My Family for the War (41 page)

Amanda and I stood in front of his lounge chair in our summer dresses and looked down at him doubtfully.

“We want to get postcards and an ice cream—will you come with us?”

“No, I don’t want to touch any money on the Sabbath. Just let me sit here and read a little.” He squinted under his hat in the sunlight and stretched out his legs to make it look like he was comfortable. I imagined that he was already boiling hot in his black shoes.

“He’ll turn the chair around as soon as we’re gone,” Amanda whispered.

We stopped a short way off and watched with curiosity, and sure enough: Matthew stood up, stomped through the sand with his coat billowing, and pushed the lounge chair into the position with the least attractive view possible. Then he wearily sank back into it and took out his prayer book. As reluctantly as I had come along myself, it was touching that he went through all of this for my sake.

At the postcard kiosk we looked for a card for Walter, but I knew what Amanda was really thinking. “Do you think your mum might like these?” she asked, making her voice sound as casual as possible.

“Mamu,” I corrected her. “Try not to confuse the two of you, please!”

She smiled apologetically and held out the card, an image of the famous pier that stretches more than a mile out into the water. On the other side was the coast of Holland. It couldn’t possibly have been more obvious. “One of you should finally make the first move,” Amanda declared, and paid for the postcard.

I didn’t say anything. I knew she was right; I even thought that Mamu probably hadn’t written yet because she was having the same trouble with those “first words” that I was. Nothing would be simpler than starting with an ordinary holiday postcard.

Nonetheless, I launched into protest as soon as Amanda pushed the card across the table toward me in the ice cream parlor. “Why do I have to be the one to take the first step?” I blurted. “If I was important to her, Mamu would have gotten in touch a long time ago.”

“If there is such a thing as hell on earth, then your mother
has been there,” Amanda said quietly. “She might still be there now.”

“I can’t help her,” I muttered in the direction of the water.

“I think you can.”

“Have I told you why she sent me to England all by myself?” I gave my foster mother a cool look. “Mamu and I could have emigrated to Shanghai; we had all the paperwork in order, including passage for the ship. But Papa was still in Sachsenhausen, and she chose to be separated from me rather than him.

“I was ten years old,” I said hoarsely. “I would rather have died than go alone, and she knew that.”

“Frances! To be confronted with a decision like that, you can’t seriously
blame
her for that!”

“We weren’t as close as you think we were. Papa always came first, he was wonderful.” My voice failed and for a few seconds I couldn’t speak. “It was the best decision she could have made,” I finally admitted. “But now I’m here and she’s over there.”

Amanda folded her hands over the menu and said nothing. I was glad when the waitress came over to our table. But I should have known better—once the topic had been raised, Mum wouldn’t let me off the hook.

“Honey, I have a feeling that you’re trying to tell me that you’re finished with your mother,” she said right to my face.

I was shocked. “No… How can you say that? I think about her, I’m worried, I…”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? You can’t just go about your business anymore. It’s time to settle it.”

“To settle what?”

“Whatever it is that stands between you two. What you’ve been carrying around with you for six years. There are things that become more significant the more you try to convince yourself they don’t exist.” She leaned forward and looked at me intently. “If I was sure you could be happy without your mother, I would do everything in my power to make things stay just the way they are. But I’m not sure. You’re not sure. That can’t just be ignored.”

“That’s true. You’d rather ignore that you’re my mother now. You’d prefer to erase the past six years. And I thought we had something special.”

“Oh, love. We did. We still do! That’s exactly what I was about to say. When you look back on these six years, if you take away the nights of bombing, the fear for your parents, and Gary, and Matthew, your accident, Gary’s… Gary’s death…” I could see how the word stuck in her throat. “Wouldn’t you agree that it was actually a happy time?” she asked bravely. “You were my daughter, and I was very, very happy to be your mum. We depended on each other, we were there for each other.”

Strange. Those were the words I had always longed to hear, but instead of being glad, something hot formed a ball in the pit of my stomach. “We have nothing to feel guilty about,” Amanda went on, and I suddenly knew where she was headed.

“No, Mum!” I heard myself say in an entirely foreign voice.

“We love each other enough that we don’t always have to be together. No matter where you are, we can’t lose each other anymore. That goes for Matthew too.”

“Stop!”

“We’re not sending you away, Frances. We just want to tell you that you’re free to go and win your mother back.”

I jumped up. “Be quiet!” I screamed at her, as loudly as I could. Heads turned at the other tables.

But Amanda actually put it into words. “My dear, if there’s anyone you’re really finished with, it’s me and Matthew.”

On the last day of secondary school there was a small celebration in the auditorium. We were simply called forward to receive our diplomas, and our teacher spoke a few warm words about each person’s plans for the future. Parents I didn’t know applauded politely, we crowded together on the school steps for a group photograph, there were hugs and solemn promises not to lose touch with each other. And then the endless wasteland of the long summer holiday before college lay before me.

My foster parents waited with the other parents around the edge of the schoolyard. “That was lovely,” Amanda observed. Since we had gotten back from Southend, we had made it a firm policy to be relaxed with each other. To celebrate the day, they took Hazel and me to the Bardolo, a sinfully expensive kosher restaurant in Westminster. My friend met us there, gave everyone a kiss on the cheek, and even as we sat down, the latest hilarious stories from her new life as a telephone operator bubbled forth.

When we were alone, Hazel listened intently as I poured my heart out. I told her what Amanda had done in Southend, that I had been so upset that I ran out of the ice cream parlor and paced up and down the beach and the pier until
nightfall. That Matthew, instead of taking my side, had only said how awful it still was for him and Amanda that they had had to break off contact with their parents and families in order to be together.

