Grand Central: Original Stories of Postwar Love and Reunion

by Karen White

  Cata was ashamed now of the pride she’d derived from that compliment. She’d called him Yann and wondered if his new parents had given him a different name or kept the old. He would never know hers. The paternity papers had been burned.

  The baby wailed again. This time, it ricocheted like a shot, making Cata’s arms tremble, elbow to fingertip. She shoved her hands into her wool pockets. In the left were two passports. In the right a garnet hatpin, fletched like an arrow but sharp as a syringe. She stabbed it, judiciously, into her hip. Just deep enough to quell the trembling but not enough to cause a stain. Neat and tidy, an efficient wound. She was skittish. An unbecoming trait. There were tricks to mask one’s true nature. The Program mothers had taught her. The prick burned a comforting pain and her body hardened like a clay pot in a kiln.

  A train pulled into the station, drowning out the sound of the baby. Its engine hissed; wheels screeched against the metal rails, then sighed to a stop. Its billow of steam made the station even balmier than the Indian summer day.

  Cata’s head spun at the heat and the hatpin still inserted. She removed it and made her way to the line of ticket windows.

  In her mind, she practiced again while waiting her turn. Boston, Massachusetts. It did not roll off the tongue easily—not her tongue, at least. Too practiced in the Germanic way. While she understood English and French perfectly, her elocution was infantile at best. She should’ve studied more as a schoolgirl. Too late. The American accent was an altogether foreign lilt, the words soft as moldering vegetables in her mouth. The consonants fell out without comprehension. So she’d guarded her voice on the sea voyage. Listening carefully to the Americans: the elite eating goose pâté and cured sausages in the vaulted dining room; the steerage passengers smoking cigarettes, backs to the wind, passing time; the waiters and porters who brought her tea and interpreted her silence as wealth; the children playing ball games on deck; and most especially the governesses, huddling together like wild daisies, eyes open and unblinking on their charges.

  From them, she learned the most useful vernacular: going bonkers was not the same as bunkers, in German or English. Horsing around was behaving foolishly. Swell was a positive quality. Giggle water was alcohol and put to the same use here as it was in the Lebensborn Program: three glugs in bedtime milk for restless children; no more or they might not wake up on schedule. All the American governesses wanted nine-to-fiver employment and a Doris Day haircut when they arrived in port. Horsefeathers was used at various occasions, so Cata still wasn’t sure its exact meaning. And then there were the hushed discussions of the war: A-bomb, Japs, home front, rations, and most notably what they would call her if she dared speak a word, Nazi, Jerry, German.

  She penned all of these useful and offensive words in her journal and practiced them in a whisper alone in her ship’s bunk each night. She had the basics down: yes, no, thank you, pardon, please. Those five had ushered her through Ellis Island security alongside her Luxembourg papers and an extra coat of lipstick.

  The Program had not accepted her on her righteousness and intelligence, but on her smile and ability to fit in. She might’ve been naïve once but not anymore. Those who survived had the faces of doves and the cunning of serpents. She’d learned well and seen the proof in her roommates at Steinhöring. Hazel the dove. Brigette the serpent. At their memory, she winced and her eyes welled.

  Dear Hazel. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Her hands trembled again so she took up the hatpin to prick and prick and prick.

  The ticket line moved forward, but she was busy allowing the slow sting to spread. A man, thin as a sapling, stumbled into her back and the needle plunged deeper than before. She gasped.

  “Entschuldigung Sie,” the man stuttered, quickly and no louder than a lamb’s bleat.

  It would’ve gone unnoticed. The apology unknown to those around them, and so mistaken for an incoherent mumble. The utterance of a walking ghost. Nothing more. Only it wasn’t nothing to Cata. It was the language and land for which she’d given children, sworn oaths, sacrificed and killed.

  He nodded apologies. He wore a busboy uniform with shirt-sleeves cuffed to his elbows, an inky thread of numbers exposed. There was no mistaking. The tattoo seemed to rise off his skin like a line of black ants marching toward her. She stared hard at it, unable to peel her eyes away. A Jew from Germany—here?

