Too Jewish (8 page)

We were out in her car sitting by the lake the night I went to the Red Cross. I wasn't going to hide the news about my mother. "So the cable said she was shipped to Bergen-Belsen. That was the word. Shipped. Like chattel."

"Oh, God, I feel sick," Letty said, and for a second I didn't connect what I said with how she felt. I reached for the inside light. "What's the matter?" I said.

She turned the light off gently. "I feel horrible for you," she said. Then she thought about it. "Now don't get me wrong. I feel horrible because, well, that's horrible. But I've been reading. A lot. Bergen-Belsen is all right. As camps go."

I had made a point of not following any of the news on the continent. Ted thought I was out of my mind when he would comment on a development in Europe, and I would not know the particulars. I didn't want to know anything about the war beside my mother's whereabouts and my own assignment. "I don't want to know about it," I said, hoping she'd ignore me.

"Bergen-Belsen isn't an extermination camp," Letty said. "The Red Cross visits there. It's sort of a Potemkin Village." She looked at me to see if I knew what that meant. I could tell she'd only learned the meaning recently. "I guess that's some solace," I said. I didn't know how I was going to leave behind a girl who knew how to ignore me.

She stroked my shoulder. We weren't sitting right next to each other because the evening was so warm. A breeze was coming off the lake, and all the windows were open, so we were comfortable, but skin touching skin would have made us perspire. "What's important right now is how you feel," she said. "You need to keep in mind that never, not for a second, did you stop trying to get her out. You'll always be able to tell her that."

In spite of myself, I was thinking,
If I ever see her again.
"And you'll always be able to tell yourself that, too," she said. The girl could read my mind. I wondered if girls in New York were that clever. If I hadn't lived in New York before, I would have assumed they would have been much cannier. But I'd read somewhere that the more primitive a culture was, the more the people were in tune with the extrasensory. I'd been sure when I read the article that it was limited to the deeply academic compared to those spared all exposure to what passed for civilization. But maybe it was more nuanced. Maybe girls in the South were wiser because they weren't trying to be wiseguys.

I kissed her. And then I kissed her more.

"You're leaving soon," she said.

I nodded.

"I don't know about you," she said, and I knew that wasn't true at all. "But I'm not dealing well with the idea of saying goodbye."

"What are you thinking?"

"The same that you're thinking," she said. "I think." She gave me a cockeyed smile.

"I wish I knew exactly what that was," I said.

"Seriously," she said. "I know you're shipping out. Are you going into combat?"

I told her I was an officer. I couldn't tell her anything more, but I completely expected to survive the war. "Until this moment, I didn't know that," I said. "But now I do. And I'm not violating any code. It has nothing to do with my orders. I just know I'm coming back intact."

"And you're coming
back
."

It took a moment to figure that one out. This hadn't been an issue for me for a long time. I once had imagined myself going over to Europe, finding my mother and living out my days in Stuttgart. Now when I found her, I would get passage for her to New York. I always thought "when." I always imagined changing her name to Cooper, of teaching her rudiments of English, grocery-store English.

"I'm an American," I said. I didn't say I was a New Yorker, though I was. I didn't see any reason to be unkind.

"Then we'll write to each other."

"That's pretty much all we can do beside get married tomorrow," I said.

I could say that to Letty.

I spent the remainder of the war on General Eisenhower's staff stationed outside London. I was on the logistics team. All my years of reading the greatest books of European literature in the original had counted for nothing when I took the tests for aptitude that sent me for officers' training. I was born a mathematician, something not evident in my cook-by-pinching mother and shoe-designing father. There was a lot of mind-wasting at the turn of the twentieth century. And a lot of my mind seemed to be wasted when I sat around outside Norfolk House on the logistics staff. It was our place to prepare for Normandy.

Each boy would have his own toilet paper, shaving brush, socks, folding shovel, first aid packet, package of v-mail letters, toothbrush, and other items he could stuff in his pockets. He was going to get onto one of the boats Letty's mother wouldn't let her build, and the chances were good he was going to die and leave those v-mails lying strewn on Omaha Beach. It was my job to count up that toilet paper. Two years in London, eating K rations and ducking air raids, and my toilet paper often didn't make it to the beach.

