The Houseguest (5 page)

“Have you looked at the
Times
this morning?” Spiro asked.

“No, haven't had a chance. I just got back from Saratoga.”

“Saratoga?”

“The horse races.”

“Horse racing? Truly? Please be careful, Max. You aren't a man who'd do well with gambling debts.”

“It was really just a lark, an excuse to go somewhere.”

“Well, before you go somewhere else, take a look at page A7 in the
Times.
And then I need to ask you a favor. I'll call you back in ten minutes.”

He began to ask what he should be looking for but Spiro had already hung up. He walked outside and found the soaked-through newspaper in his front yard, brought it back to his office and opened to A7. There were no news stories. The entire page was an advertisement.

J
EWS
F
IGHT FOR THE
R
IGHT TO
F
IGHT

T
HE
J
EWS OF
P
ALESTINE AND THE STATELESS
J
EWS OF THE WORLD DO NOT ONLY WANT TO PRAY
—

THEY WANT TO FIGHT!!!!

And beneath it, a quotation from Churchill: “Any nation, any man, who fights against Nazism will have our aid.”

And beneath that, the claim that twenty thousand Jews had offered their military service in the war against Hitler.

And beneath that, an essay expounding on the terms of this offer and the way it had been shunned by the British.

And beneath that, hundreds of signatures.

He'd never seen anything like it: Spiro advertising his cause the same way Chevrolet advertised its motorcars or Camel its cigarettes. It was so striking it was difficult for Max to know what he thought of it. It bore the undeniable stench of propaganda, eschewing all complexity or nuance or even just the realities of the world. Were the Jews of Grand Concourse and Hoboken going to see this and want to ship out? It had more shove than logic. But then that was the goal. This was Spiro's new way of putting himself into the conversation. Except now he wasn't sidling up to a group of students and making himself sound clever. He was screaming at an entire nation.

He sat down and waited for Spiro to call back. The ten-minute mark came and went. Then an hour. He made himself a sandwich, wrote a few letters for the congregation, fixed the hinge on the cupboard door. He went onto the front porch to drain the potted begonias and pick up the broken branches and to assess the felled section of tree trunk on his porch. He was testing its weight when the door behind him swung open and the Canadian stepped out. He gave the rabbi a nod, shuffled down the steps, and made it halfway to his car when Mrs. Epstein stepped onto the porch and called out his name. The emotion in her voice foretold a scene Max had no desire to witness. He wondered if he might hide behind the tree trunk, but it was too late. She'd turned and spotted him there, and then looked back at her lover with even more sorrowful eyes. Her hair was disheveled and her feet were bare; the top button of her blouse was open, and she reached for it, fastening it with one hand. She held the hot-sweet smell of all the
things that intermingle when bodies do: sweat and tobacco and sex and cologne. She seemed thinner than she had a few days before, weak with hunger, unsteady on her feet.

She started down the steps, but the officer stopped her, holding up his hand. “Nora,” he said. “I'll be fine.” She didn't answer, just crossed her arms over her chest as though she'd grown cold, then leaned against the front door, watching as he got into his car and drove away.

Max was about to go back inside when she stepped forward and sat down on the porch steps beside the tree. “I'm sorry I wasn't here to get this tree hauled away sooner,” he said, just to say something, to acknowledge her.

She looked up at him. Her eyes were gray, her cheeks still flushed. Why was it when he was out in public, at the temple, at events around town, he felt so afraid of women, cornered by them in every conversation, hopeless and nervous. But at moments like this one, alone with them, in the presence of some kind of sadness, he felt instantly at ease, and there was a certain relaxation in his demeanor, a natural—was intimacy too strong a word? It was. Call it closeness, then. They sensed it, too. They talked to him in a way they didn't even talk to their husbands or brothers or sons. They let him into their private worries and concerns, just as his sister had always done. He could be close to them because of his isolation. Because he couldn't get himself enmeshed, he could be empathic. They sensed this. They used him for it.

“I sort of like it, actually. I think the porch will seem empty after it's gone.”

“We'll keep it, then.”

“You're so accommodating, Mr. Hoffman. Do you have a light, by any chance?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Could I bother you?”

He walked inside, found some matches beside the stove, returned to the porch. Mrs. Epstein was weeping. She put a cigarette between
her lips and turned her head toward him. He sat down beside her, struck the match, held it out.

