The Time Between

by Karen White

Helena shook her head. “No. I was too ashamed to tell him. I knew he was troubled over Bernadett’s suicide. He did what he could to honor her memory by keeping the suicide from public knowledge. But I could not tell him why. So many years had gone by that I had become comfortable with all of the lies. And Magda and Bernadett took my secrets to the grave.”

  I felt relief that Finn hadn’t known, but I was sad in a way, too. I shook my head. “No, Helena. The memories won’t be lost. Tell them to Finn.” I closed my eyes, remembering Eve’s words to me. “You are smart, and strong, and beautiful, and brave. That is your legacy, something Gigi will be proud of one day. It’s where she gets her strength.”

  Her eyes met mine, and I saw new shadows in them, like clouds passing in front of the sun. “I would like you to tell Finn. I would tell him myself, but I am afraid I will not get the chance. I would not want to burden him now.”

  I looked at her with surprise. “I will tell him if you really want me to. But you’ll have plenty of time to tell him yourself. Gigi is already planning your pink dress for her wedding, remember?”

  She smiled weakly, her eyes moist. “I believe it would be easier for Finn to hear it from you. I am afraid that I will see the disappointment and grief in his eyes, and I do not have enough years left on this earth to be able to make me forget that.” She patted my hand before I could protest. “Thank you, Eleanor. For everything you have done for me.”

  “For what?”

  “For making me tell my story. Your sister said the most remarkable thing the other day. Something about the possibilities for second chances being everywhere if we just look hard enough. Everything that has happened will have meant nothing if nobody learns from it. And thank you for letting me bully you into playing the piano again. It hurt at first, to listen to you play. You reminded me so much of me and the way I felt about my music. But that was your story, and one you needed to tell so that you could heal, too.”

  “And what is my story?”

  She looked through the screen, toward the river that had always flowed into the ocean, a constant as time moved inexorably forward. “That adversity in life does not rob your heart of beauty. It simply teaches it a new song to sing.”

  I took her hand and squeezed it, sharing grief over lives lost and choices made, of mistakes we had once believed to be permanent. My gaze fell on the photographs once more, and something Helena had said came back to me.

  “Didn’t you say that Bernadett had plans to make a scrapbook for Gigi?”

  “Yes. But she died before she had the chance.”

  I smiled at her. “But you have time. And I do. And Gigi does. We can work on it together. You can tell the stories to Gigi, and I will write them down, and we will put the photographs and the stories in a scrapbook so that Samuel and Benjamin and Gunter and all the rest will never be forgotten. It is your legacy. It’s Gigi’s legacy. And there is much there to be proud of.”

  Helena’s eyes misted and she blinked rapidly, and I watched as she struggled to control her emotions. “Would the scrapbook cover have to be pink if Gigi is involved?”

  I pretended to consider it for a moment. “Probably. I hope that’s not a problem.”

  We laughed together, and the sound carried out through the screen and up to the morning sky, where a great heron stretched its wings under the warmth of the sun.

  Helena picked up the photograph of Gunter again and leaned back in her chair, studying it. “I would have liked to be a butcher’s wife,” she said with a sigh. “I would have liked to live within sight of Lake Constance and see the snow on the tops of the Alps in the middle of summer. I would have been happy.”

  “Are you happy now?” I asked, repeating the question Finn had once asked me and which I hadn’t been able to answer.

  “Yes. I think so. Or I will be when Gigi comes home. But all of my mistakes and all of my choices have brought me here to this place. To Edisto. And to Finn, and Gigi, and you, Eleanor. How could I not see my life as blessed?”

  She gently placed the photos of Gunter and Samuel inside the basket, then began gathering the rest of the photographs, the Bible, the silver box, and the key, and stored them inside. Then I lifted the lid from the table and placed it snugly on top, a secret keeper with no more secrets.

