A Master Plan for Rescue (5 page)

Pictures kept tumbling from the speakers into my head, clearer than I’d seen anything in a while. The vast darkness of the western sky at night. The Lone Ranger’s campfire, flaming up orange. I got to my knees, crawled to the radio, and pressed myself against the Silvertone’s cherrywood bulk. Then I shut my eyes and let the amber light from the broadcasting station fall warm onto them.

I stayed pressed to the radio, its speakers vibrating against my chest, for all of the evening’s serials. I saw the flakes of new snow catch in the thick fur of the malamute Yukon King. Watched the shimmers of blue-edged light play across the surface of Lamont Cranston’s martini. Could see how when the Dragon Lady lit her cigarette, her shiny red fingernails reflected the flame like ten tiny mirrors.

Later—much later—I heard footfalls behind me.

“You’re seeing that, aren’t you?” my father said. “You’re seeing the radio.”

And what I heard, bumping up against his words, was that he did not think it as wondrous as I did.

•   •   •

Once I began
to see the radio, I did nothing but listen to it. Every afternoon, before the glass tubes had warmed enough to catch sound, I’d be waiting on the checkerboard linoleum, waiting to see the purple and gold pennants of Jack Armstrong’s All-American high school whipping in the wind, the knockout gas billowing from the end of the Green Hornet’s gun like steam rising from subway gratings. I’d remain in front of the radio until my mother called me into the kitchen for dinner, but as soon as I could, I’d be back, the music from
Death Valley Days
filling my ears, my eyes trained on a distant line of covered wagons rolling across a sun-blasted landscape.

Saturdays, I spent the entire day in front of the Silvertone, beginning with
Rural Women’s Day
, seeing perfectly the visit made to an Iowa farm by Mrs. Roosevelt, picking out every flower on the First Lady’s hat as she stepped through a cow pasture. I followed that with
Calling All Stamp Collectors
and the
Interscholastic German Glee Club of New York.

Sundays, I began with
Church of the Air
and
Let’s Try Religion
, and only budged from the checkerboard linoleum when I was forced to put on my Mass pants and go with my mother and Aunt May to Good Shepherd. If I ran, I was always back in time for
Salt Lake City Tabernacle.

My mother tried everything she could to separate me from the Silvertone.
There’s a new Tarzan movie at the Alpine theater. Three inches of spring snow has just fallen in Fort Tryon Park.

“I’m fine,” I’d always tell her. And I would be. Because I could see those stamp collectors and glee clubbers and every member of that tabernacle choir.

Aunt May would come upstairs with a hundred separate errands for me.
Run down to Mandelbaum’s for some evaporated milk. See if the butcher has any lamb.

But I might as well have been a radio wave myself. No matter how often they sent me away, I continued to return to the big receiver in the living room.

•   •   •

Only my father
didn’t try to pull me from the radio. At least, not in the same way as the others. Instead, he listened with me, dragging his green armchair across the room, placing it near to where I was stretched out on the floor. And I suspect that if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in the world of the radio, if I hadn’t been watching the Green Hornet’s car pass like a shadow through the velvety darkness, I likely would have felt his eyes moving over me.

Even on the days he worked the graveyard shift at the Navy Yard, he would wake himself when I returned from P.S. 52 to come and sit in the green armchair and listen with me, the scent of his coffee lending something familiar to the exotic world of
Terry and the Pirates
.

Sometimes I’d leave my spot on the linoleum and sit on one of the wide, flat arms of his chair, lean my head against the shoulder of his ruined white shirt, the front colonized by small brown spots. That close, I could see the dark circles under his eyes, the way he concentrated on what was coming out of the Silvertone’s speakers, as if the answer he was looking for lay between the lines of dialogue and the advertisements for Palmolive dish soap and Blue Coal.

•   •   •

It was May
when I began to want the Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph.

The code-o-graph I would use to help Captain Midnight capture the scores of Nazi sympathizers the War Department had convinced us were lurking around every corner of New York City. The Nazi sympathizers who had prompted them to put up posters saying things like
The Walls Have Ears
and
Because Somebody Talked
over a picture of a flaming battleship sinking into a dark sea.

