Dry Your Smile (30 page)

If the Game succeeded there would be a small flare inside, a kindling of energy at having affirmed some particle of existence.

She let herself in at the street door.

If the Game failed there would be a hollow sensation: of hypocrisy, of Norman Vincent Peale positive thinking, of competing for some Plucky Wench of the Week award. If the Game failed it would feel as if the attempt to affirm had in itself been stagey—so that the bus driver would approve, so that Charlotte would approve, so that whoever Julian Travis was,
she
would approve. Circular thinking, the way the damned would brood in hell. If the Game failed, it was just another scam, the legacy, the only heirloom Hope bequeathed. If the Game failed, you had to wipe it out of your mind and start all over again. Put your right foot …

Julian passed the hall mirror and stopped to look. There she was. Can I love her, even
like
her? Some days she looked younger than forty, because of the cursedly round face that had been so adorable for the first ten years of her life. Today she looked older than her age. Olive skin drained ashen by the fluorescent hall light. Short straight mud-colored hair. The mouth fleshy, too sensual for what it had never dared. The eyes dark and large—like Hers. The one good feature, like Hers. She tested a smile at Julian from the mirror.

“Who are you, Julian?”
she murmured to the glass. “Is it as bad as all that, that Hope didn't just rob you of yourself but you never even got a chance to create a ‘who' in the first place?”

The eyes in the mirror started to fill. Julian always can cry on cue, she thought scornfully.

“I'll tell you who you are, Jule.
Julie. Baby,
” she muttered. “You're a fake. ‘Write it as a TV script,' Charlotte says. Little does she know you,
Julie
. You're a self-pitying bitch, a failure and a phony and a fool. You wouldn't know reality unless you'd
learned
it in a script. You have nothing,
nothing
in the whole vast universe to do with me here inside myself, do you hear me? I hate your phony faking guts, Julian Travis, your lovey-dovey affirmations, lies, martyrdoms, goody-goody bids for ego worship. I hate your garish face over my immaculate skull. You don't even exist.
God
. You're all I have, I've got to live with you until we both die, and you don't even exist.”

She turned her back on the mirror.

“And if you don't exist,”
she whispered into the dim hall,
“then who in hell am I?”

She had an answer the instant she walked into the loft. A piece of paper tacked up on the cork bulletin board accosted her with ragged block-printed capital letters:

DEAR POWER-BROKER,

I CAN'T STAND WHAT YOUR LIFE IS DOING TO OUR

LIVES. I'M BEGINNING TO HATE YOU

FOR WHAT YOU'VE DONE TO

WHAT IS (LAUGHINGLY CALLED) MY LIFE.

I'LL BE OUT ALL NIGHT IF NECESSARY DOING

WHAT I DON'T EVEN ENJOY DOING ANYMORE

THANKS TO AMERICA'S TAP-DANCING

REVOLUTIONARY DARLING. PLEASE GO TO HELL BEFORE

I GET HOME. URGENT URGENT URGENT THIS HURTS.

ALL POWER TO THE WOMEN!

YOUR LOVING HOUSEWIFE FORMERLY

THE RED MENACE NOW THE GRAY MOUSE,

LAURENCE (TRAVIS)

CHAPTER FIVE

Autumn, 1961

This was really happening: she was on her way to meet him.

Five years it had taken. Five years of sleuthing, patching the evidence together from all those eavesdropped-on conversations between Hope and Yetta or Essie, library trips on literary excuses in order to research her way through the telephone books of every major and many smaller cities in Connecticut. Five years of imagining what it would be like. What
he
would be like. Five years of fantasies. The fantasy in which he refused to acknowledge her, in which she was denied outright, annihilated on the spot. The fantasy in which he physically threw her out the door. The fantasy in which he burst into tears and flung his arms wide, unabashedly sobbing, “My daughter, my daughter. I always knew you'd find me someday.” Five years of lying in bed at night imagining how he would look; what she might recognize in his features of her own face; what his voice, his accent, would sound like.