“Please excuse me,” she said. “I'm so embarrassed.”

“Don't be. They're only tears. Of all the things to be embarrassed of.”

“Damn it,” she said, pressing her fingers to her eyes.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Could you keep a U-boat from sinking his ship? That would be nice. All the men I love end up dead.” The tears fell as the smoke rose. She spoke through them. “It's only, I'd gotten rather good at being alone. It takes effort, you know, practice, endurance. And now it's all blown to hell and I'll have to start over again. That's the hard part.” Max reached over and placed a hand on her shoulder as she wept, left it there until the tears stopped. It was a small gesture, but it felt like the only useful thing he'd done in weeks.

He lit another match for no reason, let it burn down to his fingertips, then shook it out. Inside, the phone was ringing. He rushed back to his office to answer.

4.

A
BE ARRIVED AT
the train station late in the afternoon, straining to remember the name. Ana Beidler. She was thirty-six. Polish. A refugee. No family. No home. Aboard the 12:17 from Grand Central. These were the things he knew about her—the facts. He repeated the name to himself, clung to the words as he left the yard early, took the No. 7 bus across town and climbed the stairs to the train station.

The train was late, and so he waited outside for the better part of an hour while the sky churned above him, threatening and then delivering rain. He took shelter under the awning of a newsstand as the rain sputtered down, dug out a nickel and picked up the
Forward.
Then for another fifteen minutes he stood, trying to make himself small beneath the shelter, not reading but watching the afternoon go gray as rain dampened the platform.

This, thought Abe, is how the world thanks you for doing good, for doing a friend a favor. By making you cold and wet and at the mercy of the railroads. Here's your appreciation. The compensation for goodness is as likely to be soggy shoes and a wasted afternoon as gratitude or sunshine. If you got away with soggy shoes and a wasted afternoon, you were lucky. His eyes needed only to go in the general direction of his newspaper to have that notion affirmed.

But here he was anyway. No sign of the train. No indication of when it might arrive. But he was here and he was trying to do good,
just as he'd been trying to do a few days before when Max Hoffman showed up at the junkyard unannounced, stepped into Abe's office with a lost look on his face, a look like he'd stepped out of an elevator on the wrong floor.

The rabbi's presence at the yard wasn't entirely inexplicable. From time to time, when the temple needed a chair or an elderly congregant needed a new table to eat at, Hoffman might drop by to see what Abe could offer. These were moneyless transactions, Abe insisted. Hoffman tried to offer something, ostensibly out of decorum but also, Abe suspected, because he felt the peripheral presence of shady dealings and wanted to steer as far from that as he could. Abe still refused. “I won't hear the end of it if Irene learns I've chiseled the rabbi out of a few bits for a broken chair,” he said during one of their first dealings, with a deep, enfolding laugh he'd learned to deploy in the face of skepticism. The rabbi went along but didn't seem convinced, so Abe let him in on something that was formally verboten, however harmless. A weekly Bezique game, played in the office at night, with a rotating cast of grocers, haulers, salesmen, random nudniks from the city. He wanted to show the rabbi, here is what you think you're afraid of and it's not so terrible anyways, and what you and I do is completely on the up-and-up. Hoffman turned out to be a particularly shrewd, almost cunning player; nearly everyone, Abe included, was in arrears to him. Predictably, he never said anything about collecting.

Abe couldn't decide if he legitimately liked Hoffman or if his affection was born out of feeling sorry for the guy, at how painfully misplaced he was in a burg like Utica, a city of brewers and tanners that did not need—did not
deserve
—a powerful brain like Hoffman's. His services were thoughtful and poetic and wrenched those who heard them into contemplation, more, really, than all these
machers
wanted. They didn't hate Hoffman, he was just far over their heads. Abe tried to keep up, and when he couldn't, more than ashamed he felt a lump
of sadness for this guy who worked so hard to compose such heavy stuff. He didn't belong in Utica. And yet he still tried so hard. It was an effort Abe admired.

So when he pulled up and said nothing about surplus or gambling debts, looking tense and bewildered and roiled all at once, Abe was genuinely unsure of what he was about to hear. He brought Hoffman into the office, sat him down, gave him all the time he needed before he began.

