AT FOUR O’CLOCK ROUNDS, WHEN I FOUND DR. SOLOMON in terrible pain, I enjoyed seeing her writhe and squirm. I resented the morphine for bringing her peace, then regretted there wasn’t enough in the syringe to snuff her out. The vengeful feelings terrified me. Who was I, what was I becoming? First that librarian, and now this. Already wobbly from spending the hot summer on my own, I’d been knocked off my axis by Mildred Solomon’s arrival. All day I’d been suppressing my anxiety over tomorrow’s appointment with Dr. Feldman. I kept telling myself to keep it together until I got out of work, that I could fall apart once I got her on the phone in Florida, knowing her words could put me back together.
I hurried home, desperate to get behind the closed door of our apartment, to hear her voice, to know I wasn’t alone. I let the phone ring and ring but still no answer. It was eight o’clock at night, where could she be? I began to panic, anxiety capitalizing on my old fears of being abandoned. It was as if she’d dropped off the end of the earth and left me behind, the same way Sam left me behind, again and again.
It seemed the refrain of my life: when had I last seen my brother? At least I had something to remember him by. I went into my room, grabbed the leather handle on the side of the steamer trunk at the foot of my bed, and tipped it up on end. Undoing the clasps, I opened it like a book on its spine. Behind the curtain where dresses once hung, I now stored folded quilts layered with mothballs. On the other side, each drawer that once held gloves or stockings was now dedicated to a different person’s correspondence. From Dr. and Mrs. Abrams there were letters of encouragement while I was in nursing school, annual holiday cards, his obituary clipped from the Denver Post. From Simon I’d saved the childish notes that matured over the years until, at last, his heartbroken mother had mailed me his military portrait along with the carvings I’d sent each year on his birthday, saying in her letter that he’d wanted me to have them. There was Mary’s drawer, which I preserved like a museum. In another, my collection of movie ticket stubs, torn reminders of nights out together over the years. Craving the memories, I sifted through the tickets, reading a few of the movie titles I’d scrawled on the back of the stubs—Adam’s Rib, Notorious, Jezebel, Stage Fright—but each flash of memory only made me lonelier. I shut that drawer.
Kneeling before the open trunk, I pulled out Sam’s drawer, spread its contents across the floor. I shuffled through the couple dozen postcards Sam had sent from out west, color-tinted pictures of canyons or mountains, a different postmark on every one. Counting them out, they averaged two a year. He’d never been much for writing. Then the last card, from that apple farm in Washington State. He hadn’t signed his name to it, just scrawled Arriving New York Penn Station Friday. That and the date: December 8, 1941. I dwelled for a while in the memory.
Whenever December seventh rolls around and people remember that infamous day, all I can think of is hearing my brother’s voice for the first time in a dozen years. I was just coming off shift at the hospital where I used to work. All day, radios had been tuned to breaking news about the attacks. Nurses understood that a declaration of war would affect us, too. They’d be needing us, and for a lot of girls I worked with, the Army Nurse Corps became the opportunity, and challenge, of a lifetime. During the war years, I kept in touch with some of them. I envied their adventures, their trials, their purpose—some even got commissions and benefits—and there were times I regretted not volunteering. It seemed selfish and petty to have let my worries about how I’d manage with a wig in a field hospital stop me, but they did, and not just that. I worried what I might do, who I might turn to, if I was away from her for too long.
A group of us were nearly out the hospital door when the switchboard operator shouted across the lobby. “Nurse Rabinowitz, there’s a long-distance call for you. From a man,” she added, prompting the nurses around me to squeal, their speculations finally answered. Telephone lines were hopelessly clogged that day, but somehow Sam had charmed a Bell operator into putting through his call. I hadn’t heard his voice, let alone seen him, since Leadville. And now Sam was calling to tell me he was coming to New York to enlist. “Lots of Home boys are already in the military,” he said, his voice delayed by the distance. “You can be damn sure the rest of them will be lining up to volunteer.” He was right about that; the war was well timed for orphans. The army was somewhere else for the boys to go where they’d be fed and clothed and told what to do. But Sam was too old for all that, wasn’t he? “I’m not thirty yet, and anyway, I figure I’ll have a better chance of seeing action if I join up with a unit from New York.” I could hear from the excitement in his voice that he was ready for a fight.
