The Fifth Column

by Andrew Gross

  “I had to get rid of a lot of stuff,” she said. “None of it would fit.”

  I turned and let my eyes drape over her, like silk to a form. She was still beautiful. “You do look great, Liz. I can say that, can’t I?”

  “Sure, you can say it, Charlie. And you too. You’ve lost some weight.”

  “Well, I never heard of anyone who went in there for the food,” I said, hoping for a smile.

  She complied with the smallest one. “You want some coffee?”

  “Sure. I don’t want you to go to any trouble though.”

  “It’s no trouble.” She bent down, took out a kettle from under the stove, filled it with tap water, and placed it on the burner. It took three or four times for the flame to catch.

  “We are still married, Liz.” I so wanted to go up and give her a hug, but I knew she wouldn’t let me. We had talked about it. The last time she came to visit, back in March. Four months, thirteen days ago. Without Emma there. “I saw the name downstairs. But I am still your husband.”

  “We’ve been through all this, Charlie. You know this. I’ve moved on. I didn’t want to make it harder on you by taking it any further while you were still inside. Though everyone told me I should. But now … I know I said I would think about it, the last time I was up there, and I have. I have thought about it. I know the nightmare you’ve been through. But it hasn’t been easy for me either.”

  “I know it hasn’t, Liz.…” I went up to her and placed my hand on her waist. All I wanted was for one moment to feel attached the way we used to, to the life I had wrenched away from her so violently. From both of them.

  But she pulled out of my grasp and reached for two coffee mugs from the cupboard. When she turned around, whatever softness that was in her eyes and voice a moment before were gone. “You destroyed our lives, Charlie.” There was the flicker of a tear in her eye—not from tenderness, but anger maybe. “I can’t forgive you for that. Everything’s changed. I work in a dress shop now. My folks help out, but I have to support us. We live in this tiny place. With furniture that isn’t even ours.”

  “I can help support you now, Liz. I’m not the same man who hurt you. I know how hard it is to see that now, to fully believe that. But I’m not. I haven’t had a drink in over two years. Obviously, where I’ve been,” I shrugged, “the choices of alcohol were just a tad limited. They didn’t have my brand.…”

  All I wanted was one small sign of what it used to be like between us. And she gave me a softened look—as if for a moment she could forgive me. But then she merely nodded and her eyes deepened almost like she’d aged ten years in front of me. “It’s not going to work, Charlie.”

  “What?”

  “Us. What I know you want.”

  “Liz, look, if there’s one thing I’ve had an abundance of these past two years, it’s been time. Time to think about what I’ve done. The choices I made. You read my letters. Both to you and Emma. And to that boy. You have to know, if I could go back somehow and take back that punch, I’d give everything up to do so.”

  “The punch…” She looked at me, and this time her eyes did fill with moisture. But it was more like the sorrow of someone saying, Don’t you even understand? “But you can’t take back that punch, Charlie. And you still don’t see, it was more than just the punch. A lot more. For me. The punch was just the way it all just crashed to an end. You can say you’re sorry to that poor boy’s mother for that punch a hundred times … But not to me.… It was more than that punch.” She reached for a scissor from the drawer to trim the stems, and found a vase. “Thank you though, for these. They’re beautiful.”

  The punch was just the way it all just crashed to an end.

  She meant Natalie.

  “I’ve told you, Liz, that thing with Natalie was the biggest mistake of my life. By then, it was just the alcohol doing the thinking, not me. And that part’s gone now. It’s a condition of my parole. I’m back. The real me. Charlie.” She was looking at me but there was virtually no connection in her gaze. Like we had never laughed together, never made love. Made a child. What could I expect? Her parents were professors at Michigan. Her brother was an attorney. They hardly wanted her burdened with a self-destructive lout like me.

  She shook her head finally. “I’m not though. I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m not back.”

  I took in a breath, stung, and sat down. “Do you have a guy?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “There’s someone I occasionally see. He works for an advertising company. Emma takes up most of my time. And there’s my job. At the shop.”

