Together, Independently
On dawn walks, a deliberate disappearance, and a box of letters found under a bed
My grandfather was an early riser, and so was I, and in a family of sleepers this made us a faction.
He had several grandchildren, but for some reason he sensed that I was the other wanderer — a kindred spirit, always game, and crucially, awake. He often slept at our apartment, and on those mornings he would take me out into the streets while the city was still deciding to exist, to see what we could find. There was rarely a plan. I knew only one thing for certain — that at some point we would stop to eat — and that was all the information I ever needed.
The walks had their curriculum, though I didn’t know to call it that. He liked to talk about languages: how different tongues expressed the same sentiment with subtle differences, and how the differences were where the really interesting things lived. He knew the histories of neighborhoods and buildings, and he loved the city’s deep past — the Lenape and the Ramapo, whose names he taught me to pronounce correctly, with a care I didn’t understand. (Years later, on my way to meet a composer at a college called Ramapo, the whole trip out was a reminiscence of these walks — but I have written that essay already.) He loved the forests of the eastern seaboard, had hiked the Appalachian Trail, told me that Pennsylvania meant Penn’s Woods and that the name held a respect for the new world’s nature that he clearly shared. He showed me the caves of Inwood, the water called Spuyten Duyvil, the site of the tulip tree where Manhattan changed hands for twenty-four dollars. I absorbed all of it the way you absorb things at that age — not as information but as weather.
And then there were the arguments.
Our walks were punctuated, inevitably, by his spirited debates with the men who worked the counters of the city’s luncheonettes — those long, narrow rooms with a silver counter and stools bolted to the floor, newspapers racked to the ceiling, a register by a window that opened onto the street. We always stopped at one to eat, and I came to suspect the stops were chosen strategically, because within minutes my grandfather would be locked in furious argument with the man behind the counter — in a language I didn’t know. The arguments escalated fast and seemed, always, to be continuations — resumed battles from some earlier engagement I had no access to. I could never tell whether he actually knew these men. I hated it. He would become totally immersed and seem to forget I existed, and I would walk out in frustration and orbit the block in front, careful to stay in sight of the window, though he plainly wasn’t checking.
The more it happened, the farther I strayed. And straying, I became aware of a force tethering me to the scene — a tension braided from the fear of getting in trouble and the frustration of being ignored — and then, gradually, I began to love it. The arguments created what I came to think of as a moving perimeter of exploration. Wherever we stopped, I would get my bearings and wander, checking back now and then to confirm the debate still raged. Once, checking back, I found him gone — and in the first seconds of panic found him again, on the corner, looking for me. “That man is a son of a bitch!” he announced, and spent the next several blocks dissecting the argument while I understood nothing and it didn’t matter. He never asked where I’d been. He never scolded me, never tried to frighten me into staying close. What I felt instead was a warm, happy hum of being with him — each of us with our own things, close without a shared topic or a shared goal. Connected, but somehow independently. I didn’t have words for how strange and good that was. I have spent a good part of my life since looking for them.
Then, one morning when I was eight, the familiar pattern was rendered strange.
We wandered into Grand Central Station. The building in those years was run-down and magnificent at once, and he pointed at the vaulted ceiling. There were constellations up there, he told me. I looked, and could barely find them. The painted sky was buried under decades of haze — cigarette smoke, coal soot, the city’s exhaust — and what he promised was there hovered at the edge of legibility, almost visible, a sky asserted more than seen. I believed him. But it was a curious position to stand in: his testimony in one hand, my own eyes in the other, and no way to close the gap between them. Was he right? Was I seeing anything, or seeing his words? And he made it stranger still: the zodiac, he said, was painted in reverse — the signs running the wrong way around, the left of the night sky hung on the right — so that even if I found it, I would be seeing it backwards. I stood in the middle of the great hall, in the crossing energies of people leaving for what were, in my mind, impossibly far places, puzzling upward into that in-betweenness — and feeling underneath it the particular thing I have written about in an earlier essay, the smallness and the vastness at once, the being there, the belonging there.
