style="font-size:15px;"> “This is Ngoni,” I said to everyone, reaching out my arm to draw him near.
He was elegant and reserved, extending his hand to Rose first, as the eldest. “It is so nice to meet you, Mrs. Wolk,” he said.
She turned her face away. Offered him her left hand, in which she clutched a Kleenex. He shook it as though this were the common way, but when he turned and looked back at me, I saw a shadow cross his forehead. I took his hand in both of mine, as though I could rinse it clean of her touch.
“I’m not surprised,” my mother said after dinner, as we watched them drive away. “The black woman who cleaned her house was forty years old if she was a day,” my mother said, “but Rose called her the girl.”
I held Ngoni’s hand but couldn’t look at his face. I didn’t know how this information would settle on his shoulders, if he would be able to join a family with people like that in it. By now I very much wanted him to join my family.
As we lay on my futon late that night, I held his face and apologized. For Rose. For my inability to confront her. For my inability to know what he felt and to help him through it.
“Your grandmother is from a different time,” he said to me. “She’ll come around.”
I nodded at Ngoni, smiled a little. But I wasn’t so sure she would.
* * *
THAT SUMMER I rented a small apartment deep in the woods, bought a frame for the futon and a used dining room table, pots and pans, a few mismatched plates and glasses, and borrowed the old red couch from my mom. It felt like playing house, but I was determined to make it a home. Determined to make it Ngoni’s home for his final semester in the U.S. before he returned to Zimbabwe forever. I’d found a job in the college admissions office so I could stay close.
One evening I sat on the couch staring at my hands. Wishing time would stop, wishing this warm night would last forever. Wishing Ngoni would never leave. I’d waited all my life to find my person. I didn’t want him ever to leave.
Ngoni came over and held out his hand, leading me to the window. “Look,” he said. “Look outside.”
“What? I don’t see anything.”
“Look into the woods.”
“I am.”
“Look harder.”
Then I saw her. In the woods through which we’d crashed an hour before, a small brown deer blended in with the trees. She was standing in the light from the sinking sun, and her white tail caught it. She was not ten feet from me, and yet she was a wild thing. I watched her ears twitch and her head turn as though she knew I saw her. She looked at me and I stood very still and for just one moment closed my eyes. I was playing the game I played as a child—if I don’t move a single muscle and close my eyes and can’t see you, you can’t see me either. If you’re peering into our car windows on the highway as you pass, or sitting next to me on the worn red couch after my father’s funeral, or standing before me with a book in your hands trying to teach me to read, you cannot see me. I am not here.
When I opened my eyes and let them adjust to the light, the deer had gone back to her meal. I noticed the fading white spots on her back—she was a baby. Then I saw the rest of her family and started to count in my head.
“Eleven,” Ngoni whispered. He had seen all of the deer from the beginning. He pointed with his eyes to the buck, larger again by half than the baby. His antlers stood on his head like tree branches that grew from velvet fur, and I understood why I hadn’t seen him before. He was at the edge of the group, alternately bending down to chew the blades of grass marking the spot where lawn turned to wilderness and looking up to keep watch. His whole body was alert, even when he ate. Several does stood behind him, their tails flicking as they chewed.
I thought of asking Ngoni if that’s what fathers do—stay always alert to the dangers—but my throat hurt the way it hurt at my father’s funeral, and I was scared to speak the way I was always scared to speak when I was little. I hoped Ngoni didn’t see the tears on my cheeks, and I was almost glad when the spell was broken and something startled them and they ran away in different directions. But the baby was the last one to leave, slower than the rest, and I was sure she went the wrong way.
4
MY FATHER DIED in a psychiatric treatment center in the Berkshire Mountains, one month after his admission. My father died in a place my mother called “the loony bin,” and every Saturday morning I watched Looney Tunes and tried to make the world match up.
My sister remembers visiting him in his room at Austen Riggs. Talks about all of his things, his “personal belongings” standing bare on the shelves and windowsills, naked and alone. She says those things on the shelves were what made her so sad. His things, separated from him and home and set there in that space, apart.
Nan says she looked at the things. She doesn’t remember if she looked at him. She doesn’t tell me now what they were, and at first I picture a television jail cell with pinup posters of pink ladies, a Bible, an awkwardly placed toilet. I have to blink to come back to this place, wipe the slate clear, and put the things of his that she remembers inside the room I know I was in. I see arranged against the backdrop of white walls and windows: toothpaste, shaving lotion, a framed photograph tilted so I can’t see who is in it, several little bottles of booze.
It’s another conversation and another sister—his—who tells me Riggs allowed its residents to drink. She calls them “residents” and not patients, as I expect. She is, after all, an analyst herself. She says she has learned things about Austen Riggs since his admission, things that would have given her pause had she known them before. That there were no locked wards. That the residents were free to come and go as they pleased. That there were no rules about what they brought into their rooms.
“I thought it was the Bellevue of the Berkshires,” she says. “I thought we were putting him somewhere safe,” she says. “I thought they could help him,” she says. And then, after a moment, she says, “This was a preventable death.” As though it’s the fault of those lenient laws or those tiny bottles of booze.
All I remember about Riggs is the thick red carpet and the brown rounded tips of my beat-up winter boots.
THE FACTS I learned about my father in the years before and just after his death were spare. He grew up in Brooklyn, the first child of a Jewish couple whose parents fled Poland and Russia early in the persecution. He was smart, went to Cornell when he was sixteen. After he met my mother—a WASP from Albany—at the Riviera Bar in the Village in the sixties, they traveled by boat to Tangier and then by train to Rome, where they lived for six or seven months. When they returned to the States, they eloped to the shores of Lake George in part because his parents would never accept my mother as his bride if she didn’t convert; Judaism is passed on to the children from the mother, not the father. And they eloped in part because it wasn’t the first wedding for either of them.
I knew he suffered from eczema, which sometimes covered his body from his head to his feet. I knew he was funny. I knew he was handsome. I knew he had a thick red mustache despite the black mop on his head.
And I knew he was a writer who had published some novels under his own name—George Wolk—and many more under various pseudonyms. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t understand that word, or that pulp fiction was called that because of the thick, cheap paper it was printed on, revealing its true worth. Did
