Black and Blue (26 page)

“For you, I meant.”

“I had two brothers and a sister. They’re all gone a long time ago.” She sipped at her soda, going warm and watery. “Almost fifty years we were married. It’s a long time.”

“It is a long time.”

“Forty-eight years last month.”

“How’d you meet him?”

“Ach, everyone wants to hear the story. He liberated me,” she said, and I smiled and rubbed the thin skin of her hands, cross-hatched, age-spotted.

“The fifth of May, they told us after. We didn’t keep track of time. One girl who slept on the shelf above me, she made marks with a piece of stone on the wall. She died of something, coughing, coughing, you know, and then sometimes we didn’t know what month it was, not even what year after a while.

“You could smell from a long way those little white flowers, so sweet. There were none of them so you could see, but you could smell. When we woke up all the guards were gone, and one lady who helped them, she was going down the road, looking back like she was afraid we would come after her. There was nothing to eat. There wasn’t anything to eat for maybe a week or two. Two of the girls were dead, but we waited for someone to take them. They died all the time. You’d wake up in the morning and see that someone wasn’t moving from their bunk and then you’d know, so that after a while it was nothing, like seeing a rat or the sun or anything else. Just someone dead again. A lot of them died with their eyes open. That’s not so nice.” She looked over at the hospital bed. “Otherwise it looks more like you’re sleeping.

“We went outside because of the smell. You’d think after all that time we wouldn’t notice. They soil themselves, see. Well, you
know that, with the nursing and all. So we went outside. Sada, the girl I sat with, she was from a farm somewhere. She talked and talked always, at night, in the morning. She was a big fat girl when she came but she was skinny then like the rest of us, with no hair on her lower place, no bubbies either, either of us. We were modest when we came, like young girls, you know, but not after a while.

“We saw dust coming and she said it was the guards coming back. I thought maybe she was right because I saw the trucks and the uniforms. But then they got close and we could see that they were different from the guards. Then we saw the flags on one of the trucks, and we knew. One of them, young, with brown eyes and a little mustache, he came and stood by me, and he said something in English. But I didn’t know it was English, I didn’t know English. I said in German that I couldn’t understand, that I couldn’t speak English. Then in German he said, it will be all right now. He looked like he was crying a little bit. I said to him, we are Jewish, sir. You should know that I am Jewish. And he said, ‘Yes, miss, so am I.’”

She waited a moment, as though always here in the story the audience had had something to say. But I was speechless.

“Sergeant Levitt. I never heard of such a thing, a Jewish soldier. And they had food. Sada stuffed herself and then was sick, right on the ground, like a dog. They took us to a special tent and gave us something for the bugs. The clothes were not so good.” Her eyes shone suddenly, and she smiled. “But I was a pretty girl, even in ugly clothes.”

“I learned the word later. Liberated. He liberated me. Everybody like the story. One soldier, he put it in a special soldier’s
newspaper they had. Sergeant Levitt liberated me, and he brought me home and married me. His mother and sisters, they weren’t so happy. There was a girl around the corner they liked better for him. Sophie, her name was. But he married me.”

She pushed back the sleeve of one of her cardigans and there was the identification number. “You see?” she said.

“I see,” I said, and nodded. I was crying, and Mrs. Levitt smiled and shrugged and patted my hand.

“Everybody likes that story,” she said. “But, you know, after that, then we were married. Everybody thinks because of the story, it’s like a fairy story. That’s what one of Irving’s nieces said once. Like a fairy story. I don’t know. You got to live in the time you’re living in. The past is the past, right, Irving?”

“It’s an amazing story,” I said.

“It’s just a story,” she said. “It’s a long time ago, now.”

“Are you going to bury him in the veterans’ cemetery? Or Arlington, in Washington?”

