Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 10 (64 page)

But they thought his parents were an embarrassment.
When they had to give up their ten-room flat on the Renngasse and move in with
the Radbukas, my Oma—she acted as though she had been asked to live in a cow
byre. She held herself aloof, she addressed Martin’s mother formally, as “Sie,”
never as “Du.” And me, I wanted my Oma Herschel to keep loving me best, I
needed that love, there were so many of us all cramped together, I needed
someone to care about me—Sofie was caught up in her own misery, pregnant, sick,
not used to any kind of hardship, getting spite from the Radbuka cousins and
aunts who felt she’d mistreated their own darling Martin—Moishe—all those
years.

But don’t you see, it made me treat my other
grandmother rudely. If I showed my Bobe, my Granny Radbuka, the affection she
craved from me, then my Oma would push me away. On the morning Hugo and I left
for England, my Bobe, my Granny Radbuka, longed for me to kiss her, and I would
only curtsy to her.

I choked down the sobs that started to rise up in me.
Victoria handed me a bottle of water without saying anything. If she had
touched me I would have hit her, but I took her water and drank it.

So ten years later, when I found myself pregnant,
found myself carrying Carl’s child that hot summer, it all grew dark in my
head. My mother. My Oma—my Grandmother Herschel. My Bobe—my Grandmother
Radbuka. I thought I could make amends to my Bobe. I thought she would forgive
me if I used her name. Only I didn’t know her first name. I didn’t know my own
granny’s name. Night after night I could see her thin arms held out to hold me,
to kiss me good-bye. Night after night I could see my embarrassed curtsy,
knowing my Oma was watching me. No matter how many nights I recalled this
scene, I could not remember my Bobe’s first name. So I used my mother’s.

I wouldn’t have an abortion. That was Claire’s first
suggestion. By 1944, when I was tagging around after Claire trying to learn
enough science so that I could be like her, be a doctor, all my family was
already dead. Right here in front of us they shaved my Oma’s silver hair. I can
see it falling on the floor around her like a waterfall, she was so proud of
it, she never cut it. My Bobe. She was already bald under her Orthodox wig. The
cousins I shared a bed with, whom I resented because I didn’t have my own
canopied bed anymore, they were dead by then. I had been saved, for no reason except
the love of my Opa, who found the money to buy a passage to freedom for Hugo
and me.

All of them, my mother, too, who sang and danced with
me on Sunday afternoons, they were here, here in this ground, burned to the
ashes that are blowing in your eyes. Maybe their ashes are gone, as well, maybe
strangers took them away, bathing their eyes, washing my mother down the sink.

I couldn’t have an abortion. I couldn’t add one more
death to all those dead. But I had no feelings left with which to raise a child.
It was only the thought that my mother would come back that kept me going
during the war when I lived with Minna. We’re so proud of you, Lottchen, she
and my Oma would say, you didn’t cry, you were a good girl, you did your
lessons, you stayed first in your class even in a foreign language, you
tolerated the hatefulness of that prize bitch Minna—I would imagine the war
ending and them embracing me with those words.

It’s true that by 1944 we were already hearing reports
in the immigrant world about what was happening—here in this place and in all
the other places like it. But how many were dying, nobody knew, and so each of
us kept hoping that our own people would be spared. But in the wave of a hand,
they were gone. Max looked for them. He went to Europe, but I couldn’t, I
couldn’t bear it, I haven’t been to central Europe since I left in 1939—until
now—but he looked, and he said, They are dead.

So I felt horribly trapped: I wouldn’t abort the
pregnancy, but I could not keep the baby. I would not raise one more hostage to
fortune that could be snatched from me at a moment’s notice.

I couldn’t tell Carl. Carl—if he’d said, let’s get
married, let’s raise the child, he would never have understood why I wouldn’t.
It wasn’t because of my career, which would have been destroyed if I’d had a
baby. Now—now girls do it all the time. It isn’t easy, to be a medical student
and a mother, but no one says, That’s it, your career is over. Believe me, in
1949, a baby meant your medical training was finished forever.

