The Houseguest (22 page)

It seemed that Hirschler was talking without speaking, still smirking, invoking this inexplicable voice that filled the room—none shall return without learning of the bones—in perfect, sonorous German.

It was Frederick speaking. Max opened his eyes fully, allowing Hirschler to fade, and saw Frederick hunched far forward, almost as though he were doubled over to wretch, bobbing while he spoke. His face was bright and alert, tinged with something that looked like delight.

“What did you say?” Max asked in English.

“Yesterday I was crucified for killing Jesus. Tomorrow I will be crucified again. Today I am allowed to rest because it is the Sabbath.”

Max stood up and led Frederick from the room. The Negro offered no resistance. In the hallway he looked back at Max with the same expression he had had only a little while earlier in this same place. Now what Max saw was not loneliness but someone in a place where he was the only inhabitant, catching a short and strange glimpse of an alien world.

HE RETURNED TO
the Committee's office in the morning. The door was unlocked but the rooms were nearly empty, only a few wan and shifty presences. He found Spiro in his warren, smoking and typing.

“Good, you're back,” he said. “You want a job? I have a job for you. A situation has arisen. There's a ship, the
St. Louis,
it left Hamburg for Havana and the Cubans aren't letting the passengers enter. It's something to do with transit visas, it's not entirely clear yet. But this boat is just sitting in the ocean filled with people and it can't do that forever. All the agencies are meeting in Miami. I need you to
go down there, not to be our ears but to be our mouth. Can you do that? You wanted to help, I'm giving you this chance. But you must go now. No, first you must change your clothes because you look like you just walked off a refugee ship. Does anybody know where we have the petty cash?”

18.

“I
THOUGHT YOU WERE
at work,” Judith said.

A drizzly late August morning, more redolent of autumn than summer. Brisk Canadian winds beginning their march down over the Adirondacks, the opening salvos of a cold that would stay put for months. Now, the rain. The house so empty. So quiet. Irene busy putting her home back in order, the process of removing Ana and the tiny, unexpected messes they were only now discovering: a blanket with small holes cut at the bottom, possibly for toes; the decaying remnants of an apple in a dresser drawer; dozens and dozens of hairpins stuffed into a butter dish thought to be missing. All of it evidence of a boredom or an unhinged mind. Judith busy with herself, fallen into the lovely bottomless pit of her wedding. Only Shayke now to keep Abe company. He sat across the table, watched Abe eat with hostile eyes. He seemed to take on an especially nasty air whenever Abe did anything corporeal—eating, going to the bathroom, making love.
She was your guest,
he answered, when Abe implored.

Abe slammed his coffee onto the table, spilling a few drops. “I had no choice,” he said.

“No choice about what?” Irene asked. “You turned down another buyer at the yard?”

He didn't answer and she let it drop. Better that way. He was running late, for one, had overslept, dreaming of a woman, not Ana but
someone with ghastly white skin and an inviting laugh. While Irene showered, he stood in the room where Ana had slept, nothing there but the slip he'd retrieved from the tree, white silk washed and ironed, dangling from a wire hanger in the empty closet. Now he stood staring at a piece of stationery, stained with coffee around the edges. He raised his pen. A stomping down the hallway. His daughter barging through. Judith had forgotten her umbrella. She came into the kitchen twirling it, then poured herself a splash of coffee, glancing sideways from the counter.

“You've stopped working when it rains?” Judith said.

“I'll be there when I'll be there,” said Abe.

“Has mother told you?”

“Told me what?”

“We're going to Albany next weekend to look at wedding veils.”

“They don't sell wedding veils in Utica?”

“They don't sell anything in Utica but mufflers and beer.”

“I probably could put together a veil from those things.”

“Will you be able to fend for yourself while we're gone? There's seven pounds of meatloaf left in the refrigerator because mother always makes too much.”

“I'll do my best.”

“What are you doing with your hands? You look like you're praying.”

“I'm reading the paper.”

“No, you're not. You're writing a letter. Who's it to?”

He put it down. “Judith, all human beings deserve a bit of privacy now and then.”

“Privacy? Now I'm really curious.”

“Well, go be curious someplace else.” She's going to see it, he thought. She's going to look down and see. The phone rang. Judith hurried to answer. It was Sam, her betrothed. By the time the conversation ended, she'd forgotten about spying.

