“She said—she said you’d crawled through the sewers of Europe to survive, that was her phrase. She believed that. She’s always believed that was the reason for … that explained your … callousness. My god, lies upon lies, endlessly. You lied to Hope.”
Again the aristocratic shrug. “I did not tell her those things. She had her own preconceived notions. She assumed many things. I simply refrained from telling her otherwise. It seemed kinder. And she was, for a crucial period of time, my lifeline.”
“My god,” Julian murmured again. “It’s stunning. You really are an incredibly cruel man. You ‘simply refrained from telling her otherwise.’ My god.”
“And why should I have told her otherwise?” His voice never rose, but the accent became more clipped. “Your mother believed what she wanted to believe, what they all wanted to believe. She believed it even before she met me; it was like one of your pre-cut mass-produced American coats that she slipped over my shoulders when I walked off the ship that January. She never bothered to ask whether I liked it or not—but my clothes had always been custom-tailored, you see. All the American Jews pitied us. And some of us were indeed pitiable. But every one of us needed that pity. To survive, begin new lives. Many, even most, who came here were not only pitiable, they were contemptible—less than human. Long before the Nazis, they had been like this. The stock your mother comes from: peasants, shtetl dwellers, peddlers, ghetto inhabitants. Little or no education. Little or no culture.”
“My mother’s father was a rabbi. He—”
“You asked. So then be answered. To American Jews, already in their cushioned nests, all European Jews who were war victims were the same—even worse—than their own immigrant ancestors had been before coming to the so-called New World. We were all of course scrawny, hungry, filthy, desperate, groveling, half-crushed insects. Objects which were pitiable—and a little disgusting. It let them feel how far they themselves had come from being what we still were. The Infanta and her dwarf—for contrast. Ghetto mentalities, Yiddish-speakers, whiners, mussulmen—the skeletoid walking dead of the camps—that’s what we all were supposed to be. The world’s most reliable victims: the first and last resort for persecution. Greasy, itinerant, superstitious. Am I to help it if your mother projected her family background onto mine?”
“Her family—”
“And tell her otherwise?” he snorted. “The background differences, yes. They were evident, anyway. Also, I could not always stop myself from speaking aloud the … enormity of my loss. Not people, not family, no. But an entire way of life. You could never understand that. A rhythm, a pace, of generations. Certain rituals—the opening night of the Philharmonic, the sound one’s footsteps made on the marble of the Kunsthistorische, summers in Bad Ischl, winters on ski holidays in the Austrian Alps, the spring excursion into Grinzing to sample the new wines … the young Schwartzkopf in concert the first time she dared attempt ‘Im Abendrot’ … the Ringstrasse, the Stadtpark … these things mean nothing to you. To us they were our life, leisurely, graceful, a commonplace beauty that gave form to the seasons. My great-grandfather was a surgeon-captain in the Austrian army—and he was not the first nor the last Jew to hold such a rank. My family was Austrian, you understand? Even more than that—Viennese. All of us—architects, surgeons, solicitors, professors. And the women—accomplished, elegant, able to draw nicely, to play at least one instrument, to dance charmingly, to preside over a well-kept home … These things I could not stop myself from saying aloud to Hope, as if I were mourning Kaddish like a devout simpering synagogue fanatic—which no one in my family ever was.”
Julian stared at him. He rendered her a brief laugh, at ease in his bitterness.
“What little I did tell your mother only made me more pitiable in her American Jewish eyes. Lo how the mighty have fallen. I could hear it in her voice, suffused with a love only the powerful can afford. But destroy all of her pre-cut illusions? If she had known that I never, how you said it, crawled through the sewers of Europe, never was in or heroically escaped from a camp, would I then have been a sufficient victim? I think not, my dear. And there was something more. I had my pride. Which no one—not the peasant Jews of Europe, not Hitler’s lack of discrimination, not your mother—could take from me. With that pride I survived. Not a crude pride of endurance, like the Orthodox peasant scurrying around beneath Cossack hooves. A pride of blood, a long line—”
“So you not only didn’t love her. You loathed her.”
“Oh, really. Such youthful excesses of language, such psychologizing. I was fond of her. Grateful, even. I could perhaps have remained a friendly acquaintance, except that—”
“A friendly acquaintance with your deserted ex-wife, the mother of your child? A friendly acquaintance—”
He rose to his feet, and for one terrifying second she thought he would order her from the room. But he turned, paced around his desk chair, and stared out the window. When he spun again to face her, she was confused by his expression—what seemed a clumsy encounter between compassion and his features.
“Julian,” he began softly, “you came here seeking some revelation, some happy ending to all your girlish fantasies. When you have lived longer, you may understand that there are no happy endings. But there are revelations. Some of them by their nature preclude the happy ending.”
She folded the gloves in her lap and forced her hands to lie perfectly still.
“I do understand,” she said evenly. “I’m not afraid.”
“That is good. It is best to not be afraid of the facts. So then. I will take you at your word that you wish to know what there is to know.”
He returned to his chair and sat down. She waited. All the years of waiting densified into this moment.
