A Master Plan for Rescue (28 page)

“From my friend. He was in Germany. He talked to somebody who saw it.”

Rose stared at me with her dark eyes. I tried not to sink into them.

“That means your father is saving Jews. Just like we are.”

I sipped my black-and-white.

“You’re doing something illegal,” Rose said. “My father would never break one of this country’s laws.”

“Unless,” I paused for emphasis, “following that law meant you were acting the same as the Nazis.”

Rose stared at me over her glass of water, her folded napkins.

“I don’t believe your father would do that, would he?” I took another sip of my soda. “I don’t believe
you
would do that either.”

I put my elbows on the table covered with my mother’s change and directed my words at the microphone box pinned to the collar of Rose’s blouse—navy blue today.

“Because you have to do everything you can
here
, to help your father
there
.”

Rose was looking right into my eyes. I held onto the edge of the table to keep myself focused.

“Which makes helping us with the deaf refugee pretty much the same as filling that war bond book or not having an ice cream soda.”

I sat back and sucked up the last cold drops of the black-and-white.

“At least that’s how I would think of it.”

Rose stared down at the stack of perfectly folded napkins.

The man in the hat finished his sundae and walked out of Bickman’s.

Then she raised her head.

“Where exactly at Coney Island?”

•   •   •

That night I left
a message for my father that said

VTXU OT WGNGBYLU WKTOT OTXTNNTP 22 WX

which meant

COME TO PARADISE PHOTO TOMORROW 9 PM.

After I put it in the mailbox, I stood with my hand pressed against the door, feeling all the small holes that had been punched into it under my fingertips.
The next time I have something to tell my father
, I thought,
I will say it out loud to him.

O
n Wednesday morning—the day the refugees were to land—I told my mother I had to stay late at P.S. 52. “We’re rehearsing the Thanksgiving pageant,” I said. “The Landing of the Mayflower.”

“Will you be late?” she asked. She was buttoning her coat over one of her brown outfits.

“Yes,” I told her. “Very.”

I left the apartment with my father’s gun in the stretched-out pocket of my jacket. All day it hung from a peg in the cloakroom of Miss Milhaus’s classroom.

At three o’clock, Albie and I collected the snow shovels from the basement. We walked to the subway with them propped on our shoulders, as if we expected a blizzard to come tumbling out of the cloudless blue sky.

When we arrived at Coney Island, the sun had already gone down behind the buildings. It was dark and cold under the boardwalk. We walked from piling to piling in the deepening dusk, pressing our fingers into the splintery wood like blind people reading a stranger’s face. At last I felt the Star of David under my hands, my fingertips slipping into its outline the way they’d slipped into the notches and valleys of my father’s film sheets.

We began digging.

The moon rose. It was only a quarter full, but the sky was clear and it cast a pale white light on the sand.

Rose arrived, appearing in a spot where nothing had been a moment before. She was wearing the camel-colored coat, and even standing beneath the boardwalk, she reflected moonlight.

Not long after Rose’s arrival, my shovel caught on the burlap covering the coats. We stopped digging and Albie jumped into the hole, began tossing the coats up to me. Despite the burlap, they were damp and sandy in my arms.

The first boat came as a scraping sound. Something being dragged over the sand and small bits of broken shell at the water’s edge.

I sent Albie, who could speak Yiddish, and Rose, who could speak that secret language. I jumped into the hole to toss out the rest of the coats.

I carried as many of them as I could to the water’s edge. Four people who were not Rose or Albie stood shivering on the moonlit sand. Beside them in the darkness sat the rounded shape of an inflatable boat.

I wanted to touch these people, press my palms against their beating hearts, feel the rise and fall of their breath beneath my hands, prove to myself they were real. But my arms were full of coats.

Albie said something in Yiddish, and the four refugees came and pulled the coats from my arms. My nose tingled with the sharp yeasty smell of people who haven’t bathed in a while.

A second scraping sound came from farther down the beach, and I ran back for more coats.

Six more refugees stood dripping seawater on the sand when I returned. The pale light of the quarter-moon turned everything on the beach black-and-white, made the refugees into one of my father’s photographs. Seven boys wearing pants that were soaked dark to the knee. Three girls, all in dresses that hung wet to the beach. The girls pulled the coats from my arms with small hands, holding them up to their shoulders. The boys looked out at the water. I wanted Albie to ask these people if they knew the Lone Ranger, or Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy, but another boat was scraping across the wet sand, and they would need coats.

