A Ship in the Harbor: Mother and Me, Part II

PROLOGUE

On a cold and windy January morning in 1973, a small group of us cooled our heels still further around my mother’s freshly dug grave in St. Michael’s Catholic cemetery in Connecticut. My wife held my arm supportively as I checked my watch for the umpteenth time. Fr. Jacques cleared his throat, opened his missal, closed it again, and stamped his feet. The man representing the French government turned the homburg in his hands, maintaining a dignified silence. Standing beside me, Cousin Fela nudged Cousin Isaac to remove his hat. There was an embroidered black yarmulke underneath.

She’s not coming, he said.

Please keep your hats on, gentlemen, Fr. Jacques said, in accented English. One would not want somebody catching a cold.

Major Morton, who had introduced himself to me earlier as our field commander had not removed his beret, a remnant, I presumed, of his military days, and now fingered his mustache affectionately. He had already advised me that he had another burial to command that afternoon.

I don’t understand vy she has to be in a go… hristian cemetery, I heard Cousin Isaac whisper. Cousin Fela shushed him. Dze fazer vill hear you, she said.

Cousin Stella will be here any moment, I promised hopefully to the group, stressing the word Cousin. She was very close to Barbara.

The funeral was from the trendy Frank Campbell’s in Manhattan, where we had said a rosary earlier. Cousin Stella, who lived closer to the cemetery than to New York City, had called me the day before to say that she would meet us at the gravesite if I would tell her when. Allowing an hour for the rosary and an hour and a half for the drive to Connecticut, I had given Cousin Stella eleven thirty as rendezvous time. But it seemed that I had underestimated the efficiency of Maj. Morton, and we had arrived at St. Michael’s a few minutes before eleven.

The flowers are so beautiful, my wife said helpfully. The ribbon on one wreath said, We love you, Barbara. Another said, We will always remember dear Basia, above a gold crucifix.

I don’t like here, Cousin Isaac whispered, his face tense.

Hush, his wife whispered back. Just remember Budapest. Isaac took a deep breath in an effort to dissolve his tension.

The sight of Isaac and Fela reminded me now of Hungary. Not when we were there, but a year later, on board ship from Rio de Janeiro to New York, when my mother had sat me down on my bunk and said, You understand that we are Catholic, and we have never, never been Jewish.

I had acknowledged that I understood this, because I did.

And we will never, never speak about what happened in Hungary, Mother had added, to which I had nodded my head. Then, with a wave of her hand, she had added further, Not until after I’m dead.

Now I looked anxiously at Mother’s financial adviser, the elderly Baron Romski, and was relieved to see a wool scarf around his neck. Ann, the wife of Mother’s apartment building manager, gave me an encouraging wink. I was glad that Mother’s once best friend, Sarula, the frail widow of Spyros Skouras, the legendary president of Twentieth Century-Fox, who had paid her respects at the memorial mass, had not braved the weather.

Stella and Barbara were very close, I repeated lamely.

Then, to my great relief, I saw Stella’s car pull into the cemetery. I watched my cousin hurry towards us, sunglasses and a balled handkerchief in front of her face. I stepped forward to greet her with a cousinly hug, but Stella rushed past me, making unintelligible sounds into the kerchief. I don’t think she saw me.

Stella stopped at the foot of the empty grave, not even aware that the casket still stood beside it. For a moment she swung the fist holding the drenched kerchief forward and back, as though to pump the words to the surface. Then they came in a torrent. "What a terrible woman… awful! So much tsuriz she made for everybody! No regard for anyone! Nothing was enough for her! Nothing, nothing!"

Some years later, when I told Cousin Stella how glad I was that she had felt safe enough among us to express her feelings the way she had, she said that she had no recollection of it.

CHAPTER ONE

On a cold, snowy morning in February of 1940, a ragged and dirty peasant woman hobbles into the lobby of the Hotel Bristol, one of the finest in Budapest. She limps badly, and leans heavily on the thin shoulder of her eight-year-old-son, who seems to be having difficulty concealing his excitement in anticipation. He holds a small, white teddy bear tightly in the crook of his arm. The woman requests a room in French.

We have no vacancies, says the desk clerk in his cutaway coat and striped trousers. He gives an eye signal to one of the bellhops to stand by. The peasant woman’s son sucks on his lower lip to control his face.

Nonsense, the woman snaps, the Bristol is never out of rooms.

Madam has stayed with us before? the clerk asks, unable to resist the temptation for sarcasm.

Of course. Many times, she says in the haughtiest tone she can muster. Despite her obvious fatigue, the peasant woman is enjoying this. Her son has to cover his mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

And when might that have been, Madam? the clerk asks archly, falling into her trap.

