by Bette Greene
“More or less,” said the doctor.
“Then in your opinion,” said Charlene, “he didn’t escape for the purposes of joining forces with the eight U-boat saboteurs?”
“Oh, I suspect he wanted his freedom and nothing more.”
“But, Dr. Robinson, isn’t it a distinct possibility that Reiker was merely faking an attitude that he could later use to advantage?”
He took a long puff from his pipe. “It is possible, but I doubt it. Some of our prisoners, mostly former members of the S.S., are truly fanatical men. They’re arrogant and they don’t care who knows it. Reiker wasn’t cut from that mold. He was a scholar, interested in books and ideas. And, perhaps more important, he was a loner.”
“This is very interesting, but could you give me a concrete example of something that the prisoner said or did that gives you this impression?”
Dr. Robinson leaned deep into his chair. “I can’t honestly remember specifically anything that he said, only—”
Charlene’s body pitched forward. “Only what?”
“It was only that he seemed like a decent man.”
Before the prison gate stood the same obedient sentry. His eyes swept over the blue sedan before calling, “Proceed, ma’am,” as Charlene blasted off, leaving behind a trail of raised dust.
Charlene didn’t say anything, and I was grateful for the chance to remember the doctor’s words. It was then that I experienced the last of my fear taking flight. Nestling down in its place came exultation. At this moment on a dusty back road within smelling distance of McDonald’s dairy barn I felt the greatest joy I had ever known.
10. A Person of Value
CHARLENE IDLED THE MOTOR in front of the store. “Nice having you with me today. Would you like me to send you an autographed copy of the story?”
“Yes, thanks very much.”
“And if I can ever help you in any way—”
“Well, maybe I could write you a letter?” Why would she want to hear from me? “You wouldn’t have to answer, well, I mean, unless you have the time.”
“Tell you what, next time you’re planning a visit to your grandparents, write me. I’ll show you around the paper; it should be very interesting for a girl who has the aptitude to become a reporter.”
A reporter? Was it true that just a couple of hours ago I thought about becoming a reporter? Then the word journalist had had a ring to it, but now it’s gone. A journalist’s life might be fun but fun, like champagne bubbles, can’t completely fill you up. Anyway there was something else I’d rather do with my life.
I wanted to run the two blocks home but I remembered Anton’s advice to do what I’ve always done and to go where I’ve always gone. “Be visible,” he had said, “highly visible.” I walked visibly into the store. He might like a couple of Hershey bars for dessert.
My father’s voice caught me. “What are you doing wandering around? I want you to go right home and stay there. There’s a criminal loose!”
“Yes, sir, I know. It is all right if I fool around the yard?”
“Well, stay in the yard where Ruth can keep an eye on you. And, under no circumstances, go farther than the garage.”
“Oh no, sir, no farther.”
The tub water was only lukewarm against my foot as it gushed from the “hot” faucet, and after a minute it became uncomfortably cool. As I dried myself I wondered if I would ever trade this body of sharp, thin lines for something more gentle, more womanly. “Ruth,” I called out from the bathroom, “do you have something for me to eat? I’m starved!”
“Since when you begin asking for food? And taking baths without being told?”
“Since always,” I said, buttoning up a fresh white shirt.
Ruth shook her head. “When God went and parted the Red Sea for the Israelites that was a miracle too.”
The brown paper bag felt heavy between my teeth as I climbed up the stairs ribs. A scent of salami liberally seasoned with pepper and garlic assaulted my nose and started up a series of small sneezes. As I sneezed only an arm’s length from the door, I became frightened that he would be frightened. But before I could call his name, his hand reached down and touched mine.
“Gesundheit!” he said, and smiled as though I was somebody special.
“I brought you lunch and some fresh clothes,” I said, surprised at my matter-of-fact tone.
As Anton measured the Palm Beach trousers against his waist I reached back into the sack and touched cardboard. The box was cocoa-brown, and the cover came embossed with three golden acorns, the symbol of Oak Hall, the finest men’s store in all of Memphis. Inside was the shirt, the Father’s Day present. Not the Father’s Day of a few weeks ago, but of a year before that.
