Promise Me (9 page)

Suzy took stock of the situation and said, “Ropes are the answer.”

Down to the straw market we went. We found a serviceable length of twine, Suzy bought a darling little umbrella, and I managed to bargain a peddler down on a cigarette case by pretending to be flattered when he nibbled my wrist and professed his love in broken English.

Back at the hotel, we bumped into my friend Gail and her travel mate, Cis, who were following roughly the same itinerary we were. Reunion hugs all around, and we headed to the café next door to compare notes. Gail and Cis looked terrific, and they’d had dates almost every night since they hit the continent. Suzy’s and my adventures hiking ruins and exploring museums suddenly seemed very pale next to wining and dining and getting squired about town by charming locals who knew the best places and paid for everything.

“We’ve found love in every country,” Gail bubbled like fresh champagne.

I wanted to punch her.
Love?
In
every country?
While I got nibbled for
the price of a lousy cigarette case? They sashayed off to hail a taxi, and I sat there on simmer until Suzy elbowed me in the ribs.

“All right, Lady Godiva. What’s your problem?”

“I can’t stand it that Gail and Cis are racking up romantic adventures—not to mention
free dinner
—wherever they go,” I said. “Mike and Dave are such deadheads. Mike fancies himself so in love he won’t go out. David thinks he’s so sexy and full of grandeur—oh, I could knock the hell out of him sometimes, Suzy, and as long as we stick with them, we won’t get asked on dates.”

“Nancy, I’m not going out on a date with a total stranger.”

“From now on, I’m boy-hunting. I don’t care if I get ravaged on the street.”

“
Nancy Lee Goodman
. Don’t be insane.”

“Heavens, no! I’m supposed to be the prudish one while you’re the social butterfly.”

“I don’t pick up men in bars at home, and I’m not doing it here.”

“I don’t care if I have to go it alone. I’m not boating home with nothing to talk about but dusty relics and Hieronymus Bosch and how bloody beautiful everyone thinks
you
are.”

“And to think, just this morning I wrote home about how well we’re getting on.” Suzy glared at me in stark annoyance. “No
fighting, Mommy. Nancy’s being so mature
. I almost forgot what a child you are.”

Two young men at a table by the door were ordering a bottle of wine. One was quintessential tall, dark, and handsome, the other a not-so-bad nebbish, which could mean smart.

“Hi!” I called. Handsome looked up, and I waved like a yokel. “Hello there!”

He brightened at the sound of his own language. “Hi there. Are you American?”

“As apple pie! University of Illinois.”

“UCLA. Mind if we join you?”

“Not at all,” I bubbled.

Suzy sighed and mumbled, “Tell them to bring the wine.”

They scuffed their chairs to our tiny table, and small talk ensued. It turned out Handsome actually knew a “dear acquaintance” of Suzy’s
(which in Suzy-speak usually meant “lovesick fool”) in Los Angeles, and long story short, we had dates for our last night in Rome. Over our free dinner, Suzy mentioned that we were headed for Florence the next day.

“Maybe we’ll bump into you there,” said Handsome.

I was certain they would.

W
e were heartened by the beautiful drive to Florence, but arriving days ahead of our hotel reservation, we ended up with a room the size of Mom’s linen closet. We flipped a coin, and I lost, but Suzy couldn’t bear to make me lie on the floor next to the grubby bidet, so we huddled like spoons in the narrow single bed. Dave and Mike were even more disenchanted with their dodgy fifth-floor hostel.

“No bathroom and no elevator,” said Dave. “And at this price. It’s robbery.”

“It’s cheaper than Rome,” I said. “Stop acting like they’re prying gold out of your teeth.”

“We’re going to Venice. And if it stinks like everyone says, we’re going to Munich.”

“But
Firenze
—it’s a dream,” Suzy protested. “We have to see Michelangelo’s
David.
”

“You boys go ahead,” I suggested readily. “Suzy and I’ll take the train to Germany next week. Right, Suzy?”

We’d already connected with our dates from Rome, and going out with them opened the door for other likely candidates. Suzy and I set forth an aggressive agenda of museums, galleries, and historic sites followed by dinner and dancing every night. Our skirts were hopelessly wrinkled, but every time we plugged in the travel iron, it blew out the lights on the entire floor of our shabby hotel, so we bought new evening dresses for dating and spent the days barelegged and frizzy haired in $3 jumpers from the straw market. It was mid-July now. By the time we left Florence, every zipper on every bag was broken. By the time we left Venice, neither of us had a decent pair of shoes.

