The Ambassador's Daughter (26 page)

“We can stay a few days longer,” Papa offers as a concession. “Perhaps a trip to the south.”

“No, that’s not necessary.” If we are going to leave, best to face the inevitable quickly.

“Georg is from Berlin, too, isn’t he?” he asks, sidestepping his real question.

I shake my head, looking away. “Hamburg.” The cities are only hours apart by train but it doesn’t matter. Once I am back in Berlin and married to Stefan, our separate worlds might as well be on different planets.

“Liebchen,”
Papa says gently.

I turn back. A single tear runs down his cheek. “Oh, Papa!” I rush to him. I throw my arms around him. Great sobs rack his body, a dry, unfamiliar wheeze. “I won’t go. How thoughtless of me to even mention it today....”

He straightens, wiping his eyes. “I’m terribly sorry. It wasn’t that at all.” Then what? He pulls out a handkerchief and walks to the mirror to compose himself. A moment later, he turns back. “Sometimes we want things that we cannot have. We must accept that.” I hold my breath waiting for him to bring up Georg. Should I deny it or tell him the truth, whatever that is? But he is skating just shy of the issue, talking to me in generalities at a more abstract, safe level. “It isn’t always possible....”

“But you’ve always said I must be true to myself,” I protest, borrowing his favorite Shakespeare quote. “And that’s how you live.”

“I try. But it is like the peace conference—sometimes the things that we want and aspire to must coexist within the realm of what is possible.” There is a look of longing in his eyes and I want to ask him what he has been forced to compromise. There is a silent gulf between us I have never been able to cross, though, a place in him that for all of our love I cannot reach. I do not press, knowing that he will say no more.

The doorbell rings. He hesitates, not wanting to interrupt our conversation. “That’s my car. We can continue this later.”

I nod and walk back to my room, peering out the window in the direction of the hotel.
Georg
. I see his face last night, hollow as he read for the first time the draconian terms of the peace treaty, crushing to a pulp everything for which he’s worked. I want to go check on him and reassure him. But I suspect he’s withdrawn to a place too far and dark for me to reach.

When Papa’s car has pulled away, I walk back to the sitting room and cross to the desk, searching for a copy of the peace treaty. Maybe if I can understand it better, I can find a glimmer of hope in the details. Papa has taken the documents with him, but perhaps there is something in the press. I search the desk for
Le Journal,
which I often read after Papa has left it scattered across his desk. But today it is nowhere to be found. He must have taken it with him, as well, in order to digest the treaty coverage.

I walk downstairs to the newsstand at the corner.
“Le Journal,”
I request.

She shakes her head.
“Non.”
With news of the treaty, the paper must have sold out quickly. I pick up instead a copy of the
Paris Herald,
curious what the foreign press will have to say. As I pay the seller, she smirks, as though the harsh treaty terms are to be imposed on me personally. Averting my eyes, I carry the paper back up to the apartment. The front-page story carries most of the details I already know from the previous evening. I flip to the inside, searching for more.

At the bottom of the second page, there is a photograph of a beautiful woman that seems oddly placed with the treaty. It is an unrelated story:
Fatal West End Fire,
the headline reads. A massive blaze had broken out at one of the London theaters shortly before showtime. The play had been political in nature and some of the exits had been locked to keep out the protesters. A half-dozen people, including the pictured actress resting in her dressing room before the performance, had been killed.

Papa and I had been to the West End once to see a show before the travel restrictions on Germans had been imposed, an Oscar Wilde play whose title I cannot remember. The century-old theater, with the balconies and ornate carvings around the stage, had been beautiful. But the plush curtains and wooden stage would have made the place a tinderbox, escape from a fire difficult with the narrow aisles and shrouded doorways.

I study the photo again. The woman’s large luminescent eyes leap out at me, as familiar as my own. Suddenly it is as if I am looking in a mirror. I scan the caption. The actress was Lucinda Rose, formerly of Berlin. A chill runs up my spine. My mother had been an actress, too, before she had married. But she had died years ago.

