Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  “Don’t you guilt-trip me!” Judy’s eyes flashed. “I heard that morning, noon and night for the last thirty-five years.”

  She repeated my words with savage mockery. “‘I’m sure she was difficult to live with.’ Yes, she was fucking difficult to live with. I never could have girlfriends over to play, she was so suspicious of strangers coming into the house. No one ever invited me to their birthday parties or anything because she was creepy. The other moms felt uncomfortable around her. She always thought people were following her. In high school I finally started finding my own friends.”

  She was panting, the anger exhausting her frail body. She leaned back in the wheelchair, her face pasty, like buttermilk, with red flecks floating on it. I let her rest, but when she opened her eyes, just a bit, little slits studying my reaction, I started again.

  “Who was following her?”

  “Don’t ask me. She’d say the FBI was monitoring her mail, or sometimes it was the CIA. Like one blue-collar refugee from Austria was important enough for J. Edgar Hoover to snoop on.”

  “She never talked about an old crime, something that happened before you were born?”

  Judy seemed to realize this was an important question. She took time to think about it but finally shook her head. “Not unless you mean the Dzornens robbing her of her inheritance, she talked about that plenty. It always upset my dad, he worked hard, he supported us, we lived as comfortably as anyone else around us: What did she want that guy’s money for, anyway? he used to say.”

  Poor Leonard Binder. He sounded like a decent guy whose only crime had been marrying a woman badly scarred by life and war. At least he’d had those joyous moments with Martin, when they filled the garage with dry ice and set off the rockets.

  “Your mother talked to you about the Painters. She also told you about the Dzornens, didn’t she? How they mistreated her? Did she think they were the people following her?”

  “I told you I don’t know!” Judy tried to shout but she didn’t have enough strength in her abdomen; the words came out in a grating rasp.

  “You knew a lot about her.” I kept my voice neutral, neither praise nor blame, merely a chance to open a curtain and see a new landscape. It actually got Judy to think: once again she cut herself off mid-curse.

  “She wasn’t always angry. When I was little, sometimes we had fun, my dad and mom and I. My dad loved going to the park or the zoo, and he was good with tools, he could build things, mechanical things—Kitty always did the woodwork. They even made me a wagon with a motor. Kitty could sew anything. Once she made a wardrobe for my kitten. The girls at school were jealous when I brought Ginger with me to show-and-tell.”

  “Do you remember what happened to change your mother?”

  Judy looked at her knotted fingers, the fingers of a much older woman. “She wasn’t always happy, either, don’t go getting that idea! The first words I ever heard from her were how her birth mother didn’t like her, how she only cared about equations and atoms. Her mom liked Lotty better, Mom thought Lotty was a show-off.” She smiled slyly. “Of course that’s why I went to Lotty when I got pregnant; I knew it would piss off Kitty no end.”

  I nodded. I didn’t like it, but I could understand it.

  “And like you said, she lost everybody. I heard it so many times it stopped being about real people, it was like a bedtime story, the nasty kind that gives you nightmares.”

  I nodded again: Judy’s drugs made a certain sense to me. If your life had been filled with horror stories from the day you were born, you would want something to blunt the images. That made me think of “duck and cover.” I asked Judy how that came into her history.

  She gave an involuntary glance at the door. “If I tell, you have to promise not to say.”

  “That’s okay: I promise.”

  “And shut the door. I don’t want those nurses listening in.”

  I shut the door and pulled the visitor’s chair over next to her.

  She looked from me to the door several times, deciding whether she was really ready to jump off the high dive, but she finally made the leap.

  “It was when I was seven, right after my birthday, when Mom had made these clothes for Ginger. I was playing with him. My mom came in shouting, ‘Put down the damned cat. You’re coming with me.’ She sounded so mad I was scared. I hugged Ginger tight to me and she grabbed him out of my arms and threw him onto the bed. I was screaming, I thought she’d killed him, it was terrifying.”

  Tears began welling at the corners of her eyes. For the first time I felt real pity for her.

