Theresa Rebeck - Three Girls and their Brother

“Philip,” Mom observed. “I’m surprised to see you, darling.”

“Who’s this?” said the woman in the tent, smiling. “Your son? You didn’t tell me you had a son.” This woman, whoever she was, had an incredible voice, musical and light, every syllable perfectly modulated with amusement and kindliness and intelligence. No kidding, it was startling, to hear this beautiful voice come out of a woman wearing a green tent, so I may have stared.

“His name is Philip,” said Amelia. “He’s come to take me home.”

“Philip!” smiled the green ogress. “I’m Maureen. I’m Rex’s producer.” It was hard to see her face in the weird light, but her crystals and beads sparkled on her massive chest. The beads in particular were quite distracting, they were enormous, egg-sized pieces of amber, six or seven strands of them. The whole look was puzzling and a little magical.

“It’s really nice to meet you,” I said. “Um, can I have one of those?” I pointed to the pu-pu platter, which looked unbelievably delicious—golden egg rolls piled neatly on top of each other, little meats on little sticks, plump little dumplings. I can still remember the way it smelled, that’s how hungry I was. My mouth was actually starting to water, so before anyone could say no, that’s for Rex, I just grabbed some food with my fingers, and stuffed it into my mouth. It tasted delicious.

“Philip, please ,” said Mom, handing me a napkin. Maureen the giant laughed, a beautiful bell of a laugh.

“Boys,” said Maureen. “They’re different from girls.”

“Oh yes,” said Mom. I thought, if this is the quality of the evening’s conversation, no wonder Amelia is ready to bolt. But then Mom said, “Philip loves Kafka. Tell Philip about your great-grandmother, Maureen. Philip, you’ll find this interesting.”

Now, I can’t remember the last time my mother worried about me finding anything interesting, and I also can’t remember the last time my mother was interested in the works of Franz Kafka, so I knew immediately that this remarkable statement was for Maureen’s benefit. But as long as they’d let me keep eating, I was more than willing to play along.

“Sure, Kafka’s great,” I said. “I wrote a paper on The Castle last month, for AP English.”

“He’s our deep thinker,” Mom cooed.

“The heir apparent to, what was his name?” asked the ogress. She seemingly was not one of the people who cared about “The Terror of the New.”

“Leo, Leo Heller,” Mom smiled, gracefully dancing over the intellectual faux pas. Then she came out with a doozy. “Maureen’s grandmother was Kafka’s daughter!” she cried. “Franz Kafka was her great-grandfather. Can you imagine? Isn’t that incredible?” She was all proud and giddy. Because I actually am the grandchild of a minor literary figure, or a majorly minor one at least, I do have some inkling of what it might be like to have a famous writer lurking in your pedigree somewhere. But, frankly, I was more than a little confused by all of this.

“Really?” I said, trying to sound impressed rather than incredulous. “Wow. Because, wow, I read, you know, that he died kind of, didn’t he die, did he have kids? I didn’t know that.”

“My great-grandmother was a prostitute,” Maureen said, with great dignity. “Most young girls of a certain class were, in Prague, at the turn of the century. Kafka was quite taken with her for a time.”

“Wow,” I said.

Exuberantly interested, suddenly, in Franz Kafka, my mother picked up the narrative thread of Maureen’s saga. “He used to talk to her all the time about coming to America,” Mom announced. “He wrote a novel about it, he was writing it, I mean—is that right?”

Mom looked to Maureen, who nodded benignly. “Yes, he was writing Amerika , he spoke to her about it all the time. She was full of his stories. When she became pregnant, she knew what she had to do. She didn’t want to stay in Prague, there was nothing for her and her child there, it was a prison. And he could do nothing for her if she stayed. No one knew, of course, that he would soon be hailed as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He had no money, he lived with his parents, you know the whole story.”

“Oh yeah,” I said.

“Philip, come on,” whispered Amelia. She had no interest in Franz Kafka; at Garfield Lincoln, you don’t do Kafka until your junior year. “We got to go.”

I was still eating, though. “So they just came here. Wow. Huh. And then what happened?”

“Oh, it wasn’t until long after that they realized,” said Maureen. “In the thirties, it wasn’t until then that my grandmother, and my great-grandmother, realized who Kafka was. My grandmother was a young woman, living in New York City, she came home one day from a café, where she had been meeting friends, and she had a copy of one of his books! Someone had given her a copy of The Trial , and she brought it home with her, and my great-grandmother saw his name, right there on the cover of the book, and she looked at my grandmother and said where did you get that? And my grandmother saw how upset she was and so she said why, what’s the matter? What’s the matter, Mama? And she told her. She was so stunned she just came right out and said it, she said, that man is your father.”

“That is so amazing,” said Mom. “I have goose bumps. And they never told anybody! That is even more astonishing.”

“They tried,” shrugged Maureen, bitterly accepting her fate. “No one believed them.”

“So you’re Kafka’s, uh, great-granddaughter,” I said. “That’s pretty cool.” I smiled politely. But Maureen narrowed her eyes. Now, it may be that occasionally a kind of skepticism sometimes creeps into my manner. I heard later, from Amelia, that in fact not only did I sound actively sarcastic, I also quite literally rolled my eyes before stuffing my mouth with some sort of fried shrimp thing. At which point she, of course, pinched my leg and started snickering. Such a surprise, neither Mom nor Kafka’s gigantic offspring found any of this completely juvenile behavior from me and Amelia all that remarkably clever.“Kafka was one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century,” the jolly green giant informed me, as if I needed to be informed, as if that were in fact what I was rolling my eyes about.

“I am … I love Kafka,” I responded, my mouth full of gourmet Chinese food. Amelia, oh so helpfully, continued to snicker.

“Philip. Amelia. Please,” whispered Mom, mortified.

“Never mind,” laughed the giantess, waving her hand with gay dismissal of my hopeless social ineptitude. Instantly, Mom laughed with her, all that beauty queen charm eddying in new directions, right on cue. “Oh Philip, you’re hopeless,” she sparkled. “And frankly I’m surprised to see you here, don’t you have homework?” she asked, tipping her head toward the door.

“ I have homework, Mom,” said Amelia, renewing her mission to escape. “Philip said he’d take me home, you guys can stay, this is so total fun, but I really have to go study. I have a chemistry test tomorrow.” This last bit was politely addressed to the magical ogress Maureen, who smiled benignly on the whole act. “It’s just like a third of my grade and I really have to study.” She was yanking on my arm, which I kind of enjoyed—it was annoying, I mean, but it was also nice to have someone paying attention to me for once, even under such bizarre circumstances. I stood up and grabbed a couple of dumplings and an egg roll to go.

“What an extraordinary girl,” said Maureen. “Most girls her age would give their eye teeth to meet Rex, but I honestly don’t think Amelia is all that impressed.”