by Carol Zoref
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
She reported that Ray was fine.
“Shall I send him your regards?” she asked.
“Not if he’s fine,” I replied.
By the time Dolores closed down the warehouse, I had a thousand dollars in hand. I went one last time to say good-bye. Dolores, to my surprise, threw her arms around me and cried.
“You’re the last good thing that Ray Whitmore did for me, honey,” she said through her tears. “I loved him, you know. You can’t understand, but you will. You’ll get your heart broken, too.”
She pulled away and wiped her face with a strip of muslin. “Ray’s a passionate guy. He was passionate about me, and I loved that. He’s passionate about justice and freedom and Spain, which I love too. It turns out he’s also passionate about money and about other women. I can share a lot of things, but not that. I don’t know which was worse: finding out about him and that whore Marie Dowd or that he’d been helping himself to the money.”
I turned bright, bright red. My cheeks sizzled.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I caught him red-handed with Marie. That’s how. It was all the evidence I needed. I know you care about Ray. Even about Marie. But a rat’s a rat. Now he’s a rat with the number five carved on his forehead. Everyone’ll know.” She tapped her fingers on the penknife she used for opening money packets.
“Know what?” I asked. I could not believe it. Had she really cut him? Heaven knows what she might have done had she heard that I was in the mix.
“That Ray is a member of a fifth column; the only state he’s loyal to is himself.”
I should have confessed—only about the money, of course—but how could I? Ray deserved to be punished for how he treated me. And for betraying Dolores. As for Marie, she might have known about Dolores and not cared. Or me. Or maybe not known at all. But Dolores would have attacked Ray no matter what, even had she only known about Marie and not the missing money. That was how I lived with myself; that was how I convinced myself to let Ray take the fall. Besides, Dolores was entitled to a little revenge on Ray for messing around with me, whether she knew about it or not. Or so I believed.
It was not my finest hour.
My cheeks stayed hot the entire ride home. Not even the spray on the crossing could cool me off. There were plenty of rats on board, real rats, all of them getting fat from dead horses. I pounded a stick to keep them away, not that they scared. I could feel them moving through the piles of horseflesh, greedy and determined.
On Sunday April 30, German Jews lost their tenants’ rights. Thousands were thrown into the streets, only allowed now to rent from Jewish landlords.
On the following Sunday, I rode the barge again to Brooklyn. No one asked where I was going or why. The furnace was banked for the day, there were no new barges to be emptied, and the red light at the top of the smokestack was blinking as always. A few scavengers were resting near the stern; some hopeful seagulls were watching from above. The barge captain did not ask after Noah, nor had Mr. DeWitt in all those months since Noah fled Barren Shoal. Not only had Noah-the-person disappeared, but the topic of him vanished too. Maybe that was better. It kept Noah safe. Being safe was all that mattered.
I arrived at HIAS, got my number, and waited in line with the usual sad crowd of angry, frustrated, and frightened people. What else could they be? Plenty were talking about the Evian Conference in France, which was supposed to address the crisis of Jewish refugees but did nothing. Lots of countries attended, plenty expressed sympathy, none condemned the Nazis, none lifted their Jewish quotas. Like Chaim Weizman said: the world was divided into places where Jews could not live and places we could not enter. Most of it still is. Can a Syrian Jew live anymore in Syria? Is a Jew welcomed in Indonesia? The only people who do not believe this are not Jews.
An hour later Mr. Schwartzbart, who came out to get some air, saw me standing in the crowd.
“Where’s your father?” he asked, looking around.
“I’m by myself.”
“Since when does he send you by yourself?” He guided me into his office with what felt like grandfatherly concern. I did not know my grandfathers, but I like to imagine them caring for me not because they had to, but because they could not help themselves.
I pulled the money from my pocket. It was folded into one of the packets used for tobacco. I waited for Mr. Schwartzbart to become ecstatic. I could have waited all day long.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked, alarmed.
I explained that it was given to me by some anti-fascists, but only if I promised to not say where it came from.
