“When?”
“When the blood starts flowing.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means Abe is a fox, and this is a henhouse filled with hens who think they’re foxes.”
“That makes no sense at all,” Sheldon whispered.
“And the hens have blue blood,” she added, nodding.
“You’re weird.”
“Put your napkin on your lap.”
Mirabelle was on his right, and next to her was Nate and then Dorothy Fowler, Roy Fowler, and his wife, Mary. Between Mary and Abe—on his left—was an empty seat that Sheldon assumed was for Elijah.
During the appetizer, the men spoke about the fine weather for the day, the virtues of a good education, the pleasure of spending the day with friends and colleagues, and the state of the cleanup after the hurricane. They spoke about Katharine Hepburn’s home on the coast being washed away, and Mr. Fowler joked, “I hope she had the sense to toss a match in there. They were probably insured for fire but not for the storm,” and everyone laughed and laughed. Everyone but Abe.
The appetizer was a salad with lobster tail. Sheldon’s experience with lobsters was limited to his trips to the coast with his parents, where they’d sat on picnic benches above the beach at Revere and eaten them with crackers, small tubs of melted butter, and a lot of french fries. His father called them bugs of the sea and had winked before pretending the lobster was attacking him with a claw. He wrestled it off and—to show who won—snapped the claw off and scooped out the meat with a tiny fork. Lila was not amused until, like a dam breaking, she was.
It was clear to Sheldon that the people here took lobsters far too seriously. He gobbled his up like the bug it was.
A group of four black musicians and two white ones struck up some quiet jazz as the main course was served: steak, string beans, and gratinated potatoes. It was served by men in white gloves who miraculously didn’t stick their thumbs into the sauce.
The steak was OK but not great. Joseph used to bring home large pieces of meat from the butcher, and he’d carve them himself. He had explained that doing the work himself made the meat cheaper, and with a little know-how and a willingness to get his hands dirty, they all ate better. “You can always wash your hands, Donny. So, roll your sleeves up and get in there.” They’d dry the meat, season it, wait, and then grill it. What Sheldon grew up eating was a lot thicker and tastier than this cardboard he was being served, but the people all around him were eating it as though they were French kings at high court.
He didn’t get it.
“How’s the steak, young man?” asked Mr. Fowler. “Ever tasted anything like it?”
“Not quite,” said Sheldon.
“Of course not. You’re moving up in the world!”
Sheldon wasn’t sure how those two sentences were related, and he concluded that he and Mr. Fowler were not participating in the same conversation. He smiled back to make Mr. Fowler move on.
Abe, however, coughed.
“You OK?” Nate asked.
“I don’t know,” Abe said.
Over dessert, the conversation turned to the latest gossip from the office. Mr. Fowler said that after Mr. Henkler had killed himself the police solved the mystery of the missing weapons. It turned out that the one-legged veterans Henkler had hired were smuggling guns out of the workshop in their hollow prosthetics. “He set the whole racket up from the beginning!” Mr. Fowler said. “I remember when we used to call him a saint for hiring those guys. Now we have egg on our faces. Crooks, all of them.”
“It might have been the only work they could get, and he forced their hand,” Abe said in almost a whisper.
“We’re not running a charity, and a crook is a crook.”
“Maybe people start off one way and become something unexpected along the way when their options start to close off.”
“Only people with weak wills,” said Mr. Fowler, slicing his meat.
Abe tried once more. “These guys faced enemy fire in a world war, lost limbs, and then went back to work on their feet ten hours a day in the only job anyone would give them. They don’t sound weak-willed to me.”
“It’s nice that you care about the little people, Abe. It is. But you’re on your way to the top, and once you see how many people are down below, you’ll be glad you were crafty enough to move your way up. Your father knows. He gets it.”
