Margot

by Jillian Cantor

  At 5:21 A.M., my phone starts ringing. I am lying in bed with my eyes closed, but nonetheless, I am not sleeping. My brain is heavy from my dream, and sleep has already felt like the furthest thing from my reach for a few hours. Still, I am good at pretending, lying there with my eyes closed, just because I know it is what I should be doing at this hour.

  As I walk toward the phone, I find myself thinking about Peter again—Peter van Pels, Pete Pelt, P. Pelt—and I push my brain to remember the sound of Peter’s voice, the pitch of it, how my name would sound as he spoke it. Margot. You’re really beautiful, even if you don’t know it. If he were to see the number in the paper, if he were to call it; if he were to find me listed in the phone book, Margie Franklin, as we always said—what would he even sound like now? What time would he call? Peter and I almost always spoke in Dutch. Would his voice sound different in American English?

  “Hello.” I pick up the phone.

  “Margie, hello. It is me, Gustav, again.” Gustav Grossman’s broken version of English rings clearly in my ear, and any notion I have of remembering Peter vanishes. For a moment I am surprised, because I do not remember having told Gustav my name, but maybe I did. “I do not wake you, do I?” Gustav is asking.

  “No, Mr. Grossman,” I say. “You do not.”

  “I’m sorry I call back.”

  “That’s okay,” I tell him. “But I really don’t have any news for you. I promise my boss will call you when he has some.”

  “I know that,” he says. “But your voice, it has very beautiful sound, and I wonder maybe you have breakfast with me?”

  Ilsa’s warning echoes again in my head. Ilsa is wise and strong, and I do not know Gustav. He could be a wife killer, a creeper, a secret Jew hater, or even a Nazi.

  “Margie.” He says my name again. Gustav’s voice sounds kind and broken all at once. Maybe Gustav and I, we have much in common, and suddenly, in Gustav’s voice, I feel it again, that wayward sense of homesickness that I can never seem to squelch in America, no matter how hard I try.

  “Yes, okay,” I tell Gustav.

  “How about today,” Gustav says.

  “Today?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Gustav says. “Why don’t we meet today?”

  I agree to meet Gustav at 8 A.M. at Casteel’s Diner. Though it is not far from the office, and in an area that is crowded in the mornings usually, I cannot shake Ilsa’s warning after I hang up the phone. And I know what I am about to do, meeting Gustav this morning, is what the Americans would consider Mickey Mouse. That is to say, dumb. And I am not dumb. I was always the top pupil at the Jewish Lyceum, top self-learned in the annex. I know many languages. I survived the Nazis. I jumped from a train and somehow made it safely to America, Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love. But still I have agreed to meet Gustav, this strange man from the other end of my phone who really could be anyone, because I think we are both lonely, lost souls in a great big American city.

  Yet, I am no Mickey Mouse, no matter what Shelby might have you think. So I quickly dial the number to Joshua’s house before I am about to leave.

  “Hello,” a woman’s voice answers, and it throws me because I was expecting Joshua’s voice. I think of the woman, baby Eleanor, and the pink Cadillac, but then I shake the thought away. No. Penny. “Hello,” she says again, and my heart tumbles.

  “Hello,” I finally say. “This is Margie Franklin, is Mr. Rosenstein there?”

  “Oh,” she says. “Hi, Margie, it’s Penny.”

  “Hello,” I say. There is the space of silence, and though it is the sound of nothing, it feels excruciating to me.

  “Josh can’t come to the phone right now,” she finally says. “Can I take a message?”

  I hesitate, remembering that moment at my desk when I pretended to intercom Joshua as she stood by, eagerly craning her neck to see into his office. I suspect that what I tell her now will never reach Joshua, but I say it anyway. “Can you tell him I am meeting with someone, for our new case, at Casteel’s before work today?”

  “Hang on,” she says, “let me grab a pen.” She waits, what is probably the appropriate amount of time for pretending, and then she says, “All right. Casteel’s before work today.” She pauses. “Anything else?”

  “That is all,” I say.

