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Chapter 1
My mother phones me the moment Annie is gone.
It is two o'clock in the morning.
I know at once who is calling and why. Nobody but my mother ever calls me at two in the morning, and then only to tell me that my sister is gone again.
*
The family gathers in the early morning hours. I get there last because I live in Chelsea, all the way downtown, and my mother's apartment is on West End Avenue and Eighty-first Street. They are already talking about what to do when I come in. My sister-in-law Augusta offers me a cup of coffee, and then we go in to join the others in the living room.
My mother is sixty-three years old, but she still skis and she still travels and there are many people who find her attractive. When I look at her, I see a thin, hawkish-faced woman with piercing green eyes and short brown hair she tints auburn. She is wearing tonight a brocaded silk robe she bought in Tokyo three summers ago, and red velvet slippers with gold trim, from Bergdorf's. My mother is very proud of her tiny feet. She tells everyone she knows, over and over again, that she has truly tiny feet and then immediately informs them that she once played Alice in a touring company of Alice in Wonderland, as if her tiny feet had been responsible for her getting the role.
My mother was once a stage actress, you see. Helene Hammond was her stage name, does it ring a bell? I wouldn't guess so. She hasn't performed in anything since she was part of the young cast in West Side Story -- the original Broadway production, that is -- back in 1957. That was forty-five years ago. But she still thinks of herself as a musical comedy star, which she never really was.
My mother's maiden name was Helene Lederer. That's because she's Jewish. I feel certain my grandmother intended her name to be pronounced "Ell-enn," in the French manner, an affectation common among well-to-do Jews of her generation. Instead, my mother pronounces it to rhyme with Arlene. I personally feel the French pronunciation would better suit her personality, but it's her name and her business. According to my older brother, our mother's Jewishness makes all of her kids Jewish as well, even though my father was an Irishman named Terrence Gulliver.
I say "was" because I never really got to know the man. He abandoned my mother and the family when I was only five years old. Well, divorced her. My mother keeps saying he abandoned her, even though he paid alimony and child support till Annie and I turned eighteen. Like me, Annie was also five when Daddy left, so you can't blame her problems on his defection. Annie is my twin, you see. Andrew and Anne, as our parents named us. Andy and Annie, as we became, no relation to the Raggedys.
My brother is quite successful. His name is Aaron, which was my mother's father's name. My grandfather turned all of Mama's pictures to the wall the moment he learned she was going to marry a starving artist named Terrence Gulliver. By the time my father jumped ship, he was no longer a starving artist, and my hypocritical Hungarian grandfather was calling him "Terry, m'lad," according to bitter stories my mother still tells, but it turned out the old man was right after all, wasn't he? Not wanting her to marry a goy?
My grandfather is now dead, but his namesake -- my brother Aaron -- is the CEO of a cosmetics firm with which you're familiar if you're any woman who tints her hair, go ask my mother. Aaron agrees he's Jewish because our mother is Jewish. That's okay by me. His daughters are not Jewish, however. That's because Aaron's wife is of German descent. In fact, his daughters aren't even his true daughters, in that...
Well, that's another story.
*
You see, after Aaron brought his intended bride home to meet the family, my mother instantly hired a private detective from Newark to look into the "young lady's background."
It appeared that my brother was about to marry the town whore.
The detective reported that Augusta was knocked up for the first time in the back seat of a Chevy convertible parked behind the football stadium at Ridley High School in Ridley Hills, New Jersey. The father of her first daughter was a quarterback for the Ridley Royals, as they still call themselves, a rather pretentious name for a team that has finished at the bottom of its league from time immemorial.
Michael Henderson, for such was his name, never married Augusta -- or Gussie as she was calling herself back then. Instead, he ran off to join a commune in San Francisco. Gussie somehow persuaded her staid Lutheran parents to let her go ahead with the birth rather than have the baby aborted. Augusta is now forty-five years old. Her first daughter, Lauren, is twenty-nine and married. Mr. Henderson must have spread little Gussie's legs (presumably not for the first time) when she was but a mere fifteen.
