That evening over dinner, his blue eyes smiling, her father said, “I can’t believe you’re abandoning us for a count. And not even Jewish.” He was a tall, wiry man with a nose that was too long for his face. “How do you know he’s a real count?”
“Sha!” her mother said, passing potatoes to Uncle Henry, who was always invited for Friday night dinner.
“Well, us hoi polloi usually want to see documents before we scrape and bow. Don’t you think, Henry?” He waved a chicken-laden fork at Rebecca’s uncle, a small man with the same light brown, wavy hair as Flo.
“I’d be happy with a family tree,” Henry said.
“You always were the fussy one,” said her father. Then to Rebecca, “I’m sure your uncle has a book where you can look up the count.”
Henry was a high school history teacher with encyclopaedic interests and an extensive home library. “I’m flattered by your confidence in me, Mitch, but the count, himself, is the only one who might have such a book. Unless he comes from a very illustrious family.”
“I’ll bet the count’s heard this one,” her father said. “How can you tell a Polish airline?”
She gazed at her father, wondering whether telling jokes could be classified as an addiction. “How?”
“It’s the only one with hair under its wing.”
Her mother changed the subject. “Have you heard from Nesha?” she asked, helping herself to some green beans.
“He’s got a client who’s keeping him busy,” Rebecca said.
Her mother gave her the look that said, So, what does it all mean? Rebecca shrugged. Because she didn’t know. There was something about Michael, some European charm she hadn’t encountered before. She was impressed by the title. And the novel he was working on. Maybe she was attracted to artists, what could she say?
Later on, Rebecca found a parking spot on a quiet street lined with duplexes a few blocks north of St. Clair Avenue. Night had just fallen; the heat of the day was dissipating into the dark. A fresher air cooled her arms, lifting sweat from the back of her neck. It was still warm enough for her olive green cotton pants and little black top. She walked along the brightly lit sidewalk of Lawton Boulevard, past pretty lawns where end-of-summer geraniums, impatiens, and alyssum slept in the shadows. She could see Yonge Street up ahead.
She jaywalked across Yonge, threading her way through some cars slowing down for the light at St. Clair. She headed toward the red neon sign.
Fran’s was a throwback to the fifties, with its high-backed padded booths, jukeboxes, and arborite tables. The waitresses tended to be dumpy, middle-aged women with bad perms and friendly dispositions.
Only a half-dozen tables were occupied when Rebecca stepped inside. Michael stood up from a booth partway down the restaurant, a confident arm raised in the air. She smiled and walked toward him. He looked out of place there, with his elegant taupe blazer and tanned skin. Too continental for Fran’s, escargot to their chicken potpie. He was nursing a glass of white wine. She would never have thought of ordering wine at Fran’s.
“I’m so glad you could come,” he said, waiting for her to sit down opposite him in the booth.
He lifted an index finger and raised his head imperiously. A waitress appeared in a flash. Her round eyes fixed coquettishly on Michael, her dentures ajar, waiting for his word. He nodded slightly at Rebecca.
“I’ll have an iced tea,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” the waitress said, managing another look at Michael before turning around and heading for the kitchen.
When the waitress had gone, he said, “You saw Natalka today. How was she?”
She didn’t want to be rude and mention patient confidentiality, so she said, “She’s holding her own. She’s very brave.”
He nodded absently. “Poles are known for their bravery. They often have nothing else. Will she be all right?”
The question was not new to her. Only this time she was stumped for an answer. She wasn’t usually personally involved. “I don’t know.”
He seemed to wait for more, nodded again. “I’m sorry. It’s not my business.” He sipped his wine and studied her face, a smile playing on his lips. “You know, there’s something about your face that looks Polish.”
“Is that good?”
“Polish women are the most beautiful in Europe. Jewish women — they are the dark beauties of Poland.”
Wildly flattered, but embarrassed, she said, “My mother was born in Warsaw but came here when she was a little girl.”
“I knew it. I can see it in the cheekbones, the almond shape of your eyes.”
He was still observing her when the waitress placed a tall glass of iced tea in front of her.
“Do you have children?” he asked.
“No.”
“I have a son who looks like me. For this I’m both exhilarated and dismayed. Exhilarated because he will become me when I am gone. Dismayed because he didn’t inherit his mother’s nose.”
“And where is his mother?”
“She remarried and moved to upstate New York.”
She looked at the steady blue eyes and strong pointed chin. “I’m sure he must be very handsome.” She felt swept up in a cross-cultural trance. She would never have said such a thing to a native Canadian. She was also not going to mention his hands, one of which was draped loosely around his wine glass.
“Does he live with you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Edward’s studying journalism in Ottawa. He’s a very smart boy. Very talented. I don’t say this just because I’m his father.” He gave a sour little smile. “I miss him very much. Do you want to have children?”
The question caught her off guard. “I’d like to someday, yes.”
“Was that question too personal? I’m sorry.”
