Margot

by Jillian Cantor

Hiding who you are, it will be so much easier than hiding where you are, Peter said.

  Is that what he’s been doing, married to a redhead, with a baby whose name is devoid of meaning? Is it possible Peter is a father, a husband? That Peter stopped loving me? Or that he never even loved me at all?

  “Margie.” Joshua says my name as he holds open the heavy glass door to Isaac’s. “Please order more than an apple. Let me buy you a sandwich, at least?”

  “I’m not very hungry,” I say, and that is even more true today than usual because my stomach still feels the twists and turns of Bryda’s words. I am afraid any food I eat might come right back up.

  “Half a ham?” he pleads.

  “I don’t like ham,” I say, the way I always say it to Shelby. What is it with these Americans and their pork?

  “No ham,” he says, hesitating for a moment, as if the words mean something to him. And I wonder if he is connecting the pieces, Bryda’s words, in his head. “Turkey, then?”

  “I’m really not very hungry,” I say, but Joshua orders a half turkey and an apple for me, chopped liver for him, and then we make our way to the table by the window. Our usual table, I think. Though that almost feels silly. Joshua and I do not have a usual anything, do we?

  We sit down, and Joshua hands me the plate with the turkey. I take a bite, just to appease him. But I do not taste it. I chew and I chew and I chew, and it seems to take forever.

  “So what was Miss Korzynski yelling about?” Joshua asks, in between voracious bites of his chopped liver. Joshua eats like such a boy, the way Peter used to, as if every bite of food might be his last.

  “You didn’t hear?” I whisper, still hopeful, but knowing with the paper of the walls in the office, that is most likely impossible. Joshua heard.

  “I heard her say something about you overstepping your bounds as a secretary, and then her yelling at you about her tattoo. So I figured you told her, about our case, and she didn’t take it well.”

  I almost want to laugh at the way he has interpreted things, or cry. And now I wonder, how many times have I mistaken his conversation with Ezra through the paper-thin walls for something else? Angry words float across, but not the entire context? But now I do not even care; my body floods with relief. Joshua heard “tattoo” and assumed Bryda was talking of her own. Of course! That is the perfect lie, the perfect story. Why did I not think to tell Shelby that when she asked? It seems I should be better at lying, when I have been doing it for so very long now. But still, it is such an effort for me.

  “I’m sorry,” Joshua is saying now. “I should’ve been the one to tell her. I should’ve returned her calls. I’ve just been swamped.” He doesn’t say anything for a moment. “Maybe I can think of another lawyer to take her case . . .”

  “Maybe,” I say, but I wonder how many lawyers can there be in the city of Philadelphia who will be willing to fight a Jewish fight for no money?

  “It was going to be an impossible road,” he says. “Look, we barely had anyone signed on to the case.” I nod as I think he is trying to convince himself more than me. “Oh, and just so you know, I’ve called Rabbi Epstein to let him know we’re dropping the case. So if you get any more calls, you can tell them what you told Miss Korzynski, or you can just have them call me directly, and I’ll tell them.”

  I nod again, but I am thinking that he does not sound at all like the Joshua who once sat across this table from me, his voice thick with excitement as he spoke about bravery, or the Joshua who confessed his fear: Until Jews are seen as equals, I worry it could happen again. “Anyway,” he is saying now, “you did such a great job with this that I’d like you to take a bigger role in Mr. Bakerfield’s case. I need someone to go and talk to a few character witnesses, Bakerfield’s friends, before the trial.”

  “And you want me to do it?” I ask. He nods. And I close my eyes. I picture the way Charles looked at me that day, near the bus stop, when he offered me a ride. What would he have done to me had I gotten in the car with him? Was he just being friendly, or was there something much more sinister going on? Either way, I cannot imagine taking the bus to these surely wealthy homes on the Main Line, Charles’s friends, asking these men to extol his virtues.

  I look at Joshua. He stares at his food, so I cannot tell what it is he is thinking at this moment. Can this really be it, the reason why Joshua has asked me to lunch this morning—not because Bryda has revealed me, but because he wants to assign me more duties outside the secretarial realm? Certainly, he could’ve asked me this at the office, where Mr. Bakerfield’s case is no secret.

