The Fifth Column

by Andrew Gross

  “Your place … Hear that, boys?” the drunken leader mocked. “Appears we’ve stumbled into some kind of class joint here. Excuse us then,” he chortled. “Well, one day you’ll all be gone”—he looked around—“if any of you are yids. You and that Hymie president of yours and the bloodsucking band of Jews he keeps around him. Your time is coming, right, boys? Sieg Heil!” They all shot out their arms. “All hail to the Führer!”

  He kicked the shards of glass deeper into the bar.

  “I’m Jewish,” I said, my four scotches pumping me up with a shot of courage. I stubbed out my Chesterfield in the ashtray. “And what I’m thinking is you owe my friend Eli here a new window.”

  “A new window, you say?” The redhead snorted like he thought it funny. “He’s lucky we don’t turn the place into rubble if he’s serving the likes of you.”

  “Just leave ’em be, son,” Eli said to me, holding my arm from across the bar top. “They’re drunk as a ship’s cat, and a piece of glass is not worth getting yourself bloodied over. You’ll only get yourself in trouble.”

  “No, I won’t let them be,” I said. I wasn’t the most observant of Jews; I’d only been in temple twice in the last few years and only went to the family Seder so my daughter knew the meaning of the holy days. But images of Kristallnacht swirled in my brain—mixed with everything else that was spiraling out of control in my life. And somewhere I heard this voice pushing me to act: What would my brother Ben do here? He wouldn’t have just “leave ’em be.”

  “Anyway, what can go so wrong?” I said to Eli. “It’s my birthday, right?”

  So I stood up. I’d wrestled in high school, and made the team at Tufts as a freshman. I could take care of myself pretty well. At least, that’s what the liquor was letting me believe. But as I stared at the group who’d barged in, the contempt in their beer-sodden eyes, all the images of my own dissolving life—Rusk’s snicker when he told me it might be time to leave; Natalie’s tartan skirt above her waist as she eased back on my desk; the shame I felt from my own daughter asking if I was okay; my marriage in tatters—all swirled together into a dark cloud I could no longer hold back, and stumbling more than standing, propelled me.

  “Hey, Jack,” I said to the redhead who was doing all the talking, “here’s what this Hymie thinks of you.”

  I lunged at him, draped in his red Nazi flag, his bottle headed toward his mouth, catching him on the jaw and sending him stumbling backward, the bottle crashing to the floor. He put his sleeve to his mouth and spit out a mouthful of blood.

  “Say we teach the lousy Jew a lesson.” One of the ones in khaki looked at the rest.

  In a moment, the four of them were on me. Raining punches, knocking me to the floor. Kicking me. I fought my way up to my feet, flailing wildly. We all tumbled outside. One of them picked up a trash bin from the curb and swung it at me. It caught me on the side of the head and I fell, my brain echoing like I was in the percussion section of an orchestra. I put my hand to my head and there was blood on it. One of the guys in khaki stomped his black boot on me.

  Every frustration and body blow of grief and disappointment from over the past two years seemed to come together in my drunken brain. I didn’t know if it was me or the booze talking—but by that point, I didn’t care. I lunged at the guy in the boots, figuring with all the cops around there’d be a whistle any second or at least a passerby interceding to break us up. But there was no whistle, no set of arms grabbing on to me, save theirs. Their fists and heels.

  Bloodied, I bulled myself up from the street, my vision blurred and blood streaming down my forehead, hearing only the taunts of derision and mockery all around.

  I spun with my fist cocked, and lunged for the first khaki shirt I saw.

  “Hey, watch out, mister,” I heard someone shout through my fog.

  I clipped the guy flush in the jaw and saw him reel backward, arms cycling to catch himself. He fell back against the shattered bar window—the hanging red neon flickering, Eli’s … Eli’s—his head impacting with the edge of jagged, splintered glass. Slumping to the ground, he let out a muffled cry. Then he didn’t move at all. His eyes rolled back in his head just as a tremor of panic knifed through me.

  A woman in a red coat and hat screamed out, looking at me with horror. “What have you done?” She kneeled down over the fallen man. “Johnny? Johnny?”

