Skating with the Statue of Liberty

by Susan Lynn Meyer

  “Stand up, boys!” he said wearily, as if he were getting bored. Then he looked at Maman and Aunt Geraldine and gestured. “Stand!”

  Maman looked up and smiled, dimpling. She pointed helplessly at Giselle on her lap. “Le bébé,” she murmured, closing her eyes and tilting her head to act out sleeping.

  The agent began to pat down Jean-Paul and then Gustave. Gustave felt big, sweaty hands, too close, too personal, on his chest, his legs. Then the agent stood up, sighing, his knees creaking.

  “Oh, fine,” he said to Maman and Aunt Geraldine, nodding. “You ladies stay seated.”

  There were no more passengers from the Carvalho Araujo in the seats behind them, only Americans with suspicious eyes, silently staring.

  The big-bellied man made his way back to the front of the train car. He and the other FBI agent took Monsieur Benoit and the second Frenchman by the elbows and steered them, wrists shackled, toward the door of the train. Monsieur Benoit’s hat slipped as he stumbled through the door, and the agent shoved it back onto his gray head, perching it at an odd angle. Gustave clenched his fists until his fingernails bit into his palms. He watched through the window as the FBI agents led the two men across the platform to an automobile waiting in the shadows.

  Nobody spoke until the train started forward again and American voices—loud, startled, curious—rose around them, creating a screen of noise.

  “Papa!” Gustave whispered, leaning forward. “Where are they taking him?”

  “To jail, I think, then back to France,” Papa murmured. “For breaking the law by bringing in the gold.”

  “Back to the Nazis?” Jean-Paul’s voice cracked.

  “They must have found something on the other man too,” Aunt Geraldine whispered.

  “Someone must have informed on him,” Gustave said.

  “I bet it was Monsieur Lambert, from our cabin,” Jean-Paul said indignantly. “No one else would be mean enough to do that.”

  Maman looked at Gustave. “That was quick thinking,” she whispered, glancing down at Giselle on her lap.

  Gustave felt a momentary throb of relief. But what if the FBI searched them when they got off the train in New York?

  “Monsieur Benoit was planning to stay with his nephew in Philadelphia, who’s a lawyer,” Papa said. “He gave me the phone number so we could stay in touch. I’ll call his nephew when we get to New York and let him know what happened. Maybe he can help.”

  Gustave’s family fell silent. Around them, the Americans were still talking loudly.

  “Refugees,” Gustave heard a man say. Then from behind him, he heard a woman utter a one-syllable word. It was the first time he had heard the word in English, yet somehow he knew what it meant. He knew that tone of voice. It was the same tone of voice in which he had heard certain people in France hiss “juifs,” the same tone of voice in which Germans spat out “Juden.” He hadn’t thought he would hear that particular mixture of repulsion and smug superiority here in America. But he had. The woman had muttered “Jews.”

  Nausea rose in Gustave’s throat. Jean-Paul was staring out the window. Across the aisle, Maman and Aunt Geraldine were soothing Giselle, who had woken up cranky. Either they hadn’t heard or they hadn’t understood.

  The train rumbled onward, through the night. The wheels clacked rhythmically, energetically in the darkness. Gradually Gustave’s eyes closed, but for hours he wasn’t quite sure whether he was asleep or awake, until the loudspeaker crackled.

  “Ne-e-e-e-e-e-w Yawk!” the conductor roared. “Penn Station!”

  Lugging his two heavy bags, feeling exhausted and grimy, Gustave stumbled out behind the grown-ups into the vast, crowded brilliance of the train station. It was warmly lit and echoing, a blur of light and noise, even in the middle of the night. He glanced around, but he saw no sign of any further baggage checks. No sign of the FBI. Everyone seemed to be travelling somewhere or waiting for someone.

  Papa’s voice rang out joyfully. “Cousin Henri! Cousine Thérèse!” He hurried toward an elderly couple. Gustave paused at a newsstand, trying to decipher the English headlines of the newspapers on display—something about ships, something about Japan—but the others were getting too far ahead. He hurried to catch up with them, the suitcases he was carrying banging painfully against his legs.

