“Lou Jacobi is irksomely sluggish and pathetically lax as the weakling van Daan.”

—A review of the movie The Diary of Anne Frank
by Bosley Crowther

“Is it necessary that Mrs. v. Daan calls me ‘a saint’? I understand that you want to sketch her as hysterical and exaggerating, but I feel a little ashamed.”

—Otto Frank in notes for the playwrights

FOURTEEN

MADELEINE HAD PROPPED THE BIG photograph against the wall in the living room with a kitchen towel tucked behind the blond wood frame so it would not scratch the wall. I had helped choose the picture, but this was the first time I had seen the finished product.

“It turned out well,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

“Very well,” I agreed.

We stood side by side staring at the framed portrait. Our three children stared back at us. The photographer had come to the house several weeks earlier. It had not been an easy afternoon, Madeleine said. David had been cranky. Betsy was getting a cold. Choosing among the proofs had been almost as difficult. If it was a good likeness of Abigail, Betsy’s eyes were closed. When Betsy was at her best, David was sulking. We had finally settled on one that almost did justice to all three, though it did not capture Betsy’s spirit. She was feisty, my middle child, and though she could drive Madeleine and me wild with frustration, I was glad. I did not want any of my children to be too docile. Not that I was looking for troublemakers. I was hoping they would know when to put up a struggle and when to hang back in the shadows. I wanted them to be canny.

In the photograph, they sat in size places, David leaning against Betsy, Abigail with an arm around Betsy’s shoulders. The frame had worked out well too. Madeleine had spent half an afternoon in the shop choosing it. Now all I had to do was hang the portrait above the sofa.

I put my arm around Madeleine’s waist as I went on staring at my three American children, scrubbed, well fed, smiling into the camera as if happiness were their birthright. I am not superstitious, but standing there looking at that picture, I understood peasant women who tie red ribbons on their children to ward off the evil eye and primitives who speak of their offsprings’ ugliness in loud voices to fool jealous gods.

“Handsome little devils, aren’t they?” Madeleine said.

I wanted to tell her to speak more softly.

“I’m glad I decided to let Abigail wear that dress.”

A red ribbon would not have detracted from it.

“What I want to know is where David got that hair,” she said. “Not from either of us. You’re lighter than I am, but neither of us is fair enough to have a towheaded son.”

“My mother had blond hair.”

Madeleine looked up at me in surprise. “You never told me that,” she said, as if I told her anything about my parents.

I shrugged.

“I wish they could have known their grandparents,” she went on, turning back to the photograph. “For the obvious reasons, of course, but something else too. I have the feeling, I know it’s silly, I never even met your parents, but I have the feeling another set of grandparents, a different kind of grandparents, would have made the children, I don’t know, less parochial.”

I did not answer. I was too busy thinking about my mother’s hair. It had been dark brown, streaked with gray the last time I saw her. I could not imagine where the comment about her being blond had come from, but I would not retract it now.

I HAD mistaken the color of my mother’s hair. That was not a criminal offense. Years pass. Memories fade. Thank heavens. Perhaps it would have been different if I had had photographs, though even they lie. I remember a picture taken in the schoolyard in Osnabrück, a row of eight- and nine-year-old boys standing in a line, each with arms around the shoulders of the boys on either side of him. I am in the center, one of the tallest of the group, the strongest-looking, the one with the mean expression. If you look at that picture, you will say, what a bully. But I was not the bully in that photograph. The other boys had been taunting me. Jew, they called me. Yid. Christ-killer. That is why I look so mean. Because I know I am going to cry. But I will not cry. I will not give them the satisfaction. And I did not. Or did I? How can I be sure?

IT HAPPENED again a week later at Madeleine’s parents’ house. It was a Sunday afternoon. Susannah and Norman were there too. We were sitting around the dinner table, and the children were running in and out of the dining room, and there was nothing unusual about the situation. Even the conversation was familiar. My mother-in-law was trying to persuade my father-in-law to shave his mustache.

“Look at Norman,” she said.

We all turned to look at my brother-in-law.

“You see how nice and smooth he looks.”

“Like a baby’s tush,” my father-in-law said.

