“She has family!” Irenka insisted.
“She’s a displaced person,” Pat said.
“She has mudder. In camp. In Germany.”
“Is this woman making any sense?” Jack asked Alicia.
She opened her mouth but found no response.
“You ask her how she get to America,” Irenka said, hissing. “She prostitute herself. Whore. Get visa and leave mudder behind.”
“Oh, mother,” Pat said. “Mudder. I get it.”
“Her mudder sick. Very ill. But not so ill as her dotter.”
For what seemed like a great while, no one spoke, the lone sound from the crickets calling into the night.
“Guess I won’t be retiring indoors,” Pat said. “Time for another smoke.”
The flick of the match was almost deafening.
“See?” Irenka said. “She does not deny.”
“Alicia?” Jack said, hopeful.
Alicia bit her lip and shook her head. She didn’t want to explain it here, like this, with Joe and Pat and Irenka listening, taking in every word. It was something Jack should know about her, but not in this way.
“How she describes it,” Alicia said, “is not the story. It’s not my story.”
“Alicia,” Jack said. “Are your parents alive?”
“My father died in 1942, at Tr—”
“Your mom,” Jack snapped. “What about your mom?”
Alicia inhaled, tasting the sea air, Pat’s smoke, all of it.
“It’s true,” she said, insides cratering. “My mother is alive.”
She knew that with the Kennedys, her transgression was unforgivable. A person could lie or cheat or bribe or steal, as long as he remained loyal to his tribe.
“I never stated she’d passed,” Alicia said. “It’s a complicated situation.…”
“You lied,” Jack said, face crinkling in disgust. “About your family. About your own mother.”
“I can explain.”
“Don’t bother.”
With that, Jack pivoted and went inside.
Whether Pat, Joe, and the traitorous Irenka followed him seconds or minutes later, Alicia would never know. As soon as Jack disappeared, Alicia did what she should’ve twenty minutes before. She vaulted herself over the railing and ran off into the dewy night.
JUNE 2016
ROME
The postal worker has strolled by Margutta four times, but he’s not yet encountered the pretty Serena Palmisano. She’d stand out, as most residents on this quaint street are middle-aged.
On the fifth day, the man determines that these daily sojourns are no longer worth the effort. He has no evidence she lives here, and there are other treasures to unearth. Standing in her courtyard amid the ivy-covered terra-cotta buildings, he regards the envelope one last time and goes to chuck it in the bin.
Then he hears a crunch. He cranes to see Serena Palmisano walking across the gravel. He shakes his head once, to make sure she’s really there. Yes. It is Serena, and she is accompanied by a very tall and handsome man, an American to be sure.
Serena is as lovely as the internet promised. She is slight, but feminine, and blessed with a sheath of straight, black hair, and round, soulful eyes. Her smile is large and white. The man considers that she has a few too many teeth. Also, her ears are a little big. Perhaps she’s not perfect after all.
The couple breezes past and the man follows them inside. They stop at a bank of mailboxes. That’s when Serena notices they are being shadowed. She turns away from the American and gives the postal carrier a funny look.
The man offers a darting smile and drops the letter into her mail slot, as though he’s actually there to do his job. He takes his exit, winking as he passes.
Well, that was a waste of time. He had big hopes for that letter but now it’s literally out of his hands. Maybe the girl will have better luck, though he can’t imagine a resident of this building needing an inheritance. She clearly leads a charmed life.
After leaving the quiet Margutta and stepping into the noisy clamor of central Rome, the man picks up his pace, thoughts of Serena Palmisano growing faint. He hurries toward the sorting center with unusual efficiency, dreaming of what he might find next.
HONOR DEAD BY HELPING THE LIVING
Press and Sun-Bulletin, May 31, 1951
HYANNIS PORT
George found Alicia a mile up from the Kennedys’.
Jeannette had called from the house. She told him that Miss Darr had run off without her handbag, and left her heels in the lawn.
“This is an inauspicious sight,” George said when he pulled up beside her.
