The Other Traitor (5 page)

She didn’t want to tell him any of it, but her grandson had a point. How could he ever be himself if he didn’t know where he had come from? So she would tell him some of the story, but never would she reveal everything. Not to Julian, not to anyone.

Mariasha looked across the room at the sculptures she had created. Mama adjusting the treasured hat she had made for herself. Papa immersed in a favorite book. And Saulie, poor Saulie, playing a momentous game of stickball. The frozen figures had emerged from her desperate effort to preserve the people she loved in a moment of happiness, so she wouldn’t have to dwell on how she had failed them.

Julian was on the edge of the other chair, his stocking foot tapping on the floor, impatient and frustrated, just like her brother had once been.

She studied the optimistic swoop of the rods that formed the shoulders of
Boy Playing Stickball.
“First, I would like to clear something up, Julian,” she said.

He looked at her expectantly, his blue eyes reminding her of his mother’s, just like the cat’s-eye marble Mariasha had had as a child.

“I loved my brother,” she said. “Maybe too much.”

“What do you mean?”

“You want to hear our story, so I’m going to tell it to you from the beginning. Then, maybe you’ll understand.”

The clanking sound of the radiator started up and the room filled with stale heat.

“My parents came from Russia in the early 1900s,” she began. “They ran away to escape the pogroms against the Jews, hoping to find safety in America. A place to raise their children.” She ran her tongue over her lips. “My father, I think, was in love with America. The land of liberty, he used to say. But he also felt, like many of the other immigrants, that he had to do his part to help shape America. He was very active as a social democrat. And that was how my little brother and I were taught to see our country. As a place where equality should prevail. Where everyone deserved a fair shake—black, white, immigrant. Everyone.”

She told him about how poor her family had been, how her father had gotten sick when she was a little girl. That after she’d heard the doctor talking about germs and using separate plates, she was always reluctant to eat food her mother hadn’t prepared. She recounted how her father had been a thinking man, an educated man, who wanted her to study, to learn, to teach her brother. He would read books to her and made her promise to read them to Saul.

“My father died when I was seven,” she said. “My mother was left alone with little money to raise two young children. She took in laundry and sold eggs to neighbors from our tiny apartment.”

Julian’s face was in a frown, as though he was picturing this.

“Saul was not even three when Papa died,” Mariasha said. “Mama was busy trying to support us and my brother became my responsibility.”

She looked at the sculpture of
Boy Playing Stickball
. They were a couple of ragamuffins, she and her brother, living their childhoods with practically no supervision.

“I read him the books my father had read to me. Stories by Sholem Aleichem. Books and pamphlets I didn’t fully understand at the time. About equality for all.”

She leaned her head against the chair and closed her eyes. “They have a name for children who grew up like my brother and me,” she said. “Red-diaper babies. Children whose fathers or mothers were sympathizers with certain communist ideals.”

Julian looked startled. “So were you a communist?”

Mariasha released a long heavy breath. “Let me tell you the whole story, then you be the judge of what I was.”

Mari watched the stickball game from the stoop of their apartment building. Last inning. Man on second. Saulie’s team behind by one.

It was hot and there was no breeze. Even the diapers on the clotheslines between the tenements hung motionless. Mari’s heavy black braid made her back sweaty. She threw it in front of her shoulder and fanned herself with the book she’d borrowed from the public library.
Campfire Girls at Work.
Next month, she was going to camp for a week and she wanted to learn everything she could about camping. This was the fourth
Campfire Girls
book she’d read. She couldn’t wait to hike in the woods and learn how to build a fire, where she’d roast marshmallows and tell spooky stories.

Saulie was up at bat, clutching the broom handle low, his dirty white shirt pulling out of his overalls. He was four years younger than Mari—ten and small for his age—but he was one of the best hitters on the street. He could win the game for them now.

The pitcher, a twelve-year-old named Louie from around the corner, threw the rubber ball. Saul swung. The stick connected with a thwap and the ball went flying over the second baseman’s head toward the butcher shop.

