Snow in August (25 page)

“How do
you
know?” Father Heaney said, in the tone of someone who had seen too much evil.

Michael exploded. “How do I know? I’m the Shabbos goy
at the synagogue! I help him turn on the lights every Saturday morning. I’m teaching him English. He’s teaching me Yiddish.
And his wife is dead and he’s alone and he doesn’t need some goddamned Nazi painting his synagogue!” The words clogged, as
Michael realized he’d used the word
goddamned
to a priest, and then rushed forth again. “My father
died
fighting the Nazis.
You
saw all kinds of guys die in the war, you—”

Father Heaney’s slits of eyes opened wider and he stepped back a foot, as if the words had pierced a part of him that had
been numb for a long time. He raised a hand, palm out, stopping the flow of Michael’s words. He reached for his coat.

“Come on,” he said.

He walked out into the church, pointed at a few men and gestured for them to follow him. He grabbed one of the altar boys
from the previous mass, a tall Italian kid named Albert. Some parishioners looked up from their prayer books at Father Heaney
as if wondering why he was disrupting the mass. The choir reached a pitch and then stopped. Mr. Gallagher, the owner of the
hardware store across the street, arrived late and was searching for a seat when Father Heaney took him by the elbow and guided
him back outside.

At the foot of the church steps, Father Heaney started giving orders like the military man he’d once been. He slipped two
dollars to Albert, the altar boy, and sent him to buy some coffee and buns at the bakery. He convinced Mr. Gallagher to open
the hardware store and hand out rags and scrubbers and solvents. On the corner near the schoolyard, he saw Charlie Senator,
who had left his leg at Anzio, limping toward the church. He whispered a few words to him, and Senator gave him a small salute
and fell in line.

Then all of them were marching down the avenue, carrying mops and rags, pails and solvents. People in Easter finery
looked at them in surprise. A few more men joined the line of march, with Father Heaney and Michael out front, as the platoon
crossed the great square at the entrance to the park and turned into Kelly Street.

Father Heaney’s face was now clenched in righteous anger, his mouth etched tight, the muscles moving in his jaws. He didn’t
say a word. Michael wondered if he’d gone too far, mentioning his father. His mother never did that, not to the landlord,
not to Michael, not ever, and he’d never done it before either. But it just came out, and it was true. Private Tommy Devlin
had died fighting these
momsers
. These lousy pricks. And he suddenly pictured his father marching with them down Kelly Street, going again to fight the Nazis.
Then he realized he was the only boy among almost a dozen men. And saw himself with his father’s platoon. Helmeted. Carrying
a machine gun. Going to get these bastards who killed babies and old ladies and turned men into living skeletons. Heading
for Belgium.

When they reached the synagogue, Rabbi Hirsch was still poking with his mop at the first swastika.

“Rabbi, I’m Joe Heaney,” the priest said. “I was a chaplain in the 103rd Airborne. Most of these men fought their way into
Germany two years ago, and one of them lost a leg in Italy. They are not going to let this bullshit happen in their parish.”

“Please,” Rabbi Hirsch said, “I can do it myself.”

“No, you can’t,” Father Heaney said.

And so they went to work. Mr. Ponte, the stonemason, fingered the texture of the bricks, while Mr. Gallagher examined the
paint. “Sapolin number 3,” Mr. Gallagher said. “Every moron in the parish paints his chairs with it and then sits down before
they’re dry.” Together, he and Mr. Ponte mixed the solvents
in a steel pail. Others peeled off their Easter jackets, removed their ties, rolled up their sleeves, and grabbed rags and
mops. Father Heaney stripped to his T-shirt. Albert, the altar boy, arrived with buns and coffee, then grabbed a cloth. A
police car came along and one of the cops wanted to make a report, but Father Heaney said that he and Rabbi Hirsch would take
care of the matter in their own way.

“We both believe in an Old Testament God,” Father Heaney said. “He punishes all morons.”

