You! I choked out a word, not bothering to hide my bitterness.
“Yes,” she agreed, “not who you wanted, but here anyway.” Refusing to leave until I was ready to leave, taking a jacket and wrapping it around my shoulders.
I tried for irony. You are the perfect sleuth, tracking me down against my will. But she said nothing, so I had to prod, to ask what clues had led her to me.
“The newsletters from the Royal Free-you left them on your office desk. I recognized Dr. Tallmadge’s name, and remembered you and Carl arguing over her that night at Max’s. I-I flew to London and visited her in Highgate.”
Ah, yes. Claire. Who saved me from the glove factory. She saved me and saved me and saved me, and then she dropped me as if I were a discarded glove myself. All those years, all those years that I thought it was out of disapproval, and now I see it was-I couldn’t think of a word for what it was. Lies, perhaps.
Carl used to get so angry. I brought him to the Tallmadges’ for tea several times, but he despised them so much that he finally refused to return. I was so proud of them all, of Claire and Vanessa and Mrs. Tallmadge and their Crown Derby tea service in the garden, and he saw them as patronizing me, the little Jewish monkey they could feed bits of apple to when it danced for them.
I was proud of Carl, too. His music was something so special that I was sure it would make them all, but especially Claire, realize I was special-a gifted musician was in love with me. But they patronized that, as well.
“As if I was the monkey’s organ-grinder,” Carl told me furiously, after they’d asked him to bring his clarinet along one day. He started playing, Debussy for the clarinet, and they talked among themselves and applauded when they realized he’d finished. I insisted it was only Ted and Wallace Marmaduke, Vanessa’s husband and brother-in-law. They were Philistines, I agreed, but I wouldn’t agree that Claire had been just as rude.
That quarrel took place the year after V-E Day. I was still in high school but working for a family in North London in exchange for room and board. Claire, meanwhile, was still living at home. She was applying for her first houseman’s job, so our paths seldom crossed unless she went out of her way to invite me to tea, as she did that day.
But then, two years later, after she’d finished saving me that last time, she wouldn’t see me or answer my letters when I returned to London. She didn’t return the phone message I left with her mother, although perhaps Mrs. Tallmadge never delivered it-what she said to me when I called was, “Don’t you think, dear, that it’s time you and Claire led your own lives?”
My last private conversation with Claire was when she urged me to apply for an obstetrics fellowship in the States, to make a fresh start. She even saw that I got the right recommendations when I was applying. After that, the only times I saw her were at professional meetings.
I looked briefly at Victoria, sitting on the ground beside me in her jeans, watching me with a frowning intensity that made me want to lash out: I would not have pity.
If you’ve been to see Claire, then you must know who Sofie Radbuka was.
She was cautious, knowing I might bite her, and said hesitantly she thought it was me.
So you’re not the perfect detective. It wasn’t me, it was my mother.
That flustered her, and I took a bitter pleasure in her embarrassment. Always so forthright, making connections, tracking people down, tracking me down. Let her be embarrassed now.
My need to talk was too great, though; after a minute I said, It was me. It was my mother. It was me. It was my mother’s name. I wanted her. Not only then, but every day, every night I wanted her, only then most especially. I think I thought I could become her. Or if I took her name she would be with me. I don’t know now what I was thinking.
When I was born, my parents weren’t married. My mother, Sofie, the darling of my grandparents, dancing through life as if it were one brightly lit ballroom; she was a light and airy creature from the day of her birth. They named her Sofie but they called her the Butterfly. Schmetterling in German, which quickly became Lingerl or Ling-Ling. Even Minna, who hated her, called her Madame Butterfly, not Sofie.
Then the butterfly became a teenager and went dancing off with Vienna ’s other bright young things to go slumming in the Matzoinsel. Like a modern-day teenager going to the ghetto, picking up black lovers, she picked up Moishe Radbuka out of the Belarus immigrant world. Martin, she called him, giving him a western name. He was a café violinist, almost a Gypsy, except he was a Jew.
