Margot

by Jillian Cantor

  “Yes,” I say, and suddenly I feel I am biting back tears. “It is.”

  A few hours later, though my hands are moving on the typewriter, I can feel the particular slant of Shelby’s eyes on my face. Finally, I stop typing and look up.

  “Okay,” she says. “Spill, Margie.”

  “What have I spilled?” I ask her, shaking my head, not understanding. My brain still falls underneath a heavy fog of sleeplessness, the weight of my half dream/half memory of Brigitta. Then there is the sound of Ilsa’s voice last night, still echoing in my head, telling me that I can go home again. And the lonely voice from the phone this morning. “Gustav Grossman,” he told me, when I pressed him to give me his information for Joshua.

  “What is going on, with you and . . . ?” Shelby nods her head meaningfully in the direction of Joshua’s office.

  “Nothing,” I say, putting on my best secret keeper’s face, which is to say, keeping my expression entirely blank. A skill I learned specifically in the camp: a skill of survival. But then I remember it is Friday today, and Joshua had said we would meet again at the end of the week, a thought that fills me with happiness. “Nothing is going on,” I repeat, keeping my voice calm, for Shelby’s sake.

  “He’s been staring at you,” she whispers. “Through the window, all morning.”

  I feel my cheeks turning warm at the thought of Joshua watching me, the way I have so often watched him. What does he see now when he looks at me? Does he see the tired, too-thin woman with the thick brown curls, the tortoiseshell circle glasses, the sweater? Or does he see something different, something else, something no one has seen except for Peter? I put my hand to my face, as if to wipe away the embarrassment. “You must be mistaken,” I say.

  “Nope,” she says. “Oh . . . don’t look now, but here comes Papa and he doesn’t look happy.”

  I pound my fingers noisily against the keys and see, out of the corner of my eye, Ezra, stomping past us. Can he know? About the advertisement? If he does, surely he will fire me. He is Joshua’s boss, which makes him my boss too. My heart explodes against the walls of my chest, and I draw in my breath.

  I hear their angry voices slip through the paper-thin walls. I hear some of the words. “Penny” . . . “Margate” . . . and “good son.”

  Shelby picks up the phone but doesn’t talk, and casts her eyes in my direction, brows raised.

  After a few minutes they both walk out, Joshua trailing behind Ezra, head down as if he is a wounded animal or a little boy who’s just been scolded. He stops in front of my desk for a moment, tips his hat. “Monday,” he says to me. The word sounds like a promise, and I nod, understanding, that on Monday we will convene again to discuss our secret case.

  “Have a nice weekend,” I say to him.

  He smiles at me, and then he runs to catch up with his father on the elevator.

  “Somebody’s in trouble,” Shelby says to me in a singsong voice, after the elevator doors shut. She shakes her head. “Now, that Penny, she’s a girl I wouldn’t mess with.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Clearly she’s got her hooks in Joshua, and she is used to getting what she wants.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “Maybe you, Margie, are a sweet little fling, but Penny, she’s the girl a guy like Joshua marries.”

  “I am not Joshua’s fling,” I say, exasperation leaking into my voice.

  “I’m just saying, Margie. Be careful. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  Why is everyone always telling me this, as if I am a delicate girl, made of glass? I wrap my sweater tighter around myself, holding on to my left forearm with my right hand, tightly, tight enough so my arm begins to hurt.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE SECOND THE BIG CLOCK BY THE ELEVATOR CHIMES 3 P.M., Shelby switches off her radio, stands, and begins gathering her things. “Let’s get a drink,” she says. “And today, I’m not taking no for an answer, Margie.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t going to say no,” I tell her, and I stand and gather my own things, relieved for once to get out of the office early. I remember what Joshua said about feeling suffocated here, and right now I can understand that feeling.