“My feet are ruined with all this walking,” Suzy remarked on the train to Munich. “Happily, my tush looks amazing.”

“Oh, my God.” A headline caught my eye, and I picked up a British newspaper from the floor. “Suzy, Adlai Stevenson died.”

She scootched close to read over my shoulder. The great statesman, whom JFK had appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had suffered a heart attack as he strolled down a London sidewalk with his UN colleague Marietta Tree.

“I’ve heard he’s a deplorable womanizer, but still … it’s so sad,” said Suzy. “For some reason it makes home seem even more far away.”

“We should try to find a
New York Times
every week, Suz. So we know what’s going on at home.”

“Yes. With the space flight and everything. That’s a good idea.”

Marietta Tree smiled up, chic as can be, from the rumpled newsprint. She was an object of some fascination for Suzy and me, a socialite who’d used her brains, style, and impeccable party skills to influence presidential politics and eventually gain appointment to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Somehow she’d managed to do everything right, while simultaneously doing a thousand things that simply aren’t done.

“I hope we haven’t hurt Mike and David’s feelings,” said Suzy. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I miss them a little.”

“I don’t. Some girls in Venice told me Munich is crawling with Canadian boys.” But I felt a flush of guilt and added, “Still … they’ve been awfully good about carrying things.”

A nice German lady sat down next to us and was kind enough to spend the rest of the train ride tutoring me on my
deutsche
phrases. Our first night in Munich, we were slated to go out with the boys from UCLA, but Nebbish bowed out at the last minute. Suzy didn’t want to leave me alone at the hotel, but I insisted she go. The minute she was out the door, I got dressed and set out on my own. Knowing Suzy would plotz if she knew what I was up to made me feel even more ferociously elated. I found my way to a café where Americans were said to congregate, and sure enough, fell in with a group of Boston girls bound for a party at the Excelsior. I’d been successfully goosed a few times and was striking up a conversation with a chemistry teacher who looked like a surfer when I heard Suzy call my name.

“Fancy meeting you here,” she said icily.

Back at our hotel that night, we discovered our room was next to a bell tower, where a great, beefy bell tolled every fifteen minutes like Quasimodo’s life depended on it. We lay in the dark, dozing for a few minutes, getting gonged awake, dozing again. Toward dawn, Suzy groaned into her pillow.

“My nerves are shot to hell. We have to find another place to stay.”

“It won’t be hard to find something. The German people are so friendly and helpful.”

“They should be,” Suzy huffed. “
All things considered.
”

I knew what she meant, but I’d been trying not to think about it.

“I hear you get free beer on the brewery tour,” I said. “The best beer in the world.”

“Well,” Suzy sniffed. “It’s nice they can happily go about making beer after—”

The bell tolled, echoing off the walls. It disturbed me to hear Suzy sound so hard. She was a baby during the last two years of the war, and I was born just as it ended. In that brief period of time, the whole world changed. Everyone at the temple had lost family in the Holocaust: extended family, third cousins, great-grand-aunts and uncles-in-law—people unknown to us but dear to those we held dear. We grew up keenly aware that those were Our People, who looked like us and shared our blood and our beliefs. Mom and Daddy were less than thrilled to have Suzy and me spend time in this place that was such a fresh hell in their memories. I’d brushed it off before we left, but now I understood, and I couldn’t bear to connect such dark history with the generous laughter of the old man in the bakery shop or the kindly tutoring of the woman on the train.

“How could good people get swept up in such a thing?” Suzy wondered.

“I don’t know. They probably don’t know themselves.”

In Paris, I’d felt the lingering voices of la Résistance; Germany echoed with something else altogether. I couldn’t begin to grasp what that feeling was, having come from a community where most people listened to their better angels, but now perhaps I’d equate it with having cancer. What begins as a small, unsettled dread, grows to a terrifying certainty and quickly becomes desperation. This malignancy threatens
everything, but it’s part of you. To kill it is to kill an aspect of yourself. The normal human response is thrashing anger, a need to blame, throat-gripping fear, and lashing efforts at self-preservation. What’s left, if one survives, is a scarred heart of fear and sadness, the feeling of having been rocked on one’s foundation, and a grim determination to make life normal again.

“Suzy.”

