The Secrets of Flight (21 page)

“He's not Solomon Rubinowicz anymore,” I say. “For the
next few years, he's Thomas. Thomas Browning. Which is not that unheard-of, I suppose—authors use pseudonyms to get published. And when Tzadok came through Ellis Island, he changed his name to Jack.”

“They
gave
Tzadok a new name.”

“What's the difference?”

“They forced him to assimilate. You have a choice.” Even as Sarah's voice becomes softer, it grows more insistent, and her breaths are becoming rapid. “Doesn't Sol know what we've been fighting for? If he becomes one of them, then Hitler wins.” When she starts to cough, I shudder and glance away.

“He's not becoming anything but a doctor. And I miss him. I've missed him every day for the last five months,” I confess.

She finally stops coughing and lies back to look at me. “Our ancestors died for their names, Miri. Sol may not understand that, but you do.”

But how can it be wrong to hide behind a name when the only reason we haven't been tortured and murdered ourselves is by luck of our location? Only I can't possibly ask this question of someone who meets her own suffering every day and has no ability to run away.

“Listen to me, Miri. You can't live in fear about the possibility of what they might do to you,” she says, and tears prick my eyes, because she's right—for all my bravery in the sky, I am a coward. “I need you to raise Rita,” she adds.

“You're going to get better,” I say.

“Promise me you'll stay who you are, and raise her the way she was meant to be raised.”

“I will, Sarah. Of course, I will,” I say.

“Promise
,” she orders. “I can't have you running back to Sol—or whatever alias he's going by.”

“I promise,” I say, and it feels like the truth. Again and again, when I think of this moment, of Sarah's face and my words and the way we are holding each other's gaze like it is a covenant in itself, I know it has to be the truth.

T
HE WINTER OF 1945 DRAGS ON UNDER
P
ITTSBURGH
'
S SOOT-
filled skies that turn the snow black and leave my hopes carbon-crusted. The heater is broken in Tzadok's old jalopy—has been broken since the war began, and can't be fixed until they start making car parts again—so each morning when he picks me up to ride to Uncle Hyman's East End shop, Tzadok tucks wool blankets around my lap and knees. “Smile, Little Bird,” he always says, and each morning when I make the corners of my mouth turn up for him, it feels like a mechanical exercise. In January, Grace writes to say that Teddy has been killed in action, and I tamp down my tears for the wedding that would've been, for our reunion lost, and for my own hopes killed in action. Despite the tragedy, despite the fact that the sun won't shine again, the papers are full of heartening news from the war front. The Soviet Union has liberated Warsaw and Auschwitz and marched on toward Berlin; meanwhile, the United States begins bombing Japan, first Kobe, then Tokyo, and when the Soviet and the American troops meet on the River Elbe in Germany in April 1945, we know we are closing in on the end.

It quickly becomes apparent that I can't so much as make a straight hem or iron a mended dress without burning it, so
Uncle Hyman moves me over to the bookkeeping, where I work side by side with Tzadok going over the numbers. He seems to want to make me happy, that much I can tell. One day, he asks me what I miss about flying, and because I can't bring myself to say
the power, the exhilaration,
I simply tell him “the view.” So, after work, he takes a detour to Mount Washington—or at least, he tries, but before we reach the top, the engine in the car overheats and we hold up traffic as we wait for it to cool down. “Maybe after the war, when I have a better engine, I'll take you,” he says after turning around, and I don't tell him that we could just as well have taken the incline, because I realize this is his grand romantic gesture, and I'm uncertain if I want to be present for its execution. I spend the winter trying to convince myself that when Tzadok smiles, his angular face is actually quite attractive, and maybe, just maybe, if he has to kiss me then I can get used to that, too. For the first time in my twenty-three years, I'm intent on marrying, because otherwise, I may be bound to the house on Beacon Street forever.

At night I try not to think of Sol's lips on my wind-chapped cheeks, or the Texas sunshine making me squint, or cloud islands billowing in the bright sky. I am restless and depressed, aching to be free, until more and more news leaks about the horrors of the concentration camps, bodies upon bodies upon bodies, and I realize that I am not a prisoner at all but simply an ungrateful child who wants too much.

