Margot

by Jillian Cantor

  “Mr. Rosenstein,” she shouts again.

  “What is it, Miss McKinney?” It is hard to tell whether he is confused or annoyed, or a little of both.

  “It’s your father,” she says, gasping for breath. “I’ve called for an ambulance.”

  It takes Joshua a moment to process what Shelby is saying, and when he does, he turns and runs, without hesitation. He presses the elevator button hard, over and over again, and then gives up and runs for the stairs.

  Shelby walks toward me. Her face is beaming red, her hands shaking. I reach out for one of her hands, and we walk toward the elevator holding on to each other.

  “What happened?” I whisper.

  “I don’t know,” she says, and her voice trembles. “He just collapsed. He was standing there, and then he was on the floor, and I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.” She gets the words out, as if she is choking on them, in between tears. “Oh my God,” she is saying. “Oh my God.”

  I think about the look on Joshua’s face as he ran, as he pushed the elevator button, over and over again. And I know that Joshua loves his father. Even with everything else. Ezra is his father, and he loves him. Of course he does.

  “It’ll be okay,” I tell Shelby as we step into the elevator, and it rises again. “Everything will be fine.” But inside, I feel the same as when I held on so tightly to my sister’s hand, standing in line at the camp.

  It’s just a little ink. It’s nothing, I told her. Don’t scream, don’t cry, don’t be afraid. Keep your head down and your voice low. Keep moving forward, do as they say. Everything will be fine.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  AFTER THE AMBULANCE HAS TAKEN EZRA AND JOSHUA AWAY, Shelby and I sit across from each other at our desks, staring at each other but not saying anything for what feels like a long while. I wonder if it is okay for me to be sitting here after I have quit, though I realize all I have done is taken the elevator down with Joshua and then back up with Shelby, and besides, with Ezra now riding in the ambulance, I do not think there will be anyone else here who would ask me to leave.

  Shelby’s fingers twitch in the air, until finally she fumbles through her bag for a cigarette. She tosses the pack of Kents to me, and I hesitate for a moment before taking a cigarette out. Shelby always says smoking relaxes her, so maybe I should try it.

  Normally, the girls don’t smoke inside the office, just some of the lawyers. But with Ezra being pulled out on a stretcher, and Joshua leaving with him, it seems as if all decorum has been suddenly thrown away.

  I clutch tightly to the cigarette and notice that my hands too, they are shaking. I put it loosely in my mouth and lean forward to catch on Shelby’s lighter, and then I feel smoke burning in my lungs, as if I am running too hard, too far, too fast. I have had enough, and I crush the cigarette out in the empty coffee cup on Shelby’s desk, which she is using as an ashtray.

  Shelby takes another drag on her cigarette, leans back in her chair, and closes her eyes. “I’ve never seen it before,” she whispers, after a little while.

  “What?” I ask her.

  “Death. So close, right in front of me. Just like that.” I nod. “Have you?”

  Now I close my eyes, and I can feel the weight of my sister’s small hand, holding on to me, on the train. Mrs. van Pels, naked and small and without her rabbit fur. Mother, whispering to me at night in the camp, her breath rattling in her chest. “No,” I lie. “I haven’t.”

  “Oh, Margie, it was awful. I don’t know how Peg does it all the time. I could never be a nurse like her.” She shakes her head and blows a funnel of smoke in my direction. “And Mr. Rosenstein, he’s such a big, powerful man. You just don’t imagine him falling like that, you know?”

  I nod, though in my head, I am revising slightly my image of Pim, coming straight from the camp after it was liberated to the Prinsengracht. Why have I always imagined him as the Pim I knew in the annex, still strong, with broad shoulders and girth much like Ezra Rosenstein? The Pim straight from the camp must’ve been a smaller man, broken, skeletal. I try to make the image come that way, but I cannot, no matter how hard I try to force it.

  The clock by the elevator strikes noon, and Shelby squashes her cigarette in the coffee cup and stands up. “I’m going to the hospital to see what’s going on,” she says to me. “You coming?”