When she was sixteen, and three months after Lauren was born, Augusta took on a brawny lad named Colin O'Rourke, this time on the football field itself, the better to enjoy the splendor in the grass, no doubt. Lo and behold, and having learned nothing about birth control on her earlier go-round, Augusta discovered that she was once again pregnant. Young Colin, left tackle but devout Catholic, also chose not to marry her, preferring instead to enlist in the United States Army. He was whisked almost at once to a post in peacetime Germany, where he was killed in an automobile accident on the Autobahn. Augusta's first child was only a year old when the second one was born. In honor of her slain Irish swain, she named this second daughter Kelly.
My brother Aaron was twenty-two when he met Augusta. He was a senior at Princeton, which is not far from Ridley Hills, if you have a map. She was twenty-seven, and working at the time as a counter girl at the local McDonald's. By then, gun-shy Gussie had developed a reputation for swallowing organs larger than the one at Radio City Music Hall, a talent my brother apparently found engaging as well as engorging. Gussie's daughters were eleven and ten respectively, and still bore her maiden surname, Manners, the Anglicized Mannheim from which town her forbears had migrated. Manners, no less. A singular contradiction when one considers that etiquette is the least of Augusta's attributes. By the way, she started calling herself Augusta again the moment my stupid-ass brother slipped a wedding band on her dainty trembling hand.
He has since adopted both daughters. They are now, respectively and respectfully, Lauren Gulliver Hastings and Kelly Gulliver. When my mother dies, Augusta and Aaron will undoubtedly inherit a share of her estate which -- when they die -- will go to the offspring of two-elevenths of the Ridley Royals' offensive team.
Augusta had no qualms about seeking an abortion six years ago, however, when at the age of thirty-nine she surprisingly missed two periods in a row, and quick as a wink deduced, Gee, I must be preggers again, wow. This was a woman, mind you, who -- when I suggested that she vote for a freedom-of-choice candidate because one day either one of her two lovely daughters might find herself in trouble and in desperate need of an abortion -- said, "Oh, that!" and airily waved aside the entire anti-abortion issue. It wasn't a matter of "Oh, that!" some four years later, however, when a doctor confirmed that she was indeed pregnant, and Augusta decided she was too old to be bearing another child, they're either too young or too old, right? Quicker than you could say "Right to Life," Augusta found a respectable doctor who aborted the embryos.
You heard me correctly.
Embryos.
Plural.
Two of them.
Augusta had been bearing twins.
I have never forgiven Aaron for that.
I felt he and his wife had flushed my own heritage down the drain.
*
Annie believes she is an adept who has been initiated into a form of Tantric yoga.
Her tongue is pierced. She wears a little silver circlet in it, which she says she purchased at a bazaar in Katmandu. She wears another silver circlet through her left nostril (Hong Kong) and yet another through the brow over her right eye (Sri Lanka). Kissing Annie hello is like kissing a jewelry tray. She also has a tattoo on her right buttock, a swastika above the words Ek Xib Chac in red, below which are the words Chac Xib Chac in black, which she says translates as "The red and the black," though she did not mention in which language, probably Sanskrit. She says she acquired the tattoo in Berlin before the wall came down, and before she headed for more exotic places. She proudly explained to a dining room full of dinner guests on one of her frequent stays in my mother's apartment that the swastika was an ancient and treasured symbol in her religion, and might have exhibited her tattoo if my mother hadn't called everyone to coffee and dessert in the living room just then.
Annie tells me she once ate sweet potatoes and later shat in the woods with native tribesmen in Papua New Guinea. She tells me she was mauled by a tiger in a remote section of India, the name of which I can't even pronounce, but which falls ever so trippingly off my sister's tongue.
I no longer know if any of these things are real or merely figments of Annie's fertile imagination.
Ever since what happened in Sicily a month and a half ago, I simply do not know.
*
Whenever Annie runs away, I blame my mother.
