The Woman in the Photograph Page 6

  “When the girls left Germany, in 1935, Jews could still leave if they walked away with nothing, but they couldn’t take cash out of the country. Your mother told me they gave money to a boyfriend to open another account for them in Switzerland. When he returned, they asked for the bankbook and he said, ‘What in the world are you talking about? What money?’ Then they had an arrangement with someone else, to sew money into the interior lining of a car. They were later told the car caught fire and the money was burned.”

  “That’s awful. Who were these ‘friends?’ What about all those relatives you mentioned? Didn’t the adults, the aunts and uncles, step in when both parents were suddenly gone?”

  “I know what you mean,” Lynne agreed. “That’s why the worst thing was the cows. Their Aunt Ellie and her husband arranged to take Alice and Erika’s money and invest it in cows to ship to Israel, what was then Palestine. They were transforming the desert into land for settlements, planting trees and raising livestock. Anyway, that’s why Erika and Alice went to Palestine before coming to America. They went there to collect their money. When they arrived, Ellie’s husband told them that, unfortunately, only his cows had survived the trip. He told Alice and Erika, ‘I’m sorry, your cows died!’ ”

  We both sat there without moving. There was something both comical and macabre in the image of dead cows. I thought of how bad they would smell. I drank some ginger ale and the sick sensation in my stomach passed. I had a vague memory of a reference to sewing jewels into the lining of her dress and being afraid she would be stopped when she crossed the border from Egypt to Palestine, but I could never quite grasp the context before. It was beginning to make sense now.

  “Yes,” Lynne said. “I’m sure it was when they left Germany. Your mother was always the brave one.”

  I wanted to ask her what she meant, but my mind drifted to another story about jewels my mother had told me on her last visit. She said that she once had thought of giving Tom a ring that had belonged to her father but Erika had it. Apparently there were a number of jewels that Erika had kept when they arrived in America. Whenever my mother asked her sister if the jewels were safe, Erika always answered, “Don’t worry. I’ve hidden them where no one will ever find them.”

  My mother wasn’t thinking of rings or jewels after Erika died. Sometime later, when she went to Florida to visit my uncle, she asked about the ring. Willy knew nothing about the ring or the jewels. In his despair, he had taken all of Erika’s clothes to the Goodwill and soon after sold the house in Sarasota. Erika had indeed hidden the jewels where no one would ever find them. More dead cows, I thought.

  “Can I get you anything?” I heard Lynne’s voice and turned back to her.

  “No thanks, I’m fine,” I answered. She put her hand on my arm.

  “There is something else,” she said hesitantly. “In the midst of the chaos, Erika married a much older man, a doctor named Rotholz. Maybe he stepped in when no one else helped, who knows. Perhaps he offered some security in exchange for Erika’s companionship. She was a lovely young woman.”

  I was struggling to keep up with the flood of information. It was hard to imagine Erika with anyone but Willy.

  “When Alice and Erika had to give up the property in Leipzig,” she explained, “they packed three trunks of their most precious possessions, all that could fit—silver, jewels, artwork, linens, furs, rugs—and shipped them to Dr. Rotholz’s relatives in upstate New York, in Nyack. But things took an unexpected turn. When they finally arrived in Tel Aviv, they ran into Willy, who had been Erika’s boyfriend in Leipzig. He had left Germany earlier to find refuge in Israel. Once she found Willy, Erika left her husband.

  “My parents drove up to Nyack,” Lynne continued, “to where Dr. Rotholz’s family lived. They picked up the first trunk as soon as we got the letter from Alice, and brought it to our house in Mt. Vernon, but that was all they could fit in the car that day. Once the family heard that Erika had left Rotholz, they refused to turn over the remaining two trunks. When your mother arrived here, she took them to court but lost the case. It seems to me she didn’t follow exactly what the lawyer told her to say…”

  “So like Mom,” I had to mutter under my breath.