  I think about Joshua’s face, as he stood there, in the lobby. I cannot be without you anymore, Margie. No, work. Work without you. But I imagine Joshua, like Shelby, has never stood so close to death before. And then he rode there, all the way to the hospital in the ambulance, with his father.

  “Yes,” I tell her, standing up, grabbing my satchel. “Of course.”

  Shelby and I ride the bus together up Market Street, toward the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, where I wonder if Peggy is on duty. I hope she is, because she is caring and assured and the kind of nurse who brings real comfort.

  Shelby is quiet, which is so un-Shelby-like that I turn to look at her several times, just to check if she has fallen asleep. But she is still there, her shoulder bouncing next to mine on the city bus, her gaze straight ahead, serious, trancelike. I keep expecting her to ask me what happened, just before, when I followed Joshua down in the elevator, but she does not.

  I turn and look out the window at the city blurring by me. Then I shut my eyes for a second, and all I can see is Pim, Pim, Pim. And not the way he is now, an old man about to turn seventy, living in Switzerland with a new wife, a lot of money, and, I imagine, a mountain-high pile of correspondence about the book he published. No. I picture him the way he was then, in the annex, when sometimes he would look at me, seeming defeated, and I would want to hug him, just to inflate him again. I would want to hug him and tell him he had done so much to keep us safe. He had done so much. For me.

  I was the one the Germans wanted, I might have told him. You could’ve given me away. But you didn’t.

  I never told him this, though.

  One time in the annex—it was night—and everyone was sleeping, even Peter. I got up from the divan in his room to tiptoe back downstairs, but then I saw Pim, awake, just sitting there in the front room staring at the wall.

  “Margot,” he whispered, not noticing me until I stood there, right in front of him. “You’re not sleeping.”

  “Neither are you,” I pointed out.

  “But you are still a growing girl. You need your sleep, Bubbeleh.” He hadn’t used his pet name for me in so long that I’d almost forgotten it had existed. And then there he was, saying it again—“Bubbeleh”—the word hanging in the stillness of night in the annex. His voice was warmth, and it captured me. He patted the space next to him, and I sat down there.

  I laid my head against his shoulder. He had strong, broad shoulders, even then. “I could sleep here, maybe,” I whispered, because suddenly I was so very tired. I remembered what it felt like to want to find sleep, in the darkness. I remembered what it felt like when night had once been my friend, not my enemy.

  “Go ahead,” Pim whispered into my hair. “Close your eyes. I will keep you safe.”

  “Pim,” I whispered, my voice tracing a circle in the darkness. “I love you.”

  “I love you too, Bubbeleh,” he whispered back.

  This memory is so distant, so hard to keep clear in my brain. Every so often I find it, and I try to keep it close to me. But as quickly as it comes to me, it fades away again. Too much has happened since then, to both of us.

  Mostly now I can imagine Pim there, after the war, standing at the door to the office at 263 Prinsengracht, his heart full with the hardest and roundest of emotions: hope. I imagine Miep handed him the diaries once, and at first he refused them. “No,” he would’ve told her, handing them back to her. “My girls will be back.”

  And then he waited, and he waited, and he waited.

  “Otto,” Miep’s kind, small v
oice would’ve said to him as she placed her tiny hand on his shoulder. “Take the diaries. Read them. They are something.”

  “I tried to save them, and I failed,” Pim might have said, tears perched in his brown eyes.

  “There was nothing you could do,” Miep would’ve told him. “You did everything you could. You kept them safe for years.”

  “But it wasn’t enough,” Pim might have said. “Both of my girls, gone.”

  “Take the books.”

  He took them.

  Nothing can’t mean something, Mother had said, of the ink.

  But Pim, his eyes saw the world so much differently than Mother’s, everything in opposite. Pim would’ve said it like this: Something can’t mean nothing. Or: Someone can’t mean nothing. Two someones can’t mean nothing.

  Oh, Pim.

  “What did you say?” Shelby asks me, finally speaking as the bus has stopped a block from the hospital, and she stands to get off.

  “Hmm?” I murmur.

