Margot

by Jillian Cantor

  “His father is away for the weekend. They can have his father’s big Main Line house all to themselves.”

  “But Joshua has his own house,” I say. I have ridden the bus past it before, a duplex near Broad and Olney, on a corner filled with flower boxes, a location I find divine but that I imagine feels way too bourgeois to Ezra Rosenstein.

  Shelby waves a hand in the air. “But a girl like Penny. She’d be impressed by the fancy house. Heck, I’d be impressed by the fancy house.”

  “You’d be impressed by anything.” I can’t stifle my annoyance.

  “I’m just saying,” she says. “The cat’s away, and the mice will play.”

  “That’s such a stupid expression,” I say. “It doesn’t even make sense.”

  She laughs. “Come on, Margie. It’s the weekend. Let’s get out of here and get a drink.”

  I shake my head, because even with all of Shelby’s talk about Penny and Joshua, I am still thinking about what Joshua said to me at lunch. That greatness is in bravery. Have I forgotten how to be brave, even in the smallest way? Is that why I hold so tightly to my sweater, my new name? Is that why I have not written the letter to my father that I have composed in my head a thousand times? Why I have not tried to find Peter, for so very long? Why I have tucked the woman’s voice away, in the back of my head these past few days, denied it, excused it? Am I a coward now?

  “No,” I tell Shelby. “I can’t. I have something else I need to do.”

  “It’ll keep till Monday,” she says.

  “No,” I say. “It won’t.”

  I leave Shelby on Market Street and then walk in the opposite direction from my apartment toward the bus stop at the corners of Market and Seventeenth. After I turn the corner, out of Shelby’s line of sight, I pull the tiniest of squares from my satchel. I unfold it, read the address again, though I have already committed it to memory: P. Pelt, 2217 Olney Avenue, Apartment 4A.

  Once I am sitting on the bus, I still clutch tightly to the fading scrap of paper. My fingers ache and tremble, and I do not feel brave in the slightest.

  When I first came to Philadelphia in 1953, I tried desperately to look for Peter. I called the operator every day from Ilsa’s telephone and asked her for Peter Pelt. “No listings under that name,” she always told me.

  “Try van Pels,” I’d say, just in case he’d decided not to change his name after all.

  “No. No listing for that either.”

  But then, nearly a year into my American life, I saw it for the first time. My sister’s diary, in the window of Robin’s Books. It caught my eye as I walked by, the echo of her face. I walked past it, then slowed down, then stopped, then walked back, though I am not certain how my legs moved. They were numb, and I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I gasped at the air and reminded myself to inhale, exhale. My heart pounded so hard in my chest I thought it might explode.

  I stopped at the window and pressed my nose against the glass. And there she was, preserved the way she’d been ten years earlier, maybe more, before she’d been stripped and shaved, tattooed, and broken.

  I walked inside the store, like walking inside a dream. The air was fog and silt and clung to my sweater. It was springtime, but I was shivering. Somewhere a bell clanged on the door. A man asked if he could help me. I pointed to the book, my sister’s face. Or I picked it up. I don’t remember paying for it, though I’m sure I did.

  The next thing I remember is being back in Levittown, at Ilsa’s house.

  I sat down in her front room, on a hard-backed chair, and I opened the book. It was nothing like the orange-checked book I’d seen my sister write in, so often, in the annex. It was a brighter orange, almost a red, and my sister’s name was written in big letters on the front. Such big letters. Her name—it was shouting at me.

  Dear Kitty. The words swam across my eyes, as if I’d imagined them there.

  “I’m calling my diary Kitty,” my sister told me, after she got the diary for her birthday.

  “Kitty?” I’d raised my eyebrows. “Do you want a friend or a pet?”

  “I’ll have you know that Kitty is a very American name.”

  I blinked and looked again. Dear Kitty. And then I screamed and dropped the book on the hardwood floor, where it landed with a terrifying thud.

  “Margie,” Ilsa said, running in. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, my dear.”

