The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  “That is customary,” Franz pontificated, “but the view of the Trylon and Perisphere from the Lagoon of Nations is much finer, in my opinion.”

  “Oh, he’s right,” Marie told Emilie. “I do wish that had been our first sight of them. That’s what’s so nice about going to the Fair more than once. You get to do everything, and you get to do it right.”

  Normally, Helen would have resented the lording air her aunt and uncle were assuming, but today their attitude didn’t bother her. Let them guide. Let them crow. By tonight, she, too, would be a Fair veteran, with her own memories and favorites. This would be her only visit, an early fifteenth birthday gift from her father, and she wasn’t going to let anything mar it.

  Helen’s cousins were pulling the guidebook back and forth between them in their eagerness to display different pages. The twins were sharing their knowledge of the Fair not as tutors but as comrades.

  “They’ve got a whole Swiss village,” Teresa said, “with real snow and yodeling.”

  “We gotta do the Parachute Jump,” Terence declared.

  “It scared me too much,” Teresa said, shaking her head. “Let’s go to the Aquacade instead.”

  “Futurama’s the best,” Terence told Helen excitedly. “You go to 1960, when there’s gonna be fourteen-lane superhighways across the country, and cars will only cost two hundred dollars, and fruit trees’ll grow under glass jars, and a bunch of other stuff. At the end of the ride, they give you a button that says I have seen the future.”

  Helen had to admit that her aunt and uncle had been right about the view from the lagoon. It was spectacular. Gazing from a bridge down a long avenue of trees and statuary, they were able to see, through the mist of fountains, the Fair’s symbols, a huge obelisk and sphere that glowed blindingly white in the July sun.

  Leaving the adults to take the Fair bus, the young people set off jubilantly down Constitution Mall towards the Trylon and Perisphere. How could anyone bear to sit on a bus and simply pass by the myriad surprises and marvels on every side—acres of national and commercial pavilions, lawns studded with thousands of tulips, murals, statues, bands, shows and exhibits?

  “The Trylon’s six hundred ten feet high,” Terence said when they reached it. “Taller than the Washington Monument.”

  Terence’s visits to the Fair had sparked the idea he might become an architect some day, so he was interested in dimensions and measurements, especially impressive ones. Helen smiled, remembering that only two years ago his future plans had centered on becoming the next Green Lantern.

  The three companions boarded an escalator that ascended as steeply as a roller coaster into the sphere. They stepped onto a slowly rotating balcony that passed through a tunnel and carried them out into a great space. Helen gasped. All around them, awestruck people were exclaiming, “Look, look!” A colossal, blue-lit dome arced high above them, while below sprawled a model American city in the year 2039. “Democracity” and its suburbs fanned out in concentric half circles from one central skyscraper. None of the city’s streets intersected.

  “No auto accidents,” Terence pointed out.

  As the balcony revolved, the dome darkened and stars emerged. Lights went on all over Democracity. The majestic sound of a choir welled up. Projected images of workers appeared on the dome, marching closer and closer—teachers with books, miners with headlamps, engineers with blueprints, farmers with hoes and pails, factory men with wrenches.

  The cousins exited down a spiral ramp to a plaza graced by a sculpture called The Astronomer, a male nude staring upwards. Helen thought he looked worried. It was a strange expression for a statue, especially one standing beside the splendid promise of Democracity.

  As arranged, the adults were waiting for them near The Astronomer, Emilie waved as they approached, but no one else acknowledged their arrival.

  “No, Walter, I don’t agree,” Franz was saying. “Herr Hitler is willing to let the Jews go, but no one is willing to take them in. The Poles sent thousands back. Boatloads have been turned away from Argentina, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Mexico, Egypt, Turkey. The British have quotas in Palestine to keep the Arabs calm. There are quotas here, too. It’s easy to criticize Germany, but what the critics actually do doesn’t add up.”

  Walter sighed in frustration. Helen could see he didn’t like conceding a point to her uncle.

  The family began strolling, and the conversation resumed.

