Her history is palely littered with celebrities.

I.

The story is bathed in that New England breeziness, a flippant shrug at the possible immensity of the situation: Her grandmother threw a dinner party and needed help with the preparation of a difficult recipe. So she telephoned Julia Child. It is unclear to me whether the two women were friends, or if in any way they were acquainted. Liza tells it as though they did not know one another. That those were the days during which one might casually call Julia Child to ask advice. The culinary mistress nonchalantly arrived; the dinner went off without a hitch.

II.

Another time, when her grandmother was a young woman, she went to a dance at a hotel. It must have been a swanky affair. I envision her, in swathes of yellow gauze, or tulle, a cloudy confection of a dress. Her hands might have been adorned in white gloves, long, like rose stems, or the necks of swans. Sometime in the course of the evening, she used an elevator. Whether she was going up or down, I do not know. But in that suspended room, detached from the world, she met Frank Sinatra, and he signed her dance card. To hand it to him, she must have extended one of her swan arms, a slow, gliding gesture. I wonder whose pen was used, the color of the ink, and if he signed the "S" with an elegant flourish. When he handed it back, she might have carelessly pressed her white thumb into the still-moist signature. I imagine the moment, her ethereal gown, his pale blue eyes. How she must have stared at them, adoringly. Or perhaps she averted her face, as though from an eclipse -- a rare and beautifully quiet peril.

III.

Quite another story involves Liza’s grandfather and those gray times of the Second World War. How grand it seems, recalling such an event, whose participants hailed from around the globe, yet how small the Earth became. Liza’s grandfather was a German immigrant. When he joined the service in the United States, his fluency in German was thought to be an asset. He became a spy, I think, and spent much time in his former homeland, performing various undercover duties in the name of his new one. One such task involved discovering the hiding places of the scattered Nazis, after the Allies had prevailed.

Here the story intersects with that of Richard Strauss, the opera and tone poem composer. Apparently, Hitler liked and used his music, perhaps in some of his propaganda. This greatly compromised Strauss, as he was not a Nazi, and, as was later revealed and used to exonerate him, he believed the party a dishonor to Germany. For one reason or another, Strauss went into hiding, in ever-changing locations, until the day Liza’s grandfather came upon him in a barn.

Imagine those times and this moment within them, a tile set in the mosaic. Imagine the ferocity in the air, so thick, so charged. But then, it might not have been this way. It could have been a coming down from this fierceness, a descent into more languid times. A heavy awareness of all that had preceded, and still the fog of what was to come. Liza tells me the story, not elaborating on the details. I close my eyes, and fill them in.

IV.

I believe the atmosphere to have possessed a quiet and somber clarity. The barn door creaked gently on its hinges. Within, it was dark, but evidence of the day filtered through the planks of the walls. Strauss sat in a corner, on a small mound of hay. Sunlight fell across him in one glorious stripe, illuminating all around him floating particles. He looked up when he heard the door, the immediate rustling of footsteps. But he remained sitting as the stranger approached. His face was half shadowed, half luminous, and to the visitor, he had the stillness of a wounded saint, immobile in the golden air.