The Summer of Lost Letters

by Hannah Reynolds

  Honestly, was there a conspiracy to keep me and Noah from concluding a romantic moment?

  We spent the rest of the ferry ride talking to Ms. Green, a Barbanel family friend. From Hyannis, we caught the Cape Flyer to Boston’s South Station, and then the Red Line whisked us to Harvard Square, that bastion of red brick and ivy.

  We’d booked an apartment behind the Cambridge public library, a fifteen-minute walk from the train station in Harvard Square. We emerged from the subterranean metro into a bustling area filled with bookshops and restaurants, crowded with busloads of tourists and students who traveled in packs. We strolled along brick sidewalks until we’d left the heart of the square and traveled up quieter streets, past stately Victorians and small parks. Lush gardens fronted the homes, some carefully tended, others chaotic riots of color and lush green.

  “I think this is it.” I looked up at a narrow town house, pale yellow with white fringe. We’d made it to the apartment. The apartment for just me and Noah.

  Ahhh.

  Mom had originally been appalled I planned to spend a night alone with a boy. I’d thought about not telling her about the Boston trip—thought really hard about not telling her—but keeping a secret from her would be worse than dealing with her shock. After a quick round of her telling me about safe sex and me yelling, Mom, we haven’t even kissed, we calmed down, and she moved into a “please don’t drink/do drugs/get abducted” spiel, which I vastly preferred.

  I’d told Niko and Haley and Jane about the trip, too, and their suggestions had been diametrically opposed to my mother’s. And Jane had told me if we didn’t at least make out, I was canceled.

  We punched in the code and opened the front door, also painted yellow with a frosted glass window. A narrow staircase brought us to the top of the house and into a third-floor apartment filled with light and plants. Two bedrooms lay on either side of the central living room, and a tiny kitchen and bathroom were off it.

  “Do you have a preference?” Noah asked.

  A preference. Did I have a preference about the room I slept in, in the apartment which also had a boy in it. No, I did not, because my brain was too busy with other things like the boy in the apartment.

  “This one’s fine.” I tossed my bag in one room, with a wall of books and a painting of the Boston skyline, with the Prudential and Hancock towers and Citgo sign. “Should we head over?”

  “Let’s.”

  Back we went down the red brick sidewalks, until the houses turned into stores and people replaced the gardens. A bakery piped out the scent of freshly baked bread in the center of the square, and we turned into it exactly on time for our meeting.

  “There.” I nodded across the café at a woman who matched the photo we’d found. Dr. Genevieve Weisz wore jeans and a T-shirt and looked like she needed a nap, despite clutching a thermos to her chest with the desperation of a toddler clinging to her blankie. We headed toward her, and I was surprised to find I was nervous. I cleared my throat. “Dr. Weisz?”

  She looked up and smiled. “Abby?”

  “Hi.” I did an awkward wave, then realized she was an adult, so I stuck out my hand.

  She shook it firmly, then Noah’s. “Let’s go order.”

  We wound up with a spread of pastries, while I got a hot chocolate and Noah an iced coffee. Dr. Weisz added an espresso to the order, clearly afraid her cup might runneth dry.

  It was lucky Dr. Weisz had already claimed a table, because people packed the place. Most of them looked a few years older than me—college students, which made sense, with the school right across the street. There was a scattering of adults with laptops, even though it was three o’clock on a Thursday. Dr. Weisz slid her own computer into a backpack, then shoveled in several papers as well. “How was your trip in?”

  “Great. Thanks for meeting us.” I nudged Noah, unable to stop picturing him walking these streets, studying in this café. “Noah’s going to be here next year, actually.”

  “Really? What are you studying?”

  “Um.” He glanced at me, and the words he said next came out fumbling and awkward, which I wasn’t used to from him. “Econ, but I think—I might take a few biodiversity classes.”

  I blinked rapidly and smiled at him.

  I tried a chocolate croissant as they talked about the college, closing my eyes as the layers of buttery dough and thick bar of dark chocolate melted on my tongue. Mm. Delicious. When they’d covered enough ground to be polite, I leaned forward. “What about you? How did you end up studying Kindertransport?”

  “My grandmother was part of the British Kindertransport effort,” she said. “Which I thought I’d do my thesis on, but when I looked into it, I became curious about whether America had a similar situation.”

  “It didn’t, right?” I glanced at Noah. “Rabbi Abrams gave us the general explanation about Kindertransport, and it sounded like it was less organized here.”

  “Right.” She inhaled a gulp of coffee from her thermos. “In the UK and Europe, Kindertransport got around ten thousand Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied countries, but the States shot down a similar bill. Kids need to be housed and fed and schooled, and the government didn’t want to pay. In British Kindertransport, private organizations had to agree to sponsor the kids so they wouldn’t be a financial burden.”

  “Wait,” I said, slightly confused. “So if British Kindertransport wasn’t about supporting the kids, what even was it?”

  “Basically expediting visas and legally allowing more kids to enter the country, all at once. Applying for immigration was messy and expensive. You needed documents, the documents cost money, they expired, you had to get them again—you needed a sponsor so you wouldn’t be a financial burden—you needed ship tickets and interviews with the US State Department.” She shrugged. “The UK expedited the process so the Kindertransport children could enter, but the US didn’t. So people simply didn’t have the money to come here.”

