George smiled. “You can thank us by letting us help you.”
Lila and I have since been working on the second third-floor bedroom to make it a haven for an eight-year-old. I find a girl’s bedroom set at a secondhand store that merely needs a fresh coat of paint, which George sees to. Lila buys new curtains, I use her Singer to create a pretty coverlet for the bed, and a church friend of Lila’s brings over a box of clothes her granddaughter has outgrown, all Amaryllis’s size.
The following week I find a job at a stationer’s store near the university—so very like one I loved in Lucerne—that sells fancy writing papers, journals, and pens. The owner allows me to arrange my hours so that I will be home with Amaryllis in the mornings until she leaves for school and then to meet her at the front door when classes are let out.
Two weeks after that, the Petrakis home is inspected by a county social worker who introduces herself as Mrs. Whitman. When she is finished with her assessment of the house, George,Lila, and I sit down with her to discuss my continued welcome in the house, and George and Lila’s willingness to partner with me in this venture. We seem able to assure her that Amaryllis and I will always have a home with George and Lila, but she is concerned about our ages.
“You are all in your early sixties,” Mrs. Whitman says. “When Amaryllis reaches adulthood on her twenty-first birthday, you will all be in your mid-seventies. Perhaps I don’t need to tell you that’s several years older than the average life expectancy in this country.”
“But I am healthy,” I counter, my slightly wobbly voice betraying my anxiousness. “I have a clean bill of health from a doctor right here in San Francisco. I just went for a physical last week. I can show you his report. And George and Lila are healthy, too. Seventy is just an average.”
“Yes, but it’s an average because many people don’t live any longer than that, Miss Calvert,” the woman says. “It’s going to be in my report that this is something the judge will have to weigh. I can’t leave it out.”
George, who seems to be deep in thought, suddenly speaks up. “Mrs. Whitman, would you consider coming back tomorrow around noon? I know it’s a Saturday, but there’s something I’d like to show you.”
I can’t think what it might be that George has thought of, but the county worker is intrigued and agrees. When she leaves, George tells me and Lila his plan, and I’m again overcome with gratitude for these friends.
When Mrs. Whitman returns the next day, the living room is filled with George and Lila’s sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. They’d all arrived that morning, and I’d told them everything—about Amaryllis, about Rosie, and even about Brigitta.
“All of these young people will be Amaryllis’s family,” Georgetells Mrs. Whitman now. “Our sons will be like her uncles, our daughters-in-law her aunts, and our grandchildren, her cousins. If anything should happen to Helen, Lila, and me, Amaryllis will not be left without family. I guarantee it.”
And then the Petrakis sons and their wives, down to a one, tell Mrs. Whitman that Amaryllis can have her pick of where she would want to live if the unthinkable happened, because she’d have a home with any of them.
Mrs. Whitman offers us a smile. “I’ll put that in my report, too.”
As the days progress, I make the trip into Oakland as often as I can to visit with Amaryllis and to keep her focused on the future. The visits are as much for me as they are for her. Several times, I bring George and Lila with me.
Finally, on the fourth of March, I am standing before a judge in an Alameda County courthouse, and George and Lila and all their family are there with me. The judge has studied the case file; he has heard from the county and Mrs. Sommers. And he has heard from Amaryllis.
He renders his decision, and I can’t help crying as I’m officially made the sole parent of Amaryllis Smith—Smith being the last name given to every orphan who arrives at Fairbrook without one. The first thing I do before leaving the courthouse, and at Amaryllis’s request, is submit a petition to have her last name changed to Calvert.
And then it’s over to the orphanage to get her things and bring her home.
I know that our new life as aunt and niece—almost mother and child—will not be without its difficult moments. I have seen enough as a nanny and teacher to know that children, as they grow, learn about the world and their place in it by testing what they know and experimenting with what they don’t. I’m aware there might be days, maybe many of them, when Amaryllis and Iwill clash. When Amaryllis will be angry with me. When I will have to correct her.
But I also know that love is a powerful force. Far more powerful than the strength I saw on display in Nazi-occupied Austria. Love, to overcome that kind of power, just needs to be unleashed from fear.
“Am I to call you Mother?” Amaryllis asks an hour later as we cross the bridge into San Francisco.
I hear in her voice twinges of conflict and unease.
“You don’t have to, Amaryllis,” I tell her. “You can keep calling me Aunt Helen if you want. Legally I am responsible for you as a parent, and I already love you as a mother would, but I know you still love the mother you never knew. And I understand that.”
“So I can keep her?”
I smile at the simple request worded in a way that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. But I know what Amaryllis wants. She wants to keep the mother of her dreams, the one in her heart whom she has been whispering to, perhaps for as long as she can remember.
“Absolutely,” I tell her.
•••
In the beginning, Amaryllis is guarded in her trust, reluctant to speak her own mind, afraid to give in to laughter, careful with her affection. But also, with each new day, I see those protective behaviors diminishing, little by little, especially as Amaryllis settles into school, meets new playmates, and finds a good friend and confidant in George Petrakis.
I often find Amaryllis in George’s study playing checkers with him or out on the patio with him talking about something she heard on the playground or from friends. It is George to whom Amaryllis most often goes for help with her schoolwork, andGeorge whom she wants to sit with on train trips. And when all the Petrakis children and grandchildren come to the house for weekend celebrations, it is George whom Amaryllis stays close to, until the weeks and months make her completely comfortable around the extended family. Lila had been right about Amaryllis needing a father figure in her life.
She asks me about Truman from time to time, wanting to know more about what he was like, what he loved, what he didn’t. I show her photographs of Truman and me as children and answer every question the best I can. She asks if she can keep the photographs in her room, and I give them to her. When the time seems right, I ask Amaryllis if she would like to see the place where he is buried, and she says yes.
Amaryllis has been with me nearly eight months when we pick a Saturday to go to the national cemetery in San Bruno, seventeen miles away. As we set out on the forty-minute drive, she asks me, in a puzzled voice—as if she’d been pondering this for a while—how her mother and my brother had a baby. I know this is ground we’re going to need to cover, but Amaryllis is only nine. That longer conversation is a few years away, in my estimation. I fumble for an answer for right now, and in so doing, I hesitate too long.
