The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

1

The last time my mother Cornelia Nissenbaum and her sister Constance saw their mother was the day before she vanished from their lives forever, April 11, 1923.

It was a rainy-misty morning. They’d been searching for their mother because something was wrong in the household; she hadn’t come downstairs to prepare breakfast so there wasn’t anything for them except what their father gave them, glutinous oatmeal from the previous morning hastily reheated on the stove sticking to the bottom of the pan and tasting of scorch. Their father had seemed strange to them, smiling but not-seeing in that way of his like Reverend Dieckman too fierce in his pulpit Sunday mornings, intoning the Word of God. His eyes were threaded with blood and his face was still pale from the winter but flushed, mottled. In those days he was a handsome man but stern-looking and severe. Gray-grizzled side-whiskers and a spade-shaped beard, coarse and grizzled too with gray, but thick springy-sleek black hair brushed back from his forehead in a crest. The sisters were fearful of their father without their mother to mediate among them, it was as if none of them knew who they were without her.

Connie chewed her lip and worked up her nerve to ask where was Momma? and their father said, hitching up his suspenders, on his way outside, “Your mother’s where you’ll find her.”

The sisters watched their father cross the mud-puddled yard to where a crew of hired men was waiting in the doorway of the big barn. It was rye-planting season and always in spring in the Chautauqua Valley there was worry about rain: too much rain and the seed would be washed away or rot in the soil before it could sprout. My mother Cornelia would grow to adulthood thinking how blessings and curses fell from the sky with equal authority, like hard-pelting rain. There was God, who set the world in motion, and who intervened sometimes in the affairs of men, for reasons no one could know. If you lived on a farm there was weather, always weather, every morning was weather and every evening at sundown calculating the next day’s, the sky’s moods meant too much. Always casting your glance upward, outward, your heart set to quicken.

That morning. The sisters would never forget that morning. We knew something was wrong, we thought Momma was sick. The night before having heard — what, exactly? Voices. Voices mixed with dreams, and the wind. On that farm, at the brink of a ten-mile descent to the Chautauqua River, it was always windy — on the worst days the wind could literally suck your breath away! — like a ghost, a goblin. An invisible being pushing up close beside you, sometimes even inside the house, even in your bed, pushing his mouth (or muzzle) to yours and sucking out the breath.

Connie thought Nelia was silly, a silly-baby, to believe such. She was eight years old and skeptical-minded. Yet maybe she believed it, too? Liked to scare herself, the way you could almost tickle yourself, with such wild thoughts.

Connie, who was always famished, and after that morning would be famished for years, sat at the oilcloth-covered table and ate the oatmeal her father had spooned out for her, devoured it, scorch-clots and all, her head of fair-frizzy braids lowered and her jaws working quickly. Oatmeal sweetened with top-milk on the very edge of turning sour, and coarse brown sugar. Nelia, who was fretting, wasn’t able to swallow down more than a spoon or two of hers so Connie devoured that, too. She would remember that part of the oatmeal was hot enough to burn her tongue and other parts were icebox-cold. She would remember that it was all delicious.

The girls washed their dishes in the cold-water sink and let the oatmeal pan soak in scummy soapsuds. It was time for Connie to leave for school but both knew she could not go, not today. She could not leave to walk two miles to the school with that feeling something is wrong, nor could she leave her little sister behind.

Though when Nelia snuffled and wiped her nose on both her hands Connie cuffed her on the shoulder and scolded, “Piggy-piggy.”

This, a habit of their mother’s when they did something that was only mildly disgusting.

Connie led the way upstairs to the big bedroom at the front of the house that was Momma and Pappa’s room and that they were forbidden to enter unless specifically invited; for instance if the door was open and Momma was cleaning inside, changing bedclothes so she’d call out Come in, girls! smiling in her happy mood so it was all right and they would not be scolded. Come in, give me a hand, which turned into a game shaking out sheets, fluffing out pillowcases to stuff heavy goosefeather pillows inside, Momma and Connie and Nelia laughing together. But this morning the door was shut. There was no sound of Momma inside. Connie dared to turn the doorknob, push the door open slowly, and they saw, yes, to their surprise there was their mother lying on top of the unmade bed, partly dressed, wrapped in an afghan. My God, it was scary to see Momma like that, lying down at such an hour of the morning! Momma, who was so brisk and capable and who routed them out of bed if they lingered, Momma with little patience for Connie’s lazy-tricks as she called them or for Nelia’s sniffles, tummyaches, and baby-fears.

“Momma?” — Connie’s voice was cracked.

“Mom-ma?” — Nelia whimpered.

Their mother groaned and flung an arm across one of the pillows lying crooked beside her. She was breathing hard, like a winded horse, her chest rising and falling so you could see it and her head was flung back on a pillow and she’d placed a wetted cloth across her eyes mask-like so half her face was hidden. Her dark-blond hair was disheveled, unplaited, coarse and lustreless as a horse’s mane, unwashed for days. That rich rank smell of Momma’s hair when it needed washing. You remember such smells, the sisters would say, some of them not-so-nice smells, all your life. And the smell in their parents’ forbidden room of — was it talcum powder, sweaty armpits, a sourish-sweet fragrance of bedclothes that no matter how frequently laundered with detergent and bleach were never truly fresh. A smell of bodies. Adult bodies. Yeasty, stale. Pappa’s tobacco (he rolled his own crude paper cigarettes, he chewed tobacco in a thick tarry-black wad) and Pappa’s hair oil and that special smell of Pappa’s shoes, the black Sunday shoes always kept polished. (His work-boots, etc., he kept downstairs in the closed-in porch by the rear door called the “entry.”) In the step-in closet close by the bed, behind an unhemmed length of chintz, was a blue-speckled porcelain chamberpot with a detachable lid and a rim that curled neatly under it, like a lip.