  “…and the man’s family claimed that the items in the trunks were meant for them.”

  “Didn’t Rotholz tell the truth?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid he couldn’t. Dr. Rotholz killed himself a short time earlier but that’s all I know.”

  I could only nod my head. Max died in a taxi, his wife Nelly jumped out of the window, Erika was married before, Rotholz killed himself, the jewels were buried where no one would ever find them, and the cows died. These events had taken place long before I was born, but I felt like their residue had mysteriously entered my body and remained lodged there, like indigestible crumbs that I’d eaten off my mother’s plate.

  I left Lynne’s apartment feeling both drained and excited.

  I could feel the desperation of the two young women. Suddenly they were on their own, trying to salvage something of their family wealth to carry them forward to a new life. The two women on the love seat, once assured of the predictable course their lives would follow, were swept away by a powerful current. They couldn’t imagine where it would take them.

  13

  The Girls

  After leaving Lynne, I took the train to Syosset, on Long Island, to stay with my brother. He wanted to be included in the conversation with Uncle Willy.

  It was a clear, sunny morning when he went to pick up Willy at the Long Island Railroad station. When they arrived at the house, I heard the car pull in and the engine shut off, and only a moment later Uncle Willy greeted me with a big hug and “my darling.” In the eight years since Erika’s death, he had regained some of his former zest. He looked handsome in a bright red crew neck sweater, a neatly clipped mustache, his silver gray hair still wavy and abundant.

  Tom’s wife, Harriet, offered us coffee and toasted bagels. When we were done eating, Harriet went out and the rest of us sat in the dining room and I turned on my tape recorder. I couldn’t stop thinking about Nelly’s suicide, and I hoped my uncle could fill in some gaps. I wondered how Erika and Alice felt about losing both parents so suddenly.

  “They didn’t talk about their feelings or show anything outwardly,” Willy told us. “They must have been affected, such young girls at the time. As for their father, how can two girls exposed to such brutality have any love for their father? It was impossible. He was a person to be feared. Therefore, when they got rid of him—I shouldn’t say ‘got rid of’—when they lost both parents and were relieved of supervision, they flew the coop. They started running around like crazy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They went off to Paris and went wild.”

  Went wild? “Can you be more specific?”

  “They were like birds who have been in a cage for a long time, when all of a sudden the door opens and they fly free. They were quite loose. They slept with different men. They shared boyfriends. They spent money recklessly. This is what the girls told me later, when we met again in Tel Aviv.”

  I was shocked. Going wild and sleeping with different men wasn’t something your mother did. Yet it wasn’t so hard to imagine the girls—youthful, sophisticated, and hungry for life. By the end of 1933, Alice would have been nineteen and Erika twenty-one, not much older than I was when I went to Europe in 1963. I hitchhiked from Florence to Paris with a girlfriend I met on the boat going over. We stood on the corner of Boulevard Raspail begging for coins because it was too late to change money that night. But my adventures didn’t occur in a vacuum. I had a mother who sent me light blue airmail letters to American Express offices along the way, sometimes wiring money too, a mother who worried about my safety and looked forward to my return.

  But there was no mother waiting for Alice and Erika.

  The two women in the photograph had packed away their beautiful silk gowns, buried their father and
mother, sold the furniture, thrown a handful of clothes into a bag, and locked the door of 32 Grassistrasse. Perhaps this was when my mother learned to travel light.

  “After almost a year,” Willy said, “they started to run out of money and felt lost. They returned to Leipzig to salvage whatever they could. That’s when Erika married Rotholz, the doctor from Berlin. I guess it was in late 1935, because in 1936 they came to Palestine, and by that time they knew they could never go back to Germany. On their way to America, they stopped in Tel Aviv. Did Lynne tell you the story of the cows?”

  “You knew about the cows?” I asked. I was still grappling with the idea of dead cows.

