I had not seen him for many years—I discount the time our cars pulled up side by side at a red light on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv and we shouted each other’s names with the hysterical glee of travelers overjoyed to encounter a familiar face on foreign terrain, only to lose each other as the light changed and my husband accelerated with rare venom—and I think it strange that we should meet at such a time, at such a gathering. It is an academic celebration. Our host, Ronald Dorfman, has been awarded tenure after a bitter interdepartmental struggle, but the determined gaiety of the occasion is deflated each hour, when the radio blares the news. Scud missiles are falling on Israel and we are, all of us, consumed by anxiety, news-obsessed and fear-haunted.
“Aviva,” he says and walks toward me, his glass of white wine extended as though he means to toast this meeting, this serendipitous reunion.
And, although I have not answered to that name for many years, declining to use it even during the sabbatical year we spent in Jerusalem, I smile in response and lift my hand to his cheek, once pocked by suppurating acne and now raddled by the red-tinged striations of hypertension. So swiftly is the odd intimacy of our adolescence restored.
“Chaim,” I reply, using the name he chose for himself all those years ago, but, clearly, he is no longer a Chaim. He is Charles again, or perhaps Chuck, as his mother called him, impeccably dressed in a well-cut dark blue three-piece suit, a pale blue cotton shirt, a narrow maroon tie of pure silk. I know that I am safe in thinking him either a lawyer or a doctor.
“Charles, these days,” he corrects me at once, as I knew he would.
“Abbie,” I say in turn and we both observe a moment of respectful silence for the girl who had been Aviva and the boy who called himself Chaim. Our vanished selves. And then we stare at each other because of course we must assess the changes wrought by the passing years. He sees that my hair, once long and dark, is now fashioned into a smoke-colored helmet, that although my face is still too thin and angular, I have lost my waistline and my wrists and ankles are thick and shapeless. I note that he has balded in a curious way, the hair loss concentrated at the center of his head so that the triangle of his freckled, pink scalp is fringed by tufts of rust-colored hair, threaded with gray. I remember how his hair had clustered in red-gold curls about his narrow head and how he had hated that radiant tangled thickness and tried, without success, to comb it flat. I see, too, that he has a small but firm pot belly which even his tailor’s expensive expertise cannot disguise and I think of how skinny he was, his arms bony, back then in Brooklyn, his legs stick-thin. His mother chased after him with fresh rolls plastered with butter, lathered with cream cheese, which he tossed into the trash can on Brighton Beach Avenue as soon as we were out of sight of his house.
Poor Mrs. Mandell. She feared that he would grow ill because he was so thin. She feared that he would not have the energy to study, that he would not be inducted into Arista, the honor society, that he would not score high on his college boards and the world of academic achievement, the springboard to professional success, would be lost to him forever. I wonder if she is still alive and if she is gratified by the plumpness of his maturity. She herself was a very thin woman whose neatly ironed cotton dresses were always a size too large, as though she too hoped that she might one day gain weight, might one day become a woman of substance whose son would obey her. And eat. And thus fortified, achieve.
My husband, Len, waves to me from the punch bowl across the room where he is engrossed in earnest conversation with a colleague who also teaches American Studies. Len is an authority on 19th-century transcendentalism, an odd field of concentration for the son of immigrant parents. We often point this out at dinner parties after which Len recites scraps of Emerson which he has translated into Yiddish and everyone laughs. We are, ourselves and so many of our friends, so many of those gathered tonight in this Riverside Drive apartment with its wall-to-wall bookshelves and woven rugs, bemused and secretly self-congratulatory because we have traveled such vast distances from the ambience of our childhoods. The sons of men who rode the subway climb into their Volvo station wagons. The daughters of women who wore plaid housedresses dress in tweed suits and silk blouses and sit at polished desks in well-appointed offices.
Len flashes me a smile, raises a quizzical eyebrow of curiosity. Still, he is pleased that I am talking to someone. It frees him from responsibility. I smile back. Chaim (whom I must remember to call Charles) beckons to a tall blonde woman. I take note of her cowl-necked, black cashmere dress, adorned with a heavy silver pin of stark geometric design. She, however, smiles regretfully, points to the kitchen and disappears behind its swinging doors. She is the sort of competent woman who helps hostesses arrange crudités in attractive formation, who can be relied on to see that the coffee is brewed, the creamers filled. Laura Dorfman, an overworked therapist who sits on too many committees, who does not like giving parties, relies on her now.
“Your wife?” I ask.
