_____NEWSPAPER GHOSTS by Marcy Wilson-Cales_{______}

"Hoffman is a "classic success" in the literary world today. Not since the Brothers Grimm arrived on the scene, to preserve and detail the richness of our past and the very validity of its future, has written words spoken out so vividly."

--NEW YORKER, 1920

"...unforgettable...haunting...the kind of tales you hear over the whisper of dying campfires in dark forests. And, once these stories come into your mind, they become a piece of your heart."

--PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, 1950

"Kara Hoffman’s work is as good as having an old grandmother by the fire."

--BOSTON GLOBE; Jan 4, 1945

Kara Hoffman’s books are each a work of art. The sewn pages are acid free and the covers strong and sturdy. The first page has a lush color print of a painting to go with one of the key scenes of one of the fairy tales recorded inside. The rest of the art is lush pen and ink, European in style and elaboration. The borders of the page have in its roots, European folk-art. On the facing page of the color plate, a dedication rests in copperplate, a different mentor for each book.

Once, when it had mattered, Julia had gone through all five books (five at the time; a new one added every two years or so), looking for herself in the dedications. She found one to her father, for his support, to her editor for believing in her, to her now-dead father, Julia’s grandfather, who had bought her a set of Grimm’s for her tenth birthday, firing her spark of imagination....

After the fifth book, Julia had instinctively known her name would never be in a dedication. She stopped looking. She did wonder why Kara would ignore her daughter and her own mother when everyone else in the world seemed to be given credit, but that was the case.

Julia was nine years old by then, and starting to understand certain things without needing them explained to her. She bore a great resemblance to her grandmother, growing moreso as she got older. Her mother was tiny, blonde, rounded, and blue-eyes, in all respects a copy of her father. She never said a thing when people commented on Julia’s resemblance to Jaki Hoffman, and people commented on it often. Julia knew the two women did not get along. Her father rather pointedly avoided the matter, and tended to his coffeeshop. It must have been ingrained in his daily habit, because even after Omi left, dropped off the face of the earth, he continued his long hours. And when Omi’s death was sent to them in a letter with a black seal on the envelope, he still continued to work.

"Show me the greatest magician in the world, and I will show you the world's greatest psychologist."

--Jaki Hoffman, letter to a friend.

"Conjuring requires no magic."

--German proverb

Omi herself had been fun to know; always laughing, always quick. She had been lean and spare, her fingers swift enough to click knitting needles like rain on a tin roof, or type a letter so quickly the keys would get stuck together. She had done the cooking and cleaning, and the general housekeeping while Kara wrote away the days and nights in her airless, hot attic study. When Julia broke her arm skating, it was Omi who stayed up and told the worst possible ghost stories over endless cups of white coffee and black tea, all three learned from the Gypsies she played with as a child. Julia didn’t remember the pain of the fracture, just remembered the stories. Then, when Omi grew tired of talking how her friends fixed horse races, read palms, and the secret burial grounds of the wild English ponies, she read aloud Sherlock Holmes and dared Julia to figure out the solution. Omi liked to quote Doyle, and his elimination of everything but the last possibility as the truth, was a byword of her character.

Throughout every childhood disease, Omi was there, a peculiar mix of science and superstition. She taught Julia how to read palms but made sure Julia understood the Gypsies never told each other fortunes because it ruined one’s good instincts in hard times. Every Christmas Eve, she cut six large onions and covered them in salt; reading the weather for each month in the moisture on the rings. She played with number games and logic problems; Omi had no understanding of babytalk or how to raise a proper young lady—Americans raised their daughters to be milk and water, as far as she was concerned. She simply encompassed her granddaughter into her life and Julia took the differences of her upbringing for granted. Tangram taught her physical geometry; mazes the compression of large spaces within small. She was a grown woman before realizing the abacus wasn’t a toy, and that most people didn’t know a Magic Square from a Multiplication Table.

"Sometimes, I miss traveling the world. I know Kara doesn’t. She hated to explore. She was content with her own backyard. She has roots, just like her father, and wants to sink them deep into a patch of soil to live there forever and never move again. Perhaps if Sebastian had lived, she could have built upon the security he would have offered. Well, John, it’s my fault too. I didn’t want her to grow in like a snail to the world, and I forced her into a lot of things. Even as a child, she was a terrible dreamer but she never wanted to share what she had. She was buried in books, and she piled more books over herself. She created a world that was very safe and secure, and she just wasn’t able to deal with any troubles that came around. It hurts to say this, but my youngest daughter is a parasite of sorts; taking and taking and never actually returning. She never understood that responsibility could be a gift, and she will never see what she has lost out of life. When the war takes away a family member or a friend, she never reacts. I don’t even know if she feels anything. Perhaps she can’t anymore."

