A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel
Page 21
When I came back into the hallway with the mailboxes—the truant officer so close on my heels, he was in danger of stepping on the backs of my Thom McAns—Jakob was nowhere in sight. I tried looking for him on the street, but the truant officer kept me moving toward P.S. 52 with one of his surprisingly big hands on my shoulder.
Now that he was out in the daylight and not sitting in my kitchen, the truant officer looked bigger, more barrel-chested, as if he might have been a boxer at one time, and I had the feeling that if I ran, he would have no trouble catching me and making me sorry I’d made him exert himself.
He stayed close to me all the way to P.S. 52, all the way across the empty macadam of the yard—everybody already called inside—and into a classroom that was very much like Miss Steinhardt’s, except that the Visible Man and his colorful organs had been replaced by the Periodic Table of Elements, and Miss Steinhardt had been replaced by an older, paler version of herself called Miss Milhaus.
“I’ve got Jack Quinlan here,” the truant officer announced. He made this sound as if we were characters on Gang Busters and my forty-six consecutive days of truancy had earned me the status of Public Enemy Number One.
Miss Milhaus pointed at a desk in the front row. The truant officer poked me in the back. His finger felt like the barrel of a gun.
I walked up the aisle, expecting to have that sense of everyone’s eyes crawling over me. But it was as if someone had cast a spell on the entire class, fixing their gazes on their social studies books.
It took me a second to figure it out. To understand they weren’t concentrating on social studies. They were thinking about my father falling under the uptown A, and how I was now some kind of bad luck.
I stepped over Declan Moriarity’s polio brace and took my seat. Rose LoPinto was on my other side. She was wearing a red sweater, and it looked nice against her black hair. Francis D’Amato, still wearing the flesh-colored patch, was on her left. I wondered if Francis had been repeating things for Rose while I’d been out looking for Nazis. The thought of Francis’s wet-looking lips next to the RadioEar microphone at Rose’s throat made me want to punch him in his good eye.
The day felt like a dream. I hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours, and the books on my desk changed subject without me knowing how it happened. One moment, I’d be standing on the freezing macadam with a ball in my hand, and a second later, I’d find myself inside the overheated classroom staring at the Periodic Table of Elements, trying to turn the boxes of letters and numbers into some kind of sense.
I came to as Miss Milhaus was explaining something about the weight of oxygen. She was standing at the board with her back to us, sending her words into the chalked letters, sending them in a direction I believed Rose would miss.
I bent my head toward Rose’s throat.
“You don’t have to do that,” she whispered.
Until she spoke, I’d had no idea how much I’d missed her blurred consonants, her out-of-focus vowels.
“It’s okay,” I said, leaning closer. But Rose stopped me with a hand on my chest.
“No,” she said. “Really.”
I froze, everything I was about to say about the weight of oxygen trapped beneath her fingers. I couldn’t pull my eyes from the small microphone box pinned to the neck of Rose’s sweater, now banned to me the way swimming pools and theaters and certain streets had been banned to Jakob and Rebecca. In that instant, it didn’t matter that everyone now believed I was bad luck. It only mattered that Rose LoPinto would rather not know anything about the weight of oxygen than let me whisper into the smooth skin of her throat.
What I wouldn’t learn until much later was that sometime during the summer—the summer I’d been wandering the marble halls of Pennsylvania Station, making my coconut custard pie last inside the coolness of the Automat—Rose had breathed ether and let a surgeon work inside her ear with tiny instruments. The surgeon hadn’t cured Rose’s deafness, but he had made it less profound. Enough that she no longer needed anyone to speak into the microphone box pinned near her throat.
And then, somehow, time shifted, and I looked up and the room was almost empty, only a few people left, their coats already on, the backs of them going out the door.
I grabbed my own coat, was putting it on as I bolted out the door and into the cold of November, the weight of Jakob’s code-o-graph in my pocket urging me to hurry.
But when I came through the chain-link fence, Moon Shapiro was leaning against the sad, little tree. He was wearing a new corduroy jacket with wooden buttons and had the same light blue yarmulke fastened to his red hair with a circle of bobby pins.
And I very much needed him to punch me in the head.
Even now, I am not certain why I needed this so badly. I only know that I believed something would be set right by that punch in the head, or set back. Something that had to do with Rose. And my father.
I stood before Moon Shapiro, stood within reach of his big fists and waited for the loose-fisted punch to the center of my body. But the spell of Miss Milhaus’s classroom had been cast on Moon as well. He would not look at me, only stared down, as if transfixed by a frozen puddle of dog pee at the base of that sad tree.
I stepped closer, my glasses level with the top row of buttons on his jacket.
“Marvin,” I said in a low voice. Then I shut my eyes and readied myself for the punch.
When I opened them again, Moon was still studying the layer of ice floating on the surface of the dog pee.
I looked up into Moon’s round face.
“Jewboy,” I said in a whisper.
Out of the corner of my eye, right at the edge of my glasses, I saw Moon ball his hand into a fist. But the fist did not rise more than a few inches from Moon’s side.
I said the word again, and Moon made a sound like a bark. But his fist stayed exactly where it was.
