Legacy of Silence (35 page)

“Died?” cried Jane. “Yes, she did die, but not until years later when I was a child.”

Her shaking voice stopped while the two women kept staring at each other. David came to the rescue.

“We’re assuming that you’re talking about Caroline
Hartzinger, the daughter of a physician who was a friend of your late husband. She was traveling with an older woman, a sister, an adopted sister, Lore, who was a nurse and—”

“Yes, yes, of course we’re talking about the same person. A lovely, darling girl. It was Lore who wrote us about her death. Very sudden, she said, and then we never heard any more. We were stunned.”

Jane spoke into the sudden silence. “This is unbelievable.”

David spoke again. “Let me start from the beginning. Here, very briefly, is what happened, Mrs. Schmidt. Caroline was pregnant when she left for America. She did not know it while she was still in your house. In New York she met a young man who, knowing she was pregnant, was so much in love with her that he married her, nevertheless. The baby was a girl. They named her Eve, and she grew up as his daughter. She is Jane’s much older half-sister.”

“Pregnant? Oh, yes!” Amalia Schmidt smiled a little knowingly and a little sadly. “We wondered about that sometimes when she and the young man wandered off together. They were so very much in love. You must remember that it was 1939, very different from today. Of course, it was wartime, too, or almost, and who knew what might happen to either of them?”

Energy and strength all went streaming out of Jane as water leaves a leaking container. And lying back in the chair, she repeated, “Unbelievable.”

Mrs. Schmidt was alarmed. “Are you feeling all right? Can I get you anything?”

“No, nothing, thank you. It’s your news. It’s an awful shock. Awful.”

David rose, paced to the window and stood there frowning in thought. Then he said slowly, “Obviously, we need to get back to Lore. Whyever would she have said such a thing? We shall have to work backward. Jane, you start.”

It took every effort for Jane to speak. “I only know,” she said simply, addressing Mrs. Schmidt, “that Lore has been the faithful heart of our family since the time she lived with my grandparents in Berlin. She was with my mother when she married, when my sister Eve was born, and when I was born.” Unable to say more, she stopped. “You go on, David.”

“I think Jane’s told you all that she can, and I myself know nothing more. Can you think of anything, Mrs. Schmidt?”

“Oh, I suppose I could search my memory and come up with many, many little things that I think I have forgotten. But I haven’t really forgotten. It’s all there hidden in the brain cells, you know,” she said, tapping her forehead. “Nothing is ever really lost, nothing at all. Yet for now, this minute, nothing comes to me.”

They waited. The old lady was so visibly disturbed, that she might be totally unreliable. Now, in her agitation, she made hostess gestures, intended
perhaps to calm or delay; she offered coffee or tea; when these were declined, she brought a pitcher of water, placed it on the small table between Jane and David, and took on her lap a cat that had followed her from the kitchen. The cat’s bell tinkled in the stillness.

“I’m trying to think,” she said.

And David answered gently, “Don’t try too hard. Take your time.”

“Well, first there were the parents, Caroline’s father and mother. She was so worried about them. She was terrified. Did she ever find out what happened to them, how they died?”

Jane was looking down at the rug, a very old Oriental, worn where a chair’s feet had stood. Pink faded flowers lay between dark-green octagons, and a vine crept among them. In the grandparents’ house, Lore said, all the floors had been covered with Oriental rugs.

“Yes,” she said. “After the war, my mother found out how they died.”

“And Walter? What did she know about him?”

The name, as neutral and common as any Thomas or William, would always have the power to shock; even I, thought Jane, who have no connection with the owner of the name, still have my store of pictures, imagined from what I have been told, and remembered from what I have seen in Eve’s eyes.

“Only,” she said bitterly, “that she loved him and thought he loved her, and that he deserted her.”

Another sad smile, mingled this time with irony, passed across the old face. “Deserted her? He couldn’t very well help it, could he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you know that he died?”

“How would we know?”

“We wrote to Lore. He was killed, you see, and it would have been too shocking for Caroline to open such a letter.”

“Killed in the war?”

“No, no. Just before the war. The Nazis caught him.”

“But he was one of them!”