  I nodded. But I couldn’t speak.

  She picked up the book, looked at the cover, and then handed it back to me. She clucked her tongue, the same way she had when she’d looked over my shoulder as I’d read the article about the Jewish children being attacked. “I’ve heard about this,” she said. She pulled over a chair and sat down next to me. “Maybe for you,” she said, “who lived through the war over there, it is better not to read these things.” Ilsa seemed to understand vaguely that wartime had been horrific for me, for Jews, in Europe, though she did not ever ask me for specifics. Not that I would have told her, even if she had.

  That afternoon, I simply closed the book in my lap and nodded.

  After Ilsa and her husband, Bertram, went to sleep that night, I traced the letters of my sister’s name with my fingers. Then, on the inside page, I did the same with my father’s. My Pim, I thought. He is still alive. I was flooded with joy, and then quickly, uneasiness. He did this, I thought. He published this. For her. And then I felt like I might vomit as I imagined it in my head again and again and again, like always: the last time I saw my sister, on the train. What I did to her.

  Maybe for you, Ilsa said, it is better not to read these things . . .

  But I took a deep breath and read the entire book from cover to cover that night. Twice.

  According to the book, she was the one Peter kissed. She was the one Peter loved.

  For a long while after I found the published book, I did not try to find Peter.

  I get off the bus at the corners of Olney and Broad streets, not too far from Joshua’s home, but far enough so I cannot see it from here. I think about what Shelby said, about Penny and Joshua spending the weekend at his father’s house, and I wonder if she is right. The thought of it, the two of them together, annoys me. I know it shouldn’t, but it does. But I am not here for Joshua, I remind myself. I’m here for Peter. And in my mind I again conjure up the exact color of his eyes: deep and blue and clear as the sea. Then I walk down Olney for a little while, until the numbers turn into the 2000s.

  2217 Olney Avenue, Apartment 4A, is in a group of tiny brick connected houses. They are European in their styling, not even all that dissimilar from the outside of the Prinsengracht. “I will never come back here,” Peter said to me as we lay there together on his divan. “After the war, we will go to Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love. We will be different people, no longer Jews.”

  Peter promised me we would come here together, though once, when I asked him what if . . . ? What if we could not? What if we were captured? Separated? All things we did not like to speak of.

  “Shhh,” he’d whispered into my hair. “Do not worry so much. I will find you. I will always find you.”

  Peter said he would find me, and I do not think it would be hard to do this in Philadelphia, if he were looking. Margie Franklin’s phone number is listed, and there have been a few times when I have answered a call, only to hear the sound of heavy breathing on the other end, followed by a slow click. Always, a part of me has wondered if he is here, trying to find me, just like he said he would. But also, I understand now, I can find him. I could’ve found him all this time. And if not for my sister’s diary, I know I would’ve. Or at least, I would’ve been trying. Now I am ashamed that I have not. That I have been such a coward, for so very long. Greatness is in bravery, Joshua told me. Doing something that terrifies you.

  I walk up the cement steps to 4A, slowly. There are six steps, and I count them in my head, the numbers
making an easy rhythm, calming my quickly beating heart.

  By the front door, there is a square green mailbox with one word painted on it: Pelt.

  I am in the right place.

  I take a deep breath and press my finger to the doorbell. I ring it once, and I wait. Then I ring it again, and I wait some more.

  I rap softly on the green door, and notice the paint is peeling, in ripples.

  I do not hear footsteps or even see shadows moving against the curtains. Then I notice the drive is empty of cars.

  No one is home.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BACK IN MY STUDIO APARTMENT, IT IS NEARLY DUSK, BUT I DO not move yet to get my candle from under the kitchen sink. Instead I sit at my tiny table, holding the thin yellow piece of paper in my hands, thinking about the word “Pelt” on the green square mailbox. The letters were black and thick, and just a little crooked. “Pelt.” It is real. He is real.

