Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,130

of memory, the loss of her mind at the end, made grotesque sense: a way for her to leave me effortlessly, slipping away an immeasurable amount each hour of each day, all to avoid a final, crushing goodbye.

That was the beginning for me, the beginning of a long and complicated journey I didn’t know I was taking. Although maybe some part of me sensed it after all, because when I locked the door of the house a melancholy feeling came over me that I’ve only ever had when leaving for a long trip, a hollow feeling of uncertainty and regret, and when I looked back over my shoulder and saw the dark windows of our house I thought that it was not impossible, given my age and all the things that can befall one, that I would never see it again. I imagined the garden overgrown, turned wild again as it had been when we first saw it. It was a melodramatic thought and I rejected it as such, but many times along the way I was reminded of having had it. In my bag among the usual items of clothes and books I had the lock of hair, the hospital certificate, and a copy of Broken Windows to give to Lotte’s son. On the back cover was a photograph of her, and it was because of that photograph that I chose that book of hers and not another. In it she looked as much like a mother as she ever would, so young, her face so soft and full, the skull not yet showing through as it begins to do by forty, and I thought that was the Lotte her son might like to see, if he wished to see her at all. But whenever I reached into my bag I would encounter her bruised eyes staring up at me, and sometimes it seemed she was admonishing me, and sometimes asking me a question, and sometimes attempting to bring me some news of death, until at last I couldn’t bear it anymore and tried to lose her at the bottom, and when I couldn’t (she kept rising up), I pushed the book down and buried it under the weight of other things.

The train pulled into Liverpool close to three in the afternoon. I was watching a flock of geese wing across the iron gray sky and then we plunged into a tunnel and came up under the glass dome of Lime Street station. The address Gottlieb had given me for the Fiskes was in Anfield. I’d planned to walk past the house before finding a bed-and-breakfast nearby to spend the night, then to call the following morning. But making my way down the platform I felt a heavy ache in my legs, as if I had arrived from London on foot rather than sat idle for two and a half hours on the train. I stopped to switch my bag to the other shoulder, and without looking up I sensed the gray sky pressing down on the glass roof from above, and when the letters on the flip board above the platform began to whir and click, times and destinations disintegrating, leaving us, the newly arrived, in limbo, a sickening wave of claustrophobia came over me and I had to struggle to resist the urge to walk straight to the ticket office and purchase a ticket for the next train back to London. The letters began to clatter again, and for a moment I was seized by the thought that the whirring letters were spelling the names of people. Though what people, I couldn’t say. I must have stood for some time, because a man from the railway company wearing a gold-buttoned uniform approached to ask me if I was all right. There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matters worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger. But I managed to resist self-pity, thanking him and continuing on my way, heartened by my luck at not being forced to wear a hat like his, a perky box with a shiny visor that would make the daily battle for self-dignity before the mirror immeasurably more difficult. My satisfaction only lasted as far as the information desk, though, where I joined the line of travelers trying the patience of the girl who looked as if she had closed her eyes in one place and opened