By Blood (11 page)

A knock on the doctor’s door startled us all. Dr. Schussler and the patient jumped in their seats, and it was all I could do to keep still myself. I looked at my watch in amazement: In all my years of therapy, I had never known a single one of the therapeutic breed to proceed past the very tick of the fifty-minute hour. Yet here it was noon, full noon, two hands on the twelve.

Dr. Schussler went to the door, opened it. Two minutes, she said very softly out into the corridor. The door closed, and her next client’s footsteps pounded down the hall.

Ah! We cannot stop here for an entire week! the doctor said.

(No, indeed! I thought. We cannot stop here!)

Oh, God, said the patient. Is the hour already up?

Ach
. I am afraid so.

There came the sound of pages turning.

I had a cancellation for tonight, the doctor went on. Eight o’clock. Can you come back then?

The footsteps came pounding back, then stamped outside the door.

Yes, said the patient, rising to her feet. I’ll come back then.

Your mother had just insulted you once again, said Dr. Schussler as they resumed at eight.

Oh, yes indeed, said the patient. She thinks my gums are disgusting. Can you imagine how impossible it is to be a happy person if your mother thinks your smile is disgusting? Anyway. Never mind this for now. Getting back to where we were.

There was a pause. Then she resumed as if the many hours had not intervened:

Mother asked me to make her another martini. No, didn’t ask. It was the usual command: You know, you’ll make one for me, sweetheart, dry and very cold, just like the last.

So I made yet another martini, circling the vermouth around the glass then tossing it, shaking the vodka until it was ice cold—the whole routine of Mother’s perfect martini. All the while, I was aware of wanting to prolong each step—perform the ritual exquisitely well, be the world’s most perfect bartender. Because I knew we’d go back to the story about the ruins of Europe, defeated Germany—all its horror. I knew what was waiting for me. How could I not know what was waiting for me?

I put the drink on the tray and looked at it for a moment: It was clear and icy, something immaculate in it, unclouded. This may seem silly but I suddenly wanted a clear, clean life filled with martinis, like Mother’s. I would wear high heels and skirts; I’d learn to wear makeup, learn how to chitchat at cocktail parties; I’d get married to some unassuming man—be normal, regular, like everyone else, which all at once seemed what I’d always wanted: to be normal and regular, not odd, not adopted, not an unhappy genetic alien set down among cheerful people. For a moment I even wondered if my being gay was just another admission of defeat.

Defeat at what? asked the therapist.

At being normal.

Do not do this to yourself, said the doctor. Now you are punishing yourself.

Yes, said the patient after a long pause.

As her client remained silent, Dr. Schussler said: So you made the martini and carried it to your mother.

Yes, said the patient. I did it as if in a dream. Some other person was carrying that tray, not spilling a drop of the drink, getting kissed for it. Someone else clicked off the TV. And that person said:

All right, Mother. What else was in that file?

Wait, sweetheart. That first sip. Ah! Perfect, as always. All right. Now. What else was in that file.

Mother put down her glass and looked out the window, where our neighbor’s light was now shining through the leaves.

How many times have I asked Jim Bracket to put a shade on that horrid porch light! she said. It’s brighter than a bloody streetlight. There must be some regulation about how bright a residential light can be!

Mother, please.

Her mother sighed. Yes, I know. I know I’m stalling. But you see how hard it is for me to go on with this. I promise I won’t get drunk. I’ll drink this slowly. But let me say to you now: Don’t you think you know enough already? You came from Germany. Your mother’s name was Maria. Somehow she lost you—it was wartime; perhaps she died. Isn’t that quite enough to know?

Was it? Was it quite enough to know? For one last time, the patient told her therapist, she felt the pull of secrecy, the thrill she had felt during all those years of having
mysterious origins
: the vague, wonderful stories she had recited in the back of her mind. Mothers and fathers had paraded by—nobles, movie stars, singers, artists, intellectuals—as her tastes in parents had changed over the years. Sometimes they were named Wilhelmina and Reginald, sometimes Fighting Bear and Little Feather. At twelve, she had imagined herself the secret illegitimate child of Jo Stafford; at fifteen, the unknown daughter of Virginia Woolf. Then, at sixteen, the happy images had suddenly faded, and the idea of her parents had become a hazy story of a woman who had an affair with a married man, got pregnant, and had to give up the baby for adoption when the scoundrel wouldn’t leave his wife and marry her.

