Saturday's Child (28 page)

I didn't believe him. I thought he must be repressing his experience of the Holocaust, out of survivor guilt. But his manner seemed too relaxed for that.

“You never escaped from a camp?”

“It would have been difficult for me to escape since I never was there to start with. As for escaping from concentration camps—that was hardly a common occurrence, my dear girl.”

“Faith said you'd crawled through the sewers of Europe to survive. That was her phrase. She
believed
it. She believed that was the reason for your callousness. She wasn't lying about that. … Oh my god.
You
lied to
her
.”

Again the aristocratic shrug. “I did not tell her those things. She had her own preconceived notions. She assumed many things. I simply refrained from telling her otherwise. It seemed kinder. And she was, for a crucial period of time, my lifeline.”

“My
god
,” I repeated. “It's stunning. You really are a cruel man. You ‘simply refrained from telling her otherwise.'
God
.”

“And why should I have told her otherwise?” His voice never rose, but the accent became more clipped. “Your mother believed what she wanted to believe, what they all wanted to believe. She believed it even before she met me. It was like one of your pre-cut mass-produced American coats she slipped over my shoulders when I walked off the ship. She never bothered to ask whether I liked it or not. But
my
clothes had always been custom-tailored. All the American Jews pitied us—and some of us were indeed pitiable. But
every
one of us
needed
that pity to begin new lives. Many, even most, who came here were not only pitiable but, it must be said, contemptible. Less than human. Even before the Nazis, they had been like this. The stock your mother comes from: peasants, shtetl dwellers, peddlers, ghetto denizens. Little or no education. Little or no culture.”

“The ‘stock' … my mother's father was a rabbi. He—”

“You asked. So be answered. To American Jews in their cushioned nests, all European Jewish war victims were the same: worse off than their own immigrant ancestors had been before coming to the New World. In their view, we were all scrawny, hungry, filthy, desperate, groveling, half-crushed insects. Objects that were pathetic and a little disgusting. It let them feel how far they had come from being what we still were. Ghetto mentalities, Yiddish speakers, whiners,
Mussulmen
—the newsreel skeletons, the walking dead of the camps—that's what we all were supposed to be. The world's most reliable victims: the first and last resort for persecution.
Greasy, itinerant, superstitious. Am I to help it if your mother projected
her
family background onto
mine?
”

“Her family—”

“And I should have told her otherwise?” he snorted. “The background differences were evident, anyway. Also, I could not always stop myself from speaking aloud the enormity of my loss. Not people, not family, no. But a distinctive … way of life. You could never understand. Certain rituals. The opening night of the Philharmonic, the sound one's footsteps made on the marble of the Kunsthistorische, summers in Bad Ischl, winters on ski holidays in the Austrian Alps, the annual excursion into Grinzing to sample the new wines. The young Schwarzkopf in concert the first time she dared attempt ‘Im Abendrot.' The Ringstrasse, the Stadtpark. These things mean nothing to you. To us they
were
our life, leisurely, reliable, lending a graceful rhythm to the seasons. My great-grandfather was a surgeon-captain in the Austrian army—and he was not the first or last Jew to hold such a rank. My family was
Austrian
, do you understand? More than that:
Viennese
. All of us—surgeons, solicitors, professors. And the women—accomplished, able to draw nicely, play at least one instrument, dance charmingly, preside over a well-kept home. These things I could not stop myself from saying aloud to Faith, as if I were mourning Kaddish like some devout synagogue fanatic—which no one in my family ever was.”

I stared at him. He barked a short laugh, at ease in his bitterness.

“What little I did tell your mother merely made me more pitiable in her American Jewish eyes. Lo how the mighty have fallen. I could hear it in her voice, suffused with a love only the powerful can afford. But destroy
all
her pre-cut illusions? If she had known I never, how you said it, crawled through the sewers of Europe, never was in or heroically escaped from a camp, would I then have been a sufficient victim? I think not, my dear. And there was something else. I had my pride. Which no one—not the peasant Jews of Europe, not Hitler's lack of discrimination, not your mother—could take from me. With
that
pride I survived. Not a crude pride of endurance, like the Hassidic peasant scurrying around under the Cossacks' hooves. A pride of blood, a long line—”

“So you not only didn't love her. You despised her.”

“Oh, really. Such excess of language, such psychologizing. I was fond of her. Grateful, even. I might perhaps have remained a friendly distant acquaintance, except that—”

“A friendly distant acquaintance with your deserted ex-wife, the mother of your child? A friendly distant
acquaintance
—”

He rose to his feet, and for a terrifying moment I thought he would order me from the room. But he turned, paced around his desk chair, and stared out the window. When he spun again to face me, I was confused by his expression—what seemed a clumsy encounter between sympathy and his features.

“Robin,” he began softly, “you came here seeking some revelation, a happy ending to your girlish fantasies. When you have lived longer, you may understand there are no happy endings. But there are revelations. Some of which by their nature preclude the happy ending.”

I folded the gloves in my lap and forced my hands to lie perfectly still.

“I do understand,” I said quietly. “I'm not afraid of the truth.”

“That is good. It is best to not be afraid of facts. I take you at your word that you wish to know what there is to know. So then.”

He returned to his chair and sat down. I waited. Years of waiting densified into that pause.

“So then,” he repeated. “Your mother is not my ex-wife. Viga is not my new wife. Viga is my only wife. Your mother and I were never married.”

Certain statements fall, as if through stratospheres of shock, with the gravity of the inevitable. Only then can we comprehend they had always been intuited and were merely delayed en route to the doom of confirmation.

“Viga and I have known one another since we were children in Vienna. Our families were old friends. We grew up together. We knew someday we would marry. We had been betrothed before the war came. She went to England, I came here. As soon as I could, I sent for her.”

