A Master Plan for Rescue (27 page)

I bolted back into the ocean-y blueness of the church, ran down the aisle, skirting a pile of clothes spilling out of the poor box. When I reached the bowl of Holy Water—a bowl made of porcelain that truly did look unstable—I wrapped my hands around its edge and gave a sharp tug. The bowl tilted, and then crashed to the floor with a hollow sound that echoed through Good Shepherd.

As I burst through the door onto the street, I pictured my mother having to step over those sharp-edged pieces of porcelain scattered on the floor, her Mass shoes slipping on the oily water in which she had placed so much faith.

•   •   •

Each night,
when I brought the poor box coats we’d collected back to the basement, I sat on the floor with the furnace breathing fire behind me and counted them. Often, I’d take out the coats we’d collected the days before, the ones I’d stuffed between the rusted frames of the broken bicycles and old baby carriages, and count them together, see how close we were to the twenty-three. When I was finished, I’d imagine the refugees, try to picture what they were doing at the exact same moment.

When the count was six, I pictured them at the camp in Marseilles, all of them wearing clothes that were a little too small, all of them sitting at a long table set outside a barracks, none of them knowing that a submarine was on its way to rescue them. When the count was twelve, I pictured them in the supply truck trundling over unpaved roads toward the harbor, the clanging of bottles in their ears, the rumble of the engine under their feet. When the count was seventeen, I pictured them deep beneath the ocean, stretched out on bunks that hung from the curved sides of the U-boat. They were listening to
The Lone Ranger
and
Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy
, learning English the way Jakob had—although I was sure the sound of the radio waves wouldn’t carry through the water. Still, I liked thinking of the refugees listening to the same things I listened to. I liked thinking we would have this in common when they floated ashore at Coney Island.

The night the count was twenty, I’d stuffed the last of the coats between two bicycles with flattened tires and then heard footsteps coming down the stairs behind me.

“What are you up to down here?”

It was Uncle Glenn in his spying clothes, barely visible in the dim light of the basement.

I stood, the coats behind me.

“Are you going out on Civil Defense patrol?” I said.

“That would be what your aunt May believes.”

Uncle Glenn reached the bottom of the stairs and headed toward me.

I tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go. My legs were pressed up against the hard rim of a flattened bicycle tire.

Uncle Glenn came closer, near enough for me to see the silver chain of his Civil Defense whistle disappearing into the neck of his new black overcoat. And then he kept going, past me to a teepee of ski poles leaning against the wall. He reached behind them and took out a long, narrow case.

“I sometimes find it convenient to keep my pool cue down here.”

He hefted the case, then turned and came back to where I was standing, pressed up against the rusted bicycles.

“You still didn’t say what you were doing down here.”

I pointed to the Radio Flyer.

Uncle Glenn glanced at the wagon. “
Aluminum for National Defense
.” He read the sign on the side. “Just doing your part for the war effort.”

The furnace clicked on, sounding as if something inside had caught on fire. It was keeping me from hearing his undertone.

Uncle Glenn lifted his foot, placed the front of his shoe on the wheel of the Radio Flyer. He nudged the wagon back and forth a few times.

“I see you and that small kid out with that wagon all the time.”

I felt the twenty coats behind me like living things.

“Just doing our part for the war effort,” I repeated.

Uncle Glenn pushed the Radio Flyer back and forth several more times.

“That’s it?”

My hand found its way into the pocket that held my father’s gun.

“That’s it.”

We stared at each other. Him, with the front of his shoe on the Radio Flyer’s wheel. Me, with my hand on my father’s gun and the twenty coats behind me. I think in some part of my brain, I believed that those twenty poor box coats were the refugees, and that I was standing guard over them. I don’t know what would have happened if he had taken a step forward, reached around me and yanked one of those coats from between the rusted bicycles.

Uncle Glenn lifted his foot off the Radio Flyer’s wheel.

“Don’t tell Aunt May you saw me.”

“I won’t.”