  Even the bunch of Nazis just stood there, jaws open, eyes wide, staring back at the pool of blood forming under the guy’s skull. Until they all took off as one and sprinted down the street and around the corner, and disappeared.

  I wiped my face clear and stared at exactly whom I’d struck.

  Only then did my vision start to come clear.

  I saw he wasn’t part of the group I’d been fighting with. In fact, he wasn’t wearing any German or Nazi markings at all. His khaki shirt was just a shirt, in a gray sweater vest, not a uniform.

  Then I saw he was just a kid.

  Sixteen, it suddenly came clear to me, most. Maybe younger. Not moving. Seemingly not even conscious.

  And the woman who had shouted at me, likely his mother, kneeling over him, begging anyone who’d listen, “Someone please get help. Johnny, Johnny, can you hear me? Johnny!”

  On the street, a police car screeched to a stop. I heard a voice in my ear. My little devil’s voice. No longer that mocking snicker I was used to, but more of a quiet admonition this time, filled with worry himself, as the boy’s blood pooled on the pavement.

  “I guess you’ve finally found that bottom rung now, Charlie-boy.”

  2

  JULY 1941

  Two years passed. Not the kind of years anyone would ever want to spend.

  Not the kind of years the world wanted to spend.

  Europe was at war now. Six months after I’d thrown that punch at that kid outside that bar, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, and a year after that, unleashed his armies on Poland. By the time of my sentencing he had marched his way through Holland and Belgium and overrun France, and his Messerschmitts were raining a nightly incendiary hell on London.

  Of course, I’d watched all this take place from the correctional facility up in Auburn, New York, serving two to four years for the charge of third-degree manslaughter.

  And I was lucky to get away with that. The prosecutors had pushed for first-degree. I was drunk. I’d thrown the first punch. I’d shown malicious disregard for the victim, Andrew McHurley, a fifteen-year-old from Teaneck, New Jersey, who was out for a night on Broadway, having gone to see Life with Father with his mother. They were merely on their way back to where the New Jersey bus lines picked up on West Forty-second Street. It wasn’t hard to paint me as a person not worthy of much consideration. Someone who went around drunk, who had cheated on his wife; someone who had slid down the sinkhole of second and third chances in life until he couldn’t fall any farther. Someone who’d had all the advantages of intelligence and a top education, and yet had chosen to throw it all away: His family. A once-promising academic career. His moral center.

  About the only thing I did have going for me was Eli’s testimony that I had been standing up to a pack of drunken, taunting Nazi-lovers, though by the time the police on the scene went to search for them they were long gone. By sentencing time, the public view of Hitler and Nazis had changed. Europe had been overrun; Jews were being openly persecuted and beaten. Britain was hanging on by a thread. FDR begged for support for the war in Congress. That was the only sympathy I had. Four years was reduced to twenty-two months for good behavior and for tutoring inmates in American history. And I was lucky to get that.

  Upon my release, my father was far too ill to come for me, having never fully recovered since Ben had died. He and Mom had only driven up to visit me a couple of times, consumed with guilt and shame. So my uncle Eddie picked me up in his old Packard and we drove the six hours back to his home in Lawrence on the Island, much of the trip in silence.

  I had no idea what I was go
ing to do.

  Columbia had tossed me out of their graduate program. No school I had worked for since wanted me back. I had about a hundred and twenty dollars in my pocket I had earned instructing inmates. Everything else I had handed over to Liz and Emma.

  But two days after my release I stood looking up at the brownstone on Ninetieth Street between Park and Lexington. The number over the coffered front door read 174. It was hardly the nicest on the block: three stories, gray stone, Georgian in feel, with a staircase leading up to the front door with settled cracks running through it. There were high, rounded windows on the second floor with planters on the sill, where, in season, pots of tulips and daffodils might bloom. It was on a part of the block shaded by large oaks, hiding the house in a swath of shadow. On the sidewalk, two kids in white T’s bounced a Spalding against the stone façade—Yanks against Dodgers, DiMaggio or Pee Wee Reese. An American flag draped languorously over the entrance.

