Too Jewish (7 page)

She met me in the French Quarter one afternoon after her classes. "Mama will think I'm in the library," she said. Her parents let her go out on Saturday nights during school, she said. I had offered to come up and meet her on the campus, but Letty wasn't the sort to need me to spend the carfare. I waited outside Cohen & Sons for her. I could have arrived early and finished before she came, but I didn't want to go in alone. "This is a strange place for a date," she said. "I wish it were for fun," I said, and she took my hand.

I was in uniform, so the man behind the counter wasn't particularly solicitous. I supposed he had a world of experience sizing up his customers. I wasn't coming in to give him a bonanza. I fished my gold coin out of my pocket and presented it to him in my open, damp palm. I'd waited a long time to try this because I knew it wouldn't do me enough good. Now it might do me as much good as I needed.

"Where'd you get this?" he said when he looked more closely. He sounded as if I'd stolen it off a dead body.

"My mother gave it to me when I left," I said.

The second my words came out in my accent, his face softened. I wasn't a pillaging American soldier; I was a poor Jew.

"Ah!" he said. "Where are you from?"

"New York," I said. I was holding on to New York for all I was worth. In every conversation I had, I hoped I might work my way around to the subject of my business.

"No, before New York. Where were you born?"

I told him Stuttgart. I added, Germany.

"You're sure you want to sell this?" he said.

I said that I needed to know how much it was worth. I needed cash. I wasn't going to tell him why. He looked me in the eye with an expression that said,
We are in a business where we never ask.
I had a feeling that he meant he knew I had gambling debts. But I wasn't going to disabuse him of that notion. It was easier that way. He went to another counter to weigh the coin.

"Exactly one troy ounce," he said. "Those Germans are nothing if not precise. Well, it's worth $33.85 melted down, so I can give you twenty-seven dollars." He saw disappointment on my face. "I'm sorry, kid," he said. "We sell coins, but nobody'd want a German coin. This is just gold."

"No," I said. "No." I had saved my own life at the border for the equivalent of twenty-seven dollars, but I couldn't save my mother's life unless I had, what, five times that much, if I added my savings.

I thought about the diamond ring. It was in my pocket. This was not a jeweler. My mother's last letter to me had said, "No matter what you do, do not sell that ring. I cannot tell you why I say this, but do not sell that ring. I think if you do, you would regret it." I let it rest in my pocket. It would have been strange for Letty to see it, and I was surprised to find myself thinking that way. I did not walk Letty up to the jewelry store on Canal Street. I walked her up to Walgreens and had a Coke at the counter.

* * *

I wasn't hearing from my mother, and trying to make money without help from Letty's parents wasn't getting me anywhere, but all I could do was go nickel by nickel, hoping money would go faster than time. All the officers were doing was attending classes, so we had a lot of free time, and New Orleans had a lot of shop owners who could say no, and if I hadn't known better, I'd have thought they all had an advance plan on how to rebuff me at the door. "One woman offered to buy my sample for three dollars," I told Ted. It would have hurt more than helped. I still had no more money than I could save from my paycheck, and I was using a lot of it on carfare.

"Good news, fella!" Ted said. "Know that poker game up on Panola Street? Bernie, my boy, I won twenty-five dollars last night. And I'm putting away every red cent until you've got your hundred-sixty."

I clapped him on the shoulder. I would have hugged him if people did that in this country. I wished I knew how to play poker, but Ted had told me that I had too many tells. Tells meant guys would take one look at my face and get all my money. Cards had nothing to do with it.

It was then I spoke out loud about what I'd only so far been shoving to the back of my mind. "I haven't heard from my mother in almost two weeks," I said. "I don't know if there's much point in my efforts anymore."

"Hey, maybe she's busy," Ted said. I looked at him funny. "No really, maybe she found a way to Lisbon on her own." Somehow the world news didn't lead me to be that optimistic. I told that to Ted. "We're shipping out next month," he said. "Maybe actually being in Europe will make it easier to know what's going on."

I had to smile. "Europe's larger than it looks on a map," I said. "I somehow don't think you and I will be conquering heroes." I remembered textbooks from childhood, with Hannibal as large as the elephants and the mountains.

