Madagascar

by Steven Schwartz

  “I’ve got to go back in,” she said.

  “You need to eat,” I said. “You need to take care of your baby.”

  “When he gets a migraine, he’ll sleep forever afterward. I can meet you at the gate in the morning. I have to get my things out of the van and I want to make sure he’s asleep because he has the keys in his pocket.”

  “I’ll be here at dawn. Bring whatever you can carry and don’t worry about the rest. We can fix you up later.” The sleeves of my coat hung over her hands like sleepy puppets. I had all these thoughts I shouldn’t have had, not the obvious ones that pertained to the wants of an older man in the presence of a young, comely woman and how she might save his flesh and soul and that he might be so delirious he wouldn’t know the difference between the two, but ideas about how the unexpected descended and snapped its fingers in your face and said “Awake!”

  “You’ll really come?”

  I said I would. I’d be there at 5:45 when the sun cast its first light over the place.

  I told her she could keep my coat, but she was already stripping it off saying no, Calvert would get suspicious. Before she ducked inside, she called back to me, “Bless you.”

  I woke with a start. I had left my wallet in my jacket pocket when I gave the coat to Meredith to put around her. I’d slept fitfully, if I did at all, on the surface of a plan that was simple in its execution and complicated in its reasons. Why was I getting involved? Peck had advised I chase them out of there as soon as I could. Rosalyn would have seconded that or told me to call social services and get the police involved if I suspected abuse. She would have told me I had some kind of hero complex to want to do this all myself, and maybe she’d be right.

  I got up to check my jacket that I’d hung over the chair. My wallet was still there, all the money and credit cards inside, and I felt ashamed of myself for suspecting that Meredith had filched it while she was wearing the coat. I sat there a moment on the edge of the bed, flipping the wallet open and closed in my hands like a jackknife. I lay back down and must have fallen asleep because when the phone rang I jumped up again and didn’t know where I was for a moment. The numbers on the clock said 4:50 a.m. and my first thought was that it was either Meredith or Calvert.

  But it was Rosalyn. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I…I feel terrible calling you.”

  “What’s wrong?” I could hear her sniffling, then blowing her nose. “Where are you?”

  “Home.”

  “From Atlanta?”

  “I came home early.”

  I looked at the clock; it would take me twenty minutes to get from town to my land. Rosalyn never called at this hour. She was nothing if not independent and whatever motivated her to phone me up at five in the morning must have come at a price. “Speak to me, Rosalyn.”

  “I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “I’m sitting here on the floor, it’s dark, the house is cold, and I’ve got mascara running down my face. I didn’t sleep on the plane—I took the red-eye back.”

  “What do you need, Roz?”

  “Would you…would you bring Martin back today? I know it’s earlier than I said, but I could really use his company. Is that all right, Charlie? Would you be okay with his coming here early?”

  “I’ll bring him over,” I said. “I got to do something first, but I’ll bring him back after.”

  “Thank you, I really appreciate it. I’m so sorry I woke you up. I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “You said that.”

  “You’re mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad.” I glanced at the clock again. Ten minutes had gone by, and I still had to throw on my clothes and scrub my face and teeth. I thought about that old saying, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? As far as I went with Rosalyn, she got the cow free and to hell with the milk.

  “Why do men lie, Charlie?” She was slurring her words and I could picture the bottle next to her; Rosalyn always held the neck of a wine bottle like she was shaking your hand with a firm grip. “You never lied to me.”

  “I never lied to you,” I agreed. I felt pain compress across my chest, as if someone were cinching a leather strap as hard as he could; if I hadn’t been talking to Rosalyn, if I hadn’t been witnessing her anguish over this man she loved the way she used to me, if I hadn’t been thinking I could make it all better if she’d just give me another chance, I would have thought I was having a heart attack.

  “Forgive me for waking you?”

  “I was getting up anyway. I have an appointment.” I heard her take a long gulp of whatever she was drinking.

  “An appointment?”

  “Somewhere I have to be.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly.

  “I’ll bring Martin by afterward. Later this morning. I promise.”

  I went out the door, leaving Martin snoozing on the rug with his blanket smelling of me and Rosalyn both and drove up with one thought in mind, to get Meredith out of there. I should have had the sheriff come with me. I knew him a bit, and he was a calm, reasonable fellow, but I knew too Meredith would change her story out of guilt or fear if we both showed up.

  She was waiting for me, just like she said, and she had a backpack with her when I pulled up outside the gate. She looked just as forlorn as she had last night, but I shouldn’t have been surprised when I got out of the truck and she gave me that faint, helpless smile, like she had no choice in the matter. Calvert stepped out from the clump of scrub oak where he’d been crouched down and pointed his pistol at my heart. The only thing I didn’t know was whether or not they’d planned it from the beginning, whether Meredith had had any hesitation at all or just thought me another sad fool.

  “You promised her money—if she’d fuck you.” He jabbed the pistol toward me. “Right?” I looked at Meredith, that droopy mouth and pale hungered face and tried to find the truth in it.

  “You told him that?”

  “Shut up,” said Calvert.

  “What happened to ‘sir’?”