The sisters had their own chamberpot — their potty, as it was called. There was no indoor plumbing in John Nissenbaum’s farmhouse as in any farmhouse in the Chautauqua Valley well into the 1930s and in poorer homes well into the 1940s, and even beyond. One hundred yards behind the house, beyond the silo, was the outhouse, the latrine, the “privy.” But you would not want to make that trip in cold weather or in rain or in the pitch-black of night, not if you could help it.

Of course the smell of urine and a fainter smell of excrement must have been everywhere, the sisters conceded, years later. As adults, reminiscing. But it was masked by the barnyard smell, probably. Nothing worse than pig manure, after all!

At least, we weren’t pigs.

Anyway, there was Momma, on the bed. The bed that was so high from the floor you had to raise a knee to slide up on it, and grab on to whatever you could. And the horsehair mattress, so hard and ungiving. The cloth over Momma’s eyes she hadn’t removed and beside Momma in the rumpled bedclothes her Bible. Face down. Pages bent. That Bible her mother-in-law Grandma Nissenbaum had given her for a wedding present, seeing she hadn’t one of her own. It was smaller than the heavy black family Bible and it was made of limp ivory-leather covers and had onionskin pages the girls were allowed to examine but not to turn without Momma’s supervision; the Bible that would disappear with Gretel Nissenbaum, forever.

The girls begged, whimpered. “Momma? Momma, are you sick?”

At first there was no answer. Just Momma’s breath coming quick and hard and uneven. And her olive-pale skin oily with heat like fever. Her legs were tangled in the afghan, her hair was strewn across the pillow. They saw the glint of Momma’s gold cross on a thin gold chain around her neck, almost lost in her hair. (Not only a cross but a locket, too: when Momma opened it there was, inside, a tiny strand of silver hair once belonging to a woman the sisters had never known, Momma’s own grandmother she’d loved so when she was a little girl.) And there were Momma’s breasts, almost exposed! — heavy, lush, beautiful almost spilling out of a white eyelet slip, rounded like sacs holding warm liquid, and the nipples dark and big as eyes. You weren’t supposed to stare at any part of a person’s body but how could you help it? — especially Connie who was fascinated by such, guessing how one day she’d inhabit a body like Momma’s. Years ago she’d peeked at her mother’s big milk-swollen breasts when Nelia was still nursing, jealous, awed. Nelia was now five years old and could not herself recall nursing at all; would come one day to believe, stubborn and disdainful, that she had never nursed, had only been bottle-fed.

At last Momma snatched the cloth off her face. “You! Damn you! What do you want?” She stared at the girls as if, clutching hands and gaping at her, they were strangers. Her right eye was bruised and swollen and there were raw red marks on her forehead and first Nelia then Connie began to cry and Momma said, “Constance, why aren’t you in school? Why can’t you let me alone? God help me — always ‘Momma’ — ‘Momma’ — ‘Momma.’” Connie whimpered, “Momma, did you hurt yourself?” and Nelia moaned, sucking a corner of the afghan like a deranged baby and Momma ignored the question, as Momma often ignored questions she thought nosy, none of your business; her hand lifted as if she meant to slap them but then fell wearily, as if this had happened many times before, this exchange, this emotion, and it was her fate that it would happen many times again. A close sweet-stale blood-odor lifted from Momma’s lower body, out of the folds of the soiled afghan, that odor neither of the little girls could have identified except in retrospect, in adolescence at last detecting it in themselves: shamed, discomforted, the secret of their bodies at what was called, invariably in embarrassed undertones, that certain time of the month.

So: Gretel Nissenbaum, at the time she disappeared from her husband’s house, was having her period.

Did that mean something, or nothing?

Nothing, Cornelia would say sharply.

Yes, Constance would insist, it meant our mother was not pregnant. She wasn’t running away with any lover because of that.

That morning, what confusion in the Nissenbaum household! However the sisters would later speak of the encounter in the big bedroom, what their mother had said to them, how she’d looked and behaved, it had not been precisely that way, of course. Because how can you speak of confusion, where are the words for it? How to express in adult language the wild fibrillation of children’s minds, two child-minds beating against each other like moths, how to know what had truly happened and what was only imagined! Connie would swear that their mother’s eye looked like a nasty dark-rotted egg, so swollen, but she could not say which eye it was, right or left; Nelia, shrinking from looking at her mother’s bruised face, wanting only to burrow against her, to hide and be comforted, would come in time to doubt that she’d seen a hurt eye at all; or whether she’d been led to believe she saw it because Connie, who was so bossy, claimed she had.

Connie would remember their mother’s words, Momma’s rising desperate voice, “Don’t touch me — I’m afraid! I might be going somewhere but I’m not ready — oh God, I’m so afraid!” — and on and on, saying she was going away, she was afraid, and Connie trying to ask where? where was she going? and Momma beating at the bedclothes with her fists. Nelia would remember being hurt at the way Momma yanked the spittle-soaked corner of the afghan out of her mouth, so roughly! Not Momma but bad-Momma, witch-Momma who scared her.

But then Momma relented, exasperated. “Oh come on, you damn little babies! Of course ‘Momma’ loves you.”

Eager then as starving kittens the sisters scrambled up onto the high, hard bed, whimpering, snuggling into Momma’s arms, her damp snarled hair, those breasts. Connie and Nelia burrowing, crying themselves to sleep like nursing babies, Momma drew the afghan over the three of them as if to shield them. That morning of April 11, 1923.

And next morning, early, before dawn. The sisters would be awakened by their father’s shouts, “Gretel? Gretel!”

2

…never spoke of her after the first few weeks. After the first shock. We learned to pray for her and to forgive her and to forget her. We didn’t miss her. So Mother said, in her calm judicious voice. A voice that held no blame.

But Aunt Connie would take me aside. The older, wiser sister. It’s true we never spoke of Momma when any grownups were near, that was forbidden. But, God! we missed her every hour of every day all the time we lived on that farm.

I was Cornelia’s daughter but it was Aunt Connie I trusted.

