You Are There Behind My Eyelids Forever

By Grace Andreacchi

'Now we are not two but one transparent thing, an octopus of light moving in the underwater darkness.'

Set against the backdrop of the depraved and glamourous New York of the early 1970s, this is the story of Rose, a young girl who endures incest and violence at the hands of her father, and flees into a dangerous love affair with an older man. But Anton, son of a perished Nazi fighter pilot, has problems of his own. Together they experience both delicious thrills and frightening excesses: bliss and fear, sadness and loss, confusion and despair. The novel moves with great subtlety through time and space, blending elements of myth, story-telling, memory and alternate reality to create a powerful and kaleidoscopic world of its own. A book for the #metoo era, full of real insights into the horrors of physical and sexual abuse, as well as ferocious humour and an unquenchable spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716322280

Grace Andreacchi

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years—sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Scarabocchio and Poetry and Fear (Andromache Books), Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra. Stories and poetry appear in both online and print journals. Her work can be viewed at graceandreacchi.com. 

Book preview

YOU ARE THERE BEHIND

MY EYELIDS FOREVER

by the same author

Fiction

Golden Vanities

Poetry and Fear

Scarabocchio

The Prodigy

Music for Glass Orchestra

Give My Heart Ease

Poetry

Ten Poems for the End of Time

Berlin Elegies

Two Hands Clapping (with artist Alexandra Rozenman)

Little Poems for Children

Elysian Sonnets and Other Poems

For the theatre

Two Brothers

Two Martyr Plays: Lawrence and Agnes

Raphael and Tobias

YOU ARE THERE BEHIND MY  EYELIDS FOREVER

GRACE ANDREACCHI

butterfly

ANDROMACHE BOOKS

First published by Andromache Books, London, 2021

Copyright © 2021 Grace Andreacchi

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity of persons, places or events depicted herein to actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-716-32228-0

Cover image: Egon Schiele, Akt gegen farbigen Stoff, 1911

For Judith Lewis Herman

And for my mother

PROLOGUE – SICKNESS

SIX MONTHS alone in a cold white room, surrounded by ghosts. White curtains drawn I lie in dim underwater light. Death stands at the door, whispers my name. Ghosts lie down beside me, whisper my name, pull at me with urgent hands. Mother. Father. Forgive us! Day and night they whisper, sometimes they even shout in my ears. Forgive us Rosie! We’re sorry, so sorry... Once I lived in water as now I live in air. A little mermaid, no bigger than your hand. Fluttering like a fish inside you. I was born into light and pain into a cold white room. Eyelids of pale blue paper flutter open like birds. Shhh! My head hurts. Shhh! Just be quiet, please. Mother. Father. Also my heart hurts. Fluttering inside its narrow cage of bone, hurling itself against the bars. Come, don’t cry any more! Holding you to my heart again. Thus I lie among the noisy ghosts. A small blonde girl sits in a summer garden, squinting at the sun. A man and a woman, brave in bridal finery, turn to one another in perfect joy. Two against the world. A father holds his tiny firstborn in his arms. I’m sorry, Rosie! I’m so sorry! One plaintive blackbird alone in a winter garden. Pull back the curtain, hold tight to the windowsill. Careful not to fall! I can see it now. One lone blackbird fluttering in the winter twilight. A line of gold bleeding at the horizon. Thunder of bombs in the distance women and children crying. We had nothing to eat. Pull back the curtain. Further. Further. Now the sun is shining through a blue glass transparent sky. The white spikes of chestnut bloom have come to shelter us. The angels in the garden have lowered their swords and the blackbird is singing of eternity. A bride in white is getting out of a limousine, smiling. A small blonde child sits at a table and wonders, squinting into eternal sunshine. A father holds his firstborn in his arms. Chestnut blooms white as new fallen snow. A sky the blue of lapis lazuli of alpine lakes of the Virgin’s cloak. Eia, ergo, advocata nostra... Listen to the silence. I lie back on the pillow and close my eyes. Listen — to — the — silence. When all the ghosts placated and smiling have at long last left the room the very last ghost of all, the ghost that I never want to see, standing at the very back of eternity but pushing forward now at last. Is You.

