Invisible City (5 page)

“Um … my mom was,” I say.

“Okay, well, that means you’re Jewish. As you know. Good. They can usually tell.”

She hangs up. They can tell?

I find Iris and tell her I’m taking another shift.

“On a Friday?”

“I’m going to Borough Park.”

“Really?” Iris knows that my mom grew up in Borough Park. She’s offered to go there with me and walk around, just to see. But that always felt too much like a search. I am not searching for my mother. Not actively, anyway.

“You want company?” she asks.

“I’m good,” I say.

Iris, who is loose and Friday-drunk, laughs. “I love you, Rebekah Roberts.” She turns to Brice, who is standing at attention behind her stool. “Rebekah Roberts is my fucking hero.” She hugs me.

“I’ll text you,” I say.

“Be safe,” she says. “And don’t forget poor Tony.”

Tony is at the other end of the bar, kneeling with a clipboard in front of a mini fridge. I wave and he smiles. He finishes whatever he’s doing, then comes over.

“Scoop’s got a scoop?” he says.

The night we met I told him I worked for the
Trib
and he teased me, named me Scoop. I rolled my eyes, enjoying the attention, but cringing at the truth: I’ve never gotten a scoop. Not at the
Trib,
at least. There are reasons for this. Scoops, for the most part, come from sources, and sources come from being in the same place for more than a couple hours. As a stringer, my job is to go where I’m told, get some information, repeat. I’m in a different borough every day—one day a murder on Staten Island, one day a press conference in Midtown, one day an old woman dead in a broken elevator in Brownsville—and nobody knows my name or face until I show up. Every day I have to ingratiate myself to a whole new group of people. Different ages, different languages, different values and occupations and prejudices and levels of intoxication or hostility or shame.

“I’m going to Borough Park,” I say.

“Yeah? What’s the scoop?”

“Dead lady in a crane.” I feel strong when I shock people—ooh, look how
hard
she is—but Tony’s face tells me what I already know, which is that my characterization was crass. “Sorry,” I say. “I was at this scene today. They found a woman, a naked woman, in a scrap pile. They had to lift her out with a crane.”

“And you watched that?”

I nod. “She looked cold.”

Tony shakes his head. I take a gulp from the pint, thinking, I could use a little buzz as I head into the neighborhood where my mother was born. The neighborhood that has haunted my imagination for my entire life.

“They don’t know who she is yet,” I say. “Well, we don’t, the paper. But there’s an address for the company that owns the yard. I’m going there, to see if they have any information.”

“By yourself?”

I nod and finish the beer. Tony seems about to say something, but stops himself. I appreciate his concern almost as much as his self-control. I don’t want to stiffen up with him again, but I can’t seem to help it—sometimes it just takes one wrong word.

“They’ll probably send a photographer,” I say. “Plus, Borough Park is really safe. Come on, how much Jewish street crime do you read about?”

“Just because you don’t read about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”

I smile. “True.”

He seems pleased to have bested me, but not too pleased. He’s very hard not to like.

“I’m sorry I have to bail,” I say.

“Me, too,” he says.

“What are you doing tomorrow night? Do you have to work?”

“I don’t.”

“Wanna have drinks near me?” I ask, bracing myself, just in case he says no. I can stand angry brothers and haughty teenagers telling me to fuck off when I try to interview them for a story, but in my personal life I do not take rejection well. Another thing I learned in therapy was that each rejection “brings up”
the
rejection, and all of a sudden I’m just an orphan. But I try not to think about it that way.

“I could be into that,” he says.

“I’ll call you,” I say. I step up on the footrail along the bottom of the bar and lean in. “I’m sorry I was shitty,” I say again.

Tony smiles. He has really long, almost feminine eyelashes and cloudy-day blue eyes.

“Stand me up and I’ll go Brooklyn on your ass,” he says.

I lean in closer and kiss him, feeling wet and a little drunk.

“Maybe you’ll go Brooklyn on me anyway,” I say.

Oh Rebekah, she’s so hard.

