MORTY
When Morty received Sylvia’s letter, he could hardly hide his joy. He looked around to see who he could tell, but there was no one. His cohort in basic training was full of perfectly nice boys, none of whom Morty felt really close to. They were all ages: some of them were eighteen-year-olds who had signed up at the time of the declaration of war. Some of them were graduates of college, or even married men with children.
The men had been told that they would have two weeks off before they had to either report in New York before shipping out or go on to further specialized training. Morty had gotten his wish to be assigned to an engineering group and knew that after basic, he was going to Fort Belvoir in Virginia for training as an army engineer. But he wanted to go back to Brooklyn for his two-week furlough to visit his family and hopefully see Anna and Lily.
He wrote to Anna again. This time he poured his heart out and told her everything that had happened to him since he’d left her that day at the Red Apple Rest and put her on the bus to go back to Brooklyn. Even to him it sounded melodramatic . . . like a movie he had seen before, where the good guys struggled, were in danger, and finally won the day. He did not hear back from her, but he went on with his plans to return to Brooklyn as soon as his basic was finished. He wrote to his parents and to Anna to tell them when he would be coming. He didn’t think it would be a good idea to surprise them.
The day he got on the bus to go home—it was even hard for him to say the word home, it had been so long since he had been there—was sunny and warm for early spring. The bus ride from Fort Benning, Georgia, where he did his basic training, took over seventeen hours, and he got off the bus at Penn Station, exhausted and rumpled and famished. He took the subway into Brooklyn, walked the two blocks to his parents’ apartment, and stood in front of the stoop looking up at the brick facade. The courtyard in the front of the building had broken concrete steps leading into the building. There was a patch of grass on the side of the building with a wooden bench on which two women were sitting. They looked curiously at him, and he was very aware of the fact that his uniform was not as sharp as it had been when he left the base. His hair was very short. One of the women seemed to recognize him, and she whispered something to her friend and then nodded her head at him. Since he didn’t remember her name, he also nodded and then went into the building.
The smells were the same. He went up the stairs and stood before the apartment, his heart pounding. Finally, he knocked on the door.
They were expecting him. His mother was wearing a nice dress instead of her usual housedress. Sylvia hovered behind her, and he could tell that she was jumping out of her skin, wanting to run to him and hug him. His father stood behind Sylvia.
Morty’s heart lurched. Ben looked so much older than he had when Morty left home. His hair was almost white. His face was lined, and he was a little hunched over, but he was beaming with joy, and when he came forward, they fell into each other’s arms. His hug was hard, and Morty thought he was crying. Ben held him for a long time, whispering what Morty could only think was a prayer of thanks.
Morty then went to Golda, wondering how she would accept him. He reached down and put his arms around her. To his surprise and delight, she relaxed against his shoulder and patted his back. “Thank God, thank God,” she whispered. “I only believe it now that I see you.”
Sylvia could not contain herself anymore, and she rushed to him, hugging and kissing him and patting his cheek the way she used to when she was a little girl. When the kisses and hugs were over, Golda drew him into the parlor, and they sat, staring at one another. He felt awkward, unsure of what to say or how to express himself.
Several times one or another of them started to speak but were interrupted by another member of the family.
“Are you hungry?” Golda asked.
“Let’s have a drink of schnapps.”
“I can’t believe how thin you are, and how handsome in your uniform.”
“Frieda sends her love. She wants to come over and say hello.”
When they had settled for a while, Morty felt he should be the one to speak and to tell them what had happened to him. He started with Rudy’s lending him money to help Ben get out of debt. “You knew about that, didn’t you, Mama?”
“I know now, but I didn’t know then.”
Morty nodded. “After Rudy was killed, they sent me to Liberty, New York, in the Catskills, to run their slot machine business. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t think I had a choice. They were threatening me.”
