Christmas Passed

by Anita Klumpers

  Dinah should have gone to bed. She shouldn’t have settled at her computer to learn what she could about Mathilde Mikkelson: born 1902, probably in Denmark, sister’s name unknown, came to America approx. 1919, married Walter Wagner. Dinah came up with nothing and more nothing. She put in different combinations of dates and possible name spellings. A Margrete Mikkelson was born in 1902, but she lived in Denmark until her death in 1999. David Mikkelson was born in 1894, and his occupation was listed as “Rabbi.” This caught Dinah’s attention. But no marriage was listed, no descendants, no date of death.

  And why did Freyja want to get involved? The beautiful dog was singing “Deutschland Uber Alles” but to the tune of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Dinah sat bolt upright in the chair, where she had fallen asleep, head on her arms, next to her laptop. Her cell phone was ringing.

  “Where are you?”

  “What?” She couldn’t pull herself totally out of the bizarre dream. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Mick! Why aren’t you here?”

  “Why aren’t I where? What time is it?” The sky was gray instead of black, but the sun wasn’t up yet. From his accusing tone one would have thought she’d slept past noon.

  “I’m not sure. Bring coffee. Lots of it. And doughnuts. A dozen should do for a start.”

  He sounded horrible, raspy, and exhausted, and Dinah worried that the spores she thought he’d avoided inhaling were already at work and multiplying in his lungs and bronchial tubes. “Mick. I don’t know where you are.”

  “At the house. Be here in fifteen minutes.”

  Thank goodness she’d taken a shower last night in an attempt to stay awake. Based on yesterday’s escapades, she pulled on jeans and the sort of Christmas pullover most people would wear for an ugly sweater party but that she adored. Sadly, the temperature was once more warm enough that she didn’t even need her winter coat.

  She pulled into the first doughnut shop she passed, and by seven-thirty was parking behind Mick’s car in the driveway of the Wagner House. Balancing camera case, purse, the bag of doughnuts, and a drink carrier with two coffees, she started toward the house. When a door behind her opened, she squawked and spun around, coffee cups tilting dangerously.

  Mick emerged from his car.

  “You look awful!” It was all she could think to say.

  “Yeah, well, you try sleeping in your car and waking up every hour to make the rounds of the house.”

  “Oh, Mick!”

  He brightened considerably as he focused on her, and Dinah assumed it was the sight of coffee and doughnuts.

  “That has to be one of the most hideous sweaters I’ve ever seen. But you wear it well.” He said it in the casual, offhanded way of a man who threw compliments at women on a regular basis.

  She tried to maintain her composure and tell herself that this was just Mickey’s way. “Your car or mine for breakfast?”

  “The kitchen. If the place hasn’t burned to the ground by now, we should be safe.”

  At the kitchen table, Mick finished his coffee in a few swigs and was on his fourth doughnut. “I’m starting to feel human. Thanks. I didn’t mean to bark at you on the phone. Too many weird things going on.” He took another doughnut and checked the clock. “Forty-five minutes to spare before Grandmother gets here.”

  “Greet her looking like you do now,” Dinah said, “and she won’t need much of an excuse to disinherit you.”

  Mick refused to let her stay at the house alone, and she didn’t protest when he suggested she ride along to his apartment. Dinah waited in his living room while he showered and changed. It was an ultra-modern style in a brand new building, all clean lines and smooth surfaces and blacks and whites. Dinah found nothing redeeming about it. Even the bursting-at-the-seams bookshelves held books only on science and the scientific method.

  Mick came out of his room rubbing a hand over his chin. “I don’t want to take time to shave. Think I can get away with this?”

  Yes, he most definitely could. The faint stubble only served to make him appear more masculine and virile. Dinah grabbed a book at random. “Your light reading?”

  Mick was shrugging into a jacket. “I take my teaching job seriously and double check everything I tell the students. But that definitely is not my light reading.” He beckoned her to what he called his den. Still very modern, but with color and comfort. And books. Novels and classics, paperbacks and hardcovers covered every flat surface. A tattered armchair was in the corner by a window. “My getaway from lesson planning and preparing lecture notes and writing scholarly articles.”