No one in the Chautauqua Valley knew where John Nissenbaum’s young wife Gretel had fled, but all knew, or had an opinion of, why she’d gone.

Faithless, she was. A faithless woman. Had she not run away with a man: abandoned her children. She was twenty-seven years old and too young for John Nissenbaum and she wasn’t a Ransomville girl, her people lived sixty miles away in Chautauqua Falls. Here was a wife who’d committed adultery, was an adulteress. (Some might say a tramp, a whore, a slut.) Reverend Dieckman, the Lutheran minister, would preach amazing sermons in her wake. For miles through the valley and for years well into the 1940s there would be scandalized talk of Gretel Nissenbaum: a woman who left her faithful Christian husband and her two little girls with no warning! no provocation! disappearing in the middle of a night taking with her only a single suitcase and, as every woman who ever spoke of the episode liked to say, licking her lips, the clothes on her back.

(Aunt Connie said she’d grown up imagining she had actually seen her mother, as in a dream, walking stealthily up the long drive to the road, a bundle of clothes, like laundry, slung across her back. Children are so damned impressionable, Aunt Connie would say, laughing wryly.)

For a long time after their mother disappeared, and no word came from her, or of her, so far as the sisters knew, Connie couldn’t seem to help herself teasing Nelia saying “Mommy’s coming home!” — for a birthday of Nelia’s, or Christmas, or Easter. How many times Connie thrilled with wickedness deceiving her baby sister and silly-baby that she was, Nelia believed.

And how Connie would laugh, laugh at her.

Well, it was funny. Wasn’t it?

Another trick of Connie’s: poking Nelia awake in the night when the wind was rattling the windows, moaning in the chimney like a trapped animal. Saying excitedly, Momma is outside the window, listen! Momma is a ghost trying to get YOU!

Sometimes Nelia screamed so, Connie had to straddle her chest and press a pillow over her face to muffle her. If they’d wakened Pappa with such nonsense there’d sure have been hell to pay.

Once, I might have been twelve, I asked if my grandfather had spanked or beaten them.

Aunt Connie, sitting in our living room on the high-backed mauve-brocade chair that was always hers when she came to visit, ignored me. Nor did Mother seem to hear. Aunt Connie lit one of her Chesterfields with a fussy flourish of her pink-frosted nails and took a deep satisfied puff and said, as if it were a thought only now slipping into her head, and like all such thoughts deserving of utterance, “I was noticing the other day, on TV, how brattish and idiotic children are, and we’re supposed to think they’re cute. Pappa wasn’t the kind to tolerate children carrying on for a single minute.” She paused, again inhaling deeply. “None of the men were, back there.”

Mother nodded slowly, frowning. These conversations with my aunt seemed always to give her pain, an actual ache behind the eyes, yet she could no more resist them than Aunt Connie. She said, wiping at her eyes, “Pappa was a man of pride. After she left us as much as before.”

“Hmmm!” Aunt Connie made her high humming nasal sound that meant she had something crucial to add, but did not want to appear pushy. “Well — maybe more, Nelia. More pride. After.” She spoke insinuatingly, with a smile and a glance toward me.

Like an actress who has strayed from her lines, Mother quickly amended, “Yes, of course. Because a weaker man would have succumbed to — shame and despair—”

Aunt Connie nodded briskly. “—might have cursed God—”

“—turned to drink—”

“—so many of ’em did, back there—”

“—but not Pappa. He had the gift of faith.”

Aunt Connie nodded sagely. Yet still with that strange almost-teasing smile.

“Oh indeed, Pappa did. That was his gift to us, Nelia, wasn’t it? — his faith.”

Mother was smiling her tight-lipped smile, her gaze lowered. I knew that, when Aunt Connie left, she would go upstairs to lie down, she would take two aspirins and draw the blinds, and put a damp cold cloth over her eyes and lie down and try to sleep. In her softening middle-aged face, the hue of putty, a young girl’s face shone rapt with fear. “Oh yes! His faith.”

Aunt Connie laughed heartily. Laugh, laugh. Dimples nicking her cheeks and a wink in my direction.

Years later, numbly sorting through Mother’s belongings after her death, I would discover, in a lavender-scented envelope in a bureau drawer, a single strand of dry, ash-colored hair. On the envelope, in faded purple ink Beloved Father John Allard Nissenbaum 1872–1957.

3

By his own account, John Nissenbaum, the wronged husband, had not had the slightest suspicion that his strong-willed young wife had been discontent, restless. Certainly not that she’d had a secret lover! So many local women would have dearly wished to change places with her, he’d been given to know when he was courting her, his male vanity, and his Nissenbaum vanity, and what you might call common sense suggested otherwise.

For the Nissenbaums were a well-regarded family in the Chautauqua Valley. Among the lot of them they must have owned thousands of acres of prime farmland.

In the weeks, months, and eventually years that followed the scandalous departure, John Nissenbaum, who was by nature, like most of the male Nissenbaums, reticent to the point of arrogance, and fiercely private, came to make his story — his side of it — known. As the sisters themselves gathered (for their father never spoke of their mother to them after the first several days following the shock), this was not a single coherent history but one that had to be pieced together like a giant quilt made of a myriad of fabric-scraps.

He did allow that Gretel had been missing her family, an older sister with whom she’d been especially close, and cousins and girlfriends she’d gone to high school with in Chautauqua Falls; he understood that the two-hundred-acre farm was a lonely place for her, their next-door neighbors miles away, and the village of Ransomville seven miles. (Trips beyond Ransomville were rare.) He knew, or supposed he knew, that his wife had harbored what his mother and sisters called wild imaginings, even after nine years of marriage, farm life, and children: she had asked several times to be allowed to play the organ at church, but had been refused; she reminisced often wistfully and perhaps reproachfully of long-ago visits to Port Oriskany, Buffalo, and Chicago, before she’d gotten married at the age of eighteen to a man fourteen years her senior… in Chicago she’d seen stage plays and musicals, the sensational dancers Irene and Vernon Castle in Irving Berlin’s Watch Your Step. It wasn’t just Gretel wanting to take over the organ at Sunday services (and replacing the elderly male organist whose playing, she said, sounded like a cat in heat), it was her general attitude toward Reverend Dieckman and his wife. She resented having to invite them to an elaborate Sunday dinner every few weeks, as the Nissenbaums insisted; she allowed her eyes to roam the congregation during Dieckman’s sermons, and stifled yawns behind her gloved hand; she woke in the middle of the night, she said, wanting to argue about damnation, hell, the very concept of grace. To the minister’s astonished face she declared herself “not able to fully accept the teachings of the Lutheran Church.”

