Although, by the time she was my age, Jana was married and already pregnant. In contrast, I was in a relationship with my middle-aged professor. My life had already taken a sharply different trajectory.
The turkey came out a bit drier than I would have liked, the mashed potatoes were lumpy, and the stuffing tasted salty. But Helmut raved over every bite, Ursula smiled with contentment, and altogether it was the best Thanksgiving I ever had. Its imperfections made it perfect.
Even so, I felt a chill, as a shadow were hovering over our happy gathering. I’ve always sensed when something was about to go bad.
Storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. There was no telling what form it would take, and there was no stopping it. This I knew.
Chapter Twelve
Ursula
“But I want to spend Christmas here,” Maggie pleaded.
Her blue eyes gazed plaintively into mine. My heart twisted. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” I said. “You haven’t seen your family in ages, and I’m sure you have your traditions.”
“My father gets drunk, my mother flips out, and Christmas is ruined,” Maggie said. “That’s our tradition. Oh, and if Jana doesn’t like her gifts, she pitches a fit.”
I winced, turning my head to avoid her eyes. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. I just think going home and taking a break would be good for you. Good for us.”
“But why? We had such a nice Thanksgiving,” Maggie argued, her lower lip trembling.
The pain in the girl’s eyes was tearing me to shreds. I didn’t want her to feel rejected. I needed time apart, so I could think. I required distance to gain objectivity. And I felt having Maggie here the entire winter break would prove disastrous. Someone was sure to notice. Then there would be questions. Why would I need a companion for my father when I was home all day? Tongues would start wagging.
Or was I being paranoid? Would anyone really believe this beautiful young girl was having an affair with me? Was I just flattering myself thinking people would suspect? Perhaps everyone would just accept that I was working from home and needed Maggie’s help.
“Can I come back early, then? Your father will miss me,” Maggie said.
Should I be annoyed at her for using Papa as a bargaining chip? I didn’t feel annoyed, just sad. Maggie was desperate.
“I’ll be completely honest,” I began, and saw fear spring into Maggie’s eyes. “Nothing like that,” I assured her. “I’m not trying to break up with you. Not at all. I’m just worried about us being found out. You know what this town is like. It may be the twenty-first century, but in good old Baylor, it’s still 1952. Part of the charm, but stifling.”
“I won’t go out. I’ll stay in the house,” Maggie promised.
I shook my head. Staying in the house, never allowed outside, hiding, a prisoner of narrow minds and closed hearts, was a little too close to my family’s past.
“Absolutely not. It was okay over Thanksgiving because it was just for a couple of days. But I can’t have you hiding here for a month. It’s too much like…” I gestured helplessly, knowing Maggie would grasp my meaning.
Maggie sucked in her breath. “Can I come back a few days early, then? Please, Ursula. I’ll go nuts stuck at home with my family for an entire month! I’ll just tell everyone you need me here, so you can prepare for next semester.”
“We’ll see,” I relented. “We’ll decide after Christmas.”
I hated Christmas in Baylor. It was worlds apart from Christmas in New York. Here there were no department stores festooned with decorations, no excited tourists thronging the streets snapping pictures, no ice skaters in Central Park. The sparsely inhabited Baylor Village Center, thriving when I’d been a student, had been decimated by the opening of Walmart ten years ago. The decorations that hung along Market Square were ancient, featuring lightbulbs in the washed-out colors of the thirties and forties. Perhaps it was done on purpose, to add to Baylor’s retro charm, but I found it depressing.
As for culture? Church pageants were a poor substitute for Radio City Music Hall, Broadway, and the New York City Ballet.
Papa was grouchy and unsettled in Maggie’s absence. “Where is my angel?” he asked repeatedly, although he knew full well.
“She went home, to spend Christmas with her family,” I reminded him for the umpteenth time.
“We’re her family,” he grumbled. “She should be here with us.”
“Papa,” I began. “You know that Maggie and I, we have a different kind of relationship?”
