The Summer I Met Jack

by Michelle Gable

  “Alas,” Jack said, and groaned as he moved up onto his knees. “My body might be shot to hell, but it can still dance.”

  He strained to start the Victrola. Soon, the music crackled.

  “Come.” He staggered to his feet, and offered a hand. “Let’s cut the rug.”

  Alicia rose with caution, a confused reluctance, but was quick to soften into his embrace.

  “I love this tune,” he said, guiding her back and forth. “‘September Song.’”

  And the days grow short when you reach September

  “It reminds me of you,” he said. “Because we met in September.”

  Alicia closed her eyes. They’d met in August, but there was no use correcting such a fine point.

  “‘September, November…’” he whispered in her ear, sending shivers along her spine. “‘These precious days I’ll spend with you.’”

  REP. KENNEDY IN EUROPE FOR “PERSONAL SURVEY”

  The North Adams Transcript, January 9, 1951

  HYANNIS PORT

  It was Alicia’s first American winter—Oklahoma stayed relatively warm, so it didn’t count—and she wasn’t prepared for the total desolation after the holiday lights came down. The temperature didn’t change all that much, yet the world was colder by large degrees.

  In December, Hyannis had been magical. Shopwindows were decked out, each more impressive than the last: Osborne Refrigeration’s sleigh and reindeer, Hyannis High School’s nativity scene, and Bass River Savings Bank’s forty-foot decorated Christmas tree. On Main Street, lights twinkled and Bing Crosby played on a loop.

  Now the cheer and good tidings were gone, replaced by a thick sheen of frost. Bing’s dulcet voice was exchanged for Communist hysteria, and Jack’s absence didn’t help Alicia’s mood. In those winter months, they’d stayed in contact, but every minute was stolen, fleeting. They’d discussed a trip to Palm Beach, but time slipped away before they made plans.

  “I don’t really like Florida anyhow,” he’d said.

  They spent exactly three nights together, the most recent in Boston, after Alicia undertook a journey involving two trains, a bus, and ninety minutes spent in the Hotel Statler lobby because Jack was always late.

  But he was a busy man, so who was Alicia to complain? Jack was a congressman (reelected in November), and the key cog in the Kennedy machine. Now he was abroad, scoping out Europe’s rearmament program with his pal Torby in tow. They’d been to England, and to France. The itinerary also included Spain, Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. So far, he’d sent one cable, saying he wished she was there.

  “I don’t know why the Russians are surprised,” Alicia said, late one night, while sitting in the family room with George, a newspaper in her lap. “Is it really shocking that West Germany would want to join forces with the West? Given the tyrants leering over their shoulder?”

  “People don’t usually regard themselves as tyrannical,” George said, and flicked on the television.

  “The Russians do,” Alicia said. “And with great pride. I can’t wait to hear what Jack thinks about it all.”

  George turned the television to Amateur Hour, his favorite show. Never a greater emotional investment had he made than in the lives of strangers who could sing and dance.

  “I think the West Germans should arm themselves,” Alicia said. “I don’t trust those Russians. I don’t trust them one bit.”

  George hated politics, and so Alicia was mostly speaking to herself. It helped to say it out loud, either way. She wanted to sound knowledgeable the next time she spoke to Jack.

  As some pipsqueak sang on the stage, Alicia flipped through the paper to find ever more Russians and Reds. She sighed as the wheel spun on the television.

  Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows …

  “Are you afraid?” George asked as a prepubescent baton twirler marched onto the screen. “That the Russians will invade West Germany?”

  “I’m afraid of anything they might do.”

  “Yes, but West Germany is where you’re from.”

  “For Pete’s sake, I didn’t think you were one of those types. For the hundredth time, I’m Polish, not German.”

  “Yes. We are all aware of your nationality.” He rolled his eyes. “Our poor, displaced Pole.”

  Alicia glared at George, who didn’t move. The only motion was the flickering of the television against his glasses.

  “I didn’t know you were so perturbed about my being a refugee,” Alicia said. “I’ll try to keep my homeless orphan status to myself.”

  “Oh, geez. Here we go again. You are the hardest person to have sympathy for.”

  “Wow, George,” Alicia said, lips trembling. “I’m not sure how to take that.…”

  “Since we’re on the subject, are you really an orphan? By the strictest definition of the word?”

  “I’m pleased to show you my displaced person card. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m very much alone. Me, a few pieces of clothing, and a suitcase in my room. That’s my entire world.”

  “I’d say you have more than a ‘few’ pieces of clothing,” he grumbled.

  “I don’t have to put up with this,” Alicia said, and stood. “When you’re ready to apologize, I’ll be upstairs.”

  She tramped across the room, slowly, to give George the opportunity to take back his words.

  “So, you’re an orphan.”

  “Yes,” Alicia said, between clenched teeth.

  “All alone in this world?”

  “Do you have a hearing problem?”

  “Hmm. Then you’re sending money to Germany for the hell of it?”

  Alicia’s body seized. Cold fingers of panic ran along her spine.

  “Excuse me?” she managed to croak.

  “The money you send overseas, every week,” George said. “Who is that for?”

