Grand Central: Original Stories of Postwar Love and Reunion Read online

  She had allowed Peter to help the gardener lug more bushels of giant squash up to the house but had been mortified by Peter’s suggestion that, since he was a trained cook, after all, he help assemble the produce into tasty dishes. If Esther was not much like Peter’s mother, Riva, in stature and demeanor, she was similar in two other ways: she was a gentlewoman married to a man much louder than she, and she would not countenance any man working in her kitchen. Peter was not especially surprised to find this sentiment about his lowly profession had followed him across the ocean; Peter’s father, Avram, had been the same way. It had been Avram’s greatest personal disappointment that his son had not followed him into the practice of law, although before the Nazis had kicked Peter and every other Jew out of university in 1939, that was precisely what Peter had been studying. Peter had been so grateful to his oppressors for disrupting his education, so energized by his unexpected liberation, that he had for once not waited for Avram to arrange for him another position; instead, Peter had taken a Gentile friend’s offer to work at the Hotel Adlon as a prep chef. By then, everyone agreed, it was lucky Peter had secured employment at all, though it was a pity that the only son of one of Berlin’s most prominent families had been reduced to a kitchen boy. Even Avram had to accept it, and it was at the Adlon that Peter had discovered his surprising love and aptitude for cooking. He was careful to present a long face at home, but internally he rejoiced; until later in the war, he had secretly, stupidly thought the Nazis coming to power was the best thing that could have happened to him.

  Now Peter turned away from the sight of Ines butchering the bluefish, though his hands itched to wrest it from her; he had learned early in his stay here, during a luncheon in the glass-walled room Cousin Sol and Esther called the solarium, not to offer culinary suggestions. No sooner had Peter tentatively mentioned that he could show the maid a way to clean the fish so scales would not end up in the bread, the cranberry mold, and the milk than Cousin Sol had smashed his highball tumbler on the glass-topped table and roared, GodDAMNit! I will not stand for any relative of mine doing nebbish work under my roof! So Peter smiled now at Esther and said, in careful English, “Good afternoon, ladies. I see we are at work on the evening menu. What do we make?”

  “What are we making,” Esther corrected him. She was a tiny woman with short hair curled and teased to stand up as though she had recently suffered a fright; she wore a flowered caftan, several lengths of polished stone beads, and bright red lipstick, a waxy imprint of which she left on Peter’s cheek when she craned up to kiss him hello. Peter reminded himself to wipe it off later, when he was out of her sight. “I am making rat-a-tou-ille,” Esther said, pronouncing it carefully, “a vegetable stew—have you heard of it?—although it’s for tomorrow, not tonight. The flavors blend together better if you make it a day in advance. Tonight we have the club, remember?”

  Peter thought, then nodded. At least twice a week they dined at Cousin Sol’s country club, and equally often they attended a fund-raiser for Cousin Sol’s excellent causes; tonight the two would be combined.

  “Very good,” said Esther. She took a long drag of a cigarette smoldering in a jade turtle-shaped ashtray amid the zucchini. The kitchen manager at the Adlon, Peter thought, would have threatened to break one of Esther’s fingers off had he seen her smoking near the food.

  “Your new tuxedo is in your room,” Esther said, smiling at Peter; she had the lipstick on one of her front teeth, a red smear, but it was a radiant smile nonetheless. “Ines picked it up from Sol’s tailor earlier, didn’t you, Ines?”

  “Yes, madam,” Ines said, not glancing up from the fish. Ines never looked directly at Peter, nor spoke to him; her English was even more limited than his, Peter had observed, confined mostly to answering her employers in the affirmative or the negative. But sometimes when Cousin Sol and Esther were both out, Peter had overheard Ines discussing him on the telephone or with the gardener—sucking in her cheeks and slapping her ribs to pantomime a skeleton, starvation; clicking her tongue, issuing liquidly rapid pronouncements punctuated by much head shaking and sighs of Ai! Ai!

  “Mr. Peter’s suit is on his door,” Ines said now, and Peter thought briefly of the humiliation of visiting Cousin Sol’s tailor, trying on one of Sol’s tuxedos, and having the tailor, a little man with a big mustache, tell Esther, There’s no way we can take this much in. Sol’s got at least ninety pounds on this guy. We’ll have to make him a new one—then glancing up from Peter’s feet with eyes aswim with sympathy.