“So then,” he repeated. “Your mother is not my ex-wife. Minna is not my new wife. Minna is my only wife. Your mother and I were never married.”
Certain statements fall, through stratospheres of shock, with the gravity of the inevitable, as if always intuited, merely delayed en route to their eventual doom of confirmation.
“Minna and I have known one another since we were children in Vienna. Our families were old friends. We grew up together. We knew someday we would be married. We were already betrothed when the war came. She went to England, I came here. As soon as I could, I sent for her to join me.”
“Did Hope know this?”
“No. That was not possible to tell her. You see, at first it seemed not necessary. Then, later, after I came to understand that she had been making all these plans in her mind—well, I still needed her. Then she claimed she was pregnant. So it became unavoidable not to tell her. She was of course upset. Her family was … hysterical. That I should marry her.”
“And you? You weren’t ‘upset’? You felt no pity for her?”
“My dear child. We came from two different universes. We really had nothing in common. She wanted what little I still possessed: the education, the culture—and also the suffering. It would never have worked. I suggested she find an abortion, but she would not hear of it. It was her own decision. She had miscalculated, that someone whose world had been destroyed by the coarsest of people for the coarsest of reasons and through the coarsest of means, could still feel—pity.”
“So you just—abandoned her.”
“That is harsh. I suggested she not have the child. When she refused, what else could I do? At her request—her pleading—I did see the child. I know she thought I would be so moved by this monumental event that I would be overcome with love for both her and her offspring and—well, the happy ending. It was, instead, an unpleasant occasion, as I have said.”
“And that was it? You never tried to connect with the child again?”
“It was too strained, too difficult. I had my own life to think about, to begin again from fresh. There was no way I could keep track of—”
“Actually, David, I would have been a hard child to lose track of. You can’t possibly be unaware that at a certain p
oint I was the most famous small person in this country?”
“I heard something about that. But I rarely watch the television, you see. And after all, it was none of my business. Even Hope, by that time, would not have welcomed my interest. The name had been changed—even from her own maiden name—since you had never borne my name. And, again, you see, I had my pride—”
“Yes. Your pride.” Stung, she began to speak rapidly. “I’m beginning to understand. Tell me, don’t your bastards carry the same bloodcells, the same genes of such pride?”
Had his expression not been so controlled, she might almost have imagined that he winced.
“I really can’t say, my dear. One doesn’t—”
“Follow them up. So how would you know, indeed. Or is it that you follow up the sons but not the daughters? Surely not those from peasant stock.”
“Ach, my dear Julian,” he laughed, “so you are the young radical, too. A television star, and also a revolutionary. How very American. Like President Kennedy. But perhaps that is more excusable in someone like you, only twenty years old. I too was once going to change the world. I almost became a communist, you know? It was the chic thing for Vienna intellectuals between the wars. Such fervor! Such self-righteous anger!” He chuckled, inviting her in as an accomplice in his bonhomie.
“But once in this country, you settled into the comfortable life of the bourgeoisie. You got over all that youthful idealism, I gather?” She heard her own sharp parry with the question, but her interior self was alive to something else he had said, something that had not even been aimed at her but which had penetrated fatally and was coursing through her veins, an embolism in the blood.
“Once in this country, I determined to survive and build a life here. I knew that even after the war would be over, Vienna—my Vienna, as I and my family had experienced it—would never be the same. I’ve been back to visit, naturally, many times since. But to be ‘repatriated’ and ‘recompensed’ like the merchant class, that was not for me. And today, well, there is a McDonald’s hamburger-stand not far from the Belvedere Gardens. Not for me. No, I determined to survive here. More than survive—to prevail. That is why I changed my field from surgery to pediatrics. Caring for young life in this world … it seemed … positive. When I came to this country, you see, I learned that my medical education—the finest, in the world’s most honored medical city—was not good enough for raw young America, so self-confident of its own destiny. It would have taken more years of being dependent on and possessed by your mother, to take the required additional courses and board examinations for surgery, my old specialty, than for pediatrics.”
“And the latter was also easier, perhaps?”
“Easier? Oh my dear child—”
“Please don’t call me that.” The embolism still groping through the veins, approaching the brain. What was it he’d said, what?
“My apologies. It is a manner of speech. But ‘easy’? Do you know, can you imagine, what it is to try and cure a child scientifically, despite the ignorances and superstitions of its mother? Her possessiveness, her lack of judgment? Her excessive alarm over minor illness and her self-deluding home remedies for major diseases? They resist you, these mothers. They ask for your help and claim to obey your advice—but they fight you as if to the death. It doesn’t matter what age the child is, the mother—”
There it was.
“You said … something. A moment ago. You said something about my being a young woman twenty years old. You must have lost track of that, too, David. I’ll be twenty next year. I’m just about to turn nineteen, a week from today.”
She couldn’t tell whether the astonishment in his expression was from her having dared to interrupt the direction of his thought, or whether it was the content of what she’d said. Then his eyes narrowed again and he leaned forward across the desk.
“No. You are about to turn twenty a week from today.”
