The Last Embrace
Pam Jenoff
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING TITLE THE ORPHAN'S TALE OUT NOW!Forbidden love in the time of war, this is essential reading for fans of emotional historical romance, perfect for fans of Katie Flynn and Maureen Lee.August 1940 and 16-year-old refugee Addie escapes Fascist Italy to live with her aunt and uncle in Atlantic City. As WW2 breaks, she finds acceptance and love with Charlie Connally and his family.But war changes everything: secrets and passions abound, and when one brother’s destructive choices lead to the tragic death of another, the Connally family is decimated, and Addie along with them.Now 18, she flees, first to Washington and then to war-torn London where she is swept up with life as a correspondent. But when Charlie, now a paratrooper, re-appears, Addie discovers that the past is impossible to outrun. Now she must make one last desperate attempt to find within herself the answers that will lead the way home.Praise for Pam Jenoff:‘ heartbreakingly romantic story of forbidden love during WW2’ - Heat‘Must read’ - Daily Express
Praise for (#ulink_57a34142-9f46-53ba-a5ca-355d9ad0d09a)
Pam Jenoff (#ulink_57a34142-9f46-53ba-a5ca-355d9ad0d09a)
‘This love story will melt you.’
—Company magazine on The Ambassador’s Daughter
‘This is historical romance at its finest.’
—Publishers Weekly on Kommandant’s Girl
‘In her moving first novel, Jenoff offers an insightful portrait of people forced into an untenable situation and succeeds in humanising the unfathomable as well as the heroic.’
—Booklist on Kommandant’s Girl
‘Poignant and intense’
—Good Book Guide on The Diplomat’s Wife
‘Jenoff explores the immediate aftermath of World War II with sensitivity and compassion, shedding light on an often overlooked era of European history. She expertly draws out the tension and illustrates the danger and poverty of Eastern Europe as it falls under communism. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.’
—Library Journal on The Diplomat’s Wife
‘… well constructed and a real page-turner’
—Birmingham Jewish Weekly on The Diplomat’s Wife
PAM JENOFF is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller Kommandant’s Girl, which also earned her a Quill Award nomination. Along with a bachelor degree in International Affairs from George Washington University and a master’s degree in History from Cambridge, she received her Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania and previously served as a Foreign Service Officer for the US State Department in Europe, as the Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army at the Pentagon and as a practising attorney. Pam lives with her husband and three children near Philadelphia where, in addition to writing, she teaches law school.
Visit Pam at www.pamjenoff.com (http://www.pamjenoff.com)
The Last Embrace
Pam Jenoff
For my own brother, Jay
Contents
Cover (#u69f16c77-e36f-59bd-8fc5-02b6b3ed8ffb)
Praise (#u4c9007a8-a326-50ec-8279-3500f59dae17)
About the Author (#ud0c2ceea-35fc-539a-acf4-bceddd5ea88a)
Title Page (#uee2aa475-930c-5d9e-a60d-b3caca78465d)
Dedication (#u714b709a-434e-5c6b-8c05-0fca1aec5634)
PROLOGUE (#u0e3fd4c2-77d6-5ae4-a40b-4ba1eb915d71)
PART ONE (#u0c48c856-d66c-5f8c-9d61-b8dd15809001)
ONE (#uf37f8b8d-3c50-50dc-bfda-bff53b83b108)
TWO (#uc1bb76a0-48d8-543e-a825-153819ba4639)
THREE (#u14b7db85-e57a-5775-b73c-370deadca283)
FOUR (#u5ed72a0a-0856-55fa-b3f5-ccd851699f1c)
FIVE (#u41c7f88d-b6ee-5235-b92e-a62b5bf803de)
SIX (#u6286ef8b-d808-59e3-b149-6370038b8aaf)
SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Reader’s Guide for The Last Embrace (#litres_trial_promo)
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION (#litres_trial_promo)
Endpages (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
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New Jersey August 1944
I sense home before I can see it. Five miles out, the wet salt air enters my mouth and fills my lungs, and the cries of the gulls rise harshly to meet me. But it isn’t until I round the final curve and the wide expanse of murky brown water springs into view that the lump in my chest grows and my eyes begin to burn.
“Damn you,” I say aloud as I pull to the side of the road. “God damn you to hell.”
Absecon Bay remains unmoved. Its calmness seems hypocrisy.
I shift Uncle Meyer’s Buick into gear once more; the engine revs weakly. It is midafternoon and the sun glistens high above the water, the air late-summer warm. The smell of fresh lemon polish rises from the dashboard, mingling with the sea air and lingering cigar smoke. A station wagon passes in the opposite direction, laden with beach chairs and a barbecue grill. Despite the war, some things have not changed: the flight of the summer renters, dusting the sand off their sticky-fingered children and returning to normal life as Labor Day nears, is still the earliest sign of fall. Along the Black Horse Pike on my way down the shore, the prices of peaches and cherries and other summer produce, plentiful even while other food is in short supply, have been slashed, preparing to give way to apples and gourds. Hand-painted signs tout end-of-season corn. Some of the drive-up stands that did a brisk business in hot dogs and root-beer floats all season have already closed.
I pull onto the road, passing signs that exhort me to watch the coast vigilantly for German ships and to buy war bonds. As I guide the car along the edge of the bay, high sea reeds rise from the marshes, obscuring my view of the water. Exhaling, I focus on the casual tangle of shops ahead. Everything had seemed so much bigger in my mind’s eye. Now the houses, with their blackout curtains and flags, are miniature, like the ones Uncle Meyer built alongside his model railroad. The whole place could use a good coat of paint.
I begin to climb the gentle arc of the bridge. A narrow strip of water lined with docks and small boats comes into view. I startle, accidentally slamming on the brake and scarcely hearing the car horn that blares behind me.
I wipe my damp palms against my cotton skirt, which has become wrinkled during the drive. Then I press my foot against the accelerator and continue south, clenching the steering wheel, knuckles white. “Knock it off,” I mutter aloud through gritted teeth, “or you’ll never make it.” Which, as I think about it, does not seem like a half-bad idea.
Just before the Esso station marked with rationing notices, I take a right turn and then another. Then I turn left onto Sunset Avenue. The block which holds such weight in my memories is nothing more than a half dozen or so houses parallel to the bay, built decades earlier, their clapboard fronts scarred, like the lined face of an old woman, from the storms they have weathered. As I drive past each house, I rattle off mentally the people who had lived there: at the fourth house, kindly Mrs. Henderson, known as Aunt Molly to the kids, Joe and Louise Steiner at the fifth. Many of the neighbors are undoubtedly the same—except for the sixth house, which has been vacant since the day the Connallys drove out of my life forever.
I stare straight ahead, trying to focus on the road. But it is no use—even in broad daylight, I see the nightmare that I have lived so many times in my sleep: I am standing on a narrow, deserted strip of the boardwalk, looking out at the vast green-gray ocean. I watch as the tide comes in and the water level grows continually higher. A black wave rises like an enormous hand to twenty feet or more. The wall of water crashes down from above, knocking me to the ground and enveloping me completely. I fight, unable to stand or breathe, as the water fills my lungs and swallows me whole.
Suddenly my vision clears, the image gone as quickly as it came. I tell myself that it isn’t real, that the past will not return. Why be afraid when there is nothing left to lose? But it is no use.
My nightmares have returned again, the surest sign that I am home.
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Washington, DC November 1943
I did not fight the umbrella which blew inside out as I stepped from the streetcar. Instead, I clung tighter to my nearly soaked cloche to hold it in place against the icy rain that slanted sideways across Pennsylvania Avenue. Navigating the slick pavement carefully, I swam through the midafternoon crowd, mostly women and a few men too old or broken for service, who were waiting in line at the Red Cross canteen truck for coffee, or making their way between government buildings and the makeshift tent offices that lined the Mall.
Brushing the raindrops from my overcoat, I slid under the awning that shielded the security booth outside the Department of State Building, pausing to fumble for my press pass. The guard eyed me incredulously as he scrutinized my credentials. Ignoring him, I gazed up at the White House, pale against the stormy gray clouds. Something moved on the roof above, the swivel of an anti-aircraft gun pointed upward. My heart skipped. Washington was a city occupied not just by the thousands who had come here to work, but by the army that defended it as though the Germans might at any moment descend from the sky.
Lowering my eyes, I caught a wistful glimpse of my disheveled reflection in the window of the guard booth. I’d left the rooming house in good form to a sky that, if not sunny, had certainly not suggested this downpour. Arriving at the Post, I expected a day like most I’d had these past few months, typing stories from shorthand notes on a Remington at a desk barely wide enough to hold it, pressed close to a dozen other girls. I didn’t mind; I needed work and I was grateful that my high school secretarial course had qualified me for it. Though it would have paid a few dollars more, I had dreaded the prospect of working as one of the government girls at the War Department. I couldn’t bear to endlessly type letters telling families that their sons were not coming home, seeing Charlie’s face in each of them.
During my first few months at the news bureau, the work had been quiet and predictable. But one afternoon nearly two weeks ago, a man with his sleeves rolled up had opened the door to the steno pool. “Italian?” he bellowed. A cloud of cigarette smoke appeared before him as he exhaled, making him seem a gray-haired dragon. The room fell silent. Chip Steeves, managing editor of the Washington Post, never came into the typing room. “My secretary is out and I need someone to call a translator.” Impulsively, I raised my hand. Then I looked around. I was the only one and I started to lower it.
But Mr. Steeves was already weaving his way through the desks, descending upon me. “You can find me someone to translate Italian?” He spoke through the cigar stub clenched between his teeth.
“No.” I looked at him squarely. “I can do it myself.”
He eyed me for several seconds, his face a scowl. “Well, come on,” he barked impatiently, as though I, and not he, had hesitated. I could feel the eyes of the other typists on me as I walked from the room.
“Montforte, isn’t it?” he asked, surprising me as we entered his office. The desk was covered in piles of papers, the floor littered with dirty coffee cups.
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Addie, that is Adelia.”
He didn’t introduce himself; he didn’t need to. Chip Steeves was legendary as journalist and terror. “You’re the girl who caught that mistake in the U-boat story.” I straightened slightly. My job was only to type articles, not proofread them. I had seen an error in one of the stories, though, a date that I knew from my own reading was wrong. I had pointed it out to Mr. Steeves’s secretary, who oversaw the typists. But I did not know that the message had been passed on—or that I had received credit. “That was good work. You speak Italian?”
“Yes. I was born in Trieste.” Being foreign-born was not something that one announced loudly these days, and I’d worked hard to remove all trace of an accent. This might be the first time it was an asset.
He thrust out a pen as if he might hit me with it, and I fought the urge to cower. “Well, translate this, Adelia Montforte.” I took the paper he offered and moved an overflowing ashtray from the nearest chair, then perched on it and scrawled the translation hurriedly. It was a cable about a skirmish that had taken place near Salerno, brief but with a few military terms I wasn’t quite sure I’d gotten right.
When I finished, I handed it back to Mr. Steeves, who scanned the page. “This is good.”
“I could do better with more time,” I offered.
“Couldn’t we all? But you don’t botch the feel of it, like the real translators do.”
After that, Mr. Steeves sent more translation work my way through his secretary. But he had not reappeared himself—until this morning. “Montforte,” he hollered as he stuck his head into the steno pool, causing me to jump. I’d leapt up and grabbed my pen and pad, assuming it was another translation job. But when I started for the door of his office, he waved me away. “Be at the State Department this afternoon at three.”
I stared at him blankly. “Me? But why?” He tossed me a press pass and disappeared into his office.
The guard handed back my pass now, along with a visitor’s badge, which I pinned to the collar of my blouse. I stepped uncertainly into the massive lobby of the State Building, marveling at the high chandelier, better suited to a ballroom. But before I could take it all in, Mr. Steeves appeared, grabbing me by the arm. He led me unceremoniously past a marble staircase, down a corridor and into a room with a long oak conference table. “The deputy secretary has called a meeting with the press to talk about our coverage of our allies, making sure it doesn’t hurt the war effort, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t understand. Isn’t there something you need me to translate?”
He shook his head. “Nah, kid. My cub reporter’s been called up so I need someone to help me cover the meeting. You were the best one for the job.”
“The best one? I’m a typist. I can’t possibly cover a story.”
“Just take one of the chairs against the wall and take notes. And don’t say anything,” he instructed, then disappeared into a group of uniformed men clustered in the corner.
I took off my overcoat and folded it in the lap of my navy blue skirt, noticing as I sat down a run in my nylons. Then I tried to smooth the wrinkles from my pleated-front blouse. I was the only woman in the room, except for the one setting out coffee cups. The war might have brought women to work, Rosie the Riveter and all that, but in high-level Washington meetings like this, the seats at the table were still reserved for the men.
The door opened and a man I recognized from the papers as Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius came in. “Be seated,” he said, as the others came to the table. “I’ve only got a few minutes so I’ll be brief. I’ve called you here to ask for your help in talking to the American people about the war.” He launched into a discussion of a new initiative by the Office of War Information to work with the press on the way it would communicate information about the fighting.
I scribbled furiously. Though I frequently typed the shorthand notes of others, I had seldom taken dictation and I feared I would not be able to keep up with Secretary Stettinius’s rapid English. But as I listened, I became absorbed by what he was saying. The relationship between newspapers and government had always seemed adversarial, one seeking information and the other holding it back. But he was speaking now of ways they could work together. “I’m happy to take your questions,” he concluded a few minutes later.
A correspondent from the Washington Star whom I did not recognize raised his hand, then spoke without waiting. “It sounds good on the surface—but isn’t it something of a conflict of interest?” I had been wondering the same thing: Could the newspapers still maintain their independence and integrity while working with the government?
Secretary Stettinius offered a vague explanation of how it would all work without compromising the independence of the press.
“Surely you aren’t suggesting we show you our stories before they go to press?” another reporter pressed. “That would be censorship.”
“No, of course not,” Secretary Stettinius replied, looking tugging at his collar. “We simply want to be a resource.” Across the room, Mr. Steeves folded his arms, unconvinced. “My deputy will be in touch with each of you individually to discuss specifics,” Secretary Stettinius promised, cutting the questions short. He rose, signaling that the meeting was over.
As the newsmen stood and chatted among themselves, I tried to catch Mr. Steeves’s eye, but he was engrossed in conversation with a foreign correspondent. I made my way toward the door of the too-stuffy room, uncertain whether to wait for him or return to the bureau.
As I neared the massive foyer, a door across the hallway opened, letting loose a low din of chatter from another meeting. I started past. “Then we are agreed,” a voice broke through the others, unexpectedly familiar. I stopped mid-step. “We’ll meet again when we have the plans drawn up.”
Charlie! My head swiveled in the direction from which the voice had come. It couldn’t be. I craned my neck, trying once more to hear the voice. I had imagined him so many times since coming here, seen him in every uniformed soldier on the street corners. But I’d never heard his voice.
I stepped toward the door of the other room, not caring that I had no business being there as I scanned the crowd. “Oh!” I cried so loudly that a man in front of me turned to stare. I brought my hand to my mouth as Charlie’s broad shoulders appeared above the others. Joy surged through me, making my head light. It really was him. But how? There was no reason on earth for him to be in Washington. He was meant to be off training somewhere or deployed, not standing in front of me, tall and glorious. Had he come for me? No, there was simply no way he could have known I was here—which was exactly how I had wanted it.
