“What happened? What happened?” An hour ago, I was Davis-daydreaming, slathering Noxzema on my face, and now my head was throbbing with bmb, bmb, bmb.
“Dynamite low to the ground against this wall. That’s why I left you a note.”
“How do you know?” As soon as I asked, I felt sick. I kicked at the grass.
“It came across the wire at the main house. The Teletype went crazy. Ten bells.” Her stockings were splattered with red.
“God, was anyone here? Max?”
“It was four in the morning. Did you hear it? I thought it was an earthquake.”
“I didn’t hear.” At four in the morning, I was with Davis, turning the turntable—and the timetable—over in my mind. I pointed at Mother’s legs. “Is that blood?”
“Red clay. Mud. Water pipes burst.” Mother held my hand. Her grip was fierce.
“Where’s Nattie?” I said, letting go of Mother and spinning slowly around, looking at all the places Nattie wasn’t. She’d spent the night with Leah, but weren’t the rabbi and his house vulnerable?
“I phoned the rabbi’s house as soon as I heard. Dina told me she sent Leah and Nattie on bikes around the neighborhood to tell people not to come this morning. She called them her ‘Paula Reveres,’ spreading the news.” Mother’s laugh was high, uneasy.
And then her legs jellied, and Mother was knee-first in the mud. “Nattie’s safe. We’re all safe.” Her voice cracked. “But what a world. After your father—”
I helped Mother up, my eyes welling.
She stood, her hose laddered down the front. “I’m going to stay here awhile. Let Daddy take you home.” It was only the second time she’d called her father Daddy since we’d become sudden southerners.
“Are you reporting this? Is Mr. Hank letting you? Where’s the rabbi? And Max?” Asking about Max again made my throat hot.
“The rabbi is inside. I don’t know about Max.”
We walked closer to the side entrance—to what used to be the side entrance—and stood elbow to elbow, like I had with Fontaine in Mother’s tiara on what seemed like a long-ago afternoon, when sunniness swallowed up all the shade. With Mother now, the view was fully shadow. We took in the hole with jagged wooden teeth and chewed-up bricks and shredded bits of choir robes, some blown clear out to the lawn. Ribbons of metal dangled from the ceiling, looking like they had nothing better to do than sever someone’s hand.
My stomach moved up to my chest and displaced my heart.
Mother kissed the top of my head and held me close.
I stepped back, opened my pocketbook, and took out my own EZ-on-the-Eyes notebook. “Let me stay.”
She shook her head.
“I’m a good observer.”
Mother glanced at her own notebook, and I knew then she’d agree. By being her daughter, I’d learned how to see things and record them.
“Do not—do not—go in the building,” she said, her back to the opening.
I nodded, tightening the grip on my pen.
“You see that rock?” She pointed to a silver-flecked boulder at the edge of the parking lot where Max had semi-taught me to drive. “Sit on it. Sit there and witness.”
Following orders, I sat on the stone, warm from the sun, not caring about crossing my ankles in the pink-booklet S shape. My feet were sore, and my eyes were sore. The smoke stung the back of my throat, and I was glad.
I wrote down what I always noticed first: what people wore. The detectives, at least I thought they were detectives, looked like waiters from the Club, in dark pants, white shirts, black ties. A fireman’s shirt was gunmetal gray. He was talking to a man with his back to me in a navy jacket. Older, familiar-looking men, including Mr. Silvermintz, held their cuffed trouser legs up as they sloshed around the mud.
I made myself look back at the building, straight into the damage, and I took notes about something other than clothes. I counted twenty-six—no, twenty-seven—windows blown out on this side, some of them the delicate stained-glass pieces that had turned Nattie’s ankles lilac the first day. Already, I couldn’t remember what the windows had looked like, all put back together.
The building shuddered for a half second, and bits of black—bomb confetti—rained down, fluttering against the too-beautiful blue sky. I reached out, wanting to push the flakes of prayer books or activity pamphlets or choir music or plaster flowers from the wedding-cake ceiling into my skirt pockets.