  “What about your work?”

  “My work? I just told you.”

  “Your real work, Liz. Chopin.” Her thesis was the most important thing in her life.

  “This is my real work, Charlie. All that, that was a long time ago. Another world. But we’re not going back to it. Look, I trust you’ve changed. I can hear it in your voice. I see it in your eyes. And I’m happy for you, Charles. I really am. You still have your own life to live. But trust … it just isn’t something you can just pick up where you leave off, like a book you put down for a while. Like nothing’s happened in between. You may want to, but I’m sorry, you just can’t. You can’t.…”

  I picked up a salt shaker in the center of the table and tapped it on its side. “I understand,” I said, nodding resignedly. “I know I have to live with what happened then. Everything that happened. And believe me, Liz, I see the image of that kid lying there on the pavement every day. Who won’t get to live out his life. That’s the sight I see every night before I go to sleep. Other than yours and Emma’s. I know I have a lot to make up for. And I accept that I can’t just show up, and do it in a day. But all I thought about these past months, you know, is maybe, just to have the chance. The chance to try and prove myself to you again. To the two of you. That would mean everything to me, Liz. I know how you feel. I saw the name you go by downstairs on the door. But you can’t blame me for fighting for that. For my life.”

  She arranged the roses prettily in the vase and placed them in the center of the tiny sitting table. “You can’t really love me anymore, can you, Charlie? I mean, really love me. Not just the idea of being a husband again. Or a father. And trying to put the whole thing back together.”

  “I will always love you, Liz. I’m sorry, I can’t help that.”

  That seemed to touch her a bit, get past the shield she’d put up to push me off, and for a moment I saw a glimmer of the Liz I once knew. In her eyes. We’d been happy. How I had been a knight to her and she an angel to me.

  Then the kettle sounded. Steam poured from the spout. It seemed to break the spell. She looked over at it and shook her head. “I’m sorry. But I can’t. I just can’t.” There was finality to it this time. She looked at me as if it was a broken vase we were talking about, a family keepsake, and it was futile to put the pieces of it back together. “You still want that coffee…?”

  “I understand,” I said, nodding. “But I need to see Emma. My parole officer says I can. As long as I’m sober. And we are still married. At least for now.”

  “You were always a good dad.” She smiled. “Through it all. That’s one thing I can’t take away from you. She loves you to death, Charlie. And she’s missed you terribly.”

  “And I could be a good husband again,” I said. “Like before.”

  “Before…” She gave me the tightest, most begrudging smile, more a ray of fondness and remembrance than promise, and I saw there was no turning back. “Do you have a place to stay?”

  “A friend from Columbia is letting me flop on his couch,” I lied. I was sleeping in my car.

  “That’s good. That’s good.” She didn’t even ask who it was. She said, “It’s best if you come by in the afternoons, after Emma gets out of day camp. Mrs. Shearer picks her up at three and stays with her until I get off work. That’s around six.”

  “Okay.” I got up.

  She picked up the box from the View-Master and placed
it on the counter. “I’d appreciate it if when I got back from work you were gone.”

  4

  Later, I did stop for a cup of coffee at a café on Second Avenue that the two of us used to go to. Old Heidelberg, it was called. Yorkville was always a vibrant neighborhood. It was known as Germantown. Stores and restaurants from the Old Country were on every block. In the summer, oom-pah-pah music played loudly in the outdoor cafés and German beer was aplenty. On the street, more German was spoken than English.

  But now, with Europe besieged by war, celebrations of life back home had changed. I’d read from jail that the German American Bund that had sponsored the giant rally at Madison Square Garden that night had all but fallen apart, and its leader, Fritz Kuhn, was serving time in jail for tax evasion. The bombing of London, the harsh treatment of the Jews, not to mention Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic America First speeches, had driven all but the most ardent supporters of Hitler and National Socialism behind closed doors. To many, what was happening across the Atlantic was a European war, which would only result in the loss of American blood if we took sides and stepped in. Many remembered the last war, where over fifty thousand doughboys had been killed. A resistant Congress had forced Roosevelt to sign a Neutrality Treaty, though his lend-lease program of shipping arms to Britain tested the limits of it, and to many, presidential authority.