The conversation then turned to politics, and Abe was unable to control himself—much as Mirabelle had predicted. Roy Fowler tossed his napkin onto the table in victory over his baked Alaska and shook his head, addressing Nate. “I’m not thrilled about Roosevelt’s stance on Europe at the moment. I’m afraid he’s not steadfast enough about our neutrality. They might solve it with Hitler if they give him what he wants over there, but the Germans have themselves so wound up over their treatment at Versailles that they really need something to get their self-esteem up again. If we can settle this Sudetenland problem, let those of German background be ruled by Germans, maybe we can stop all this nonsense. I’m not sure of it, but it’s sensible to try.”
“Yes,” said Nate. “Another war is not good for anyone.”
Dorothy, who had said absolutely nothing until now, leaned across Nate just enough to capture Mirabelle’s attention, and whispered, “I love your dress.”
“It was my mother’s,” Mirabelle answered.
“Where is she?” Dorothy asked, looking toward the empty seat between Abe and her mother.
Mirabelle whispered: “She burned to death in a fire last year watching Topper, with Cary Grant and Constance Bennett. Which I hear wasn’t even that good.”
Dorothy sat back, her eyes as wide as dinner plates.
“Do you really think we should stay out of a war against Hitler? Against Mussolini?” Abe asked.
“Of course,” said Mr. Fowler. He waved over the waiter and asked for a refill of his coffee. Sheldon noticed that Mr. Fowler’s wife had not said a word all afternoon other than a few pleasantries. She made no intervention now.
“The arguments are indisputable,” said Mr. Fowler, sitting farther back and crossing his legs. Nate sat more formally; he was a guest here, not a lord. “Take a look at this issue of Danzig in Poland that they’re all clamoring about. Most of those people are German or come from the German race. I see that Poland has economic concerns, but the racial claims supersede the economic ones. And after Germany’s treatment at Versailles at the end of the Great War . . . well . . . it’s no wonder they wanted a strong leader to restore their sense of dignity and pride in themselves. They were routed and treated unfairly. Sure, I disagree with their domestic policies. But it’s not America’s business. Cooler heads must prevail. After all, we’re partly to blame for the rise of the dictators, aren’t we? Our constant disapproval of their internal policies only weakens the voices of those calling for moderation and peace. We ought to keep our mouths shut, stay out of it, and remain neutral to the end. If there’s a war, heaven forbid, America can mediate the results and restore the values of Western civilization.”
“The values of Western civilization,” said Abe, repeating the phrase.
“Quite right,” said Mr. Fowler.
“Does that include the burning of books throughout Germany? The declaration that there is only one legal party? The decree that the Aryan race is superior to all others and that a non-Aryan is anyone descended from non-Aryans, especially Jews? The creation of the Gestapo, the establishment of concentration camps back in 1936, the claims on land belonging to other nations, the constant belligerent threats? America should remain . . . neutral to all this?”
“I think it’s very sad what’s happening there. But it’s of no geopolitical significance, and it’s not America’s role to step in and defend British and French colonies. We don’t have a horse in such a race.”
Nate tried to catch Abe’s attention and turn the conversation away from the topic of Jews; away from the conversations that he knew Abe was having at Zio
nist meetings in Hartford at night, where he was learning about the latest oppressions in Europe; away from the latest setbacks in Palestine, where the British had severely limited Jewish immigration with their Passfield White Paper; away from the expulsion of the Jews from Italy and the refusal of any European country to take them in; and away from the tightening of immigration laws in the United States.
But Nate was two seats away. His arm couldn’t stretch over both Mirabelle and Sheldon to squeeze Abe’s leg.
“In December,” Abe said very quietly to Mr. Fowler, “German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop said that Eastern Europe is now Germany’s exclusive sphere of influence and that all French security commitments are now off limits. In March, Germany destroyed Czechoslovakia and seized land from Lithuania. Last month, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy signed the Pact of Steel. Western civilization is now on the brink of a civil war of ideas—of destiny—among communists, fascists, and democracies, and you’re telling me that we don’t have a horse in this race? That the United States of America should remain neutral in a battle for the soul of our civilization?”
