by Mandy Berman
Not for a second was Simone worried about the health of her baby when he did come. He was on time, at exactly forty weeks, and the sonograms had shown nothing but a perfectly healthy little boy. The risks were so much higher for Danièle: the baby might not be strong enough, might not have lungs that worked properly. This little girl, five weeks early, would be more prone to infections or any other combination of terrifying possibilities than Henri had been. What did it feel like for Danièle, the fear for the baby’s health and well-being on top of all of that excruciating pain?
Surely, Simone reasoned with her anxious self, the baby wouldn’t come if it wasn’t ready to?
It didn’t always work like that. We are at the mercy of these tiny creatures, she thought, who themselves are at the mercy of chance. Who decided who survived? Her father would have said that God decided, that we are all at his mercy. Oliver, if he had ever met Hugo, would have responded that there was no God, that life was only a string of random events that we attempted to ascribe meaning to.
Simone had once believed in God because her father believed in God, and she had thought that if a man who lost his parents in the Holocaust still believed in a god, then he must know something she didn’t. But it was hard for Simone to believe in a god after her father died of cancer, too young, before getting to meet his grandson. It was harder to believe in a god after losing three babies. It would be nearly impossible to believe in a god if something terrible happened to Danièle’s baby now or to Dani herself. Simone certainly did not believe that God had brought her Oliver, this man who had caused her so much pain over the past year. Everything reasonable in her said that God did not exist.
It also felt callous, in a way, to be so defiant about God’s nonexistence. How could a person obstinately rule out that which we might never have an answer to? Maybe God was randomness itself, the moments of despair and joy, the things we would never understand, in coexistence with one another. Maybe God was Henri playing on the floor with his trucks, single-mindedly focused on the task in front of him. Maybe God was the voice that had referred to Oliver as her ex-husband last night, to that American girl at the bistro, words that had come out of Simone before she even had a chance to consider them. Or maybe God was none of these things. Did it matter, having an answer?
If she believed that God was a man in the sky who listened to prayers, then she would certainly be praying to him now, for the health of her sister and the baby. This, she was almost sure, wasn’t what God was. And so instead she sat down on the floor, took a toy truck, and chased her son’s truck with her own until he began to giggle. If she could not be in there holding Danièle’s hand, wiping sweat from her forehead, and if she could not have the chance to endure that pain all over again herself, then at least she could be here, playing with the boy who was already hers.
One hour later, Alex came out, tears in his eyes, to announce the birth of their little girl.
* * *
—
They named her Maya, for the month she’d been born—not the month she’d been expected. The “M” was also after Joséphine’s mother, Madeleine. She was ushered almost immediately to the NICU to be put on a feeding tube and respiratory support, and to protect her from infection. No one except Danièle had been able to hold her yet. Simone and Henri went in to see Danièle before visiting the NICU, and they found her in the hospital bed where she’d delivered Maya, sobbing.
“They took her from me,” Dani was crying. “She was so hungry, and I tried to feed her, but it wouldn’t take, and then they took her.”
“They’re simply making sure she’s up to her regular weight,” Alex said, dipping a washcloth into a cup of cold water and placing it on Dani’s forehead. “She’s going to be okay. They’ve already said so.”
“I don’t trust them!” Dani screamed out, her face red and full of fury. Henri grabbed Simone’s leg and hid behind it. Simone remembered this, too, all of the hormones coursing, how obsessed with and attached to and fearful for Henri she’d felt in the minutes following his birth, and yet how no one seemed to understand her, how unreasonable everyone else was. She patted the top of Henri’s head, told him everything was okay.
“Should I take him out?” Joséphine asked, which caused Henri to grasp Simone’s leg more tightly.
As much as she wanted to stay with Dani, tell her everything was going to be okay, tell her she understood exactly what she was afraid of, Simone knew she had to choose her son now. “No, we’ll go,” she said.
“It sure would be easier if Oliver was here,” Joséphine said under her breath, just loud enough for Simone to hear it.
* * *
—
Right before he fell asleep, Henri asked, “When are we going home to Papa?”
Simone hadn’t booked a return flight. She had been too overwhelmed by fear for her sister’s health to think that far into the future. Too angry with Oliver to think about returning to him, ever. It was already the twenty-fourth of May; they would be returning to Paris in a week. They only had to go back to Berlin to pack up the apartment, ship some boxes. All of their important furniture had remained in Paris. The thrift-store or Ikea items they’d bought for the Neukölln flat were already posted for sale on Craigslist. What they didn’t sell Simone planned to put on the curb; she was too tired to bargain.
Most surprisingly—or maybe not surprisingly at all—she hadn’t heard from Oliver. He hadn’t checked in about the baby, and she hadn’t kept him updated. It felt as if they were making a simultaneous decision to give up on each other, which felt anticlimactic despite the massive repercussions. Perhaps the magnitude of this would hit her later. Perhaps there was a blowout waiting for them in Berlin, or perhaps Oliver would already have his bags packed, waiting for them to return. Perhaps—quite the opposite—his things were still in their drawers, having been unpacked mere weeks earlier; perhaps he’d decided to stay in Berlin indefinitely. This seemed the more likely option. What it came down to was how much he wanted to be near his son. Simone was sure that only Oliver knew the answer to that.
