Kantika, page 25
Beneath her clothes, her bosoms are burning. Just this morning, they were her own best thing, but now they have been ruined, laid to waste. She had not planned to show them to her (step)brothers, but as she was leaving the first-floor bathroom, they’d walked by whispering, heads bent close, and she’d had an unruly urge to—what? Command their attention. Stop them in their tracks. See herself reflected back, made real. Something has happened without her even trying: She has made a perfect thing, and it is part of her. After a lifetime of avoiding her own reflection, she looks in the mirror all the time now, locking the bathroom door from inside and running the water to make it seem like she’s busy in there. It’s what girls her age do, primp alone or together, with a key variation: Luna narrows her vision, like looking through a camera lens to frame only what she wants to see. Two pale eggs, two powdery, pink-topped bakery buns, and if she strokes them, they shiver, and if she lifts and squeezes them, she can make a passage—cleavage—for the silver minnows darting up and down her body like electric shocks. A half hour might pass, even longer, before someone raps on the door and boots her out.
“The children”—Mother looks at her watch and sounds suddenly panicked—“will be home soon. Sam will be home.”
“Please don’t tell Papa!” Luna’s head starts to wobble.
“Don’t, Ma!” says Al. “It won’t happen again.”
“Never,” says David. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Mother looks at each of them in turn. They’re all a little afraid of Papa, not because he’s mean (he’s not, though he can be strict with the boys), but because he has high standards and they live in fear of disappointing him. Mother steps out of the square. In her khaki gardening trousers and beige blouse, she might be a curvy army sergeant, but her lipstick and the purple pansy tucked behind her ear add another element. And something else. Luna, who has been reading Mother closely since the minute she showed up in the first apartment in Astoria on Papa’s arm, can see it in her eyes: She’s scared.
“Fine,” Mother says, but she won’t look at them. “No need for us to bother him with this. It would only upset him, and he might overreact. It will stay between us. I won’t tell.”
She bends down to still Luna’s bobbing head with her hands, and abruptly she is a mother again, poised and sure. “You made something beautiful, Luna,” she says. “Of course you’re proud. But you have to understand—they’re yours to save, a gift from God.”
She turns toward the boys. “You keep your lousy hands off her, do you hear me? If it happens again—or anything like it, no matter how slight—I’m going straight to Sam, who’ll beat you to within an inch of your life and send you away without a penny to your name. But first”—she flings out her arm as if brandishing a sword—“I’ll cut your little pipis off.”
* * *
A FEW WEEKS AFTER THE INCIDENT, Mother comes into the girls’ bedroom after Suzanne is asleep, holding a sock with a darning egg stuffed in its toe. Luna has been reading by the light of her gooseneck lamp but slides the book—a dime-store novel about a rich American girl abroad and her Swiss romance—under the covers.
“I’ve been thinking,” Mother says in a half whisper. “Thinking and praying. And I think—I really think, Luna, that it might be time for you to spread your wings.” She perches on the edge of the bed, pulls a needle from the sock and begins to mend, squinting in the dim light. “You deserve to meet nice boys who appreciate you. To have a best friend, like I had with your mother, of blessed memory. To belong. I called that school in the Bronx, just to see. The lady was so nice, a good person—I could tell from her voice. She said you’d need to take an entrance exam, and I told her that’s no problem, Luna is intelligent and a hard worker. You can see for yourself, I said to her. They help their students go to college or find jobs. She said they’d love to meet you. They have a few openings for the fall.”
Luna pulls herself up to sit. “You want to get rid of me, because of what happened! You want to stick me in some awful cripple school! You’re kicking me out, but it wasn’t my fault, I wasn’t the one who—”
“Shhh. You’ll wake her.” Mother points at Suzanne, who sleeps like a log. “Who said anything was your fault? You haven’t told your fa—?”
“No! Did you?”
“Of course not. It’s in the past. I’m focused on your future now. Will you give some thought to this school, Luna, just to learn a little more, to see?”
“I don’t need a place like that. I can go to a regular school.”
