THE FIFTH DAY (OR THE FOURTH DAY OF PASSOVER)

SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO FIND A WAY

HARPO, 1933

“Harpo!” said Sam.

Harpo heard his name, then stumbled into Sam’s embrace, then stumbled out of it again. He held onto the registration desk. Mornings were getting more and more difficult.

“Thank you, Harpo,” said Sam.

Harpo felt the smooth surface of the counter, didn’t look up at his friend. He shouldn’t be thanked. He hadn’t found them yet, the letters, whatever else Simon may have given, whatever else Simon may have done. He hadn’t fixed anything. He would though. He wanted to, so badly. He’d stayed away from Sam’s wife at least. At least there was that.

“The window is a masterpiece,” said Sam.

“Oh.” That, Harpo hadn’t done either. Last night, William had sanded and straightened and pounded, then stained it all, while all Harpo had done was watched and breathed in the fumes. The room did look great, and the window looked dizzyingly good inside it. But it had nothing to do with him.

“I knew to believe in miracles,” said Sam. “And I knew that you’d be miraculous.”

“I think you’re wrong,” whispered Harpo.

Sam patted him on the back. “Come tonight,” he said. “We’ll smoke cigars. We have to celebrate the window. You’re a good man, Harpo, and we’ll celebrate that too.”

Harpo escaped into the morning air. It was getting bigger, this problem he’d stumbled onto.

Harpo stumbled down the stairs, and beside the back window, he saw the faint mark of paint on the brick. He stopped, then edged nearer. There was the outline of words: dirty jews. Was that what William was always doing all alone in the dark? Cleaning graffiti? And what about the message itself, the fact that angry men were lurking close? Should he be concerned about that? Harpo looked around, at all the chattery guests, wearing bathing suits, holding towels, chattering and laughing. Nobody else seemed worried. He kept walking.

Harpo had a ritual too, he realized as he eased himself down beside Ayala. He loved this place, this time, these warm mornings full of pink sky and whispering lake. He didn’t ever want to leave.

“You’re easy to talk to,” Ayala said suddenly. “I talk too much sometimes. But it’s fine if I’m with you. There needs to be a certain amount of conversation, and you’re certainly not doing it.”

Harpo freed his arm so that he could touch her shoulder. She eased into his hand, her back concave. She was wearing a soft white sweater that reminded him of the nightgown from the night they’d met.

“Silences from you are comfortable,” she said. “They’re never uneasy. There’s never that tension that happens right after I’ve said the wrong thing.”

Harpo ran his hand up and down, and he could feel her spine under the wool. He drew a heart with his fingertips.

“Those bad kinds of silence follow me after they start. I drag them from room to room. All of this is easier for Sam, of course. He just loves people, and that’s all there is to it. It doesn’t matter who they are, Sam will love them. Getting along is easy for him.”

“Was Simon like that too?” asked Harpo.

Ayala paused, but not for long. “I can’t help what I see,” she said. “These people, the ones who come to stay at the lodge, they’ve never had to run from anything.”

“What does Simon do for a living?”

“These guests, they have their parents still. I had my mother until I was twenty-three years old. If you’re forty and you still have a mother, and you see your mother two times every week, that means that you’ll see her an average of three hundred times more than I saw my mother. That’s not fair.”

Harpo spelled out the word mother. Then Minnie. “I miss my mother too,” he whispered.

“I have too many worries,” said Ayala.

Harpo shifted so that he was sitting behind her now and she was between his knees. Now he could trace on her back properly. He needed a long word. Or a funny sounding one maybe. He wrote filament. He’d done this with Minnie once, on a balmy evening. He’d been walking back to the tenements when he saw her sitting out on the sidewalk, head in her hands and looking tired, so he sat behind her and patted her back. She hadn’t pulled away.

“I talk about these worries,” Ayala was saying, “and that’s where the silences come from. Nobody wants to know. They don’t want to hear about it because they know I’m right. I’m scared my girls will have to leave this country too. I’m scared the Jews won’t be welcome.”

Harpo blinked away the afterimage of paint on brickwork.

“Wars, kinim, dever, pestilence too, maybe, but that’s not a major worry because I’ve never been squeamish about insects. Sam asks me to kill the spiders.”

Harpo wrote spider in a loopy cursive. Ayala didn’t say anything. Minnie had. Minnie had guessed: pencil, glass, tabletop, and Harpo had said, “that’s right” every single time, even though he’d just been doing scribbles then. He hadn’t trusted his spelling.

“I’m scared the girls will never find husbands,” said Ayala. “I’m scared they’ll choose the wrong ones. It’s not like at home, where we just put the girls on the market and bargain between parents.”

Harpo wrote the word love. He wasn’t so good a speller, but that was one word he knew for sure.

“Here it’s all so loose. What do you know when you’re just eighteen? Can you really pick a husband on your own? You’re still a child then. No. I know my daughters better than they know themselves and I’d do anything for them. Even if it’s something that I shouldn’t have done, I won’t regret it. What I did, it was for my family. What I asked, I asked for them, because I love them.”

Harpo rested his forehead on her back, breathing in her smell, the powder, the soft vanilla, then he wrapped his arms around her waist. That day in New York, Minnie had scooped around and pulled him into a hug, and for once, Harpo had liked being small. Harpo planted one chaste kiss on Ayala’s cheek.

“When did you leave Russia?” he said into Ayala’s fluffy, white sweater.

“Three years ago. No. Four. Almost four.”

Harpo let her go. He lay down on the dock, suddenly too tired to stay upright. Ayala’s smaller daughter couldn’t be much older than four. She’d been conceived in Russia then, he’d bet on it. And she had blond hair and pale eyes and didn’t look anything like Sam. Sonja was Simon’s daughter.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Ayala was gone, and he sat up to find little pebbles stuck to the side of his face.

Harpo picked his way off the dock.

Ayala had had an affair, a kid, an escape from Russia, but not in that order. And he was about to destroy the letter that she’d written to little Sonja’s father. If he were a father, if he had a child somewhere in the world, he wouldn’t want anyone to do that. He knew what Chico would tell him. If he wanted to be a grown-up, then he’d have to learn to make tough decisions. Sometimes, he’d have to do bad things. But he knew that already. He knew that better than his brothers did.

He knew that Minnie stole food for them. He’d never told anybody. He’d been skidding down 83rd past the grocery vendor one afternoon, pretending he was a marble in a box maze and the world was tilting him around, and that’s when he’d seen her. She’d stolen things, taken them and slid them in her handbag, and then Harpo saw that the shopkeeper was watching her too, and the whole world stopped, and Harpo thought that his heart would just stop beating. Minnie might go to jail. This might be it. He couldn’t catch his breath. But then the shopkeeper turned away, pretended not to see. Minnie had had to be formidable just like Ayala. She’d raised five boys with no money. Sometimes you just have to find a way.

So here’s the deal. If Harpo could save this family, then he’d be responsible enough to have his own.

He had to find the father. He had to get Simon. No, he had to get word to Simon, and bring a letter back. He had to do it himself. He was going to Russia anyway, so he’d go playing Harpo the Postman. Then he’d tell Ayala that Simon was safe. He wouldn’t tell her where he was though. He wouldn’t give any kind of return address, just in case.