At her insistence, they finally let her go home, because they didn’t know what else to do. No medication had worked, no test had been conclusive, and she confided to Jakob that she thought they were letting her go home to die, but she informed him with an iron look in her eyes that she had no intention of dying, and she was going to get better. He wanted to believe her, but he didn’t. This time it was Jakob who thought the end had come, and they were going to lose the war.
She stayed in bed for the first few days after she got home, drinking milk shakes until they made her sick. She ate mashed potatoes with every meal. And with grim determination, she got up and cleaned her house four days after she got home, and then went to sit at her sewing machine. She had decided to make new curtains with some fabric she’d been saving.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” Jakob asked her when he got home. “You should be in bed resting.” She was too weak to go to the office with him and seemed very frail.
“I’m tired of resting, and I don’t like our curtains. I never did. I’m making new ones.” She was using an elegant beige damask, and she said she was planning to make pink satin curtains for their bedroom when she finished. After that, she got up and dressed every day, put on makeup, combed her hair, cleaned the apartment, worked on the curtains, went out for a walk in the afternoon every day, and cooked dinner at night. At first, Jakob thought it was some terrible sign that she was nearing the end, and clinging to life by a thread, but she had decided to choose life not death.
She slowly got stronger, and started to put on weight again. After a few weeks, she went for longer walks, and was visibly stronger. And six weeks after she’d come home, she announced that she was going back to work with him. When he refused to let her, she showed up at the office anyway. She had come by cab, a luxury she normally never allowed herself. He tried to send her home and she wouldn’t go, and she stood in his office with a look of rage, at him, at the mysterious illness that had nearly killed her, and she refused to be beaten by it.
“I survived Buchenwald, dammit. I’m not going to let my stomach kill me, or some disease they don’t even have a name for. I’m through being sick. I won’t have it,” she said with purpose and marched back to her desk, where she started answering the phones and making his appointments again. At the end of the day, she looked exhausted, but no worse than she had for months. In fact, she looked better. And little by little she improved, and three months after she’d been released from the hospital, she looked almost normal again, had her strength back, and had gained ten pounds. They still had no idea what she’d been suffering from, but whatever it was, she had refused to be beaten by it, and she was winning. Jakob smiled at her one night as he looked at her.
“You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met.” He could see now why she had survived the camp, she had simply refused to let them kill her. She didn’t want to die. And he had come to a decision while she was sick and he told her about it now. “I want to sell the business.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’re too young to retire.” She dismissed the idea immediately.
“No, I’m not. I’m fifty-six years old. I’ve worked hard for thirty years, after five years of hard labor in the camp. That’s long enough. I made myself a promise that if you survived, I was going to retire. We’re going to travel and have some fun, and do all the things we’ve never done, while we’re young enough to enjoy it.” She thought about it for a moment, and this time she nodded. What he said made sense to her.
“What if we get bored after a few months? Then what? Or if we lose our money?” She said it out of habit, not real belief, and he knew that about her.
“We won’t and if we do, we can start another business, or I’ll get a job. But that won’t happen. And there won’t be a war, we won’t get deported. Let’s have some fun for a change. Maybe Max is right and we should go to Europe. We don’t have to go to Germany, why would we? But I’d like to see Vienna again, and go to Paris with you, if you want to. We could travel in Italy. We’ve never taken time out to have fun. We were always working, and you never wanted to spend any money.” He looked at her, and she smiled ruefully. “We have more than enough. Let’s enjoy it. And when we get back, let’s move to a new apartment. We’ve been here for twenty-five years, and I want to sell the building.” It was the only one on the Lower East Side he hadn’t sold yet. “We can stay downtown if you want to, maybe on Fifth Avenue, or move uptown near Max. But I think we should enjoy life and do some new things.” He had thought about all of it while she was sick, and she wasn’t ready to admit it to him, but she liked what he was suggesting. Two days later, she agreed. She had been thinking the same things during her illness, that if she died now, there would be so much she hadn’t done. And she wanted to enjoy Jakob while they were both young enough and strong enough to do it.
He put Izzie’s business on the market, with only a faint pang of guilt, and she spent weeks planning their trip to Europe. One Saturday afternoon, they went to an open house for an apartment on lower Fifth Avenue near Washington Square. They fell in love with it, and made an offer immediately. She had spent her whole life being frightened, and she didn’t want to be afraid anymore, of illness, or death, or wars, or persecution, or another Holocaust. She wanted the rest of her life to be about living, not about fear, which was a kind of death in itself. She had been afraid to spend money, and of being poor, or losing everything they had, or something terrible happening to Max or Jakob. Terrible things had happened, and they had survived them. Now it was time to look forward and get past them, and enjoy what they had. She had figured it all out when she was sick, and so had he.
They told Max that they were going to Europe in June, and Jakob told him he was selling the business. Max was happy for them. It was what he had been telling his father to do for years. Jakob said they would be moving into a new apartment in September, after Emmanuelle decorated it to her satisfaction, and then they were going to sell the building they were living in. It was the last building he still owned on the Lower East Side. Their days of poverty were over, had been for a long time, and they were finally willing to acknowledge it.
