The Letter
A year or so after my grandfather moved to Florida, a letter came for me.
I was about eleven. I had almost no contact with him. I could not remember him ever asking me a question. And here was a long letter, several pages, friendly in tone, addressed to me.
It was about his youth near Moscow. He had been an athlete, he wrote — a champion runner. He described winning races at track meets, and the admiration of the other boys. That was the thread he chose: a boy who loved sports, writing to another one.
I could not make it fit. The man I knew shuffled when he walked; at some point he had had a minor stroke. He used a cane — a fine one, pearl-handled, typical of him. Mostly he sat in chairs and smoked. I could not picture him running anywhere, let alone winning.
I showed the letter to my father, and my father was as puzzled as I was. He had never heard any of it. I am not certain he knew, even then, where his father had come from.
“You should write him back,” my father said. “If you get stuck, let me know, and I’ll help you.”
I got stuck.
I had no way in. With my mother’s family, or with Alice, writing a letter was like picking up a conversation that had only paused; there was a person on the other end and I knew their voice. Here there was nobody I recognized. Every sentence had to be worked out in advance, as though it would be graded. It turned into a term paper. I worked on it after school, every afternoon, and it never got better and it never got finished.
Then one day my father told me I didn’t need to write to him after all. I was going to Florida instead, with one of my sisters, to visit.
I no longer have the letter. Somewhere in fifty years of moving, it went. It was the only thing he ever wrote to me, and the one word in it I am sure of is Moscow.
Fort Lauderdale
My sister and I spent a long weekend there, and mostly what we did was go to the pool.
My grandfather had a live-in assistant at the time — that is how she was introduced to us. Her name was Gloria. She was from Texas: loud, friendly, generous with her attention, with a good deal of make-up and tight clothes and a figure that an eleven-year-old boy found difficult not to look at. I think my grandfather noticed me noticing, and I don’t think he liked it. My father always said his father had a weakness for women like Gloria.
She made the weekend easy. The three of us — Gloria, my sister and I — managed to have a good time. My grandfather, in spite of the long letter, was mostly quiet. Well dressed, as always. Smoking in the living room, as always.
When it was time to leave, Gloria helped us gather our things while he sat in his chair.
“You should say goodbye to your grandfather,” she whispered.
“Bye, Grandpa!” we called across the room.
Nothing.
That was enough for my sister, and she went out. But as I crossed the threshold into the hall I turned around.
Maybe he hadn’t heard. He wore a hearing aid. Though my mother — who kept her distance from him, and was kept at a distance in return — had once told us, when we asked why he never spoke to us and whether he was simply deaf: “Your grandfather can hear perfectly well. He uses those hearing aids as a prop.”
The unanswered letter was in my mind, and I was afraid he was angry with me about it. I wanted some kind of connection with him, even a small one. I took a step back into the apartment, meaning to say goodbye again —
and stopped, because he was looking at me.
Directly at me, from the chair, without moving and without a word.
Was he angry? Was he sad? Was he thinking about something he wanted to tell me and couldn’t? Was he saying goodbye for good? I think it was all of those at once, and it lasted an instant, and I have never forgotten it. It may have been the only time I ever felt close to him — and the closeness came wrapped in his usual withdrawal, both at the same time.
I froze. Then I understood that whatever was happening was not something I could solve, and I turned and left.
The letter never came up. I never heard from him again.
I had said goodbye once before to someone who didn’t answer, as described in a previous essay — at six, beside a bed in a darkened room. Bye, Dad. Have a nice trip. My father didn’t respond either. But my father was sick and fighting to stay alive; there was nothing in his silence but illness. He came back. He was in the kitchen the next morning with half a grapefruit.
My grandfather’s silence was a different kind. There was intention in it. He was not struggling with anything that afternoon. He had decided something, and he was in control of it.
It did not take long to find out what, I believe, he had decided.
Two days early
About six months after we came back from Florida, I had a nightmare.