“Of course you can. You are. We know you can. But you’re not happy, you cry in your room. You deserve better. It’s no way to live.”
Mother moves closer, sets the darning on the bedside table and strokes Luna’s arm through the fabric of the bedspread. “Let me tell you a story. When I was young, I married the first man who came along, a real good-for-nothing, missing something up here.” She taps her forehead. “With your father, it was different. I was a mother twice over by then, a widow. I’d been around the block. Of course I was scared, terrified, really, to give up everything I’d ever known, but my children needed more—I needed more—so I took a chance, and then—well, you know the rest.” She shrugs. “I made a life. We made one. If you don’t like this school, Luna, right away when you see it, or after a month or five months, you just walk away, come home. You don’t even need to cross an ocean. You just call us up and say come get me, I am done. But not to look, not to see…”
Luna wants to ask: Are you doing this to protect David and Al, sending me away to keep them home? Are you afraid it will happen again, which it won’t, though the other day Al did say oooh la la when she walked by, and he outlined a curvy lady with his hands. She should have spit at him or told, but she didn’t—she was flattered, she’s pathetic, she loves Al, for how easy he is with her, jokey and accepting. David is more like her, darker and brooding, damaged somehow, though with working limbs. He’s only fifteen, but he’s already talking about quitting school to work or lying about his age and joining the Navy, though Papa says he has to stay in school, and Mother says she’s not sending her son off to war, not after all they’ve been through; even once he’s seventeen, she won’t sign the consent form. Do you love your real children more than me? Luna almost asks, but Mother reaches out to stroke her face with fingers so deft as to possess a kind of witchery, knowing just where to press the temples and massage the jaw, turning Luna’s thoughts to mush.
After a time, Mother takes back her hand and sits rocking slightly as, outside, the neighborhood tomcat yowls. Luna can hear her breath, in and out, and Suzanne’s, too, a shallow, light rhythm she has come to depend on, and sometimes when she can’t sleep, she climbs into her little sister’s bed just to feel the warm pads of her feet and her small belly rising and falling beneath her flannel nightgown.
Finally, Mother speaks. “All my life, I thought people were good. It’s how I was raised, what my mother taught me, what I saw. But lately, I don’t know. I thought my father was crazy, putting glass on the walls to keep people out, but look what happened to him and to his synagogue, look what’s happening in Europe now. I don’t know anymore.” She turns toward Luna, her face half in shadows but still (always) too beautiful, the curve of cheek, her earring catching the light. “I was sure you’d make friends. I mean, why not? You’re a nice girl, smart and well dressed, polite and funny. Interesting. But people are small, they can’t see past their noses. It’s been almost three years, and you’re … I think you’re stuck. That’s what I see now. It’s not your fault, but enough is enough. I’m sorry, mi alma. I”—her voice falters—“expected too much, not from you but from the world. I was wrong.”
“I will never be normal,” Luna tells her. “I will never be beautiful, or even pretty. Don’t say I am.”
Mother says nothing.
“So I’m not. You’re saying I’m not!”
Mother laughs. “Shhh. You’ll wake her. You said not to speak! I can’t see you from outside, not anymore. All my children are beautiful to me.”
She stands, reaches for her darning, turns off the light and plants a quick kiss on Luna’s cheek. “Don’t forget to say your prayers. Ask what should I—Fanny Luna Levy—do with my one life to live? Then go to sleep. God willing, El Dyo will pay a visit in your dreams.”
III
LUNA’S NEW SCHOOL in the Bronx needs a photograph for the records and for use in a pamphlet to send out to donors, so Mother sews her a new tea-dyed muslin blouse and slim white skirt with a kick pleat, and one Sunday afternoon in July, they drive to a field on the outskirts of town, Papa, Mother and Luna, just the three of them, a snug little triangle. Papa was slow to come around but is now excited. There have been articles in the New York Times about the school and its pioneering spirit. One of his heroes, Dr. Carlson, is a fan. My daughter can study ancient Greek, Papa tells the lawyers and teachers who frequent the store. There is nothing he admires more than education, so that Luna almost wishes she could give it to him as a gift, for while she likes learning, too, she is more focused on other things now: moving to a new neighborhood where she’ll have to prove once again that she’s not a dimwit and memorize all the potholes, uneven curbs and jagged steps that could do her in; making friends; getting over her own deep resistance, bordering on repugnance, at being lumped in with the halt and lame.