--Jaki Hoffman, Swiss Alps, 1917

1946

Strange that Julia, now an adult, can remember Omi’s letters so clearly. She’s in the middle of her one-year stay in poor, war-torn Vienna, and fed up with too much culture and history living side by side with shattered bodies, minds and spirits. She needs to breathe clean air and see some wilds that the war forgot, so it seems to be a good idea to visit the Alps. Bridget’s game and along for the ride; she’s just as exhausted as Julia is. They have two weeks to kill before they go back to school, under the figurative thumb of professors who are afraid to think of a new idea since Freud and Jung. Julia, especially, is working in Vienna General Hospital, home of Ignaz Semmelweis, the man who first discovered the Germ back in the 1850’s...and was nearly ridiculed to death for it.

The Tyrolean Alps are an endless sweep of all shades of blue going into violet and white. Snowcaps blend with clouds and the alpine strawberries are ripe. The guides pick them whenever they can, and the women agree with the sentiment. Mint is everywhere, with pale lavender blooms, and small frail flowers that Julia has heard of but never seen in real life. The sun is so bright one can forget it isn’t all that warm. Occasionally they see a small herd of the stunted-looking cattle with wooden bells about their necks and the herders still wear raincoats of grass for the unexpected bursts of rain. The cattle, the guides tell them, have winter hides over a quarter inch thick, and much valued for shoe leather.

Later in the evening the guides harvest small birds, mostly songbirds, out of web-fine mesh and wring their necks, dropping them feathers and all into the soup pot. Bridget is slightly discomfited, but Julia had already been warned about this in Omi’s letters, and had been bracing herself for this since they stepped into the frostline. Admittedly, dinner is good.

"Hard to believe anyone can cross these," Bridget says over supper. The shadows are melting valley and mountain into one smooth, infinite shelf of gray-violet. Behind them the guides are with the rest of the travelers, helping them set up their respective tents. "But then, I guess that’s why the churches keep Missing Persons records for several hundred years...never know when someone will come out of an old avalanche."

"Mmn." Julia agrees. She’s thinking again, back to Omi’s old letters, and especially, the one that revealed so much about her mother. Kara had written many stories about this particular plot of land, but never did she do anything that would make her readers feel sad, like making dinner of small birds or remembering ancient, lost bodies under bitter ice. Even though it’s the height of summer here, the wind forever smells of snow, and killing cold, and of the primal chill that will settle tonight from the north. Julia feels this, and wonders, how her mother could constantly deny the thorn on the rose.

Julia finds Omi in the basement, inside hard cardboard boxes held together with coppery staples and books that smell like men’s cologne. Letters in a swift hand, done by ink already fading after a few decades. Julia traces the slope of the J’s with a finger. She writes the same way her grandmother does. Years later, a graphologist with too many drinks under his belt at a criminal psychology convention will tell her she is completely linear, and lacking in imagination and certain mental concepts. What he means is, because she doesn't waste paper by leaving margins and has no use for swooping F’s and S’s, her writing is fully functional, with no artistic endearments to it whatsoever. Then he apologizes. There is a strong elegance to her personality that shows in her writing. He calls it the elegance of simplicity and efficiency. Julia likes being referred to as "efficient" but gently rebuffs his increasingly drunken advances. He is charming, but that is as it goes, and "charming" has been the word to describe her mother far too often.

Julia wonders about writing a lot. Her thoughts are no deeper than any young girl’s on the edge of adulthood. She’s been mentally aware for years, and felt trapped by the body she wears, impatient for it to catch up with the rest of her. She explores the basement in silence, alone but for the thin layers of dust and mildew and the cat when it comes looking for mice.

Omi exists in yellowing pages, paper tombs of a past that her mother wants to be dead forever. Omi had raised many children besides Kara. Hers and any stragglers that came by for attention. Julia finds letters to Omi, written by those children, in languages from odd corners of the world. Children grown up and no doubt telling their children of the laughing woman who always had the pot on to boil and a card trick to show them. Omi had been a stage magician, a professional medium. Julia finds this so astonishing it takes a long time for her to believe it, and a longer time to get over the shock. Her grandmother, her snow-white hair braided like a thick rope of cream over her left shoulder, had once been a free-spirited traveler of the world, packing halls with acts of illusion and wonder. Omi Hoffman catching bullets? Ectoplasm pouring from her lips like milky smoke as she becomes a telephone for the dead? It was easier to imagine the troll-shaped crack on Julia’s bedroom ceiling, to start talking to her.

