Why did people stay together to be unhappy? My own parents hadn’t shown me a Harlequin picture of true love, but at least my mother struggled to create domestic harmony. She had married my father out of gratitude, and out of fear, an immigrant alone on the streets of the city, not knowing English. He’d been a beat cop when he rescued her in a Milwaukee Avenue bar where she’d thought she could use her grand opera training to get a job as a singer. He’d fallen in love and never, to the best of my knowledge, fallen out of it. She was affectionate toward him, but it seemed to me her true passion was reserved for me. Of course, I wasn’t quite sixteen when she died: what does one know of one’s parents at that age?
And what about my client’s uncle? Isaiah Sommers was certain that if his uncle had cashed in his life-insurance policy, he would have told his aunt. But people have many needs for money, some of them so embarrassing that they can’t bring themselves to tell their families.
My melancholy reflections had carried me unnoticing past the landmarks of my childhood, to where Route 41 became the gleaming eight-lane drive skirting the lake shore. The last color had faded from the sky, turning the lake to a spill of black ink.
At least I had a lover to turn to, even if only for a few more days: Morrell, whom I’ve been seeing for the past year, was leaving on Tuesday for Afghanistan. A journalist who often covers human-rights issues, he’s been longing to see the Taliban up close and personal since they consolidated their power several years back.
The thought of unwinding in the comfort of his arms made me accelerate through the long dark stretch of South Lake Shore Drive, up past the bright lights of the Loop to Evanston.
III
What Is in a Name?
Morrell greeted me at the door with a kiss and a glass of wine. “How’d it go, Mary Poppins?”
“Mary Poppins?” I echoed blankly, then remembered Calia. “Oh, that. It was great. People think day-care workers are underpaid but that’s because they don’t know how much fun the job is.”
I followed him into the apartment and tried not to groan out loud when I saw his editor on the couch. Not that I dislike Don Strzepek, but I’d badly wanted an evening where my conversation could be limited to an occasional snore.
“Don!” I said as he got up to shake hands. “Morrell didn’t tell me to expect this pleasure. I thought you were in Spain.”
“I was.” He patted his shirt for cigarettes, remembered he was in a no-smoking zone, and ran his fingers through his hair instead. “I got back to New York two days ago and learned that the boy reporter was leaving for the front. So I wangled a deal with Maverick magazine to do a story on this Birnbaum conference and came out. Of course now I have to work for the pleasure of bidding Morrell adieu. Which I won’t let you forget, amigo.”
Morrell and Don had met in Guatemala when they were both covering the dirty little war there a number of years back. Don had gone on to an editorial job at Envision Press in New York, but he still undertook some reporting assignments. Maverick magazine, a kind of edgier version of Harper’s, published most of his work.
“Did you get here in time for the Maccabees–EYE-team standoff?” I asked.
“I was just telling Morrell. I picked up literature from both Posner and Durham.” He waved at a pile of pamphlets on the coffee table. “I’ll try to talk to both of them, but of course that’s breaking news; what I need is background. Morrell says you might be able to supply me with some.”
When I looked a question, he added, “I’d like a chance to meet Max Loewenthal, since he’s on the national committee dealing with missing assets for Holocaust survivors. His Kinder transport story alone would make a good sidebar, and Morrell tells me that you know two of his friends who also came to England as children in the thirties.”
I frowned, thinking of Lotty’s furies with Max over exposing the past. “Maybe. I can introduce you to Max, but I don’t know whether Dr. Herschel would want to talk to you. And Carl Tisov, Max’s other friend, he’s here from London on a concert tour, so whether he’d have the time, let alone the interest—”
I broke off with a shrug and picked up the pamphlets Don had brought back from the demonstrations. These included a flyer from Louis Durham, printed expensively in three colors on glossy stock. The document proclaimed opposition to the proposed Illinois Holocaust Asset Recovery Act, unless it also covered descendants of African slaves in America. Why should Illinois ban German companies who profited from the backs of Jewish and Gypsy workers but accept American companies who grew rich on the backs of African slaves?
I thought it was a good point, but I found some of the rhetoric disturbing: It’s not surprising Illinois is considering the IHARA. Jews have always known how to organize around the issue of money, and this is no exception. Margaret Sommers’s casual comment about “the mean old Jew Rubloff” echoed uncomfortably in my head.
I put the flyer back on the table and rifled through Posner’s screed, which was irritating in its own way: The day of the Jew as victim is over. We will not sit idly by while German and Swiss firms pay their shareholders with our parents’ blood.
“Ugh. Good luck in talking to these two specimens.” I flipped through the rest of the literature and was surprised to see the company history Ajax Insurance had recently printed: “One Hundred Fifty Years of Life and Still Going Strong,” by Amy Blount, Ph.D.