Two nights before Christmas, Peter took June to the Rainbow Room. June had cocktails at Masha’s while Peter worked the first dinner seating; then he changed, and they made their way to Rockefeller Center. The city had the feverish feel it always did during this season, New Yorkers shoving through intersections and trying to snatch cabs from tourists who clogged the sidewalks, craning up at the buildings, boggling at department-store displays. Peter was both mildly amused by all the hoopla—this was not his holiday; he had no holidays—and irritable because he was away more than usual from the restaurant, at such a highly trafficked time of year. Several times a day he felt he had forgotten something, and he was patting his pockets or checking his notebook before he remembered, guiltily: Ah. Masha’s. For the first time in two decades, he was not spending every waking hour there.
But tonight he would make a special effort: June was leaving for Minnesota the next day, to spend Christmas with her mother, and therefore Peter found himself doing everything visitors to New York did and that he, as an inhabitant, had never done himself. They admired the holiday tableaux in Macy’s windows—June pointing out the mannequins with her face, which had been made, she explained, from a mold. “I had to lie on my stomach breathing through straws up my nose while the plaster hardened,” she said, and Peter tsked sadly and said, “And people think the life of a model is glamourous.” At Rockefeller Center they waited in line at the skating rink and ate chestnuts from a cart. Down on the ice June skated figure eights, giggling when Peter’s ankles bowed inward, and coaxed him off the encircling wall by gliding backward and holding his hands. Afterward, thawing, they had hot chocolate, and then they waited amid a crush of fur and wool in the Rockefeller Center lobby, where finally an elevator whisked them to the sixty-fifth floor.
Peter had made arrangements, and they were seated at a window-side two-top with the Empire State Building as their candle. The city sprawled vertiginously at their elbows. They had martinis, and June ordered shrimp cocktail and Caesar salad, Peter a lobster Thermidor that he knew he would assess for industrial flavor—the Rainbow Room, unlike Masha’s, was a massive brigade kitchen, an assembly line serving hundreds and hundreds of people a day. Peter wished the executive chef no ill will, but he hoped he would be able to taste the butane of the warming tray his entrée had been kept in, discern the slightly chewy texture of a dish broiled under the salamander. He lit June’s cigarette and smiled at her as she surveyed the room: the red-clothed candlelit tables clustered around the dance floor, the massive chandelier suspended from the round ceiling famously aglow with rainbow hues; more shimmering prisms shooting from floor lights at the room’s periphery, and all Manhattan glittering beneath their feet.
“You were right,” Peter said as the orchestra began a medley from The Nutcracker, “this is festive.”
“You should have seen it during the Mod Ball last month,” June said. “It was crammed! Duke Ellington was playing.”
“Ah,” said Peter, who, aside from his cooks’ transistor radio and the mandatory concerts at Carnegie, tried not to listen to music at all.
“Who is that?” he asked, as June waved merrily to a man on the other side of the room, a bearded fellow in a turtleneck and candy-striped trousers.
“That’s Roger, one of the photographers I work with.”
“Ah,” said Peter again. He watched June blow smoke rings toward this Roger, visible signatures of her lips on the air. Was it Peter’s imagination, or was June drifting a bit? He didn’t have any fact to hang the feeling on; when she wasn’t working, she was always available to him, in fact a little too available for Peter’s schedule, ceaselessly cajoling him to places he never would have sought on his own: ElMo, the Copa, the Factory to see Mr. Warhol. Her attention wandered more to gossip and future plans, other clubs and cities they would visit, than to other men. But Peter was sharply aware that the women in her circle dated tycoons or sporting figures; he had experienced some rueful amusement at being, as a restauranteur, one of the lower totems on the pole. Surely he was jealous, and that was a good sign, wasn’t it? He couldn’t locate the source of his unease, and he feared it was that at the prospect of losing June, along with the dismal sense of having woken from a wonderful dream, there was another slight one of relief.
He tried to shake this off—after all, one couldn’t ask for a more charming companion. “You are especially dazzling tonight,” he told June, “like the Snow Queen.” Indeed June was all in white, her dress a sparkling sheath that brushed the tops of her thigh-high silver boots, around her head a white turban fastened by a diamond snowflake.
“Thank you,” said June. She swayed confessionally toward Peter. “I’m not wearing any underwear.”
So much for drift. Peter raised his eyebrows. “Happy Christmas to me.”
“I thought you didn’t celebrate Christmas,” June said.
“I do now,” said Peter.
He took her hands across the table and considered bringing out the velvet jeweler’s box, but then their food arrived. It was just as well, Peter thought; the gift would be better presented over dessert—a Floating Island Peter had preordered, hoping June would eat at least a few bites of low-calorie meringue.