Desperate, I grabbed hold of Moon’s arm with both of my hands and yanked his fist toward my face.
But Moon fought me. Each time I brought his fist close to my face it bounced away, as if there was a force field around my head, as if I was trying to push two magnets together.
Francis D’Amato came to watch, staring at us with his lazy eye. Bobby Devine came, too, exhaling the scent of Juicy Fruit into the wintery air. Also people I didn’t recognize, people who stopped to stand in the cold, people who couldn’t resist watching somebody beat himself up with Moon Shapiro’s big fist.
I kept shouting, “Hit me, you bastard,” and Moon kept grunting with the effort of keeping his fist away from my head. At last it occurred to me to try Moon’s weaker hand.
I let go of his right wrist and before he could figure out what I was doing, I grabbed the other one, folded his fingers into a fist, and drove it into my nose, knocking my glasses onto the ground.
It was like hitting myself in the face with a flesh-covered stone, an arm-shaped baseball bat. Bright pain exploded from my nose outward, and for a second I couldn’t see anything except black. Then I was sitting on the sidewalk, listening to a sound that was like pressing seashells hard against both of your ears. Something warm gushed over my mouth and chin. I wiped at it with the back of my hand, and it came away red.
I felt around the cold ground for my glasses, but all I could find was a crumpled-up pack of Lucky Strikes and an empty paper bag. The edgeless figure that was Moon was making a motion like wiping his hand on the front of his corduroy jacket. When he was finished, he turned and disappeared into the general blurriness of Academy Street.
“Here.” Declan Moriarity’s polio brace clicked next to my ear. “They were behind you.” My glasses fell into my lap.
By the time I’d dropped their weight on my nose, Declan—and anyone else who’d stopped to watch—had vanished up Academy Street. I pushed myself to my feet and wiped my sleeve under my nose. It didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore, but the skin
around my mouth felt stiff, like it had frozen in the cold.
Being punched in the face had disoriented me. Once I stood, the sidewalk shifted under my feet, and the air felt thick and hard to breathe. At the corner of Vermilyea Street, the back of my neck itched with the feeling of being followed, and when I spun around, I saw the small man with the cigarette I believed I’d spotted those first weeks I stopped going to P.S. 52. The man I’d convinced myself wasn’t there, because he was much too small to be a man.
I waited on the corner for him to catch up with me, and when he got into my three-foot spot I realized I’d been right. He was too small to be a man, because he wasn’t a man. He was a boy. No older than I was.
His hair was almost black, and his skin was pale, and he had purplish half-moons under his eyes as if he stayed up nights worrying. He carried his books in an old-fashioned leather book bag covered with straps and buckles. But the most remarkable thing about him was the cigarette. It balanced on his lower lip as if glued there, sending a curl of smoke into his squinted brown eyes.
“Albie Battaglia,” he said, putting out a skinny arm. His voice was raspy, worn out before its time.
I shook his hand. The two of us—kids, one smoking a cigarette—shaking hands on Vermilyea Street as if we were men in suits.
I started to tell him my name, but he said he already knew it. Because of my father. But also because nobody at P.S. 52 had ever gotten away with missing forty-six days of school.
I told him I had someplace I had to be.
“Maybe you might want to wipe off your face first,” he suggested. “Unless you want to scare some lady on the subway.”
I felt the stiff skin under my nose and around my mouth.
“I live just over there.” He pointed to a brick apartment building ahead of us on Vermilyea.
Albie took me to his apartment, where a bald-headed man in a sleeveless undershirt was in the kitchen, stirring something in a big pot. I was so tired and disoriented that for a second I thought he was Otto from the flat in the Wasserstrasse. But then Albie called him Pop and shook a can that had a picture of a tree and a Star of David on it.
The two of them stood listening to the sound of one coin rattling.
“That’s all you could get for the Jewish Homeland?” Albie’s father asked.
“Everybody’s buying war bonds.” Albie shrugged. The cigarette was gone from his lower lip, though I had no memory of how or when he’d gotten rid of it.
Albie’s father noticed me standing in the doorway.
“Whoa, kid, you want to clean that up.” He reached across the sink and threw a sponge at my head.
I wiped it around the lower half of my face. It was warm and smelled like garlic and Palmolive.
Albie led me to his room, and the two of us sat on the bed, which was covered with a cowboy and Indian bedspread that was exactly like mine. He told me his parents worked at the Navy Yard in alternating shifts, and that it was his father’s dream to move them all to the Jewish Homeland in Palestine.
“My mother says it’s because my father is a convert,” Albie explained, “because all converts are crazy Zionists.”
Albie told me these things in a rush, as if he’d been waiting awhile to say them to me.
When he stopped for a breath, I pointed to his wall.
There was an enormous map of Europe taped there, and someone—Albie, I assumed—had stuck what looked like a hundred different-colored thumbtacks into it.
Albie stood and swept his sticklike arm across the map. “These are all the places my brother Mordy dropped bombs on the Nazis.”
I got up and pushed the glasses onto the top of my head, took a closer look. There were thick clusters of tacks around cities in Germany—Hamburg and Mannheim, Bremen and Kassell. There were also clusters of tacks in places outside of Germany—in Gdynia and Crete and Lorient.
