“Of course. God. You were acting so weird. I thought you took them to sniff or wear on your head, something freaky.”
“I didn’t have any underwear,” I confessed. “I was down to only two pairs.”
“Yeah, well, if you spend your life ringing groceries, you’ll won’t be able to afford anything, never mind underwear.”
Point made and taken.
Because of Laila, I was now sitting in a classroom in Baylor, staring out the window, barely able to believe I was here. In college. Me.
Funny how the most humiliating moment of your life can become the turning point around which the entire axis of your future revolved. Had I not taken those used panties when I was fifteen, I would not have been sitting in Writing and Critical Thinking at Baylor University about to write about My Most Embarrassing Moment seven years later.
And I would never have met Dr. Ursula Reiter.
Chapter Three
Ursula
I was terribly homesick for the city after moving to Baylor. I missed the frantic energy of people rushing anywhere and everywhere. I missed the anticipation that always hung in the air, the knowledge that anything could happen at any moment. A man on a street corner could burst into song, or you could spot a celebrity ducking into the corner Starbucks. I especially missed the feeling of being lost in the crowd, one of millions. In Baylor, I stuck out like a sore thumb.
The town was just the way I remembered it, a black and white photograph someone had halfheartedly attempted to retouch.
Baylor had its good points, which was why I’d chosen to return. For instance, the countryside was breathtakingly beautiful in the summer. I took up cycling, because the wide flat roads were perfect for bike riding. I could ride for hours, past cemeteries and farms and abandoned general stores, through landscape so lovely it was a pity I couldn’t paint. I appreciated the beauty of my surroundings. I tried to be grateful to be away from the crowds and smog of the city.
I still missed it. My homesickness was incurable.
I hated Baylor. But I couldn’t leave until Papa died. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere. Permanently.
I felt guilty when I thought about the endless possibilities life would offer once Papa was gone. It would be a relief to not spend my whole day worrying about him. If he was gone, I’d have the freedom to go anywhere, do anything. Europe. Hong Kong. San Francisco.
God knew, I would probably do nothing. Just stay in Baylor as my own body began to stoop with age, thinking longingly of other places, but never leaving.
Depressing thoughts in a depressing place.
I was a respected professor at the City University of New York. My classes on the Holocaust and studies regarding the dark side of human nature earned me notoriety. I was somebody. No one graduated without taking at least one of my classes. Most students took more than one.
In contrast, I was off to a shaky start at Baylor University, my undergraduate alma mater. Gone were the days when every seat in the lecture hall was filled and people who were not even enrolled lined the walls, just to hear me speak.
Baylor was a different environment. The students were not as hungry for knowledge as the ones who attended my classes in the city. They were local, coming from small towns and surrounding farms, places so isolated the inhabitants had never even laid eyes on someone whose skin was a different color, or encountered anyone of a different religion. Oddly enough, they were not racist or xenophobic. Having never dealt with anyone different, most of the students had no hatred for anyone different, either. They had an innocence about them that was as refreshing as it was stifling.
Baylor University regarded me as a coup, a well-regarded professor successfully seduced away from the big city. But they didn’t know what to do with me once they had me. Their psychology curriculum was basic, geared to help students prepare for a teaching career. I had to manipulate my courses to be more in line with the college’s philosophy. I was losing my identity, becoming just another boring psychology professor teaching out of a textbook.
Yet, after two years at Baylor, they had finally given me the green light to teach Psychology of the Holocaust. In the city, it had been an introductory course, the first of a series of three. Now it was a stand-alone class, but I was grateful for the opportunity. Teaching that class gave me a purpose.
I was relieved when the class filled quickly at registration, with a sizable waiting list.
“Maybe we should have you teach two sessions next spring,” Dr. Heinrich mused. “I didn’t realize it would be so popular.”
I shrugged. Next spring was a year away. I didn’t like to think that far ahead into the future, because then I’d remember I was stuck here, wilting in this oppressive environment. I liked to pretend that the next semester would be my last, even though I knew better. Fall semester would flow seamlessly into spring semester, and then it would be summer again, and before I knew it another year had passed. My life was trickling away, like everyone else’s life, but it seemed not to matter as much to them. They were living. I was merely existing.
I didn’t know how to live, and time was running out. Soon it would be too late.
It was no different in the city, but I hadn’t noticed the passage of time, since I was doing something I loved. I felt I was contributing to the future by molding eager young minds.
I didn’t feel the same way in Baylor. My students were just passing time. The women wanted a few fun years before settling down to marriage and kids. I was shocked to discover there were still areas in the United States where women still regarded college as a place to find a husband. But that’s the way it was in Baylor. I had been too isolated as an undergraduate to realize it.
The men had no more ambition than their female counterparts. They just wanted a degree that would enable them to earn enough money to support a wife and kids. There was no burning thirst for knowledge. They showed up for the requisite number of classes that would grant them a passing grade and that was it.