  On the drive back to the Wagner House, Dinah reflected how little she knew about Mick. She’d always thought him a big fish in a small pond. All the girls had crushes on him. Except Dinah. She disliked Mickey and his ego and his puncturing of hers. After eighth grade, the districts had been redrawn, and he’d gone to a different high school. She’d lost track. Now she wondered if her own hurt kept her from seeing him as he really was. Or maybe he really had been a jerk in those early years and was finally growing out of it.

  Miriam Wagner hadn’t arrived yet. The wind shifted, the air grew perceptibly cooler, and Dinah shivered involuntarily. Mick looked at her sharply. “Are you cold? Of course you are. Where’s your coat? Hustle yourself inside. Can’t let my protector catch a chill.”

  Dinah took a surreptitious peek at the weather app on her phone. Maybe there was snow in the forecast. There was not. “I’m looking forward to seeing your grandmother again. It’s been several years. I wonder if she’ll remember me.”

  “She might. I told you she’s as sharp as ever. Still driving, even. And there she is.”

  From the unbroken sidelight, Dinah watched a gray sedan pull in behind Mick’s car.

  “Right on the dot.”

  Miriam Wagner exited her car with a flourish of swirling black. She stumped with a seemingly superfluous cane up the sidewalk, sparing only a glance for the boarded-up window. Mick held the door open, and she let him kiss her cheek before nodding at Dinah.

  “You’re the Braun girl. Mousy child but intelligent. You’ve blossomed into quite a beauty.” Mick’s grandmother appeared no older than when handing cookies to grade-school Dinah and telling her she needed meat on her bones. The marble-white hair coiled in a braid around her head. The hooded hazel eyes flanked a proud nose, and the olive skin hadn’t faded. There was none of Helen’s aristocratic beauty or fine-boned features, but strength and character were evident in her face and posture. Dinah felt drawn to her while being just a bit terrified.

  Still flustered by the very direct compliment, Dinah fell in line behind Mick who followed his grandmother into the kitchen. The old woman glared at the wrappers and cups still on the table. “Doughnuts and coffee for breakfast? You aren’t a teenager, Michael. Your metabolism overworked when you were a growing boy. It wants to relax now. Eat like that and in a few years, and you’ll be wearing the doughnut around your middle.”

  Mick mumbled something but Miriam wasn’t finished.

  “Are you still going around with that Parson girl?”

  His face flared. “No. Not for a while.”

  “Threw her over like the rest?” Miriam transferred the glare to Dinah. “Don’t carry a torch for this boy. He’s a heartbreaker. An unsavory quality in a young man.”

  No doubt. Dinah’s face was probably as red as Mick’s. She’d love to break the silence but couldn’t think of anything to say. Not her grandmother, not her business.

  Mick almost stumbled over his explanations for the broken window and hole in the dining room. Miriam held up a silencing hand. “I heard all about it. My pottery instructor has a son who will plaster that wall and paint to match the original color. Tell him there’s a gallon in the cellar. I also heard this young woman is worth her weight in gold.” She nodded at Dinah. Miriam remained standing, and now grasped her cane. “Water aerobics begins at ten. Can’t be late or they’ll send someone to see if I’m dead.” Her e
xpression remained austere but a whiff of humor wreathed these last words.

  “Grandmother.” Finally, Mick sounded like himself, abrupt and in charge. “Do we have Jewish ancestors?”

  “You’ve redeemed yourself somewhat.” Miriam seemed pleased with the question. “You’re the first person in the family with the wits to ask.”

  She hung her cane on a chair and sat, motioning them to do the same. “No one questioned but that we were German. The Wagners were here since Theodore Roosevelt’s first term. My mother, Mathilde, and her sister came over in…oh my. After the war. In 1919? From Germany. She mentioned family in Denmark, but seldom spoke of our relations.” She drummed fingers on the table. “I believe their mother was taken in one of the flu epidemics, and their father died fighting in the war. She and Auntie seemed to leave everything German behind. They took my maternal grandmother’s last name of Mikkelson. And no, I don’t know what their original name was. They even refused to join the German American Club. I took after her. Uninterested in the old ways and the old country, especially once tensions began building before the Second World War. We were Americans. Mother and Auntie became citizens.”

