Only the Beautiful, page 30
“Yes.”
“I can take her,” I say without so much as a second’s thought. “I can adopt her.”
Mrs. Sommers hesitates before answering, and when she does, it seems she is choosing her words carefully. “You appear to be quite a bit older than most adoptive parents. And you are unmarried?”
“But if I can provide her a good home where she will be loved and wanted, isn’t that more important than how old I am or the fact that I’m not married? And besides. She is my niece.”
“Perhaps if you could get a good lawyer to help you with stating your case before a judge?”
“I know a good lawyer,” I say, inwardly thanking heaven for George Petrakis.
“I can see where a court would be disposed to let you have Amaryllis, provided you can prove that you can give her a good home. It is always harder to place the older children,” Mrs. Sommers says, tipping her head as she studies me. “I will help you with the application. It has always bothered me that we could not find a home for her. We came close once. Amaryllis is a sweet child. She deserves a real home.”
“I would appreciate any help you could give me.”
“Maybe before we continue this conversation, you should meet the child.”
“I would like that very much, even though I know I won’t change my mind.”
“I’ll go fetch her. I’ll tell her a visitor is downstairs and wants to meet her. You can decide how much about yourself you want to tell her. If anything.”
“All right.”
“Wait here a moment.”
She returns minutes later with a brown-haired girl in tow behind her. Amaryllis’s heart-shaped face and dark hair are her own, but her eyes—locked on me—are Truman’s eyes, large and luminous.
Mrs. Sommers walks back into the room briskly, but Amaryllis hovers at the doorway, peering at me. She is wearing a plain blue dress that looks like a school uniform and scuffed patent leather Mary Janes.
“Come inside, Amaryllis,” Mrs. Sommers says, beckoning the child forward.
Amaryllis doesn’t budge.
Mrs. Sommers repeats her words in a louder, slightly more authoritative tone. “Come inside, Amaryllis.”
When the child again makes no move, Mrs. Sommers opens her mouth to no doubt repeat the request and maybe add a warning, but I speak before she does.
“Hello, Amaryllis. My name is Helen. I’d like to talk with you if that’s okay.”
“I don’t know you,” the child says in a voice void of emotion. She is making an observation and nothing else.
“I know. I would like for you to know me, though.”
“Why?” The child narrows her eyes slightly, as though she’d been studied by prospective parents in the past and then ultimately not been chosen. The look in those Truman-like eyes speaks of far more heartache than eight years on the planet should. It is as if Amaryllis is already done with pretense and half-truths. The answer I give must be as truthful a one as I can give.
“Because,” I say, and I can only hope my next words are the right ones, “we are family, you and me. You are my niece.”
Amaryllis stares at me for a long moment before saying, “I don’t have a family.”
“It may not be a big family, that’s true. But I am your aunt, and that makes us family.”
“How are you my aunt?” the child says, her brows slightly furrowed.
“Well, my brother was your father.”
Amaryllis stares at me in obvious disbelief. “I don’t have a father.”
“Everybody who is born has a father,” I say. “I know you never knew yours, and I wish my brother were still alive so that you could meet him. He died during the war. I’m sorry to have to tell you that.”
Amaryllis does not react to this news, either, at least not that I can see.
“Was he nice?” she asks seconds later.
“He was a good brother to me.” I hope that is answer enough. “I’m a little older than he was. We lost our mother when we were young, and so we sort of looked out for each other when we were children.”
“What was his name?”
“Truman.”
Still Amaryllis does not move.
“I knew your mother, too,” I say.
At this, Amaryllis’s face seems to crumple the tiniest bit. “Is she dead, too?”
The child’s words pierce me, but I keep my voice light. “I don’t think so. I’ve been looking for her, and I haven’t found her yet. But I did talk to someone who said she was well when he last saw her.”
Still Amaryllis does not move.
“And there’s something else. I think I know why your mother gave you your name.”
Amaryllis holds my gaze as her cocoa brown eyes suddenly begin to shimmer.
“Won’t you come sit with me so we can talk?” I ask.
She hesitates only a moment more before joining me and Mrs. Sommers at the little sitting area.
I watch as Amaryllis wipes her eyes of their unfallen tears and turns to stare at me as we sit next to each other on the sofa.
“Why don’t I know about you?” she asks.
“It’s because I didn’t know about you. I didn’t know you had been born. I wish I had. I only just found out on Christmas Eve.”
“Who told you?”
I know I can’t explain the intricacies of how Amaryllis came to be in my life, nor would telling her about Celine be easy or helpful. “It seems like it might be important to know who told me, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is, as soon as I knew about you, I wanted to come find you. I wanted to find you and your mother. I haven’t found her yet, but I did find you.”
“My mama didn’t keep me.”
The five words are razor-sharp and yet somehow also delicate. Fragile.
“I think she wanted to,” I say. “But she wasn’t allowed.”
“Why?”
“We’ve gone over this, Amaryllis,” Mrs. Sommers interjects, and then she turns to me. “Amaryllis knows her birth mother was very young, she wasn’t married, and she didn’t have a home or a job and was living at a state institution, so she couldn’t take care of a baby.”