Now all those old parents were suddenly banished.

Now there was Frau G.

Wasn’t that quite enough to know?

If she stopped here, and learned no more, she thought, there would still be stories she could tell herself, plausible stories about Frau G. Perhaps she was a very rich woman, a cultured woman, who lived in a grand apartment in Berlin. Yes, of course. She was a liberal-minded woman, not a Nazi, and the intelligentsia of Berlin had flocked to her drawing room, where each Tuesday evening she held a salon. Her husband was on leave when she was conceived; and then, tragically, he died at the front. The war ended, and Frau G. now found herself without her fortune, all the banks of Berlin having been looted, all the records lost, the mark worth not a pfennig. Sitting in the ruined drawing room where she had held forth over so many happy gatherings, her belly grown large and heavy, the lovely Frau came to the reluctant and awful decision to give her baby away, to give her to someone who could give the child what she had had before the war: a happy, prosperous home.

But I was too old for all that now, said the patient to her doctor with a laugh. The ridiculousness of the story was too apparent. I knew I couldn’t make up any more special parents.

So I said:

You can’t stop now, Mother. What else was in the “secret” file?

Yes, sighed her mother. I know. I can’t stop now. I knew this day would come sometime. And, oh, hell—she laughed—here it is.

She took a small sip of her drink. All right, now, dear. Collect yourself. So. I looked at the next page. I should tell you it was a very odd document. Very strange. It was mostly blank. There wasn’t even room on it for information. Just a stark little piece of paper. Maybe five by seven inches. Gray and already crackling. Wartime paper. I picked it up very carefully—as I said, my hands were trembling—and scanned it all over for something more, anything more. But there were just some short sentences in German, maybe two, and what looked like an official stamp on the right-hand corner.

And then you turned the page.

Yes, after I stared, dumb, at the words in a language I don’t understand. After I had stared so long that the letters turned into nonsense squiggles—yes, then I turned the page.

Her mother fell back in her chair, let her head lean against the headrest of the recliner. The next page, dear, she said, was a dossier. It was in English, no name, only a number—307—and I assumed of course that this was more information about the … about you.

She smiled at her daughter.

But then I read on and saw that couldn’t be true. I saw a birth date. Her smile fell. May 17, 1921.

So it was about—

Yes—

My birth mother—

Frau G
., dear.

My mother
, the patient said to herself.

Please go on, she said aloud.

Her mother took a sip of her drink, then went to take another.

Mother. Slowly, you said.

Yes, she said, putting down the glass.

Yes. What else. There was more, a little more. Place of birth: Berlin. Last known residence: Celle. Then there were spaces for information about the child’s father. Father’s name: Unknown. Father’s date of birth: Unknown. Father’s last residence: Unknown. And so on about the father: unknown, unknown, unknown.

So Frau G. had been born in Berlin and had last lived someplace named Celle. Nothing was known about your father. And the next line on the dossier said this: Date of surrender: May 18, 1946.

May 18th. Isn’t that just one day after her—after Frau G.’s birthday?

How quickly you memorize it! For all the times you forgot mine.

Oh, God.

Yes, her mother said, running her polished index finger around the rim of her glass. It appears to have been her birthday.

And what did it mean—surrender?

Surrender. That’s the term they use for when a woman gives up a baby. She surrenders it. Horrible. Another one of those brutal adoption terms. As if people didn’t have any feelings. Terrible! Let’s agree never to mention the word again.

She—she gave me up the day after her birthday?

So it would seem, dear. And now, darling, it’s time for another sip.

The patient watched helplessly as her mother downed the rest of her martini, then sat there considering the olive at the end of the toothpick.

Mother. Please.

Yes, yes. We have to go on, don’t we? Ever forward. Onward! She ate the olive.

Mother!

Yes, well. The next part of the dossier described Frau G. physically. It listed her height: five foot five. Weight: about one-twenty—slim, I remember thinking. Eye color: blue. Hair color: blond. Complexion: fair. Like us, I thought. Like Father and me: blond, blue-eyed, and fair. Physical defects: none. Genetic diseases: none. Mental health: excellent. I remember thinking, How can her mental health be excellent when she is … when she is giving up her baby? And then I realized they meant she wasn’t schizophrenic or hysterical, or some other gross mental problem they worried about at the time. People feeling sad, or even tormented … This wasn’t considered a mental health problem in those days. Only feelings. People thought of them as only feelings.