She names a date last summer. Her lips are drawn tight to repress a smile.

Ah yes, he says, repeating the date and opening the register with a flourish. And the name, Madame? he asks.

Visebrem, she says. Monsieur and Madame Visebrem.

It takes a beat and a half for the clerk to look up from the guest register. He takes off his glasses to look at her more closely. He gasps audibly. Oh Madame, Madame, what has happened? He is beginning to cry. She is laughing. They hug across the counter.

In a leather armchair, a few steps away, a woman bends down to tie a lace that isn’t untied on her brown oxford walking shoe and cocks an ear to hear the dialog. She is holding her breath because the skirt of her brown, tweed suit is now tight around her waist. Her full face begins to turn red. She has minimal makeup on and hair that is an even mixture of brown and gray. She wears a miniature version of a man’s fedora hair-pinned to her head. In the left lapel of her suit there is a small, enameled Swastika. When the peasant woman and her son have been ushered into the elevator, she strands up, puts on her trench coat, and hurries out into the street.

The peasant woman was my mother. Six months earlier, she had been Beautiful Basia to Warsaw society, pampered and admired, and her ragged appearance on this February morning was part disguise and part the result of an eleven-hour traverse on foot of what had, until recently, been the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia. Now, in 1940, it separated the Soviet Union and Hungary. The eight-year-old with her, of course, was me.

Mommy, I began when the elevator started, but Mother hushed me. When we had first disguised ourselves as peasants, Mother had instructed me not to let anyone hear me speak because, she said, I didn’t speak with a real peasant accent, though I was sure I could do it as well as she could. But now our masquerade was over. We were in Hungary and the man at the desk knew that we weren’t peasants. But I kept my silence.

When the bellhop showed us to our room, and we were alone again Mother said, We have to be very careful when we speak here in Hungary. It’s best not to let people hear us speak Polish.

But why? I argued, Hungary isn’t in the war. I considered myself somewhat of an expert by now on who was and who wasn’t in the war. So why can’t we speak Polish?

"Officially, Hungary is neutral, Mother explained. That means that they are neither on our side or the Germans’. But some of the people here are Nazi sympathizers. They like Hitler."

I didn’t understand this. They must surely know about the German planes bombing Warsaw and killing innocent civilian people. They may not know, I allowed, about the planes machine-gunning people along the road, as we had seen on our way out of Warsaw, but they must certainly know that it wasn’t we who invaded Germany, but the other way around. But I realized that this just meant that there were things here that I did not yet understand, and I didn’t want to advertise this ignorance to Mother.

Then I had an idea. Why don’t we pretend that I’m deaf and dumb. That way we can just point to things and make noises and faces to each other. Kiki and I had seen some people doing that on the beach in Yurata that previous summer. Kiki had been my governess right up until the war started when she had had to go back to her father in Lodz. Her real name was Miss Yanka, and where I had gotten the Kiki from, I didn’t know. As far back as I could remember, she had always been Kiki. Kiki had shared my room and my life. When she had a day off, every other Sunday, I would be inconsolable. But I wasn’t like that any more. When the war began that September, and she had gone home to her father, Mother had told me that Kiki would take a train and meet us somewhere on the road, but that never happened. That had been a long, long time and many tears ago.

Actually, the afternoon after we had seen the people talking with their hands and their faces on the beach, Kiki and I had been sitting on a bench in the park, and I had suggested that we pretend that we were deaf and dumb. But Kiki had said that it was cruel to make fun of handicapped people, and I had said no more about it, though I certainly hadn’t been intending to make fun of anybody.

Now Mother said, We’ll see. From the tone of her voice, I wasn’t really sure that she had heard me. Grownups had a way of hearing you, but not really hearing you. Mother was sitting on one of the beds with the telephone receiver in her hand. First I’m going to order us some breakfast, she said.

That was a monumental idea. We hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday, though, with the excitement of arriving here, I had forgotten about being hungry until this moment. I heard Mother order croissants, marmalade, orange juice, coffee, cocoa, and three soft-boiled eggs, and immediately became ravenous.

But before the breakfast arrived on its little cart, a chambermaid who knew Mother from before had come in, crying. Oh, poor, poor Madame, she said through her tears. They spoke in French, which I now understood a lot of, thanks to my long walks with Mademoiselle just before our escape. Mother told the woman how the Germans had bombed Warsaw and how, after my stepfather Lolek went into the army, we had ridden in the back of a closed truck with my two aunties and two cousins for two days to get away from the bombs and ended up on a farm when the Russians had come. They had said that they were helping us to fight the Germans, but suddenly there we were, thrown off the farm, Russian soldiers with rifles patrolling the streets, and no food in the stores.

