The Bells of Times Square

by Amy Lane

  Outside his head and his heart, the world was gray, black, and white, like a movie but without sound, without dialogue, without laughter or movement.

  He embraced his father when he walked off the plane, and the absent tenderness that coated his icy heart was the first thing to warm him since he’d been asked to analyze some of the first aerial photos of Japan.

  “You were wounded?” his father asked jovially, seeing the cane and the weight loss and the nicotine stains on the fingers of his son who had never smoked until hours spent over a photo table. “How is it you were wounded when all you did was take pictures of the officers and their wives?”

  Nate had no room inside him for jokes, even ones made hopefully, in the interest of keeping peace. “Papa, the whole world was wounded. We’re still bleeding.”

  Selig Meyer was, like Nate, a large man, and his face had grown broader with age. For the first time, though, Nate saw the flesh of him droop and sag, grow old. “I know, Nathan. I had just hoped better for my one remaining son.”

  If Nate had any doubts then that Walter had been right, and that his father’s parting had sprung from anything besides embarrassed love, they died a quiet death. His heart thawed just a trifle more, and he hugged Selig again. They might never reach a perfect understanding—fathers and sons didn’t always, particularly not the children of war and depression. But Nate raised his children with the sure knowledge that his father loved him and that he needed to do a better job of showing them the same thing.

  Nate’s mother had no such reservations.

  “You are too thin. Let’s get you home, and you can get back your strength.” She glared at him, unafraid. “And no smoking in the house. It’s a terrible habit. You smell like an ashtray.”

  She’d begun to dye her hair black since he’d left for the war, and her coiffure and composure were, as always, impeccable, right down to the perfectly applied red lipstick that suited her. But her eyes—large, brown, and expressive, like his—were lined at the corners and worried. Nate remembered Walter telling him that he’d quit smoking on the POW train because nobody had cigarettes, and how neither of them had cared enough about the habit to take Captain Albert’s stash under his seat.

  It would be nice to reclaim that man again, even in so small a matter as cigarettes, so Nate used his mother’s strictures as an excuse to cut down and then to quit. Of course, as years passed and the world realized what a tremendous matter cigarettes really were, Nate had cause to think that Walter had, once again, saved his life, even in death. It seemed that the habit of watching after Nate was too great for even bullets to stop.

  “Yes, Mama,” he said dutifully, and for a moment, he had cause to think the frost surrounding his heart would thaw, that he could remember what it was to live again.

  But it was not that easy.

  When he’d been stationed at HQ, he’d slept like the dead, because death was what he woke up to every day. When he slept at his parents’ house, he woke up to the living, and every morning when he heard his mother in the kitchen and his father calling him down for breakfast, he thought one of two things.

  Sometimes it was that he was a child and his brother Zev had let him sleep in.

  More often, he was in Moselle, and Walter was doing battle with the wood stove to cook him breakfast.

  And then the reality would sink in, and he’d be alone in the room he’d left when he went away to college, and the griefs, both of them, would weigh down the lightness of waking with the heaviness of sleep eternal.

  He arrived home in August of 1946. In October, he began his once-weekly trips—a train and three buses—to the cemetery in Albany. The grave site was pristine. He stretched out his wounded leg and hip doing the small bit of gardening required to keep it that way. He had to cut down his visits when the weather became severe, but he went four of the eight days of Chanukah. He stood in the snow and told Walter about the traditions—the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days, the games with the dreidel, and the coins made of chocolate. It seemed silly, perhaps, standing in the cold and preparing a dead man for what amounted to his bar mitzvah, but it felt very necessary to Nate.

  You need to be ready, Walter. When I join you, I’m going to expect you to know all sorts of things, so we can stroll about Gan Eden together, and you will be prepared.

  Even the most wicked of men only went to the other place for what amounted to less than a year. Walter was far from the most wicked of men; he would be waiting for Nate when Nate had spent his time in Gehinnom.

