Dry Your Smile

by Morgan, Robin;

  In the little games she played with herself, this had been the next to last trip to the library phone books she was going to permit. It was ludicrous, futile, thinking someone might still be where he was eighteen years earlier—if he had been there to begin with at all. Like an alcoholic trying to clamber on the wagon, Julian now had a history of refusing to permit herself further self-indulgence. She first stopped searching for him after confiding the matter to her journal. But when Hope began showing an interest in her writing, Julian had shredded and flushed the journal pages. There was no evidence. Safety. There also was no exorcism of him remaining—on the page. So long as he had been confined there, Julian had earned a relative peace of mind. Now he was loose again, and the library trips started. Then, with only one more self-permitted trip to go, it was suddenly too late. She’d found the name. Now none of them could escape from any of them anymore.

  It was hot in the bus and the window was stuck. She felt her palms begin to sweat and stripped off her gloves, remembering how her hands had shaken the day she’d made the first call, in a British accent—pretending to be a researcher doing follow-up on Jewish war refugees—to confirm that this was indeed the same Dr. Traumstein who had emigrated from Austria in 1941. The very thought of that phone call, just before her eighteenth birthday, still could make her hands tremble now, a whole year later. How in hell can I carry off a face-to-face meeting, she worried, nervously smoothing out the cotton fingers of the gloves.

  The wife had answered. Julian hadn’t known that at the time; possibly the nurse-receptionist, she’d thought. But those well-contrived questions of the follow-up researcher from the mythical American-European Jewry League had amazingly enough elicited a fair amount of information—certainly sufficient to brood over for another year—until the next call, this last call, the fatal one, to make the appointment toward which the bus steadily sped her.

  “To whom am I speaking, please?” the British researcher’s voice had inquired.

  “This is Mrs. Traumstein, the Doctor’s wife. I also work in his medical practice, his office.”

  “I see. And may I ask how long you and the doctor have been married?”

  “Since 1941.”

  “1941?” Impossible.

  “Yes.”

  “I see. Any children, might I ask?”

  There was a pause so slight it might have been imagined by the British researcher.

  “One child.”

  Acknowledged. Acknowledged, after all. And how did the current Mrs. Traumstein cope with that for so many years?

  “And may I have your maiden name, please?”

  “I was born Weisstern, Minna Weisstern.”

  The accent, though faint, was there.

  “Born in Vienna, as well?”

  “Yes. The Doctor and I were childhood friends.”

  “And you emigrated in—?”

  “In 1941, the same year we were married.”

  Each answer blasted open further underground deposits of questions. But these were questions no American-European Jewry League volunteer could get away with asking. Besides, although she retained her cool British tone of inquiry, Julian had to get off the telephone quickly now, because more than the hand holding the receiver had begun to tremble.

  Who would have thought it might be so easy? Just say thank you for your cooperation and hang up the phone. Then sift for months, solipsistically, through the new information—which didn’t jell with information she had already lived with for years.

  So he had remarried. Yet he still acknowledged the child of the first marriage. Then why had he never—or had he?—tried to be a presence in that child’s life? Furthermore, the second wife, Minna, clearly knew about the child. Or did she think the child was dead? And how could they have been married a year before the child was born? Why hadn’t the League volunteer pressed for a bit more information about the child? Minna’s respect for authority seemed so entrenched that she might have gone on answering whatever questions were put to her.

  At times, Julian’s brain reeled down side paths that led to dead ends, swamps, precipice edges. What if Hope were not her biological mother? Nonsense: the genes showed themselves physically. What if David were a bigamist? What if Hope had told him the child had died, just as she had told the child that he was dead? A rat in a laboratory maze, Julian’s mind traced and retraced every path, no matter how irrational. Always the end returned her to the starting place.