Anxiety rose, eclipsing my happiness, and the walls of the immense room seemed to grow close. I started to duck away, the idea of facing Charlie unfathomable. But even as I took a step toward the door, I turned back, drawn to him. He looked different to be sure, aged by all that had happened, with lines in places I hadn’t remembered and a permanent sadness about the eyes. His brown hair was cut short and it was thinner, too, without the thick, rich curls he had once had. He was still beautiful, though. My breath caught. That did not, could not, change what had happened. I had to leave. Now.
I stepped back toward the corridor, my ankle turning inward and causing me to stumble. As I struggled not to fall, I dropped my notebook, which clattered against the marble. Heads turned in my direction, seeming more annoyed than concerned. As the others resumed their conversations, Charlie stepped from the group and moved toward me in the hall, his face breaking. “Addie?” His tone was disbelieving. I froze, unable to move or speak as he drew close. He reached out, as if to touch me, but his hand foundered midair before falling to his side again. He leaned in to kiss my cheek and his familiar scent made the room wobble. I struggled not to turn and meet his lips with my own. “Addie.” There it was in that single word, that voice which cut right through and connected with my insides as it had since the first time I heard it. “What are you doing here?” He didn’t know any of it—that I had left Philadelphia, or how I had come to be here. Because he had gone first.
“I’m working for the Post.” I watched his face for any sign of disbelief. But Charlie had never doubted me. “I never expected you to be in Washington,” I added.
His face flinched slightly as though he had been slapped. “You aren’t pleased to see me.”
“Of course I am. It’s just that I thought you were training.” My words came out too quickly, piling on top of one another.
He fumbled with the hat, neatly folded in his hands. “I was, for almost a year. But now I’m here for some extra briefings.” There was a strange undercurrent to his voice. A year had slipped through our fingers. How was that possible? Once it had seemed unthinkable to keep breathing without Charlie, but somehow the clock had kept ticking. I tried to imagine his days in between, all of the things he had done and seen since we’d last laid eyes on one another. But my mind was blank.
“Your hair,” he blurted. I raised my hand to my temple, wincing at how tousled I was from the rain. “It’s short.” It was the bob, so different than last time he had seen me. “I mean, I like it.” I couldn’t tell if he was just being kind.
“How’s your family?”
“Holding up as well as can be expected.” He shrugged, helpless but not indifferent. “My folks are in Florida. Mom has thrown herself into the women’s auxiliary.” It sounded so much like Mrs. Connally that I had to smile. “Dad’s Dad.” Guilt at having left them flickered across his face. “It tore them apart, you know.” Yes, I knew only too well. The Connallys lived in a place where their grief would always be as raw as the day it all happened, no matter how much time passed or how far away they moved. “They’re together, but in a separate kind of a way. They know now,” he added, and I wanted to ask if he meant about the army, or what had been between us, or both.
The question stuck in my throat. “And the boys?” I asked instead.
“Jack, well, he works at a plant in Port Richmond. He’s taking night classes at Temple, though.” Jack had been the real brain of the boys—he might have gone to an Ivy League school and practiced medicine as he once dreamed, but for money and circumstance. “He hasn’t been called up yet, thank God. Mom couldn’t bear to lose another son.”
I swallowed. “And Liam?”
Charlie stared hard at the floor. “I’m not sure.” But surely his parents knew about Liam’s whereabouts, and whether or not he was okay. Or had they cut ties with him as well? My stomach tugged. I still hated Liam for what he had done, yet I could not help but worry.
Charlie and I watched one another, not speaking. We had talked about everyone, of course, except the one name we could not say. “How long will you be in town?” I asked, not sure what answer I was hoping to hear.
Before Charlie could reply, voices came from the conference room behind him. He looked over his shoulder. “There’s another meeting. I’m going to have to go.” A knife ripped through me at the idea that he might leave again just as quickly as he had appeared. “Addie, I want to talk to you. Meet me tonight?” he said suddenly. “The Old Ebbitt Grill at seven.” So he did not want our chance reunion to end either.
I peered at him, trying to read the meaning behind his words. Were we merely two old friends, trying to catch up? No, it was still there, that hungry, yearning look in his eyes I had first seen the night on the dock. He wanted to pick up once more and return to that moment when we had stood on the edge of the world, gazing down at everything that lay before us. He wanted to make things whole again.
Something licked at my insides then, familiar like a forgotten dream: hope. Even after everything that had happened, Charlie still reached a place in me that made me believe things could be good again.
But something held me back. “I don’t know.” I was suddenly angry. Did he really think we could put all of those broken pieces back together and not see the cracks? Doubt thundered beneath my feet like a freight train and the ground began to sway. I had managed to make my way back from the place that nearly killed me and stand despite it all. I could not afford to let him in and risk going there again.
“Please, Addie. I’ll wait for you.” There was a desperation about him I had only seen once before in my life. Before I could answer, the men spilled forth from the conference room, enveloping Charlie, and we were separated by a sea of suits and uniforms giving off the odor of cologne and cigarette smoke. I had not had the chance to answer.
Our eyes met and locked, his making a silent plea before he slipped from sight.
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Philadelphia June 1941 Two years earlier
I struggled to stand in the crush of unwashed bodies that surged forward from the ship on all sides. Then I squeezed my way to the side of the dock, pressing back against a rotted wood railing that I hoped would hold. I lifted myself to the tips of my toes in Mamma’s too-large shoes, struggling to see above the ocean of heads around me. Shoulders pushed close, blocking my view. I hoisted myself onto the rail, grasping it tightly so as not to fall, and scanned the sea of travelers. I wished that I might see the familiar face of one of the girls from steerage (not that they had been so friendly). But I recognized no one from the massive ocean liner, even after traveling on it for seven wretched, seasick days.
The travelers moved in small clumps, couples and families of three or four. Across the wharf, a woman flew into the arms of a man waiting for her, reunited. Everyone was carrying things, boxes and bags and children. But I was alone, my hands empty. Worry mixed with the hunger that had been gnawing at my stomach, growing to a burn. In her haste, Mamma had not given me so much as an address for my aunt and uncle who were supposed to take me in. What would I do if no one came for me?
Think. I inhaled, then took in the scene again, framing it and trying to find the right angle to make sense of the situation. Back home I might have snapped a photo with the old camera Papa had given me. But here I was overwhelmed by the chaos, great swirls of strangers moving in all directions, colliding with one another. A dog trotted along the edge of the dock, sniffing at garbage. Even a stray seemed to somehow know where it was going.
Looking around the smelly, crowded harbor, my spirits sank. Lucky, I’d heard a woman remark days earlier as the Italian coastline had faded from view. Heads around her had bobbed in agreement: we were fortunate to be away from the violence that had worsened ominously against the Jews in recent months. But as the ship pulled from the Stazione Maritima, I did not feel lucky, but alone. My parents were still there—and I wanted to go back.
“You!” a male voice barked, and I turned with a flicker of hope. Perhaps my uncle had found me after all. But it was one of the burly stevedores who had herded us from the boat. “Down!” I scrambled from the railing, trying to fade into the crowd. The travelers had moved forward, though, dwindling and leaving me exposed like a broken shell on the beach at low tide. “Keep moving.” It had been like this the whole of the trip, deckhands shouting orders to the lower-class passengers, not bothering to maintain a pretense of courtesy. “Someone here to get you?” the man pressed.
I processed his English slowly. Good question. What if the message had not gotten through and no one was coming for me? Perhaps they would let me go back, I thought with fleeting joy. But after all of the struggle to get me out of Italy, Mamma would think that a failure.
It was only a week ago that I had been reading in our two-story apartment just off the Via del Monte, snug in the bedroom that I had shared with Nonna before she passed two years earlier, when Mamma came running in, breathless. “We have to go.” Downstairs, Papa was throwing papers into the fire that never burned in summer, with an energy I thought he no longer possessed. “Come!” Mamma ordered, urging me down to the street, and lifted me onto the handles of her bike.
“Where are we going?”
My mother did not answer, but pedaled fiercely through the darkened streets. It was after curfew and I feared the police might stop us. We neared the harbor, drawing close to the docks where too many people were crowding onto a rickety ship. Mamma stopped, climbed off and pulled me from the bike, breathing heavily. Perspiration glistened on her forehead and cheeks. “You have to go first.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “Where?”
“America.” She handed me a satchel heavy with coins, and a ticket and papers, though real or forged I could not say.
She could not possibly be serious. I reached for her, panicking. “I can’t go alone!” The sight of the dark water behind the ship filled me with terror.
“There’s no other way. You’ll be fine. You’re strong.” Mamma had never coddled me, forcing me to find my own way from our apartment through the city to market from a young age and do almost everything for myself. It was as if she had known and somehow been planning for this.
“Why now?”
“These documents.” She gestured. “That ship. You’ll have to transfer in Gibralter, but there’s no telling when we might get another chance.” But her voice was evasive, and remembering Papa burning the papers, I knew it was something more. I would be leaving them behind in danger.
“Papa and I will follow.” I knew it was a lie. Papa was too weak to travel. She urged me forward onto the rotten-smelling dock, finding gaps in the crowd that I could not see and making her own with shoulders and elbows where none existed. Her hair fanned out around her, a lioness with her cub.
We neared the front of the crowd and Mamma pushed toward a uniformed man and handed him a fistful of bills, saying a few words I could not hear. She turned back. “Come.” We reached the edge where the dock met the ship and my toe caught in the gap. Mamma grabbed my arm hard to keep me from stumbling. “Stay out of sight as much as you can.” Her fingers bit into my skin. “Talk to no one. I will send word to Papa’s brother.” She took her mizpah necklace, with its half-heart pendant made of gold that she had always worn, from around her neck, and fastened it on mine. My father had given it to her years earlier, keeping his half in his breast pocket, close to his own heart. She did not kiss me, but pressed me tightly to her once, firm and hard. Then she released me and, before I could follow, disappeared into the crowd.
“Hey!” The stevedore’s voice came again. My vision cleared. Impatient now, he gestured with his thick hand in the direction of the large building ahead. “You gotta go in there. Police come for the kids who’ve got no one to claim them.” There was a quiet thud in my chest, as I carefully pieced together his words. What did the police do with those kids?
I ran my tongue over the chipped spot on my front tooth as I glanced back over my shoulder at the ship. Once dirty and confining, now it seemed a refuge. But I did not have money for a meal, much less a return ticket. “You can’t go back, only forward.” The man stood with arms folded, blocking the way behind me, and I had no choice but to move in the direction of the building.
Inside the high-ceilinged arrivals hall, bodies pressed together, making the air warm and thick. Conversations in different languages, German, Yiddish, Italian, rose and clashed around me. I hung back from the queue that shuffled forward, trying to figure out what to do. In an alcove to the right, a few of the other kids from the ship sat forlornly on a wood bench. A policeman lorded over them in the doorway. Nothing good was going to happen to that lot and I didn’t want to join them. But I was not about to go up to immigration and announce that I was alone.
I saw a sign for the ladies’ room at the far side of the terminal and made my way toward it. Pressing inside through the wall of stench, I grimaced at my reflection in the cracked mirror. On the boat I had tried to cow my thick dark hair back into braids, as Nonna had done each morning. But pieces stuck out in all directions. The scratch on my cheek had just begun to heal. I pushed my way to the basin where women jostled at the sink like pigs at a trough. Reaching my hands into the fray, I managed to get a few drops of water. I desperately wanted to drink it, but didn’t dare. Instead, I used it to smooth my hair and wipe a smudge from my forehead.
Back in the main hall, the crowds from the ship had thinned. I walked to a newspaper stand in the corner, pretending to be interested in the headlines. Ten minutes passed. “You buying?” the man behind the kiosk asked. I moved away, feeling exposed in the vast, emptying arrivals hall. If I stood here any longer, the policeman who took the kids was going to notice. In the short queue which remained ahead, a family with several children was nearing the immigration desk. I moved close to them, hoping to slip through with them.
But as the family stepped past the desk, a hand caught my shoulder, stopping me.
“Papers?” I drew myself up to my full four feet eight inches, then handed my passport to the man in a dark blue cap and jacket whose eyes darted back and forth as he scanned the paper in front of him. An open pack of Lucky Strikes peeked out of his breast pocket. I held my breath, praying that the papers were good, and that the money my mother had given the ship’s purser was enough to have my name added to the manifest. The waiting room on the far side of the immigration desk, where cleared arrivals met their hosts, stood just feet but oceans away.
The man looked up beneath bushy brows. “Who’s sponsoring you?” I shook my head at the unfamiliar word. “You have family here?” he asked more slowly.
“My aunt and uncle. They’re expecting me.” My accent sounded thicker than when I had practiced speaking English with Mamma back home.
“Where are they?” I faltered. “Children have to be collected.” He made me sound like luggage. I bristled at the notion of still being called a child at almost seventeen, then decided not to complain. He gestured toward the guarded side room with the kids. “Otherwise you’ll have to go to the Home until your relatives can collect you.”
“Home?” I repeated, picking out the word I recognized.
“It’s a place for kids who have no one.”
My stomach tightened. “My uncle, he is...sick,” I said, spinning the lie as it came out. “They couldn’t came.”
“Come,” he corrected. “You have a letter?”
“It blew away.” I gestured with my hand, then fought not to blink as he stared at me. “On the boat.”
He took off his cap and scratched his head. “I’d like to help you. But we can’t just let kids go loose in the city.” Now he sounded like a zookeeper. My heart sank as he raised his hand to wave over the policeman who was guarding the children.
Over the edge of the immigration desk, I spotted a grainy family photograph. “You have children?”
The man hesitated, unaccustomed to others asking the questions. Then he lowered his hand. “Four. A girl and three boys.”
“Your daughter is beautiful. How old?”
His face softened a bit. “Mary’s six.”
The officer rubbed his right temple with thick fingers. Behind him, the clock struck five. “Joe, we’re headed to O’Shea’s,” another man called from behind him.
“My aunt and uncle lived close to here,” I said, not stopping to correct my grammar as I sensed a crack in his resolve. “I will bring my aunt back tomorrow to sign for me? Please.”
The man hesitated. “What’s their address?”
“2256 South Fifth,” I replied, making up the numbers and hoping they sounded right.
“I could lose my job for this.”
“You won’t. I’ll come back.” The man stamped my passport. I took it and hurried past him. I scanned the waiting room, but did not see anyone who might have been my aunt and uncle. Not daring to linger in case the immigration officer changed his mind, I scurried through the station and stepped out into the light.
On the far side of the door, I stopped again and scratched at the back of my head, hoping I had not picked up nits. The street in front of the Port of Philadelphia was packed thick with buses and taxis and black sedans, choking the already thick summer air with exhaust. An enormous American flag flapped in the breeze above. At the corner, a hot-dog cart gave off a savory smell. My mouth watered. Food had run out in steerage almost two days before we docked. I had not eaten, except for the scrap of bread an upper deck passenger had carelessly tossed below in waste. I moved closer to the cart, eyeing the soft pretzels stacked high on the edge. I could take one without anyone noticing.
No, I was not going to start my life here by stealing. Better hungry than a thief. I turned from the cart, focusing on the street in front of me. I had made it through immigration, but I still had no idea where I was going.
“Adelia?” a voice called behind me. I froze. They were going to stop me from leaving after all. But this time the voice was female and it had spoken—not barked—my name. I turned. A sturdy woman in a flowered dress and thick brown shoes was walking toward me, a thin, stooped man at her side. My shoulders slumped with relief. So Mamma had been able to send word after all.