Mari jumped up. “Go Saulie!” she shouted.

Saulie raced the bases marked in chalk, red curls bouncing, his short sturdy legs churning up and down like engine pistons.

The ball bounced behind a parked car and two boys ran to get it. The second baseman got there first. He fumbled the ball, trying to throw it to Irving, who was standing in front of home base waving his arms. “Throw, you
shmendrick!
” Irving screamed.

Saulie was nearing home base, a chalk mark on the rough asphalt. The second baseman wound up his arm and threw.

Don’t slide, Saulie, don’t slide.
Stop trying to be a hero
. Her brother had already torn up his other pair of overalls, and his legs were covered with scabs.

Saulie slid into home.

“Safe,” the umpire said.

Saulie got up, a wide grin on his face. Blood darkened the fabric on his freshly torn pants. The other kids surrounded him, patting his back.

She shook her head, even though she was proud of him. “Saulie, come inside,” she called. “I need to get that cut cleaned up.” She closed her book and went to get him. She knew how stubborn he could get.

“Good game,” a man said to Saulie. He was standing near a small truck with
Portraits
written on its side, and he had a camera box and a folded tripod under his arm. “Let me take a picture of you swinging. Maybe your ma would like it.”  He handed Saulie the broomstick, which had been lying on the curb.

“But his pants are torn,” Mari said.

“You’ll hardly notice in the picture.”  The man opened the wood camera box like an accordion and set it up on the tripod in the street. “Ready?”

Saulie went into a swing pose, hamming it up with a fake serious expression.

“Say
toochis
!” the man said, smacking his butt.

“
Toochis
.” Saul’s face broke into a grin, revealing his too-big front teeth that made him resemble a beaver.

The man took the picture, then glanced at Mari. “What about you? You’re awfully pretty with those big dark eyes, especially when you smile.”

Mari covered her mouth with her hand. Mama had told her she shouldn’t smile so wide, so as not to tempt the evil spirits, but Mari couldn’t help it sometimes. “No thank you.”

The man shrugged. “What apartment are you in? I’ll bring the photo up to your mother after I’ve developed it.”

“2B,” Saul said.

Mama was making stuffed cabbage and it stank all the way into the outside hall. The apartment was different from when Papa had been alive. Mama had sold the velvet drapes, rugs from the living room and dining room, and a few of the pretty cut glass bowls that she’d kept in the china cabinet and on the coffee table.

Mari had done her best to fill the empty spaces. She had turned broken broomsticks, rusty pipes, cracked dishes, rubber balls, and whatever else she could find, into tiny people. She chose not to dress them in scraps of fabric, preferring to leave their elegant attire to her imagination. They stood in the corners of the rooms, arms extended to give her a hug whenever she passed them.

Saulie pulled off his overalls in the bathroom and sat on the edge of the clawfoot bathtub as she examined them. He’d torn a section she’d already darned before and it was damp with blood.

“Hold still while I clean the cut.”

“I’m going to play for the Yankees someday,” he said. “Ouch.”

“I’ve told you not to slide anymore.” She dabbed an old clean diaper they used as a rag against his knee, soaking up blood. Luckily it wasn’t too deep a cut.

“I want to be like Lou Gehrig.”

“Last week you said Babe Ruth,” Mari said. “I’m putting on the iodine.”

“I changed my mind. I know Babe batted 373 last year and Gehrig only batted 341, but this year Gehrig’s on track to beat him. And anyway, I’ve got Gehrig’s consistency. OUCH!”

“I’ll bet neither of them screams like a baby. Go put your other pants on.”

Mari took the torn overalls to the kitchen to scrub them with lye soap.

The photographer was there with Mama and was showing her the photo of Saulie. He had put it in a nice paper frame. “Two dollars,” the man said.

“Ha,” Mama said. “I should live so long that I’d have two dollars to spend on a picture.”  She spoke in Yiddish, the language they all used at home.

