The Chaperone

  She was silent. He could be lying. Perhaps he’d really been a spy. Or maybe he’d been secretly sending money to Germany, the way she’d heard some immigrants were doing. Perhaps he’d deserved to be sent to Georgia. But then, maybe not. In Wichita, at the start of the war, a foreigner who sold popcorn from a cart on Douglas Avenue was nearly killed by a mob. Alan had been there, just walking down the street, and he said it was the most frightening moment of his life, seeing so many people screaming at this man who was on his knees pleading, trying to explain that he’d misplaced his war bond, and that he hadn’t hung the flag from his cart because it was torn and he hadn’t been able to mend it. The police finally arrived and got the man to safety. Later, she and Alan heard the man wasn’t even German, but a Polish Jew.

  “Your wife died while you were there?”

  “Ya. And I did not know. They only sometimes gave us our mail. I never got the letter.” He shrugged. “There was nothing I could have done. It was all barb-wired.” He pointed up at the low ceiling of the drugstore, his finger moving in a slow half circle. “There were men in towers with machine guns. When they let me out, I make my way back, and that is when I found out about Andrea. The neighbors said a charity took the baby. I spend three months to track her down, and find out she was placed down here.” He lifted the bottle, then set it down. “But then I could not take her out. My business was gone. I had no money. I could not work and care for her. I told the sisters I know how to fix things, and they take mercy on me and hire me. So now, at least, I get to see her every day. And I know she is safe.” He rubbed his chin. “She is almost six.”

  Cora lowered her gaze. “You must be angry,” she said quietly. “About being sent away.”

  He sighed, puffing out his cheeks. “No. Like you tell me, I am lucky to be living. I can go crazy, thinking about what would be if I had not been sent to Georgia.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was good luck. The flu was in Oglethorpe, too. There were bodies going out every night. But I think it was worse in Queens, on our street, in our building. If I was not interned, I would have been with her, but maybe I get sick and die, too. And then what for our daughter? She would be a full orphan, not a half one.” He met Cora’s gaze. “She might have already gone out on a train.”

  Cora was silent. It was so hard to believe that the trains were still going out, that other children were still, maybe at this very moment, headed west into anything, into so much good luck or bad. “It’s true,” she finally said. “It’s hard to know what could have been.”

  “You should think about that.” He leaned forward on his elbows, and the table creaked. “So what will you do now? You will write to this person?”

  “Yes,” Cora said. “It’s someone who knows, or knew, my… mother. She wrote from Haverhill, Massachusetts. She might still be at that address.” She felt insensitive now, talking about her own good fortune. But he was looking at her intently. Quite intently.

  “Have you ever heard of the Florence Night Mission?”

  He shook his head.

  “On Bleecker Street?”

  “That is in the Village. Not far.”

  “The records said that was where I came from. I might go down there, just to see.” Might nothing, Cora thought. She would go to Bleecker Street tomorrow, as soon as she got Louise to class.

  “You might as well. You have come all the way from Kansas.”

  She smiled. He had a good memory. Her gaze rested on his hands. They needed cream, she thought. The pads of his thumbs were callused.

  “I think the sisters were wrong not to let you see the records,” he said. “That is why I show you. But you should know they aren’t just mean and crazy, the nuns. They have reasons.” He held up his hands. “Have open eyes. That is what I mean.”

  She nodded, looking at him shyly. It was nice to be shown such caring. She’d been feeling a little beaten down, perhaps, spending so much time with just Louise. And she’d thought everyone in New York would be so cold and hard. But here she’d already made a friend. A German handyman ex-prisoner, whom she’d never see again, but a friend nonetheless.

  “Thank you,” she said, meaning it. “Thank you for taking the time.”

  He nodded, his gaze moving over her face in a way she would long remember.

  “It was a pleasure.”

  She stood quickly, saying she had to hurry and catch the subway; her young charge would be getting out of class soon. She really had to run. On her way out of the store, she walked fast and kept her head low, concerned that she was blushing. But the woman behind the counter only called for her to please come again, with a little wave of her grape-stained hand.

