“Come on,” Peggy says to me. “Have a seat.”
I slide across from them and pick up a thick plastic menu, but I do not actually read it. Instead, I listen to the sounds of their voices: back and forth and back and forth, like Ping-Pong. Are they arguing or are they chatting? It’s hard to tell. Their words move so fast, thick with much emotion. I want to reach my hand out and capture them, to hold on to them and take them home with me to my apartment, to keep them there with me at night, when it is hard to find sleep. But Shelby and her sister, their words are like bubbles. Even if I could grab on to them, just for a moment, they would pop and disappear.
Can I read your diary? I hear my sister’s voice in my head. She asked me that once, as we lay there together, hip to hip. Her voice was still light then, much the way Shelby’s is now.
If I can read yours, I told her, and then we switched books. Because why not? There was no privacy anymore. And besides, maybe I’d wanted her to know exactly how I felt about Peter, so I could claim him for my own. Not that that was the way things ever worked between us.
“Peg,” I hear Margie saying now. “You must go see the movie. Peeter is so dreamy.”
Oh, the movie. Clearly, I have underestimated her; Shelby is not done talking about it.
Peggy laughs and shakes her head. “Only you would see that movie as a romance, Shel.”
“That’s not true,” Shelby says, picking up her own thick plastic menu and hiding behind it with mock offense. “He’s dreamy. That’s a bona fide fact.” She lowers her menu and stares pointedly at me. “See,” she says, wagging her forefinger at me. “You should’ve come with me, Margie, so you could back me up on this.”
“What makes him so dreamy?” I ask, and the sound of my own voice startles me, as if the question has popped out of my mouth, without my permission. Immediately, I want to take it back.
“The way he hangs on to Anne and kisses her, just as they’re about to be ripped out of the annex . . .” She shakes her head. “You have to see it.”
“That didn’t happen,” I say softly.
“How do you know?” Shelby asks, and I realize I have said too much. I feel my brow breaking into a sweat, and I am ready to stand and run. The way he hangs on to Anne and kisses her . . .
“Of course, Margie’s right, Shel,” I hear Peggy saying, though her voice sounds very far away. “It was just a movie. Do you really think hiding from the Nazis was romantic?”
“I don’t know,” Shelby says. “Maybe. All cooped up like that, with nowhere to go.”
Peggy rolls her eyes in my direction, but I cast my gaze down, toward the table. My stomach turns, and I stare at the menu, as if I am trying very hard to decide what I should eat, though now I am no longer hungry in the least. I breathe deeply, fighting the urge to stand up and run out of the diner. For a few moments I concentrate on my breath, in and out and in and out, until I hear the conversation turn, and Peggy and Shelby start bickering over which sandwich to share for dinner.
“Fine,” Shelby is saying now. “If you don’t want hot turkey then Margie will split with me instead, won’t you, Margie?” I look up and nod slowly, carefully.
Peggy rolls her eyes again. “Everything is always so difficult with you, Shel.” But she says it lightly and with a smile, so I know she is teasing.
Shelby elbows her sister and laughs. The sound of it now, once again, falling over me like a stream.
CHAPTER FIVE
BACK IN MY APARTMENT, LATER THAT EVENING, I LIE ON THE blue couch with Katze and think about what Shelby said. The way he hangs on to Anne and kisses her . . .
That is ridiculous, not at all what happened. Not even close.
I stare at the phone. I have not called to look for him for so long. But now I wonder again, for maybe the millionth time: what is true and what is not? If the movie is filled with such outrageous stories like the one Shelby spoke of, well . . .
I kept a diary before my sister even started hers, before the annex even. In 1941, I wrote about a boy named Johann, who had straw-colored hair and pale blue eyes and who lived around the block from us on the Merwedeplein. I wanted him to notice me so badly it made my stomach hurt.
Once, before the annex, my sister had picked the diary up off my dressing stand and read it without asking me.
“Who’s Johann?” she asked me.
“That’s private,” I told her.
