A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  One by one, the Silverman twins emerged from the metal frames. Blackish bundles with fine white wisps of hair on their heads. And one by one, I hung them on a line strung across the back of the darkroom, these reverse images of the Silverman twins, made by me in the dark.

  But the last negative was not a picture of the Silverman twins. It was the photograph my father had taken of me on the roof, the one that was meant for the little window in the code-o-graph.

  In it, I had nothing except the wide, blue sky behind me. My face was smooth, uninterrupted by the round, black frames of the glasses. I looked like a person who could be anywhere, a person who might do anything.

  I hung this negative—this picture that was the reverse of me—on the line with the Silverman twins.

  • • •

  Back out in Hell’s Kitchen, the sun was still high and the streets were broiling. Streets that were filled with people pushed out of their apartments in search of a breeze—men in sleeveless T-shirts, suspenders cutting into their fleshy shoulders, women in housedresses and hair-curlers. And kids. There were always a hundred kids on the sidewalks of Hell’s Kitchen. Kids who spit on the ground close to your Keds as you passed them, heading to the 42nd Street subway with your father.

  The station was more stifling than the streets. My father and I stood on the uptown platform, pressed in on all sides by families on their way home from Coney Island and the Rockaways, a sea of sunburnt arms, and sandy blankets, and picnic baskets that dripped pink-colored water smelling of liverwurst around our ankles.

  Behind us, soldiers with their arms wrapped around the waists of laughing girls poured down the stairs in twos and fours, girls in light dresses that moved about their legs in unfelt breezes, as if these girls carried their own weather. They joined the hot, sweating families, nudging us closer to the edge of the platform.

  My father stepped aside for a woman who was tugging the sun-reddened arm of a crying boy. Two soldiers and their girls passed behind us, sharp elbows brushing my back. The girls’ laughter echoed off the tiles.

  We stood in the heat of the station for what seemed like an hour, our faces running with sweat, my glasses sliding down my nose. I began to believe the train would never come, and then, the air changed. All the particles of it, all the smells stirring—the sweat, and the liverwurst, and the perfume of the soldiers’ girls. I felt a heavy rumbling beneath the soles of my shoes, as if a thunderstorm might be brewing under the ground. Everybody on the platform straightened, began to move—although there was no place to move to—because at last, the uptown A was coming.

  My father and I were at the very edge of the platform. Hot, mouse-scented air, forced through the tunnel by the oncoming train, blew on our faces, ruffled through our sweat-soaked hair. The rumbling under my feet grew stronger, traveled up to my chest, shaking loose something I’d been thinking about, worrying over, all the way here.

  My father watching me bury the code-o-graph in the box with the sweaters.

  After everything he’d just taught me at Paradise—how to read the edges of film, the secret to making negatives while blinded by darkness—I needed him to know the reason I’d taken that object he’d gone to so much trouble over and shoved it under my bed. I needed him to know it had nothing to do with him, everything to do with me. I wanted there to be no chance he hadn’t been able to read it for himself, no matter how unlikely.

  “The code-o-graph,” I began.

  My father had been pushed so close to me, his face was out of focus.

  “I know,” he told me. And then, I suppose, because he wanted me to see his expression, he stepped back.

  The bald-headed man should have turned that inner tube in for the rubber months ago. Should have let it be made into jeep tires or airplane tires, and then sent off to fight the Germans. Should never have let it remain the kind of inner tube that could be taken out to Coney Island for the day. Taken out, then brought back on the subway, where he could rush along the crowded platform, carrying it in front of his face, so he couldn’t see that he was bumping into somebody’s father.

  In the glare of the uptown A train’s headlamp, I saw my father’s face, and I searched for the expression he had meant to show me. But whatever it had been, it had vanished. Replaced by surprise, and then by something else. Something darker. Because my father had begun to lean over the tracks in a way nobody could recover from.

  The station filled with the sound of screaming—the train trying to stop itself, the brakes grabbing for the metal tracks. A sound that could cut through skin.

  My father was arcing off the edge of the platform in pieces. His expression. His ruined white shirt. His camera. The newspaperman’s camera, slung from his shoulder on a strap, making its own separate arc as he toppled.

  He was timing it perfectly—his fall and the oncoming train. The train that, despite the terrible sound of the brakes, did not stop.

  And then, another arc. My hand reaching up and pulling off the glasses.

  But it did not matter if I turned the entire world into a blur.

  The train, nothing more than green motion, flew past me. Right through the spot where my father had been.

  When it came to a stop, everything went silent, as if the sunburnt families, the soldiers and their girls, me, were waiting for a signal. And then, I heard a screaming that might have been the echo of the brakes inside my head, might have been the soldiers’ girls, might have been me.

  The rest I recall in pieces. The families and soldiers’ girls staring at me. A sweating, red-faced transit cop, getting down on one knee, his face too close to be in focus, asking if my father had jumped.

  “It was a bald-headed man with an inner tube,” I told him. “An inner tube he should have turned in for the war.”

  The red-faced transit cop asked me for my address, and when I said nothing, he suggested I think on it for a while, and went to talk to a couple of soldiers.

