A Master Plan for Rescue (8 page)

What I heard was that my mother believed I had written those messages. That she believed I was fooling myself.

I left her room and went into mine. Then I wrote my father a new message that said

OUSS XU LTXUOKYRA TRSI ITE GRB LKU HRTP

which meant

TELL ME SOMETHING ONLY YOU AND SHE KNOW.

I folded the paper and held it in my hand, instilling it with my magnetism. When I was certain my father would be able to feel every bit of my need when he unfolded the paper, feel it right through his fingertips, I went downstairs and put it in the mailbox. Then I came back up and waited.

•   •   •

The next morning,
my father left me this

ITEN XTOKUN VGRO HRTP

which meant

YOUR MOTHER CANT KNOW.

I sat in the early light of my bedroom, still in my pajamas, and stared at my father’s message.

How could someone who could read strangers, who could look at a person and know something about him, how could that person have held my message in his hands and not understood how important this was?

But my father read people, not magnetism on paper. He hadn’t seen my mother in her dress with the black sleeves, hadn’t seen her leaving the apartment every day with the piece of lace bobby-pinned to her black hair, as if she was afraid to let God see the top of her head only walking down Dyckman Street.

He would have to see for himself, have to be dragged up to our apartment, made to stand in the doorway of the bedroom that was once his and watch her exhale cigarette smoke at the cracks in the ceiling as if she was letting go of some essential part of herself. And he would have to do it soon, before it was too late and there was nothing left of the black-haired bootlegger’s daughter who had once been my mother.

•   •   •

That night I stood outside
my mother’s room listening for the sound of her sleeping. When my mother was awake, her breath stayed shallow, as if she was afraid to send it deep into her chest, afraid she’d disturb something that was lying there. Only when she slept did she take a full breath.

Once I heard it, I left the apartment, stepping out into the hot darkness. I crossed the street and slipped into a narrow alley. The supers of the adjacent buildings stored their garbage cans here, and the air was close and filled with the nose-biting smell of ammonia and the sickly sweetness of something rotting, but I was worried my father wouldn’t come if he saw me, and I could see our steps perfectly from here.

Uncle Glenn came out wearing his white Civil Defense helmet and armband, and headed down the street. Then some of our neighbors who had war factory jobs, the sharp shine of their metal lunch pails glinting as they passed beneath the downward-casting light of the streetlamp. When my legs got tired, I found a wooden crate halfway down the alley, kicked it to the front and sat on it.

As it got later, a scrabbling started up from deeper in the alley, as if the garbage were coming to life. The sound made the skin on the back of my neck twitch, and I inched the crate closer to the sidewalk.

Then, suddenly, the alley was lit up with the pale gray light of dawn, and the side of my face was stuck to the cool bricks of the apartment building to my right.

The next night, I brought out my luminous-face alarm clock and set it to go off every hour. The green glow of the clock kept me company as I sat on the crate watching for my father. My eyes weren’t good in the dark, but I was sure I would know it was him when he came, even if he was wearing a disguise, as if I were a radio tuned to his particular frequency.

Each hour, I woke to the hard brass ringing of the clock.

The next night, I set the alarm for every half hour.

I did this for two weeks. Leaving the apartment in darkness to sit in the alley with the clock shining green in my face. Staying out until the sky lightened enough for me to make out the shapes of the cars parked in the street. Only then would I go inside and change out of clothes that had taken on the ammonia and sweet rotting smell of the alley—or maybe it wasn’t the clothes, maybe the smell had worked its way inside my nose—getting into bed and falling into a deep sleep that lasted until early afternoon.

I was living the schedule my father had lived when he worked the graveyard shift at the Navy Yard, the schedule he’d kept in those months before we went to Paradise together. Waking and sleeping the same hours, except for the time he’d spent with me, sitting in the green armchair listening to the Silvertone.

Over time, I began to believe that my father could sense when I was asleep, that this was one of the things he could read. I pictured him walking past the alley within reach of my hand, pausing to watch me sleep with my cheek pressed against the bricks, the luminous clock reflecting green off my glasses. I began to believe, too, that maybe he’d stopped coming, deciding it was too dangerous, deciding not to come back until I’d given up waiting for him.

And then, one night, I saw him going up the steps to our building.

