Margot

by Jillian Cantor

“Why you wear sweater when it so warm today?” she asks.

  “I’m cold,” I say, wrapping the sweater tighter around myself.

  “You one of us,” she says. I’m still shaking my head, back and forth, back and forth. I want her to stop. I want it to stop. It never stops. Nothing can’t mean something, Mother said. She was wrong; nothing could mean everything. “Your eyes,” Bryda says. “They like eyes of dead person.”

  “You’re mistaken,” I whisper.

  And then I do run, as fast as I can, the clicking of my small heels on the pavement not nearly enough to drown out the sound of Bryda Korzynski’s voice echoing in my ears. You one of us.

  You cannot understand what it is like to hide until you have done it yourself. And I do not mean the kind of hiding my sister and I did as girls on the Merwedeplein, where we’d play hide-and-run around the thick oak trees before we’d catch each other and start all over again, counting off in German: Eins, zwei, drei . . . But real hiding, where your life depends on being squirreled away, being somewhere or someone else—that’s entirely different. That was what we did, of course: my family, the van Pelses, and the dentist. We were not the only Jews who hid this way, but now we are the most well known. From 1942 to 1944, the seven of us inhabited the five small rooms in the annex above my father’s office on the Prinsengracht, Amsterdam.

  You cannot understand the fear that courses through you at the sound of every noise, every rat or howl of wind creaking the attic, wondering if it is someone coming for you. The fear of discovery, it is the kind of fear that makes your heart feel always full, pounding too fast. It is the kind of fear that keeps your eyes pried wide open at night amid the dark and the snores of your parents, even if you haven’t slept in days. And, it is a fear that does not go away, even now, even fifteen years removed, in a new city, with a new name, a new religion, a thick sweater.

  You not Polish. Bryda Korzynski said. You one of us.

  That night, after Bryda has confronted me on the sidewalk, I lie in bed, for a long time fully awake, listening, listening, waiting. It feels peculiar, that the only sound I hear is the sound of Katze scratching against the furniture with his claws.

  After a little while I get out of bed, and even though it is late, already past nine, I pull the smallest folded square from my satchel, unfold it, and stare at the address and phone number again. P. Pelt. 2217 Olney Avenue.

  Peter told me that he would be Pete in his American life. “I’ll be Pete, and you’ll be Margie,” he’d said. “Good American names.” Is that what the operator had said? Pete Pelt. Did I hear her wrong?

  I feel my breath tightening in my chest, and I can see his face, right there, so clearly, the way it was when he was afraid, when he too feared discovery. I think about the time in the middle of the night. 1943 or 1944—it all falls together now. There was a crash, then a clanging in the office below us. The next morning we would learn that someone burglarized the office, but in the middle of the night I did not know at first if they were burglars or the Green Police. I prayed they were burglars. People who stole things felt so much safer than people who stole people.

  “Margot,” Peter whispered in the dark, his voice tracing a circle in the air in my parents’ room, where I slept on a foldout after the dentist arrived a few months into our stay. Mother and Father were both still sleeping. I heard Mother’s soft breathing, and Pim’s—that was our pet name for Father—snore. I was afraid to move.

  I could barely see Peter in the darkness, only the outline of his hand holding on to something. “I will use this,” he whispered. “I will slash their throats.”

  Then I realized it must be the knife, the one we had used to prepare potatoes that night for dinner.

  “Don’t move,” I whispered. “They’ll hear you.”

  “I will use this,” he repeated. “I will slash their throats.”

  “Oh, Peter,” I whispered. We both knew he wouldn’t do it, but I guessed he felt safer holding on to it, feeling he had something, some way to stop them. Peter was seventeen then, not yet a man, but almost. He was independent, more so than me and my sister, more detached from his parents, certainly. And he was brave, but he was not stupid. If the Green Police had charged in and saw Peter holding on to a knife, they would’ve shot him faster than he could move. They would’ve shot all of us.

  The noises stopped, and we waited in silence. I heard the tick of Pim’s clock. It was a tick that often could rock me to sleep, gentle and regular. We waited, perfectly still.