  Joshua looks up, and his gray-green eyes meet mine for a moment, but then they break, and he looks away, and he shakes his head a little bit.

  “Joshua,” I say. He looks back at me. His expression softens as he hears me say his first name, and I don’t correct myself this time.

  “What is it, Margie?” His voice is imbued with tenderness and hope and maybe a sense of loss, the sense that something is now missing from him that he is never sure he can get back. I know that feeling, so, so well. Joshua reaches across the table for my hand, and his touch, it makes my fingers tingle.

  “Are you really going to marry Penny?” I ask.

  “Penny?” He says her name like it is typing paper, flat and pale and blank. He pulls his hand away from mine and runs his fingers through his curls. “I suppose I will, yes.” He pauses. “It’s what my father’s always wanted for me, anyway. And he would love nothing more now than to see us married.”

  “But do you love her?” I ask.

  He hesitates for a moment, and his eyes catch mine. “I could never be with someone who wasn’t a Jew, you know,” he says. “I just couldn’t.”

  I am confused for a moment, because he has not answered the question, because his words, they don’t make sense, and then it occurs to me, what it is he is saying. You are you, Shelby said. I am the one who is not a Jew. Margie Franklin, she is not a Jew but the Gentile girl Peter was to find in the city of Philadelphia. We will go to America, Peter said. We will be married. We will no longer be Jews.

  But it is not Peter talking to me about being Jews now, it is Joshua. And why, I wonder, is he telling me this? Does this mean he has thought about me the way I have thought about him, watched me through the glass, wondered what it might be like to run his fingers through my hair? That he has noticed me? That he has not been able to resist the impulse to reach his large hand toward my face, at least once? I cannot work without you, Margie. That our lunches and our talks, they have been about something more than a secret case? “Joshua,” I say softly, “I am not who you think I am.”

  He shakes his head and turns his eyes away again. “My father always said, Penny and I, we would make beautiful babies. He’s right about that, isn’t he?” Joshua has missed it, the first truthful thing I have said to him in three years. But maybe it does not even matter. Even if he knew the truth, Margie Franklin, the Jew, she still would not be wealthy and beautiful and charming the way Penny is. She still would not be the one Joshua’s father would want him to be with. But what about what he wants? I wonder.

  “But do you love her?” I ask. I want him to admit that he doesn’t. That he does not love her. I do not love him, my sister said. But I did. I do.

  “It’s not always about love,” Joshua is saying now, again letting his fingers thread through his hair. “Life is more complicated than that, Margie. You get to a point in your life where it’s time to stop playing around. And then you just need to bite the bullet and do the things you’re supposed to do.”

  I think of it, questioning character witnesses for murderers, then sitting at my secretary’s desk, watching Penny Greenberg—no, Penny Rosenstein—saunter in for lunch with her Josh. In no time she will sport a round belly, filled with life, with Joshua’s life.

  “I don’t think I can,” I whisper. And I stand and push my chair back.


  “Margie.” Joshua says my name. At first it rings with surprise. Then he says it again. “Margie, where are you going? Margie, come on . . .”

  I hit Market Street, already sweating, and I turn the corner onto Sixteenth, then Ludlow, but I keep walking, past my apartment, past the bus stop even. Though I am warm, sweating, and tears build in my eyes, I keep on walking.

  I do not stop for a long while, until I hit Olney Avenue.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  MY WALK, IT IS A FAR ONE, ESPECIALLY NOW, IN THE HEAT AND under the weight of my sweater. But I have walked through much worse, and after I am far enough away to put the sound of Joshua’s voice out of my head, I am not in a hurry. I want to arrive by the five o’clock hour so I can stand there, watch him pull up into the drive after work.

  His car—the black Volkswagen, the kind of car one would never imagine a Jew to drive. A nice and masculine complement to his wife’s powder-pink Cadillac. His wife. Is it possible still she is his nanny, his landlady, his friend, his housekeeper even? But her words from last time about the steps and the stroller—words that implied that she lived there and she had chosen that—swim carelessly in my brain.