  “We went in the car. I don’t know where, but it was a long way, out into the country. We went into this gas station, it was in the middle of nowhere, and this old lady was there. She and my mom, they spoke in German. My mom used to talk to me in German, and I could understand some, but I didn’t like it. The old lady asked about somebody and my mom said she was dead.

  “Next the old lady wanted to know who followed us, and Mom said, no one, I was careful, and then the old lady knelt down next to me. She looked me in the face and asked was I a girl who liked nature and stars or a girl who liked dolls and sewing.

  “I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what the right answer was, so I said, I loved my kitten and Mom had sewn beautiful clothes for him. Mom was teaching me to knit.

  “The old lady and Mom started having an argument, in German, it was about—” Judy stopped and eyed me suspiciously. “This is going to sound stupid, so you’d better not laugh at me.”

  “No, I won’t laugh,” I said gently. “There’s nothing ridiculous in a hard story and yours is quite painful. What were they arguing about?”

  “About knitting, I think of that sometimes and I think I can’t be remembering right. The German word is stricken, and sometimes I think they were speaking English and the old lady was stricken by something. But then another car drove up and this man got out and the three of them started having a terrible fight. The old lady was speaking German, but the old man spoke English.

  “He said something like, ‘I’m not doing anything else, so whatever it is you want, forget about it.’ And the lady said, ‘You are a weasel.’ I remembered that because of ‘Pop! Goes the Weasel.’ I had a windup clown that sang the song. They were so angry, I thought it was because of me, I was the child, did they think I shouldn’t have toys? I was afraid they were going to send me away, the way my mom got sent away, she was a little girl like me when she got sent away from her Oma. I thought they were mad because I was knitting and playing with toys. I was so scared, I said, ‘Pop! goes the weasel,’ out loud.

  “They all stared at me, which made me even scareder. I started to cry, which got my mother mad, and the man said the lady was doing something to me, a word I didn’t know even though it was in English, something about doctors, I think. I wondered if I had to go to a doctor because of talking out loud. The lady said, ‘I would if I could. If I could keep her from turning into a weasel like you, believe me I would risk everything, jail, everything.’

  “And he said, ‘That’s—’ I don’t know. Maybe he said, ‘an outrage.’ I was seven, they used a lot of words I didn’t know. The lady started saying, ‘Tell her, you and tell her, you signed on to duck and cover. That was a cruel lie that you and tell her made up.’

  “Mom was shouting, everyone was mad. The man from the gas station came out, so they all shut up, everyone got back in their cars. When we were in our car, Mom said, ‘You must never tell anyone. They will put us all in prison if you tell anyone. Don’t talk about duck and cover, don’t talk about tell her, they’ll know who you’re talking about.’”

  Judy started to cry again. I put an arm around her, awkwardly because of the IV lines and the wheelchair. Her sobbing on top of the stress of the interview was too much for her fragile body; she slumped over in my embrace, her heart monitor sending out a frantic warning.
I wheeled her chair to the bed, moving the IV lines with her.

  I found the nurse’s call button and pressed it, but Judy was so thin, so light, that I could lift her without help. A nurse arrived as I was laying a pillow under Judy’s feet.

  The nurse took over. “What happened?” she demanded.

  I shook my head. “She was talking to me about her childhood and I guess she was more worn-out than I realized—she suddenly collapsed.”

  The nurse felt Judy’s pulse, her eye on the monitor. “I’m paging the doctor, but you’d better leave: we need to get her heart stable again.”

  Doctors arrived, worried questions were asked, orders barked. I was pushed out of the room. I hoped Ginger the cat had survived Kitty throwing him across the room when Judy was seven. I hoped Judy survived my prying into her tormented past.

  37

  NUCLEAR UMBRELLA

  WHEN I LEFT JUDY, I felt almost as exhausted as she was. I climbed into Martin’s car, trying to imagine what to do next, but I couldn’t organize my mind. I tried to write up the substance of the conversation on a legal pad, but my arms felt heavy, unable to hold a pen.

