by Carol Zoref
The water was rough and little whitecaps were swelling and splashing and breaking against the barge and onto us. Lucky for us the barge was empty and riding high. I pressed my forearm against my mouth, glad that the smell of salt on skin could camouflage the smell of almost everything else. Sofia, who had not been off Barren Shoal in the ten years since the Paradissis family arrived, spit up her breakfast over the side. No one said a word, including my father, who volunteered his handkerchief.
Miss Finn met the barge at the dock in Brooklyn, where my father and the boys said polite hellos before setting off to their own difficult meetings on Astor Place and Mulberry St. The plan was for my father to meet us back at the dock in time for the final barge to Barren Shoal.
Miss Finn’s place in Brooklyn was a sturdy brick house with decorative masonry in geometric patterns that looked Egyptian. Set between the sidewalk and the house was a flower garden flooded with pale blue running hydrangeas, petunias, and white roses. Do roses and hydrangeas blossom at the same time? At least that is how I remember them. The copper window boxes were filled with pink, double-begonias that Miss Finn absentmindedly deadheaded with one hand while she searched for her keys with the other. At the top of the steps, like sentries on either side of the door, were two marble urns overflowing with ivy and lavender.
“Try this,” said Miss Finn. She pinched two stems of lavender and held them beneath our noses. “People dry it and sew it into sachets to freshen drawers.”
“Uchh,” said Sofia, pushing Miss Finn’s hand away. She threw up on a blue hydrangea. It was amazing that she had anything left after vomiting on the barge. She wiped her mouth with my father’s handkerchief, which she folded to hide the newest yellow stain.
“You two wait here,” said Miss Finn, pointing to a mahogany bench in the foyer. At its foot was a small, brilliantly blue and burgundy wool carpet.
As we were taking our seats, a man entered through the still open door and greeted Miss Finn.
“This is Sofia and Marta. Girls, please meet Mr. Whitmore.”
Ray Whitmore was tall and lanky with a pink, sunburned complexion. He was wearing a plain, clean shirt and blue work pants with a crease pressed down the center of each leg.
More brief, polite greetings were exchanged. Mr. Whitmore explained that he had seen us walking up the street and came by to return a shovel he had borrowed. “And to drop off The New Masses. They ran MacLeish’s speech.”
“Mr. Whitmore is the one with the green thumb around here,” said Miss Finn. “There wouldn’t be flowers without him. Or healthy rose bushes. Thank goodness for Ray.”
He asked if Miss Finn would be attending some sort of gathering that night. Word of a surprise guest had gotten around, someone come all the way from Spain.
“We can discuss that later,” said Miss Finn. She tapped a finger to her lips, a sign that he should drop the subject. “When I know better about the girls and their schedule.”
Sofia looked at me with a knowing grin. It was good to see her smile; I smiled back.
“Is that your boyfriend?” I asked when Mr. Whitmore left. It was not the kind of question I would have asked on Barren Shoal. But we were in Brooklyn now.
“For heaven’s sake, no, he’s not my boyfriend” she said, laughing. “He’s a boy from two doors down. He’s your brother’s age.”
“But you called him Mister,” I reminded her.
“I’ve been calling him Mister since he was a little boy, when he was a patient of my sister’s,” she explained. “It is a way of making children feel grown up, less frightened.”
“He looks a lot older than Noah.”
“Some people just do, but this isn’t really the time.”
“It’ll be okay,” I said to Sofia while Miss Finn stepped away to another room. It sounded unconvincing. She took my hand and rubbed her fingers across my thumb, pulling the nail back a little as her own, larger finger passed over it.
“That’s a big, fat lie,” she said. “Nothing about it’s okay. Either I’m pregnant or I’ve got a tumor.” She smiled weakly, stroked my hand again and started to weep.
Miss Finn returned with her sister, the woman we had referred to for all those years as Miss Doctor Finn. She was close in height to Miss Finn, but dark-haired instead of blonde and with a paler, smoother complexion, broader hips, and a wider mouth. She was pretty in a quieter, more elegant way than Miss Finn, though I would be happy to look like either of them. She had a professional demeanor. This is not to say that she looked masculine, which is how people always described professional women in those days. She appeared preoccupied, quiet; she appeared efficient.
