Bereft : A Sister's Story

by Bernstein, Jane

• ISBN13: 9780865475861
• ISBN10: 0865475865
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-04-01
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux

Summary

This disquieting memoir is a detective story; what it solves is not the crime of Bernstein's sister's murder, but the puzzle of how unacknowledged loss profoundly, if silently, warps the lives of those it leaves in its wake.

Author Biography

Jane Bernstein is an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Excerpts

Chapter One

Even before my sister was murdered I was a detective, a watcher, a child who stood in doorways, heart beating hard, listening. I was always listening. On the nights when my parents' friends came over, the "boys" to play poker or the "girls" for mah-jongg, I sat at the top of the steps, listening between the clack of tiles-- Four bam, two crack --or the jangle of coins. You could say it was sheer nosiness, but really it was more. I listened to figure things out. I listened because what wasn't said scared me, even then.

    You must understand: my life was ordinary in the days before Laura's murder. If I was haunted by anything in the waking world, it was how pathetically, sadly, embarrassingly ordinary my whole family was, in our split-level house, on our patch of velvety grass, in our suburban town in New Jersey, where we had moved from Kew Gardens Hills when I was six years old. If I grieved then, it was over how ordinary I was, not a scholar, no great beauty, no one special. And still, at night it was different. That was when I lay in bed, trying to piece together the fragments of conversations and quarrels I overheard, to make sense of the adult world. Did my parents hate each other or were they just mad? Would my mother really sell the house? I watched the shadows on my wall, listening hard.

    Is it possible that I never fell into deep sleep, that from childhood I was always half awake and listening? There is no reason I should have heard the phone when it rang that night in September 1966, since the only phone upstairs was in my parents' room, behind their closed door. But I did hear it, and I sat up in bed, in the pretty room my sister and I had asked to share, where we had slept side by side every night until she had left for college three years before. It was as if I had been in training my whole lifetime for this moment. I heard the harsh metallic ring of the phone, looked at the time on the radium dial of the bedside clock Laura had bought me for my seventeenth birthday that summer, and got out of bed. I walked into the hall, and then, like a voyeur, pressed my ear against my parents' door. Already I knew everything, and nothing at all. I heard my mother say, "Are you sure?" and "Are you positive?" I heard her hang up the phone and say, "Our baby is dead." And then I heard nothing.

    If angry words and pieces of sentences had been the source of fear before, now silence brought me terror, what was not said, what could never be spoken. The only thing I remember my mother saying to me about Laura's murder was, "I'm sorry." Her apology confused and upset me, since she had done nothing wrong. I do not remember anyone telling me that my sister had been stabbed to death while chaining her bicycle to the window grate at the back of the Casa Loma Hotel in Tempe, Arizona. I did not, in fact, know many details of her murder until nearly a year later. But I was a listener and absorbed things, because that was when the refrain-- four times in the body and twice in the head --began to play in my head.

For years I was convinced that I did not miss my sister after she was murdered or feel what all the condolence cards so delicately referred to as our "loss." When I remembered this time, it seemed that after Laura died, I moved on with little fuss, just as I had been advised. I got "right back into the swing of things," and behaved in what my mother called "a normal way." Within days after Laura's murder I started an art scholarship in her name, and spent my evenings at my desk, tallying checks and writing charming thank-you notes to all the donors. When that was done, I worked on my college applications, drafting essays in which I wrote that the most significant event in my life was the week I spent as part of a domestic exchange program in Plymouth, Wisconsin, suburb of Sheboygan.

    My parents were practical people who passed on their distrust of the intangible, their firm belief that it was nonsense--worse, self-indulgence--to ponder things that could not be seen or touched. Years later, when I doubted that I could have been so buoyant after my sister's murder, I sorted through photos of myself from this period and found solid evidence of the vibrant, chatty girl who recognized and sought pleasure and anticipated the future with such eagerness, the kind of all-American girl you'd see from afar and think: Life has treated her kindly.