The orchestra segued into “Moon River.” June tucked the croutons of her salad beneath the romaine, then lifted a lettuce leaf to her mouth and nibbled the edges. She did the same to another, and a third; then she sat back and rubbed her nonexistent stomach. “I’m stuffed,” she said. Her shrimp glistened untouched, clinging like inverted commas to the rim of their frosted silver dish.
“But you barely ate a thing,” Peter said. It made June happy when he said this, and Peter had thought he had gotten used to her eating so little—but now, quite unbidden, there came to his mind the recollection of standing next to a man in the Auschwitz kitchen, and the man sneaking a bit of potato peeling into his mouth, and then the peeling dropping out of it, half chewed, when the man was shot in the head. His blood had spattered on Peter’s pile of potatoes, so that Peter had been punished too. The man’s name had been Merckel. Merckel’s family had once owned a chain of beer halls in Munich. This memory shrapnel was surfacing more and more for Peter lately; it was beyond disturbing. Peter stuck his fork in the mottled flesh of his lobster and pushed it away.
The orchestra went on intermission; their waiter cleared their plates. “Was the food not to your liking, sir?”
“Quite the contrary,” said Peter, “my compliments to the chef.”
“He will be pleased, Mr. Rashkin,” said the waiter and cleaned their tablecloth with a silver crumb-catcher. “May I bring coffee? Cordials?”
“I’m impressed,” said June, when Peter had ordered a port for himself, a White Russian for June. “You’re famous!”
Peter waggled his eyebrows. “Shtick with me, kid,” he said in his best Humphrey Bogart accent. Being recognized wasn’t really a remarkable achievement; most of Manhattan’s chefs of a certain level knew of each other. Nonetheless, Peter was pleased; it was always nice to receive another chef’s salute, and their dessert would probably be comped as well.
June extracted another cigarette, and Peter lit it. “Are you excited about your trip?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“Oh, I suppose,” she said. “It’s always good to see my mom. But the place—blech,” and she made a face. “It’ll be all one color this time of year, hip-deep in snow, and all anyone’ll talk about is their husbands and kids and what brand of laundry detergent works best.”
“That sounds . . . restful,” said Peter carefully.
“You mean stultifying.”
“Well, yes,” he admitted, and June snorted smoke through her nose like a dragon.
“There must be something festive about it,” Peter said. “What will you do for your Christmas?”
“Go to church. Eat dinner. My mom is a terrible cook, she lives mostly out of cans, but every year on Christmas Eve she and her friends make about a thousand cookies and serve all the traditional Norwegian foods. Lefse, rommegrot—”
“Grout?” said Peter doubtfully. “You eat wall paste?”
June laughed. “Now that I think of it, that’s probably why they named it that,” she said. “It has exactly the same consistency. No, it’s a flour and milk pudding. The legend is the Norwegian farm wives used to give birth, eat a bowl of rommegrot, and go back to work in the fields. And if that isn’t fortifying enough for you, there’s always lutefisk,” and she made a gagging noise.
“And what is this? Is it like gefilte fish?”
“I have no idea,” said June, “but I’m sure lutefisk is more repulsive. It’s cod boiled in lye—it stinks to high heaven, and it’s like eating an eyeball.”
“Lye,” said Peter thoughtfully. “I supposed it must originally have been a method of preservation . . .”
He took out his notebook to jot this down and looked up to find June watching him with a mixture of, he thought, fondness and exasperation. “Only you could find lutefisk interesting,” she said and ground out her cigarette. “Of course, you could always come with me and sample it for yourself.”
“I wish I could,” Peter said mildly. He picked up her nearest hand and kissed it. The orchestra had reassembled and was playing “Silent Night” with a swing tempo. Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, sang a small voice in Peter’s head.
“I don’t have to go,” said June, squeezing his fingers. “I could visit at Easter instead, and you could come with me. But meanwhile, I could stay here with you.”
“Nothing would please me more,” said Peter, “but I fear you would be bored to tears. I’ll be so busy with the New Year’s Eve gala, you see—oh, did I tell you?” He lowered his voice and stage-whispered, from behind his palm, “I hired an ice sculptor. There will be statues at Masha’s! The Russian Tea Room’s owner will turn green with jealousy.”
June withdrew her hand from Peter’s and sat back. “That’s nice,” she said, gazing out over the dancing couples. Her dress had ridden up to nearly the tops of her thighs, and Peter couldn’t help noticing the interested glances in her direction.
“What is it?” he said.
“Nothing,” said June.
“It is my experience,” said Peter, “that when a woman says this, she means quite the opposite.”