I was no longer teaching the future movers and shakers, young people infused with a burning desire to change the world. Instead, my students viewed college as a place to party before settling down to ordinary, mundane lives. Educating them was a waste of time. They had no interest in learning for its own sake, no desire to know more. They figured they already knew what they needed to know for the lives they planned.
I wouldn’t be stuck here, in such a stifling, provincial town, if not for Papa. The only man in my life, one of only two human beings I’ve ever loved. I would gladly lay down my life for him, and so I had.
Throughout my childhood, I nursed a silly, secret fantasy of building a time machine, so I could go back in time and rescue the little boy that became my Papa from the Nazis, who continuously stalked his nightmares.
I still didn’t know the whole story. I’d been fed bits and pieces that snapped into place like a jigsaw puzzle. Since Papa was unable to speak about his past, what I knew came from Mama, and even she didn’t know the whole story.
My mother was in nursing school when she met Papa. He worked as a driver for the company that stocked the kitchen of the dining hall. As it was an all-female institution, any male who set foot in its estrogen-soaked halls risked being ravished by dozens of horny females.
Mama heard stories from the kitchen girls about a handsome prince who made deliveries. She determined to see him for herself. She staked out the hallways around the kitchen, to put herself in the path of the elusive driver.
The girls who worked in the dining hall were not fooled.
“Do you need something, Anna?” Carrie, who’d told Mama about Helmut, asked in disgust.
Mama snapped her compact open and reapplied her lipstick with a deft hand. “Just scoping out the lay of the land,” she responded. “In case my family becomes poor.” She looked pointedly at Carrie’s frayed sweater.
Carrie winced. Mama had hit a nerve. She vanished back into the kitchen, probably to bitch about her to the rest of the staff. Mama
was ashamed of herself, but stubbornly stood her ground.
When Helmut finally showed up, she half-expected him to be wearing a golden crown. Instead, he was a thick, squat guy with untidy black hair sprouting beneath his cap. Mama was less than impressed. She looked him up and down, dismissing him with a flick of her chin. This was Carrie’s handsome crush?
Papa noticed the slender woman loitering around the loading dock, pretending to smoke, and her contempt was not lost on him, either. He followed her.
“Miss?” he asked. “Miss, what are you doing here?”
She rolled her eyes, tossing, “none of your business,” over her shoulder.
“None of your business, none of your business,” Helmut mimicked with his thick German accent. “Are you always so rude?”
Mama turned around and stalked back. “I am not being rude, I don’t owe you courtesy. I don’t even know you.”
“Then what are you doing here?” He had removed his cap and was twisting it in his hands.
“I heard so much about the handsome Helmut, I had to check out this stunning specimen of masculinity for myself,” she sneered, “but I find you lacking, so if you’ll excuse me…”
The argument did not end there. Helmut demanded to know in what way he was lacking, and who had been talking about him, and what they had said. By the time they finished squabbling, Mama was feeling stirrings of interest for the young driver, and Helmut was determined to win over this arrogant young woman.
He took her out for dinner and dancing the following Friday, and as he twirled her on the dance floor, she noticed the tattoo on his wrist for the first time.
“That’s a strange tattoo,” she mused. “Did you get it in the army?”
“I got it at Auschwitz, the concentration camp,” he said, without missing a beat of the music. “I didn’t cry when they did it, even though I was just a little boy, because to get it, meant you had permanence, eh? You weren’t going to the gas right away.”
Mama gasped. World War II was very far from 1965 Brooklyn.
It was then that she fell in love with Helmut, with that broken, wounded part of him. After they married, he would wake her up every night, screaming in his sleep.
“They’re coming for me again,” he whispered, eyes enormous.
Papa hid for most of the war. His memories were fragments. He recalled sitting on the floor coloring a lot, because it was a quiet activity and he wasn’t allowed to make noise.
One day, cars came shrieking into the alley below the apartment where he lived. Boots thundered up the stairs. He hid. He knew to hide if the Gestapo came. There was a panel that slid open in the wall behind the bed to reveal a space just big enough for a little boy to lie in a fetal position.
The officers went straight to the hiding place and pushed it open and removed Helmut. They were well informed. The officer carried Helmut outside on his hip, like a baby. He was so frightened he urinated, but the officer didn’t complain. Perhaps he was a father himself. He was not cruel. He took Papa away in his car. The rest of the household was frozen in front of the apartment building with their arms in the air. That was the last Papa saw of them.
It was good Mama was capable of earning a living, because as time passed, Helmut sunk into madness. After my birth, he refused to leave the apartment. He was convinced “they” might come during the day and steal me away.
At first, Mama attempted to take him to doctors, but he refused. Her family suggested institutionalizing him, but she could never do such a thing. That would make her husband’s irrational fears a reality. Finally, she just accepted him as he was. If she had any regrets, she never voiced them aloud.
After Mama died of cancer, I was the one left to care for Papa. His condition hadn’t changed much over the years, although it seemed he hid more, only coming out when I got home from work. I rarely left him for any other reason, because I didn’t like to leave him alone. Even in the middle of giving a lecture, a part of my brain was occupied, worrying about him. It was exhausting.