  “Yes, of course. That was their uncle Max Hergeshausen who shipped the cows to Palestine. They had come to collect their money, and that’s when I met Eri on the street. We were thrilled to find each other again and were still madly in love. Erika went back to the apartment where the girls were staying with her husband, and threw her wedding ring down on the kitchen table with a note saying ‘The marriage is over. I am leaving.’ You know Eri wasn’t one to say anything extra. When I got back to my boarding house that evening, the landlady stopped me in the hall and said, ‘The lady in the photograph on your dresser is waiting upstairs for you.’ ”

  I got goose bumps on my arms again. I thought of an article I once read that said relationships in times of crisis and war had an intensity that made people behave differently than they would under more normal conditions. I saw “the girls” through Willy’s eyes—untethered and impulsive. Forced to keep moving toward an unknown future, they became less and less attached to the relics of their past—an apartment, furniture, parents, even a husband who no longer fit into their dreams. I saw the two sisters bobbing up and down in a sea of uncertainty, grasping at cows shipped to Palestine, jewels sewed into the linings of their dresses, a passionate encounter with an old lover on the streets of a foreign land.

  Through it all, Willy spoke of the sisters as though they were one person. I asked him if they used to be more alike, before my father died and Alice’s life took such a tragic turn.

  Willy shook his head. “The girls were different from the start. Your mother always felt cheated. Erika was considered prettier, better at school, and more popular. She was successful without trying. Alice was nervous and timid as a child. From her parents she often heard, ‘Why can’t you be as smart or well-liked as your sister?’ ”

  I didn’t think Erika was prettier, though maybe more easygoing and lighthearted, and I was sure my mother was very smart. I knew there had often been tension between Willy and my mother, but I was not prepared for his description of her.

  “Alice counted on Erika for everything. She followed Erika around and craved the recognition and admiration that Erika got. I’m sure she desperately wanted love, but her actions did not invite people to get close to her. When she got older, Alice pretended she didn’t need anyone. Especially after she was freed from parental supervision and criticism, she covered up her craving for admiration by trying to appear sophisticated, intelligent, and independent.”

  I recognized my mother’s determination to appear self-sufficient; beyond that, it wasn’t easy to hear Willy’s perspective, especially his harsh, unforgiving tone. I wanted to defend her, to contradict his opinion, but I tried to remain calm. I wanted to keep the door open.

  “How was your own relationship with Alice?” I asked.

  “We were thrown together because Eri was always loyal to her, but we never came as close as you would expect for brother-in-law and sister-in-law. To me, she was a totally inaccessible person. I had a relationship with her because she was the sister of my wife, and she was a presence all the time because they were very close. Whether before or after I married Erika, all throughout life, these two girls were like twins.”

  I saw the women in the photograph, the way they looked at each other—the one reliable, unbreakable bond, even in death. When they were together, you could feel it. How many times had I walked into a room and found them sitting and talking in low tones and felt the invisible barrier. I remembered the time I overheard Willy complaining to my father, “Cluck, cluck, cluck. Those girls are like chickens. They never stop talking, and you know, if I ask Erika what they had to talk about, the answer is always nothing.”

  Willy had to compete with Alice for the person he loved most. In the end they had to share her tragic death. But instead of bringing them closer, the loss fed their resentment of each other. I could feel my cheeks burn with the heat of anger just under the surface. How could he have so little sympathy for the many difficulties that had haunted Alice’s life?

  I thought again of the last note my mother had sent me—You would protect me from evil and take care of me. It made yet more sense in the light of Willy’s story. I remembered how my mother could shift from a confident, independent adult to a threatened child fighting for her life if someone criticized her or used a harsh tone. I appreciated the complex character of a sensitive woman who from an early age had to devise some form of self-protection—even if it made her seem brittle—to survive.