  I approach 2217 cautiously. There are no cars out front. Not even the pink Cadillac, but I resign myself to sitting on the bottom step to wait.

  I think about Peter’s eyes, blue as the sea. The way they lingered on my face even after the man in green pulled me up from my neck and started dragging my limp body out of his room.

  “Margot,” he called desperately after me, before one of the men clamped a large hand across his mouth, muffling the sound. I hear it now, my name in his voice, not the way it was that morning but the way he said it as we lay together on the divan. He whispered my name, into my hair, like the sound of wind chimes, blowing back and forth, their sound pleasant and high and sweet. “Margot.”

  Margie, Joshua said. I could never be with someone who wasn’t a Jew. His gray-green eyes flickered in the light shining in past the window of the delicatessen. How could he marry Penny? I wonder. How could he marry someone he doesn’t even love? Maybe Joshua isn’t even the man I thought he was. I am pretending, pretending, always pretending. But so, it seems, is he.

  “Hello there.” I hear a woman’s voice, the redhead’s voice, and I look up and she is standing before me on the sidewalk. I have been lost in thought, not even noticing the pink Cadillac, which now I see is parked in the drive. She holds Eleanor tight to her hip, and the baby makes a fist in the air, then examines it, and decides it looks ripe for chewing.

  I hold my eyes tightly to the baby’s face, her eyes. Her cheeks are round and fleshy, her tufts of hair the color of sunlight striking snow, and her eyes, they are a remarkably deep sea blue.

  “Do you live around here?” the woman asks, and I startle and look back to her face. Her eyes are green, darker than Joshua’s, lighter than Ilsa’s. And now they seem wary of me.

  I stand. “No,” I say. I clear my throat. “But when I was here a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but notice your box.” I point to the mailbox by the crumbling green door. “I knew a Pelt once,” I say.

  “Oh,” she says, her eyes softening. “Well, maybe I could be related, then.” She smiles. “Would you like to come in? Eleanor needs a nap, and I need to get dinner ready,” she says. “But we could have a glass of lemonade, talk. You look like you could use a cool drink dressed the way you are.”

  I want to walk inside the duplex. I want to see them, the pictures she might hang above the mantel of the three of them: her, Eleanor, and Peter. I want to know that he is here, in the city of Brotherly Love, just the way he once promised. I want to watch his eyes light up, one more time, even if it is only in a photograph. “Okay,” I say. “Yes. Thank you.”

  And I follow her up the steps into the duplex.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  THE INSIDE OF THE DUPLEX IS DARK AT FIRST, UNTIL THE redhead switches on the light. “Excuse me for a moment,” she says. “Let me just run Eleanor back to her crib.” I nod, and in the new fresh light, I have a look around.

  The living area is spacious, deep rich hardwoods like Ilsa’s covered with an Oriental-style bright red rug and flanked with unmatching green chairs. I approach the mantel, and just as I imagined, it is covered in pictures. A few of baby Eleanor. One when she is very, very young, a newborn. One with the redhead, Eleanor, and an older gray-haired woman who I guess to be the redhead’s mother. Another one with the gray-haired woman and an older mustached gentleman who holds a protective arm around her shoulder.

  “Ignore the dust,” the redhead says, walking back in and running her finger across the glass of the picture of her and her daughter, leaving the impression of her fingertip. “I’m not a very good housekeeper, I’m afraid. And now that I’ve gone back to work, I’ve gotten even worse.”

  “What do you do?” I ask. I imagine Peter would’ve married someone like me or my sister, or the working women we might have become, anyway, had it not been for the war, or had we not been Jewish, or had we been born in America.

  “Oh.” She laughs. “My friend owns a restaurant, and I’ve been waitressing there. It’s only temporary,” she says, “until I find something better.” She walks into the kitchen and motions for me to follow her. There is a small square oak table that barely feels big enough to seat three, and I try to imagine Peter, his long legs spread out in front of him, cramped in a space like this. How tall was Peter? Now I am only seeing the movie Peter in my mind, and it is ruining everything.

