As Teresa ate, she remembered her little dog. Last September, she had adopted a badly beaten Sheltie-mix named Sunshine. He was beautiful, tan and white like a full-blooded Sheltie, but he trusted no one. He wouldn’t even let her walk him, so Teresa left her back door open—imagine, in Denver!—so he could relieve himself in her fenced-in back yard.
Then one night Teresa heard a noise in her bedroom. When she turned on her lamp, she saw Sunshine standing by the side of her bed looking at her, so she patted her blanket. He joined her. She caressed him and talked to him. From then on, they were close friends, so close Sunshine let no one near Teresa. She had to look sharp to keep him from nipping someone, but she didn’t mind. Her house no longer felt empty.
When Teresa thought of her gorgeous Sunshine, she wrapped her uneaten meat, whispered to Arthur, “I’m going to save that for my dog.” She whispered because she didn’t want Doris to see her wrapping food for Sunshine. If Doris saw her, she would make a fuss.
After they finished coffee, Doris and Don drove to Kansas, while Arthur and Bernice took Teresa home and stayed to visit. As she opened the door, she saw how cluttered her house was, papers piled high and projects left half finished. She apologized profusely for her housekeeping, but the Weinsteins made light of it. She introduced them to Sunshine and told them his history, which they admired, but they said that keeping a dog wasted money. She saw they weren’t “dog people.”
Arthur and Bernice spoke highly of Doris—she obviously made a good impression—but Arthur continued to describe the four Feits who married the four Breitowichs. However, Teresa’s new “cousins” fascinated her more than his genealogy. She liked Arthur and Bernice, but their refinement made her uneasy. She never really believed her grade-school teachers who told her she came from “good stock,” so she doubted Arthur’s claim to be her cousin. How could this cultured man be related to a nobody like her? Cousins? That seemed absurd.
As Arthur talked, she finally understood the significance of the Feit/Breitowich marriages. Arthur’s grandparents, Hersch and Jachit Breitowich, had eight children. Three of these Breitowich children, Alter, Joe, and Anna, married Feits. Then Teresa’s Breitowich mother, clearly a relative of the Hersch Breitowich children, also married a Feit. All this intermarriage, Arthur believed, made them “double cousins.”
Teresa nodded politely. But as she closed her door behind the Weinsteins that night, pride surged unexpectedly through her. I’ve found my relatives at last, and they’re not horse thieves! Whoopee!
•
Teresa expected never to hear from Arthur again, but that September, the Weinsteins invited Teresa and Doris to their Skokie, Illinois, home near Chicago, to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
Doris declined. “I don’t want to get to know the Weinsteins any better,” she said.
“Are you sure?” Teresa pressed.
“Positive.”
Just look at that, Teresa thought. We’ve switched roles. Doris was so fascinated with our genealogy, but once she met her relatives, she was satisfied. But me, so bored with genealogy I met the Weinsteins just to please Doris, here I am fascinated by these new flesh-and-blood cousins. How curious!
She laughed off Doris’s shortsightedness and eagerly bought her ticket.
In Skokie, the Weinstein home looked ordinary. After all those swanky white trees at the Denver restaurant that Arthur chose, Teresa expected at least an artificial tree or two!
That night, Friday, she went to synagogue with Bernice, Arthur, and his sisters, Helen and Lillian. They attended the Yahrszeit, a ceremony to remember those who had gone before them. The service reminded Teresa of High Mass in Latin that Catholics used to celebrate.
Saturday, at breakfast, Teresa and the Weinsteins ate bagels and lox.
“This lox,” Arthur said, “cost $14 a pound.”
Unlike her cousins, who loved to eat, Teresa never ate a lot. Since the removal of much of her colon, she ate even less, so she didn’t know what to do when Arthur pushed food on her.
“No, thanks so much,” she said. “It’s very good, but I really can’t eat any more.”
“Just because I say $14 a pound,” Arthur said, “that doesn’t mean you can’t eat lox!”
