A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  The men didn’t believe Gammon. They came to the blood-soaked yard with the trickiest cutting jobs. Goats and spring lambs. Even a hare. They strung each up on the hook and sat on the upturned buckets as if at a show, waiting for the slow wop kid to butcher the meat. Whatever they brought, he could always do it.

  Anthony’s ability with a knife eventually earned him enough money to open his own butcher shop in Yonkers, away from the town that knew him as the slow wop kid. Enough to marry. Lucia, a girl just arrived from his hometown in Sicily, a girl with hair black as a winter’s night and almond-shaped eyes of such an impossible darkness, you were in danger of falling into them.

  Rose would tell me that as a child she’d spend hours staring into her mother’s eyes, that her mother was the kind of person who’d sit quietly still while you did such a thing.

  But Lucia was shy in a way even her beauty couldn’t compensate for. In the evenings, Anthony sat with his new wife practicing the simple English phrases she would need to buy food or talk to the neighbors. But Lucia never used those phrases. She was too shy to set foot in a shop that contained even one person she did not already know, too shy to answer the women who hailed her from their apartment windows as she clothespinned Anthony’s shirts to the line outside her own.

  After Rose was born, Anthony hoped the little girl would bring enough English into the apartment to entice her mother to learn it. But as his daughter grew older—certainly old enough to begin talking, he thought—she remained as quiet as her mother.

  One evening, Anthony arrived home from the butcher shop earlier than usual and heard Lucia’s voice coming from the kitchen. His wife was speaking in a rush of Sicilian, more words strung together than he’d heard her say in all the years he’d known her, and he wondered who she was talking with. He listened, but the only reply was the knocking of the wooden bobbin Rose liked to play with against the floor.

  Lucia was talking about the elementary school she’d attended in Sicily. How they always seemed to be studying Garibaldi, but to this day, she knew very little about Garibaldi because she’d always been thinking about the boy who’d left to go to America. Sometimes, she told her daughter, she’d pretend the dust on her shoes—dust that had come from the lemon grove outside the window—was the same dust he walked on, dust that had seen the feet of wild Indians and buffalo.

  Anthony came around the corner, thinking how disappointed his wife must have been to arrive in New York, a place that was nothing like the Wild West. Lucia was still talking, the Sicilian pouring out of her mouth so effortlessly, he might not have recognized her if she hadn’t been standing in her own kitchen. Rose sat on the floor with the wooden bobbin, not listening to anything her mother was saying. No, Anthony thought as he watched his daughter roll the bobbin around her shoes. Rose wasn’t hearing anything her mother was saying. Which, he realized, was what was giving his wife the courage to keep talking.

  I always believed, Rose would tell me later, that this was the day my father stopped loving my mother.

  If I had known this story the gray-sky afternoon I followed Rose LoPinto’s camel-colored coat up Academy Street and onto Sherman Avenue, I might have known sooner how to convince her to help me. But all I knew then was that Rose could talk with her hands. I’d seen her do it once, with a boy on the playground at P.S. 52, the two of them speaking in that secret language that was like a code you kept inside your head. A code that seemed better than anything you could send away for from the radio.

  Rose’s building was nicer than ours. The mailboxes had locks that worked, and there was a glass door between me and the stairs to the apartments. I pressed the button next to the piece of cardboard that said LoPinto, and after a moment, Rose’s voice came out of the little holes in the wall.

  “I need to ask you something,” I shouted at the wall.

  I had an image of Rose standing on a chair so the microphone box at her throat would be level with the speaker.

  “Jack?”

  “It’s important,” I shouted. “And secret.”

  The glass door buzzed and I lunged for it.

  I ran up the steps to Rose’s apartment and knocked on the door. Rose opened it and stood there looking at me.

  I realized then that I’d never seen her from straight on. I was always sitting next to her, looking at her from the side. She was wearing a plaid wool jumper that day—a pattern I think was called black watch—and a white blouse, and I’d never noticed before how from straight on, her black curls exploded around the metal headband she wore to hold the RadioEar receiver. I might have stood in the hallway noticing that for a while.

  “Is this something you have to come in and ask me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

  She led me into the living room and we sat together on a green sofa. Across from us, where other people might have hung a family portrait, were framed pictures of Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt.

  “Those belong to my father,” she told me.

  “Is anybody else here?” I asked her.

  “Only my mother, but she’s in her bedroom. She won’t come out until you leave.”

  “My mother’s like that now,” I told her.

  “My mother’s always been like that.”

  Rose sat and waited for me to say what I’d come here to say. I sat wishing I could tell her all about my father. But I didn’t have any experience telling secrets to girls, and I didn’t know how much you could trust them.

  What I ended up telling her was that Albie Battaglia and I were helping a friend bring in some refugees, and that one was deaf, and that I needed her to come to the beach at Coney Island at night and translate everything I said into the secret language I knew she could speak with her hands.

