The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  At first he thought she meant they didn’t dance to a song with a Yiddish title, but that didn’t make sense. Others were dancing to it, and most of them were Americans. Then she went on.

  “In America white girls don’t dance with schvartzes.”

  His head swiveled to her in surprise. “But isn’t that the kind of thing we’re running away from?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “What kind of a country are we going to?” he asked Meike when he repeated the woman’s comment.

  Neither of them had the least idea.

  * * *

  Years later they’d argue about whether they saw the Statue of Liberty that morning. David would describe the way she had loomed out of the mist, her upraised arm promising them shelter beneath it, her torch flaming freedom. Meike would assure him that if he’d seen the statue at all, it had been a glimpse of only part of her through a porthole in the ship’s dining saloon, where immigration officials who’d come aboard in the harbor had set up tables to thumb through papers, fire questions, and bring the stamp down with a thunderous thud, or not. As they inched closer to the table, Meike grew more worried. She didn’t admit it to David—she didn’t want to frighten him—but she kept going over it in her head. Their visas were in order, they’d passed their physical exams, their sponsors would be waiting on the dock. But things could always go wrong. They already had.

  Then suddenly they were leaving the dining saloon, properly stamped papers in hand, and going up on deck to stand side by side as the steel towers of the city sailed down to meet them.

  The arrival hall was a vast metal shed of people searching for one another, shouting at porters, embracing, and going from one letter of the alphabet to the next hunting for trunks and suitcases. Luggage was supposed to be arranged by the first initial of the last name of the owner, but often wasn’t. Meike and David didn’t have to search. Each of them carried a single suitcase, carefully packed by their mother, down the gangway and into the deafening chaos.

  Mr. and Mrs. Bennett were waiting. The four of them recognized one another from photographs that had been exchanged, Mr. Bennett big and bearlike, Mrs. Bennett wiry with a long upper lip that suggested unexpected reserves of strength. They snaked through the crush and din with wide anxious smiles. Then they were standing face-to-face, David and Meike on one side, the Bennetts on the other. Between them three other people loomed like pale images in a half-developed negative of the photo that was supposed to be.

  Meike held out her hand to Mrs. Bennett. Lydia Bennett took it, drew her close, and folded her in an embrace. Russell Bennett hesitated only a moment longer, then decided David was more boy than man, put his hands on his narrow shoulders, and drew him near.

  Later that night in the big master bedroom of the Tudor house in Ardmore on Philadelphia’s Main Line, after they’d shown the children, as they called them, though both Meike and David seemed to have been through too much to warrant the term, to their rooms, the Bennetts discussed that moment on the pier.

  “I wasn’t sure if I should shake hands,” Russ Bennett said, “but then I decided he was still a boy and a little more affection wouldn’t be out of order.” He stopped to take a cigarette from the case on the night table and light it. “And I’m glad I did. When I let him go, I saw the tears in his eyes.”

  Lydia Bennett reached for her husband’s cigarette and took a puff. “I noticed.” She handed the cigarette back. “I also noticed that her eyes were dry.”

  “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel.”

  She shook her head. “Of course it doesn’t. That’s what worries me.”

  * * *

  Within a week of their arrival, David went off to boarding school. It was, Mr. Bennett explained when Millie protested at their being separated, what their father wanted. “When we were making arrangements, one of the first things he asked about was schools for David. For all of you, but especially for David. He’s already lost part of the first semester. We can’t wait till your father arrives to make decisions. He’ll never forgive us. You know that, Millie.”

  She did know it, but the knowledge didn’t make David’s leaving hurt any less.

  The night before Mr. Bennett was to drive David to school, she and David sat up in his room until almost dawn, reassuring each other that Massachusetts wasn’t that far away, and he’d be home for something called Thanksgiving, which was just around the corner, and Christmas soon after that, and most important, this was what Papa wanted, insisted upon.

  The next morning, she stood on the gravel of the Bennetts’ driveway, clutching her coat against the November cold, with the muffled disoriented feeling that a sleepless night leaves behind, waving goodbye. Mr. Bennett wouldn’t even let her go along for the ride.

