Brian Gifford
Haunted
In my memory, it is the summer of 1976. I am climbing a hill on my bike, approaching a brick building that was already old when my parents were born. Once an elementary school, it is now a library. It is named Nauvoo, from a Hebrew word meaning “beautiful place.” The sun is struggling to reflect off the library’s dirty burnt red brick exterior, and I am now in its shadow. I am five years old and I am alone, my mother home hanging clothes on the line, my father working at the factory. I am over a mile from home, and no one else is around. In my memory it is the kind of scene from which a child is likely to be abducted. But it is several years before Adam Walsh, before most parents began worrying about things like allowing children to be alone outside. It is just the library, the suffused sunlight and me.
How I have forgotten so much but remember this particular scene nearly fifty years later I do not know. Still, I sense that there are things I cannot remember from that day. Sometimes there is a flash of red, a car door slamming, the smell of cigarettes in the ashtray, all ephemeral and suggestive of something more just outside the reach of my memory.
I wonder why this memory of the library comes to me from time to time while I can no longer resurrect what must be thousands of other scenes from my life, even those I have had as an adult. My wife often asks: “Do you remember?” Often, I do not. The doctor says that this is probably normal, but that we will keep an eye on it.
Our children are all grown now, so I have plenty of time on my hands. I tell my wife I am going for a drive. She tells me she worries that I won’t be able to find my way back home. I assure her that I will.
After driving around aimlessly for a while, I end up at our town’s glittering new library, all awash in white and chrome, the sun easily reflecting off it. Inside the library, a memory flashes: I am inside the Nauvoo library looking at the Berenstain Bears book The Bike Lesson, in which Papa Bear teaches Brother Bear how to ride a bike. I find the book in the children’s section of the glittering library. I remember it as Berenstain Bears, and I recall that the Berenstains were Jewish and Holocaust survivors. I notice that the title is spelled Berenstain Bears. I place The Bike Lesson back on the shelf and go to the biographies, where I learn that only Stan Berenstain was Jewish, they were not Holocaust survivors, their name was always spelled Berenstain, and they were both born in Philadelphia.
“Let’s visit Philadelphia. ” I say to my wife.
“You know we’ve been there, just last year, right? On one of our art museum trips.”
Now I remember. We decide to visit an art museum we have not been to before, the Cleveland Museum of Art.
I discover that the Cleveland museum has a library with over a half million volumes. It is a closed stack, non-circulating library. I sign up for a library account, and I search the library’s database. Sparked by one of the museum’s Edward Hopper paintings, I put in a request for a book titled Edward Hopper: Painter of Indirect Light and Loneliness. I begin flipping through its pages. There is a painting of a woman sitting alone on her bed. There is a painting of a woman alone in an automat. And then there is a painting of a young boy biking up a hill alone, approaching a building with a dirty burnt red brick exterior, the boy in its shadow .
It is my memory.
Now I realize how unreliable memory is. How fragmented. Not only do I not recall things that happened, I recall things that didn’t. Did I ever visit a library named “beautiful place” in Hebrew? Did my mother hang clothes on a line? Did my father work at a factory? They are gone, so I cannot ask them.
Worried that I am running out of time to uncover the answers, I go for a drive. Stairway to Heaven comes on the radio, and the song unravels more threads in the tapestry of my past: In my memory, I am being led out of the Nauvoo library on that day in the summer of 1976; the sun is blazing in the angry cloudless sky, I am being forced into a car that I had not seen before that day— a bright-red Dodge Charger with faded red interior, the texture of a crushed Velvet Elvis—Led Zeppelin is playing on the 8-track, a crinkled pack of Virginia Slims is lying on the backseat beside me, and I am being driven away from a past that I cannot yet remember, into a future that to this day remains contingent and uncertain.
Brian Gifford's fiction has recently been published in Agape Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, BULL, and The Muleskinner Journal, which has nominated his story "So Long as They Both Shall Live" for a Pushcart Prize.