1941

The summer crawls along wearily, its vigor sapped by the heat. It drags its heels as it struggles to leave town before Autumn arrives. When one has the nerve to step outside, the entire world smells of baking bread: drying seeds in the tall yellow grasses in the field behind Dalky Avenue. The young children, halfway invincible, gather ripe cattails on the far end where the wetland forms in winter, and chase peacock colored damselflies. The heat is killing the weaker people. Normally the trees would be coloring with the first blush of fall’s early fire, but there is no fire now, only heat. Heat that dries life from the earth and the leaves are browning flat and dead. Some shops don’t even open until the evening, and close as the sun rises. Influenza is the name of the monster that keeps children close to home and well behaved. Up till now, it had been a punishment of other towns. But they hear, all the same, of the quarantine and entire families found dead or dying, of the stink of disinfectant and boiled white vinegar.

One day Julia goes for an early morning wander down Main Street and finds a change: the large bowl of blue-green water in the front window had been replaced with water colored the red of blood. The quarantine is here. Travelers see the warning and keep going. Every morning the hospital’s death-car rolls down the street. White linen bedsheets shroud the windows. The bell of every church is always ringing, sometime and somewhere, the hollow and heavy sound of plague.

Julia stays in the basement and no one thinks it odd; everyone tries to avoid the world. Her father works in the store as much as he can, where the fans are better and cheap medicines sell out every few days. Only her mother ignores the weather and the death. She ignores everything when she writes. Writing is her world more than her daughter, more than her husband. No one questions this at all.

"Part of a conjurer’s magic is to appear like everyone else."

--Arabic.

"Devils laugh when men make plans."

--Japanese

1941

The evenings are burning, casting everything into hot gold. A world Midas would have liked. Julia and her best friend Bridget O’Fee are sitting outside the Vinalia Community Building. Most of the women are inside, and the rattle-click-hum of the weaving club’s shuttles and pedals sound almost alive, like a giant nest of bees. Here you can catch a breeze. Not a cool breeze, though. That’s too much to hope for. Their long church skirts flow around their ankles, and Bridget picks up a lump of soft chalk from someone’s hopscotch, running it smooth between her long fingers. Her aunt has just died. First assumption is the influenza, but it was really the water. Wells are going dry. What water there is, is in danger of going stale and bad. Everyone’s boiling now. You can’t be too careful when Nature is rebelling against you.

A strange sound—a distant crack, sends the girls’ heads up, considering. They’re still wondering what it is when the ambulance screams by. It isn’t until the shadows grow and they head back to Dalky Avenue, that they find out it was Bridget’s cousin Rus. Depressed by his mother’s death, the boy took his own life. The cracking sound they had heard was the window of his attic room slamming shut after him.

"Someday, the West is going to come to its senses and throw Aristotle, that great moron, OUT the window and INTO the trash where he belongs, and give Heraclitus the credit he deserves for having a TRUE understanding of the Natural World. Aristotle a scientist? The irony of the joke is almost cruel. His (in)famous Law of Contradictions might be the keystone of Western Logic, but Logic is a new toy upon this poor weary Earth. In Aristotle’s world, nothing can change from one nature to another, that opposites are a danger to struggle from. Under this reasoning, there is no doyo, no shift from winter to spring, summer to fall, just the seasons sprung, helter-skelter, into being! Heraclitus, on the other hand, was nearly Taoist; there were no rival forces at odds, only a vast universal harmony. Aristotle is easy to mindlessly accept, but Heraclitus is what makes us think, and consider. And in doing so, we reaffirm the reasons for our being here."

Julia finds this minor tirade on the back of a VERY large postcard; one in a series of ongoing and friendly fights between herself and an Irish philosopher named John Morton. The postcard is made of a photograph of her grandmother, quite young, her hair dark and glossy and as long as ever, braid falling to her waist over her left shoulder. She’s wearing her medallion, of course, and...a man’s suit, black, with swallowtails. One day Julia realizes this is her stage magician’s suit.

She is standing next to a large gray tombstone in what is clearly a cemetery in Europe—American graveyards aren’t that old and decrepit yet—and the stone reads in impossible, squat letters:

HEIR RHUT IN MUTTERSHOSS DER URD

HOUFFMANNAZ

And, in very small print, directly on the photo itself, in Omi’s hand:

"Family Plot, Babenhausen, Germany."

Germany’s somewhat less ominous version of the "Rest in Peace" or, "God Graunt He Lye Still." Julia considers this postcard as the bells toll the lives away, ring by deep throated ring.