June shook out another cigarette. “I just wish you were a little more . . .”
“What, June?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Into it?”
“Into . . . ,” said Peter. He struggled with the phrase. “Into what?”
June exhaled with frustration. “It means enthusiastic.”
“I am enthusiastic,” said Peter. “This is how I am when enthusiastic.”
“Okay, that’s nice,” said June. “I know not everybody makes a big song and dance out of everything. But I just wish . . .”
“What?” said Peter again. He was trying to modulate his irritation—it was like having a conversation with the caterpillar from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“That we’d be together for New Year’s, for instance. That we’d made plans.”
“But that’s the biggest night of the year for the restaurant,” said Peter, “and you’ll be in—”
“Paris. I know.”
“A work assignment you accepted,” said Peter. “I don’t understand the problem.”
“The problem is, I invited you to come with me—on the magazine’s dime—and you won’t. Not even for a weekend.”
“June, I am a businessman. I cannot completely abandon Masha’s. Lena can run it for only so long.”
“That doesn’t really wash,” said June. “I’ve never known a chef to turn down the chance to go to Paris.”
Peter grappled with his temper. He had not told her—he had not told anyone—that he would never, ever set foot on the European continent again. Why should he have to? Anybody with an ounce of sensitivity would see it was self-explanatory.
“Well, you know one now,” he said. “And was I upset that you have chosen to go to France with Mademoiselle rather than stay with me? We both love our work, June. We are both career people. New Year’s Eve is just a night, a square on a calendar. Was I angry when you went to Lisbon for Halloween?”
He lowered his head bullishly and smiled up from beneath his brows, meaning to make a joke out of it, but June sighed.
“No,” she said. “That’s just it. You weren’t angry at all.”
She set her cigarette in the ashtray and stood up.
“I think I should go,” she said.
“What?” said Peter. “Before dessert?”
He rose as well, automatically, and the waiter, who was bringing forth their Floating Island, backpedaled in some confusion. June kissed her fingers and touched Peter’s cheek.
“I’ll be in touch,” she said. “Happy Christmas.”
Off she floated through the whirling couples—the band was playing a Strauss waltz. Peter watched June thread between the tables and the dancers. He held up one finger at their waiter—Wait, please—and caught up with June at the hallway coat check. She was digging through her silver clutch, and Peter took their chit out of his wallet.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” he asked.
June held out her hand. “Please,” she said.
Peter closed his fingers over the chit. “Not until I wish you Happy Christmas.”
“Go ahead.”
Peter took the jeweler’s box from his pocket. “Happy Christmas,” he said.
June eyed the box but made no move to take it. Her face was very still except for a tiny muscle that jumped like a minnow near her left eye.
“What is this,” said June finally, “a bribe?”
“I suppose that depends upon whether you like it.”
Peter gave the box a little shake. The coat check girl peeked from behind her curtain.
“Go on,” said Peter, “it won’t bite you. What do you think will pop out, a jack-in-the-box?”
“More like something from a Cracker Jack box,” said June.
But she took the box and flipped open the lid. Her expression shifted—Peter couldn’t quite read it in the dim red light of the hall: Surprise? Disappointment? The coat check girl nearly broke her stomach in half leaning over the counter to see.
June lifted the necklace out of its satin nest. “It’s beautiful,” she said, in what Peter thought was a curiously toneless voice. What had he done wrong now?
“I hope you like it,” he said. “Because if not I’ll have a devil of a time finding some other June to give it to.”
June said nothing, but she presented the back of her neck to Peter, who took this as a signal to fasten the necklace around it. Once he had secured the clasp, he kissed her nape, where the point of her hair was just visible beneath the white turban. June turned and touched her collarbone, where on silver mesh tiny diamonds spelled out her name.
“There,” said Peter. “Happy Christmas, love. Now let’s have dessert.”
“What did you say?” June said.
“Dessert,” said Peter, “a Floating Island—”
“Not that. You called me ‘love.’”
Peter inclined his head. He hadn’t intended to say this, it had slipped out of its own accord, but he found he didn’t want to rescind it, either. “If the name fits,” he said.
June put her hands on either side of his face and kissed him.
“I love you, too,” she said. “Now prove it, mister. Dance with me.”
“Dance!” said Peter in mock horror. “Have you forgotten my ice-skating disaster? Wait until you see me on the dance floor.”
“I have,” said June. “At the Copa, the Factory . . . Not a pretty sight.”
