“On October 23—one day after the ‘Aryanization’ decree—a notary . . . was asked, at Otto’s instigation, to register a new company. . . . Kugler was given as its managing director and J. A. Gies . . . a supervisory director. . . . The paid-up shares . . . were issued to Kugler and Gies. The business was thus wholly ‘Aryan,’ at least officially, but in practice the actual ownership of the company remained vested in Otto Frank.”
—The Diary of Anne Frank:
The Critical Edition
WHEN THE DOOR TO HARRY’S OFFICE opened and he stepped into the hall, I knew the timing was not accidental. He had been waiting for me to come out of my own office. He wanted to talk to me, but he did not want to appear as if he wanted to talk to me. If I had intended to take advantage of Harry when we started out, which I definitely had not, it would not have been difficult.
He fell in step beside me, a balding man with a perpetual purple shadow on his jaw and a bulky bottom-heavy body that reminded me of my daughter’s rubber Shmoo. The toy is weighted at the feet so that every time Abigail pushes it over, it pops back up.
“How’s the throat, pal?” When I first knew Harry, he used to call me boychick, but after he found out I wasn’t Jewish, he switched to pal. He also stopped peppering his conversation with Yiddish expressions, at least when he was with me. His voice now was elaborately casual, but I knew he was worried. Banks and businesses do not like to extend credit to invalids. No one wants to buy a house from a man who is here today and gone tomorrow.
“Getting better every day,” I said, as we came out of the building into the parking lot.
“Great, great.” He reached up and pounded my shoulder. “So they found the problem?”
They did not exactly find it, pal. They just named it. Aphonia, Dr. Gabor called it. I had no intention of telling Harry that. I had not even told him about Dr. Gabor. Harry is not a callous man. He has, if anything, a reverence for illness. He speaks of heart attacks and strokes in hushed tones. He does not use the word cancer at all. The big C is as close as he gets to naming it. Harry believes in the power of words. He might even appreciate aphonia, so musical and medical in the same breath. But then I would have to explain that it is not a physical illness, only the description of the absence of one. That would distress him. He prefers his diseases to be observable under a microscope, or detectable on an X-ray, or measurable by a machine.
“No need to worry,” I told him. “It is not communicative. I mean communicable,” I corrected myself and laughed to show it was a joke.
He smoothed the dark hair he had begun, in the past year, to comb across the crown of his head. “The only reason I ask, pal, is that people keep asking me. I ran into George Johnson this morning. He wanted to know how my partner was, and I didn’t know what the hell to tell him.”
“Tell George and everyone else I am just fine. Getting better every day. You can hear how much stronger my voice is,” I croaked into the dusk.
We had reached Harry’s car, a robin’s egg blue Coupe de Ville, hot off the assembly line, and the sight of that blinding chrome and those curvy fenders that would not be out of place in a burlesque house took his mind off my problems.
“Is she a beauty or is she a beauty?” he asked. I agreed that she was. He pulled open the door and folded himself into the soft upholstery that smelled good enough to eat. “Maybe you should take up these,” he said, as he drew a crushed package of Lucky Strikes from his pocket and pushed the lighter into the winking dashboard. “It wouldn’t help your throat, but at least it would give you an excuse for it.”
He held the glowing tip of the lighter to the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and exhaled. The aroma of tobacco floated toward me, sweeter than the smell of new leather, stronger than the acrid fumes of the passing traffic. I grabbed on to the baby blue door of Harry’s car to keep from doubling over.
You know why we have no money for food, Putti? Because it goes up in smoke. The smoke from your filthy cigarettes.
The pain disappeared as suddenly as it had come, but I knew I had not imagined it. I stood in the gathering twilight sweating with fear. Dr. Gabor and the other doctors were wrong. The pain had been too sharp to be psychosomatic. It must be the symptom of a fatal disease.
I WAS ten minutes late for my appointment with Dr. Gabor. I blamed it on Harry.
“My partner had some matters he wanted to go over,” I said.
“Problems?”
“Just business.”
“You and your partner get along?”
I nodded.
“How did you come to go into business together?”
