Abe slipped into his civilian clothes and immediately grabbed an empty supply truck and headed off for Reykjavík with something on his mind that he desperately wanted to share.
It was morning when he arrived at Ingunn’s little red house in the city that was little more than a village. The arctic sun was high in the sky as though it were close to noon rather than early morning. The small city of Reykjavík glowed in tranquility and looked magical and foreign, a treeless community as isolated as an Amazonian tribe and peopled by blonds who seemed preternaturally attracted to brunettes. Walking up to Ingunn’s door, Abe was sure that this was a place where humans were never supposed to live. A respite on a long voyage, maybe, but not a destination.
It was too cold here. Too bright. Too dark. Too isolated. No wonder Ingunn wanted some fresh blood, a foreign boy to cuddle. Maybe a ticket out of here. Who knows?
He didn’t tell her. Or hadn’t told her. But Ingunn had been his first. They’d done it three times now, and other stuff a bunch more. He hadn’t really opened himself up to getting to know her—she was still imaginary somehow, still illusive, a girl you meet on vacation. He didn’t love her—he didn’t think so, anyway—but the intimacy was so intense and the warmth and gentleness and kisses so enveloping that saying it wasn’t love might have been unfair or even wrong. It didn’t feel eternal and inevitable. It simply felt . . . good.
Abe rang the bell and waited on the steps like a schoolboy. He desperately wanted to see Ingunn. He needed a hug more than anything else. A smile from a girl. They have no idea, he thought, what power they have.
He was smiling and hopeful when the door opened. It was not Ingunn who stood there, however, but a large man whose eyes were full of hate. A brother? A boyfriend? Abe didn’t know. He didn’t have time to wonder. The man’s fist blasted out of the doorway and smashed into Abe’s nose, severing an artery in his brain and killing him instantly.
Funeral
ABRAHAM HOROWITZ OF HARTFORD, Connecticut, was to be buried beside his mother, Lucy, and his aunt Lila on the return of his remains to the United States courtesy of the Canadian government. Nate left a message with Mrs. Finegold at the front desk of Grossinger’s, who saw fit not to write it on a piece of stationery but found Sheldon and sat him down.
The next day he left Lenny behind at Grossinger’s and returned by bus with the green duffel bag full of cash, the two guns, and four days’ worth of clean clothes. Nate met him at the door and said nothing to him. Sheldon climbed the stairs to his and Abe’s bedroom and closed the door behind him.
Nate had already thrown away all the newspapers on Abe’s dresser and had placed his clothes in canvas sacks to be donated to a charity. Unlike with Lucy’s clothing, there had been no one to stop him this time, and now Sheldon had to look at Abe’s remaining personal effects as he sat on his old bed. This—it was impossible not to think—is what people leave behind. That must have been why Joseph reached out to Sheldon in the car. To hand over everything we’re not supposed to take with us.
That night—late enough that Sheldon wasn’t even sure whether he’d been sleeping or not—there was a knock on his door and Mirabelle opened it.
When Mirabelle had pulled away in the taxi only days earlier, Sheldon had not expected to see her again. That they had been called back into each other’s lives so soon was one of life’s refusals to conform to expectations.
“May I come in?” she whispered.
Sheldon didn’t have to answer. He moved over on the bed and made room for her. She walked to him and lay down next to him and put an arm around his shoulders.
Unprompted, she recounted what had happened after the taxi pulled away.
* * *
De Marco had broken up with Mirabelle in the taxi after they drove off from Neversink.
“You’re blaming me for this?” she’d asked him, one leg crossed over the other as they pulled away from Grossinger’s.
“Yes,” he said.
“And . . . why?”
“I don’t know. A hunch. We’re done.”
“Fine,” she’d said. They had sat beside each other like estranged aristocrats for the remainder of the ride.
After arriving in Hartford, he had disappeared and no one she knew had any idea where he’d gone. It was just as well. To Mirabelle, his life had seemed glamorous, and in some significant ways, it was—the dinners, the nightclubs, the introductions, the money, the clothes, the champagne, and the discussions about exotic locations and the people whose gossip sold papers—but she had learned that it was all theater. The man was no doctor or lawyer. He wasn’t a scholar or writer. There was nothing under his feet to hold him up. It was more like he was dangling from a rope instead, always trying to get higher but everything was always precarious. At some point, you either reach the top or fall off. And if there is no top . . .
“And then Dad called me and told me that Abe died,” she whispered to Sheldon.
“I don’t want to go back to that fucking cemetery a third time,” Sheldon said to her.
“Me either.”
Sheldon, Mirabelle, and Nate woke early, dressed appropriately, and sat in silence at the breakfast table. Nate was hunched at the shoulders and his face looked ten years older. Whatever spirit had remained in him was clearly gone. Sheldon and Mirabelle avoided looking at him. Comfort and love may have been what was needed, but Nate’s grief was too powerful—too contagious—for them to confront.
The synagogue was sweltering hot as they listened to English and Hebrew words that fell on them like so much ash from a burning world. Neither Sheldon nor Mirabelle engaged with the sounds they heard, and both of them turned so far inward that they might have been standing on far-off beaches watching the waves break at their feet and concentrating on the shells glistening next to their toes.