The other nurses had milled in the lobby, waiting to hear my news. Disappointed that it was only my brother, they strutted off, anxious to get ready for dates with young men who would soon be soldiers. I walked home quickly across Washington Square, so excited Sam was coming back I barely noticed the cold.
A few days later, I was in the train shed of Penn Station, flakes on the glass roof making me feel like I was inside a snow globe, watching the board for the arrival of Sam’s train. For a moment I panicked, wondering if I’d recognize him in the frantic crowd. I stood on a bench, not caring how desperate I looked to anyone else, scanning the sea of faces. When I spotted him, I wondered how I could have ever doubted I’d know him. Seventeen or twenty-nine, his face still fit the contours of my memory. He told me later he was confused, looking up, to see a pretty young woman with red hair calling to him in his sister’s voice. Then our eyes met, and what we saw in each other reached back to those mornings under the kitchen table, waking hand in hand.
I set aside the postcards and took out his military letters. Sam had gone to enlist right away, but the army was taking too long to get new units organized, so he joined the National Guard upstate, figuring once they deployed, his age wouldn’t hold him back. He wrote from basic training to tell me how easy it was. Not that the exercises and the drills weren’t hard—they had one sergeant who made them run until they vomited. It was just that it all came back to him: the rules, the orders, the discipline. Everyone sleeping and showering and eating together. It’s like the Home was basic for the military, he scrawled. He knew all the training was important and he excelled at it, but he chafed at being garrisoned. It was the summer of 1943 before their unit finally mustered up for the ground war in Europe. We better not win this thing before I get my chance to fight.
He needn’t have worried. The conflict dragged on in a way no one had expected. Soldiers were coming home, not in victory but on stretchers. Wounded veterans began showing up in my hospital. It was like the Infirmary all over again except the boys were bigger, their bloody noses and scraped knees now shrapnel wounds or severed limbs. And those were the lucky ones. I tried not to think about the men left behind, killed on some battlefield or too wounded to survive the voyage home. Once he was overseas, Sam wrote when he could, each stained page containing the fewest sentences necessary to assure me he was safe, there being no words for what he was really seeing. Despite his reassurances, every long stretch between letters tempted me to imagine him among the dead.
After victory in Europe, I worried Sam might be sent to the Pacific, but there was enough of a mess to mop up in Germany and Austria to keep him out of that until it was all over. When Sam’s division shipped home in ’46, he got assigned to an army barracks up on Amsterdam Avenue, where they were housing soldiers in a big old building that looked like a castle. I thought, after the war, that Sam would settle down in New York, give us a chance to become reacquainted. It turned out, though, he had more leaving to do.
It had been awhile since one of Sam’s letters had arrived from Israel. I kept them all in order. The very earliest ones, bearing the stamp of Palestine, had been delivered promptly. Then there was the heart-stopping gap, months and months in 1948 when nothing arrived and all the news was terrible—fighting, bombings, sieges. That first envelope with a stamp all in Hebrew dropped me to my knees in relief. Even after the post became reliable, Sam’s correspondence was spotty. On the rare occasions that a blue airmail envelope arrived, I drew out the time until I opened it, running my fingers over paper that felt dry as the desert. Cutting open the edges, I inhaled the captured scent, imagining orange groves and palm trees. The paper folded flat felt gritty; sometimes I’d find grains of sand in the creases. Sam now had so much to say that he filled every available space with his scrawl. I struggled to follow his talk of the fighting and of politics, but I savored his descriptions of the country: the sparse beauty of the dry hills, the night sky over the desert, the sparkling expanse of the Galilee. When he recounted his struggle to learn Hebrew, I wrote back, teasing, that he should have paid better attention at the Home studying for his bar mitzvah. It’s not about religion, he replied. It’s so we speak our own language, the only language that’s even been ours alone.
