A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  Grete was a full-fledged Nazi sympathizer and a raging anti-Semite. She loved the Fatherland and the Führer, and after dinner, she ran on her long golden legs into the camp’s open-air pavilion to listen to Walther Kappe, Camp Siegfried’s propaganda chief, give his nightly talk. And I ran after her. Sat in the folding chair beside her and studied her parted lips, tracked the breath lifting and lowering her swimmer’s chest, knowing that if at any point she turned and asked me to go out and lynch a Jew, bring her back the limp body as a trophy, I would have done it in an instant.

  It was Grete who informed me I was competing in the swimming race. She came rushing into the dining hall in her red bathing suit and pressed her golden body against mine, telling me it was for luck. I had not signed myself up, and I couldn’t picture my father writing my name on the list. But perhaps he’d seen me swimming in the lake beside Grete and saw only what he wanted to see. Or perhaps he wanted to watch me fail. I never could guess anything my father wanted. The larger point was that this was the first time I’d touched more than Grete’s hand, and I was certain it was a promise of more if I won. For Grete was a true Nazi, willing to reward perfection. No one could have forced me to scratch my name off that list.

  Like so many days that August, the day of the Camp Siegfried Games was hot and humid with threatening thunderstorms. The ozone in the air made the hair on my arms and legs stand away from my skin, and the humidity made it difficult to pull into my lungs, even when my asthma was quiet. The sky was white and bright, and a rumbling of thunder traveled slowly across the opaque lake.

  Lanes had been made with rope and floats. We racers stood together, looking across to a distant raft, still as death on the green water. I felt Grete’s cool blue eyes on my back. I did not know how to feel for my father’s eyes, for he had never come to watch me do anything.

  A gun went off, and I dove low and straight into the cool water. Slicing through it clean and fast. I controlled my breath in a way I’d never done before, breathing in and out on command, holding it deliberately as I swam with long strokes across the green lake. Master of the race.

  I heard the rumbling of thunder, but that might have been my heartbeat. My fingers touched the rough edge of the raft at the end of my lane. I flipped over, pressed my feet against the raft, and sprang away. Swimming back, back to where Grete waited, my golden prize.

  Back to where my father waited, his aluminum hand shining silver in the hot sun.

  The thunder was louder. The storm must be getting closer. Or maybe it was my heart, because I could feel it now inside my chest, rumbling there. The water was colder, too, sliding over my skin. I breathed out, commanded myself to breathe in, but the water had frozen my lungs, making it impossible to move them, to take in any air.

  My mouth filled with water. I pushed my head above the green surface of the lake and began to flounder, my arms splashing against the ropes at the sides of my lane. I shook my head wildly, trying to clear the water from my mouth, and reached into the pocket of my swim trunks for the nebulizer. One part of my brain was telling me it would be better to drown here. But there is always that other part that wants to live, the part that will put the tip of the nebulizer into your mouth even while you are imagining what is going on behind Grete’s cool blue eyes. The part that will make your legs kick hard enough to keep your head above water, while you consider how relieved she must be to have discovered this now, before she’s put herself at risk of producing imperfect children.

  I stayed in the lake until everyone had left its banks for the grassy field and the broad-jumping competition. Then I went to the meadow where my father kept our rucksacks and changed into a T-shirt and khaki-colored pants. As I walked to the gates of Camp Siegfried, I heard cheering coming from the field.

  I hitchhiked back to the city. At the apartment, I stuffed some clothes and the money I’d earned sweeping in a beer garden for a friend of my father’s in the rucksack. I would have liked to take something that had belonged to my mother, but there wasn’t anything.

  Before I left, I went up to the roof and opened the door to my father’s pigeon coop, grabbed hold of the bird he had lavished the most affection on, the one whose head his thick lips had kissed the most often, an almost pure white bird. With a quick twist, I wrung its neck, telling myself it was to keep from being tempted to return.

  I came up to Inwood, because my father hated the Irish only slightly less than he hated the Jews. I knew he wouldn’t look for me here. Though if I was honest, I knew he wouldn’t look for me at all—unless it was to get revenge for the pigeon. But he never came looking. And I never looked for him.

  Your father suggested going after him once. The night the army made me 4-F and he came up to the roof to drink that bottle of rye. I told him this story, and when I was finished he asked me if I wanted to go down to Yorkville and beat up the son of a bitch. We were almost drunk enough to do it.

  If we had, I would have taken that damned Cauet hand as a trophy.

  Eight

  As the wind picked up and the storm that had been threatening began to move across the river into the city, my uncle asked me if I was planning on coming outside again when I couldn’t sleep.

  “No,” I told him, shaking my head. “I’m done.”

  And I was.

  For as Uncle Glenn had been talking, I’d been remembering the day after I got the code-o-graph, the day I’d listened for the sound of Nazi sympathizers in the ocean-y blueness of Good Shepherd. The day I’d believed that if I found one, I would send a message to a made-up person on the radio.

  But that was then. I pressed a hand to my chest, feeling how damp the papers had turned in the humidity, how soft they were against my skin. Now I would be sending a message to a real person.

