Secrets She Kept

by Cathy Gohlke

  “Of course not, as long as they don’t ask me how I’m doing since Mama died or how my job’s going or anything personal.” Aunt Lavinia regularly invited her best friend, Norma Mosely, and half the kinless in her church for holiday meals. By tomorrow there would be at least seven more. There was nothing I could do to change that, but I didn’t have to like it.

  Aunt Lavinia ignored my sarcasm. “I think Clyde might be a little sweet on you.”

  “You’ve been saying that since I was ten.”

  “It’s still true. It wouldn’t take much encouragement on your part to light that fire.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Please, Aunt Lavinia.”

  Aunt Lavinia ignored me and pried the teacup from my fingers. “Now, you’d best get to bed. I’d like to keep my good china in one piece, and I’ve got a date with a turkey at half past five.”

  I’d hidden the windup alarm clock in a bureau drawer between bed linens so I couldn’t hear it tick, but that meant the alarm was just as useless. Still, the aromas of rosemary-stuffed turkey in the oven and cranberries and apples simmering in cinnamon and cloves made their way up the stairs, tickling my nose beneath a mountain of quilts, drawing my feet to the bedside rag rug. I should have been downstairs and helping two hours ago.

  The back porch door slammed, the kitchen door opened, and a “Yoo-hoo!” rang through the house. Norma, with three pies and a bridal congealed salad. Aunt Lavinia won’t miss me.

  Still, I raced through my hair and makeup, zipped my favorite gray wool skirt, and pulled on a rose knit sweater set and the pearls Daddy’d given me for my sixteenth birthday—the only thing I’d kept to remember him by. Aunt Lavinia believed in dressing for Thanksgiving dinner. It was one of the things I’d always groaned over as a child, but had secretly appreciated. It made the day seem more special.

  Another favorite pastime was spying on my aunt whenever she let me sleep over. Anytime things got too tense or loud or silent at home, Aunt Lavinia gave me sanctuary. I must have been five or six when I discovered I could peek through the coarsely cut circle in the floor, the one the black stovepipe shot through to reach the roof. It heated the upstairs bedroom just enough to keep icicles at bay. If I caught the right angle, I could watch Aunt Lavinia working in the kitchen and learn more than my share of gossip.

  Twenty-seven was too old to be eavesdropping, but when Norma hissed, “Why don’t you tell her? She’s a right to know,” my ears perked. I sat cross-legged on the floor and squinted until I saw Aunt Lavinia shushing her. But Norma protested, “She can’t hear me; she’s not even up yet. I’m just saying—”

  “I know what you’re saying, but it would only bring her more grief. She’s had a lifetime of that woman’s cold heart. No matter how bad things were between Joe and Lieselotte, he was a good provider and a good father and I’m not about to shame him now.”

  “He’s been dead eleven years. There’s no shame for him—only credit due. I don’t know another man who’d do what he did for that woman.”

  “It would break her heart. I won’t do it.”

  “What if she finds something telling in the house? There’s bound to be something from Lieselotte’s past.” Norma snapped a dish towel open and plucked a pot from the drainer. “That could open up a whole new can of worms, and when she finds out you knew and never told her . . .”

  “Clyde Dillard’s going to clean out the house, burn everything he can’t sell. That’ll be the end of it.”

  “She’s not going through it herself? Not even curious?” Norma sniffed. “I don’t know. It seems like an awfully big gamble. All it takes is a little math.”

  Thirteen squeezed around Aunt Lavinia’s table built for eight. Despite the cheerful banter, I barely touched her lavish Thanksgiving dinner. Norma teased that I seemed off my feed. I stared back, doing my best to bite my tongue. She flushed and turned away. I wouldn’t confess that I’d eavesdropped, but I couldn’t pretend what they’d said made no difference.

  After the meal, Aunt Lavinia sliced the pumpkin pies. I cut the mincemeat and apple. Clyde grabbed two half gallons of ice cream from the freezer, and Norma carried trays into the dining room.

  “I haven’t eaten this much since last Thanksgiving at your table, Mrs. Mayfield.” Clyde heaped dollops of vanilla ice cream over too-big slices of pie. “I’m much obliged.”

