Joyce Oates: The Gravedigger’s Daughter

Maybe I will send you these ravings, my tenacious American cousin. I’m drunk enough, in a festive mood!

Your (traitor) cousin,

Lake Worth, Florida

15 December 1998

Dear Freyda,

How I loved your letter, that made my hands shake. I have not laughed in so long. I mean, in our special way.

It’s the way of hatred. I love it. Though it eats you from the inside out. (I guess.)

Its a cold night here, a wind off the Atlantic. Florida is often wet-cold. Lake Worth/Palm Beach are very beautiful & very boring. I wish you might come here & visit, you could spend the rest of the winter for its often sunny of course.

I take your precious letters with me in the early morning walking on the beach. Though I have memorized your words. Until a year ago I would run, run, run for miles! At the rain-whipped edge of a hurricane I ran. To see me, my hard-muscled legs & straight backbone, you would never guess I was not a young woman.

So strange that we are in our sixties, Freyda! Our baby-girl dolls have not aged a day.

(Do you hate it, growing old? Your photographs show such a vigorous woman. You, tell yourself “Every day I live was not meant to be” & there’s happiness in this.)

Freyda, in our house of mostly glass facing the ocean you would have your own “wing.” We have several cars, you would have your own car. No questions asked where you went. You would not have to meet my husband, you would be my precious secret.

Tell me you will come, Freyda! After the New Year would be a good time. When you finish your work each day we will go walking on the beach together. I promise we would not have to speak.

Your loving cousin

Lake Worth, Florida

17 December 1998

Dear Freyda,

Forgive my letter of the other day, so pushy & familiar. Of course you would not wish to visit a stranger.

I must make myself remember: though we are cousins, we are strangers.

I was reading again Back From the Dead . The last section, in America. Your three marriages-“ill-advised experiments in intimacy/lunacy.” You are very harsh & very funny, Freyda! Unsparing to others as to yourself.

My first marriage too was blind in love & I suppose “lunacy.” Yet without it, I would not have my son.

In the memoir you have no regret for your “misbegotten fetuses” though for the “pain and humiliation” of the abortions illegal at the time. Poor Freyda! In 1957 in a filthy room in Manhattan you nearly bled to death, at that time I was a young mother so in love with my life. Yet I would have come to you, if I had known. Though I know that you will not come here, yet I hold out hope that, suddenly yes you might! To visit, to stay as long as you wish. Your privacy would be protected.

I remain the tenacious cousin,

Lake Worth, Florida

New Year’s Day 1999

Dear Freyda,

I don’t hear from you, I wonder if you have gone away? But maybe you will see this. “If Freyda sees this even to toss away…”

I am feeling happy & hopeful. You are a scientist & of course you are right to scorn such feelings as “magical” & “primitive” but I think there can be a newness in the New Year. I am hoping this is so.

My father Jacob Schwart believed that in animal life the weak are quickly disposed of, we must hide our weakness always. You & I knew that as children. But there is so much more to us than just the animal, we know that, too.

Your loving cousin,

Palo Alto CA

19 January 1999

Rebecca:

Yes I have been away. And I am going away again. What business is it of yours?

I was coming to think you must be an invention of mine. My worst weakness. But here on my windowsill propped up to stare at me is “Rebecca, 1952.” The horse-mane hair & hungry eyes.

Cousin, you are so faithful! It makes me tired. I know I should be flattered, few others would wish to pursue “difficult” Professor Morgen-stern now I’m an old woman. I toss your letters into a drawer, then in my weakness I open them. Once, rummaging through Dumpster trash I retrieved a letter of yours. Then in my weakness I opened it. You know how I hate weakness!

Cousin, no more.

Lake Worth, Florida

23 January 1999

Dear Freyda,

I know! I am sorry.

I shouldn’t be so greedy. I have no right. When I first discovered that you were living, last September, my thought was only “My cousin Frey-da Morgenstern, my lost sister, she is alive! She doesn’t need to love me or even know me or give a thought of me. It’s enough to know that she did not perish and has lived her life.”

Your loving cousin,

Palo Alto CA

30 January 1999

Dear Rebecca,

We make ourselves ridiculous with emotions at our age, like showing our breasts. Spare us, please!

No more would I wish to meet you than I would wish to meet myself. Why would you imagine I might want a “cousin”-“sister”-at my age? I like it that I have no living relatives any longer for there is no obligation to think Is he/she still living?

Anyway, I’m going away. I will be traveling all spring. I hate it here. California suburban boring & without a soul. My “colleagues/friends” are shallow opportunists to whom I appear to be an opportunity.

I hate such words as “perish.” Does a fly “perish,” do rotting things “perish,” does your “enemy” perish? Such exalted speech makes me tired.

Nobody “perished” in the camps. Many “died”-“were killed.” That’s all.

I wish I could forbid you to revere me. For your own good, dear cousin. I see that I am your weakness, too. Maybe I want to spare you.

If you were a graduate student of mine, though! I would set you right with a swift kick in the rear.

Suddenly there are awards & honors for Freyda Morgenstern. Not only the memoirist but the “distinguished anthropologist” too. So I will travel to receive them. All this comes too late of course. Yet like you I am a greedy person, Rebecca. Sometimes I think my soul is in my gut! I am one who stuffs herself without pleasure, to take food from others.

Spare yourself. No more emotion. No more letters!

Chicago IL

29 March 1999

Dear Rebecca Schwart,

Have been thinking of you lately. It has been a while since I’ve heard from you. Unpacking things here & came across your letters & photograph. How stark-eyed we all looked in black-and-white! Like X-rays of the soul. My hair was never so thick & splendid as yours, my American cousin.

I think I must have discouraged you. Now, to be frank, I miss you. It has been two months nearly since you wrote. These honors & awards are not so precious if no one cares. If no one hugs you in congratulations. Modesty is beside the point & I have too much pride to boast to strangers.

Of course, I should be pleased with myself: I sent you away. I know, I am a “difficult” woman. I would not like myself for a moment. I would not tolerate myself. I seem to have lost one or two of your letters, I’m not sure how many, vaguely I remember you saying you & your family lived in upstate New York, my parents had arranged to come stay with you? This was in 1941? You provided facts not in my memoir. But I do remember my mother speaking with such love of her younger sister Anna. Your father changed his name to “Schwart” from-what? He was a math teacher in Kaufbeuren? My father was an esteemed doctor. He had many non-Jewish patients who revered him. As a young man he had served in the German army in the first war, he’d been awarded a Gold Medal for Bravery & it was promised that such a distinction would protect him while other Jews were being transported. My father disappeared so abruptly from our lives, immediately we were transported to that place, for years I believed he must have escaped & was alive somewhere & would contact us. I thought my mother had information she kept from me. She was not quite the Amazon-mother of Back From the Dead …Well, enough of this! Though evolutionary anthropology must scour the past relentlessly, human beings are not obliged to do so.