Read Online A Master Plan for Rescue by Janis Cooke Newman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Janis Cooke Newman
Ads: Link
third rail, that rail full of electricity. He leans down to pick up the Speed Graphic—miraculously undamaged—and looks up into the surprised faces of a couple of transit cops, the only people left in the station. Then he tells them to take him to the mayor.
Inside Gracie Mansion, my father and Fiorello La Guardia have a long talk about my father’s ability to read people, about how useful it would be to have somebody like that on the streets of New York keeping an eye out for Nazi spies and saboteurs. Then my father drops his hand on the Speed Graphic.
Now let me tell you what I can do with this
, he says. Fiorello La Guardia smiles and shakes my father’s hand. And my father tells him,
One last thing. The transit cops, everybody, they have to pretend I’m dead. Otherwise it will be too dangerous for my family.
Was it an unlikely story? Perhaps. But it was backed up by evidence. The empty coffin that had sat balanced on sawhorses in front of the Silvertone. The fact that no one had brought my father’s camera back from the 42nd Street subway station. The two messages crinkling inside my shirt.
I pushed my glasses back onto my face and rose from the floor. Turned off the radio and went into my bedroom. I tore another page from my composition book and wrote a new message for my father.
Y ERBERLOGRB
I UNDERSTAND
Then before it turned light, before it became another day, I went downstairs and slipped it into the mailbox.
For the first time since the red-faced transit cop brought me home, it felt like nothing inside me was dying.
Six
I t was hot that summer and stifling inside our apartment, but my mother and I rarely left those four rooms. My mother spent the time she wasn’t at five o’clock Mass lying on her bed with the lights out and her blackout shades pulled down, smoking and staring at the ceiling as if a better movie of her life was playing there. I got dressed every morning, tucking both of my father’s messages inside my T-shirt and putting the code-o-graph in my pants pocket. Then I sat in front of the window with the radio on, staring out onto Dyckman Street, hoping for a glimpse of my father.
I was certain he came every day, though I believed it might be at night, when no one would see him. I imagined him standing on the opposite side of the street, gazing up at my window. Some nights, I was sure I could feel him there, his magnetism moving through the bricks like radio waves washing over me.
Because of the Dim-Out orders, I was afraid to lift the edge of my blackout shades and search for him. Although one night, I tucked the luminous-face alarm clock under my blankets, trapping its green light, and went to the window, lifted a corner of the shade. Only one corner, and only high enough to look down on Dyckman Street.
I saw darkness and a circle of light shining on the sidewalk from the downward-casting bulbs that were in all the streetlamps now. A taxi, the top half of its headlights covered with black paint, moved slowly up the street, and I imagined it had let my father off at the corner.
It was a hot night and my window was open. I breathed in the humid air full of garbage and the scent of distant rain, searching for the bitter and sweet smell of the developing chemicals, the smell of Wildroot Cream-Oil. Maybe it was there.
I went back to my bed and retrieved the luminous-face clock, brought it back to the window and lifted the corner of the shade once more. Only for a second, not long enough for any Germans who might be floating in the water off the coastline to see anything important. Only long enough for my father to know I was up here.
I let the shade drop and sat on the floor with the green glowing clock in my lap. Put my back against the wall, as if my father could reach up and touch it.
The rest of the time, I watched for him during the day, dragging an ottoman to the living room window, leaning against the wooden frame for so many hours, I frequently went to bed with a crease
Inside Gracie Mansion, my father and Fiorello La Guardia have a long talk about my father’s ability to read people, about how useful it would be to have somebody like that on the streets of New York keeping an eye out for Nazi spies and saboteurs. Then my father drops his hand on the Speed Graphic.
Now let me tell you what I can do with this
, he says. Fiorello La Guardia smiles and shakes my father’s hand. And my father tells him,
One last thing. The transit cops, everybody, they have to pretend I’m dead. Otherwise it will be too dangerous for my family.
Was it an unlikely story? Perhaps. But it was backed up by evidence. The empty coffin that had sat balanced on sawhorses in front of the Silvertone. The fact that no one had brought my father’s camera back from the 42nd Street subway station. The two messages crinkling inside my shirt.
I pushed my glasses back onto my face and rose from the floor. Turned off the radio and went into my bedroom. I tore another page from my composition book and wrote a new message for my father.
Y ERBERLOGRB
I UNDERSTAND
Then before it turned light, before it became another day, I went downstairs and slipped it into the mailbox.
For the first time since the red-faced transit cop brought me home, it felt like nothing inside me was dying.
Six
I t was hot that summer and stifling inside our apartment, but my mother and I rarely left those four rooms. My mother spent the time she wasn’t at five o’clock Mass lying on her bed with the lights out and her blackout shades pulled down, smoking and staring at the ceiling as if a better movie of her life was playing there. I got dressed every morning, tucking both of my father’s messages inside my T-shirt and putting the code-o-graph in my pants pocket. Then I sat in front of the window with the radio on, staring out onto Dyckman Street, hoping for a glimpse of my father.
I was certain he came every day, though I believed it might be at night, when no one would see him. I imagined him standing on the opposite side of the street, gazing up at my window. Some nights, I was sure I could feel him there, his magnetism moving through the bricks like radio waves washing over me.
Because of the Dim-Out orders, I was afraid to lift the edge of my blackout shades and search for him. Although one night, I tucked the luminous-face alarm clock under my blankets, trapping its green light, and went to the window, lifted a corner of the shade. Only one corner, and only high enough to look down on Dyckman Street.
I saw darkness and a circle of light shining on the sidewalk from the downward-casting bulbs that were in all the streetlamps now. A taxi, the top half of its headlights covered with black paint, moved slowly up the street, and I imagined it had let my father off at the corner.
It was a hot night and my window was open. I breathed in the humid air full of garbage and the scent of distant rain, searching for the bitter and sweet smell of the developing chemicals, the smell of Wildroot Cream-Oil. Maybe it was there.
I went back to my bed and retrieved the luminous-face clock, brought it back to the window and lifted the corner of the shade once more. Only for a second, not long enough for any Germans who might be floating in the water off the coastline to see anything important. Only long enough for my father to know I was up here.
I let the shade drop and sat on the floor with the green glowing clock in my lap. Put my back against the wall, as if my father could reach up and touch it.
The rest of the time, I watched for him during the day, dragging an ottoman to the living room window, leaning against the wooden frame for so many hours, I frequently went to bed with a crease
Similar Books
