A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  Which was where? And how had he ended up there?

  I put my hands on the piece of paper that had come from my father, pressing it into my cowboy and Indian bedspread, and tried to imagine what might have happened in the 42nd Street subway, after I’d taken off the glasses.

  Perhaps, in the final moment of the arcs, my father had tumbled off the platform with enough time to roll out of the way. To squeeze himself into the narrow space between the track—where in less than an instant the metal wheels of the train would come screeching—and the third rail. Perhaps that’s where he’d been the entire time the red-faced transit cop had been leaning in too close to me. The entire time I’d been concentrating on the crumpled-up Chuckles wrapper. The entire time the uptown A train sat silent above him.

  It was an improbable story—impossible, really—but I was a twelve-year-old boy who had lost his father. A twelve-year-old boy with a head full of radio serial dramas, dramas that depended on last-minute escapes. And perhaps more important, I wanted very much to believe it.

  There was a mentalist at Coney Island who claimed to be able to tell your future. You would write a question on a piece of paper, and then he’d ask you to hold it in your hand for a few seconds to put your magnetism on it. I pressed my hand harder against the paper on my bedspread, sure I could feel my father’s magnetism, a buzzing beneath my hand.

  Then I smoothed my father’s message flat and slipped it under my T-shirt, tucking in the hem to keep it from falling out. The paper felt stiff and scratchy against my chest. I got up and ripped a page from one of my old composition books, wrote

  I NEED TO SEE YOU

  which I turned into

  Y RUUB OT LUU ITE.

  Because I had to know why, once the uptown A train had pulled out of the 42nd Street subway station, once my father had stood up and brushed himself off, why he hadn’t come straight home to Dyckman Street, where I was waiting, certain he was dead.

  I folded the paper in half and wrote

  BGB

  on the outside, which was

  DAD.

  Then I ran downstairs and slipped it into the mailbox.

  • • •

  I waited all day for my father’s answer. Leaving the Silvertone every fifteen minutes to run down to the mailboxes. Running my hand along the row of brass doors, each with a circle of holes punched into it, as if mail needed to breathe. Lifting the door of ours to see if my message had disappeared, if it had been replaced with one from my father.

  It had not come by the time my mother left the apartment for five o’clock Mass, wearing the black dress that was too hot for days like this, a piece of black lace bobby-pinned to the top of her head. My mother had been going to five o’clock Mass every afternoon since Father Barry had turned up in our living room with his black suit smelling of incense.

  It had not come by the time she returned, heading straight for her bedroom, as if she was worn out from standing and kneeling and repeating things in Latin.

  My father’s answer had not come by the time Aunt May came up to make the apartment hotter with her cooking. Aunt May had taken over all the cooking for us. Nearly everything she made came from Victory Meat Extenders, a cookbook that had come out since the war began, since meat had started being rationed. Aunt May served us dishes like Pork-U-Pines and Emergency Steak, dishes that tasted like cereal and gravy. Most nights, I pushed these gray-looking meals around on my plate until she went back downstairs.

  I never saw my mother eat any of Aunt May’s cooking. Except for her trips to Good Shepherd, she was always locked in her bedroom, so silent, I only knew she was in the apartment by the sense I had of her heart beating.

  My father’s answer still had not come after dinner, when I bumped into Uncle Glenn near the mailboxes. He was on his way out, wearing his white Civil Defense helmet and armband, the silver whistle strung around his neck.

  Only later, after all these things happened, did I find a new message replacing mine.

  When I brought it upstairs and decoded it, what my father had written back was

  Y VGRO LUU ITE

  which meant

  I CANT SEE YOU.

  If the piece of paper sitting on my bed, the paper with those four coded words, had not been full of my father’s magnetism, I would have torn it into a hundred pieces. But it—and the paper crackling inside my shirt—were the only things I had left of him. The only things that had gone from his hand to mine. I slipped this latest message inside my shirt and instead tore up the paper from my composition book I’d used to decipher it. Ripped it into pieces, let it fall like a blizzard on the cowboys and Indians riding across my bedspread.

  When I was done, I went into the living room and turned on the Silvertone, needing to fill up my head with noise, fill it with something that wasn’t my father’s voice—his mix of American and Irish I was already starting to forget—repeating the words

  I CANT SEE YOU

  over and over, as if every one of those pieces of ripped paper could talk.

  I lay on the checkerboard linoleum with my head next to the Silvertone’s big speakers. But I couldn’t focus on what was pouring out of them, not the baritone of the announcer’s voice, not the crashing of the orchestra.

  My father was alive and somewhere out in the world and didn’t want to see me. I couldn’t believe that was true. Not unless he had a good reason. A life-or-death reason. A reason that had to do with the war, because everything in those days had to do with the war.

  I lay there, trying to come up with a reason that my father—my father who had survived his fall from the subway platform—could not come to me.

  It is no surprise that what I came up with was something straight out of a radio serial drama. A story built on a faked death and a secret identity and a plan for spying. What else would I have thought of? All I’d done for the past months was let radio serial dramas pour into my ears. A radio serial drama was pouring into my ears at the very moment I was dreaming up the story.