Alicia wanted to keep walking but knew he’d follow, and why make it painful for the both of them? She reluctantly got into his car.
“Jack found out about my mother,” Alicia told him. “And that’s all I have to say.”
“Did you explain why you left her in Germany?” He shook his head. “I knew this would happen.”
“Thanks for your keen insight. And, no, I didn’t explain because I never had the chance. I’m done talking about this.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence.
Now Alicia was upstairs, on her bed, the butterfly dress fanned out around her. Her feet were cold, and grass clippings covered her toes and ankles. For hours she’d been staring blankly through the gingham curtains. It was almost dawn.
At about six o’clock, Alicia heard a car clambering outside. She peered through the window in time to spot a telltale Buick. Alicia watched as Jack lurched out of the car, then slammed the door behind him. He had Alicia’s handbag tucked beneath his right arm. A small relief glimmered inside.
The doorbell rang. It was early, but the smell of coffee told Alicia that Mrs. Neill was awake. A polite resident would’ve intercepted the visitor but he was probably only there to drop off the purse. Anyway, Mrs. Neill would be pleased to see the man. Jack Kennedy charmed the dickens out of her, and it might be the last time their paths crossed.
Alicia listened to the soft patter of their voices, and the intermittent light chuckles from Mrs. Neill. She crouched onto the floor for a better eavesdropping spot, then decided to hell with it, she might as well meet her fate.
After straightening and fluffing her butterflies, a good match for her stomach as it happened, Alicia rushed downstairs before better judgment could take over.
“Oh! Alicia!” Mrs. Neill said as Alicia stumbled through the living room door. “I was coming to get you. You have a visitor. Jack positively had to see you before returning to Washington. Isn’t that sweet? I may be an old bag, but I adore a good romance.”
Mrs. Neill winked, brushed Alicia’s arm, and then padded upstairs. In all this time, Alicia didn’t once glance at Jack. She was afraid of how he might look at her, and what he might see.
“Aw, Alicier,” he clucked. “You’re so bedraggled and cute. Still in your same clothes.”
Alicia let out a sob and rushed toward him. But as she got near, Jack stiffened. Alicia wrapped both arms around her own waist instead of his.
“Are you here to drop off my handbag?” she asked, staring at the floor.
“Nah. Well. Yes,” he said. “But I was coming over regardless. Seems like a few things need to be cleared up. I hate surprises.”
“Trust me, I feel the same.”
“But no one let you tell your story, and explain what that maid meant.”
Alicia quickly glanced at Jack. His eyes were watery, just like hers.
“It’s easy for me to say, don’t do this, don’t do that,” he went on. “When I have the benefit of being able to make decisions from a very fortunate spot. When I thought about it, when I asked myself why you’d lie about your mother, I realized that people lie about their families all the time, to protect loved ones, or themselves.”
Alicia stared, stomach tumbling. How was it he always found the right words, even when she was in the wrong?
“So.” Jack plopped onto the sofa and pushed up his sleeves like he was
about to draft a speech. “Let’s get to it. You have a mother? In…?”
“West Germany. Stuttgart.”
She took a few steps forward, and a few more after that.
“And she’s in a camp of some sort?” Jack asked.
A few scuffles closer.
“Yes,” Alicia said. “A displaced-persons camp, where we both used to live.”
Jack patted the cushion beside his.
“Now explain the rest.”
With an exhale, Alicia lowered herself onto the couch. The dress crunched and her underpinnings were at once too snug. Of course, she’d been wearing them for twelve hours straight and they were meant to hold up breasts and rein in waistlines for only about six.
“I didn’t abandon her,” Alicia said. “I left, so that I could get us both out. Every week I send her money, as much as I can. Every week I’m one step closer to getting her out of that camp.”
This was the easy part of her story. As far as visas went, it was Alicia or nothing. The camps were temporary and would soon close. Their only chance was Alicia, and the United States.
Alicia repeated the tale already told to George, but could not stop where she had before because George never asked if her name was Barbara. He never asked why a maid named Irenka might call her a whore.