She traces the letters slowly, considering the mystery of the skeletons underneath the soil, and the mystery of death itself. Omi records death matter-of-factly, casually, mentioning the lack of proper regard in other people. She doesn’t sound like the dead really ARE dead.

And yet, they...aren’t they?

If a medium really is real, and they can talk to the dead...do they think of death the way other people do?

Julia rests her damp face on her arm, trying to find the answers with her own ability to reason.

"It was a brief period of time indeed, when Science and Spiritualism lived hand in hand. People still accepted the matters of the soul with less embarrassment than they do now. And women found a new acceptance in this world with their cultivated abilities to communicate with the dead."

Julia reads haltingly the Deutsch of her grandmother. Omi had been a thinker and a recorder of the world, and how she makes sense of it, and its beauty. She justifies her viragic choice of career in simply taking her natural abilities and making use of them. She uses words that don’t translate well in English. If they translate at all. Julia can literally feel her mind struggle to understand new concepts: the marchen of fairy tales, Gedankenexperiments...she has a personal thing against Freud. Before she ever cracks open a tome of Sigmund’s Required Reading in Psychology, Julia has already had her opinions altered against the man who knew not, even on the day he died, what women really wanted out of life. She absorbs without being aware of it, how to argue points clearly and simply. She doesn’t like big words, does Omi.

Was that why she killed off the last two letters in the family name?

Julia goes looking, having found no answers that can satisfy. By now she knows its rather out of the common norm for herself to carry the same last name as her mother and Omi, but not her father. Out of the norm, at least, in America, where the suffix "-ster" is the only vestige of the English clans that were founded by women, not men.

"Magic is the very breath of life. We cannot kill it. It is our sense of wonder in all things. All we can do is stifle its embers. When I perform, I never ignore what my people want to see. They want to see life and light, yes, but they want the darkness and death there too—without them, happiness has no meaning, any more than freedom can be defined to those who have never tasted slavery."

--Jaki, to John Morton, 1922

1951

"So what does it mean?"

Duncan asks just a little bit sluggishly. She’s reminded of that drunken graphologist in that dratted convention in Los Angeles. Only, Duncan is a sight better on the eyes. He’s very tall, and very Scottish, and she knows without a doubt that if he gets just one more shot of that "water of life" in his blood, he’s going to start telling her more horror stories about Black Annis, the One-Eyed Blue Cannibal Hag of the Hills.

She finishes her own drink before replying, feeling no pain on her own part. She’s entitled. Seven hundred and fourteen staid, stiff and oh-so-proper Old School, Hidebound and Chauvinistic doctors couldn’t toss a single challenge to her paper without her shooting them down like clay pigeons. "Advantages of Pulse Taking in the Radial Artery Above Conventional Methods." Eat your heart out, Democrites. She wonders if she’ll be this giddy tomorrow. Wouldn’t that be great. Dave tried to warn her that it might not be a good idea to "brag" about her findings, but she doesn’t see how it could be bragging. Dave’s sweet, but a conservative worrywort. Sometimes she wonders how he survived med school with his skin intact. She’s thirty-one, not some over-charged prodigy.

Why is she even thinking about Dave? Here’s Duncan sitting right across the table from her, waiting patiently for her to answer with his gleaming eyes. Gray or green? They look like one...then the other. And like his eyes, Duncan’s mind is always shifting, glimmering. Thinking. Three people can talk to him at once and he can keep up easily. She thinks he looks like a little boy promised a good story.

She suddenly feels awkward; wishing Bridget was here instead of in Nova Scotia, researching old influenza corpses buried under the permafrost. She clears her throat from the bramble-burn of Cutty Sark and sets the shot down with a cut-glass clatter. "S’funny," she says, wondering just how drunk SHE is. "The name is incredibly old...I had to go backwards and backwards on it..." Another shot. Her eyes water. "Hoffman means, on the surface, Hoff’s Man, and in many contexts, it means exactly that. Some’ve the dictionaries say it means anything from a coutier to a farm manager, but while it sounds distinguished enough, I kept coming across some um...slightly pejorative definitions that implied a low birth. And my family only recently came over to Germany...they spent most of their existence in Austria, which is like being a kind of mongrel to some people." She struggles to explain. "It’s kind of like my having a Pennsylvanian accent, and expecting to be considered English just because I speak a form of it."

Duncan grins. "I guess a lot of us are peasant Americans, then." He offers. His own accent still leaks out, the faintest burr of heather and harebells. Julia can’t explain why she’s so comfortable with first-generation Americans like herself...except that they seem to not take certain things for granted.