  Our old waiter, Karl, was still at the restaurant and seemed surprised to see my face. “I haven’t seen you in ages,” he said, happy to greet me again. “Have you moved away?”

  “Yes, for a while,” I said, eager to keep it at that. “But now I’m back.”

  “Good. Good, Mr. Mossman. And how is that lovely wife of yours?”

  “She’s doing well,” I said. The less said, the better.

  I ordered a weisswurst with cabbage, something I’d dreamed of in prison and hadn’t had in years. And I even thought about washing it down with a beer—for me, it had been a long time between them—and the frosty mugs of Wurtzheimer and St. Pauli Girl I saw carried about looked tempting. But I merely said water would be fine.

  That last thing Liz said to me had stung. I’m not sure what I’d been thinking—that I was just going to come back after two years and pick up where we left off after destroying their lives. I guess I’d been harboring that fantasy somewhere in my mind, fueled by many months of hopeful dreaming in my cell. But hearing her ask me not to even be there when she returned from work put an end to it, as abruptly as a head-on car collision.

  Still, it had been great to see Emma again, and we made plans for me to come back the following week.

  When I finished the three sausages, I threw a couple of dollars on the table and hopped the bus down to Thirty-fourth Street. I walked across town to Penn Station. It was my first day back in Manhattan. Just being out among people, rushing to and from work, passing the department store windows, all the buzzing activity of being home again after being confined so long, made my head swell with the vastness of it. For two years my entire world had been in an eight-by-ten cell.

  At Penn Station, I grabbed the 6:07 train to Lawrence. The hamlet sat at the western edge of Nassau County, virtually more in Queens than the Island. My uncle Eddie had lived there in a small two-bedroom for ten years, having moved out from the Bronx. He worked for the city as a claims auditor for the comptroller’s office.

  “I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here, Charlie,” he had said in the car on the ride down, looking over with an air of guilt and helplessness. “Lucile’s mother is in the second bedroom and you know she’s not so well these days. We have the basement, but … I’m just not sure it would be for the best.”

  My aunt Lucille had never been the warmest of people toward me, or my father and mother, and my recent trouble with the law and the state of my life didn’t make that any easier. “Don’t think twice about it, Uncle Ed,” I said. “I’ve made arrangements.”

  He’d kept my ’36 Buick roadster in his garage for the past two years, the only real asset I had.

  “If you need a few bucks,” he said to me, “I told your dad we’d try and help out. Fred and Dot,” my parents, “they’re not doing so well anymore, since the store closed.” My father had a linen store in New Haven that had closed in the downturn; now he worked in one, behind the counter. The New Deal, so far, hadn’t worked so well for them.

  “Nah, I’m fine, Eddie,” I said. “Thanks for offering.” I had under a hundred bucks to my name and zero job prospects. I knew I had to sell the car as fast as I could.

  The train rattled out of the city. It was dark now. I saw the familiar Sabrett sign as we chugged our way into the Jamaica, Queens, station. Lawrence was the third stop.

  I needed a job; that was clear. When I knew I was being released, I wrote a few contacts: Otto Brickman, my old department head at Columbia, who was now at Hunter. The dean at John Jay. The rest of my bridges, I’d burned. If you know of a position open, I’m a new man, I told them, and I could really use the work. Any work.

  Look, Charlie, Brickman wrote back, I’d like to help, but there’s nothing I can offer you now. Things are pretty tight these days. Especially things for a convicted felon who’s spent two years in jail, I knew he wasn’t saying. And with a history of an affair with a female student. Maybe I can find something for you grading papers.…

  The dean from John Jay was even less sanguine.

  My parole officer said he should be able to line up something for me. Washing dishes or sweeping floors. The usual parolee kind of work, trying to acclimate back into society. Next to his usual clientele, I was at the top of the list.