* * *
You know that we fled Łódź in 1939 because my father’s status put him at risk of being deported.
You also know that we went to Radom, a city in which we lived cautiously and on guard for several years. I couldn’t attend school and so Father educated me himself, my classroom the crooked table in our shabby little home. During this time, Mother taught herself to sew, at Father’s insistence and despite her dislike of the craft.
Papa had many talents, the chief of these his ability to spot a threat before it hit, like a train heard in the distance. In the summer of 1941, he sensed a shift, the heightening of tension. That’s when he shuttled me off to convent school, and Mother to a factory, where she worked as a seamstress for the Wehrmacht. She wouldn’t have had that job, and probably not her life, if not for Father forcing her to learn a trade. She also lied about her age, shaving off seven years. It helped that she was at that time so beautiful that people often mistook us for sisters.
Weeks after I departed for Warsaw and Mother assumed her factory job, the Germans initiated aktionen in Radom. They rounded up tens of thousands of citizens and sent them to the concentration camp Treblinka, where they were gassed. Some years later, I’d learn that Papa was in this group. After the heart and cunning he used to save his family, he died in an inhumane, brutal, and anonymous way, no difference between the criminals and the heroes, the sinners and the saints.
He’d sent me to a convent for “good girls” from affluent homes. I didn’t know if I was good, and we certainly didn’t seem affluent anymore, but they took me in. As I was not raised Catholic, Mother Superior and the others had some work to do. They taught me Latin, and the Bible, and the rhythm of the matins and vespers. I went through full Catholic rites. Several convents sheltered children during the war, but there was nothing false about my knowledge of the faith. I earned this, same as those who’d been Catholic from birth.
After two years, a group of us moved to Szymanów, where the sisters ran a boarding school for older girls. Szymanów was a long way from Warsaw and was therefore less dangerous, for a time. But immediately we had to confront frequent, unannounced inspections. German storm troopers descended in their black uniforms with red swastikas, crashing through our wall, barging through our doors. They requisitioned part of the convent to billet soldiers. By then, none of us were safe, not even the nuns.
While I studied under the sisters and endeavored to survive, Mother toiled twelve hours a day, sewing uniforms in a crowded, intemperate factory that was frequently bombed. From where she worked, she could hear evidence of life outside. Also, evidence of death, like the screams of people being hauled off in cattle cars.
Eventually, Mother was transferred to a factory in Warsaw, and then a munitions plant in Ludwigslust, followed by a salt mine somewhere in Germany. Then they sent her to a labor camp. She would move fifteen times between Łódź and the displaced-persons camp where we reunited.
They say the war ended in September 1945, but Germany unraveled many months before. In April, the Allies began liberating camps. They captured the Reichstag, and Hitler took a gun to his head. Finally, with the bombing of Hiroshima, the Allies had their victory. But a war never really “ends,” does it? It’s not like a holiday or a party, where everyone packs up their possessions and goes home. The signing of a treaty is the end of combat fighting, but the start of some new state.
Our state was this: homelessness, loneliness, confusion. All in, the overarching sense of being displaced. There were ten to twenty million in this position, a number too enormous to calculate. At the time, I still had a home at the convent, but my status was not secure. Father paid for me to attend school, but how much had he given, and would they let me stay? I was able to finish my schooling and left in 1946, a few months after my sixteenth birthday.
Father Skalski tried to trace the girls’ families, but his information wasn’t always reliable or complete. He knew about Mother’s job in Radom, but after that he couldn’t find a trail. My father was listed among the dead at Treblinka, a fact he disclosed on the occasion of my fourteenth birthday, which meant I’d never celebrate a birthday again. Why did I get another year, and not Papa? And how was surviving three hundred sixty-five consecutive days something to celebrate? I didn’t do anything. It was pure luck, nothing more.
Though I believed the priest’s words, the news read like fiction all the same. In my mind, Father left war-torn Poland to live temporarily in a different story, a place where he could enjoy literature and music and debate political topics without punishment. He’d pop into my world when the time was right. I had to stay at the convent in case he came. Also, I was afraid to meet real life.
