Such Good Girls (21 page)

The chief of the department, most of the staff, and almost all patients were Jews, but Sophie never went out of her way to identify herself as Jewish. Between her ambiguous religious identity and the British formality that had mirrored so well her own diffidence and reserve, Sophie found little in common with the city’s America-born Jews. As for the Hasidic Jews she saw everywhere in New York, they only reminded her of the racist caricatures promulgated by the Nazis.

At work she was assumed to be one of the minority of non-Jewish doctors. She didn’t use any Yiddish words, and, in any case, her British accent would rob them of credibility. She didn’t wear a Star of David around her neck, although she’d received several as gifts. More painfully, she lacked the narratives of Jewish life and ancestry that bound her Jewish-American colleagues to the past and to one another. She could hardly join in the small talk about difficult fathers, troubled siblings, or loving grandparents.

In her early thirties, Sophie took a big step out of the shadows of her past. One Yom Kippur, when a colleague at Albert Einstein asked her to cover for him, she heard herself say, “I’d be happy to, but I’m Jewish.”

In 1969, she started work as an attending physician in radiation oncology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University. She developed a friendship with a German radiologist for whom she felt sympathy because, as a child, the woman and her family had been starving toward the end of World War II, when all of the country’s resources were diverted by the Nazis’ lost cause. Sophie could hardly bear a grudge against its innocent German victims. On the other hand, she felt uneasy when the German friend invited her to a party at her home and she arrived to find a gathering of other recent German immigrants—doctors, lawyers, educated people. Who were these Germans drinking cocktails and chomping deviled eggs, whose family secrets weren’t known, even by them?

Now that she was publicly a Jew, the head of her radiology department came to her later with a touchy matter. He’d received an application for a residency from a German who had disclosed on his application that his father had been a Nazi. The man was an excellent radiologist, the department head explained, but if Sophie objected, he wouldn’t hire the applicant. Sophie studied the application and gave her consent, reassured by the man’s candor and reasoning that he had lived with a terrible burden and shouldn’t have to pay a price for his parents’ crimes. Sophie and he would go on to have a cordial relationship.

In her work, she began extending herself a bit more for her Jewish patients, spending extra time with the older ones. It was not only a sign of her growing comfort level with other Jews, but also a way to connect with the older generation after losing so many of her own family members.

In the 1970s, in an interview that her relative Alice Herb, Uncle Emil’s niece, conducted for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Sophie said, “I used to be envious of people who had a family with grandparents, and I’ve always liked old people for this reason. I get along with them. When I have old patients, really old patients, really leathery old people, I guess this is how I imagine grandparents. I always spend more time with them.” Radiation oncology—the use of radiation to kill cancer cells—was more than her occupation. “It’s almost like being a missionary,” she said as her career took off. “Maybe it’s a justification for living. I think that’s logically so.”

If Sophie pushed herself to “be somebody,” it wasn’t in any mundane sense. In hard work and achievement she had found an actual identity, some solid ground to stand on from which she could more calmly look back at a remote childhood that didn’t quite figure into her calculations of self.

By this time in her career, she had another reason to justify her life. Her serious romantic experience had been limited to one relationship with Monty in London, and another with a Mexican-born resident at Polyclinic during her first year in New York. That relationship had triggered the revelation that what she really wanted was to marry a Jew. A Jewish man, that is, who was neither Hasidic nor uncultured. She wanted—the thought had become conscious—to help rebuild the Jewish race and to deny Hitler his victory.

She had both a colleague and a patient to thank for meeting her husband. Janet Pinner, an Englishwoman and colleague at Montefiore, threw a party at her little Upper East Side apartment in early 1970 and invited Sophie as well as another resident, named Marvin Rotman. However, her mother was visiting from Montreal, where she had moved to be close to Putzi. She insisted that Sophie go—“Don’t worry about me”—but Sophie wasn’t convinced she should until, the day before the party, she was examining an elderly black woman at Albert Einstein who was dying of cancer. As she often did during her examinations, she asked the woman a bit about her life.

Concentrating to understand her thick southern accent, Sophie made out that the woman told people’s fortunes.

“You can actually see into a person’s future?”

“That’s what they tell me,” the woman said. “Now let me see that hand.”