  She was still in Yorkville, I reflected, a part of the city on the Upper East Side between Eighty-sixth and Ninety-sixth, extending east to Carl Schurz Park and the East River. The area had been home to German-Americans for decades—and our home, when we were first married. And most of the businesses on the streets between Lexington and First Avenue had German names: Schaller and Weber meats. Old Bavaria Café. Gustave Bitner Travel Agency. Café Geiger. Rheingold beer.

  Before the war in Europe, Yorkville had been home to many public pro-Hitler and America First rallies. Fritz Kuhn, who had established his German American Bund there, was now in jail on tax evasion charges. Father Coughlin, who had had his own highly followed national radio show, and once made a fiery Fortress America speech there, was off the air. Even Joseph McWilliams, “Joe McNazi,” who once tried to organize a boycott against Jewish businesses, had been shut down. Now, from what I’d heard, any expressions of support for the Nazis were far more private, and conducted behind closed doors. Support for Britain in the war and the rounding up and persecution of the Jews had rallied public opinion, as had the German torpedoing of Allied merchant ships on the high seas. Above the door, the American flag rippled faintly in the breeze.

  Anticipation stirring in me, I climbed the front stairs. I had been nervous during my trial, nervous at my sentencing; nervous as hell when they escorted me the first time, cuffed and in chains at Auburn, down a long block and into my cell.

  But I felt even more nervous now. Seeing my family for the first time since I was out. Since I was free. Since we would have to see where we would pick up.

  The outside door was unlocked; it was clearly the kind of neighborhood where you didn’t have to be worried about such things. In the vestibule, a Persian runner led to the inside staircase. A low-hanging Tiffany-style chandelier hung from the ceiling. I scanned the intercom buttons and saw the name there. My heart dropped off a cliff. Rubin. Liz’s maiden name. Not Mossman. Apartment 3A. I rested my finger on it, then hesitated, and took in a deep, unsure breath, trying to overcome my fears. I decided not to ring. Instead, I started up the stairs, with the bouquet of flowers I had bought on the street and the box in a brown bag marked Simpson’s Children’s Toys, Every Child’s Dream is Our Joy.

  On the second-floor landing, there was a framed drawing of an English hunting scene hung over an upholstered wooden chair, and on three, a mahogany table with a doily on it, a small vase of dried flowers, and on the wall, a framed landscape of verdant hills over a winding river with a castle on a hill. The Rhine, maybe. Everything had a fine, European feel to it.

  I stood for a while in front of their apartment, my heart ricocheting with nerves. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea. Showing up like this, out of the blue. I thought about going back down. There was no name on the door, just a pink heart-shaped sticker, which made my heart soften and my nerves suddenly go away.

  Two years. Twenty-seven months, actually, including the trial. That’s how long I’d been away from them. I’d gone away a man ashamed to look at himself in the mirror. Now … now I was different. I was. Sober. Remorseful. I had a lot to make up for. I was ready to face the family I had let down. Ready to make it up to them.

  Rubin. No longer Mossman. I inhaled a breath.

  If they were ready to face me.

  Blowing out my cheeks, I pressed the buzzer.

  I didn’t hear anyone inside. Maybe they weren’t here. I admit I felt the slightest lift of relief. Maybe they were out, or still at school. I knew Emma was in a summer program. Or at the park. Or maybe Liz didn’t want Emma to see me. They hadn’t come to visit me since March. (Sure, it was a six-hour bus trip up to Auburn, and a night over, hard for a young girl. But still…) I glanced back down the stairs, thinking it wasn’t too late to leave, to do this another day.

  Then suddenly I heard the patter of running footsteps coming from inside.

  The lock opened and then the door was flung wide. And my daughter stood there looking up at me. A larger version of her than I recalled, up to my waist now. In a light blue gingham dress. Pigtails. Her million-dollar smile and bright green eyes shining happily at me. Completely washing away my fears. And I heard the word, the one word, I’d been aching to hear for almost a year.

  “Daddy!”

  3

  “Hey, peach face.” I bent down and hurled Emma high in the air. Liz had brought her on three or four visits, but we were always separated by glass. After a while they stopped coming. I squeezed her and held her close. I hadn’t had a hug like that in years.

  “Mommy, Daddy’s home. Daddy’s here!”