In the dream my grandfather had gone missing and was presumed dead, and Gloria was implicated. She was being questioned about where she had been, and she was being evasive. I woke afraid, with a heavy sense of something about to happen — which was strange, because I hardly ever thought about my grandfather at all.
Two days later my parents left on their first vacation together in Europe. It was a celebration. The break-up with Ron had dragged on, bitterly, for years, and my father had at last got himself free of it. This was the two of them finally having some time to themselves. They flew to Paris.
That afternoon I came home from school with some friends. The plan was to play music; with my parents away, I figured we could make all the noise we liked. Outside our building I was met by Mrs. Mayer, who stayed with us whenever my parents traveled — a very kind woman.
“I need to speak with you,” she said, and walked me a few feet away from the door.
I thought immediately of my grandfather.
“Your grandfather has died,” she said. She paused.
“He took his own life.”
I felt numb. If it had been someone closer — a relative I loved, a friend — I don’t think I could have walked past her and up the stairs. But he was far enough away from me that there was a gap between the news and whatever I was going to feel about it, and the gap gave me a choice. I went upstairs with my friends and we played music, as planned. I didn’t tell them. It would have been awkward, and I didn’t know what I would have said, so I held it and kept playing.
The distance made a pause, and the pause let reasoning in — the calculating kind, which puts a simpler version of things in place of the larger one and calls that a decision. I notice now that it never, anywhere in this story, kept anything down for good. Its work was management, and management was all it ever accomplished. Nor does the larger thing return simply because the managing stops. It comes back on its own terms, in its own time. Trying to control it and trying not to have turned out, for me, to be two sides of the same coin; whatever brings it is an alignment whose workings I have never been able to see, but have learned to accept. The acceptance has been a kind of permission, and it is from there that the truth has most often appeared.
Later, alone in my room, I lay down on my bed, and it all arrived at once — the dream, the look from the chair — and I wept. I want to be accurate about what I was weeping over, because it was not ordinary grief for someone I loved. I barely knew him. Mostly I was trying to reconcile the dream. How could I have dreamed it? Should I tell someone that Gloria might be involved? And the look kept coming back. Had he been saying goodbye? Had he already decided, that afternoon, with my foot over the threshold?
It was remarkable how quickly someone I hardly knew could take up residence in my mind.
My parents landed in Paris — of all the cities in the world, the capital of the country Alice had spent her life pretending we came from — and were given the news there, and turned straight around. As soon as they were back, my father flew to Florida.
I told my mother about the dream. She listened carefully and kindly. And then she told me what had happened.
The window
I described it in an earlier essay and I won’t tell all of it again. He had asked Gloria to marry him. She had said no. They argued, and she went down to the lobby, where a friend found her upset and brought her into the restaurant on the ground floor, to a table by the window overlooking the pool. My grandfather came down and asked her to come back upstairs. She refused and turned to the window. He stood in the entrance of the restaurant, looking at them; her friend told her he was there; she didn’t turn around. Then he went back up to the apartment, carried a small footstool to the roof, set it at the railing above the restaurant, and went over.
He landed where she could see him.
The police did speak with Gloria, as my mother said. My dream had the cast right. It had the crime wrong. I’ve wondered since whether the dream was doing what a frightened mind does with a dread it can’t place: something was coming, I could feel that much, and it gave the feeling a culprit, because a culprit can be questioned. There wasn’t one — only a man who had already decided something, and a dread that had been right about everything except whom to blame. Gloria had done nothing. He had arranged things so that she would have to watch.
There are windows all through this story, and I didn’t see them until I started writing it down.
In the 1920s Alice stood outside the window of the Plaza in the snow, looking in at this man and at her sister, having been asked to leave the two of them alone together. She stood there a long time. Then she walked away.
Half a century later he sat at the window of our apartment on Mott Street — in the building where his wife had grown up, a fact she had kept even from her own sons — smoking and looking out for whole afternoons, saying nothing to anyone.