In the DP camp, if they talked about the past at all, they talked about ifs. If I had been in the front of the line that morning and not at the end. If I had hung back instead of stepping forward. If I had not been the first to start unbuttoning my pants when the SS came through the train. Gradually the ifs led to theories. I survived because I was careful. I lived because I took chances. But beneath those convictions about the effectiveness of certain behavior, going hand-in-contradictory-hand with them, was a fearsome respect for chance. Chance brought me together with Harry Wolfe—“Like the animal, but with an e,” he said when he introduced himself—but I took advantage of him. I mean of it, of the situation.
“Harry owned a parcel of land,” I rasped. “I had saved a little money and was looking for a business.”
It was not a lie. I had saved money, every penny I had made waiting tables and driving a cab. But that was not why Harry took me on. He did not need my money. He needed me. That was not my fault.
“He was the first friend I made in America.”
Harry had been a regular at the restaurant where I worked. That was before he married. He used to come in three or four times a week, occasionally with a girl or another man, but usually alone. He kept company with his papers and documents and brochures. I used to sneak glances at them as I served his dinner and cleared his plates. “Guidelines of the Federal Housing Administration.” “Prefabrication Methods and the Rate of Housing Starts.” “Mortgage Financing as the Key to High Production.”
One night he caught me looking at them. “Wave of the future.” He tapped the brochure with his knife. “This housing shortage isn’t going away anytime soon.”
I nodded and went off to take care of other tables.
“Since the war,” he said when I returned, “every Joe and his little woman want a house of their own. More to the point, the government says they’re entitled to a house of their own. It’s part of the GI Bill of Rights.”
I knew about the Bill of Rights. I had already begun to study for my citizenship exam, though I would not be eligible for more than four years. But strange as it seems to me now, I had never heard of the GI Bill of Rights.
“You know where they want their houses?” Harry said when I returned with his coffee and pie. I was not hovering. I was merely doing my job. “Not here in the city where the kids will grow up not even knowing what a blade of grass looks like, unless their parents schlep them to Prospect Park. Not in the towns they came from where the houses are old and need work and have one lousy bathroom with worse plumbing for the whole family. They want them in the suburbs. Brand-new, never-before-lived-in houses in spanking-new suburbs. Where the kids have a whole yard to play in. And the little woman has a shiny new kitchen with all the latest appliances. And you don’t have to worry about your property values, because all the houses look just like yours, and all your neighbors are just like you, or at least free, white, and twenty-one.”
I told him I had read that a couple of men named Levitt were planning something like that on Long Island. His eyes, which were set a little too close to instill trust, narrowed, as if he were taking me in for the first time, and I knew he was surprised. I was not just a greenie waiting tables. I might even be smarter than I looked.
Remember when he first arrived, Anne, that morning when we were all at breakfast? What a dope, you said. He won’t amount to much.
Margot! I never said that.
A week later Harry told me he had an extra ticket to the Yankees and the Dodgers at Yankee Stadium and wanted to know if I was interested. I did not like taking off a whole night from work, but something about Harry smacked of opportunity. My boss was always saying that if I kept on the way I was going, I could count on a job waiting tables for the rest of my life. I told Harry I had never been to an American baseball game and would like very much to go.
“Good,” he said, “only it’s not baseball, it’s pro football. Don’t worry, boychick, it’s a normal mistake. Anyone could make it.”
After that, Harry got in the habit of lingering until the other customers had left. Then he would tell me to pour myself a cup of coffee and cut myself a slice of pie on him, and take a load off my feet. You did not have to be a greenie living alone in a basement room with an eye out for the main chance to know Harry Wolfe was a lonely man. I would do as he said, and we would talk. Or rather Harry would talk and I would listen. Harry was to me what night school was to the waiters and cabdrivers who were in less of a rush. He was where I learned that the GI Bill of Rights made it possible for returning servicemen to go to college, and start businesses, and, here was the best part, buy houses, or, as Harry put it, become homeowners. I learned about government incentives for bankers to issue low-interest mortgages to veterans, and government guarantees that the bankers would recover a portion of their investment if the veterans defaulted. I learned about the vagaries of building codes that could dictate to Harry the pitch of a roof or the thickness of a wall, and the selfishness of county planning boards who were more interested in luring tax-paying corporations than honest-to-goodness vets, who would need schools and sewers and other expensive services. I learned more about the Levitts, who were Harry’s professional heroes and would become his personal nemesis. The Levitts, Harry said, were Jews. I registered the information, but I did not react to it. And most important of all, I learned how, thanks to all those government programs, bankers would make production advances to builders as work progressed, so someone like Harry—even someone like me, Harry added with a wink—did not need a bundle to go into business on his own.
