“Imagine sending your thirteen-year-old daughter to sleep in the same room as a grown man who was divorced and who had nothing but contempt for anything but his own appetites. Pfeffer’s arrival literally broke up the Frank family. It also limited their privacy and made life in the Secret Annex harder to endure because there was no longer the same family solidarity or togetherness. On top of that, Pfeffer was a large man who ate far more than his share of the food. He was also loud, boorish and opinionated.
“How stupid. Dussel the dentist. Dussel. No wonder she chose that word for him—the German word for “dullard,” “dunce” or “fool.” The Franks and the van Pels didn’t become careless about leaving the windows open and raising their voices loud enough to be heard. They did those things because of Dussel. They argued with him and they opened the windows because he made them feel so claustrophobic.”
“Anne doesn’t say that in Het Achterhuis.”
“What’s going to become of you, Rachel? So much writing and reading. Inventing languages?”
“One language.”
“You’re sad, aren’t you?”
I nodded, hoping to speed her departure by agreeing with her.
“I blame Carmen for this. Those shorthand notes she left lying about the house—it would never have occurred to you to write in code if not for her. You’re not like my other girls, Rachel. Not yet, anyway. But the way you’ve taken to this book—I don’t understand why you’re putting two families of misguided Jews ahead of your own. Why do you spend day after day reading about them and writing who knows what about them when you could be talking to me?”
“I told you I don’t know. Besides, I don’t write about them.”
“Is that what you tell others when they ask you why that book fascinates you so much?”
“I would if they asked. But no one asks.”
“Not even your teachers?”
“Not anymore. When they asked, I told them I didn’t know.”
“Your father is very concerned. He doesn’t say so but I can tell. His insomnia is worse than ever. His ulcers. Is there something you want to tell us? Is there something we can clarify for you? You can always come to us.”
“No.”
“Did something happen? Have you been with a boy?”
“No. Boys avoid me like the plague.”
“Because they know you’re a good girl.” Tears were now flowing freely down her face. “I want you to promise me something, Rachel. If you have intercourse before you’re engaged to be married, I want you to tell me.”
“What?”
“I want you to promise me that you’ll tell me. I won’t judge you, but I would like to know. Will you promise?”
“Alright,” I said, “I promise.”
She got up slowly from her chair and, sniffling, left the room, easing the door shut behind her.
* * *
—
Later, sitting in front of the mirror of my dresser, I cut my hair with a pair of scissors, trying to make it look like Anne’s did in the black-and-white photographs, the ones in which she was smiling for the camera, her pen in hand and her diary in front of her, one arm curled protectively around it. I lopped off great chunks of hair, which fell onto the hardwood floor. Soon, I had gone past the point where I could make it look like hers. I went on cutting until I had almost no hair left.
Mom came into the room and, when she saw me, put her hand over her mouth. She retreated, and came back with a dustpan and a broom and swept up every last strand of hair. She didn’t say a word, but she took the scissors with her when she left.
WADE
One afternoon, while Rachel was out shopping for groceries and I was at my desk in the bedroom, still trying without success to fashion a story from the ever more mundane-seeming chaos of my childhood, our doorbell rang. No one had ever rung it before and I wasn’t expecting anyone. I got up, went downstairs and opened the door to find Clive standing there, holding his glasses in one hand as tears streamed down his face.
“Clive?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“Can I come in?” he managed to say, his mouth quivering.
“Of course,” I said.
He followed me up the stairs and, when we reached the top, brushed past me and made for the front room as if he had been in the apartment many times. He sat in one of our two leather chairs and lit a cigarette—I’d never seen him smoke before. I handed him an ashtray and sat in the other chair. He could have put the ashtray on the coffee table, but he cradled it on his lap, more or less hunched over it.
“What’s wrong, Clive?” I said.
“Bethany is in hospital,” he said, and began to cry again.
Before I could ask him what had happened, he said, “She took an overdose of pills.”
“Oh no,” I said. “Is—”
“It was a few days ago.” He put his glasses back on. The hand that held the cigarette shook as he raised it to his mouth. “They, the police or someone, I don’t know, someone, they found her early in the morning near Greenmarket Square, sitting beneath a tree. They thought she was dead. There were empty pill bottles all around her. They took her to the hospital. She’s fine now, physically.”
“That’s good,” I said.
He shook his head and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “No,” he said. “I didn’t know—I mean, no one told me about what happened to her back in Canada. Did you know that she had some sort of breakdown and was in hospital for months?”
“Yes,” I said. “I assumed you knew. She talks pretty openly about herself.”
“I know she has anorexia,” he said, “but I didn’t know she attempted suicide. She never mentioned that before we got engaged. She should have, but she didn’t. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have agreed to marry her; I’m just saying she should have told me.”
“But how is she?” I said.
