“Ach, mein freund Milo, I do not at all odd find this matter,” Osterreich said, shaking his head and smiling. “Most of these words and phrases of general conversation are not.” He flicked away the list that Milo had meticulously written out. “If, as suspect I strongly do, you mastered your multiplicity of tongues through living amongst people of those tongues rather than more formally, it fully understandable is that many modern words and technical terms of narrow usage you would not have learned. Do not to further trouble yourself with regard to such trifles.
“You are doing good work, very good work, incidentally. The translations are most precise, yet without meaning of the original languages losing. Where do you work? At the O’Shea house?”
“No,” replied Milo, “at the public library. It’s always quiet, and there’s reference books available there, as well. I tried to do it all at your office, but decided after one day that I’d never get the first article finished in less than a week, not with all the interruptions.
“What did you tell these people about me, Sam? The Russians think I’m Russian, the French and the Germans seem to think I’m German, and everyone there is clearly of the opinion that I’m lying about my inability to recall my past, that I’m on the run from one government or another, a spy or an international crook.”
Osterreich sighed. “I know, I know, Milo. Of these fanciful suppositions some of them haf broached to me, too. I told them only the truth, that an amnesiac you are following probable neural damage which from a blow to the skull resulted. More recently, of their consummate silliness I haf chided them; how much good my vords to them did, I know not, howefer.”
He sighed again. “I had had hopes that to work around so many people to jog your memories to the surface it might. But this work you do so well is of great importance, and if you do it best alone, so be it.
“But to other matters: how goes your life at the O’Shea domicile?”
“The Convent of Saint Maggie?” answered Milo. “That’s what the neighbors called it before I moved in, I hear.”
Osterreich wrinkled his brows in puzzlement. “She is so religious, then?”
Milo laughed. “No, Sam, she had all females in the house, with the sole exception of Pat—two daughters, two or three female servants and five to seven female boarders in residence. The neighbors don’t appear to like the idea of a boardinghouse in their neighborhood. I guess they would all have preferred that Maggie sink into genteel poverty rather than manage to survive and hold her own the way she did. She’s a fighter, that woman. I admire her.”
“And what of the others, there, Milo? What of them do you think, eh?”
“Pat O’Shea,” Milo chuckled, “if he had his way, would long since have had me and everybody else in the house—excepting only Maggie, his daughters and the servants—in some branch of the armed services, having already gotten both of his sons and one of Maggie’s former boarders so persuaded. He keeps working on me, of course, using every excuse he can think of to get me to enlist in the Army of the United States of America. Were you twenty years younger, no doubt he’d have been after you, too.
“As for the rest of the household, I see most of them only at dinner and, sometimes, at breakfast. Those nurses who work the night shift sleep during a good part of the day, and those who work the day shift, as does Maggie, have to be on the floor at seven a.m. and so leave at a godawful hour of the morning. Fanny Duncan hasn’t been around for two weeks now, or nearly that; she’s on private duty at the home of some wealthy people up near Evanston, living there to be near the patient at all times.
“The cook is a widow about sixty, and Irish, like Maggie herself. I’ve been polishing my Irish Gaelic on her, learning new words … and that brings us back to my list there, Sam. She, the cook, Rosaleen O’Farrell, says that I speak an Irish dialect that she’s not heard since she was a child, in Ireland, and then only from her rather aged grandmother.”
“I had thought that to settle that matter we had, Milo,” said Osterreich with very mild reproof in his voice. “Now, what of the other persons with whom you reside?”
Milo shrugged. “I’ve met Sally O’Shea but once, and that very briefly; she’s living at the hospital, in nurse’s training. The few conversations I’ve had with Maggie’s youngest, Kathleen, have been mostly her monologue on a hash of something concerning the subjects she’s studying at the University of Chicago. The elder of the two maids is a friendly sort, Canadienne; we chat in French. The other maid hasn’t been with Maggie too long, a colored girl from somewhere down South; I don’t talk much with her because I have great difficulty in understanding her—they must speak a very odd dialect of English where she comes from.”
