When We Meet Again (28 page)

And suddenly, without intending to, he was running. He had walked all this way with his suitcase in hand, but he dropped it in the dirt and dashed to Margaret’s door, as if every second counted. There was no answer at first, but after Peter pounded more and more insistently, the panic threatening to overtake him, the door swung open.

“What?” It was Margaret’s sister, Louise, who looked much older than the last time he’d seen her. Her once youthful face was weathered, and her eyes looked flat and faded, like a photograph that had been exposed to the light for too long. It took her a few seconds to recognize Peter, and he could tell the moment that she realized who he was, because her look of annoyance twisted into a full-fledged scowl. “What do you want?”

“Louise,” he said. “I’m Margaret’s friend, Peter.”

“I know exactly who you are,” she spat. “But her
friend
? Is that what they call a rapist these days?”

Peter took a step back, his eyes widening. “A rapist? Louise, I never—”

She cut him off. “She ain’t here, anyways. Margaret’s gone.”

“Can you tell me where she is?”

Louise smiled coldly at him. “Sure thing.” She leaned in closer. “She’s dead. So I guess maybe she’s in heaven if you believe in that sort of thing.”

Peter took a step back. “No,” he whispered. “It is not possible. I would have known.”

“What, because you were so connected to her? Bullshit.” Louise shook her head. “Besides, you know it’s your fault, right?”

“What?” Peter felt like he couldn’t breathe. How could Margaret be gone? How could he have not felt it when her soul left the earth?

“She died in childbirth. It was your baby, wasn’t it? You might as well have killed her with your own two hands.”

“Oh, God.” Peter could feel himself falling, but he couldn’t stop it. He crumpled on the doorstep of the house that had once been Margaret’s, breathing hard. “And the baby? What happened to the baby?”

“He died too.”

“He?” Peter asked. “I have a son?”

“You
did
.”

“Oh, God,” Peter said again. In his mind’s eye, he had seen a little girl or boy out there somewhere, reveling in Margaret’s love, maybe even hearing stories about a faraway father who had promised to come back someday. But none of it had been real. Peter began to sob, his shoulders heaving. He glanced up at Louise, his vision blurry with tears, and was surprised to see something in her eyes that looked like pity, or maybe regret, but then it was gone. “Tell me, did he have a name? My boy?”

“Wasn’t alive long enough. And his mother wasn’t around no more to name him.”

“Where are they buried?” Peter finally managed to ask.

“They were cremated,” Louise said, her voice clipped. “We scattered their ashes in the wind. There ain’t no headstone for them either, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Why?” Peter whispered.

“Everyone in town knew you were the father,” Louise said coldly. “You know why? My stupid sister was proud of it.
Proud.
She was an outcast. Don’t you understand? She ruined everything for our family, brought all kinds of shame upon us. When she died, honestly, it was a relief.”

For the first time since Louise had delivered the terrible news, Peter felt something else other than overwhelming sadness. He felt anger—hot, blazing anger. “How dare you?” he asked.

Louise blinked at him. “How dare
I
?”

“Your sister was an amazing woman. She did nothing wrong.”

“She fell in love with a damned Nazi!” Louise spat.

“I’m not a Nazi!” Peter shot back. “I’m German, and I’m a human being, just like you. I’m sorry you don’t see it that way, but that won’t change what I feel. It won’t change the way I loved your sister.”

“Whole hell of a lot of good it does you now,” Louise muttered. “She’s long gone.”

“So why do I still feel her here?” Peter asked softly. But the question was to himself, not to Louise, and after a moment, still glaring at him, she shut the door.

Peter stood there for a long time, unable to move. As soon as he began the long walk back toward town, he’d have to begin digesting the loss. But here, in this moment, with the scent of orange blossoms and sugarcane wafting through the air, he could believe it was 1945 and that he was waiting for Margaret, believing he’d have her in his arms again.

Peter couldn’t go back to Atlanta. Not yet. It would have made the most sense to have rejoined Maus, to have started a new life, to have left Belle Creek behind forever. But if the ashes of Margaret and his son had been scattered on this earth, they were still here, in a way. They were in the wind and in the dirt beneath his feet. Perhaps that was why Peter didn’t feel like they were gone. He would stay for a little while, he decided. He would stay to say good-bye.