If there were other more intimate issues between Gretel and John Nissenbaum, or another factor in Gretel’s emotional life, of course no one spoke of it at the time.

Though it was hinted — possibly more than hinted? — that John Nissenbaum was disappointed with only daughters. Naturally he wanted sons, to help him with the ceaseless work of the farm; sons to whom he could leave the considerable property, just as his married brothers had sons.

What was generally known was: John woke in the pitch-dark an hour before dawn of that April day, to discover that Gretel was gone from their bed. Gone from the house? He searched for her, called her name, with growing alarm, disbelief. “Gretel? Gret-el!” He looked in all the upstairs rooms of the house including the bedroom where his sleep-dazed, frightened daughters were huddled together in their bed; he looked in all the downstairs rooms, even the damp, dirt-floor cellar into which he descended with a lantern. “Gretel? Where are you?” Dawn came dull, porous and damp, and with a coat yanked on in haste over his night clothes, and his bare feet jammed into rubber boots, he began a frantic yet methodical search of the farm’s outbuildings — the privy, the cow barn and the adjoining stable, the hay barn and the corncrib where rats rustled at his approach. In none of these save perhaps the privy was it likely that Gretel might be found, still John continued his search with growing panic, not knowing what else to do. From the house his now terrified daughters observed him moving from building to building, a tall, rigid, jerkily moving figure with hands cupped to his mouth shouting, “Gretel! Gret-el! Do you hear me! Where are you! Gret-el!” The man’s deep, raw voice pulsing like a metronome, ringing clear, profound, and, to his daughters’ ears, as terrible as if the very sky had cracked open and God himself was shouting.

(What did such little girls, eight and five, know of God — in fact, as Aunt Connie would afterward recount, quite a bit. There was Reverend Dieckman’s baritone impersonation of the God of the Old Testament, the expulsion from the Garden, the devastating retort to Job, the spectacular burning bush where fire itself cried HERE I AM! — such had already been imprinted irrevocably upon their imaginations.)

Only later that morning — but this was a confused, anguished account — did John discover that Gretel’s suitcase was missing from the closet. And there were garments conspicuously missing from the clothes rack. And Gretel’s bureau drawers had been hastily ransacked — underwear, stockings were gone. And her favorite pieces of jewelry, of which she was childishly vain, were gone from her cedarwood box; gone, too, her heirloom, faded-cameo hairbrush, comb and mirror set. And her Bible.

What a joke, how people would chuckle over it — Gretel Nissenbaum taking her Bible with her!

Wherever in hell the woman went.

And was there no farewell note, after nine years of marriage? — John Nissenbaum claimed he’d looked everywhere, and found nothing. Not a word of explanation, not a word of regret even to her little girls. For that alone we expelled herfrom our hearts.

During this confused time while their father was searching and calling their mother’s name, the sisters hugged each other in a state of numbness beyond shock, terror. Their father seemed at times to be rushing toward them with the eye-bulging blindness of a runaway horse — they hurried out of his path. He did not see them except to order them out of his way, not to trouble him now. From the rear entry door they watched as he hitched his team of horses to his buggy and set out shuddering for Ransomville along the winter-rutted Post Road, leaving the girls behind, erasing them from his mind. As he would tell afterward, in rueful self-disgust, with the air of an enlightened sinner, he’d actually believed he would overtake Gretel on the road — convinced she’d be there, hiking on the grassy shoulder, carrying her suitcase. Gretel was a wiry-nervous woman, stronger than she appeared, with no fear of physical exertion. A woman capable of anything!

John Nissenbaum had the idea that Gretel had set out for Ransomville, seven miles away, there to catch the mid-morning train to Chautauqua Falls, another sixty miles south. It was his confused belief that they must have had a disagreement, else Gretel would not have left; he did not recall any disagreement in fact, but Gretel was after all an emotional woman, a highly strung woman; she’d insisted upon visiting the Hausers, her family, despite his wishes, was that it? — she was lonely for them, or lonely for something. She was angry they hadn’t visited Chautauqua Falls for Easter, hadn’t seen her family since Christmas. Was that it? We were never enough for her. Why were we never enough for her?

But in Ransomville, in the cinderblock Chautauqua & Buffalo depot, there was no sign of Gretel, nor had the lone clerk seen her.

“This woman would be about my height,” John Nissenbaum said, in his formal, slightly haughty way. “She’d be carrying a suitcase, her feet would maybe be muddy. Her boots.”

The clerk shook his head slowly. “No sir, nobody looking like that.”

“A woman by herself. A—” a hesitation, a look of pain, “—good-looking woman, young. A kind of a, a way about her — a way of—” another pause, “—making herself known.”

“Sorry,” the clerk said. “The 8:20 just came through, and no woman bought a ticket.”

