Yours,
Tom
“That one made me cry,” said Sarah, as Robert read the letter aloud.
“So that’s why she had the album,” said Robert. “Do you know what happened to him?”
“As I said, she never spoke about Tom or Gene except that one day when we looked through the album. ‘Don’t live in the past’ was like a mantra to her. I loved her for that, though. It meant she was always truly present.”
“Should I open these now?” said Robert, indicating the sealed letters.
“Wait just a minute,” said Sarah. She disappeared and was back a moment later with a silver letter opener. “This was a wedding gift to me and Gregory from Aunt Magda. She said she planned on writing me letters from all over the world and she wanted to think of me opening them in style.”
She handed the letter opener to Robert, who carefully slit the first envelope, addressed To Eugene Pinkney.
May 8, 1945
Dear Gene,
I could never bear to finish The Last Adventure on my own, but I hope if you are reading this it means you came to find me and discovered this box. It’s all I still have of our notes and ideas, and if you only found it and not me, then I am just a memory now. Do with this what you will, but it makes me happy to think that someday you might finish what we began together all those years ago.
As for all the rest, no words are needed. You know how I feel.
Yours,
Magda
The letter to Tom was identical, except for the last sentence: “You know how sorry I am about all the rest, but I have found, as I hope you have, that the present offers joys and the past only memories.”
“May 8, 1945,” said Robert. “That was VE Day.”
“As good a time as any to put one’s affairs in order,” said Sarah. “Though she lived for another thirty-two years.”
“So, all that time she thought Tom or Gene might come back, that they might finish the story.”
“But they never did,” said Sarah.
Robert looked wistfully at the two letters in his lap. Though he had discovered Magda, it felt as if Tom and Gene had slipped through his fingers. If Magda never knew what happened to them, what hope was there that he could discover their stories? He, and not Tom or Gene, had been the one to open Magda’s letters, so perhaps the best way to know these two forgotten men was to step into their shoes and do what Magda had wanted them to do and what, he now realized, he had promised his father to do so many years ago.
“If you’ll allow me,” said Robert, “I’d like to write The Last Adventure. I’ve been reading one of the Tremendous Trio books to the children at my local library and the kids love it. And I think the final adventure could be something that . . . I don’t know, that really speaks to kids, older kids who are going through, you know, the things you go through when you’re a teenager. And I have . . . well, I have a personal reason for wanting to write it. It would help me keep a promise I made a long time ago—a promise I’d like to tell you about sometime, but I have to tell someone else first. So, if I have your blessing—”
Sarah smiled, patted him on the arm, and said, “Why do you think I kept the box?”
Robert looked at the bookcase he had crammed with what he now knew were Stratemeyer books—Tom Swift, the Great Marvel series, the Hardy Boys, and many others. He didn’t need these anymore, he thought. These formed no part of the story of Magda and Tom and Gene, not really. An hour later he had boxed them all up and put them in the storage room in the basement. Only the Pickering books remained lined up neatly on the shelf. Rebecca liked neatness.
He had been trying not to think about Rebecca, knowing that the excitement of possibly seeing her tomorrow, his nervousness about the story he wanted to tell her, would pour so much adrenaline into his veins that sleep would prove impossible. But, with a little more than twelve hours until their scheduled rendezvous, and with the Tremendous Trio all arranged on his desk and waiting to inhabit his writing, he could think of nothing but her smile—the smile he hoped would be playing across her face the next day in the Ramble.
Robert spent the night scrubbing every surface in the apartment, doing laundry, cleaning out the refrigerator and restocking it with all her favorites from the twenty-four-hour bodega on the corner. He bought flowers for the kitchen island, flowers for the dining table, flowers for the living room, and flowers to take to her in the park. He washed the towels and sheets and made the bed. At five a.m., knowing her phone would be turned off, he called and left her a voicemail.
“I just want you to know that I’m so excited to see you I haven’t slept at all tonight. There is so much I have to tell you, but for now I’ll just say, I love you.”
He lay in bed for an hour or two, staring at the ceiling. For a while he tried rehearsing the story he would tell Rebecca, but he quickly realized that the truth didn’t require rehearsal, only courage. And so he only pictured an ideal summer day on Long Island—a day when the sun shimmered across the rooftops, a haze of laziness hung in the air, and, sitting in his room with the window open, Robbie could hear occasional screams of delight drifting in from the beach a half mile away. He wanted to bottle that moment, that last perfect, innocent second before his father knocked on the door and began the final chapter in the story that had returned to haunt him.
The crowd at story time at the St. Agnes Library was bigger than the previous Saturday.
“Apparently word got out someone was reading an exciting story,” said Elaine.
Trying his best to focus on the narrative, when all he could think about was whether or not Rebecca would show up in the park, he gave a quick summary of the previous week’s reading before launching into the second installment of his revised version of The Tremendous Trio around the World.
