The Inheritance - Part II
Years ago, I consulted with a local psychic who told me there’d be “problems with an inheritance.” I had no idea what he was talking about and tossed the comment off as random. Little did I know, my ex husband, an eccentric Czech photographer who lived in London, was worth a small fortune. So when he died, I learned that the psychic’s prediction would come true. Because that’s when our family was introduced to a hostile Russian woman named Vera who would harass our family for years.
THIS IS PART 2 of a FIVE-PART STORY
Werner Forman
Even when he was older, Werner was a very good looking man, stooped over, yes, but with a chiseled face and a full head of wild gray hair. His voice was soft and heavily accented, and he could have a sharp tongue – a person who didn’t suffer fools lightly. But he was a hoarder and when his house was so full of crap that he could literally no longer enter it, he moved into a residential hotel in Golders Green – an area of London heavily populated with orthodox Jews. (Werner was a secular Jew with no interest in religion.) It was at that hotel that he became involved with a Russian woman named Vera.
Vera was gorgeous. I only made her acquaintance once, at a lawyer’s office where we gathered to discuss ownership of the house Werner and I had bought together thirty years before. My name was still on the deed, which meant I was liable for taxes on the place. By now, the house that we’d bought for 20,000 dollars in 1973 had become valuable, and I was regularly receiving calls from potential buyers offering a million plus. Vera was tall and slender, with an intense expression in her almond-shaped eyes and a pile of dark hair swooped into a pompadour above her forehead. She wore boots with pointy toes and a tightish dress that brought out the curves of her body. Her voice was as heavily accented as Werner’s. In that meeting at the lawyer’s office, she gave out a hostile vibe.
I had no idea who she was, no idea that Werner had acquired a companion. But he made it clear that Vera was important to him, a business partner privy to all his affairs. It was a weird encounter.
Vera was young, perhaps in her late twenties. (Werner was entering his eighties.) I had the feeling there was romance between them, at least on his side.
I had left Werner on the spur of the moment – almost recklessly – during a trip to the States for the summer. I never ever returned to our little house and most of my possessions were still there – clothing, cosmetics, artwork, jewelry. Later I learned that Werner had never disposed of those things, had just left them where they were. Clearly, I was rash in the way I went about my departure from the marriage – there one day, gone the next. I catapulted myself into my next life without a thought about the sadness or devastation it would bring to my erstwhile husband. While he suffered over the loss of me, his young, heedless, growingly alcoholic wife, I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where I fell in with a group of people my own age (one of them a friend from high school) and began to drink excessively, even though I had a job teaching writing to prison inmates that required my full, unbroken concentration. It was a terrible time, one of the worst and darkest of my entire life.