Then She Found Me (5 page)

The doctor smiled indulgently at the quaint and simple thought.

“What else can we do?” asked Trude.

“Do you know when your fertile time of the month is?” asked the doctor.

“We’re educated people,” said Trude, finding her voice after the insult.

“Don’t be offended,” said the gynecologist. “A patient
once asked me why she hadn’t gotten pregnant, since she and her husband slept together every night.”

“Why hadn’t they?” asked Trude.

“Slept
together,” he said, putting his palms together and to one side of his head, pantomiming sleep. “That’s
all
they did.”

“Is that a true story?” asked Trude sharply.

The doctor nodded. “Now you see why I don’t take anything for granted.”

“Be assured we know how to make babies,” said Trude.

“Give it a year,” said the doctor.

Trude asked if being in the camp had damaged her.

The doctor said, “Many of my patients who have led perfectly comfortable lives cannot conceive. Don’t blame yourself.”

“Who said I was blaming myself?” she asked.

After two years, Trude called an adoption agency in Boston, chosen from the phone book because it bore a Jewish woman’s name. “My husband and I would like to inquire about adopting a baby,” she told the person who answered the phone. She went right to the salient detail, the camps. The woman on the phone was a formidable gatekeeper, but she recognized the unusual and the compelling. Trude was put through to a caseworker. For a second time she asked whether the agency disqualified people if they had been in concentration camps. The caseworker sputtered and said,
“Disqualify!
Why, why, we …
glorify
people like you!” At her end of the line, Trude smiled knowingly. She made an appointment for herself and Julius and reported to him, “Social workers! Everything’s black and white to them. They love their little heroes.”

They took the train to Boston from Providence, then walked from South Station to Boylston Street. At their
interview, they were served lemon drop cookies and tea in china cups with gilded twig handles. “We have to ask for certain documents,” the caseworker apologized. “We have to observe our protocol. But of course you needn’t worry about that. We know that your records have been … lost.” More tea? she asked. Water? A piece of fruit? Trude explained that she was a coffee drinker; had the social worker realized she was Viennese? The interviewer said soothingly, “We are here to help you in any way you might need.” Her expression—a look that Trude and Julius knew by heart—said, This is why I went to social work school and this is what I hoped to find in the adoption field. You will be my helpless wounded bird and I will be your eyedropper.

“One thing that we cannot make an exception about,” the interviewer began once Julius’s cup had been refilled, “is your income.” Trude and Julius thought, This is it. Here’s where they say, “We glorify you, as long as you own a home with at least two bedrooms.” Trude cut in and named a figure that was almost twice as much as Julius earned. She didn’t think they would ask for proof; she figured that Adele Solomon could write a letter saying Julius earned extra money working weekends at the bakery. What did she care about lying? What moral nicety was stronger than giving the answer that would result in a baby?

The social worker looked pleased as she recorded the figure. Refugees with qualifying incomes! Then she left the office and came back with another woman—Florence Cohn of the Florence Cohn Agency herself! She shook their hands and looked into their faces with a compassion reserved for the very rich and the very celebrated who knew the tragedy of infertility.

“We are honored that you came to us for help,” she said.

“How long will it take to get a baby?” asked Julius.

“Do you have a preference for the sex?” They said they did not.

“Six months.”

“Six months!” they said. “That’s all? Six months!”

On their next visit, there was a manila folder before the caseworker. There had been a match. Some question about the religion of the baby’s father. Was that acceptable to them?

Trude said, concealing her annoyance, “Of course.”

“What of the mother?” they asked.

“Intelligent. Very. Seventeen years old. Healthy, attractive, good family. Has availed herself of prenatal care. Her involvement with the father was not … typical of her. She believed they were engaged.”

“What’s she like?” asked Julius.

The social worker, with a patient smile, repeated more slowly, “Jewish. Very smart. Very pretty. In good health.”

“What I mean,” said Julius, “is—will she make trouble when the baby’s born?”

The social worker shook her head emphatically. “She is absolutely committed to giving this baby up for adoption. She has specified Jewish parents”—she read from a card—“with many books in their house and who will educate the child as far as his intellectual needs take him.”

“She said that?” asked Trude.

“She’ll be going to college herself as soon as this is behind her.”

Trude and Julius nodded to each other.

“When is the baby due?” asked Julius.

“The baby’s here,” said the social worker. “She has an April birthday.”

“April!” repeated my mother and father. They smiled.
April
.

*  *  *

Frederick was their natural child. I was seven when he was born, an age considered grown up enough to accompany them in a well-behaved manner wherever they were invited. Trude’s pregnancy was a personal affront to me; besides not being their flesh and blood, I was left at home—me, their little lady, a mensch already—with tiny Freddie and the baby-sitter.

I asked all the time, “Is Freddie a beautiful baby?”

“Yes,” they would answer.

“Was I a beautiful baby?”

“So beautiful.”

“Who was more beautiful?”

“You were the most beautiful girl and Freddie is the most beautiful boy.”

“But what if you didn’t know who was what? If you saw both of us lying side by side in a crib, which one would you say was the most beautiful?”

What harm would it do, my parents probably said, Freddie wouldn’t understand the question or the answer.

“You,” Julius would mouth, and Trude would affirm with a poke of a forefinger into my belly.
You
.

In fact, Freddie was the beautiful one. He had reddish lights in his fluffy brown hair; he had Julius’s blue eyes. His little body was irresistible in every posture. I never knew a baby could be so adorable, or that the sight of veins crisscrossing a chest under pale skin could be so moving. Worst of all, he was a miracle, Trude and Julius’s
lang ersehntes Wunschkind
. Did they think I didn’t understand?

