Only the Beautiful, page 21
I begin to look at advertisements in the San Francisco Chronicle, which Celine has delivered every morning, for an apartment and a job. By the first of the year, I hope to be on my own so that Celine can have the solitary life she seems to want. And if I haven’t found my own place by then, I’ll take up George and Lila’s offer to come stay with them for a time.
Christmas Eve arrives, and I try to make the day as pleasant as possible for Celine. I offer to make faschierter Braten—a savory meat loaf—for our dinner, served alongside a creamy potato mash and pickled red cabbage. As I dish up our plates, Celine opens a bottle of wine. The food is delicious and the wine, too. Celine ordered a cherry torte from a bakery in Santa Rosa, and as she cuts into it, I remember the muscat dessert wine that Rosseau Vineyards bottles and that I loved the last time I was here. I ask if Celine wouldn’t mind opening one of those, too.
We’ve already had two glasses of wine each at dinner, and now, with our dessert, the third glass of wine is starting to go to my head. I know I need to stop. But Celine continues to pour from both bottles into her glass, alternating from one to the other. Perhaps her many pours are how she deals with her lingering sorrow, especially at the holidays. I’m glad she is acknowledging her loss and loneliness, but I’m thinking that alcohol is probably not the best way to do it. I reach across the table and lay a hand on Celine’s arm.
“Do you want to head on to bed, Celine? I can take care of these dishes.”
Celine withdraws her arm and picks up her glass. “I’m not done with my wine,” she says, her words a bit slurred.
“You don’t have to finish it.”
“Oh yes, I do.” Celine tips back the glass and takes a large gulp.
“Maybe you can just give me the glass,” I say gently.
“Maybe you can just mind your own business.” Celine sets the glass down and pours more, her hand wavering a bit. A few drops of wine splash over the side of the glass and onto the linen tablecloth.
“I’m just trying to help,” I say.
“Well, you’re not helping. You’re actually making it worse.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?” Celine’s tone is quick and terse.
I sit back in my chair, dumbfounded. “How am I making this worse?”
Celine regards me for a moment, narrowing her eyes. “You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“All right,” she says, her words dripping with cynicism. “Having you here in my house right now is not helping me. At all.”
“Because you’d rather be alone?” I reply, genuinely perplexed.
“Because I’d rather you weren’t here.”
“So you’re saying it’s me? I am personally making it hard for you? I honestly don’t understand, Celine. If I have offended you in any way, please tell me, because I assure you it was unintentional, and I am so very sorry.”
Celine shakes her head as if I am dense. “I don’t want you here, because you remind me of Truman. You’re his sister and you look like him. And you sound like him. Every minute of every day that you’re here, I see him when I see you, and I hear him when I hear you.” Celine says this with a tone of revulsion, not sorrow. It’s not grief in her words but contempt. I am momentarily at a loss for words.
“Oh, Celine,” I finally reply. “What happened between you?”
My sister-in-law picks up her glass, takes a sip, and swallows. “Of course, you wouldn’t think it was his fault, would you?” She sets the glass down hard. “Because you think Truman was wonderful and I was terrible to him and he deserved better than me. So of course you think he couldn’t possibly do anything to hurt me.”
“Celine, that is not what I’m thinking.”
She locks eyes with me, as if daring me to look away. I don’t. She leans over the table.
“Your brother betrayed me.” She sits back in her chair as though triumphant, her head bobbing slightly to and fro.
“Betrayed you? You mean . . . he was unfaithful to you?”
“Want to know who it was with?” Celine asks, a false and crooked smile on her face. “You’ll never guess.”
“I don’t need to know that. That’s personal.” I’m sure it is the alcohol talking and that Celine would not want to have this conversation if she were sober.
“It was Rosie,” Celine continues, her voice oozing venom. “That girl I let into this house out of the goodness of my heart. Truman got her pregnant.”
I feel the room go cold. It can’t be true. Truman would not sink to that level, no matter how unhappy he might have been in his marriage. He wouldn’t have done that, couldn’t have.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Celine grabs her wineglass. “But it’s true. Your brother humiliated me and I hated him for it. I hated him because I could do nothing to get back at him. I had to pretend he hadn’t done what he’d done, and I had to pretend that girl wasn’t carrying his child. I had to pretend all was well in front of everyone, including Wilson. And I hated it. When I got the telegram that Truman was dead, I was glad.”
Tears are slipping down my cheeks. I have no ready words of response. None. Celine barrels on.
“I was glad because I could finally stop pretending I had a happy marriage. He got what he deserved after what he did to me.”
“What he did to you?” Tears continue to stream down my face. “What about Rosie? What about what he did to her?”
“Oh, you would be thinking about her and not me!” Celine’s voice is just on the edge of rage. “She wanted it!”
I wince at the unwanted image of my brother, in his forties, taking a teenage girl—his ward!—to his bed. Impossible. I try to shake the image away. “Are you sure? How do you know?”
“Because I asked her!”