Milo’s job was better than no job at all, but the income he derived from it fluctuated from two or three dollars a week to, occasionally, as much as twenty or thirty dollars a week, so that all too often he found it necessary to dip into his dwindling hoard of cash from the sale of his gold coins. This would have been bad enough, but he discovered through countings that someone else apparently was dipping in, as well; there never was a large amount missing, no more than ten dollars at a time, but after the third or fourth such occurrence, he invested in a small steel lockbox with a key, a length of log chain, a padlock and a neckchain on which to carry the keys.
He had bought a well-made box with a good lock of heavy construction, and he was glad he had when he found deep scratches on the face of the lock and marks along the edges of the box resulting clearly from vain attempts to pry open the lid. A few days later, he returned to his room from the library to find the box pulled out from under the iron bedstead to which it was chained and with a few millimeters of nailfile tip broken off in the lock. The removal of this required no little effort and the necessity of borrowing a pair of tweezers from one of his co-boarders, Nurse Irun0 Thorsdottar. But a week later, he had to borrow them again to extract a short piece of stiff wire from the lock. On that occasion, he confided in Irunn about the problem of the thefts and attempted thefts, and between them they devised a plan to apprehend the thief in the act.
The tall, broad-shouldered and -hipped woman shook her blond head, her pale-blue eyes above her wide-spreading cheekbones mirroring disgust and anger. “Nothing lower, Mr. Moray, than a sneakthief. I’m not rich, precious few folks are these days, but if a body here was in real need, I’d loan them what I could and I judge you would too, so it can’t be no excuse for them to steal or try to steal from one of us. We’ll catch the snake, though, count on it.”
Milo and Irunn had, however, to bring one additional person in on their plot, and Rosaleen O’Farrell, upon being apprised of the cause for the scheme, was more than willing. So, on the day Milo left the house at this usual time, bound in the direction of the library, battered secondhand briefcase in hand; and Irunn long since having departed to begin her shift at the hospital, the second floor lay deserted as soon as the maids had finished sweeping and dusting it and moved on to the third floor, whereon two night-shift nurses lay sleeping.
Cautiously, Milo returned by way of the service entrance and Rosaleen let him up the back stairs, relocking the door behind him, then returning to her work. Safely out of sight behind the closed door of Irunn’s room—it being directly across the hall from his own—Milo opened the wooden slats of the Venetian window blind just enough to allow light for reading and settled himself in a chair with a library book to wait and read and listen. Nothing happened on that day, nor on the following two days, and he was beginning to think he was needlessly wasting time better spent elsewhere, but on the Friday, about midafternoon, he heard footsteps, two sets of them, and a whispered mutter of voices from the hall outside Irunn’s door. One of the voices sounded vaguely familiar; the other, deeper one did not.
Laying the book down soundlessly and gingerly easing out of the now-familiar chair, he tiptoed over to take a stance hard against the wall behind the door to Irunn’s spotless, scrupulously tidy room. He was glad that he had positioned himself just where he had when the door was slowly opened enough for some unseen person to survey the room from the hallway, then ease it shut again before passing on to open and view the other rooms on the second floor.
Only by straining his hearing was he aware of when his own room’s door was opened, then almost soundlessly shut. There was another dim, unintelligible muttering of two voices, then a brief rattling as his strongbox was dragged out from under his bed on its chain. He gave the thieves a good ten minutes, during which time there were a couple of almost-loud clanks, half-whispered cursing in a man’s voice, another clank, then the commencement of a scraping-rasping noise which went on and on.
Opening Irunn’s room door and then his own on the hinges that they two had carefully oiled at the beginning of this scheme, Milo entered the room to find Kathleen O’Shea, daughter of Maggie, kneeling beside his bed, watching while a black-haired, sharp-featured young man plied a hacksaw against one link of the logchain; the blade had already bitten a couple of millimeters deep into the metal.
When Kathleen looked up and saw Milo, she shrieked a piercing scream, which caused her companion to start, look up himself and heedlessly gash open a thumb and a forefinger with the blade of the saw. But he seemed to ignore the injury, and, dropping the handle of the saw, he delved his right hand into his pocket, brought out a spring knife and, all in one movement, flicked upon the shiny five inches of blade, rose to his small feet and lunged at Milo’s belly.