I blame her because she keeps giving Annie money even though she's been advised time and again that she is just pissing the money down the toilet. My sister-in-law Augusta doesn't like my mother to give Annie money, either, but that's because she's fearful her two daughters won't inherit as much when Grandma dies. In that respect, Annie and she are soulmates. My sister often talks about friends of hers who have inherited huge sums of money, or luxurious houses, or acres and acres of undeveloped land in Florida. She seems to think my mother is enormously wealthy. I don't know what gives her this idea; there is no empirical evidence to support such a notion of wealth. My mother's apartment on West End looks like the shabby abode of a European lady who has seen better times. The furniture is shoddy, the drapes need cleaning. There is the faint odor of mustiness and age clinging to everything. And yet, she keeps sending money to Annie.
I think she's afraid my sister will become a prostitute or a homeless person. I think she's afraid she will be blamed for my sister's destitute state, if it ever comes to that. Even before Sicily we were all a little afraid of that. Afraid we'd be held responsible somehow if anything happened to her. Jewish guilt. My brother may be right. We may all of us be Jews, after all. Except my sister-in-law and her two bastard children.
So here we are on a hot muggy night in August, commiserating and plotting because Annie has fled once again, and we're all afraid that before morning Sicily will happen all over again.
*
Then again, Annie has always run away, with or without seeming provocation. In fact, she has been traveling all over the world without incident ever since --
Well, that isn't quite true.
On the other hand, it's almost true.
Except for that one crazy week in Italy a month and a half ago, Annie has managed to keep out of serious trouble for most of her life. Sicily was the only episode...well, incident...well, episode...I promise you, the only one.
The family has heard various versions of what happened, most of them from Annie herself, one of them from yours truly who went to Italy to "rescue" her, as Annie puts it. After everything Bertuzzi told me, I don't know which parts of her story are true. It's a known fact, of course, that there are banditos on the road in various isolated parts of Italy, and especially in Sicily where my sister had gone to seek out the wisdom of a guru whose name I still can't pronounce and whose presence in Italy, of all places, I still sincerely doubt. But possibly the bandito part of her story is true, no matter what Bertuzzi says.
Before the incident -- well, episode -- Annie told us she was living in a room she rented from the village butcher. This was undoubtedly true. She told us she had met a German girl from Frankfurt, possibly also true, who like herself was an initiate, and who -- again like herself -- was in Sicily to seek further enlightenment and inspiration from Abu Ben Pipik or whatever his name was.
According to Annie, she and Lise were enjoying a bottle of cheap Sicilian red at a quiet outdoor table under a grape arbor when two Italian "roughs," as Annie later called them, approached the table and began making fun of her rings, the one in her nose, yes, and the one over her eye, but especially the one in her tongue.
I have to tell you that my sister generally takes exceptionally good care of herself. She is three inches shorter than I am, which makes her five-nine, and she weighs a hundred and thirty pounds, which makes her slender -- well, before she went to Italy, she'd let herself go a bit, but I would guess by the time of the trouble there, she was back in good shape again. When Annie isn't sitting silent and motionless in the lotus position, practicing yoga, she is doing sit-ups or pushups or jogging in place. She is extremely fit. We both have green eyes -- Aaron's are blue, but thank you, anyway, Mom. We both have blond hair -- so does Aaron, thank you unconditionally, Terrence Gulliver, wherever you may be. Annie's hair is blonder than mine, almost flaxen, in fact, but that's because on her travels ("Gulliver's Travels," we sometimes call them) she spends a great deal of time in the sun. Altogether, my sister looks like what the guys on the singles scene in New York might call a babe. So it is understandable that a pair of Sicilian youths on the prowl might have approached the table where she and Lise were in deep conversation. That part of the story is possibly true, though Bertuzzi thinks it's all imagined.
