A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  The first shooting had occurred at mid-morning, not a time a man expects to be shot. My grandfather had just finished his second cup of coffee and was about to head out the back door to the privy, when Red Nolan, a small-time nightclub owner, burst through the front door and shot him in the chest. My grandfather staggered back, exclaimed, “You should not have done that, sir,” then took out his gun and shot the stunned nightclub owner in the center of his forehead. Not until he and my mother, who was fourteen at the time, dragged Red’s lifeless body to the back of a saloon on West 37th Street did my grandfather show her the dented timepiece in his breast pocket.

  The second shooting occurred in the early evening, while my mother and her father were setting out poison pellets for the rats that liked to nest in the straw that came packed around my grandfather’s Canadian whiskey. This time the would-be murderer was called Johnny Nack, though his reason for wanting to kill my grandfather was much the same as Red Nolan’s—a short shipment. On this occasion, my grandfather’s life was saved by his great fondness for the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Indeed, he read one of Mr. Yeats’s poems at Johnny Nack’s funeral, reciting from a volume that had a bullet hole in its cover.

  The third shooting took place at night. My mother and her father were on their way home from the Saturday pushcart market under the Ninth Avenue El. My mother was carrying a bag of peaches, and my grandfather was carrying nothing because he believed that gentlemen did not walk in public with groceries in their hands. The two of them turned the corner at West 39th Street and Billy Cremore, another speakeasy owner who’d been shorted, stepped out of the dark and fired his gun. Billy Cremore aimed for my grandfather’s head, but it was dark and Billy Cremore wasn’t much of a marksman. The police never did figure out why Billy’s killer left a bruised peach perched on his chest.

  “These shootings were a sign,” is how she would finish this story. “God had taken my mother and wanted to make the point that He was done. Nothing bad would ever happen to anyone I loved.”

  “God sent Red Nolan, Johnny Nack, and Billy Cremore to shoot at your father to make a point?” my father would tease her.

  But she’d only smile, showing him that gap between her teeth, and he’d have no further argument.

  As for me, I would much rather believe my mother than Dr. Shaperstein. And that night, after I took off the glasses, I walked around my room, squinting at the objects there—the Holy Skully Cap on the night table, a model airplane on a shelf, the cowboys and Indians riding across my bedspread—attempting to pull the color of each thing back within its boundaries, trying to hurry along what my mother believed would happen. And it did seem after a while that the edges of things were growing more sharp.

  But deep in the night, I woke to the sound of my glasses clinking against the lamp, and caught the scent of my mother—her unlikely smell of new cut grass. I sensed her standing beside my bed, looking at me, then I heard her bare feet crackle along the linoleum to the kitchen. After a moment there was the splashing of water, and I realized she was washing my glasses.

  I lay there thinking about all the reasons my mother might have gotten up in the middle of the night to wash my glasses. Or perhaps I was thinking about all the reasons that weren’t what I already suspected, what I might have already figured out, that washing the glasses was a ritual—practiced alone and in the dark—for luck. That my mother—who put so much faith in signs—had made a connection between clearing the lenses and clearing my vision.

  I can’t say if it had been those Japanese bombs, or what she’d seen through the thick lenses of my glasses, but whatever it was, I feared that the belief my mother had in our own good luck had been knocked out of focus as surely as my sight.

  My mother’s footsteps moved back along the linoleum toward my room. I tried to slow my breath, make it sound as if I was still asleep. But I could feel it moving fast and shallow in my chest, and I could only hope my mother would think I was in the middle of a nightmare. And somehow, as she set the glasses back on my night table, she didn’t notice my breath, so I can only assume she was in the middle of her own nightmare.

  • • •

  The moment I stepped through the chain-link fence that surrounded P.S. 52 wearing the glasses, people who had been throwing balls stopped and held them motionless in the air, people who had been shouting ceased and stood openmouthed in the cold. I focused on my feet as I moved across the macadam, heading for the overheated building. No one will notice me inside, I was thinking. It will be like I’m invisible.