Milo never could recall clearly just what happened then or in what order events occurred, but when the blur of motion and activity once more jelled, his assailant sat propped against the neatly made bed, his eyes near-glazed with agony. The young man was gasping loudly, tears dribbling down his bluish cheeks, his right arm cradled in his lap with white shards of shattered bone standing out through flesh and shirt and suit coat, which coat was beginning to soak through with dark blood from that injury as well as from the doubly gashed left hand that supported the injured arm.
Milo’s own shirt was sliced cleanly a bit below his rib cage on the left side of his body, sliced about the length of an inch, and there was blood on his shirt around and below that opening, but he had no time at that moment to examine himself for injuries or wounds, for Kathleen still knelt unmoving in the identical spot she had occupied when first he had entered and apprehended her and her companion in the commission of their crime, and she was still screaming. Peal after peal had been ringing out without cessation, and agitated movement could be heard from the floors above and below, as well as on the stairs.
Rosaleen O’Farrell was the first to arrive, and her initial action was to take Kathleen by the hair and slap her, hard, with palm and backhand on both cheeks, twice over. That effectively stopped the screaming. The cook’s muddy-brown eyes took in the strongbox chained to the wrought-iron bedstead, the hacksaw, the slightly damaged link and the massive padlock from the keyhole of which an ineffective wire pick still protruded.
“Caught them, did you?” she stated to Milo in Irish Gaelic. “I knew, I did, it’s telling herself I was that no good would come of them dirty furriner boys Kathleen has been bringing into this house. I think that one’s the Dutch Jewboy, Jaan what’s-his-name, a godless Bolshevik.”
At the shaken Pat O’Shea’s insistence, Maggie was rung up at the hospital and summoned home. She was advised, also, that it might be wise to bring a doctor along who was prepared to handle a compound fracture of the lower arm, as well as dislocations of both elbow and shoulder joints, not to mention a case of shock. The two night nurses from the third floor, both wakened by the screams of Kathleen, which had been of a timbre to wake a corpse, had raised the slight, fainting young would-be burglar and would-be knifer onto Milo’s bed, removed his shoes and tie, unbuckled his belt, ascertained the full extent of his injuries, then set about trying to slow his loss of blood, while keeping his feet elevated and his body warm.
By the time Maggie came puffing across the lawn from Dr. Gerald Guiscarde’s motorcar, her plump face nearly as white as her uniform, a few more judiciously applied slaps of Rosaleen’s hard hands and a stiff belt of neat whiskey pressed on her by her father had brought Kathleen out of her hysterics to a stage of red-eyed, moist-cheeked snuffling interspersed with shudders, gaspings and swallowings and the occasional horrified stare at the man called Milo Moray.
But when Maggie entered, Kathleen sprang up and flung herself into the stout woman’s arms. “Oh, Mama, Mama, he killed him! He did! Right in front of me! I saw him do it.”
“Stuff and nonsense, Mrs. O’Shea,” snapped Rosaleen from where she stood in the archway between front and rear parlors. “The Jewboy ain’t dead … yetaways. But it’s I’m thinkin’ he should be. The little bugtit, he’s been sneakin’ out money from Mr. Moray’s room for weeks, he has, either him or Kathleen, more’s the pity. Mr. Moray bought him a lockbox and chained it to the bedstead, he did too, but somebody”—she stared hard at Kathleen as she paused, and the girl flushed and refused to return the stare—“has been tryin’ to pick the locks.
“Mr. Moray and Miss Thorsdottar got together to catch the thief, and fin’ly, today, he did. When he went into his room this afternoon, he found Kathleen and that Jewboy takin’ a hacksaw to the chain, set to carry the box away, I’d say, I would, so’s they could bash it opened. And when they come to see him, Kathleen comminceted a caterwaulin’, while the Jewboy went at poor Mr. Moray with a switchblade jackknife, he did.
“Poor Mr. Moray, he should ought to’ve kilt him, but he didn’, just busted his arm a wee bit and unjointed his shoulther and elbow, is all. He—”
“God Almighty damn, Milo" burst out Dr. Gerald Guiscarde from the foyer, which he just had entered after parking his SSKL 1931 Mercedes-Benz in the parking area off the driveway. “For the love of Christ, man, sit down! How deep did the stab go, do you know? Do you feel pain,, weakness or giddiness? Any nausea?”
