A Master Plan for Rescue (23 page)

One of the first things I bought was a radio. A broken one I found in a pawnshop—like the shortwave radio I had found in the shop in the Kreuzberg to bring France into our flat in Berlin. I fixed it, then spent as much time as I could listening to it, repeating everything that came out of its speakers. Between that and a German-English dictionary, I learned to speak English.

Later, I fixed a printing machine for a man whose name I never learned in exchange for some papers that would allow me to work. They could be better, but now that it is wartime and so many men are off fighting, nobody looks too close at the papers of someone who can fix things.

I changed my name also, but only my last name. My first name I kept the same. Maybe that was not a good idea, but I could not bring myself to change the name Rebecca had called me.

O
ver the past hour, I’d begun to see Jakob, the chalky blue light of dawn near the ocean seeping through the open doors, lightening the space between us. At some point during his story—I couldn’t remember when—the clanging of metal on metal had stopped, the electrical hum whirring down. And now that he’d finished, there was only the distant card-shuffling sound of the tide coming in.

Jakob looked at his watch. “We are between shifts.”

In the blue light, his face was full of shadows, as if all the sorrowful parts of his story had settled there.

“The picture in your code-o-graph. It’s Rebecca?”

He pushed a piece of hair out of his eyes. “
You
took it?”

“I also let your pigeons go.”

He shrugged. “They came back. It is what they do.”

“Who are you sending messages to?”

He stood, wrapped the scarf back around his neck.

“Her.”

“But where do the birds go?”

“That is a good question.”

“And you put them in code?”

“What I have to say is only for the two of us.”

I considered asking him whether he believed his pigeons could fly to France, or whether he’d ever gotten a message back; instead, I asked him if he wanted to come uptown with me and get his code-o-graph.

“I would,” he said. Then I got up, and Jakob helped me climb out from under the subway car.

In the flat blue light of the dawn, the floating subway cars looked dreamlike, almost as magical as I’d first believed them to be. Jakob stopped to pick up a green metal toolbox, and the two of us walked out into the salted cold.

The wind cut right through my T-shirt. I wrapped my arms around my ribs, and Jakob asked me if I’d had a coat.

“Lost it,” I said.

He set down the toolbox and unzipped his jacket, dropped it over my shoulders. It held the warmth from his body and smelled like cloves and the bottom of the subway car, the black grease from the wheels, maybe.

We walked through the still-sleeping streets of Coney Island. Only the gulls and the factory workers were moving, only the restless ocean and the wind from it, blowing onto us, stiff with salt and brine. I’d been awake all night and everything had the sheen of unreality—the pale salt-blasted houses, the poster-ed fronts of the sideshows advertising the
Real Human 2-Headed Baby
, the
Georgia Peaches
, two normal-sized girls with heads the size of baseballs.

From the elevated subway platform, I watched the light at the top of the Parachute Jump wink out—the only light left on at Coney Island since the war had started. A light at the top of an amusement ride, too small to be of any use to the German U-boats floating off the coast, but bright enough to warn ships at sea where the shore was.

Jakob and I stood in the ocean-chilled wind waiting for the train to open its doors.

“I’m sorry,” I said. For taking his code-o-graph, for thinking he was a Nazi, for keeping his jacket in all that biting wind.

Jakob shook his head as if it didn’t matter, as if so many regrettable things had already happened to him.

When the doors opened, we got onto a Manhattan-bound subway train along with a couple of people on their way to factory jobs. Once we started moving, time seemed to shift onto icy tracks, speeding up and slowing down of its own accord. It was probably the lack of sleep, but the journey from Coney Island to Dyckman Street—which should have taken an hour or more—was over in an instant, and I had no memory of it, except the warmth of Jakob’s clove-and-grease-smelling jacket.

Sunlight was slanting across Broadway when we came aboveground, making it feel later than I wanted it to be. I tugged Jakob’s shirtsleeve, pulling him through the tide of winter-bundled people pouring down Dyckman Street, dragging him to our building.