  I stepped inside and Liz came out of the bedroom. Our eyes met, Emma still hoisted in my arms. Any nerves I was feeling melted. It was like I was seeing her there for the first time, and also seeing why I’d fallen for her. In a pretty navy dress, a lace collar unbuttoned at the top. Her brown hair was in a bob, which I knew from newsreels and the occasional Hollywood magazines that made it to me was now the fashion of the day. She didn’t approach me. She just stood there, clearly unsure herself, her hand on the floral chair by the love seat in the tiny sitting room—tinier even than our first apartment on Eighty-eighth and York, before everything fell apart. She gave me a faint smile, the best she could do. Who knew where we even stood now? The name next to the buzzer downstairs made that clear.

  “Charlie.”

  “Boy, you’re both a sight for sore eyes,” I said. I cradled Emma in my arms. “You can’t even imagine how much I’ve looked forward to seeing you, peach face. And look how big you are now.” I put her back down. “Six. A real lady now.” I rubbed my knuckles softly against her cheek. “You too, Liz. You both look great.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re out,” Liz said, neither sympathetic nor cool. “Eddie called me.” There was a measure of hesitancy in her voice, an edge of distrust as well. And why not? I’d put her through the wringer. She’d had to raise Emma on her own these past two years. All I’d done was leave her in a big hole.

  “I wish you could have come,” I said. “It would have been nice to, you know, see someone there. It really is like in the movies. They give you your possessions back. In a brown paper bag. Your watch. Whatever money you came with or earned inside. Then they open the big iron door and suddenly there’s a loud clang behind you and you’re on the other side. Uncle Eddie was waiting for me. In that beat-up old jalopy of his. I guess Mom and Pop, they…” They hadn’t been so well since Ben had died. “We hardly exchanged ten words on the way down. But it sure is nice to see my angel now!” I said, cupping Emma’s happy face to my thigh. “Hey, I brought you something.” I handed her the gift bag. The toy store owner told me it was all a boy or girl of her age wanted these days. It and the flowers for Liz had cost me a chunk of the money I came out with. “And Liz, here…” I handed her the roses. “I got these for you.”

  “Thanks, Charlie,” she said with the slightest smile. “They’re really lovely. I’ll put them in some water.”

  “Do it later,” I said. “Right now, I just want to take a look at the two of
you.”

  “Look, it’s a View-Master, Mommy!” Emma said, brimming with excitement. Plastic binoculars in which you inserted a disc of photo images and one by one, as it rotated, it made it seem like you were there. Live. The store said it was all the rage now for kids her age.

  “I see, honey. That’s nice, Charlie. It really is.”

  “They have discs for Africa, and Europe. And the Ten Wonders of the World … And the Far East,” I said, “inside.”

  “I love it, Daddy. Millie Richards has one. Are you going to be around now, Daddy?” Emma asked.

  “Didn’t Mommy tell you? I sure am, honey. I am most definitely going to be around. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Daddy’s going to be back now, Mommy,” she said. “See.”

  “We’ve had this conversation, Charlie,” Liz said, with a bit of exasperation in her tone. “Emma, why don’t you give Mommy and Daddy a few minutes together and play with your View-Master in the bedroom.”

  “You’ll still be here, won’t you, Daddy?”

  “Of course I’ll be here, honey.” I winked at her. “Promise.” Emma smiled and went inside.

  Yes, we had had the conversation. Though it was behind a glass wall and in whispers. And I always had the hope that once I was out I could show her differently.

  The real Charlie.

  The window was open, but there was no breeze. “I see you’re still in Yorkville,” I said. “Eddie gave me the address.”

  Liz put the flowers down at the sink and shrugged resignedly. “Yes, we are. But as you can clearly see…” Her eyes drew me around the place.

  It was even smaller than where we used to live. A tiny open kitchen off the sitting room and what appeared to be two small bedrooms. The furniture was sparse and unfamiliar—a love seat, a worn print chair, a plain coffee table with some art books on it; it all must have come with the place. On the wall, though, there was the little Monet reproduction of the cathedral in Rouen we bought in France on our honeymoon. About the only thing that looked familiar. I went over and put my hand to the frame. We stayed in this little place in the place overlooking it. We got drunk that night, enough pastis to last a lifetime. “I remember this.…”