yet I knew she was still wracked with guilt about having been born Aryan in a time and place when that had mattered and about never having questioned the Hitler regime until she was forced to. She spent hours composing the letters she sent Herr Willi. Writing them out in longhand, revising them, writing them again, typing them, she struggled to untangle turgid emotions and troubled philosophies. Occasionally she would let me read the letters, to see if I thought what she was trying to say was clear. But she wrote to him in German, her sentences far more complex than anything she ever produced in English, and often I could not fully understand them. One thing, however, was always plain to me then: we underestimated Mama.
So I felt sorry for her. It seemed wrong to me that she should spend so much time sitting around the house all day, reading novels and watching soap operas. That would depress anyone. But one time Mama overheard me when I was talking to my father about it and telling him I didn’t think he was right to keep her at home. She took me aside afterwards and told me to leave the matter alone. She was OK, she said, she didn’t mind. What she meant, I think, was that she didn’t want me to hurt my father.
Mama seemed at loose ends that Saturday, trying to help Dad assemble what he needed for the income taxes. Finally, she wandered into the living room and turned on the phonograph. She had a collection of old 78s she’d bought while they were living in Wales. The music on them was a type unique to the Welsh, and Mama was fascinated by the complex harmonies.
‘Do you want to hear The Lark Ascending?’ Mama called to me after a short while. I was still in the kitchen.
‘All right, Mama,’ I called back.
That had been Elek’s favourite piece. Mama had told me so often about Elek’s sitting in the gazebo, playing his violin, that I could see the house near Lébény myself, and the gardens with their broad expanse of lawn curving around the lime trees. The white gazebo I pictured was one of those with all the ornate Victorian fretwork. Behind it was the mill pond, glassy in the mid-afternoon sun. The ducks quacked sleepily as they drifted in the shallows. And soaring over it all was the eerie, grave beauty of The Lark Ascending.
She played the record twice, turning it up louder to make certain I could hear it. As I was trying to fill out college application forms at the kitchen table, I ended up putting my hands over my ears in order to concentrate enough to understand what I was reading.
My father came down the stairs from the study. Mama lifted the needle off the record. He came into the kitchen to sharpen a pencil. She followed him to the doorway.
‘O’Malley, dance with me,’ she said to him as he stood over the pencil sharpener. She came and put her arms around his waist.
‘Not now, Mara. Let me get this done first.’
She had her cheek pressed against his back. Her hair, still loose, flowed over her shoulders. She was watching me, smiling at me, because my mama knew she could get pretty much anything she wanted out of Daddy. He stood in front of the sharpener and felt the point of the pencil.
‘Dance with me now, O’Malley,’ she said. ‘I’m in the mood.’
Grinning, he unhooked her arms. My dad was a sucker for dancing. On Friday and Saturday nights he would put on records and push back the couch and the coffee table in the living room and whisk Mama off, as if it were the Stardust Ballroom. Both Megan and I had learned to dance before we were in school. Perhaps my favourite memory of my father came from when we lived on Stuart Avenue. Mama was very pregnant with Megan at the time and she could hardly get close enough to my father to put her arms around him. Plus, she tired easily and her back hurt. So my dad played waltzes all night because they were slow. When they were taking a break, my father lifted me up on his lap and showed me the cover of one album with a picture of the Vienna Woods on it. He and Mama had been there in the woods of Vienna, he told me. Right there by that tree. They had eaten bread and cheese on a picnic, but no sausages because meat was still too hard to get in those days. They had gotten married not very far from that spot in the Vienna woods. Then when he started the music again, he bowed deeply to me and asked if I wanted to be his partner. I was eight and couldn’t waltz very well. So he told me to stand on his feet and he whirled me around and around the living room.
I remember that evening with timeless clarity. I remember the colour and plaid of his shirt. I remember the way he looked down at me, his smile, his eyes. I remember his warm man’s smell as he hugged me to his stomach. I felt like a princess, dancing magically around the room on my father’s feet.
‘Dad?’ I said, standing in the doorway of the study. I was trying to discern if he was still working on the taxes, because if he was, I didn’t want to interrupt. The papers were strewn all over the top of his desk: tax forms, receipts, slips for this and for that. But Dad had a magazine open on top of the lot.
He raised his eyes as I came into the room. It was almost evening. On such a gloomy day, the passage of day into night was not noticeable until it had happened. He had the desk lamp on, and it bathed his hands and the litter of paper on the desk in a yellowish glow. The rest of the room was a deep, grainy blue.
‘I need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘It’s about going to college next year. I have to get these applications in.’
He rocked back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.
‘They’ve got deadlines. My counsellor at school keeps hassling me about it because I’ve put it off so long.’
‘Put what off?’ Dad asked.
‘Put off deciding where to go.’
‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked.
I set the applications down on the edge of the desk. Stuffing my hands into my pockets, I gazed at him over the top of the lamp. Silence.
‘It’s something I thought you might kind of like to help me decide,’ I said. ‘Like Paul’s dad. His dad decided that he ought to go to Ohio State. See, they have a good statistics department there. His dad thought that the job opportunities would be good in statistics.’
My father reached over and took the applications. ‘Have you figured out how much these places cost?’
‘Yes, Daddy. It’s at the end. I was doing that earlier. That’s why it took me so long. See. I calculated the tuition and my room and board. If I used that savings bond Grandma gave me, plus my money from work …Well, just look at it. I got it all figured up.’
He studied my calculations.
‘I could go to Fort Hayes. Or KU. If I get a really good scholarship, I thought I might try for Columbia. It costs a lot, I know, but if I got a big enough scholarship … It’s a very good school. That’s what Miss Harrich says.’ I paused. ‘What do you think, Daddy?’
He said nothing. He just read. Standing in front of his desk, hands still in my pockets, I rocked back and forth on my heels and watched him. I felt nervous without really knowing why. It caused a crawly feeling, primarily in my hands and feet and in the pit of my stomach. Desperately, I wanted my father to help me, to tell me where he wanted me to go and what he thought I should do, the way Paul’s father had done. That was the chief reason I had procrastinated with the applications for so long. I kept waiting for Dad to say something when I told him about the places I was interested in. I knew he cared about what I did, so I could never figure out why he left me to decide so much on my own.
‘It’d be nice,’ he said, ‘if you could go somewhere close to home. In case we needed you or you needed us or something.’
‘Fort Hayes? That’s nearest. If we don’t move. Are we going to, Daddy?’
‘I don’t know. No one’s mentioned it to me.’
‘Should I apply there?’
Again he paged through the various applications, checking my figures at the end. Then looking up, he handed them back to me across the lamp. ‘I trust you to do a good job, Lessie. You know better than anybody what you’d like to do.’
‘But