A Reunion of Ghosts
‘A triumphant, beautiful, and devastating novel about coincidences, family, and the sins of our fathers’ Anthony Doerr, author of All The Light We Cannot See‘Had me devouring the pages … Tragic, touching and – against all odds – strangely uplifting’ Stylist Magazine, 5 StarsMeet the Alter sisters: Lady, Vee and Delph. These three mordantly witty, complex women share their family’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They love each other fiercely, but being an Alter isn’t easy. Bad luck is in their genes, passed down through the generations. Yet no matter what life throws at these siblings, they always have a wisecrack – and each other.In the waning days of 1999, the sisters decide it’s time to close the circle of the Alter curse. But first, as the world counts down to the dawn of a new millennium, Lady, Vee and Delph must write the final chapter of a saga generations in the making – one that is inexorably intertwined with that of the twentieth century itself. Unspooling threads of history, personal memory and family lore, they weave a mesmerising account of their lives that stretches back decades to their great-grandfather, a brilliant scientist whose professional triumph became the sinister legacy that defines them.Magnificent and heartbreaking, A REUNION OF GHOSTS is an epic novel about three unforgettable women, bound to each other and their remarkable family through the blessings and the burdens bestowed by blood.
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A Reunion of Ghosts
Judith Claire Mitchell
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This EBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
First published in the United States by HarperCollins Publishers in 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Judith Claire Mitchell
Judith Claire Mitchell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Linda Hogan for permission to reprint, as an epigraph, an excerpt from Dwell: A Spiritual History of the Living World, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY. Copyright © 1995 by Linda Hogan. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Photographs © Getty Images. Jacket design by Anna Morrison.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007594344
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007594368
Version: 2015-12-07
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Suddenly all my ancestors are standing beside me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.
—LINDA HOGAN, Dwell: A Spiritual History of the Living World
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: The Ghosts
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two: The Reunion
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Three: Last Words
December 2010
Author’s Note
Names Mentioned in A Reunion of Ghosts
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Also by Judith Claire Mitchell
About the Publisher
From a distance the tattoo wrapped around Delph’s calf looks like a serpentine chain, but stand closer and it’s actually sixty-seven tiny letters and symbols that form a sentence—a curse:
the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the 3rd & 4th generations
We are that fourth generation: Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter, three sisters who share the same Riverside Drive apartment in which they were raised; three women of a certain age, those ages being, on this first day of summer 1999, forty-nine, forty-six, and forty-two. We’re also seven fewer Jews than a minyan make, a trio of fierce believers in all sorts of mysterious forces that we don’t understand, and a triumvirate of feminists who nevertheless describe ourselves in relation to relationships: we’re a partnerless, childless, even petless sorority consisting of one divorcee (Lady), one perpetually grieving widow (Vee), and one spinster—that would be Delph.
When we were young women, with our big bosoms and butts, our black-rimmed glasses low on the bridges of our broad beaky noses, our dark hair corkscrew curly, we resembled a small flock of intellectual geese in fright wigs, and people struggled to tell us apart. These days it’s less difficult.
Lady is the oldest, and now that she’s one year shy of fifty, she’s begun to look it, soft at the jaw, bruised and creped beneath her eyes. She’s the one who wears nothing but black, not in a chic New York way, but in the way of someone who finds making an effort exhausting. Every day: sweatshirt, jeans, sneakers, all black. “I work in a bookstore,” she says, “and then I come home and stay home. Who do I have to dress up for?” She wears no bra, hasn’t since the 1960s, and these days her breasts sag to her belly, making her seem even rounder than she is. “Who cares?” she says. “It’s not like I’m trying to meet someone.” Her hair, which she wears in a long queue held with a leather and stick barrette, is freighted with gray.
Vee is the tallest (though we are all short), and the thinnest (though none of us is thin). Her face is unlined as if she’s never had any cares, which (she says with good reason) is a laugh. She doesn’t like black, prefers cobalts and purples and emeralds, royal colors that make her look alive even as she’s dying. “Isn’t that what fashion is?” she says. “A nonverbal means of lying about the sad, naked truth?” She wears no bra either, but in her case it’s because she has no breasts. She has no hair either. Chemo-induced alopecia, they call it. No hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. Her underarms, her legs—they’re little-girl smooth. As is the rest of her. Little-girl smooth.