“You tell Maria, but you won’t tell me.” She put her hands on her hips, honestly offended, as if Maria were a real person whom I loved more than I loved her. Maria was just the name I called my diary, only further evidence of her snooping.
“Johann is not a real person. He’s just a character,” I lied.
“Oh.” Her eyes lit up then. “You’re telling stories.”
I remind myself of this moment so often, every time I look through the book. Every time I read the words she has written about Peter. And again now, having heard Shelby’s description of the movie.
You’re telling stories.
I stand up and reach for the phone on my kitchen counter; I pull the dial to 0 again, and this time, I quickly let it go before I lose my nerve.
“Operator,” the woman’s voice says.
“I need the address and number for a Peter Pelt, Philadelphia,” I tell her. The words shake in my throat. Peter Pelt. That was the name he told me he would go by, in Philadelphia. I will no longer be a Jew, he’d whispered to me as we were lying on the divan in his room, more than once. I will leave everything behind. Hiding who you are, it’ll be so much easier than hiding where you are. He would be Peter Pelt, and I would be Margie Franklin. We would come to Philadelphia, and we would be Gentiles together, safe together.
“Just a moment,” the operator says now.
I hold my breath and close my eyes. According to the Red Cross, Peter died in 1945, after a death march to Mauthausen. But also, my sister and I both died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen.
“Miss.” The operator comes back, and I am waiting for her to say it again: that he doesn’t exist. Peter van Pels died, near Mauthausen, fifteen years ago, almost. “Here you go,” she says instead. “I’ve got a P. Pelt, at 2217 Olney Avenue, Apartment 4A . . .” She is still talking, but my ears buzz so loud, I almost cannot understand what she is saying.
I have not called to ask for him for so long. How long has this listing been there? Peter died, near Mauthausen.
After the war, we will go to Philadelphia, he told me, so many times. We will find each other in the City of Brotherly Love.
But Peter is dead.
Or he isn’t.
I can never be entirely sure what is real and what is not.
CHAPTER SIX
THE NEXT MORNING AT WORK, I SIT AT MY DESK AND HOLD tight to the yellow piece of paper on which I wrote down P. Pelt’s information. I stare at it so hard that the letters swim before my eyes, becoming something unreal. I force my eyes away, and then they catch on something else. There, through the glass, working at his desk, is Joshua. He concentrates hard, reading something carefully, so from this angle I can see only the arch of his broad shoulders and the top of his chestnut curls. I wonder how late he stayed last night, and if I had stayed too, if he would’ve walked out of his office and invited me for a drink again. But it feels wrong to imagine that now, and I quickly look away. I finger the yellow paper between my hands until it starts to crumble. P could mean a lot of things, I tell myself: Paul, Patrick, Peter. Peter Pelt.
Shelby steps off the elevator, and I hastily fold the yellow paper up into the smallest of squares and tuck it in the bottom of my satchel before she can ask me about it.
But when she reaches her desk, I see her eyes are red and puffy, and she does not seem to notice what I am or am not doing in the least, which is not at all like her.
“Everything okay?” I whisper across the desks. She nods, then shake
s her head. “Do you want to talk about it?” She opens her mouth, then closes it again, and I guess that whatever happened has something to do with Ron, as he seems to be the only thing that can shake Shelby’s normally happy disposition. It occurs to me that whatever it is, it might have taken her mind off her new favorite topic, the movie, and I feel a little guilty for feeling relieved. Though Shelby sometimes pesters me, I don’t ever want her to get hurt.
“Margie.” Joshua buzzes me through the intercom, and Shelby sits down at her desk and pulls the beige cover off her typewriter.
“Yes, Mr. Rosenstein,” I say.
“I’m leaving for court in five minutes. Can you get my Zimmerman files ready?”
“Of course,” I say. I look to Shelby, who shrugs, and then Joshua bursts out of his office, dressed to the nines in a navy-blue three-piece suit. His body hums with nervous energy, the way it always seems to before court, and I notice, as he straightens his striped tie and reaches for his hat off the rack, that his hands shake just a little bit.
