The Butler(20)
“Wait, are you telling me that during all those years you told us our father was dead, he was alive?” The idea that their mother, whom they trusted implicitly, had lied to them about something so important was an additional shock.
She shook her head in answer to his question. “By the time you asked me about him, he was dead. He remarried almost immediately after the divorce, a very young, very beautiful socialite. He died in a polo accident three years later. They had ordered me to take back my maiden name of von Hartmann after the divorce. They denied you and Javier the use of their name too. They wanted nothing to do with any of us. So, I changed yours and your brother’s as well. You were both three years old when he died. We never saw him again from the day he left. And I was ordered to leave our home within weeks, with both of you. They considered me the daughter of a monster, and a criminal myself by association. Your father and his family wanted nothing to do with any of us after that, no intermingling with their pure bloodline. I never heard from any of them again. Your father never saw you or Javier after he left us when you were four months old.
“I would have gone to see my father in Germany, but I never had the money. I wanted to see him at least once so he could explain everything to me himself. We wrote to each other several times. I moved from our big house to a tiny apartment. I got the job I had at the museum. They were aware of the scandal, but they knew that I was desperate and had two babies to support. And unlike my in-laws, they didn’t blame me for my father’s crimes. They were very kind to me. I was heartbroken over my father and what he had done. I never saw him again. He died in prison in Germany. And then, all those years later, fifteen to be exact, Francois and I met, and two years later, I married him and we came to Paris.
“Francois knew the whole story. I told him. I would never have kept it from him. He got me the job at the Louvre, and once I was there I discovered the organization I work for now. When I realized what they did I begged them to hire me, and they did. It is my way of paying penance for my father’s sins. He took much more than paintings from the people he robbed and sent to their deaths. But with each painting I can find and restore to its rightful owners, I am doing some small thing to restore dignity to them, and justice, and often even money that they need. I can’t bring their relatives back, but if I can find their art for them, that’s something.”
She had been doing it for twenty-five years and had returned an astonishing amount of art. She was driven to help them, and tireless. There were tears sliding down Joachim’s face at the end of the story. He put his arms around his mother and sobbed, thinking of the blows she had survived, the heartaches she had endured, the loss of a father, a husband, dignity, protection, her home, and even the money she needed to survive and support her children. He had never known anyone so brave. And even now, when she told him, she didn’t speak with bitterness.
He could only guess at the hardships she’d been through, how panicked she must have been when the father she adored was taken away and exposed as a criminal of heinous proportions, and how crushed she was when the husband she loved left her, abandoned her penniless with infant twins. And yet, she had survived. She had taken good care of them, been an admirable mother, and provided a good home for them. Now he realized what a savior Francois had been for her. She had spent twenty-five years atoning for her father’s crimes, not her own. The losses in his mother’s life had been monumental. Then on top of it, she had lost Javier. Yet, she was still standing, and strong, and compassionate. She was a living testimony to the endurance and resilience of the human spirit. Even now, she didn’t condemn the husband who had left her. She had simply been resourceful and prevailed. She had had the hardest life of anyone Joachim had ever known, and he loved his mother more than ever after he heard her story.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he asked in a hoarse voice.
“You were too young. And I was deeply ashamed of my father for a long time. And I saw no point in poisoning you against your own father. He wasn’t a strong man. He did what his family wanted him to do. They saw me as a criminal, linked to my father. They treated me as if I was as guilty as he was, and Alejandro didn’t have the courage to fight them. It was easier for him to let go of me, which is what he did, even if it meant giving you up too.”
“He abandoned us. What if you couldn’t support us? What if we had starved?” His voice shook as he said it and she smiled.
“I wouldn’t have let that happen. And I didn’t. We didn’t have much, but we had what we needed, and we had each other. We always had food on the table and a roof over our heads.” But the roof had been a thin one, and Joachim remembered now how she had washed their clothes every night, when they only had one set to wear, and she never bought anything for herself, and wore the same dress to work every day. He realized that she must have felt like a queen when she married Francois. He tried to spoil her in every way he could afford to. He wanted to make up for all the hardships she’d endured. And quite amazingly, she wasn’t bitter about her father, or the husband who had left her. She had simply done whatever she had to, to survive and give her two boys the best life she could.
“I never felt the same way about my father again,” she admitted, as Joachim looked at her.
“How could you? My father doesn’t sound like much of a man either. How could he have left you alone to fend for yourself with your two babies?” She didn’t tell him or his family, but the small amount they had given her had been enough to rent her tiny tenement apartment but had run out in a few months. They had never inquired how she was after that. She had sent a letter of condolence to his parents when their son died, and they had never responded. They were hard people and she had paid a high price for her father’s sins. He had committed them when she was a small child, born during the war in 1940. It was an extraordinary life story, and Joachim felt numb with shock after she’d told him.