  “I know boys,” he told her. “I was one myself. The only thing they’ll razz a new boy about more than a big sister saying a weepy goodbye is a tearful mother doing the same thing. David and I are going to perform a manly handshake. Maybe even a slap on the back. Right, David?”

  David smiled. It was hard not to like Russell Bennett. Both Bennetts. Their intentions were so good, and they were trying so hard. Nonetheless, as Millie stood watching the station wagon with the wood-paneled sides move off down the street, she couldn’t get over the feeling that a part of her was being amputated.

  * * *

  Once David was gone, she had no excuse for resisting the rest of the Bennetts’ plan. Mrs. Bennett was brimming with enthusiasm.

  In the wake of Kristallnacht, while Meike and David were crossing the Atlantic and Meike was transforming herself into Millie, the student body, faculty, and administration of Bryn Mawr College took up a collection to establish scholarships for two non-Aryan German girls. Mrs. Bennett, an alumna of Bryn Mawr, had immediately put Millie up for one of them.

  “There’s nothing to be nervous about,” Lydia Bennett said as she pulled the station wagon up in front of a stone arch that opened on the other side to an expanse of lawn crisscrossed by gravel paths and lined by handsome sheltering trees. A few flamboyantly colored leaves still clung to the branches.

  Millie didn’t say anything. The idea that an interview with the dean of a college could strike fear in her was ludicrous, but telling Mrs. Bennett that would be a slap in the face of her kindness and generosity and naïveté. That was why she played the model child to the Bennetts’ uneasy assumption of in loco parentis roles. But she could never get over the feeling that the Bennetts were the juveniles in the equation. For all their experience and worldliness, their admirable achievements and considerable success, they were two cossetted babes in the wood, unacquainted with terror, innocent of horror, strangers to guilt, except the generic kind common to well-intentioned people of their class.

  Mrs. Bennett turned off the ignition. “Do you want me to go in with you?”

  “There’s no need,” Millie said. “Really.”

  “When you’re finished, I’ll be in the Deanery. Anyone can tell you where it is. We’ll have tea. Celebratory tea. I’m sure they’re going to give you the scholarship. The interview is only a formality. If anything, your German education has overqualified you.”

  Millie wished she’d stop talking. She wasn’t nervous about the interview, but neither was she as giddy about the opportunity as Lydia Bennett seemed to be. She would have been if her parents and Sarah were here. She would be when they arrived. But until then, it was heartless, it was unconscionable to think about school or scholarships or anything except how they were and where they were and how soon they’d be here. She repeated the mantra to herself over and over. Their visas were still valid.

  She won the scholarship. She never knew for sure, but she doubted there was much competition. How many academically prepared non-Aryan German girls with an alumna sponsor knew about the opportunity or were even in the States?

  On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, a strange holiday built around even more peculiar food, but one that brought David home from school for a long we
ekend and Millie gave thanks for that, she joined the class of 1942 of Bryn Mawr College. Though the semester was half through, the urgency of the situation and Millie’s solid grounding in a variety of subjects permitted her to start immediately. This time both Bennetts drove her to the campus. Mr. Bennett said they’d need a man to carry things and added he had no intention of missing the fun. When they arrived, he helped his wife and Millie out of the station wagon, then went around to the big drop-down door at the rear and began unloading the two suitcases—one with the things she’d brought from Germany, the other with the new clothes Mrs. Bennett had bought her—a box of books that were also new, and a lantern. The last was another gift from Mrs. Bennett. At first, Millie hadn’t understood why she had to take a lantern to school. Surely there would be electric lights.

  Mr. Bennett had laughed. “We Americans may be cultural barbarians, Millie, but we do have creature comforts. The lantern is a tradition.”

  “There’s a ceremony at the beginning of the first semester,” Mrs. Bennett explained. “It’s called Lantern Night. Each freshman is given a lantern by a sophomore. It symbolizes learning and enlightenment. Since you weren’t here at the start of your freshman year to get yours, I want you to have mine.”

