Children of the Promise

by Dean Hughes

  Peter had caught up by then. Anna could hear that he was crying, and she knew he was hurt more than he wanted to say. “Stay with Mama,” Anna said, and she took off running again.

  Anna saw nothing, heard nothing, and now she realized, they had made a mistake. Her father should not have gone last. He must be struggling to get out of the coal car. But then she caught a glimpse of his silhouette. He was on the ladder, getting ready. But darkness enveloped him, and she didn’t see him jump. She kept running as hard as she could, even though her lungs were burning with pain.

  And then, ahead of her, she heard him moan. “Papa, papa,” she shouted, and she dropped down next to him. He was taking long, agonizing breaths, but when he realized she was next to him, he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be all right.”

  But he wasn’t all right. Anna could hear that in his voice. “Did you land on your shoulder?”

  “No. I turned the other way. But it . . . I don’t know. I’ll be all right in a moment. How did your mother do?”

  “I think she’s all right. Peter hurt his knee. It’s you I’m worried about.” Anna knew that her father’s shoulder had twisted in some way. This could only make things worse.

  “Help me up. I can get up now.”

  When she tried to lift him, however, the twisting was too much. He cried out, and then he said, “Wait.” He took a few more gasping breaths, and then he sat up, pulling himself forward without using his arms. “Now get behind me. Help me stand.”

  The last car of the train passed by, and suddenly the night was surprisingly quiet. Anna got behind her father and wrapped her arms around his chest, but she had the feeling that she helped very little, that he forced himself up through sheer will, on his own. And when he reached his feet, he had to stand and breathe again, every breath a groan.

  Still, he began to walk, back along the track, and they hadn’t gone far before they heard Sister Stoltz and Peter crunching through the cinders.

  “Heinrich, how are you doing?” Sister Stoltz asked, even before Anna could see her.

  “I’m fine,” Brother Stoltz said.

  “He’s not fine,” Anna told her. “He hurt his shoulder again.”

  “No, no. It’s nothing new.” Anna and her father stopped as they reached Peter and his mother.

  “Peter has cut his knee. I can’t see it very well, but it’s bleeding badly.”

  “It’s nothing,” Peter said, no longer crying, and trying hard, Anna could tell, to sound as brave as the others.

  As it turned out, Sister Stoltz had come out better than anyone. Her elbow was sore, but Anna was scratched up worse, and Peter, besides the cut on his knee, had torn up his forearms. The cinders had apparently been more solid, hadn’t given way as much, where Peter and Anna had jumped. It was good, they all concluded, that the parents hadn’t jumped first.

  “We can’t stay here,” Brother Stoltz finally said. “I don’t know where we are exactly, but we need to clean up and get our other clothes on, so we won’t draw attention to ourselves.”

  “I want some water,” Peter said.

  “Yes, I know. We all do. We’ll find some. But it may be morning before we can get any food.”

  They left the tracks and walked toward the buildings in the distance, and they found that they were in a neighborhood of apartment houses and shops. They soon found a school, however, with a little playground outside. They hid behind a pair of large spruce trees and changed their clothes. Before Peter put his fresh trousers on, his mother tore up his old shirt and tied a bandage around his knee.

  Brother Stoltz suffered terribly in getting his shirt off and another one on, but he got it done, with some help. And then, once he got his breath again, he told the others, “Let’s throw away our old clothes, but tear up a rag or two that we can use to wipe our faces and hands. We’ll find some water now.”

  So with fresh clothes on, they walked down the empty street until they found a park—and in the park, a fountain. Brother Stoltz warned everyone not to drink too much, too fast, but Anna found the advice hard to take. She drank a great deal, and she did feel a little sick after, but the hunger pangs were not so bad with something in her stomach. And it did feel good to wash her hands and arms, and her face. She couldn’t get it out of her head that Kellerman’s blood was still all over her.

  “We need to stay out of sight until morning,” Father said. “If the police catch us out here now, they’ll want to know who we are. Maybe we can get a little sleep on the grass.”

