Pictures of the Past

by Deby Eisenberg

  Taylor Woodmere never broached the topic with his son, neither then, nor in the future. But it was not because he was indifferent. For Taylor, just hearing the words “Jewish girl,” made his own painful memories come rushing back. The years of torment, the years of searching, of fear, disappointment and despair returned in a flood. He wanted to rush toward his son, shake him, slap him, but he didn’t. Perhaps he had misunderstood the situation; maybe he was reading his own history into his son’s words. But most of all, he did not wish to aggravate his wife. For years now, for what seemed a lifetime, he had worked hard to maintain the peace between them.

  For Rachel, Court’s final rejection was a sword, a knife—and she emotionally felt its impact. She did not know whether to pray that the baby escaped the pain of it or hope that his words did their trick to expel it before any doctor needed to operate. As Court made an abrupt U-turn to head back to the restaurant, Rachel sat stiff and cold as a marble statue. When she left the car, he turned to her and with a boyish, remorseful face, mouthed, “I am sorry.”

  What to do? What to do? “Think,” she sobbed aloud, walking from his car. He hadn’t even opened the door for her as he had since their first date. No. Not today. Today no doors were opened for her. It was one simple gesture, but it revealed his true manner. After he drove her around the block to talk and they pulled up again at the restaurant, he did not get out. He simply leaned over her and opened the passenger door—almost shooing her out as if she were a hitchhiker, or worse, a whore.

  Of course she understood that abortion was the easiest solution—but until now that had only been a word, a concept, a popular cause. Now it was personal. This was a real baby. She had been conditioned to welcome news of a baby—to greet it with joy and expectation. Her own parents had desperately wanted another child. On two occasions her mother had announced that she was pregnant, and each time, just weeks later, Rachel heard her sobbing in her bedroom. Shortly after, a neighbor, the mother of a friend, would come to stay with her, when her parents left overnight for the hospital. The next day, her father would only tell her of a “disappointment,” and ask Rachel to be “Mother’s best little helper.”

  What to do? What to do? It took two more days of anguish and then it came to her. And that was the gift that was Rachel—she could turn something potentially bad, a shanda, and spin it into a mitzvah—a good deed.

  The hardest part was telling her parents. She knew it would be a blow, knew they had been complacent in their pride in her. She feared her father—who had put her on a pedestal—might actually need medical attention after she delivered the news. Just telling them she was dating a Gentile boy would be bad enough, but now she was going to tell them that she had been in love with the boy and that she was pregnant with his child. But, perhaps because of their love for her, or because she was so obviously overcome with remorse and fear when she broke the news to them, they responded, after their initial shock, with concern, and tried only to comfort her.

  After a few minutes of weeping and hugs, they left her with a box of tissues and spent some time in the kitchen conferring with each other. Ten minutes later they emerged again.

  “Will you marry this boy?” her father asked with trepidation.

  “You don’t understand,” Rachel was quick to respond. “He wants nothing to do with me. He said that he loved me, and now he can’t wait to be rid of me. What a fool I am—I think he may be anti-Semitic. Here was his solution.” She paused and got up from the couch to retrieve her huge macramé purse. Fumbling through it, she pulled out the white envelope and tossed it on the coffee table. “He got his mother to give me $300 for an abortion. Oh, my God,” she said, weeping again, “How could I have let this happen?”

  “Rachel, good riddance to this fiend. We cannot pretend that we are not shocked or disappointed—but that will pass—our love never will,” her father said, as her mother, tears in her eyes, nodded agreement. “We will figure this out together.” These two middle-aged people could never forget their own struggle to have another baby, and because of that they could never be complicit in sacrificing a pregnancy.

  Rachel straightened herself, smoothing her clothes and hair and rubbing smeared makeup from her eyes. “Actually I have thought this through and I have a plan. I think it is a good idea and would save a great deal of anxiety and embarrassment for you. I hope you will be supportive.”

  The day before, “Aunt” Ida had come into her mind in an epiphany. Ida was not really her aunt, but a woman for whom they all had great fondness. Rachel’s mother and her grandparents had been in an earlier emigration wave from Europe—they did not need a Hitler to drive them out when perennial pogroms breached the peace of their village. “Aunt” Ida had been the daughter of her grandparents’ neighbors in the old country; she was about five years younger than Rachel’s parents. But Ida’s family, possibly because her father was of some means in the village and tried longer, too long, to protect his possessions, became victims of the Nazi rampages. Only Ida, less than twenty years old when she finally was liberated from Auschwitz, survived the war. Through agencies abroad and at home, Rachel Gold’s family was able to connect with Ida and sponsor her immigration to America.

