When We Meet Again (33 page)

I
don’t understand.” I was staring at Arno Fromm, my throat suddenly dry. How could Ralph Gaertner, one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated artists, be Peter Dahler?
My grandfather?

“Peter’s father was a cruel man,” Fromm said, “and after Peter learned that his mother had died and that his father had kept Margaret’s letters from him deliberately, he left Germany. He wanted nothing to do with his family again. But it wasn’t until 1963—after he thought he saw Margaret at the March on Washington—that Peter made the decision to leave the past behind forever, to become someone else entirely. He didn’t know how else to let his grief over losing Margaret go, and he feared that if he didn’t, he wouldn’t survive. Gaertner was in honor of his childhood best friend, Otto Gaertner, who had died in his arms on the battlefield in Africa. And Ralph was for Ralph Waldo Emerson, his favorite poet. The first conversation Peter ever had with your grandmother was about Emerson, and the two of them spent much time quoting Emerson to each other. He said the name would always connect him to Margaret in a way only she would understand.”

I could feel tears in my eyes. “Do you think that’s why my grandmother chose Emerson as a last name too?”

Fromm sucked in a breath. “Emerson is not your married name? I just assumed.”

“No, I’m not married. It’s the name my grandmother took when she left Belle Creek behind.”

“My goodness,” Fromm murmured. “They were connected after all, their whole lives through.”

“But what if it was the false names that kept them apart?” I asked after a moment. “What if they had been able to find each other otherwise?” They had both ultimately believed the lies they’d been told, but the most heartbreaking part of the story was that they had inadvertently created the final, insurmountable obstacle themselves.

“I had a nickname too,” Fromm said. “And I think Peter saw that it was a way to separate from the past. I was a scrawny little man, but the nickname allowed me to sort of reinvent myself as the funny guy. I think that appealed to him, the way that a name allows you to become someone else.”

Something that Werner Vogt had said suddenly clicked. “Are you the one they called Mouse? Or, um, Maus?”

Fromm looked surprised, and then he laughed. “Why, yes. No one but Peter has called me that in many years. Peter found it very funny. I think the name made me disarming. No one is intimidated by a man named Maus.”

“Mr. Fromm, did you and my grandfather know each other in Germany, before Belle Creek?” I asked.

“No. In much the same way Belle Creek brought your grandparents together, it brought me and Peter together. He was my dearest friend, and my journey through life would have been far grayer without him. He brought color to my days, both literally and figuratively. He was a wonderful man, and I wish that you’d known him.”

“Did the two of you paint in Belle Creek?” I ventured. “Is that where you got your start?”

Fromm chuckled. “No, in fact. The two of us never even thought of it. We’d both been raised in homes where boys were allowed only to speak of guns and politics, not of something as insignificant as art. The irony is that in the end, the lives we were both able to lead were supported by the talent we both stumbled upon, almost by accident. Although admittedly, Peter possessed much more talent than I did, in the end. My skills were learned, but his came naturally, as if he’d been born to paint. Then again, I was the one who first handed him a paintbrush, I suppose.”

He explained how he and Peter had run into each other in Munich after the war, how he was working for a construction company, and how Peter was out of work and desperate to return to Margaret. It was Fromm who first began taking home brushes and paint samples, and soon, Peter followed suit.

“The rest, as they say, is history,” Fromm concluded. “For a time, I think the painting saved him. He realized first that he could paint Belle Creek, and then that he could paint Margaret. So for me, painting was a way to make a living, something to be proud of, but for Peter, it became an obsession, a way to remind himself of a world he swore he’d return to.”

“And then he finally made it to America,” I said softly. “And Louise lied to him.”

“She told him Margaret was dead,” Fromm said with a frown. “Eventually, Peter moved away. I don’t think he ever quite stopped believing, though.”

“But then he married someone else,” I pointed out.

Fromm frowned. “That was my fault, I’m afraid. I believed that Margaret was gone, you see, and yet Peter spent more than thirty years looking for her around every corner. He painted her constantly, and it made me worry. When Ingrid came along, well, it felt like she could save him from himself.” He bowed his head. “I sometimes think I was wrong to encourage him so strongly.”

