The Houseguest (15 page)

Ana didn't hesitate. She was nodding even before she answered. “He's so kind, isn't he? He saw me going and worried about me losing my way in the dark. We had a nice stroll. You don't mind, do you, me stealing him for an hour here or there?”

She laughed without opening her mouth. “What's to mind?”

“That's generous of you. I enjoyed the company.”

Irene put the car in park and turned to face Ana. “May I take you to lunch? Once you're finished with Lutzenkirchen's? I'm enjoying this a great deal, talking to you.”

Behind the open, inviting grace of Irene's face Ana thought she detected something sharper, but did not take the time to decide if it was truly there or not. She accepted. They would meet outside Woolworth's in fifteen minutes.

She walked to the druggist's door, waited until Irene's Oldsmobile had fully vanished around the corner, then started the other way, into a surprisingly cool wind. She kept her head down and walked quickly.

When she gave her name at Western Union the narrow-eyed boy held his gaze, as though she had still been coming each day, before reaching into a large wooden box behind him. He handed her an envelope addressed to “A. Beidler of Utica.”

P
ERMANENT RESETTLEMENT STILL UNCLEAR
—STOP—H
OMELAND NOT AN OPTION
—STOP—L
IKELY TILL DOOMS-DAY
—STOP—W
ILL ADVISE
—STOP—W
ARMLY SPIRO

She read quickly, one time only, then tore the paper to shreds as she stepped onto the street, dropping them into the nearest waste bin, cursing the man beneath her breath. For that bit of non-news she'd endured the car ride with Irene, and now lunch. But she wasn't surprised. It was exactly the sort of theatrical flourish she'd come to expect from him, that balanced proportion of earnestness and mocking that made it impossible for her to measure where she stood.
Keep holding breath,
he might just as easily have said. Now she'd go back to waiting, counting the days.

Ana was surprised to find a group of women waiting for her outside the Woolworth's, Irene's women, four of them pretending to be talking and enjoying the chatter, but really just waiting for Ana to appear. What struck her most forcefully as she approached the group was their sameness, the surprising, almost martial similarity in their dress, demeanor, posture. They were like different drafts of the same basic premise: provincial, Jewish, American women. Only as she came closer did small discrepancies emerge. Irene was the prettiest, the softest of the bunch with her full bosom and rounded hips, sharpness only in her eyes and chin. The woman to her left had a similar figure but a grimace on her lips, a look of perpetually frustrated expectation. Her hair was thick, coarse curls straining against pins. It fell in her face as she looked
down into her handbag, looking for what—spare change, Pall Malls, a file for her nails. Beside her stood another brunette, darker, narrower, more petite than the others in an elegant shirt dress and single strand of pearls. Extremely feminine and yet somehow sexless. Her name, Ana thought, would be Betty or Bea. She was the kind of woman men liked to pick up and carry in their arms across thresholds, across puddles, into bedrooms—though what they did with them there was harder to imagine. And the fourth woman, who appeared to be the leader of the crew, blended qualities of the other three, but all Ana could see when she looked at her was her bright coral lipstick, her elaborately coiffed hair, and her arms reaching out to welcome Ana with a manic, vaguely threatening vigor.

They didn't so much greet her as engulf her in goodwill.
Here she is so nice to meet you we've all been looking forward to welcoming you and now you're here wonderful wonderful wonderful.
Ana reminded herself to breathe, to offer up a smile. She'd been hoping they would pull her into the Woolworth's, that lunch would consist of a club sandwich eaten at a counter, a ten- or fifteen-minute affair. Instead she found herself down the street at Magnolia's, a restaurant with heavy chairs and heavy tablecloths and a menu engraved on heavy paper.

“Now Ana,” said the small one. “We hope you know we've been asking to meet you for weeks. Almost since the moment you arrived. Irene has been hiding you away, though. But you must know we're all here to help with anything you need.”

“Help?” Ana repeated, as though even this one word were difficult to recall.

“Anything, anything at all,” said the curly-haired woman. “It can't be very comforting, spending your days cooped up with Irene. Have you gotten into town much? Met any people? My husband and I are hosting a dinner for some friends next weekend. You are welcome to join. Also, we have a weekly bridge group. A progressive dinner through Hadassah. A summer potluck for the synagogue.”

