Bloodline (10 page)

“They let you come back!”

“I—I don’t understand,” his father stammered. “We thought you—”

Quickly, Samuel explained what had happened, and their looks of concern turned to expressions of terror.

“Oh, my God!” groaned Samuel’s father. “They’ll murder us all!”

“Not if you listen to me,” Samuel said. He explained his plan.

Fifteen minutes later Samuel and his father and two of their neighbors stood at the gates of the ghetto.

“Suppose the other guard comes back?” Samuel’s father whispered.

Samuel said, “We have to take that chance. If he’s there, I’ll take all the blame.”

Samuel pushed open the huge gates and slipped outside alone, expecting to be pounced upon at any moment. He put the huge key in the lock and turned it. The gates of the ghetto were now locked from the outside. Samuel tied the key around his waist, and walked a few yards to the left of the gates. A moment later a rope slithered down the wall like a thick snake. Samuel clung to it while on the other side his father and the others began to haul him up. When Samuel reached the top of the wall, he made a noose of one end of the rope, fastened it to a projecting spike and lowered himself to the ground. When he was safely down, he shook the rope loose.

“Oh, my God!” his father was mumbling. “What’s going to happen at sunup?”

Samuel looked at him and replied, “We’re going to be pounding on the gates, telling them to let us out.”

At dawn the ghetto was swarming with uniformed police and soldiers. They had had to locate a special key to open the gates at sunrise for the merchants who were yelling to be let out. Paul, the second guard, had confessed to leaving his post and spending the night in Krakow, and he had been placed under arrest. But that still did not solve the mystery of Aram. Ordinarily the incident of a guard disappearing so close to the ghetto would have been a perfect excuse to start a pogrom. But the police were baffled by the locked gate. Since the Jews were safely locked up on the
inside
, they obviously could not have harmed him. In the end they decided that Aram must have run off with one of his many girl friends. They thought he
might have thrown away the heavy, cumbersome key, and they searched for it everywhere, but they could not find it. Nor would they because it was buried deep in the ground, under Samuel’s house.

Exhausted physically and emotionally, Samuel had fallen into his bed and was asleep almost instantly. He was awakened by someone yelling and shaking him. Samuel’s first thought was:
They’ve found Aram’s body. They’ve come to get me.

He opened his eyes. Isaac was standing there in a state of hysteria. “It’s stopped,” Isaac was screaming. “The coughing’s stopped. It’s a
bracha!
Come back to the house.”

Isaac’s father was sitting up in bed. The fever had miraculously disappeared, and the coughing had stopped.

As Samuel walked up to his bedside, the old man said, “I think I could eat some chicken soup,” and Samuel began to cry.

In one day he had taken a life and saved a life.

The news about Isaac’s father swept through the ghetto. The families of dying men and women besieged the Roffe house, pleading with Samuel for some of his magic serum. It was impossible for him to keep up with the demand. He went to see Dr. Wal. The doctor had heard about what Samuel had done, but was skeptical.

“I’ll have to see it with my own eyes,” he said. “Make up a batch and I’ll try it out on one of my patients.”

There were dozens to choose from, and Dr. Wal selected the one he felt was closest to death. Within twenty-four hours the patient was on his way to recovery.

Dr. Wal went to the stable where Samuel had
been working day and night, preparing serum, and said, “It works, Samuel. You’ve done it. What do you want for your dowry?”

And Samuel looked up at him and replied wearily, “Another horse.”

That year, 1868, was the beginning of Roffe and Sons.

Samuel and Terenia were married, and Samuel’s dowry was six horses and a small, well-equipped laboratory of his own. Samuel expanded his experiments. He began to distill drugs from herbs, and soon his neighbors began coming to the little laboratory to buy remedies for whatever ills bothered them. They were helped, and Samuel’s reputation spread. To those who could not afford to pay, Samuel would say, “Don’t worry about it. Take it anyway.” And to Terenia, “Medicine is for healing, not for profit.”

His business kept increasing, and soon he was able to say to Terenia, “I think it’s time to open a small apothecary shop where we can sell ointments and powders and other things besides prescriptions.”

The shop was a success from the beginning. The rich men who had refused to help Samuel before came to him now with offers of money.

“We’ll be partners,” they said. “We’ll open a chain of shops.”

Samuel discussed it with Terenia. “I’m afraid of partners. It’s
our
business. I don’t like the idea of strangers owning part of our lives.”

Terenia agreed with him.