Other people might use their Captain Midnight Code-O-Graphs for deciphering the messages the announcer gave at the end of the
Captain Midnight
radio program. But those people did not have the ability to hear the undertone in someone’s voice, they couldn’t tell just by listening if somebody was lying.

Me, I would use my ability—the thing I could do—to find a Nazi sympathizer, and then send a secret message to Captain Midnight, who would fly straight here and capture him.

I can only say that I had spent so much time in front of the Silvertone’s speakers, this seemed a realistic plan. I can only imagine that by then, the line between the real world and the radio world had become as blurred as most things were to me.

But a Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph required a dime and the lids from two jars of Ovaltine, and my mother refused to buy Ovaltine, because she insisted chocolate-flavored dirt would taste better. Also, all the spare change we had was going into the little half-moon-shaped slots in the
My First War Bond
book Miss Steinhardt had handed out back in February.

Still, each week as the announcer spoke the secret message, spelling out the letters for the members of Captain Midnight’s Secret Squadron, my fingers itched with the desire to write them down.

Then, one hot Saturday afternoon in June—the first of summer vacation—my father came into the living room and dropped a package onto my chest.

Inside was a Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph.

It was made of brass, the size and shape of a policeman’s badge. In the center was an airplane propeller that could be spun to point at the ring of letters and numbers stamped around the code-o-graph’s face. And at the top, there was a little window for a photograph of yourself, though at the moment, it held a picture of Captain Midnight wearing his leather flying cap.

I sat staring at it, this piece of the radio world that had magically appeared in my hands.

“How?” I said to my father.

“Turns out Harry Jupiter likes Ovaltine. Said it’s the only way he can get down all the milk he has to drink for the ulcer thirty years in the newspaper business gave him.”

“And the dime?”

“Let’s just say Hitler isn’t going to lose the war any quicker if we buy that bond a little later.”

The code-o-graph wasn’t especially heavy. Yet its weight traveled straight into my bones, making them seem more solid. I wished it had come earlier, when I could have taken it to P.S. 52, and whispered into Rose’s throat,
I am a member of the Secret Squadron
, instead of,
The heart has four chambers
.

My father took me up to the roof to shoot my picture for the little window. He said he wanted nothing except the wide, blue sky behind me. I stood on the west side of the building, with only the trees of Fort Tryon Park and the cliffs of the Palisades between me and the whole rest of the country. I could have been anywhere.

The Texas plains.

The Canadian forest.

The far horizon of Death Valley.

I took off the glasses and held them in my hand for the photograph, tried to look like the kind of person who would be in something like the Secret Squadron.

When my father called across the roof to say we were finished, I asked him how I’d looked inside his camera.

“Exactly like you,” he told me.

•   •   •

I slept that night
with the code-o-graph tucked into the chest pocket of my pajamas, feeling it lift and lower with each breath. The next morning, I slipped it into the pocket of my Mass pants, where it could remind me of its presence with every step.

On the way to Good Shepherd, I stayed a couple of paces behind Aunt May and my mother, tuning my ears to the conversations of the people around me, pulling in their frequencies. I was listening for the off-kilter hum of lying, the unbalanced sound of someone pretending to be somebody he wasn’t.

Even after I stepped out of the heat and into the oceany blue coolness of Good Shepherd, I continued to listen. All through Mass, I sorted through the voices, dipped beneath their Latin phrasing. But I heard nothing more subversive than boredom and distraction.

Heading back, I hurried ahead of my mother and Aunt May, eager to get home, change out of the Mass pants and return to the streets. But when we got there, Uncle Glenn was in our kitchen, waving around a copy of
The
New York Times
, which no one in our family bought unless the news was important.

Uncle Glenn was saying something about Nazi saboteurs landing on Amagansett beach. Saying it first to my father, who was sitting at the red table, still wearing his Navy Yard clothes, his denim overalls and heavy, round-toed factory shoes. Then saying it to Aunt May and my mother and me, showing us the front page of
The
New York Times
, but before we could read any of it, taking the paper back and telling us the story instead.

Several weeks ago a German submarine had surfaced five hundred yards off the coast of Long Island. It had been a foggy night, but it had been clear enough for the four Nazi saboteurs onboard to inflate a couple of rubber boats and paddle to shore. Once there, they’d dug a hole on the beach and buried a cache of explosives. When they were finished, they headed to the road, and walked the two miles to the nearest Long Island Railroad Station. After that, they’d disappeared into Manhattan.

