Chapter 1

Rachel heard murmuring; she thought it was part of a dream. In it she was carrying Adam, who was amazingly small and light, to a canoe, like the one they’d rented when they went through the wilderness park in Minnesota. She carried him easily at first, then as the woods got deeper, and the sun started to go, his body got heavier, and soon she was staggering along the trail, toward the canoe that waited at the edge of one of the lakes. He was alive and awake, his eyes were bright, and he talked to her, to make the trip go faster. She didn’t listen to what he said, but the sound of his voice was a comfort, and before long she reached the canoe, laid him in the bottom, careful not to bang his head on the slats. Then she got into the stern, and with a sweet movement that no one who hadn’t portaged could appreciate, they slid across the shallow end of the water and out into the lake. He couldn’t move, but he talked as she paddled, the murmuring of his voice spread over the flat water.

She woke up and opened her eyes, but the murmuring went on. She had a pain between her legs, her back hurt, and she knew she’d had the baby, and that it was Jacob sitting next to her bed, praying or just talking to himself. She was glad to be alive, not on the lonely lake with her paralyzed husband. She turned her head to smile at her father-­in-­law, and saw Isaac Luria sitting on a chair next to her bed, his lips moving, his fingers rubbing something flat and silver in his hand. He saw she was awake, and he stopped talking and put the silver whatever in his pocket.

“The baby?” she asked.

“A little girl,” he said. “But perfect. Seven pounds four ounces.” He looked at her like he always did, with the same flat look he’d give a chair or piece of meat. Yet, she thought, he’d been praying for her, or over her, or something, and she smiled at him. He didn’t smile back, just regarded her without any expression on his face.

Suddenly she wanted him out of her room.

“Jacob . . .” she cried.

“He’s eating,” Luria said. “He’s exhausted and needs to eat.”

She lay still, watching the ceiling, then the snow that blew against the window. She asked him when she could see the baby, and he said he didn’t know. Then she asked where Golda was, and he told her Golda was with Jacob. His voice was soft, and she knew he was trying to sound kind. They didn’t say anymore to each other and she tried to fall asleep. She closed her eyes but couldn’t forget he was there; she even thought of trying to get out of bed, when the door opened and she saw Jacob. He threw his arms wide and shouted so loud nurses came running down the hall.

“It’s a little girl, Rachel. The prettiest baby in the whole world.”

Rachel and Levy learned how to take care of the baby together. Golda showed them how to bathe her and she recommended brands of powder, paper diapers, cotton, baby oil, even though she’d never had a baby herself. She said she’d read a lot, so they listened to her. They called the little girl Leah. She was born with hair, which was thick and black, and curly by the time she was three months old. Her eyes turned hazel, then brown. She didn’t get fat enough to suit Levy, and he worried, even after the doctor said she was fine.

On Fridays, Rachel lit the Sabbath candles according to Jacob’s instructions. She shielded her eyes against the glow the way he taught her, and with him and Leah watching, she held her hand flat and waved it around and between the flames in an odd Eastern gesture, the meaning of which was lost, but Jacob said women did it anyway.

She cooked, kept the house, helped Levy in the store in the afternoons with Leah in her playpen next to the cash register. She played cards on Tuesdays, went to the movies on Saturday with Golda or Barbara Fineman, and thought that it would have been a good year if she could sleep nights.

Getting to sleep was the problem. It was quiet and she was used to noise. In Minnesota, other professors had parties, or played Bach, Mozart, Scriabin until late at night. In Brooklyn, trucks ran all night between fisheries on the bays and the bridges. When she was growing up, people walked under her window from Central Park to Columbus, talking, laughing, yelling until late, and buses ran all night. But in Laurel, it was quiet. She tried to imagine that she could hear the surf on the other side of the Island, or the sea birds, but the quiet defeated her imagination and she stayed awake until she heard Levy leave his room, which he did every night, and go into the baby’s room. Then she’d fall asleep. If she didn’t, she would think about Adam, and that was dreadful because she didn’t remember him alive, diminutive, vibrant, and with the brightest eyes she’d ever seen; she remembered him in his coffin. Levy had warned her not to look. Orthodox Jews never looked at their dead, but she had insisted. He had been too sad to argue, and the mortician, after a few hours of preparation, lifted the simple coffin lid and she looked into her dead husband’s face. Pancake makeup covered dry rubbery-­looking gashes from the knives, and the lids covering the protruding eyeballs looked too thin to keep out the light.