The children, who crowded every square foot of the room, sat silent and entranced, only occasionally trying to scoot closer to the storyteller as he read. Robert felt like a magician and when, at the cliff-hanging end of each chapter, he peered into the eager eyes of his listeners, he felt a sudden and unexpected pull, almost as strong as the force tugging him toward the Ramble. It was a yearning he couldn’t wait to confess to Rebecca.
By the end of the hour, he had read another third of the book. “Would it be all right if I came back next week and read the end?” he said, meaning to address the question to Elaine, but her answer was drowned out in cries of “Yes!” from the children.
As much as he wanted to stay and chat with his listeners, answering their questions and accepting their thanks, Robert stuffed his manuscript into his messenger bag, grabbed the flowers he had brought for Rebecca, and dashed for the park. He would arrive a good thirty minutes early at their favorite spot in the Ramble, but he didn’t care. He would wait.
XXXIX
New York City,
After the Germans Moved to Yorkville
A few weeks after the Titanic and Pickering Brothers both sank, Magda had taken a job with another firm in the Flatiron Building—a publisher of magazines and periodicals. She worked mostly on a publication called Matrimonial Times, which, in addition to a variety of general-interest articles, carried advertisements from readers, mostly men, seeking spouses. Magda watched as the other female employees of the magazine eventually succumbed to the enticement of these advertisements. She could not imagine stepping off a train somewhere in the Midwest to be greeted by a total stranger about to become her husband. So Magda worked on as the other girls in the office came and went.
When war came to Europe, she spent all her spare time volunteering for the Red Cross. She had seen a poster in Times Square proclaiming “You Can Help,” and showing a woman about her age knitting, and so she knitted socks, sweaters, mufflers, helmets, and wristlets—anything to keep the boys warm in the miserable trenches of France and Belgium. She rolled bandages and even helped out in a Red Cross hospital, preparing meals fo
r soldiers who had returned lacking limbs or large swatches of skin and, judging by the vacant look in their eyes, lacking something else as well. Whenever she spoke words of comfort to one of these broken boys, she always thought of Tom and Gene, wondering if they were in the war and saying a prayer for their safety.
As hard as she had tried to think of herself as nothing but an American, she felt the burden of her German heritage during the war. Whenever someone in the street or even at the Red Cross said something awful about Germans, or called them filthy Huns, she thought of the kindness of her mother, the wisdom of her father, and the sweetness of so many of their neighbors back on St. Mark’s Place—qualities so incongruous with what so many people now said about Germans. The invectives hurt, but whenever anyone asked where “Mary Stone” was from, she answered only, “Twenty-Third Street.”
War made the business of working at a marriage magazine seem frivolous, and so Magda had returned to Grace Institute where she had received her secretarial training. She took up a position teaching typing and related skills, mostly to poor immigrant women. It seemed a good way to repay New York for all it had given her.
Four years after the war ended, Magda began thinking about looking for a job back in publishing. So, she passed her job at Grace Institute on to one of her former pupils and was now flush with the promise of a new start.
On Magda’s way to Tompkins Square Park to visit the Slocum memorial, she had walked past the Flatiron Building and glanced up at the window where her Pickering office had been. As she walked through Union Square Park and across town through what had once been Kleindeutschland, she thought about how awful Mr. Lipscomb’s attitude toward women had been. Even so, she missed him. Walking past that building and then through the old neighborhood had put her in a rare nostalgic mood. In spite of her efforts to forget the worst parts of her past, memorials, like the one to the dead of the General Slocum, were designed to remind people of what might have been. How could Magda, standing here alone, not spare a thought for Mr. Lipscomb and Gene and Tom, as well as her mother and the twins.
“Good afternoon, miss,” said a deep voice behind her. Magda started out of her reverie and turned to see a well-dressed middle-aged man standing behind her. “I couldn’t help seeing you at the memorial. Did you lose someone on the Slocum?” His voice had the faintest trace of a German accent.
“Yes,” said Magda. “My mother, my brother, and my sister.”
“It was a dark day,” said the man. “I myself was lucky. Though I lost many friends, my wife was at work that day at the Freie Bibliothek.”
“I went there often,” said Magda, smiling. “In fact, I went there that day. Mrs. Heidekamp gave me a copy of The War of the Worlds.”
“My wife!” said the man. “Frederick Heidekamp, at your service.” The man doffed his hat and gave Magda a slight bow.
“And is your wife . . .”
“We live now in Yorkville, where so many of us Germans moved after . . . after that day. She works in the public library there. You must come to see her.”
“I would like that,” said Magda. “I think I would like that very much.”
“If you are not busy,” said Mr. Heidekamp, “I am on my way home now. Perhaps you could join us for dinner.”
Magda had not come to the Slocum memorial with the intention of reconnecting with her old community. And yet, one way to start the next chapter of her life would certainly be to return to the beginning and perhaps atone for the way she had denied her heritage. “As it happens,” she said, “I am not busy at all.”