  After I hang up, I cradle the receiver in my hand for a moment, imagining the weight of Penny’s smirk on the other side of the line.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I WALK DOWN MARKET STREET PAST THE LAW OFFICE TO GET to Casteel’s. It is early and the air is still cool, the street uncrowded. My breath rasps in my chest, then my throat, and I remind myself. Breathe. Just breathe. It is not so hard.

  I feel my heart pounding in my chest, my throat closing a little bit. What am I doing? I wonder. Why am I meeting this man who I do not know, just because he is a Jew and lonely like me? He could be anyone, I remind myself.

  I close my eyes for a moment, and I see Penny’s face, then the redhead’s, and then baby Eleanor. What color were her eyes? Why did I not think to notice them?

  Suddenly I hear the heavy footsteps behind me again. I quicken my pace. They quicken too. Pounding, faster, faster. I think of Charles Bakerfield, offering me a ride on Friday. Was he following me? Or was he just being nice?

  He’s a creeper, Shelby said.

  I am trying to breathe. But I cannot. My chest hurts from the effort of breathing and running—it is too much. The boots, they get louder and louder, and louder, breaking my ears, and then I am back on the Prinsengracht again. May 1942, just before the call-up notice came. Mother had asked me to stop by there after school, to bring Pim a letter at the office that had come for him that morning. I’d held it in my satchel all day, and on the way home, I took a different turn from my sister. She was skipping, anyway, with her friend Hanna, as if the yellow star across her heart, it meant nothing.

  I walked quickly, though my legs were already tired. I was scared to walk alone, or even leave the house since I’d overheard Father talking, telling Mother that now Jews could be arrested, just for being Jews. “They do not even need a reason,” he’d said to Mother, when he thought my sister and I weren’t listening. “They see a yellow star and that’s enough.”

  I turned the corner, just before the Prinsengracht, and I heard the sound of footsteps behind me. The heavy gait of boots.

  I sped up to a run, and the boots, they sped up, too.

  “Stop, Jood.” A man’s voice called out to me, and I couldn’t breathe; the words fell on me, like the hardest of rains, flooding me, sweeping me down toward the Prinsengracht, drowning me. Yet my feet stood still on the pavement as if they were stuck there. I wanted to run, harder, faster. I didn’t. The sound of the man’s boots got heavier in my ear.

  I turned, and he was behind me, dressed in his Green Police uniform: thick black boots, long green coat, hat like a bell, obscuring all but his black and penetrating eyes. “What are you doing, a young girl on a business street at this time?” He spoke to me in Dutch. I had trouble understanding the words at first, though by then I was already quite fluent in Dutch. With fear, my brain still turned back to its first language, German. I tried to answer, but my voice, it trembled in my throat and refused to make a sound. “Jood,” he yelled in my face, his breath hot and smelling of cigarettes. “Answer me, Jood.” He grabbed my arm roughly, twisting it a little.

  “I am going to see my father.” The words fell out of me, somehow. “He works on this street.”

  He twisted my arm a little more, a smile twitching against the white hairs of his mustache, a smile that said he was deriving pleasure out of frightening me.

  “What’s your name, Jood?”

  That was the time to lie, the time to find a second skin; only I was too young then, too innocent to understand how important lying was. I told him my name. If I had lied, maybe the call-up notice never would’ve come a
few weeks later, and we wouldn’t have had to go into hiding so quickly, just to save me.

  He let go of my arm. “Hurry up,” he told me. “Run. Your yellow star, it’s making me sick.”

  Uw gele ster, het maakt me ziek.

  There is the Dutch. It comes back to me sometimes, even still, in 1959.

  Just as I reach Casteel’s, I feel a large hand grasp my shoulder, tugging at the corner of my sweater.

  Stop, Jood.

  I hear the sound of a scream, somewhere, in the distance. It rises, like a siren, getting louder and louder, hurting my ears.

  It takes a moment for me to recognize that that sound, it is my own.

  “Margie,” a voice is saying, whirring in my ear. Margie, Margie, Margie.

