Great House

  Here Gottlieb blinked, and in the peace of that sunny afternoon I heard his lashes, magnified many times, brush against the lenses of his glasses. Otherwise, the room, the house, the day itself seemed to have emptied of all sounds but my voice.

  I suppose there was something else that laid the groundwork for my uneasiness, I continued, something from Lotte’s life before I knew her. Being part of her past, I felt I didn’t have the right to interrogate her about it, though at times I was frustrated by her reticence, and resented her unspoken demand for privacy on the matter, since as far as I knew it had nothing to do with her loss. Of course I knew that she had other lovers before me. After all, she was twenty-eight by the time I met her, and for many years she had been alone without any family in the world. She was an awkward woman in many ways, a woman unlike the sort many men her age would have encountered, but if my own feelings can be used as any example, I have to guess that this drew those men to her all the more. I don’t know how many lovers she had, but I assume there were enough of them. I suppose she kept silent about them not only out of a desire to contain her past, but also so as not to arouse my jealousy.

  And yet, I was jealous all the same. Vaguely jealous of them all—of how and where they had touched her, and what she might have told them about herself, of her laughter given up for something they’d said—and agonizingly jealous of one in particular. I knew nothing about him except that he must have been the most serious of all, most serious to her, because he alone had been allowed to leave behind a trace. You have to understand that in Lotte’s life, a life reduced to fit the smallest possible space, there was almost no trace of her past at all. No photographs, no keepsakes, no heirlooms. Not even any letters, or none that I ever saw. The few things she lived among were entirely practical, and held no sentimental value to her. She made sure of this; it was a rule by which she lived in those days. The only exception to it was her desk.

  To call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always poised to offer up its back for its owner to make use of, and which, when not in use, occupies its allotted space with humility. Well, I told Gottlieb, you can cancel that image immediately. This desk was something else entirely: an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be inanimate but, like a Venus flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers. Perhaps you think I’m making a caricature of it. I don’t blame you. You’d have to have seen the desk with your own eyes to understand that what I’m telling you is perfectly accurate. It took up almost half of her rented room. The first time she allowed me to stay the night with her in that tiny pathetic bed that cowered in the shadow of the desk, I woke up in a cold sweat. It loomed above us, a dark and shapeless form. Once I dreamed that I opened one of the drawers to find that it held a festering mummy.

  All she would say was that it had been a gift; there was no need, or perhaps it would be better to say she saw no need, or resisted the need, to say from whom. I had no idea what had become of him. Whether he had broken her heart, or she his, whether he was gone for good or whether he might still come back, whether he was alive or dead. I was convinced she had loved him more than she could ever love me, and that some impossible obstacle had come between them. It tore me apart. I used to fantasize about encountering him in the street. Sometimes I gave him a limp or dirty collar, just so he would leave me alone and let me get some sleep. It struck me, the gift of that desk, as an act of cruel genius—a way to stake his claim, to insinuate himself into the unreachable world of her imagination, so that he might possess her, so that every time she sat down to write it would be in the presence of his bestowal. Sometimes I would roll over in the dark to face a sleeping Lotte: Either he goes or I do, I imagined saying. During those long, cold nights in her room there was no distinction in my mind between him and the desk. But I never had the courage to say it. Instead I would slip a hand under her nightdress and begin to stroke her warm thighs.

  In the end it all came to nothing, I told Gottlieb, or almost nothing. With each passing month, I became more confident of Lotte’s feelings for me. I asked her to marry me, and she agreed. He, whoever he was, was part of her past, and like the rest it had sunk away into the dark, irretrievable depths of her. We learned to trust each other. And for the better part of fifty years the suspicions I sometimes harbored, the ridiculous idea that she might betray me with another man, proved unfounded. I don’t believe that Lotte was capable of doing anything that would have in any way threatened the home we two had so carefully built together. I think she knew that she couldn’t have survived in another life, one of unknown specifications. Nor do I think she had the stomach to hurt me. In the end, my doubts always fizzled out on their own, without the need for confrontation, and in my mind things again returned to the way they’d always been.