“Didn’t she make him happy?”

“The only thing that made your grandfather truly happy was painting your grandmother. Look around you. This was his world, and I think eventually, Ingrid realized that too. She didn’t know about this place—neither did I, for a while—but we could both feel that he was never with us. Not entirely. His mind was always somewhere else.” He glanced around at the thousand images of my grandmother, all of which were staring at us. “His mind was with her.”

“Why did he marry Ingrid then?”

“He
wanted
to love her. But wanting and doing are not the same thing, are they? We all thought that she was what he needed: a beautiful, kind woman who truly loved him. Surely she would bring him back to life.” He paused. “I thought he would never take our advice. But I pushed and pushed, and finally, he saw what I was saying. He saw that he couldn’t hang on to Margaret forever without destroying himself. Ingrid was his attempt to move on.”

I shook my head as Fromm began to speak again. “I know now that it was wrong to encourage him to marry Ingrid. Peter broke Ingrid’s heart, you see. She loved him in a way that he could never love her. And that’s why, ultimately, when I discovered this warehouse, I told him he must never tell her. It would hurt too much. And so he spent many of his hours here, painting Margaret day in and day out without fear of hurting Ingrid any further. It was like an affair. Each day, with his paintbrush, he cheated on the woman he had married. But I was wrong, too, to encourage him to keep this place a secret. It became like a drug for him, an addiction, and after a while, Ingrid followed him and found out about it. She discovered that he was living in a world of make-believe instead of living in a world with her.

“He asked me to reason with her,” Fromm went on. “But I wouldn’t. I thought he was wrong. I told him that the only way to salvage his marriage was to get rid of this place—these paintings—once and for all. And that made him furious. He accused me of being jealous of the love he shared with Margaret, and although I denied it, he wasn’t entirely wrong. I had loved her too, you see.”

“You loved my grandmother?”

He smiled sadly. “She never loved me back, Emily. Really, she barely knew me. And she truly only had eyes for Peter. But yes, from the day I first saw her, she was in my heart too. Peter knew that and understood it. He forgave it, because after all, I couldn’t be blamed for the way I felt. I never acted on it. But when I told him he needed to get rid of these paintings and close the warehouse down, well, he wrongly assumed that it had to do with my long-buried feelings. We had a huge argument—the only one we really had in our many years as friends—and I assumed that he’d eventually come around. My pride kept me from apologizing to him, you see.”

“When was this?” I asked, though I already had the feeling it was toward the end.

“Three months before he died. I never spoke to him again.” Fromm sighed. “In any case, I’ve set up a trust that will pay the real estate taxes and insurance for this warehouse from now on. It’s my final gift to Peter—I will preserve this warehouse in his memory, because I can still feel his presence here. The mistake wasn’t in keeping his secret. The mistake was in thinking that I could force him to follow a path other than the one his heart was showing him. I realize now that some of us fall in love just once, and then nothing quite compares to that ever again.”

Neither of us said anything for a full minute. I gazed at the painting of my grandmother to my right, one in which she was standing in a small clearing, surrounded on all sides by sugarcane, looking at the viewer with eyes that were wide and full of love. It made me miss her terribly. In the painting beside it, a hand reached out for my grandmother—my grandfather’s hand, I imagined—and she was reaching back, her face radiant and hopeful. I thought suddenly of Nick, and my heart ached even more. Maybe I was destined to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps, haunted forever by something I could never have.

“None of it feels fair,” I said after a while. “How can two people love each other that much, wind up in the same city, and somehow never see each other? It’s so cruel and senseless. Why do any of us fall in love like that if we aren’t given the chance to find each other again?”

Fromm didn’t say anything for a moment. When I looked up, he was studying the portrait of my grandmother standing in the clearing. “I think they both ran from their pasts rather than running toward each other,” he said slowly. “Yes, they both believed the other was gone, and that was tragic. But if they hadn’t shut down—if they hadn’t reinvented themselves and run—maybe things would have been different. Maybe in the end you can’t run from who you are without destroying your life.”

I digested the words for a minute. “Do you keep in touch with Ingrid?”