“A Nazi! He was never a Nazi.” The old lady gasped. “Is that what you all think? My God, what a pity. Poor young Caroline! How awful, how very awful, that she never learned the truth. Terrible as it is, it would have made all the difference in the world. No, Walter was never a Nazi. Never at all. Quite the opposite. He was arrested with a group of students who had plans to assassinate Hitler.”

Jane’s heart, which had quieted, awoke to beat in her very ears. “Mrs. Schmidt!” she cried. “This is mad! It’s mad! Are you sure of it? Why, Lore said—”

“Lore was mistaken. The entire episode was in the German papers, and of course we learned of it here. It got particular attention because Walter’s father was such an important industrialist and Party man, that the whole affair was all the more shocking. In
fact, the father was in serious trouble over it and only managed by the skin of his teeth to survive.”

“But Lore,” Jane insisted, “but Lore said—”

“It doesn’t matter what Lore said, my dear. These are the facts.”

“But, Mrs. Schmidt—” Jane stopped to put into some sequence a torrent of questions.

Now David interrupted. “Let Mrs. Schmidt finish. How did all this happen? What else do you know?” he asked.

Amalia Schmidt sighed. Making a little steeple with her fingers, she began to speak with such fluent ease now that surely she must have told the story many times before.

“You must be aware that during those shameful years, the Nazi program was very popular in the universities. Educated people who should never have been infected—well, no matter. That’s how it was. At the same time, though, there were some young people, not enough of them, but some, who were decent and courageous enough to go against the tide. The particular group to which Walter belonged, or so I construct the event from the accounts, was caught when one of the students was picked up with pamphlets in his possession. The rest I suppose you can imagine.”

“Oh, I can imagine. Nazi justice. No trial,” David said. “Quick justice, shall we say? Quick and over with.”

“Quick? A bullet in the head? No, unfortunately
not. Prolonged torture as only they knew how to do it. Then death by hanging in a most grisly—well, never mind,” Amalia said after glancing toward Jane.

“My poor sister,” Jane whispered. “All her life she has been tormented by this. She never says much, but she doesn’t need to. Please, can you tell me something about Walter as a person, something I can bring back to her? Anything you can think of will be precious.”

“I haven’t very much more than some impressions. He wasn’t here long. And when he was here, he was out of the house with Caroline. My impressions? He was a cultured person, perhaps even an intellectual. Mannerly and refined. And very deeply in love with Caroline, very tender with her. I remember that sometimes he called her ‘Rebecca’ in fun because she looked like those old engravings of Rebecca with the long black hair.”

Jane was thinking: My mother was here with him in this house. She might even have sat in this chair.

“History,” she murmured. “So long ago.”

Amalia corrected her. “Not so long. It is very real to me, and there are still many others who remember those years. You only feel like that because you’re young.”

“I feel like that because I am here in this house with someone who knew my mother when she was not yet nineteen. What can you tell me about her? Any little thing at all?”

“Ah, my memory is funny. One minute it’s so clear, and then the next minute it isn’t. Well, let me see. I can’t tell you much, but I can say that she was charming. She had a delicacy, an innocence that you don’t often see these days. She was very young for her age. Obviously she had been sheltered. Very likely she was more sheltered than she would have been if the times had been different. But they were violent, and the German streets were full of rowdies. She had needed protection. Oh yes, there was ‘law and order,’ too, under that government, plenty of order—depending upon who you were.

“My husband saw something in Caroline that I admit I did not see. I worried about her when that blow struck and she learned that he wasn’t coming back to her. And there she was, setting forth across the ocean without her parents, for I had little confidence in their survival, even though it was before we knew as much about death camps as we later learned. But my husband was a discerning judge of people, and he always said that Caroline was strong. Resilient, he said. Good stock.”

“Jane,” David suggested, “tell Mrs. Schmidt about the business that this very sheltered young girl built up—with your father, of course.”

“I can’t,” Jane said. “I’m sorry, but I think I’d like to go outside for a few minutes.”

When Amalia Schmidt stood up to follow, David stopped her. “I know her ways. She needs to be alone when she’s troubled.”