But gradually the word when began to creep into Harry’s sure thing, and then if began to replace when. Not the instructive if of past experience that the DPs had clung to like rabbits’ feet, but the regretful if of lost opportunity. The bankers were stalling him, he said. The local planning boards would not give him the time of day. Every time he changed the architectural plans or specifications to meet one code, some son-of-a-bitch came up with another he had never heard of.
“Makes you wonder what we fought a war for,” Harry said one night as we were walking up Fulton Street. The wind knifed off the East River and sliced through us. Steel grates rattled on the windows of closed shops. An emaciated Christmas tree grew out of a metal trash can.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we sent millions of guys over there to knock out Hitler, but nobody lifts a finger to fight it at home.”
“It?”
“Anti-Semitism, boychick. Jew-hating, Jew-baiting, Jews need not apply, no dogs and Jews, get those sheeny bastard Christ-killers out of here.”
“What about the Levitts? They get the loans. They get planning board approval.” I tried to sound nonchalant, like a man who abhorred injustice, rather than a victim with a vested interest.
“That’s just the problem. The Levitts have bought up half the potato farms on Long Island. I want to build twenty, thirty homes. They’re talking two or three thousand. Maybe more.”
Harry underestimated his heroes that night. Their first development eventually numbered more than seventeen thousand units. I should have told Dr. Gabor that. He would not have been so in awe of my accomplishments. But I had no intention of telling him about my arrangement with Harry. Not even my wife knew the original reason we went into business together.
“The point is,” Harry went on, “the Levitts just make it harder for little guys like me. People look at them and say, ‘Uh-oh, the Jews are taking over the building industry.’ ‘Watch out, the Yids are buying up the area.’ Then they start stonewalling guys like me.”
We walked on for another block or two. I asked if he was sure he was not imagining it. He said he knew it when it hit him on the head. I asked about the ten acres he had an option on in New Jersey. He described the location again. I asked a few more details, though I already knew them by heart. But all the time I was questioning him, I was arguing with myself. I could not do it. It was not right. But other people had.
The gentlemen from Frankfurt are coming.
Kugler will have to see them.
Kugler’s not up to it.
Kugler’s all we have. It’s an Aryan business now, remember.
No, I could not do it. It would be wrong.
We stopped at a corner to wait for the light to change. Another Christmas tree sprouted from another trash can. Silver tinsel clung to the branches for dear life.
On the other hand, I would not be hurting anyone. I would be doing Harry a service. I would also be striking a blow for justice. And for Jews. Or a Jew. At least, I would outwit the odds stacked against him. The more I thought about it, the more right it seemed. The more I turned the plan around in my mind, the more foolproof I knew it was. We walked on, Harry hunched under the weight of his worries, me galloping beside him on a white horse, my armor clanking and rattling in the winter wind.
“Maybe I can help,” I said.
He stopped walking as I started to explain the plan. I was surprised I remembered the details my father and Mr. Frank had worked out with the employees. I had forgotten so much else. Harry would incorporate, and I would buy some of the shares with the money I had already saved, and V, for van Pels, and W, for Wolfe, Construction would have one gentile partner, me, who would be extremely visible, and one Jewish, Harry, who could fade into the background when necessary.
“Well, I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” he kept repeating as we stood in the pasty light of a neon sign for Hebrew National frankfurters. “Well, I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch.”
“You could have fooled me,” he said half an hour later, when we were sitting at a greasy table in an all-night restaurant. In the glare of the overhead lights, his stubbled jaw look sore, and his eyes were wary. Who could blame him? A man does not sign away half his dream without second thoughts. But I had gone over the plan several times, and he had not been able to find a flaw.
“Fooled you about what?” I asked. “That a greenie straight off the boat could come up with a plan like this?” I could use the word now that it was receding into my past.
“Nah, I always knew you were a smart kid. Maybe that was why I figured you were Jewish. I thought you changed your name, but I guess I should have known. It’s one thing to go from Moscowitz to Miller, but van Pels is too swanky. You start out life Rabinowitz, you don’t suddenly become Roosevelt. Not that it makes a difference. To me, I mean.”
