Safe Haven (7 page)

Ilse took out a man’s shirt. It, too, was cotton, a muted green plaid with short sleeves. She handed it to Franz and smiled then looked in the box again. Quickly, she identified packages of new underclothes for each of them and some books for Liesl. At the very bottom of the box was a lavender pleated skirt that looked as if it would at last be long enough to meet Ilse’s standards in modesty and a white blouse with pearl buttons down the front and lace around the flat round collar and the cap sleeves.

“There’s one more item,” Franz said as he took the box and started to break it down so that it would be flat. He handed Ilse an envelope. She opened it and unfolded the note inside, and as she did several bills in American currency floated down to the table. “Read it,” she said, handing the note to her husband:

“How very kind of this woman,” Ilse murmured.

“Mama, I’ll wear my new dress tomorrow for the welcome party, all right?”

“Yes. We want to look our very best.” She turned to her husband. “Theo is here?” Her voice trembled; she couldn’t quite believe the news.

“I’ll go to the administration building and ask if I can use the telephone to call this boardinghouse.” Franz put the letter back inside its envelope and grabbed his hat from a hook by the door. “Perhaps if Theo is there …”

“Go,” Ilse urged, and she smiled at Franz. He was so excited, and after the weeks and months of his depression, she was anxious to encourage anything that might bring her husband all the way back to her. “Liesl and I will wash our hair, won’t we, Liesl?”

“Who is Theo?” Liesl asked, and Ilse remembered that her daughter had been little more than an infant when they had all been together on the farm in Wisconsin.

“Theo is Beth’s brother and your cousin.”

“And he lives here?”

“In America—yes.”

“Will Beth be with him? And Josef?”

“No, Liesl.” Ilse struggled for words to explain why without putting a damper on the child’s good mood. “But perhaps Theo will have news of them.”

Ilse had thought so often of Beth and Josef—about her actions toward each of them especially in the early days when Josef had first come to live with them. She had been afraid of everything then and in particular of this former student of Franz whose father was a member of the Reich’s secret police. In her paranoia, Ilse was certain that the Gestapo officer had sent his son to spy on them. And when she realized that Beth was falling in love with the young doctor, she was also certain that their niece was doomed. But on that fateful day when they had made a run for the train to take them away from Munich, it was Franz who became convinced that Josef had betrayed him to the authorities. He was sure that Josef was the reason he had lost his position at the university and that they were forced to leave with only the clothes on their back and a small valise.

Franz had sent Beth to retrieve something incriminating that he had left in his office. Later they learned that at that very hour several members of the White Rose resistance movement to which Franz had belonged had been arrested. Franz had admitted to Ilse that Beth and Josef had also been involved in the group, and when they heard nothing from her, they assumed she had been betrayed and arrested. Franz had never forgiven himself for sending her to the university that day. Now Ilse prayed that Theo would have some good news about Beth.

  CHAPTER 3  

L
ater that afternoon Suzanne was sitting at her typewriter, a blank sheet of paper rolled into the machine. How was she going to tell this story? She had once been known for the way she could take facts and present them in such a fashion that the people and places associated with the breaking news came alive for readers, meant something to them, stirred their emotions. But then she had gone too far and crossed that very thin line between the realms of journalism and fiction.

“Theo,” Mrs. Velo shouted up the stairway. Suzanne startled at the unexpected noise, another part of living in a boardinghouse that she would have to learn to tolerate. “Telephone call for you,” Mrs. Velo added in that same raised voice meant to carry all the way to the attic.

Suzanne listened for Theo’s steps. They told their own story. They were slow at first, hesitant as if he hadn’t heard Mrs. Velo correctly. And as if sensing his indecision, Mrs. Velo called to him again. “Theo, it’s for you.”

“Long distance?” Suzanne heard Theo ask.

“No. You gonna take the call or not?” Suzanne heard Mrs. Velo set the phone receiver down on the hard surface of the table. “I’ve got chicken frying that needs my attention.”

He ran down the last of the stairs. “Hello?”

Suzanne pictured him standing in the shadowy front hallway of the house where the only phone sat on a small table with a straight chair next to it. There was no privacy, and voices tended to carry up the stairwell and down the hall.

“Uncle Franz?” Theo’s voice was almost a whisper, and then it rose to a joyous shout. “Uncle Franz!”

To Suzanne’s surprise he conducted the rest of the conversation in German. She caught a word here and there.

Ilse. Liesl
. The wife and daughter, she recalled. And then a mention of “Beth.”