  CHAPTER 37

  It was still dark when I awoke, Finn’s steady breathing beside me. He had come back to Luna Point with me after we’d said good night to Gigi, and there’d been no discussion as we’d climbed the stairs together. He’d led me to my room, unwilling to sleep in a twin bed for another night. I watched him sleep for a long moment, breathing in his scent, then gently slid from the bed, unwilling to disturb him, imagining it had been days since he’d slept soundly.

  I put my T-shirt back on, then padded through the dark room to the hallway, making my way to Bernadett’s room. I had awoken with a single memory of a brass key falling onto the stone bench in the cemetery, the key to the locked armoire where Helena had hidden her letter.

  But Bernadett had found the letter months before, and then while she was preparing to die, she had gathered her memories in the sweetgrass basket, along with the key in its secret compartment in the basket’s lid, and hidden it under her bed. So why were the mirrored doors in the armoire still locked?

  I opened the door and closed it quietly behind me, then flipped on the light switch. The small ceiling fixture cast a drowsy yellow glow across the room, not completely reaching the armoire on the far wall.

  Helena had asked me to store the basket in Bernadett’s room until Gigi was home and we were ready to start the scrapbook. It sat on the nightstand, next to the empty glass I’d seen the first time I’d been in the room, when I’d tried not to think of the woman who had died here and of the sister who had wished she could have gone with her.

  I lifted the lid of the basket and spotted the key lying on top, nestled between the Bible and the silver rosary box. I took the key and moved across the room toward the armoire, feeling as if I wasn’t alone or even directing my own actions.

  The key slipped easily into the lock, and I pulled on the knobs of both doors, allowing them to swing open. I leaned back, allowing the light to reach its feeble fingers into the dark space, and saw an envelope. I reached in and pulled it out and stared at it for a long moment, as if this were all a dream, as if the envelope in my hand weren’t real.

  At first I thought it was Helena’s letter, but she had told me that Bernadett had made her burn it. The envelope had crease marks across it, as if it had once been folded in quarters to fit inside a small space. A space the size of a hidden lining inside the lid of a sweetgrass basket. I looked closely and read the typewritten words:

  Miss Bernadett Szarka

  Edisto Island, South Carolina

  I brought the envelope directly under the light, seeing now the yellowed condition of the paper and the three-cent postage stamp. The lack of a zip code or street address. With steady fingers I slipped the letter from the opened envelope, then unfolded the letter.

  It was dated June sixteenth of 1951, and the return address was the German embassy in Washington, DC.

  Dear Miss Szarka,

  Thank you for your correspondence dated this last 4th of January, 1951, regarding information for a soldier in the Wehrmacht Heer 13th Panzer Unit stationed near Budapest in the summer of 1944.

  I regret to inform you that Private Gunter Hans Richter, from the Bavarian town of Lindau, was killed in action on the 27th of August, 1944, during the second Jassy-Kishinev Offensive in Romania. We have no record of his burial.

  Please do not hesitate to contact me if you should require further information.

  My eyes only skimmed the name and signature of the official who’d sent the letter. I imagined him with wire-rimmed glasses and brutally short hair, a man who did not know that within his typewriter he held the power to change lives.

 
I wondered for a moment why Bernadett had waited so long to write and then recalled the Allied occupation of Germany following the war, and how the German embassy would not have reopened until at least 1950. I pictured her, waiting for news that diplomatic relations between the two countries had been reopened, and then sitting down to write her letter in secret.

  Bernadett had known. She had known that Gunter had died, had known since 1951, yet never told Helena. I stared at the letter for a long time, seeing Bernadett writing her letter to the German embassy about Gunter, wanting to hear good news so she could share with Helena. Trusting that Helena was doing what she could to find Samuel and Benjamin. And, like Helena, when their respective letters arrived, she had recognized how despair can disguise itself as the truth.

  I folded the letter and held it against my heart. I thought of the two sisters, at cross-purposes, each trying to hide a separate horrible truth from the other, each knowing that sometimes hope is all we have, and to lose that is to lose all.