“Excellent. Now, you must tell me your name.”
Magda hesitated. For the last eighteen years she had been Mary Stone to everyone but Tom and Gene—and those few readers who knew her as Dexter Cornwall. And yet, if she really intended to make a fresh start, why not be honest? “I’m Magda,” she said. “Magda Hertzenberger.”
Mrs. Heidekamp had aged over the eighteen years since Magda had seen her, but she would have recognized the librarian even if Mr. Heidekamp hadn’t introduced her.
“My dear, this lady says she knows you from the days at the Freie Bibliothek. This is Magda Hertzenberger.”
Mrs. Heidekamp’s pale face turned even paler. “Magdalena?” she said in a trembling voice.
“That’s right,” said Magda.
“Mein Gott,” said Mrs. Heidekamp, “but Magdalena Hertzenberger died eighteen years ago on the General Slocum.”
“That was a mistake,” said Magda, not willing to confess to Mrs. Heidekamp what she had confessed to Tom and Gene.
“Oh, mein Gott!” said Mrs. Heidekamp again, pulling a scarf over her hair. “You must come with me. Come now.”
“What is it, meine leibste?” said Mr. Heidekamp.
“Come, come!” said Mrs. Heidekamp excitedly.
“I suppose we should follow,” said Mr. Heidekamp to Magda with a shrug.
Ten minutes later, they stood on the landing outside a third-story walk-up apartment on Eighty-First Street. Mrs. Heidekamp pounded on the door and shouted, “Mrs. Müller, Mrs. Müller! Open up!”
The door opened to reveal a woman holding a large spoon in one hand and a dishtowel in the other. Her apron did not disguise the fact that she would be a mother sometime very soon.
“Yes, yes, what is it, Mrs. Heidekamp? Why all the shouting?”
“Mrs. Müller, you know this woman?”
“I do not think so,” said Mrs. Müller, looking at Magda.
“You do not understand,” said Mrs. Heidekamp, turning to Magda. “Before she was Mrs. Müller, this fine lady was Rosie Hertzenberger. Rosie, this is your sister, Magdalena! She has come home!”
New York City, Upper East Side,
Nine Days after D-Day
The East River flowed steel gray and solid under a cloudy sky forty years to the day after it had taken Magda’s mother and brother into its depths. Rosie liked to come to this bench, looking out across the water, every year on the anniversary. Magda, who owed so much to her sister, saw no harm in humoring her. And so they sat, silent and sober, gazing north toward Hell Gate, that particularly turbulent section of the river where the General Slocum had taken fire.
Rosie had not perished when she plunged into the fire with her twin brother, Henry. She had little memory of exactly what had happened, but somehow she had made it into the water and floated free of the wreckage. Someone—she never knew who—pulled her from the river onto one of the many craft that had come nearby to attempt rescues. Rosie’s left shoulder and arm had been badly burned, a disfigurement she still bore.
She had been taken in by the Müller family, who had lost two daughters on the Slocum. Like so many of the survivors, the Müllers had eventually moved to Yorkville on the Upper East Side. For the Germans who had not perished on the Slocum, Kleindeutschland held too many memories. Willie Müller, four years older than Rosie, had helped nurse her back to health. Later he would tell her he had loved her from the first day she came to the Müller house, at eight years old; he waited ten years before he proposed marriage.
Like Magda, Rosie had learned not to let the past control her life, but on this one day a year, she came to the river to say a prayer for her mother and Henry.
“I used to pray for you,” she said, squeezing Magda’s hand, “and look how God has blessed me.”
The two sisters watched as a group of young boys ran along the edge of the river, doubtless looking for U-boats. Since D-Day, a little over a week ago, there had been a surge of interest among the youngsters in the neighborhood in anything war-related. Magda could not know, of course, that at that very moment an officer in the Allied forces was taking courage from a letter she had written to him when he was a child.
It was a cool day for mid-June, and Rosie shivered when a breeze blew up across the river, carrying with it the smell of diesel fuel and the slightest hint of the sea.
“You go in,” said Magda, patting Rosie gently on the knee. “I’ll wait for her here.”
Magda’s miraculous sister, who had, so it seemed, come back from the dead, stood and took one last look at the river. Then, squeezing Magda’s hand, she turned toward home. A few minutes later, Magda smiled at Sarah, who slid onto the bench beside her aunt.
“I love your smile, Aunt Magda,” said Sarah. “It always makes me feel good after a bad day.”
“Tell me about it,” said Magda.
“The bad day? There’s not much to tell,” said Sarah with a sigh. “Just another boy gone that I knew when we were kids. A boy I used to play with in the park.”
Magda reached out for her niece’s hand and squeezed hard. War was cruel to everyone, but especially the young.
“How do you do it?” said Sarah. “How do you smile when there is so much . . . so much bad news in the world?”
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