The White Rose

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  This is Oliver’s cue to feel smug, he supposes, but he is inexplicably numb. “You’ve heard of us?” is what he can manage.

  “No. I mean, yes. Look, do you know what the White Rose is?”

  “Well…what?” He stands there, at sea. The fact is, he doesn’t really understand the question. He knows what the White Rose is to him, but that is his own meaning, and private. Whatever else it is, he does not know. And she, evidently, does, which has him off balance.

  “I’m writing my thesis on the White Rose. Look,” she says, leaning in again to the flowers, this time with her hands, “can I ask who sent them to me?”

  “Oh, your…” For some reason he can’t say it. He can’t say “fiancé.” So he says, “Mr. Barton Ochstein.” He points to the card, which has eluded her.

  “Oh!” She laughs, delighted. “So that explains it. He saw the name and he knew how much I’d like that. That’s so sweet of him.” She smiles. “Thank you for bringing them.”

  “Yes, all right.” But he can’t, for some reason, go. “What did you mean? About your thesis.”

  She looks at him. The misalignment of her buttons makes a pucker, just below her breasts. He does not understand why this is of more than passing interest to him. She has amazingly dark eyes, with dark circles underneath them. She wears no jewelry, no makeup. Oliver is having trouble getting her to mesh with the reality of her house, and her wealth. Is she certain that she is Sophie Klein?

  “I’m at Columbia,” says Sophie. “In the history department. I’m writing my doctoral thesis on the White Rose.”

  “The White Rose,” Oliver repeats.

  “Hey, are you Jewish?”

  Oliver stares at her. “Yeah. I mean, I’m not anything, belief-wise. But I’m Jewish.”

  “Typical,” she says laughing. “New York Jews. Deny, deny, deny…admit.”

  “I grew up in Connecticut,” he says, addled.

  “Then you have no excuse!” Sophie goes to the stove, which takes up the better part of a wall and looks capable of cooking food to feed hundreds, and opens the oven door. She takes out a large roasting pan and places it on the stovetop, then begins to baste two chickens, surrounded by vegetables. More good smells. Oliver has not eaten since the Pink Teacup this morning, and his stomach contracts. “There was this group in Munich,” says Sophie. “Not Jews. They were university students, and they called themselves the White Rose. Nobody knows why. One of them said it was after a Spanish novel he’d read, but he was being interrogated at the time, and possibly he was trying to protect someone else, or just misleading his torturers on principle. The students were caught distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets at the university, and they were beheaded.” Oliver realizes that he is still staring at the food. Now he looks at Sophie. “That, since you asked, is the White Rose.”

  “I had no idea,” he says, feeling weak.

  “So I gather. Don’t you think that’s sad?”

  He nods, but he’s not altogether clear why it’s sad. He would like to sit down. Actually, he would like to leave. But he does neither.

  “Sad?”

  “That you’re Jewish and you don’t know that? It’s not like there were endless groups of Germans protesting the Nazis. There were a handful. These students called Hitler a mass murderer, and they died for it. We should know who they are.”

  Oliver nods. “You’re right.”

  “Not that it’s any of my business,” says Sophie, shoving the pan back in the oven. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know you.”

  “I’m Oliver,” he hears himself say. “Oliver Stern.”

  “From Connecticut.”

  He smiles, a little sheepish. “Greenwich.”

  “How refined,” she comments, in her flannel shirt. “Well, look. The flowers are gorgeous. And I love that they gave me a chance to be didactic, which is what grad students live for.” She pauses. “I’m sorry I asked if you were here for dinner. I just thought maybe you worked for Kaplan Klein. My dad sometimes invites people home on Fridays. He doesn’t always tell me. Sometimes he even forgets, till they show up.”

  “You do the cooking yourself?” says Oliver. He is thinking of this huge house, the huge amount of money that bought and inhabits it.

  “It’s a ritual,” she says. The gap in her shirt puckers and goes slack. “Shabbos is about rituals. Not that you’d know, being a not-belief-wise Jew,” she says lightly.

  Oliver looks at her. It occurs to him that he has stayed too long, far too long, that his standing here is wrong. Then it occurs to him that he does not want to leave.

  “You know, I hate to rush you,” Sophie says, as if sensing his predicament, “but it’s almost sundown. I gotta scoot.”

