Skating with the Statue of Liberty (5 page)

6

L
ate the following afternoon, Cousin Henri, Gustave, and his parents entered a small apartment. The rental agent, a brisk young blond woman wearing heavy makeup, waited in the doorway, jingling her keys. That morning, Jean-Paul and his mother and sister had gone off to stay with an elderly aunt of Jean-Paul's father in the Bronx. She had a big apartment, and she needed help with the housekeeping, she had written. It was a job for Aunt Geraldine and a place to live. But Gustave and his parents had been looking at apartments all day, with Cousin Henri coming along to translate, using a list given to them by HIAS. Now Cousin Henri leaned wearily against the wall, and Gustave's parents looked discouraged.

“This is the last one on the list,” Cousin Henri said. “What do you think?”

It was a single room with a rudimentary kitchen. An old sofa sagged next to the wall, and in the corner was a stained, bare mattress.

“It's furnished!” the rental agent announced cheerily. “It has steam heat! And hot water from seven a.m. to seven p.m.”

“Where are we now?” Maman asked Cousin Henri. “I'm all turned around.”

“West Ninety-First Street, in Manhattan.”

“Is it anywhere near the Grand Concourse, where Geraldine is staying?”

“No, I'm afraid not. The Bronx is much farther north. But you can get there by subway.”

Maman sighed. “New York is
so
big.”

“This apartment isn't,” Gustave muttered.

Maman bit her lip and looked around, gesturing. “This is the whole thing?”

“It's small, true, but this is a good neighborhood,” the rental agent said briskly. “You aren't going to do any better in your price range. There are other Jews nearby. I know
you people
like to live close together.”

A grimace flickered over Cousin Henri's face before he translated, leaving out the last sentence, Gustave noticed.

Maman pushed down on the mattress, testing its springiness, then opened the door of the oven and looked inside.

“It's a cozy space, isn't it?” the rental agent said after a moment. “It's true that a few Negroes are moving into the area too, these days. But not too many. And there aren't any in this building,” she added in a reassuring voice, adjusting the ends of her scarf. “Don't worry.”

“What do you think, Lili?” Papa asked Maman in French.

“I suppose we could use the mattress and Gustave could sleep on the sofa,” Maman murmured. “But ask her where the bathroom is please, Henri.”

“At the end of the hall,” the rental agent answered, when he translated. “You wouldn't expect your own bathroom at
this
price.”

“Would you prefer to wait and keep looking?” Cousin Henri asked apprehensively.

Maman and Papa consulted in the corner. Gustave squeezed past the others to the window and looked out. There was no view. He could almost have reached out and touched the brick wall across the way. Faded red-checked curtains hung limply inside the grimy window opposite.

Papa cleared his throat. “We'll take it.”

“Formidable!”
Cousin Henri beamed.
Wonderful!

The rental agent pulled out the papers and set them down at a small table in the hallway. Papa and Maman signed. Cousin Henri reached for the pen.

“I have to cosign, as your sponsor,” he explained quietly, in French. “In case one month you can't pay the rent.” Papa's face turned a mottled red.

“This is what American apartments are like? Shared bathrooms?” Maman murmured to Papa as they went out the door. The rental agent clicked briskly down the hall ahead of them in her elegant shoes. Something in the set of her shoulders made it evident she was relieved to be done with this unpleasant task.

“We'll move somewhere nicer as soon as I find a good
job,” Papa said. “Don't worry,
chérie
. We'll get along in this country. It'll just take a little time.”

Gustave took a last look at the dingy room. It was nothing like the apartment they had lived in back in Paris, with its high ceilings and tall windows, where light fell quietly on elegant furniture handed down through the generations. Somehow, they had become poor.

7

“
W
hich would you rather do?” Papa asked. “Paint with me, or help Maman clean the shared bathroom?”

“Paint,” Gustave answered quickly. “That bathroom is disgusting!” Whenever he had to go in, roaches scuttled all over the place when he switched on the light, scrambling into cracks and holes. He spent as little time there as possible.

“Well, somebody has to clean it,” Maman said grimly, rolling up her sleeves.

When the paint was dry, Gustave and Papa put up shelves. Gustave got his French Boy Scout manual and his two favorite novels,
The Three Musketeers
and
Around the World in Eighty Days
, out of the bottom of his suitcase. He set them on the shelf next to the brown Berlitz book of English phrases and the new, red-leather-bound French–English dictionary that Cousin Henri had given them and stepped back to look around. Maman's hand-embroidered tablecloth lay on a small table that Gustave
and Papa had bought at a secondhand store. His parents' familiar bedspread covered the mattress that had come with the apartment. With fresh white walls and the books up, the small room was starting to feel a bit less depressing and a bit more like home.

