The Imperfects Page 11

  Now, all the cream-colored walls have been painted lavish colors. The house’s natural scent of floral perfume and cigarettes has been buried beneath the aromas of curry powder, hot peppers, and sage.

  “I added some color,” Deborah confesses when she finds Beck staring at the teal walls of the living room.

  Beck turns to her mother, ready to lash out, only Deborah is visibly nervous, eager for her daughter’s approval. Moving here must be more complicated for Deborah than Beck understands.

  So, Beck fights the urge to tell her mother she’s ruined their house and instead lies. “It’s perfect.”

  Deborah sighs, clearly relieved.

  After dinner, Beck follows her mother through the peach hall into Helen’s now mint-colored bedroom, cloaked in piles of Deborah’s clothes. The closet door is closed, and Beck realizes that her mother hasn’t opened it yet.

  The closet is the only part of the house that still smells like Helen. The scent of mothballs, cigarettes, and floral perfume has intensified after being trapped in the windowless space. The clothes rack is brimming with bright pantsuits, wool slacks, collared blouses. Above Helen’s clothing, cardboard boxes are stacked neatly. Below, a row of orthopedic beige shoes.

  They begin with the clothes, creating two piles, one to keep and one to give away. At first, everything ends up in the keep pile, but what are they going to do with the plaid pants Helen made, the silk blouses, the wool blazer that does not complement either of their styles?

  “Maybe we can box them up and put them in the guest room closet?” Beck suggests.

  The shoes are a different matter. Helen was not a cobbler. They swiftly bag them and toss them in the giveaway pile.

  “What are in those boxes?” Beck points to the ones above the empty clothes rack.

  Deborah shrugs and reaches for the first box. It’s filled with ledgers from before Beck was born, shorthand for services she only partially understands. DR must mean dress, but what is MG? Everything is priced lower than Beck would have expected for tailored clothes, even in 1962.

  “I guess this is why we never had meat more than once a week,” Deborah says, flipping through the ledgers.

  When they’ve read through Helen’s records, Beck and Deborah return the box to the shelf and reach for another. The next one is filled with photographs of women they do not recognize, a few actions shots where Helen is taking their measurements. In one photo, Helen stands beside a bride at a reception hall. Helen’s cheeks look artificially blushed, her blue dress impossibly sapphire.

  They pull down the third box, anticipating more relics of Helen’s seamstress career. Deborah hopes she’s hiding her disappointment from her daughter. This was what Helen kept in her closet, photographs of strangers’ weddings?

  Beck emits a sharp breath when she opens the third box. A tattered doll, wearing a blue dress with an apron, rests on top of two photo albums. Disproportionately large, aquamarine-blue eyes stare back at her. The doll’s nose and the mouth are small, giving it an otherworldly look. Its shoulder-length hair is brown and coarse. The doll’s head and limbs are made of peach porcelain, browned in spots where grubby hands must have held it. “Was this yours?”

  Deborah shakes her head. With its large red cheeks and distorted features, the doll would have given her nightmares as a child. “I’ve never seen it before.” After a pause, she adds, “Do you think it was Helen’s?”

  “Who else’s could it be?” Beck turns the doll over, inspecting it. She lifts the dress, and on the cushioned body a faint red stamp reads Made in Austria.

  “She must have brought it from Vienna,” Deborah says as she takes the doll from her daughter and hugs it to her chest. The porcelain limbs, while dirt-stained, are free of chips or cracks. A slip of the finger, a grip too loose, and the doll would have shattered. Instead, it had survived the carelessness of youth, the voyage to another life.

  Deborah maintains a firm grip on the doll as Beck pulls out the two photo albums. They sit on Helen’s bed, flipping through the first album. It’s filled with several Miller milestones: Beck’s kindergarten graduation, Jake’s first guitar recital, Ashley’s My Little Pony–themed birthday, Jake’s and Ashley’s high school graduations, Beck’s college graduation party celebrated in the living room downstairs.