  He frowns. “Sundown.”

  “Yeah. Shabbos? Sundown?” She sighs. “You know about that part, right?”

  “Oh,” he says, dizzy. “Yes. Sundown.” He turns stiffly and walks back to the service entrance. Then he stops. It comes to him that he has something else to say, but he is not sure what it is, so he opens his mouth and what comes out is, “You’re getting married.”

  “Yup!” says Sophie.

  “To Mr. Ochstein?”

  “That’s the one,” she says. “Do you know Bart?”

  “No.” Oliver shakes his head. “Well, just through the flowers. We…uh…had a little chat. When he ordered them.”

  “He’s upstairs now, if you want to meet him,” says Sophie.

  “No!” Oliver steps back. This information, at least, will get him out the door. He has no wish to see Barton Ochstein. He especially does not want to see Barton Ochstein in front of his intended—but already betrayed—bride. “I mean, that’s okay. If he likes the flowers, I’ll look forward to working with him again. Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye,” says Sophie, reaching ahead of him to hold back the door. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  He stops on the outside steps, almost reluctantly. He is near a getaway, but what he’s escaping is still unclear to Oliver. “Sure,” he says politely.

  “If you didn’t name your shop the White Rose after the White Rose, then why’d you name it that?”

  Oliver looks at her. She is holding her braid between two fingers. It snakes from nape to breast and the fingers rest farther down. Near her navel, he thinks. Near the pucker of her shirt. One of the fingers holding the braid bears a diamond ring.

  And this is where it gets strange, because Oliver does not plan to say what he says then. He does not plan to do anything to prolong this strange interview or this depressing afternoon, and certainly nothing to bring himself, once again, into the presence of Sophie Klein, with her black braid and her engagement ring and her puckered flannel shirt and her laughable fiancé. But when he speaks, it is to utter a phrase that is almost sacred to him.

  Or should be, he will later think. Or should be.

  “I’ll tell you,” says Oliver, “when I know you better.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  An Observant Jew

  In actual fact, chicken is not Sophie’s strong suit. Roast chicken, the kind of roast chicken she is in the midst of preparing when a vase of white roses is delivered to her kitchen door, is comfortably within her repertoire, but then again, it’s hard to screw up a chicken. You just buy a halfway decent bird, shove a handful of herbs under the skin, stick a lemon in the cavity, and coat the whole thing with salt and paprika—no culinary art required, and no extravagant praise accepted when the chicken lands, perfectly executed, on the dinner table. Sophie is far more gifted with what her father has charmingly termed “the shtetl cuts.” Certainly, she has more affinity for them, but the truth goes well beyond that. The truth is that it moves her to contemplate those homely meats, the slabs of muscle worked to toughness in life and promising only toughness in afterlife. Looking at a brisket does something strange to her—it makes her float, Chagall-like, above the ocean, the lip of Europe, and east, east, to the other world of her history and dreams, and into those rude kitchens of the
lost.

  She tends not to make an issue of this.

  In high school, Sophie took it upon herself to become a cook, an endeavor that Frieda first met with great satisfaction. Given that their chef at that time, an irritable Belgian named Armand, could be induced neither to provide instruction himself, nor to relinquish his domain to an outside instructor, Frieda conspired to schedule Sophie’s lessons on Sundays, Armand’s day off. The person Frieda selected was a sous-chef at the Quilted Giraffe, and he favored, not unreasonably, a classical curriculum, somewhat adapted to the tender years of his pupil, beginning with breaking eggs and making roux.

  Sophie got restless.

  “I want to make cholent,” she said. “And do you know how to do tzimmes?”

  The sous-chef did not.

  Sophie soldiered on through béarnaise and béchamel. She learned to pound a supreme of chicken.

  “Do you know the difference between prakas and holishkes?” Sophie wanted to know.

  The sous-chef did not know the difference. He had never heard of either one.

  She became a competent, if uninspired, handler of the chef’s knife. She learned to peel asparagus stalks, though no one in her family could abide asparagus.

  “Look,” she said, in exasperation, “I don’t care about pâté. I hate pâté. Can you teach me to make chopped chicken liver or not?”