  It took her a minute to assemble the pieces of what George had said. When it all snapped together, Alicia gasped. They were being watched, like in Germany, and Poland before. Her life was once again at stake.

  “Oh, God,” she cried, “we’re in trouble. If they’re tracking me, and you’re letting me live here … Oh, God.”

  Alicia sat down, and dropped her head into her hands. So, it was over. This was it, the disintegration of her big, fat American hope. Alicia could smell the ashes.

  “Stop crying,” George said. “Girls are so dramatic.”

  “We’re being watched!”

  “Being watched? I merely asked why you send money to Germany, when you’ve always said that you’re alone?”

  “Who told you?” Alicia looked up, her face red and tearstained. “Who told you about my letters? The government?”

  “The government?” George said, and scrunched his nose.

  On the television, the host told people to cast their vote by postcard or by phone. Call JUdson 6-7000!

  “Good gravy,” George said. “I didn’t hear it from any spies or G-men or anything so exciting. I heard from my mother.”

  All of Alicia’s dread, the clanging and collapsing inside of her, these things suspended. The situation couldn’t be too dangerous, if Mrs. Neill was involved.

  “How does your mother know?” Alicia asked. She lowered her voice. “Is she a spy?”

  “A spy?” George said, almost spitting the word. “Cripes. No. She was chatting with the postman, and he asked when you were planning to bring your family to the States. Something about how it had to be cheaper than sending packages home every week. That was news to her, of course. And to me.”

  “The postmaster.”

  Alicia gave a rusty laugh. She hated that her mind had been trained to think the worst, primed to transform garden-variety gossips into instruments of insidious plots.

  “Who’s in Germany, Alicia?” George asked, facing her straight-on for the very first time.

  Usually he looked at everyone sideways, or from the periphery, or not at all.

  “It’s not some
thing I can explain,” Alicia said.

  “Who’s in Germany?”

  “I don’t have to answer that. You’re not my keeper, or a checkpoint agent.”

  George bit his lower lip and halfway shook his head. He stood and moved into the doorway. He wasn’t going to watch the final act. That was unheard of, especially when it involved a children’s musical troupe.

  “My mother!” Alicia blurted.

  He spun around, forehead raised.

  “It’s my mother,” she said again, tears rolling down her face. “Every week I send her money, as much as I can. Every week I pray I’m one step closer to getting her out of that camp.”

  * * *

  George seemed bedeviled by the information, like he hadn’t known there were still camps. The war left millions without a home. Where did he presume all those people had gone?

  Alicia explained that these were not the camps he pictured, nothing quite that grim. Mother’s was more of a military-barracks-style outfit, a cinder-block town that, albeit charmless, still had schools and theaters and a library or two.

  “It’s been six years,” George said. “Haven’t people gone home?”

  That was the problem. The Allies hadn’t meant to keep the camps open for that long, but where was home, exactly? Very few of them could repatriate. Many places remained unsafe for Jews, or for anyone not wishing to live under Communist rule. Just because a paper had been signed, and a white flag waved, didn’t mean attitudes had changed.

  “But your mother?” George said. “I thought some priest told you that both of your parents were dead?”

  Yes, a priest had said something along those lines. He said that Father had been rounded up, and had died at Treblinka. The last record of her mother was from a factory in Radom that’d been bombed twice, and Mother was therefore presumed dead. But “presumed” was just a guess.

  After the war, with so many displaced, the Allies established tracking bureaus to help families reunite. Alicia left school and secured a job with one of these organizations as a typist, based in Bünde. After clacking out responses and requests for countless inquiries, Alicia completed one for her parents, just in case.

  SEARCH BUREAU

  CONTROL COMMISSION FOR GERMANY

  ENQUIRY CONCERNING MISSING PERSONS

  Kopczynski, Mordechai

  Kopczynska, Felitzya

  Alicia filled out the requisite information: their names, birth dates, birth places, and last known address. She recorded the date of their most recent communication, which was a staggering five years before.

  It wasn’t that Alicia believed she’d find them; she simply needed definitive proof that they were gone. Life was so transient, in the camp as in Europe, that it was hard to accept anything as the unmitigated truth.

  News of her father shot back like a boomerang. He’d died at Treblinka, as Alicia had been told. And her mother? Nothing arrived on Mamusia for days, weeks, months at a time.

  Then, one bright June morning, Alicia was filing discharged inquiries when her boss walked in with information for her. Mother had been found. She was alive, though not well, and residing in a DP camp in Stuttgart. The nurse who wrote the letter gave the address, and Alicia scraped together every last reichsmark and set off.

  “How come you never told me you lived in a camp?” George asked, jaw slack with disbelief. “How do I not know this about you?”

  Alicia shrugged. She wasn’t hiding it, exactly. It hadn’t come up.

  “How long did you live there?” he wanted to know.

  “About three years,” she said. “Until I got my visa.”

  “You fled to the States.” George frowned. “And left your mother behind?”

  “You don’t understand,” Alicia said. “The camps were temporary. People had to leave the moment they could. No country would take the ill, or the elderly, or the handicapped or otherwise unable to work. My mother’s health is very poor. They told us that there wasn’t hope. She’d die in that camp.”