“I won't be home for dinner tonight,” she called on her way out. “I'm going to the movies with the girls.”

“Tell your mother,” he said.

“I'm telling you.”

After she left, he looked down at the letter before him. He'd written,
Since you left, I think of no one else.
Once Judith was gone, he tore it to shreds. He didn't want to be the sort of man who wrote what he could not say.

SHMUEL—STOP—IN
NEW ACCOMMODATIONS
—STOP—T
HEIR DURATION UNKNOWN
I
ASSUME
—STOP—P
LEASE ENLIGHTEN WHEN POSSIBLE
—STOP—AB

She did not begrudge the Auers for moving her. The room was more comfortable, the hallways populated by visiting railway executives and steel manufacturers and low-level politicians who, like the Auers, made few attempts to hide their stares but at least these had lust in them, rather than mistrust or impatience or confusion.

T
HERE IS A WAR GOING ON
—STOP—Y
OUR PATIENCE IS REQUESTED
—STOP—Y
RS IN
C
HRIST
SS

Writing to Spiro was her primary pastime. She wanted to know where she was going next. Utica, New York, was not a terminal place. She was a person of unique and easily identified flaws but she knew she didn't deserve that.

Her life had been defined by constant movement. Her mother had essentially considered her an additional piece of luggage.
Never, dear Ana, let a man lodge you at a cheap hotel,
her mother told her.
Do you hear me, darling? It is the one indignity from which a woman cannot recover.
They were staying at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin at the time, living off a German diplomat, her mother's admirer of the moment. She understood very clearly what it meant to be moved at the whims of unseen others. A show booked. A lover guilted back home. A visa stamped. (That same diplomat had simply paid the bill and closed
down their rooms when he was given a sudden assignment someplace in Asia.) But never had she felt so thoroughly
suspended,
as though the current of her existence had been dammed up and was left with nowhere to go except back over itself.

I
AM GRATEFUL TO BE HERE
—STOP—I
WILL BE MORE GRATEFUL TO BE ELSEWHERE
AB

For every half-dozen wires she sent he responded to one. She realized she actually missed the leery boy at the Western Union office whom she'd been beholden to while she lived with the Auers. The ramrod solicitousness of the Hotel Utica staff bored her. They were kindness Stakhanovites who did not gossip or fantasize or wonder about the endless notes she was sending. She might have been wiring troop counts to Hitler and this scurrying race of desk people would have just smiled.

E
VEN THE RABBI WALKED AWAY FROM THIS PLACE
S
HMUEL
AB

Alive and languishing. She let a podiatrist from Philadelphia and his wife buy her dinner. She entertained them in exchange for a meal. When the wife excused herself to use the restroom, the podiatrist slid his hand under her dress. She let it stay there, let it explore to the point that she could feel his fingers trembling, and stood up and left the moment the wife returned, leaving him maroon-faced and lurching in a very obvious direction. At least the Auers could be counted on for a kind of domestic theatricality, something like Chekhov under excessive anesthesia. This hotel stifled itself. A show that ended before the curtain went up.

At the end of her second week at the Hotel Utica, she received a letter that read simply:

Dear Ana,

You are ridiculousness incarnate.

Warmly,

J

She had become so focused on waiting to hear from Shmuel that she had forgotten she had written Jacob in the first place. She balled up the letter to drop in the trash, then thought better and burned it, held a match to it right there above in ashtray on her nightstand. It flared more than she expected. The letter seemed to fight back against the flame. She had to carry it into the bathroom, drop it in the bath. She tried to call room service to tend to the mess of ash that remained, but room service was indisposed at the moment. Well, she thought, sometimes one must listen to what the universe is shouting. Its message to her was unambiguous and emphatic: she was no one's problem but her own.

19.

T
HE SENSE OF
certitude Max had hoped would materialize on the train down to Miami never appeared. Of course he felt right about what he was there to do, was satisfied that Spiro had brought him on board, believed he was prepared to invest all of himself, rhetorically, physically, intellectually, theologically, into the efforts to save these hundreds of Jewish souls aboard the
St. Louis
bobbing in the ocean under the warm sun. But bundling down along the Atlantic seaboard he waited for his resolve to coalesce into something sturdy and vigorous. He wanted to present himself like Spiro or Hirschler, to project what he knew and what he believed in a way that could not be ignored. Night fell as they entered Virginia, then the Carolinas. What he summoned inside himself stayed hazy, elastic.

