“So”—Rabbi Selwick smiled—“this is what it takes to get you to come to services.”
He started the meeting at three o’clock exactly, eleven hours after the blast, in the bombed-out sanctuary. The pews were full, as full as High Holiday services, and I had a spot in the front row, along with Nattie, Max, and Leah, and Mrs. Selwick, who was wearing a defiantly cheerful floral dress. Here we were. Here we all were, with the exception of Mother, who’d gone to the newsroom.
The rabbi smoothed the hair that had taken flight the night he and Max came over for dinner. “Let me tell you what we know. Early this morning—shortly before four a.m.—fifty cardboard cylinders of dynamite exploded in our sacred building. The cylinders appeared to be homemade and were packed in a suitcase. The blast woke people from their sleep several blocks away. The building has hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage, but that’s unimportant. What’s important is this: We thank God no one was hurt.”
The air had a metallic taste mixed with a whiff of something sweet, something tropical. I sucked my lips in.
“This is our Leo Frank,” the rabbi said, his voice free of his usual singsong dramatics. “What his lynching meant to previous generations, this bombing will mean for ours.”
Max nodded, his hands balled up in his pockets, a corner of the kangaroo sticking out of his chinos.
I looked up at the dome; a custodian had turned on all the lights, so it glowed down on us. It seemed ridiculous to have been afraid to climb up there with Max. Now there were bigger things to be afraid of. I wanted to remember this moment, to engrave it like one of Fontaine’s note cards. It had happened, and it couldn’t unhappen.
The sadness I’d been skipping a step ahead of caught up with me again. The tears started as a trickle, slipping down my cheeks and chin. A few plopped on the collar of the Peter Pan blouse. I wasn’t usually a crier, not even after Dad died. But today the smoke and the blasted-out bricks and the broken glass and prayer book ash made me cry, cry, cry.
Rabbi Selwick gripped the lectern. “Mr. Hank Landry of the Gazette tells us the paper received notification within fifteen minutes of the explosion. The caller said he was with an organization called the Confederate Underground, a known Klan group.” The rabbi looked down at his notes, and those note cards made me want to hug Nattie. My hands were so clammy I thought they’d slide right off her, but they didn’t.
“The caller said, ‘We bombed a temple in Midtown. This is the last empty building we will bomb. Negroes and Jews are hereby declared aliens.’ Already, I’ve heard from our clergy neighbors. Northside Presbyterian and Wesley Methodist have offered their chapels for our services. East Rivers offered us classrooms for Sunday school. This underground group thought they’d blow this city apart, but the opposite is true.”
Mrs. Selwick leaned over and patted my insane, probably electrified-looking hair. The waterworks started again, and I saw I was in good company. Max fiddled with his belt, eyes glued to the buckle. Farther down the row, Mrs. Silvermintz took her sunglasses off, then put them back on.
The mayor, in wire spectacles, took the microphone next. “These criminals, these supremacists, must’ve wanted to pit our city against itself. Let’s prove them wrong.” He listed other southern temples that had been bombed by white supremacists, not all of them successfully: Charlotte, North Carolina; Gastonia, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama. He told us that on a single night in Alabama, four churches were bombed along with the homes of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Reverend Ralph Abernathy. He reminded us that we were a small part of a larger story of hate, that all along, the clock had been ticking. And now the alarm rang for us.
Max drove Nattie and me home. Fontaine, who’d been kept apprised of the goings-on via the Teletype, poured Max and me a drink from Mr. Hank’s brass bar cart—a cocktail shaker full of whiskey and hope. She had the little television on, a fuzzy image of Douglas Edwards of CBS News showing pictures of our temple. We drained our glasses while Fontaine got Nattie involved in a game of gin rummy on the porch.
I took Max out to the perfectly aligned chaise lounges, where Frooshka greeted him in her crazy poodle way—all four paws off the ground, mouth wide open. He scratched her behind the ears, and she, and we, settled into the shade.
There were no words to say. None. “Should I get the transistor radio?” I asked Max. “We could listen to music.”
“Let’s listen to nothing,” he said.
I closed my eyes. They didn’t sting anymore.
“I don’t know,” Max said, not taking his own advice. His voice was quiet, and I kept my eyes closed. “The caller said, ‘Jews are hereby declared aliens.’ What do you say to someone who believes that?”
I elbowed up and he did the same, and then I noticed the flutter of his pulse at his temple, near those crazy eyebrows. It was like he was transparent, like I could see the bruise of the day, the pain of it all, right there.
