Peterson sighed loudly. “Five minutes. And then we’re starting.”
Lena leaned over and whispered, “Catherine, what’s going on?”
“You’ll find out. I hope.”
Ten minutes later, Catherine returned to the courtroom and took her seat. Still no Liam. Judge Peterson said, “Finally. Mr. Shirley, call your first witness.”
“Petitioner calls Mr. Arthur Woodward to the stand.”
Arthur stood, looked at Catherine and Lena, shook his head, and walked to the witness stand. He swore to tell the truth and sat straight and confident. Shirley led him through a brief history of his childhood and his relationship with his mother and father. Then, after fifteen minutes, he got to the heart of the matter.
“It all began four years ago,” Arthur said. “She started having these visions of someone named Karolina. I’d never heard about her before. My mother would cry. She’d tell my father that Karolina’s babies are gone, someone needs to find them. She kept saying, ‘I need to go to Poland and find Karolina’s babies.’ Babies, Your Honor, who would now be in their seventies, if they were still alive and if they ever existed. But she still calls them babies.”
Arthur continued. “After my father died, it became all-consuming. She’d sit in front of the cocktail table with maps of Poland spread out everywhere. Travel brochures. Train schedules. She’d send away for information on train travel in the 1940s. She had shelves and shelves filled with GPS photos of farmland and railroad tracks. She didn’t seem to want to do anything but focus on this obsession.”
Lena’s eyes were tearing and she sat with her handkerchief, dabbing her eyes. “I can’t do this,” she mumbled.
“I’d come over at night to see my mother and she’d be staring at her computer, trying to find out about people in little cities in Poland and Germany. She searched online archives and printed out small-town European newspaper clippings from the late forties. I’d tell her to give up on it. Move on. We’d have shouting matches where she’d tell me to mind my own business. I’d tell her, ‘This is my business. Do you know how ridiculous you are, looking at a computer to find people who don’t exist, who don’t—”
“Stop!” Lena shouted, jumping to her feet and banging her fist on the table. “Stop this hearing! Stop it right now! I concede. Give him whatever he wants. I’ll hear no more of this.”
Catherine stood, put her hands on Lena’s shoulders and tried to calm her. “Don’t do this, Lena,” she whispered. “Let’s be patient. Liam told us to wait. Besides, we didn’t get the chance to tell our side of the story yet. If it comes down to it, I think I can win this hearing.”
“It’s over, Catherine. I can’t fight anymore. I can’t endure this and I won’t testify. I will not get on that witness stand.”
“Your Honor, may we have a short recess? As you can see, my client is very upset.”
“Request denied. Does Mrs. Woodward wish to admit the allegations of the petition? Does she now agree to judgment in favor of the petitioner?”
“She does not!” yelled Liam from the back of the courtroom. “Lena, don’t say another word. Catherine, I need to see you immediately.”
Catherine turned to the judge. “I’m very sorry, Your Honor, but my investigator has just arrived with information that will bear on the balance of this trial. I need a few minutes, please.”
Judge Peterson shook his head. “There’s a witness on the stand. Your client has just confessed judgment on the pleadings…”
“Your Honor, just a quick moment, please? Let the record show that you were fair. If my investigator has nothing, then I won’t stand in Lena’s way and the case will be over. But I have the feeling that Mr. Taggart has brought us very important information that will change the course of this hearing.”
“I most strenuously object,” Shirley said.
“I weary of all this drama, Ms. Lockhart,” Judge Peterson said. “It better be good. The court will allow you a fifteen-minute recess.”
Liam turned and left the courtroom.
“What the hell is this all about?” Arthur said. “Another showboat tactic, Ms. Lockhart? Putting off the inevitable? You heard my mother. She concedes.”
Catherine leaned over and whispered, “Lena, come with me.”
Tears rolled out of Lena’s eyes and dropped onto the courtroom table. She shook her head. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“Not yet. Come with me.”