“Good luck,” I say, handing him the stack of files he’d asked for. Zimmerman, I remember, is a man who’d embezzled money from the Franklin, a Jewish social organization where he’d once been treasurer.
Joshua nods and smiles at me, a smile tinged with nervousness, but still, a Joshua smile nonetheless, so I cannot help but smile back, even as I now think guiltily of the yellow square tucked in my satchel.
I watch Joshua walk to the elevator, and then I turn back to Shelby. Her face is pale and small, her blond hair a little mussed. She is listening carefully to instructions from Ezra now, through her intercom.
“Yes,” she is saying. “Yes, of course. Right away, Mr. Rosenstein.”
In a way, I think, looking at her now, thinking about the way her voice sounded last night as she insisted the annex was romantic, Shelby reminds me of my sister. She is alive and stubborn and kind and terribly emotional. If it had been her and Peggy in the annex, I am sure, she would be the one the world is in love with now, while most everyone else wouldn’t even remember that Peggy had ever existed or, for that matter, kept a diary. And Peggy, like me, she would probably be happy about that.
For the longest time, I have lived in fear of walking by Robin’s Books and seeing my own face staring back at me as well as my sister’s. I have been full of fear, wondering what would happen if everyone knew, if my father knew, that I am still here. At first, I became Margie Franklin, the Gentile, because it was Peter’s plan, but then it became about survival, all over again. I did not want people to know that in so many ways I was that girl too: that Jew trapped like a rat, deeply in love, stolen away by the Green Police. That I am that girl. That Jew.
About a year into my life in Philadelphia, I began to notice articles in the Inquirer about terrible things that had been done to Jews. A gang of hoodlums went after Jewish children in a very “Jewish section of the city,” my sponsor, Ilsa, informed me. Then a few weeks later, a flaming flare was nailed to a house nearby, just because a Jewish woman was thought to live there. With the flare, the Nazis left a message that said der Jude, the German word for Jew, and Deutschland über alles.
Ilsa looked over my shoulder as I read the articles and clucked her tongue. “It is terrible,” she said to me. “And with the firebomb thrown into that synagogue last fall.”
“Firebomb in the synagogue?” I asked, the words feeling like rubber on my tongue. Synagogues being bombed, in the city of Philadelphia? Jewish children being attacked?
It was late spring 1954. The air had just begun to grow warm and heavy. I put my sweater on. And I have worn it, tightly, ever since.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I THINK RON HAS ANOTHER GIRL ON THE SIDE.” SHELBY whispers this to me, across the desks. It is Friday again, and by now, I have almost forgotten about both her teary entrance on Tuesday and her talk of the movie, which she has dropped in favor of a new concern over Rock Hudson and Doris Day: are they an item or no? Shelby believes they are, especially because she saw the poster for their new movie, Pillow Talk, coming out in the fall, and she thinks they just look like an item.
“A girl can always tell these things,” she told me as I’d nodded and half listened, thinking instead about the tiniest square of paper still folded inside my satchel. It was one thing to know Peter might be here, but another thing altogether, to actually call the number. After all this time.
Now Shelby’s voice has taken on an unusually serious tone, and her normal smile is gone from her face as she mentions that she thinks Ron is not being faithful to her.
“Why do you think that?” I ask her, looking up from my typing.
“He’s been lying to me. Telling me he’s working late, when really he’s not,” Shelby says.
This Friday morning Joshua has come in for a few hours before heading to Margate, but Ezra is already gone and Joshua doesn’t mind when Shelby plays her radio softly. I hear the strains of Mr. Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” floating across the desks. Frankie croons, and I glance through the glass window at Joshua, who is talking on the phone and scribbling something at his desk. He runs his fingers through his chestnut curls and smiles as he says something to the caller. He is hunched over his desk, but still, his shoulders look wide and strong in his dark brown suit, a near exact color match to his curls. For a moment I think about Peter, about whether he wears a suit to work now, like Joshua, and whether his shoulders now are just as broad. And then I quickly look away from the window, from Joshua.