  Miriam Wagner sighed. “But I wondered about the candles. Father was uncomfortable with them. He was a progressive German, celebrating the secular aspects of Christmas to fit in with the neighbors. But ‘God’ was only used as an oath and Jesus never mentioned in our home.” She looked up with a trace of defiance. “Are you shocked?”

  “Why would I be shocked?” Mick asked.

  “I wasn’t talking to you. Dinah’s family has always been very religious.”

  Dinah moved uncomfortably, wishing the word “religious” didn’t carry such negative connotations. “It’s true. Everyone in my family is a member of a church except Cousin Brayden, the card-carrying atheist. He spends every family get-together arguing about our ignorant superstitions and demanding my grandparents stop praying for him.”

  “Would that be Rosa and Henk? What do they say?” Miriam seemed genuinely interested.

  “They tell him if he doesn’t believe there is a God, why get so worried about it?”

  Mick had been growing increasingly restless. “Grandmother, you need to answer about a dozen questions before your pool party.”

  “Water aerobics. So listen quickly. I think my mother was a Jewess. Little things like her reactions to the internment camps after the war. To any kind of anti-Semitism. Those candles. After my mother’s death I burned the colored candles until the supply ran out. Only after I tried to purchase more did I learn that Advent candles were to be lit on Sundays for a month, not for eight nights before Christmas. I always took for granted that different people celebrated different ways, but I admit I began to wonder.” Her tone was stern. “That is all I know about that. Don’t judge us for not being as interested in ancestry as people are now. It was a different time, and so many people were making a break with old identities to become fully American.”

  Mick’s expression softened. “I don’t judge you. But we found something else. They were at the bottom of the box with all the regular, non-barbaric ornaments.” He pulled out his cell and Dinah assumed he was showing her a picture of the swastika ornaments. “Are these familiar?”

  Miriam’s eyes rested blankly at the phone for a moment. Then anger washed over her face. “Are these familiar? You’re asking if I am too ga-ga, too feeble-minded to recognize such a hated symbol?”

  Mick looked as shocked as Dinah felt, but he persisted.

  “No one but Wagners have lived here since this house was built. Why are those in the same box as Christmas ornaments and Chanukah candles?”

  Miriam’s mouth relaxed, and she narrowed her eyes as if trying to see into the past. “I feel I should know the answer to that. I barely remember the Christmas ornaments, except when I was small they were set out in a bowl, and I loved them.” She sat back in her chair. “My mother hated all things to do with the Nazis, and my father defended much of what they did. He never completely left behind nationalistic pride, although he considered himself fully American. He said what Hitler did to the Jews was an awful thing but believed that many other things the Third Reich stood for were good.”

  “You think your father wasn’t aware Mathilde was probably Jewish?”

  “I believe not.” She leaned forward. “Maybe it explains why I grew up hating Hitler, retaining some distant sympathy for Germany yet being fully Americanized. It’s a wonder I’m so sane, isn’t it?”

  Mick softened. “I’m sorry I sprang that photo on you. And no, I don’t think you are gaga. Which is embarrassing to say, incidentally. Although you did have us wondering before you moved to Our Best Years.”

  “Inactivity is not healthy for the elderly. Or too much time with one’s own company.” His grandmother seemed not to be offended. “I didn’t worry”—she directed this at Dinah—“until I heard things, saw things in my peripheral vision, found things where they weren’t the day before. But nothing has happened at Best Years.” Miriam lifted her shoulders in an expressive shrug. “You think I’m a bit of a hypocrite sanctioning a grand Christmas event when the holiday means little to me? It makes others happy. The home is being cared for until this scalawag marries and moves in. If I were a praying woman I would beg it happens while I’m still alive.”

  Mumbling something about being too busy for a serious relationship, Mick fumbled with his phone. “I didn’t get a photo, but there’s another oddity in the attic. We found a boarded-up room under the eaves of the attic, between the rafters. Do you know anything about it?”