Louis Bouchard had arrived with Abe’s casket. A handsome man with sad eyes and a gentle way about him, Louis towered over everyone. He wore a yarmulke out of respect without knowing what it was. For all Louis’s bulk, Mirabelle sensed that he was willing himself to be smaller, less conspicuous, more harmonious with those around him.
When the service concluded, Sheldon was a pallbearer along with his uncle, Louis, and three of Abe’s schoolfriends, and they carried the pine casket out to the cemetery, where it was lowered into position. The weight of Abe’s body inside the coffin dug into Sheldon’s shoulder, the only physical sensation he would remember from the funeral.
* * *
Nate was not so lucky. It was when the rabbi and dozens of friends and family and congregants began to say the mourner’s kaddish that Nate fell to his knees in the damp soil and let out a sound like the heavens giving way to hell.
* * *
Sheldon watched his uncle, and he knew that if Nate could have followed Abe to wherever he was going he would be gone as quickly as a prayer. He watched, with his own throat swelling, as the supporting wall that Nate had built for them all—so carefully, so meticulously—crumbled into nothing when faced with the destruction of the universe that had been his beloved son.
Sheldon turned away, unable to be the family he knew he should be.
* * *
When it was over and the crowd began to break, Louis Bouchard approached Nate and took his hand.
When Mirabelle and Sheldon joined them, Louis spoke. He told them everything he knew: about Halifax, Abe’s bombardier training, their boredom in Nova Scotia, their deployment to Iceland. He described the mission that saved the convoy. He explained Abe’s relationship to Ingunn and how the man who turned out to be her older brother had only meant to punch Abe because that’s what protective brothers do and how the man was now distraught and penitent.
“After it happened,” Louis said, “Ingunn came to the base. She knew that Abe and I were friends. She cried and said it was her fault. I said it wasn’t.”
His storytelling was spare. And yet, the words he left out spoke to what he couldn’t say.
Louis handed Nate Abe’s le
tter. The one he was writing before The Shrew took to the air to defend the convoy.
Nate reflexively held out his right hand to take the letter. He looked at it—white, reflecting the sun’s light, perfect and unbroken—and didn’t move. It was Mirabelle who reached out and gently took it from him.
“I’ll read it,” she said.
“He addressed it to Sheldon,” Louis said quietly. “He obviously didn’t think this would be his last letter. I wouldn’t read too much into it. He wrote before every flight. He was different that way.”
“It’s OK,” Mirabelle said.
Dear Sheldon,
I’ve been trying to imagine your life at the hotel. I’ve never seen a hotel like that before. In Hartford we only had those city hotels where cabs pulled up and dropped off rich people, and then in Canada there were sort of boardinghouses where travelers stopped on long trips. Nothing that had grounds. A lake and a golf course? That must be something. And all those people not having to hide, or pretend they’re something else, or spend all that energy trying to fit in and make people like them. You can just be yourself and be in your own culture and stuff. Sounds great. It really does. I’d like to hear all those comedians. I like laughing, but sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how to do it. I think too much. These guys, though. They help a lot. I feel like I’m with the right people doing the right thing. I’ve never really felt that before. I’m at war, but I guess you could say I’m at peace with it. Does that make sense?
The thing about Iceland is that it’s smack between America and Europe. Or close enough, anyway. It doesn’t look it or feel it, but when I’m in the air, I see the expanse of ocean on either side and get a real sense of how different life is on the shores to the east and west. I know Europe and what’s going on there feels far away when you’re surrounded by pretty girls in some resort town. But it’s not. It’s really not. We could hear those Nazis yelling from our bedroom in Hartford. They came through the radio. They came in print in the papers. I can feel them slinking around underneath the Atlantic. I like looking for them. Like roaches and I’m the boot.
I think I told you about most of the guys in the last letter. The only thing really new is the plane. They painted a Vargas Girl on the side for luck, but she looks like your mom and it kind of rattles me a bit because I always liked your mom and I don’t like seeing her with her boobs busting out against her bathing suit like that.
I haven’t written to Mirabelle directly in a while because I think she’s even more pissed at me than you are, but I need you to work on her a bit for me. It’s not right to fight. People are blowing up, Sheldon. Bombs are falling. Nazis are gunning down families. We can’t squabble with each other. Not when people would give their eyeteeth to be with the ones they love again.
And tell my dad too. I don’t agree with him. We can’t assimilate ourselves out of existence to try and please people who think we’re inferior, but I get the impulse and I know he wanted the best for us. We’ll work it out in the end.
Shit, I got to go. This new guy, Bachmann, is all worked up about something. I’ll finish this later.
The letter wasn’t signed because it wasn’t finished.
When Mirabelle finished reading, it was Louis she looked at first.
* * *
WITH LOUIS IN TOW, the family gathered at the town house to sit shiva, but by sundown, Mirabelle couldn’t take it anymore. To avoid a scandal—only because her father couldn’t take another one—she placed her favorite green dress and party shoes in a paper bag and marched out. She told Louis to follow her and, like a manservant trailing a maharaja, he did.
