by Pam Lewis
Minke regaled him with her stories about the Wileys, Mrs. Bowen, the dinner parties—of which there had been several by that time—and the guests and their astonishing conversation about meteors and art exhibits and a riot in Paris over a ballet. Oh, and Elly was eating solid food, a little bit of porridge, which was a relief, and Minke was gaining some weight. The sisters sometimes asked her to play canasta with them—well, Miss Anne asked, and Miss Amanda went along with it. Best of all, she was reading the newspaper every day, getting better and better at it, and both sisters were happy to tell her the meaning of the words she didn’t know. She excitedly showed him the stack of newspapers that was growing taller every day. Cassian laughed as she spoke. “And you?” she asked at the end of her spiel. “Tell me!”
He drew in a breath. “Where to begin,” he said. Chiefly, he had a number of patients. All of them were homosexual men who did not dare visit regular doctors who might report them to the police. There was quite a large population of such men in lower Manhattan, Cassian explained, and he planned to move to an address in a place called Washington Square quite soon.
“And Sander?” Minke asked warily.
“The baby is due in October,” Cassian said, shaking his head. “Pregnancy does not suit Fenna. She’s in a sour mood most of the time. Sander has a job as a driver for someone. It pays him a little. I try to help out when I can.”
Minke shuddered, the reality of Fenna’s pregnancy sinking in all over again.
“When we’re out of Fenna’s hearing, Sander asks after you. He wants to know if you’re well.”
“Let him wonder,” she said.
“I tell him I don’t know. He rages at me.”
“I regret putting you in such a situation.”
“He knows I’m lying.”
“You were careful when you came here, weren’t you? That he didn’t follow?” The thought of Sander showing up at the apartment sent a chill down her spine.
“One day he’ll find out, Minke.”
“How? He’ll never know if neither you nor I tell him. Besides, I’ll be gone one day.” She told him her plan. She’d worked it out to the penny and to the day. If she managed carefully, she would have saved enough money to debark for Comodoro on March 15 of the following year. The cost was thirty-three dollars, steerage to Comodoro for her and Elly. Once she arrived, she would immediately go to the Almacén to talk to Bertinat. He had always liked her. She would offer to make alterations. She would be aggressive about her skills as a seamstress. After all, she’d been the tailor to one of the most important men in New York City. She would put up advertisements in all the public places. “I shall make sure everyone knows I’m looking for Zef. Maybe when I arrive there will be news. In a country like that, a towheaded boy is noticed. I can do it. I know I can. Already, after only a few months, I’m managing well and saving my money. Elly is thriving here.”
Cassian gave her a shrewd look. “Then you have a difficult choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“The chance of finding Zef is small, Minke. And here in New York, you have the certainty of a good life for yourself and for Elly.”
19
EVERY EVENING AFTER Elly was asleep, Minke pored over Mr. Wiley’s newspapers in the kitchen. Mrs. Bowen had gone home to her husband by that time, and the Wileys were in their rooms. She read everything. The range of subjects covered in the newspaper was astonishing. There were stories of murders and politics and the threat of war and, on Fridays, the society news. A woman named Iris Singer went into people’s homes and took photographs of rich families posed formally with children and dogs surrounded by opulence to match royalty. Minke had never seen such lavish interiors, thousands of square feet. Iris Singer described what she saw the way a starving person might describe food—full of longing. Minke liked to try out the words she learned on the Wileys. “Quite luscious,” she might say about a piece of fabric one of the sisters had brought home, or “the epitome of rococoesque design,” she attempted once with Mr. Wiley, who glanced at her oddly and said, “Precisely right, but I think you mean eh-pih-to-me, not eh´-pi-tome.”