  And so the Stoltzes tried to rest. But Brother Stoltz, even though he managed, with help, to lie on his back, was in far too much pain to sleep. His strained breathing continued to worry the others, and only Peter fell asleep quickly. Anna did drift off after a time, but she never really slept deeply.

  When the sun finally began to rise, and the birds began to sing, Anna was struck by the strangeness of the world going on quite normally. She realized then that her father, at some point, had gotten up. He was sitting on a bench some distance away. When he saw Anna stirring, he came back to the others. He looked at Anna and for the first time realized how badly she had scraped herself. “Oh, my dear,” he said, and tears came to his eyes. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.” He pulled Anna to her feet and folded his arms around her. She was tempted to cry, but she held on.

  “I wish I could promise all of you a better place to sleep tonight,” Brother Stoltz said. “I can’t do that, I suppose, but I do promise you that I will try.”

  “It’s not your fault, Papa,” Anna said. “It’s mine.”

  “No! Don’t ever say that, Anna. You did nothing wrong—absolutely nothing. I’m just thankful that you did what you did, and that he wasn’t able to defile you.”

  Anna wanted to believe that. But still, without understanding why, she felt a dreadful filthiness that she didn’t know how to clean away. Her mother came closer and put her arm around her, and the closeness did help.

  “I’ve been thinking everything over,” Brother Stoltz said. “We need names we can use, and we need a story. Then we need to get into the city near a bombed-out area so we can claim to be dispossessed of our papers and our belongings.”

  They walked back to the bench where Brother and Sister Stoltz sat down, with Peter and Anna on the grass in front of them, and they invented names: Hofmann for a family name, because it was common. Norbert and Maria, Karl and Ursula. Then they walked in pairs until they found a streetcar. They boarded it without seeming to be together, and they rode toward the city center until Brother Stoltz spotted some damaged buildings and got off. The others followed.

  They walked until they found an outdoor market where people were doing their early morning shopping. Brother Stoltz bought bread and cheese and milk, and then they split off in pairs again and shared the food. Anna had never tasted anything better in her life, and she watched Peter come back to life as he got some nourishment in him.

  After they had eaten, Brother and Sister Stoltz walked back to the children. “Stay here,” Brother Stoltz told the others. “Stroll around. Sit on a bench over there. Split up at times, perhaps, but keep each other in sight. I’m going to try to find the Church—or a member.”

  “What if the Gestapo tracked us to Berlin somehow?” Anna asked. “Wouldn’t they check all the members’ homes?”

  “I’ve thought a great deal about that,” Brother Stoltz said. “The only way to track us would be through the man in Friedberg, but he would be inviting his own death if he told anyone. He’s not going to say anything, I trust, so the Gestapo have no reason to look for us here any more than anywhere else.”

  “What can Church members do for us?” Sister Stoltz asked.

  “I don’t know, but we know they’re people we can trust. Maybe a member can hide us until we figure out a place to go.”

  And so Brother Stoltz left. Anna felt herself a little more relaxed now that she could move about more freely. And she felt stronger now that she had eaten, but her hands conti
nued to tremble, and she constantly studied anyone who approached her. No matter what she tried to think about, the image kept coming back. The wound. The blood running off Kellerman’s chin and onto her face. The fanatic anger in his eyes. What she knew was that the man would never stop looking for her. Her father wanted her to believe that the Gestapo had lost the trail, but Anna was not sure of that.

  Brother Stoltz came back much sooner than she had expected—less than two hours later—and when she saw him, she knew that he had good news. His face had not looked this confident, this relaxed, since they had left their home. He gathered the family together, and then he said, “I found the address of the church, and I went there. A caretaker was cleaning up, and he gave me the branch president’s name and address. I found him home before he left for work. He lives on the edge of the city—in a house. President Hoch is his name.” And now tears came into Brother Stoltz’s eyes. “He was careful. He was dubious about my story at first. But then he said, ‘Bring your family. Have them come to the back. We have a cellar in the house. You can all stay there for now—until we think of something else.”

