We Were Strangers Once

by Betsy Carter

  Kaethe cried when he told her he was leaving, and Georg insisted he was being too hasty. “You’ll be back soon, when this nonsense passes.” Egon gave them his treasured desk and rug from his office. He filled up a satchel with some of his mother’s old dishes, silverware, and linen tablecloths, and stuffed whatever else he could into a single suitcase. As he packed, he felt himself slipping into the past tense, cherishing the scant reminders of who he’d been: two white shirts; one pair of mother-of-pearl cuff links from his father; a leather case containing a refractor, a scalpel, and a cataract knife; the oval plaque with his name on it; an envelope filled with his mother’s drawings; one copy of each of his parents’ books; fifteen hundred reichsmarks sewn into the lining of his black suit jacket; his mother’s gold pocket watch in a green satin pouch; the beautiful old eye prosthesis; and two bottles of heartburn tablets.

  Early on the morning of May 21, 1938, he shared coffee, bread, and honey with the Schnabels, then rode a streetcar to the station. He sat on the train to Hamburg, his papers neatly stored in a folder in the pocket of his suitcase, and tried to read the newspaper as casually as a commuter.

  From the train station it was only a matter of catching another streetcar to the pier, where he boarded the SS Washington. Unlike in the movies he’d seen about sea voyages, there was no popping of champagne corks, no crowds waving handkerchiefs and blowing kisses. Passengers boarded as resolutely as patients walking into a dentist’s office. Because it was raining, most went right inside, leaving Egon as one of the few remaining on deck. A foghorn bleated, and the ship lurched as it disentangled itself from its berth. Salty spikes of water blew onto his face, and a mist curled around him. There was nothing to see on this dull afternoon, no land or water. Even so, knowing that Germany was still in reach was enough to keep him outside until dark. On this night there was no sunset, only the gradual halting of light. In the moments before darkness, he became aware of a gathering cloud, one with substance and motion. As it got closer he heard a ruckus. He stared into the sky until the cloud became a swarm of birds, and the birds became familiar faces, and the faces brought him back to the Stadtwald. Then the clacking and the squawking stopped, the cloud took wing, and what was left of the light slid out of the sky.

  PART II

  In the New Country

  7.

  Rose McFadden grew up as the oldest of three, and the only one of them to come to America. While her childhood was as spare and poor as those of most of the other immigrants in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, she knew nothing different and would remember her first sixteen years as happy ones. Only after she met Ryan Walsh did she learn how sorrow could wear a soul down.

  It was a drafty afternoon in 1904 when she first laid eyes on him. She was accompanying her mother to the emergency room across town at Bellevue Hospital. Ryan was steering the No. 3 horse-drawn trolley across Thirty-Fourth Street, wearing a black cap and a silver badge with his name on it. As Mrs. McFadden climbed the stairs, he must have seen how she limped and noticed the sores on her swollen ankle. “No need to pay,” he said. “You’ll ride as my guests.”

  Rose squinted at his badge and said, “How very kind of you, Ryan Walsh.”

  “And who might you be?”

  “Rose,” she said. “Rose McFadden.”

  They heard in each other’s voices the dialect of County Mayo and understood that they were both immigrants. He pressed his lips together in a way that wasn’t a smile exactly but made her feel noticed. When they got to First Avenue, Rose held her mother’s arm as Mrs. McFadden struggled off the trolley. Ryan caught her eye and tipped his hat. “Rose, I suppose, has as many beaus as the stars in the sky and the freckles on her nose.”

  After that, she found any excuse to take the No. 3 trolley. Ryan wasn’t anyone’s idea of handsome. He was stalky and pale, his facial features were straight lines that could have been drawn with simple pencil strokes. But he had life in him that made up for his flat face and hidden eyes, and Rose found herself imagining how it would be to touch the smooth skin on the back of his neck.