  “We love having you, Clyde. You and that strong arm just keep dipping that vanilla.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And I’ll get busy over to the house first thing tomorrow. I know you want to get it on the market before Christmas.” He glanced at me, his face as red as the cranberry chutney.

  “That’ll be wonderful.” Aunt Lavinia patted his shoulder. “The sooner the better.”

  “About that . . .” I wiped the stickiness of the last pie slice on a tea towel. “Let’s hold off on clearing out the house. I want to think about it some more.”

  Aunt Lavinia straightened, and from the corner of my eye I caught Norma’s sideways glance as she set down the empty pie tray.

  “But, honey, we settled that last night. Clyde has some free time now. And just think, if you could sell the house before the end of the year, you’d have all that money to do whatever you want. There’s no need to wait.” Aunt Lavinia spoke a little too brightly.

  “You mean, in case the school won’t take me back?”

  “I didn’t mean that. Of course they’ll take you back. They’re lucky to have you. But, Hannah, honey, you don’t want that old house. It’s best to let it go.”

  “Whose best? Yours? Mine? My dead parents’?”

  Aunt Lavinia’s color rose and she smiled, flustered, at Clyde, who glanced uncertainly between the two of us.

  Aunt Lavinia didn’t deserve that after how good she’d been to me, all my life. But I couldn’t get past the idea that she knew something about Mama and Daddy and hadn’t told me—something that even Norma knew and thought might be important. If there was something in the house that might help me reconcile my relationship with my dead mother or at least help me understand her and move forward, that would be worth any amount of embarrassment.

  I picked up Norma’s second tray and headed for the dining room. “I want to go through the house on my own, Clyde. I’ll let you know soon what I want to do about the contents—but it won’t be tomorrow.”

  The company gone and the dishes finished, Aunt Lavinia shoved the clean turkey roaster to the back of the pantry for another year and turned on me. “I don’t understand you. You wanted nothing to do with that old house. You couldn’t wait to get away after high school, and you hated coming back last summer to nurse your mother. Have you forgotten?”

  “It was just after she died in her room—right there—that I didn’t want to go back.” I spread the fourth wet tea towel on the rack to dry. “I couldn’t go back. But now, before I leave it forever, I’m thinking I should sort through things—things Mama never let me see. No telling what I’ll find.”

  “Wallowing in that old house will just make you miserable.”

  Couldn’t Aunt Lavinia understand that I needed Mama—no matter that she hadn’t needed, maybe hadn’t even wanted, me? “You sound like one of your soap operas.”

  “I’d arranged everything—just like you asked me to, let me remind you. You—”

  “I need some time, Aunt Lavinia. My career as a teacher is over if I don’t get my act together. And I can’t get on with my future if I don’t settle things with Mama—once and for all. Running away from home resolved nothing. Coming back to nurse her last summer didn’t redeem our years of misery. She barely spoke to me the whole time, except to say things out of her head. Crazy, raving things as if she was fighting someone, and other times whispering and then pleading, begging for something not to happen. Once she screamed, and I had no idea what any of it meant. All things that made absolutely no sense, at least as far as anything I ever knew about her. But that’s it. I never knew her, not really. Going through her things is the only thing I haven’t
tried. I’m going to live in the house—alone.”

  “Please don’t do this to yourself. Let God close that door.”

  “God never opened the door, Aunt Lavinia. I don’t see what reason He’d have to close it.”

  “Leave it alone, Hannah. You don’t want to dig up things that can hurt you.”

  “What, you believe in ghosts now?”

  “There are ghosts and then there are ghosts.” She peered at me over her glasses.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means leave the past alone. What you don’t know can’t haunt you.”

  “Then tell me. What is it you and Norma were talking about this morning—‘do the math,’ or whatever?”

  Aunt Lavinia paled and turned grim in one go. “Still listening at keyholes?” she quipped defensively. “I’d have thought you’d outgrown that.”

  I stared her down.