The next day, after Albie and I had stolen the twenty-third coat from St. Ignatius, I told him that things would go more smoothly when the refugees landed if we buried the coats at Coney Island.

•   •   •

The day we went
to bury the coats was gray and drizzly. I’d divided them between the Radio Flyer and an old baby carriage, and even then, no matter how hard I pressed on them, woolen sleeves kept trailing out the sides, as if the coats were trying to escape. I hid two of Mr. Puccini’s snow shovels in the bottom of the wagon, and thinking that the sand might be damp, I emptied out some burlap bags of dirt I’d found in the basement and stuffed those in there as well.

Albie and I had to make two trips down the stairs to the subway to get the wagon and the baby carriage to the platform. While we were carrying down the carriage, I asked Albie if he thought the coats we’d left at the top of the steps would be okay, if he thought anybody would take them.

He squinted at me across a corduroy jacket. “Who except us would want to steal poor box coats?”

We sat in the crowded subway car, hanging onto the baby carriage and the Radio Flyer, both of them overflowing with old coats, and nobody looked at us twice. People had begun collecting clothes for European refugees by then, and I supposed everybody on the subway believed Albie and I were just kids helping with the war effort.

It was more drizzly out at Coney Island. We rumbled the Radio Flyer and the baby carriage over the planks of the boardwalk, past old couples bundled up in so many layers they looked stuffed, couples walking with their hands clasped together, as if afraid one of them might disappear in the mist.

We chose a spot beneath the boardwalk directly below the Parachute Jump—closed today because of the bad weather. To help us find it in the dark, Albie carved a Star of David into one of the wooden pilings. He used a pearl-handled pocketknife that was as good as the flying cap.

“This is Mordy’s, too,” he told me.

When he’d finished the carving, I flattened my palm over it, read it like Braille.

“Perfect,” I said.

Then we started digging.

It took much longer to dig a hole in the sand deep enough for twenty-three coats than I’d imagined. Sand slid back into the hole nearly as fast as we shoveled it out, and Mr. Puccini’s snow shovels were big and unwieldy. The day was cold and damp, but before long, we were so warm, we’d thrown our own coats onto the sand.

It was a quiet day. Only the sound of the ocean breaking on the shore, and the footsteps of the old couples passing overhead, and the occasional seagull laughing in the rain. And over it all, our snow shovels biting into the sand with a soft grinding.

We lined the hole with the burlap bags, then dumped in the coats. I topped them with another bag before I shoveled the sand back in, flattening it with the backs of Mr. Puccini’s shovels. The sky was a much darker gray when we’d finished.

We carried the Radio Flyer and the baby carriage up to the boardwalk, where the wind was whipping the cables of the Parachute Jump, clanging them against its steel base. I was anxious to get back on the subway, to get the wagon and the baby carriage back into the basement before anyone noticed they were missing. But Albie was leaning against the railing, looking out at the dull gray sea.

“Where do you think they are right now?” he said.

The waves were choppy, as if a storm was brewing.

“Coming toward us,” I told him.

Then I said something about the rain and dinner, and we headed toward the subway.

•   •   •

When Albie and I came
out of the subway on Dyckman Street, the sky was black and the rain had turned to sleet.

“Do you want help with this?” Albie held up the handle of the Radio Flyer.

“It’s not far,” I told him.

I was partway up the block when I saw Jakob leaning against the stoop of our building. I knew it was him despite the darkness and despite my eyes. Knew it from the way he was huddled into himself, taking up so little space. Knew it from the way he was doing the one thing to guarantee Uncle Glenn would notice him the instant he stepped outside, the instant he stepped through the door that was right above Jakob’s head—which, judging by the dark, would happen any second.

I began running up the block—even as I was asking myself why, why I was so worried that my uncle would discover me talking to Jakob—tilting the baby carriage crazily, yanking the Radio Flyer off its front wheels.

“How long have you been here?” I asked him.

The shoulders of Jakob’s jacket were soaked black and his hair hung wet in his eyes.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Did you ring my bell?”