She was seventeen when she became pregnant with me. He would have married her, I learned from the family whispers, but she wouldn’t-not a Gypsy from the Matzoinsel. So then everyone in the family thought she should go to a sanatorium, have the child, give it up discreetly. Everyone except my Oma and Opa, who adored her and said to bring the baby to them.
Sofie loved Martin in her way, and he adored her the way everyone in my world did, or at least the way I imagine they did. Don’t tell me otherwise, don’t feed me the words of Cousin Minna: slut, harlot, lazy bitch in heat, all those words I heard for eight years of my London life.
Four years after me came Hugo. And four years after him came the Nazis. And we all moved into the Insel. I suppose you saw it, if you’ve been tracking me, the remains of those cramped apartments on the Leopoldsgasse?
My mother became thin and lost her sparkle. Who could keep it at such a time, anyway? But to me as a child-I thought at first living with her all the time would mean she would pay attention to me. I couldn’t understand why it was so different, why she wouldn’t sing or dance anymore. She stopped being Ling-Ling and became Sofie.
Then she was pregnant again, pregnant, sick when I left for England, too sick to get out of bed. But she decided to marry my father. All those years she loved being Lingerl Herschel, coming to stay with her parents when she wanted her old life on the Renngasse, going to the Insel to live with Martin when she wanted him. But when the iron fist of the National Socialists grabbed all of them, Herschels and Radbukas, and squeezed them into a ball together in the ghetto, she married Martin. Perhaps she did it for his mother, since we were living with her. So my mother for a brief time became Sofie Radbuka.
In my child years on the Renngasse, even though I wanted my mother to stay with me, I was a well-loved child. My grandparents didn’t mind that I was small and dark like Martin instead of blond and beautiful like their daughter. They were proud of my brains, that I was always number one or two in my class in my few years in school. They even had a kind of patronizing affection for Martin.
But they thought his parents were an embarrassment. When they had to give up their ten-room flat on the Renngasse and move in with the Radbukas, my Oma-she acted as though she had been asked to live in a cow byre. She held herself aloof, she addressed Martin’s mother formally, as “Sie,” never as “Du.” And me, I wanted my Oma Herschel to keep loving me best, I needed that love, there were so many of us all cramped together, I needed someone to care about me-Sofie was caught up in her own misery, pregnant, sick, not used to any kind of hardship, getting spite from the Radbuka cousins and aunts who felt she’d mistreated their own darling Martin-Moishe-all those years.
But don’t you see, it made me treat my other grandmother rudely. If I showed my Bobe, my Granny Radbuka, the affection she craved from me, then my Oma would push me away. On the morning Hugo and I left for England, my Bobe, my Granny Radbuka, longed for me to kiss her, and I would only curtsy to her.
I choked down the sobs that started to rise up in me. Victoria handed me a bottle of water without saying anything. If she had touched me I would have hit her, but I took her water and drank it.
So ten years later, when I found myself pregnant, found myself carrying Carl’s child that hot summer, it all grew dark in my head. My mother. My Oma-my Grandmother Herschel. My Bobe-my Grandmother Radbuka. I thought I could make amends to my Bobe. I thought she would forgive me if I used her name. Only I didn’t know her first name. I didn’t know
my own granny’s name. Night after night I could see her thin arms held out to hold me, to kiss me good-bye. Night after night I could see my embarrassed curtsy, knowing my Oma was watching me. No matter how many nights I recalled this scene, I could not remember my Bobe’s first name. So I used my mother’s.
I wouldn’t have an abortion. That was Claire’s first suggestion. By 1944, when I was tagging around after Claire trying to learn enough science so that I could be like her, be a doctor, all my family was already dead. Right here in front of us they shaved my Oma’s silver hair. I can see it falling on the floor around her like a waterfall, she was so proud of it, she never cut it. My Bobe. She was already bald under her Orthodox wig. The cousins I shared a bed with, whom I resented because I didn’t have my own canopied bed anymore, they were dead by then. I had been saved, for no reason except the love of my Opa, who found the money to buy a passage to freedom for Hugo and me.