“And she said those words to you? She said it was consensual?”
“I could see it in her face. And after all I had done for her, too! I took that whore into my home to be kind to her. I treated her as my own child!”
“But . . . you brought her into this house as a maid,” I say, my own voice rising in volume.
“I treated her like a daughter!”
“By making her wash your clothes and clean your toilets?”
“You weren’t here!” Celine spits back. “You were never here. You don’t know what I did and didn’t do.”
I raise my napkin off my lap to wipe away my tears, but they continue to fall. It is all so incredibly depressing—the ruin of a marriage, my brother’s stunning lack of judgment, a young girl getting pregnant, the enraged woman who was wronged.
“Oh, Celine, let’s not fight,” I say in a softer tone. “This is all so terribly sad. I am heartbroken—for all of you.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re not sad for me. You’re just sorry your brother got that girl pregnant; you’re not sorry for what he did to me.”
“But I am. I am sorry for all of you. What happened? Did Truman get arrested?”
Celine downs the rest of her wine and then sets the glass down. “Nothing happened to Truman because no one knew it was him who got Rosie pregnant. Truman bought her off.”
“What?”
“You heard me. He promised to pay Rosie for her silence. And she agreed. So you see? She was a whore. Just like I said.”
“What about the child? Please tell me. What became of the child?”
That baby is Truman’s baby. My brother’s son or daughter. A child of my blood. My heart is suddenly aching to know where the child is.
Celine leans over the table again. “I made sure Rosie was sent to a place that takes girls like her, white trash girls who are as crazy as she was.”
“What do you mean, as crazy as she was?”
“She said she saw things—colors and shapes floating around that no one else could see! Completely delusional. You couldn’t trust a word she said. About anything.”
“Celine, please tell me where she was sent. What happened to the baby?” I don’t even try to hide the begging tone of my voice. If what Celine is saying is true, there is a child out there who is my niece or nephew. My family.
“I bet you’d like to know.” Celine rises unsteadily to her feet.
“Please tell me. What became of the child? What happened to Rosie?”
Celine plasters a sick smile on her face. “I don’t care what happened to her. They didn’t let her keep the baby, if that’s what you’re wondering. It went to some orphanage, ‘father unknown’ on its birth certificate. And I hear they sterilize people like her at that place.”
“What . . . what do you mean?” I feel the blood rush from my face. Horrific images from my last years in Vienna threaten to crowd in. I push them back with effort.
“You heard what I said. They sterilize people like her.” Celine turns from the table, needing to hold on to her chair as she does to keep her footing. “You better hope there are taxis running on Christmas morning, because I want you gone in the morning.” Then, without another word or glance backward, Celine sways out of the room.
I hear my sister-in-law head down the hallway, leaning against the wall as she goes, and then slamming the door shut after staggering into her bedroom.
For many long minutes, I can only sit at the table in shock and disbelief.
I will call the taxi tonight. I will not spend another night in this house.
But first I need to know where Celine sent Rosie Maras. The baby that young woman bore was Truman’s child. My only family now besides Wilson. I rise from the table, wiping my tears. I head for the office off the kitchen, which, years before, was the maid’s bedroom, to search every inch of it.
Celine had to have a record of what happened with the teenage girl she and Truman took in. There had to be a file, a document, a note. Something.
I’m afraid something awful happened to Rosie when she left here, and my brother and his angry wife are the reason why.
I fear a terrible injustice has occurred to someone I care about.
Again.
If that’s the case, I won’t be able to rest until I can make it right somehow.
And this time, I will succeed.
I must.
23
Before . . .
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
MAY 1939
In all the years I’d been employed by families with multiple little ones, I’d always had equal affection for all of them. But with seven-year-old Brigitta Maier, it was different.
I wasn’t certain if the other Maier children sensed I had a special affection for their youngest sister. I’d long supposed the children’s parents, Johannes and Martine Maier, could tell. If they knew, no one ever mentioned it, not even Hanna, the second-to-last born and only eighteen months older than Brigitta.
Perhaps the other children didn’t mind because Brigitta had been dealt a heavy blow compared to them, and the extra love I gave Brigitta helped to offset that. Werner and Karl, the two oldest at fourteen and twelve, could run, ski, and shoot a bow and arrow; Brigitta could not. Hanna and the ten-year-old twins, Liliana and Amelia, could play hopscotch and take ballet classes and would one day gain the notice of the boys in the neighborhood; Brigitta could not and likely would not.
She’d been born prematurely and with misshapen limbs, including arms that ended in three fingers on each hand. She’d had problems from the start with breathing on her own and had struggled with almost every developmental step a child takes as she grows. She walked with an unsteady gait, and her other motor skills were likewise unrefined. She struggled at times to find the words she wanted to say. She would likely always remain at home, unsuited to living an independent life.