  “You were just saying something?”

  “No.” I shake my head. “I wasn’t saying anything.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You were talking about a pin.”

  “Oh, that,” I say, and I can’t believe I have thought about him so much that I have spoken his name, out loud, accidentally. “Don’t worry about it,” I tell Shelby. “It was nothing.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  SHELBY AND I WALK THROUGH THE WIDE EMERGENCY entrance of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, with our arms linked, but not the way they are when Shelby, skipping, pulls me toward the bar. Now it is as if we are holding each other up. We are tied together, pulling each other’s weight, like sisters. No, I remind myself, friends.

  Shelby has been here before to visit Peg, and she leads me straight to the emergency area nurses’ station, where Peg works. The waiting area surrounding the station is crowded, and I briefly look around and see a young woman bleeding from her arm and a small child crying at her feet. My stomach turns, and I look back, to focus on Peg, who is tall and serious and confident in her starched white nurse’s uniform and pointed hat, and who walks quickly in circles behind the station, grabbing charts from a large white filing cabinet.

  Shelby lets go of my arm and runs to her sister, and Peg turns, reaches across the desk, and wraps Shelby in a hug. I struggle to breathe for a moment as I am standing there by myself, watching them.

  Peg points to the elevator, Shelby nods, and then she is back at my side. “Come on,” she says.

  “What did Peggy say?” I ask.

  “He’s up in critical care. They think it was a massive heart attack.”

  I think of Joshua, and I am overcome by sadness. Is that all you are, he’d yelled at his father this morning, my boss? Of course, that wasn’t all he was. Joshua knew it then, and even more, I am sure, he knows it now.

  “But he’s still alive,” Shelby is saying now as the elevator rises, her voice hopeful.

  The elevator doors open and I see, right away, a small crowd of them, huddled together in the blue waiting area. My eyes fall immediately on Mrs. Greenberg, Penny’s mother, whom I have seen from time to time around the office. She is a large woman, tall and big-boned, and has never struck me as the least bit graceful, as her daughter is, though now her spine is hunched, her expression pale blank. She wears a green hat and clutches a pile of tissues in her hands, and she holds on to her husband with one arm, Joshua with the other.

  My heart bursts to look at Joshua, and I hold tightly to Shelby’s hand, holding myself back. After a moment he looks up, and he catches my eyes. His gray-green eyes are red-rimmed with sorrow, and they are lacking their usual light. I let go of Shelby’s hand to wave, and he waves back and shoots me a meager smile.

  Joshua turns, whispers something to Penny’s mother, stands up, and then he is walking toward me. His smile is even and somber and strong, and his eyes they are speaking to me, as if suddenly I am the only one. I am the only one who can understand him. And I can. I can.

  “Josh, honey.” I hear her voice from somewhere not too far behind me, and I startle. It is shrill and wily and I have the urge to cover my ears, to keep it from hurting me. “I brought back coffee for everyone.”

  I turn, and Penny stands there, pure as snow in a white tapered dress cinched at the waist with a snakelike navy-blue belt. Our eyes meet for a second, and then Penny looks away quickly. “How sweet,” she murmurs, walking past me and handing the coffee tray to Joshua. “The girls from the office came down.” She leans up and kisses him purposefully on the cheek, her pink lips, as if she is marking him, right there, like that.

  “Thanks for the coffee, Pen,” I hear Joshua say, and I cannot look anymore. I cannot stand there and watch while he kisses her back.

  “I have to go,” I whisper to Shelby.

  “Margie,” she says. “Wait, don’t leave me here all alone.”

  But she is not all alone. Her sister is just downstairs.

  I let go of Shelby’s hand, and I do not wait for the elevator. I pull open the door to the stairwell and run, quickly, down the three flights.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  THE EARLY MAY SUNSHINE HITS MY FACE, WARM, NEARLY TOO warm for springtime. It is almost summer now, my favorite season once, when I was not afraid to bare my skin and jump into the Baltic Sea or the IJsselmeer, where the water was crisp and blue. We missed experiencing one full summer while stuck in the annex and two halves. Also, two springs gone, just like that. As a girl, I used to love all the things spring and summer: the feel of water and sunshine against my skin. But I do not like the summertime in Philadelphia, the way the heat makes lying even more oppressive, makes my secret an even bigger burden to bear.

