The Other Side of Love (37 page)

Aubrey blew out the candle-flame and opened the door.

“I meant every word I said last night. I’d rather lose the war than lose you. Be careful, Kathe. Be very, very careful, darling.”

He kissed her lips, a light gentle touch in the darkness.

She heard a single light footfall in the darkness, then there was only the rustle of the wind in the night.

Two months later, in February of 19m, Winston Churchill despatched a secret letter to the Kremlin outlining all that he knew of the German invasion plans, including the blurry photographs Kathe had taken.

Joseph Stalin, smug in his belief that he could swallow up the countries of Europe that his ally Adolf Hitler didn’t want, ignored the letter.

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Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy …

Opening of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech requesting that Congress declare war

against Japan

I

Six days after Pearl Harbor, First Lieutenant Wyatt Kingsmith strode briskly up West 102nd Street. As he reached the brownstone with the elegant ironwork door, he tucked his cap under his arm. His ring was answered by the Leventhals”

elderly butler, who stared at him in consternation. Wyatt hadn’t been here since that long-ago summer afternoon when he and Kathe had come-to tea. He wasn’t expected. As a matter of fact, until fifteen minute*arlier it hadn’t crossed his mind to come here. He had been visiting one of his professors at Columbia and, realizing how near he was to the Leventhals’, had decided that tying up loose ends was appropriate. This was his last leave before shipping overseas.

In the drawingroom, assailed by memories, he went to the bow window, watching a driver in a heavy overcoat carry packages from a UPS truck into the service entrance of the house next door. The truck had moved up the street before he heard slow footsteps.

Mrs Leventhal was yet frailer, her spine more bent, the professionally waved white hair thinner. Her black wool dress was sizes too large, her softly sagging throat lapped over the uppermost strand of her pearls. Nothing about the stern stiff judge had changed. His jaw was set as unyieldingly, the rheumy eyes were as lacking in humour, the spinal column as fused.

Ah, so you’re a soldier, Mr - no, Lieutenant Kingsmith.”

The judge held out his hand.

As Wyatt took it, he said:

“Wyatt.”

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‘What a pleasant surprise, Wyatt.”

Mrs Leventhal whispered in her rustle of a voice.

“I was at Columbia, so it was no big deal to drop by.”

Wyatt paused. Tm shipping overseas.”

Mrs Leventhal sank into a chair.

“So soon?”

“Eleanor, there’s a war on now.”

The judge pulled up his trouser knees as he lowered himself into a nearby chair.

“It’s extremely difficult to accept that the two countries are at war again. Naturally my loyalties are all with the United States. Still, Germany’s the land of my birth.”

“You’re lucky you moved here,”

Wyatt said.

The judge and his wife glanced at each other.

“I was born here, and so were my parents,”

Eleanor Leventhal said.

“Still, all four of my grandparents came from Germany. We were raised to believe that made us superior.”

“You feel that way about Germany, even being Jewish?”

At the final word the judge’s nostrils flared.

But Mrs Leventhal nodded.

“Wyatt, you’d have to understand what it’was like. When we were young, younger than you are now, millions of immigrants poured in from eastern Europe. Good people, but crude and uneducated. We had standards. We didn’t wish to be lumped with them, so we held ourselves apart. We had always been kept apart from the gentile world. It seems ridiculous to me now, ridiculous and sad, all of us squandering the little time we have on earth to build up barriers.”

The thread of voice frayed.

“We’re old, my husband and I, and not flexible. We find ourselves unable to bridge the gaps. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

Wyatt understood perfectly, but he said:

“It’s pretty oblique, Mrs Leventhal. What do you mean, kept apart from the gentile world?”

“In many parts of Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it meant death for any Jew who married a gentile. The rest of the community suffered, too. Often there was a terrible pogrom. That danger has been bred into us. Then, too, prejudice has made us touchy. Besides, there are the tenets of our religion. What I’m trying to say is that we don’t intermarry.”