I told her that I had just walked away from him. And the next day we left right after breakfast and I had to continue pacing in the train so I wouldn’t have to sit in the same compartment with people I was through with.

“Well,” Hazel remarked when I was finished. “She could have put it more delicately.”

“Were you listening to me at all? Amanda dismissed me from being her daughter! What difference does it make how she put it?”

We sat in the late afternoon sun on the terrace of one of the ruins on Harrington Grove that were overgrown with grass and brush. I found the weather-beaten handle of a knife on the ground near me and carved a groove in the stones as I dangled my legs over the wall.

Hazel leaned against the side wall. “I don’t think Amanda dismissed you,” she said thoughtfully. “I think she just wanted to say that you don’t have to feel obligated to them. Does she know what you promised Gary?”

“No,” I replied sullenly, and poked around with my knife.

“What did you expect?” Hazel persisted. “That your mother would arrive and move in with the Shepards, preferably along with Uncle Erik and Walter?”

I pressed my lips together. I didn’t see what would have been so wrong with that!

“Wake up, Frances,” my friend said. “Your problem is that you’re stuck between two chapters. One is over, and you’re
not quite ready to start the next one. But if you just look at the one after that, the whole thing will fall into place. Stop agonizing about your mothers. Your future isn’t named Amanda or Mamu, but Walter. What does he have to say about all of this, anyway?”

“Not much. That’s part of the problem. He was there when Uncle Erik got my mother out of Belsen, but he’s only mentioned it in passing. She was probably in such terrible shape that even Walter doesn’t know what to say.”

“Wasn’t that almost two months ago? Surely she must be doing better. Why don’t you go to Holland during the holiday and see her?”

“Because Uncle Erik wrote that she doesn’t want to see me yet. And if I leave England, I might not be allowed back in the country.” The old knife broke, and I threw it far away into the brush. “She must have gotten my postcard by now, but six and a half years is just too long. Too much has happened. No!” I exclaimed emphatically. “I’m not going to Holland. We would be like strangers to each other. It’s better if everything just stays the way it is.”

“I believe I had your mother on the phone again,” Amanda said when I got home. “That was the third time this week the phone rang but no one spoke when I answered. I could tell from the clicking sounds that it was an overseas call, but the caller didn’t say their name and hung up after a few seconds.”

“Why would she do something like that?” I asked.

“Because she doesn’t want to talk with me. Maybe she’s scared.”

“Mamu? Scared? Of you? That’s funnier than you know,” I said, but secretly I was slowly beginning to have my doubts. Could I possibly know anymore what my mother felt and thought?

“It’s always late afternoon, just as I come home from the nursing home.”

“Maybe you should call her by name,” I suggested hesitantly. “Margot.”

“That’s a good idea. I’ll just start talking, tell her about you. I imagine she takes a walk alone every afternoon and passes by a public telephone. Because if Erik were there, he would say something, especially since you probably have to wait for hours for a connection.”

Officially we had long since forgiven each other. At the same time, I couldn’t forget that Amanda had given me up; I distanced myself from her and hoped that it bothered her as much as it did me.

The following afternoons I stayed within hearing distance of the telephone, but whoever it was that had called had apparently given up. The first week of my holiday passed, the Americans released atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the war that had begun in Poland found its end in the Pacific. The third anniversary of Gary’s death came and went and Amanda decided, “I want to go to the place it happened. Someday, if it’s possible, I’ll go there.”

“Francesfrancesfrances…” My name, like a distant echo. In the entrance of the bomb shelter a play of light and shadows, a figure bent forward to peer in, coming toward me as if in slow motion. When we had to spend nights here, this cold little tube of corrugated metal protected me from the bombs. Now it was still and warm inside, it smelled of earth and summer, but there was no protection from a piece of paper.

Deported to Lettland and perished there. Six words, thirty-four letters. The one and only constant hope I clung to. Bekka, who taught herself English, carried around secret escape routes in her shoe, who loved chocolate with nuts, adventure stories, and especially Shirley Temple, without ever once being allowed to go into a movie theater. She had managed to see half of one film at least,
The Littlest Rebel
, before the other children chased her out of the theater. Her eyes had glowed as she told me the end of the story, the ending she had thought up herself. “And when
we’re in America, I’m going to see if the real ending is as good as mine!”

She knew, I thought. She knew what the kindertransport meant, and what it meant to be left behind. She had braced herself; she had to have been among the survivors. Her world didn’t collapse when she was murdered, but a long time before that: When the chance to live fell to me and not her.

I will never understand it,
I thought.
If you die and I live, then there are no rules in this world.

Amanda sat down next to me. “It makes no sense whatsoever that she’s dead. It makes all the sense in the world that you live.”

I can’t remember much about the two days and nights between the letter from the Red Cross and what happened next, but those two sentences remain: the attempt at an answer, if there can be such a thing at all. At the time I didn’t have an inkling that they would accompany me the rest of my life; I just clung to the hope that Amanda, who gave me that answer, knew something about it, because a mother shouldn’t have to survive her child any more than one friend should live instead of another.

I suspected it wouldn’t help at all that my salvation hadn’t been my doing. The only comfort was that for a short time, Bekka and I had been allowed to be friends again.

The second morning after the news about Bekka, light came through the window and swept over me and something took shape, sorted itself out. Maybe you can only see the flip side of things very early in the morning, in this other, still new light.

I had two families—it was as simple as that. While many of the young people from the kindertransports were learning that their families had been extinguished, I had two mothers, a father, an uncle, possibly a future husband, and a good friend. Could anyone be any luckier?