You come to me waking and sleeping, the noisiest ghost of all. With your big hand you break open the cage and seize the small bird, hold it tight in your fist, the frail wings beating against your hand. I won’t think about you. A cage closed for forty years. You put your big hands on me again, on my stomach, on my breasts, between my thighs again. Tears shining in your eyes. You call my name. Rosie! Rosie, forgive me! Out of bed at last I sit at the neat white laptop. Sunlight through the white curtain warm on my hair. I sit and type your name for the first time in forty years. Anton Franz von Talhofer. In my school notebooks over and over again in blue ballpoint in a round childish hand. Anton Franz von Talhofer. Rose Anne Catherine von Talhofer. My fingers poised over the keys. Name. Birth date. You come up dead. Ten years dead, like some crazy old song. Ten years dead. I sit before the neat white laptop moving my head slowly from side to side the white curtain blows into the room the wounded bird struggles in your hand the window breaks into a thousand fragments sharp as death irretrievable as light. Nooooo! You can’t be dead you can’t be dead you can’t be dead... Not you. You were too big to die. Not possible. Anton’s dead, I say out loud. But I don’t believe it. You can’t be dead. Not really dead. Can you? Anton! I cry out loud. Anton! Where are you? You — can’t — be — dead... I cry and I cry I cry like a baby I cry like a motherless child I cry like you cried the last time I saw you. I throw myself down on the bed in the white room and I writhe and I weep and I sob my poor empty twisted heart out. You can’t be dead! Where are you, Anton? I cry for hours and hours for days and nights and weeks and years. I’m crying still. I can’t stop crying I can’t not till you come and take me in those strong arms again and tell me that you are not dead.

I’m sick. On bad days I lie on the bed eyes closed in the cold white room and wait for you. I listen to the wounded bird fluttering inside my chest. I listen... I think about the sound of your voice and the way you walked and the way you smelled and the touch of your hand and the light in your eyes and I know that you are not dead. On good days I write down what I have learned on the bad days. In time to the fluttering bird I write these things down. At night you come to me not in dreams only but also waking and say, Forgive me! And sometimes, I’m sorry Rosie. And once, I love you.

It says you died on the 3rd of August 2004, age at time of death sixty. An address just a mile or two from where I left you. And I try to remember some moment of grace... Driving back to the city on the Interstate after another night in some crap motel, the roof down on the T-bird and the cold wind whipping our faces raw, it’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ on the radio, Janis shrieking into the wind, calling her lover, calling her man in a voice like broken glass. I touch your hand, and you smile at me with those eyes of lapis lazuli. And I’ve sometimes wondered, did you ever find it, that peace or home or whatever it was you needed? So we sang it good and loud into the pure face of the morning, just me and my sweet lover boy, free as two homeless birds, singing the blues and going way over the speed limit.

The room fills up with tiny white flowers, a faint sweet perfume that vanishes when I open my eyes. The Virgin spreads wide her blue cloak to shelter us.

ACT ONE –   ROSE

She keeps aloof in earnest, though she plays at loving in jest; and death lies between that earnest and jest.

— Tarjumán Al-Ashwáq

November 1971

I met him at the Queen of Heaven fall party. Parties were forbidden, but my father was willing to make an exception for this one. He figured I couldn’t get into any trouble at church. No kids at that party anyhow, just grownups. My father was worried about boys, not men. Which was kind of stupid. I was the piano teacher for the night school, that’s why I got invited. I taught elementary piano to grownups three nights a week, it got me out of the house, away from my father. I didn’t even like parties, but I’d go anywhere that wasn’t home. Come here, Rosie, my father would say, once my mother had left for work. Come to Daddy, sweetheart. Or maybe try to kill me again.

I sat on a bench on the sidelines, watching the grownups make fools of themselves. Everybody got drunk pretty fast. Brother Thaddeus, who taught seventh grade, tried to pull me onto his lap when I went for a soda, but I ran away, back to my bench. A wise virgin, just sitting there watching the world go by under the bright strip lights of the new gym where on Fridays we played basketball and on Sundays they had the extra Masses, taking the overflow from the big church on Broadway. The priests in bright silken garments, green for hope, violet for passion, white for redemption. Your dick when it was hard just that delicate shade of violet. The tiny veins in your eyelids when you closed your eyes.

A photograph: Taken on my sixteenth birthday. Face a pale, perfect oval framed by dark plaits, long lidded eyes that look away and down, like the melancholy Madonnas of the quattrocento who never quite meet our gaze. A soft pulpy childish mouth, slightly open. Something wild and sly, caged. The right hand is loosely curled around a cigarette, a puff of white smoke near the head.

