“You haven’t made up your mind about that?” Anneliese said. “You seem very certain about everything else.” Those cold blue eyes swam with tears, and Anneliese was suddenly shaking with sobs.
You are not going to fob this off with crying, Jordan thought, pressing her lips tight. But her dad took a confused, automatic step forward, and Anneliese turned in a helpless movement, turning her wet face against his shirt. “Don’t say anything to Ruth,” she whispered. “It was all to protect her.”
“Stop lying,” Jordan flared, but Anneliese’s tears rolled even faster. Her husband’s arm came around her shoulders, even though his face was still blank with shock.
“There, now,” he muttered. “Let’s all be calm—”
“Be calm?” Jordan cried. “Dad, we let a Nazi into our family. She could be anything, a murderer. Who knows how dangerous she—”
“Stop shouting. I can’t hear myself think—”
“Don’t be angry with Jordan.” Anneliese lifted her face, flushed and dewy with tears. “Please don’t be angry with her.”
“Angry at me?” Jordan’s voice scaled up despite herself. “I’m the one who found you out. You’re the one who lied your way into our—”
“I did,” Anneliese said simply. “I don’t deny any of it.”
Jordan felt as though she’d stepped down a step that wasn’t there, teeth snapping shut on empty air. She’d expected tears, anger, evasions. She hadn’t expected pure, bald-faced acceptance of all charges. “What do you have to say, then?” she rallied, and she cringed to hear how hectoring she sounded.
“Kurt was not my husband’s name,” Anneliese said quietly. “I was never married. The man in the photograph here is my father, and his name was Manfred. He was an officer in the SS, yes. I knew nothing of his work, what any of them did. He never discussed work with me, and it certainly wasn’t my place to ask. I’m not a modern girl like you, Jordan. I went to university and I read English poetry, but my mother died and I came home to keep house for my father, to obey him while I lived under his roof. I wasn’t political; I kept to the kitchen. I didn’t hear the terrible things about the SS until after the war, after my father had already died. Can you imagine my horror? A man who had always been a kind, good father, discovered to be part of . . .”
Her eyes welled up again. She turned her head as if she wanted to bury her face back in her husband’s shirtfront, but with a gigantic effort kept talking, smoothing her cheeks with her hands.
“I wanted no part of Germany or Austria after the war. I wanted a fresh start. Of course I didn’t tell anyone about my family when I applied to come here. Who would? I wouldn’t be accepted if people knew.” Her voice trembled. “My first week in Boston, a boy threw a stone at me because I had a German accent. What would they do if they knew what my father had been?”
“If you’re so innocent, why didn’t you tell us?”
“I wanted to leave it all behind me, all that ugliness. The hatred. People throwing names and stones . . . I wasn’t bringing that into your beautiful house.” She made a little helpless gesture at the four walls, the festive Thanksgiving table. Gently, her hand came to rest atop her husband’s. “I did carry my father’s medal at the wedding. It was the only thing I had of his . . . and I wanted him to walk me down the aisle. Was that wrong?” Her drowned blue eyes turned back to Jordan. “You want to know why you couldn’t find the medal, when you searched my room? I threw it into a pond on our honeymoon. Because that part of my life was finished.”
Something cold and hideous was growing in Jordan’s middle, knotting her stomach. She still had the sensation that she’d taken a wrong step, ended up in the wrong room. Made the wrong accusation, the thought whispered, but she braced herself with a deep breath. “And Ruth?” she asked, fighting to sound level, reasonable. Because Anneliese’s creamy voice was reason itself. “Explain Ruth.”
Anneliese went off into another torrent of tears, hands over her face. Jordan’s dad stood helpless, looking between his wife and his daughter, and something in Jordan squeezed when he reached out and touched Anneliese’s hair. “Sweetheart—” He never could stand to see a woman crying. And Anneliese was gripping his hand, pouring out words—to him, only him, not giving Jordan so much as a glance.