Morty spoke quickly and nonstop. He told them about his time in Liberty and how he had tried to get back to Brooklyn, but Mickey Adler wouldn’t let him. He mentioned Detective Hanrahan and the Molino gang and how he had to leave Liberty and go into hiding. “I wrote you the day I left, Papa. Didn’t you get my letter?”
“Yes,” Ben said. “But they said you mailed it just before you were killed. That’s what that Hanrahan said.”
“Hanrahan? Was he the one who told you I died?”
“Yes, he came to the house. And he took me up to Liberty to get the body.”
Morty shook his head. “All a mistake. I don’t know why they identified the body as me. Did Hanrahan say how they identified me?”
“Your wallet was in the pocket. The keys to your car. And a leather jacket with your name sewn in it. That’s what he said. The body was decomposed, so they couldn’t even get any fingerprints.”
Morty nodded. “I get it. I think the body must have been Jake Gold. He’s the guy who took it all from me.” They sat in silence, thinking about this Jake Gold and what his family must think. Morty started to talk again. “I left Liberty and wound up in Cincinnati, and I was there until the war started. When I joined up, I realized it was time to get back in touch with you.”
Then it was Ben and Golda’s turn to fill Morty in on what had happened in Brooklyn and how Ben had gone to Liberty to retrieve his body. They did not mention the newspaper stories and how Golda had at first refused to take the body.
“Papa never believed that you were dead,” Sylvia said. “And neither did I. At least I hoped. Me and Papa always believed.”
There were long silences now that they had each told their stories. Morty took a breath. “Mama, Papa, I know you know about my girlfriend Anna. I have to try to see her and Lily if she’ll see me.”
Sylvia couldn’t contain herself. “She will. She will. She’s waiting for you. She said so. I saw her yesterday, and she said she knew you were coming, and you could come to her. There wasn’t enough time for her to write to you, so she said I should tell you.”
With his parents’ blessings, Morty went down the street to the public telephone booth and called the number Sylvia gave him. When Anna picked up the receiver and he said, “Anna,” the line went silent. “Anna?” he said again.
“Yes? Who is this?”
Morty was sure she knew it was him, but he allowed himself to wait a second and then whisper, “It’s me. It’s Morty.” He heard the breath she drew on the phone, and he added, “Sylvia told me you would see me.”
After a minute she said, “Yes, you can come. But if you want to see Lily, you should come now, otherwise she’ll be sleeping.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Morty ran to the avenue and grabbed a taxi. He didn’t notice the changes on the street, the new stores, the way people were dressed, so intent was he on getting to Anna’s house. When he rang the doorbell, he could hardly breathe.
Anna opened the door, holding a year-old Lily dressed in yellow Dr. Denton footie pajamas. Her black hair framed her face; she had the same eyes as her mother, violet blue with thick lashes. She looked at him with a solemn expression. Morty reached out to touch her hand, but she pulled back from him and turned her face away.
“Just give her a little time, and she’ll get used to you.”
Morty took a breath, encouraged by what Anna said. He followed her upstairs and into the living room. Anna sat on the sofa, pointed to a chair opposite, and put Lily on the floor between them. Morty wondered who should speak first. He stared at her. She was wearing a blue dress that made her eyes pop. “Thank you for seeing me,” he said.
Anna laughed. It sounded a little bitter. “Like I had a choice?” She looked away, and he saw her fidgeting with her skirt.
Morty didn’t think he could speak, so he knelt next to Lily, and the baby pulled herself up on his arm, standing unsteadily beside him. Morty held her hand to make sure she didn’t fall; she let go of his hand, took a few steps alone, and then plopped down beside him.
“She walked,” Anna shouted, clapping her hands. Lily laughed. “She just took her first steps. For you. For her father.”
Morty was still on his knees, somehow in supplication to Anna and to Lily. He held out his hand to Anna.
“Sit next to me,” she said, and she took his hand and waited.