As the business grew and expanded into additional shops, the offers of money increased. Samuel continued to turn them all down

When his father-in-law asked him why, Samuel replied, “Never let a friendly fox into your hen house. One day he’s going to get hungry.”

As the business flourished, so did the marriage of Samuel and Terenia. She bore him five sons—Abraham, Joseph, Anton, Jan and Pitor—and with the birth of each son Samuel opened a new apothecary shop, each one larger than the one before. In the beginning Samuel hired one man to work for him, then two, and soon he had more than two dozen employees.

One day Samuel received a visit from a government official. “We’re lifting some of the restrictions on Jews,” he told Samuel. “We would like you to open an apothecary shop in Krakow.”

And Samuel did. Three years later he had prospered enough to erect his own building in downtown Krakow and to buy Terenia a beautiful house in the city. Samuel had finally achieved his dream of escaping from the ghetto.

But he had dreams far beyond Krakow.

As the boys grew older, Samuel hired tutors for them, and each of the boys learned a different language.

“He’s gone crazy,” Samuel’s mother-in-law said. He’s the laughingstock of the neighborhood, teaching Abraham and Jan English, Joseph German, Anton French and Pitor Italian. Who are they going to speak to? No one here speaks any of those barbaric languages. The boys won’t even be able to talk to one another!”

Samuel merely smiled and said patiently, “It’s part of their education.” He knew to whom his sons would be talking.

By the time the boys reached their middle teens,
they had traveled to different countries with their father. On each of his trips Samuel laid the groundwork for his future plans. When Abraham was twenty-one years old, Samuel called the family together and announced, “Abraham is going to America to live.”

“America!” Terenia’s mother shouted. “It’s filled with savages! I will not let you do this to my grandson. The boy is staying here where he will be safe.”

Safe.
Samuel thought of the pogroms and Aram, and of his mother’s murder.

“He’s going abroad,” Samuel declared. He turned to Abraham. “You’ll open a factory in New York and be in charge of the business there.”

Abraham said proudly, “Yes, Father.”

Samuel turned to Joseph. “On your twenty-first birthday you will go to Berlin.” Joseph nodded.

Anton said, “And I will go to France. Paris, I hope.”

“Just watch yourself,” Samuel growled. “Some of those gentiles are very beautiful.”

He turned to Jan. “You will go to England.”

Pitor, the youngest son, said eagerly, “And I’m going to Italy,. Papa. How soon can I leave?”

Samuel laughed and replied, “Not tonight, Pitor. You’ll have to wait until you’re twenty-one.”

And thus it worked out. Samuel accompanied his sons abroad and helped them establish offices and factories. Within the next seven years, there were branches of the Roffe family in five foreign countries. It was becoming a dynasty, and Samuel had his lawyer set it up so that, while each company was independent, it was at the same time responsible to the parent company.

“No strangers,” Samuel kept warning the lawyer. “The stock must never leave the family.”

“It won’t,” the lawyer assured him. “But if your sons can’t sell their stock, Samuel, how are they going to get along? I’m sure you’ll want them to live in comfort.”

Samuel nodded. “We’ll arrange for them to live in beautiful homes. They’ll have generous salaries and expense accounts, but everything else must go back into the business. If they ever want to sell the stock, it must be unanimous. The majority of the stock will belong to my oldest son, and his heirs. We’re going to be big. We’re going to be bigger than the Rothschilds.”

Over the years Samuel’s prophecy became a reality. The business grew and prospered. Though the family was widely scattered, Samuel and Terenia saw to it that they remained as closely knit as possible. Their sons returned home for birthdays and high holidays. Their visits were more than festive occasions, however. The boys would closet themselves with their father and discuss business. They had their own private espionage system. Whenever one son in one country heard about a new drug development, he would dispatch couriers to report it to the others, and they would begin manufacturing it themselves, so that in this way they kept constantly ahead of their competitors.

As the wheel of the century turned, the boys married and had children and gave Samuel grandchildren. Abraham had gone to America on his twenty-first birthday, in the year 1891. He had married an American girl seven years later and in
1905 she gave birth to Samuel’s first grandchild, Woodrow, who sired a son named Sam. Joseph had married a German girl, who bore him a son and a daughter. The son in his turn married a girl, who bore a daughter, Anna. Anna married a German, Walther Gassner. In France, Anton had married a French girl, by whom he had two sons. One son committed suicide. The other married and had one daughter, Hélène. She married several times but had no children. Jan, in London, had married an English girl. Their only daughter had married a baronet named Nichols and had a son whom they christened Alec. In Rome, Pitor had married an Italian girl. They had a son and a daughter. When the son, in his turn, married, his wife gave him a daughter, Simonetta, who fell in love with and married a young architect, Ivo Palazzi.

