by Amy Meyerson
“He got fired obviously. We haven’t told the kids.”
Ashley tells Beck how, for the last week since the agents showed up, Ryan has put on a suit and pretended to go to work. Ashley has no idea where he would go. She made a point of staying away from the house, lingering in the locker room after her swim, reading magazines at the library when Clara had to help other patrons. She didn’t ask her husband what he did all day and he didn’t offer, not until she was lying in bed, her husband on a pile of blankets on the floor, and he’d said, “You and the kids should get away for a while.”
“Why? What are you planning?”
“Can you stop with the accusations? I’m trying to fix this.”
Ashley sat up in bed and looked down at her husband, supine on the floor. “How are you going to fix this? You were fired. You’re probably going to get arrested. Tell me how exactly you can fix any of this?”
“I’m not going to get arrested, okay? I’m meeting with a lawyer.”
“I hope he’s not a DUI lawyer from Vegas.” Momentarily, she felt guilty when she saw her barb landed.
“I’ll know more after I talk to the lawyer. The major thing for now is that we’re going to have to pay back the money to my company.”
“How much?”
“Let me worry about that.”
“Ryan, tell me right now how much you owe.”
Ryan stared at the ceiling. “Five hundred thousand, give or take.”
“Five hundred thousand dollars? You’re serious? You stole half a million?”
“I know it looks bad. If we cut back our expenditures and—”
“You think canceling cable and your whiskey club is going to cover this?”
“If we sell the house—”
“Sell the house? This isn’t just your house. I worked for years to help save for a mortgage. I gave up my career... I never wanted to quit...and now you want to sell the house?”
“You didn’t want to quit?” Ryan laughed cruelly. “You can be mad at me for this thing with the FBI, but don’t go rewriting history.”
He’s right, of course, even though he’s in no position to be right about anything. “I’m not selling the house. I’d rather divorce you first.”
As soon as she said it, she wished she could spool the words back in. It was out there now. This might break them.
“Please, just take the kids for a few days while I talk to the lawyer, okay?”
“I don’t know where you expect us to go, seeing as we don’t have any money.”
The next afternoon, when Beck had called about the Italians, it seemed fated.
Beck pours Ashley more wine. $500,000. The exact amount the Italians had offered. Of course Ashley wanted to sell.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Ashley says.
“What we’ll do,” Beck corrects her sister.
Deborah sits on the top stair, out of view, listening to their exchange and cursing her daughter for inheriting her taste in unworthy men. She didn’t mean to snoop, but she heard their voices through the radiator in Helen’s bedroom and knew it was serious. So she tiptoed into the hall. It wasn’t nosiness. It was protectiveness, a maternal instinct. And once she started to hear Ashley’s story, she couldn’t not listen.
Deborah leans back, and the stair creaks beneath her. The conversation grows silent. Deborah waits a minute, hopeful that her daughters will continue talking. When their silence persists, she downs the rest of her wine and trudges downstairs as though in search of more pinot.
In the living room, both daughters study her, trying to determine what she’s heard.
“What? Did someone else die?” It’s a terrible joke, but it has the desired effect. Her daughters shake their heads, dismayed.
Deborah sits in the rocking chair beside the couch, holding out her glass for Beck to pour her more wine. She can’t remember the last time she was this tired. It’s a good kind of tired, the exhaustion of racing after children. She races after dogs all the time, but children are different. You have to earn their love. Deborah hopes she’s earned their love this weekend. She told the children about their astrological signs and taught them how to tie knots that would confound their friends. She hopes she’s earning Ashley’s love now by pretending she doesn’t know about Ryan. She hopes this is enough for Ashley to let her see the kids again.
Beck turns on the television, stopping on a Friends rerun. She was never a fan, but it’s the perfect show for them to pretend to watch.
At the commercial, Beck asks Ashley, “When are you going to see the woman who wrote the book on the fifty children?”
“Cheryl Appelbaum? Day after tomorrow. That’s why we have to leave in the morning. She’s finally back from Europe.” Ashley wishes she could jet off to Europe for a month.
“Cheryl Appelbaum?” Deborah asks.
“You know her?” Beck and Ashley say simultaneously.
“Not a Cheryl, but I know an Irma and Hetty Appelbaum. They used to visit from New York when I was a kid.” Beck turns off the television and both daughters sit up, eager for more. “What?”
Ashley tiptoes upstairs, returning with the library’s dog-eared copy of My Grandmother and the Other 49 Children. She tosses the book in Deborah’s lap and plops onto the couch beside her sister.
Deborah flips through the pages. “Irma’s granddaughter wrote this?” She stops on a picture of two girls posing on the deck of a boat and reads the caption: Helen Auerbach and my grandmother aboard the SS President Harding. Helen has one arm slung protectively around Irma’s shoulders, the other hugging a doll. Although in better condition, it is the same doll from Helen’s box. “What is this? Did Irma and Helen come over together?”
Ashley turns to Beck. “You didn’t tell her about the fifty children?”
“What are the fifty children?” Deborah asks. Beck and Ashley glance at each other, deciding what they should tell her.