Not until the doctor had had up Milo’s bloody shirt and undervest to see what looked like a minor and closing scratch on the skin of the abdomen beneath would he believe his prized mystery man to be unhurt. Only then did he leave for the upstairs, guided by Michelle, the maid.
Maggie pushed her daughter from off her bounteous breasts and said, “Kathleen , . . ?” When the girl did not answer, merely stood snuffling, with downcast eyes, the older woman gave her a shake that rattled her teeth.
“Answer your mother when she speaks to you! If you think you’re too old for me to take down your knickers and paddle you, you’ve got another think coming, young lady!”
“Oh, Mama, he … he killed him. He just tore poor Jaan apart with his bare hands!” Kathleen’s voice had risen to a higher pitch with each succeeding syllable, and so the last four words came out as a near-scream.
Rosaleen resignedly took a step or two forward, her intent to administer a few more wallops of her sovereign Old Country cure for hysteria. But Maggie had her own brand of cure. She once more shook her slender daughter, a shaking that was painful to watch and revealed just how much power lay underneath the adipose tissue.
She nodded. “It’s true, then, isn’t it, Kathleen? You’ve been letting in hoodlums to steal from my boarders, haven’t you? Well, you shameless hussy, answer me?” She gave the girl another shake, of shorter duration but just as powerful if not more so. “Haven’t you?”
“Bububu …” Kathleen blubbered, her tears once more at full flow. “But, M-Mama, it … it wasn’t really stealing. Jaan ex—explained it all to me … to us all. Lenin said that—”
“Lenin, is it?” Pat O’Shea sprang up from his chair. “Is this what that damned university teaches you? I’ll not see you go back to learn more godless Boshevism, daughter. It’s to the nursing school, with your sister, you’ll be going, by God, there or as a novice with the Holy Sisters of Saint Agnes.
“Mrs. O’Shea, we should be ringing up the police to come and fetch that Dutch Jew up abovestairs. I’ll not be having a heathen Bolshevik longer under my roof!”
“Aye!” Rosaleen O’Farrell nodded her firm approval. “It’s doing it now, I’ll be. The jail’s the best place for the likes of that one. Corruptin’ young, witless, Christian girls!”
But Maggie O’Shea would not have the police summoned. Instead, when Dr. Gerald Guiscarde had done all that he could immediately do for Jaan Brettmann, he drove into the business area and brought back from his tailor shop old Josef Brettmann and his eldest son.
When the three men entered the parlor, Milo immediately recognized the youngest, not simply because of the strong familial resemblance to the injured knifeman, but because he recalled him from the office from which he received the papers and to which he returned the translations.
He walked forward, his hand extended, “Sol, what are you doing here?” he asked in Dutch.
The newcomer was slow to take Milo’s hand, took it only gingerly then, and quickly took back his own hand. Not meeting Milo’s gaze, he said softly, Mijnheer Moray, this is my father, whom you had not yet met. The boy, he who robbed you and tried to kill you like some commom thug, that is … is my younger brother, Jaan. The medical doctor explained all that happened while we rode here in his auto. Jaan has humiliated me, our father, all of our family before with his wild, radical ideas and schemes, but never to this extent, never housebreaking and attempted murder.
“I do not, cannot understand him and his university friends. America has been so good to him, to us all, has given us so much that we never would have had in Amsterdam or anywhere else. How could he have done, have even thought to do, such a horribleness?
“I do not know what your losses have been, but we— my father and I—will assuredly repay them. It may take time, but you will be fully repaid by the Brettmann family.”
He turned, “Papa, dit is Mijnheer Moray.” Then, switching languages, he added, “Mr. Moray speaks also Yiddish and Hebreish, Papa.”
The little old man was tiny. Shorter than either son, neither of whom was of average height, shorter even than the girl, Kathleen. He wore thick-lensed, wire-framed spectacles high on the bridge of a Roman nose, was cleanshaven and utterly bald. He was slightly hunchbacked and peered up at Milo from dark eyes full of tears, and a lump of pity blocked Milo’s throat.