  In one photograph, they are in the backyard of the house in Mt. Airy. Jake looks to be about eleven, frizzy curls blossoming into his signature style. Ashley must have been twelve, but looks several years older. Beck smiles, her oversized adult teeth having recently grown in, a piece of watermelon dangling from her right hand. Beside her, the picture is torn, ragged at the edges, and retaped so that Deborah stands beside her children. Their father’s hand is the only part of him that remains in the photograph. It grips their mother’s shoulder, disembodied.

  Deborah laughs. It is the perfect gesture to describe Helen. Seemingly harsh; fundamentally protective.

  “I’m keeping this.” Deborah rests the doll on the bed as she peels the plastic sheet back to remove the picture.

  Like the first album, the photographs in the second book are chronological, beginning with black-and-white images from before Deborah was born. Deborah has seen some of the photographs of her grandmother Flora, her grandfather Leib, her uncle Martin, their family’s stall in the Fleischmarkt. Shots of them picnicking along the Danube and visiting the Vienna Woods where Leib could recite the Latin name for every plant they encountered. Whether these were the actual names or something he made up to awe his children, Helen never knew or cared.

  “You can’t tell from these photos,” Deborah tells her daughter, “but your great-grandmother Flora had the most glorious red hair.”

  “And Helen never learned what happened to her family?” Beck asks, staring at a shot of Flora, Leib, Martin, and Helen in what looks to be their modest living room.

  Deborah shakes her head. “Her brother and dad were sent to Dachau, so they probably died there. I don’t think she ever learned what happened to her mother. When the Holocaust Museum opened in the ’90s, I remember her looking, but she didn’t find any information on her.” Deborah stares at the photograph in her daughter’s hand. “I wish I’d known them. My father, too. Sometimes I wonder how my life would be different if he hadn’t died, if he’d come back from Korea.”

  Deborah was only three months old when Joseph Klein was deployed, then two years old when he died. Helen rarely talked about him, never took Deborah to visit his grave, always changed the subject when Deborah begged for stories about her father similar to the ones Helen told about her family in Vienna. She’d explain that she’d only known him for a few months before they married, that he was almost as much of a stranger to her as he was to Deborah. “Your father died a hero. That’s more than most people can say,” Helen would tell her. “I wish we’d both gotten to know him better.” Rarely one for physical displays of emotion, Helen’s eyes would well, which made young Deborah feel a complicated mix of remorse and longing. It pained her mother to discuss the future they’d lost, but it made Deborah wish she could know more about her father. Ultimately, the loss of Joseph Klein was another thing that distanced Helen and Deborah when it could have brought them closer.

  Deborah sniffles, and Beck feels something akin to guilt that she doesn’t know the loneliness of her mother’s childhood, but the feeling quickly calcifies. Her mother doesn’t know the loneliness of Beck’s youth, either.

  Deborah feels something shift in Beck, the evening at risk of falling apart. Though the details were different, she’d repeated the pattern between her and Helen with her own children, separating herself from them to avoid confronting what was missing in their lives. “You know I have lots of regrets,” she begins, “about how I was after your father left. I... I should never have... I should have been there for you and your siblings.”

  Beck cannot look at her mother. Although she’s been waiting for
a more eloquent version of this apology, her mother’s timing is predictably terrible.

  Beck continues flipping through the album, reaching a few photos of Helen holding a baby. Even as an infant, Deborah’s high forehead and square jaw were evident.

  Deborah surveys her daughter instead of the photographs in the album. Is there anything she can say that will make Beck forgive her? Anything that will justify her mistakes? Not justify; make them human instead of monstrous.

  “Who is this?”

  Deborah turns her attention to a black-and-white photograph of a man she doesn’t recognize, sitting in the living room downstairs, Deborah propped on his knee.

  “Is that your father?” Beck peels back the plastic sheet and holds the photo close to her face. There’s an obvious resemblance between Deborah and this man, same long slender noses, same high foreheads, square jawlines, wide-set eyes. “It can’t be. He’s got to be, like, fifty. He would have been too old for Korea. Maybe he’s your grandfather? Did you ever meet your father’s family?”

