by Bina Bernard
Hannah flinched. Oh my God, he’s going to leave me!
“I know I said some hurtful things the other day,” Robert continued. “I still believe we have things to work out. But I realize that my dissatisfaction has more to do with my work. In my mind, it got all mixed up with us. Hannah, I need a break. I want to make some changes. Maybe after three months I’ll end up missing the city and the big commissions. Or maybe I’ll find my niche as a small-time architect. I just want to see how it goes.” Having had his say, Robert leaned back in his chair and relaxed.
But the knot in Hannah’s stomach hardened. Her palms began to sweat.
“Where does that leave us?” She was afraid to hear his answer.
“You like the beach. You’ll come out as often as you can. It’ll be like we’re dating again. That should bring romance back into our life.” He smiled sheepishly.
Hannah opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything, Robert continued.
“I don’t want to live the way we’ve been living. I want more than what we have now.” Tentatively he reached for her hand. When she didn’t pull back, he leaned over to kiss her. Hannah closed her eyes hard to stop her tears, and put her arms around Robert’s neck.
“That’s okay for the summer. But if you’re still living at the cottage in the cold of winter, you’ll have to make the trips into New York,” Hannah said, hoping to get a laugh.
No laugh from Robert. Instead he said, “Being apart for a while will give both of us a chance to focus on what we want, what kind of life will make us happy.”
“Except for our damn schedules, I was happy the way we were,” Hannah answered. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was inching toward abandoning her. “Do you see this as a trial separation?”
“No. I see it as an exploration. For both of us.”
She sighed. “Well, I guess this is not the worst present you could have given me for my birthday.”
“Oh no! What a jerk!” Robert closed his eyes and gave himself a slap on the head. He reached over and squeezed Hannah’s clammy hand. “Happy Birthday! I’m so sorry!” he said, and raised his wine glass to toast the occasion.
Hannah forced a smile, and took a sip of wine. At least you didn’t flat-out leave me, she thought. But the feeling of uneasiness stayed with her.
What had happened with her father this weekend made Hannah feel hopeful. If Harry and I can be close, anything is possible, she reasoned. Smiling, Hannah pressed the button on her answering machine. Two hang-ups followed, and then Christy’s voice blared: “I need some help. I need an editor. You! I have a book report due and a creative-writing assignment. Only you can help me on this one. Pleeezz!”
Hannah decided it was too late to call Christy back. I’ll get to her tomorrow, she thought. She hoped Margo would not be the one answering the phone. Robert’s ex-wife was positively the last person on the planet she wanted to talk to about the state of her marriage. Margo knew Christy had been spending weekends in Amagansett.
Sorry she’d missed his call, Hannah thought about calling Robert back and reached into her cavernous tote bag for her appointment book.
As she pulled out the well-worn, navy blue faux leather organizer, Hannah saw it as further proof that a bad situation could be reversed. It was a Mother’s Day gift from Christy, who had decided Hannah needed a better way to keep track of things than on random scraps of paper at the bottom of her handbag.
Christy was just four years old when Robert and Hannah began dating. Uncomfortable around the child at first, Hannah willingly went on outings to the zoo, museums or lunch at Serendipity when Robert had Christy. But Margo’s venom kept poisoning their relationship.
“I don’t want that whore anywhere near my child,” she’d yell in front of Christy. Although she was too young to understand the meaning of the words, her mother’s attitude toward Hannah made the child feel she could ignore anything Hannah said. For a brief time Margo’s outbursts put the brakes on Robert and Hannah’s dating.
He’s not divorced, his kid’s a problem. Why do I need this? Hannah thought. For four months, they only talked on the phone and Hannah started seeing other people. But it was too late for her. She realized that she was in love.
Once they got married, Margo’s tactics changed. She no longer attacked Hannah personally. Instead, she berated Robert. Margo complained about everything, especially money and religion. Every conversation included a complaint: “Christy and I can’t live on the money you give us!” and “I expect you to take Christy to church on Sunday, not to Serendipity.”
