Later, I did stop for a cup of coffee at a café on Second Avenue that the two of us used to go to. Old Heidelberg, it was called. Yorkville was always a vibrant neighborhood. It was known as Germantown. Stores and restaurants from the Old Country were on every block. In the summer, oom-pah-pah music played loudly in the outdoor cafés and German beer was aplenty. On the street, more German was spoken than English.
But now, with Europe besieged by war, celebrations of life back home had changed. I’d read from jail that the German American Bund that had sponsored the giant rally at Madison Square Garden that night had all but fallen apart, and its leader, Fritz Kuhn, was serving time in jail for tax evasion. The bombing of London, the harsh treatment of the Jews, not to mention Charles Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic America First speeches, had driven all but the most ardent supporters of Hitler and National Socialism behind closed doors. To many, what was happening across the Atlantic was a European war, which would only result in the loss of American blood if we took sides and stepped in. Many remembered the last war, where over fifty thousand doughboys had been killed. A resistant Congress had forced Roosevelt to sign a Neutrality Treaty, though his lend-lease program of shipping arms to Britain tested the limits of it, and to many, presidential authority.
Our old waiter, Karl, was still at the restaurant and seemed surprised to see my face. “I haven’t seen you in ages,” he said, happy to greet me again. “Have you moved away?”
“Yes, for a while,” I said, eager to keep it at that. “But now I’m back.”
“Good. Good, Mr. Mossman. And how is that lovely wife of yours?”
“She’s doing well,” I said. The less said, the better.
I ordered a weisswurst with cabbage, something I’d dreamed of in prison and hadn’t had in years. And I even thought about washing it down with a beer—for me, it had been a long time between them—and the frosty mugs of Wurtzheimer and St. Pauli Girl I saw carried about looked tempting. But I merely said water would be fine.
That last thing Liz said to me had stung. I’m not sure what I’d been thinking—that I was just going to come back after two years and pick up where we left off after destroying their lives. I guess I’d been harboring that fantasy somewhere in my mind, fueled by many months of hopeful dreaming in my cell. But hearing her ask me not to even be there when she returned from work put an end to it, as abruptly as a head-on car collision.
Still, it had been great to see Emma again, and we made plans for me to come back the following week.
When I finished the three sausages, I threw a couple of dollars on the table and hopped the bus down to Thirty-fourth Street. I walked across town to Penn Station. It was my first day back in Manhattan. Just being out among people, rushing to and from work, passing the department store windows, all the buzzing activity of being home again after being confined so long, made my head swell with the vastness of it. For two years my entire world had been in an eight-by-ten cell.
At Penn Station, I grabbed the 6:07 train to Lawrence. The hamlet sat at the western edge of Nassau County, virtually more in Queens than the Island. My uncle Eddie had lived there in a small two-bedroom for ten years, having moved out from the Bronx. He worked for the city as a claims auditor for the comptroller’s office.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here, Charlie,” he had said in the car on the ride down, looking over with an air of guilt and helplessness. “Lucile’s mother is in the second bedroom and you know she’s not so well these days. We have the basement, but … I’m just not sure it would be for the best.”
My aunt Lucille had never been the warmest of people toward me, or my father and mother, and my recent trouble with the law and the state of my life didn’t make that any easier. “Don’t think twice about it, Uncle Ed,” I said. “I’ve made arrangements.”
He’d kept my ’36 Buick roadster in his garage for the past two years, the only real asset I had.
“If you need a few bucks,” he said to me, “I told your dad we’d try and help out. Fred and Dot,” my parents, “they’re not doing so well anymore, since the store closed.” My father had a linen store in New Haven that had closed in the downturn; now he worked in one, behind the counter. The New Deal, so far, hadn’t worked so well for them.
“Nah, I’m fine, Eddie,” I said. “Thanks for offering.” I had under a hundred bucks to my name and zero job prospects. I knew I had to sell the car as fast as I could.
The train rattled out of the city. It was dark now. I saw the familiar Sabrett sign as we chugged our way into the Jamaica, Queens, station. Lawrence was the third stop.
