The Lost Time Accidents (49 page)

It was my mother who told me the story of that first trip to Spanish Harlem, not my father, so I’m confident the details can be trusted. It was an eight-hour drive to New York in those days, and I bawled from Rochester to Painted Post; Orson’s nerves were in tatters by the time we crossed the Hudson, and the Kraut could feel a fever coming on. We pulled up at the General Lee at dusk. The neighborhood looked even more abject than my father remembered, purged of any phantom traces of romance. He pressed the buzzer of his former place of residence three times, counted silently to thirty, then pressed it again. When no response came, he dug out a key from the glove compartment—huge and ancient and tarnished, like the key to a fairy-tale dungeon—and unlocked the front door himself. Ursula followed him feebly, already running a temperature, humming to keep the restless baby quiet.

The electricity was out in the lobby, and the windows were covered in cardboard and tape. At the fourth-floor landing they found themselves confronted by a massive jet-black door, apparently freshly installed: it was out of all proportion to the stairwell, Ursula thought—much too grandiose for that decrepit building—though perhaps the fever was affecting her judgment.

“Here we are,” Orson said softly, as though afraid of being overheard. From somewhere—possibly far away—came the sound of running water.

“Do you hear that?” said Ursula, whispering without knowing why.

He laid his ear to the door. “What time have you got?”

“Quarter to three.”

“They’ll be taking their afternoon bath.”

The baby squawked; Ursula gave it a jiggle. “They take their baths together?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

He gave her an odd smile, motioned for her to step back, then slammed the heels of both his palms against the door. The resulting boom set the whole building trembling and the baby caterwauling and Orson cursing and clutching his wrist. The door hummed like a gong. She touched it with her fingertips and found that it was made of some kind of metal, smooth and cold to the touch. She was about to ask Orson about it when a weatherbeaten gentleman with a yellowish afro and a debonair manner appeared on the landing below and suggested, in a high, cultured voice, that they go right to hell. “Is that you, Mr. Buckram?” Orson called down to him.

The man gave Orson the finger. Soon afterward the bolts began to turn.

However violent my debut may have seemed to my aunts—they hadn’t been expecting our visit until the next morning, according to Gentian, and it was only the sound of my crying that had kept them from alerting the police—their own entrance into my duration was notably mild. I seem to remember it, Mrs. Haven, though I couldn’t possibly remember it. The great door swings inward, making no sound at all, and the sisters are standing behind it, shoulder to shoulder, small and frail against the yawning dark behind them. A tense silence falls, which Ursula breaks by holding up the baby for inspection. They examine it dubiously (my mother’s choice of words, Mrs. Haven, not mine). She can’t quite decide, as they poke at her son, whether or not she ought to feel offended. Gentian turns to Enzian, who gives a brisk nod.

“Waldemar,” Enzian announces.

It seems to Ursula suddenly—but again, she’s exhausted and feverish—that she’s known all along which name the sisters would choose, and also that she would put up no resistance. Orson embraces each of them in turn, solemnly but with feeling, as though they were Russian functionaries at a banquet. Ursula realizes, dimly, that she’s being escorted back downstairs. Now she’s offended—no, perhaps not offended; bewildered, perplexed—but her husband appears not to notice. Go to sleep, he tells her, making a manger of sorts in the Buick’s backseat. We’ll be in Buffalo by midnight, all three of us. You and me and little Waldemar.

*   *   *

Half my childhood was gone when I next saw my aunts, and by then the name had warped and shrunk to fit me. It would be years before I learned its full significance—before I was taken quietly aside, by my mother, on my seventeenth birthday, and told exactly what Äschenwald, that pretty word, meant to the rest of the world—and by that point, of course, it was too late. Or so I was led to believe.

