Sophie at twenty-five is a slovenly graduate student with a black braid, a half-written thesis, a closet full of flannel shirts, and an apartment on Morningside Drive. Mort at twenty-five was a runner at Chase Bennet with a new license to trade (he had studied at night) and a yen to get on with it. With three friends he formed a brokerage firm from a combined sum north of two hundred thousand but south of three, and entered the 1960s on a tear. Everyone got rich, and the partners departed—one to publishing (he purchased a lauded but ailing literary magazine), one to restaurants (three, all French), the third to full-time philanthropy, with a sideline in Broadway producing—leaving Mort to make his play for Kaplan Brothers, a much larger brokerage firm on the verge of implosion. He named the new company Kaplan Klein, and with its operations streamlined, it surged ahead and began taking on ballast: securities, commercial credit, planning, insurance, a groaning board of financial services. The flag of Kaplan Klein was hoisted ever higher atop a growing heap of conquered companies, and every time he merged or acquired, Mort honed his corporation and redefined its points of weakness (he was not heartless, but he was not sentimental). Mort’s original partners remained his board members and—more important—his friends. He commanded a chimera of businesses that served one hundred million customers in one hundred countries. He resided in one of the city’s great mansions, and on a four-hundred-acre horse farm in Millbrook. He was a congregant of Temple Emanu-El, at least for two days each autumn. Once widowed, he never remarried. He was worth, by his own CFO’s best estimate, $1.4 billion, a figure that he himself regarded with some measure of disbelief.
A person with that kind of money might make an assault on the social peak of his preference, but Mort Klein did not consider himself a social aspirant. Neither, however, was he enormously self-aware on this issue. His urges were not exactly vulgar—they merged, after all, with his intellectual interests—but they were not plain to him, as they were all too plain to others. To engage Mort Klein, for example, in a conversation on the subject of the first Jewish families of the city of New York—his abiding fascination—was to become painfully aware of how deeply he wished he himself had been born to such a family. Mort belonged to the temple founded by the German Jews (“our lady of Emanu-El,” according to his daughter), made prodigious donations to the charities they created, and lived in their only remaining private home. He was routinely inaccessible to an untold number of applicants for his attention but would clear his schedule to have lunch with anyone named Loeb, Schiff, or Sachs. In some Manhattan circles, Mort had come to seem the tiniest bit ridiculous.
Those who followed such things found it perplexing that Mort had not begun to relinquish some of his involvement in Kaplan Klein, given his unrelenting schedule, his single child who appeared to show no interest in business, and the now unignorable rumors about his health. Sophie, one of the very few people privy to the relevant details, hadn’t asked him to slow down (waste of breath), and no one else would dare. Mort lived for the riptide of adrenaline, flowing from all corners of the earth to the thirty-second floor of the Kaplan Klein building on West Street, where he chewed an unlit Cohiba cigar and made, all day, decisions that kept him feeling creative and robust, if not exactly young. In the pantheon of contemporary American tycoons, he was a little short on personality (there had been no up-from-the-streets autobiographies, no dubious girlfriends, no public pissing contests), an under-the-radar guy with a whole lot of money, a small circle of tested friends, and a kid he genuinely liked.
Sophie, who had, of course, already lost one parent, truly loved her father, so though her primary home was the small Morningside Heights apartment, her weekends were dedicated to Mort. Typically this meant that a black Lexus would appear in front of her building on a Friday afternoon so that she might be collected for the trip to Millbrook in time to finish her preparations for Shabbos, but sometimes a commitment would keep them in the city. The commitment was almost always Mort’s, since Mort sat on the boards of many organizations, for which he was expected to donate lots of money and attend the overblown social functions that crowded the pages of the New York Ascendant: the Henry Street Settlement, the UJA Federation, and the New York Landmarks Conservancy. (These were of his own choosing.) He was also on the board of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Shoah Foundation, and the “I Have a Dream” Foundation. (These were of his daughter’s choosing.) All told, Mort’s board commitments preempted a handful of his weekends annually, but he did not complain, and for a very good reason. Left to herself, Mort knew, Sophie would take nearly uninterrupted refuge in her flannel shirts and the Nicholas Murray Butler Library at Columbia—most probably both—but if she were conscripted into service for a noble cause—being his escort for the Landmarks Conservancy Gala, or a fund-raising event for the Settlement House—Mort could experience the rare satisfaction of seeing her dressed in appropriate clothing and shaking hands with any number of potentially suitable men.
Past are the days he griped about her clothes and hair, or begged her to accept the Bloomingdale’s credit card, or conspired with Frieda to do something about her shoe situation. Sophie cleaned up beautifully when she made an effort, which she did of her own volition every Friday night (one of the major reasons he consented to Shabbos dinner) and whenever he made a special point of asking. Before the Shoah Foundation benefit the previous spring, she had walked down to Nicole Miller and purchased a sleek black sheath, which had given him his first good look at her figure in years. She’d had her hair pinned up by someone who knew what he was doing, and Mort even detected a bit of lipstick (inexpertly applied, alas—but you can’t have everything). Sophie looked spectacular, and Mort had for once not minded seeing their photograph in the Style section of the Times that Sunday. After that night, he made sure that the various benefits and parties were on her calendar as well as his own.
