The Ghost Writer (12 page)

“But I’m going crazy! I cannot live apart from you! I don’t know how. Oh, why didn’t I take that job—and move back! And the hell with her!”

“You did the right thing. You know just what to do.”

“Yes, give things up!”

“Dreamy things, correct.”

“Oh, Manny, would it kill you just to kiss my breasts? Is that dreamy, too? Would it cause the death of anyone if you just did that?”

“You cover yourself now.”

“Dad-da,
please
.”

But next I heard Lonoff’s carpet slippers—yes, he was out of his suit, dressed for bed—padding through the upstairs corridor. Soundlessly as I could, I slipped down from the desk and made my way on my toes to the daybed, where, from the sheer physical effort that had gone into my acrobatic eavesdropping, I collapsed. My astonishment at what I’d overheard, my shame at the unpardonable breach of his trust, my relief at having escaped undiscovered—all that turned out to be nothing, really, beside the frustration I soon began to feel over the thinness of my imagination and what that promised for the future. Dad-da, Florence, the great Durante; her babyishness and desire, his mad, heroic restraint—Oh, if only I could have imagined the scene I’d overheard! If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life! If one day I could just
approach
the originality and excitement of what actually goes on! But if I ever did, what then would they think of me, my father and his judge? How would ray elders hold up against that? And if they couldn’t, if the blow to their sentiments was finally too wounding, just how well would I hold up against being hated and reviled and disowned?

III.   FEMME FATALE

It was only a year earlier that Amy had told Lonoff her whole story. Weeping hysterically, she had phoned him one night from the Biltmore Hotel in New York; as best he could understand, that morning she had come down alone on a train from Boston to see the matinee performance of a play, intending to return home again by train in the evening. Instead, after coming out of the theater she had taken a hotel room, where ever since she had been “in hiding.”

At midnight, having only just finished his evening’s reading and gone up to bed, Lonoff got into his car and drove south. By four he had reached the city, by six she had told him that it was the dramatization of Anne Frank’s diary she had come to New York to see, but it was midmorning before she could explain even somewhat coherently her connection with this new Broad way play.

“It wasn’t the play—I could have watched that easily enough if I had been alone. It was the people watching with me. Carloads of women kept pulling up to the theater, women wearing fur coats, with expensive shoes and handbags. I thought, This isn’t for me. The billboards, the photographs, the marquee, I could take all that. But it was the women who frightened me—and their families and their children and their homes. Go to a movie, I told myself, go instead to a museum. But I showed my ticket, I went in with them, and of course it happened. It had to happen. It’s what happens there. The women cried. Everyone around me was in tears. Then at the end, in the row behind me, a woman screamed, ‘Oh, no.’ That’s why I came running here. I wanted a room with a telephone in it where I could stay until I’d found my father. But all I did once I was here was sit in the bathroom thinking that if he knew, if I told him, then they would have to come out on the stage after each performance and announce, *But she is really alive. You needn’t worry, she survived, she is twenty-six now, and doing very well/ I would say to him, ‘You must keep this-our secret—no one but you must ever know.’ But suppose he was found out? What if we both were? Manny, I couldn’t call him. And I knew I couldn’t when I heard that woman scream ‘Oh, no.’ I knew then what’s been true all along: I’ll never see him again. I have to be dead to everyone.”

Amy lay on the rumpled bed, wrapped tightly in a blanket, while Lonoff listened in silence from a chair by the window. Upon entering the unlocked room, he had found her sitting in the empty bathtub, still wearing her best dress and her best coat: the coat because she could not stop trembling, in the tub because it was the farthest she could get from the window, which was twenty floors above the street.

“How pathetic, you must think. What a joke,” she said.

“A joke? On whom? I don’t see the joke.”

“My telling this to you.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Because it’s like one of your stories. An E. I. Lonoff story … called… oh, you’d know what to call it. You’d know how to tell it in three pages. A homeless girl comes from Europe, sits in the professor’s class being clever, listens to his records, plays his daughter’s piano, virtually grows up in his house, and then one day, when the waif is a woman and out on her own, one fine day in the Biltmore Hotel, she casually announces…”

He left his chair and came to sit beside her on the bed while she went to pieces again. “Yes,” he said, “quite casually.”