Annie isn't fluent in any language except English, but she does have a smattering of French and Italian, so maybe her recounting of the dialogue at the table is accurate. In any case, in yet another retelling of the story, Lise was fluent in Italian, including the Neapolitan and Sicilian dialects, and it was she who was doing the translating. Here, then, is how the conversation at the table went, as translated by a German girl from Frankfurt, repeated later by Annie, and sincerely doubted by Bertuzzi.
"Hey, girls, you want some company?"
"No, thank you, we're having a little private talk here."
This from my sister.
"But thank you for asking."
This from Lise; my sister insists it encouraged a further dialogue.
"Why are you wearing a ring over your eye?"
"None of your business."
"How about the one in your nose?"
"Ditto."
"Doesn't it get in the way when you kiss?"
"Boys, we're not interested, okay?"
"Are you lesbians?"
This may seem like far too sophisticated a comment from an ignorant Sicilian farmer, but remember that if a woman isn't interested in an Italian man's obvious charms, she must be queer. On the other hand, I myself have often wondered about Annie's sexual orientation, so it's entirely possible that she and Lise were enjoying more than just a private conversation at their hidden table. In one of Annie's tellings, they were meditating. In another, they were holding hands. In a third version, they were holding hands and meditating. Given the question about the nose ring getting in th...
Présentation de l'éditeur :
My mother phones me the moment Annie is gone.
It is two o'clock in the morning.
I know at once who is calling and why. Nobody but my mother ever calls me at two in the morning, and then only to tell me that my sister is gone again.
*
The family gathers in the early morning hours. I get there last because I live in Chelsea, all the way downtown, and my mother's apartment is on West End Avenue and Eighty-first Street. They are already talking about what to do when I come in. My sister-in-law Augusta offers me a cup of coffee, and then we go in to join the others in the living room.
My mother is sixty-three years old, but she still skis and she still travels and there are many people who find her attractive. When I look at her, I see a thin, hawkish-faced woman with piercing green eyes and short brown hair she tints auburn. She is wearing tonight a brocaded silk robe she bought in Tokyo three summers ago, and red velvet slippers with gold trim, from Bergdorf's. My mother is very proud of her tiny feet. She tells everyone she knows, over and over again, that she has truly tiny feet and then immediately informs them that she once played Alice in a touring company of Alice in Wonderland, as if her tiny feet had been responsible for her getting the role.
My mother was once a stage actress, you see. Helene Hammond was her stage name, does it ring a bell? I wouldn't guess so. She hasn't performed in anything since she was part of the young cast in West Side Story -- the original Broadway production, that is -- back in 1957. That was forty-five years ago. But she still thinks of herself as a musical comedy star, which she never really was.
My mother's maiden name was Helene Lederer. That's because she's Jewish. I feel certain my grandmother intended her name to be pronounced "Ell-enn," in the French manner, an affectation common among well-to-do Jews of her generation. Instead, my mother pronounces it to rhyme with Arlene. I personally feel the French pronunciation would better suit her personality, but it's her name and her business. According to my older brother, our mother's Jewishness makes all of her kids Jewish as well, even though my father was an Irishman named Terrence Gulliver.
I say "was" because I never really got to know the man. He abandoned my mother and the family when I was only five years old. Well, divorced her. My mother keeps saying he abandoned her, even though he paid alimony and child support till Annie and I turned eighteen. Like me, Annie was also five when Daddy left, so you can't blame her problems on his defection. Annie is my twin, you see. Andrew and Anne, as our parents named us. Andy and Annie, as we became, no relation to the Raggedys.
My brother is quite successful. His name is Aaron, which was my mother's father's name. My grandfather turned all of Mama's pictures to the wall the moment he learned she was going to marry a starving artist named Terrence Gulliver. By the time my father jumped ship, he was no longer a starving artist, and my hypocritical Hungarian grandfather was calling him "Terry, m'lad," according to bitter stories my mother still tells, but it turned out the old man was right after all, wasn't he? Not wanting her to marry a goy?
