The Gordonston Ladies Dog Walking Club

by Duncan Whitehead

  “Why don’t you just get them to call you?” asked Veronica, noticing the dejected look on her husband’s face.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “The time difference, for one thing.” He shrugged. “Also, I don’t want them ringing in the middle of night or early morning and waking Katie. Chances are, I would be out in the park anyway if they called. At least if they send an email, I know I would read it eventually.” Veronica conceded that Doug had a point. She could see, though, that her husband was upset, and was worried that he could quite easily be slipping into a mild depression. She placed her hand on his arm.

  “Well, just relax, honey. It isn’t that big a deal. We can pay the bills, and that’s what matters.” Doug smiled at his wife. She was right, of course, but that didn’t really make him feel any better; he just hoped he could find some work and make some extra money, and soon.

  She had not left her home in two days, which was unheard of for Heidi, as it was usually guaranteed someone would see her tending her garden or walking Fuchsl in the park. She had called both Carla and Cindy and told them that she felt unwell, but it wasn’t anything serious. Both her friends had offered to come around and bring food as well as provide a little company. Heidi had thanked each of them, refused their kind offers, and told them not to worry about her. It was nothing major, and she preferred to be alone anyway, she said. She would be fine in a few days and appreciated their concern. She told them that Betty Jenkins had promised to exercise Fuchsl by letting him wander in the large rear garden of the house, so there was no need to worry about him either. She could, she said, open and shut the back door, and she wasn’t bedridden. She was probably contagious, though, so it would probably be best all around if they just stayed away for a few days.

  Betty Jenkins had prepared several meals that she had bagged, labeled, and stored for her employer, filling her refrigerator and her freezer. Heidi had told her not to come in for a few days, as she wouldn’t need her. Betty had jumped at the chance for some time off and thanked the old woman, as Heidi had promised she would pay her for her time anyway. Heidi had informed her housekeeper she would call her in a few days and let her know when she should come in again.

  The truth was that Heidi Launer felt perfectly fine. In fact, she had never felt better, and her little lie to her friends had been designed to keep them away from her house. As for Betty Jenkins, if for one minute her loyal housekeeper had thought Heidi had been ill, she would have called Doctor Victor immediately and prepared the spare bedroom so she could be Heidi’s on-call, twenty-four-hour nurse. Betty would have insisted on staying the night and waiting hand and foot on the elderly lady, which was the last thing Heidi wanted. No. Feign sickness for the Gordonston Ladies Dog Walking Club and give Betty some free days off—that was the only way to guarantee her privacy and ensure she would not be disturbed.

  Heidi Launer spent the day alone with her memories. It was the only company she desired or required that day. She hunted and found several old photograph albums and spread them out on the side table she had positioned in front of her chair. She smiled as she scanned through the photographs and portraits the albums contained: photographs of her husband, Oliver; and her son, Stephen as a baby, a child, a youth, and a young man. She flicked through the pages and smiled at the images of Stephen’s wedding and her grandchildren’s christening photos. She even found some old newspaper clippings that included a picture of Stephen with one of the Mafia bosses he had successfully defended.

  She dug further into drawers and closets and found even older albums containing faded black-and-white photographs of her parents—her father, standing proudly outside his butcher shop, clad in his white apron, her mother at his side, proud of her husband and his achievement. There were pictures too of Heidi as a child, standing outside her father’s shop with her school friends. In some of these she was dressed in her school uniform. She had attended an all-girl’s day school, and once again she smiled at the faces of friends whose names were now long forgotten. She gently traced her finger along an image of herself with her mother and father—a family portrait —and smiled. They were good people, honest and hard working, but above all they were loyal.

  As she turned the pages of the old photo album from front to back and traveled the years back, she found a photograph of herself, taken on the day her family had arrived in America. She had been fourteen. As she sat in her parlor room, with the old album on her lap, she recalled the voyage across the North Atlantic as if it had been yesterday. The family had arrived in Southampton from Hamburg aboard the SS Bremen on the last voyage between Germany and Great Britain before the outbreak of war. Heidi recalled that there was a feeling of despair among the crew at the thought that they could soon be fighting the friends they had made in England. Her father had told her not to listen to the chatter among the crew, that whatever happened would all be for the best.

  The family boarded the Queen Mary in Southampton, after an overnight stay in a plush hotel not far from the port. The voyage to New York took sixteen days, and Heidi enjoyed every minute of the journey. The family traveled first class. The crew was made up of the friendliest and most polite people she’d ever encountered, and she and her family were treated like royalty. Heidi had marveled at the finery of the dining room and its silver cutlery and plush furniture. The food had been spectacular, and her mother and father had smiled through the whole voyage. She recalled the games and fun she and her family had joined in on deck. It had been a good time, and it was as if all the troubles that loomed on the horizon were a million miles away. Heidi gazed into the distance as she remembered the governess who traveled with them; her main role was to teach Heidi English, which she had, and very well. Heidi fondly recalled the days spent in her cabin with Helga as she learned the language of her new home.

