by Audrey Braun
“I can’t wait to see what you find in there.”
“By the way, any more phone calls from the police?”
“Nothing.”
“Anything in the news about the guy who escaped from the hospital?”
“Benicio?” Willow teases.
“Yes. Benicio.”
“I checked the local news. I didn’t see anything but there may be more on the evening news so I’ll check again.” She gestures to the stack of papers in my hand. “Do you want me to come back after I get off work and help you go through all that? Bring you some dinner?”
“I would love that. Thank you.”
I toss the pile onto the bed, thank her again, and lock the door. I don’t even know where to begin.
I sit down and sift through the pages in the order they were sent. Legalese. I go back and start over. Slower. Like trolling through a river of mud. “Good God,” I say out loud. How is anyone supposed to make sense of this?
Then the sight of my mother’s loopy signature stabs me in the heart. It isn’t sorrow I feel, it’s anger. If she hadn’t died, I wouldn’t be in this mess.
There’s a note from Jacobson apologizing for the fact that his father passed away before the file was fully completed. When he took over, the file had been overlooked. He’s recovered several letters that were removed from a safety-deposit box but left forgotten in an attached file. He’s enclosed copies of them in the fax as well. Again, he apologizes. It isn’t like his office to make such mistakes, but surely I can understand what it’s like in the aftermath of a parent’s death. He also includes the dates when Jonathon made requests. There are two. The first, shortly after Jonathon and I were married when I must have signed something giving him permission to the files. The second, several weeks ago, just before Jonathon suggested we take a vacation. I understand now that he was desperate to cover his debts. He started combing through anything he could think of, searching for a way out. He found a solution. That look on his face when we were heading out the door for Mexico was one hundred percent relief. He was drunk on his own cleverness, his own dumb luck. Oopsy. A small fortune has been right there the whole time, lying next to him for eighteen years. “I love you, Cee,” he said with enough emotion for me to believe it. Maybe it wasn’t a lie after all. I’m his ticket out. I’m going to save him. Oh how he loves me.
I sift through the papers until I come across what appears to be an investment fund. At the bottom of the last page is typed See attached note. It’s a handwritten letter. I don’t recognize the handwriting. It isn’t my mother’s. It looks as if a very old person wrote it using an ancient, abandoned style of cursive. On closer examination I see that there are actually two letters. One signed by Annaliese Hagen. The other, Sonja Hagen. Sonja was my mother’s mother who died before I was born. I know very little about her. Annaliese would have been Sonja’s mother, my great-grandmother.
I recall the few conversations I had with my mother about our ancestry. My mother was the first U.S.-born child in her family. She had no interest in the past and apparently neither did her own mother. According to my mother, all Sonja ever told her was that she herself had become an American; her husband, my grandfather, had lived and died an American; and my mother was American, too. There was no need to concern herself with the rest. The only thing my mother seemed sure of was the fact that women in the family have never had very good luck. Not in love, and not in business, which they seemed to take an interest in regardless.
I read the letter from Annaliese to Sonja.
Dear Sonja,
Let me start at the beginning, even as I’ve come to the end, even if you think you already know all there is to know. I promise you do not.
Growing up in Zürich I always dreamed of being a chemist. This, of course, is nothing new. Nor is the fact that my family saw this dream as little more than the fantasy of a foolish girl. My father insisted I become a teacher for grade school children. If a girl had any sort of intellectual promise this was what was allowed her in my day. She could teach boys to follow their dreams, while teaching girls to be girls, as if they couldn’t figure out such a thing on their own.
I did what I was told. I never knew any woman to rise above teaching. I never knew any woman to even try. I was too young and naive to believe I could make a difference. But not a day has gone by in my life where I haven’t felt the weight of that decision, the weight of such regret.
But what I’ve never told you is this: I came close to being recognized as a chemist when I invented a cold remedy together with a chemistry student, a young man I had known since we were children. We used a good portion of the money I earned from teaching for the research, and in two years’ time the remedy was selling very well. It was obvious to everyone in town that I was a woman doing fine on her own. I was in no need of a husband, and this caused my family a great deal of stress, particularly my father who was embarrassed by me and who, in so many words, accused me of favoring women over men. The truth was I was financially better off than many of the men we knew. I was an unmarried woman with money in the bank. I didn’t need a man, and for this they despised me. For this they believed I deserved to be punished.
One evening as I was leaving the Metzgerei, two men stopped me just outside. They shoved me back into the alleyway until I found myself in the lane where the Lautens left their trash. The men circled me like hungry hounds. They said it was time someone showed me what a woman was supposed to be doing. I could smell the liquor on their breath. I could hear shoppers the next lane over, and yet no one came when I screamed.
It pains me to share this part of my life with you, but to leave it out would be to lie, to pretend it never happened, to make as if it had no bearing on what came next.
