A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  ALSO BY JANIS COOKE NEWMAN

  Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln

  The Russian Word for Snow

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2015 by Janis Cooke Newman

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Newman, Janis Cooke.

  A master plan for rescue : a novel / Janis Cooke Newman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-18401-5

  I. Title.

  PS3614.E626M38 2015 2015004284

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To my father,

  who told me his stories

  CONTENTS

  Also by Janis Cooke Newman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Acknowledgments

  One

  This is the moment I spend the rest of my life trying to return to:

  The three of us sitting around the table my father and I have painted red to match The Flash’s cape. A shade, I now know, that doesn’t belong in a kitchen, but it was my father who suggested bringing the comic book to the paint store on Dyckman Street.

  It’s early December, and the clanging of the radiator mixes with the violins that spill from the speakers of the Silvertone radio. I know the Silvertone is on, because it is always on. My grandfather, a man once known as the Gentleman Bootlegger, a man who is dead by this time, claimed that music during meals is what separates man from beast, and so my mother—his daughter—puts on music. But we never listen to it. Instead, we sit above bowls that smell of gravy and spices and talk over each other, sometimes banging our silverware on the red table for attention. The three of us—my father, mother, and me—in our small apartment at the northern tip of Manhattan.

  In this moment, though, there is only the clanging of the radiator and the violins. We have stopped talking so my father and I can watch my mother add up numbers inside her head.

  Because that is what she can do. Her ability.

  Though to be more accurate, it’s my father who is watching her. I am watching him. And I’m realizing, for the first time—and probably because I am so close to turning twelve—that it isn’t the feat of her adding up those numbers he enjoys so much. It’s the way she’s sliding the tip of a No. 2 pencil into and out of the gap between her front teeth.

  And now that I’ve noticed this, I cannot remember a single time my father has taken that pencil back and checked her answer. I can only remember him doing exactly what he’s doing now. Gazing at her mouth, her eyes—the exact shade of green the Hudson River gets on a clear day—her long swoops of black hair.

  In the pocket of the black Mass pants I have not yet had time to change out of is something rare I am waiting to show my father. This morning, during Father Barry’s sermon, I found the stub of a Mass candle caught under my kneeler, and I’ve spent the past hour melting its wax into the hollow of a perfectly round beer bottle cap, creating an object I believe will make me unbeatable at the game of skully.

  I’m, at best, a mediocre skully player. However, with this new skully cap—this Holy Skully Cap—it will be as if God Himself is directing my thumb every time I flick my cap across the chalked squares of the board. As if His Mighty Force is propelling my cap into that of another player, one filled merely with the wax of a melted crayon.

  As I wait, I imagine myself dropping the Holy Skully Cap into my father’s hand, telling him the story of finding the candle, melting the wax. I know that when I’ve finished this story, my father will lift his eyes—brown like mine—and run them over me, reading me. I know, too, that he will understand all the powers I believe the Holy Skully Cap to possess without me having to say them aloud.

  Because that is what he can do. His ability.

  I do not yet have an ability. I am only an almost-twelve-year-old boy, small for my age, black-haired like my mother, wanting no more than for the life I have to keep going as it is.

  All these things are held in that moment. Everything I am about to lose. My mother adding up numbers inside her head. My father watching as she slides the tip of a No. 2 pencil into and out of the gap between her teeth. Me with something rare I am waiting to show my father.

  It has been a cold day, the temperature barely making it into the twenties. But the chill has thinned the air and the sky is clear. The last rays of sunlight slant through the front windows of our apartment, and though it is only mid-afternoon, there is a sense of the day ending. That nostalgic Sunday afternoon feeling of wishing to remain exactly where you are.

  Those things, too, are held in that moment, the moment before the violins turn into words. Turn into

  Surprise attack and Japanese bombs and Pearl Harbor.

  It is my father’s hand I’m looking at when my eyes go bad.

  My father’s hands are not like anyone else’s. The skin in the creases has been bleached white by the chemicals he uses to develop his photographs. My father shoots portraits, and I think of these white marks as the ghosts of every picture he has ever taken.

  It’s these white marks that disappear first, blurring into nothingness, like ghosts vanishing. Then the hand itself. The edges melting away, dissolving into a table painted a red that doesn’t belong in a kitchen.

  My eyes dart around the room, but everything has turned into a mass of color, as if the outline of each object—the icebox, the stove, the window over the sink—has been erased, as if the boundaries that keep the color of one thing from invading another no longer exist. And what I think—what I can only think—is that it is the Japanese. That they, with their bombs, have knocked the entire world out of focus.