She politely dismissed the suggestion with a tiny wave of her hand.
“I find Canadians very shy. Poles are very frank with one other. We meet someone for the first time and in an hour we know everything about each other.”
She grinned at him, charmed by his openness.
“I would certainly have been asked about my hands by now.”
She sighed. “All right. You have remarkable hands. I’ve never seen hexadactyly outside a textbook. May I see?” She put her hand on the table palm up.
He placed his hand in hers, stretching out his six fingers with cool assurance. “It runs in the family.”
“You have six toes too?”
He nodded.
Her other hand moved his fingers gently apart to check the spaces between. “What’s unusual is that they’re symmetrical. Often, hexadactyly — or poly-dactyly — means an extra thumb or an extra pinky finger. They usually look like an afterthought. Often they’re surgically removed at birth. But you have the extra one in the middle so it’s hard to tell unless you count. It looks completely normal. You must have a devilish time trying to find gloves.”
“Shoes are worse.”
She smiled, his warm hand still in hers. “Did you ever consider surgery on your feet?”
“No, Doctor. Luckily I can afford expensive shoes.”
He bent forward over the table and turned his hand so that his fingers curled loosely around hers. “So why did you become a doctor?”
She sighed, choosing her words with care. “I was idealistic when I was young. I thought I could make a difference.”
“And now?”
“I’m no longer young. And now I have to satisfy myself with small contributions. Delivering a baby. Discovering the root of someone’s pain.”
“Those are not small. If I could do what you do, I would very satisfied with my life. You belong to the most honourable profession.”
“I’m not — Thank you,” she said, trying to accept the compliment graciously. “And you? You aren’t satisfied with your life? Writing is also an honourable profession.”
“I write to try to resurrect my family. Poles have long memories. They live in the past, and I’m no
exception. I’ve never gotten over the death of my parents, and with this novel, I try to find the secrets of my father’s family.
“I didn’t know you were writing about your family. Did your parents die in the war?”
“Surprisingly, they managed to survive the war. They died six months later. One of their own people betrayed them.”
“What happened?” she said.
“Do you really want to hear?”
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”
He took a breath. “Before the war, my parents, more my mother really, managed an estate for a very wealthy family — they’re called magnates in Poland. My parents lived very well in a beautiful large house in exchange for managing the estate, which was really a huge farm. My Aunt Klara and her family also lived with us. It was like a feudal system. So — magnates on top, then my parents, then beneath them, some other families who were in charge of the peasants working in the fields. Halina’s parents were one of those families. This is how I know her.”
“Her parents worked for your parents.”
“They all worked for the magnate, but it was a hierarchy. Then the war came. My parents suffered, but they managed to survive. Aunt Klara was taken away in a transport — she had the bad luck to be in town on market day when the Nazis arrived to deport people. She came back after the war, but her husband and two sons had died in a camp. Meanwhile, I’d spent five years in the forests fighting with the partisans. Only half the estate was still standing, the land ravaged, but my parents were lucky. Until the Soviets took over.
“The winter after the war, we had nothing. A few vegetables — seed potatoes mostly — and we barely lived off those. People were getting typhus from the water. I was twenty. Skinny as a rake from constant starvation. But I was happy just to be home with my family.” He stopped suddenly. “But you don’t want to hear all this.”
“I’m very interested. Please go on.”
“One day, a Soviet delegation arrived at our estate and arrested us for collaborating with the Nazis. I’d spent every day for five years risking my life fighting the Nazis. The charges were absurd, but it was no use. Someone had denounced us. I didn’t know who. That was all it took in those days. For someone to say we were anti-Communist. They even said we’d given out anti-government leaflets. Completely false. But it didn’t matter. Of course, with us gone, it was easier to nationalize the estate.” His gaze drifted away.
“And then?” she asked.
“Then they forced us into a boxcar on a train filled with people they were trying to get rid of. Men who had fought with the Armia Krajowa, especially. People who owned land, workers who complained, anyone who had been denounced by a neighbour. The train was unheated and the winter was unbearably cold. It was mid-February and we travelled east for three weeks in an unheated train. Many people died during the journey. I’ll never forget how cold it was. When we got to the camp —” He shook his head. “I can’t describe it… it was hell on earth. My parents were dead within a year.”
He finally let go of her hand and picked up his glass, gulping down his wine. Raised his finger for the waitress again.
“They took you to Siberia?”
He nodded. “It took me five years to escape. I was barely alive when I came back. Aunt Klara nursed me back to health. And I saw Halina again. She was visiting her parents for the summer with her little girl. She’d been very fond of my father.”
“Did you ever find out who denounced you?”
He finished another glass of wine. “I was in hiding. If I went around asking questions, the secret police would’ve found me. Not a day goes by that I don’t curse him. But life goes on.” The lines around his mouth hardened and he looked more his age.
“How did you end up in Canada?”