Catherine handed Lena her cane and helped her to her feet. They slowly walked toward the courtroom door.
“Fifteen minutes,” Arthur yelled. “After that, I’m calling the shots. No more Lockhart. No more Karolina.”
Lena and Catherine walked into the hall and toward Liam, who stood by the windows with two women. Catherine looked at them and smiled broadly. The women were tall, poised and stylishly dressed. They smiled warmly at Lena.
“Come on, Lena,” Catherine said, prodding her forward. But Lena stood still and wouldn’t move. Liam brought the two women across the hall and directly to Lena. “I’d like to introduce you to Sofia Stachiewicz and Aniela Lersky,” he said, “otherwise known to you as Rachel and Leah.”
Lena’s face flushed, her mouth quivered, her hands shook. Catherine put her arm around her shoulders to steady her. Lena looked into Catherine’s eyes.
“Karolina,” Lena said softly. “They’re her twins.”
“No,” Catherine said with a gentle smile. “Tell them the truth, Lena. It’s all right.”
She took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. They already know.”
Lena broke into sobs as she reached out for her babies. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry? You gave us our lives,” Sofia said. “However you did it, you had the courage to save both of our lives. Thank you. Mother.”
They stood together, the three of them, warmly embracing each other for several minutes.
With her arms wrapped around Aniela, Lena said, “The last moment I held you, you had a twinkle in your eye and you smiled at me. I’ve held that smile in my eyes every day since 1943. You still have the same smile.”
Liam whispered to Catherine, “Sorry I didn’t get here earlier. Their plane was late.”
“We have so much to tell you,” Aniela said. “All about our lives. Liam has arranged for us to stay for the entire week.”
“We want to know all about our mother and father,” Sofia added.
“Oh, I wish you had known your father,” Lena said. “David was a wonderful man and he would have loved to know you. If I had been stronger, maybe I’d have found you years ago and you would have known him. But I wasn’t. I do have many pictures to show you.”
Shirley pushed the courtroom door open, poked his head out and said, “The judge is back, Ms. Lockhart.”
The five walked into the courtroom and straight up to the bench.
“Your Honor, I would like to introduce Mrs. Woodward’s twin daughters, who have just arrived from Europe.”
“What?” Arthur said, jumping to his feet. “It’s true? This crazy story? There really are twins? And they’re not Karolina’s? You’re telling me these are my sisters?”
Lena nodded tearfully. A satisfied smile was on her face. “You are all the children of David and Lena Woodward. Arthur, I’m sorry to have deceived you. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you or your father. That’s my fault. But these lovely women are your blood sisters.”
Arthur looked sharply at Shirley. “You told me you had the evidence. You told me you could prove that my mother was delusional. There was no doubt. What about Dr. Sullivan, the expert who was coming to court to give his opinion that my mother suffered from an obsessive delusion brought about by dementia?”
Shirley flippantly sat tapping his pen on his notepad. “The best opinion money can buy.”
Arthur turned to face his mother. “I can’t believe this. This is a shock.”
“Do you want to wait for the DNA?” L
iam said.
Arthur shook his head. “No. There’s no point.” He looked at his lawyer with disgust and then back at Lena. “What is there to say? If it makes any difference, I always thought…”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lena said. “It doesn’t matter what you always thought, or what you did. It doesn’t matter, because you’re my son and I will always love you.”
Arthur picked up his briefcase, put on his coat and said, “Dismiss the case, Mike.”
“But, Arthur,” Shirley responded, “she won’t take the stand. She’s afraid to testify. I can win this case in my sleep.”
“Dismiss it.” He started walking toward the door when Lena said, “Don’t you want to meet your sisters?”
He stopped, thought for a minute, and said, “Are you sure they want to meet me?”
Lena nodded. “Come and meet your sisters. They’ve traveled a long way.”
As the Woodward children shook hands and greeted each other for the first time, Liam turned to Catherine and elbowed her. “Chokes me all up.”
“How did you ever find them both?”