Hannah watched as Robert held the phone two feet away from his ear, closed his eyes and took the verbal battering.
“How can you not scream back at her?” Hannah asked.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” he said philosophically. “Besides, I can take it. Let her yell at me and get her anger out. I just don’t want her to turn Christy against me.”
Hannah did her best to woo Christy. On his weekends, Robert would pick her up early Saturday morning and bring her to the apartment. Hannah always had breakfast ready.
“I’m not hungry,” was Christy’s usual response.
“You don’t have to eat, but your father and I haven’t had breakfast yet, so we’ll eat.”
Invariably, Christy relented and gobbled whatever was available. But everything with Christy started with “No!”
“Is there anything special you’d like to do today?”
“No!”
“Want to go to the park?”
“No!”
“What about riding your bike?”
“No. Mom said it’s too dangerous in Manhattan.”
“How about going to the bookstore? We’ll get something you’d like to read.”
“No. Mom said I can only read the books she buys for me.”
Their visits became so difficult, Robert looked forward to the weekends when Margo announced Christy was too busy to see him. But with relief came guilt. “I’m a lousy father. I think I’m losing Christy,” Robert confided to Hannah.
The first change came when Margo met a man she liked better than tormenting Robert. She turned into a different person, and so did Christy. The boyfriend had a share in a house on Fire Island. That summer Robert and Hannah got to see a lot of Christy.
With Robert’s hotel phone number in her hand, Hannah hesitated. But whenever anything special happened to her, he was the person she wanted to tell, and Harry’s apparent change of heart toward her was a monumental special event in Hannah’s life. For years Robert had listened to her complain about Harry. Now she had something good to tell him. She gave herself permission to make the call. Getting through to Tokyo was not as easy as calling across town. She almost gave up when a sleepy Robert answered the phone.
“’Lo, who is this?” he asked.
“Hannah. Sorry I missed your call.”
“Uh huh.”
“I just needed to talk to you. Something strange and wonderful has happened.”
“Uh huh.”
“Harry and I . . . we stopped fighting. At least today . . . It was so different. He actually hugged me. Isn’t that something? After all these years.”
“That’s nice.”
Once she realized she was talking to someone who was basically asleep, Hannah felt foolish.
“Sorry I disturbed you. Go back to sleep. We’ll talk when you get home.”
“That’s nice . . .” were the last words Hannah heard before she hung up.
She admonished herself. He said he was tired and going to sleep, but Hannah Stone couldn’t be put off. Robert’s accusation: “You’re just like your father!” echoed in her head. Hannah remembered how she had bristled at the comparison.
“You may be right. Maybe I am just like Harry!” Hannah caught her reflection in the mirror. “I’m a crazy person, talking to herself. But that’s really your fault, my dear husband, because you are not here with me.”
What a day! Hannah thought, headi
ng to her bedroom. But was it a sea change? Hannah was at a loss to explain her own behavior or Harry’s. She was as shocked by her willingness to let out those repressed memories, as she was by Harry’s changed attitude.
Sometimes, triggered by outside events, memories resurfaced unexpectedly. She remembered the time Robert came home and found her huddled on the sofa, her arms hugging her knees, crying hysterically, staring at the TV.
David Brinkley was reporting the evening news from Vietnam. His mouth was moving but no words reached the McCabe living room. With the sound muted, the images flickering on the TV of casualties lying along the road, while U.S. soldiers rounded up Viet Cong prisoners, marching them away from the camera, seemed to be part of a silent movie, rather than the evening newscast.
“My God, what happened?” Robert asked, worried she’d been in an accident.
“No . . . thing . . . happ . . . end . . .” Hannah rocked back and forth, her chest heaving between breaths. She blotted her wet cheeks with a soggy tissue but the tears continued to flow as she sat hypnotized by the sight of what had been a battlefield hours before.