  Frieda, by this time, was on to her, and Sophie was forced to endure a strident lecture, complete with cringe-inducing descriptions of Frieda herself at Sophie’s age, a paragon of all that was charming and lovely in a high-caste Jewish girl from Berlin. When Frieda had finished with her slovenly ward, Sophie slunk off downstairs, irritated and mortified in equal parts, but resigned to continue her forced march through the Cordon Bleu. Thus did she learn, with competence, the noble tradition of taking a lump of protein and doing various things to it in the name of cuisine. But she did not abandon her own particular calling.

  Not everyone was like Frieda, who had entered the Klein family as a nursemaid and stayed on to become the brain, if not the heart, of the household, a kind of spinster consort to Mort and generally—in every way that mattered to her—the queen of all she surveyed. Some housekeepers were present only in the flesh (morosely ensconced at their kitchen tables, flicking the pages of the Daily News while dinner warmed up in the microwave), or so servile that Sophie wondered at their being able to command a shopping list, let alone a household. But when Sophie met Ruchel Zakar, who ran the lives of the Gotbaum family, she knew that she had discovered her mentor. The Gotbaum girls were at Dalton with Sophie, two fleshy creatures starved by their terrified mother. From Mrs. Gotbaum they received infusions of Tab, thin-sliced Pepperidge Farm bread, healthful bouillons of chicken and beef and the occasional treat of ice milk. The Gotbaums senior were often away from home, however, and when they were, their daughters were fed latkes and stuffed cabbage and great, melting hunks of brisket, slumbering beneath mountains of fried onions. Sophie, who struggled in ninth-grade math alongside the similarly unmathematical Samantha Gotbaum, had the good fortune to be present at a study session on one of these occasions, and in due course she offered herself to the bemused Ruchel Zakar as pupil, acolyte, and willing consumer of her knowledge and food.

  “You are spending a lot of time at Gotbaum,” Frieda observed.

  Sophie shrugged. “She’s bad at math, too.”

  “Exactly. Maybe better you should spend a lot of time with a person who is not bad at math, too.”

  In this opinion, Frieda was—as usual—perfectly correct. Sophie got a C in math that year, but in the Gotbaum kitchen she perfected mandelbrot, shaped balls of gefilte fish in the palms of her hands, and learned to braid challah more expertly than she braided her own hair. Given the underground element of these dishes chez Gotbaum, much of the food ended up going home with Sophie, where it had similarly to evade the attention of Armand, the ferocious Belgian, but was ultimately consumed by both Sophie and by her father. By eleventh grade, Sophie had the parallel repertoires of a bubbe and a post–Julia Child Junior Leaguer, as well as a math SAT score sufficiently high (though only just) to get her into the college of her choice, which was Columbia.

  Her family had not been religious, at least during her early childhood. Mort, for his part, had gladly set aside the holy books after his bar mitzvah at Baith Israel-Anshei Emeth, and Felicia—Sophie’s late mother—had been the daughter of parents who despised religion, their own not excepted. Their only concession on this subject—to circumcise their child, should it prove to be male—had been a matter mostly of conventional wisdom pertaining to health issues, and was neatly sidestepped when the infant in question proved not to have a penis in the first place. Sophie had grown up quite happily in a household without God and his chosen, and she spent a decade at Dalton before she learned the first thing about what she’d been missing. Too clever to be taken in by some evangelist Jew in the park, too resolutely modern to hear the siren song of the Hasidim, she met her ethnic transformation in an Amsterdam attic, courtesy of ninth-grade social studies and its elective unit on wars of the century.

  Not that Sophie hadn’t known. Of course she’d known—from her father’s lost cousins, from the New York Times and its Holocaust obsessions, not to mention from Frieda, who had actually been booked to sail on the St. Louis before the family found an earlier escape hatch. But this girl in the attic, Anne Frank, so like Sophie with her petty complaints and outsized longings, harried to her death with such focused determination, just shook Sophie awake. Once awake, she could not be asleep to it any longer.

