Relay: Am I You? Are You Me?

Nina, am I you? Are you me? Standing before her tombstone at Oak Grove Cemetery as the leaves fell and were scattered on an autumn day, I did not expect an answer, but nonetheless had to ask. 

Hear me out, please, before pronouncing me insane. 

Nina is on my mind again, along with Tsuya Matsuki, who taught piano to me and to so many others across the decades at Miankoma Hall, where they lived.

Late last summer, in Amagansett, just after a grim and forbidding birthday, an email from a retired teacher near Philadelphia landed in front of me. He had purchased a recorder (the woodwind instrument) on eBay, and a label was affixed to its case: Tsuya Matsuki, with an address in East Orange, N.J.

This had spurred research into Miss Matsuki, which led him to my “Relay” in The Star’s Oct. 25, 2012, issue. He learned of Miankoma Hall. He found, online, page one of The Star’s July 13, 1950, issue, which included an article on a concert she was to give, at Miankoma, with the cellist Maurice Eisenberg. He found a 1954 article in The Star about another concert, with the violinist Max Polikoff, to benefit the Amagansett Village Improvement Society Scholarship Fund. He even found a 1908 newspaper report of a recital given by Tsuya Matsuki, age 10. 

And he found Miss Nina Harter. Miss Matsuki, he believed, had been a boarder with the Harter family in East Orange. 

“She was the organist at St. Thomas Church, Amagansett, for many summers, and presented Gilbert and Sullivan and her own operettas for the Red Cross during World War One,” according to Miss Harter’s obituary in The Star’s July 28, 1966, issue. 

“The performances were given in Bridgehampton and in Amagansett at Miankoma Hall, which was purchased from the American Legion by Miss Harter and her friend, Tsuya Matsuki, with whom she lived for many years, and made into a summer home and music studio.” 

“They were just wonderful together,” Josephine Crasky, who lived next door, told me last fall. “Tsu was easygoing and always a lot of fun.” (Ms. Crasky visited The Star’s office on Tuesday morning and gave me a trove of slides she had recently uncovered depicting Miss Matsuki and Miss Harter and Miankoma.)

“She and Nina lived together and were a couple until Nina’s passing,” said Wendy Turgeon, whose family bought the house next door in 1958. “After Nina passed, she had other friends out, but nobody as close as she was to Nina.” 

Maybe she said this to all her students, but Miss Matsuki always, always told me that I was gifted, and, even after Little League beckoned and I grew bored with the piano and quit for a while, she continued to offer my financially unstable parents the rate of $9 per hour, after raising it for her other students, and was ecstatic when I told her, one summer morning by the checkout counters at the Amagansett I.G.A., that I would resume lessons in the fall. Did she see something, or someone, in me? 

Long before I’d developed any interest in Buddhism or Tibet, I saw parts of “Himalaya With Michael Palin,” a BBC television series. One episode had Mr. Palin in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, where an astrologer told him about one of his past lives (likely as an elephant), and of his next life (the daughter of a wealthy family in the West). The idea that one could know such things certainly aroused my curiosity. 

Let me further state that in my limited research into Buddhism I learned of the bardo, the intermediate-transitional period between death and rebirth. According to some Buddhist traditions, this period, when one’s consciousness is not connected with a physical body, is said to span “seven times seven days,” or 49 days. 

Nina Harter was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 5, 1903, and died, in East Orange, on July 20, 1966. Forty-nine days later, on the Upper East Side, I was born. 

My brother was living in Dharamsala last year. Am I insane? I asked him. 

“Re: reincarnation, no, it’s not a crazy idea,” he said, “as ‘persons’ (the one Spirit incarnated variously) tend to meet up in successive incarnations. The movie ‘Cloud Atlas’ beautifully shows space-time to be illusory when the ‘future’ incarnation dies (soon after her lover is killed) and then her (nearly 1,000-year) past incarnation is instantly (as though walking through a door) reunited with his past incarnation when he returns from a life-threatening voyage.”

“So it’s and we’re all connected, above and beyond space-time, even.”

Nina, am I you? Are you me? 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.