by Jenna Blum
“How long?” said Peter. “From the beginning?”
“Kid, you got it all wrong.”
“Don’t give me that. I heard you, Sol. I heard you talking to Dutch. About the Skyhawks and tanks and weapons. You’re sending money to Israel, aren’t you? For their war machine.”
“What are you, a hippie?” said Sol. “It’s not a war machine. It’s defense. Defense of our people.”
“Whatever you want to call it,” said Peter, “you’re laundering money through Masha’s to do it. I don’t want any part of it, Sol. I don’t want you using my name, my reputation, my business, for your illegal activities.”
“Illegal shmelegal,” said Sol. “Hitler had plenty of laws too, you may remember, and that didn’t make ’em right. What matters is the greater good. Taking care of your own.”
“The end justifies the means,” said Peter.
“Now you got the idea.”
“Even if it means screwing your own family. We’re just cogs in your machine.”
Sol had been gazing philosophically out over Palmer Avenue as he chewed the last of his lunch, but now he looked at Peter with surprise.
“Whaddya talking about?” he said. “You got it backward. It’s all about family. It’s always about family. Haven’t I helped you? Didn’t I get you out of Europe, that miserable DP camp, take you into our home like a son? Didn’t I give you money for your place—even though it’s meshugga, a man wanting to be a cook, but that’s your business. What you wanted you got. Because you’re mishpocha—family. Family is everything.”
“But it’s not just my business,” said Peter. “It’s your business. You made it your business. Masha’s is just one of your means to an end. A respectable front for your dirty money. Like all the suppliers you insist I use—the laundry and the linens and the printer.” Peter thought of the nonagenarian owner of the company responsible for printing Masha’s menus, flyers, matchbooks, his Bronx factory with the broken windows and cobwebbed machines, either the tufts of hair growing out of his ears or his age making him almost totally deaf. Charging three times what another printer would. “They’re all your guys,” Peter said. “Mob. Connected.”
Sol wheezed some more. He took another swig from his flask. “Oy gevalt, the mob,” he said. He drank and held up the flask. “Wanna toot?”
“No,” said Peter.
“Too bad,” said Sol. “Scotch goes good with Walter’s. Eat your Puppy Dog.”
“I don’t want my fucking Puppy Dog,” said Peter. “I want the truth.”
“I’m giving it to you,” said Sol. “You’ve got it all wrong, kid. Seen too many movies. Mob—that’s rich! Wait’ll I tell the guys.”
“So you deny it? You deny that you and your friends—Choppers, Dutch, that doctor, the suppliers—you deny you’re connected?”
“Sure we’re connected,” said Sol. “But not the way you think. Not Kosher Nostra—like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and those guys. We’re just a buncha guys who came up together, like I told you. We’re not mobsters. We don’t get involved with drugs and gambling and whores—we leave that meshuggaas to the Italians. We’re numbers guys. The worst we do is maybe massage the numbers a little.”
“To buy arms. And make a nice profit from it, too.”
Sol reared back and glared at Peter, his eyes watering behind his glasses.
“We don’t see profit,” he said. “Whaddaya take me for? We’re not criminals. We give back. I give back to the guys by giving them business, they help me raise money, every cent goes to defense. To protect our people over there.”
“It’s for war,” said Peter. “And let me ask you something. These people you raise the money from, the people I helped you get money from, do they know what it’s going for? Guns and tanks and planes?”
Sol shrugged. “A couple do. Most don’t. But that’s all right. We give some money to the up-front causes too. Hospitals. Orphanages. The Joint. Red Cross. We just stretch the contributions a little, creatively, to cover defense too.”
