Next to Love (24 page)

“Nuts!” Jack says. “That’s what the guy tells the Kraut when he says surrender or die. Nuts!” he shouts to the sky, and Al reaches over and tousles his head. It releases the strangely moving scent children carry in from play, a blend of grass and fresh air and sweat too young to go sour.

“And then Rodriguez gets it, but they can’t carry him out because of the snow, so they hide him under a jeep and promise to come back for him. Only when they do, he’s dead.” He stops at the top of the steps and looks up at Al.

“Dad,” he says, and Al knows what is coming. “Did you ever kill anyone? In the war, I mean.”

“It’s different on a ship. You’re pretty far away.”

It is different on a ship. You do not see death close up, unless your ship is the one that takes the fish or the bomb, but you see death. A ship is not a free ride.

“Did you see guys die?” Jack’s voice still throbs with an undercurrent of excitement. He’ll take second best to killing. Nuts! the Americans shout in the face of slaughter.

Al stops on the small wooden back porch, searching for an answer, and suddenly he is a thousand miles to the east, standing on a deck in another world. The convoy is zigzagging through a calm summer night, with a moon thin as gauze rising on his right and a blush of pink hugging the horizon on his left, and he feels the strange peace that sometimes came over him at a crystalline sunset or silvery sunrise on a clement ocean, despite the knowledge of submarines beneath and bombers overhead. Then something in his peripheral vision makes him turn his head. He is just in time to see it. The next ship over cracks in half, the two parts slip into the sea, and hundreds of men go with them. It does not happen in the blink of an eye. He knows, because he keeps blinking in disbelief. But it happens in minutes. It is not the same as having a buddy die in your arms. It is not the same as the ghoulish sight of the men in lifeboats waving for help, who, when they came alongside, turned out not to be men waving for help but bodies frozen upright and rocked by the sea. But the speed of it, and the closeness, and the thought that maybe tomorrow or in three months or in two minutes still stalk him. He is not like Claude, who starts at the sound of a car backfiring, or Mac, whose eyes are as dead as those of all the men he has failed to keep alive, but as long as he lives, he will never forget the sight of that ship cracking open like an egg and spilling its men into the sea. They rescued some. Not enough.

“Yes,” he says to Jack.

“What’s it like?”

“Something I hope you never experience,” Al says, but he knows Jack does not agree. He is almost eight years old; he has just seen the fog lift, and the American bombers fly over, and the men of the 101st Airborne Division march out of the woods, filthy, decimated, wounded, but singing, sound off, one, two, sound off, three, four; and nothing is going to persuade him that all that isn’t more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

OCTOBER
1950

There is no reason to make a fuss about it, Millie insists. She forgot to ask him for money before they went to visit Grace, so Babe paid for lunch, and now she has to pay her back. It’s not exactly a crime. “The three of us are always borrowing and paying one another back.”

“That’s different,” he says.

“Why?”

He does not want to explain it to her. He loves her innocence. He is tired of his own paranoia, and his parents’ paranoia, and his grandparents’, and that of generations before them. For all he knows, that’s another reason he married her. Because she does not know what people say about Jews and money. Because in the playground of her childhood, no one tossed a penny on the cement and yelled Jew at the first one to bend for it. Because no one ever accused her of Jewing someone down. Why doesn’t anyone ever accuse his good Yankee neighbors of Protestanting someone down? I’ll tell you why. Because Yankees are frugal. Jews are money-grubbing. But if she hasn’t heard the rumor, he is not going to tell her. His silence is one of the secrets of their happy marriage, and it is happy. The dissension his parents and his uncle and Millie’s friends—he suspects, though she has never said—predicted has never surfaced.

He takes money from his pocket, comes up behind her at the sink, and tucks the bills into the top of her blouse. Her skin inside her bra is warm, and he lets his hand linger.

“Forget it,” he says.

But he cannot. He is still thinking about it the next morning in the shower. Months later, he continues to think about it. The idea is not original. Others are trying it. But nobody, as far as he knows, in Massachusetts. He can get in on the ground floor.

JANUARY
1951

“It was touch-and-go,” Millie tells Al that night. “At the last minute, Grace wanted to put one photograph back up.”

“Would that be so terrible?” he asks.

“Paintings go on walls. Photographs belong on tables.”

He is standing beside her drying dishes, and he snaps to attention and salutes. “Aye, aye, sir.”

Jack looks up from the kitchen table where he is doing his homework. He likes to see his dad salute. His dad says most people don’t do it right. They just put their hands next to their foreheads, all floppy, and think they’re saluting. But he taught Jack to do it properly.

“You know,” his dad says quietly, not quite a whisper, but almost, and Jack knows what that means. He pretends to go back to his spelling list, but he is listening. “It wouldn’t hurt to have one picture around. For …” Out of the corner of his eye, Jack sees his dad tip his head toward him.

“We’ve been through this,” his mom says, and Jack knows from the tone of her voice that that’s the end of that.

Only it isn’t, because as he’s getting into bed, he hears them talking again. Their voices float up through the big iron grate where the heat comes into the room. He lies down on his stomach to hear better.

“We ought to have some trace of him around,” his dad says. “It’s not right. If it makes me uncomfortable, I can imagine how Jack feels about it.”