My grandfather is now dead, but his namesake -- my brother Aaron -- is the CEO of a cosmetics firm with which you're familiar if you're any woman who tints her hair, go ask my mother. Aaron agrees he's Jewish because our mother is Jewish. That's okay by me. His daughters are not Jewish, however. That's because Aaron's wife is of German descent. In fact, his daughters aren't even his true daughters, in that...
Well, that's another story.
*
You see, after Aaron brought his intended bride home to meet the family, my mother instantly hired a private detective from Newark to look into the "young lady's background."
It appeared that my brother was about to marry the town whore.
The detective reported that Augusta was knocked up for the first time in the back seat of a Chevy convertible parked behind the football stadium at Ridley High School in Ridley Hills, New Jersey. The father of her first daughter was a quarterback for the Ridley Royals, as they still call themselves, a rather pretentious name for a team that has finished at the bottom of its league from time immemorial.
Michael Henderson, for such was his name, never married Augusta -- or Gussie as she was calling herself back then. Instead, he ran off to join a commune in San Francisco. Gussie somehow persuaded her staid Lutheran parents to let her go ahead with the birth rather than have the baby aborted. Augusta is now forty-five years old. Her first daughter, Lauren, is twenty-nine and married. Mr. Henderson must have spread little Gussie's legs (presumably not for the first time) when she was but a mere fifteen.
When she was sixteen, and three months after Lauren was born, Augusta took on a brawny lad named Colin O'Rourke, this time on the football field itself, the better to enjoy the splendor in the grass, no doubt. Lo and behold, and having learned nothing about birth control on her earlier go-round, Augusta discovered that she was once again pregnant. Young Colin, left tackle but devout Catholic, also chose not to marry her, preferring instead to enlist in the United States Army. He was whisked almost at once to a post in peacetime Germany, where he was killed in an automobile accident on the Autobahn. Augusta's first child was only a year old when the second one was born. In honor of her slain Irish swain, she named this second daughter Kelly.
My brother Aaron was twenty-two when he met Augusta. He was a senior at Princeton, which is not far from Ridley Hills, if you have a map. She was twenty-seven, and working at the time as a counter girl at the local McDonald's. By then, gun-shy Gussie had developed a reputation for swallowing organs larger than the one at Radio City Music Hall, a talent my brother apparently found engaging as well as engorging. Gussie's daughters were eleven and ten respectively, and still bore her maiden surname, Manners, the Anglicized Mannheim from which town her forbears had migrated. Manners, no less. A singular contradiction when one considers that etiquette is the least of Augusta's attributes. By the way, she started calling herself Augusta again the moment my stupid-ass brother slipped a wedding band on her dainty trembling hand.
He has since adopted both daughters. They are now, respectively and respectfully, Lauren Gulliver Hastings and Kelly Gulliver. When my mother dies, Augusta and Aaron will undoubtedly inherit a share of her estate which -- when they die -- will go to the offspring of two-elevenths of the Ridley Royals' offensive team.
Augusta had no qualms about seeking an abortion six years ago, however, when at the age of thirty-nine she surprisingly missed two periods in a row, and quick as a wink deduced, Gee, I must be preggers again, wow. This was a woman, mind you, who -- when I suggested that she vote for a freedom-of-choice candidate because one day either one of her two lovely daughters might find herself in trouble and in desperate need of an abortion -- said, "Oh, that!" and airily waved aside the entire anti-abortion issue. It wasn't a matter of "Oh, that!" some four years later, however, when a doctor confirmed that she was indeed pregnant, and Augusta decided she was too old to be bearing another child, they're either too young or too old, right? Quicker than you could say "Right to Life," Augusta found a respectable doctor who aborted the embryos.
You heard me correctly.
Embryos.
Plural.
Two of them.
Augusta had been bearing twins.
I have never forgiven Aaron for that.
I felt he and his wife had flushed my own heritage down the drain.
*
Annie believes she is an adept who has been initiated into a form of Tantric yoga.
