out of an upper-story farm window and limping off, broken-legged, into the night. How the government up north hid The Night Watch in the marlstone quarries under Maastricht. How C.'s uncle, forced to stand guard over his fellow coal miners during the occupation, was tried for complicity in the postwar hysteria, and imprisoned again by his friends.
C.'s fellow students, in that class of mine, could not identify Treblinka or date that war on a pop quiz I'd once given them. C. knew these things from nightly dinner table conversation. As if the occupation had ended yesterday. If then.
Our life in B. closed, really, with that first phone call from Limburg. I lay in bed one Saturday dawn, thrilling to the sound of my C. speaking another language. Another woman lived in the body of the one I lived with. C. had been accommodating me, making herself into someone she thought I could love. I hadn't the first idea who this other person was.
She spoke a dialect that ran like the fabled brook through the heart of E. Out of her mouth flowed an unparsable cascade of phonemes. She talked with her mother for a long time. Then her father, ear to the transatlantic taxi meter, came on for a verbal minute waltz. Then a dozen or so aunts, each with a bit of news. I'd moved in with all of them, without knowing.
A flurry of dialect goodbyes, and C. hung up, wrung out. "They're home," she said. "Come on. Outside."
I put my hand to the pane. The windchill was sub-desperate. "Only if you've been good."
C. began to cry. I fell all over myself telling her I was joking.
We bundled as best we could and hit the street. Her aimlessness was always hard on me. But I'd learned by then not to ask for destinations.
Everything was still the same, she assured me. B. would go on being bearable if we could keep making our long, random walks. That day, we ended up in her beloved public gardens, now frozen over and empty for the winter. The day after, we kept our standing cantata date, at that church that had sung one a week for years before our arrival and that would go on singing them long after we were permanently out of earshot.
Things would be all right, she implied, if we just kept busy. In the evenings we played board games, or sang songs that I wrote for C.'s perfect, clear alto. We watched old films on a black-and-white set with tinfoil antenna, on loan from friends. Gradually, C. convinced me that movies have been going downhill since 1939.
At night, we read to each other — more biography, history, legend — following no program but delight.
Things would be fine if we kept out of the house whenever possible. Saturday morning was free day at the Fine Arts. C. was the only woman alive who would want to return in her spare time to see the same objects she'd just stood in front of for forty hours that week. "It's not the same, Beau. They're much more interesting when you don't have to worry about protecting them."
We went to see the first American retrospective of a German photographer neither of us knew. C. had not yet been assigned the special exhibition. So Saturday was the day. We crossed the swamp that B.'s Brahmins had a century ago called in the Dutch to drain. We strolled into the gallery and around the corner. My photo waited for me there, although I would never have expected it in any number of lifetimes.