Her first book had been published in February of 1989. The Sunday Times had given it a big write-up. Even the Boomerang had reviewed it. “She followed my career?” Sally asked Maude.
“Didn’t you notice her copies of your books? She saw some of herself in you. You both loved to write. You both got out of Laramie. Oh, she wasn’t hanging out in bars or having sex with reprobates when she was here, but she understood how a girl could get stuck in a tight place.”
“But she came back,” Sally whispered, her throat very dry.
“She had to come back. And finally, she wasn’t sorry. She loved Wyoming. She always understood that nobody is alone in the world, that every person has a chance to make things better or worse for at least somebody else.
“Most people make those differences in their kids’ lives. For people who don’t have kids, there are other choices. Clara McIntyre, Meg’s English professor, had changed Meg’s life by making it possible for her to leave. Meg had given Ezra and me our chances.” Maude swallowed hard. “As she got older, she didn’t know whether anyone would ever appreciate her poetry, but she did know she could make a difference with her money. As far as Meg knew, she’d never really made it as a poet, even though she always believed her work was good. She figured that as a musician who never hit the big-time, you’d have some sympathy for that. And that you’d have the heart and the imagination to find other things that mattered about her life.
“She wanted to give you the chance to return here, and to make your own differences. She asked me lots of times in those last years, when you were in Los Angeles and doing so well, whether I thought you’d want to come back. I told her I honestly had no idea. She made me promise we’d ask.”
Sally burst out crying.
“I knew you’d do that,” said Maude, digging in the back pocket of her jeans and offering a clean bandana.
Sally asked both Maude and Ezra if they wanted to listen to the tapes first, but both declined. “This is your project,” Maude said firmly. “We’ll listen to them later.”
So there she sat, alone at a table in the basement, with her laptop, her cassette player, yellow pads and pens, and the three tapes. Each cassette was numbered. Sally reminded herself that what she was about to listen to was a product of memory, and memory, she knew, could be the furthest thing from history. But you needed memory anyway. She began with tape number one.
“My name is Margaret Parker Dunwoodie,” Meg said in the same strong, aging voice Sally had heard on Edna’s oral history tapes, “and I am recording this at ten p.m. on July 21, 1982, in the town of Laramie, Wyoming. I am making this tape in secret, because it will reveal stories of crimes committed by people who will never face a court of law. I am one of those people.”
Here, Meg took a long breath. Sally did the same. “My father was a fascist and a traitor. I am not sure, but it may be that my lover was his accomplice. I killed them both.”
“I’ve often thought that 1929 was a bad year for everyone in the world, except me,” Meg resumed after a long silence. “That was the year I went to Paris. The year I met Giselle Blum and Paul Blum and Marc Sonnenschein. And Ernst Malthus.” Her voice broke on the last name. Meg evidently turned off the recorder for some time, then resumed. “I’d learned some things about life in New York, but I was still pretty much a Wyoming ranch girl at heart. Paris changed all that. No—Ernst changed all that. The first time I ever saw him, he was performing at one of the Blums’ Tuesdays. At that time, I didn’t even know what it would feel like to want a lover. By the time he’d finished playing Night and Day, I knew.”
Sally had planned to take notes on the tapes. The notes could wait. She leaned her elbows on the table, put her chin in her hands, and just listened. “My mother had always told me that good girls made a man wait until marriage. That women needed their rights so that they could compel men to control their baser instincts.” Meg chuckled. “The first time he made love to me, I found out a lot about those baser instincts. I had them, too. I didn’t mind a bit.” Sally laughed. Meg continued. “There was so much more. Ernst was everything I wanted. Charming, brilliant, passionate. He loved the mountains as much as I did. It seemed to me that he was ready for anything. He needed to be ready, and so did I. The Nazis made sure of that.”
Meg described their long love affair, spanning the continent and more than a decade, and only occasionally did she descend into pure nostalgia. For four years, Meg and Ernst had lived their lives, separately and together, pretty much freely. They’d met in Paris and Nice and London and Lucerne, arranged rendezvous in Germany and Austria and Italy. They were planning to be married. But everything changed in 1933, when Hitler came to power. They put off the wedding, because Meg refused to become a German citizen, and Ernst didn’t feel that he could leave the country permanently. They still managed to find ways to be together, but they knew wherever they went, the Gestapo might well be watching.
