The German Money, page 20
“Just like one of the first times,” she said drowsily. “Remember? We barely got our clothes off.”
“I’m sorry it was so fast.”
“Fast? It took fifteen years to get here. . . .”
I disengaged carefully, took off the condom while she struggled out of the rest of her clothes. I tucked her into bed, closing the lights around the room, and washed up briefly. Done, I was caught by my reflection in the large baroque mirror, suddenly aware how much I looked like my mother, even with my face flushed and relaxed.
“Where the hell are you?” Val called, half-asleep now as I turned off the bathroom light. I slipped into bed behind her, nestling against her warm back, soft butt and long legs, relishing the sensations that were as quietly dazzling as I’d remembered.
We were fifteen years older, but I felt like a horny happy kid again, in love with love, with her body and mine, and more: with all the possibilities that had unfolded in each kiss, each joke, each touch of her hand.
“You never said if you’d marry me or not,” I whispered against her ear, the warmth of our bodies surrounding us as densely as the thicket around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
She muttered, “Be quiet—maybe—if everything works out for us.”
I grinned, listening to her breathing slow down and grow deeper, steadier, hypnotic. I knew that if I followed that rhythm, I would be asleep very soon.
Before her confession, Mrs. Gordon had said that taking my mother’s money would bring something good out of something terrible. That was truer now than before. I was going to buy myself a very small piece of Old Mission Peninsula with it. I would escape a job that was sterile and unappealing, to explore my future. I would get my courage up and do what I had longed to do as a boy: write. A book about Old Mission, about its hills and arbors and wine and shores.
It was not too late to rebuild my life—with Valerie and Libby. I thought of that line from Jodie Foster’s Contact: “The only thing that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”
Then I pictured my mother dying with Mrs. Gordon’s unforgiving face the last thing she saw. Was she thinking of me, wishing I were there, or wondering how I’d feel about the Germany money? I could see her look of disgust when I’d broken up with Valerie, when I’d chosen a dead-end career. Maybe that was why she’d given me this inheritance—to liberate me from my mistakes. Surely the German money had burdened her, and maybe leaving it to me had freed her.
But I could never tell Val, or Simon and Dina, everything that Mrs. Gordon had revealed to me about my mother in what seemed now like another life, another world.
Lying there with Valerie in my arms at last, it was as clear as the Milky Way to me that I had wasted too much of my life trying to escape the forces that had made me. I had finally stopped running. I was ready for life, for Valerie, even to find my way as a parent.
And ready to embrace a strange new reality.
Whatever the German money meant, I was truly my mother’s son.
I had a secret, too.
Acknowledgments
Thanks for their invaluable advice, encouragement, and assistance to Mary Bisbee, Linda Fairstein, Marilyn Hassid, Gershen Kaufman, Kristin Lauer, Anne Tracy & Ira Wood.
About the Author
Lev Raphael was born and raised in New York City, the son of Holocaust survivors. He did an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he won the Harvey Swados Fiction Prize, awarded by Martha Foley for a story later published in Redbook.
He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Michigan State University, where he taught Creative Writing and many other courses. Raphael’s short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in two dozen anthologies in the U.S. and Britain, most recently in American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories, which includes work by Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Allegra Goodman.
One of America’s earliest Second Generation writers, Raphael has published dozens of stories, essays, and articles in a wide range of newspapers, magazines and journals. His stories and essays are on college and university syllabi around the U.S. and in Canada. His fiction has also been analyzed in scholarly journals and at conferences like MLA in the U.S. and abroad. Raphael is a winner of Amelia’s Reed Smith Fiction Prize and International Quarterly’s Crossing Boundaries Prize for innovative prose, awarded by D.M. Thomas. That memoir appears in his collection of memoirs and essays Journeys & Arrivals. His first collection of short stories Dancing on Tisha B’Av won a 1990 Lambda Literary Award and has been in print ever since. Raphael is also the author of a literary novel, Winter Eyes, a scholarly book about Edith Wharton’s life and fiction, and four co-authored books in psychology and education. He has also published five comic academic mysteries.
He has done well over 125 invited readings from his fiction and nonfiction in North America, Europe, and Israel at colleges and universities, writing conferences, synagogues, and book fairs. Featured in two documentaries, he has been a panelist at London’s Jewish Film Festival and is widely sought after as a panelist, moderator and keynoter at conferences. Raphael has been writing full-time since 1988 and is the book critic for National Public Radio’s “The Todd Mundt Show” and “Mysteries” columnist for The Detroit Free Press. He also reviews for Jerusalem Report, The Forward, The Washington Post & The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.
The German Money © 2003 by Lev Raphael
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No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in 2003 in the United States by
The Leapfrog Press
P.O. Box 1495
95 Commercial Street
Wellfleet, MA 02667-1495, USA
www.leapfrogpress.com
Distributed in the United States by
Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
St. Paul, Minnesota 55114
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-0-979-64155-8
1. Jews--New York (State)--New York--Fiction. 2. Children of
Holocaust survivors--Fiction. 3. Mothers--Death--Fiction. 4. New York
(N.Y.)--Fiction. 5. Jewish families--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.A5988G47 2003
813’.54--dc21
2003001639
Lev Raphael, The German Money
