The Blood Lie

by Shirley Reva Vernick

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1928

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1928

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1928

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1928

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Copyright Page

  Many thanks to teen editor Hannah Hollandbyrd. She loves this book!

  And to good readers everywhere, especially Eve Tal and Lisa Sandlin.

  And to our friends in the Cinco Puntos Press West and East Coast offices for their support. You know who you are!

  In memory of

  JOEL VERNICK

  &

  MY PARENTS

  BLANCHE AND ABRAHAM LEVINE

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1928

  Jack Pool had been awake for a while already, but he waited in bed until the hallway clock chimed quarter past eight—the exact beginning of his sixteenth birthday. At least, that’s what his birth certificate said. Earlier, the neighbor’s mutt Agatha had snuck up on the Pool’s chicken coop and gotten the hens squawking. If Jack were more like Harry, he’d have snoozed right through the racket, but he was a light sleeper. So he lay there, lightly humming, moving his fingers to his upcoming audition piece, and waited. When the clock finally rang the magic number, he slid off the bottom bunk, pulled his shirt and trousers onto his lean frame, and headed downstairs.

  There was a light rap at the door. He opened it and found Emaline Durham standing on the front steps with her little sister Daisy. Emaline, the girl with the caramel hair and the voice like a flute. The girl he adored.

  “Emaline, Daisy, hi,” he said, pushing his black hair off his forehead. “Come on in.”

  “Hope we didn’t wake you,” Emaline said, smiling all the way up to her topaz eyes. “Your mother said it was all right for Daisy to come play this morning.”

  “Daisy?” came a little girl’s voice from the kitchen.

  “Martha!” Daisy took off.

  Emaline moistened her lips and rocked gently on the balls of her feet. “Happy birthday, Jack. Wow, sixteen.”

  “Thanks. Yeah, can’t wait to get my driver’s license.” For a split second, he imagined the two of them sitting close together in the front seat of the Pools’ Model T.

  “That will be great,” Emaline said.

  “What?”

  “You driving, Jack. That will be great.”

  The image of them in the car disappeared. Driving would be fantastic, but driving with Emaline, that would never happen. Being casual friends with her was one thing. Being something more was something else. Impossible.

  Emaline inhabited a different world from Jack’s: the world of Christians. Normally, her orbit never would have intersected his. The only reason Jack and Emaline were friends, the only reason their younger sisters were playmates, was the miracle of their mothers’ unlikely alliance.

  The mothers had moved to Massena—and into Mittle’s Boarding House—at the same time. They were both newlyweds, knowing no one except their husbands. The newcomers helped each other pass the days, with Eva Pool reading Jenna Durham the stories she was forever, almost obsessively, scribbling down—there was so much to write about! —and Jenna Durham playing her mandolin for Eva. Years later, when Emaline’s father and uncle died in a car accident, it was Jack’s mother who watched baby Daisy while the entire Sacred Heart congregation attended the double funeral.

  “Do you get the day off for your birthday?” Emaline asked.

  “Doubt it. We’re taking delivery on a shipment today.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you at the store then. Lydie and I are going shopping, so we’ll probably stop by.” She bit her lip, leaned toward his ear and whispered, “I was really hoping we could meet up in Paradise Woods so I could wish you happy birthday properly.”

  He could feel her breath on his neck. The blood rushed to his face in a hot wave. Over the summer, he and Emaline had twice managed to “bump into” each other on the path that cut through the local woods. The first time, they’d touched fingertips while they talked, flushed with anxiety over being caught. The second time, they’d gone behind a fat oak tree and almost kissed. Almost, because some men came trudging through on their way to work at the aluminum plant. Still, the thought of that kiss—and others he imagined—often kept Jack awake at night.

  That was in August. When school started a few weeks later, George Lingstrom set his eye on Emaline. George—the captain of Jack’s baseball team, the popular high school senior, the notorious flirt. Jack wondered if Emaline was interested in George. Why shouldn’t she be? George was well-liked, good-looking. And Christian. That was that.

