Roy sometimes cut through Rosedale Cemetery on his way to play ball at Winnebago Park. Jews were not allowed to be buried at Rosedale, so Roy thought it interesting that next to the cemetery, on its western boundary, was the Zion National Home, a residential institution for elderly Jews.
One summer’s morning, Roy was cutting across Rosedale when he saw an old woman walking with a cane along the same path ahead of him. As he approached her, the woman suddenly stumbled and fell. Roy ran up to her and took hold of one of her arms.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
The woman was wearing a pink housecoat buttoned up to her neck and fuzzy purple slippers. She wore thick glasses that magnified her hazel eyes.
“I’ll survive,” she said, “at least for a little longer. I’m used to this, unfortunately. When you get to be my age—I’m eighty-eight—you never know if your next step will be your last.”
Roy helped the woman to her feet, then picked up the cane and handed it to her. She looked at Roy and smiled. A few of her teeth were missing.
“How old are you, son?” she asked.
“Eleven,” said Roy.
“That’s the age my granddaughter, Esther, was when we left Hamburg on the Caribia, bound for Cuba. This was in 1938. What year were you born?”
“Nineteen forty-six.”
“Esther would have been thirty now, had she survived.”
“What happened to her?”
“The Cuban government wouldn’t allow the Caribia to dock because most of its passengers were Jewish. We were fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Esther caught the typhoid fever and she died on board. We were forced to bury her at sea. The Caribia truly became a ghost ship after that. Esther’s ghost was with us as we sailed back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a safe harbor.”
“Why didn’t the Cubans want the Jews?”
“They were afraid if they took us, more Jews would come expecting to be taken in, too. This happened in many places, in many countries, on five continents.”
“How long were you on that ship?”
“Four or five months, I think. Finally, we were granted permission to disembark at Baltimore, Maryland. All of the passengers were housed in the same buildings slaves were kept in after they were brought there from Africa. My daughter, Rebecca, Esther’s mother, and I waited in those slave quarters for weeks—I can’t recall now how many—until we were taken by train to New York City and deposited at the Jewish Orphans and Immigrants Home.”
“Do you live at Zion National?” Roy asked.
“Yes, barely, as you can see.”
“No Jews are allowed to be buried here at Rosedale. Did you know that?”
The old lady smiled again and said, “Even after death there are places Jews are forbidden to go.”
She coughed a few times, very deeply, making a sound so loud it frightened Roy a little.
“Zion stretches out her hands,” the woman said, “but there is none to comfort her; the Lord has commanded against Jacob that his neighbors should be his foes; Jerusalem has become a filthy thing among them.”
“What’s that?” said Roy.
“One of the lamentations of Jeremiah.”
“Is it from the Bible?”
“Yes. The only words worth repeating are from the Old Testament or Oscar Wilde.”
The woman coughed again and shuddered.
“I have to be getting back now,” she said.
Roy accompanied her to the entrance of the Zion National Home and held her left elbow as she walked up the two front steps and went inside. He decided to walk all the way around Rosedale to get to Winnebago Park, even though he knew that would make him late for the game. On the way there he imagined the little girl’s ghost roaming the decks of the Caribia as it sailed without a destination. The girl’s name was Esther, Roy remembered. She was the only person he knew of who had been buried at sea.