  It was only in the final months of Lotte’s life, I told Gottlieb, that I discovered there was something enormous she had kept from me all those years. It happened quite by accident, and many times since then I’ve been struck by how close she came to keeping her secret until the end. And yet she didn’t, and though her mind was failing her, I can’t help but believe that in the end she made a choice not to. She chose a form of confession that suited her, that made, in her obscure state of mind, a kind of sense. The more I’ve thought about it, the less it has seemed to me an act of desperation, and the more it has seemed the culmination of an oblique logic. Alone, she found her way to the magistrate. God knows how. There were times when she could hardly find her way to the lavatory. And yet, there were still moments of lucidity when her mind suddenly reassembled itself, and then I was like a sailor at sea who suddenly sees the lights of his hometown illuminate on the horizon, and begins to make wildly for shore, only to see them go out again a moment later and find himself alone again in the infinite dark. It must have been in such a moment, I told Gottlieb, who sat unmoving in his chair, that Lotte rose from the sofa where she had been watching TV, and, while the nurse was busy talking on the phone in another room, quietly left the house. Some ancient reflex would have reminded her to pick up her bag from the hook in the front hall. Almost certainly she took the bus. She would have had to change once, something too complex for her to have worked out on her own, and so I have to imagine that she put herself in the driver’s hands, asking him to show her the way, just as we did as children. I still remember my mother putting me on the bus in Finchley at the age of four, and asking the conductor to see me off on Tottenham Court Road where my aunt would be waiting for me. I remember the sense of wonder I had as we drove through the wet streets, the view I had of the back of the driver’s muscular neck, the shiver of joy I felt at the privilege of traveling alone, combined with a shiver of fear brought on by disbelief that at the end of all of those seemingly random turns of the driver’s enormous black wheel my aunt, with her ruddy cheeks and funny red-brimmed hat, would actually materialize. Perhaps Lotte felt the same. Or perhaps, determined as she must have been, she felt no fear at all, and, as the driver signaled to her the right stop, and which bus to take next, she gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman.

  As I told Gottlieb what had taken place between Lotte and the magistrate, then described the hospital certificate and lock of hair I found among her papers, I felt a sense of relief, of a tremendous unburdening, knowing that I would no longer be the only one responsible for her secret. I told him that I wished to find her son. Gottlieb straightened up in his chair and let out a long sigh. Now it was I who waited to hear what would come next, knowing I had put myself in his hands and would proceed only as he decided. He took off his glasses and his eyes shrank and became reduced again to the sharpened eyes of a lawyer. He rose from the table, left the room, and returned a moment later with a pad of paper, then took out the
fountain pen he kept at all times in his pocket. He asked me to repeat to him the information on the hospital certificate. He also asked exactly when Lotte had arrived in London on the kindertransport, and the addresses of the places she had lived before she met me. I told him what I knew, and he made a note of everything.

  When he finished writing, he put down the pad. And the desk? he asked. What happened to the desk? One night in the winter of 1970, I said, a young man, a poet from Chile, rang our bell. He was a fan of Lotte’s books and wanted to meet her. For a few weeks he became part of her life. At the time I didn’t understand what it was about him that moved her—normally so private and introverted a person—to give so much of herself. I became jealous. One day I came back from a trip and discovered that she’d given him the desk. At the time I was baffled. The desk she had clung to and refused to give up, had dragged with her ever since I’d met her. Only much later did I come to understand that the young man, Daniel Varsky, was the same age as the son she gave away. How he must have reminded her of her own child, and what it would have been like with him. How moving those days with Daniel must have been for her, in ways he himself could never have grasped. He, too, must have wondered what she saw in him, and why she gave him so much of herself. All those years she had submitted to that monstrous piece of furniture that her lover had given her, with which he had bound her to him—to him and later to the dark secret of their child she gave up. All those years she had borne it as she had borne her guilt. How right it must have seemed to her, in the mysterious poetry of the mind’s associations, to give it away at last to this boy who reminded her of her own son.