These then were the descendants of Samuel and Terenia Roffe.

Samuel lived long enough to see the winds of change that swept across the world. Marconi created wireless telegraphy and the Wright brothers launched the first aeroplane at Kitty Hawk. The Dreyfus affair captured the headlines and Admiral Peary reached the North Pole. Ford’s Model Ts were in mass production; there were electric lights and telephones. In medicine, the germs that caused tuberculosis and typhoid and malaria were isolated and tamed.

Roffe and Sons, a little less than half a century after it had been founded, was a multinational behemoth that circled the globe.

Samuel and his broken-down horse, Lottie, had created a dynasty.

When Elizabeth had finished reading the Book for perhaps the fifth time, she quietly returned it to its place in the glass case. She no longer needed it. She was a part of it, just as it was a part of her.

For the first time in her life, Elizabeth knew who she was, and where she had come from.

It was on her fifteenth birthday in the second term of her first year at school that Elizabeth first met Rhys Williams. He had dropped in at the school to bring Elizabeth a birthday present from her father.

“He wanted to come himself,” Rhys explained, “but he couldn’t get away.” Elizabeth tried to conceal her disappointment but Rhys was quick to see it. There was something forlorn about the young girl, a naked vulnerability, that touched him. On an impulse he said, “Why don’t you and I have dinner together?”

It was a terrible idea, Elizabeth thought. She could visualize the two of them walking into a restaurant together: him, incredibly good-looking and suave, and her, all braces and pudge. “Thank you, no,” Elizabeth said stiffly. “I—I have some studying to do.”

But Rhys Williams refused to accept no for an answer. He thought of the lonely birthdays he had spent by himself. He got permission from the headmistress to take Elizabeth out for dinner. They got into Rhys’s car and started heading toward the airport.

“Neuchâtel is the other way,” Elizabeth said.

Rhys looked at her and asked innocently, “Who said we were going to Neuchâtel?”

“Where are we going?”

“Maxim’s. It’s the
only
place to celebrate a fifteenth birthday.”

They flew to Paris in a private jet, and had a superb dinner. It began with pâté de foie gras with truffles, lobster bisque, crisp luck à l’orange and Maxim’s special salad, and ended with champagne and a birthday cake. Rhys drove Elizabeth down the Champs-Élysées afterward, and they returned to Switzerland late that night.

It was the loveliest evening of Elizabeth’s life. Somehow Rhys managed to make her feel interesting, and beautiful, and it was a heady experience. When Rhys dropped Elizabeth off at school, she said, “I don’t know how to thank you. I—it’s the nicest time I’ve ever had.”

“Thank your father.” Rhys grinned. “It was all his idea.”

But Elizabeth knew that that was not true.

She decided that Rhys Williams was the most wonderful man she had ever met And without doubt the most attractive. She got into her bed that night thinking about him. Then she rose and went to the small desk under the window. She took out a piece of paper and a pen, and wrote, “Mrs. Rhys Williams.”

She stared at the words for a long time.

Rhys was twenty-four hours late for his date with a glamorous French actress, but he was not concerned. They wound up at Maxim’s, and somehow
Rhys could not help thinking that his evening there with Elizabeth had been more interesting.

She would be someone to reckon with, one day.

Elizabeth was never certain who was more responsible for the change that began in her—Samuel or Rhys Williams—but she began to take a new pride in herself. She lost the compulsion to eat constantly, and her body began to slim down. She began to enjoy sports and started to take an interest in school. She made an effort to socialize with the other girls. They could not believe it They had often invited Elizabeth to their pajama parties, and she had always declined. Unexpectedly, she appeared at a pajama party one night.

The party was being held in a room shared by four girls, and when Elizabeth arrived, the room was crammed with atleast two dozen students, all in pajamas or robes. One of the girls looked up in surprise and said, “Look who’s here! We were betting you wouldn’t come.”

“I—I’m here.”

The air was filled with the pungent sweet aroma of cigarette smoke. Elizabeth knew that many of the girls smoked marijuana, but she had never tried any. Her hostess, a French girl named Renée Tocar, walked up to Elizabeth, smoking a stubby brown cigarette. She took a deep puff, then held it out to Elizabeth. “You smoke?”

It was more of a statement than a question.

“Of course,” Elizabeth lied. She took the cigarette, hesitated a moment, then put it between her lips and inhaled. She could feel her face going green, and her lungs rebelling, but she managed a smile and gasped, “Neat.”

