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Authors: Janis Cooke Newman
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fifteen minutes to run down to the mailboxes. Running my hand along the row of brass doors, each with a circle of holes punched into it, as if mail needed to breathe. Lifting the door of ours to see if my message had disappeared, if it had been replaced with one from my father.
It had not come by the time my mother left the apartment for five o’clock Mass, wearing the black dress that was too hot for days like this, a piece of black lace bobby-pinned to the top of her head. My mother had been going to five o’clock Mass every afternoon since Father Barry had turned up in our living room with his black suit smelling of incense.
It had not come by the time she returned, heading straight for her bedroom, as if she was worn out from standing and kneeling and repeating things in Latin.
My father’s answer had not come by the time Aunt May came up to make the apartment hotter with her cooking. Aunt May had taken over all the cooking for us. Nearly everything she made came from
Victory Meat Extenders
, a cookbook that had come out since the war began, since meat had started being rationed. Aunt May served us dishes like Pork-U-Pines and Emergency Steak, dishes that tasted like cereal and gravy. Most nights, I pushed these gray-looking meals around on my plate until she went back downstairs.
I never saw my mother eat any of Aunt May’s cooking. Except for her trips to Good Shepherd, she was always locked in her bedroom, so silent, I only knew she was in the apartment by the sense I had of her heart beating.
My father’s answer still had not come after dinner, when I bumped into Uncle Glenn near the mailboxes. He was on his way out, wearing his white Civil Defense helmet and armband, the silver whistle strung around his neck.
Only later, after all these things happened, did I find a new message replacing mine.
When I brought it upstairs and decoded it, what my father had written back was
Y VGRO LUU ITE
which meant
I CANT SEE YOU.
If the piece of paper sitting on my bed, the paper with those four coded words, had not been full of my father’s magnetism, I would have torn it into a hundred pieces. But it—and the paper crackling inside my shirt—were the only things I had left of him. The only things that had gone from his hand to mine. I slipped this latest message inside my shirt and instead tore up the paper from my composition book I’d used to decipher it. Ripped it into pieces, let it fall like a blizzard on the cowboys and Indians riding across my bedspread.
When I was done, I went into the living room and turned on the Silvertone, needing to fill up my head with noise, fill it with something that wasn’t my father’s voice—his mix of American and Irish I was already starting to forget—repeating the words
I CANT SEE YOU
over and over, as if every one of those pieces of ripped paper could talk.
I lay on the checkerboard linoleum with my head next to the Silvertone’s big speakers. But I couldn’t focus on what was pouring out of them, not the baritone of the announcer’s voice, not the crashing of the orchestra.
My father was alive and somewhere out in the world and didn’t want to see me. I couldn’t believe that was true. Not unless he had a good reason. A life-or-death reason. A reason that had to do with the war, because everything in those days had to do with the war.
I lay there, trying to come up with a reason that my father—my father who had survived his fall from the subway platform—could not come to me.
It is no surprise that what I came up with was something straight out of a radio serial drama. A story built on a faked death and a secret identity and a plan for spying. What else would I have thought of? All I’d done for the past months was let radio serial dramas pour into my ears. A radio serial drama was pouring into my ears at the very moment I was dreaming up the story.
Here is how I told it to myself.
My father rises from that narrow space between the track and the
It had not come by the time my mother left the apartment for five o’clock Mass, wearing the black dress that was too hot for days like this, a piece of black lace bobby-pinned to the top of her head. My mother had been going to five o’clock Mass every afternoon since Father Barry had turned up in our living room with his black suit smelling of incense.
It had not come by the time she returned, heading straight for her bedroom, as if she was worn out from standing and kneeling and repeating things in Latin.
My father’s answer had not come by the time Aunt May came up to make the apartment hotter with her cooking. Aunt May had taken over all the cooking for us. Nearly everything she made came from
Victory Meat Extenders
, a cookbook that had come out since the war began, since meat had started being rationed. Aunt May served us dishes like Pork-U-Pines and Emergency Steak, dishes that tasted like cereal and gravy. Most nights, I pushed these gray-looking meals around on my plate until she went back downstairs.
I never saw my mother eat any of Aunt May’s cooking. Except for her trips to Good Shepherd, she was always locked in her bedroom, so silent, I only knew she was in the apartment by the sense I had of her heart beating.
My father’s answer still had not come after dinner, when I bumped into Uncle Glenn near the mailboxes. He was on his way out, wearing his white Civil Defense helmet and armband, the silver whistle strung around his neck.
Only later, after all these things happened, did I find a new message replacing mine.
When I brought it upstairs and decoded it, what my father had written back was
Y VGRO LUU ITE
which meant
I CANT SEE YOU.
If the piece of paper sitting on my bed, the paper with those four coded words, had not been full of my father’s magnetism, I would have torn it into a hundred pieces. But it—and the paper crackling inside my shirt—were the only things I had left of him. The only things that had gone from his hand to mine. I slipped this latest message inside my shirt and instead tore up the paper from my composition book I’d used to decipher it. Ripped it into pieces, let it fall like a blizzard on the cowboys and Indians riding across my bedspread.
When I was done, I went into the living room and turned on the Silvertone, needing to fill up my head with noise, fill it with something that wasn’t my father’s voice—his mix of American and Irish I was already starting to forget—repeating the words
I CANT SEE YOU
over and over, as if every one of those pieces of ripped paper could talk.
I lay on the checkerboard linoleum with my head next to the Silvertone’s big speakers. But I couldn’t focus on what was pouring out of them, not the baritone of the announcer’s voice, not the crashing of the orchestra.
My father was alive and somewhere out in the world and didn’t want to see me. I couldn’t believe that was true. Not unless he had a good reason. A life-or-death reason. A reason that had to do with the war, because everything in those days had to do with the war.
I lay there, trying to come up with a reason that my father—my father who had survived his fall from the subway platform—could not come to me.
It is no surprise that what I came up with was something straight out of a radio serial drama. A story built on a faked death and a secret identity and a plan for spying. What else would I have thought of? All I’d done for the past months was let radio serial dramas pour into my ears. A radio serial drama was pouring into my ears at the very moment I was dreaming up the story.
Here is how I told it to myself.
My father rises from that narrow space between the track and the
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