The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  “Evie,” Daryl drawled. “I never suspected. You’ve been keeping this from me.”

  “It’s a little less exalted than a kingdom,” Evie protested, looking at Paul, though she knew it was a losing battle.

  “And what do you do there?” Daryl asked.

  “Mess about in boats.” She took a sip of wine. “Drink. Play capture the flag.”

  “Really?”

  “Isn’t that what you’d like to imagine?” She was arch. “Summer house of the patricians, tanned faces turned to a leeward breeze, hands resting on the tiller, nobility at the helm. Isn’t that the fantasy?”

  Daryl raised his eyebrow and looked at Paul.

  “An island.” Daryl whistled. “Your family owns a whole island.”

  He reached for the wine bottle and filled his own glass. “How exclusive, how very old-school.”

  She watched the fantasy take hold. The Island was always itself, and more than itself.

  “Not really,” she said. “There is always someone simply showing up and having to be dealt with, having to be given tea, or a drink. Always someone new landing.”

  Something flickered across Paul’s face.

  “How inconvenient,” Daryl remarked dryly. “And utterly American.”

  “It is.” Evie reached forward and pressed the melting wax down around the lip of one of the big candles, making a little barrier against the drip.

  “Who owns it?”

  “I do,” Evie answered, “and my cousins, now that our parents are gone.”

  “Though Evie’s going to sell her share,” said Paul quietly, looking across the table at her. “That’s been the plan.”

  Evie didn’t meet his eyes.

  “How much does it cost to keep?” Daryl was intent.

  “I don’t know exactly,” she admitted. “It’s in trust.”

  “You don’t know?” Daryl answered, incredulous. “Haven’t you asked?”

  Evie shook her head.

  “So what’s going to happen?”

  “How do you mean?” Evie hadn’t meant for the Island to become a point of conversation. She didn’t actually want to talk about it.

  “What happens when the trust runs out? How will you keep it then?”

  Enough was enough. She looked at Daryl levelly. “By hook or by crook. Beggar our children, beggar ourselves.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” He laughed amiably and raised his glass. “To the future of the past.”

  She smiled wanly, toasted, and drank, then stood, reaching for Paul’s plate and Daryl’s, and walked with full hands through the swinging door into the kitchen.

  There wasn’t a clear spot to put anything down on the kitchen’s counters. The morning’s breakfast dishes and the bags from the takeout competed for the space. It was like the last day of Pompeii in there. She set the plates down on the burners, angry and feeling exposed. What had Paul been doing out there, launching them into talk of the Island? What was going on with him tonight? She opened one of the cupboards and got a glass, then filled it at the sink and stood and drank it down.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE PUSHED back through the swinging door, the dining room was empty. She followed their voices down the hall to his study, where they were staring up at the photographs of the stumble stones pinned above Paul’s desk. Embedded in Berlin’s streets and sidewalks, there were thousands of stones like these all over the city, set down outside the last place a Jew had lived or worked before deportation and the camps. Three of them had lain outside the door of the apartment building Paul had sublet, and when he called her on the day after he’d arrived, it was all he could talk about.

  “That sounds incredibly moving,” she’d said.

  “It’s more than moving,” he’d countered. “It’s everything. Everything I’ve been thinking—”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice was tense with excitement. “I don’t know yet.”

  “Before the Holocaust,” Paul was explaining to Daryl now, “when someone tripped on a paving stone in the road, the folk saying went, A Jew must be buried there. So the stumble stones take the old folk saying and make it literal.”

  He folded his arms, leaning against the edge of his desk. “I had heard about the project but had forgotten it was there.”

  “Pavement stories,” Daryl mused.

  Paul nodded. “Told all over the city.”

  Evie came to stand beside them. Ranged in neat rows, a grid above their heads, the small brass squares reminded her of blocks of moveable type: Here lived, or Here worked. Then the name. Their birth. The date of deportation, and last, of their murder.

  “Those were the ones outside the flat in Schoeneberg where I was staying.” Paul pointed to the top three, what looked like a family.

