Her Hungry Heart (2 page)

Mimi seemed neither surprised nor puzzled by the men guarding the gate, and Cassandra was quite used to them.
To pass through the gates of Beechtrees was the highlight of her working day in the Berkshires. ‘Mimi,’ she whispered, ‘this is the best place we come to. Any moment the Queen might come out to the lorry as she has done several times with her cook and the young princes and princess. She has been so nice. Nothing like as grand as she looks in the newsreels with her diamond tiaras and ball gowns. She fled her country with her Prince and their children only at the last moment, with the Germans on their heels marching into her kingdom. So here she is sitting out the war in Beechtrees instead of being captured and used by Hitler. I find it all quite unbelievable. This actually happening in New England.’

Mimi felt relieved to think that even a Queen could be a displaced person in times of war. She was about to tell Cassandra, ‘It’s not unbelievable to me,’ when the pedlar spoke to Mimi in Polish. Mimi was reluctant to do as he asked, but she trusted him and finally allowed one of the FBI men to open her cardboard suitcase. Most of the little that was in it was utterly threadbare. The men, like the pedlar, seemed embarrassed. They tied it up again with the piece of clothes-line and then untied the patched cloth bundle. Books and photo albums, a locked flat leather envelope wrapped in an aged piece of oil-skin.

Mimi tried to rally herself as the men rifled through her things. She felt upset and downtrodden that she should be subjected to this search. The gloom on Mimi’s face was unmistakable, her silence heart-rending. The pedlar picked Mimi up by the waist and swung her from the seat to set her on the ground. She looked so pathetic. Even the FBI man felt foolish for having rummaged through her belongings. He squatted down beside her. ‘Don’t look so sad. My name is Jack, and this is Ernie, and you don’t have to be afraid of us or our guns. We’re only here to guard the gate. We just protect the family. We’re kinda friends. We go out shopping with them and for long rides and picnics. We all
have a good time. You’ll like living here. They’re real nice people in the mansion house. No sad faces here.’ Uncertain that he’d got his point across, Jack looked up at the pedlar. ‘Not gonna cry is she, Joe?’

‘No, I’m not going to cry,’ answered Mimi having bounced back from some dreary dark place where she had been. She had had enough of people speaking about her as if she wasn’t there. No one missed the note of assurance in the tone of her voice. The three men looked relieved.

Mimi listened to one of the men tell her, ‘Hello, I’m Jack’s partner, Ernie.’ He put out his hand to shake hers. ‘This is a great place. You got everything right here in these grounds. Even a little house in the orchard where the children go to school. It’s small, mind you. Used to be a dovecote. But it’s big enough. There are only three of them. There’s tennis and swimming, and horses to ride. So put on a happy face.’ And she knew he and Jack were nice people, but wondered how to put on a happy face when she didn’t feel happy.

Ernie patted her head, and told Jack he was going to ring through and tell them the child had arrived.

None of what the men told her came as a surprise to Mimi. The pedlar had already told her most of what she was to expect. She suddenly thought, what if they don’t like me? What will happen to me then? She began wringing her slender, delicate hands. That was more than Jack, the younger of the two, could stand. Yet again he stooped down. Gently taking her hands in his and separating them, he said, ‘Are you worried about working in the kitchens with cook? You don’t have to be. She is a very nice lady, when you can understand her. Now that’s not going to be a problem for you, ’cos Joe tells me you speak the same language.’

The pedlar returned from the far end of the lorry. He had dipped a clean handkerchief into the melted ice collected at the bottom of a lettuce crate. Brusquely he wiped Mimi’s
face and then her hands, one at a time, while conversing with her in Polish. ‘And what if they don’t like little girls who smell like a summer salad?’ she asked. The pedlar laughed and patted her on the head, and then took some of her hair in his hands. Had she a brush? She climbed up on to the running-board and leaned into the cab for her case. There were a brush and a comb. The pedlar adjusted the wing-mirror. Balanced on the running board she combed her hair. It sprang into lustrous curls. She tied a pale-green satin ribbon in a neat bow around it.

Cassandra sat silent. How come Mimi had the attention of the three men, and the good fortune to have come to live at Beechtrees? Finally she asked her, ‘Are you going to live here with the Queen and the Prince and their children?’ Mimi turned away from the mirror, perching still on the running board. She looked at Cassandra.

