by Karen White
Her eyes traveled to a newspaper headline, a photo showing the destruction of Berlin after the Allied bombings. “So many suffered,” David remarked.
She was surprised how charitable he could sound to those who had taken his family. “You don’t hate them?”
“I hate those who killed my family and neighbors.” He gestured widely toward the street, then lifted his arms toward the sky. “But hating an entire country is not going to bring back my family.” There was an energy about him, a constant fluttering of the hands. She reached out and put her hand over his, the gesture so impulsive and bold it hardly seemed her own. Their eyes met. A second passed, then another. Ella saw the fear that if he stopped moving he might crumble like dust. She released him.
David continued, “It’s going to be quite a job, though, rebuilding the world. Let’s hope they get it right this time.” He was referring of course to the Great War, not three decades earlier. Then the peacemakers had thought they were creating a new world order. What would make this time any different? “It’s going to be a trick, with the Russians and all,” he added.
Ella nodded. Trouble was emerging already between the Soviet Union and the West, squabbling over Eastern Europe like stray dogs fighting for a scrap of meat. “The communists, are they really so bad?”
He looked hurriedly in both directions. “Shh—people here, they need something to be afraid of, and now that Hitler is gone, well, that’s it.” Hitler had shot himself unceremoniously months earlier. Then the German army surrendered and the whole thing ended.
The war in the East had lingered on, though. Hearing of the destruction, especially the awful bombs that had been dropped, Ella felt a bit sad. She knew the Japanese were hated in America. But they had kept the Jews of Shanghai alive, albeit in deplorable conditions, and that was something. She was not sure who the enemy was anymore.
As she thought about it now, Ella’s stomach hardened—what would happen to Mama and Joseph now that the Japanese no longer controlled Shanghai? China had always tolerated the Jews, but the political situation would be unstable at best.
“You’ll do just fine,” he said brightly, misreading the consternation on her face.
“I’m not worried about . . .” Then she stopped, accepting the encouragement he offered, which she had not known that she needed until just that moment.
“You’ve got a lucky feel about you,” he added. Luck. It was not the first time he had mentioned it, though perhaps it was fitting that someone who professed to no longer believe in God should put so much stock into chance. “I should take you with me,” he blurted. “That is, you could come along.” She inhaled sharply, taken aback by the boldness of the suggestion from a man she just met. “There are lots of opportunities for women, too, I’m sure, if you weren’t off to see your father.”
He was joking, certainly. But there was something familiar about sitting here talking with David, as if she had known him for years. And it felt nice, after weeks of traveling alone, to know someone. He was going his way, though, and she hers, and there was nothing to be done about it. She would have liked to have invited him along to Papa’s if she knew what it would be like there.
Across the station the clock chimed five. “Oh goodness,” she said, standing up. Time had flown so much more quickly than she’d expected.
“If we had more time, we could see a film,” he said, an unmistakable note of wistfulness to his voice. If.
“You could take the subway,” he added, his tone practical now. She shuddered. The dark underground maze seemed scary and alien. “A bus, then. Right at the corner of Lexington. I can go with you if you’d like. My train doesn’t leave for another few hours.”
But she shook her head. She needed to meet Papa on her own. “I wouldn’t want to take you out of your way.”
A look of disappointment crossed his face. “Well then, Miss Ella.” He brought his lips to her hand and then held it for a second, leaning in. She wondered if he might kiss her cheek—or more. But he let go of her hand and tipped his hat. “Good-bye.”
Ella picked up her suitcase, which seemed to have grown heavier, and started walking toward the corner. When she turned back, David had disappeared.
Sadness filled her then, and she was seized with the urge to turn and run after him. Enough, she thought, brushing the notion away. Papa was waiting. Ella began walking once more. Ahead of her, a man pushed a pram down the street, while the woman at his side licked an ice-cream cone. So this was what life was to be like here. Ella’s step grew light and confident, as if she were sailing down 42nd Street. She had made a friend already. She would not see David again, and she was sad to see him go. But he had surely found her interesting, and if she did that in just a few minutes, maybe there was a chance to make any life here that she wanted.
Forty minutes later, Ella climbed off at the stop the driver had indicated. Clearing from her throat the fumes the bus had belched before leaving, she set down her bag and paused to gather her bearings. The ramshackle neighborhood, with its run-down stoops, seemed worlds away from the gleaming city she had just left across the river. Laundry lines awash in white sheets were strung between the tenement buildings. How had Papa come to live here? She knew so little about his life—perhaps he lived in a boardinghouse just for men. He might not have a place for her.
Ella paused in front of a drugstore. She eyed the front window. A wall of penny candy, rows and rows of gum balls and taffies and licorice, danced before her eyes, taunting her. Joseph would have loved it. Outside a shoeshine boy sat on the ground, waiting for a customer. He reminded her of the barber they used to see on Chushan Road, cutting hair on the front steps of his house for change. Ella considered asking the boy for directions. Then, thinking better of it, she kept walking. The house numbers were going lower now, confirming that she was headed in the right direction. The neighborhood here was shabbier still, voices arguing loudly through a cracked window over a broadcast of a baseball game, the sound of something breaking. The stench of warm, rotting garbage rose from a sewer. A teenage boy sat idly on a dirty stoop, his socks improbably white below rolled jeans.
