Because we didn’t have to worry about damaging carefully constructed family relationships?
I took a deep breath. “Why did she leave?”
“She wanted a job in the city. She wanted her independence. Her parents were gone—I think she felt like a charity case. She wasn’t. But she felt like one.”
“But why—why did you two stop seeing each other?”
“Ah, well.” He let out a heavy sigh. “These things happen.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “They just do.”
All right, apparently it wasn’t always easier to push with people you didn’t know. “Why did she want the necklace back so badly?”
“The necklace.” He waved a hand. “What a mess.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “It just was.”
“What happened to it?”
Now he started to frown. “It was a difficult situation.”
“How come?”
“It was,” he said, his voice rising.
“Okay.” I’d agitated him too much. “She wanted it back, right? Do you know why?”
His face crumpled, and he looked at his grandson. “Noah.”
I put a hand on Noah’s arm, as though to keep him from stepping between me and Edward Barbanel. “What happened to the necklace, Mr. Barbanel?”
He shifted in his seat, and his voice came out faster than usual. “It’s gone.”
“Gone where?” My stomach plummeted. “You sold it?”
“Noah.”
Noah hesitated, then nodded. He turned to me. “We should go.”
“But Noah—”
“Look at him,” he whispered harshly. “He’s upset. We have to let it go.”
I drew back. “Why can’t I get a straight answer?”
“Come on.” Noah placed his hand above my elbow and directed me out of my chair, steering me toward the door.
I twisted out of his grasp and faced Edward Barbanel. His face was still painfully contorted, visible even as he leaned it into one hand. The fight drained out of me. We were so young, he’d said, and yet I couldn’t imagine it. I slipped out of the study.
My irritation at Noah didn’t fade as easily. “Really, Noah?”
“Abigail, calm down.” He followed me down the hall, and we paused, caught in between two walls of cream paint and surrounded by paintings of the sea.
“You tried to physically force me out of the room.”
“It wasn’t worth a fight.”
“What is worth a fight, then? I don’t get you. You act like you’re on my side and ready to confront the family or whatever, but whenever they snap, you jump.”
“He’s my grandfather.” Noah’s calm cracked for a moment. “What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t understand why I can’t get an answer.”
“He’s an old man. It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter.”
“It mattered to my grandmother!”
“Did it? Because she had a lifetime to follow up and sounds like she never did.”
“We have no idea what she did or didn’t do.”
“You’re so convinced your grandmother was in the right, but how do you know? How do you know the details we’re missing are in her favor?”
I glared at him. He glared right back.
I shook my head. “I should go home.”
“Seriously?” If anything, he looked even angrier. “You can’t storm away every time you get pissed off.”
“Why not? It’s a pretty good strategy for preventing blow-out fights.”
“We don’t have to fight, we could have a discussion—”
“And what are we going to discuss? How you’re always going to be a shield for your family?”
“They’re my family! What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know! Nothing! Protect them, I guess! But it just means we’re on different sides, which is fine, but it doesn’t mean I like it.”
He stared at me, then let out a gust of air and pushed his fingers through his hair. “I don’t like it, either.”
I looked away. “I should call my Uber.”
“I should go talk to my grandpa. Try to calm him down.”
“Fine.” I took a deep breath. “Even though it’s not your job to manage your entire family.”
He frowned at me, and I lifted my face toward him. Though still mad, I didn’t want him to leave.
But he stepped back. “I’ll see you later, okay?”
I shrank a little and nodded. “Okay.”
I forced a smile and a stupid wave and went outside to call my ride. I sat on the porch steps and turned my face up toward the moon, sucking in deep breaths of the heady summer medley. What was I doing? Forcing confrontations and getting into fights. Maybe the necklace really didn’t matter. Maybe I should be focused on what made me happy.
But O’ma had wanted her necklace back so badly.
The door sounded behind me and I jumped up, hope unspooling in my chest. It drained away when I saw Helen stepping onto the porch. “Hi, Mrs. Barbanel.” I cleared my throat. “Um, thanks for having me.”
She said nothing.
Jeez. Had all the Barbanels taken a class in intimidation through silence? I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, because apparently I turned into a cartoon from the fifties when nervous. “My car should be here in eight minutes.”
In the fading light I couldn’t make out her expression. “You asked my husband about a necklace.”
Word traveled fast at Golden Doors. “I did, yeah.”
“It’s none of your business, but if you must know, he gave her that necklace.” Her words were clipped. “He gave her everything, and she gave him nothing.”
“What?” I blinked, trying to fit this new piece of information into the history of events. If Edward gave Ruth the necklace, why would she be demanding it back?
“He gave her the necklace, then took it back, and she was furious.”
“What—why did he take it back?”
“They broke up. It didn’t belong to her.”