  The tall, stout man and slight, gnarled woman Papa was embracing looked almost like Americans, Gustave thought, but there was still something French about them. Maybe it was the pattern of the silk scarf Cousine Thérèse had knotted around her neck. He had a flash of memory from a day long ago. He was much younger and eating ice cream with some of Papa’s visiting relatives at a café in France by a blindingly blue sea. Deep purple ice cream, he remembered suddenly. It had dripped and stained his shirt. Cassis ice cream. Black currant. His favorite. He hung back now, watching the adults embrace.

  “And this tall young man must be Gustave!” Cousin Henri’s voice boomed. Gustave felt his hand in the elderly man’s large, warm grip and looked up into his friendly face. “Bienvenue! Welcome to the United States!”

  5

  In the morning, at Cousin Henri’s apartment, the adults made plans over breakfast. Cousine Thérèse was going to take Papa, Maman, and Aunt Geraldine to meet with some people at HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to get help with apartments and jobs and to find out about night school. Cousin Henri offered to take charge of Jean-Paul and Gustave.

  “What do you say, boys?” Cousin Henri asked. “While your parents deal with the boring stuff, do you want to go up the Empire State Building with me? See how your new city looks from the top of the tallest building in the world?”

  “Sure!” said Gustave and Jean-Paul together.

  “You’re lucky!” Papa said. “First things first for the grown-ups.”

  As everyone got ready to leave, Gustave caught Papa in the hall, where he was waiting for a turn in the bathroom. “Will you ask those HIAS people if they can help find Marcel and get him and his mother out of France?” he whispered urgently.

  Papa hesitated. “I’ll see what I can do. It depends on what the organization is like. Go—have a good time with your cousin.”

  Jean-Paul and Cousin Henri were in the kitchen with their coats on.

  “Look at this, boys.” Cousin Henri poured pills from a medicine bottle into his palm. “You know what these are made of? Gold! I take them for my arthritis.” He winked and took a pill with a big swig of water as the boys stared.

  “I can’t believe they make pills out of gold in this country!” Gustave whispered to Jean-Paul as he put on his coat. “People here must be so rich!”

  Outside, a dusting of snow covered the sidewalks. “It’s freezing!” Jean-Paul said, pulling his hat down over his ears. “It was a lot warmer yesterday.”

  “In Baltimore? You were a lot farther south there,” Cousin Henri explained. “New York winters are bitterly cold.”

  But the bus was steamy, hot, and crowded. They got seats in the back.

  “Watch out the window,” Cousin Henri said from the seat behind the two of them as the bus turned. “There. That’s the east side of Central Park. We’ll go there another day when it’s warmer. There are playing fields, a lake, a zoo, and statues and fountains. You’ll love my favorite statue, Balto.”

  “Who’s he? An American general?” Jean-Paul asked.

  Cousin Henri laughed. “He’s a sled dog. He pulled a sled carrying medicine through a blizzard to some sick children in Alaska. He reminds me of a dog I had when I was a child in France.”

  “Why don’t you have a dog now?” asked Gustave.

  “Oh, in an apartment—I just don’t think it is right. Dogs need space to run free. In the French countryside, when I was a child,” Cousin Henri said wistfully, “there were meadows and woods to run in.”

  After a while the bus left the park behind and entered an area with tall buildings. “Now we’re going to make a quick stop,” Cousin Henri said, pulling the cord. “I want you to
see the New York Public Library.”

  As they got out, they saw a parade going up Fifth Avenue, a large group of people with placards and banners. The marchers were all africains, Gustave noticed, or—what was the American word? “Negroes.” He said the word silently to himself, looking at the signs the marchers were carrying. Some words that were almost the same in French leapt out at him: LIBERTY, JUSTICE, VICTORY, DEMOCRACY.

  “What’s going on, Cousin Henri?” he asked, jumping to look over the shoulders of the people standing in front of him. “Why are they marching?”

  “Did something happen with the war?” Jean-Paul asked nervously.

  “No, no,” Cousin Henri said, glancing at the parade over his shoulder and turning away. “It’s some sort of Negro protest. Nothing to do with us. Now look, isn’t this a beautiful building?”

  On each side of the library steps, massive stone lions guarded the entrance. Jean-Paul ran up. Cousin Henri put his hand on Gustave’s shoulder for support and started up slowly.