He leaned his elbows on the table and made a steeple with his fingers. “Halina told me that Janek had made a lot of money in Canada. She wrote to him and told him I was coming and that it was his patriotic duty to give me a job. She remembered my parents — especially my father. She was working for Orbis by then, so it wasn’t hard for her to get me the papers I needed to leave the country. I had nothing to stay for. If Janek welcomed me, fine. If not, I had survived worse.”
“So Halina, a card-carrying Communist, helped you escape the Communist regime.”
“Politics are a farce in Poland. She’s a Communist for convenience, not ideology.”
“So what do you do for Janek?” she said, avoiding the subject of the strike.
He smiled. “I’m his social secretary. I make sure his meetings go smoothly. That nobody leaves mad.”
“I’ll bet that’s not easy.”
He shrugged. “I’ve learned a lot about business from him over the years. He’s a hard man; not many people could do what he does.”
“Maybe they have more scruples.” She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth. “I’m sorry, I’ve been listening to the radio. The strikers are very angry.”
“They have a valid point of view,” he said, sipping his wine. “But they wouldn’t have jobs if he didn’t create the company. They’ve been making good wages, supporting their families for years on the money he paid them.” He rubbed his eyes. “Yes, yes, I know. He was too anxious to get his company off the ground. Some things were overlooked. Safety issues. Things will have to change. I wouldn’t want to be in his position.”
Enough about Janek. “How do find time to write?” she said.
His steady blue eyes watched her. “I make time. I stopped bringing my work home with me. Janek’s not so happy about that, but he likes the idea of the book so he stays off my back. Now it’s like a drug for me. When I’m writing my book, it takes me very far away. I go back more than two hundred years: 1750 is just yesterday. The people I’m writing about are historical characters; they actually existed. The one I’m most interested in is the last king of Poland, Stanislaw Poniatowski. My mother always told me that our family line goes back to him. His mother was a Czartoryski — one of the leading Polish families — and they will all have a role in the book. They are more real to me than most of the people I meet. I don’t usually tell people this,” he leaned over the table, “but there’s a secret at the heart of the story, a wonderful, terrible secret. What’s important is that it contradicts written history, and my publisher is excited about that.”
“Contradicts written history?”
“I’ve discovered something quite extraordinary. Rather by accident while I was doing research on the king. He was a sensitive artistic man who loved women. And they loved him back. He had a host of mistresses, and that was my problem. They all had children by him. I knew one of them was my ancestor. So I got the list of them and checked them until I was blue in the face, but they were all accounted for. None of them was my great-great-great-grandmother. So I developed a theory. More than a theory. I believe it’s true.” He smiled sheepishly.
“It’s not important to the world. Just to me. And the scholars who’ll have to rewrite the textbooks. That’s what I started off with. To shed light on my family, shake the family tree and find some royal apples. But after all my reading, I’ve found something different, a new world. It’s their innocence that appeals to me. Despite the wars, the corruption, their world was blameless compared to ours. They could never imagine what the world has become. In 1750 there was still hope. That’s what we’ve lost. Hope.”
She hardly knew what to say to such pessimism. He had certainly seen too much.
“Surely there’s always hope.”
He gave a small, tired smile. “Yes, of course. There must always be hope. We tell ourselves that in desperation because how else could we go on. But two hundred years ago, people were just waking up. Imagine a child entering puberty: he looks around and everything is changed. Suddenly he begins to understand things. This was the Enlightenment. Our modern sensibilities were born then, the idea that everyone has the right to life and happiness.”
“That sounds very democratic fo
r a count,” she said, teasing him with a smile.
“Janek is the one who tells people I’m a count. It’s good for business. He wants to impress the people on Bay Street with my name on the board of directors. It gives him a certain cachet.”
He needs it, she thought.
“He’s quite anxious for me to finish the book. I’m working on the last chapter. Once it’s published he’ll revel in the publicity. He’s very conscious of how people see him, and he wants to show all the snobs in the financial world he’s just as good as they are. Better.”
No, she thought, I won’t tell him I detest the man. Instead, she said, “Is your publisher waiting for it too?”
“Yes, but before he gives me a contract, he insists I show him proof of my version of history. Halina’s brought something from Poland that’ll give me crucial information.”
“What is it?”
He gave her a cagey smile. “A gift that Poniatowski gave to my great-great-great-grandmother. I’ll be happy to show it to you when Halina gives it to me.”
After leaving Fran’s they strolled along St. Clair toward Yonge Street.
“Where did you park?” he asked.
“On the other side,” she peered across Yonge, “a few streets over.”
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
“Where did you park?” She suspected he had parked in one of the nearby lots.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
He took her elbow in his hand as if they were crossing an elegant ballroom and guided her across the street on the green light. She felt curiously underdressed beside him in her cotton pants and top, even with the lacy black sweater she’d thrown over her shoulders. He had let go of her elbow and every now and then as they walked along the side street his arm bumped softly against hers.
“Do you mind if I ask you — how did your husband die?”
Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle Page 31