Could you simply take gifts back when you broke up with someone? Maybe. I hadn’t even considered the idea of the necklace being a gift; I’d been so sure it belonged to O’ma. I’d thought it was a family heirloom, perhaps, brought with her from Germany. If it wasn’t? If it was a necklace Edward had given her in the first place? Then maybe my digging into its history wasn’t as appropriate as I’d thought. Maybe I didn’t have a case at all.
Let it go.
I pictured the sparkling pendants dangling around O’ma’s neck in the photo. It had been a romantic, beautiful dream, a lost necklace, a grandmother’s legacy. In my head, my grandmother had always been the heroine of this story, but maybe Noah was right. Maybe there were other interpretations. What was Helen Barbanel’s story? A young woman whose fiancé ignored her but married her anyway.
How much had I even really known O’ma, as a person instead of as my grandmother? Why was I so convinced she’d been in the right—simply because we shared blood? Was blood enough of a reason to back someone?
“Why—do you know why they broke up?” I asked.
“She met some other boy.” Helen Barbanel looked me up and down. “Your grandfather, I suspect. He worked at a bagel shop.”
I felt like I’d been kicked. Of course. What a convoluted web. And what a simple reason. She decided to marry someone else, and had to give back a gift, and didn’t want to.
I looked up at the moon, feeling a little sick. “I’m sorry if this has all brought up a past you would have rather kept buried. I didn’t mean to be trouble.”
When she looked at me, her expression was unforgiving. “No one ever does.”
Nineteen
November
19, 1953
I’ve accidentally landed a job! On Wednesday, I walked inside a bagel shop to order breakfast and entered a madhouse instead. People were shouting and covered in flour and someone kept yelling for the cornmeal and I saw it on a shelf behind him, but no one would give it to the poor man, and finally I couldn’t help it, I walked right behind the counter and handed it over.
Afterwards he kept giving me tasks to do, cutting and washing things and pummeling the dough and flipping bagels as they boiled, and eventually someone asked who I was and he said to her, very aren’t-you-an-idiot, “This is Saul’s daughter, she’s come to help us for a while.” I should have said something, but it was nice to be called someone’s daughter. And then someone asked me my name and I said Michal, which I thought witty, but everyone nodded, and there’s nothing worse than making a joke and having it fall flat.
Except later, after everything settled down, one young man said, “And is your husband’s name David?” and I laughed and we started talking and I admitted I’d actually wandered off the street. He laughed but I could tell he was embarrassed by the way his ears went red (he has very large ears). So he introduced me, properly this time, to the man who thought I was Saul’s daughter, who wasn’t embarrassed at all and offered me a job on the spot.
I felt horrible the next day, horrible for pushing Noah, for how my conversations with Helen and Edward Barbanel went, for deciding to come to this island in the first place. I composed half a dozen texts to Noah during my shift at the Prose Garden, but didn’t send a single one. At lunchtime, I went down to the docks with a sandwich and ate it woefully as I regarded the boats.
Surprise replaced woe when I opened my email and saw a response from one of the many emails I’d sent earlier in the week. By now, I knew better than to get my hopes up, but knowledge doesn’t necessarily correlate with emotions, and my heart beat a little bit faster as I clicked on the message from the French organization Mémorial de la Shoah.
July 26
Dear Mlle Schoenberg,
Thank you for your email. It looks as though your grandmother came through Paris and left, bound for New York, on the SS Babette. We have included the records of her passage below.
My breath caught. I stared at my phone; then my gaze slowly drifted higher, toward a boat coming into the harbor, then higher still to a triangle of gulls flying in formation. Just like that, here it was. They’d pulled her names from the records, found her ship, had the data my mom and I hadn’t had for our entire lives.
The SS Babette.
I opened the attached PDF. There: Ruth Goldman, née 7 avril 1934. It listed the ship’s date and berth of both departure and arrival.
I wasn’t even sure what I’d do with this information yet, but I could do something. If O’ma had been on this ship, maybe other Kindertransport kids had been, too. Maybe people who were still alive, who’d known O’ma.
SS Babette, I googled. The first option linked to a wiki article on the ship itself; I amended the search to “SS Babette passenger list” and still landed four million results. Luckily, three out of the first four led to searchable archives, and one of the three let me download the ship’s passenger list for free.
I impatiently skimmed through the list for the Gs. There her name was, smack in between Frederick Godfrey and Jean Guerrant.
I scrolled back up to the first name on the list. Gemma Allenson.
And I started googling, name after name after name.
* * *
I looked up the passengers on the SS Babette during every second of downtime I had on my shift, then for hours after, curled up on Mrs. Henderson’s sofa with Ellie Mae by my side. I read LinkedIn pages and Wikipedia articles and obituaries and wedding announcements. Many of the passengers weren’t easy to find, or had little or no information. But some had information.
