Ordinary Heroes (53 page)

My inch-by-inch discovery of the wartime travails of young David Dubin, so resolute, high-minded, and frequently unwise, eventually made some of my father's shortcomings as a parent easier to bear. Tenderness came hard to Dad, like so many other men in his generation, but I understand now that, very simply, he'd exhausted his capacity for daring in Europe. He'd bet everything on my mother and, having won, never put all his chips down anywhere else. The terror of the battlefield, the cruelty he'd witnessed, and the damage to his proudest beliefs were a weight always holding him a step back from life. Yet I grant him the one grace we can ask as humans: he had done his very best.

But the revelation of my mother's identity shook me to the core. How could she have done this? How could she have deceived my sister and me about our heritage? How could she have denied her own past? I barely slept for weeks. The world, as I knew it, seemed as dramatically changed as if I'd found out I was the offspring of an amphibian.

I had always accepted that there was an element of mild deceit in my mother's character. She was essentially a straightforward person, but she could lie like a champ when required. I was quite a bit older when I realized my parakeet, whose cage I had constantly failed to clean, did not simply fly away when
I was seven. And she was very good at sticking up for utter implausibilities that she thought were good for us--like the alleged bout of childhood pneumonia she'd contracted because she had gone outside without a jacket.

But the autobiography she'd passed off was no little white lie, especially laying claim to the hallowed status of a survivor. How could she have done this? The words were buzzing through my mind at unexpected moments for months.

But time slowly began to leach away my anger. All parents keep secrets from their children. I eventually realized that neither she nor my father could have anticipated the abiding reverence the Jewish community ended up paying to those who had suffered in their names. True, that purported legacy allowed my mother at times to exert considerable emotional leverage over my sister and me, as well as my father's family, but she explicitly rejected any effort to celebrate her for what she had supposedly endured, always insisting without elaboration that she had been far, far luckier than most.

More important, I accept now that my parents really had no choice. They had started down this road before the revelations of Martin's death in Soviet hands and were stuck with it when Dad was released. Admitting they'd falsified Gita's identity would have been foolhardy; he'd risk renewed prosecution, and she, in all likelihood, would never hav
e b
een admitted to the U
. S
. Once here, the legal perils remained real, both for him, as a licensed attorney, and for her. Ironically, every time our government pounced on a former Nazi and tossed him out of the country for lying his way in, I'm sure their fears were reinforced. Certainly no one would choose to reveal a secret so dangerous to loose-tongued creatures like small children. The years passed. And their joint refusal to speak about the war stiffened their resolve not to tell Sarah or me. The anguish and disorientation I felt when I discovered the truth was, oddly, testimony to the fact that they had been sparing us pain.

Nor do I think they made anything easier for themselves. Everyone who has so much as nodded toward therapy knows that the turmoil of the past is never wholly forgotten. Unresolved, it seeps through even the strongest foundation. My mother was warm, strong, and courageous. She was a venerated champion of the needy, who could count hundreds of persons rescued through the Haven, the relief agency she ran. But I never had the illusion she was happy. As the past receded, she grew more brittle and dwelled closer to her anger. Some of that fury, I think now, might have been easier to set aside if she'd been free to acknowledge the shame of being the town bastard, instead of pretending to come from a tragic but loving Jewish family. Yet my parents had taken to heart the lesson of Orpheus an
d c
ould return to the world of light only by never looking back.

I do not judge. I still cannot fathom enduring or witnessing what they and millions of others had. My mother referred so frequently to the "darkest time humanity has ever known" that the phrase lost any power for me--she might as well have been saying, "Things go better with Coke." But my excavations finally brought me nose to nose with the staggering truth she had been trying to impart. More human beings were killed in Europe from 1937 to 1945 than in any epoch before or since. Yes, six million Jews. And also twenty million Russians. Another three million Poles. A million and a quarter in Yugoslavia. Three hundred and fifty thousand Brits. Two hundred thousand Americans. And, may a merciful God remember them, too, more than six million Germans. Forty million people in all. Mom had called it right. Not merely dark. Black.

In June 2004, my sister made her intended trip home to look in on Mom, who was declining. Caged by my own lies, I had debated for months what I would tell Sarah. By rights, our parents' story was as much hers as mine. I just didn't think I'd get much credit for sharing it. Still, the day she was leaving, I buttoned up my courage and gave her a copy of Dad's typescript, and a handwritten summary o
f w
hat Leach had added. She read that letter in my presence and, despite the labored apology it contained, responded in the spirit of our era.

"I'm going to sue you," my sister said.

"And what good will that do?"

"Hire a lawyer, Stewart."

I did, my high-school pal Hobie Tuttle, but no papers were served. Sarah called two weeks later. She was still boiling--I could literally hear her panting in the phone--yet she admitted that she'd been moved reading Dad's account.

"But the rest of it, Stewart? About Mom being this other woman? You're making it up. The way you've always made things up. Reality has never been good enough for you. Dad didn't write one word saying that.

I reasoned with her for just a moment. Leave Leach aside, whom she dismissed as an addlepated ninety-six-year-old. Why else would Dad have let Martin go? What other woman could Dad have married, given the fact that Teedle had him in custody a day or two after freeing Robert Martin? By then, I'd sorted through dozens of Gideon Bidwell's two-by-twos, copies of photos which Dad had kept after sending everything else to Biddy's family. I found one showing my father in uniform, conversing with a woman who is indubitably my mother. They stand in a courtyard in front of a small chateau constructed around a medieval turret, a "little castle"

if ever there was one. Sarah had a duplicate of the picture, but she claimed it might have been taken at another time and place.

"Believe what you want," I said.