Morty felt the words stick in his throat. His voice was scratchy when they came out. “I love you, Anna. Please forgive me. Please let me marry you and take care of you and our baby.” The words he had been rehearsing came out in a rush now. “I’m going to be in a war. Anything can happen. I want to make sure you and Lily are taken care of. That she knows she has a father.”
“She’ll always know,” Anna said. “I named you on her birth certificate as her father.”
Morty felt his heart open. “Let’s make everything legal then. Let’s get married.”
“I guess there really isn’t anything else I can do,” she said. Anna looked into his eyes, put his hand to her mouth, and kissed his fingers, and then, somehow, she was in his arms, and he was smothering her face with kisses, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth. They reached down together and pulled Lily into their embrace, but she was having none of it and pushed away from them, crawling to a table where she pulled herself up, took a few steps forward, and fell again. Morty and Anna held each other, laughing and crying at their daughter, who was struggling to stand again. They crawled over to her and held her tight. They were still sitting there on the floor, still laughing and crying, when a voice interrupted them.
“Who is this?”
Morty swiveled his head toward the voice and jumped up from the floor so that he was standing and facing the door. Backlit by the hallway light was Anna’s mother. Morty had met her once before, but she looked older now and less formidable. Her black hair was streaked with gray, and she stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at her daughter.
Anna jumped up too. She scooped Lily into her arms and said, “Mama, this is Lily’s father, Morty Feinstein.”
“Hello, Mrs. DeMaio,” Morty said. He felt like bowing or saluting but thought that would be a bit much. Instead, he nodded his head.
Mrs. DeMaio made a sound in the back of her throat. “I thought you were dead.”
“I know. That was a mix-up,” Morty said. “I have to find out about that.”
“Well, if you weren’t dead, where have you been all this time?”
“Mama,” Anna said, a plea in her voice. She held Lily close, as if getting support from her.
“It’s okay,” Morty said. “It’s a reasonable question . . . I was in Cincinnati. Anna and I broke up last summer. She didn’t like the work I was doing. And she was right. I was mixed up . . . involved with some bad characters. I had to leave where I was. I didn’t think she wanted to see me again. I didn’t know that she was pregnant.” He rushed the words out. “When Pearl Harbor was bombed, I enlisted. And I’m shipping out soon. So, I got back in touch with Anna. And that’s when I found out we had this beautiful daughter, Lily.” Morty turned and looked at Lily, who had put her head on her mother’s breast and was sucking her two middle fingers.
“Give her to me,” Mrs. DeMaio said. She held her arms out to Anna, who put Lily into them. “I’ll put her to bed.” She took the baby and was about to leave the room when she turned and said to Morty, “You better make this right.” Then she left them alone.
Anna and Morty sat together on the sofa. “Don’t mind her. She’ll be all right once she gets used to the idea of me getting married to . . . to you.”
Morty wondered if Anna had been about to say “married to a Jew,” so he asked, “She remembers I’m Jewish, right? She asked me when I met her that time.” Anna nodded. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“Not to me, Morty. Not to me. And my mother and my uncles will get used to it. My nonna doesn’t care at all. She says she likes the Jewish shopkeepers on the avenue. Everything’s changing now. They’ll be okay with it eventually. They’ll have to be.”
Morty felt a weight lift from his shoulders. Anna and he spent the next hours talking and kissing and somehow filling in the happenings of the last year and a half, and by the time Anna’s mother and uncle came back into the living room, bringing Anna’s grandmother, they had made plans to get their license and get married.
There was one more thing weighing on Morty’s mind. Detective Hanrahan. He was the one who had told Morty’s parents that he was dead. He wondered if he should go to Hanrahan’s office and turn himself in. On the one hand, if the police thought he was dead, he didn’t have to worry about them looking for him for any of the so-called crimes Hanrahan had mentioned to him. On the other hand, Morty wasn’t sure whether being legally dead in police records might be a problem for him later in life.