  Sitting there, I think about the last time I saw Peter, the morning the Green Police came for us. August 1944. Two years we had been in the annex by then. But the war would be over soon, we knew it. We crouched around the radio at night after dinner, and there was a burgeoning sense that things were beginning to go our way. Only two weeks earlier there’d been an attempt on Hitler’s life, and by a German count. We were not the only ones fed up with the war. “The tide is turning,” Father had said, smiling gently at Mother.

  Peter and I whispered about it at night in his room after everyone else was asleep. Each night, I waited in my parents’ room until I heard the soft sound of Pim’s snore and Mother’s breath rattling in her chest, and then I would tiptoe, ever so carefully, up the stairs, to Peter’s.

  Once, all our talk about after the war had felt almost like talking about a story, something that could never happen to us. But by this point, it had begun to feel real, like the idea of the sun on our faces, the feel of August rain against my cheek. I would feel these things again. We both would.

  Peter and I had spent many nights whispering furtively in the dark about the future and what it might hold. But that night, what would be our last night in the annex, Peter lay waiting for me on the divan. I sat down next to him, and he pulled me close and put his finger to my lips before I could speak. “Let’s not talk tonight,” he whispered.

  I watched the turn of his face, his blue, blue eyes reflecting in the sheerness of the moonlight as he traced his finger from my lips, slowly, across my cheek. And then he leaned in even closer and kissed me.

  I kissed him back, my lips moving against his as if they belonged there, as if we belonged like that, together. We held on tightly to each other as we kissed, and my hands trembled a little against the warmth of his back.

  “Tell me again,” I whispered. I could hear the sound of his breath moving against his chest, so close, it was almost as if it were my own. “Tell me what we’ll do when we leave here.”

  “We’ll move to America,” he whispered, tracing the outline of my cheekbone with his thumb. “Philadelphia. City of Brotherly Love. We’ll be married, and we will no longer be Jews.”

  “You won’t forget about me,” I whispered.

  “Never,” he whispered back.

  And then, for the first time, there in Peter’s room, in the darkness, I actually fell asleep, Peter’s warm body tucked against the folds of mine, my hands still resting against his back.

  The next morning, just before the Green Police came, I awoke to the heavy sound of Peter’s door swinging open. My sister stood there, at the entrance to Peter’s room, her big brown eyes holding on to us like the eyes of a wounded animal. I expected her to yell at me, to gasp at our indecency, to call for Father. But she did none of those things. Instead her eyes turned to him.

  “Peter?” she said softly.

  Then the door by the staircase was breaking open, and Mrs. van Pels was screaming, louder than I’d ever heard her. “No,” she was screaming. “No. No.”

  Peter locked eyes with me. Blue, blue eyes like the sea. They were there, so close to mine I could touch them.

  And then they were gone.

  My phone rings, and the sound of it startles me. It barely ever rings, unless it is Ilsa calling to check up on me from time to time, but she would not call me on a Friday night. Ilsa does not know my true identity, but she knows more than anyone else in Philadelphia; that once I was a Jew, that on Friday nights I still light my Shabbat candle.

  “Hello,” I say, expecting a breath, followed by a click. Peter?

  “Margie. It’s Joshua Rosenstein.” My mouth is open, but I have nothing to say. “I hate to bother you, at home like this on a Friday night. I called the office first but you’d already left.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I finished my work before leaving.”

  “Oh, no. Don’t worry about that. It’s just . . . I had an idea. About Miss Korzynski’s case, but I need your help.”

  “My help?” I know I sound like an idiot, but I am still dazed by the fact that Joshua is calling me, at home, asking me to help him.

  “Are you free now? Can we meet for a drink and we’ll discuss it?”

  “A drink?” I say, compounding my idiocy. I am wondering what has happened to Penny, or why Joshua can’t tell me his plan on the phone, but of course I don’t have the courage to ask him any of that. I stare at my unlit candle, at the skies darkening outside of my window. Joshua is a liberal Jew, and I’m sure he does not observe the Shabbat. Margie Franklin is not a Jew either, I remind myself. And Margot, who is a Jew? She is dead. I stare once more at the piece of paper in my hand. Peter Pelt. “Of course,” I finally say. “Of course I can meet you.”