I wrote to Letty fifteen times, and her letters crossed with mine so somehow I heard from her eighteen times. She became my girlfriend in my mind. I met English girls all the time. London was packed wall to wall with American boys, and English girls came out in the evenings to entertain us. They were so pink, even if they were hungry, and I could have paired off with a number of them. After all, the time I spent in London was so much longer than the time I spent in New Orleans. But I measured each against Letty. And none had a chance to know me as well.

Dear Bernie,

I am trying to be your salesman. I took Mama's matchbox into a little shop on St. Charles Avenue and showed it to the owner. I could see in her eyes that she liked it, but I didn't get a yes. I was all dressed up that day, and I think she got the idea. Even though I don't smoke.

You're not learning to smoke over there, are you? I would never kiss a boy who smokes!

I listen to the radio a lot. I wish you could tell me where you are. I think about you all the time. I tell my friends I don't want to go down to the French Quarter because it reminds me of you. But even the dining room in my house reminds me of you. I miss you.

Love,

Letty

If I danced with another girl, I would hold her close and pretend she was Letty. I was careful in the letters I wrote back, because I didn't know what I would do after the war, but I let out love without plans. That was all she needed. One of us would have to make a choice when I went home. It was as simple as that. For all I knew, she would meet a boy at Tulane in my absence. He would be 4-F, but there was no shame in 4-F. There was some shame in conscientious objector, but I'd only heard of such men, never actually met one. Letty was such a tender soul. She might push a boy across campus in a wheelchair and discover his mind. Letty was such a wise girl; she might make one of her professors fall in love with her. But Letty also was such a straight-shooting girl that I knew she would tell me if she found someone else. Instead she kept finding me.

It was Letty, more even than the war machine surrounding me, who made me think about what was happening in Germany. I was still in London when the camps were liberated. I heard newsreels when Letty saw newsreels, I couldn't avoid them. If I wanted to see a film, I sat through the newsreel first. I could close my eyes, but I could hear the voice over. I could hear the sounds of others in the audience, the inrush of breath, the cries, some screams, and I had to protect myself because I knew the images were indelible. I knew, too, that I would search for familiar faces, ruined beyond recognition, but recognizable all the same. Letty wrote to me about what she saw, sparing me the details, saying only that she was frightened for me, that if I needed her to go to the Red Cross for me, I needed only to ask. I wrote her back. "Knowing about my mother is necessary before I can feel I have a home," I said in a letter early that summer. "But not knowing about her might be better. I'll always have hope."

The Red Cross had offices in London. This was not like New Orleans in the early part of the war. Now the Red Cross had the task of saving the world, one destroyed person at a time, and the place was packed to the walls with workers, all trying to be efficient, but struggling against the demands of millions with equal tragedies. I waited my turn. Everyone there waited his turn. I could see on their faces that coming in was a dare. The possibility of a bad answer made it almost not worth coming in at all. The possibility of a good answer drove our dreams, though. Just the night before I'd dropped off to sleep thinking of taking my mother to Peltzl. No, I decided, I'd take her to Saks Fifth Avenue. A mink for my mother. She would be so proud.

The Red Cross worker gave me a slip of paper. On it I wrote the name of the camp, Bergen-Belsen, and my mother's name, Dora Kuper. She gave me a number and told me I would be called when my information was found in the books. Did they have anything about the liberation of that camp? I asked. They most certainly did, she said. She was proud, efficient, almost Teutonic, but I remembered I was in England.

I waited only about twenty minutes, and the same woman called my number. Suddenly she wasn't so brusque. "We've looked at the DP list," she said. I frowned, not knowing what that meant. "Displaced persons," she said. "I'm afraid Mrs. Kuper was not on that list. Is this your wife?" "My mother," I said. "Oh, my" she said, and she became even softer. "Well, I checked, and I see no other records. There were fairly accurate death records, despite how massive the losses were there." I thought I understood her, but I had to make sure. "Are you saying she didn't survive, but she also didn't die?"