“Even Peter,” my mother-in-law went on, clearly scraping the bottom of the clean-shaven barrel. My father-in-law loves me like a son. My mother-in-law still regards me as the thief who stole her daughter from a more worthy suitor. Perhaps larceny runs in my family. “You don’t see him with hair on his face.”

“I’m too old to change,” my father-in-law insisted.

“Don’t say that, Daddy,” Susannah said. “Besides, that’s Mommy’s point.” My wife and her sister still call their parents by the terms of childhood. I thought they would stop when they had children of their own, but I was wrong. “You’d look younger without a mustache.”

“You see, Susannah agrees,” my mother-in-law said. “You get rid of that gray mustache, you lose five years. Maybe ten. Am I right, Norman?”

“Five years, definitely,” Norman said.

“And if he did shave it off,” Madeleine said, “if he walked in one night without it, you’d be screaming who’s that stranger in my house.”

The moment Susannah took her mother’s side, I knew Madeleine would espouse her father’s. The constantly shifting alliances in my wife’s family still amaze me. They disagree and conspire and jockey among themselves as if there is no tomorrow, or as if they are sure there will be one. It never occurs to them that there might not be enough time to make amends.

“What about you, Pete?” my father-in-law asked. “You’re the only one hasn’t rung in on the subject.”

They all turned to me. I was a member of the family, even if I was not exactly one of them.

“I admire a mustache,” I said.

My mother-in-law shot a look down the table. I have often thought she would make an excellent military officer.

“My father had a mustache,” I went on.

My father had not had a mustache, any more than my mother had been a blonde. The long mournful face that could twist into humor, or rage, in a moment had been hairless from the top of his high balding forehead to his prominent chin.

We were in the car on the way home, when I realized where I had got the idea. Lou Jacobi, the actor in the movie, the one who steals the bread, had a mustache. It was black and bristly and a little like Hitler’s, come to think of it.

THE INCIDENT that afternoon on the site was of no importance, though at the time it gave me a scare. I thought I was losing my vision, just as years ago I had lost my voice.

I was walking through one of the unfinished houses. It was almost five, and the workmen had left, but Harry was supposed to meet me there. In the distance, a stand of trees, etched black against the pale sheet of late afternoon sky, caught my attention. The trees made the raw earth around me look even more barren. The first thing we did when we moved onto a piece of land was bulldoze everything in sight. I did not like to do it, but I had stopped fighting Harry some time ago. You would be surprised how little people care. As long as they have a kitchen with countertop range and wall oven, a bathroom with twin sinks, and a family room with floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors, they do not care what they see when they look through those doors. They do not care if they have mimosas or chestnuts or oaks or a gouged wasteland to look at. The only reason the stand in the distance had been spared was because it was not on our property.

The trees in the distance reminded me of the park at the end of the Hunzestraat, the one near the flat where we had lived before we disappeared. That was the way our Christian neighbors would have thought of it, no questions asked. The less you knew about others, the better. Before the decree forbidding Jews to enter public parks for fear their uncleanliness would contaminate the benches, my parents had liked to stroll there. I stood in the half-finished house and saw my mother and father walking beneath the distant trees. They were coming toward me slowly, her hand tucked into the angle made by his arm, his long scarecrow’s body listing toward hers. As they drew closer, I recognized the cigarette drooping from his mouth. She was wearing her good black hat with the grosgrain ribbon and jaunty narrow brim. They made their way toward me through the mosaic of light and shadow till we were standing only inches apart. My father’s face was on a level with mine, though I could not see his features. The smoke was too thick for that. He tipped his head back, opened his mouth, and let out a perfect ring. That was the father I remembered.

I turned to my mother. She was shorter than my father and me, and I could not see her face beneath the brim of the hat. I bent my knees and twisted my body to look under it. The sight pushed me back against the raw wooden struts. It was something out of a horror movie. My mother’s face was a blob of blank white flesh. She had no features. She was nothing.

I slid to the unfinished floor and sat with my back against the struts, legs drawn up, face resting on my knees, arms crossed over my head. It was the posture we used to assume when we cowered beneath the falling bombs.

“Hey, pal.”

The words came to me through the explosions going off in my head.

“Are you okay?”

He pried my arms loose from my head.

“Are you okay, pal?”