Teresa’s heritage, her Weinstein relatives. Arthur is seated on the floor in center. (Courtesy of Teresa Martin)
That Saturday, Arthur and Bernice hosted a large reception to introduce Teresa to her other cousins. The crowd, full of stylishly dressed women, arrived in a throng. She met cousin after cousin—so many she didn’t remember much about them individually. Each seemed so happy to meet her. When she realized that most of her cousins worked as physicians, teachers, or lawyers, she burst with pride. They seemed so generous, too, supporting causes like the Jewish National Hospital in Denver, and they gave her many gifts, including a menorah.
One cousin, Lottie Breitowich Sachs, gave Teresa a Star of David necklace with diamond chips, which Teresa treasured. Lottie fascinated her. Tall and slender with colored red hair, Lottie dressed well. She didn’t look her age—the mid-eighties—and she didn’t look Jewish. Oddly, Lottie seemed proud of that.
“I worked for years as a secretary in a firm where no one knew I was Jewish,” she told Teresa. “I had to swallow a lot, but I needed the work.” She and her husband used her income to put their boys through medical school. “They took me for a Gentile,” she bragged.
After the reception, Teresa felt strange yet happy, strange that she, an orphan, was related to these polished people, and happy with their refinement. That night tears dampened her pillow.
When her visit was over, Arthur drove her to the airport and helped her to her plane.
“I had to pay the airlines quite a bit of money to change my ticket,” Teresa said as they waited. Before she left Denver, Arthur had called and asked her to change to a more convenient time.
Arthur examined her ticket. “Why, you only had to pay $67 more! You act like it was so terrible!”
But to her, $67 did seem terrible. She liked Arthur, but she saw he had no idea what it was like to stretch a dollar.
•
On her next Chicago visit, Arthur showed Teresa that he had located, among his numerous relatives, a person named Rachel, the second child of thirteen children, twelve of them female. He believed Rachel was Teresa’s mother.
“But how can Rachel be my mother? Her name isn’t Rosie.”
“True. But Rachel’s Yiddish name is Raisa. Your mother probably used Rosie instead of Raisa because Americans understood it easily, just like women named Etka go by Esther. Doesn’t sound so foreign.”
“But look!” Teresa pointed to Arthur’s chart. “This Rachel can’t be my mother. She died in Europe.”
Arthur smiled. “You don’t know where your mother died, do you? Maybe she went back to Europe. Or maybe my information’s wrong. The people I interviewed said they thought Rachel died in Europe, but they could be wrong.” He shrugged. “See? I wrote that she ‘probably’ died in Europe. We can’t be sure, Jessie.”
Hearing herself called “Jessie” still gave Teresa a start.
“What we know is this. Rachel was the right age to come to New York and give birth to you when she did. Did you notice that five of her sisters died of tuberculosis? Where did they get it? Not from the Liba Breitowichs.”
Both Rosie’s parents—Liba and Mechel—were Breitowichs; they were cousins.
“Of all the Breitowich families in my genealogy, only one family mentions lung disease—Rosie’s family.” Arthur looked at Teresa. “You remember that her hospital record states that her father had a lung disease?”
Teresa nodded.
“Well, maybe Mechel brought tuberculosis into his family, gave it to his daughters, and then died of it himself. That could be. We don’t know anything about his people, so we can’t prove it one way or the other.”
Teresa didn’t know what to think. “So that’s why Rosie went into the Lying-In Hospital so early, becau
se she was sick.”
Arthur disagreed. “There’s no mention of her not being well,” he said. “She’s described as ‘erect and cheerful.’” He smiled at Teresa. “Sounds just like you.”
That rang true. “But why did she go to the hospital early if she wasn’t ill?” Teresa said.
“Because she had no home. She was a pioneer. If the Feits or the Breitowichs had been in New York then, the family would have helped her, if they could.”
•
Over the following months, Arthur searched for additional information about Teresa’s family, but he found nothing. When Teresa realized she would never know, definitely, what happened, she felt empty. She remembered the psychologist at the Nebraska reunion saying that their relocation had disconnected them from their pasts. She certainly was disconnected. She had so hoped she could find out more about Rosie. Nearly any detail would do. In particular, she wanted to find out if the nuns had forced her mother to give her up because they were Jewish. That rumor haunted Teresa.
