2009
Prologue
The Girl with Her Back to the Camera |
Nell paused at the open doorway. She stood flanked by her 17 and 22-year-old daughters. Kat was a lanky high school student and pink-hair Brittany a college senior.
For years, the downstairs bedroom had served as her deceased mother’s study. The glow of the Southern California sun, filtering through the golden curtains, revealed that the space had become a jumble, in contrast to the tidy order, which had characterized her mother’s house when she was alive.
Nell crossed the room and parted the drapes. Through the north-facing window, Gray-domed Mount Baldy and its brother peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains regarded her like silent sentinels.
Along the opposite wall, half in shade, were bookcases, vacant cavities now. They looked like thin old men who had been unburdened of the volumes that Nell’s mother had been accumulating since the beginning of time. Fortunately, a former colleague accepted all the books and hauled them away.
Nell’s girls fanned out from the doorway and moved around the room, silently surveying the piles of boxes and grocery bags of household items that had been gathered and sorted by their mother and aunt. The computer, printer/scanner and giant monitor that had dominated the old woman’s desk had been removed. A few crumpled post-its lie around where the screen had sat.
“Over there in the corner—that’s all trash,” Nell pointed out. “This little pile here we will take home. The rest goes to Goodwill.”
“Okay, what do you want me to do?” Brittany groused. Nell’s oldest may be close to graduating from college but at times had the sullen attitude of an adolescent middle child.
“Well, first,” her mother answered, “there are photos all over the house. Your Grand Mom had so many. Gather them up and take the pictures out of the frames. Put the frames in a box for Goodwill and the photos . . . over there, with that stuff we’ll sort out later.”
Kat wandered over to the trash heap and looked down at the assorted jumble.
“What are these?” she asked, bending over and picking up two old paperback composition tablets. The paper had yellowed and looked as dry as fall leaves. The girl opened one and flipped through a few pages. She smiled.
“What’d you find, Indiana Jones?” Brittany asked. Kat handed her one of the workbooks.
“These must be Grand Mom’s diaries,” Kat said. “When she was a teenager, I guess. Mom, why are you throwing these out?”
“You want to read the pouting of a teenage girl?”
“When she’s Grand Mom, yes I do. And I don’t think she was a pouter. Even when she was a kid.”
Nell should have known better than make the comment. Kat had a special bound with her grandmother.
“You can have her diaries,” Nell said, resigning to the inevitable, even if the girl didn’t need more stuff to add to the clutter in her bedroom. “Put them down for now. We have things to do.”
The girl grinned and instead of putting the composition book aside, stooped and pulled others out of the trash.
Brittany had opened the one she held and started to flip through the pages as she walked back to her grandmother’s desk.
“God. Most of these are written in hieroglyphs. Can you believe? Even when she was a kid she knew that stuff. Hah, look! Mickey Mouse.” She showed the page to her mother, who really didn’t want to look, but she had to admit the figure formed of three circles looked like the Disney icon. In the middle of the page three words in English stood out—College Why Not.
“This one’s in English.” The younger sister handed the tablet up to Brittany, who looked at the spin.
“1941. Isn’t that the year Pearl Harbor was bombed?”
Nell glared at her daughters.
“Come on girls. Let’s get to work.”
“Okay,” Brittany mumbled and dropped the diary on the stack her sister had begun building.
“Kat, you can get those later. Help me in Grand Mom’s bedroom.”
* * * * *
In contrast to books, Nell’s mom had routinely disposed of clothes she no longer wore. The garments left were nice and relatively new—articles that would be considered upscale in a thrift shop.
“Grand Mom’s bedroom has such a fresh scent,” Kat said, carefully folding a cashmere sweater. “She didn’t smell like an old woman.”
Brittany trudged into the bedroom with a stack of photos in her hand.
“Okay, I took all the pictures out of all the frames I could find. Who’s Rebekah Wolff?”
Brittany handed her mother a sepia tone photo of a woman. The picture looked like it had been taken in the forties. The woman had kind but wise old eyes.
Nell shook her head.
“And who’s this man?” She held up a photo of a white-haired man in a robe. “Was Grand Mom once in a cult or something?”
