Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (17 page)

To go back in time was to return to when I felt optimistic and unbounded, back before my sister died. Everyone has a before and after, the times of our lives divided by an event of loss or suffering or hardship. For me, the event was the death of my sister, unexpected and too soon. In the months after Anne-Marie died, I lost all faith in the future. I took my sister's death as a sign that the whole world no longer waited for me.

But I was wrong. Through this year of reading I was recovering that “green fuse still lit” of possibility. Not only were books carrying me away on escapades of new experiences but the people and places and atmospheres created by authors were also bringing me back to those times in my life where I looked forward to tomorrow.

How to live? Engaged in the present but willing to take vacations to other places and other times. My future depended on it. We all need to escape once in a while, from the big and little pressures, heartaches, and disappointments of daily life. I need to escape from the place where Anne-Marie no longer lived, and go back to when we were both alive, back to when what lay ahead seemed endless and wonderful.

Books are the frigate to wherever I want to go. My future is not infinite, I know that now. But my life is as full of possibility as it had been when I was just a girl, sitting out on the front steps with my sisters, eating ice cream and watching the fireflies flicker on and off over the darkened lawn.

Chapter 18
The Answers That Mysteries Provide

I realized it was my decision whether I would interpret the ending as unjust and unsatisfactory and suffer because of it or decided that this, and only this, was the fitting ending.

BERNHARD SCHLINK,

Self's Murder

I CAN SEE IT NOW: A YELLOW HAT FLOATING ON WATER,
brown hair spreading out all around. I first read
The Scarlet Ruse
by John D. MacDonald thirty years ago, and I still remember how Travis McGee had cut the hair himself, shearing the woman and then attaching her lost locks to the hat. The hat was flung out into the bay, creating an illusion to capture the bad guys. “It was better than I hoped. It was spooking her. She floated out there, dead in a raft. I wondered if she had ever really been able to comprehend the fact of her own eventual and inevitable death. Today, my friends, we each have one day less, every one of us. And joy is the only thing that slows the clock.”

Wisdom from a mystery, one in a series of twenty-one color-coded books written by MacDonald, every one of them read by my father and most of them by me too, over the course of the long, hot, humid days and nights of Chicago summers.

A book doesn't have to be part of the canon of great literature to make a difference in the reader's life. I was seventeen when I first read MacDonald's line “Joy is the only thing that slows the clock.” The underlying avowal of letting go of misery and exulting in rapture, big and small, is more relevant to me now than it was then, but even back then it sparked something in me, and it stuck with me. Not only because it was from a MacDonald mystery, and reading MacDonald was an addiction I shared with my father, but because mysteries as a genre have something to say to all of us about the world, and our efforts to make sense of our place in it.

Growing up, everyone in my family read mysteries. Especially in the summer, we worked our way through volumes of murders, disappearances, and other acts of treachery and deception. There was nothing better than being the last ones still on the beach, panting our ways through gripping stories of twists and turns. My father spent his summers with the two Macs: John D. MacDonald and his Travis McGee novels and Ross Macdonald and his Lew Archer series. My mother preferred Rex Stout and P. D. James, Anne-Marie loved Agatha Christie, and Natasha was devoted to Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey. I started early on with the racecourse mysteries of Dick Francis and kept pace with my father's appetite for MacDonald and Macdonald.

The first summer I spent working in New York City, Anne-Marie gave me an open invitation to come out to the house in Bellport. After a seventy-hour workweek, weeks at a time, it was bliss, when a break finally came, to head out of the sticky, greasy heat of a New York City summer and arrive in the salty, breezy air of eastern Long Island. I arrived carrying nothing more than a swimsuit and a pair of shorts. Anne-Marie provided everything else I needed, from suntan lotion to my own room at the top of the house. The room was empty but for a twin bed with a green-and-white comforter faded with washings, a spiderweb-decorated floor lamp, and a woven basket filled with
New York
magazines going back to the 1970s.

My first weekend out there, I found a treasure trove of mysteries. One floor below my attic room was Anne-Marie's office, a space lined with books. One side was all academic books, treatises on architecture, tomes of philosophy, and journals on art history and critical theory. The other side of the room was lined with narrow shelves tightly filled with novels, poetry collections—and mysteries. I reread my way through works of Agatha Christie, volume after volume, during that first summer as a New Yorker.

