The Right Thing to Do (3 page)

“So simple, the grammar’s almost crude,” she’d informed Willy. “For a simple people.”

Neither Willy nor Sabina had much use for any culture that wasn’t German—why bother, when you had Bach and Beethoven and Goethe and Kant? That included avoiding the religion into which they’d been born. The last time either of them had crossed a synagogue threshold was in 1930, for the circumcision of their only child, Siggy. A ritual they considered unnecessary but went along with because everyone, even the irreligious Jews, did it and because Sabina’s doctor uncle, Oskar, assured her it was healthy.

Siggy’s solitary status didn’t result from Sabina’s lack of effort. She’d suffered four miscarriages since the birth of her gorgeous, towheaded, maddeningly mischievous son.

Each failure—that’s how she viewed it—gnawed a chunk out of her soul. She knew she was an inadequate woman. She’d never say so to Willy, of course. Why trouble him? He’d never been anything but comforting and loving each time the cramps took hold and she knew another bad end was coming. Of course he’d try to dispel the notion of failure, but what else could you call it when you’d flunked the basic female assignment?

Sabina comforted herself by thinking of childless women who had it worse. Was sensible enough to recognize that the crucial difference was between zero and one. And what a singleton she had: tall and strong, gregarious, gorgeous.

Everyone said Siggy looked more German than an Aryan.

Everyone said the apple didn’t fall.

Sabina was a good-looking woman, blond and dark-eyed, and at five nine the tallest female in every grade from kindergarten through gymnasium. That mandated a tall husband, and Willy at six foot one filled the bill. Their parents knew each other and arranged the first meeting. Sabina didn’t need to be convinced; Willy was dark-haired and blue-eyed, hardworking, good at math, and built like a mountaineer. Though his most strenuous exercise since marriage had been toting spools of copper wire from his warehouse to a waiting delivery van.

She found it easy to learn to love him, believed he loved her, and, more important, they both adored Siggy beyond imagination. Though his activity level and refusal to learn the word “no” sometimes tried them.

Life was good.

Then came January 30, 1933, and the mustachioed lunatic weasel had somehow—unbelievably—come to power.

Almost immediately people the Blausteins had considered their friends turned into strangers and business deals outside the Jewish district dried up. Like a cancer, it spread, subtle resentment blossoming into sneers, gibes, overt resentment.

Then vicious periodic aggression inflicted by roving gangs of young brown-shirted thugs.

Siggy’s pediatrician, a smiling, red-haired man named Professor Alois Wasser, suggested she find another doctor for her boy. When Sabina asked why, Wasser blushed and turned away, muttering, “It’s called for.” Then he left the examining room. Not neglecting to have the nurse hand Sabina a bill marked
Final.

It kept getting worse, the newspapers whipping up Jew-hatred. Soon, their lawyer expelled them from his practice, and Willy’s suppliers stopped taking his calls.

Still, the Blausteins, like so many other German Jews, clung to hope. The weasel had been elected democratically and though the first thing he’d done upon assuming the chancellorship was to weaken democracy, perhaps at some point their countrymen would wise up and kick his arse back to jail.

Encouraging trends, they assured themselves, had already begun down south. Stolid Bavarians realizing the error of their ways and growing disenchanted with Arsehole Adolf. Uncle Doctor Oskar was convinced that was a harbinger of better days to come.

“That’s good, Uncle,” Sabina had replied. Keeping her true feelings to herself:
Yes, but the supposedly intelligent, liberal northerners up in Hamburg are embracing him with greater enthusiasm. Who next? The Danes?

Berlin certainly hadn’t seen the error of its ways. Just the other day, thugs had broken six shop windows and looted Otto Kahn’s butcher shop, leaving behind swastika graffiti and a pile of human excrement in the sausage case.

Some of the Blausteins’ fellow Jews had fled—no, be honest,
many
had fled. One estimate had nearly a quarter million gone, an equal number seeking sanctuary from the few countries that would take them.

The notion of leaving the homeland was one that Willy and Sabina had finally dared to broach with each other. Even though the sound of that was unreal.

Three hundred years dissolved like dandelion fluff? What about the house? The business? Where would they go? What would they do? You needed bribe money. Time to begin saving. Though no concrete plans were made.