  Peter lowered the knife, and it was then my eyes grew focused enough in the dark to see he was shaking. “Margot,” he whispered. “Do you want to come up to my room?”

  Now my hand traces a circle on the phone dial, shaking, the way Peter was that night. I turn the numbers, one at a time, unsteadily going through each one, until all the numbers have been turned, and then I am waiting for the sound of ringing in my ear. I do not consider what I will say, other than hello. I do not consider that even if it is him, he might not remember me, the way I remember him. I shut off my brain and listen to the ringing. Once. Twice. Three times. Four.

  “Hello,” a voice says on the other end of the line. It is high and sweet and mellow, the voice of a woman, not at all unlike the way I might imagine my sister’s voice to sound today, had she lived. “Hello,” she says again. “Anyone there?”

  Quickly, I press the button on the phone to disconnect the call.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I OFTEN REPLAY THIS FANTASY IN MY AMERICAN LIFE, A STORY of my own, if you will. In my head I picture a sweet little American family living in a tidy tract house not too far from Ilsa in Levittown. They are Margie and Pete Pelt, who have two children, a girl named Edie and a boy named Herman, after Margot’s mother and Peter’s father. Margie worries about things like curtains and wallpaper for the children’s rooms and Pete takes the train into the city, where he works.

  At night, Pete takes the train home again, and when he arrives, it is already dark and Margie has already tucked the children safely into their beds. She has a roast chicken waiting in the oven and a candle lit on the table.

  Pete walks in the door, a brown suit coat hugging his broad shoulders. His eyes find Margie, right away, so blue, blue like the sea. Then he finds her mouth with his, and they kiss, a long kiss that is still imbued with passion, even after so many years, so many secrets.

  “How was your day?” Margie asks.

  Pete takes off his coat and hat. “It was good,” he says. “Are the children asleep?”

  “Not yet,” she answers, and he smiles, a bright American smile, like Joshua’s, so that Margie cannot help but smile back. Then he rushes back to the children’s bedrooms to tuck them in and kiss them good night.

  Later, after dinner, when it seems the world is pitched with blackness, Margie and Pete crawl into their bed together and cling to each other. The moonlight shines in through the bedroom’s large picture window, just enough to illuminate Pete’s face as he kisses Margie good night and they both fall into a deep and dreamless slumber.

  I am thinking about this fantasy the next morning as I walk to work. Wondering about the woman’s voice who answered the phone last night. Maybe she was a housekeeper, I think. A friend. She cannot really be someone important, another woman who could slip right into my fantasy, just like that. Could she?

  When I arrive at work, Shelby is already there, sitting at her desk holding the phone to her ear, but she isn’t speaking into it. This is Shelby’s ruse, what she does when she wants to eavesdrop on something and doesn’t want anyone to know.

  “Good morning,” I say to her. She holds a finger to her lips, then points in the direction of Joshua’s office.

  I’m not trying to eavesdrop like Shelby, but I cannot help but hear Ezra Rosenstein’s booming voice, his words breaking like claps of thunder. “How many times do I have to tell you?” he says. “We don’t take clie
nts who can’t pay our retainer . . . I don’t care. And I’ve played golf with Robertson before.”

  “So,” Joshua says. “That doesn’t mean he isn’t an anti-Semite. Half the men at the club are.”

  I sigh, realizing they are arguing about Bryda. I slump down in my chair and lean my head on my arms against my desk, not even bothering to cling to Shelby’s ruse. I am exhausted this morning, barely having slept at all last night, my dreams filled with Bryda Korzynski, who morphed into the disembodied woman’s voice on the other end of the telephone line last night, who quickly morphed into Peter’s mother, Mrs. van Pels, yelling about having to sell her rabbit fur so the van Pelses would have the money to pay for food in the annex. “She’s so materialistic,” Peter told me once, hanging his head in shame. He did not love his mother the way I loved mine, and for that reason, I always felt sorry for her, even if she was, as Peter said, materialistic.