Before they killed Adam, nothing frightened her; now, if the baby coughed, she called the doctor. If she ran a fever, Rachel wanted to take her to the hospital. She paid the mortgage on the twenty-­fifth and had the van tuned up every three months. She bought five pounds of coffee at a time and ten pounds of sugar because she was afraid of running out. She bought a whole case of toilet paper and in the middle of wrestling it down to the basement, the absurdity of what she was doing hit her and she sat on the basement steps and cried until Leah, in her crib, started crying too. The worst, craziest fear was of the doorbell because when it rang, she thought automatically of the story The Monkey’s Paw and she had a glancing image of opening the door and looking into her husband’s dead face, the eyelids blown away like spider webs and the poor bare eyeballs staring at her, weeping from the light they couldn’t shut out.

She lost weight, got dark rings under her eyes, and decided that what she needed was fresh air. She started driving out to the beaches with Leah. Leah loved it; she screamed when the waves broke, and clutched wildly at the sea gulls that flew over their heads. Rachel looked out over the gray water toward Europe; Finland was there, she thought; Norway, Russia. “Home,” she whispered to Leah. But she knew if she ever found that flat ice plain her grandmother had told her about, it would be covered with factories. Ten thousand factories, all making rubber boots. “Rubber boots,” she told Leah, who waved her hands and cried “ubbah.” Rachel started back to the car, then saw a black man in fishing boots standing in the water almost up to his knees, casting into the waves. He had the same strands of white in his frizzy hair that Roger Hawkins did, and even though she knew it wasn’t Hawkins, something about the figure was reassuring; she crossed the pebbles and stood near him; he didn’t move away.

“Did you get anything?” she asked, wanting to hear his voice.

“Not yet,” he said. He didn’t sound like Hawkins, except for the soft timbre some black men’s voices had.

“What’s running?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Blues maybe.”

He kept his back turned and she left him alone. When she got home, she looked for Hawkins’s name in the address book. It wasn’t there and she called Levy at the shop. He was quiet at first, then he asked, “Why do you want his number?”

“He was Adam’s best friend and we haven’t heard from him for almost a year, Jacob.”

“He’s a busy man, Rachel. When he has time, he’ll call,” Levy said and he hung up. She went out to the Florida room and stood next to the window wall and looked out for a long time, trying to figure out why Jacob should sound so cold about calling Roger Hawkins. Hawkins had been Adam’s best friend. “If I was in trouble,” Adam had said once, “I’d call Hawkins. I feel safe with him. We used to go to Astoria, to the Italian section where they hate blacks and Jews the same, and we’d sit in any bar there, with the whites trying to look like they were going to kill Hawkins because he was black and me because I was a nigger-­lover, or a Jew, and either way they hated me. I’m a little guy and they smirked when I stood up to go to the can or order another beer but I always felt safe with Roger. Not just because he was big. Though he is. One of those men who never seem to stop standing up. He says he’s six three. I think he’s taller. . . . But anyway, it wasn’t just that. It was this gentleness about him. A wall of gentleness and humor. And pretty soon he’d smile at the wops at the bar and their eyes would lose that hard look, and I’d remember what handsome people they are, and I’d be smiling too. We made friends, just like that. If I’m ever in trouble, Rache, get Roger Hawkins. If you’re ever in trouble and I can’t help, get Roger Hawkins.”