  I slid into my seat and kept my head down, staring at the pencil-carved initials on the top of my desk, initials that were now soft-edged and blurry from the glasses. As the rest of the class rumbled in, bringing with them the smell of wool coats and bologna sandwiches, I felt everybody’s eyes on me, crawling over my face, over the glasses—exactly like the X-Ray Specs in the back of comic books—making me feel exposed, like the Visible Man. The man on the poster Miss Steinhardt unrolled when we studied biology, a man with his skin peeled back and all his colorful organs exposed—blue lungs, orange kidneys, purple spleen.

  Even Miss Steinhardt was not immune to the power of the glasses. They revolved her from the chalkboard as if the thick lenses produced gravity, forcing a startled, “Well . . . Jack . . . glasses,” from between her vermillion lips.

  It was quiet for a moment, and then Miss Steinhardt asked me if I could see the board from where I was sitting.

  “Yes,” I told her, without lifting my head.

  “Can you tell me what I’ve just written on it?”

  I looked up and squinted. Miss Steinhardt’s chalk marks resembled nothing except the snow clouds building up outside the window.

  “The date?”

  Miss Steinhardt used her piece of chalk to point to the front row.

  “Why don’t you bring your desk up here?” she said

  Only the defective sat in the front row. Declan Moriarity, who could not bend his left leg all the way because of the polio brace buckled to it. Francis D’Amato, who had a lazy eye and was forced to wear a flesh-colored eye patch over the good one. And Rose LoPinto, who despite the complicated hearing aid she wore, still couldn’t hear well enough to sit any farther back.

  The legs of my desk made a horrible squealing sound as I pushed it up the aisle. Inside my head, I couldn’t stop seeing the picture of Jesus from my Child’s First Catechism, the one of him carrying his own cross up the dust-covered rise of Golgotha.

  Miss Steinhardt pointed to an empty place next to Rose LoPinto. With more squealing, I pushed my desk into it.

  “Rose,” she said, “you can read for Jack anything he can’t see. And Jack,” she looked at me, “you can repeat for Rose anything she can’t hear.”

  Then she turned back to the board.

  This close, I could see what it was Miss Steinhardt had asked me to read.

  Manifest Destiny.

  I could also see Rose’s hearing aid, which was called a RadioEar. It had three parts: a silver, lozenge-shaped receiver she wore pressed against the bone behind her ear on a metal headband; a microphone the size and shape of a box of matches, which she pinned to her collar; and a battery case the size of a pack of cigarettes she kept in a pocket. All of Rose’s clothes, I guessed, had to have pockets.

  The first thing I had to repeat for Rose was the Annexation of Oregon. I leaned over to whisper it into the lozenge-shaped receiver behind her ear, but Rose shook her head and pointed to the microphone box pinned at her collar.

  I bent down and brought my mouth close to Rose’s throat. The skin there was smooth and olive-colored, and smelled impossibly like chocolate and coconut. Like a candy bar.

  It was a smell that stopped the Annexation of Oregon in my mouth.

  “Are you talking?” Rose said, reaching into her pocket and shaking the battery case.

  But I couldn’t answer, t
oo distracted by what felt like a cold stream that had started running just beneath the surface of my skin.

  All that morning, I whispered important historical facts about the Monroe Doctrine and Mexican Cession into the microphone box pinned at the base of Rose’s smooth, olive-colored throat. In return, she read various significant years off the chalkboard into my ear. And for the first time in more than a week, I didn’t think about my eyes going bad.

  Unless you count this. Listening to Rose, I noticed that none of her words had sharp edges. Her consonants were blurry, and her vowels out of focus. It was as if the way she spoke was the vocal equivalent of how I saw.

  And also this. There was one piece of her black hair that kept breaking free of the metal headband, trying to curl itself around the silver lozenge of the RadioEar receiver. A piece of black hair I couldn’t pull my eyes from.