I gave him back his jacket and left him in the hallway with the rows of mailboxes. Told him I’d only be a minute.

I ran up the stairs, telling myself I would only be a minute. Because surely it was still early, surely my mother was still asleep. But the moment I creaked open the door to the apartment, my mother was on the other side, pulling me against her, her collarbone pressing against my cheek, her heart beating beneath my ear—a steady fluttering, the most steady thing about her now.

The point of her chin rested on the top of my head, and here time must have hit a slow section of track, because I cannot remember my mother ever holding me for so long.

When she did finally let me go, she said there was a man waiting in the kitchen to see me.

I looked around her. A man wearing some kind of uniform was sitting in one of our kitchen chairs.

My mother has sold me to the Gestapo
, I thought.
That is why she stood here and held onto me so long.

It was a ridiculous thought, but my head was still filled with bits and pieces of Jakob’s story.

“Go on.” My mother put her hand on my back.

I stood in the hallway, thinking about Jakob downstairs with the mailboxes. Jakob waiting for me to return the code-o-graph with the photograph of Rebecca he’d managed to save from the Nazis, but not from me.

“I have to do something first,” I said.

“I think you’d better go see about this.” My mother’s hand pressed more firmly into my back.

I let her lead me into the kitchen.

The man at our table was older, maybe fifty. And once I got closer, I saw that his uniform was nothing more than a gray suit and a badge. A badge that had the words
New York City Truant Officer
pressed into it.

My mother pulled a cigarette out of her pack and used it to point to the seat across from the truant officer. I sat in it.

“Tell my son what you told me,” she said to him.

The truant officer looked at me and smiled. His teeth were yellow. “Our records indicate that Jack Quinlan has been absent from P.S. 52 for forty-six consecutive school days.”

He shifted his gaze to my mother. “You do know,” he said, “that in the State of New York, it is illegal for a child to miss school?”

“She didn’t know anything about it,” I told him.

The truant officer turned back to me. He leaned across the table, brought his face near to mine. I smelled licorice and whiskey on his breath.

“You then,” he said, “do you realize that truancy is against the law in the State of New York?”

He was so close, his breath was fogging up my glasses.

The truant officer and I sat face-to-face across the red table, staring at each other. I was trying to decide if it would be better or worse to admit I didn’t know truancy was against the law. Trying also to figure out how to get back downstairs with Jakob’s code-o-graph.

In a puff of smoke, my mother’s voice drifted over us. “Are you planning on arresting my son?”

I had not heard this tone—the tone of a bootlegger’s daughter—in a long while. I took my eyes away from the truant officer. My mother was leaning against the sink, the cigarette between her fingers, the gap between her front teeth visible.

“Because if you are,” she continued, “I’ll go pack him a suitcase now.”

The truant officer sat back in his chair, waved his hands around as if trying to erase something that existed in the air in front of him.

“No, no,” he said. “I’m only here to take him back to P.S. 52.”

My mother blew smoke into the air above his bald head.

“Then why don’t we let him go change out of his Mass pants?”

•   •   •

When I came back
into the hallway with the mailboxes—the truant officer so close on my heels, he was in danger of stepping on the backs of my Thom McAns—Jakob was nowhere in sight. I tried looking for him on the street, but the truant officer kept me moving toward P.S. 52 with one of his surprisingly big hands on my shoulder.

Now that he was out in the daylight and not sitting in my kitchen, the truant officer looked bigger, more barrel-chested, as if he might have been a boxer at one time, and I had the feeling that if I ran, he would have no trouble catching me and making me sorry I’d made him exert himself.

He stayed close to me all the way to P.S. 52, all the way across the empty macadam of the yard—everybody already called inside—and into a classroom that was very much like Miss Steinhardt’s, except that the Visible Man and his colorful organs had been replaced by the Periodic Table of Elements, and Miss Steinhardt had been replaced by an older, paler version of herself called Miss Milhaus.

“I’ve got Jack Quinlan here,” the truant officer announced. He made this sound as if we were characters on
Gang Busters
and my forty-six consecutive days of truancy had earned me the status of Public Enemy Number One.

