“I was so worried about you,” she said the minute she heard him, and pulled the phone from the hall table into her room. It had a long cord so her sisters could use it too. Her parents had their own line for their private use. “How did it go?” she asked, as soon as she got the phone into her room, so her sisters couldn’t listen in. “Were they very upset?”
“They were pretty shocked,” he admitted, sounding beaten down. “You know how southern families are, they think people have to marry someone just like them. I guess it never occurred to them that I could fall in love with a woman of another religion, or from a different background than theirs. And Jewish is pretty out there for them. Even fancy southerners can act like rednecks at times.”
“So what did they say in the end?” She couldn’t stand the suspense, and he sounded exhausted. It had been a rough night, much rougher than he wanted to tell her.
“Claudia, I don’t know how to say this to you, and I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. My mother cried all night. We had to call the doctor. She’s not as young as yours.” He was the youngest of four sons. “My father has a heart condition, and she thinks it will kill him if we get married. They called in two of my brothers and we nearly came to blows. I love you, with every ounce of my being, but this will destroy my family.” He was crying by then. “They’re just not going to let this happen. My brothers said they would kill me first, and my parents said they’d never see me again. I can’t do this to them, or to you, to bring you into a family that would hate you and never accept you. I never realized they would feel this strongly about it, or I wouldn’t have let it go on for four years,” he said miserably, sobbing between sentences, and so was Claudia by then. They were going to get married. That’s what he had said. How could he turn around like this and let them bully him out of it?
“Just because I’m Jewish?” Her voice was a croak when she asked him.
“Jewish, German, the Jewish family who adopted you, the concentration camp. All of it. It’s all foreign to them. They don’t understand who you are.”
“Will they meet me?”
“Never. They’re southerners, and military. And my mother said she would die if our children were Jewish.” And Claudia’s family would die if they weren’t. She and Seth had agreed to it two years before, in the isolation of their relationship, without their families involved. “And they aren’t crazy about my not wanting a career in the military,” but that was the least of their problems. “Claudia, I love you, but I can’t do this to them.”
To them? What about to her? She felt dizzy and sick as she listened to him. “What are you telling me? That it’s over? Just like that? You tell them we’re getting married, they go crazy because I’m Jewish, so you dump me over the phone?” She wanted to fight, but she couldn’t. They had him in their grip and had convinced him in a single night.
“I didn’t have the strength to come to New York today. We fought about it all night.” But he didn’t have the guts to fight back, or to stand by her and what they felt for each other. He had given in. They had won. “It’s over,” he confirmed. “We just have to learn to live without each other. There’s no other choice.” He seemed entirely willing to accept it, although he was crying as he said it.
“We could stand up for what we want, and what we believe, and our love,” Claudia said, sounding desperate.
“I just can’t do that to them,” he repeated.
“But you can do it to me?” she said, feeling sick.
“I can’t help it. We’re young, we’ll get over it. They won’t. And I owe them a lot: my life, my education. I can’t just walk out on them if they won’t agree to our being together.”
“So now you marry some southern Christian girl because they tell you to? What happens to me?” She was sobbing uncontrollably. She had never thought he could do this to her. And what if she’d gotten pregnant in the past two years? Would he have dumped her then too? Apparently, he would. She realized now how lucky she had been that she hadn’t. She would have been faced with an abortion or a baby born out of wedlock, because she was a Jew. Overnight he had turned into a stranger. She wasn’t good enough for him.
“I love you. You’re the only girl I want to marry, but I can’t. I can’t do this to my parents,” he said again.
“So what happens now?”
“We go on with our lives, without each other.” He made it clear, and had stopped crying.
“Will I ever speak to you again?” she asked in a whisper that nearly broke his heart more than it already was.
“I don’t think we should,” he said sadly. “It’ll only make it harder. The only thing left to say now is goodbye.” She sat crying into the phone, and then pulled it away from her ear as though there were a dagger in it, and, staring at the phone as she did it, she silently hung up. He had said all she could stand to hear. She waited a few minutes to see if he’d call her back, but he didn’t. She dialed Meredith immediately. Fortunately, she was home and answered the phone. Everyone was out, and she was still recovering from the explosion at 21 the night before.
“Are you busy?” Claudia was frantic, and Meredith frowned when she heard her.
“No. Why? What’s wrong?” She’d never heard Claudia like that before. She almost didn’t recognize her.
“Can I see you?”
“Sure. Do you want to come here?”
“No, meet me in the park.”
“Did you hear from Seth?” Meredith had a bad feeling, listening to her. Claudia sounded as though her whole world had collapsed, or as if she was running from something, running for her life.
“I’ll tell you when I see you.” They agreed to a meeting place, and fifteen minutes later Meredith was there. They came from opposite sides of the park to the boat pond in the middle. Claudia arrived two minutes later, at a dead run, and almost knocked Meredith down when she flew into her arms, sobbing.