Peter sat back. All the catering he had done for Sol’s luncheons and dinners and brunches, in the law firm, in homes all over Manhattan and Westchester and New Jersey. All the years Peter had been the poster boy for Sol’s good causes. How many darkened rooms had Peter sat in, while Sol clicked off slide after slide of emaciated Jewish children, of the melee in the DP camps, of trawlers full of survivors, bound for Palestine but sunk by the British before they could get there? Of men and women gazing out from bunks, skeletal, in rags, toothless, each bearing a tattoo like Peter’s own? “We gotta help ’em,” said Sol as people wept softly in the dark—by no means all women. “We gotta help our own. They survived Hitler’s filthy camps—for what? To return to homes burned to the ground. To go back to shtetls that no longer exist. They want to come to this country—but there are quotas, waiting lines; our government says there’s no room, sorry, we can’t take ’em. Well, I’ll take ’em,” said Sol, “and with your help I’ll make sure they’ll all get here safe. Like this guy here,” and he would gesture to Peter with his slideshow clicker, Peter who had been standing next to the podium in the dark, now stepping into the bright beam of the projector, rolling up his shirtsleeve to show his tattoo.
“I’m done,” Peter said. “I’m through being your shill.”
“Fine with me, Mr. Conscientious Objector,” said Sol, relighting his cigar. “Guys like you, you sit around thinking about right and wrong, hold hands, sing ‘Kumbaya,’ and then when somebody’s burning your house down, you say, ‘Help! Help!’ Before the war, when we were sounding the alarm, trying to get people out, you guys said, ‘Nah, you’re exaggerating, sit tight, it’ll blow over.’ Until they started herding you into the camps, and then who’d you turn to? The dirty-money guys. You think the world should be all flowers and sunshine, and maybe it should, that’s nice. But the world doesn’t work that way.”
“You sound like my father,” said Peter.
“Good,” said Sol. “Now there was a smart man. A fighter. Willing to put his mouth and his money on the line. If it weren’t for him, there’d be a lot more dead Jews. If you’d been more like him—”
“—I’d be dead too,” said Peter. “The Nazis would have dragged me off to Buchenwald too, and there’d be no one left.”
“They hauled you off anyway,” said Sol. “And you barely made it. Haven’t you wised up by now? You of all people, I’d have thought you’d learned a lesson over there.”
“My lesson?” Peter spat. He was so angry his lips were numb. “Don’t you talk about my lesson. It is not the same—Israel and Germany. You have no idea what it was like. No idea at all. Don’t you understand, we’d lived in Berlin for a century. It was our city—the way New York is yours. Germany our country. And then some strutting idiot, this little fool, this bigoted madman screaming idiocies with spit flying from his mouth—he comes in telling lies. Oh my God, the lies! The lies, the lies, the ridiculous lies. We never heard such stupid things. Every day a new one—our mouths were hanging open. We Jews had collapsed the economy—it wasn’t the Versailles Treaty, oh no. We were bankrupting Germany. We had a Jewish master plan. Also—my favorite—he said we had declared war on Germany. War! We had! While our rights were being taken away from us one by one, first the movies and then parks and our pets and jobs and even riding on streetcars. We were undermining Germany. We were winning. Who could believe it? Who could believe such black-is-white horseshit? We laughed; we thought sooner or later people must wake up and say, ‘All right, enough is enough, the emperor has no clothes,’ and send him on his way. We never thought he’d stay. That things would get worse. We never thought that our friends—my parents’ friends, the people we worked with, educated, civilized, cultured people, good people, people who knew right from wrong—we never believed they’d believe him. Or pretend they did, which was the same thing. Don’t you see? There was no precedent. It was unbelievable that anyone could believe such lies lies lies lies lies!”
Peter stopped for breath, aware that at some point he’d jumped to his feet, that he had been shouting, that the people on line at Walter’s were looking at him. Sol was considering the end of his cigar.
“Of course there was precedent,” he said calmly.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“People’ve always wanted to kill us,” said Sol. “Cossacks. Pogroms. Nazis. Arabs. The uniforms change, that’s all.” He pitched the cigar stub toward the gutter. “Precedent or not, who cares? That’s the trouble with you guys. Always thinking about ideas, when what matters is what’s actually happening. Use your eyes. Use your ears. If you’d done that back in Germany—”
“Don’t say it!” Peter shouted.
“—your family might be alive today,” said Sol.