He rented a room by the week in the town’s only boardinghouse, owned and run by a woman named Meli Wilkes, and in the first few days, he set out to discover what had happened to the rest of the people he’d known in Belle Creek. He learned soon enough that Margaret’s parents had died—her father in 1947 and her mother in 1948—which meant that Louise was all alone now. He visited the cemetery and knelt by their headstones, breathing hard.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a long silence. Around him, the wind sang through the willows. “I’m sorry if I caused you any heartache. And I’m so sorry that you lost Margaret and your grandchild. It fills me with grief and despair, and I can only imagine that as her parents, you would have been heartbroken too. May you rest in peace.”

He tried to locate Jeremiah, but he learned only that he had left town in 1946, gone in the middle of the night. No one knew what had become of him, and Peter hoped that he had made it up north the way he’d always planned to.

He hired an investigator to look into Margaret’s death on the small chance that Louise was lying, but he knew it was a fool’s errand. There was no death certificate for Margaret or the child, but the investigator assured him that this was normal for a small town in the South. “Especially when a woman dies while bringing shame to her family,” the man had added pointedly, avoiding Peter’s eyes.

Peter never considered going home to Germany. After all, he had promised Margaret that he’d return for her. Even if she wasn’t here, he would live a life in her honor. He would live a life in honor of his son too. In his mind, he named the child Victor, for he had been conceived on Victory in Europe Day. The boy should have been a symbol of triumph, of victory, of the end of the war. Instead, he had barely had a chance to live at all. It felt desperately unfair.

Finding work in Belle Creek proved difficult, as people still reacted badly to Peter’s accent. Many still bore a grudge against the Germans, and those who hadn’t gotten to know the prisoners one-on-one tended to assume that the POWs had been criminals convicted of wrongdoing. Plus, while Peter had intended to stay so that he could be surrounded by memories of Margaret each day, he instead found it very difficult to work the fields where he’d first caught sight of her, where he’d first spoken with her, where he’d first held her in his arms. Being there didn’t bring the memories back; it only made them foggier somehow.

Peter moved several miles east in the fall of 1950, settling near a huge strawberry farm in unincorporated Palm Beach County. The skies and the land reminded him of Belle Creek, but they were different enough that he could live without being paralyzed by memory. He made money working in the strawberry fields and helping out around the barns and stables as more and more equestrians moved to the area. It turned out Peter had a knack with the horses. As he withdrew into himself more and more, he found it soothing to talk to them. It was easier than talking to other people and being reminded of just how alone he was.

That Christmas, he visited Maus in Atlanta, and though his friend tried to convince him to move to the city, Peter couldn’t do it yet. He wasn’t ready to leave Florida behind. And so Maus—who was beginning to establish a reputation as a talented artist—gave Peter a gift: a set of paints and brushes. “You have a great talent, my friend,” Maus told Peter, clapping him on the back. “Don’t waste your life shoveling horse manure just because you’re sad.”

Peter took one of the paintbrushes in his hand and twirled it thoughtfully. “I don’t know what I would paint.”

“Of course you do,” Maus said, rolling his eyes.

Back in Palm Beach County a few weeks later, Peter picked up a brush, dipped it in some paint, and touched it to paper for the first time in almost a year. By the fading light of evening, he began to create again, and the first work he completed was the most beautiful and lifelike he’d ever done. He used his imagination to evoke what he wished fervently could have been reality: Margaret standing in the midst of a sugarcane field at dawn, holding the hand of a beautiful little boy of five—for that’s how old his son would have been now. They were both staring right at Peter, their eyes full of love.

Once he finished, it was as if the floodgates had been opened. His brush seemed filled with magic, and whereas in Munich he had struggled with rendering things correctly, now he was able to capture the exact shade of the sky, the exact pitch of the shadows, and the exact shape of Margaret’s lovely eyes. At first, the paintings were just for him. He filled his small apartment with them, painting on every available surface when he ran out of paper. And for a couple of years, the images were like a bandage on his heart. He was greeted each morning with Margaret’s soft smile, and he watched his son grow up, getting taller and lankier every month. It was like they were still with him, and so Peter didn’t bother living a life outside of work. Each day, he would whisper to the horses or pick strawberries in silence, then he would return home and spend the evenings painting.

