Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (18 page)

Hugo, whom I saw on Sundays, was already chattering in
English. I felt humiliated, the big sister not able to speak because Minna kept
me barricaded behind a wall of German. She hoped day to day that I would be
sent back to Vienna. “Why waste your time on English when you may leave in the
morning?”

The first time she said it my heart skipped a beat. “
Mutti
und Oma, haben sie dir geschrieben?
They wrote you? I can go home?”

“I haven’t heard from Madame Butterfly,” Minna spat.
“In her own good time she will remember you.”

Mutti had forgotten me. It hit my child’s heart like a
fist. A year later, when I could read English, I despised the children’s books
we were given in school, with their saccharine mothers and children. “My mother
would never forget me. She loves me even though she is far away, and I pray
every night to see her again, as I know she is praying for me and watching over
me.” That’s what the girls in
Good Wives
or
English Orphans
would
have said to Cousin Minna, boldly defiant in their trembling little-girl
voices. But they didn’t understand anything about life, those little girls.

Your own mother lies in bed, too worn to get up to
kiss you good-bye when you get on a train, leave your city, your home, your
Mutti and Oma, behind. Men in uniforms stop you, look in your suitcase, put big
ugly hands on your underwear, your favorite doll, they can take these things if
they want, and your mother is lying in bed, not stopping them.

Of course I knew the truth, knew that only Hugo and I
could get visas and travel permits, that grown-ups weren’t allowed to go to
England unless someone in England gave them a job. I knew the truth, that the
Nazis hated us because we were Jews, so they took away Opa’s apartment with my
bedroom: some strange woman was living there now with her blond child in my
white-canopied bed—I had gone early one morning on foot to look at the
building, with its little sign,
Juden verboten
. I knew these things,
knew that my mama was hungry as we all were, but to a child, your parents are
so powerful, I still half believed my parents, my Opa, would rise up and make
everything go back the way it used to be.

When Minna said my mother would remember me in her own
good time, she only voiced my deepest fear. I had been sent away because Mutti
didn’t want me. Until September, when the war started and no one could leave
Austria anymore, Minna would say that at regular intervals.

Even today I’m sure she did this because she so
resented my mother, Lingerl, the little butterfly with her soft gold curls, her
beautiful smile, her charming manners. The only way Minna could hurt Lingerl
was to hurt me. Perhaps the fact that my mother never knew made Minna twist the
knife harder: she was so furious that she couldn’t stab Lingerl directly that
she kept on at me. Maybe that’s why she was so hateful when we got the news
about their fate.

The one thing I knew for sure my first summer in
London, the summer of ’39, was what my papa told me, that he would come if I
could find him a job. Armed with a German–English dictionary, which I found in
Minna’s sitting room, I spent that summer walking up and down the streets near
Minna’s house in Kentish Town. My cheeks stained with embarrassment, I would
ring doorbells and struggle to say, “Mine vater, he need job, he do all job.
Garden, he make garden. House, he clean house. Coal, he bring coal, make house
warm.”

Eventually I ended up at the house behind Minna’s. I
had been watching it from my attic window because it was so different from
Minna’s. Hers was a narrow frame structure whose neighbors almost touched on
the east and west sides. The garden was a cold oblong, as narrow as the house
and only holding a few scraggly raspberry bushes. To this day I won’t eat
raspberries. . . .

Anyway, the house behind was made of stone, with a
large garden, roses, an apple tree, a little patch of vegetables, and Claire. I
knew her name because her mother and her older sister would call to her. She
sat on a swing-bench under their pergola, her fair hair pulled away from her
ears to hang down her back, while she pored over her books.

“Claire,” her mother would call. “Teatime, darling.
You’ll strain your eyes reading in the sun.”

Of course, I didn’t understand what she was saying at
first, although I could make out Claire’s name, but the words were repeated
every summer, so my memory blurs all those summers; in my memory I understand
Mrs. Tallmadge perfectly from the start.