“I found Sofia. I had an address in Warsaw. I had no clue about Aniela. When I met with Sofia, she told me that she and Aniela have known they were sisters for more than forty years. They’re very close.”
“How did they know?”
“Each of their parents told them they were adopted from the St. Stanislaus orphanage. The nuns in the 1970s all knew the story about the two babies that were found by the railroad tracks, wrapped up and thrown off a train during the war. The nuns knew they were twins when they were brought in, but they fudged the information on the IDs. When Sofia came to St. Stanislaus to inquire about her adoption, the nuns put her in touch with Aniela. When I found Sofia and told her all about Lena, she said, ‘Oh, you need to meet my sister. She lives in Paris.’ We flew there together. As I’m sure they’ll tell you, both of them have had extraordinary careers. Sofia is a pediatrician. Aniela is a publisher of a French fashion magazine. They were so eager to come to Chicago to meet their mother and defend her in this lawsuit. They dropped everything and flew out last night.”
Judge Peterson, who had been leaning back and watching the whole scene, said, “Mr. Shirley? Are you moving to dismiss?”
“I guess so. That’s what my client wants.”
Judge Peterson slammed his gavel. “So ordered.”
FIFTY
IN A PRIVATE DINING room in a Streeterville steakhouse, Lena, Sofia, and Aniela sat at a large round table with Catherine and Liam, celebrating the grand reunion. There was so much information to share, and so much urgency to share it, that it was difficult to complete an entire sentence without interruption. Seventy years was a lot of catch-up.
Pictures of Lena’s four grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren lay on the table. Sofia tapped her finger on the pictures. “They are your legacy.”
“I want to meet them all,” Lena said.
Just then the door to the dining room opened and Arthur walked in. Catherine quickly glanced at Lena.
“I insisted that he come,” Lena said. “I intend to repair this broken relationship.”
“And Arthur? Is that his intent as well?”
She shrugged. “Well, he’s here.”
Arthur took a seat at the opposite side of the table and immediately ordered a martini. He nodded at his mother. “Thank you for including me.”
“Thank you for telling your lawyer to dismiss the case,” Lena said.
“Don’t give me too much credit, it wasn’t that charitable of a gesture. You were right and I was wrong.”
“But I wouldn’t have testified. You could have won.”
“It was the wrong thing to do.”
Aniela pulled a wrinkled piece of paper out of her purse and set it on the table. “I saved something. For all these years. I don’t know why. When I was found in the field, this paper was pinned to my diaper. It had an address in Sharmassing, Germany. Later in life, I went to look for Helga Schultz, thinking she might have been my mother, but by then she was dead and the folks in town told me she didn’t have any girls. We finally figured that someone wanted to us to be sent there to hide during the war, and that maybe she had agreed to hide us.”
“Pinning the address to your diaper, that was Karolina’s idea,” Lena said.
“We both had the same addresses pinned to our diapers, and that’s how the orphanage knew we were twins.”
Lena was suddenly on the verge of tears. She covered her eyes.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” Sofia said.
“For so many years, I didn’t look for you. I wish I had. I wish David had met you. I could have searched, but I didn’t. I never even told David. I never told Arthur. No one knew I had these two lovely babies. You were sealed behind closed doors, deep, deep inside of me. I couldn’t face the shame that I had thrown my babies away.”
“Mama, you did the only thing possible,” Aniela said. “How many mothers would have had that courage? We weren’t thrown away, we were packaged for delivery. We’re all here today because you took the bold step to rescue us from slaughter.”
“Still, I wish I would have found you earlier.”
“I doubt you could have located them much before now,” Liam said. “For almost fifty years Poland was locked behind the Iron Curtain. Searches would have been next to impossible.”
Arthur lifted his glass. “If you’ll permit me, with a dose of humility, I lift my glass to my mother”—he shrugged—“our mother, the most determined woman I know. She never gives up.” He looked at his sisters and nodded.
Lena smiled. “Thank you, Arthur.”
