In the hilly cemetery behind the First Lutheran Church of Ransomville, New York, there is a still-shiny black granite marker at the edge of rows of Nissenbaum markers, JOHN ALLARD NISSENBAUM 1872–1957. Chiseled into the stone is How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Such angry words of Jesus Christ’s! I wondered who had chosen them — not Constance or Cornelia, surely. It must have been John Nissenbaum himself.
Already as a girl of eleven, twelve, I was pushy and curious, asking my mother about my missing grandmother. Look, Mother, for God’s sake where did she go? Didn’t anybody try to find her? Mother’s replies were vague, evasive. As if rehearsed. That sweet-resolute stoic smile. Cheerful resignation, Christian forgiveness. For thirty-five years she taught high school English in the Rochester public schools, and especially after my father left us, and she became a single, divorced woman, the manner came easily to her of brisk classroom authority, that pretense of the skilled teacher of weighing others’ opinions thoughtfully before reiterating one’s own.
My father, an education administrator, left us when I was fourteen, to remarry. I was furious, heartbroken. Dazed. Why? How could he betray us? But Mother maintained her Christian fortitude, her air of subtly wounded pride. This is what people will do, Bethany. Turn against you, turn faithless. You might as well learn, young.
Yet I pushed. Up to the very end of her life, when Mother was so ill. You’d judge me harsh, heartless — people did. But for God’s sake I wanted to know: what happened to my Grandmother Nissenbaum, why did nobody seem to care she’d gone away? Were the letters my mother and Connie swore their father received authentic, or had he been playing a trick of some kind? And if it had been a trick, what was its purpose? Just tell me the truth for once, Mother. The truth about anything.
I’m forty-four years old, I still want to know.
But Mother, the intrepid schoolteacher, the good-Christian, was impenetrable. Inscrutable as her Pappa. Capable of summing up her entire childhood back there (this was how she and Aunt Connie spoke of Ransomville, their pasts: back there) by claiming that such hurts are God’s will, God’s plan for each of us. A test of our faith. A test of our inner strength. I said, disgusted, what if you don’t believe in God, what are you left with then? — and Mother said matter-of-factly, “You’re left with yourself, of course, your inner strength. Isn’t that enough?”
That final time we spoke of this, I lost patience, I must have pushed Mother too far. In a sharp, stinging voice, a voice I’d never heard from her before, she said, “Bethany, what do you want me to tell you? About my mother? — my father? Do you imagine I ever knew them? Either of them? My mother left Connie and me when we were little girls, left us with him, wasn’t that her choice? Her selfishness? Why should anyone have gone looking for her? She was trash, she was faithless. We learned to forgive, and to forget. Your aunt tells you a different story, I know, but it’s a lie — I was the one who was hurt, I was the youngest. Your heart can be broken only once — you’ll learn! Our lives were busy, busy like the lives of us grown women today, women who have to work, women who don’t have time to moan and groan over their hurt feelings, you can’t know how Connie and I worked on that farm, in that house, like grown women when we were girls. Father tried to stop both of us going to school beyond eighth grade — imagine! We had to walk two miles to get a ride with a neighbor, to get to the high school in Ransomville; there weren’t school buses in those days. Everything you’ve had you’ve taken for granted and wanted more, but we weren’t like that. We hadn’t money for the right school clothes, all our textbooks were used, but we went to high school. I was the only ‘farm girl’ — that’s exactly what I was known as, even by my teachers — in my class to take math, biology, physics, Latin. I was memorizing Latin declensions milking cows at five in the morning, winter mornings. I was laughed at, Nelia Nissenbaum was laughable. But I accepted it. All that mattered was that I win a scholarship to a teachers’ college so I could escape the country, and I did win a scholarship and I never returned to Ransomville to live. Yes, I loved Pappa — I still love him. I loved the farm, too. You can’t not love any place that’s taken so much from you. But I had my own life, I had my teaching jobs, I had my faith, my belief in God, I had my destiny. I even got married — that was extra, unexpected. I’ve worked for everything I ever got and I never had time to look back, to feel sorry for myself. Why then should I think about her? — why do you torment me about her? A woman who abandoned me when I was five years old! In 1923! I made my peace with the past, just like Connie in her different way. We’re happy women, we’ve been spared a lifetime of bitterness. That was God’s gift to us.”
Mother paused, breathing quickly. There was in her face the elation of one who has said too much, that can never be retracted; I was stunned into silence. She plunged on, now contemptuously, “What are you always wanting me to admit, Bethany? That you know something I don’t know? What is your generation always pushing for, from ours? Isn’t it enough we gave birth to you, indulged you, must we be sacrificed to you, too? What do you want us to tell you — that life is cruel and purposeless? — that there is no loving God, and never was, only accident? Is that what you want to hear, from your mother? That I married your father because he was a weak man, a man I couldn’t feel much for, who wouldn’t, when it came time, hurt me?”
And then there was silence. We stared at each other, Mother in her glisten of fury, daughter Bethany so shocked she could not speak. Never again would I think of my mother in the old way.
What Mother never knew: In April 1983, two years after her death, a creek that runs through the old Nissenbaum property flooded its banks, and several hundred feet of red clayey soil collapsed overnight into the creek bed, as in an earthquake. And in the raw, exposed earth there was discovered a human skeleton, decades old but virtually intact. It had been apparently buried, less than a mile behind the Nissenbaum farmhouse.
There had never been anything so newsworthy — so sensational — in the history of Chautauqua County.
State forensic investigators determined that the skeleton had belonged to a woman, apparently killed by numerous blows to the head (a hammer, or the blunt edge of an ax) that shattered her skull like a melon. Dumped into the grave with her was what appeared to have been a suitcase, now rotted, its contents — clothes, shoes, underwear, gloves — scarcely recognizable from the earth surrounding it. There were a few pieces of jewelry and, still entwined around the skeleton’s neck, a tarnished-gold cross on a chain. Most of the woman’s clothing had long ago rotted away and almost unrecognizable too was a book — a leatherbound Bible? — close beside her. About the partly detached, fragile wrist and ankle bones were loops of rusted baling wire that had fallen loose, coiled in the moist red clay like miniature sleeping snakes.
Peter Robinson
The Two Ladies at Rose Cottage
from Malice Domestic 6