“Perhaps it’s too painful for her to see that face every day,” Max said heavily.
I turned to the newsletters. They were like all such documents, filled with tidbits of information about graduates, amazing achievements of the faculty, status of the hospital, especially under the severe retrenchments forced by the shrinking National Health budgets. Claire Tallmadge’s name jumped out at me from the third one I looked at:
Claire Tallmadge, MRCP, has given up her practice and moved to a flat in Highgate, where she welcomes visits from former students and colleagues. Dr. Tallmadge’s unbending standards earned her the respect of generations of colleagues and students at the Royal Free. We will all sadly miss the sight of her erect presence in her tweed suits moving through the wards, but the Fellowship being established in her honor will keep her name bright among us. Dr. Tallmadge promises to keep busy with writing a history of women’s medical careers in the twentieth century.
Lotty Herschel’s Story:
The Long Road Back
When I reached the rise overlooking the place, I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t move at all. My legs suddenly weakened at the knees and I sat abruptly to keep from falling. After that I remained where I landed, looking over the grey and blowing ground, hugging my knees to my chest.
When I realized I’d left my mother’s photograph behind, I’d become frantic. I searched my suitcase at least a dozen times, and then I called the various hotels where I’d stayed. Many times. “No, Dr. Herschel, we haven’t found it. Yes, we understand the importance.” Even then I couldn’t resign myself to its loss. I wanted her with me. I wanted her to protect me on my journey east as she hadn’t protected me on my journey west, and when I couldn’t find her picture, I almost turned around at Wien-Schwechat Airport. Except at that point I couldn’t imagine where I’d go back to.
I walked the city for two days, trying to see behind its bright modern face the streets of my childhood. The flat on the Renngasse was the one place I recognized, but when I rang the bell, the woman who now lived in it greeted me with contemptuous hostility. She refused to let me inside: anyone could pretend they had been a child in an apartment; she knew better than to fall for confidence tricksters. It must have been the nightmare of this family of squatters, someone like me coming back from the dead to reclaim my home from them.
I made myself go to the Leopoldsgasse, but many of those crumbling old buildings had disappeared, and even though I knew the right intersection to look for, nothing looked familiar to me. My Zeyde, my Orthodox grandfather, had threaded his way through this warren with me one morning to a vendor who sold ham. My Zeyde traded his overcoat for a greased paper full of thin-sliced fatty meat. He wouldn’t touch it himself, but his grandchildren needed protein; we could not starve to death to uphold the laws of kashruth. My cousins and I ate the pink slices with guilty pleasure. His overcoat fed us for three days.
I tried to re-create that route, but I only ended up at the canal, staring into the filthy water so long that a policeman came to make sure I wasn’t planning to jump.
I rented a car and drove into the mountains, up to the old farmhouse at Kleinsee. Even that I couldn’t recognize. The whole area is a resort now. That place where we went every summer, the days filled with walks, horseback rides, botany lessons with my grandmother, the nights with singing and dancing, my Herschel cousins and I sitting on the stairs peeping into the drawing room where my mother was always the golden butterfly at the center of attention—the meadows were now filled with expensive villas, shops, a ski lift. I couldn’t even find my grandfather’s house—I don’t know if it was torn down or turned into one of the heavily guarded villas I couldn’t see from the road.
And so finally I drove east. If I couldn’t find a trace of my mother or my grandmothers in life, then I would have to visit their graves. Slowly, so slowly other drivers spewed epithets at me—rich Austrian they took me to be from my rental license plates. Even at my slow pace I couldn’t help finally reaching the town. I left the car. Continued on foot, following the signposts in their different languages.
I know people passed me, I felt their shapes go by, some stopping above me, talking at me. Words flew by me, words in many languages, but I couldn’t understand any of them. I was staring at the buildings at the bottom of the hill, the crumbling remnants of my mother’s last home. I was beyond words, beyond feeling, beyond awareness. So I don’t know when she arrived and sat cross-legged next to me. When she touched my hand I thought it was my mother, finally come to claim me, and when I turned, eager to embrace her, my disappointment was beyond recounting.