Miss Milhaus pointed at a desk in the front row. The truant officer poked me in the back. His finger felt like the barrel of a gun.

I walked up the aisle, expecting to have that sense of everyone’s eyes crawling over me. But it was as if someone had cast a spell on the entire class, fixing their gazes on their social studies books.

It took me a second to figure it out. To understand they weren’t concentrating on social studies. They were thinking about my father falling under the uptown A, and how I was now some kind of bad luck.

I stepped over Declan Moriarity’s polio brace and took my seat. Rose LoPinto was on my other side. She was wearing a red sweater, and it looked nice against her black hair. Francis D’Amato, still wearing the flesh-colored patch, was on her left. I wondered if Francis had been repeating things for Rose while I’d been out looking for Nazis. The thought of Francis’s wet-looking lips next to the RadioEar microphone at Rose’s throat made me want to punch him in his good eye.

The day felt like a dream. I hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours, and the books on my desk changed subject without me knowing how it happened. One moment, I’d be standing on the freezing macadam with a ball in my hand, and a second later, I’d find myself inside the overheated classroom staring at the Periodic Table of Elements, trying to turn the boxes of letters and numbers into some kind of sense.

I came to as Miss Milhaus was explaining something about the weight of oxygen. She was standing at the board with her back to us, sending her words into the chalked letters, sending them in a direction I believed Rose would miss.

I bent my head toward Rose’s throat.

“You don’t have to do that,” she whispered.

Until she spoke, I’d had no idea how much I’d missed her blurred consonants, her out-of-focus vowels.

“It’s okay,” I said, leaning closer. But Rose stopped me with a hand on my chest.

“No,” she said. “Really.”

I froze, everything I was about to say about the weight of oxygen trapped beneath her fingers. I couldn’t pull my eyes from the small microphone box pinned to the neck of Rose’s sweater, now banned to me the way swimming pools and theaters and certain streets had been banned to Jakob and Rebecca. In that instant, it didn’t matter that everyone now believed I was bad luck. It only mattered that Rose LoPinto would rather not know anything about the weight of oxygen than let me whisper into the smooth skin of her throat.

What I wouldn’t learn until much later was that sometime during the summer—the summer I’d been wandering the marble halls of Pennsylvania Station, making my coconut custard pie last inside the coolness of the Automat—Rose had breathed ether and let a surgeon work inside her ear with tiny instruments. The surgeon hadn’t cured Rose’s deafness, but he had made it less profound. Enough that she no longer needed anyone to speak into the microphone box pinned near her throat.

And then, somehow, time shifted, and I looked up and the room was almost empty, only a few people left, their coats already on, the backs of them going out the door.

I grabbed my own coat, was putting it on as I bolted out the door and into the cold of November, the weight of Jakob’s code-o-graph in my pocket urging me to hurry.

But when I came through the chain-link fence, Moon Shapiro was leaning against the sad, little tree. He was wearing a new corduroy jacket with wooden buttons and had the same light blue yarmulke fastened to his red hair with a circle of bobby pins.

And I very much needed him to punch me in the head.

Even now, I am not certain why I needed this so badly. I only know that I believed something would be set right by that punch in the head, or set back. Something that had to do with Rose. And my father.

I stood before Moon Shapiro, stood within reach of his big fists and waited for the loose-fisted punch to the center of my body. But the spell of Miss Milhaus’s classroom had been cast on Moon as well. He would not look at me, only stared down, as if transfixed by a frozen puddle of dog pee at the base of that sad tree.

I stepped closer, my glasses level with the top row of buttons on his jacket.

“Marvin,” I said in a low voice. Then I shut my eyes and readied myself for the punch.

When I opened them again, Moon was still studying the layer of ice floating on the surface of the dog pee.

I looked up into Moon’s round face.

“Jewboy,” I said in a whisper.

Out of the corner of my eye, right at the edge of my glasses, I saw Moon ball his hand into a fist. But the fist did not rise more than a few inches from Moon’s side.