  Here is how I told it to myself.

  My father rises from that narrow space between the track and the third rail, that rail full of electricity. He leans down to pick up the Speed Graphic—miraculously undamaged—and looks up into the surprised faces of a couple of transit cops, the only people left in the station. Then he tells them to take him to the mayor.

  Inside Gracie Mansion, my father and Fiorello La Guardia have a long talk about my father’s ability to read people, about how useful it would be to have somebody like that on the streets of New York keeping an eye out for Nazi spies and saboteurs. Then my father drops his hand on the Speed Graphic. Now let me tell you what I can do with this, he says. Fiorello La Guardia smiles and shakes my father’s hand. And my father tells him, One last thing. The transit cops, everybody, they have to pretend I’m dead. Otherwise it will be too dangerous for my family.

  Was it an unlikely story? Perhaps. But it was backed up by evidence. The empty coffin that had sat balanced on sawhorses in front of the Silvertone. The fact that no one had brought my father’s camera back from the 42nd Street subway station. The two messages crinkling inside my shirt.

  I pushed my glasses back onto my face and rose from the floor. Turned off the radio and went into my bedroom. I tore another page from my composition book and wrote a new message for my father.

  Y ERBERLOGRB

  I UNDERSTAND

  Then before it turned light, before it became another day, I went downstairs and slipped it into the mailbox.

  For the first time since the red-faced transit cop brought me home, it felt like nothing inside me was dying.

  Six

  It was hot that summer and stifling inside our apartment, but my mother and I rarely left those four rooms. My mother spent the time she wasn’t at five o’clock Mass lying on her bed with the lights out and her blackout shades pulled down,
smoking and staring at the ceiling as if a better movie of her life was playing there. I got dressed every morning, tucking both of my father’s messages inside my T-shirt and putting the code-o-graph in my pants pocket. Then I sat in front of the window with the radio on, staring out onto Dyckman Street, hoping for a glimpse of my father.

  I was certain he came every day, though I believed it might be at night, when no one would see him. I imagined him standing on the opposite side of the street, gazing up at my window. Some nights, I was sure I could feel him there, his magnetism moving through the bricks like radio waves washing over me.

  Because of the Dim-Out orders, I was afraid to lift the edge of my blackout shades and search for him. Although one night, I tucked the luminous-face alarm clock under my blankets, trapping its green light, and went to the window, lifted a corner of the shade. Only one corner, and only high enough to look down on Dyckman Street.

  I saw darkness and a circle of light shining on the sidewalk from the downward-casting bulbs that were in all the streetlamps now. A taxi, the top half of its headlights covered with black paint, moved slowly up the street, and I imagined it had let my father off at the corner.

  It was a hot night and my window was open. I breathed in the humid air full of garbage and the scent of distant rain, searching for the bitter and sweet smell of the developing chemicals, the smell of Wildroot Cream-Oil. Maybe it was there.

  I went back to my bed and retrieved the luminous-face clock, brought it back to the window and lifted the corner of the shade once more. Only for a second, not long enough for any Germans who might be floating in the water off the coastline to see anything important. Only long enough for my father to know I was up here.

  I let the shade drop and sat on the floor with the green glowing clock in my lap. Put my back against the wall, as if my father could reach up and touch it.

  The rest of the time, I watched for him during the day, dragging an ottoman to the living room window, leaning against the wooden frame for so many hours, I frequently went to bed with a crease pushed into my forehead. After a week of this, on an afternoon when the air was full of ozone from brewing thunderstorms and I felt too jittery to sit at the window, I went out looking for my father.

  It was the first time I’d gone into the subway since the transit cop brought me out of it, and the smell going down the steps—dead mice, urine, the sweetish scent of electricity—almost knocked me flat, made me grab for the railings to keep myself from crumpling to the ground like a drunk. I had to take one hand off the sticky railings and press my father’s messages against my chest, remind myself they were there, to make myself walk to the bottom of the steps.

  When the hot wind from the oncoming train blew into my face, and the brakes began screaming, metal on metal, I replayed the story of what had happened to my father after he’d arced off the platform—making myself see it clear inside my head—his incredible story of escape and rescue.

  I came out onto Times Square, stood beneath the billboard advertising Camel cigarettes, the smoking man made into a soldier for the war. As his clouds of artificial smoke drifted over me, I studied the faces of the men rushing past, faces that snapped into focus, as if I were turning the pages of a book of photographs. I imagined my father in a disguise, a belted overcoat like a movie detective, a hat pulled low on his forehead, although the temperature that day must have been in the nineties.

  After an hour or so, I walked down 43rd Street to Paradise Photo. I had decided that this was where my father came to develop the photographs he took of the people he suspected of being Nazi spies or saboteurs, that each night, he removed the key from behind the loose brick and went through the door with the sign that said Knock or die.

  Later, when I returned to Dyckman Street, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with Aunt May hovering over her.