She smiled at the coat check girl, who withdrew into her window like a cuckoo into a clock. They returned to the dining room. The orchestra was in full swing, the bandleader singing Bing Crosby: “Iiiiiii’m dreaming of a whiiiiiiiiiite Christmas . . .” June led Peter, mock-protesting, onto the parquet floor. People smiled at Peter snapping his fingers and stomping out of rhythm. “Like this?” he said. “Can you help me?” June put her arms around his neck and told him no, he was hopeless. They stood in place, swaying.
* * *
“You know, you really could use a decorator in here,” June said.
They were in the living room of Peter’s apartment, sitting on the floor on either side of a wok full of scrambled eggs. The sun was just coming up over the East River; the room was filling with gold. It was Christmas Eve morning and June had an early flight to Minnesota; she wouldn’t let Peter accompany her to Teterboro. No, too much trouble, she said, and didn’t he have to work? But Peter had gotten up with her and made some breakfast. It was the least he could do, even if she wouldn’t eat it.
He looked around his living room and said, “You don’t like my minimalist style?”
June jabbed the air with her chopsticks, which she preferred to regular cutlery because, she said, they helped her eat less.
“It’s very Breakfast at Peter’s,” she said, referencing one of her favorite films. “It would be charming if you were Audrey Hepburn. As it is, it just screams bachelor.”
Peter put his hand over his heart. “Guilty as charged . . . until now.”
June leaned over the wok and kissed him, then unfolded her long limbs to prowl the room. She was wearing only one of Peter’s white button-down shirts, and he watched her with pleasure. She ran her fingers over the dark-green leather couch, the Steinway grand piano—the only furniture, besides his bed, that Peter had accumulated in fifteen years. Even these were donations from Sol, castoffs from the estate of a client who’d had to leave the country, Sol had said, rather quickly.
June lifted the lid of the piano and peeked beneath it at the keys. “I’ve never heard you play anything.”
“No coincidence. I don’t play.”
June laughed. “Then why do you have it?”
“Because it’s beautiful,” Peter said.
“Doesn’t it bother you, to live with so little?”
Peter thought of his parents’ home in Charlottenburg, crammed to the rafters with cherished items that had belonged not only to them but to four previous generations. The walnut dining table, capable of seating twenty. His grandmother’s silver that the scullery maid, Berte, polished every week. The Belgian lace tablecloths; the sheets hand-stitched by French nuns. His mother’s Oriental rugs. His father’s prized humidor and five antique Daimlers. What good had any of those things done them? Where were they now?
“I like to travel light,” he said.
He would have added that he was rarely here, that before June he had spent all his time at Masha’s, but he didn’t want to resuscitate the previous night’s discussion about his work habits. Instead he said, “You should talk—that garret you live in, with the bathtub in the kitchen. With a roommate, yet!”
June made a face. “That’s not a home. It’s more like a bus station. I can’t wait to have my own place someday.”
She beckoned for her cigarettes and Peter got up, stiffly—one difference between forty-five and twenty-five was that twenty-five didn’t ache from sitting on the floor. He took her cigarettes from the mantel and shot the pack to her across the bare floor.
“You need at least a few rugs,” said June. “And some lamps, maybe a pair in the foyer, on a demilune table?” She frowned, hands on hips. “A mirror on that far wall would amplify that spectacular view of the river . . . Did you know I wanted to be a decorator when I was little?”
“Not a farm wife with six children, like all the other girls?” Peter teased.
“Please. I killed every baby doll I ever had.”
“And not a world-famous supermodel?”
“I would have liked that better, but I wouldn’t’ve dreamed it’d happen in a million years. I was eight feet tall by the time I was six, and so skinny—my mother thought I had a tapeworm, and all the boys called me Stilts.”
Peter smiled. It was a sign of June’s youth that she didn’t think she wanted marriage and children—all women did, eventually; it was tucked into their biology. Perhaps June just hadn’t reached that stage yet. Peter pictured her as a girl, all elbows and knees and braids sticking out at awkward angles, scowling as she rearranged a dollhouse.
“I’m sure you were adorable,” he said.
“Only to a discerning eye,” said June absently. She held her hands up in a square, framing the east window. “All I ever wanted was to make things beautiful.”
“Which you do,” said Peter, “simply by existing.”
She flashed him a quick grin. “Thanks, you’re a doll,” she said in her girl-about-town voice. “But really, I don’t want to just be decorative—I want to create decorative settings. Beauty doesn’t last forever. Beautiful places do.”
Peter could have told her otherwise, that nothing on earth was exempt from its own demise, not a king, clerk, bird, or tree; no matter if it were a modern skyscraper, a stolid row of burghers’ apartments, a castle that had stood for a millennium—all could be reduced in a flash to stones. But why spoil her Christmas Eve–morning reverie? “Well, Stilts,” he said, “how about this: when you get back from Minnesota, you can decorate this place.”