It was a hot, humid night. A night with low thunder that rumbled over Long Island, making me believe I was hearing the war. A night full of heat lightning that flashed in the narrow band of sky over my head. A night too agitating for sleep. Twice already, I’d turned off the alarm before it rang. Even whatever it was that made that scrabbling sound at the back of the alley was feeling it. Earlier a garbage can lid had come clanging to the ground back there, and now it was being scraped from one side of the alley to the other.

A bus lumbered down the street, the top of its headlights painted black. It passed in front of me, blocking my view, then continued on toward Broadway. I looked back at the steps. A shadowy figure was hurrying up them. He was nothing more than darkness brought together into something denser. But I knew it was my father. Those gathered shadows were too familiar.

I darted out of the alley and across the street.

He wasn’t wearing an overcoat. He was dressed in black pants and a black jacket, despite the hot night. I followed him through the front door. I meant to be silent, but I was in too much of a hurry, and the door banged shut after me.

He spun around.

Not my father.

Uncle Glenn. Looking surprised, and possibly like he’d been caught at something.

My uncle put a finger to his lips as if we were in on some secret together and gestured for me to follow him back outside. We sat side by side on the steps, the concrete still warm under my legs from the heat of the day.

I began to explain what I was doing out in the middle of the night, saying something about how I couldn’t sleep, and it wouldn’t be until much later that I’d realize he hadn’t asked for any explanation. I was still holding onto the luminous-face clock, and I told him I’d wanted to keep track of the time.

“You can imagine your mother,” Uncle Glenn said, “if she woke and found you missing.”

I didn’t want to imagine that, so I asked him why he wasn’t wearing his white Civil Defense helmet or armband.

“I’m on a different kind of Civil Defense patrol.”

I took in his black pants and jacket. “Are you spying on the neighborhood?”

Uncle Glenn put his finger to his lips again.

I lowered my voice. “Do you think somebody on Dyckman Street could be a Nazi?”

“That might be saying too much.”

But that didn’t mean the neighborhood wasn’t full of Nazi sympathizers, he continued. People who could be talking to the wrong person about what they were doing at the Navy Yard, people who might be telling the wrong person something they shouldn’t about what was being loaded onto the ships in New York Harbor.

I could hear the wheeze of my uncle’s asthma humming beneath his breath. The humid air of New York summer was not good for his lungs.

“And you’re going to catch them?” I said.

“If they’re out there.”

“How will you know if you find one?”

Uncle Glenn might have had Civil Defense training and a certificate from Fiorello La Guardia, but he did not have my father’s ability to read people.

“How will I know if I find a Nazi sympathizer?” Uncle Glenn said.

Heat lightning flashed in the eastern sky and there was the rumble of thunder. Uncle Glenn looked into the darkness of the street.

“I grew up with one.”

GLENN

My father had a Cauet hand. An aluminum replacement for the appendage he’d lost fighting for the Kaiser in what they called the Great War. The Cauet hand had been made in France, and my father loved the symmetry of this. That he had lost the original fighting the French, then had tricked—at least in his mind tricked—his enemy into making him a substitute.

The Cauet hand was shiny and hard, and attached with a shoulder harness that sprouted pull cords running the length of my father’s arm to the aluminum wrist. These cords made it possible for him to move the fingers of the hand, but my father preferred to bang its hard metal side against whatever was closest, the kitchen table, the stovetop, the soft spot where my neck and shoulder met.

I was a terrible disappointment to my father. He couldn’t understand how the son of the great war hero Gustav Hauck could have difficulty with something so simple as breathing. The first time I had an asthma attack with my father in public, we were on Lexington Avenue. We lived in Yorkville then, where all good Germans lived in New York City. All good Germans who had fled the Fatherland during the years of economic hardship that came after having lost the Great War. It was a freezing cold day, and we were on our way back from grocery shopping, an activity my father considered beneath the dignity of a man. But this was shortly after my mother disappeared and he would have to endure this indignity for another couple of years, until I was old enough to do it for him.

My father was walking fast, perhaps so no one would see him with his bags of food, and as I hurried to keep up with him, all the breathable air turned to concrete. I stopped and stood on the sidewalk with my mouth wide and gasping, trying to force solid air into my frozen lungs. After some steps, my father stopped as well. He turned his head and looked at me. Then, as if he didn’t know me, he continued walking.

I watched his broad shoulders and the back of his blond head moving up Lexington Avenue. As he turned the corner at 92nd Street, the cold winter sun glinted off the fingers of the Cauet hand.