“Good for you, Dad,” Max said and hugged him. “I’m proud of you.”
“What about you? When are you going to start living instead of just making money? Any sign of romance in your life? I keep reading about you at Studio 54 and El Morocco with beautiful girls. Have you met anyone you care about yet?” Studio 54 had just opened and was the secret hangout of young, racy New Yorkers.
“I’m trying hard not to care about anyone,” Max said with a smile. “I’m not ready yet. Maybe when I’m thirty-five. I have a lot I want to do first.”
“My life would have meant absolutely nothing without your mother,” Jakob said with feeling. “I realized that again when she was sick and I thought I might lose her. You and she are all that ever really mattered to me. Don’t miss out on that, Max. Maybe not now, but eventually you need someone to give your life meaning and make it all worthwhile. Until that happens, it’s all meaningless.”
“I know, Dad,” Max said but Jakob knew he didn’t, not until it happened to him. “But I just haven’t met anyone I care about, not enough to settle down and marry, and have kids with.”
“It’ll happen. You can’t predict when. One day you’ll meet the right woman. A woman who makes your heart beat faster every time you look at her.” That’s how he had felt about Emmanuelle since the day they’d met, and still did. Max nodded and didn’t comment. His mother nagged him about it all the time, and he accused her of being a Jewish mother when she did. But in the meantime, he was glad that his parents were taking time to enjoy their life. They had earned it and worked hard all their lives, and had been through so much together. He had never forgotten his pilgrimage to Buchenwald.
* * *
—
Jakob sold the business to his two original Flemish sto
necutters, and agreed to let them pay him slowly over time so they could afford it. He thought Izzie would have liked that, and it made him feel less guilty for selling. They closed on the apartment on Fifth Avenue near Washington Square in a beautiful pre-war building. He received an offer on his last Lower East Side building a week before they left for Europe, and he accepted it. He sold the building for six times what he had paid for it, and probably could have gotten more if he’d pushed, but he didn’t want to. The man who bought it was thrilled.
They had dinner with Max the night before they left for Europe. It was going to be a trip back in time for both of them, but they felt ready for it now, to face the ghosts of their past, as Max had twelve years before, the first time he’d gone to Europe, while he was in college. They were starting in Paris, and staying at the Ritz. Jakob had insisted they were going first-class everywhere, and Emmanuelle would just have to put up with it. He was not going to stay in small miserable hotels just so she could brag about how much money they’d saved when they got back. It still pained her to spend money, but she’d agreed. When they arrived at the Ritz, she was bowled over by how luxurious the hotel was, how elegant their suite, all done in beautiful brocades, with rooms filled with antiques, and fresh flowers in every room, chocolates, and macarons from Ladurée.
“This is what we’ve worked for, for thirty years,” he reminded her as he put his arms around her and kissed her. “Consider it a belated honeymoon.”
They walked all over Paris together, to all the places that were meaningful to her, and others he wanted to see. They stood outside where she had lived, and she cried thinking about her mother and sister, but it was a peaceful feeling coming back here, as though she were putting old ghosts to rest, and was no longer tormented by them. She was glad they had come back to Paris. She had needed to see it again and hadn’t realized it. There had been so much violence in the way she’d left, and she’d never been back since, to say goodbye to the people and places she loved. She walked into the butcher shop across from her home, and saw Flore, the daughter of the owner. She was heavier but looked the same. They had played together as children. She recognized Emmanuelle immediately and they both burst into tears and hugged each other. She owned the butcher shop now, had inherited it from her parents, and said she had four children, and three grandchildren. Emmanuelle asked her in a pained voice if the same people were still in their old apartment, the ones who had denounced them to the police as Jews and got them deported. Flore said they had moved away years ago, right after the war. The entire family had been denounced as collaborators and paraded through the streets with shorn heads, and after that they left, and Flore had no idea where they went.
“There’s a nice family there now with two little girls,” Flore reassured her. “I always think of you and Françoise when I see them.” She had heard years before that Emmanuelle’s sister and mother had died in the camp. People said Emmanuelle had survived, but she never came back to Paris, and no one knew where she went. “I always wondered where you were, but I didn’t know how to find you.”
“I had no one to come back to, and nowhere to stay,” Emmanuelle said quietly. “I met my husband at the camp, and we got married after it was liberated. We went to America together. I have a son, but no grandchildren yet.” She smiled, and introduced her to Jakob, who was warm and gracious when he shook her hand. She was happy to see that Emmanuelle was alive, in good health, comfortable, and not alone in the world. It had been such a terrible time for all of them, and even worse for their Jewish friends.
They talked for a little while longer, and then Jakob and Emmanuelle left, walked around the neighborhood for a while, and then back to the hotel. It struck her that many shops and bistros near her home were still the same. In many ways, Paris hadn’t changed. She loved that about the city, that there were establishments that had been in the same place, in many cases run by the same family, for a hundred years.