At home, she read everything she could find about Jewish immigration, pages upon pages, some in tedious tomes. What she learned was this: Rosie was hardly the first eastern European Jew to come to America. They had been arriving since the 1820s, packing America’s ghettoes.
Then, between 1880 and World War I, when Rosie came, roughly a third of the eastern European Jews left their homes in an astonishing migration, equaled only by the rush to leave Ireland during the potato famine. Teresa liked the way one Yiddish writer described it, as though “a powerful storm-wind ripped us out of our place and carried us to America.” That storm-wind, Teresa figured, clearly carried her mother and possibly her father to New York City.
Teresa couldn’t know if anything she read was true of Rosie or Wolf, but at least it might have been. That seemed to satisfy her. She put the books away.
1
3
The Scene of the Crime
On January 29, 1982, after a working life that spanned sixty-one years, Teresa retired. From her unpromising beginning as a fourteen-year-old who scrubbed commodes, she had risen to be an accomplished medical librarian in Denver. Her achievement pleased her, especially her success as a research librarian where her “unbelievable tenacity,” as Dr. James DeRoos called it, let her find almost any piece of literature in the medical field. Maybe Dr. DeRoos sensed how important to her finding every item was. Each time she filled a request, especially a difficult one, a doctor was pleased and that pleasure transformed her, momentarily, from “just an orphan” to “as good as any hospital worker.”
After Teresa retired, she lived alone in Denver, a widow with an overprotective dog. Her close friend, Captain Korb, had died shortly before she retired, and she lamented his absence. Sometimes she paced the living room, unaccustomed to so much free time. Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she wondered where the Teresa she knew had gone. Oh, with careful eating, she had maintained her trim figure. The few extra pounds didn’t show, but her face! How had she arrived at this old woman’s face, as wrinkled as an apple left to dry?
As time passed, Teresa tired. When her daughters noticed, they insisted she see a doctor. He found a cancerous tumor, which a surgeon removed along with fourteen more inches of her colon.
Afterward, Doris, who lived in Hill City, Kansas, not far from Hays, and Mildred, who lived in Springfield, Missouri, argued that Teresa needed to move to Hays. Who knew what her health would be like? And in Hays, she’d be closer to them.
Initially she rejected this idea. How can I leave Denver? It’s been “home” for thirty-one years, and home in a way Hays never had been, perhaps could not be. She had no idea how she could explain this to her daughters. Doris and Mildred seemed to believe she should move, but how could her “girls” possibly know? They seemed like such children.
However, Teresa finally decided to placate them. Perhaps living in Hays would be different now. She knew who she was: daughter of Rosie Feit who’d come to the States during the flood of Jewish immigration in the early 1900s; cousin to Arthur Weinstein and his many relatives, rich, bright Jewish people; Jewish by birth and Catholic by happenstance; medical librarian at the finest Denver hospitals. She no longer had to hang her head.
So in the spring of 1985, at the age of seventy-nine, she moved to Hays.
•
In Hays Teresa wanted to rent an apartment close to the main part of town. There she could walk to the public library and go to Fort Hays State University for various gatherings. But Doris insisted on renting an apartment in Saint John’s senior citizen complex, not far from the area Teresa once called The Jungles, leveled now and replaced with modest homes.
Teresa didn’t want to live in Saint John’s. “It’s so far away from everything.”
“Look, Mother, at this button. If you press it, a nurse will come running. You don’t have one of these in an apartment.”
So, full of misgivings, Teresa moved into Saint John’s with Sunshine. How lucky she owned a dog! Saint John’s allowed dogs to stay only if they initially moved into the complex with their owners.
The first night, the phone rang about midnight.
Who can that be? The telephone company had installed her phone earlier that day, but not even her daughters knew her number.
She answered to hear a woman, “Get your damned dog out of my yard!”