“Vivian.” He offers her name with the shy pride peculiar to men who remain awed by the happiness of their own marriages, by the attractiveness of the women who, against all odds, have consented to be their wives.
“I hear that she’s very talented,” I say, startled that I should have remembered that. “Oh? From whom did you hear that?” His tone is easy but I sense the edge of wariness. The privacy of his present has been invaded.
I struggle to remember who it was who told me that Chaim Mandell had married a successful jewelry designer. It is not a long struggle because the field is very narrow. Death, distance, and disinclination have taken their toll on the friendships of high school. Still, I keep in touch with those few who call and write at infrequent intervals, calls and letters that I return because I am tenacious in friendship, reluctant to surrender intimacy.
“Sue Green,” I say at last. “She has a boutique in L.A. I have lunch with her sometimes when she comes to New York. I think she’s bought jewelry from your wife for her shop.”
“Sue Green?” He frowns.
“She who was Shoshana Bergman. We should all carry identity cards. You know: Aviva Speiser—now known as Abbie Rosen. Chaim Mandell—now called Charles Mandell.”
“Mansfield. Charles Mansfield. I changed it when I graduated from medical school.” His tone is at once defiant and apologetic.
“A good thing you didn’t pick Manson,” I say and we both laugh.
_____________
The room grows silent. Someone has switched on the television set. We all lean forward, as though this posture of apprehension, so newly learned, can effectively ward off danger. Air-raid sirens have sounded in Tel Aviv, the correspondent in that city tells us, speaking through the absurd yet frightening gas mask that causes him to resemble an oversized anteater. Another Scud attack is anticipated. My heart hammers and my throat is dry until, after some minutes, an all-clear is reported. The television set is switched off. Conversations are resumed, voices rising with shrill relief, laughter rasping nervously as the same jokes travel from group to group. “Did you hear about the Polish paratroopers who jumped into the Gulf? The Mexicans don’t know what to do with them.” “Knock knock. Who’s there? So Damn. So Damn Who? So Damn Insane.”
“We had no jokes,” I say sadly, almost accusingly, “back then.”
Back then. The days when we shuddered for Israel’s survival as we shudder for it now.
“Maybe we didn’t need them,” he reflects. A thoughtful man as he had been a thoughtful boy. “We were too busy for trivia. School, meetings. Working the subway every Sunday.”
“Oh yes. The subway.” I laugh so harshly and so loudly that Sharri Dorfman, who is circling the room with a tray of hot miniature egg rolls, turns to stare at me. Sharri, who wears a bright red jump suit and dangling gold earrings, her blonde hair sprayed with scarlet dust, holds the tray out to us and we each gravely take an egg roll and carry them to the window seat where we watch the lights of the Drive and follow the progress of a single tug bravely making its way across the ink-dark water.
“How old is Sharri?” I ask. “Fifteen. Sixteen. About as old as we were when we worked the subways.”
I try to imagine Sharri in the royal blue middy blouse, laced with red, the uniform of the Zionist youth movement that we had worn on our subterranean excursions. I received my own blouse only two days before Israel became a state, paying for it with my babysitting money. I wore it for the first time on Independence Day.
I wonder if Chaim (Charles—I must remember to call him Charles) remembers how we danced a hora on the Brighton Express, weaving our way about the poles while other passengers smiled at us. “Mazel tov,” people said to us, to each other.
Two little women, each wearing a light tweed spring coat and clutching an oversized shopping bag, kissed each other and wept before getting off at Union Square.
“At last,” one said to the other. “At last.”
Shimon, our leader, tall and gaunt, his silken sand-colored hair, as always, falling over his high pale forehead, strummed his guitar and led us out of the train at Times Square. There we unfurled the movement’s banner, a white scythe sewn onto royal blue felt, and joined the other young people who had flocked there from every part of the city. Our hora circle encompassed the Times tower and we danced and sang, drawing passersby into our circle, shouting our slogans of solidarity. “The Nation of Israel lives!” “We will build the Galilee!” “Who will ascend to the land? We will—we are coming, we are coming!” I danced with a black woman.
“I’m glad for you people. It gives us hope,” she said and after all these years I remember the words and remember too that I did not understand them at the time.
Sharri passes with her tray and Chaim takes yet another egg roll. How proud his mother would have been to see him eat with such zest, I think wryly. I wonder if he remembers how we sat side by side on the journey home and how I fell asleep at the DeKalb Avenue station with my head resting on his shoulder to find his arm around me. He removed it as soon as I awakened, of course, but the others had noticed it.