  Helga had been English on her mother’s side, and she spoke the language perfectly. She had been hired especially, not only to teach Heidi English, but her parents also. It had been difficult at first. There were so many distractions and things she wanted to do on the large ship. Eventually, though, she had settled down to study, so that by the time she and her parents had arrived in New York, she spoke enough English to get by, and her mother and father were competent enough in the language to build their new lives.

  Heidi stared into the distance and wondered whatever had become of Helga. She wondered if she had returned to Austria, for when the boat docked in New York, Heidi and her parents were whisked away in motorcars, and she never saw Helga again. Had she, wondered Heidi, returned to her mother’s homeland, or had she returned to the Fatherland? No matter what, Heidi guessed that somehow Helga would have been caught up in the war that engulfed Europe. Heidi just hoped that Helga had survived.

  Heidi returned to the memory of her family’s arrival in New York. She thought of the photographer who had taken her portrait. He had been brought to the port to await the family’s arrival with the cars and the important-looking men in suits and top hats, and a man in uniform who was the attaché and a very important man. She remembered her parents being treated like royalty, her father signing papers and shaking hands; her mother laughing and smiling and speaking in German to the men who had collected the family’s luggage. Heidi recalled a man who never spoke and who wore a dark suit. He’d seemed worried, even scared. He’d nodded to her politely before ushering them all into a waiting car.

  The family had been driven to a grand building where everyone spoke her native language. It was a busy place, with people rushing around with papers and briefcases. She had run to a window and marveled at the scene outside. She had never seen such tall buildings, and the man who never smiled told her that one day every city in the world would look like this. She laughed and told him not to be silly, that there were already too many beautiful buildings in the cities that would all have to be knocked down to build a city such as this. He looked somber as he told her that what men made, men could destroy. She’d gotten th
e feeling that the stern man didn’t like her, and she turned back and watched the city scene below her. She had never seen so many cars and people, moving around like so many ants.

  The family left the German Embassy later that day, after her father was handed a briefcase that he held tightly to his chest. They were driven the long distance to Savannah by a chauffeur who spoke both German and English and who told them about the towns and cities they passed through. They drove all through the night, and Heidi slept most of the way. They stopped twice, and spent the night in small hotels. Their chauffeur paid for everything—rooms, food, and even Heidi’s first taste of Coca-Cola. It was as if he knew how important the people that he was driving were. When they eventually arrived on the Georgia coast, it was daybreak, and Heidi marveled at the scenery and the houses as they approached the small coastal city. When the car pulled up to a big house, set on a square in the center of the town, she squealed with delight when her father told her it was to be the family’s new home. She ran from the car onto the porch and jumped for joy, only to stop dead in her tracks when she saw the three servants.

  Heidi had never seen Negroes before, not even in a picture or in a book. She didn’t know what to think when she saw the family’s new housekeeper, gardener, and butler, who all stood waiting for the arrival of their new employers. She ran straight into her father’s arms, more frightened than she had ever been in her life. Her father assured her not to be afraid, that the darkly colored people were indeed just people. He reminded her of the time she had gone to Berlin and watched the Olympic Games from the special box a few years earlier. “Do you remember Jesse Owens,” her father asked Heidi, “and the way he ran so well?”

  Heidi said she did. She had cheered and clapped along with everyone else when he was presented with his medal, despite what everyone said later. Her father explained that he was the same as the people who would now be sharing their home. He said that Negroes were people, just like them, and to forget anything that she may have heard to the contrary. Heidi had not believed this. She’d always thought that there was no one else like her, her family, and her countrymen. They were superior in every way. Her father certainly had some strange ideas, and she felt like reminding him that he should not say such things.

  Heidi took a deep breath. She had been at the Berlin Olympics in 1939, and despite what she read years later, and even to this day she remembered the cheers and the ovations all the medal winners received, irrelevant of race or nationality. Propaganda, thought the old lady, was something that her own country was not alone in using during those dark times. Heidi remembered sadly that there were no photographs of her life prior to her arrival in Savannah. There were none of her homeland or any of her before she had arrived in Savannah. It doesn’t matter, though, she thought as she sat in back her easy chair in her parlor. I still remember. She didn’t need photographs to remind her. Her memories were enough, and you couldn’t change the truth.

  Heidi remembered what she had looked like and felt a tear begin to well up in her eye. She remembered everything; she remembered the truth. Maybe it was because the man she had called her father—that the whole world called her father—who had said the black people were the same as them, wasn’t her real father. Her real mother would never have said or allowed such a thing, and if Heidi had ever known her real father, she was sure he would not have either. She knew for certain that her uncle would have been horrified to think that she had been told such nonsense.

  Heidi sighed, as memories of her childhood before her arrival to Savannah flooded back, memories of her real mother and her real family. Though the couple she called her parents were not actually even related to her, they were good people, and she couldn’t have wished for more loving guardians. The truth, though, was that they were not her flesh and blood. They were friends of the family, and she had known them for many years. She was told to call them “Mother” and “Father,” but that was not who they were.

  She had never known her real father; he had died a week before she was born. Her mother had been devastated. They were not married, but the wedding had been planned, and despite the scandal of her being pregnant at the altar, it hadn’t caused too many raised eyebrows. Those were hard times back then. The family was poor, and if it hadn’t been for her mother’s brother, Heidi’s uncle, she doubted that she would have made it through the depression that engulfed Austria and Germany after the First World War.