This was a direct engagement, a face-to-face duel, one she must win. For her mother’s sake? For the few things she, Julian, had believed solid among so many shifting unrealities? Or was it one she hoped to lose—for the savage, awesome freedom it implied?
“I was born on October 7, 1942. This is 1961. I’m about to be nineteen.”
“You were born on October 7, 1941. You are about to be twenty years old, Julian.”
They stared at each other. Then he rose, strode to a filing cabinet across the room, took out a set of keys on a silver pocket keychain. He selected one and unlocked a file drawer. It took him only a moment’s search to find the paper. Julian watched him, mesmerized.
“This is your birth certificate. Perhaps you have never seen it.”
She started to speak, then stopped herself. How suddenly irrelevant to explain to him that there was no certificate, that there had been a fire in the city registry and all the records had been lost, that it had been necessary for Hope to swear a deposition to a judge years ago so that a new certificate could be issued. She stopped herself—one last helpless gesture of protection for the young mother whose despair, she now realized, must have been all-encompassing.
But there it was, in her hand. The real one, the original one, the one with the seal. Julian, female, born to Hope Baker, née Hokhmah Broitbaum; father unknown, October 7, 1941.
“It’s … a strange feeling. To suddenly lose a year of my life.”
“Your mother lied to you? You thought—?”
“No … No. She’s … never lied to me. She—I think we both knew that it was helpful in my career. To, well, shave off a year. But as time went on I must have … lost track myself.”
Not enough to have had your own radio program at age five; more precocious at age four. A whole year that you lived somewhere, somehow, doing what, utterly lost, vanished forever. To cover the shame of a woman who did the only thing she could do—pretend. Pretend the real into being, by pure will. And he speaks of pride. Nothing about you is real, Julian. You are a figment of the imagination of Hope Travis. You are a hallucination, an invention, a golem.
“Would you like to have this?” he asked gently.
“I—yes, I would.”
“Keep it, then. I have no use for it. I do not know why I saved it all these years.”
He began to straighten out small items on his desk. It was time to exit before the room spun completely out of control.
“Well. Thank you, David. For seeing me and telling me what you’ve told me. And, for this,” gesturing with the paper. “I—wish you well.”
“Thank you,” he replied formally, “And—may I ask—what you intend …”
“I will never bother you again. I agree with you. Our … relationship seems irrelevant.” She lifted her chin and smiled, both prides—her mother’s and her father’s—alive in that smile, but recognized by neither, nor by their daughter. “And I don’t intend to tell Hope of this meeting. Not for a while, at least. It would only—distress her. So. Then. I’ll be going.” She rose to her feet, her eyes sweeping the room to record it a last time. “Oh, there is one thing more.”
“Yes?” he asked, and with a final burst of longing in some vessel of the heart she thought she heard an eagerness in his question.
“David. Why does the man who only saw his child once and never ‘followed up’ still keep, ninet—twenty years later, her baby photograph framed in silver by his desk?”
If it could have been said—I exist, look at me, tell me, let me know, speak it once and for all O my father, let free whatever shred of love for me you might have hidden all these many years—if it could have been spoken, that which resonated in her question, poised waiting in her eyes, spined her whole body upright as she stood by the door of his office while her nerves hummed like tuning forks for his answer, if. If it was ever to be learned, let it be learned now.
He looked at the picture. When he turned again to her, his expression was tinged with what once might have been grief, and something else she could not perceive: the addictive self-contempt
known only to a survivor.
“That photograph is not of you. It is of my son. He is three years younger than you. I am sorry, Julian.”
“Thank you, David. For—Goodbye.”
You smile, she directed herself. You exit with dignity. You thank Minna in passing, you do not break your stride, get out of this corridor now and this stained-glass door and to the street and walk in the general direction of the bus depot somehow you do it a bastard a year lost wiped clean out of your past a brother one child she’d said on the phone how could you have thought wishful hearing 1941 half-crushed insect a year the son he always wanted she was right she lied he never loved her never wanted you he lied she never wanted you a son she did want you she lied you were wrong wrong always wrong. The only real choice in your life is a choice between mendacities.
But by the time the bus deposited her back in New York, she had remembered that there was one human being on the planet in whom she could confide these bleeding new truths. One person who would hear her, understand, still be able to see something real, something Julian, in her. One person so scarred from his own bleak and violent family love that he would care. One person who knew that if you could turn it into something of use, into art, into politics—yes David damn you naïvely save the whole vile hateful lying ravaged bloodsick world with it—then you could do more than just survive it, callous and brutalized. Then you could understand it, forgive it perhaps. And not repeat it.
She ran to the first phone booth she saw after disembarking the bus, and dialed. Please god let him be in, please god.
The familiar voice answered.
“Laurence? Oh thank god you’re there.”
“Oh, hi, Julian. You okay?”
“Laurence. I—I need to talk to you. And Laurence, can we take that walk across Brooklyn Bridge you always said we might someday? I’ve still never been.”
“Uh, yeah, sure, Julian. Wait a minute, you mean right now? Aren’t you at work? Oh, I couldn’t poss—”
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