It happened then that John Nissenbaum was observed, starkeyed, stiff-springy black hair in tufts like quills, for the better part of that morning, April 12, 1923, wandering up one side of Ransomville’s single main street, and down the other. Hatless, in farm overalls and boots but wearing a suit coat — somber, gunmetal-gray, of “good” wool — buttoned crooked across his narrow muscular torso. Disheveled and ravaged with the grief of a betrayed husband too raw at this time for manly pride to intervene, pathetic some said as a kicked dog, yet eager too, eager as a puppy he made inquiries at Meldron’s Dry Goods, at Elkin & Sons Grocers, at the First Niagara Trust, at the law office of Rowe & Nissenbaum (this Nissenbaum, a young cousin of John’s), even in the Five & Dime where the salesgirls would giggle in his wake. He wandered at last into the Ransomville Hotel, into the gloomy public room where the proprietor’s wife was sweeping sawdust-strewn floorboards. “Sorry, sir, we don’t open till noon,” the woman said, thinking he was a drunk, dazed and swaying-like on his feet, then she looked more closely at him: not knowing his first name (for John Nissenbaum was not one to patronize local taverns) but recognizing his features. For it was said the male Nissenbaums were either born looking alike, or came in time to look alike. “Mr. Nissenbaum? Is something wrong?” In a beat of stymied silence Nissenbaum blinked at her, trying to smile, groping for a hat to remove but finding none, murmuring, “No ma’am, I’m sure not. It’s a misunderstanding, I believe. I’m supposed to meet Mrs. Nissenbaum somewhere here. My wife.”

Shortly after Gretel Nissenbaum’s disappearance there emerged, from numerous sources, from all points of the compass, certain tales of the woman. How rude she’d been, more than once, to the Dieckmans! — to many in the Lutheran congregation! A bad wife. Unnatural mother. It was said she’d left her husband and children in the past, running back to her family in Chautauqua Falls, or was in Port Oriskany; and poor John Nissenbaum having to fetch her home again. (This was untrue, though in time, even to Constance and Cornelia, it would come to seem true. As an elderly woman Cornelia would swear she remembered “both times” her mother ran off.) A shameless hussy, a tramp who had an eye for men. Had the hots for men. Anything in pants. Or was she stuck-up, snobby. Marrying into the Nissenbaum family, a man almost old enough to be her father, no mystery there! Worse yet she could be sharp-tongued, profane. Heard to utter such words as damn, goddamn, hell. Yes and horseballs, bullshit. Standing with her hands on her hips fixing her eyes on you, that loud laugh. And showing her teeth that were too big for her mouth. She was too smart for her own good, that’s for sure. She was scheming, faithless. Everybody knew she flirted with her husband’s hired hands, she did a hell of a lot more than flirt with them, ask around. Sure she had a boyfriend, a lover. Sure she was an adulteress. Hadn’t she run off with a man? She’d run off and where was she to go, where was a woman to go, except run off with a man? Whoever he was.

In fact, he’d been sighted: a tower operator for the Chautauqua & Buffalo railroad, big red-headed guy living in Shaheen, twelve miles away. Or was he a carpet sweeper salesman, squirrelly little guy with a mustache and a smooth way of talking, who passed through the valley every few months but, after April 12, 1923, was never seen there again.

Another, more attractive rumor was that Gretel Nissenbaum’s lover was a thirty-year-old Navy officer stationed at Port Oriskany. He’d been transferred to a base in North Carolina, or was it Pensacola, Florida, and Gretel had no choice but run away with him, she loved him so. And three months pregnant with his child.

There could have been no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it.

But, in any case, where had she gone?

Where? Disappeared. Over the edge of the world. To Chicago, maybe. Or that army base in North Carolina, or Florida.

We forgave, we forgot. We didn’t miss her.

The things Gretel Nissenbaum left behind in the haste of her departure.

Several dresses, hats. A shabby cloth coat. Rubberized “galoshes” and boots. Undergarments, mended stockings. Knitted gloves. In the parlor of John Nissenbaum’s house, in cut-glass vases, bright yellow daffodils she’d made from crepe paper; hand-painted fans, tea cups; books she’d brought with her from home — A Golden Treasury of Verse, Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc, Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, missing its jacket cover. Tattered programs for musical shows, stacks of popular piano music from the days Gretel had played in her childhood home. (There was no piano in Nissenbaum’s house, Nissenbaum had no interest in music.)

These meager items, and some others, Nissenbaum unceremoniously dumped into cardboard boxes fifteen days after Gretel disappeared, taking them to the Lutheran church, for the “needy fund”; without inquiring if the Hausers might have wanted anything, or whether his daughters might have wished to be given some mementos of their mother.

Spite? Not John Nissenbaum. He was a proud man even in his public humiliation. It was the Lord’s work he was thinking of. Not mere human vanity, at all.

That spring and summer Reverend Dieckman gave a series of grim, threatening, passionate sermons from the pulpit of the First Lutheran Church of Ransomville. It was obvious why, what the subject of the sermons was. The congregation was thrilled.

Reverend Dieckman, whom Connie and Nelia feared, as much for his fierce smiles as his stern, glowering expression, was a short, bulky man with a dull-gleaming dome of a head, eyes like ice water. Years later when they saw a photograph of him, inches shorter than his wife, they laughed in nervous astonishment — was that the man who’d intimidated them so? Before whom even John Nissenbaum stood grave and downgazing.

Yet: that ringing, vibrating voice of the God of Moses, the God of the Old Testament, you could not shut out of consciousness even hours, days later. Years later. Pressing your hands against your ears and shutting your eyes tight, tight.

“‘Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children: and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife, and has eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life: thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground; for out of it thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’” Reverend Dieckman paused to catch breath like a man running uphill. Greasy patches gleamed on his solid face like coins. Slowly his ice-eyes searched the rows of worshipers until as if by chance they came to rest on the upturned yet cowering faces of John Nissenbaum’s daughters, who sat in the family pew, directly in front of the pulpit in the fifth row, between their rigid-backed father in his clothes somber as mourning and their Grandmother Nissenbaum also in clothes somber as mourning though badly round-shouldered, with a perceptible hump, this cheerless dutiful grandmother who had come to live with them now that their mother was gone.