  THIRTEEN

  “I hate movies.” Louise sat under the painting of the Siamese cat, fanning herself with a section of the newspaper. “Really. I don’t care what’s playing. I absolutely won’t go.”

  Cora looked up from the listings, irritated. Heat and humidity this early in the morning did nothing for her patience. “How can you hate the movies, Louise? You love theater. You have to read with the movies, but that’s the only difference.”

  “Blasphemer.” She closed her eyes, still fanning. “Please don’t say that in my presence again.”

  Cora frowned. After only a week of diction lessons from Floyd Smithers, free with the purchase of a daily milk shake, Louise’s way of speaking had already changed. The difference was subtle—she didn’t, in fact, sound as if she were faking a British accent. But she no longer sounded like herself, either, or like anyone from back home. Her vowels were more rounded, her consonants more distinct. She’d accomplished her goal in a matter of days: she had no accent at all.

  “They’re hardly the same,” she continued, her eyes open now, fixing Cora with a pitying stare. “Movies are manufactured and packaged for the masses, served cold. Wichita sees what Los Angeles sees, and Manhattan sees what Toledo sees. It’s all the same because it’s all dead.” She put down the newspaper and fluttered a hand over the table between them. “Live theater is like dance. It’s alive and ephemeral. You have just one night between the dancer and the audience, everyone breathing the same air.” She sighed, as if realizing the futility of trying to explain any of this to Cora. “Besides,” she said, “you can see all the movies you like back in Wichita, but you won’t be able to go to Broadway once you get back.”

  Cora had for some time noticed that Louise always said “once you get back to Wichita,” not “once we get back to Wichita,” and Cora suspected that Louise was not simply hoping to be offered one of the permanent spots at Denishawn, but planning on it. Cora worried how Louise would react if it didn’t happen, how she (and therefore they) would survive the long trip home. It wasn’t that Louise never suffered insecurity. She was always criticizing herself on the way home from class, saying that her jumps had been too sloppy or that her legs were still too fat for a dancer’s. At the same time, she seemed so bent on success that Cora doubted she had any kind of contingency plan, or even any capacity to accept a different kind of life if things just didn’t work out. Part of her thought she should caution Louise, to warn her that life didn’t always go according to one’s wishes, if only to prepare her for the possibility of disappointment. But most of her understood that this conversation would not go well, and she managed to hold her tongue.

  Nevertheless, Cora cautioned herself against hope, even as she waited for a letter from Haverhill, watching for the postman from her window like a hawk watching from a tree. A letter was her only hope. She’d already gone down to Greenwich Village and wandered its curving streets until she found 29 Bleecker Street, which was just a three-story building that appeared broken up into several apartments. Cora asked the greengrocer on the corner if he knew where she might find the Florence Night Mission, and although the grocer had never heard of it, he translated her question to Italian for an elderly man sitting by a barrel of apples, who apparently told the grocer to tell Cora that the Florence Night Mission had been across the street some thirty years a
go, but wasn’t anymore.

  And the old man, wrinkled and toothless as he was, looked her up and down.

  So the Florence Night Mission was gone, a dead end. She tried not to be too anxious about the letter. Even if Mary O’Dell were still alive and living at the same address in Haverhill, even if she still wanted contact, it might be several days before Cora received her response. But probably not much longer than that. Cora had been clear in her letter that she would only be in New York for a few more weeks. She would either hear from Haverhill soon, or not at all. She knew that of the two possibilities, the latter was more likely. If that was the case, she would bear it. She was not like Louise, unfamiliar with disappointments, needing everything to go her way. If she got no reply, if Mary O’Dell was dead or otherwise unreachable, Cora would find a way to be grateful that she’d at least discovered that her mother, whoever she was, had wanted to know her. That might have to be enough.

