by Karen White
“How do you do,” Peter said and bowed slightly from the waist, and Miss Rachel Nussbaum’s cheeks instantly stained the color of raspberries. She smiled at Peter when he pulled out her chair for her; she was shy, it appeared, and graceful as she folded her full skirt beneath her, and utterly lovely—as unlike Masha as she could be. Masha, who had not been lovely, who in fact had been plain, long faced like a foal, but who had been so full of life she practically crackled with it, throwing off sparks. Masha with her flashing eyes and teeth, the first things Peter had noticed about her in the kitchen at the Hotel Adlon, and her surprisingly robust laugh and her one vanity: her beautiful, beautiful Veronica Lake hair . . . Peter smiled at Miss Rachel Nussbaum as his tablemates settled themselves into padded chairs; he feigned interest when she spoke, asking, How did Peter like America? What did he think of this Indian summer? but in answer Peter said, “Bitte?” and “Entschuldigung Sie?”—Pardon me? leaning forward and cupping his ear as if he were hard of hearing, and soon, as he had intended her to do, Miss Rachel Nussbaum lapsed into bewildered silence. Esther, who of course knew Peter’s English was fairly good despite his truncated time at university, witnessed this charade from a seat away and shook her head; she murmured, “You have to live again, bubbeleh.” But she reached over and patted Peter’s hand.
The first course was presented by Negro waiters in white gloves: a rather wilted Waldorf salad. Peter was not fond of apples amid his greens nor the aberration called American mayonnaise, which Peter knew came from plastic tubs instead of being freshly made, so he stirred the concoction with his fork as conversation swirled about his head. The usual topics, golf scores and politics, disobedient servants and clothes. Peter knew most of his fellow diners at this large table: the elder Nussbaums and Webers, the Steins and Rosenbergs. But there were a few he had not been introduced to, who cast puzzled glances at him until it was whispered to them who he was. Then their faces changed, assuming either expressions of magnified pity or the same oblique, crawling curiosity Peter’s mother’s Doppelgänger had displayed this morning in the Oyster Bar. Peter kept forking through his lettuce. He was used to these looks and had been ever since May, when the first Life magazine with the Margaret Bourke-White photos had appeared on the newsstands, the headlines proclaiming NAZI ATROCITIES and AT THE GATES OF HELL! above black-and-white images of skeletal prisoners and entangled corpses. Poor Esther had been unhinged for days, following Peter through the corridors of the Larchmont house, shaking pages at him and demanding, Is this what it was really like in there, Peter? Did you see this? How about this? Or, Gottenyu, this? Peter had excused himself and gone to the Loom Room, pleading exhaustion. He had not so much as glanced at the images. He didn’t need to. He had seen the corpses in color.
Peter’s right-hand seatmate, Dan Rosenberg, elbowed Peter in the ribs. “So how do you like it,” he boomed, “working for the alte kakker?”
Peter tried to translate this as Dan waited, exhaling whiskey and impatience. Dan was Sol’s age, the age Peter’s father, Avram, would have been: in his midfifties, with a bald, spotted head and amazing purple lips like two cuts of liver. Dan lifted his highball glass toward Sol, seated across the round table. “WORKING FOR SOLOMON,” he enunciated, as if Peter were slow-witted, “IN HIS LAW OFFICE.”
“Ah,” Peter said. “I do not work with Sol. I work in a restaurant.”
“BUT I WAS TOLD YOU WERE A LAW STUDENT,” Dan said.
“Long ago,” Peter said. “I work now in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal. You must visit. We serve excellent Oysters Rockefeller.”
Dan appeared to find it suspicious, Peter’s backward slide from legal scholar to kitchen servant. He shot a look at his wife, Belva, and tapped his temple.
“ANYHOW,” he said, “SOLLY’S A MENSCH. YOU’RE LUCKY HE SPONSORED YOU, WITH SO MANY OTHERS STILL IN THE CAMPS.”
“Dan!” Belva Rosenberg gasped.
“I meant the DP camps, not the other ones,” Dan muttered, and subsided into his drink.