“I think you’ll come into the library, Marta, while Sofia is with the doctor,” said Miss Finn. She spoke in the teacherly way that made commands sound like choices, even when they were not. She did not even introduce me. The doctor led Sofia in one direction; Miss Finn led me the other way.
The library floor was cushioned with a thick carpet like the one at the front door, only many times larger. Its gold tone changed as we crossed it, though it was obviously only one color. I kneeled to smooth the impression left by my footsteps.
“These are silk rugs, hand-woven by young girls somewhere in Turkey, back when it was still the Ottoman Empire. They were my great-grandmother’s.”
“She worked in a rug factory,” I noted. A historical tidbit to share later with Sofia.
Miss Finn laughed. “For heaven’s sake, no.” She reached for a picture frame on an end table, where it was sitting next to an elaborate clock with a rose-colored, porcelain face with cherubs in place of numbers. “This is my great-grandmother,” she said. The photograph was of a beautiful, heavy-set woman with a mass of white hair combed up in an old-fashioned braid that rested on the crown of her head. “She lived with us when we were little girls, after my great-grandfather died. My sister has that gorgeous hair and her wide hips. I, as you know, have neither.”
On another small table were a glass of milk that someone had already set out and a plate of perfectly uniform bakery cookies on a blue and orange faience dish with latticed edging. I had never even seen pictures of this kind of finery, never mind the real thing.
“Find something to read, Marta. There’s lots here to keep you busy.” She pat my shoulder and disappeared before I could ask after Sofia.
I ran my finger over the leather spines of the complete works of Twain, Trollope, and Balzac. Directly across the room were a tan leather set of books by Mark Twain and a black bound set by Dickens, who I had never read though I knew the story of Oliver Twist the way everyone did. The book I selected started somewhere in London during something called Michaelmas, which was new to me. The only Christian holidays I knew about were the Greek Orthodox ones that Sofia and her family celebrated, but I figured it was something like Christmas. I never guessed that it was the day in England that quarterly rents were due and accounts settled. Whatever the case, it was so hard to keep the story straight that I put it aside in favor of the magazine that Mr. Whitmore had dropped off. I turned to the article that he had mentioned, something about the mounting troubles in Spain, and American writers standing up to fascism. Soon enough I dozed off. I dreamed about a baby, about pulling my nipple from his mouth and him grabbing for my breast with his tiny fingers while his mouth quivered in that fuzzy zone between sucking and crying. The next thing I knew, Miss Finn was taking the magazine from my sleepy hands.
“He’s a poet, you know, MacLeish,” said Miss Finn. She began to recite:
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.
“From his poem ‘Ars Poetica,’” she explained, “his statement about how poetry works.”
“His article is about the Italian Fascist Party and the Spanish
Fascist Party and....”
“A poem is something, an article is about something,” she said. “Writing one does not exclude writing the other, as you can see with MacLeish. Some people think poetry and politics don’t mix. Nonsense. Try telling that to the ancient Greeks. But that’s a conversation for another time. This might be better.” She exchanged The New Masses for a book of 19th century botanical drawings by Clarissa Badger. Who could forget a name like that? “There’s paper and soft pencils on the desk beside the atlas. You can look up the places where the plants and flowers grow.”
“Where’s Sofia?” I finally asked. Miss Finn had been gone for an hour and had returned with a cheese sandwich for me and a cup of tea for herself.
“She’s fine,” said Miss Finn, with a brave chumminess that I could hear right through. “Don’t look so sad. She’s just resting.”
“She still throwing up?”
“She needs some rest.” Miss Finn sat for a while, sipping her tea while I ate.
More time passed. The house was quiet except for once when the doorbell rang and I could see Miss Finn through the corner window, declining to take a pamphlet from a young man dressed in a shirt and tie. I moved closer for a better view. The street was deserted except for that boy Ray Whitmore, who was hammering dents out of a garbage can. I watched him shoo the other boy away, stamping his foot like he was chasing off a dog. The boy with the tie could have been a Jehovah’s Witness; he might have been from the German-American Bund. I never asked. Just before 5:00 p.m., Miss Finn came in to say that Sofia would be spending the night. She pulled out a sheaf of notepaper.