And at the end he stood at the entrance of a restaurant, looking across the room at a woman sitting by a window, who would not turn around. This time he was the one on the outside of the glass.
He didn’t walk away. He went up to the roof and came down past it.
Nothing to say
The funeral was in New York, and I have told that part too. My father and Ron had not spoken in years, and each tried to arrange things so that the other would be left out. My father somehow got control of the casket and had it flown north. We were brought in to say goodbye, and brought out again so that my uncle and his family could have their turn.
Not long before the roof, my grandfather had asked Ron — his eldest, his favorite — for a loan. Ron had said no.
The war between the brothers had ended in court rather than in violence; that was what the trip to Paris had been for. Afterward my father built a house in the country, a long way from the city, far enough that he could feel safe. Until the day his brother died he never entirely let go of the fear that Ron might hurt him.
Ron died in 1987, of heart disease, like so many people in this family. My father went to see him in the hospital and was alone with him in the room. Ron was no longer able to speak.
“I really had nothing to say,” my father told me.
I have never stopped turning that over. How could he have had nothing to say? This was the brother he had, in his own word, warred with his entire life. The brother he had been made to go into business with, on his own army pay. The brother who had sent a man to his office at five o’clock to kill him — my father asked the man outright, and the man said yes. The brother whose lawsuit he had fought for years, whose threats had shaped where we lived and how we lived, and whose quarrel had broken the family in two. If anyone had earned a last word, it was my father, at that bedside.
I would have loved it if he had come away with some final observation — something that would have looked well on a page and given the rest of us a way to hold all of it. What he gave me instead was the withdrawal. When he said it, I pictured a wave that has broken on a beach and is drawing back into the sea, leaving everything it had buried lying exposed on the sand.
And there really was nothing left to say. Everything had already been said — screamed, at seven in the morning, in language I had never heard my father use — and acted on. All of it without one word of explanation to any of us. We were simply expected to accept it and carry on. That is what we did. We never discussed it. It has been erased from the family’s account of itself, like most things, and what’s left in its place is a kind of open space that can be filled with whatever version suits the moment.
Years later I had a day job working for an attorney — a long story — a very sharp man who liked to say: “Not saying something is saying something.”
Alex, the middle brother, died the following year — at almost exactly the age Ron had been, and their mother before them. Within a few years of Ron’s death my father had reconnected with Ron’s son, and those two branches of the family, slowly, went back to speaking.
At the same time, and with no more explanation, he drew away from Alex’s children. I had been fairly close to them growing up; they were at that Easter table. My father had always got along with Alex, who had his difficulties and needed a good deal of help, which my father always gave. But after Alex died my father backed away from his family, and the distance extended to my sisters and me. We are completely out of touch with them now. There was no quarrel. There was nothing to say.
I’ve come to think this family had two ways of dealing with what it couldn’t bear to look at. One was the telephone at seven in the morning. The other was this: no quarrel, no slammed door, only a distance that opened and was never mentioned. They look like opposites, and they do the same work. Rage turns the unbearable into a fight; distance turns it into a fact of geography. Either way, no one has to stay in the room with it. What neither allows is the harder thing — staying near someone without settling anything between you.
The back row
In the first of these essays I described clearing out Alice’s apartment with my father after she died, and finding her photo albums. Every picture of her late husband had been attacked with scissors — cut out, scratched away, page after page. Where she couldn’t cut, she had scored him out with hard strokes of a pen. “He really must have hurt her,” my father said. I wrote then that I understood it now, but that it belonged to the essays ahead.
This is that.
From the 1930s Alice lived with a car salesman named Byron Richards. She told everyone they were married and took his name, and she kept it for the rest of her life. She was, of course, still legally married to Carlo Raviola in Italy — the husband she had left on a January night in 1931, who crossed the ocean at least ten times over more than a decade looking for her, and whom she refused to see. By every account Byron was a nice man who got along well with the family. My father liked him. In the late 1940s Byron fell ill and moved to Florida for the warmer weather. Alice stayed in New York.
