Her mom was gone by then, and her dad had remarried to a classic wicked stepmother, who pulled him away from his children and wore his dead wife's furs around their Long Island mansion. He sent money to Heidi sometimes, enough to keep up a lifestyle, but otherwise cooled to her. Meanwhile, Heidi and her new boyfriend got married, moved to the beach, raised dogs, quit smoking, got political, and grew older.
They traveled to Mexico for a niece's wedding and chanced to meet an Austrian man named Herbert. They were with the bride's family, Herbert was with the groom's. They got to talking and learned Herbert was from Salzburg. This piqued Heidi's interest, because she's not really American, or not by birth. Heidi was purchased in adoption from Salzburg in 1955 by the rich American couple who became her parents, a beautiful woman who looked like a movie star, and a handsome man who was the king of the huge, animated advertising signs of midcentury Manhattan. The giant man exhaling real smoke in the Camel sign? That was him. The massive cup of Eight O'Clock Coffee that emitted steam into Times Square? Him too. He's famous in the annals of Mad Men-era advertising.
Unable to adopt in America due to their advanced ages (36 and 40ish), they turned to Europe. Who knows how many orphanages they visited before they saw that pink and blonde baby, with blue eyes the size of silver dollars, fat fists curled around the bars of her crib as she stood and bounced and gurgled. Once you know this, the name they gave her, Heidi, sounds rather on the nose, but it was appropriately exotic for her future life in New York. They signed the papers and swooped the baby away to a life of big lawns, flouncy dresses, Kodachrome family photos and visits from Santa.
A decade and a half later, Heidi's movie star mother died after years of suffering from early advanced rheumatoid arthritis in much of her body. Whether it was an accident or not, it was barbituates that finally did it, maybe a couple of years too late. Heidi was already away at boarding school in Florida, only allowed to see her mother for a few moments at a time when she came home, where she was placed for viewing on a long glamorous couch with her nails done and head in a turban, puffed and pressed into an appearance not too ghastly for the child to see.
Then came the stepwitch, who pulled Heidi's dad away and kept him for about thirty years. Then was Heidi's married life, fun but unremarkable, full of play and stepkids, adversity but always privilege too.
For me, it gets really interesting when Herbert appears. Delighted by the coincidence of meeting someone from her "hometown," Heidi exchanged contact information with Herbert and sent him some of the adoption papers she miraculously retained after the stepwitch hauled every vestige of her husband's previous life to the curb after he finally died. Herbert scanned the German words, and said, wouldn't it be funny if we looked your mom up? What if she's alive? She can't be, Heidi said. We don't even know what the circumstances of the adoption were. What if she died back then? But go ahead and look.
Herbert's retired, his kids don't live in Austria anymore, and he's got the time, so he went down to the archives and checked it out.
And there she was. Paula.
Paula was still alive. Still there in von Trapp town, living in a retiree apartment alone. Herbert called Heidi for permission, who held her breath and then said, "What the fuck, call her," and it began.
Paula's tough. She's cold. She is beyond reticent. She is suspicious. She and Herbert talked several times in an exchange both outraging and comedic as she cursed him and hung up, then called him back, then hung up again. Herbert is a giver, though. He couldn't let this go once he understood the mother was actually alive, and he was careful in his pursuit of her. They become a sort of friends over the phone, and built a rapport outside of this American reality show plotline. Herbert and his wife started to visit Paula, they took her to the doctor and did her grocery shopping and had her house cleaned. She's old, and after a lifetime of menial jobs, she needs help. She fixed meals for them and they drank together in the local biergarten. They became real friends.
All the while, Herbert would periodically report back to Heidi on Facebook or the phone.
"She says she can't remember anything." "She says you must learn to speak German." "She can't remember your father." "She loved your father." "She won't talk about anything back then."
Paula couldn't make up her mind about how to handle this. As Heidi and her husband became closer friends with Herbert and his wife, they decided to go to Austria. They'd meet crazy Paula, and if that didn't work out, they could hang out with Herbert and see the sights and still have a nice trip one way or another. It doesn't matter how early Heidi came to America, how much she loved Davey Jones or how much Coca Cola she drank, she's a lot like Paula. Guarded, irreverent, unemotional: she could handle this.
They went. They saw her. She was a tiny, shriveled lookalike to Heidi in a blonde bouffant, still pretty, with squinty laughing eyes. She hugged and kissed and was warm as you would be to a second cousin from out of state, polite and gracious but that's it. She wouldn't talk about the past because she didn't want to tell Herbert, didn't want him to serve as a translator, she wanted to tell Heidi herself, but Heidi can't understand German. So they laughed and smoked a cigarette together and drank a beer in the pretty sun dappled place, all edelweiss, and smiled and gestured and made the best of it. When Heidi got up from the table, Paula pointed and choked, laughing, mumbled a little something in German. Heidi wheeled on Herbert, "Ok, this time you better tell me what the fuck she said," and Herbert said, embarrassed, "She says you have her ass."
And this goes on! Heidi goes home, she comes back, she talks to Herbert who talks to Paula, then Herbert's wife tries talking to Paula, and slowly, carefully, like pulling a fragile, brittle thread out of an ancient tapestry, they get a narrative out of her.
Paula had other kids, and least two others. The other girl is older and was put up for adoption too. She lives in Russia now, but Paula can't remember where, and a jealous ex-boyfriend burned all their letters so she can't find her contact information. The boy was born with dwarfism, and though she didn't want to keep him either, she did. She was afraid he'd be abused in the orphanage and in his life. He lived to adulthood, but died early, and she took care of him.
She said she was in love with Heidi's dad, a boy from a nearby village. She said he never knew they had a baby. She wanted to tell him but she couldn't. He lived on a farm with his family and she couldn't figure out how to do it or be with him. She told Herbert she really did love him, and he was beautiful.