“That’s a headshot of an old-time actor. Your grandmother was a big movie fan. Is it autographed?”
“No,” Brittany said and flipped the picture over. “Lost Horizon is stamped on the back. I guess that’s a movie.”
“Can I have it?” Kat asked, reaching up for the photo.
“I don’t want to see you selling it on eBay.”
“Gee, like you think I would.”
Brittany joined her mother and sister going through drawers, placing clothing on the bed, folding and sorting.
“Mom,” Kat said. She had been pulling items out of the night stand. “This book looks like you defaced it when you were a kid.”
Nell had no memory of marking up any of her mother’s books. Heaven forbid.
On the title page, the name Heinrich had been crossed out and above the name was clearly printed, in her mother’s hand, “Nelly.” A book in German, Ein Ernstes Leben by Heinrich Mann.
“I didn’t start going by my middle name until college. Your Grand Mom did that. I have no idea why.”
Kat created a potpourri of pastel notes and cards when she dumped the contents of the bottom drawer of the night stand onto the corner of the bed, dismantling whatever order the salutations may have been in. Amongst the paper jumble Nelly noticed a cameo brooch.
“This looks old,” she said, pulling the adornment out of the clutter. A purplish black ribbon that had, no doubt, once been a shimmering, jet threaded through the tarnished mounting.
“Is that an Egyptian artifact?” Brittany asked.
“It looks Italian,” Nell said. And very old.
Her daughter eyed the peach-colored piece, considering its possibilities as some kind of fashion bauble. It matched the hue of her pink hair.
“Can I have it? I think it looks cool.”
* * * * *
When the three finished for the day, Nell drove them home. Brittany sat next to her, thumbing the iPhone she held a few inches from her nose. The brooch hung around her neck. Kat lounged in the back seat between piles of her grandmother’s diaries. As she flipped through one of the composition books. Nell watched her in the rearview mirror, noting her wispy smile and somber eyes.
“Did you know that Grand Mom had a boyfriend when she was in high school?” Kat said in a bright tone.
“She always said she wasn’t into boys when she was in high school,” Nell replied. Her mother had been a self-proclaimed wall-flower as a kid.
“Well, she had a boyfriend named Karl. And he took her to the junior prom.”
“I never heard about that.”
“She wrote all about making her dress. Wow, they really made their own gowns in those days?”
“Yes. Some people still do.”
Nell heard her daughter put down one diary and pick up another.
“Ooh,” Kat purred. “She just saw the movie Of Mice and Men. I read that book in the tenth grade. February 24, 1940. Grand Mom thought the story of George and Lenny sad. She didn’t mention anything else that day except she saw the movie at the Bruin with Brother Rat and Baby. That’s a strange title. Would that be an old Disney animated film?”
“I don’t think so,” her mother said. She then remembered something that made her feel wistful, like she had touched something forgotten but precious found in the back of an old cabinet drawer.
“Kat, did you know when your Grand Mom was about your age, she met Charlie Chaplin?”
Brittany put the phone in her lap and turned to look at her mother.
“Wasn’t Charlie Chaplin, you know, into teenage girls?”
Nell had never made that connection. She knew the meeting was special to her mother, but maybe it was for reason she had never revealed.
“She always spoke fondly of Charlie Chaplin,” she admitted.
“Gee. My grandmother had a fling with a famous movie star.”
“That doesn’t sound like her,” Kat said. There was a defiant tone in the girl’s voice. Glancing at the rearview mirror, Nell saw the girl’s glaring eyes fixed on her sister.
“Well, maybe she did,” Brittany replied.
Like boiling water in a pot taken off the stove, the bubbly chattered ceased. Nell drove on, thinking about her mother, not sure what to make of Brittany’s interpretation.
“Mom,” Kat said. “Did you see this? Grand Mom printed this from the Internet and stuck it in one of these hieroglyph diaries.”
“I can’t see. I’m driving.”
“It shows a couple of African American businessmen walking through a parachute plant. The caption of the picture reads ‘Eddie Rochester Anderson and Howard Skippy Smith touring their company, Pacific Parachute.’ In the picture one woman has her back to the camera. Grand Mom drew an arrow and wrote, ‘Me.’ She must have worked there.”