Only last year, over lunch in the Brasserie, loose-tongued after a single glass of white wine—we children of Brighton Beach never really learned to drink, our heads whirl after a single cocktail and we talk too much after a sip of wine—Sue told me that we were considered to be “a couple.” Chaim and Aviva.
“We were kids,” he says. “Children. I have a fifteen-year-old daughter. She’s a child.” His eyes darken and I know this daughter must cause him difficulty. Perhaps she smokes pot. Perhaps she skips school. As my son does. We never even contemplated such misadventures. But then we were children at a different time, of another generation.
_____________
We met our freshman year at Lincoln High School, both of us the new kids in the class, having moved in when the semester was already in progress, friendships formed, the honor classes chosen. No one waited for either of us when the dismissal: bell sounded and we made our separate way to the huge brass-handled doors, crouching next to the wall in the hope that our solitary progress would go unnoticed. Like all adolescents, we perceived our aloneness as a deformity and we dissembled so that we would be spared the pity awarded to cripples. Because he lived on Brighton Sixth Street and I lived on Brighton Seventh, we walked home side by side, but not together. I held my books close to my chest (my flat chest, I reminded myself with bitter cruelty each night as I studied my naked body in the mirror, half in hope, half in despair) and I sucked desperately on a long strand of dark hair. I worried that my slip might be showing, that my kneesocks might be falling down, that I could not understand what caused the other girls, who wore club jackets and walked with their arms about each other’s waists, to giggle. He carried his books in a heavy briefcase of worn dark leather, unlike the other boys who laced theirs together with a jaunty strap. Thus burdened, he walked with his head bent low, one shoulder askew, like old Mr. Gartenberg, our upstairs neighbor, who sold what my mother called “sundries” and carried his samples with him in a large black case.
We reached his street first and if his mother was home, she would lean out of the window and call to him in an avian screech, flapping her arms in their oversized cotton sleeves.
“Chuck! Chuck!” Her voice was relieved, exultant. Her fledgling had returned to the nest.
He never looked up to wave to her, nor did he look at me, although he always blushed, his skin taking on the wine-red hue peculiar to redheads. It was her use of the nickname that embarrassed him, I decided. I did not know then that it was her very existence that shamed him. We were not a generation proud of our parents.
Only once during that painful semester did we speak to each other. Walking slightly behind me on a June day—a half-day, I remember, because the school year was limping to a close and the teachers were busy counting books, writing up report cards—he hurried to catch up with me.
“There’s blood on your skirt,” he whispered, careful not to look at me. “I thought you’d want to know.”
I had felt the dampness, the beginning of a cramp, and I knew that the long awaited event had happened.
“Thanks for telling me,” I said, and, inexplicably, I began to cry.
He did what I realize now was an extraordinary thing. He took off his tan cardigan and tied it around my waist by the sleeves. He walked all the way home with me and at my door, I removed the sweater and returned it to him, relieved to see that it was unstained. I did not thank him. My throat was too dry with sorrow and embarrassment.
We did not see each other that summer. My parents, frightened of polio, took a bungalow in the Catskills and when I returned, two months later, I had a new haircut—a pixie cut, it was called, with bangs that were unevenly cut and that fringed my forehead. I wore a lipstick called Honey, and now owned two white satin bras and two matching sweater sets, one pink and one yellow. But most important of all, I had the beginnings of a life because at that bungalow colony I had met Shimon. He worked there as a lifeguard and he was the madrich, the counselor, of the Brighton Beach branch of Hanoar Hatzioni, a Zionist club which he invited me to join.
I went to the first meeting the Sunday night before school was to begin. It was held in Asher Kornblum’s unfinished basement, a damp room that fronted Ocean View Avenue and smelled of old clothes and the sea. There was intense talk about Jewish destiny and the Zionist imperative, of the meetings at the United Nations that would decide the Palestine problem.
“We are living in historic times,” Shimon said proudly, his gray-blue eyes shining.
We were filled with pride, determined to meet the challenge of those times. We called one another by Hebrew names. I became Aviva. We stood in a circle and held hands and sang “Hatikvah” before going out into an evening fragrant with the scent of the ocean and the last desperate roses of summer.
I waited outside Chaim’s house the next day and I was glad to see that he had discarded the worn briefcase and his notebooks were tied with a strap.
“Did you have a nice summer?” I asked boldly. “It was okay,” he replied, and so I knew that it had been long and lonely.
We walked to school together, understanding that things were different now. We were friends.