“One has to wonder whether traits like that are inherited. Caroline, in her worst despair, used to shut herself in her room upstairs or else go out alone and walk for hours.”

The scene was as Lore had so often described it: a long, sloping lawn, a walk along the rim of the lake, and even a group of rustic chairs beneath the linden tree, which must have been much smaller then. And Jane stood quite still with no constructive thought in her smitten brain, only a sum of maddening questions.

Why had Lore told them that Caroline was dead? It made no sense. In fact, it was so senseless that it was not to be believed. Caroline, weighed down by grief and helplessness, must have been in a wretched state. So Lore might simply have written that she feared for Caroline’s health and had been misunderstood by the Schmidts. Mrs. Schmidt was now admittedly forgetful; perhaps she was even entirely confused.

Looking outward as now toward the calm gleam of water and sky, Jane was struck by its contrast to the muddy turmoil of human affairs.

When she returned to the house, Mrs. Schmidt had spread photographs out on the dining room table. “I haven’t taken anything out of that closet in years,” she was saying. “But I suddenly thought that there might be some pictures in there. Look at these. Our neighbor took one of my husband and me with Caroline and Walter. Now that I see it again, I remember
the day. Here’s Caroline. She had on a pink dress. I think it was her favorite. And Walter—you see how tall he was? A distinguished young man. Too bad it’s faded, but you can still see—”

Jane took the picture to the light. So often and so carefully had Eve tried to describe their mother, yet even she could not describe Caroline at the age of nineteen. So here is Caroline; does she seem happy? I can’t tell. She is close to him. Almost touching each other, they stand apart from the older couple. The photo can be enlarged. I can have a copy for my own. What is she seeing behind her quiet gaze? Her shoes have two straps, back in style now. They were probably white. And so that’s the pink dress. She has a ribbon band, Roman-striped, tying her hair back. This is her brief, sweet summer. No, it’s not even a whole summer, only a few days. She has no idea what is going to happen to her life. But then, none of us ever has. Eve says she got over him when she married my father. I wonder. I doubt it. No woman could ever forget such loss.

Mrs. Schmidt’s memory, reviving, flowed like a stream. “They each had a trunkful of beautiful clothes, no difference between the two of them in quality. Lore said she was one of the family. They were wonderful to her. You could see that she appreciated everything, the good clothes, everything. She told us that once the doctor reached America, they would be ‘back on top.’ She was a very intelligent woman, very clever. The doctor had entrusted Caroline
to her, and she felt the responsibility. Yes, you could see that.”

After a long while, as the afternoon drew in, signals began to pass between David and Jane. It was time to leave; they made the usual motions and spoke their words of gratitude.

“Why not stay awhile?” Mrs. Schmidt was not ready to end the day. “Stay and have a little supper.”

But neither wanted to, so with more thanks they accepted the photo, promised to write, and departed.

In the car they were stunned and quiet, their mutual disturbance palpable in that silence. The wave of dread that Jane had managed to fight down while at the Schmidt house now threatened again to swallow her.

David started to think aloud. “I can’t seem to make up my mind whether the stuff is true or not! In some ways the old lady seemed very sharp, and then in the next moment she was unsure of herself. She could have gotten Walter’s name wrong, and that business about Caroline’s death did seem very farfetched. Didn’t you have the feeling that she was sometimes wandering a bit?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure. But I think maybe not.”

David gave her a sharp look. “You know something you’re not telling me, Jane, such as why you wanted to go there in the first place.”

“If I ever wanted to hide anything from you,” she replied ruefully, “you’d catch me, wouldn’t you? Yes,
I did have a reason, but it seemed so cockeyed that I hesitated to tell you about it.”

“Well, tell me now.”

“I almost don’t know where to begin.”

“At the beginning.”

“Remember when you and I went to Lore’s apartment and you remarked on the rows of notebooks in a closet? You opened one and I put it back on the shelf, but not before I had glimpsed something that I thought very, very odd. It went something like this. ‘I feel so much guilt because they’ve been so good to me all my life. When I feel this way, I’m always so sorry. I can’t bear to remember all the things I have done to them.’ That’s all I read, but it’s haunted me ever since. What do you make of it?”