Prologue

A family album: leather-bound, thin, its pages yellow with age. There are images on every page—black and white to start with, then Kodacolor. The reds have dimmed to orange, the blues to pale blue-gray. Most of the photos are dated, and some of them name names. These identifying markers have been written in pencil or pen. Onkel Harry, Tante Lotte. Biarritz, 1921. The images are glued—sometimes two, sometimes three, rarely four—to the black album sheets.

There are pictures of children and dogs. There is landscape and seascape, a series of weddings; there are houses, furniture, and tombs. A hand hovers above the binding, its fingernails jagged and needing to be filed. The back of the hand is spotted with age, its liver spots light brown. The index finger curls. On the desk a glass of water, on the lamp a shade.

The Window
2011

Frederick Hochmann is seventy-two. A widower, with two grown sons on the West Coast, he still calls Connecticut home. New Canaan is the town where he and Sarah lived, and though the house can make him sad it also can console him: this is where they sat together by the fire, drinking their nightly martini; this is where the children played Ping-Pong and baseball and basketball and chess. He knows the colonial structure is too large for a single man, in need of the kind of attention he no longer wants to pay. In time gone by he’d stand on a ladder, cleaning the gutters or nailing back shutters himself. For the larger projects—plumbing, trimming the high protective hedge, replacing the broken slate shingles or storm windows that needed re-glazing—Sarah had known whom to call.

But maintenance seems unimportant or beside the point. The point is to continue with a minimum of fuss.

This, Frederick is good at. Retired, he reads the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. For the first part of the week, and sometimes through to Saturday, he does the crossword puzzle; three or four times monthly, he takes the train to New York. He goes to museums or concerts at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium—a chamber-music series he and Sarah used to patronize. Since she no longer plays the piano he no longer has to keep tuned, he put aside his violin. For similar reasons he stopped playing tennis, although he likes to watch the sport on television; the tournament at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open can claim his attention for days. He admires the players’ raw power but dislikes the way they shriek.

And he still listens to music, the piano trios and string quartets of Franz Joseph Haydn in particular. When asked what it is about Haydn—as opposed, say, to Mozart or Schubert—that he finds attractive, he has a ready answer: self-control, restraint. These are qualities his parents praised and tried to instill in their sons. Sarah too had valued self-control, and only at the very end of her long losing battle with cancer did she turn to Frederick and raise her ravaged face and cry, “Why me, why me?”

He has an elder brother in a nursing home outside of Guilford, and two or three times yearly he drives to visit Peter. These visits are not a success. They talk about the things they have in common—their childhood, their parents, the weather—and Frederick stays for lunch with what he thinks of as his brother’s fellow inmates, then drives home. In the 1960s, Peter belonged to a commune, and the drugs he took seemed somehow to have leached away all sense of professional purpose; the jobs he held were dead-end jobs, the women he lived with were feckless. While Frederick climbed up the corporate ladder—his career was in commercial real estate, and early on he had the idea for a model of self-storage and a warehousing system that would gain national traction—his elder brother drifted from address to address and liked to quote Timothy Leary: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

This he has done with a vengeance. Nearing eighty, Peter sits all day in a rocking chair, holding a spy story in his lap, or someone’s cast-off magazine, and staring at the wall. He still believes in Marx, he says, and that the revolution was betrayed by inside agents, a cadre of FBI operatives he calls “capitalism’s moles.” His gaze is blank, unfocused; what hair he has is white. Their parents, he tells Frederick, were the unwitting pawns and apparatchiks of what Eisenhower labeled the military-industrial establishment, and any self-respecting Jew should study the Talmud instead. In the Talmud and the Kabbalah you can find the answer to life’s questions, since the question is the answer if you know how to pose it. What seemed complex will look simple if you poke the ground for moles.

A certain skein of logic runs through Peter’s nonsense, and his brother finds this hard to deal with: when should he argue and why disagree? So he sits an hour by Peter’s side, talking about how cold or hot or wet it is, and then returns to New Canaan and watches a movie on television or treats himself to dinner at the restaurant he likes. They know him there; they bring him his martini without asking—straight up, with pimento olives on a toothpick—and about the nightly specials the waitress tells the truth.