My dear daughter. You know what they did to me. Afterwards, I stumbled out onto the street. Mothers saw me and clutched their children to their sides. Husbands hurried their wives in the opposite direction. I staggered home alone, my face bloodied and swollen, my dress torn and soiled. No one helped me to heal during the awful weeks that followed as I tried to come to terms with what those men had done to me. I became a disease others did not want to come near. The weeks of waiting to see if I might be with child were a torment. My own sister asked me where I found the will to live. But it wasn’t my life I wanted to take. It was theirs. Why was I asked such a question while they walked the streets with their heads held high?
That was many, many years ago. It took time, but I moved past that day in both body and spirit. I did not give my life to those men. I did not let them take away my right to happiness. My right to love and pleasure. What they did was not my fault. And yet I admit that even after all these years I’ve never understood how two grown men could have done such a thing to an innocent young woman. Who knows what motivates the hearts of men? In this sense my father was right about me. I prefer the hearts of women.
I did not become pregnant then. Don’t fear that one of these men turned out to be your father. But if my prospects of ever finding a husband before this happened were low, they were hopeless after that.
The exception was your father. I married my friend the chemist, Walter Hagen, or should I say, he married me, claiming to have loved me his whole life. In time I came to love him, too, even when he decided to take sole credit for our cold remedy and claimed to his colleagues that I had lied about my part in formulating it. The truth was he couldn’t live with their chiding, nor could he live with the fact that I had never set foot in the science lab of a university and yet I knew what he knew. I devoured every science book I could get my hands on, including the ones he left lying around unread as he busied himself in the laboratory. I eavesdropped on conversations between him and his colleagues in the salon. I absorbed everything into the deepest parts of my being. And I forgave him for what he had done. I understood that he lived beneath the weight of the same establishment as me.
By the time you arrived, Hagen Pharmaceuticals was thriving. We lived better than anyone in our
corner of town. I had few true friends outside of my own sisters and brothers, but my life, once you were in it, could not have been better. I was fascinated by your insatiable curiosity. You taught me the truth about the intellect. You were my scientific proof that we are all born with a strong, healthy dose of intellectual curiosity. Male, female, what does it matter? Your questions, your answers, were no different than those of your male cousins, though in some instances, I must confess, yours were far more complex than theirs.
Nearly ten years went by during which it seemed impossible that anything should ever go wrong. The townspeople had come to respect me, as our company employed so many of the families. They depended on us for virtually everything they had.
But of course, nothing truly lasts. People became mysteriously ill, and over time it was discovered that our cold remedy contained arsenic. How it got there I never knew. It was not part of the original formula your father and I had devised. Was he to blame? Or was it a mistake? I knew in my heart that he had put it there. Arsenic in small doses makes people feel very good, very alive, and they would no doubt come back for more of the remedy. It is when arsenic builds up over time that it becomes deadly. He knew this. I knew this. We were chemists after all. And he sold it anyway.
We lost nearly everything. The company would have gone bankrupt if not for the production of facial creams women were unwilling to go without. Even so, people in town spit on me. I hope you have no memory of this, as they did not spare me even as I held your hand on the street.
I can still feel the scowl of the tellers in the bank as I withdrew my monthly allotments. They liked to keep me waiting for hours under the pretense that there was a problem with the account. A problem that always seemed to resolve itself if I waited long enough. I was determined in my patience. I refused to let them win.
What I did relinquish was your father. For many reasons our marriage was beyond repair. Even so, I refused to relinquish my ownership in the company I had helped in good faith to start. I refused to let go of the shares. For the rest of my life those shares have remained nearly worthless, but they are priceless in principle, you understand.
In the end I was a chemist both in practice and in my heart. In the quiet of my own room I devised formulas never seen. But I devised them nonetheless. I was who I was regardless of what others tried to make of me.
It is in this spirit that I leave these shares to you under the condition that you will never give your husband control of them. And should there ever be healthy funds to withdraw from again, you must visit the bank personally to make a withdrawal, even though you live on the other side of the world where I myself have taken you. This inconvenience is small compared to what I have lived through to make such funds possible. It is important for all the sons and daughters of those who spit on me, for the children’s children of the men who assaulted me, to see you walk in with your head held high, for it is they who have a legacy to be ashamed of. They will wait on you like servants, hand over to you what I hope will be more money than they will ever know in a lifetime, money that began with the hard work, the intellect of your mother, the chemist. You may remind them of this. You are my daughter. Never forget.
Your loving mother,
Annaliese Hagen
It feels as if a storm has blown in and set my hair on end. I rub my eyes and iron flat the goose bumps on my arms.
I need to get out of this room. Take a walk on the beach. Clear my head. But when I step out onto the balcony and peer over, the swimmers and sunbathers make my stomach flip. Everyone appears suspect in sunglasses and hats. Faces hidden behind clever disguises. Are they looking up at the seagulls and paragliders? Or are they looking at me?
I come back in and get a drink of water. I take a deep breath and return to the bed. My hands shake as I read the letter my grandmother Sonja wrote to my mother.