The second my father vanished, I remembered the nebulizer in my coat pocket. The nebulizer I had to remember to take with me every day, now that my mother was no longer there to remember it for me. I felt for the rubber bulb with numb fingers, and when I found it, I stood on the sidewalk of Lexington Avenue pumping bittersweet chemicals down my throat.

When I arrived home, the door to our apartment was locked. I knew my father would be on the roof with his pigeons, and I could have gone up there to ask for the key, but instead I sat on the floor with my back against the door to wait for him.

I hated watching my father with his pigeons. Hated how he took them out of their coop and let them climb onto his aluminum hand, their clawed feet making obscene scratching sounds. I couldn’t watch him look into their red eyes, speak to them in a musical German I never heard, calling them
Liebchen
and
Schatzchen
. Couldn’t bear how he put his thick lips close to the birds’ heads before he sent them into the sky. It was disgusting to kiss pigeons. I hated especially how my father held out the Cauet hand to call the birds back, as if they were also war heroes, and how as each would land on the shiny aluminum hand, he’d stroke its head with his real one, the one made of flesh, the one he never put on me.

The only real hand I remember being touched by belonged to my mother, and it was a thing of unbelievable softness. It was plump and cushioned like a pillow, and it often smelled of cinnamon and sugar and cloves. My father was always shouting at her, calling her something in German that I believed translated into
swine.
One day she was gone. Vanished like the middle of a magic trick. And when I asked my father where she was and when she was coming back, he told me we were never to speak of her again.

It was inevitable that I would follow my father into the German American Bund. I was happy in the Bund. Not because I loved Hitler, who by this time—1936—was already in control of Germany, and not because I hated the Jews. At twenty, I had no opinion on either subject. No opinion that was not my father’s. I was happy because my father couldn’t dress up his pigeons in the shiny black boots and gray shirt of the Bund. He couldn’t march them around the open fields of Long Island, or take them drinking with him in the beer gardens of Yorkville.

When summer came, my father and I—and hundreds of Bundists—spent weekends at Camp Siegfried, in the small lakeside town of Yaphank, Long Island. So many of us left Pennsylvania Station each Friday afternoon; the Long Island Rail Road arranged a special train, which we filled. As leafy branches slid past the windows of the cars, we roamed the aisles, singing Nazi songs about Jewish blood dripping from our knives.

When the train arrived at the tiny, wooden station house in Yaphank, hundreds of us poured from the doors, all wearing our starched gray shirts and black boots. We formed ranks, as if preparing to march on the town, raised our fists into the blue summer sky in the Nazi salute, then goose-stepped to camp, where most of us spent our time swimming in the lake and drinking warm beer. It was the elite of the Bund, a group that included my father, who met in a secluded bungalow on the far side of the lake. It was whispered that they were plotting acts of sabotage against America.

I once asked my father what he and the other men discussed in the bungalow on the far side of the lake. It was late, and the two of us were in our sleeping bags beneath the stars. My father never allowed us to sleep in the Camp Siegfried cabins, though his war hero status entitled us to one of the best. He also never brought a tent, the way most of the other campers did, despite the fact that sleeping in an open field usually triggered one of my asthma attacks. I always dreamed I was suffocating at Camp Siegfried. But it was worth it to sleep next to my father.

“Are you thinking to blow up a shipyard?” I whispered into the cricket-filled night. “A railroad line?”

Like a punishment from God, my father’s Cauet hand came out of the darkness and struck me in that soft place between shoulder and neck. I do not know how he found it so easily in all that country blackness.

That summer was the summer of the Olympic Games in Berlin, and in honor of the occasion, Camp Siegfried planned to hold its own version of the Games with relay races and broad jumps and a swim meet across the green lake.

I was aware of the excitement surrounding the Camp Siegfried Games, but I was much more aware of Grete, who was tall and blond, and had skin that shone in the sun as if she were made out of gold. And if someone had told me that was true, I would have believed it, for she seemed that precious. Grete was a natural swimmer, and for her sake I’d started spending more time in the lake, though I was not a swimmer. I had never seen the point of purposely holding your breath. But for Grete, I would do it, and did do it. Chasing her beneath the surface of that green lake, willfully stopping my breath if it meant spending time beside that golden girl.