Nate knew what was happening in Mr. Fowler’s mind. He didn’t know the man well, but he knew the type, and he had seen him in action for several years as he presided over a small empire in his worsted-wool suits. Mr. Fowler was thinking that a Jew finally gets invited to the Brubeck Club—makes his first step into society—and his upstart and uncontrollable teenage son decides to grandstand, decides to try to make an established man of Hartford—one almost thirty years his superior—look small in front of his guests and his wife and his daughter on the day of her graduation. A boy who is eating food off his own table is deciding to pick it up and throw it at his host. Nate had never felt so ashamed.
But Fowler only smiled.
“You have a burning sense of justice,” Mr. Fowler said to Abe. He then turned to Nate. “That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful in a boy his age. The young should yearn for justice. Has he been considering law? It’s the next obvious step for your family. Isn’t that right?”
“Of course. University and law school. No doubt about it.”
“Justice,” said Abe, more to himself than to Mr. Fowler.
“That’s what’s happening in Europe right now,” Mr. Fowler said, turning back to Abe. “A balancing of the power. Germany wants its pound of flesh, and we understand that. An eye for an eye. Once the balance is achieved, all of this will die down. That’s the Old Testament right there. Right, Nate?”
“Absolutely,” said Nate.
“No, it’s not. That’s not what it means,” said Abe, even more angry at his father for being weak than at Fowler for being wrong.
The band struck up a slow-tempo version of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby,” and—inexplicably at first—this invited Dorothy back into the conversation. “Have you seen Bringing Up Baby?” she said to Sheldon, who until then had been waiting for blue blood to start flowing, hoping it would explain something. “This song was in it,” Dorothy explained. “Katharine Hepburn plays Susan Vance, and she’s in possession of a tame leopard named Baby. This causes all sorts of problems with Cary Grant, who is starting to fall in love with her but finds her crazy. The leopard is calmed whenever he hears the song. It was so funny, did you see it?”
“Alas, no,” said Mirabelle on Sheldon’s behalf. “His mother burned to death in the same fire as mine. And during a Cary Grant movie. So—no, we’re not seeing movies in dark enclosed rooms doused in flammable material with tiny little exits right now. You see the awkwardness of it, I’m sure.”
Dorothy did see the awkwardness of it and felt it too. She seemed to make a private vow to never speak again and fell into a silence that approached a winter stillness after a frost.
Sheldon was starting to get that gentiles were different. He couldn’t even fathom a way to keep a Jewish woman from talking.
Cake, maybe. If you gave her cake.
“Not what it means?” said Mr. Fowler. He was a lawyer. Was there anyone better at understanding the meaning of a text than a lawyer? “It’s there in black-and-white, young man.” His chuckle wasn’t as hearty as the earlier ones.
“The words are,” said Abe, still very quiet but looking up now. “But the meaning is not. It’s a Christian interpretation imposed on a Jewish text to validate the need for Jesus to come and fix the unfixable problems of a seemingly incomplete and petty Jewish theology. Which is pretty much the source of anti-Semitism right there. If Jews took it literally, there’d be a lot more jokes about one-eyed pirates looking for dentists.”
Mr. Fowler forced a chuckle and was about to ask a question, but Abe was not having a conversation anymore and he had made his last joke. “The Talmud says we can’t take it literally,” Abe explained, “because ‘no two eyes are the same.’ That’s why justice can never be mechanical and God needs us to engage and restore it every day. When we lie down, and when we rise up. This is why justice will never come from finding a balance with the forces of evil. It will come by defeating them.”
Abe stood. He thanked Mr. and Mrs. Fowler for their hospitality and said he wasn’t feeling well and needed to leave. Nate stood too, intent on following him out, but Abe put up his hand and said it wasn’t necessary. He’d find his way home. There was no point in ruining a fine afternoon.