Peter’s whole body clenched—and then all the fight went out of him. He felt very tired. He looked over at Walter’s, at the people waiting on line for hot dogs; at the tiny leaves, just born, fluttering in the breeze above him; at the new daffodils and tulips springing from the mud; at the big American cars whooshing past on Palmer Avenue. Sol could talk all he wanted about how the world worked, but he was an American, and he would never know what it was like, how dumbfounding, how confusing, how paralyzing it was when it all went wrong, when the place you’d lived in your whole life, your city, your beloved country, abruptly and for no reason except the rants of a rabid fool, turned against you; when the place where you got your morning coffee and roll and had your hair cut and smiled good-morning to the neighbors as they walked their dogs—when that place started ejecting you. Suddenly you were invisible, and the next day worse: you were despised, you were filthy, you were vermin, and you stared in astonishment at the erosion of your life, no more films, no more work, no freedom of movement, no citizenry, no home, and by the time your mind caught up with events, it was too late, and your government, friends, and neighbors were joyously hunting you down like dogs.
“I want out,” Peter said. “I won’t bankroll war. Any war.”
Sol shrugged. “Suit yourself. You want out, you’re out. But if you’re too good to help me, you’re too good for my money. You’re on your own. Don’t come to me with your hand out.”
“I won’t,” said Peter. “I’m done with that.”
“You sure?” said Sol. “I’d think about it if I were you. Without my money, you’ll be outta business by the end of the year. Nothing personal. Just numbers.”
“I’ll take the chance,” said Peter. “I’d rather live on food stamps.”
Sol planted his hands on his knees and pushed himself up.
“Okay, big talker,” he said. “I’ll give you a week to think about it. Because you’re family.” He hitched up his pants. “You might be fine eating government cheese,” he said, “but that fancy piece you’ve been shtupping, something tells me she won’t be so happy with it. How long you think she’s gonna stick around when you’re living under some bridge like a schvantz?” And off he stomped to his car.
* * *
Once Peter was on the New Haven line back to Grand Central, having walked to Mamaroneck Station, he realized he’d forgotten the fish. He swore. Mackerel wasn’t a popular entrée, too oily for most people’s palates, but he could have made a nice pâté out of it. Aside from planting the garden, the whole day had been a waste.
He took a seat by the window. At least the train wasn’t too crowded, since it was midafternoon. Peter scanned his fellow passengers’ faces, wan in the spring sunlight. Two teenage girls in dungarees, their hair plaited, a guitar case on the floor between them. An older woman in a suit, with white gloves. A young matron with her eyes closed, head balanced and bobbing against the window glass—what had kept her up late? crying baby, angry husband? Suddenly Peter realized what he was doing: looking only at the women. Not that there were any men commuting at this hour, but still—he was searching for Masha. For the girls. Playing the looking game.
Disturbed, he got up and walked the length of the car, one of the young girls smiling at him as he passed. There was a daisy painted on one of her cheeks. Her hair and eyes were dark, and she couldn’t have been more than sixteen: too young. Peter used the restroom, poured himself a Dixie cup of lukewarm water, and stepped into the compartment between the cars.
He stood with one foot on one part of the moving floor and the other on another, feeling the coupling swivel beneath him as the train took the track’s curves. Outside the narrow window, the backyards of Westchester flashed past. Soon they would become highways, then the high-rises and swamps of the Bronx. Peter sipped his water. In the early days, in the 1940s when he first arrived here, the looking game had had a point. It had made sense for him to walk the streets and avenues of New York, staring at every woman he passed, seeking Masha’s energetic stride and pale face, his girls’ candy-floss hair. The war’s end had been such a mess: people unaccounted for, too sick to remember their names, assuming or being assigned others’ identities by mistake. It happened all the time. Peter had heard stories. There had been a rabbi on the Upper West Side who remarried, then opened his apartment door one day to find his dead wife standing on his welcome mat. Why shouldn’t the same miracle happen for Peter? Why shouldn’t the bell chime in Sol and Ruth’s foyer one day, the door swing back to reveal Masha, or one of the twins clinging to a Red Cross worker’s hand? Peter visited and revisited the relief office, asking them to check the rolls of the dead, to check again; on buses, in the subway, in stores, everywhere he went, he looked for a woman in her twenties, little girls who had grown from toddlerhood.