  Aunt Lavinia pulled off her dirty bib apron and tossed it toward the washer, then pushed her fists into her hips. “I will say that I did not always treat your mother as kindly as I could have—as I should have. But she didn’t do right by you or your daddy from the get-go. Joe would tell you to leave sleeping dogs lie and get on with your life. Even Lieselotte would have wanted that.”

  “What ‘math’?”

  But Aunt Lavinia simply closed her eyes, threw up her hand, and headed for the door.

  “Why did they move to the mountain in the first place?”

  She stopped, shook her head, as if I’d asked a wearisome question, but turned to face me. “You know that Henry and I settled here because his family was here. What you probably don’t know is that he’d joined up in Oklahoma because he was going to college out there. That’s why he and Joe ended up in the same unit once the war started. Henry and I met through Joe—you know that. When Joe came back from Germany, there was just no reason for him to stay in Oklahoma.”

  “But all your family was there—all Daddy’s. I never understood why Mama and Daddy followed you out here.”

  Aunt Lavinia wouldn’t meet my eye. “Joe and I always got along—the closest of the siblings—and I guess he thought your mama might be more accepted here than out there, where so many families had lost boys from their unit.”

  “Why wouldn’t people accept Mama in Oklahoma?”

  Aunt Lavinia sighed again, this time exasperated. “The war changed the way people treated foreigners. The war changed everything.”

  “I know about the US internment camps during the war. But the war was over by the time she got here, and it’s not like she was German or Japanese. She was Austrian. They were victims of the war—people we fought to liberate.”

  “So she said.”

  “What? You think Mama wasn’t Austrian? C’mon, Aunt Lavinia. She’d have no reason to lie about that. And she certainly sounded Austrian.”

  But Aunt Lavinia had turned again and taken off, down the hallway for her favorite fireside chair and footstool.

  “This isn’t about me.” She pulled off her shoes, rubbed her arches, and lifted her feet to the ottoman. “It was a different time, and you’re too young to understand.” She massaged her temples, as if to relieve an ache lodged there. “Leave sleeping dogs lie, Hannah. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  “But what if I find something that tells me who my mother was—I mean, who she was really?”

  “I don’t believe anything or anyone could explain that woman.”

  “Nobody’s born so closed off, Aunt Lavinia. I need to know if that was her own warped nature or if something happened to her . . . or if it was because of me.” That confession cost me everything, though I turned away, fussing with the afghan on the sofa, so Aunt Lavinia could not read my face.

  “It wasn’t you, sweetie.” She shook her head. “What if you find it was because of something she did? Something neither she nor you can ever reconcile? A lot of bad things went on in the war. You just never know. Besides, she couldn’t love herself; how could she love another person?”

  I sat heavily on the sofa, swinging my legs up to lie down and stare at the ceiling. “She never loved Daddy; that’s for certain. I hated that—for both of them. I think part of him wanted to love her, but he wasn’t good at it. He could be soft with me but awfully hard on her. But she must have felt something for him, sometime. They married. They had me.” I couldn’t keep the hope from my voice, or my glance from her eyes, just in case she knew something, anything.

  But Aunt Lavinia closed her eyes and turned away. “I don’t believe your mother ever loved another soul.”

  2

  LIESELOTTE SOMMER

  NOVEMBER 1938

  I’d loved Lukas Kirchmann all my life—from the time I was old enough to breathe, or at least to bat my eyelashes. Lukas was my older brother’s friend—both two years older than me. But unlike Rudy, Lukas took the time to smile and talk with me, to ask the names of my dolls as I set out their china plates and cups and metal spoons, or to mention that his mother and sister were very fond of tea parties too.

  When I was old enough to walk to school, Rudy ignored Mutti’s instructions to walk beside me, determined to run ahead. But Lukas insisted they keep a step behind to watch over me and his sister, Marta. No one dared tease or torment us with two big boys on patrol. In all those years I never saw Lukas afraid of anyone—not until Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

  I’d just turned thirteen and was long past playing with dolls. My father had warned me to stay home that night and keep the door locked, no matter what I heard or saw from our windows. He and Rudy—so full of himself in his Hitler Youth uniform—would be out late. Our housekeeper had long gone home to her family for the evening, and of course Mutti lay upstairs, sound asleep from the laudanum drops taken to ease her pain.