Because we were friends, I invited him to the next meeting of Hanoar Hatzioni and it was at that meeting that he became Chaim, a name he had not used since his bar mitzvah.
He was my partner in the movement’s principal fundraising activity, subway solicitations for the Zionist cause, to raise money for Israel’s War of Independence. Shimon issued us flimsy bits of printed paper which he told us were our licenses, and blue-and-white canisters. A senior at Brooklyn College, who left a month short of graduation to fight with the Haganah, came to our basement clubroom to help us write the speeches that would be bellowed above the grinding of the subway trains. He complimented me on mine, a poem of sorts which I belted out shrilly.
“Give! Give so that Israel may live!” was the concluding line which I shouted, clinging to the center pole as the train lurched and swerved through tunnels and onto the elevated track. Chaim patrolled the car as I spoke, shaking two canisters vigorously, jangling passengers into wakefulness and then staring at them accusingly until they shoved a coin or a folded bill into the slot.
We met early on Sunday mornings and boarded the first car of the Brighton Express. I shouted my speech, Chaim made his collection, and we dashed to the next car as the train pulled into a station and there repeated our performance, changing trains again and again. We sometimes traveled as far as the last stop in the Bronx or traversed Queens, encountering members of our own movement or of other Zionist movements—the skull-capped boys of the religious B’nei Akiva, the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair crowd in their unpressed uniforms and bright red ties, and the intense intellectuals of Habonim. We were, all of us, brave soldiers in Israel’s army; our royal blue shirts, so carefully washed and ironed by our mothers (who were happy that we belonged to a “Jewish” club), were our uniforms. And, of course, despite the flimsy “licenses” we carried, we were always nervous about being stopped, even arrested, by a transit officer. We had been solemnly warned by Shimon that it was a possibility. My own nervousness was laced with anticipation. Arrest would make me a heroine of sorts. Shimon, who often talked down to me (I was, after all, a high-school sophomore and he was already in college), would see me as a peer, an equal. He might even notice the red highlights in my hair as I noticed the silken texture of his sand-colored cowlick. I imagined myself the Hannah Senesh of Brooklyn, staring out at Shimon from behind bars and telling him that it had all been worth it. I had jeopardized myself for the Zionist cause and for him.
But on the day I was stopped by a transit officer at Prospect Park, Chaim, who was at the opposite end of the car, rushed over to protect me.
“She was only helping me, officer,” he said, ignoring the look of annoyance I shot at him.
The Irish transit cop glared at us briefly and then smiled.
“I got to respect you people for what you did to the Brits,” he said and forced a folded dollar bill into the canister. “But you’re breaking the law. Don’t let me catch you again.”
It was only noon, but we gave up collecting for the day and went back to Chaim’s house. His mother made us scrambled eggs with lox and onions and told me that her Chuck would go to medical school. That had been his father’s dream, before his death from a heart attack. The insurance money was put away for that purpose and she supported them on her bookkeeper’s salary.
“You put away. You have. Interest.” She chirped on in half-sentences while we ate and went to the window to stare down at the street. She sighed deeply because Chaim left half his eggs. She would have sighed with even greater fervor had she known that he vomited up the other half in the men’s room of the Oceana. The encounter with the transit officer had upset him greatly.
“What if he had arrested us?” he asked as we walked to the theater.
I knew that he had not been afraid for himself but for his mother.
“Why does she call you Chuck?” I asked.
“She thinks it sounds more American than Charlie or Charles,” he replied.
We laughed at her foolishness, we who called each other by Hebrew names, who were familiar with terms like Judeophobia, Jewish identity, Jewish pride. We did not want to be more American. We were all convinced that our future lay with the nascent Jewish state, fighting for its life a world away.
_____________
I look at the man who now calls himself Charles Mansfield. I note that his nails are manicured and covered with a pale polish. He must be a surgeon. He follows my eyes and, as though offering an explanation, he says, “I always hated it when my hands were full of sand, when the grit got underneath my nails.” I know then that he is thinking of that last summer and, as we look down at the dark water of the Hudson, as we catch the key words of the urgent discussions that dominate this room tonight (“Israel’s security . . .” “The right to retaliate . . .” “Scuds.” “Oh, the children, the children . . .”), I know that such thoughts, such memories, are inevitable. We cannot escape them just because we have changed our names and earned our graduate degrees, because his wife is tall and blonde and because my husband knows how to mock his Jewishness. We are bonded by our memories of sand and sea, of careering subway trains and a hora danced on a day when history was made. But of course I know, as we sit side by side on the window seat and as Ron Dorfman sits down at the piano and plays Broadway show tunes, in an attempt to rescue his party, that one memory dominates and I wonder if either of us will have the courage to speak of it.