  Sophie was then fourteen years old, motherless and newly pubescent—her breasts, that year, had grown woefully large, and she spent much of her time regretting them—but she had somehow missed the surge of sexual interest that now consumed her friends. Sleepover dates and locker-room discussions became something of a torment as she learned to feign interest in the evolving codes of intergender interplay. Although her physical dimensions made her, by default, a participant in the relentless word-of-mouth currency of her school, she could not seem to drum up much interest in it, nor in the boys themselves, with their scurrying hands and breathy compliments. She was, it occurred to her, the opposite of oversexed, whatever that might be. (This concept was never discussed by her friends.) The whole grade was hurtling, lemminglike, over the cliff of virginity, while Sophie hunched her shoulders forward and wished they’d just leave her out of it. No one seemed interested in any other topic. Even in her social studies elective, the teacher permitted (lasciviously? she wondered) seemingly endless discussion of whether Anne Frank and Peter Van Pels had managed to consummate their awkward attraction.

  And in the midst of all those hormones, the strutting boys and suffering girls, the Jewry of Europe became Sophie Klein’s fervor. That summer, she read Martin Gilbert through her habitual summer internship at Kaplan Klein (not difficult to do, as her post was receptionist to some vacationing partner) and spread maps out across the long desk at which she was stationed. She immersed herself in the accounts, the rants, the litanies of disaster and grief, and then in the rationales, excuses, justifications, and theories, that cacophony of useless assaults on the problem of human evil. It was not a summer’s project. Even in its infancy, she recognized the shape of a lifetime’s obsession, and this she accepted, though it meant that she must, as Rabbi Greenberg had duly pointed out, live the remainder of her life in “the presence of…burning children.” (Holocaust scholars, as she would learn, speak often of their inability to retain less cataclysmic interests. It’s hard to downshift from genocide.)

  For her own part, Sophie had not been in the habit of dwelling on her losses. She did not aspire to victimhood—quite to the contrary, Sophie had always been aware of her privileges. She came of age with one of the city’s worst public policies, which released scores of mental patients onto the streets of Manhattan, and she grew as familiar with the homeless of Fifth Avenue as with its liveried doormen and Yorkshire terrie
rs. Every Friday afternoon, as they drove between the Steiner mansion and the farm in Millbrook, her father—somewhat illogically—took a route that wound through Harlem to the George Washington Bridge, and Sophie understood that half a mile from her oversized and beautifully furnished home were families crammed into primitive housing, on streets lacking both necessities and pleasures. This embarrassed her, and when her schoolmates fanned out along the traditional hunting grounds of Madison and Columbus Avenues, she found that she could not join in their pointless purchasing. (The fact that she never bought anything was interpreted by her friends as the cheapness of the filthy rich, something Sophie would be unaware of for years.)

  Sophie’s father, a good person as well as a good father, knew better than to dissuade her from her growing asceticism. Unlike many men of his generation, Mort Klein did not need to be told that his child trumped everything else. They had dinner together three or four nights a week and always on Fridays, spent their weekends generally without guests, and vacationed together twice a year—or once a year, depending on who was interpreting “vacation.” Of these trips, one destination (selected by father) would generally feature a beach, a cove, and snorkeling, of which Mort Klein was very fond; the other (selected by daughter) would prove profoundly unrelaxing. After ninth grade, Sophie dragged her father to France (Drancy), Holland (Westerbork), Czechoslovakia (Terezin), and finally, when she felt able to withstand the experience, Poland. For the time being, she avoided Germany.

  Conscious as Sophie was of this historical suffering (not to speak of her own local poverty), she wore her wealth uneasily, but she was also respectful of her father and would neither insult nor reject it outright. Mort had not been wealthy until the middle of his life, which perhaps explained the fact that money had few bitter overtones for him. The son of Polish immigrants—his father was a tailor until the loss of his sight—Mort Klein had won admission to Amherst despite the fact that the uncle who drove him to Massachusetts for his interview had had a racing form protruding from his jacket pocket, in full view of the startled admissions officer. Mort was the first in his family to attend college, the first to live in Manhattan, and—over the following decades—the first to acquire wealth, which he uncomplainingly siphoned back to the Kleins of Brooklyn. (A younger sister was sent to Skidmore. A home for his parents was purchased in West Palm Beach. A cousin’s child with Tay-Sachs received private care until his death, and a memorial foundation for research was endowed in the boy’s name. Temple Baith Israel-Anshei Emeth received a Torah scroll saved from a Czechoslovakian synagogue.)