For the photograph, Mother helps arrange her, tucking in her blouse, angling her just so, darting back and forth between Papa behind the camera and Luna sitting on the grass, though with the wind picking up and how hard it is for Luna to stay still, things keep going awry. The pose is designed to disguise Luna’s deficits—leg braces removed, a seated position—even though the donors might cough up more for a pity case. “Smile like a movie star,” Mother tells her, but it’s easy for her to say—she was actually in a movie once in Spain. When Luna first heard the story, she had pressed Mother: “Where is it, can I see it, is it shown in the theater?” “It was nothing, really, just a small film about our community,” Mother had said, and then she’d started crying, stunning Luna, who hadn’t known she was treading on fragile ground. “If I could find that film, I’d see my father again,” Mother had explained as she dried her eyes with her apron. “He’s in it, walking, gardening. I’d see him like he’s right here in the room.”
Papa devotes seven pictures to the photo project for Luna’s new school. Six are unusable, but one is acceptable, a slightly blurry girl in the grass, slim-waisted and smiling, though if you look closely, you can see that her head is a little too big for her torso and her legs are hidden and her hair a bit of a mess, with a clump sticking up from her head. “Look,” Al crows when he sees the prints. “She has a horn—she’s a Jew with a horn!” “Stop it, it’s just her hair, what is wrong with you?” Mother snaps, and she slides one copy of the photo into a creamy envelope to send to the school and frames the double so it can join the other family portraits on the stairwell, where Luna, on her way out, finally has a place of pride.
Luna takes the remaining photos and shreds them, using a satisfying combination of her hands and teeth. Years later, she will see a reproduction of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. Another decade will pass before she learns the story behind the image—how Wyeth stuck his young wife Betsy’s head and upper torso on his older disabled neighbor Christina’s body—but from Luna’s first glimpse of the painting, she will understand, as much from the sweep of gold field and faraway house as from the woman’s grasshopper legs and tense, twisted pose, that she is looking at someone like herself.
* * *
“I’LL MISS YOU,” Mother tells Luna plainly on the day in late August when she wraps each ironed skirt and blouse in tissue paper and arranges them in the trunk from Turkey that she’s lending Luna for her much shorter migration to the Bronx. Luna believes her, though she also knows that if it came down to kicking out David and Al or kicking her out (as, in a certain way, it has), Mother would eject her in a flash. Mother’s hands pleating the tissue paper are like her hands on the phyllo dough, patting, smoothing, flipping, tucking, and Luna feels a sudden wave of homesickness, though Nona and Rachel will make the same filikas, and she’s not going far. Even as Mother’s hands keep working, she is watching Luna. Something must happen. What’s the expression? Meet me halfway.
Luna returns her gaze, then looks away. “I’ll miss you, too,” she says.
Leaving Papa is the hardest thing. Luna worries about him now, for he seems older lately and more tired. Someone painted a red swastika on the sidewalk in front of the store, which made Mother want to file a police report and close the store until they caught the culprit, but Papa said no, that would be bad for business and make us look scared; some people are ignorant, pay no attention, just move on. Instead, he scrubbed the sidewalk, applied gray paint and did drive-by check-ins in the middle of the night as his vision of America began to fray.
Now Luna is leaving him, scuttling away, a thief clutching a secret. He still doesn’t know what happened in the basement, Luna, Mother, David and Al united in a silent, if uneasy, pact to keep it among themselves. When Papa drops her off at Rachel and Nona’s (just him, at her request, with breakfast on the way at a diner) he cannot find the words to say goodbye. “I’ll find your schoolbooks in the library,” he says gruffly as he turns to go. “I’ll read along with you”—though they both know that she has already outpaced him, and he won’t have the time.