One night, when Tzadok and I are bent over the books in the back room of Hyman's shop, going over the inventory and the payroll, I turn my face up to him, willing him to look into my eyes. Finally, shyly, he puts his pencil down and kisses me. The kiss is fumbling and awkward but really not so bad, I
think, reaching up to caress the bones in his face. Maybe I can convince him to grow a beard.

Citing the doctor's advice, Uncle Hyman won't allow Sarah to return home, and Mama busily pretends, despite all evidence to the contrary, that death is not upon us. In some ways, it's easy to forget. One moment during visiting hours, Sarah and I are sharing a conspiratorial laugh over the way Uncle Hyman looks when carving a roast chicken—sweaty, red-faced, and vaguely short of breath, as if he's actually killing it right there at the table—when Sarah suddenly asks, “You don't believe it's really happening, do you?” and I automatically shake my head, knowing that it's her own end she's talking about. “I don't believe it, either,” she confesses. “I feel like me, but”—she holds up her arm, as thin as Rita's—“I'm not me.” Two weeks later, on May 3, 1945, Sarah is gone.

Shiva begins, seven days of mourning where we sit on tiny stools in the living room while the community files in to pay their respects and feed us. I'm not supposed to lift a finger, not to prepare foods or wrap up the leftovers or clean the dishes, or even myself, but just sit and be still and pray and receive. All I want to do is fly away, and Rita's an easy excuse—someone has to run after her as she crashes about—except that Mama's clucking friends quickly intercede anytime my niece needs a snack or a tear dried when she skins her knee. At nearly four, Rita's too little to really understand what this means, that her mother, who's been gone for almost ten months, is never coming back.

Or maybe I'm the one who doesn't get it. For the first day, I can't even cry, not even when I'm sitting
shemirah,
reading psalms through the night next to her closed coffin in the living
room. As a candle burns in the dark, we take turns—Mama, Uncle Hyman, and me—keeping watch over her body, but I can't believe Sarah's actually in there.

It isn't until the following evening, after the burial, that I notice Rita's missing and find her on the floor of my closet—Sarah's closet, too, I remember belatedly. Curled up in a pile of her mother's clothes, the little girl isn't crying, but her mouth is pulled into a wobbly frown, and I wonder then if Sarah taught her about the Spartans of Greece, too.

“There you are,” I say, stooping down to crawl into the closet next to her. It's musty inside, making me cough. I reach up to pull the cord on the lightbulb, which glows yellow and warm somewhere above us. Rita doesn't move at first, until I reach over and rub her back and caress her hair, and then she crawls into my lap, still holding Sarah's red sweater like a blanket. “Are you hungry?” I ask, channeling Mama, a firm believer in the power of comfort food. Rita shakes her head. “Can I . . . read you a book?” I offer, and slowly, she nods. “Well, go pick,” I say, and she crawls off my legs and over to the little bookshelf beside Sarah's old bed. After retrieving one, Rita plops back down on my lap again. I know the light is better in the bedroom, but I don't even suggest moving. It feels right to sit on the wood floor in our cocoon of clothes, the faint scent of Sarah wafting around us.

Rita's picked
The Runaway Bunny,
by Margaret Wise Brown, the story of a little bunny who wants to run away and his mother won't let him. As soon as I begin reading, my voice begins to quake. At first it's because
I
am the bunny, obligated to stay, but then I read the line “If you become a bird and fly away from me . . . I will be a tree that you come home to,” and
then I can't go on, for Sarah's the tree, and she always has been.
What am I going to do without you? How can you leave me here alone?

“Want me to read?” Rita asks, and I nod, because my vocal cords are rebelling now; any sound I make is in danger of becoming a howl. So, I listen to her read—unless she's just memorized the story—and realize that Rita's the little bunny and Sarah's the mother, turning herself into a fisherman, and a mountain climber, and a tightrope walker, and the wind. She will be hiding in every place, in every moment, only we'll never see her again. And then, I do start to cry, noiselessly, with shuddering shakes and clenched stomach muscles, as Rita leans her head into the crook of my neck, and flips the pages of the book. I'm grateful to be holding her right now in our little cave from the world, and for her clear, high voice, which never wavers.