I opened my eyes. The purple-shadowed jaw, the too-close-together eyes, the bald head beneath a few combed-across strands of dark hair filled my vision. I had never been so happy to see Harry’s unhandsome face. I was not going blind after all.

I DID not make a habit of going to the safe in the closet to count the money I had stashed there. I was not a miser. Nor was I Verfolgungsbedingt, that noxious German word for that sad pathological condition. I merely found it reassuring, every so often, to make sure that things were in order. You never knew when an emergency would arise. The vision of my parents strolling in the Hunzestraat had reminded me of that. And since I was having trouble falling asleep, I decided I might as well use the time productively. There was no point in lying in bed, imagining mayhem in the moving shadows the tree outside the window made on the ceiling. If I faced the night table, the glowing hands of the clock, inching forward, jangled my nerves. If I turned the other way, the sight of my wife, sleeping as I could not, irritated me. She lay on her side, her knees drawn up, her back to me. I lifted the covers gently. Her skin was waxy in the dim moonlight. Her spine made a delicate outline beneath it. How easily it would snap. I could almost hear the sound of it breaking. I smoothed the covers over her, climbed out of bed, and made my way out of the room. I was careful to close the door before I switched on the hall light. The clean-laundry smell was bracing. The numbers clicked into place. The door swung open.

I took out the passport and checked the expiration date. I knew it by heart, but I liked to see it in black and white. I have not got where I am by being careless. I returned it to the safe and drew out the manila envelopes. There were two of them now. I did not want big bills. I opened the first envelope. The twenties, fifties, and hundreds, not suspiciously crisp and new, but reassuringly worn, were sorted by denomination and held together by rubber bands. I went through the piles, slipping off the bands, counting the bills, making a mental note of the tally, replacing the rubber band, and going on to the next. Everything added up properly. I put the bundles back in the envelope, fastened the flap, and opened the second one. It contained the same amount. I had divided the bills evenly. I began counting. When I finished, I was a hundred and seventy dollars short. I started over. This time I was missing two hundred and twenty. I did not understand it. No one else knew the combination to the safe. I still had not got around to giving it to Madeleine, though I swore I would do it first thing in the morning. I went through the money a third time. Now I was three hundred over what should have been there. This was insane. I am not bad with figures, but I could not make these bills add up. I went downstairs to the kitchen. I did not want to risk going back to the bedroom and waking Madeleine. I took a pad from the small desk in the corner and a pencil from the cup Abigail had made in school, and climbed to the upstairs hall again. The sight of the open linen closet, towels jumbled, safe yawning, gave me a start. I knew it had not been ransacked. The disorder was my doing. But that was the way it looked. I took out the envelope that refused to add up, closed the safe, and spun the lock. I even straightened the towels and closed the closet door. I wanted to be able to concentrate on counting the bills, and the sight of the seemingly looted safe was disturbing.

I sat on the floor under the overhead light with the envelope, pencil, and pad. I knew it was foolish. The money could not have gone anywhere. The fact that I got a different sum each time meant the fault was mine. But I had to make it come out right. If I could not count on this, what could I count on?

I began the tally again. This time I wrote down the amount of each bundle after I counted it. I had gone through three stacks of twenties and one of fifties when the door to the girls’ bedroom opened. Abigail stood in the framed rectangle. The darkness behind her outlined her white nightgown and sleep-pale face. She was a ghostly photographic negative of herself.

She blinked against the light and rubbed an eye with one fist. “Water,” she said, and the word opened into a yawn.

I stood, and we went together into the bathroom, her sleep-tangled hair brushing my pajamas as she leaned against me. At the sink, she lifted her head to drink from the plastic glass rimmed with daisies, and her Adam’s apple pulsed like a heartbeat. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and we started back across the hall. Her small pink feet crackled the bills I had left on the carpet. She looked down at them.

“What’s that?”

I stood gazing at her upturned face. It was sleepy but inquisitive. She was old enough to know. Children younger than she had survived on their own. I sat on the floor, took her hand, and pulled her down beside me.

“It’s money,” I explained. “Money I put away in case we ever have to run.”

The eyes she turned up to me were crusted with sleep. “Run?”