  I search for my father, stare into the space where a second ago, he was sitting. But there’s nothing there except the brownish-red smudge of the wallpaper, and it feels like those bombs have sucked all the air out of the room along with the outlines of things, because I cannot breathe, can only gasp.

  I hurl my arm into the place where my father had been, stunned that the Japanese could have taken him from me, amazed at their evil magic. My hand collides with something, the bones of his chest, the worn fabric of his shirt. My father shifts in his chair, drops his hand
over mine, and I realize that his reddish hair, the Sunday stubble on his face, his brown shirt have all merged with the wallpaper behind him, turning him invisible. I press the flat of my hand against his chest until I can feel his heart beating.

  And that’s better, but only a little. Because now Aunt May—my mother’s sister—and Uncle Glenn are in our kitchen, which I know only by the sound of their voices. The two of them, up from their apartment one floor below. And I have the sense from the confident movement of their blurs—Uncle Glenn’s pudgy and beer-colored, Aunt May’s still in the navy blue suit she wore to Mass—that they do not see our kitchen as an unnavigable smudge of color. And I’m figuring out, by the way Aunt May is clattering what sounds like rosary beads on the table, and saying we should all go straight back to Good Shepherd and repeat a thousand Hail Marys for peace, saying to my father, “Yes, even you, Denis,” my father having long declared that Ireland more than cured him of Catholicism; and by the way Uncle Glenn keeps repeating that first thing tomorrow morning he’s going to Whitehall Street and joining up; and by how the black-haired blur of my mother is heading for the living room, shouting back that everybody needs to pipe down, because she can’t hear the radio, that it is only me who is seeing the world this way.

  And that is worse. Much worse.

  I take my hand off my father’s chest and press both palms into my eyes until I see sparks of light, and then I press harder, as if that light is a mechanism for fixing what has gone wrong. But when I open my eyes, nothing has changed. Or, I suppose, everything has.

  I have to say something, I’m thinking. Tell somebody. But I can’t pull enough air into my lungs for speech. And even if I could, everybody is talking. About the Japanese. And their bombs.

  Except my father, who hasn’t moved, hasn’t spoken. Who, I believe, has been running his eyes over me, reading me.

  “Jack,” he says. “How many fingers?”

  But I cannot tell he has raised his hand.

  Two

  The following day, my father took me to see Dr. Shaperstein, the optometrist on Broadway and 207th Street.

  Dr. Shaperstein’s office was nothing more than a brown blur, except for a model of an eyeball the size of a grapefruit that appeared to be floating in space and Dr. Shaperstein’s white coat, which hovered over me.

  “Tell me what you can read on the chart,” Dr. Shaperstein said.

  I squinted into the brownness.

  Dr. Shaperstein dropped his hands on my shoulders and pushed me forward a foot.

  “Better?”

  I shook my head.

  His hands fell onto my shoulders once more, and he pushed me again. Then he kept pushing me, asking every foot or so what I could see. Not until I was near enough to touch the chart, press my palms flat against it, did I finally say, “E. I can see E, the big letter at the top.”

  Dr. Shaperstein turned to my father. “Your son has the most remarkable case of myopia I have ever encountered.”

  He did not say remarkable as if I had developed a special skill like flying. He said it as if I might have wandered over from the Coney Island sideshow.

  My father told him my eyes had been fine only a couple of days before, and Dr. Shaperstein said it wasn’t uncommon for boys on the cusp of puberty to experience a sudden deterioration of vision. Then he moved me back and forth in front of the chart to see exactly what I could and couldn’t read, and repeated remarkable a few more times, until my father said, in his voice that still contained enough Irish to push around the American, “How about you knock it off and see about making him some glasses.”

  After that, there was the noise of wooden drawers opening and shutting, and finally, Dr. Shaperstein said, “You’re in luck. The luck of the Irish.”

  “I believe history has shown,” my father said, “that the Irish have never been particularly lucky.”

  • • •

  Dr. Shaperstein told us the glasses wouldn’t be ready for a week. Because I couldn’t go out without someone to guide me, I spent that week at home. Mostly, I listened to the radio, sitting on the green and brown checkerboard linoleum in front of our big cherrywood Silvertone, spinning the dial, searching for something familiar, some program that hadn’t been preempted by war news. But like my eyes, everything that poured out of the Silvertone’s speakers seemed to have been altered by those Japanese bombs.

  I tried to put my faith in Dr. Shaperstein and whatever he’d found in those wooden drawers. Told myself that the glasses he was making would restore the world to order, reinstate the boundaries between objects, send the colors back within their borders.