Even before they could read, Anne-Marie started my kids on the summer mystery tradition. She sat with them out on the porch in Bellport, translating all her Tintin books by Hergé from French to English, thrilling them with
The Castafiore Emerald
,
The Blue Lotus
, and
The Black Island
. When they got older, she would walk with the boys over to the Bellport library. There they would wander together through the children's stacks. Using Anne-Marie's library card (which I still have in my wallet—light blue with the navy logo of a seagull standing on a pile of books), they checked out Nate the Great mysteries by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat and Elizabeth Levy's Something Queer mysteries.

The first summer after Anne-Marie died, the boys, Jack, and I went out to Bellport to visit Marvin. Pulling up into the gravel driveway out back, I realized that I expected to see Anne-Marie coming across the grass to meet us as we disgorged from our car. But of course she didn't. She was gone; we had scattered her ashes the month before off Bellport's beach on Fire Island. How could I come out to this house without her waiting there for me? I stayed in the car as the boys tumbled out and made their own way across the grass, banging in through the back screen door, shouting out for Marvin.

I finally got out of the car that day and went inside to join everyone else. During the afternoon we spent there, I went up to Anne-Marie's office and ran my hand over the row of Agatha Christies. I reached for
Ten Little Indians
, then put it back. I wasn't ready yet to reread a book I'd shared with my sister. I sat in the old gray chair facing west over the hedge planted just a few years earlier and already growing high, and I cried.

Since that summer, we've gone out every year to Bellport, and every year I still get the feeling that
this
year, Anne-Marie will come out across the grass to meet us. It's a fleeting sensation, one moment of insanity against the reality of what I know, but for that one moment, the possibility of her crossing over the grass in her black sandals, short khaki shorts, and white T-shirt makes more sense to me than her death ever will. In my internal universe, the order I seek is one in which she plays a prominent and constant role. No other world rings true for me.

It is that search for order that drives my hunger for reading mysteries. Sure, I find sparks of wisdom in a good mystery, but what I am really looking for are solutions. I'm searching for an order in the universe. In a world where, sometimes, very little makes sense, a mystery can take the twists and turns of life and run them through a plot that eventually
does
make sense. A solution to a question is found. The sense of satisfaction is huge.

Owing to this summer of my reading a book a day, our yearly trip out to Bellport would be only for a short visit, enough time for lunch and an afternoon spent at the beach. When we arrived, I once again stayed in the car for a moment, while the boys and Jack made their way across the grass and into the house. I waited in anticipation, but Anne-Marie didn't come. No matter how many summers I returned, and no matter how long I stayed in the car, Anne-Marie was not going to come out and greet me with smiles and kisses. I waited for just another moment, and then I went to join the others in the house.

We went out to Fire Island that afternoon, traveling across the Great South Bay in Marvin's speedboat. It was a hot day and very windy, with huge waves coming up onto the shores of Fire Island. Too rough for me to swim, and anyway, I preferred to read under the umbrella. How wonderful this year to have an excuse—“I have to finish today's book!” I opened my book, a mystery by Bernhard Schlink called
Self's Murder
, and began reading. Schlink is most famous for his novel
The Reader
, but this mystery of his quickly drew me in.

The main character in
Self's Murder
is private investigator Gerhard Self, former state prosecutor under the Nazis and current do-gooder. As a private eye, Self is trying hard to right his past wrongs in a self-imposed penance of diligent work. Over seventy years of age, he is well aware that most potential clients “will be more impressed by a younger fellow with a cell phone and a BMW who's a former cop . . . than by an old guy driving an old Opel.” Nevertheless, Self is not ready to call it quits. He struggles on, caring for those who have come to him for help and struggling to accept that there are times when there is nothing he can do for them: “I was tortured by the powerlessness of not being able to do anything anymore, not being able to fix things.”

There was a sudden interruption to my reading.

“Mom! Don't you want to go bodysurfing?” Peter called from the water.

“Not today, honey, I am loving this book.”

Self agrees to take on a new case, helping the director of a bank find the real identity of one of its silent partners. The search takes unexpected turns, going back in time to the plundering of Jewish property under the Nazis, and forward again through the present-day strife of a unified Germany, with its problems of resurgent Nazi skinheads and the integration of the East Germans into a Western mentality and culture.

In the end, Self solves the mystery of the identity of the silent partner, while also uncovering a connected plot of deception and thievery that has led to a series of murders. But he can't prove what he knows about the murders, and the perpetrator never has to pay for his crimes.

Self feels cheated. He has solved the case of the murders, but been denied the satisfaction of justice served. Self comes to understand then that his own sanity depends upon his accepting what he cannot change: “I realized it was my decision whether I would interpret the ending as unjust and unsatisfactory and suffer because of it or decided that this, and only this, was the fitting ending.”

