The Houseguest (3 page)

She was wrong, of course. They were different. She needed the things he wanted least: small talk, acquaintances, the everyday meaningless give-and-take. She didn't understand inaction for inaction's sake. The grease sizzled over the pan into the sink, pooling like lava in the water. Everything smelled rich, fragrant, overflowing. The top of her blouse was damp and clinging slightly, see-through like wet tissue. He liked to watch his wife. Also, he wished she would be quiet. He wished he could watch her in pure, perfect silence, like a film. Words ruined everything, even her elegance, but what did it matter? Her elegance was out of place here.

THE EVENING CAME
together around him as it always did. A well-set table. A decent meal. An attractive woman to serve it to him. A moody but basically well-behaved girl, loving, sharp-witted, and darkly beautiful. Not a fancy house but good enough to keep the cold
out. Not a fancy dinner but filling. What was so bad about all this? What was insufficient? He interrogated himself at times. So Jews were being murdered in Rumania. What was that to him? He tried to push it away but something always drew it back. A feeling he couldn't shake, a feeling that he wasn't really outside it, wasn't exempt. He'd been seeing Shayke more and more. This apparition that came when he failed to sleep.

Irene and Judith sat on either side of him now. Judith was wearing a yellow dress with a black bow along the collar, a watch with false pearls on the band. Her lashes were thick and sticky black. Her hair long with a dark wedge of bangs. Not to his taste but pretty, so pretty these days. She could be on a magazine cover if she would ever smile.

“Stop staring at me,” she said.

“Staring? I was chewing.”

“Do I have something on my face?”

“I was thinking how beautiful you are, if you must know. Next time I'll keep my compliments to myself.”

“Don't sulk. I'm only joking.”

“I like to look at my daughter's pretty face.
Es tut dir vey?
Am I hurting you? Is that a crime?” He was asking his wife.

“Do it without discussing it,” said Irene. “No one likes to be gawked at. Besides, she has to lose five pounds before the wedding. Too many compliments will sap her willpower.”

“My willpower's fine, thank you.”

“Did you follow up with Max Hoffman about the ketubah?” Irene said.

“Since you asked me ten minutes ago, no.”

Abe stopped listening. He'd stopped following the details of Judith's engagement. It only took a few seconds for his eyes to glaze. Irene and Judith yammered as they passed the dishes. Meat drippings and margarine and soft-boiled vegetables were pushed to the edges of the plates. Water was sipped. Salt and pepper shaken. The windows
were faintly fogged from all the cooking. Bread was buttered. Glasses refilled. Meat stabbed. Sauce sopped. The neighbor was mowing the lawn. He could smell it through the window. The sweetness of the grass took his appetite away.

He watched Irene eat. She was the neatest eater he'd ever seen.
Pinktlekh.
Precise. Never a stray crumb or a drop of sauce in need of wiping.
He
was the messiest aspect of her life. As he watched her, an idea occurred to him that if the junkyard, his largest single investment, had appreciated beyond his wildest expectations, Irene's investment in him, as a husband, had followed a path of steady decline from the moment they took their vows.

Her parents, his late in-laws, had tried to warn her. He could still remember so clearly the pitch of his mother-in-law's voice, its shrapnel-whistling rise and fall. She could carry on an entire conversation, a full and lengthy conversation, without ever acknowledging his physical presence in the room. She talked not to him but about him. To her, he was the milkman or the butcher or the boy she'd hired to rake leaves. What else had he expected? She came from good people. Refined people. Assimilated German Jews to whom Abe's parents, well-off as they'd been in Grodno, could never measure up. Abe's father had owned a small factory. He worked with heavy machinery and the men who manned it. Irene's father was a pharmacist from Gloversville. He worked with beakers and powders and pestles, worked the muscles in his fingers and brain and not his back. Abe's mother had spent her life before a stove and sewing machine. Irene's mother chaired committees of her local Hadassah and planned progressive dinners. Abe's brother had been a communist. Irene's brothers were Coolidge Republicans. Eighty years ago in Germany, Irene's family had servants. They'd owned a stationery business, a house and country cabin. They had fifty Eastern workers in their employ, little more than slaves. America had required a slight recalibration in this stature. Still, Irene could have married anyone, any of her many reasonable suitors, and instead she'd
chosen Abe because at nineteen they shared a close moment passing in a stairwell and ever after, Irene later confessed, she knew it to be love. A few weeks after he started coming to court her in the evenings, taking her on strolls through the park, he ushered her behind a tree and kissed her deeply, touching her face with one hand while the other lifted her skirt and slid inside her panties and made something happen that she told him she hadn't thought possible.

When she announced the engagement, she'd promised her parents that he would work his way up, build something solid, better himself.

