by Carol Zoref
After months of mystery and being on the move, he wrote that he would finally be staying in one place long enough to receive mail. I wrote back the very same day and told him about Yorgos moving again—this time to Staten Island—to work at the new dump called Fresh Kills and how he came to visit every few weeks at what he now called Old Kills. I said nothing about Ray; I said nothing about my little larceny or my plot for getting our relatives out of Zyrmuny. The first part felt like it was already cursed and I was afraid of cursing the other. Better to go it alone; better to not screw things up like the boys, who had gotten nowhere other than beaten, fired, and exiled. There was already plenty enough of that in Zyrmuny.
A few days later I sent a drawing of places and things from Barren Shoal that would mean something: a clamshell, a tuft of dune grass, a window frame from our house, the school, and the factory, the small things representing the whole, meaning the whole of Barren Shoal. And I changed my mind about telling Noah about Ray. I’m so impressed, he wrote back. It takes a hell of a lot of courage to love someone, never mind tell them. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, but it will. With someone else, someday. Promise. It was a promise he was in no position to make, but so what? I took my consolation where I could get it.
The more we wrote, the more I missed him. He missed us too, but not enough to come back to New York, where surely Gray or Lois could have found him a place in the Village. It was only Barren Shoal that he could not come to because people would know him. Anywhere else in New York he could be anyone he wanted to be.
“Why do they need guards at this camp?” asked my mother, when I read to her about the hunting trip. “Now Oregon’s a prison?”
“He’s in California, Mom. The guards watch the camp so no one can get in and make trouble or steal.”
She wiped her hands on a rag and pushed some hair off her brow. “Who can believe this? First Noah’s hiding from the police and has to go all the way to California; now he’s being protected by the police. And they call me crazy.”
The measure of a good life is not whether or not we live in some kind of Eden; it is how we compensate for the fact that we do not. Joey, after Noah and Yorgos were gone, took to spending time with Mr. Paradissis, who taught him how to make wine from the grapes now growing wildly on the arbor. Mr. Paradissis took this project to heart, what with the bar on Barren Island long gone and the people on Barren Shoal having more reasons to drink than ever. Joey’s role in this enterprise included keeping the seagulls away from the grapes. He dreamed up a jamboree of sorts. Joey, who could barely speak after his brothers beat him so badly, devised a contraption out of the broken tools that were left behind on Barren Island. He strung these from the arbor using fishing line, creating wind chimes that surprised human beings as well as gulls. Little kids stopped by after school to play the tools and make a crazy mixed-up racket. The people who lived nearby got pretty fed up with the noise until the first harvest of wine was ready. After that everything was forgiven. The same neighbors who were complaining became customers. My father even asked Mr. Paradissis to concoct something sweet, which he did by adding his honey. This was not truly kosher wine because it was not officially blessed by a rabbi, but my father used it regardless to make a Kiddush.
Joey, after a day at the factory shoveling maggot-infested animal parts into carts, spent his evenings washing wine bottles, chasing away birds, and mashing grapes. I do not know if it was the wine itself or something else, but he seemed happier. Mr. Paradissis appeared happier too. What was there not to like? Mr. Paradissis had a helper who, unlike Yorgos, did as he was told; Joey now took his meals inside at the table, across from Sofia, where he did not have to worry that someone would grab away his plate or interrupt dinner with a beating. Joey, even before the rest of us, found his calling.
A portion of my father’s salary now went to keeping Uncle David and Aunt Sara and Flat Sammy in their apartment. Uncle David was not strong enough to keep an eye on Sammy all day if Aunt Sara went out to get a job, so she took in sewing to supplement their tiny relief checks and what little my parents could give. Things would have been even harder were Ruthie not married or Noah not off in California. That meant two less mouths to feed, not to mention Helen, which no one did. Things would have been easier had I shared my booty but for the fact that they would have made me return it. No matter. They would be happy when I turned the money over to Mr. Schwartzbart and saved the family in Zyrmuny. They would give me a hero’s welcome.