  “But they did, somehow, right?” I said. “Because there was some sort of American Kindertransport?”

  “Right. Individuals pooled their resources. The German Jewish Children’s Aid association brought over two hundred and fifty young German Jews in 1934. Then they brought over children fleeing the Blitz, a wave of kids from Central Europe helped by the French Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, and kids from Spain and Portugal.”

  “And they were all placed with families?” Like O’ma.

  “Pretty much. Though American law, unlike European, stated foster kids had to be placed with families of their own religion. At first, there weren’t really enough Jewish families to go around, and people were nervous to advertise publicly because of anti-Semitism. Orthodox families did try to volunteer, but the Children’s Bureau often wouldn’t qualify them because their homes were too crowded.”

  “I’d think it would be better to live in a crowded house than no house,” I said.

  “Bureaucracy is filled with red tape. Luckily, families heard about the program through word of mouth and opened up their homes.” She nodded at Noah. “And look at what a difference what a single person, what a single family can make. His grandfather’s family took in your grandmother, right? And here you are.”

  Here I was.

  * * *

  Harvard’s Widener Library presided over part of Harvard Yard. Dozens of steps led up to the Corinthian columns fronting the red brick structure. Dr. Weisz walked us inside. “There’s over three and a half million books here,” she said. “And five miles of aisles.”

  Clearly I wasn’t the only one with a library/book obsession.

  She got us set up at the listening stations, and helped us find the two recordings by the people who’d been on the same ship as my grandmother. “Let me know if you find anything out,” she said. “I hope you do.”

  After she left, Noah and I plugged in our headphones and looked at each othe
r. Noah nodded. “Let’s do this.”

  We pressed play.

  At some point during the recordings, Noah took my hand. I glanced at him, and found him staring at the ceiling, while he idly ran his thumb across my palm.

  I supposed that was the thing about Noah. I didn’t have to explain anything to him. I didn’t have to tell him I would like a hand to hold right now. I didn’t have to explain how I was feeling, because he had the same emotions tied up inside of him, too.

  Two hours into Michael Saltzman’s recitation of his life, he described the ship from Paris to New York. I perked up, but the description was over in a moment, and he didn’t mention anything about my grandmother. Instead, I listened to him talk about being separated from his older brother and sent off to distant relatives in California, none of whom spoke German, while he didn’t speak English. He liked the palm trees, though.

  Twenty minutes later, Noah’s head jerked up. “I think I have something.”

  “Really?” I paused Michael’s recording. “What?”

  “Here.” He set the recording back a minute and we both put an earbud in. “Ready?”

  I nodded, and a warm, scratchy voice filled my ear, coated in a thick German accent. “—a girl named Ruth attached to me early on at the église in Paris. She was four years old and from a town close to mine. She was a quiet thing, and used to watch me closely. I think she missed her parents very much, and half expected everyone else to leave her, too. That was the first time I realized I had to be strong for other people. I had to take care of this little girl because no one else would, and I was older than her and a stand in for an adult. We were together on the SS Babette, which took us from Paris to New York in one week. Some of the actual adults were terribly seasick, but we never were. It was wonderful. I’d never been on a boat before. It felt like a vacation.

  “The German Jewish Children’s Aid society placed Ruth and me and a few of the other kids in the Holtzman House in New York until families could be found to take us. We were there together for a few weeks, but I don’t remember what happened to her. I suppose a family took her in, but I just remember her following me around, ghostlike, and then her being gone. I remember thinking—you don’t learn how much you’ll miss people until it’s too late.

  “Anyway, the Holtzman House wasn’t a bad place to be, even if it was packed. I was fifteen, not so appealing to families, and I wanted to get a job and live my own life . . .”

  We listened for a few more minutes, but she didn’t mention O’ma again. I paused the recording and looked at Noah. I could feel how wide my eyes were, feel the adrenaline coursing through my body. “I didn’t really think we’d find anything.”

  “But it’s her. It has to be, right?”

  “It has to be. Ruth. The SS Babette. Four years old.” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine having to take care of myself, not to mention a little kid. And thinking it was like a vacation.”

  “Kids are resilient. And it probably was, compared to what they’d been through already.”

  “True.” I blew out a breath. “Okay. So. What do we think ‘a town close to mine’ means?”

  “She said where she was from in the beginning—let’s find it.”

  The woman, Else Friedhoff, came from Hamburg. We looked it up and studied the map on my phone. Hamburg lay northwest of Berlin, not far from Denmark, a port city on the confluence of three rivers. Dozens of names of smaller towns doted the map around it, many of them coastal: Bremen, Lüneburg, Schwerin, Lübeck, Cuxhaven. “So she’s from northern Germany.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Definitely a start.”

  * * *

  We emerged from the library into the early evening, with the sun still high and the sky still blue. In the yard, tourists took pictures on the library steps while students lay beneath tall trees. We passed through an arch in one of the walls surrounding the school and reentered the bustling square. Our arms swung gently between us, our hands occasionally grazing as we crossed one final street onto the embankment with a boathouse and paths in either direction. We walked to the right, past long reeds edging the banks and geese waddling about.