But when I grabbed the confetti, it fell apart. My hands were covered in soot.
I rubbed my eyes, rubbed my nose. I must have slashed ash all over my face, but I didn’t care.
A long metal ladder clanged against the side of the building, stretching up fifty feet or five hundred. A fireman, his jacket beribboned with epaulets, barked orders. One man climbed the ladder, then another, then another, then a fourth, positioning themselves at different heights.
The first man unfurled a long black drape, which drifted down slowly, billowing over the building, a giant-sized shroud. Each man grabbed the canvas as it came by, banging nails all around the broken windows, covering the pretty arches with black blanks, covering up the hate after all.
A group of mothers and daughters floated up from the street. A girl—Judy—screamed. She was from Nattie’s class and had the teal cat-eye glasses. The rabbi was suddenly at her side. Of course, he’d been here all along, I realized. He was the one in the blue blazer talking to the policeman. He kneeled in front of Judy, eye to eye.
I knew—knew in my bones—the stained glass, the robes, the bomb confetti were revenge for the rabbi and his integration sermons.
The water pipes could get fixed, and the windows could get restained or whatever it was you did with stained glass. But I could never look at this place, and Judy could never look at this place, and feel unhated.
“What a damn shame, Ruthie.” I looked up to see Mr. Hank in a fedora. I threw myself into him, my sooty hands around his bony shoulders.
He pulled back. “This is your place.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded.
With his cane, Mr. Hank nudged a few shiny splinters into a pile. He stared down at the shards of lilac glass that had bathed the sanctuary in dreamy light. He offered me his handkerchief. “You’ve got a little something on your nose.”
I waved him off. “I want it there.”
“Understood. The police are combing ten blocks in each direction, knocking on doors, stopping cars.” He reached down and picked up the glass with the handkerchief, wrapping the pieces like they were a most fragile gift. Then he tapped the press pass hanging around his neck. “I’m going to see what I can find out.”
Mr. Hank walked into the damaged temple—and I followed, going inside the building I’d sworn to stay out of.
There were men—firemen, policemen, temple men—taking notes and taking pictures, but no one even blinked at me.
The bomb had blown out the vestibule and buried a bronze plaque listing all the temple members who’d been killed in military service. It had destroyed the sisterhood shop; a bunch of hand-knit baby blankets floated in burst-pipe water. It had toppled a glass case filled with menorahs. I waded through it all and into the sanctuary, where there was no beautiful, delicate light, the windows covered in that black canvas nailed into the surrounding bricks from the outside.
I went up the steps to the bima, the pulpit, and stood in front of the spectacular golden ark. A layer of plaster coated the prayer book open on the lectern. With my finger, I cleared away the dust to read the words: Oh God, may all created in Thine image recognize that they are brethren, so that, one in spirit and one in fellowship, they may be forever united.
This perfect passage made me want to tell Max, to find Max. The stairs up to our classroom were blocked by a broken-off column, but I squeezed past.
And he was there, in our doorway. Max�
�s hair was damp, separated into little fingers on his forehead. He grabbed me around the waist and hugged me hard. He smelled salty and safe. My tears, his sweat, it all seemed related, part of the same ocean.
My arms rested against his back. I could feel him breathing.
Crumpled in his hand was a flash of pink—a construction-paper animal, one of the kangaroos I’d cut out while Max led the kids in the Noah’s Ark song. “There’s a hole right through the wall,” he said. “Shrapnel everywhere.”
I traced my finger along the stupid kangaroo. “What if the—” I didn’t want to say the word “bomb.” “What if it had gone off during class?” I knew Max must have been thinking it too—the gold robes, the guitar, the pink kangaroo, the kids.
“Will you pray with me?” Max’s eyes were a watery smear.
“I can’t.” I was a faker. Faking Covenant, faking cotillion, faking the Lord’s Prayer, faking Judaism. I didn’t even know if I believed in God.
“It’s okay,” he said, his mouth to my ear. “Do it anyway.”