But Brigitta Maier was never without a smile on her face, and the thought that this sweet child would never outgrow the need for my care, tragic as that was, also filled me with a sense of lasting purpose, an immense comfort since I’d been unlucky in love and had no children of my own. I felt fortunate that in this family I had what my own life hadn’t given me.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d given my heart fully to three different men over the decades. All three had swept me off my feet, courted me with affection, professed love, and then left me.
The first had been when I was twenty-six and still in London. I dated Byron for two years and had been ready to give up a posting and family I loved to be his wife and move with him to Calcutta for his job. But he abruptly ended things just when I thought he would propose, telling me that he had met someone else.
Devastated, I’d waited six years before allowing myself to fall that deeply in love again. This time I was nannying in Paris and the world was at war. I met a Frenchman who wooed and charmed me for a year and a half, and to whom I wrote perfume-scented letters that he read in muddy trenches. It was when I spoke of marriage upon his safe return that he confessed he already had a wife, and that I was actually his mistress, that he had no plans to divorce, and that he liked things just the way they were. This time it was I who ended it, but I was just as broken.
The third time, after having spent a decade casually dating and being supremely cautious, I had fallen for Marcel, a divorced Parisian with two grown children. I had just celebrated my forty-third birthday. Marcel was kind and gentle, and for the four years we dated, he spoiled me with jewelry and weekly bouquets and summer vacations to Provence. I’d just begun to believe Marcel was the one I’d been waiting for all those years when he was killed in a traffic accident involving his motorcycle. It was at his funeral that I learned he and his ex-wife had started seeing each other again.
The blow had been hard and swift, and I’d been ready for a change. A big one. The Parisian family I’d been working for at the time, whose last child was going off to boarding school, had heard through friends that there was a couple in Vienna who were looking for a new nanny. The Maiers had five children already and were expecting their sixth. They’d been greatly interested in me not only because I now had more than twenty years’ experience but I spoke French, knew a lot of German already, and was of course fluent in English.
I had eagerly accepted the position, and I immediately fell in love with Vienna, just as I had with London and Paris.
But the years since I’d first arrived in Europe were filled with political and civil unrest. When Adolf Hitler and his army marched into Austria to annex it, Truman wrote and begged me to come home. He even offered to wire me the money for my passage on the next ship out of Marseilles.
Johannes Maier had also told me if I wanted to return home, he’d understand.
But leaving Brigitta wasn’t something I could consider. Johannes, now an officer in a German panzer division, had been deployed to Berlin for training.
Martine needed me more than ever.
The Austria that I loved was hiding now under the flapping of thousands of red flags bearing the Nazi swastika. With the German troops’ arrival came their anti-Jewish laws and hatred for Jewish people. SS officers routinely forced Jewish men and women to get on their knees and scrub off graffiti critical of the annexation. The Schutzstaffel expected Viennese civilian spectators to witness these humiliations and toss in our own insults.
Most of the synagogues in Vienna lay in ruins. Businesses owned by Jews had been ransacked. Thousands of Jewish people had been arrested and deported to penal camps.
“I don’t understand Herr Hitler’s hatred for Jewish people, Johannes,” Martine had said one evening when he was at the town house and all the children were in bed. It was his first night home in weeks, and we were all sitting in the parlor having a nightcap. “Why does he want them gone?”
“Because he sees what most cannot,” Johannes replied. “He can see a strong Germany where her people can thrive in every way. A strong Germany for Germany’s people, and that includes us. The Jews aren’t German, Liebling. They aren’t even European. They immigrated from elsewhere, you see? Palestine is their ancestral home. That’s where they belong. It is fine to live in a place for a time, like Helen here is living in Vienna with us. But she is American. Her true home will always be America. Am I not right, Helen?”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d not heard Johannes talk this way before. It had never been a practice of his to discuss politics at home.
“Well,” I said after a moment’s thought, “what is an American, though, Captain Maier? America is a nation of immigrants.”
“Yes, I’ll grant that America is a young country settled by foreigners, as you say. But Germany is not. Austria is not. Hitler sees all the economic troubles facing us and he sees a solution. Germany is for Germans.”
“What about this campaign the Germans have brought into Austria to prevent people from having children who might pass on genetic flaws? What does that even mean, Johannes?” Martine said. “How is that making Germany for Germans or Austria for Austrians? And what does that mean for people like you and me? What does that mean for someone like Brigitta?”
Johannes crinkled his eyebrows in consternation. “The führer doesn’t see the merit of perpetuating weakness, that is all, Martine. Not in politics, not in economics, and not in people. A strong, healthy Germany needs strong, healthy citizens. Weak people make for a weak country. We want a strong country, don’t we? It’s that simple.”
“I don’t see anything simple about it,” Martine said. “There was talk at the sewing circle today that people who aren’t perfect are being sterilized. I didn’t believe it could be true, but now to hear you talk, I wonder if it is.”
“This is nothing that concerns us,” Johannes said, still frowning. His tone was unconvincing, though, even to me.
“Would the Germans sterilize people like you and me because we had a child who isn’t . . . perfect?” Tears had suddenly sprung to Martine’s eyes.
