We got back home at the beginning of September. There was no communication from Sven, not a letter, not a postcard, nothing. No acknowledgment that he had received any of her ten thousand postcards, no thank you for the lime-green birthday shirt, nothing. Our own birthday was on the eighteenth. My mother planned to throw a sweet-sixteen party for us. Annie and I insisted that we supply the music.
Our group was called The Boppers, which was a play on the expression “teeny-boppers” and a reference as well to the time-honored series of books about The Bobbsey Twins, not to mention a sidelong wink at “bop,” which was very far from the kind of music we were playing at the time. This was 1982, remember. The Beatles had broken up long ago. In fact, John Lennon had been killed almost two years ago. Paul McCartney had recorded a song called “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder, and it was now the number-four song on the charts. The Boppers imitated it to perfection. We also played “Eye of the Tiger,” the Survivor hit, and “Don’t You Want Me” from the Human League, and we did a fair rendition of the Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra,” too. Not to mention all the Golden Oldies from when you and I were young, Gertie. Altogether, we weren’t a bad band.
I played bass guitar, and my sister played the tambourines and sang. She had a strong, clear voice, not unlike Janis Joplin’s, or so everyone, including me, told her. We used to rehearse in a church hall six blocks from the apartment we were still living in with my mother; Aaron was already off at college. We kept all our equipment at the church... well, not my guitar. But everything else. Tuners and amplifiers and speakers, and microphones, all the stuff every garage band in the nation, or perhaps the world, had to buy if they ever hoped to achieve instant stardom. My mother had paid for the equipment, of course. It had cost something like six thousand dollars.
Two days before our birthday, after we’d been rehearsing for close to ten days, my sister hocked all the equipment, bought herself a ticket to Stockholm, and ran off to meet her beloved Sven. Of course, we didn’t know where she’d gone at first. We just knew she was gone. Aaron was the one who suggested that she’d gone in search of her “inamorato,” the exact word he used. This was confirmed at the beginning of October, when we received a postcard from an island called Visby. It read, “Can’t find Sven, moving on, love to you all. Annie.” Not even a happy birthday to me.
Not even that.
In retrospect, though, her search through the Scandinavian countries, and later London and Paris, was the shortest of all her excursions. She was still a minor at the time, and after my mother contacted the State Department, they were able to track her comings and goings through various ports of entry and finally located her in a seedy hotel on the Left Bank.
When my mother got her on the phone, she told her that unless she was on the next plane to New York, she would have the French police arrest her, a threat Annie apparently believed because, lo and behold, she showed up at the apartment two days later, looking none the worse for wear, and telling us smugly that there were far better-looking men than Sven Lindqvist in this wide world of ours. We thought she was cured of her adolescent crush as well as her recent wanderlust.
But after what happened in Sicily, I wonder if Annie accepted my mother’s threat of arrest only because the FBI had already entered the landscape of her mind.
“The New Year’s Eve Incident,” as the family later referred to it, took place in December of 1983, a bit more than three months after our seventeenth birthday. By then, I was going steady with a girl named Rosemary Quinn who was sixteen and a junior at Ambrose. Annie, being mean, said Rosemary probably still wore white cotton panties. She also said she probably didn’t know how to kiss, a misapprehension I didn’t bother to correct. I was taking Rosemary to a party on West Seventy-ninth Street that night. A twenty-one-year-old boy who was a senior at Dartmouth picked up Annie at nine o’clock and took her to a party in Greenwich Village. My mother, at the age of forty-one, had begun dating a bald lawyer Who was fifty-four years old and who lived in a white clapboard house overlooking a pond. She went to a party at his house in Larchmont, New York.
My mother and I were both home by four A.M.
Annie still wasn’t home by the time the sun came up.
Neither of us was particularly alarmed.
I made scrambled eggs (which were a bit runny, my mother kindly informed me) and she and I sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating and watching the sun come up over Manhattan. She told me Douglas Feingold was really a very nice man, but that she couldn’t see herself getting sexually involved with him (thank you for sharing that, Mom) and then she went into her “My Son the Doctor” routine (although Aaron was in Business Administration and not Pre-Med), kvelling about how well he was doing at Princeton where he would be starting his last semester next year (and incidentally meeting the future Mrs. Gulliver, young Gussie Manners serving up burgers at Ye Olde Mickey D’s). As I say, this was 1983 — well, 1984 already — and the cotton was high, and neither of us even thought to wonder about where the hell Annie might be until it occurred to me that it was almost nine A.M. on the first day of the new year, and no sign of her, and she hadn’t even called to say good morning and happy new year.
I asked my mother if she knew where Annie had been headed for with the twenty-one-year-old Dartmouth senior, and she said Annie had left a number...
“Which I’ve always insisted on,” she said.
... and she went fishing in the drawer under the wall telephone and found a slip of paper with the name Josh Levine scribbled on it, and a telephone number under that.
“Is this the Dartmouth guy’s name?” I asked. “Or the name of the guy where the party was?”
“The Dartmouth guy is a Wasp named Freddie Cole,” my mother said with some contempt, since she had always considered my father a Wasp even though he was a Catholic.
“Do you think Annie would be angry if we called her?”
“To wish her a happy new year?” my mother said.
“Well, to see if she’s okay.”
“Why wouldn’t she be okay?”
“I don’t know. It’s already nine, five after nine, in fact,” I said, looking at my watch again.
“Call her,” my mother said. “She’ll be happy to hear from us.”
I dialed the number on the scrap of paper. The phone rang once, twice, three times...
“Hello?”
A girl’s voice. At first I thought it was...
“Annie?”
“No, this is Irene.”
“Irene, hi, this is Andy Gulliver. Is my sister still there?”
“Who’s your sister?”
“Annie. She came there with... uh... Freddie Cole? Is he there?”
“Just a sec,” Irene said.
I waited.
My mother looked at me.
I shrugged.
“Hello?”
A man’s voice.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“Freddie Cole.”
“Hi, Freddie, this is Annie’s brother. Could I speak to her, please?” There was a silence on the line.