A look of something—disapproval perhaps—passed over the woman’s face as she neared. She leaned in to kiss my cheek, flinching at the travel smell I could not help. “I’m your aunt Bess. This is your uncle,” she added, gesturing toward the gray-haired man in horn-rimmed glasses who stood behind her. I tried to stand straighter. I wanted them to like me, to be glad they had taken me in.
“Meyer,” he offered, switching his cigar to his other hand so he could shake mine. I strained to hear his voice, one step above a whisper. There was something familiar around his dark, almond-shaped eyes that made him an older, less handsome version of Papa. Homesickness washed over me.
“I’m so sorry we were late. There was construction on the road and then we had the wrong dock,” Aunt Bess said, sounding harried. I struggled to keep up with her rapid-fire English, catching only a fraction of what she said. “I suppose we have to clear you through customs.” She pointed to the building.
“I already did.” As if on cue, I saw the immigration officer who had let me go walking from the terminal, jacket thrown over his shoulder. He turned, a wave of recognition crossing his face as I gestured toward my aunt and uncle. I had been telling the truth after all. He raised his hand, wishing me good luck with a kind of salute before rounding the corner.
“But how did you manage that? Oh, never mind,” Aunt Bess added before I could share my tale. She took me by the arm. “Oy, you’re all bones.” The comment stung. Before I’d left Trieste I’d been developing, with new curves that made my clothes fit differently. But all that seemed to melt away during the days of hunger on the ship and now my elbows and knees stuck out like a scarecrow’s.
“You must be hungry,” Uncle Meyer offered more kindly.
“A little,” I lied, nearly swooning at the mention of food. My eyes traveled once more toward the stack of pretzels on the hot-dog cart.
But Aunt Bess opened her purse and fished out a bagel wrapped in tissue. She dusted off a bit of lint that had stuck to the corner and handed it to me. “Thank you,” I managed, trying to mask my disappointment as I bit into the stale, crusty bread. I gulped the first mouthful, then forced myself to slow down as my stomach roiled.
“You don’t have bags?” I shook my head. “We’ll have to get you some things,” Aunt Bess said, as though it had only just occurred to her. I followed them to a black car at the corner. “We’re headed to the shore. That is, the beach. Atlantic City. We take a place there in the summer. It’s nothing fancy, just a few rooms in a boardinghouse. But we thought the sea air might do you good.” Aunt Bess spoke quickly, using too many English words that I did not know. “Do you understand?”
She must have noticed my confusion. I tended to wear my emotions on my face—a habit I’d been trying to break. “Si. I mean yes.”
“You’ll like that, nu?” Uncle Meyer asked, his whisper kind. I did not answer. How could I explain that, even though I’d been raised in coastal Trieste, the ocean was in fact the one thing I hated most?
A tear escaped from my right eye then and trickled down my cheek. “Oh, dear,” Aunt Bess said, mistaking my sadness for gratitude and hugging me awkwardly. I let myself be folded into her stiff, unfamiliar arms and took a step into the life that was waiting for me.
(#ulink_2827cafe-85cb-5353-bc75-b773dbf99190)
Hearing the screen door slam behind me, I shielded my eyes and peered up at the slope-roofed beach duplex where we occupied the second floor. Aunt Bess labored down the rickety wood steps, straw purse tucked under her arm. Though it was not yet midmorning, the sticky July heat had already caused damp spots to form at the armpits of her dress. “I’m headed to Margie’s.” Aunt Bess’s routine was always the same, the only question if it was canasta at Margie’s or mah-jongg at Flo’s. “Do you want to come?”
I considered saying yes, just to see her reaction. “No, thank you.” Aunt Bess’s shoulders dropped slightly with relief. She hesitated in that way she always did, not quite sure what to do with a teenage girl whom she’d only just inherited less than a month earlier. Things were especially awkward during the week. Uncle Meyer traveled in the Buick, selling pots and pans and other household items to the housewives of Elkins Park and Cheltenham and other neighborhoods northeast of Center City. Until he returned Friday afternoons, it was just Aunt Bess and me. “There are some leftover prakas—I mean cabbage rolls—in the icebox for lunch.” Aunt Bess’s family had come from Pinsk some thirty years earlier, fleeing the pogroms. She regarded herself as American, but little bits of the old country seeped through, like a white slip peeking out beneath the hem of her dress. Sometimes I felt as if I were an embarrassment to her, the immigrant niece a reminder of the world from which she’d tried so hard to distance herself. “There’s cheese for sandwiches and some potato salad,” she continued, as if rattling off a grocery list. She was forever trying to feed me. “I’ll be back this afternoon.”
I watched as Aunt Bess padded, dingy white sandals scraping, down to the corner of Monmouth Avenue. She was not an unkind woman; she simply did not know how to do this, like a muscle stiff from lack of use. I did not dare to ask if she ever wanted kids of her own.
I was supposed to be grateful, I knew, from the looks and not-too-low whispers of Aunt Bess’s friends. Grateful to her and Uncle Meyer for the clothes that were new, but not quite the right size, and for the secondhand books that were a few years too young for me. Grateful that they had taken me in, even though they really hadn’t had a choice. And I was grateful, but I wished they might just once ask me what I wanted, or even let me choose for myself.
When Aunt Bess had disappeared from sight, I climbed the steps of the duplex and went inside for some calamine lotion. We had two rooms, if you counted the screened sundeck with the daybed that made me an easy target for the mosquitos as I slept, plus kitchen privileges down below. I rubbed the lotion into my legs, avoiding the scrape on my left knee. Then I straightened, licking the salt from my lips and peering out across the horizon where greenish bay water met overcast gray sky.
My hand wrapped reflexively around the mizpah pendant, fingers feeling the engraved Hebrew: May the Lord keep watch between you and me when we are away from each other, or so Mamma had told me once when I was little and had asked about the charm around her neck. Hebrew was nonexistent in our home, and the item’s value to Mamma was sentimental, not religious. I had not taken it off since Mamma fastened it around my neck that night she put me on the ship. I pictured the other half in my father’s pocket, close to his heart. Sadness seemed to seep from the cool metal through my fingers as I thought of them and what might have happened in the weeks since I left. Had their lives had gone on much the same without me?
The sound of a car engine interrupted my thoughts. I looked down through the screen window, surprised. Our street was narrow and not a major thruway; vehicles this time of day other than the milkman and garbage truck were scarce. A boxy black station wagon lumbered into view, with suitcases strapped to the roof that looked ready to topple off at any moment.
The car stopped just past the duplex. I stood up, curious. The sprawling house next door with its wraparound porch had been vacant since we’d arrived three weeks earlier. Aunt Bess had sniffed at its dilapidated state, but I liked the empty place—I played under the eaves and even found a rabbit’s nest there. There had been signs in recent days that someone was working on it, though: a whiff of fresh paint coming from a suddenly open window, a pile of fresh lumber on the back porch. Once I thought I glimpsed a man through one of the windows, but when I moved closer to peer inside, he was gone.
But there was no mistaking the arrival now. A woman got out of the driver’s seat. She was pretty, with pale skin and strawberry-blond hair I would have loved for my own, and a smattering of freckles that said she’d better keep out of the sun if she didn’t want more. Behind her, several brown-haired boys spilled out of the car and raced toward the house, shouting and laughing. At first it seemed that there were too many to count. A little one, not more than ten or so, scampered ahead. He was followed by two boys about my age. They looked nearly the same, except one wore thick glasses. I’d heard of identical twins, but these were the first I’d actually seen. A dog bounded from the car, barking noisily at their feet.
Finally an older boy unfolded himself from the front passenger seat. He had long legs and wide shoulders, hair in a neat side part but that still curled at the edges. My stomach flipped, like the time Papa had taken me on a roller coaster at the carnival.
A family moving in. I waited for a father to appear, but the woman and the boys began unloading things and carrying them to the house. The oldest boy lifted a case from the roof of the car, his muscles flexing under his T-shirt. One of the twins hung back, head low, until his mother went to him and said something, cajoling a smile. They laughed at a joke I could not hear.
When the boys had finished unloading the boxes, they disappeared into the house. I looked down at the street, which seemed emptier than it had before they’d come. Then the screen door to the house next door banged open and the boys appeared once more. They jostled like puppies as they pushed outside. One of the twins carried a football, which the boys began tossing among them on the thin strip of grass that separated our two houses.
I watched the scene play out below, wanting to go down and join them. I stepped forward, starting toward the door that led downstairs. Then I stopped. But I kept watching, fascinated. The hair of the oldest boy seemed to glow gold in the morning sun. He didn’t so much run as fly, feet barely touching the ground. He leapt for the ball and his shirt pulled free, revealing a bit of midsection. I inhaled sharply at the unfamiliar sight.
“Hey!” a voice called out. It took a second to realize that it was directed at me. The youngest boy had his head tilted upward toward the porch, hand raised to shield his eyes from the sun. I stepped back from the window, but it was too late. He waved his brothers over. “A kid.”
The others stopped playing and gathered to peer up at me. “A girl,” the oldest brother corrected. “Don’t be shy,” he coaxed in a voice too rich and hypnotic to resist. “Come down and join us. We won’t bite.”
“We might,” the twin without the glasses taunted. I hung back. Then, curious and struck by the kindness of the oldest boy’s eyes, I opened the door and started down the steps.
“I’m Jack,” the twin with glasses said when I’d reached the bottom. He held out his hand. Closer I could see that he had a fuller face than his brother, splashed with freckles. Long lashes blinked behind the thick lenses.
I opened my mouth but no sound came out. “Adelia,” I croaked finally, wishing my accent was not so obvious.
The leaner twin cocked his head. “She must be the greenhorn from Italy that Dad mentioned.” How did they know about me? I blinked, caught off guard by the rudeness of his tone. My cheeks reddened and I started to turn. Coming downstairs had been a mistake.
“Don’t mind Liam,” said the oldest boy, his voice low and resonant. I stared up, not answering. He was even more handsome up close, with hazel eyes and a wide smile. Bright sunlight seemed to cast a halo of gold around him. “I’m Charlie.” My breath caught. I brushed my hair from my face, trying to think of something to say that would impress him, make him take notice. He cupped his hand on the head of the youngest boy standing beside him. “And this is Robbie.”
I smiled down at Robbie, who had wide, round cheeks that seemed to cushion his eyes, and front teeth still a bit too big. He stood very straight, trying to look taller in a way that I recognized from doing it myself. “Nice to meet you,” I said solemnly.
“Adelia,” Charlie said, as if trying my name on for size. Hearing him say it, my insides warmed. “That’s a mouthful. Is it okay if we call you Addie?”
I nodded, liking the short, easy sound. “Si. I mean, yes.” I blushed. My knowledge of English was not awful. Mamma had insisted that I learn other languages since I was a child. I had read as much as I could since coming here, mostly Ladies’ Home Journal and the other women’s magazines Aunt Bess loved. And I had listened to the radio programs, too. But I had not had much opportunity to practice speaking and when I was nervous it all seemed to fade away.
“Come meet our mother.” Before I could reply, Charlie strode across the lawn, covering it in about two steps. The others followed. “Mom!” The red-haired woman emerged from the house, wiping her hands on the apron that covered her light blue shirtwaist dress. “This is Addie. She’s staying next door.”
The woman smiled with a kindness that said she had heard about me. “Hello! We’ve been summer neighbors of your aunt and uncle for years, though we usually get here a good deal earlier. I’m Doris Connally.”
“Where did you come from?” Robbie interjected.
“From Trieste, in Italy. On a boat.”
“All by yourself?” he asked. I nodded, standing straighter.
“Well, that’s something,” Mrs. Connally said, her voice full of admiration. “I normally wouldn’t even make the trip down to the shore by myself, but my husband had to work and the boys wanted to be here for the fireworks on the Fourth.”
“Who lives there with you?” Robbie resumed his interrogation, pointing up to the screened porch where I had stood minutes earlier.
“Just my aunt and my uncle.”
“No brothers or sisters? Any pets?” I shook my head twice, trying to keep up with his questions. “Boy, you’ll sure be glad to have us around!” His brothers chuckled.
Robbie turned to his mother. “Can we keep her?”
“Robbie, she isn’t a puppy. But I do hope you’ll join us often,” she added.
“Because we really need more kids,” Liam said wryly. His words stung. But he did not sound as though he was trying to be mean, just truthful.
The yellow dog I’d seen earlier bounded down the porch steps and stopped at Liam’s feet. “This is Beau,” he added, face softening.
“Jack and Liam must be about your age,” Mrs. Connally remarked.
“I’m sixteen.” I heard my accent again, the way my voice did not sound like theirs.
“I’m taller,” said Liam improbably.
“Okay,” I conceded, because it seemed to matter to him a great deal.
“Would you like to join us for lunch?” Mrs. Connally offered. “I haven’t much ’til we get to Casel’s, just sandwiches.”
I still could not get over the way Americans spoke so casually of food—something I would never again take for granted. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”
Mrs. Connally smiled. “Hardly. With these boys, I’m already cooking for an army. Come on, everyone. Let’s eat.”
Charlie lifted Robbie across his shoulders like a sack of potatoes and started for the door with the twins at his heels. Inside, the house was airy and cool. There were little touches, like the carved oak bannister and wide windows, that said the house had been built for someone to live in year-round, and not merely as a vacation home.
As we passed through the living room, I paused to admire a chess set which sat already unpacked on a low table. “It’s lovely,” I said, fingering one of the carved wooden rooks.
“Do you play?” Charlie asked with new interest.
I tried to calm the fluttering in my stomach. “I did. My father taught me.” In recent years when he had become broken and withdrawn, it was my one way to still connect to him. Papa had no one to play with him now. I imagined the chessboard sitting unused by the fireplace in our apartment in Trieste. It had been my dearest possession—the one thing I might have brought with me, had I known I was going.
I followed Charlie through the open boxes that littered the floor to the freshly scrubbed kitchen smelling of lemons. Mrs. Connally unpacked a basket of meats and cheeses and began slicing thick white bread. My stomach rumbled embarrassingly. Even after several weeks here, every meal felt as though it might be my last.
The boys whooped and hollered their way to the kitchen table, its enamel top scratched from years of use. Charlie plunked Robbie down in his chair before grabbing Liam and Jack under each arm and pretending to bang their heads together.
“Boys!” Mrs. Connally admonished, but her tone was good-natured, as if the chaos was normal. She turned to me. “Why don’t you sit here next to me where these little rascals can’t bother you.”
“Thank you.” I slid into the chair Mrs. Connally indicated, then looked hopefully at the empty seat next to mine. But Charlie dropped down between the twins on the other side of the table.
Mrs. Connally passed me a plate of sliced tomato. “We just bought these at a farmer’s stand on the way into town.” The piece I took was warm. Biting into it, I was taken back to sun-soaked holiday afternoons at the cottage outside Trieste, filling our baskets with tomatoes off the vine for Nonna to make her thick sauce.
Mrs. Connally handed around the platter of sandwiches and glasses of milk. The kitchen turned quiet as the boys attacked their lunches. Each of them ate differently. Charlie wolfed his meal down in great bites, barely pausing between mouthfuls to breathe or speak. Jack was meticulous, as if auditioning for a part. Liam sat back and nibbled disinterestedly, while Robbie played with his food just shy of irritating his mother. I ate carefully, taking care not to leave crumbs.
