Saturday's Child (25 page)

“But—who's Morgan then?”

“
Nobody's
Morgan, you fool!” she snapped, “
We
are. You and me. I made it up. I liked it. That sorceress in King Arthur stories, she's
Morgan Le Fay, and I thought since my name's Faith I can be Faith Morgan. So I took it. It's a good name. For you too. It's a beautiful name. What's wrong with it?” She glared at me.

“Nothing, Mommie. It's fine. It just feels—strange to think that—”

“There's nothing goddamned strange about it. People change their names all the time. It's normal. Your Aunt Sally and I had already changed our maiden names from Teitlebaum to Berkley. You knew that.”

“Yes … but that was
you
two. This is
my
name. All this time I never even knew … I mean I thought—”

“You thought. You never knew. What do you know about life, about anything, Robin?”

“I guess I don't, Mommie. But all I mean is, it feels—it's … peculiar. Not being my real name.”

“The hell it isn't!” she shouted. “It's legal, it's real, it's mine, it's yours. The whole goddamned country knows you by that name. That name is
famous
because of you and me. What could be more real? Are you crazy?”

I remember thinking to myself: Back off. Don't aggravate her further. Get more facts if possible.

“Mommie?” I reached out and touched her hand. She pulled it away. “He never … I mean, in thirteen years he never once—”

“
Never
.” The word hit like a fist in my face. “And don't cook up romantic fantasies in your overheated brain about finding him, either.
Never
. He didn't want you. He still doesn't. Get it?”

“But how do we know for sure? Maybe—”

“Do you hear him pounding down the door to get in to see his cherished daughter?”

“No.”

“He didn't want you.
I
wanted you.”

“Yes.”

“I bore you, raised you, sacrificed for you, loved you. He didn't give a tinker's damn for his precious daughter. He only wanted a son.”

“He did? He said that?”

“He didn't have to say it. Or maybe he did say it, I can't remember. It doesn't matter, I knew it. Your father, Robin, is a Prussian iceman, arrogant and fancy. The kind from a long ‘bloodline' who wants to extend it. A son he would have stayed with his wife for. A
son
.”

I just sat there, crying. She looked at me and seemed to relent.

“Baby. What would I do with a son?
I
wanted a
daughter
. Look. Put it out of your mind. It's always been us against the world, you and me, remember? Back in Mount Vernon, when we'd go window shopping and plan our future and bake cookies and laugh? We've still got each other. That's really all we've ever had. But that's all we need, you and me.”

She reached out to me. I took her hand.

“Robin, baby, you're thirteen now, a big girl with a wonderful career and life ahead. There's no stopping us. Remember what I've always told you:
you can be anything you want, there's nothing you can't be
. So what's the point of mooning after some scum who never wanted you? Even if you
could
find him—and you can't and he's moved on by now and he might be dead for all I know—believe me, Robin, he'd throw you out on the street. I won't have you hurt like that. I
love
you. More than life itself.”

I looked up at her and when I saw she was crying too, it burst inside me and I hurled myself into her arms. This time she took me under the covers, inside next to her, warm and safe.

I remember the softness of her breasts under her nightgown, the sheet wet with our tears, and her murmuring, “Some kind of monster, the war must have made of him. That he could be so loving. Marry me. Father you. Then—goodbye, farewell,
auf wiedersehen
. Some kind of inhuman
creature …
”

The last thing I remember, before we cried ourselves to sleep in each other's arms, was my whispering,

“Like Zeus in the myths, huh Mommie? He appeared as a swan, or a rain of gold coins, or a bull, but then he always vanished afterwards …”

And her crying, answering softly,

“Yes, my baby, yes. Just like in the myths.”

After that night we never spoke of it again.

But the knowledge that he might be out there wasn't silenced. At first, I was just so grateful to her—for having wanted me, for having kept me. And for finally telling me the truth. Then the anger started.

Why had she lied to me all those years? Why had she been so
nasty
when it turned out I knew? Why did she imply I was “fragile,” as if unstable? Then the guilt started:
Hello again, guilt
. Because she
was
the one who raised me. Then the feeling, growing like a tumor, that I owe her so much I'll never be able to get away from her. And through it all, loving her. For having survived. For having loved
me
.

So here I am, almost eighteen, still locked in battle with her. And still obsessed—with the phantom of myself, the unreality of him, the too vivid reality of her.

Last night I read that in parts of rural China, to this day the most dutiful of Chinese daughters cuts out a piece of her flesh to make a soup for her ailing or weak mother.

Today I felt Chinese.

EIGHT

Storming the Gates of Mycenae

Father, if I had the voice of Orpheus

if I could sing rocks into rising
,

if I had words to move all hearts, or only yours
,

I would have used them
.

—E
URIPIDES
,
I
PHIGENIA IN
A
ULIS

Finally, I was on my way to meet him.

It had taken five years of sleuthing, patching fragments of evidence together from eavesdropped-on conversations between my mother and her sisters, five years of library trips on literary excuses to research my way through the telephone books of New Jersey cities. Five years of imagining what it would be like, what
he
would be like.

There was the scenario in which he refused to acknowledge me, in which I was denied outright, annihilated on the spot. The scenario in which he physically threw me out the door. The scenario in which he broke into tears and flung his arms wide, crying, “My daughter, I knew you'd find me someday.” Five years of lying in bed at night, fantasizing how he would look, which of my features I might recognize in his face, what his voice would sound like.