  “It’s another miracle,” Sister Stoltz said. “It’s what you prayed for.”

  “Yes. Exactly. We’re going to live. The Lord wants us to live, or he wouldn’t be opening these doors for us.”

  Anna put her arm around Peter’s shoulders. She was fighting not to cry. But Brother Stoltz said, “Don’t shed tears. Don’t do anything out of the ordinary. Let’s go now. Two at a time.”

  Anna got herself under control, and then she and Peter followed, staying back. Still, Anna kept watching, checking behind her and studying every person she passed on the street. Her face was bruised and scratched—maybe someone would notice that. She wanted the cover of the cellar, the darkness. She wanted to hide where no one would ever look.

  Chapter 30

  Bobbi had always been careful with her money, but she withdrew most of her savings for her trip to Chicago. The train ticket alone was $59.35. Still, this would be her chance to have some new experiences. And as it turned out, she loved the streamliner: the novelty of sleeping in a berth in an air-conditioned Pullman car; the luxury and comfort of the dining cars; the indulgent treatment from the porters and waiters. It was all like living in a movie. She also enjoyed the mountains of Colorado, the plains of Kansas, the rolling hills of Missouri and Illinois, and she was impressed by the grand, showy train stations in Kansas City and St. Louis.

  By the time the train pulled into the station in Chicago, however, she was nervous, and she almost wished she hadn’t come. But when she stepped off the train and found David there, she found herself slipping naturally into his arms, feeling deeply happy for the first time in a long time. He kissed her longer than she liked in the middle of all these people, but when he stepped away and looked at her with his tender eyes, she had no doubt that she had done the right thing in coming. Her decision seemed already made.

  “It’s awfully hot,” he told her, and he reached for her suitcase. “It must seem humid to you.”

  She could barely hear over the noise of the trains and the people. She was amazed at the size of this place, with all the big coal locomotives lined up alongside the modern streamliners. “It’s been humid since Kansas City,” she said, “but my hotel will have air conditioning.” She smiled at the thought of it. She was staying at the Stevens Hotel, downtown, the largest hotel in the world, with three thousand rooms. The price was terrible, $4.50 a night, but she didn’t care. She had never stayed in a hotel in her life, and she wanted to experience the best.

  Just getting to the hotel, however, was almost more excitement than Bobbi was prepared for. She had tried to picture what it would be like, but the vibrancy of the huge city was beyond anything she had imagined. The noise, the intensity, the movement—the grand picture of it all—was splendid and frightening at the same time. The skyscrapers were overwhelming: hundreds of buildings clustered together, every one of them taller than the highest building in Salt Lake. David kept pointing out the window: “That’s the Field Building—over fifty floors. But look this way and you can see the Chicago Board of Trade—the tallest building in Chicago.” Bobbi would lean one way and then the other, always oohing and aahing, even though she wondered what the taxi driver must think of her.

  When the taxi crossed Wabash street, under the L—the elevated train—Bobbi heard the thunderous rattle of the trains and, below, saw the jam of trucks and cars, the mass of people on the sidewalks. It was chaotic and wonderful, so glittering above, with buildings reaching into the sky, but dirty and seedy at the street level. She had no idea why she liked it.

  The next few days were perfect. Bobbi’s room at the hotel was on a corner of the nineteenth floor. Northward, she could see the downtown “loop” area, and to the east, Lake Michigan. Beneath her, on the shores of the lake, was Grant Park, where she could see the giant Buckingham Fountain, illuminated by colored lights at night. Everything in the room was exquisite: the tiled bathroom with the big bathtub, the fancy draperies, the elegant cherrywood bed. She had trouble calming down enough to sleep at night, and so she sat up late, gazed out the window, or took a long bath and, like a princess, lounged in all the luxury.