  Seeing her gaze, he crossed his arms, covering the markings, and took a deferential step back.

  Cata pulled the hatpin from her flesh and felt the blood ooze hot through her stockings. Flames of guilt blistering her back. She wanted to turn and speak to him—in their language. To say all the things she’d been thinking ever since she’d learned the details of the Jewish camps. She’d been ignorant of those truths. Perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not. In a way, she felt as culpable as the Nazi officers she’d bedded and borne a daughter and son.

  Nein, she would bite her tongue and leave this man to make his way in peace—to have a new beginning without any reminders of war and suffering. Leave the past behind. Take the fastest train into the future. Wasn’t that what they were all doing here at the station?

  “Whereto, miss?” asked the man behind the barred ticket window.

  It was her cue. She’d practiced the proper response for weeks on the ship. Mass-ah-choo-sitz, she visualized it spelled out in phonetic syllables on her journal page. She didn’t stumble if she said it slowly, but the slower she spoke, the more foreign she sounded. She wiped a sweat bead from her brow before it streaked her rouge.

  “Massachu-setts.” She hurried through the beginning and broke it in two, flipping her bob between. It seemed to work. The man’s gaze remained fixed to his receipts.

  “Amherst, Springfield, Salem, Boston?”

  To her relief, she was able to reply in perfect impersonation, “Baw-stin.”

  He looked up then and gave a crooked smile when he saw her. “Aw, yeah? I got a brudda up d-air. He’s a caw-pentah. You goin’ to see family or friends?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  Mildred, called Milly, was a cousin, twice removed. She’d married a wealthy mercantile and moved to Boston a decade before.

  You cannot come home to Luxembourg, Cata’s mother had penned when the war ended. It’s too dangerous. Your brothers are young and still in school. Your father could lose his business.

  Cata had been banished, in essence. So she’d written the one family member removed from all connections to the Kutter family name.

  Milly had consented to give her lodging and keep her heritage a secret if she financed her own way to Massachusetts and agreed to work as the family’s governess. She had her hands full with three girls: ages eight, six and two. She was expecting her fourth child that winter. A boy, she hoped. Lebensborn Program mothers earned special privileges and honorary cards for their male offspring. Milly wanted to please her husband. Cata understood.

  While she wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea of playing the hired nursemaid to her distant cousin, she was in no position to debate the one charity offered. She had to leave Germany immediately. So she emptied her savings and sold off everything of value: jewelry from SS officers, nightgowns made of French lace, silk stockings, feather hats, fur wraps, her favorite pair of T-strap shoes dusted in gold sparkle, ivory-handled hairbrushes, perfumes and soaps, even her lavender talc power, half used. All for pennies on the dollar. Better to get solid coin for her journey, she decided, than hold on to the items merely to have them confiscated if arrested. She brought only what she wore and a small handbag containing toiletries, a change of underthings, pajamas, a card stack of photographs and a handful of personal effects. Everything else she sold, right down to the length of her hair. The bob was more American, she told herself as her traditional blond braids were lopped off.

  In total, she was able to amass enough to pay for the Steinhöring Home’s gardener to drive her to the coast in his covered pro
duce truck, single-room passage on an America-bound steamship, one night’s boarding at a women’s hotel in New York City and this train ticket from Grand Central to the Boston depot. She was on the final leg and could not afford a careless mistake now.

  The ticket booth man cocked his head as if waiting for her to go on. Instead, she silently counted out crisp American bills, tousled her blond hair and angled her chin down with a grin. He winked, took the payment and stamped her receipt.

  “If you come back this way—stop in and say hello.” He tapped on the counter. “This’s my booth. I’ll be here.” He slid her ticket under the bar but kept his fingers there so hers were forced to touch his.

  Amis or Jerries, she thought, all the same. Men were men.

  “Thank you,” she said and strolled off knowing full well that his eyes were on the sway of her hips with every step.

  She nodded gingerly as she passed the Jewish man, but he kept his stare to the burnished floor.