  The riddle goaded her on, depleted her, drove her to desperate invocations of peace. Put it out of your mind, she’d chant to herself. Forget it. So she’d landed a job, freed herself of her virginity with Laurence, found an apartment, moved. Surely sufficient rites of passage? Forget the other. What will matter in your life is what you make of your life, not your ancestors, ethnicities, superstitious genetic influences. You can be anything you want to be. Then she would remember who had taught her that. And she would enter the labyrinth again, the chthonic place of mystery, terror, longing, nausea—the only place she now felt truly at home.

  Julian glanced at her watch. The delicate gold face—Hope’s gift for her eighteenth birthday—announced they were only twenty minutes away from Storrs. This was happening. She was approaching the core of the labyrinth.

  She brushed a piece of lint from the jade-green wool suit in which she had carefully costumed herself, and readjusted the collar of the white blouse. Stocking seams straight, she could feel them. Black high-heel pumps, new, still unscuffed, still uncomfortable. Beige gloves in lap, matching beige purse. The well-dressed young woman, self-contained, prepared for anything.

  She had lied to Hope, of course; the genes showed themselves more than physically. She had told her mother not to phone as usual at the literary agency or at the Yorkville apartment because she was taking the day off to spend it with Laurence, knowing that Hope—still enranged about their affair—would never phone at his loft. She had lied to her boss, claiming that a family illness necessitated her absence. She had lied to the wife-receptionist in order to make the appointment. Although, she told herself, that had been more of a hint than a total falsehood. But its being a hint depended on how valid Hope’s stories about him had been. Lies teetering on a foundation of truth? Or the reverse? At this moment, everyone concerned had been lied to, everyone concerned thought Julian was elsewhere than where she was. At this moment, only Julian Travis, riding in a bus somewhere in Connecticut, knew who she was going to meet.

  Think tactically, she had directed herself. Plan it; stage, light, costume it; it’s the only way you can get through it. He was a classics scholar, Hope had said, and he loved Greek drama in particular. He’d refuse to see you, Hope had said, he wants no part of you how stupid can you be can’t you figure that out after all this time. Calculate. How can you make an appointment, be assured you get to see him? Certainly not warn him it will be Surprise Daddy. Hope just might have been telling the truth. But can you surprise him totally? The man was a concentration-camp victim, an escapee, a refugee. How merciless can you get? What if he has an on-the-spot heart attack from your little surprise? What if you murder your own father out of curiosity? Plan it. Stage it. Do what you know how to do.

  Give him at least a hint, a half-lie but a clue—the way you have lived with hints and clues all your life. Something with wit. If he’s as smart as you think he is, as educated as you’ve been told he is, as obsessed with his child as you’ve dreamt he is—then he’ll figure it out. He’ll know and be prepared for the young woman who walks through his office door in time for her 2 P.M. appointment on October first, 1961.

  So she had made the second call. And again got Minna. This time Julian wore a French accent—but a light one, to confuse things safely. She wished to make an appointment to discuss her child’s health problem even before bringing the child in for an examination. Why? Well, the child was, uh, fragile. She had not expected to be asked who referred her to Dr. Traumstein. It threw her. But the years of training, rehearsals, live television perfo
rmances when if something went wrong you improvised, carried her through.

  She tossed out a made-up name: an old friend who lived in Connecticut had praised Dr. Traumstein highly. Since she herself had only recently moved to New York from California and had no pediatrician of her own, why no it wasn’t too far to travel an hour or so to find a really good doctor.

  But, ventured Minna, the name of the referrer was unfamiliar, not one of the Doctor’s patients.

  “Ah, yes, but of course. My friend has recently remarried and I never can remember his name. I always knew her by her widowed name. Doubtless she is registered with your office by her new husband’s name, you see.”

  Minna saw. Minna, faithful to her role as a walk-on character unwittingly furthering the plot, helpfully made the appointment. In the name of Atreus. First name or initial, please?

  “E.”

  If he knew his classics, then.

  If he remembered.

  If the House of Atreus put him on alert.