Not that the boards weren’t a pain. They were a pain, and in general Mort held himself to a personal limit of five years’ tenure, the only exception being that of the Landmarks Conservancy, which fed his great passion for architectural preservation and gave him intense pleasure. The restoration of the Steiner mansion—which, forty years earlier, had been carved into eight apartments—had been an act of love (expensive love!), and the Millbrook horse farm featured a huge barn rescued from Warren, New Hampshire. For the past several years, Mort had offered the conservancy the use of his own homes for fund-raising purposes (a privilege he did not extend to the other organizations on whose boards he served, much to their consternation), and the Living Landmarks Gala had, accordingly, taken place in one of the city’s last private ballrooms. Few of Mort’s experiences had been sweeter than watching his exacting restoration come to life with historically accurate music and flowers and a crowd of appreciative guests. Few of Manhattan’s social events—the Met’s Costume Ball, say, or the annual Frick party—had acquired such a mystique, or inspired such a rush for tickets.
This weekend, however, it is not a board or a fund-raiser that keeps Mort Klein in the city. This weekend, the injunction to remain has come not from him at all but from Sophie, or rather from Barton Ochstein, who has for the second Friday in a row diverted father and daughter from their habitual weekend plans by traveling to Manhattan. The upheaval comes not from Barton’s presence alone—since their meeting, Sophie has spent many of her weekend hours with Barton—but the novelty of his appearance in the city. Last Saturday was consumed by an interminable meeting with Farley Burkowitz (“the Prenup Pasha,” Sophie has heard him called, and after her experience last weekend, she doesn’t wonder why), but Barton has placed himself at Sophie’s disposal this weekend, and she is full of plans: Barton has never seen her apartment or the Columbia campus, never taken her favorite walk in Riverside Park (from Ninety-sixth Street, heading south) or experienced the otherworldly pleasures of lox, capers, and warm bialys at Barney Greengrass on a Sunday morning.
More to the point, they have a meeting with the rabbi on Sunday.
Even so,
Sophie’s mind is elsewhere on the Friday of Barton’s visit, and the shortened October afternoon finds her—of course, in Butler, of course, in a flannel shirt—immersed in the first White Rose leaflet, analyzing its use of Goethe’s The Awakening of Epimenides, Act II, Scene 4, and appreciating the thrilling audacity of the group members in using the poet of Germany’s soul against its demagogue:
spirits:
Though he who has boldly risen from the abyss
Through an iron will and cunning
May conquer half the world,
Yet to the abyss he must return.
Already a terrible fear has seized him;
In vain he will resist!
And all who still stand with him
Must perish in his fall.
So the hours have slipped past her, until Sophie (with one of those rude reentries contemplative types are prone to) makes an agitated hunt for her watch (she tends to remove it in the library; it interferes with her writing), realizes that it’s nearly four, which means that she can’t possibly make the stop at her apartment she’d intended to, and so takes off at a run with her hastily crammed bag to find a taxi. There must be clothes to change into at home, at her father’s house, she is frantically thinking. There are groceries delivered already, according to Frieda, and she has bought two loaves of challah, even now getting mashed in their plastic sack between the books and her right thigh. There are always cabs heading south on Broadway, slowing before the gates of the university in the expectation of someone like Sophie, running late. Shabbos afternoons are meant to be busy but calm—anticipatory, Sophie thinks, hurling herself onto the cracked plastic of the backseat and giving the driver her address. This afternoon promises to resemble Lucy Ricardo at the chocolate factory.
The taxi takes Ninety-sixth Street across the park, rounding the corners like a race car and hurling her against the door. Sophie closes her eyes, oddly content now that she is speeding toward her destination, mentally running through her list of preparations: the chickens first, then the cholent, the salad, the table, the candles, and she has to change clothes, of course, and it would be great to sneak in a shower—the truth is that she does not smell very good. How could she? She has been in the stuffy library for many hours, lost in the year 1942 and the city of Munich and the heroism of her namesake, Sophie Scholl, who would be seventy-seven years old this year had she not been executed at twenty-two. Sophie looks at her watch. There is still time for the chickens to cook, if she blasts them a bit first. And she needs to call Rabbi Franke to confirm the Sunday meeting—after the chickens, after the cholent, before the salad and shower.
When the taxi pulls up at the house, she catches, in the rearview mirror, the taxi driver’s expression of distaste. Taxi drivers, in her experience, tend not to like the rich, who probably do not work as hard as they do. When Sophie was younger and oppressed by guilt, she had sometimes camouflaged her address by asking to be left in front of Mount Sinai Hospital, which might give the impression that she had a stricken relative (or was, herself, a stricken patient!) but actually left her only a short walk from the Steiner mansion. Now that she was older, she overtipped instead, as she does now, before slamming shut the taxi door and tearing up the stairs.
Frieda, psychic chatelaine, waits in the entryway.
“You are late.”
“Thank you,” Sophie says, letting her book bag crash to the parquet. “I’m aware of it.”