He mulled it over and decided that he just wouldn’t deal with it right now. He had less than two weeks home with Anna and Lily and his family. Getting tangled up in police red tape now seemed crazy to him. They think I’m dead. Let me stay dead to them. All the players in the Brooklyn mob are dead or in jail . . . Abe Reles, Mickey Adler, Rudy. Even Louis Lepke is in prison. I don’t have to deal with it now. And I won’t.
Morty felt more settled having made that decision. He made up his mind not to think of it again. When he came back from the war—he paused in his thinking—if he came back from the war, he would straighten it all out. He decided to enjoy the week and a half he had left of his leave and then get on with his army life.
He and Anna spent every day together, but her mother would not let them sleep together at her house until they were married. Anna laughed at that. “It’s a little like locking the barn door after the horse ran out!” Morty laughed too.
But then he said, “Maybe it’s a little like a punishment for me, because I wasn’t around when you were pregnant.” So Morty asked Anna if she would go with him to a hotel room for the week, and they left Lily with Anna’s mother, picking her up each day so that Morty could spend as much time as possible with her.
Morty loved Anna’s nonna. She was a small woman, square and strong looking, with pure white hair and a wrinkled face like crushed velvet. Her blue eyes popped out and snapped when she smiled. She spoke English with a broad Italian accent that moved up and down melodically. Morty had never met any of his grandparents, so he loved sitting and talking to Nonna, who attempted to tell him stories about growing up in Sicily. Anna sat beside him and translated whatever he didn’t understand.
“She likes you,” Anna told Morty. “She says you’ll make a good husband.”
Morty laughed and hugged Anna. “She’s right. I will.”
At night, when they lay in their bed in the hotel room, Morty told Anna all his thoughts and dreams for them. He’d been having them ever since he’d received the letter telling him about Lily’s birth. He told her how he hated himself for missing the joy of watching her bloom with her pregnancy. He asked her if she had nursed Lily, because he remembered watching Golda nurse his brother Isaac, who had died in the flu epidemic, and how beautiful his mouth was and how blissfully she looked at him. He was disappointed to find that Anna had not nursed Lily, but he did not say anything.
Anna told him that she’d had Lily baptized as a way of consoling her mother and nonna and uncles for having a baby out of wedlock. “And besides,” she said, “I thought you were dead. And I’m a Catholic.”
Morty said he understood completely. “When I come back from the war”—here his voice hitched with hesitation—“we can decide how to raise her. And if you want her to be Catholic, then I guess I’ll be all right with it.”
Morty told Anna about his days in Liberty, Detective Hanrahan, and the revolver that Mickey Adler had left in the car. “I gave it to the detective, and he said it had been used in a couple of murders. It didn’t have my prints on it because I never touched it, but, as he said, I could have wiped them off. I know he thinks I’m dead. He was the one who told my family I was dead. But I’m not going to get in touch with him now. He thinks I’m dead, let me be dead to him.” Morty looked at Anna out of the corner of his eye. He wondered what she thought.
“Of course, you shouldn’t go in now. It’s all water under the bridge. You’ll get yourself all tangled up if you go in now.”
Morty hugged her close. “I knew you would agree with me.”
She laughed. “You mean you hoped I would agree with you.”
They stayed up as late as they could, wanting to draw the two weeks out so they had more time together, and every night they fell asleep entangled in each other, exhausted, their eyes closing despite themselves.
They ate three times with each family, wanting to be fair to them so they had the same amount of time together. And then it was time for their wedding.
They planned to marry at city hall, like many of the soldiers and their girls, at the first appointment they could get, and that was four days before he had to leave for Virginia. Sylvia, Ben, and Golda were there, as well as Anna’s mother, nonna, and uncles.
