The Time Between

by Karen White

  “Helena called me,” Finn said. “Late yesterday afternoon. She said she was supposed to be resting.”

  I almost laughed at the image of a ninety-year-old woman sneaking in a phone call to her nephew instead of napping. I sobered immediately when I began to think of why.

  “She wanted to know where Magda’s basket was.”

  “Magda’s basket?”

  A brief pause. “The basket under Bernadett’s bed.”

  My hand froze on the phone as I remembered when he and I had gone through the contents of the basket in Bernadett’s room and I’d thought that there had been something he wasn’t telling me. My voice sounded thin to my ears. “You didn’t tell me that’s what it was.”

  “No. I didn’t. I didn’t think. . . .” He stopped. “I told her that you would get it for her.”

  “All right,” I said slowly. “Why did she call it Magda’s basket?”

  “It had belonged to her, and she kept all of the old photographs in it, and other relics of the sisters’ lives in Budapest. When she died, my father just stuffed it in the back of a closet, and when he died I found it and showed it to Helena, who told me to hang on to it for safekeeping. I think she may have added a few things before she gave it back to me, and I forgot about it.”

  Something seemed stuck in my throat. “How did Bernadett come to have it?”

  He paused. “Last Christmas Bernadett mentioned that she was planning on putting a scrapbook together—for Gigi. And that she knew Magda had all the old photos. I didn’t even look inside the basket when I brought it to the island when Gigi and I came for Christmas. I just . . . handed it to her.”

  Last Christmas. The last time Bernadett had played the piano and then closed the fall board and the piano top and silenced the music in the house. “And you didn’t know what was inside?”

  “Not all of it.”

  Like the businessman he was, he was not going to show his hand without me asking him to. I hoped his reasons were because he was trying to protect Helena and not because he knew more than he was saying.

  “How did it get to be under Bernadett’s bed?”

  I felt him shake his head. “I think she put it there. She knew she was going to end her life and began to tidy up all the loose ends.”

  I thought of the planned meeting with Jacob Isaacson and the painting on the music room wall and wanted to ask him if he knew. Wondered if his silence meant that he did.

  “Eleanor?”

  “Yes?”

  “This would be so much easier if you were with me.”

  I closed my eyes, allowing the warmth to spread through my body, pushing aside all other thoughts. For a moment. “I know,” I whispered.

  “I’ve got to go now,” he said. “I’ll call you later.”

  “Good-bye.” I ended the call and found myself staring at the phone wallpaper for a long moment. It was a photo of Gigi in her life jacket, taken after our kayaking trip. She was smiling her trademark smile, her blue eyes hidden behind pink sunglasses. I could see her small fingers showing me how to take the picture with my phone, then move it to my wallpaper. I wanted to take that small hand and squeeze it and tell her what she meant to me. It was too late, of course. Like so many things. I think the possibilities for second chances are everywhere if we just look hard enough. Maybe Eve was right. And maybe an old woman with too many secrets to hold on to was a possibility I hadn’t considered.

  Tucking my phone into my pocket, I climbed the stairs to Bernadett’s room to retrieve the secret keeper stored under a dead woman’s bed.

  CHAPTER 35

  Helena

  Nurse Kester had just finished tying my shoes when Eleanor entered the room carrying the basket. She looked different somehow. Not like one of those women in the before-and-after makeover photos in one of the women’s magazines I used to hide from Bernadett. It was more like someone who’d learned to touch the sun and lived to tell the story.

  “Finn called. He said that Gigi’s getting better. That her brain function looks normal.”

  I pressed the heel of my hand against my heart to still the small fluttering there, as light as a butterfly, but enough of a sign to remind me that I was still alive. “Good,” I said, as if that could encompass a journey to hell and back that I had embarked on when I had made Eleanor play the nocturne.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, taking in my purse and shoes and the slash of lipstick I had asked Nurse Kester to apply to my thin lips. I knew it made me look clown-like, but old habits died hard.

  “We are going to speak with Magda.”

  She frowned. “I’m not sure if I can drive. . . .”

  “You will be fine. Or I could drive if you like.”

  “No,” she said. “Never mind. I’m sure I can handle it. Will you want ice cream afterward?”

  “Only if you are very good,” I said. “And only if we can both find the appetite for it.” It was the first time I had alluded to little Genevieve, and I saw her gaze sharpen. It was a small step, but it was a step nonetheless. Our visit from Eleanor’s sister, Eve, had been an illuminating one. I had once thought that there could be no other relationship like the one I had shared with Bernadett and Magda, that there would be no one else who understood what it was to share the same soul.

  But I had been wrong. Watching and listening to Eleanor and Eve had been like eavesdropping on a conversation between my sisters and me. It had been an unexpected gift, an opportunity to understand how two people could know the very worst about each other and love the other anyway. It had given me hope that if Bernadett had only given me enough time, she would have known this. If only the courage she had used to take a handful of sleeping pills had been spent in forgiveness instead.