The synagogue to which they alluded was the center of their social if not religious life. Ana sat and listened for the better part of an hour as they described this congregation that seemed to have no more to do with the rituals of Jewish worship than a social club or athletic league. At this synagogue, there were no yarmulkes or tefillin, or interest in Hebrew as a modern language. The Hebrew uttered in ceremonies was the old Ashkenazi Hebrew of Paris and Berlin and Vienna. There was no talk of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If the children in religious school wrote papers about their Jewish homeland, they were papers about America. And yet, it filled them. It made them happy, was enough. Ana sat there listening to their pleasantries and gossip, wondering how long she could maintain the timid smile, the soft voice and attentive gaze. Each passing minute seemed to slow the next. And in the middle of this chatter, a strange, unsettled feeling came to Ana, a feeling she couldn't have predicted. In the middle of them, she found herself missing Abe Auer. She hardly knew him, but she missed him, wished he were there, his hard, unsentimental gaze. Sitting there, she felt something for him the same way she always felt for men in the beginning—a commingling of interests, a camaraderie against the world.
And then, somewhere out on the hills, away from the wall, there's you.

“Ana,” Irene announced, “is coming to Old Forge with us next weekend. We only have to find her a bathing suit and teach her how to swim.”

“Don't you listen,” said the one with the coral lipstick. “The water's freezing anyhow. Better to stay on the beach.”

“A nice bathing suit is imperative, however,” said the small one. “I've got it. Let us take you now to the Boston Store. We'll all chip in. We'll have a little fashion show.”

“Oh, no, please. I . . . ”

“Come now. It'll be fun,” Irene said. “Don't be shy.”

And so she followed them, these lovely, kind-hearted, horrible women. She did what needed to be done, followed through, just as her
mother always did. Fainting onstage had been among her many talents. “It's easy,” she insisted, chiding Ana for being so easily impressed. Much easier than love scenes where sweat and fetid breath are so often involved. For fainting, all you do is hold your breath until you feel your head go light. A good audience can tell when you're faking. Just keep smiling, she told herself. And yet she wondered, what did these women see when they saw her?
Keep holding breath,
Spiro should have said. Like her mother's God, he was an unreliable, wrathful, monomaniacal piece of shit.

Ana's thoughts were interrupted by Irene's voice. “Far nicer for us all to walk together on a beautiful summer afternoon than out on the streets in the middle of the night. Don't you agree?”

11.

T
HE CITY THAT
passed beneath the elevated train was a roaring one. Max remembered it as having a clumsy, lurching momentum, heaving, pulling, torquing. Call it the influence of hearing too many stories from the dead-eyed, trunk-armed grunters who worked the stockyards. His memories had a hacking rhythm. But the Chicago he saw now, barreling downtown, was smooth and brutal. It was too broad to replicate Manhattan's friction dynamo. There was space here for the expressions and yearnings of the people below to be seen. He saw cars zoom through wide streets, saw barrel-chested children walk out and stare down these cars, saw their giantess mothers haul them back into their dark, gaping homes. It was like he had come to the inside of a capacious machine.

At Belmont the man sitting opposite him got off and left his
Tribune.
Max reached across the aisle, nearly swiping the backside of a woman who'd just boarded. She was redheaded and busty and looked at Max aghast before settling halfway across the car. Max wanted to put the paper over his head but instead started to read it. Soon, his eyes could not focus on the words.

R
EFUGEES
M
AKE
W
AR
B
OOMTOWN OF
M
ARSEILLE:

F
RENCH
P
ORT
T
OWN
F
ABULOUSLY
R
ICH
—A
ND
H
UNGRY
!

Marseille a year after France's armistice is France's most amazing and incredible city. To believe such a place exists you must see it. It is overcrowded with refugees who cannot find any place to which to escape. It is a Mediterranean melting pot squirming with defective vitality. It is a contrast of poverty and opulence, the largest and the highest-priced city in unoccupied France where, however, all classes seem to be hungry.

Every train seems to loose another flood of arrivals and the struggle for hotel rooms begins at the station. Hotel clerks say the desperate newcomers offer them money, sugar, ration tickets, a leg of mutton, a couple of chickens, sausages or smoked ham as bribes for a room. Many refugees seek only a comfortable room until the storm blows over or until they can get to America. The latter, incidentally, is becoming more difficult. No visas have been granted from the local American consulate for many days.

The fear of hunger haunts nearly all guests. Wardrobes are stocked with hoarded food and this has led to an epidemic of mice. One refugee in a swank hotel kept three ducks in his bathroom.

There was life.
To believe such a place exists you must see it.

He sat on the train and read the paper and watched the windows and brick facades speed past and was furious that the next stop was not on La Canabière or someplace else that must be seen. His heart shuddered. The redhead across the car, smirking at another man now, glanced at him and threw him a wink. He wanted to punch the nearest window and dive out of the train and back into the world.