Mari looked at the photo. The photographer had captured Saulie’s impish grin, the wild curls, the tough-boy pose. It was a wonderful picture.

“And why would I want a picture of my son in torn pants?” Mama said. “He looks like a little
trombenik
.”

“A dollar then,” the man said. “I can’t do better than that.”

“I’m sorry,” Mama said. “For a dollar, I could practically feed my family for a week.”

The man shook his head and left with the photo.

Mama fiercely scooped chopped meat mixed with rice into a cooked cabbage leaf. “Such a nerve,” she said. “A dollar for a picture of a dirty boy in torn pants.”

“Saulie hit a homerun,” Mari said. “He won the game.”

“Better he should sell newspapers and make a little money.”

Mari filled the washbasin with water and put the overalls in to soak. Even with the windows open, it was steamy in the house. Canisters of rice, flour and sugar, and a tin of tea lined the cupboard shelves. Mama always seemed to worry when the canisters got low.

“A dollar,” Mama said, stuffing another cabbage roll. “Does he think I’m made of money?”   Her hands stopped moving, bits of pink chopped meat stuck to them. She stared out the window at the hanging clothes. “I don’t have a single picture of him. Not even a baby picture. Papa got sick. Who could think of pictures at such a time?"

She turned to Mari, her eyes wide as though she’d seen a ghost. She wiped her hand on her apron and took a few coins out of the money jar on the oak icebox. “Come quickly, Mari. We have to catch the man.”

Mama ran ahead down the stairs. Mari had a hard time keeping up. She’d never seen her mother move so fast.

Mama went out into the street and looked both ways. There was no sign of the photographer. “Which way did he go?”

Mari pointed in the direction the truck must have headed. They both ran down the street, past the drugstore and the grocer and shoemaker. At the corner, Mama looked around, a wild expression on her face. “Come,” she said. And she ran down the next street, dodging pushcarts laden with fruits and vegetables, pickles and halvah. The photographer’s truck wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

Mari was panting. She put her hand on Mama’s arm. “He’ll be back another time. We’ll have him take Saulie’s picture next time.”

But Mama just stood in the middle of the intersection, her white apron dirtied with pink chopped meat. She looked forlorn. As though she had lost more than a photograph.

* * *

“Is this Saul?” Julian asked, pulling Mariasha out of the past. He was gesturing toward the sculpture of
Boy Playing Stickball
. “Is that why you made this? Because you didn’t have any photos of him as a child?”

She nodded, hoping that would satisfy him for now. Her memories had drained her.

Julian seemed to sense her exhaustion. He kissed her goodbye and promised to come back the next day and bring lunch.
Blinchiki
and caviar, he said, making a little joke. “Isn’t that what communists eat?”   She laughed with him, trying to ignore the uneasiness in her gut. She had opened the door to the past, just a little this time. But could she keep the torrent of memories from throwing it all the way open?

She had to watch her words, even if it was the last thing she ever did.

Mariasha Lowe’s Lower East Side apartment was about two miles from Barnes & Noble, but it had warmed up outside, so Annette decided to walk.

She went down side streets passing restaurants, groceries, hardware stores, and apartment buildings that had been converted to NYU dorms. It was an eclectic blend of old brick buildings with an occasional eruption of modern glass and steel. Sections of the streets were slippery with ice despite the salt that had been sprinkled by shopkeepers. It reminded Annette of where she lived uptown, but it was also very much like Grandma Betty’s neighborhood in the Marais district. A wonderful fusion of the new growing out of the old.

This was also the neighborhood where her own grandparents had lived and her mother had been a little girl. Columbia Street. That’s what was written beneath the photo of the two little girls.
Our Sally with classmate Essie Lowe
.
In front of our apartment on 120 Columbia Street.

Annette entered the address in her phone, then followed the walking directions, zigzagging toward her mother’s old block. But as she approached, she felt a stab in the pit of her stomach. All the tenement buildings were gone. She was in the midst of a public housing complex of tall, almost identical brown buildings, with air conditioning units jutting from their dirty windows. There was nothing here for her to connect to. The shops and smells of her mother’s childhood had been bulldozed away.