  After settling me into the Cadillac with the closed basket on my lap, Eleanor slid behind the steering wheel, studying it closely for a long moment before inserting the key and turning the ignition.

  “You will be fine,” I said. “The sun is shining and people will expect you to drive ten miles per hour because you are in a Cadillac.”

  She gave me a half smile as she put the car in gear, then drove slowly out of the drive with both hands clutched on the steering wheel like an old woman.

  We parked at the church where we had the last time we had been there to visit Magda. It was not as hot, as it was still morning, and I seemed to have found a new energy, a new lightness of being. Still, it took most of Eleanor’s strength and my own to hoist me out of the car.

  “We forgot the red tulips,” she said.

  “Next time.”

  We made our way slowly through the graveyard as I silently castigated Magda for being buried so far away instead of insisting on something closer. I would never have been so inconsiderate. I suppose it was the prerogative of being the eldest.

  I stopped near the grave site, at a small bench that was part of the memorial for a sixteen-year-old girl who had died more than a century before. Her monument was a tall fluted column, dressed in roses, that was missing its top half. I had seen such a thing before, this reminder of how life could be cut short without warning, and it brought me some comfort to know that there had been a reason for keeping me here for ninety years. Or maybe I was not allowed to leave until I had finished what I had been sent here to do.

  “Sit down,” I said, indicating the bench. “This will take a while, and I think we are close enough to Magda that she can hear.”

  Eleanor did as I asked without complaint, and I hid my smile. I imagined her holding herself back, thinking me too fragile to argue with, too fragile to return a favor.

  “I am too old for secrets, Eleanor. But not too old to believe that it is not too late to learn from our mistakes. I mourn Bernadett, but I pity her, too. Pity her because she ended her life before she had met her own Eleanor.”

  I put the basket on the bench between us but k
ept the lid on, amused at the confusion on her face. “I promised you my story, and so now you shall hear the rest of it.”

  In silence she took my hand and held it as I began to speak.

  Eleanor

  “I never saw Gunter again. I still tell myself that he could not remember where I was going in America and that he must still be looking for me. I wanted to believe that I would have felt something if he had been killed, like a tearing- or ripping-away feeling in my chest, and know that he was gone. But so much of my past was built on the foolish things only the young can sustain. Always believing that if we wish for something hard enough, it will come true. That we could plan to meet after the war and have that happen just because we made promises to the wind.”

  She sighed. “I think, deep down, I have always known that he was dead or he would have found me. In some ways, I suppose I am still waiting for him. He was the love of my life, as Benjamin was Bernadett’s, and we were prepared to wait forever. There could never have been anyone else for us. So I continued to wait for Gunter as if he were alive and searching for me. To think otherwise would have taken away all of my hope. I saw that many times in Bernadett, her near hopelessness even though she tried to hide it from me. It was worse than death. Despite everything, I still believe that.”

  I squeezed her hand tighter, feeling the bones, as fragile as a bird’s.

  “Once in America, Bernadett got stronger, but her mind was tortured with thoughts of her Benjamin and Samuel. As always, she trusted me to take care of things, to find her Samuel. I wrote so many letters, to whomever I thought could help, and she would go with me to the post office each time I mailed one and would say a prayer before she put it in the box.

  “But in those first years after the war, when there was no stable government in Hungary and the Communists were gaining power, it was impossible to get information. I lived in denial and would not look for Gunter, but I was desperate for information about Samuel and the children from the convent. We were in a state of uncertainty and waiting. I knew what had happened to Benjamin, but with Bernadett’s fragile state of mind, I could not tell her. Even though for years every time she heard a car, she would rush outside to see if it might be Benjamin bringing her their son.”

  I studied her face closely, looking for signs of fatigue or distress, but I saw instead an odd calm, as if she had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.

  Helena continued. “I could not rest, not knowing what had happened. Needing to know that Gunter’s plan had worked and that all the children were safe. I had to believe it. Otherwise, I would lose all hope, and without hope I would have nothing. And then who would care for Bernadett?

  “We had spent five years of waiting, and I saw my sister’s health diminishing and I could not watch her suffer anymore. So I told another lie. I told her that I had finally heard from the Hungarian government in a phone call from the embassy in Washington. They had records that Samuel had been taken out of Hungary during the war, to a family in the Austrian Alps, a family with a mother and father and a brother and sister, and they lived on a farm and he was very happy.

  “I made her believe that Samuel, who was then six years old, would not know her. Would only know his family, and that even if we could find him, to take him from the only family he had ever known would be cruel.” She swallowed. “At least then I still believed Samuel to be alive. And that once everything was sorted out, I could go back to Budapest and bring him home to Bernadett. Then I could tell her the truth about Benjamin, when she could withstand the grief because she would have their son.”

  Tears tightened my throat. “You don’t have to tell me any more if this is too hard for you.”

  She patted the top of my hand, as if she were comforting me. “It is all right, Eleanor. I need to do this. I just wish it had not taken me this long.”