But Sunshine sat right beside her. “It can’t be my dog, he’s right here.”
The woman hung up, leaving Teresa rattled.
When she woke the next morning, on Good Friday, she decided to license Sunshine immediately, just to be on the safe side. She knew she must hurry, for Hays businesses close at noon on Good Friday. She called a taxi but when it arrived at city hall, nothing looked familiar. Clearly city hall had moved, but where? Neither the cab driver, a college student, nor Teresa knew, but together they found it. There she bought Sunshine’s license.
Then she ran to the bank. While there, Mrs. Jeter, a woman that Teresa remembered as quite stuck up, greeted her and seemed interested in her return to Hays.
Then, in that la-de-dah way she had, Mrs. Jeter looked at Teresa’s feet.
Surprised, Teresa glanced down to realize she’d run out of the house in her carpet slippers. Her face turned crimson. Later she wished she had told Mrs. Jeter which side of the bus to get off, but instead she said, “Oh my gosh! I wore my slippers by mistake.” Mrs. Jeter’s cool glance didn’t change. Oh, no! Is this what living here is going to be like?
Living in Hays did prove difficult for Teresa. In Denver, people knew her as a medical librarian, but in Hays, few knew about her achievements.
One day when she visited the sick in nearby Saint John’s Rest Home, she saw that Winola, a Schoenchen schoolmate, occupied a room. Winola had been hateful when they were children, but as an adult, she was civil, so Teresa walked into the sick room.
Winola looked quite ill. Friends and relatives, who were clustered around her bed, glanced up as Teresa entered; one said “Geschickte” or “sent for” and nodded toward Teresa.
A shock like ice water coursed through her veins. Could it be true that, after more than seventy years, these people still regarded her as the mail-order orphan? A choking sensation rose in her throat. She fled the room.
At her apartment, her stomach cramped. She wretched. The experience struck her so deeply that even remembering her rich, educated Chicago relatives didn’t assuage her.
When Teresa visited the rest home another day, she met a Volga German man who had lived in Schoenchen. “I always remember how much fun I had throwing snowballs at you,” he said.
This time Teresa’s temper flared. “To think I let people like you hurt me. You were just a nobody. I don’t know why I let you bother me so.”
Shortly after she stalked away, she realized that reacting angrily damaged her less than fleeing in shame. Her stomach didn’t churn. But she felt badly that she put the man down so quickly. She struggled to be fair. When she considered the suf
fering the Volga Germans had endured, pioneering twice, once in Russia and then again in Kansas, when she thought how hardy and stoic they were, why she couldn’t help but admire them. However, she certainly was pleased to see that those heroic Volga Germans no longer gathered on Hays’s street corners to jabber and jostle her when she tried to pass.
Teresa joined every organization that interested her: the Ivanhoe Club, Toastmasters International, Ellis County Historical Society, Friends of the Hays Public Library, the Senior Companion Program, and the auxiliaries at Saint Anthony’s Hospital and Hadley Memorial. She became a life member of Saint John’s Auxiliary of Hays, volunteered half days at Fort Hays State University’s Forsyth Library, and brushed up on her German. She resumed her membership as a university alum, joined the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and the Western Kansas Association on Concerns of the Disabled. A charter member of Colorado Council of Medical Librarians, she kept up her membership there as well as her professional memberships in the Medical Library Association and in Special Libraries.
But no matter how many organizations she joined, she couldn’t conquer a childhood emotion, more active since she moved to Hays. As she sat with others, maybe in a meeting, suddenly she experienced a deep certainty that these people didn’t really want her.
I’m an outsider, she would think. I have no right to be here. And her body would melt with the shame of being nobody.
Rarely could she shake this feeling quickly. Sometimes she longed to return to Denver to live, or to relocate in New York, the city of her birth, for in the anonymity of the city, she felt as though she belonged.
•
One day Regina, Fred’s daughter, came to see her. “Grandma’s in a bad way. I don’t think she’ll live much longer. Why don’t you go see her?”
Mail-Order Kid: An Orphan Train Rider's Story Page 21