Grete was a full-fledged Nazi sympathizer and a raging anti-Semite. She loved the Fatherland and the Führer, and after dinner, she ran on her long golden legs into the camp’s open-air pavilion to listen to Walther Kappe, Camp Siegfried’s propaganda chief, give his nightly talk. And I ran after her. Sat in the folding chair beside her and studied her parted lips, tracked the breath lifting and lowering her swimmer’s chest, knowing that if at any point she turned and asked me to go out and lynch a Jew, bring her back the limp body as a trophy, I would have done it in an instant.

It was Grete who informed me I was competing in the swimming race. She came rushing into the dining hall in her red bathing suit and pressed her golden body against mine, telling me it was for luck. I had not signed myself up, and I couldn’t picture my father writing my name on the list. But perhaps he’d seen me swimming in the lake beside Grete and saw only what he wanted to see. Or perhaps he wanted to watch me fail. I never could guess anything my father wanted. The larger point was that this was the first time I’d touched more than Grete’s hand, and I was certain it was a promise of more if I won. For Grete was a true Nazi, willing to reward perfection. No one could have forced me to scratch my name off that list.

Like so many days that August, the day of the Camp Siegfried Games was hot and humid with threatening thunderstorms. The ozone in the air made the hair on my arms and legs stand away from my skin, and the humidity made it difficult to pull into my lungs, even when my asthma was quiet. The sky was white and bright, and a rumbling of thunder traveled slowly across the opaque lake.

Lanes had been made with rope and floats. We racers stood together, looking across to a distant raft, still as death on the green water. I felt Grete’s cool blue eyes on my back. I did not know how to feel for my father’s eyes, for he had never come to watch me do anything.

A gun went off, and I dove low and straight into the cool water. Slicing through it clean and fast. I controlled my breath in a way I’d never done before, breathing in and out on command, holding it deliberately as I swam with long strokes across the green lake. Master of the race.

I heard the rumbling of thunder, but that might have been my heartbeat. My fingers touched the rough edge of the raft at the end of my lane. I flipped over, pressed my feet against the raft, and sprang away. Swimming back, back to where Grete waited, my golden prize.

Back to where my father waited, his aluminum hand shining silver in the hot sun.

The thunder was louder. The storm must be getting closer. Or maybe it was my heart, because I could feel it now inside my chest, rumbling there. The water was colder, too, sliding over my skin. I breathed out, commanded myself to breathe in, but the water had frozen my lungs, making it impossible to move them, to take in any air.

My mouth filled with water. I pushed my head above the green surface of the lake and began to flounder, my arms splashing against the ropes at the sides of my lane. I shook my head wildly, trying to clear the water from my mouth, and reached into the pocket of my swim trunks for the nebulizer. One part of my brain was telling me it would be better to drown here. But there is always that other part that wants to live, the part that will put the tip of the nebulizer into your mouth even while you are imagining what is going on behind Grete’s cool blue eyes. The part that will make your legs kick hard enough to keep your head above water, while you consider how relieved she must be to have discovered this now, before she’s put herself at risk of producing imperfect children.

I stayed in the lake until everyone had left its banks for the grassy field and the broad-jumping competition. Then I went to the meadow where my father kept our rucksacks and changed into a T-shirt and khaki-colored pants. As I walked to the gates of Camp Siegfried, I heard cheering coming from the field.

I hitchhiked back to the city. At the apartment, I stuffed some clothes and the money I’d earned sweeping in a beer garden for a friend of my father’s in the rucksack. I would have liked to take something that had belonged to my mother, but there wasn’t anything.

Before I left, I went up to the roof and opened the door to my father’s pigeon coop, grabbed hold of the bird he had lavished the most affection on, the one whose head his thick lips had kissed the most often, an almost pure white bird. With a quick twist, I wrung its neck, telling myself it was to keep from being tempted to return.

I came up to Inwood, because my father hated the Irish only slightly less than he hated the Jews. I knew he wouldn’t look for me here. Though if I was honest, I knew he wouldn’t look for me at all—unless it was to get revenge for the pigeon. But he never came looking. And I never looked for him.

Your father suggested going after him once. The night the army made me 4-F and he came up to the roof to drink that bottle of rye. I told him this story, and when I was finished he asked me if I wanted to go down to Yorkville and beat up the son of a bitch. We were almost drunk enough to do it.

If we had, I would have taken that damned Cauet hand as a trophy.