As she neared the address on the paper, her heartbeat quickened. It was a real house, with a freshly washed stoop and yellow flowers in the box outside the window. Papa really had done well here after all. But was he kinder now? She stood motionless, as if her feet were now cased in concrete. On the journey, which seemed as though it had taken years, Ella had pictured the reunion a thousand times. She had practiced the words she would say in her mind, how she would tell him about all that he had missed. Now that the reunion was actually here, she was not ready.
But there was nothing to be gained from waiting. Steeling herself, she walked to the house. She knocked on the door, then touched the silver mezuzah mounted on the door frame, not unlike theirs back home in Shanghai. From inside the house came the Sabbath smells like a nearly forgotten dream, baking challah and roast chicken mixing familiarly with stale pipe smoke. Her pulse quickened as she imagined stepping inside, a welcome daughter.
A woman appeared in the doorway, brushing back auburn hair from her face. Ella started. There had to be someone, she reminded herself. Papa would not have prepared such a delicious-smelling meal himself. Was she a cleaner, or a cook, perhaps? But the woman moved with an ease that suggested something else. “Yes?” Her voice was harried but not unkind.
Uneasiness tugged at Ella’s stomach. “I’m looking for Jacob Saul.” The woman had strawberry freckles. Her face was too small, features seeming to cluster in the center.
“Jack is still at work at the press,” the woman replied. Ella cursed herself inwardly for not remembering the Americanized name from his later postcards. “Can I help you?” There was a note of possessiveness to her voice.
“I . . .” Ella stopped, noticing the pearl bracelet that swung around the woman’s wrist. Papa had given the bracelet to her mother as a
wedding gift, representing both her birthstone and her namesake. It was her most cherished possession.
But Mama had given it back to him on the dock that foggy day, much like this one, when he had left. “In case money gets short,” she insisted.
“Until I can put it on your wrist again,” Papa had corrected. Now it hung around another wrist, not pale and graceful like Mama’s, but thick and sturdy.
“I’m Mrs. Saul,” the woman added, before Ella had time to grasp the gold band on the woman’s fourth finger.
A rock seemed to slam into Ella’s chest, making it hard to breathe. No, she wanted to correct, Mrs. Saul was in Shanghai, dutifully waiting for Ella’s husband to send for her.
Ella’s mind reeled: Papa was married to someone else. How could that possibly be? Easy enough, she realized, when your wife was halfway around the world, and nobody knew about her—or the two children you shared.
“And you are . . . ?” Ella clenched her fists as her shock hardened to anger. The woman did not know about her. Of course not. She did not know about any of them. Ella opened her mouth to deliver the news that would shatter her world into tiny little pieces: You aren’t the first wife. None of this is real.
Just then a little girl appeared from behind the woman’s legs. “Mama?” The woman tried to shoo the girl from sight, but when she popped out again, she picked her up. The girl had curls the same shade as her mother’s, with hazel eyes that were unmistakably Papa’s. She was younger than Joseph, but she had to be at least two. As Ella did the math, her rage grew. Papa had scarcely waited a year after leaving them before he married again. Had they not mattered at all? Papa’s letters had continued to come after that date, though with decreasing frequency, as he maintained the charade.
“Did you want something?” the woman pressed. The child watched Ella’s face, curious.
Ella faltered. She could stay and confront Papa, insist that he take her in. The woman’s expression, though worried, carried a kindness that said she would not turn her away. But Ella would be extra here, a reminder of a life nobody wanted. And there would be no place for Mama or Joseph.
Ella tried to think of an excuse that would have her standing on the woman’s doorstep with a valise, but could not. “Nothing,” she said finally.
Something registered in the woman’s eyes. It was her voice, low and lyrical, so clearly like her father’s. “You . . .”
Ella turned to walk away. “Wait . . .” The woman ran after her clumsily, bobbling the little girl. “He said he had been married once, but he never mentioned a child.”
Children, Ella corrected silently. She waited for the woman to ask about her mother, but she did not. “My name is Alice,” the woman added. “I lost my husband at Normandy during the war.” She seemed to be asking Ella to understand. Ella wondered if Papa still had a temper. Had that changed, too, or did his new wife simply bear it as the price of having someone?
Ella debated whether to say more about who she was, or the distance she had come. This woman should know not just about Ella, but the little boy and the wife who waited faithfully. She did not want to know this woman, though, or to acknowledge that any of this was real.
The woman’s eyes followed Ella’s gaze to her wrist. She set down the child and took off the bracelet. “Here.”
Ella hesitated. She would not accept pity or charity, especially not from this woman. But she would reclaim Mama’s bracelet as payment for leaving her alone, and not destroying her world. Ella took the bracelet and slipped it in her pocket.
Her gaze traveled to the second floor of the house, where pale yellow curtains billowed behind an open window. There might be a bed, she thought—a bath, a place to lay her head, even just a cup of tea. Surely the woman would not refuse her husband’s blood kin. But she did not offer and Ella was too proud to ask. She stepped from the porch.