I wore an angora mini dress my grandmother had made for me. Crocheted lace the pale pink of seashells, glimpses of pearl white skin, thin arms, ivory soap, tuberose gardenias and l’Air du Temps. I am a rose of Sharon, I am a tower of ivory, a house of gold, a garden enclosed. Mermaid hair. Long fingered lily white hands. Enchanted feet. I didn’t even know I was beautiful. Men fell silent when I entered a room, stared at me with heavy eyes, then tried to touch me. A sudden, inexplicable power, but what was it good for? I didn’t have the faintest idea. A little wild thing, gnawing at the bars of that cage, gnawing with sharp little teeth. I had secrets I wouldn’t tell to anyone, not even God.

It is a beast of the sea, wondrously shapen as a maid from the navel upward and a fish from the navel downward, and this wonderful beast is glad and merry in tempest, and sad and heavy in fair weather. With sweetness of song this beast maketh shipmen to sleep, and when she seeth that they are asleep, she goeth into the ship, and ravisheth which she may take with her, and bringeth him into a dry place, and maketh him first lie by her, and if he will not or may not, then she slayeth him and eateth his flesh. — De proprietatibus rerum, Bartholmaeus Anglicus

One of those men whom women follow with slow eyes, one of those men for whom the mermaids are singing. One of those big men who move with ineffable grace, as if somehow granted a reprieve from the general law of gravity. Tall, beautiful, blue-eyed, his thick brown hair close cut, tinged with auburn. He spoke softly, asked me my name. Then sat down beside me on the bench and began to talk in his deep, musical voice. He wore jeans and a crisp white shirt rolled to the elbows. Enormous arms, muscles like ropes under the light brown down. Shoulders to uphold the starry mansions of the gods. Not a boy. Very definitely a man. What are you doing here? he said. I told him about the piano and he said he loved music but couldn’t play anything. You’re lucky to be able to play, he said. He asked me what kind of music I liked, watching me closely while I spoke, smiling with his eyes, smiling without opening his mouth. I’d never seen anyone smile that particular way before. I said I liked Mozart best. Mozart was Austrian, like me, he said. Austria! Land of the snow capped mountains, of edelweiss and Maria whirling madly in a meadow of wildflowers. I wish I could go there, I said. You want to go to Austria? he said. I want to go everywhere! Are the mountains in Austria very beautiful? The eyes were smiling even more now. I come from the mountains he said. They are beautiful, you speak the truth.

A photograph: Stagey backdrop of snow capped mountains. A young Luftwaffe Offizier holds his firstborn son in his arms. The Offizier is young blond and handsome, tall and lean, his officer’s cap placed rakishly on his fine blond head. He is looking into the baby’s face and smiling. The baby is just a baby, impossible to read as yet. The Offizier will not return from his next tour of duty.

He lit my cigarette for me, leaning in with profound interest as though performing something sacred, holding the little silver Zippo up to my face with his great hand. I took a drag on the cigarette and watched him watching me, curiously, as you watch a small animal. I wasn’t a big talker, too many secrets. I hate parties, I said after a while. So do I, he said. Look at them all, acting like idiots! Why don’t we get out of here, go some place together? What do you say? I said I might. I need to take these things back to the store first, he said, indicating the empty metal trays on the buffet table. I’ll be back for you in a few minutes. The store? I’m Anton from the deli, he said. Don’t you recognise me? No, I said. There were lots of different people worked at the deli. It was the best deli in Inwood, the German one on 207th Street, not the crappy Irish one. My mother only ever shopped at the best deli. He said I’d been in his store plenty of times, he’d recognised me right away. You buy Westphalian ham, he said. For my mother, I said. You have this big cape you wear, he said. I had a cape I’d bought with my own money. A long woollen cape in slate blue, it reached to my ankles and had a red satin lining and a big cowl hood like a lady’s in a gothic novel. My Jane Eyre cape, my Wuthering Heights. Nobody else had a cape like mine. I was hoping I might meet Heathcliff on the way home from school some day, and I wanted to be sure he’d recognise me. Your big cape! he said. You look like a little monk in that cape. Smiling with his eyes. I’ve been watching you for years, he said. Little girl. Don’t run away! he said. I said I wouldn’t. You sure now? he said. Making me laugh. I said I was sure. He told me to get my coat and wait in the hall.

I stood in the dim entry hall, wondering about men and what they might do. Watching for him through the glass doors, streetlamps shining on parked cars and the night all around. My knees knocking together. If my father finds out I’m dead. He’s planning to kill me some day anyhow. I don’t care. I’m not his property. A girl belongs with her father till she’s at least thirty, he said. I had my own opinion about that.