It made no difference to him, but suddenly there were no more Jewish jokes. “So these three rabbis meet in a whorehouse . . .” There were no more slurs. “If that guy thinks he can Jew me down . . .” There were no more boasts. “You should have seen me Jew that guy down.” He still liked me. He must have trusted me. But he was less easy with me.
The men he had been complaining about were a different story. The bankers were happy to make government-backed loans to Peter van Pels, and the local councilmen and aldermen picked up my calls and pocketed my payoffs. Some of them wondered how I had got caught up in that mess in Europe, but nobody wanted to ask. They were relieved to find a good Christian who had stood up to Hitler and to be able to deal with him rather than some of the others. I was living proof they had nothing against foreigners. I was, George Johnson joked after we signed the papers for the first loan, their own private Marshall Plan.
“I had money to invest,” I told Dr. Gabor, “but it was more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have always been good with my hands.”
“Surely you’ve progressed beyond that.”
“It was my idea that put us ahead of the competition.” If Harry ever forgot that, I was there to remind him. I was more than just a front man.
“What idea was that?”
“We build a bigger house and sell it for the same price. And not by cutting quality.”
“Then how do you do it?” The owl eyes regarded me with interest. He had the intellectual’s secret respect for practical expertise.
“It was simple,” I told him. It was, as I said, so simple I had been amazed no one else had thought of it. But then no one else had Susannah. At least not in those days.
“Space inside a house is cheap. About one-third as expensive as the overall cost per square foot. And it does not require more plumbing or wiring or windows. The others are catching on now, but we were the first to do it.”
“And you say the idea just came to you?”
“Out of the blue,” I answered.
More accurately, the slate blue of Susannah’s eyes, but Susannah was one more subject I had no intention of taking up with the doctor.
“Business is good,” I went on. “The company is solid. Whatever is wrong with my voice does not have to do with that.”
He sat watching me. The moment of curiosity had passed. The balance between us had shifted again.
“Have you ever sought psychiatric help in the past, Mr. van Pels?”
I shook my head no.
“Not even when you developed the tremors.”
“I knew the doctor was wrong. The last thing I wanted was to go back to that DP camp.”
“What about the camp? A psychological evaluation was usually part of the process of getting a visa.”
He was a clever devil, all right. They called it an evaluation. Obstacle course would be more like it. The psychological exam was even more treacherous than the physical. At least there you knew what they were looking for. A lesion on the lung. A spirochete in the blood. But who knew what these civilians with their incomprehensible titles—psychiatric social worker, master of social work, doctor of psychology—were after? Who could guess what answer would keep you out, what word would give you away? Who could even concentrate on the questions in that office where SS officers had once issued their orders and kept their records? That was where they held the evaluations. I often wondered who had got the bright idea of housing a DP camp in an old SS barracks. Was it a cutup with a wicked sense of irony or merely a pragmatist who had spotted a prime physical plant? Probably the latter. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency ran the operation, but America called the shots.
As I stepped into the office, I heard the gunshot crack of boots snapping to attention. As I took the seat I was directed to, I heard the guttural growl of threats and the sibilant whisper of lethal secret plans. But the man sitting across the desk from me that morning was not a German officer. He was an American civilian. STANLEY MINTZ, M.S.W. the brass nameplate on his desk said. He stroked the nameplate with his fingers as he asked me questions.
“Do you feel guilty?”
“Guilty?” I repeated.
“Guilty.” Mintz lifted his fingers from the nameplate, picked up an English-German dictionary, and began leafing through it.
“I know what the word means.” The anger in my voice frightened me. It was a luxury I could not afford.
Mintz put down the dictionary and leaned back in his chair. “You’re not going to get anywhere with a chip on your shoulder, young man.”
I did not answer.
“Well, do you? Feel guilty, I mean. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a perfectly normal response.”
I sat staring at the nameplate. It was a long metal triangle with a wide base and a sharp top. I felt the weight in my hand. I saw it crashing into Mintz’s head. The blood burst into bloom like a flower. Mintz’s eyes opened, wide and dead as coins, just like the eyes of the man in the barn.
Forget guilt, let’s talk about revenge, I should have said.
“No,” I told Stanley Mintz.
“No,” I repeated to Dr. Gabor now. “I never sought psychiatric help. Why would I?”