If I’d told Carl, told him I couldn’t keep the child,
he would have always blamed me for putting my career first. He would never have
understood my real reasons. I couldn’t tell him—anything. No more families for
me. I know it was cruel of me to leave without a word, but I couldn’t tell him
the truth, and I couldn’t lie. So I left without speaking.

Later I turned myself into the saver of women with
difficult pregnancies. I think I imagine every time I leave the operating room
that I have saved not myself but some small piece of my mother, who didn’t live
long after the birth of that last little sister.

So my life went on. I wasn’t unhappy. I didn’t dwell
on this past. I lived in the present, in the future. I had my work, which
rewarded me richly. I loved music. Max and I—I never thought to be a lover
again, but to my surprise and my happiness, as well, that happened between us.
I had other friends, and—you, Victoria. You became a beloved friend before I
noticed it happening. I let you draw close to me, I let you be another hostage
to fortune—and over and over you cause me agony by your reckless disregard for
your own life.

She muttered something, some kind of apology. I still
wouldn’t look at her.

And then this strange creature appeared in Chicago.
This disturbed, ungainly man, claiming to be a Radbuka, when I knew not one of
them survived. Except for my own son. When you first told me about this man,
Paul, my heart stopped: I thought perhaps it was my child, raised as he claimed
by an
Einsatzgruppenführer
. Then I saw him at Max’s and realized he was
too old to be my child.

But then I had a worse fear: the idea that my son
might somehow have grown up with a desire to torment me. I think—I wasn’t
thinking, I don’t know what I thought, but I imagined my son somehow rising up
to conspire with this Paul whoever he is to torture me. So I flew to Claire to
demand that she send me to my child.

When Claire came to my rescue that summer, she said
she would place my child privately. But she didn’t tell me she gave him to Ted
Marmaduke. To her sister and her brother-in-law who wanted children they
couldn’t have. Want, have, want, have. It’s the story of people like them.
Whatever they want, that they must get. And they got my child.

Claire cut me out of her life so that I should never
see my son being raised by her sister and her husband. She pretended it was
disapproval of my thinking so little of my medical training that I would get
pregnant, but it was really so I would never see my child.

It was so strange to me, seeing her last week. She—she
was always my model—of how you behave, of doing things the right way, whether
at tea or in surgery. She couldn’t bear for me to see she was less than that.
All those years of her coldness, her estrangement, were only due to that
English sin, embarrassment. Oh, we laughed and cried together last week, the
way old women can, but you don’t overcome a gap of fifty years with one day’s
tears and embraces.

Wallace, Ted and Vanessa called my baby. Wallace
Marmaduke, for Ted’s brother who died at El Alamein. They never told him he was
adopted. They certainly never told him he had Jewish ancestry—instead, he grew
up hearing all the lazy contempt I used to hear when I crouched on the far side
of Mrs. Tallmadge’s garden wall.

Claire showed me a photograph album she’d kept of his
life: she’d had some notion she’d leave it for me if she died before me. My son
was a small dark child, like me, but then, so had Claire and Vanessa’s father
been a small dark man. Perhaps Vanessa would have told him the truth, but she
died when he was seventeen. Claire sent me a note at the time, a note so
strange I should have realized she was trying to tell me something that she
couldn’t put into words. But I was too proud to look behind the surface back
then.

Imagine Wallace’s shock when Ted died last fall: he
went through Ted’s papers and found his own birth certificate. Mother, Sofie
Radbuka instead of Vanessa Tallmadge Marmaduke. Father, unknown, when it should
have been Edward Marmaduke.

What a shock, what a family uproar. He, Wallace
Marmaduke, was a Jew? He was a churchwarden, a regular canvasser for the
Tories, how could he be a Jew, how could his parents have done this to him? He
went to Claire, convinced there was some mistake, but she decided she couldn’t
extend the lie that far. No mistake, she told him.

