Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (23 page)

Anne, and her mother, had been expected to honor those silent spaces. At the same time, Anne had always felt that her family was somehow bound together by Henry’s tragedies.
Not to be analyzed, just to be
known.
For as long as she could remember, Anne had carried with her a confusing mixture of pride that Henry had survived and a kind of shameful guilt over her privilege and comfort, over having been spared. How could she ever prove herself in such a bland and dangerless world as this? The Van Loeb book had no precise answers for Anne, but it did put into words some of the sensibilities, the questions that had always hung in the air, unasked.

Anne had had no idea that Nina Van Loeb lived in Geneva; she wouldn’t have been certain, had she thought about it, that Dr. Van Loeb was still alive. She must be very old. Anne remembered reading a newspaper article somewhere that had referred to Dr. Van Loeb as a survivor herself. She had waited out the war in the Dutch countryside, hidden in the hayloft of a Lutheran farmer who raped her from time to time in exchange for food, and his silence when the soldiers came.

Then Anne happened to spot a newspaper listing for a lecture by Dr. Van Loeb at the university in early June. At first Anne had no thought of attending the lecture, and was merely intrigued, having read the book, but she found herself thinking about it, and it seemed significant somehow that she had bothered to tear out the information from the paper. She realized that she was as much curious just to see Nina Van Loeb, now eighty-nine, to be in the same room and hear her speak, as she was interested in what Dr. Van Loeb might have to say.

Anne’s evenings were usually unscheduled, in the event that Victor should get away, though more often than not her nights were uneventful, punctuated at most by a furtive telephone call. She had attended the lecture, which was titled “The Inevitability of Sadness.” It was Sunday, the twelfth of June. Anne wondered if anyone else realized that it was Anne Frank’s birthday.

The lecture hall wasn’t where Anne had thought it was located—the building she had assumed it to be turned out
to house some sort of international center filled with unhelpful exchange students who seemed to speak no recognizable language and who were barely capable of languid gestures to indicate their lack of knowledge about university geography—and she arrived late. The only seats left were in the front row.

Anne settled into a seat and looked around her. The audience all looked studious, serious. Many people sat with blank notepads and pens, poised to take notes. Apparently some very great and important things might be uttered by Dr. Van Loeb this evening. Or maybe they were all psychoanalysts, too, in the habit of note-taking? Anne wished she, too, had brought something with which to take notes. She felt unaccredited, like a fraud.

Dr. Van Loeb walked out onto the stage. A ripple of applause began and grew, which startled Anne. Did one applaud at lectures? (A colleague at UGP, a dreary accountant with a wispy beard and a passion for Gilbert and Sullivan, whose only life achievement seemed to have been getting into Yale, had described applauding the final lecture of a brilliant and renowned classics professor there. The professor had then disappeared through a trapdoor in the stage.) Perhaps it was a Swiss thing, or they were simply acknowledging respect by way of applauding.

Clapping seemed wrong to Anne, an intrusion, an insulting act of pity. Miming applause without actually making contact between her hands, Anne felt that she and everyone around her were doing something inappropriate, like clapping between movements. Dr. Van Loeb ducked her head in acknowledgment of the applause, which grew louder. People began to rise from their seats. Anne stood and began to clap in earnest, her face red with empathic embarrassment. Why are we doing this? Why not let the woman give her lecture? As always, she thought, I pretend to take part in something that for everyone else is genuine.

Dr. Van Loeb was small, not much taller than the lectern, which she stood beside. She looked like a wise old Chinese man, or a monkey, yet Anne found her beautiful. Having to sit in the front row suddenly seemed like another significant happenstance, like finding out about the lecture in the first place.

There was something wonderfully intimate about being able to gaze up at Dr. Van Loeb, who was wearing a schoolgirl’s plaid skirt and a gray silk jacket that matched the color of her hair, which was so raggedly cropped around her head that Anne wondered if Dr. Van Loeb cut it herself, with nail scissors. The jacket seemed plain, almost militarily severe at first, but when Dr. Van Loeb moved, there were flashes of red lining, which caused Anne to revise her opinion of the jacket: it was subtly elegant.

