The Prosperous Thief (23 page)
W
hen the American woman turned up out of the blue several weeks before her father’s death, Laura had been thrilled, not simply for her father whose severance from the past had been so total, but also for herself. At last, she thought, some facts about his early life. But her excitement was to be short-lived: Henry denied any connection with the woman, categorically denied it. So when the American lingered on in Melbourne, Laura assumed she had joined the bridge-playing, meal-providing widows who had flocked around her father in the years since her mother’s death. But the American didn’t play cards, and if she cooked it was not for Henry Lewin. She came to talk, and with the exception of that first lunch when she seemed so keen to meet the family, she kept her talk for Henry alone. This was, if Laura had stopped to think, sufficient to distinguish her from the customary widows who knew their prospects were enhanced if Henry’s joys became their own. They would admire his coin collection and his enduring reputation as a pastry-chef, and lavish interest in his family – Laura, her brother Daniel, his wife Melissa, their two children, and if they were really keen, Nell too – poring over photographs and scrapbooks with exquisite patience. But not the American, or at least not after her initial flash of friendliness. There were no photos when she came to visit, nor admiring laughter, the topics were of her choosing and they concerned Henry alone.
For hours they would talk, the American and Laura’s normally taciturn father, the answering machine switched on, bridge meetings missed, a medical appointment once forgotten. A couple of times Laura was through the back door and into the kitchen before hearing their voices, her father’s heavily-accented speech low and earnest in contrast with the American’s sharp, peremptory tones. She would catch a glimpse of them from the doorway, the two of them sitting on opposite sides of the living room, her father stiff and defensive, the American leaning forward poised like a bullet, a mere fraction of a second when Laura would see her blond, bearish father almost pretty in contrast to this small, sharp woman. Then they would notice her, and the American would collect her things and, with a nod to Laura and a ‘See you tomorrow, Mr Lewin’,would be gone, leaving in her wake a smell of unanswered questions, Henry’s perspiration and a vaguely familiar perfume.
The woman was from the past, her father had finally admitted. Not a relative, he stressed, but the daughter of a man he had once known.
Laura’s excitement returned. It didn’t matter her father had lied, finally she had an opening.‘Someone from Berlin?’ she asked. ‘Someone from before the war?’
‘
During
the war,’ he said, before turning away and effectively closing the conversation.
Laura watched her father walk down the hallway to his office, enter the room and close the door. And even though her excitement was pushing her to follow, she knew there was no point. She was well acquainted with his attitude to the past and for most of her life had complied with it – against her better judgment, it must be said. Persecution, torture, murder, genocide all have a long and noxious half-life, yet her father seemed to think that if he didn’t dwell, if he didn’t talk, the horrors would go away. And who was Laura to tell him he was wrong?
If only her father had been more like her mother. Etti Lewin had believed it was important to speak.‘You can’t keep the poisons inside,’ she used to say.‘It’s unhealthy.’An Olympian talker until her premature death at sixty-two, Etti was a poor advertisement for her beliefs. Laura had heard about her mother’s family in Lodz, along with a string of neighbours, shopkeepers, peddlers, teachers, Laura had heard about them all in such detail she would recognise them immediately should there ever be an afterlife. So many words, so many stories, Etti Lewin had talked so long and so often about her past it was more real than Laura’s own. But all the talking had not saved her. Eighteen years younger than Henry, she had died of cancer five years ago, reciting her well-thumbed life to the end, while Henry, who had bottled up his memories, letting them steep undisturbed in their poisons, was eighty-five when he died.
Laura, while reluctant to press her father, had never given up hope he would eventually speak. And so he had, not to the family who had loved him, but an unknown American woman who had appeared out of nowhere. Once when he was with the woman, Laura had heard her father slip into German. Immediately the American had cut him off, saying she would tolerate no German. Her voice was raised, her tone ice hard, clearly there was to be no discussion on this issue. Then the jerk and silence of her poor father trying to shape his old unspoken memories in a language alien to his early life and still too unsteady after forty years to do the job properly. How Laura had wanted to intervene, but Henry had made it clear the American was no one’s business but his own.