As a woman of science used to stories with unhappy endings, whether in her own life or that of her patients, Sophie was extremely skeptical. Not once in her life had she ever visited a psychic or a fortune-teller. But this was one of her beloved patients, who was not going to live much longer.

Sophie gave the woman her hand, which she grasped in the papery palm of her own. “All right, Dr. Turner,” she said, “let’s see what this hand says.”

The woman ran her finger along Sophie’s palm and after a moment drawled, “You are very hesitant about something, Dr. Turner. I feel it’s an event, a party, you’ve been invited to. You’ve been invited somewhere and you’re not sure you should go.”

Sophie felt a shiver go through her body.

“But you should. You should go, Dr. Turner.” Then she added, “Yes, and there will be a lot of travel in your life.”

Although that second prediction sounded stock, Sophie was so impressed by the first that the next evening she made her mother comfortable in her Manhattan studio apartment—where Sophie kept only a few relics of their life in Busko-Zdrój on top of her dresser: her catechism, rosary, and little Steiff bear, Refugee—and took a taxi to the Upper East Side.

Janet Pinner’s small apartment was filled with men and women in their thirties and forties. Marvin introduced her to his friend, a somewhat older man named David Zaretsky, who was also Jewish. David, in turn, introduced Sophie to his neighbor, a tall, extremely good-looking man dressed casually in a denim shirt unbuttoned to his sternum.

Sophie ended up sitting on the sofa talking to the good-looking guy, who, she soon learned, was one of the rugged models used in the Marlboro Man cigarette advertising campaign. Instead of warning him about the carcinogenic properties of cigarettes, she found herself entranced by this six-foot figment of Madison Avenue’s imagination. She even got to hold his hand when he showed Sophie a splinter that she expertly removed. However, her burgeoning interest in him evaporated at his mention of a girlfriend.

“You’re very good at that,” David said, looking on.

“I’m known for my splinter removals,” Sophie replied.

His wound cleaned, the Marlboro Man excused himself, leaving David to Sophie, who soon interrogated him.

David Zaretsky had been born into a large immigrant Jewish family in South Bend, Indiana—it hadn’t occurred to Sophie that Indiana had Jews—that then moved to Brooklyn when he was three. Now he was a venture capitalist focusing on medical advances. He had served in the Korean War in counterintelligence in Germany, where his job, ironically, had been to visit displaced persons camps and try to identify the Communists among the Jews there. He happily considered himself a failure at this task—he had no interest in making any more trouble for the Jews—and was far more successful at hanging out with his Jewish buddies at a Munich café.

On the basis of this information, Sophie quickly calculated his age as forty or a bit older. When he asked about her, she confined her autobiographical comments to the fact that she was born in Poland. He didn’t press her for details then, or ever, really. Maybe, Sophie would eventually conclude, he couldn’t face her past himself.

When they parted, David told her, “I’m in the phone book.”

Sophie sighed inside; she felt that their comfort around each other warranted something a little more aggressive on his part. She stole another glance at his left hand to make doubly sure there wasn’t a wedding ring on it.

She didn’t hear from him, and after two weeks her colleague Marvin reassured her that he still thought David Zaretsky was a very good idea and told her to be patient. Actually, she hadn’t been able to get him out of her mind. When he finally did call, he proposed they double-date with another friend of his named Frank. Frank had nightclub tickets to see Leslie Uggams, who had recently finished hosting a season of The Leslie Uggams Show on CBS—the first black person to host a network variety show since Nat King Cole back in the 1950s.

A limousine came to pick her up. The only other limousine that had ever come for her had contained the Nazi Leming. Her doorman’s eyes popped when David emerged in formal wear and helped Sophie into the limo, where his friend Frank was sitting with a beautiful young Norwegian woman. Forewarned that they were going out on the town, Sophie wore a cocktail dress she’d bought in London under a short lynx coat made by a Polish furrier friend of the family in Canada.

