Remembering Jo.

October 12, Ellsberry.

Another by-product of reading The New Yorker this morning was remembering my friend Jo.
Jo Kaufmann was a simple copy editor but I always thought there was much more to her, without seizing the chance to find out. I was a kid, really, and she was my family on this side of the Atlantic, my new home. I was looking for a room to rent in New York one summer when someone, I forget who, put us in contact. She lived in a u-shaped apartment on the Upper West Side, on 93th Street and Central Park West, and sublet two bedrooms to foreign students, whom she sometimes befriended to the point where they became like her children, much to her own children's disapproval, as I learned later (there might have been jealousy.) I became one of these; the liking was mutual and instantaneous.
A few years later I think it was her daughter who called to say she had died. I felt cheated, the world lonelier without her intelligence and wit (but the first and only time my father spoke to her on the phone he told her a joke she did not appreciate and was hence relegated to the forbidden place of people Jo did not like and were therefore never mentioned in her presence; my poor father never understood what had happened.)
It was the summer of 1988 and I had found work in a Washington Square coffee shop on a temporary student working visa. It was my second visit to New York, the one when I fell in love with the city, and Jo had a lot to do with it. Don't you love it here, she would say, not a question but an affirmation, as if there was no other possible way to feel about her adopted home.
Jo was related to the Freud family, the founder of psychoanalysis, and cousin to Lucian Freud, the famous British painter. She was born and raised in Germany and emigrated shortly before World War II, first to England and ultimately to the United States. Some time during this exile route she was married, but by the time I met her her husband was not around.
I write this struggling to patch together the few fragments of what she told me I still remember, and wishing the kid that I was would have taken the time to sit down with her and learn much more. In truth I did think about interviewing her even back then; my mentor and the grandfather I never had, Paul Lambert, a painter, had committed suicide a few years earlier, leaving me with the bitter regret of not having asked him to tell me his life in his own words - all the way back then the pull to try and enshrine a person through their words, to archive the details of experience, to delve into the lives of the ones I love as if it might help stave off the inevitable void into which I felt they were bound to disappear too soon, too suddenly, leaving no trace but in my memory, ephemeral, unreliable.
Pauls' wife, Helene, died of breast cancer; Paul killed himself a few years later; Jo died of heart failure, and their story died with them.
I remember sitting in Jo's kitchen drinking tea and eating Pepperidge Farm bread, which she introduced me to as if it were a delicacy. The kitchen was painted entirely bright yellow and its window gave onto a narrow back court full of rusty fire escapes. I don't remember the color of the other rooms, but in my memory they are an invisible cream white. What I remember is Jo sitting at the tiny kitchen table with me, peppering me with questions about my day, always taking the opportunity to celebrate the city with me, an exile's zeal. What I remember is Jo sitting at the big table in the living room right off the kitchen, working on a manuscript, surrounded by dictionaries and books and pages and pages, and the coffee table at the other end of the room, where I would sit, with a pile of New Yorker magazines on it, and the window sills with meager plants trying to survive the scorching summer heat, and the shelf full of books on the end wall.
The process of writing sometimes brings back memories, like people walking slowly out the shadows.
There was a Chinese restaurant she liked to go to, at the end of the block on Columbus Avenue, and sometimes we would go there together, as the time, on a short visit to the city in later years, when I met her in her apartment to walk to the restaurant together. She walked with difficulty, being overweight and riddled with health problems (of which I never dare to ask.) One night on that initial stay with her, one of what would be many, she invited me to her bedroom, a tiny room immediately by the front door, to watch opera on television. Her bedroom was forbidden territory, by an unspoken rule, as we were expected to respect each other's privacy above anything else.
She loved opera, and dance, and theater, she was passionate about literature and the English language (how I wish she could read over my shoulder now,) she was to me the ultimate New Yorker, the embodiment of the many East European Jews who came to flourish in this country after fleeing Hitler's crimes.
Every visit to New York after she died has left me with a disappointing feeling. It took me a long time to recognize she was missing from the city, and that the city she inhabited would never be returned to me. It has disappeared just as entirely as she has.