Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

  “Are you union?” asked Sofia. She made no sign of knowing Ray and he did not remind her.

  “You gotta have a job, which I don’t,” said Ray. “Wall Street folks made sure of that.” He glanced at Miss Finn. She stared back hard; her face looked like ten different ways of saying No.

  “These are union boys,” Ray reminded her. “They’re okay.”

  “That’s up to you,” said Miss Finn. “But keep it about your business, not anyone else’s.” I imagined that she was referring to Ernesto, but she could have been referring to anything. Ernesto was the only secret I knew.

  She crossed the yard to greet our mothers.

  Ray seemed younger without Miss Finn in the picture. Instead of looking like one of her friends, he looked like ours.

  “I’ve been writing pamphlets and collecting supplies for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” he told us. “You know about that?”

  “I could help with that. I won an award for my essay....” I began.

  “You’re a communist?” asked Yorgos.

  “If you say so,” said Ray.

  “How about this,” asked Yorgos, “how come you guys never come to Barren Shoal? Too busy recruiting the coloreds?”

  “Good question,” said Ray. He sounded amused, not angry.

  “So what do I win?” asked Yorgos.

  “All I got.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Time to answer your questions.”

  Yorgos laughed, I was happy; all was good.

  “C’mon,” said Noah. “There’s lots of food, beer.”

  We tramped down to the beach with our plates and glasses, hoping it would be cooler than by the house, what with the crowd of people and the homemade grill and the June heat. We settled in where we had once picnicked with Gray and Lois, this time with grilled fish, potato salad, and beer instead of finger sandwiches and martinis. That had been a lesson; this was a party.

  The sand was damp, as were the driftwood logs that we leaned against. The moisture was cooling through my dress.

  “You’d think there’d be more of a breeze down by the water,” said Ray, who fanned himself with his hand.

  “Stinks bad here, all right,” said Joey.

  “I got an earful about that from Miss Finn,” answered Ray. “She told me to clam up about it.”

  “Nothing to say,” said Noah.

  “What d’you think?” Ray asked me. It was about time he noticed.

  “This is Barren Shoal, take it or leave it. Yorgos and Joey got jobs here. Our families have houses. Nobody starves,” I said.

  “So why the unions?”

  “I didn’t say it was perfect,” I told him. I sounded testy. “I said—”

  “He’s trying to back you into a corner,” interrupted Noah. “By the time he’s done, you’ll be a card carrying member of the YCL.”

  “I’m not trying to back anyone into anything,” said Ray through a mouth of potato salad. “I’m asking her a question. Admit it: Barren Shoal is damned peculiar. I’ve heard of company towns, but never company islands. And this company town, island, whatever it is—it’s in the middle of New York City.”

  “Nowhere near the middle,” I said.

  “You know what I mean. It’s like the company is the government and the city doesn’t exist.”

  “The city sends Miss Finn to teach,” I reminded him.

  “Because the company doesn’t want you going off-island every day and bringing back trouble.”

  “You know that for a fact?” I asked, “or is that what you think?”

  “We go to the city all the time,” said Joey.

  “The bosses don’t know the half of it,” said Yorgos. “They’d jam us up good if they did.”

  Ray nodded. “That’s my point.”

  “So how come you’re not with the unions?” I asked.

  “I know some Wobblies. That’s how I got to the Lincoln Brigade. Lots of old Wobblies joined up.”

  It was one thing to want a union so Barren Shoal would be better. It was where we lived. It was another thing to worry about Spain, about people Ray had never met and a life he would never lead. I am not saying that one was more important than the other. I would have thrown everything I had into the union if they had let me. But Ray’s altruism was something else. It was terrific, but it was also an indulgence. Going to Spain would be an adventure. Not that there was anything wrong with that. It was romantic, but that also took the shine off what was right about it.

  “Hey, you,” someone called. One of the Dowd kids was walking towards us. “Your mothers say you should come back to the party.”

  “I don’t have no mother,” Joey shouted back at him.

  “That’s not my fault,” yelled the kid.