  “She just wants to hold on to something,” I told him then. “Just one thing to remind her of who she used to be.”

  Now I think of her in the camp. She did not have her rabbit fur then, of course. Neither did she seem to have her voice. She was so much smaller, naked and bald, her flesh pale as snow. Suddenly all she had—all we all had—was indelible ink.

  A badge of honor, my sister said.

  Shelby hisses my name across the desk, and I lift my head.

  “But she is one of our people,” I hear Joshua saying now, through the paper walls. Joshua’s words feel kind and stupid all at once, his thinking that his people and Bryda’s people are the same. Though underneath, really, are they so different? Joshua was luckier than Peter. Had Ezra Rosenstein practiced law in Germany, Joshua might have marched to his death in Mauthausen. The thought makes me cringe.

  “What are they arguing about?” Shelby whispers. I shrug, as if I am as stumped as she is. “I think the Zimmerman verdict came back,” Shelby whispers. “But that doesn’t seem to be it.”

  I nod, guessing this probably means Joshua lost the case, and that Ezra’s anger over Bryda is really, doubly, anger about that.

  “Not everything is about money,” I hear Joshua saying now. His voice is softer than his father’s, but it’s louder than usual and infused with anger.

  The door flies open and Ezra storms out, slamming the door behind him hard enough for the wall by my desk to shake.

  I quickly pick up the phone, borrowing Shelby’s trick, but he doesn’t even glance my way as he passes.

  “Miss McKinney,” Ezra barks, and Shelby says a pretend good-bye into her pretend phone call. “Where’s my schedule for the day?”

  “I’ll have it right on your desk,” Shelby says quickly.

  Ezra Rosenstein is a businessman at heart, who does not seem to appreciate Joshua even though he is smart and kind and filled with goodness. I do not understand why Ezra cannot look at him and see the wonderful man that I do, and for this reason, I hate Ezra, even though he’ll be the one keeping Bryda Korzynski away.

  After Shelby takes Ezra’s schedule into his office, I walk to the break room, pour Joshua a cup of coffee, black with two sugars, and bring it to his office.

  “Oh, Margie,” he says, taking the cup and having a sip. “You always know just what to do, don’t you?” He smiles and runs his hand through his curls.

  I nod and turn to leave, shining a bit with his compliment and keeping my hands taut at my side, but then Joshua invites me to have a seat across from his desk, so I do.

  He doesn’t say anything for a moment, so I say, “The Zimmerman verdict came back?”

  He nods, then shrugs. “You can’t win them all.” He is in a black suit today, with a white shirt and straight black tie, and somehow, as I am sitting closer to him now, he appears smaller than when I watch him through the glass. Is it that the suit is too big, and he is like a boy trying on his father’s clothes, or that Ezra’s harsh words have somehow shrunk him?

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head, opens his mouth to say something, and then, as if he has thought better of it, he takes a sip of his coffee. “Margie,” he says, when he is finished. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.” I nod.

  “What did you think of Miss Korzynski yesterday?”

  “Me?” I fix my eyes on the bronze placard at the front of his large oak desk that reads Joshua S. Rosenstein, Esquire. The S stands for Samuel, I know, who was Ezra’s father, Joshua’s grandfather, one of the original founders of this firm. For some reason, I think of Samuel in the Bible, the great uniter against the Philistines. But wasn’t it Joshua, in the Bible, who led the Israelites into the Promised Land? Or was that Peter? No, I remember. Peter was the fisherman, who for a moment walked on water, until he lost his faith and he began to sink.

  “Yes,” Joshua is saying now. “I’d like your opinion.”

  I don’t know why Joshua is suddenly so keen to have my opinion, but it could be because he knows I will not yell at him as his father just did. “Well,” I say, choosing my words very carefully. “Her story was very sad . . .” I have a but. But, there are many people with sad stories, I would say. And they cannot all be helped. My sister knew this about me, used to tease me about it even. There is always a but with you, Margola! Joshua doesn’t know me well enough to ask, or if he does, he doesn’t actually want to hear it.