  She tried to distract herself, playing the tourist the rest of the week. While Louise was at class, she visited Grant’s Tomb. She spent a whole day at the Museum of Natural History and several art museums. She went for a ride in an open-air bus, and she took a guided walking tour of Central Park, where she saw a veritable flock of grazing sheep, oblivious to the cityscape behind them.

  And through it all, she was so lonely. The intensity caught her off guard. She’d spent plenty of time alone back home—days when Alan was at work and the boys were at school. She’d always liked having time to herself, to read, to think, to pretty up the house. But she’d had her friends and her volunteer work, or a pleasant exchange with Della or a neighbor to break up the time. This was a different kind of solitude, unrelenting and thorough. She moved through the crowded sidewalks as a stranger to everyone, without even a chance of bumping into anyone who might recognize her and call out. This was how it felt to be a foreigner, she thought, with no one knowing who you were or where you came from. It was as if she had become a person not just unknown but unknowable, and it bothered her to think that her grasp on herself was so weak that she needed steady reminding from people at home who knew her to feel like herself at all.

  The German was foreign, of course, and he had seemed at ease.

  On Friday, she paid a dime to take an express elevator, so fast it felt like a thrill ride, to the top of the Woolworth Building, so she could look out at the city from its highest point some sixty floors up. It was something, really, to be up that high, higher than she’d ever imagined she would be, surrounded by windows and looking down at the tiered and tapered tops of regal buildings that were all at least twice as tall as the tallest building in Wichita. She could see the great bridges, and the Statue of Liberty, so far away they looked small, and the embracing arms of the blue, surrounding water, and in the distance, it seemed, the very curve of the earth. But even then, even in her wonder, she couldn’t help but think that from up in the high and quiet, behind the glass of the observation booth, the city finally looked and sounded as apart from her as it felt. And after spending so much time alone with herself, she wondered if she were in Wichita, somehow looking down from such a great height over the quieter streets and surrounding prairie she knew so well, full of people she would recognize and love, she might still find the distance fitting.

  • • •

  She purchased postcards with sepia-toned pictures of famous landmarks. She wrote Alan and the boys and Viola that the city was even bigger than she had imagined, and that there was so much to see in such a short time. That was true. Then again, the idea of spending even one more week in so much solitude, going hours without speaking to anyone except to say “thank you” and “excuse me” and “one ticket, please,” filled her with a heavy dread.

  There was still no reply from Massachusetts, though enough days had passed that a reply was possible. Every afternoon when they returned from dance class, Cora checked the little locked mailbox on the first floor of their building. Louise got a letter from Theo, but nothing, Cora noticed, from either of her parents. Cora herself got a nice letter from Alan, saying that she was missed, but that Wichita in July was Wichita in July, and that she wasn’t missing much. He wrote that he’d driven over to Winfield to visit the boys, and he could report that they were still in good health, though they both seemed a little disenchanted with farm life, and they were both looking forward to starting their more sedentary studies in the fall. They sent their love to her through him, he wrote, and hoped she would understand that they didn’t write only because they worked right up until sunset, and fell asleep the moment they could. They both seemed to know your young charge, he added. They said Louise B. was a real “looker,” and that everyone knew who she was. But they doubted she would know of them, since she seemed bored with every boy in school. Can you imagine that? A cheeky freshman ignoring even our wonderful boys? I’m sure you have your work cut out for you, as they say. I can only send you my best wishes.

  And money, of course. He’d wired a good amount to a Western Union, and told her she should go claim it at once. He hoped she would buy herself something pretty, he wrote, something she could show off when she came home.

  She supposed she should have been excited. She’d gone walking past the big department stores on Broadway, and she’d seen so many beautiful things in the window displays: afternoon dresses of crepe de chine, and hats trimmed in taffeta bows or smart feathers. There were many times at home when just the feel of new silk or a pretty shoe had brought her real comfort, and there was the satisfaction in usually being able, with the assistance of a good corset, to fasten a button on a narrow waist. But now the idea of shopping for clothes, even expensive New York clothes, only depressed her. She was irritated by the way he had written his suggestion. She wasn’t sure if it was the show off or the home that made her feel tired, even of taffeta and silk. She never knew when a gift was just a gift, truly given in caring, or just part of the charade.