He shook his head again in frustration, as if I was missing the point. “We’re no longer engaged. She broke it off. She said she thought it was the best thing for both of us.”
“I’m so sorry, Clive.”
“I’m going to look like a fool in front of everyone, engaged for a few weeks and then dumped. She said I could have my engagement ring back.”
“No one will think you’re a fool,” I said.
“You’re in for quite a shock,” he said. “Quite a shock, I can tell you.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Bethany told the doctor something, and the doctor told me even though Bethany told him not to. He said he thought I ought to know because we were engaged.” Clive stabbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and, closing his legs tightly together to hold the ashtray in place, took a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and lit another.
“What did Bethany tell him?”
“She’s sedated most of the time,” he said. “She talks about everything else but not about what she told the doctor.”
“Well, what did the doctor tell you she said?” I was fast losing patience with him.
“Prepare yourself,” Clive said, as if he was about to inform me of a death in the family. He drew in a chest full of air and said, “She said that Hans has been abusing her for years. Ever since she can remember and right up until she was taken to hospital.”
“What?”
“Ever since she can remember,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “And right up until—”
I stopped him. “What exactly did the doctor say? Bethany says a lot of things she doesn’t mean. She can be very ironic, and someone who isn’t used to her might get the wrong idea.”
Clive shook his head. “He said he asked her several times if she was telling the truth. He has no idea what really happened, but he said that Bethany believes that what she said is true.”
“Well, that’s a far cry from saying that it
really happened,” I said.
“Yes, but Bethany said more to the doctor, much more. She said that Hans has been abusing all of his daughters for years, all of them.” He looked at me.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “It can’t be true. Bethany’s been unstable for quite some time. Maybe the pressure of getting engaged, the prospect of so much change—”
He shook his head. “You’re acting like I did when I first heard,” he said. “Don’t you understand what I’m saying? Do you think Hans would do that to one daughter and not lay a hand on the others?”
“Maybe Hans didn’t do anything to Bethany is what I’m saying. Maybe that’s what the doctor meant.”
“It doesn’t matter to me, now, does it? We’re not engaged anymore.”
My heart hammered. Sweat had broken out on my forehead and now trickled into my eyes. “Rachel would have said something to me.”
“When I told my parents what the doctor said,” Clive said, “my father just laughed and left the room. But my mother said she thought she knew what Bethany was talking about. She said that Hans was once accused, years ago, before the van Houts left South Africa, of having done something to a student. The student’s mother made the accusation, but she eventually withdrew it and that was the end of it. My mom said that Bethany must have got it into her head while she was on too many drugs that Hans had done something to her. My mother said that she was sure it wasn’t true.”
“Well, there you are,” I said. “Your mother might be right.”
“Might be right. That’s the whole thing. All Bethany said to me was ‘Don’t tell anyone what I told the doctor.’ Don’t you think it’s strange that Bethany has been in hospital for days and you’re only finding out about it now, from me?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do, but—”
“She asked me not to tell any of her sisters that she’s in hospital or why. Hans and Myra know, but they don’t know what Bethany has accused him of. I’m not supposed to be talking to anyone about that either, but I had to talk to someone. What are you supposed to do when your fiancée tries to commit suicide and breaks off your engagement—keep it to yourself? When they found her near the square, she had no ID. When she woke up, she refused to tell them who she was until they let her make a phone call. I have my own phone line at home, so she called me. It was in the middle of the afternoon, and Mom and Dad were out. She told me where she was and asked me to come see her. When I got there, she broke it off, and then the doctor told me what she’d said. When I asked her whether it was true, she told me to tell her parents she was in hospital, but not about her accusations against Hans. She also asked me not to tell her sisters where she was, because she wanted to tell them herself. And not to tell my parents either, but I did. I didn’t speak to Myra or Hans. I couldn’t work up the nerve. Mom and Dad did.”
“Well,” I said, “Bethany didn’t tell Rachel.”
“Not that you know of,” Clive said. He was hurt and maybe thought it would make him feel better if he knew that he was not alone in his affliction.
“Rachel is not Bethany,” I said. “She’d tell me about something like this.”
“I wanted you to know,” he said. “You have a right to know that accusations have been made against Hans by one of his daughters. You have a right to know because you’re living with one of his daughters. Unlike me, you didn’t have to hear it from some stranger.”
“Clive,” I said, “I think you’re getting too far ahead of yourself. Bethany is sick and medicated. There’s no telling yet how this will all play out.”
He shook his head, stabbed out another cigarette, stood and, without a word, went to the door and hurried down the stairs.
* * *
—
One minute, you’re sitting at your desk as you do every day. You think you know who you are, where you are in your life and how you got there. You have a rough idea of what the future holds. And then the doorbell rings and a man you barely know barges in and upends everything. You wonder if, from now on, you will think of the past as having happened on one side of this moment or the other, before and after.