  Jack groaned. “I’ll probably be working late tonight,” he said.

  Emaline took a deep breath. “Rain check then?”

  “Rain or shine.”

  “Good.” She touched Jack on the sleeve, color spreading up along her cheeks, and then quickly turned and disappeared out the door.

  “Someone here?” asked a drowsy voice from the top of the stairs.

  Jack turned to find Harry, still in his nightshirt, plodding down the stairs. “Let’s ankle it, pipsqueak,” Jack said. “Go get ready for shul.”

  “Again?” Harry grumbled.

  “Yup.” They’d spent two full days in the synagogue last week for Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and would be back again tomorrow for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, but that didn’t get them off the hook for the Sabbath. “And don’t use up all the hot water,” he added as he headed for the kitchen.

  Martha and Daisy were sitting on the counter, watching his mother slice challah bread.

  “Happy birthday, Jackie,” the little girls chirped.

  “Happy and healthy,” added Mrs. Pool, a small, olive-toned woman with a single chestnut braid halfway down her back. She always wore her apron in the house, the one she made with the pocket big enough to accommodate a pad of paper and a few pencils. Just in case of a story, she always said. “Till a hundred and twenty.”

  “Are we gonna have a party?” Martha asked. “Daisy and me could make you a cake.”

  “No party this year, squirt,” laughed Jack. He had much bigger plans than that. Plans for learning how to drive. Plans for getting a nickel-an-hour pay raise. And best of all, in three days, plans for interviewing at the Bentley School of Music in Syracuse.

  Jack grabbed a piece of the sweet yellow bread and took a bottle of milk from the icebox. Eating over the sink, he silently recited the letter he’d memorized the moment it arrived last month:

  Dear Mr. Jack Pool:

  I am pleased to confirm your interview at the Bentley School of Music at four o’clock on Tuesday, September 25. Please bring your cello and your scholarship application with you. My office is located in Trumbull Hall.

  Yours very truly,

  Elihu Pierson, Dean of Students

  Jack closed his eyes and tried to picture the elite boarding school—the classrooms, the auditorium, the dormitory, the musicians. He could hardly wait to go to the place where everyone loved music. A place where there were things to do. A place that wasn’t this pit town of Massena, New York.

  He felt a hand on his back. “Happy birthday, shport,” said his father, his Yiddish accent shaping the last word into a cross between ship and port. Sam Pool was a short man with thick spectacles that hardly improved the poor eyesight he was born with. Blotting his graying mustache with a handkerchief, he added, “And a hundred more.”

  “Thanks, Pa…So, do I get the day off?”

  Mrs. Pool jumped at this opportunity to make the point she made every Saturday morning. “Jack should always get Shabbos off. It’s bad enough you break the Sabbath yourself, Sam. Do you have to en
courage your son to do the same?”

  “Friday is payday at the plant,” he said. “Saturday is shopping day. I have no choice in it.” He pointed toward his wife’s apron pocket. “Some things can’t wait, can they, my dear?” Turning toward Jack, he added, “I tell you what, shport. Tomorrow you can have off.”

  “We’re closed Sundays, Pa,” Jack said.

  Mrs. Pool just rolled her eyes, then checked her hands for tell-tale pencil smudges.

  The synagogue, a ten-minute walk from the Pools’ house, was a small red brick building with tinted windows and heavy double doors. Jack, Harry and Mr. Pool climbed the front steps and entered the sanctuary, a simple room with twelve benches—six on the left for men and boys and six on the right for women and girls. On the bima stood a lectern and, against the far wall, a wooden cabinet that housed the two Torah scrolls. The windows spilled chartreuse light into the room.

  “Where’s Rabbi Abrams?” asked Harry, impatient for the services to begin and end. He fell into his usual spot, nearest the window in the second row.

  “What difference does it make?” Jack asked, nodding to his friend Abe Goldberg. “We’re only five yet.” Ten men were required to hold a worship service, and they were only halfway there.

