John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

Just after dawn, three days out from Gibraltar, Kaspar awoke wide-eyed and alert, as though someone beside him had whispered his name. The same force that roused him brought him onto his feet, accustomed by now to the pitch of the ship, and steered him gently toward the open door. He was aware that he was barefoot — that he was stark naked, in fact — and that the morning was unusually cold. Snow was falling in flurries, although it was still early autumn. He was dimly aware, without finding it strange, that he and his family were alone on the Comtesse Celeste . He glanced down at the twins, side by side on their backs, like two fish in the bottom of a boat. Then he stepped out to join Sonja at the rail.

“There you are,” she said. Her voice was hoarse from disuse. “I’ve been trying to get you up. To talk to me.”

He looked past her at the dishwater-colored ocean, translucent and jagged in the September light, a roiling field of chipped and age-worn china. Sonja was smiling at him, lovely as ever, wrapped in one of her white linen gowns. It put him in mind of something. He was beginning, by small but steady increments, to understand that he should feel surprised — but even that discovery felt familiar. She’d been one lifelong surprise to him, after all.

“I’ve been sick,” she said.

He nodded.

“You’ve been sick, too.”

It was difficult for him to answer. “You’ve been in bed for ten days,” he said. “You’ve had a high fever. I can appreciate your wanting fresh air, my darling, but it might be for the best—”

“ Ach! It’s been longer than that,” Sonja said. “I’ve been sick since our first night together.” She raised one slender arm to shade her eyes. “I was in love with you, you see. It ended badly.”

What she said was distressing, and he intended to ask what in God’s name she meant, but he found himself saying something else entirely. “It didn’t end badly,” he said, placing his hand over hers. “We’ve been wonderfully happy. If it’s a sickness, we’ve been fortunate to catch it.”

“All right,” she said, turning her back on the sea. “It’s all right, Kasparchen. Let’s go to the beginning.”

Her body showed clearly through the wave-colored linen, gaunt and frail from the fever, and he knew, in that instant, when and where he’d seen that gown before. It was the same one she’d worn, apple-cheeked and defiant, on the day his earthly fate had been decided. The noise of the sea fell away and the outline of her form began to flicker. The deck and ocean were struck, rolled away like a stage set, and he was back in the tubercular light of the Jandek, the soles of his shoes sticking to the beer-soaked floor, watching a girl of not-quite-seventeen light a cigarette. He murmured her name — he knew this girl well, after all — and she looked up and laughed, surprised to see him there. He straightened in his booth as she came toward him.

* * *

The man who staggered off the train in Buffalo, New York’s Union Station on New Year’s Day 1939, gripping the shoulders of his daughters as if he needed them to walk, was so changed that his wife’s second cousin — the notorious “Buffalo Bill”—passed them by without slowing his step. Wilhelm Knarschitz was a pursy, preoccupied man (“the opposite of any kind of cowboy,” my grandfather wrote in his diary) with the unfortunate habit of chewing on the ends of his mustache. He failed to notice his nieces altogether, on account of the cameo photograph he held stiff-armed in front of him, like a fetish to deflect the evil eye. On his second go-round, Kaspar (who had no picture to go by) made an educated guess and caught his cousin-in-law by the sleeve — which was lucky, since Wilhelm’s fetish was no use to anyone. It was a picture of Sonja at the Washerwomen’s Ball.

“Kaspar, is it? Delightful!” Wilhelm stammered in yankified Yiddish. He took hold of his cousin-in-law by both the elbow and the shoulder, shaking every part of him except his hand. “Professor Kaspar Toula, as I live and perspire!”

“Kaspar Tolliver ,” my grandfather corrected him. “We’re Americans now. We’ve put Europe behind us.”

“You have trunks?” demanded Wilhelm. “Of course you have trunks! What we need is a porter.” He squinted up the platform, still oblivious to the presence of the twins. “Where’s that cousin of mine?”

“In the water,” said Enzian.

Wilhelm skipped lightly backward. “Whatever do you mean, dear?” When Enzian didn’t answer, he stared bug-eyed at Kaspar. “Whatever does she mean?”

“In the ocean ,” Gentian murmured from the far side of the trunk. “The Atlantic. We left her down there.”

There’d been a point in Kaspar’s duration — not too far in the past — when such an exchange would have fascinated him, proof as it was of his daughters’ difference from other children; now he did no more than shrug his shoulders. “I wrote you a letter from New York,” he said, in response to Wilhelm’s flabbergasted look. “Did you read it?”

“ Naturally I read it. I’m here to meet you, aren’t I?” Wilhelm hesitated. “Of course, there may have been certain points—”

“I have something to tell you,” said Kaspar. “Sit down on this trunk.”

Wilhelm’s reaction to the news of Sonja’s death was no less singular than the twins’ had been: he sat utterly still for the space of a breath, covering his mouth with two fingers, then smoothed down his pant legs and clenched his eyes shut. Gentian and Enzian studied him the way they studied everything. Kaspar sat down next to him and waited.

By the time Wilhelm’s eyes finally opened, the four of them were alone on the platform. He drew himself up, heaved a decorous sigh, and brushed a single tear from each eye corner.

“In light of what you’ve told me,” he said, “My course of action is clear. I’m prepared to formally adopt the children.”

Kaspar explained to his cousin-in-law that adoption wouldn’t be necessary, given that he himself was still alive, and Wilhelm looked appropriately relieved. In all but a strictly legal sense, however, he did come to adopt Enzian and Gentian — and even, in those precarious first months, Kaspar himself. The promised apartment was set aside in favor of Wilhelm’s comfortable sandstone manse on Voorhees Avenue, and Kaspar’s arithmetical gifts were put to immediate use. Fastidious as Buffalo Bill was in his person — his hair immaculately Brylcreemed, his twill suits never less than einwandfrei —the accounts of Empress Sisi’s Cabinet, his jewelry shop, were the bookkeeping equivalent of smoldering dung. As Providence (or fate, or random chance) would have it, Kaspar had materialized in his cousin-in-law’s life at precisely the moment at which he was most desperately required.

The challenge of transmuting chaos into order — bordering, as it did in the case of Wilhelm’s accounts, on outright alchemy — turned out to be the ideal task to arrest Kaspar’s descent into despair. The twins, for their part, got along with their uncle beautifully, in spite of the fact that he regarded them — when he noticed them at all — with the same benign befuddlement he’d first shown at the station. A Kindermädchen was procured from somewhere (a poker-faced drudge whose German was as unintelligible as her English) and Wilhelm obligingly picked up the tab. His own sainted mother had died the previous year, and he was still mourning her passionately: he never failed to kiss his fingertips and hold them up to heaven when Mutter Knarschitz was mentioned, which caused the twins to snicker with delight.

Buffalo Bill, in other words, was nothing like the character Sonja had dreamed up for him, for which my grandfather was deeply grateful. He was grateful for practically everything, in fact, over the course of that first stunned, defenseless year. In haughtier days, Mrs. Haven, he might have found much to disapprove of in the life he’d fallen into; but Kaspar was a new man now, with a social security number and a name that still rang foreign to his ears, and disapproval was an Old World luxury. A life of some sort was conceivable in this bullish border town; even — with considerably less struggle than he’d feared — a measure of contentment. There was nothing else that he could think to wish for.