We spent the summer of 1948 on Bay One of Brighton Beach. I had adamantly refused to go back to the Catskills bungalow colony. Shimon was going to summer school, most of my other movement friends would be home, and I, who dreamed of confronting Arab armies and hostile transit officers, refused to be cowed by the specter of polio. We sat cross-legged on the sand and passed one another sections of the Herald Tribune and the Times in the morning, PM and the Post in the afternoon. We followed the Haganah and Palmach battles in the Negev sands and in the hills of Judea as we spattered oily puddles of suntan lotion on the beach. We argued mightily about whether or not the United Nations truce which was finally imposed in mid-July should have been accepted.
“We should take Faluja,” Shoshana Bergman argued. She was a very pretty girl and although she always got lost during subway collections and had once been found weeping on the 42nd Street shuttle, she was an authority on the geography of Palestine and correctly pronounced Majdal and Bet Guvrin.
We flew the blue-and-white movement banner and sat on an army blanket, worn thin in the middle and patched with a red and white checkered terry-cloth dishtowel. Shimon, who had classes in the morning, arrived at noon, carrying his book bag and his guitar. A sad-eyed, thin boy named Herbie sat on a corner of the blanket and played a recorder. It was he who bought us the afternoon papers when he went up to the boardwalk each afternoon to call his mother.
“She has to know I’m all right,” he said in answer to Shoshana’s teasing question. Everyone carried a Modern Library Giant, the brave bright book jackets speckled with sand and drippings of the Eskimo Pie pops which we bought from Chaim who plodded across the sand in a white shirt and white cotton pants, a refrigerated case slung from his narrow shoulders. Like most redheads, he did not tan but his face became swollen and blotched, its pink cartilaginous surface pebbled with acne. He always gave me a free fudgicle and I always gave him a drink of orange juice from the thermos my mother filled each morning. I saved my extra tuna-fish sandwich for Shimon.
Shimon was taking physics at Brooklyn College that summer in preparation for the course in hydraulic engineering, which he would take when he transferred to Cooper Union. He really wanted to go to law school but he had decided on engineering with a specialty in hydraulics because he had been told by the movement that Israel would need such professionals. There would also be a need for scientists, doctors, nurses, agronomists, teachers, and social workers.
“We must all study for transferable professions,” he told us with the quiet certainty of the true believer. “Professions that we can practice here and transfer to Israel when we go on aliyah .It doesn’t matter what we want to do. What matters is what Israel will need.” Shimon received his information at regular meetings held at the movement’s national headquarters, an address in midtown which I realize now was probably a starkly furnished rented office, but which I thought of then as a great hall ringing with oratory made all the more forceful by idealism and conviction.
I decided that summer that I would be a nurse, despite my aversion to blood and despite the fact that I had locked myself in the bathroom when a grease fire in the kitchen had blistered my mother’s arm. Like Shimon, I would fight my revulsion and deny my own inclinations for the greater good of the nation of Israel. I looked deep into his gray-blue eyes one afternoon and said so, and he rewarded me by gripping my hand very tightly.
“Good for you, Aviva. Good for you.”
_____________
In the afternoon, when we had wearied of reading, when Shimon had completed his homework, we sang Hebrew songs about the building of the Galilee and the greening of the Negev and we sang all the verses to “On Top of Old Smoky” and mournful choruses of “The Foggy Foggy Dew.” Shimon played the guitar and Herbie provided sweet and melancholy accompaniment on his recorder.
Asher Kornblum, overweight and extremely serious—he is a psychiatrist now, with a practice in Tel Aviv and a beautiful villa in Savyon—brought an oversized portable radio each day and on the hour we stopped singing and listened to the news. The fighting was fierce during those early days of July and at least once after each newscast Shimon would sigh deeply and say, “I should be over there.”
“But the movement thinks it’s more important that you continue your studies,” Shoshana would protest.
I was jealous of her because she had accompanied Shimon more than once to national headquarters, because her long blonde hair was the color of butter and smelled of lemons, because she always managed to sit next to Shimon on the blanket and to walk home with him after meetings in the basement clubroom.
“I hope you don’t mind walking with me,” she would say, in that small girl voice which she has still not outgrown—I imagine that she uses it now to disarm both her suppliers and her customers as it surely disarmed the two husbands she divorced—“but it’s so dark that I get scared. You can just walk me to the corner if you want.”
