Chapter 5: Air ducts

Two months were over and no, we had not changed our plans. Some doubts remained on my part, sure, but with each passing day Lillian grew more on me. We just meshed on so many levels, be it our tastes in food or our general outlook on life. There was also a growing intimacy. We learned how to please each other, no only physically but also emotionally. More and more I became convinced that accepting Lillian's deceit was a small price to pay for the wonderful companion I had found.

There was also something that made me question Lillian's reckoning. It was when we calculated the birth date. I noticed that, oddly, she calculated everything with the last day of her menses as day one.

Asked about it, she looked at me like I had grown horns. "Why are you asking?"

"Lilly, the way to count is to take the first day of the menses as day one. That's how it's in all the books on natural birth control." See, I was a man of the eighties: I knew about stuff like that.

"That doesn't make a difference either way, does it? I'm pregnant," she answered a bit defensively. But then she shook it off. "Sorry, Rudy. You're just trying to help, and I'm snapping at you. So I'm supposed to take the first day, huh? God, I don't know, it's just how I understood it in sex-ed. Good thing I didn't sleep around too much or I would have got pregnant much earlier."

That was pretty much the extent of our conversation but it made me think. She must have slept with Theo the Weasel after her return to Charlottesville, to guess from her ranting that I had overheard. 'One last time' she had said. If her receptive window had been earlier, then the child may still be mine. After all, I had not used any protection, trusting Lilly to know her cycle. God, how could that be? Here she was, the daughter of two world-renowned scientists, and she screwed up her calendar?

I was a regular dinner guest at the Rosenzweig house and Ruth in particular had already adopted me. After dinner that evening I made like I was helping with the dishes and quizzed Ruth.

"Umh, Ruth, not to be a know-it-all, but did you know that Lilly has no idea how to calculate her receptive days?"

"She does not ... What do you mean?"

I explained about our conversation that morning and Ruth listened with wide open eyes. The she shook her head.

"I thought they had covered that in sex-ed. We ... I guess I never saw the need to talk about that in detail. I mean, we have all the books on the bookshelf. She could have just ... Oh, fuck!"

It was my turn to gape. To hear Dr. Ruth Rosenzweig, MD, PhD, say the F-word was a surprise. She wasn't done yet.

"Oh, damn! That's why ... Oh God, I'm so sorry. I screwed up, and now you must bear the load!"

I was quick to register my objection. "No, no! Lilly is not a load for me."

"Yes, but I would imagine that you would have enjoyed to get to know her with a bit more leisure?"

I made a face. "I don't know if she would even consider me..."

Now it was Ruth's turn to object. "Stupid man! Don't you see how much she loves you? That evening, after the Christmas party, she came up to my study and told me about you. She was positively gushing about how nice you were and how much she wanted to see you again."

She was? But why hadn't she called earlier? Ruth saw the question, but she tightened her lips.

"Don't ask me why she waited so long to call. That's something she'll have to tell you when she's ready. Let's just say that she had to arrange things first."

I let it be, but I had more food for thought now. Okay, it was possible that Ruth was in on the true story and just wanted to lull me further, but her words seemed to fit with what I sensed from Lilly.

Plans for our shotgun wedding were soon under full steam and my own family had already booked their flights to Dulles. My parents and both my sisters planned to attend my wedding. My parents were of course dismayed to learn that their son had knocked up a girl. Soon, however, they warmed to the idea of having their first grandchild. I was twenty-nine after all, a doctor, and it was time for me to procreate.

I sent them pictures of Lillian and my sisters agreed with each other that she was far too pretty for me. They joked on the telephone that I had knocked up the poor girl as my only chance to get her to marry me. I cannot say that I was indifferent to those allusions but with my affection, oh hell, love for Lillian growing steadily I mentally shrugged it off. I was the winner here. I won the big prize. Theo Weaselham (or whatever his name was) was just a sperm donor and a bad memory for her. I hoped.

Then came the day when I picked up my family at Dulles Airport. They were four (I thought) and therefore Lillian had stayed at home to do some last minute planning with her mother to leave enough room in my car. Imagine my surprise when an unknown elderly lady followed my parents and sisters from immigration into the arrivals hall. She had to be over sixty but I could see that she must have been a real knock-out in her young and even not-so-young years.

My parents hugged me first, then came my sisters, and then my father pushed the lady forward.

"Rudy, this is Veronica Langner."

My eyes popped open. She smiled at me.

"Please, I don't plan to be a nuisance. Only, when I heard that Robert is still alive I just had to come."

I had to shake my head. "Well, then by all means welcome! Robert will be surprised, that's for sure."

Six adults were a tight fit in the Benz. Fortunately, it could seat three in front and I picked Barbara and Irene, my sisters, to sit with me.

"Once you return home, bring this car back with you!" my father commented from the rear seats. "Those tail fin Mercedes fetch huge money at home."

"Papa, that may take a while if at all. I like the work here and now I'll have a wife and a child, too. We'll come to visit you, never worry, but I don't know if I'll ever move back for keeps. I can make a career here and I don't have to deal with the Old Boys' networks at home."

"That's what we thought already," my mother answered. I could see in the rearview mirror that she was trying to smile bravely. "Is it because of your Uncle Georg?"

Uncle Georg was the former (and as I suspected, still latent) Nazi.

"No, I haven't seen him in five years. But you all know there are other people like him. Lillian's grandfather lost his family and I don't want to expose her to that sort of shit."

"Does her family know about Georg?" my father asked, all of a sudden uneasy.

"Lillian's father knows. I came clean right away. I told him that you were not involved."

My father shook his head. "We were all guilty," he said dejectedly. "We all closed our eyes to what they did and planned and we pretended we had no idea. When Vroni told us her story..."

"There were some good people, too," Veronika Langner interrupted him. "A woman confronted the SA and stopped them, dressing them down like you wouldn't believe! Then a policeman made the SA men release me, and the woman gave me clothes and held me while they drove me home in his patrol car."

"I fled," my father continued. "That's why I joined the Reichsmarine (Navy), to be away from all that. In the ships you could pretend that things were not happening."

Wow. In twenty-eight years I had never heard him speak of the Third Reich. The topic was taboo. At school our teachers, even the young ones born after 1935 and not to blame for anything, did not dare to touch the topic for fear of alienating some of the senior teaching staff who might or might not had laden guilt upon themselves.

My mother patted his hand. "If you had been bad back then you would have never married me," she said.

True, that. With some Polish ancestors sprinkled in and a Socialist Labor Union leader for a father she must have been an leper in my paternal grandfather's perception. My parents had met in Kiel in 1943, after my father's ship, the battlecruiser Gneisenau, came in to repair severe bomb damage. They married within a week of meeting each other at a dance. They had a total of three weeks as a married couple before my father sailed to Norway in the battleship Tirpitz. She never saw him again until late 1948, after his return from captivity. I can still remember my grandfather's dislike for my mother. It was something that even I as a small child had always sensed.