Dear Gilion,
Enclosed you will find a letter from my mother Annaliese written to me shortly before her death. I should have shown it to you long before now, but isn’t that one of life’s little tricks: to deliver clarity only when we reach death’s door? It is in memory of her, of the grandmother you never knew and whom I regret not sharing with you, that I am writing this.
First things first. I invested more money in Hagen Pharmaceuticals years ago after receiving a letter as a shareholder informing me that the company’s chemists had patented an innovative anesthesia they were planning to bring onto the market. I hid the letter and told your father nothing. At the time we married, women in this country had only been voting for twenty years. Merely a handful of elections to take part in, hardly enough to make a difference in the rule of law. In some ways it felt as if women had come such a long way; in others, it seemed they hadn’t stepped away from the stove. In the eyes of the law my property belonged to my husband, but his property belonged to whomever he decided. Even my own body was considered his property. We fought about this and so many other points we could not agree on, and more than once he raised his hand to me to make his point. But there was one thing I had over him, and that was the Hagen shares left to me by my mother. Your father couldn’t read German, and so I lied and told him the trust fund was nothing more than paperwork for an old house in the hills of Switzerland that had fallen into disrepair decades before on a small piece of useless land. He believed me. I was a bit of an actress, I must say.
But the Hagen investment. One of the chemists responsible for the development of the anesthesia was listed as Ulrike Tobler. A woman. If only my mother had lived to see the day! If you have read her letter, then you understand that for Ulrike Tobler alone I had to invest. The anesthesia was used for surgeries. Hagen Pharmaceuticals could barely keep up with the demand. They sent statements of the shares, which I claimed to your father were tax estimates of the land if we wanted to reclaim it. I told him it was best just to leave it alone and let the government take over and deal with it. It was one of the only times he told me I had a good head on my shoulders. As I said, I was quite an actress. I gave him a long spiel about Switzerland and their awful laws and high taxes. I threw away the statement with flair, only to retrieve it later from the trash and hide it with the others beneath the loose baseboard in the laundry room.
It is shameful to say, but World War II proved to be even more profitable. Where soldiers used to die en route to hospitals, many of the injured were now safely operated on not far from where they fell, and as a result had a greater chance of survival. Word traveled fast, even in wartime, and before long surgeons around the world were using the anesthesia. I became rich in secret while the husbands and sons of people I knew were dying at the hands of the Germans. I never wished such a thing on anyone, and was torn apart by my strange fortune.
They say history repeats itself. I believe this is true. By the time the war ended you were five years old, and I decided to leave your father, the same as my mother left mine, something that was still unheard of in those days. There was no one to talk to about this. No one who understood my tears and frustration. When I tried to speak with our family doctor, a man I had known for years and considered an intelligent, trustworthy friend, he told me what I needed was to have more children. Just one had not fulfilled my purpose. This, he said, was the root of my unhappiness. I got my divorce. Enough said about that.
You probably don’t remember the trip we made to Zürich. But just as your grandmother had asked, I walked into the bank and withdrew enough money so that you and I could live comfortably for the rest of our lives. I told the young teller that my mother was Annaliese Hagen, founder of Hagen Pharmaceuticals. She was a chemist, I said, though he seemed to have no idea who I was talking about, or maybe he simply didn’t care. The war had just ended. Everyone was focused on that.
When we returned, I purchased a home for us with a library large enough for hundreds of books, as you were already taking such a big interest in reading. I bought a yearly membership to the theater, and every weekend we attended plays or ballet or concerts, which in
cluded one female violinist, an instrument I myself had begun to play with surprising talent. My teacher encouraged me to join a local orchestra. Do you remember the small concerts I played in the outdoor theater in the park? It wasn’t so long ago. You and I were so happy. Then came the letter from your father’s lawyer suing me for what he claimed was rightfully his. He claimed that by law I had withheld property that would have belonged to him through marriage, and therefore he had a right to it, even after we’d been divorced for two years.
I wept in that courtroom. It made me appear weak, I knew this, but I could not help myself. It was beyond my comprehension that the law could be so cruel. By law, your father received half of what I brought back for us, plus a bonus thrown in by the judge because I had lied to my husband. He was still trying to figure out a way to gain half if not more of the remaining shares in Hagen Pharmaceuticals, but the tides had suddenly turned, and not long after the war had ended Hagen Pharmaceuticals became branded as Nazi sympathizers for providing the new anesthesia to the German military at below cost, as well as dispersing, free of charge, pain relievers. The value of the shares dropped significantly, and now, decades later, even though the company has been through many different incarnations, they have never quite recovered.
Your father died of a sudden heart attack not long after he took our money. He left everything to his brother, who left everything to his son, who now lives in an estate in Texas surrounded by oil wells paid for by Hagen Pharmaceuticals.
I’ve come to the end of my life far too soon and without much to show for it, aside from peace of mind, which is certainly nothing to scoff at. I would have liked to have done things differently, studied more, discovered the violin early on, understood more of what was in my own heart. But it is late, and I leave those reins to you. You must carry on where your grandmother and I have left off. You must pursue your love of reading, of the written word.