I needed a job; that was clear. When I knew I was being released, I wrote a few contacts: Otto Brickman, my old department head at Columbia, who was now at Hunter. The dean at John Jay. The rest of my bridges, I’d burned. If you know of a position open, I’m a new man, I told them, and I could really use the work. Any work.
Look, Charlie, Brickman wrote back, I’d like to help, but there’s nothing I can offer you now. Things are pretty tight these days. Especially things for a convicted felon who’s spent two years in jail, I knew he wasn’t saying. And with a history of an affair with a female student. Maybe I can find something for you grading papers.…
The dean from John Jay was even less sanguine.
My parole officer said he should be able to line up something for me. Washing dishes or sweeping floors. The usual parolee kind of work, trying to acclimate back into society. Next to his usual clientele, I was at the top of the list.
The honest truth was I had nothing.
The train rattled into Lawrence station. I got off with a throng of businessmen straight from the office and women in dainty suits who looked like they had spent the day in Manhattan having lunch. I’d borrowed an ill-fitting sport coat from Ed, a pair of rumpled slacks, and a workman’s shirt that made me look like I belonged on a breadline more than a job interview. A few cars were waiting in the lot as passengers flooded out on the street. Doors opening, wives welcoming them back with a kiss; it only brought home how far I had fallen. Others just dispersed onto the main street, their afternoon Suns or Journals folded under their arms. I waited on the platform till the crowd went their ways and grabbed one, the Sun, that had been left behind. The headline was: “26 German-Americans Arrested as Spies by the FBI. Fears of Larger Spy Ring Grow.”
I took the paper and walked to an alley next to a liquor store across the street.
I’d left my Buick in the lot there. A handwritten note on the windshield read, Please don’t park here again. Private Property.
I got in, then turned the car on and pulled out onto the street. I drove down Central Avenue to Nassau Expressway, past restaurants and filling stations. It led to Far Rockaway. It was dark, drizzly. The day crowd had gone. I turned into Silver Point Park and continued to the end, to the inlet where I could see Long Beach Island across the way, and beyond that, the sea. I sat in the car and watched the evening fall. Sea lights twinkled and the smell of marine life and fuel oil hung in the air. A barge went by. And a large freighter, who knows, maybe making the perilous crossing of the Atlantic, carrying supplies to Reykjavik and then on to England for all I knew. German U-boats were targeting American vessels now. Anyone who helped the Brits. I’d read that the crossing had become pretty hazardous these days.
Not to worry, I’d said to Liz. A friend from Columbia is letting me flop on his couch.
A lie, of course. All I could think of to save face. The truth was, no one had offered. Not even a couch to spend the night on. I might as well have been back in a cell. Lights flickered in the distance. A gull landed on my grille. It looked at me curiously and seemed to be saying, Don’t you have anywhere better to be? I opened the newspaper and munched on the roll I’d wrapped up in a napkin and put in my pocket from Old Heidelberg. I read the headline by the lights of the seawall. The spy ring had set up offices at the Knickerbocker Building right in lower Manhattan. Their target had apparently been top-secret bomb sites from the Nordon Corporation, and those arrested included employees of the plant, even accountants and engineers.
Operating right in New York. Right under our noses.
“But fears of a fifth column,” an FBI source said, “a network of German spies embedded in day-to-day life here, were largely overblown.”
I put down the paper, put my head back against the seat rest, and closed my eyes.
You’re broke, Charlie. And alone. A convicted felon. My life as a professor was just a twinkling in my memory now, like these lights I was staring at in the dark. In the distance. Rubin, Liz’s nameplate had said. A husband without his wife.
But you are a father again.
I thought of Emma. Leaping into my arms. Throwing her arms around me. Are you going to stay, Daddy?
I sure am. I’m not going anywhere, peach face.
And that made me smile.
I grabbed a blanket I had taken from Uncle Ed’s and curled up in the front seat. Daddy. How beautiful it was to hear that word again. Hear her laughter.
For once, the sight of Andrew McHurley on the pavement with his eyes rolled up wasn’t the last thing in my mind as I drifted off to sleep.
Emma was.
My daughter.
My dreams were peaceful. Easing.
And for the first time in two years, free.