  They never talked when she came on board, but he’d always manage to whisper a bit of doggerel to her before she disembarked. It took him nearly two months to use up every word that rhymed with Rose. One afternoon, as she was about to step off the trolley, he turned around and whispered, “Lovely Rose, don’t mean to impose, my rhymes have run out, can we talk soon in prose?” She knew what he was asking, and the next time she got on the trolley, she handed him a piece of paper on which she had composed her own poem: My heart and head they disagree, whether you might be the boy for me. I’m not so sure that this is smart, but good-bye, head, and hello, heart.

  He smiled for real. “Will you stay on with me while I finish my route?”

  For the next two weeks, after school and whenever she could get away from her chores, she traveled with him back and forth between the Hudson and East Rivers. Rose always sat behind Ryan, and when their eyes met in his mirror, they would exchange shaky smiles. After his shift, they would walk down to the water and sit on the pier. Ryan told her about his family, how they’d come over ten years earlier. “My father promised that we’d be rich in America, that we’d get new clothes and shoes when we needed them, that we’d eat meat once a day.” He ran his fingers over his worn, ill-fitting pants. “Well, that hasn’t happened yet.”

  Once, after they’d watched a seagull snap up his squirmy prey, Ryan said, “Pushy bastards, aren’t they? And look at the size of those beaks. My father calls them Jew birds.” He laughed so rarely that Rose, warmed by the sound of it, laughed with him.

  On a late afternoon, when the fog was so solid they could only smell the water, he took her hand and said, “I never thought about marrying until I met you.” He was nineteen, and although the three-year disparity in their ages seemed like a century, he said he didn’t care how long it would take, that he would wait for her forever.

  Forever came sooner than they’d planned. By the time she was seventeen, Rose was married and pregnant with their first child. Their daughter, Erin, was born with dimples in her cheeks, which Ryan called “God’s fingerprints.” She died of typhus at four.

  At nineteen, Rose gave birth to a second child, with blue lips and the wrinkled skin of an old man. They called him Liam, and he lived for thirty-seven hours.

  Little Kiefer was dark and fierce, and bellowed like his father. This one would survive.

  Two years later, in 1910, when Rose was twenty-two, came beautiful Catrina, a perfect replica of her mother. By then, Ryan had quit driving a trolley and had taken a job as a longshoreman. He made more money at the new job, but still barely enough for them to get by. They lived in two cramped rooms on the top floor of an old tenement on Leroy Street, two blocks from the Hudson River docks. The bedroom, with only a curtain separating Rose and Ryan from their children, had one window that looked out onto an interior hallway; the other window, in the kitchen, opened onto an airshaft. The flimsy walls made daylight as scarce as money but did little to diffuse the odor of manure or muffle the sound of clomping horse hooves and bickering neighbors. The kitchen had room for an oilcloth-covered table and two chairs, which meant the family could never take their meals at the same time. Not that it mattered, since Ryan was rarely home in those days. He worked long hours, digging ditches and hauling freight on and off the passenger ships. His hands had become coarse and calloused, and if you’d asked Rose, she’d have said his soul had too.

  He fought the Negroes who, he said, threatened to take his job. He raised his fists to the Italians and spat at the Jews. “Dagos, kikes, niggers”; he had names for them all, and they had ones as bad for him. Men like Ryan had to be careful where they walked at night. The first time he came home with raw egg streaming down his face, Rose said, “If you’re going to bring home eggs, make them the kind your children can eat.” The next time it was bruises around his eyes. “You keep this up and next thing you know, you’ll walk in here with a knife between your ribs
,” said Rose. “Dead, you’ll be of no use to us.”

  On his days off, Ryan took the family to his favorite place, the duck pond at Central Park. Their trip to the country, he’d call it. They’d walk the grassy slopes of a bluff called the Promontory and sometimes take the swan boats around the pond. During the winter they might splurge for sleigh rides, and once, on Rose’s twenty-fifth birthday, the four of them went for a cruise up and down the East River. Rose begged Ryan to come to church with her, but he’d given up on God after Erin died.