With the money Spiro had given him, he bought his train ticket and a new suit, forgoing new socks to have money to phone the temple in Utica, letting them know that an uncle in Cleveland had suffered a stroke and he was needed by the family to offer spiritual assistance. The call was brief. He still had a little money left.

Without knowing why, he gave the operator the number of Mrs. Epstein. The line rang for quite some time and the operator asked if he'd like to disconnect the call. No, Max said, she often takes her time.

When she did pick up her reaction to hearing her landlord was a mixture of relief and sorrow. It was the voice of someone who had become far too accustomed to being abandoned.

“You've been away all weekend,” she said, “and they said at your temple, that you just left . . .”

“Everything is fine, Nora,” he said. “How are you doing? Any word from your Canadian friend?”

“A letter,” she said. “Ten days ago. He's been seconded to help defend Hong Kong.”

The name of such a remote place made her choke up. It had a disheartening effect on Max as well. What he was involved in was on a planetary scale. A nice fellow from Ontario was needed to defend an island in the South China Sea. What sorts of forces were required to leave the world so fully skewed, to have such dislodging powers?

He was about to offer reassurance but the words fell like lead in his throat. He hadn't the strength to utter more fictions.

“He's tremendously brave, Nora. It takes extraordinary courage to do that. And no doubt he gathers a lot of that from you.”

She sobbed on the other end of the line.

“Nora, I'm sorry to bother you but I need you to do something. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” she said miserably.

“I need you to arrange to have the elm tree in front of the house pruned. A few of the lower branches look to have rotted. We wouldn't want another branch to fall on us. I meant to do it myself but never found the time.”

“Can't you take care of it when you return?”

“Of course I could, but I would hate for one of those branches to come smashing through the windows if a good rainstorm reaches town before I do. Do you think you can manage that?”

“Mr. Hoffman, Rabbi, I—”

“In the upper-right drawer in my desk there is an envelope with money inside. Five dollars ought to be enough. I'm grateful. And if anyone asks you tell them I'll be back as quickly as I can.”

Barreling through the Southern night he could not imagine summoning as much force in Miami as he had on the phone with the widow Epstein. His desires, even when placed right in his hands, always had a way of eluding him.

THE CONFERENCE WAS
taking place in the ballroom on the fourteenth floor of a hotel along the water. The whole room was filled up with glaring light. For a hotel so luxurious, the windows were filthy. The dirt—maybe it was salt—on the glass was white in the sunlight and obscured Max's view of the beach and the sea below, a bright, green-blue sea, calm and waveless from this height, where the refugee ship had been floating around for three days.

The looming disaster of the
St. Louis
was now floating off the coast of Florida. The Cubans didn't want it. The US didn't want it. Representatives from the National Refugee Service and other agencies, including, somehow, the Committee for a Jewish Army, had been sent to try to negotiate a deal with Immigration and Naturalization by which the ship could anchor.

It was a large vessel, 937 passengers, most of them Jews. The saddest part about the whole episode was that most of them actually had papers, had somehow obtained a Cuban entrance visa, which Max knew from his work back in New York was no easy feat. What the passengers didn't know was that the Cuban president, a fickle and politically insecure man with the heart of a fascist and a mercurial disposition, would decide (long after the boat had launched and the shipping company officials in Hamburg been paid) to invalidate all previously issued visas. The ship had sat in the Havana harbor for the better part of a week, the captain hoping the president would relent or
another country would intervene. On day seven, the president expelled them. For a few hours Washington held its breath, praying the captain would steer south, down through the Caribbean, east along the coast of Brazil. There were so many nice South American countries where a Jew might find a home. Pick one, they were all thinking. No such luck. The
St. Louis
raised its anchor and veered north to Miami, invitation or not. It was so close to Miami the passengers (if reports from the captain were to be believed) could see city lights at night, the lights of the country that would not take them.

The table held about twenty-five men. Max recognized a few. There was Louis Rothstein from the Joint Distribution Committee and Harold Sacks from the Refugee Placement Service. At the far end of the side of the table Max was on was David Hirschler.