She stared at the featureless highrises, no longer sure about this mission she had planned. How could an old woman like Mariasha Lowe accurately recall the past when so much time had gone by? Even if she remembered Isaac Goldstein, Mariasha’s memories were likely to be tinged with the last sixty years of public condemnation.

Clearing her grandfather’s name was just another one of Annette’s stupid ideas. She’d had many of them over the years, each one designed to fix some unhappiness in her life. Like when she was eight and had written her father a long letter about how much she missed him and then signed her mother’s name. The letter came back because of insufficient postage. Mama had read it and torn it up with a warning to Annette never to do such a thing again.

Or there was the time when Annette was twelve and had begged Mama to adopt Tsega, the Ethiopian girl who’d been her pen pal. Even after Mama said no, Annette contacted an international adoption agency, posing as her mother. When a woman from the agency came by to interview the Revoir family, Mama had been furious. “Our family is fine the way it is,” she’d said. But later that night, Annette heard her mother crying in her room.

Now, once again, Annette was hoping to fix things. But would she only end up hurting her mother yet again?

She found herself standing in front of an older five-story building. She checked the street sign on the corner and the building number. Her subconscious had led her to where Mariasha Lowe lived.

She took a step back. It was a pretty building with bay windows overlooking a courtyard. Against the beige and brown bricks, the fire escapes were freshly painted and there was a giant oak tree in front of the building that probably provided wonderful shade when it had leaves.

Annette was filled with a physical sense of the past. Her grandparents had probably come here to visit their friends, the Lowes. Did Mama have sleepovers with Essie? Perhaps little Sally had played hopscotch with Essie in the shade of the oak tree while their parents watched.

At last, a tangible link to her mother’s childhood and her grandparents’ world. Maybe Mariasha Lowe’s memories hadn’t been twisted by the ugliness around her. Maybe she could help.

Annette walked through the courtyard and examined the intercom board beside the door. It took her a moment to recognize a barely legible name on a yellowed paper.
Aaron Lowe
. Mariasha’s husband. Beside the name was the buzzer for Apartment 4B.

She felt a rush of anxiety, like bees swarming in her belly, and took a breath to settle herself. Why was she reacting like this? She’d interviewed people before. But she knew why. This time it was personal.

The outer door to the building opened and a tall guy in a faded green jacket came out. He was probably around thirty with a couple of days’ beard growth and a preoccupied scowl. They caught each other’s eye and Annette felt the kind of static electric shock you sometimes get when you touch another person on a cold, dry day. The guy seemed thrown off balance as well. He pulled his head back like a shying horse and blinked a couple of times. His bloodshot blue eyes were piercing.

Then he half-smiled at her. There was a tiny cleft in his chin. “Can I help you?”

“I’m not sure. I’m looking for a woman…Mariasha Lowe.”

His smile turned into a frown. “May I ask what it’s about?”

She didn’t like being interrogated by some stranger. “That’s really between me and her.”

“Actually, it’s between you and me. I’m her grandson.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t been expecting that, but it made sense. Aaron Lowe’s obit mentioned grandchildren.

“My grandmother has all the life insurance and long-term care policies she needs.”

She realized his misunderstanding. “That’s not why I’m here.”

“And she’s happy with her Part B Medicare coverage.”

“I’m not a solicitor,” she said. “I’m a journalist. I’m doing a piece on her sculptures.” She felt uncomfortable swapping one lie for another, but maybe she would write a piece on Mariasha’s work, too.

His eyes rolled over her satchel, her Barnes & Noble bag. “You probably should have called first.”

She was about to argue, but it would be better to have this grandson on her side. “You’re right,” she said. “But I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by.”

“Well, I’m sorry. You can’t see her now.”

Arrogant jerk, she thought. “Wouldn’t that be her decision?”

