“Do with you?”
“Do you remember, Mr. Seabrook, the fire that burned down the Grand Central Hotel in 1913?”
It was like she had dashed a glass of water in his face. All the blood went out of his cheeks, and he sat back so hard, she heard the leather squeak in his chair.
“Of course I remember.”
“My husband worked in that hotel. He was the janitor.”
“Wait a minute. I met the janitor one evening. The concierge, Max something or other, he took me to meet him. That was your husband?”
Now it was Sarah’s turn to look confused. “You met my Micha?”
“I don’t remember his name, or even his face. But Max assured me he was working in the hotel the night it burned down.”
“My Micha, he never told me anything about that. He died in the war a long time ago, and there are a lot of things he did not tell. But I know what he did that night.”
“And what did he do?”
“He got a little baby from that fire and brought her home with him.”
Sarah watched the play of emotion on the man’s face; it was like watching a statue come to life. George Seabrook, always so proper and so formal, sat there with his mouth open, trying to find the right words. But there were no right words.
He got up, very slowly, and went back out onto the terrace. She watched him staring up at the sky, his hands in the pockets of his pinstripe trousers, blinking at the drizzle of rain. Finally, he seemed to shake himself, and he came back in, closing the terrace doors behind him.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Sarah stared at the polished floorboards.
“That was Clare’s baby,” he said.
“Clare?”
“The woman who died in the fire. She was my second wife.”
There was a long silence. Their coffees grew cold on the table.
“When your husband came home with a baby, I mean, what did you think, what did you say?”
“It is my first night in America, Mr. Seabrook. My first night! What do I know from hotel fires? He said he found the baby in the street. Mr. Seabrook, if you ever lived on Delancey Street, you would know, finding a baby in the trash round there, well, it is not such a big deal that you would write the papers about it.”
“That’s what he told you? That he just found her?”
“Yes, that is what he told me.”
“How did she get her name?”
“From the Liberty statue, the first thing I ever saw from America. ‘Come to me,’ she said, ‘I will make all your dreams come true.’ And she did. She gave me a baby when Micha cannot give me a baby, you know, the usual way.”
“He was . . .”
“He thought he was. Turned out it was me all along. Just Life, having its little joke.”
He nodded, slowly. “I see.”
“So, the little baby, we raised her like she was our very own daughter. But she wasn’t, was she, Mr. Seabrook? She was your daughter. Mr. Seabrook, we stole her from you.”
His hands were shaking. He reached for his cigar, but it had gone out. She waited for him to say something.
Finally, he said: “Does she know?”
“Only I tell her before she went off to this stupid war. I don’t know how she will ever forgive me. Perhaps never. Maybe, too, I will go to prison. I do not know what crime they call it, but I am sure it must be a crime, yes?”
“How did you find out, about Libby, about me?”
“After my Micha died, I found this.” Sarah reached into her purse and took out the cutting from the newspaper, the one she had found all those years ago in Micha’s biscuit box. She unfolded it very carefully and put it on the blotter on the desk between them. George pulled it toward him with his forefinger, recognized the faint and grainy photograph of himself as a much younger man. He picked it up and the tissue-thin paper tore. He had to hold the pieces together on the desk while he read through the article. When he had finished, he sat back again.
“After I find this, I didn’t need to be that Mr. Einstein to work it out.”
“It’s a long time to keep a secret like this,” he said.
“A lifetime.”
George nodded. He looked down at the cutting and shook his head. What was his expression? Not angry, like she thought he would be, just sad. “Is there anything else?”
“One more thing, I got to tell you. I loved my Liberty like nobody’s business, and maybe if I had my time over, I would lie to you and to everybody all over again. Maybe if not for my Libby meeting your Jack, I would go to God never telling. Who knows? But it is up to you now. Anything you do, it is okay. You got a right.”
He was quiet for a long time. She waited for him to reach for the telephone, maybe jump up and go crazy and hit her with his fist, and what could she say, anything he did she would deserve. What she did not expect was that he would sit so quietly, with his head bowed; she certainly did not think she would ever see a tear run down the big Yankee nose of George Seabrook.
He wiped it away brusquely with the back of his hand when he was aware of it and stood up, went back to the French doors, his unlit cigar clamped between his teeth.
“You understand what I told you?” Sarah said, after the longest time.
“Yes, of course.”
He came back to the desk, fiddled with a box of matches, fumbled it onto the carpet, gave up, and tossed his cigar back into the ashtray. “It’s my turn to tell you something now. Dear God, the past never lets us be, does it?”
She nodded. No, never.
“You’re not the only one who knows how to keep secrets, not the only one who thinks they’re the worst person in the world. You’ve just told me something you didn’t want anyone in the world to know. Now it’s my turn.”
This, she had not expected.
“My first wife died soon after Jack was born,” George said. “She drowned. Some people say it was an accident, and perhaps it was. I hate to say this, but it was a little convenient for me. You see, I had a young mistress named Clare at the time, and my wife was not too long in the ground when I married her.”