He was silent for a moment, as if he was getting up his nerve. And he
was
getting up his nerve, because what he said next frightened me too much to consider. "If you want to go to the Red Cross, I'll go with you," he said.

* * *

Instead I called Axel. It was hot inside the phone booth, but I kept the door closed, as if somehow that would make a difference. I came from a short line of superstitious Jews, and I made up my rituals as I went along. If a closed door would bring me a comfort of spirit, then I would have a closed door. Even if I was going to emerge like a roasted bird.

"I've got to confess," I said. "Fur-covered luxury items don't sell in the South," I said. I wasn't sure where I wanted this conversation to go, but I was starting it.

"Hey, what's the temperature down there?" Axel said.

I'd been in that booth about three minutes, and I already was soaked. Thank goodness it was under an oak tree. "About a hundred and five," I said.

"You want a fur coat right now?" Axel said.

I didn't want a fur coat any time of the year. I'd been in Peltzl's shop. I knew where fur came from. It kind of made me sick, even if it was in nice little geometric strips by the time it got to Axel. But I knew what he meant. "No, in fact I have a feeling maybe one in a hundred women has a fur coat around here when winter comes. Even raccoon. It's hot."

"Same thing happened when I sent a guy down to Washington," Axel said. "Washington! Women go there from all over. From the north! Not a bite. You need to quit worrying. I'm not expecting anything out of you."

I thanked him. I owed Axel my life, and now I was compounding that debt, but I sensed he knew much of the payback came in pure affection and a strange shared history. If we never had left Germany, our lives would have had nothing in common. Because we left, they were as similar as any we were going to find.

"I've still wanted to make money, not paring down that 160 dollars by much," I said.

"If it was life and death, and you're still alive, maybe you don't need to worry so much."

"You think it was my life?" I said.

Axel didn't answer right away. "It didn't occur to me that it was anything else."

"I'm so safe, Axel. No one ever has been so safe."

"I think I understand," he said. "You need to save someone else."

"Yes."

"Do you want to tell me whom?" Axel had English as good as mine. Not book-learned, maybe, but just as correct.

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"Is it a woman?"

"Are we going to play this Twenty Questions?" I said. Of course she was a woman, even a woman I was pining over, but I wasn't going to send Axel on that tangent. "Listen, you know there's a topic we never discuss."

"I thought we discuss everything."

"Are you serious?"

"Bernie, I consider you my closest friend. I went into debt to save you. I consider us the same person, one making the business, one fighting the war. If I were in love, I would tell you. When I think you're in love with that girl there, I'll tell you."

"So no topic is off limits?" I said.

"You could commit murder, and I would write to you in prison."

"I want to save my mother."

He didn't hesitate. It was as if I'd blown magic air through the phone and into his ear. "Of course you do!" he said. "Oh, my God!"

"This doesn't bother you?"

Axel reassured me that of course it didn't, that my mother was a wonderful woman, that now he recalled I'd left her behind, that he was following the trajectory of the war on the European front, that he knew it was beyond urgent that I would want to help her escape. "So that was life and death," he said.

"Yes," I said. "It was life and death."

"I thought you had a gambling debt or something," he said.

"Don't you know me better than that?" I said, and he laughed. I didn't say that the meaning of gambling debt could be inflated into my personal sphere, something I owed for having taken a terrible risk.

Axel quickly got serious. "There's not much agencies can do from here now," he said. "Whatever would have happened would have happened from New York."

"You know all these things?" I said, hoping he would tell me about his family.

"Everyone in New York knows about these things," he said. "How much more do you need for your mother?"

I did the arithmetic. With Ted, the gold coin, and my savings, it was less than 80 dollars. I wondered for a moment whether that would impress Letty's father. I gave the figure to Axel. He asked if my mother was still at our old address and told me to send what I had, and he would get the money to her.

"But, you know, I haven't heard from her in two weeks," I said.

"I'll send you my half. You take it to the Red Cross." I got the same sick feeling I'd had when Ted had mentioned going there.

Before we hung up, before I fell to the bottom of the booth from the heat, I asked him about his family. His father was alive, so he had two parents left behind. He didn't get terse or angry. At least not terse or angry toward me. "That's something I would have to tell you in person," he said. "I'm willing to tell you anything, but I want to look in your face when I tell you that. Try to remember my mother." All I could remember of his mother was that she never encouraged me to eat.