  That piece of black hair made me wish Dr. Shaperstein had corrected me better for things that were close up.

  • • •

  When the bell rang for lunch, I dashed out to the smooth stretch of playground where the skully boards were chalked. All morning, the Holy Skully Cap had sat in my pocket giving off emanations, assuring me I didn’t belong in the front row with Declan Moriarity, whose polio brace prevented him from getting down on the ground low enough to flick a skully cap. Or Francis D’Amato, whose eye patch so interfered with his depth perception, his caps went veering off in bizarre directions.

  Bobby Devine and a pack of boys were already standing around the chalked squares, the steam from their breath hanging in the frigid air. All of the girls—and possibly some of the boys—were in love with Bobby Devine, with his black hair and his blue eyes, and his breath that always smelled of Juicy Fruit, even when he wasn’t chewing any.

  They were deciding the rules—or more accurately, Bobby Devine was deciding the rules, and everyone else was waiting. A pack of boys, flipping their skully caps over in their palms, eager to start playing, poised for Bobby Devine to give the word.

  I joined them, the Holy Skully Cap already in my hand, the steam from my breath mingling with theirs before settling to the ground.

  “Sorry, Quinlan.” Bobby Devine never called you by anything except your last name. “Too many players.”

  I counted the boys breathing steam into the frigid air. But I am not sure why. There were never too many players. And also, I’d heard something in Bobby Devine’s voice. A kind of undertone, a humming beneath the words that bumped up against them, shading their meaning.

  They say that when one sense is damaged another takes over. Develops an ability it never had before. And I suppose that is what happened with me. Over time, I would become skilled at hearing this undertone, this hum that exists beneath a person’s words, that colors—at times, even contradicts—their meaning.

  But that first time, standing in front of those boys flipping their skully caps, I heard enough of it in Bobby Devine’s voice to understand now that I’d been moved to the front row, there would always be too many players.

  • • •

  A strange man was sitting in my father’s chair when I got home. It couldn’t be my father, though I was still too far away to see him clearly, because the man was wearing a white shirt, and my father only ever wore brown shirts. My father had a closet full of brown shirts. Shirts that smelled of the chemicals he used to develop his photographs. Chemicals that would have left small colonies of brown spots on shirts of any other color.

  But when I stepped into the room, put the man in my three-foot range, I saw that of course it was my father. Just my father in a white shirt. A white shirt, I realized when I came close, close enough to sit on the wide, flat arm of his chair, that didn’t smell of anything, that hadn’t yet taken on the bitter and sweet smell of the developing chemicals. The smell that, along with the scent of the Wildroot Cream-Oil he used to flatten his hair—spiky, like mine—was the smell of my father. A white shirt that left him smelling only like Wildroot Cream-Oil, which could have been the smell of anybody.

  “Hey, kiddo,” my father said.

  The words that would have told him to take off that white shirt, trade it for one of the brown ones hanging in his closet, crowded my throat, tried to scramble their way out of my mouth. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how my father had figured out that I saw better when things were in contrast. Couldn’t stop picturing him buying that shirt, which would be ruined the first time he developed any photographs, and the thought of that squeezed at my chest, making it impossible for me to let those words out, those words telling my father to take off the shirt that made him look and smell like somebody else.

  I felt my father’s eyes studying me, as if I were a book written in a language to which only he had the key. I did not want him to read the words in my throat, and I knew there was no way I could stop him. Because that was what he could do. His ability.

  I got up and forced out some other words—something about homework—turned and went to my room. Leaving my father alone, his white shirt contrasting with the green chair.

  I had never—not once—stopped my father from reading me. He had been doing it all my life, and I took his ability for granted—this father who always seemed to know what you were thinking or how you felt without you ever having to say anything out loud. Once, when we’d gone to Coney Island and seen a man in a turban who claimed to read minds, I asked my father if that was what he did, read people’s minds.