It was while I was gathering these coats into my arms that footsteps sounded above my head. One person in hard shoes, walking slowly, then stopping right over me, right in front of the Parachute Jump. I dropped the coats and went to the end of the pier, squinted toward the water’s edge. Even with my eyes, I could see them. A bunch of kids on the beach, bits of their clothing catching white in the moonlight.

I held my breath, listening for the scraping of another boat. Listening for the hard shoes on the steps that led from the boardwalk to the beach. Waves broke on the sand, wind blew the cables of the Parachute Jump against its steel scaffolding. The footsteps shifted from side to side, then moved away, heading down the boardwalk.

When I returned with the last of the coats, the deaf refugee had landed. She and Rose stood apart from the others, surrounded by darkness yet catching the moonlight, as if they were magnets for it—Rose’s camel-colored coat and the deaf refugee’s dress.

The pale light caught their hands as well, fluttering in the black night. But this was not like watching Rose and the boy in the playground. The deaf refugee nodded at only some of the words Rose made in the air. The rest made her shake her head, sent her own hands flying in interruption, smaller birds driving away bigger ones from a nest. It was as if Rose and the deaf refugee had sent away for code-o-graphs but had each received different versions, versions where a few of the letter codes were off, rendering every message half-understood.

What we didn’t know was that American Sign Language wasn’t universal. The deaf refugee had learned a French version, and it was a kind of miracle that she and Rose found any common words in the language their hands made in the moonlight. Or perhaps it was no miracle, perhaps it was only the luck that had attached itself to this master plan for rescue dreamed up by a boy.

And so far, it was lucky. The five rounded black shapes of the inflatable boats sat at the water’s edge, reflecting white in the places they were wet. And on the beach, twenty-three refugees—fourteen boys and nine girls—stood shivering in damp coats, cold and wet, but alive.

I counted them—this time putting my hands on them. Touching the damp wool front of each poor box coat, my fingers pressing firmly enough to feel the resistance of breastbone, the solidity of a person who for weeks had been living inside my head. The last one I counted was the deaf refugee. She’d just finished buttoning up her coat when my hand fell on the front of it. She raised her head and studied my face, as if my touch was somehow part of the secret language she and Rose shared. Then she smiled. There was the black gap of a missing tooth on the left side of her mouth.

“Let’s go to Paradise,” I said.

We walked away from the inflatable boats, our footsteps silent in the sand.

We came up onto the boardwalk between the curved tracks of the Tornado and the Wonder Wheel, white and round like a moon fallen to the earth. The amusements were dark and shuttered because of the war and winter, but still there were people walking along the boardwalk, looking out to sea. None of them paid us any attention. Not the old couple bundled like sausages against the cold. Not the soldier and his girl, kissing against the side of Stauch’s Dance Hall. Not the man with the Civil Defense armband just like Uncle Glenn’s, squinting out at the shoreline as if maybe he saw something reflecting white out there. We were only kids—twenty-three of us with coats wetter and sandier than the others—fooling around at Coney Island.

We wove our way through the rides and shuttered arcades and came out onto Surf Avenue, crossing the street near the entrance to Luna Park, passing beneath the giant pinwheels, which—had it not been for the Dim-Out—would have been lit up with a thousand tiny lights, would have been spinning and dazzling the refugees. We were a block from the subway and we might as well have been invisible. None of the factory workers hurrying past us with their hair tied up in turbans and their metal lunch pails in their hands glanced at us. We were only kids—twenty-three of us paler than normal from a week under the ocean—walking past the Sodamat and Bushman Baths and Bernstein’s Penny Arcade.

Inside the grimy light of the Stillwell Avenue station, Albie and I handed each of the refugees a nickel for the turnstile. Those nickels that had been spent as offerings for saints—Joseph and Mary and Francis of Assisi. Then we all went up to the platform and got onto a Manhattan-bound train, sitting together in the last car.

In the better light of the subway car, I wished Albie and I had stolen some hats. Some of the refugees looked as if they’d cut their own hair. Chopped-looking bangs fell unevenly across their foreheads and stuck out above their ears. I glanced around the subway car to see if any of the factory workers or soldiers or women sitting with bags of groceries on their laps were looking at us. But this was wartime, when people had other things on their minds—sons and lovers who were off where somebody was shooting at them.