“What’s the matter?” Robert insisted. He sat down next to her and began to massage her neck.
Hannah did not answer, but her body relaxed a little. Still she continued staring at the television.
“Hannah, talk to me,” he pleaded.
“I smell them . . . those dead bodies lying along the road,” she finally said, her voice almost inaudible. “That smell of decaying flesh. I can still smell it. It won’t go away,” Hannah said.
Robert did not ask for an explanation. He shut off the TV and held her in his arms. Hannah tried to sink into his chest. Her tears soaked Robert’s shirt. She couldn’t block out the images, nor the smell, until she fell asleep in his arms.
As she stripped and headed for the shower, Hannah made a mental list of things to do on Sunday: (1) Call Christy back, (2) Do laundry, (3) Revisit M & H. Of the three items on her list, Hannah knew only doing the laundry would be stress-free. Actually it was a chore Hannah enjoyed. She took pride in her skills as a laundress who made difficult stains disappear.
After her hot shower Hannah was still wired. To decompress, she turned on the TV and curled up in bed with a pile of magazines. As pleased as she was by her father’s new expression of affection, after a day of reminiscing with Harry, Hannah needed to reconnect with the present, to counter the gravitational pull of the past.
That night when she finally reached REM sleep, Hannah found herself in the middle of a dream that had haunted her nights for nearly twenty-five years. It had receded into history the year after she and Robert were married. Until now.
The dream began on a warm, sunny day, as three-year-old Hannah played by herself in a courtyard. Off in the distance she watched a little girl dancing around a huge musical top that was spinning magically. As Hannah approached the curly-haired blonde, she gestured for her to join in. Soon holding hands, the two danced faster and faster around the top, laughing with pleasure. Suddenly it got very dark and cold. The little blonde girl vanished. Hannah was left alone yelling, “No! No!”
The cries of, “No! No!” awakened Hannah from her deep sleep. Dazed, she looked around the room and instinctively reached across the bed for Robert. His absence woke her up fully. Hannah sat up and clutched Robert’s pillow.
The dream’s sudden reappearance unnerved Hannah. Not again, she thought and shook her head, hoping to flush the dreaded dream from her subconscious forever. Hannah had spent many sessions with Dr. Kahn attempting to decipher the meaning of the dream.
One of Dr. Kahn’s explanations was: “It’s about separation anxiety, very common. You’re afraid if you care about someone, that person will leave you.”
Remembering how anxious she was when Robert first told her he was moving to Amagansett, Hannah accepted that interpretation for the dream’s return.
In bright green neon the clock on the night table said it was 3:30. Hannah turned up the TV volume and hoped the hum of the infomercial about beauty creams would lull her back to sleep. To drown out her troubling dream, years ago she had gotten into the habit of falling asleep with the TV on. It was Robert who always turned it off.
Sunday morning Hannah woke up relieved that the dream had not made an encore appearance. She glanced at the clock. It beamed 8 a.m.
“I’ll start on the laundry early,” she said cheerfully.
Christy called just as Hannah was finishing her second cup of coffee. The day was shaping up well. Hannah was grateful she had avoided an interrogation by Margo.
“Have you heard from your dad?” Hannah asked.
“Yeah, yesterday. He was beat. Said he’s glad he’s coming home. He’ll be back tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow, can I come by your office in the afternoon so you can read through my stuff?” Christy pleaded.
“Tomorrow’s not so good. How about this morning?”
“I can’t. I have a date with Eric and Kay to hang out. Couldn’t I just come by for a teeny bit tomorrow? My report isn’t very long. It’s the creative writing thing. I really need your professional opinion.”
“You know I can’t give you much time in the office. What’s it about?” Hannah said, reluctant to give in to Christy too quickly.
“It’s hard to explain. You have to read it. It won’t take long. I promise,” Christy said laughing at herself. They both knew she was a con artist. “I’ll come by after three and be gone before four!”