After the Armistice Agreements, he left the permanent army and joined a kibbutz, became one of its leaders from the way he talked about it, though he claimed no one person was in charge. Instead of skirmishes and negotiations, his letters became devoted to irrigation schemes and housing plans. Then came a letter that took me by surprise, though I should have expected it eventually. Sam was getting married. He’d met his wife, Judith, on the kibbutz. She was a young refugee who’d spent the war hiding in a cellar only to emerge into a Europe purged of our people. I wrote back with congratulations, sent as a gift for the newlyweds a box full of seed packets, varieties of tomato and cucumber that thrive in heat.
A year later, instead of a blue airmail letter, a small cardboard box arrived. In it, a roll of film was carefully sealed into its canister with electrician’s tape. I had it developed at the camera shop. Apparently the roll had been in the camera for a long time—the pictures told the story of an entire year. I opened the envelope of photographs again that night and dealt them out on the floor in front of the open trunk, fingering their scalloped edges.
There was Sam, smiling broadly, his gray eyes squinting against the sun. The beautiful woman with a wash of freckles across her nose must have been Judith. In one image they were beside blue water in what seemed to be their underwear, though I supposed it must be bathing suits. In the next, they had scarves around their necks and shovels in their hands, pointing proudly to a row of saplings. In one picture, Judith wore a printed dress and held some wildflowers while Sam, in uniform, faced her. Their wedding picture. Every time I looked at it, my eyes stung. Why hadn’t I been there? That I didn’t have money or time for the journey seemed a meager excuse, even if they had thought to invite me.
I shuffled through unpeopled pictures of gardens and fences and cinder block dwellings, their prominence in each frame telling of Sam’s pride. Then the picture of Judith turned to the side to show her pregnancy. He hadn’t written they were expecting—that photograph had been my first inkling. The last pictures on the roll were of an infant. I couldn’t tell if I had a niece or a nephew until I saw the baby crying in Sam’s arms, the rabbi hovering over him for the bris.
I stuffed the pictures back into the envelope and abandoned myself to a good cry, stretched out on the rug, my head pillowed on my folded arms. God knows I needed to let the tears out, and that picture of my nephew brought them on every time. What good did it do me to finally have a family if they were half a world away? Sometimes I thought Sam was being deliberately cruel, dangling from a distance the only child in the world who could have filled that place in my heart. I’d assumed the baby was named after our father, imagined my nephew as Harold or Hershel or Hillel, until a letter, dated before the film was sent, arrived a few days after. He’s a true sabra, Sam wrote, born a Jew in a Jewish state. We named him Ayal. I had been surprised until Sam’s words rang in my memory. “Our father left us, Rachel. We don’t owe him a thing.” Not even, apparently, the memory of a name.
Wrung out, I put everything back in the drawer, slid the drawer into its place, closed the trunk. Needing some air, I stepped out onto the balcony. The sky was as dark as it gets while the boardwalk and the rides were still lit up. The hot air carried notes of carnival music from the carousel. Who knows what was happening on the beach or in those shadowy places under the boardwalk. Men who met each other secretly, women who gave themselves up to their lovers, boys like that awful Marc Grossman looking to ruin some poor girl. Entire trajectories of lives were being set in motion, like balls across a billiards table.
I used to think it was the terrible accident that felled my mother and drove my father away that had set my life along its course. Now, though, I saw it was Dr. Solomon who’d made the breaking shot. If she hadn’t used me for her experiment, I would have arrived at the Orphaned Hebrews Home whole and undamaged, pretty enough that Sam wouldn’t have felt ashamed to look at me. If I’d been a normal girl, Marc Grossman wouldn’t have been goaded into hurting me, Sam wouldn’t have had to come to my defense, and Mr. Grossman wouldn’t have given him the beating that forced him to run away. Without all that anger he carried, Sam might not have even gone to war, and if not, then neither would he have felt compelled to fight for Israel. He would have met some other girl, had different children. I’d have had nieces and nephews who grew up here where I could know them, build sand castles with them at the beach, cat’s cradle with them when I babysat, shower them with the love I would have given my own children.
I could see now that it was hopeless. My mind would never stop running along these crazy tracks. I took a sleeping pill and surrendered myself to my empty bed. I felt again for the acorn in my breast, hoping against hope that Dr. Feldman would test it and find the cells benign, reassure me it was only a cyst. Now that I understood how my fate depended on Mildred Solomon, it seemed not only my life that hung in the balance, but hers as well.