The sensation of forgetting comes back first, how one walked through years sealed in oblivion. It was a substance with its own weight and density, without color, texture or taste, like some abstract Newtonian matter, the unremembered past. The first crossing by boat to America putting an ocean full of mines and roving submarines between her and her childhood in Budapest, a sea voyage, a world war, another country, another language—distances which cannot be measured in miles or years—may have helped to cancel the first decade. Growing up in America during the war, the ten years she lived as a child in Budapest broke off. As for the years in America from 1939 to 1947, they were disowned when she married Ezra.
The next crossing, covering a negligible distance by taxi from the hotel to the synagogue where she was to be married to Ezra Blind; up some stairs; in and out of rooms to sign papers; then walking from a side door to the center of the room under the canopy—pointless to count out the steps of what in one step had to annul the preceding years of her life.
The process of annulment, begun the night of her engagement to Ezra Blind, was completed in the public wedding ceremony; it was like being hollowed out—thankful to know that one was only a mold—and being filled very slowly with some thin even fluid that would slowly harden.
At the reception after the wedding she showed superior indifference to all the people wishing her happiness; and hordes of men, young and old, taking advantage of this day to kiss her, some boldly on the mouth, she received with equal pride. Invulnerable to personal insult or happiness, she accepted everything jarring or simply irritating that happened that day as contributing to her transformation, her triumph over past selves. The sense of triumph gave her strength to put up with what was unpleasantness and delay and hide her impatience, her wanting this day to be over, the congratulating, she needed all this to seal and bind so she could begin her new life.
Thinking back after fifteen years to that day, she recalls the sense of annulment, already in effect as she walked under the canopy, like some bleach it permeated through every pore of her eighteen years. This dominated over her disappointment with the indifferent room, a library or classroom where a canopy and chairs had been set up; straining to hear the music. Mrs. Brensky was playing the piece on the piano in the next room, too far to hear. She was reluctant to enter, when they said now, she was waiting to hear the music, the wedding march. She is playing in another room, they explained, and then she began walking but she heard no music even inside. And of the hours preceding, the mind retains only the inessentials: in a hotel facing the park, the night before, Aunt Olga’s voice saying: “Don’t put your hair in pins, it will press at night and give you a headache.” The drive uptown in a taxi through Central Park on a June day. She shut her eyes and looked and shut her eyes again on the green they were passing; because it was not like an ordinary drive through the park; nor was it like passing through the city for the last time before leaving; it was not like anything she had experienced before; for each annulment is new and disturbing in its own way.
She believed she had brought all her possessions, what she wanted and in the shape that she wanted it, into the marriage. It seemed she would lose everything. But she lost only what was packed in that trunk.
And now it is very strange, this new sense of the present, of a street in New York more like she experienced it as a girl than in the more recent decade of her marriage. As if a middle segment of a bone had been cut out, and the end sections joined.
It worries her off and on—will the juncture hold? Sometimes she feels a painful crack. How fast our little props wear out their charm. These Italian sunglasses carried her through the week; but now it’s time for a new purchase.
One walks more lightly, easily distracted by street sights, pursuing now a fantasy, now fabrics in shop windows; long-forgotten desires and interests resume their power. How odd to be thinking of Barry back in high school. The class had them practically engaged in spite of the fact that he was a shameless fairy. Still, the only boy in school who wasn’t frightened off either by Dr. Landsmann or his daughter, and courted her teasingly. She remembers the first time he came to the house; when her father appeared he put on a hilarious faggot act, at first declining to shake hands, “Oh Dr. Landsmann, don’t you come near me, I’m so ticklish,” he giggled, twitching all over. “Oh my goodness, you watch out, Dr. Landsmann, I know you’re a bug doctor!” He was so crazy and handsome and corrupt. And then he went into the navy and she never saw him again. Right now she feels like having a cup of coffee with Barry. Is she back where she was fifteen years ago?
She has never walked so lightly, not as a girl. The breeze was never so fresh. It’s the gratuity of the present and the sense of this great continent where by historical accident she was taken as a child, but where she never really lived. Though she went to school, married and worked in America, she never really got off the boat in 1939, and now as it dawns on her she isn’t at all certain whether this time she has really arrived; and yet finding herself in New York, ridiculously stranded, seems to make some weird sense.
• • •
Years that do not belong to one’s life. Pittsburgh, 1939–1942, impossible
