The Houseguest (13 page)

“It's intoxicating to them,” Elsie said.

“It's like a sport,” added John. “We could have a person like Smith in charge. Can you imagine? Instead, we have Roosevelt, a rational, educated man who wants to do some real good for the country, and for the Jews, too.”

Max laughed. It was not an expression of any real mirth, but a brief and sudden eruption of something darker: bitterness, disdain. His sister gave him a look, not quite chiding.

“I get worked up,” John said. “But I'm right, aren't I?”

“Not for me to say,” said Max.

“Come on. We're family. You disagree with me? Tell me so. I enjoy a lively debate, particularly with a learned man like yourself.”

“I'm not so learned, believe me.”

“Please, do me the honors.”

Max opened his hands before him like a flower in bloom, an oratorical gesture, but he didn't follow it with any oration. Instead, he glanced toward the table. “I find it a little amusing is all, the devotion of people like yourself toward the president.”

“People like myself? Oh, now he's gonna let me have it. Mild-mannered Max. You listening, Else?”

“I don't mean anything personal by it.”

“Well, what do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. I find it strange is all. I find it peculiar the way so many people like yourself—intelligent, thoughtful Jews—hold unwavering allegiance to a man who does not deign to lift a finger for our brethren across the sea.”

“That seems unfair, now. I can't believe he's not doing everything he can do without sabotaging the British?”

“Not a finger, John. Not a finger. I can assure you of it. It's one of the few things I know about.”

“You're saying he should raise the quotas?”

For a moment, Max assumed that John was joking. But John didn't smile. He didn't change his expression at all. Max saw then that his sister's husband had been completely serious with this question, and he remembered with painful clarity the thing that he so often forgot, the thing he willed himself to forget—how little, how astonishingly little, regular Americans, even intelligent, well-educated, well-intentioned Americans, understood about what was happening in Europe.
Raise the quotas?
he asked. The truth was that since 1938, the country hadn't even come close to meeting the quotas that were already in existence. The quotas were a formality. They were beside the point. The bitter, impossible-to-swallow truth was that even when these people could get out, they almost never could get in. Max had seen it firsthand during his time working for the refugee aid agency in
New York, the job he'd taken when he returned from Europe, the job that had eventually driven him to Utica.

That job had been a bureaucrat's nightmare. The towers of applications on every aid worker's desk, the walls of papers waiting to be processed. And while the walls stiffened and the towers grew, the opposition to the people and families and lives behind these papers hardened. Senator Holman blocked important legislation because it aroused his suspicion that it relaxed the immigration laws, even though he admitted later he knew nothing about the bill. One of his colleagues implored the Senate to channel refugees toward all shores other than our own. And not long before Max left New York, the VFW and the One Hundred Percent Americanists coordinated measures to block a bill that would have allowed a onetime exception for ten thousand refugee children to enter the country. These were kids, German Jewish kids, most of them under the age of ten, children American families had agreed to take in and provide for, children whose parents would give them up just to know they were safe. But none of it mattered to these people. The wife of one of these legislative ogres had summed it up so nicely in an interview reprinted in the
Times
: “The problem with these cute little Jewish children is that they all grow up to be ugly adults.” He'd read this sentence sitting at his desk and he thought he was going to be sick. But vomiting across his typewriter wouldn't change anything. Outrage only fermented into apathy and cynicism. He could already feel it happening.

You think he should raise the quotas?
his sister's husband asked, as though it were a thing done so easily, a measure no one had attempted. It was like asking a blind man if he'd ever considered opening his eyes.

“Raise them?” Max said, trying to keep his voice steady. “How about meeting them? With the bureaucratic hoops we make these people jump through to get a visa, the quotas go unfilled. The quotas are a fiction.”

“You can hardly hold Roosevelt responsible for that. He didn't create the problem of Hitler's madness.”

“Madness has to be confronted.”