It was while I was lost in exactly that looking that he left. My absorption in the almost-visible was his open door.
And then I noticed I couldn’t see my grandfather.
I assumed he was near, and began to scan the station — and the search, I understand now, was the ceiling’s problem turned on its side. I was looking for him horizontally through the same haze and smoke and distance, and the hall kept offering me figures that were almost him: a coat, a gait, a hat, resolving one after another into strangers. Testimony said he must be there. Perception kept failing to deliver him. And then the two stopped arguing, and I didn’t conclude it so much as feel it — he wasn’t there. The absence was real. The awe drained out and fear came in, and the fear braided itself with every luncheonette he’d ever forgotten me in front of, and turned to anger. He had abandoned me. In the middle of Grand Central Station. I would tell my mother; she would yell at him. And under the anger, the practical terror: I was not allowed to be alone this far from home. How do I get back?
I knew, instinctively, to stay where I was — if I moved and he returned, we’d never find each other. And beneath that practical reason sat a stranger one, which I could feel more than think: if I started moving, I would become one of the ambiguous figures myself — another shape in the haze, mistakable, losable. Panic eventually broke both rules. I circled the hall; it was quiet, probably a Sunday; had he gone to the restroom? And then, out of pure anger, I made a decision that changed the shape of my life: I would leave. I would find my own way home. Let him see what it’s like when he can’t find me.
I went out the south doors and crossed onto Park Avenue, heading downtown, retracing our walk. At 38th Street I passed the Church of Our Saviour, which he had pointed out on the way up — a modern building wearing an old face — and whose door he had even pulled open, because he wanted me to see the stained glass from the inside; but a service was underway, an organ and voices coming through the opening, and we had to close the door on them and go. At 36th I crossed and turned around to look at the narrow house on the north side of the street where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had lived as newlyweds — “A tiny house for two giant bastards!” he said, and then said something about Stalin, none of which I understood - however the word “bastard” stuck in my mind and I lingered on the corner looking at the narrow building, my grandfather’s outburst and my own mix of fear and rebellion hanging in the air. I continued heading away from Grand Central, and somewhere around 34th Street my gesture, my angry test, collapsed into the thing it was pretending at: we really were separated, and I really was alone, many blocks from home. Going back to the station was suddenly and clearly pointless.
It was a beautiful day. People were out. And into my fear came, block by block, something I had not expected — the return trip assembling itself in my mind out of everything he had taught me. The landmarks he had pointed out on the way up now hung along the avenue like a constellation I could actually read: legible, right-way-round, at street level — the working sky he had given me while the painted one stayed buried in its haze. He’d shown me, too, how the station was just a crooked line from our neighborhood: Mott to Bleecker to Broadway to Union Square, Union Square to Park Avenue South, Park Avenue South straight to the great hall. Run backward, the line led home. I knew I could ask a policeman if I got into real trouble. And slowly, walking, I felt something open that I can only call the gift: I was free. The dangers my mother invoked to keep me close to our block suddenly seemed contrived, and the situation — blameless, unsupervised, navigable — revealed itself as ideal. If she yelled, I would tell her everything, and her anger would land on him. By 23rd Street I was near Vercesi’s Hardware, where I’d been many times with my father; at 20th, the birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt, someone he admired, and the city was familiar now. Union Square. Broadway. Past the Strand, site of so many of his debates. Past Grace Church. And then, because the fear was simply gone, a detour — into Washington Square Park, where I looked at the arch, and watched some girls dancing near it, and lingered on them longer than my parents would have liked, and eventually came out the south side and walked the rest of the crooked line home, to Mott Street.
I stopped at the window of Lonnie’s, the neighborhood sweetshop, and looked in for my friends, wishing I had money. Everything was suddenly, absurdly normal. And as I stood there I noticed what the glass was doing: I could see into the shop, and I could see, laid over it, the reflection of the street behind me — two worlds on one surface — and the reflection pulled up a memory of standing on our roof with my grandfather during the Chinese New Year parade, the whole neighborhood below us, his hand pointing out landmarks. I stood looking at myself in a pane of glass that held the present and the past at once.