My eyes travel from the photograph in the newspaper to the one that sits over the mantelpiece. Though the woman in the paper is older, the heart-shaped face is unmistakably the same. “Oh!” I cry aloud, bringing my hand to my mouth.

There is a noise at the door, footsteps behind me. “I forgot some papers....” Papa’s voice is difficult to hear over the roaring in my ears. “Darling, are you...?” He stops midsentence as he leans over my shoulder and sees the newspaper.

I do not look up. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

I hold up the paper, waiting for the denial. Silence. I turn in time to see his face crumple. His earlier tears had not been about the conference. He had seen the article, taken the newspaper to hide it from me. “Margot, wait...” he calls as I stand and walk to my bedroom, slamming the door behind me.

He raps on my door, then opens it slightly. “Let’s talk about this.”

“What is there to say? She’s my mother, isn’t she?”

I wait for him to deny it, to offer some explanation that would make the past ten years something other than a lie. “Yes, she is. Or I should say
was.
” His voice cracks on the last word.

“But, Papa, why?”

He sits at the end of the bed, suddenly looking very tired and much older. “I thought it would be easier for you to accept that she had died.” Rather than the truth—that she had left us. “When I met your mother she was a rising star of the stage, poised for greatness. I wooed her and convinced her to leave it all for me.” A married woman never would have been allowed to continue to act and tour. She would have been expected to choose between the footlights and family.

He continues. “She was always restless, though, and resentful of me for taking the greatness that might have been hers. The story I told you was partially true. She did have the flu and she very nearly died, but when her body healed her spirits didn’t. She was morose after that, and said she felt a prisoner.” She felt trapped by a husband and baby.
Me
. “She wanted to leave and I couldn’t stop her.”

So she had left us, whether driven by her depression or something else, I do not know. I picture the elaborate headstone erected in the cemetery in Berlin. It was all a ruse, intended for my benefit��and hers. Better a cherished memory of a mother who had died than hatred for one who had abandoned me. “I planned to tell you when you were old enough.” I’m twenty—why isn’t that old enough? He continues. “So that way you could make your own decision, maybe even meet her...”

But that opportunity had been taken from me. The article said the show she was in had toured Paris just months earlier. We were in the same city, might have passed each other on the street. If only I had known.

“Did you suspect she would leave?”

But he shakes his head. “Never. I knew she was discontented, but when I pressed her as to what she wanted, she would not say.”
Because the thing she wanted was not something you could have given her—freedom.
“I’m not sure I could have stopped her—she was suffocating.” Papa had always regarded my mother as a fragile object, one too perfect and beautiful to be his, a prophecy that had proved to be true the day she left.

Could I have done something differently? If I’d been a neater child, with combed hair and clean dresses and good manners, instead of always knocking things over and throwing fits and climbing trees. In an instant I am nine again, reliving the abandonment. But this loss, coupled with rejection, is worse—death from flu was without choice. She could have stayed, but she chose not to.

An image pops into my mind long forgotten. I rushed into my mother’s room having just lost a tooth. She jumped up, hurriedly blocking her armoire from view. I waited for her to rebuke me for not knocking. But instead she took the bloody tooth from me in her elegantly manicured hand with none of the usual revulsion, closing a drawer behind her when she thought I could not see. She was hiding something, I realized.

Later as she napped, I crept back into her room and opened the drawer that she had closed so quickly. Money, great stacks of bills banded neatly together, filled the drawer. Why would she hide it? She could simply ask Papa for anything she needed.

She had stirred then. “Margot,” she said, unable to keep the uneasiness from her voice.

“What is all of the money for?” I asked with a childlike trust that my questions would be answered.

“A present for Papa.” She winked, making me her coconspirator. Was it to be something practical like a hat, or something grand for all of us? The gift never materialized and I later forgot about it. I know now that the money was for her escape. Nearly eighteen months before she was gone, my mother had been squirreling away funds to disappear. Suddenly I am infused with guilt. If only I had told Papa....