  “Did you eat?” Esther asked Peter now, and Peter said yes, thank you, he’d had lunch at the Oyster Bar. Esther shook her head and snuffed her cigarette. “That’s not enough,” she said, flinging open the refrigerator. “Here, here’s some nice whitefish dip, and I think I’ve got some crackers—oh, would you like a peach? Last of the year—or some cookies?”

  Peter smiled but again said no, thank you. When he had first arrived in this country, he’d been astounded by all the food—the abundance of it, the dizzying rainbow array, the fact that you could eat whatever you wanted whenever you wanted—and he had been ravenous all the time. Now, most days, his stomach felt like a shriveled walnut.

  “At least some ruggelah,” insisted Esther, pressing on him a plate of the small pastries, containing a prune spread and peppered with chopped nuts, that Peter had never seen before coming to America. He doesn’t know ruggelah? Esther had said to Cousin Sol, astonished, and Sol had shrugged and said, How many times do I have to tell you Avi and his family didn’t observe.

  Peter took the ruggelah and a glass of milk to be polite. Esther patted his cheek, then pinched it, although Peter, at twenty-six, had not allowed his own mother to do this for at least fifteen years. “So handsome,” Esther said, her eyes filling with tears, “mien scheena Jung! What those goyim monsters did to you,” and she ripped off a sheet of what Peter had learned was called paper towel and blew her nose. “Go, go,” she said, waving him away with this makeshift handkerchief, “go for a swim, lie down, rest. We’ve got a big evening ahead.”

  3

  In the shadowy foyer beyond the kitchen, Peter stood with the plate of little mouse-shaped pastries in his hand, indecisive. Behind him, a grandfather clock identical to the one Peter had grown up with bonged the quarter hour. He estimated he had forty-five minutes before Sol arrived home, flush with Crown Royal whiskey and either triumph for having walloped his fellow commuters in the club car at bridge or rage because they’d emptied his pockets. Either way, Peter didn’t particularly want to be in Sol’s path. He considered the pool; there was indeed time for a swim, and for a moment Peter envisioned changing in the pool house with its striped towels and pleasant smell of chlorine; floating on his back in the man-made turquoise lagoon, listening to the waterfall, and gazing up into the canopy of the huge oak that spread its branches over the pool. Although the last time Peter had done this, he had heard rustling in the wild reeds that divided Sol’s property from his neighbor’s; turning his head from where he lay on the inflatable raft and shielding his eyes, Peter had spied the two little girls who lived next door, peering at him and whispering. When they realized they’d been found out, they fled, fleet and shy as deer, but not before Peter had seen they were almost exactly the same age as Vivi and Ginger, his twins . . .

  He decided against the pool and began walking through the house. The rooms were hushed and crammed with treasure from Cousin Sol and Esther’s numerous prewar trips abroad: Japanese scrolls and golden Buddha statues; Russian dolls and Persian rugs; Esther’s Venetian glass collection. There was a lit display case containing what Esther had explained to Peter, her penciled eyebrows again rising in dismay and pity at his ignorance, were Jewish artifacts: antique dreydls and menorahs belonging to Sol’s grandfather; a tallit once owned by a famous rabbi. There was a harp in the living room and, in a specially designed nook, a Steinway grand piano that, to the best of Peter’s knowledge, nobody played.


  He wandered, trailing his fingers over glossy surfaces and coming up dustless, his feet gliding soundlessly over the Oriental carpets like a ghost’s. At some point, he must have put down the pastries, but he couldn’t remember where. These memory lapses still plagued him, although they were growing less frequent; shock, Sol’s physician had said, when Peter had first arrived in New York: the aftereffects of starvation and all Peter had been through. With rest and good nutrition, they would diminish over time. They seemed to be doing so, Peter thought; he had little trouble retaining orders at work, for instance, although every so often he still got on the wrong train or left a book in Esther’s refrigerator, and once, most frighteningly, he had woken in the middle of the night and for several panicked moments had not been able to remember his own name.