“Don’t be late.” This time, Hannah didn’t really mind Christy’s manipulation. She actually missed her stepdaughter, even with her frequent crises.
With Christy’s call out of the way and the laundry in the works, Hannah congratulated herself. “I’ll easily make it uptown by lunch-time, as promised.”
CHAPTER
3
“PROMISE ME, IF WE don’t like living in America, we will leave and go to Palestine,” eight-year-old Hannah begged.
“Yes, yes, I promise,” her father said just to stop Hannah’s constant badgering. “If we don’t like living with your uncles in New York, we can go to Palestine.” But he was certain it would never come to that.
At the time, they were still Hershel, Malka, and Hannah Stein, living in Zeilsheim, a displaced person’s camp, outside of Frankfurt, Germany. The U.S. Army had appropriated the German village to make room for the thousands of Jewish refugees who were flowing into the American sector. The refugee families were billeted in houses set up like barracks on an army base.
Dr. Hershel Stein was recruited to be a medic in the camp clinic, and life took on a welcome normalcy for the family. Each morning Dr. Stein put on his Army-issue Eisenhower jacket under his white lab coat, took the briefcase packed with his medical paraphernalia, and went to work, happy. Malka kept their living quarters gleaming, and busied herself making clothes for Hannah from parachute material she’d gotten from one of the American soldiers on the base. At school Hannah slowly began to interact with other refugee children. The high point of her day was hearing the teachers tell stories about life on a kibbutz in Palestine, and the promise of Israel. Unlike her parents, who longed to resettle in the United States, she was convinced that living on a kibbutz in Palestine was where they all belonged. Tasked with studying Hebrew and English, Hannah eagerly applied herself to tackling Hebrew, but she refused to learn English.
There was great camaraderie among the survivors in the DP camps. Evenings her parents socialized with fellow refugees and shared delicacies like canned peaches and chocolate bars that Harry brought back from the PX. While the grown-ups talked, Hannah sat in the corner doing homework, always keeping one ear glued to the adult conversations. But having heard stories from camp survivors, she’d flee the moment anyone mentioned Auschwitz, Dachau, or any other concentration camp. When Hannah encountered a person branded with a number, she instinctively covered her wrist. Not having a number tattooed on her forearm was a reminder of how lucky she was. She felt guilty for having no visible sc
ar. What she had experienced during the war was nothing compared to the suffering of those who had a tattoo.
Most of the talk Hannah overheard seemed to concern overcoming immigration obstacles.
“You were lucky the Red Cross got you in touch with your brothers.”
“How can we find a sponsor if we don’t have family in America?”
“I have no documents, no birth certificate, no marriage license. How do I prove who I am?”
But what the refugees feared most were medical exams. According to rumors flying around the camp, even if they were lucky enough to find a sponsor, and managed to secure proper documents, a medical condition like TB could automatically make anyone ineligible for immigrating to the U.S.
After listening to several such sessions, Hannah interjected herself into the adult conversation. “Why do you only talk about going to America?” she asked. “Maybe it’s so hard to go there because they just don’t want us! What about Palestine? We could start our own kibbutz!” Hannah insisted.
“Aren’t you the little Zionist?” David Kruger said as he affectionately pinched her cheek.
Nothing she said could alter his preference for emigrating to the U.S. Her proselytizing fell on deaf ears.
“Family, that is what is important,” her father told a dejected Hannah. “Don’t you ever forget that!”
Being reunited with his brothers was key, but Hershel Stein also looked forward to his life as a doctor in New York. He knew it would take some time to establish a practice in a new country, but he imagined life in America would be the way it was in Poland before the war, only better. They would be safe, in a country where everything was possible. Going to another war zone like Palestine was out of the question. Hannah never considered how war-weary her parents were.
Her father was sure of their future as they walked up the gangplank of the SS Marine Flasher, a former troop transport, on May 11, 1946, to set sail for New York from the Port of Bremen. While Hannah was sure they were going to America on a trial basis only.