My mother was never especially interested in helping me fit in—she considered it an expression of Austrian pride to speak German to me in public places, and dressed me in a style that a college girlfriend, flipping through a photo album years later, dubbed “Hitler Youth casual”—but even
she
realized that the name Waldemar was more than my skinny shoulders could support. “Waldy” was Ursula’s invention, and I’m grateful to her, though her insistence on pronouncing it the Austrian way (“VAL-dee”) tended to defeat the nickname’s purpose. Fortunately I had a gift for deflecting attention: I was remarkably unremarkable, Mrs. Haven, as I’ve mentioned before. By June 18, 1978, when my father and I climbed the General Lee’s stairwell together for the second time, I’d been punched, bitten, knocked over and peed on no more than most seven-year-olds, which I take a certain pride in even now. I was reasonably well adjusted for my age, and tended not to take things much to heart, especially when grown-ups said or did them. This made me a mild but steady disappointment to my parents, especially at parent-teacher conferences—but it proved to be a crucial skill in dealing with my aunts.

This time Orson knocked politely, both out of consideration for his knuckles and for the door of the apartment, to which the intervening years had not been gentle. It hung askew on its hinges, as though the building had somehow shifted out of plumb, and the gaps this produced (of which there were a few) were plugged with soggy-looking wads of newsprint. My father had been in lecture mode on the long drive downstate—without actually explaining the point of our visit, which remained a mystery—but now he was silent and grim. As I listened to the sound of slippered footfalls and of deadbolts being thrown, I was seized by the suspicion that I was about to be sold into white slavery, or forced to take a trigonometry exam, or cooked slowly in a child-sized witch’s cauldron.

The last bolt was thrown and the black door swung open and a lady peered out from behind it. She had a harried look, and she wasn’t much taller than Orson, but she seemed to gaze down on us from on high. I knew she was one of my aunts, of course, but I didn’t know which. If I’d been allowed to read my father’s books, I’d have recognized her right away—she could only have been Empress Eng Xan, the Obsidian Priestess, villainess of the Chyldwyrld trilogy.

“You’re here,” said the woman. She said it in German:
“Ihr seid da.”
Her accent—equal parts Austrian and Yankee and Yiddish—was no more curious than anything else about her. “Where’s the other one hiding?”

“If by ‘the other one,’ you mean Ursula, my wife,” my father answered in English, “she’d have liked nothing better than to drive for eight hours to wait out here on your landing again, but she’s visiting her mother in Vienna. Are you going to let us in this time?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed, as if she suspected us of subterfuge (and in fact my mother was very much at home in Cheektowaga, already in bed, with a paperback and a glass of iced Lillet); then she took in a sharp, girlish breath that made her seem decades younger, and receded smoothly—ceremonially, it seemed to me—into the gloom. A second woman appeared, blushing and grinning and rubbing her plump hands together, but in that first dazzled instant I paid her no mind. The hall we stepped into was fitted with shelves of every conceivable description, some extravagantly filigreed, some obviously homemade, and each devoted to a single object. Many of the items in question were familiar—a teakettle, a bowling ball, a snow globe enclosing a miniature Chrysler Building—but some were completely obscure. There must have been nearly a thousand such shelves, ranging in size from the width of my palm to the length of my arm, running along both walls as far as I could see. The blushing woman kissed my father on both cheeks without saying a word. Then she took my hand and led me down the hall.

“Do you like what you see, Waldemar?” she asked in an odd voice, both boisterous and shy.

“It’s Waldy,” I corrected her.

“
Is
it, now?” Behind her smile she was watching me closely. “Do you like what you see, Waldy?”

“What is all this stuff?”

“I thought you’d never ask! It’s an archive.”

I was old enough to know that people were supposed to collect expensive things, or rare things, or things that fit together in some way; these looked as though they’d been scavenged at the Cheektowaga landfill. A fencing mask, a Dixie Cup, a credit card, an upside-down jar with the shell of a bug underneath it: any object takes on authority, of a kind, when singled out and given pride of place. But the sheer quantity of items on display, and the contrast of their battered condition to the customized perfection of the shelves, repelled interpretation like an antimagnet. It was my first physical encounter with paradox, Mrs. Haven, and it made me feel hollow and weak. My aunts’ apartment was now a museum of sorts—I understood that much—but a museum whose only curator, as far as I could see, was chance.