  Nate had much to atone for, living being chief among his sins.

  Six million Jews. Six million. It was . . . The number was . . . Seventeen million people? Six million Jews? Who wakes up one morning and decides to simply annihilate part of the world’s population, like cutting away fabric?

  The atomic bomb. It vaporized people. Left nothing more than shadows etched into the stone and sickness and horror afterward. Nate had seen the pictures, had read the stories, had felt his heart shrink and quail at the suffering.

  Like the world, when the first euphoria of the war ending faded, Nate spent much of his time simply reeling from these facts, closing in on himself, afraid, because any thought past eating and helping his father in the shop hurt. There were demons. There were monsters. They lurked outside the door, and in the newspapers and magazines, and in the eyes of the returning veterans, and in the hearts of the bitter, angry, despondent people who over and over again asked, Why?

  It was a time when Jews gathered together, afraid of additional hostility, comforting each other in their communal grief, and Nate, ever the outsider, could not do that.

  He tried to go to temple during Yom Kippur, because every Jew in the city spent his day in temple—it was the day of atonement.

  But he couldn’t sit through prayers, and midway through the first service, he turned from his place in the back of the small temple, just blocks from his parents’ house, and made his way through the crowd lamenting the things they’d allowed to happen because they hadn’t known.

  He was stopped by one of the younger rabbis, a man who’d gone on to lead the church into Reformed Judaism, one of the freer thinkers who believed in atonement and that intentions mattered more than laws.

  “Nathan,” he chided, reminding Nate that he’d only been a few years older than him as they were coming up through school. “You cannot even sit through prayers?”

  Nate regarded him bleakly.

  “Rabbi, you must regret the sins you ask to atone for,” he said, thinking painfully of Walter’s head resting against his chest. “I . . .” He turned away. “I can’t.”

  “Then perhaps they weren’t sins,” Rabbi Oskar said tentatively, and Nate closed his eyes.

  “And perhaps they were, and I am simply the Wicked.” He said it, trying to make a joke, but his voice fell, and it sounded very, very real.

  The rabbi’s hand on his sleeve was gentle. “And perhaps you were just the Young,” he said hopefully.

  Nate shook his head. “I shall never be young again,” he said, meaning it.

  And he walked away that day, thinking about Walter and how he’d never regret that sin, and couldn’t atone for what hadn’t felt like a sin at all. And that the biggest sin, the sin of seeing what the world was doing to his people and being locked into inaction, was something his country would not allow him to tell.

  So he mourned for the world, and he mourned for one man, and his grief for the one man set him apart from the world.

  New Year’s Eve, 1946, was unbearable. When had his plane been shot down? 1943 He’d lived nearly five years after that? It was unthinkable. He had to have something to look forward to.

  It was that thought that drove him outdoors, walking from his parents’ brownstone to Times Square. Nearly a thirty block walk in the cold—he would move closer in future years, when his business took off—and he was making it in a thin coat with a cane. The twinges in his hip and his thigh were agonizing, but in a way, the p
ain was a blessing. When he was in pain, at least he could see red.

  Times Square was manic, even in those days before the place was lit up like daylight and the bleachers were put in. He made it within two blocks, though, and found a building to lean against, closing his eyes against the chill of the granite against his back.

  I’m here, Walter. I’m here, and I’m listening. Will they ring for us, do you think? My God, Walter, I need to hear them. I need to hear some beauty in the world or I will fade away from it, like a photograph that never developed.

  He shed bitter, bitter tears then, his shoulders heaving, gasps tearing from his throat, heedless of the stares of passersby.

  He would need to take a bus home, eventually, and he was chilled so badly, he had to stay in bed with a fever for the next week. It wasn’t until he was lying in bed with his face toward the wall, his mother’s matzo ball soup cooling on his bed stand, that he realized he felt strangely lighter.