“God gave me Ruth. He gave us to each other in Altaussee. The war was over and I was walking beside the lake—I’d finally gotten my papers, my tickets here. I was thanking God for my good fortune, and I see a little girl crying on a bench. Filthy, thin, her papers pinned to her coat. Only three years old. She couldn’t tell me anything, where her parents were. Who knows what happened to them. I waited hours with her. I didn’t know what to do. That was when a half-crazed woman tried to attack us. Everyone was desperate for boat tickets, for money. I fought for Ruth like she was my own, and that was when I knew she’d been sent to me. I couldn’t leave her.” A long quivering breath. “So I washed the blood off her face where she’d been knocked down and took her with me when I left Altaussee, and by the time we landed in Boston she seemed to think I was her mother. Most of the time, I forget I’m not her mother. She was so young, and it all happened like a terrible dream . . .”
Another choked silence fell. Jordan’s lips parted. She couldn’t think what to say. “I don’t believe that,” she forced out finally. “It all sounds—theatrical.”
“War is theatrical, Jordan. I don’t expect you to understand that; you haven’t lived it.” Anneliese’s voice was drained, lifeless. The cold pit in Jordan’s stomach clenched again. “Those of us who survive are only alive because of some stroke of luck. Ruth’s parents were struck down; she was left behind. My father was struck down; I was left behind. Any survivor’s story is extraordinary. Death is everyday; survival is a theater trick.”
Still Jordan’s father wouldn’t speak. His face was gray and sagging, but his hand lay under Anneliese’s.
“Why did you lie about Ruth?” Jordan clutched after the certainty that had sheathed her like armor. “Why?”
“I thought you might not love her . . .” Looking up at her husband. “She’s almost certainly a Jew. How many men would take a Jew into their homes, give her their name? I was afraid.”
He flinched. “I would never have hesitated to—”
“I deceived you. I’m so sorry.” Anneliese reached out, touching his cheek. “Perhaps you won’t forgive me. But don’t hold it against my poor Ruth.”
“Dad, stop,” Jordan said desperately. “How can we trust her? She has lied about everything, you need to—” Her own thoughts circled in confusion. What do you even think anymore? “Your name isn’t Anneliese Weber, is it?” Rounding on her stepmother. “That’s Ruth’s mother’s name, it’s on her birth certificate, so it can’t be yours. You were lying about that too—”
“I gave up my name for Ruth, so no one could take her from me. I was so terrified she’d be taken away . . .” Anneliese wiped her eyes. “I didn’t want my old name, anyway. My father’s name felt tainted. Weber was easier for Americans to pronounce. The name was something I never lied about.”
“You did—”
“No.” It wasn’t Anneliese who spoke this time; it was Jordan’s father. “She told me the day we met that her name was different now, that she had wanted something easier for Americans to say. Something to give her a fresh start.”
Jordan’s heart knocked. “Dad—”
“Don’t be angry with her,” Anneliese interrupted, touching his cheek again. “She was only trying to protect her father.”
I am still trying to protect him. Jordan clutched after that instinctive shiver of fear that had touched her at the beginning of these accusations, meeting Anneliese’s eyes, but she couldn’t find it, not even a trace. Anneliese didn’t look dangerous. She looked like a broken doll.
“I’m sorry.” Her eyes were swimming. “I’m so sorry. I should have told you.”
Jordan’s lips parted, but she couldn’t speak.
“You should talk.” Anneliese looked from her husband to Jordan. “If you don’t wish me to—” Her voice broke. “Du meine Güte, I’m sorry—”
She rushed out of the room, shoulders hunched as though expecting a blow. The first sob came just before the sound of the bedroom door closing.
Jordan looked at her father numbly. He stood with his hands hanging at his sides, wearing the good shirt he’d donned for Thanksgiving dinner. The table’s bright silver and holiday pumpkins looked like festive flags decorating a shipwreck. Jordan dragged a breath into her frozen lungs and realized she was smelling smoke from the kitchen. Their Thanksgiving dinner was burning.
Her father was staring at her. She took a step forward, eyes blurring. Not knowing what to say. Not knowing what to think, except that this had all gone horribly wrong. “Dad . . .”