“Leave here. Go someplace else.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes people have to. This is to make sure that if we have to, Mommy and you and Betsy and David and me, all of us together, we can. My daddy didn’t think ahead, but I have. So you don’t have to be afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Anything.”

She picked up a hundred-dollar bill and sat staring at it dumbly.

“Do you want to help me count it?”

Her head drooped forward. I took it as an assent.

“Come on. I’ll count, and you write down the numbers.”

Her head slumped against my shoulder. I put the pencil in her hand.

“We’ll have to start over. I lost track when I got up.” I arranged the piles of money in neat rows, took the first stack of hundreds, and slipped off the rubber band. Her head drooped lower against my arm. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

She lifted her head. I began counting. “Three thousand,” I said when I finished the first stack. I had to shake her gently to get her to write the number on the pad. “Write a three and three zeros.” As I picked up another bundle of bills, I heard the door open behind me.

“What are you doing?” Madeleine’s bare feet were beside me on the carpet. She swooped down and picked up a bundle of bills. “What on earth are you doing?”

“I was thirsty,” Abigail said. My firstborn was loyal, or perhaps she simply misunderstood her mother and thought the anger was directed at her.

“She got up for a glass of water, and I thought it would be fun for her to help me.”

“Fun for her to help you! Count money? At one-thirty in the morning? Are you out of—” She stopped and stood looking down at me. I said nothing. I was not going to defend myself for taking care of her and the children.

She reached down, took Abigail’s hand, and drew her to her feet. “Come on, sweetie, back to bed.”

I was still on the floor with the piles of money when Madeleine came out of the girls’ room and closed the door behind her.

“I’ll be finished in a minute,” I told her, before she could say anything.

She crossed the hall, went into our bedroom, and closed that door without a word. I was sorry she was annoyed, but I had to get the money to come out correctly. I started from the beginning again. This time it all added up.

THE NEXT evening I brought Madeleine a dozen roses. She thanked me, and said they were beautiful, and asked me to get the tall vase down from the top cabinet for them. I was relieved. I had been afraid she would be brooding about the night before, though I still could not see what was wrong with a man trying to take care of his family.

While she ran water into the vase and arranged the flowers, I turned to the pile of mail she had been going through when I walked in. It was the usual assortment, a few bills, a flyer from a carpet-cleaning establishment and another from an exterminator, a letter from the local chapter of a Jewish organization thanking me for my contribution. Even that was not out of the ordinary. I made donations to Catholic Charities and the Boy Scouts, the United Fund and the United Jewish Appeal, to name only a few, and the various recipients sent back letters thanking me for my generosity. This particular letter also told me about the good deeds my money would effect and wished me and my family G-D’s blessings. As I stood staring down at the letter, I understood Madeleine’s high spirits.

The first time I saw the eviscerated word was in a newsletter lying on a table in Madeleine’s parents’ house, though at the time I still thought of it as Susannah’s parents’ house. It was the moment, Madeleine would tell me later, when she knew that Susannah would never marry me, and she would.

“What’s this?” I asked, pointing to one of the scores of G-dash-Ds scattered over the page.

“God,” Susannah said.

It could not be a typographical error. It occurred too often. “Then why don’t they just write it?”

“You’re not supposed to spell out the word.”

“Why aren’t you supposed to spell out the word?” I wasn’t arguing with her. I was curious.

“It’s blasphemy.”

“It’s blasphemy if you say goddamn. It’s not blasphemy if”—I glanced down at one sentence—“you’re writing about being grateful to God.”

“That’s just the way it is,” Susannah insisted.

“That’s not an answer,” Madeleine said. Until then I had forgotten she was in the room. In those days, Susannah had that effect on me.

I turned from her to Madeleine. She shook her head in annoyance at herself. “All my life I’ve been reading G-dash-D, and I never even thought about it. Even after Anthropology 101, I didn’t think about it. But now you make me see how absurd it is.”

I was sorry I had said anything. Susannah could write God backward and upside down, for all I cared. Spelling was not what I was after.

“What does Anthropology 101 have to do with it?” Susannah asked.

“Explain it to her, Peter.”