“Not, however,” Uncle Glenn said, “before being observed by a suspicious young coastguardsman.”

It was the call the coastguardsman made to the FBI that led to the saboteurs’ capture.

Uncle Glenn carefully folded his copy of
The
New York Times
, as if he intended to save it. Then he said some things about how many lives the young coastguardsman had likely saved, and that Fiorello La Guardia should give him a medal, because this was proof that it was just as important to fight the war at home.

It was some moments before I realized my father had been trying to get my attention.

“You okay, there?” he said.

I nodded.

But inside my head, as clearly as if it was coming out of the radio, I saw the young coastguardsman making that phone call to the FBI. Making it on a
real
telephone, to a
real
person. Not to some made-up character on a radio serial program.

I saw myself, too. Sitting in the ocean-y blueness of Good Shepherd listening to the people saying Mass, as if being a member of the Secret Squadron was something that existed outside of the radio world.

It was a picture that made me not want to be inside my own skin.

I turned from the kitchen and rushed to my room. Got to my knees and yanked out the box of sweaters I kept under my bed—sweaters I never wore because they itched in a way I couldn’t stand. I reached into my pocket and took out the code-o-graph. I caught the image of Captain Midnight’s face in the little window, smiling at me, and I shut my hand over it, so I wouldn’t see him anymore. Then I buried the code-o-graph as far under those sweaters as I could.

I heard the linoleum creak behind me.

My father, still in his Navy Yard clothes, was standing in the doorway. Even I could see how tired he looked.

“Change out of your Mass pants and meet me at the door in fifteen minutes,” he said.

“Why?”

“We’re going to Paradise.”

M
y father and I took the subway to 42nd Street, then walked the hot, unshaded sidewalks of Hell’s Kitchen to Paradise Photo, the photography studio Harry Jupiter opened after he quit the newspaper business. Harry Jupiter had named it Paradise because thirty years in the newspaper business had not only given him an ulcer, it had also given him a highly developed sense of irony.

I stood scowling up at the portraits of brides hanging in the Paradise windows, wishing I was back in front of the Silvertone, while my father went to retrieve the key Harry left for him behind a loose brick in the stairs. Before Harry Jupiter took over the building, it had been a butcher shop, and on hot days like this one, the smell of blood rose up inside Paradise, like an undertone beneath the bitter and sweet scent of the developing chemicals.

I smelled it along with the open bottle of whiskey on Harry Jupiter’s desk, as my father and I passed through the cluttered front office. Harry Jupiter had still not flipped his girlie calendar from May 1936. Once, when I’d asked him about it, he told me he liked looking at that redhead more than he liked knowing the date.

We went through the dusty curtain that separated the front office from the studio in the back. Harry’s studio was filled with painted backdrops that pulled down like window shades. People could stand in front of these backdrops and have their picture taken, pretend they were someplace other than the middle of Hell’s Kitchen.

Niagara Falls.

The Coliseum in Rome.

Mount Rushmore.

Even with my eyesight, they didn’t look very realistic.

I asked my father what we were doing there.

He pointed to the door of the Paradise darkroom. There was a sign taped to it.
Knock or die
, it said.

“In there.”

For as long as I could remember, I’d imagined my father inside the Paradise darkroom, performing the miraculous experiments that made his clothes—possibly his very skin—smell like science, working the secret magic that transferred the ghosts of his photographs into the creases of his hands. In those imaginings, the Paradise darkroom was a supernatural place, a movie scientist’s laboratory where electricity fizzed in jagged sparks and great clouds of colored smoke rose without warning.

But the actual room behind the
Knock or die
sign was cramped and narrow, with a long metal table that held two steel tanks and a high shelf crowded with bottles. It was cooler, though, and right away I felt the sweat drying on my skin.

“What are we doing in here?” I asked my father.

“You are going to develop the Silverman twins.”

I wanted to run back out through that door with the
Knock or die
sign, past the redhead hanging above Harry Jupiter’s desk, and out onto the hot, unshaded streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Babies were my father’s sure thing. All his pictures of them turned out to be exactly what everybody else saw. Nothing more. Perhaps because they hadn’t lived long enough for there to be anything for him to read.