CHAPTER THREE

I got my job at the
Trib
five weeks after I moved to New York City. My dad gave me three thousand dollars for graduation. Enough to put down my half of our first month’s rent and security deposit, buy a monthly MetroCard, and float me for a little less than a month. I wanted to do daily newspaper work. I’d listened to my professors and read various memoirs of successful journalists and they all espoused the virtues of the daily grind. They also recommended staying away from major markets, like New York City, where competition is fierce—for jobs and for stories. But New York City was nonnegotiable. New York City was the goal. I decided I could temp if I didn’t get a job right away. Plus, Iris was going. And yes, partly, it was about my mom. Being close feels like forward movement.

I’m not actively trying to find her; I’ve gone over the ways that would turn out in my head many times and each time the conclusion, even if I find her, is sadness. She and my dad never got married, and if she was smart, which my dad says she was, she probably never told anyone she’d had a child in that lost year when she ran off with a Methodist from Orlando. I used to feel nothing but hurt and hate for her. I hated that what she’d done was even possible. Then I got pregnant my freshman year at college and I experienced what it felt like to know that I just couldn’t take care of a child. I wasn’t in love—or rather, I was in love, but he wasn’t—and while I imagine that my mom’s trepidation probably began as soon as she found out she was pregnant, having my father there with her, ecstatic, proposing marriage, ready to be a family, postponed the realization that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—shed everything she’d been bred to believe her life was about. I had an abortion at ten weeks. I think it was the right thing to do.

So New York City it was. On my fourth day in town, I interviewed for, and got, a position at
The New York Star.
Official title: Reporter. It was magical. Iris and I invited everyone we could think of to our apartment to celebrate. We drank and smoked weed and then pranced through the streets like we owned them. Which we kind of did. I fell completely in love with New York that night. Who was I? Some motherless white chick from Florida, and yet every sidewalk and storefront and street corner and subway car was
mine.

Then the
Star
folded. Apparently, New York City can sustain five major daily publications, but not six. The next week I interviewed at the
Staten Island Advance
and
The Jersey Journal,
but they were just “informational interviews,” as there were no actual openings. I found a weekly paper in Brooklyn that needed writers, but their “freelancer guidelines” were seven single-spaced pages long, and they only paid twenty-five dollars per article. Iris had started buying my food when I got an e-mail from a reporter at the
Queens Chronicle,
where I’d sent my résumé. The reporter said that they weren’t hiring, but that I might contact his buddy Mike Rothchild at the
New York Tribune.
“They’re always looking for stringers,” he said in the e-mail. “Feel free to use my name.” I did, and two days later I was walking into one of those black glass Midtown high-rises with half a dozen revolving doors to the lobby. The reception desk called up for Mike, and I waited until someone came to fetch me and take me upstairs.

My first impression of the newsroom was that the ceilings were low. The entire floor was open, a maze of cubicles and outdated desktop computers. Windows all around but nothing beyond the next glass building to see. My escort tapped Mike on the shoulder, motioned to me, and then walked away. Mike took me into an office that did not belong to him, looked at my résumé, and asked two questions: when can you start and do you have a car? Now, and yes, I said. He nodded and explained my role. We’ll try you out three days a week, he said. Call in at nine for a ten-to-six shift. He gave me the phone number of the city desk, where I was to report, and told me to go to the fifteenth floor to get an ID made. And just like that, I became a New York City tabloid reporter. I get $150 a day.

I get off the D train at Fifty-fifth Street and New Utrecht Avenue just after seven. Every sign is in Hebrew and there isn’t a soul on the street. Streetlights glow weak orange over the stores. It doesn’t exactly make sense, but I kind of feel like I’ve been transported to a 1930s Polish village. There is a milliner, a kosher meat market, a bakery, a florist, a tailor, a cobbler. There is a store for purchasing gravestones. There is a women’s clothing store with the windows iced over as if it were a porn shop. Fifty-five ten is a brick building with three floors. The ground floor appears to be a commercial space of some kind, with racks of clothing and shelves of products inside. A small, hand-lettered sign leaning against the inside of the window says
Boro Park Mommies.
I try the front door, but it is locked. The buzzer panel has three buttons, all unmarked. I step back and make sure I’m in the right place. Fifty-five ten New Utrecht Avenue. I call Cathy.