“What kind of an archive?” I asked her at last.

“The Archive of Accidents. That’s what my sister calls it. It’s beautiful, wouldn’t you say?”

I frowned at her. “Accidents? What do you mean?”

“I have to keep myself
amused
,” she said, lowering her voice. “My sister has her work, you know, and I have mine.”

No one had ever spoken to me as an adult before, and it thrilled me almost as much as it confused me. I had no idea what to say next.

“I
find
things, Waldy,” she went on. “I notice things, and occasionally I take them.” She giggled. “Every man-made thing can be thought of as a work of art, you know. You’re familiar with
The Shape of Time
, by Kubler?”

I opened my mouth to speak. No sound emerged.

“No? Then let me read a bit to you.” She reached blindly behind her and plucked the book down from a shelf, like a conjuror producing a bouquet.

“I’ll begin, as the mock turtle advises, at the beginning.

“‘Let us suppose that the idea of Art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of Art. In effect, the only tokens of history continually available to our senses are the desirable things made by men.’”

As she read I looked past her, past the ceiling-high matrix of shelves, past a personal computer and a dressmaker’s mannequin and a stuffed kinkajou, toward the shadows at the turning of the hallway. The hallway had refused to conform to my expectations as my aunt led me inward, rushing toward us when my attention was diverted, then holding unnaturally still—resisting any and all acknowledgment of our forward motion—as though we’d stepped into the forced perspective of a painting. I was seven years old, an age at which the world still changes shape and hue according to one’s mood; but there was something unnatural, irresolvable, about the boundaries of that space. I sensed this right away, Mrs. Haven, as clearly as I sensed the anxiety behind my aunt’s coquettishness.

“‘Such things mark the passage of Time with far greater accuracy than we know, and they fill Time with shapes of a limited variety. Like crustaceans, we depend for survival upon an outer skeleton, upon a shell of historic houses and apartments filled with things belonging to definable portions of the past.’”

“That’s what I’m after with this little collection,” my aunt said, closing the book with a snap. “To approach
every
man-made thing as if it ought to be in a museum. Everything I see out there”—here she waved a hand vaguely (and with a bit of a shudder, I thought)—“could potentially have a place in
here.
Isn’t that terribly exciting, Waldemar?”

I struggled to come up with some worldly-sounding comment, as I did when watching football with my father. “How do you decide what to take?”

“Excellent question!” She looked proudly about her. “In theory, of course, this collection should be infinite. I suppose that we’ll have to expand.”

“What’s back there?” I asked, pointing toward the hallway’s turning.

“Where?”

“Back there. Where it starts to get dark.”

“You must be
hungry
,” my aunt said, returning the book to its shelf. “I baked a peach cobbler this morning. It’s not easy to find peaches, you know, at this time of—”

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Of course, dear! The WC’s right behind you. Don’t trouble yourself about that dressmaker’s dummy—just waltz it right out of the way.”

Aside from its arched ceiling and acid-green walls, the only point of interest in the WC was the toilet seat, which was upholstered in chocolate pile. My aunt said something through the door that I didn’t quite catch, then tittered to herself and trundled off. Every so often I heard an odd noise, like the moving-about of heavy furniture. I made a game of trying to guess what it could be.

The hallway seemed darker when I came back out. I could hear my father’s voice not too far off, speaking more guardedly than I was used to, and a woman’s voice asking him questions. I stood still for a time, trying to make out what was being said, savoring the delectable thrill all children feel when spying on their elders. The voices were tantalizingly close, just shy of intelligibility; I crawled toward them on my hands and knees to keep the floor from creaking. My father was talking about someone they all seemed to know, someone who had to be handled with tact, even caution—a delicate case, not as simple as it might appear.

“I’m aggrieved to hear that,” came the voice of the woman. Not the one who’d led me down the hallway—the other one. Aunt Enzian.

“Let’s not get melodramatic here,” my father said. “He isn’t who you thought he was, that’s all.”

“He
is
,” said Enzian. “He has to be.”

“Listen to me. He’s too suggestible, too fragile—”