She whispered the last sentence as if the effort of using her thin little voice had been too much.

“Eleanor, you mustn’t excite yourself.”

At a tap on the door, the butler wheeled in the tea-cart with the same delicate Meissen as before, similar pastel petits fours. Wyatt accepted coffee and a pastry, finding it impossible to banish the remembrance of Rathe.

“What about your German relation, Judge?”

he asked.

“Ever hear from him?”

“We received a note - it must have been a month or so after you and Fraulein Kingsmith visited us. He didn’t mention being in a

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camp, so we assumed we were falsely alarmed. Since then he hasn’t been in contact.”

“We can only hope for the best,”

Mrs Leventhal added.

“Being a lawyer,”

Wyatt said,

“what you said about the old law against intermarriage interested me. I never knew it had been a capital crime. As a matter of fact, I’d like to learn about the history and religion.”

Judge Leventhal’s expression indicated Wyatt had produced inadmissible evidence.

“Is that so?”

All at once the circumlocution in this formally arranged drawingroom was more than Wyatt could take.

“Look, neither of you will say it, so I will!”

he snapped.

“My father was your son.”

The delicate folds of Mrs Leventhal’s throat trembled.

“Myron …”

“Then, what’s so peculiar about wanting to know a bit about that side of me?”

The judge cleared his throat. His lips had gone pale, yet he spoke in the same ponderous tones.

“Since you’re being open, let me be equally blunt. My wife would prefer to have you in the role of family member. But, on my part, that’s an impossibility. Having reached a decision years ago - a decision, I must add, that caused my wife and me untold pain - it’s too late in the day for me to reconsider. You must understand this is not personal but a matter of the faith we live by. You seem like a fine young man.”

He drew a quavery breath.

“It is difficult to say that you are nothing to us”

“Abraham …” Mrs Leventhal murmured.

The judge ignored the interruption.

“But that is how it must be, Lieutenant. And, on your part, you haveA’set of parents. How would we fit into your life?”

Wyatt took a sharp breath. After a moment he said:

“Score one for you.”

“If that means I’ve won,”

said Judge Leventhal,

“I can assure you that’s not true. We had one child, and he was everything to us.”

“Cutting him loose was your decision.”

“We acted according to our faith.”

“And Myron died …

“

Mrs Leventhal held a lacy handkerchief to her white lips.

“There was no choice, Eleanor.”

After a silence Wyatt said:

“Listen, I’m sorry about the whole mess. Everybody seems to have suffered. I didn’t mean to harry you about it, but it seemed right to drop by before I went overseas.”

“We’re glad you’re here,”

the judge said.

“And we would like to see you when you return. Just so long as you understand how it must be.”

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‘Friends,”

Wyatt said, glancing at his watch.

“I better be shoving off.”

Mrs Leventhal managed a smile.

“I wish you every sort of good luck, Wyatt. Return safe.”

The judge looked at him with age-blurred eyes, a look that was searching and incomprehensible, then he said:

“If you’ll wait a minute.”

He trod in his old man’s short hitching steps across the hall. Wyatt glimpsed a large dim room furnished with what appeared to be a complete legal library. After a minute the old man returned with a black leather-bound book.

“Please accept this as a going-away gift,”

he said. The veined hand shook as he held out the book.

The worn gilt lettering read: The Story of the Jewish People.

As Wyatt left the brownstone he gripped the book tightly. He kept seeing Judge Leventhal’s trembling hand and the bluish white of Mrs Leventhal’s lips. His eyes blurred with tears for the shrunken old woman who longed to embrace him, the lonely old judge who clung so adamantly to laws he believed fixed and immutable. Yet even in his sadness for them - and for the young couple who had been his parents - Wyatt felt a lift of spirit. He had made a peace of sorts with his past.