She was always on the alert for news of Argentina, a country The New York Times said was like America in its rapid expansion and ability to attract immigrants from all over the world. People were flocking to Argentina to make their fortunes. Occasionally, there was even mention of Comodoro, always related to oil production. Minke read these reports over and over, as if she might find news of Zef between the lines. In August two photographs of Comodoro appeared in the paper. She borrowed Miss Anne’s magnifier and hunched over them. One showed a Comodoro oil well, “sheathed in corrugated metal to protect it from the blowing sand and dirt,” the article said. Outside, a dozen workers posed stiffly in their woolen hats and heavy coats. She looked closely at each face, hoping to see one she remembered. She thought perhaps she’d seen some of the men, but there was no one she really knew. Still, her heart fluttered with nostalgia at the sight of the familiar rubbled landscape, the smooth rolling hills in the distance.
The other photograph was looking down from the Cerro. It took her a moment to recognize the barracks at Dietz’s camp, the same buildings she’d ridden to on the day Cassian was attacked. The operation was so much larger now, like a town unto itself. The article called Comodoro “primitive by any standard but experiencing rapid growth.” It went on to say that the most valuable land had been bought up by speculators who were agents for major European oil companies working under cover until agreements with Argentina would allow for foreign investment. It mentioned Dietz’s oil works by name: Petróleo Sarmiento.
This explained everything! He’d been certain from the start he would sell to Germans. Oh, this world. You thought a thing was true, and then it wasn’t. Dietz wasn’t an independent but a pawn in a much larger game of chess.
On her next day off, a splendid September afternoon, she set out for Cassian’s apartment. Eight months old now, Elly was too restless to stay long in the sling, but Minke kept her there until they were settled in seats on the Ninth Avenue Elevated train. Then Elly sat on her lap and watched alertly everything that happened as the train swayed and screeched over the city.
As she did every week, Minke carried the week’s newspapers for Cassian to read, but this week she was breathless to show him the photographs of Comodoro. When she reached the Thirteenth Street station, she zigzagged around the blocks to Cassian’s building, a tall narrow structure made of brick and, like all the others on his street, with a metal fire escape down its front. She rapped at the door to his small office on the ground floor and, getting no answer, climbed the stairs to his apartment, where she rapped again and didn’t wait for an answer before swinging open the door.
His flat was decorated with colorful wall hangings and big pillows like something Turkish or Moroccan, crowded with furniture and bookcases, so much like his house in Comodoro. She set Elly down, and the child crawled to a couch, covered in tapestries. Cassian opened his arms to her. He was much stronger now. His face had filled out, his dark eyes shone with their old spirit, and his hair was longer and oily black. Two of his neighbors were present, a couple who lounged on the couch, drowsy as Indian summer. Royal was a painter, and many of his paintings were stored on Cassian’s walls. His wife, the frail, dark Ivy, watched her husband with doting eyes. They were often at the apartment on Sunday afternoons, Royal raging against this or that government, spouting opinions about whether there would be a war, about the corruption of public officials.
Minke nodded a quick hello, drew the papers from the bottom of Elly’s sling, kept out the article about Comodoro, and dropped the rest with a thud on the stack in the corner. “Look at this one.”
Cassian put on his glasses and sat down to read. Placed a hand over his breast. “Dietz was working for an oil company?”
“It looks that way,” Minke said.
“He pretends to have everything at stake, like the rest of us, but he was on a payroll,” Cas
sian said. “No wonder.”
Cassian brought out the tea things, and Minke burrowed into the sofa, sipping her tea. She felt so utterly peaceful at Cassian’s, watching Elly move from one set of knees to the next, fall on her behind, then pull herself up again.
A great racket sounded on the stairs to the apartment. Minke recognized the voices immediately and froze. The door was flung open to reveal Sander and Fenna, Fenna in her green coat, wide open in front to expose her nightdress. Sander’s face was shiny with sweat from running up the stairs. Minke shrank into the sofa as if to keep Sander from seeing her. She stared at the two of them the way she might observe actors on the stage. Fenna was doubled over in pain and hanging on to Sander. Fenna made a terrible sound, a combination of a wail and a retching sound, clutched at her abdomen, and fell into one of the armchairs.
“Help her,” Sander said, giving Cassian a shake. “For God’s sake, man. The baby is coming.”
“It’s too early,” Cassian said.