Although she put Heidi in the orphanage when she was born, Paula would make the long walk back there every day or every couple of days to nurse her. She said she didn't mean to officially put her up for adoption, but she just couldn't keep her then. She said she made the walk to the orphanage one day and the baby was gone.
After that, she became silent. She wouldn't talk about her family, her youth, or even her later life anymore other than she had cleaned a school for a living, and she got by. She wouldn't talk about her parents or her own family or about living through the war. She became angry when questioned and she cursed Herbert, for real this time, not in jest. She insulted him.
By this time, Herbert's wife had had it with Paula. They wanted to move to Spain to be with their son. They were done with this episode of caretaking an old woman who wasn't even their family, who spat and insulted them when they were just trying to be helpful to people halfway across the world, who made rude demands. And there it sat, seemingly over, just a surprising story of coincidence and unlikely meetings.
And it's all true. Heidi is my mom's best friend. She's my godmother. I've known her all my life, ever since my mom placed my 6 week old glow worm shaped swaddle in Heidi's lap, and Heidi fumbled me and screamed, SHIT!! when the family dog simultaneously jumped into her lap, unconscious of the baby there.
My mom says (resentfully) that somehow I am actually Heidi's daughter, not hers. She and I are the same in the ways that I am least like my mother, in the ways that my mother likes least. Heidi and I cursing and making fun in the kitchen, hexing and insulting, talking politics (verboten to Kari).
In fact, this all started for me when my mom and I were having a fight in Heidi's kitchen. A casual disagreement had turned into a real argument, one of those visceral mother-daughter things when everything she says makes me want to flip a table, and when she takes the imagined privilege of not backing off, no matter how visibly angry I've become. In this familial environment, Heidi's space, it went on longer than it ever would in other company. The topic? Where are the grandchildren. As I became increasingly defensive, telling my mom she was crossing the line for real, Heidi suddenly burst into tears. Loud tears, maybe even a small wail. We turned, both shocked, especially me because I thought Heidi had been on my side, and she said, through sobs, "AT LEAST YOU HAVE A MOTHER."
I fell back in my chair, completely dead, and she laughed through tears, "I know. Beat that, bitch!" Heidi doesn't cry. Or not for long.
That's when I learned about Paula. I learned about Heidi's adoptive mother, and how she had committed suicide but how it was somehow ok, because of the pain she was in. I became entranced by this story and I recorded her telling me everything she could possibly remember about both of her mothers, her father, hours of conversation while we staved her husband off with a closed door. Heidi's husband is so extroverted that most people don't know how complicated and interesting her life is, because she is happy to never be a focal point while he can't be anything else.
The one thing I couldn't accept was how reticent Paula was. How dare she? What absurd vanity was she trying to protect after 60 years? How dare she not share the father's name, and the story? Does she not understand what this means to Heidi? She was about to die, for god's sake! All of the things she had done in her life, the kids she abandoned, and she still had to keep that story to herself? She seemed so selfish, so foreign, so unnecessarily difficult. I was pissed. Heidi was pissed. Herbert was pissed. What the fuck, Paula?
I tried to research her on the internet, but it was fruitless. I didn't know her family's names, I didn't know her exact birth date, I don't think she was even born in Salzburg. I didn't know where to look and finding records from back then on the internet in another country is hard. Herbert couldn't even find her without going to a library in Austria. So I started looking into the area and the other towns, I thought Heidi said she was from nearby somewhere. I started trying to find a context for her life. Heidi shared all of her documents with me and I scanned them, translating and saving for my reference. When she was born, Heidi's name was Sieglinde. A beautiful name I have never heard of.
Paula was about 20 when WWII began in Europe. She lived in a place that sympathized with the Nazis. As I learned more about the details of life in this part of the world during and immediately following the war, I started to think. If you're an American with a functional but one-sided understanding of WWII, even if you watch the History channel religiously, you don't know how it was for the Europeans. You don't know what the war was like for Germans and Austrians and others, starving and no work and everything taken away, the bad times that happened before and then what it was like afterwards. I watched an old documentary made in the 80s, when more US vets were still alive, and the same observations rang over and over: the Russian soldiers were so cruel, unspeakably violent, and the American GIs, who hated the Nazis and their supporters as much as anyone, were repelled and repulsed by the way the Russians treated the people in the towns they occupied. To say that they raped and stole and burned is an understatement. And they were everywhere.
And Paula, a young girl, working alone in another town away from her family. There, in the middle of all of that war and inhuman chaos. It's trauma that makes her inconvenient now, doubtlessly trauma that is big enough to occupy sixty years of time. How could it not be? In what scenario was she there in that melee not being victimized and abused? Fuck, to think of it.
I tried to say this a little bit to Heidi. Heidi doesn't read history, doesn't know any more about that part of the world back then than anyone else here. This is the same Heidi who was like, "Fuck it, I'm too old," when I asked if we could get her on Rosetta Stone to learn enough German to talk on the phone to Paula. I didn't want to say, yo I think your mom might have been psychologically destroyed by a war machine and the worst of humanity, but tried to impart it in ways that wouldn't keep her up at night, or hurt her now after she's been hurt in so many other ways. At the same time, I wanted to talk about how, hey, maybe this is really complicated. Maybe there's stuff there that no one is allowed to know. Maybe it's not about you, that baby, the accident who happened when your mother was just trying to get ahead, when things were just starting to turn up in that part of the world. I know Heidi knows that, somehow. It's why she's ok to leave it alone, and leave Paula alone for now.
They're thinking about visiting one more time, before Paula dies, maybe next summer.
Until I hone and perfect this, make it better, do more research, editorialize less and learn more, I can't comment any more than this.
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