HE EMERGED FROM
the station into light, pushed his way through the morning crowd of men in suits. At the corner of Michigan and
Monroe, he tossed his paper in the trash, stepped inside the club's lobby, took off his hat and immediately looked up, as he guessed Sullivan and Adler had wanted him to do. Above his head was not a ceiling but a wide, domed roof with a skylight in the middle, sunlight flooding in and illuminating a hunting mural that swirled out from the glass, broad strokes of paint in rich, Renaissance color. Strange to be trotting down Michigan Avenue one minute where everything was cheerful and bright and standing the next beneath a scene of broken-necked quail and disemboweled fawns, hunting dogs with shiny pelts and glossy fangs and the blood of the hunt dripping from their jaws with such life-likeness it seemed the drops would plunk onto his face.

“Makes you want to kill something, doesn't it?”

He looked down and saw a thin man in suspenders watching him from beside a water fountain. He was half-leaning on it, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a cigarette. He drew from it, exhaled up toward the high ceiling.

“The goyim and their guns,” he said. “Nothing says beauty to them like a sweet little deer with its innards spilling out. Where's the sport in that? Now, if the critters had guns, that might be interesting.”

“If the critters had guns, they'd be the ones painting us,” said Max.

The man nodded, looked down at his watch. He didn't like what he saw there because he cursed softly, inhaled again with greater force. There was something familiar about him, Max thought. He knew this person, had known him, had known someone who looked like him or had the same quality, the look of a clever, watchful, irreverent wiseass with good intentions.

“You lost?” he asked, and Max realized he was still standing there, waiting.

“I'm not sure. I'm looking for a meeting. The American Jewish Council.”

“Fourth floor. Elevator's that way. Better hurry. I think we're late.”

“You're headed there, too?”

“Right now, no. Right now I'm headed no place. My solitary goal for the next few minutes is to stand here, finish a cigarette, and try to clear my mind of nonsense. Right now what I'm doing is standing still. Sometimes it's the best thing a man can do.”

Max touched his hat, began walking down the long hallway. “Take the elevator on he left, not the right. The one on the right tends to stop a foot too low. I almost fell on my face this morning, would have if a little old lady hadn't caught me.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Max said, walking away, sensing the man watching him even as he turned his back.

When he stepped into the ballroom, the meeting had already begun. There were a few familiar faces from the Refugee Service, a few men he recognized from the Joint Distribution Committee, but mostly, they were strangers. The people working on the crisis in '36 and '37 had been fired or had quit. The aid workers sitting around the ballroom seemed both hopeful and perplexed. Max took a seat near the back, took out a notepad and pretended to take notes. The speaker, who looked like he'd eaten his way to Chicago from Washington, mumbled and fidgeted, said words about Senate Select Committees and East Africa. A few minutes later, the door swung open again and the man from the lobby walked in. The speaker, sputtering, noticed him and said, “Come on in, David. I won't waste time with lengthy introductions. For those of you who don't already know, David Hirschler is going to be taking over for Felix as head of the New York office. In addition to his work at the JDC, he's done amazing things at the IGCR and the National Refugee Service. He's worked in the field as well, so he knows what's actually happening over there better than any of us. I'll turn the floor over.”

Hirschler walked onto the stage, took his time getting comfortable before the podium. He tapped the microphone that had been adjusted for him, cast his glance widely. He thanked the obese man who had introduced him, thanked everyone in attendance, promised to keep his
presentation as brief as possible because he knew there were many others waiting to contribute, others with far more experience and knowledge than himself.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “We're gathered here today to propose solutions and emergency measures regarding the Jewish refugee crisis in Europe. You've come from near and far for this purpose. You've come at your own inconvenience and expense. So believe me when I say it's with more than a little embarrassment that I have to begin by confessing to you that I have no solutions or emergency measures to propose. I have no suggestions, no easy answers, no miracles at my disposal. I came with such things to a similar conference convened in Washington three years ago, a few months before the German invasion of Poland. I saw some of you there, and I gave a little speech about the graveness of the situation, the need to pressure Congress on immigration quotas, to impress the urgency of the situation. But the tenor of my message was deemed hysterical, the message itself, inconvenient. So it should be a relief to many of you that now, three years later, I come with no such agenda. Now I come only with news.” He paused. There was a glass and a pitcher of water on a table beside the podium. He poured some, drank it slowly. Then he said, “Ladies and gentleman: I come here to tell you that we've failed.”