Was she in trouble? She couldn’t sleep and she longed for company that wasn’t Jewish and female. Or Jewish and a dentist from Centerreach or a psychiatrist from Glen Cove.

She called information. She knew he lived in Queens, but she didn’t know the street. She knew he lived with his mother, which seemed crazy, since he could have lots of women, but she didn’t know his mother’s name. There were three R. Hawkinses listed in Queens. The second number she called was his. His mother answered and gave her his office number. His secretary answered there. Rachel held on while the woman went to get him, and she realized that she was looking forward to hearing his voice so much that she was a little breathless. But it was the woman who came back on, saying that he was busy and he’d call her back. She hung up and thought that after all this time he could talk to her at least for a second. Or tell her himself that he was busy and would call later. She heated up the soup, sliced the roast.

He hadn’t called back by seven. Leah was asleep, Levy was in the den watching the news; Rachel finished the dishes, went back to the sun porch and, feeling sneaky for some reason, she called his house. He answered himself. Her heart beat faster.

“Inspector Hawkins . . . Roger . . . this is Rachel Levy. Adam’s wife . . .”

“I know who you are.” His voice was cold. “What do you want?”

No hello, how’s the baby. He didn’t ask if she’d had a boy or girl.

“I just thought . . . I had a daughter, and we didn’t hear from you for so long . . . I wondered . . .”

“Don’t wonder,” he said, “ask Jacob. On second thought, don’t ask him because he won’t tell you.” He hung up and left her holding a dead phone, staring out at the snow still falling.

She didn’t know what to do. Ask Jacob, he’d said. She went into the den, but he was asleep, sitting upright with The MacNeil-­Lehrer Report going on PBS. She left the TV on to mask the quiet and went back to the porch. Something scampered in the attic. Mice, Golda said. All houses have mice.

She thought of writing to him but he didn’t have to answer and she could wait months and not hear from him. She walked back and forth across the porch. The program changed and she heard ballet music. Finally she called Queens information again and got the number for the only Moses Ableson listed. He was the right Ableson, but didn’t want to talk.

“Call me tomorrow at the precinct,” he said, “or come in. I’m there between—”

“It’s personal,” she told him.

“I don’t know what could be personal, Mrs. Levy.” He sounded wary and a little drunk. In the background Rachel heard a woman call that something was getting cold.

“You and Roger Hawkins were Adam’s friends, weren’t you?”

“The best,” Ableson said softly, “the very best.”

“I just called him and he wouldn’t talk to me, he sounded like he hated me.”

“Did he?” Ableson said softly. “Did he indeed? And you want to know why, is that it?” His voice made her skin crawl. She didn’t say anything and after a moment Ableson sighed and said, “I’ll tell you what I think, Mrs. Levy. I think Hawkins wanted to be Jacob’s son and Adam’s brother. Part of a family he could respect. And maybe he thought Jacob could make that happen somehow, and he would be transformed from a lonely black man of no special ties to a Polish Jew who belonged to the village. And maybe when you left him behind and took it all with you, maybe he realized that he’d never known or understood you people and maybe he thought he’d gone too far to come back and now wasn’t one thing or the other. Which maybe, he thought, made him nothing.” Ableson was quiet for a moment, then he said, “But that’s a lot of cheap-­shit psychology, isn’t it, Mrs. Levy?” Now he sounded angry.

“I don’t know,” Rachel said.

“It is, because there’s a better reason.” Ableson took a breath. “He thinks your father-­in-­law and his mish­pochah killed the kids on President Street.”

“That’s crazy . . .” Rachel cried.

“Why?”

“They couldn’t.”

“Someone saw your car there. Parked in front of the clubhouse. A dark green Dodge van, right?”

Rachel didn’t answer.

“You still got that car?” Still no answer. “Sell it, give it away. It’s tumah, that car. Corrupt.”

He was sounding a little crazy. His wife said something about soup and he told her to shut up.

Rachel said, “Don’t get upset, Lieutenant.”