  The name falls and breaks like a clap of thunder followed by a torrent of rain. “Margie, are you all right?”

  The voice is familiar, and the screaming stops. I look around, and I realize I must’ve fallen down as I was screaming, because now I am sitting there, on the dirty morning sidewalk on South Seventeenth Street, staring at the tops of black, dressy, familiar shoes. Joshua.

  “Margie.” Joshua’s voice echoes in my head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was just trying to catch up with you.” His large gentle hand reaches down for mine, and I hold on to it, allowing it to pull me up, back to my feet. “Are you all right?” he asks again.

  “Yes,” I finally say, but he does not let go of my hand. He laces his fingers through mine, and he shoots me a worried smile.

  Suddenly I am embarrassed that Joshua heard me screaming, that he saw me slink to the ground. It has happened to me before, these fits, as Ilsa would call them. Where something will startle me, and I will crumble. “It must be some kind of residual stress,” Bertram guessed, “from the war.” And Ilsa had encouraged me to see a doctor, but always I refused.

  “It’s nothing,” I told her, and then, for so long, I’ve been able to contain myself.

  “It’s nothing,” I tell Joshua now.

  “Are you sure?” he asks. “Because you seemed pretty upset. Did something happen?”

  His eyes look at me in a way I have not seen before. It is neither seriousness nor sadness, but something else. Concern? Have I worried him? Does he think I was getting mugged here on the street? That would certainly be a better explanation for my screaming than the truth, but some lies make me feel too terrible, so I will not tell him that.

  “No,” I say softly. “Nothing happened. I just . . .” Twisted my ankle. Saw a ghost. Heard a ghost. Am a ghost. “I just startle easily, is all.”

  “Are you sure?” he says again, his gray-green eyes holding on to me.

  I nod, and he slowly steps back and lets go of my hand.

  “Shall we go in?” he asks. It is not until Joshua says this that I think about how he got here. Penny must have actually given him my message. I flush with embarrassment. Of course. She does not look at me the way I look at her. Why should she? I am Margie Franklin, the Gentile secretary wrapped oh-so-tightly in her sweater. And she, she is Penny Greenberg, the wealthy Jewess who weekends in Margate.

  I shake the thought away and take a few tentative steps to the front window of Casteel’s. Is he inside? Gustav Grossman? I put my hand up to the glass and press my face close, peering inside, but all I see are two elderly women drinking cups of coffee.

  “Margie.” I hear Joshua saying my name again. His hand touches my shoulder gently, and I close my eyes for a moment before I walk toward the door to Casteel’s. Joshua opens it for me, and I walk inside, where I am greeted, at this hour, by the smells of stale coffee and greasy bacon. The air is fog and silt, and it covers me, as if in a dream. So many empty tables, no men inside to speak of. “I’ll grab us a table,” Joshua says. “We can get some breakfast, talk.”

  I nod and walk in the other direction, up to the counter. “I was meeting a man here,” I say to the pink-striped waitress, who is standing behind the counter, holding a pot of coffee.

  “A man?” she asks. Something about her tone reminds me of Shelby when she teases me about finding me a man.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “What does he look like?” she asks. I shrug, and she says, “So you were meeting a Joe Doe for breakfast, hon, and he didn’t show?” She laughs a little, as if I am an amusement to her.

  “Tall,” I hear myself saying, though I know as I speak, the words make no sense. “Brown curly hair. Blue eyes, like the sea.”

  “Nope.” She shakes her head. “Haven’t seen him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  JOSHUA HAS CHOSEN US A TABLE BY THE WINDOW JUST IN CASE, he says, Gustav still decides to show. But I wonder if he’d already arrived, heard me screaming, saw the commotion on the street, and he ran. That’s what I would’ve done had it been the other way around. I would’ve run far and fast, holding on tightly to my sweater.

  Joshua asks the pink-striped woman for two cups of coffee and two plates of eggs, though I do not think I can stomach eggs at this hour, but I do not tell him that.