  The honest truth was I had nothing.

  The train rattled into Lawrence station. I got off with a throng of businessmen straight from the office and women in dainty suits who looked like they had spent the day in Manhattan having lunch. I’d borrowed an ill-fitting sport coat from Ed, a pair of rumpled slacks, and a workman’s shirt that made me look like I belonged on a breadline more than a job interview. A few cars were waiting in the lot as passengers flooded out on the street. Doors opening, wives welcoming them back with a kiss; it only brought home how far I had fallen. Others just dispersed onto the main street, their afternoon Suns or Journals folded under their arms. I waited on the platform till the crowd went their ways and grabbed one, the Sun, that had been left behind. The headline was: “26 German-Americans Arrested as Spies by the FBI. Fears of Larger Spy Ring Grow.”

  I took the paper and walked to an alley next to a liquor store across the street.

  I’d left my Buick in the lot there. A handwritten note on the windshield read, Please don’t park here again. Private Property.

  I got in, then turned the car on and pulled out onto the street. I drove down Central Avenue to Nassau Expressway, past restaurants and filling stations. It led to Far Rockaway. It was dark, drizzly. The day crowd had gone. I turned into Silver Point Park and continued to the end, to the inlet where I could see Long Beach Island across the way, and beyond that, the sea. I sat in the car and watched the evening fall. Sea lights twinkled and the smell of marine life and fuel oil hung in the air. A barge went by. And a large freighter, who knows, maybe making the perilous crossing of the Atlantic, carrying supplies to Reykjavik and then on to England for all I knew. German U-boats were targeting American vessels now. Anyone who helped the Brits. I’d read that the crossing had become pretty hazardous these days.

  Not to worry, I’d said to Liz. A friend from Columbia is letting me flop on his couch.

  A lie, of course. All I could think of to save face. The truth was, no one had offered. Not even a couch to spend the night on. I might as well have been back in a cell. Lights flickered in the distance. A gull landed on my grille. It looked at me curiously and seemed to be saying, Don’t you have anywhere better to be? I opened the newspaper and munched on the roll I’d wrapped up in a napkin and put in my pocket from Old Heidelberg. I read the headline by the lights of the seawall. The spy ring had set up offices at the K
nickerbocker Building right in lower Manhattan. Their target had apparently been top-secret bomb sites from the Nordon Corporation, and those arrested included employees of the plant, even accountants and engineers.

  Operating right in New York. Right under our noses.

  “But fears of a fifth column,” an FBI source said, “a network of German spies embedded in day-to-day life here, were largely overblown.”

  I put down the paper, put my head back against the seat rest, and closed my eyes.

  You’re broke, Charlie. And alone. A convicted felon. My life as a professor was just a twinkling in my memory now, like these lights I was staring at in the dark. In the distance. Rubin, Liz’s nameplate had said. A husband without his wife.

  But you are a father again.

  I thought of Emma. Leaping into my arms. Throwing her arms around me. Are you going to stay, Daddy?

  I sure am. I’m not going anywhere, peach face.

  And that made me smile.

  I grabbed a blanket I had taken from Uncle Ed’s and curled up in the front seat. Daddy. How beautiful it was to hear that word again. Hear her laughter.

  For once, the sight of Andrew McHurley on the pavement with his eyes rolled up wasn’t the last thing in my mind as I drifted off to sleep.

  Emma was.

  My daughter.

  My dreams were peaceful. Easing.

  And for the first time in two years, free.

  5

  For the next couple of weeks I came by the brownstone to see Emma twice a week. Though each time I rang the buzzer I noted with dismay the hand-scratched name there that was not my own.

  I hadn’t had much luck finding work. I tried with the academic offices of every college in the city for a teaching position, and when those didn’t pan out, the private schools, in town and in the Bronx, and then even the trade schools. I’d teach math if they’d let me. But the moment the conversation turned to where I’d spent the last two years, the discussions ended pretty quickly.