"Well. That’s the whole point of America." Julia tells him.

"S’go on." He urges.

Julia reaches for the water this time, and gulps like a fish. "OK...going back on the records, where you really need a translator for half the books, I came across some accounts of the family in the 15^th century—about 200 years after Babenhausen stopped being a lump of mud inside a high wall. Here, the name is clearly, Hoff’s Man." Swallow. "Vassals. Peasants belonging to the current landowner—they were listed in the value charts."

"Shades of Dead Souls." Duncan says.

"Mmn-hmn, that’s not the best part of it. These serfs were inherited though the women’s line—like it was done in the West Indies—" Julia plays with a straw puzzledly. "Man as a suffix, means "woman" just as the prefix "wer" means "man." That’s why we say "werewolf" for a man who can change into a wolf."

"Werewolf." Duncan repeats. "So..." His brain is comfortably padded with the softness of an alcoholic cloud. "Hoff’s Man, means, Hoff’s Woman."

"Yup." Definitely, a little too much to drink,. Oh, well. "I thought all this was really...reaching for it, until I was paging through an alphabet of European runes, and I found one called the Mannaz—it looks a lot like an M married to an X—" She’s leaning her whole weight on her elbows right now, and the table doesn’t feel hard at all. "It means, humanity, but that which is in the female sense of the word."

"Wow." Says Duncan.

They stare at each other in silence over the small table, as the bar-bustle continues on. Julia hopes he changes the subject soon. She’s done enough talking. Her powers of concentration aren’t up to much more.

"Did I ever tell you," Duncan blinks, "That the windows in my grandfather’s home was kept small so Black Annis couldn’t grab the children through them?"

Brief pause.

"No." Julia admits. And finally, can’t hold back any longer. "Are your eyes gray or green?"

"Both." He smiles sweetly as her heart suddenly jump-starts. "Glas. Gaelic. It means both Gray AND green."

"It does?" Julia frowned. "How can that be?"

"Just a mistake on a mild accent...the older legends of the Gray Man got confused with the later translators...and that’s why it’s Sir Gawain and the GREEN Knight, instead of the Gray Man." He smiles again. "The colors of life and death, under one word."

"I have no idea what to say to that." Julia confesses.

"Try, ‘mo bhron.’"

"Movron." Julia repeats clumsily. "That means...what?"

"Alas, alack..."

Julia snickers. "Pouge mahone, you sassenach."

He bursts out laughing, a roaring tumble of boulders down a hill. People stop and stare. "You’ll have to buy my drinks for that!"

"Then you’ll have to buy me dinner." She shoots back.

He grins like a merry bandit. "All right...but what if I COOK dinner...at my place?"

1941

Dust gathers, dry and pale on the cobwebs of the basement. Dust from the yellow clay soil that brought the settlers in to build the yellowware kilns to build the town to build the railroad to bring in the refugees of the world in this little place called Vinalia, barely deserving of its own name; considered to be a part of Philadelphia.

The graveyards are choking. They are small plots of land, tended by the few, small churches. None of them are prepared for the kind of reapings they are facing now. The kids that are allowed to play with each other are scaring themselves silly with overblown stories of old graves being dug up to make more room. They say where the old bones should be, are nothing more than a long smear of red dirt in the ground. Death goes walking down the streets at night, they say, looking for people who are stupid enough to be out.

Death here; death abroad. Soldiers dig trenches under the light of enemy shells. Hired hands dig trenches for the newly dead outside city limits. Crematoriums clog skies with oily smoke on both sides of the world, for different reasons. Soldiers covered loosely in sheets, still bleeding. White-wrapped influenza victims drowned in their own lungs. The Sunday paper carries eight-page adventures of a cartoon crimefighter in a mask that battles Nazis and germ warfare on a regular basis. Women freed to join the workplace are genies freed from their bottles.

"You have to come back when the war is over." Orders the tiny husband in the editorial cartoon.

"Oh, yeah?" Laughs his fifty-foot wife in overalls. Upheaval within; without. And all under the rays of the sun. How fitting. Influenza. Influenced by the stars, the stories go, for Canicula rules until the eleventh, the Dog Days of panting heat and illness.

1953

Duncan ladles water from the bucket onto the hot glowing rock. Steam boils from the konnos, releasing worlds of heat. It pricks the parched, thirsty skin like tiny hot-cold needles. He sighs in relief.

"So, what did Dave have to say?"

"Mn?" Julia asks, head buried under a towel.

