National Story Project
With Paul Auster

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Listen to Paul read stories by Grace Fichetelberg and Corki Stewart

January 2000 -- In this installment of the National Story Project, Jacki joins author Paul Auster at Ellis Island. They meet up with Janet Levine of the Ellis Island Immigrant Museum's Oral History Project and learn about some of the stories of immigrants coming through Ellis Island early in the 20th century. Then Paul reads stories by "Sara Wilson", Vicky Johnson, Grace Fichetelberg and Corki Stewart.

A woman from Corrales, New Mexico, writing under the pseudonym of "Sara Wilson," tells us what happened after her mother's death on August 18, 1989. A charming and magnetic woman, but also a difficult woman, her mother had been born in Sweden, had lived all over the world, and had been married four times: to a Swedish town planner, a Russian artist, a Cape Cod carpenter, and an Irish Communist. Ms. Wilson was the product of the third and shortest marriage, and after her mother died, she decided to have her cremated. Her cousin made a handsome wooden box to hold the ashes in, and for the time being Ms. Wilson put the box in a chest of drawers at home. She had several ideas about what to do with her mother's remains. One was to have them sent to Sweden. Another was to throw them into the waters of the Rio Grande. Still another was to scatter them from the top of a windy hill in San Francisco -- where her mother had lived the longest.

Before she could make up her mind, however, burglars broke into her house one night and the box was stolen. The police told her that local fences had become so efficient that there was a good chance her mother would wind up in an Arizona flea market within a couple of days. But Ms. Wilson thought that once the burglars realized their mistake, they might come back and leave the box on her doorstep. After all, there were no jewels inside it, just a heap of ashes. But this never happened, and little by little she was forced to conclude that her dead mother was still roaming around the world, just as she had done in life.

"Five years later," Ms. Wilson continues, "there was a message on my answering machine from a Father Jack Clark Robinson of the Holy Family Catholic Church. There was another Sara Wilson who lived in the area, and I often received calls that were meant for her. As I had found out from listening to those misguided messages, she was active in a church and coached soccer. Naturally, I thought the good Father had the wrong number. I returned his call and tried to explain to the receptionist that he had the wrong Sara Wilson, but she tranferred my call and I had to repeat my explanation. The Father then asked me if I was the daughter of Kerstin Lucid. 'Yes,' I said slowly. They had found a box containing ashes in the church vault, he said, and inside the ashes they had found an identification tag from the Vista Verde Mortuary, which they had in turn traced to me. Father Jack had been at the church for only two years and did not know how or when the box had arrived. He had talked to the priest who had worked at the church before him, but that man didn't know anything about the box either.

Later that day, I drove out to the South Valley of Albuquerque to pick up my mother. She had been such a pagan all her life, it was ironic to find her in a Catholic church. Father Jack, dressed in the brown robes of St. Francis, took me to his office. The reappearance of my mother was quite unnerving, and I think he read this on my face. As he gently gave her back to me, I decided to keep her. My family and I now decorate her box for holidays and parties -- and always make sure that she is on the piano when we dance."

Vicky Johnson of Great Falls, Montana spent her childhood in Lake Forest, Illinois. After graduating from high school, she enrolled in a summer course at Barat College, a small Catholic college run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. The subject was French and it turned out that she was the only student in the class. Her teacher, in Mrs. Johnson's words, "was a little French nun in her eighties with warm, dark eyes and a little mustache that trembled when she spoke. 'Fermez la porte, s'il vous plait,' she said. Her accent in English was so thick that it was just as easy or easier to understand her in French."

The class went well. Mrs. Johnson made rapid progress, and with many gestures and much laughter, she began to master the intricacies of French grammar under the friendly tutelage of the aged nun in the flowing black habit. "One morning," she continues, "I woke up with puffy eyes, and my neck and throat were very swollen. Even my mother, who summoned doctors only when you appeared to be on the point of death, decided that I should stay home from school. I lay in bed for days with a pounding headache and a very high fever. One night I told my parents I was afraid that if I allowed myself to fall asleep, I would be gone in the morning. My mother paid no attention, but my father, who had to get up at 5:00 a.m. and commute to Chicago, sat up all night reading to me. I had no idea what he read, but in my delirium I saw myself standing on a tall stone wall that had almost split in two. I knew that if it split apart, my soul and body would be separated. My French teacher stood on the other side of the split, holding out her hand to me. I took it, stepped over the crack, and joined her. Afterwards, I fell into a deep sleep and knew that I would be safe. Lab tests determined that I had 'mono,' a newly recognized glandular fever. I was given antibiotics and slept and slept for most of the summer. One morning I awoke feeling renewed, refreshed, suddenly aware that birds were singing outside. I rushed to resume my French classes at Barat College with my dear teacher, but the nuns told me that she had died while I was gone. I asked them when, and they told me. It was the same night that she had helped me over the wall."

By her own admission, Grace Fichetelberg is over 75. She moved to Taos, New Mexico, a few years ago, but most of her life was spent in New York City. Her story concerns something that happened to her when she was a little girl of six. But, she adds, "It's as fresh in my mind as if it happened just yesterday."