  For the first time since Millie had heard about the scholarship, she felt a flash of real enthusiasm. Her parents wanted her to be educated because that was an aspect of refinement. No one had ever worried about her being enlightened. The thought was followed by a backlash of guilt. Criticizing her parents, even in her own mind, was another betrayal.

  “You’re in luck as far as dormitory assignments,” Mr. Bennett said as they made their way through a fine drizzle toward a turreted gray stone building. “Most of the dorms were built in the last century, but Rhoads wasn’t even here back when I came courting my bride. It was finished just last year. You’ll be living in luxury, or at least modernity.”

  Her room was on the first floor at the end of a long hallway. As they carried her things down it, the few girls who passed smiled and nodded and tried to hide their curiosity.

  Mr. Bennett put down the box of books and opened the door. Millie stepped into a sitting room with a sofa, two club chairs, and a cushioned window seat beneath casement windows. Mrs. Bennett crossed to another door, opened that, and stood aside for Millie to go in. The room held a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, a desk and chair, and a bookcase. Outside the window, a maidenhair tree glowed like gold. Even the rain couldn’t dim its brilliance. It seemed impossible that such beauty could still exist in the world. She couldn’t wait to write her parents about the tree and the campus and her room and enlightenment. Then she remembered. She had no address. That was when she decided to keep a diary. She’d record everything that happened during this time so Mama and Papa and Sarah, especially Sarah, could share her experiences when they arrived.

  As they stood in the small bedroom, Mrs. Bennett told her that on the other side of the sitting room was an identical, except for what each of them added to it, room where her suitemate lived. “She’ll be able to show you the ropes.”

  An hour later, after Millie had put away her clothes, organized her books, and placed Mrs. Bennett’s lantern on top of the bookcase, she was standing in the middle of the room trying to decide where to put Sarah’s floppy dog hand puppet—she wanted to keep it where she could see it, but she didn’t want anyone asking about it—when a girl knocked on the open door, stepped into the room, and sat on the bed. Millie was surprised. She didn’t mind the girl sitting on her bed. She just hadn’t expected her to without being invited. She reminded herself she had a lot to learn about America.

  “Thank heavens, a suitemate at last. The one I was supposed to have decided she didn’t want to go to college after all. The little fool. I’m Barbara Gross.” She leaned forward and held out her hand. That was when Millie saw it. She had to blink to make sure she wasn’t imagining it. Around Barbara Gross’s neck hung a gold chain, and suspended from it was a Star of David, clear as daylight, as blinding in its own way as the maidenhair tree outside the window. And Barbara didn’t even seem to be aware that she was wearing it. What a school, what a country, where you could wear a Star of David right out in the open! It would be a few years before the star would become not a choice but a compulsion, not a piece of jewelry but a sign of shame in Germany and the countries it conquered. It would be only a month or two before Millie put another interpretation on the fact that she and the girl who wore the star were suitemates. In America, being Jewish wasn’t a crime as it had become in Germany, but it was still a stigma. In the middle of this bucolic campus, of this halcyon world where young women gave one another lanterns to symbolize enlightenment, she and Barbara Gross had landed in their own little ghetto. The handful of other Jewish girls in other dorms were similarly paired off.

  Their classmates didn’t treat her and Barbara badly, or even differently. She was touched by their kindness and skittish concern. No one knew what she’d been through and of course no one dared ask, but most of them suspected something. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, they were quick to take her in. Sprawled in the smoking room, lounging on the stone patio of the dormitory overlooking a sweep of lawn called Rhoads Beach, gathering in a housemate’s sitting room in their flannel pajamas and plaid bathrobes, they’d call to her to join them.

  There were, nonetheless, occasional moments of awkwardness. No, awkwardness was the wrong word. That implied discomfort, and it never occurred to Kiki Newton as she chattered on about her coming-out party that those who not only would not celebrate that particular rite of passage but would not be invited to enjoy her commemoration of it might not want to hear endlessly about the orchestra and the flowers and the dress with yards and yards of white tulle she’d be wearing. When Grace Sommers quoted daddy on the fact that though Hitler was a madman, you had to admit the Jews really did control international banking, she didn’t seem to notice that the Jew sitting across the table at dinner, who just happened to be on scholarship, might not take daddy’s word as revealed truth.

