Brown-Eyed Girl (33 page)

“A hundred times, he looked in my eyes, and held me, and begged me to trust him. I loved him. What else could I do?”

Sally had no idea.

“When the Germans invaded France in 1940, I had choices of my own to make. Paul and Marc immediately went into the Resistance, but Giselle wouldn't leave her parents. I could have stayed and fought with them, but Giselle begged me to take Ezra to America, and promised me that she would find a way to follow. I had to go to Wyoming. My mother was very ill, and I wanted to be with her. I said I would find a way to get the boy out of the country, but I didn't have the faintest inkling how I was going to do that.

“Ernst was supposed to have been in Berlin at that time, but all of a sudden he turned up in Paris. Somehow, he got false papers for the three of us. I was sure we'd be caught, but he had an enormous amount of money to bribe any official who got too suspicious. He was also carrying a gun. I made him swear that if they tried to detain us, he'd use the first bullets on Ezra and me, then shoot himself. We couldn't relax until we had docked at New York and gone through customs inspection. At the time, of course, American officials were refusing to give sanctuary to European refugees, and I was terrified that if they found out who we really were, they would be cruel enough to send Ezra back.”

Sally stopped the tape, got herself a second cup of coffee. A hell of a trip, she thought to herself, and not exactly a hero's welcome when Meg got home.

“My father's letters had made his ugly opinions clear for years, but I assumed that he would be glad to see me, that my mother's illness would make him want my help. I hardly expected the vicious reception he gave us when we reached the Woody D. He took one look at Ezra and screamed that he wouldn't have ‘some Jew bastard' in his house. He said he was going to call the immigration authorities in the morning and have the kid deported. And he said more. I couldn't listen. I took Ezra in with me when I went to my mother's room, leaving Ernst to try to reason with my father. My mother lay in bed, ghost-pale and emaciated, weeping and pleading with me to forgive my father, to ignore what he was saying, and to stay. She needed me. She knew what she was asking of me, she said, and she was asking anyway. I couldn't refuse her. I had to find a place for Ezra, then come back and nurse her until she died.”

What choice could she have made? What would Sally have done?

“I didn't know how he did it,” Meg went on, “but somehow Ernst had gotten my father to calm down enough that by the time we left, he was able to keep silent. I asked Ernst what he'd said to him, and he told me that all he'd done was to appeal to Mac, businessman to businessman. He didn't elaborate, and I was so relieved to be out of there, I didn't push. All I could think about was finding somebody to take care of the boy, keeping him out of my father's reach, and getting back to my poor mother. And of course I knew that my time with Ernst would be short. I couldn't convince him to stay in the United States, marry me, become an American. He said he couldn't abandon the work he was doing. He had to go back.

“Do you know,” Meg said with wonder, “on his last day in Laramie, Miss McIntyre and Miss White informed us that they would be going to Cheyenne for the night, but that we were welcome, of course, to remain at their house? Ezra had gone with the Starks. We were alone. They had put us in separate bedrooms, of course, but we spent the night together in the single bed I'd been sleeping in . I have never made love like that in my life. I was sure I would never see him again.”

The tape clicked off. Sally turned it over.

“But then,” Meg continued, “I did. He'd promised he would return, and so he did, in 1943. I can't imagine how he managed to get himself out of Germany and into the United States at that point, what kinds of connections he was able to make in countries in the middle of a fight to the death. Well.” She sighed. “Ernst always was good at making connections. Obviously he was involved in espionage. I assume the Nazis were confident he was working for them—that's why they gave him so much latitude. I assume also that he was involved in some capacity with the American OSS or British SOE”—the countries' two main spy agencies during World War II—“and that they considered him, oh, what's that John le Carré word? An asset. Yes, a very valuable asset.

“My mother had died the year before, and I was living in Laramie and teaching at the University. It was summer, so I was at home, writing. I had no idea he was coming. He knocked on the door of my house, wearing the disguise he'd worn when we left Paris and came to Wyoming. I have written at least a dozen poems trying to describe what I felt at the sight of him, but none of them have been any good.”