  It was the first time I’d said so many words in a row to Rose. The first time I’d said so many that had come from my own head and not from the lips of a teacher. And when I was finished talking, I sat on the green sofa all out of breath, as if I’d been running.

  “Why are they coming into Coney Island?” she asked. “And why at night?”

  From the far wall, the unblinking eyes of Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt bore into me.

  “It’s possible they don’t have visas.”

  “So, they’re not supposed to be here?”

  “They were supposed to be here. Until the Allies invaded North Africa.”

  Rose’s dark eyes flicked across the room, and for the first time I noticed the blue star hanging in her front window. I tried to remember if she had a brother.

  “You and Albie Battaglia are sneaking in Jewish refugees and you want me to help you?”

  “Only with the deaf one.”

  She folded her hands in her black watch lap and shook her head. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Do you know where my father is?”

  “At work?”

  “North Africa.”

  I glanced back at the star in the window. “Your father’s in the army?”

  She nodded. “So I can’t be doing anything treasonous.”

  “It’s only talking with your hands.”

  “It’s called signing.”

  “Signing,” I repeated. “How can that be treasonous?”

  “Is what you’re doing illegal?”

  “Your part won’t be.”

  Rose shook her head again, her dark eyes glued to that blue star.

  “It’ll be dark,” I told her. “We might lose the deaf refugee on the beach.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Not as long as my father is in North Africa.”

  • • •

  I could have taken Rose at her word, could have figured we’d hang onto the deaf refugee by the sleeve of the poor box coat, make gestures in the dark. But by then, I’d looked straight at Rose for too long, said too many wo
rds to her that had been born inside my own head. By then, I wanted her on that beach.

  The following afternoon, I ran after Rose’s camel-colored coat as it headed up Academy Street and asked her to come with me to Bickman’s Fountain.

  “An ice cream soda isn’t going to change my mind,” she told me.

  “Then no danger in coming.”

  I had no actual plan, no words ready to convince her. But I believed I had a better chance away from the twin stares of Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt.

  Bickman’s Fountain was bright and sugary. Fluorescent light bounced off the chrome edges of the stools, and the air was full of the scent of ice cream, a scent so sweet it made your skin feel sticky. It was a cold day for ice cream. The only person inside Bickman’s—except Mr. Bickman scowling behind the counter—was an old man in a hat eating a chocolate sundae.

  Rose sat in one of the pistachio-colored booths and unbuttoned her coat. When I asked her what she wanted, she told me a glass of water.

  “It’s my treat,” I told her. I’d taken thirty-five cents out of my mother’s wallet that morning.

  “Just a glass of water,” she repeated.

  “Ice cream doesn’t mean you’ll come to Coney Island,” I said.

  “I know.” Rose slipped off her coat. “I’m just not eating any sugar.”

  I pointed to the wall behind the counter where Mr. Bickman had taped up pictures of ice cream sodas and sundaes. “You don’t have to use your ration coupons here.”

  “I know that, too.” Rose pulled a napkin out of the dispenser and began folding it into perfect squares.

  I wanted to ask her for more explanation, because nobody came to Bickman’s and ordered water, but there was something about the way she was folding that napkin that stopped me.

  I went to the counter and got a black-and-white for myself and a glass of water for Rose. In the time I’d been away, she’d folded three more napkins into perfect squares.

  “Do you want a sip?” I asked her. “Since I’m the one who ordered it.”

  “No, thank you.”

  I sucked on the straw. The black-and-white was cold and sweet and tasted oddly of Fascism.

  “Do you think I could have the money you would have spent on my soda?” Rose asked.

  It was such a startling request, I couldn’t think to do anything except reach into my pocket and empty all the change there onto the table between us. The coins made a metallic racket, the dimes twirling around on their edges before flattening and going silent.

  Rose glanced at the wall with the pictures of ice cream sodas and sundaes, and—I now realized—how much they cost. She slid a dime over to her side of the table.

  “What would you have gotten?” I asked her.

  She nodded at my half-empty glass. I smiled around my straw.

  She opened her schoolbag and took out a My First War Bond book. It was exactly like mine, except that hers was nearly full instead of entirely empty. She slipped my dime into one of the half-moons.

  I pointed to the war bond book. “Is that your first one?”

  “Fourth,” she said. Then, “No, fifth.”

  I looked at the perfectly folded napkins in front of her. Six of them now.

  “And when exactly did you stop eating sugar?”

  She took a small sip of water.

  “When my father got his orders.”

  It came to me in a sugary rush along with my black-and-white. And why wouldn’t it? It was the kind of thinking that made perfect sense to me. Rose believed that if she didn’t eat sugar, if she filled enough My First War Bond books, her father would come home safe from the war.

  I looked at her across the scattered coins.

  “You know,” I said, “what your father is doing in North Africa isn’t any different from what Albie and I are doing.”

  “It’s entirely different.” She drank a swallow of water as if it was something she actually wanted.

