Wherever There Is Light (26 page)

Eddie double-parked outside Crossroad Bar-B-Q. He said, “I'm supposed to ask Kendall to come out?”

“For two minutes—that's it.”

“And if she doesn't want to?”

“Tell her I'll come in.”

Eddie laughed. “That oughtta do it.”

Julian waited on the corner and looked down toward the garbage-strewn lot on 134th Street, where maybe a dozen Negros in stingy-brim fedoras and overcoats were stamping their feet against the bite of the cold, drinking out of brown bags, and staring at Julian with the hooded-eyed rancor of men who had worked too hard for too little and didn't care for the deal. In Berlin, Julian had had his fistfights with kids who called him “Jewshit,” and during Prohibition he'd earned his share of enemies who would have killed him if Abe and Eddie hadn't been around to kill them back. Being hated on sight for the color of his outer shell was a new, less-than-thrilling experience.

In just a shirt and slacks, Kendall walked out of Crossroad, her face no more animated than if Julian were a stranger hawking roasted chestnuts. Even so, just seeing her made his spirits rise.

“Kendall, I'm very sorry.”

She nodded.

“I was—”

“We've been through this,” Kendall said.

“I made a mistake. Can't you forgive me?”

She was shivering.

“Please, Kendall.”

Her lower lip was trembling.

Julian had the Tiffany ring box in his pants pocket, and he felt ridiculous for bringing it with him. “Is this about the building? Or Simon? Or something else?”

Kendall had been asking herself the same questions. She was no longer so angry at Julian about the apartment, and her reaction seemed harsher than his crime. Yet she wanted to be free from Julian, even though she hated hurting him and her reasons hovered beyond her reach.

“I . . . I don't know,” she said, her voice small, hesitant, as if she were reluctant to admit her confusion not only to Julian, but to herself.

Julian saw himself on that boat to America, his loneliness shrouding him like the fog rolling off the waves. He said, “I'm going to Lovewood to see my folks, then I'm off to Europe.”

“The Army? Are you in the Army? Did you enlist?”

“Something like that.”

Kendall was crying without a sound, her shoulders shaking.

“I wanted to see you before I went. And say I was sorry.”

Kendall took off her grandfather's Hamilton watch and fastened it to Julian's right wrist. “Bring it back to me.”

“Okay.”

“Promise me, Julian.”

“Promise.”

She hugged him, and he pressed his face into the warm, lemonyscented hollow between her neck and shoulders. He remembered Kendall sitting before a mirror in her bra, garter belt, and panties and brushing her hair, and how safe this intimacy made him feel, how grounded, and he wasn't sure how he would manage without it.

“Don't die,” Kendall said. “Please, don't die.”

She broke away and disappeared inside the restaurant. As the door closed, Julian heard the simmer of conversation and then silence. He stood there, as though Kendall would be right back, staring at the ghost-gray light, until Eddie came out and said it was time to go.

1944

A
t Lovewood College, the students and faculty followed the news on the radio and in the papers of the fighting in the Pacific, North Africa, Italy, and the landings at Normandy, but on campus little changed except that three-quarters of the classes were women and all of the men had been classified 4-F by their draft boards. When Theodor wasn't teaching, he was writing his final volume on the Enlightenment, his faith in the restorative powers of reason undiminished by the pictures of the dead and wounded in the magazines and a letter from Germany informing him that his second cousin had died at Dachau. Elana detested Theodor's blindness and envied his optimism. She considered leaving him, as she had in Berlin, but she had nowhere to go, and however desolate their marriage was, she told herself, her husband had rescued her from the orphanage, and abandoning Theodor would condemn him to the same emptiness that Elana had spent her life trying to fill.

Tending to the farm families helped her feel useful and distracted her from worrying about Julian overseas, particularly because Garland accompanied her. Garland no longer had the time for picnicking, though. Mayor Scales kept sending out surveyors to check and recheck the lines that separated his property from Garland's and inundated her with offers to buy her land; the dean of students and the chair of the Education Department had gone to fly with the Tuskegee Airmen; and Garland had to assume their workload, including teaching a course on instructional techniques. Instead of the picnics, she invited Elana for dinner every Wednesday and Sunday. They ate in Garland's formal dining room, then had coffee and a ruby port in the parlor, where Garland, a zealous creature of habit, sat in the center of the yellow-and-white poppy-print couch and wasn't comfortable unless Elana was across from her in the cane-backed recliner.

On this Sunday, after Garland guzzled her port, she handed a book to Elana. On the dust jacket was a black-and-white photograph of a Negro man in a blood-spattered undershirt being led out of a tenement by a white policeman. The title was
City of Tears, City of Flames
, and the book traced the story of last summer's riot in Harlem. Kendall had taken the photographs; Simon Foxe had written the text.

“Are you still upset about it?” Elana asked.

Elana returned the book to Garland, who secured it between brass lion-head bookends on the wicker table next to the couch. The slender volume beside it was
Double Lives
, Kendall's first book, a long essay accompanied by photographs of girls and women in Harlem. One evening, while Elana had paged through it, Garland had commented that Kendall had made her subjects appear pathetic—“which Negroes do not need.” Elana had found the pictures beautiful and haunting. But then, as Kendall had written about herself, Elana was also aware of a life that she lived each day and another subterranean life of despair that Elana let no one see.

Garland said, “I didn't raise my daughter to attend riots or run around France with Germans shooting at her.”

“Kendall's very brave.”

Garland treated herself and Elana to more port. “Brave? That girl has the brains of a boiled turnip.” Garland emptied her glass in two gulps. “Have you heard from your son?”

“Not since he got to England. Julian told me that because he's with the Office of Strategic Services, I'd only hear about him if he died.”