One day our apartment was burglarized, in broad daylight, one of several in the building. The thieves took my laptop, our big screen television, and Mama’s engagement and wedding rings, kept in the jewelry box in the master bedroom. Papa hid under the bed the whole time. Ironic that he used to scold me for choosing that as a hiding place.
This time I couldn’t dismiss Papa’s terror as a figment of the past. This time it was real. “Everyone said they would never come again, but they came!” he lamented. “What would they have done if they found me?”
I shuddered at the thought. Tied him up, beaten him, killed him? I didn’t know. It was anyone’s guess. But now my father’s terror was real, and mine matched his. The apartment wasn’t safe anymore.
I hated leaving him at all now, even for the brief period required to give lectures. I couldn’t go on like that. I had responsibilities, I needed to hold office hours for students, I couldn’t just give lectures and then rush home.
The only solution I could come up with was to leave the city and move upstate. I knew I would easily find employment at one of the many colleges that dotted the rural areas of New York. Papa would be safe in a town where crime was unheard of and inhabitants still left their doors unlocked.
Returning to Baylor was the logical choice. Nestled in a remote valley on the other side of the Adirondacks, it was an hour and a half from the nearest highway. To reach it, one had to travel through a maze of scenic mountain passes and winding roads peppered with windmills and fields that stank of manure in high summer. The town itself was spread out over thirty miles, consisting of mainly farmland, but including a quaint village with a charming nineteenth century flavor. The entire area harkened back to a bygone era, a time when a town was a community, not a collection of strangers.
Scarcely five thousand year-round residents called Baylor home. The number swelled to five times that when school was in session. The charm of the nineteenth century homes swiftly evaporated as students thronged the wraparound porches of the Victorian houses for keg parties or flouted building codes by cramming six or seven apartments within their frames.
I was stunned by the price of housing in the village. I could own a three-story home and pay less for a mortgage than the monthly rent of our cramped two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.
I dismissed the modern suburban monstrosities other professors favored and chose a mansion that had once been part of the underground railroad. The realtor had been reluctant to show me all the hidey-holes and passageways the place contained, fearful that I would be creeped out. But I was elated. This was the perfect place for Papa. It had so many hiding places.
Most of the other mansions in Baylor had either been torn down or chopped up into apartments long ago, but this house had remained intact because it belonged to the Stadlers, the founding family. They had built Baylor University, which had originally been called Stadler Normal School. Emmaline Stadler, the last remaining Stadler in Baylor, presided over graduations at the University for as long as anyone could remember. She lived alone in the huge mansion until conveniently dying in her sleep around the time we were robbed. Perfect timing.
I purchased the house for a song, as the remaining Stadlers were scattered all over the United States and had not the slightest interest in upstate New York.
After the closing, I packed our belongings and hired a U-Haul. The last thing I removed from the apartment was Papa. I borrowed a dustbin from the janitor and coaxed my father into it, covering him with a sheet to hide him from view. Then I pushed it into the U-Haul and released my father.
He stayed in the back of the van the entire seven hour drive, refusing to leave even when I stopped at rest stops. He urinated into an empty Pepsi bottle. Try as I might, I was unable to convince him to join me up front. It upset me. We were driving through the Lake Placid area, some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, and Papa was missing it. But I didn’t press him. There was no convincing Papa of anything when his mind was mad
e up, and he’d been pretty good about the move thus far. I didn’t want to press my luck.
Night had fallen by the time I pulled into the driveway of the old mansion. I had worried about getting Papa into the house, but I lucked out. The old man was agreeable about leaving the van and creeping into the imposing structure under cover of darkness.
I left most of our furniture behind in the city. It was old, and I would have struggled with moving the bigger pieces. Hiring moving men was out of the question. They would terrify my father.
We spent our first night in our new place sharing an air mattress on the floor.
Papa was more comfortable in this huge empty house, sharing take-out on the floor, then he had ever been in our Brooklyn apartment. That was a good sign. Whatever my misgivings about Baylor itself, this was the right decision for Papa.
I filled up the ensuing days with picking out new furniture. Papa hid in one of the passageways when it was delivered. He came to favor the rooms in the rear of the house, where the foliage grew up close to the windows. I instructed the landscapers not to cut it back, to let it grow wild against the walls.
“My Papa likes it,” I said, when I noticed them exchanging looks.
We made a new life for ourselves. We stayed safe. Sometimes I was lonely, but I didn’t need anyone but Papa and my work. Most of the time I was able to push away the feeling that my father and I were rattling around in a world filled with indifferent strangers.
Most of the time.
Chapter Four
Maggie
I became a resident assistant because the advertisements hung all over campus claimed it was a great way to make friends. I was never good at making friends. I could use all the help I could get.
My high school years were fraught with anxiety, as I struggled to hide my embarrassing family issues. I never had the money to do things like other kids my age. Once I got a job, I had the money, but not the time. I was an observer of life, not a participant. I wanted that to change.
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