  I turned to look out the window, tired after saying so much. Gottlieb shifted in his chair. They’re cut from a different cloth than us, he said quietly, by which I took him to mean women, or our wives, and I nodded, though what I wished to say is that Lotte was made of something else entirely. Give me a few weeks, he said. I’ll see what I can find.

  THAT AUTUMN the frost came late. A week after I planted the spring bulbs, I packed my bag, locked up the house, and took a train to Liverpool. It had taken Gottlieb less than a month to track down the name of the couple who had adopted Lotte’s child and to find an address. One evening he dropped round to hand me a piece of paper with the information. I didn’t ask him how he’d come by it. He had his ways—his work led him to know people in every walk of life, and as he was someone who went out of his way for others there were plenty who owed him favors he was not above returning one day to collect. Perhaps I, too, am one of those people. Are you sure you want to do this, Arthur? he asked, brushing a thatch of silver hair from his forehead. We stood in the hallway, the collection of unworn straw hats assembled on the wall like the costumes of another, more theatrical life. The motor of his car was still idling outside. Yes, I said.

  But for some weeks I did nothing. A part of me had remained convinced that all traces of the child had vanished, and so I hadn’t adequately prepared myself to receive the names of his parents, the ones he’d gone through life with. Elsie and John Fiske. John who perhaps went by Jack, I thought on my knees as I divided the hostas a few days later, and I imagined a burly man hunched at the bar in the pub, a chronic cougher, extinguishing his cigarette. Separating the tangled roots with my fingers, I imagined Elsie, too, scraping food off a dirty plate into the bin, dressed in a robe with her hair still in curlers, lit by the grim light of a Liverpool dawn. It was only the child that I couldn’t fathom, a boy with Lotte’s eyes or her expressions. Her own child! I thought, placing my rucksack on the rack above my seat, but as the train pulled out of Euston Station I imagined in the windows of a passing train the flickering faces of those Lotte had said goodbye to in her life—her mother and father, brothers and sisters, school friends, eighty-six homeless children bound for the unknown. Could she really be blamed for encountering in her own depths a refusal—the refusal to teach a child to walk, only to watch him walk away from her? In a way I’d never thought of before, her loss of memory, the loss of her mind at the end, made grotesque sense: a way for her to leave me effortlessly, slipping away an immeasurable amount each hour of each day, all to avoid a final, crushing goodbye.

  That was the beginning for me, the beginning of a long and complicated journey I didn’t know I was taking. Although maybe some part of me sensed it after all, because when I locked the door of the house a melancholy feeling came over me that I’ve only ever had when leaving for a long trip, a hollow feeling of uncertainty and regret, and when I looked back over my shoulder and saw the dark windows of our house I thought that it was not impossible, given my age and all the things that can befall one, that I would never see it again. I imagined the garden overgrown, turned wild again as it had been when we first saw it. It was a melodramatic thought and I rejected it as such, but many times along the way I was reminded of having had it. In my bag among the usual items of clothes and books I had the lock of hair, the hospital certificate, and a copy of Broken Windows to give to Lotte’s son. On the back cover was a photograph of her, and it was because of that photograph that I chose that book of hers and not another. In it she looked as much like a mother as she ever would, so young, her face so soft and full, the skull not yet showing through as it begins to do by forty, and I thought that was the Lotte her son might like to see, if he wished to see her at all. But whenever I reached into my bag I would encounter her bruised eyes staring up at me, and sometimes it seemed she was admonishing me, and sometimes asking me a question, and sometimes attempting to bring me some news of death, until at last I couldn’t bear it anymore and tried to lose her at the bottom, and when I couldn’t (she kept rising up), I pushed the book down and buried it under the weight of other things.