Claire was studying because next year she would take
her higher-school certificate; she wanted to read medicine—again, I only
learned this later. The sister, Vanessa, was five years older than Claire.
Vanessa had some refined little job, I don’t remember what now. She was getting
ready to be married that summer; that I understood clearly—all little girls understand
brides and weddings, from peeping over railings at them. I would watch Vanessa
come into the garden: she wanted Claire to try on a dress or a hat or admire a
swatch of fabric, and finally, when she could get her sister’s attention no
other way, she would snatch Claire’s book. Then the two would chase each other
around the garden until they ended up in a laughing heap back under the
pergola.

I wanted to be part of their life so desperately that
at night I would lie in bed making up stories about them. Claire would be in
some trouble from which I would rescue her. Claire would somehow know the
details of my life with Cousin Minna and would boldly confront Minna, accuse
her of all her crimes, and rescue me. I don’t know why it was Claire who became
my heroine, not the mother or the bride—maybe because Claire was closer to my
age, so I could imagine being her. I only know that I would watch the sisters
laughing together and burst into tears.

I put off their house until last because I didn’t want
Claire to pity me. I pictured my papa as a servant in her house; then she would
never sit laughing with me on the swing. But in the letters that still passed
between England and Vienna that summer, Papa kept reminding me that he needed
me to get him a job. All these years later I am still bitter that Minna
couldn’t find a place for him at the glove factory. It’s true it wasn’t her
factory, but she was the bookkeeper, she could talk to Herr Schatz. Every time
I brought it up she screamed that she wasn’t going to have people pointing a
finger at her. During the war, the glove factory was working treble shifts to
supply the army. . . .

Finally, one hot August morning, when I had seen
Claire go into the garden with her books, I rang their doorbell. I thought if
Mrs. Tallmadge answered I could manage to speak to her; if Claire was in the
garden I was safe from having to face my idol. Of course it was a maid who came
to the door—I should have expected that, since all of the bigger houses in our
neighborhood had maids. And even the small, ugly ones like Minna’s had at least
a charwoman to do the heavy cleaning.

The maid said something too fast for me to understand.
I only knew her tone was angry. Quickly, as she started to shut the door in my
face, I blurted out in broken English that Claire wanted me.

“Claire ask, she say, you come.”

The maid shut the door on me, but this time she told
me to wait, a word I had learned in my weeks of doorbell ringing. By and by
Claire came back with the maid.

“Oh, Susan, it’s the funny little girl from over the
way. I’ll talk to her—you go on.” When Susan disappeared, sniffing, Claire bent
over and said, “I’ve seen you watching me over the wall, you queer little
monkey. What do you want?”

I stammered out my story: father needed job. He could
do anything.

“But Mother looks after the garden, and Susan cleans
the house.”

“Play violin. Sister—” I pantomimed Vanessa as a
bride, making Claire burst into gales of laughter. “He play. Very pretty.
Sister like.”

Mrs. Tallmadge appeared behind her daughter, demanding
to know who I was and what I wanted. She and Claire had a conversation that
went on for some time, which I couldn’t follow at all, except to recognize
Hitler’s name, and the Jews, of course. I could see that Claire was trying to
persuade Mrs. Tallmadge but that the mother was obdurate—there was no money.
When my English became fluent, when I got to know the family, I learned that
Mr. Tallmadge had died, leaving some money—enough to maintain the house and
keep Mrs. Tallmadge and her daughters in respectable comfort—but not enough for
extravagance. Sponsoring my father would have been extravagant.

At one point Claire turned to ask me about my mother.
I said, Yes, she would come, too, but Claire wanted to know what kind of work
my mother could perform. I stared blankly, unable to imagine such a thing. Not
just because she had been sick with her pregnancy, but no one expected my
mother to work. You wanted her around to make you gay, because she danced and
talked and sang more beautifully than anyone. But even if my English had
allowed me to express those ideas, I knew they would be a mistake.