Her father hadn't looked up from his paper. Her mother had twisted up her face and said, “Will he begin by learning to use a knife and fork? Or by learning English?”

“He speaks English fine, Mother.”

“The English of a man selling fruit out of a cart. Not the English of an educated person.”

“He might not be educated but he's the smartest, kindest man I've ever met. He'll learn. He'd do anything for me.”

“He'll ruin your life,” her mother predicted. “He'll drain your beauty and youth and leave you with nothing but grief and back pain. These Eastern Jews are all dumb peasants at heart.”

She was a nasty piece of work, his mother-in-law, a
yekke,
a true German Jew who looked down on anyone born east of Vienna.

Now he watched Irene spoon green beans onto her plate, her shoulders slumped, hair dyed regularly, yet still graying a little around the edges, but everything around her the same as it had been twenty-one years ago. Same rusted faucet. Same water-stained drywall and drafty windows. The linoleum beneath her feet was turning as yellow as her teeth. And yet he loved her. The knowing smile still warmed him, the delicate slope of her shoulders, the softness of her hands. She was a good woman. It was a good house. A good family. He'd bought the place in moderate disrepair and built it up, kept it going, sanded and hammered and insulated and reinforced the dwelling into something
that would last. At certain moments, more than a few, he took pride in it. Tonight, for instance.

After dinner, he took out the garbage while Irene and Judith washed the dishes, stood in the yard and took it all in from the outside, his life. Another Yiddish newspaper tossed onto the front porch, never unrolled. Why bother now? He tossed it into the garbage can, dug into his pocket for a cigarette and smoked it slowly in the yard, savoring it. He'd rather smoke and look up at the stars than read about more news he could do nothing about.
And who says you can do nothing?
a voice inquired, a voice he hardly recognized as his brother's after all these years. He turned away from it, closed his ears to this voice without body, this empty echo. He turned his attention to the north of town where the mountains faded to the deepest shade of blue. Beneath, the crickets hummed a high, soft static. And high above, a thin film of moonlit cloud obscured the view. That was how it always was in summer. Utica's stars were tentative and abundant.

2.

T
HE FIRST THING
Shmuel Spiro noticed when he pushed open the door to the offices of the Committee for a Jewish Army was that the secretary was talking on her phone. Her name was Rachel and she was born in Liverpool; and now, hearing her speak, a thing that had not happened with much frequency since her hiring some weeks back, Spiro was reminded of her origins. The little undulations of her accent emerged. She was talking excitedly. Whoever phoned was hardly letting her breathe.

“I have no idea, sir . . . if you'll only let me . . . no, sir, that isn't . . . I understand, you must believe me I understand . . . I don't know, sir, I really and truly do not know . . .”

Other people in the office were talking, too. Phones were in use. Bodies moved, bumped, and moved on. Hands were waved. Pens were chewed. For the first time the place was alive with activity.

It was all very strange to Spiro.

“Field's Free Synagogue burned down last night,” said Dave Metzger, his arms piled with envelopes. “Phones were ringing when we walked in, and they haven't stopped.”

A tiny look of excitement passed over Metzger's face. It was a handsome face and indeed, once upon a time, Metzger had been in pictures out in Hollywood. But then he grew tired of playing the sniveling fop or pompous undergraduate whom heroes were constantly wooing
women from, so he started writing movies instead. Then the governor of California asked if he'd like to write some speeches for him. Then, at a B'nai B'rith fundraiser on Wilshire Boulevard, he'd been cornered by a small, angular man who asked if he wanted to help arm Jews, the same small angular man he was presently grinning at. He was older than Spiro, but there was something boyish about him: floppy hair, rumpled clothes.

“This,” Metzger said, pausing to let Spiro acknowledge the ambient energy that had been entirely absent from the office up until that morning, “this is something.”

Spiro nodded. “Shame the same can't be said for Field's temple.”

As soon as he made the joke he regretted it. He didn't hate Stephen Field. Field was his rival, his enemy even, ideologically, politically, but he didn't hate the old man. Though he would tell anyone willing to listen that Field was gutless and a traitor to his own people, he found him vaguely charming and more than a little sad. The synagogue he'd built up himself and turned into a pillar of New York's Jewish community gone in a night. The
alter kaker
didn't deserve that. Of course, the countless poor bastards whom Hitler was turning to dust all across Europe didn't deserve that either. But it was Field and his ilk, the American Jewish Committee, the Zionist Organization of America—not Hitler or Himmler, the General Government in Poland, or Pétain in France—with whom Spiro was at war. The Fields of the world were against raising immigration quotas, against arming resistance movements in Europe, some were even opposed to American intervention against the Nazis.

