JULY 1941
Two years passed. Not the kind of years anyone would ever want to spend.
Not the kind of years the world wanted to spend.
Europe was at war now. Six months after I’d thrown that punch at that kid outside that bar, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, and a year after that, unleashed his armies on Poland. By the time of my sentencing he had marched his way through Holland and Belgium and overrun France, and his Messerschmitts were raining a nightly incendiary hell on London.
Of course, I’d watched all this take place from the correctional facility up in Auburn, New York, serving two to four years for the charge of third-degree manslaughter.
And I was lucky to get away with that. The prosecutors had pushed for first-degree. I was drunk. I’d thrown the first punch. I’d shown malicious disregard for the victim, Andrew McHurley, a fifteen-year-old from Teaneck, New Jersey, who was out for a night on Broadway, having gone to see Life with Father with his mother. They were merely on their way back to where the New Jersey bus lines picked up on West Forty-second Street. It wasn’t hard to paint me as a person not worthy of much consideration. Someone who went around drunk, who had cheated on his wife; someone who had slid down the sinkhole of second and third chances in life until he couldn’t fall any farther. Someone who’d had all the advantages of intelligence and a top education, and yet had chosen to throw it all away: His family. A once-promising academic career. His moral center.
About the only thing I did have going for me was Eli’s testimony that I had been standing up to a pack of drunken, taunting Nazi-lovers, though by the time the police on the scene went to search for them they were long gone. By sentencing time, the public view of Hitler and Nazis had changed. Europe had been overrun; Jews were being openly persecuted and beaten. Britain was hanging on by a thread. FDR begged for support for the war in Congress. That was the only sympathy I had. Four years was reduced to twenty-two months for good behavior and for tutoring inmates in American history. And I was lucky to get that.
Upon my release, my father was far too ill to come for me, having never fully recovered since Ben had died. He and Mom had only driven up to visit me a couple of times, consumed with guilt and shame. So my uncle Eddie picked me up in his old Packard and we drove the six hours back to his home in Lawrence on the Island, much of the trip in silence.
I had no idea what I was going to do.
Columbia had tossed me out of their graduate program. No school I had worked for since wanted me back. I had about a hundred and twenty dollars in my pocket I had earned instructing inmates. Everything else I had handed over to Liz and Emma.
But two days after my release I stood looking up at the brownstone on Ninetieth Street between Park and Lexington. The number over the coffered front door read 174. It was hardly the nicest on the block: three stories, gray stone, Georgian in feel, with a staircase leading up to the front door with settled cracks running through it. There were high, rounded windows on the second floor with planters on the sill, where, in season, pots of tulips and daffodils might bloom. It was on a part of the block shaded by large oaks, hiding the house in a swath of shadow. On the sidewalk, two kids in white T’s bounced a Spalding against the stone façade—Yanks against Dodgers, DiMaggio or Pee Wee Reese. An American flag draped languorously over the entrance.
She was still in Yorkville, I reflected, a part of the city on the Upper East Side between Eighty-sixth and Ninety-sixth, extending east to Carl Schurz Park and the East River. The area had been home to German-Americans for decades—and our home, when we were first married. And most of the businesses on the streets between Lexington and First Avenue had German names: Schaller and Weber meats. Old Bavaria Café. Gustave Bitner Travel Agency. Café Geiger. Rheingold beer.
Before the war in Europe, Yorkville had been home to many public pro-Hitler and America First rallies. Fritz Kuhn, who had established his German American Bund there, was now in jail on tax evasion charges. Father Coughlin, who had had his own highly followed national radio show, and once made a fiery Fortress America speech there, was off the air. Even Joseph McWilliams, “Joe McNazi,” who once tried to organize a boycott against Jewish businesses, had been shut down. Now, from what I’d heard, any expressions of support for the Nazis were far more private, and conducted behind closed doors. Support for Britain in the war and the rounding up and persecution of the Jews had rallied public opinion, as had the German torpedoing of Allied merchant ships on the high seas. Above the door, the American flag rippled faintly in the breeze.
Anticipation stirring in me, I climbed the front stairs. I had been nervous during my trial, nervous at my sentencing; nervous as hell when they escorted me the first time, cuffed and in chains at Auburn, down a long block and into my cell.
But I felt even more nervous now. Seeing my family for the first time since I was out. Since I was free. Since we would have to see where we would pick up.
The outside door was unlocked; it was clearly the kind of neighborhood where you didn’t have to be worried about such things. In the vestibule, a Persian runner led to the inside staircase. A low-hanging Tiffany-style chandelier hung from the ceiling. I scanned the intercom buttons and saw the name there. My heart dropped off a cliff. Rubin. Liz’s maiden name. Not Mossman. Apartment 3A. I rested my finger on it, then hesitated, and took in a deep, unsure breath, trying to overcome my fears. I decided not to ring. Instead, I started up the stairs, with the bouquet of flowers I had bought on the street and the box in a brown bag marked Simpson’s Children’s Toys, Every Child’s Dream is Our Joy.
On the second-floor landing, there was a framed drawing of an English hunting scene hung over an upholstered wooden chair, and on three, a mahogany table with a doily on it, a small vase of dried flowers, and on the wall, a framed landscape of verdant hills over a winding river with a castle on a hill. The Rhine, maybe. Everything had a fine, European feel to it.
I stood for a while in front of their apartment, my heart ricocheting with nerves. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea. Showing up like this, out of the blue. I thought about going back down. There was no name on the door, just a pink heart-shaped sticker, which made my heart soften and my nerves suddenly go away.
Two years. Twenty-seven months, actually, including the trial. That’s how long I’d been away from them. I’d gone away a man ashamed to look at himself in the mirror. Now … now I was different. I was. Sober. Remorseful. I had a lot to make up for. I was ready to face the family I had let down. Ready to make it up to them.
Rubin. No longer Mossman. I inhaled a breath.
If they were ready to face me.
Blowing out my cheeks, I pressed the buzzer.
I didn’t hear anyone inside. Maybe they weren’t here. I admit I felt the slightest lift of relief. Maybe they were out, or still at school. I knew Emma was in a summer program. Or at the park. Or maybe Liz didn’t want Emma to see me. They hadn’t come to visit me since March. (Sure, it was a six-hour bus trip up to Auburn, and a night over, hard for a young girl. But still…) I glanced back down the stairs, thinking it wasn’t too late to leave, to do this another day.
Then suddenly I heard the patter of running footsteps coming from inside.
The lock opened and then the door was flung wide. And my daughter stood there looking up at me. A larger version of her than I recalled, up to my waist now. In a light blue gingham dress. Pigtails. Her million-dollar smile and bright green eyes shining happily at me. Completely washing away my fears. And I heard the word, the one word, I’d been aching to hear for almost a year.
“Daddy!”