In 1954, the strawberry farm closed so that developers could come in and make the land into a housing community. The stable where he’d worked folded six months later, and Peter wasn’t able to find another job. People thought he was strange, a foreigner who operated in near silence. Maus surprised him with a visit that fall, just as the last of Peter’s savings were drying up, and when his old friend stepped into Peter’s apartment, his jaw dropped.

“You have gotten much better, Peter,” Maus said, looking around at all the paintings. “You must try to sell some of these. You could be rich.”

“Sell them?” Peter asked. “Never. It’s how I keep Margaret with me.”

“Maybe it’s time to let her go,” Maus said gently. “Come on. I’m part of an exhibit in New York next month. Why don’t you join me? I can talk to the gallery owner, tell him how good you are. I’m sure he’ll add you.”

Peter considered this. “All right. I will come to New York. But not with these paintings. I’ll paint something new.”

“Whatever you wish. You have money for new supplies? And a bus ticket to New York?”

“I have a little. I will find a way.”

“Very well. I’ll send you the address of the gallery. And you can stay with me. I have a room near the Empire State Building.”

In November of 1954, Peter met Maus in New York. Maus had a series of ten still lifes to sell, and they were all spoken for by the end of the exhibit’s first day. Peter had brought only three images—all of them scenes from Belle Creek—but he, too, had sold out by the end of the weeklong show. He knew he wasn’t as talented as Maus, but he could make money from his art. And now he realized that he could take Margaret and his son anywhere. He didn’t need to be near Belle Creek, because they were with him all the time, wherever he went.

It was nearly nine years later that Peter saw her. Or he could have sworn he did, but that was impossible, wasn’t it? It was 1963, which meant that Margaret had been dead for seventeen years. He still painted her in the privacy of his own home—which was now a high-rise apartment in New York—but he never made the mistake of seeing her in crowds. He knew she wasn’t there.

Until she was.

It was August, and Peter had taken the train down to Washington with his sketchpad and pencils to see the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at the Washington Monument. The world was changing, and Peter wanted to capture it with his paintbrush. He imagined himself doing a series of paintings on the civil rights movement, leaving the imagery of Belle Creek behind once and for all. It was time he moved on.

Maus was there too. They had ridden down together, although Maus seemed to be struggling to understand why Peter was so drawn to the subject matter. “Won’t it just be a crush of people?” he asked. “Won’t it be chaos?”

“I’m sure it will,” Peter replied. “But they’ll be fighting for something important. They’ll be fighting for everyone to be seen as equals.”

Maus raised an eyebrow. “I had no idea you were such a civil rights crusader.”

Peter was silent for a long time. “My father kept Margaret’s letters from me simply because she was American. He didn’t know her at all, but he hated her. Because of that, she perhaps went to her grave thinking I didn’t love her, and I will never forgive him for that. The people coming to Washington today are fighting for the same thing I was fighting for back in Belle Creek: a chance to be seen for the people they are on the inside. This has to be my fight too, Maus, because if my father hadn’t had a heart filled with prejudice and hatred, maybe things could have been different.”

“You couldn’t have saved her, my friend,” Maus reminded him.

“But we would have had more time. I could have made her happy.”

They had parted ways in the surging crowd, each of them agreeing to work alone but to meet back at their hotel bar in Georgetown later that night. They would have a drink together and talk about what they’d seen, what they’d sketched, what they planned to do with their paintbrushes once they returned home. Today would be about gathering images and ideas; next week would be about creating something unique and special.

Peter found a spot toward the back where he could get a decent view. He could see the podium where Dr. King would speak later in the day, and he had the perfect vantage point over the gleaming Reflecting Pool. Sketchpad in his left hand and pencil in his right, he was looking around the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the celebrities rumored to be there—Marlon Brando or Sidney Poitier, perhaps, or Charlton Heston—when his eyes came to rest on the back of a woman’s head some hundred yards away. He stared for a moment, not sure what had captured his interest, exactly. Was it the shade of her hair? Her posture? The way her head was tilted in conversation just so? It only took a few seconds for his brain to compute what his eyes were seeing.
It looked just like Margaret.