  A real person who would surely send a message back. One that said

  Y RUUB OT LUU ITE,

  I NEED TO SEE YOU.

  • • •

  Next morning, as soon as it was light, I got up and left the apartment. I had my code-o-graph in my pocket and also some paper, in case I found a Nazi right away. I’d also slipped some change out of My First War Bond for the subway.

  It was hot, and the subway was full of people going to work. I moved through the car, listening for something suspicious—a voice that had beneath it a vibration that jarred me, like music played off-key.

  When I finished with one car, I pulled open the door and moved to the next, stopping to stand on the metal platform as the train sped through the warm dark tunnel beneath the city streets. Under my feet, visible in the gap, was the narrow space between the track and the third rail where my father had squeezed himself, a space almost too narrow for a man.

  I came aboveground in the places I knew I’d find people. In the street-side crush of Times Square. Beneath the blue-painted dome of Grand Central Station. Among the marble columns of Pennsylvania Station. When I got hungry, I went to the Automat on Eighth Avenue and used up one of my war bond dimes on a piece of coconut custard pie. I sat at a small table in the cold whiteness of the Automat taking the smallest bites I could of the pie and listening to the conversations going on at the tables around me. It was lunchtime and the Automat was filled with workers from nearby offices. Men in summer suits made of seersucker, women in dresses with narrowed skirts, because cotton had to be saved for uniforms.

  When the Automat emptied, I went back into the subway. I rode it all the way out to Queens, as far as the stop for the World’s Fair. All through the summer of 1939, my father and I had come out here to take pictures of Johnny Weissmuller swimming through the man-made waterfall inside the Aquacade, watch a robot smoke cigarettes in the Futurama exhibit. On Superman Day, my father had taken me to shake Superman’s hand.

  I did all of these things and was back by the time my mother returned from five o’clock Mass, pushing open our apartment door as if it weighed a hundred pounds. She did not ask me whe
re I’d been all day, but I was certain she’d been praying to the chandelier for my safety.

  This is what I did the next day, and the next, and every day of that summer.

  Not always, but now and then, I heard something in a voice that made me follow someone. The man who stole a copy of Life magazine from the newsstand outside Grand Central Station, sliding it under his jacket when the vendor turned away to make change for a woman in a hat, all the while keeping up his conversation about Tiny Bonham’s pitching arm. The man and the woman who exited the Eighth Avenue subway line as if they didn’t know each other, waiting to come together until they were inside the pedestrian tunnel under 59th Street, the man pressing his body against the woman’s, bending hers into the C shape of the wall.

  But it was always people with secrets, never Nazis.

  Still, I kept looking. When I ran out of money in the My First War Bond book, I went down to Aunt May and asked if she needed me to go to Mandelbaum’s for her. Aunt May was still cooking for us, still making those horrible recipes out of Victory Meat Extenders—Codfish Casserole and English Monkey, which thankfully did not have any actual meat in it. If Aunt May had already been to the store, I took the change out of my mother’s purse, which she left on a chair near the front door, ready for five o’clock Mass. Since my mother never went anywhere except Good Shepherd, she never seemed to notice.

  • • •

  I was still looking at the end of the summer, when my mother went back to her work as bookkeeper for the now-legitimate restaurants and supper clubs that belonged to her father’s former customers. I don’t believe she would have gone back at all, if Mr. Puccini hadn’t knocked on our door every day for two weeks in August, asking about the rent.

  For the first few days, she headed out wearing the black dress. Finally, Aunt May came by and said it would do everybody good if she put on something more cheerful.

  “I don’t feel cheerful,” my mother told her.

  “None of us do,” Aunt May said. “But most of us are at least pretending.”

  The next morning when my mother left the apartment in the black dress, Aunt May was waiting for her on Dyckman Street. She took hold of my mother’s black sleeve and made her look up at all the windows where blue Son in Service stars had once hung, blue stars that had more recently been replaced with gold ones.

  “You’re not the only widow on the block,” she said, spinning my mother around on the sidewalk. “You’re not even the only one in the building.”

  The next morning, my mother put on a brown skirt and a brown blouse. They were the color the leaves on the trees in Fort Tryon Park turn before they give up and fall to the ground at the end of autumn. Aunt May told her it was an improvement, though not much of one.

  My mother said it was as much pretending as she was capable of.

  She wore some version of that color every day for the rest of the week. Some version of that color for the rest of the month. My mother must have gone out and bought a small wardrobe of clothes the color of dead leaves. It was as if fall had come early to our apartment.

  • • •

  The Tuesday after Labor Day, Aunt May handed me five dollars and sent me to the Thom McAn on Broadway to buy new shoes for school. Buying shoes for school was something I’d always done with my father, the two of us taking our time to examine the paired-up samples in the window, standing together on the tiles that spelled out THOM MCAN while I made up my mind, going through the glass door to sit in the velvet seats joined at the arms like the seats at the Alpine movie theater. The Thom McAn shoe salesman always had a mustache and would take off my dirty sneaker with two hands, as if it was something precious, as if he were afraid of dropping it. My father knew that the metal instrument the shoe salesman used to measure my foot was called a Brannock Device. Once, even the Thom McAn shoe salesman hadn’t known that.

