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Street, I sit on the couch for a little while, letting Katze, my
05
overweight orange tabby, knead his claws into the threads of
06
my blue sweater, then my plaid skirt. He cannot settle himself,
07
my Katze. He can never decide exactly where he wants to sit,
08
nor can he bring himself to chase the mice I sometimes hear
09
scurrying in the walls. But I do not hold this against him. I
10
cannot seem to settle myself now either, and I tap my pointy
11
blue pump in an uneasy rhythm against the dark hardwood
12
floorboards.
13
Friday nights, I always light a candle at sundown and say
14
a silent prayer.
Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha’olam
. . .
15
Words repeat themselves in my brain, even though Margie
16
Franklin, she is a Gentile. My Friday prayer, it is not religion,
17
it’s ritual.
18
But now it is not quite dusk yet, and the words repeating
19
themselves in my brain, just after 4
p.m., are Shelby’s: The
20
Diary of Anne Frank
is much too sad for that,
she’d said
.
21
I push Katze aside and begin pacing across the room. It is
22
tiny enough that I take only ten steps before I have to turn
23
around and start all over again. Back and forth and back and
24
forth.
25
Much too sad.
I am certain Shelby cannot even fathom
26
that kind of sad. Shelby was born in the United States, a
27
Christian, and during the war she and her sister lived with
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their parents in a two-bedroom apartment that she describes
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as small. “There were rations,” she told me once. “We didn’t
always have enough to eat. My shoes wore through, straight
01
to the soles.”
02
When she told me these things, I’d nodded, as if I was
03
sympathetic to her plight. Then I bit my tongue to keep it
04
from moving, from saying all the things I often think about
05
my own time during the war, but never would dare utter out
06
loud to Shelby.
07
You’ve at least read the book by now, haven’t you?
She’d
08
actually admonished me, standing there on Market Street.
09
I stop pacing for a moment by my bed, where my copy of
10
the book sits atop the small shelf above my mattress. Its
11
bright orange cover is tattered, the pages worn from too much
12
use.
No,
I would tell Shelby, if she ever pressed me for an
13
answer.
I haven’t read it. I don’t want to.
14
And yet that, like so much else, would be a lie, as I know
15
the words contained within the diary by heart.
16
I hold the book in my hand now, flipping through its dog
17
eared pages. My eyes skim through the mentions of Peter’s
18
name.
19
When I first came to America, before I discovered the
20
book, I would often call the operator and ask for Peter, but it
21
has been a long while since I have done that now. Sometimes,
22
though, I still dream of walking into him on the street, by
23
chance. He will look different, with shorter hair, and he will
24
be older, of course, his body thicker, more of a man’s, like
25
Joshua’s. But I will recognize him all the same—his face, or
26
his eyes, blue and clear as the sea.
27
We promised each other we’d come here, when the war
S28
ended, or if we escaped. Peter picked the city of Philadelphia
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01
out of his world atlas.
The City of Brotherly Love,
he told me.
02
Surely, Jews cannot be in hiding there.
03
Peter is dead,
I remind myself now.
04
But then, so am I.
05
I put the book back on the shelf, and I reach for the phone
06
on my small kitchen counter. I turn the dial to 0, but I wait a
07
moment, before letting my finger go.
08
“Operator,” a woman’s voice says on the other end.
09
I open my mouth to ask for him.
Peter Pelt,
I want to tell
10
the operator.
I need to talk to Peter Pelt
.
11
There is a movie, Peter. A movie, for goodness’ sake!
12
But it has been so long since I have called and asked for
13
him under the new name we agreed on, and now I cannot
14
bring myself to make a sound.
15
I look out the small square window behind my couch; it is
16
nearly dark now.
17
I hang up the phone and reach underneath my kitchen
18
counter for my Shabbat candle.
19
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23
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25
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02
03
Chapter Three
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11
12
13
The law office of Rosenstein, Greenberg and Mos
14
cowitz is on the seventh floor of a wide cement office building
15
near the corners of Market and South Sixteenth streets in
16
Center City, Philadelphia. It is close enough to walk to from
17
my apartment, and also the courthouse, which makes it per
18
fect both for the lawyers and for me.
19
Monday morning I am one of the first people to arrive at
20
the office, at least according to the elevator attendant, a small
21
brown-skinned man named Henry, who I find to have sympa
22
thetic brown eyes.
23
“Anyone else here yet?” I ask him, hopeful.
24
“Only Mr. Rosenstein,” he says. “The younger one.” I smile
25
to myself as Henry ushers me through the elevator door. By
26
Monday morning, both Shelby’s voice and my call to the oper
27
ator have dimmed.
So there is a movie,
I told myself on the
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walk to work this morning.
