“I don’t understand. You want us to go”—Chloe struggled—“to Riga?”
“Yes.”
“No! Why?”
“I have family near Riga,” Moody said. “I want you to visit them. I told them a lot about you. You can bring them a letter from me, and a package.”
“You know, Moody, there’s something we have in this country called the United States Postal Service—”
“Not interested. And don’t be fresh. Also, there is an orphanage in a Latvian town called Liepaja. The town has had a painful history with the Communists, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, the young people there have not been doing so well. Many American families sponsor children from Eastern Europe to come live, study, and eventually work in the United States. Your parents have been thinking of sponsoring such a child.”
“Don’t look so shocked, honey,” Jimmy said. “We meant to talk to you about it. We just didn’t get a chance to.” He glared at his mother who ignored him.
“Your parents would like you to visit this orphanage in Liepaja. Maybe you can find them a suitable boy. Age doesn’t matter, but it must be a boy. Older is better. Not too old. Six or seven. The four of you kids can stay with my relatives. It will make them happy and stretch your lodging budget. Riga is a wonderful historic city. You’ll love it. A win-win, if you ask me.”
Chloe shook her head. Lose-lose is what it sounded like. Worse, Moody wasn’t finished. There didn’t seem to be a finality to her words.
“And,” Moody continued, “after you finish helping your parents, I’d like you to do something for me.”
“Other than visit with your family?”
“You have it wrong. They’re doing you a favor, not the other way around. You won’t be forced to stay in places unsuitable for a young lady.” The old woman kneaded her creased and square hands. “A long time ago, before the war, I had a best friend like you and a sweetheart like you. When war broke out in Poland, we knew we were going to get squeezed by the Russians on one side and the Germans on the other. We ran from Riga and hid out in the countryside. Our plan was to get to the Baltic Sea, make our way to one of the Scandinavian countries and board a ship bound for the west. But we didn’t realize how much of the continent Hitler and Stalin already had in their grip. We were in Kaunas, northwest of Vilnius, when we got caught by the Soviets and taken to the Jewish ghetto. We were there two years, until 1941 when the Germans came. We all thought we were lucky we weren’t in Vilnius because there was a massacre there, near Ponary. Everyone died. They put us on a train bound for the Bialystok ghetto. A year later there was an uprising, crushed of course. But by that time, most of the Jews had been taken to a transit camp nearby. Do you know the name of that transit camp, Chloe?”
“Of course not.”
“Treblinka.”
No one spoke for a moment.
“What about you?” the girl asked her grandmother.
“I’m not Jewish,” Moody said. “Though I reckon that meant little to the Germans. What might have meant more is that I made boots for them. Footwear for the German soldier. I was quite good. Perhaps that helped me.” She spoke matter-of-factly, looking only at her gnarled hands that once had made boots for the Wehrmacht. “How little I understood life. I really believed after the war I would find my friends, see them again. I didn’t know then that Treblinka was like pancreatic cancer. No one survives.”
Chloe didn’t know what to say. Questioningly she opened her hands.
“After Latvia, I’d like the four of you to travel by train and visit Treblinka. Bring my love some red roses. There must be a mass grave around there. After that, you can do what you like. You might want to visit Warsaw, or Auschwitz in southern Poland, but that’s your business. You have three items on the to-do list. Liepaja for your mother and father, Riga for my family, and flowers in Treblinka for me. You do those things, and I will help pay for your trip.”
“I have my own money, Moody,” Chloe mumbled in response, as if that was the only thing she’d heard.
“Oh, sure you do,” Moody said. “But you know who doesn’t have their own money? Hannah. You know who else? Blake and Mason. I hear their mother plans to tap into her life savings to buy them the plane tickets. You can’t travel through Europe on the kindness of strangers, Chloe.”
“You’re going to pay for all of us to go?”
“Well, let’s just say you’re not going to be staying at the Ritz-Carlton. You’ll bring your own money for food, for incidentals. But your travel expenses and your lodging expenses, yes, I will take care of.”
Chloe shook her head. “Moody, I don’t want to go to Riga.” Or to an orphanage! She scowled at her stoic mother, at her father sitting like a sad sack next to her. “My friends will never go for it.” Chloe was thinking of Blake especially. “They’d rather not go at all than go to Poland.”
“Child, I think you’re mistaking what this is,” Moody said. “Is this how your mother allows you to speak to her? This isn’t a negotiation. It’s a proposal. Take it. Or leave it. You want Barcelona? Fine. You’ll have to get to it through my home country. And through Poland. Barcelona through Treblinka.”
“But …”
“Or you don’t go.”
Chloe frowned, perplexed, maddened, upset. “Why would you pay for my friends to go with me?”
“It’s my graduation present to you,” Moody said. “You’ve been largely absent from my life these last few years”—she glared at Jimmy who glared right back—“and I would like to fix that. I’m not as young as I used to be. I don’t want your father’s irrational anger at me to stop you from taking this historic trip. And without your friends you can’t go.”
“Not irrational, Mom,” said Jimmy.
“Oh, yes,” Moody said. “Chloe is your daughter, like Kenny was my son, like you’re my son. Why can’t you understand that?”
“Chloe is a very good daughter,” said Jimmy.
“You’re not such a good son,” Moody said. “What son can stay angry at his mother? Kenny wasn’t a good man, but he was a good son. Better than you. He didn’t stay angry for seven years. That’s a sin, you know. It’s bad luck.”
“We’ve had about all we can handle of that, thanks to him,” Jimmy said as if spitting. “Us, Burt, Janice, their boys. Bad luck well and truly covered, Mom.”
“Listen, if I spoiled him, all right, but I spoiled all you kids. He wasn’t special. You wanted me to love him less than you? He was still my son! I had it rough growing up. I wanted it to be easier for my own children. Why is that so hard to understand?” She raised her hand. “Stop arguing with me, Jimmy. I’m done with it. We’ve yelled all we can yell. Help your child, spoil your child, or take me home. That’s your choice.”
Chloe could see her mother making intense beseeching eyes at her father from across the table. Head bent, Jimmy wasn’t looking at anybody.
Moody turned her attention back to Chloe. “I advised your parents not to keep you from going. Even though you are only eighteen or already eighteen or whatever it is you say, I told them that you should at least try to look for the answer to the fundamental question before you.”
Chloe hated questions before her. “What question is that?” she asked in an exhausted voice.
“What meaning does your finite existence have in this infinite world?”
Chloe didn’t think her Uncle Kenny asked himself this question once, and he probably was never harangued like this. Maybe he should’ve been. Maybe that had always been her dad’s point when he railed at his mother.