As for me, on top of thieving I was busy preparing for the exams that could get me into Hunter. Nights found me in the schoolroom, away from the noise of Joey’s bootlegging and bird chasing and the sad hum of my father listening to the radio in Noah’s room, writing yet another letter of appeal for visas. On those evenings the schoolroom smelled of autumn, the new winds from Canada valiantly driving against the factory smells. I had spent so much of my life in the schoolhouse by then. Ten years is a whole life to a girl. I was looking at that room with new eyes now, as much for who was gone as for what was still there.
I paced the room one restless Saturday, touching books and pencils and the globe on Miss Finn’s desk in search of something to cool my fingers, as if there was anything in that room that did not retain heat. The globe was the same one that Sofia and I had been turning since we were children. Of course Ray had to be in Spain by now. He might be with Miss Finn’s Ernesto; he might be facedown in the brush, a bullet through the back of his head. He was wrong about my being in love with the idea of him, but the idea of him was how I now measured things. Does it feel worse than Ray? I would ask myself about this thing or that, not does it feel worse than Helen? Helen was something that happened; Ray was something that happened to me.
With a tip of my finger I sent the globe spinning counterclockwise, not clockwise the way Miss Finn had instructed, “in order to replicate the rotation of the earth on its axis.” I turned it faster and faster until the globe achieved liftoff, spinning across the room, smashing into a window pane, shattering it, dropping down to the shelf below, knocking over a display of sea shells with name cards attached to them, and finally falling to the floor and rolling under a table. Turning it counterclockwise, I learned, not only ran contrary to science; it unscrewed the globe from its base.
Aside from breaking the window, the globe itself was dented and its surface material cracked, leaving the Baltic states something of a mess. No, I was not concerned that day with geopolitical metaphors. The same would have happened no matter where the globe landed. My only concerns were replacing the window and repairing the globe. On the bookcase behind Miss Finn’s desk was a dictionary, a thesaurus, and an atlas of the known world. I decided to draw a replacement for the damaged section and glue it into place. Not without Miss Finn knowing, of course, but it would be ready to hand over when I offered my confession. I had no ideas yet about finding a new piece of glass. I thought about using money from the Zyrmuny fund, but then everyone would know.
I flipped to the map of Europe, which only barely resembled the borders of the countries on the globe.
“Of course not,” said Miss Finn, when I owned up to the situation. Being a thief had made me gutsier. “Look at the publication date of the atlas. 1913. A gift to me from my parents for my 13th birthday. By 1914 it was inaccurate. Just like this globe.
“A globe, a book, a map,” she said, smiling. “They represent things for a moment. Look at the maps Columbus used. How could he imagine he was going to India and end up in North America? Because of the maps. Just wait until you read War and Peace and see what a mess the cartographers got Napoleon into, never mind Tolstoy.”
“You don’t care about the globe?”
“Of course I do and yes, you’re going to do your best to fix it. But it’s a globe that you made a mess of, Marta, not the world.”
Barren Shoal, on the other hand, was thriving. Production increased to take in the rendering that had been handled on Barren Island. Five families were relocated to Barren Shoal
. Nestled in among the Dowds, Eisensteins, Paradissises, and Pessaras were now the Smiths, the Johnsons, the Woods, the Whites, and the Hansons. One day there were five empty cabins on Barren Shoal and the next day there was laundry drying out on the line. My mother was wary.
“Why are they doing this,” she asked, “moving in Protestants with Catholics and Jews?”
“And Baptists, and Eastern Orthodox?” said my father, bothered by my mother’s fears and suspicions. “They’re just happy to have jobs.”
“Such a step down for them,” said my mother, coolly.
“There were mostly Irish and Italian on Barren Island, too,” he reminded her.
“So how is it that only Protestants got the jobs here?”
“What’s your point?”
“I’m just seeing what’s in front of my face,” she said, angry now.