  Ron is still working, so it is only Shelby and I who walk across the street and take a seat at a table at Sullivan’s Bar. This is the place I’ve been to with Shelby before, where the dance floor is checkered, and where the office girls, like us, sometimes hike up their skirts a little too far to dance after they’ve drunk a little too much. Not me, though sometimes I wonder what it might feel like to let yourself go like that, to be so free.

  Shelby and I sit at a low round table, just next to the checkered dance floor, though it is too early now for anyone to be on it, for the loud music to be playing, or even for the place to be crowded. Only one other table is taken, on the other side of the bar, with two girls looking not all that dissimilar to Shelby and me in their plain cotton dresses, so I guess they work for rich men who leave early on Fridays too. And there are a few young men sitting by the bar, dressed in suits, who are either conducting a business meeting or pretending to, I think.

  Shelby orders a vodka tonic, and I order a club soda with a twist of lime. When our drinks arrive, I am surprised to find myself mildly disappointed when I take a sip and it does not burn my throat. Perhaps I should’ve ordered what Shelby is having. Maybe next time I will.

  “Okay, Margie,” Shelby says. “You know what I think?” I shake my head. “I think it is time for us to find you a man.”

  “A man?” I laugh a little, into my club soda.

  “Yes,” she says. “Preferably a good-looking one with a decent job.” She scans the room with her eyes.

  “Oh, stop,” I say.

  “You’re not getting any younger,” she tells me. “Before you know it, you’ll be thirty, and being unmarried and thirty is like death in this city. You may as well just buy a few cats and call yourself a spinster.”

  Really, I am thirty-three, but Shelby, like everyone else who knows Margie Franklin, believes her to be twenty-seven. So I don’t tell her now, of course, that I am already well past thirty. “I don’t even want to get married,” I say instead. “And I like cats.”

  She gasps, as if I’ve just said something blasphemous. “Of course you want to get married,” she says. “Don’t you want to fall in love?”

  “I’ve been in love,” I tell her.

  “And not with Joshua.” She shakes her head. “That doesn’t count.”

  “I told you,” I say, biting back my annoyance. Though it is not, truly, annoyance with her. At the moment I feel more annoyed with Penny, with just the idea of her in her frivolous, tomato-colored dress. “Nothing’s going on with me and Joshua.” I pause. “And I wasn’t talking about Joshua.”

  “So what’s his name?” she asks me.

  “Peter,” I say, and I surprise myself with my honesty. But in some instances, you are so hidden that even the truth is safe. I know Shelby will never connect the pieces between the movie she has seen and a Polish American girl named Margie Franklin. She would never even imagine that my Payter is the Peeter she saw on the silver screen, the Peter who was kissing that Millie Perkins Shelby is so fond of.

  “Peter,” she says, arching those eyebrows. “And where is this Peter now?”

  “I knew him when I was a girl.” Then I add, for good measure, “In Poland.”

  “Well, Margie,” she says, waving her hand in the air and polishing off her drink. “That doesn’t even count. We need to get you an American man.”

  “That does count,” I insist. “And who knows,” I say, “perhaps now he is an American man.” I think of the tiny square, folded, folded, folded again in the bottom of my satchel, the mailbox reading Pelt.

  “No,” she says. “I mean a real American man. How about him?” She points to one of the men at t
he bar. He is tall with wire glasses and the face of a boy, and he wears a brown suit that swims on his lanky frame.

  I shake my head. “I know you are trying to help,” I tell her. “But really, Shelby. I’m not interested.” Then, to change the subject, I quickly say, “Whatever happened with Ron and his hussy? Did you ask him about her?”

  “Shhh.” She leans into the table and looks around the room to see if anyone has heard me. “You can’t just go shouting that word in public, Margie.”

  I am not sure why not, as she was the one who used it first, and in the office no less, but I offer an apologetic shrug, then take another sip of my drink.

  “Now don’t laugh at me,” she whispers, and leans in close, as if she is about to reveal the grandest of secrets. I nod. “Last Friday he said he was working late. So Peggy and I, well, Peg did it actually, we tried to call the office to check if he was there. But no one answers, right? Because it’s after hours. The girls have all gone home.”