  “A boarded-up room? Are you sure I’m the only one imagining things, dear?” She smiled sweetly and rose. “You could ask Rolf.”

  “Who?”

  “Rolf—Ralph—Konig. Another German who became fully Americanized. He had to fight his parents for it though. They sent him to Camp Hindenburg every summer. It’s where he met Helga. Now called Helen. I told you. We all wanted to leave the old German ways behind.”

  Dinah could tell Mick wanted to ask about Camp Hindenburg. She signaled what she hoped he’d read as “I’ll tell you later.” They were back in Miriam’s good graces, and the clock ticked toward water aerobics time.

  “I asked Ralph about the attic. He seems clueless. Why ask him?”

  Miriam took her cane in hand and walked into the dining room. She tut-tutted at the hole, looked curiously at Helen’s Royal Copenhagen plates, and finally faced Mick, who’d glued himself to her shoulder. “I suppose I told you to ask Rolf from force of habit. I always idolized him, and Father confided in him. But it’s true, I can’t imagine him going into the attic.” She pushed the cane ahead of her as though it wasn’t moving quickly enough and, at the front door, took Dinah’s hand. “This boy is a rascal. But he’s a Wagner and that means there’s hope.” On the enigmatic remark, she let her grandson kiss her cheek, and then she was gone.

  To relieve Mick’s obvious discomfiture, Dinah told him if he would water the tree, she’d tell him about Camp Hindenburg. “It was one of several camps across the U.S. in the thirties, for German children. This one was just north of Milwaukee. Supposedly to perpetrate German culture but more likely to recreate Hitler Youth camps here on American soil. There were accusations of indoctrinating the children into Nazi ideology and spreading pro-Hitler sympathies here.”

  Mick crawled out from under the spindly branches of the broad tree. “This thing is a fire hazard in the making. Grandmother and I were nuts to approve this whole shebang.”

  Dinah was on the sofa, checking Camp Hindenburg facts on her phone.

  Mick sat next to her. She became uncomfortably aware of his proximity.

  He clasped his hands behind his head. “I don’t even want to think how many little Americans were brainwashed in those camps. I admire Ralph and Helen. Must have been tough, choosing to turn their backs on the little Nazis their parents wanted them to become.” He stopped abruptly and leaned closer.

  She wasn’t su
re if she liked the twinkle in his eye or not. Historically, it meant he was up to no good.

  “Want to go back up to the attic with me?”

  If only he hadn’t worded it like a proposition. If only he wasn’t eight inches from her face. Make that five. If only she could regulate her breathing.

  Dinah’s phone buzzed with a text, and to her mortification, she shrieked and catapulted to her feet. Mick retreated into the sofa, watching her with an unreadable expression.

  “The delivery van is here! The replacement window! Goodness, I forgot all about it!”

  Mick always could incite high emotion in her, though this disquieting hyperawareness of him was new. She forced herself to stop bleating, answered the door and took delivery of the window.

  Mick disappeared during the transaction but now came back with a small square box. From it he took two air-filtering masks. “Found them in the trunk. Come on, partner. Suit up and let’s check what’s on the other side of that door.”

  She couldn’t resist. The secret room in the magical attic in the wonderful house. And Mickey Wagner, her nemesis, making her skin tingle and her heart do the sort of things sleigh bells used to.

  The air was fresh because, of course, neither of them had thought to close the small attic windows. The door to the hidden room lay on the floor and beyond it a square of perfect blackness. Mick took her hand and Dinah was grateful for the warm contact even as she couldn’t wait to discover what lay inside. He flicked on the flashlight. They squeezed between the accumulated debris of the Wagners and knelt in the dust. Mick reached in, grimacing. “I don’t feel anything. Wait.” He’d bent his arm along the side of the opening. “It’s something solid wrapped in plastic. Here goes nothing.” He pulled, and a swath of brittle plastic appeared. One more hearty tug and the bottom of a tubular shape appeared. It must have been propped on one end, and Mick stopped pulling, but gravity had already taken over. What resembled a five-foot long cigar slid out the opening and lay at their feet.