‘The cook. I’m going to live with the cook. I’m going to be a scullery maid while I learn. I’m allowed to attend school and play with the princes and be a friend for the princess after all my chores are done. Mr Joe and Mashinka have fixed it for me.’

‘Mashinka is your mother. Won’t she miss you?’

Mimi felt a hint of tears in her eyes, suppressed at once. Just at that moment she was whirled around by the pedlar. He attacked her shoes with a dirty rag, giving them an extra burnish. He pulled on the hem of her dress and smoothed the wrinkles with his hand. Again in Polish, ‘What more can they expect? You’ve been riding in a lorry since before six this morning.’ Then, tossing the damp handkerchief to Cassandra, he told her, ‘You clean up a little, too. Your hands. The cook might offer you something. Maybe comb your hair?’ From the shelf above the seat, reaching under a box heavy with the weight of his extra stock of brown paper bags, he withdrew a clean, well-pressed shirt. He stripped off the sweat-stained one he wore, and passed a comb through his own hair. He turned away from the girls,
distancing himself by several steps, to undo the wide, worn leather belt, tucked his shirt neatly in, buckled and re-buttoned his trousers, before turning his attention again to the two FBI men.

They walked together to the rear of the lorry whence the pedlar snatched a large brown paper bag. Snapping it open, he filled it with peaches, plums and cherries. ‘Be good to her,’ he told the two FBI men. ‘An insurance policy.’ And he waved four large yellow bananas at them before he popped them into the bag.

‘Jesus, Joe, that’s great, thanks. But this kid, Joe? What do you think it’ll take to get her to smile? Have you ever seen her smile?’

‘Never. Years I know her. And the mother, a drunkard. Never lets the kid out of the house. No school, no nothing. But a good woman. Poor as a church mouse. Crazy she is for Mimi, worships the ground the kid walks on. She comes not twenty miles from where I was born, but like me she’s a long time away from the old country. Not even when Tatayana was alive did she smile. She was a woman, a teacher, who lived with them. A lotta tragedy there. It’s some story. They’re only in America since maybe three, four years. The brother, he was a no-good drunk. Took ’em in, and then died. So they lived off his pension. And now Mashinka hasn’t got long to live. Cancer. Believe me, our children should never go through what Mimi has. But what can you do? That’s life.’

He handed Ernie the bag. ‘Jesus, Joe, you gave us too much.’

‘Never mind. Just be nice to Mimi. She needs friends.’

‘It’ll work out, Joe, but that cook will work her hard.’ The three men walked back to the cab where Mimi now stood looking up the avenue of beech trees. Mimi felt her heart racing. Could it be true that this was to be her home?

‘OK, Joe, you go on ahead. Jerry’s stationed at the entrance to the back drive. He’ll take you in.’

The drive from the front gates up the beech avenue to the mansion house was just short of a mile. The grounds, over a hundred acres of them, were not especially well tended and were overgrown: paths wove through high grass where wild flowers mingled in abundance. The beech trees themselves, though neglected, were still impressive. The road boasted as much dirt as patches of gravel. There were ruts and pot holes. Beechtrees’ parkland had about it an air of comfortable wildness. It was a place of nature to which man had applied his hand, cutting a path through it without actually spoiling it. The afternoon sun filtered light through the leaves. Its dappled pattern across the road reminded Mimi of the mountain road. She could imagine how birdsong would be woven into the silence here once the rumbling of the lorry ceased. It would be the sweetest song she had ever heard.

She tried to still her heart. Impossible. Her happiness, its sheer improbability. Memories were flooding back of another wood, barely remembered. But how could she have forgotten? Home, she was coming home. Maybe not her own home, but such a home as the Blocks had never been. She began to cry. She was thinking of Mashinka and Tatayana, her teacher. Poor Tatayana. Of the three of them she had suffered most in their wanderings to find a home for themselves. And she had died of a broken heart, or so Mashinka said. Her tears were for Beechtrees too because it was so beautiful and because it was true, her father would come and find her, and they would be together for the remainder of their lives.

The pedlar was thinking of his schedule. How quickly he could decently get away from Beechtrees. The summer camps? And the furriers on vacation from New York? Several houses of them, four or five families to a house. His toughest customers. Now that they were inside Beechtrees, Mimi, though not quite forgotten, was relegated to the back of the pedlar’s mind. As far as he was concerned, she was
settled. He had done his bit for poor Mashinka and Mimi. More than his bit. A good deed was a good deed, but charity still began at home.

