Loving Liberty Levine

by Colin Falconer

  “Which man? This Mr. George Seabrook?”

  Sarah didn’t answer. They looked at each other, and Sarah waited for her sister to work it through. “So Libby is this Seabrook’s daughter,” Etta said.

  Sarah nodded.

  “And Jack is his son?” Etta’s eyes widened. “That is why you wouldn’t let her see him.”

  “Yes. That is why.”

  Etta took Sarah’s hands in hers.

  “Did your Dewey know this Mr. George Seabrook?”

  “Sure he knew him. That is how my Libby knows his Jack.”

  “But she is his sister. They nearly make romance. And she doesn’t know? You don’t tell her?”

  Sarah couldn’t raise her eyes from the floor. She just shook her head.

  “Oh, Sura!”

  Sarah shook her hands like they were covered in something foul and she could not get it off. “You tell one lie, then you have to tell another because of that first lie. Before you know, everything has gone bopkes.”

  Etta got up and paced the room, her arms folded across her middle as if it was hurting her. She went to the window, parted the lace curtains, looked out at the street. “Look at this America,” she said. “All these brick houses and bigness and nobody talking. Look what it does to us.”

  “It is not America does this,” Sarah said. “I did it. Nobody else.”

  “Oh, Sura, Sura.”

  “One thing I wanted, what I promised. I would never lose my Libby. And what happens? She is like a stranger to me now. She is polite, she writes letters, but my daughter, I don’t think so. Nothing like before. She hates me. And now, now she is going off to some stupid war, like my Micha.”

  Etta stared out the window for a long time, not saying anything. Finally: “You have to tell her.”

  “I can’t. Not now.”

  “You must, Sura.”

  “I will lose her for always.”

  “And that is different how? Do it, Sura. Do it before it is too late. Don’t do it because you will lose her or you will not lose her. Do it because it is the right thing, and because she deserves to know.”

  Sarah nodded. Etta was right. She was always right about such things. Even if her Libby never forgave, at least Sarah would not have to live with this burden anymore. And how could Libby ever forgive? For being a possessive mother, for meddling, maybe. But to forgive for not being her mother at all?

  How could she ever do that?

  A gray, grim day outside. Isn’t it supposed to be spring? Sarah thought. It was like the war had affected everything. The man beside her in the café had the New York Times open on the table in front of him while he drank his coffee. Sarah read the headlines over his shoulder.

  Wainwright had surrendered Corregidor, and the Germans were still attacking Russia, somewhere called Kharkov. The newspaper said the Russians’ sixth and ninth armies had been encircled. That sounded to her like a lot of armies.

  There was another whole column about Jews in France and Belgium having to wear a yellow Star of David wherever they went. She thought about their Zlota. Still no word. She wondered if they were making all the Jews in Tallinn wear yellow stars as well. Hadn’t she tried to tell them all? Doesn’t matter if it’s Germans or Russians, none of them like us.

  She watched the crowds hurrying to and from Penn Station, so many uniforms now, even the Camel man in the poster in Times Square had a flying helmet and goggles on. Everything was war, war, war, just what they had come to America to hide from. Seemed to her, you tried to run away from badness, but in the end, it came after you.

  She felt again for the package on the seat beside her. Most days she came out with just a clutch for powder and her purse; today she had with her a large leather bag, not her usual show-off thing from Bergdorf or Saks, a cheap thing, but big enough to put the parcel in, and Libby couldn’t sneer at her for being too hoity-toity.

  The waitress brought her coffee, and she stirred sugar into it, then let it go cold. She felt like she was going to be sick. All these years she had kept what she had in her bag hidden away, under beds, in secret drawers in desks, and these last few years in a safe-deposit box in her bank.

  But Etta was right, it was time to stop with all the hiding. This might be her last chance to do things right.

  “Mama.”

  Sarah looked up, and there she was, her Libby, standing there in her blues and forage cap. “Wasn’t sure you’d come to see me off. It was good to get your message.”

  “Sure I’m coming, what else am I going to do?”

  Libby sat down. How beautiful she looks, Sarah thought. A new perm in her hair, her eyes shining, excited or afraid, maybe both. She saw two sailors look over at her daughter from another booth, and she glared back at them until they looked the other way.

  “Leave them be, Mama,” Libby said. “They don’t mean any harm.”

  “You have men look at you like this all the time now? Is because you are nurse, doing I don’t know what.”

  “I can look after myself, Mama.”

  The waitress brought Libby coffee.

  “I still don’t understand why you want to go fight Germans like . . .” She was about to say, like your father, and stopped herself. “Like my Micha.”

  “I’m a nurse, Mama. The war is where young nurses are needed the most right now. Word is they’re sending us overseas on the USS Wakefield, bound for Scotland. After that, no one knows.”

  “Scotland? They got Germans in Scotland now?”

  “Field training, I think.”

  “I thought you already got training in Washington.”

  “Combat training, and other things you won’t want to know about. What’s that you’ve got there. Is that for me?”

  Sarah didn’t answer. No, she thought. No, I can’t do it.

  “Mama?”

  No, you got to, she heard Etta say.