So what? It will be no different
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01
from the book
. Then I reveled in the fact that today it is Mon
02
day, and that means I will get to see Joshua again. That
03
thought now turns my cheeks warm as I step off the elevator
04
and walk into the large open center room of the law office.
05
My metal desk sits face-to-face with Shelby’s in this center
06
room, where all the lawyers’ secretaries have their desks. We
07
are surrounded by the lawyers’ offices, which are behind
08
closed doors all along the sides. Joshua’s office is just to the
09
right of our desks, and Ezra’s office is the next one over. The
10
other partners, Saul Greenberg and Jason Moscowitz, have
11
offices on the other side of the room, closer to the elevator,
12
but I suspect Ezra likes to be on this side so he can keep an
13
eye on his son.
14
Joshua’s office, like the others, has a small rectangular
15
window by the door, and I watch him for a moment now,
16
through the glass. He is sitting at his desk, studying some
17
thing carefully. His forehead creases when he does this, as if
18
concentration is either an art or a science. I can’t decide.
19
Joshua looks up from his desk, catches my eye, and smiles at
20
me. I smile back before I walk to the break room and brew
21
some coffee. I pour Joshua a cup with two sugars the way he
22
likes it, and then I tread carefully back to his office and rap
23
lightly on the door.
24
“Come in,” he says. His voice floats, in a way that told me,
25
even the very first time I met him, that he has never known
26
anything like I have. Joshua’s life in America has been
27
charmed, I suspect, even when he was a teenager, during the
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war, with the rations. But I don’t hold this against him. “Good
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morning, Margie.” He smiles again. His smile is one of those
warm American smiles where nothing is held back, where joy
01
is uncontained. I hand him the coffee, and he thanks me.
02
“How was your weekend?” he asks.
03
“It was fine, thank you,” I say, even though I spent most of
04
it cooped up nervously in my apartment. Saturdays, I always
05
still keep as a day of rest, though this particular one had not
06
felt very restful. Sundays, I normally take my correspondence
07
work to Fairmount Park to study by the banks of the Schuylkill
08
River, though this Sunday I walked to the Reading Terminal
09
Market and perused the fruit instead, knowing I would be
10
unable to concentrate on my studies. Across the street I’d
11
spotted the cinema I have gone to with Shelby before, and I
12
saw it there, on the marquee, in hideously assaulting red let
13
ters:
The Diary of Anne Frank.
I stared at the picture of the
14
unfamiliar woman on the movie poster out front. I watched
15
her face, her deep brown eyes, as if she too could stare back at
16
me.
Look at you,
my sister said, laughing, in my head.
Living
17
your American dream in a thick black sweater
. When I returned
18
home, I thought about dialing the operator again. But some
19
thing stopped me. Now I shake the thought away. “How was
20
your weekend?” I ask Joshua.
21
He shrugs. “I’ve had better.” Joshua and his father, Ezra,
22
don’t always get along. I learned this on my third day of work,
23
when I heard their raised voices coming through the paper
24
thin walls of Joshua’s office. Their disagreements have
25
become, over the past three years, a fairly regular occurrence.
26
Shelby says Ezra used to be nicer before his wife, Joshua’s
27
mother, died the year before they hired me. But this is some
S28
thing I would never ask Joshua about, though I feel a hole in
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01
the pit of my stomach for him, thinking about the empty
02
space where his mother used to be. I wonder if she was the
03
one who loved him better, the way it was with my mother and
04
me. My sister was Father’s. I was Mother’s.
05
But all I allow myself to say now is, “I’m sorry to hear that.”
06
He shrugs again. He is so casual about his family squab
07
bles, the way all the Americans I’ve met seem to be. Once
08
Shelby got into a fight with her mother, and they didn’t speak
09
for three months. Then, one weekend, they went out to lunch,
10
and Shelby told me it was “water under the bridge.” From the
11
sound of her voice I understood that she was no longer angry,
12
but I did not understand the reference to water and bridges,
13
or how she could let go of her anger, just like that.
14
“Well.” I stand. “I should get to work.”
15
“Margie.” He taps his fountain pen gently against his
16
desk.
“How are your paralegal studies coming?”
17
“Good,” I say, feeling guilty now about having ignored
18
them this weekend. Next weekend I will do double, I promise
19
myself. “Two more correspondence classes left.”
20
“Great. I’ll talk to my father soon about finding a position
21
for you when you’re done,” he says.
22
I smile at him, and I stop at the doorway for a moment.
23
He smiles back at me, his warm American smile again
24
lighting up his face. “By the way, how’s Mr. Katz?” he asks.
25
I laugh, the way I always do when he turns Katze, the
26
orange tabby, into a Jewish-sounding man, most definitely a
27
lawyer. It is doubly funny because there is a Mr. Katz who
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works in the district attorney’s office, a portly man with a
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