Mrs. Tuesday's Departure: A Historical Novel of World War Two

by Suzanne Elizabeth Anderson

  “Since Momma left.”

  “Yes, since your mother left. I wasn’t prepared for that. I was hoping that she would take you with her, so that you’d be safe too.”

  “And you can’t understand why she didn’t?”

  “Can you?” I looked into Mila’s eyes, scarred by pain since the scene at the train station.

  “She never loved me like you did.”

  “Like I still do.”

  “But you’re not so nice now. Maybe you’ll…”

  “Leave you too?” I softened my voice, caught by grief that my darling child, yes, my child, that’s how I’d always thought of her. Ilona knew that and as much as she’d considered Mila a burden, she resented my relationship with her daughter. As if I were a trespasser. “I will never leave you Mila.”

  Mila wiped an angry tear from her eye. She leaned forward and hugged me tightly. I held her to my chest and let her cry for the first time since her mother had left.

  I whispered in her hair, “What happened tonight, after I left?”

  “Anna went to your study. She shut the door.”

  Mila’s sentences came out in slow gulps in between her breaths from crying. “She stayed in there for awhile. And then she came out carrying some books, they looked like notebooks.”

  Chapter Sixty-One

  I HELD MY breath, willing myself to stay and listen to the rest of the story instead of running to my study to confirm my suspicions. “What did she say Mila?”

  “She was mad,” Mila replied looking away. “She said that you’d betrayed her. That you were going to run off with Deszo and leave us alone.”

  “Did she say anything else, did she say where she was going?”

  Mila remained silent, I couldn’t decide whether she was recalling Anna’s words or choosing which ones to tell me. “Mila please, this is important! Anna could be in danger!”

  “She said that you’d betrayed her twice. She said you weren’t working on her journals, you were working on your own stories because you were jealous of her.”

  I rolled my eyes and yet I could clearly imagine Anna’s reasoning. I’d given up writing in the early years of my marriage. And then, at my husband’s insistence, I’d begun again. I’d chosen children’s stories knowing they were well out of the realm of Anna’s interest. I wrote in obscurity for years, most of my stories published with the assistance of Max’s money rather than public interest. But slowly, I had earned a following.

  My popularity was growing; there were requests to publish some of stories in other countries in Europe and even in America. I had once again begun to surpass Anna in recognition. And then Max died. And so did my voice. After three years of silence, there was an offer from a publisher. It was then that Anna suggested that I edit her journals instead.

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  Mila shook her head.

  “How was she dressed?”

  Mila furrowed her brow as if wondering why I would ask such a simple-minded question. “She went to her room and put on a dress. I walked to her door and watched her put on her make-up. I asked her where she was going but she just laughed and said she was going to take care of things. Then she went down the hall and put on her coat and left.”

  “Which dress she was wearing?”

  “It looked like one of the dresses she wore when she went out dancing.”

  I shut my eyes and sighed. Now I knew where she’d gone.

  I opened my eyes and grasped Mila’s hands. “I have to go out to find Anna. I don’t want you to stay here alone. Will you go down to Miss Szep’s? You can spend the night there and I’ll come and get you in the morning.”

  Mila pulled her hands out of my grasp. “What if something happens to you and Anna? What if you don’t come back?”

  There was no point in giving her false assurances. We both knew it was possible that anything could happen tonight.

  “If that happens Miss Szep has a friend you can stay with. You’ll be safe with her. And I will come back for you.”

  I stood and looked down at Mila. “Come on, get some clothes to wear tomorrow, you can just put your robe over your pajamas.” I tried to smile. “And take a good book to read to her cat.”

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  I LEFT MILA and walked down the hall to my study. Papers were strewn across my desk. I shoved them aside, underneath was my journal, also open, to the entry I’d made this morning.

  I look in the mirror and I see my sister. I am afraid that I will become her. I was jealous of her once. Now I feel pity. She was the successful one. Does she wonder how much of her success is because I left the field in which we used to compete? Then, I was patronized for the ‘nice little fables’ I wrote. Now my grasp exceeds hers. She will decrease and I will increase.

  “You were with Deszo.” The ghost of Anna turned in my chair and looked at me. “Weren’t you!”

  “I met Deszo for coffee. We were discussing what we should do.”

  “About keeping your affair secret?” her apparition sneered.

  “No,” I sighed. “About finding a safe place for Mila.”

  Anna pointed at my journal and continued, “So, you feel pity for me?”

  I looked at the entry. “Yes, I’m sorry that you are losing your mind.”

  She laughed. “That would be the only way you could surpass my achievements.”

  Anna picked up one of the pages she’d scattered across my desk. “You call this literature.” She read one of the lines from my story, “The sharks nipped at Herkimer in their attempt to separate him from his mother. Looking back, Momma whale suddenly realized in horror, that Herkimer was gone.” She tossed the page aside. “You’re pathetic. I gave you my journals to edit so that you wouldn’t continue to embarrass yourself and me with your insipid little stories.”

  I clenched my teeth and my jaws trembled with rage. “I am a writer.”