“There’s nothing for me to do out there,” I’d said to Father Skalski.
He responded that I was a bright and faithful young woman, and would be fine. I had to go, he said, and start my life in this new Europe.
“And you must find your mother.”
“Find my mother?” I’d gasped. “How do you propose I do that? Wander through Europe, hoping to bump into her?”
He went to write something as I scrambled to find a reason that might compel him to let me stay.
“I want to become a nun,” I said.
I didn’t want to be a nun. I wanted a home, not a pointless quest for someone I’d never find.
“We’d love to have you,” he said. “But you must try to locate your family first. You can always come back, if a life of the cloth is truly what you want.”
He handed me a list of the DP camps with the most Poles. The majority were in Germany, he said, so I should begin there. He’d gotten me a job at a tracking bureau in Bünde. It was a good place to start.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “a soldier will escort you to Bünde. There you will earn a nice wage, and, with any luck, find the answers you seek.”
I could say nothing but “thank you.”
The next morning, on my way out the door, Father Skalski handed me some money, so I could get by. I wept over his generosity but later wondered if he’d done nothing more than return what was rightly mine. Surely in his desperation, Papa overpaid for the privilege of a convent school, though he would’ve viewed no price as too steep.
In Bünde, I realized there were millions of us rambling around the blighted country, trying to find loved ones across five hundred camps. Thankfully, the rumor web was thick and by 1947, I’d learned that Radomers were congregating in Stuttgart. My family wasn’t originally from Radom, but it was the last home we’d had together so it was worth a shot. Father used to say, “Don’t believe every rumor you hear; but don’t ignore them either.” So, on the inquiry form at the tracking bureau, I wrote “Stutt
gart?” under “Other information.” This was where I found my mom.
Mother was hospitalized when I arrived and therefore quarantined. They warned she probably wouldn’t last the month. We’d hear similar warnings many times over the following years.
We finally saw each other, face-to-face, in the lobby of that hospital. Mother was in a wheelchair, an image that clawed right into my heart. I performed a quick calculation, and then did the math a second time. There’d been an error, I was convinced. The person before me wasn’t in her thirties. This was an old woman, with white hair, and no teeth. Her hands were cracked, her nails peeled.
“Barbara?” Mother wheezed.
“No, that’s not my name.”
By then denying my life had become rote. Barbara Kopczynska? I’d never heard of her.
Then I remembered who I was.
“Yes, Mamusia,” I said, tears rolling down my cheeks, “it is me.”
I squatted beside her, and took her frail hands in mine, instantly regretting all my complaints about the convent schedule, and the dank quarters, and the billeting soldiers trying to have their way. It wasn’t always happy, and it was hardly ever comfortable, but it hadn’t taken me to the bone. What had Mamusia endured in five years, to appear as though she’d aged fifty?
I understood that I’d developed into an attractive woman, but I didn’t stop to consider that Mother must’ve been similarly alarmed. The last time she’d seen me, I was a wispy innocent, miles from womanhood, and still unknowing of the horrors to come. That girl obeyed her mother, and worshiped her father, and was quiet and soft and kind.
When I first saw Mother, I thought, Who is this old crone? But, Mother saw a little girl acting too mature. I should’ve been in a pinafore, not wearing such a mature dress. Was I pretending to have breasts? And what was with the lipstick and that face? The doctors passing by snuck hungry stares. Mother knew nothing about me, but at that moment she saw that I was very plainly a bad girl. In Radom, her greatest fear was that she’d never see her daughter again, and I was a reminder that this fear had come to pass.
Our relationship started cold and distant, and worsened from there. Thanks to years of starvation and abuse, sickness racked Mother’s body, everywhere including her mind. She yelled at me for childhood infractions and accused me of hiding her medicine. Once she asked if I’d given up Father to the authorities. She’d seen the worst of humanity and her guard was up. Thankfully, I’d developed a tough and callous stoicism over the years.
The Summer I Met Jack Page 21