  I imagined Bernadett before her death taking the letter from its secret place in the basket lid and hiding it in the armoire before secreting the key just as Helena had done. It was as if she wanted it to be found eventually by someone besides Helena. It was part of their story. Their legacy of love and survival.

  We would never know what happened after Gunter shut the door of the truck and watched Helena and Bernadett disappear into the darkness. Did he deliver the note? Did he warn the convent in time? Did they heed his warning? He had loved Helena and helped save Bernadett’s life, and Helena believed that he would have done everything possible to save Samuel and the other children, unless extreme circumstances had prevented or circumvented his plans. There was so much we didn’t know, so much we would never know. The secrets of the dead are always kept.

  I turned at the sound of the door opening and saw Finn, his gray eyes full of questions. He came to me and I stepped into the shelter of his arms, still holding the letter against my heart. I laid my head against Finn’s chest as he stroked my hair, and I began to tell him the story of a courageous woman with a fierce heart, and the story of the love between sisters that even death could not separate.

  And somewhere in the dark night, redolent with the scents of the pluff mud and summer grass, amid the cries of a night heron and the chorus of thousands of insects, the sound of a door closing and another opening.

  EPILOGUE

  I smoothed down the burgundy wool of the skirt of my suit, glancing at the group of people assembling in the music room and in the foyer of the old house. The paintings had all been removed, the walls now wearing a pale cream that brightened the interior and welcomed in the light from outside.

  Finn and Jacob Isaacson had been working on identifying and cataloging the paintings, researching their origins and returning them to the families they had once belonged to. It was a small thing, the return of property, considering all that had been lost. But it was one thing.

  Teri Weber, brought in by the housekeeper, Mrs. Adler, to help with the refreshments, placed a large tray of her chocolate chip cookies on the dining room buffet next to the mézeskalács that Gigi and I had made.

  I spotted Gigi in the music room darting across the foyer toward them, and I stopped her with a hand on her shoulder as she negotiated her way through the crowd in front of me. “Not yet. You don’t want greasy crumbs on the keyboard or your fingers will slip all over the place. Believe me, I speak from experience.” I smiled down at her. “I’ll go put a stack in a napkin and hide them for you.”

  She beamed up at me. “Thanks, Ellie.”

  I hugged her to me, closing my eyes in silent gratitude. Our physical scars were healing, but I couldn’t help a small part of me wishing that they wouldn’t fade completely, like the scar on my finger from my fall from the tree, as if we both might need reminders of the battles we had fought and survived.

  “Are you nervous for your first piano recital?” I asked.

  “Just a little. I’ve done lots of ballet recitals but I’m never alone up on the stage, even though you’re going to be with me turning the pages, but it’s not really the same thing because you’re not playing the piano, only I am, well, at least at first since I’m doing four songs and then you get to play a song all by yourself.” She stopped to draw breath. “Are you nervous?”

  I nodded. “Yep. I’ve never played in front of anybody besides your family and mine.”

  Her gray eyes widened with relief. “It’s good to be a little nervous. God compensates those with a lack of talent with an overabundance of self-confidence.”

  I looked down at her as the large words slipped so effortlessly from her tongue, certain I’d heard those exact words before. “Did Madame LaFleur tell you that?” I glanced toward the dining room, where the woman herself, tall and dark haired and razor thin, stood by the table talking with Harper.

  Gigi shook her head. “No, ma’am. Aunt Helena.” She smiled again, then ran across to the front door, where her best friend, Teensy Olsen, was walking in accompanied by her mother.

  Finn came up from behind and kissed me on the side of the neck just as I caught Lucy’s gaze. She was sitting between Glen and Eve’s wheelchair in the front row of chairs before the piano. She gave me the look that said, That man is fine, and I blushed. I turned to Finn, taking in the dark suit and gray tie. I supposed some things would never change.

  “She’s starting with the Csárdás,” I said. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to do an accompanying dance since you know all the steps?”

