This Must Be the Place (29 page)

“Even as I wander I’m keeping you in sight,”
he sang along.

When he came to the entrance to Springtime Estates, he paused.

He crept through the community at twenty mph, its blue bungalows and evenly spaced young trees. When he hit the high notes, he closed his eyes.

His grandfather’s car was sitting in the driveway of his house. Walter got out of the car and walked slowly toward the house.

“Hans.”

His grandfather greeted him at the door. He was wearing chinos and a button-down shirt, street clothes, not the usual tennis gear. He had a cast on his leg but otherwise appeared to be very much alive. Walter’s voice cracked.

“You’re okay?”

“I broke my ankle playing tennis.”

“That’s great.”

“Great?”

“I mean. I mean—”

His grandfather’s eyes narrowed.

“How did you find me here?”

“I asked the waitress.”

“She doesn’t know where I live.”

“She looked it up in the phone book for me.”

The screen door stood between them like a scrim in the theater, dividing the light: his grandfather in the cool darkness of the house and Walter in the sunshine on the doorstep.

“I was worried when you didn’t show up for a week. I thought—”

“You thought I was dead!”

“No. Yes.”

“Almost,” he said. “But not quite.”

Almost reluctantly, he pushed open the screen.

“Since you’re here you might as well come in.”

“Walter?”

Both men turned in response to the high voice that preceded a woman moving slowly toward him in a pale green housecoat. If his grandfather was old, his grandmother was ancient. Her white hair was pulled back tightly into a bun.

“Who’s this?”

“Hans,” said Walter’s grandfather, “this is my wife, Vera. Vera, this is Hans from the diner. I told you about him.”

She turned to Walter and looked him up and down.

“From Germany.”

Walter nodded.

“You came here to work at Disneyland.”

He nodded.

“What part?”

He smiled at her.

“What part, dear?”

“I play Prince Charming in the Cinderella panorama.”

“I meant which part of Germany.”

The same answer was true of Hans and himself, but still he had to think about it.

“Bavaria.”

“We lived in Bavaria,” she said. “When Walter was in the service. Did he tell you?”

“He did.”

“It was a long time ago. Before you were born, probably.”

“Probably.”

“We have pictures.”

“Really?” He took a step toward her. “I’d like to see them.”

His grandparents looked at each other. She clasped her hands together and released them.

“I feel homesick sometimes,” said Walter, as if to explain his interest.

“It does sound nice there,” said his grandfather to his wife. “A lot nicer than what we remember. He’s told me some great stories.”

He was nervous, thought Walter. He was speaking more quickly than usual, as if trying to convince his wife that what he said was true.

“Tell her about the horse, Hans. About the time you found it in the neighbors’ living room. Tell her about it.”

They were still standing in the dark foyer, where lamps were on despite the midday sun outside. There were thick curtains on the windows and wall-to-wall carpeting. Walter listened to the purr of a fan. His grandmother looked at him, seeming to consider the fabric of his T-shirt, the shape of its sleeves, the width of his neck.

“Let me see if I can find the album,” she said finally. “Come into the living room. I’ll get some lemonade.”

She was shaking almost imperceptibly when she served the drinks. Walter’s grandfather seemed to concentrate on a sliver of sunlight struggling to push in through the curtains, uncrossing and recrossing his legs. Walter’s palms were wet. He switched hands so the glass wouldn’t slip from his fingers while his grandmother searched through a cabinet at the back of the room. When she found a large leather photo album, she sat down next to him and balanced it between their laps. They touched; her skin felt like tissue paper against the muscular curve of his arm. She smelled like apricots and soap, he thought, a clean but thoroughly indoor smell. He could get used to it. She reached across him and opened the album’s cover.

Walter’s mother had been a teenager when the pictures were taken. She was wearing ice skates in one of them, standing in front of a house with her schoolbooks in another. In the background, the landscape of his childhood. The snow-capped peaks whose jagged outlines he could trace in his sleep; the ugly brown houses and grazing meadows behind them; the thick pine forests of the foothills.

“We were in the Alps,” said his grandmother. “Do you come from that area? I know there are flatter parts of Bavaria. It’s probably changed a great deal since we were there.”

“The mountains haven’t changed.”

“Of course not.”

“They still look familiar.”

“The mountains
were
beautiful.”

She emphasized the verb, as if to say that nothing else was.

“You didn’t like it very much.”

“We are religious people,” she said, looking up at her husband. “To you it seems like ancient history, I’m sure, but we lived through the Second World War. It was very difficult for us.”

“Of course.”

“Germany was very difficult for us.”

“And for your daughter?”

“I’m sorry?”

Walter pointed to a picture on the page. His mother was smiling in a snowsuit. She was holding up a set of skis.

“This is your daughter?”

“Our only child. A miracle. We thought we couldn’t have any children at all and then she came to us late in life. I was forty-one years old. My husband was forty-four.”

Walter ran one finger over the yellowing photograph, his mother’s face still softened by lingering baby fat. She had been beautiful when he was a child, but thinner than the girl in these pictures, as he remembered her, sadder, wearier.

Now, he told himself. Say it now. It was a simple line; he had said it a million times before:
I am Walter Baum.
Walter could feel the shape of the words on his tongue, but his grandmother spoke first.

“She died the year this picture was taken,” she said.

“When?”

“1961.”

His mother had become pregnant in 1961. Walter was born in 1962. His mother died in 1971. She had been twenty-seven at the time.

“When?”

“1961.”

“No.”

“I’m afraid so. She was seventeen. Much too young.”

“1961.”

His grandmother told the lie with calm conviction, as if she believed it to be the indisputable truth, as if the past could be actually changed by describing it differently often enough.