  With the help of her brother, Heidi’s mother managed to bring up an intelligent, bright, and attractive young woman. Heidi closed her eyes, remembering the fun times with her mother—her real mother—and her uncle, the uncle she had loved so dearly. They’d spent so much time together that he had become more like a father to her, praising her, supporting her interest in arts and music, listening to what she had to say, encouraging her to become a person of courage and honor and to be proud of what he taught her to call her “Aryan roots.” She longed for his visits, and though he was a busy and important man, he always seemed to have time for his niece.

  Heidi stood up from her chair and slowly made her way up the stairs to the second floor of her home. The old woman paused as she passed the normally locked room. She had unlocked the door earlier that day, after Betty Jenkins left, knowing that she would be entering it sometime later during the day. She felt the door handle and closed her eyes. The room contained many secrets, many memories, and it would devastate her if anything untoward occurred—a fire, for example—that would damage her precious memories. She turned the door handle and entered the room where she housed her collection of books.

  Ten-foot-high shelves lined every wall. There were thousands of books, all lined up like those in a library, categorized by genre and writer. Heidi ran a finger along a section of books. She breathed in the smell of them, the smell of old paper, musty even, and once again fleetingly closed her eyes. This was her other sanctuary, the place where she could come and sit and gaze at her vast collection. It was her special place, though not a secret like the room next door—this one she allowed visitors to enter and Betty Jenkins to clean. Fuchsl stood at the door and tilted his head as he watched his owner wander around the room, pausing at different shelves to inspect this book or that, lifting it from its allotted space and then returning it to its home.

  Heidi finally stopped still at the section she had come to inspect that evening. Her hand reached up to the shelf, and she selected a book, then another, and then a third. She carried the three books to the reading table and chair that sat in the center of the room. She placed the books on the table, drew out the chair, and took her seat. Opening the pages of the first book, she briefly read a few paragraphs. She did the same with the second and the third. She flipped each book over individually, as if inspecting it, front cover and back. She was pleased to see that they were still in mint condition. They had been well cared for and were still like new, despite the fact she had read each of them many times.

  She placed the books face up on the table and read the title of each aloud. Fuchsl stared at her, not sure whether his mistress was calling him to join her. He decided she wasn’t and once more sat down on his hind legs at the entrance to the room.

  “The Bavarian Forest of Magic,” she said aloud. “The Wizards and the Boy, Fairies in the Forest and Other Tales.”

  Heidi’s expression had changed; she was no longer smiling, and her mouth contorted into a sneer. How dare he? she thought. How dare he! The man was an imposter, a liar of the highest magnitude, a fraud and a cheat, vermin. She clenched her fists, and the wrinkles on her hands seemed to fold like layers of old pink leather. Her eyes clouded with hate, and her lips trembled. She stared at the three books on the table: not at the titles, nor at the illustrated covers. No, she stared at the name of the author, the author of all three books. The name stared back at her, and it seemed to the old lady that the name mocked her. She despised the name, had done so for years now, and soon she would take her revenge on
the man who bore that name, for the wrongs he had done. Emblazoned across the bottom of each cover, printed in bold, black capital letters was the name “Elliott Miller.”

  Heidi stood up from the reading table, steadying herself on the chair as she did so, and carried the three books with her as she exited her private library. She proceeded, slowly and with Fuchsl trailing behind her, along the second floor landing toward the “special” room for which she held the only key, the room that no other soul had ever entered, the room that her late husband had tried many times, always unsuccessfully, to enter. This room contained secrets within its walls, and its contents were for her eyes only. She slowly opened the door, Fuchsl following loyally behind her, and entered the sunlit room.

  She carried the three books with her as she made her way toward the glass-doored bookcase that was central to the room. She placed Elliott’s books on the floor, opened the glass display case, and removed the object she had so lovingly caressed and cradled a few days earlier.

  The Luger was in excellent condition. She had no doubt that it would still function, and she raised it above her head so the sunlight that entered the room from the draped windows reflected on its black, shiny surface. The Luger was the favored German handgun in World War Two for the officers of the Reich, though it was developed prior to the First World War. Her uncle had referred to the weapon as his “Pistolen-08.” The German Army had adopted it in 1908. For Heidi, this gun was far more than just a weapon. It had been his Luger.

  As she gently stroked the barrel, she recalled the day her uncle had presented it to her. It was one of the last things he had ever given her, and she treasured it. The occasion had been a dinner party, held in her honor, just before she had departed for America. Seated around the table were her mother and her soon-to-be new “parents,” plus faces she recognized from the newspapers and the movie reels. She remembered the gleaming medals and the highly pressed uniforms, the spit-polished boots, and the way the men seated at the table applauded everything her beloved uncle said. Every utterance that left his mouth was met with agreement; the whole table was in complete awe of him. But to Heidi he was just her uncle, a man she loved more dearly than anyone else, even her own mother. He handed her the weapon, cleaned and polished, after the servants cleared their plates.