What if I ruin them, I said, what if they all turn out wrong? But my father was already preparing, taking out the plastic frames from the black box he used to carry his film—each frame holding two exposed film sheets of a Silverman twin, each sheet the size the finished print would be, and each one protected by a thin piece of metal that fit inside the frame. My father piled all the plastic frames on the table—there must have been a dozen of them—then piled an equal number of empty metal frames beside them. Next, he filled one of the steel tanks with the developing chemicals, another with fixer, and set them on the table. Last, he grabbed a wind-up timer from the shelf.

“I’m going to show you how to do one in the light, so you’ll know how to do the rest in the dark.”

“The dark?”

My father picked up one of the plastic frames and pulled on a handle at the bottom to slide out one of the pieces of metal, exposing the film sheet to light.

“What if that was the best one?”

“Let’s just say that it wasn’t.”

He set my fingers on the other end of the frame so I could feel how the top edge flipped open and the film sheet slid out. Then he showed me how to slip it into one of the metal frames.

“When they’re all frames, you hang them on this rod and drop them into the tank with developer.”

I looked up at my father. There were dark circles under his eyes; he hadn’t slept in more than a day. He was not going to let me out of doing this.

“Look at the table and memorize where everything is, so you’ll know it when I turn out the light.”

Plastic frames, metal frames, tank with developer, tank with fixer, timer. And then we were in darkness. Darkness so thick you could press your hand against it. So thick it made the air unbreathable. I couldn’t seem to pull its blackness into my lungs, could only stand in the unnatural coolness of the Paradise darkroom, choking.

My father’s hand fell over mine. So surely, he must have memorized me.

“First thing, figure out what type of film you’ve got. That will tell you how long to leave it in the developer.”

The edge of a film sheet appeared under my fingers.

“Tell me what you feel.”

I ran my finger along the razor-thin edge, expecting an unbroken line, but finding a gap.

“An upside-down triangle, then a square.”

“That’s the notch code. Triangle and square is Kodak Ektapan.”

The film sheet under my fingers vanished and was replaced by another. “Try this one.”

“Only triangles.”

“Perfect. Fortepan 200.”

My father rummaged around the Paradise darkroom, replacing one film sheet with another. Each time I ran my finger along the top, feeling for the notches, and each time I read them correctly, deciphering the language of the film sheets as precisely as if my finger was a type of code-o-graph.

“I’m ready now,” I said, and I was sure I felt my father nod.

I pictured the metal table the way I pictured the table next to my bed when I woke in the night and needed to find my glasses, then put my hand out for one of the plastic frames, feeling my fingers brush the raised diamonds molded onto its face.

There was something familiar about working in the dark. About knowing exactly how far to extend my arm to find the metal frames or the tank of developer, about sending a signal from my brain to my body without any information from my eyes. It was like taking your sled over tracks you’d already made in the snow.

When all the film sheets of the Silverman twins were hanging from the metal rod, I dipped them into the tank filled with developer.

“How long?” I asked my father.

“Seven minutes.”

I picked up the timer and felt for seven raised lines.

My father talked me through developing the Silverman twins, his voice coming at me in the dark like a voice on the radio, telling me when to move the metal rod into the tank filled with fixer, how many minutes to add to the timer. When it went off the second time, sounding bright in the blackness, he snapped on the light and pulled the metal rod out of the tank, handed me one of the dripping film sheets.

I pushed my glasses onto the top of my head and brought the piece of film—a negative now—close to my face. There like a black ghost propped up on a white sofa was one of the Silverman twins. My own miraculous experiment.

One by one, the Silverman twins emerged from the metal frames. Blackish bundles with fine white wisps of hair on their heads. And one by one, I hung them on a line strung across the back of the darkroom, these reverse images of the Silverman twins, made by me in the dark.

But the last negative was not a picture of the Silverman twins. It was the photograph my father had taken of me on the roof, the one that was meant for the little window in the code-o-graph.

In it, I had nothing except the wide, blue sky behind me. My face was smooth, uninterrupted by the round, black frames of the glasses. I looked like a person who could be anywhere, a person who might do anything.

I hung this negative—this picture that was the reverse of me—on the line with the Silverman twins.