  I decided, too, that the Holy Skully Cap was a kind of relic, as potent as Holy Water, or the Communion Host after Father Barry had blessed it. During the day, I kept it in my pocket, running my fingers over its scalloped edges. Each evening, I placed it—always with two hands—on my night table next to my luminous-face alarm clock. Then I prayed to it—this beer bottle cap filled with melted wax—asking it to grant my request for the gift of sight.

  I did not want to believe that something fundamental might have shifted. That for me, much like for the rest of the world, nothing would be the same.

  • • •

  When we returned to Dr. Shaperstein’s office, he again placed me in front of the eye chart, this time settling the glasses on my nose. The weight of them was like coming down with a head cold.

  “Well?” he asked.

  Without hesitation, I read the rows of letters, my eyes stopping smartly against each sharp, black line.

  Then I turned to my father, sitting on the other side of the room, wanting to see his expression. But his features—his eyes, his slightly freckled skin, his mouth—had gone soft-edged and smeared, as if somebody had rubbed an eraser over them.

  Starting to feel breathless again, I ran my eyes around Dr. Shaperstein’s office. Some of the things were clear. The floating eyeball, three feet away, the fountain pen next to it. But when I looked across the room at my father, he remained blurred.

  I pushed the glasses closer to my eyes, slid them down my nose. But my father stayed out of focus, and the room was starting to feel airless.

  “Something’s wrong,” I gasped.

  “With myopia this bad, there’s a trade-off,” Dr. Shaperstein said. “Correct for distance, and you lose what’s close up. Correct for what’s close up, and you lose the distance.”

  I walked across Dr. Shaperstein’s office, keeping my eyes on my father’s face, bringing his features back into sharpness, turning them recognizable. But when I got too close, close enough to touch him, they began to drift out of focus again.

  “What if I want to see something up close?”

  Dr. Shaperstein lifted the glasses from my face and rested them on the top of my head.

  “Now I can’t see anything.”

  “Get closer,” he said.

  I stepped closer to my father, close enough to smell the chemicals he used to develop his photographs—a smell that was both bitter and sweet, a smell that made me think of science. His face moved back into focus.

  “What exactly did you correct him for?” my father said.

  “The best I could,” Dr. Shaperstein told him. “Something in the middle.”

  He pushed the glasses back in front of my eyes and handed me a mirror. I stretched out my arm to put myself into better focus.

  The glasses he’d made for me had black frames and lenses as thick as the bottom of a Nehi soda bottle. They looked like the X-Ray Specs advertised in the back of comic books. The ones that claimed they would let you see through walls and ladies’ dresses. They took over my whole face.

  I pushed the mirror back at Dr. Shaperstein.

  “Any chance he’ll grow out of this?” my father said.

  “Anything’s possible,” Dr. Shaperstein told him. “But probably not that.�
��

  As my father and I walked back down Broadway, the people coming toward us—men in overcoats, women wearing hats—snapped into and out of focus without warning, as if they possessed the power to control how much of themselves they would allow the world to see.

  I kept shutting my eyes, opening them again, willing everyone to stay still, stay in the three-foot distance where I could focus. But they kept moving, going from blurred to clear to blurred again.

  “I’m thinking you’ll get used to that,” my father said.

  “What about how they’re staring?”

  “That might take some time.”

  • • •

  When we arrived home, my mother lifted the glasses off my face and held them in front of her own eyes.

  It’s possible what happened next was the power of the lenses, possible their strength was more than she’d been expecting. But the moment my mother looked through them, her head startled back, as if those thick lenses had shown her something she didn’t want to see.

  She took the glasses away from her face, set them back onto my nose.

  “Your eyes won’t stay bad,” she told me.

  “I suggested that same possibility to the doctor,” my father said.

  “And?”

  My father repeated what Dr. Shaperstein had told us.

  “What does he know?” My mother shrugged.

  And what did he know—this doctor who could only correct me for something in the middle—against a woman who had no belief in her own bad luck. A woman who had witnessed her father—that man known as the Gentleman Bootlegger—shot point-blank on three separate occasions. And on three separate occasions, had seen him rise unharmed.

  It was a story my mother repeated often. I suspect because it was about signs—in which my mother placed a good deal of faith—and also because I think she liked talking about the time she and her father lived in the warehouse full of illegal alcohol on Tenth Avenue. When it had been only the two of them, Aunt May having gone off to the convent school in Poughkeepsie, believing she possessed a vocation.