I did not have to explain it to Susannah. She knew what her sister and I were driving at. Superstition and primitive practices and graven images. The words, suspended in the air, waiting to be plucked from it, frightened Susannah. They intrigued Madeleine. The fact that I had summoned them thrilled her. That was why she had not objected to the flowers I had brought her. Last night, she had come out of the bedroom and stumbled upon a husband whose universe was shrinking to the size of a one-foot-square wall safe. This evening, she had opened a letter and rediscovered a boy who had promised, and threatened, a larger world. The memory must have had a gasp of life in it still, because as she passed me on her way to the living room to put the vase of roses in the bay window, she went up on her toes to kiss me in thanks, or maybe for no reason at all.

I HAD been right to bring Madeleine flowers the day after she caught me counting money with Abigail, but I came home empty-handed the following week. This time she did not tell me not to bring her anything, but I knew.

The girls were never in danger, no matter what she said, though I suppose I should not have left them alone in the car. But if I dashed into Korvettes for the roll of film on my own, I could be back in three minutes. If I had them in tow, it would take at least half an hour. Betsy would try to drag me toward the aisles lined with plastic toys, and Abigail would come to a covetous halt in front of the cheap jewelry. It would be easier to dash in, grab the film, and be back in a minute. They were not infants. It was broad daylight.

I found a space two rows down from the entrance, told them I would be right back, got out of the car, and started across the parking lot. Inside, I headed straight for the film. There were no other customers at the counter. I was on my way out the door before I knew it. I stopped only long enough to hold it for a woman with two toddlers in tow. How could I not?

The rest of the story is so foolish I am ashamed to remember it. It was a comedy, really. The kind of thing Dussel the fool would do, if the playwrights transported him to the suburbs of America. Dussel would lose his wits in the big sprawling parking lot of the new E. J. Korvettes, and the audience would laugh, and it would all work out in the end, as it did. But I am not a fool like Dussel, and I would not have lost my wits that afternoon, if it were not for the girls. Madeleine was wrong when she accused me of irresponsibility. Actually, she used a stronger word than that, but she was upset and did not know what she was saying. If I had not been worried sick about the girls, I would not have gone half crazy when I misplaced the car, and the rest would never have happened.

I started across the parking lot. You had to hand it to the company. It was not just the discounts, it was the ease. There must have been room for eight hundred, maybe a thousand cars. I sprinted down the row looking for my Cadillac. Harry had finally won me over. I was halfway to the end of the line before I realized I was in the wrong row. I cut through the parked cars, and started up the next aisle.

The rest is an old story. It happens every day. People come out of a different door from the one they entered, misplace their cars, and wander around cursing their own stupidity until they find it. I did a lot of cursing that afternoon. I also did a lot of running, up one row, down the other. I stopped at every maroon car, even the ones that were not Cadillacs. I peered into every dark Cadillac. None of them had two little girls inside.

I stopped running and stood for a minute. The sun pressed down on my head like a steel helmet. Sweat stung my eyes. I took off my dark glasses to wipe them. The light glinting off shiny bumpers and bright hoods was blinding. I put my glasses back on.

I had to remain calm. My daughters were here, somewhere, safe in the car. I tried to remember if I had left the windows open. But they were not infants. If they were too hot, they would roll down a window. Except the car had those new push-button windows. I saw my two little girls sprawled lifeless across the seats. In the heat and glare, the image wavered into thousands of lifeless little-girl bodies strewn over a gray landscape. I started to run again.

A police car cruised by. I raised my arm to hail it, then caught sight of the men inside. Their faces were pitiless masks. In place of eyes, they had flat silver disks that shot sunlight. I imagined the guns strapped to their brutal sides. I dropped my hand and started to run again.

I could feel the big breakfast Madeleine had made me rising in my chest. I spat out a mouthful of saliva. The taste of stale bacon grease coated my mouth. I spat again. I felt my knees begin to buckle and grabbed the hood of a car for support, but I could not control my insides. My body convulsed. My breakfast spewed out. I felt like the fools who, when the camps were liberated, had refused to listen to reason and stuffed themselves with food their bodies could not accept.

The car stopped beside me. I turned to face it. From under peaked caps, four silver disks glared at me. One of the cops had a handlebar mustache. It trembled around his words. “You okay, sir?”

The sir did not fool me. I told him I was fine.

“Sure you don’t need any help?”