  “Quite sure,” he said, his voice soft as we both remembered the aunts who had taught him the steps to the Hungarian folk dance.

  As a man I didn’t recognize drew Finn’s attention, Gigi approached with Teensy and her mother, Sharon. Sharon had bright red hair, with warm green eyes and a smile to match. “I have been looking for a piano teacher for Teensy forever. Gigi played one of her pieces for us when she was at our house last week, and I can only hope you will be taking on more students.”

  I smiled down at Teensy, who was at least three feet taller than Gigi and had bright red hair like her mother’s. “I haven’t really thought about it, but I’m sure we can work something out. I’m actually going back to school to get a teaching degree in music, but that won’t be full-time.”

  “Oh, Gigi hadn’t mentioned that. What are you wanting to do with your degree?”

  “I’m hoping to work with an after-school music program in North Charleston for disadvantaged children. I’ve already started volunteering there.”

  Gigi jumped up and down, still clinging to Teensy’s arm. “Just like my aunt Bernadett did in Hungary,” she announced, repeating what her father must have told her.

  “Yes,” I said. “Something like that.”

  “Great.” Sharon beamed. “I’ll call you next week and try and set something up.”

  They retreated, and Finn and I began herding everyone into the music room, which now glimmered with light. The heavy drapes had been removed, and the walls repainted in the same hue as the foyer and dining room, forming a bright refuge for creating and enjoying music.

  The love seat where Helena would sit to hear me play had been pushed back against the far wall and remained empty. I was glad, wanting to imagine her there now, listening.

  Three months after Gigi came home from the hospital, Helena passed away peacefully in her sleep. We had completed the scrapbook a few days before she died, and I wondered if Helena had chosen to go then, her story told. Gigi had asked if she could continue placing photographs in the scrapbook, and I had agreed, knowing Helena would have, too. Gigi’s life was a link between what had gone before and what was to come, the empty pages of the scrapbook like doors waiting to be opened.

  In the end, Finn had not told her about Bernadett’s letter, wanting to allow Helena to continue thinking of her Gunter out there somewhere, still searching for her.
I pictured them together now, along with Bernadett and her Benjamin and Samuel, and Magda. I saw them dancing the Csárdás, the three beautiful Szarka sisters, together again.

  The night before Helena died, I had played the nocturne for her again, and she had let me see her weep. It somehow made it easier for me to say good-bye to her, to this woman who had been through so much and taught me so much.

  We had her cremated, as she had wished, and Finn and I would be bringing her ashes and Bernadett’s to Hungary, where we would be going as part of our honeymoon trip. It would be the first time Finn had visited the place of his grandmother’s birth, and I would get to see where the small house on Uri Utca had once stood, the house with the tiny room shared by two sisters and where the lives of so many had been permanently altered. We would stay in the hotel where the New York Palace Café still exists on the ground floor in all its splendor, just as it had in 1936, when their mother had taken Magda, Helena, and Bernadett there for Magda’s sixteenth birthday.

  We also planned to visit Poland, and Auschwitz, where we would lay a wreath of remembrance flowers on the train platform for Samuel, and another one to honor all the lost souls who stepped off the trains there and live now only in our hearts and our collective consciences.

  We postponed the wedding until after Eve’s baby was born so she would be more comfortable in her matron-of-honor dress. It would also give her more time to make my wedding gown. I showed her three of my favorites I’d seen in a bridal magazine and allowed her to surprise me. I knew it would be stunning. She actually had a waiting list of people needing custom gowns and costumes, assisted by our mother, who had learned how to use a specially designed computer keyboard so she could manage the accounts and client database. And give her opinions to Eve and me whether or not we needed them.

  Eve was also making Gigi’s maid-of-honor dress. It would have a wide skirt that twirled when Gigi turned, with lots of lace and tulle and sparkles, and it would be pink, of course. Gigi had at first suggested we wear our matching GEECHEE GIRL T-shirts as we marched down the aisle, but it had been Eve who dissuaded her with promises of a princess gown created just for her.