Keeping Secrets (17 page)

“Hey, what about Bernie?”

“Bernie knows his way home. He’ll come when he’s through running after that stupid dog.”

That stupid dog, Emma thought, whom Herman cosseted and spoiled as much as he did her and Bernie.

“Where are we going?”

“Didn’t I tell you I was going to show you something?”

Emma shook her head.

“Then you need to learn to listen.”

“Watch it, old man,” she teased, and goosed him from behind as earlier his son had goosed her.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” But his eyes were twinkling. “Shhh. Now listen.”

They moved softly, their footfalls little whispers through the brush, but clear as drumbeats to the creatures who made the woods their home. Birds called the news to their fellows farther on who had not yet cocked their feathered heads to the crackling twigs. “They’re coming, they’re coming,” Emma imagined they said. “With guns, with loaded guns.”

She and Herman would never shoot a bird. The quail hunt was a joke, an excuse to get out in the autumn air, walk, talk and, if they felt like it, blast some tin cans to kingdom come.

In between the bird calls there were long deep silences, more still even than those she and Herman often shared in the Graubarts’ living room, their chairs pulled close, the smoke of their cigarettes spiraling up toward the pressed-tin ceiling after one of his lessons.

“You know nothing,” he’d begin, and then he’d pull out his beloved
Encyclopaedia Britannica
which every three years he read straight through, then started over with Volume I. He told her Jewish history, customs, stories of growing up in the Warsaw ghetto, though he waved her off when she asked about religion, for Herman was not a religious man.

How strange, Emma often thought, that when she looked down onto the basketball court and zeroed in on tall, curly-haired Bernie Graubart, she’d found the only other half-Jew in all of West Cypress High, maybe in all of West Cypress—and with him had come Herman. What were the chances of her looking for a boyfriend and also finding a Jewish father, more of a father, in many ways, than Jake? Was it luck? Was it fate? Or was it genetic?

He taught her about the world too. “The French,” he’d say. “No, before that, but we’ll start with the French. This,” he pointed to a map, “is Laos. This is Vietnam.”

When Emma could absorb no more, they’d sip schnapps, and Herman would put his favorite, “Scheherazade,” on the record player.

Now they were in a part of the woods where Emma had never been before. Just ahead she spied a little clearing, to one side a small fire circle, charcoal within blackened stones. Beyond it stood a sloping one-room shack, its rotting wooden walls camouflaged beneath green moss and mold. It was like a fairy tale, something out of Grimm.

“Is this yours?” she whispered.

He nodded, reached into his pocket for a Camel and his nickel Zippo lighter. “I come here when I want to be alone.”

“What do you do?”

“I read.” He pushed on the door to the shack. Its rusting hinges groaned, then opened. Inside was a tiny room, a simple pine table, an old kitchen chair, a kerosene lamp, a faded rag rug. “I think.” He rubbed his nose with the back of a wide hand. “Sometimes I write.”

Herman waved her in. There wasn’t room for two, so he stood in the open doorway.

“Sit,” he said as if he were speaking to Molly. Emma did as she was told.

She ran her fingers across the top of the table, its unfinished pine worn smooth with use.

“What do you write?”

“Letters.”

“To whom?”

“To Leo and Esther and Mo.”

Emma watched dust motes floating in the golden sunlight. Herman’s eyes were huge behind his thick glasses.

“Do they ever write back?”

“No.” Herman laughed. “I’m not
that
crazy.” He pulled off his baseball cap and scratched his head. “It just makes me feel closer. I miss them, you know.”

Emma nodded. Herman’s brothers and sister had died in a death camp twenty-odd years ago. Before he told her about it, she had never heard of the Holocaust. It wasn’t something she’d ever been taught at West Cypress High.

He stood there for a moment, staring while faces long dead smiled their turns upon a stage only he could see. Then Emma sneezed. “Come on.” He waved her outside again and brushed aside some leaves. They sat perched above the shack’s little yard on a flat rock.

Emma felt that Herman wanted to change the subject now, but she couldn’t let go yet.

“Do you miss Jennie Lou too?”

He reached over and squeezed her hand. “You know I do.”

“How can you miss someone who never was? I mean, even if she was your daughter, she only lived four days, and that was so long ago.”

Herman nodded. “When Bernie was a year and a half old. She’d be just about your age.”

Emma nodded. She walked with him sometimes across the railroad tracks, then down the road to the tiny churchyard where his baby daughter was buried. His wife Mary Ann had never gone, not once in all those years had she walked the path to the graveyard door. “She can’t,” Herman said. But he could. He placed flowers from their yard, sweet peas, roses, petunias, in a china vase shaped like a baby lamb. And she knew that when he looked at her across that little grave he saw in part the grown Jennie Lou.

“What do you write to them about, to Leo, and Esther, and Mo?”

“My cucumbers. How my scallions are doing.”

Emma slapped at him. “Okay, forget it.”

Then Herman shifted, sat cross-legged in his baggy khakis facing her. His smile faded. “I write them about things I’m worried about. Last week I wrote on the trouble that’s coming now for the Negroes.”

They watched leaves fall for a few minutes. Then she spoke. “I wonder sometimes what it would be like to go to school with a Negro. To have one for a friend. What were they like in the Army, Herman?”

“Like people. Good and bad. Nice and mean. Tall and short.”

“Did you eat with them?”

“Emma,” he laughed, “we ate, talked, played poker, slept, crapped—we did everything together. It was the Army.”

“It’s just hard to imagine. I mean, when you think about it, it’s one thing, but in real life…it’s another.”

Herman picked up a stick and played with it.

“Well, you’ll have your chance to see it all.”