  Sarah picked up the bag and put it on the table between them.

  “You’re trembling, Mama.”

  “Open it.”

  Libby unzipped the bag and looked inside. She took out the biscuit box.

  “You bought me biscuits? The army does feed us, Mama.”

  Sarah nodded at the bag, and Libby reached in and took out an old leather-bound notebook. A child’s drawing, scrawled on yellowing butcher’s paper, fell out of it onto the floor. Libby picked it up, frowning.

  “Your baby book,” Sarah said. “You asked me once about it. Well, here it is, all yours now.”

  “Why are you giving me this now? You’re being very mysterious, Mama.”

  Libby opened the book. There were diary entries in Yiddish, written in Sarah’s careful Hebrew letters.

  “You remember your Yiddish?”

  “I remember it.”

  “Then you can read for yourself. You see the dates? It begins 1913, the year you were born.”

  Libby flipped through the pages. “Why are there two columns? I don’t understand.”

  “Open the box.”

  Libby pulled up the lid. She peered inside, sorted with her forefinger through the medals and papers inside.

  “Read this newspaper here,” Sarah said.

  Sarah unfolded the yellow scrap of newspaper very carefully. It was worn thin, as delicate as a butterfly cocoon. Libby brought it closer to her face to look more closely at the photograph.

  “Micha cut it out of the newspaper.”

  “It’s from the year I was born.”

  “I didn’t find this newspaper until after he died, I swear you.”

  Libby read it quickly, and the color drained out of her face. “This is me? I’m the baby?”

  “That is why the two columns in the baby book. One side is what is real, the other one is what I tell my vati and mutti and everyone. So they think you are really mine.”

  Libby looked as if she was about to say something, then shook her head. Sarah took Libby’s hand, but she pulled it away. “Micha said you were a foundling girl. I didn’t want my vati to know. At
the time, I think, what else I can do? I cannot write: Oh, when I get to America, I find this baby on the street, be happy for me. Micha said it was better this way. He never told me about the newspaper, about George Seabrook. Not a word.”

  Libby stared out the window. A flurry of rain whipped against the glass. Finally, she put both hands to her throat. She was wearing a locket on a gold chain. She slipped it over her head and opened it. Inside the locket was a grainy black-and-white photograph, the picture of Micha that Sarah had given her all those years ago. “This man is not my father?”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “He did it for me,” Sarah said. “He was not a bad man, Libby, please believe.”

  “Let me get this straight, Mama. You’re telling me George Seabrook is my father. That’s why you stopped me seeing Jack.”

  “I was scared to tell you. I think maybe you will never forgive me.” She waited for a denial, but there wasn’t one. She put her finger on the newspaper cutting. “I don’t know why this Mrs. Seabrook came to be in the hotel, alone, with you. Maybe only George Seabrook knows the answer to this.”

  “He doesn’t know about me either?”

  “Until now, no one knows. This morning, I go to see Etta, make better with her, like you said. And then, it just comes out of me, I cannot stop it. And Etta, she begs me, she says, Sarah, Sarah, you got to tell her.”

  “This”—Libby stared at the newspaper cutting—“this Clare Seabrook was my real mother?”

  “I am still your mama.”

  Libby looked away.

  “I raised you from when you were a little nothing. I fed you; I brought you hot soup when you were sick; I been there for you, always. Tell me, how am I not your mother, bubeleh?”

  “When did you find out, Mama? When did you know?”

  “Only when my Micha didn’t come back from the war, I found this box hidden under our bed with his private things.”

  “And you still didn’t tell anyone?”

  “I tried so hard to be rich for you, make sure you do not have the poor life, you do not suffer because of what we did, Micha and me.”

  “You have to tell him. You have to tell Jack’s father.”

  “I can’t, bubeleh.”

  “If you don’t, I will.”

  Oh, the look on her Liberty’s face. Sarah knew she was right, like Etta was right. How had all these secrets ever helped for anything?

  “Promise me!”

  “I promise,” she said. She tried again to reach for Libby’s hand, but she pulled away.

  “I have to go,” Libby said.

  She walked out, left the notebook and the biscuit box on the table where she’d dropped them. Sarah crammed them back into the leather bag, threw some money on the table, and went after her. She almost lost her in the crowd, buffeted this way and that by all the people.

  Finally, she caught up with her, tried to catch her arm, but Liberty shrugged free.

  “Libby!”

  “I’m sorry, Mama. Please just go home. I can’t bear to even look at you right now.”

  She turned away and was soon lost in the crowds milling about the station entrance. Some people stared at the crazy woman in the Chanel coat who was shouting “Come back, come back!” with her mascara running down her face. But then, there were a lot of people crying outside Penn Station that day. There was a war on, and everyone had their own problems.

  62

  Two Miles off the Coast of Oran, Algeria, November 8, 1942

  Liberty felt the hull dip and lurch on the ocean swell, heard the dull thunder of guns from the beach. The scuttlebutt was the French wouldn’t fight, but that’s not how it sounded to her. It looked like she was going to war after all. They had been told to expect to come under heavy fire when they got to the beach.