“Don’t be silly. I’ll walk you to the door.” His gray-eyed gaze was warmly reassuring and I envied her that reassurance, that concern. I was angry that Chaim lived so near me, that he was always quick to stand beside me when the meeting ended, so that I could not claim Shimon’s protection.
_____________
My husband, whose eyes are also gray but deeper in color than Shimon’s (still, his eyes brought Shimon to mind when I first met him at a party in Cambridge), comes toward us and I move to make room for him on the window seat.
“Len, I want you to meet an old friend, Chaim Mandell—you’ve heard me speak about him,” I say. I am foolishly proud of my husband because he is lean and tall, his face fine-featured, his dark hair, which has not yet begun to gray, attractively unruly.
“Yes. Of course. From your Zionist youth,” Len says breezily. “Last seen at a traffic light on King George Street in Jerusalem. You’re a friend of Ron’s?”
“Actually it was Dizengoff in Tel Aviv. And I’ve explained to Aviva—Abbie, I mean—that I’ve been called Charles Mansfield for a good many years now.” He blushes as he says this. “My wife and Laura Dorfman went to high school together. As Abbie and I did, of course.”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Len says. “You were with Abbie the night of that Sheepshead Bay adventure?” He says this as a question although he knows the answer.
“We never thought of it as an adventure.” His reply is stiff, almost angry, and I wonder why Len chose to use that word. But naturally, he distorts and seeks to diminish my past because he has no part in it.
“I think you called for me at my house that night,” I say to Chaim, thrusting him into intimacy to punish Len.
“I remember that I did,” he replies, “but then I think I remember everything about that night.”
Len excuses himself. An administrative dean has just come in, a man who is influential in the dispensation of grant money and Len wants to talk to him about a research project. This takes precedence, of course, over a story which he has heard told too often and which he considers to be exaggerated and if not exaggerated, then foolish rather than heroic. I am in agreement on this last judgment, although I will not tell him so. In retrospect, viewed as I now must view it because I am myself the mother of adolescent children, that night was the zenith of foolish irresponsibility, of arrogant adolescence. But then we were protected by the great cloak of courage that envelops most young people—a courage based on an absolute disbelief in our own mortality. We did not believe that it was possible for anything terrible ever to happen to us; we were immunized against tragedy by our youth, our vitality, our innocence. We crossed against the light, we never checked the brakes of our bicycles, we dashed from car to car on subway trains that catapulted us to unfamiliar boroughs, always laughing when we should have been trembling with fear.
It was Shimon, of course, who devised the plan for that night, which seemed to all of us to be the natural culmination of that summer of song and fantasy, of suppressed yearning and ambitious idealism. We all wanted to do something, to be part of the great historic adventure in which the young Jews of the newly created state of Israel, some of them no older than ourselves, were participating. It was not enough to collect money on trains, to watch our parents write checks, to study maps, and worriedly listen to the news. It was not enough that Shoshana and I had, one sweltering August afternoon, carried shopping bags of discarded clothing for rummage to the Young Israel on Neptune Avenue, where an overworked secretary had directed us to a storage room. Amid the cartons of old winter coats and woollens that stank of camphor, there was a large wooden box, coffin-shaped and covered with a black velvet cloth on which a silver Jewish star had been embroidered with metallic thread.
“A corpse,” Shoshana whispered and we giggled and lifted the cloth and then the top of the crate. We stared down at an assortment of rifles and handguns. We knew, of course, that the weapons were destined for the Haganah and, with trembling hands, we covered the crate, replaced the cloth, and dashed downstairs. Our discovery had filled us with pride coupled with a sense of longing. We did not want to stand on the sidelines while exciting things were happening, while a war was being fought. Our war for our own people.
Shimon’s plan was just what we wanted at summer’s end—a heroic adventure that would sustain us through the boring back-to-school days of an autumn already cool and sere, through a winter when we knew we would see one another less frequently. Our basement clubhouse was unheated and already we were thinking about college, about after-school jobs. Chaim had a job at Aufrichtig’s Dairy and I had been hired to shelve books at the Sheepshead Bay branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.