My mother was not the only person looking for signs that the U.S. would take a sharp right turn into bed with the Nazis. Joe Kennedy, the paterfamilias of those Kennedys, was appointed ambassador to England and became, as the German ambassador described him, “Germany’s best friend in London.” It made me sick to have to vote for his son in 1960. I did it, I held my nose, but I was not happy. Better than voting for that rotten Nixon after what he did to poor Helen Gahagan Douglas, red-baiting her that way. “Pink down to her underwear.” That is how Nixon described her. Such a disgraceful way to speak.
Lives reorganized themselves; things were not what they had been nor what they were going to be. Some of the men from Barren Island had gotten work on the clean-up crews way out on Eastern Long Island after the big hurricane in September. I hoped that Noah would be among the WPA boys trucked out there, but that was just wishful thinking. They brought in boys from New York City, not California.
My parents argued and the Paradissises argued about the terrible things happening in Europe. Hitler was deporting Polish Jews from Germany; Metaxas ordered book burnings in Athens, among other things.
“If Roosevelt doesn’t know what to do about this Hitler, how should we?” asked Mrs. Paradissis.
“Stalin will make a move,” Mr. Paradissis assured them. “He’s not gonna sit this out.”
“Like he did with Franco?” I asked sarcastically. Ray popped into my mind like a Jack-in-the-box. The International Brigades were getting walloped in Spain, with casualties way out of proportion to their numbers. Was this my fault? By then I had stolen $800—the price of a new car—and heaven only knew where Ray was.
“The Soviets are sending supplies to fight the Spanish Fascists,” said Sofia.
“Stalin don’t give a damn about Spain,” said Mrs. Paradissis. “Or Greece. Just trouble for Russia.”
A labor union local was the only cause anyone on Barren Shoal had been willing to fight for; now it was just a handful that stayed involved. When Yorgos and Noah were on Barren Shoal, the men could say that they were trying to keep the boys from making things worse. With the boys gone, the men had no one to hide behind. Most of them stayed home. Sometimes my father went to a meeting, sometimes not. Mr. Paradissis never missed a meeting, so Joey never missed one either. Mr. Paradissis even tried tying his wine sales to attendance, but just got everyone mad.
At the end of October, when I should have been studying trigonometry, Sofia and I sat in Noah’s room on an unusually warm night listening to Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of the “War of the Worlds.” It is pretty thrilling to get excited about something that is not true. Every now and then, for a few seconds here and there in the dim light, we would forget the facts and become gloriously scared. We would poke our heads out into the warm autumn air and check the sky for flashing lights.
In the middle of the broadcast, Joey rushed up to the window, banging on the glass. “There’s Martians,” he said, breathing hard. “They landed in Jersey. They killing everyone with heat rays.”
Sofia sighed. She motioned for him to come inside.
“We gotta take cover,” cried Joey. “They’s killing cops in Jersey.”
“It’s a radio play,” I said wearily. The fact that Joey was getting stupider did not shrink my contempt for him.
“You think some Martian’s gonna come all the way to Earth so he can invade Barren Shoal?” asked Sofia. Even she was getting fed up.
“Hide on the barge,” I told him in a conspiratorial voice. “They won’t come looking there.”
Joey’s lips twitched as he considered this. “I’ll slip you on,” he said, proud and determined. “Come find me.”
With the program over and Joey still scouting out an escape by barge, Sofia offered to quiz me on the trigonometry problems I needed to master for my upcoming exams. Did we take NY State Regents exams then, or was there a city requirement for math? Some things I am glad to forget. What is trigonometry, anyway? Just a way of measuring angles? It could have been so beautiful, a way of knowing what happens to the whole when a single part is moved. What an interesting idea if that, in fact, is what it is about. But what do I know?
“Come to Hunter with me,” I begged Sofia. “You’ve done all the work.”
“It’s plenty enough I’m doing these damn questions.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said.
