SUBJECT: Overthrown
Alice, well, of course this was going to happen all along. Looking back, I do see it now. Debbie Banks is a formidable woman, and wasn’t she looking for a chink in my armor for YEARS? I suppose she has found it, and that is fine by me. She can have the position. I’m not sorry for my absence. As I told you, I have had a long-term houseguest since the fall and garden club happens to fall at a time in the evening when the fish are biting. My guest likes to fish in the evening before dinner and frankly I enjoy his company far more than I enjoy our meetings, which have become overrun with women more interested in chattering on about their bygone husbands, arthritic joints, and bowel movements, and munching on cakes and cookies than information about gardening. I hope you don’t feel the need to step down from your own position as treasurer out of loyalty to me; Stay! You have Mary in the club, anyway. If I had a daughter-in-law attending, I’d probably be on my best behavior. (Well, probably not, but I will say if I had a daughter nearby I’d be with her every chance I had.)
Sybil
Sybil Van Antwerp
17 Farney Rd.
Arnold, MD 21012
May 16, 2017
Dear Sybil,
It’s been a while since I have heard from you, either letter or phone, and what communication we have exchanged has been brief. I know you’re very busy with Harry in the house and the mess you have with the garden club, but my life is small and boring! I miss our correspondence. Is everything OK?
Paul’s back surgery is scheduled for the first week of June, and as much as I am dreading it, I wish it would just go ahead and get here so we could move on. The recovery will be difficult, but in the long term, theoretically, it will ease some of his ongoing discomfort. With that on the horizon, and the physical intensity of caring for him, I’ve been debating more and more the nursing home for Lars. My right shoulder is weakening from lifting Paul, and I just went to see a doctor who thinks I need to have shots for the pain in my back. Anyway, I went and took a tour of Greenmont Village and had a meeting with the director, who seems very smart and caring. She can’t believe I haven’t acted sooner, but everyone says that. If I was outside the situation I’m sure I would be saying of course, put him in a home, but it feels different from inside the situation. It is so strange now that we are here (Lars and me), now that it is us, with all the memories we have. From the outside I’m sure he looks like a brainless slug, but he is my partner. Putting him in a home feels like surrendering. Like I’ll be giving all that up.
In other news, you’ll be happy to know I’ve been cleaning out my closet and drawers, going through and taking out things I’ll never wear again, and giving them to Goodwill. As a treat tomyself, I drove an hour to Nordstrom last week when I had the nurse here for most of the day. A really nice sales gal helped me pick two pairs of comfortable slacks, a pair of jeans, one new dress, and some cute sneakers meant to be worn casually, not for exercise. It was fun.
Did you ever hear back from the letter you wrote to your relation in Scotland? And how are things going with Mick? I am reading The World Below by Sue Miller. What are you reading?
Love,
Rosalie
May 29, 2017
Dear Sybil,
Happy birthday. I hope you are able to enjoy it, and you aren’t worrying. I am worried about you and I wish you would let me engage some kind of investigator. I keep my eyes peeled. I’m sticking to my word, and now I will tell you why this date holds significance to me, a story I have rarely had reason to retell. I remember you saying you find it is easier at times to write than it is to speak. What happened on 29 May 1941 brings me both grief and shame, although with age I have learned my feelings and my experience are, sadly, not unique. Terrible things happen. We make choices. Time cannot be rewound. The good that comes out of the bad can be unbearable.