“Of course,” he said. “You’re my girls. I love you both.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. “Papa, we’re lovers,” I blurted.
As soon as I said the words, I wanted to take them back. Why did I suddenly feel the need to tell him? It was better that he didn’t know. He wouldn’t understand.
Was Papa a litmus test, a way of testing out the level of shock and revulsion emanating from my students and colleagues when they found out the truth?
Papa glared at me. “Ursula Reiter, I am a lot of things,” he said. “I am half insane. My troubles during the war left me grievously injured in a way that cannot be seen.” He tapped his head. “Up here. This, I know. But I am no fool. I have eyes. I’m not blind. I know about you and my angel. I’ve known all along. She’s not just my angel, she’s your angel, too. Haven’t I said it all along?”
My eyes filled with tears. “You don’t hate us? You’re not disgusted?”
Papa lurched to his feet and pulled me into his arms, pressing my face into his chest. I inhaled Old Spice, an aroma that reminded me of childhood, of feeling safe and secure. He hadn’t held me like this since I was a little girl.
“Ursula, I love you,” he said. “Since you were born I have only wanted two things, for you to be safe, and for you to be happy. For so many years, having one meant sacrificing the other. Now, it’s the other way around. The time may have come to sacrifice safety for happiness.”
He patted my back reassuringly as I pulled away. “You’ll figure out the answer.”
It was Christmas Eve. It was silent in my office on the Baylor Campus. All the students had departed the week before, and I missed the distant sounds of their presence.
I was not the only professor at work in the building. I had exchanged a few nods with colleagues in the hallway. Someone had brewed a fresh pot of coffee in the Psychology lounge, for which I was grateful, because the heat had been turned down to save money.
I worked in a jacket, scarf, and gloves, which was ridiculous, since I could work from my home office and crank the heat as high as I liked. I would have Papa and the background noise of his television as company. But I couldn’t bear our house today. It seemed empty in Maggie’s absence. The hallway seemed to ring with echoes of her laughter.
I preferred the clutter and cold of my tiny office on campus to the ghosts inhabiting the halls of my house.
I was studying the experiments of Stanley Milgraum, my mind turning over the possibilities. I’d always wanted to conduct a similar experiment. The question as to whether my fellow Americans was capable of the brutality of the Nazis was one that had tormented me since I was old enough to comprehend my father’s dark past.
I took a sip of the scalding coffee and made a face. Bad, so very bad. It had been sitting for hours. At least it was hot.
Thoughts of Maggie intruded. Beautiful, angelic Maggie. Under the right circumstances, would my sweet innocent Maggie turn into a monster? Would she have been among those that cheered as the Jews were herded into the ghetto, beaten, and killed? Would Maggie have betrayed the family who had hidden Papa for an extra bread ration?
I leaned back in my chair, troubled. These were the same thoughts that had prevented me from getting close to anyone. I believed that deep down inside, everyone was bad. That the only thing separating the good people from the bad was circumstance.
I rummaged through the stacks of paper on my desk until I located the essays that my Psychology of the H
olocaust class had written the first day. I had neither read them nor graded them. They were for research purposes only.
If I was alive during the Holocaust, I would have hidden Jews and worked for the Resistance. I would have done everything I could to overthrow the evil Nazi government. I would have tried to assassinate Hitler.
Most of the papers expressed similar sentiments. Everyone would have hidden the Jews and fought the Nazis, they would not have allowed Hitler and his regime roll over them. Never, ever. After all, they were superior to the Germans. They were Americans, for God’s sake! Born free.
A less perceptive, more optimistic professor would have dismissed the possibility of Americans committing genocide. Not here. Not in a land that rang with freedom, the mecca of immigrants, the haven for the desperate. A place where the very streets were paved in gold.