From where I sat at the kitchen table, I could see that the house was a bit down-at-heels, the paint peeling and woodwork worn. “It’s been in my family for generations,” Mrs. Connally said, seeming to notice. “It’s a lot to keep up, but I couldn’t bear to sell it.”
“We live in South Philadelphia back home,” Jack offered between bites.
“We do, too, I think. Fifth and Porter,” I said, repeating the location I’d heard from Aunt Bess.
“That’s the Jewish neighborhood,” Liam observed.
“Liam, mind your manners,” his mother cautioned.
“Is it true that Jews don’t believe in Jesus?” Robbie asked. I nodded. His eyes widened with disbelief. “We’re Catholic.”
“Sort of,” Charlie corrected. “Dad is, and we go to church sometimes. But Mom is a Quaker.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s just a different kind of church,” Mrs. Connally replied. “And we Quakers are pacifists, which means we don’t believe in fighting or war.” Still not fully understanding, I made a note to look up the words later.
“Is that why you don’t want America to help stop Germany?” Charlie asked his mother. His voice was rich and resonant. “Because you’re a pacifist?”
“Partly, I suppose. Mostly it’s because I have four sons.” My heart sank. I had heard such talk at the drugstore and among Aunt Bess’s friends. Back in Italy, I’d just assumed that the Americans would come and help stop the Germans, that it was only a matter of time. How could they not? But here people spoke of the war as though it were unreal, a book or movie, or simply someone else’s problem.
“We live about ten blocks from you,” Jack said. I turned to him, grateful for the return to an easier subject.
“You’ll attend high school in the fall?” Mrs. Connally asked me.
“Ugh, only Mom would ruin a perfectly good lunch with the S word.” Liam ducked as his mother swiped at him playfully, then tried to wipe mustard from the corner of his mouth.
“At South Philadelphia High School, I think.”
“It’s called Southern,” Liam corrected disdainfully.
“Us, too,” Jack chimed in. “Charlie’s gonna be quarterback of the football team.”
Charlie shrugged and waved his hand. “We don’t know that yet.”
“Naw, unless Tommy Thompson decides to stroll down from Eagles’ practice and try out, I think you’re in like Flynn.” I smiled, trying to look as if I understood.
When the food was gone, I stood to help Mrs. Connally clear the plates, then returned to the table. She passed each of us a miniature Hershey’s bar. I stared in disbelief. Aunt Bess’s idea of a treat were the cookies she’d brought from the kosher bakery in the city, dry even before they had gone stale. I had not had chocolate since coming to America. “Thank you.” I tore off the paper and popped the whole thing in my mouth. Sugar rushed through me, heating my blood.
“You kids go on back outside while I clean up and unpack a bit more.” The boys pushed back their chairs from the table and started for the door.
Outside, Robbie held a baseball bat he had pulled from one of the boxes. “Wanna play?”
“She’s a girl,” Liam sneered derisively.
I bristled. What was his problem? “Sure.” In truth I’d never played before, but I wasn’t about to admit it to him. The bat I took from Robbie felt strange and cumbersome in my hands.
“Here.” Charlie walked over and adjusted my hands, his fingers pressing warm on my own. Jack threw the ball in my direction, soft and slow. I swung and then released, putting all of my weight behind the movement as the bat made contact with the ball. It sailed high into the yard on the far side of the Connally house and there was a sudden crash, followed by the sound of shattering glass.
I dropped the bat. Everyone froze. “Uh-oh,” Robbie said. His jaw dropped.
A man came around the fence angrily holding the ball. “Who broke my car window?”
I hesitated, trembling. “I did,” a voice behind me said. I turned, surprised to see Liam stepping forward before I could speak.
Mrs. Connally burst through the door. “Liam, how could you? I’ve warned you boys about playing ball by the houses.” She reached into the pocket of her dress as she walked toward the man. “Mr. Steiner, I’m so sorry,” she said, handing him some dollar bills. “This should cover it.” The man took the money and walked off with a harrumph. Mrs. Connally turned back to Liam, hands on hips. “You are grounded and no allowance until you earn back what I just gave Mr. Steiner.” She stormed back into the house.
I turned to Liam. “You took the blame for me.”
He shrugged. “People expect me to get in trouble. No one would believe it was a girl who hit that far anyway.”
I opened my mouth to issue a retort and then thought better of it. “Thank you.” But he just stomped off around the side of the house.
I walked to the door of the Connally house and knocked softly. “Ma’am?”
Mrs. Connally knelt over a box, unpacking clothes. “Come in, dear.”
“It was me who hit the ball and broke the window.” Mrs. Connally looked up, surprised. “Liam was just protecting me.”
Mrs. Connally straightened. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
I looked away. “I know I should have. I’m sorry. But I is, I mean was, was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
I swallowed. “That they would send me back.” Something had changed in the past few weeks, I realized. Though I desperately missed my parents and wished they would join me here, a growing part of me wanted to stay in America—today, having met the Connallys, more than ever.
“To Europe? Oh, honey.” Mrs. Connally opened her arms and I stepped into them, inhaling the cinnamon smell. “That won’t happen. This is your home now.”
I relaxed slightly, secretly relieved—and a bit guilty for feeling that way. A moment later, I pulled away. “I should let my aunt know where I am.” Really, Aunt Bess would not be back for hours, but I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.
“Well, hurry back.” I tilted my head, not understanding. “You’ll go to the beach with us.”
I faltered. I’d managed to avoid the beach since coming here. Aunt Bess had offered to take me once, but I’d made excuses and, though puzzled, she hadn’t pressed. I could not tell Mrs. Connally about my fear of the water, which seemed silly even to me—and I did not want them to go and leave me behind. “I’ll be right back.” I hurried next door to the boardinghouse, finding the polka-dot bathing suit Aunt Bess had bought me, with the Gimbels tags still on it.
When I walked downstairs a few minutes later, the Connallys had assembled in front of their house, buckets and other beach toys in hand. I stopped, suddenly self-conscious of my new suit. When Aunt Bess had given it to me, I’d loved the bright pink color and ruffles. Now I was embarrassed at how it clung in some places and gapped in others.
“Wait for me,” Robbie called, struggling to keep up with his brothers’ long strides as we started down the block. Charlie reached down and scooped up Robbie, then hoisted him to his shoulders.
I studied the boys out of the corner of my eye as we walked. Liam looked more like Charlie than his own twin. With the same almond-shaped eyes and angular jawline, he was almost a copy of his older brother. He was much slighter, though, and his skin was a paler shade. They stood opposite one another like sun and moon. Charlie’s movements were sure and deft and he seemed to hover above his brothers, guiding their movements, steering Jack around a pothole so he didn’t trip, then putting out an arm to stop Robbie before he stepped into the street. The other boys fell in behind him like geese following in formation. I was drawn closer, longing to walk beneath his protective wing and be one of them.
We soon reached the boardwalk that separated the road from the beach, wide planks forming a neat pattern with a railing that overlooked the sea. Just to the north loomed the Chelsea and other grand hotels. As we climbed the worn plank steps, I could hear waves crashing hard on the other side, so different from the calm Adriatic I’d known as a child. I froze, nauseous. I’d had the nightmares for as long as I could remember, of dark waters rising and pulling me under. The week on the ship, feeling the water rolling beneath, had been nearly unbearable. But this was worse, because even though I had never been to this beach, the spot where we now stood looked exactly like the nightmare I’d had for a lifetime.
Charlie set Robbie down. Robbie scampered onto the sand, racing to a dune that lay just below. He began to climb it. But as he neared the top, he wobbled. A look of sheer terror crossed his face as he lost his footing and began to tumble. “Robbie!” his mother cried with alarm.
Charlie raced up from behind me. In two swift strides, he reached the bottom of the dune and extended his arms, catching Robbie neatly in midair. “You need to be more careful,” Charlie scolded as he set Robbie down. “I’m not always going to be here to save you.” But the protective note in his voice suggested otherwise.
I hung back as the boys ran ahead down the wide beach, which was dotted with other groups of bathers, women in stylish swimsuits reading magazines and families with small children digging for sand crabs and splashing in the surf. To everyone else, the beach was a happy, relaxed place.
“Are you all right?” Mrs. Connally asked, noticing my distress. She adjusted the wide brim of her straw hat, then took my arm. “Come, let’s set up.” I followed her to the spot where the boys had cast down their things, and helped spread out the blanket. I tried not to stare as Charlie pulled off his shirt, revealing a broad torso and muscular shoulders. His eyes traveled in the direction of a girl a few years older than me, sunning herself in a suit with a cut-out midriff. My heart sank; I could never hope to fill out a swimsuit like that.
“Are you coming?” Charlie asked as he started toward the water. I shook my head. “I’ll take you,” he offered, softer now, seeming to sense my fear. How I wanted to trust him! I almost felt as if I could.
Then a wave rose behind him and thundered down. Panic gripped me once more. “You go on.” I stretched out in what I hoped would be a glamorous position on the blanket. A biplane buzzed overhead, advertising the diving horse show at Steel Pier.
Jack settled down beside me on the blanket and pulled a book from his mother’s bag. The Red Badge of Courage; I’d never heard of it. “Summer reading assignment,” he said, noticing me looking.
“Oh.” I didn’t know if I was meant to be reading something over the summer. “I’m worried,” I confessed.
“About school? Don’t be. I’m sure the other kids are going to like you a lot.” Jack smiled so brightly I almost believed him.
“It’s the schoolwork. I’m mostly nervous about the writing.”
“Why don’t I help you? Tutoring, they call it.”
Robbie peered over Jack’s shoulder. “Whatcha doing? Homework in summer. Aack!” He ran away.
“It’s the beach, for goodness’ sake!” Liam protested as he followed Robbie to the surf.
“Buddy system!” Mrs. Connally called after them. Her eyes darted back and forth attentively, never leaving the water.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got them,” Charlie called from the water’s edge. He dove in without hesitation, then swam out to meet his brothers, his stroke as smooth and confident as a lifeguard.
“Come on, Addie!” Robbie cried, his voice drowned out by the crashing of a wave. I watched longingly, wanting for once to take part in the fun, instead of simply standing on the sidelines watching.
But I couldn’t. Instead, I took some of the lotion Mrs. Connally offered. Sand from my fingers mixed with it as I rubbed it into my arms. I inhaled deeply, gazing northward down the beach where the boardwalk bustled in front of the Claridge Hotel and Convention Hall. Haze swirled around the top of the roller coasters and other amusements on the piers that jutted out into sea. The air was salty but curiously sweet, a bit of taffy or caramel corn drifting in from the piers.
A few minutes later Jack closed his book and went to join his brothers in the water. I lay back, squirming against some sand which had worked its way into the bottom of my bathing suit. I closed my eyes and let the sun lull me into a semi-nap. My parents appeared in my mind. We had been happy once like the Connallys. I saw Mamma and Papa dancing around the kitchen, the three of us and Nonna enjoying long leisurely meals of fish and cheese and bread out on our balcony in summertime. When I was ten, I had asked if it was the lunches that were making Mamma’s belly round. She just laughed. She and I spent long days strolling the city, wading in the fountains and pointing out interesting things until it was time for Papa to come home.
Only one day he didn’t. At first Mamma tried to be cheerful. “He’s just gone to see friends,” she reassured. But a night passed, then another, and then she forgot to maintain her pretense of calm. She left me with Nonna and did not return by morning. I tried to pray in the darkness at night for their safe return. Please, I said over and over again, because I did not know any other words. It seemed to work, because two days later Mamma came back. She was pale and drawn—and still alone. She took to her bed. Nonna ran for the doctor.
A few days later, Mamma emerged, but her stomach no longer swelled as much. “Is Papa still with friends?” I asked.
Mamma shook her head. “No,” she replied bluntly, not bothering to cushion the truth. “He’s been arrested.” My heart froze. I’d seen a man once, taken from the street by the police. People whispered that he would not come back. I prayed more, adding more pleases until I was saying the word a thousand times each night before finally falling asleep.
Papa did return a week later, walking through the door as unexpectedly as he had disappeared. He looked the same, right down to the same clothes, now dirty and creased. He’d even managed to keep the mizpah heart and not have it taken. But he fell into a chair with a wince that suggested he was hurting on the inside, and a haunted look in his eyes that did not go away. He did not return to his work after that but wrote from home, welcoming in the occasional visitor. Instead it was Mamma who took to the streets, leafleting and attending meetings and protests against the Fascist regime, calling for elections.
I jumped as a drop of cold water hit my back and the vision evaporated. I rolled over. Liam stood over me, a mischievous grin in his eye. He had come up from the water’s edge, shaking droplets of water from his hair like a wet dog.
“Why, Addie,” he drawled. “You haven’t even gotten wet. You’re missing all of the fun.”
“I’m fine,” I protested, but he reached down and picked me up. I tried to pull away but his wiry grip was surprisingly strong.
“Liam Scott Connally, don’t you dare!” his mother began to admonish, but it was too late. Her voice faded as Liam carried me toward the water. “Please put me down,” I begged, flailing. But he stared straight ahead, not listening. The boy who just hours earlier had protected me from a neighbor’s wrath over a broken window was now my tormentor.
I closed my eyes, knowing what was coming next. The waves thundered in my ears, a sound I had heard thousands of times in my nightmares. Water splashed around Liam’s ankles as they reached the surf, kicking up the icy spray against my bare skin. Then he let me go. I screamed as cold darkness enveloped me. I reached wildly for the bottom, trying without success to find my footing. A powerful wave slammed into me from behind, tossing me like a ball until I could no long figure out which way was up. I flailed my arms, panicking. Water filled my nose and mouth, salt where air should have been.
Suddenly I was lifted to the surface. “Hey.” Charlie’s strong arms encircled me, holding me close as I coughed the water from my burning lungs. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.” He had reached me in a few long strokes. “Easy.” His voice was soothing. He raised me higher as a wave lifted them so it would not break on me. “I’ve got you.” I did not answer, but leaned my head against the wetness of his chest, still trying to catch my breath.
A second later Jack reached us. “Addie, are you okay?”
“That was so cool,” Robbie exclaimed, dog-paddling up from behind. He and Jack followed Charlie as he carried me to shore.
Charlie neared the beach blanket and set me down gently. Mrs. Connally wrapped a towel around me. “Liam, how could you?” she demanded. “Addie, are you all right, dear?”
“It was a joke,” Liam replied defensively.
“You idiot,” Charlie swore. Liam’s face crumpled and he slumped forward, as though he had been punched in the stomach. Clearly his older brother’s opinion meant everything.
I nodded and assured Mrs. Connally I was fine. A man carrying a white ice cooler on his back walked down the beach calling out, “Ice cream!” Mrs. Connally fished in her bag for coins. “Come with me, boys,” she said, standing. Robbie and Jack started after her. Liam hung back, watching Charlie, as if wanting to make what he had done all right. But Charlie did not look away from me, until finally Liam followed the others reluctantly.
Charlie put a hand on my shoulder and slid closer. “You want to talk about it?”
My trembling eased slightly. “There’s nothing to tell.” I fought the urge to put my head on his shoulder. Though I’d only just met Charlie, he seemed to have a way of making everything okay—even the beach.
“But Trieste is on the coast, isn’t it? You’ve lived by the water your whole life. You can’t swim at all?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed, pulling the towel closer around me. “I can’t even breathe when I get near the ocean.”
“I could try to help you.”
“No, thanks.”
“You’re not ready. I understand.” I wanted to tell him I never would be. “I hope you’ll come to the beach with us anyway. ’Cause I promise,” he added, shooting a murderous look down the beach toward Liam, “that what happened today will never happen again.”
