by Lynn Austin
Two years ago when the first wave of forced labor conscription took place, we had no idea what it meant. Now we do. The “lucky” ones will be put to work inside factories all day – factories that are the targets of Allied bombs. Others will be forced to mine the raw materials needed for the war or to work in gangs repairing and building roads and railroads. In other words, they are slaves. No one has returned home except to die. The government won’t feed men who have become too weak or too sick to work, and so they are sent home to die.
Now that I am no longer ill, I live in fear that they will come back to conscript me. After much prayer, I have decided that Sarah Rivkah, Fredeleh, and I must leave the village. It’s too difficult for me to hide here, and except for my Christian friend and his wife, I don’t know which of our Hungarian neighbors I can trust. I have tried to convince our families to join us – Abba’s brother Yehuda, Mama’s family, Sarah’s family. I have begged them all to come to Budapest with us. It is easier to hide in a big city, I tell them. But they all say, “What about food? How will we live? The whole country is suffering from shortages and famine. At least we can grow our own food, raise our own chickens in the country.”
Everyone believes they are safer here in the provinces. No one will listen to me except for Sarah’s mother. And so tomorrow I will take her and my wife and daughter to Budapest to stay with Abba’s brother Baruch, if he will have us.
I love you, Mama and Abba. And I am hoping that even if the worst happens to us, you will receive this letter one day. I place all of my trust in Hashem, who is able to keep us in His care.
Love always,
Avraham
CHAPTER 17
THE PIANO BENCH felt very hard to Esther as she tried to concentrate on the piece she was supposed to learn for her next lesson. She wanted to get it right so she could play it for her father as a surprise, but tonight she felt much too restless to practice the piano. Daddy was coming home in only three more days, and she wished she knew how to make the long, endless weekend pass more quickly. He would make everything right again when he got home. Well, almost everything. Mama would still be gone. But Daddy would see how much they needed him and he would quit the army. Then Peter would start talking again and Penny would go back home where she belonged. And maybe, just maybe, Esther would feel happy again.
Esther glanced over her shoulder at Penny. She was sitting beneath the living room lamp, sewing the hem on an ugly gray uniform with a needle and thread. Penny never used to wear a uniform to work, and these ugly ones had pants – something Penny never wore at all, even at home.
Esther tried once again to concentrate on the music and couldn’t. She pounded the keyboard with a discordant crash and whirled around to face Penny, who had a startled look on her face. “May Peter and I go to the movies on Saturday?”
“Tomorrow? Well . . . I was planning to go shopping with a friend from work. I thought you might want to come with us and do girly things.”
“No, thank you. I’d rather go to the movies.” She hoped Penny wouldn’t ask which film was playing because Esther didn’t know. The idea of going with Jacky Hoffman – the new, nicer Jacky Hoffman – made her heart jump around inside her chest like a game of Double Dutch skip rope. He walked home from school with her nearly every day, and she liked talking to him.
“What time does the movie start?” Penny asked. “I don’t know how long it will take me to shop, but I could try to get back in time to take you.”
“You don’t have to. Peter and I can go to the movies by ourselves. I’m almost thirteen. And the theater is only a few blocks away.”
“I don’t know, Esther . . .”
“Besides, some friends from school are coming with us.”
“Which kids? Does your father know them?”
“Sure. They live right next door. We walk home from school with them sometimes.”
Penny didn’t reply. Esther wished she knew what Penny was thinking, but since Esther wasn’t being completely honest with Penny, she feared looking her in the eye. Mama had always been able to detect a fib.
“I think I should ask your father first,” Penny said. “Can you wait and go to the movies another Saturday? I’ll ask him when he comes home. It’s just a few more days.”
“He won’t mind if we go. We used to go to the Saturday matinee all the time when he was home.” Esther didn’t mention the fact that he had gone with them. “And if you’re worried about money, Peter and I can pay our own way. We have money from doing chores for Mr. Mendel.”
“I don’t know . . .”
