A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  • • •

  When we pulled the Radio Flyer up to Good Shepherd, I sent Albie in alone. I couldn’t bring myself to step inside that ocean-y blue light, couldn’t make myself walk into the church I’d run out of only a few months before.

  I waited outside with the wagon, praying Father Barry would not sense me there, the way he sensed any minor transgression—chewing gum, daydreaming—during a Catechism lesson. Albie was back out in less than a minute, his gloveless hands empty.

  “That priest didn’t take his eyes off me for a second. It was like he knew what I was doing there. Like he could tell I wasn’t Catholic.”

  “Not much happens in Good Shepherd Father Barry doesn’t know about.” I picked up the handle of the Radio Flyer.

  Albie stepped in front of the wagon.

  “There were coats in that poor box.”

  “Forget them.”

  I wheeled the Radio Flyer around him.

  “We only need to distract that priest.”

  “Let’s go to Blessed Sacrament.”

  I began walking up Isham Street.

  “You could go in and confess.”

  I shook my head and kept walking, but I didn’t feel him following me. I turned around. Albie was standing on the sidewalk, half-turned toward Good Shepherd.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The bowl of Holy Water in there? It’s very unstable.”

  “Don’t,” I told him.

  “It wouldn’t take much to knock it over.”

  I pictured my mother walking into Good Shepherd for five o’clock Mass—less than an hour from now—and seeing that bowl of Holy Water smashed into a hundred pieces on the tiled floor. Imagined what terrible sign she’d take it for.

  I turned the wagon around.

  “All right,” I said. “But be quick about it. Because I’m going to make this short.”

  The inside of Good Shepherd smelled the same as Father Barry’s suit the day they’d waked my father with an empty coffin, the same as my mother’s clothes smelled every day now. Like Mass incense. Like candy you believe will taste better than it does.

  I dipped my fingers in the Holy Water and moved them to my forehead, heart, shoulders in the sign of the cross. Then I put them in my pocket and pressed them against the barrel of my father’s gun to keep them from recalling the rough feel of my mother’s mouth.

  Father Barry was standing in front of the confessional booths, as if he knew I’d be coming. He said my name, and then he clapped his hands one time, like that was all the applause I deserved.

  I pointed to the confessional, and Father Barry nodded. He spun and went through the door, the hem of his cassock swirling around his ankles.

  It was stuffy inside the confessional, the atmosphere full of other people’s sins. Father Barry’s hair shone white through the holes of the mesh screen that divided his side of the booth from mine.

  I confessed to lying to my mother, and to not having attended P.S. 52 for forty-six consecutive days. Then I sat on the wooden bench and waited for Father Barry to ask me if I was sorry and tell me how many Hail Marys it would take for my sins to be absolved.

  “And why did you not attend school for forty-six days?” Father Barry asked me.

  His voice floated through the holes in the screen, clear and distinct. It was the voice he used when he wanted to accuse us of something—not contributing enough to the building fund, or eating meat on Friday. In his tone, which filled the stuffy atmosphere of the confessional, thickening the air, making it difficult to breathe, I heard that my mother had told him everything. Everything I had told her about my father not being dead, everything she hadn’t believed.

  I gripped the edge of the wooden bench, my arms twitching with fury. First, my mother had given Father Barry all of my father’s clothes, let him send them to darkest Africa, then she had poured the story of what had really happened in the 42nd Street subway station into his hairy ears.

  “I asked you a question,” Father Barry said. “Why you did not attend school for forty-six days?”

  “I was looking for Nazis,” I told him.

  “I should counsel you that lying to a priest is as great a sin as lying to God.”

  “I am not lying.”

  “And why were you looking for Nazis?”

  “Because we’re at war with them.”

  I heard rustling from Father Barry’s side of the confessional. “And that is the only reason?”

  I was gripping the bench so tightly my arms were shaking.

  “Or perhaps the reason has something to do with your father?”

  All the holes in the mesh screen turned flesh-colored as Father Barry brought his face closer.

  “You know that your father is dead, don’t you, Jack?”

  There was a smooth layer of solicitousness floating in Father Barry’s undertone like oil, but beneath that hummed the pure pleasure the priest would take in telling my mother that he had been the one to make me see reason.

  Alone in my side of the confessional, I shook my head.

  “Say it, Jack. Say it instead of a Hail Mary.”

  Though I tried to stop them, Father Barry’s words wormed their way inside my head. That thing he wanted me to say. That lie. It pounded and echoed, making pictures. The way the radio made pictures. Clear and perfect. My father arcing off the subway platform, over and over again. Each time Father Barry’s words echoed—You know your father is dead—a new picture appeared on top of the old one. My father falling. And then falling again. And again.

  It didn’t seem my head could hold all these pictures. I was sure that any minute, the bones of my skull would blow apart.

  “Say . . . I know my father is dead,” Father Barry repeated

  My hands—out of my control now—flew to the mesh screen. The screen filled with the flesh color of Father Barry’s face. I slammed my fists against the flesh-colored holes, over and over, until the screen began to give, and then cut into my knuckles—a thin, sharp, satisfying pain. I only stopped when the light changed on the other side of the confessional, when it was clear that Father Barry had opened the door and fled.