  At the end of a long hallway, next to Ines’s quarters, was the room Esther had assigned to Peter: the Loom Room, or so Peter had nicknamed it because his cot shared the small toile-papered space with Esther’s giant loom, on which she spun yards and yards of mohair. Peter went into this room and shut the door behind him, and there, on a hook, as Esther had promised, was Peter’s new tuxedo. Slowly, Peter stripped to his underwear and took down the suit, but instead of putting it on, he draped it over the loom and stood looking at himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. His body glimmered mostly white in the light refracting off the Long Island Sound, winking blue beyond the window—the Loom Room being one of the few in the house that received direct sun. Like his memory, Peter’s physique was not quite back to its prewar shape—or, to be more accurate, the body he’d had before Terezín and Auschwitz. Prior to deportation, even during rationing, Peter had actually been quite strong, a by-product of working on the kitchen line at the Hotel Adlon, a job that had required stamina, strength, and nimbleness. How Masha had loved to tease him about this, running her hands silkily over Peter’s back and shoulders and biceps, remarking on his resemblance to the American actor Buster Crabbe. My husband, Flash Gordon, she said, kissing his neck, my own personal Tarzan! Peter had groaned and rolled his eyes, although he secretly preferred the comparison with the jungle hero to the awful two weeks Masha had decided he looked more like Errol Flynn and made him grow a pencil-line mustache. You just want to see me in a leopard loincloth, he teased her, and on their honeymoon he had been astonished when Masha produced just that, a ridiculous spotted length of fabric she had sewn herself and that Peter had wrapped around his head instead of his groin, like a turban. Come to me, he had said in his best Sheik of Araby accent. You are my slave. I paid ten thousand camels for you! and he had chased Masha shrieking around the luxurious hotel room, both of them scrambling on and over the bed like children, knocking over lamps and chairs. How they had laughed and laughed . . .

  Peter stripped off his underwear as well, flicking contemptuously at his penis. Useless appendage, all the more so because it still worked, awakening him in the mornings and sometimes at night with its tumescence, throbbing—to what purpose? You’re young, Sol’s physician said. There’s little permanent damage; you’ll bounce back quickly. You’re one of the lucky ones. Peter pulled on fresh briefs and the crisp new shirt, covering the purple scars on his rib cage and back, souvenirs from an SS officer dissatisfied with how quickly Peter had been laying gravestones from the nearby Jewish cemetery to pave a new road at Terezín. Watch out, Peter remembered the man saying as he beat Peter with his truncheon. Move faster, faster! Or I’ll kick you in the ass. Peter had had the benefit of understanding the man, who spoke Peter’s native tongue, unlike the prisoner next to Peter who, not comprehending, continued to move too slowly to suit the officer, who then unleashed his dogs. Even here, in the Loom Room, Peter sometimes woke abruptly from a dream of having to step over and over the ropes of intestines steaming and steaming on the gravestones.

  The house vibrated as the garage door rumbled up in its tracks, a novelty Peter had yet to adjust to, and a minute later Peter heard Cousin Sol bellow, “Esther, I’m home.” There was Esther’s higher staccato voice, then the crack of ice cubes being freed from their tin tray and the clink of them hitting a glass. Sol demanded, “Where’s my tux? Did you get it back from the cleaners?” More Esther, her words indecipherable but her voice drawing closer now; she was probably trotting to keep up with Sol, slightly behind him as he thundered along the hallway. “What?” Sol said. “The whitefish. Bring me some of that. I’m starved.” The Russian dolls-within-dolls clattered on the table next to Peter’s cot as Sol’s heavy footsteps thudded closer. Sol could have been Peter’s father’s twin, separated at birth and spirited to America: short, stocky, powerfully built men you could hear coming from a hundred meters away, their mouths plugged with excellent cigars that they removed only to issue forth smoke and opinions. Self-made men, each with his own law firm; men of influence, self-described. At least, Avram, Peter’s father, had been until the Nazis dismantled his business; even then, Avram had continued to funnel money and influence into organizations that carried Jewish friends off to distant countries. Later, after the Nazis took Avram away during the Night of Broken Glass and put him in Buchenwald, Avram still proved stubbornly unsinkable; he returned—unlike so many others—and kept up his illegal activities, this time channeling Cousin Sol’s funds into resistance networks in the newly established ghettos of Poland. We will NOT leave, Avram bellowed, whenever Peter’s mother, Riva, brought up the subject. You want me to bow to those thugs? Our family was practicing law in Berlin when their peasant grandparents were wiping shit out of their asses with their hands. Our family does NOT run. It wasn’t until the Nazis removed Avram for the second time, to Buchenwald again, Peter later discovered, and then to Lodz and finally to Birkenau, that Avram was finally quiet, leaving only Sol to carry on his good work.