  “No,” he’d told me. “It’s the rest of them I read.”

  He first noticed he was doing it back in Ireland, growing up in St. Brendan’s Home for Boys in an ugly seaside town north of Dublin. He’d see how Eamonn Plunkett could not prevent his hands from jerking during morning Mass, and stay out of his way, knowing that this would be the day he’d be looking to lay them on another boy. He’d note when Brother Garrity’s eyes had the glaze of migraine, and keep his head down in class, so as not to be struck on the knuckles with the large wooden crucifix the brother kept on a rope about his waist.

  The ability had gotten my father his first job in America. He’d been twenty years old and three hours off the boat from Liverpool, his clothes still smelling of seawater and his legs unsteady on the thick carpeting of a bootlegger known as the Duke of the West Side.

  “I read how comfortable the man was in his fourteen-dollar suit,” my father said. “Too comfortable. Like he’d studied on it.”

  As the Duke of the West Side read my father’s letter of introduction from a Dublin pub owner, my father read the Duke of the West Side. He read something Irish beneath the bootlegger’s English accent, and—like my father’s own raising—a childhood spent parentless.

  It was less the letter of introduction and more what my father read that got him the job as bodyguard to the Duke’s illegal alcohol. The job that eventually sent my father to a warehouse on Tenth Avenue belonging to one of the Duke’s best customers, the Gentleman Bootlegger.

  One stormy afternoon in November, my father stepped inside that warehouse to get out of the rain and was struck by the sight of the Gentleman Bootlegger’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Lily. She was seated at a high wooden desk, her dark head bent over her father’s ledger books.

  “It was the oddest thing,” my father told me. “I know it was raining, but there was this one beam of sun falling through the skylight of that warehouse. Falling right on the head of that black-haired girl. As if someone—God Almighty, probably—set her there for me to look at.”

  My father stood a long time watching that sixteen-year-old girl slide the tip of a No. 2 pencil into and out of the gap between her front teeth. Long after all the Gentleman Bootlegger’s illegal alcohol was unloaded.

  When Prohibition ended, and my father needed to find legitimate employment, it was his ability, and the Gentleman Bootlegger—my grandfather by that time—that got him the job at Wasserman’s Listening Emporium.


  “That knack you have of reading people,” my grandfather said, “that is going to make you the world’s greatest radio salesman.”

  Wasserman’s Listening Emporium was located inside a long, narrow storefront on a Times Square side street, tucked between a shoe repair shop and a pool hall. Every inch of it was filled with radios. The shelves were crammed with Philcos stacked on top of Zeniths stacked on top of Crosleys. The floor was so jammed with Silvertones and RCAs and Atwater Kents, most people had to walk through sideways.

  My father read that his first customer—a lady in a homemade hat with a large feather—wished to be shopping somewhere grander than Wasserman’s. He sold her a top-of-the-line Atwater Kent after telling her it was very much like the one Helena Rubinstein had in her Park Avenue apartment.

  The fat man who came in after her had only entered the shop hoping for someone to talk to. My father sold him a Murphy tabletop model by implying that the constant sound of a radio left on was a good remedy for loneliness.

  Shortly before closing, my father sold an enormous Philco to a middle-aged married couple, subtly suggesting it would allow them to spend their evenings listening to vaudeville comedians rather than each other.

  This is much the way that first week went. Proving my grandfather right, my father’s talent for reading people did make him the world’s greatest radio salesman.

  Over the weekend, Leo Wasserman took out a full-page ad in the Mirror. The following week, my father sold fifty-five radios. But that Friday evening, after Leo Wasserman locked up the store and said goodnight to my father, the stories of every person he had sold a radio to began pounding inside his head. It was as if all the radios in the Listening Emporium, every Zenith and Atwater Kent and Philco stacked on the shelves and crowded together on the floor, had been jammed into his skull and turned on at the same time. Each one tuned to a different station, each one broadcasting a different story of longing and desire and unfulfilled want.