Laura knew she could have eavesdropped, just slipped in the back door and stood silently in the kitchen listening to what Henry had always denied his family. Yet even with the curiosity pummelling the very heart of her, she couldn’t do it. Throughout her life her father had sealed his past from the family behind a wall of proprietorial authority. To have listened as he talked with the American would have been a trespass comparable to reading a private diary.
And then it was too late. Henry died soon after the American’s appearance, his entrenched embargo on the past broken only with a stranger.
And there was no diary.
‘Although if there had been, I’d have had no compunction about reading it,’ Laura said to Nell one Saturday as they were eating breakfast on their back deck.‘People who write diaries and don’t burn them expect a posthumous audience.’
The two women were enjoying a leisurely morning together, the first since Henry’s death. It was May, but a cushiony heat still lingered, scored by a rustling of autumn leaves in the streets and lanes.
‘And where there’s a diary there’s the possibility of a film,’ Nell said with a smile. After several years devoted to cinema studies, Nell was considering a return to filmmaking. ‘I bet his story would make a terrific movie.’
A terrific movie perhaps, but a terrible betrayal of her father’s wishes.And although Laura knew Nell was probably joking, could not bring herself to play along. From her earliest years Laura had bent over backwards to comply with her parents’ desires, after everything they had suffered it was the least they deserved. And in the case of her father there had been no confidences, no diary, and no matter what Nell thought, there would be no film.
Which would come as no surprise to Nell, for she and Laura disagreed on most things. Indeed for six years they had regularly disagreed, yet were devoted to each other. They were a textbook example of the compatibility of opposites. Background, temperament, likes and dislikes, all different. Even here in their own slender garden their different tastes were manifest: roses, a camellia, a gardenia and a daphne in one small garden bed for Laura, grevillea, kangaroo paw and bottlebrush in the other for Nell.
Their tastes did, however, coalesce in their home. They lived in a modern townhouse, with the deep blue and terracotta colourings of the southern Mediterranean. There were swathes of honeyed timber floors, and an indoor rock pool called a Zen fountain, which Laura hoped provided tranquillity by osmosis as they blustered past in the course of their busy lives. The house was built on two levels, with ample space for two tall women with towering personalities and Wystan, a blue Burmese cat with attitude. So great was their attachment to both house and cat, they would joke that if either was foolish enough to break what they assumed was a lifelong partnership, then the guilty party would lose custody of both. An easy, casual joke because neither believed for a moment it would happen.
Laura sat back in her chair sipping her coffee and breathing in the sanctuary that was this place and this partner. If she could just prolong the moment for a few days in order to regenerate – like her peace rose recovering from black spot, she found herself thinking – she would re-enter life with all her old energy and eagerness. She and Nell had been out here only an hour and already she was feeling better, aware that a lightness had displaced the grind and crush of the past couple of months since her father’s death.
She had never thought grief could be so raucous. She had lurched this way and that, seeing the lawyer, the accountant, the bank manager, redirecting her father’s mail, forgetting to cancel the newspaper, discovering by virtue of its smell a bin of rubbish rotting in the laundry; in short, dealing with all those aspects of a life that go on irrespective of death. And through it all going to work each day and dealing with those problems too. Day after day with so much to do and all the while wanting to stop, wanting to turn the ruckus off, wanting time just to reflect.
Her father had been old, Laura knew that, but he had been healthy and his death had come as a shock. As for his absence, she felt it like a faulty car alarm, blessedly silent for the moment but sure to return. Having to sort through her parents’ house had merely exacerbated the difficulties, for it was filled not only with her father’s possessions but also her mother’s.
Her parents had bought the house in 1970, the same year Laura had started high school.With so much life associated with the place and over such a long period of time, the many visits Laura had made since her father’s death should have been like little pilgrimages. Instead she had been aware of a stiffness, even a foreignness with both her father and mother now gone, as if she were walking through a simulacrum of the place: everything where it belonged, everything familiar, but none of it real.