  May used to be a month of promise: the end of school was so near, the sweetness of summer and all the freedom that came with it. May is also Pim’s birthday month, and even now, every year as the date approaches, May 12, I still think of him, getting one year older. This year, he will be turning seventy.

  In May of 1944, Pim was turning fifty-five. He was still young enough to be our Pim, but almost old enough to be something else. He was graying then, but just around the temples. Now I wonder if he is completely gray, looking more like a grandfather than a father, though he cannot be a grandfather without me and my sister, a thought which makes me desperately sad.

  “I know!” my sister said in 1944, the week before his birthday, one midafternoon as we lay in her room. Her voice was just a little too loud. I shushed her, and she rolled her eyes at me. She was next to me on the bed, her hip folded easily against my own. “We should write Pim a poem for his birthday this year.” She spoke a bit softer.

  I looked up from my diary and nodded in agreement. Yes, that was just the kind of thing Pim would love. Maybe it would even cheer him up, make his birthday something special despite our being trapped. We were rats, and we were Jews. But we still celebrated things. Miep brought flowers and cake and we lit the menorah for Hanukkah. “We should write it in English,” I told her. “Show him how far we’ve come in our studies.”

  “How far you’ve come, you mean,” she said.

  “You know some English now too,” I told her, and she rolled her eyes again. “And Pim will be so happy to see we have learned something while we’ve been here. Like two presents in one.”

  “Fine,” she agreed. “An English poem, for Pim’s birthday.”

  TO PIM ON HIS 55TH BIRTHDAY

  Pim, Pim, you do not dim

  Even sometimes when things look grim

  Your smile is wide and your hair is trim

  And we think we are not on a whim

  Or even out there on a limb

  To say we love you, our darling Pim!

  We chanted it to him, like a song, on the night of his birthday. May of 1944, and so many Allied bombings in Europe that, surely, the war was almost over. P
im would not spend another birthday in the annex. None of us would.

  Mother smiled wide that night, and Pim laughed and hugged us both close to his chest. “My girls.” He shook his head. “What good English.” He kissed each of us on the top of our heads, twice. “I will cherish this,” he said. “Forever.”

  Even now, the words, they play in my head from time to time. A silly, stupid child’s rhyme. The paper we wrote them on, I’m sure it was destroyed so very long ago. But I wonder if sometimes the words, they still play themselves in my father’s mind too.

  After I leave the hospital, I take the bus back to Market Street, and then I find myself wandering, almost aimlessly, on the street, hearing the words from Pim’s birthday song in my head. I am not lost, but I am without direction, and even though they sound the same, they are not. It’s just that now I’m not sure exactly where I’m headed. Not back to work. Not now, because what is there, waiting for me? Not home, not in the middle of the day, when all I have there is Katze.

  I cross the street, and then I see it there, the way I have before. I wonder if my feet took me here on purpose, overtaken by homesickness that I can never get through no matter how much I think I can, or might want to. It is always lurking there, just beyond the surface. Even in the Jewish law firm. Especially in the Jewish law firm.

  The letters up in front of me, they gleam a putrid red on the marquee, the color once, of the swastikas defiling the broken wall of Judischausen. They assault me, but still I stop there, and I stare at them. Bright red letters: The Diary of Anne Frank. Introducing: Millie Perkins. Starring: Shelley Winters.

  I buy a ticket, and I walk inside the theater.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  IT IS COLD INSIDE THE THEATER, AND SUDDENLY I AM HUNGRY. So hungry that my stomach hurts and rumbles, and I cannot remember exactly the last time I have eaten something whole. I buy some popcorn at the concession stand in the lobby and find myself a seat inside the wide empty theater. It is empty, of course, because it is the middle of the day, and people are working, and so many people have already seen this movie. And I imagine it is not the kind of movie you would come back to see twice.