Conversation resumed. Swans glided past the floor-to-ceiling windows, on the golf course’s artificial lake. The Negro waiter replaced Peter’s salad with a pallid salmon plank reposing among flower-cut radishes. Peter toyed with the fish, wishing very much he were back in the kitchen with the staff rather than in this upholstered seat. He would show them how to properly treat this fish, baking it in parchment paper, and then when they took their break he would join them as they smoked behind the rhododendron bushes near the loading dock, as he had seen them doing. He would have enjoyed working at this club, so convenient to the Larchmont house, but of course Sol would not hear of it. Peter wondered daily what had become of his friends in the kitchen at the Adlon: he had not had a chance to say good-bye to them; he had been at work one day and deported the next. Perhaps they were all still there, and maybe the Adlon was now the way it had been, the grandest restaurant in the best hotel in all of Berlin. Peter knew it was unlikely—he had heard the Adlon had been bombed—but he still held it in his mind like a photo, its marble columns and mirrored walls, the movie star patrons who sent Masha into a frenzy. Peter had once spotted Henry Ford, and a white-haired gentleman he was sure was Albert Einstein smoking in the lounge, but Masha had been more impressed by Clark Gable and Frau Marlene Dietrich, the Negress singer Josephine Baker and the actress Louise Brooks . . .
The salmon plates were whisked away and crumbs swept from the table by the white-gloved waiters. Then silverware chimed against glasses as Sol ascended to the podium at the front of the room, carrying his Scotch. There was applause. Sol dipped his head. “Thank you,” he said. The lights dimmed.
“Many of you here know me,” Sol began, and somebody yelled, “We sure do, Solly!” prompting laughter and a scolding susurrus of shushing. Sol waited tolerantly. In the spotlight, his complexion was so ruddy from golf and fishing he could have been mistaken for one of the Negros serving dinner. Peter had recently overheard Esther confide laughingly into the telephone, Solomon has such a tan I woke up last night and screamed; I thought there was a schvartze in my bed!
“We gather here tonight after the High Holidays not just to enjoy each other’s company but to find yet another way in which to make amends, to give,” Sol told the now-quiet room. “And the need for giving, especially now, is boundless. You all know I am a very dedicated man. I’ve been on the board of the Jewish Distribution Committee for thirty years. Saly Meyer and I, we saw the writing on the wall for European Jews before anyone here ever even heard the word Nazi. We funded the emigration of Jews to Canada, to the Americas and Palestine. We raised money for Jewish schools, hospitals, and orphanages. Because we knew what would happen to our people.” He paused to sip his Scotch.
“In 1944, I was appointed by President Roosevelt himself to the War Refugee Board,” he went on, in the same rolling tones Peter had heard him once use, at a smaller dinner party, to announce, I was instrumental in bringing Polish ham to this country! leading Peter to wonder whether Sol equated the saving of European Jewry with the importation of luncheon meat. “It is my job to ensure safe passage for Jews devastated by the war to this country and to help them set up new lives,” Sol said. “Here tonight we have just such a young man, who has lost everything,” and Sol gestured in Peter’s general direction with his Scotch tumbler. “This young man is my family,” Sol said. “His father, Avram, was my beloved cousin. We played together as boys when our families summered in the Alps, and as adults, when the Nazis started pushing our people into ghettos, Avi and I . . . Avi . . .”
Here Sol set down his drink. He removed his glasses and took out his handkerchief. This happened every time; the tears were genuine, Peter knew, which made them all the more terrible. All over the darkened room people wept in sympathy. Noses were sniffled, then honked. Peter could feel Miss Rachel Nussbaum gazing at the side of his face, her eyes a liquid glimmer. Peter knew what would happen next: Sol would tell the story of his own lost fa
mily, Peter’s parents. A screen would roll down behind Sol and slides would be projected onto it, clicking one after another: of the ghettos and camps, then of the raw Displaced Persons settlements, Jewish sickrooms and community centers, Jewish children emaciated and lost. There would be cries of sorrow and outrage. Sol would emphasize that the good work, far from being over, was just beginning. Checkbooks would be removed from inner pockets and opened, supplementing the already high price of dinner. And as the pièce de résistance, the proof, Peter would be summoned to stand with Sol in the spotlight; he would be asked to remove his cuff link and roll up his sleeve to expose the tattoo. Now, Peter slipped off his tuxedo jacket in preparation. He sat back in the dark and awaited his cue.