And yet it had happened to one of the most celebrated, refined cultures in the entire world, the culture that had birthed Faust, Beethoven, Mozart, Freud, Nietzsche, and Luther. Like Icarus, they had flown too close to the sun. They had built the tower of Babel and fancied themselves gods.
I pressed my hands against my temples. The similarities of pre-war Germany and the United States were endless. Over the past few years, I had observed, with slowly dawning horror, an identical madness taking hold of the country that had once been regarded as a haven for the poor, the persecuted, and the rejected.
A cancerous spirt of nationalism had infected the country. And the United States lacked the excuses that justified the rise of fascism in Germany. Most Americans were well fed, with roofs over their head and the latest electronic gadget in their pockets. And yet they were paranoid, jumping at shadows, looking for scapegoats to explain their feelings of restlessness and discontent.
Perhaps enduring a horrific, murderous dictatorship was merely a growing pain every nation underwent, like a teenager going through a rebellious phase.
Or, absent the fight for survival that had preoccupied humankind since inception, mankind was bored and needed to manufacturer conflict.
I could analyze the subject to death, but the fact of the matter was, I was terrified, and that was why I was hiding in Baylor.
Isn’t that what Papa and I were doing? Hiding? After all, I’d barely left town since moving here over two years ago. Yes, I’d driven to neighboring towns, to go to the mall or the DMV, but I hadn’t spent a night away from Baylor since the day we left New York City.
As provincial and stifling as Baylor was, it was insulated from the troubles that gripped the rest of the nation, existing in a separate bubble. There wasn’t a problem with illegal immigration, because there were no aliens living in Baylor. There was no racism, because everyone was white. I didn’t have to worry about riots, or crime, or someone taking it into their head to shoot everyone on the street that was white, or black, or Muslim, or anyone different, because no one was different in Baylor.
Despite my reserved exterior, I fit right in. A skinny white woman who never said shit, who dutifully gave lectures and cared for her Papa, had been welcome in Baylor. I did my work and didn’t make waves.
Papa and I were safe here.
Until now. Maggie was threatening our security, because she put our apple pie identity in jeopardy. I was not just an old maid caring for my father, I was a lesbian. Different. Other. There was no denying the truth any longer.
If I had courage, I would break things off with Maggie and find a woman closer to my own age. Then Maggie would be safe, even if I wasn’t. She was fragile. She suffered from low self-esteem, the logical result of growing up with emotionally abusive parents. She was vulnerable. She was the one who would suffer the most when our affair came to its inevitable end.
If I truly loved Maggie, I would set her free.
Instead, the cold, calculating part of my mind plotted her destruction.
I needed to get out of my own head. After all, it was the day before Christmas. Even though we weren’t religious, Mama always made Christmas special, decorating an artificial tree erected in the corner of our shabby apartment. I can still recall the fun of unearthing all the ornaments from the attic where they’d been stored from the previous year.
Mama had done her best to infuse my life with joy.
Acting on impulse, I drove to Walmart. The only trees left were the smaller ones, standing only as tall as my shoulder. That was okay. The decorations had been picked over, but there was more than enough left to decorate a tree, and they were marked down thirty percent. I shook my head, knowing that in just a few hours they’d be seventy percent off. But then Christmas would be over.
I wished I knew where Mama’s decorations were. They were packed away in boxes somewhere in the cavernous house. In the time it would take to find them, my holiday mood would depart.
I set up the tree in the corner of Helmut’s sitting room.
“It reminds me of Anna,” he proclaimed, tears misting his eyes. “We haven’t had a tree in so many years. I missed it so.”
I stared at him, aghast. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
He shrugged. “I thought maybe it was too painful for you.”
We opened the boxes of ornaments and had begun trimming the tree when the bell rang, echoing sonorously through the huge house.
The sound was so unfamiliar, Helmut blanched.
“It’s just the doorbell,” I comforted.
It rang again, more insistently this time.
“Coming!”
