Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

Prologue: Larceny

Prologue: Larceny ADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE My parents seemed to believe in letting everyone do whatever they wanted until they became very good at it or died. My father, Cecil Hemley, was a poet, novelist, editor, and translator ofIsaac Bashevis Singer's work. He was also a good smoker and that's what he died of when I was seven. My older brother Jonathan used to be good at everything, from languages to sports to the sciences, but over the last twenty years he's specialized-in OrthodoxJudaism, and lives with his eight children and wife in LA My sister Nola was good at everything, too, art and language, but especially things ofthe spirit-and that, in a sense, is what she eventually died from. My mother Elaine Gottlieb is a short story writer and teacher. She's good at surviving. As for myself... I've always had a larcenous heart. As I get older, the thiefdiminishes, but still there is something inside me essentially untrustworthy, someone hard and calculating, egged on by the deaths ofmy father and sister, someone who will not always accept responsibility for his actions. I remember a camp counselor at Granite Lake Camp in New Hampshire telling me one night that he was on to me. He called me conniving. I pretended I didn't know what he was talking about, and was silent. He was one of the only people who saw through me like that, or at least one of the few who ever told me directly. I wonder about confession, this nagging need. When I confess, I make myselfvulnerable. Some people will like me for it and others will arm themselves with my admissions and hurl them back. One time I told my mother what this counselor had said about me and the next time we argued, she said, "Your counselor was right. You are conniving." After that, I resolved to bury myselfdeeper, to hide this other person where even I wouldn't be able to recognize him. Sometimes I think it's too late, that he has already stolen away the things my sister gave me-things ofthe imagination and spirit that he pawned to support his habit. xiii XZV Nola INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE I'm looking through a drawer ofadesk in my room at mygrandmother's house. I'm seventeen and I'm lookingforsomething to steal-loose change would begreatoran antiquepaperweightorletter opener. Inside one ofthe drawers, I come across a legal-sized document with a rusty paperclip attached. It's titled POINT OF ERROR #1 and reads "The Finding that 'No marriage between Elliot Chess and Elaine Gottlieb (also known as Elaine Remley) was ever entered into at any time oratany place' is contrary to the evidence and against the weight of the evidence. Appelleesproved the contractofmarriage." That's asfor as I read. I'm not sure what this document is or how itpertains to me, but I know I have to have it, and I know thatI can't tell anyone about it. It has something to do with Nola, who's been dead threeyears. DISCOVERY Uncovering the facts, not even the facts but the feelings of my sister and mother's lives, has become a detective story for me. It started out before I even knew it was a detective story, when I was seventeen and found some court documents about my mother and Nola's father, Elliot Chess, in a drawer at my grandmother's house. The remarkable thing about finding these documents was that I never told anyone I'd found them and never read them until now. For years, I kept them in a box and never looked at them. But now that I've read them, now that I understand things about my mother's life, things perhaps that she wouldn't want me to know, the revelations follow quickly, one upon the other. And the more I uncover, the more I realize that one ofthese days I'm going to have to tell my mother about the court papers I found. Eventually, I'll confess. But the documents keep multiplying. Everyone in my family, or connected with it, it seems, has written about the events I want to write about-although not in a way that gives an overall picture ofwho we are. Every day, I seem to learn about new documents. I'm drowning in them. My mother tells me little by little about their existence, almost as though she's teasing me. But this...