“Perhaps you’re mistaken?” I murmur, and I notice now Shelby is chewing on her fingernails, the way she always does when she is distressed about something.
She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Peg saw him, on the way home from Casteel’s the other night. She said he was walking down Chestnut with some . . . hussy.” She bites her lip now, as if she is holding back tears.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But maybe it isn’t what you think? Sometimes things, people, they are not as they appear to be.”
“What else could it be?” she asks.
I shrug, because I honestly don’t know, though I also know Shelby has sat across from me for three years, and she neither knows nor seems to suspect nearly anything real about me. She has an American blind trust in the people around her. “His sister?” I finally say.
“He doesn’t have a sister.”
“Cousin?” I ask. She shrugs. “Maybe you should just ask him?” I tell her, thinking how ironic it is that I am giving her advice about getting the truth.
She considers it for a moment, as I find my eyes drawn back to Joshua again, through the glass. He hangs up the phone, moves toward the door, and I quickly avert my eyes and hands back to my typewriter.
He walks out of his office, grabs his brown hat off the hat rack by my desk, and places it atop his chestnut curls in one swift motion. Shelby turns the music down so it is barely audible. “Don’t do that on my account,” Joshua says, smiling at me. I remember my image of Peter, broad-shouldered and in a suit, wondering if this might make me immune to Joshua’s smile now, but apparently it does not. I smile back. “Margie,” he says. “I have a new client coming in Monday afternoon, and I want you to sit in on the meeting.”
“Me?” Though Joshua has encouraged me on the paralegal front, he has never offered me more than secretarial duties.
“You speak Polish, right?”
I nod, and my smile falls away in an instant as I swallow back the lie I tell everyone when they ask me about my accent. It is only a hint of an accent by now, but still, Americans seem to have the ability to detect even the slightest bit of foreignness in a person. Yet, of course, they cannot tell the difference between German and Polish accents. And I cannot say the truth, that my accent is German. There is so much hatred still for Germans in America, especially among Jews.
“It has been a long while,” I tell Joshua now. “I barely remember my Poli
sh.”
“That’s all right,” Joshua tells me. “She speaks English. But heavily accented. So I might need your help understanding.”
I know many languages: French, Hebrew, German, English, Dutch. Some Latin. Polish is not one of them.
“Well, have a nice weekend, ladies,” Joshua says, tipping his hat in my direction as he floats toward the elevator. The doors shut behind him. Shelby turns up her music louder, and for a moment Frankie seems to be shouting at us. Surely the things I ask can’t be too great a task . . .
“Maybe you’re right,” I hear Shelby saying. “I should just ask Ron.”
But now all my words are gone, and all I can do is sit there and cling tightly to my sweater against my chest.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE WEEKEND PASSES IN A BLUR OF RESTLESS NIGHTS, AS I pace my apartment, staring at my paralegal work without absorbing any of it, and folding and unfolding the yellow square from my satchel, though now I have memorized both the address and the number by heart. P. Pelt. It cannot be him, I think, and yet, maybe it is. But Sunday afternoon I become more consumed with what is waiting for me at work on Monday, and I find myself at the Free Public Library of Philadelphia, browsing through a Polish dictionary.
I am quite good at learning. In the annex, through correspondence, I learned English, French, Latin, mathematics, physics, literature, and English shorthand, which is something that helped me get the job with Joshua. And so I try to cram as much Polish into my brain as I can within the space of a few hours.
But by Monday afternoon as I sit at my desk, nervously awaiting the Polish woman’s arrival, the only Polish words I can seem to remember are the two I have known for a very long time. Jestes diablem. You are the devil. They rattle in my brain, as if they are still being screamed there by an old and helpless woman. They will be useless words in whatever business Joshua is conducting, I’m certain. But still, I cannot turn them off.
Margot Page 3