"I suppose I'm saying we have no record of her," the woman said. "I'm afraid my best guess would be that she was transported elsewhere, but I have no way of knowing without going through every record. And even that might yield nothing."

I couldn't take in any more air than would fill the very top of my lungs. I couldn't see anything outside the narrow circle of light that took in the woman's face. My mother was gone. Lost. Surely dead. But maybe, just maybe, traded for a German soldier. Maybe sent to Palestine. A one in thousands chance. I had no way of knowing what happened to her. I'd thought I didn't want to know.

"I thought I didn't want to know," I whispered to the woman.

She spoke so softly I almost couldn't hear her in the din around us. "It might wind up being better for you in the long run," she said. "I'm so sorry."

I was several blocks away, more filled with thoughts than I realized, when I turned around and went back. This time I didn't wait my turn. I flagged the attention of the woman who had helped me. "What if she needs to find me?" I said. Even if the woman already had forgotten me, the question was enough. She directed me to another part of the building. When I registered, I realized I was a man with an APO address and nothing more. I expected to live past the APO, I needed permanency past the APO. The world needed more than the Red Cross and names floating in alphabetical order, some spelled wrong. My mother would never look for Bernie Cooper. I wrote down Bernard Kuper, care of Axel's business address in Washington Heights. I would be part of something she always could find. I would give her thirty years. She could live to a hundred before I would give up.

* * *

When I was shipped back to the States three months after Germany surrendered, I asked to disembark at New Orleans. I wired Axel that I was taking a short detour. He wired me back that he would wait and see. "You are my permanent address," I wired back. It cost money, but it was important.

It seemed to me that I never would be in New Orleans at any time that wasn't unbearably hot. It was August, and I wanted to look my freshest best when I walked up to Letty's house. I last had seen her when I knew nothing of the world. I had left my home and learned another country and the peculiarities of its people when I met her, but I hadn't picked apart in my mind why anything happened. Literature had tried to give me hints, but I'd had no instructor to tell me to look. I knew a lot more why's now, and I knew I was sophisticated. I was imagining I even might be able to speak to Letty's parents using nothing more than fine instincts. Letty was another story. It was possible that Letty had been reading books with the help of teachers, and she was sophisticated now, too. I figured I might need more than instinct. Though I wasn't sure what I would want from her. I would wait to see. That was why I chose to go to New Orleans.

Letty wasn't doing as much thinking as I was. The moment she saw me on the front steps, she threw her arms around my neck and began kissing me all over my face. She was wearing a dark pink lipstick, and she didn't care where she left the marks. I didn't care, either.

She had both arms around my waist. There we were out there where the neighbors could see us, looking like a photo in
LIFE
or her mother's worst nightmare, but neither of us cared. "Nobody's here but Louise," she said, and for a second I thought she was inviting me to come up to her bedroom. I had been invited to rooms with English girls, but I hadn't gone. My friends who had no girlfriends waiting had many conquests in London, and they talked over chow in enough detail for me to come home feeling both terribly experienced and terribly inexperienced. I knew all the parts and moves, but I couldn't imagine them having anything to do with me. It was like kissing. I remembered as a young boy not being able to imagine where my nose would go. "It just mashes up where it hits," Axel said. Axel always went first. I was sure Axel was having a fine time with New York girls.

"Let me get my key," Letty said, and I was terribly grateful. "Louise doesn't need to know anything about my comings and goings." Letty's life had changed during my absence. She even had her own telephone.

There was something almost thrilling about the smell in K&B. The air conditioning was cold, and people were having root beer floats at the soda fountain, but some were having hamburgers fried on the grill, so I guess it just smelled like America. We'd walked the whole way, the full stretch of Broadway from Fontainebleau, past her college, and I wanted to eat and drink for a long time. Letty was there across from me, asking for onions after I did. She assured me she hadn't learned about onions from kissing boys. I didn't know anything about breath, so she explained, and I wondered for a second what impressions I might have made in London. I didn't care, but I cared a little.