“Oh my God, what happened?” Meredith was horrified at the condition she was in. They sat down on a bench together, and Claudia poured out the whole story. Four years of a serious relationship, plans of marriage, and it was over in a single night with his parents. “All because you’re Jewish? That’s ridiculous.” But apparently it wasn’t ridiculous to them, or to him, since he had agreed to give her up, and then called to say goodbye.
“I hung up,” she sobbed in Merrie’s arms. “I didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing left to say.”
“I would have hung up on him too, after I told him to screw himself.” She was furious on her friend’s behalf and wanted to shake him. Claudia looked absolutely destroyed. She hadn’t expected this to happen. He hadn’t warned her that he might give in to them. And there was nothing she could do now, except what he had told her: they had to forget each other and move on, because he didn’t have the guts to stand up to his parents and marry her.
They sat in the park for two hours, with Meredith’s arms around her while Claudia cried. And then, slowly, Meredith walked her home. Her parents’ party for her was that night, and Claudia had no idea how she would get through it. Meredith left her outside her building, and Claudia stumbled in looking like someone had died.
Her mother heard her come in, and came to find her in her room. She was sitting on a chair, staring into space, with a ravaged expression. Her mother hadn’t seen her look like that since she’d arrived from Germany when she was ten. And she’d had nightmares for two years.
“Where were you? We’ve been looking for you for an hour. I wanted to show you how pretty the flowers look for tonight.”
Claudia nodded, fighting back tears again. She didn’t want her mother to see them. “I was with Meredith. We went for a walk in the park.”
“Is something wrong?” her mother asked pointedly. She could see that there was, and also that Claudia didn’t want to tell her. Claudia didn’t think she ever would. They wou
ld never know about Seth. There was no point upsetting them now, telling them she’d been in love with a Christian and hidden it from them for four years.
“No, I’m fine,” Claudia said, steeling herself to go to see the flowers. She had no idea how she would face the party that night. She didn’t want to see anyone. And she kept telling herself that if she could survive losing her whole family, she could survive losing Seth, but she was devastated.
She told her mother the flowers were beautiful and went back to her room as quickly as she could. Meredith called to check on her, as she sat crying in her room again. It was the worst day of her life since coming to America. Meredith felt desperately sorry for her. But there was nothing she could do to help her. Seth was gone, and Claudia was going to have to live with it, along with all the other losses in her life.
* * *
—
Claudia was quiet and ghostly pale at the party that night, and her mother checked to see if she had a fever. She looked sick. She didn’t eat any of the food on the buffet. And more than once her mother thought she looked like she was going to faint. Somehow she got through the evening, and thanked her parents for the beautiful party. Everyone congratulated her, and she didn’t care. She just wanted to go back to her room, curl up in a ball, and die.
She called Meredith after everybody left, and they talked for a while.
“So what do I do now?” she said miserably. She wasn’t going to be getting married. All her plans for the future had evaporated that morning, talking to Seth.
“Get a job, maybe,” Meredith suggested cautiously. “You wanted to work for a newspaper.” Claudia nodded, thinking about it. They were going to Long Island for the summer, and she had wanted to start looking for a job in the fall, if she and Seth had stayed in New York.
“I’ll think about it,” she said to Meredith. After they hung up, she stood in the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked like someone had died. She lay in bed afterward and thought about Seth, realizing that she would never see him again or hear his voice. She used to feel that way about her parents. Now she felt that way about him. She wanted to hate him, but she didn’t yet. She still loved him. She closed her eyes and tried not to think. She thought of her parents, who had died so long ago. And her sisters and brother. She could barely remember them. And then she thought of Seth, and told herself that he was dead now too. It was the only thing that she could do. She had to forget the past four years and everything they had meant to her. And whether she wanted to or not, whatever happened, she had to go on living. However much she had loved him, she couldn’t let him destroy her. He wasn’t worth it. No one was. She felt dead inside when she went to bed, and sobbed herself to sleep.
* * *
—
When Claudia woke up the next morning, it felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest. The terrible weight of grief and loss, and knowing something awful had happened, hit her from the moment she opened her eyes.
She forced herself to get out of bed, put on her bathrobe, and go to the kitchen. She still looked deathly pale as she picked up the newspaper and made herself a cup of coffee. She sat staring at the newspaper without reading the words. She had no idea what to do now. She had left her summer open so she and Seth could make plans. Her family was going to be on Long Island, and she wanted to be with them. It would give her time to figure out what to do next without him.
She called Meredith, who was staying in New York for the summer and starting her job in a few days. But Claudia didn’t want to be in town with nothing to do. She wondered what Seth was going to do now, and imagined he would stay on the farm with his parents. He had two months off after graduation before he had to report to begin a Basic Officer Leader Course. He had told her he didn’t want to stay in the army as a career, but he had given in to them on that too. She had never expected him to surrender so easily and abandon her so completely. He wasn’t the man she’d thought. At twenty-three, he didn’t have the guts to fight his family when they opposed his plans to marry the woman he said he loved. Or did he really love her? Now she would never know.