Shimon had read about Jewish sailors who were training for possible naval battles on the Mediterranean coast. Their training exercises were conducted in rowboats and fishing launches. It was Shimon’s idea that we simulate such training exercises on the shores of Sheepshead Bay. It would provide us with an excellent test of organization and coordination and it would serve a public-relations purpose. The world was unaware of the plight of the fledgling Jewish navy, of the threat to Israel from the sea. He would invite the press. Someone at national headquarters had a contact at the Brooklyn Eagle .His uncle knew a Daily News photographer. One shot of our group in action would reveal to the world what was happening off the coast of the Mediterranean. As always, Shimon spoke with quiet passion, hypnotizing us with his vision, his sincerity.
“It’s a wonderful idea,” I said quickly, before Shoshana could say the same thing. Shimon rewarded me with a smile, with the proud toss of his head that sent his silken fair hair cascading across his high forehead.
“But won’t it be dangerous?” Chaim asked and I looked at him scornfully.
I did not walk home with him that night although he waited for me at the doorway.
“I have to go to Shoshana’s house and get this book she promised me,” I said.
“I’ll go with you,” he offered. “It’s not such a great neighborhood where Shoshana lives.”
“Then it’s probably too dangerous for you,” I retorted cruelly.
He blushed and I joined Shimon and Shoshana who were waiting for me, Shoshana still insisting that she could bring the book to school the next day.
“But I want to read it tonight,” I said.
I knew that Shimon would have to walk me home after I collected the book. Chaim was right. Shoshana lived on a street that bordered Coney Island, too close to the boardwalk to be considered “safe.” Shimon did walk me home and at my door, he kissed me on the cheek. The comradely kiss of an approving counselor.
“You’ll be with us on Sunday night?” Shimon asked.
“Of course,” I replied proudly and then, to my surprise and surely his own, I stood on tiptoe and kissed him, thrusting my tongue into the moist warmth of his mouth, and then dashed inside. I did not brush my teeth that night. I wanted to keep the taste of Shimon upon my tongue.
_____________
Our plans proceeded rapidly. Not only would the Brooklyn Eagle and the News cover the story, but WEVD had promised to send a reporter. We all learned how to send signals with flashlights and it was decided that Shimon, Herbie, and Asher would sail off while the rest of us waited on shore.
And so, on a soft September night, we met at the intersection of Brighton Beach and Coney Island Avenues, our faces bright with excitement, all of us giddy with energy and pride in our own courage, our own commitment.
We wore our movement shirts and jeans and because we were, all of us, the children of vigilant mothers, we carried sweaters and jackets, thermoses of hot chocolate and brown-paper sacks that held oranges and wax-paper-wrapped salami sandwiches and Dugans cupcakes.
Shimon had impressed upon us that this was a military operation and discipline was necessary. We marched in formation, loudly singing all the songs of the summer, the rousing hymns and the mournful ballads. The Hebrew words, which few of us understood, rose sweetly in our throats and we sang in vigorous unison. We were part of something beyond our lives; we were marching in step with history.
The old people of Brighton Beach, sitting on benches along the shore or in front of their buildings on canvas and plastic folding chairs, hugged their Yiddish papers and stared at us. One stooped old lady went up to Shimon, who led our phalanx, carrying the blue and white Jewish flag provided by “national.” She pressed her twisted arthritic fingers to her lips and then to the flag, as though it were a Torah and Shimon, who carried it, a rabbi.
Chaim walked beside me and I shot him a look of sympathy when a voice rang out above our song.
“Chuck! Chuck! Careful. Be careful.” His mother’s voice was the shriek of a frightened bird, an urgent maternal caw.
_____________
At a pier on Sheepshead Bay, we claimed the small craft we had rented. It would be sailed as far as Gravesend Bay for a hypothetical skirmish. We would remain at the pier and when they sailed back, using our newly learned flashlight signals, we would guide the boat to shore.
But there was a problem. Herbie, who had been very quiet on our march, who had not brought his recorder although he was seldom without it, hung back.
“I’m not going,” he said. “I can’t do it. I promised my mother.” His voice trembled and his face was taut with shame and misery but we knew that he could not be coaxed into changing his mind. His mother was a Holocaust survivor. Pale blue numbers marched up her thin arm and she sometimes wept as she pushed her shopping cart through the supermarket. She worried obsessively about Herbie, which was why he called her every afternoon. If he was even a few minutes late getting home, she would phone each of us in turn.
“Where’s my boy, my only boy?” she wailed plaintively.
We were patient because we knew that Herbie was her only boy now, but there had been two other sons who had vanished, it was said, in the Vilna ghetto.
“Okay,” Shimon said. He pulled a dark wool cap down over his forehead obscuring his soft fair hair. “Any volunteers?”
