Twenty Unusual Short Stories. Dr. Donald D. Hook
from self-defense, the love of God, but even less about how Evil can ruin lives in a flash. Despite the massive accumulation of knowledge in the last two centuries, most people, like Buford and James Alfred, still don’t know themselves, let alone others, and the culture seethes along in social and religious anarchy. Buford’s question, “Why did this happen to us?” revealed that he had no clue to the forces within him that ended this day in immeasurable tragedy, for indeed it was shortly shown that two entirely different men carried out the assault on Missy and Edna Mae.
(This story, by the author, first appeared in Prose and Rhyme.)
Two
An Untoward Couple
Alfred and Elsa née Blaustein Reitmeyr were married in Temple Bat Yam in Middle Village, New York, on November 11, 1941, in the recent wake of the Tripartite Pact of 1940 forming the Axis alliance of Japan, Germany, and Italy, and just a few weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th that signaled the beginning of the U. S. involvement in World War II. The harbingers of this great world disturbance had displaced them and their parents and siblings, all natives of Germany, only five years before, and both families were understandably shaken by these events.
On the surface at least, Alfred and Elsa shared a long, prosperous, and largely uneventful lifetime together. Both spent their teenaged years in New York City, where they met in school at age 16. They were both born in 1920. He was an only child, the offspring of a Jewish father and a gentile mother. She was from a non-religious Jewish family with a younger brother and a half-witted sister, who died very young. Both families had left their native Saar region in 1935 in advance of Hitler’s takeover, but only met once they took up residence in New York City.
After their death many questions were raised, but few were conclusively answered. On one thing everybody agreed: These people were different from most people. Some further background information may help in understanding this couple’s unconventional later attitudes and actions.
When I think of the Saar Territory during the 1920s and 1930s, a region I have visited several times and know rather well, I think of a region permeated with people of great differences. Separated from the Reich by various impassable boundaries and linked to France monetarily, the Saar region nevertheless shared that common ground of Germanness that made of her a miniature “Deutschland.” What National Socialism became the world saw there fully enacted. In 1933 a considerable number of anti-Nazi Germans fled to the Saar, the only part of Germany not under Hitler’s control. Historians have described the Saar as a sewer through which innumerable rejected elements of Hitlerite Germany began to flow, and then stopped, like a clogged-up toilet: an assortment of troublemakers, revolutionists, exiles, Communists, Jews--you name it.
One day it was clear that the region had become much more than a local problem, for Nazi Germany’s amazingly effective propaganda machine was aimed squarely at the Saar Basin, which was now a seething, boiling cauldron whose effects were felt worldwide. It was widely expected in late 1934 that the Saar would opt for the status quo, namely, that the area would remain a haven for exiles and outcasts, but on January 14, 1935 a plebiscite was held and the people voted overwhelmingly for return to Germany.
This was the scary part: All these disparate types, dissimilarities—especially Catholics and communists—when, protected by neutral foreign forces and a secret ballot and thereby given the opportunity to maintain the status quo, chose instead to give their full devotion to the “Vaterland” under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. This was thus the scene begun in the 1920s that culminated in the late 1930s and led directly to the exile of many ethnic Jews. Alfred’s and Elsa’s families were among those with the good sense to get out while they could. However, the scars of fear, distrust, dire financial loss, and removal from everything familiar at home persisted throughout the lifetimes of those exiled.
The Reitmeyrs and Blausteins ended up in the same neighborhood in Queens, New York, and thus the two children went to the same high school. Elsa’s younger brother Erich also attended that school five years after his sister’s graduation, but he died from injuries sustained in an automobile wreck just before his 18th birthday. Their mentally defective baby sister had passed away just before the family departed from Luxemburg on their way from the Saar region to America. No one remembers clearly who the children’s friends were, or whether they had any, only that Alfred and Elsa were marked as withdrawn, even sullen at times, uncommunicative, and downright strange. It was little wonder that they found each other, despite the well-founded assertion that opposites attract.
After their wedding Alfred and Elsa moved into what was called in those days a “cold-water walk-up” in nearby St. Albans. The families hoped for good things for them, but in less than six months Alfred had quit his job at a foundry and disappeared. Elsa claimed not to be worried and explained to the few people who asked where her husband was that she “knew but couldn’t say.” Alfred’s parents were distraught and tended to blame their daughter-in-law. Elsa’s family claimed they had suspected Alfred was “not quite right in the head” and threatened to disown him and their daughter. Elsa stuck to her story that she knew where her husband was and that she was not concerned he wouldn’t return.
And return he did, after about two years. By then his and her parents had died. Neither Alfred nor Elsa revealed where Alfred had been all that time, but when he got back home he seemed to be better off financially by far. Some people speculated that Alfred had run to Canada to avoid the possibility of being drafted and found profitable work there. Others suggested the CID employed him because of his knowledge of the German language and a particular region in enemy territory. Was he a lucky gambler? Had he won a lottery? No one ever found out where he spent those two years or how he managed to become rich.
Upon Alfred’s return, he and his wife moved into a slightly better apartment down the street, and he resumed his work as a welder. Elsa stayed home. In the normal course of things this is when people have babies, but such was not to be the case with the Reitmeyrs. In fact, they didn’t even like children. They seemed to be perfectly content with each other and their simple, routinized life.
Alfred was an expert welder whose services were appreciated at the foundry and at a car and truck body shop where he sometimes worked part-time. He came home late afternoon each day, regular as clockwork, and had his supper by 5 o’clock before he and his wife undertook one of their several evening activities. First, they would draw the curtains and, in an effort to save on electricity, sit under a single light at a table in their living room and count their money or sort their bills or file other papers in manila folders. It rarely happened, but if someone rang the doorbell, they would gather everything up and sequester it so that when they admitted the guest into the living room, there were no papers or money in view, only furniture that had been cleared off.
On other occasions they might have been occupied in another of their evening routines, that of hymn singing and Bible reading. For some unexplained reason Elsa had become interested in both at about age 40 and had drawn Alfred into the practice. There was a certain bizarre aspect to the matter, though, for neither could sing or play the piano very well, and both gave clear signs under every other circumstance of disliking, or at least disregarding, all expressions of religion. They certainly did not attend a synagogue or church. Still, they could be heard several times a week by the next-door neighbors playing, singing, and reciting Bible verses. In fact, visitors almost always reported that they found the Reitmeyrs doing just that shortly after they arrived and were admitted into the house, for these two usurers—let’s call a spade a spade—wanted to be sure they were always a step or two ahead of the law. Presenting a picture of total innocence was part of that game.
The illegality of the Reitmeyrs’ business was probably marginal; after all, they weren’t a real bank or licensed loan institution, and they didn’t advertise. However, they couldn’t help knowing their operation was unsavory because the interest rates they charged were unconscionably high and the people who desperately needed their services were the least able to pay such exorbitant rates. Most of their business arose out of word-of-mouth dealings with fleeting acquaintanceships and other casual, personal contacts. They had no relatives, as far as anyone knew.
Where they stashed all their money, no one