  The plan was that after Ida Lieber arrived in New York, she would then travel on to Chicago. But Ida, still a skeleton from her experiences in the concentration camps, was barely admitted past the gates of Ellis Island. Luckily, a processor misread her information, and thinking she was a little girl accompanied by a guardian, instead of an unhealthy young woman traveling alone, allowed her to enter the United States. But that very day, she fainted on the street and landed in a hospital where she stayed for several weeks. When she recovered, she had neither the will nor the energy to move on, although she was effusively grateful to her sponsors, Rachel Gold’s family.

  They visited Aunt Ida often. And Aunt Ida, who never married, who said that she had been “violated” by the Nazi beasts, found a contented life in New York. She had made friends with seamstresses during her hospital stay, had quickly picked up English from them, and secured a job in the fabric industry. She had lost her family, but she had made a family of friends in New York.

  Rachel remembered conversations with her when she was so small that she didn’t even understand their meaning—"Rachel, my sweet one, you are the future. You are the hope. I will look to you—pray that you help to replace those we have lost. Please may I be ‘Aunt Ida’ to your children one day—and please -may your parents still be living—that you would one day bring alive again the name Jacob, honoring my young brother— through your children.”

  Rachel

  New York

  October 1968

  So Rachel let go of her carefree college days of sororities and late night parties, said to herself— “Here is Rachel, Part II,” and she embraced the new situation. As it turned out, New York was a gift to her. She had visited several times when she was younger, after long car trips with her parents, but she didn’t remember the city outside the Greenwich Village apartment of her aunt. Now she loved exploring everywhere, the cacophony of the streets—the vendors’ cries, and construction work whistles, the taxi cab horns, and police sirens—was a symphony of enchantment.

  True, Chicago was a beautiful city with a world-famous skyline—but nothing compared to New York. She loved Chicago and knew she would return there one day—but now she was a person who was ready to be lost in the anonymity of New York City.

  Aunt Ida herself turned out to be a wonderful surprise. When the taxi arrived at her apartment building just blocks from the Village’s iconic Washington Park, Rachel chose the first load of luggage to carry up to the second-floor landing, one suitcase full of clothes and her first of three small cartons of books. She spotted Ida waving to her from the window, and wondered for how many hours she had been pacing the apartment awaiting her safe arrival. When Rachel climbed the stairs and was at the front door, Ida was there too, with an offering of flowers in one hand and a plate of double f
udge brownies in the other. She lifted both arms high so she could accept Rachel’s enthusiastic embrace, but she could return only kisses on the cheek at the moment.

  “Aunt Ida,” Rachel said with a laugh, “I’m the guest. I’m supposed to come bringing gifts for you. And I have many things, but I don’t know which suitcase they are in.” As she spoke, drawing in not only the warmth of Ida’s greeting, but the familiar scent of chicken soup and old rugs that pervaded the apartment, she felt at home already.

  “No, darling,” Ida insisted. “Your coming here…this to me is an honor…you are to me from a royal family…you are a princess and you will be treated as such…end of discussion.” And so Rachel accepted the flowers graciously and nibbled some brownies, savoring each bite of the deep chocolate flavor. In the moments she stood facing Ida with smiles and nods as she chewed, she took a really good look at her. Rachel saw immediately that Ida was not the old-world guarded individual she remembered from her youth, but a sweet, perky, middle-aged woman, younger looking than she had anticipated, with a petite frame and a possibly good figure hidden beneath an outdated wardrobe.

  Rachel knew a little of Ida’s history in Europe and had previously witnessed her quiet, yet contented life in New York. But now as she walked through the same apartment that she had visited two or three times as a child, her focus was different. She wasn’t looking out the windows; this time she was also looking at the apartment—at Ida’s memorabilia—plates and linens and crackled pictures. She wanted to know more about Ida’s story and the wisdom in her years. “Aunt Ida,” she coaxed, “please tell me about all of these pictures.”

  “No, my dear,” she answered almost abruptly. “You think they are mine, my real memories. But they are gifts from other people, thinking they can replace what I have lost.” Her back was to Rachel now, as she scanned her own apartment. “Over the years, when I was reunited with neighbors from our village or relatives from neighboring communities, people who had made their way to America before the war would share with me pictures they would insist included my mother or father or even me. I would thank them graciously, for I knew they had only the best of intentions, but my father would never have had a beard of that fashion, my mother would never have worn that dress, and I certainly was not a towering, husky child.”

  “Aunt Ida,” she said again. “Won’t you please tell me your story?”

  Ida looked at her chosen niece with sweet adoration and tried to be soft in her response. “Rachel, my Rachel—you have always been a unique child—and now a woman. It is so easy for me to see how you would love and be loved.” (This would be one of the only references Ida would make to Rachel’s predicament.) “One day, my darling,” she continued. “Perhaps, one day I will tell you my story, though it is a sad one.” But to herself, Aunt Ida hoped that Rachel could help her create new good memories of birth and push further back the memories of death.

