by Carol Zoref
“Look at this one, girls,” said Miss Finn, drawing us close to a scruffy bronze of Walt Whitman, his legs set to look like he was walking. She faced the Whitman statue and spoke:
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
One, then two, then a cluster of people stopped to listen, including a hunched man so old that he could have been a water boy for the Union Army. Old enough to know Whitman himself. The man rested his hand against the leg of the statue while Miss Finn continued:
And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.)
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
“From “Song of Myself,’ ” said Miss Finn, pausing to collect herself. “Number 48.”
“That the whole thing there you spoken?” asked the old man.
“Heavens, no. It’s very long.”
“People used to recite the whole Odyssey,” said Sofia.
“Not teachers from one-room schoolhouses on Barren Shoal.”
“You from Barren Island? What a stink, all those dead horses. You a actress?” asked the old man.
“No, sir,” replied Miss Finn.
“A poet?”
“No, sir, I was reciting a poem by Walt Whitman,” she explained.
“‘Why should I wish to see God better than this?’” the old man repeated. With that kind of memory he should have been the actor. “I’m counting on seeing a better God than this one if I see Him at all, I can tell you that. Because the one I know is a war criminal,” he muttered.
“What Whitman means is that....”
The man did not hear her. Or did not care. He shuffled away.
The Fair reached its epiphany, so to speak, at the General Motors complex, outside of which formed the longest line of the day, way longer than any line ever at HIAS where my parents were standing at that very moment. Everyone was there for the Futurama.
When I saw this impossibly long line—we would have to wait an hour or more for our turn—I understood that this was the place where Noah would find us. All that he had to do was walk the line. What an excellent strategy. What a brilliant surprise.
Kids were leaning against their parents’ legs, half sleeping on their feet; women were fanning themselves with Chinese sandalwood folding fans, or with church fans printed with proverbs on one side and a blonde Jesus on the other; men were wiping their brows with handkerchiefs.
A half hour passed; Miss Finn suggested that Sofia and I go for a stroll. Sofia looked tired and impatient. I felt that way too.
“Just don’t wander far, girls,” said Miss Finn.
Of course not, I thought, though I liked the idea of making Noah wait for us rather than us waiting for him. He had been gone for so long.
Sofia and I were somewhere other than Barren Shoal together for the first time since her abortion. We deserved something better than that; we deserved something fun. And it was fun seeing all the men in jackets and ties—other than those idiot Nazis, of course—and women wearing gloves, girls in dresses and boy in knickers, as if we finally had tickets for the good seats at the opera.
“Ohmygod!” I shouted. “There he is.” Finally. There was Noah, way down the walk just before it curved around the back of the General Motors building, where it ran parallel to the Grand Central Parkway.
Sofia craned her neck. “Where are you looking? Who?”
“Noah! Look!”
Sofia could have been a track star at a big school with a sports program, but I outpaced her that day, fueled by adrenaline and desire.
“Noah!” I hollered. “Noah!”
“Hey, hey,” Sofia yelled as I ran down the line. “Wait up,” she was still calling when I threw my arms around him and squeezed him and kissed him on both cheeks and ruffled his hair.
“You’ll have to excuse my friend,” said Sofia, pulling my arms away and laughing. “We don’t know what’s gotten into her lately and now she thinks it’s okay to kiss boys she doesn’t know. We think it’s something in the water.”
I wish there had been something in the water to offset my humiliation.
That caught me for a second. I had never said a word to her about Ray. Then I realized she was just making talk.
The boy straightened his jacket. He was from Rochester, he told us, sent by the Eastman Kodak Company to work at the company exhibit. He stepped back and looked us over before pressing two guest passes into Sofia’s hands, as if my kissing him made him owe us something in return. Then he dashed off.
“What ever were you thinking?” demanded Sofia.
Miss Finn, who had been watching the whole silly encounter, rushed over to see what was the matter. “She thought she saw Noah,” said Sofia, repeating my explanation. “She thought that’s why you brought us here. That you’d arranged a secret rendezvous with Noah. That he was coming through New York on his way to fight the fascists in Spain.”
“Oh, girls,” she said. “The war against the Franco is lost. At least for now.” She led us back to our spot in line, which the people behind us were guarding for her. “It’s not Noah who’s going to fight the fascists. At least not that I’m aware of, though I wish he had. It’s me. I wanted us to have a special good time before I say good-bye.”
“You?” we asked together.
Try as I might, I could not fold my mind around this one. Miss Finn, the woman who buried all those aborted fetuses on the garbage barge, was now off to Europe to fight the Nazis? Did she have to take a stand on everything?