  “Where’s the nebbish?” Sol was saying now, almost directly outside the door to the Loom Room; he would be standing, Peter deduced, near the entrance to Sol and Esther’s master bedroom suite. “Is he home from the city?” and Esther said something affirmative in her anxious tones, and Sol said, “Does he have his suit at least?” and Esther assured him yes, and Sol said, “Schlemiel the busboy. After all I’ve done for him. My cousin Avi would be turning in his grave—if those Nazi bastards had left him one,” and Esther said something like, Shush, he’ll hear you! and ice cubes clinked and rattled as Sol handed her his glass. “Get me another one of these, would you?” he said. “Go get ready. We leave in half an hour.” A door slammed. The floor creaked as Esther trotted quickly off down the hall. Peter looped his tie around the collar of his tuxedo shirt and went to his cot. He turned his head to the toile-papered wall; the slanted eye of a red deer, pursued by lords and maidens on a hunt, stared at Peter, sinister with inscrutable meaning. Peter lay back and shut his eyes against the evening sun.

  4

  By the time they arrived at the golf club—not the White Stag, which looked very much to Peter like the Schloβ Charlottenburg, but the Briar Rose, which allowed Jews—Cousin Sol was well in the bag, as Americans would say. Peter had picked up many such phrases for inebriation from the Oyster Bar kitchen staff: soused, oiled, sloshed, three sheets to the wind, and the most imagistic, pie-eyed. Sol was all of the above. He stashed bottles of Crown Royal in convenient locations throughout the Larchmont house; Peter had come across the navy blue velvet bags with their gold script and piping in Sol’s phonograph cabinet, the breakfast nook, the pool house, and the powder room off the foyer—in this instance beneath the skirt of the knitted lady who was meant to conceal toilet paper. Sol also apparently kept a bottle in the glove box of the Volvo he drove, for handy tippling while traveling. The roads in Larchmont were serpentine, wending among huge rock outcroppings and alongside the shoreline of the Sound, and they were made all the more curvaceous by Sol’s creative driving. At one point, Sol had not only crossed the yellow center line, a fairly frequent occurrence, but scraped the Volvo up against one of the boulders, making a squealing sound and causing Esther
to grab Sol’s arm and scream, Solomon, you’ll kill us! and Sol to shake her off, roaring, GodDAMNit, Esther, leave me alone! I know what I’m doing. The resulting gash along the side of the car was deep enough to earn a startled look from the Negro valet at the club’s front door, before the large bill Sol slipped him recalled him to his senses. Peter was not so fast to recover; he had not been frightened at the prospect of a crash, but he was nauseous, and the club’s lobby seemed to tip and tilt before his eyes until he got control of his gorge.

  They were all streaming toward the dining room, Sol’s friends and colleagues—the machers, Peter had heard them called, the movers and shakers, doctors and lawyers and business owners who founded schools and gave to charities. They stopped to clap Sol on the back, to kiss Esther on the cheek and smile at Peter as they made their way toward dinner. The hallway was lined with flower arrangements in recessed alcoves and hung with portraits of the club’s presidents, Sol prominent among them; the carpet was lush and gold patterned and the wallpaper gaily striped mint and flamingo pink; the chandelier tinkled overhead. The artificially cooled air was redolent of liquor and a hundred ladies’ perfumes. Peter followed Esther to their table in the dining room overlooking the golf course and suddenly found standing before him a dark-haired woman his age, wearing pearls and a bright yellow frock. “Peter,” Esther said, “this is Miss Rachel Nussbaum. Rachel, this is our cousin Peter I told your mother about, from Europe,” and Esther pinched Peter’s arm through his tuxedo jacket.