•   •   •

Back out in Hell’s Kitchen,
the sun was still high and the streets were broiling. Streets that were filled with people pushed out of their apartments in search of a breeze—men in sleeveless T-shirts, suspenders cutting into their fleshy shoulders, women in housedresses and hair-curlers. And kids. There were always a hundred kids on the sidewalks of Hell’s Kitchen. Kids who spit on the ground close to your Keds as you passed them, heading to the 42nd Street subway with your father.

The station was more stifling than the streets. My father and I stood on the uptown platform, pressed in on all sides by families on their way home from Coney Island and the Rockaways, a sea of sunburnt arms, and sandy blankets, and picnic baskets that dripped pink-colored water smelling of liverwurst around our ankles.

Behind us, soldiers with their arms wrapped around the waists of laughing girls poured down the stairs in twos and fours, girls in light dresses that moved about their legs in unfelt breezes, as if these girls carried their own weather. They joined the hot, sweating families, nudging us closer to the edge of the platform.

My father stepped aside for a woman who was tugging the sun-reddened arm of a crying boy. Two soldiers and their girls passed behind us, sharp elbows brushing my back. The girls’ laughter echoed off the tiles.

We stood in the heat of the station for what seemed like an hour, our faces running with sweat, my glasses sliding down my nose. I began to believe the train would never come, and then, the air changed. All the particles of it, all the smells stirring—the sweat, and the liverwurst, and the perfume of the soldiers’ girls. I felt a heavy rumbling beneath the soles of my shoes, as if a thunderstorm might be brewing under the ground. Everybody on the platform straightened, began to move—although there was no place to move to—because at last, the uptown A was coming.

My father and I were at the very edge of the platform. Hot, mouse-scented air, forced through the tunnel by the oncoming train, blew on our faces, ruffled through our sweat-soaked hair. The rumbling under my feet grew stronger, traveled up to my chest, shaking loose something I’d been thinking about, worrying over, all the way here.

My father watching me bury the code-o-graph in the box with the sweaters.

After everything he’d just taught me at Paradise—how to read the edges of film, the secret to making negatives while blinded by darkness—I needed him to know the reason I’d taken that object he’d gone to so much trouble over and shoved it under my bed. I needed him to know it had nothing to do with him, everything to do with me. I wanted there to be no chance he hadn’t been able to read it for himself, no matter how unlikely.

“The code-o-graph,” I began.

My father had been pushed so close to me, his face was out of focus.

“I know,” he told me. And then, I suppose, because he wanted me to see his expression, he stepped back.

The bald-headed man should have turned that inner tube in for the rubber months ago. Should have let it be made into jeep tires or airplane tires, and then sent off to fight the Germans. Should never have let it remain the kind of inner tube that could be taken out to Coney Island for the day. Taken out, then brought back on the subway, where he could rush along the crowded platform, carrying it in front of his face, so he couldn’t see that he was bumping into somebody’s father.

In the glare of the uptown A train’s headlamp, I saw my father’s face, and I searched for the expression he had meant to show me. But whatever it had been, it had vanished. Replaced by surprise, and then by something else. Something darker. Because my father had begun to lean over the tracks in a way nobody could recover from.

The station filled with the sound of screaming—the train trying to stop itself, the brakes grabbing for the metal tracks. A sound that could cut through skin.

My father was arcing off the edge of the platform in pieces. His expression. His ruined white shirt. His camera. The newspaperman’s camera, slung from his shoulder on a strap, making its own separate arc as he toppled.

He was timing it perfectly—his fall and the oncoming train. The train that, despite the terrible sound of the brakes, did not stop.

And then, another arc. My hand reaching up and pulling off the glasses.

But it did not matter if I turned the entire world into a blur.

The train, nothing more than green motion, flew past me. Right through the spot where my father had been.

When it came to a stop, everything went silent, as if the sunburnt families, the soldiers and their girls, me, were waiting for a signal. And then, I heard a screaming that might have been the echo of the brakes inside my head, might have been the soldiers’ girls, might have been me.

The rest I recall in pieces. The families and soldiers’ girls staring at me. A sweating, red-faced transit cop, getting down on one knee, his face too close to be in focus, asking if my father had jumped.

“It was a bald-headed man with an inner tube,” I told him. “An inner tube he should have turned in for the war.”