“The gymnastic team event in 1960 was dominated by the Russians. There was no storybook victory for Germany, I’m afraid. But something else happened which in some ways had a certain logic to it, but in others was quite remarkable.
“The gymnastics took place in the evenings in the historic Terme di Caracalla, a former Roman bath. One evening Trudi found herself sitting next to a group of young Americans watching the beam exercises. They were cheering a little Czech girl named Eva Bosakova, who was performing so brilliantly that she looked to be snatching the gold medal from the Russians, and so preventing a clean sweep in the women’s events. When the result was announced, and Bosakova was declared the winner, the young man sitting next to Trudi jumped up in excitement and tipped half a bag of popcorn into her lap. As so often happens in such incidents, it started a friendship between them. He told her that he and his companions were members of the U.S. track team, and he presented her with a ticket for the next day’s events in the stadium.
“I have never discovered whether the young American became a medal winner in the event, because Trudi concealed his identity from the one person with whom she discussed these things. I do know that when his competition was over and the team manager no longer checked his movements around the Olympic Village from hour to hour, he met Trudi and they went out together, discovering the beauties of Rome. I am speculating now, but I imagine that to Trudi, who had so often heard her mother speak with pride about that short weekend in Bavaria with the handsome sportsman chosen by the Reich as her Liebhaber, the friendship with an Olympic athlete must have seemed intensely romantic. And it may be that when she gave herself to him in her hotel bedroom, she was exhilarated by the knowledge that she, too, was privileged to enjoy the embrace of a superman.
“Whether she made a conscious decision to conceive his child, I do not know. I can only say with certainty that she was not ignorant about birth control. As a schoolgirl in Germany and in the States, she would have received a comprehensive sex education, and her mother would certainly have talked to her about the methods in use.”
“But she had a child, I guess,” said Armitage.
“Goldengirl?” said Valenti.
“She was born in the Norwalk State Hospital, Los Angeles, on June 6, 1961,” Serafin said in confirmation.
“When did you first hear of her?” Dryden asked. Determined still to have no part in promoting the girl, he had found himself becoming increasingly interested in Serafin’s narrative. A question or two didn’t commit him to anything.
The doctor leaned back in his chair, pausing, Dryden suspected, not to recollect the date — because the details of the story had come so readily to his lips — but to take the measure of the interest it had evoked. “In 1964,” he answered. “I mentioned earlier that I studied in Vienna. I was engaged in a research project there during 1963, on the influence of heredity on human physique. I set myself the task of comparing the skeletal proportions of one generation of females with their offspring at maturity. To achieve this, I had to locate accurate data obtained about twenty-five years previously, trace the progeny of the women concerned and measure them. I decided to use the data obtained by the medical team at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Perhaps you recall the sequence in the official film of the Games when hundreds of women gymnasts were shown moving in perfect co-ordination in a display in the stadium. With their customary attention to detail, the Germans recorded the measurements of two hundred of those women. I estimated that I might be successful in tracing about half this number, of whom perhaps a third might have given birth to daughters. I needed more to achieve a statistically valid sample, and to my great good fortune, I also found anthropometrical data for each of the forty-two women in the official German team. The fact that they had achieved distinction by representing their country was likely to prove helpful in the process of contacting them and their children. Actually, I found twenty-nine of them, which wasn’t bad after twenty-seven years, including World War II.
“One of those I did not meet, of course, was Gretchen, who had died four years previously. However, I succeeded in tracing five of her teammates from that successful octet who won the gold medal for combined gymnastics. One of them had been a close friend of Gretchen’s, actually attending the same Napola in Lower Saxony. They had corresponded right through the war and for some years after. She it was who told me of Gretchen’s pride in being selected to participate in the Nazi eugenics program, and of the birth of Trudi. After Gretchen emigrated to the States she lost touch with her, except that she received a Christmas card one year bearing a Santa Barbara postmark, but no address. It amused me that one of the group I called ‘my 242 Frauen’ had found her way to my own state, to a place, in fact, less than two hours’ drive from my home in Bakersfield. Unfortunately the research grant didn’t stretch to trans-atlantic trips, so I had to put a small cross beside Gretchen’s name on my list.
“I didn’t forget her, however. The story intrigued me. After all, there can’t be many women about who will admit to having served the Third Reich in the way she did. After I had presented my thesis, I took a little time off to check the story. In the university library at Vienna, I found a sports almanac listing the names of all Germans who had competed internationally in scores of different sports in the pre-war years. I looked for the names of men who had competed in the modern pentathlon. There were twenty-three listed as full internationals between the years 1924 and 1936, which I considered the likeliest span that would include Gretchen’s SS captain. With a list of those names I traveled to Berlin, to the American sector, where the SS records captured at the end of the war were still held. In the document depository there, I explained the purpose of my mission — although I will admit that I gave the impression that the information was vital to my thesis.