Elana wasn't offended that Garland never spoke of Julian in relation to Kendall. Nothing Kendall did seemed to please her mother—though Garland displayed her books prominently enough—so how could she approve of her keeping company with a white, Jewish ex-bootlegger? On his visit before going to England, Julian had struck his mother as wistful. When she'd asked him about Kendall, he'd said that she was fine, but Elana knew something was wrong.

Garland said, “You're welcome to take the leftover roast to the professor.”

“Theodor can get his own dinner.”

“What's he eat when you're here?”

“His dirty socks, for all I care.” Elana drank the syrupy wine. “I do enough cooking and cleaning for him.”

“That's how it goes with husbands. They tangle you up with everything they want and you start asking yourself what they're good for.” Garland set her glass on the table. “My husband, Robert, used to like to have himself a five-course meal and climb on top of me. When he got done, I felt like I'd been spinning upside down on a Ferris wheel.”

Elana giggled drunkenly. Theodor hadn't touched her in bed for three years, which was just as well, since it was a challenge for her to stay awake until he finished.

“My daddy would say, ‘Baby girl, don't let no man ride you 'round the clock like no hobby horse. Waste of your time.' But Daddy, he loved his Kenni-Ann. Loved her like every girl deserve to be loved and few is. And I'll be damned if I know where Daddy thought his granddaughter came from.” She laughed bitterly. “Sears, Roebuck?”

Garland rested her head on the back of the couch, and soon she was snoring. These dinners often concluded with Garland rambling about her father or daughter and drinking herself to sleep. Elana slipped off Garland's shoes, swung her legs onto the couch, and arranged a pillow under her head. The next time Elana saw her, Garland wouldn't mention dozing off. She was too proud. And sad. That was their strongest connection. Their sadness.

Elana planted a kiss on her forehead and went home.

1945

T
hat autumn, with the war over, Julian made it back to South Orange right before Eddie married Fiona at Our Lady of Sorrows. Eddie had fought with the Ninety-Sixth Infantry Division at Okinawa, where so many corpses lay in the mud, it was as though a plague had swept over the island. Julian was relieved that Eddie didn't ask him about his OSS missions, and Eddie said nothing about his war until he was in church with Julian beside him as his best man and Fiona coming down the aisle in a cloud of white lace that had Julian imagining Kendall walking toward him in the same dress. Glancing back at Jesus on the cross, Eddie said, “Ya gotta love the Catholics. They don't bullshit people about what's in store for 'em.”

The next day, Eddie and Fiona sailed to Ireland, and Julian ate lunch with Abe at the Weequahic Diner.

“You look good,” Abe said.

Julian cut into his hot turkey sandwich. “You used to be a better liar.”

Julian had lost weight and had bags under his eyes. President Truman was about to officially KO the Office of Strategic Services, so Wild Bill, now a major general and enraged at the Nazis for torturing and executing his agents, wrangled himself a position as an assistant to the chief prosecutor for the war-crimes trials in Nuremberg. The lawyers needed translators, and Wild Bill asked Julian to help with the interrogations. Julian was already in Germany assisting with the denazification program by translating official German documents, and he had accepted the assignment because he was in no shape to go home. He couldn't stop dreaming about that patrol in the Ardennes and the barn where Willy swung from the rafters like one of the Flying Wallendas and boasted that someday he'd be in the Olympics. Julian would've liked to tell Kendall about the sad-eyed faces that accused him as he struggled to sleep, but the last photographs of hers that he'd seen in
Look
were from Italy. So he moved into the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg and helped prosecutors interrogate Nazis in a monk's cell of a room in the Palace of Justice. He might have stayed in Nuremberg straight through the trials had he not been at an interview with an SS general who oversaw squads that murdered civilians and American POWs. The general denied any involvement, claiming that his name was used on the orders as a formality. Julian responded by slamming the prick's head against a wall. The concussion put the general in the hospital and earned Julian a vacation—at the insistence of Wild Bill, who said that he didn't want these shitbirds drooling on the witness stand.

“Your investments are in decent shape,” Abe said. “The sale went through on Minetta Street. Siano bought the building again.”

Julian dipped a wedge of turkey into the gravy and ate it. “I'm going back to Nuremberg. Could you take care of things awhile longer?”

“Yeah.”

Julian put down his fork. He had no appetite.

“How your folks doing?” Abe asked.

“Good. I spoke to my mother this morning, and I'm flying down in ten days.”

“Kendall?”

“No Kendall.”

Outside on Elizabeth Avenue, Abe put his hands on Julian's shoulders. “It's okay by me if you flush every Nazi down the shitter. But when you're done, find a way to live,
fershtay
?”

“I understand, Abie.”

“Remember—a way to live.”

A week later, Julian was drinking himself to sleep when the phone rang in his apartment, and the long-distance operator asked if he'd accept the charges from his father. Theodor had never called him. Julian was suddenly sober, and nervous.

Theodor said, “
Mutter ist krank
.”

“How sick is she?”

“
Sehr krank
.”

Very sick wasn't much of a diagnosis. “Is Mother in the hospital?”

“
Nein
,
sie ist mit Präsident Wakefield
.”

“Has a doctor seen her?”

“Julian,
schnell kommen
.”

“I'll take the first flight out.”

“
Gut
,
gut
,” his father said.

When the taxi dropped Julian at Garland's house, he expected to find his mother dying in one of the bedrooms, but she was sitting at a cast-iron table on the veranda with her long blond hair brushed out and a shawl over her shoulders, enjoying the warm, late-morning breeze and squeezing a lemon wheel into a cup of tea. He bent and put his arms around her, and she held on to him until she began coughing. It was a deep, rasping cough, and Julian stood there, feeling helpless, until the coughing subsided. His mother took a sip of tea, and Julian sat across from her.