"I will," she answered. "I will. But here's my bottom line. Leave Mom in peace. If you show her one page of this, I'll never speak to you again. And if you so much as talk to anyone else about this while she's alive, I swear to God, I really will sue you."

Mom, by then, was suffering. Within a year of my-father's death, in an eerie reprise, she began to develop symptoms of most of the diseases that had killed him. There was a spot on her lung and serious vessel damage around her heart. The body contains its own brutal mysteries. How could an organic illness be aggravated, as it clearly was, by Dad's absence? The surgeons took a lobe from her left lung. Cancer showed up on the scans again within two months. We'd been down this path with my father. She was brave and philosophical--as he had been. But her time was dwindling. She had good days and bad. But having watched Dad slide over the cliff, I knew that if I was ever going to say anything to her, it had better be soon.

I checked on her every day, bringing groceries and other necessities. She resisted a caretaker, but we had someone coming in for a few hours each afternoon. One morning, when Mom and I were alone in the kitchen, having our usual daily discussion, whic
h w
andered between family gossip and global affairs, I brought up my book about my father.

"I've decided to put it aside for a while," I told her.

She was next to the white stove, where she'd been making tea, and faced me slowly.

"Oh, yes?"

"I think I've gotten what I wanted to. Maybe I'll go back to it someday. But I'm doing a lot of freelance stuff now and I don't really have time to get to the end."

"This, I think, is wise, Stewart."

"Probably so. There's just one thing I'm curious about. You may not remember."

She was already shaking her gray curls, the same stark refusal to be quizzed I'd dealt with for nearly two years now.

"Well, just listen, Mom. This might be something you want to know."

Sighing, she seated herself at the old oak kitchen table, where the history of our family was written in the stains and scratches. She was shrinking away inside her skin, a small person now reduced to the minuscule. I recited the one paragraph my sister, after months of my begging, had given me clearance to utter, my prepared statement as it were.

"There was a woman Dad knew," I said, "named Gita Lodz. She was amazing, Mom. Brilliant, beautiful, a commando who worked underground with the OSS. She'd been orphaned in Poland and made her way to Marseilles. She was like Wonder Woman. She was ten times braver than most of the soldiers who won medals. I think she was probably the most remarkable person I learned about."

Mom peered across the table, the same obsidian eyes my father often described.

"Yes?" she asked. "What is your question?"

"I just wondered if Dad ever talked about her?"

She must have been someone he knew before he came to Balingen. I never heard her name from him once we were together there."

Disowning herself, she remained utterly serene, the same would-be Bernhardt who had saved Martin a hundred times. But the truth, as I'd recognized, was that the life she'd claimed was the life she'd lived. Who are we, she'd once asked, but the stories we tell about ourselves and believe? She had been Gilda Dubin now since 1945, nearly sixty years, far longer than she had been Gita Lodz, the firebrand and ingenue who'd cast her spell over my father. Gita, like millions of others, had been incinerated in Europe. As Mrs. David Dubin, she had raised me and loved me. She'd been to hundreds of Holocaust remembrances and synagogue services, had worked tirelessly at the Haven to aid Jews in need, most of them survivors or Russian immigrants. Her identity was assumed as a matter of necessity, but she was loyal to it, just as she had been to my father.

True to what Sarah and I had resolved in advance, following that brief excursion I let the subject go. I'd said what I meant to. I checked her pill counter to be certain she'd taken her medications, and prepared to leave. As usual, she asked me about Nona, whose past-tense status Mom refused to accept, even though I'd begun seeing someone else.

When I moved toward the door, she spoke up behind me again.

"Stewart," my mother said. You know Emma Lazar?"

"Naturally, Ma." Emma was my mother's closest friend, a survivor of Dachau.

"Emma remembers every day. Every day she recounts something. She walks down the street, she is remembering--someone who was raped by a guard, a man who died from eating a scrap of rotten meat he'd found, the moment she last touched her father's hand as they were pulled apart. This is what she lives. She must, of course. I do not blame her. But that is a crippled life. To go no farther. That is the brutal scar the Nazis laid upon her.

"When I came here, I promised myself a new life. A life that would not look back. This is life." She touched the wood of the table and then reached for a perfect orange atop the mounded fruit bowl that was always there. "Right now. This is life. You kno
w t
he philosophers? The present never stops. There is only the present. You cheat life to live in the past. Isn't that so?"

"Of course.,
,
"The past is beyond change. Good or bad. I am your mother, Stewart. That is the present and the truth. And your father was your father. That, too, is the truth. Whom he knew, or didn't know, I never dwelled upon. He saved me. He chose to love me when that was the bravest possible choice. From there, we both vowed to go forward. For me he was a hero."

"To me, too, Mom. More today than ever. I see him as a hero. But you were a hero, too, Ma. An amazing hero. You are both my heroes. I just want you to know that."

When the word 'hero' was applied to my mother as a camp survivor, she rigidly refused to hear it, citing the greater bravery of millions. And she rejected the title again today.

"I knew people, Stewart, who aspired to be heroes, to live beyond human limits because they found routine life a misery, and who were therefore doomed to disappointment. But I am an ordinary person, Stewart, who was fortunate enough to realize she wanted an ordinary life. Your father, too. In unusual circumstances, we did what we had to in order to preserve our chances to return and live normally. We all have much more courage than i
s c
ommonly imagined. Every day, Stewart, as I get older, I marvel at how much bravery it takes to go on, to bear the blows existence so often delivers. I bore mine and was lucky enough to survive to have the ordinary life I desired with your father and Sarah and you, a life that means far more to me than anything that went before. Does that," she asked, in a way that made me think she actually expected an answer, "does that make me a hero?"