All of them, my mother, too, who sang and danced with me on Sunday afternoons, they were here, here in this ground, burned to the ashes that are blowing in your eyes. Maybe their ashes are gone, as well, maybe strangers took them away, bathing their eyes, washing my mother down the sink.
I couldn’t have an abortion. I couldn’t add one more death to all those dead. But I had no feelings left with which to raise a child. It was only the thought that my mother would come back that kept me going during the war when I lived with Minna. We’re so proud of you, Lottchen, she and my Oma would say, you didn’t cry, you were a good girl, you did your lessons, you stayed first in your class even in a foreign language, you tolerated the hatefulness of that prize bitch Minna-I would imagine the war ending and them embracing me with those words.
It’s true that by 1944 we were already hearing reports in the immigrant world about what was happening-here in this place and in all the other places like it. But how many were dying, nobody knew, and so each of us kept hoping that our own people would be spared. But in the wave of a hand, they were gone. Max looked for them. He went to Europe, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear it, I haven’t been to central Europe since I left in 1939-until now-but he looked, and he said, They are dead.
So I felt horribly trapped: I wouldn’t abort the pregnancy, but I could not keep the baby. I would not raise one more hostage to fortune that could be snatched from me at a moment’s notice.
I couldn’t tell Carl. Carl-if he’d said, let’s get married, let’s raise the child, he would never have understood why I wouldn’t. It wasn’t because of my career, which would have been destroyed if I’d had a baby. Now-now girls do it all the time. It isn’t easy, to be a medical student and a mother, but no one says, That’s it, your career is over. Believe me, in 1949, a baby meant your medical training was finished forever.
If I’d told Carl, told him I couldn’t keep the child, he would have always blamed me for putting my career first. He would never have understood my real reasons. I couldn’t tell him-anything. No more families for me. I know it was cruel of me to leave without a word, but I couldn’t tell him the truth, and I couldn’t lie. So I left without speaking.
Later I turned myself into the saver of women with difficult pregnancies. I think I imagine every time I leave the operating room that I have saved not myself but some small piece of my mother, who didn’t live long after the birth of that last little sister.
So my life went on. I wasn’t unhappy. I didn’t dwell on this past. I lived in the present, in the future. I had my work, which rewarded me richly. I loved music. Max and I-I never thought to be a lover again, but to my surprise and my happiness, as well, that happened between us. I had other friends, and-you, Victoria. You became a beloved friend before I noticed it happening. I let you draw close to me, I let you be another hostage to fortune-and over and over you cause me agony by your reckless disregard for your own life.
She muttered something, some kind of apology. I still wouldn’t look at her.
And then this strange creature appeared in Chicago. This disturbed, ungainly man, claiming to be a Radbuka, when I knew not one of them survived. Except for my own son. When you first told me about this man, Paul, my heart stopped: I thought perhaps it was my child, raised as he claimed by an Einsatzgruppenführer. Then I saw him at Max’s and realized he was too old to be my child.
But then I had a worse fear: the idea that my son might somehow have grown up with a desire to torment me. I think-I wasn’t thinking, I don’t know what I thought, but I imagined my son somehow rising up to conspire with this Paul whoever he is to torture me. So I flew to Claire to demand that she send me to my child.
When Claire came to my rescue that summer, she said she would place my child privately. But she didn’t tell me she gave him to Ted Marmaduke. To her sister and her brother-in-law who wanted children they couldn’t have. Want, have, want, have. It’s the story of people like them. Whatever they want, that they must get. And they got my child.
Claire cut me out of her life so that I should never see my son being raised by her sister and her husband. She pretended it was disapproval of my thinking so little of my medical training that I would get pregnant, but it was really so I would never see my child.
It was so strange to me, seeing her last week. She-she was always my model-of how you behave, of doing things the right way, whether at tea or in surgery. She couldn’t bear for me to see she was less than that. All those years of her coldness, her estrangement, were only due to that English sin, embarrassment. Oh, we laughed and cried together last week, the way old women can, but you don’t overcome a gap of fifty years with one day’s tears and embraces.