  “It’s still not right, Franz, for the Nazis to put them in camps,” Walter persisted. “Or to use the threat of camps to force them to leave. The nations that turn their backs are wrong, yes, but it’s Germany who’s causing the problem.”

  “German civilization is one of the highest in history,” Marie objected. “Didn’t the Führer give Richard Strauss a lavish birthday luncheon in Vienna just last month? He is a man of culture, and he can be relied on to behave as one in state matters, too, I think.”

  “I don’t know about that, Marie,” Emilie said. “The little bit of news out of Germany is often troubling.”

  “Which news?”

  “Did you see the newspaper photos of the Italian Minister of Culture inspecting Jews at Sachsenhausen concentration camp? They looked so grim, so sad.”

  “Pooh,” Marie said. “So would anyone with a shaved head and wearing those baggy striped uniforms. They’re prisoners, after all. I expect the food is not good. They’re probably at hard labor.”

  “I’ve read much worse than that happens in those camps. Terrible cruelties. Every month, hundreds of people commit suicide by throwing themselves into the Danube rather than be taken.”

  “Who knows what to believe and what’s propaganda? We don’t hear the whole story, I’m sure.”

  “You’re probably right there,” Emilie admitted.

  “What about the St. Louis?” Ursula said.

  The adults all turned to look at her, as if they’d forgotten she was there.

  Helen remembered well the story of the Hamburg-Amerika liner. Her grandmother had told her about it in May. It had made a deep impression on Ursula.

  “More than nine hundred Jews on it,” Ursula said now. “Whole families. All approved for the United States, going to Cuba to wait. That was all. Only to wait until the entry numbers came up. Round-trip tickets they had to buy, though no one planned to return.”

  “The St. Louis,” Walter jumped in. “There’s a case in point. While they were at sea, the President of Cuba decreed that they’d need more money to enter, plus additional documents. It was only a trick to keep them out. The ship circled the Caribbean for weeks before finally heading back to Germany.”

  “I remember,” Emilie said. “The Coast Guard followed them when they were near Florida so no one would try to swim ashore.”

  “Cuba already has nine thousand refugee Jews,” Franz said. “Why should they take more if they don’t want to?”

  “But Franz, while the St. Louis was at sea, tens of thousands of Jews in Germany were given notice to leave the country within weeks or sometimes hours, or face internment. How could anyone send them back into that?”

  “The Jews have made their bed, now let them get out of it on their own,” Marie said. “And they’re not on their own, anyway. All those countries you fault for turning some away, Walter, they’ve taken thousands of them in, too.”

  “Most of the St. Louis Jews ended up in England and France, and in Belgium and Holland,” Franz added.

  “Because the League of Nations twisted some arms,” Walter said.

  “The newspapers helped,” Franz said, seeming to complain. “‘Cargo of despair,’ the New York Times called them. I don’t know why those Jews got singled out for special attention.”

  “Lucky for them they did,” said Walter.

  “They say sometimes,” Emilie put in, “if a captain can’t land anywhere, he just dumps them on an island in the Mediterranean or at some remote spot along the Palestine coast. I guess they have to fend for themselves then.”

&
nbsp; “As I said earlier,” Marie sniffed. “But come now,” she added in a cheerier tone. “What dark talk on such a lovely day. And with the children probably hungry, no?”

  She looked appealingly to Helen and the twins. Terence nodded.

  “It’s like being on a mountain here,” she went on, “looking at what this great country has achieved and the even better life it will bring us all.”

  She linked arms with her husband. He smiled affectionately at her.

  “This is a good spot,” he said, pointing to a restaurant at the Court of Railways. Helen could see that her father was reluctant to drop the debate, but that he was going to do so anyway. Her mother, too, was rearranging her expression to one of conviviality.

  “When the ship was in Havana harbor,” Ursula said, “a man cut his wrists. A man with a wife and children.”

  “Nanny, please,” Marie began, but the old woman scowled at her, so she didn’t go on.

  “They took him to a hospital. But they would not let his family on shore. The ship left, and they were parted.”