Her tongue is pierced. She wears a little silver circlet in it, which she says she purchased at a bazaar in Katmandu. She wears another silver circlet through her left nostril (Hong Kong) and yet another through the brow over her right eye (Sri Lanka). Kissing Annie hello is like kissing a jewelry tray. She also has a tattoo on her right buttock, a swastika above the words Ek Xib Chac in red, below which are the words Chac Xib Chac in black, which she says translates as "The red and the black," though she did not mention in which language, probably Sanskrit. She says she acquired the tattoo in Berlin before the wall came down, and before she headed for more exotic places. She proudly explained to a dining room full of dinner guests on one of her frequent stays in my mother's apartment that the swastika was an ancient and treasured symbol in her religion, and might have exhibited her tattoo if my mother hadn't called everyone to coffee and dessert in the living room just then.
Annie tells me she once ate sweet potatoes and later shat in the woods with native tribesmen in Papua New Guinea. She tells me she was mauled by a tiger in a remote section of India, the name of which I can't even pronounce, but which falls ever so trippingly off my sister's tongue.
I no longer know if any of these things are real or merely figments of Annie's fertile imagination.
Ever since what happened in Sicily a month and a half ago, I simply do not know.
*
Whenever Annie runs away, I blame my mother.
I blame her because she keeps giving Annie money even though she's been advised time and again that she is just pissing the money down the toilet. My sister-in-law Augusta doesn't like my mother to give Annie money, either, but that's because she's fearful her two daughters won't inherit as much when Grandma dies. In that respect, Annie and she are soulmates. My sister often talks about friends of hers who have inherited huge sums of money, or luxurious houses, or acres and acres of undeveloped land in Florida. She seems to think my mother is enormously wealthy. I don't know what gives her this idea; there is no empirical evidence to support such a notion of wealth. My mother's apartment on West End looks like the shabby abode of a European lady who has seen better times. The furniture is shoddy, the drapes need cleaning. There is the faint odor of mustiness and age clinging to everything. And yet, she keeps sending money to Annie.
I think she's afraid my sister will become a prostitute or a homeless person. I think she's afraid she will be blamed for my sister's destitute state, if it ever comes to that. Even before Sicily we were all a little afraid of that. Afraid we'd be held responsible somehow if anything happened to her. Jewish guilt. My brother may be right. We may all of us be Jews, after all. Except my sister-in-law and her two bastard children.
So here we are on a hot muggy night in August, commiserating and plotting because Annie has fled once again, and we're all afraid that before morning Sicily will happen all over again.
*
Then again, Annie has always run away, with or without seeming provocation. In fact, she has been traveling all over the world without incident ever since --
Well, that isn't quite true.
On the other hand, it's almost true.
Except for that one crazy week in Italy a month and a half ago, Annie has managed to keep out of serious trouble for most of her life. Sicily was the only episode...well, incident...well, episode...I promise you, the only one.
The family has heard various versions of what happened, most of them from Annie herself, one of them from yours truly who went to Italy to "rescue" her, as Annie puts it. After everything Bertuzzi told me, I don't know which parts of her story are true. It's a known fact, of course, that there are banditos on the road in various isolated parts of Italy, and especially in Sicily where my sister had gone to seek out the wisdom of a guru whose name I still can't pronounce and whose presence in Italy, of all places, I still sincerely doubt. But possibly the bandito part of her story is true, no matter what Bertuzzi says.
Before the incident -- well, episode -- Annie told us she was living in a room she rented from the village butcher. This was undoubtedly true. She told us she had met a German girl from Frankfurt, possibly also true, who like herself was an initiate, and who -- again like herself -- was in Sicily to seek further enlightenment and inspiration from Abu Ben Pipik or whatever his name was.
According to Annie, she and Lise were enjoying a bottle of cheap Sicilian red at a quiet outdoor table under a grape arbor when two Italian "roughs," as Annie later called them, approached the table and began making fun of her rings, the one in her nose, yes, and the one over her eye, but especially the one in her tongue.