Sally thought for a moment. There were poems about reunions with a lover, but Meg was right. They were not Meg's best work. She could write about sex, about anger, and about loss, and could render complicated emotions into remarkable images. But joy was not her forte. Maybe because you could count on joy to blow up in your face, Sally thought cynically, half-hoping that she didn't really believe that herself.

“I'd never seen him so thin or tired. He wouldn't talk about the war, about what he'd been doing for three years. He said he hadn't heard from Marc. I asked him about Giselle, and he put his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head. He said he believed that she and her parents had been sent to one of the Germans' concentration camps. They were probably dead. Paul had been smuggling arms to Resistance fighters in Marseilles. He was captured by Vichy soldiers and hanged.

“Ernst wanted to see Ezra as soon as possible, to know that the boy was doing well. I took him to visit the Starks, and saw Ernst smile for the first time since he'd come back. Little Eddie, as he was known, was thriving. Just the sight of that dear little boy seemed to refresh my old lover, to restore some of the curiosity and energy I had missed so badly those three long years.

“Ernst had a car. I have no idea how he got it in the middle of the war. We had two weeks, and he wanted to see the Rockies. We went north as far as the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, south all the way to Pike's Peak, hiking and staying in tourist cabins. He had more gasoline coupons than any American I knew,” she commented dryly. “As long as I knew him, whenever we were together, Ernst was a master at pretending that the rest of the world didn't exist.

“Our motto on that mountain tour was ‘Make the War Go Away.' We pretty much managed it. We were enough for each other. Perhaps whoever you are, listening to this tape, will wonder how I could welcome a man who was, for all I knew, a Nazi agent, into my heart and my bed. I will say in my own defense that I didn't believe for one second that Ernst Malthus was a Nazi. Nothing in his character matched up with that. Nothing in any of the actions I knew about. What I knew was all in his eyes when he saw Ezra looking like a happy little boy. I had all the reason in the world to assume that he was exactly what he'd led me to believe—too valuable to the Resistance to give up the guise of being a ‘Good German.' I didn't doubt that he had been forced to make some terrible choices. You could see that, too, very clearly, in his eyes. I wanted to give him an oasis, to bury him in beauty and pleasure and what laughter we could steal. He left after those two weeks, saying not a word about where he was going, or when we might meet again.”

Tape number one ended.

And tape number two began. “If I'd had to guess where he went when he left me waving goodbye from the door of my house in Laramie, I'd never have guessed in a lifetime. For a long time I held on to the hope that he'd come back. I bought a big bed. I wondered, every day, where he was and what he was doing. I tried to find out. Marc Sonnenschein hadn't seen him since early in the war, didn't know where he'd gone. I wrote to everyone we'd known who'd survived the war, but it was as if he'd fallen off the earth. Gradually, I gave up trying to find him. I assumed he was dead. Or maybe I wanted to think that he must be dead. Otherwise, why wouldn't he have come back? I didn't learn the truth for more than twenty years, and then I didn't want to hear it, particularly from the person I heard it from.

“That morning in 1943, Ernst Malthus got up out of my bed, cooked me a breakfast of bacon and eggs, loaded his grip into the trunk of his car, and drove straight to the Woody D Ranch. He went to see my father, McGregor Dunwoodie. They had a kind of business arrangement. It was not the last time they met.

“You see, by 1943, my father was helping to finance the Axis war effort. Germany was starved for cash, and a small, revolting group of capitalists around the world was making it possible for the Nazis to buy enough food to keep their death machine running. The capitalists offered American dollars and gold and silver. The Nazis offered the treasures they'd stolen from the people they murdered. Ernst was, in this case, simply the middle man,” Meg finished, her voice flat.

Sally had to stop the tape, rewind, and listen again to make sure she understood. She listened three times, and the meaning, each time, seemed unmistakable.

“Do you wonder how I learned all this? My father told me.”

Sally had to stop the tape again, get a drink of water before starting it back up.