Dr. Van Loeb spoke in English, in a soft, accented voice, for perhaps forty minutes, glancing down only occasionally at her packet of notes, index cards she held in her tiny hands. Everything she said seemed momentous, filled with many layers of meaning and truth, though afterward, when Anne was trying to summarize the ideas of the lecture to Victor (who was listening reluctantly and with showy patience, in bed at noontime on the following day), she found that she could no more do it than she could remember the details of her dreams.

Dr. Van Loeb looked directly into Anne’s eyes once, near the end, at a moment when she was pausing to draw breath for her concluding points. The moment electrified Anne. It was charged with something she didn’t understand. When Dr. Van Loeb had finished and everyone around Anne had jumped up and burst into steady applause of the sort concert audiences sustain in the hopes of eliciting an encore, Anne had picked up her sweater and handbag and rushed out, feeling that if she stayed for another moment, she would burst into tears.

For days after, Anne couldn’t shake Dr. Van Loeb, the lecture, that instant when their eyes met. What was so important,
so magical? Why did Dr. Van Loeb filter now into all of Anne’s thoughts, why had she become an invisible presence hovering overhead?

It annoyed Anne, and it upset her to find her thoughts drawn repeatedly to the same moments, as if she were being compelled to look through a series of virtually identical photographs over and over. Photographs such as Harriet might produce. If Harriet were here, she would be satisfyingly intrigued by Anne’s preoccupation. She would no doubt develop all sorts of abstruse theories about it, and some of them might even be right.

But Harriet wasn’t expected for nearly a month, and until then Anne had no one with whom she could satisfactorily talk about Nina Van Loeb. About her obsession with Nina Van Loeb. Victor made it clear that he didn’t want to hear one more inarticulate reference to this miraculous Van Loeb woman, either. The third time she brought Dr. Van Loeb into the conversation, at a clandestine dinner in a little fondue restaurant in the basement of a hotel, where only tourists went, Victor had looked up from his menu, gazed at her over his half glasses with a cold look, and said, “You sound like someone who’s fallen in love, you know.”

Anne was stunned, and embarrassed. She knew he was right. There was only one person in Geneva with whom she could pursue this. That night, after Victor had left in time to be at home when Annamarie returned from a weekend of hiking with the children, Anne looked up Dr. Van Loeb in the telephone directory. The next morning, when she knew she would be safe from interruption at her desk for a few minutes, she telephoned. Dr. Van Loeb answered on the second ring, which caught Anne by surprise, as she had only gotten up enough nerve to leave a message. Stammering, Anne explained herself badly, but finally she was able to choke out a request for an appointment.

“You do still see patients?” she asked, after explaining that she had attended the lecture the week before.

“Yes, my vision has not failed me,” came Dr. Van Loeb’s polite reply.

“No, I mean, are you still, do you still …”

“Yes, do I still treat patients? A few. Is that your question?”

“I, yes, I would like to make an appointment in that case.”

“Ah. Perhaps first we should have a meeting to talk, Miss … did you say your name was Gordon? A consultation.”

Anne thought that was what she had requested. But Dr. Van Loeb seemed to think they should meet in order to plan to meet. Whatever. (The precise literalness reminded Anne in a pleasant way of her dealings with Harriet, who wouldn’t
make
coffee, though she would be happy to
prepare
some. Anne and Harriet frequently accused each other of being overly literal.) They agreed on an hour for the next day, after Anne was through with work.

The first time Anne saw Dr. Van Loeb’s waiting room, which was up one flight, in a building entered through a courtyard like her own, she was struck by its spare elegance and timelessness. I could live here, she thought as she opened the unlocked door (which was marked with a brass nameplate), as per Dr. Van Loeb’s instructions, closed it behind her, and went to sit on the oatmeal-colored sofa opposite the door.

The walls were rough, white plaster, and the late-afternoon June light streamed in an open casement window and fell across the worn Persian carpet in pleasing stripes. The room smelled of furniture polish, and something else, that crisp butter and linen smell of good restaurants. Maybe a faint coffee aroma. Would Dr. Van Loeb offer her coffee?