She loved seeing all the familiar landmarks and monuments, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides, Napoleon’s war monument in the Place Vendôme. They were the sights of her childhood and adolescence, the places she had gone with her parents, and later with her mother and sister. Even the smells of Paris were familiar to her. And she had always gone to Ladurée with her grandmother for hot chocolate and macarons for a special treat. It was one of the few memories she had of her since she had died when Emmanuelle was very young. And she remembered things she had done with her mother and sister that she hadn’t thought about for years.
She took Jakob to all the places that Max had visited when he had gone to Paris for the first time when he was in college, and now she could see them for herself. It wasn’t the agony being there that she had feared it would be. On the contrary, it comforted and soothed her, and felt like coming home after thirty-six years. How she had left no longer seemed as important as the fact that she had grown up there. When they left, she felt calm and at peace.
Jakob felt the same way in Vienna when they got there. He showed her all the favorite places of his boyhood, the parks, and the monuments, the places where he had played, and their enormous elegant home. It was a club now, and he stood outside for a long time, and showed her the windows where his room had been. She had always known that he had grown up in wealth and luxury, but she had never fully understood to what extent, and all that he had lost, until she saw the family bank and his home. The bank was still a financial institution of some kind, but he didn’t want to go in when she suggested it. He wanted to leave the past in the past, and he looked sad as they walked away from his home. She tucked her hand into his arm, and he looked down at her with deep emotion, with tears brimming in his eyes.
“I don’t mind losing the house so much as all the people I loved in it.” It was incredible to realize that an entire family had disappeared, had been wiped out, except for him. It was what the Nazis had wanted, and nearly succeeded in doing, and in many instances they did. In their case, he and Max were the only ones left to carry on his name. And since she was a woman, Emmanuelle’s family name had ended with her.
They only stayed in Vienna for two days. They had accomplished what they’d gone there to do. In essence, they had come to say their farewells to their cities, their childhood homes, and the people they had lost. They had never had a chance to do that. And now finally, they were ready to bury their dead and move on.
From Vienna, they flew to Rome, which Emmanuelle only remembered vaguely from a trip there once with her mother and sister, and Jakob still remembered fairly well. The atmosphere was electric. Everything was chaotic, with a holiday feeling to it. From there they drove north to Florence and Venice, which she didn’t know but Jakob did. He had traveled a great deal in Europe with his family, and their last stop was Lake Como, which she thought was one of the most romantic places she’d ever seen. They spent four days there, relaxing and walking, looking at the mountains and the lake, and talking about where they’d been. But both of them had been more peaceful since they’d been to their respective homes and cities. It had done them both good to see them again. And they were both sad when it was time to leave.
After Lake Como, they flew from Milan to New York. They had much to do when they got home. Jakob had to conclude the sale of the building they had lived in, Emmanuelle had to get their new apartment ready. And Jakob had work to do getting ready to hand over his business. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do after that, although he was still interested in more land development deals. They had dinner with Max their second night back. He seemed busier than ever, and very stressed, and told his father about a new land offering in Illinois for another shopping mall. Jakob was interested in the deal. He’d been worried he wouldn’t have enough to do once he left his business, but he was busy all week and they were thinking about taking a cruise that winter. Suddenly, they were turning into world travelers, but it was what they had wanted to do. Th
ey had gently left the past behind them in Europe, and now they were ready for the future, and whatever it would bring.
Chapter 10
Jakob and Emmanuelle moved into their new apartment in September, and it took until the end of the year to hand over the business. They took a Caribbean cruise in January, and planned a trip to Hawaii and Mexico in the spring.
The cruises they took introduced them to new people and places. They were waited on hand and foot, and they came back every time having made new friends and discovered foreign destinations they would never have gone to otherwise. Jakob still felt guilty about not going to work every day, but once they were away, he enjoyed it immensely. They’d been traveling constantly for almost a year after he left the business, and came back for Max’s thirty-second birthday. His mother noticed that he had a gleam in his eye when they had dinner with him. There was something he wasn’t telling them, she was sure, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She said something to Jakob about it, on the way home to their new apartment, and he said it was her imagination. And then he saw it in the paper, on the society page two days later. It was a picture of Max with a beautiful young woman in an elegant white evening dress on his arm and the caption under it said that they were going to the Christmas dance given by the young woman’s parents. Her name was Julie Morgan and she was a spectacular-looking girl. The column said she was one of the three Morgan girls who were currently taking New York by storm.
Emmanuelle saw her son in the social columns frequently, so there was nothing unusual about it, but he was smiling broadly and looked absurdly happy in the photograph, and she had a strange feeling that this young woman wasn’t just the girl of the hour. She was clinging to him, and he was leaning toward her in a very familiar way. Her hair was swept up in a shower of blond curls, she was almost as tall as he was, and she was wearing a diamond necklace. She didn’t look like just any girl. He called Emmanuelle that afternoon to thank her for his birthday dinner, and she tried to sound nonchalant when she asked him about the column.
In His Father's Footsteps Page 14