Nell had no idea. She thought her mother worked in a flashlight factory during the war. She may have told her about a parachute job, but that would have been so long ago, when Nell herself was a kid. Her mother had told her lots of things about growing up, but Nell tended to tune her out. When she was a kid, she had no interest in stories about the “Dark Ages” as her mother called her childhood and adolescence. Nell would rather listen to music and play sports.
“Here’s a Christmas card from Helga Schneider. How did this get in the 1945 diary? It’s from 1972.”
“Who’s Helga Schneider?” Brittany asked.
“She was your Grand Mom’s neighbor,” Nell said. “In West Los Angeles, during the war. Grand Mom always called World War Two ‘the war.’ When I was a kid, we used to visit Helga. She had a thick German accent. She loved to bake and made delicious bread. Is there a note in the card?”
“The note. . . . It’s in German. I guess it’s German.”
“Probably just a Christmas greeting. I guess we’ll never know.”
“I’ll use Google to translate.”
“She and her husband were so lucky,” Nell observed. “Imagine! They left Germany before the war. They got away from Hitler and the Nazis. Coming to California must have been like going to heaven, living on the border of Santa Monica, so close to Hollywood. Girls, can you imagine back then? All those movie stars.”
Brittany and Kat did not respond. They sat absorbed in their own worlds, one preoccupied with her phone, the other with the catch of brittle composition books.
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1941
Chapter 1
Metropolitan Tahiti |
“Max, I must say again, we have come to live on the very edge of the earth.”
Helga and Max Schneider stood in the small front yard of their new home, a stucco bungalow on Wellesley Avenue. The street was on the western border of Los Angeles and only a short distance from the gray Pacific Ocean. Their children, Jonathon and Marlene, played on the grass with a partially deflated sun-bleached ball the boy had found in the street gutter.
Helga held herself against the late spring coolness. A hint of mist crept through the air in advance of the evening fog—nothing as cold as she had known in Germany but a chill that somehow felt more penetrating.
She watched their landlord, Fred Nakamizo, tend his plot of lima beans on the lot across the street. The short Asian waddled down the furrows between the thick stringy plants growing over the dark earth, stooping, at times, to inspect a spot of the knotted harvest on the lookout for evidence of gophers and other pests.
“Palm trees. Orange groves. Movie studios,” Max said.
“I’m not Greta Garbo and you’re not Peter Lorre. You don’t even enjoy the cinema or citrus fruit.”
“I have a full professorship at a young university,” he replied. “There are also many of our countrymen in this city, people who speak our language.”
The other Germans were émigrés who had been forced to flee to the United States. They referred to Los Angeles as Metropolitan Tahiti. The city was at the same time bright and dull, exotic and ordinary, rich and vacant, a sprawling metropolitan unlike any they had known in Europe.
“Radical philosophers, communist writers, actors, composers. These people are not part of our circle,” Helga said, wearily shaking her head.
“Yes, but most are not so bad. Can’t some of them be part of our circle, as you say?”
Helga looked down at the ground. Her fair complexion appeared pale. Her once straw blonde hair had gradually turned to lightly burnt butter, dull and somber in the gray afternoon. Still, at twenty-seven, thirteen years younger than Max, she could pass for nineteen.
“I don’t fit here,” she finally said. She wanted to pose that as a question instead of making a statement. She was beginning to sound like her mother—a harpy.
“Helga, you will adapt.”
“I don’t agree!” Her tone surprised her as much as it did Max. She sounded like her mother berating her father.
“Well then, think of our lives this way,” he replied, his eyes drifting off in the detached, airy look he often assumed when formulating a response to a question concerning an academic subject. “We are part of the great movement of European Intelligentsia who have found a home here. You should embrace our new status.”
In the 1930s and early 1940s the world experienced a migration unlike any witnessed before. Many important minds and some of the greatest authorities in physics, medicine, philosophy, literature, cinema, theater, history, music, and all the other sciences and arts left their homes in central Europe. They fled their countries in fear for their lives. Most were Jews, but some were political thorns to the Nazis like the Noble laureate Thomas Mann. Others, like the famous actress Marlene Dietrich, were simply unwilling to live under Hitler’s “New Order.”