I remember how important it had seemed then to give something special, something of value. At first my mother and I went to Goldsmith’s, Memphis’ largest store, and we found this perfectly nice sport shirt that she tried to talk me into buying. “And you’ll have two whole dollars left over from your birthday money to buy something nice for yourself,” she told me. When I said I wanted to walk over to Oak Hall to see their shirts, she got all worked up. “It’s just plain stupid to pay two dollars more for a label. You got so much money you can throw it away? Don’t you know labels are worn inside the collar where nobody can see them?”
But because my determination outdetermined her determination, she told me to go by myself. I was to meet her back in Goldsmith’s in exactly one hour on the fourth floor, better dresses. One whole hour of my very own. Freedom, freedom. I felt happy and practically grown-up. So I took the scenic side trip up in the elevator to the seventh floor book department.
Over a table, a sign decorated with a painted Teddy bear said CHILDREN’S BOOKS Some were books that I had long ago passed through. A Treasury of Mother Goose and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Then there were the Bobbsey Twins and Winnie-the-Pooh. On the next table were stacks of the Hardy Boys and good old Nancy Drew. Her father is a hot-shot lawyer, but it takes Nancy to solve all the mysteries.
It was in the adult section that I found the books I wanted to take home. The Best Stories of Guy de Maupassant and another collection by O. Henry. Goldsmith’s had some good books, beautiful books, and five dollars would buy two or three.
When I glanced up I saw a saleslady starting towards me, and I knew if she just said, “May I help you?” I’d buy de Maupassant and O. Henry. But instead I turned and half-walking, half-running made it back into the elevator with integrity and five dollars still intact.
Inconspicuously printed on the store window in gold Gothic letters were the words, OAK HALL SINCE 1887 and just underneath, three golden acorns. Inside the heavy brass door a middle-aged manikin posed majestically with riding stick. He wore a deep-blue shirt with a Paisley ascot at his neck.
A carefully attired salesman who, like the acorns, must have been with Oak Hall since 1887, took out stacks of size fifteen sport shirts from behind a sliding glass door. Many of the shirts were marked five and six dollars and some cost as much as ten dollars. One was the exact shirt worn by the manikin. The buttons were pearl, but dyed in perfect matching blue. My hand glided across the fabric, which had the smoothness of marble. The label read, FINE EGYPTIAN COTTON. It was a shirt for presidents and premiers, princes and polo players.
It took only a few minutes’ wait for the initials “H.B.” to be ironed onto the pocket. But it was only by the greatest amount of self-control that I was able to check my impulse to present the shirt to my father that very night. Actually I did cheat, but only a little, when I told him that I had bought him a perfectly wonderful Father’s Day gift.
When Sunday finally arrived I felt the way I used to feel about Christmas. My imagination had played the scene over so many times. I knew that he would be pleased with my gift. He’d say it was the finest shirt he’d ever owned. And then the focus would shift from gift to giver and I would rest there in his arms like a long-lost daughter come home.
&nb
sp; The reality wasn’t like that. He opened the box, said “Thanks,” and then, replacing the cover, he tossed it casually out of sight. But it’s what happened next—what I did next—that even now makes me feel the painful pinch of shame. I brought the shirt back to him. “Look, it has your initials, H.B.,” I said. “And see the buttons, genuine pearl dyed to perfectly match the fabric which is very special too. Comes all the way from Egypt.”
With a sudden half swing of his hand, he pushed both me and the shirt out of his way. “I said, ‘Thank you,’” he said, edging each word with finely controlled irritation.
Anton asked me to excuse him while he went into the bathroom to change into the pants. It was then that I handed him the cocoa-colored box. “A shirt. You’ll need a shirt.” I turned my head away. Maybe it isn’t such a great shirt. Maybe he won’t like it either. But I turned my head back just in time to see his face change from surprise to pleasure. His hand stroked the blueness and his fingers even stopped momentarily to examine a button.
“Thanks,” he said, touching my cheek with his hand.
