Wherever There Is Light (27 page)

“Mama, are you all right?” Her hair had strands of silver in it now, and her face was paler than Julian recalled, the new lines around her eyes and across her forehead like hairline cracks in plaster.

“There was a virus going around. I was helping the farm families—five of the older folks passed away—and I must've caught it. My temperature was a hundred and four and wouldn't come down. Garland moved me to here so she and the couple who work for her could look after me. The doctor came, but there was nothing he could do. My fever broke this morning. Your father called you because I suppose he was scared.”

“Sure he was scared.”

Elana gazed into her cup as though some answer that had eluded her might float up to the surface of the milky tea. “His reaction was a surprise. I always thought he'd be fine without me. I once asked him if our past meant anything to him, and he said, ‘A great deal. But were I enraptured by memories, I'd be a poet, not a philosopher.' ”

Not the most politic reply, Julian thought, but he'd heard his father's fear on the phone.

The front door opened and Garland, in a high-necked blouse and ankle-length skirt, walked onto the veranda. Julian stood, and she gave him a terse hello.

“Nice to see you,” Julian said, but he had to stop himself from laughing. Garland was the only person he'd ever met who could make a simple greeting sound as if she were asking why you weren't in jail.

She said to Elana, “You stay put until I get back. You need your rest.”

“Take your time,” Elana said. “I'm fine.”

She began to cough, covering her mouth with her hands. When she was done, Garland said to Julian, “Your mother can have more cough syrup in an hour. And don't you tire her out none.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

They watched Garland walk across the road to the college.

Elana said, “Garland told me Kendall is living in Paris.”

“That was her plan.”

“I could get you her address. It might not be a bad idea to write her.”

“Or it might be a terrible idea.”

“You won't know unless you try.”

“Mama, Kendall ended it with me.”

Elana was twisting and untwisting the string of her tea bag around a spoon. “You know what I learned getting old?”

Julian shook his head.

Elana stared at him, her eyes shining like sunstruck turquoise. “No one gets prizes for loneliness.”

1946

J
ulian hadn't finished unpacking his bags in Nuremberg when he was dispatched to Foehrenwald, a displaced-persons camp ninety miles to the south. The United States government was preparing a case against the former directors of IG Farben, a chemical conglomerate that had, among other crimes, helped produce Zyklon B, the gas used in the extermination camps. Julian spent four days interviewing Jews who had been slaves in the company's factories, then drove back past the towns with their bomb craters and mountains of debris to the Grand Hotel. He got in at midnight. The desk clerk handed him a cable and said that it had been delivered three days ago. The cable was from Theodor and written in English:
Mother died this morning. Funeral tomorrow.

Julian's first impulse was to dash out of the lobby and hop a flight to the States, as if there was something he could do. That reaction gave way to a weary numbness, and he wrote out Theodor's phone number for the clerk and asked him to place the overseas call and direct it to his room. In the elevator, Julian thought how unusual it was for his father to write to him in English, as though by using Elana's native language he could hold on to her, and Julian remembered that winter when nine of his classmates died from the Spanish flu, and Julian asked his mother what language they spoke in heaven, and Elana assured him that language wasn't necessary in the world beyond the sky—everyone understood each other's thoughts.

He was lying on his bed when the call came through. Julian reached over for the phone and said hello, and Theodor replied in English, “It was her fever. Her fever carried her away.”

Theodor's impressive baritone was scratchy and weak and, hearing it, Julian's numbness was replaced by a medley of gloom, regret, guilt, and loneliness—the music of his childhood. He apologized for not responding to his father's cable, saying that he had been out of town.

Theodor said, “I was with her. I didn't leave her alone. . . . Your mother insisted.”

All of his wretched history with Theodor compressed itself into one furious instant. Did his mother really have to insist that her husband sit by her deathbed?

“Your mother insisted. She insisted that I accept the professorship at Lovewood. I preferred not to go. If she hadn't—if she hadn't insisted . . . I would have died in the camps.”

Julian's anger receded. “Do you want me to come to Florida?”

As if he hadn't heard his son, Theodor said, “I did rescue her from that orphanage. I told her if we were married, she would be a wife and a mother, and she could revise her definition. She could stop thinking of herself as an orphan.”

Julian heard a simmering on the line, like the distant breaking of waves. “If you need any—”

“I'm going to be late. I have a class to teach.”

“
Vater
—”

Theodor hung up. Julian put the phone in its cradle, loosened his tie, and kicked off his shoes, but he was too tired to undress. What did he expect from his father? To ask him how he was doing? That wasn't his style. A good cry? Forget it. Julian had only seen his father cry once. A gray Sunday afternoon when he was ten years old. The Roses had gone on a family outing, strolling through the Tiergarten with the dying flames of autumn in the trees. His mother had been silent on their walk, and she didn't say anything when they entered the zoo through the Elephant Gate. They toured the aquarium, Elana trailing behind her husband and son. Later, as Julian watched two lion cubs wrestling in their cage, his mother said quietly, “I can't stand it.”

“What can't you stand, Elana?”

Loud enough to attract the attention of the families around them, she replied, “The cages. The animals in the cages. I can't stand it!”

Theodor placed his hand on his wife's shoulder to calm her, but she burst into tears and hurried back toward the gate. Julian looked at his father.

“Mother will be fine. She needs her nap. Let's go for Kaffee und Kuchen.”

At the Romanisches Café, Theodor had coffee and a cherry streusel tart, and Julian a glass of milk and a slice of Black Forest cake. His father stared at the table as he ate and drank.