  “Please,” Anna rolled her eyes. “You are nothing. You married a man old enough to be your father and spent your youth playing wife. Now you are forty and a dried up passionless woman who stole the affections of your sister’s daughter. You are a disgrace.” I turned to the next page in the journal.

  Deszo kissed me last night. He hasn’t kissed me like that since we were eighteen. We were so young then. He only had eyes for me. He said that when he looked into Anna’s eyes he only saw everything I was not. He wanted me. I chose Max. I fell in love. I was young, Max was older, so sophisticated I thought. Now after all these years, he wants me still. What do I want? I will always want Max. He is the only one I want. I am sorry that Anna will never know how wonderful it is to be loved as I have been loved.

  “So you want him back?” Anna said.

  “No, of course, not,” I said, putting down the book and looking at the shimmering image of my sister in the chair. “Where did you go, Anna?”

  Her apparition laughed and threw the book across the room. “You’re my twin, where do you think I went?” Then she disappeared, wearing the dress that told me her destination.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  I TOOK MILA downstairs. Miss Szep was distressed to learn that Anna had slipped out without her knowledge. I knew she felt that she’d failed in her responsibilities as the self-appointed sentry. “It’s alright,” I assured her. “Anna probably went out through the back.”

  She agreed to let Mila spend the night. She took Mila down the hall to a small spare bedroom and told her to make herself at home. Mila put her small satchel of clothes on the floor and turned to me, “Don’t go.”

  I stepped into her arms and held her close. “I’ll be back,” I whispered into her hair. I inhaled the scent of her as if I would have to remember it forever. “In the morning I’ll bring you something sweet to have with your coffee.”

  Then Miss Szep took my arm and led me down the hall. She told me that if I hadn’t returned by the morning that she would contact her friend and take Mila to Buda herself. I kissed her on both cheeks, thanked her a
nd asked her to say a prayer for me. She smiled and said that she’d already lighted a candle to the Virgin. Then I left, going down the stairs and back into the cold night.

  Excerpt from Mrs. Tuesday’s Departure,

  written by Natalie X,

  published by the General Directorate of Publishing, 1952

  MRS. TUESDAY LIFTED her reading glasses to the bridge of her nose and took the pages from her granddaughter’s hands. She had moved back into the city to attend college. After her parents divorced, her granddaughter and her mother moved to Long Island and Mrs. Tuesday watched Mila grow up on weekend visits and holidays. With each visit, Mrs. Tuesday had brought books for her granddaughter to read. Her granddaughter’s maturation measured by her progression from the fairy tales of Hans Christen Andersen, to Little Women, Jane Eyre and then novels that her granddaughter checked out from the library.

  Her granddaughter had expressed an early interest in writing. At the age of eleven, she had begun sending Mrs. Tuesday short stories to ‘edit’. When she was old enough to come into the city alone, they had begun these monthly meetings.

  “You know you come from a family of writers.”

  “Publishing, not writing. Mom edits romance novels, and you edited literary novels.”

  “Your great aunts were very important writers.”

  Her granddaughter sighed at the reiteration of well-worn territory, “I know Grandma.”

  “You should get to know them better.”

  “Their books haven’t been published in years,” her granddaughter countered. “Even the library archives don’t have them.”

  “Your mother says you haven’t come out to the house in a month and when she calls you’re always out.”

  Mila looked down and shrugged. “Momma’s not the same. Have you noticed?”

  “Yes, it seems to have skipped a generation,” Mrs. Tuesday said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Things fall apart with age,” Mrs. Tuesday looked toward the window on the other side of the room. “In some it happens sooner than others. Bodies, minds, some before their time.”

  “Grandma,” her granddaughter reached out and gently placed a hand over hers, “We’ve taken her to a doctor, they think it might be early onset Alzheimer’s.”

  Mrs. Tuesday nodded. “Is that what they call it? My Aunt’s mind began to disintegrate when she was about your mother’s age. I always thought it was because of the war. Now, the same is happening to my daughter, your mother, but without benefit of a war.” She shook her head at the unfairness of it all, how gladly she would trade places with her daughter, to erase some of her own memories would be a blessing.

  Mrs. Tuesday picked up the journals, flipped through one and then the other.

  “This was written by my Aunt Natalie. It is her record of the last part of World War Two. The other journal is Anna’s. Both will tell you about their lives as writers. I’ve translated both journals for you.” She handed another stack of typed pages to her granddaughter, “And this is a story that Aunt Natalie wrote during our last days together.”

  Her granddaughter looked through the pages, “How is this supposed to help me?”

  Mrs. Tuesday clasped Mila’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I want you to see that others have gone through what your mother now faces. How you deal with it, is up to you, these journals will show you what others did.”

  “What about the envelope?” Mila asked.

  Mrs. Tuesday looked but did not touch it, “One last bit of business I must attend to, and I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  THE TEMPERATURE HAD dropped in the short time that I’d been inside. Or was it the chill that comes when fear seeps into the bones?

  I knew where Anna had gone. The possibility filled me with more dread than being stopped by the Nazis.