Max said words in Hebrew, soft and fast—and they were familiar. They were my father’s words, my New York words.
Instead, I said my own words, barely out loud—Natalie Louise Robb, Sara Eleanor Robb, Alice Fontaine Landry Robb, Arthur Abraham Robb. An incantation. A prayer.
20
The Genus of the Pineapple
“So”—Rabbi Selwick smiled—“this is what it takes to get you to come to services.”
He started the meeting at three o’clock exactly, eleven hours after the blast, in the bombed-out sanctuary. The pews were full, as full as High Holiday services, and I had a spot in the front row, along with Nattie, Max, and Leah, and Mrs. Selwick, who was wearing a defiantly cheerful floral dress. Here we were. Here we all were, with the exception of Mother, who’d gone to the newsroom.
The rabbi smoothed the hair that had taken flight the night he and Max came over for dinner. “Let me tell you what we know. Early this morning—shortly before four a.m.—fifty cardboard cylinders of dynamite exploded in our sacred building. The cylinders appeared to be homemade and were packed in a suitcase. The blast woke people from their sleep several blocks away. The building has hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage, but that’s unimportant. What’s important is this: We thank God no one was hurt.”
The air had a metallic taste mixed with a whiff of something sweet, something tropical. I sucked my lips in.
“This is our Leo Frank,” the rabbi said, his voice free of his usual singsong dramatics. “What his lynching meant to previous generations, this bombing will mean for ours.”
Max nodded, his hands balled up in his pockets, a corner of the kangaroo sticking out of his chinos.
I looked up at the dome; a custodian had turned on all the lights, so it glowed down on us. It seemed ridiculous to have been afraid to climb up there with Max. Now there were bigger things to be afraid of. I wanted to remember this moment, to engrave it like one of Fontaine’s note cards. It had happened, and it couldn’t unhappen.
The sadness I’d been skipping a step ahead of caught up with me again. The tears started as a trickle, slipping down my cheeks and chin. A few plopped on the collar of the Peter Pan blouse. I wasn’t usually a crier, not even after Dad died. But today the smoke and the blasted-out bricks and the broken glass and prayer book ash made me cry, cry, cry.
Rabbi Selwick gripped the lectern. “Mr. Hank Landry of the Gazette tells us the paper received notification within fifteen minutes of the explosion. The caller said he was with an organization called the Confederate Underground, a known Klan group.” The rabbi looked down at his notes, and those note cards made me want to hug Nattie. My hands were so clammy I thought they’d slide right off her, but they didn’t.
“The caller said, ‘We bombed a temple in Midtown. This is the last empty building we will bomb. Negroes and Jews are hereby declared aliens.’ Already, I’ve heard from our clergy neighbors. Northside Presbyterian and Wesley Methodist have offered their chapels for our services. East Rivers offered us classrooms for Sunday school. This underground group thought they’d blow this city apart, but the opposite is true.”
Mrs. Selwick leaned over and patted my insane, probably electrified-looking hair. The waterworks started again, and I saw I was in good company. Max fiddled with his belt, eyes glued to the buckle. Farther down the row, Mrs. Silvermintz took her sunglasses off, then put them back on.
The mayor, in wire spectacles, took the microphone next. “These criminals, these supremacists, must’ve wanted to pit our city against itself. Let’s prove them wrong.” He listed other southern temples that had been bombed by white supremacists, not all of them successfully: Charlotte, North Carolina; Gastonia, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama. He told us that on a single night in Alabama, four churches were bombed along with the homes of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Reverend Ralph Abernathy. He reminded us that we were a small part of a larger story of hate, that all along, the clock had been ticking. And now the alarm rang for us.
Max drove Nattie and me home. Fontaine, who’d been kept apprised of the goings-on via the Teletype, poured Max and me a drink from Mr. Hank’s brass bar cart—a cocktail shaker full of whiskey and hope. She had the little television on, a fuzzy image of Douglas Edwards of CBS News showing pictures of our temple. We drained our glasses while Fontaine got Nattie involved in a game of gin rummy on the porch.
