Dreams Bigger Than the Night (13 page)

Arietta and Jay now saw each other regularly on weekends. When work permitted, he even dropped into the dance parlor, though she usually had only a few minutes to spare between lessons. Having heard her occasionally play on the academy piano, he decided to buy an upright for his apartment. On Prince Street, at the Bodian Pawn Shop, for only twenty bucks, he found what he wanted: a Sears-Roebuck Beckwith. Although bearing the imprint “Concert Grand Chicago,” it belonged in a dive. While she played, he sang in his best countertenor. At home, his father had often observed that his son’s voice was sadly wanting. Wonderful at harmonizing, Arietta would let him get a good start and then come in under his line. They had a thousand laughs, and he thought the piano—almost as much as dancing—bridged their cultural differences.

And yet in the midst of his bliss, he entertained doubts; he felt that Arietta had a secret life. Twice when he called on her at home, he could hear her on the Ma Bell speaking in German; and once at the Riviera, she excused herself to use his phone, closing the door behind her. Even so, he caught the occasional
ja
or
nein
. When he asked her to whom she had spoken, she replied, “Oh, just a friend.” But she never took him into her confidence, and her lack of openness gnawed at him. He presumed that the calls had to do with the work she couldn’t disclose, but he refrained from asking her directly. He did, however, hear her distinctly say on the phone “Friends of the New Germany,” as he waited in her living room to take her to a movie.

To put his suspicions to rest, he decided to visit one of these German meetings, normally held in Irvington. On a Wednesday evening, he dressed in a black suit and dark tie, took a bus that dropped him off two blocks from Montgomery Hall in Irvington, and walked the rest of the way. When he tried to enter the building, a young man with a red armband held up his hand and asked to see a membership card.

“I’ve never been here before. I want to join.”

The man directed him to a table just inside the front door, where a husky, blond guy, with a crew cut and a fascist uniform including a Sam Browne belt and swastika armband, asked for some identification. Since he had deliberately left his driver’s license at home, he could open his wallet and plead insufficiency. The Teutonic avatar seemed none too pleased.

“Why do you want to join?”

“To promote the ideals of the homeland.”

“And what are those?”

Good question. From all reports they involved race hatred, anti-intellectualism, a celebration of militarism, and a gagging sentimentality in things having to do with the
volk
.

“Blood purity, honesty, strength, honor . . .”

Prepared to continue, he stopped when asked his name. Klug might mark him as a Jew, so he gave him the name of the composer his father liked least, Richard Wagner.

“The Führer’s favorite! A glorious name.”

Jay added, “His music makes my father cry,” not mentioning why.

Told he’d have to swear an oath, he took the paper, raised his right hand, and recited:

I hereby declare my entry into the association of the Friends of the New Germany. The purpose and aims of the association are known to me, and I pledge myself to support them unequivocally. I recognize the principle of leadership according to which the association is conducted. I am not a member of any secret organization of any kind, Freemasons and so forth. I am of Aryan extraction, free from Jewish or colored racial admixture.

Scribbling his “name” on the bottom of the page, he asked what else was required.

“Ten cents, please.”

He gave him a dime and received a membership card; then both men saluted. The meeting began with a song in English that included the line “Our greatest joy will come when Jewish blood flows through the streets.” What he’d failed to anticipate was that the speakers would address the audience mostly in German, a language he could partially comprehend owing to his knowledge of Yiddish. When they lapsed into English, he faithfully made notes, as if drinking at the fount of Germanic wisdom.

One man said that the anti-German propaganda of World War I and its aftermath had led to the loss of German-American identity. Children growing up after 1914 had come to doubt and suspect the Fatherland. They had grown to distrust their parents and accept as fact the vile propaganda that Germans had crucified Canadian soldiers and cut off the hands of Belgian babies, and that Germans had introduced poison gas into the war.

The audience, for the most part silent and sullen, would rise in tumultuous salute when the speakers periodically shouted, “Heil, Hitler.” Toward the end of the meeting, a familiar face took the stage: the man from the restaurant, the one with the dueling scar, who warned, in English,

Without proper instruction in the ways of the Fatherland, German-American children will drift into pool halls, learn bad language, read obscene literature, see evil movies, smoke cigarettes, and drink alcoholic beverages. They will, like so many American adolescents, become swarms of human parasites. Just look at American society now. It is overrun with depraved Orientals, Blacks, and Jewish scum from southern and eastern Europe. In their place we need Aryans, German-Americans to shape the course of U.S. history.

Why do you think Heinz Diebel was murdered? Because every day he exposed the vomit this sick government feeds on, a government composed mostly of Jewish politicians who protect and coddle Bolsheviks and their own spawn: swindlers, gangsters, white slavers, dope peddlers, pickpockets, gunmen, and brothel keepers.

Heinz Diebel knew that America was becoming a nation ruled by Jews and Communists.

Raising his eyes and extending his arms to heaven, the speaker implored, “Dear God, bring forth a man in this nation who will lead us out of our misery, who will do for America what Adolf Hitler has done for Germany through the National Socialist philosophy, who will bring about salvation at the last hour.”

The crowd loved him, applauding his screed wildly. At the end of the meeting, the group sang the “Horst Wessel” song.

What Jay had heard scared him; but what he had not understood might have been worse. As he left the meeting, he told himself that languages constitute a code and that not to know them is to render yourself vulnerable. On his way home, he stopped at the Saba bookstore and asked the venerable owner if he had any German grammar and phrase books. The store owner complied, handed him his change, and smiled mischievously. “Italian is the more beautiful tongue.”