She looked out into the glare of Jim Bracket’s porch light while the shadows of the leaves scrabbled over her face. She crossed her arms over her chest. And when she spoke again, her voice was level, and a little cold.

I really should have started here, she said. No point in holding off. Very stupid of me. The last line on the dossier was “Religion.” Mother’s religion.

Not Catholic, said the patient.

Yes. Not Catholic. She looked at her daughter.

Jewish, it said. Jewish.

This is what I’d been holding off the whole time I was making the martini, the patient told Dr. Schussler. Now I couldn’t keep it away, of course. She’d said the word, and that was that.

So me, I said. So I’m Jewish too.

No, no! You were baptized. And from that moment, you were Catholic.

And before that—Jewish.

Her mother stood, smoothed her dress, sat down, then exchanged the places of two little glass figurines, the ballerina with the balloon seller. I didn’t know it until I saw the file, she said at last.

What do you mean, you didn’t know it? asked the patient.

Her mother said nothing. I don’t understand, the patient said.

Her mother sat forward, ran her fingertips over the ballerina’s legs. Of course, I didn’t either. I … Well, when I found out, you can imagine how I felt—

You?—

—standing there, coming across the fact that your mother was Jewish.

What
you
felt?

I leafed through the rest of the file, her mother went on. Correspondence, some of it in German, to and from that Bill Ryan person, one letter with a Vatican letterhead. It was more than I could take in, more than I could conceive of. I closed the file. That logo. Catholic Overseas Rescue. Who was being rescued? And from what?

All this took place in the morning. I had to wait all day for your father to come home, eight hours before I could ask him what the hell this was all about. The day seemed to go on forever. You were very fussy, crying over everything. I must have changed your diaper ten times. I couldn’t understand what was the matter with you.

I was a nuisance.

No.

A nuisance. You fell out of love with me just as quickly as you fell in love. Look what you were stuck with: a Jewish baby.

Don’t be silly. You were ill or something. I couldn’t soothe you. You wouldn’t be soothed.

A bother.

No. I paced up and down with you, bounced you up and down, held you, and still you kept on crying and crying until I thought I would go crazy until your father came home.

At last you went down for a nap. At last I heard Father’s key in the door. Before he had his hat off, his coat off, I was asking about you, your mother, Jews, Catholic Overseas Rescue. Rescued from what? I demanded to know.

He was furious. How dare you go into my locked drawer! He threw his briefcase at me; I had to jump back so it wouldn’t hit me. It was very heavy, loaded with papers, and I stood there stupidly for a moment looking at it sprawled at my feet. Meanwhile Father is hollering, How dare you! You stupid idiot. You’ll ruin everything. You stupid cow!

He spoke to you like that? the patient asked.

Yes. He did. In those days. When he was still fresh from the influence of his father and that horrible group.

And then?

Then I followed him into his office, still demanding to know what was going on. He tore off his hat, his coat. He kept shouting, You idiot! No one’s supposed to know. Not even you. He pounded the desk. He bent his chair back. He picked up an ashtray—glass, heavy—and raised his arm to throw it. Not at me! I yelled. And he crashed it to the floor.

Upstairs, you started crying. Wailing.

You’d better go tend to her, Father said.

But I wasn’t going to be dismissed so easily. I went upstairs, checked you, saw you were all right, then picked you up and carried you into the office.

Father eyed me as I came in, but now I had you in my arms, the baby he’d … the baby we went to so much trouble to bring into our lives. I sat down on the side chair, he at the desk, as if we were there for an appointment.

You fussed and whimpered, almost too big to hold in my arms.

I thought she’d have blue eyes, Father finally said.

Maybe too soon to tell, I answered.

They’re going dark, aren’t they? He leaned over and looked at the big bundle in my lap. He gave a laugh, then said to me: They told my father she’d be a blonde. What an ass. He believed it when they told him the child was “pure Aryan.”

(Dr. Schussler gasped.)

Tell me, I said to your father. What are you hiding from me?

He sat back in his desk chair—it had a high back, and he rested his head for a while. Then he reached out his hand to you. He caressed your soft hair, your sweet soft skin, ran a finger over your brow, and looked into your sparkling eyes. You started laughing. He tickled you. You laughed some more. He kissed you. You see, darling, no matter what anyone thought they wanted or didn’t want, there you were. And we fell helplessly in love.