Field, as Spiro saw it, was not a Jew in America but an American Jew. These were two distinct, discrete things. Take first the American. The great swallowing spirit of democracy. The irrevocable, enveloping force. When you came to America, you had to disavow yourself of Minsk or Chelmno or Odessa, or Australia or Abyssinia for that matter. You had to renounce it and could not argue. Field didn't. He
didn't argue. Yes, he held on to something Jewish, something mystical, something historical, something binding, but he took a knee before the Constitution, before FDR, who had invited him to tea on not one but two occasions, a fact everyone knew gave him as much pride as the temple he'd founded. This was how it worked for those who were American and a Jew. America ate you and made you one of its children, like a third-rate Greek god.

In practical terms, this meant that any group or organization with Field or someone like him at the helm was—had to be—extremely
circumspect
about what the world was doing. Specifically the parts of the world that included Jews who were not Americans. Of course they were aware that bad things were happening, they being Field and the American Jewish Committee, as well as the Zionist Organization of America, B'nai B'rith, the folks who got invited to eat at the big table—they were aware of how rapidly the situation was deteriorating in Europe. Arrests, expulsions, camps people did not return from, trains filled with living corpses, things called
Totenkopf,
Death's Head—or let's just call them German soldiers. But the way to deal with all this, as men like Field saw it, was not to arm the Aliyah Bet in Palestine, the only ones smuggling Jews out of Europe, not to nudge the British to let a few more into Palestine legally or heaven forbid into America itself. They could not or would not fight for this because they were Americans. They had been through the chutes and were, at a deep but not too deep level, ashamed of the
shtetl
folk, even if they were evidently being slaughtered. These were not Americans. Just as they understood the plight of their (distant) kin they understood (distantly) the rantings of Father Coughlin or Reynolds or Holmans or Elmers or any of the other orthodox bigots populating Congress, men who would sooner see America slide into sea and shining sea than let these dirty and rootless characters settle in their towns. Field got that message loud and clear, and it was because of that that he and his American flock operated the way they did.

But Spiro was not an American. He was born in Russia. He grew up in Palestine. His life had been defined by flight. And he was lucky—some of his flight was by choice rather than the whim of a czar or sultan or whatever potentate you happened to be squirming beneath. Jews moved. They bounced. Sometimes by choice, sometimes not. They could settle. They could make roots, of course. Look at Warsaw or Berlin or Trieste or even Cairo or Istanbul. All cities inhabited by centuries' worth of Jews who knew no other home. That was fine, said Spiro. But that was not the end of the proposition. The end was Palestine. The end had always been Palestine. Your centuries of history aren't a lie, they're just temporary.
Shema Yisrael.
The absolute beginning of the Torah, for Pete's sake. Lord, send us to Israel. Lord, now that a very big
Wehrmacht
is bearing down on us very quickly with its awful fangs and horrific guns, could you send us any quicker? No? Fine. We'll do it ourselves.

Field and his ilk found this balls-grabbing an embarrassment, and it was this embarrassment that was incomprehensible to Spiro. He fought Field for attention in the press, for money, for influence in Washington. Mainly, Jews died and Field won, but as the news brought more and more stories of ships filled with refugees with nowhere to go, ships sent across the Mediterranean in unseaworthy condition, marooned off the Port of Haifa, off the coasts of South America, ships turned back, their Jewish passengers returned to the desperate situations they'd fled, Spiro refused to be embarrassed. It was in his nature to move and make noise and turn order into chaos when chaos was what was called for, and from this chaos sprang his Friends of a Jewish Palestine that he'd now changed, was changing, to the less inflammatory Committee for a Jewish Army, an organization dedicated to creating an army of stateless and Palestinian Jews to battle against the Nazis, to defend their own homes and people. It was an idea as unimpeachable as it was audacious. And yet it barely registered in the public consciousness over here. What voice was heard was the harmless, droning sound of Field,
reassuring Americans that they weren't doing anything wrong by turning away steamers full of displaced persons.

Spiro had scant resources to counter such deluded thinking. In fact, he didn't have much that he couldn't see in front of him: a staff of a half-dozen and a dozen more volunteers, mostly unemployed or unemployable Broadway types; the dim, dusty office rooms on Madison Avenue that had been previously occupied by a sect or some sort of free-love movement. But now, for the first time in its history, the office was buzzing. A fire could do that.

“Any idea who did it?”

“Doesn't have to be arson,” said Metzger. “Could just as easily be electrical.”

The phone rang and rang.

Spiro returned to his desk. On the way, he saw Ron Kellman, a former comrade from Irgun, yelling into the phone, and Dick Shoemaker, the bright accounting director Spiro had poached from the Zionist Organization of America, trying to hear over him while also writing urgently on a notepad.

“How much?” Spiro asked. “How much in pledges?”

“A lot,” Shoemaker said, without bothering to put down the receiver. “You know what this means, don't you?”