Wisdom from a mystery, discovered on a beach. And a new understanding of order in the universe. We cannot control events around us, but we are responsible for our reactions to those events. I was responsible for how I reacted to the death of my sister. Once past the initial shock of losing her and the period of grief that followed, I could choose how to respond.

I tuned in to what was going on around me on the beach. Michael, who had a healthy fear of waves after one year's bodysurfing mishap resulted in a trip to the ER and twenty stitches across his lip, was building a castle in the sand, while Martin dug out the moat and connecting canal leading down into the water. Peter and Jack were bodysurfing, and George sat beside me, reading. Marvin and Dorothy, the woman who would become his wife, were taking a walk down the beach.

Peter ran up from the water. “Got anything to drink, Mom?”

“I'm hungry,” yelled Michael. I turned to the cooler and pulled out bottles of water and bunches of grapes.

“What time are we leaving?” asked George, never one for prolonged exposure to heat or sun.

“Anytime is fine with me,” I said.

Anytime was fine, anything was fine, everything was fine. My response was up to me. The fitting ending is determined by
how
a person takes what life gives them, not by
what
life gives them.

But what about what life takes away? How to live with the loss of my sister. How to live. That response was wholly up to me as well.

Mysteries tell me there is order in the universe. And I believe that there is. But a good whodunit also demonstrates that for some questions, there is no answer. I know that to be true as well. We all face mysteries—
Why did that have to happen
?—that we will never be able to understand. But we can, and we do, find
order
somewhere, whether it be in our books, our friends, our family, or our faith. Order is defined by how we live our lives. Order is created by how we respond to what life dishes out to us. Order is found in accepting that not all questions can be answered.

On that beautiful August afternoon, I sat back in my beach chair and surveyed where I was. Looking over a glittering ocean under a blue sky. Kids close by me on the sand, Jack still jumping the waves, Marvin and Dorothy coming back now over the dunes. I was doing okay. I was creating order by following lessons learned from the books I immersed myself in, day after day. My year of magical reading was proving to be a fitting ending to my overwhelming sorrow and a solid beginning to the rest of my life.

Chapter 19
Discovering Purpose in Kindness

Acts of kindness demonstrate, in the clearest possible way, that we are vulnerable and dependent animals who have no better resource than each other.

ADAM PHILLIPS AND
BARBARA TAYLOR,

On Kindness

EARLY IN SEPTEMBER, MY STEPDAUGHTER, MEREDITH, CALLED FROM LONDON
. She'd moved to England eight months earlier, but the planned future with her boyfriend hadn't worked out. In the predawn hours of a Thursday morning, I reached for the ringing phone and found her on the other end, weeping and overwhelmed. Jack took the phone from me and told Meredith to get on a plane. He mouthed an “Okay?” to me, and I nodded.

What else could I do? How else to respond to despair but with kindness and a place to live safe and protected, for as long as she wanted? It is my first impulse, to offer solace or comfort, no matter how small, to a person who is sad and confused. I couldn't solve Meredith's problem. But I could be witness to her grief, and a companion through the hardship.

In the graphic memoir
Stitches
, author David Small tells the story of his childhood. His early years, living with a depressed mother and a detached father and spending summers with a psychotic grandmother, were marked by verbal abuse and utter lack of physical affection. Stricken with a throat cancer caused by his father giving him radiation to cure respiratory problems, Small was literally and figuratively mute for years. He turned to art to express himself. Through his art he was also able to find relief from the prevailing misery in his home. One page in
Stitches
shows a young Small diving into his drawing pad, being taken down through the page and into a world of his own creation, a world safe for being his own, and for being unreachable by his family.

It was only when he was a teenager that an adult finally took notice of Small's desolation and reached out to help him. This man, a therapist, showed Small the kindness and compassion the boy had been missing in his life. “He treated me like a favorite son,” Small writes. “He truly cared about me.” That one caring adult, and the sanctuary of his art, led Small past the misery of his childhood and into a fulfilling life.

In
On Kindness
by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, the authors argue that human kindness
is
human nature: “History shows us the manifold expressions of humanity's desire to connect, from classical celebrations of friendship, to Christian teachings on love and charity, to twentieth-century philosophies of social welfare.” Phillips and Taylor believe that in lightening the burdens of others—easing their fears and fostering their hopes—we gain strength. And when that same kindness is given back to us, we flourish, our own fears lessened and our own hopes bolstered: “Kindness . . . creates the kind of intimacy, the kind of involvement with other people that we both fear and crave . . . kindness, fundamentally, makes life worth living.”