“They said it’s all the same, whether they help republicans in Spain or Jews in Zyrmuny. It is, isn’t it?” Ray had said something like that to me as a reason for why helping the republican cause was as worthy of my own time as helping Jews. It served him right that I turned his logic around. As far as I was concerned, Ray owed me.
Mr. Schwartzbart sat quietly, thumbing the stack of immigration forms on his desk. The streetcar rattled up Lafayette St. and the subway rumbled beneath us.
“I suppose it is,” he said, finally breaking his silence. “I hope we have better luck with our fight. But we must involve your father.”
“You don’t know him,” I begged. “He’ll give it back.” Not that I believed this was possible. Who would he give it to: Dolores, who I did not know how to find outside the warehouse? Ray, if he ever dared show his face?
Mr. Schwartzbart took the packet and held it up to the light as if sneaking a peak at its contents.
“So what difference does it make?” he repeated. He laid the packet on the desk and folded his hands over it. “We help who we can help. Why look a gift horse in the mouth?”
Not a question we ever asked on Barren Shoal.
In early May, spring came to Barren Shoal. When my children ask what it was like to live in war times, I tell them people live the same as always until they no longer can. One would think they would know this, having lived through Vietnam and all that news on the TV. But they mean something else. Losing the war in Vietnam did not mean the Viet Cong coming to New York in order to kill us. The Nazis would have brought SS to America; Americans would have signed up. They would have built camps here. And so on. My children want to know if I was afraid. “Of course I was afraid,” I tell them. But I will not describe my nightmares. That is too much.
Do miracles happen? I think it was hard work that got me into Hunter.
To celebrate our graduation, Miss Finn announced that she was taking Sofia and me to the World’s Fair, which had opened in Flushing Meadow in April. I was glad she did not suggest another barbecue like the one when Noah and Marie finished school. I was relieved when my parents did not either. I was happy about Hunter but still sullen. Never speaking about Ray had not cured my being brokenhearted. Nor was I interested in making nice to the many Dowds who littered the island.
“It will be a day of surprises, I promise,” said Miss Finn.
The more Sofia and I talked about why it was just we two Miss Finn was taking, the more I grew convinced that Miss Finn had some secret plan up her sleeve.
The secret she was hiding, I decided, was Noah.
Once it came to me, I knew in my soul that he was passing through New York as part of a thirteenth-hour effort to fight the fascists in Spain. Noah, of course, would be joining up with the remnants of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Yes, it had officially disbanded but some had stayed behind, hiding in the Pyrenees and aiding the underground. Perhaps Ray was there, too? Wondering did not equal wanting him, at least not that I was aware of. But he had a place now in my personal history, which meant I would always be curious.
Noah, with all that Spanish he learned in California, could get across the border. He and Tyson: they would be sailing out of New York Harbor. Where better for us to meet than at the World’s Fair, crowded with thousands of people from all over America, never mind from all over New York,
and Noah tanned and stronger and not looking like himself anymore and nobody else from Barren Shoal around to alert the police or our parents. What better time for me to tell him about the money, about Mr. Schwartzbart, about Zyrmuny?
I thought a lot about what Noah wrote: I can’t wait for you to meet Tyson. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Noah was playing matchmaker, of course; they were also stopping in New York so that Tyson and I could meet. He was trying to help me get over Ray.
Sofia trimmed my hair. Thirty cents would have bought me a real cut in Brooklyn, but that was a fortune. A funny thought, especially after handing over a king’s ransom to Mr. Schwartzbart. Our mothers had cut our hair when we were little; as we got older we cut it for each other. Noah even cut my hair a few times. He said cutting hair was a whole lot cleaner than being a dead-horse butcher. He had such a steady hand, holding the crown of my head with one set of fingers and scissoring with the other. He became so enamored of his own handiwork that he thought he might become a barber.
There was something of an embarrassed pleasure that day in letting Sofia pull the coarse brush through my hair, me seated backward on a kitchen chair staring at the wall. With my eyes closed, I imagined being in a real salon, all heady from the perfumed shampoos, and the noise of the fans overhead, and this person talking to that one and some new, sad girl pushing cuttings with her broad broom. I asked Sofia to try parting it in the middle, or parting it on the side, or twisting it up into a French knot. Who knows how many other styles she tried out of the movie magazines.