Then he was gone and the room seemed emptier than it had ever before been. Probably it was just that before Anton the room had grown accustomed to its loneliness.
Anton came back, filling it up. His eyes looked blue now, very blue, like the shirt he wore. During our lunch I told him about all the excitement in town, and about my visit to the prison camp. He seemed confused by it all, especially about my interrogation by the FBI.
“Why is there such interest in me? An ordinary soldier.”
“Only because they think you’re a threat to our national security.”
“Me?”
“Because of the German saboteurs from the U-boats the FBI captured. They think you escaped to join up with them.”
“U-boats were here, Patty?”
“They just stopped long enough to let off the saboteurs.”
“And they think I—”
“Yes.”
“It was the timing. It was the worst possible timing!”
“But you’re safe here, Anton. You can stay here till the end of the war! Nobody knows about this place and I can bring you food and books to read and anything else that you want—tell me what you want!”
Anton raised his eyes to look at me without raising his head. “A bit of your courage, P.B.”
“P.B.” he called me, and my initials took on a strength and beauty that never before was there. And now that I had of my own free will broken faith with my father and my country, I felt like a good and worthy person.
Anton laughed, keeping it well within his throat. “After the war when I’m with my family again I’ll tell them about you. How an American Jewess protected me.”
I searched through his words for even a slight implication that when he was with his family again I’d be there too. But I couldn’t find it. I was close to coming right out with it—asking him, begging if that would help, to let me go where he goes.
Then my hand brushed across my hair and I felt the forgotten—the tizzledly, frizzledy handiwork of Mrs. Reeves. The moment went sour.
“Tell me,” he said, showing a perfect set of teeth like an advertisement for toothpaste. “Why have you suddenly taken the vows of silence?”
A knot of anger rose up. Anger towards Mrs. Reeves who uglified me, towards Anton who pretended not to notice, but mostly against myself for believing that a prince could love a plowgirl.
“If I talked less would you talk more?” he asked, still showing off his teeth. Show-off!
“No! It’s only because—because I don’t feel like any more talking. You want coffee? I’ll bring you coffee.” As I reached for the door, I saw his hand reach out towards me. But I closed the door firmly between us.
I found myself in front of the house and sat down on the steps, out of view of the garage. The carousel inside my brain began its revolutions: He’s nice to me only because I’m useful. He’s nice to me only because he likes me. He’s handsome. I’m homely. Love is blind and beauty, skin deep. He’s laughing at me—with me. With me. Why did I have to find him? How could I endure losing him?
My head dropped forward and rested in the dark hollow of my hands. Remember what they say? My father, mother, the clerks in the store, and the salesmen with heavy sample cases from Memphis, St. Louis, and Little Rock: “You only get what you pay for.”
From somewhere a voice called my name. My eyes remained closed. At any moment he’ll sit down next to me, and after a little quietness he will ask me to go away with him. “You really want me to go away with you?” He’ll nod his head, and I’ll say, “Yes, Anton, yes.”
“Looky here!” said the voice close up. “I got me some salt pork for crawdading.”
Freddy Dowd! “I don’t want to catch any crawdads, Freddy. I might have a headache.” How do you tell a boy who never has anything more to brag about than a piece of salt pork that you want him to go away? Poor Freddy, so thin, like he never quite gets enough to eat.
He sat down next to me. “Salt pork is what them crawdads would rather eat than anything in this here world.”
“Have you ever tasted crawdad, Freddy?”
He laughed, showing jagged areas where his teeth had darkened and decayed. “Crawdads ain’t for eatin’, they’se for catchin’.”
“Did you know that crawdads are in the same family as lobsters and crabs? The crustacean family, and only people who are very, very rich can ever afford to taste them.”
He looked at me like I was telling him the stars are stuck to the heavens with little bits of cellophane tape. “I’m a-gonna ask my daddy,” he said after an interval.
Freddy is getting very close to being twelve years old, and he still believes that being a grown-up man is the same as knowing things. Daddy Dowd is a big, slow-moving, slow-speaking man who delivers milk, but drinks something else. Poor Freddy, you’re not going to find many answers there.