“Yes, Nan?”

“You know what they call the sleeping car on the train?”

“No, what?”

“
Schlafwagen.
” For some reason, we broke into a fit of giggles over that.

“You’re such a nut,” said Suzy. “What does
Schlafwagen
have to do with anything?”

“
Nichts,
” I said. The bell tolled, and we broke into another inexplicable fit of giggles.

“I heard from that nice man we met in Italy. I told him I’d go out with him tomorrow night if he brings a friend for you.”

I huffed, indignant. “I can get a date on my own.”

“I know, Nanny, but I want us to stick together. Some of these guys are so phony-baloney. Not just Europeans. American tourists and ex-pats, too. In fact, as far as I’ve observed, men are pretty much the same all over the world. It’s fine to go out and have a good time, but we can meet guys anywhere. I’m here to see as much of Europe as I can. I don’t want you to be so distracted chasing boys that you miss everything.”

Later that week, two men got into a fistfight over Suzy, breaking stuff all over the Hofbräuhaus, but other than that, we found everyone in Munich to be wonderfully kind and pleasant. Suzy and I explored museums and funny little galleries tucked between butcher shops and bakeries, staring for hour after fascinated hour at images from the grotesque movement that had influenced German art in the decades leading up to World War II. Suzy moved quickly past a series of Otto Dix etchings of twisted soldiers in bulky gas masks. The unsettling undercurrents were palpable, even in the portraiture. Tortured colors, nightmare expressions. The postwar art was even more conflicted. We stood in front of an installation of black-and-white photographs, searching the meticulous compositions
and corners, trying to understand how such great shame and such great dignity could possibly coexist. I thought of Suzy’s mandate over my broken suitcase.

Ropes are the answer
.

There were times, I decided, when redemption could be found only in the simple act of keeping it together.

Suzy seemed to have a homing beacon for the small galleries and arty coffeehouses, and in these less stately places, the so-called “degenerate art”—
entartete Kunst
—that had been ridiculed and confiscated by the Third Reich enjoyed a triumphant return from exile. In 1937, the “decadent work of Bolsheviks and Jews,” which included works by Picasso and Kandinsky, had been exhibited in Munich alongside paintings by psychotics and schizophrenics. Some of the sixteen thousand works were auctioned off in Switzerland and America to finance the efforts of the Nazi Party. The rest were burned.

“I can’t stand to think what was lost,” said Suzy. “Art is the soul of a people. I don’t know if it’s possible to get that back.”

We met up with Dave and Mike and drove the heavily laden VW to Berlin.

In 1961, the government of East Germany had reinforced the expanse of electrified barbed wire with 26 miles of concrete that separated family members, friends, and neighbors who’d once lived in the same city. In the pubs at night we heard stories about how the West Berliners posted Christmas trees on pedestals and sang carols over the Wall. The East Berliners had been forbidden to wave at West Berlin friends and family, so groups of housewives conspired to all wash windows at the same time. (It’s laughable, really: those fat old colonels in their war rooms imagining they were any match for the kaffeeklatsch ingenuity of womankind.)

Travel between East and West Germany had been severely restricted since the iron curtain had descended, but during this brief window of opportunity, we were able to get permission to go into East Germany for a few hours. (Permission from the German government, that is, not our parents. We decided they’d be happier not knowing until we had the photos developed.) We made our way through Checkpoint Charlie under the hard stares of heavily armed soldiers and snarling dogs. At the border, we were thoroughly searched, interrogated, and warned about the
consequences of overstaying our welcome or making any attempt to abet the escape of East Germans. Foreigners were known to alter the undercarriages of their cars to accommodate illegal passengers, so guards routinely measured frames and fuel tanks. If they found any discrepancy, the car was dismantled and the travelers arrested.

Facing the Berlin Wall on its eastern side was a façade of tidy prefabricated buildings, but beyond that, the city was scarred with rust and studded with wreckage from the war that hadn’t yet ended for the people who lived there. We drove past toppled bricks and jutting rebar, sagging shingles rotting in the sun, women in worn-out dresses scolding their children out of the street, men with downcast faces standing in line for whatever compels desperate men to stand docilely in lines. Dave occasionally pointed out monuments and architectural features, but for the most part, we rode in silence. Huddled in the backseat of the VW, Suzy and I held our breath and swallowed our tears. The atmosphere of despair was overwhelming.