June looked at him. “Really?”
“Really and truly.”
She came to him and threw her arms around him. “Thank you! That’s the best Christmas gift I’ve ever had!”
“You mean besides the necklace?” said Peter.
June touched it, the diamonds glittering on her clavicle; last night, when they’d come back from the Rainbow Room, it was the only thing she’d worn. “Of course.”
Peter kissed her. “It’s getting late. Why don’t I take a quick shower, and then we’ll get you a cab.”
He walked down the hall to his bathroom, whistling “Silver Bells,” and shaved while he waited for the water to run hot. He would miss June, he thought with relief as he stepped into the shower. Five days seemed suddenly too long. Maybe he would surprise her by meeting her return plane—
“Hey, got room in there for me?”
Peter jumped and reached for his robe, but it was not in its usual place on the back of the door. “I’m just about to get out,” he said, “if you’d hand me a towel—”
But he was too late: the curtain rattled back on its metal rings, and then she was in there with him, naked. At least Peter assumed she was, from the warm length of her pressed behind him. The water poured over them. It would have been erotic, if only—
“You don’t have to hide your scars, you know,” said June. “I’ve seen them.”
Peter stood dumbly. “When?” he asked finally.
“Just glimpses here and there,” said June. “But I’ve felt them all along.”
Peter sighed. And he had been so careful! He never came to bed without pajamas. He never swam without a shirt. And he never left the bathroom door unlocked when he bathed. Happiness, today, had made him careless. But he should have suspected June would have felt them. They were thick, raised, the size of ropes. They would be tactile even through a layer of cloth.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “They’re grotesque.”
“Oh, Peter! Please, don’t apologize. They’re just . . . How did you get them?”
“From an SS sergeant,” Peter said, “at Auschwitz, with a whip and a bad temper.”
“Jesus,” said June.
“No,” said Peter. “Just a fat man named Stultz.”
He got out of the shower and pulled on his robe—there it was, the traitorous thing, on the lid of the hamper. He started combing his hair, automatically, with no real idea what he was doing. So now June had seen them—the braille of Peter’s humiliation and helplessness. Next she would want to know what it had been like. Americans always wanted to know—they were like children that way, well-meaning, insatiably curious. What was it like? What was it like, Ruth had demanded the first months Peter had lived in Larchmont, following him around with Life and Time, their lurid covers proclaiming, new nazi horror discovered! thousands of corpses unearthed in pit! “Did you see anything like this? Or this? What about this? My poor, poor Bubbie! How did you get through it? What was it like?” There had been no way to tell her, even if Peter had wanted to. About the perversity of luck, for instance, so that the whipping Stultz gave Peter on the Appellplatz for no reason one icy January day had laid Peter’s back open to the bone, which was why Peter had passed out and been taken to the infirmary, which was where he had in his delirium called out recipes for sauerbraten and schnitzel, which was why when he came out of it he had been reassigned, was no longer on pickup detail, on which Peter had loaded corpses no heavier than box kites on the crematorium wagon, but on kitchen duty, which was where he was working two months later when the Allies liberated the camp. So really, the whipping Stultz had given him was what had saved him. There was no way to tell anyone who hadn’t been there any of that, how your very concept of luck turned inside out and upside down, so that when you found yourself alive at the end of it, you were no longer sure whether that was a good thing.
Peter watched June in the mirror as she emerged from the shower, her admirable but too-thin body glistening. She wrapped herself in a towel and came up behind him, and Peter waited for her to ask: What was it like? Instead, she said, “What happened to him? Was he hanged at Nuremberg?”
“Who, Stultz?” said Peter, and June nodded. “No, he was a pretty small fish.”
“I wish we could find him,” said June. “I’d kill him.”
“Would you now?” said Peter. “How would you do that?”
“I’d shoot him.”
“Ah. You have a license to kill, like 007?”
“I’d push him out the window,” said June. Her eyes were red, but she was starting to smile.
“And I’d hold it open for you,” said Peter. He looked at his watch, which covered his other set of scars—this one he would bet the restaurant June didn’t know about. Nobody did, not Sol and Ruth, not his staff. Peter never, ever removed his watch; one of the best days of his life had been when the Swiss Army had offered their waterproof timepiece for sale.
“We have to get you into a cab,” he said. “You’re going to miss your plane.”
“All right,” June agreed, but she didn’t move, and Peter didn’t know why until she asked, “Can you really not feel that?” and he realized she was running her hands over his back.
“No,” he said, “I have no sensation there.” That was true, and it was the blessing of scars: the deeper they were, the more you couldn’t feel anything in them at all.
