Faithless: Tales of Transgression Read online

  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 cherubim guarding the garden.

  Mere girls with mothers, how could they know?

  3

  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 farmhands. 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 Papa 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, Papa had a liking for the stable which was for him a private place where he’d chew tobacco, spit into the hay, run his calloused 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, Papa?” keeping her voice low, unexcited. And Papa 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, Papa? What is that, Papa, in your pocket?”

  And Papa 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 Old 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 might be 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 grizzled, like cobwebs. And his breath—it smelled of tobacco juice, wet, rank, sickish, rotted.

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

  Papa 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. Papa 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 writing not 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 Papa 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 Papa.

  4

  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 washroom, 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 pupil
s 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 churchgoing, 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 Papa, 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 Papa. Capable of summing up her entire childhood back there (this was how she and Aunt Connie spoke of Ransomville, their past: 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 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 Papa—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 glistening 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 apparently been buried, less than a mile behind the Nissenbaum farmhouse.

  There had never been anything so newsworthy—so sensational—in th
e 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.