His sons are raising families and urge him to fly west for Thanksgiving or their children’s birthdays. The older son, John, practices real estate law in San Francisco; Daniel, the younger, teaches history at Berkeley. In the years since Sarah’s death, Frederick has stayed with them—apportioning the length of his visits—on six separate occasions. His daughters-in-law are respectful, and Daniel’s wife Eileen in particular will sometimes put her hand on his, and leave it there, as if she understands and shares his need for contact. For such a slender woman, her breasts are surprisingly large. Arriving and departing, she embraces him, and the embrace has human warmth.

Yet he cannot shake a sense of loss: how glad Sarah would have been to watch her grandchildren growing, how happy it would make her to spoil those wild-haired boys. This increases the pain of her absence, and returning from his visits he feels almost a kind of relief. The furniture is furniture she purchased, the curtains are curtains she hung. She has been dead for five years. From May to October he works in the garden, a little, and reads books on the Civil War, or biographies of statesmen, and from time to time has dinner with a widow or old friends. At such gatherings he drinks red wine, but does not open a bottle at home; he cannot finish a bottle alone, and it does seem wasteful to let the wine go sour and then pour it out.

He understands, of course, that this is what old age entails: a shutting down, a closing in, a lessening of the desire to try something new. He understands also that he is depressed. In the watches of the night, or in the early mornings—standing by the kettle and measuring the coffee grounds for his French drip coffee pot, warming a bran muffin on which to spread marmalade—he remembers how his parents, refugees from Hitler’s Germany, had had their own set of habits: lox and bagels, fresh-squeezed orange juice, two boiled eggs every Sunday morning, and how they spoke German together when they did not want the boys to join the conversation. Therefore Frederick learned German.

His father’s ancestors were bankers—moneylenders in the sixteenth century—his mother’s in the import-export business. They had been prosperous people. His father’s father owned a private bank, and they had “wanted for nothing,” in the phrase his father used. In the way of such things, the families frequented similar circles and, once, took the same walking tour in the Tyrol. It is almost as though, when his parents married, the nuptials of Johann Hochmann and Gisela Lefchinsky had been prearranged.

There were distinctions, however. His mother’s people were “artistic,” with a penchant for collecting the paintings of Nolde and Klimt and, early on, African masks. They had come to Hamburg from Vienna. The Hochmann family, by contrast, was conventionally strait-laced and had lived in Germany for three hundred years. In his childhood Frederick heard stories about chauffeurs and upstairs maids, and the time when his father at six years old grew so impatient with a gourmandizing uncle who helped himself to too much whipped cream he cried, “Das ist genug, Onkel Max.”

“That’s enough, uncle Max,” became a slogan—a way of saying that the slice of chocolate cake or pudding should be distributed around the table so that everybody present would get a sufficient portion when that person’s turn arrived. Brother Peter did not feel this way, and did not act as though the whipped or clotted cream would come to his plate in the fullness of time, if he waited patiently. Frederick tried to be patient; there was always enough to go around.

The Third Reich destroyed that, of course. When their families were dispossessed—the houses and bank accounts plundered, the exit duties levied—his parents fled to America via a sojourn in Cuba. They settled in Westchester County. In their community of refugees, men smoked cigars and wore blocked hats, women owned crocodile-skin handbags and sen- sible shoes. Because of the import-export business, there were connections in New York, and his father found employment with a cousin of his mother’s, taking a train to the city. His parents rarely spoke about the years of exile or the way their fortunes changed.

“We were luckier than most,” his father said. “My father arrived with his parents. And only a few of the family died.”

“Why is that lucky,” Peter demanded. “What sort of score were you keeping?”

“Don’t be impertinent,” said their mother, and Peter went up to his room.

The Oleskers invite him to dinner; they have something they want to discuss. “Is next Saturday good?” Judy asks on the phone, and Frederick accepts. Sam and Judy are a couple he had known with Sarah; they played mixed doubles as a foursome in the years when everyone played tennis, and dropped by in the final months with casseroles and wine. Sam too had been in real estate, and they live in a Breuer house not two miles from the Hochmanns; there’d been easy camaraderie between the couples. Sarah and Judy confided in each other for what could seem like hours in the kitchen, or when they went out walking.

“What do you tell each other?” Frederick asked.