Esther was losing her temper but thought it might work against her to throw a tantrum. Grandma Shaffer had once told her, “You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.” Esther hadn’t known what that meant until Grandma had explained it. She would try the “honey” approach now. “Please, Penny? You shouldn’t have to change your plans just for us. The theater is even closer than the school is, and we walk to school without you every day. Please?”
“Well . . .”
“Thanks, Penny. We’ll work extra hard and get all of our chores done tomorrow morning.”
“But I – ”
“And I promise that we won’t even complain while we do them.” She blew Penny a kiss before she could protest and sprinted up the stairs to tell Peter the good news. He sat hunched on his bed like a little old man, thin and looking worried.
“Hey, Peter, guess what! Penny said we can go see a matinee tomorrow afternoon.”
Peter seemed to shrivel even more, as if he wanted to crawl under the blankets and hide. She felt a jolt of fear and wanted to shake him until he was all right again.
“I’ll pay your way, don’t worry. It’ll be fun.”
He found the little slate he sometimes used and wrote: By ourselves? Without Daddy?
“Jacky Hoffman says he’ll go with us.” She felt herself blush as she said his name out loud, remembering how cute he was. “He has to deliver groceries in the morning, but he’ll be done in time for the matinee. His brother, Gary, might come, too.” At the mention of the Hoffman brothers, Peter started shaking his head vigorously from side to side. “What’s wrong? Why are you shaking your head like that?”
Peter wrote on the slate: not with them.
“Why not? Jacky’s been sticking up for you at school, you know. That’s why the other kids don’t make fun of you anymore for not talking. He’s been acting nice lately, hasn’t he? Walking home from school with us and everything?”
Peter continued to shake his head as he pointed to the slate, not with them.
“You make me so mad sometimes! I went to all that trouble to talk Penny into it and now you don’t want to go? She won’t let you stay home alone, and I don’t think you want to go shopping with her, do you?”
Peter slouched lower, still shaking his head in defiance.
“Stop that! You can’t sit around this room reading your stupid comic books for the rest of your life. I want to go to the movies, and you’re coming with me whether you like it or not!”
He turned his head away and lifted his comic book to hide his face. Once again Esther remembered the honey and vinegar approach.
“Please, Petey? Won’t you please do this for me? I’m so tired of being cooped up in this apartment every Saturday, aren’t you? Don’t you want to get out of here and go to the movies like we used to do with Daddy?” She waited, but Peter didn’t respond. “Please? I’ll do the dishes for you all week . . . and I’ll let you listen to any radio program that you want.”
He finally lowered his comic book again and wrote: OK, but just us.
Esther could have agreed to go by themselves, only she didn’t want to. She was surprised to discover how much she wanted to go with Jacky. It felt like such a grown-up thing to do. And it felt nice to be a grown-up. Exciting. He had called her “beautiful.”
“I promised Penny that we would go with the other kids. She won’t let us go alone. Besides, Jacky is diffe
rent now that he has a job after school. You’ll see. Please, Peter? . . . Pretty please?” When he finally nodded his head, she felt like kissing him.
Esther worked extra hard on Saturday morning to finish her chores. Penny had added a few extra ones, saying she wanted to make the apartment especially nice for their father’s homecoming on Monday. As the time to leave for the movie theater approached, Esther worried that Peter would change his mind. She saw his reluctance in every move he made as he slowly put on his jacket and followed her downstairs to the front porch, where Jacky and Gary were waiting for them. Esther’s heart thumped so hard as they walked the one block to the cinema that she barely had enough breath to talk.
A teenaged couple waiting in the ticket line in front of them was holding hands. Esther knew that the pair would probably sit upstairs in the balcony and smooch. Would Jacky consider this a date if she let him pay her way? Would he try to hold her hand or steal a kiss, too? It made her feel very grown-up to imagine that he was her boyfriend. But Esther wasn’t sure she wanted to be that grown-up yet.
“Peter and I can pay our own way,” she said when they reached the ticket window. She quickly shoved enough nickels through the slot to pay for both of them.
