Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind (5 page)

Later, much later, entirely too late, I came to understand my question was all wrong. Like all refugees from the period, he—they—had left an entire world behind, one that seemed to have disappeared behind them entirely, a smooth wall, an unbroken floor, a sinkhole in time—a world rendered so totally lost, it was as though it had never existed at all. It was, I realize now, a reality so discomforting, so unnerving, that none of them ever wanted to fully narrate it for the rest of us, we who couldn’t possibly understand, in our relatively carefree world; our own lives having been enabled, after all, by their very ability to leave, by their own success; so to undermine that success by discussing the failures, by fault or not, was simply not done. Only when something mild would go awry would I hear a bit of reproach.
Silver problems
, my grandmother would trill, in response to whatever minor traumas were worrying me, as an adolescent or a twentysomething, at any given moment.

That smooth wall, that vanished world—I had no sense of it, I couldn’t grasp it. Even though I knew, from a tender age, of the horror: I cried on Holocaust Memorial Day, gasped at the drawings of the children of Theresienstadt. After all, we often shared our dinner table with women who had been smuggled to England as children, who had lost their parents as a result, who would begin to weep, fifty and sixty years on, when asked about their losses. We kissed the weathered cheeks of the grandparents of our friends, grandparents who hadn’t left “in time,” grandparents who didn’t speak of what they had seen. I would hear whispered fragments among the adults—
her mother never was the same. . . .
Somehow I had always seen my grandfather’s story as outside that, happier than that;
easier
than that.

And so, careful obfuscations in place, a blurry filter, Karl became the man with the glossy, glamorous—lucky—past. He came to
America at
exactly
the right time, my father would say, admiringly. It was all bold strokes, all perfect. When I was in elementary school, I wrote a short play about his exile—it was all very cinematic to me. It seemed so daring, so devoid of real loss even though, in reality, he had lost everything, and everyone, outside his immediate family. Even though he had lost Valy. But I knew nothing of her then.
I zipped up my valise and sat down upon it. I looked around the room, hugging my knees to my chest. Leaving!
That’s how my play began. I played Karl.

And yet, much of it was—not a lie—but a considered construction, a wholesale repackaging, one presented first to the generation before mine, and from there it trickled down to the rest of us.

In the early years after his death, even more than his notes to me, I loved finding the letters between him and Bruno, small windows into his adult mind, his adult relationships. The letters were kept in a manila folder; tissue-thin pages written in half German, half English, the
Gemisch
of a half century lived in a second language, between worlds. By the third quarter of the twentieth century, he decided to keep a copy of all his replies. I can picture him dictating these letters to my grandmother, who spent four decades typing them for him; for that is what he did, usually, either spoken aloud or scrawled, nearly incomprehensibly, onto slips of sheer white unlined featherweight paper that were then patiently translated by the fast clicks of her typewriter keys. Dictation would have been in his study, up the plush, winding stairwell from the formal dining and living rooms below, stairs that allowed him to make an entrance upon greeting guests.

I dream of that grand house still, the textured wallpaper in the formal entryway we hardly ever used (we came in the back) where his outdoor shoes—in the German style—were traded for indoor slippers, his black lambskin hats and heavy coats, my grandmother’s furs, hung in a closet a bit further inside. Down a step and under the stairs was a hidden powder room with a plush rose-colored carpet, which, forever, even
after their deaths, had treasures in the drawers, a lipstick in a gold-ridged case, a powder compact, a bit of reading. The living room had an enormous hi-fi system, invariably set to a symphony on vinyl, or tuned to classical radio; a large couch with a gold-velvet raised pattern; two camel-colored lamb’s-wool side chairs, a brass bare-breasted woman whose arms held up a light; an enormous fireplace with a mirror above it and a mantel where characters wrought by the Spanish porcelain company Lladró were set to waltz, forever, their pale unnatural skin gleaming far from the tiny hands of children. Just beyond was the formal dining room, with its heavy chairs upholstered in a green silk brocade; a large banquette held
kippot
embossed with the slowly fading dates of a thousand weddings and bar mitzvahs, tablecloths, silver platters.

Upstairs, the second floor spread in all directions: straight ahead was their bedroom, with its gold-leaf wallpaper; to the left, my father’s childhood room, with its wood-paneled library and ancient encyclopedias, which had largely remained the same over the years; and my aunt’s former room, which had not. By my childhood, it had morphed into my grandmother’s office, wallpapered in blues and whites, with a white laminate desk and framed artwork from grandchildren carefully aligned on one wall, the latest fiction in the bookshelf. To the right of the stairs was my grandfather’s study, its shelves strained by heavy texts, the major works of German literature and Jewish thought, the busts of dead intellectuals. Further still, up yet another stairwell, was the attic, which seemed, always, to reveal some treasure—a wedding gown, a costume, a military uniform, a box of children’s toys decades old. And, of course, files upon files of letters.