He nodded.

“My mother doesn’t answer it.” I glanced up at the door. “Why did you come?”

“You have not been down to see me.”

“We’ve been busy, collecting coats.”

“You have them all?”

I nodded.

“Good. Because they will arrive in three days.”

I counted in my head. “Wednesday.”

“They will come ashore not long after it turns dark.”

I pictured it—the boats on the beach, my father stepping out of the darkroom.

There was a sharp bang. The door to our building had been flung open, and someone dressed all in black hurried out. It was Mr. Carbone from 2F, running down the stairs with a newspaper over his head.

I exhaled.

“Is that it?”

“Well,” Jakob said, “I suppose there is one thing you should know.”

“Yes?” I was already pushing the baby carriage toward the basement stairs.

“The refugees, one of them is deaf.”

T
his is the story I didn’t know the afternoon I followed Rose LoPinto home from P.S. 52 with the intention of asking her to come to Coney Island and translate for the deaf refugee. The story Rose wouldn’t tell me until much later, until it was almost too late.

The first English word Rose’s father learned on his arrival from Sicily as a ten-year-old boy was
wop
. The second was
dago
. And the third was
slow
, which was what the teacher called him when he couldn’t learn to read any of the textbooks in the farm town of Newburgh, New York. After a year, Anthony LoPinto traded his desk in the schoolhouse for an upturned bucket in the blood-soaked yard of the local butcher, a man named Colson Gammon, who had once cut up a whole hog while blindfolded.

Anthony LoPinto might have been bad with a book, but he was good with a knife. Gammon claimed the boy possessed an ability for it, as if he could see the tendons and muscles of the animal inside his head. “That slow wop kid?” the other men laughed.

“You have to watch him,” Gammon told them. “He’ll stand in front of a side of beef, the thing hanging there twice his size, staring at it like he’s seeing through the hide to each cut. Haunch, flank, shoulder. Then when he’s got it all pictured inside his head, he’ll take the knife and start cutting. Never makes a wrong move.”

The men didn’t believe Gammon. They came to the blood-soaked yard with the trickiest cutting jobs. Goats and spring lambs. Even a hare. They strung each up on the hook and sat on the upturned buckets as if at a show, waiting for the slow wop kid to butcher the meat. Whatever they brought, he could always do it.

Anthony’s ability with a knife eventually earned him enough money to open his own butcher shop in Yonkers, away from the town that knew him as the slow wop kid. Enough to marry. Lucia, a girl just arrived from his hometown in Sicily, a girl with hair black as a winter’s night and almond-shaped eyes of such an impossible darkness, you were in danger of falling into them.

Rose would tell me that as a child she’d spend hours staring into her mother’s eyes, that her mother was the kind of person who’d sit quietly still while you did such a thing.

But Lucia was shy in a way even her beauty couldn’t compensate for. In the evenings, Anthony sat with his new wife practicing the simple English phrases she would need to buy food or talk to the neighbors. But Lucia never used those phrases. She was too shy to set foot in a shop that contained even one person she did not already know, too shy to answer the women who hailed her from their apartment windows as she clothespinned Anthony’s shirts to the line outside her own.

After Rose was born, Anthony hoped the little girl would bring enough English into the apartment to entice her mother to learn it. But as his daughter grew older—certainly old enough to begin talking, he thought—she remained as quiet as her mother.

One evening, Anthony arrived home from the butcher shop earlier than usual and heard Lucia’s voice coming from the kitchen. His wife was speaking in a rush of Sicilian, more words strung together than he’d heard her say in all the years he’d known her, and he wondered who she was talking with. He listened, but the only reply was the knocking of the wooden bobbin Rose liked to play with against the floor.

Lucia was talking about the elementary school she’d attended in Sicily. How they always seemed to be studying Garibaldi, but to this day, she knew very little about Garibaldi because she’d always been thinking about the boy who’d left to go to America. Sometimes, she told her daughter, she’d pretend the dust on her shoes—dust that had come from the lemon grove outside the window—was the same dust he walked on, dust that had seen the feet of wild Indians and buffalo.