Soon he was back with the car, a big shoddy white Oldsmobile. He held the door open, told me to get in. We drove a few blocks, went into a bar. I’d never been inside a bar before. Inwood had dozens of them with names like Sweeney’s, Clancy’s, Tom’s Irish Bar and so on. On Sundays the priests would rail against the number of bars and the number of people in them. Nobody in my family ever went to bars. But we were different, Italian and genteel. It wasn’t at all like I’d imagined it. Just a dark cramped little room, people jammed up against one another like on the subway and soul music blasting from a big jukebox in the corner. He ordered a Courvoisier brandy, then turned to me. What’ll it be? he said. I asked for a rye and ginger. My friend Eileen had told me, if you ever have to order a drink ask for rye and ginger because it’s not too gross. I took a tiny sip and put it down again. We sat down on a couple of bar stools and he looked at me and did that thing with his eyes again. They seemed to twinkle like two bright blue stars. Mischief, mischief! I thought. Not like the old pervs who try to grab you. Watching it all with my sober sixteen year old eyes. I was not a drinking girl. I figured I needed to be keeping my wits about me. He was so big, so beautiful, I wasn’t sure whether to be afraid of him or not. It smelled funny in there, like somebody had peed, and the floor all sticky. Nearly all men, and definitely all grown ups.

He leaned over and spoke softly into my ear. It’s too loud in here, he said. Why don’t you meet me tomorrow and we can go some place quiet? I like talking to you, he said. A man came up and asked us for money for the IRA. Go away, he said. He was looking into my eyes, his mouth looked almost as if he were about to laugh. He never smiled with his teeth, only the lips turned up a little and then those eyes. Later, much later, in Europe I saw men smile like that. I said I would meet him but I had to think of what to tell my mother first. Tomorrow was too soon, maybe in a couple of days. He asked for my phone number, wrote it down on a piece of paper, kissed it and put it in the pocket of his shirt. Come on, I’ll drive you home, he said. We drove up the hill and I told him where to stop. Thank you for driving me, I said. I sat quite still, waiting to see if he would try to kiss me but he did not. Good night! he said. He held his hand up to his ear, holding an invisible telephone. I’ll call you tomorrow, he said. It was lovely to meet you, I said. He stared at me for a moment, I couldn’t quite make out his expression in the light from the streetlamps. Thank you, baby, he said. It’s nice to meet you too. Good night, I said. Good night! When I got upstairs I realised he hadn’t once touched me, not even so much as the tips of his fingers.

A photograph: Backdrop a tall, spindly Christmas tree swathed in tinsel. A father holds his firstborn child in his arms, this time it’s a girl. He looks down at the tiny creature with unfathomable tenderness. The papery eyelids are shut and tiny fists clenched, she must be sleeping. Eyelids that lower whenever you come into the room now Daddy.

I let myself into the apartment as quiet as a mouse or maybe even half a mouse but it was no use, my father was right there waiting for me. You’re late, he said. Only half an hour, I said. I stayed to help Father Reardon clean up. We had to put out the chairs for Mass tomorrow. I made to slide past him towards my room but he dodged round me and stood there, blocking the narrow hallway. Kiss Daddy goodnight, he said. He put his arms around me, holding me close, breathing into my hair the odours of his body, pipe tobacco, soap. I felt like I needed to throw up. Rosie, he said, nuzzling my neck. Fear like a shark swimming up, getting closer now. What if he can see inside my head, see that Irish bar and the rye and ginger and Anton from the deli taking me away in his car, what if he can see all that the moment my lips touch his cheek? I stared hard at the Picasso print of Don Quixote hanging just behind him, holding on to it tight with my eyes till it filled my whole head. Good night, Daddy, I said, kissing him. Go to bed now, sweetheart, he said. I slipped into my room and shut the door. Then took off my coat, hands trembling and stumbling at the buttons. An old Persian lamb that had once belonged to my grandmother. In this coat I am practically Marlene Dietrich, I am Hedy Lamarr. So long as my father doesn’t see me without my coat he won’t know how short my dress is. I sit down on the bed and press my forehead to the windowpane, cold glass against hot skin. Through the bars of the fire escape jagged rooftops skinny TV aerials the crooked crazy night. A little sliver of moon stuck up in the sky just over the Henry Hudson Bridge. From this window I can see across the river the exact place where you will die.

On a map the street where I lived with my parents and my three brothers and the street where you lived and did those things with me are the same street. Once it crosses Isham Street and begins to climb the hill it changes its name from Cooper Street to Park Terrace. That climb up the hill, so slippery in winter, was all that separated us. Slippery as a hill of glass.