  “Rats,” Harry said. But by the time they put on their prayer shawls and yarmulkes, Rabbi Abrams was entering the sanctuary, flanked by a handful of other men. “Finally,” Harry whispered.

  Rabbi Louis Abrams was a compact man with a trim nut-brown beard and a scar on one cheek that turned into an S whenever he smiled, which was often. He nodded to the men and boys as he approached the bima, then took his place behind the lectern and began chanting the Hebrew prayers.

  Jack grew restless within minutes. He’d felt restless a lot lately, stuck in this remote little whistle-stop that didn’t even have a movie theater or a music store. Scarcely five miles from Ontario, Canada, Massena was locked between the St. Lawrence River on one side and the Adirondack Mountains on the other, a flat, bland expanse of nothingness. Most Massena men toiled as dairy farmers or laborers at the aluminum works, jobs they held all their lives and then passed on to their sons. People stayed on here—and so did their children—until no one seemed to notice the drudgery anymore.

  No one except Jack. Every day he felt this place trying to squeeze the music right out of him. No concert hall, no local quartet, no classical music on the radio. Jack didn’t know what he’d do without Mr. Morse, who taught the skimpy school orchestra, gave lunch-period lessons, and, most importantly, spent untold hours with him after school, talking about fingering, bowing, rhythm, and the inner workings of the music. But Mr. Morse would be retiring at the end of the year. What then? What would he do then if he didn’t get into the Bentley School?

  Harry nudged Jack out of his reverie. “I saw Sarah gawking at you yesterday,” he whispered.

  “Huh? Sarah who?”

  “Sarah Gelman, who else? Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed her looking.”

  “Well, I haven’t,” he said, and it was the truth. How could Jack think about other girls when there was Emaline, the girl he’d almost kissed? The only girl he wanted to kiss.

  “Don’t you think she’s pretty?”

  Jack didn’t hear him.

  “Don’t you?” Harry asked again.

  “Don’t I what?”

  “Think she’s pretty, genius.”

  “Yeah, she’s okay.”

  “Want me to tell her brother next week?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Jack had nothing to say, so he said nothing.

  “You think she’s a bug-eyed Betty, don’t you?” Harry said.

  “I told you she’s okay. I’m just not interested.”

  “How come?”

  Rabbi Abrams saved Jack from Harry’s inquisition by singing Adon Olam, the closing song. Harry had his shawl folded and put away before the hymn was over.

  “Come, the store,” Mr. Pool said to Jack. “Harry, your mother needs your help at home.”

  Pool’s Dry Goods was one long room divided into departments by handwritten signs: SHOES. LADIES’. MEN’S SUITS & JACKETS. CHILDREN’S. HOME WARES. Roscoe, Mr. Pool’s head clerk, was standing by the window, dressing the mannequins in work pants and boots. Other clerks were milling about the departments, chatting with browsers, folding clothes, and ringing up purchases.

  “Who you rooting for today?” Jack asked Roscoe.

  Roscoe took a straight pin from between his lips. “Yankees, ’course. You?”

  “Any team with Lou Gehrig and the Babe is my team. It’s the one good thing about having to work today—I can listen to the game on the radio here.”

  “You ain’t got a radio at home?”

  “Not on Saturdays. Got the delivery?”

  “Shoulda been here half an hour ago. I’m just killing time. Why don’t you…let’s see…” He clicked his tongue, something he fell into when he was thinking. “How about you straighten up the men’s pants?”

  Jack frowned. “Got anything a little more interesting?”

  “More interesting?” Roscoe blew a raspberry. “What you got in mind—cleaning the bathroom?”

  Jack turned in resignation to the denims, figuring he’d use the mental downtime to walk through his piece for the Bentley audition, but he stopped short when he heard a sweet and airy laugh nearby. He peeked around the pants rack to find Emaline and her older cousin Lydie sorting through the ladies’ hat display.