“We could not have stopped her,” he says, reading my mind. “Freedom was like oxygen to her and we could not have stopped her from leaving any more than one could stop breathing.”

I think of all of her possessions, the jewelry and clothes left as neatly hung in the armoire as though she had just gone out for coffee. It had been easy enough to believe she died because everything remained in place exactly as it had been. Now I see that she left it all and just walked away, not wanting any of her old life to interfere with the escape upon which she was so intent.

His shoulders slump. “I thought you would be angry with me for having not been enough.”

“Oh, Papa.” He had stayed, doing the work of father and mother taking care of me, just the two of us, because there could not be more children. That was a lie, too, I realize now. My mother had found even one child more than she could bear. Papa would not have insisted upon more for fear of what it would have done to her. “I could never feel that way. But if you had told me...”

He pats my cheek. “Such a beautiful girl. She could not have imagined.”

For a moment, I savor the warmth of his hand on my face, his love strong and protecting as it had been every day of my life. Then I pull back. “You lied,” I say, the air suddenly cold and distant between us. Every fond memory I have of the two of us over the past decade seems tainted, premised on a fabrication.

“Margot, please.”

But I turn away, unwilling to be consoled. His betrayal is worse than my mother’s in so many ways because I believed in him. He steps back, defeated. “I’m afraid I must get back to the delegation. We can talk more this evening.”

What good will talking do?
I want to ask. It won’t bring her back, give me a chance to speak with her before it is too late. But he has already closed the door. I lie across my bed, studying the newspaper picture once more. Tears form in my eyes, splashing onto the paper like great raindrops. We might have been sisters, or even friends. No, not friends. I cannot forgive her what she did. What would I say to her if she were here now? I would have liked to ask her why she had gone. Now I won’t have the chance.

An hour later Celia rushes into the apartment. “You know.” It is not a question. Papa must have rung her and asked her to comfort me in his absence. “Don’t judge him for this,” Celia pleads. Though she means well, trying to bridge the conflict between Papa and me, I am flooded with anger. Who is she to tell me about my parents? “He loved her...” Hurt washes across her face as she acknowledges the depth of his feelings for her sister, a love that she will never own. “And he tried, really tried.” She is asking for him, not for herself.

I raise my hand. “Stop, please.”

“Don’t blame your father,” Celia presses, more forcefully than I have ever heard her speak. “It would be easy to say that he had been inattentive or too preoccupied with his work. But he is the most loving man I have ever known.” I cringe at the proprietary tone of her voice. “The truth is no man would have been enough for Lucy. She was like that as a girl, always hungry, always wanting more. It was a curse.” Is my own restlessness, always searching for more and never finding it, somehow passed on from her? Maybe that is why I am dissatisfied with Stefan—not because of who he has become, but because of who I really am.

Unable to bear Celia’s explanations any longer, I walk from the apartment and downstairs. Though it is midmorning, the streets are somber and hushed, curtains drawn. At the corner, the fountain in the center of the tiny square is still. The smell of the stale water stirs a memory in me. I am standing in the park at the Tiergarten wearing the pink coat that means I could not have been more than four or five at the time. Papa was abroad at one of his conferences and it was the nanny’s day off, giving my mother and I a rare few hours alone. She kept us in perpetual motion at times like that, walking parks and streets, as though she could not bear to be home and still, just the two of us. I’d wandered off toward the duck pond, captivated by the proud white swans that Papa had always cautioned me to avoid. Suddenly I turned around. I was alone, lost among a sea of unfamiliar trouser legs and coat hems.

I screamed, a high desperate wail, and the crowd parted as though whatever misfortune I was suffering might be contagious. Finally, a vendor took pity on me. “What is your name?” He led me through the park, calling out, “Has anyone lost a child named Margot?” mispronouncing it with a
soft
g.
At the fountain, I recognized my mother’s coat and leaped from the man’s arms and ran to her. She turned absently, as though she hadn’t noticed I was gone. I waited for her to scold me for disappearing, but she simply gave the vendor a mark for his troubles and led me away. I wonder now if she was sorry to have found me again.