  Hier arbeitete

  Arthur Kroner,

  JG 1874,

  Gedemutigt,

  Flucht en den Todd, 1941

  Next to his block lay his wife: Hier wohnte Sophie Kroner, JG 1878, Gedemutigt, Flucht en den Todd, 1941; and beneath her parents, Mildred Kroner, JG 1925, Deportiert, 1941, Ermordert in Auschwitz, 1942.

  “Here worked and lived Arthur and Sophie Kroner.” Daryl paused. “Gedemutigt?”

  “Humiliated,” Paul translated. “And flown into death, 1941.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They probably killed themselves rather than be taken.”

  Evie shuddered. It looked like their daughter had been deported around the same time. That day? Earlier? It was impossible not to begin imagining.

  “After I saw those first three outside my door, I started photographing the stones as I wandered around in my first days, and then I found I couldn’t stop. I got the list of where they were in the city and I tried to find each one, just to stand there, in a place where they stood, before they were taken.”

  1930. Born. Deportiert, 1942. 1943. Deported. Caspar Baer. Paula Baer. Ermordet in Auschwitz. In Dachau. In Sachsenhausen. Born. Lived. Worked. Taken. Murdered. Julius Oppenheim. Frida Trieu. Ephraim Worrmann.

  At the end of the last row were the stones of what appeared to be another family: Here lived, Elsa, Gerhard, and Wilhelm Hoffman. Evie read. The father was taken first, in 1936, and killed shortly after. The mother in July, 1941, and murdered in 1942. And their son—she leaned closer.

  “Yeah,” Paul said, noticing where she was looking. “The father died first, in Sachsenhausen, the mother in Plötzensee. Those were the prisons in Berlin. But look at that last one—the boy’s.”

  “Ermordet Hier,” Evie read. Here.

  “He was killed in front of his house on Linienstrasse, in Mitte, the heart of the city. In the spot where I stood.”

  They stared up at the photograph.

  “He was eleven,” Paul said.

  The ache in his voice was palpable.

  “His was the one that got me. I kept coming back to their stones—they had lived not far from the Institute—and the more I walked past his stone, over his stone, around his stone, the more I wondered: Had anyone seen it happen? Who? I imagined the people in the street, who stood, as I was standing, maybe just a few feet away. The man passing by. The woman walking her dog. The ones who watched people taken away.”

  Daryl had his head tipped, listening hard.

  “So I started to imagine another group of stones to set in place beside the stumble stones around the city.” Paul pivoted from the photographs and looked at them. “A stone for each watcher. Stones for the crowd.”

  He folded his arms, falling silent.

  “But I don’t see,” said Daryl, after a little, “how any of this has to do with anything you’re working on.”

  “Where are the Jews in Henry James?” Paul challenged, looking up at him with a little smile.

  “Last I checked there were no Jews in Henry James.” Daryl was dry. “Except Deronda.”

  “And why not?” Paul answered. “There were Jews everywhere around him. In London, in Venice. Certainly in New York�
�”

  “Go on.”

  “And the blacks in Nathaniel Hawthorne? Where are they?” Paul pushed.

  “That wasn’t his subject,” Daryl retorted.

  “Exactly.” Paul nodded. “Precisely my point. There are no blacks in Hawthorne because he’d have to see them as real enough, human enough, for him to imagine them, put them in the story.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Paul,” Evie pushed back. “Of course he understood them to be human beings—”

  “Really? Then where are they?”

  Evie didn’t answer.

  “Everyone you can’t see on the surface. That’s the story. But they are buried, implicit.” Paul didn’t miss a beat. “That’s what the stumble stones remind us. We were here.”

  “And?”

  Paul turned to Daryl. “What if a place could remember what had happened? What if a place could speak? What if that memory tripped us up in our daily lives?”

  “Okay.” Daryl looked at him. “Go on.”