“I’m here,” I say. “It looks like it’s some kind of shop. Is there an apartment number or something?”

“Nope, just 5510 New Utrecht Avenue, LLC.”

“Okay,” I say. “There’s
nobody
on the streets.”

“Shit,” says Cathy. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. It’s fucking Sabbath.”

“Oh, right,” I say.

“I thought you were Jewish?”

“I am,” I say. I don’t tell her that I’ve never once observed the Sabbath.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have remembered that. You’re gonna have a hard time getting anybody.”

“Well,” I say, “I’ll buzz.”

“Great.” She hangs up.

I buzz the top buzzer. Nothing. Again. Then the other two. Nothing. I buzz again. I wait. I buzz again. I buzz for five minutes. If there’s anybody up there, they are either incredibly stoic, or deaf.

I call Cathy and tell her no one is answering. She says to hang around and see if anybody goes in or out. I walk up the block and across the street, then take shelter in the heated vestibule of a Citibank. While I wait, I pull out my phone and Google “Smith Street Scrap Yard and Boro Park Mommies.” The fifth link is to an article from 2011 on a Web site called YiddishReader.com: “Mendelssohns donate space, funds to new mothers.” That’s it. Mendelssohn. The boy said his name was Yakov Mendelssohn. According to the article, the family founded an organization that provides assistance to new mothers, and clothing and supplies for families in need. Aron Mendelssohn is quoted as saying, “My wife, Rivka, and I visited a similar organization in Jerusalem and we strongly believe in the importance of nurturing Jewish children through assisting their mothers.”

Rivka. Rivka is the Hebrew version of Rebekah. I am named for my mother’s sister Rivka. According to my father, my mother had—has (I vacillate between referring to her in the past and present tense)—four sisters and three brothers. Rivka, the second oldest, died of an allergic attack when she was eleven. The girls were upstate, at a camp where Jewish families from Brooklyn sent their children. Rivka and my mother, who was nine, were walking back from a pond where they’d gone to try fishing. They were swinging their homemade poles and Rivka managed to smack open some kind of hive. My mother was a few steps ahead and escaped the worst, but the bees or wasps or whatever they were attacked Rivka. And she was allergic. She fell there, as little Aviva ran for help. When my mother came back, Rivka’s eyes were swollen shut and she was gasping for breath. She died at the hospital.

I scroll through the search results for something else on the family, but don’t find anything. I look up and see a man walk quickly to the door of 5510, open it, and slip inside. Fuck. I call Cathy to tell her the boy’s last name was Mendelssohn.

“Great,” says Cathy. “The library got a hit on the LLC that owns the building. Aron Mendelssohn?”

“That could be the father,” I say. “I found an article about him and his wife creating a charity that seems like it’s based here. And I remembered that the little boy said his name was Yakov Mendelssohn.”

“Okay. Let me see if the library can confirm that Aron Mendelssohn actually owns the yard. In the meantime, let’s get to his house. It’s not far from where you are. If he
does
own the yard, he’ll know what’s going on with the dead body on the property. He might be our best chance of ID’ing the victim, because the cops aren’t giving anything out.”

“Right. Somebody went in the office. I’ll wait and see if he comes out.”

She gives me the Mendelssohn home address and I walk across the street to 5510. I’m not there two minutes when the man appears. He’s rushing, and lets the door slam behind him.

“Sir,” I say, skipping to catch him. “Excuse me, sir?”

He keeps walking a moment, then turns toward me. We make eye contact briefly. It’s the tall man from the gas station.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I say quickly. “I’m a reporter from the
Tribune.
I was at the scrap yard earlier today and I just wanted to ask you a couple quick questions. Your family owns the yard, right?”

The man says nothing.

“Sir?”

He shakes his head and begins walking away.

“Mr. Mendelssohn, wait.…”

That gets his attention. He stops and turns again.

“You
don’t
own the yard? I’m just trying to…”

“I have no information.”

“Um, can I just confirm … Is your name Aron Mendelssohn?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, turning, “I must get home.”

“Sir,” I call, but he’s walking away. I go out on a limb. “Mr. Mendelssohn, I spoke with your son.…”