Cambria Heights, 1944
Our Mother of Blessed Memory is Dead STOP She fell down stairs nobody home STOP No better woman walked this earth STOP Please tell Corinne STOP Your Loving Brother Josef
THIS, M’IJIKA, IS HOW TO CLEAN my body, with lukewarm water and a soft cloth, the way you’d sponge a baby—thoroughly, gently, without squeamishness or shyness, as I cleaned you, as we cleaned yours. Get behind the ears, along the neck crease. Wash behind my knees, my tired feet, then rub them in almond oil. Forgive me the condition of my nails.
I can’t do it, Mama—I’m too far.
I’m your mother, you’re allowed to draw close.
I’m a kohen, it’s against the rules.
I’m your mother. You’re obliged to draw close. Circle my wrist stained with tarnish from the cuff bracelet your papa got me at the Grand Bazaar. Take off the bracelet, my earrings, my ring, that I may leave this life unadorned, the way I entered it. Put them away, three gifts for three daughters. Now prepare the shroud. You’ll find it in the box under my bed.
Where are my sisters? My brothers?
They come and go, but don’t worry, I’m never alone. Keep the threads loose, without any knots.
David is at war, Mama. Al—Berto—will go soon. The world is in flames, I can’t be here without you.
I’m tired, mi alma. Please sing me to sleep.
Did you hear what I said? Are you listening to me?
Close your eyes, close my eyes. Now cover my face. That’s it, that’s good. Grasyas. Now sing.
* * *
THREE MONTHS AFTER her mother’s death on the spiral marble staircase outside Elsa’s third-floor apartment in the L’Eixample neighborhood of Barcelona, Rebecca receives a certified letter from the Spanish consulate saying that her mother’s entry to the United States has finally been approved. Later still, she learns from Josef that for obscure reasons related to the war, Sultana could not be buried next to Alberto in the Jewish section of the Cementiri de les Corts but was instead interred in an unmarked grave in a different cemetery called Sant Andreu, in a section reserved for non-Catholics and infants.
Five years will go by before the name of Sultana Camayor Cohen, of blessed memory, is carved into a memorial stone at Sant Andreu. Sultana will share the stone with other Jewish women—Fortuna, Augusta, Raquel, Miriam, Sarah—who might have been strangers to her or might have been friends, but who all shared the fate of dying during wartime, far from home.
USS Franklin, 1945
THE DAY BEGINS LIKE ANY OTHER, which is to say like no other except in a world where rules and order are set against the constant possibility of eruption, and the smallest things—the pinup girl making eyes at David from his bunk, his Navy-issued Jewish prayer book, the intricate innards of the 20-millimeter anti-aircraft guns he tends, the amulet pouch from his mother and book of inspirational verse sent by his fifth grade teacher, Miss Hill—are anchors in the uncertainty of a ship under attack and the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, whose scale turns the massive aircraft carrier into a bobbing bathtub toy.
At dawn on Monday, March 19, 1945, they are fifty miles from Japan, part of a force bound to strike the home islands of the Japanese Empire. All weekend, they have been launching planes from the flight deck and dropping bombs as the kamikazes counterattack, though the only recent death on the ship is that of a sailor—unknown to David until his dramatic last act—who drank torpedo fuel to end his life. They’ve been called to battle stations twelve times in the past six hours, but the captain just downgraded the alert status to Condition III so that the boys can, in rotation, down a hot meal and get a little sleep. David, part of the first group released, leaves his gunner’s station and goes to quarters to use the toilet and do a quick shave before heading to the hangar deck, where he joins the chow line snaking around the waiting planes.
Is this when gut instinct comes into play, or the scrappy learned behaviors of a boy who spent his first years fatherless, then left home and grew up watching his own back? Whatever the cause, something makes him hesitate. The line is long, the mess hall on the third deck down, below the hangar deck. He wants a hot meal—they’ve had nothing but stale sandwiches—but they’re near land and have been under constant attack and it doesn’t feel like a great idea to be inside. He gauges how long the line of shifting, chattering sailors will take to progress so he can go topside and return when the wait is shorter.
