And Pappa would say calmly, staring her full in the face, “When your father says nothing, girl, he means nothing
Sometimes his hands shook, fussing with the pouch of Bugler and the stained cigarette-roller.
Since the shame of losing his wife, and everybody knowing the circumstances, John Nissenbaum had aged shockingly. His face was creased, his skin reddened and cracked, finely stippled with what would be diagnosed (when finally he went to a doctor) as skin cancer. His eyes, pouched in wrinkled lids like a turtle’s, were often vague, restless. Even in church, in a row close to Reverend Dieckman’s pulpit, he had a look of wandering off. In what he called his earlier life he’d been a rough, physical man, intelligent but quick-tempered; now he tired easily, could not keep up with his hired men whom he more and more mistrusted. His beard, once so trim and shapely, grew ragged and uneven and was entirely gray-grizzled, like cobwebs. And his breath — it smelled of tobacco juice, wet, rank, sickish, rotted.
Once, seeing the edge of the letter in Pappa’s pocket, Connie bit her lip and said, “It’s from her, isn’t it!”
Pappa said, still calmly, “I said it’s nothing, girl. From nobody.”
Never in their father’s presence did either of the sisters allude to their missing mother except as her, she.
Later when they searched for the letter, even for its envelope, of course they found nothing. Pappa had burned it in the stove probably. Or torn it into shreds, tossed into the garbage. Still, the sisters risked their father’s wrath by daring to look in his bedroom (the stale-smelling room he’d moved to, downstairs at the rear of the house) when he was out; even, desperate, knowing it was hopeless, poking through fresh-dumped garbage. (Like all farm families of their day, the Nissenbaums dumped raw garbage down a hillside, in the area of the outhouse.) Once Connie scrambled across fly-buzzing mounds of garbage holding her nose, stooping to snatch up — what? A card advertising a fertilizer sale, that had looked like a picture postcard.
“Are you crazy?” Nelia cried. “I hate you!”
Connie turned to scream at her, eyes brimming tears. “Go to hell, horse’s ass, I hate you!”
Both wanted to believe, or did in fact believe, that their mother was not writing to their father but to them. But they would never know. For years, as the letters came at long intervals, arriving only when their father fetched the mail, they would not know.
This might have been a further element of mystery: why the letters, arriving so infrequently, arrived only when their father got the mail. Why, when Connie, or Nelia, or Loraine (John’s younger sister, who’d come to live with them) got the mail, there would never be one of the mysterious letters. Only when Pappa got the mail.
After my mother’s death in 1981, when I spoke more openly to my Aunt Connie, I asked why they hadn’t been suspicious, just a little. Aunt Connie lifted her penciled eyebrows, blinked at me as if I’d uttered something obscene — “Suspicious? Why?” Not once did the girls (who were in fact intelligent girls, Nelia a straight-A student in the high school in town) calculate the odds: how the presumed letter from their mother could possibly arrive only on those days (Saturdays) when their father got the mail; one day out of six mail-days, yet never any day except that particular day (Saturday). But as Aunt Connie said, shrugging, it just seemed that that was how it was — they would never have conceived of even the possibility of any situation in which the odds wouldn’t have been against them, and in favor of Pappa.
5
The farmhouse was already old when I was first brought to visit it: summers, in the 1950s. Part red brick so weathered as to seem without color and part rotted wood, with a steep shingled roof, high ceilings, and spooky corners; a perpetual odor of woodsmoke, kerosene, mildew, time. A perpetual draft passed through the house from the rear, which faced north, opening out onto a long incline of acres, miles, dropping to the Chautauqua River ten miles away like an aerial scene in a movie. I remember the old wash room, the machine with a hand-wringer; a door to the cellar in the floor of that room, with a thick metal ring as a handle. Outside the house, too, was another door, horizontal and not vertical. The thought of what lay beyond those doors, the dark, stone-smelling cellar where rats scurried, filled me with a childish terror.
I remember Grandfather Nissenbaum as always old. A lean, sinewy, virtually mute old man. His finely cracked, venous-glazed skin, red-stained as if with earth; narrow rheumy eyes whose pupils seemed, like the pupils of goats, horizontal black slats. How they scared me! Deafness had made Grandfather remote and strangely imperial, like an old almost-forgotten king. The crown of his head was shinily bald and a fringe of coarse hair bleached to the color of ash grew at the sides and back. Where once, my mother lamented, he’d been careful in his dress, especially on Sundays, for church-going, he now wore filth-stained overalls and in all months save summer long gray-flannel underwear straggling at his cuffs like a loose, second skin. His breath stank of tobacco juice and rotted teeth, the knuckles of both his hands were grotesquely swollen. My heart beat quickly and erratically in his presence. “Don’t be silly,” Mother whispered nervously, pushing me toward the old man, “—your grandfather loves you” But I knew he did not. Never did he call me by my name, Bethany, but only “girl” as if he hadn’t troubled to learn my name.
When Mother showed me photographs of the man she called Pappa, some of these scissored in half, to excise my missing grandmother, I stared, and could not believe he’d once been so handsome! Like a film actor of some bygone time. “You see,” Mother said, incensed, as if the two of us had been quarreling, “—this is who John Nissenbaum really is.”
I grew up never really knowing Grandfather, and I certainly didn’t love him. He was never “Grandpa” to me. Visits to Ransomville were sporadic, sometimes canceled at the last minute. Mother would be excited, hopeful, apprehensive — then, who knows why, the visit would be canceled, she’d be tearful, upset, yet relieved. Now, I can guess that Mother and her family weren’t fully welcomed by my grandfather; he was a lonely and embittered old man, but still proud — he’d never forgiven her for leaving home, after high school, just like her sister Connie; going to the teachers’ college at Elmira instead of marrying a local man worthy of working and eventually inheriting the Nissenbaum farm. By the time I was born, in 1951, the acreage was being sold off; by the time Grandfather Nissenbaum died, in 1972, in a nursing home in Yewville, the two-hundred acres had been reduced to a humiliating seven acres, now the property of strangers.