"I said," Duncan lifts the towel up. She’s as hot and sweaty as he is, only she carries off her bathing suit with far better grace. "What did Dave have to say?"

Julia shrugs. "Not much." She lifts an eyebrow. :I know you don’t care for him."

"He shouldn’t have gotten Placement over you."

Old argument. Stubborn argument. Worn to death argument. "It’s hardly his fault he’s male, any more than I’m female."

"If Cannon would have just acknowledged that credit in—"

"He was too conventional to admit I might be right. Dave’s ideas of morality were suitably comfortable for him." In other words, just a tad old fashioned. Julia’s refusal to pin down hard concepts of good and evil are always giving her trouble. "This is the PAST, Duncan. Let it be."

"And you can be friends with him? Somebody who wants to just be a GP in a one-stop town shouldn’t get placed higher than someone who pulled a double major in two different fields of medicine."

"I don’t think they’ve GOT a stop sign over there yet...it’s past, Duncan. I don’t need them or their approval."

"Your ‘friend’ calls you eccentric."

"And brilliant too." Julia teases. "I call him worse."

Duncan falls silent. The hot rocks hiss like snakes carved of crystal. His ink-black hair shines. She lies on her stomache on the top shelf and muses at him.

Lately, he’s tired often, and something like defeat is in his eyes. Nothing to do with his career, or with them...but he’s losing his appetite and he isn’t sleeping anymore. He used to joke about the team they’d make. Look out, Salk! But the jokes have stopped coming...about the same time he started staring at the sky like the blue was too beautiful to bear. When he started talking about HER career instead of THEIR career...when he started taking dextromethorphan with every meal. His work isn’t affected...yet...but she can’t get him to take a checkup. Whatever’s wrong with him, he knows. And she’s afraid she knows what it is too.

She wants suddenly, to look at his palm and read what’s there like Omi taught her.

But Omi was right. Fortunetelling is a leech to the spirit. If she really had the courage, she would read the truth in his eyes.

Glas eyes. Gray/green. The colors of both life and death.

"Why’d you do it?" He suddenly asks in the steamy silence.

"Why what?"

"Why’d you decide to become a psychiatrist?"

Myriad answers to a linear question. Responsibility. The gift of. Community. The fact that all other frontiers have been explored or trampled, and the only one left is the one at home: the human animal, body, mind, and soul... Although she’s learned to feel embarrassment whenever the soul enters the topic of conversation. They’ve managed to do that to her. The chance to be famous. Oh, yes. That does exist. To be somebody besides Kara Hoffman’s little shadow. To mark her name in her own way. In a more responsible way that has nothing to do with mentally-induced pipe dreams and happy endings and ever-afters.

And death.

She answers absently, her hushed voice filling the softness of the sauna.

"It’s...like magic..."

1941

The young girl-nearly-grown lives among the newspaper ghosts, reading what they have to say. The medallion Omi left her is no longer heavy around her neck. She’s growing into it. An iron design, on an iron chain. Sometimes she stops time upon herself, caught by the play of sunbeams catching on the bits of colored glass. "Tools can be traps." Her grandmother whispers in her mind.

1946

"I don’t know." Julia can feel the dying sun on her face. She opens her eyes to it. The Alps are melting like candlewax into soft lumps, smoothing with the approaching night. "I’m American but there are times when I feel more American than the ones who’ve been there longer."

Bridget nods, her pale white-yellow hair falling across her face. Her name is Gaelic, but she’s her Polish father’s daughter, every inch of her. Eyes pale as a shallow lake’s often sparkle like morning dew, and her skin is a dusty pale Slavic brown. Grown up together in the same small town outside Philadelphia. Decided to be doctors together. Only Bridget had the full blessings of her family. Eventually, their paths will divide them, but for now, its summer, and they have two weeks before they go back and finish their studies in Vienna.

"I know exactly what you mean," She says. "Maybe we’re just a different kind of American...maybe first-generation Yanks can’t help but think and see differently."

"I don’t know." Julia says again. "Sometimes I feel like the safe and secure groups are just using us as an excuse to lash out."

Doesn’t Bridget know what THAT means. They’ve been blamed for everything other Americans feel the brunt of. Higher land prices. Quality of schools. Alien thoughts. Differences.

In delicate ways, the first generation Americans are neither fish nor fowl; partly rejected by the Old World and the New World. It encourages the vague rootlessness they often feel, and their ability to pack up and move without thinking much of it. Better to look ahead and travel a good road, than to stay and fester in a swamp.

"Remember when the flu hit, in 1941?" Julia asks softly. Her eyes have gone far away. "How...we thought it was the end of the world?"