  But those infrequent incidents were no match for the joys. The sound of girls’ voices echoing across the campus aflame with color in autumn, dozing under a silent snowfall in winter, greening in spring, drenched in innocence the year round. The cavernous Gothic hall of the library, where students in the sacred solitude of carrels, each illuminated by a green-shaded lamp casting circles of light on glossy hair, bent over pages that promised to unlock the meaning of life or the nature of matter or the workings of the human heart. The sheer ease of daily existence where maids made their beds and cleaned their rooms and waiters served their meals because these girls were supposed to devote themselves not to tidying the world but to opening their minds. The halls bubbling with anticipation as girls flew up and down in satin and velvet, tulle and organdy, hair curled, wrists and earlobes perfumed, cheeks so bright they didn’t need rouge, while across the campus the starched white fronts of dress shirts that had come from Haverford and Swarthmore, Princeton and farther afield flickered like moths in the moonlight. Then suddenly, at odd moments, in the midst of all that joy, the thought of her parents and Sarah would shoot through her like a bolt of lightning, revealing her unspeakable selfishness in its unforgiving glare. What right did she have to all this? What kind of a monster was she to enjoy it? The mantra about their visas was no match for her self-loathing.

  Occasionally she lost hope. On those days, she slipped in and out of class like a cat burglar, hid behind the closed door of her room, and existed on fruit and crackers because she couldn’t bear to sit in the dining room among all those blameless girls whose conversations were spiked with mother says and father thinks and mummy still believes and daddy insists. Then there were the stories about older brothers and kid sisters. She didn’t begrudge those girls their vibrant present families. At least she tried not to. She was on her guard against her resentment the evening her suitemate Barbara, who lived in Philadelphia, took her home for Friday night d
inner.

  “Get ready for a cast of thousands,” Barbara warned. “My two older sisters, Helene and Linda, their husbands, Eddie H. and Eddie B., my brother, Bobby, Aunt Esther, Uncle Sol, three cousins, my grandmother, and of course my parents. It’s been like that every Friday night of my life for as long as I can remember. Don’t even think about a movie or a date or anything else. I’m excused if I’m studying for exams or have a paper due, but otherwise it’s a command performance. Occasionally I complain, but I bet if they ever stopped, I’d miss them.”

  “I bet you would,” Millie agreed.

  The living room was filled with men and boys, the kitchen and dining room were crowded with women and girls, and the entire house was redolent of roasting chicken, steaming vegetables, and freshly baked pies. Mr. Gross took her coat and welcomed her to the family, and Mrs. Gross hugged her and said it was about time she joined them for Shabbat dinner, and everyone tried to make her feel at home, though she sensed a certain walking on eggs. They wanted to know how she liked America and Bryn Mawr and her courses. Had she been to the Philadelphia Orchestra and Wanamaker’s and an Eagles game? No one dared inquire about her parents or Germany or any of the other questions she could read behind their smiles. The only exception was Barbara’s father, who wanted to know which synagogue her family had worshipped at in Berlin. Fortunately, he didn’t give her time to answer, but launched into the founding of their own temple by German Jews who had conducted services in German until the end of the last century. By the time he finished recounting the history of the synagogue, they were seated at the long table covered with a white damask cloth, set with what was surely the family’s good china and silver and crystal, and lit by, in addition to the overhead chandelier, flickering candles. The story of the synagogue set off the kind of debate that can be waged only by people who have spent their lifetimes bound by shared joys and setbacks, love and grudges. With the exception of Millie, everyone at that table knew everyone else’s convictions, follies, and foibles. The subject under discussion was whether women as well as men should be counted among the ten heads necessary to make up a minyan, or quorum for prayer. Mr. Gross thought so. Mrs. Gross was sure of it. Uncle Sol and Helene’s husband, Eddie B., were vehemently opposed.