* * *

My first visit to the Red Cross gave me the kind of relief that comes of having no way of knowing anything. I didn't have the money in hand. I wanted to know all the details first. The volunteer had been so kind. Her name had been Martha, and she had resembled Letty's mother, only she wasn't fancy. "There's no point sending money until we find your mother," she had said when I told her I hadn't heard from my mother in two weeks. She was leaving a lot unsaid, but she wasn't letting me come up to the surface with that realization. She told me to come back in two weeks.

Ted went with me both times. The second time I knew that unless telegraphs didn't work, I was going to learn something. I was shaking so badly that Ted asked if I wanted to stop on the way and get a beer. I didn't think beer would do anything but make me nauseated, I told him. "Maybe they won't know anything," I said as we walked through the door.

Martha remembered me before I opened my mouth. People often remembered me after I spoke; otherwise I was another American soldier in uniform. "But I don't recall your name," she said. "Except it's odd for some reason."

"Cooper?" Ted said.

"Oh, right," Martha said. "It's different in German."

I spelled out my mother's name, Dora Kuper. "She lives in Stuttgart, and it's all right if you have no information," I said.

"I understand," Martha said.

She brought a cable from the back room. There was no mistaking it. News. She looked at me as neutrally as possible, but I didn't think the Red Cross carried good news. I handed it directly to Ted, who turned his back to me when he opened it and read it. Ted wasn't experienced in being neutral. He turned right around and said, "I am so sorry."

"What," I said. She was dead. I felt the blood rushing out of my head. That really happens. Everything in my line of vision went light. I was not going to be able to keep standing.

"Sit," Ted said. He grabbed my elbow with his free hand. I didn't know Ted was so strong. With one hand he guided me to a chair. "Hey, Bernie," I heard him say, "put your head between your knees."

It was while I was sitting with my head between my knees, with Martha out from behind the counter fanning me with a packet of papers, that I learned my mother was not necessarily dead. Ambiguously living. The cablegram said she had been transported to Bergen-Belsen three weeks earlier. "I think that means she's alive, don't you?" was the first thing I really heard Ted saying.

I sat up. All I knew right then was that I'd lost all chance of getting her out of Germany. She'd probably known that was coming; that was why she told me not to sell the ring. I didn't want to think about what being trapped in Germany meant. Bergen-Belsen wasn't a death sentence for a young person, but being shipped to any camp seemed to me to be a death sentence for a seventy-year-old woman. Though in one of the last conversations I'd had with my mother she had assured me that she was not old.

"Not knowing is very difficult," Martha said to Ted. She told me I could write a letter, and the Red Cross would try to deliver it. I asked if it would come back if it couldn't be delivered. Martha said she didn't think so.

I thanked her. I asked her whether I could come back before I shipped out. She said I could, knowing I wouldn't. I knew I wouldn't, too, except maybe to see Martha, just for herself.

After we were out on the sidewalk, I said to Ted, "I have just learned that some things are better not knowing."

* * *

I could not tell anyone, but I knew I was being assigned to London. I had ten days, and in spite of myself I didn't want to leave Letty. I never had allowed myself to do more than kiss her, and even in my daydreams I never went farther because I didn't want to love her with passion, but I'd begun to love her with an ache I'd never felt before. Needing and wanting always had been confused in my mind when it came to girls, and I'd generally wanted them more. I needed Letty, her wit more than anything. For a schooled girl, she wasn't all that schooled, choosing to study psychology as if it were science, and managing not to know literature and philosophy any more than to cite names she'd seen on lists. But she could think, and really all I wanted was someone who could take the quotidian and pick it apart with as much nuance as Voltaire. She saw the world right. Right was important. She always said the right thing. Not just to me. In fact what she said to me was the least of it. I liked what she said to other people the most. She wasn't in her parents' thrall. She was controlled by them, but she didn't believe in them. I believed in respect, but not respect that wasn't rational. Letty had figured out how to be rational all on her own. I was falling in love with her, and it wasn't rational at all, not if I planned to go back to New York after London. She was part of my New Orleans experience, and I couldn't imagine separating the two. I needed to prepare us both for saying goodbye.