“I didn’t understand how he managed to go and do whatever he wanted, when I knew all too much about what the Nazis were doing to the German people, turning the Jews into outlaws and murdering them wholesale, terrorizing anyone who might sympathize or resist, watching and striking fast, crushing any spark of humanity. Most of the time, we couldn’t talk about it. We never knew if a hotel room might be bugged, or if the person sitting at the next table at a café might be Gestapo. The only times we could speak freely came in remote places—on the tops of mountains, or far out in the countryside, where we’d go for long walks, or take horses, and get far away from all signs of human beings. There, I could ask questions.
“But Ernst didn’t give many answers. He insisted he had never joined the Nazi Party, and never would. Yes, he was under pressure to become a party member, but his family was so rich and influential that their position gave him a lot of protection. He had important friends in the foreign office—that was how he could travel. He said there were many people in and out of Germany who were working to make Hitler fail, but he couldn’t say who or where they were, or what they planned to do. He could do more good, he said, by appearing to cooperate than by fighting them openly. He’d tell me that he didn’t want to endanger me by telling me anything the fascists might want to torture out of me later.
“A hundred times, he looked in my eyes, and held me, and begged me to trust him. I loved him. What else could I do?”
Sally had no idea.
“When the Germans invaded France in 1940, I had choices of my own to make. Paul and Marc immediately went into the Resistance, but Giselle wouldn’t leave her parents. I could have stayed and fought with them, but Giselle begged me to take Ezra to America, and promised me that she would find a way to follow. I had to go to Wyoming. My mother was very ill, and I wanted to be with her. I said I would find a way to get the boy out of the country, but I didn’t have the faintest inkling how I was going to do that.
“Ernst was supposed to have been in Berlin at that time, but all of a sudden he turned up in Paris. Somehow, he got false papers for the three of us. I was sure we’d be caught, but he had an enormous amount of money to bribe any official who got too suspicious. He was also carrying a gun. I made him swear that if they tried to detain us, he’d use the first bullets on Ezra and me, then shoot himself. We couldn’t relax until we had docked at New York and gone through customs inspection. At the time, of course, American officials were refusing to give sanctuary to European refugees, and I was terrified that if they found out who we really were, they would be cruel enough to send Ezra back.”
Sally stopped the tape, got herself a second cup of coffee. A hell of a trip, she thought to herself, and not exactly a hero’s welcome when Meg got home.
“My father’s letters had made his ugly opinions clear for years, but I assumed that he would be glad to see me, that my mother’s illness would make him want my help. I hardly expected the vicious reception he gave us when we reached the Woody D. He took one look at Ezra and screamed that he wouldn’t have ‘some Jew bastard’ in his hou
se. He said he was going to call the immigration authorities in the morning and have the kid deported. And he said more. I couldn’t listen. I took Ezra in with me when I went to my mother’s room, leaving Ernst to try to reason with my father. My mother lay in bed, ghost-pale and emaciated, weeping and pleading with me to forgive my father, to ignore what he was saying, and to stay. She needed me. She knew what she was asking of me, she said, and she was asking anyway. I couldn’t refuse her. I had to find a place for Ezra, then come back and nurse her until she died.”
What choice could she have made? What would Sally have done?
“I didn’t know how he did it,” Meg went on, “but somehow Ernst had gotten my father to calm down enough that by the time we left, he was able to keep silent. I asked Ernst what he’d said to him, and he told me that all he’d done was to appeal to Mac, businessman to businessman. He didn’t elaborate, and I was so relieved to be out of there, I didn’t push. All I could think about was finding somebody to take care of the boy, keeping him out of my father’s reach, and getting back to my poor mother. And of course I knew that my time with Ernst would be short. I couldn’t convince him to stay in the United States, marry me, become an American. He said he couldn’t abandon the work he was doing. He had to go back.