Visitors came to see Freddie—more friends than I ever knew we had. Some engaged me in a few moments of big-sister talk before rushing to coo over the bassinet. Some brought presents for both of us. Books were popular, and barrettes; little-girl toilet water in bottles shaped like teddy
bears. Who were they kidding with their one or two halfhearted questions and their coloring books? Keep April distracted, the presents seemed to say.

I was yesterday’s news in my pink-framed eyeglasses and new, big permanent teeth. How nice for Trude and Julius that, just as April’s homeliness—no fault of theirs—was surfacing, a baby like Frederick should come along.

Freddie and I said, “Will you remember all this to tell the grandchildren, or would you like it on tape, an oral history?”

“These little stories?” Trude said. “Absolutely not. My voice on tape sounds like an old lady’s. I have an accent on tape. Why go to such troubles?”

We didn’t push. Freddie said, “Okay. We don’t need them on tape—April with her good memory and all. Besides, you’ll be around to keep the details straight. You’ll tell the grandchildren—what am I saying?—the
great
-grandchildren.”

She went along with this false good cheer, even though she didn’t feel well. Even though I was thirty-four, unmarried, unwooed. Even though Freddie was living at home at twenty-seven, happy to have Trude folding his underwear and cutting his meat while he sneaked out to boink the unaccountably large number of women who found his cockiness and his red-gold Vandyke beard cute. My childhood friends noted his grown-up charms when they paid their respects. He looks like Julius, they told my mother, but with a certain, well, American robustness. Little Freddie. Who would have thought? Even during the week we were officially in mourning women called him. He’d get off the phone and say, “Just someone I work with. Just a friend. Heard about Dad.”

“You weren’t on the phone for very long,” my mother would say.

“I know I wasn’t. It was a business call, basically.”

In private Trude would worry. “I did something wrong. He thinks it’s shameful to bring a girlfriend home. He’s waiting until I die so he can marry anyone he wants.”

I’d say, “Stop it. You’re not going to die just because Daddy did.”

“Don’t let a shiksa have my engagement ring. I’m leaving it to him, but you see that it doesn’t end up on the finger of some little shiksa. You keep it for yourself if you think I wouldn’t approve.”

“Where are you going to be?” I’d always answer, “Florida?”

“These are the things I think about,” she’d say quietly.

She died in an ambulance twenty-three months later while two paramedics tried to save her. They managed to start her heart up again, which made her just conscious enough to fight them off and split the lower lip of one. “Let me go,” she cried.

They said she had had chest pain while Freddie was at work—real chest pain, finally; months of angina disguised as stomach cramps and hot flashes had failed to pique the concern of her semiretired internist. “Intestinal angina,” a cardiologist said afterward. “Must have been. Fools a lot of good people. I would have done an angiogram if she had been under my care.”

“They see their loved ones,” the bleeding ambulance attendant told Freddie in the emergency room, “just like you hear about on TV. It looks so beautiful to them that they don’t want to come back. That’s why she was saying ‘Let me go’ like that.”

“You didn’t listen to her, did you?” Freddie yelled. “You still kept trying, right?”

“She coded,” he said. “We kept trying and then the E.R. docs took over.”

“How come other people get brought back?” Freddie asked. “Why didn’t it work with my mother?”

“She’s happy now,” the EMT said. “We see this a lot. Makes you think they’re goin’ on to someplace better.”

“We’re Jewish,” Freddie said. “We don’t believe in that.” He excused himself and said he had to call his sister. She lived out of state. He had to tell her.

“She’s lookin’ down at you,” said the EMT. “She’s watchin’ over you and that sister of yours. You can bet on that.”

Freddie called me at school and spoke carefully. When I cried, he said he had held up so far with the doctors and those EMTs but that now he was scared.

“I’ll come right now. I’ll be there in an hour. Will you be all right?”

“Are you?” he asked.

“Are you?”

“This guy said she was asking to die, and now she’s with Daddy, watching over us.” His voice cracked and he stopped.

“That’s what people say. They think it helps.”

“It wasn’t like that. This guy saw something. He was
there
—he knew what he was talking about.”

“I’m leaving right now,” I said. “I love you.”

It had been two years since Bernice Graves had found any clipping about the Epners of Providence in her monthly statement from the service. She complained about not even having enough for a scrapbook—not that she would have done anything so patently tacky as create a shrine to her lost child, anyway. We had been the least newsworthy family in America, she said. No engagements,
marriages, citations, elections, promotions; just an obituary now and then. This one was headlined, “Gertrude Epner, 66, Holocaust Survivor.” It said she was from Vienna, had survived internment in Auschwitz, had met and married fellow displaced person Julius Epner in Providence in 1948. Two children: daughter April of Quincy, Mass., and son Frederick, at home. At least this clipping stated explicitly where I was; and at least it brought her up to date on my family situation: I was fatherless, motherless, childless, and husbandless. Probably lonely and, even if I didn’t know it yet myself, ready.

S
o once a week at the restaurant of her choice Bernice treated me to dinner. She quizzed me on my life in the form of coy questions often asked of celebrities in magazine sidebars: my favorite color, shoe size, most unforgettable birthday party, last book read. It was only a warm-up, though, a stab at intimacy before asking what she really cared about: me and men. Me and sex.

I told her I had had boyfriends.

“In high school?” she asked. “College?”

“Not really….”

“Who was the love of your life?” she asked easily.

“I feel kind of funny talking about this,” I said.

She looked puzzled.
Funny
talking about men?

“I don’t have a lot to tell,” I said.

“I’m not going to judge you by what you’ve done or haven’t done. I need to know certain things for my”—she
searched the acoustic ceiling tiles for the word—“to satisfy a
craving
I’ve had all these years. A craving to know you.”