  A dragonfly flittered from a small rosebush planted at the base of the monument, rising on unseen currents to land on Magda’s grave marker. Helena and I watched as it sat on the marble, fanning its iridescent wings.

  “Did it make her happy?” I asked, seeing the Bernadett in my mind dancing the Csárdás with flowing skirts and red shoes.

  “Yes. If not happy, then content. That is when she began throwing herself into service to her church and community. She believed if she performed enough penance, they would come back to her.”

  “Atoning for her sins,” I said quietly.

  “Yes. It is not such a thing now, but she was always ashamed that she had a child without being married. Nobody would have married Benjamin and Bernadett then, as it was frowned upon by both faiths. But their love was strong. It created Samuel.”

  Helena’s voice broke, and I moved to stand, to get her to stop. She shook her head. “Please. Let me finish. This is my penance. For perhaps not loving my sister enough to tell her the truth.”

  I shook my head. “No, Helena. You loved her enough to carry the burden of the truth all by yourself.” I watched the dragonfly fan its wings, the sunlight filtering through, making them shimmer. “What changed?”

  “It was the paintings that gave me away in the end. After all these years, it was the paintings.” She shook her head. “I should have left them all with the Swiss farmer when I had the chance.”

  “But you didn’t. Because you had promised Gunter that you would bring them with you.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice quiet. “Because I had promised him.”

  I frowned down at our hands, no longer able to hold back the question that had been burning in the back of my throat for so long. “You knew where the paintings came from, so why did you decide to sell some of them? Because you needed the money?”

  She faced me, a hint of her old color coming back to her cheeks. “Is that what you think? That we sold paintings to live on all these years?” She shook her head. “No, it never came to that. And I have Magda to thank. She was the brains of the lot of us. When she came to the States, she brought all of our recording money with her and had her husband invest it, which he did. Finn continues to manage everything for me.”

  “But you did sell them.”

  “Yes. But not at first, and not for the reasons you are probably thinking. When we arrived here, I kept the paintings rolled up, just as Gunter had given them to me. But I was afraid they would get damaged after being rolled up for so long. So after a year, I decided to frame them and hang them, but I remembered Gunter warning me that I had to keep them hidden—from whom, I was no longer sure. So I framed them myself and hung them, then waited for him to come.”

  She sighed, and I allowed her to lean into me, trying to absorb some of the burden she’d been carrying on her narrow shoulders for so long. “For years I continued to write to the Hungarian government, and even to the Vatican, to find out what happened to the children and the sisters. I could not ask Magda’s husband for help, as I did not want anyone to know all of the lies I had been living. I do not think he could have helped anyway. Everything was such a mess in Europe, so much destroyed, and then the Communists took over everything in Hungary. I kept writing, but I received no replies.”

  “And you still had all those paintings.”

  “I did. And for a long while I continued to believe that they had been rescued from St. Stephen’s. It was easy to believe. The Holy Right Hand—the saint’s relic that had been kept at the Basilica—had also been taken and hidden during the war, and I allowed myself to believe that I was doing a noble thing by keeping the paintings. I was glad the Communists did not have them and that I had played a part in saving them. Until one day.” She paused. “One day when my sisters and I went to an art exhibit of the Dutch masters at the Gibbes Museum. There was a large section of van der Werff paintings, including three scenes of a pear tree in summer, spring, and fall. There was a little sign next to the group of paintings, explaining their origins and meanings. The sign read that the fourth painting, of
the tree in winter, had belonged to the Reichmann family and was believed either lost during the bombings during the war or confiscated by the Nazis. But I knew that it could not have been lost. Because it was hanging on my dining room wall right then as I stood there.”

  “What did Bernadett say?”

  “She didn’t. She always took too much time in museums and was a room behind Magda and me. So I made up a story that I was feeling ill, and because she was always the good and dutiful sister, she agreed to leave. It helped that I did throw up on the way home, as the truth took hold of me.”

  A squirrel darted from an oak tree and ran across the sparse grass, pausing only to collect an acorn by the base of Magda’s stone before scurrying away and disappearing up another tree. I noticed with some surprise that the dragonfly had not moved but almost seemed to be listening.

  Helena cleared her throat. “I did not know what to do. So much time had gone by that it made me hesitate to admit that these paintings were in my possession. I was afraid I would be arrested. Mostly, I did not want Bernadett to know. It would have destroyed the small peace of mind that she had found serving the community. Yet at the same time I wanted to get rid of them, as if they themselves were tainted. I had to do something, to try to make it right. It was Magda’s idea that I begin selling them—she always knew what to do. She at first tried to find the Reichmann family, to see if she could find a way to return the paintings without letting them know where they had come from.” She was silent for a moment. “She told me what had happened to them, that the entire family had been killed. There were rumors that a child had survived, but she could not substantiate the claims or even find a name.”

  “Her name was Sarah,” I said quietly. “And she did survive. She was Jacob Isaacson’s grandmother.”

  “Ah,” she said, looking at me with understanding. A small smile touched her lips. “I wish I had known. Then all that came afterward would never have happened.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.