  Now I walked down Broadway by myself, stood alone on the tiled letters examining the paired shoes, sat in the joined-up chairs with no one next to me. When the shoe salesman, whose upper lip was clean-shaven, placed my baggy-socked foot on the metal plate to measure it, the words Brannock Device boomed so loud in my head, I couldn’t hear myself say the style number.

  Perhaps the shoe salesman hadn’t heard me right, or perhaps I’d been too distracted thinking about how I didn’t want to be standing out on Broadway with only my two feet on those THOM MCAN tiles, but the shoes the salesman brought me were the same terrible tan color as Aunt May’s Victory Pudding, which was made with molasses and evaporated milk.

  “These the ones?” Even the bare-lipped salesman sounded doubtful.

  But by that time my throat was so closed up, I could only nod.

  He slipped the shoes over my socks, and I walked around on the thick Thom McAn carpet. The shoes were stiff and rubbed against my heels.

  “How do they feel?”

  “Fine,” I croaked.

  • • •

  When I got home, I left the shoes in my room, buried beneath the folded layers of tissue paper. Then I turned on the radio and tried filling my head with cowboys and flying men in capes. But I couldn’t picture anything except myself sitting in the front row of a sixth-grade classroom wearing the tan-colored Thom McAns, squinting at the blackboard as a version of Miss Steinhardt chalked down facts about the Emancipation Proclamation, while finally—finally!—a Nazi spy slipped into the Automat for a piece of cream pie, or a Nazi saboteur hurried across Grand Central Station on his way to Croton to poison the water supply.

  I pushed around the food Aunt May left us—Boiled Tongue with Horseradish Sauce—and then threw myself in front of the Silvertone again, radio serials unspooling from the speakers beside my head, unable to conjure up a picture of anything except me, trapped inside P.S. 52 as the Nazis I’d been searching for all summer strolled by the windows.

  Around nine o’clock, somebody knocked on our door.

  It was Harry Jupiter, wearing a rumpled jacket and a hat that looked as if he’d sat on it. I hadn’t seen Harry Jupiter since my father’s wake, since he’d stumbled around our apartment looking as if it was only his glass of rye whiskey keeping him upright.

  I asked him if he wanted to come in, but he shook his jowls like he was afraid there might still be an empty coffin in our living room.

  “I have something for you.”

  He dug around in both pockets of his rumpled jacket until he came up with a photograph.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

  He passed it over to me.

  I pushed my glasses onto the top of my head and brought the photograph close to my face. It was the picture of me standing on the roof with nothing but the wide, blue sky behind me.

  “I found it when I got around to printing the Silverman twins.”

  It had been a long time since I’d seen my entire face without glasses. Every now and then I tried to see it, standing in front of the bathroom mirror with the glasses in my hand. But to see anything clear without glasses, I had to put my face so close to the glass, I could only catch pieces of myself.

  Yet here in this photograph was my whole face—without glasses.

  I pushed the glasses back onto my face and looked up at Harry Jupiter. His blue eyes were watery.

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  He nodded, and began to shuffle down the dim hallway.

  “Why now?” I said to his back.

  He turned.

  “Why did you finally get around to printing the Silverman twins now?”

  Harry Jupiter shrugged. “I came across the note from your father asking me about the darkroom. Must have been buried under the negatives on my desk.”

  I looked down at the photograph in my hand. The photograph delivered by Harry Jupiter, who had not been up here in all the weeks since we’d waked my father with an empty coffin. Harry Jupiter, who never came across anything
buried under the negatives on his desk.

  I shut the door. This photograph was a message.

  My father knew.

  Likely he’d followed me. Perhaps watched me in the cold brightness of the Automat eating a slice of coconut custard pie in small bites, or sat in the next subway car as I rode the train to Flushing, where the two of us had gone to shake Superman’s hand. It would only have taken one time. One time for my father—who could read strangers, after all—to understand what I’d been doing all summer, and why.

  And once I’d deciphered this part of my father’s message, I knew why he’d left the note that sent Harry Jupiter up to Dyckman Street with it at the exact time he had.

  I went to the kitchen and got the scissors, cut away just enough of the wide, blue sky to make the photograph fit into the little window of my code-o-graph. Then I slid out Captain Midnight’s face and replaced it with my own.

  The next morning, I walked out into the September wind wearing the stiff, new Thom McAns that were the color of Aunt May’s Victory Pudding, and carrying my leather schoolbag as if I was on my way to P.S. 52. At the corner, I turned in the opposite direction and headed toward the subway.

  • • •

  Weeks went by and nobody from P.S. 52 tried to get in touch with us.

  Once I ran into Mrs. Krinsky from apartment 1A, coming out of Mandelbaum’s with an armful of groceries, and she asked me where I was going in such a hurry.

  “School,” I told her.

  “Isn’t it that way?” She pointed with her chin.

  “I’m going to a special school. For people with bad eyes.”

  “You’d better hurry then,” she said, clutching her bags to her chest, as if they might cover her embarrassment.