  David came for her in the mornings, and he took her everywhere. They spent most of one day at the Art Institute in Grant Park. They saw works by all the great American painters whom Bobbi had studied, and when David guided her into the collection of French impressionists, tears actually came to her eyes. She was looking at paintings by Monet, Renoir, Manet. She had seen Renoir’s “Two Little Circus Girls” in her art-appreciation text, but now she was seeing the real thing. It seemed impossible.

  One afternoon David took Bobbi to a White Sox baseball game at Comiskey Park, then to dinner in Little Italy, and that night to an opera in the lavish Chicago Civic Opera Building—with a stage that was thirteen stories high. David loved so many different kinds of things, and he made everything fun. He took her walking in the loop one morning, down State Street, where they wandered through the opulent departments of the Marshall Field store. But then they stopped for lunch at a shabby little chili parlor on Wabash. And after lunch, they walked north along Michigan Avenue, the “Fifth Avenue” of Chicago, where they window shopped, waited to watch a drawbridge rise over the Chicago River, and then continued on to the famous old gothic Water Tower. David had told her to wear her swimming suit under her clothes, and as the afternoon heat came on, they swam in the lake and then rested on the beach.

  David had to leave Bobbi on her own one day, and she spent the time in Grant Park at the museum of natural history and then at the aquarium. But that evening David took her to China Town for dinner, and then he strolled with her around the campus of the University of Chicago. Bobbi had read Sandburg’s Chicago poems and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and she finally complained that she was seeing mostly the glamour of the city, so the next day David took her on the L to the south side, and there she saw rows and rows of broken-down tenements, vast areas where virtually all the people were Negroes. Bobbi had the feeling she would never be exactly the same after seeing poverty of a kind she had only read about before.

  That night David took her to a little jazz joint, in a better part of town, and David talked about the origins of jazz, all the way from Africa, something Bobbi had known very little about. But he seemed to be making a point: all these ethnic groups—this diversity—gave Chicago something that Salt Lake would never have.

  It was all dazzling and fascinating, and every day was something new. They ate wonderful food of all kinds, and they met people who spoke all sorts of languages. David constantly made her laugh, but he also held her hand, touched her hair, stole kisses. They spent way too much money—twenty cents, at least, every time they climbed into a taxi—and dinners that cost five or six dollars for the two of them. It was almost like a honeymoon, except that each night David said goodnight at the door to Bobbi’s hotel room.

  Bobbi was
in love. She didn’t have to ask herself about that. And he adored her; she felt that in everything he did and said. As her time began to run out, she felt certain he would ask her, once again, to marry him. She told herself to be careful, not to answer on the basis of this golden experience, but she was already quite certain she would never feel anything this powerful for another man.

  On Thursday night, when she knew she would be leaving on Saturday morning, she finally invited David into her hotel room. They sat across from each other and talked, but then, as he prepared to leave, they stood by the door and kissed. It was all very soft and sweet in the beginning, but they didn’t stop after a kiss or two. They continued to hold each other, continued to kiss, and Bobbi felt a hunger that she had never experienced before. She could feel his hands on her back and sides, moving, caressing, felt the firmness of his body against her, and she told herself to stop, not to let him get the wrong idea, but she didn’t want to stop, and their kisses were taking her to a numb, light-headed state that pushed aside her usual wisdom.

  David was beginning to breathe hard. He suddenly grasped her tighter and whispered, “Bobbi, do you want me to stay?”

  For a moment she couldn’t think what he meant. And then she was startled at the idea—and even more startled how much she wanted to say yes. But already she was pushing him away. “David, I love you,” she was whispering. “I love you—but no. We can’t do that.”

  And somehow she expected him, then, to propose marriage, and she expected to say yes. She wanted the wedding to happen as soon as possible.

  “It’s all right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” He took hold of the doorknob. “I’m really sorry.”

  She didn’t mind that he had asked, actually loved the idea that he wanted her that much, and she stepped back to kiss him one more time. “It’s all right,” she said.