“I got a phone call the other day from a friend, a very old friend, someone I knew in Europe, in Germany, when I was a student but then lost sight of for many years, until this phone call, in fact, it was the first time I'd spoken to him in half a lifetime and as it turns out he's right here now, not exactly here but in Manhattan but when you've known someone on a different continent the city and Utica can be merged together as here, don't you think?”

He was hunched forward, elbows on knees, eyes in constant motion, totally stripped of the composure and presence he brought to the bimah.

“Max, take a breath. I have no idea what you just said,” said Abe.

Hoffman looked up at him with such a strange energy flashing across his face.

“It took you some time to get here, didn't it?”

“Utica?”

“No, to America.”

Abe reached for the hairs on the back of his neck.

“It wasn't an express journey, no.”

Max nodded, a little too quickly for Abe's comfort. The energy was still there in his face but was starting to coalesce into something.

“That's why I'm here,” he said, and then suddenly slapped Abe's desk. “I knew you were the man I needed to see. You understand, Abe.”

Abe tried to remember if it was a forbidden thing to contradict a rabbi. He didn't understand at all.

He heard, in the yard, his assistant haggling with a hauler. The day was moving past Abe.

“Abe, I won't ask you to go back to the time when you had to pass through fire and ice to get to America. I trust those memories will remain with you for far longer than they're welcome. What I'll simply ask is that you think of someone else making a similar journey, now, at a time when things are no better than they were for you.”

His gaze hardened on Max.

“My friend, the one in New York, asked if we might take in a refugee from Poland. She's a Jew, Abe. My friend works for an organization that has the means to get her out. They need a place for her to stay. They could find her a room on the Lower East or I could even find the space in my own apartment. But what I thought was, a nice home, filled with nice people, loving people, a place like that could be so much more . . .”

“Comfortable?” Abe suggested.

Max smiled. “Sure, Abe, comfortable. So much more comfortable than any of the accommodations my friend's group usually has access to.”

Max sat back, looked briefly at his feet. “Look, I know a phone booth at the corner of Orchard and Delancey is going to be an improvement on Poland. It's an imposition, Abe. But I'm asking.”

“You've got to talk to Irene,” Abe said. “She goes to those NCJW meetings about the German kids.”

“No, this isn't a kid. She's an adult DP. She needs families, people to claim a relation, to sponsor her. And, of course, lending a hand once they arrive. By the time they get here, these people often have nothing left. No money, no family, no ties.” He paused. “You're the first person I've asked.”

“It won't be too discouraging then if I say no,” Abe said.

“You don't have to answer right now,” Max said. “And if it's too much, I'll figure something out. I know it's a lot to ask.”

A few years ago, Abe would have nodded, been grateful for an easy dodge. He would have asked Max if they were still on for cards the following week and been done with the whole affair. The problem Abe sensed now was not with Max but with Irene, the way he knew she'd react. She'd been finding more and more fault lately, not with Abe himself but with his attitude to the world, which was not generally a positive one. What would she say when she heard about his refusal to help with this, as she surely would?

Yes, he was sure of it. Irene would be angry if he refused Max now. He'd been listening to her point of view so long it now had its own special satellite location inside his brain. She would accuse him of being cold, selfish, misanthropic. And what was so bad about misanthropy, he'd counter, with people being what they were, occupying varying degrees of awfulness? Then he'd add to himself that sometimes he thought those who wanted to help humanity were the ones who needed help most of all.
Then why'd you marry such a person?
she'd ask. And the answer, clear and unspoken, would shame him. Because he loved her. Because she was a good person and a wonderful wife. Because he admired in her the things he demeaned in others: her charitable nature, her depth of feeling. He'd say no to Max Hoffman, then he and Irene would argue about it. The arguing would cool off to resentment and bad humor. They'd marinate in it for a couple days. Then he'd go to her and announce his change of heart, say of course it was the right thing to do, the decent thing, to help some poor refugee with nowhere else to go. But he'd feel worn down and lousy about the bitterness built up along the way. What if for once they could skip to the end?

“How long?” he asked Max. “How long would she stay?”

“I can't imagine more than a few months.”