(#ulink_7b2666e1-a824-5644-ac6d-fc0dc3a6a1e3)
I was losing the battle to stay awake in civics class as Mrs. Lowenstein droned on about wartime production in Britain. I blinked against heavy eyelids, but the polka dots of her dress seemed to blend together, making my vision swim. Normally I enjoyed the class, which purported to be about the past two centuries of history, but in fact focused unabashedly on the war in Europe. But Mrs. Lowenstein’s monotone recitation of facts about steel manufacturing today hardly seemed relevant.
The rest of summer had passed much like that first day with the Connallys, afternoons on the beach with the boys and trips to the boardwalk in the evening. But then the days began to shorten and we only had a bit of time on our Schwinn bikes after dinner before the sun dropped low to the bay. There was a tiny release in the humidity, like air leaking from a balloon.
One day I spied Aunt Bess taking out a large box. “What are you doing?”
“Packing. It’s only a week until we return to the city and we have to register you for school.” Life at the shore was all that I had known here. I had almost forgotten about Philadelphia.
“What grade will I be in?”
Aunt Bess looked confused. “I suppose they’ll have to test you.”
“Will I need to bring my own school supplies? How will I get there?” I piled my questions on top of one another, realizing from her expression that she did not know the answer. She had not done this before either.
She paused to set down the pile of shirts she’d been packing, then swiped at her brow. “I suppose,” she said, “we will have to figure out all of this together.”
“I don’t want to go,” I had burst out to Jack as he helped me through Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men on the porch of his family’s beach house that evening.
“We’re not that far from you in the city,” Jack offered. “We might even have classes together.” But I was not consoled—it was not the same as being next door, hearing their laughter through the open window as I fell asleep.
I waited until a few days after we returned to the city to ask. “I want to go see the Connallys.” We had just finished supper at Aunt Bess and Uncle Meyer’s house on Porter Street in the small dining room sandwiched in between the parlor in front and kitchen in back. The row house was so narrow I could almost touch both sides with my arms outstretched.
We’d moved into the parlor after eating, sitting three across on the flowered, slip-covered sofa, facing the fireplace we never used. Aunt Bess may have tried to seem American outside, but the house was filled with tarnished framed photos of grandparents and other relatives from the old country and the Shabbes candlesticks and Kiddush cup sat on the mantel.
Aunt Bess was reading Home Chat magazine while Uncle Meyer smoked his cigar and listened studiously to the news on the radio. I had waited until after the weather report to bring up the Connallys. Uncle Meyer followed the forecasts and their accuracy as studiously as though he was embarking on a great sea voyage. Even Aunt Bess, who spoke at him constantly, did not talk during the weather. But I had to ask quickly; after the news, Uncle Meyer would retreat to the basement, where he’d constructed an elaborate model railroad, complete with farms and a town, stretching nearly the length of the parlor above. I wondered if he wished I’d been a boy so he might have someone to share it with.
“I have their address,” I added hopefully.
“You can’t go,” Aunt Bess replied distractedly, bending to smooth the area rug which was a bit frayed at the edges. “It’s practically across town.”
I had looked at a street map and knew this wasn’t true. “It’s no farther than walking to school. I can do it.” It was the first time since coming here that I had spoken up for something I wanted and it felt good.
“The Irish neighborhood is dangerous,” Aunt Bess replied.
“Why?” I pressed. I did not want to be rude to my aunt and uncle, who had done so much for me, but I could not leave it alone.
“They don’t like Jews,” she replied bluntly. So she had not been speaking of crime, but of the hatred of Jews that existed here as surely as it had back home in Italy.
“But the Connallys aren’t like that.” She shook her head, unconvinced. My heart sank. “Uncle Meyer?” He lowered the newspaper, blinking with surprise at being included in the conversation. Normally it was Aunt Bess who did all the talking. My uncle could not be more different from Papa, who was a decade younger and so fiery—or had been, at least, before his arrest. “Do you think I can go?”
My uncle adjusted one of the two pens that always protruded from his shirt pocket, then glanced over at Aunt Bess before answering. “It’s different here,” he said, his voice stilted. “This isn’t like at the shore. The goyim and the Jews...people are separate.”
“Why?”
He took off his glasses and rubbed at a speck of dirt, fumbling for an answer. “That’s just the way it is. There are lots of nice kids right here on the block. You should be with your own kind, especially now.” He stopped awkwardly. He was talking, of course, of the things that were going on in Europe. The Germans had continued their march across the continent, seeming to occupy another country each week. Hitler hated the Jews, was banning them from schools and professions and even the streetcars. There were stories of arrests. And Italy had allied itself with Germany, which meant things were worse now, too, in Trieste. My stomach tightened. My parents had been persecuted for their political activity—they were hardly religious at all. But Hitler would not see it that way—a Jew was a Jew.
“About that...” I licked my lips, changing to the other subject I’d been wanting to ask them about. “I heard on the radio about a program offering visas for some refugees. Maybe my mother and father would qualify.”
My aunt and uncle exchanged a look. “Getting visas for your parents isn’t the problem,” Uncle Meyer said gently. My spirits lifted. “We offered to arrange it a long time ago. They want to stay in Trieste and keep doing their work.” Uncle Meyer’s voice was even scratchier than usual. He had left Italy when he was fifteen and made his way here alone. His skin was a shade more olive than most here, but beyond that did not have the slightest accent or trace of the old country. He had not looked back. He still cared for his brother, though, and it pained him that he could not bring my father to safety.
“Oh.” I looked away. All this time I’d assumed that Mamma and Papa could not come, and that they would follow when their papers were ready, like Mamma had said. But the truth was that their work mattered more than I did. It always had.
“When all of the fighting is over, I’m sure they’ll come.” Aunt Bess spoke as though the war was wrapping up. She had not seen, though, the things I had before leaving, the way people over there were stocking up supplies and digging hiding spots ahead of the armies rolling in.
I swiped at my stinging eyes, then stood and walked upstairs to my room. It was tiny, no more than a large closet that could just hold a twin bed and dresser. But Aunt Bess prepared the way she thought a girl my age would like, with pink flowered sheets and curtains. She and Uncle Meyer were trying their best, but it wasn’t the same as my own family.
I reached for the photograph of my mother and father, which sat in a frame on the corner of the dresser. When we’d come to Philadelphia from the beach, I’d been surprised to see this photo of my parents by the seaside on the mantel above the fireplace. “They sent it right after they were married,” Aunt Bess had told me. “Why don’t you put it in your room?” I ran my finger over the image. They looked so young and carefree.
So my parents wanted to stay in Italy—or had anyway, the last time we’d been able to reach them. I wrote to them each week, but so far there had been no reply. “Overseas post is so unreliable,” Uncle Meyer offered, to try to explain the lack of a response. I was not consoled. Things might have worsened for them and they could be trying desperately to leave.
I set down the photo. There was a section of newspaper from yesterday’s Bulletin on the top of the dresser as well. I picked it up, along with the dictionary beside it. I’d been working through the paper at Jack’s suggestion as a way to improve my English. But the story, about refugees displaced by fighting in France, just made my heart ache worse. In my memories, my childhood in Trieste was idyllic. That was gone now, though, and the reality, of war and violence and suffering, leapt off the pages at me. What was life like for Mamma and Papa now?
The doorbell rang and I looked up from the paper. Visitors were constant on Porter Street, neighboring women dropping by to borrow a cup of sugar or share the latest bit of gossip, and men from the tiny shul on the corner of Porter Street needing Uncle Meyer for the minyan, the ten men required to pray on Shabbes. “Good evening, sir.” Joy surged through me as Charlie’s rich, familiar voice flowed up the stairwell. I dropped the dictionary and leapt up, then smoothed my hair, hoping the smell of Uncle Meyer’s cigar did not linger about me.
“I was just in the area,” I heard Charlie explain. It was, of course, a lie. He had no cause to be in our neighborhood, far from his own home. It was as if he’d heard me calling out for him. “And I thought...” He stopped midsentence as he saw me at the top of the stairs. I had seen him just days earlier at the beach, but here, dressed more formally in chinos and a collared shirt with his hair held in place by a bit of pomade, he seemed somehow older—and even more handsome. “Hi, Addie. Would you like to come over for ice cream?”
Trying to contain my excitement, I turned to my aunt. “May I?”
“I don’t know.” She looked at Uncle Meyer uncertainly, hesitant to be rude to Charlie by saying no outright. “It’s so far, and she doesn’t know the neighborhood.” Her voice was heavy with concern. My heart sank. They were going to say no.
“I will walk her there and back personally, sir,” Charlie said, voice solemn and low. There was something about him that could be trusted.
Uncle Meyer relented. “Fine, but have her home by eight.”
“Don’t overstay your welcome,” my aunt cautioned in a low voice, and I wondered if she was just talking about the Connallys or if I had somehow been a burden here, too. I tried to stay neat and out of the way, not cause extra work or expense.
Charlie held the door and I hurried past before my aunt and uncle could change their minds. Outside, it was still warm and neighbors sat on their porches or marble steps, smoking and watching the children play handball in the street. They stared curiously as we made our way down the block. Everyone knew about the immigrant girl from Italy who had come this summer to live here—but who was this goy walking with her?
Charlie seemed not to notice, whistling a bit as we reached the corner, passing the barbershop where Uncle Meyer and the other men played cards. I glanced at Charlie out of the corner of my eye, trying not to stare. “Mom thought you might like to come over.”
“Oh.” I’d wanted it to be his idea.
“But I offered to be the one to come get you.” My spirits lifted again, riding the endless roller coaster I’d boarded the day I’d spied the Connallys across the rooming house yard.
I followed him northeast and the streets grew wide and unfamiliar. The Irish neighborhood ran close to the shipyard and soot-covered dockworkers made their way home, empty lunch tins in hand. “Careful.” Charlie grabbed my arm to guide me around a pothole at the curb. I shivered at the contact. Then the sidewalk grew even and he let go of my arm once more. Finally he stopped at a corner house with bright yellow curtains and a small garden of flowers beside the front step. “This is it.”
But the lights of the house in front of us were darkened. Perhaps the others had gone out. I followed Charlie inside uncertainly. Did he mean for us to be alone? “Surprise!” Lights flickered on and the Connallys stood around their dining room table, a cake before them aglow with candles.
“Got her,” Charlie said, sounding as if he’d gone to the grocery store for milk.
“Addie!” Robbie cried, running to me and wrapping himself around my waist.
I was too surprised to respond. Robbie had asked me once at the shore when my birthday was, but I hadn’t thought anyone else had heard, or might remember. As they sang to me, a chorus of smiling faces, illuminated by candlelight, my mind whirled. September 9, my seventeenth birthday, was still three days away and Aunt Bess had mentioned something vaguely about going out to dinner on Sunday to celebrate.
But I hadn’t expected this. Mrs. Connally served the cake. It was just big enough to hold the candles that had been crammed on top, and there was a tiny slice for each of us when it was cut up, none leftover for seconds. It was homemade, though, right down to the wobbly writing that said Robbie had helped. I had not had a real cake since Nonna made one for my twelfth birthday in Trieste. After she was gone Mamma had been too busy with her causes to manage more than tiramisu from the café down the street. And Aunt Bess, for all of her good intentions, could not bake and relied on store-bought Entenmann’s. This was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted.
Scraping the icing from my plate, I looked around. The Connallys’ house seemed a smaller replica of their place at the beach: casual furniture, piles of paper and toys stacked haphazardly. A grand piano occupied one corner of the room.
When we finished the cake, Mr. Connally handed me a box with a bow. “Happy birthday, Addie.”
I’d finally met Mr. Connally a few days after the rest of the family had arrived at the shore. The boys and I had come home from the beach to find a man stepping from the car in a crisp white shirt, short-sleeved and a bit wrinkled from the trip. The boys flocked to him, calling out excitedly, and he lifted Robbie high up in the air. Mrs. Connally had returned to the house early and as she greeted him in a ruffled pink cap-sleeved dress there was a warmth between her and her husband that reminded me of my parents in earlier days. I’d stood back, an outsider as their circle was now complete. But Mr. Connally welcomed me just as readily as the rest of the family. A large man, reminiscent of a grizzly bear, he seemed to be always smiling. The mustache above his mouth was yellowed from the pipe his wife would not let him smoke in the house.
“You didn’t have to get me anything.” I opened the box and inside sat a chess set. I lifted it out. Though it was not an exact replica, the pieces were iron just like the ones back home in Trieste.
Mr. Connally cleared his throat. “I saw you admiring ours several times, and I remembered you mentioning something like this.”
“It’s perfect.” They had thought, really thought about what I wanted. My eyes stung with happy tears.
“Help me with the dishes, Addie?” Mrs. Connally asked, and I followed her to the kitchen, pleased to be of use.
After we cleaned up, we all settled in to listen to Abbott and Costello on the radio. Mrs. Connally sat on a long sofa, Robbie and Jack on one side, Mr. Connally on the end.
Liam hung at the edge of the room, seeming uncomfortable in his own house. I started toward him, wanting to draw him in. “Game of chess?” He had a smart, analytical way of looking at the world and something told me he would be good at it.
“Nah, I’ve got plans. Happy birthday, Ad.” He slipped from the house, leaving an emptiness in the otherwise perfect night.
“Come sit.” Mrs. Connally patted the small triangular wedge of sofa beside her. I looked uncertainly toward Charlie, wishing there was room for him too. But he had already dropped comfortably to the rug. I slipped in close to Mrs. Connally on one side, my leg pressing against Jack’s on the other. Beau ambled into the room and nestled on my feet.
And just like that, I was home.
What was it the Connallys liked about me? I wondered now as I recalled that special night nearly six weeks earlier. They already had enough kids, as Liam once pointed out. How strange that in this family that was already so full there seemed to be a place waiting for me. Over the summer I had become something different to each of them: the daughter that Mrs. Connally never had, a friend to Jack, and the one who would listen to Robbie when the others were all too busy. But what was I to Charlie exactly: a little sister, or something else?
A loud siren blared unexpectedly, cutting through Mrs. Lowenstein’s lesson. I sat bolt upright, suddenly wide-awake. Boys and girls looked around, uncertain how to react to the unfamiliar sound, more shrill than the fire alarm. “This is an air raid drill. Under your desks, everyone,” Mrs. Lowenstein instructed calmly. “Put your heads beneath a book.” The others obeyed slowly, joking and talking as they went. But I scrambled under my desk, trembling.
Mrs. Lowenstein (“Roberta” I’d heard another teacher call her once) crouched down and put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s only a drill.” America was not at war; we were only practicing. But the fact that the drills like we had back home had begun here seemed to signal something ominous. The siren droned on relentlessly. The hard linoleum floor pressed unpleasantly against my knees. The exercise seemed futile—if bombs actually came, a desk would not protect me. A minute later the siren ended and there was a beep signaling the all clear. We climbed out.
Mrs. Lowenstein smiled reassuringly at me as I took my seat. “With respect to shipbuilding...” she continued, resuming her lecture.
I jumped when the bell rang ten minutes later, but this time it was just signaling that class was over. “Have a nice weekend,” Mrs. Lowenstein called over the din of chatter and desks slamming. I gathered my books and walked down the hall, which was covered in student-made Halloween decorations and smelled from a mixture of Clorox disinfectant and leftover lunches. I put my books in my locker and grabbed my coat and lunch bag, then closed the door again and leaned against it. The sharp knob cut into my back as I pressed against the wall to escape the surge of students, laughing and talking as they jostled roughly past between classes. I drew my cardigan more tightly around myself like armor. I still could not get used to the size and chaos of Southern High.