"I remember." Bridget whispers too. "And how it meant nothing to the rest of the country. There were other epidemics...other deaths. Our town was just too small to be all that important. We didn’t even get mentioned in the county’s statistics."

"Yes." Julia sighs. "Strange, isn’t it."

Both of them fall silent as the sun bleeds its life away behind the earth. Kara would never write this. She never injects such moods into her work. Julia’s never reads her mother’s works, but why bother? She’s Kara Hoffman’s daughter—how can she avoid hearing the endless gushing and fawning other people have to spill over her?

So many people desperate to be happy, even if it’s in a story that isn’t real, with no blood to spill, no bones to break. Not even a winter wind on an Alpine evening. Julia can understand that craving for a never-never land, after the shock of death and pain, but even before the war, people were insanely happy with Kara’s latest title came out.

Julia wonders if she could understand it, and, with a snow-smelling wind ruffling her hair, she wonders if she’s not happy.

1941

Omi had been outspoken for the women of the Labor Party, but no one had ever pinned anything down on her. "Charges dropped for lack of evidence" occurs with damning frequency in clipping after clipping, while other people sit behind bars hang. Sometimes, it almost feels as if the medallion grows warm around Julia’s neck while she reads, sometimes, it almost feels like Omi is there, sitting cross-legged on top of the BLACK CAT ORANGES crate, elbows on her knees and grinning, her mug of mud-thick coffee at her side while her medallion, the one she left Julia, swings from her neck on its iron chain.

"They thought, sometimes, that I was trading my freedom for information to the Pinkertons." Where did Omi write this? Sometimes, Julia’s memory of Omi’s written word, and Omi’s spoken word, blur and run together. "But I never did. I was cautious. God gave the tiger stripes so she could hide in the grass." The medallion glitters under the sunlight. Reflecting into her yellowish eyes. "Why do tigers like the grass? Because they can hunt? Because they’re invisible? Both reasons. And I survived ALL my enemies."

Julia sometimes feels too small and young for the weight of the medallion (just like she feels she doesn’t understand all of those words), but it was the only thing Omi actually, truly left her. Omi called it an Earth’s Eye but never said why. Julia finds this peculiar, but it’s just like Omi to leave a riddle behind her. She finds the peculiar pattern on the obverse repeated in the iron folk motif called Circle & Star. Six circles forming a star. It was used against hexes, and the Amish still use it to keep their barns safe.

Hex: witch; sorceress; hag.

Hexen=treis: m. Magic circle

Hex: Greek for Six

"One unique trait in Teutonic Paganism was its Wheel of the Year. While it shared its roots in Celtic Tradition, the Germanic form held SIX festivals a year instead of four, carried six as an especially lucky number, and their symbol for the year was a wheel with six spokes radiating. One other name for the wheel was, "the sun."

--John Morton, letter to Jaki, 1934

Pg. 2, Paxon Daily News, Paxon, PA, Oct. 6, 1919

TRAVELLING PREFORMER BRINGS MAGIC TO LOCAL CHILDREN

Jaqueline Huffman, world-famous stage magician, illusionist and medium, will be appearing at the Paxon Hall Theatre tomorrow, from 5pm until 7pm only. Admission is free for children under 12, else, ten cents: adults, twenty-five. No food or drinks please. Entertainment will be wholesome and enjoyable. Proceeds will go to the Fund for Paxon’s War Orphans."

(clipped to the back of above; article from the following day with the first half missing, and preceeding a scathing note from Jaki over the misspelling of her name):

"...t Mr. Van Buren was astonished to learn later that his compliance with Prof. Hoffman’s simple request had led to his being hypnotized. Friends and family claim he made quite a creditable chicken, but he does not intend to examine any more pieces of exotic jewelry."

Julia laughs out loud to read it.

Sept. 10, 1941

CHERRYH, CHERRYH, & ELDONSDOTTIR

Dearest Kara,

It grieves me to inform you by letter, news that should be given to you in person. Seven years ago from this day, your mother told me she had business in the Homeland. I advised her not to go, with the political climate so turbulent. She assured me she was aware of the nature of Europe, and considered no more dangerous than that of our country’s. At any rate, she made certain her affairs were in order before she left. The nature of her trip, she never mentioned.

"I hope that it was merely your own pressing business that kept you from answering the letters I sent you. I would dread to think that after all this time, you did not know what she had done. But as you are no doubt aware, after the period of seven years, a missing person is declared legally dead, and the state or the attorneys (if known) execute the letter of the client’s estate.