“Sewing,” I finally remembered. “Very good sewing,
mother make. Makes.”

“Maybe Ted?” Claire suggested.

“You can try,” her mother snorted, going back into the
house.

Ted was Edward Marmaduke. He was going to be Vanessa’s
husband. I had seen him in the garden, too, a pale Englishman with very blond
hair who turned an unhealthy pinky-red under the summer sun. He would serve in
Africa and Italy but come home in one piece in 1945, his face scorched to a
deep brick that never really faded.

That summer of ’39 he didn’t want a poor immigrant
couple to encumber the start of his married life with Vanessa: I heard that
argument, crouched on the other side of the wall between Minna’s yard and
Claire’s, knowing it was about me and my family but only understanding his loud
“no” and from Vanessa’s tone that she was trying to please both Claire and her
fiancé.

Claire told me not to give up hope. “But, little
monkey, you need to learn English. You have to go to school in a few weeks.”

“In Vienna,” I said. “I go home. I go on the school
there.”

Claire shook her head. “There may be war in Europe;
you might not go home for a long time. No, we need to get you speaking
English.”

So my life changed overnight. Of course, I still lived
with Minna, still ran her errands, endured her bitterness, but my heroine
actually did take me to the pergola. Every afternoon she made me speak English
with her. When school started, she took me to the local grammar school,
introduced me to the headmistress, and helped me at odd intervals to learn my
lessons.

I repaid her with lavish adoration. She was the most
beautiful girl in London. She became my standard of English manners: Claire
says one doesn’t do that, I would say coldly to Minna. Claire says one always
does this. I imitated her accent and her ways of doing things, from how she
draped herself in the garden swing to how she wore her hats.

When I learned Claire was going to read medicine if
she got a place at the Royal Free, that became my ambition, too.

Gate Crasher

M
orrell’s
and my brief vacation in Michigan helped drive Friday’s worries to the back of
my mind—thanks chiefly to Morrell’s good sense. Since I was driving the
outbound route I started to detour to Hyde Park, thinking I could make a quick
trip in and out of Fepple’s office to look for the Sommers family file. Morrell
vetoed this sharply, reminding me that we’d agreed to forty-eight hours without
business.

“I didn’t bring my laptop, so that I wouldn’t be
tempted to e-mail Humane Medicine. You can stay away from an insurance agent
who sounds like a disgusting specimen for that long, too, V I.” Morrell took my
picklocks out of my bag and stuck them in his jeans. “Anyway, I don’t want to
be a party to your extracurricular information-gathering techniques.”

I had to laugh, despite a momentary annoyance. After
all, why would I want to spoil my last few days with Morrell by bothering with
a worm like Fepple? I decided not even to bother with the morning papers, which
I’d stuck in my bag without reading: I didn’t need to raise my blood pressure
by seeing Bull Durham’s attacks on me in print.

Less easy to put aside were my worries about Lotty,
but our ban on business didn’t include concerns about friends. I tried to
describe her anguish to Morrell. He listened to me as I drove but couldn’t
offer much help in deciphering what lay behind her tormented speech.

“She lost her family in the war, didn’t she?”

“Except for her younger brother Hugo, who went to England
with her. He lives in Montreal—he runs a small chain of upscale women’s
boutiques in Montreal and Toronto. Her uncle Stefan, I guess he was one of her
grandfather’s brothers, he came to Chicago in the 1920’s. And spent most of the
war as a guest of the federal government in Fort Leavenworth. Forgery,” I added
in response to Morrell’s startled question. “A master engraver who fell in love
with Andrew Jackson’s face but overlooked a few details. So he wasn’t part of
her childhood.”

“She was nine or ten when she last saw her mother,
then. No wonder those wartime memories are too painful for her. Didn’t you say
he was dead—the person named Radbuka?”