“What should I tell him?”
Ella wavered: even if she did have an address to leave, or some idea where she would go, she did not want Papa coming after her with the half-truths and excuses that would be so far short of making things all right. Or perhaps he would not follow her, a rejection that would hurt worst of all, if she were to let it happen. She reached into her valise and pulled out the sweater. Navy blue and wool, Mama had knitted it bit by bit each late night, and had insisted that Ella fit it into her bag where space was so precious because she was sure that Papa needed it. The stitching alone would be a calling card, Mama’s meticulous handiwork a rebuke.
“And ask him if he remembers the barber on Chushan Road.” There were a thousand other memories racing through her head, but she did not want to share them. The woman nodded. Would she tell Papa and give him the sweater or pretend none of this ever happened? It did not matter now.
Ella walked down the steps. Though she could not look back, she felt the woman’s eyes on her, watching to make sure she was really gone. Around the corner, she leaned against a low wall, shaking. She saw Papa walking merrily through the streets of Shanghai holding her hand and carrying Joseph—how could he have forgotten so easily the life they had shared? “America really changes a person,” Mama had said with each letter they received from Papa. Because she so, so wanted to believe it. Partly it was true—Papa had found a job and a good place to live, in the house that had surely belonged to Alice and her dead first husband. But the rest, about the money he was saving for boat tickets and the life they would share, had all been a lie.
Ella’s mind flashed back to when she was five and had gotten momentarily separated from her parents at the market, lured around the corner by the curious site of a monkey shelling peanuts. Standing perfectly still in the sea of tall bodies that milled around, Ella had felt alone for the first time in her life. Mama had found her quickly, of course, and scolded her for wandering off, but the shaken feeling had lingered for days.
Suddenly on this Brooklyn street corner, she was five again. Abandoned. How dare he? Others like David had traveled the world looking for their families, while Papa had cast his away so callously. For what? The woman had been plain, with none of Mama’s boundless grace. But she had been there in front of him, more convenient than pining for the beautiful wife he’d left thousands of miles away. And Papa, more so than anything, had always been about easy. Ella thought of the little girl with the hazel eyes like Joseph’s. Would she grow up not knowing that she had two half-siblings, her own blood?
Across the street, Ella spied a print shop. Through the glass front window, she caught a glimpse of a familiar graying head, bowed low over one of the presses. The solemn, hardworking man was a stranger to her now. America really had changed Papa, but it was too late for their family. How could he have done this? Her stomach pulled, torn equally by the desire to run into his arms and to slap him. But neither would change a thing. She turned.
She stood for a second on the curb, feeling more alone than she had since leaving China. The streets were dirty and dank. Buildings crowded in above her. It was everything she hated about Shanghai, but with none of the family and love to make it worthwhile.
What now? Her whole journey was premised on a lie. She did not belong here. But even if she had the money to return to China, she could not face her mother and brother, knowing that she had failed them. And she could not tell Mama the truth. Ella would figure out something else to save her mother’s pride, lie and say that she had not been able to find Papa. Even telling Mama that he was dead would bring her less pain and shame than the reality that he had moved on and left her behind.
No, she could not go back. And she did not want to go back to China, she realized with newfound clarity. Though she had been born there, she had never quite fit in. She would stay and make a life here somehow and make good on the promise to bring Mama and Joseph over. But she did not want to stay here in this city, no less stifling than Shanghai, which would always belong to her father and his new family.
Ella
looked at the clock above a tobacco shop. It was after six. David would surely be boarding his train soon. Her stomach fluttered as his dark eyes and dancing hands appeared in her mind. He managed to look bright, despite all he had lost. How could a man she had known only an hour linger with her so? She had felt stronger with him, more capable. Go west, he’d said. She was suddenly as alone as he. Ella wanted to put her head down and give up. But if David would not retreat in the face of such pain, she could not, either.
Ella began walking once more, passing the bus stop. She kept going, turning this way and that, feeling for the towering skyscrapers of the city that loomed ahead, obscured by the fog. Ahead stood the wide expanse of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Half an hour later, Ella reached the other side of the bridge and kept walking down the unfamiliar street. She paused and set down her valise, her feet aching. The fog broke then, and a faint beam of late-day sunlight shone through, revealing a hint of the city.
Across the street sat a pawnshop. Ella’s eyes traveled to the window as she fingered the roundness of the pearls in her pocket. She did not want to part with Mama’s bracelet. But food on the trip had been more costly than she expected. She’d had just enough money to get to Papa and not much more.
And even with money, she still would not know where she was going. In the West, David had said, it was open. Anyone had a chance. Once, as she was traveling to New York on the train, she had glimpsed an animal—like a deer, only thinner and more lithe (a gazelle, perhaps, if she was sure what that had been), leaping across the horizon. Free. What would that feel like?
Come with him, David had said. What if she had taken him up on it? It was madness to consider going after him. Maybe he had been joking after all, and liked it better now being alone. She might not even make the train.