He called the next day. I’d been hanging around the phone all afternoon but my mother finally made me go to my room where I was supposed to be doing my homework. Rose there’s someone on the phone for you, she said. Obviously annoyed with me for daring to get a phone call. Everything I do annoys my mother, even breathing. Hello baby, how are things? he said. I said fine. Can you meet me tomorrow night? I’ll come pick you up. Not here, I said, trying to shut the kitchen door. A sliding door, it always got stuck inside the wall. My mother was about two feet away, listening. OK then meet me under the El, by the bus depot, he said. You know the place? Broadway and two eighteenth? I’ll pick you up at seven. OK, I said, trying not to say anything. You sure now? he said. Uh huh, I said. Don’t let me down! he said. I won’t, I said. Who was that? said my mother. He sounded German. Just some guy I met at Eileen’s, I said. He’s a cousin of hers or something. He wants to know if I’m going to the folk mass on Sunday. He sounded German, said my mother. He’s not, I said. Probably just fooling around.

Carcharodon Carcharias. The great white shark. This beast of the deep will travel fast and far in pursuit of its prey. And then there are the teeth. Up to three hundred in seven beautifully spaced rows. In an ocean of salt water it is able to detect so much as a single drop of blood.

— Encyclopaedia Universalis

You were waiting for me under the El in the big Olds, the same you used for deliveries. The T-bird only came out for special occasions — I had not yet been introduced to the T-bird. Jump in baby, you said. And we roared off into the night. Soon you stopped the car, turned the engine off, turned to look at me. Where are we, I wondered? Somewhere in the Bronx for sure. It was dark there under the El, I could just about see your face in a shaft of light from a streetlamp. I want to tell you something, you said. I want you to know I’m getting divorced. I’m waiting for my naturalization papers to come through, that’s all. It’s almost done, just a few more weeks. Do you understand? I said I understood fine. I’m not some kind of bum, you said. I have respect for you, Rosie. I have respect for you too, I said. Let’s talk a little, you said. Tell me about yourself, little girl. What do you do all day? I see you go by in your little school uniform... I hate school, I said. I go to the worst school in the world. I told you about the nuns, whose delight it was to make me suffer in both crude and subtle ways. You sat with one arm on the steering wheel, your head bowed towards me, listening carefully to every word I said. Nobody had ever listened to me like that before, like what I said mattered. It sounds just like the army! you said. I hated the fuckin’ army! I hate people telling me what to do! Then you leaned in slowly, taking my face in your enormous hand and looking right down into my eyes. Then you kissed me. I’d never been kissed before, not like that. Oh sure a few grotty boys had slobbered on my face, mauled me about a little after a dance or under a boardwalk but nothing like this. One of those boys made my nipples bleed, another took his dick out and told me to ‘make it hard for him’. Make what hard? I said, shying back from the ugly thing as he tried to thrust it into my hand. You kissed me. You kissed me and you kissed me and you kissed me... Kisses so velvet soft so warm so deep, I thought, this is what I have been waiting for all my life, this is exactly what I have been longing for my whole life long only I didn’t even know it, how is it possible that I didn’t even know?

The great white shark has a unique method of increasing speed when closing in on its prey. By stiffening its tail in mid swing it is able to produce an almost continuous thrust.

— Encyclopaedia Universalis

I have a nine inch dick, you said to me once. I measured it. I know a guy has one eleven inches. You could choke a horse with that thing. He has to look for one huge woman, you need a baby with a big box for that thing! Not for little girls like you. I tried to picture you measuring your dick with a ruler and thought it was pretty funny. My friend Eileen was wondering one day, is it true that guys with big hands and feet have small dicks? No! I said. And turned bright red. Are you all right baby? you said. That’s a big dick for a little girl. Sometimes I’d cry when you hurt me, cry into the pillow, hoping you wouldn’t see. I’m not a little girl! But I was afraid to say it. I’d pretend it didn’t hurt, afraid you would despise me for it. You said your wife was built like a brick shithouse. She was actually six feet tall. And what am I built like? I said. A little Prinzèss right out of a fairytale, you said. Raising your beautiful eyebrows, putting on a girlie voice. I was mad at you for making fun of me but I didn’t say anything. I was afraid to say anything.

Soon we were meeting at least once a week under the El. You’d phone in the afternoons after school, I’d race to get to the phone before my mother but didn’t always make it. Who is that? she said. Nobody, just a friend. Stop calling me! I begged. You’re going to get me killed. But I need to hear your voice, you’d say. Phone me. Will you phone me? Call me at the store.