Sarah watched a muscle ripple in his jaw. He turned and looked at her as if he was wondering if she could work out the rest and save him the pain of saying it aloud.
“Have you ever had an affair, Sarah?”
“That I should think of such a thing.”
“Probably wise. For myself, I discovered that those things that are exciting inside an affair are much less so in a marriage. I regretted marrying Clare almost immediately. She was much younger than me, and in many ways, we were not suited. We overcame our difficulties, as many couples do, through distance. In those days, I traveled frequently on business. When I came home from an extended visit to London, and Clare declared herself pregnant, well, I had my suspicions, of course, but I chose to ignore them. Then one night, during an argument, she told me to my face that the child was not mine. So I threw her out. That is how she came to be living in the Grand Central Hotel in New York six months later.”
“Liberty is not your daughter?”
“Her father, I believe, had reddish hair and green eyes. He was a rake, as we used to say in my day, very handsome, very charming, but about as faithful to Clare as she was to me. As I understand it, having a mistress with a small child soon proved tiresome for him, and he soon found a replacement. He paid up on the room in the hotel and left her there. He died in a brawl over a gambling debt two years later in San Francisco, and the world mourned such a loss. But I shouldn’t judge, my behavior was scarcely better. I had been unfaithful to my own wife. So we all got our comeuppance, as they call it. It so very rarely happens, but life made exceptions for us.”
“But you put this advertisement in the newspaper.”
“Well, I regretted my anger and my pride, and besides, it wasn’t the child’s fault. But I could hardly tell the newspapers, or the police, that the infant was not mine. I would look like a fool.”
“And Jack?”
&nb
sp; “He is very clearly mine: stubborn as a mule and uncompromising as all hell.”
They looked at each other for a long time, these new versions of their different histories playing out in both their minds. “So, what happens now?” Sarah said at last.
“Your behavior, I have to say, has been reprehensible. Should it ever become public knowledge, you’d be pilloried for it, and your business will crumble overnight. Socially and financially, you would be ruined.”
“Is that how you will punish me?”
“Why would I want to punish you? I am in no position to judge you. Something else I’ve never told anyone. There was this young fellow called Art Woodward, an old Harvard pal of Jack’s. I had him do a little dirty work for me to make sure Jack did what I wanted. Bribed Art with the offer of a job in my Boston office. You think I am going to condemn you, Mrs. Levine? We all do things we regret, and sooner or later, life catches us out. We can all only hope that there is something or someone that will offer us some measure of mercy in the end.”
“But I stole your baby.”
“You stole nothing from me that I had not already tossed aside. If Jack is to be believed, I am a tyrannical and unbending father. Seems to me Liberty was assuredly better off with you. As you have pointed out, you loved her like your own. I suspect I would have been too busy and too bitter to have treated her with much more than a sort of distracted sense of obligation. Sarah, let’s forget about the coffee. Warm your bones with some vintage port, and let’s talk about what we can do to make all this better.”
He stood up and poured two glasses from the decanter on the mantel, held one of the glasses out to her. “It’s time we both laid the past to rest, don’t you think?”
“Let God bring them both home safe,” she said.
He smiled. “If we sinners dare to ask it,” he said.
The sun was still not up, dawn just a dirty orange stain in the eastern sky. A truck pulled up outside the hospital, and the most seriously wounded were carried out on litters and loaded into it. Libby heard one of the wounded men moan as he was maneuvered into the back.
Jack was one of the last to be loaded. She squatted next to the stretcher, reached for his hand in the dark. He was so cold and still shivering from shock and pain. “They’ll get you morphine when they get you back to the beach.”
The men couldn’t even smoke cigarettes because of snipers. The sooner they were out of here, the better. They had patched the wounded up as best they could, but they all needed to get to a proper field hospital.
Jack had asked her last night how bad he was hurt. What could she tell him?
It didn’t seem right, didn’t seem fair, to find him again, to finally know the truth, and then have it end like this. She put her lips close to his ear. “I never forgot you, Jack.”
“I never . . . forgot you . . . either.”
“I’ll see you Stateside.”
“Like that . . . just fine,” he said. Would he make it back to New York? He might not even make it back to the beach. If he did make it, would he want to? A wound like that.
She bent toward him to kiss him good-bye, but then two corpsmen shoved her aside and hefted the stretcher into the back of the truck. He was the last.
She watched the convoy rumble back toward the beach. They were barely out of sight when a medic came and told her she was wanted in the OR.
She went back into the aid station, up to the OR on the second floor. They were still in blackout, but a corpsman had jerry-rigged an operating lamp by suspending a flashlight from a rope hanging from the rafter. As she walked in, the draft from the door moved the blackout curtain in front of the window.
She didn’t hear the crack of the sniper’s rifle, just saw a blinding flash of white light. One of the nurses screamed, and then a surgeon shouted: “Sniper!” But Liberty was already flat on her face on the floor of the OR and didn’t hear either of them.
66
Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, DC
George Seabrook sat by the bed and waited for his son to awake. Jack looked pale and wasted, the skin taut under his cheekbones. Seabrook remembered how handsome he had looked in his officer’s uniform the day he left, how indestructible.