“Do you know,” Meg said with wonder, “on his last day in Laramie, Miss McIntyre and Miss White informed us that they would be going to Cheyenne for the night, but that we were welcome, of course, to remain at their house? Ezra had gone with the Starks. We were alone. They had put us in separate bedrooms, of course, but we spent the night together in the single bed I’d been sleeping in . I have never made love like that in my life. I was sure I would never see him again.”
The tape clicked off. Sally turned it over.
“But then,” Meg continued, “I did. He’d promised he would return, and so he did, in 1943. I can’t imagine how he managed to get himself out of Germany and into the United States at that point, what kinds of connections he was able to make in countries in the middle of a fight to the death. Well.” She sighed. “Ernst always was good at making connections. Obviously he was involved in espionage. I assume the Nazis were confident he was working for them—that’s why they gave him so much latitude. I assume also that he was involved in some capacity with the American OSS or British SOE”—the countries’ two main spy agencies during World War II—“and that they considered him, oh, what’s that John le Carré word? An asset. Yes, a very valuable asset.
“My mother had died the year before, and I was living in Laramie and teaching at the University. It was summer, so I was at home, writing. I had no idea he was coming. He knocked on the door of my house, wearing the disguise he’d worn when we left Paris and came to Wyoming. I have written at least a dozen poems trying to describe what I felt at the sight of him, but none of them have been any good.”
Sally thought for a moment. There were poems about reunions with a lover, but Meg was right. They were not Meg’s best work. She could write about sex, about anger, and about loss, and could render complicated emotions into remarkable images. But joy was not her forte. Maybe because you could count on joy to blow up in your face, Sally thought cynically, half-hoping that she didn’t really believe that herself.
“I’d never seen him so thin or tired. He wouldn’t talk about the war, about what he’d been doing for three years. He said he hadn’t heard from Marc. I asked him about Giselle, and he put his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head. He said he believed that she and her parents had been sent to one of the Germans’ concentration camps. They were probably dead. Paul had been smuggling arms to Resistance fighters in Marseilles. He was captured by Vichy soldiers and hanged.
“Ernst wanted to see Ezra as soon as possible, to know that the boy was doing well. I took him to visit the Starks, and saw Ernst smile for the first time since he’d come back. Little Eddie, as he was known, was thriving. Just the sight of that dear little boy seemed to refresh my old lover, to restore some of the curiosity and energy I had missed so badly those three long years.
“Ernst had a car. I have no idea how he got it in the middle of the war. We had two weeks, and he wanted to see the Rockies. We went north as far as the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, south all the way to Pike’s Peak, hiking and staying in tourist cabins. He had more gasoline coupons than any American I knew,” she commented dryly. “As long as I knew him, whenever we were together, Ernst was a master at pretending that the rest of the world didn’t exist.
“Our motto on that mountain tour was ‘Make the War Go Away.’ We pretty much managed it. We were enough for each other. Perhaps whoever you are, listening to this tape, will wonder how I could welcome a man who was, for all I knew, a Nazi agent, into my heart and my bed. I will say in my own defense that I didn’t believe for one second that Ernst Malthus was a Nazi. Nothing in his character matched up with that. Nothing in any of the actions I knew about. What I knew was all in his eyes when he saw Ezra looking like a happy little boy. I had all the reason in the world to assume that he was exactly what he’d led me to believe—too valuable to the Resistance to give up the guise of being a ‘Good German.’ I didn’t doubt that he had been forced to make some terrible choices. You could see that, too, very clearly, in his eyes. I wanted to give him an oasis, to bury him in beauty and pleasure and what laughter we could steal. He left after those two weeks, saying not a word about where he was going, or when we might meet again.”
Tape number one ended.
And tape number two began. “If I’d had to guess where he went when he left me waving goodbye from the door of my house in Laramie, I’d never have guessed in a lifetime. For a long time I held on to the hope that he’d come back. I bought a big bed. I wondered, every day, where he was and what he was doing. I tried to find out. Marc Sonnenschein hadn’t seen him since early in the war, didn’t know where he’d gone. I wrote to everyone we’d known who’d survived the war, but it was as if he’d fallen off the earth. Gradually, I gave up trying to find him. I assumed he was dead. Or maybe I wanted to think that he must be dead. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he have come back? I didn’t learn the truth for more than twenty years, and then I didn’t want to hear it, particularly from the person I heard it from.