And then, in the reflection, I saw my grandfather.
I turned around. “I made it back here all by myself!” I told him — genuinely thrilled, before anything else. And then the other thing arrived. “Why did you leave me!” — tears coming now. I punched him.
“Would you like some ice cream?” he asked.
We found a booth at Lonnie’s, which was loud with children — at least two birthday parties running — and I ordered a sundae, and he told me the truth. Or what I took, for four more years, to be the whole of it.
He had been following me the entire time. He mentioned my unexpected change of course around 10th Street. He asked if I had seen the girls dancing near the arch.
I felt the air go out of me. I was angry, sad, and frightened by what the day had been, and elated and joyful at what I had done — and now, on top of it, deflated: I hadn’t done it alone. I had been supervised. The accomplishment dissolved in my hands.
“You did it by yourself,” he said. “Don’t diminish your own accomplishment — that’s all in your head. I knew you could do it. But I wanted to be there to see how you did it. When you took a detour and found your way back, it made me very proud. Your uncles followed the path I showed them. You didn’t. You’re a very independent person — like your grandfather. We need to stick together...” — and here he paused — “independently.”
There it was again: a moment composed of opposites, its energy sustained by the live pairing and collapsed by any attempt to resolve it. On my wandering he had been there and not there. If I fixed on there — I’d been supervised, it didn’t count. If I fixed on not there — I’d been abandoned, betrayed, tricked. Either way a hardened stance formed, and I was no longer belonging to the day; I was participating in it through anger or through fear, an interior sealed inside an exterior. But held together — followed and free, watched and alone — the day stayed what it had actually been: the largest thing that had ever happened to me. What sustained it was being of it rather than in it. I could not have said any of this at eight. I could feel all of it.
About the dancing girls: yes, I had seen them. I had lingered, watching, in a way my parents would have disliked, and watching them I had felt my new freedom meet theirs — their dancing was a freedom of movement too, and for a few minutes two freedoms had been in the same place, in different bodies, on different terms, neither communicating with the other, and the parallel was vivid and felt. When he asked, I told him yes. I did not tell him what I had understood watching them. This was not the first time I deliberately kept the inside of an experience to myself in order to keep it alive — held it back from the world of telling, where things get agreed upon and go flat. It would not be the last. However it was the first time I had held something back from him.
In those same years there was another kind of wandering, with its own architecture.
My mother had a cousin on the Upper East Side whose apartment was understood to be an adults-only space, and when she visited him she would sometimes bring me as far as the Met, hand me a few dollars, and turn me loose — with instructions to behave, to draw no attention (blending in was the great recurring lesson of her curriculum), and to be at a designated spot at a designated time. I loved those afternoons completely. The Egyptian rooms, the ancient instruments, the armor. And the freedom — I remember watching other children being dragged past the art, their lingering gazes overridden, the visit run as a game of accumulation, and feeling sorry for them in a way I have written about in these notes before. Inside my mother’s parameters, something opposite happened: the rule-following boy gave way, and the encounters became mine — personal, unhurried, fearless. Fear had no place there, and I understood why: this wasn’t the wilds of the street, and she knew it, and therefore so did I.
One detail of her system I only appreciated later. She told me firmly that she would find me — that I must never start looking for her, since a child searching is a child lost. What she knew, and I didn’t, was that my free wandering was patterned. She always found me in one of three galleries and I always knew she would find me.
So there were two guardians, and two architectures of care, and both rested on knowledge withheld from me. He watched in secret to see how I was free. She predicted in secret so that my freedom would never look like being lost. I never told either one about the other’s world. This was deliberate, even then — a disciplined separation, an attention to keeping each experience whole, out of a conviction I could feel long before I could defend it: that talking across them would muddle them, that each conjured meaning in its own way and deserved to keep its own weather. They were simply co-present in my life, unmixed. Looking back, that refusal to blend runs through nearly everything I have ever made.