  “How about I beat you up anyway?”

  The party was going strong back at the house.

  “Where have you been?” asked my mother.

  “Eating,” I said.

  “Your mother asked where,” said my father.

  “You think I didn’t see you talking to that boy?”

  I could not say which was more surprising: that she had noticed me at all or that my curiosity about Ray was obvious. So much for guarding secrets.

  “Noah was with us.”

  “That’s besides the point,” said my father.

  “What is the point?” I asked.

  “You’re not a little girl anymore. That’s the point,” said my mother.

  “Are you saying I can’t talk to him?”

  “Is he Jewish?” asked my father. Can you believe it? Oh, why not. It is the same question I asked my own children thirty years later.

  “We were talking, not getting married.”

  “Remember that,” said my father.

  I caught up with the others, who were gorging themselves on big pieces of a lemon sheet cake. Joey had helped himself to the scholar’s cap and tassel made out of chocolate.

  “Want some?” he asked. It was already melting and he licked the chocolate that was oozing between his fingers.

  “Thanks but no thanks,” I said.

  “How about cake?”

  I turned quickly and my chin landed squarely in the piece that Ray was offering. The others laughed harder than the moment deserved. At least it felt that way, the laughter being at my expense.

  “Not funny,” I muttered.

  “Sure it is,” said Sofia.

  I grabbed the cake from Ray’s hand and smushed it in her face.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Hysterically funny.”

  She wiped a big piece of it away from her mouth. Her lips curled into grin.

  I took off.

  Sofia chased me around the yard, weaving through the tomato plants and the string beans and an assortment of Dowd children of all ages and the fathers smoking until she finally gave up. Out of breath and gasping for air, she handed the used piece of cake to Joey who, of course, ate it.

  The other boys said nothing either except for Ray, who had been laughing and cheering us on.

  “If you wanna help the Internationals come to Brooklyn, help roll bandages we send over with the volunteers.”

  Days passed—not weeks, but just days—before the first dump trucks could be heard filling the shallows between Barren Island and Floyd Bennett Field with landfill. What a silly, misleading name for trash. The bulldozers came every day, no matter the weather, to drive the landfill further into Jamaica Bay. It was not long before Barren Island was an island no more. It was merely another piece of land jutting into the water.

  Life on Barren Shoal became measured by the comings and goings of work crews to the newly created extension of Floyd Bennett Field. Noah said something about seeing if he could get work there, but Mr. Paradissis said a few choice words to him about being a collaborator. Noah discussed it with Stanley Morrow, who declined to weigh in on the matter. Morrow told Noah to stay focused on Barren Shoal, so Noah dropped it.

  Noah became obsessed with eviction notices th
at he was certain were coming soon. He and my mother discussed them for hours: when they might come, who would bring them, why it was inevitable, how much time we would have to pack. The situation was awful, yet it was good to see her interested in something again. The strangest thing of all was that other people dropped the subject from public conversation as if that would make it disappear.

  “Mr. Morrow also says it’s time to make a move on the factory,” announced Noah. “He says the local is really ready now to back us up, especially after everything that happened to Barren Island.”

  “Who says we want them?” said Yorgos. “It’s taken them a hell of a long time. Forget about Morrow. It’s Mike Sierra or nothing.”

  “We still got work in the plant, Noah,” reasoned Joey. “What else you want?”

  “I got nothing,” said Noah.

  My father continued making fruitless trips to HIAS, as if there was still a chance of saving anyone who could not save themselves. Noah and the boys continued traveling to the union hall in Brooklyn and the rallies in Union Square, from which they often came home with black eyes and split lips. They did not act concerned about being arrested. Noah said someone from Morrow’s union promised him a job, but there were no jobs anywhere.

  Unlike the boys, I did not leave Barren Shoal, though I finally wanted to. Sofia could sneak around with Joey without drawing much attention, but what could I do? Ask my father to bring me to see Ray Whitmore? Ask Miss Finn to arrange a rendezvous? Girls in my day did not do that, not the kind of girl that I was. Ray became a conversation I had with myself. He was the secret I kept, even from him.