  I’d finished my school lessons and the dishes, then hung the dripping tea towel to dry. It was half past ten, and still no sign of Rudy or Vater. Only when I stepped outside to stuff rubbish into the bin did I catch the faint, far-off whiff of wood burning and a faded light painted across the sky. No one dared openly burn brush or wood with the current rationing, certainly not at night and not in Berlin—unless a house was burning. I’d followed my nose to the street when a roughened hand clamped over my mouth and a strong arm yanked me back into the shadows. Scratching, kicking, clawing, biting—I did it all—but he dragged me into the bushes.

  “Lieselotte! Lieselotte, it’s me, Lukas!” he hissed in my ear. “Stop biting me, for pity’s sake!”

  “Lukas!” He relaxed his grip and I jerked away. “You scared me to death. What are you doing?”

  “Is Rudy home? Your father?”

  “Nein. Lukas, what—?”

  “Let us come in, just for a bit.”

  “Let who?” And that is when I glimpsed another shape in the dark, one I couldn’t make out, hunched and lurking behind the courtyard door.

  “Please,” Lukas begged. In that moment I sensed his fear—a thing so foreign in Lukas Kirchmann that I immediately shoved open the door and pulled him through, the hulking form on his heels. “Bolt it.” Lukas had never ordered me to do anything before, but I turned the lock without thinking. He put out the kitchen light and peered around the edge of the curtain. “Your father’s not home?” he repeated, as if he’d not quite believed me.

  “Nein. He said he’d be late. Your arm is bleeding—and your face! What’s happened?”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  The other man, more than twice Lukas’s age, moaned toward the pale light cast from the street, nursing a crumpled arm.

  “Herr Weiss?” I recognized him as the butcher from the market three streets over. The Jewish market, where I was no longer permitted to shop, no matter that we’d shopped there ever since I could remember and it was so very close and had always carried the best cuts of meat—at least, Mutti claimed that once it did. According to Vater, good Aryan girls didn’t buy from Jews—not meat, not anything. The Führer had made that cl
ear for a long time.

  Herr Weiss nodded miserably.

  “Lieselotte, do you have some cloth? A strip I can make into a sling for Herr Weiss?”

  “Sit down, Lukas. You’re bleeding all over the place! Let me get you a face flannel.”

  “Never mind me.” But he sat and grabbed my arm, warming me through despite the shock of seeing him roughened up. “Help us.”

  “Anything,” I swore.

  “I’ve got to get Herr Weiss and his family away.”

  “His family? Where—?”

  “That doesn’t matter. Can you help us? Can you help me—without telling your father or Rudy?”

  He wants me to do something secret and dangerous—he wants me, without Rudy. I didn’t know exactly what Lukas needed or had planned, but I knew that helping Jews was forbidden and that I ran the risk of my father’s wrath, Rudy’s wrath, and of being denounced by our neighbors. It was frightening, and thrilling. “What do you need? What can I do?”

  “We need bandages, coats, some food. And we need a place to hide Herr Weiss and his family until tomorrow night.”

  “Tomorrow night?” Bandages and food and even coats were one thing, but hiding them . . . Where could I hide them? Did I dare?

  “Others will be able to get him away from Berlin by then.”

  My heart raced. This was more than I knew how to do.

  But Lukas stepped near, so near I could feel his whispered breath on my face. “The brownshirts smashed his shop. They threw all his meats and goods into the street. They’ve set fire to the synagogue and to a whole string of Jewish houses. No one’s trying to stop the fires, unless they endanger Aryan houses. There’s a good chance every Jewish shop and house nearby will burn, including the Weisses’. His son’s been beaten senseless and arrested for trying to protect his parents. Herr Weiss and his wife need to get their daughters away before . . . before something worse happens to them. Help them. Please. Help me help them.”

  How can I refuse? But not in the house—there’s no place safe. “The garden shed in the courtyard. No one goes there now. There’s room for all of them in the cellar just beneath, where you and Rudy made your clubhouse when I was little—when you wouldn’t let me in.” I remembered the long-ago slight, even in that moment.