Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

This was also the day Ernest met Elsa, the girl working the counter. A transplant herself, she could spot one of her own a mile away. She laughed loudly. “You cannot understand one word,” she said to him in English fringed with a southeastern German accent. The other men turned to Ernest and play-punched him in the gut. Ernest had no choice but to burst out into the only English song he knew: “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” beginning to end, making Elsa out to be the liar.

Elsa was seven months pregnant before Ernest had scrounged up enough money to rent a room in a farmhouse in Ovid, New York, a small town proud both of its working-class bent and newly built theater with a quaking chandelier. The owners of the farmhouse were off on fishing boats most of the year, and Ernest promised Elsa that someday the whole house would belong to them, maybe even the whole street.

Later, Ernest would tell Claire these stories while she did her arithmetic on scraps of wallpaper in the evenings. She knew his life by heart. But it was difficult for Claire to speak to Nicolette about her mother. Elsa was always closed and private, and Claire never thought of her outside of the confines of Claire’s own life, with brief cameos in her father’s. Elsa seemed not to exist until Claire was born.

For most of Claire’s school years, Ernest was out of a job because of one war and then another. He took work as a traveling salesman — trousers door to door — and as a talc worker until it proved poisonous and he watched his friends die. He couldn’t serve in the military with his talc-weakened lungs, and no one would hire him once tensions in Europe rose. He was naturalized, and all of his savings went to war bonds to prove his loyalty. They changed their name from Gabelmacher to Gabler. But none of it helped or hid his accent at job interviews, and the dream of the house, and the street, evaporated in the night. Elsa took the reins and found work as a silent seamstress, playing mute so no one would know she was German. When she came home each evening from the small factory, she would yell just to hear her own voice.

Every Sunday of Claire’s childhood (while Ernest got to stay home and listen to Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy ), Elsa took Claire, dressed in their Sunday best, to visit her grandmother at the Willard Asylum. This was, to Claire, the opposite of a church. Claire’s grandmother had Huntington’s, or that’s what she’d been told — a hereditary, degenerative disease with the power to change your personality, to rob you of motor control, to riddle your mind with hallucinations. Black magic, she thought as a child. Her grandmother would often mistake Claire for Elsa. Whom she mistook Elsa for, Claire would never know. During each visit she would tell stories about training as an opera singer and she would sing an aria or two for Claire. On laundry duty, she would get into trouble for writing lines of poetry on the bands of other patients’ undergarments.

The hospital was a large site not far from Ovid, with Gothic-style buildings as old as any in this country but which somehow felt slap-dash, fake. Grass green enough it seemed painted on. While her grandmother’s personality changed shape, the hospital never altered. Time was different there. The grounds didn’t change with the years. There was no progress, no war.

When Claire was thirteen, she came to understand what the word “hereditary” meant. She began spending her days in the public library, missing school, hiding away in the stacks with texts on lobotomy and psychosurgeries newly discovered. It was at least warmer there than her classroom, where they couldn’t afford to fill the potbelly stove.

According to Elsa, Claire’s grandmother had her first hallucination when she was twenty-four. This was what Claire decided she could expect as well. Elsa had not inherited it, and so it must have skipped a generation, making Claire an even more likely candidate. She imagined she would suffer doubly so. She would hear voices. She would be locked in an asylum, visited by people she didn’t know. She was the author of all the odds.

One very sunny day, when every book glinted back at her like tin, Claire realized how much time she’d wasted sitting inside a library. And how little time she had left. Time with her mind, before it became unrecognizable, before she was someone else, like her grandmother.

That was when Freddie, the golden-haired entrepreneur, came to town on business. Not quite seventeen, Claire would have been drawn to anything polished in her ashen little Ovid. She liked the way Freddie leaned forward, intimate with anyone who spoke to him. How he loosed his shoelaces rebelliously when he thought no one was watching. How he took the matter of making Claire smile very seriously and wasn’t afraid of the volume of his own laugh. When the draft call came, it did not take much convincing for her to make a home with him.

In this way she left her family for a man she was forbidden to marry before she turned eighteen. Her mother grew silent even at home. Her father was so hurt he fasted the day Claire left and refused to see her off. He blamed Freddie more than her, saying the boy should know better and that Freddie had a spoiled face. But Claire was intent on growing up then and there, wed properly or not. When her mother asked why— why so foolish, why so young —Claire could not tell them. None of them knew the fear whipping around inside her. She never knew how to explain.

They took a one-bedroom bungalow in Croton-on-Hudson, hemmed in by manors overlooking the river. Such urgency shaped their short time together before Freddie’s deployment, and he only knew the half of it. They were so new then, getting to know one another as quickly as two bodies could. She wanted him always, the thought flitting in the forefront of her mind, written across his arm as she kissed the length of it: would she still recognize him when he came back? Would she still be here?

Claire turned eighteen the week before Freddie was deployed and they married in a rush. “We’ll last through this war together,” Freddie said in his vows. “What more do we need to know?”

Claire did not tell her parents of the marriage until after he’d left.

Freddie’s yearlong service morphed into four and no one voiced any resentment. Armed with Ladies’ Home Journal , she made a home for the two of them by herself. And, like other women, Claire found work during the war. She was a bus driver, transporting men too old to serve from their bedroom community down to the Bronx, where they caught the train to the city. Her cheeks, and other parts, were raw from pinching. But she liked her job well enough. She wore a transit company cap that was far too big. She was quite a good driver.

The war was there, in the bus, because she was there. But the rides were jolly and no one ever spoke of what was happening abroad. If anyone questioned her, Claire was prepared to say her maiden name — Gabler — was English, not German. But no one ever asked. She played music in her bus on the transistor, never the news. She tried not to listen to the reports unless her friends, also military wives, told her she must hear a certain story. She frequented the movies and became a master at bridge. The war was an interruption to everyone’s plans, but Claire never had a plan. It had nothing to do with her — Freddie’s absence and her new job seemed somehow far removed from invasions and sneak attacks.

Freddie’s letters were full only of jokes he’d learned from the other boys. He spent most of the war in India. When Claire asked him about the war, he said sharply that he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. This would have made sense to Claire had it not been for the defensiveness in his voice, as if he were protecting himself from being scolded. It gave her the feeling that Freddie didn’t understand what he’d been doing, what he’d been fighting for.