  In any case, she had a better idea.

  “You’re back,” the German said. He looked happy to see her, and surprised. But he blocked the doorway as he glanced at his watch. “Mass is almost over,” he whispered. “The sisters will come down very soon.”

  She nodded. She’d timed it exactly right. “I know,” she said. “I have a different mission today.”

  He waited, looking at her pleasantly. For a moment, she forgot what she’d planned to say.

  “The radio,” she said. “I wondered if you were able to fix the radio.” She kept her face businesslike.

  “No. It was… kaput. Why?”

  “Well, I was thinking you were right, that it would be nice for the girls to have one. And I just happened upon a little extra money. I was thinking I would buy one for them.”

  He tilted his head. “They are expensive.”

  She nodded. “I passed a place that sold them a few blocks away. They had one with a single-tube receiver that seemed good.” She pointed vaguely behind her. “But they didn’t seem keen on delivery.”

  He raised his brows and laughed. “I am not surprised.”

  She was relieved. In truth, she hadn’t asked about delivery. “Well, if you do think the girls would still like a radio, I’d be happy to go buy one now. But it’ll be heavy, of course. I was hoping you could come with me and help me carry it back.”

  His gaze was as steady on her face as it had been the other day. She focused on the truth, which was that she really did want to get a radio for the girls. That was part of it.

  “I am Joseph Schmidt,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Oh.” She smiled, and in her nervousness, shook hands as if she were a man, her hand vertical, her grip tight. “I’m Cora.” There was no need to give him a last name.

  Even after she loosened her grip, he held on longer than he might have, his callused thumb rough against her palm. “Cora,” he said, with careful pronunciation, as if learning a new word for something familiar. “I will get my cap.”

  He brought an old baby buggy to carry t
he radio. A Chelsea Model-T, he called it, because almost everyone in the neighborhood used one to get things from here to there. His buggy had a torn green sunshade and a wobbly tire, but the radio fit inside it just fine. They got a bit of a laugh, with him pushing it down the street, both of them smiling at passersby like proud new parents. “He’s got your eyes,” she said, feeling bold, and when this made him laugh, she went light in the head, but in a good way, as if she were breathing differently, and taking in more oxygen than usual. He steered the buggy over sidewalk cracks and past chattering Italians, or maybe Greeks, and around gangs of children, going slowly enough that she could keep up in her heels, and the whole time she was giddy with the idea that during this little holiday, she was not Cora Kaufmann or Cora Carlisle or even Cora X. She was only Cora in the neighborhood where she used to live and where, now, no one knew her. She could act as she liked without any consequence or anyone from home even finding out, providing she did no real harm or get herself arrested.

  “What’s the sweet smell?” she asked, holding her hat down against the breeze. She liked walking with a man her height, not always having to look up. “It always smells like baking treats around here.”

  “That is National Biscuit.” He looked at her, then away, then back. “Nabisco? You eat the Fig Newtons? They are made here.”

  She had to laugh. How many packages of Fig Newtons had she bought over the years? She bought them for the boys and Alan, and to serve at tea parties, and she’d eaten quite a few herself, with no idea they’d been baked within sniffing distance of the New York Home for Friendless Girls. Her street in Kansas, with its wide lawns and shade trees, seemed a separate world from this crowded Babel of a neighborhood, with no possibility for overlap, and yet for years, without her knowledge, mere cookies had passed between them.

  “What’s that ya got in there?” A damp and shoeless boy pushed past Cora to look into the buggy. “That’s a radio. Does it work?” Cora turned to see more boys, all wet-haired and dirty-looking, some with shoes, some without, crowding them from behind, trying to see into the buggy. It was confusing to be afraid of them. The oldest was twelve at the most, but there were six of them, and then seven, and they were fanning out, coming around to the buggy from the sides, hands quick and reaching in. All around on the sidewalk, other adults kept walking by as if nothing were out of the ordinary.