I let my gaze fall back on my niece. “I bet it was hard for your mother to let you go. I bet she did it because she loved you.”
“One of the older girls here says my mama was crazy. That I was born at the loony bin.”
“Amaryllis!” Mrs. Sommers exclaims. “I—”
“It’s all right,” I interrupt. “Please, Mrs. Sommers.”
The woman shuts her mouth on the words she’d been poised to say.
I turn again to Amaryllis. “I know for a fact your mother wasn’t crazy. And I’ve been to the place where you were born. It is not a loony bin. It’s a pretty building made of bricks on a grassy green hill, and there are two big oak trees in front that look as if they are as tall as the clouds. It’s . . . it’s a place that tries to help people.”
Several seconds of silence hang between us as Amaryllis appears to be picturing this image in her head and fitting it all in with what she knew before and what I am telling her. Then she speaks again.
“Do you think my mama remembers me?” she says.
“I am sure she does.”
“Why did she name me Amaryllis? You said you knew.”
I smile at her. “I lived far across the ocean for a long time, and I didn’t get home to America very often. But I met your mother when she was a little girl, and we were friends. She grew up on a vineyard my brother and his wife owned. The Christmas before you were born, I sent an amaryllis plant to your mother at my brother’s house, and I know for a fact she loved having it. Her name is Rosanne, but we all called her Rosie. Rosie worked as a maid at my brother’s house, and she liked keeping the letters I wrote to my brother’s family because of the pretty stamps. And that Christmas was her first without her parents and little brother, because they had died in a tragic accident. I hadn’t seen her for a few years, but I thought the amaryllis would cheer her. An amaryllis flower is very beautiful.”
I pause a moment to gauge how all of this new information is falling on the little girl. But her expression reveals only quietly intense interest. I continue.
“I told your mother you can always see an amaryllis bloom again. I wrote a letter with the instructions. All your mother had to do was put the amaryllis bulb in a quiet, dark place and then plant it the following autumn. I told her it would bloom every year if she did that, if she just took care of the amaryllis in a special way. I think maybe that’s why she gave you the name. She was taking care of you in a very special way, and she knew with every birthday that you’d celebrate apart from her, you’d be blooming, just like you are right now. And she’d be able to picture it.”
The child’s eyes are suddenly shimmering again, and this time two tears slide slowly down her cheeks. “I wish I could see her.” Her voice is full of longing.
“I wish you could, too.”
“I talk to her at night in my bed. I pretend she hears me.”
“I like that. I think I’ll believe she hears you, too.”
Amaryllis palms the tears away. “I talk to her because I’m still here. Lots of kids get new moms and dads, but not me.” The tenderness in her voice is gone and the observational tone back. “One mom and dad almost chose me, but they changed their minds.”
Amaryllis’s words are piercing, and again I keep my voice soft and gentle, as though I didn’t feel the prick. “That must have been sad for you.”
The child shrugs. “Mr. Allred was nice, I guess, but I liked Mrs. Allred a lot. I was starting to love her. She bought me these shoes. They were black and shiny when she gave them to me. I thought she was starting to love me, too. But she wasn’t.”
I can stand it no longer. I scoot over to Amaryllis and put an arm around her, bringing her into my bosom. When she doesn’t resist, I put my other arm around her and hold her close. As Amaryllis eases into my embrace, I feel her shudder with the weight of owning far too much sadness.
“I want you to listen to me carefully,” I say into the child’s soft brown hair. “You are worthy of love, Amaryllis. And I swear to you, I will spend the rest of my life making sure you know it.”
“I don’t want to live here,” Amaryllis whispers after several long minutes.
“I don’t want you to, either.” I pull away slightly so that I can look at her and hold her gaze. “What I really want is for you to come live with me. I know it might be hard for you to trust grown-ups, but if you would have me, I would like very much for you to come live with me. You’re my family, Amaryllis. Your blood and my blood are the same. I know I’m older than most mothers, and I don’t have a husband to be a father to you. It would be just you and me. But I promise you I will do my very best to give you a good and happy home, and I will love you from this day forward as if you were my own daughter.”
All those decades of caring for other people’s children, and even the desolation of losing my beloved Brigitta and then the years at the convent school in Lucerne, have prepared me in both wonderful and terrible ways for this moment. I will not rest until Amaryllis is mine in law as she is mine in my blood and now in my heart.
Tears are now sliding down my own face. Amaryllis reaches up and touches my wet cheek, as if needing assurance I am real, and my tears are real.
“Can I go with you today?” she asks.
“Oh, how I wish you could. But I have to convince some people that you and I belong together, so I need you to be brave just a little while longer. I have a good friend who’s going to help me, and I promise we will work very hard to make it happen as fast as we can. I will not stop until you are with me. And I will come visit you, every day if I can. In the meantime, though, I need you to be brave. Can you do that, Amaryllis?”
My niece regards me with an unreadable expression; it might be resignation or doubt or defeat or perhaps the beginnings of hope, but she nods.