A few years after Grand Central — I would have been about ten — we were out wandering on a cold day and ended up in Times Square. I suggested we go to the movies. With warming up in mind, I noticed an enticing poster and lobbied for The Towering Inferno. He was agreeable to a theater; telling me how as a younger man he had used the movies to work on his languages — buying one ticket and staying all day, watching the same film over and over until it gave up its words. As we approached the ticket window he noticed the other title on the marquee, a film he misread as Poseidon’s Adventure. He insisted we see that instead. He seemed to believe it had something to do with Poseidon — the god — and that this would surely be more interesting than a burning skyscraper. I had some idea of what the movie actually was and remember thinking how he was going to be disappointed. I spoke up but he doubted my interpretation. The promise of a warm theater, drinks and popcorn kept the conversation short. We bought tickets. We bought snacks. We settled in. The theater was nearly empty.
The film is about a cruise ship flipped over by a tidal wave. When the wave came and the ship went over, my grandfather grew restless beside me. I knew he wasn’t going to like it, and dreaded the thought of heading back into the cold. Then he covered his face, and a sound came out of him that I took at first for howls of laughter — I was shocked, confused, half-ready to laugh along — until, slowly, I understood that he was sobbing. Loudly. In the dark. I tried to comfort him and could not; he was inconsolable; and I began to panic, because his grief was a country I had never seen him enter. I got up. He didn’t notice. I started walking up the aisle, not sure what to do. I wondered if I should get my mother, then I thought about finding an usher to call my mother. There was no usher — there seemed to be no one in the world but the two of us and the drowning ship. I knew how to get home, but I couldn’t leave him. I sat back down. When the movie ended he wiped his eyes, gathered himself, stood, and said: “Let’s not tell your grandmother about this.”
We walked out into the windy late afternoon. I had almost nothing to say, and no map for where I now was — trying to reconcile the intensity of his grief, the suddenness of his calm, and the total absence of any discussion of what had just happened. For the first time in all our wandering, being close without a shared topic did not feel like warmth. I felt utterly separate from him — together, and stranded on my own side of it. I had met the limit of our arrangement, and I didn’t have words for that either.
At home, I told my mother. And she — in what I recognize now as one of the only times anyone in my family ever simply answered — told me. Her eldest brother had died in the war, heading to battle, aboard a troop transport struck by a torpedo. His body was never found, and for years the family had held out hope that he had somehow survived and would one day wander back home. He had enlisted in his twenty-first year, before his twenty-first birthday, which meant the army required a parent’s signature. My grandmother refused. My grandfather relented, and signed. His son — the eldest child, understood by everyone as the brightest light in the family — went out on his father’s signature and did not come back. Before he left, my mother, uncle and grandmother went to see him off. My grandfather didn’t go and that was never explained. The boat was in New York. When the family was leaving he turned to them and said, “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” The loss shattered the family and left a wound that never healed and was, by the time I came along, no longer discussed. I understood then what could not be told to my grandmother, and something of why. What it had to do with Grand Central, I did not yet understand at all. That took most of my life.
My grandfather died when I was about twelve. At his funeral, his surviving son — my uncle — told a story in his eulogy that I had never heard.
It was his own, and it had happened at the Metropolitan Museum, but as it unfolded it sounded very familiar. My grandfather had taken him there as a boy, led him to what my uncle called the Halls of Adventure — the arms and armor wing — waited until he was fully enrapt among the knights, and disappeared. For my uncle the day was pure terror: alone in the museum, and then a journey home that meant finding and riding the Third Avenue El by himself. And when he finally walked in the door, “See, I told you he would find his way back!” Stunned silence. “You’ll thank me later.” the experiment detonated — a storm between my grandfather and my grandmother that had evidently entered family legend long ago, because the room now erupted in laughter, emphatic and warm, at a story everyone but me seemed already to know. His ordeal had been public property twice: once as household turmoil, and now as comedy.