On his way out, Abe stepped between Sheldon and Mirabelle, and placed his hands on their shoulders. For the first time in Sheldon’s presence, Abe bent down and kissed his sister on the cheek. He couldn’t be sure, but Sheldon thought he heard Abe say, “Goodbye.”
* * *
The rest of the meal passed without incident. Mirabelle was out for the rest of the afternoon with her friends, and Sheldon—having no one to speak to on account of Abe’s continued absence—took Brave New World by Aldous Huxley to the river close to the armory and read about a world asleep from a drug called Soma. It made Sheldon look up and watch the light twinkle off the river like he and Lenny did in Whately. He wondered if Europe had colors too.
* * *
When Sheldon didn’t find Abe at home on his return at dusk and didn’t see him when he was getting ready for bed, he decided to walk down the hall in his pajamas to Mirabelle’s room and knock.
“Yeah?”
Sheldon opened the door.
“What’s up?” Mirabelle was in a softer mood, the way Sheldon liked her best. She was under the covers in her light-blue nightgown. With her makeup removed, she looked much younger than usual. The wall between them—the one she placed between herself and everyone and everything else—was momentarily down like a drawbridge.
“Abe’s not here,” Sheldon said. “His favorite jacket is gone and a bunch of his clothes. The newspapers are all stacked up perfectly. They’re never stacked like that.”
Mirabelle was holding a fashion magazine and placed it on the blanket that covered her outstretched legs. She made a thinking face.
“Did he say anything to you?” Sheldon asked her.
“No. The last time I saw him was at the lunch. You?”
“Nothing.”
“He must be out with his friends or something. It’s graduation night. There must be parties all over the place.”
Sheldon stood there unconvinced.
Mirabelle didn’t believe it either. If she did, she would have started reading the magazine again and shooed him away.
“Where do you think he went?” she asked.
“I think he went away.”
“No. No, he can’t. He can’t just leave us. Not like this.”
As though hearing the truth was all it took to admit it, Mirabelle started to cry.
Sheldon had never seen her cry before. He had never seen her act like anything but a warrior. Now she looked like she needed her mother very, very badly. Even more than Sheldon needed his own.
Sheldon usually backed away from Mirabelle when she became emotional. This time, though, he stepped forward and stood next to her. Her crying was unprotected and op
en. She looked up at him and then reached for him. He sat on the edge of her bed, placed his arms around her, and hugged her. She began to sob, and as she did, Sheldon realized that, in her own way and like he had, she had now lost it all.
* * *
ON HIS OWN BED, his pajama top wet with his cousin’s tears, Sheldon sat in silence looking at the empty space where Abe should have been. Had he done it? Had he killed Mr. Henkler? Is that why he left them?
After the first reports came in about the gun having been fired twice and Mr. Henkler’s wife saying that he never would have killed himself, there was a wide-ranging investigation that was reported in the papers that Sheldon and Abe had read voraciously. Once it was revealed, though, that Mr. Henkler had had financial troubles connected to gambling, had been behind the missing guns, and did have relationships with certain crime elements in town, the police decided to let the matter lie. Eventually, even Mrs. Henkler stopped agitating for the truth. Abe had been the one to explain why: “Colt paid her to stop.”
If he had done it, Abe would be safe now. The investigation was over. Would he have left them anyway? Or was it about more than that? All that stuff he was talking about to Mr. Fowler?
It was a gentle and breezy night, and Sheldon opened the window to let in some life and sound. He missed the smells of the forest and the sounds of the crickets, and wished he was home. The movement of the city air, though, was just enough to calm him.
Ready to try to sleep, he lay back on the pillow and pulled up the blanket. Something, though, was under the pillow.
Sitting up, he moved it aside and saw two items: a Colt .45 automatic and a piece of paper with a single sentence.
THE MAN YOU’RE LOOKING FOR IS CALLED LORENZO.
Part II
Comedy
Two Years Later
Sliced Bread
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 14