O
N THE SIXTH EVENING OF
S
HIVA, THE HOUSE IS BUSTLING WITH
visitors offering condolences, and I am leaning against the kitchen doorframe, wearily watching my mother, wearing her
keriah
and shaking hands in the living room, when I straighten up and inhale sharply. Wearing a dark suit and his yarmulke, and holding a platter of meat and fish and dried fruits, Sol Rubinowicz is standing in the front room of the house on Beacon Street.

Quickly, I weave through the throng of guests, until we're face-to-face. His shoulders drop at the sight of me. “What are you doing here?” I ask, too flustered for hello. It's been ten months since we've seen each other last—and five since his last correspondence.

“I got your letter,” Sol says. “I wanted to pay my respects.”

“You shouldn't be here,” I say, rescuing the platter and then rushing off, knowing that he'll follow me. Since the kitchen is full of my mother's friends—big bosomed, big-voiced, middle-aged women in aprons, doing dishes, refilling the trays—I slip the food onto the table and then keep going, out onto the back porch with Sol on my heels. The cold air hits me like a splash of water in the face. As per the custom, I haven't been outside in six days, and for a moment I'm taken aback by the weather. Is it really spring, when it's thirty-five degrees and the magnolia blossoms are blowing off the trees? In the kitchen behind us, the ladies pause, mid-conversation, like a stunned Greek chorus.

“Tzadok and I are engaged,” I whisper.

“You can't marry your own cousin,” he says, quickly slipping the yarmulke off his head, as if it's a force of habit now, looking like a goy.

“It's—we're—not related by blood,” I say, flushing.

“Do you love him?” His earnest green eyes search mine, and my heart thuds painfully.

“I . . .” I glance down, thinking. “Does it matter?”

“Miriam?” Mama says from the doorway, and I startle and turn.

“Oh, Mama, this is—”

“Mrs. Lichtenstein, I'm Solomon Rubinowicz,” he says, stepping forward and extending his hand. “I'm a friend of Miriam's from Texas—I'm so sorry,” he adds quickly, mashing the phrases together as if it's meeting me he's sorry about rather than the loss of my sister.

“Thank you,” Mama says, shaking his hand so warily that
for a moment I wonder if Sarah told her everything. But no, she wouldn't have; there wouldn't have been a reason, not when Sol and I had broken up months before I returned home.

“Sol's family was very nice to me in Texas. They took me to temple and had me over for Shabbat. He's in medical school in New York now.”

“You're going to be a doctor,” Mama says, approval seeping into her voice. “Well. That's wonderful. Has Miriam told you that she's getting married next month?”

“Next month? Oh.” The way Sol keeps twisting his yarmulke in his hands reminds me of a man wringing out his own heart.

“I've already sewed her wedding gown,” Mama adds.

I look at the broken floorboards of the porch thinking of the dress, the same one she married Papa in, which had to be hemmed just for me.

“Miriam, you're needed inside,” Mama says. “Rita has eaten an entire basket of
rogalech
and knocked over a pitcher of cream. She needs a fresh outfit,” she says, pushing me toward the back door, and I think,
This is my life now. This is the promise I made
. “Go on. I'll be there in a moment.”

I have no idea what she says to him after I'm gone, but one moment I look through the window and see Sol nodding solemnly while Mama's head bobs and her finger points, and then I wrestle Rita into another outfit, and look up, and no one's on the porch.

“Please go be with our guests,” Mama says as she shuts the back door and pulls down the shade to the kitchen window, lest I keep searching for him through it.

“You didn't let me say goodbye,” I say, and she pushes past
me into the living room, into the throng of mourners. But I have to go look for myself. Cracking open the door to the back porch, I step outside and peek around. The backyard is still and cold, and, between the pockets of silence, there's a strange swishing sound. I look up and realize it's just the magnolia leaves falling around me, the sound of letting go.
This is your life. This is the promise you made
.

I think of the last time I saw him, the day we agreed to say goodbye forever. “What's the first thing you'll do in New York?” I'd asked on the ride back to base.