5
Peter made his escape as soon as he decently could after the show, when he thought he would not be missed: while dessert, scoops of vanilla ice cream melting in silver cups, was being served and what Sol called schmoozing was going on. Although Peter slid along the circumference of the room, a tearful lady waylaid him and told him that her whole family, her aunts and uncles and all their offspring, had all perished in those awful camps—all, all!—and she had cried on Peter’s starched shirt a little, and then he was free. He slipped into the hallway and walked quickly with his head down toward the closest set of double doors leading out onto the putting greens. But then, “Hello,” said the quiet voice of Miss Rachel Nussbaum; she was standing by the exit in her yellow dress, gazing out at the misty night. “Would you care to join me for a cigarette?” she asked. “I’m so sorry about what happened to you in those . . . places. They must have been terrible,” and Peter smiled and nodded and, pantomiming desperation, did an about-face and dove for the men’s room.
Inside the tiled room with its smell of wet paper towel and urinal cakes, Peter locked himself into a stall and, without unbuttoning or lowering his trousers, sat on the commode. He mopped his forehead with his palms; his body was running with sweat, his hair damp and coming loose in clotted waves from its pomade, and he feared he smelled bad. Peter hated this above all else. In the camps, they had all stunk. He leaned his forehead against the cool metal wall of the cubicle and closed his eyes. How many more minutes—fifteen, twenty?—and then this evening would be over and they could go home. Or at least back to the Larchmont house. Although Peter didn’t know why he wanted that; it wasn’t preferable, not really. What did it matter whether he was here performing like a trained seal or lying on the cot in the Loom Room, hands crossed behind his neck, staring into the dark? There was no place he wasn’t without them, Masha and Vivi and Ginger, and no place where he could be with them, either. There was no respite from this grinding existence, no restful place anywhere anymore.
Peter must have dozed, his head leaning against the side of the stall, for he was startled when the men’s room door clanked open and two men came in. Sol’s voice, which Peter would by now have recognized anywhere, and a fellow Peter thought was Sol’s fishing partner Dutch, a confusing name because the man wasn’t Dutch at all. In fact, he had told Peter when the three were out on Sol’s boat, Dutch’s family were Jews from Romania, and he didn’t know what had happened to them, they hadn’t been close, but he thought they probably—zzzzht! and Dutch had made a cutting gesture across his throat.
“How much you think you pulled in tonight, Solly?” Dutch asked, as flies were being unzipped, and Sol said something unclear. “Wow,” said Dutch, “that’s some haul,” and there was the sound of a healthy stream hitting porcelain.
“I didn’t know that about the kid,” Dutch continued, “that he’d been in more than one camp. I thought he was just in hiding and then at, you know, that really bad one.” Sol said something else lost in the urinal’s flush, and then Dutch said, “Gee, that’s too bad. Still, thank God he has you, huh, Solly? It’s a real mitzvah, you helping him out like that.”
“He’s family,” Sol said.
“How’s he working out at the law firm?” Dutch asked.
“He’s not,” Sol said. “He’s cleaning tables at some restaurant in the train station,” and a faucet ran.
“Huh? Why?” Dutch said.
“He’s no good,” said Sol. “No ambition. He’ll never make anything of himself. Soft—his own father said so.”
“Huh,” Dutch said. Then, cautiously: “Is he a faygele?”
“No,” Sol said. “He had a family over there, wife and two kids. Cutest little twin girls you ever wanted to see. But they didn’t make it. He wasn’t man enough to save them.”
“Gee,” Dutch said again, “that’s too bad,” and then the taps squeaked off, the paper towel dispenser cranked, the door opened and wheezed shut.
Peter waited until he was sure they had gone. Then he emerged from the stall and washed his hands and face. He finger-combed his shining hair back into place and looked at himself dispassionately in the mirror. If there had been some gesture big enough to express the violence of emotion within him at that moment, he gladly would have made it. Instead, he straightened the jacket of his tuxedo, gathered himself, and went out.