    Yet in this house where nothing was said, I knew soon after the murder that someone, "a boy" about my own age, had confessed to Laura's murder. Somehow I knew that my mother had gotten a subpoena for an arraignment and refused to appear. I learned, though I don't know how, that someone, maybe a customer of my father's, had collected the headline stories about Laura's murder and mailed them to us. "Did you ever hear anything so stupid in all your life?" I heard my mother say in rage. I was standing motionless, breath held, listening. That's how I knew that we had those newspaper articles, tangible, undeniable evidence of what had happened to my sister.

    Perhaps, then, this story begins on an evening in the spring of 1967, six months after the murder, when I came home from a date with a boy, so drunk the house was like a boat in rough seas. I navigated slowly, holding on to walls and banisters, listing toward my parents' room to tell them I was home. I knocked lightly, then opened their door an inch. We exchanged the usual words. How was your night? they asked, and I said, Great. I had a lot of fun.

    Sleep tight, they said.

    And I blew them kisses and murmured: You, too. Sweet dreams, I said, and backed into the hall.

    Their lights went out and I worked my way into the den, shutting the door slowly behind me. I did not lock it before I opened my father's desk drawer, did not worry that someone would wake and tiptoe in after me to ask why I was rifling through the drawer that was deep enough for large envelopes. I could not have said what I understand now, that my parents would not catch me because, since the murder, they fell into a deep sleep as soon as I came home at night. They had not noticed that I had dyed my hair black the week before, or that, when I paused at their door to say good night, I was sometimes so drunk that I could barely stand. That I was alive was enough.

    I cannot recall how I knew where to find the newspaper clippings. I had not planned to look, did not know I needed to read them, never considered where they might be. But I found the envelope without searching, slid out the file and sat at my father's desk.

    It is not necessarily true that shocking things blur with time. Sometimes the details stay vivid and blindingly hot. Thus I recall not only how seeing those articles split me in two, as if by an ax, but the rust-colored shag carpet, the plaid sleeper-sofa across from the TV, the large, carved desk with family photos beneath the glass top, where in those days I often found my father sitting.

    It was here that Laura and I had modeled our new clothes for him after our mother took us shopping, had spun in slow, awkward circles and waited for him to turn his full attention to us and say, "Not bad," or "Adequate," his highest compliment, or, once in a while, against all logic, "Very adequate."

    In those days, I did not understand my parents' reluctance to praise, did not know why, no matter how funny my jokes, my mother would only say, "Har-de-har-har," in a dry voice, and my father, "Adequate." I did not yet realize that what seemed to me an indictment, proof of my failures, was a kind of superstition, two generations old. My grandmother, after all, had been called Baba, or "Grandmother," at birth. The other baby girls in her family had died and her parents hoped to thwart the evil spirit of Lilith, the baby snatcher, by calling the new baby "old woman." My mother was a modern woman, in no way superstitious, but when she was feeling affectionate, she said, "I hate you!" and when I was dressed up to go out for a prom she said, "Uch-- Ugly! " Not that it mattered, since the evil spirits would not be fooled again.

    I pulled the clippings from the envelope. They were stiff and yellowish, already decomposing. A banner headline, the size used when President Kennedy had been shot. ASP COED STABBED TO DEATH ON TEMPE STREET.

    Her body curled on its side.

    Slim coed, petite coed, Brooklyn-born coed, she was called. Murdered, knifed, slain, stabbed to death. The words and pictures were unbearable, but I went on, clipping after clipping, absorbing each word the way a punchy boxer takes the blows, just stands and takes them. Four times in the body and twice in the bead . There was no question of turning away. I needed to take the punishment.

    I sat and read these articles. I looked at the photos of my sister crumpled on the pavement, and at the photos of "the boy," the murderer with the benign face and mild expression. I did not cry. Nor did I put pieces back in my father's desk when I was done. I took the whole envelope. I needed to have it. Such fuss had been made when I took scissors or tape from this drawer, yet no one ever mentioned the envelope. No one seemed to need it, as I did.

    A long time would pass before I looked at those clippings again. But they followed me, as if of their own volition, from New Jersey to dorm rooms and walk-up apartments in New York, to flats in London, and back again to the States, always with me, whenever I moved. I don't remember unpacking them or putting them in a special place. But they were with me. I know this, because years after the murder, when I needed to learn what had happened, I knew exactly where to find them.

Copyright © 2000 Jane Bernstein. All rights reserved.