“Confronting sounds a lot like war to me. You want us in the war? God forbid. And I mean that. If Roosevelt brings us into the war, I don't have to tell you what the Christians across this country will be saying. They'll say, ‘See, that Jew-loving son of a bitch got us into another war.' They're already saying it and we're not even fighting. Impeach Roosevelt and his Jew Deal and his Jewish war; that's what they'll say. I saw a flyer on a street pole the other day. I tore it down and stuffed it into my pocket. Do you want to know what it said? ‘From the shores of Coney Island / Looking out into the sea / Stands a kosher air-raid warden / Wearing V for victory.' This is what we're dealing with, Max. Now, I don't pretend to be an expert. I'm not going to any conferences, but I just don't see what you can expect him to do.”

“Help them.”

“With what money? With what ships?”

Max leaned back in his chair, looked down at his lap, then up at his sister. She wasn't smiling anymore. She was hardly looking at him. The kind, civil thing to do would have been to end it.
I'm sure you're right. We're all allowed our own opinions.
That was all it would take. And yet he couldn't. He felt vitalized by what stood before him in the coming days, this strange opportunity to see these esteemed Jews of power trying and failing to make history, the opportunity to pretend to be one of them, to spy. “Yes,” he said. “Of course, of course. That's the State Department line, isn't it? Sorry, but we just don't have the ships. Funny, isn't it, how there are never any ships around when there are persecuted Jews that need transporting? Non-Jewish Poles need to be moved to a haven in East Africa? Slavs and Greeks need moving to the Middle East? What do you know, a ship at the ready. When non-Jews are fleeing, there are Portuguese ships and Spanish ships and Turkish ships and League of Nations ships. The British
Navy's been transporting thousands of Yugoslav refugees across the Adriatic to save them from the Nazis, but when it's Jews, all the ships just disappear. Jews must repel them somehow? Are they unknowing torpedo targets? Because when a thousand Jews are crowding a port, Southampton or Eindhoven, fleeing unconscionable persecution, not a single seaworthy vessel can be found. All the captains of the world go deaf. Funny thing is, at this point, I'd venture a lot of these Jews would be more than happy to swim. After they've seen their friends and family dragged from their homes, arrested, shot. Do you know what they do in Rumania, John? Do you know what they do to Jews? How they deal with them? Bombs or fire or even fists? Nothing as human as any of that. They load them into locked boxcars, drag them out to the countryside, and leave them all to suffocate. It's kind of genius, really. Good for you, Rumania. Using the most natural resource of all,
air,
to kill old men and small children. The Enlightenment certainly didn't pass them by, wouldn't you say? After all that, I'd venture the icy waters of the Atlantic don't seem so ominous. A ship? I think most of them would take a raft about now, or a life vest. But I understand, those cost money, too, and take time to procure. And why should Roosevelt bother when there's nothing to gain, when his loyal Jewish base stares at him with stars in their eyes? That's all I meant when I said I find it all amusing. But what do I know? I'm sure I'm wrong. Here . . .” He raised his glass toward the center of the table. “To my beautiful sister and my shrewd brother-in-law. And also, to FDR. A great president and a great man and a great friend to the Jews. America's Jews, that is. The ones that matter.”

“Max,” said Elsie, raising her voice. He hadn't seen her look at him like that in years.

He sank into his chair. “Please,” he muttered. “Forgive me. I get carried away.”

Elsie and John looked at each other. After a moment, she stood, tried to smile. “Let's see what we have for dessert,” she said. “You're
tired from your train ride. I know . . . There's some leftover cobbler in the refrigerator. How do you feel about blackberry cobbler with whipped cream? The blackberries are beautiful this time of year. Big as plums.”

“Let me help you,” Max said.

“Don't be silly. Sit.”

After she'd gone, John, the man who'd been so warm and full of goodwill earlier, now sipped his Tom Collins, smiled blandly, looked at the clock across the room, the loose thread on his napkin, the hair on his hands. Anywhere but at Max.

“Well,” he said at last, “Elsie makes an amazing cobbler.”