  O’Malley’s, the bar where Joshua has asked me to meet him, is back on Sixteenth Street, near the office, and I walk out of my apartment building and head in that direction. It is dark outside now, and the streets are quieter than during the day, or the five o’clock hour when everyone is bustling home.

  It occurs to me that it might not be safe for a woman, even a Gentile one, to walk on Ludlow Street after dark, all alone. I do not usually go out after dark. Never on a Friday.

  I hear the sound of footsteps behind me. They are heavy, the gait of boots. Surely, NSB footsteps. The Green Police.

  I cannot help it. I quicken my pace, until I am almost running.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  JOSHUA IS ALREADY AT O’MALLEY’S WHEN I ARRIVE, AND I spot him sitting on a bar stool by the long rectangular bar in the back. The place is small and dim inside, with high-topped tables filled with businessmen in suits and their dates dressed in shiny full dresses, all of which block my path to Joshua. I look around and I realize that this is not the kind of bar I’ve been to before with Shelby and Ron, where the men and women dance too close and holler on a checkered floor after everyone has had one too many drinks. Of course, I only watched in those bars. But here, in O’Malley’s, I feel even more out of place, in my plain gray cotton work dress, covered with a simple navy sweater.

  I make my way through the haze of smoke, well-dressed bodies, and the bright sound of laughter. The stool next to Joshua is one of the only empty seats in the bar, and I realize, staring at it for a moment, that it is meant for me, that maybe he has saved it for me.

  “Hello,” I say, sitting down next to him.

  “Margie.” He smiles, and I smile back, suddenly so happy that he called, that I am sitting here next to him. Then I think uneasily about the green mailbox on Olney Avenue, and I feel a tiny surge of guilt. “Can I buy you a drink?” Joshua asks. His drink is in a half-size glass: something brown that he takes a sip of, grimaces, and then takes another, bigger sip.

  “No thank you,” I say. “I don’t really drink much.” Or at all.

  “How about a club soda, then, with a twist of lime?”

  “Okay,” I say, and he beckons to the young man in the white-collared shirt and red bow tie who
is standing behind the counter. Joshua orders my drink, and then he turns back to look at me. He is still dressed in his work suit, but his black tie is loose around his collar and the top button of his shirt is undone.

  “So it’s official,” he says. He takes another swig of his drink and smiles again. “I must be the world’s worst boss, dragging you out here on a Friday night.”

  “No, you’re not,” I say.

  “After I called you, it occurred to me that you might have had another . . . obligation.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t mind, really.”

  “Really?”

  I nod. I do not let myself think about the Shabbat, the unlit candle in my apartment. I do not let myself think about Bryda Korzynski, or even the crooked black letters on the Pelt mailbox again. Instead I think that Joshua is close enough to me that if I swing my stool, just a little, our knees might touch, and that his arm rests easily across the bar counter, just inches from my own. “You’re working on a Friday night too,” I say timidly. “I thought you had a date.”

  “Oh, that,” he says. “Penny and I just went to see a movie. Diary of Anne Frank. Have you seen it?” I shake my head and hold my breath. “Penny thought we should go together.” He doesn’t elaborate on why, and I’m not sure whether it’s because Penny is his girlfriend again or because they are both Jews. I don’t ask.

  “Did you like it?” I ask instead, though I regret the question as soon as I say the words. The bartender sets my drink down on a small square napkin in front of me, and I pick it up and take a sip. The club soda burns my throat, and I wonder if it is not club soda at all, but a clear alcohol the bartender poured by mistake. It makes my head warm, but it’s a feeling that I like, so I drink a little more.

  “It’s not really a movie you can like, is it?” Joshua is saying. “It’s more like school. Where you know you have to go and learn. Or going to the doctor. You know it’s good for you. That you should do it. But you don’t exactly enjoy it.”