“I just came from her apartment. She’s not up to seeing anyone today.”

“
Ce trou du cul
,” she mumbled.

He raised his eyebrows as though he knew she’d just called him an asshole. “What’s that?” he said.

“Nothing.” She tried to control her disappointment and be professional. “Well, I guess I’ll call her and set something up for another time.”

He ran his fingers through his short black hair. “Or I can arrange it. She doesn’t like to talk to strangers, but if I tell her we’ve met, she’s more likely to see you.”

Well, at least he was trying. “That would be great, thanks.”

“Do you have a card?” he asked.

“Um, sure.” She dug through her satchel, pulled out a purse-worn business card and handed it to him. It had her name, cell number, email, website, and said Freelance Journalist. No address. She wasn’t interested in attracting stalkers.

He examined it like a bar doorman checking for fake IDs. Apparently, he still didn’t believe her.

“You can check out my website, too,” she said. “It has links to my published articles and references.”

He nodded, still looking at the card. “Annette Revoir.” He pronounced it as though he’d studied French. “Is that a real name or did you choose it because you like saying goodbye?”

“
Revoir
means to see again, not goodbye. And yes, it’s a real name.”

“You’re French?”

“Born in Paris, but I live here now.”

He put the card in his pocket. “I’ll give you a call after I talk to her.”

“Thanks.” She started walking away.

“Julian Sandman,” he said.

She turned. “What?”

“My name. So you know who I am when I call.”

“
Bien.
” She continued walking.

He loped after her. “I can probably give you some background on her.”

“That’s okay, but thanks.” She started walking more quickly.

He kept up with her. She didn’t like his persistence. Maybe he wasn’t really Mariasha Lowe’s grandson. He hadn’t actually given her any information outside of what a stranger would have figured out during their conversation.

“I can tell you about what it’s like having a famous sculptress for a grandmother,” he said. “The art projects we did together when I was a kid. Nana was big on pipe cleaners and buttons.”

He’d called her Nana. That was sweet. And she didn’t think he’d made up the detail about pipe cleaners and buttons. He probably was her grandson, but Annette was still picking up a vibe that made her uncomfortable. Of course, that was probably because he was an attractive guy who was showing an interest in her. Historically a huge deal breaker for her.

“Would you like to go for a cup of coffee?” he asked.

“I don’t think so, but thanks.” She reached the corner of Houston Street. The car traffic was heavy and the street was teeming with people. The guy was no longer walking beside her. She stopped and turned.

He stood a few feet behind her with his thumbs hooked on his jacket pockets. “Are you really a journalist, Annette Revoir?”

“Of course.”

“You sure as hell don’t act like one.”

She felt her cheeks grow warm, but he was right. This grandson was a potential source of information and she was racing away from him like he had ebola.

She took a step toward him. “I’ve already had coffee.”

He took a step toward her. “Then how about a drink?”

“Too early.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“Do you like knishes?” he asked.

“Knishes?”

“Don’t they have them in Paris? Like hot pockets. Turnovers filled with mashed potatoes. There’s a place nearby that’s been around since the early 1900s.”

“Really? I’d like that.”

He looked surprised, clearly not expecting her to agree. “Okay then,” he said.

Okay then, she thought.

She followed him up Houston Street, passing old tenement buildings and restaurants that had been there forever. Katz’s Delicatessen, a giant sign read. Since 1888. Russ & Daughters, Appetizers, Established 1914. Except for the electronics stores and occasional boutique, the wide boulevard might have looked a lot like this sixty, seventy years ago. Her grandparents and mother would have walked here, maybe eaten at the deli or bought herring from the appetizing store. It was only a few blocks from their apartment building. And Mariasha Lowe must have come this way, too. Maybe she’d walked on this street at the same time as her grandfather, perhaps even going to get knishes.

“Yonah Shimmel’s just a little farther,” Mariasha’s grandson said, and gave her that half smile.

And once again, Annette marveled at how the new grew out of the old.