  He remembered waking up in Menwith Hill and how terrible a secret he was hiding with Walter’s death, and realized: he had borne, and he had mourned, but he had never cried.

  He had needed to cry.

  At the end of his convalescence that week, he got a welcome surprise. Marion knocked on his door, her black armband gone and a new wedding ring in its place.

  At her side was her cousin, Carmen, the one who’d been going to Vassar.

  The two women came bustling into his bedroom, where he was sitting up in his pajamas, reading a newspaper. His father’s business was doing very well, but Nate was hoping to find a studio. Perhaps, if he were to start taking pictures again, he thought restively. Perhaps . . .

  He looked up at the two of them, a polite smile on his face.

  “Your mother seems to think you’re at death’s door,” Marion said practically. “You seem healthy enough to me. Shirking your duty, that’s what you’re doin’!”

  And that elicited a warm grin. “Well, the military gave us no time to shirk, so I’m doing it all now! How are you? Happy, I hope.”

  Marion nodded and proceeded to regale Nate and her cousin with the story of how she met her Saul and how it would be true love forever. It probably was true love forever, but she lived to bury Saul, and Ephraim after him. Ezra—fifteen years her junior, and very much in love—had been the one to bury her, when she’d passed away late into her eighties. But now, in this moment, she was a friend, and one who made him smile, and he so badly needed to smile.

  Her cousin didn’t say much that day, just listened to Marion with a smile and laughed in all of the appropriate places. When they stood to leave, she took his hand.

  “I hope you feel better.” Her smile was perfect, with even, white teeth, and her blonde hair peeked out from under the little cap on her head. The man in him didn’t notice these things, but the photographer in him awoke, wishing for the Kodachrome slide film to capture the contrast between her blonde hair and her red lips.

  He knew what would make a pleasing picture. But the pleasing picture of a woman did not stir him.

  Still, her appearance—and that desire for a picture—made enough of an impression that he bought a camera and some film.

  The first thing he took a picture of was Walter’s grave.

  Morbid, of course. But he had no pictures of Walter, no mementos. The doll that he’d carried in their flight through the forest had been shattered when Nate had fallen with Walter on top of him. Nate had nothing but that grave site to prove it had ever happened.

  He took the picture in the spring, before Passover, when crocuses and daffodils and lilies were everywhere. Nate left a bouquet of them on the grave, making sure no other visitors there could see, and then pulled out his Leica and . . .

  And composed a picture. Light, shadow, form, line—he remembered these things. He had a degree in art and history—if a man didn’t paint, this was the thing, perhaps, to do with it.

  He began to take his camera everywhere in the city to photograph the usual things: The Empire State Building, the skyline at night. The streets from the rooftops, and from the pavement, the sky. His black-and-white photos from that time were some of his best work . . . and his most private. He saw Carmen often in the city during his rambles with his camera: in the library, in the museum where she worked, on her way to temple. Often, he nodded and waved, speaking pleasantly to her. Occasionally he bought her a cup of coffee or a bagel at a kiosk, and they caught up on the news from Marion, who was living with her new husband in New Jersey and still visited.

  But for all that they saw each other in passing, he never in that time took her picture, never celebrated the color of her hair or the glint of her smile in Kodachrome. All he saw, all he photographed, was the black and the white. It meant his eye was not distracted by color, and he could compose the picture with only line and shadow in mind.

  He told her that once, about the black and white, but he never let her see the pictures he took. He assumed she forgot about them. Even after Carmen’s death, he kept them up in his room, under his bed, and he’d given copies of them to only three people, none of whom would betray his secret for the world. Most of the photos—by trick of light, by accident of shadow or line—were shockingly masculine and astonishingly sexual, not that there were any male models to make them that way. Most of the time, he hadn’t been conscious of taking a picture that suggested a man’s back, or his phallus, or the length of his flank, but that was the picture he would develop in the little darkroom in the back of his father’s shop.