"As you will see in the attached documents, your mother left Julia well cared for in the event she should need help. She was strongly of the opinion that you and Rodger needed no aid; I noticed that even in these financial straits, your GRIMJACK novels are selling as well as ever. Perhaps we, as a people, have never needed the works of fantasy as much as we do now, with two global wars, an epidemic, and the grip of the Depression inside our recent memories. I confess, when troubled I am sorely tempted to page through the worlds you have breathed life into. It is a far better world than that of subopenas.

"In a few days, Julia will be a legal adult. I congratulate her, and wish her the best. Her assets have been transferred into the savings account your mother founded at her birth. I will personally be giving her the details myself, but I felt as a mother, you would naturally be concerned for your child’s future, and felt it best to tell you first.

"You can expect my visit three days from this letter.

"Best Regards,

Ericha Eldonsdottir, Attorney at Law.

1941

On the day before Julia’s birthday, the basement is empty of Omi’s things. Julia looks, never saying a word, for traces of her grandmother, but nothing is left. The boxes are filling up with her mother’s life. Manuscripts and rough drafts. Reviews. Books critiques. Reject and acceptance slips. Years of them. Privately printed, limited edition stories of the folklore and fairy tales that Julia has no interest in reading.

"Your mom’s a great storyteller. How come you never read any of her things?"

She hears that again and again, from her friends, from their mothers, from people she’s never met before. Her ignorance always astonishes them, that she could live next to a fountain and never drink from it. But Julia never cared for the taste of those waters, and she doesn’t want to read what her mother has to say. That would be giving in to the situation, to accept the fact that Kara Hoffman wanted to raise her daughter up with printed words instead of the spoken. Julia doesn’t feel like she’s had a mother—Kara never told her any of the stories she wrote of, when she was a baby and in need of them. Omi had been the one to tell her of ghosts and gypsies, of talking animals, vampires, and singing trees. Even back then, her mother was too busy writing, wanting to record herself for posterity. Let others get what good they can out of it. Julia could never get what was her right, as the child of the storyteller, and so refused the cup altogether.

Only one poster survives of Jaki Hoffman’s days as a stage magician. A present from the woman lawyer who handled her affairs. Julia unrolls it to see a large black and white print from a photograph; her grandmother, so young, only ten years older than Julia is now, and Julia realizes with a start, that she looks JUST LIKE HER. She’s smiling, leaning against a gray stone wall, dressed in the black swallowtail suit, her hands and head bare, a loose mane of thick dark hair falling down her back. She isn’t quite dressed like a regular magician. She wears a dark turtleneck sweater instead of a vest and laced shirt. Her medallion hangs from her throat, in the center of her open jacket.

In German, the letters below are brief:

THE MAGICIAN HAS RETURNED.

"A remarkable woman." Ericha says quietly.

"Where is she?" Julia thinks that what little she sees of the background, is oddly familiar.

"That’s the homeland." Ericha explains. "Babenhausen, in the Western part of the country. She’s leaning against the Hexen Turn. That was Jaki for you—irreverent humor from the beginning to the end."

Hexen Turn. The Witch Tower. Where they hung witches or burned them alive, depending on your taste. Yes, it would be just like Omi to advertise magic in such a place, to laugh at people who thought it had been killed.

"Kara Hoffman’s work is a credit to the body of American folklore and fiction, and deserves a place on every shelf."

--Cooper Reviews, jl/5/47

"The GRIMJACK TALES are a worthy companion to MacDonald’s PHANTASIES, to Frank L. Baum, and Lewis Carroll."

--Pennsylvania Bell, 1/1/50

Feb. 19, 1926

Jaki Hoffman

Hexen Turn/Babenhausen, Germany

To Kara Hoffman

14 Dalky Ave.

Vinalia, PA

Kara,

I am telling you not to give up this child.

Your Mother,

Jaki

1941

Julia never asks where Omi’s papers are. It doesn’t matter in the long run. She remembers all of it.

She steps outside of the house as a legal adult, answerable to no one. Stray strands of dark red hair, braided to one side, catch with the evening wind. She lifts her head up, inhaling deeply the scent of the grassy field, turpentine in the dying pines, antiseptic against the flu, and the first, faint tang of ozone drifting down from far, far above. She searches for it, a young girl with centuries under the skin. A thin scratch of lightning in the inky sky reflects against her green eyes, a skeleton hand made of longfingerd fire stretching down to stroke the weary earth. Autumn brushes its hands off briskly, getting down to the business of moving in. And its first act will be to wash weak and sickly Summer, out of the world.

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