With the agreement of all concerned parties, the police were never summoned or even notified of the incident. When, a few days later, Jaan Brettmann emerged from the hospital, he was met by Sol, who gave him a packed suitcase, a one-way railroad ticket to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the address of his father’s first cousin by marriage, Isaak Sobelsky, a jeweler. True to his word, Pat O’Shea saw Kathleen yanked from out the university and ensconced in the hospital nursing school, the only other option offered by her furious parents being Holy Orders. A week or so after his erring, youngest son had been sent off to well-earned exile in the East, old Mr. Brettmann suffered a stroke, which, though it did not quite kill him, left his entire right side paralyzed, useless, making Sol the sole support of his father, his aged mother and his two younger sisters.
As for Milo, he and Nurse Irunn Thorsdottar began to enjoy occasional days or evenings—dependent entirely on which shift she was working—out. After confiding to him her passion for the works of the musical masters, many of their sojourns were to the opera or the symphony, and he soon became familiar with the soul-stirring music of Wagner, Grieg, Beethoven and Sibelius.
The translating work really took up little time, and he made use of the rest of each day and of his work locale to voraciously read of past, of present, of imagined or projected futures of the world in which he lived, hoping against hope that some word or group of words, some photograph or painting reproduction in some book would trigger his memory that he might regain his lost past. He learned vast amounts about the world, about its history and accomplishments, but he could never remember any more of what he had done, had been, before his clubbing than he had on that morning in the hospital, in the depths of the winter now past.
On each succeeding visit to the office of Osterreich’s group, Milo noted that Sol Brettmann looked more worn with exhaustion and care and worry. In order to pay the medical costs, to keep food on the table, clothes on the family’s backs, his sisters in public high school and the rent paid on the family flat above the sometime tailor shop, Sol had dropped out of his almost-completed law-school program and taken a second job, a night job selling—or, rather, trying to sell—life insurance.
One day, on the day when he was scheduled to collect his pay for translations completed, young Brettmann took Milo aside and pressed,a wrinkled and stained envelope into his hand. Inside it, Milo found a sheaf of crisp new ten-dollar bills, ten of them in all.
“This will, I hope, recompense you for the money my brother induced the O’Shea girl to steal of you.”
“Now, damn it all, Sol,” expostulated Milo, “you can’t afford to part with this money, you know it and I know it. How the hell did you get so much together so soon, anyway?”
Brettmann flushed darkly, hung his head and replied, “I … I knew that I … that we, the family, would be years, maybe, in getting that much … now, with Papa and all. I borrowed it from … from Mijnheer Doktor Osterreich. And he wouldn’t even talk of any interest on the loan. He is a truly good man.”
“Then you just give it back to Sam Osterreich, Sol. You do or I will. You owe me nothing, hear? You and your family aren’t in any way responsible, so far as I’m concerned, for what your nutty, deluded brother did or tried to do.”
Brettmann’s thin lips trembled. “But … but you must take the money, Mijnheer Moray 1 You must! This is a matter of honor, of family pride, and it preys so on poor Papa’s mind. I … I must ease at least that burden from him. It is my duty.”
Nor would Osterreich take the money from Milo. “Mein freund, Josef an old and dear acquaintance is and much more than this I vould do for him and his family, vould they allow such of me. The vord ‘loan’ I used only for young Sol’s pride and for Josefs. Whatefer he pays back to me I vill manage into his pay envelopes to place back to him.
“Such a shame it was, too, that from university he withdrew. A mind that boy has, a brilliant attorney he vould haf made, too. But a real mensch he is, it is there for all of the vorld to see!” He sighed, then, and added plaintively, wistfully, “If only to help them more they vould allow me … if only they vould …”
The spring of 1937 slowly became summer, and on the Fourth of July of that summer, Milo accompanied Irunn on a picnic outing sponsored by a Scandinavian-American society of which she was a member. Milo mixed in well with the merry, hard-eating, hard-drinking men and women, conversing easily with them in only German, at first, then, upon hearing and discovering that he knew the languages, in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. Even as he ate and drank, mingled and walked and talked, he. wondered just what was the total of languages he knew, how many of them lay somewhere in his mind, just below the surface, awaiting only the right stimulus to prod them to his consciousness.