I looked longingly in the direction of the tunnel. Southern was in fact two schools, one for the boys and one for girls, and our homeroom, cafeteria and gym were separate. But they were connected by an enclosed walkway so kids could take classes together on either side.
When there was a gap in the crowd, I started for the cafeteria. I eyed the swarming lunchroom warily from the doorway. The girls seemed to camp in clusters, Italians in the far right corner, Irish on the far side of the room, as if trying to recreate the divisions of the local neighborhoods. A few of the girls from Porter and Ritner Streets sat at the first long table in a tight circle. Aunt Bess tried to help me fit in, buying me the popular plaid wool skirts and sturdy saddle shoes, so unlike the loose, flowing dresses and sandals I’d worn most of the year back home. “Maybe you could invite a friend over after school,” she’d suggested more than once—as if it were that simple. My olive skin was still darker than the others, my accent undeniable. The girls from the Jewish neighborhood, who had grown up together, had no room for a foreigner.
I carried my lunch box toward a nearly empty table on the far edge of the room. At the end a little girl with skin even darker than mine sat by herself, staring straight ahead, chewing purposefully. “Coloreds,” Liam called the small group of black kids at Southern. They, too, kept to their own group—except for this girl, who was alone like me.
“Mind if I sit?” The girl shrugged. “I’m Addie.”
“I’m Rhonda. You talk funny.” The girl’s tone was matter-of-fact. “Where you come from?”
“Italy. I moved here a few months ago, but we were at the shore for the summer.”
A harsh laugh came from two tables over. A few of the Irish girls were looking at Rhonda and me, making jokes.
Rhonda finished her lunch and stood, casting the remnants of her lunch in a trash can. “See you.” I watched her go, wondering what Aunt Bess’s reaction would be if Rhonda was the friend I invited over. Not wanting to remain at the table alone, I took the rest of my sandwich and folded it back in the wax paper. I still could not get used to the amount of waste—or take for granted that there would be food tomorrow.
My science class was in the boys’ school so I started down the tunnel. Unsupervised, the long, dim corridor was the one place boys and girls could meet and I averted my eyes from the couples that loitered close to one another against the walls, necking. I didn’t know much about sex, other than what I’d gleaned from a few books and whispers in the girls’ bathroom. But I sure saw some things here.
I glimpsed Liam at the far end of the tunnel. Seeing just one Connally boy was always strange, like a game piece that had been separated from the rest of the chessboard. My eyes caught his and I started toward him, hoping we might talk before class; I didn’t even mind if he teased me. But Liam had become more aloof since returning from the beach, not just from me but from his brothers. I saw him hanging on the shadowy outskirts at the edge of the playground with kids who smoked and more often than not had only one parent at home—a place he didn’t belong.
As I neared the boys’ school, Charlie appeared from behind the open door of a locker. Happiness flooded me as it always did when I saw him. But it quickly disappeared. Looking up at him adoringly from beneath his arm was Stephanie Weidman, a blonde senior who led the cheerleading squad. Her hair was neatly rolled and pinned back and the cuffs of a crisp white blouse peeked out beneath her pink cashmere sweater.
I should not have been surprised. It had not taken me long to figure out that Charlie was very popular with the girls. “Why are you giggling?” I’d demanded of the girl at the locker next to mine the very first day when he’d passed by. I would not have anyone make fun of him.
“He’s Charlie Connally,” the girl explained, her voice hollow with awe. “The quarterback.”
At the shore he had just been Charlie. Here, though, he was larger than life, the “bee’s knees,” one of the girls called him. Crowds seemed to part as he passed and girls looked at him in a way that I had not understood before. Even those who didn’t like football and didn’t understand the game, including myself, sat in the stands, shivering, with their hands around a paper cup of metallic-tasting cocoa just to see Charlie in all his glory.
I started to duck away now but Charlie’s head swiveled in my direction and he started over, leaving Stephanie standing alone. There was a hushed silence in the tunnel around us, then whispers and stares as the school’s star quarterback walked over to talk to the small, foreign girl who nobody knew. “Hi, Addie.” Charlie smiled brightly, as though we were at the beach and it was just the two of us. He wore his varsity letter sweater, black with the red S. He’d grown taller since summer and wore his hair in a neat comb-back with pomade, not loose and curly as it had been at the beach.
Behind him I noticed Liam watching our exchange, eyes longing. He always seemed so separate from the rest of us, in a way he just didn’t have to be. Join us, I pleaded silently. If I went to him, he just might. But my feet remained planted, not wanting to give up this one moment with Charlie.
Charlie turned to Stephanie, who had come up behind him. “Do you know Addie?” Of course not. Girls like her would never even see me—nor would Charlie if it hadn’t been for the shore. “Addie’s like family,” he said. The words, intended with kindness, stung. Not family—like family. There was always that one step separating me from them. Stephanie sniffed, unimpressed, and turned and walked down the hall. Charlie looked after her, as if he wanted to follow.
But he did not.
Warmth surged through me. I loved him. Loved. I had realized it late one afternoon near summer’s end as I watched the boys play in the lot between beach houses, sunlight streaming down. I knew he did not feel the same, but the very idea seemed to change things. It wasn’t just his image—he was smart and sure and he had a way of making everything safe and all right when he was in the room. I had begun to dream about him, too. The previous night I dreamed that he had pulled me from the water, rescuing me as he had last summer. In my fantasy, though, he did not set me down, but held me, bringing his lips to mine. I’d woken up breathless, my skin damp.
I had other dreams too, not the kind that came unbidden at night but the film that ran all day in my head: What if Charlie really saw me? We could go steady, be a couple. I imagined myself on his arm. No, it wasn’t that he didn’t quite think of me as family that I minded. I wanted him to think of me as something more.
He looked over his shoulder, then lowered his voice. “I saw you with that colored girl before in the cafeteria.” I was flooded with confusion. I always looked for Charlie, but I hadn’t known he’d noticed me as well.
“Rhonda?” He shrugged, as though her name was unimportant. “What about it?”
“It’s just that colored and whites, they keep to themselves here.”
“Why?” I demanded. He blinked. Charlie was not used to being challenged.
“I don’t know,” he said, revealing a crevice of doubt that he could not show as the oldest always trying to protect the others.
“You play football with some of the colored boys, don’t you?”
“That’s different.” He glanced uneasily over his shoulder. “Maybe we should discuss it at home.”
“Whose home?” I liked Charlie, and the last thing I wanted to do was fight. But I couldn’t let it go. “Because if what you are saying is true, then perhaps the Jews and the Irish, they should keep to themselves too.”
I was right and he knew it. But he clenched his jaw, as though admitting he was wrong would somehow be a weakness or flaw. Charlie saw the world in terms of black and white. “It isn’t that simple.”
We stood facing one another squarely. He was clearly surprised that I’d stood up to him in a way that few people had. But he would not back down either. There was a light in his eyes, a respect that I hadn’t before seen.
“Anyway...” Charlie cleared his throat, retreating. His eyes softened, holding mine. “I’m glad to see you.” My stomach flipped. Had he somehow guessed the truth about how I felt?
From across the hallway, I heard a snicker, unmistakably aimed in my direction. My face flushed. The fact that I did not fit in here, it was always bubbling beneath the surface with my accent, my slightly darker skin. Kids simply could not imagine why the Connally boys, especially Charlie, wanted to be friends with me. Charlie did not seem to hear it or notice—things like that were below his line of sight. My anger grew. “They’re laughing at us.” This, coupled with the girls laughing at Rhonda and me in the cafeteria, was too much to take. I started down the hall.
“Addie,” Charlie cautioned, wanting me to just leave it alone for the sake of peace. But I had never been able to look away from unfairness.
My mind reeled back to one of the first mornings on the ship when I had awoken to find the chain which perpetually hung around my neck, holding the mizpah, gone. Across the narrow galley, I saw an older girl palming it casually.
“Give it back,” I’d demanded. When the girl ignored me, I lunged for it. I was on the ground then, pinned under the larger girl, nails gouging like fire at my cheeks. With all my might, I lifted my knee and pushed the girl off of me, grabbing the necklace that had skittered across the deck. I put it back on, defying the other girl to try to take it again.
I hadn’t been able to leave it alone then, and I couldn’t now. I approached the boy who had laughed at us. “Something funny?”
His eyes widened, unaccustomed to being called out for his bullying. “Why don’t you go back where you came from?”
As I opened my mouth to answer, the bell rang. “Come on,” another boy said, urging him outside. I started toward class. But as I neared the end of the tunnel there was a clamoring outside, and I saw Liam crossing the playground with swift, long strides toward the boy whom I’d confronted minutes earlier. I opened the door in time to hear the other kid say, “...Jew lover?” Liam drew back his arm. I heard a sickening crunch, flesh splitting, as Liam’s fist connected with the boy’s face. “Liam!” I cried, running toward him. He had a quick temper, an Irish temper, his mother had called it. He was forever getting into arguments. This was the first actual fight I had seen him in, though. The last thing he needed was further trouble.
But Liam was on top of the boy who lay on the ground now, both hands around the boy’s neck. “Apologize,” he commanded. The boy gurgled helplessly, blood trickling from his nose.
“Liam, he can’t apologize if he can’t breathe.” I tugged at his shoulder. “Let him up.”
Teachers and lunch aides surged forward, pulling Liam and the other boy apart. Charlie rushed up beside us. “What were you thinking?” he admonished.
The principal, Mr. Owens, crossed the schoolyard. “I should expel you!”
Charlie stepped forward quickly. “Respectfully, Mr. Owens, that isn’t necessary. I will take him home right now myself.”
The principal paused, then acquiesced. “Fine.” Charlie was a student leader, someone he trusted. He wagged a finger in Liam’s direction. “But next time, you’re outta here.”
“Dad’s going to wallop you.” Charlie scowled once the principal and other teachers were out of earshot. My heart ached that Liam would be punished simply for sticking up for me—again. I wanted to run after him and explain to his parents. “And now I’m going to be late for class.” Liam’s face fell. He could handle expulsion or whatever punishment his folks might hand out. It was Charlie’s disapproval that was too much to bear.
“But he was only trying to stick up for me,” I began.
“I don’t need your help,” Liam cut me off tersely. He did not care about punishment, or what the other kids thought of him—except for Charlie.
“Come on.” Charlie started to lead Liam from the schoolyard, then turned back. “Addie?”
My heart lifted as it did every time he said my name, wondering if maybe this time he would mean it differently. Was he finally noticing?
I spun back hopefully. “Yes?”
“Will you stop by the science lab and tell Mrs. Ferguson I’m going to be late?”
They set off across the parking lot, leaving me behind. “Sure.” I turned away, dejected. How could I possibly have thought he would say something more?
(#ulink_1530db61-8eaf-50d4-b44b-2c802b703c77)
I had always been able to sense change, like the way Nonna’s leg used to ache before a storm. My neck would tighten and stay tense for days. My appetite would fade to nonexistent and I’d grow tired, sleeping long, restless nights that were full of vivid dreams, even darker and stranger than usual. I’d awaken more exhausted than I’d ever gone to sleep, as though I had traveled great distances in my dreams.
I’d been that way for more than a week now and I yawned as I stood in my wool coat on the porch, which was still damp from the night’s rain. I hadn’t seen the boys since school on Friday. I still went to the Connallys’ most nights during the week. Charlie (or Jack, during football season when Charlie had practice) would call for me after dinner and then bring me home. My aunt and uncle had stopped fighting me about visiting the Connallys, as long as my homework was done.
They insisted, though, that I stay home on Shabbes. Back in Trieste, my family had been secular, attending the large synagogue in our neighborhood only on high holidays. But here the block quieted Friday nights and Saturdays, the men making their way to shul and the women keeping the children busy without putting on the radio. It was always a long, sluggish day in the tiny house, and I filled it as well as I could, doing my assignments for school and writing letters to my parents.
“They haven’t written back,” I fretted the day before at lunch.
“The mail is disrupted,” Aunt Bess said, speaking authoritatively, though she could not possibly have known for sure. “I’m sure they’re fine.”
“But what if they aren’t?’ I’d pressed. They could be trying to get word out, or even want to leave now, and we would have no way of knowing. My question hung unanswered in the air.
It was Sunday now and I could leave the house. But there was no sign of Charlie. Perhaps he had forgotten about me. Did I dare to find my way to the Connallys’ on my own? “I’m going out,” I called inside to Aunt Bess, who was getting ready for her Hadassah meeting. Then I closed the door before she could stop me. Pulling on my stocking cap and gloves, I hurried down the steps and ran, past the drugstore and the shoeshine boy at the corner until my feet hurt beneath the stiffness of my Mary Janes and my blouse grew damp, finding my own way for the first time.
The sun shone down brightly on the worn pavement. But a breeze, sharp for early December, cut across the street. I walked south, past shops on the bottom floor of buildings, shoe stores and a dry cleaner’s. I turned east toward Pennsport, the Irish neighborhood where the Connallys lived. Soon the streets began to change, like an unmarked border crossing between countries. Breathless, I slowed to a walk. Though Christmas was nearly three weeks away, almost every house sparkled with lights, one brighter than the next. I passed a tavern, noisy through its open door even before lunchtime. Older, noisy boys played stickball on a corner lot. My skin prickled as I recalled Uncle Meyer’s admonition months earlier about the dangers of this strange neighborhood. Perhaps coming alone had been a mistake.
But soon I reached the Connallys’ and knocked. No one answered. The house was usually bustling with activity, so it had not occurred to me that no one would be home. I considered leaving. Instead, I turned the doorknob and stepped inside the house, looking around the empty living room uncertainly. “Hello?” I called out. “Mrs. Connally?” I eyed the piano in the corner, as I had so many times on my past visits. I made my way toward it, taking off my coat and then stroking the keyboard. It was a grand piano, so much bigger than the creaky old upright we’d had wedged into the dining room back in Trieste. I sat and played now, a simple piece that Papa had taught me back before his arrest when he still played. The notes rose above me like bubbles.
Hearing the door, I stopped abruptly. Mrs. Connally walked in and removed her coat, revealing her cornflower-blue dress. “Addie!” she said, taking off her hat. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
I stood hurriedly. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have come in.”
“Not at all.” She waved away my concern. “We were at church for the O’Neill baby’s baptism and there was lunch and the boys stayed to help with the nativity. They should be home soon.” Church. The Connallys went so infrequently and so it had not occurred to me that was where they might have been. But now the word seemed to magnify the differences between the Connallys and myself, which were otherwise so easy to forget. “Do you like it?” Mrs. Connally asked, gesturing to the piano. “I had hoped one of the boys would take it up, but none of them did—they can’t sit still long enough.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t ask first.”
Mrs. Connally waved her hand. “Don’t be. It does my heart good to hear it make music again. You should come play it whenever you want, and I hope that will be often. I’m going to change out of my good clothes. Why don’t you play something else for me?”
I sat and began to play again, “Torna a Surriento,” a song that Papa knew could always get my mother to smile. Once I had struggled with the notes, but now my fingers seemed to move of their own will, as if he was here, leading me. I finished the piece, the last notes echoing through the house.
There was a noise behind me and I looked up, expecting Mrs. Connally. But Charlie stood watching me from the doorway, more handsome than ever in his navy church suit. How long had he been there? Our eyes met. Several seconds passed, my throat too dry to speak.