  I nod and hang on to her words. “So then what did you do?” I whisper back.

  “Peg and I, we took the bus to his house, and the whole house was dark, so we knew he wasn’t home. Then we waited on the street, hiding behind the big oak tree when we saw his car.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And nothing.” She shrugs. “He got out by himself, carrying his attaché, and he walked into the house. He really was working late, just like he said.”

  I think about the fact that Shelby does not really know where Ron was before he drove home, that he could have been off with his hussy then, but I am not going to point this out to her. “What about the huss—woman Peggy saw him with before?”

  Shelby shrugs and takes a sip of her drink. “Maybe it was a mistake.” She rolls her eyes. “Peg is forever forgetting to put her glasses on. Maybe she wasn’t wearing them, and it wasn’t even Ron.”

  “Maybe,” I say. I do not really believe that Peggy would’ve made such a dramatic mistake. But then I remember the way my own face changes in the mirror, without my glasses on. The way I so easily see myself as a ghost.

  “Now, enough about me,” Shelby says. “I’m serious about finding you a man, Margie.” Her eyes scan the room once more.

  I finish my drink, and I stand up. “It is time for me to go home,” I say.

  “Oh, come on,” she says. “Don’t be like that. The night is just getting started.”

  I shake my head again. I want to leave plenty of time to make it home before nightfall.

  I have missed one Shabbat. It is not the end of the world, I know it, but still the guilt bubbles up inside my chest when I remember last Friday night, at O’Malley’s with Joshua. Father was a liberal Jew and couldn’t care less about rituals. Mother, however, she always believed. “Religion is breath, Margot,” she told me once.

  This was even after the yellow star, even after the word Jood became something dirty, something foreign. The yellow star. The Star of David. The Star of Death.

  Margie Franklin, she is a not a Jew. But every time I light a candle and say a silent prayer as darkness breaks on Friday night, it feels like a reminder of the person I once was, that somewhere, deep underneath my sweater, my second skin, my lies, she is still in there. Sometimes, in the wash of the cool yellow flame, I can even hear the sound of my mother’s voice, so close, it is almost as if she is still with me. “Religion is breath,” Mother told me. “And don’t you ever forget it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SOMETIMES I WONDER IF PETE PELT FEARS DISCOVERY, THE way I so often do. Does he keep his forearm covered, or does he not let it bother him now, the way a true American, or my sister, might?

  In the annex, I asked him once, just before the end, how we would do it. If we could really hide ourselves forever, even after the war. “Two years has been so long,” I said. “And every day, we are afraid.”

  He’d shaken his head, and leaned in and kissed me on the forehead. “Margot,” he said. “Hiding who you are, it’ll be so much easier than hiding where you are.” He paused. “We will be out in the open then, living life. Just different names, that’s all. No longer Jews.”

  “Can it really be that easy?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s like an annex in your mind. And no one can unlock your mind.”

  But what would Peter have said if I could’ve talked to him after that morning, when the Green Police ripped us out of the annex? Or after the war, after my father published my sister’s diary for all the world to read, then see on the stage and now the silver screen? Perhaps he would look me in the eyes, and I would notice his eyes are darker than the sea, black as night. Perhaps he would look at me and say that now he understands, that you really cannot hide forever, even in your mind. A hiding space can only remain secret for so long. That always, eventually, you are discovered.

  Sunday morning, I am still thinking about what Shelby said, about how she and Peggy spied on Ron, and though I am holding on to my paralegal studies and readying myself to leave for Fairmount Park, I find myself walking in the other direction, toward the city bus stop. I tuck my studies into my satchel and board the bus toward Broad and Olney. I feel guilty about pushing my studies aside once more, and I promise myself again, double studying next week, or even triple, if I must. But today I cannot shake Shelby’s plan from my mind.

