Mother wasn’t even home when Davis dropped me off, which was odd but also okay, since it meant I wouldn’t need to lie out loud about last night. I hopped in the shower and rubbed Noxzema all over my face, letting needles of water rain down on me, letting thoughts of Davis—and his hands and his saxophone-y music—wash over me, too. I got dressed for Sunday school in a Peter Pan blouse and flared skirt. Everything I put on, I imagined him taking off.
Even though it was woefully early, I called the pay phone on Sara’s dorm floor to fill her in on last night’s developments. No answer.
It wasn’t until I went to make coffee that I saw a note taped to the percolator in Mother’s no-vowels shorthand: SKP TMPL. In capital letters for emphasis.
But just because Nattie was having a spend-the-night at Leah’s didn’t mean I needed to skip temple. I’d come to like it there—being adored by the small people and amused/annoyed by the tall person.
I drank my coffee avec sugar, then walked to the main house and looked in the garage. The Savoy was gone. If Mother or Mr. Hank or Fontaine weren’t back with the car in twenty minutes—and wherever could they be?—then I’d have to take the bus.
I took the bus.
There weren’t many people on the number 23 Peachtree on a Sunday morning. I walked toward the back. It had been a few years since Mrs. Rosa Parks sat in the middle of the bus in Alabama. People seemed to think she sat in the white section, but Dad made sure we knew she was arrested for not moving from middle rows that Negroes were definitely allowed to sit in—at least until those seats were needed by whites.
I slid into a seat across from a lady in a yellow housekeeper’s uniform. She wore her hair short, shiny, and curled under. In the reflection of the window, I assessed my own wild-as-air hair: Better down or up? Up, I decided. I wound it into a bun and clipped it in place with a tortoiseshell barrette. I couldn’t tell from the bus-blurry glass whether I looked different—older if not maybe wiser—now that I had spent a night with Davis, been skin-to-skin with a boy who had no idea the previously almost-naked girl under his letterman jacket was now on her way to synagogue.
“You missed a piece,” the woman across from me said. I turned around. She pointed. “By the ear.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Should I wear it down? Does it look messy this way?”
She smiled. “It’s very becoming.”
“Which way?”
“It suits you any which way,” she said.
I took my hair down again. Then put it up again.
A siren wailed. One police car passed, then another.
I wondered whether the woman was going to or from work. Then I wondered why she didn’t have Sundays off for church, like Birdie and Norma. Then I wondered what difference it made. I was suddenly a wondering machine.
We passed the Steakery and my stomach lifted into my throat, and I knew the bus had hit the dip in the road. A third police car passed by, and a fourth.
The sirens weren’t somewhere out there. They weren’t the background sounds of New York avenues. They were here, in front of me—a lineup of revolving red lights slicing right across the entrance to the temple.
“Oh, Lord, now it’s the Hebrews,” the woman said.
“Here! My stop!” I called to the driver and rushed to the front of the bus. “Stop! Stop!”
The bus veered to the curb, and the doors sighed open.
“God bless,” the woman called after me.
From the bottom of the hill, the temple looked nearly normal, just a faint trail of smoke wending up its left side. Maybe there’d been a fire in the kitchen, or maybe someone had left a lit cigarette in the Social Hall.
Still, something made me sprint across the street and up the center of the lawn.
Squad cars were parked all pell-mell, noses poking into the grass, and a few fire trucks stood guard at the turnaround at the top. There was water everywhere. My suede flats slid in the mud. I didn’t care.
A sea of people surged up the driveway, men mainly, in jackets and ties. All these people, but nobody looked familiar.
I headed toward the smoke by the side entrance—but where there should have been a door, there was nothing. Nothing but a hole, as tall and wide as four of me—ugly, gaping, angry.
A woman came toward me, and it took me a long second, longer than you’d believe, to realize it was Mother. “Ruthie!”
My eyes went straight to her notebook: Bmb.
“Oh, Ruthie. It’s horrible. Shattered columns, broken windows, plaster ripped off the walls, an office wrecked, damage to the Social Hall, the sanctuary.”