I draw Amaryllis back into my arms. “I will come back for you, I promise you.”
33
Before . . .
JULY 1940
I stood on the platform at the train station in Favoriten, my hard-won travel documents clutched in one hand and the hand of the little boy who stood next to me in the other.
At my feet was a travel case, all that I was bringing with me from Vienna, all that a person who was supposed to be in Switzerland only a week would need. Wilhelm’s—an even smaller one—rested atop it.
No one had come with us to the station to wave good-bye or to help us board the train. It had been collectively decided that any tearful family farewells had to be said in the privacy of the Leitners’ house. Wilhelm Leitner and I had said a final good-bye to his parents and older sisters, all of whom struggled to rein in their tears, from inside a taxicab. Emilie had stayed behind to comfort them after we were no longer in view.
I squeezed Wilhelm’s hand now and smiled at him.
“You are very good at this game,” I murmured to him, moving my lips carefully so that the six-year-old could read them. He smiled back at me.
The object of the game was not to make a sound, not a peep, until we got to Lucerne. A box of chocolate-covered cherries was waiting for him in my travel case if he won. I had spent the last three days at Wilhelm’s house to get to know him and his parents and siblings so that he would willingly board a train with me with no family present. I had also learned the few signs he used to communicate everyday things like hunger, thirst, weariness, and the names of his family, as well as simple finger spelling.
“Wilhelm doesn’t know it’s uncertain when he can come home,” Emilie had told me the last time we’d taken the tram together to the Leitner house. “He thinks he’s going just for a visit to see the Swiss cows with their colorful collars and tinkling bells.”
“Even though he can’t hear the bells?”
“Even though he can’t hear them,” she’d said. “I’m afraid you will have to be the one to tell him the truth when he is finally safe. Or maybe my sister-in-law can tell him if you’d rather.”
The little boy had already become precious to me. “I’ll tell him,” I’d said.
I finally caught the eye of a porter, who brought our luggage aboard and hoisted it up onto the rack above our seats.
Wilhelm and I settled down, he at the window and me next to him. The train car was quickly filling with fellow travelers, civilians like us but also Nazi officials, and the occasional SS officer. We were no one to them; just a grandmother perhaps out with her young grandson, a quiet boy who wasn’t running around and shouting and being intolerable.
A woman walked by us in the aisle and said to Wilhelm, “What a cute little fellow you are.”
Wilhelm, with his concentrated gaze on the window and all that was soon to happen on the tracks below, didn’t look at her.
“He loves the train,” I said enthusiastically, and she smiled and moved on.
This was going to be the easiest part of the trip; I knew that. The farther we got from Vienna, though, the more I knew I’d worry about being noticed, remembered, or questioned. We had a very long day ahead of us and several transfers to make. Wilhelm had been warned by his parents that it would take a while to get to where the Swiss cows lived, that he’d be playing the game with Fraulein Helen for a very long time. But he also knew there was going to be a fabulous tunnel over the Tyrol and deep within the Alps where dwarves lived. And he knew that if a policeman came to us and asked to see any papers, he was to do nothing except play the game. If he got agitated or cranky, I had a small dose of sleeping powders to put in his can of juice. By the time we reached the German-Swiss border near Höchst, twilight would be falling.
The train began to puff and wheeze and Wilhelm turned to me and smiled. Then he put his hand on the windowsill to feel the vibrations from the rails below. The train lurched forward, and a whistle blew that the boy did not hear. The platform began to fall away, and with it, Vienna. I didn’t know if I would ever be back. The future looked so dark and unclear.
As I watched the city drift past, I practiced in my mind what Emilie and I had decided I would say to the Swiss canton officials when I at last arrived in Lucerne.
I had procured my Swiss travel visa by stating that I, as Wilhelm’s nanny, was bringing him to Lucerne to see an elderly aunt and also visit the school that his parents wanted him to attend when he was older, Sister Gertrude’s school. We were to be in Lucerne only seven days. That was what I was going to tell both the German and the Swiss border officials.
But that was not what I was going to be telling the canton officials in Lucerne.
I was instead going to be begging for temporary residency for Wilhelm. I knew I’d have the backing of Sister Gertrude’s convent and school, and also the local Catholic relief agency and the family who had agreed to care for Wilhelm until he could go home safely to Austria and not be in danger. But still.
“When I tell them that, the canton officials will know that I lied when I got the visa,” I’d said to Emilie as we were making these plans.
“No, they won’t,” she’d said. “I’ll send you a telegram two days after you arrive telling you that Wilhelm’s life is in danger and he shouldn’t return home. And that’s when you will go to the canton. That’s when you will ask if you can stay also. It’s widely accepted that it’s not wise for Americans to reside in Nazi-occupied territories right now, Helen. You can remind them of that, and you can say that your Austrian work visa is about to expire. You tell them you will require nothing from the canton except permission to stay. Sister Gertrude will tell them she will provide you room and board in exchange for teaching English, so that you will not be taking any wages from a Swiss worker. Oh, and offer your services to the canton as an interpreter. You speak English, French, and German. You can be an asset to them during this uncertain time.”