Since the confrontation about him with my mother when I was thirteen,
a deceptively calm silence had descended on the subject. Only once, on my eighteenth birthday, had I dared gingerly raise the subject again. But there were no fireworks. Faith's version had simply picked itself up from its position five years earlier and ambled sideways, settling down not far from where it had been. So he was alive, what of it. He had deserted us. Why be curious about a so-called father who'd never taken a particle of interest in his own child—especially when such curiosity wounded the other parent, whose entire existence had been given over to that child? Faith neither understood nor would grant a millimeter of sympathy to the notion that one could be obsessed about a mystery parent. There was nothing to learn from or about Mates Morgenstern; he
was
, in effect, a dead man. And so should he be to me. Hadn't eighteen years of his invisibility made that clear?

My obsession went into hiding, taking inventory of all the ways he might have tried to contact his daughter but been impeded by Faith. Had she destroyed letters? Deflected phone calls? I knew that nothing was beyond her when struggling for what she believed was her survival and her daughter's love. So the mystique of him had ripened, tended in secret by my imagination.

Now, riding in the window seat of a dingy bus en route to the university town of New Brunswick, I began for the thousandth time to number the minimal facts I knew about him, telling the beads of memory through one last novena.

He was a doctor, an obstetrician/gynecologist. Born in Vienna, of a middle-class Jewish family. About ten years older than Faith. Well educated. A linguist: spoke German, English, French; reportedly had read the classics in the original, for pleasure; particularly relished Greek drama. Knew and loved music—but Faith would go into no details there. Was brilliant, handsome, arrogant; could be cold, cruel, “emotionally aloof unto sadism” (Faith's phrase). Indeed, my mother's virtuosity in the skills of exaggeration had to be weighed against every detail. To drop one's guard about that for even a second was to be assaulted by such doubts that I would again surrender any idea of contacting him. That had already happened three times, as I tried to reconcile myself to eternal ignorance on the subject, even after I had finally learned where he was: the city, the address, the telephone number.

That moment, sitting in the wooden library chair with the phone book for New Brunswick in front of me, is etched in my brain. How the room froze, how utterly still everything became when the name leapt at me—in the same fine print as those above and below it but with the impact of emblazoned letters flaming ten feet high: Morgenstern, Mates, M.D.

Mates: the Hebrew for Mattheus, heroic Maccabee leader. Morgenstern: the German for morning star.

In the little games I played with my obsession, this had been the next-to-last trip to the library phone books I was going to permit myself. It was ludicrous, thinking someone might still be in the same state where he'd been eighteen years earlier—if he'd been there to begin with. Like an alcoholic trying to clamber on the wagon, I now had a history of refusing to permit further self-indulgence. I first stopped searching for him after confiding the matter to my journal. But when Faith escalated her interest in my writing, I stopped keeping the journal and hid it away more securely, so there would be no evidence. But then there also was no longer any exorcism of him on the page. As long as he'd been confined there, I had relative peace of mind. Now he was loose, so the library trips started again. Then, with only one more self-allowed trip to go, it was suddenly too late. I'd found the name. Now none of us could escape from any of us anymore.

It was overheated in the bus, and the window was sealed. I felt my palms begin to sweat and stripped off my gloves, remembering how my hands had shaken the day I'd made the first call—in a British accent, pretending to be a researcher doing follow-up on Jewish war refugees—to confirm that this was indeed the same Dr. Morgenstern who had emigrated from Austria in 1940. The very thought of that phone call, placed just before my eighteenth birthday, still could make my hands tremble now, a full year later.

The wife had answered. I hadn't known that at the time; possibly the nurse-receptionist, I'd thought. But those well-contrived, British-accented questions of the researcher from the mythical American-European Jewry League had amazingly enough elicited a fair amount of information—certainly sufficient to mull over for another year—until the next call, the second call, to make the appointment toward which this bus steadily sped me.

“To whom am I speaking, please?” the British researcher's voice had inquired.

“This is Mrs. Morgenstern, the Doctor's wife. I also work in the office of his medical practice.”

“I see. And may I ask how long you and the doctor have been married?”

“Since 1941.”

“1941?” Impossible.

“1941, ya.” How amazingly obedient she was to this inquisitive stranger. Yet she responded only to what was asked, volunteering nothing.

“I see. And may I have your first name, please?”

“Viga.”

“Spelled—?”

“V-i-g-a.”

“Any children, might I ask?”

There was a pause so slight it might have been imagined by the British researcher.

“Ya.”

Acknowledged, after all
. And how had she coped with
that
for so many years?

“Will that be all?” The accent, though faint, was there. Stall for more information.

“You were born in Vienna, as well?”

“Ya.”

“And you met Doctor Morgenstern in—”

“The Doctor and I were childhood friends.”

“So you emigrated to the United States in—?”

“In 1941, the same year we were married.”

Each answer blasted open further underground deposits of questions. But these were questions no American-European Jewry League volunteer could get away with asking. Besides, although I retained my Oxbridge tone of inquiry, I had to get off the phone, because more than the hand holding the receiver had begun to tremble.

Who would have thought it might be so easy? Just say thank you for your cooperation and hang up the receiver. Then sift for months, solipsistically, through the new information—which certainly did not relate to the details I'd already lived with for years.

She was clearly confused about her dates. But he'd obviously remarried. Yet he still acknowledged the child of the first marriage. Then why had he never—or had he?—tried to be a presence in that child's life? Furthermore, the second wife, Viga, clearly knew about the child. Or did she think the child was dead? And how could they have been married a year
before
the child was born? Or was the man a bigamist? I cursed myself that the league volunteer hadn't pressed for more information about the child. Viga's respect for authority seemed so entrenched that she might have gone on answering whatever questions were put to her.

At times, my speculations reeled down side paths leading to dead ends, swamps, precipice edges. What if Faith were not my biological mother? Nonsense: the genes showed themselves physically. What if Faith had told him their child had died, just as she'd told me
he
was dead? Rat in a maze, my mind retraced every route, no matter how irrational.