“What happened? What happened?” An hour ago, I was Davis-daydreaming, slathering Noxzema on my face, and now my head was throbbing with bmb, bmb, bmb.
“Dynamite low to the ground against this wall. That’s why I left you a note.”
“How do you know?” As soon as I asked, I felt sick. I kicked at the grass.
“It came across the wire at the main house. The Teletype went crazy. Ten bells.” Her stockings were splattered with red.
“God, was anyone here? Max?”
“It was four in the morning. Did you hear it? I thought it was an earthquake.”
“I didn’t hear.” At four in the morning, I was with Davis, turning the turntable—and the timetable—over in my mind. I pointed at Mother’s legs. “Is that blood?”
“Red clay. Mud. Water pipes burst.” Mother held my hand. Her grip was fierce.
“Where’s Nattie?” I said, letting go of Mother and spinning slowly around, looking at all the places Nattie wasn’t. She’d spent the night with Leah, but weren’t the rabbi and his house vulnerable?
“I phoned the rabbi’s house as soon as I heard. Dina told me she sent Leah and Nattie on bikes around the neighborhood to tell people not to come this morning. She called them her ‘Paula Reveres,’ spreading the news.” Mother’s laugh was high, uneasy.
And then her legs jellied, and Mother was knee-first in the mud. “Nattie’s safe. We’re all safe.” Her voice cracked. “But what a world. After your father—”
I helped Mother up, my eyes welling.
She stood, her hose laddered down the front. “I’m going to stay here awhile. Let Daddy take you home.” It was only the second time she’d called her father Daddy since we’d become sudden southerners.
“Are you reporting this? Is Mr. Hank letting you? Where’s the rabbi? And Max?” Asking about Max again made my throat hot.
“The rabbi is inside. I don’t know about Max.”
We walked closer to the side entrance—to what used to be the side entrance—and stood elbow to elbow, like I had with Fontaine in Mother’s tiara on what seemed like a long-ago afternoon, when sunniness swallowed up all the shade. With Mother now, the view was fully shadow. We took in the hole with jagged wooden teeth and chewed-up bricks and shredded bits of choir robes, some blown clear out to the lawn. Ribbons of metal dangled from the ceiling, looking like they had nothing better to do than sever someone’s hand.
My stomach moved up to my chest and displaced my heart.
Mother kissed the top of my head and held me close.
I stepped back, opened my pocketbook, and took out my own EZ-on-the-Eyes notebook. “Let me stay.”
She shook her head.
“I’m a good observer.”
Mother glanced at her own notebook, and I knew then she’d agree. By being her daughter, I’d learned how to see things and record them.
“Do not—do not—go in the building,” she said, her back to the opening.
I nodded, tightening the grip on my pen.
“You see that rock?” She pointed to a silver-flecked boulder at the edge of the parking lot where Max had semi-taught me to drive. “Sit on it. Sit there and witness.”
Following orders, I sat on the stone, warm from the sun, not caring about crossing my ankles in the pink-booklet S shape. My feet were sore, and my eyes were sore. The smoke stung the back of my throat, and I was glad.
I wrote down what I always noticed first: what people wore. The detectives, at least I thought they were detectives, looked like waiters from the Club, in dark pants, white shirts, black ties. A fireman’s shirt was gunmetal gray. He was talking to a man with his back to me in a navy jacket. Older, familiar-looking men, including Mr. Silvermintz, held their cuffed trouser legs up as they sloshed around the mud.
I made myself look back at the building, straight into the damage, and I took notes about something other than clothes. I counted twenty-six—no, twenty-seven—windows blown out on this side, some of them the delicate stained-glass pieces that had turned Nattie’s ankles lilac the first day. Already, I couldn’t remember what the windows had looked like, all put back together.
The building shuddered for a half second, and bits of black—bomb confetti—rained down, fluttering against the too-beautiful blue sky. I reached out, wanting to push the flakes of prayer books or activity pamphlets or choir music or plaster flowers from the wedding-cake ceiling into my skirt pockets.
But when I grabbed the confetti, it fell apart. My hands were covered in soot.
I rubbed my eyes, rubbed my nose. I must have slashed ash all over my face, but I didn’t care.
