Chapter 8 The Truth—Or Most of It #2
“I’m going to have to explain,” I told him.
“Yes,” he said, “I think you are.”
“This is beyond ridiculous,” Mrs. Stark burst out.
“I have no idea anymore what’s true and what isn’t, but the entire thing sounds like a fairy tale.
I told you, Joe, the minute you told us you’d married her—married her, so now it’s too late!
—that you knew nothing about this girl. She could be anybody!
Her father hid Jews, and hated the Nazis?
What a story! She arrives practically in rags, and within a day, she’s outfitted like a princess?
She doesn’t want to spend your money, yet the moment she’s here, she spends so much of it? Open your eyes!”
Joe’s hand was shaking now, or maybe it was mine. He said, “She’s outfitted like a princess because she is a princess. And she didn’t spend my money. She spent her own.”
Oh, the drama! But also, what a relief that Joe had told them about the clothes!
About everything, really, but most especially the clothes, for my good intentions had been wavering with every hard look from Mrs. Stark at my lovely suit, and I wasn’t sure how long I could have kept from bursting out with the truth.
“A princess,” Mr. Stark said flatly when I’d explained. “A Catholic princess, when all of Saxony is Lutheran? I did my research as soon as Joe told me. You should have said you were from Bavaria if you wanted us to believe you’re royal.”
“Now, wait just a minute, Dad,” Joe said. His color was up, and his eyes were harder than I’d ever seen them.
I didn’t let him continue. Why should he fight this battle for me?
“Yes,” I said coldly. “A Catholic princess. You may wish to research Augustus the Strong, who became a Catholic in 1697 so he could become King of Poland as well as Saxony. The Saxon populace is Lutheran. The monarch is Catholic. My father and mother were Catholic, and so am I.”
No help for it. I opened the train case and took out the two photos within.
They were creased, for I’d carried them a long time out of their frames.
I held out the first one. “My grandparents, of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. This was taken on their wedding day.” The uniform, the moustache, the ramrod-straight posture, the sash across his chest, the many extravagant military decorations.
And my grandmother in her gown of figured silk, her long white gloves, her air of assurance even in her youth.
The emerald parure, too, with the tiara gleaming in her dark hair like a crown.
Even a black-and-white photo couldn’t dim the grandeur.
“These could be anybody,” Mr. Stark said. “A photo proves nothing.”
“Do you want me to cut myself off?” Joe asked. “Is that what you’re going for here?”
“Yes,” his father said. “That’s the thought.”
Joe stared at him, and his parents stared back, all of their chests rising and falling.
I wasn’t the only one with a temper, it seemed, for Joe had discovered his.
I thought that, then realized what they’d said.
“I don’t know the precise meaning of this,” I said, “to ‘cut oneself off.’ But I think Joe meant from you, not from me.”
“From us?” His mother looked like she couldn’t believe it.
Joe would have spoken, but I said, “Wait. Please. It’s a terrible thing to lose one’s parents. It’s the last thing I want for you.”
“I’m sure,” Mrs. Stark said. “We’re the golden geese.
Oh, what have I done to deserve this?” She didn’t say, ‘Oy, vey!’ but she may have wanted to.
Joe’s parents seemed as carefully assimilated as Dr. Becker, other than the pork.
Another thing I wasn’t going to say, for I suspected it wouldn’t be well received, and what did I know about being Jewish in America?
I didn’t answer any of it, in fact. Instead, I held out the second photo. “My parents.”
This time, Mr. Stark took the photo from me, and both of them stared at it, horror-struck.
Not the first time I’d seen that look on a person’s face; I’d watched it happen all my life.
“My father was burned,” I said, “in the Great War. This is why Dr. Becker was our physician, you see; he was a very great specialist in the treatment of burns. My father was the Crown Prince until the title was ended, and of course never crowned King as my grandfather had been, but kingship cannot so easily be put away. His face, his arm, his chest were ruined. The man was not.”
“Again,” Mr. Stark said, “it’s a picture.” He sounded less sure of himself, though. “But your mother looks—the woman looks—”
“The Queen,” I said. “Before her marriage, Princess of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. My mother. Yes, I’m like her in face and figure, though she was much lovelier, and had a …
a beautiful fragility, and a light about her that people felt when she entered a room.
Whereas I, as you can perhaps tell, favor my father in temperament. ”
Mr. Stark said, “It’s compelling, but it’s not conclusive.”
“Why would she make it up?” Joe said. “What would be the point? She told you, it meant the Russians would mistreat her if they found her, and so would the Gestapo, because her father was an enemy of the regime. She never told anyone in Nuremberg, and Dr. Becker kept her secret, but he’d known her since she was a baby.
I was able to talk with him again on the day he came up from the DP camp to give her a character reference so we could get permission to marry.
Unless he’s a fraud, too—and he’s not; he’s a doctor, all right, and a Jew, and he and his kids were like scarecrows when I met them—she’s exactly who she says she is. ”
I opened the case again and pulled out two pouches: one small and one large.
I opened the small one, set the velvet pouch on top of the train case in my lap, and laid the two things it had held carefully on the velvet.
“These pieces are all I have left of the emerald parure, the set of jewels you see in the photos. The only things I was able to take with me.” The emerald teardrops gleamed bold as love against their diamond settings, and I opened the other pouch and removed that larger object.
I took some time to lay it out on the purple velvet.
A graduated fall of emeralds, each set in a halo of diamonds, and at the bottom, an enormous stone.
The green so deep, the diamonds so bright.
I touched the center stone with a careful finger, as I’d done in childhood.
“My mother wore the parure often, for it had come to her through her own family, and she loved the necklace as I do. Lippert, her maid, would fuss at her when she touched it, saying that her fingerprints would mar the stones. It became a joke between them. There was a tiara, too, the one you see in the photos, but I had to leave it in its hiding-place, as I had no way to conceal it. These pieces, I could hide by sewing them into the sleeves of my coat, the same one I was wearing when I met you. A coat shabby enough that I wouldn’t receive a second look.
It belonged to a young man named Franz, who lost his leg on the Russian front and whose great ambition was to become a butler.
He was a very good young man, I think. Cheerful in spite of all, you know.
Kind, too, and very young; only eighteen when he died.
I took the coat from his body, but I hope he would have understood. ”
Joe took my hand again, and I finished it.
“Dr. Becker wore that coat all through Germany, and I wore his, for it showed where the star had been. It had been sewn onto the coat so long ago, you see, that the coat had lost its color around it. I didn’t look Jewish, so I became Dr. Becker’s niece, since he and his children were dark and I am very fair, and made up a story about the Gestapo giving the coat to me as they took away an old Jew.
I was believed, for it was the sort of thing they would do.
We wore our coats, then carried them, through Saxony and then through Bavaria, through winter and into spring.
And that summer, when I went to Munich with Dr. Becker and the children to help them get to the Displaced Persons camp …
” I had to take a breath. “I sold the brooch to an American captain for nine hundred dollars. I used that money to survive, and yesterday, I used it to buy my new things, to begin my new life.”
“Marguerite,” Joe said helplessly.
“I’m sorry even now,” I told him, “in my heart. And yet I’m not, for I’m alive, and I’m here.
I came to you with almost nothing, but the necklace and the earrings, I have to offer.
These, and my education, the high and the low of it.
The Goethe and the Rilke, the Dickens and the Shakespeare, the French and the English and the Latin, and the baking of bread.
All this, I have still. This, and the love of my family. ”