Gustave took a piece of onionskin paper out of the box of airmail stationery and sat down at the table.

“Who are you writing to?” asked Papa.

“Nicole Morin in Saint-Georges. She said she'd keep trying to find information about Marcel Landau and his mother.”

Papa sighed. “I think you're being too optimistic. Even the people at HIAS thought there was nothing that could be done. I doubt we'll find out anything more about the Landaus until the end of the war.”

“But Nicole's father is in the Resistance,” Gustave insisted. “They helped us, so why couldn't they help Marcel? Anyway, I want her to have our address.”

“Airmail is expensive, but I suppose you can send one letter. Hurry, though—I want you to help me wash the windows.”

Gustave picked up a pen and started to write.

18 January, 1942

Chère Nicole
,

We're in America! I know you wanted to hear about movie stars, but I haven't seen any yet, sorry. I've seen some ladies on the streets wearing fur coats, though
.

New York is enormous and crowded. They have dog statues
in the park and lion statues at the library. At night, there are neon signs in all different colors in Times Square. There's so much food here, but Jean-Paul always keeps a piece of bread in his pocket. He and I went up the Empire State Building with Papa's cousin when we first got here. We could see the whole city. It was amazing!

We found an apartment last week. Our address is 165 West 91st Street, New York, USA. I wrote it on the envelope too
.

What's happening in Saint-Georges? Please write as soon as there is any news about M. I haven't started school here yet. Jean-Paul is living far away, so we won't be going to the same one. He's living with his father's aunt. I wish I could spend some time learning English better before starting school, but my parents say they don't want me to get behind the other kids my age, so I'm going soon
.

Gustave hesitated at the signature. Should he write,
“Je t'embrasse,” Kisses
, “Gustave”? That was the usual ending in France if you knew someone well, but…maybe she'd take it the wrong way. Finally, he wrote:

Best wishes
. That sounded better. He folded up the delicate paper and slid it into the thin blue envelope.

After Gustave finished washing the windows, Papa handed him two quarters. “That should be plenty to pay for one stamp, I hope,” he said. “Be careful with the change.”

Gustave walked around outside for a while instead of going straight to the post office. Maman or Papa would surely give him another job to do the moment he came back, so there wasn't any point in rushing home. In front of a building on 92nd Street, a group of girls wearing fingerless gloves sat on crates in a patch of pale, wintry sunshine, knitting and laughing together. At the corner of 91st and Amsterdam, inside a window marked
QUONG'S HAND LAUNDRY
, a cat was curled up on a red-and-gold blanket. Gustave tapped on the window.
“Salut, le chat!”
he said. The cat picked up her head and meowed at him.

By the time he got to the post office, Gustave had worked out what to say in English.

“Goes to the France?” he asked nervously, pushing the envelope forward.

The clerk nodded. “Forty-five cents.”

That was an awful lot of money, enough to buy five loaves of bread. Gustave handed over the quarters, hoping Papa wouldn't mind.

It was cold outside, but at least it wasn't windy, and Gustave still didn't feel like going straight home. The apartment lease listed the school he would be going to as P.S. 118 on 93rd Street. He headed over to find it. There it was, a new-looking building, eight stories high. A name was carved into the stone front:
JOAN OF ARC JUNIOR HIGH
.

How odd to travel so far from France and end up at a school in America named after a French heroine! It was a school day, but it was after four o'clock, so the building was quiet. The afternoon light reflected blankly off the windows. After a while, Gustave wandered idly down 93rd Street, west toward the Hudson River. He came to a small flight of steps leading up to a park. At the top he stopped in surprise, looking at the back of a statue of a figure on a horse. Was that who it looked like? He ran around to the front. Yes! It was Joan of Arc.

Gustave felt a rush of excitement. What was Joan of Arc, a French heroine, doing here in Manhattan, with New York apartment buildings all around her? People in France loved Joan of Arc, especially now. She had fought to free France from the English, so now the French Resistance fighters were using Joan of Arc's double-barred Cross of Lorraine as a symbol of the French fight against the Nazi occupation. Gustave searched carefully on all sides of the statue, but to his disappointment, the double-barred cross wasn't on it. It was nearly dusk now, and there was nobody else around. A half-frozen puddle stood near the base of the statue. Gustave dipped his finger in it and drew a Cross of Lorraine on the granite base. It shimmered on the stone, drying quickly but leaving a faint mark behind, like a secret.