Relay: No Reply

“I tried to talk with the dead last night, but the dead, being dead, gave no reply.”

I wrote that sentence over 20 years ago, channeling, I suppose, a little Edgar Allan Poe, with a dash of John Lennon. I had just returned from a walk on a damp, frigid fall afternoon on the beach at Ditch. The dead I was thinking of, at that moment, was my Tante Frieda. 

When I was born, my mother was in ill health. Frieda Evers, my father’s maternal aunt, came to live with us, to take care of the three children, while my mother recovered.

She had come from Germany at the height of that country’s post-“war-to-end-all-wars” economic meltdown. She carried with her a stack of trillion-mark notes, the worthless currency printed by the German banks.

A kindergarten teacher in her native land, she became a nanny in America, taking care of families with newborns, with my family being first and foremost. Shewould be with us several months, and then go away for a stretch of time, tending to another family.

She was an integral part of my father’s family when he was growing up, and became so with our family, as well.

Tante Frieda had a bedroom opposite my sisters’ room on the second floor. It was furnished entirely with dark, Gothic German furniture, including a big rocking chair. Beth, Cathy, and I used to jump into that chair, the three of us, and rock wildly back and forth. 

Tante Frieda doted on me. I could do no wrong. Murder? “Das weife ich nicht,” she would say.

She was Lutheran, and quite religious. That only added to the anarchy that was our unformed understanding of faith, what with a Jewish mother and a father whose family had left the Catholic Church. 

She had a foldout couch, and sometimes I would sleep in her room. She read to me at bedtime, either from the Bible, or a well-worn edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” or perhaps from Hans Christian Andersen.

When I was 7, my family moved to Forest Hills Gardens. She took an apartment nearby, and continued to join us for Sunday dinner. For the first few years in Forest Hills, I occasionally slept over in her apartment on that foldout couch.

As I went into my teenage years, I became a wild thing. There was nothing she could tell me that was of any import. I saw her less and less.

She began falling down and moved into the Wartburg Home in Mount Vernon. She died when I was in my late teens, and was buried in a cemetery outside Philadelphia. There was no funeral.

Many years later, I went to that cemetery to find her grave. Carole was with me.

We figured out where her grave was from the maps. She has no gravestone. 

I don’t remember now what it was, walking on the beach that chilly day over 20 years ago, that made me want to speak to her for a moment, to hear her voice. 

Just one second, one tiny moment. That’s not asking too much, is it?

T.E. McMorrow is a reporter for The Star.