All of them, my mother, too, who sang and danced with me on Sunday afternoons, they were here, here in this ground, burned to the ashes that are blowing in your eyes. Maybe their ashes are gone, as well, maybe strangers took them away, bathing their eyes, washing my mother down the sink.
I couldn’t have an abortion. I couldn’t add one more death to all those dead. But I had no feelings left with which to raise a child. It was only the thought that my mother would come back that kept me going during the war when I lived with Minna. We’re so proud of you, Lottchen, she and my Oma would say, you didn’t cry, you were a good girl, you did your lessons, you stayed first in your class even in a foreign language, you tolerated the hatefulness of that prize bitch Minna—I would imagine the war ending and them embracing me with those words.
It’s true that by 1944 we were already hearing reports in the immigrant world about what was happening—here in this place and in all the other places like it. But how many were dying, nobody knew, and so each of us kept hoping that our own people would be spared. But in the wave of a hand, they were gone. Max looked for them. He went to Europe, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t bear it, I haven’t been to central Europe since I left in 1939—until now—but he looked, and he said, They are dead.
So I felt horribly trapped: I wouldn’t abort the pregnancy, but I could not keep the baby. I would not raise one more hostage to fortune that could be snatched from me at a moment’s notice.
I couldn’t tell Carl. Carl—if he’d said, let’s get married, let’s raise the child, he would never have understood why I wouldn’t. It wasn’t because of my career, which would have been destroyed if I’d had a baby. Now—now girls do it all the time. It isn’t easy, to be a medical student and a mother, but no one says, That’s it, your career is over. Believe me, in 1949, a baby meant your medical training was finished forever.
If I’d told Carl, told him I couldn’t keep the child, he would have always blamed me for putting my career first. He would never have understood my real reasons. I couldn’t tell him—anything. No more families for me. I know it was cruel of me to leave without a word, but I couldn’t tell him the truth, and I couldn’t lie. So I left without speaking.
Later I turned myself into the saver of women with difficult pregnancies. I think I imagine every time I leave the operating room that I have saved not myself but some small piece of my mother, who didn’t live long after the birth of that last little sister.
So my life went on. I wasn’t unhappy. I didn’t dwell on this past. I lived in the present, in the future. I had my work, which rewarded me richly. I loved music. Max and I—I never thought to be a lover again, but to my surprise and my happiness, as well, that happened between us. I had other friends, and—you, Victoria. You became a beloved friend before I noticed it happening. I let you draw close to me, I let you be another hostage to fortune—and over and over you cause me agony by your reckless disregard for your own life.
She muttered something, some kind of apology. I still wouldn’t look at her.
And then this strange creature appeared in Chicago. This disturbed, ungainly man, claiming to be a Radbuka, when I knew not one of them survived. Except for my own son. When you first told me about this man, Paul, my heart stopped: I thought perhaps it was my child, raised as he claimed by an Einsatzgruppenführer. Then I saw him at Max’s and realized he was too old to be my child.
But then I had a worse fear: the idea that my son might somehow have grown up with a desire to torment me. I think—I wasn’t thinking, I don’t know what I thought, but I imagined my son somehow rising up to conspire with this Paul whoever he is to torture me. So I flew to Claire to demand that she send me to my child.
When Claire came to my rescue that summer, she said she would place my child privately. But she didn’t tell me she gave him to Ted Marmaduke. To her sister and her brother-in-law who wanted children they couldn’t have. Want, have, want, have. It’s the story of people like them. Whatever they want, that they must get. And they got my child.
Claire cut me out of her life so that I should never see my son being raised by her sister and her husband. She pretended it was disapproval of my thinking so little of my medical training that I would get pregnant, but it was really so I would never see my child.
It was so strange to me, seeing her last week. She—she was always my model—of how you behave, of doing things the right way, whether at tea or in surgery. She couldn’t bear for me to see she was less than that. All those years of her coldness, her estrangement, were only due to that English sin, embarrassment. Oh, we laughed and cried together last week, the way old women can, but you don’t overcome a gap of fifty years with one day’s tears and embraces.