  As it had so many others’, the past decade had decimated Mother’s body, and her mind. She’d spent most of the war toiling in munitions factories and salt mines. After that, she lived in a series of concentration camps, though Alicia did not reveal this part to George.

  “Don’t you see?” she said as George remained fixed in the doorway, his features tweaked into a look of revulsion. “One of us had to get out, in order to save us both. The people who didn’t seize their opportunities before the war, most of them ended up dead. Countries were starting to shut their borders and I had to take my chance while it was still available. By the time I received my visa, I was the only person under twenty still left at the camp, aside from the children who’d been born there.”

  In the end, the hardest choice Alicia ever made was really quite obvious. That’s how it was for someone without options. The camps were not designed to last forever. Hundreds of thousands were scattered to the countries that’d take them, but no one wanted the sick. When the camps closed, what would become of them? There were only two ways to leave that place: with a visa or in a hearse.

  Two old bags committed suicide this week, her mother last wrote. It’s not so sad. We’ll die in this place, one way or another.

  Alicia had to earn enough to move Mother out, if for no other reason than to get her better care in her final days. Sure, the camp had a hospital, but did George ever wonder what happened to the doctors and nurses from Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the rest? The ones who performed ghastly experiments and brutally hastened the deaths of millions? They were repurposed, sent to DP camps to take care of those who survived, those they’d already tortured but not quite killed.

  “I stand by my decision,” Alicia insisted, as Irenka’s words ran through her head: I see you. I see who you are.

  “My mother wanted me to go,” she said. “I’ll make a better life for both of us. She’s still young. Who knows, maybe a miracle will happen, and she’ll recover. I dream of buying her a home, a cottage, at the foot of a mountain.”

  A quaint, half-timbered, thatch-roofed kotten surrounded by buttercups, violets, and alpine rose. Not until she spoke the words did Alicia realize how complete the picture was.

  “So that’s your plan,” George said flatly. “To get your mother out of the camp?”

  “It is,” she said.

  “Okay then, what are you doing about it?”

  “George!” Alicia tossed up her hands. “Do you not see me in front of you? I moved to America, is what I did.”

  “Yes, okay.” George sniffled, pushed up his glasses. “I usually don’t bother pointing out the obvious, but this cottage? For your mother? You do realize that you don’t have a home for yourself?”

  Alicia’s mouth fell open.

  “Does your mother want me to leave?” she asked.

  “Of course not. She loves you like a daughter, more than her actual daughter, it must be said. I think some part of her wishes, and believes, that you’ll stay forever.”

  Tears rushed to Alicia’s eyes. Sweet Mrs. Neill. How kind. How generous. Alas, Alicia was not getting drippy-eyed about the woman’s hospitality but instead the unintended weight of George’s words.

  She believes that you’ll stay forever.

  What’s your plan, George asked, and he was right. Fact of the matter, Alicia was hardly going to start one life at forty dollars per week, much less two, especially when these lives had to be made of something more than skirting by.

  “Have I offended you?” George said, and glowered. “That’s not my intent. I’m just mystified. You realize how little you make, right?”

  “So, you don’t think I’ll hit it big hawking Goobers to the summer folk?” Alicia said with a partial smile.

  “Definitely not. Especially since you’re perennially in danger of getting fired.”

  Alicia laughed, but said nothing.

  “I thought the plan was your art,” George said.

  “It was. As you can see, it’s progressing
brilliantly.”

  She immediately envisioned the Center lobby, the empty lobby. Alicia didn’t display her pieces anymore, and she hadn’t lifted a brush in months.

  “You’re right, George,” she said, “my plan is crap.”

  “Whoa.” He held up both hands. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Regardless, message received.”

  “I see why you did it,” George said.

  Alicia blinked.

  “Why you came to the States,” he said. “Alone.”

  She blinked again.

  “You want to get your mom away from those doctors, obviously,” he said. “But you also want to repay her for the risks she took, for getting you out of Łódź, and making sure you were safely at school.”

  Alicia bobbed her head. That was part of it, yes, though these actions belonged mostly to her dad.

  “I hope you get that house for her,” he said. “And yours, too. If you want it.”

  “I want both of these things, and more. George?” she said, a little absently, her mind starting to wander. “What’s that American notion? A New Year’s dedication?”

  “New Year’s resolution?”

  Alicia nodded and walked toward him.

  “I’m going to make one,” she said. “A resolution. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and scratched his neck, “these things usually only last a few weeks. They’re kind of a joke, if you ask me.”

  “A drop of encouragement might be nice.” Alicia rolled her eyes. “And this is no joke. Let it be known that within one year, everything will be different. My home. My career. My life.”

  “I don’t think you’re doing this right. I’ve personally never made a resolution—who has time for that—but it should be more, I dunno, specific. You want to lose twenty pounds. Take Sunday drives. Swear less. That sort of thing.”

  “I’d say a new house is quite specific. Or are you implying that I’m fat and swear too much?”

  “No! Lord, no!”