The cops shrugged and drove away. Michael hung his jacket and tie on the picket fence, on top of Charlie Senator’s coat, and
joined in the scrubbing. The men said little as they scrubbed and grunted. Their eyes seemed cloudy with memory, as if the
things they had seen a few years earlier were driving them to finish. Michael was soon exhausted but pushed himself harder,
thinking of the grainy black-and-white images from the Venus newsreels, the skeletal men, the hollow-eyed women, the mounds
of corpses. Thinking of soldiers dead in the snow. He kept glancing at Rabbi Hirsch, but the man had retreated into himself,
his lips moving inaudibly as he attacked the hated red paint. The word
JEW
vanished. Then the word
GO
. And another swastika.

He must be thinking of her, Michael thought.

His wife.

Leah.

At one point, Frankie McCarthy and four of the Falcons strolled up from Ellison Avenue and stood on the far corner beside
the armory. For them, Michael thought, the hour was early. Usually, you didn’t see them until noon. They passed around a quart
of Rheingold beer and wore sneers on their faces and one of them said something that made them all laugh. But they knew better
than to look for trouble from this
group of men. Michael thought: Come on, Frankie, shout something about the Kikes, come on. These guys kicked the shit out
of the
Wehrmacht
, Frankie, these guys beat Tojo. Come on, prick.

For a moment, Charlie Senator glared at the Falcons, as if he were thinking the same things, then went back to work, putting
his weight on his good leg as he bent into the paint with his rags. Lighting cigarettes, jingling change in their pockets,
the Falcons watched the Christians cleaning the swastikas from the synagogue and then went bopping away to the park.

Finally, it was done. The walls were lighter where the swastikas had been painted. But the light patches had irregular shapes
and didn’t indicate what had been put there on an Easter morning. Rabbi Hirsch walked back and forth alone, mounted the steps
leading to the sealed front door of the upstairs sanctuary, examining the walls, then came back to the men. He was still shaking
his head, his mouth a bitter slash. The men had finished cleaning their hands and pulling on their jackets and neckties. Most
were sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes and wolfing down the buns from the bakery. They looked awkward now, saying little,
staring at the wall or the sidewalk or the sky. In the war, Michael thought, they must have soldiered with Jews. But they
certainly didn’t know many rabbis. The synagogue was as strange a place to them as it was to Michael on that first morning
of ice and snow. He saw Rabbi Hirsch flex his fingers as if to shake hands, but his hands were covered with paint.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” the rabbi said hoarsely.

“Here, Rabbi, use this stuff to get the paint off your hands,” said Mr. Gallagher, dipping a rag into the solvent. “It smells
awful, but it does the job.”

“Thank you, and thank
you
, Father Heaney,” the rabbi said, cleaning his hands. “And Michael…”

His body shook in a dry, choked way, but he would not weep.

“I wish to the synagogue, you all could come,” the rabbi said. “To have a big seder together.… But food we don’t have here,
just tea, and matzoh, and—”

“It’s all right, Rabbi,” Father Heaney said. “Some other time.”

The rabbi bowed in a stiff, dignified way. Michael looked at his eyes and saw that he did not believe there would be another
time. They would all go back to their world and he would stay in his.

“I’ll see you, Rabbi,” Mr. Gallagher said, and grabbed the pail, emptying the solvents into the gutter, nodding to the others
to retrieve the mops. “Let’s move out,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day.”

Charlie Senator glanced at his watch and then at Father Heaney.

“Well,” he said, “I better go do my Easter duty.”

“You just did,” Father Heaney said, popping a Camel from his pack.

T
hat afternoon, after hanging up his suit and taking a bath to wash away the odor of the solvents, Michael handed his mother
the five dollars. He explained about Mrs. Griffin but didn’t tell her the details of his dreams.

“Och, Michael, you should keep it,” she said, holding each corner of the bill with thumb and forefinger. “It was
your
dream.”

“No, let’s save it for a phonograph.” He told her about the composers Rabbi Hirsch had mentioned, finding their names written
into his notebook. Smetana, Dvo
ák, Mahler. “We can hear all the music they don’t play on the radio.”