My father was in denial about the situation for Jews even though, as Americans say, the writing was on the wall. He forbade talk of it at the dinner table. He was always laughing too loudly when the rest of the village had become somber. He did not want to accept what it was to be Jewish under the Nazis, but then a man my father worked with disappeared. His name was Levi Holtz. Holtz was also a Jew, and it was one day my father was supposed to meet him to look at making repairs to a building on the edge of the town, and the man didn’t arrive. My father called up to his house and the housekeeper answered. She said when she had arrived in the morning to work there was not anyone there but the dog trapped in the larder. That was when my father had to remove his head from the sand. He snapped into action and made some calls. He found us passage out of Germany and set it for the end of May. My father was friendly with everyone—Jews and Christians, no matter, always the life of the party and smiling and saying yes because it was good for business, obedient to the new rules and friendly with the Nazis, thinking if he behaved they would treat us better. He’d built houses or buildings and things for so many people, and he waswell liked because he only ever said the things people wanted to hear. He taught me that, too. To say what people want to hear, not necessarily the truth, because most people tell you they want to hear the truth, but they do not, and if you tell the truth it will come back to bite you like a snake finding its own tail to swallow. I remember how he would say this to my brother and me and I didn’t like the way it sounded because my mother taught the opposite, that if we do not say the truth we have nothing. We are nothing.
When Holtz disappeared, my father found us a way to leave, and the date we would leave was 29 May. A car came to the house in the early morning, maybe four. We had two suitcases and a few small bags. My father locked the front door as if we were leaving on a holiday, but I had seen my mother packing strange things like the paperwork of our births and a locket from her sister she never wore, so in that way there was no pretending. My brother, my mother, my father, and I climbed in and we drove. The morning was heavy with cold fog when the sun began to rise. We drove in silence and it was a young woman driving, younger than my mother, and I thought she was a man at first because her hair was cut short and she wore a man’s cap. My mother was thirty-one. This girl drove us out of town in a direction I had never been on small roads. We went up into some hills and then the girl pulled up in front of a house beside a lake and there was a mill there and another car running. And what happened is that we all of us got out of the car and a man stepped from the driver’s seat of the other car and he looked at us and he looked at the girl who had delivered us. He said he would take one adult and one child, no bags. My father had been cheated. He had paid for four of us to get out, but at some exchange of hands the money was only enough for two. I have lived a long life. I am eighty-one now and when I look back here is the worst moment, when I was not six years old. My father wept, disbelieving, andbegged the man to take all four of us, but the man said we had to go without delay and he would take one adult and one child only. At this, my mother fell to the ground. She clawed at the man, asking him to take my brother and me. It was embarrassing to me when I was a boy that my mother was on the ground like an animal, her blouse coming untucked. For many years I thought of this man as worse than the devil himself until I was grown and married and had my daughter. Then I still hated him but could finally understand. I wonder how many people he drove to asylum. I do not know his name or any other detail. He said one adult and one child now, or he was leaving. My mother stood and composed herself and took a few things from the bag and tucked them into her pockets and she put me in the car. Although I understood what it meant I did not fight because I wanted to escape. There was another woman in the front seat and a teenage girl with her hair set in curls in the back already. My mother kissed my father and my brother, who was five years older than me, goodbye and got in after me. She was silent and her hair was messed and her white blouse dirty from the ground. My brother stood beside my father and the girl who looked like a boy. My brother was very quiet and still, but my father stumbled after the car as we drove away. Mother stared out the window the whole way. We drove for hours. We changed cars again. We did not speak. We went into Switzerland. My father and my brother went to Dachau and died there. They shared the name Joh. I remember a time my mother was vibrant, honest, beautiful, but all of it was extinguished. I wish I would have spoken up to offer my brother safe passage, but I did not. I was only a child. I was learning what vastness is found in the hearts of men.
You were right when you said that sometimes writing something difficult is easier.
Every year the anniversary of that day comes and I grieve. I cut flowers to put in a vase in memory of my brother and myfather, but also I cut roses for the celebration of your birthday, which makes me glad. I feel fortunate we have become friends the last couple of years. I had reached a point of thinking my life had run out of surprises.
Tracey said this cake was the best one they make at the bakery, good for breakfast or dessert. I hope you enjoy it.
Yours,
Theodore
Felix Stone
7 Rue de la Papillon
84220 Gordes
FRANCE
May 31, 2017
Dear Felix,