He took a step toward the piano bench. “Hey.” Something seemed to shift with that single word, in the quiet space between us. At school, he was larger than life. But here it was just the two of us away from the eyes and remarks of the other kids. Despite my fantasies of being his girl, this was the part I really wanted, the two of us alone, away from our families and the world.
“That was just beautiful, Addie,” Mrs. Connally said as she appeared on the stairwell. Then she stopped. “Charlie, I thought you were helping with your father.”
He tore his gaze from me, then cleared his throat. “I was, but I ran into Coach and he said there’s a scout from Georgetown coming tomorrow. I want to get in some extra practice.” Though football season had ended weeks earlier, Charlie continued to work on his game with a few of the fellows, hoping to catch the eye of one of the colleges.
“Georgetown? That’s great, honey, but...” Conflict washed across Mrs. Connally’s face. I suspected they couldn’t afford a school like that. “Maybe somewhere closer.”
“There are scholarships, Mom.” I knew Charlie had never even contemplated forgoing college for a job at the factory as his father had, or even applying to a lesser school. He had always known he was meant for something great. “I’ve gotta go.” He disappeared upstairs.
A minute later Jack walked in with Robbie in tow. “Dad’s still at church finishing up,” he told his mother. “Hi, Ad.”
I followed them to the kitchen. “Addie, the boys had sandwiches at church. Have you eaten?” I nodded, thinking of the leftover gefilte fish and reheated soup from Shabbes that was a Sunday staple at my aunt and uncle’s. She pulled a carton from the icebox. “Chocolate or vanilla?”
“Both!” Robbie interjected.
“Not too much. I’m putting in the roast and dinner is at four.” Mrs. Connally handed me a bowl.
“Thank you.” I broke off a bit with my spoon. Ice cream here was harder than Nonna’s creamy gelato. It almost needed to be cut.
“I spilled!” Robbie wailed as his ice-cream bowl tipped, sending a creamy pool onto the linoleum.
Jack quickly set the bowl straight and scooped some of his own into it, evening things out as he so often did. “Want some help with the science homework after this?” he asked me.
“Sure,” I said, grateful for the excuse for having come over later.
“Can I help, too?” Robbie asked eagerly.
Jack knelt by his brother. “How ’bout you give us a little while, and then maybe we can all play dominoes?”
“Marbles,” Robbie sniffed.
“All right, but no cheating,” Jack teased.
But Robbie’s face was serious. “I’m going to beat you, fair and square.”
“Why don’t you let the dog out first?” Mrs. Connally suggested to Robbie.
He leapt up, whistling for Beau. “Come on, boy.”
When he was out of earshot, Mrs. Connally turned to Jack. “Have you seen your brother?”
“Which one?”
“Haha, wise guy. Where’s Liam?”
Jack shrugged. “I’m not his babysitter.” But worry creased his face. Though Liam hadn’t been in any more trouble since the fight in school nearly two months earlier, he was more withdrawn and absent than ever.
“Jackie,” his mother pressed. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He was hanging out with some of the fellas.” He did not sound as though he was talking about the kids from church.
Mrs. Connally cringed. “I told him to come home right after you were finished.”
“I know. I reminded him. He told me to mind my own business.” I followed Jack up the stairs. Through an open door, I could see where Robbie had constructed a giant city out of his blocks, using cardboard boxes when he ran out. He loved to build and Jack loved to read, and Charlie loved football—but what did Liam love? Perhaps it was the lack of a passion that stirred him to trouble.
“I’m worried about Liam,” Jack confided when we reached the room he and his twin shared.
“You should be. He’s gone from school more often than he’s there and those kids he hangs out with are awful. We have to do something.”
“Like what?”
I searched for an answer. Liam wouldn’t listen to us. Telling the Connallys and getting him in further trouble would only make things worse. “I’ll be right back.”
I raced downstairs and outside after Charlie, who had changed into his practice jersey and was climbing on his bike, shoulder pads slung over the handlebars. He turned and my breath caught, as it always did when he was near. “What is it, Ad?” he asked. “I’ve got to practice.” But his eyes were soft, his voice warm. What would he do if I kissed him right now?
“I’m worried about Liam.” He cocked his head, not following. How could he not have noticed? “He’s missing school a lot.”
“He’s always been a wild kid, Addie. He just loves to give Mom and Dad the business.”
“But it’s different now. He could be drinking.” Though I had not seen Liam with beer or liquor, I knew from conversations I’d overheard at school that some of the wilder kids drank. “Or worse.”
“It’s a phase. He’ll get over it.”
“What if he doesn’t?” I pressed.
Charlie’s brow wrinkled fleetingly. “I’ll talk to him, I promise. But right now I’ve got to get to practice.” He rose up on the pedals and started forward. “Don’t worry,” he called over his shoulder as he pedaled away, his voice fading in the wind. Longing tugged at my stomach. If only he would see what was going on with Liam. If only he would see me.
I started back through the living room toward the stairs. “Addie,” Robbie called in a stage whisper, though no one else was around to see or hear. His head stuck out from a doorway beneath the stairs. He’d first shown me his secret hiding place in early fall, waving me in from the dining room during one of my visits while the others were busy debating the Lend-Lease Act to a small door that I had always assumed was a broom closet. I lowered my head and peered inside. “Come in,” he’d urged. The tiny space with its low ceiling was barely big enough for the two of us, but he had decorated it with photos and pictures he had done at school and put two pillows on the floor. I’d squeezed onto one of them. “My hideaway.” I understood. The house was so overrun, two boys to a bedroom, noise in every corner. This was the one place he could call his own. “No one else knows,” he’d whispered. Though quite sure his mother did, I nodded solemnly, flattered that I was the one with whom he had shared his secret.
I hesitated as he waved me in now; Jack was waiting for me upstairs to finish homework. But I slid into the closet and Robbie curled up under the crook of my arm in a way he surely would not do for much longer.
“Look,” he said, pointing to the sloped ceiling of the closet. He’d stretched black paper across it and in white he’d sketched the stars, trying to replicate the constellations. “I don’t have them quite right,” he fretted. I imagined how he’d worked on the design, biting his lip with grim concentration as he tried to get the positioning of the stars just right.
“You should ask Liam.” Last summer at the beach, Liam was forever pointing out the different patterns of stars visible in the night sky. His eyes would light up as he explained a particular constellation; it was the closest I’d seen him to taking an interest in something.
“He’s never around anymore.” Robbie’s words were a refrain of my earlier conversations with Jack and Charlie. Even at eleven, Robbie could see the change in his brother. My anger toward Liam rose: couldn’t he see that Robbie looked up to him, and needed him in the same way that he needed Charlie? “Charlie’s always practicing, and you and Jack are busy with homework.” Robbie’s voice was dangerously close to a whine now. “I’m bored.”
“Wait here.” I walked to the living room and picked up the chess set that the Connallys had given me. I’d left it here for the occasional game with Jack, since neither my aunt nor uncle played.
Robbie’s eyes widened as I lowered the chess set into his hideaway. “Dad says I’m too young.”
“Not at all. I started playing when I was seven.” I held up the first piece. “This is the pawn and it moves a single space straight ahead, but diagonally...”
From outside the closet there came a clattering. At first, I thought it was Jack, coming to see where I had gone. But Mr. Connally’s voice, low and urgent, rose from the entranceway. “What on earth?” I unfolded myself from the closet, meeting Jack as he came down the stairs. We found Mr. Connally in the kitchen with his wife. His usually jovial expression was dark as a storm and he did not greet me. A rock formed in my stomach. “What’s happened?”
Grim-faced, he turned on the radio: “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air... The attack also was made on all military and naval activities on the principal island of Oahu...”
“America will enter the war for sure now,” Jack said.
My heart lifted: surely the United States would declare war on the Germans, too. But Mrs. Connally was gripping the counter, knuckles white. “What’s wrong?” I asked, forgetting not to be forward. “Don’t you want the Americans to help? I know that the Quakers don’t believe in fighting but surely now that it’s for good reason...”
“It’s not that,” Mrs. Connally replied quietly.
“Then what?”
“Our boys are too young,” Mr. Connally soothed, reading her unspoken thought. “And it will be over quickly.”
“Yes, of course.”
Charlie ran in breathless, still wearing shoulder pads under his practice jersey. “The Japs bombed...” He stopped, realizing we had already heard. We stood huddled for several minutes, listening to the reports of the devastation in Hawaii, ships destroyed, casualties possibly in the thousands. I had seen the edges of war in Italy, homes burned and shop windows smashed, people arrested. But the scope of the damage described on the radio was simply unfathomable.
Charlie cleared his throat. “Will you go down to the enlistment center with me tomorrow, Dad?” he asked. His mother’s face seemed to fold with horror, as though her worst nightmare had come true.
“You’ll be eighteen soon,” his father said grudgingly. “I suppose you’ll need to register.”
Charlie shook his head. “Not just register. I want to join up.” My heart stopped. Charlie could not go to war.
“Charlie, no. You need to finish school. You may not even get drafted.”
“You don’t understand. I want to go now.” His eyes burned bright with an idealism that made me love him even more. “There’s a chance to make a difference and really help.”
Liam slammed through the door. “Mom, I was just...” Then, seeing us gathered, he stopped short. “What gives?”
“The Japanese attacked our base in Hawaii,” Mrs. Connally said. “And your brother wants to enlist.” She did not have to say which one.
Liam rolled his eyes. “Figures.”
“There’s no need to enlist. The war won’t last long,” Mrs. Connally said. This was the first time I had seen the Connallys disagree. As much as I wanted to be part of their family, I felt like an intruder listening in.
“Exactly. I want to go now, while I can help.” As the debate went back and forth like a ping-pong match, I watched Liam. He was looking at Charlie, rapt, his face a strange mix of adoration and resentment.
“But what about college?” his mother persisted. “You were just talking about a football scholarship.” Charlie bit his lip, trying to reconcile his dreams.
“It’s out of the question, Charlie,” Mr. Connally added firmly.
“But this is my decision.”
“What if you just registered for now?” Liam spoke up unexpectedly, before his parents could respond. All heads turned in his direction. Usually it was Jack that made peace. “I mean, that way as soon as you graduate you can go.”
“I don’t want to wait to enlist,” Charlie replied sharply.
“And we don’t want you to go at all,” his father shot back. His suggestion rejected by both sides, Liam slunk from the room.
Mrs. Connally turned toward me, Jack and Robbie. “Kids, would you excuse us, please?”
As we left the kitchen, I saw Robbie eyeing his hideaway, wanting to escape. The family quarrels were perhaps hardest on him. I put my arm around him. “Come on.” At the front door, I looked back at the stair closet, wondering if it would be useful as a bomb shelter. Uneasily, I shooed the thought away and followed Jack out onto the porch. Clouds had formed, turning the air cold and blustery. I scanned the street. Where had Liam gone? I wanted to find him and tell him I thought his suggestion had been a fine one, but he was nowhere to be seen. Pigeons huddled on the rooftops across the street. Jack pulled a pack of Juicy Fruit from his pocket and offered both of us a stick. I unwrapped it and popped it in my mouth, the syrupy sweetness a contrast to the somber mood. “Why is your mom so against the war?”
He shrugged. “She doesn’t believe it solves anything.”
Anger rose within me. It was so easy to sit here thousands of miles away and say that. “Is your dad a pacifist, too?”
“Injured,” Jack replied. “The army won’t take him.” I was puzzled. Mr. Connally looked just fine to me. “He had such a hard time during the Depression,” Jack added. I didn’t understand what that had to do with being able to fight.
Before I could ask further about their father, the door to the house opened and Charlie walked out, slamming it behind him.
“Charlie, I...” I began, searching for the words. I wanted America to go to war. But not him. “Please wait.” But he walked straight past and stormed off, not seeing me, leaving me feeling small and cold.
(#ulink_6261d3ab-6a7b-50cf-a5b9-9f8871769d23)
The smell of marsh grass baked in the late-August sun rose from the ground as I walked down the steps from our rooms at the beach house, brushing at some sand that lingered on my knee. A faint breeze, cooler than the day before, threatened to lift the hem of my pale yellow sundress, then set it down with a swirl.
I ran my fingers over the shell bracelet which Robbie had won for me from a boardwalk ring toss a few weeks earlier. It was hard to believe summer had come and gone again. We had arrived just before the Fourth of July, a day after the Connallys. Here there was no rushing home across the city after dinner, or worrying about the long walk between neighborhoods. Instead we had fallen back into our familiar routine of leisurely days on the beach and jitney rides up to the boardwalk some evenings. It was as if we had never left.
But everything was not the same. The country had been at war for more than eight months now. Life had changed in a thousand small ways, from the blackout curtains that lined the windows to the things like white sugar and sometimes butter that we were all meant do without for the war effort.
One day, just after the war had broken out, my name was called over the intercom when I was in Mrs. Lowenstein’s class, asking me to come to the principal’s office. This had never happened before and I hurried down the linoleum corridor, trying to figure out what I had done wrong. I was surprised to find my aunt and uncle waiting for me. They seldom ventured beyond the neighborhood. “We need you to come with us,” Aunt Bess said. They were both wearing their best clothes and their expressions were somber.
My apprehension rose. “Is it my parents? Have you had word?” Uncle Meyer shook his head and I followed them as we boarded the trolley downtown. Immigration and Naturalization, read a sign over the door of the office building at Fifth and Market to which Uncle Meyer led us.
Despite my uncle’s denial, hope flickered in me for a second: perhaps my parents were coming after all and we needed to get them visas. I turned to Aunt Bess questioningly. “Your citizenship paperwork came through,” she said. Annoyance rose in me. They had not asked if I wanted to be American; they had just presumed and filed the application without asking me. For a minute, I considered refusing. “It will make things easier,” Aunt Bess added. Easier for whom?
We sat in a waiting room with a dozen other people where a clock ticked above a water fountain. Finally, my name was called and we walked into an office. Would I have to take a test like I’d heard about in civics class? But the bald man behind the desk just asked me to repeat after him words I did not quite hear over the buzz in my ears, something about defending the Constitution. “Congratulations.” He handed me a certificate with coarse dry hands. Was that it? My heart sank a bit as I passed the paper to Aunt Bess, who folded it neatly and tucked it in her purse.
“That was wonderful,” Aunt Bess said, hugging me as though I had won an award, though I had in fact done nothing at all. “Wonderful.” I was not so sure. More and more lately, I had wanted to be like the Connallys and others here in America. I even dreamed in English, a transition that had happened so subtly I couldn’t say when. But now a small piece of me slipped away permanently, widening the gulf between me and my parents and the world I had left behind.
After leaving the immigration office, we went for a late lunch at Famous Deli and ate our corned-beef sandwiches silently. “Now that I’m not an Italian citizen anymore...” I began.
“Shhh,” Aunt Bess said, sneaking quick glances in both directions. I understood then the rush to naturalize me. With war raging overseas, people were growing more suspicious of foreigners here by the day. It was important to simply fit in, especially for a girl from Italy, which had declared war on America just days after Germany. Even on Porter Street, the chatter between porches that had mostly been Yiddish had become almost all English.
“I’m American now,” I’d told the Connallys when I’d visited them afterward.
“Congratulations!” Jack exclaimed brightly.
“Great,” Liam, on a rare evening home, remarked wryly. “You’re just like everyone else.” His words echoed my own misgivings. It was as if the part of me he’d admired—the part that was different—was gone.