  I do not have to knock on the door, I think. I do not have to be brave. I can just hide on the street and watch. I will go, and just like Shelby, I will spy from a distance.

  On the bus, I close my eyes and lean my head against the dirty window. I think about what I might see when I get to Peter’s house, what he might look like now, if I will even recognize him. I try to conjure up the fantasy image of him in my head, the man I have envisioned, over and over again, taking the train home from work, walking into our home in Levittown. But now, as hard as I try, I can only picture Joshua. Joshua. Joshua, I remind myself, is in Margate, with Penny.

  Then I hear my sister’s voice in my head, again, the way I so often do.

  “I could fancy Peter,” she is saying. She said this to me once. We sat together on her bed, in the room she, by then, shared with the dentist. We were both writing in our diaries, and I put my pen down to look at her. Her almond eyes were glossy, nearly feverish.

  “But he loves me,” I said. Or maybe I didn’t say that. Maybe I said, “That’s ridiculous.”

  She shook her head. “His eyes are dreamy.”

  “You should stay away from him,” I said. “Father won’t like it.” But warnings, especially mine, bounced off my sister, as if her glowing skin made her immune to them.

  “Oh, don’t be such a paragon of virtue,” my sister said, laughing a little.

  I get off the bus and walk down Olney. The sun is warm today, my sweater too hot, and I feel my core temperature rising, my skin ready to burst, but I do not even push up my sleeves. I have lived through worse than feeling a little hot, haven’t I?

  I approach 2217 with care, whispering through the air, walking on my tiptoes so as not to be noticed, though the early morning street is quiet, and I imagine most families in these houses are still sleeping. But I am a spy this morning, not a paragon of virtue. A genuine Ethel Rosenberg, I think. And I am trying to act the part, a thought which makes me smile a little. Then something catches my eye, and I stop, and my smile quickly fades away. Even from a few houses away, I can see exactly what rests in the small drive at 2217.

  There are two cars there, parked side by side: a black Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible parked first, and then, right next to it, there is a Cadillac, its sharklike fins, its powdery pink color like silk, taunting me.

  I have seen enough. I turn and run back toward the bus stop.

  My heart rises and then falls against the rhythm of the city bus that takes me back toward Market Street. A pink Cadillac. It is a woman’s car, certainly. There can be no other
explanation for that, can there? And it would not be a housekeeper there, this early on a Sunday morning, would it?

  I hear my sister’s voice in my head again, though this time it sounds like it did that very last morning, as she stood at the doorway to Peter’s room. “Peter?” His name was a question.

  I wanted to ask her then, What, why?

  But then there was a man grabbing on to my arm, twisting it roughly, and pulling it against the coarse green flesh of his uniform. He didn’t have to pull so hard. I would’ve walked. I would’ve just gone with him. Just seeing them there, I already knew we were defeated.

  “No,” my sister screamed. “I’m not leaving.” She dug her heels into the floor. She was holding it in her hands, the orange-checkered book.

  The man picked her up and flung her over his shoulder, so hard that I gasped, afraid her neck might snap.

  The book went flying across the room, landing somewhere close to where Peter and I had spent the night on the divan. My diary was hidden away, in between the layers of the cot where I was supposed to sleep in my parents’ room.

  Back in my apartment, I cannot shake the picture of the driveway at 2217. But the farther away I am, the less certain I become about exactly what it was that I saw. Some spy I am. I can see now why Shelby convinced herself that Ron was not off with his hussy while she and Peg were waiting behind the oak tree. That was what she wanted to see, I suppose.

  I lie on my blue couch with Katze and think about it. I cannot imagine that my father would ever own a pink car, but American men, who knows? And Pete Pelt, I am certain he is a very American man. Joshua drives a blue car, and so does Bertram, but I wonder if that is just by chance.

  Just before dusk, I pick up the phone and dial Ilsa’s number. “My dear,” she says immediately, “is everything all right?”