  A violin began to play somewhere, a slow, sad melody that didn’t bounce off the walls like the child’s cry but pooled in the station’s enclaves like dew in a tombstone’s etching.

  Cata made a beeline for the Main Concourse where the song was lost in the scramble of people zigzagging this way and that, looking up to the train schedule and down to their luggage; porters and conductors tapping watches; children holding their parent’s hands; soldiers in uniforms everywhere. Fleshly specters, pointing cloaked fingers, Nazi. She could hear the collective whisper in the rhythmic panting of the train engine, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi. She checked her ticket and the rail board then found her track.

  Get on, get on, she told herself. Inside she’d be safe. Inside she’d be on her way.

  On the platform between her and her train was a lonesome, young girl, standing straight as a quill amid the flurry. She surveyed the crowd then paused on Cata. Her eyes were bluer and clearer than any child born to the Lebensborn Program—bluer than Cata’s daughter’s eyes. Cata could not look away. The girl cocked her head under her stare but did not smile, her jaw set hard with thought. Cata’s stomach dipped. A mass of chills crawled down her back and she had the unnerving feeling that the girl saw her. Saw everything—Steinhöring, the officers, the babies and Hazel.

  She quickly moved on, down the platform, though her ticket was for first class. She’d walk back up the entire length of carriages to avoid those piercing eyes and did just that.

  Finding her roomette, she pulled the door’s shade, put her bag away, took a seat and exhaled. Finally. The voices, music, whistles and cries of the station muted to a dull discord. Her hip tweaked from the stab. She shrugged off her wool coat and rubbed the spot.

  —

  “The needle is worn,” Hazel had said when they came home from the marketplace that awful night.

  Hazel had been working on a dirndl bodice and pushed the needle through the material too hard. It had gone straight into her arm. She’d never been very skilled at sewing. She held a rag to the wound, splotched with more blood than Cata imagined a prick to produce.

  “Nothing worse than a dull tip.” Brigette had snickered and set her wet mittens by the stove. “Did you miss us?” Without waiting for a reply, she’d gone on, “A bad January. I don’t know how we’re supposed to make good German stock on a diet of root vegetables. We need meat! And what I wouldn’t give for a slice of Black Forest cake.”

  Cata moved aside Hazel’s brown dirndl panels to set the grocery bag on the table. “We saw your friend Ovidia. She had new buttons carved with edelweiss. They’d match your dress. She said hello.”

  Brigette said after a tsk, “Poor thing. I can’t imagine how she goes on—after giving birth to a deformity. The dishonor would’ve killed me.”

  Ovidia had been in the Program with them. A tender, quiet girl who liked to take her meals alone in the garden so she could sketch the summer flowers and winter birds. She’d wanted to be an artist, so they said. Her talents garnered praise in the Bund Deutscher Mädel, Hitler’s League of German Maidens program, and had been her doom, too. The leaders of the BDM had recommended her to the Lebensborn Program for her aptitudes. Her parents were of earliest Germanic heritage and she was pretty enough. Though she’d never said as much, they could all see her heart was distant from the Fatherland’s mission. Many took offense—other mothers and staff. Insolent, they called her. So when she gave birth to a Mongoloid boy the spring before and was discharged from the Program, there was little sympathy. She didn’t go home to her family. Instead, she opened a market stall and sold materials and sewing bits to make a living. There were rumors that she stayed in the hopes of finding the son taken from her at the delivery bed, a blemish on the Steinhöring Home’s record. That kind of word spread fast, right to the doors of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest if they let it. A shame, Cata thought. Ovidia had always been kind to her and a friend to Hazel.

  “She does sell the finest fabrics.” Cata nodded to Hazel’s sewing. “That’s got to count for something.”

  “A waste of money.” Brigette pulled a grimy cabbage head from the sack. “Much good a pretty dress will do if the Americans and Russians come. Just one more enticement to throw you on your back and have their way.”

  Two spindly carrots, an onion and four pockmarked potatoes: Cata lined them up on the table. They’d paid triple what the items were worth, but with so little to be had, even the farmers’ children were crying with hunger pains.