I clattered through the empty house and opened the door. Dusk was falling. The air smelled like snow. Up and down the block, my neighbors had switched on their Christmas lights. In the dim illuminance they gave off, I saw a FedEx driver standing on the front step, holding a package.
“For me?” I asked, holding out my arms.
“Ursula Reiter?” When I nodded, he replied, “It’s addressed to you, all right.”
The driver tapped his foot impatiently while I signed for it, squinting at the document in the dim light. I wondered if he had a wife and kids waiting impatiently at home to start their holiday while he made last minute deliveries.
“Look, Papa!” I called. “Gifts for both of us, from Maggie!”
I slit open the FedEx box. Inside were two flat packages, clumsily wrapped with a hodgepodge of messy corners and visible pieces of Scotch tape. The wrap job was so quintessential Maggie, I felt a lump in my throat.
“Put them under the tree,” Papa suggested, excitement creeping into his voice. “We’ll open them tomorrow, like when you were small.”
I had been about to tear into my package, but I decided to humor him. It would be nice to have something to look forward to on Christmas morning.
Tree trimmed, packages deposited beneath, we settled down to watch Christmas specials on television.
“I remember my last Christmas, before…” Papa began.
“You celebrated Christmas in that place?” I interrupted, amazed. He had never mentioned this before.
“Of course, they were Christians,” he scoffed. “Even though it was war time they got an extra sugar ration for the holiday, so we had Christmas cake and pudding. And I got a gift. Not new, but a gift all the same.” He chewed his lip, lost in memory. “It was a picture book. Angela took me on her lap and read it to me. It was about a magical land where a boy rode around on a flying carpet. She promised me someday I would go to this land, and there I would be safe.”
I felt a chill. Had Angela been trying to prepare my Papa for his own death?
There was no way to know. Over the years, I searched for the family who hid my father, even went to Germany to pore over the records, but there was so little to go on. Papa didn’t know the name of the town or city where he’d been hidden, or the name of the family who took him in, or even when they’d been betrayed. He had been kept inside so long, unable to look out a window for fear of being spotted, that he was unaware of the seasons passing.
If the family had survived the betrayal, they never tried t
o find my father, not in all these years. It was safe to assume they were dead, executed that long-ago day, after the Gestapo whisked Helmut out of sight. A kindness not in keeping with their general behavior.
Long after Papa went to bed, I sat staring into the branches of our Christmas tree, sipping a glass of wine. For once, my mind has ceased its restless churning. I sat back and allowed an unusual sense of peace and contentment to wash over me, a welcome respite.
The next morning, we opened our gifts with Christmas music blaring from the television. Maggie sent us sweaters. Mine was white, and Papa’s was blue. They were woven out of material so soft, I embraced it, rubbing it against my cheek. It smelled faintly of the girl’s perfume. It was like getting a hug from Maggie herself.
How could I break up with her? I made my decision. I picked up my cell phone. Can you come back tomorrow? I miss you.
Chapter Thirteen
Ursula
Maggie returned three days after Christmas under cover of darkness. This was not by design. The Adirondack Trailways bus out of New York City didn’t get in until after seven.
I was conflicted over whether to chance picking her up at the bus depot. The weather was clear but had turned bitterly cold, the temperatures plunging into the single digits. Fortunately, my house was less than a mile away.
“I’m okay to walk. I’ll bundle up,” Maggie assured me.
Now I was second guessing my decision. I knew the girl was reacting to my paranoia when she insisted she’d be okay. Baylor was deserted, which would make us more noticeable if we ran into someone we knew.
Sitting snug in my warm house, the space heater on and a throw wrapped around my always frigid feet, the thought of the girl being out in the cold filled me with remorse. I was a ridiculous woman. What were the chances anyone would see me picking her up? I could have waited for the girl in the parking lot with the heat in my SUV running. And even if someone did see us, I had a plausible explanation. Maggie worked for me. Granted, it was semester break, but everyone knew I was a workaholic. It was common knowledge.
Hiding Places Page 10