“It’s coming anyway,” Sander said.
Cassian helped Fenna to her feet. She didn’t seem to have noticed that Minke was even there. Ivy and Royal must have fled. Only Sander and Minke remained in the living room. She was sharply aware of a change in him, a bleariness in his eyes, the result of drink, she assumed. His clothing—once his great pride—was limp and soiled, and while she might have felt vindicated, she felt only sadness at what had become of him. At last he took notice of her and was visibly shaken at the sight. Her painstaking efforts to hide her whereabouts had come to naught unless she could flee immediately. He ventured a weak smile. “Minke,” he said.
Fenna screamed again from the bedroom. Minke drew herself up to standing. “Go to her,” she said. “I’ll put on water to boil.”
Fenna screamed again. The baby was eight weeks early. Way too early. Minke put a hand to her forehead, and Fenna opened her eyes. She clutched at Minke’s arm. “Help me, Minke. Help me,” she sobbed. “The pain is too much.”
The kettle shrilled in the kitchen. Cassian returned and dispensed some morphine to Fenna, and it calmed her a little. “More,” she said. “Please, more.”
But the baby wasn’t waiting. Fenna screamed out and then was quiet.
It was a boy not much bigger than Cassian’s hand, with thin, sharp features. Cassian ordered Minke to warm a blanket in the oven. In the kitchen, Sander held the kettle, clearly not knowing what to do with it. She went back to the bedroom as Cassian laid the child on Fenna’s abdomen and covered it with another blanket. Such a mess, the bedding soaked in fluid and Fenna’s clothing wet and bloodstained. She had to be cleaned and kept warm where she lay, cradling the child. “We mean to call him Woodrow, after the newly elected president,” she whispered.
If he lives, Minke thought. He weighed only four pounds on Cassian’s scale. “The baby,” Cassian said to Sander in the living room, “must be kept at a uniform temperature.”
“Impossible,” Sander said. “It’s growing cold now.”
You would give up without even trying, Minke thought.
Cassian cleared his throat. “Difficult, Sander, yes, but not impossible. It has been done with success. The child must be kept in the oven with only the pilot light burning. The temperature can be kept close to the mother’s temperature that way.”
Minke was frightened for the child, whose parents could be incapable of this care. She fought the urge to go with them, to give up her life and take care of the child, who might otherwise die.
Cassian must have sensed Minke’s dilemma. “Fenna will stay here with me for the time being, and I’ll help with the infant.” He indicated the stove, a massive cast-iron thing with an oven and a warming compartment. “Like so.” He opened the doors to both oven and warming compartment, removed the blanket from the oven, raised it to his face to test the warmth, flapped it open to cool it, and folded it again. He brought it to Minke. “Feel.” She reached out a hand. The blanket was perfect to the touch, exactly the temperature of her hand.
She gathered up Elly. “Go see your son, Sander.”
He seemed about to speak, but she put a finger to her lips. After he left the room, she used the chance to slip out the front door with Elly and ran as quickly as she could to the Ninth Avenue Elevated, looking behind her in case Sander had followed. She wondered, perhaps even half wished, she’d catch a glimpse of him behind her. No such thing, of course. He wasn’t a man to try hard.
20
AGAINST ALL ODDS, and facing a life with Fenna and Sander as his parents, Woodrow hung on, struggled for breath every day, and finally began to put on weight. This Minke learned from Cassian in November, when he came to see her. His mission was to tell her the coast was clear. Fenna and Woodrow had gone back to the apartment on 121st Street, and it was safe to visit again.
She had news of her own. The money was piling up in her stocking. On March 8 she would set sail for Comodoro. Steerage, but what did that matter? She was strong. Elly was strong.
“You’ll be going into winter again,” Cassian said. “Just your luck.”
It didn’t matter. She would be closer to finding Zef. That was what mattered. He would be twice the age he’d been, almost two. “I see children Zef’s age in the park when I take Elly, and my heart breaks with missing him. I picture him all the time, Cassian. Has someone cut his hair? He must be walking, running, exploring by now. Will he know me when I find him?”