The woman gasped and said that the Russians were barbarians, and Mother said that they were animals—which didn’t make much sense to me, since Mother must have surely known that people were really animals too—and that there was no food or firewood, even though we were on the most fertile land in Europe. Then she told her how we had disguised ourselves as peasants and sneaked across the border, over the mountains alone after the guide that we had hired abandoned us.

The woman gasped a few more times as Mother told her about wandering in the woods for eleven hours. Mother even rolled down the black, wool stocking on her leg to show the bruises and dried blood where she had gotten the leg jammed under a log.

And all the while leading a little boy by the hand, the woman said, and now Mother began to cry.

The chambermaid put the bathrobes she had brought for us, along with toothbrushes and toothpaste, on the bed and began to dig in her pockets for a handkerchief.

I’m sorry, Mother said, accepting the handkerchief and dabbing her eyes with it. I will buy you a new one.

Oh Madame, Madame! Madame is a heroine, a real heroine!

Mother smiled. When I arrive in America, I will write a book, she said.

Oh yes. Madame will be famous, the chambermaid said.

And you will be in it…. for your sympathy.

Oh, Madame!

Then Mother suddenly stepped out of the long, peasant skirt she had worn over her dress for the last three days and told the woman to burn the awful thing.

The chambermaid asked if she could keep it as a remembrance of Mother’s heroism, and Mother smiled and also gave her the red kerchief from her head as well.

Oh, thank you so much, Mme. Visebrem, and God bless you and your little son, the woman said.

Mother leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. I don’t have money to give you now, but when I get some… Mother began.

Oh, Madame! the woman said. Then, with the back of her fingers against the spot on her cheek, she hurried from the room.

Her name is Rada or Vada-something, Mother said. She said it out loud to me, but I had the sense that she was really talking to herself.

An hour or so later, I found myself in the bathtub filled deep with warm, soapy water and with a stack of thick towels on a stool by the side of the tub. Stay just as long as you like, Mother had said. I have some telephone calls to make.

If Mother really was a heroine, then I certainly was a hero as well. The thought struck me with a breathtaking force. A few months ago, before the war actually began, Kiki and I had talked about rolling bandages and passing out hot soup to the soldiers at the train station, as Kiki had done as a girl in the previous war. But what Mother and I had done, crawling through the snow past border guards and singing marching songs when we thought we were too exhausted to walk any further, was what real soldiers did. So now we were real heroes.

Of course, what Mother had not said to the chambermaid was that I was the one who got her leg out from under the log and that I had helped her get down the mountain. And then it was I who had to help her to walk. She also totally skipped telling her about the Hungarian secret police agent who had wanted to send us back to the Russians and how I had made friends with the sleigh driver so that we ended up on the train to Budapest instead. Nor had she mentioned how she had lied to our own Polish soldiers saying she was the wife of a senator so they wouldn’t take our truck, or how she had managed to get us thrown out of the cottage we were staying in on the farm, when the Russians first came, by telling silly lies to the Census Committee.

But I wasn’t upset by any of this any more. I was like a grownup now, and being upset by those things was childish.

I thought of my cousins, Fredek and Sonya, still back in Durnoval because Auntie Edna and Auntie Paula had not been brave enough to escape with us. Fredek was only six months younger than I was, and Sonya was actually twice my age, but they were, really, both still children.

I remembered seeing Mother dressed as a peasant for the first time when she had wakened me before dawn, three days before. We had to catch the train from Lvoof to the village by the border where we were to meet Yanek, our hired guide. It was the first time that I had seen her round face wiped totally clean of makeup, and, seeing her large, brown eyes without the black stuff she put on her lashes, with her light brown eyebrows, and her soft, pink lips, I had the sense of why she was Beautiful Basia. Framed in the kerchief around her face, peasant style, her face looked to me like that of a Madonna.

Then Mother woke me out of my reverie by coming into the bathroom and telling me I should get out and let her get bathed.

I haven’t washed yet, I said.

What have you been doing all this time?

You said I could stay as long as I wanted.

Well, hurry up—I have to get washed.

I didn’t get mad. I knew that that’s just the way Mother was.

Unscrewing the top of the plump, new tube of toothpaste a few minutes later, I was reminded of the feeling I would always get in Warsaw when I started a new tube. The last few days of the old tube had always been an emotional time, as the tube grew ever smaller and I knew that in a few days Kiki would throw it in the garbage. As the days wound down, I would use less and less toothpaste to extend the poor tube’s life as long as possible. Then, when I was presented with a brand knew tube and knew that the inevitable had happened, I would be hesitant to press that first dent into its smooth roundness, knowing, as the tube didn’t, what that would eventually lead to.