A long metal ladder clanged against the side of the building, stretching up fifty feet or five hundred. A fireman, his jacket beribboned with epaulets, barked orders. One man climbed the ladder, then another, then another, then a fourth, positioning themselves at different heights.
The first man unfurled a long black drape, which drifted down slowly, billowing over the building, a giant-sized shroud. Each man grabbed the canvas as it came by, banging nails all around the broken windows, covering the pretty arches with black blanks, covering up the hate after all.
A group of mothers and daughters floated up from the street. A girl—Judy—screamed. She was from Nattie’s class and had the teal cat-eye glasses. The rabbi was suddenly at her side. Of course, he’d been here all along, I realized. He was the one in the blue blazer talking to the policeman. He kneeled in front of Judy, eye to eye.
I knew—knew in my bones—the stained glass, the robes, the bomb confetti were revenge for the rabbi and his integration sermons.
The water pipes could get fixed, and the windows could get restained or whatever it was you did with stained glass. But I could never look at this place, and Judy could never look at this place, and feel unhated.
“What a damn shame, Ruthie.” I looked up to see Mr. Hank in a fedora. I threw myself into him, my sooty hands around his bony shoulders.
He pulled back. “This is your place.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded.
With his cane, Mr. Hank nudged a few shiny splinters into a pile. He stared down at the shards of lilac glass that had bathed the sanctuary in dreamy light. He offered me his handkerchief. “You’ve got a little something on your nose.”
I waved him off. “I want it there.”
“Understood. The police are combing ten blocks in each direction, knocking on doors, stopping cars.” He reached down and picked up the glass with the handkerchief, wrapping the pieces like they were a most fragile gift. Then he tapped the press pass hanging around his neck. “I’m going to see what I can find out.”
Mr. Hank walked into the damaged temple—and I followed, going inside the building I’d sworn to stay out of.
There were men—firemen, policemen, temple men—taking notes and taking pictures, but no one even blinked at me.
The bomb had blown out the vestibule and buried a bronze plaque listing all the temple members who’d been killed in military service. It had destroyed the sisterhood shop; a bunch of hand-knit baby blankets floated in burst-pipe water. It had toppled a glass case filled with menorahs. I waded through it all and into the sanctuary, where there was no beautiful, delicate light, the windows covered in that black canvas nailed into the surrounding bricks from the outside.
I went up the steps to the bima, the pulpit, and stood in front of the spectacular golden ark. A layer of plaster coated the prayer book open on the lectern. With my finger, I cleared away the dust to read the words: Oh God, may all created in Thine image recognize that they are brethren, so that, one in spirit and one in fellowship, they may be forever united.
This perfect passage made me want to tell Max, to find Max. The stairs up to our classroom were blocked by a broken-off column, but I squeezed past.
And he was there, in our doorway. Max’s hair was damp, separated into little fingers on his forehead. He grabbed me around the waist and hugged me hard. He smelled salty and safe. My tears, his sweat, it all seemed related, part of the same ocean.
My arms rested against his back. I could feel him breathing.
Crumpled in his hand was a flash of pink—a construction-paper animal, one of the kangaroos I’d cut out while Max led the kids in the Noah’s Ark song. “There’s a hole right through the wall,” he said. “Shrapnel everywhere.”
I traced my finger along the stupid kangaroo. “What if the—” I didn’t want to say the word “bomb.” “What if it had gone off during class?” I knew Max must have been thinking it too—the gold robes, the guitar, the pink kangaroo, the kids.
“Will you pray with me?” Max’s eyes were a watery smear.
“I can’t.” I was a faker. Faking Covenant, faking cotillion, faking the Lord’s Prayer, faking Judaism. I didn’t even know if I believed in God.
“It’s okay,” he said, his mouth to my ear. “Do it anyway.”
Max said words in Hebrew, soft and fast—and they were familiar. They were my father’s words, my New York words.
Instead, I said my own words, barely out loud—Natalie Louise Robb, Sara Eleanor Robb, Alice Fontaine Landry Robb, Arthur Abraham Robb. An incantation. A prayer.