When he died, she asked her nephew to take her down for the funeral. That was Ron, then a young man in the Coast Guard, who got permission to escort her.
They walked into the church and Ron started up the aisle toward the front, where the widow would sit. Alice took hold of his arm and steered him, quietly and very firmly, into the last row.
He was puzzled, and said nothing. Then, slowly, during the service, he understood. The people in the front row were Byron’s wife and family.
Alice already knew. I’m sure of that, although I’ll never know how long she’d known — whether for years, or only since the telephone call that told her he had died. But she walked in knowing exactly where she was going to sit.
“You are never to discuss this with anyone,” she told him afterward. Not even his brothers.
He told his brothers, of course. And his mother. Eventually my father told me. Alice herself never said a word about Byron for the rest of her life. When my father brought him up — fondly; he really had liked the man — she would grin and look away.
Put it next to the Plaza. The woman who stood in the snow because she would not trust a man who was hiding a wife spent nearly fifteen years with a man who was hiding a wife, and sat at the back of a church in Florida so that his family would not have to see her. She told no one. She went home and got out the scissors.
So there were two men attached to the two sisters, each with another household, each of whom went south to Florida at the end of his life and died there. The temptation is to make it mean something — a curse, a pattern, a lesson. This family has always been quick to supply a story where none was given; that is how we came to be French. A story like that is a way of managing a thing rather than letting it show itself, and in this family the managing has never revealed anything except how fragile the story was. The truth has always arrived in its own time, and by a much less direct way of approaching it. I would rather leave it where it is. Some things recur without explaining themselves, and the recurrence is all they offer. I can only note that it happened twice.
Catherine
Late in 2013 — I was living in Baltimore then, and my father was still alive — I got a text from a New York number. The sender said he was a relative and asked me to call. His name was Herb. I had never heard of him.
In most families, I imagine, a message like that goes straight in the trash. In mine it had happened before. At eleven I had opened a long letter from a grandfather who had never once asked me a question. A year after Alice died, a genealogist had telephoned out of nowhere to ask whether I might be connected to a family on Long Island called Sandriani; I wasn’t. When nobody will tell you who you are, a stranger who claims you is always a real possibility. One sees shapes in the fog.
I never did find out how he got my number.
I called my father and read him the name. Yes, he said, that was a cousin of his — on his father’s side. He hadn’t heard from him since he was a boy. He thought it was safe to answer.
Someone else might have assumed it was a scam, and ignored it, or called back ready to interrogate him — looking for the angle, waiting for the request for money. I had done my bit of checking — the call to my father — and that was enough. Then I did what I usually do, which is accept the invitation and let the other person talk. I wasn’t looking for an angle and I wasn’t looking for a fight. I was intrigued.
So I called, and the man who picked up had my uncle’s voice. Not a resemblance: the voice, the cadence, the way it sat in the phone. Before he had finished explaining who he was, I knew he was family.
He was passing through Baltimore, he said, and wanted to take me to lunch.
About a week later we sat down across a table from each other, and he laid it out.
His father had been my grandfather’s cousin. When my grandfather was a young man there had been a split in the family — I didn’t need to be told that this sounded familiar — and half of them had left New York for rural New Jersey and become farmers. That was Herb’s line. Nobody had ever mentioned it to me. He and his brother had both turned out to be gifted at mathematics and engineering, gone to Ivy League schools, and made careers of it. The brother, whose name I don’t remember, was by Herb’s account brilliant and eccentric; he had started and sold a few businesses and then retired with his wife to a small town in New England, where they lived more or less apart from everyone. Herb had retired to the Carolinas.
He was also, it turned out, terminally ill. He had driven all the way up to sit across from a man he had never met and show him two photographs. Why it had to be me, I still don’t know. It was clearly something very personal to him.