  Instead, I thought about a flattened Chuckles wrapper that was next to my Keds. Wondered whether the person who’d thrown it there had saved the black one for last—the way I did—because it was his favorite. I thought about that black Chuckle long and hard, hoping to erase my address from my mind, so I would never have to walk out of this subway station without my father.

  But sooner or later, I must have told the transit cop my address, because I remember walking up the stairs of the station with him, everybody else stepping back like I was some kind of bad luck.

  • • •

  I knocked on our door, because my father had had the keys. When my mother opened it, she looked at the transit cop, and then at me. She was wearing a white shirt with no sleeves, and her black hair was brushing across the top of her shoulders at the place where her shirt ended and her tanned skin began. She was smiling, showing us the gap between her front teeth, but already, her smile was losing some of its tension.

  I wanted to push the transit cop back into the hallway, shut the door on him, as if that would stop what he had to say from coming into the house. But I could hear him speaking my mother’s name over my head.

  I couldn’t watch what would happen to my mother’s face when the rest of what he had to say traveled across the air to her. I pushed my way into the apartment, ran down the hallway, past the living room, where my father’s green armchair sat, still pushed close to the radio. I went into my room and shut the door.

  Then, as if the only thing that had been keeping me upright had been the presence of other people, I collapsed to the floor as if I was Superman knocked down by Kryptonite.

  I squeezed myself under the bed and pulled out the box of sweaters, tore through them until I found the code-o-graph. I wrapped my fingers around its thin, metal edge, clutched it as tightly as I could, as if this thing from the radio, this object my father had gone to so much trouble over, possessed the power to bring him back.

  I lay on th
e floor, hot cheek pressed to the linoleum, taking shallow breaths. All my colorful organs—blue lungs, orange kidneys, red heart—were turning black and withering inside me. All of them, one by one, as if I was dying from the inside out.

  Five

  My father was waked with an empty coffin. Two men from Dunleavy’s Funeral Home carried it in, then balanced it on sawhorses in front of the Silvertone. The coffin was made of the same cherrywood as the radio, and it and the Silvertone looked like a matched set. I had to stop myself from believing that from now on it would live in our apartment instead of my father.

  After the men from Dunleavy’s left, Aunt May curled a rosary made out of wooden beads inside the coffin, placing it on the purple satin in the place where my father’s hands would have been if the coffin hadn’t been empty, if he’d been inside it. Then she told me to go put on my Mass pants and a shirt with sleeves.

  It was too hot for the Mass pants and too hot for a shirt with sleeves, but I put them on. Before I left my room, I slipped the code-o-graph into my pants pocket.

  In the two days since the transit cop brought me home, I hadn’t been without the code-o-graph. I slept with it in the chest pocket of my pajamas, dropped it into the pocket of whatever pants I decided to wear each day—which was never the shorts I’d been wearing the afternoon my father took me to Paradise. My hand was always in my pocket, feeling for the thin metal edge of the code-o-graph, spinning the propeller that would turn the letters of a secret code into something comprehensible.

  When I came into the kitchen, I saw that Aunt May had made my mother put on something that was black and too hot, too. She was sitting at the table in a black dress with long sleeves, holding a coffee cup with both hands as if she believed it was about to shatter into pieces. Aunt May was leaning into the oven, poking a fork into a casserole filled with something bubbling and orange.

  My mother said my name, which was more or less all she’d had to say to me in the past two days. But I didn’t need her to say many words in a row to hear the broken sound under them. A sound that let me know all her colorful organs had turned as black as mine.

  She set down her coffee cup and got to her feet. She was wearing the black shoes she only wore to Mass and she walked over to me like she was unfamiliar with the floor. She came near enough to turn blurry and unfamiliar—my mother in that black dress I’d never seen before. With no warning, she wrapped her black-sleeved arms around my shoulders and pulled me against her angular chest.

  My mother did not hug in this way. More often she surprised me with an arm flung across my collarbone from behind, a quick brush of her lips on the top of my head. Now I felt her breathing, her lungs—once blue—rising and falling against the side of my face. I smelled her cigarette, the cedar from the closet where she kept this awful dress, and beneath it, the improbable cut-grass scent of her skin.

  I wanted to tell her it was my fault there was a coffin in our living room, that it was I who had changed our luck. But the many consonants of that confession, which out of my mouth would have been sharp and clear and not the least bit blurry, were caught in my throat.

  I opened my mouth, tried to push the words into the space between my mother and me.

  The oven door slammed shut. My mother flinched and let me go.

  • • •

  Our apartment filled up with people who had come to talk about my father and drink whiskey and stand in our living room with an empty coffin.

  Harry Jupiter was there, his fat face sagging with sorrow. He walked in wide circles around the cherrywood coffin, clutching a glass of rye as if it were the one thing keeping him upright. Father Barry was there as well. Father Barry who belonged at Good Shepherd now standing in our living room with all his bright white hair and his black suit that smelled of Mass incense. Father Barry making me think about the Body of Christ disappearing from the tomb on Easter morning, leaving it as empty as the coffin balanced in front of our radio.