My four boys were excited that their sister, Meredith, was coming home. They didn't ask why she was leaving London or inquire as to the circumstances of her changed life. In fact, the only question they asked at all was if her name would be added to the rota for dinner cleanup. Yes, it would be. Nothing like chores and routine to get a person back on track. Friday evening, Jack picked up Meredith and her two bulging suitcases at JFK and brought her back to Westport. We all settled in, seven at home again.

I expect acts of kindness within my family, physical and verbal demonstrations of acceptance and support from one member to another. We have our share of spats between siblings (and parents), but nevertheless, our home is the place where we all can be just who we are and expect to be loved for exactly that. It is this underlying unconditional love that makes the family unit a refuge, and the family house a place to return to for solace and peace at the end of a school day or workday—or after a boyfriend and a future planned around him go down the tubes.

Outside the family unit, my experience is that kindness between friends, acquaintances, and even strangers is the rule rather than the exception. After my sister died, I was buffeted by acts of kindness from friends. People wrote cards, made dinners, brought flowers. One friend planted a lilac bush in my garden, placing it so I can see it whenever I am in the kitchen. The bush has grown large, and in the spring it is heavy with dark, fragrant buds. I think of Anne-Marie every time I see the flowers, and I think of my friend Heather, who planted it for me.

I grew up on stories of generosity and compassion. Some families thrive on war stories of valor and bravery, and other families draw strength from a past of pioneering and privation. In my family's mythology, kindness is the greatest power. There were the stories of wartime kindness, like how the couple in Regensburg who, after losing all three sons to war, took my father in to live with them; or how after the war the entire population of my great-grandmother's village outside Antwerp came out to pray for penicillin to be delivered to their local doctor. Within days a convoy of American soldiers delivered the medicine, and the certain death of a tooth-abscessed man was averted.

There were the funny stories too. One of my father's responsibilities as a young boy was to herd the family sheep out to the fields in the morning. While out tending the sheep one day, my father was bitten on the leg by a stray dog. It was a deep bite, and my father began to bleed. An old babushka approached him across the field and offered to help. My father was grateful for her offer. His leg hurt, and the bleeding wouldn't stop. Then the old woman explained
how
she could help. She'd pull up her skirt and, stooping over his bitten leg, urinate on the broken skin to disinfect the wound. She gestured to a group of boys coming over the hill, all friends of my father. He hadn't seen them coming.

“I can pee on you, but with the other boys around, maybe you'd rather I wouldn't?”

My father nodded.

“Then run on home, and wash your leg up with soap. Go!”

The babushka offered kindness both ways, to pee or not to pee, and my father made his choice. He still bears the scar of that bite on his leg, but the way he explains it, if his friends had seen him pissed on by a local grandmother, the mental scars would have been much worse.

My grandmother in Belgium started up a charity during the war. Its purpose? To darn the socks of families deprived of maids during the war. After the war, she devoted her knitting to the “poor children of the Congo.” Why children living in the heat of central Africa would need woolens was beyond me, but her heart was in the right place, and her mind was subconsciously trying to somehow make up for the horrors King Leopold II had exercised while governing the Belgian Congo.

That same grandmother was the only one in her family to welcome home a cousin who had left for Africa as a priest and came back as a husband to an African woman and father to three mixed-race children. “All love is sacred” was my grandmother's philosophy, and she helped the young family settle in to life in provincial Belgium.

My uncle George's philosophy was to keep loved ones fed, at all costs. In Germany after the war, food was hard to find. Uncle George kept my father fed despite the shortages. He worked in the kitchens of the American army barracks and sneaked out sausages and hams to my father, food that kept him alive until he was enrolled in the University of Regensburg and taken in by the German couple. Even then, my uncle kept passing on food to my father to share with his new family, as thanks to the couple for taking my father in.

Uncle George worked for the Americans for another thirty years, ending up as the head cook at an American base along the Czech border. He was let go when the Americans caught him taking sausages for his Sunday lunch. “But I've been taking sausages for thirty years!” he exclaimed. The Americans wanted to keep him on—he was a great cook, a cheerful fellow, and nice to everyone—but rules were rules. So Uncle George began working at a bar in the local village, a bar that quickly became the favorite watering hole for off-duty GIs, including the men who had to fire him from their kitchen. My sisters and I understood the lesson taught: kindness sometimes operates outside of the law, but in the end, kindness overrides even the most law bidden.

