“Claire ask, she say, you come.”
The maid shut the door on me, but this time she told me to wait, a word I had learned in my weeks of doorbell ringing. By and by Claire came back with the maid.
“Oh, Susan, it’s the funny little girl from over the way. I’ll talk to her-you go on.” When Susan disappeared, sniffing, Claire bent over and said, “I’ve seen you watching me over the wall, you queer little monkey. What do you want?”
I stammered out my story: father needed job. He could do anything.
“But Mother looks after the garden, and Susan cleans the house.”
“Play violin. Sister-” I pantomimed Vanessa as a bride, making Claire burst into gales of laughter. “He play. Very pretty. Sister like.”
Mrs. Tallmadge appeared behind her daughter, demanding to know who I was and what I wanted. She and Claire had a conversation that went on for some time, which I couldn’t follow at all, except to recognize Hitler’s name, and the Jews, of course. I could see that Claire was trying to persuade Mrs. Tallmadge but that the mother was obdurate-there was no money. When my English became fluent, when I got to know the family, I learned that Mr. Tallmadge had died, leaving some money-enough to maintain the house and keep Mrs. Tallmadge and her daughters in respectable comfort-but not enough for extravagance. Sponsoring my father would have been extravagant.
At one point Claire turned to ask me about my mother. I said, Yes, she would come, too, but Claire wanted to know what kind of work my mother could perform. I stared blankly, unable to imagine such a thing. Not just because she had been sick with her pregnancy, but no one expected my mother to work. You wanted her around to make you gay, because she danced and talked and sang more beautifully than anyone. But even if my English had allowed me to express those ideas, I knew they would be a mistake.
“Sewing,” I finally remembered. “Very good sewing, mother make. Makes.”
“Maybe Ted?” Claire suggested.
“You can try,” her mother snorted, going back into the house.
Ted was Edward Marmaduke. He was going to be Vanessa’s husband. I had seen him in the garden, too, a pale Englishman with very blond hair who turned an unhealthy pinky-red under the summer sun. He would serve in Africa and Italy but come home in one piece in 1945, his face scorched to a deep brick that never really faded.
That summer of ’39 he didn’t want a poor immigrant couple to encumber the start of his married life with Vanessa: I heard that argument, crouched on the other side of the wall between Minna’s yard and Claire’s, knowing it was about me and my family but only understanding his loud “no” and from Vanessa’s tone that she was trying to please both Claire and her fiancé.
Claire told me not to give up hope. “But, little monkey, you need to learn English. You have to go to school in a few weeks.”
“In Vienna,” I said. “I go home. I go on the school there.”
Claire shook her head. “There may be war in Europe; you might not go home for a long time. No, we need to get you speaking English.”
So my life changed overnight. Of course, I still lived with Minna, still ran her errands, endured her bitterness, but my heroine actually did take me to the pergola. Every afternoon she made me speak English with her. When school started, she took me to the local grammar school, introduced me to the headmistress, and helped me at odd intervals to learn my lessons.
I repaid her with lavish adoration. She was the most beautiful girl in London. She became my standard of English manners: Claire says one doesn’t do that, I would say coldly to Minna. Claire says one always does this. I imitated her accent and her ways of doing things, from how she draped herself in the garden swing to how she wore her hats.
When I learned Claire was going to read medicine if she got a place at the Royal Free, that became my ambition, too.
XV Gate Crasher
Morrell’s and my brief vacation in Michigan helped drive Friday’s worries to the back of my mind-thanks chiefly to Morrell’s good sense. Since I was driving the outbound route I started to detour to Hyde Park, thinking I could make a quick trip in and out of Fepple’s office to look for the Sommers family file. Morrell vetoed this sharply, reminding me that we’d agreed to forty-eight hours without business.
“I didn’t bring my laptop, so that I wouldn’t be tempted to e-mail Humane Medicine. You can stay away from an insurance agent who sounds like a disgusting specimen for that long, too, V I.” Morrell took my picklocks out of my bag and stuck them in his jeans. “Anyway, I don’t want to be a party to your extracurricular information-gathering techniques.”
I had to laugh, despite a momentary annoyance. After all, why would I want to spoil my last few days with Morrell by bothering with a worm like Fepple? I decided not even to bother with the morning papers, which I’d stuck in my bag without reading: I didn’t need to raise my blood pressure by seeing Bull Durham’s attacks on me in print.
Less easy to put aside were my worries about Lotty, but our ban on business didn’t include concerns about friends. I tried to describe her anguish to Morrell. He listened to me as I drove but couldn’t offer much help in deciphering what lay behind her tormented speech.
“She lost her family in the war, didn’t she?”
“Except for her younger brother Hugo, who went to England with her. He lives in Montreal -he runs a small chain of upscale women’s boutiques in Montreal and Toronto. Her uncle Stefan, I guess he was one of her grandfather’s brothers, he came to Chicago in the 1920’s. And spent most of the war as a guest of the federal government in Fort Leavenworth. Forgery,” I added in response to Morrell’s startled question. “A master engraver who fell in love with Andrew Jackson’s face but overlooked a few details. So he wasn’t part of her childhood.”
“She was nine or ten when she last saw her mother, then. No wonder those wartime memories are too painful for her. Didn’t you say he was dead-the person named Radbuka?”
“Or she. Lotty revealed no details at all. But she did say it, said that the person no longer exists.” I thought about it. “It’s a peculiar construction: that person no longer exists. It could mean several things-the person died, the person changed identities, or maybe the person betrayed her in some way so that someone she loved or who she thought loved her never really existed.”
“Then the pain could come from the reminder of a second loss. Don’t go sleuthing after her, Vic. Let her bring the story to you when she’s strong enough to.”
I fixed my eyes on the road. “And if she never tells me?”
He leaned over to wipe a tear from my cheek. “It’s not your failure as a friend. These are her demons, not your failures.”
I didn’t speak much for the rest of the ride. We were going about a hundred miles around the big U of Lake Michigan’s southern end; I let the rhythm of car and road fill my mind.
Morrell had booked a room at a rambling stone inn overlooking Lake Michigan. After checking in we took a walk along the beach. It was hard to believe that this was the same lake that Chicago bordered-the long stretches of dunes, empty of everything but birds and prairie grasses, were a different world than the relentless noise and grime of the city.
Three weeks after Labor Day we had the lakefront to ourselves. Feeling the wind from the lake in my hair, making the crystalline sand along the shore sing by rubbing it with my bare heel, gave me a cocoon of peace. I felt the tension lines smooth out of my cheeks and forehead.
“Morrell-it will be very hard for me to live without you these next few months. I know this trip is exciting and that you’re eager to go. I don’t grudge it to you. But it will be hard-especially right now-not to have you here.”