  She pours the lemonade and hands me a glass. “I’m Petra, by the way,” she says. It is a nice name, Petra. I guess it to be Russian or Slovakian in origin, though Petra looks so clearly Irish with her thick red hair.

  “That’s pretty,” I tell her. “I’m Margie.”

  She smiles. And for a moment I think she might tell me that her name is short for Petronella. “Petronella van Daan,” the pen name my sister used for Peter’s mother in her diary. The name the entire world knows as that of Peter’s mother. Oh, the irony. For Peter to have found his fake-named mother, here in America. But Petra does not say her name is short for anything.

  “So who is this Pelt you know?” she asks me. “There aren’t too many of our family in Philadelphia, I’m afraid.”

  Of course not.

  I take a sip of my lemonade. It is tart and sweet and curls against my tongue, which is parched from my walk in the early summer afternoon. “Peter,” I say, and my voice comes out in barely a whisper. “Peter Pelt.”

  I expect her face to turn, for her to smile, then laugh, and say, Well, Margie, you have come to the right place. I sit at the edge of my chair, half expecting him to walk in, home from work, any moment. I’m home, darling, he might call. And then, how will he react as he walks in, attaché tucked under his arm, pulling his hat from his curls, and seeing me, sitting there, in his kitchen?

  “Payter,” she says. “I don’t think I know of a Payter?”

  At first her words don’t register, because I am still imagining him, standing there at the cusp of the doorway. Tall and strong and handsome. His American-ness, his Gentile-ness, they will have aged him gracefully and perfectly. He will smile at me. He will forget all about his wife. He will turn and his eyes, blue as the sea, they will capture mine. Margot. He will whisper my name, and it will become a summer breeze that dances so gently against my neck that my brain begins to tilt and whirl the way it once did in his room in the annex.

  “Pete?” I ask, clinging to the smallest iota of hope.

  “Nope,” she says. “It must be another Pelt clan entirely.”

  “P. Pelt,” I whisper.

  “Oh.” She looks at me funny, as if I have given away too much, because I remember my lie, that I noticed the word “Pelt” on the mailbox. “I’m P. Pelt,” she says. “Petra Pelt.”

  “And your husband?” I ask.


  She frowns. “We’re getting a divorce,” she says. “Pelt is my maiden name. I’ve gone back to it now. My husband is a Bellwether, nosebleed that he is.” She pauses and shakes her head. “Anyway, I’ve just moved in a few months ago, and I’ve listed the house and the phone with just my first initial because I don’t want the whole world to know I’m a woman living here, all alone with her baby.” She laughs nervously. “You won’t go and advertise this now, will you, Margie? My mother is convinced I’m practically inviting Jack the Ripper to come on in.” Petra’s green eyes are sad and tired, and I understand now that she is hiding too.

  “I just thought Peter would be here,” I whisper.

  She shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says. “What you see is what you get. It’s only me and Eleanor.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  BACK IN MY APARTMENT, I TAKE MY SWEATER OFF. IT IS TOO hot for a sweater, and anyway, there is no one to see me now other than Katze.

  I lie on my blue couch, and Katze tumbles himself in my lap, kneading and kneading, unable to settle himself in one place. I think about Petra and Eleanor, about their lonely secret life on Olney Avenue. I promised Petra I would stop by soon, as she said she was in need of some girlfriends who did not know her in her life as Mrs. Bellwether. And though I can entirely understand the sentiment, I also know that I will not be finding myself at 2217 Olney Avenue anytime soon.

  Peter is dead. Like my sister is dead. I know it so solidly in my heart that it aches and falls and burns in my chest. Perhaps I have always known it. But I hate to think that hope, which has for so long been the only thing I have had left, that it is also nothing but my enemy.

  Peter is dead, and I wonder even if he isn’t, if he is somewhere else, unlisted, or living under a different name, or still somewhere in Europe, or even if he had been there, Petra’s husband, would it be too late now? Whatever we had, we were teenagers then. Maybe we had nothing. Maybe we had everything, but we were only teenagers. Before the war, I never even considered love, marriage. I was too busy with my studies. I was a child, and I felt I had so much time for all that other stuff.