A curtain had been dropped on the subject since Julian was thirteen, since the confrontation that had broken open the lie that David was dead. Hope's version had simply picked itself up that night and ambled sideways, settling down again not far from where it had been: so he was alive, what of it. He had deserted them. Why be curious about a so-called father who had never taken one particle of interest in his own child—especially when such curiosity wounded the other parent whose entire existence had been given over to that child? But the obsession wasn't so easily exorcised. Julian knew that Hope neither understood nor would grant one millimeter of sympathy to the obsession: it was done, over with, finished; there was nothing to learn from or about David Traumstein; he
was
, in effect, a dead man. And so should he be to Julian. Hadn't eighteen years of his silence made that clear?

The obsession went into hiding. Julian's imagination took inventory of all the ways he might have tried to contact his daughter, but been impeded by Hope. Had she destroyed letters? Deflected phone calls? Julian knew that nothing was beyond Hope when fighting for what she thought was her survival and her daughter's love. So the powerful mystique of him endured and ripened, nurtured in secret by Julian's care. Sitting stiffly in the window seat of this dingy bus en route to the university town of Storrs, she began for the thousandth time to number the minimal facts she had about him, telling the beads of memory through this last novena.

He was a doctor, a pediatrician. Born in Vienna, of a “good” family, upper-middle-class, well educated. About ten years older than Hope. A linguist: spoke German, English, French; supposedly had excellent Greek and Latin. Had read the classics in the original, for pleasure; particularly relished Greek drama. Knew and loved music—but Hope would go into no details there. Was brilliant, handsome, arrogant; could be cold, cruel, emotionally aloof unto “sadism” (Hope's word). Indeed, Hope's virtuosity for exaggeration had to be weighed against every detail, at every re-listing. To drop one's guard about that for even a second was to be assaulted by such doubt and fear as to the possibility of actually connecting with him that Julian would again give up the whole idea. This had already happened three times, this reconciling herself to eternal ignorance on the subject, even after she had finally learned where he was—the city, the address, the telephone number. That moment, sitting in the wooden library chair with the phone book for Storrs in front of her: how the room froze, how still everything became when the name leapt at her, in the same fine print as those above and below it but with the impact of emblazoned letters flaming ten feet high—DAVID TRAUMSTEIN, M.D.

In the little games she played with herself, this had been the next to last trip to the library phone books she was going to permit. It was ludicrous, futile, thinking someone might still be where he was eighteen years earlier—if he had been there to begin with at all. Like an alcoholic trying to clamber on the wagon, Julian now had a history of refusing to permit herself further self-indulgence. She first stopped searching for him after confiding the matter to her journal. But when Hope began showing an interest in her writing, Julian had shredded and flushed the journal pages. There was no evidence. Safety. There also was no exorcism of
him
remaining—on the page. So long as he had been confined there, Julian had earned a relative peace of mind. Now he was loose again, and the library trips started. Then, with only one more self-permitted trip to go, it was suddenly too late. She'd found the name. Now none of them could escape from any of them anymore.

It was hot in the bus and the window was stuck. She felt her palms begin to sweat and stripped off her gloves, remembering how her hands had shaken the day she'd made the first call, in a British accent—pretending to be a researcher doing follow-up on Jewish war refugees—to confirm that this was indeed the same Dr. Traumstein who had emigrated from Austria in 1941. The very thought of that phone call, just before her eighteenth birthday, still could make her hands tremble now, a whole year later. How in hell can I carry off a face-to-face meeting, she worried, nervously smoothing out the cotton fingers of the gloves.

The wife had answered. Julian hadn't known that at the time; possibly the nurse-receptionist, she'd thought. But those well-contrived questions of the follow-up researcher from the mythical American-European Jewry League had amazingly enough elicited a fair amount of information—certainly sufficient to brood over for another year—until the next call, this last call, the fatal one, to make the appointment toward which the bus steadily sped her.

“To whom am I speaking, please?” the British researcher's voice had inquired.

“This is Mrs. Traumstein, the Doctor's wife. I also work in his medical practice, his office.”

“I see. And may I ask how long you and the doctor have been married?”

“Since 1941.”

“1941?” Impossible.

“Yes.”

“I see. Any children, might I ask?”