The next day, using the
News
archives to check up on the hate-spewing Nazi sympathizers, he came across a brief description of Horst Wessel, who wrote the song he had heard. To the dismay of his father, a well-respected Protestant minister, Horst had given up his law studies to lead brawls and street fights as a Nazi storm trooper. Enamored of a prostitute, Horst was murdered—shot in the mouth—by her pimp, a German Communist, and thus became an instant political martyr. The more Jay learned about the votaries of National Socialism, the more he realized that these people all began as haters: of parents, of learning and teachers, of outsiders, and, not least, of themselves. They brought to mind Ahab, who “piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate (read: Jews and Communists) felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

Anxious to speak to Arietta about scarface, he suggested they take the train to Coney Island. An unseasonably warm autumn had inspired a spate of newspaper ads trumpeting the park and its rides. Arietta wore a pink dress and he, white ducks with a boater. The subway overflowed with Sunday outers smelling from the foods of their different cultures and sweating from the closeness of the car. Wicker baskets provisioned the revelers from virtually the first moment the train pulled out of the station. Papas with big bellies gave orders to mammas thin as needles from bearing and raising the flocks of kids huddled around them. Fortunately, he and Arietta had seats. Amid the press of bodies and the clickety-clack of the rails, he decided not to say anything until they had a chance to walk, hand in hand, in a setting more conducive to intimacy and confession.

As they pulled into Coney Island, the station teemed with food vendors hawking sausages, peanuts, and salted pretzels among the sound of steaming trains arriving and departing. On the street, cars honked for apparently no reason, and pawnbrokers manned folding tables where the cash-starved traded brooches and other baubles for enough money to enjoy the rides and concessions. They bought tickets and entered the park to the sound of bands playing oompa, oompa, the Cyclone roller coaster eliciting screams of delicious fear, merchants crying their wares and services, parents in myriad languages disciplining their recalcitrant children, guns crackling at the shooting gallery, the surf pounding the beach, and everywhere the cricket voices of children expressing their delight. A barker outside the vaudeville hall engaged in a patter of one-liners as a come-on. “I knew a fellow who kissed a girl on the cheek and died of painter’s colic. She was the kind of girl that five minutes with her and you were a man with a past. Just step inside for the laughs of a lifetime—and seven other acts, including dancers and a melodrama, ‘Tilly’s Punctured Romance.’”

As they traversed the grounds, he wondered what attracted people to bumper cars, saucer dishes, slides, roller coasters, moving sidewalks, barrel rolls. What was the fun of being spun, upended, hurtled, tossed, thrown, toppled, and tripped? Why should disorientation be pleasing? To his mind, staying upright was hard enough.

He asked Arietta what tickled her fancy.

“Let’s begin with the merry-go-round.”

As they rose up and down on their painted horses, he had a glimpse of the fierce imagination of the children, who lovingly spoke to their mounts and happily squealed. Real equestrians lacked the pleasure of imagining their horses.

The Ferris wheel gave them an overview of the park and a perspective that brought to his mind the distance of the rich from the poor, and the politicians from the populace. He would have broached the subject of the man in the restaurant had not Arietta been so absorbed in the sights, leaning this way and that to point out another landmark.

Leaving the Ferris wheel, they stopped for a Nathan’s hot dog and some caramel corn. On the boardwalk, a small band played while a waif-sized busker danced and sang the lyrics, “I can be happy, I can be sad; I can be good, or I can be bad. It all depends on you.” Arietta suggested they stop at the penny arcade, where they peered through the viewers at the vaud tricks and watched the flashing cards tell “Sadie Simpson’s Secret.”

Near the arcade they stopped to watch the weight guesser, always watchful for the trickster trying to swindle a prize. A short, skinny guy stepped on the scales, registering 190 pounds. The concessionaire patted the man’s pockets and told him to empty them. Handfuls of ball bearings spilled out, making Jay wonder about the importance of the unseen. At his suggestion, they headed for the fortune-teller’s tent. On the way, they passed a juggler, who seemed to keep four or five balls suspended above his outstretched dexterous hands in defiance of gravity. Taking Jay’s arm and pausing to watch, Arietta made a strange comment:

“Every gigolo’s dream.”

The crystal gazer, dressed in a yellow robe with black moons and crescents, introduced herself as Madame Blotofsky. Although they asked for separate fortunes, she insisted that theirs were intertwined. Mumbling a lot of mumbo jumbo, which included a few Yiddish words that caused Jay to shake his head skeptically, she quoted the biblical line, “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.”

Refusing payment, she said the “reading” was a gift from the other world and they should tell their friends about Madame Blotofsky and her profound pronouncements. He noticed that she did not say predictive powers.

Before he could steer Arietta to the beach, she insisted they had to stop at the shooting arcade and the fun house. Plopping down two dimes, he waited for the attendant to prime his pistol, but Arietta took a clip and expertly loaded her own. They faced two kinds of targets, one composed of animals, like bears and bison, and the other of World War I German objects, a submarine, a soldier, a tank, a plane. Jay fired at the second targets, forgetting that Arietta’s mother came from Stuttgart. Before he had finished his allotted shots, he stopped, put down the gun, acknowledged his bad manners, and murmured “Sorry.” Without responding, Arietta proceeded to knock down all the wildlife without a single miss, earning a stuffed giraffe.