The shore had changed, too—Atlantic City and the surrounding towns seemed to have been swallowed by the war. Fresh-faced young men in crisp new uniforms were everywhere and Convention Hall had been taken over as a training center. “Camp Boardwalk,” they called it. In the morning, troops marched and drilled in neat lines before scores of onlookers. Though bathers still took to the beaches, they scanned the horizon as if a German U-boat might appear at any second.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go to the shore this summer,” Mrs. Connally had fretted in early spring. Hearing that, my heart sank. The long summer days at the shore without the Connallys were unthinkable.
“The Germans won’t attack the coast,” her husband replied gently. He spoke with confidence, certain the war could not possibly reach America. But I had thought that once in Italy, too. Now newspaper stories ran pictures of fighting in the cities and villages, ordinary people arrested. My parents were smart, I told myself. They would have left and gone into hiding if things got too bad. It did little to ease my fears.
Thankfully the Connallys had come. I crossed the yard and Beau bounded out around the side of the wrapped porch in greeting. I knocked, not waiting for a response before opening the door. Though it was dinnertime, the smell of bacon and eggs filled the air. Boxes were strewn across the floor, much as they had been the day I’d met them. But this time they were packing to leave. At the base of the stairwell stood a small trunk. A lump formed in my throat at the bag that would go with Charlie when I would not.
They were all gathered in the kitchen, Robbie and the twins picking at the dishes their mother was cooking before she could swat their hands away. A radio played on the counter, President Roosevelt talking about how each American could help the war effort. “Addie, we’ve got eggs!” Robbie exclaimed, excited about the dinner he once might have scoffed at. I ruffled his hair, noting Mrs. Connally’s pained expression over his head. With rationing it was hard to get enough food for four growing boys, and even the ordinary things had become occasional treats.
Charlie sat at the table with his father, sharing sections of the newspaper. He wore a white T-shirt and his hair was still damp from his post-beach shower. Though I had seen him just an hour earlier, my stomach jumped.
Charlie looked up and his eyes seemed to hold mine just a beat longer than usual. “Hello, Addie,” he said. Did I imagine the odd twinge to his voice? There were moments, just a few, where I wondered if he might like me as well. Like back in the city last winter, when I had gone with all of the boys to see The Wizard of Oz downtown at the Stanley. About three-quarters of the way through the movie, right about when Dorothy tried to go home in a hot-air balloon, something brushed my hand in the darkness and I lifted it, thinking it was a fly. Charlie’s fingers hovered just above mine, then settled on them lightly. I wondered if it was intentional, but he stared intently at the movie, seeming not to notice. I did not breathe for fear of interrupting the moment. A few minutes later the lights came on and he stood, leaving me confused. As we made our way down the street to Horn & Hardart for hot cocoa, I searched his face for an explanation. But his expression was impassive and conversation ordinary, so ordinary I might have imagined it.
Things like that made me think that maybe he could like me, too. Why not? He was only a year and a bit older. But then he would retreat into his world of senior friends and dances and football, and I knew he would never feel the same way about me. He had spoken to me less recently, too, avoiding my eyes in a way reminiscent of Liam. I had wondered more than once if he was angry, though about what I could not fathom.
“Sit, sit,” Mrs. Connally urged, setting a plate before me. Guilt nagged at me as I inhaled the savory bacon smell. My aunt and uncle kept kosher at home. They didn’t ask what I ate at school or with the Connallys, but I felt fairly sure they hadn’t contemplated anything so trayf. My stomach grumbled. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. I took a bite.
“We’re going to the boardwalk while Mom and Dad pack up,” Jack offered. He’d gone a bit pimply around the chin, an awkward phase that the other boys seemed to have been spared. “I promised Robbie one last carousel ride.”
“Two,” Robbie corrected.
“Want to come?”
“Sure.” I wanted to buy a box of saltwater taffy to bring back for Rhonda. We’d become friends in a way. I didn’t see her outside of school—she had a gaggle of five younger brothers and sisters to babysit and I was busy with the Connallys. But we sat together at lunch every day and partnering up for relay races in gym. The other girls had either grown tired of mocking us or simply stopped noticing.
I took a sip of the juice Mrs. Connally had set before me, secretly studying Charlie as I ate. He was reading about a particularly difficult campaign that the army was waging in North Africa.
“I should be there,” he burst out, slamming his hand onto the table with uncharacteristic frustration. He had gone to register for the draft, waiting more than two hours in the line that snaked around Federal Street. He had not enlisted, though, in accordance with his parents’ wishes.
“Next year when I join the army—” Jack began. Gentle Jack was not a fighter, but he would do anything he could to be like his older brother.
“Next year the fighting will be over,” his father interrupted firmly.
“Please, God,” Mrs. Connally mumbled. “This may be the only time that I wish I had daughters instead.”
“You’re lucky you’re going to college,” Liam pointed out. Charlie had been accepted at Georgetown on the full football scholarship, just like he’d hoped. I’d been helping Mrs. Connally plant her victory plot last April when he’d come home with the news. Mrs. Connally had always made the tiny garden into an oasis, roses climbing trellises stubbornly looking for sun in the shaded patch of green, honeysuckle giving off a fragrant smell. When the war had come, she had reluctantly dug out some of her prized flowers to plant vegetables.
Charlie had run down the sidewalk, whooping. “I got into Georgetown.”
“But how do you know?” his mother had asked. “There hasn’t been a letter.”
“There will be. Coach found out.” He’d lifted me and spun me around. Then he’d set me down to hug his mother and I stood motionless, emotions cascading over me. His dream had come true, and he was going to school, not war. But I was still losing him. Charlie had talked about going away since the day we met. The neighborhood simply could not hold him.
But his excitement about college had not staved off the fact that part of him—a big part—felt duty-bound to go and fight. “Maybe you can get a part-time job in Washington with the War Department when you’re at Georgetown,” I offered now, trying to ease his frustration.
His face relaxed and he smiled slightly. “That’s an idea.” But I couldn’t tell if he meant it or was just humoring me.
“Thanks, Addie,” Mrs. Connally said in a low voice as Charlie walked from the room.
When we finished eating, Jack, Liam and Robbie spilled outside with their football, tossing it in the grass yard between the two houses. The boys were outpacing me now, I noticed. The twins were as tall as Charlie had been the day we met. Even Robbie’s shoulders now nearly matched my own. And Charlie... I looked back at the Connally house. Why hadn’t he come out yet?
From our rooms above, I heard the scrape of a window screen and saw a curtain move. Aunt Bess had been watching me with the Connallys, her expression undoubtedly one of disapproval. Though I had been friends with the Connallys for over a year, it seemed to bother her and Uncle Meyer now more than ever. They were forever trying to push me toward Jewish kids back in the city. “There’s a dance at the Y,” Aunt Bess had said tentatively at dinner about a month before we’d come down the shore. “I thought that maybe you would like to go.” I had not answered. It wasn’t that I disliked the Jewish kids, but even if they would have accepted me, I didn’t want to go. I had the Connallys. I didn’t need anyone else.
“You’re almost eighteen now,” Aunt Bess had pressed. “You need to meet some nice boys.”
“And the Connallys aren’t?” I demanded. Uncle Meyer blinked in surprise at the forcefulness of my voice.
“It’s not that. But being Jewish matters. After everything that you’ve seen, I would have thought that you would appreciate that.”
I pushed aside my aunt’s disapproval and watched the boys play as they had done dozens of evenings this summer. But this time was different: it was the last time. Tomorrow it would all be gone. Swatting back a tear, I ran up the stairs to my room and grabbed the camera that Uncle Meyer had given to me as a birthday present. “I noticed you admiring it,” he’d confessed. It was smaller than the one Papa had let me use and not as new. But I didn’t mind; I took it everywhere, capturing bits of the city, like the shopkeepers beneath the sagging awnings at the Italian market and the old men who fed pigeons in Mifflin Park. I saved a bit of my allowance each week to buy film and had gotten permission to use the darkroom at school, rinsing the images until the contrast was just right.
I stood on the stairs, snapping shots of the boys as they tackled one another, their hair and skin golden in the late-day sun.
“Hey!” Liam scowled at the clicking sound. “No pictures.”
I lowered the camera and walked down the steps. “Why not?” I challenged.
“You gotta be careful with that. Someone might think you’re an Axis spy.”
“Liam!” Jack cautioned.
“I didn’t mean anything by it.” His face flushed. But there was some truth to what he’d said: people looked at me differently since the war began. Even though I was an American citizen now and my accent had faded with time, my past meant I would never truly be one of them. I was an outsider, foreign once more.
“I doubt the Germans would want a photo of you anyway,” Jack chided his twin, trying to break the tension. Liam did not answer but stormed off around the side of the house.
“But, Liam, we’re going to the boardwalk!” Robbie could not imagine anyone passing up on that. His voice was drowned out by the choky rev of Liam’s dirt-bike engine, then tires squealing. Seeing Robbie’s face fall, I walked over and squeezed his hand, which was still a bit slick with bacon grease. Jack looked at me helplessly. Liam was so much moodier and more distant than a year ago. We had hoped that the summer away from the city, where trouble was so easy to find, would have done something to calm Liam’s wild ways. There were moments when he seemed his old self, playing with his brothers in the surf. But his darkness always returned.
Mrs. Connally stepped from the house, shielding her eyes as she scanned the side yard. “Where’s Liam?”
“Gone—on his bike. He said something earlier about meeting some friends at the beach.”
Mrs. Connally’s face fell. “I hate that thing,” she said bluntly. The bike had been a reward—Liam was allowed to buy it with the allowance he’d saved in exchange for finishing the semester with no Fs. But it had backfired, allowing him to roam farther and longer than ever before. “He’s having such a hard time.” She seemed to be pleading with me to do something, though what I did not know.
Before I could ask, Jack came to my side with Robbie in tow. “Ready?”
“What about the others?” I asked, purposefully vague.
But the point of my question could not have been more obvious. “Charlie’s got plans.”
“A date,” Robbie piped up cheerfully.
“Robbie, don’t.” Jack shifted uncomfortably. He had been trying to spare my feelings. A foot seemed to kick me in the stomach. I had seen Charlie talking to the girl who worked the concession stand by the beach a couple of times, a strawberry blonde a year or two older than me. But I had not actually thought he would go out with her tonight of all nights. It was our last night at the shore, for goodness’ sake. How could he waste it with someone he hardly knew?
A few minutes later, the jitney came and we paid a nickel each to board. Our nights had changed since last summer when the whole Connally family had made the trek to the boardwalk on Saturday nights to ride the Ferris wheel and watch the lights twinkle along the hazy coastline below. On the Fourth of July, we’d crowded together on a blanket, sharing caramel corn as fireworks exploded above and an orchestra played on the pier.
Now everything was different. Liam was off getting into trouble and Charlie was with that red-haired girl. My mind was flooded with images. Where was he taking her tonight? So those moments I’d glimpsed between me and Charlie had just been my imagination. How foolish of me! I had no right to stop him from dating, but it still felt like a betrayal—and it hurt worse than I could have imagined.
“We’re here.” Robbie tugged at my arm and we climbed off, then walked the last few steps to the wide promenade of the boardwalk. The shops and arcades stood in a row beneath brightly colored awnings. The heady aroma of taffy and funnel cake and caramel corn, which I normally savored, seemed stifling now. Roller coasters and other amusements rose on the massive piers that jutted out like freighters into the sea. Across the boardwalk, a serviceman who had not yet shipped out yet stole a kiss from the girl on his arm.
We walked passed the Warner Theater, its marquee alight touting a Gary Cooper film. Once the boardwalk would have come alive with twinkling lights even before dusk, but now they were dimmed out, lights covered with a special blue film in a precaution to make the coast less visible in case of an attack. “The Miss America pageant is coming,” Robbie announced as they passed a poster of a striking woman in a swim costume.
“She sure is a dish,” Jack chimed in, but the words sounded forced and silly.
“Hey!” Normally I didn’t mind the boys’ rough banter. “That’s rude to say in front of me.”
“Sorry, Ad,” Jack said, chastened.
But his apology did no good. My frustration, with Charlie and Liam and all of it, suddenly boiled over. The lights and merriment only seemed to amplify my sadness. I could stand it no longer. “I’m a girl, too, you know. Maybe it’s time you remembered that!”
I turned away blindly. Ignoring the boys’ calls, I dodged through children licking ice-cream cones and the wicker rickshaws pushed by colored men. I ran south, my sandals flapping against the boards until the sound and lights faded behind me.
Finally, I slowed a bit, breathing heavily. The sun was setting in great layers of pink, like wide swaths of strawberry frosting on a cake I’d once admired through a bakery window. The boardwalk grew quiet except for the cry of a few gulls and the rhythmic thunder of the waves. When I reached Chelsea Avenue, I saw a cluster of kids sitting around a fire down on the beach and Liam’s dirt bike propped against the side of the boardwalk. Before I knew it, I was going after him.
I took off my sandals and then stepped onto the beach. The sand, still warm, grew damp and harder beneath my feet as I neared the water. About fifteen feet away from the group, I stopped. Seven or eight kids sat in the surf smoking and drinking out of glass soda bottles that I guessed contained something stronger. Liam was not among them, and for a moment I was grateful I had been wrong. Then a familiar whoop came across the water. Liam was almost fifty feet out paddling on a surfboard, scarcely visible at dusk. It wasn’t accurate anymore to say that Liam had no hobbies. He had the dirt bike and surfing, which he had picked up earlier this summer. He was drawn, it seemed, to anything dangerous. He rose up and the water seemed to dance beneath him. I momentarily forgot my fear of the water and stood transfixed.
As Liam played to his audience, he scanned the coastline. Seeing me, he lurched in surprise. The board few out from under him and his legs went flying through the air. “Liam!” I called, panic surging through me. Seconds passed and I watched the surface, willing him to appear.
A minute later he emerged in shallow water, his hair dark and slicked with water. As he saw me, a light came to his eyes and for a moment he almost smiled. Then his face seemed to close again and he turned from me, starting toward the group by the fire. “Liam, wait.” As he neared, I noticed an odd smell mingling with the salt water, and his eyes were glassy.
“Hey, Ad.” He reached into his bag and held out a flask to me. His look was daring, sure that I would say no. “I didn’t think so,” he sneered when I hesitated. I took the flask from him and as I raised it, the acidic smell took me back to the glass of vodka Nonna always had before supper. Wanting him to trust me but knowing better than to sip, I took a swig, cringing at the burn.
The others kids were packing up now and I feared Liam would follow, leaving me behind. I shivered. He pulled out a shirt and passed it to me, and I could smell the sweat and smoke and beer it had seen as I rolled up the too-long sleeves. He dropped to the sand and I followed, leaning back. There was a great white streak of cloud across the night sky, seeming to light it, as if someone had taken a piece of chalk and brushed it sideways. One of Robbie’s ceiling sketches come to life.
I stared up at the sea of stars. “So much darkness,” Liam said. I turned in amazement. Was that really what he saw? “What are you doing here?” he asked.
Running away, I thought. Just like you. I drew my knees close under the sweatshirt and wrapped my arms around them. There were moments when Liam and I seemed to get each other, like last February when snow had blanketed Second Street in fresh white. The boys had built forts out of shoveled snow on either side of the street and it had been Liam and I on one side of the snowball fight, just the two of us against the world. “I was thinking about school this fall,” I said instead, trying to find a topic easier than admitting the real reason I had come.
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