  “I always liked those lions,” he said. “That one on the right looks a bit like Charles de Gaulle to me.”

  Gustave laughed. With his long face and serious expression, the stone lion did look a little like the French general.

  When they got to the top of the steps, Gustave looked back at the parade. From up here, he could see that there were quite a lot of people marching.

  “As soon as you get an address, you can get a library card,” Cousin Henri said, breathing heavily, as the three of them went in. “There are also smaller branches all around the city. We’ll just peek inside for a moment.” He led the way to the main reading room, and they peered in. Bronze lamps shone on massive oak tables surrounded by readers, and overhead, ornate gilding framed panels painted with rosy summer skies. The hush of the room seemed to vibrate with energy.

  “Are you sure we can use the library? Even though we aren’t American citizens?” Gustave whispered as they went back out. Clouds had gathered while they were inside, and the day had turned gray and even colder than before.

  “Sure. You’re going to find out that America is a big and generous country.” Cousin Henri stopped with his hand on the railing. “At least, it is for the people who get in,” he added after a moment, in an undertone.

  Gustave’s mind flashed back to Lisbon, in Portugal, to the interminable lines of desperate Jews at the consulates. If his family hadn’t had a relative in America, they never would have been given papers to enter the United States. Most of those people were stuck in Europe.

  As the three of them waited at the bus stop, Gustave’s dream about Marcel and the yellow feather washed back over him, leaving him dizzy and sick.

  The second bus trip was short, but the line for the elevator to the Empire State Building observation deck was agonizingly slow. Jean-Paul pulled a blue yo-yo out of his pocket and rewound the string.

  “Is the line always this long?” he asked.

  “I’ve only been up to the top once before,” Cousin Henri said. “It was one of the first things I wanted to see when we got to New York. Actually”—he looked at the boys solemnly—“are you sure you really want to go up? Maybe that would be a bit too much for you—maybe you’d rather just look around the lobby.”

  “What?” Jean-Paul protested, letting his yo-yo stall at the bottom of its run. “We have to go up now that we’re here!”

  Cousin Henri laughed. “Gotcha! Did you really think I wouldn’t take you up?”

  Jean-Paul grinned and rewound his yo-yo. “It would be cool to have a yo-yo long enough to go all the way down to the ground from the observation deck,” he said to Gustave. “You’d have to jerk it really hard to get it to come back up.”

  Gustave had been examining the picture of the building on the lobby wall. “You couldn’t, though,” he said. “You couldn’t reach out far enough. The building gets narrower and narrower as it goes up, see?”

  When it was their turn, the elevator lurched and started upward. Gustave watched floor after floor speeding by through the accordion gate. When the doors opened onto the observation deck, Gustave and Jean-Paul squeezed through the crowd. Gustave gasped, transfixed, while Jean-Paul darted around, trying the view from different spots. The sun had come back out, and building after building rose up, far below them, the gleaming snow on their roofs making them look clean and untouched.

  Gustave peered down, searching for the Negro protest parade, but from this height he could only see the snow-topped buildings. Between them, here and there, light glinted on a moving taxi or a bus. Through the iron railings and beyond the buildings, Gustave saw rivers feeding into the blue of the harbor. So there it was, the Atlantic, sparkling and vast, part of the great distance they had crossed.

  Cousin Henri put a warm hand on Gustave’s shoulder. “Well, there it is,” he said. “Your new home. America.”

  Gustave turned his gaze downward. Far below, an American flag fluttered from a building. New York City spread out around him, its windows catching the light, fracturing it into rainbow colors. Under the slanting light of the January sun, the city beckoned to him, a place for a new life, a place of infinite promise and possibility.

  6

  Late the following afternoon, Cousin Henri, Gustave, and his parents entered a small apartment. The rental agent, a brisk young blond woman wearing heavy makeup, waited in the doorway, jingling her keys. That morning, Jean-Paul and his mother and sister had gone off to stay with an elderly aunt of Jean-Paul’s father in the Bronx. She had a big apartment, and she needed help with the housekeeping, she had written. It was a job for Aunt Geraldine and a place to live. But Gustave and his parents had been looking at apartments all day, with Cousin Henri coming along to translate, using a list given to them by HIAS. Now Cousin Henri leaned wearily against the wall, and Gustave’s parents looked discouraged.