I sat inside the laughter and felt the floor of my own memory shift. Your uncles followed the path I showed them. You didn’t. The sentence from Lonnie’s, four years ago, snapped into focus. It was a rite. He had run it before. Grand Central had been deliberate — the vanishing timed to my absorption in that unreadable sky as surely as the Met vanishing had been timed to my uncle’s absorption among the armor. And no one in that laughing room knew there had been a, presumably, third performance. My uncle’s day had belonged to everyone almost from the moment it happened. Mine had never belonged to anyone but the two of us — and now, to me alone. Whether he followed my uncle to make sure he found his way to the El, unseen, the way he followed me down the crooked line, I will never know.
So I made a decision, sitting there at twelve, that I recognize now as the same decision I’d made at the window of Lonnie’s about the dancing girls: I kept it. The eight-year-old’s day — the constellations, the anger, the crooked line assembling itself, the transflecting glass with two worlds in it — stayed untold, not out of grief or shyness but out of custodianship. Telling it would have handed it to the process I had just watched at work: the shaping, the sharing, the agreement, the laughter — the flattening that makes a thing communicable. I have held it for roughly fifty years. Everyone who laughed that day is gone. This essay is the first telling — and I can tell it now, I think, because I finally understand it, and because he taught me the protocol himself, at Lonnie’s, over a sundae: full disclosure is permitted only after the accomplishment is complete.
And the funeral reorganized one more room. My uncle’s ordeal had happened at the Met — the same museum where, years later, my mother would hand me a few dollars, name a meeting place and a time, and let me go. She had grown up inside the story of her brother’s day. And her system — the parameters, the promise that she would find me, the finding, every time, in one of three galleries — now read as something more than method. It was her father’s gesture, performed in her father’s building, with the wound taken out: the leaving kept, the abandonment subtracted; the freedom granted, the return guaranteed. I don’t claim she designed it as a repair. Her relationship with her father was complicated in ways I was mostly not shown. But I have come to believe that something in her was answering him — that every time she left me at the Met and then found me, precisely, she was re-performing her brother’s day the way it should have gone. And beneath that, a stratum I can only touch and not hold: her family’s defining wound was a brother who could never be found. She built an arrangement in which the finding was guaranteed.
After the funeral made my uncle’s story public, my mother would mention it now and then. She and I never once spoke of our own Met arrangement — our leavings and our findings — and she could not have spoken of Grand Central, because she never knew. What I received instead, occasionally, was a look: a knowing one, resting on me a beat longer than the conversation required, acknowledging a memory without ever proposing to discuss it. I understood the look completely. It was her dialect of the family grammar — acknowledgment without communication — and it was, I see now, her own version of the arrangement: the two of us holding a shared thing, together, independently.
There is one more box to open.
Many years after my parents died, my sister — who had taken over their summer house — found a box of letters and photographs under their bed, and passed it to me. The first thing I saw was a photograph of my grandparents, young, both smiling, in Lvov. I had not known they were ever in Lvov. And in the same box, letters in English — my mother’s adopted, dominant language — written to her at the time of my grandfather’s death by a relative I had never heard of, explaining everything. My mother had received the whole story, at his funeral season, in writing. She kept it under the bed and never said a word. The letters that explained the family’s silence were themselves kept silent. In an earlier essay I wrote that the family’s past was present in my childhood only as a certain shape of silence; the box was the inside of that shape.