  These were the kinds of details Helen could understand. She didn’t know what happened in the concentration camps in Germany. She couldn’t comprehend how the Jews could be so dangerous that all of them, all ages and occupations, had to be regulated and watched. But she could imagine the pain of leaving home and losing loved ones. That’s what her grandmother had wanted the odyssey of the St. Louis to explain to her.

  “And when the ship left Havana,” Ursula continued, “out into the harbor came many little boats, with the aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and brothers on them. The little boats went alongside the big one and kept company until the sea was too wide and rough. There was sobbing on the big ship and sobbing on the small boats. And they all were calling auf Wiedersehen, back and forth, again and again.”

  They entered the restaurant and ordered. Marie leafed through the guidebook, making suggestions for the afternoon, asking Franz’s advice, Emilie’s preferences. She succeeded in drawing Walter out by blathering on about the RCA exhibit and then letting him correct her on how television broadcasting actually worked. Ursula was quiet. They had all had their say. No one was going to change anyone’s mind.

  The world was at peace at present, and everyone had their fingers crossed that it would hold. In March, the Civil War in Spain had ended, and Hitler had annexed the areas of Czecho-Slovakia that hadn’t been already given to him by France and England the previous September. It was hoped he’d be satisfied with that.

  The whole Fair was keyed to the world of tomorrow, and to the conviction that in the decades to come, technology and hard work and democracy were going to make a better life for everyone. But in many homes in Europe, Helen considered as she listened to the careful cordiality of the adults and thought again about the plight of the St. Louis, tomorrow didn’t mean 2039 or 1960 or even, perhaps, 1940. Tomorrow there meant the very next day and queasy speculations on what it might bring.

  CHAPTER 16

  AUGUST 1940

  It was Helen’s sixteenth birthday, and Billy had given her his yearbook photo, signed “fondly,” and a nosegay of violets. He’d passed them over the fence, as they’d been passing items back and forth for years. But things were deliciously different now.

  In May, they’d started walking to school together, a day here and there, when they chanced to leave their houses at the same time. By the middle of June, Billy was waiting on his porch for her every morning, and they often met to walk home together, too, dropping the pretense of happenstance.

  After his graduation, Billy went to work at Benson’s Hardware, but he and Helen spent every Saturday and some Sunday afternoons together, bicycling, swimming, fishing. They’d been out at night three times, to a movie, a band concert, and the roller rink. The summer jaunts had reinforced and broadened the mutual attachment nurtured by their school-day walks, and the gift of the photograph cinched it.

  Helen had tucked the photo in a corner of her dresser mirror and was arranging the violets in a vase when her grandmother paused outside her open bedroom door.

  “So, you have Billy Mackey’s picture. Does such a thing mean what it did when I was young?”

  “I don’t know,” Helen said shyly.

  “No?”

  “Sorry, Nanny. I don’t know what it used to mean to you, but I do know what it means to me.”

  She gently pushed the photo more tightly into the mirror frame. “To us,” she added.

  “To us?” Ursula repeated archly.

  Helen didn’t wince under her grandmother’s inspecting gaze. The bravery of saying “us” had released her from shyness.

  “It means I’m his girl,” she went on. “That I won’t go out with anyone else. And he won’t, either.”

  “Ah, your first sweetheart.”

  “First and last.”

  September 1940

  The band concerts at Brinker’s Green were a pleasant way to pass a summer evening, but Helen preferred the latter concerts of the season, played on the first three Saturdays of September. The weather was crisper, the crowd smaller, the music somehow brighter and more bracing. This year’s final concert was scheduled for tonight. Helen would wear Billy’s varsity letter sweater. It was too big for her, but that was part of its charm.

  “Mama,” Helen said, walking into the kitchen, “I need snacks for tonight.”

  “Look around,” Emilie replied, “There are chicken wings in the fridge, some squares of Pfefferkuchen in the cookie jar.” She was sitting at the table leafing through Life magazine.

  Chicken wings are too greasy, Helen thought, rummaging in the meat drawer for cold cuts. But she’d definitely take some gingerbread. It was one of Nanny’s specialties, and she knew Billy liked it.