  In the sunlight, Emaline’s eyes shone gold, and her ash-blonde hair reflected hints of red. Jack wondered what her hair smelled like today and decided on nutmeg or aniseed—something fresh and lively and a little exotic. She looked so beautiful to him that even her little flaws—the crowding of her teeth, the asymmetry of her eyebrows—made him feel crazy.

  And her hands—what else had they touched today: her pillow, her skirt, her lips? Had they ever held another fellow’s hand or felt anything close to the desire she inspired in him? From his hidden lookout behind the denim rack, he allowed himself to picture those exquisite fingers where he knew they’d never go. As that vision pulsed through his brain, he suddenly wished he weren’t in public.

  “Ooh, Em, I like the one you got there,” said Lydie, a tall girl with round eyeglasses and a mouthful of Tutti-Frutti chewing gum.

  Emaline tried on the wide-brimmed gold hat and studied her reflection in the wall mirror. “I don’t think so,” she said. “You try it.”

  “Not me,” Lydie said, holding her hands up to her dark hair, which was cropped blunt and angular in the popular short style. “But here, try on this black one with the flower.”

  “Okay, help me with my hair, will you?” Lydie held Emaline’s long curls high on her head while Emaline pulled on the bonnet.

  Jack imagined that Emaline would pile her hair just like that when he took her to the school’s fall festival dance next month. He pictured himself arriving at her front step wearing his best suit, the one he’d gotten for the Bentley School audition. Her mother answers the door. Emaline’s not right there. She’s keeping me waiting while she slips into her heels. Then there she is at the top of the stairs, and it’s like she floats down to my side. I have a corsage for her, white roses, and I pin it on the shoulder of her dress.

  It was one of Jack’s favorite fantasies.

  “Hey, Jackie,” called a voice from behind. It was Roscoe.

  Emaline glanced up. “Hi, Jack,” she beamed. “Lydie, you remember Jack, don’t you? It’s his birthday today.”

  Lydie pushed her chewing gum against her cheek. “Happy birthday, Jack.”

  Jack had to force his eyes off of Emaline. “Hey, Lydie, it’s been a while.”

  “From the looks of you, I’d say it’s been at least three inches. How’d you get taller than me?”

  “Listen, Jackie,” Roscoe said, “the truck won’t be here before one.” Tongue-click. “You might as well go home till then.”

  “
Hmm?” asked Jack. “Oh, right, I’ll come back after lunch.” Turning back to Lydie, he said, “I eat like a horse, that’s how.”

  “Boys are so lucky that way,” Emaline said. “They eat whatever they want, and it never goes out, just up.” She smiled at his lanky frame, an unhurried, unselfconscious smile.

  If only Jack had left for home right then, he’d have had that parting smile to keep him company. Instead, he helped Roscoe get a stubborn mannequin to stand up properly, and the extra five minutes was all it took for him to run into the last thing he wanted to see: George Lingstrom talking to Emaline, eyeing her, laughing, standing too close, right there on the Main Street sidewalk.

  Emaline was wearing the hat she’d just bought at Pool’s Dry Goods—the black one with the silky red rose pinned to the side—and George was touching the flower in away that brought the two of them nose to nose. Jack felt sick. Is she flirting back at him? he agonized. But no, he didn’t really want to know, so he crossed the street and fled home, his fingers itching for the cello strings. Come January, with any luck, he and his instrument would move the 160 miles to Syracuse, and he wouldn’t have to see George getting what he could never have.

  When Jack got to the house, Martha and Daisy were clomping around the kitchen in Mrs. Pool’s buttoned pumps and costume beads. Daisy had her face hidden behind a scarf, exposing only her golden eyes. They looked so much like Emaline’s, he winced. Martha wore evening gloves up to her armpits and tripped on her too-long necklace.

  “Careful now, girls,” Mrs. Pool said without looking up from her writing. “Harry,” she called out through the screen door, “how’s the horseradish doing?”

  “Almost done digging,” he yelled from the backyard.

  “What are you making?” Jack asked. He picked up a handful of the walnuts she’d just chopped before he realized he didn’t have an appetite.