But such childishness was well behind me now, and I soon emerged from the bathroom wrapped in the thick bathrobe the maid had brought. Mother was sitting where I had left her, on one of the beds. She was using the point of a nail file to tear apart the stitching from around one of the diamonds that she had concealed by covering them with material and turning them into buttons for both of our clothes. On the night table there was now the ring with two large diamonds that I had not seen Mother wear since leaving Warsaw, and she was just unwrapping a large, round broach made of many smaller diamonds that I had only seen her wear one or two times in my life. That had been with an evening gown on a black, velvet ribbon around her neck. The broach had been Grandmother’s, and Mother had once said that some day it would be my wife’s.

I’m going to put your father’s watch where it’ll be safe, she said. This was the gold pocket watch that had been my late father’s. It was lying on the nightstand with the other valuables. Three days ago, when she told me that she had sewn it into my pants pocket, she said I was grownup enough now to have it. This morning it was your father’s watch again, and she was going to safeguard it for me. Well, I didn’t really want to walk around with a valuable watch in my pocket. But now I wondered about the pocket knife that the Russian colonel had given me in Durnoval, which was lying beside the watch. Unlike the watch, the knife had no value, except to me. It had a chipped blade and the wooden-sided handle was worn, but it had been the colonel’s whose father, the cowherd, had probably given it to him when he was old enough to have a knife, and now he had given it to me. Mother had taken it away once before, but returned it just before our escape because I was, supposedly, grown up enough to have it now as well. Now I wondered whether she would take it away again.

Then Mother swept the objects from the night table into the little drawer. Don’t open this drawer, she said. This is everything that we own in the whole world.

For a moment I debated asserting my adulthood now by taking my knife, my rosary, and my steel washer when she was in the bathroom. The washer was what I used in place of a coin to make it disappear and then appear again in people’s ears and hair. The rosary, Mother had given me recently, along with a crucifix, to hide the fact that we were Jewish— though Kiki had taught me to be an actual Catholic at heart. If I did take my things out of the drawer, Mother would, of course, get angry, and it wouldn’t do to have a fight today. The grownup thing, I decided, was to let the matter go for the time being.

The business of my being a Catholic at heart had not just been a matter of being more like my beloved Kiki. It had a practical basis. Catholics went to heaven when they died, and Jews didn’t. It’s not that Jews went, necessarily, to hell. Kiki had assured me that hell was reserved for really bad people and those who talked against God or the Church, and I didn’t believe myself a candidate for that designation. And my father, who had died when I was just a year old, and who had been a very good man, according to Kiki’s repeated assurances, certainly hadn’t warranted eternal fire and brimstone. But exactly where he and other good Jews went after death was beyond my governess’ theological limitations, though she knew for a fact that it wasn’t into the presence of God, Mary, their boy Jesus, and that sacred pigeon, the Holy Ghost, and where Kiki, herself, would some day reside.

Kiki’s inability to provide any specifics in regard to the destination of good Jews had, of course, created a vacuum which my own imagination had rushed to fill. It was on the trolleys cruising Warsaw’s streets that I had seen the only recognizable Jews, besides my own family. In their black coats, wide brimmed hats, beards, and ear-locks, speaking a guttural foreign language, and possessed of strange body-language, they were frequently the subject of rolled eyes, pointed fingers, and not-so-quietly-whispered comments by the other passengers. One time, when one of these men had seated himself directly across from us and begun staring at me, Kiki had taken my hand and we had changed seats, without waiting for the trolley to stop. The image that my four or five-year-old imagination had constructed, in terms of the lot of good Jews after death, was a voyage through eternity on a train of these red and white trolleys.

Between this image and Kiki’s conception of heaven, there was powerful motivation to pursue Catholicism, and Kiki had assured me that this was doable as long as I learned my prayers and repeated them with fervor, refrained from sinning, was sincerely sorry for being Jewish, and, at some point, received the sacrament of baptism.

While I had followed Kiki’s admonitions with great diligence, the whole pursuit had seemed to take a major step toward realization just a few weeks earlier in Lvoof, when Mother had given me the rosary and the crucifix and instructed me to, henceforth, declare that she and I were Catholic. There had even been an unexpected benefit in it for me, as Mother had asked me to teach her to do the rosary.

Then, on the very eve of our escape from the Soviets, Mother had taken a major, major load off my heart by informing me that good Jews did, indeed, go to heaven, just like Catholics and that, for that matter, Jesus, Himself, had been Jewish. Because, at that crucial point, I desperately wanted it to be true, I accepted the part about going heaven. Kiki, I reasoned, had, after all, been an authority on matters Catholic, not