  “Fuck you. You were going to turn us in for shooting that deer.”

  “I still can.”

  He grinned at me, waving the gun around like he intended to lasso me with it. His fedora, with its dirty white feather, was pushed back on his head, and I saw he had a pretty good receding hairline. I should have been more afraid than I was; I don’t know why I wasn’t.

  “You’re a stupid old man, just like I thought.”

  “You going along with this?” I asked Meredith, who had her lips pressed tightly together.

  “Hey, you,” said Calvert. “Don’t talk to her.”

  “You’re not going to shoot me.”

  The dust splattered up at my feet. Nobody had ever shot at me before, and I stared at my feet. “Maybe I won’t miss next time, old man. Maybe I’ll get my deer.”

  “Let’s just go,” said Meredith. “Please.”

  “Throw your wallet over here!” Calvert commanded. “Get it,” he told Meredith. And even this, the tone, I wondered if it was for my benefit alone. Would they have a good laugh down the road? Would she cry over what she’d done? Would they count my money and go for…whatever made them happy? Did he treat her so badly he owned her soul?

  Calvert took out the cash and threw the wallet back at my feet. “Give me your keys,” he said. I threw them to him. “Turn around and put your hands on that gate.” He told Meredith to come over and tie my hands to the gate. She wouldn’t look at me while she did. She smelled of wood smoke and oranges, and I told her so, and then I felt a whack on my head that turned my land dark.

  “What happened to those people?” Rosalyn asked me later that day when I brought Martin over and she kneeled down for him to come running into her arms.

  “They just left.”

  “Just like that?”

  I snapped my fingers. “Just like it.” She’d taken a shower and put on a black slip dress that had a scoop neck that showed off her freck
led chest. Black for mourning or black for seduction; both were probably true. She wanted to see my eyes light up, to be appreciated by a man, even one fooled by thieves, a man who had decided he would stop punishing himself in all the obvious ways.

  “Charlie,” she said, “you look so tired. That’s my fault.” She seemed to have come out of her sorrow. I had a mean bump on my head and my vision wasn’t back to normal, but I could see well enough to drive. The one thing Meredith had done for me was tie a slipknot, making it easy to get out.

  “I’ve got to leave,” I said.

  “Another appointment?” Rosalyn said this teasingly. Then her face went soft as a bruised peach. “You want to come back tonight?” She never asked me over at night.

  “I think I can do that,” I told her.

  Maybe fortune came with getting your head clonked.

  She walked with me outside. “Whose is that?” she said when she saw the couple’s blue van parked in the driveway. For whatever reason, either carelessness or (I’d like to think) Meredith’s doing, the key had been left behind, too.

  “I’m borrowing it for a few days. From some acquaintances.”

  She stared at the bus with its bald tires and cracked windshield. “What’s wrong with your truck?”

  “Nothing. That I know of.” I nodded at the van. “Makes me feel young again.”

  Rosalyn lifted her well-shaped eyebrows. “Oh yeah? You’ll have to give me a ride in it sometime.”

  I smiled. “That I’ll do.”

  I had one more job before I quit for the day. I drove the van. The seats smelled of cigarettes and the engine whined and lost what little power it had going up a small rise, but I had my arm out the window on a beautiful spring afternoon, and I felt fitter than I should have when I pulled into the Division of Wildlife parking lot. You were supposed to leave the animal intact for state identification so the game warden could make the count, but I couldn’t really bring the whole carcass in here and throw it across this gentleman’s desk, could I?

  “What you got there, mister?”

  I untied the rose silk scarf that Meredith had left behind in the cabin, an awfully nice scarf for someone who had lived out of a robin’s-egg blue van and had picked a bad seed of a man to father her child. “I take full responsibility,” I said.

  “What the hell…” The wildlife officer got one look at the buck’s putty-colored testicles and about gagged. But I was all about rules and doing right by them and making the best of what time I had left on this merciful earth.

  Madagascar

  This is a story I know so well.

  My father, who is twenty-one, is on his way home from finding food for his family. He has traded a gold brooch for a bottle of milk, some vegetables, and a little meat. With his blue eyes and blond hair, my father is the only one in the family who has any chance to pass for Gentile on the streets. He makes sure to sit on a public bench, to pick out a paper from the trash and look comfortable, then go on. Among the many edicts against Jews—no traveling in motor cars, no leaning out windows, no using balconies open to the street, no going outside after dark—is one that forbids them to sit on park benches.

  On the way home he takes another chance meeting his fiancée in South Amsterdam. Before the deportations started they were to be married; now they must wait until the war ends, each of them hidden in different areas of the city. After dark when he returns to the apartment cellar where his father, mother, and sister hide, he sees the Gestapo drive up. It is May 26, 1943. Tomorrow he will learn the Great Raid has taken away all the remaining Jews, those in rest homes, in mental institutions, in orphanages, those too sick to walk, those who have cooperated with the Germans thinking it would spare them. Even the entire Jewish Council will be shipped to the labor camps. Now he knows nothing, only that he must avoid the house, that if he is caught out after curfew he will be imprisoned or shot. He steps into a bakery where the baker—a Gentile though trusted friend of the family—offers to hide my father. If someone has informed on the family and the Gestapo do not find all the members, the baker knows they will search the whole block; they have been through here before. They will check the back room, the bins of flour, the attic above. They will tap the floor and walls for any hollow spaces. But, ironically, they will not check the ovens.