(Their other grandparents, the Hausers, who lived in Chautauqua Falls and whom they’d loved, the sisters would never see again. It was forbidden even to speak of these people, Gretel’s people. The Hausers were to blame somehow for Gretel’s desertion. Though they claimed, would always claim, they knew nothing of what she’d done and in fact feared something had happened to her. But the Hausers were a forbidden subject. Only after Constance and Cornelia were grown, no longer living in their father’s house, did they see their Hauser cousins; but still, as Cornelia confessed, she felt guilty about it. Father would have been so hurt and furious if he’d known. Consorting with the enemy he would deem it. Betrayal)

In Sunday school, Mrs. Dieckman took special pains with little Constance and little Cornelia. They were regarded with misty-eyed pity, like child-lepers. Fattish little Constance prone to fits of giggling, and hollow-eyed little Cornelia prone to sniffles, melancholy. Both girls had chafed, reddened faces and hands because their Grandmother Nissenbaum scrubbed them so, with strong gray soap, never less than twice a day. Cornelia’s dun-colored hair was strangely thin. When the other children trooped out of the Sunday school room, Mrs. Dieckman kept the sisters behind, to pray with them. She was very concerned about them, she said. She and Reverent Dieckman prayed for them constantly. Had their mother contacted them, since leaving? Had there been any… hint of what their mother was planning to do? Any strangers visiting the farm? Any… unusual incidents? The sisters stared blankly at Mrs. Dieckman. She frowned at their ignorance, or its semblance. Dabbed at her watery eyes and sighed as if the world’s weight had settled on her shoulders. She said half-chiding, “You should know, children, it’s for a reason that your mother left you. It’s God’s will. God’s plan. He is testing you, children. You are special in His eyes. Many of us have been special in His eyes and have emerged stronger for it, and not weaker.” There was a breathy pause. The sisters were invited to contemplate how Mrs. Dieckman with her soft-wattled face, her stout-corseted body and fattish legs encased in opaque support hose, was a stronger and not a weaker person, by God’s special plan. “You will learn to be stronger than girls with mothers, Constance and Cornelia—” (these words girls with mothers enunciated oddly, contemptuously). “You are already learning: feel God’s strength coursing through you!” Mrs. Dieckman seized the girls’ hands, squeezing so quick and hard that Connie burst into frightened giggles and Nelia shrieked as if she’d been burnt, and almost wet her panties.

Nelia acquired pride, then. Instead of being ashamed, publicly humiliated (at the one-room country schoolhouse, for instance: where certain of the other children were ruthless), she could be proud, like her father. God had a special feeling for me. God cared about me. Jesus Christ, His only son, was cruelly tested, too. And exalted. You can bear any hurt and degradation. Thistles and thorns. The flaming sword, the cherubims guarding the garden.

Mere girls with mothers, how could they know?

4

Of course, Connie and Nelia had heard their parents quarreling. In the weeks, months before their mother disappeared. In fact, all their lives. Had they been queried, had they had the language, they might have said This is what is done, a man, a woman — isn’t it?

Connie, who was three years older than Nelia, knew much that Nelia would not ever know. Not words exactly, these quarrels, and of a tone different from their father shouting out instructions to his farm hands. Not words but an eruption of voices. Ringing through the floorboards if the quarrel came from downstairs. Reverberating in the windowpanes where wind thinly whistled. In bed, Connie would hug Nelia tight, pretending Nelia was Momma. Or Connie was herself Momma. If you shut your eyes tight enough. If you shut your ears. Always after the voices there came silence. If you wait. Once, crouched at the foot of the stairs it was Connie? — or Nelia? — gazing upward astonished as Momma descended the stairs swaying like a drunk woman, her left hand groping against the railing, face dead-white and a bright crimson rosebud in the corner of her mouth glistening as she wiped, wiped furiously at it. And quick-walking in that way of his that made the house vibrate, heavy-heeled behind her, descending from the top of the stairs a man whose face she could not see. Fiery, and blinding. God in the burning bush. God in thunder. Bitch! Get back up here! If I have to come get you, if you won’t be a woman, a wife!

It was a fact the sisters learned, young: if you wait long enough, run away and hide your eyes, shut your ears, there comes a silence vast and rolling and empty as the sky.

There was the mystery of the letters my mother and Aunt Connie would speak of, though never exactly discuss in my presence, into the last year of my mother’s life.

Which of them first noticed, they couldn’t agree. Or when it began, exactly — no earlier than the fall, 1923. It would happen that Pappa went to fetch the mail, which he rarely did, and then only on Saturdays; and, returning, along the quarter-mile lane, he would be observed (by accident? the girls weren’t spying) with an opened letter in his hand, reading; or was it a postcard; walking with uncharacteristic slowness, this man whose step was invariably brisk and impatient. Connie recalled he’d sometimes slip into the stable to continue reading, Pappa had a liking for the stable which was for him a private place where he’d chew tobacco, spit into the hay, run his callused hands along a horse’s flanks, think his own thoughts. Other times, carrying whatever it was, letter, postcard, the rarity of an item of personal mail, he’d return to the kitchen and his place at the table. There the girls would find him (by accident, they were not spying) drinking coffee laced with top-milk and sugar, rolling one of his clumsy cigarettes. And Connie would be the one to inquire, “Was there any mail, Pappa?” keeping her voice low, unexcited. And Pappa would shrug and say, “Nothing.” On the table where he’d dropped them indifferently might be a few bills, advertising flyers, the Chautauqua Valley Weekly Gazette. Nelia never inquired about the mail at such times because she would not have trusted her voice. But, young as ten, Connie could be pushy, reckless. “Isn’t there a letter, Pappa? What is that, Pappa, in your pocket?”

And Pappa would say calmly, staring her full in the face, “When your father says nothing, girl, he means nothing

Sometimes his hands shook, fussing with the pouch of Bugler and the stained cigarette-roller.