“Manny, I’m not a lunatic, I’m not a crackpot, I’m not some girl—you must believe me—trying to be interesting and imitate your art!”

“My dear friend,” he replied, his arms around her now and rocking her like a child, “if this is all so—”

“Oh, Dad-da, I’m afraid it really is.”

“Well, then, you have left my poor art far behind.”

This is the tale that Amy told the morning after she had gone alone to the Cort Theatre to sit amid the weeping and inconsolable audience at the famous New York production of The Diary of Anne Frank. This is the story that the twenty-six-year-old young woman with the striking face and the fetching accent and the felicitous prose style and the patience, according to Lonoff, of a Lonoff, expected him to believe was true.

After the war she had become Amy Bellette. She had not taken the new name to disguise her identity—as yet there was no need—but, as she imagined at the time, to forget her life. She had been in a coma for weeks. First in the filthy barracks with the other ailing and starving inmates, and then in the squalid makeshift “infirmary.” A dozen dying children had been rounded up by the SS and placed beneath blankets in a room with twelve beds in order to impress the Allied armies advancing upon Belsen with the amenities of concentration-camp living. Those of the twelve still alive when the British got there had been moved to an army field hospital. It was here that she finally came around. She understood sometimes less and sometimes more than the nurses explained to her, but she would not speak. Instead, without howling or hallucinating, she tried to find a way to believe that she was somewhere in Germany, that she was not yet sixteen, and that her family was dead. Those were the facts; now to grasp them.

“Little Beauty” the nurses called her—a silent, dark, emaciated girl—and so, one morning, ready to talk, she told them that the surname was Bellette. Amy she got from an American book she had sobbed over as a child,
Little Women
. She had decided, during her long silence, to finish growing up in America now that there was nobody left to live with in Amsterdam. After Belsen she figured it might be best to put an ocean the size of the Atlantic between herself and what she needed to forget. She learned of her father’s survival while waiting to get her teeth examined by the Lonoffs’ family dentist in Stockbridge. She had been three years with foster families in England, and almost a year as a freshman at Athene college, when she picked an old copy of
Time
out of the pile in the waiting room and, just turning pages, saw a photograph of a Jewish businessman named Otto Frank. In July of 1942, some two years after the beginning of the Nazi occupation, he had taken his wife and his two young daughters into hiding. Along with another Jewish family, the Franks lived safely for twenty-five months in a rear upper story of the Amsterdam building where he used to have his business offices. Then, in August 1944, their whereabouts were apparently betrayed by one of the workers in the warehouse below, and the hideout was uncovered by the police. Of the eight who’d been together in the sealed-off attic rooms, only Otto Frank survived the concentration camps. When he came back to Amsterdam after the war, the Dutch family who had been their protectors gave him the notebooks that had been kept in hiding by his younger daughter, a girl of fifteen when she died in Belsen: a diary, some ledgers she wrote in, and a sheaf of papers emptied out of her briefcase when the Nazis were ransacking the place for valuables. Frank printed and circulated the diary only privately at first, as a memorial to his family, but in 1947 it was published in a regular edition under the title
Het Achterhuis
—”The House Behind.” Dutch readers,
Time
said, were greatly affected by the young teenager’s record of how me hunted Jews tried to carry on a civilized life despite their deprivations and the terror of discovery.

Alongside the article—“A Survivor’s Sorrows’’—was the photograph of the diarist’s father, “now sixty.” He stood alone in his coat and hat in front of the building on the Prinsengracht Canal where his late family had improvised a last home.

Next came the part of her story that Lonoff was bound to think improbable. She herself, however, could not consider it all that strange that she should be thought dead when in fact she was alive; nobody who knew the chaos of those final months—the Allies bombing everywhere, the SS in flight—would call that improbable. Whoever claimed to have seen her dead of typhus in Belsen had either confused her with her older sister, Margot, or had figured that she was dead after seeing her so long in a coma, or had watched her being carted away, as good as dead, by me Kapos.