“You think things are going to change here? Will there be trouble?”

“No way around it.” He leaned back and squinted. “Good people are going to die all over the South before this is over. But here? I don’t think so. Probably not.”

“Then what do you mean I’ll see it all?”

Herman looked into her eyes as if in them he could read her future. She stood, waiting with her hands on her hips for his answer.

“Do you think you’re always going to live in West Cypress, kiddo?”

“I hope not.”

“So where are you going?”

Emma shrugged. “New Orleans, maybe. Atlanta. New York. San Francisco. Bernie and I talk about it sometimes, but we never decide.”

“He wants to go where you go.”

“Well…yes,” she answered, not seeing, out of stubbornness, the point Herman was making.

For Herman knew that Emma thought she loved Bernie, and she did, in her own way. But he knew that even if she loved him with her whole heart, his son, his beloved son, was merely going to slow this girl down. It would be years before anyone could lasso Emma. And he felt sorry for any poor bastard who tried. “Why stay so close to home? Why not Paris?”

“Well, hell, Herman, why not Katmandu?”

“Why not?”

Emma thought for a minute. This was her way into what she’d been thinking about for days. This was her opening.

“When you left Poland, wasn’t it lonesome to leave behind everybody you ever knew?”

“Sure, but sometimes you don’t have a choice.”

“If I go away, I’ll miss you.”

“Me too, sweetheart.”

Emma stood up, stretched, swung her arms in a big circle.

“What’s on your mind?” Herman asked.

“You know what you were talking about earlier, about missing people who are dead, who you never knew really, like Jennie Lou?”

“Yep.”

“I miss people I don’t know, too,” she said.

Herman looked up at her, waiting.

“I miss all the relatives on my daddy’s side I never met. And the others I know but never see.” You’re getting warm, Emma, but you’re not there yet. Do it.

“Well, everybody does that,” Herman said. “Families don’t live together like they used to. Back in the old country they were all around you forever. Their noses in your business till you were sick of them,
feh!
”

This is it, she thought. Don’t back away. Don’t laugh at Herman’s joke. Say it now.

“I miss my mother, Herman.”

Herman laughed, “What do you mean, you miss your mother? She probably misses you, too. You’re always here or off with Bernie. As much as I love you, you know you ought to go home every once in a while, Emmale.”

“I mean my real mother.”

“
Mein teiere
Emmale, what the hell are you talking about?”

She opened her mouth and the words tumbled out. “My cousin, I mean I guess he’s my step-cousin, J.D., told me something a couple of weeks ago that I’ve always known—or anyway suspected.” She took a deep breath. “Rosalie’s not my mother, Herman.”

Herman stared at her. “You’ve had too much schnapps.”

“No, really. I’ve been looking for proof for years, when they were out, and finally, in a little suitcase at the back of the hall closet, I found it.”

“What?”

“My birth certificate.”

Herman’s eyes grew wide. “All kids think they’re adopted…but you’re not joking, are you?”

“No.” And then Emma’s heart thundered in her chest as she said the words aloud for the very first time. “Her name is Helen, Herman. It says my real mother’s name is Helen Kaplan.”

Herman picked up another stick and drew a circle in the soft blanket of leaves. What the hell was he going to say to her now? “Have you talked with them about it?”

“No.” Emma’s voice faltered. She was close to tears. “I don’t know
what
to do.”

Herman reached over and gathered her into a hug. The tears began in earnest then, rolling down her cheeks, her nose running, but she struggled through. “You know, I overheard little things they’d say now and then when I was growing up, and I’d ask them questions. They’d pretend they didn’t hear me. Or change the subject. They’d never talk about the past, not like you do, it was like there was something awful there, something dirty.”

“Emma.” He hugged her closer, as if he could squeeze away her pain.

“So I’d try to trick them. I used to do things like, in the middle of supper, I’d say, ‘Daddy, could you pass the peas, please, and how did you and Momma meet?’” She smiled at the memory, laughed a little. “Like if I did it fast enough, they wouldn’t notice and would answer before they thought. And then once, I called Daddy from school, when we had to fill out some form with our mother’s maiden name. As if asking on the phone would make a difference.”

“What did he say?”

“He said ‘Norris.’”

Herman struggled for an explanation, but he didn’t understand these people. Why would they do this? But Emma was looking for an answer. “They have a reason for this, Emma. I’m sure they thought they were doing the right thing.”

“Do
you
think that was the right thing? To lie to me all these years? To hide that from me like it was something awful? What could be so awful, Herman?”

He shrugged. “You never know what people think. People have pain, Emma, that you don’t know about.”

“What about
my
pain, Herman? All that whispering and lying? It made me crazy—to wonder who I really was…am. It’s weird to know you can’t trust your parents…
if
they’re your parents!”

“You’re not crazy, sweetie. You’re one of the sanest people I know. Now, what are we going to do about this?”

“I don’t know. I want to talk to them.”

“And you should. But you must be very careful, Emma. Very careful. They had good reasons for what they did. They’re not bad people. Have you talked with Bernie about this?”

“Not yet, I—”

“Don’t, not yet.”

“Talk with me about what?” Bernie struggled into the clearing then, having heard his name as he came through the bushes.

“About what to get you for Christmas.” Emma quickly wiped her nose and gave Herman a look. He was right. She wasn’t ready yet. And then, as always, her tongue covered up her feelings. “A jock strap or a nose guard? Which should I get him, Herman? Which do you think, Herman? Which is bigger?”

Herman laughed at his son’s blushing. Then, behind him, Molly rushed up, her speckled tongue lolling. She ran over to Emma and snuffled in her crotch.

“Get away, you pervert!” Emma managed a laugh.