Mrs. Levitt shook her head. “I already talked to the people at Perlman’s. They’ll cremate him. Then I can take him wherever I go.” She looked over at the hospital bed. “You know what would have been the best thing for Irving? If he’d just gone home and married Sophie. She never married, that girl. She taught fourth grade in the public schools until they made her retire. Irving would have married her and thought about me, and I would have married somebody else, or maybe not, and thought about Irving, how he saved me.” She sighed. “Ach, well. I don’t know what I’ll do with myself now. Maybe I’ll move down to Miami. Two of my friends from home live in Miami. Both widows. Ruth and Esther, if you can believe it. I used to feel sorry for myself, tell people all
my family was dead, they took them all away, my mama, my papa, my sister Rachel, my brothers. Now everyone I knew is dead. They got old. They got sick. Whatever.” She lifted her hands to the sky. “Ah, what are you going to do?”

At the door I hugged her. “You look tired,” she said.

“My son had four of his buddies spend the night last night. They stayed up, you know? They were good, but you still don’t sleep. You could have called me earlier.”

Mrs. Levitt smiled. “My sister and I, we did that. Rachel. She was the pretty one. I was smarter. Both of us in one big bed, the sheet over our heads, talking about the boys. You know, this and that. Our mama would yell at us, go to sleep. Go to sleep.” She was smiling, Mrs. Levitt, but her eyes were full of tears. “Maybe your boy will want to take up golf,” she finally said.

“Maybe,” I said.

J
ust so you’ll be ready, I need to warn you that Mrs. Bernsen makes them all do family trees in fifth grade.”

Cindy handed me a cup of coffee. “Is she out of her tiny mind?” she said.

It’s exactly what I had told Mike Riordan when I picked Robert up after he’d been held in after school because of what Mike called “a verbal altercation” with the despised Jonathan Green, who had said that the New York Yankees were a bunch of losers. “We’ve done some talking about keeping your temper and agreeing to disagree,” Mike had said, handing over Robert’s backpack, trying not to look at me, or me at him, the horrible see-and-slide we’d both done with our eyes ever since we’d slept together. And Mike and I had had to agree to disagree about the genealogy lesson with which Mrs. Bernsen proposed to galvanize the fifth grade during the waning weeks of the school year, a lesson that might have made sense when she’d started teaching thirty years before but today was as perilous as walking down the center of Route 18. What would little Hillary Thompson, who stuttered like a jackhammer, do with her two stepfathers and their five collective children? What about Brittany McLeod, who had been adopted from Paraguay and was as small and dark as her parents, now divorced, each remarried, were big and fair?

“She says that this always gives the class a lift,” Mike said,
shrugging. “All I can tell you is every year I get complaints, and every year I hear afterward that it worked out fine.”

“She’s out of her mind,” I said.

There was no spring in central Florida, just as there had been no real winter, no hiding the ungainly edges of its strip malls and ranch houses beneath the white hillocks of snow that lent charm to even the most charmless Northeastern town in the months that seemed to stretch endlessly between Christmas and Easter (or, as Mrs. Levitt informed me when I complained about the lack of seasons, between Hanukkah and Pesach). The change of seasons might touch the tired foliage in the farm fields and the shades of green on the development lawns, but on the narrow streets with their yards of yellow-white gravel and their struggling shrubs where I lived and worked, the seasons were visible only in the displays in the store windows, the green of Christmas giving way to the red of Valentine’s Day and the purple of Easter and now the pink of Mother’s Day. Robert walked to the strip and bought me a box of candy and a stuffed bear holding a balloon that said I Love You. Cindy made lasagna, but Mrs. Manford couldn’t come, had stomach flu or some such. “Thank God it didn’t happen the day after, or my dad would have sworn it was my cooking,” Cindy said.

The next day Robert had no school, some teacher’s conference or another, and he went with me to visit Mrs. Levitt. The television was on, as it always was, and the noon news featured a story about a police shootout in the Bronx, four officers dead and two wounded, the greatest carnage in twenty years for the New York City Police Department. As though still corded together my boy and I sank down side by side on the sofa and leaned toward the
television, as though, face-to-face, it could tell us more than the sketchy story a woman in a bright red suit and matching lipstick was reading from a TelePrompTer. We didn’t have cable in our apartment, couldn’t afford it, but the Castros did, and Robert knew to flip to other news channels. For an hour we waited, watched, as though we were those people I’d seen so often in the public areas of the hospital, mouths agape, half-asleep in molded chairs, waiting for the doctor to bring them news. Finally there were names, and we sank back, exhausted. I put my arm around his shoulder.