She smiled at him. “Women talk. Girl talk. You know.”

He did not know. He never knew what Sarah found to talk about, or why she and Judy would huddle together in corners, drinking coffee, gossiping with an intimate intensity he found somehow disquieting. There were secrets she should not disclose. There was the public world, the private world, and the two were adjacent but not interchangeable; there were things he told his wife in bed, and things they did together, he would never discuss with a third person, no matter how sympathetic that third person seemed. Das ist genug, Onkel Max.

Sarah, however, had few boundaries. When she had a second martini, she could be the life of the party, and her antics made him nervous; she would twirl around the living room, or raise a corner of her skirt as if performing flamenco. She would twitch her hips at him and say, “Oh come on, Freddy, don’t be such a prude.”

On Saturday evening the rain is cold, and he regrets the need to drive to the Oleskers; he could have stayed at home. The roads are wet, the branches bare; springtime has not yet arrived. The car’s right headlight slants off at an angle, making a solid-seeming cone of light, and he reminds himself to have the lamps aligned. This is the sort of maintenance—an oil change, a tire rotation—he still attends to regularly, and his Volvo runs like a clock. His wife’s Mercedes station wagon remains in the garage; he has not had the heart to put it up for sale.

Inside the Olesker house—with its stripped modernist arrangement, its fire burning brightly, its Calder mobile in the dining space—things do feel familiar. Harry and Clarissa Wilson have been invited also, and a divorcee with her cheeks pulled tight by plastic surgery and an elaborate necklace Judy praises: her name is Jane Markou. She has a sister down the street, but her sister and brother-in-law are renting a condo in Sarasota this winter; she’s been house-sitting in New Canaan for three months. Un-plain Jane sits next to Frederick at dinner—sorrel soup, a leg of lamb—and tells him she works as a PR representative for luxury hotels and resorts, as well as for the State of Utah, and if he ever wants to go to Utah or to any of the various hotels and resorts she works with he should let her know. She then proceeds to list the places in Malaysia, Indonesia, Africa she represents, and he has heard of none of them and feels so keen a longing for Sarah that he excuses himself and goes to the bathroom and, peering at his white face in the mirror, says aloud: How could you leave, why am I here alone?

The Oleskers are going to Europe. They have a trip planned for May. They are flying to Vienna and traveling by train to Budapest and Prague and Dresden and perhaps Theresienstadt and ending the trip in Berlin.

“Why don’t you join us?” asks Judy over crème brûlée, and he cannot tell if she is serious, but Sam says, “That’s what we want to discuss, it’s what Sarah wanted.”

“Excuse me?”

“To keep an eye on you,” says Sam. “She made Judy promise.”

He turns to his hostess. She nods.

“I don’t follow . . .”

“Oh, only that she asked me—you know, right before the end of things—to, as Sam puts it so elegantly, ‘keep an eye on you.’ Take care of you. She meant, I mean, to try to make certain you weren’t so alone, to keep you in the loop of life.”

“‘The loop of life,’” says Harry Wilson, who sits across the table. “Hey, that’s a good one.” He circles his neck with his hands and makes a strangling motion. “You mean, the noose.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Clarissa Wilson interrupts. “It’s the red wine talking,” she tells Frederick. “Pay him no attention. I don’t.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” Harry says. He drops his hands.

“Are you serious?” asks Frederick.

“Oh, I do know it was years ago, and we haven’t asked be- fore, but this seems like the perfect trip and I’ve been wanting all along to honor my solemn—the word is solemn—promise.” Judy smiles. “Last year we took a cruise to the Greek islands: Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete. And we promised each other the next trip we took would be something we’d ask you to join.”

“Think about it,” Sam repeats, and Jane Markou—whose PR accounts do not appear to include resorts in Eastern Europe—asks everyone at table if the rain will turn to snow, if spring is routinely so late in New Canaan, and where to find seedlings and plants.

The conversation shifts, continues, lags. He leaves at eleven o’clock. He should have brought an umbrella, he thinks; the wind-blown rain is hard. “I will,” he says.

“Will what?” asks Sam.

“I’ll think about it,” Frederick says, surprising himself, and Judy says, “Oh, perfect. It’s what Sarah wants.”