A murmur moved through the room. Near the back, a man stood. “This isn't the time for theatrics, Hirschler. This isn't some fucking play. We are working days and nights in rooms the size of broom closets to do whatever the hell we can. For two goddamn years I've done this, day and night, and I will not let you shit on those efforts, and the efforts of many of the others here like me, in order for you to put on a performance.”

Others in the audience seemed to agree. Max watched Hirschler, waiting for his next word.

He reached below the podium and pulled out a pile of newspaper clippings. “These are from the past month,” he said. “Reports from
every Jewish paper and even a few American ones. What we're dealing with here is no longer a problem. It's a crisis. It needs to be responded to as such.”

The man in the back, a beak-nosed type in rimless glasses, stayed standing. “Everyone here understands that. And we're doing the best we can with a small staff and a smaller budget and a State Department and a Congress that never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. We're working on it from every angle.”

“You may be working on it, but the Germans are working faster.” Hirschler flipped through the papers again, pulled out an issue of the
National Jewish Monthly.
“Every person in this room at some point in the past five years has been accused of exaggeration. We've been accused of it by the State Department, by immigration services, by Representatives Rankin and Dies. You yourself, John, got yourself called what, ‘a zealot telling monster stories' by Senator Reynolds. Maybe we've even been accused of exaggerating by members of our own ranks, by our friends and loved ones, our fellow Jews.”

He paused then held up two fingers. “Two,” he said. “Two pieces of information are printed in this material before me, two pieces of information which should make painfully clear the scope and urgency of the situation abroad. One,” he said, holding up a single finger and looking around the room. “The Germans are systematically moving Jews out of the city centers of occupied Western Europe. Berlin. Vienna. Prague. Bucharest. The Jewish populations of these cities are gone. Vanished. And if the information we're getting from Resistance leaders is to believed, they're being shipped east, which makes no sense whatsoever. It's completely counterintuitive to everything we know about the German war machine. The Nazis are in bad need of labor in Germany on both the Eastern and Western fronts. That's where they need their workers. So why take hundreds of thousands of able-bodied prisoners and ship them away from that need, away from the factories, away from industry? It makes no sense.”

He paused, then held up another finger. “Two,” he said. “Soviet guerrilla forces in Eastern Poland and the Ukraine report no Jews in all of White Russia. They're sweeping through these areas every day and are telling us there's not a Jew in sight. One recounts a
shtetl
abandoned as though the plague had swept through, cows groaning in pain with no one to milk them, laundry left flapping on lines. But no people, not a one. So Jews are being shipped to the East, systematically, thousands every day, but according to the Russians, the East is free of Jews. So where are they, friends? Where are the Jews of Europe? This is the question we must ask our dear friends in Congress and in the White House and in the press when they accuse of us hysteria and exaggerations.”

Hirschler stood in silence, looking out at the crowd. Then he raised his hand and spoke: “Ladies and gentlemen, I say to you again: We have failed.”

Without waiting for further comment, Hirschler turned and walked off the stage. A few more speakers followed, all of them seeming flaccid and punchless coming after Hirschler. None of them knew what he did. None of them could convey it in the way that he did. It stirred something deeply in Max. The information and the delivery. The terror and the charm. It was like he'd remembered something he'd been told long ago and since forgotten, something important, something meaningful. He hardly heard what the subsequent speakers said. The room grew restless too. Max fidgeted, took meaningless notes for Spiro, failed to focus on anything in the room for more than a few seconds. What he felt was different from the boredom or letdown that the rest of the audience was experiencing. What Max felt was clawing and rising. He felt it on the back of his neck. In the bottom of his gut. In his breath.

The fat man who had introduced Hirschler returned to the podium to adjourn for lunch. People began to rise then. The orderliness and accord of the meeting unraveled, broke apart into competing strands
of discord. Max gathered himself. He could not be of any use to Spiro in a state like this. He looked around for someone, some group to attach himself to, people he could milk for information of any sort. But he couldn't penetrate any of the circles of bodies that had already formed. Factions huddled. Friends leaned into each other conspiratorially. He saw no openings. He slanted himself into conversations only to be shouldered away. Open faces closed. He was not a snitch, not a kibbitzer, had no gift for eavesdropping or teasing out news. Spiro probably would have had enough material to start several world wars by now. All Max had was a page of incomprehensible notes and the echo of a roiling sensation.

He decided to look for a place to get a cup of coffee. He wandered back onto the street. Such an odd mixture of exhilaration and dejection. He stood looking at windows, stood dumb, stuck, when he heard Hirschler.

“You see,” he said, “If I'd wanted to be merciful this morning, I would have misdirected you, told you the conference was being held across town at the Palmer House. What a missed opportunity to spare a man an awful morning.”