  “Your father is fighting the people who are killing Jews.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do I know the Nazis are killing Jews?”

  She nodded.

  “From my friend. He was in Germany. He talked to somebody who saw it.”

  Rose stared at me with her dark eyes. I tried not to sink into them.

  “That means your father is saving Jews. Just like we are.”

  I sipped my black-and-white.

  “You’re doing something illegal,” Rose said. “My father would never break one of this country’s laws.”

  “Unless,” I paused for emphasis, “following that law meant you were acting the same as the Nazis.”

  Rose stared at me over her glass of water, her folded napkins.

  “I don’t believe your father would do that, would he?” I took another sip of my soda. “I don’t believe you would do that either.”

  I put my elbows on the table covered with my mother’s change and directed my words at the microphone box pinned to the collar of Rose’s blouse—navy blue today.

  “Because you have to do everything you can here, to help your father there.”

  Rose was looking right into my eyes. I held onto the edge of the table to keep myself focused.

  “Which makes helping us with the deaf refugee pretty much the same as filling that war bond book or not having an ice cream soda.”

  I sat back and sucked up the last cold drops of the black-and-white.

  “At least that’s how I would think of it.”

  Rose stared down at the stack of perfectly folded napkins.

  The man in the hat finished his sundae and walked out of Bickman’s.

  Then she raised her head.

  “Where exactly at Coney Island?”

  • • •

  That night I left a message for my father that said

  VTXU OT WGNGBYLU WKTOT OTXTNNTP 22 WX

  which meant

  COME TO PARADISE PHOTO TOMORROW 9 PM.

  After I put it in the mailbox, I stood with my hand pressed against the door, feeling all the small holes that had been punched into it under my fingertips. The next time I have something to tell my father, I thought, I will say it out loud to him.

  Fifteen

  On Wednesday morning—the day the refugees were to land—I told my mother I had to stay late at P.S. 52. “We’re rehearsing the Thanksgiving pageant,” I said. “The Landing of the Mayflower.”

  “Will you be late?” she asked. She was buttoning her coat over one of her brown outfits.

  “Yes,” I told her. “Very.”

  I left the apartment with my father’s gun in the stretched-out pocket of my jacket. All day it hung from a peg in the cloakroom of Miss Milhaus’s classroom.

  At three o’clock, Albie and I collected the snow shovels from the basement. We walked to the subway with them propped on our shoulders, as if we expected a blizzard to come tumbling out of the cloudless blue sky.

  When we arrived at Coney Island, the sun had already gone down behind the buildings. It was dark and cold under the boardwalk. We walked from piling to piling in the deepening dusk, pressing our fingers into the splintery wood like blind people reading a stranger’s face. At last I felt the Star of David under my hands, my fingertips slipping into its outline the way they’d slipped into the notches and valleys of my father’s film sheets.

  We began digging.

  The moon rose. It was only a quarter full, but the sky was clear and it cast a pale white light on the sand.

  Rose arrived, appearing in a spot where nothing had been a moment before. She was wearing the camel-colored coat, and even standing beneath the boardwalk, she reflected moonlight.

  Not long after Rose’s arrival, my shovel caught on the burlap covering the coats. We stopped digging and Albie jumped into
the hole, began tossing the coats up to me. Despite the burlap, they were damp and sandy in my arms.

  The first boat came as a scraping sound. Something being dragged over the sand and small bits of broken shell at the water’s edge.

  I sent Albie, who could speak Yiddish, and Rose, who could speak that secret language. I jumped into the hole to toss out the rest of the coats.

  I carried as many of them as I could to the water’s edge. Four people who were not Rose or Albie stood shivering on the moonlit sand. Beside them in the darkness sat the rounded shape of an inflatable boat.

  I wanted to touch these people, press my palms against their beating hearts, feel the rise and fall of their breath beneath my hands, prove to myself they were real. But my arms were full of coats.

  Albie said something in Yiddish, and the four refugees came and pulled the coats from my arms. My nose tingled with the sharp yeasty smell of people who haven’t bathed in a while.

  A second scraping sound came from farther down the beach, and I ran back for more coats.

  Six more refugees stood dripping seawater on the sand when I returned. The pale light of the quarter-moon turned everything on the beach black-and-white, made the refugees into one of my father’s photographs. Seven boys wearing pants that were soaked dark to the knee. Three girls, all in dresses that hung wet to the beach. The girls pulled the coats from my arms with small hands, holding them up to their shoulders. The boys looked out at the water. I wanted Albie to ask these people if they knew the Lone Ranger, or Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy, but another boat was scraping across the wet sand, and they would need coats.

  It was while I was gathering these coats into my arms that footsteps sounded above my head. One person in hard shoes, walking slowly, then stopping right over me, right in front of the Parachute Jump. I dropped the coats and went to the end of the pier, squinted toward the water’s edge. Even with my eyes, I could see them. A bunch of kids on the beach, bits of their clothing catching white in the moonlight.