  “Now, Margie,” Joshua says. “I want you to tell me exactly what was going on and why you agreed to meet a client on your own.” It’s only now that I realize he sounds annoyed, that I have overstepped my bounds as his Gentile secretary.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. But I don’t tell him the truth, about Gustav telling me about the loneliness of America, about how Gustav and I have something to discuss, something in common, about the wayward sort of homesickness that burns a hollow space in my chest. What I tell Joshua is this: “He was very persistent about meeting in person today. I called to let you know . . .”

  “Okay.” Joshua sighs. “But don’t do it again, all right? If someone wants to meet, put them on my schedule.”

  “At the office?” I say, raising my eyebrows.

  “Good point,” he says. “This is becoming more complicated than I thought.” He sighs again and runs his hands through his curls. “I hate this secrecy, this . . . sneaking around. As if we’re doing something wrong.” He shakes his head. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I’m a grown man. A lawyer. And still, I’m under my father’s thumb.”

  I nod, but I am thinking about my own secrecy. My own father. All the lies I have told because of him.

  “I know I shouldn’t complain so much about my father,” Joshua is saying now. “He’s given me a good life, an easy life, especially when you look around and see how Jews my age in other parts of the world have had it. Or, hell, even right here, in Philly.”

  I nod, but I press my lips together, not saying anything. What if Ezra had practiced law in Germany, and passionate, contemplative Joshua had been marched to his death at Mauthausen? He would not have survived very long, in that world. There is a softness about Joshua, but maybe that is only an American softness. In another world, Joshua too, it’s possible he would’ve found a kind of strength that he did not even know existed.

  The waitress plunks our plates down in front of us. Each is full with eggs over easy, hash browns, two pieces of buttered toast, and three large slices of bacon. Joshua pushes the bacon aside with his fork, and I am surprised. I would’ve expected him to eat it, such a liberal Jew. Or is it just that he does not like the taste of bacon? Joshua takes a bite of his eggs, and I push mine around on my plate with my fork.

  “He’s given me a good life, an easy life,” Joshua repeats, as if he is trying to convince himself. “But sometimes I wonder what it would be like to feel truly happy.”

  “And what would make you feel that?” I ask him. I catch his gray-green eyes with my own, and hold on to them for just a second, until he breaks my gaze and he smiles.

  He shrugs. “Sometimes I think about starting my own firm, where I could work on the kinds of cases that would help people. Like this suit against Robertson.” He shrugs again. “So maybe it’s not going to make me rich,
but it means something. There just has to be more out there than defending murderers, you know?”

  I nod. I imagine some people, Shelby, for instance, might feel annoyed by Joshua’s complaints—poor little rich boy. But I am not. Though neither do I feel sorry for him. Joshua is a wealthy American Jew, in the year 1959, which also means he has choices. Freedom. “Why don’t you start your own firm?” I ask him. I think about what I told Shelby once about a sense of duty to one’s father. But how far does one’s sense of duty go? When does loyalty to one’s father end, and a child’s self begin?

  Joshua shrugs again. “I can’t leave my father,” he says. He pauses as he sops up egg yolk with his toast and eats a little. “My mother left him, both of us. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t want to leave, of course. But . . . it destroyed him,” he says.

  “And you cannot work on your own and still be his son?” I ask gently.

  He shakes his head. “If I left the firm, my father would see it as a betrayal. He’d never forgive me. It’s all he’s ever wanted, his only son following in his footsteps. And now. . . since my mother passed, well, I’m the only thing in the world he has left.”

  “What about what you want?” I ask.

  “Me?” He laughs a little and finishes off his meal, save the bacon. “Aren’t you going to eat anything, Margie?” he asks.

  “I’m not very hungry this morning.” He frowns, so I add, “And I ate a little before I left my apartment.” Then I take a bite of the toast, just so he will stop staring so hard at my plate. Only, he diverts his eyes, instead, to my face, and he stares even harder, as if he is searching my eyes for the secrets that he may have begun to suspect are there.

  “What about you?” he finally asks. “Your paralegal studies still going well?”

  “Yes,” I say. Then I think guiltily about the number of Sundays I have ignored them lately.