“What do you want to do now?” Meredith asked her when they spoke.
“Get a job, I guess.” She’d been planning to do some freelance writing, but she didn’t have the energy to do it now. She needed time to catch her breath. “I think I’ll go to Long Island, and send out some applications and get serious about it in September.” She had the luxury of time. They both did, since their families didn’t want them to work, and would have been happier if they didn’t and concentrated on finding husbands instead of jobs. “Will you come out for a weekend?” Claudia asked, sounding lonely and lost. She felt totally broken by what Seth had done.
“Of course. Take care of yourself now,” Meredith urged her. She’d had a terrible shock, after everything else she had suffered in her early life. She didn’t deserve this, Merrie thought. No one did. To be betrayed and abandoned by the man you loved, when you thought you were getting married. Maybe it would be a blessing in the end. She hoped so for her.
Claudia hung around the apartment for the rest of the day, and decided to send out her applications and CV sooner rather than later. She sent letters to the employment offices of all the major newspapers, and included half a dozen articles she’d written for the college paper. Other than that, she had a bachelor’s degree from Vassar and included on her CV that she spoke fluent German, which would be useless to them anyway. She hoped they’d at least be impressed by the college she had graduated from, and would like the articles she’d written.
Three days later, after having lunch with Meredith, she left for Long Island with her parents and sisters. Her father commuted in the summer, and took the month of August off. She begged Meredith to come for the weekend as soon as she could. She said her family would be happy to see her, and Meredith was her only close friend, and the only one she could talk to about Seth. She and Meredith had talked about getting an apartment together once they both had jobs, but neither of them could afford it for the moment, and they knew that their parents wouldn’t approve. Nice girls lived at home until they were married. But it was something to think about for later on, now that Claudia wouldn’t be getting married.
As they drove to Long Island, with the station wagon full of their belongings and the housekeeper driving behind them in another car with more, Claudia stared out the window, thinking about her life. A week before, she thought that all her dreams had come true and she had a happy life with Seth ahead of her. And now it was all smashed to pieces, in rubble at her feet. She knew that one day there would be another man, but she couldn’t imagine it and didn’t want to. A lone tear slid down her cheek, for all the people she had loved and lost.
In Seth’s case, it felt like a tragedy, but she knew it wasn’t. She had lost far more important people in Germany. This was just a broken heart, even if it felt like the end of the world.
Chapter Seven
Once Alex and her parents left for Martha’s Vineyard, and Claudia was on Long Island, Meredith was lonely in New York. Her job at the ACLU was not as exciting as she had hoped. They used her for a spare pair of hands in the office. She did a monumental amount of filing, cleaning up, serving coffee to all the people who worked there, buying pastries, and keeping the coffee machine clean. Sometimes they sent her out to get them lunch. She was basically an errand girl, but she assumed that one of these days they’d let her do something more interesting. If not, it was going to be a long, tedious year. They were not only wasting her time but her brain. But she didn’t have the skills yet to work on the legal team, or the experience to be a secretary. It made her hungrier than ever to go to law school so she could do something meaningful and use her mind.
For lack of anything better to do, she called Ted in Connecticut and asked him if he was coming into the city and wanted to have lunch. He sounded thrilled to hear from her, and said he h
ad some errands to do for his father later that week, and could even have dinner with her. They made a dinner date for Thursday at P.J. Clarke’s.
It cheered her up immediately, as soon as he walked through the door. She’d been standing at the bar, waiting for him, and several middle-aged executives had tried to pick her up.
Ted ordered a gin and tonic, and a Bloody Mary for her as soon as they sat down. He looked very serious in a suit and tie, and she saw a hint of the usual mischief in his eyes, but he was more subdued than she’d ever seen him before.
“So how’s your job?” he asked her, and she was honest with him.
“Boring so far. I file and make coffee. They treat me like I don’t have a brain. I guess it’s inevitable fresh out of college. I love being there, but they act like I don’t exist and have nothing to contribute.”
He listened to what she had to say and took a long sip of his drink, and then avoided her eyes. She saw into him and through him, and he didn’t want her to this time. She had the feeling that he was hiding something from her, or ashamed. “I just took a job myself,” he said casually.
“Wow! With whom? Doing what?” She was happy to hear he had escaped his father’s clutches. All through college, he had been pushing to have Ted work for him permanently. It was the one thing Ted always said he didn’t want, and would never do.
“With my dad.” Ted stunned her when he said it. “It’s a pretty good opportunity at the bank. And the salary he offered is damn nice.” He smiled at her, but when she looked at him more closely she could see that he was sad, as though he’d failed somehow, or something had gone wrong. But the gin gave him enough bravado to make it sound better than it was. He switched to tequila then, and she could see he was getting drunk.
“Is that what you really want?” She looked shocked by what he’d said.
The Good Fight Page 10