“You’re going to Finland,” I said, as if I was not surprised and had expected this all along.
“Why on earth Finland of all places?” asked Miss Finn.
“Because of your family, where you’re from.”
“Where did you ever get that idea?”
“From my mother,” said Sofia. “Finn as in Finland. Like Napolitano as in Joey’s uncle Sal Napolitano from Naples.”
“It’s Finn as in Finnenberger, from Prague. Clipped and trimmed by a clerk at Ellis Island. I’m going to Prague.”
“To do what?” Sofia asked.
“Whatever I can.”
“Why you? You’re Catholic, you’re American.”
“Because someone has to help and right now that someone is me,” said Miss Finn.
“Everybody’s trying to get out,” said Sofia, as if there was a conspiracy afoot. “Why in God’s good name would you go?”
“So maybe a few less people will die, maybe some will get out faster.”
I thought about Sofia’s abortion; about all the other abortions that Miss Finn and her sister performed for
those women in Brooklyn; about Miss Finn’s refusal in our health lessons to call a fetus a baby but how, when pressed, she would not say whether or not they were the same thing.
Complicated. Miss Finn was very, very complicated.
“What about Ray?”
Miss Finn laughed. “Ray’s not going anywhere, at least not yet. Ray’s a good talker, but it will take a draft to get Ray into uniform. At the end of the day, he’s too happy here to go far from home.”
“He’s not in Spain?”
“Ray? Oh, Marta, he’s in Brooklyn, where he’s always been.”
“But when I asked, you said he was fine. After Franco declared victory. Don’t you remember?”
Everyone keeps a list of worst moments. There are the obvious ones, like a dead sister. Add to that particular betrayals. Ray had betrayed me not only with other women, but by staying behind in Brooklyn. He had played me for such a fool. Maybe he pulled it off because he was right. Perhaps I loved the idea of him once loving him for real was off the table. Now that was gone too. There are so many things we know about people, about ideas; there are things we cannot. Why is this so difficult to live with?
When we returned to Barren Shoal that night on the garbage barge, we could see a bonfire blazing.
“What on earth?” said Sofia.
All sorts of people were milling about when we docked, including my father and mother looking as ashen as ashes really look.
“Oh, baby,” said my mother.
“Momma?”
“Look,” she said, shoving the piece of paper into my hands.
We can think we are safe, we can think we will dodge the bullets, and maybe we can. We can convince ourselves that we are as insignificant as we are told we are and not worth going after, but none of that matters. They come after us exactly because they see us being as worthless as they have made us believe we are. We could have talked ourselves blue in the face after the letters came, but no one was going to talk our way out of being evicted. The notices came from Robert Moses, who still had the chutzpah to sign his name. You would think he would have been ashamed, would have kept his identity a secret from the people he evicted from Barren Island and Barren Shoal, and later on from the Bronx, this man named Moses.
Just like Barren Island before it, Robert Moses needed Barren Shoal for his master plan of New York. We needed it too, but nobody was asking any of us about our master plans. People who did not live there, people like my aunt and uncle, thought this was a blessing in disguise. But Barren Shoal, despite its stench and isolation, kept our families off the bread lines and coal lines and relief lines all those years. It was where we lived in our own little houses with a speck of land, small as they all were. How many ways and how many times must I say this? Barren Shoal was home.
Everyone drifted to the schoolhouse the next morning: Sofia and her parents, Joey and his brothers, the Dowds and all their children. Miss Finn came too, packing up books and rulers and pieces of chalk and anything else she could fit in a few boxes. Instead of it all being used by a new teacher who would come to Barren Shoal to replace her, the boxes would go to one of the segregated schools in Brooklyn.
“Those Negro children,” she said, “get worse than nothing.”
“What’s worse than nothing?” I wondered.
“Broken, page-missing, raggedy books that the white schools don’t want anymore.”
“At least that’s something,” said Sofia.
“What’s the point in reading a story that’s missing a page?” Miss Finn continued. “You might as well read the back of a soap carton. And that’s the point,” Miss Finn continued. “Those Negro children won’t know any better. It’s deliberate. I don’t mean ripping out the page, though it might be. But not fixing what’s broken: that’s a conscious and deliberate choice. It’s a choice to be cruel.”
CHAPTER 22
Some of the men took up a vigil at the factory gates. Mr. Paradissis brought along some homemade wine. After the men emptied a few bottles, Mr. Dowd stood up and shouted that it was Mr. Paradissis’ fault about the evictions, saying that if he had not gotten the boys all worked up with his Daily Workers and his talk about bringing a union into the plant and such nonsense, none of this would have happened. Mr. Paradissis, according to my father, accused Mr. Dowd of being a company goon because he refused to take going on strike seriously.