“You know people who are police officers in New York?” Mrs. Levitt said softly, placing another cup of tea in front of me. “Family maybe?” And Robert looked into my face with fear and yearning, too, and I squeezed his shoulder.

“We have friends in the department,” I said. “None of them were hurt.”

“I’m glad Daddy’s not dead,” Robert said as we began walking home.

“Me, too,” I said. “Really. I’m really happy that he’s okay.”

“Is he okay?” Robert said. “Do you know he’s okay?”

“You heard the news.”

“But I mean really okay, like every day.”

“I hope so,” I said.

How many times had I wished Bobby would die? I lost count years ago. It was my biggest fear when he was first a street cop that the phone would ring, that the chaplain would come to the door, that I would have to hear those bagpipes again that I’d heard wailing at his father’s funeral, that all I’d have left was a piss-poor pension and his badge in the bottom of my jewelry box. Even on
those days when he’d first twisted my arm, or shoved me into the wall, I still woke and peered at the digital clock and then lay back to wait if he was even a half hour behind his usual time. I’d be awake when he dropped his clothes in the corner, the belt buckle making a
ka-chunk
in the quiet house, when he slipped between the sheets, smelling of scotch and beer, tasting of it too as he put his arms around me and eased my nightgown up, hand over hand, like he was climbing a rope up into me.

And then there were the nights when I began to dread the sound of the door opening softly downstairs, two or three hours past the time he got off, the sound of his stumble on the stairs or the loud bangings of cabinet and refrigerator door from the kitchen, semaphore for discontent, an investigation going nowhere, a witness who’d been arrogant or uncooperative, even a car nosed a little too far toward the entrance to our driveway. The nights when he would pick a fight, throw open the bedroom door to say “Where the hell is the bread?” or ignore the regular breathing I learned to fake and come over me, into me, no matter what.

God forgive me, but there were so many times he went out to work and I would think the best thing that could happen to me was the call, the chaplain, the casket with the handsome cop I’d married inside it, who would never ever be able to lay a hand on me again, a fist in my face or rough fingers that opened me up as though I was a tunnel through which he was entitled, as a matter of right, to pass. When I was thinking about it rationally I knew it was no solution, that for my son his father would become a martyr, a man he would idolize and about whom he could never be told, never stand to hear the truth, the whole truth, nothing but.
But often I was not thinking rationally, and I wished with all my heart that some lowlife’s bullet would find a soft spot on Bobby’s body, one of the soft spots I had lost the ability to find myself, with my hands or my tears or my words.

“Why did you say Daddy was a friend?” Robert said a week later, out of nowhere, as he was working on his family tree. “That day when you were talking to Mrs. Levitt? When the other police got hurt.”

“Well, he sort of is,” I said. But that was never true. Every time I saw a woman describe her husband as her best friend in some magazine or another, I always wondered what in the world she was talking about. Bobby and I had never been friends, ever, or I could never have loved him so completely and let him treat me so badly.

Hunched over a sheet of gleaming poster paper, Robert began to sketch out his family tree for Mrs. Bernsen, and as he did I thought of how little he asked about the past and the future. Any other child would have been at me constantly with questions, about when and whether we were going back. Any other child would have slipped up at school, told his friends where he was really from, boasted that his father was a policeman, pointed to the map of Italy during social studies and made a lie of the nondescript middle-American last name that he carried. But as I watched Robert spread his left arm wide around his work as though to hide or shelter it, I realized that he had been in training for this subterfuge almost his whole life, learning to ignore what was in the next room, to hide what he knew from others, to refrain from asking the wrong questions. His parents had always
been in disguise; it was just a different disguise now, a different sort of false mustache, funny hat.

“Do you want help?” I asked nervously from the kitchen.

“Not yet,” he said.

I made some macaroni and read a magazine and the new Avon catalogue and there was still no sound from the room. Then he appeared in the doorway, smiling, nodding his head, taking my hand and pulling me to the card table.