  “No. They were in the Midwest or something.” Deborah leans over her daughter’s shoulder and feels her stomach drop. She has no memory of this moment, yet she feels an innate yearning as she looks at this unfamiliar man.

  “Um, Deborah?”

  Deborah follows her daughter’s finger to another photograph of the man, this one from a dark restaurant. Helen is seated beside him in a booth, his arm around her bare shoulders. Two champagne coupes rest on the table. A banner in the background reads Happy New Year, 1955. Helen wears her hair up, accentuating her sweetheart neckline beneath a fur stole. On the right side of Helen’s stole, the orchid brooch clings to the fur.

  In 1955, Deborah’s father was dead. In 1955, Deborah was the daughter of a widow. In the photograph, a band is visible on the man’s ring finger but Helen’s fingers are bare.

  They flip through more photographs from Atlantic City and Fairmount Park of Helen and the man. Some where Deborah is nestled between them. Others where they only have eyes for each other.

  In first grade, Deborah’s class had been assigned family trees. When she asked her mother for help, Helen had grown furious. “What kind of assignment is this? Prying into students’ lives.” At the time, Deborah thought her mother’s reaction was because of the trauma of her family’s deaths during the Holocaust, of her war-hero husband killed in Korea, the inappropriateness of making a first grader parade that kind of tragedy before her classmates. If these photographs have anything to say about it, Helen may have being hiding another secret unsuitable for the first grade.

  Deborah shuts the album. “That’s enough for one night.”

  “Can I make you some tea?” Beck asks as she stands from the bed.

  “I’m fine.” Deborah struggles to smile. “This has just been...a lot.”

  As Beck walks out with the album tucked under her arm, Deborah calls to her. “Can you leave the album?”

  Beck rests the album on the dresser where she found the orchid brooch. She doesn’t want this to be the story of the Florentine or her grandfather’s identity. Yet, this photograph from New Year’s Eve is invaluable. It means Helen has had the diamond since at least 1955. As she says good-night to her mother, she wonders how many other secrets lay dormant in Helen’s bedroom, how many truths the Millers will be able to uncover about their grandmother.

  Seven

  Two weeks have passed since Helen’s shiva, and already strange things are beginning to happen. Things that can only be explained by the presence of the Florentine Diamond. Ashley is the first to notice. Since she’s returned from Philadelphia, she’s started swimming again, a ritual from her childless days in the city. It’s less expensive than therapy and more effective. Right now, Ashley needs an inexpensive outlet for her anger toward Ryan. Despite his continued insistence that he’ll sort through the misunderstanding with his company, nothing will vanquish the memory of Ryan cowering in the corner of their bathroom, his anxiety as he told Ashley he’d ruined everything.

  As she pulls into the YWCA parking lot, a dark sedan turns in behind her.

  An hour and a half later, Ashley’s hair is wet from the shower, her muscles fatigued and head cleared by the swim. It’s drizzling, and Ashley dashes toward her car, past the dark sedan parked in one of the handicap spots. It doesn’t have a disabled placard. The driver is a dapper middle-aged white man. He looks up from the newspaper he’s reading and flashes a neighborly smile at Ashley that makes her think he’s waiting for his wife to finish her aerobics class.

  Ashley heads straight from the pool to the library, eating her premade salad when she’s stopped at red lights. She takes massive bites, unable to shovel the food into her ravenous body quickly enough. It’s one of those moments when the car gives her a false sense of privacy. It does not have tinted windows. Everyone around her can see her behaving like a pig. Embarrassed, she glances into the rearview mirror and sees the dark sedan stopped at the light behind her. The man is good-looking in the way she often finds attractive, the tall, dark, and handsome type. The way Ryan is good-looking. For the first time since she found him on the bathroom floor, she feels a pulse of desire for her husband.