I considered calling my parents but didn’t know how to even describe what was happening. Mom and Dad would fret and attribute everything to our being in a place so far away that no one in their world knew anything about it.
Instead, I waited for Rachel to come home, wondering what it would mean to us if Bethany’s accusations were true. The Rachel who walked in the door would not be the Rachel who had left an hour ago. She would be a new Rachel, one who had known for years what I had just found out, one who had been dealing with it for years. Her obsession with Anne Frank—was she trying to escape her father by hiding in Het Achterhuis? Was this, at last, the explanation for her breakdowns and her illnesses? If Bethany was telling the truth, nothing, absolutely nothing, would ever again be as it had been—as I thought it had been. That was what most galled Clive, it seemed, that Bethany had fooled him, that she’d known all along and hadn’t told him—and even asked him to marry her. To Clive, Bethany’s deceptiveness seemed to be a greater crime than what she’d accused Hans of. He hadn’t said a word against Hans, even though he was more than half convinced that Bethany was telling the truth. He hadn’t uttered a word of concern for her, either.
Perhaps Rachel would say something that would explain it all away. Perhaps Bethany had made this accusation before and Rachel would know just how to deal with it. Her father was the man who thought that self-publishing a book would get him his full professorship. He was hapless at best.
When I heard Rachel coming up the stairs, I opened the door before she reached the top. “Bethany is going to be just fine,” I said. Rachel stopped and looked up at me. “She made another attempt. But she’s in hospital and she’s okay.”
She followed me into the kitchen, where she sat at one end of the table. I sat at the other. As I told her what Clive had said, she listened with her arms folded as if I was merely relating more instances of the oddness of her family. She showed no sign of surprise or incredulity, even faintly nodded. My first impulse, after I was certain that my sister was in good hands, would have been to defend my father, to wonder what could possibly have motivated my sister to make such accusations against him. Not even when I told her how Clive’s mother had explained everything away did Rachel’s expression change.
I pulled my chair close to hers. “Rachel?” I said. “Are you all right?” I worried that she was in shock and that I had been in something like shock since Clive had left.
At last, in a tone as flat as if she had been hypnotized, she said, “You’re absolutely sure that Bethany is all right?”
“I told you that.”
“Yes,” she said, “but are you sure? You also made it sound like Clive is more concerned about himself.”
“I’m pretty sure he is.”
I watched in silence as she got up and made a cup of tea. She sat down again, cradling the cup in both hands, her eyes averted from mine. “I feel ashamed,” she said. I began to stand, intending to hold out my arms to her, but she put a hand firmly on my shoulder and pushed me back into my chair.
I said, “Why should you be ashamed? Do you mean you’re ashamed of what your father did to you?”
She shook her head. Her colour rose and her eyes filled with tears—at last, I thought, a reaction of some kind.
“I’m ashamed that I am one of them. One of us. The van Houts. All of us. We were taught that, above all else, you must protect the family. Our mother taught us that, sometimes without saying a word. Do as I do. Ignore what you’ve seen, what you’ve heard, ignore what happens right in front of you, ignore what happens to you. Pretend that nonsense makes perfect sense. The more often you do it, the easier it gets. The abnormal becomes normal, in time, as your notion of normal is endlessly revised. On and on it goes until nothing is abnormal as long as the van Houts kee
p it to themselves.”
“I don’t understand, Rachel. Are you saying that Bethany—”
“I don’t know. It makes sense.”
“It makes sense?”
“You think you want to know what he did because that will prove to you that he did something. You think it will take all the uncertainty away and then everything will be just the way it used to be. Believe me, it will only make things worse for us. It will put back in my head pictures that it took me a long time to replace with words.”
“So you are saying that what Bethany said about Hans is true and that he did those things to you, too?”
“He never laid a hand on me. Never. But I’m saying it makes sense that he might have done something to Bethany, maybe even to Carmen or Gloria. I once helped him cover something up. One of my friends, a pretty girl named Nancy, slept over one night in my room. We were dressed in lacy nighties, pretending to be twice our age. We were goofing around, kneeling on the bed, bouncing up and down, laughing and singing songs. The door opened and Dad came in in his pyjamas. He had an erection that was so conspicuous it looked fake. Nancy let loose a squeal that sent me into hysterics.
“Dad got on the bed and began bouncing up and down with us. Then he kind of knocked us over and he fell on top of Nancy, trying to make it seem like it was just a game. I was so embarrassed, I acted all grown-up. ‘Well then,’ I said,’ I guess I better give you two your privacy.’ Nancy scrambled out from under Dad. She was laughing, but she also looked on the verge of tears. Dad got off the bed, said something about having dropped in just to say good night and left, closing the door behind him. Nancy and I never said a word about it. She was gone when I woke up in the morning. She may have left the house in the middle of the night for all I know.
The Mystery of Right and Wrong Page 26