“I hadn't spoken to him in more than twenty years,” said Meg. “On the day my mother died, I left the Woody D and swore I would never go back and never even mention the name of McGregor Dunwoodie again. I'd lived for two horrible years with his monstrous tongue-lashings, his bitterness and anger and abuse. Once, when he'd begun to rant about the Jews, about how Hitler had the right idea, and he still had half a mind to call up the authorities and send that little kike bastard I'd brought home back to get what he deserved, I'd gotten his shotgun off the wall and told him that if he ever, ever mentioned the child again, I would blow his head off. When I left, I told him not to write or call or try to contact me. The last thing he said to me was that he'd never disinherit me, because he'd never give me the pleasure of being free of him. ‘When I'm dead and buried, my goddamn money will haunt you to your own grave,' he said.

“But he didn't tell me then about his arrangement with Ernst. That came much later, in 1966. I had made good on my pledge not to see Mac or speak to him, and he hadn't written or called. But I went to my office one day to find a message from an old family friend in Encampment, somebody I hadn't seen in years and years. He said that Mac had had a heart attack. He knew he was dying. He was at home at the ranch and wanted to see me just once more, before he went.”

Click.
Sally had to flip the tape.

“I don't know why I went. Maybe it was the memory of my mother. But I did, I drove over the Snowies and down to Encampment, down gravel and dirt roads I could have driven with my eyes closed. And then I was there.

“He was right there in the same bed my mother had died in. And smoking—even a heart attack couldn't stop him. He already looked like a corpse. I don't know what I expected, but I should have known that he'd called me in to hurt me one last time. He was almost too weak to speak, but he managed to whisper to me to pick up a piece of paper on his bedside table, next to his ashtray. It was a list of all his property, detailed for the executors of his estate. I asked him why he was showing it to me, and he said, ‘Look under the headings for miscellaneous.' I looked, and saw that he'd listed coins and jewelry, and so on. ‘Those are the presents I received for giving a little help to the Axis during the war, and things like that.'

“I just looked at him. I couldn't understand. Seeing me confused and worried gave him the energy to talk. ‘You'll love looking at my trinkets when I go, my girl,' he said nastily. ‘I've got some right pretty jewels and quite a few gold South African Krugerrand coins in the vault over in that bank in Laramie—'course the coins came later. Got 'em all from your boyfriend, Ernst Malthus. I gave him the cash the Nazis were needing, and he brought me some awful nice things. Didn't hear from him again until 1962, when I was asked to help out some people who wanted to change the way things were going in Cuba. That time, they wanted somebody who could get 'em some weapons. I said I probably knew somebody who could help them out, but I wanted Krugerrands in return. They said it could all be arranged, and the next thing I knew, here came old Ernst with a damn suitcase full of gold. Didn't he stop by to see you, Meg?'

“‘No, he didn't,' I said. ‘You're lying. Ernst had so much money when we left France, I was sure we'd be robbed. Why would he need your filthy money?'

“‘What kind of money?' my father asked me. ‘French francs? Italian lira? How about Reichsmarks—let's see, right about then, Reichsmarks would have been trading against dollars about five thousand to one.' He looked at me like I was something he'd spat out and said, ‘Who the hell would want
his
worthless money?'

“‘I still don't believe you,' I told him.

“His eyes were glittering with fever and malice. He was clutching something in his hand. ‘Why honey, the first deal we ever did was that day you walked in with that little mongrel bastard. Ernst said he'd heard I had expressed an interest in aiding the defense of the Fatherland—you know how he had that fancy English the foreigners talk? Yeah, he said, he could
assist
me, but that he'd grown fond of you, and out of concern for you, he would be willing to demonstrate his intent by offering me a gift that had been seized from enemies of the Reich. That time it was a ruby bracelet. When he came again in 1943, it was five of the prettiest diamonds you ever saw. Here's the bracelet.'

“He put it in my hand. I almost couldn't look. I knew the bracelet. Giselle had never taken it off. It was inscribed inside; it was a wedding present from Marc. Why had Ernst given it to my father?