“When are we going home to Papa?” Henri asked again, thinking she hadn’t heard him.
“In a few days,” she said, and gave his hand a tight squeeze.
“That’s so long,” said her sad, sleepy boy.
“They’ll go fast. I promise.”
He nodded, swallowing back his tears. He got that from Oliver—the ability to secrete away the things that really hurt him, and save them for a rainy day.
* * *
—
As she waited for Joséphine to return to the apartment, she opened up her laptop, which she hadn’t done all weekend, to answer some overdue emails. Logging into her account, she had the false hope that, perhaps, there would be a message from Oliver. A long email apologizing, or even simply explaining himself. He was a writer, after all; he was always better at expressing himself on paper than in person. He had written so many letters to her at the beginning of their relationship—love letters, erotic letters, admiration letters. She’d saved them all, pushed them to the back of her underwear drawer.
But there was nothing in her inbox except a couple of emails from her university in Paris, about her fall schedule, and one from her fellowship advisor, whose notes she’d been ignoring for nearly a month now, asking about progress. Could they take their money back? She didn’t know. She’d unequivocally failed at her Berlin year; she wasn’t sure she’d ever failed so spectacularly. Soon, she would be able to erase it, pretend that it had never happened at all.
Her phone buzzed, and she jumped, half hoping; it was only her mother, saying that she’d be home for the night around ten, if Simone wanted to go back to the hospital when she returned.
So was this it, then? Was this how their relationship ended—not with a bang but with a whimper? She wondered how he was busying himself in Berlin that weekend instead of coming wit
h her. Packing up all his stuff? Going out to a club, finding someone in a dark corner, staying anonymous? How little she knew about this man she’d spent the last six years of her life with. She was starting to feel like they’d been a dream—a hazy, sometimes sexy, sometimes traumatic dream—that she was only now waking up from. A dream that had left her a son, one who was very real.
* * *
—
Joséphine came home to relieve Simone, and when Simone got to the hospital and walked toward her sister’s room, she cracked open the door to find Danièle fast asleep. She wouldn’t wake her; Dani needed rest.
She made her way toward the NICU nursery instead; she’d yet to see Maya, for fear of scaring Henri with all those infants hooked up to life support. The hallway was badly lit, fluorescent lighting that reflected off the cheap linoleum flooring, and there was only one person standing there looking at the babies. It was Alex.
He was looking down at the sea of minuscule humans plugged into their various contraptions: oxygen tanks and feeding tubes and heart monitors. Some of the babies were no longer than Simone’s forearm. She followed his gaze to one of the bigger babies, relatively speaking, in the third row. She was pink-skinned and wrinkled, with what looked like a gas mask covering her face. She had a feeding tube coming from her belly button, and she was fast asleep.
“Is that her?” Simone whispered, and Alex jumped, putting a hand over his heart.
“You scared me.”
“Sorry.”
He placed a finger on the glass, pointing her out. “Fourth from the left.”
“She’s beautiful,” Simone said, though truthfully she looked terrifying, hooked up to all of those machines that had the capacity to give her life as easily as they could take it away.
“She’s going to be okay,” he said, with a certain amount of overconfidence to his voice, as if convincing himself of it.
“She will be,” Simone said.
“Thanks for being here,” he said.
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
He turned to look at Simone.
“Does Oliver hate Danièle that much?”
“No,” Simone said. “I don’t know. I think I’m the problem.”
“Why?”
“I ask too much.”
“You’re his wife.”
She shrugged.
“I know I’m not perfect,” he said. “But it’s changing now. I’ve decided.”
“You say that.”
“I don’t understand how…with a baby, how can you leave your baby?”
“Some people can.”
She knew that Oliver was going to break Henri’s heart, the way Oliver’s parents had broken his. She mostly expected, when they returned to Berlin, that Oliver wouldn’t be there. That kind of trauma—they say it’s inherited. She had borne a boy with trauma in his blood.
But maybe there was a chance that she alone could save Henri. Maybe he would always be a little bit broken, and maybe she had capacity enough, as his mother, to mend the broken pieces.
If not her, who?
28.
FIONA HAD SLEPT the entire flight from Berlin to New York. Although they took off at seven in the morning from Germany, it was only nine A.M. when she got home, having flown backward in time. She hadn’t told her mom that she was flying in from Berlin, not Paris, and that she had changed the flight for a whopping fee two days earlier; the Berlin flight had landed in New York at nearly the same time as the one from Paris.
Fiona made her way through customs to find Amy waiting for her. She looked nervous, as if waiting to meet a blind date. Fiona greeted her mom with a long hug, and she thought she heard Amy sniffle.
“Mom, are you crying?”
She appeared to wipe away an errant tear. “No,” she said. “I’m just happy you’re home.”
“I was only gone for a week,” Fiona said, throwing an arm around her mom while she pulled the suitcase with the other.