But nothing was unbreakable.
What was worse, it wasn’t even the Germans who did this to him. They told him that this had happened fighting the damned French. Weren’t they all supposed to be on the same side?
The nurse had offered to wake him, but George had said no, let him rest. Just time now, the doctors all said, time and healing.
Will he walk again? he asked the doctors every time he saw them.
We don’t know, they said. We hope so. We have to wait. His spinal cord was bruised, but not severed. We have to wait for the swelling to subside.
“Knowing my son, he’ll be playing football again in six months,” he said, staying bullish. At least he was alive.
He took the chart from the rail at the foot of the bed, flicked through it, but none of it made any sense to him. They had told him all there was to know, done all they could. They couldn’t perform miracles. These days, mothers and fathers praying for miracles were everywhere.
Jack’s eyelids fluttered. There was a moment of panic on his face as he tried to remember where he was.
George reached for his hand. Jack squinted against the light, the merest flicker of a smile. “If you’re here, this must be bad.”
“Not a bit of it. You’ll be fine.”
“Can I have some water?”
There was a glass beside the bed. George held it to Jack’s lips, and he sipped through the straw.
“How long have you been here?” Jack said.
“A little while. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Have you spoken to the doctors?”
He nodded.
“When I’m out of here, will I be able to play tennis?”
“Sure, you will.”
“That’s great. I could never play it before.” He looked down at his feet. “See that? I can wiggle my toes.”
George swallowed back the lump in his throat, dared himself to hope.
“Liberty’s mother came to see me a few weeks ago. We’ve stayed in touch.”
The shadow of a smile on his son’s face. “So you know what happened?”
George nodded. “I wrote you a letter. I guess you never got it.”
“Maybe it got shot to hell, like me.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now. You found out the truth the hard way.”
“So did you,” Jack said, and smiled and closed his eyes. “Will you do something for me?”
“Anything, you know that.”
“Find out for me if she’s all right, will you? That she didn’t get herself hurt over there.”
“Sure. Like I said, Sarah said she’ll keep me posted.”
“Sarah now, is it?”
“I think I might have misjudged her, Jack.” The fact was, she had already rung him to tell him what had happened to Liberty. But he wasn’t going to tell Jack about that right now. When he was better. Another secret, but this time he had a good reason for keeping it.
“I’m so tired. I might rest for a while now,” Jack said.
He closed his eyes and slept. George Seabrook sat and watched him, even prayed a little, though it was perhaps a little late to bargain with a God he had never had much time for before.
An irony to all this. He had always thought himself a good man, a man who knew right from wrong. It had occurred to him lately that he had counted himself too high in his own reckoning.
But he was hoping for a fresh start, for him and for his son. You never knew; stranger things had happened after all.
The grave was at the top of the hill with commanding views of the bay. Not many of the mensch out here today, Sarah thought, too cold to mourn. There was ice along the sedge on the shoreline, like the day her Micha left Tallinn for America, the northerly wind raising whitecaps on the bay. This wind, it cut through
the skin, right through the heart. It was nicer in the summer, when the maples were in leaf, but she supposed no one out here minded the weather much anymore.
She made her way up the hill, watching for the ice; that would be real slapstick, wouldn’t it? Real W. C. Fields, break your neck in a cemetery.
The marker stone was near the top of the hill, a thick chunk of snow-dusted granite, the best money could buy. No cross, of course, that was just for the religious, who believed in such things.
She knelt down by the grave, took the dead flowers out of the little vase. She supposed an hour from now, these fresh ones would be curling up in the wind as well.
A handsome stone, it was. She had to hand it to George. He had dug deep for this. She had had nothing for headstones like this back then, not after she had paid off all the creditors.
WILLIAM THEODORE “BILL” DEWEY
1881–1929
ONE OF LIFE’S GENTLEMEN
Sarah looked up; a winter wren was watching her from the twisted, bare branch of a maple. He cocked his head, like he was surprised to see her there. Why so shocked, little bird? I have been coming here the same time every week for thirteen years.
She touched a finger to her lips and laid the finger on the cold stone.
“I love you, Dewey,” she said, and then got to her feet and went back down the path to catch the train home.
67
Pier 12, North River, New York
Sarah wondered how her Libby would look, had imagined her in a wheelchair or coming down the gangplank on a stretcher with a bloodied bandage covering her head. But no, there she was, waving even, not even a nurse holding her arm. She had on dark glasses under her ANC cap, had a walking stick, though it looked to her she wasn’t using it too much.
Sarah ran to her, hugged her, felt her stiffen in her arms. “Not too tight, Mama. I lose my balance real easy.”
Sarah backed off, held her at arms’ length. “Thank God, you are alive. Those Germans, they were better shots in Micha’s day.”
“Not even Germans, Mama. The sniper was French.”
There was a small dressing on her forehead. Sarah had expected much worse. She touched the edges of it with her finger. “This is not so bad. How are you feeling, bubeleh?”
Loving Liberty Levine Page 35