  “It’s for when my family sees me,” Hazel explained flatly.

  “If your family sees you,” corrected Brigette. “The Program is not permitting anyone to travel or visit. Besides, you had best take better care of yourself first. If word gets out that you’re producing flawed children—well, look at Ovidia—you could be gone for good.”

  “I’ll make us a delicious vegetable soup,” Cata had said and pulled a dark loaf of bread from the bag, smiling widely. Change of subject.

  Hazel had given birth to twins near Christmastime, a girl and a boy. The girl was round and pink. A true Aryan gem. The boy, however, was terribly inferior and growing worse with each passing day by refusing to eat. Hazel had gone to see him more often than was typically allowed postdelivery. Cata only saw her Yann when called upon to wet-nurse. The doctors had hoped Hazel’s additional mothering might break the child’s starvation. Sadly, it had not, and they’d moved the boy from the Program’s nursery to a facility better suited to care for his ailments. Now the doctors were conducting further testing on the girl twin to ensure she did not carry a hidden deficiency as well.

  Since the boy’s removal, Hazel had withdrawn completely. Her eyes were dark from nights of crying in bed, and she’d lost such a substantial amount of weight that her milk had dried up already. Cata couldn’t blame her. While Brigette was as blunt as a butter knife, her words cut true: the sorrow and disgrace could kill a woman.

  Hazel came close and inhaled the bread deeply. “Rye and dandelion root,” she whispered, then took a seat beside the potbelly stove.

  After she said it, Cata could distinctly smell the toasted herbs. She set the loaf in the middle of the table like a vase of flowers. “Better looking than blooms to hungry eyes!” She put on her apron to skin vegetables for the soup.

  “Stoke the fire, Hazel,” instructed Brigette.

  Hazel opened the stove door and pushed a handful of dry twigs within. The coals glowed wraithlike. The kindle ignited and flickered red tongues, burning bright against the ash.

  “No good if you keep it open.” Brigette flung the metal door closed, wiped the soot off her hand and grabbed Hazel’s arm. “Time to be useful—cabbage.” She crunched the crucifer on the table.

  If they had to live three to a room, they had to find a way to get along. Cata bristled at being hustled along like a prisoner, no matter how many stars and crosses, ranks and honorariums Brigette had earned. “Let her be, Brig.” Cata scraped her knife down t
he sides of the carrot. “She’s not herself. Remember her boy . . .”

  Hazel pulled a slimy leaf from the cabbage and held the rotten pulp in her hand.

  Brigette huffed. “The health of the child depends on the health of the mother.”

  “The girl came out beautiful,” Cata protested. “Have you seen her? I was in the nursery feeding Yann, and she was lying in her crib, fair as a peach.”

  “I don’t visit the nurseries. Once I give birth, they belong to the Fatherland.” Brigette unclothed a moldy cheese wedge and shaved away the furry green with a butcher’s knife.

  Cata placed the vegetable peelings in an empty pot for the broth and began on the potatoes. “One good baby makes up for the other.”

  With a thunk, Brigette cut the centerpiece bread where it laid. “I heard they feed arsenic to the flawed ones.” She put the cheese on the bread heel and bit down with a smirk. Crumbs sprinkled her breast.

  That crossed the line. “Wicked gossip. Don’t believe it.” Cata’s hand slipped and the half-peeled tuber skittered across the table.

  Brigette continued, undeterred. “It’s true. They burn them alongside Jews from the camp. That’s why I make sure all my offspring are perfect.”

  Hazel rose to stand, but her knees buckled and she fell, head smacking the tiles.

  “Hazel!” Cata knelt and pulled her into her lap.

  Brigette smoothed a hair back into her tight braid. “She needs a pill.”

  It was too much for any mother to bear. On top of that, Hazel was a gentle spirit. She wasn’t like Brigette: hard and rusted bitter as iron. She wasn’t like Cata, either: afraid and able to feign apathy when the truth was that Cata had cherished the kick and stretch of Yann within her. The truth was, she loved her children beyond oaths of allegiance and would do anything, even give them up, for their well-being.