The Bookcase

History isn't a minimalist endeavor nor, likewise, is my house. Nevertheless, Spring Cleaning is a biological instinct and, as such, it's a pleasure to give in to the urge. Daylight Savings Time begins today—this morning we lost an hour of our lives for no good reason. But it's almost Spring, so whatever. As I take my first, jet-lagged sip of coffee, the chaos in the dining room comes into my crosshairs.

How bad could it be, after all? It's just two shelves. I'm fooled by multi-packs of anti-bacterial wipes, masks, and boxes of COVID tests, all leftovers from the plague. Historically, that's only five years' worth of crap. No biggie. So I turn on my Audible version of "Remembrance of Things Past"—because I can't bring myself to read the damned thing myself, and the narrator has a seductive British accent and, moodwise, it pairs well with archeology. 

Then I kneel and begin the process of pulling everything out.

I throw all the COVID stuff straight into a garbage bag (with reckless satisfaction), exposing a geological layer of office supplies, all of indeterminate age. This separates the COVID years from the deeper past.

*

Oh, look: there's Uncle Henry (1910-1990).

Henry was in the OSS and the CIA and spent time in South America, Europe, and Asia. 

Henry came to dinner every Sunday, which was kind of odd, now that I think about it. He and my father were at odds politically and ethically. Henry often waited stoically for my father to finish cursing him out before abruptly rising from the dining table (where I am writing this) and taking his leave, often with the parting words, "Well, that's all folks." He was a surprisingly calm and gentle man (a gentleman) who had a soft spot for animals. Henry had a pet monkey when he was stationed in Laos, and he secretly fed our poodle table scraps. 

The brothers both led double lives. In one of the stories that was made public, it came out that when he was stationed in Chile, Henry posed as a coffee seller named Pete. My father, on the other hand, had a "secret" mistress spanning most of my parents' marriage. 

The brothers never spoke or corresponded in German, probably because they both fled Nazi Germany in the early 1930s. But I have a memory of them at the dinner table singing together, a song from their shared youth, "Follow the Lady with the Sunshade." I still remember the tune, but I can't find it anywhere. As far as I know, the song no longer exists anywhere but in my memory.

*

Evidence of my mother, Roxanne (1926-2013), is here, too. She was a garage-sale connoisseur and her collections included netsuke (Japanese ornamental ivory miniatures, the strange and curious toggles found on 17th-19th-century traditional clothing), Weller pottery, ornamental fans, cookbooks, and first editions of children's book illustrations. Here is a pile of the latter, circa 1960s. Do I research and try to sell them? Do I throw them out? It costs me less angst to replace them on the shelf and leave it for my kids to get rid of.

This looks like the kind of hidden treasure my mother would pick up from a yard sale.

There's actually very little of her on these shelves, besides the fact that she is the one responsible for squirreling this stuff away. She was the real historian in the family. She saved everyone's life, regardless of the personal cost to her. She saw to it that my father's extensive, erotic correspondence with his assistant was not only preserved but labeled and put in chronological order.

In my more melancholy reflections, I think this pretty well describes the aspect of my mom that allowed and perhaps even necessitated her to be crushed beneath the weight of caring for these two, formidable men. My father and my uncle depended utterly on her support and it worked to their advantage that she drew the most meaningful, energetic sense of herself from nurturing them. Them, and me.

*

Lottie (1900-1978) was my father's older sister and probably his closest confidante, after whom my mother named me. It's strange to have a doppelganger about whom I know so little. She was a gifted artist and writer who took pride in being the vice president of a printing company—a rarity for a woman in the 1960s—and an unmarried woman, at that. My uncle wrote letters urging her to stop wasting her time, to quit her job and devote her time to writing seriously. In her diary, she complains about Henry's remarks and makes indignant excuses. Of course, 50 years after her death, it's her extraordinary writing that matters, not the statement, an unmarried female vice president was a rarity. I have all of her writing collected together in a file cabinet in my father's study, and my sisters and I are the only living people who have read her work.

But in the dining room catacombs are some of the books she read as a child.

All in German, naturally, so I can't read them, but the illustrations are rich and magical and tell the unheard stories of her childhood.

All of this, somehow, is my father, William (1904-1999). He was an art historian and a force of nature. He was the focus of any room he was in and, though he's been dead for over a quarter of a century, he still presides over every room of this house. 

One picture on these shelves, of uncertain provenance, I choose to attribute to my father, regardless of the fact that he didn't paint it.

This scene with the giant terrorizing a small group of people, and the one, puny man who dares to fight back, captures a particular naughty, chaotic mood that none of the other artifacts possess. Or, should I say, none of the other ghosts possess.

It should be obvious now, I live among ghosts by choice. I couldn't bear to have it otherwise. But sometimes when the chaos gets out of hand, I take it all out and examine each object. I discard what I can and dust off the rest before returning it, in an orderly fashion, exactly where I found it.