He was going to burn the birth certificate, he was
going to destroy the idea of his birth identity forever, except that his
daughter—you met his daughter, Pamela? She’s nineteen. It seemed to her
romantic, the unknown birth mother, the dark secret. She took her father’s
birth certificate away with her, she posted that notice on the Internet, that
Questing Scorpio you found. When she heard I had shown up, she came at once to
my hotel, bold like all those Tallmadges, with the self-assurance of knowing
your place in the universe is secure, can never be taken from you.

“She’s very beautiful,” Victoria ventured. “Dr.
Tallmadge brought her to my hotel so I could meet her. She wants to see you
again; she wants to learn to know you.”

She looks like Sofie, I whispered. Like Sofie at
seventeen when she was pregnant with me. Only I lost her picture. I wanted her
with me. But I lost her.

I wouldn’t look at Victoria, at that concern, that
pity, I would not let her or anyone see me so helpless. I bit my lip so hard it
bled salt into my mouth. When she touched my hand I dashed her own away. But
when I looked down, my mother’s photograph lay on the ground next to me.

“You left it on your desk among the Royal Free
newsletters,” she said. “I thought you might want it. Anyway, no one is truly
lost when you carry them with you. Your mother, your Oma, your Bobe, don’t you
think that whatever became of them, you were their joy? You had been saved.
They knew that, they could carry that comfort with them.”

I was digging my fingers into the ground, clutching at
the roots of the dead weeds I was sitting on. She was always leaving me. My
mother would come back and leave, come back and leave, and then she left me for
good. I know that I’m the one who left, they sent me away, they saved me, but
it felt to me as though once again she had left, and this time she never came
back.

And then—I did the same thing. If someone loved me, as
Carl once did, I left. I left my son. Even now, I left Max, I left you, I left
Chicago. Everyone around me should experience the same abandonment I did. I
don’t mind that my son can’t endure the sight of me, leaving him the way I did.
I don’t mind Carl’s bitterness, I earned it, I sought it. What he will say now,
when I tell him the truth, that he did have a son all those years ago, whatever
ugly words he showers on me, I will deserve them.

“No one deserves that pain,” Victoria said. “You least
of all. How can I feel angry with you? All I have is anguish for your grief. As
does Max. I don’t know about Carl, but Max and I—we’re in no position to be
your judges, only your friends. Little nine-year-old Lotty, setting off alone
on your journey, your Bobe surely forgave you. Can’t you now forgive yourself?”

The fall sky was dark when the awkward young policeman
shone his flashlight on us; he did not like to intrude, he said in halting
English, but we should be leaving; it was cold, the lighting was bad on this
hillside.

I let Victoria help me to my feet. I let her lead me
along the dark path back.

About the Author
SARA P ARETSKY
is the author of eleven other books, including the
bestselling
Hard Time, Tunnel Vision, Guardian Angel,
and
Burn Marks
.
She lives with her husband in Chicago.

Also by Sara Paretsky
HARD T IME

GHOST C OUNTRY

WINDY C ITY B LUES

TUNNEL V ISION

GUARDIAN A NGEL

BURN M ARKS

BLOOD S HOT

BITTER M EDICINE

KILLING O RDERS

DEADLOCK

INDEMNITY O NLY

PRAISE FOR

TOTAL RECALL
“Like the tough-cookie PI herself [
Total Recall
] is unpretentious and
fast on its feet. V.I. is A-1.”

—
People
, Page-turner of the week

“A spectacular mystery—complex, fast-paced yet
ruminative, and imbued with the grim awareness, shared by all intelligent
hard-boiled novels, that the past always catches up with us . . . a thrilling
and even moving mystery.”

—
The Washington Post Book World

“
Total Recall
is one of the best V.I. yarns to
date.”

—
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“[A] meticulously plotted, labyrinthine tale . . . the
reader rides breathlessly with [V.I. Warshawski].”

—
Providence Sunday Journal