Commerce made him oblivious to Mimi’s tears. But not so Cassandra. She placed an arm around Mimi’s shoulder and pressed a clean handkerchief into her hands. The two girls looked at each other. After taking a deep breath, Mimi composed herself and dried her eyes. For a few seconds she covered her eyes with her hands. When she removed them, the crying was over.

The three, strangers to each other in their various ways, bumped along over the rutted drive. All her life Mimi would remember the pedlar and what he had done for her and for Mashinka. Most especially for taking her fate in his hands. That ride from the gate along the avenue of trees gave her the first real sense of comfort since she had been sent away from home with Tatayana and Mashinka, to become a refugee, a casualty, a mere item amid the flotsam of war. It was the road to new beginnings for Mimi. This displaced child of nine knew it. She could feel something stirring in the very marrow of her bones. The comfort of strangers.

Chapter 2

Half a mile up the avenue, a pair of winged stone griffins, the more menacing for being pitted by time, wind and rain, stood on ten-foot-high stone plinths. Like sentinels they appeared on either side of the secondary road that led through the stable courtyard to the kitchen gardens, the kitchen itself and the service entrance to the mansion house. At the turning the pedlar slowed for a man to hop on to the running-board. A head poked through the window. ‘Hi, Joe, Cassandra, and you too – can’t keep calling you “you too”. Got a name?’

‘Jerry, she’s called Mimi,’ the pedlar told him as he shifted gears and picked up speed again.

‘Well, Mimi, look over there.’

All eyes in the cab looked in the direction pointed out to them. They could just see, parallel to the lorry and a good distance from it, running through the tall grass and its spattering of wild red poppies, three children of various ages and sizes wildly waving at them. They were shouting and jumping up as they ran, to get a better look at the lorry and a glimpse of cook’s new helper.

Mimi’s heart was racing. She watched them and remembered fun, happiness, what it felt like to run wild and laugh and play. The Blocks and Chicopee, years of imprisonment in those grim, smelly rooms – now it was just a bad dream, a long nightmare through which only Mashinka’s and Tatayana’s love for her had sustained them all. The poverty that had ground their spirits had alienated
them from the niceties of life. At the beginning there had still been laughter between herself and Mashinka, first her wet-nurse then her nanny, her second mother, and Tatayana, her governess and tutor. But that had been in the early days of their exile, shortly after her father had engineered their escape from the war to safety. When they had thought Mimi’s father would follow them and build a new life for them all. She could hardly remember those days when they still had hope and dreams.

The children racing the lorry were too far away for their shouts to be audible, but a game was most definitely on. The pedlar shifted gear again and picked up more speed. Jerry hung on, Cassandra waved with both arms. She got into the spirit of things, even turned to Mimi and raised her arm, making her wave. Cassandra knew the children from previous visits. The pedlar’s arrival was always an excitement for them. For security reasons, few callers were allowed on the estate and the entire household and their FBI minders felt the strain of seclusion, no matter how comfortable it was. Now the children would have another refugee from Hitler like themselves as a playmate. This was a real event.

The lorry stopped in the cobbled courtyard long before the children arrived. A nine-year-old child could hardly expect to understand the power that places can exert upon a life, but Beechtrees and its whole ambience exercised a comforting power over Mimi. The displaced child felt a sense of security, of belonging. With every minute that passed she gained confidence in herself and her future. She climbed down from the cab to stand next to the pedlar, her few possessions spread on the cobblestones next to her. She was ready to confront fate with more hope of happiness than she had expected.

‘Cassandra, go tell the cook we’re here.’

Cook was a large, soft-looking woman in her thirties with kindly eyes, a downy lip, a sharp tongue. She could be a
hard taskmaster. A blubbering string of assistants who had left could attest to that. Although Cassandra liked her, she did not envy Mimi having to work for cook. She was from Czechoslovakia, like Mimi, fluent in French, and with Polish learned from a long-forgotten husband. Her English was practically nil. She detested America, Beechtrees, and being in exile. But she loved every one of the royal family she cooked for. And so there she remained, a part of their lives, a significant member of their household. And willing, with many reservations but on the pedlar’s recommendation, to save a life and get some help in her kitchen. A week’s probation, that was all she had promised, and even then Her Highness and the children would have to approve the child as a fit playmate. But the pedlar had paid no attention to that condition. He was sure that Mimi, once seen, would not be turned away.