Her sister Dotty was eight years older than she was and had been given the responsibility of caring for her after school. Dotty hated having to do this, but Grace loved going along with her when she visited her friends. One afternoon, Dotty had to go to another girl's apartment to do a homework assignment and dutifully dragged Grace to the building and up three flights of stairs. Grace knew that she was going to be bored. "When they did homework in the kitchen," she writes, "I was neglected in every way. The two of them would giggle and ignore me. They called me brat, pest, and often teased me to tears. On that particular afternoon, I had nothing to do. After all, I was only six years old. And so I had a fit. I just lay down on the floor and started kicking me feet. I screamed, I banged, I made all the noise I could. The tenant in the apartment below couldn't tolerate the noise, and so she grabbed a stick and started banging on the ceiling. That frightened me, but I stubbornly continued to kick and scream. What a horrible noise I made! But my sister went on ignoring me, and she and her friend just laughed to show how little they cared about what I was doing. And the lady below, in her second floor kitchen, kept banging up, screaming at the top of her lungs. Then I stopped crying -- out of pure exhaustion -- but the lady kept banging on her ceiling. I could feel the vibrations in my body, and then I heard her scream: 'I'm coming up! You'll be sorry when I get there!' My sister and her friend panicked -- and so did I. Dotty grabbed my hand, pulled me to the door, and opened it, listening to make sure that the woman wasn't on her way up to our landing. 'Shut up,' she said to me, and then she gave me a pinch on the arm to make sure I'd behave. I was so scared, I was whimpering, but she kept pinching my arm until I calmed down. As we stood there on the landing, listening for signs of the woman, I could feel her body shaking with fear. We couldn't leave the building by going down the stairs because that would have meant passing in front of the woman's door. Dotty was worried that she was waiting for us. The only way out was to go up the stairs. We climbed to the fourth floor, to the fifth floor, to the sixth floor, and then we came to a steel door. Luckily for us, she was able to open it. We went out onto the roof of the building, but I didn't know this. I had never been on a roof before, and I didn't know where we were. I didn't know what this place was. I remember that we climbed over walls, running from one rooftop to another. Then Dotty stopped at another steel door and opened it and guided me down the stairs to safety. We stepped out onto the sidewalk of this strange block. I don't know why, not even to this day, but when our feet touched the sidewalk, I thought we'd gone to heaven. I imagined that we were in heaven. I looked around and was amazed to see children jumping rope, just like we did, and that everything looked the same -- except how could that be when this was heaven? When we turned the corner, I could see stores, and people going into them and out of them carrying bundles, and I was amazed. 'So this is what heaven looks like,' I said to my sister, but she wasn't listening. Every block we turned into was more exciting to me than the last. I figured we'd reached heaven by climbing up the stairs and crossing over the rooftops. I was so happy to be there, where children played like me. Then we turned one more corner, and we were on the block where we lived. 'How did our street get up to heaven?' I asked my sister. But she didn't answer me. She just pulled me in through the door of our building and said 'Shut up.'"

Grace Fichetelberg concludes her story with the following short paragraph: "I kept this experience to myself for many years. It was my secret. I truly believed I'd been to heaven. Only I couldn't understand how I'd gotten there -- or how I'd found the way back to my house. This happened in the Bronx. We lived on Vyse Avenue."

Corki Stewart writes: "In 1956, Phoenix, Arizona was a city with boundless blue skies. One day, as I walked around the house with my sister Kathy's new parakeet on my finger, I got it into my head to show Perky what the sky looked like. Maybe he could make a little bird friend out there. I took him into the backyard, and then, to my horror, Perky flew off. The enormous, relentless sky swallowed up my sister's blue treasure, and suddenly he was gone, clipped wings and all. Kathy managed to forgive me. With fake optimism, she even tried to reassure me that Perky would find a new home. But I was far too canny to believe that such a thing was possible. I was inconsolable. Time passed. Eventually, my great remorse took a modest place among the larger things of life, and we all grew up. Decades later, I watched my own children growing. We shared their activities and got to know the parents of the kids' friends, the Kissells. The two families went camping around Arizona together. We all piled into the van to go on outings to the theater. We became the best of friends. One evening, the game was to tell Great Pet Stories. One person claimed to have the oldest living goldfish. Someone else had a psychic dog. Then Barry, the father of the other family, took the floor and announced that the greatest pet of all time was his bird Sweetie Pie. 'The best thing about Sweetie Pie,' he said, 'was the way we got him. One day, when I was about eight, out of the clear blue sky, a little blue parakeet just floated down and landed on my finger,' When I was finally able to speak, we examined the amazing evidence. The dates and the locations and the pictures of the bird all matched up. It seems that our two families had been connected long before we ever met. Forty years later, I ran to my sister and said, 'You were right! Perky lived!!'"

The National Story Project can be heard the first Saturday of every month on Weekend All Things Considered.