“It was a long time ago.”

“Twenty-four years ago,” Walter whispered.

“That’s right.”

He pulled the photo album gently into his lap and stared into his mother’s smiling face.

“We say Kaddish for her every year.”

“What?”

“It’s a Jewish prayer.”

Across the room, his grandfather shrugged.

“Not a lot of Jews where you come from.”

He said it kindly, as if to explain Walter’s ignorance to the room, but Walter was still staring in awe at the photographof his mother. How many times had his grandmother told this story? How many people had she told that her daughter died in 1961? How long had she been telling herself that, because her daughter died in 1961, she had never had a grandson born in 1962? Her version of events was much simpler than the truth, and if it had not eradicated the very fact of his existence, Walter might have liked to accept it himself. Because the truth was so much harder to handle. Because the truth was that his mother was Jewish and had married a German, which meant that she was as good as dead to her parents in 1961, ten years before her time.

“I’m Walter Baum,” he said, clutching the sides of the photo album with both hands.

His grandfather cleared his throat.

“I’m her son,” said Walter.

“That’s impossible.”

“Hans,” said his grandfather. “Please don’t.”

Walter turned to him.

“Not Hans. My name is Walter. Your name. She named me after you.”

“Walter,”
said his grandfather, whispering the name but no longer contesting the fact of it, as if to admit that he had known all along.

“Yes,” said Walter.

“It’s impossible,” said his grandmother. “No.”

The veins in her temples stood out, pale blue rivers running into her eyes. When Walter’s grandfather moved to comfort his wife, he did not try to convince her. He looked plaintively at Walter, who was gripping the photo album against him like a breastplate of armor, and the look on his face said everything. That it had been easier to feel each other out through a smooth curtain of artifice. That Hans and his happy stories, his flower-topped hillsides and big-breasted Bavarian milkmaids and a horse in the neighbors’ living room were preferable to the truth, because the truth was too painful to imagine: his own grandchild, grown up motherless in a godforsaken land.

Walter ran from the dark house into the sunshine as if into the blast of paparazzi flashbulbs and held up one hand to block the light from his eyes. When he’d first moved to Los Angeles two years earlier, he had mapped out a tour to pay homage to German émigrés who preceded him. He went by the small room on Vine that Peter Lorre shared with Billy Wilder when they first fled Germany in 1933; had a drink at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset where Hedy Lamarr lived in 1937; and sniffed perfume at the Beverly Hills department store where she was arrested for shoplifting in 1965. He visited the studio lots where Johnny Weissmuller played Tarzan in twelve films and Jungle Jim (“Tarzan with clothes on”) in an additional sixteen. He peeked through the front gates at the villa on Roxbury Drive that had once belonged to Marlene Dietrich. But his last afternoon in California, he just drove. Out the windshield: sun-scorched crabgrass and an occasional sliver of the Pacific; the pastel-colored housing developments of Orange County, layered back into infinity like paper dolls. He pulled off the freeway and parked his car at the airport. He removed both passports from the glove compartment and left the mix-tapes and glossy headshots behind. His plane was halfway across the Atlantic already when he remembered that the one time Dietrichhad performed in Berlin after the war, people had booed her off the stage. Fleeing the Nazis had lent the vain ambitions of his predecessors a dignity Walter could not claim. Still. They had laid out a one-way path for him and he had failed them. Although what happened that afternoon in the living room in Irvine had nothing to do with Hollywood, he knew no one was going to believe it. The plane had already begun its descent into Berlin when he realized that he was the first of his people to flee in reverse.

23

The first time Hope was pregnant, she was sick from the beginning, throwing up every day well into her fourth month. She was exhausted and plagued by apprehension, privately calculating risk at every turn, staying home so as not to cross the street at the wrong moment or overexert herself. She avoided going anywhere she might have exposed her unborn child to secondhand cigarette smoke or loud noises or germs. What a rotten deal, she thought afterward. Nausea, stretch marks, fifteen pounds and back pain, all that anxiety for nothing. In retrospect now, it seemed sadly ironic that she had been so cautious, as if, by avoiding all manner of external risk, she had forced her body to generate its own calamity. Dave would have said that she was just emotionalizing the facts. But he didn’t even know that she was pregnant again. He didn’t know that this time she felt totally different. This time, she felt good. Blood for two coursing through her veins! She kept thinking about an article once distributed at the private school where she worked, a study of wealthy children in New York City who drank only expensive bottled water. The children had developed an alarming number of cavities, while their less privileged counterparts in the public schools drank city tap water, which was enhanced by fluoride, and thus had much better teeth. It was a useful metaphor. In the past few days she had worked day and night in the nursery. When she slept, she slept well and when she was awake, the pregnancy made her feel invincible and compassionate. When she walked down the street, she smiled at her neighbors, even when they didn’t smile back. When Dave called from Poland, she was neutral, even polite, but did not encourage him to hurry home. When she saw the look on Walter’s face at Bodo’s restaurant, although she didn’t understand a word of what was going on, she took him back to her apartment, where she listened to his story and held his hand.

Across the table in her dining room now she watched his face change color in the dim light of the one lamp that was on in the corner. If his face had been almost white when they came in, it was brighter now, a warmer shade, she thought. The blue of his eyes was by contrast very blue.

“I never told this to anyone before,” he said when he was finished. “Not the whole story.”

“Why now?”

“Because I don’t want us to have any secrets.”

She nodded.

“Because I want to start over,” said Walter. “When we go back.”

She bit her bottom lip. How could she explain to him that she had to stay here?

“This is as good a place as any other to start over,” she said.

“Here?”

“If we stand right here on this spot, the whole world will keep spinning past us. We can travel ten thousand miles to California—”