“Upset!” he shouted. “Do you know what they did to those kids . . . do you know what we found in that basement? Revenge is one thing, lady. I’ll go with it, maybe. But this wasn’t just that. This was hate like I never saw or imagined. They beat them to death, all five of them. They tore one to pieces and, oh God, that’s the one that haunts me still. Can you imagine? I mean, how long did that kid live with parts of him missing? Did he pull his torso along the floor with the one arm he had left? Did he see his own leg lying next to him? What was it like for the kid, Mrs. Levy?” Rachel sobbed, but he didn’t stop. “And that wasn’t enough. They hated them so much that they threw dirt on the bodies. Clay. Why clay? Where’d they get clay? And why didn’t they just shoot them or stab them—anything.”

“Shut up,” Rachel screamed and slammed down the phone.

Levy came running out to the porch. “Rachel, what happened?”

She wanted to tell him what she’d just heard, to scream it at him, the way Ableson had at her, but even asking about it would give it some credence and she couldn’t do that. Instead she yelled, “What happened with Roger Hawkins?”

The question stopped him.

“He never called,” she kept yelling. Leah woke up and started to squall. “He never came to see us. Because of you. Why?”

She raced through the kitchen to the garage. He followed, and Leah cried louder in the background. Rachel slid open the van door and looked inside. It was clean and dry, but she knew it would be. They’d had the inside shampooed a long time ago.

“What did you do with my van?” she yelled. He looked helpless. It was cold in the garage; he was in his shirt and trying not to shiver. She started hating herself but she couldn’t lower her voice. “What happened with Roger?”

“A misunderstanding. A terrible misunderstanding.”

“Tell me.”

“Please, let’s go inside.”

She felt like a harpy and wanted him to get angry at her, to yell back, but he said quietly, “It’s too cold to talk here.”

She followed him back to the kitchen, feeling like she’d lost momentum.

“What did you hear on the phone?” he asked.

“Just tell me what happened.”

“It’s not so easy to know what happened. Maybe if you tell me . . .”

She was silent. He said softly, “Is our trust so fragile, Rachel?” She was still quiet, and he said, “Maybe it should be. Why should we trust each other after only a year? . . . Maybe your suspicion makes more sense.” He wasn’t looking at her. “Okay,” he said, “what I know is that Roger met Isaac at the funeral of those boys.” Now he looked at her. “I don’t know why Isaac was there, maybe to gloat, maybe he felt some sorrow. He met Roger there and he told Roger that I was going away that day, and he should leave us alone.” He was looking into her eyes. “Isaac shouldn’t have said it. But he did.” He looked out the kitchen window and his voice got so soft she had to lean forward to hear. “Roger must’ve believed him and maybe he blamed himself for not being able to try the men who killed Adam, and thought we blamed him, too.”

He kept looking out the window. “I think that’s what happened,” he said. There were tears in his eyes, and she thought he probably didn’t want her to notice them.

What he said made sense. Besides, she thought, eight old men together couldn’t beat five young men to death. Hawkins was wrong and Ableson was crazy.

Levy watched his granddaughter sleep. When she was awake, she looked like Adam; when she laughed, she looked like Rachel; but asleep, right now, she looked like his dead wife, Leah, and he closed his eyes and let himself imagine that it was her after all. She was wearing the linen nightgown he had had made for her in Sosnowiec and she was half lying, half sitting on their bed, waiting for him to strip and wash in the icy water. It was so cold he was trembling and, still a little wet, he got into bed next to her, naked, and she held him, using her body to warm his. When he stopped trembling, they made love, and late at night, after she was asleep, he awoke and had to get up and put on his socks and nightshirt.

He heard a whistle and woke in a panic. Then he saw the ducks appliquéd on the curtains and remembered that he was in Laurel, not Dabrowa, and that the whistle was a freight running from New York to Greenpoint and not the relocation transport from Krakow to Belzec.