In October 1936, Sabina became pregnant for the sixth time and this time the baby stayed with her well past the fifth month. A magical criterion because the previous failures had all occurred by then.

Barely able to sleep from anxiety and heartburn, she crossed her fingers when month six passed. Then seven, her belly swelling to a level not seen since Siggy.

She shut herself off from the world. Things were getting worse for the Jews of Germany but
this
Jewish woman had succeeded and soon another tall, gorgeous Blaustein would enter the world and that would, indeed, be a harbinger of better times to come.

An intelligent woman, Sabina knew her fantasies were fanciful, even idiotic. But so was reading novels, so why not? She was growing tired, lugging that watermelon belly in front of her, needed something to exalt her. Just taking care of the house was a challenge, having to hire another maid, this one a moron, after Helga, who’d been with them for twelve years, left without notice in the middle of the night.

The once dutiful housekeeper leaving behind a copy of
Mein Kampf
in her nightstand drawer, vile passages underlined, her own crudely drawn cartoons of big-snouted ogres wearing yarmulkes and Jewish stars in the margins.

All that time, without a hint. So many smiling
Fraus
and
Herrs
uttered over a decade of seemingly cheerful service.

They’d paid her more than anyone paid help. Treated her with respect—an employee not a serf.

The woman had seemed to adore Siggy. Meanwhile…

Sabina would never trust anyone or anything again. Except Willy. And Siggy.

And, of course, the gorgeous thing fulminating in her womb.

On the first day of her eighth month, she looked through her bedroom window and yawned like a woman of leisure. Her bedding smelled fresh. Freshly cleaned windows framed a crisp, clear, blue-sky day. Time to put aside fatigue and stretch her legs on their quiet chestnut-lined street.

She’d made it two blocks, was pausing to catch her breath when a dark mass came dervishing around a corner.

Dark because they were brown-shirted. As they got closer, she saw that most of them looked too young to shave. Good-looking lads, straight out of a National Socialist poster. Wearing swastika armbands and hideous grins.

Sabina was the only pedestrian in sight. Had there been some kind of warning? If the rumor mill was operating, it had bypassed her. Time to get out of here—oh, no, not time enough, the stampede had picked up its pace and was charging straight at her.

Running, shouting, waving cudgels and iron bars, some of them singing the Horst Wessel song.

They barreled down on her and she leaped out of the way, tripping on the curb and tumbling back down to the street.

The horde ran past her. Except for one skinny boy at the end who saw her and returned, laughing, and shoved her hard when she tried to get up so that she was back on the cobbles, terrified eyes fixed on her assailant’s face.

As if engaging him could save her.

Skinny, young, but already balding. A gap-toothed smile.

He said, “Yid scum,” and kicked her ribs.

She kept silent, not wanting to risk inflaming him further.

“Jewish sow,” he shouted. “What are you cooking in your fat belly? A hunk of kosher pork?”

Laughing, he raised his boot. Brought it down hard on her abdomen.

By the time he was back with his comrades, the cramps had begun.

Two months later, they’d left everything behind, but for cash secreted in money belts and hidden suitcase compartments and jewelry sewn into coats and jackets. Nothing that amounted to much; they’d already exhausted most of their savings on bribes to ease passage, had been forced to walk away from the house and the business. The house after the Levines’ once proud townhome next door burned to the ground, a victim of arson. The business, a more subtle defeat, “appropriated” by city officials on grounds of “code violation.”

A series of coaches and trains got them to Holland, where they lived off diminishing savings for two years and Siggy had the time of his life pretending to dive into canals.

Blessedly, Uncle Doctor Oskar had abandoned his optimism a full year before their departure, traveling to America and finding a position at a hospital in Rhode Island because his surgical skills were deemed unique.

It took a while as he pulled strings but on November 9, 1937, three Blausteins trudged through a long queue at Ellis Island, presented their papers, and waited to be granted a new life.

Stating their names and not realizing until later that the aloof, rubber-stamping customs official had waxed creative.

Blaustein was now Bluestone, Wilhelm, William.