“Fair enough,” she said, and put the bill in her purse.

Then they sat down to an early dinner. Kate Devlin did not mention what had happened at the synagogue, so he knew she must
have taken the trolley car to the eight o’clock mass at Sacred Heart. If she had walked, she’d have seen the swastikas. But
Michael did not want to spoil the meal by relating the
events of the morning. The meal was the reason she’d risen so early to go to mass and had then rushed home to scrub potatoes
and peel carrots, and prepare the small pot roast for the amazing oven of the new gas stove. That, and one other thing: although
she had paid for a new suit for Michael, she did not buy an Easter outfit for herself. “I think I’ll skip the fashion show
at the eleven o’clock mass, thank you very much,” she’d said before leaving. Now the kitchen was filled with the aroma of
the roast, and before they sat down she toasted the
hametz
that Rabbi Hirsch had sent to them for Passover.

“Well, happy Easter, son,” she said, “and to all the others who don’t have food.”

She said grace then, with Michael adding an “amen,” and they began to eat. The meat was pink and savory and he cut off small
pieces and tried to chew them slowly. He still ate much faster than his mother did. He slathered butter on the opened potatoes
and the crunchy toasted
hametz
. He piled more carrots on his plate. She cautioned him about using too much salt. He sipped cold water. Then he told her
what a seder was and how Jesus and the disciples were actually at a seder when they had the Last Supper and how next year
Rabbi Hirsch wanted them to come to a seder at the synagogue and was going to invite Jackie Robinson too. Kate Devlin thought
that was a wonderful idea and said she would cook and they could carry the food up to Kelly Street.

But when dinner was almost over, he told her what had happened that morning. Kate Devlin was furious about the swastikas and
thrilled at what Father Heaney and the men had done.

“At least they’re not all a bunch of bigots,” she said. “There’s still a lot of decent people around here, no matter what
you might think.”

They talked about how the police had to find the people with the red paint and how it was probably the Falcons, since Frankie
McCarthy had come by with his boys to see the results. They usually ate breakfast when other people ate lunch.

“You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes,” she said, “to figure that one out.”

But as this was Easter Sunday, and she wanted to make it special for the boy, she didn’t dwell on the story. It was one more
terrible event in a sinful world. After dinner, they walked together to the Grandview, where she was working that night. This
was a big deal for Michael: because there was no school on Easter Monday, he could sit through the entire double feature,
along with cartoons, the newsreel, and the coming attractions, while Kate worked in the box office. And he would go home with
her when the pictures were over. She took him through the lobby to a side door, bought him a box of Good and Plenty candies,
and then went to the box office.

The first movie was a western with Joel McCrea, and although he missed the beginning, he felt as if he’d already seen it ten
times at the Venus, with different actors. The other movie was
13 Rue Madeleine
, with James Cagney, all about four OSS spies who infiltrated France to destroy a secret German rocket base before D day.
The address in the title was Gestapo headquarters, and one of the OSS agents was secretly a German spy. Michael disappeared
into the movie, training with Cagney, operating secret radios in barns and basements, moving bravely down dark European streets
in a holy mission against the Nazis. When it was over, he felt uneasy. The swastikas were obviously symbols of evil, the Nazis
were clearly the bad guys. How could anybody copy the Nazis by putting swastikas on a synagogue? Probably the
Falcons. But maybe someone else. Maybe people right here in the RKO Grandview.

His feeling of unease worsened when the newsreel came on after the coming attractions, just before the Joel McCrea picture
was to play again for the last time that night and he could see what he had missed. Part of the newsreel was about Jackie
Robinson signing with the Dodgers. It showed Branch Rickey shaking hands with the smiling black player, and film of Robinson
in Havana, slashing a ball to left field and dashing to first in a pigeon-toed way, his hat falling off as he rounded the
base. Some people cheered. But about half the audience booed. In Brooklyn! They were booing a
Dodger!