Anthony came around the corner, thinking how disappointed his wife must have been to arrive in New York, a place that was nothing like the Wild West. Lucia was still talking, the Sicilian pouring out of her mouth so effortlessly, he might not have recognized her if she hadn’t been standing in her own kitchen. Rose sat on the floor with the wooden bobbin, not listening to anything her mother was saying. No, Anthony thought as he watched his daughter roll the bobbin around her shoes. Rose wasn’t
hearing
anything her mother was saying. Which, he realized, was what was giving his wife the courage to keep talking.

I always believed, Rose would tell me later, that this was the day my father stopped loving my mother.

If I had known this story the gray-sky afternoon I followed Rose LoPinto’s camel-colored coat up Academy Street and onto Sherman Avenue, I might have known sooner how to convince her to help me. But all I knew then was that Rose could talk with her hands. I’d seen her do it once, with a boy on the playground at P.S. 52, the two of them speaking in that secret language that was like a code you kept inside your head. A code that seemed better than anything you could send away for from the radio.

Rose’s building was nicer than ours. The mailboxes had locks that worked, and there was a glass door between me and the stairs to the apartments. I pressed the button next to the piece of cardboard that said
LoPinto
, and after a moment, Rose’s voice came out of the little holes in the wall.

“I need to ask you something,” I shouted at the wall.

I had an image of Rose standing on a chair so the microphone box at her throat would be level with the speaker.

“Jack?”

“It’s important,” I shouted. “And secret.”

The glass door buzzed and I lunged for it.

I ran up the steps to Rose’s apartment and knocked on the door. Rose opened it and stood there looking at me.

I realized then that I’d never seen her from straight on. I was always sitting next to her, looking at her from the side. She was wearing a plaid wool jumper that day—a pattern I think was called black watch—and a white blouse, and I’d never noticed before how from straight on, her black curls exploded around the metal headband she wore to hold the RadioEar receiver. I might have stood in the hallway noticing that for a while.

“Is this something you have to come in and ask me?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

She led me into the living room and we sat together on a green sofa. Across from us, where other people might have hung a family portrait, were framed pictures of Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt.

“Those belong to my father,” she told me.

“Is anybody else here?” I asked her.

“Only my mother, but she’s in her bedroom. She won’t come out until you leave.”

“My mother’s like that now,” I told her.

“My mother’s always been like that.”

Rose sat and waited for me to say what I’d come here to say. I sat wishing I could tell her all about my father. But I didn’t have any experience telling secrets to girls, and I didn’t know how much you could trust them.

What I ended up telling her was that Albie Battaglia and I were helping a friend bring in some refugees, and that one was deaf, and that I needed her to come to the beach at Coney Island at night and translate everything I said into the secret language I knew she could speak with her hands.

It was the first time I’d said so many words in a row to Rose. The first time I’d said so many that had come from my own head and not from the lips of a teacher. And when I was finished talking, I sat on the green sofa all out of breath, as if I’d been running.

“Why are they coming into Coney Island?” she asked. “And why at night?”

From the far wall, the unblinking eyes of Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt bore into me.

“It’s possible they don’t have visas.”

“So, they’re not supposed to be here?”

“They
were
supposed to be here. Until the Allies invaded North Africa.”

Rose’s dark eyes flicked across the room, and for the first time I noticed the blue star hanging in her front window. I tried to remember if she had a brother.

“You and Albie Battaglia are sneaking in Jewish refugees and you want me to help you?”

“Only with the deaf one.”

She folded her hands in her black watch lap and shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Do you know where my father is?”

“At work?”

“North Africa.”

I glanced back at the star in the window. “Your
father’s
in the army?”

She nodded. “So I can’t be doing anything treasonous.”

“It’s only talking with your hands.”

“It’s called signing.”

