“I don’t. I don’t know what to think. You say she didn’t do anything, Arturo says she did a lot of stuff he can’t even talk about. I mean, which is it?”
Mrs. Fletcher peered at me for a long time. Her expression became grim. She said: “They didn’t tell you about her.”
“You tell me. Someone’s got to. How did you meet?”
“She contacted me about a book she wanted to buy for her husband’s birthday. It was the first I’d heard of her, and I didn’t believe her when she said she’d been born in Flax Hill, and that Olivia Whitman was her mother. Then she came by to look at the book, and I saw she was a Whitman all right. She said the book was too expensive and went away, then came back the next day, said she guessed it was worth the price, paid up, and left town. That was four years ago. I haven’t seen her since.”
“Where does she live?”
“In Boston, I believe.”
“With her husband…”
“Yes. Her married name is Baxter.”
“Any kids?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was the book she bought from you?”
“It was an 1846 edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”
“She’s a historian?”
“No.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to ask; a riddle ran all the way through the account I’d just heard. I questioned a detail and the answer didn’t tell me anything. Finally I said: “Okay. Do you have her address or telephone number? I’d like to talk to her. Introduce myself. Thank her for the flowers, that sort of thing.”
Mrs. Fletcher hesitated, and I said: “Nobody else needs to know about it. I guess I just want as much family as I can get. Surely you understand that?”
I tried the telephone number she gave me three times, but the phone on the other end just rang and rang, and no one picked it up.
12
charlie sent a letter to the boarding house and Mrs. Lennox sent it on to me at Caldwell Lane.
This doesn’t count as bothering you; it’s just that there’s something that’s been on my mind and I can’t do anything to get it off my mind but tell you. I’ve always liked the way you listen — you have what they call an impartial air, like the ideal judge. Then afterward you just say four or five words and the case is closed. This is about my aunt Jozsa, in the old country. You know, we read the papers, but it’s hard to say what’s really going on over there. We just know it’s something. Aunt J was sent to an internment camp in Szeged, which is so crazy, I don’t even know how to express the insanity of her having been interned — hand on my heart, she’s red all the way through, risked her life for the party and the cause on too many occasions to talk about back when the fascists ran things. So we don’t know… someone with some sort of grudge against her must have denounced her. The camp officials wanted her to confess disloyalty and collaboration with enemies of peace (enemies of the government, I guess) and she racked her brain for weeks and weeks but couldn’t think of anything she’d said or done that could even be construed as disloyal or treacherous. So then she started putting some of her own statements of the past few weeks to herself, to see how they sounded. She remembered that once, at a party meeting, her mind had wandered, she’d looked out of the window at all the snow and whispered to her friend: “Will spring never come?” So maybe it was that. Aunt Jozsa told my dad she sat in her cell repeating those words until they became sinister… and incriminating. But when she confessed to having asked if spring would come, her interrogator just said: “Oh, I see we’ve got a joker here.”
I don’t know, Boy. I think she got close to going crazy. But when Stalin died last March, they let everybody out of the camps and Aunt J went home again. I wrote to her right away. She hasn’t seen me since I was a boy, but she says I’m her favorite and stupidest nephew. I wrote: Hey, Aunt Jozsa, what can I do for you, what can I send you? A plane ticket maybe? I mean, I could do it too, with a little help from my dad and my uncle in Milwaukee.
She answered: Send me candy, my boy. Send a lot of that great American candy. Send an amount that will shock me, send enough to make the neighbors say “That is a LOT of candy, the New World is certainly being kind to the Vacics.”
So I did, Boy. I sent her a cardboard box by freight. A couple of feet wide, a couple of feet tall, and heavy. At the bottom of the box I put a note saying that there was more where that came from if she came to America. She’s a skinny woman and I now know for sure that she doesn’t really eat much candy, because she only found the note a couple of weeks ago — a year and a few months after I sent her the candy box. She wrote: You know very well I can’t live in your shitty capitalist country, Charlie. I’m not even interested in visiting.
I got angry. Because who was it who locked her up — communists or capitalists? I asked her that question, and I asked her what had become of her communism now. And I’ve got her reply right here; I’m looking at it as I write to you — she says:
I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But it will not always be like this.
That’s it. What am I supposed to do with that?
C
Charlie’s Aunt Jozsa, who just couldn’t walk away from certain principles. I thought of her, on and off, for days. I didn’t reply to his letter, but if I had, I would’ve told him that his aunt probably called him her favorite because their hearts worked the same way. Charlie and I were still in love. How strange it is to wake up in the middle of the night with that feeling that someone has just left the room, that just moments before someone has been whispering: Me and you, you and me, soft music that stops playing the moment you really begin to listen. Who’d have thought that Charlie Vacic could be so tenacious? “People underestimate the freckled.” He’d told me that more than once, with all seventy-two of his own freckles scrunched up together. I’d underestimated him too, and I had to face up to the reason why.
It’s true that nothing really happened the night I ran away. It’s a night two weeks before that I don’t like to think about. It was a Saturday and Charlie Vacic was back in the city visiting his mom. He met me for a slice of pie at the diner where I worked, and then he walked me home. I told him and told him there was no need to walk me right to my door, but he insisted, and the rat catcher came out with a covered cage just as we reached the front doorstep. I bet he’d timed it that way. I bet he’d been watching us from the window. “Hello, Charlie,” he said, friendly as could be. “I’ve seen the way you look at my daughter. You think she’s pretty, don’t you?”
Charlie said: “More than just pretty, sir. I think she’s beautiful.”
They both turned to me and went on a looking spree. I left them to it and wished I could sail over their heads and into the acid blue sky. They didn’t look for long, it was more a practiced series of glances; they knew what they were looking for and seemed to find it. It was a wonder there was anything left by the time they were through looking.
“Say thank you, Boy. Didn’t you hear what Charlie said? He thinks you’re beautiful.”
I told the sidewalk thank you, and the rat catcher took me by the arm, thanked Charlie for “bringing me home safe and sound,” and closed the front door in his face. We walked side by side down the hallway to our apartment door, the rat catcher and I, and he scraped away at me a little more with his dull nickel gaze. “So you’re a beauty, hey?” He slapped me. “Or are you not?”