While this flood of intellects found many places to settle, the young city of Los Angeles ultimately became home to the largest number. Having an outlook and manner defined by the old world, these immigrants now found themselves stranded in a modern place with, at most, a superficial link to any tradition.
The Schneiders were not part of this exodus and, contrary to what Max said, did not share the same “status” with the intellectual refugees. Unlike the émigrés, who were stripped of their citizenship and forced to leave their homelands with little more than the clothing on their backs, Max and Helga still had German passports and their possessions. They could return to Germany, if they wished—and if the British blockade of ships bound to the European continent did not prevent the journey.
Helga frowned.
“Many are as anti-establishment as the Nazis. Their excesses and decadence during the Weimar Republic made that man Hitler seem like a savior of German virtue. God only knows what their indulgences will bring down on all of us in this place.”
The two had had versions of this conversation before. Normally a sociable person, Helga felt uncomfortable with the avant-garde tastes and Marxist views of many of the émigré. Because of this, she had avoided making friends and found herself alone.
“At least they don’t burn books or crack skulls,” Max replied, oblivious to the real issue. “And as far as what will happen here, some will, I am sure, find themselves unwelcomed and be forced to leave. The rest, including you and me, will go on with what we do.”
Helga watched Nakamizo move deliberately through his field pausing from time to time to inspect something that only a person of the soil would recognize. He wore knee-high rubber boots caked with mud from the furrows.
“I never understood why we left Germany in the first place.” She had said this many times, but never received a satisfactory explanation.
“I had an opportunity in Paris,” he replied, giving his usual answer.
In 1934 Max, rather abruptly and without discussing their moving, had secured an academic position at the French Université de Paris et de la Sorbonne. His teaching at the school had been a dismal experience, although he never admitted it. Max, like so many German men, kept the troubles of his professional life to himself.
“I wish we had returned to Germany before the war instead of coming here. The Nazis never would have noticed you.”
Max’s mouth twitched. He looked down at their children.
“Forget that I would have had to swear an oath to Hitler in order to teach. Think of Jonathon and Marlene.”
The two-year-old girl glanced up and smiled at her father.
Helga wearily shook her head.
“It would have been an empty oath. And as for our children, they will now be Americans and in time speak only English.” This inevitable consequence of living in America had troubled her for months.
“They would be forced to be Nazis,” her husband answered dryly. “Members of the Hitler Youth, saluting their teachers and elders with the sieg heil.”
Helga continued to shake her head.
“When we return to Germany, we will be with family. I hate the wind and the loneliness of this place. I have no one to talk to. My English is so poor. The neighbors—what neighbors there are around these empty streets—must think I’m an idiot, smiling and nodding at everything they say.”
Max had picked this house for her. Inconvenient for him in relation to the university, the empty yard in the back allowed her to plant a vegetable garden, something she once enjoyed tending in Germany. The soil was rich, the weather fair, but she had still not determined what would grow—other than the landlord’s cash crops. Max hoped for asparagus.
“And if the United States goes to war,” she added, revealing a worry she hadn’t spoken.
“We can expect to experience the same trouble we faced in France,” Max said dryly.
“I cannot go through that again,” she answered.
“That will not come to pass. Hitler’s ambitions are in Europe, and the American people do not want to see their men sent off to war. Just read the newspapers.”
The two silently watched Nakamizo cross his field and return home.
Helga pointed up to the sky and smiled.
“Black birds. There are so many black birds here.”
“They are common birds.”
“They leave droppings on the laundry,” Helga replied, smirking.
“I’ll make you a scarecrow.”
“Don’t! I like the black birds. They chase off the feral cats. I’d rather have the birds than the cats.”
The teenage girl who lived in the house at the other end of their block came down the street on her bike, returning home from school, Helga assumed. The woman had seen her from time to time but had never talked to her.
The girl whisked by, pushing the petals down with strong legs, steering the bike around the pits in the gray spider-webbed pavement. She had thick, brown curly hair that flew in different directions and flapped down her neck. She glanced in their direction, smiled and waved.