I have to tell you that my sister generally takes exceptionally good care of herself. She is three inches shorter than I am, which makes her five-nine, and she weighs a hundred and thirty pounds, which makes her slender -- well, before she went to Italy, she'd let herself go a bit, but I would guess by the time of the trouble there, she was back in good shape again. When Annie isn't sitting silent and motionless in the lotus position, practicing yoga, she is doing sit-ups or pushups or jogging in place. She is extremely fit. We both have green eyes -- Aaron's are blue, but thank you, anyway, Mom. We both have blond hair -- so does Aaron, thank you unconditionally, Terrence Gulliver, wherever you may be. Annie's hair is blonder than mine, almost flaxen, in fact, but that's because on her travels ("Gulliver's Travels," we sometimes call them) she spends a great deal of time in the sun. Altogether, my sister looks like what the guys on the singles scene in New York might call a babe. So it is understandable that a pair of Sicilian youths on the prowl might have approached the table where she and Lise were in deep conversation. That part of the story is possibly true, though Bertuzzi thinks it's all imagined.
Annie isn't fluent in any language except English, but she does have a smattering of French and Italian, so maybe her recounting of the dialogue at the table is accurate. In any case, in yet another retelling of the story, Lise was fluent in Italian, including the Neapolitan and Sicilian dialects, and it was she who was doing the translating. Here, then, is how the conversation at the table went, as translated by a German girl from Frankfurt, repeated later by Annie, and sincerely doubted by Bertuzzi.
"Hey, girls, you want some company?"
"No, thank you, we're having a little private talk here."
This from my sister.
"But thank you for asking."
This from Lise; my sister insists it encouraged a further dialogue.
"Why are you wearing a ring over your eye?"
"None of your business."
"How about the one in your nose?"
"Ditto."
"Doesn't it get in the way when you kiss?"
"Boys, we're not interested, okay?"
"Are you lesbians?"
This may seem like far too sophisticated a comment from an ignorant Sicilian farmer, but remember that if a woman isn't interested in an Italian man's obvious charms, she must be queer. On the other hand, I myself have often wondered about Annie's sexual orientation, so it's entirely possible that she and Lise were enjoying more than just a private conversation at their hidden table. In one of Annie's tellings, they were meditating. In another, they were holding hands. In a third version, they were holding hands and meditating. Given the question about the nose ring getting in th...
It's two o'clock in the morning when Andrew Gulliver gets a phone call from his mother, who tells him his twin sister, Annie, is gone. This is not the first time. Ever since she was sixteen, she's been taking off without notice to places as far distant as Papua New Guinea, then returning unexpectedly, only to disappear yet another time, again and again and again.
But this time is different.
Last month, Annie got into serious trouble in Sicily and was briefly held in a mental hospital, where an Italian doctor diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Andrew's divorced mother refuses to accept this diagnosis. Andrew himself just isn't sure. But during the course of a desperate twelve hours in New York City, he and the Gulliver family piece together the past and cope with the present in a journey of revelation and self-discovery. Recognizing the truth at last, Andrew can only hope to find his beloved sister before she harms herself or someone else.
The Moment She Was Gone, a shattering novel of a family confronting its collective secrets, marks the high point in a writing career spanning almost five decades.
But this time is different.
Last month, Annie got into serious trouble in Sicily and was briefly held in a mental hospital, where an Italian doctor diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Andrew's divorced mother refuses to accept this diagnosis. Andrew himself just isn't sure. But during the course of a desperate twelve hours in New York City, he and the Gulliver family piece together the past and cope with the present in a journey of revelation and self-discovery. Recognizing the truth at last, Andrew can only hope to find his beloved sister before she harms herself or someone else.
The Moment She Was Gone, a shattering novel of a family confronting its collective secrets, marks the high point in a writing career spanning almost five decades.
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- ÉditeurOrion (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
- Date d'édition2004
- ISBN 10 0752859048
- ISBN 13 9780752859040
- ReliureBroché
- Nombre de pages224
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Description du livre Etat : New. . N° de réf. du vendeur 5AUZZZ000IKA_ns
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EUR 273,18
Autre devise