The photographs were of his mother and my grandmother, at a party. Both of them were smiling.
His mother’s name was Catherine, and she was German. She and my grandmother had been best friends — confidantes. Both had married into my grandfather’s family from outside it, and both, as outsiders, had to find a way to live inside it.
“They formed a bond,” Herb said. “They helped each other.”
He described his mother very much as I had heard my father describe his. And Catherine, like my grandmother, died young — not long after her son left for college. The same thing had happened to my father.
My grandmother had confided in Catherine, and asked her to keep her secrets, and Catherine kept them. Alice never once mentioned her. I had always assumed that Alice was my grandmother’s only confidante. Catherine told Herb only that my grandmother had been through a great deal. Herb spoke of the loyalty between the two women as something closer to necessity than sentiment — a matter of survival. And he remembered one thing his mother said about it, which he repeated to me across the table:
When the time is right, the truth will come out.
Then he said:
“You may have heard that your grandfather had a second family, and when they found out about him and your grandmother they blamed your grandmother and were awful.”
“My family had nothing to do with that, but we heard all about it.”
Which family counted as the second one, I was learning, depended on where you stood.
And of my grandfather himself:
“Your grandfather was very distant. I really don’t remember him saying much, but he seemed very intense. He was always well dressed and only seemed to smile around women. I remember being afraid of him.”
He was curious about my father and my uncles, though he plainly hadn’t really known them. He had heard through the grapevine about the split with Ron, and about Alex’s troubles, and he talked about all three of them with the particular caution people reserve for an animal that might, for all they know, be dangerous. I filled him in as best I could. What struck me most was how thoroughly my family had been made other on that side — turned, at some distance and over many years, into something like monsters. Whatever happened after a little girl at a birthday party noticed which boy Michael Lewis was taking home must have been far worse than Alice ever let on.
That explained the nervousness I had felt in him from the start. He told me he meant to call my father, and then gave me a look — as though he were asking my permission, or bracing for the answer he expected to get. I told him to call.
Before we parted he mentioned that his son lived in Baltimore, about a mile from where I did.
“But he won’t talk to you,” he said. “It’s complicated.”
He never told me his son’s name, so I had no way of reaching him even if I had wanted to. A man I have never met, with whom I share some distant connection, declines to speak to me for reasons his father would not explain. By then it seemed about right. I didn’t press him, and I didn’t feel any need to. I let it be.
Herb and I stayed in touch for a while. He said he would send me copies of the photographs and never did; he had a great deal on his mind, and I am grateful for the time he gave me. He did call my father. My father, as I could have predicted, spoke with him exactly once. His account of it in full:
“He called me and we spoke, but we really didn’t know each other. I’m not sure what he was looking for.”
Mike — my godfather, my father’s best friend for most of his life, the man who once found me wandering the city as a small boy and walked me home — would have put it more bluntly. “Your father had nothing to do with his cousins.” He didn’t mean a falling-out. He meant the trouble had always been there, and that nothing between them had ever been possible.
When my father died, I wrote to Herb. He was kind, and said he would try to come to the funeral. He didn’t. I never heard from him again, and I assume he died not long afterward.
I wrote in an earlier essay that there was no Lilliana on my grandfather’s side — that no one had been appointed, no one instructed, nothing kept.
That was almost true. Nobody kept my grandfather’s record. But someone inside his family had been asked to keep my grandmother’s secrets, and had kept them, and had told her son that the time would come. What reached me from her was two photographs I wasn’t allowed to keep and a single sentence.
She was a kind of variation on Lilliana, by the opposite method. Lilliana had been instructed to tell, and she told. Catherine had been asked to keep quiet, and she kept quiet. And yet her son, at the end of his own life, went far out of his way to put a photograph of the two women in front of me and tell me how close they had been. It was a strong pull toward the truth, and the truth withdrew at the same moment: the photographs went back into his pocket, his son a mile away would not speak to me, and Herb himself was gone within a year or two.