Since the shame of losing his wife, and everybody knowing the circumstances, John Nissenbaum had aged shockingly. His face was creased, his skin reddened and cracked, finely stippled with what would be diagnosed (when finally he went to a doctor) as skin cancer. His eyes, pouched in wrinkled lids like a turtle’s, were often vague, restless. Even in church, in a row close to Reverend Dieckman’s pulpit, he had a look of wandering off. In what he called his earlier life he’d been a rough, physical man, intelligent but quick-tempered; now he tired easily, could not keep up with his hired men whom he more and more mistrusted. His beard, once so trim and shapely, grew ragged and uneven and was entirely gray-grizzled, like cobwebs. And his breath — it smelled of tobacco juice, wet, rank, sickish, rotted.

Once, seeing the edge of the letter in Pappa’s pocket, Connie bit her lip and said, “It’s from her, isn’t it!”

Pappa said, still calmly, “I said it’s nothing, girl. From nobody.”

Never in their father’s presence did either of the sisters allude to their missing mother except as her, she.

Later when they searched for the letter, even for its envelope, of course they found nothing. Pappa had burned it in the stove probably. Or torn it into shreds, tossed into the garbage. Still, the sisters risked their father’s wrath by daring to look in his bedroom (the stale-smelling room he’d moved to, downstairs at the rear of the house) when he was out; even, desperate, knowing it was hopeless, poking through fresh-dumped garbage. (Like all farm families of their day, the Nissenbaums dumped raw garbage down a hillside, in the area of the outhouse.) Once Connie scrambled across fly-buzzing mounds of garbage holding her nose, stooping to snatch up — what? A card advertising a fertilizer sale, that had looked like a picture postcard.

“Are you crazy?” Nelia cried. “I hate you!”

Connie turned to scream at her, eyes brimming tears. “Go to hell, horse’s ass, I hate you!”

Both wanted to believe, or did in fact believe, that their mother was not writing to their father but to them. But they would never know. For years, as the letters came at long intervals, arriving only when their father fetched the mail, they would not know.

This might have been a further element of mystery: why the letters, arriving so infrequently, arrived only when their father got the mail. Why, when Connie, or Nelia, or Loraine (John’s younger sister, who’d come to live with them) got the mail, there would never be one of the mysterious letters. Only when Pappa got the mail.

After my mother’s death in 1981, when I spoke more openly to my Aunt Connie, I asked why they hadn’t been suspicious, just a little. Aunt Connie lifted her penciled eyebrows, blinked at me as if I’d uttered something obscene — “Suspicious? Why?” Not once did the girls (who were in fact intelligent girls, Nelia a straight-A student in the high school in town) calculate the odds: how the presumed letter from their mother could possibly arrive only on those days (Saturdays) when their father got the mail; one day out of six mail-days, yet never any day except that particular day (Saturday). But as Aunt Connie said, shrugging, it just seemed that that was how it was — they would never have conceived of even the possibility of any situation in which the odds wouldn’t have been against them, and in favor of Pappa.

5

The farmhouse was already old when I was first brought to visit it: summers, in the 1950s. Part red brick so weathered as to seem without color and part rotted wood, with a steep shingled roof, high ceilings, and spooky corners; a perpetual odor of woodsmoke, kerosene, mildew, time. A perpetual draft passed through the house from the rear, which faced north, opening out onto a long incline of acres, miles, dropping to the Chautauqua River ten miles away like an aerial scene in a movie. I remember the old wash room, the machine with a hand-wringer; a door to the cellar in the floor of that room, with a thick metal ring as a handle. Outside the house, too, was another door, horizontal and not vertical. The thought of what lay beyond those doors, the dark, stone-smelling cellar where rats scurried, filled me with a childish terror.

I remember Grandfather Nissenbaum as always old. A lean, sinewy, virtually mute old man. His finely cracked, venous-glazed skin, red-stained as if with earth; narrow rheumy eyes whose pupils seemed, like the pupils of goats, horizontal black slats. How they scared me! Deafness had made Grandfather remote and strangely imperial, like an old almost-forgotten king. The crown of his head was shinily bald and a fringe of coarse hair bleached to the color of ash grew at the sides and back. Where once, my mother lamented, he’d been careful in his dress, especially on Sundays, for church-going, he now wore filth-stained overalls and in all months save summer long gray-flannel underwear straggling at his cuffs like a loose, second skin. His breath stank of tobacco juice and rotted teeth, the knuckles of both his hands were grotesquely swollen. My heart beat quickly and erratically in his presence. “Don’t be silly,” Mother whispered nervously, pushing me toward the old man, “—your grandfather loves you” But I knew he did not. Never did he call me by my name, Bethany, but only “girl” as if he hadn’t troubled to learn my name.

When Mother showed me photographs of the man she called Pappa, some of these scissored in half, to excise my missing grandmother, I stared, and could not believe he’d once been so handsome! Like a film actor of some bygone time. “You see,” Mother said, incensed, as if the two of us had been quarreling, “—this is who John Nissenbaum really is.”

I grew up never really knowing Grandfather, and I certainly didn’t love him. He was never “Grandpa” to me. Visits to Ransomville were sporadic, sometimes canceled at the last minute. Mother would be excited, hopeful, apprehensive — then, who knows why, the visit would be canceled, she’d be tearful, upset, yet relieved. Now, I can guess that Mother and her family weren’t fully welcomed by my grandfather; he was a lonely and embittered old man, but still proud — he’d never forgiven her for leaving home, after high school, just like her sister Connie; going to the teachers’ college at Elmira instead of marrying a local man worthy of working and eventually inheriting the Nissenbaum farm. By the time I was born, in 1951, the acreage was being sold off; by the time Grandfather Nissenbaum died, in 1972, in a nursing home in Yewville, the two-hundred acres had been reduced to a humiliating seven acres, now the property of strangers.

In the hilly cemetery behind the First Lutheran Church of Ransomville, New York, there is a still-shiny black granite marker at the edge of rows of Nissenbaum markers, JOHN ALLARD NISSENBAUM 1872–1957. Chiseled into the stone is How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Such angry words of Jesus Christ’s! I wondered who had chosen them — not Constance or Cornelia, surely. It must have been John Nissenbaum himself.

