“Oh, Fletcher,” I said, looking away from the unbearable image of my father, “remember that early, early morning that you and Dad and I visited Grandma at the nursing home right before she died?”
Fletcher nodded.
“Remember how she did the tarantella on the front lawn? Oh, Fletcher, remember how happy she was!”
“Grandma never did that,” Fletcher said sadly, looking at me and then looking back at the chestnut coffin. “Grandma never did that, Vanessa.”
I felt a great pressure on my chest as if all the air had suddenly left the room and some new tremendous wave of sorrow was moving in. I looked to the doorway.
“Fletcher,” I said, breathlessly, “over there.” And even my father turned around, sensing something enormous through the layers and layers of his despair.
I stood up and moved in front of the coffin. “Grandpa Sarkis,” I said to the fat old man who stepped into the room. No coat to fit him, he wore an exotic silk wrap, blood red and black.
“No,” he said, shaking his head sadly, stepping back, not wanting me still.
I sat back down next to my brother and watched this colossal man run his hand hypnotically over the smooth wood, as if trying to conjure something to help him with this. That was his fate: to outlive the child he had held in his arms, the golden girl, the dream child. When he turned from the coffin he had aged decades and could barely walk. He looked at me. “Alice,” he said. “What are you doing here?” He closed his eyes and touched my face. “My wife,” he said, “this is my wife,” introducing me to Fletcher. “How are you feeling, Alice? She’s been so sick.” He turned away, shaking his head, and slowly left the room.
White flowers grew from the walls. The snow had continued to fall. People who arrived now were completely white when they entered the room: Florence, Bethany.
When they lifted the coffin into the hearse, it was still snowing. I worried she would be cold out there. I worried she would be lost because everything in this weather looked the same. Each tree looked like every other, each field. She would be frightened. I worried she would not be able to find her way back. I worried she would suffocate under so many white flowers. My father must have felt the same way. No flowers, he said, would follow my mother from the funeral home into the cemetery. They might weigh her down. She might never rise up. As I got out of the limousine, there were only white flowers of snow — only snow, the sighing of snow, the sighing of burning flesh in the snow. I stood at the edge of the plot of snow my mother would disappear into. White flowers continued to fall from the sky, the white pressing against us, pressing us to the ground. I looked to my father, stooped with sorrow in the snow in his borrowed clothes. I watched my brother and the others lift the coffin from the hearse up the hill onto a steel platform in the snow — his bandages dragged in the snow. The priest, and Grandpa Sarkis, the press, the friends, the snow — and the terrible hole, the terrible sighing hole.
The knock at the door came just as my mother’s chestnut coffin was being lowered into the ground again, as my father pivoted in the hard snow, slipping slightly, as my brother brought his hands to his face, and as I–I cannot even see myself anymore. The knock at the door stopped the weeping, stilled the speech in the priest’s throat. The knock at the door lifted the horrible weight of snow from my mother’s chest, and I could breathe again for a moment. I wondered whether I had invented the knock, for it not only stopped her descent now but seemed to tilt her body slightly away from the great silence at the center of the earth. I opened the door slowly, unsure whether anyone would be there at all. I thought this knock might be some elegant safety device of the brain, nothing more. Opening it, though, I still wanted to believe that someone might actually be standing there, someone who would walk into the room when invited and smile and sit with me for a while. I still wanted to believe that I might not be destined always to hear and see what was not there, to love that which did not exist, to want what could never be touched.
I opened the door. Over her arm was a dark corduroy coat. She wore a long black-and-white diamonded cardigan, a tailored white shirt, and black pants. Her hair was short and dark with a few flecks of gray in it. Her nails were polished and perfectly shaped. She wore a thin gold band on her right hand. I had given up the idea of ever seeing her.
She stared at me, saying nothing. Her eyes were dark. She was still beautiful. I stepped back from her.
“Sabine,” I whispered, and tears flowed down my face. “What are you doing here?”
She extended her arm tentatively. Her hand was shaking as she touched the side of my face. As she touched me she gasped and with that intake, the breath reversing itself, I knew she was real. I could smell her perfume; I could feel her body trembling; her hand was warm.
“I never expected,” she said in a thick accent, “I never expected this. I never thought”—her voice trailed off, then came back, “I never thought you’d look so much like her.”
“Please,” I whispered. “Please don’t.”
The cat had come to the doorway where we still stood. It rubbed against Sabine’s silky leg, then moved in between mine, and then back to Sabine. She bent down and picked it up. “China,” she sighed, looking at my mother’s cat sadly, hugging it to her, burying her face in its fur. “Oh, China.” In her voice was the sorrow of the universe. In her voice was a car being hit from behind and exploding into fire.
“Please come in,” I said.
Sabine, though she said nothing, noticed it all. She recognized the desk, the lamp, the chair, the things my mother had had for years. Some of them she had bought with Sabine in France.
“I didn’t think it would be this hard,” she said. “I should not have come.”
“No, Sabine, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve always wanted to meet you. I’ve always wanted to know who you were, to see you, to look at you, to meet you just once. I have all your records,” I said shyly, and she smiled. I was nervous suddenly. I felt awkward, ill at ease, shaken; I bumped into things. She smiled again. I felt a great disorder moving in. This is not at all how my mother would have acted in such a situation, and I thought it brought Sabine some comfort to see me separate from her. But she was still saying it over and over, “I should not have come. I should go.”
“Please don’t go,” I said.
She nodded her head.
“May I?” she asked, tapping on the top of the Scotch bottle.
“Please.”
I watched this woman who had never been here before take charge, find the glasses, fill them with ice, make the drinks.
“We’ll feel better after this, yes?” she said and smiled slightly. She did not sit but did a little pirouette in the center of the room, put her hand to her head, and said, “My cigarettes — ah, yes,” and reached into the pocket of her sweater and took out a light-blue package. She lit one and her voice deepened with the first drag as she settled into a more familiar place.
“Ah,” she said, sinking into my mother’s chair. She watched me very closely as we spoke of New York and of Paris, of the house in Maine, her life, her singing — my mother hovering on the periphery of each subject but not mentioned.
“Do you like it here in Greenwich Village?” she asked. She smiled again, absently, weakly. She stood up suddenly and turned her back to me.
“You are so much like her — so beautiful and so sad.” Tears fell in her voice. Tears had been falling in her voice a long time; it was worn by water.
“I should leave.”
“Don’t go away,” I said, touching her back lightly, “please don’t go.”
With her back still turned to me, she began snapping her fingers, singing very softly in French, and the room turned dark. Berlin, I thought, it’s Berlin. In the darkness I heard an accordion, a violin, a piano, a drum. “Oubliez,” “regardez,” “l’histoire,” “déjà,” “l’amour,” “il ne me quitte pas”—each word was rough-edged and sounded as if it were being pulled from her. She was making the words work as hard as they could, as if she were trying to help herself explain something, as if through these hard, nasal words filled with bitterness something might come clear to her. The accordion faded, and the piano, and I listened to that voice alone in the dark trying to make some sense.