He found me about eighteen months before I walked into a room in Pontecurone and met Lilliana — the sister my father never knew he had. Looking back, his visit reads like a presage: a ripple running ahead of the thing itself. I could argue that it set something moving, and that the pull which took me to Pontecurone in the months after my father died had been gathering since that lunch. I can’t prove it. It doesn’t belong to anything that can be verified. But it appeared, without warning, and I was willing to be with it on its own terms, and I think that counts for something.
Not long after Pontecurone, a genetic test would tell me that the man whose cousin Herb was is very probably not my grandfather at all. The voice on the phone that told me instantly I was talking to family was not, it seems, a matter of blood.
What I recognized was a way of talking. They all had it — my grandfather’s people, my father, my uncles, and Herb, whose branch had left the city for New Jersey a generation before: the same accent, the same rhythm, the same way of coming down on a word. That group was fiercely clannish. If you grew up inside it, your attention was drawn toward it rather than out past it, and you learned to sound like it, and the sound did the work that blood is supposed to do.
My mother’s family went the other way. She and her siblings had worked hard to speak the most ordinary American English they could find, so that they would blend in — my mother believed firmly that this was the way to stability and success in this country. And she could not stand the way my father talked. He had a pronounced New York accent, and she told us, regularly, not to talk like our father. She said it with a smile, and he thought it was funny. There was nothing he could do about it, he would tell her, and us, even if he wanted to.
I hear it now as two kinds of fitting in, at one kitchen table. My father and his brothers had learned to sound like the group they were born into, which meant, in the end, like their father. My mother had learned to sound like a country, so that it would open to her.
My father’s family used language the way you use a wall in the dark — to find where you are, in a house you know, even a house that is coming down around you. My mother’s family used it the way you use a door you have never opened. One voice tells you where you stand. The other lets in what you didn’t know was there.
I find I don’t mind that Herb and I weren’t related by blood. Catherine was no blood relation to my grandmother either. What joined the three of us was something else. Each of us was compelled: Herb, at the end of his life, to find me; Catherine, to keep a friend’s secrets for a moment she would not live to see; and I, to go after the truth about my family — which in the end meant letting go of what I had been using to hold up an identity that had, quite suddenly, lost its charm. None of us was drawn toward anything we already knew. We were drawn toward what hadn’t appeared yet, and then, when it did, toward accepting it. What came was never proof. It was the world, shown to be more complicated than any of us had agreed to believe.
The call came in my father’s accent. What let it in was my mother’s kind of language.
I had seen Catherine’s promise once before, in another language. Among Alice’s things, as I described in an earlier essay, was a two-volume English–French dictionary so old I have never been able to find a date in either volume; it may well have come to her from someone before her. In the second volume, in ink, someone had written: Un jour viendra. A day will come.
In French it is simply a sentence about the future. In this family it reads several ways at once. It could be a warning. It could be a consolation — one day you will no longer have to carry this. Or it could mean what Catherine meant: that a day would come when everything hidden would be out in the open.
I can’t say whose hand it is, or when it was written, and I’ve come to value not knowing. Undated, unsigned, it seems to rise from somewhere further back than any of us — from a family that had been managing who it was for longer than anyone could remember, and that knew what that management cost as well as what it protected. The same three words can comfort the one who keeps a secret and unsettle the one it is kept from. Both are true of them.
So the same sentence had been set down on either side of my grandmother — once in French, in a book that passed through the hands of the sister who did more than anyone to keep her secret, and once in English, by the friend she had asked to keep it. Neither woman tried to bring the truth out. Each simply said that it would come. The truth in this family always seems to have been about to arrive, and it could arrive only when it was let in — not pried loose, not managed, not forced. It needed a particular alignment, and that alignment could be permitted but never arranged.
When the time is right, the truth will come out.
The last of these comes next week.
Almost Visible is a notebook of encounters with art, sound, space, and attention. If this one opened something, consider sharing and subscribing.