  Taylor

  Paris

  July 1937

  Although this was not Taylor’s first European trip—twice before he had accompanied his parents on summer holidays in the south of France—this would be his first exposure to the metropolitan life of a European city, and his first independent passage. The itinerary was well planned and seamlessly executed. He boarded a train in Chicago and his first-class Pullman accommodations afforded him ample comfort and privacy to review his father’s instructions and all that had transpired in the last week.

  Surprisingly, he was not consumed with thoughts of Emily. Initially, he had been worried that she might return to Newport immediately upon his departure, and he pictured her recaptured by the patterns of her youth, dancing in the arms of any number of young men who had pursued her through the years. And so, he was extremely relieved when she assured him she would remain in the Chicago area while he was abroad. She would still use her guest room at the Woodmere Estate in Kenilworth as her home base, but she would spend time with a rotation of girlfriends from school, as well as a cousin’s family, all in adjacent North Shore communities. He chose not to interpret her sullen mood and tearfulness as emanating from a lack of understanding and support, but just the disappointment of separation that tugged also at his heart.

  “When I come back, I will have something for you…something very special,” he told her the last morning. He had dressed at 5:00 a.m. for the long car ride to Chicago’s Union Station, and while the chauffeur placed the suitcases in the black Packard, Taylor had quietly opened the door to Emily’s room and gently rubbed her back to wake her.

  She heard the words as she emerged from sleep and with her eyes still closed there was a slight smile on her face. “You will have something for me?”

  “Ah, ha. I knew that would improve your mood and chase away your frowns.”

  She maneuvered herself to a more upright position against her considerable collection of pillows and made no attempt to adjust the bodice of her nightgown, which revealed a generous glimpse of her right breast. Taylor kissed her there, then drew her to him in a tight embrace. He planted more kisses in the rich thickness of her glorious hair before his lips finally settled on hers, and then he pulled back for a lingering look into her eyes.

  “I love you, Taylor,” she said. “I will miss you so much.”

  “Wait for me…I will come back to you soon,” he promised.

  A representative from the SS Normandie was waiting at Grand Central Station in New York when he arrived to take him to the harbor and assist with his luggage. The Normandie was twice the size of the Titanic, and was built to be the most powerful and fastest ship ever constructed, boasting modern turbo engines and a new hull design.

  Taylor was not one of those who let out an audible gasp when he ascended the boarding plank and entered the foyer of the grand ship, nevertheless he was truly awed. There was a museum quality to the structure, with sculptures and paintings that were rarely seen in public spaces. And this was a deliberate new direction for the models of such luxury liners. While refugees to the United States had previously filled ships with lower-class passengers and even steerage, the declining immigration quotas had now influenced the steamship line to design a ship geared mainly toward amenities for first-class passengers.

  Carrying just his briefcase, he approached the purser’s desk where there was only a short wait until it was his turn and he presented his boarding papers.

  “Mr. Woodmere,” a young, uniformed officer of the ship addressed him after glancing at them for his name, “Welcome to the Normandie and please tell me any way I might be of assistance to you during the cruise.” The purser did not speak with the French accent that Taylor had anticipated and so he surmised that among the special considerations that would make American first-class passengers feel most at home was the hiring of employees who spoke their language and understood their needs. The European traveler might require a fuller bulk to his pillows and duvets, might expect a larger meal at lunch and lighter fare in the evening, and might want to begin that repast at an hour when the Americans would be folding their napkins and pushing their chairs from the table. The French would want their morning café, the English their afternoon tea, and the Americans an enormous dessert display.

  “And I’m glad to know that you will personally be available to me,” Taylor said in the friendly, joking style that sometimes only Americans can understand. “I am traveling on business to Paris and I may need to communicate with Chicago during our crossing. Is that possible or do I sound impossibly naïve to even ask?”

  “Sir, that is a reasonable question. Every ship will have its own capabilities, but not every ship has the efficacy of communications as does the Normandie.” He went on to explain that the ship was fitted with the most advanced technology that would well service his needs. Thanking the purser for his help, Taylor left the desk while reviewing a simplified blueprint that he had been handed. He was anxious to explore the vessel, but lingered to overhear the conversations of the other passengers now waiting in the growing line.

 
“How y’all doing? Told my friends I was booked on the largest ship afloat,” one man said with a thick, colorful Texas accent. “And in my first hour I have not been disappointed.” He continued speaking to no one in particular, perhaps waiting to catch a response from a fellow passenger. “Did you see the dining room? I mean they say it is more beautiful than the Palace of Versailles.” His mispronunciation of that venue was so egregious an assault on their language, that the group of returning Frenchmen passing by exchanged incredulous glances and grimaces with each other.