As I read my grandfather’s letters to Bruno, my childhood memories are supplemented and expanded upon by drily witty narrations of medical emergencies (his own quadruple bypass surgery, my grandmother’s endless rounds in the hospital for a botched hip operation), his children (my aunt, he writes at one point, has persuaded him to read
Fear of Flying
, which he grudgingly enjoys), his grandchildren (I am stupidly thrilled to discover I am “exceptionally bright and promising”),
the world around him, boring summer guests who linger too long, his unadulterated love for his lifelong Viennese friends. He worries about the rise of Communism and the nuclear arms race, believes the Soviet Union to be the death of man’s creativity, but also sees Americans as unconscious, unaware, ungrounded. Florida terrifies him, he writes to Bruno in 1977, after investigating retirement homes.

What I found is the same one-dimensional man—flat, choked with statistics—lifestyle expressed in two full bathrooms and one half-bath, fulfillment expressed in two bedrooms and emotions, love and interests expressed in fun. I become very melancholy at the pathetic attempts to squeeze some meaning out of 50, 60, or 70 years of living and this grandiose demonstration of the utter futility of life filled to the brim with convenience and nothing else. Where are the storms of curiosity? Where are the tempests and triumphs of the hot pursuit of femininity? Where are the colossal satisfactions of new insights? Where is the grandiose sense of fulfillment that comes from emotional, intellectual, or physical performance? All drowned in instant gratifications and “Bequemlichkeit” [comfort] in an abysmal ocean of ignorance.

He was a man of great passions who believed passion should fuel all choices. When my cousin Michael, some six years my senior, came to ask him if he, like his father, like my father, like my grandfather, should become a doctor, my grandfather told him to enter medicine only if “nothing else is possible.
Only
become a doctor,” he said—they were at another cousin’s bar mitzvah reception at the time, and Michael was nearing the end of college—“if there is
nothing
else you can do. If you can picture nothing else of your life but a life in medicine.”

“In terms of Valy, I have never heard of her,” my father’s cousin Shirley (Cilli’s daughter) e-mails me, when I start querying family about the
story of the girl I discovered in “Correspondence, Patients A–G,” the girl who had, far more than any of the other characters that box revealed, winnowed her way into my consciousness. “If Karl was already committed to Dot”—my grandmother Dorothy—“I would imagine there would be much ambivalence about helping his former lover immigrate to the United States.

“Secondly,” Shirley writes, “as you know, Karl was an extremely charming, passionate, attractive man—many women loved him and while I recognize Valy may have been one of those women, I wonder what place she really had in his heart.”

This sits uncomfortably. If she had a secondary place, would that have made him feel less guilty? What about what my grandmother said about his “true” love? Was that just bitterness at a lifetime of having to share him? Women loved him. When I tell those who knew him, who knew my grandparents, that I’m thinking about him, it’s one of the first things people say, with a smile, a wink.
He was a charmer
.

Shirley recommends I go and talk to Tonya Morganstern Warner; she was the first to really meet him in his new world. Literally—she was at an event held by relatives to welcome their European refugee cousins to New York moments after they stepped off the boat in September 1938. When I call her, she is taken aback—
Karl Wildman’s granddaughter,
she keeps repeating—and then agrees to see me. Tonya is well into her nineties, and she lives alone on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, near Washington Square Park, in an apartment, lined with oil paintings, that she shared with her husband, Alan, until he died in 1980. They had no children. Tonya has outlived most of her peers, most of her world; there is nearly no one left; even her nieces are dying. She is in excellent health, but like most nonagenarians, she worries life won’t continue much longer.

Tonya Morganstern Warner.

Tonya has always been at the periphery of my family; she was a part of the greater Viennese Diaspora my grandfather cultivated and socialized with, a mix of those he had known in Europe and those his friends had known, a bilingual world Karl held court within. Tonya was
invited to every anniversary, every bar and bat mitzvah, every wedding. Film-star gorgeous in her youth, she is still beautiful now, with clear skin and the kind of overstylized thin brow favored by women of the 1930s. Born in Galicia to a wealthy land-owning farming family, she was expected to move to Vienna in adulthood—that’s what one did, it’s what her sister did before her; it was the City. She still speaks Polish and German and Yiddish. But instead of Vienna, she came to America with her parents as a teen, in the early 1930s, when her father became worried about growing anti-Semitism in the Galician countryside. They were poor here; Tonya never received the education she was raised to expect.

Younger than my grandfather by a few years, Tonya fell for him hard, almost immediately after he got off his ship in New York. They then dated, eventually, briefly, tumultuously. Each time I see her, she reveals a bit more of an enduring ardor that she has nurtured for over seventy years. Once, she produces a watercolor painting for me; it is my grandfather, age twenty-seven or so, circa 1939. She still keeps his tie, in a drawer by her bed; it is wrapped up in a package he sent to her in the early 1960s; his handwriting is on the envelope. She explains: She and her husband were going to Italy on vacation; my grandfather wanted her to pick up a similar tie for him in Milan. She never returned the prototype, so thrilled was she that this one had once been around his neck. It is devastating, this love she carries.