“But you heard your parents discuss her situation,” I suggested.
“Oh, often,” Herta agreed. “Papa was always rather softhearted. Mama had to look out for the welfare of the whole family.”
“Your father wanted to bring her with him?” I said. “And your mother wouldn’t allow it?”
Herta’s face was heavily powdered, but I could still see her cheeks redden. “Fr?ulein Saginor was not a family member; there was no way the Americans would allow her to come on our visa. Papa wanted to bring her as a research assistant, but what would she have lived on, even if the visa had been issued? He didn’t have independent resources to pay a stipend, the way the head of the Institute did. You do understand that there were many more Jews trying to leave Europe than there were countries willing to take them in.”
“Yes, but the great scientists all found homes; look at your own father,” I said.
“That’s the point,” Herta said, her tone contemptuous. “My father was a great scientist. Martina Saginor was not. As sad as her fate may seem, it wasn’t possible in that climate to find a lab willing to offer her a place.”
“Maybe she was a great scientist who had a gender handicap,” I suggested.
“Yes, that’s what K?the wanted to believe, too,” Herta said, “that my father abandoned Martina Saginor because he was jealous of her abilities, or my mother was jealous of her for this imaginary affair. The drug addict daughter said the same thing when she showed up. She said Papa owed it to her because Mama’s jealousy murdered her grandmother!”
She added savagely, “My father was not the father of this stupid Binder woman. Martina Saginor lived in a ghetto filled with poor Jews from Eastern Europe; likely she spent the night with a vagrant junk dealer or some such, and wanted to pretend it was a more glamorous story. Benjamin Dzornen never betrayed my mother, and he was far too honorable to have an affair with one of his students. If you put anything out in public suggesting otherwise, my husband’s law firm will file a suit of libel against you!”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “It’s a comforting tale, anyway. But Martin Binder, Kitty’s grandson, has he been in touch with you?”
She eyed me with a wariness that made me think of her brother.
I added, “I know he visited your brother, but Julius wouldn’t tell me what they discussed.”
“Then there is nothing further for me to say to you on the subject,” Herta said.
It was meant as a conversation ender, but I ignored it, asking instead about Julius’s strange comment. “Your brother said a detective should have come fifty years ago and didn’t. What did he mean?”
Relief that I was abandoning the subject of her father and Martina Saginor took the anger out of Herta’s face, replaced by a look of sorrow, or puzzlement. Perhaps both.
“Something went wrong between him and Papa, but neither of them ever said what. That happened before K?the showed up, about three years earlier. Julius had followed Papa like a duckling before that, loving science in the same way Papa did, and then, suddenly, it was over. Julius started making ugly remarks to Papa at the dinner table, and Papa would sit there, not responding. Mama tried to make Julius stop, but Papa would only shrug his shoulders and disappear into his study. I’m sure the change in Julius hastened Papa’s death.”
I got to my feet, handing her a card. “Call me if you remember why Martin Binder came to see you.”
On my way to the door, I stopped again to look at Dzornen’s Nobel medal. “I’ll never be this close to a Nobel Prize again,” I said.
Herta came over to stand next to me. She picked up the shallow box and unhooked its glass lid so that I could touch the medallion. I ran my fingertips over the figures on the coin’s reverse side, two women draped in the robes of classical antiquity. You were there when the King of Sweden handed you to him, I addressed the medal in my head. What was in his heart? Was Kitty Binder his daughter?
I handed the prize back to Herta. Thinking again of the snapshot in Kitty Binder’s living room, I said, “You hated the times you had to play with Kitty, back when you were girls in Vienna. Do you remember ever taking her to the beach on an outing with your parents?”
Herta laughed scornfully. “There are no beaches in Vienna, just the Danube running through it. Since the end of the Habsburg Empire, Austria has been a little landlocked country.”
“A trip to the park, then, you, Bettina, and your parents.”