  “I told you he was safe,” Aunt May said.

  But my mother flew out of her chair and pressed her hands against my chest as if she was checking that I was solid, crushing my father’s messages.

  “You cannot ever leave this apartment,” she told me.

  “Lily,” Aunt May said, “he’s a boy. You have to let him out.”

  “Take this then.” My mother pressed a rosary into my hand. “Carry it with you always.”

  The rosary was exactly like the one that had been coiled up inside the empty coffin. The moment I was inside my bedroom, I dropped it like it could bite me.

  Later that night after Aunt May left, I walked down the hallway to my mother’s room, stood outside her door with my father’s messages in my hand, breathing in the smoke from her cigarette.

  I should tell her, I was thinking, remembering the panicked feel of her hands moving over my chest. But my father had written only my name on the outside of those messages, and I believe there was a part of me that wanted this to be a secret between the two of us, to be something only we knew.

  I stood in the hallway breathing in cigarette smoke for a while, then I slid the papers inside my shirt and went back to my room.

  • • •

  The following Sunday, when I returned to Good Shepherd with my mother, we did not go to the later Mass with Aunt May as we generally did, and we did not sit in our usual place in the middle pew. Instead, my mother walked me to the very front of the church, close enough to see the pots of wilted marigolds on the altar, to sit with the Desperate Catholics.

  It was my mother who had given them the name. Whispering it into my ear one bright Sunday, as we watched them spring to their feet ahead of the rest of the congregation, as if Mass were a competition, drop to their knees as if struck down.

  The Desperate Catholics repeated each phrase of the Mass after Father Barry in loud voices, their Latin disturbing the calm blue light of church. They did not pray with their heads bowed, the way the rest of us did, but craned their necks upward to stare at the ceiling of Good Shepherd, as if they believed the Holy Spirit might be hiding behind the burnt-out lightbulbs and cobwebs of the building’s chandelier.

  And now we were seated with them. My mother wearing the black dress that was too hot, even for this early in the morning, and me in my black Mass pants and a long-sleeved shirt, the code-o-graph in my pocket, my father’s messages sticking to my sweating chest.

  Father Barry came up the aisle swinging the censer, filling the already hot church with the smell of incense—that sweetish scent like candy you think will taste better than it does. He moved behind the row of wilting carnations to the altar and began the Mass, and though I tried not to hear it, my mother’s voice rose above even the loudest of the Desperate Catholics.

  It was not so much her voice, but what lay beneath it that disturbed me. The undertone that was asking—no, not asking, begging—God to protect me from German bombs dropping from the sky, and subway trains screaming into stations. Spare me from polio and tuberculosis and pneumonia, and a score of other diseases that had probably long since disappeared. And already my mother was looking up at that burnt-out chandelier with such concentration, I wanted to shake her and tell her there was nothing up there except spiders and dust.

  It was time to kneel, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed by my mother’s voice. I sat in the row of Desperate Catholics, the only one silent, the only one motionless. And the more my mother beseeched God to watch over me, the more the terrible hum of her undertone worked its way beneath my skin, slipped into my bloodstream like one of the illnesses from which she was trying to protect me. Until I was sure that if I did not stop her, everything she was attempting to save me from would happen.

  I felt the skin of my mother’s lips under my fingers, rough and chapped from so many days spent smoking and staring at the ceiling, so many days of begging God for favors. The raised bits of dry skin were like the peaks and valleys on the edges of my father’s film strips, the secret code I’d deciphered in the blackness of the Paradise darkroom. Koda
k Ektapan, I thought. Ilford Delta. It was as if I was determining how long my mother would have to stay in the dark with the developing chemicals. But my mother had already spent her time in the dark, already done the work of becoming herself in reverse.

  My mother placed her hand over mine and gently removed it from her mouth. She touched the side of my face with her fingertips. But her lips were already back to saying the Mass, already caught up with Father Barry, as if she’d never stopped saying it inside her head.

  I was in the aisle before I knew I’d stood. Running past the early morning Mass-goers, my footsteps a pounding heartbeat beneath their holy repetitions. I burst through the church’s double doors into the bright hot day like someone coming up for air, ran all the way home, rubbing my hand against the side of my pants to scrape away the feeling of my mother’s mouth.

  Once inside the apartment, I went straight to my mother’s room and opened the door to my father’s closet. I wanted to touch my father’s clothes. Bury my face in those brown shirts he used to wear, shirts that smelled so strongly of the developing chemicals, it was like standing inside the Paradise darkroom. I wanted to run my hands over the white shirts, too. Those shirts with their colonies of brown spots. Shirts he’d bought, knowing they’d be ruined, just to make it easier for me to find him.

  But my father’s closet was empty.

  Everything had vanished. Even his hats—tan for summer, brown for winter. Hats that smelled of Wildroot Cream-Oil and my father’s head.

  I craned my neck and searched the shelf. The photographs were gone. The portraits people had refused because he’d captured something about them they hadn’t wanted to look at. The photographs that showed off my father’s ability, the ability that was as remarkable as flying.