We both collapsed back into our respective chaises, and I was reminded of lying on the temple roof, unprotected against the wind, the sun turning purple inside my closed eyelids. But then Frooshka curled around my feet, and I let myself nod off.
I was dreamily thinking of Davis, of last night, of hands—his, mine—when I felt a flick of water on my actual face.
My eyes flew open to see a real Davis standing above me. I shot a glance to the other chaise—empty.
“Tired?” Davis’s smile was huge. “Long night last night?”
“What?” The sun was over his shoulder, and his body threw a shadow my way.
“You’re not dressed for swimming,” he said.
“Swimming?” I’d totally forgotten I’d invited him to the pool. I sat up and saw that Max had relocated next to Nattie, his socks and shoes off, pants rolled up, both of them dangling toes in the shallow end and singing something soft and sweet.
Davis followed my look. “Hey, the driving instructor,” he said, nodding to Max.
“Hey.” Max shook his feet half dry and stuck his socks and shoes back on. “I’m going to go. When’s that next driving lesson, Ruth Robb?”
“Tomorrow.” I said it deliberately, wanting to imbue the word with hope and belief. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’m going to change for a swim,” Nattie said.
Max took off one way, and Nattie, the other—and Davis, he dropped into the chaise next to me.
“Did you hear about it—the bomb?” I asked Davis, rubbing my eyes.
“Yeah. You look cute asleep,” he said, hair flopping over one eye.
“Not today I don’t—nothing’s cute today.” You would think this would have been the time to tell Davis everything. What day could be better?
I pulled Frooshka into my lap even though she was too big. I wanted a living, breathing mammal that knew me—knew me and loved me anyway. I put my hand over her heart and let the rhythm of its beats calm me.
We sat there in the early evening light—his skin, his sunshine smell, his bermuda shorts, his breath at my neck. After all the ash, it was so nice, so necessary, to feel love and beauty in the world. And it seemed perfect Davis would be here right now, that he would know I was aching, through osmosis or a scientific term I didn’t know the name of.
“It’s been a really, really hard day,” I said. “I was there.”
He jerked his head up. “Where?”
“At the temple.”
“On Peachtree?”
I nodded and considered what to say next. “My mother was covering the story.”
“Oh, makes sense.” Davis walked his fingers inside my shirt to pluck a bra strap. “You want to run my car through the car wash?”
I shook my head. A car wash was more fun when you didn’t need one.
“Hi, Davis,” Nattie said. She was back in her good old navy bathing suit. Un, deux, trois—into the pool she went. Frooshka flopped in after her, a big splash of floof.
“Isn’t it freezing?” I yelled over.
“I’ll get used to it,” Nattie said.
The light was glimmery, the magic hour when everything, from the bushes to the swoop of Davis’s hair, was outlined in bursts of gold. Gold like the temple.
Nattie paddled over, hanging off the side, her face covered in pearls of water. “Ruthie, can you bring me the pineapple towel?” It was Dad’s favorite—he pined for pineapple, he’d said—and I’d last seen it folded under the sink in the bathroom.
I went inside to grab the towel and to change, but I did the former and not the latter. When I came back, I found Davis (on land) and Nattie (in water) deep in a conversation about the genus of the pineapple. “ ‘Ananas’ is the original name, and it means ‘excellent fruit,’ ” Davis was saying. And it made me love Davis a whole new layer of love. He didn’t just know me; he knew what to say to fact-loving Nattie on this dark, dark day.
Nattie held the towel to her face, letting the tail of it dip into the twenty-two thousand gallons of chilly, chlorinated blue.
“Nattie, count for me,” I said.
“Un, deux—but you’re not changed,” she said. “Trois—”
I dropped down, straight down, soldier-style, and gasped.
My swirly skirt billowed out like a parachute before plastering itself against my goose bumps. I rubbed my arms, oddly happy to feel the prickles.
Then, boom, Davis was in, too—shirt, shorts, tennis shoes.
Nattie fluttered around us, her kicks wobbling the water’s surface.
Davis and I sank, together, to the bottom, where it was even more Siberian.
The thin ribbon that separated the air and the water here—gone. The ribbon that separated my heart from Davis’s—gone. Davis grabbed me around the waist and spun me, my skirt catching a tiny swell in the shallow end. The pool felt smaller with our clothes on. I blew a long trail of bubbles, saying our family names like a prayer, saying even part of the Shehecheyanu, an actual prayer, until the water between Davis and me was cloudy with air. And yet we could still see each other through the frosty, fading light.