  I bolted back into the ocean-y blueness of the church, ran down the aisle, skirting a pile of clothes spilling out of the poor box. When I reached the bowl of Holy Water—a bowl made of porcelain that truly did look unstable—I wrapped my hands around its edge and gave a sharp tug. The bowl tilted, and then crashed to the floor with a hollow sound that echoed through Good Shepherd.

  As I burst through the door onto the street, I pictured my mother having to step over those sharp-edged pieces of porcelain scattered on the floor, her Mass shoes slipping on the oily water in which she had placed so much faith.

  • • •

  Each night, when I brought the poor box coats we’d collected back to the basement, I sat on the floor with the furnace breathing fire behind me and counted them. Often, I’d take out the coats we’d collected the days before, the ones I’d stuffed between the rusted frames of the broken bicycles and old baby carriages, and count them together, see how close we were to the twenty-three. When I was finished, I’d imagine the refugees, try to picture what they were doing at the exact same moment.

  When the count was six, I pictured them at the camp in Marseilles, all of them wearing clothes that were a little too small, all of them sitting at a long table set outside a barracks, none of them knowing that a submarine was on its way to rescue them. When the count was twelve, I pictured them in the supply truck trundling over unpaved roads toward the harbor, the clanging of bottles in their ears, the rumble of the engine under their feet. When the count was seventeen, I pictured them deep beneath the ocean, stretched out on bunks that hung from the curved sides of the U-boat. They were listening to The Lone Ranger and Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy, learning English the way Ja
kob had—although I was sure the sound of the radio waves wouldn’t carry through the water. Still, I liked thinking of the refugees listening to the same things I listened to. I liked thinking we would have this in common when they floated ashore at Coney Island.

  The night the count was twenty, I’d stuffed the last of the coats between two bicycles with flattened tires and then heard footsteps coming down the stairs behind me.

  “What are you up to down here?”

  It was Uncle Glenn in his spying clothes, barely visible in the dim light of the basement.

  I stood, the coats behind me.

  “Are you going out on Civil Defense patrol?” I said.

  “That would be what your aunt May believes.”

  Uncle Glenn reached the bottom of the stairs and headed toward me.

  I tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go. My legs were pressed up against the hard rim of a flattened bicycle tire.

  Uncle Glenn came closer, near enough for me to see the silver chain of his Civil Defense whistle disappearing into the neck of his new black overcoat. And then he kept going, past me to a teepee of ski poles leaning against the wall. He reached behind them and took out a long, narrow case.

  “I sometimes find it convenient to keep my pool cue down here.”

  He hefted the case, then turned and came back to where I was standing, pressed up against the rusted bicycles.

  “You still didn’t say what you were doing down here.”

  I pointed to the Radio Flyer.

  Uncle Glenn glanced at the wagon. “Aluminum for National Defense.” He read the sign on the side. “Just doing your part for the war effort.”

  The furnace clicked on, sounding as if something inside had caught on fire. It was keeping me from hearing his undertone.

  Uncle Glenn lifted his foot, placed the front of his shoe on the wheel of the Radio Flyer. He nudged the wagon back and forth a few times.

  “I see you and that small kid out with that wagon all the time.”

  I felt the twenty coats behind me like living things.

  “Just doing our part for the war effort,” I repeated.

  Uncle Glenn pushed the Radio Flyer back and forth several more times.

  “That’s it?”

  My hand found its way into the pocket that held my father’s gun.

  “That’s it.”

  We stared at each other. Him, with the front of his shoe on the Radio Flyer’s wheel. Me, with my hand on my father’s gun and the twenty coats behind me. I think in some part of my brain, I believed that those twenty poor box coats were the refugees, and that I was standing guard over them. I don’t know what would have happened if he had taken a step forward, reached around me and yanked one of those coats from between the rusted bicycles.

  Uncle Glenn lifted his foot off the Radio Flyer’s wheel.

  “Don’t tell Aunt May you saw me.”

  “I won’t.”

  The next day, after Albie and I had stolen the twenty-third coat from St. Ignatius, I told him that things would go more smoothly when the refugees landed if we buried the coats at Coney Island.

  • • •

  The day we went to bury the coats was gray and drizzly. I’d divided them between the Radio Flyer and an old baby carriage, and even then, no matter how hard I pressed on them, woolen sleeves kept trailing out the sides, as if the coats were trying to escape. I hid two of Mr. Puccini’s snow shovels in the bottom of the wagon, and thinking that the sand might be damp, I emptied out some burlap bags of dirt I’d found in the basement and stuffed those in there as well.

  Albie and I had to make two trips down the stairs to the subway to get the wagon and the baby carriage to the platform. While we were carrying down the carriage, I asked Albie if he thought the coats we’d left at the top of the steps would be okay, if he thought anybody would take them.

  He squinted at me across a corduroy jacket. “Who except us would want to steal poor box coats?”

