Our trip was not long. The railroad platform with its roof and electric light soon appeared before us.
The policeman stopped the horse beside the platform. I wondered how long we would have to wait in the cold for the train. The policeman indicated with his head that we should descend. Mother and I climbed down.
As we stood beside the sleigh, Mother still held her hand out to the policeman. The two men didn’t move.
Then the policeman pointed his whip straight over the horse’s head. “Lvow,” he said. It was the first word I had heard him speak. He turned to face the rear of the sleigh, and pointed the whip again. “Budapest, seventh hour,” he said in broken Polish. Then he made a clucking sound, and the horse moved forward. We watched the sleigh turn and head back toward the village. Suddenly Mother and I were standing alone beside the empty platform.
The train to Lvow came a few minutes later. It stopped, but no one got on or off. We shivered deliciously till the Budapest train roared in with a cloud of steam and a splendid rumble and hiss.
It was warm inside the train. Mother and I sat facing each other on the soft plush seats beside the window. I watched the Hungarian countryside fly past us, the moonlight glistening on the crusty snow.
Then I felt Mother take my two hands and turned to look at her. I found myself looking directly into her large brown eyes. Mother and I were the only two people in the whole world.
Epilogue
A ragged and dirty peasant woman hobbles into the lobby of the Hotel Bristol in Pesht, the modern section of the Hungarian capital. She limps badly, and leans heavily on the shoulder of her small son. He is having difficulty concealing his excitement. He holds a small white teddy bear in the crook of his arm. Speaking French, the woman requests a room.
“We have no vacancies,” says the desk clerk, in his cutaway coat and striped trousers. He gives an eye signal to one of the bellhops to stand by. The peasant boy sucks on his lower lip to control his face.
“Nonsense,” the woman replies, “the Bristol is never out of rooms.”
“Madame has stayed with us before?” the clerk asks, unable to resist the temptation for sarcasm.
“Of course, many times,” she says in the haughtiest tone she can muster. She is enjoying this. Her son has to cover his mouth to keep from laughing out loud.
“And when might that have been, Madame?” the clerk asks archly, falling into her trap.
She names a date last summer. Her lips are drawn tight to repress a smile
“Ah, yes,” he says, repeating the date and opening the register with a flourish. “And the name, Madame?” he asks.
“Waisbrem,” she says. “Monsieur and Madame Waisbrem.”
It takes a beat and a half for the clerk to look up from his register. He removes his glasses to inspect her more closely. He gasps audibly. “Oh Madame, Madame, what has happened?” He is beginning to cry. She is laughing. They hug across the counter.
Mother and I arrived in New York in the spring of 1941 where, with the help of a translator—Mother spoke little English—she wrote her account of this story. The first of the “escape” books to come out of World War II, Flight to Freedom, by Barbara Padowicz got considerable media coverage and sold briskly. Of course in her book I’m only six, which made her younger as well, and our relationship is as smooth as glass. But, hey, it’s her book.
Mother would never use the name Waisbrem again because of its Jewish sound. Nor would she ever admit to being anything but Catholic for the rest of her life.
Of the families and friends left behind in Poland, I have heard little more than rumors. Kiki, I have heard, did not survive the war, but the family left in Durnoval did, though I understand that they were deported into the interior of the Soviet Union until war’s end. Sometime in the fifties, Mother received a letter from an acquaintance who announced that Mr. Herman Lupicki had been elected to government office.
My grandmother survived as well, by hitchhiking from Lodz to Warsaw where no one knew her, so that she could not be denounced as a Jew. When the war ended, my mother brought her to America, but, her health broken, Grandmother lived only a few more years.
My stepfather, Leon, was taken prisoner of war and escaped to join the Polish army in England. Mother, however, soon divorced him, and I had only sporadic contact with him until his recent death at the age of ninety-three.
Not long after arriving in America, Mother found herself sought in marriage by two men, an elderly English millionaire and a penniless handsome Free French hero of the battle of BirHakim in the North African campaign. The choice was not an easy one for Mother, and I was summoned from boarding school to make the final decision. Since the Frenchman, Pierre, had taken me to several Abbott and Costello movies on prior school vacations, it was he who received my nod.
With the war’s end, Pierre entered the French diplomatic service, to be posted eventually to Philadelphia, where, in the 1950s and ’60s, Mother was celebrated as one of that city’s leading hostesses. Hobnobbing with prime ministers, prelates, admirals, and captains of industry, she led a life of charm, tumult, media coverage, and much general excitement, remaining Beautiful Basia until her death at sixty-two.
As for me, I was quickly shipped to boarding school to be Americanized, or as Americanized as a nine-year-old could feel with a mother who could not pronounce the th sound, thought the capital of New York State was Alabama, and could not understand why a baseball glove was for the left rather than the right hand. As unprepared for the American boarding-school experience as I had been for my French school in Warsaw, I found my familiarity with the Holy Family to be of little solace in the long lonely nights when I longed for the intimacy of Durnoval. In the absence of further spiritual instruction, Kiki’s fragile catechism could not stand up to the abrasions of adolescence, and I set out on the often-trod path of nihilism and agnosticism.
Nor have I received any more street lamps or sausage sandwiches from God. But He did send me an angel. In 1986, at a Unitarian Universalist church service, I met Donna and managed to marry her the following year. Born and raised Catholic, and educated by the sisters, Donna has worked to put me in touch with my Jewish heritage. Though I still have not had one minute of Hebrew instruction, following Donna’s leadership we do celebrate various Jewish holidays in our home and share them with my grandchildren whenever we can.
In a quiet church, a quiet temple, I can often hear God speak to me again in the same language that Meesh and I used to use. Sometimes we just listen to the music together—until people come in and begin fussing in English or Hebrew or Latin. Then God grows still, or maybe He is simply drowned out, and I get fidgety and look for the first pretense to leave.
Sometimes, on a busy street corner, waiting for the light to change, or in a crowded elevator or subway, a stranger and I make eye contact and we suddenly realize that we’ve both found the same thing funny or poignant, and I feel that God is there with us. Or, in the quiet of my study, God will lay a firm hand over mine and cause the pencil to write things that weren’t in my mind a moment ago and that I would not have thought of on my own.
A one-time Air Force navigator and documentary filmmaker, I now have three beautiful daughters, two handsome stepsons, seven grandchildren, and, at last count, one lovely great-granddaughter. My wonderful wife Donna and I live in a 104-year-old house in Connecticut where I spend my retirement at what I love best—writing and tennis. Less than a mile away, my mother and grandmother lie in a quiet, suburban cemetery, presumably the only two Jews in that Catholic resting place.
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Mother and Me Page 42