  He loved those pictures. Sometimes when he was working on them, he would array them in the darkroom, as though he were at a gallery showing, and trace the lines that reminded him of Walter, finding the corrugation of his ribs in a bicycle rack and the poetry of his shoulder blade in the silhouette of a car on the pavement.

  They were the best work he’d ever done.

  But although they sustained him for that spring and summer, by the time fall came, he was fighting his way, day by day, through melancholy, and he had no heart for those pictures in October of 1947. He had visited Walter’s grave the day before, a chilly Friday evening laced with the fluttering of falling leaves, like bat’s wings, and came to some sort of decision. He must move forward or die. He could not leave Walter behind entirely, but his picture-taking could no longer be the kind to feed his soul. He would have to make it into a livelihood.

  Thus, he sat in the library, researching how to apply for a business permit and what items he would need for a photographic studio of his own.

  He had money—and the government would help subsidize a business of his, as a veteran—but somehow, even investing in the paperwork felt like a betrayal.

  Silly, wasn’t it? How moving on from a life you never had was still a denial that you might ever have it?

  So that left him where? Mourning in his childhood room? Never leaving his father’s shop? And because why? Because he was afraid Walter wouldn’t be able to find him?

  Walter wasn’t going anywhere. And at this rate, neither was Nate.

  “You look as though you’re losing an argument with yourself.”

  Nate glanced up, startled, and he had to focus his eyes to recognize the pretty girl Marion had brought to his bedside in January and whom he’d seen periodically since.

  “I am,” he said, attempting to smile so she wouldn’t worry. “I am trying to decide if I want to set my business in Manhattan or Queens.”

  She grimaced. “Manhattan, of course,” she said, nodding. “Because my parents live in Queens, and this would give me the excuse to get out of Queens and come visit.”

  He smiled. “There’s a certain hubris there,” he said, making sure she understood. “If a business fails in Queens, well, you start another business. If a business fails in Manhattan . . .”

  “You end up working for somebody else,” she said, nodding soberly. Only her dancing eyes let him know she was taking this as play.

  “Or you try again in Queens,” he said, and she laughed
. She had a nice laugh, he thought, remembering those coffees, the hurried chats on the steps in front of the museum, and the times he’d done little more than tip his hat in passing.

  All of which reminded him—

  “No,” she said, when he started to pack up his books and set them aside to shelve. “We were having such a lovely time. Don’t run away from me, Mr. Meyer. I was just settling down for a good talk.”

  And a part of him really wanted to. And a part of him was lonely, so lonely and so tired of grief in its many forms.

  He settled back down with a forced smile. “Well then, a talk with a pretty girl. How can a man resist?” Well, a man such as Nate, he could. But he didn’t, not this time.

  And not when Carmen followed him home, still talking, angling for an invitation to dinner that his mother readily gave.

  Walter wasn’t going anywhere, and no other man was worth the isolation. The pictures were just that—flat and stark and full of mourning. At least with Carmen, there was laughter, a certain quickness, a feisty sense of humor. This girl would be a partner, not a burden.

  And Walter had taught him all about partnership, so Nate would know.

  So he didn’t resist, not through invitations to dinner, not through invitations to the movies.

  Not through that first night when Carmen, hesitatingly and giggling through her blushes, invited him to stay at her apartment for coffee.

  She’d had another lover before him—for all he knew, a score of them, but she was a sweet girl, shy when they were undressed, gentle of touch, so he assumed one or two at the most. She assumed he’d had others, and he never, not in nearly sixty years, ever disabused her of that notion.

  They trembled together that first night, and snuck glances from under lowered brows. He asked her, in a polite whisper, repeatedly, what felt good, and he was willing to give her directions of his own.

  It didn’t move the world—not his world, anyway—but when it was over, she lay with her head on his shoulder and looked at him worshipfully. In the light from the streetlamp, he could see the gleam of her hair and the blue of her eyes, and thought once again of colored film.