  A small pedestrian bridge arched over the Charles, and we climbed to the middle, looking out. Long banks edged the water, lush with greenery, and colorful domes rose against the skyline. Noah leaned against the wide stone rail. “My dad used to take us here to see the regatta each fall. He rowed for Harvard.”

  “So you’re a legacy?”

  His mouth turned up humorlessly. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t suppose he expects you to row, too?”

  This time some wryness permeated his expression. “Nailed it.”

  “Do you want to?”

  He glanced back at the water, at the next bridge painted against the sky. “I want him to be proud of me. And he loved rowing. He loves the regatta. He’s always so happy when we come here.”

  We were silent. I didn’t know how to comfort someone about their difficult paternal relationship. But maybe the point wasn’t for me to comfort him; maybe the point was simply for me to listen.

  “I think he tried really hard to fit in,” Noah said. “Maybe I do, too. And I think he does want me to be happy, theoretically. But he thinks this will make me happy in the long run—the college, the company, everything.”

  “And do you?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  For several minutes, we leaned against the railing in silence, watching the sailboats and rowboats moving along the river. “I had an idea,” I finally said. “I looked up the Arboretum after the rabbi mentioned it. Why don’t we check it out?”

  He looked wary. “Abigail . . .”

  “What? You like plants. There are plants there. I like plants, too! It’ll be great.”

  He shook his head but couldn’t contain a smile. “You’re ridiculous.”

  “But also convincing? It’s supposed to be really pretty.”

  “But also convincing.”

  We caught a Lyft across the river and down through Boston, passing large, stately houses and circling a giant pond before pulling up to the Arboretum. In the most basic of terms, it was a park—but unlike any city park I’d visited before. It covered hundreds of acres, and was filled with meandering paths and endless, giant trees and shrubbery.

  We meandered first to terraced gardens, where vines climbed up trellises, then followed signs pointing along to a bonsai garden. “Pretty sure these aren’t bonsai,” I said as we passed yet another sign leading us to a row of evergreens.

  “It’s supposed to be one of the best collections in the US,” Noah said. “We’ll probably notice it.”

  “Are you an expert on bonsai, too?”

  He laughed. His enthusiasm was endearing, the way he admired the plants the way I did Ellie Mae. “No, but it’s impossible not to think they’re cool. Here!”

  We’d reached a hexagonal shade house. The walls opened to the elements, and a walkway ran around the interior. We walked, counterclockwise, peering close to read the signs and admire the miniature trees. “This one is a Hinoki cypress,” I said. “Over two hundred years old.”

  Noah leaned a little closer to see it, and a soft voice piped out “Please KEEP BACK from the trees.”

  He jumped back and looked at me guiltily, as though he’d hoped I hadn’t seen him leap. I started giggling. “So much for a bonsai heist.”

  Next, we walked through the rest of the park, wandering up hills and past massive trees. At the farthest end from where we’d entered lay the highest point of the park, a gentle hill with a view of the Boston skyline. Noah and I dropped down on a plank of stone. To our left, a man took pictures of a woman as she posed; to our right, two men played with a dog.

  “You could work here,” I said. “Harvard runs it. You could take classes here.”

 
He nodded. Obviously this wasn’t news to him, but I thought maybe he’d actually begun to consider it as an option.

  The park closed with the setting sun, and by then, we’d worked up an appetite. We ate at a Cuban place recommended earlier by our driver. It was ten by the time we arrived back at our Airbnb. Late enough to be a reasonable hour for bed.

  Instead, we sat on the couch. Nervous energy ricocheted throughout me. Now what? Surely we weren’t actually going to go to bed.

  Here was the thing. I totally, absolutely, one hundred percent wanted to hook up with Noah Barbanel. I wanted to so badly it hurt. My longing for him twisted up my insides and shortened my breaths and made my very lungs ache.

  And yet. The transitional period, going from not making out to making out, seemed so utterly terrifying, so fraught with potential rejection, I thought I might rather jump off a bridge than face it.

  Niko said this state of not-kissing got better with practice. She said eventually, you became such an expert you could sense the way kisses fell like commas in sentences; the silence before them, the expectation in the air.

  I hadn’t reached that point.

  Noah shifted on the couch. “Do you want to watch something?”

  No. I did not want to watch something. I wanted to make out with him.

  “Sure,” I said, because god forbid I communicate like an adult.

  He switched on the TV and we found the first episode of a show we’d both been talking about trying, and turned it on.

  Okay. Fine. I would sit here, watching TV like there was any possible way I could concentrate on it, when all I wanted to do was jump his bones. We sat shoulder to shoulder, but without actually touching, and not touching made me want to throw up. I was as aware of the spare inch between us as I’d ever been of anything in my life.

  The show ended.

  “Do you want to watch another one?”

  Obviously I didn’t want to watch another, which I communicated by shrugging. Great. I needed to say something. To make a move. But I couldn’t manage to part my lips, to make anything come out of them.