The limo turned out to be on loan, but by the end of the evening, they were hooked. Three months later, when she met David’s family at Passover, her head reeled from all the siblings and cousins she encountered. She wasn’t used to big Jewish family gatherings, yet it seemed to be exactly what she was missing. The sudden death of David’s brother-in-law in September brought them still closer together. She took David to Canada to meet her mother, Aunt Putzi, and Putzi’s family. Sophie and David were soon inseparable. In December, David’s good friend Burke and his wife, Gini, from London, came to New York to stay at the Hotel Elysée on East Fifty-Fourth Street. After observing David and Sophie, Burke and Gini asked the two of them, “Why aren’t you getting married? Look, David, you were the best man at my wedding, and if you want me to be the best man at yours, I strongly suggest you get married in the next ten days, before we go back to London.”

Why not, indeed? David had what Sophie craved: a great feel for family and friends, and plenty of both. Everyone who seemed to come into David’s orbit remained there. He made her laugh, he was loving and could show his love, something Sophie didn’t know how to do, but which she suspected he could teach her. And it didn’t hurt that he wrote her romantic poems, especially since Sophie hardly thought of herself as romantic.

Suddenly the wedding machinery was in frantic motion. David’s newly widowed sister Mollie drowned her grief by organizing the entire event with the help of her three daughters—Ellen, Ilyne, and Debbie. Her brother Bill owned a catering company and wedding facility on Long Island, with an open date on December 19, the day before David’s friends were scheduled to return to London. Mollie supplied her own rabbi, Saks Fifth Avenue supplied the dress, a jeweler named Arthur King supplied the wedding rings. Without a formal proposal, without ever having discussed whether to have children, without even much of a chance to get to know each other’s bad habits, David Zaretsky and Sophie Turner, née Selma Schwarzwald/Zofia Tymejko, were married. In the insane rush of it all, they forgot to eat at their own wedding and had to stop for sustenance at a diner in Queens on their way to the honeymoon suite at the Hotel Elysée that David’s friend, the owner, had donated for the night.

They were both back at work on Monday (the honeymoon in Mexico came a month later). In 1972 and 1973, they had two sons, Daniel and Jeffrey. In the mid-1970s, Sophie left Albert Einstein for Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, and they moved from Manhattan to Neponsit, an exclusive neighborhood on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. She stayed at Long Island College Hospital until 1985, when she took a job at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, Long Island, and their family moved to nearby Great Neck, one of the most Jewish suburbs in America.

Sophie saw her mother regularly now. Before Sophie met David, they were both single, lonely, and ecstatic to be together again. Laura would come down to New York from Montreal to see the sights and take the Circle Line Sightseeing Cruise around Manhattan. Sophie would fly to meet her in Canada for car trips to Niagara Falls and the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Laura had always loved nature and was interested in all forms of culture, but it was the art of enjoying life that she practiced best, and they talked and laughed their way through New York’s wine country. Laura started to travel widely and once, in Israel, discovered by chance her only living relative on her husband’s side, a niece named Aliza Schwarzwald Bar, who had been hidden by Polish peasants and lost both her parents. Aliza was almost exactly Sophie’s age, but she had always known she was Jewish, and after the war had made it to Palestine, where she became a prominent educator.

“I always had this problem with not knowing where I came from,” Sophie had told her cousin Alice several years before. “It was like being a person with a void around her, except for my mother, which was a saving thing because she’s a very strong person and I think she somehow managed to direct me in some way. That I was able to function, that I didn’t crack up or anything like that, like a lot of people have. So I think it’s to her credit, really, that she kept things going the way she did.” There was no telling how far Laura Turner would have gone had she not had the misfortune to be a Polish Jew in the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century. She spoke five languages fluently—Polish, German, English, French, Yiddish—and she could get by in a sixth, Hebrew.

When Sophie became eligible for citizenship by 1968, she was entitled to bring her mother to the States on a visa, but her mother was ensconced in Montreal and Sophie was single and still not committed to staying in America. By 1971, however, Sophie, married and settled in New York, brought her sixty-two-year-old mother to the city, where David had found her a bookkeeping job at a Wall Street firm. She moved into Sophie’s old studio apartment in the same Upper West Side complex where Sophie and David and their two sons lived. She followed the first job with another at Merrill Lynch, where she handled international accounts. She was so efficient that, on retiring, she had to be replaced with two full-time employees. Avid about learning, Laura made full use of Manhattan’s educational institutions and also began auditing courses at Hunter College in Manhattan—linguistics, art history, comparative religions, and philosophy.