You! I choked out a word, not bothering to hide my bitterness.
“Yes,” she agreed, “not who you wanted, but here anyway.” Refusing to leave until I was ready to leave, taking a jacket and wrapping it around my shoulders.
I tried for irony. You are the perfect sleuth, tracking me down against my will. But she said nothing, so I had to prod, to ask what clues had led her to me.
“The newsletters from the Royal Free—you left them on your office desk. I recognized Dr. Tallmadge’s name, and remembered you and Carl arguing over her that night at Max’s. I—I flew to London and visited her in Highgate.”
Ah, yes. Claire. Who saved me from the glove factory. She saved me and saved me and saved me, and then she dropped me as if I were a discarded glove myself. All those years, all those years that I thought it was out of disapproval, and now I see it was—I couldn’t think of a word for what it was. Lies, perhaps.
Carl used to get so angry. I brought him to the Tallmadges’ for tea several times, but he despised them so much that he finally refused to return. I was so proud of them all, of Claire and Vanessa and Mrs. Tallmadge and their Crown Derby tea service in the garden, and he saw them as patronizing me, the little Jewish monkey they could feed bits of apple to when it danced for them.
I was proud of Carl, too. His music was something so special that I was sure it would make them all, but especially Claire, realize I was special—a gifted musician was in love with me. But they patronized that, as well.
“As if I was the monkey’s organ-grinder,” Carl told me furiously, after they’d asked him to bring his clarinet along one day. He started playing, Debussy for the clarinet, and they talked among themselves and applauded when they realized he’d finished. I insisted it was only Ted and Wallace Marmaduke, Vanessa’s husband and brother-in-law. They were Philistines, I agreed, but I wouldn’t agree that Claire had been just as rude.
That quarrel took place the year after V-E Day. I was still in high school but working for a family in North London in exchange for room and board. Claire, meanwhile, was still living at home. She was applying for her first houseman’s job, so our paths seldom crossed unless she went out of her way to invite me to tea, as she did that day.
But then, two years later, after she’d finished saving me that last time, she wouldn’t see me or answer my letters when I returned to London. She didn’t return the phone message I left with her mother, although perhaps Mrs. Tallmadge never delivered it—what she said to me when I called was, “Don’t you think, dear, that it’s time you and Claire led your own lives?”
My last private conversation with Claire was when she urged me to apply for an obstetrics fellowship in the States, to make a fresh start. She even saw that I got the right recommendations when I was applying. After that, the only times I saw her were at professional meetings.
I looked briefly at Victoria, sitting on the ground beside me in her jeans, watching me with a frowning intensity that made me want to lash out: I would not have pity.
If you’ve been to see Claire, then you must know who Sofie Radbuka was.
She was cautious, knowing I might bite her, and said hesitantly she thought it was me.
So you’re not the perfect detective. It wasn’t me, it was my mother.
That flustered her, and I took a bitter pleasure in her embarrassment. Always so forthright, making connections, tracking people down, tracking me down. Let her be embarrassed now.
My need to talk was too great, though; after a minute I said, It was me. It was my mother. It was me. It was my mother’s name. I wanted her. Not only then, but every day, every night I wanted her, only then most especially. I think I thought I could become her. Or if I took her name she would be with me. I don’t know now what I was thinking.
When I was born, my parents weren’t married. My mother, Sofie, the darling of my grandparents, dancing through life as if it were one brightly lit ballroom; she was a light and airy creature from the day of her birth. They named her Sofie but they called her the Butterfly. Schmetterling in German, which quickly became Lingerl or Ling-Ling. Even Minna, who hated her, called her Madame Butterfly, not Sofie.
Then the butterfly became a teenager and went dancing off with Vienna’s other bright young things to go slumming in the Matzoinsel. Like a modern-day teenager going to the ghetto, picking up black lovers, she picked up Moishe Radbuka out of the Belarus immigrant world. Martin, she called him, giving him a western name. He was a café violinist, almost a Gypsy, except he was a Jew.