The moment Renée turned away, Elizabeth sank down onto a couch. She experienced a dizziness, but in a moment it passed Experimentally she took another puff. She began to feel curiously lightheaded Elizabeth had heard and read about the effects of marijuana. It was supposed to release inhibitions, take you out of yourself. She took another puff, deeper this time, and she began to feel a pleasant floating sensation, as if she were on another planet She could see the girls in the room and hear them talking, but somehow they were all blurred, and the sounds were muted and far away. The lights seemed very bright, and she closed her eyes. The moment she did, she was floating off into space It was a lovely feeling. She could watch herself drifting over the roof of the school, up and up, over the snowy Alps into a sea of fluffy white clouds. Someone was calling her name, calling her back to earth. Reluctantly, Elizabeth opened her eyes. Renée was leaning over her, a look of concern on her face.

“Are you all right, Roffe?”

Elizabeth gave her a slow, contented smile, and said fuzzily, “I’m just wonderful.” And in her infinite, euphoric state, she confessed, “I’ve never smoked marijuana before.”

Renee was staring at her, “Marijuana? That’s a Gauloise.”

On the other side of the village of Neuchâtel was a boys’ school, and Elizabeth’s classmates sneaked away for trysts at every opportunity. The girls talked about the boys constantly. They talked about their bodies and the size of their penises and what they allowed the boys to do to them, and
what they did to the boys in turn. At times it seemed to Elizabeth that she was trapped in a school full of raving nymphomaniacs. Sex was an obsession with them. One of the private games at school was
frôlage.
A girl would completely strip, and lie in bed on her back while another girl stroked her from her breasts to her thighs. The payment was a pastry bought in the village. Ten minutes of
frôlage
earned one pastry. By the end of ten minutes the girl usually reached orgasm, but if she had not, the one administering the
frôlage
would continue and earn an additional pastry.

Another favorite sexual
divertissment
was to be found in the bathroom. The school had large, old-fashioned bathtubs, with flexible hand showers that could be removed from the hook on the side of the wall. The girls would sit in a tub, turn on the shower, and then with the warm water gushing out, they would push the head of the shower between their legs and rub it gently back and forth.

Elizabeth indulged in neither
frôlage
nor the shower head, but her sexual urges were beginning to get stronger and stronger. It was at about this time that she made a shattering discovery.

One of Elizabeth’s teachers was a small, slim woman named Chantal Harriot. She was in her late twenties, almost a schoolgirl herself. She was attractive-looking, and when she smiled she became beautiful. She was the most sympathetic teacher Elizabeth had, and Elizabeth felt a strong bond with her. Whenever Elizabeth was unhappy, she would go to Mlle. Harriot and tell her her problems. Mlle. Harriot was an understanding listener. She would take Elizabeth’s hand and stroke it, and give her soothing advice and a cup of hot chocolate
and cookies, and Elizabeth always felt better immediately.

Mlle. Harriot taught French and also taught a class in fashion, in which she emphasized style and harmony of colors, and the proper accessories.

“Remember, girls,” she would say, “the smartest clothes in the world will look terrible if you wear the wrong accessories.” “Accessories” was Mlle. Harriot’s watchword.

Whenever Elizabeth lay in the warm tub, she found that she was thinking of Mlle. Harriot, of the look on her face when they talked together, and of the way Mlle. Harriot caressed her hand, softly and tenderly.

When Elizabeth was in other classes, she would find her mind drifting toward Mlle. Harriot, and she would remember the times that the teacher had put her arms around her, consoling her, and had touched her breasts. At first Elizabeth had believed that the touches were accidental, but they had happened more and more often, and each time Mlle. Harriot would give Elizabeth a soft, questioning look as though waiting for some response. In her mind Elizabeth could see Mlle. Harriot, with her gently swelling breasts, and her long legs, and she would wonder what she looked like naked, in bed. It was then that the full realization stunned Elizabeth.

She was a Lesbian.

She was not interested in boys, because she was interested in girls. Not the kind of silly little girls who were her classmates, but someone sensitive and understanding, like Mlle. Harriot. Elizabeth could visualize the two of them in bed together, holding and comforting each other.

Elizabeth had read and heard enough about Lesbians to know how difficult life was for them. Society did not approve. Lesbianism was considered a crime against nature. But what was wrong, Elizabeth wondered, in loving someone tenderly and deeply? Did it matter whether it was a man or a woman? Was it not the love itself that was the important thing? Was it better to have a loveless heterosexual marriage than a loving homosexual one?