On the drive back to Larchmont, Fiona resisted the heavy pull of her eyelids, determined to stay up in order to beat jet lag. She felt a sort of culture shock despite having been away for such a short period of time: she was struck by how wide the highways were, how big the cars, how ugly the drive, the gray and smoggy industrial turnpikes through Queens and the Bronx.
The house was filled with boxes, some packed up already, labeled KITCHEN and DINING ROOM and OFFICE. The bookcases in the living room were empty, the open boxes filled with novels. Fiona left her suitcase in the living room, afraid that if she brought it up to her bedroom she’d immediately collapse on the bed.
Fiona sat down at the kitchen table; Amy made scrambled eggs and a pot of strong coffee, and turned on the little TV on the kitchen counter for background noise.
On a morning news show, there was brief footage of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in El Salvador, attending the inauguration of the country’s new president. She was dressed head to toe in a royal-blue pantsuit, shaking hands with Salvadorean men in identical black suits and bending to accept presents from local girls in school uniforms. The red carpet she walked down was lined with soldiers in red uniforms, standing to attention. Hillary’s blue pantsuit stood out against the red and black that surrounded her; she was, Fiona thought, brave to dress like that, setting herself apart from the crowd. After all, she was already a woman in power, already set apart enough.
Fiona took the first sip of her coffee, watching Secretary Clinton and thinking about her Monica Lewinsky project. Her mother placed a plate of eggs and toast in front of her and sat across the table with her own mug of coffee. It felt like a lifetime ago, that project, and a lifetime ago for Hillary, too. The humiliated wife who’d gone on not only to survive but to thrive. That project was, ultimately, the only work Fiona had truly cared about last year. Oliver’s notes on her final portfolio now seemed false and insignificant. In the end, she’d only wanted to do well in the class because of him. But she would have spent another semester, another school year, an entire graduate degree studying Monica and women like her—women who were betrayed by other women, ruined by the patriarchy, and forced to go into hiding because they decided to have sex with a powerful man.
Did it make Fiona a better person that she hadn’t chosen to sleep with Oliver? What might have happened to her if she had? Maybe, if she’d kept it a secret, nothing would have happened. This sort of thing occurred all the time. The only thing that varied was which women chose to speak out about the things they came to regret. Imagine all the women who didn’t, who went on with their lives carrying around a secret. Was it possible that any of Oliver’s previous conquests recalled their trysts with nostalgia or erotic longing rather than shame? In a way, she hoped so. She hoped that some of them had gotten what they wanted. She hadn’t slept with him because, ultimately, she didn’t want to, not because it was the “wrong” thing to do. That in itself, she believed, was a victory.
“I wonder what Monica Lewinsky thinks about all this,” Fiona said to her mother.
Amy looked confused. “About what?”
“About Hillary. It can’t be easy, watching her thrive.”
“It wasn’t easy for Hillary, either,” Amy said. She gestured to the TV. “This shows resilience.”
Fiona wondered if Amy saw herself in the secretary, finding fulfillment again after hardship. Only, Amy had not just been cheated on but had lost a child, too. She seemed to be doing so well these days that sometimes Fiona could forget that they had endured the same loss. Why was Amy so good at moving on, and Fiona so bad at it?
Maybe it wasn’t a competition, how one grieved. Fiona could never know what the depths of Amy’s despair looked like, because she’d never shown them to her. And maybe that was okay. The point was, Amy had gotten herself out of the bedroom she’d hidden in for months. She was here for Fiona now, and she was moving forward.
> Maybe they needed to pretend to be doing better than they were. If only for each other.
“Are you going to tell me about Paris?” Amy asked.
She could leave out the fight with Liv. She could speculate on the things that Helen might have loved: the flower boxes over the balconies, the sumptuous queen bed, the crème bru
Fiona and Helen might not have grown to love each other. But they might have loved each other. There was no way to know.
“I went to Berlin, too,” Fiona said, after a pause.
Amy didn’t look mad; on the contrary, a small smile crept in, conspiratorial. She leaned forward in her chair and put her hands around her coffee mug.
“You did?”
In memory of my grandfather,
Howard Hobbes Remaly
Acknowledgments
I AM GRATEFUL TO many people for their support in the writing of this book, and this is by no means an exhaustive list.
Thank you to my visionary agent, Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, and to my brilliant editor, Andrea Walker. I’m grateful to Emma Caruso, Allyson Lord, Melissa Sanford, Andrea DeWerd, Katie Tull, Janet Wygal, and the rest of the lovely people at Random House for their hard work at all stages of publishing this book. Thank you to everyone at DeFiore and Company, especially Reiko Davis and Jacey Mitziga.
I am grateful to the following works and institutions: The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster, with commentary by Cathy Davidson; The Culture of Sentiment by Shirley Samuels; The Last Jews in Berlin by Leonard Gross; Amelia, or The Influence of Virtue by Sally Wood; the Jewish Women’s Archive; the Jewish Museum, Berlin; Yad Vashem; and The Washington Post and The New York Times, for the Monica Lewinsky transcripts.