Cook arrived in the courtyard almost simultaneously with the Queen. As one, sovereign and cook granted audience first to the pedlar and then to Mimi. It was not difficult to understand why the Queen was so beloved of her people. She was a down-to-earth, courageous and generous soul who had governed with a sympathetic and caring hand. Though now in exile, she would rather have faced the occupation of her country and remained with her people. Prudence and diplomacy, an inability to be the puppet of so evil a regime, made her no less a refugee than the child standing in front of her. More illustrious, a wealthier refugee (she was known to be one of the wealthiest women in the world) but in exile from her home and her people, just like little Mimi.

More often than not she shopped at the lorry with cook. She unaffectedly played the housewife in her unpretentious cotton dresses, usually with a scarf around her hair. She appeared to enjoy very much the role of country lady and family on holiday in the Berkshires.

Mimi had no idea what the two women had expected, or
indeed what the pedlar had told them. But whatever it was, they were not prepared for her. Though they tried to hide it, surprise was evident in their eyes. Mimi, for all her certainty that fate had at last dealt her a better hand, was full of anxiety. Unconsciously she joined her hands and began wringing them as she made her curtsey. Mashinka’s instructions had been automatically put into effect. It was quite obvious that the two women were distressed by the condition of the beautiful child standing before them, and by her plight. They spoke to Mimi, giving the child reassurance that she would be happy here. They were interrupted by the royal children who swooped down on Mimi as if she were some long lost friend. They appeared to be pulling her in five different directions, wanting to show her everything at once.

Cook insisted they first pick up her belongings and show her to her room: a small, sparsely furnished, very clean room, just off the kitchen. Two windows overlooked the courtyard and the stables. The elder boy of about fifteen dropped her suitcase on the bed. She barely had time to admire the window-boxes filled with a profusion of summer flowers at their best before they pulled her from the room and out to play. Play meant first climbing all over the pedlar’s lorry, in and out of the cab, to help Cassandra weigh the onions and potatoes, to insist that peaches, plums, some grapes be purchased. A tour of Beechtrees, they told her, was to be given after family tea on the lawn.

Mimi was lost to her pedlar-benefactor long before he took down the galvanized metal scale, freshened his more fragile load with blocks of ice from Beechtrees ice-house, pushed up the tail gate, and had his cup of coffee with cook. But not so lost that, when Cassandra climbed into the lorry’s cab and the pedlar leaned in to it to honk his horn several times, announcing their departure, she didn’t run back with the children to say her farewells. They had been speaking in French, but said goodbye to the pedlar in
English. When cook called them to her, they obeyed, watching as Mimi said farewell. Mimi and the pedlar spoke, as they always did, in Polish.

‘You be good,’ he told her. ‘Remember, you must work hard for cook. I’ll see you next week. And I will bring you news of Mashinka. But don’t expect good news. You know how sick she is, what she told you about going to heaven to meet Tatayana. This is home for you now. Cook will take care of you. You have friends to play with, a school, a beautiful place to live. You’ll be happy here.’

‘I will be happy here, Mr Joe. But who will talk about the old country with you, the way Mashinka and I did? Who will read us those wonderful stories from
The Jewish Daily Forward
by Mr Singer? You will be lonely without us.’

Cassandra watched her father pull Mimi towards him and pat her on the head. There was affection in that action. And what would she have thought had she known that he was fighting back a sense of loss? The child and Mashinka had afforded him companionship.

‘No, not lonely. But just like you, a naturalized American citizen who should forget about the old country, give up the old ways, become more American,
be
more American. You have to learn from any Americans who come your way. This is the most wonderful country in the world. The Blocks was no place for you. Hard it will be, but you can do it. Mimi, I have to go. Here.’ He peeled off five one-dollar bank notes from a wad of bills and shoved them into her hand. ‘Put this away, a present. It’s always good to have a little money in your pocket. If cook doesn’t offer you pocket-money, you come and tell me. You understand? Now go and play. Too long it is since you had children to play with. I don’t say you have to be happy, Mimi, but at least enjoy yourself.’