He ran through other details, nationality, age, day of arrival, and yet not the thing Abe really wanted to know. Would he regret it? That was all anyone ever wanted to know, wasn't it? Will this thing I'm about to do lead me to a million bucks or my face down in the gutter
or something in between? Will this action or the other add to or detract from the sum of misery and disquiet inside my head, my home, the world at large? Was there ever any other question?

“
THEY WRITE ABOUT
the fire in the Yiddish news?” the vendor asked him now as he stood before the platform, waiting for the train's arrival. He pointed to the
Forward
tucked under Abe's arm. In Yiddish, he said, “You bought it, but you don't read it?”

Abe shrugged. “I promised my wife I'd stop. Too much bad news. I get—” He had no word for it, the moods that came over him, the darkness that was not just darkness but also like fog inside his head, slowing down his thoughts. “Down,” he said. “Gloomy.”

The vendor nodded. “Murder is gloomy. War is gloomy. Persecution too. She wants you to do a jig?” The man made a
tsk
-ing sound with his tongue, a sound Abe's own mother had made, thirty years and a thousand miles from where they now stood. “Terrible,” the vendor said. “Shameful, what's happening.”

“Try the American papers. No bad news there.”

“Americans don't care what happens to us in Europe. Christians don't care what happens to Jews. That's the beginning and the end.”

Abe nodded, observed how stiffly the man stood. His eyes were large and gray; his skin hung slack from the bones of his face like a sheet draped over a post; and his mouth, no more than a knot above his chin, clamped tightly over his near-toothless gums when he wasn't speaking. Occasionally, a spritz of rain would dampen the man's face, and he wouldn't bother to wipe it away, just kept staring and watching the passerby like an old horse unbothered by the gnats around its mane.

“You have people trapped?” Abe asked. “Family?”

The vendor looked down at his magazine display. “My brother. His wife. Four children. Ukraine. A small town near Kiev. Four months now, we hear no news.”

Dead,
thought Abe. He'd read the reports about the German units sweeping through, killing every Jew along the way, only the occasional partisan managing to flee and report what had happened to the Red Cross or a government in exile. “Don't assume the worst. The post doesn't work during war. It barely works during peace. You'll get a letter soon.”

The moment he said it, he wished he hadn't. What could be crueler than hope? The vendor seemed to agree.

“
Zey zaynen shoyn geshtorbn
,” he replied. They are already dead. “I will never see them again. And do you know what the worst part is? The worst part is that at the very moment they were murdered by those beasts, whenever it was, a week ago, a month ago, three months, who knows? At the very moment they were facing it, I was standing right here, selling a tin of mints to some
schmegege
on his way downstate, or smoking my first cigarette of the morning, or eating a piece of bread and jam or taking a dump. That's what this world does to us, turns brothers into strangers. We're all alone in the end.”

Abe took a deep breath and nodded, then walked forward to wait in the rain.

HER ARRIVAL BEGAN
as a vibration in the platform. Then, down the track, a silver mass took shape against the mist. When he leaned forward, he could just make out the headlamp. It slowed as it approached, the conductor visible as a dark silhouette behind the glass. Abe shrugged his shoulders, tried to shake off any impatience that had settled in his posture in the course of the hour. The worst thing would be to seem put out by the train's lateness, to appear conscious of the fact that it was now five past six and Irene would have dinner on the table soon. The vibrations grew to a rumbling. He found himself standing up straight, wondering what to do with his hands, where exactly he should direct his eyes. The train groaned to a halt, sweating and steaming in the drizzle, while beyond it, the Adirondack Mountains hovered over
the city. Passengers disembarked then hurried along the platform in a swarm of gray. They rushed toward shelter as Abe moved away from it. How would he find her? Should he have made a sign? What would he have written on it, besides? Jewish refugee, this way?

The last of the train's passengers pushed out. He was trying to see around them, and that was when he noticed the woman who wasn't moving at all, a straggler in the thinning crowd, a fixed stone in the current. She was tall and thin, her face obscured by a mass of black hair, her dark eyes framed by sharply drawn brows. He approached her. She didn't smile or nod. She placed her suitcase down then looked at him directly, without shyness, without fear. Not young. Not old. A face equal parts weariness and hope.

“
Gutn ovnt
,” he said. “Are you Ana Beidler? Max Hoffman from the synagogue sent me.”