The German Wife(8)

“Levi felt so guilty that his staff was losing their jobs that he was determined to pay out as much of their entitlements as he could. He sold everything they owned, right down to the silverware. He’s working as a clerk for the City of Berlin and they’re living in a Mietskaserne in Mitte.” A tenement building, and in this case, one of the worst in Berlin. “Their situation is very bad, Lydia. Please try to be sensitive.”

“I will. My God, I can’t even imagine what that would be like, and especially for them. How on earth are they coping?”

“Better than you or I would, I suspect,” I admitted.

“I just mean it must be especially hard for them.” She was laboring a point and I didn’t understand why.

“I don’t know what you mean?”

“Sofie, my God. You know how the Jews are. They just love their money.”

The waitress came to clear our plates, so we fell silent, and by the time she finished, Mayim returned. She and Lydia easily slipped back into the conversation about my pregnancy, but I sat in uneasy silence.

Later, we parted at the roadside in front of the café. Lydia kissed my cheek, then Mayim’s, and waved to us as she slipped into the back seat of her car. Mayim and I climbed into mine, and my driver pulled out into the traffic.

“You’re awfully quiet,” she murmured. “Are you feeling unwell?”

“I’m fine,” I told her, forcing a smile. “Just tired.”

Why was I so unsettled by Lydia’s comment? It was a throwaway line, a silly, reductive stereotype that people joked about all the time. I tried to reassure myself that Lydia didn’t mean a thing by it. She wasn’t anti-Semitic. How could she be? She was one of Mayim’s best friends.

Besides, Mayim didn’t even hear what Lydia said, so no harm was done. Not really.



5


Lizzie

Huntsville, Alabama
1950

“I’m already late, Henry,” I said, shifting from one foot to the other as I peered under the hood of my car. “Cal’s going to think I’m not coming. Can you just—”

“Lizzie, I’m working as fast as I can. Would you just—” My brother pressed the heel of his palm into his forehead and took a long, slow breath. “You harping at me isn’t going to make me work any faster.”

“Sorry,” I said weakly. “We fought, that’s all. I really don’t want to go to this thing.”

Henry pursed his lips as he tightened a bolt on my engine with a spanner.

“I still can’t believe he’s a part of this,” my brother muttered, shaking his head.

I knew the feeling well. I was running late to a party intended to welcome a group of German families to their new home in Huntsville—celebrating their arrival as if they were special dignitaries. I hadn’t even left my driveway and my skin was already crawling.

Throughout our marriage, my husband and I rarely disagreed. But in the year since Calvin was transferred from El Paso to Huntsville, we’d rarely gone more than a day without arguing about the men he was now referring to as “our Germans.” He said everyone on base called them that, but whenever I heard those words, I wanted to scream.

My brother stepped out from beneath the hood, then slammed it closed. It seemed that whether he found work processing insurance claims in Chicago or laboring on the railway in Tennessee or selling tickets at a fair in Nashville, things inevitably went sour and Henry ended up back with me and Calvin. We never minded when Henry came to us—we’d even added a small studio apartment over the garage so he’d have a private place of his own. When Henry told me he was coming back this time, I called around until I found him some work at a lumberyard just a few miles away. A few weeks in, he seemed to be doing well.

Even so, if we’d had any other surviving family anywhere other than Huntsville, I’d have suggested he go to them instead. Henry spent less than a year in Europe in the dying days of the war and he never spoke about his time there, but he had come back a broken man. And now my brother did not need to be living in a town lousy with Germans.

Henry had changed even since I saw him at Christmas. Sometimes he would get a glazed, confused look about him—as if he were drunk. It was even more perplexing that he’d gained maybe fifty or sixty pounds in just four months and his once-muscular frame seemed bloated. I was worried that he’d been unwell, but Henry said he’d been eating too much fried food at that traveling fair. I couldn’t shake the feeling that wasn’t the whole truth. How much fried food could one man eat?

He wiped his hands on his thighs and gave me a dark look.

“There. New spark plugs. Have fun with your Nazi friends.” He was joking, but his tone was so bitter, I felt a pang of guilt. He suddenly paused, then added softly, “Lizzie, please be careful.”

“Cal says they aren’t a threat...” I said, but I trailed off. That was what Calvin said. The problem was, in the beginning, Calvin fought tooth and nail against those men being allowed into the community, and for good reason too.

“Men like that are a threat as long as they’re breathing,” Henry said abruptly.

“I don’t even want to go,” I insisted. Attending the lunch felt like a betrayal of my brother. I could stay home, but that option felt like a betrayal of my husband. “Calvin says it’s important that I show my support.”