  We sat in the crowded subway car, hanging onto the baby carriage and the Radio Flyer, both of them overflowing with old coats, and nobody looked at us twice. People had begun collecting clothes for European refugees by then, and I supposed everybody on the subway believed Albie and I were just kids helping with the war effort.

  It was more drizzly out at Coney Island. We rumbled the Radio Flyer and the baby carriage over the planks of the boardwalk, past old couples bundled up in so many layers they looked stuffed, couples walking with their hands clasped together, as if afraid one of them might disappear in the mist.

  We chose a spot beneath the boardwalk directly below the Parachute Jump—closed today because of the bad weather. To help us find it in the dark, Albie carved a Star of David into one of the wooden pilings. He used a pearl-handled pocketknife that was as good as the flying cap.

  “This is Mordy’s, too,” he told me.

  When he’d finished the carving, I flattened my palm over it, read it like Braille.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  Then we started digging.

  It took much longer to dig a hole in the sand deep enough for twenty-three coats than I’d imagined. Sand slid back into the hole nearly as fast as we shoveled it out, and Mr. Puccini’s snow shovels were big and unwieldy. The day was cold and damp, but before long, we were so warm, we’d thrown our own coats onto the sand.

  It was a quiet day. Only the sound of the ocean breaking on the shore, and the footsteps of the old couples passing overhead, and the occasional seagull laughing in the rain. And over it all, our snow shovels biting into the sand with a soft grinding.

  We lined the hole with the burlap bags, then dumped in the coats. I topped them with another bag before I shoveled the sand back in, flattening it with the backs of Mr. Puccini’s shovels. The sky was a much darker gray when we’d finished.

  We carried the Radio Flyer and the baby carriage up to the boardwalk, where the wind was whipping the cables of the Parachute Jump, clanging them against its steel base. I was anxious to get back on the subway, to get the wagon and the baby carriage back into the basement before anyone noticed they were missing. But Albie was leaning against the railing, looking out at the dull gray sea.

  “Where do you think they are right now?” he said.

  The waves were choppy, as if a storm was brewing.

  “Coming toward us,” I told him.

  Then I said something about the rain and dinner, and we headed toward the subway.

  • • •

  When Albie and I came out of the subway on Dyckman Street, the sky was black and the rain had turned to sleet.

  “Do you want help with this?” Albie held up the handle of the Radio Flyer.

  “It’s not far,” I told him.

  I was partway up the block when I saw Jakob leaning against the stoop of our building. I knew it was him despite the darkness and despite my eyes. Knew it from the way he was huddled into himself, taking up so little space. Knew it from the way he was doing the one thing to guarantee Uncle Glenn would notice him the instant he stepped outside, the instant he stepped through the door that was right above Jakob’s head—which, judging by the dark, would happen any second.

  I began running up the block—even as I was asking myself why, why I was so worried that my uncle would discover me talking to Jakob—tilting the baby carriage crazily, yanking the Radio Flyer off its front wheels.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked him.

  The shoulders of Jakob’s jacket were soaked black and his hair hung wet in his eyes.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Did you ring my bell?”

  He nodded.

  “My mother doesn’t answer it.” I glanced up at the door. “Why did you come?”

  “You have not been down to see me.”

  “We’ve been busy, collecting c
oats.”

  “You have them all?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. Because they will arrive in three days.”

  I counted in my head. “Wednesday.”

  “They will come ashore not long after it turns dark.”

  I pictured it—the boats on the beach, my father stepping out of the darkroom.

  There was a sharp bang. The door to our building had been flung open, and someone dressed all in black hurried out. It was Mr. Carbone from 2F, running down the stairs with a newspaper over his head.

  I exhaled.

  “Is that it?”

  “Well,” Jakob said, “I suppose there is one thing you should know.”

  “Yes?” I was already pushing the baby carriage toward the basement stairs.

  “The refugees, one of them is deaf.”

  Fourteen

  This is the story I didn’t know the afternoon I followed Rose LoPinto home from P.S. 52 with the intention of asking her to come to Coney Island and translate for the deaf refugee. The story Rose wouldn’t tell me until much later, until it was almost too late.

  The first English word Rose’s father learned on his arrival from Sicily as a ten-year-old boy was wop. The second was dago. And the third was slow, which was what the teacher called him when he couldn’t learn to read any of the textbooks in the farm town of Newburgh, New York. After a year, Anthony LoPinto traded his desk in the schoolhouse for an upturned bucket in the blood-soaked yard of the local butcher, a man named Colson Gammon, who had once cut up a whole hog while blindfolded.

  Anthony LoPinto might have been bad with a book, but he was good with a knife. Gammon claimed the boy possessed an ability for it, as if he could see the tendons and muscles of the animal inside his head. “That slow wop kid?” the other men laughed.

  “You have to watch him,” Gammon told them. “He’ll stand in front of a side of beef, the thing hanging there twice his size, staring at it like he’s seeing through the hide to each cut. Haunch, flank, shoulder. Then when he’s got it all pictured inside his head, he’ll take the knife and start cutting. Never makes a wrong move.”