  “What if we had said what we had done here?” Paul went on. “Like the Germans. What if this country put down a paving stone for every slave—their names, the places where they arrived, the spot where they were sold—all over the South, in every marketplace in the South? What if this country put what happened in the past right under our feet and said, All right. Look. Look there. Pay attention. Joseph, Sold. Anna, Sold. Harriet, Sold.” He paused. “And resold.

  “And then,” he slowed. “What if there were a stone for the rest of us? What if we laid stones for all of it? A stone for the sold and a stone for those who watched. Who watched and turned away. What if we could mark it somehow? What if we had?”

  “Well, there’d be no art, for starters,” Daryl retorted, “as art’s what tells secrets.”

  “But we’d have the truth.”

  “Yes,” countered Daryl. “Then what?”

  Paul broke into a grin. “Exactly. That’s what I’m wondering. What’s the art that comes when what happened is all out in the open? When what’s been buried is laid out in stones for all to see? What would this country’s stories, its paintings, its movies and poems look like if they didn’t need to tell the open American secret over and over and over—this happened, is still happening.”

  “My god,” Daryl whistled. “Listen to you.”

  Stop this, thought Evie mutinously. Stones. Memory. Race. These are words falling on words. Let’s stop, she pleaded silently. But he was restless now, and on fire.

  “But slavery wasn’t a secret,” Evie interjected. “It isn’t a secret.”

  “No. But on a street in South Carolina, or Kentucky, or Virginia, a black man, or a woman, or a child was led away with a bit between his teeth, and a white man—or woman, or child—turned away. That’s what I’m getting at. That moment is somewhere in all of us—the history inside us handed down—white and black. Baldwin wrote this sixty years ago. I see it so clearly now. That moment is the one we still repeat here, over and over again, the ordinary, everyday wickedness of turning away. The American primal scene.

  “And we’re stuck in it, here. The black man looks at the white and says, You you you, and the white looks back at the black, thinking, Not me, man, I didn’t buy you.”

  “But he turned away.” Evie saw where this was going.

  Paul nodded.

  “Though some didn’t,” remarked Daryl.

  “Some didn’t,” Paul agreed. “But we repeat what we don’t know, or insist we don’t know—and until we recognize that, acknowledge it, we will repeat it. We are repeating it, endlessly, over and over and over—”

  “We acknowledge it all the time; what are you talking about?”

  “Sure.” Paul nodded. “We teach it. We talk about it. But still, in this country when you meet a black person for the first time, you have to prove yourself, right?”

  She frowned. “How do you mean?”

  “You have to prove—both of you have to prove—you are not that kind of white person.”

  “You have to prove you aren’t racist?”

  He nodded. “We have to deny the moment in the market in us. And we can’t. That’s the American story.”

  She shook her head, troubled. “You can’t make an easy analogy like that.”

  “Which?”

  “Germans and American whites. It’s not so simple.”

  “Why not?” Paul countered.

  “Because people are people.” Evie fixed her eyes on him. “People have complicated lives. Lives that don’t necessarily fall so cleanly into black-and-white choices—people are blind, but still well-intended, and see as far as they can.”

  Paul stared at her.

  “And,” Evie went on, “most people in this country don’t like to be reminded.”

  “Most white people,” said Paul.

  “Yes. But why say it like that? It stops the conversation.”

  “Because it’s true,” he repeated.

  Evie shook her head, impatient. “Granny K used to say that some things were better off left unsaid.”

  Daryl snorted. “But you don’t believe that, do you? You wouldn’t be where you are now if you’d sat on your hands and kept quiet.”

  “I know that.” Evie flushed. Hazel had said as much to her that afternoon. “But sometimes I wonder about how we say what we say when we say it—”

  “Your grandmother also referred to me as ‘the Jew who married Evie,’” Paul reminded her.

  “Ouch,” said Daryl.

  “Come on, Paul, that’s not fair,” Evie retorted, not hiding her annoyance. “We all know how it was in the thirties. No one of that generation would have said Jewish. Even Eleanor Roosevelt’s letters were pocked by little dashes of irritation about ‘this Jew or that one at a party.’”