“What's wrong with Mother?” Julian asked, and it was then, as Theodor raised his head, that Julian saw the tears running down into his beard.

“I wish—” his father said. “I wish I knew.”

Now, as Julian turned over on the bed and his own tears wet the pillowcase, he knew that his sorrow had another cause, perhaps a deeper one than the loss of his mother. When Julian started working for Abe as a teenager, he'd daydreamed of a better future when he would be rich and married with children of his own, and he and his parents would get together and love each other as families are supposed to. For the Roses, that future was permanently out of reach, and letting go of his daydream was as difficult for Julian as reconciling himself to the fact that his mother was gone.

“Bye, Mama,” Julian said, and his voice sounded strange in the empty room.

In Nuremberg, Julian attempted to put Abe's advice into practice by dating a British translator. She was pleasant company, but he hoped that Kendall would show up to photograph the trials. She never did, and the closest Julian got to her was reading her latest book,
Here & There
, which alternated between her photos of the dead and nearly dead at the Ohrdruf concentration camp, and pictures, originally published in newspapers, of lynchings across the South. The captions were the only text: the layout was the message—that is, until the final chapter, which covered the short life of Derrick Larkin along with Kendall's photos of his death.

The reviews Julian saw were terrible. The critic in the London
Observer
declared that it was manipulative of Miss Wakefield to equate the sporadic tragedies of lynching with assembly-line slaughter; and the critic in the
Herald Tribune
opined that
Here & There
was not a view of the war that Americans deserved and recommended the more rounded vision in photographer Margaret Bourke-White's
Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly
. Julian was tempted to write Kendall that he had liked her book, but in the acknowledgments she had thanked Simon Foxe for assembling the newspaper photographs, and Julian assumed that she was involved with him.

Julian remained in Germany through the fall and a round of executions. In his dreams, the dead asked him if he hadn't earned a place on the scaffold. He refused to answer.

Returning to South Orange didn't cure Julian's insomnia, but his exhaustion churned itself into a shopping mania, which was how he became one of the largest holders of undeveloped land in New Jersey.

“You're worse than a gold digger with a charge account,” Eddie said.

“I'm gonna build those garden apartments, and you're getting a piece.”

“I ain't got the scratch.”

“The feds'll chase Abe till he keels over or they throw him in prison. I'd like to keep you around.”

“I'm grateful for you cutting me in. But boyo, are you all right?”

“No.”

“Fiona's got girlfriends. You could try a date.”

“I have business in Florida, and I'm going to see my father.”

In Miami Beach, Julian arranged to sell his hotel. He hated being there without Kendall, and with the Beach a popular tourist destination again, he would earn a nice buck on the sale. After meeting with the Realtor, Julian called Theodor. He hadn't spoken to him since Nuremberg. They had exchanged two letters, Julian asking how his father was getting along and recounting the bizarre experience of listening to Nazi killers explain their innocence; and Theodor replying that he was adjusting to living without Elana and scrawling a quote from the writer, Mary Shelley, across the top of both letters: “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.”

“How are you?” Julian said, when Theodor answered.

“
Gut
,
danke
.” Julian thought that his father must be through the worst of his grief because he was speaking to him in German.

Julian asked if he wanted to have dinner. “
Ich bin beschäftigt
,” Theodor said, and explained that he was writing a series of lectures on Spinoza's
Theologico-Political Treatise
that he had been invited to deliver at Morehouse College in Atlanta next week.

Julian told himself that he shouldn't be surprised—or hurt—that Theodor claimed he was too busy to meet him, but he was. They said good-bye, and Julian mixed a double martini, with no olives to distract him, and halfway to the bottom of the glass, he recalled standing in the kitchen with his mother, helping her stuff a chicken with apples and walnuts, and Elana looked up from the pan and spoke to the wall over the stove: “If your father's writing and has an audience to admire him, he doesn't need me any more than my parents did,” and before Julian could comfort her, Elana went back to work on the chicken.

The phone rang, and Julian hoped that his father had changed his mind, but it was his secretary. There were several messages, she said, nothing pressing. A General Donovan had called to see if Julian wanted to have lunch. Wild Bill was back at his Wall Street law firm, and Julian figured he was trolling for clients, so he asked his secretary to give him the number, his feelings of rejection mollified by the fact that somebody wanted to eat with him.

PARIS

M
AY
19, 1947

M
usic was floating up from the Seine, and the afternoon light shining on the couples jitterbugging below was as thick and golden as custard. The quartet had set up on a barge moored against the quay, and from where Julian stood above the stone stairway that led down to the river, he saw Otis at the piano, hammering out “Pinetop's Boogie-Woogie,” bouncing around on the bench like a puppet with a madman yanking his strings. The drummer and bassist couldn't keep up with him, and the saxophonist arched so far backward as he wailed that it seemed his spine would snap. The dancers were white and Negro: ex-GIs in their khakis and Parisian girls in their vivid scarves, all of them gyrating with the exaggerated gestures of mimes, only faster, neckties swinging, skirts flouncing up and offering glimpses of thighs and lingerie, the giddy music transforming the ancient stones of the quay into the floor of the Savoy Ballroom.

At last, Julian saw Kendall under the linden trees. He couldn't see her face because she was photographing the dancers. Her hair, still long, was tied behind her in a radiant wave. The music stopped, and the dancers clapped. Kendall lowered her camera. She was so beautiful it hurt to look at her. Going down the stairway, he concluded that showing up in Paris wasn't the wisest move he'd ever made. To suppress his nervousness, Julian gazed out at the Seine.