  “This is the last one on the list,” Cousin Henri said. “What do you think?”

  It was a single room with a rudimentary kitchen. An old sofa sagged next to the wall, and in the corner was a stained, bare mattress.

  “It’s furnished!” the rental agent announced cheerily. “It has steam heat! And hot water from seven a.m. to seven p.m.”

  “Where are we now?” Maman asked Cousin Henri. “I’m all turned around.”

  “West Ninety-First Street, in Manhattan.”

  “Is it anywhere near the Grand Concourse, where Geraldine is staying?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. The Bronx is much farther north. But you can get there by subway.”

  Maman sighed. “New York is so big.”

  “This apartment isn’t,” Gustave muttered.

  Maman bit her lip and looked around, gesturing. “This is the whole thing?”

  “It’s small, true, but this is a good neighborhood,” the rental agent said briskly. “You aren’t going to do any better in your price range. There are other Jews nearby. I know you people like to live close together.”

  A grimace flickered over Cousin Henri’s face before he translated, leaving out the last sentence, Gustave noticed.

  Maman pushed down on the mattress, testing its springiness, then opened the door of the oven and looked inside.

  “It’s a cozy space, isn’t it?” the rental agent said after a moment. “It’s true that a few Negroes are moving into the area too, these days. But not too many. And there aren’t any in this building,” she added in a reassuring voice, adjusting the ends of her scarf. “Don’t worry.”

  “What do you think, Lili?” Papa asked Maman in French.

  “I suppose we could use the mattress and Gustave could sleep on the sofa,” Maman murmured. “But ask her where the bathroom is please, Henri.”

  “At the end of the hall,” the rental agent answered, when he translated. “You wouldn’t expect your own bathroom at this price.”

  “Would you prefer to wait and keep looking?” Cousin Henri asked apprehensively.

  Maman and Papa consulted in the corner. Gustave squeezed pa
st the others to the window and looked out. There was no view. He could almost have reached out and touched the brick wall across the way. Faded red-checked curtains hung limply inside the grimy window opposite.

  Papa cleared his throat. “We’ll take it.”

  “Formidable!” Cousin Henri beamed. Wonderful!

  The rental agent pulled out the papers and set them down at a small table in the hallway. Papa and Maman signed. Cousin Henri reached for the pen.

  “I have to cosign, as your sponsor,” he explained quietly, in French. “In case one month you can’t pay the rent.” Papa’s face turned a mottled red.

  “This is what American apartments are like? Shared bathrooms?” Maman murmured to Papa as they went out the door. The rental agent clicked briskly down the hall ahead of them in her elegant shoes. Something in the set of her shoulders made it evident she was relieved to be done with this unpleasant task.

  “We’ll move somewhere nicer as soon as I find a good job,” Papa said. “Don’t worry, chérie. We’ll get along in this country. It’ll just take a little time.”

  Gustave took a last look at the dingy room. It was nothing like the apartment they had lived in back in Paris, with its high ceilings and tall windows, where light fell quietly on elegant furniture handed down through the generations. Somehow, they had become poor.

  7

  “Which would you rather do?” Papa asked. “Paint with me, or help Maman clean the shared bathroom?”

  “Paint,” Gustave answered quickly. “That bathroom is disgusting!” Whenever he had to go in, roaches scuttled all over the place when he switched on the light, scrambling into cracks and holes. He spent as little time there as possible.

  “Well, somebody has to clean it,” Maman said grimly, rolling up her sleeves.

  When the paint was dry, Gustave and Papa put up shelves. Gustave got his French Boy Scout manual and his two favorite novels, The Three Musketeers and Around the World in Eighty Days, out of the bottom of his suitcase. He set them on the shelf next to the brown Berlitz book of English phrases and the new, red-leather-bound French–English dictionary that Cousin Henri had given them and stepped back to look around. Maman’s hand-embroidered tablecloth lay on a small table that Gustave and Papa had bought at a secondhand store. His parents’ familiar bedspread covered the mattress that had come with the apartment. With fresh white walls and the books up, the small room was starting to feel a bit less depressing and a bit more like home.