  After Noah explained it, I understood the irony of reading the moldy copy of Robinson Crusoe that he had found in the Barren Island schoolhouse. Noah said I could borrow it if he could borrow my Thoreau.

  “Lakes, islands, get it?” he said.

  “Get what?” I asked.

  “Imagine you’re Crusoe, an imaginary man at the center of your own universe, and you’re lonely. Or you’re Thoreau, a real man circling the center, and you’re just as alone. In either case you want to stay alive. So do you try to stay where you are or do you go?

  “You expect an answer?”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Just take the book.”

  It turned out to be pretty terrific, the way Crusoe reinvented everything from what little he had. It was crazier still that Crusoe was a nicer man alone than he was when Friday appeared. Correction: calling it crazy is too easy. Crusoe chose to make Friday his slave. And it is choice that makes us human, even a character in a story.

  Like Crusoe, I sketched every species of plant and grass that grew on our island, as well as every object that washed up on the beach, and every animal and insect that crawled across the sand. I drew the marram grass and heather on the dunes, and the glasswort and sea lavender in the waters of the muddy shore facing Long Island. When I ran out of paper I snuck into the schoolhouse and helped myself. I took the key that Miss Finn hid on a nail beneath a loose shingle. Having opened that door once, I felt free to open it whenever I needed. I never mentioned the key to the boys, who still jimmied the lock to get in. Why would I?

  On the bookcase behind Miss Finn’s desk stood a volume of botanical drawings by Albrecht Durer, Franz Andreas Bauer, Gerard van Spaendonck, and others. No women artists, even though we are supposed to be so crazy in love with flowers.

  I am done with being told what to like.

  I worked my way up to birds, though without much success. Only later, with the aid of a Roger Torey Petersen book, could I say with authority how Barren Shoal hosted muted swans, cormorants, snow geese, Canadian geese, gadwalls, snowy egrets, great egrets, herons, roseate terns, sandpipers, red knots, dunlins, piping plovers, a couple of kinds of gulls, warblers, and grackles. I love saying these names. By the end of the 20th century, the plover and tern in Jamaica Bay were on the endangered or threatened species lists. I bet plenty of others are gone for good.

  I made studies of rock crabs and mud crabs, including forensic studies based on a couple of claws or the back of a shell. I pulled in butterfish, yellowtail, and hogchokers, sketching them too before scaling and gutting them. I still brought quahogs and surf clams to Mrs. Paradissis, even if Sofia insisted that crushing them was a task better left for children.

  “Which children exactly?” I asked, one of the few times we were now alone. Sometimes I would forget what she had been through that winter. Sometimes I wondered if she had forgotten too. That was probably me wishing we could all forget, as if any good would come from forgetting.

  There was a new restlessness on Barren Shoal, a feeling of agitation I would have embraced had I any thoughts about what to do with it. The boys fed themselves on this tension, ready to tussle with any palpable feeling.

  Yorgos had grown worse than anxious. “What now?” he would ask impatiently. The racket from the dump trucks at the marshes would end for the day, Joey would gnaw on leftovers from Sofia, and Yorgos would ask, “What now?” Noah would read aloud from Mr. Paradissis’ Daily Worker, the only newspaper around now that Miss Finn was home in Brooklyn for the summer, and Yorgos kept asking, “What now?”

  On every front there was nothing until one evening Noah said, “Look at this. Isn’t that Miss Finn’s Ray?”

  I was pulling weeds, though the garden barely needed tending. It was better than imagining eviction scenarios or Sofia with Joey. I never did make peace with that.

  Sure enough, in The Daily Worker was a photo of Ray waving goodbye to some Lincoln Brigade volunteers. They were shipping out to join the Spanish Civil War. He had a real big grin on his face and a Friend of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion pin on his shirt.

  “He’s a communist,” remarked Noah.

  “That’s only what Yorgos said. Ray just didn’t say that he wasn’t,” I said.