It was while he was chatting with a Danish friend of Irunn’s that the scholarly man remarked, “Your languages all are very well spoken, Herr Moray, Danish, German, Norwegian and Swedish, too; your accent is flawless in all of them. But I cannot but wonder where and when and from whom you might have learned them, for the dialects you speak are very old. Your Danish, for instance, sounds like I assume the Danish speech of two hundred years ago sounded.”
Milo was trying to think just how to respond to the probe when Irunn saved the day, half-pouting mockingly, “Oh, Dr. Hans, I will bring Herr Moray to a meeting one Wednesday, soon, and you two may sit and drink and talk that night away. But now, today, he is my man and there are things to do here in God’s green, beautiful world. Come, Milo, let us get a boat and row out on the lake.”
But as the^ rowed around the lake, Irunn said, “You should not have withheld from me that you spoke Norwegian, too, Milo. I don’t speak it too good myself. I was born in this country, in Wisconsin, and Papa and Mama insisted that all of us children talk in English most of the time. But both of my parents speak it, and … and soon I must take you up to meet them … if you so wish, of course.”
Stroking easily and evenly—unaware of how much practice was required to learn to handle a small rowboat that way—Milo nodded and smiled. “Sure, Irunn, I’d like to meet your folks.”
As they two plodded tiredly up the walk to Maggie O’Shea’s boardinghouse that night, Irunn stopped suddenly, faced Milo and laid her palms on his cheeks, then pressed her opened lips onto his. “Milo Moray,” she whispered after the long kiss was done, “I love you, Milo Moray. I am yours and you will be mine. You will be mine.”
Milo liked Irunn, but that was all. Besides that, he had no intention of marrying her or anyone else, not for a while, for a long while, possibly. But he quickly found out that attempting to reason with the woman was equivalent to batting his head against a brick wall.
“Irunn, can’t you see that I can’t marry anyone now?”
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing, I still have no slightest idea who I am … or was. I could be … have been a criminal of some kind, you know.”
“You? You could never have been a criminal, my Milo, you are too good, too kind. And as for who you are, you are Milo Moray, the man I love. You are a good man”, a strong man, a man who makes a good living, a man who my Papa will be proud to name his son-in-law and the father of his grandchildren, when they come.”
He considered packing up his few effects and leaving the Chicago area entirely, _but he had the presentiment that that would only bring the stubborn, strong-willed woman dogging his trail wherever he went, however far he went.
He made an appointment and visited Dr. Osterreich in the psychiatrist’s office, seeking advice and help in extricating himself from the situation. But Sam Osterreich just laughed.
“Ach, mein gut, gut freund Milo, marriage the lot of most men is, do not to fight it so hard. Fraulein Thors-dottar I’haf at the hospital seen and talked with. A gut voman she is, und a gut Frau vill she for you make. Basic, Teutonic peasant stock, she is—strong, sturdy, with much vitality und not prone to easily sicken, und they little difficulties usually haf in the birthings, either.
“No, no, there no charge is for you, mein freund, nefer any charge for you. Just name one of your sons, Samuel, eh?”
Milo could still hear the little psychiatrist laughing as he closed the door to the outer office.
Dr. Gerald Guiscarde was of no more help. “Look, Milo, I know a little bit about Irunn and her family. They own a big, a really big, dairy farm up in Wisconsin, you know, and for these times, they’re doing damned well. So you could do a hell of a sight worse, say I.”
Finally, he went to Pat O’Shea. The old soldier showed his teeth in a grimace that was as close as he could any longer come to a real smile. Then he sobered and said bluntly, “Milo, time was when I felt just like you do, but I knows different, now; indeed I do. If I hadn’t had my Maggie when I come home like I am from the war, God alone knows what would’ve become of me. And a man never knows whatall is going to happen to him, Milo, peace or war, day or night, one minute to the next, so I say when you got the chance to get hitched up to a good, strong woman like that, even if looks ain’t her best suit, do it afore she changes her mind. Marry her, Milo.”
After a long pause, he added, “But if you really are dead set against the institution of marriage in gen’rul and you want to get somewheres where she can’t come after you and fetch you back to the altar, let me know and I’ll have you enlisted in the Army and on a train out of Illinois in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”