Around DeKalb Avenue, I heard a sound like a waterfall and looked down. The refugees’ coats were raining sand, small steady streams of it falling onto the floor of the train. And still not one person on the subway paid attention to us. New York City was full of kids with bad haircuts, kids who’d been playing at the beach, kids roaming the city on their own. We were only more of them. Only kids—twenty-three of us who were supposed to have been on an entirely different kind of train.

•   •   •

We came aboveground
at Times Square, stood in the artificial smoke drifting down from the soldier’s cigarette on the Camel billboard. The neon was dark, the top half of every headlight blacked out, yet the streets were crowded with soldiers and girls and people dressed up in good clothes, all rushing to the shows that went on behind their unlit signs.

We headed west into Hell’s Kitchen, where there were always a hundred kids on the street, most of whom were usually wearing somebody else’s coat. Rose walked behind me, her moonlit presence shining on my back. Albie was beside me, the top of his wool cap at the edge of my vision.

When we were a block from Paradise, I told him my father would be there.

“Your father?” he said. “Why would he be there?”

“I left him a message.”

Albie stopped walking.

“Where?”

There was something in his voice that made me not want to say any more. I tried to keep us moving down 43rd Street, but now that Albie had stopped, I had to as well.

“Where did you leave the message?” he repeated.

“In our mailbox.”

“And somebody took it?”

“He did,” I said. “My father.”

Rose came to stand beside me.

“Tell me what the message said.” Albie sounded as if he was holding his breath.

I looked at the twenty-three refugees standing in a quiet line down 43rd Street.

“It said, ‘Come to Paradise Photo at nine.’”

Albie exhaled, then he and Rose stared at each other, neither of them saying a word.

“But it was in code,” I told them. “They’re always in code.” I took out my Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph and waved it around in the dark. “And anyway, why are you asking me these questions?”

Albie pulled off his wool hat and held it in his hands, as if what he had to tell me couldn’t be told wearing a hat.

“Because,” he said, “your father is dead.”

I have wondered how it was that Albie could destroy the world I’d so carefully built with only five words. Destroy it as instantly and irrevocably as our bombs—in less than three years—would destroy those Japanese cities. Herr Brackman had once told Pietr that if people don’t want to know the truth, you can put it on the front page and they will find a way not to see it. But perhaps there is something different about
hearing
the truth. Or perhaps it has more to do with who is doing the telling.

Whatever the explanation, the moment I heard those five words, the world in which my father had rolled out of the way of the uptown A in the nick of time, the world in which he would come back when the war ended needing his white shirts and his hats smelling of Wildroot Cream-Oil, collapsed in on itself. It seemed as if my eyes had gone entirely bad, as if I had turned blind. I was surrounded by darkness, and entirely alone.

Cold water—freezing water—rushed into my lungs, filling them up, choking off my breath, stopping me from grabbing any new air. I stood on the corner of 43rd Street with my mouth open and gasping and the world gone dark, drowning on dry land.

Fingers, warm from the pocket of a shining coat, slipped around mine.

I drew a breath. The downward-casting streetlights of 43rd Street blossomed back into my vision.

Albie was studying the sidewalk as if he was looking for those five words, perhaps to take them back.

“I always thought you believed me,” I said.

He glanced up. “I thought it was like Mordy.”

“Your brother?”

“He was shot down the first month.”

Details clicked into place, and I realized I should have guessed it. The old-fashioned schoolbag. The map with more colored tacks than anyone could fly. The pocketknife. The flying cap.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am.”

Albie shrugged.

The deaf refugee tugged on Rose’s sleeve, probably wanting to know why we had stopped. Why we were all standing on 43rd Street.

“We can’t go to Paradise,” Albie said. “We don’t know who’s waiting there.”

“What about the families?” Rose asked.

“Without them,” Albie nodded at the refugees, “the families haven’t done anything wrong.”

I pulled my hand out of Rose’s warm one and took a few steps in the direction of the corner, as if the solution was up ahead on Ninth Avenue. The movement rustled my father’s messages against my chest.

Except they couldn’t be my father’s messages.

“What about Jakob?” I said, turning back. “He’s there.”