  “Yes,” he says. “It was very sad, wasn’t it? I should help her, shouldn’t I? I mean, I owe her something, don’t I?” He seems to be talking more to himself than to me.

  “Why is that?” I ask.

  “Because,” he says, but I know what he really means is because he is also a Jew but he hasn’t suffered for it, not the way that she has, or the way Margot had. Also, Joshua likes to help people. “Anyway.” He clears his throat. “Bring my schedule in for the day, will you?” I nod, and as I turn to walk out, I hear the sound of Joshua’s giant sigh, floating past me.

  As I reach my desk, I sigh too.

  Bryda Korzynski, I think, she is just like that night in the annex, that burglar. For a moment Peter held on to the knife, tracing a circle in the air with his voice. And then the moment passed. And once again we were safe.

  At least, for a little while longer.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AT LUNCHTIME, SHELBY AND I TAKE THE ELEVATOR DOWN TO the lobby, where she purchases a ham sandwich from the cart, and then I follow her out to the sidewalk, where she sits on the bench and pulls a box of Kent cigarettes from her satchel. Shelby has told me this is her favorite brand because it is also the brand Marilyn Monroe smokes. The sun is shining, and the feel of it on my face is still, even now, like brilliance.

  “Here.” Shelby hands a cigarette to me, and I roll it around in my fingers. Another time, another place, one that I do not like to go back to.

  I hand the cigarette back to her. She shrugs, lights her own, takes a puff, and leans back against the bench and closes her eyes as if she is dreaming. “You know what I don’t get,” she says to me, holding her pale freckled arm out with the cigarette dangling loosely from her fingers, as if wishing to catch the rays of late-April sunlight and smoke them.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Joshua and Ezra.”

  “What’s not to get?” I say.

  She shrugs. “I mean, I would never work for my father if he treated me like that. Why doesn’t Joshua just go work at some other law firm?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, but I am thinking that it is not as easy as Shelby thinks, that Shelby’s missing sense of duty to her father might not be an American thing, but a Gentile one. “Who can you trust if you can’t trust your own father?” I swallow the words as I say them, worried they might choke me.

  She shrugs. “Did I tell you I’m missing a glove?” she asks. And there she goes, with the attention span the size of a pinhead.

  “A glove?” I murmur
.

  But I am thinking about the way Ezra yelled at Joshua, not so dissimilar to the way my mother and sister used to yell at each other. You have to love someone to yell at them so intensely; you have to care so unbelievably much that your anger explodes and burns across the sky like the Soviet’s Sputnik I’ve read so much about. My sister always thought they fought because Mother hated her, but I knew better.

  “I think Ron took the glove,” Shelby is saying now.

  “What?” I shake my head. “Why would he do that? To give to his hussy?”

  She laughs. “No. To find my ring size, silly.” She holds the cigarette in her left hand, out in the sunlight, as if admiring a diamond. “And besides that. What you said about trusting one’s father, it reminded me.” I’m surprised that she has brought the conversation back full circle—I have misjudged her attention span after all.

  “Reminded you of what?” I ask.

  “My father is acting funny. I think he knows something. I think Ron has already asked him if he can marry me.”

  “But what about his hussy?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “I’m sure it was just all a big mistake.” She smiles and takes a drag on her cigarette, but I wonder, how can she be so sure? She seems so excited about her missing glove, and I do not want to burst her delicate bubble, so I do not press her further. Instead I find myself thinking again about the woman’s voice on the phone last night, and in the sunlight, now, I wonder if she might be a mistake as well. Did I simply dial wrong?

  Shelby crushes her cigarette with her foot and grabs on to my hand. “Can you imagine it?” she asks me. “Me as somebody’s wife?”

  “No,” I say. “I cannot.” I smile at her, so she will know I am teasing. Because in truth, I can see Shelby as someone’s wife. I believe Shelby would be much like that Donna Reed, who Ilsa had me watch on TV with her one evening when I was there at her house for dinner, bright and charming and hospitable and capable of running a busy household. Much like the Margie Pelt of my fantasy world.