I didn’t know any Judys who might be calling Lotty in the predawn, but Ms. Coltrain did. She’s usually completely discreet, but when she realized who was calling, she snapped, “I’m not surprised. She only calls Dr. Herschel when she’s been beaten up, or has an STD. And why the doctor keeps trying to help her, I don’t know, except they seem to have some kind of history together. I don’t like to ask it of you, but you’d better try to find her.”
She found the downstate address in Lotty’s private files. None of my databases could produce a phone number or even a photograph. In the end, not sure what else to do, I’d made the trek downstate.
After I described the unspeakable mess in Judy’s so-called commune to Lotty, I said, “The sheriff down in Palfry wants your name, and he wants to know what your involvement is with this Judy Binder. I protected your privacy today, but I can’t forever. It would help if I knew who she was and why you care so much.”
“I didn’t ask you to drive down to Palfry. If I’d been in the clinic, I would never have bothered you.”
“Lotty, don’t try that on me. If you’d been in the clinic, you know darned well that your first call would have been to me, to ask me to trace the call, which, by the way, I lack the legal authority to do—you can sic Ms. Coltrain on the phone company in the morning, if you want to find out where Judy was calling from. And then you would have said, Victoria, I know it’s an imposition, but could you possibly check up on her?”
Lotty grimaced. “Oh, perhaps. Just the way you come in every time someone puts a bullet through you and say, I know it’s an imposition but I don’t have enough insurance to pay for this.”
I sat up in the Barcelona chair and stared at her. “You want to start a fight to keep me from asking about Judy Binder. I’m too tired for that. I’m not leaving until you tell me who she is. Rhonda Coltrain says you feel responsible for her. Here I’ve been knowing you thirty years and never once heard you mention her name.”
“I know a lot of people you’ve never heard of,” Lotty said, then gave her twisted smile, a recognition that she was being petulant. She put down her coffee cup and walked over to the long glass wall that overlooked Lake Michigan. She stared at the dark water for a long time before she spoke again.
“Her mother and I grew up together in Vienna, that’s the problem.” She didn’t turn around; I had to strain to hear her. “That’s the story, I mean. K?the, her mother’s name was in those days, K?the Saginor. So when K?the’s daughter Judy began needing extra attention, running away from home when she was only fifteen, getting involved with one abusive boy after another, then needing her first abortion when she was sixteen—she came to me for a second when she was twenty-two—I felt—I can’t even tell you what I felt.
“I didn’t see that much of Judy as a child, so why should I feel responsible, or even affectionate? But I did feel some of both, along with a dash of schadenfreude over K?the’s failure at motherhood. I only know that against all my own beliefs or my normal course of action, I kept trying to rescue Judy.”
She turned to look at me. “In an Uptown practice, I see many people caught in the thralls of addiction to one thing or another. I know if they are going to be saved they have to want salvation, which, to be honest, I never saw any sign of in Judy. I don’t know why I thought my own willpower could imbue her with the desire.”
“She was the daughter of a friend from your childhood,” I said, thinking I understood. “That can—”
“I don’t like her mother.” Lotty cut me off sharply. “K?the Saginor was always a whiny, nervous girl. I hated that my grandmother thought I should play with her. I was never very nice to her on the days K?the’s grandmother—Kitty, I mean, she changed her name in England—Kitty’s grandmother brought her over to our flat on the Renngasse. After the Anschluss, when we had to leave the flat, it was worse because we were stuck next door to each other in those cramped slums in the Leopoldstadt. K?the used to tell her grandmother—oh, never mind that!”
Lotty flung up a hand, as if brushing a cobweb out of her hair. “Why am I dwelling on those petty old slights and wounds? Still, when my Opa put K?the on the train to London with Hugo and me that spring before the war started, I was scared K?the would jinx the trip. I worried that she would cry and complain so much that the German guards would throw us off the train, or even that the English would be so cross with her that they’d ship Hugo and me back to Vienna with her. It was a relief when we reached London and she was sent on to Birmingham.
“In the turmoil of the war years, I forgot about her. Then, without warning, she appeared in Chicago, around the time I was doing my obstetrics fellowship at Northwestern. She’d become Kitty—I don’t know why I can’t remember that. After all, I anglicized the spelling of my own name.”