Elizabeth thought about how horrified her father was going to be when he learned the truth about her. Well, she would just have to face up to it. She would have to readjust her thinking about the future. She could never have a so-called normal life like other girls, with a husband and children. Wherever she went, she would always be an outcast, a rebel, living outside the mainstream of society. She and Mlle. Harriot—Chantal—would find a little apartment somewhere, or perhaps a small house. Elizabeth would decorate it beautifully in soft pastels, with all the proper accessories. There would be graceful French furniture and lovely paintings on the walls. Her father could help—no, she must not expect any help from her father. In all probability he would never even speak to her again.

Elizabeth thought about her wardrobe. She might be a Lesbian, but she was determined not to dress like one. No tweeds or slacks, or tailored suits or vulgar mannish hats. They were the lepers’ bells of emotionally crippled women. She would try to look as feminine as possible.

Elizabeth decided that she would learn to be a great cook so that she could prepare Mlle. Harriot’s—Chantal’s—favorite dishes. She visualized the two
of them sitting in their apartment, or small house, enjoying a candle-lit dinner that Elizabeth had prepared. First, there would be vichyssoise, followed by a lovely salad, then perhaps shrimp or lobster, or a Chateaubriand, with delicate ices for dessert. After dinner they would sit on the floor before a blazing fire in the hearth, watching the soft snowflakes fall outside.
Snowflakes.
So it would be winter. Elizabeth hastily revised the menu. Instead of a cold vichyssoise she would prepare a nice, hearty onion soup, and perhaps make a fondue. The dessert could be a soufflé. She would have to learn to time it so that it would not fall.
Then
the two of them would sit on the floor before a warming fire, and read poetry to each other. T. S. Eliot, perhaps. Or V. J. Rajadhon.

Time is the enemy of love,

The thief that shortens

All our golden hours.

I have never understood then

Why lovers count their happiness

In days and nights and years,

While our love can only be measured

In our joys and sighs and tears.

Ah, yes, Elizabeth could see the long years stretching out before the two of them, and the passage of time would begin to melt into a golden, warm glow.

She would fall asleep.

Elizabeth had been expecting it, and yet when it happened it caught her by surprise. She was awakened one night by the sound of someone entering her room and softly closing the door. Elizabeth’s
eyes flew open. She could see a shadow moving across the moon-dappled room toward her bed, and a ray of moonlight fell across Mlle. Harriot’s—Chantal’s face. Elizabeth’s heart began to beat wildly.

Chantal whispered, “Elizabeth,” and, standing there, slipped off her robe. She was wearing nothing underneath. Elizabeth’s mouth went dry. She had thought of this moment so often, and now that it was actually happening, she was in a panic. In truth she was not sure exactly what she was supposed to do, or how. She did not want to make a fool of herself in front of the woman she loved.

“Look at me,” Chantal commanded hoarsely. Elizabeth did. She let her eyes roam over the naked body. In the flesh Chantal Harriot was not quite what Elizabeth had envisioned. Her breasts looked a little like puckered apples, and they sagged a bit. She had a tiny potbelly, and her derrière seemed—this was the only word Elizabeth could think of—underslung.

But none of that was important. What mattered was what lay underneath, the soul of the woman, the courage and the daring to be different from everyone else, to defy the whole world and to want to share the rest of her life with Elizabeth.

“Move over,
mon petit ange,”
she was whispering.

Elizabeth did as she was told, and the teacher slipped into bed beside her. There was a strong, feral smell about her. She turned toward Elizabeth and put her arms around her, and said, “Oh,
chérie,
I have dreamed of this moment.” And she kissed Elizabeth on the lips, forcing her tongue into Elizabeth’s mouth, and making quick, groaning noises.

It was without doubt the most unpleasant sensation
Elizabeth had ever experienced. She lay there in shock. Chantal’s—Mlle. Harriot’s!—fingers were moving across Elizabeth’s body, squeezing her breasts, slowly sliding down her stomach toward her thighs. And all the time her lips were on Elizabeth’s, slobbering, like an animal.

This was it. This was the beautiful magic moment.
If we were one, you and I, together we would make a universe to shake the stars and move the heavens.

Mlle. Harriot’s hands were moving downward, caressing Elizabeth’s thighs, starting to reach between her legs. Quickly, Elizabeth tried to conjure up the candle-lit dinners and the soufflé and the evenings before the fireplace, and all the wonderful years the two of them would share together; but it was no use. Elizabeth’s mind and flesh were repelled; she felt as though her body was being violated.