“Signing,” I repeated. “How can that be treasonous?”

“Is what you’re doing illegal?”

“Your part won’t be.”

Rose shook her head again, her dark eyes glued to that blue star.

“It’ll be dark,” I told her. “We might lose the deaf refugee on the beach.”

“I can’t,” she said. “Not as long as my father is in North Africa.”

•   •   •

I could have taken Rose
at her word, could have figured we’d hang onto the deaf refugee by the sleeve of the poor box coat, make gestures in the dark. But by then, I’d looked straight at Rose for too long, said too many words to her that had been born inside my own head. By then, I wanted her on that beach.

The following afternoon, I ran after Rose’s camel-colored coat as it headed up Academy Street and asked her to come with me to Bickman’s Fountain.

“An ice cream soda isn’t going to change my mind,” she told me.

“Then no danger in coming.”

I had no actual plan, no words ready to convince her. But I believed I had a better chance away from the twin stares of Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Roosevelt.

Bickman’s Fountain was bright and sugary. Fluorescent light bounced off the chrome edges of the stools, and the air was full of the scent of ice cream, a scent so sweet it made your skin feel sticky. It was a cold day for ice cream. The only person inside Bickman’s—except Mr. Bickman scowling behind the counter—was an old man in a hat eating a chocolate sundae.

Rose sat in one of the pistachio-colored booths and unbuttoned her coat. When I asked her what she wanted, she told me a glass of water.

“It’s my treat,” I told her. I’d taken thirty-five cents out of my mother’s wallet that morning.

“Just a glass of water,” she repeated.

“Ice cream doesn’t mean you’ll come to Coney Island,” I said.

“I know.” Rose slipped off her coat. “I’m just not eating any sugar.”

I pointed to the wall behind the counter where Mr. Bickman had taped up pictures of ice cream sodas and sundaes. “You don’t have to use your ration coupons here.”

“I know that, too.” Rose pulled a napkin out of the dispenser and began folding it into perfect squares.

I wanted to ask her for more explanation, because nobody came to Bickman’s and ordered water, but there was something about the way she was folding that napkin that stopped me.

I went to the counter and got a black-and-white for myself and a glass of water for Rose. In the time I’d been away, she’d folded three more napkins into perfect squares.

“Do you want a sip?” I asked her. “Since I’m the one who ordered it.”

“No, thank you.”

I sucked on the straw. The black-and-white was cold and sweet and tasted oddly of Fascism.

“Do you think I could have the money you would have spent on my soda?” Rose asked.

It was such a startling request, I couldn’t think to do anything except reach into my pocket and empty all the change there onto the table between us. The coins made a metallic racket, the dimes twirling around on their edges before flattening and going silent.

Rose glanced at the wall with the pictures of ice cream sodas and sundaes, and—I now realized—how much they cost. She slid a dime over to her side of the table.

“What would you have gotten?” I asked her.

She nodded at my half-empty glass. I smiled around my straw.

She opened her schoolbag and took out a
My First War Bond
book. It was exactly like mine, except that hers was nearly full instead of entirely empty. She slipped my dime into one of the half-moons.

I pointed to the war bond book. “Is that your first one?”

“Fourth,” she said. Then, “No, fifth.”

I looked at the perfectly folded napkins in front of her. Six of them now.

“And when exactly did you stop eating sugar?”

She took a small sip of water.

“When my father got his orders.”

It came to me in a sugary rush along with my black-and-white. And why wouldn’t it? It was the kind of thinking that made perfect sense to me. Rose believed that if she didn’t eat sugar, if she filled enough
My First War Bond
books, her father would come home safe from the war.

I looked at her across the scattered coins.

“You know,” I said, “what your father is doing in North Africa isn’t any different from what Albie and I are doing.”

“It’s entirely different.” She drank a swallow of water as if it was something she actually wanted.

“Your father is fighting the people who are killing Jews.”

“How do you know that?”

“How do I know the Nazis are killing Jews?”

She nodded.