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Chapter 2
Shangri-La |
As Helga Schneider had guessed, Trudy Mansfield was riding her bike home from school.
Halfway to Wellesley, Trudy had begun daydreaming about Lost Horizon, a movie she admitted to seeing twice but had actually seen four times. Most of the story took place in hidden Shangri-La. This secret garden valley remained untouched by war and misery. The rising forces of the fascist powers threatening the modern world could not penetrate the massive barrier of the giant snowy mountains which kept Shangri-La a veiled refuge, about which elderly Hindu priests reverently and guardedly whispered.
Daydreams often lifted Trudy out of self-conscious discomfort, and this afternoon, she needed daydreams. The residue of an unsettling experience earlier in the day throbbed in her mind like a festering bee sting.
If there was one truth Trudy wholly believed about herself, it was that she was blatantly unattractive, and today, this unpleasant self-appraisal was set off, once again, by her friend Susan French chatting about the boy she was taking to the “Sadie Hawkins” dance. After going on and on about her dress and how perfect she expected the evening to be, Susan then looked inquisitively at Trudy and asked whom she would invite. Trudy felt the heat fill her face as she fibbed about a promise she had made to her mother to go to Claremont on a family visit that weekend.
At the moment, Trudy felt like Sadie, the character from the Lil’ Abner comic strip, the “homeliest gal” in the world. There was, of course, a critical difference. Fast, devious, and determined, Sadie Hawkins chased boys. Trudy shied away.
Trudy brooded about how unfair puberty had been. She was ugly. About that she had no doubt. She could not see what others recognized—that the course from childhood to becoming an adult had begun to reveal attractive features. All she saw were the migrating red blotches and white-tipped pimples spattering her cheeks, forehead and chin. She dismally concluded that her eyes were not a pretty sapphire blue, like Susan’s, nor a pleasant brown. No, her irises looked something like tiny pots of stewed-vegetables, a dull green with floating stalks of over cooked meat edging around the pits of her pupils. She also fretted over her hair. The mop remained a thick frizzy mess of boring brown tangled tresses, a jumbled mass no matter how much she brushed or how she tied it back. She did not see her strong cheek bones and finely shaped nose nor understand that she had simply not learned how to master her rich curly hair. Neither had she come to appreciate that she had beautiful hazel eyes which already dominated her face. She could not see ahead to the time when her complexion, giving her such despair, would clear and the aftermath of adolescent acne would be covered with a whisk of makeup. Her crooked lower teeth were the only real imperfection, but in time she could learn to hide them when speaking or smiling by barely parting her lips, like many women not blessed with pretty teeth.
At fifteen, she was not opened to any positive assessment about her appearance and mentally discounted compliments given by her mother and other adults. Every day, the evil magic mirror on her bedroom wall showed her what she took as truth.
As she rode her bike, she pushed into the chilly breeze which blew off the ocean in the afternoon, the cool air numbing her cheeks and picking at her sweater. Feeling this, she imagined the icy cold wind blowing down snow banks in the Himalayas and pretended to be searching for the tunnel in the mountain, the passage to the hidden valley. The Shangri-La of Lost Horizon was her refuge where the peaceful residents not only enjoyed contentment and health but had great knowledge and a deep understanding of life’s mysteries. The high Lama, who had guided the people of Shangri-La for hundreds of years, revealed to the British hero, Robert Conway, the deep but simple truth to this happy life, a formula for eventual world peace summarized by the maxim, “Be Kind.” Trudy had been so touched by his words that she begged her friend Joan Fulbright, whose father worked at Columbia Studios, to secure a picture of the wise old man. The photograph now hung framed on Trudy’s bedroom wall.
As far back as she could remember, Trudy had been enchanted by the idea of discovering the remains of some forgotten people and bringing their stories to light. While Susan and other girls daydreamed about boys and romance, Trudy had a secret fascination for ancient ruins and lost civilizations. Her parent’s meager book collection contained a copy of The Dawn of Civilzation, and she loved to look at the pictures to see what discoveries had been unearthed by archeologists and the upper crust of ancient culture excavators, the Egyptologists. She read the text and studied and restudied the book’s smoky photographs of broken statues and ruins of ancient temples so many times that the book’s binding had become floppy. She told no one of her obsession, sure her friends and family would laugh. People were fascinated with modern advances, not mysteries of old, buried cultures. They wanted to know what wonderful new invention would appear tomorrow, not who invented the wheel.