  “How it was?”

  Holding her gaze, Paul reached into his coat pocket and handed her a photograph.

  Several people sat about at a sunny picnic in a park somewhere long ago, their faces turned toward the camera, delighted to be caught. The men wore coats and ties, the women, their legs tucked under and to the side, wore skirts that dated to the thirties, Evie reckoned. One of the women had dark curly hair that seemed to have burst free of its ties, cascading around her neck. Beside her was a man whose face was turned toward her, as if trying to catch what she had said.

  Evie bent her head.

  “What am I looking at?” she asked, frowning at the image.

  He put his finger on each of the men seated in the grass. “Nazi. Nazi. Nazi—”

  Pops, she thought, looking up at Paul. That’s Pops.

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes on her. “How it was.”

  Fifteen

  THE DAY WAS FECKLESS. Shafts of light plunged to dark as the sun crossed above and played with the clouds. Did one pull down or take off one’s hat? The heat of the last few days remained unbroken, and the windows of the offices of Milton Higginson were shoved up as high as they could go in their narrow tracks, the wooden sashes swelling in the heat off the river, the thick heat in the air. Money moved slowly. The bondsmen called out their sales sitting down. Number 30 Broad Street, north facing, enjoyed the shade in the mornings, and Ogden Milton’s secretary typed as quickly as she could. The sun would turn and begin its slow drop through the opposite window in the afternoon, finding her, finishing her. She typed. In the inner office, Mr. Milton was quiet. She stopped a minute to listen. Perhaps, she thought, returning to her typing, too quiet.

  Ogden Milton was sitting behind the same polished Sheraton desk at which his father and his grandfather had worked, faced when he looked up by the same flank of mahogany bookshelves upon which ranged complete sets of MacCauley and Gibbon and the bound prospectuses of companies of interest, sunk in thought. Off his shoulder to the right, a row of windows stretched, so that from where he sat, the island of Manhattan unfurled, a granite lawn of buildings stretching to the tip where the East and the Hudson rivers met and where the great ships of Europe drew slowly upward towar
d the yards at Brooklyn and the piers at Chelsea. In slow majesty the old world still arrived.

  At sixty, Ogden and the firm had profited from steady hard breezes moving their fortunes along after the war. Ogden sat on three boards and was the president of the American Museum of Natural History. He and Kitty had a small apartment for nights in town, but the big brick house they had built in Oyster Bay with a view of Long Island Sound meant that on most nights of his life, he was facing the water. So that most days, even when he wasn’t on Crockett’s, he felt near it. Pushing back from his desk, he came to stand at the window where he did most of his thinking.

  Through the gaps in the buildings in front of him, a sail cut the blue distance of the Hudson on a downwind tack, some lucky guy out on the water before lunch in the middle of the workweek.

  His throat tightened. Some lucky guys, Dunc used to say, just a couple of dumb lucky guys. Ogden kept his eye on the white triangle, trying to push away the thought of Dunc. It was too damn sad what seemed to be happening to his old friend. The boat glided forward, moving gloriously slow, the canvas filling and filling with wind, carrying with it the thought of Crockett’s and the particular patch of dead air right at the center of the bay just off the end of the Island and how, if you caught the wind just right, you might start to fly before it past the calm, past the land’s end—out into the Reach. He and Dunc used to let the sails run and turn to each other, laughing in the bright air. But that had been long ago.

  It was no use. Ogden leaned his forehead against the glass. He couldn’t shake it off.

  The sail luffed down there on the water.

  “Dad?”

  He turned. “Moss.”

  A young man in horn-rimmed glasses, dressed in narrow trousers and a white shirt—but tieless, Ogden noted—poked his head in, pushing open the door. “Am I interrupting?”

  “Some woolgathering,” Ogden admitted with a sad smile. “Come in. I’m glad to see you.”

  “I came to see if you’d like to have lunch.”

  “Very much. But not today, I’m afraid,” Ogden answered just as the buzzer rang on his desk. “That’ll be the new man.”