I shook my head back and forth. I was afraid if I opened my mouth to speak, I would throw up again, or tell them to stay the hell out of my business.

The cop with the mustache looked at the one behind the wheel. The driver shrugged. The car purred off.

I waited until it was out of sight to start running again. Only after I covered the entire lot in what I always think of as the front of the building did I remember there was another lot in the back. My daughters were where I had left them, a little way down the second row.

“You were in there forever.” Betsy dragged out the last word.

I told them about getting mixed up. I made it sound like a joke. Wasn’t daddy silly? They thought it was hilarious. Guess what Daddy did, they burst into the house shouting. That was how Madeleine found out about it. I would not have been foolish enough to tell her myself.

THE NEXT incident was even more absurd. It never would have happened if it had not been for those damn cops cruising the Korvettes parking lot the week before. You okay? they asked, as if they gave a damn. Sir, they called me, as if they wouldn’t throw me into a stinking cell at the drop of a hat, or an order from above, or just for fun.

I know what I sound like, but I am not Verfolgungsbedingt. If I were, would I have built a successful company, and raised a family, and become a pillar of the community? The National Association of Home Builders does not give awards to men haunted by the past. I do not condemn those poor souls for their problems. I wish them every aid and compensation, though what can compensate for such acts I cannot imagine. But I am not one of them.

I was alone in the house with David that afternoon. That is another thing. You do not leave a baby alone with someone about whom you can use the term Verfolgungsbedingt. Madeleine never would have gone out with the girls and left me with David, if I had been behaving dangerously. I would not have let her, if I thought I might hurt him.

David was upstairs napping. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of iced coffee left over from lunch and the Times crossword puzzle. People with the kind of symptoms judged Verfolgungsbedingt do not do crossword puzzles either. I had started doing them recently, though I had not looked at one since those endless hours in the annex. No doubt my old friend Gabor would make something of that. He would be wrong. I simply had more time these days. That was also the reason I had taken down the diary and reread it. That, and the fact that I wanted to make sure there was nothing in it about my father’s stealing bread. There was not, of course. The absence was reassuring. The movie would fade. It was not even in the theaters anymore. The play would die. All those European companies could not go on forever. If anything endured, it would be the book. The view of a thirteen-year-old girl might not be as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it was not the pack of lies the play and movie had fashioned.

One sequence in the book did disturb me, though. It was the night I neglected to unbolt the door, so that the next morning Kugler and the workmen could not get in. I had put the incident out of my mind. It was unimportant. It had not given us away. But now it had come back. Sometimes, when I was sitting in a meeting or driving down the highway, I could hardly keep from groaning at the memory. One night when I went down to lock up the house on Seminole Road, I saw the accusing faces of the inhabitants of the annex staring back at me from the dark windows.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I meant to unlock it. I thought I had unlocked it.”

“What did you say?” Madeleine called from the upstairs hall.

I told her I had not spoken. It was the television, which we had neglected to turn off.

The heavy brass knocker thudded against the front door. I lifted my head from the crossword puzzle. No one in Indian Hills used front doors. People came up the driveway, through the garage, and into the family room. The morning I forgot to unbolt the door, Kugler did not bang on it either. No one was supposed to be inside. He went next door and broke the glass to the kitchen window in the office. Who was to say someone had not seen him? Just because no one came that morning did not mean I was not guilty of giving us away the night before. The Green Police had not pounded on the door, but banging on the door was what we were expecting. The director of the movie was right about that. At night, in our sleep, we dreamed the noise. During the day, we imagined it. Shh, we said. What was that? we asked one another. Did you hear something at the door?

The brass knocker sounded again. I was glad Madeleine and the girls were not home. I only hoped she would see the truck on the street from a distance and have the sense to turn back or keep going past. I should have drilled her. I had gone over it in my mind again and again, but I never told her what to do. I had not wanted to frighten her.

That was ridiculous. No one was hunting us. I was not in hiding. This was a clean, well-maintained, fully-paid-for house in America, not a vermin-infested secret annex on a murky canal in Amsterdam. The refrigerator hummed. The Dutch girl in the shape of a cookie jar smiled. The cat we called Mouschi slept on a chair beside me. Even he was not the real Mouschi, but a cat I had adopted after the play closed, a cat who had been trained to walk across a stage, and knock over a saucer of milk, and do any number of nifty tricks on command. The children were wild about him.