  The train pulled into Liverpool close to three in the afternoon. I was watching a flock of geese wing across the iron gray sky and then we plunged into a tunnel and came up under the glass dome of Lime Street station. The address Gottlieb had given me for the Fiskes was in Anfield. I’d planned to walk past the house before finding a bed-and-breakfast nearby to spend the night, then to call the following morning. But making my way down the platform I felt a heavy ache in my legs, as if I had arrived from London on foot rather than sat idle for two and a half hours on the train. I stopped to switch my bag to the other shoulder, and without looking up I sensed the gray sky pressing down on the glass roof from above, and when the letters on the flip board above the platform began to whir and click, times and destinations disintegrating, leaving us, the newly arrived, in limbo, a sickening wave of claustrophobia came over me and I had to struggle to resist the urge to walk straight to the ticket office and purchase a ticket for the next train back to London. The letters began to clatter again, and for a moment I was seized by the thought that the whirring letters were spelling the names of people. Though what people, I couldn’t say. I must have stood for some time, because a man from the railway company wearing a gold-buttoned uniform approached to ask me if I was all right. There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matters worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger. But I managed to resist self-pity, thanking him and continuing on my way, heartened by my luck at not being forced to wear a hat like his, a perky box with a shiny visor that would make the daily battle for self-dignity before the mirror immeasurably more difficult. My satisfaction only lasted as far as the information desk, though, where I joined the line of travelers trying the patience of the girl who looked as if she had closed her eyes in one place and opened them to find herself there, in that little circular booth, dispensing information about Liverpool she never knew she had.

  It was almost dark by the time I arrived at the hotel. The walls of the tiny, overheated foyer were papered with a flowery design, bunches of silk flowers were set out on the small tables clustered at the back, and hanging on the wall, though it was still some weeks before Christmas, was a large plastic wreath, the whole thing giving one the feeling of having stepped in
to a museum dedicated to the memory of long-extinct floral life. A wave of the claustrophobia I’d felt at the station came back to me, and when the receptionist asked me to fill out a registration form I was tempted to make something up, as if going under a false name and occupation might bring the relief of another, untapped dimension. My room looked out on a brick wall, and it, too, continued and elaborated the floral theme, so that for the first minutes during which I stood in the doorway, I did not believe that it would be possible for me to stay there. If it weren’t for the heavy ache in my legs and my feet that felt like a pair of anvils, I almost certainly would have turned around and left; it was only exhaustion that made me enter and collapse on the chair with its dense print of exuberant roses, though for more than an hour I was unable to close the door behind me for fear of being shut in alone with so much choked, artificial life. As the walls seemed to lean in toward me, I couldn’t help but ask myself, not in so many words, but in the fragmentary shorthand of thoughts one thinks alone to oneself, What right do I have to turn over a stone she wished to leave unturned? It was then that the sense rose up in me like bile, a sense I tried but failed to keep down, that what I was really doing was trying to expose her guilt. To expose it against her wishes, in order to punish her. For what, you might ask, punish the poor woman for what? And the answer that comes to me, which is only part of the answer, is that I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the name of love. Of course she needed me—to keep order, to remember the shopping, to pay the bills, to keep her company, to give her pleasure, and, in the end, to bathe, and wipe, and dress her, to bring her to the hospital, and finally to bury her. But that she needed it to be me who performed these duties and not some other man, equally in love with her, equally at the ready, was never entirely clear to me. I suppose it could be said that I never demanded she make the case for her love, but then I never really felt I had the right. Or maybe I feared that, honest as she was, unable to tolerate the smallest insincerity, she would fail to make the case, that she would stutter and grow silent, and then what choice would I have but to get up and leave forever, or continue with things as they had always been, only now with the full knowledge that I was simply one example where there could have been many? It isn’t that I thought she loved me less than she might have loved another man (though there were times I feared as much). No, what I’m speaking of now, or trying to speak of, is something else, the sense that her self-sufficiency—the proof she carried within her that she could withstand unthinkable tragedy on her own, that in fact the extreme solitude she had constructed around herself, reducing herself, folding in on herself, turning a silent scream into the weight of private work, was precisely what enabled her to withstand it—made it impossible for her to ever need me as I needed her. No matter how bleak or tragic her stories were, their effort, their creation, could only ever be a form of hope, a denial of death or a howl of life in the face of it. And I had no place in that. Whether I existed downstairs or not, she would continue to do what she had always done alone at her desk, and it was that work that allowed her to survive, not my care or company. All our lives I’d insisted that it was she who was dependent on me. She who needed to be protected, who was delicate and required constant care. But in truth it was I who needed to feel needed.