“You’re turning into Marie,” she said, a warning tone in her voice.
“Huh?”
“It’s one thing to be a snob. It’s another to be an out-loud mean one.”
Maybe I was a snob, thinking I could go off to college like Marie Dowd, turning her back on everything and anyone at Barren Shoal. How many months had passed since she visited?
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, though the thought of disappearing from Barren Shoal—or of Barren Shoal disappearing from my life—was not at that moment unappealing. What a thing it would be, I thought, to forever get that stink out of my nose.
“See what I mean?” said Sofia.
The world did not need my help messing things up. Chamberlain came back from Munich in September and announced “peace in our time.” Nazi foot soldiers, under orders from the Gestapo and cheered on by ordinary Germans, were unstoppable on Kristallnacht in November, smashing windows of Jewish-owned shops and painting terrible words on Jewish homes, and burning synagogues, and beating up ordinary Jews walking down the streets, and arresting prominent members of Jewish communities throughout Germany. How did Father Coughlin explain this on his weekly radio broadcast? He declared that, “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.” He was saying that the horror of Kristallnacht was retribution; he was saying that Jews got what Jews deserved. This priest, from his radio pulpit in Detroit, revealed things about Christians and Christianity that I wish I never knew.
All the Jewish children were expelled from the German public schools a few days later. Jews could no longer be doctors, or own land, or receive national healthcare. German-born Jews had already been stripped of citizenship back in 1935, no matter how many generations of their families were born in Germany. Having everything taken away overnight is one kind of torture; having things ripped away in increments is another. Anyone who believes that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way should understand that every act of cruelty is cruel in its own way. There is nothing to be gained by comparing them.
Like all Holocaust deniers, Father Coughlin turned the truth inside out and upside down. I listened to his famous November 20 radio sermon alone in Noah’s room: “Although cruel persecution of German-born Jews had been notorious since 1933, particularly in the loss of their citizenship, nevertheless until last week the Nazi purge was concerned chiefly with foreign-born Jews. German citizen Jews were not molested officially in the conduct of their business. The property of German citizen Jews was not confiscated by the government, although a few synagogues and stores were destroyed by mob violence.”
Who was he kidding? Evidently millions of his listeners, who did not understand that every German Jew was a foreign Jew from the moment they were stripped of citizenship. Books had been
burned, business burned, Jews banned from owning land or editing newspapers; Jews were being beaten in the streets. And what would his listeners have cared anyway, after the way he roused them by masquerading his bigotry as anti-communism.
Every word of it was a lie.
And listen to me now, trying to discredit his lies as if I could change the minds of anyone who wants to believe them. By comparison, my stealing all those $20 bills was the sanest thing in the world.
In January 1939, in his anniversary speech to the Reichstag, Hitler announced that if Germany went to war—never mind an invasion by H. G. Wells’ Martians—the Jews of Europe would be annihilated. It was a promise, simple as that. From then on my mother traveled with my father every week to HIAS as if he had not already done all that could be done to get whoever they could out of Europe. I stayed home and prepared dinner, the opera playing in the background. What was the point? My parents had no money to ransom the family. They had nothing but prayers. I, on the other hand, would have a thousand dollars in just a few more weeks. Imagine that. A thousand dollars meant more to me then than a million dollars could mean to me now. Not even ten million. Mr. Schwartzbart could do a lot more with a thousand dollars than he could with a thousand prayers or a thousand heart-felt thank-yous. It was disgraceful, but it was a fact, even if a life is something you save, not something to buy.
In March of 1939, Germany completed its occupation of Czechoslovakia. On April 1 the Spanish Civil War ended in defeat for our side. I had no idea of Ray’s whereabouts. I only asked Miss Finn if he was okay.
“Ray?” she repeated. “Ray Whitmore?” She looked surprised.
“Is there another Ray?” I asked.
“You haven’t spoken about him in ages,” she said.
“He told me not to.”
“That’s a strange thing.”