I took Max out to the perfectly aligned chaise lounges, where Frooshka greeted him in her crazy poodle way—all four paws off the ground, mouth wide open. He scratched her behind the ears, and she, and we, settled into the shade.
There were no words to say. None. “Should I get the transistor radio?” I asked Max. “We could listen to music.”
“Let’s listen to nothing,” he said.
I closed my eyes. They didn’t sting anymore.
“I don’t know,” Max said, not taking his own advice. His voice was quiet, and I kept my eyes closed. “The caller said, ‘Jews are hereby declared aliens.’ What do you say to someone who believes that?”
I elbowed up and he did the same, and then I noticed the flutter of his pulse at his temple, near those crazy eyebrows. It was like he was transparent, like I could see the bruise of the day, the pain of it all, right there.
We both collapsed back into our respective chaises, and I was reminded of lying on the temple roof, unprotected against the wind, the sun turning purple inside my closed eyelids. But then Frooshka curled around my feet, and I let myself nod off.
I was dreamily thinking of Davis, of last night, of hands—his, mine—when I felt a flick of water on my actual face.
My eyes flew open to see a real Davis standing above me. I shot a glance to the other chaise—empty.
“Tired?” Davis’s smile was huge. “Long night last night?”
“What?” The sun was over his shoulder, and his body threw a shadow my way.
“You’re not dressed for swimming,” he said.
“Swimming?” I’d totally forgotten I’d invited him to the pool. I sat up and saw that Max had relocated next to Nattie, his socks and shoes off, pants rolled up, both of them dangling toes in the shallow end and singing something soft and sweet.
Davis followed my look. “Hey, the driving instructor,” he said, nodding to Max.
“Hey.” Max shook his feet half dry and stuck his socks and shoes back on. “I’m going to go. When’s that next driving lesson, Ruth Robb?”
“Tomorrow.” I said it deliberately, wanting to imbue the word with hope and belief. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’m going to change for a swim,” Nattie said.
Max took off one way, and Nattie, the other—and Davis, he dropped into the chaise next to me.
“Did you hear about it—the bomb?” I asked Davis, rubbing my eyes.
�
��Yeah. You look cute asleep,” he said, hair flopping over one eye.
“Not today I don’t—nothing’s cute today.” You would think this would have been the time to tell Davis everything. What day could be better?
I pulled Frooshka into my lap even though she was too big. I wanted a living, breathing mammal that knew me—knew me and loved me anyway. I put my hand over her heart and let the rhythm of its beats calm me.
We sat there in the early evening light—his skin, his sunshine smell, his bermuda shorts, his breath at my neck. After all the ash, it was so nice, so necessary, to feel love and beauty in the world. And it seemed perfect Davis would be here right now, that he would know I was aching, through osmosis or a scientific term I didn’t know the name of.
“It’s been a really, really hard day,” I said. “I was there.”
He jerked his head up. “Where?”
“At the temple.”
“On Peachtree?”
I nodded and considered what to say next. “My mother was covering the story.”
“Oh, makes sense.” Davis walked his fingers inside my shirt to pluck a bra strap. “You want to run my car through the car wash?”
I shook my head. A car wash was more fun when you didn’t need one.
“Hi, Davis,” Nattie said. She was back in her good old navy bathing suit. Un, deux, trois—into the pool she went. Frooshka flopped in after her, a big splash of floof.
“Isn’t it freezing?” I yelled over.
“I’ll get used to it,” Nattie said.
The light was glimmery, the magic hour when everything, from the bushes to the swoop of Davis’s hair, was outlined in bursts of gold. Gold like the temple.
Nattie paddled over, hanging off the side, her face covered in pearls of water. “Ruthie, can you bring me the pineapple towel?” It was Dad’s favorite—he pined for pineapple, he’d said—and I’d last seen it folded under the sink in the bathroom.
In the Neighborhood of True Page 18