When Theo’s voice became even more muffled, Suzanne realized that she had moved closer to the door of her room to hear him over the spatter of chicken frying and someone cutting grass next door. Her hand was wrapped around the doorknob. She actually leaped back as if she’d been burned.

“Please tell me that you are not so desperate for a story, Suzanne Randolph, that you would stoop to eavesdropping on a private conversation.” She sat back down at her typewriter, determined to put words on the blank page. But her thoughts were still on the conversation in the hallway.

She knew the exact moment when Theo hung up. Only seconds later she heard the heavy tread of Hilda Cutter’s large brown oxford shoes coming down the stairs. “Good news?” Hilda asked as if she hadn’t been listening at
her
door.

“Yes,” Theo replied, but he said no more. The next thing Suzanne heard was the screen door creaking open and then shut.

Certain that Theo was on his way for the reunion with his uncle and aunt, Suzanne grabbed her camera, her pocketbook, and key. She was halfway down the hall when she realized she’d left her notebook behind. She ran back for that and then hurried out the door. The secret to any good story was to take a large complicated event like nearly a thousand refugees coming to Oswego and bring it all down to a single family’s story. Possibly there were more interesting stories than that of Theo’s family, but at the moment she saw Theo as her link to getting close to the refugees. She was not going to miss this opportunity.

Theo was already a block ahead of her when Suzanne emerged from the boardinghouse, having had to pause long enough to be sure that Hilda had wandered into the kitchen where she was giving Mrs. Velo advice on frying chicken in between pumping her for what the landlady might know about Theo and his family. When Theo reached the grounds of the shelter, he moved along the fence, hesitating now and then to stare at the people inside. But he was no gawker like so many of those who had come from town to stand outside the fence. Theo was looking for one man, and Suzanne knew the exact instant he found him.

She edged along the fence, fingering her camera as she glanced around for some unobtrusive spot from where she could photograph the reunion.

“Franz Schneider!” Theo shouted, and the man turned and began to walk slowly toward his nephew, his arms outstretched as if he might be able to wrap them around the fence.

Suzanne stood near a cluster of trees and starting snapping the shutter of her camera.

The older man reached the fence where Theo waited but dropped his arms as he stared at the barrier between them. Then Theo reached up and through the barbed wire that topped the fence, and his uncle reached up and clasped his hand. Both men had their faces pressed close to the wire. Both men were smiling, and she suspected both were crying, as well.

She knew for certain that she was having a lot of trouble focusing the camera because her eyes were blurred with tears.

“Your
Tante
Ilse will never forgive me for not coming to get her so that she and Liesl could share in this moment,” Theo’s uncle said, alternating between German and English as he and his nephew released their hold over the fence and clutched each other’s fingers through the wire.

“We will have other reunions,” Theo assured this man who was not anything like the robust professor he remembered visiting the farm all those years earlier. Franz Schneider was only a shell of the man he had been. Not only was he gaunt and emaciated, but his eyes had a hollow, haunted look that Theo suspected might never entirely go away. “Are you settling in?”

Stupid question
.

Uncle Franz smiled and shrugged. “It is very nice here,” he replied. “We have plenty to eat and a little apartment in that building over there. We can move around the camp—I mean the shelter—freely and they tell us that the fence was here long before we arrived. Once the quarantine is lifted perhaps …” He glanced over the buildings around them. “It is a pretty place, this part of New York—different from New York City where we got off the ship.”

As suddenly as his thoughts had drifted, he brought them back to the moment at hand. “How is my sister? And tell me more of Beth.” He pinned Theo with a hard look—the one Theo remembered his mother calling her brother’s “classroom” look.
“It means he wants answers,”
his mother had told him.
“And he wants them now.”

“Mom is fine, and Dad as well. They are both anxious to hear that I’ve finally connected with you. I’ll call them tonight. Beth and her husband and daughter are in England. They are safe, Uncle Franz, and as soon as the war is over they will come home.”

“So she made it.” The words were a whisper spoken more to himself than to Theo. He smiled with more relief than joy and looked at Theo again. “And she has married?”

“A German doctor—Josef Buch—and they have a little girl named Gabrielle.”

“She married Josef?”

This news had upset Franz to the point that he was now shaking. “They are safe, Uncle Franz. I have a letter that Beth sent us to hold for you. I was in such a hurry to see you that I left the boardinghouse without stopping to get either that or the doll I bought for Liesl. She likes dolls, I hope.”

“You will bring the doll and Beth’s letter this evening after supper. We will meet here again—this time all of us. And you will be at the program and reception tomorrow.”