My heart beat rapidly. The Brooklyn Eagle photographer had his camera poised. If I moved quickly I could be photographed standing beside Shimon. But Chaim had already stepped forward. “I’ll go. Me. I volunteer.” His voice was loud, almost belligerent, and he stared angrily at me. I looked down, at once proud and ashamed.
We launched the craft in a rush of excitement and song at eight o’clock. It was a moonless night and we had a marvelous time waving our flashlights, using the signal code that Shimon had taught us, the messages flitting from ship to shore like bright fireflies until the small boat drifted into the darkness. We built a campfire and ate our sandwiches and drank our hot chocolate. We danced a hora that began with enthusiasm but grew desultory as the night turned colder and sand crept into our sneakers.
We looked at our watches. Shimon had anticipated that they would be back in Sheepshead Bay by nine o’clock. We searched the darkness and flashed our lights frantically but there were no answering incandescent flickers. At ten o’clock Herbie called the police from a pay phone and the police called the Coast Guard. A squad car arrived.
“Go home,” an officer shouted at us. “Go home, you damn crazy kids.”
I clutched Shoshana’s hand and with tears streaming down our faces, we ran to my house. Chaim’s mother leaned out of the window.
“Where is he?” she shouted after me.
But I could not answer her. My voice had deserted me.
We learned, the next day, that a Coast Guard cutter had picked up an exhausted Chaim clinging to the overturned boat and that a fishing boat had plucked Asher, sustained by a life preserver, from the bay waters. But it was not until three days later that Shimon’s waterlogged body was washed ashore on the narrow promontory we called Plum Beach.
We wore our movement blue shirts to his funeral. His mother screamed and tore at her black blouse as though to reveal her heart. His father huddled into the dark tent of his clothing and stared at us through red-rimmed watery eyes. He carried the letter from Albany informing Shimon that he had won a New York State Regents Scholarship. It was clipped to a photograph of Shimon, his dark blue wool hat pulled low over his forehead, his lips parted in a smile of excitement—the photograph taken by the Brooklyn Eagle photographer which had appeared on the front page of the paper with the story of Shimon’s death.
The closed coffin was covered by a black velvet cloth on which a silver Jewish star was embroidered. Shoshana and I looked at each other when we saw it and then averted our eyes. The rabbi told the mourners that Shimon had not died in vain. He had died for the Jewish people. He had died for Zion. We listened but we did not believe him.
_____________
After the funeral, Chaim and I went to the esplanade and sat on a broad sun-streaked rock. We watched the crashing waves.
“Were you scared?” I asked him.
“That’s a dumb question,” he said harshly.
“Why did you go?”
“Because.” His voice was sullen. He was angry the I had asked a question to which we both knew the answer.
“I’m sorry,” I said and although I had not wept at the funeral, my tears came now and I was glad that my mother had thought to place a freshly ironed handkerchief into the pocket of my royal-blue skirt.
But Chaim took that handkerchief out of my hand. He leaned forward and pulled me toward him. His breath came in rasps as he cupped his hands about my breasts and slid them under my skirt, as he kissed my mouth, pressing his tongue against my own, as he sucked at my neck until he drew blood, holding me so tightly I found it hard to breathe. I did not resist. I understood that this was owed to him because he had come so close to death and that I owed it to him because I had placed him in its shadow.
We walked home as we had walked during the first year. Side by side but not together.
We continued to see each other, of course. We were neighbors, both of us active on the school paper, in the debating society. Boy and girl leaders of Arista. Our mothers sat proudly side by side at our induction. We did not leave the movement but the movement crumbled around us. Herbie moved. Shoshana joined the cheering squad and reverted to calling herself Sue. Chaim went to Columbia and I went to Cornell. The years passed. Our children are older than we were that night at Sheepshead Bay. We shout each other’s names at a traffic light on Dizengoff. We meet at this party high above the Hudson on a night when Scuds are falling on Tel Aviv.
“If Shimon were alive, he’d probably organize a simulated Scud attack,” the man who calls himself Charles Mansfield says wryly.
“And we would all buy gas masks and go into sealed rooms, having sent news releases to Eyewitness News,” I embellish.
“Aviva.” In that soft utterance of the name I have not used for all these decades, he condenses our history and forgives me.
“Chaim,” I reply. The forgiveness is mutual, the disappointment shared. We are, once again, on the wrong shore, agonizing from afar, voyeurs still, despite our pounding hearts, our anxious eyes.
We rise then and wait in a circlet of lamplight for my husband and his wife, who approach us from opposite ends of this crowded room.