Their beautiful, overactive boy, seemingly unscathed by exile or journey, had bounced up and down at the booth, shouting over his father as Willy stated, “Sigmund.”

Asserting his childish voice by dint of volume:
“No! Siggy! Siggy!”

The clerk had finally cracked a smile, but in the end, it was he who decided and the boy was now Sidney.

There were new rules to play by.

Only Sabina’s name remained unchanged, perhaps no easy substitution had materialized in the clerk’s head. Or he just liked the sound of it.

She’d forever be Sabina.

She would never be the same.

They tried a few months in Rhode Island, ended up moving to Brooklyn when Oskar grew impatient with guests and revealed a side he’d never shown before: prone to anger, a taste for drink.

A year to the day after their arrival in Brooklyn, Kristallnacht erupted in the city of the Blausteins’ birth, Jewish shops, residences, and synagogues demolished, streets littered with broken glass. Hundreds were murdered outright, thirty thousand others arrested and shipped off to concentration camps.

The beginning of the nightmare. Willy and Sabina never saw any of their relatives again. Neither of them spoke about it; both of them insistent on suppressing images, thoughts, memories. But the primary lesson rang loud: The world was a treacherous, terrifying place.

That view was buttressed when Willy could gain no entry to the union-controlled world of electrical work and was forced to eke out a living by taking on double shifts as a janitor at a lunch-meat factory. He came home reeking of garlic and offal, supplemented on weekends by work as a shoeshine “boy” at Penn Station. On the side, he began tinkering with the radios and appliances of their neighbors, was finally able to rent a roach-infested, half-width storefront no one else wanted. There, he plied his skills as Blue-Bulb Repairs and by 1940 the income from the shop got the small family by and he only janitored on Saturdays.

Late in that year—approaching the dreaded November—Sabina missed her third period in a row and finally went to her women’s doctor. She’d made sure to find a Jewish one, this time. Though he was cranky, habitually tardy, and smoked a cigar nonstop, Nathan Diamond, M.D., would never expel her because of her ethnicity. Also, he seemed to know his business.

On top of the menstrual delay her abdomen ached dully and she felt weak and off-kilter and was convinced she had cancer. Not totally displeased by that terrible possibility because it confirmed her worldview, she confided her belief to Dr. Diamond, expecting a mournful look and talk about keeping her comfortable.

He felt her abdomen and said, “Let’s kill a rabbit.”

“Pardon?”

“Pregnancy test.”

“Not necessary,” said Sabina.

“Why the hell not?” said Dr. Diamond, a man not used to being challenged.

“Not possible.”

“Not only possible, young lady,” said Dr. Diamond, glaring at her. “Probable. You’ve always been regular before.”

“No,” she insisted.

The rabbit said otherwise.

The growth of the thing in her belly was startling, so big, so fast. Abnormal. Part of her still believed it might be a monstrous tumor, though Dr. Diamond claimed to have heard a heartbeat and pronounced her fit and able.

“What about the size?” she insisted.

He ignored her and left to see another patient.

By four months along, she was heavy to the point of near-immobility. Dr. Diamond felt around with his stethoscope, wondering out loud if she could be carrying twins. Blowing out a cloud of acrid Cuban smoke, he said, “Nope, one heartbeat. You’re a good-sized woman. How big was the other?”

Sabina mentally converted kilograms to pounds. “Eight and a half.”

“There you go, you grow ’em sizable. See you next month, go get dressed.”

“This feels different.”

“Get yourself dressed, go home and drink some wine to calm yourself down, and stop being neurotic.”

Two weeks before her due date, having been bedridden for a month due to fatigue and depression and dread, Sabina was rushed to the hospital where Dr. Diamond, not one for anesthesia, allowed her to struggle for seven agonizing hours before cursing and transferring her to an operating room where he finally intubated her and performed a cesarean section and extricated a ten-pound nine-ounce, twenty-four-inch-long boy with a full head of dark wavy hair.

“Biggest damn thing I’ve ever seen,” he confided to his O.R. nurse. “And she’s not even diabetic.”

They named him Malcolm, because it sounded Gentile and evoked nothing of the world and the families they’d left behind.

“Better,” said Sabina, “to be reminded of nothing.”