But it was useless, of course. Time had kept moving, as time did, and Peter kept having to push up his wife and children’s ages, and one day in 1954 he had chased a woman up East Eighty-Sixth Street because of her quick step and white twist of hair, and she turned and hit him with her purse. After that, he had sworn: no more. Masha was gone, the girls with her, and the best Peter could hope for was that if there were some sort of afterlife, they had been reunited there. Someday maybe he would be with them. Now the roundup dream had come back; now the looking game. What did it mean? If they persisted, if they increased, Peter would not be able to stand it. This erosion of his sanity.
He put his hand on the exit door. It vibrated. Peter had read that when the train reached a certain speed, these doors locked to prevent jumpers. He had never tested the theory. Once he’d tried to step in front of an incoming train at Grand Central, but his legs had locked. The only other time he’d tried had been during that first miserable year, at Sol and Ruth’s. They had gone on a cruise to Bermuda, and Peter had taken a packet of razor blades into their guest bathroom and sat on the side of the tub. Cut down, not across, he’d heard from a girl in the Bremerhaven DP camp, a Bergen-Belsen survivor who had taken her own advice and succeeded the next week. Peter had cut despite the incredible, nauseating pain. He had cut deeper. And then he had heard the voice. Peter had never believed in God, but he thought that if God had chosen to speak to him, He would sound like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments: “Peter, do my bidding!” Instead, what Peter heard was the voice in his own head, the one he thought of as his, except it was saying something very different from what it usually said. And what it said, firmly and calmly, was:
you are not allowed.
So he had put down the razor blade and wrapped his wrist in the cleaning rags Maria kept under the sink, and he had gone into the kitchen and taken an extra bottle of Sol’s Cutty Sark down from the cupboard over the refrigerator and poured the whiskey over the wounds.
Peter crumpled the Dixie cup, turned, and went back to his seat. He put his hand in his pocket and found the ring, poked the prongs of its setting into his thumb, over and over. June. What was he going to do about June? Peter had thought she was his fresh American start—an idea as optimistic as something Roosevelt would say. Perhaps, if June were here, sitting in the next seat with her head on his shoulder, none of this would be happening: the memory shrapnel not working its way to t
he surface, the dead not reanimating. Peter would not be backsliding. But what if, instead of the cure, June was the cause? Peter thought of a PBS program he had seen about the Titanic, how it had not been a head-on collision with the iceberg that had sunk the great ship but the underwater slicing of its several watertight compartments. What if June, rather than being his lifesaver, was his iceberg? What if her presence in his life had punctured the sealed chamber into which Peter had put Masha and the girls? There was no way to know for sure.
Peter took the ring out of his pocket. The diamond made tiny sparklers of light against his palm. Peter had meant what he had said to Sol: he wanted out. It would mean finding another investor for Masha’s, a process that could take months. Years. Peter might even have to close temporarily. He would be fine working in another kitchen, eating bachelor rations in his apartment. He had done it before. But what about June? Was it fair to her to saddle her with a pauper? And even if Peter cut ties with Sol, what if Sol was investigated, by the Internal Revenue Service, for instance? Would Peter himself fall under suspicion? Peter had done plenty of work bringing in money for Sol over the years—unwittingly, but who would believe him? Peter was family. Even if Sol was no Bugsy Siegel or Meyer Lansky—and Peter still had his doubts about whether Sol had told him everything—what he was doing was bad enough. Was it right to bring June into this situation? June, so young, so beautiful; she could have whoever she wanted. Was it not kinder to her to let her go? Peter looked out the window at the approaching city, turning the ring over and over in his hand.
6
Peter and the Wolf
One morning in mid-May, June talked Peter into having breakfast in Washington Square Park. It was on Peter’s way uptown, she’d wheedled. “Let’s stroll,” she said, hooking her arm through Peter’s, “get some fresh air, dine alfresco.” Peter wasn’t sure what they were doing now could be described as any of these things: they were sweltering on a bench near the Arch, June taking tiny sips of tea and feeding her breakfast sandwich to the pigeons, and the air in the park, far from crisp, smelled of pretzels, horseshit, and marijuana. Peter took out his handkerchief and daubed his forehead, the back of his neck. At least he wasn’t on an uptown train, dangling from a strap, entangled with his fellow New Yorkers like sauerkraut. It wasn’t technically that hot yet, but lately Peter felt he was perspiring all the time. He would take a taxi.
