A Small Fortune (16 page)

We lost nearly everything. The company would have gone bankrupt if not for the production of facial creams women were unwilling to go without. Even so, people in town spit on me. I hope you have no memory of this, as they did not spare me even as I held your hand on the street.

I can still feel the scowl of the tellers in the bank as I withdrew my monthly allotments. They liked to keep me waiting for hours under the pretense that there was a problem with the account. A problem that always seemed to resolve itself if I waited long enough. I was determined in my patience. I refused to let them win.

What I did relinquish was your father. For many reasons our marriage was beyond repair. Even so, I refused to relinquish my ownership in the company I had helped in good faith to start. I refused to let go of the shares. For the rest of my life those shares have remained nearly worthless, but they are priceless in principle, you understand.

In the end I was a chemist both in practice and in my heart. In the quiet of my own room I devised formulas never seen. But I devised them nonetheless. I was who I was regardless of what others tried to make of me.

It is in this spirit that I leave these shares to you under the condition that you will never give your husband control of them. And should there ever be healthy funds to withdraw from again, you must visit the bank personally to make a withdrawal, even though you live on the other side of the world where I myself have taken you. This inconvenience is small compared to what I have lived through to make such funds possible. It is important for all the sons and daughters of those who spit on me, for the children’s children of the men who assaulted me, to see you walk in with your head held high, for it is they who have a legacy to be ashamed of. They will wait on you like servants, hand over to you what I hope will be more money than they will ever know in a lifetime, money that began with the hard work, the intellect of your mother, the chemist. You may remind them of this. You are my daughter. Never forget.

Your loving mother,

Annaliese Hagen

It feels as if a storm has blown in and set my hair on end. I rub my eyes and iron flat the goose bumps on my arms.

I need to get out of this room. Take a walk on the beach. Clear my head. But when I step out onto the balcony and peer over, the swimmers and sunbathers make my stomach flip. Everyone appears suspect in sunglasses and hats. Faces hidden behind clever disguises. Are they looking up at the seagulls and paragliders? Or are they looking at me?

I come back in and get a drink of water. I take a deep breath and return to the bed. My hands shake as I read the letter my grandmother Sonja wrote to my mother.

Dear Gilion,

Enclosed you will find a letter from my mother Annaliese written to me shortly before her death. I should have shown it to you long before now, but isn’t that one of life’s little tricks: to deliver clarity only when we reach death’s door? It is in memory of her, of the grandmother you never knew and whom I regret not sharing with you, that I am writing this.

First things first. I invested more money in Hagen Pharmaceuticals years ago after receiving a letter as a shareholder informing me that the company’s chemists had patented an innovative anesthesia they were planning to bring onto the market. I hid the letter and told your father nothing. At the time we married, women in this country had only been voting for twenty years. Merely a handful of elections to take part in, hardly enough to make a difference in the rule of law. In some ways it felt as if women had come such a long way; in others, it seemed they hadn’t stepped away from the stove. In the eyes of the law my property belonged to my husband, but his property belonged to whomever he decided. Even my own body was considered his property. We fought about this and so many other points we could not agree on, and more than once he raised his hand to me to make his point. But there was one thing I had over him, and that was the Hagen shares left to me by my mother. Your father couldn’t read German, and so I lied and told him the trust fund was nothing more than paperwork for an old house in the hills of Switzerland that had fallen into disrepair decades before on a small piece of useless land. He believed me. I was a bit of an actress, I must say.

But the Hagen investment. One of the chemists responsible for the development of the anesthesia was listed as Ulrike Tobler. A woman. If only my mother had lived to see the day! If you have read her letter, then you understand that for Ulrike Tobler alone I had to invest. The anesthesia was used for surgeries. Hagen Pharmaceuticals could barely keep up with the demand. They sent statements of the shares, which I claimed to your father were tax estimates of the land if we wanted to reclaim it. I told him it was best just to leave it alone and let the government take over and deal with it. It was one of the only times he told me I had a good head on my shoulders. As I said, I was quite an actress. I gave him a long spiel about Switzerland and their awful laws and high taxes. I threw away the statement with flair, only to retrieve it later from the trash and hide it with the others beneath the loose baseboard in the laundry room.

It is shameful to say, but World War II proved to be even more profitable. Where soldiers used to die en route to hospitals, many of the injured were now safely operated on not far from where they fell, and as a result had a greater chance of survival. Word traveled fast, even in wartime, and before long surgeons around the world were using the anesthesia. I became rich in secret while the husbands and sons of people I knew were dying at the hands of the Germans. I never wished such a thing on anyone, and was torn apart by my strange fortune.

They say history repeats itself. I believe this is true. By the time the war ended you were five years old, and I decided to leave your father, the same as my mother left mine, something that was still unheard of in those days. There was no one to talk to about this. No one who understood my tears and frustration. When I tried to speak with our family doctor, a man I had known for years and considered an intelligent, trustworthy friend, he told me what I needed was to have more children. Just one had not fulfilled my purpose. This, he said, was the root of my unhappiness. I got my divorce. Enough said about that.