They retired to a bar in town—a brown place with pale people despite the summer sun. She changed in the bathroom and came out looking as though she should be on a yacht. She ordered a Bellini and he ordered a sidecar.
He was still wearing his yarmulke but Mirabelle said nothing. She wasn’t sure whether that was because she was enjoying a private joke or because, somewhere in her soul, it comforted her to see him that way.
Mirabelle removed a cigarette from a silver case and Louis lit it for her. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs.
“I hate funerals,” she said.
“Me too.”
“Been to many?”
“Four,” said Louis. “My uncle’s when I was eleven, and two grandparents. Now Abe.”
“Was he happy?” she asked, blowing out smoke.
“He was focused and determined,” Louis said, sitting back slightly when the drinks arrived. “I don’t know if he was happy, but he never doubted that he was in the right place and doing the right thing. I think he was . . .” Louis paused to consider his next words. Mirabelle smiled and he lost his train of thought.
“What?” he asked. Her smile confused him.
“No one pauses for words around here. To pause is to surrender. It shows you don’t know what you’re trying to say or that you can’t keep up the tempo.”
“I want to be sure I’m describing it correctly.”
“I know,” she said, sipping her drink. She licked the taste of prosecco and peach from her lips.
“It’s true, though. I probably can’t keep up.”
“I know that too,” she said, bringing the cigarette to her lips again, lipstick staining the paper filter.
“I’m good at other things,” Louis said.
“We’ll see,” Mirabelle said, with a cracked smile.
“You’re intimidating.”
“You fly bombers through hurricanes over the Atlantic to attack submarines.”
“That makes me a good judge of these things.”
Mirabelle blew out her smoke and looked at him for a moment. She liked being called intimidating, but she didn’t like the idea of a wall between them. Sammy had never been someone she could talk to. Most of her boyfriends weren’t. Louis seemed different. He seemed like someone who might listen.
“There’s this vaudeville comedian,” Mirabelle said. “Seamus Cole. Sheldon and I were listening to him on the radio once. He was talking to George Burns, another comedian. They were talking about making people laugh and whether or not it mattered in a world falling apart at the seams. Cole said something like ‘Life is a series of games played within games and nothing is real until a heart is broken or healed.’ I remember thinking how profound that was. Until he said that, I was starting to feel like it was all games and more games and that nothing mattered at all. So, when he said that, I started crying all of a sudden because I realized it was true.”
Louis nodded. She couldn’t tell whether he understood or was being polite. Taking a cue from him, she decided not to interrupt his thoughts. She wanted to know what he’d come up with. Sitting there, cigarette in hand, Abe in a box, she realized that she was testing him.
“Content,” he said.
“What?”
“Abe was content. He had found a way to be content with himself. I think he was haunted by more than he ever talked about. In the service and in the air, all that went away. I think he was content.”
Mirabelle looked at this man in a yarmulke drinking from a martini glass. She scratched the top of her head, and this acted like a charm. Louis reached up, felt the almost weightless fabric, and smiled.
“How do I look?”
“Content.”
* * *
She spoke about her mother. He talked about Canada. They talked about Nazis. About food. About the Catskills—the parts she wanted to, anyway. She talked about Sheldon.
* * *
Louis asked her about her work at Underwood.
She said that typewriters were uninteresting to her but that writers were, and sometimes famous people would show up to buy one or have their own serviced. Journalists and novelists mostly. “Margaret Bourke-White came by last month. That was amazing.”
Louis didn’t know who she was, and Mirabelle explained that she was the first female photojournalist hired by Life magazine. She was the one who had taken those famous pho
tographs of the Soviet Union.
Louis still didn’t know.
“What about the one of all the black people standing in a line under the giant poster of the white people in the car that read, WORLD’S HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING and THERE’S NO WAY LIKE THE AMERICAN WAY?”
“Never saw it.”
“It was on the cover of Life in 1937. They were flood victims.”
Louis shook his head.
“That was the year my mother died. We had the magazine in the bathroom. Maybe it wasn’t as famous for everyone else as it was for me.”
Louis said that he wanted to see her again. He said he had five more months to serve and that he’d be out by Christmas.
* * *
Mirabelle moved home from the apartment she’d been sharing with Sharon Miles, a girl from her graduating class. Nate stopped going to work for the next three months and sat in the parlor on the blue-velvet sofa day after day saying nothing. Mirabelle would tune the radio to different programs and announce to him what was on. Sometimes she would sit with him and sip coffee or a glass of wine. She often read to him as though he were an invalid.
As the days grew colder into autumn, she would wrap a blanket around him. At night he would retire from his silence and drift into unconsciousness. He ate whatever he was served and communicated mainly with gestures.
* * *
Sheldon turned fifteen in September of 1941 and doubled up on all his classes like Abe had done. Sitting where Abe used to sit in their room, he would do complex math problems and read the newspapers from front to back every day and stack the ones he’d read in their spot on top of the dresser.
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 30