“Helen was part of a group of kids that was chosen for US visas. A lawyer here in Philadelphia brought them over.”
Deborah stares at the back cover of the book where black-and-white images of Irma overlay each other.
“Let’s back up,” Ashley says. “You’ve met Irma Appelbaum?”
Deborah nods. “And her daughter, Hetty. She was a few years older than I was. We used to walk down to the five-and-ten. Hetty taught me how to steal.”
Deborah can still remember the look on Helen’s face when they got caught, furious and confused. “Why must you steal?” Helen had asked, pulling Deborah out of the shop by the back of her neck. “Is there anything I haven’t given you?” Deborah was only seven. She knew vaguely that she was doing something wrong, but Hetty told her it was fun, a conquest with the slightest tinge of danger. She hadn’t even wanted the Hershey bar she’d slipped into her pocket.
“I always wondered if she and Irma knew each other in Vienna, but I never thought about them coming over together.” The smile falls from Deborah’s face. “There’s so much she didn’t tell me.”
“She didn’t tell us, either,” Ashley says. Beck shoots her a look that says she shouldn’t compare the secrets Helen kept from them to those she kept from Deborah.
“Why wouldn’t she tell me? Not just Irma. I asked her. As a kid, I wanted to know about my father. She’d say he died a hero, and that was that. How could she have kept so much from me?”
Beck and Ashley peer over at each other, unsure how to react. The real question is, why hadn’t Deborah kept pressing Helen? Joseph Klein, the war hero—it was such a thin lie.
“We can find him now,” Beck suggests.
“How? I don’t even know his name.”
Well, I guess you should just give up then, Beck thinks. She knows her mother’s hurting, but it’s so frustrating, her passiveness, the way she’d rather feel injured than have agency.
“I have no idea where it could be.”
Ashley reaches over to squeeze her mother’s arm. “We can search for it online, if you want?”
Beck watches her sister, mystified. Why does her sister’s empathy surprise her? And how would she have acted if she were in her mother’s position? It’s not like Beck went looking for her own father. Instead, she told herself that she hated him, that he wasn’t worth finding. Maybe she’s more like her mother than she realizes.
Ashley scoots closer to Beck and motions for Deborah to sit beside them on the couch. “What do you say? Should we see if a copy of your birth certificate is available?” Ashley opens ancestry.com on her phone and angles it toward Deborah. “Just type in your name.”
Deborah hesitates, staring at the search bar on Ashley’s screen. A strange calm washes over Ashley as she waits for her mother to say yes. It centers her, this patience, something she’s lost in recent months with Ryan and her children. Right now, there’s no rush. Her mother can take all the time she needs.
Deborah doesn’t want to type her name into a website, to have records appear, to access her father’s identity that easily. Right now, however unrealistic, there’s still denial. Maybe the man from Helen’s photo album wasn’t her father. Maybe her mother hadn’t lied to her for her entire life.
As her daughters watch her, waiting, she knows she needs to do this for them. So she types her name into the search bar.
They hold their breath as they wait for the search engine to work its magic. Within moments, hundreds of records appear for Deborah Auerbach. Ashley refines the search until the top hits are documents on the purchase and sale of the house in Mt. Airy, Deborah’s high school yearbook photo, her marriage certificate. Ashley scrolls through, but there is no birth certificate for their mother.
“I guess birth certificates for living people wouldn’t be on here,” Beck eventually says. “With privacy laws and all.”
Her daughters monitor Deborah, gauging her reaction. Suddenly, she feels an inexplicable urge to laugh. So much tension, so much buildup, and for what? Helen is dead. She’ll never be able to explain why she lied to Deborah. The married man in the photographs is surely dead, too. What exactly are they hoping to learn? She starts laughing so hard her eyes water.
Beck and Ashley exchange worried looks that their mother is finally coming unhinged. But her laughter, saturated in ironic disbelief, isn’t irrational. It’s relief, Beck realizes. She, too, feels relieved that they did not find their grandfather so swiftly.
“We can order a replacement birth certificate from the state?” Ashley offers, uncertain what’s so funny.
“It’s that simple?” Deborah asks, trying to control her laughter.
“Let’s order you that birth certificate,” Ashley says. She fills out the online request. “It should be here in one to two weeks.”
A stitch forms in Deborah’s side. She grows light-headed. As her laughter quiets, her daughters continue to watch her expectantly. A new tension builds. Never gifted with words, Deborah understands that she must thank her daughters for this, must acknowledge that Helen was not the only mother who kept things hidden from her children.
“I hope you know, everything after your father left, I never meant for any of it to happen.” Deborah doesn’t know how to explain everything she should have done differently, those weeks where she was out of state with some man whose name she can’t remember or at some retreat that has probably gone bankrupt. She can’t tell them what she was running from or toward because she doesn’t know herself. She just knows that she should have been there for her children and wasn’t. She has no one else to blame, not even their father. “I have no excuse.”
Ashley shifts her attention from her mother to her sister. The evening is dangerously close to imploding, and neither Beck nor Deborah knows how to put the peace before their own feelings.