You probably don’t remember the trip we made to Zürich. But just as your grandmother had asked, I walked into the bank and withdrew enough money so that you and I could live comfortably for the rest of our lives. I told the young teller that my mother was Annaliese Hagen, founder of Hagen Pharmaceuticals. She was a chemist, I said, though he seemed to have no idea who I was talking about, or maybe he simply didn’t care. The war had just ended. Everyone was focused on that.

When we returned, I purchased a home for us with a library large enough for hundreds of books, as you were already taking such a big interest in reading. I bought a yearly membership to the theater, and every weekend we attended plays or ballet or concerts, which included one female violinist, an instrument I myself had begun to play with surprising talent. My teacher encouraged me to join a local orchestra. Do you remember the small concerts I played in the outdoor theater in the park? It wasn’t so long ago. You and I were so happy. Then came the letter from your father’s lawyer suing me for what he claimed was rightfully his. He claimed that by law I had withheld property that would have belonged to him through marriage, and therefore he had a right to it, even after we’d been divorced for two years.

I wept in that courtroom. It made me appear weak, I knew this, but I could not help myself. It was beyond my comprehension that the law could be so cruel. By law, your father received half of what I brought back for us, plus a bonus thrown in by the judge because I had lied to my husband. He was still trying to figure out a way to gain half if not more of the remaining shares in Hagen Pharmaceuticals, but the tides had suddenly turned, and not long after the war had ended Hagen Pharmaceuticals became branded as Nazi sympathizers for providing the new anesthesia to the German military at below cost, as well as dispersing, free of charge, pain relievers. The value of the shares dropped significantly, and now, decades later, even though the company has been through many different incarnations, they have never quite recovered.

Your father died of a sudden heart attack not long after he took our money. He left everything to his brother, who left everything to his son, who now lives in an estate in Texas surrounded by oil wells paid for by Hagen Pharmaceuticals.

I’ve come to the end of my life far too soon and without much to show for it, aside from peace of mind, which is certainly nothing to scoff at. I would have liked to have done things differently, studied more, discovered the violin early on, understood more of what was in my own heart. But it is late, and I leave those reins to you. You must carry on where your grandmother and I have left off. You must pursue your love of reading, of the written word.

I lift my eyes from the page. How is it that I have never known of my mother’s love for books? For the written word? Is this where I’ve gotten mine?

The shares that I bequeath you have spent years going up and down, but overall their value outside of containing our family history has remained quite low. Even so, in honor of my mother I stipulate that you do not let your husband or anyone else try to take them from you. Should there ever be a significant amount of funds that you wish to withdraw, you will do as I have done, as my mother wished it to be, and show yourself at the bank with your head held high for everyone to see. Feel free to mention you are the granddaughter of the chemist Annaliese Hagen, founder of Hagen Pharmaceuticals. They may not remember her, but I believe the mention of her name within those walls is like a talisman, delivering us all a little something on the air.

My eternal love to you, dear daughter,

Sonja Hagen-Williams

I find myself on the balcony with no recollection of how I got there. The letter is no longer in my hands. It feels as if someone has come along and told me that my hair isn’t dark and wavy. I don’t have a dimple. My name isn’t Celia. Oliver isn’t my son. I’m not who I think I am. I never have been. I descended from a whole other group of people, from women of principle, women with backbone and talent. What am I? Who am I? Who was my own mother?

I look out across the water and squeeze the railing. Is it a coincidence that I took such an interest in German? I wonder now if my mother might have spoken it to me as a child. Did she read the German fairytales to me?

I’ve been to Switzerland, once, passing through a corner on my way to Italy with my host family during my exchange. Did I sense something about it then? I can’t remember. There’s so much I haven’t paid attention to.

Willow arrives with plates of chicken and beans and tortillas.

“You’re early,” I say as I close the door behind me. “My God, that smells delicious.”

“I decided to close early.”

“You didn’t need to do that for me.”

“I know. I did it for me. The curiosity is killing me. What’d you find?”

I hand her the letters. There aren’t any words to describe what I feel. How does one deal with the contradiction of having a new past?

I sit back and stuff the food down my throat, moaning involuntarily with every bite.

“Oh my God,” Willow says every other paragraph until she finishes. “You never knew any of this?”

“Not a thing.”

“I love these women.”

“Don’t you though?”

“So, where’s the next one?”

“What next one?”

“The one from your mother to you?”

It didn’t even occur to me. “I didn’t see anything.” I set my empty plate aside and hand Willow half of the stack.

A minute later Willow hands me several sheets of paper. They’re typed, easy to miss, blending in with everything else. My name at the top of the page has caught her eye.

I read out loud:

My sweet, sweet Celia,

I sit here before this piece of paper the way my mother once sat before hers and her mother once sat before hers so many, many years ago. It doesn’t seem real. My time has come and gone too quickly. I’m not ready yet. I wonder if anyone ever is.

But yesterday I received the shock of my life. I am not expected to survive more than a few months, perhaps weeks. I am late in my writing of this, might have been too late if I’d waited much longer.