Already as a girl of eleven, twelve, I was pushy and curious, asking my mother about my missing grandmother. Look, Mother, for God’s sake where did she go? Didn’t anybody try to find her? Mother’s replies were vague, evasive. As if rehearsed. That sweet-resolute stoic smile. Cheerful resignation, Christian forgiveness. For thirty-five years she taught high school English in the Rochester public schools, and especially after my father left us, and she became a single, divorced woman, the manner came easily to her of brisk classroom authority, that pretense of the skilled teacher of weighing others’ opinions thoughtfully before reiterating one’s own.

My father, an education administrator, left us when I was fourteen, to remarry. I was furious, heartbroken. Dazed. Why? How could he betray us? But Mother maintained her Christian fortitude, her air of subtly wounded pride. This is what people will do, Bethany. Turn against you, turn faithless. You might as well learn, young.

Yet I pushed. Up to the very end of her life, when Mother was so ill. You’d judge me harsh, heartless — people did. But for God’s sake I wanted to know: what happened to my Grandmother Nissenbaum, why did nobody seem to care she’d gone away? Were the letters my mother and Connie swore their father received authentic, or had he been playing a trick of some kind? And if it had been a trick, what was its purpose? Just tell me the truth for once, Mother. The truth about anything.

I’m forty-four years old, I still want to know.

But Mother, the intrepid schoolteacher, the good-Christian, was impenetrable. Inscrutable as her Pappa. Capable of summing up her entire childhood back there (this was how she and Aunt Connie spoke of Ransomville, their pasts: back there) by claiming that such hurts are God’s will, God’s plan for each of us. A test of our faith. A test of our inner strength. I said, disgusted, what if you don’t believe in God, what are you left with then? — and Mother said matter-of-factly, “You’re left with yourself, of course, your inner strength. Isn’t that enough?”

That final time we spoke of this, I lost patience, I must have pushed Mother too far. In a sharp, stinging voice, a voice I’d never heard from her before, she said, “Bethany, what do you want me to tell you? About my mother? — my father? Do you imagine I ever knew them? Either of them? My mother left Connie and me when we were little girls, left us with him, wasn’t that her choice? Her selfishness? Why should anyone have gone looking for her? She was trash, she was faithless. We learned to forgive, and to forget. Your aunt tells you a different story, I know, but it’s a lie — I was the one who was hurt, I was the youngest. Your heart can be broken only once — you’ll learn! Our lives were busy, busy like the lives of us grown women today, women who have to work, women who don’t have time to moan and groan over their hurt feelings, you can’t know how Connie and I worked on that farm, in that house, like grown women when we were girls. Father tried to stop both of us going to school beyond eighth grade — imagine! We had to walk two miles to get a ride with a neighbor, to get to the high school in Ransomville; there weren’t school buses in those days. Everything you’ve had you’ve taken for granted and wanted more, but we weren’t like that. We hadn’t money for the right school clothes, all our textbooks were used, but we went to high school. I was the only ‘farm girl’ — that’s exactly what I was known as, even by my teachers — in my class to take math, biology, physics, Latin. I was memorizing Latin declensions milking cows at five in the morning, winter mornings. I was laughed at, Nelia Nissenbaum was laughable. But I accepted it. All that mattered was that I win a scholarship to a teachers’ college so I could escape the country, and I did win a scholarship and I never returned to Ransomville to live. Yes, I loved Pappa — I still love him. I loved the farm, too. You can’t not love any place that’s taken so much from you. But I had my own life, I had my teaching jobs, I had my faith, my belief in God, I had my destiny. I even got married — that was extra, unexpected. I’ve worked for everything I ever got and I never had time to look back, to feel sorry for myself. Why then should I think about her? — why do you torment me about her? A woman who abandoned me when I was five years old! In 1923! I made my peace with the past, just like Connie in her different way. We’re happy women, we’ve been spared a lifetime of bitterness. That was God’s gift to us.”

Mother paused, breathing quickly. There was in her face the elation of one who has said too much, that can never be retracted; I was stunned into silence. She plunged on, now contemptuously, “What are you always wanting me to admit, Bethany? That you know something I don’t know? What is your generation always pushing for, from ours? Isn’t it enough we gave birth to you, indulged you, must we be sacrificed to you, too? What do you want us to tell you — that life is cruel and purposeless? — that there is no loving God, and never was, only accident? Is that what you want to hear, from your mother? That I married your father because he was a weak man, a man I couldn’t feel much for, who wouldn’t, when it came time, hurt me?”

And then there was silence. We stared at each other, Mother in her glisten of fury, daughter Bethany so shocked she could not speak. Never again would I think of my mother in the old way.

What Mother never knew: In April 1983, two years after her death, a creek that runs through the old Nissenbaum property flooded its banks, and several hundred feet of red clayey soil collapsed overnight into the creek bed, as in an earthquake. And in the raw, exposed earth there was discovered a human skeleton, decades old but virtually intact. It had been apparently buried, less than a mile behind the Nissenbaum farmhouse.

There had never been anything so newsworthy — so sensational — in the history of Chautauqua County.

State forensic investigators determined that the skeleton had belonged to a woman, apparently killed by numerous blows to the head (a hammer, or the blunt edge of an ax) that shattered her skull like a melon. Dumped into the grave with her was what appeared to have been a suitcase, now rotted, its contents — clothes, shoes, underwear, gloves — scarcely recognizable from the earth surrounding it. There were a few pieces of jewelry and, still entwined around the skeleton’s neck, a tarnished-gold cross on a chain. Most of the woman’s clothing had long ago rotted away and almost unrecognizable too was a book — a leatherbound Bible? — close beside her. About the partly detached, fragile wrist and ankle bones were loops of rusted baling wire that had fallen loose, coiled in the moist red clay like miniature sleeping snakes.