And some were Jewish.
When I pulled my list, I emailed Dr. Weisz, on the off chance she’d have other ideas. Then I let out a huge breath and closed my laptop. It was past eleven; Jane and Mrs. Henderson had both come home and gone to bed. With one hand curled in Ellie Mae’s fur, I pulled over my phone, hoping to see a text I’d somehow missed from Noah.
Nothing.
All right. Cool. Now what? Maybe I should take more risks. Be bold. Show some chutzpah.
Not, like, huge risks, but a teensy little risk wouldn’t hurt. An olive branch. An indication of interest.
A corgi dressed like a sailor.
Me:
Here’s a picture of a corgi dressed like a sailor
Noah:
How is the hat staying on
Where did you find said corgi
Me:
On the docks
He faced off against a seagull and emerged victorious.
Noah:
He’s half the size of a seagull
Me:
Right??
Also I’m sorry about getting stressed last night
Also I talked to your grandmother after I went outside
Noah:
Er
Why?
Me:
She came out
And told me Edward actually gave Ruth the necklace originally
So that’s a thing
Noah:
Wow
Really?
Me:
Yeah
Also, Ruth broke up with Edward to marry my grandfather
Noah:
Whoa
On the other hand
Maybe they were madly in love
If it makes you feel better
Me:
Lol I hope so
Or at least had better power dynamics
Noah:
?
Me:
The disparity in wealth thing
So
I feel bad about all of this? Can I make it up to you by buying you ice cream tomorrow
Noah:
You realize you already owe me two ice creams
Me:
I had no cash!!
Noah:
I will accept three ice creams
But tomorrow’s supposed to be nice, actually, so I’m thinking of sailing
Me:
Monday then? I’ll tell you the latest developments in the Girl from Germany story
Noah:
Abigail.
I meant let’s go sailing instead of getting ice cream
I wore the tiny red bikini.
“Is it too much?” I asked Jane the next morning, standing in front of our mirror. “Like, am I going to fall out of this?”
“Don’t make any sudden movements. Or dive. No diving or you’ll lose the bottoms.”
“I’ll stay very still.”
“And you’re sure you’re not cousins?”
“I hate you.”
I checked my email on the way to the yacht club, anxious for a response from Dr. Weisz—or maybe I was just anxious all over. I hadn’t had time to process everything that had happened at Golden Doors. When Noah had said I drove him crazy. The conversation with his grandfather.
The moment in the window alcove.
I wasn’t sure if Noah would want to talk about the alcove, or about our arguments, or not talk at all. I couldn’t tell if this meant something, inviting me to be alone on the water with him, when aloneness and nature were two things he prized so highly. What was in my head and what actually existed? Was he waiting for me to make a gesture of interest, or was I reading things unwritten?
Luckily, Dr. Weisz had written, and her words were plenty distracting:
Hi Abigail,
Good digging! I had an additional thought—while the other passengers might have already passed away, it might
be worth cross-checking their names against this collection of oral histories from survivors. If any of them left a testimonial, they might mention your grandmother or where they went afterward—and if they’re also part of the American Kindertransport, they might share a similar path as your grandmother.
If any of the passengers did leave testimonies, you do unfortunately have to visit, in person, one of the institutions with access to the records (you can find the list of institutions, mostly colleges, here). The closest to Nantucket are Boston University, Harvard, and Brandeis—if you do come to Boston, I’d be happy to meet up (and some of these universities might actually require you to be an affiliate in order to gain access, and I could definitely bring you in as a guest).
I was so excited I almost ran over a tourist. Then I spent the rest of my walk plugging in the names of the Jewish passengers I’d discovered—and all the other passengers as well, for good measure.
And lo and behold, two passengers had left oral records: Else Friedhoff and Michael Saltzman.
When I reached the yacht club, I ran right up to Noah. “Guess what I got!”
He raised his brows. “Gold? A winning lottery ticket?”
“Passenger records!”
“What? For your grandmother?”
And we easily fell back into our rhythm, as though we hadn’t fought at all, as though I hadn’t told him we were on opposite sides.
Noah directed the sailboat with long-practiced ease. It would be August in two days, and I felt like I existed in a snow globe of summer, the glitter of sun scattered everywhere, and heat baking into my bones. Noah stood against the sky, listening, strikingly handsome. We were alone in the world, the two of us. As I finished talking, I could feel my heart pounding in my throat. I felt so light and tight with nerves my mind might break away from my body and float into the blue, blue sky.
And Noah was smiling. “So you’re basically Sherlock Holmes.”
“Exactly, my dear Watson.” I licked my lips, then felt embarrassed. “Unfortunately, it’s yet another archive where you have to go in person. Why have digital recordings you can’t transfer digitally?”
The Summer of Lost Letters Page 22