Here is what the letters said. He was born near the southern tip of the Caspian sea, and as a young man with wanderlust he fell in with a circle sympathetic to the Russian Revolution. A good student, he was offered a place to study in the USSR in the 1920s, and took it. The promises curdled slowly; by the time he understood, he was a citizen, and citizens’ movements were restricted. He worked as a chemist in Kiev. In the thirties, when supplies ran short, his lab turned to the black market, whose routes ran through Poland — and at some point my grandfather realized that the same smugglers who moved reagents could move him. What he wanted, first, was not escape. He wanted a forest. Białowieża — the great primeval wood, devastated in the first war and then being actively nursed back, parts of it already remarkably recovered — and he was smuggled over the border, at least once, for no strategic reason whatsoever: to walk in it. Then the smugglers mentioned they could get him to Lvov, which he believed to be a vast free city, and he wanted what Lvov had — café life, the open exchange of ideas, art, music, argument. On another supply trip, he crossed.
He had shared his plans with a co-worker, who asked him to bring back cigarettes and chocolate for his wife. My grandfather obliged. Shortly after his return, the co-worker denounced him to the NKVD — the price of a better apartment and a promotion at the lab. And then the co-worker’s wife came, quietly, to see my grandmother, who was a medical doctor, and told her what her husband had done. I have always wondered whether the chocolate is why she came. My grandparents had already been bracing — Persians and other outsiders were being deported east in those years, and his criticisms of the government had grown careless — and so, that evening, they gathered their children and some belongings, told the neighbors they were going on holiday, and left. The holiday lasted the rest of their lives. It ran through Poland and Copenhagen and ended in New York, in a neighborhood that didn’t want them, near a Friends’ Meeting House that did — the refuge of shared silence I have written about, the one he never let go of.
And the box reorganized every morning of my childhood, the way, as described in another essay, a plaque once reorganized a gold wall. The lunch-counter arguments in a language I didn’t know — I still don’t know which language they were in; I know now where he could have learned them, and I understand at last that I had been listening, weekly, to the concealed life itself, audible and unreadable, arguing about God-knows-what with men who may have carried pieces of the same buried world. The love of eastern forests, the Appalachian Trail, Penn’s Woods — a man who had once paid smugglers to let him walk among trees. The reverence for a free city of cafés — from someone who then spent decades in the freest café city on earth, debating strangers at every bookstore, coffee shop, magazine rack in it, continuing Lvov by other means. And Grand Central: a man who had been followed, in earnest, by people who meant him harm — whose life was saved because a watcher’s wife chose to warn rather than stay silent — took his grandson to the middle of the largest station in America and disappeared, and followed him, unseen, all the way down the crooked line, meaning him nothing but love. He knew exactly what following someone can be. At Lonnie’s he did what his century never did for him: he told me I had been seen, and said it with pride, and bought me ice cream.
And the rites themselves finally gave up their meaning. A man whose eldest son had walked out the door carrying his father’s signature and never come back spent his later years staging disappearances with the return built in — vanishing at the exact moment of our enrapture, then following, unseen, block by block, so that he could witness what he had been denied: a child of his line finding the way home. He wasn’t testing whether we could leave. Everyone he had ever loved had proven they could leave. He was rehearsing the coming back — and he needed to watch it happen with his own eyes, each time, all the way to the door.
The other side of my family kept its past a different way — with fire — but that is for a later essay.
I still look up, every time I pass through Grand Central. The sky has long since been cleaned — the constellations are vivid now, and still, gloriously, backwards — and I catch myself regarding them askance, trying to see them and not see them at once, keeping faith with the boy who couldn’t close the gap between a promise and a perception. The restorers, famously, left one small rectangle of the ceiling untouched: a dark patch of the old obscurity, kept as evidence of everything that had once been in the air. I understand the impulse completely. For fifty years, this story was mine.
We need to stick together — independently. He has been gone for half a century, and I find I have kept the arrangement. I still rise early. I still stray to the edge of whatever perimeter the day sets, and I still check back over my shoulder toward the argument, and he is still there and not there, which I now understand was never a paradox to endure but the whole instruction: the two of us, connected, each with our own things, close without a shared topic or goal. The perimeter is still moving. I am still on it.
Almost Visible is a notebook of encounters with art, sound, space, and attention. If this one opened something, consider sharing and subscribing.