  This waiting was the worst part. She knew she should be scared, like everyone else, but all she could think about was the same thing she had thought about ever since she left New York, that thing her mama had told her in the diner across the street from Penn Station.

  You’re not who you think you are.

  She had been in a daze when she left the diner, couldn’t even remember catching her train at Penn. It was all a blur. Every day since, she had thought about next to nothing else. When she rejoined the other nurses at the surgical unit, they thought it was all because of a man.

  “Levine’s got herself a beau. Still thinking about mystery man, dreamy head?”

  If only it was that simple.

  Everything her mama had said kept churning over and over in her mind on the long voyage over the Atlantic and on the train down from Scotland. They had finally ended up in a barracks in some place called Shipton Bellinger in the south of England. She had never heard of it, and neither had any of the other girls. She didn’t even know exactly where she was. Nothing seemed real, not her past or her present. It was like she had been cut adrift from the world, from everything she had ever known. Was she Liberty Levine or No-Name Seabrook, missing, presumed dead since 1913? Perhaps neither, perhaps she was just the number on her dog tags.

  Once they got to England, they had been loaded with field packs and sent tramping through the hills every day on long hikes. She had loved it because, by the end of every day, she was too exhausted to think anymore. For two months it was just walk and sleep. Before she knew it, they were on a train back to Scotland. They boarded a troopship called Monarch of Bermuda in a damp, gray place called Greenock. No one told them where they were going. They were just a handful of nurses surrounded by a wolf-whistling Ranger battalion and some boys from the Sixteenth Infantry. New York boys, one of the girls had said. “Hey, Levine, you’re from New York. You can make the introductions.”

  Joking around. Only it wasn’t funny.

  Months now, and she couldn’t make her peace with this. So many things that seemed at odds in the past made sense to her now; but there was still so much that didn’t. Too many questions she should have asked.

  “Did you ever love Dewey, or was that whole marriage about me?”

  “Didn’t George Seabrook ever once guess? Don’t I look even a little like my mother?”

  I must look something like her, Libby thought, because I sure as hell don’t see anything of me in George.

  At least she knew why her mama had gone so far out of her way to come between her and Jack.

  Jack.

  A few days ago, she had been standing on A Deck, watching some GIs exercising on the deck below her, and she thought she’d seen him, for a moment. Her mind playing tricks, because Jack Seabrook was in England the last she had heard, still running Daddy’s business. Even if Jack was in uniform, George Seabrook would have found a way to keep him out of all this, get him posted to a cozy headquarters somewhere, leave the real fighting to the guys and girls from Orchard Street.

  An artillery shell landed close off the starboard side.

  It was still dark outside the porthole. She looked at the luminous dial on her watch. Five fifteen, and all the tables in the mess were crowded. All the officers and nurses in combat fatigues, no one talking much, a few whispered conversations, everyone getting ready.

  “It’s started,” someone said, and they went up to A Deck to watch the first wave of the Sixteenth Infantry Division getting ready to board the landing barges below them.

  One by one the barges pulled away from the ship and headed for the shore. It was getting on to dawn, but the navy destroyers were lobbing smoke shells into the water to provide cover for the GIs. It all looked almost ghostly in the sparse gray light.

  “We’re next,” someone said.

  63

  The day vanished in an instant, though there were minutes of it that seemed to last an eternity. The front line moved five miles inland, and a captain assured them the last of the French and Arab snipers had been eliminated.

  The Forty-Eighth Surgical had been moved into a shack back from the beach, behind the command headquarters. Libby opened her C rations and stared at the
glop inside with little enthusiasm. Something made her think about the pickle man on Delancey Street.

  She peered out through the shattered window. The LCI were being unloaded on the shore, a chain of GIs ferrying boxes of supplies from the small boats to the shore. She heard the nerve-wearing metallic clanking of the bulldozers working the beach, compacting the sand for the half-tracks.

  The blackout was scheduled for 1800. All the lights went out on the LCI, and they were plunged into the dark.

  She curled up on the cold tile floor and stared at the ceiling, watched the artillery flashes play along the sky through a hole in the tin roof. The army was engaged in a full-scale assault on Oran.

  North Africa, it was supposed to be hot. She had expected palm trees and a blazing sun. Instead she lay there shivering with cold. Her fatigues were stiff as cardboard from the salt water. There had been hardly any sun to dry them. Her eyes were still smarting from seawater, where she had gone under while wading onto the beach. There was sand in her underwear and in her boots, and she was too tired to do anything about it.

  She heard one of the other nurses crying in the dark. They grow them tougher on the Lower East Side, she thought. Frankie would be proud of me.

  Libby closed her eyes, thought about Micha, the man in the black-and-white photograph, whose likeness she had kept around her neck for so many years. She felt for the locket, remembered yet again she had left it on the table in the diner, next to the biscuit box and the leather-bound diary. She wished she still had it, for luck.

  Was this how it was for him, she thought, on his first day in a real battle? Was he brave, or was he shaking and terrified, like I am now? What did he think about on his last day? If only I could go back and ask him, so many things I want to know, most of all—what really happened the night he made me his daughter.