He left her standing there and climbed into the cab. Jerry stood on the running-board to ride with them back to his post. Cook called Mimi to her. The child hesitated, but
when the motor burst into life, walked slowly back to join cook and the children. The pedlar made a wide arc in the courtyard with his lorry. Mimi watched it lumber away. It had gone only a few yards when she charged after it. Running alongside the lorry, tears streaming down her cheeks, she called out in English, ‘I’ll always remember, Mr Joe.’

The pedlar did not slow down, never looked back. Cassandra did. She leaned out of her window and watched the girl chase after the lorry, the other children not far behind her. Mimi stopped only when she was no longer able to run, the dust from the road rising up around her skinny legs. The children caught up with her and watched the lorry disappear down the road. Cassandra felt at that moment that she might never see Mimi again. She felt a sense of relief, but also a need to acknowledge her, to bid her god-speed. Cassandra waved and kept waving until, at last, the children responded to her frantic appeal and all waved back.

No amount of comfort, kindness, time, could dissolve that feeling of separateness Mimi felt as a displaced person. It showed in her eyes, even as the smile came back into them. Those things that made her life sweeter were fast becoming a solid foundation to build on. They acted like scar-tissue over a wound. But the scar remained. No matter how faint, it remained. And for a nine year old constantly blocking out the pain of too many traumatic losses sustained in a young life, for a child made wise beyond her years, Mimi was doing just fine at Beechtrees. She had cultivated the ability to live from moment to moment and to expect nothing to last.

The family, their cook, and every other person in service at Beechtrees, even the FBI men, all swept her swiftly into their world, filling every minute of her waking hours. The children: Juliet, almost the same age as Mimi; Pierre,
twelve; Maximillian, fifteen, gathered her to them as a new toy to be played with. They sensed at once her hunger, her need to belong, her separateness. Right from that moment in the courtyard when they had first set eyes on her, it had been so evident as to have overwhelmed the children without their even realising what it was that drew them so quickly to her. Mimi inspired instant love that appeared to answer deep needs within her benefactors as well as herself. So strong were they that all barriers crumbled. Mimi experienced friendship and family, laughter, caring and comfort. Eagerly she lapped it all up.

She was graceful and agile in both body and mind, and very female, with a seductive personality that vied with a certain remoteness that intrigued. Her sense of self was strong but confused. So she was unaware of being a nine-year-old femme fatale, or anything else. She had, too, a generous spirit, and gave whatever of herself she could, making it easy for her benefactors to gather her to their bosom, this strong-willed child. She rose at five in the morning to work in the kitchens until eight o’clock, when she joined the children’s world of school and play. Then she would return to the kitchens and the cook to work from six in the evening until bedtime.

In a matter of days it became obvious to everyone that Mimi was not the child they had thought they were taking into their home. This could not be the offspring of an alcoholic Polish peasant woman, who was dying of liver cancer, leaving her a penniless orphan – which was what the pedlar had told them she was. But no matter how discreetly they probed, Mimi maintained this version of her background. There were her American naturalization papers to confirm it.

The family’s affection for their scullery maid and intermittent playmate was as strong as her pride. Had she had a better background and had not been a kitchen worker she would, at the very least, have been adopted as a
companion or surrogate sister for Juliet.

Several weeks after her arrival the pedlar was approached by the Queen. They conferred at a distance from the lorry and Mimi and the children. The Queen came immediately to the point. ‘Have you told us all you know about Mimi and her background, Mr Pauley?’

‘Yes, ma’am. All that they would admit to, ma’am.’

‘Ah. Then you suspect there is more to Mimi’s story? I think you had better first tell me all that you know for fact, Mr Pauley.’

‘There is not much, ma’am. I knew the brother for years, a worker in the wire mill in Chicopee. I used to leave his order at the door every week, he’d pay me once a month. He never mixed with his neighbours. He was a solitary man, a drunk, though a good worker, never missed a day. But he wasn’t a nice man. He could be mean when he was drunk. Then he tells me his two sisters are coming to live with him, and a niece. I should call in to them and give them what they want. So I do. And that’s the story he told, and that’s what they stuck to. In all the years I know them, they never changed it.’

‘But you never believed it, Mr Pauley?’

‘No, ma’am. You see, they was all afraid. They, like the brother, never went out, never mixed with the neighbours. They thought they were too good to live in such a place, among such common people. I used to buy most everything for them and bring it in. That’s how I got to know them so well. They needed a doctor, I sent the doctor. A funeral, I sent the undertaker.