  “We drove up,” somebody said. “We couldn’t face the subway,” making subway sound like polio.

  So many of these people I’d seen only in the portraits my father had shot of them, seen only in black and white. Now they stood in our living room sweating and drinking, looking in color much too lifelike.

  I do not know if the Keener was invited, or if perhaps she was so old and close to dying herself, she knew when someone had passed and turned up on her own. She wasn’t there, and then she was there, standing in the middle of our living room, her face so collapsed into itself, it could as well have been a forgotten apple from several winters ago as a human face. So few strands of white hair covering her scalp, the only way to tell she was a woman was by the black dress that hung from her shoulders. One of her legs must have been shorter than the other, because she walked toward the empty coffin with a hitched, rolling gait, as if she was traversing an invisible boat.

  No one else noticed her. Not my mother, standing close to Father Barry, her pale hands trapped inside his waxy ones. Not Aunt May, bustling about the room collecting half-empty whiskey glasses. Not one of the too-lifelike people who had come by car to stand around and not stare at the coffin in front of the Silvertone. The Keener, though, she looked at it.

  She looked at nothing else, gazing at its purple satin interior and the rosary curled up like a snake where my father’s hands would have been. Looked at it as if she saw my father inside. She made her hitching way through the crowded room to its cherrywood side, circling it until she stood at the top, at the place where my father’s head would be, as though we’d been saving the spot for her.

  The old woman drew a breath that seemed to gather in more than air, that pulled at something that wasn’t in the room at all. She opened her mouth, a dark hole empty of teeth, and produced a low-pitched wailing in that ancient language, the Gaeilge language of the Irish.

  My father had once told me it was the language of Irish heroes. But coming out of the old woman’s black hole of a mouth, it sounded like the knocking together of bones. As if the Keener was a radio for the dead. I stared across the empty coffin at her, certain she had been sent to broadcast the voices of ghosts, transmit their undertones through the dark speaker of her mouth. Transmit them to me. The one she was looking at. The one who was guilty.

  And then, I heard it, Donnchadh, my father’s Gaeilge name. And all the air in that chokingly hot room began to disappear into the dark hole of the Keener’s mouth.

  I had to get out, get away. Before everybody knew. Before they learned it was me.

  I hammered my fists on their black-clad backs. Told them all to go home, get out of here. Finish your whiskey and drive away in your cars! It was only Uncle Glenn’s hands coming down on my arms that calmed me. Only his voice suggesting everybody step back and give the boy some air. Leaning down and saying in my ear, “I’ve never been much for Keeners either, all that Irish melancholy.”

  Then he put an arm around my shoulders and the two of us went down to his and Aunt May’s apartment and sat at a table covered in ruffled place mats and drank a couple of cold glasses of milk.

  After a while Uncle Glenn said my name, and his undertone was so thick with sympathy I didn’t deserve, the consonant-filled confession that had been caught in my throat broke loose and came pouring out of my mouth. I told my uncle everything about the sunburnt families and the soldiers with their laughing girls and the man running along the platform with the inner tube that should have been turned in for the rubber. Then I told him about how I’d needed to explain to my father about the code-o-graph, the object he had gone to so much trouble over.

  But before I could get any further, Uncle Glenn said, a Captain Midnight code-o-graph? And when I nodded, he got up, pulled open a kitchen drawer, and tossed a Captain Midnight code-o-graph onto the table.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Found it in the backseat of the taxi last time I took it out.”


  I reached into the pocket of my Mass pants and set my code-o-graph on the table next to his. They were identical except that Uncle Glenn’s didn’t have anybody’s photograph in the little window. Not even Captain Midnight’s.

  “I was saving it for you,” he said, “but I guess you’ve already got one.” He sat back down. “From what you say, I don’t see how anything was your fault.”

  “Then I didn’t explain it right.”

  “You want to tell it over again?”

  But telling it once had put too many pictures inside my head.

  I slipped my code-o-graph back into my pocket, let my fingers spin the propeller around.

  “You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  • • •

  The first message arrived the following morning. It had been tucked inside our mailbox, which was never locked, because the lock had been broken a long time ago, a folded piece of paper with

  FGVH

  written on the outside.

  And

  YO PGLRY ITEN JGESO

  written on the inside.

  It was mixed in with the electricity bill and the sympathy cards, which had been coming every day now. Cards that just from the way our names were written on the envelopes made me sorry to be us.

  I took the message upstairs and deciphered it using the code-o-graph. I didn’t doubt—not for one instant—that the message could be translated with the code-o-graph. Perhaps it was because I’d already spent so many of my waking minutes spinning that propeller, running my fingers over the device’s circle of raised letters and numbers, as if I could change history if only I did it the correct number of times.

  FGVH

  turned out to be

  JACK.

  And

  YO PGLRY ITEN JGESO

  was

  IT WASNT YOUR FAULT.

  And here is the other thing I didn’t doubt—that the message had come from my father. Such an idea made no sense, was illogical. Then again, there was the message in my hands. And what was written there was precisely what I most needed to hear. My father, with his ability to read people, would have known that. Would have sensed it from wherever he was.