“No time for rhetorical questions, Richard.”

“It means a hell of a lot more ads.”

The latest sketch was rolled out on Spiro's desk. A man in bed with his eyes closed, and above him a panorama of men, women, and children with downcast eyes and emaciated bodies marching along a dirt road with tanks at their backs. Above it all in large, block letters: A
CTION
, N
OT
P
ITY
, C
AN
S
AVE THE
J
EWS OF
E
UROPE
. He picked up the drawing, carried it over to where the artist sat.

“Can you do this again?” Spiro said. “Put a fire in the background. A burning synagogue behind the tanks.”

“I can,” he said. “You don't think it'll be too much?”

“I think it'll be perfect.”

Yes, God's wrath could be perfect. Wrath, or a drunk trying to get warm, or a faulty fuse, or who knew what. The well-known place had burned to the ground in front of the neighborhood and people were scared. Smoldering synagogues in Germany or Austria or Rumania were one thing. But an assault like this on the Jews of Manhattan, destruction a person could see and smell and feel in the air, wondering if their own synagogue would be next. Spiro—a student of violence as much as anything else—understood the power of proximity.

Long before this fire, long before the other fires and explosions and artillery-driven assaults he had witnessed around the world, Spiro had believed in fear. He believed in its driving, penetrating force; he believed in it as an angry spirit hanging over the heads of men; he believed in it ultimately as a truth, a germ of certitude buried deep inside every news report and rumor and scrawled letter from across the sea, hardened and blackened and impossible to banish or destroy. The Irgun reprisals that began in '37 with the bombing of the Arab cafe was the first time he felt it, this change. Two persons killed. Five wounded. Hardy a massacre. But then Black Sunday. Attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa at once. Fifteen wounded. Seven casualties, three of them women. It was the first time they'd allowed themselves to do more than defend, to dispense with restraint. And it worked. He could feel there was a palpable change in the behavior of the British, an empirical and real change, as though they were suddenly given new clocks with a thirteenth hour on them. They were afraid of Irgun Bet. They knew the dead officers, the wives, the children; they saw the shards, smelled the cordite that hung in the air, displacing those tangy mineral odors from the hillside that normally coated the city and never sat right in Spiro's nose.

Now it was the Jews of Manhattan's turn to see the fear god in the fire that took away the Free Synagogue and called on Spiro, as one of its prophets, to make sense of the horror. Who did it? Hitler? Is Hitler
here? Are they coming? Are they coming for us? Do we stay away? Do we hide? We have services to attend. Shul. Sabbath. The Temple of Our Lord, the blessed and almighty, the sanctuary defiled, swept away on a tide of fire. Was this foretold? Is this the beginning? What is this? The phones rang on and Spiro answered them. The panicked Jews of Manhattan wanted answers.

“My grandson's Bar Mitzvah's next weekend,” one fellow in Brooklyn told him. “Should we stay home from temple? My daughter's scared to go. I tell her that's crazy, but is it? I can't sleep at night.”

Spiro didn't answer right away. His desk was in what had once been a storage closet. To the outside world it gave the impression of modesty, but in truth Spiro had deposited himself there for the intimacy it afforded him with his own thoughts. He picked up a pen, wrote on the paper before him, H
OW
A
RE
Y
OU
S
LEEPING
? F
IVE
M
ILLION
J
EWS
R
EMAIN IN
H
ITLER'S
P
ATH
. “Sir,” he said, “There's no reason to think that the fire is part of any systematic plan of persecution. And remember, unlike in Europe, when synagogues in America catch fire, we put them out.”

The man sighed. “I took the train in to see it this morning. You can smell the smoke eight blocks away. I feel like I should do something.”

“You can,” Spiro said, “You can make a contribution to our committee.”

The old man took a moment to mull this over. “Yes,” he said without conviction. “And what is it your committee does?”

“We are a political committee, sir. We are actively lobbying Congress to work with the British in forming a Jewish armed force to fight the Nazis alongside the Allies.” Spiro waited for a follow-up question that never came. The line went dead, but within a minute, it was ringing again.

When Spiro had a second between comforting the worried and the appalled, he called his contacts at the papers. Nobody had any idea who set the fire, or if they did, they were keeping it to themselves.

At 5:30, Dick Shoemaker, looking as though he'd just walked to the office from the Sinai, told Spiro that they had raised $3,000 in pledges. Spiro put down the phone and banged his fist against the wall.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Recognizing that our natural state is one of impoverishment and that our families and loved ones are still in the jaws of a hideous beast, I'd like to take a moment to point out that in the past seven hours we've raised more money than in the previous seven months. It's been a long day. If there's ever been a day that should end at the Cafe Royal, I'd say this is it.”