The knocker struck the brass plate again. Mouschi’s ears lifted into twin pink-lined triangles. Yellow stars for the Jews, pink triangles for the fairies. Stop it, I warned myself, but I could not help standing. I was careful not to scrape the legs of the chair on the linoleum floor. I crossed the kitchen on tiptoe. When I reached the living room carpet, I stepped over the spot at the bottom of the stairs that always creaks, then hugged the wall on the left to stay out of the line of vision from the long, narrow window next to the door.

I had to stoop to look out the peephole. From under a peaked cap, a white face, the features squashed wide and flat and vicious by the distorting glass of the tiny opening, stared back at me. I could not make out the insignia on the cap. It did not matter. The last time they had come in civilian suits, except for the one who had dumped Anne’s diary out of the briefcase and stuffed the money and jewelry into it. He was the only one in uniform. The rough green fabric was slimy with dirt. Even the Green Police were short of soap by that time.

I went on peering through the peephole. This uniform was blue. A new division. Old tricks in new uniforms.

He lifted his hand. The peephole turned dark. The door vibrated against my face as he brought the knocker down. I jumped back.

I would have preferred to go down to the basement. My workbench was well stocked with hammers and saws and heavy tools. I had carried a hammer when I went downstairs to find the burglar with my father and Otto. I had used an axe in the barn. But I did not have time to go to the basement.

Hugging the wall again, I returned to the kitchen and ducked across it to the drawer next to the sink where Madeleine keeps the bread and carving and other serious knives. The carving knife would go in easily, but the ragged edge of the bread knife would be more effective. I took one in each hand, just to be safe. On my way back to the living room, I was careful to step around the squeaky spot again.

He was standing at the bottom of the two steps now, staring toward the garage. I had left the door open the night before. He could see the car. He knew I was in here. David and I both. Goddammit, would I never learn? I should have closed the garage. Just as I should have unlocked the door to the annex for Kugler and the workmen to get in.

He climbed the steps to the door again. The closer he got, the more misshapen his face grew. This one would want more than money and jewelry. This one was a killer.

He lifted his hand again. This time it didn’t cut off my view. I saw it move to the bell. The noise sizzled through the house. The sound died. The house held its breath. The man lifted his arm again, but before he could press the bell, another sound split the silence. My son howled in protest.

I took the stairs two at a time and burst into his room. My son lay on his back in the crib, arms and legs boxing the air, chest heaving like a small earthquake, mouth open to let out his outrage.

“Shh,” I pleaded into the crib. “Shh.” But he went on howling.

Everyone knew the stories. The mother who put a hand over a child’s face to stifle the cry so the SS would not hear, and felt the body go limp in her arms. The father who suffocated a screaming baby to save two older children. But I would not think of the stories.

I hovered over the crib, a knife in each hand. “Be quiet,” I hissed.

My son looked up at me. The sound stopped. Sleep-crusted lids blinked over inky blue eyes. I held my breath. He blinked again. I exhaled. He opened his mouth. The sound shook the walls.

I reached into the crib. The light from the window glinted off the carving knife, bright and silvery as a toy. My son’s eyes darted to it. His hand reached for it. I pulled it away. He shrieked. The bell rang. The knife dangled over him. He howled and strained his small furious body toward the knife. I pulled it away from him. The bell rang again. Longer this time. The son-of-a-bitch was leaning on it. David shrieked. I lifted the knife high above the crib.

The bell stopped. My son blinked. His mouth closed. The house shuddered into silence. I sensed something above the crib, a bright sparkling mobile. I looked up and saw the knife in my hand. I pulled my arm back, dropped the knife on the floor, noticed the knife in my other hand, and dropped that too. I reached into the crib and picked up my son. I was still holding him when I heard Madeleine’s car pull into the garage. I took both knives in one hand, carried them and David down to the kitchen, and slid them into the drawer, careful to put them back in the same slots. She would never know they had been taken out.

On my way out of the kitchen, I noticed an envelope sticking out from under the front door. Still holding my son, I bent, picked it up, and tore it open. Our local Police Athletic League wanted a contribution.