“What about the different colors?”
“It’s a code. For when he bombed a place more than once.”
“And your brother did all these?”
“Let’s say he might have done all these. The army doesn’t let Mordy get too specific in his letters.”
Albie swooped his hand in the air above the tacks, like it was a bomber.
“I put in the tacks from newspaper stories. When Mordy comes home, we’ll pull out the ones that aren’t his.”
He went back, sat on the bed, opened the old-fashioned book bag. “He sent me this.”
I pushed the glasses back down. It was a leather flying cap. The kind Captain Midnight wore, with goggles and fur inside.
I went and sat next to him. Albie placed the flying cap into my hands. I buried my hands in the softness of the fur lining.
Again, I felt Jakob’s code-o-graph in my pocket, and I was about to tell Albie I had to go. But then I noticed something. Maybe it wasn’t real, maybe it was only a piece of Jakob’s story snagged on my consciousness. Still, in the light coming through the window, Albie’s lips had taken on a bluish color and instead of telling him I had to leave, I asked him why he smoked.
“I have a heart murmur.”
“And smoking is good for that?”
“Who knows? But nobody ever got punched in the head for not being able to run because he smoked too much.”
I looked at Albie, at the purplish half-moons under his eyes, his small size.
“Moon Shapiro has never beaten you up?”
“Moon Shapiro once asked me to show him how to blow a smoke ring.”
“You’re a genius,” I told him.
Albie lifted his bony shoulders. “I didn’t get away with forty-six days of truancy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well.”
I smoothed the lining of the flying cap.
“Try it on,” Albie told me.
I slipped the cap onto my head. It was soft and warm. Comforting.
“What were you doing all that time?” Albie asked me.
Sometimes I think I told him because he slept under the same cowboy and Indian bedspread that I did. Other times I think it was because I’d been awake all night listening to a man tell his story under a floating subway car. Mostly, though, I believe it was because I’d spent too much time keeping too much of a secret on my own. But maybe it was the cowboy and Indian bedspread after all.
Whatever the reason, after Albie Battaglia asked me the question, I sat on his familiar bedspread wearing the flying cap that had come straight out of the radio world, and said, “I was looking for Nazis.”
And then I told him why.
The words came tumbling out of my mouth in a rush—the way Jakob’s must have all night—and it was like riding the Parachute Jump. The way your body feels after you’ve climbed to the top and suddenly you’re falling through the bright salt-tinged blue of sky and sea, certain you are going to smash into a thousand pieces like glass on the boardwalk, and then your chute catches air, pulling you upward, and every single muscle lets go, every muscle you didn’t realize you’d been holding tight.
As I talked, Albie kept nodding his head, as if he was making room inside it for everything I was saying. And when I finished, he asked me if I’d found any Nazis.
“I thought I did,” I told him. “But I didn’t. That’s why I have to go.”
I stood and handed back the flying cap. My head felt cold and bare.
I walked to the door of Albie’s bedroom.
“Hey,” he said.
I turned, and he tossed me the flying cap the way his father had tossed me the sponge.
“It’s cold out there,” he said.
• • •
I was halfway down the dark hallway of Jakob’s tenement when I heard voices coming from inside his apartment. At first I thought they might be coming from the radio. But they were too ringing and bright to be radio voices. And they were speaking in Ger
man.
I pulled off Albie’s flying cap and pressed my ear to the door. I made out the sound of two men shouting, and beneath them, the quieter sound of Jakob’s voice. I had no practice with deciphering the undertone in foreign voices, but even through the layers of paint on Jakob’s door, there was something threatening in that loud German.
I heard more shouting, and then a flurry of footsteps heading for the door.
I ran for the stairs. Behind me, Jakob’s door clicked open. Down? Up? I ran up half a flight, then turned and slowly came down. Just somebody on my way out.
Two men in dark overcoats stepped onto the landing below me. One was tall, and one was short. And if I’d seen them on the subway, I might have followed them. Because now that they weren’t shouting, they were very good at not being noticed.
I lingered on the stairway until I heard the two men leave the building, then I ran back to Jakob’s apartment and once again pressed my ear to the door.
Nothing except silence. He hadn’t even turned the radio on, and for a terrible moment I imagined him lying inside there—dead—killed by the two men in one of the terrible ways still swirling around inside my head. Hung by the neck, drowned in a vat.
I began pounding on the door, shouting his name into its thick-painted surface.
A man came out of an apartment across the hallway.
“Hey, boychik,” he said, “what’s with the ruckus?”
Then there was nothing under my pounding fist, and Jakob was pulling me by the front of my jacket into his apartment.
He slammed the door shut behind me and put his hand over my mouth—the second time he’d done that in twenty-four hours.
“You are finished with the yelling, yes?” he said.
I nodded, and he dropped his hand.
“Who were those men? The ones who were shouting at you in German?”
“It is better if we do not talk about them.”
“Are they Nazis?”
“No,” he said. “They are Jews.”
“Why is it you say everyone I think is a Nazi is a Jew?”
Jakob sighed. “Maybe they are getting more difficult to tell apart.”