“That morning in 1943, Ernst Malthus got up out of my bed, cooked me a breakfast of bacon and eggs, loaded his grip into the trunk of his car, and drove straight to the Woody D Ranch. He went to see my father, McGregor Dunwoodie. They had a kind of business arrangement. It was not the last time they met.
“You see, by 1943, my father was helping to finance the Axis war effort. Germany was starved for cash, and a small, revolting group of capitalists around the world was making it possible for the Nazis to buy enough food to keep their death machine running. The capitalists offered American dollars and gold and silver. The Nazis offered the treasures they’d stolen from the people they murdered. Ernst was, in this case, simply the middle man,” Meg finished, her voice flat.
Sally had to stop the tape, rewind, and listen again to make sure she understood. She listened three times, and the meaning, each time, seemed unmistakable.
“Do you wonder how I learned all this? My father told me.”
Sally had to stop the tape again, get a drink of water before starting it back up.
“I hadn’t spoken to him in more than twenty years,” said Meg. “On the day my mother died, I left the Woody D and swore I would never go back and never even mention the name of McGregor Dunwoodie again. I’d lived for two horrible years with his monstrous tongue-lashings, his bitterness and anger and abuse. Once, when he’d begun to rant about the Jews, about how Hitler had the right idea, and he still had half a mind to call up the authorities and send that little kike bastard I’d brought home back to get what he deserved, I’d gotten his shotgun off the wall and told him that if he ever, ever mentioned the child again, I would blow his head off. When I left, I told him not to write or call or try to contact me. The last thing he said to me
was that he’d never disinherit me, because he’d never give me the pleasure of being free of him. ‘When I’m dead and buried, my goddamn money will haunt you to your own grave,’ he said.
“But he didn’t tell me then about his arrangement with Ernst. That came much later, in 1966. I had made good on my pledge not to see Mac or speak to him, and he hadn’t written or called. But I went to my office one day to find a message from an old family friend in Encampment, somebody I hadn’t seen in years and years. He said that Mac had had a heart attack. He knew he was dying. He was at home at the ranch and wanted to see me just once more, before he went.”
Click. Sally had to flip the tape.
“I don’t know why I went. Maybe it was the memory of my mother. But I did, I drove over the Snowies and down to Encampment, down gravel and dirt roads I could have driven with my eyes closed. And then I was there.
“He was right there in the same bed my mother had died in. And smoking—even a heart attack couldn’t stop him. He already looked like a corpse. I don’t know what I expected, but I should have known that he’d called me in to hurt me one last time. He was almost too weak to speak, but he managed to whisper to me to pick up a piece of paper on his bedside table, next to his ashtray. It was a list of all his property, detailed for the executors of his estate. I asked him why he was showing it to me, and he said, ‘Look under the headings for miscellaneous.’ I looked, and saw that he’d listed coins and jewelry, and so on. ‘Those are the presents I received for giving a little help to the Axis during the war, and things like that.’
“I just looked at him. I couldn’t understand. Seeing me confused and worried gave him the energy to talk. ‘You’ll love looking at my trinkets when I go, my girl,’ he said nastily. ‘I’ve got some right pretty jewels and quite a few gold South African Krugerrand coins in the vault over in that bank in Laramie—’course the coins came later. Got ’em all from your boyfriend, Ernst Malthus. I gave him the cash the Nazis were needing, and he brought me some awful nice things. Didn’t hear from him again until 1962, when I was asked to help out some people who wanted to change the way things were going in Cuba. That time, they wanted somebody who could get ’em some weapons. I said I probably knew somebody who could help them out, but I wanted Krugerrands in return. They said it could all be arranged, and the next thing I knew, here came old Ernst with a damn suitcase full of gold. Didn’t he stop by to see you, Meg?’
Brown-Eyed Girl Page 33