Wallace, Ted and Vanessa called my baby. Wallace Marmaduke, for Ted’s brother who died at El Alamein. They never told him he was adopted. They certainly never told him he had Jewish ancestry-instead, he grew up hearing all the lazy contempt I used to hear when I crouched on the far side of Mrs. Tallmadge’s garden wall.
Claire showed me a photograph album she’d kept of his life: she’d had some notion she’d leave it for me if she died before me. My son was a small dark child, like me, but then, so had Claire and Vanessa’s father been a small dark man. Perhaps Vanessa would have told him the truth, but she died when he was seventeen. Claire sent me a note at the time, a note so strange I should have realized she was trying to tell me something that she couldn’t put into words. But I was too proud to look behind the surface back then.
Imagine Wallace’s shock when Ted died last fall: he went through Ted’s papers and found his own birth certificate. Mother, Sofie Radbuka instead of Vanessa Tallmadge Marmaduke. Father, unknown, when it should have been Edward Marmaduke.
What a shock, what a family uproar. He, Wallace Marmaduke, was a Jew? He was a churchwarden, a regular canvasser for the Tories, how could he be a Jew, how could his parents have done this to him? He went to Claire, convinced there was some mistake, but she decided she couldn’t extend the lie that far. No mistake, she told him.
He was going to burn the birth certificate, he was going to destroy the idea of his birth identity forever, except that his daughter-you met his daughter, Pamela? She’s nineteen. It seemed to her romantic, the unknown birth mother, the dark secret. She took her father’s birth certificate away with her, she posted that notice on the Internet, that Questing Scorpio you found. When she heard I had shown up, she came at once to my hotel, bold like all those Tallmadges, with the self-assurance of knowing your place in the universe is secure, can never be taken from you.
“She’s very beautiful,” Victoria ventured. “Dr. Tallmadge brought her to my hotel so I could meet her. She wants to see you again; she wants to learn to know you.”
She looks like Sofie, I whispered. Like Sofie at seventeen when she was pregnant with me. Only I lost her picture. I wanted her with me. But I lost her.
I wouldn’t look at Victoria, at that concern, that pity, I would not let her or anyone see me so helpless. I bit my lip so hard it bled salt into my mouth. When she touched my hand I dashed her own away. But wh
en I looked down, my mother’s photograph lay on the ground next to me.
“You left it on your desk among the Royal Free newsletters,” she said. “I thought you might want it. Anyway, no one is truly lost when you carry them with you. Your mother, your Oma, your Bobe, don’t you think that whatever became of them, you were their joy? You had been saved. They knew that, they could carry that comfort with them.”
I was digging my fingers into the ground, clutching at the roots of the dead weeds I was sitting on. She was always leaving me. My mother would come back and leave, come back and leave, and then she left me for good. I know that I’m the one who left, they sent me away, they saved me, but it felt to me as though once again she had left, and this time she never came back.
And then-I did the same thing. If someone loved me, as Carl once did, I left. I left my son. Even now, I left Max, I left you, I left Chicago. Everyone around me should experience the same abandonment I did. I don’t mind that my son can’t endure the sight of me, leaving him the way I did. I don’t mind Carl’s bitterness, I earned it, I sought it. What he will say now, when I tell him the truth, that he did have a son all those years ago, whatever ugly words he showers on me, I will deserve them.
“No one deserves that pain,” Victoria said. “You least of all. How can I feel angry with you? All I have is anguish for your grief. As does Max. I don’t know about Carl, but Max and I-we’re in no position to be your judges, only your friends. Little nine-year-old Lotty, setting off alone on your journey, your Bobe surely forgave you. Can’t you now forgive yourself?”
The fall sky was dark when the awkward young policeman shone his flashlight on us; he did not like to intrude, he said in halting English, but we should be leaving; it was cold, the lighting was bad on this hillside.
I let Victoria help me to my feet. I let her lead me along the dark path back.
About the Author
SARA PARETSKY is the author of eleven other books, including the bestselling Hard Time, Tunnel Vision, Guardian Angel, and Burn Marks. She lives with her husband in Chicago.
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