  “The guy’s red,” said Yorgos.

  “Aren’t you?” I asked.

  “I’m union,” said Noah. “And a socialist if I’ve gotta be anything.”

  “I wonder if he’ll come over again,” I said.

  “You know they won’t let him,” said Noah. “The graduation party was a one-shot deal.”

  “I liked him,” I said. It felt good saying it.

  “Marta’s got a boyfriend,” said Noah, chuckling.

  “It’s not like that,” I protested, tugging the newspaper from his hands.

  “Oh yes it is,” teased Noah.

  “Ray could be a socialist,” I said. My feelings for Ray, the ones that continued to multiply despite having met him only those two times, made no more sense to me than did the passion that Sofia had for Joey or Noah had for the unions. Or maybe even for Mr. DeWitt. But there they were.

  “It doesn’t matter, Marta. Ray’s okay. He’s an anti-fascist.”

  “And a gardener,” added Joey. “Like us.”

  “Imagine that,” said Noah, grinning. “Two things we all agree on.”

  Agreeing about two things, even important things, was no guarantee that anything might come of my schoolgirl crush. I knew better. Even so, I was glad to have one.

  “Forget about that. The point is that we’re not going down like sheep the way they did on Barren Island,” said Noah.

  Noah had his cause just like I now had mine. I had Ray.

  “Sheeps and horses are what they burned on Barren Island,” said Joey, without a trace of irony. “We do horses and cows.”

  “Very funny,” said Yorgos, “except we eat the sheep now, too.”

  “Right,” said Joey through a mouthful of chicken, though it was unclear what he was agreeing to. Joey could go either way on anything as long as he was included. Or eating.

  “What could those poor dopes do? The city threw them out,” said Yorgos.

  “What city? There was a person’s name on the eviction papers. A living, breathing person. Robert Moses. He signed them. He made it happen. He takes the power, he’s gotta take the blame.”

  The boys spent the evening d
ebating strategies for convincing Commissioner Moses, coercing Moses, even kidnapping Moses, though he was too big for anyone to take on and they knew it. Mayor LaGuardia had tried and failed. President Roosevelt, too. To this day I do not understand how Moses managed all that power, but he did.

  That was the last I heard about Robert Moses for a while. It was officially summer, a hot one that came on the heels of a heat wave in May. Instead of politics the boys turned their attention to baseball and Noah’s radio. It was too hot to listen inside so they turned it to an open window facing the yard.

  Lots of people came by to listen to the games. Everyone cheered for the Dodgers and booed the visitors and no one owned up to rooting for the Yankees, though plenty must have because DeWitt was always around to collect their bets. The men brought sandwiches or plates of cold chicken and marinated seafood. There was no bar on Barren Island anymore—for heaven’s sake: there was no Barren Island anymore—where the men could buy beer, so they bought bottles of spirits from the barge captains or drank homemade wine. Barren Shoal could have been anywhere in America in those days. Or at least anywhere in Brooklyn.

  That summer Miss Finn, for the first time, sent over newspapers from Brooklyn every week so that we could follow the fighting in Spain and China, the legislative barbarities in Germany, as if the Nuremburg Race Laws were not bad enough, and the unrelenting heat wave that had become a national disaster. The Herald-Tribune printed photos of buckled roads in Minnesota and families sleeping outdoors in Detroit public parks. The randomness of suffering corresponded to a world that was forsaking reason.

  There were no other pictures of Ray, but I studied the papers anyway—even The Daily Worker—so I would be ready when I saw him again. I knew little about the Communist Party before that. Even now, long after my brief affair with them came to a dismal and disappointing end, I can understand their appeal. They stood up for working people, for poor people, even for the blacks when no one else did. At least on paper. It was a lot more than the big muckety-muck capitalists were doing. Too bad the reds became muckety-mucks too.

  As for seeing Ray again, it was not so complicated. One night in early July, Noah and I were listening to a radio story set in a London church in 1915; whole families were rolling bandages for the English soldiers fighting in the 2nd Battle of Ypres.