  I tilted the seat as far back as it would go and shut my eyes. Focused on the breath going in and out, the way my mother always started music lessons.

  The morning that Kitty had driven Judy out to the country was the crux of the story. The old lady who’d asked whether Judy preferred stars or sewing—could that have been Martina, not dead after all? If so, why had she not been part of Kitty’s and Judy’s lives all along?

  Not much of a mother, that was how Lotty and Kitty had both characterized Martina Saginor. But if she’d survived the war, even a woman who cared more for protons than people would want to see her only child. At least, I hoped that was true. Besides, Martina hadn’t sounded like a melodramatic person, and the meeting in a remote gas station sounded melodramatic in the extreme.

  Perhaps it had been Martina’s student Gertrud Memler, the Nazi turned anti-nuclear activist. She apparently experienced a deep revulsion against her young Nazi self. Maybe she was seeking Kitty’s forgiveness for causing her mother’s death.

  Memler certainly regretted her weapons work, both in Nazi Austria and in post-war America. Her letters attacking America’s nuclear program meant the FBI was hunting her: she lived the last part of her life underground. If she wanted to meet Kitty, she had to do it secretly.

  “‘Tell her, that was a cruel lie that you and tell her made up.’” I repeated the words out loud and they suddenly changed meaning.

  Not “tell her,” but “Teller.” Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.

  I pulled the seat back up. Memler attacked Teller for Star Wars, she’d attacked him for the hydrogen bomb itself. She might well have attacked him for signing on to that chirpy civil defense lie, that we could survive a nuclear war if we ducked under our desks and covered our heads with our hands.

  Where I grew up, in South Chicago, we might vote Democrat, but we were a hundred percent behind our government and its nuclear weapons. The nuclear umbrella: I could remember the drawing Ms. Jostma put on the bulletin board in my sixth-grade social studies class. It showed a stern-looking Statue of Liberty holding a big black umbrella whose points were all hydrogen bombs. It was a terrifying picture, but all of us knew that the might of the American military kept us safe. Those ugly bombs were an umbrella that was as scary to the Communists as it was to my friends and me. Better dead than Red: my aunt Marie, Boom-Boom’s mother, often snapped those words at Gabriella.

  “You’ve never lived through a war, Marie,” my mother would say wearily. “When your mother and grandmother are murdered by people of one ideology, you don’t long for another ideology to save you.”

  Judy had heard the “old lady” and the man arguing. She knew part of the quarrel was about her, so when she heard “Tell her,” she thought they wanted to tell her something. And then her mother warned her that if she repeated what they’d told her, she’d be punished in a terrible way. For over forty years she had buttoned that fear deep inside her chest: you will go to prison if you talk about duck and cover, or the two people who quarreled over it.

  In the early part of the encounter, the older woman and Kitty had talked in German about someone being dead. Maybe it was Kitty telling Memler that Martina was dead. Or the other way round.

  What I had trouble with was the picture of someone moving from running a Nazi weapons slave camp to anti-nuclear activist. Some catastrophe must have hit her personally, although what could have been more devastating than war and its aftermath?

  I sent your mother off to the Sobibor death camp when we had no more use for her. Can you forgive me? Even someone less damaged than Kitty would be furious in such a moment. You took everything from me and now you also want my forgiveness?

  Just contemplating such a conversation made me clench my muscles. I got out of the car to get some air and stretch my aching arms. In the middle of Kitty and Memler’s argument, a man arrived. The older woman had called him a weasel for signing on with Teller.

  Dzornen. It had to have been Dzornen. Breen had signed on with Teller to help design the computers needed to create hydrogen bombs, but it was Dzornen whom Memler and Martina knew back in Vienna.

  The man had said, “I’m not doing anything else for you, so whatever it is you want, forget about it.” He’d brought her into America, that was one thing he’d done.

  That couldn’t be right. Would an Austrian Jew like Benjamin Dzornen have supported Martina’s Nazi student but left Martina to languish?