* * *
After Peter put June in a cab, he decided to walk to Masha’s. It was only a few blocks, and it was still early; the sun had risen into milky clouds, but the temperature was fairly mild. After the previous evening’s holiday throngs, Peter relished the empty sidewalks. The only people out at this hour were returning from a night of revelry or walking dogs; in neither case did they want to make conversation, which suited Peter fine. He bought a cup of coffee from a corner grocery on Ninety-Second and First, again wrapped in a queer feeling of well-being. How could this be, when June was gone, soaring somewhere in the sky above? But Peter was heartened by that morning’s conversation; he had never disclosed so much to any woman, and she had handled it well. He glanced at the ladies’ wear boutiques he passed and smiled when he realized he was looking for the mannequins with June’s face.
He stopped to admire a mechanical Christmas tableau, a family, mother, and father and two children opening presents with painted-on smiles and jerky movements—and suddenly found himself thinking of the last time he had observed the holiday. Peter’s last Christmas had been in 1942, when Vivi and Gigi were toddlers; they were growing quickly then, out of their baby round-belliedness into long-legged little girls, and it seemed they could never get enough to eat, particularly Vivi, who loved anything Peter set in front of her. Their ration cards were a joke; if not for the scraps Masha brought home from the Adlon, the girls would have starved. Their growth would have been stunted; Peter was home with them full time by then, his work permit having been revoked, and he deliberately kept from Masha the tales he had heard from mothers in the building’s stairwells, about children grown slow and fretful, about their developing sores or their adult teeth not coming in for lack of milk.
That Christmas there were no presents, although they did manage to have a tree, a pathetic little foundling Peter had salvaged from a scrap heap. Their specimen was barely two meters, and it listed to the side on which it also had no needles. But Peter had propped it on their kitchen table and wrapped its trunk in a tea towel, and he had spent several nights while the girls were asleep punching holes in tin cans with a screwdriver; when he inserted candle stubs in them and put them on the tree, he thought, it would look quite festive. Not quite the magnificent firs of his childhood, ablaze with tapers—Peter’s family, quite assimilated, celebrated Christmas just as Masha’s had. But it would do for a surprise.
Masha came home from the Adlon long after midnight, having had to close out the hotel’s Christmas Eve buffet. Peter had been watching for her through the window and saw her bundled figure drop off the tram as it rattled past the flat, clattering the plates on the shelves. The girls slept on; city children, they woke only when it was too quiet.
By the time Masha had climbed the six flights of stairs, Peter had the candles lit in the tin cans, which he had inserted among the few branches that would hold them. “Happy Christmas, Mashi,” he whispered.
“Happy Christmas, Petel,” said Masha. They kissed. Masha’s pale face was nearly translucent with exhaustion but for the very red tip of her nose. She unwrapped her scarf and took off her coat; Peter smelled roast bird wafting from her whites, and his stomach growled.
“Goose?” he whispered.
Masha nodded. “And duck,” she whispered back; “I had the carving station,” and she held up her lunch pail.
Peter didn’t bother with utensils; he sat at the table and shredded meat with his fingers, careful to set aside the bulk of it for the twins. Vivi twitched at the odor of food but didn’t wake, merely put her hand on her sister’s cheek in the room’s double bed.
“This is delicious,” said Peter, “thank you.”
Masha sat across from him and started removing her hairpins with such emphatic movements, some of them flew into the corners. “Why that girl,” his mother had asked, “out of all the eligible young ladies we’ve introduced you to? She’s not only common, she’s homely.” It was true; Masha’s face was long and bony, her coloring too anemic for beauty. She barely had any eyelashes. But Peter had been in awe of Masha since the first moment he became aware of her: in the Adlon kitchen, Peter’s second day as a commis. Chef had stopped the entire staff to watch Peter dice an onion, making an example of Peter’s clumsiness, his utter incompetence. “Look at this,” he had screamed in Peter’s ear, seizing a handful of ragged slices and flinging them into Peter’s face, “my grandmother could chop onions better using her dentures! You will not stop, nobody will cook, until you do it right,” and he had dumped a basket of yellow onions onto Peter’s chopping block, some of the orbs bouncing off to the floor and rolling away. There was no sound but for the sizzling and bubbling of ignored food on various burners, Chef’s enraged huffing, and Peter’s snuffling as he chopped and chopped, blindly, eyes burning with tears, lacking even the burned match one usually held between one’s teeth to prevent weeping during this task. Until finally he felt his knife taken from him. “Watch,” said a soft voice near his shoulder, and when Peter’s stinging tears had subsided, he saw an even younger and smaller apprentice making quick work of his latest onion, Peter’s knife moving so fast he couldn’t see it, like a hummingbird’s wings. “Like this,” said the small commis, “put your finger on top of the blade to guide it, you see?” and Peter nodded. Chef, who had been hulking behind them both, flicked at the pile of tiny dense cubes on Peter’s cutting board and said, “Ach . . . Back to work!” and as if the Adlon kitchen staff had been frozen by enchantment and were now released by his bawl, they sprang back to life. All except the little commis, who patted Peter’s shoulder, retreated to the sink near the walk-in, and took off her white cap to dash water on her forehead—for it was a woman, Peter saw, with amazement, a tiny one with white-blond braids, which she tucked back up into her cap before she resumed work at her own station, stretching strudel dough as though nothing had happened. And that was Masha.