O.K., so Freddy is simple. There are worse things than that. There’s hypocrisy, for example, pretending to like somebody just so they can keep you safe from the FBI. And with Freddy a person can feel comfortable because from his miserable perch he’s not likely to be laughing at anybody. Sometimes I feel Freddy and I are related. Well, not exactly related as much as we share something that makes us both outcasts.
Part of our outcastness has to do with simple geography. He is a country boy who because of some accident of his daddy’s job lives right here in town. And my geography problem is in being a Jewish girl where it’s a really peculiar thing to be. Even when I went to Jewish Sunday school in Memphis the geography thing was still there. I would come in on a cold Sunday morning wearing short-sleeved, short-legged union suits under my sash-tied dresses, while the other girls looked as though they were born into this world wearing matching sweater and skirt outfits.
It struck me that neither of us had said anything for a while. I looked over at Freddy who was busily picking at a piece of scab. How like Freddy to sit quiet and amuse himself when I don’t feel like talking. One thing you can say about him is that he’s appreciative. He’s just happy having someone to sit with.
Leaving downtown was the familiar roar of a car motor. (Did all Chevys sound angry?) It must be six o’clock. Moments later I watched my father steer a wide turn in front of the house and gun the car up the gravel driveway.
“Oh, Harry, leave her alone!” cried my mother through the open car window.
Me? What did I—oh, God, it’s Freddy! Where do I keep my mind?
“Go, Freddy!” I whispered. “Go home!”
The car door slammed shut. My father’s face was a pasty white. “How dare you disobey me!”
“Please let me explain something to you.” My hands automatically reached out in a gesture that looked futile even to me.
My mother stationed herself between us. “Now, Harry. Harry, leave her alone. Please!” With one hand, he gave her a strong push that sent her staggering backward across the grass.
“God damn you!” he shouted at me. “You’ll obey me if it kills you!” My legs were carrying me in reverse toward the rear of the house. “Let me at least tell you what happened. I was sitting there and he just came over a moment ago and sat down. I swear to God that’s the truth!”
His feet came faster and I moved to keep space between us. The sounds of Ruth’s kitchen radio tuned into the gospel station poured out the open window. “Op-pressed so hard they could not stand. Let my people go ...”
We were deep into back-yard territory and my eye caught sight of the garage hide-out. God! Don’t let him see this. I tried to maneuver back toward the front of the house, but my arm was caught with an explosion of pain.
“Awllll!” My arm felt as if it was pulled out of its socket. Then the barrage. “Noooo-ohhh.” The ground reached up and laid me down. Oh, God, can’t you help?
Everything was quiet. Was it all over? It seemed too quick to satisfy him. I forced my eyes open. He was standing over me, the brown of his suit in perfect outline against the white of the garage. His breath was coming in quick, heavy gasps and I began to hope that his exhaustion would cut short the agony.
Metal clicked against metal. A leather belt rushed through fabric loops. As the belt whipped backward, I saw Anton with raised fists racing toward my father’s unsuspecting back.
“Nooo!” I shouted. “Go ’way! Go ’way!”
The belt came down. “Ohhhh-nonono!”
Anton, his hands outstretched before him, froze. His face was like I had never seen it, dazed with horror. Then he clapped his hands to his eyes and backed towards the garage.
11. Mining the gold
“SHE HAS TO BE taking it home with her; I can’t think of any other explanation. That kosher salami cost one dollar and ten cents.” My mother repeated the price a second time for added emphasis.
I pulled the top sheet over my head to block out the early morning sounds from the kitchen and rolled over a now very warm ice bag and remembered. In another few minutes they would be leaving for the store. Only then would I get out of bed. Just as soon as my mother downs her second cup of coffee and my father finishes his corn flakes. As long as I can remember it has been corn flakes and nothing but corn flakes. He’s got the same loyalty towards cars. “I’ll buy any kinda car as long as it’s a Chevrolet.” And cigarettes too. He’s never had a cigarette in his mouth that wasn’t a Lucky Strike.