  On the other hand, that might be the crime that so burdened Julius Dzornen. When the Dzornens left Vienna, his wife, Ilse, probably thought she’d left Kitty and Martina behind forever. I imagined the hot fire of anger and jealousy burning in her, making her persuade herself that Kitty and Martina’s fate wouldn’t be so bad. She could have kept Benjamin from putting real muscle into finding a lab in America that would accept Martina. They might experience some privation, but Martina deserved that for having sex with Ilse’s husband. Ilse’s main feeling, as I imagined her, was relief: the fact that her husband was Kitty’s father was something she would never have to think about again.

  Then Kitty showed up at the Dzornens’ Chicago house. Kitty’s frenzied journey around the neighborhood, looking for Dzornen, demanding a response from him, would have brought that old wound right back to the surface.

  According to his sister Herta, Julius adulated Benjamin and was showing the potential for his father’s scientific gifts. Then bam! Kitty arrived and blew his vision of his father apart. Julius would have been about sixteen then, a vulnerable age. He went through the motions for a few years, but by the time he was twenty, he couldn’t even keep up the motions. He dropped out of school, dropped out of life.

  A security guard came over to me, wanting to know if I was lost or in trouble. I realized I’d been walking in circles around the parking lot in my agitation. “I’m just upset about the person I’ve been visiting.”

  The guard watched until I got back in the car and shut the door.

  The trouble with the scenario that I’d been imagining was it didn’t include the Breens. Julius had gone to Cordell Breen last night. Cordell had mocked him for letting this ancient crime consume him. That wasn’t why Julius had gone to Lake Forest, though: he’d arrived at the Breens’ furious because someone used his identity at the university library.

  My thinking was like a suitcase with bra straps and sweater sleeves sticking out the sides. Every idea I had left me with unpackable loose ends.

  I picked up my pen again and managed to scribble down Judy’s saga. I included her childhood memories, but also wrote down her more recent past, namely Martin’s arrival at the meth house. When he found the papers Judy had filched from her mother’s bureau drawer, he was beside himself. The papers should have come to him, and Judy should have
known they were important because they came from Ada Byron. The name meant nothing to Judy, and it meant nothing to me.

  I drove down to Lotty’s clinic. As usual on her office days, the place was packed, mostly with women and children. The handful of men looked awkward; what are we doing in this women’s space? their bodies seemed to ask.

  Ms. Coltrain, the clinic manager, greeted me with her usual calm. I gave her a note to hand in to Lotty. In a couple of minutes, Jewel Kim came out to get me, much to the annoyance of everyone else who was waiting. I smiled apologetically but followed Jewel into Lotty’s office. Lotty herself came in almost immediately, brusque, she didn’t like to be interrupted in the middle of seeing patients.

  “I never heard of an Ada Byron that I remember. Could she have been the person Kitty lived with in England?” Lotty asked.

  “Judy says their name was Painter. But she described a very strange event when she was seven.”

  Lotty looked at her watch. “Can’t this wait?”

  “Probably,” I said, “but I’m here now.”

  I told her about the drive to the country and the adults who’d caught her in their angry net. “Judy couldn’t describe the woman, just that she was old. Could it have been Martina?”

  “I don’t see how,” Lotty said, frowning. “She was sent from Terezín to Sobibor. That was a death march and there was no record of her in any of the refugee reports; Max checked his networks when Kitty first showed up here in 1956. Last week, he got the Holocaust Museum in Washington to search their records, too. There’s nothing about Martina Saginor among the Terezín or Sobibor survivors.”

  I told her my alternate idea, about Gertrud Memler. Lotty looked disgusted. “A Nazi slobbering with guilt twenty years too late and thinking everyone should bow down and accept her conversion? If Benjamin Dzornen worked with her, then he was truly despicable. The only one I pity is the son, Julius, carrying his father’s burden all this time.”

  Lotty picked up a chart from her desk. “If that’s all you wanted, this definitely could have waited until tonight.”