  I kept to the shadows and the side streets and hurried along with my collar up, avoiding eye contact. The storefronts were shuttered, the lights of the apartments above blackened by shades or sleep. Knowledge that there would be no witness to an assault heightened my sense of vulnerability.

  As I neared Deszo’s building, I looked up and saw the lights were on in his apartment. I slipped in the door and crept up the stairs. At his door, I hesitated straining to hear Anna’s voice. It had been more than a year since I’d been here. The last time was during one of Anna’s delusional episodes after the end of their affair, when she’d come to confront Deszo’s wife, Katya, as being her usurper, as Anna believed she was now Deszo’s wife. At that point, our phones still worked and I was called to find the two women facing off in the kitchen. Anna was raging, threatening Katya with a rolling pin. Deszo had the wretched task of facing both his wife and his mistress, neither of whom were pleased to see him.

  I’d come in and talked Anna out of her hallucination, using a mixture of cajoling and promises I’d never keep. Rather than being grateful, Katya had accused me of conspiring with my sister and threatened to turn us over to the police, as she knew that at the time Ilona and Bela were still living with us.

  Her threat was real. She’d been humiliated for ten years. I sympathized with her. She’d married a man, knowing that he’d not been in love with her, but married her because their families had important business ties. I imagined that at the beginning she was willing to accept the bargain, hoping as all people in love do, that with time their beloved will see them differently, will return their loyalty and long-suffering with love. Like a dog waiting for a crumb from the master’s table, day after day, looking with hopeful, pleading eyes.

  At some point, the dog’s mind turns from wanton hunger to resentment and then fury. Not so stupid to strike out at the master, but at that which keeps its master’s attention. This had happened to Katya. Though she was the same age as Anna, her bitterness had aged her, creasing her once lovely face with ugly furrows, and withered lips seamed shut by unspoken venom.

  She married a man in love with another woman. Not the mistress he’d later taken up with but her sister. Her twin.

  We were so young then. We’d grown up together. Deszo, Anna, and I’d known each other since we were children. Our parents were friends, our father’s business associates, and our mothers in the same social clubs. We’d entered those frightful years of adolescence together when childhood playmates begin to recognize the difference in their sexes.

  Anna had professed her attraction to Deszo to me many nights in the bedroom we shared in our parent’s apartment. I’d laughed when she’d told me that her flirtations were frustrated by the fact that he was attracted to me. “But that’s impossible, we’re twins. He should like you as much as he likes me!”

  He didn’t.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  IN OUR LAST year at university, I’d met Max and fallen in love. My parents threatened to disown me for loving a man who was not only twice my age, but also not Hungarian. At first Anna had encouraged my relationship with Max, as much as it represented rebellion and as it afforded her a chance to supplant my place in Deszo’s heart. It hadn’t. On the night that I came home and announced to my parents that Max had asked me to marry him, Deszo was there. I remember that as I walked him to the front door to say goodnight, he’d pulled me into an embrace and kissed me hard on the lips and then said, “Marry me, Natalie. Not him. I love you. Marry me.”

  I was hurt by what I felt was his betrayal of my night of happiness. Yet, I saw in his eyes a depth of anguish that touched my heart and which I have never seen since. Not even in the eyes of my beloved husband.

  Not more than six months after my marriage to Max, Deszo announced his engagement to Katya. Anna was devastated. Deszo’s parents, hoping to re-direct his attention, had arranged the marriage. I remember attending his wedding, the detached look on his face. Anna had attended the ceremony, had sat next to Max and me in the church. She was unable to comprehend that Deszo had chosen another woman, when he could have had her, the replica of the one he loved. Wasn’t that e
nough? She would love him enough for both of us. Throughout the service she whispered to me, scathing comments about Katya’s dress, about how unhappy Deszo looked, speculated that he had been forced into the marriage. That he really did love her. That the marriage wouldn’t last. I wonder if that event carried the seed of her eventual descent.

  I knocked at the door. The voices stopped and then I heard footsteps in the foyer.

  “It’s me, Natalie,” I whispered into the crack between the door and its frame.

  The door’s locks clicked open one by one and then I saw Deszo’s face, pale and angry. I knew I was too late.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  “COME IN,” he hissed. I slipped in the door and he shut it quickly behind me.

  “She’s been here.”

  “Yes,” he said. “She came two hours ago. I wasn’t here.”

  I held my breath. “Katya?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “Deszo?” I turned and saw Katya standing at the far end of the hall silhouetted in light. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s me, Natalie,” I said.

  She laughed in a hideous knowing way. “Well it couldn’t be your sister.”

  I looked at Deszo. “Where is Anna?”

  “Go back to your room, Katya,” he commanded.

  “She should be reported too!” Katya cackled and then left us standing alone in the hallway.

  “Deszo, what happened?”

  He took my arm and steered me toward the living room. “Your sister came here before I got home from the café. Why weren’t you at home to stop her?”

  I looked at him, bewildered that he would blame me. “She came here looking for you.”

  “Katya was here. They got into an argument.” The exhaustion showed on his face. He crumpled into a chair and motioned me to take the chair next to him. “Anna told Katya that I was beginning an affair with you. That we’d gone out tonight to meet at the café to arrange everything.”