  “Dear, dear, look at this,” Emilie said.

  Helen came to peer over her mother’s shoulder. She was pointing to a photograph of a group of children crowded together in a deep, narrow ditch. They were all looking up, not at the photographer, but higher, beyond him. What you noticed first were their intent faces. Then the hands. One boy’s hands were clenched together, another was using his hands to shade his eyes, another had his fingers in his mouth. Two girls had their arms around younger kids, their hands curled tenderly around little shoulders. The headline over the picture read “Hitler Tries To Destroy London.”

  “It’s a trench shelter in Kent,” Emilie explained. “They’re watching Spitfires intercept bombers.”

  The Germans had been dropping bombs on London for the past sixteen days, with no signs of stopping. Thousands had been killed. In Movietone News, Helen had seen people digging in rubble piles, sometimes with their bare hands, and rescue workers carrying stretchers, but this magazine photo gripped her more than any of the moving pictures had. The children were so average-looking, so clean and well-fed, their upturned faces trusting in spite of their obvious anxiety.

  The children’s faces seemed to acquire throbbing color. Helen knew suddenly, without reading the text, that they’d all survived that day in the trench, but she also knew that the little boy in the foreground would die later, when a bomb hit his church, and that the girl with her hair pulled back from her brow with a barrette would also die, during an air raid that would take out a whole block of houses.

  Helen turned away. Everything had been so quiet for so long, two whole years. She’d been sure she was really done with such things. Why should it come back now, in her own kitchen, on a happy Saturday afternoon, just because of a photograph? She’d been seeing newsreels and hearing radio broadcasts about the war in Europe for a year with no such effect.

  Though the United States remained neutral, Helen’s American history teacher had colored a world map to show occupied countries and inserted little flags to mark embattled areas. In the spring, German armies had overrun Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France. With Japan and Italy as allies and Russia signed to a nonaggression pact, Hitler seemed unstoppable. Helen knew that peopl
e were suffering and dying every day and night overseas, yet neither the classroom map nor the teacher’s daily review of current events had sparked any visions or intuitions. Helen hadn’t even had to resist them. They just weren’t there.

  “Honey, are you all right?”

  Helen turned to find her mother standing beside her. Only then did she realize she’d been leaning against the edge of the counter and softly moaning.

  “It’s that picture,” she said. “I saw … Well, I didn’t actually see anything, but two of those kids—I know they’re going to die.”

  “Oh, Helen.” Emilie put her arm around the girl’s shoulders.

  “I don’t like finding out things like that, Mama. I don’t know what to do with them.”

  “Shall we ask Nanny about it?”

  “No. I want to forget it.”

  Helen could see her mother struggling to think of what to say. Abruptly, Emilie opened the breadbox.

  “All right then,” she said. “I was saving these rolls for supper, but why don’t you use them for sandwiches?”

  She peered into the refrigerator. “I know I’ve got some sweet pickles … Here they are. And, Helen, I believe there’s a bit of lettuce still in the garden. Go pick it. It’ll only be wasted if the weather turns.”

  Helen stood staring at her mother’s industry as if she were watching a circus act.

  “Well, go on,” Emilie said.

  Still Helen hesitated. Emilie moved close to her and spoke quietly.

  “It’s just these times,” she said. “All the terrible news, the wondering where it’s leading. Anyone could have premonitions or dreams. I’m sure people do who have never had such things before. Don’t worry about what to do about it.”

  Helen knew it was not as simple as that, and she knew Emilie knew it, too. But she decided she would take the route her mother was laying out. She would pretend she hadn’t received any communication about the children in the photograph, at least not anything almost anyone might imagine, as her mother said, in times like these. She would make her bologna sandwiches and go to the band concert and hold Billy’s hand while they listened to the music, and she’d stop with him in the shadows on the way home and kiss him and let him touch her breasts if he wanted to, which he had taken to wanting often lately. She could forget anything while that was happening. She could forget anything just by thinking about that happening.