Now she started to giggle. “That tree is . . .” She covered her mouth with her hand to block the sound but laughed all the harder; soon she was quaking with it.
“The tree is what?” said Peter, feigning indignation. “Magnificent? A masterpiece? Worthy of The Nutcracker?”
“Yes,” said Masha, “exactly, that’s what I was trying to say.”
She wiped her wet eyes and nose and put her face in her hands.
“I’m so tired,” she said, “and I’m sorry, Petel, but I couldn’t get any chocolate for the girls. Chef had it practically under lock and key.”
“That’s all right,” said Peter. “The tree is the present—don’t you dare,” he warned her as she snickered again. “The girls will think it’s a marvel, you wait and see.”
“I’m sure they will,” said Masha. Peter patted his lap, and Masha came to sit there. Peter could smell the grease in her hair, cooking lard and oil.
“Our being together is the gift,” he said.
“Petel,” she said, picking up his hand and playing with his fingers. “About that . . .”
“Not this again,” said Peter.
“Dieter says he can get three ID cards,” said Masha. “It’ll cost us, but isn’t that why we saved your mother’s earrings?”
Peter looked down at her small hand with the scars and burns earned by any chef. Her whole left palm was a shiny lineless pink from when she’d grabbed a saucepan without a rag. She was toying with his wedding ring, spinning it around and around.
“I want to save the earrings,” said Peter. “For an emergency.”
“Petel, this is an emergency.”
Peter scoffed. He gestured toward the window, where the snow fell silently on the streetcar tracks, covering the sidewalk. “Does that look like an emergency to you?”
“I’ve started to hear things. About how there will be a roundup—”
“Horseshit,” said Peter, “propaganda.”
Masha sat up on his lap, eyes blazing. “That doesn’t even make sense. Why would the Nazis spread rumors about a roundup? That’d give people time to leave!”
“Scare tactics,” said Peter. “That’s been their game all along. To cow people into doing what they want.”
“Well, it’s working, isn’t it?” said Masha.
She got up and went to the window, where she stood gripping her elbows and shivering—the pane was cracked, and the room was cold.
“Come away from there,” Peter said, “you’ll catch your death of pneumonia.”
“And what will your death be? Theirs?”
Masha nodded to the twins, asleep like a heap of rags in the bed.
“Keep your voice down,” said Peter. “Stop being so dramatic, Lana Turner.”
He’d hoped the reference to one of Masha’s idols would cheer her, but she just stared at him.
“Hasn’t everything I’ve said come true so far? Haven’t things gotten worse and worse? Look what happened to your father, your mother. You can’t even work!”
“But you can, your work pass is still good,” said Peter. “My father was a troublemaker, and my mother— Lots of people caught that flu. You act as though the Nazis gave it to her! Look, we’re fine here, we’re safe and warm and fed. As long as you can work, we’ll be fine.”
“For how long?” said Masha. “People know. They know you and the girls are here. How long before some Jew-catching Greifer gives us up? For money, or a travel permit, or to save their own skins?”
“I think you underestimate our friends, Mashi.”
“I think you overestimate how many friends we have, Petel.” Masha shook her head, her long hair falling like a curtain around her face. Impatiently she pushed it back.
“You’re here all day,” she said, “with the girls. You don’t know what’s going on out there. You don’t see.”
“Yes,” said Peter with a bitterness that surprised him, “you’re right, I’m like a recluse, or a man in a cell.”
He regretted it the moment he said it, for Masha was then in front of him, crouching on her clogs, seizing his hands in her cold ones.
“That’s just it. You are. You’re a prisoner here in our flat. And it’s only going to get worse. The roundup—”
“Just rumors.”
“—I heard it’ll be in spring, as early as February. We don’t have much time—”
“No,” Peter said.
His voice was loud enough that it woke Gigi, who started to cry. He went to her and lifted her from the bed, her body warm and heavy with sleep.