“Suit yourself,” Jacky said with a shrug. But when they got inside, he sat down right beside her and shared his box of Jujubes with her. Peter sat on Esther’s other side, acting mad. Too bad. She was glad for once that he couldn’t talk. She could ignore him easier this way. Even if Peter tried to write her a note, she wouldn’t be able to read it in the darkened theater.
The newsreel played first, showing tanks rolling across a desert, airplanes flying low, and a huge ship with hundreds and hundreds of soldiers aboard, waving as they sailed away. The film brought tears to Esther’s eyes. Her father might soon be one of those men, sailing away into danger.
After seeing all those soldiers going off to war, Esther didn’t think the cartoons were very funny at all. They were all about the war, too, and even Donald Duck was marching off to fight. The weekly Masked Marvel serial was next, then the first movie began to play. Jacky tossed his empty candy box on the floor and draped his arm around the back of Esther’s seat. Once again her heart thumped like Double Dutch skip rope, even though he wasn’t really hugging her or anything.
The double feature – one film with Judy Garland and another with Abbott and Costello – distracted Esther for a little while, but the afternoon ended much too quickly. The lights came on, the fantasy faded, and she was back in a movie theater with sticky floors and worn velvet seats, stale popcorn crunching underfoot. Happily-ever-after was only an illusion.
They emerged from the theater, squinting in the bright afternoon sunlight. Jacky brushed up against Esther a few times as they walked home together, their shoulders bumping. She suspected that he’d done it on purpose, and it made her feel excited. As they neared home, Peter hurried on ahead, disappearing around the corner. Let him go. She didn’t know why he acted so weird, almost as if he was jealous that Esther had another friend besides him. Too bad. He would have to get used to the fact that she was growing up and wasn’t going to do everything with him all of the time.
They rounded the corner and the burned-out synagogue came into view, a dreary pile of burned bricks and twisted beams. Esther still couldn’t get used to the ugly sight, and even though the cleanup work had begun, it reminded her of the bombed-out ruins in Mr. Mendel’s newspaper pictures. And of Daddy’s last night at home.
“Do you think the synagogue will ever look the way it did before the fire?” she asked.
“Are you kidding? I hope they tear it down and turn the vacant lot into a ball field.”
“Where would the Jewish people go to pray?”
“Who cares? This neighborhood could use a nice park – and fewer Jews.”
His harsh words startled her. He seemed like the old Jacky Hoffman all of a sudden.
Then he smiled his roguish grin and punched her lightly on the arm. “Just kidding.”
They halted on the front steps of her apartment building. They were alone. Peter had gone inside, and Jacky’s brother had gone home. Esther usually had no trouble thinking of things to talk about, but today she felt tongue-tied. For a long moment neither of them spoke. Esther could hear the rush of traffic on the next block. Why couldn’t she think of something to say?
“Um . . . what did you think of the movies?” she finally asked.
“They were okay. The newsreel was my favorite. Boy, I sure would love to fly an airplane and drop a few bombs on some yellow-faced Japs.” He gripped imaginary airplane controls as he imitated the sounds of planes diving and bombs exploding. He was still making bombing noises when Mr. Mendel came around the corner and walked up the sidewalk toward them. Esther waved when she saw him coming.
“Hi, Mr. Mendel.”
“Good afternoon, Esther.”
Jacky’s expression hardened as Mr. Mendel went past them. “You always talk to kikes?” Jacky asked after Mr. Mendel had gone inside.
Esther wasn’t sure what kikes were, but the ugly face Jacky had made as he’d spat out the word told her that it wasn’t good. “Mr. Mendel is our landlord.”
“He’s just another dirty little kike, if you ask me.”
The popcorn and candy Esther had eaten churned uncomfortably in her stomach. Once again she felt pulled in opposite directions. Mr. Mendel was her friend and she wanted to defend him, but Jacky Hoffman was her friend, too. The day suddenly seemed tired and faded, like threadbare clothes that had been washed too many times.
“Well, I should go inside,” she said. “Thanks for going to the movies with me.”