  Willy, Tom, and I sat at the table in silence, each of us in our own reverie. I was relieved when Harriet got home and started making plans for dinner. I felt far away, caught in quicksand that was pulling me into a distant past. I went outside to the garden, hoping the sweet smell of new lawn and the late afternoon sun on my arm would help me settle down. The Japanese maple where we had buried Mom’s ashes had spread out and flourished in the four years since her death. I remembered how the dry, powdery ashes mixed with fragments of bone clung to my damp palms as I scattered them under the tree, and how the air felt heavy with moisture and the fragrance of flowers. When I mentioned the lush tree over dinner, my niece Sharon said, “We point to it all the time and say, ‘Tree’s growing, Grandma’s here.’ ”

  I felt as though her Grandma was here—Alice looking over my shoulder and wondering why we were digging up her past. She would have hated for anyone to invade her privacy. I felt guilty and hoped she would forgive me.

  My sleep that night was restless, my dreams filled with random fragments from Willy’s story. I saw the dark clouds gathering on the horizon, and the hard cobblestones several stories down below. I heard the laughter of the sisters as they turned the corner on their way home from high school, and felt the weight of Nelly’s body as she pressed her hips on the windowsill and leaned out as far as she could. I woke up at two a.m., shivering.

  14

  Fez

  The next morning, it was time to talk about my father. If I knew little about my mother’s past, I knew even less about the man who had died when I was a little child. After a breakfast of bear claws and coffee, I asked Willy how well he had known my father.

  “I knew your father from the university in Leipzig. We were in the fencing club. I don’t think there was ever a man who was a better friend to me, or—I hope—I to him. We were very close. Often he would stay over and we talked half the night. Fez was a highly intelligent, sensitive man, and I don’t think he would hurt a fly, but it was another story with his father.”

  He turned to my brother. “You knew him, didn’t you Tom?”

  “Yes, I knew Opa,” Tom said. “He only spoke German, and we all took turns going upstairs to visit him for a half hour each day. That’s how I learned a little German.”

  “I only know him from a few photos of a tall, gaunt man with a little two-year-old me in a snowsuit,” I added. Willy continued, “During our school vacation, your father took me to meet his family near Essen. I don’t remember his mother; she must have already passed away. But his father left quite an impression on me. Old man Feniger was stern and imperious, a religious fundamentalist. I was excited about my newly acquired knowledge, and I spoke to him about the sun being the source of energy and the moon being a dead planet. He jumped out of his chair and started yelling at me: ‘It is written that God created the sun to shine by day and the moon to shine by night. Get out
of my house!’

  “And here was Fez, the youngest of nine siblings, who loved the good life. Oh my god, how the girls adored him. When we were at the university, we used to go quite often to Berlin, where certain restaurants had tables with pipes that could transport mail. Each table had a pad of paper and a tube so you could direct your message to other tables.

  “You should have seen your father!” Here Willy made a flourish with his hand, “The poems and notes he got! I remember a note that read, ‘To the man with the sad eyes, I’d love to meet you.’ ”

  I tried to picture my father’s face. Were his eyes sad? He had been gone so long that I hardly remembered him, but for a split second I had an image of his wistful gray-green eyes and clean shaven face bearing an enigmatic half-smile that captivated the attention of the well-dressed young women at the next table. He lifted his glass of wine to his lips as he turned to look in their direction.

  “So how did he and Alice meet each other?” I asked.

  “Initially, through me. Your father and I were part of a larger social group of young men and women. We did things together—hikes in the mountains, trips to the seashore, picnics, parties. Alice was only one of the girls Fez went out with. But I can tell you, she wanted him from the start.”

  “So what happened?” I asked. “With all the moving around, how did they find each other again?”

  “I always assumed they got married in Germany,” said Tom.

  “No, no. Your father came to New York at least a year earlier than the rest of us. When he left Germany he was in love with another girl, Annalie was her name. She didn’t get out until much later. When Fez came here, he was alone, completely uprooted from his family and his society. When I arrived, he naturally found himself spending time together with Erika and me and your mother. Alice was convenient, someone familiar from the life he left behind.”