“Have you communicated any of this to your mama and papa?” Cassian asked.
Minke shrugged. She’d written them about Elly, about New York. But how could she break their hearts and tell them the rest?
“What’s the news there?” Cassian asked.
“If they knew my address, they would give it to Fenna even if I told them not to. I don’t dare. I write to them. I hear nothing back.”
She returned to her work, smocking a dress for Miss Anne. Cassian settled onto the daybed to play with Elly and then began to look through the stack of newspapers Minke kept in her sewing room.
“Read to me while I sew, will you, Cassian?” she asked. He obliged, going from story to story. He often read only the first few paragraphs, the most interesting part, then skipped to another story, and when he’d finished with one day’s paper, he would rummage around in the pile and find the paper from another day. It didn’t matter to either of them that the news was old.
She was just finishing off a buttonhole when Cassian stopped reading. He’d been regaling her with stories of the rich. “God in heaven!”
“What is it?” She lay down her sewing.
Cassian held out the paper, shaking his head. “They’re here in New York!”
“Who’s here in New York?”
“Dietz and his wife.”
She grabbed the paper from him and read the story.
A WARM WELCOME
No clearer proof is required that the center of New York’s fashionable society is set firmly at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-second Street than the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Frederik Dietz and their baby son, Hendrik.
Eight-ten Fifth Avenue, for decades home to Astors, DuPonts, and Fricks, is now also home to the Dietz family, newly arrived from Argentina. Mr. Dietz is the recently named president of Pan American Petroleum & Transport, with offices in the Woolworth Building.
The triplex boasts a ballroom on its main floor, two fireplaces, a grand center staircase, and a penthouse apartment with gardens overlooking Fifth Avenue.
Through her interpreter, Mrs. Dietz, who is of Dutch descent, thrilled over the view of Central Park and proximity to fine restaurants. Mrs. Dietz was stunning in a richly embroidered day dress by Callot Soeurs and black turban made especially memorable by its fan of striking blue feathers—tail feathers, she explained, of a rare Patagonian parrot.
Minke started to laugh. “She made that parrot into a hat!” She fell on the daybed beside Cassian.
“Look at the photograph,” he said.
She hadn’t noticed it, but at the top of th
e page, separate from the story, was a photograph. She held it close to her eyes, the better to make it out. In it, Tessa looked like a swami in her turban, the feathers fanned over the top of it like a peacock tail. Dietz stood behind her, hands firmly planted on each end of her chair back. And in her lap, the child. Minke drew in her breath. It was sharply painful to see Tessa with a son.
“That’s a very big baby!” She studied the child in the grainy photograph. She tried to remember when he would have been born. Tessa was newly pregnant, not even sure of it, when Minke gave birth to Zef. The boy wore a ridiculous beret and a sailor suit of crisp white cotton. He was very large, but then the Dietzes were very large.
Minke kept going back to the photograph. Something about it. “Please hand me my magnifier.”
The child’s beret rode low on his forehead, and Tessa’s large hand rested on his little shoulder, obscuring one side of his face. Still, the resemblance was there. It was in his smile. Her heart skipped a beat. “Cassian?”
“I wondered the same. Come.”
As they packed up Elly and slipped out into the street by the rear service door, she kept telling herself to be calm, but it was no use. She was trembling, finding it difficult to breathe.
Cassian hailed a taxi. “Sixty-second Street and Fifth Avenue,” he said. “Do as I say, Minke. We need to proceed in steps. We’ll wait until one of them comes outside with the child. Perhaps not today, but someone has to come sometime. We must first lay eyes on the child to see if he’s indeed Zef. But that’s all. We won’t take him. Promise me.”
“How can I possibly promise that?”
“I’ve never done wrong by you, Minke. You must promise.”
At 810 Fifth Avenue, they crossed over to the Central Park side of the street and looked up at the building. It was a fortress, a great block of stone with hundreds of windows. Her eyes traveled to the top floor, where the article had said the Dietzes were in residence.