“We should go again sometime.”
Esther hesitated. Would she be betraying Mr. Mendel if she did? But the excitement of having a friend like handsome Jacky Hoffman was too strong to resist.
“Yeah, we should.”
“See you later, then.” Jacky gave a little salute and sauntered away as if the pavement rested on box springs.
The apartment was very quiet when Esther went inside. Penny still wasn’t home, and Peter had probably crawled back into a hole somewhere. Esther trudged up the stairs to the third floor, then stopped outside Penny’s bedroom. No, she wouldn’t call it Penny’s bedroom; it was Daddy and Mama’s bedroom. The door stood open, and she went inside to rummage through Daddy’s closet, searching for Mama’s photograph album. Esther felt like a snoop, but she didn’t care. She found the album on the closet shelf beside the hat Daddy used to wear to church every Sunday. Esther sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor to page through it. Tears blurred her vision as she studied her mother’s face. She missed her so much. The black-and-white photographs couldn’t capture the rich brown color of Mama’s hair or her hazel eyes. She recalled how Mr. Mendel had asked about Mama’s family the other day, and suddenly Esther wanted to know all about them.
The album began with pictures of Mama and Daddy, looking very young and happy. In nearly every picture her parents were holding hands or standing with their arms around each other, belonging to each other. In several photos they stood in Grandma Shaffer’s backyard beside a table filled with food. Mama had said that those photographs had been taken on the day she and Daddy got married.
Esther saw pictures of her parents on a beach wearing swimsuits and pictures of herself as a little baby. It made her tears fall faster to see how happy Mama looked as she held Esther in her arms. She turned the page and saw Mama standing on the sidewalk in front of their apartment building, holding Esther’s hand. She could see part of the synagogue across the street, and that made her sad, too. Why did everything have to change?
She turned the page and saw pictures of Peter, including one of Esther holding him in her arms. Mama sat right beside them, smiling and happy. Always happy. In another picture, Mama smiled as she sat at her piano keyboard. Esther remembered the day Daddy had taken that picture. He had brought the piano home as a surprise for Mama’s birthday. Uncle Steve and U
ncle Joe had helped him wrestle the heavy instrument up the stairs.
“I guess we’ll have to live in this apartment forever,” Daddy had joked, “because I’m not moving that blasted piano again.” Daddy was smiling in all of the pictures, too. Esther had nearly forgotten what his smile looked like.
There were pictures of some of the trips they’d taken together – a day at Coney Island, a ferry ride across the river, an afternoon at Luna Park. There were pictures of Grandma Shaffer and Daddy’s two brothers, Uncle Joe and Uncle Steve. Pictures of Uncle Steve and Aunt Gloria when they got married. But among all the photographs, Esther couldn’t find a single one of Mama’s family. Didn’t everyone have a family? Was Mama an orphan?
The apartment door downstairs banged shut. “I’m home,” Penny called out. “Esther? Peter?”
Esther scrambled to her feet. She felt guilty for snooping, even though it was Daddy’s bedroom and Mama’s album. She quickly shut the book and put it back on the shelf in Daddy’s closet.
“We’re up here,” she called before running into her own room and flopping onto her bed. Peter sat on his bed reading a comic book and eating the last of his candy from the movies. Esther heard Penny climbing the stairs and quickly grabbed a book and pretended to read.
“How was the movie?” Penny asked from the bedroom doorway.
The voice sounded like Penny’s, but when Esther looked up at the person standing there, it wasn’t Penny Goodrich at all! The hair that she always wore pulled back had been cut to shoulder length and curled in a pretty wave around her face. There was something different about her eyebrows, too. They used to remind Esther of caterpillars, but now they were thin and arched like Betty Grable’s eyebrows. Penny was wearing lipstick. And a new dress. And she had real shoes on her feet instead of grandma-shoes. She looked like a completely different person, as if she finally had taken off the Halloween costume of a dowdy old maid, revealing a much younger person underneath – years younger. You would almost say she was pretty if you didn’t know Penny very well.