Fromm nodded. “Here and there. I think she has never quite forgiven me for keeping Peter’s secret, even when I disagreed with it.” He turned to me. “But she loved him, and you are his granddaughter.”

“And yet she never told you about me. I don’t know when she realized the truth, but she had to know in order to send me that painting.”

He smiled sadly. “Ingrid is a lovely woman. But she’s also a woman who lives in denial. How else could she have stayed with Peter for so long? Still, I think she’ll want to see you. If I’m right, can you stay in Atlanta for another day?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, then, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go call her now.” He nodded to me and slipped out a side door, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I felt stunned and winded, slapped in the face by a past that had been both so rich and so unfortunate. As I gazed at the paintings surrounding me, I felt a strange blend of sadness and hope. I pulled out my iPhone and snapped a few more pictures of the paintings, because I didn’t want to forget them. I wanted to be able to show my father too.

Fromm returned a moment later. “Ingrid would like to see you tomorrow morning at eight. If that’s agreeable, I can give you her address.”

I nodded, and he said he’d call to confirm the arrangements. On our way out of the warehouse, he added, “You are welcome back here anytime, Emily. This is your history. And please, bring your father as well. But I’m afraid that for now, I must go. I have things to attend to.”

“Of course. Thank you so much for showing me all of this.”

Fromm nodded solemnly. He pulled a notepad from his pocket, scribbled down Ingrid’s address, and handed it to me. Then, he grasped both of my shoulders and looked into my eyes. “My dear Emily, I knew your grandfather for more than seventy years. So I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that he would have been glad to know you. He always dreamed of having a family.”

“Thank you. For everything, Mr. Fromm.”

“My pleasure, my dear.” He smiled, gave my shoulders one last squeeze, and headed for his car.

As I walked back to my own car, I was thinking about my grandparents, but I was also thinking about Nick. My story wasn’t like my grandparents’. Nick wasn’t lost. I had driven him away myself, and I had to accept that. But in order to move on—to pick myself up and try again, like Arno Fromm said—there was one more thing I needed to do.

Forty minutes later, with the help of Google Maps, I was pulling off the highway in Decatur, a town I hadn’t seen in nearly nineteen years. Coming back to Atlanta had been difficult, because it had forced me to confront my childhood, but Decatur was where all my ghosts resided. It was the town I’d lived in when my father left and my mother died. It was where I’d met Nick, and where we’d conceived Catherine. It was home, and it was also a place that I knew I had to face sooner or later, because it was a piece of the past I’d been trying to run from. I had to make a change now, or I never would.

I drove first down Hemlock Lane, the side street where I used to live, and I was surprised and somewhat jarred to see my old house repainted from blue to white. There was a tricycle propped on its side out front and a rope swing hanging from the old oak tree I used to climb. It wasn’t my home anymore, though,
and I forced myself to turn right at the street’s end without looking back.

I drove next to my old high school, Ernest Evans High. It had changed a lot in the last two decades—a new sign out front, a completely rebuilt entryway, metal detectors at some of the entrances—but it was familiar enough to put a lump in my throat. The moss-draped oak outside the cafeteria, whose shade I had often used while gazing into Nick’s eyes, was still there, but it seemed taller and wider. Had it grown that much in nineteen years, or was I remembering incorrectly? Memories, I knew, couldn’t be entirely trusted.

I headed away from the school, passing Nick’s childhood house, but I didn’t slow down. It, too, was in the past. It was where Nick had first told me he loved me—in his bedroom, the third window from the right upstairs—and where we’d made Catherine. It was the beginning and the end. And now I had to put it to rest.

Finally, I arrived at Decatur Cemetery, on the edge of town. I cut the ignition and took a deep breath, but I didn’t move. Finally, I pulled myself together and got out of the car. And then, as if I’d been coming here all the time, I made a beeline for my mother’s grave.

I hadn’t been here since the day I fled town all those years ago. I’d come then to tell her the bittersweet news that she would be a grandmother—but that I’d have to say good-bye. I’d felt a tugging at my heart then, a whisper in the wind telling me to stay, but I thought it was just my conscience speaking. I had to get out. I had to save myself.