“How about a roll?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“A wave?”
No again.
“A bob?”
“Eewww.”
“What do you want?” she sputtered, waving a rolled-up magazine in my face.
“How about not going too wild. How about remembering that we live on Barren Shoal and that everyone’s broke and we’re about to go to war.”
“How about you sit quiet and let me start somewhere.”
CHAPTER 21
The 1939 World’s Fair had nothing to do with anything that resembled, reflected, or even hinted at anything in our lives on Barren Shoal. It was a gigantic, gleaming stage production of everything modern, as if everything old could be replaced by something that would always be new. No one knew that new things would come faster and faster until it did not matter anymore how long anything lasted. I bought a 4x5 Speed Graphic view camera in 1943 that I used for fifty years. If I buy a digital camera today, it will be obsolete by tomorrow. I will have to replace it in a couple of years. If I live that long.
I looked for Noah everywhere not merely because he might turn up anywhere, but because the life he had now looked nothing like his old one. It stood to reason that neither would he. Instead of the slender, brown-haired boy who won second prize in the Brooklyn Evening Eagle All-Borough High School Students Arts Contest for the drawings he made of Hollywood movie stars, I looked for a muscular 25-year-old with forearms as strong as the solid shank shovels he used for digging roads. I looked for him in the Theme Center, which was so jammed that children cried when their parents moved a step forward in the lines. I looked for him in the grey shadows of the Trylon and at the Perisphere, which the line circled so many times that it was impossible to keep track of which people I was seeing for the first time and who I was passing again. I scoured the crowds in the moving rings around the Democracity diorama, with its perfectly laid out city and town and roads and waterways, where there was not a single garbage barge, or steam pipe, or track of grease trailing from a truck, or a boat, or a cart, or a car, as if every kind of effort was pure efficiency, as if no action resulted in a reaction that was not usable. Had I a better idea of what Tyson Johns looked like, I would have watched out for him too.
I had dressed that morning in a pleated skirt and blue sweater set that Noah would recognize from before. I had filled out the sweater in the year and a half since he had been gone. It was a hand-me-down from Marie Dowd—how is that for a kick in the pants?—who had inherited it from who-knows-who. I looked like the young woman I had become.
“There are a few things I would like you girls to see today,” said Miss Finn. “After that you’ll choose. Fair?”
What could we say? That it was not fair?
She drew us close to study a special pull-out section from The New York Post. She had been saving it since opening day on April 30, and had drawn stars at the exhibits she wanted to visit.
The desire for the unflawed was everywhere in Flushing Meadow, as if engineers, bricklayers, and electricians were recreating the universe in their own images, meaning the ones they held in the minds’ eyes. Near the Perisphere was a statue called “The Astronomer” by Carl Miller, who, according to the descriptions that Miss Finn read aloud from the newspaper, was “a Chicago artist who built ‘civic sculpture.’ An interesting idea except for the fact that art intended for the broad public is supposed to be ‘uplifting’ or ‘inspiring,’ which pretty much guarantees that it won’t be. Yes, girls? Look at the Washington Memorial, which is what? A whole lot of nothing. Like Mt. Rushmore, which is more silliness. Built to bring tourists to the Dakotas to do what on earth? Look at big faces? The Lincoln Memorial, mind you, is another thing altogether: the approachable figure of Lincoln sitting rather than standing; the Gettysburg Address and second Inaugural Speech etched into the walls; the inference of democratic wisdom confirred by the colonnades; its overall resemblance to a Greek temple. Compare the Lincoln in Washington to the Lincoln in South Dakota and you’ll see the difference between honor and idolatry.”
“Look at that thing!” said Sofia, pointing across the way. She was laughing at a giant, sculpted George Washington of the way he was supposed to have looked at the 1789 Inauguration. “It says on this plaque that the 1939 World’s Fair marks the 150th anniversary of the first inauguration of ‘the perfect father of a once-perfect nation.’”