  Ashley turns the stereo up as she navigates the familiar streets toward the library. When she steers her car into the underground parking lot, the sedan rolls down the tunnel behind her. The man is alone in the car. No wife in spandex. Why was he parked outside the Y if he wasn’t there to pick someone up? Maybe he was waiting out the rain? It’s a bit odd. Then again, people are odd. She shrugs it off as she heads up to the library.

  In addition to the pool, Ashley has started visiting the local library each afternoon. After her disastrous meeting with Georgina, Ashley shifted her efforts from trying to sell the diamond to trying to prove that it’s legally hers. Only problem is Ashley had no idea how to begin researching Helen’s past. She’d wandered into the library, looking for a dummy’s guide to ancestry, and instead found Clara, the head librarian.

  Clara is not a researcher but an avid recreational user of ancestry.com. She’s traced her own family back to the Vikings and enthusiastically offered her support when Ashley asked her about genealogical resources. Clara showed Ashley how to use ancestry.com. Together, they located the most recently available census from 1940, where they were pleased to discover that Helen was boarding on Monument Street in Philadelphia. Ashley hadn’t realized that in 1940 Helen was already living in the US, only fourteen years old, which made her ninety-two when she passed in March. She’d assumed her grandmother was closer to one hundred.

  From there, Clara helped Ashley make a family tree, which she called the Miller Family Tree, even though no one on it was a Miller other than Deborah, Beck, and Jake, not even Helen. Not even Ashley Johnson. After Ashley added the Millers and Helen, she included Ryan, her children. While she was unable to locate Helen’s birth certificate or her great-grandparents’ marriage license, she knew Helen’s family’s names enough to fill them on the tree: Flora, Leib, and Martin Auerbach. To add more ancestors, she needed more information.

  Deborah quickly became defensive when Ashley asked for Flora’s maiden name.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” she said. “I know she taught Helen how to sew and had bright red hair, but Helen never told me her maiden name.”

  “Do you know when she died?”

  “Don’t you think if I had that kind of information I would have told you? Helen’s dad and brother were shipped to Dachau, but she never found out what happened to Flora.”

  “What about your father?” Ashley asked. When she’d typed “Joseph Klein” into the database, over 70,000 hits had popped up. She limited the search to military records, but no casualty or service records appeared for Joseph Klein in Korea.

  “Leave it alone,” Deborah cautioned.

  “Helen must have told you something that might help me find him. Where
was he deployed? When was he born? Where was he from?”

  “I said to leave it be.” Deborah’s voice had an unusual curtness to it.

  When Ashley reported their mother’s strange behavior to Beck, Beck explained the photographs they found in Helen’s closet, the man who looked like Deborah but was too old to have fought in Korea.

  “So Joseph Klein isn’t our grandfather?” Ashley asked her sister.

  “I’m not sure there was a Joseph Klein, at least not one that Helen knew. I did some digging and didn’t find anything.”

  Momentarily, Ashley felt guilty for being so forceful with their mother. Then she realized that it barely took any investigating to know something was amiss with Helen’s story. For years, Deborah must not have asked about her father.

  The tree looked anemic with just the Auerbachs, the Millers, and the Johnsons on it, but Ashley had run out of extended family to explore. Well, more Millers could have been added. It would have been easy to find her father Kenny’s family, but she refused to indulge that curiosity. So she saved the Miller Family Tree with just those eleven names, fearing she’d never locate more family.

  Today, as Ashley approaches the reference desk, Clara motions for Ashley to hurry. “I’ve been waiting for you all morning. You’ll never guess what I found.”

  As Ashley leans over Clara’s shoulder, she feels a flurry of anticipation. Clara smells like white musk. She wears a dress with book graphics on it. She’s unlike Ashley’s other friends, which makes Ashley like her even more.

  Clara clicks on a link to the New York, Passenger and Crew Lists, 1820–1957 and a record for Helen Auerbach pops up on the manifest from the SS President Harding, sailing from Hamburg to New York on April 23, 1939.

  Halfway down the page, Helen Auerbach is listed on the manifest. Fourteen years old; Occupation: pupil; Able to read and write: German; Country of birth: Germany; City: Vienna; Race or people: Hebrew.