“What is our actual birthday, Mama?” Aniela asked. “We never knew for sure.”
“January fifth. I remember it like yesterday. With the help of Muriel and Karolina, I brought you into the world with all our hopes for a brighter future. They were two strong women who loved you both very much. They loved you and fed you and would have done anything for you.” She shook her head and wiped a tear. “None of us would have made it without them.”
The waiter brought in a bottle of champagne. Liam held it up. “This bottle is a gift from a very special person. It comes with an e-mail.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket. “It reads, ‘To my dear friend Lena and the Woodward family. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to your celebration tonight. I’m there in spirit. I wish you all the very best. Lena, God bless you, you kept your promise. All my love, Muriel Bernstein.’”
The spirited celebration continued well into the night. A little after midnight, without warning, Catherine reached out, grabbed Liam’s arm and squeezed. Hard. “Liam! Liam!”
“What?” What!!!”
She arched her back and held her abdomen. “Liam!”
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God. It’s time. Holy shit. I gotta go. We gotta go. Damn, Catherine, we don’t have our car.”
Arthur stood. “My car’s outside. I’ll have Rico drive you.”
“Rico? Thanks all the same, I think we’ll take a cab.”
“Liam!!!” Catherine said through clenched teeth, “Let. Rico. Drive!”
“Okay, okay, let’s go. Rico drives! It’s been a lot of fun, Woodwards. We’ll catch up with you later.”
Before Catherine could leave, Lena reached out and squeezed her hand. “God bless you!” she whispered. Then she smiled a knowing smile. “It’s a boy, isn’t it?”
Catherine put her finger to her lips and winked.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Karolina’s Twins is a work of fiction. The story was inspired by the life of Fay Scharf Waldman, a woman of extraordinary courage, determination, and wisdom. However, Karolina’s Twins is not intended to be a biographical account of Fay’s life. Lena Woodward is a fictional character who experienced many of the travails described to me by Fay but, in the process of creating a work of fiction, some of the episodes, though authentic in their occurrence to others, did not involve Fay. I have endeavored to portray th
e history of World War II Poland, the town of Chrzanów, the Gross-Rosen subcamps, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps and postwar Europe as accurately as possible. To that end, I drew upon the accounts of courageous survivors, many of which may be found in memoirs, Yizkor Books, museum archives and in the personal stories conveyed to me over the past few years. Except for the court drama, which is entirely a product of my imagination, I believe the events described in Karolina’s Twins are genuine.
I am eternally grateful to Fay, for sharing her story with me, and to her daughter, Hannah, who kindly gave me an enormous portion of her time to fill in the details. Sincere thanks go out to Fay’s loving son, Fred Waldman—who, I must tell you, bears absolutely no resemblance in any way to my fictional character Arthur Woodward, a person who did not exist in real life. Thanks as well to Barbara Waldman and Carol Chaikin. The memories of the Waldman family and the wealth of materials available to me gives me confidence that the environment in which the characters play their roles is authentic.
I am also grateful to my editor, Jennifer Weis, my tireless agent, Maura Teitelbaum, and the staff at St. Martin’s Press, for their assistance and wise guidance. Thanks to my readers for their suggestions, among them Katie Lang Lawrence, Kathleen Smith, David and Cindy Pogrund and Linda Waldman. And, as always, my deepest gratitude to my wife, Monica, who read the pages as they came off the printer and provided invaluable feedback. Karolina’s Twins would not have been possible without her continuing support, encouragement and wise edits.
A Reading Group Gold Selection
KAROLINA’S TWINS
by Ronald H. Balson
About the Author
• A Conversation with Ronald H. Balson
Behind the Novel
• A Selection of Photographs
Keep on Reading
• Recommended Reading
• Reading Group Questions
Also available as an audiobook from Macmillan Audio
For more reading group suggestions visit www.readinggroupgold.com.
ST. MARTIN’S GRIFFIN
Karolina's Twins Page 32