“I’ve telephoned Ray to ask him to bring you to the dock to meet your father. I’m explaining in this note that Sofia is still unwell and that it is best if she stays here tonight and tomorrow night. She can return to Barren Shoal with me come Monday.”
I watched anxiously as Miss Finn wrote. I had not laid eyes on Sofia since she went off with the doctor hours earlier.
Minutes later Ray and I were out the door, walking to the streetcar. It was not until we had taken seats that he spoke.
“You shouldn’t worry about your friend,” he said. “The lady doctor is as good as any.”
“I know,” I replied, not that I knew anything of the sort. I have plenty of women doctors now—my internist, my ophthalmologist, my radiologist. But who would have imagined such a change? We are all lousy prophets.
“Who’s coming from Spain?” I asked.
“Miss Finn wouldn’t like my talking about it,” he said.
“It’s her boyfriend?”
“She’s told you about Ernesto?”
I did not say yes, but I did not say no.
“He’s back for more money, more guns.”
“Can’t someone else bring them over?”
“Sure, once they understand why. Ernesto will tell it better because he’s been there.”
“Isn’t he afraid?”
The streetcar jolted to a stop. Ray grabbed my arm to stop me from hitting the seat ahead of us. The conductor was now yelling at the driver of a horse-drawn fruit cart blocking an intersection. The cart was filled with bananas and peaches and pears—seven pears for a dime, twenty bananas for a quarter, three pounds of peaches for 15 cents. Cheap. Then again the streetcar cost a nickel. Nothing is ever cheap for people with no money.
“I don’t really know the guy,” said Ray when we started back up. “Hell, I don’t even know his real name; Ernesto’s his nom de guerre—but no one talks about it.”
“Why doesn’t he use his real name?” I asked.
“Protects his family. Protects his friends. You think the big deals in Washington want us over there?”
“You going to Spain?”
“As soon as they’ll take me.”
“Do you have a nom de guerre?”
“If I did I couldn’t tell you.”
“You could die.”
“Not a good enough reason to stay home.”
“They take girls?”
“Nurses, ambulance drivers. You know how to drive?”
“I could be a nurse.”
“No on-the-job training,” he said. “You need experience.”
“You’ve soldiered before?” I asked.
He looked at me hard.
“You’re pretty clever. But you’re not old enough for Spain.”
I thought about Sofia, if she was okay, if she was upset that I had left her. I wondered if she had been put to bed in a beautiful room with another oriental rug. I did not know enough what to wonder about.
“Maybe I can help here,” I said.
“Well maybe you can.”
Ray delivered me to the dock and my father, explaining that he was Miss Finn’s neighbor and that Sofia was not well, had stayed behind. He shook hands with my father and gave him Miss Finn’s note. My father was in no position to question Miss Finn’s judgment, never mind put up an argument. And on another day he would have been angry that I was escorted by a boy he had never met. But he was tired from his own day of disappointment, one in which Mr. Schwartzbart had no good news.
“It goes to show that you can’t plan an adventure,” my father said in a feeble attempt at sounding lighthearted. “You can have an adventure or you can make a plan. You can’t do both.”
I reminded him that he said this when Yorgos showed up without Noah or Joey.
“They’re staying with Mr. Morrow,” said Yorgos.
“What the h—”
“Look, Mr. Eisenstein: your brother-in-law brought Flat Sammy with him to the union hall today. Noah said he’d take Sammy to the movies if there was time, but the meeting was still going when I left.”
“The deal was that you all stay together,” my father bellowed. “Why can’t you guys get it right?”
“I got some things going on at home, Mr. Eisenstein.”
Mrs. Paradissis got hysterical when she heard Sofia was staying in Brooklyn, as did my mother when she heard that Noah was there as well.
“Why didn’t you wait?” said my mother, angry at what she so obviously saw as my father’s abdication of his duty.
“We would have missed the barge; we would’ve had to stay in Brooklyn, too,” he said. “And what if DeWitt was too busy with the poker or whatever to come down and tell you? You wouldn’t know what happened to us. What then?”
“These people where he’s staying—you know them?”
“It’s already done. Now stop.”