“They were extremely helpful. Some of the records had been destroyed by the SS in the last hours before the Allied occupation, but I was able to consult a catalogue of the names of officers, and compare them with my list of pentathletes. Eventually, I had eliminated every name but two: a Manfred Schmidt and a Wolfgang Meyer. Either or both could have been pure coincidence; the names are really quite common in Germany, and the SS catalogue was like a telephone directory. Schmidt was listed as a captain, Meyer a colonel. I was permitted to examine the dossiers for both, including the RuSHA R-card, on which assessments of physique, racial origin and personality are recorded. Schmidt’s I put aside after scanning it quickly; if I can recollect it now, he was born in 1918, whereas my Manfred Schmidt had competed for Germany against Sweden in 1934, which would have made him only sixteen at the time — practically impossible in an event requiring such versatility. But as soon as I opened Meyer’s file I noticed that he was born in 1910 and had died before the war’s end, on a date of considerable significance: February 14, 1945.” Serafin stopped, raising his eyebrows for some reaction from his listeners.
“St. Valentine’s day?” Valenti thoughtfully suggested.
“True — a fact that had not occurred to me,” said Serafin, without enthusiasm. “It lends a certain irony to the story, if that is what you had in mind. No, gentlemen, February 14, 1945, was the date of the British RAF bombing which devastated the city of Dresden, killing at least thirty-five thousand people, among them, if what Gretchen had heard was true, her SS captain. Wolfgang Meyer had attained the rank of colonel, but it was quite possible that in the five years since that weekend in Bavaria he had been promoted to colonel. So I studied the document with gathering excitement, and there, below his personal data and photograph, was the detail that confirmed the story I had heard: Gretchen’s name, and beside it the date: November 12, 1939. In different writing someone had added another date, August 10, 1940, and the letter “W,” for Weib, the German word for female.
“I looked at Colonel Meyer’s picture with interest. He was very close to the Aryan ideal — fair-haired, with a high forehead, light eye-brows and strong features, a sufficiently handsome face to impress any girl meet
ing him for the first time. I could almost have understood Gretchen’s hero worship of the man if I had not also noticed the names of five other women on the R-card, with dates beside them. It seems the colonel sired three female children and two males to the glory of the Third Reich. One copulation had been unproductive; even the SS could not guarantee total success in such activities. I felt only revulsion when I looked at the photograph again.
“After my thesis was accepted by the university in the spring of 1964, I returned to the States. There was a tremendous backlog to attend to in my work, as you will appreciate, quite apart from the claims of my wife, who was a doctor and had been busy enough in my absence, but had a right to some of my time now I was home. One way and another, it wasn’t until midsummer that I got around to thinking about Gretchen and her daughter again. The story still intrigued me, though, and one afternoon in August, I drove to Santa Barbara and tried to trace them. I began by looking for the name in the phone book. It wasn’t there, so I tried the Chamber of Commerce in East Carrillo Street, where they produced a directory of the kind used for mailing sales literature. Again I drew a blank. I went to the City Library, where they got out an electoral roll for me to look at, but still no luck. That night as I drove home along the Cuyama Valley, I resolved to forget the whole thing.”
“But you didn’t, eh, Doc?” said Valenti with a knowing dip of the head.
“It was pure chance that brought the issue to life again,” said Serafin. “Two months went by, and one Sunday evening in October, while my wife was watching something that didn’t interest me on TV, I was thumbing absently through an old copy of Time. A feature about the safety standards of bathing beaches caught my attention. I don’t know why — the subject wouldn’t interest me nine times out of ten. Well, this piece drew attention to the havoc a freak wave can sometimes cause on an apparently safe beach. In particular, it mentioned an incident the previous May on Huntington State Beach, Los Angeles. On a placid Saturday afternoon when the surfers were complaining that the sea was too calm to ride, a huge breaker rose up from the sea in seconds and ripped along the beach, carrying numerous bathers, including children, out of their depth in its undertow. The lifeguards did their best, but five people lost their lives, including a young airline stewardess who had gone to the rescue of her two-year-old daughter. The lifeguards picked the child up, but the mother was drowned.”
“Trudi?” said Dryden.
Serafin nodded. “I recognized the surname, you see. I had spent so long looking for it in those lists in Santa Barbara that it leaped out of the page at me. Next morning I went to the Los Angeles Times building, looked up the file, and got the whole story. It gave Trudi’s address and age and the year of her arrival in California, and there couldn’t be any doubt that this was Gretchen’s daughter. I visited the apartment Trudi had occupied, and spoke to the young married woman living next door, who had formed a friendship with her. From her, I learned about the death of Gretchen, the affair in Rome and the way Trudi had brought up her child, giving up her job with TWA until the little girl was old enough to attend a day nursery. It was a story that moved me deeply, and I felt I couldn’t leave it there. I asked for the name of the children’s home where the child was being cared for, and next afternoon I drove out there with my wife. It was a place called Tamarisk Lodge, just north of Ventura.
“The matron-in-charge listened to us sympathetically and agreed to let us see the child with others in the playroom. That, gentlemen, was when I first saw Goldengirl, three years old, tragically orphaned, standing alone, half hidden behind a curtain, hugging a grimy rag doll dressed in the costume of a Bavarian peasant girl.