AT DUSK, HE
sat on the porch, listening to them argue while his sister washed dishes. He couldn't hear what they were saying, exactly, but he could read the tone. Three blocks east, Max could feel but not see the energy of Broadway, the vibrant pulse of music halls and jazz, automobiles idling roadside while young people stepped out, flirted and gossiped. But here, just west of Uptown, it was quiet. The apartment buildings held their ground against the encroaching nightlife. They had a nightlife of their own—the people who lived in them coming out now in the darkness to sit on the second and third story balconies, the porches and perches. Max couldn't see them clearly but could sense their silhouettes, hear the edges of their voices without understanding their words. It was a shadow world and somehow Max felt more comfortable in it.

He'd been outside a few minutes when Elsie stepped out, sat in the rocking chair beside him. “This seat taken?”

She dropped herself with a suddenness he didn't know.

“I should apologize,” he said.

“Well. . . . It was quite a stem-winder, Max.”

“I get carried away lately. I have no excuse other than to say I don't mean anything by it. I'm in a strange mood lately.”

“What's that from?”

“Moods need origins?”

“No, but yes,” she looked at him, side-eyed. “People don't go feeling strange on account of nothing. There's a job or a girl or a man he owes money to or a voice he hears coming out of the plumbing. These are the things that make people feel strange.”

He laughed again. Laughter felt unfamiliar and good.

“I promise you, it's none of that.”

She didn't answer. When he looked up at her, her face was taut with worry.

“If it's none of those,” she said, “I hate to think what it might really be.”

It occurred to him how little he associated family with truth. Liturgically, in his work, these things were practically synonymous, although it only took the Torah a couple chapters to introduce familial deception to the world. Always, always, he counseled and sermonized to Utica that if there were one remaining bastion of truth, it was family. He told the adulterers, the indebted, the misguided:
that
is the place where all must be seen. It was ingrained, it was held solemn. And folks believed it, which only increased its value. But Max—sitting on his own sister's porch, contemplating truths, a truth, however many small, discrete truths he stuffed into his pockets at every moment—all of it felt inaccessible. Because that was how it had always been.

“Everything's fine, I promise. I mean, Hitler has made a solemn declaration to rid the earth of Jews. But besides that, everything's perfectly pleasant and boring. The synagogue just finished a new addition for the Sunday school.”

“So much insincerity. It's not like you, Max. It makes you sound like our father.”

“Unless he's formally joined the Axis there are few people I'd less wish to sound like.”

He rocked back and forth on his chair. Elsie was doing the same, rocking, looking out at the street, down at her feet. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'll stop now.”

“Max, what's wrong? You arrive here out of the blue when you can't even be bothered to show up for my own wedding, which I admit was not a grand affair but you could have come. Utica is not Attica, last I checked.”

“I should have come. I know. And I shouldn't have raised my voice like that. I didn't mean to offend. Can we leave it at that? I like John. I knew I would. I think he's a good man. He loves you, and I'm happy for you.”

“Daddy thinks he's a pansy. He thinks only a pansy would teach ninth graders for a living.”

“Our father's a bully and a fool.”

“A bully, yes. A fool, no. That's what makes him so impossible to tolerate. We had lunch at his club the other day. We had a lovely lunch, a truly pleasant and grown-up conversation about this chemistry professor he had drinks with in Hyde Park. Then, at the very end of the conversation he turned deadly serious and said, ‘Sweetheart, now don't take offense to this. Really, don't. But is John doing what a husband should for his wife? Because if he's not, there are steps that can be taken. You have recourse.'” She began to laugh. “I wish he could just be a human being, that he could be decent to John. And to you. The three of you are the only people I have. I wish he could appreciate what wonderful men you both are.”

“He's not capable of appreciation. He looks at people and sees them only in terms of how they're useful.”

“But why? What makes a man so narrow and selfish?”

He waved it away. “Selfishness is too common to wonder where it comes from or why it exists. Better to ask why people do good, why they ever act charitably.”