There was a pause so slight it might have been imagined by the British researcher.

“One child.”

Acknowledged. Acknowledged, after all
. And how did the current Mrs. Traumstein cope with that for so many years?

“And may I have your maiden name, please?”

“I was born Weisstern, Minna Weisstern.”

The accent, though faint, was there.

“Born in Vienna, as well?”

“Yes. The Doctor and I were childhood friends.”

“And you emigrated in—?”

“In 1941, the same year we were married.”

Each answer blasted open further underground deposits of questions. But these were questions no American-European Jewry League volunteer could get away with asking. Besides, although she retained her cool British tone of inquiry, Julian had to get off the telephone quickly now, because more than the hand holding the receiver had begun to tremble.

Who would have thought it might be so easy? Just say thank you for your cooperation and hang up the phone. Then sift for months, solipsistically, through the new information—which didn't jell with information she had already lived with for years.

So he had remarried. Yet he still acknowledged the child of the first marriage. Then why had he never—or had he?—tried to be a presence in that child's life? Furthermore, the second wife, Minna, clearly knew about the child. Or did she think the child was dead? And how could they have been married a year before the child was born? Why hadn't the League volunteer pressed for a bit more information about the child? Minna's respect for authority seemed so entrenched that she might have gone on answering whatever questions were put to her.

At times, Julian's brain reeled down side paths that led to dead ends, swamps, precipice edges. What if Hope were not her biological mother? Nonsense: the genes showed themselves physically. What if David were a bigamist? What if Hope had told him the child had died, just as she had told the child that he was dead? A rat in a laboratory maze, Julian's mind traced and retraced every path, no matter how irrational. Always the end returned her to the starting place.

The riddle goaded her on, depleted her, drove her to desperate invocations of peace. Put it out of your mind, she'd chant to herself. Forget it. So she'd landed a job, freed herself of her virginity with Laurence, found an apartment, moved. Surely sufficient rites of passage? Forget the other. What will matter in your life is what you make of your life, not your ancestors, ethnicities, superstitious genetic influences. You can be anything you want to be. Then she would remember who had taught her that. And she would enter the labyrinth again, the chthonic place of mystery, terror, longing, nausea—the only place she now felt truly at home.

Julian glanced at her watch. The delicate gold face—Hope's gift for her eighteenth birthday—announced they were only twenty minutes away from Storrs. This was happening. She was approaching the core of the labyrinth.

She brushed a piece of lint from the jade-green wool suit in which she had carefully costumed herself, and readjusted the collar of the white blouse. Stocking seams straight, she could feel them. Black high-heel pumps, new, still unscuffed, still uncomfortable. Beige gloves in lap, matching beige purse. The well-dressed young woman, self-contained, prepared for anything.

She had lied to Hope, of course; the genes showed themselves more than physically. She had told her mother not to phone as usual at the literary agency or at the Yorkville apartment because she was taking the day off to spend it with Laurence, knowing that Hope—still enranged about their affair—would never phone at his loft. She had lied to her boss, claiming that a family illness necessitated her absence. She had lied to the wife-receptionist in order to make the appointment. Although, she told herself,
that
had been more of a hint than a total falsehood. But its being a hint depended on how valid Hope's stories about him had been. Lies teetering on a foundation of truth? Or the reverse? At this moment, everyone concerned had been lied to, everyone concerned thought Julian was elsewhere than where she was. At this moment, only Julian Travis, riding in a bus somewhere in Connecticut, knew who she was going to meet.

Think tactically, she had directed herself. Plan it; stage, light, costume it; it's the only way you can get through it. He was a classics scholar, Hope had said, and he loved Greek drama in particular. He'd refuse to see you, Hope had said, he wants no part of you how stupid can you be can't you figure that out after all this time. Calculate. How can you make an appointment, be assured you get to see him? Certainly
not
warn him it will be Surprise Daddy. Hope just might have been telling the truth. But can you surprise him totally? The man was a concentration-camp victim, an escapee, a refugee. How merciless can you get? What if he has an on-the-spot heart attack from your little surprise? What if you murder your own father out of curiosity? Plan it. Stage it.
Do what you know how to do
.