“I see. Did Faith know this?”

“No. It was not possible to tell her. At first it seemed not necessary. Later, when I came to understand she had been making all these plans in her mind—well, I still needed her. Then she claimed she was pregnant. So it became unavoidable
not
to tell her. She was of course upset. Her sisters were hysterical. That I should marry her.”

“And you? You weren't ‘upset'? You felt no pity for her?”

“My dear child. We came from different universes. We had nothing in common. She craved what little I still possessed—my education, my culture, my suffering. It would never have worked. I suggested she get an abortion. She would not hear of it. It was her decision. She had miscalculated that someone whose world had been destroyed by the coarsest of people for the coarsest of reasons through the coarsest of means, could still feel pity.”

“So you just abandoned her.”

“That is harsh. I urged her not to have the child. I knew doctors who would have helped. She refused. What could I do? At her request—her pleading—I did see the infant. I know she believed I would be so moved I would be overcome with love for her and her offspring and thus the happy ending. Au contraire. It was an unpleasant occasion.”

“And that was it? You never tried to connect with the child, to see the child, again?”

“It was too difficult. I had my own life to think about, to begin again. There was no way I could keep track of a child who—”

I burst free of the third person.

“Actually, Mates, I would have been a hard child to lose track of. You can't possibly be unaware that at a certain point I was probably the most famous small person in this country?”

“I read something about that. But I rarely watch television, you see. And after all, it was none of my business. Even Faith by then would not have welcomed my interest. She had changed her name again, and you had never borne my name. Also, you see, I had my pride—”

“Your pride.” Stung, I began to talk rapidly. “I'm beginning to understand. Tell me your scientific opinion as a doctor: don't your bastards carry the same bloodcells, the same genes of such pride?”

Had his expression not been so controlled, I might almost have imagined he winced.

“I really can't say, my dear. One doesn't—”

“Follow them up. So how
would
one know. Or is it that you follow up the sons but not the daughters? Surely not those from peasant stock.”

“Ach, my dear Robin,” he laughed, “so you are the young radical, too! A television star, a celebrity, and also political. How very American. Like
your new President Kennedy. But perhaps that is more excusable in someone like you, only twenty years old. I too was once going to change the world. I was a pseudo-Communist, can you believe it? It was the chic attitude for Viennese intellectuals between the wars. Such self-righteous fervor!” He chuckled, inviting me in as an accomplice to his bonhomie.

“But once in this country, you settled into the comfortable life of the bourgeoisie? You recovered from all that youthful idealism, eh?” I heard the edge in my voice, but my interior listening was alive to something else he'd said, something not even aimed at me, but something that had penetrated fatally and was coursing through my blood like an embolism.

“Once in this country, I determined to build a life here. I knew that even after the war would be over, Vienna—my Vienna, as I and my family had experienced it—would never be the same. I've been back to visit, naturally. Many times. But to be ‘repatriated' and ‘recompensed' like the merchant class, that was not for me. Anyway, it is not possible to be on this planet and escape America. I can imagine a day when one will be standing in the Belvedere Gardens and look up to see the hideous golden arches of McDonald's not far off. So, since I could not escape this country, I determined to survive
here
. This is why I changed my field from surgery to gynecology and obstetrics. They seemed—obstetrics, especially—more positive. When I came to this country, you see, I learned that my medical education—the finest, in the world's most honored medical city—was not good enough for raw young America, so self-confident of its own destiny. It would have taken more years of being dependent on and possessed by your mother, to take the required additional courses and board examinations for surgery, my old specialty, than it did for ob/gyn.”

“And the latter was also easier, perhaps?”

“Easier? Oh my dear child—”

“Please don't call me that.” The embolism was still traveling through the veins, approaching the brain. What was it he'd said,
what?

“My apologies. A manner of speech. But ‘easy'? Can you imagine what it is to try and minister medically to women? Their emotionality, their lack of judgment? Their excessive alarm over minor illness and their self-deluding home remedies for major diseases? They
resist
you, these women. They ask for your advice and claim to obey it—but they fight you as if to the death. It doesn't matter what age they are, they act as if—”

There it was
.

“You said something, Mates. A moment ago. Something about my being a young woman twenty years old. You must've lost track of that, too. I'll be twenty
next
year, Mates. I'm about to turn nineteen, later this month.”

I couldn't tell whether the astonishment in his expression was from my having dared interrupt the direction of his thought, or whether it was the content of what I'd said. Then his eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward across the desk.

“No. You are about to turn twenty later this month.”

This was a direct engagement, one I had to win. For my mother's sake? For the few things I had believed solid among so many shifting unrealities? Or was it one I actually hoped to lose—for the savage, awesome freedom that would imply?

“I was born January 29, 1942. This is 1961. I'm about to be nineteen.”

“You were born January 29, 1941, Robin. You are about to be twenty years old.”

We stared at each other. Then he rose, strode to a filing cabinet across the room, took out a set of keys on a silver pocket key chain. He selected one and unlocked a file drawer. It took him only a moment's search to find the paper. I watched, mesmerized.

“This is your birth certificate. Perhaps you have never seen it.”

I started to speak, then stopped myself. How suddenly irrelevant to explain to him that there
was
no certificate, that there had been a fire in the registry of the little Florida town and all the records had been lost, that it had been necessary for Faith to swear a deposition to a judge years ago so a new certificate could be issued. I started to speak, then stopped myself in one last hopeless gesture of protection for the young mother whose terror and despair, I finally realized, must have been overwhelming.

But there it was in my hand. The original one, the one with the seal.
Robin, female, born to Faith Berkley, nee Malkah Teitlebaum. Father: Mates Morgenstern. January 29, 1941. Lake Worth, Florida
.