“First they build that awful obelisk in Washington and now this: ‘perfect father’?” said Miss Finn. “A rather religious accolade, wouldn’t you say? And what is intended by ‘a once-perfect nation’? Does this suggest that it has been perfect in the past but no longer is? Is that disloyal? Is that merely imprecise writing? You know who built the first obelisks?”
“The Greeks,” guessed Sofia.
“The word ‘obelisk’ is from the Greek word ‘obelus,’ meaning a spit, but the structure as we know it is Egyptian. Which would you prefer as your monument: Lincoln’s Greek Temple or Washington’s Egyptian obelisk?”
“Lin—”
“Of course you want the Greek one. And Marta?”
“‘Once-perfect nation’?” I asked, repeating Miss Finn’s question.
“Don’t blame the messenger,” said Miss Finn. She bent over to more closely examine the plaque. “I’m merely quoting James Earle Fraser, who also designed the Buffalo nickel. In case you are interested.”
“Hey, look!” cried Sofia.
Noah. Finally. I turned to embrace him.
But not Noah. Not even close. Just two guys ambling past. Behind them were two more guys, the second pair wearing brown slacks and brown shirts and swastika armbands. They were eating big, soft pretzels.
“German soldiers,” I gasped.
“Americans, no doubt,” said Miss Finn. “Bundists, Sturmabteilungen, Storm Troopers, big shots ever since their big rally in February at Madison Square Garden. Plenty of Americans are Nazis.”
“Noah got jumped that night on 86th Street,” I told her. I hoped that Noah would not appear just now and use his new CCC muscles to avenge himself. The last thing we needed was for Noah to get into a street brawl, get arrested, get found out.
“What do you do with a man like Fritz Kuhn?” said Miss Finn. “How does an American man stand in front of crowd of twenty thousand Americans at Madison Square Garden, in the middle of New York City, and announce that white gentiles are ‘the true patriots’? That kind of man...t
hat kind of man could run for office and get elected because no one would stop him. They adore him. Fritz Kuhn isn’t the problem. It’s the twenty thousand other Americans who cheered him and saluted him in Madison Square Garden.”
We fell quiet. It was impossible to press her about Noah when two Nazis had walked by so closely that I could see the salt grains on their pretzels. Two young men who for no good reason wanted me dead. When I tell that to people now, to younger people like my grandson, they reply with a patient smile that makes me know that they think I exaggerate. They still want to believe that the danger was only in Europe. They do not imagine the consequences of things turning out otherwise. And the non-Jews? I have never heard a Catholic wonder aloud if their parents or grandparents listened to Father Coughlin on Sunday nights. Millions of them listened. I bet you even the Dowds.
Maybe it never crosses their minds because their families, their fathers and grandfathers, fought against Japan and Germany, not England and France. None of them, not Joe Kennedy’s children or Lindbergh’s children, had to defend their fathers’ infatuation with Hitler once America went to war. But Joe Kennedy and Lindbergh hated Jews before the war and still hated us after. Fighting Hitler did nothing to change that. And what about today? People who say we Jews should think about this less are the ones who should think about it more. I am not paranoid nor am I crazy. I am eighty years old and have seen what I have seen.
We were all there together: the Hitler Youth were strolling around Flushing Meadow eating pretzels, while Miss Finn was leading Sofia and me on a tour of public sculpture. Give the people bread and circuses, pretzels and Trylons. The hell with virtues; the hell with reason. Forget about Greek ideals and Egyptians temples. Sedate us with spectacle! The Roman Emperors were right: keep the poor fed and everyone entertained. Bread and circuses two thousand years ago—bread and circuses today. Never mind the Enlightenment’s belief in human reason, in human rights. The Enlightenment was the single greatest anomaly in human evolution. I do not mean great in size; I mean great as in magnificent, as in brilliant. Yet an aberration, nonetheless, in the history of ideas, which has been more about controlling people than freeing them. Ray Whitmore was right: ideologies are worthless. As Rabbi Hillel said: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. This is the law: all the rest is commentary. I love that: all the rest is commentary. He was not the only one who thought this: Confucius said it, and Jesus said it, and Baha’u’llah all said it in their own ways, too. This is what matters, not useless, high-flown ideologies. But who listens? Is anyone listening?