“Belsen was the third camp,” Amy told him. “We were sent first to Westerbork, north of Amsterdam. There were other children around to talk to, we were back in the open air—aside from being frightened it really wasn’t that awful. Daddy lived in the men’s barracks but when I got sick he managed somehow to get into the women’s camp at night and to come to my bed and hold my hand. We were there a month, then we were shipped to Auschwitz. Three days and three nights in the freight cars. Then they opened the doors and that was the last I saw of him. The men were pushed in one direction, we were pushed in the other. That was early September. I saw my mother last at the end of October. She could hardly speak by then. When Margot and I were shipped from Auschwitz, I don’t even know if she understood.”

She told him about Belsen. Those who had survived the cattle cars lived at first in tents on the heath. They slept on the bare ground in rags. Days went by without food or fresh water, and after the autumn storms tore the tents from their moorings, they slept exposed to the wind and rain. When at last they were being moved into barracks, they saw ditches beyond the camp enclo sure piled high with bodies—the people who had died on the heath from typhus and starvation. By the time winter came, it seemed as if everyone still alive was either sick or half mad. And then, while watching her sister slowly dying, she grew sick herself. After Margot’s death, she could hardly remember the women in the barracks who had helped her, and knew nothing of what happened to them.

It was not so improbable either that after her long hospital convalescence she had not made her way to the address in Switzerland where the family had agreed to meet if they should ever lose touch with one another. Would a weak sixteen-year-old girl undertake a journey requiring money, visas—requiring hope—only to learn at the other end that she was as lost and alone as she feared?

No, no, the improbable part was this: that instead of telephoning Time and saying, “I’m the one who wrote the diary—find Otto Frank!” she jotted down in her notebook the date on the magazine’s cover and, after a tooth had been filled, went off with her school books to the library. What was improbable—inexplicable, indefensible, a torment still to her conscience—was that, calm and studious as ever, she checked
The New York Times Index
and the
Readers’
Guide to Periodical Literature
for “Frank, Anne” and “Frank, Otto” and “
Het Achterhuis
” and, when she found nothing, went down to the library’s lowest stacks, where the periodicals were shelved. There she spent the remaining hour before dinner rereading the article in Time. She read it until she knew it by heart. She studied her father’s photograph. Now sixty. And those were the words that did it—made of her once again the daughter who cut his hair for him in the attic, the daughter who did her lessons there with him as her tutor, the daughter who would run to his bed and cling to him under the covers when she heard the Allied bombers flying over Amsterdam: suddenly she was the daughter for whom he had taken the place of everything she could no longer have. She cried for a very long time. But when she went to dinner in the dormitory, she pretended that nothing catastrophic had once again happened to Otto Frank’s Anne.

But then right from the beginning she had resolved not to speak about what she had been through. Resolutions were her strong point as a young girl on her own. How else could she have lasted on her own? Once of the thousand reasons she could not bear Uncle Daniel, the first of her foster fathers in England, was that sooner or later he wound up telling whoever walked into the house about all that had happened to Amy during the war. And then mere was Miss Giddings, the young teacher in the school north of London who was always giving the orphaned little Jewess tender glances during history class. One day after school Miss Giddings took her for a lemon-curd tart at the local tearoom and asked her questions about the concentration camps. Her eyes filled with: tears as Amy, who felt obligated to answer, confirmed the stories she had heard but could never quite believe. “Terrible,” Miss Giddings said, “so terrible.” Amy silently drank her tea and ate her lovely tart, while Miss Giddings, like one of her own history students, tried in vain to understand the past. “Why is it,” the unhappy teacher finally asked, “that for centuries people have hated you Jews?” Amy rose to her feet. She was stunned. “Don’t ask me that!” the girl said—”ask the madmen who hate us!” And she had nothing further to do with Miss -Giddings as a friend—or with anyone else who asked her anything about what they couldn’t possibly understand.