It wasn’t until he was in a taxi that he flipped the book open at the title page. This is the property of Myron Leventhal. The rusty ink slanted boldly up, sprawling across the page. Precisely how he inscribed his own books. The writing was enough like his to be a skilled forgery.

II

It was three days before Christmas of 1941, and the Yanks had not yet invaded the British Isles. At Waterloo Station quite a few people especially women - turned to look at the unfamiliar khaki uniform. Wyatt, on his part, was taking in the English as they hurried to catch trains. The housewives in shabby raincoats lugging heavy cloth shopping-bags, the service men and women in uniforms that looked too bulky, the overage men with slumped shoulders and dripping umbrellas. Everyone seemed … grey. Yes, grey was the colour of the determination-knotted faces.

There was no available taxi. Slinging his duffel to his shoulder, he crossed Waterloo Bridge, zig-zagging towards New Bond Street. From censored family letters, newsreels and press coverage, as well as Edward R. Murrow’s nightly CBS reports, he knew the battering that London had taken, yet he was unprepared. Blackened walls rose like headstones from the rubble that had been dock warehouses. Barriers surrounded gaping water-filled craters. Once handsome

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buildings were husks plastered over with warnings: Dangerous Premises. Danger. Keep Out. Three men wearing goggles to protect their eves from flying orange sparks aimed ferociously noisy metal-cutters at the eighteenth-century wrought-iron railings that fronted an undamaged cream-coloured house all ironwork was coming down to supply much-needed metal to the British war industry. Women patiently queued under their umbrellas outside shops whose windows were boarded over to display a few inches of merchandise. The only external sign of the season was a Fry’s Chocolate poster wishing a happy Christmas to all who had so bravely endured the Battle of Britain.

His khaki topcoat was dark with rain by the time he turned off Piccadilly into Old Bond Street. Kingsmith’s had been bombed out twice, and he halted at the original premises, staring bleakly at the twisted girders. The current Kingsmith’s in New Bond Street, was in none too great condition. The top storey had been burned, and the door was a badly carpentered makeshift. The old sign, however, had been rescued and angled outwards. Wyatt smiled. It was the same logo used at the American branch. P. Kingsmith & Sons in cursive writing above the gilded rampant lion crest and proud ribboned phrase,

“By Appointment to Her Majesty, Queen Mary’.

Inside, the Christmas spirit prevailed in the form of spicy-smelling fir branches and holly swagging the unpainted, clumsily knocked together shelves. A half-dozen customers queued at the front table, waiting for the motherly-looking womanA write up their selections. Wyatt couldn’t repress a smile at this sigfi of the times. Before the war, no mere female had gained admittance to the Bond Street Kingsmith’s employment-rolls.

“Might I be of assistance, sir?”

enquired a narrow-shouldered seventyish clerk.

“Is Mr Kingsmith about?”

“Wyatt! Is that you?”

called Porteous.

Only then did Wyatt see the white-maned head. Edging around customers, he embraced the thin old man. This, he thought, is my grandfather.

“My boy, ah, my boy.”

Porteous blew his nose emotionally.

“Lady Copmbes, may I present my American grandson, Lieutenant Kingsmith? He’s just arrived this minute. I’m sure that under the circumstances you’ll pardon me.”

Porteous led Wyatt to a narrow cluttered office with a desk at either end.

“Euan’s laid up with a cold,”

he said.

“Nothing serious, mark you, but since that spot of heart trouble it’s best not to tempt

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fate in nasty weather like this.”

The twisted veins showed through the transparent skin of his domed forehead.

“Well, now you Yank chaps are in, the war’s as good as won.”

“Attaboy, Grandfather, that’s the spirit.”

Wyatt hung his wet khaki things on the coat-rack.

“But what about Herr Schickelgruber? He’s squatting on most of Europe, a hell of a lot of Africa, not to mention the best Russki real estate.”

“Spread himself a bit thin, our Hitler, what?”

Porteous said with a smile.