Morty knew that one of Anna’s uncles was connected to the Italian gangs and the other ran a deli, but he had a hard time remembering which was which. He looked at Anna’s uncles, trying to be casual. Had he seen them before? He’d caught a glimpse of her uncle Tony DeMaio, who owned the deli, twice several years ago. Morty remembered how Anna’s uncle had come out of the deli looking for her one day when she had come out to meet Morty. He was a short man and thin, with curly black hair and a thin mustache. He had a ready smile that was very engaging. Her other uncle, Mario Amato, her mother’s brother, was also short, but with a powerful physique and a muscular torso. He had curly black hair and a classically handsome Italian swarthiness, but he had a suspicious air about him, his eyes darting this way and that, as if trying to see what lurked behind every corner, every table, and every person. Both men wore suits, and both men held their fedoras in their hands.
It was the first time that Ben and Golda had met Anna’s family, and it was civil but not warm. While they were waiting to go into city hall for the short wedding ceremony, Anna and Morty tried to fill in all the awkward silences with stories.
Anna was holding Lily, who wore the blue dress that Golda had made for her. Anna said, “Look, Ma, this dress was made by Morty’s mother. She’s like a painter with thread.”
Mrs. DeMaio nodded her head. “It is beautiful,” she admitted.
Golda nodded and said, “Thank you.” Then she added, “If you like, I can make you a blouse or a scarf. And your mother too.”
Mrs. DeMaio smiled and said, “That’s very kind of you, but it isn’t necessary.”
“Ma!” Anna whispered to her. “That’s not nice. She’s a well-known dressmaker. People come to her from all over New York. I bet Nonna would love a scarf.”
Mrs. DeMaio looked straight ahead and said nothing more. Golda, too, was quiet.
That afternoon, after the ceremony, Mrs. DeMaio and Anna’s uncles were hosting a celebratory wedding luncheon. There was a big discussion between Ben and Golda beforehand about inviting their own friends.
“How can we not invite Cousin Surah? Or my partner, Abe? Or the Weissmans next door?” Ben had asked.
“We weren’t asked to invite anyone,” Golda said. “It’s not our house, and it isn’t our party. It would be rude to just assume.”
Ben shook his head. “Are we ashamed of this wedding? Shouldn’t we celebrate Morty’s miracle? That he’s alive? And our beautiful Lily.”
“All right, all right,” Golda said. “But not at their house. At our house. We’ll have a party too.”
And that was what was decided. Ben and Golda went to the DeMaio’s party and invited Anna’s mother, grandmother, and uncles to theirs. Morty and Anna did not argue with either family. They allowed their families to decide what to do.
Golda brought a beautiful home-baked pie to the DeMaio’s party, and Anna’s house was filled with her large Italian family. Even their parish priest was there. Anna had warned Morty that he would come. Since Lily had been baptized in the church, as far as the priest was concerned, Lily was Catholic. Morty didn’t think he could really object after the fact, although he had not told his parents that Lily had been baptized. He wondered if they would care. He thought, I can teach her about her Jewish background when I’m really in her life. And who knows when that will be, with me in the war. It was not something he wanted to think about and certainly not anything he would mention to his parents.
Golda, Ben, and Sylvia were the only people connected to Morty at the DeMaio party. The food and wine were abundant, even with the new wartime restrictions. Anna told Morty that she had begged her mother not to bake a ham, which she had been planning on serving, but there were plenty of other meats that Morty knew his parents wouldn’t eat. He was happy to see they took the cheeses and the breads and at least one pasta dish with vegetables. And each of them filled their dessert plates with pastries. He thought briefly how many little hiccups there were in this marriage of two different religions and cultures. But he pushed the thoughts aside and accepted all the toasts from each of Anna’s relatives and was deliriously happy that he and Anna were going to spend the next two nights at The Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan all by themselves.
Two nights later, Ben and Golda had their party, but rather than inviting people to a wedding party, they said they were celebrating Morty’s miraculous return from the dead. They introduced Anna as his beautiful wife and Lily as their granddaughter, and the awkwardness of the baby being born before the wedding was not discussed. Anna’s mother and uncles showed up for half an hour and then left. Golda and Ben were relieved and were able to celebrate Morty’s return with their friends.
And just one day later, Morty had to leave for Virginia.