Total Recall

I handed it to Max, who frowned over it. “I’m not good with this old German, but it’s written to someone named Martin, a love message from-I think it says Lingerl-inscribed in 1928. Then she’s rewritten it to Lotty: Think of me, dearest little Charlotte A

“Who is this? Dr. Herschel’s mother, do you think?” Mrs. Coltrain picked up the picture respectfully by the edges. “What a beautiful girl she was when this was taken. Dr. Herschel should keep it in a frame on her desk.”

“Perhaps it’s too painful for her to see that face every day,” Max said heavily.

I turned to the newsletters. They were like all such documents, filled with tidbits of information about graduates, amazing achievements of the faculty, status of the hospital, especially under the severe retrenchments forced by the shrinking National Health budgets. Claire Tallmadge’s name jumped out at me from the third one I looked at:

Claire Tallmadge, MRCP, has given up her practice and moved to a flat in Highgate, where she welcomes visits from former students and colleagues. Dr. Tallmadge’s unbending standards earned her the respect of generations of colleagues and students at the Royal Free. We will all sadly miss the sight of her erect presence in her tweed suits moving through the wards, but the Fellowship being established in her honor will keep her name bright among us. Dr. Tallmadge promises to keep busy with writing a history of women’s medical careers in the twentieth century.

Lotty Herschel’s Story:

The Long Road Back

When I reached the rise overlooking the place, I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t move at all. My legs suddenly weakened at the knees and I sat abruptly to keep from falling. After that I remained where I landed, looking over the grey and blowing ground, hugging my knees to my chest.

When I realized I’d left my mother’s photograph behind, I’d become frantic. I searched my suitcase at least a dozen times, and then I called the various hotels where I’d stayed. Many times. “No, Dr. Herschel, we haven’t found it. Yes, we understand the importance.” Even then I couldn’t resign myself to its loss. I wanted her with me. I wanted her to protect me on my journey east as she hadn’t protected me on my journey west, and when I couldn’t find her picture, I almost turned around at Wien-Schwechat Airport. Except at that point I couldn’t imagine where I’d go back to.

I walked the city for two days, trying to see behind its bright modern face the streets of my childhood. The flat on the Re

I made myself go to the Leopoldsgasse, but many of those crumbling old buildings had disappeared, and even though I knew the right intersection to look for, nothing looked familiar to me. My Zeyde, my Orthodox grandfather, had threaded his way through this warren with me one morning to a vendor who sold ham. My Zeyde traded his overcoat for a greased paper full of thin-sliced fatty meat. He wouldn’t touch it himself, but his grandchildren needed protein; we could not starve to death to uphold the laws of kashruth. My cousins and I ate the pink slices with guilty pleasure. His overcoat fed us for three days.

I tried to re-create that route, but I only ended up at the canal, staring into the filthy water so long that a policeman came to make sure I wasn’t pla

I rented a car and drove into the mountains, up to the old farmhouse at Kleinsee. Even that I couldn’t recognize. The whole area is a resort now. That place where we went every summer, the days filled with walks, horseback rides, botany lessons with my grandmother, the nights with singing and dancing, my Herschel cousins and I sitting on the stairs peeping into the drawing room where my mother was always the golden butterfly at the center of attention-the meadows were now filled with expensive villas, shops, a ski lift. I couldn’t even find my grandfather’s house-I don’t know if it was torn down or turned into one of the heavily guarded villas I couldn’t see from the road.

And so finally I drove east. If I couldn’t find a trace of my mother or my grandmothers in life, then I would have to visit their graves. Slowly, so slowly other drivers spewed epithets at me-rich Austrian they took me to be from my rental license plates. Even at my slow pace I couldn’t help finally reaching the town. I left the car. Continued on foot, following the signposts in their different languages.

I know people passed me, I felt their shapes go by, some stopping above me, talking at me. Words flew by me, words in many languages, but I couldn’t understand any of them. I was staring at the buildings at the bottom of the hill, the crumbling remnants of my mother’s last home. I was beyond words, beyond feeling, beyond awareness. So I don’t know when she arrived and sat cross-legged next to me. When she touched my hand I thought it was my mother, finally come to claim me, and when I turned, eager to embrace her, my disappointment was beyond recounting.

You! I choked out a word, not bothering to hide my bitterness.

“Yes,” she agreed, “not who you wanted, but here anyway.” Refusing to leave until I was ready to leave, taking a jacket and wrapping it around my shoulders.

I tried for irony. You are the perfect sleuth, tracking me down against my will. But she said nothing, so I had to prod, to ask what clues had led her to me.

“The newsletters from the Royal Free-you left them on your office desk. I recognized Dr. Tallmadge’s name, and remembered you and Carl arguing over her that night at Max’s. I-I flew to London and visited her in Highgate.”

Ah, yes. Claire. Who saved me from the glove factory. She saved me and saved me and saved me, and then she dropped me as if I were a discarded glove myself. All those years, all those years that I thought it was out of disapproval, and now I see it was-I couldn’t think of a word for what it was. Lies, perhaps.

Carl used to get so angry. I brought him to the Tallmadges’ for tea several times, but he despised them so much that he finally refused to return. I was so proud of them all, of Claire and Vanessa and Mrs. Tallmadge and their Crown Derby tea service in the garden, and he saw them as patronizing me, the little Jewish monkey they could feed bits of apple to when it danced for them.

I was proud of Carl, too. His music was something so special that I was sure it would make them all, but especially Claire, realize I was special-a gifted musician was in love with me. But they patronized that, as well.

“As if I was the monkey’s organ-grinder,” Carl told me furiously, after they’d asked him to bring his clarinet along one day. He started playing, Debussy for the clarinet, and they talked among themselves and applauded when they realized he’d finished. I insisted it was only Ted and Wallace Marmaduke, Vanessa’s husband and brother-in-law. They were Philistines, I agreed, but I wouldn’t agree that Claire had been just as rude.

That quarrel took place the year after V-E Day. I was still in high school but working for a family in North London in exchange for room and board. Claire, meanwhile, was still living at home. She was applying for her first houseman’s job, so our paths seldom crossed unless she went out of her way to invite me to tea, as she did that day.

But then, two years later, after she’d finished saving me that last time, she wouldn’t see me or answer my letters when I returned to London. She didn’t return the phone message I left with her mother, although perhaps Mrs. Tallmadge never delivered it-what she said to me when I called was, “Don’t you think, dear, that it’s time you and Claire led your own lives?”