  As reckless as he was with his own body, Ryan was obsessed with keeping Catrina out of harm’s way. He carried her everywhere until she was old enough to sit on his shoulders. Then he’d make it a game, bending down before her and saying, “Time to climb onto your throne.” Up there, Catrina’s world became his. He’d sing to her: Have you met my Catrina Ballerina? No one’s smarter, no one’s keener, and make up stories about the people they passed in the street: Look at that woman, rich and stout, with airs like a queen, she’s a Kraut, no doubt. Up there, she was safe. She became so much a part of her father that she thought his sweat and the smell of his hair were hers.

  When she was six, he told her, “You’re getting too big for your da’s shoulders. From now on we’ll walk side by side like partners.” His crusty hand enveloped her pale, freckled fingers. He still made up rhymes and called her his Catrina Ballerina, but with her feet on the ground, her world became a less safe place: Her father cursed at strangers and made sure she understood the difference between dagos and sheeneys. Rose fought him, saying more than once, “If you teach these children hate, they’ll be no better than the rest of them.”

  He argued that the children needed to know who to avoid, even though he didn’t avoid any of them. When he came home one night with three teeth knocked out and blood pouring from the side of his head, he said to Rose, “You’re right, I’ll sure as bloody hell get killed if I stay here any longer.”

  He had a plan. He was going to go to Chicago, where he had relatives from County Mayo who said they were treated fairly and that there was plenty of work in the stockyards. He promised to send for the family as soon as he got settled. “We live cooped up like cockroaches,” he told Rose. “Our lives are no better than they were in Ireland, the only difference being that here no one wants us. If I see one more ‘Irish need not apply’ sign, I swear, I’ll… We can do better; if not for ourselves, at the least we should give the children a proper chance.”

  Catrina, now seven, was sure that her father would take her with him. She’d keep house for him, boil water for his tea, and lay out his shirt and trousers and shoes each morning. She waited for him to pull her aside and tell her that it would be the two of them, partners as always. When no one was around, she’d fall on her knees and pray: “God, I will do anything you ask, but let me go with him.”

  In his last days at home, Ryan stopped talking to Catrina and Kiefer. There was packing to do, last-minute chores like repairing the rotten floorboard in the kitchen or hauling a winter’s worth of firewood up three flights of stairs. And there was Rose. With so little privacy, she and Ryan retreated to their side of the curtain, where they had some whispered conversations but more shouting arguments.

  Then one morning, Catrina and Kiefer woke up and their father was gone. No good-byes, no notes. Rose said he’d gotten an early ride and didn’t want to disturb them. “We’ll all be together soon enough,” she promised. But it was clear from the dead tone in her voice that she didn’t believe it.

  “That’s it, he’s gone forever,” Kiefer told Catrina when they were alone. “He’s never going to send for us.”

  “Why do you have to be so mean about everything?” Catrina asked. “He’d never do that.”

  “He would and he did. And I’m not mean,” said Kiefer. “I’m real about things. Men like him don’t stick around when things get hard. That’s how it is.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “If we had money,” said Kiefer, “I’d wager you a bet. But I’ll tell you what. If you’re right, and he does call us to Chicago, you get first pick of what room you want. But if he never comes back, and we have to help Ma with all the household chores, you have to do the cooking and the laundry.”

  For the previous three years, Rose had been keeping house for a rich older American woman named Mrs. Livingston, who treated her kindly, while a neighbor watched Catrina and Kiefer. Mrs. Livingston became ill shortly after Ryan left, and Rose cared for her, brushing her hair, feeding her, and cleaning her when she fouled herself. When her employer could no longer walk, Rose would carry her to the window, where she could look out on her beloved Central Park. Rose was holding Mrs. Livingston in her arms when she finally died, and it was Rose to whom she left three hundred dollars in her will, suggesting she use it to become a certified nurse. Instead, Rose used the money to buy new clothes and shoes for Catrina and Kiefer, and put the rest of it in the bank for when the four would move to a bigger apartment. After Mrs. Livingston died, Rose got a job at the only place that would employ a nearly thirty-year-old Irishwoman: the laundry in the subbasement of Bellevue Hospital.