The rooms were emptying and soon the house would be sold. As she sorted through her parents’ possessions, Laura was reminded again and again that while her mother had no secrets, her father had behaved as if his life began at thirty-five. It had always been reasonable to assume, then, that the earlier period had simply been well hidden. But drawer by drawer, cupboard by cupboard, room by room Laura discovered nothing more than the little she already knew. She was beginning to think she had been wrong about her father, that he had no secrets, had never had any secrets, that he had kept silent all these years because he had nothing to say.
Nell would have none of it.‘Of course he had secrets, what else brought the American woman halfway across the globe to see him?’ She bent her fine sculptured face to one side, and ran an index finger a thoughtful track from her chin down the long, slender neck to the notch in her clavicle. ‘My theory,’ she said slowly, ‘is the American was a long-lost love child –’ ‘The woman was well into her sixties, Nell. My father would have still been in short pants when he’d gone to bed with her mother.’
‘It happens, darling,’ Nell said with an emphatic raising of the eyebrows, and popped a strip of roasted red capsicum in her mouth. ‘All right, so she wasn’t his love child, but perhaps her mother had some sort of an affair with Henry later, after he’d shed his knickerbockers for something more mature.’
Laura was laughing. ‘You’ve been watching too many bad American movies. Not all intrigues have to be sexual –’ ‘But they are the most interesting.’
‘Not in pre-war Germany,’ Laura said as she uncurled from her chair, gathered her robe about her and walked to the edge of the garden. There she stood gazing out over their small patch, breathing in the fresh morning air.
There was a richness about Laura Lewin, a lovely feminine succulence, with her smooth full curves, the mass of blonde curls, the almost white strands framing the face, and the unnerving swimming-pool blue eyes. All of her so blonde, not a faint and watery Dickens blonde, but the tall, full-bodied 1950s version. As she stood at the edge of the garden, wrapped in her crimson robe and stretching her arms up high, she was a compelling figure.
She twisted around.‘Whatever my father was hiding, if he was hiding anything, he took great pains to keep it hidden. Maybe,’ she shrugged,‘maybe it’s best we don’t know.’
She knelt down and started to pick at some weeds. Wystan roused himself from the warm grass, sauntered over to investigate and applied himself to dispersing the pile. Several minutes passed before Laura sat back on her haunches, a clump of violet seedlings in her hand. She dumped the violets on the pile of weeds – Nell despaired of her ever learning the difference – and with the garden desperately in need of further attention, returned to her chair.
The two women sitting together in the autumn sun comprised a yin and yang of womanhood: blonde, full-bodied Laura, and tall, angular Nell – like Audrey Hepburn, Etti had said when they were first introduced. Nell was outgoing and self-assured, Laura was far more reserved; Nell was flamboyant in everything from clothes to conversation, Laura was highly competent but preferred a set of instructions; Nell’s humour tended towards the smutty, Laura’s was typically wry and self-deprecating. And while both were now thinking about Henry Lewin, Laura’s mind was on betrayal and loss, while Nell’s was hooked into sex and affairs.
‘We know your father was very poor in Germany,’ Nell said. ‘Perhaps he picked up some gardening work with a rich German family, or was a general roustabout on an estate, and perhaps he had an affair with the lady of the house –’
‘Very DH Lawrence.’
‘– and perhaps the husband started to suspect, so Henry had to be sent away and he wandered for months, which was when his teeth started to rot, until at last he was taken in by a woman who turns out to be the American’s mother, and they have an affair, the result of which is the American woman’s much younger sister.’
Nell sat back looking very pleased with herself and Laura knew that with very little encouragement she would fill in the gaps to the story and happily throw in a sequel and they’d be sitting here in their bed clothes at midday. Nell really had missed her calling. She was an academic in cinema studies, her published speciality the avant-garde (with such a low tolerance for boredom, she said she needed a field whose very essence was change); her passions, however, were Hollywood schlock and airport novels. Now Laura leaned over and placed a kiss on her neck.