There were magazines on a small table, but Anne, who was ten minutes early, didn’t want to read. She became aware of a soft roaring sound coming from somewhere underneath her. She ducked her head down and lifted the skirt of the sofa and
saw that the sound was coming from a small machine. White noise. To block out other noise, to prevent her from overhearing the private conversation in the next room that Dr. Van Loeb must be having with someone else. Anne flushed with embarrassment, feeling caught out for having peered under the sofa, somehow accused of eavesdropping by the very presence of this device.

She jumped up and began to examine a print on the wall, feeling as though she were somehow onstage. It was the only art in the room other than a wild-looking wooden mask, possibly African, that loomed over the sofa and made Anne think with distaste of Picasso. The print, which hung beside a closed door, was a matted reproduction of van Eyck’s
Wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Jan Arnolfini.

Anne tried to remember what she had learned in art history. She recalled something about this being a document of a marriage. Was the woman pregnant, or was her rounded belly, over which her hand was placed protectively, a suggestion of future fruitfulness? The dog signified fidelity. What kind of dog was that? A terrier of some sort.

It reminded Anne of a stuffed dog she had been given by her mother after she had her tonsils out at age four. It had a key in its belly, which scratched Anne when she cuddled the dog, who never did have a name. When wound up, it played “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?”

Where was that stuffed dog now? Anne supposed that thinking about it now must have to do with thoughts of her mother. Was she looking for mere mothering from Dr. Van Loeb? How tiresome and unoriginal. Maybe she ought to leave at once, telephone an excuse later.

Oh, and the painter was visible in the reflection, a fact she hadn’t learned in class—or if she had, she hadn’t retained it—but from Harriet, who had mentioned this painting en passant
in a passionate discussion of her beloved Dutch still lifes. Still lives? Anne could never remember which was right. Jan van Eyck was here.

Having a wonderful time. Wish I were anywhere but here. Anne checked her watch. It was precisely six. She wouldn’t leave now that she had got this far. She searched the print for other clues, trying to lose herself, trying to forget what she was here for. There were seven candleholders in the candelabra, which signified something or other. Seven sacraments. But there was only one candle: the sacrament of marriage.

The couple were a quite peculiar-looking pair, actually. Did people really look like that? They stood apart, joined only by their hands. The man’s pale gaze seemed to penetrate the centuries. Anne felt that his eyes could momentarily shift from the middle distance to meet her stare.

The door next to Anne opened suddenly, nearly hitting her in the head. She stepped back. Dr. Van Loeb’s face emerged in profile at the edge of the door and she peered around the room, not seeing Anne. Anne cleared her throat nervously.

“Oh. There you are. Miss Gordon?”

Anne nodded. Dr. Van Loeb didn’t come out any farther or offer her hand, but simply tilted her head that Anne should follow her. So there hadn’t been another patient. Unless there was a different way out? Anne closed the door behind her as Dr. Van Loeb sat down in an armchair and gestured in the direction of another. Anne sat down, too, feeling perplexed already over the unfamiliar etiquette. There would be no coffee.

She looked around the room. It was lined with bookshelves and had a more cozy, personal feeling than the waiting room, though it was a good deal larger. Anne wondered if this was Dr. Van Loeb’s living room. Perhaps she lived on the other side, through the other door in the opposite wall. Dr. Van
Loeb was watching her. Anne dropped her eyes and clasped her hands together, aware of her own nervousness. Neither spoke. Perhaps a minute passed.

“Could you tell me something about yourself?” Dr. Van Loeb murmured. She was looking at Anne with a sort of detached, almost blank curiosity. She was wearing a tweed suit that might have been fifty years old.

“I was at your lecture,” Anne began hesitantly.

“Yes, in the first row. I remember you.”

This startled Anne, and thrilled her, too.

“Some of the things you said … they were about me. I mean, not about me as a survivor, obviously, I’m not a survivor, but you see, my father was, is. He was there, at Auschwitz.” Anne trailed off, feeling overwhelmed by a surge of
sadness. She could never explain it all. She had counted on this connection too much. It was foolish to hope. She started to cry.

Dr. Van Loeb simply sat still, saying nothing. After Anne had continued to weep quietly for a few minutes, Dr. Van Loeb made a sudden gesture with one hand that seemed for an instant to Anne like a dismissal, a “get out of here,” but in fact it was an indication toward a box of tissues on a small table.