After the initial briefing there was silence. Everyone seemed afraid to talk first. Finally a man who Max knew was the president of the American Jewish Council cleared his throat and said, “Well, gentlemen, I just got off the phone with Congressman Dickstein from the House Immigration Committee.”

“What'd he say?” Rothstein asked.

“That we should go fuck ourselves.”

“He didn't elaborate?” asked Sacks.

“There's an election in November. He elaborated on how much shit the administration and the party would find themselves wading in if Americans open the Sunday paper this weekend to pictures of a thousand Jewish refugees disembarking in Miami.”

The same silence reclaimed the room. Twenty-five men, gathered for the rescue of a thousand Jews, were downed at the knees after ten minutes and one phone call.

“Dickstein wants us to come up with something else,” the man from the AJC said, “to call London, talk to people in Argentina, figure something out. We need something. This isn't Chicago. We're dealing with a crisis that is nearby. There must be a solution.”

How did the city lights look from the boat? They almost certainly lacked definition, especially to the provincials, the
shtetl
-bound. To their eyes, Florida was probably a cluster of mountain villages, some tropical recreation of Carpathia or the Massif: glimmers at elevations that normal topography didn't allow for. In that regard, in that familiar way, there was likely something hopeful about the place. Not just that it was a place of refuge but that it was a place not unlike home. You stood above decks at the end of another sultry day and understood passage was notched just a little bit closer, it had to be, it simply had to be. The world doesn't reflect itself so perfectly only for the mirror to turn its face away. These stifled and unknowing people, Max could not believe, were wholly reliant on this room for their salvation. Dumb and pinched faces, drooping mustaches, constipated spirits, guts and odors and their own disowned or bowdlerized or rewritten pasts. Salvators.

“I have an idea,” said Max.

“Who the Christ are you?”

“Rabbi Max Hoffman. Representing the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews.”

“Shmuel still won't show his face. Pity. What's your idea?”

“Torpedo it.”

“That's very funny.”

“It's not a joke. Have you read the news coming off the Yiddish wire? If we're not going to let it dock, we should be merciful and blast it out of the water and be done with it. That's what the Russians would do.”

Sacks opened his hands. “How is that kind of talk helpful?”

“I'm illustrating a point.”

“You don't need to illustrate it to us,” Hirschler said. His tone was imploring, either to get Max to save himself or to leave the limelight to someone with more clout.

“Apparently I do because I don't understand what's happening here. If we won't let them in, why on earth would anyone else? They'll bounce around from port to port for a few more weeks and when they
get low enough on supplies they'll have to go back to Hamburg. They won't even need to worry about U-boats since the Germans have far more efficient ways of killing them on land. We might as well do it ourselves and save everyone the time and frustration.”

“What do you suggest as an alternative?” said Sacks.

“We need to get onto the boat. Bring reporters. Interview the passengers, the captain, take pictures of the children. There are two hundred children on that ship.”

The director of the JDC leaned forward. “Nonsense coming from the Jewish Army people is nothing new but are you even hearing the words coming from your mouth? You're talking about taking pictures and writing stories as though that will change the minds of men who often can't tell a Jew from a cocker spaniel. Even if you're trying to be absurd, are you fucking serious? Get reporters to do the job? Your Spiro might get a little kick out of his outlandish newspaper ads, but as someone who has dealings with more than a dozen sane people, I can tell you for a fucking fact that using public opinion to solve this mess is about as feasible as
building
these people a new country. Public opinion moves at a glacial pace and the only time it speeds up is when it's moving away from you. You fucking ideologues and your fucking ideas of human participation.” He turned away from Max long enough to give a knifing look to Hirschler. “If we are to move anything we need to turn the gears that are already in place. You, Rabbi Max Hoffman, representing the Committee for Insane Jews and Stateless Lunatics, will have no part in that. Now what about Argentina? Who's going to call London?”

At a certain level, Max felt the hot sear of humiliation pass through him. At a different, rather parallel level, listening to the JDC man was like listening to the roar of the surf. It washed over him, left him drenched, but seemed compelled by powers that Max neither knew nor fully comprehended. His cheeks burned but the noise still rattled in his ears, unintelligible and alien.