III.
GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL
Friday, September 21, 1945
6
The next day, a Friday, Peter was in the Oyster Bar kitchen eating a hamburger before the lunch rush when Leo, the manager, came in. This was a rare foray; Leo was usually back in his office or surveying the front of the house—Peter had seen little of him since the day he’d been hired. Leo was in his early fifties, bald but with a beard as long as a rabbi’s, bristling with vitality as if to make up for the lack of hair on his head. He was also cross-eyed, so that on the occasions he had addressed Peter, Peter had a hard time meeting his gaze and settled for focusing on the bridge of the manager’s nose. The other staff had various nicknames for him, calling Leo “Chrome Dome” or sometimes “the Generalissimo,” but Peter liked him. Leo had been kind to Peter since the June afternoon Peter, killing time between when the train from Larchmont had disgorged him and his language class on the Lower East Side, had wandered into the Oyster Bar and timidly asked, after ordering a chicken salad sandwich, whether Leo could use any help. Leo had rolled his crossed eyes and said, Kid, what do I look like, the classifieds? But then he had noticed the tattoo on Peter’s arm and his expression had softened to sorrow and he had said, Okay, I don’t need a cook right now, but I guess I could use a busboy. Why don’t we start you off there and see how you do. Peter wished he hadn’t gotten the job out of pity; he would have very much liked to show what he was capable of—like the night after closing when he had made crêpes for the staff, adding the seltzer that was his secret ingredient for laciness of the batter; how they had all applauded when Peter had flipped the large, thin pancakes in the pan! Still, for all its humbleness, Peter was grateful for this job—so much better than being an errand boy in Cousin Sol’s office until he finished polishing his English, when the busywork would have calcified to clerking and, eventually, the dreaded practice of law.
Now Leo once again looked mournful. He came in, glared around over his bushy beard, and said, raising his voice to be heard above the sizzling grills and churning dishwasher, “Where’s the kid?”
“You mean Pretty Boy?” said Big Al, one of the cooks. “He over there by the walk-in, eating us out of house and home, as usual.” He wiped sweat from his forehead and winked at Peter. Big Al was another one Peter liked, although at first Peter had been fascinated and a little wary of the cook, the first Negro Peter had ever seen in person, outside the cinema. But Big Al, too, had been in Europe during the war, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, and he, like Peter, was a refugee in exile. I’m from Atlanta, Big Al had said, and don’t let nobody tell you the South ain’t a different country from up here, boy, because it surely is. And I ain’t never going back. I guess after what I been through, I got the right to be treated like a real man. Big Al teased Peter mercilessly about his looks, which Peter knew from the Adlon was a
sign of acceptance, and what Big Al called Peter’s double life. Lookit you, Prince Valiant! Big Al had chortled one morning, holding up the society pages a diner had left on a table; to Peter’s chagrin, there was a photo of him and Sol at one of Sol’s fund-raisers, this time at the Pierre. You some sort of secret agent? I knew you was hiding something! Why you slumming here when you could be dating Miss Lana Turner? Where your penguin suit at? But in a quieter moment, when Peter explained about being the front man for Cousin Sol’s admirable causes, Big Al had looked thoughtful, then sad. I get it, he said. You and me, we alike, boy. Me to white men and you to the Nazis—and now even to your own people—we both niggers.
“Yo, Goldilocks,” Big Al called now, “Mr. Leo wants you,” and Peter jumped up from the onion crate on which he had been sitting, cramming the last chunk of meat into his mouth. No matter how little appetite Peter had nowadays, he could not resist hamburgers, which was lucky as Big Al cranked out an assembly line of patties for him throughout the day—After what them Nazis did to you, boy, you ain’t got no more meat on you than a chicken wing! We got to fatten you up some.
Leo spotted Peter in the corner and beckoned to him. “Kid,” he said, “come with me,” and he led Peter out of the steamy kitchen and through the rear of the restaurant to his tiny office. It was hot in this room, too, Leo’s black wire fan riffling his pinup girl calendar, hiding and revealing Miss September 1945 in an endless game of peekaboo but doing little to stir the stuffy air.