“Jack doesn’t feel anything about it,” his mom says. “You’re the only father he knows.”

“Sure, and he’s my son, but still. The way things are now, it’s almost as if he’s more a presence in the house than if we had a picture of him around. Jack sees pictures at his grandparents’. He must wonder.”

“Oh, shoot.”

“I don’t want to argue about it.”

“No, all I meant was oh, shoot, I forgot to iron your new dress shirt.”

Jack hears her feet crossing the kitchen, then the squeak of the ironing board opening.

“You’re going to iron it at this hour?”

“I’m not about to let you walk into that bank in Boston tomorrow in one of your old shirts when you have a brand-new one with French cuffs.”

AL REFUSES TO SEE
it as a bad-luck omen. He does not believe in luck, at least the kind that has to do with jinxes and curses and primitive mumbo jumbo. He just doesn’t want to lose his confidence. He wants to walk into that bank in Boston with all flags flying. But as he pulls up at a traffic light on the road out of South Downs and recognizes King’s big gray Cadillac in front of him, the humiliation returns.

“You asked me, I would have told you not to go to King Gooding,” his uncle said afterward. “An anti-Semite of the first water.”

“You think the bankers in Boston aren’t anti-Semites?”

“In Boston, they’re not afraid you’re going to make a bundle on this meshugeneh idea and move in next door. Plus, you came home. His son didn’t. For the man, I got no sympathy. For his loss, my heart breaks. You got any idea what my sister would be like, you didn’t come home? Ach, I don’t like to think about it.”

His uncle was right. He never should have gone to King Gooding. He’d already had one go-round with him when he wanted to open the appliance store. But this is different. This will make money for the bank too. And the government says he has a right to the loan.

The G.I. Bill is a great idea. He’s in love with the goddamn G.I. Bill. It’s the people who administer it who screw things up. Look at the raw deal they gave Frank Hart. Naomi’s husband got himself accepted at a college, but the veterans’ counselor refused to sign off on it. He told Frank he would be better off going to trade school. No jobs for college-educated colored men, he told him. The guy takes night courses for two years to get into college—and how many guys, let alone colored guys, will do that?—then the VA counselor tells him, no deal, buddy, you belong in trade school. Just as King said, no deal, Baum, the government’s money is not for the likes of you.

KING GLANCES IN THE
rearview mirror and recognizes Al Baum in the car behind him. He can’t get away from the man. Last time he stopped at Grace’s to make sure Frank Hart was shoveling her snow and not just taking his money and saying he was shoveling her snow, Baum and his wife and that brood of theirs were there. Poor young Pete Swallow, to get mixed up with that. Then a couple of weeks later, Baum comes in with some cockamamie idea for a new business. Business! It sounded more like a Ponzi scheme, though no one, especially not Baum, is going to get rich on it. The idea makes the appliance store look like a sure thing. How many times does he have to say no before the man understands?

It has nothing to do with the fact that he’s a Yid. Hell, that’s one thing you can say for Yids: They know how to make money. But this is the most harebrained scheme he’s ever heard. Baum’s wife forgets to ask him for money one morning—and why isn’t she on an allowance, anyway?—and he comes up with some pie-in-the-sky plan to do away with cash.

A cardboard card, he explained, like the ones his uncle issues to get people to shop at Diamond’s. Only this card will be good at all the stores in town. All you have to do is have an account at First Farmers Bank, and you can go into any store in town—not just stores but restaurants and maybe even the movies—and hand them the card. Then the bank reimburses the merchant and collects payment from the customer, and everyone comes out ahead. The customer has convenience, the stores and restaurants do more business, and the bank gets a percentage of the transactions.

“Why not pool halls?” he asked.

“What?” Baum said.

“Why stop at stores and restaurants? Why not pool halls?”

But Baum just went on talking. He didn’t even get the joke.

King did not tell him how crazy the idea was. He just said it wasn’t right for First Farmers. Maybe a bigger bank, he suggested. Maybe one with a couple of branches in the state. That way people could use the cardboard card in the next town over. Before you know it, they’ll be using it all over the state. He could not resist having a little fun with him. But the Yid still didn’t get the joke. He really thought that people were going to stop using money and start running up bills for every little thing they bought.

THIRTEEN

Babe

JANUARY 1952

B
ABE STANDS IN THE WINDOW OF THE DARKENED LIVING ROOM
, staring out into the winter evening. The snow has stopped, and the plows have come through, but the front yard is a ghostly expanse of white. No footprint or animal track or fallen branch mars the icy loneliness. Overhead, light that started out thousands, millions, of years ago burns holes in the cloudless black sky. The inhuman beauty of it assaults her with her own insignificance. When the phone rings, she dashes for it.

“I hate to bother you,” Grace says, “especially on a night like this, but the babysitter just called. She has a cold, and her mother won’t let her go out. Could you stay with Amy for a few hours? I wouldn’t ask, but we’re supposed to have dinner with the Johnsons.” She drops her voice conspiratorially. “Morris is thinking of opening a practice here, and he has to sound out the other doctors. I’d say I’d drop Amy there, but it will be less disruptive if she sleeps in her own bed and can walk to school in the morning.”

Babe thinks it will also be less disruptive if Amy is not awakened by shouting in the night. She says she’ll be happy to drive over and stay with Amy for the evening.