“In reply to my inquiries, the matron told us that the child appeared to be adjusting as well as you could expect in such a case. It seemed likely that she would soon be adopted. In fact, a couple had practically arranged an adoption that had just fallen through on account of some drinking misdemeanor of the husband’s that had come to light. The adoption authorities are very careful about such things. Well, after a few minutes the matron picked up the child and brought her over to us. You may imagine the interest with which I looked at her, this representative of the generation succeeding the ones I had studied for my thesis. Moreover, nobody — not even my wife — knew, as I did, each link in the remarkable chain of circumstances that had contributed to that little girl’s genetic profile. Let me make it unequivocally clear that I am opposed to the idea of selective procreation. That is not my notion of eugenics, gentlemen. But when events had contrived to produce a child whose lineal origins were as distinguished as Goldengirl’s, I would have been a poor physiologist if I had not taken an interest in her.
“I could see at once that she had inherited an excellent physique. I would have put her skeletal age — the indicator of physiological maturity in children most commonly used — at four or five months beyond her chronological age, and that, in a child of under four years, is a significant discrepancy. Her muscularity, too, was well-developed. It crossed my mind that the members of the SS who arranged Gretchen’s weekend in Bavaria all those years before would have looked with approval at this young recipient of the precious Aryan genes.
“Before we got home that night, my wife said she knew the directions my thoughts were taking, though I had given no hint of them to her. She, for her part, had been charmed by the little girl and shed some private tears for her. We were childless ourselves and I was in my mid-forties, but we talked over the idea of adoption. She was quite prepared to give up her medical career, so I knew that this was no whim on her part. The more we discussed it, the more obvious it seemed. In the morning I went to the authorities and got the papers to fill in. Adoption isn’t easy to arrange, particularly if you have set your hearts on a certain child, but my wife was very well known locally as a doctor, and I think what the Bakersfield people said must have carried some weight with the adoption agency in Los Angeles. Early in 1965, the formalities were completed, and Trudi’s child became ours.”
Dr. Serafin looked keenly at his listeners, as if gauging their reaction to this development in his narrative.
One, at least, hoped his private thoughts were not written too plainly on his face. It seemed to Dryden that Serafin had acquired the child primarily as an extension of his researches. He might be misjudging the man, but everything he had said so far about his adopted daughter sounded more clinical than paternal.
Chapter 4
“You will have noticed that I have not mentioned the child’s name yet,” said Serafin, looking steadily at Dryden. “I shall explain why. It was an unusual one for a girl: Dean.” He spelled it. “To tell you the truth, neither my wife nor I particularly liked it. Whatever Trudi’s reason was for choosing it — wasn’t there a Hollywood cult hero of that name young people of the fifties revered? — we accepted that it would have been psychologically damaging to change it when the child became ours. But after a year, before she started her formal education, we embellished it a little by calling her Goldine, which she liked.”
“I like it, too,” Valenti announced. “Sounds zippy — Goldine the Goldengirl. Can’t you just see that on the newsstands?”
“That was not a factor we took into consideration,” Dr. Serafin flatly replied. “She led the life of any other girl of school age in residential Bakersfield.”
Dryden frowned slightly. “Didn’t the school discover her ability in sports? You said in the film she has never competed with other girls.”
“Correct,” said Serafin with a sharp glance. “If you listened carefully, I said she was of school age, not that she attended school. We arranged for her to be tutored at home.”
“Why was that?”
“Because we wanted to be quite certain she had the best opportunities possible for mental and physical development. As people in our profession do, we had ideas on nutrition, exercise and so on, from which Goldine could derive only a partial benefit if she attended school. At home, we were able to ensure that her diet had the
correct balance and that the physical demands made upon her matched her capabilities. She was a gifted child, you see. Gifted, I mean, in physical respects. But like the child of very high intelligence, the athletically precocious child needs a form of education that makes demands, presents challenges. The physical education provided in schools for children of her age would have been unsuitable. She would have become bored and very likely put on excess weight.”
Dryden felt increasingly hostile to Serafin’s rationale, but he couched his next question as blandly as he was able. “Did you give any consideration to her social development?”
Serafin said without altering his expression, “Do I detect a note of censure, Mr. Dryden? Yes, we took steps to see that she met other children of her own age. She attended ballet classes regularly from the age of six. She also went swimming — not at the beaches, which might have been traumatic — but at the municipal swimming pools. I believe she made a number of friends there. I don’t think you would regard her as socially deprived, would you, Melody?”
“Deprived?” Melody’s eyebrows peaked. “No way.”
“Thank you,” said Serafin. “My account is now reaching the point where some of those present enter the picture, you see. Up to the age of sixteen, Goldine had the upbringing I have briefly described. Two years ago, the situation was complicated by certain differences between my wife and me — they didn’t concern Goldine, except in their upshot, which was that we separated. My wife now lives in Jamaica, but the details are unimportant here. At about the same time, I arranged for Goldine to run some private time trials on the Bakersfield College track. I had monitored her progress since she was a small child, but her running that evening was truly as you described it earlier, Mr. Dryden. In a word, a revelation. It was evident to me that with the advice of a first-class coach and proper training facilities, she was capable in a year or two of representing this country at the Olympics. There was even the possibility of emulating her grandmother and winning a gold medal.
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