I wanted to do something to show Meredith that I cared for her and cared about what happened to her. Yet she had no visible wounds that needed disinfecting and no socks that needed darning. I wasn't one for praying, but I did try to make her favorite dishes for dinner, frying up a sausage or two in honor of Uncle George. In
On Kindness
, the writers note that “acts of kindness demonstrate, in the clearest possible way, that we are vulnerable and dependent animals who have no better resource than each other.” I wanted to be a resource for Meredith, but what kind?
On Kindness
makes much of the caring instinct that exists between parents and child: “Between parents and children . . . kindness is expected, sanctioned, and indeed obligatory.” But I was not Meredith's parent; I was not her pal; I was not her aunt or grandmother; I was not her babysitter or teacher.

Meredith and I have not always had the easiest of relationships. She was the only daughter of Jack, and I was the opinionated second wife. There were plenty of occasions for us to clash. One of the very first times Jack, Meredith, and I went out together was a Sunday trip to Bear Mountain, a state park close to New York City. It was late October, the leaves almost gone from the trees, but the temperature was warm, with clear skies and bright sun overhead. We spent the day doing little kid things—playing on a playground, taking a hike around the pond, and running a tag game on the park's patchy grass fields.

On the drive back to Meredith's home in New Jersey, where she lived then with her mother, Meredith began to complain that she had to sit in the backseat.

“Should we just drop Nina off here, Meredith?” Jack asked. “Get you up in the front?” We were on Route 9 at the time, somewhere in the suburbs of Bergen County. Night had fallen, and the temperature had turned chilly.

“Yes, Dad. Let her out here.”

Jack laughed, and slowed the car down.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Jack winked at me. “Are you sure, Meredith? It's awfully cold and a very long walk back to the city.”

“Do it, Dad, she'll be fine.”

Jack did not “do it”; he sped up again, and we drove Meredith home to her mother.

I suppose the best way to define our relationship is that I am Meredith's oldest friend. I've known her since she was six years old; I've traveled with her and lived with her. We share a love of cats and horses, and of red wine and chocolate. She's held me when I've cried, and I've held her when she needed me. As all long friendships do, our relationship has flowered and blundered, steamed ahead and stuttered to a stop, then restarted itself again. And as is true in all friendships, the restart always comes from an act of kindness. The weekend after our trip to Bear Mountain, I let Meredith sit in the front seat of our rented car. When Jack moved into my Chelsea apartment, I welcomed Meredith with a day of baking Christmas cookies shaped as cats. The cookies came out of the oven hard as a rock, so we used them as ornaments for the Christmas tree. We pounded a hole through the top of each cookie with a nail (yes, they were that hard) and laced ribbons through for hanging on branches.

When Meredith moved in with us full-time nine years later, forbearance was offered on her part by how she treated her younger brothers. She was exceptionally patient with them, and affectionate. On my part, I insisted to Jack that we give up our bedroom in the two-bedroom apartment and move out to the living room. I knew that Meredith needed her privacy and her own space.

Thirteen years later, she needed space and privacy and a safe haven all over again. I could do that, easily. But I wanted to do more for her. Love between a mother and child is expected. My love for Meredith has to be re-proved, again and again. Big act or small, I wanted to do something special. I offered to take her to the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens, and she took me up on it.

“It will mean getting up really early,” I cautioned her. Every year I buy grounds admission tickets for the Open. Grounds admission means no reserved seats were waiting for me. But by getting out to the tennis center by 8:00 a.m. and waiting in line for the gates to open at ten, and then running as fast as I could to the Grandstand Stadium (which had only nonreserved seating), I could snag front-row seats for the day. If I knocked a few people down along the way, I apologized (kindness) and kept going (determination: this was, after all, the one and only U.S. Open). I explained the plan to Meredith and she was up for it.

We got to Flushing Meadows in plenty of time, with only a few people before us in line. I got out my reading for the day,
Better
by John O'Brien. It was a depressing novel about sex, drinking, and money. The book has more than a few graphic scenes of alcohol-fueled sex and debauchery integral to the plot, and I hunched over as I read, hoping no one was peeking over my shoulder. At ten the gates opened and I took off at a gallop, climbing the steps up into the grandstand two at a time and then sliding into front-row seats behind the baseline and slightly to the right. Meredith came in behind me and smiled.

“These are great seats,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” agreed the panting couple taking the seats beside us. Their faces were decorated with red and white paint, colored in to look like the Danish flag across their foreheads and cheeks.

“We're here for Caroline Wozniacki,” said the man who had come in to sit behind us. “Who are you here for?”

I turned around to talk. “Who is playing the grandstand today?”

“Tommy Haas, Kim Clijsters, Wozniacki . . . Serena and Venus are supposed to be playing doubles here later.” Meredith and I looked at each other and did the high five. The Williams sisters? Then Meredith went off in search of coffee while I turned back to finish
Better
. We still had an hour to go before the matches began.