  When she came home at night, she made what Ryan used to call her “Pot of what?” Usually it was nothing more than potatoes, onions, salt, pepper, bread, and whatever meat or meat remnants she could afford. After dinner, she and the children would settle down under the red-and-white quilt on her bed. The quilt and a lace curtain were the two luxuries that her mother had brought over from Ireland. While the lace curtain covered only half the kitchen window and the quilt was tattered, they and her small shrine of two statues of the Blessed Virgin, two saints, a rosary, and a vase of artificial roses injected color into the otherwise drab apartment.

  Rose deliberately kept Ryan in the conversation, assigning him tasks and coloring him into their future: “When we move, I’ll leave it to your father to figure out how we’ll get out there,” or “I found a scarf at the hospital today. I’ll save it for your father, he’ll need one in Chicago.” Lying under the quilt with Catrina and Kiefer, she’d spill out her daydreams. They’d gotten a map of Chicago. They drew circles around where they might live and imagined how it would be to swim in the big lake.

  Ryan’s letters came weekly at first. He’d gotten a job mopping the blood from a slaughterhouse floor. He’d seen an affordable house in the Bridgeport section of Chicago that had three rooms and running water. Rose hoped that they might have a backyard. “Should that happen,” she told the children, “we could grow flowers and vegetables, and I think we could find our way to getting you two a pony or a horse.” Catrina asked if they could also have some dogs, and Kiefer offered that he didn’t care about any of that; what he wanted was for his bed to be in a room with a door.

  Rose prayed that Chicago would heal Ryan’s anger and the brawling would stop. If he got a good-paying job, maybe the Lord would see fit to grant them more children. She wouldn’t ask for more than that. But, after a while, the letters became scarcer. No more talk of the job at the slaughterhouse, no mention of houses. Instead, evenings spent with new friends, promises of new business schemes. Rose and the children continued writing him weekly, asking question upon question: Are there lots of Irish people there? Is it as cold as New York? Do you eat well? He never answered any of their questions. Then the letters stopped coming.

  After nearly two months of silence, a thick envelope with a Chicago postmark arrived for Rose. She allowed herself a moment of hope as she tried to pry open the envelope without ripping the paper, but too quickly, unthinkable words flooded the page:

  My dearest Rose,

  I understand that a man doesn’t leave his wife and children unless his being gone is better for them than his being there. You and the children are better off without me than with the person I have become. Believe me, this causes me more agony than you will ever know. Please don’t look for me but I beg that you and the children hold me in your hearts and know that wherever I am, I am thinking of you wi
th all my love. Explain to Catrina and Kiefer as best you can, and find it within yourselves not to hate me as I am only doing the best I can. Here is twenty-two dollars. I hope that you will use some of it to take the children on a boat up the East River and they will remember the good times they had with their da. You deserve better than me. It’s probably too late, but I am going to church again. I speak to you and the children through prayer, which is all I have left. That and God’s mercy.

  Ryan

  For six days, Rose didn’t tell Catrina and Kiefer about the letter. She carried it in her purse and read it every chance she got, hoping each time that it would rewrite itself. But when that didn’t happen, she sat the children down in the kitchen and said, “It’s time we face the truth. Unless we are granted a miracle, your father is gone. Our lives are here, and we are meant to make the best of it.”

  At only eight, Catrina didn’t know the language of mourning, other than what she read on her mother’s face. Rose stopped eating. Either she was crying or her eyes were red from the last time she had. Her cries weren’t the snuffling sounds a person usually made. They were piercing and incessant, like those of a trapped animal. She stopped caring what she wore and whether or not she combed her hair; on the rare days when she did not work, she wouldn’t even change out of her nightdress. Often Catrina would find her slumped on the kitchen chair or lying on her bed with both hands over her heart. When she asked, “Why do you hold your hands that way?” her mother answered, “My heart. It hurts.”

  “Can’t you take some medicine to make it better?”

  “I don’t expect you to understand this kind of hurt,” said Rose. “It’s the kind that can’t be fixed.”