“If Dowd was spying for Boyle he would’ve gone along with a strike so he could finger the guys who were for it,” my father said when he came home. “Nonsense, anyway. Who cares if we strike when they’re closing it down? At any rate, Paradissis threw a bottle at Dowd, missed his mark, the thing broke, and Dowd threw the neck back at Paradissis. He got one ugly gash on his hand.”
“You should’ve stopped it,” said my mother.
“You know what? Nothing wrong with them getting angry. Not anymore.”
My mother was not impressed. “It doesn’t take a whole lot of guts to get angry at your friends. Lot a good that does them.”
“Maybe it got them all the good it’s gonna get. You think if they throw a bottle at Boyle the plant will stay open? It’ll get them shot dead. That’s what they’ll get.”
Mr. Paradissis and Mr. Dowd did not fight again that we heard of, but their anguish and rage bristled and spread, especially a few days later when the plant shut for good without any fanfare whatsoever. The furnaces were allowed to burn down. Even without being fed, they smoldered for days.
The men gathered again at the gatehouse that night and each night that followed as if to play cards, except no one played. Beyond that, no one protested the evictions, there being no one to protest to aside from Mr. Boyle, who left Barren Shoal before the furnaces even cooled for a job as an inspector at the 14th St. Meat Market.
I asked Miss Finn for one final favor, to get a letter to Lois and Gray. I asked a favor of them as well: would they please get me to Manhattan. Lois and Gray were the only people I knew with a boat; they were also the only people who would not insist on knowing why.
They pulled up a few days later in the mahogany runabout. We did not know when to expect them, but we could hear them crossing the bay. Gray was wearing a seersucker suit, just like he did at the martini picnic. Lois’ hair was pinned back beneath yet another broad-brimmed hat.
“Darling,” cried Lois, extending her hand to me. “Get into this boat right this minute and tell us everything.”
So I was wrong about them not asking.
Gray sped off before I settled into my seat. A garbage barge was the tortoise to the runabout’s hare. It was all I could do to say hello and say yes, everyone at home was fine.
“What’s all this urgency about getting to town?” asked Gray.
Who calls Manhattan “town”? People like Lois and Gray, who have enough money to know the best of it.
“I need to see someone,” I replied.
“Someone? Or someone?”
“He means someone special,” added Lois. “You know, darling: a young man.”
“Sure,” I said. I was not about to tell them about stealing $1000. Instead I told them about Ray. It was easier to admit I was a fool than a thief. Correction. It was more expedient. Not that I worried about what they thought. After all, my intentions were gutsy, which would impress them. It was the desperation of it all that was so painful, and the fact that $1000 was so little to them. Should I have asked them for the money instead of stealing it? Interesting question. Should they have offered? A more interesting question.
“How dreadful,” said Gray when I finished telling them about everything but the money, including about how Ray was involved with Marie and Dolores and me at the same time. “And typical. A fellow like your Ray gets to dash from woman to woman to woman, and the only ones who get upset are the women. His pals must think he’s the bee’s knees. I, on the other hand, would be branded a pervert for doing the same with men.”
“Have you forgotten, darling? You’re a ‘pervert’ with even one man.”
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Gray smiled broadly. “And a cheater on my charade of a marriage, not that I don’t love you, Lois.”
“Of course you love me: I’m the most elegant skirt you’ve ever had.”
“And you, dear Negress, have never passed as beautifully as you do my arm.”
“Are we shocking you, Marta?” asked Lois.
It took a few seconds to dredge up my courage. “You’re a Negro?” I asked.
They burst into laughter.
“And you’re married?”
I understood that they lived together, which was odd enough—they had made that clear at the martini picnic—but I had never put them together. All of us are blind when it suits us.
“You do what you have to do, dear,” said Gray. “You do it in order to live another day.”
So I told them about the money.
Not only did Lois and Gray deliver me to a pier in Manhattan, but they escorted me to HIAS which, it turned out, was in walking distance from where they lived.
“I wish you the best of luck, dear,” said Lois, after which she kissed me on both cheeks. I had never been kissed before by a black person. At least not that I knew of, unless it was by another Negro who looked white. Think of me what you will; I will not pretend it was nothing. I had never been kissed Continental style either, on both cheeks. Not that the two are the same, but they were two new steps that would help me walk away from Barren Shoal.
“Thanks a million,” I said.
I grabbed each one in a brief hug, then opened the door and slipped inside. I pushed through the crowd of people and up the hallway to Mr. Schwartzbart’s office