When Ashley begins to speak, she doesn’t know what she’s going to say. She only knows that she needs to take control of the conversation before it turns into an argument. “Do you want to come with us tomorrow?” she asks Deborah. “To Westchester? We’ll talk to Cheryl Appelbaum together. It could be helpful, since you’ve met Irma.”
Deborah shrugs, feigning indifference. “Sure, if you think it might help.”
“Sounds like a great idea,” Beck says. Ashley turns to her, grateful, and Beck realizes she, too, is capable of more than her family assumes. They all are. Maybe the fighting grows out of their limited expectations for each other. If they try to be more generous, if they try to believe in each other, maybe the Millers can be another kind of family, one not so quick to anger. One that forgives rather than holds grudges.
Ten
Two days later, Ashley pulls into Cheryl Appelbaum’s circular driveway, looking up at her Victorian mansion. It reminds Ashley of the Millers’ former house in Mt. Airy. She hasn’t thought about that home in years. Ashley wonders if her mother sees the resemblance. She’s never considered what it must have been like for her mother to lose the house after her father betrayed them. Now Ashley can imagine it all too readily. Ryan’s lawyer offered him few options. He must plead guilty before he’s indicted. He must return the money he owes his company. Even if Ashley helped save for the house, like Deborah, she has little say in what will happen to it.
“Must be a lot easier to write a book when you have all this waiting for you,” Deborah says, shaking her head.
“How do you know the book didn’t buy this house?” Ashley asks, causing Deborah to scoff as she steps out of the car into the muggy afternoon. Spring has somehow already come and gone. By mid-May, it feels like summer.
As Ashley follows her mother up the path, she thinks about the money she’d stowed away for her dream of a forever home. Even before she met Ryan, she’d been steadily setting aside a quarter of her paycheck. She hadn’t been waiting for a man to come along and buy it for her. So how has she gotten here, at the whim of her husband’s bad decisions? It’s her house, too. She can fight for it. She can do what she’d always done: work and save. She can get a job and regain control of her family’s future.
When Cheryl opens the door, she’s younger than Deborah anticipated, no more than forty with dark hair falling straight around her shoulders. Dressed lavishly in a silk blouse and trousers, a string of pearls lining her neck, her outfit is out of Helen’s closet.
“Please, come in,” she says warmly. “I’ve set up tea in the living room.” As they follow her into a cool, dark room with oak panels lining the walls, she chatters about her month-long sojourn to the Amalfi Coast. “We rent a house somewhere different each year. Last year, it was the French Riviera, and the year before that we got a flat in London—” She continues to rattle off places Deborah has never been, and Deborah has no idea why her mother would have confided in a woman like this.
They sit on a settee across from Cheryl, waiting as she pours them each a cup of tea. “I’m so glad you found me. Helen was one of my favorites. But I’m sure you could have guessed that.” Deborah and Ashley cannot venture a guess. Helen would have said this woman was so full of shit you could smell her from a mile away.
Cheryl sips her tea, oblivious to the perplexed stares her visitors offer her. “This book has been an incredible reunion. You’re the sixth family that’s reached out to me since it was published. One family contacted me to say my book helped with their grief. That’s the highest compliment you can get from a reader.” Cheryl stares at them expectantly.
“Your book has been very helpful to us, too,” Ashley begins, sensing the woman’s desire for a compliment. “Helen died two months ago.”
Cheryl’s face shifts to genuine regret. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to see her again.”
Ashley reaches for her cup and re
sts it in her lap. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Let’s see...” Cheryl’s eyes flit toward the ceiling. “The hardcover came out in 2009, so it must have been 2007 or 2008.”
“Did she come here, to visit?” Deborah asks, creating patterns with the honey across the surface of her tea.
“I went to see her a few times in Philadelphia. She gave me some photographs and paperwork for the book.” Cheryl reaches down and produces a pink box, mining through it until she finds a photograph they don’t recognize of Helen and Flora sitting outside a café. “Here she is with her mother.”
“Flora,” Deborah asserts more forcefully than she intends. In this oak room, with this pink box filled with items Helen never showed her and this woman whom she does not like but knows Helen confided in, she’s feeling more than a little defensive.
“That’s right.” Cheryl continues to dig through the box until she finds a German passport for Helen, which she hands to Deborah. In the photograph, Helen wears a white bow in her ear-length hair and a checkered dress with a lace collar. Her smile exposes a lifelong gap between her two front teeth. The passport was issued in 1939 and stamped twice with the Nazi eagle emblem. Helen was fourteen, although she looks younger.
Deborah gasps as she notices Helen’s name on the passport, Helen Sara Auerbach, written in childish cursive. Sara.
Deborah had wanted to name her firstborn Sara, had gotten as far as calling her Sara Miller during her first day of life while she was still in the hospital. When Sara was just thirteen hours old, Deborah, sweaty, tired, and proud of her body for producing a child, held her daughter toward Helen. Helen cooed at the baby, nuzzling her nose against the child’s splotchy skin.
“Hold on to that smell,” Helen said to Deborah as she handed the baby back. “It goes away so quickly.”