Sofia was wearing the same opaline pallor on her face as Dr. Finn back in Brooklyn when the police boat docked on Monday morning. She showed neither surprise nor delight at my waiting for her. One of the officers carried her down, after which he helped Miss Finn onto the dock. He then passed her bags to Katrine, who, it was evident, had managed this routine before. A man on the police boat wearing a suit and tie observed the scene as well. He had a handkerchief tied over his mouth and nose, as if that could protect him from the smell.
Miss Finn handed a canvas bag to Katrine, who slung it over her shoulder. She passed the week’s newspapers to me. Behind us, the police boat sped off across the narrows to Barren Island.
“Of course you’d be here, Marta,” said Miss Finn. She groaned a little as she lifted a heavy bag, all the while holding Sofia’s arm.
“Should we get the other bags?”
“Katrine will catch up,” said Miss Finn.
We walked quietly down the path to the schoolhouse, Sofia between Miss Finn and me. It was the empty hour between when the factory opened for the morning and the students arrived at school. The only sound came from bottles clinking in the bag she shouldered on the side away from me.
“Feeling better?” I asked Sofia.
I wanted to ask if she had seen Ray Whitmore again or Miss Finn’s boyfriend Ernesto, but I did not dare. I wanted to know if Ray had mentioned anything about me getting involved. Barren Shoal was about waiting, whether it was for my mother to speak, or Sofia to stop being with Joey, or for
the union to step in, or for the relatives to be rescued from Zyrmuny. Pitching in for the Spanish cause was something to do. Ray Whitmore was something to do. Everyone had something. Now I did as well.
“Let’s just be quiet for now,” Sofia said.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Katrine watching us from the dock where Joey was already picking through a barge. I was always torn between wanting and not wanting to know her, between being repulsed by her and intrigued.
“Are Noah and Joey back?” asked Miss Finn.
“Last night on a Sunday barge,” I said. Barges lined up on Sunday nights so that their loads wouldn’t stink up Manhattan.
Joey had managed to evade the thugs looking for him, at least for now. If he knew anything about Sofia’s situation, it did not show.
“Is Ernesto coming here?” I asked.
“How do you know Ernesto?” she asked.
“Ray told me that he is—”
“Never mind what Ray told you. Better that you should walk Sofia home, make yourself useful.”
So much for Miss Finn’s little lecture about poetry and politics.
When I returned to the schoolhouse, Katrine was in Miss Finn’s kitchen rinsing bottles with soapy water. Here was my chance to speak to her. But what would I say? What do you say to a girl who survives off the waste of dead animals? Who sometimes sleeps on the barge?
My own restlessness in the face of Joey’s new role in Sofia’s life and waiting for the call from Ray was buried in the work Miss Finn gave me as long-range preparation for the entrance exam to Hunter. After her luck with Marie, she decided that I should take it too. Who knows if any of us were really so smart—Marie or Yorgos or Noah or me—or if it was just that Miss Finn liked to think we were. Maybe it made her feel better about herself. Or maybe it distracted her from worrying about Ernesto, who I somehow understood had returned to the fighting in Europe. Whatever the case, she managed to tip the odds in favor of our getting in by getting us prepared. I read Hamlet again like everyone did, but I also read Macbeth and King Lear and Julius Caesar in the big Riverside Edition that she lent me. That book was so heavy that I did not have a hand free for Sofia’s when she finally returned to school. I scoured Miss Finn’s newspapers for stories about Spain; I listed to radio reports about the riots and strikes in Madrid. I read the names of the dead. How would Miss Finn know about Ernesto if that was not his real name? I read Sophocles and Aeschylus and Euripides, and after everyone else who was old enough finished them, the Odyssey and the Iliad for me. Helen, it turned out, was not only my sister, but was the face that launched a thousand ships. Our Helen had become a mythological figure as well. How could she have been otherwise, having died so young? I read about Galileo and about the Renaissance, which meant I read about Humanism. I wrote an essay about the ascent of individualism coinciding with Copernicus explaining that the earth revolved around the sun. How about that! I was really something. When I asked Miss Finn about Homer’s journey and the ancients’ knowledge of the roundness of the world, she said something about the contempt people have for what others have long known. I wanted to ask her if Ray had returned to Spain with Ernesto, but the moment was never right. I wondered if that was why I never heard about helping the cause.