“You are the one who wants to do this! You are the one who insists on doing everything before the sun goes down, like somebody superstitious in a fairy tale.” Frieda folds her elegant arms, but it is not possible to look very fierce in pink cashmere, Sophie thinks.
“I know, thank you. I’m hurrying.”
Frieda trails her down the stairs, light as a cat. “A chicken needs three hours!”
This from Frieda Schaube, who can barely cook pasta.
“Two. I’ll blast them.”
“Blast them!”
Sophie turns on two of the Wolf ovens and hauls open the Sub-Zero. The chickens, wrapped in brown paper from the Vinegar Factory, rest on the upper shelf with a large brisket. Sophie scoops everything up and pulls out the vegetable drawer for carrots and onions. “Where’s the garlic? I asked for garlic!”
“In front of you,” Frieda says, sulking.
Below street level, the windows let in only afternoon gloom. Sophie turns on all the lights and WQXR, which is unfortunately playing Wagner, and assaults her chickens with oil and herbs. The onions and carrots and garlic go in the pan. The pan goes into the oven.
“Is that what you’re going to wear?” says Frieda.
Sophie smiles indulgently. With the chickens on their way, she is very nearly calm.
She dredges the brisket in flour and starts to brown it in a large copper pot, cutting up potatoes and more onions while it sputters. Frieda sniffs. “Another of your inedible stews?”
“It’s called cholent, Frieda, as you know perfectly well.”
“Cholent.” Into this word is infused all of the disdain a German Jew can express.
“You could help me, you know. You could set the table.”
“No. You know how you want it. I don’t know the rules.”
“I’m not a stickler for rules,” Sophie says and laughs, opening a can of navy beans over the brisket and pushing the cut carrots and potatoes from the chopping board into the pot. “As you know.”
She puts the heavy pot on the stovetop, turns on the gas flame, and sighs.
Sophie’s version of Shabbos would raise the hackles of any observant Jew, and with good reason. She has taken from the ritual those elements that are meaningful to her (and those, sometimes, for unorthodox meanings), even as she neatly, indifferently, excises many others. The fact that she can rush from her studies to prepare the Sabbath meal and perform the blessings over candles, wine, and bread, then spend the following day hammering out a contract in the office of the Prenup Pasha would be nonsensical, if one were not operating within Sophie’s private litany of regulations. Both Frieda and Mort have abandoned the effort to learn these, though to Sophie they are simplicity itself.
She is an observant Jew who does not believe in God.
She is an observant Jew who believes in Jewishness, which is not precisely a holy concept but is a profound one.
Sophie respects and admires the Sabbath conceit of the island in time—the night and day consecrated to rest. (She would argue that she does precisely this when she drives into Rhinebeck with her father for lunch, or switches on an electric light to read a novel.) But the Sabbath also serves her in a more private manner, which is as remembrance. Immersed as she is in one of the great desolations of the century, Sophie has found that—in order to function—she must store up her grief or risk being overwhelmed by it, unable to function as a scholar, and probably as a human being. The Friday night rituals are her chance to discharge the grief accumulated during the week. They are her offering to the past, in honor of the suffering.
She has explained this, several times.
She has now given up trying to explain.
Frieda, relenting, goes to the fridge and retrieves the lettuce, which she pauses to glare at, then begins to wash. Picking over salad greens suits her exacting character, so Sophie leaves her to it and rushes upstairs for the briefest of showers. Her old room on the third floor is trapped in the aesthetic of her Dalton years: on the wall, a framed photograph of herself and her two closest friends (Roberta Sarnoff and Philippe Labatt), a Jackson Browne poster, a set of vintage Dickens, unread, alas. She drops her clothes on the bed, flicks dejectedly through her closet, removing a green skirt and a respectable white silk shirt, and finds a pair of beige shoes from eleventh grade—a bit tight, but she won’t be walking anywhere. She is just stepping into the shower when Frieda raps on her door to say that Barton has arrived.
“I’ll be right down!” Sophie calls, though clearly she will not. She steps under the stream, holding her braid out of th
e way and washing quickly, then closing her eyes for a luxuriant moment. The chicken is cooking, the fiancé is waiting…everything ought to be all right.
But I was going to call the rabbi, Sophie thinks.
She turns off the water and steps out, and faintly, there comes the sound of a doorbell from two flights below.
Delivery? thinks Sophie.
She dries off, pulls on a pair of stockings, zips the skirt. She is just fastening the straps of her shoes when the doorbell sounds again.
“Hey!” Sophie shouts, sticking her head around the door in a manner unlikely to meet Frieda’s approval. “Anybody getting that?”
From below, she hears the sound of her father’s voice. Then Barton’s.
Where is Frieda, anyway?
The doorbell rings again.
Sophie goes back into the room. She is modestly clad from the waist down, naked from the waist up, and her first effort to button the silk blouse is hopeless. In exasperation, she throws her arms back into the flannel shirt and buttons frantically (and, alas, inexpertly), even as she hurtles down the stairs to the kitchen, where the afternoon light is nearly fled and the chickens roast on, oblivious, and a man waits for her at the door, with his arms full of white roses.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The White Rose Page 20
