“I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what the right answer was, so I said, I loved my kitten and Mom had sewn beautiful clothes for him. Mom was teaching me to knit.
“The old lady and Mom started having an argument, in German, it was about—” Judy stopped and eyed me suspiciously. “This is going to sound stupid, so you’d better not laugh at me.”
“No, I won’t laugh,” I said gently. “There’s nothing ridiculous in a hard story and yours is quite painful. What were they arguing about?”
“About knitting, I think of that sometimes and I think I can’t be remembering right. The German word is stricken, and sometimes I think they were speaking English and the old lady was stricken by something. But then another car drove up and this man got out and the three of them started having a terrible fight. The old lady was speaking German, but the old man spoke English.
“He said something like, ‘I’m not doing anything else, so whatever it is you want, forget about it.’ And the lady said, ‘You are a weasel.’ I remembered that because of ‘Pop! Goes the Weasel.’ I had a windup clown that sang the song. They were so angry, I thought it was because of me, I was the child, did they think I shouldn’t have toys? I was afraid they were going to send me away, the way my mom got sent away, she was a little girl like me when she got sent away from her Oma. I thought they were mad because I was knitting and playing with toys. I was so scared, I said, ‘Pop! goes the weasel,’ out loud.
“They all stared at me, which made me even scareder. I started to cry, which got my mother mad, and the man said the lady was doing something to me, a word I didn’t know even though it was in English, something about doctors, I think. I wondered if I had to go to a doctor because of talking out loud. The lady said, ‘I would if I could. If I could keep her from turning into a weasel like you, believe me I would risk everything, jail, everything.’
“And he said, ‘That’s—’ I don’t know. Maybe he said, ‘an outrage.’ I was seven, they used a lot of words I didn’t know. The lady started saying, ‘Tell her, you and tell her, you signed on to duck and cover. That was a cruel lie that you and tell her made up.’
“Mom was shouting, everyone was mad. The man from the gas station came out, so they all shut up, everyone got back in their cars. When we were in our car, Mom said, ‘You must never tell anyone. They will put us all in prison if you tell anyone. Don’t talk about duck and cover, don’t talk about tell her, they’ll know who you’re talking about.’”
Judy started to cry again. I put an arm around her, awkwardly because of the IV lines and the wheelchair. Her sobbing on top of the stress of the interview was too much for her fragile body; she slumped over in my embrace, her heart monitor sending out a frantic warning. I wheeled her chair to the bed, moving the IV lines with her.
I found the nurse’s call button and pressed it, but Judy was so thin, so light, that I could lift her without help. A nurse arrived as I was laying a pillow under Judy’s feet.
The nurse took over. “What happened?” she demanded.
I shook my head. “She was talking to me about her childhood and I guess she was more worn-out than I realized—she suddenly collapsed.”
The nurse felt Judy’s pulse, her eye on the monitor. “I’m paging the doctor, but you’d better leave: we need to get her heart stable again.”
Doctors arrived, worried questions were asked, orders barked. I was pushed out of the room. I hoped Ginger the cat had survived Kitty throwing him across the room when Judy was seven. I hoped Judy survived my prying into her tormented past.
37
NUCLEAR UMBRELLA
WHEN I LEFT JUDY, I felt almost as exhausted as she was. I climbed into Martin’s car, trying to imagine what to do next, but I couldn’t organize my mind. I tried to write up the substance of the conversation on a legal pad, but my arms felt heavy, unable to hold a pen.
I tilted the seat as far back as it would go and shut my eyes. Focused on the breath going in and out, the way my mother always started music lessons.
The morning that Kitty had driven Judy out to the country was the crux of the story. The old lady who’d asked whether Judy preferred stars or sewing—could that have been Martina, not dead after all? If so, why had she not been part of Kitty’s and Judy’s lives all along?
Not much of a mother, that was how Lotty and Kitty had both characterized Martina Saginor. But if she’d survived the war, even a woman who cared more for protons than people would want to see her only child. At least, I hoped that was true. Besides, Martina hadn’t sounded like a melodramatic person, and the meeting in a remote gas station sounded melodramatic in the extreme.