“Shhh, you’ll wake your sister. Everything is all right; Mama’s here, see?”
Masha waggled her fingers. “Hi, sweet love,” she said.
Gigi buried her face sleepily in Peter’s shoulder.
“How,” Peter whispered, “do you expect me to take them God-knows-where—to America or England or whatever outlandish destination you have in mind? They’re so little. They tire so easily. They’ll talk.”
“There are ways,” Masha said. “Sleeping syrups—”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll be fine. I’m Aryan.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“After the war—”
“I’m not breaking up our family,” he hissed. “I will not.”
Gigi lifted her head from his shoulder and put her hand on his cheek.
“Papa angry?” she asked.
Peter kissed her palm.
“No, sugarplum,” he said and turned her toward the tree. “Do you like the lights? See how they glow?”
Gigi stared at the candle stubs in their perforated tin cans.
“Vivi sleeping,” she said with satisfaction and corked her mouth with her thumb. She put her head back on Peter’s shoulder, and he inhaled the unwashed scent of her hair—white like her mother’s, stringy without a bath since the previous week.
Masha was breathing hard—furious or on the verge of tears or both.
“Petel, I’m begging you to be reasonable. These people will stop at nothing. You must see—”
“Reasonably,” said Peter, “things are bound to get better. It’s always darkest just before dawn—right, Gigi?” She nodded. “We’re almost to a new year. How about this: by spring, when it’s warmer and easier to travel—I’ll consider it. Consider it,” he repeated.
Masha looked at her daughter, stroking the child’s hair over and over.
“They are half Jewish,” she said. “Have you considered what will happen to them if—”
“But you are their mother, and you are Aryan.”
She chewed her lip. “By spring I might be able to get a fourth Ausweis as well.”
“You see?” Peter said. “It will all work out.” He put out his free arm and drew his wife to his side.
“By next Christmas, we will probably all be in London,” he added.
* * *
“Hey, buddy, would you mind stepping aside?”
Peter looked over; the man who owned the shop he was standing in front of waved for Peter to move so the man could unlock the grate.
“Apologies,” said Peter.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s Christmas. Or almost.” The man was gnomic and bald except for tufts of black hair sticking out of his ears. “You window-shopping, handsome?” he said, unlocking the grate. “You wanna come in, pick up something for your wife or sweetheart? I got some great haberdashery.”
“Thank you, no,” said Peter.
He touched the brim of his hat and started walking, then realized he was heading north and needed to go south. He corrected his course. He removed his overcoat despite the chilly air and slung it over one arm—he had perspired through his shirt. His coffee had gone cold; God knew how long he had been standing there. Peter would have been embarrassed if it hadn’t been New York, where people were accustomed to much stranger sights. He took one deep breath, then another. The air smelled of the hot sooty wind from the subway grates, hot dogs from a nearby cart. Peter pitched his coffee into a garbage can. He was in New York and it was 1965 and there wasn’t a bit of snow on the ground. The sun was shining fully now. Peter glanced at his watch; it was almost nine. He would need to truss partridges, make sure the chestnuts were roasted for stuffing and hard sauce had been made for the plum pudding.
He quickened his step down the glittering, gum-spattered sidewalk, then changed his mind at the last minute and hailed a cab. He gave the driver, a turbaned Oriental fellow, an address and sat back. The sitar music spiraling out of the radio reminded Peter of his days as a younger man wandering the city: ashamed of having lost the job at the Oyster Bar but using the freedom, and the wages he had saved, to sample every food he had never had before. Potstickers. Saag paneer and gulab jamun. Chicken in mole sauce. Roti. Shawarma. His favorite had been dim sum in Chinatown, where he could sit at a counter and point at whatever rolled past him on a cart. He remembered his astonishment at being served, in this manner, a broiled, breaded chicken foot.
The cab stopped at the southeast corner of Fifth and Fifty-Seventh, and Peter hopped out. He did have to fight crowds again now—tourists and last-minute shoppers, men who had forgotten to have their secretaries buy gifts for their wives. Peter went through the famous brass doors. Enough was enough. He had to put a stop to this . . . invasion of the past. It was June, he felt quite sure, June was the ticket, with her optimist’s innocence, her lack of appreciation of how bad things could get, her charm and youthful vigor—she was the quintessence of Peter’s adopted country, his fresh American start. Peter had waited long enough; it was time to take a confident step toward the future. Maybe this would do it. He stood looking around Tiffany’s until he identified where the rings were, and then he walked to the glass counter. An associate in a Savile Row suit stepped over.
“May I help you, sir?” he said.