  If the name “E. Atreus” snapped into place unerringly as the final missing piece of the puzzle; if the magic words opened a door to a path that curved inevitably around the last turn of the labyrinth he too might have been treading for almost two decades; if Sophocles and Euripides were still read by him for pleasure; if he were brilliant or merely cared, if he were vigilant or even wary, if, if. Then he would not be surprised. Then he would be well warned that no one in the world but his daughter would be appearing in time to keep the appointment of Elektra Atreus.

  And if not? If he were stupid or unsubtle, uneducated or forgetful, complacent, dense? If he hadn’t ever cared at all?

  In that case—some Sophoclean chorus intoned softly inside Julian’s proscenium brain, an ancient menace of revenge hissing through its sibilant innocence—in that case, let him be surprised.

  She was suddenly sleepy. Absurd to be sleepy now, when they were entering the outskirts of this quiet New England town—neat lawns, tidy white houses, windowbox nasturtiums, trees already flaring gold and crimson with autumn. It was as if the years of lying awake were only now taking their toll. Years rebuilding his face from one faded photograph, decoding, tracking him down—his daughter the post-war Gestapo. Years of Elektra living under Clytemnestra’s ruthlessly loving hand, hunching at the palace gate on guard for the encounter that would set in motion a final avenging of her father’s honor, the meeting that would at last tell her who she was. Suspense shriveled to boredom, curiosity to indifference, as those years drained out of her mind. All she wanted was to pass the stop, let it slide past the window; to stay on the bus so its motion could rock her to insensibility. Stay on the bus and never go back, not to him, not to her, not to any of them. Stay on the bus and get off someplace else. Become someone else.

  “This isn’t me,” Julian whispered to the gold watch-face, “I didn’t write this. I don’t want to live this. It’s all the fault of the script.”

  But the bus stopped. She rose, tottering slightly on the new heels, and straightened her spine as if she were about to make an entrance.

  And so you are, she added silently. You will get down this aisle—there—and off this bus—there. Now you will look around for a taxi. There’s one, that’s it. Now you will give the address. There.

  This was happening. She was on her way to meet him.

  The taxi reached its destination with alarming speed. Two blocks to the right, a turn, three blocks to the left, compacted labyrinth, and the houses became larger, more imposing, the front lawns more lush, the azalea bushes luxuriant even in autumn. There was no mistaking the house. She sensed it ahead just as the taxi began slowing down. The corner house. There, in polished brass swinging from two posts on the lawn, his shingle. The Doctor’s House.

  Not the gates of Mycenae, but formidable all the same. The Doctor’s House differentiated itself from the uniform white of neighboring homes on the block. This one was painted a soft gray; the sun-porch around the back half visible from the side, glass-enclosed for year-round use. A back-lit stained-glass panel—imported, from the looks of its quality, possibly an antique—had been mounted in the front door: opalescent water-lilies undulating against a milky green background. The block, the neighborhood, the town itself might be “suburb,” but the Doctor’s House proclaimed itself “Old World Europe.”

  Julian tried to ingest and process the moment as she paid the cab driver. Twitches of emotion—excitement, fear, urgency—were now so continual in their shifts that she could barely separate them one from another as they jerked through her puppet self. But there was no time to wait them out. She didn’t dare linger too long on the sidewalk. It wouldn’t do to appear suspicious until the moment itself. The twitches danced their puppet up the front walk. She was still fearful of telegraphing herself, that her identity would be discovered before she got to him—that the audience would then be snatched away, the visitor rejected before she reached the inner chamber of the throne room.

  The doorbell of this home-office didn’t buzz like most American doorbells; it chimed deeply, echoing from somewhere inside the bowels of the house. A respectable wait. No answer. Julian pressed the bell again, watching her gloved hand begin to tremor slightly. Control yourself, she thought. What is this—stage-fright, like a baby? Had she—or Minna—got the date wrong, or the time? Had all those damned fake accents confused the facts of when and how? Had David read the Atreus clue too clearly, and summarily cleared out rather than face his Elektra? Was he even now hiding inside the house, refusing to grant her admittance?

  The door swung open. A plump, dark-haired woman in her early fifties stood there, offering a tentative smile.