  The baker tells my father to climb into an oven no longer in use. At first my father resists. He is afraid. Afraid he will die in there. But there is no other way. The Gestapo will not think to look in such an obvious yet unlikely place. My father crawls in. The sirens stop. His family is taken away to Majdanek, never to return. He lives in the oven until the end of the war, coming out every two hours when business has slowed sufficiently so that he may stretch. Some days the baker stays so busy that my father must be inside for three, four, and once even six hours. Without room to turn over or extend his legs, he remains curled up in a ball. On one occasion, much to his humiliation, he must go to the bathroom in his pants. The baker and his wife kindly provide him with a long apron while his trousers are washed in back. In the oven, he makes up waltzes in his head and has long, complex discussions with himself, marshaling arguments for each side, as to which of the two Strausses, father or son, is the true Waltz King, despite the son being known by the title. He recreates each note of their compositions and discusses the works with a panel of experts, but always delays the final vote another day so he may weigh the evidence more carefully and reconsider the merits of “Joy and Greetings,” “Loreley-Rheinklänge,” “Shooting Stars,” and a hundred others.

  After the war my father will listen to music in a high-backed chair. The record player during my childhood, a hi-fi, will be near a whisper in volume, perhaps the loudness at which he originally heard the melodies in his head. When I come into the room, he does not mind being disturbed, but asks me to sit and listen with him. I am ten. “Ah, now,” he says, raising his hand when the French horns begin to play. “Our favorite part.” I do not know if “our” includes me or someone else or if he just speaks of himself in the plural. Soon he closes his eyes, smiles, and extends his hand for mine. Although we are sitting down, me at his feet, our arms sway together, my father waltzing with me from this position. Softly he releases my hand, tells me I have good timing and to remember practice practice practice. Mastering the clarinet is no easy task—even for a bright ten-year-old. He rises from his chair, pulls down the sides of his coat—on Sunday afternoons he wears a jacket and tie at home—returns the record to its sleeve, closes the lid of the hi-fi, and stands with his hands behind his back for a few seconds as though making a silent prayer. Then he says, “Ephram, would you like to accompany me on a walk in the park?” I have my coat on within five seconds.

  In ninth grade, I am caught shoplifting. I steal a silver pen from a drugstore. I am taken to the police station in Haverford, the small town where we live outside Philadelphia and where my father teaches European history at Haverford College. My mother is in New York visiting her sisters, so I must call my father. The department secretary informs me that he should return from class within the hour.

  “Are you at home, Ephram?”

  “I’m at the police station,” I say, shocked by my own admission. Perhaps I want to confess right away and get it over with, not hide the shame I feel, or perhaps I want to boast.

  Without comment, she makes a note of my situation and promises she will get the message to my father immediately. While I wait for my father in front of the sergeant’s desk, on a plastic chair a faded aqua color, I think how I’ve wanted to succeed at something, most recently sports. The basketball game I made sure my father attended, positive I would be put in since we were playing a much weaker team, we wound up only narrowly winning, coming from behind. I sat on the bench the whole time. “Very stirring match,” my father said afterward, walking me to the car, his arm around me. He knew I felt bad, of course, but there was nothing he could do, nothing I could do.

  I lack the speed and agility to be first string; and by this
season I have lost interest in sports, don’t even try out for the team, and instead have fallen in with a group of kids who hang out at the edge of the parking lot, wear pointed shoes with four-inch Cuban heels, pitch quarters during lunch, comb their hair in duck tails (a style that requires me to sleep with my hair parted the opposite way so that the curls will straighten out by morning), and who generally get in trouble for everything from smoking cigarettes to belching “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the back of Spanish class. It is 1964. School has become intolerable.

  My father soon comes to the police station. I am released into his custody and we leave the old armory building of massive, buff sandstone, me in a blue corduroy coat that says Haverford Panthers, my father with his walking stick and tweed overcoat, a cream-colored scarf tucked under his chin. He puts his hand lightly behind me and I reflexively sink back against his open palm, no easy feat going down a flight of steps. I keep expecting him to ask me what happened. Though I know he won’t raise his voice, he never does, let alone physically punish me, I anticipate a lecture, as is his custom when I’ve misbehaved, which to be honest has not happened all that often. An only child, I have learned how to fulfill my parents’ wishes better than my own. They have little reason to find fault with me, so trained am I in the subtlest of ways—a raised eyebrow from my father, a frown from my mother—to find fault with myself first.

  “Why don’t we walk a little bit, Ephram.” We stop at the post office. My father buys a roll of stamps and some airmail envelopes for letters to Holland. We have no relatives over there anymore but he keeps a regular correspondence with friends and some members of the Amsterdam Symphony. Before the war he, too, had studied the clarinet and planned to become a professional musician, a source of conflict with his father who wanted my father to have a career in business like himself. When I was younger I always eagerly awaited the letters from Holland so I could steam off the stamps for my collection.