Still floating through the Tibetan Himalayas, Trudy saw
the German couple when she turned onto Wellesley. She smiled at the two as she passed and waved. The woman smiled and waved back. The man seemed to nod.
She had been curious about the German family since they had moved into the house. The man looked like a professional, maybe a lawyer or an accountant. In the morning, he walked to work, down the weeded curb to the bus stop, always in a dark suit, wearing a somber fedora and carrying a scuffed leather briefcase. He appeared so European and formal, completely out of character for the neighborhood.
Trudy glided her bicycle up her driveway and passed under the carport. She parked her bike in the garage in the tight space behind her brother’s Schwinn and next to their mother’s Ford. The vigorous ride and sojourn to Shangri-La had lifted her somewhat out of her glum mood.
In the house, the living room radio was turned to the local station broadcasting Superman. The house reeked of her father’s stale cigarette smoke.
“Mom.”
No answer.
Walking through the hall and into her bedroom, she glanced through the open doorways of the bathroom and her parents’ bedroom looking for her mother. Her brother’s door stood open enough that she could see him slouched in his chair reading a comic book, his feet up, resting on the windowsill. Their mother would kill him if she saw this. Barely fourteen, he looked like a scrawny circus roustabout in his red striped knit shirt, grass stained blue jeans and scuffed shoes.
“Where’s mom?” she asked, walking into her room.
No answer.
“Andy,” she said louder, “Where’s mom?”
“I don’t know.”
She sat her book bag on the floor next to her bed and noted the high Lama serenely looking down at her. He reigned as the contradiction to her mother’s view that old people were grumpy and impatient. Certainly, Trudy’s grandpa, her dad’s unpleasant father, was as opposite to the high Lama as an elderly person could be.
She returned to the living room and changed the radio station.
“I was listening to that!” her brother hollered. Trudy ignored him, switching the stations randomly. The pointer never lined up correctly with the stations’ broadcast frequencies.
Like she had rubbed a genie’s magic lantern, the Andrew Sisters jumped out of the speaker and grabbed her, swinging her around with Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.
“Hey!” her brother yelled.
“Read your funnies,” she snapped back and danced around the room. She clapped her hands in rhythm to the bouncy song, swung her hips and shrugged her shoulders to the beat the way she remembered Patty Andrew boogied in Abbott and Costello’s Buck Private.
The tune was barely over when her mother came in the house. She had on her long, decade old, out-of-style blue white polka dot dress with a white collar she sometimes wore when not doing heavy housework.
“The radio’s too loud,” she complained.
“Sorry.”
Trudy’s mother walked into the kitchen. After adjusting the volume, Trudy followed her.
“I saw our new neighbors,” she said.
“Oh?” her mother said, setting a bowl down and opening the utensil drawer.
“They were standing in front of the Nakamizo rental.”
“I can’t think why a German family would want to live way out here.”
“We moved way out here,” Trudy said.
“We moved to be closer to your father’s work.” He designed airplane parts at Douglas Aircraft, a few blocks from the house.
“Well, maybe they like the peace and quiet,” Trudy said, “out here in the sticks.”
“Trudy, we’re not in the sticks. Look out your bedroom window. They’re building a new movie theater right over on Pico. Soon we’ll be able to walk to the show.”
Her mother pulled dinner ingredients out of the refrigerator and a can of corn from the pantry cabinet. Trudy tried to help but found herself in the way. Without being asked, she gathered up the plates, glasses and flatware to set the table, and then went to her room. Pulling out her latest diary notebook, she made an entry referencing her exchange with Susan and waving at the German neighbors. She also recounted that she was the only student in her history class who enjoyed listening to Mr. Greene talk about the unification of upper and lower Egypt and the thousands of years that followed, a time during which the people of the Nile built pyramids and temples, worshiped a family of strange gods, and created a written language of exotic picture graphs.
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