  “Yes?”

  “I have an appointment with Dr. Traumstein?” The statement came out as an appeal. Correct the tone. Needs more authority. And don’t forget the French flavor.

  “Ah. You are Mrs. Ahtrayoos?”

  “Miss Atreus, yes.” Stupid, Julian. You’re a Mrs., you’re the mother of a child, he’s a pediatrician, remember? And why repronounce the name more accurately? Maybe nobody got the clue just because of Minna’s mispronunciation. Because this, definitely, was Minna. The “other woman.” The woman who’d displaced Hope. The stepmother, wickedness and all. No mistaking the voice, or, for that matter, the type.

  David Traumstein was in one thing, then, consistent. He had a weakness for a particular type—the Doctor’s Woman. Short, zaftig, with dark hair and large eyes. Minna and Hope could have been sisters, Julian thought. But she couldn’t avoid noticing the milder quality of this woman, an almost deliberately projected pliancy, perhaps required to conceal the strength of the woman who had won. That vibrant, often offensive, sometimes electrifying energy Hope radiated was lacking here. Where Hope would confront and defy, Minna would appease and manipulate. Where Hope would manipulate, Minna would concede. And where Hope would (hard to imagine) concede—which would be done with privately articulated vows of vengeance—Minna would surrender tractably. This was a more unsavory, because more genteel, version of Julian’s mother. Even the physical features, Julian thought with some satisfaction, were coarser: the eyes not so lustrous, the hair not so fine. The skin was ruddy, unlike Hope’s cream alabaster flesh. The voice was a shade too high-pitched, too cheerful in its hausfrau poise. Julian, following the jelloid hip-motion of Minna down the Persian-carpeted dark foyer, felt startled to discover in herself such unforeseen loyalty to Hope. Nonetheless, she couldn’t help thinking that David Traumstein had settled for a Roman copy of the Greek original.

  Minna ushered her into the waiting room. It was Modern American Doctor, an abrupt departure from what little she had been permitted to glimpse of the rest of the house. This room might have been moved intact to any twenty-storey “professional building” of doctors and dentists: pastel yellow walls, the wifenursereceptionist’s desk toward which Minna homed like a self-satisfied pigeon, a tweed-cloth-covered sofa on which sat a tired-looking woman not much older than Julian, with a toddler asleep on her lap. Th
e requisite coffeetable displayed copies of Time, Newsweek, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s. These were joined by a stack of pamphlets: “How to Raise a Healthy Child,” “What Every Mother Should Know” (in a pink cover), and “Fathers Can Help, Too” (in a blue one). A vase of silk flowers stood on Minna’s gray metal desk, where that pudgy dovelet now sat, proffering a clipboard and pencil at Julian with her ladylike menial air.

  “You will please to fill out the information form, Mrs., uh—”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Julian swallowed a tiny bubble of panic when she glanced at the form. Mother’s name. Father’s name. Date of birth. Hers? Or her imaginary child’s? Medical history. But the Greek chorus remained steadfast inside her head, swaying slightly in rhythm to their chant. It’s a standard form. Make up any answers you like. He’ll have his answers soon enough. They don’t matter. What matters is how close you are now, all but inside the door, that door, there, which must lead to his office. You’re inside the gates, now get inside that door. She scribbled her answers rapidly and handed the board back. Minna disappeared with a courtier-like scuttle through the door to the inner sanctum.

  Julian sat down on the sofa, smiled nervously at the young mother, and looked at the sleeping child.

  “Not seriously sick, I hope?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I sure hope not,” the woman sighed. “I don’t have an appointment, I’m just waiting for an opening. I sure hope not,” she repeated. “I’ve got a newborn at home—my mom’s with him now—and he’s had colic. I dunno how I can handle two sick kids at once.”

  Julian nodded, trying to act sympathetic but feeling a twinge of guilt that she was not about to offer her own appointment time so that this woman and child could go first. As it was, every second of waiting for Minna to emerge seemed interminable.