“Let me have a scotch on the rocks,” Roxane said.
Aaron made one for her and one for Ruth. He poured Burgies for Howard and himself. “Salt, Daddy! Salt!” Leon said. Aaron put salt in beer for some extra flavor. He took it wherever he could get it; the way he smoked, his sense of taste was down for the count like a pug in against Sugar Ray Robinson.
Leon cared nothing for that. He liked the way the salt made the beer bubble. Once he was happy, Aaron took the drinks out front. Leon followed. Howard ruffled his curly hair and tickled him. Leon squealed. He liked Howard, which made Aaron cut the actor more slack than he might have otherwise.
“L’chaim!” Aaron said. They all clinked glasses-two tall, two short-and drank. The beer was cold and smooth. Not expensive beer, but Aaron had never had expensive tastes. His younger brother did. Affording them sometimes got interesting for Marvin.
Everything stayed cheery and familial for about a minute and a half. Then Roxane pointed to a frame hanging above the rocking chair Aaron was sitting in. “What’s that?” she asked. “I don’t remember it from the last time we came over.”
“I made it myself,” Aaron said, not without pride. And he had: he’d done the backing and the wooden pieces, and he’d cut and fitted the glass, too. He was handy with tools. He always had been. Any kind of tools or machinery-he could make them sit up, roll over, and do what he wanted. It wasn’t a rare knack or a great big one, but he had it.
“But what did you go and frame?” Instead of waiting for an answer, Roxane came over to see for herself. Aaron downed the rest of his Burgie in a hurry. Things wouldn’t stay cheery or familial much longer. Roxane had to lean past his chair to see what the envelope and the letter under it were. She straightened and angrily turned on him. “Oh, Aaron, how could you?”
“Because I darn well wanted to, that’s how,” Aaron answered, setting his chin. No, he didn’t start quarrels, but he didn’t back away from them, either. “Not every day somebody gets a commendation letter from the President of the United States.”
“I wouldn’t be so proud of a letter that congratulates you for fighting for the reactionaries and against the working class.” Yes, Roxane wore her politics on her sleeve.
“I caught that Russian flyer after he A-bombed L.A.,” Aaron said. “If Comrade Working Class dropped it a couple of miles farther west, you wouldn’t be here kvetching at me. And if I didn’t catch him and take him to the cops, odds are he’d’ve been hanging from a lamppost fifteen minutes later.”
“Can we talk about something else, please?” Ruth said. She didn’t like arguments. Aaron sometimes thought she’d married into the wrong clan. Bravely, she went on, “And can we do it after dinner? It ought to be just about ready.” She hurried into the kitchen to check-and, by the way ice cubes clinked, to reload.
“Sounds like a good idea.” Howard’s politics lay at least as far to the left as his wife’s, but he wasn’t so strident about them. Roxane was so sure about what she imagined she knew, she might almost have been a Finch.
Ruth had boiled the tongue with potatoes and carrots and celery and onions. Aaron’s mother had made it the same way, though his family was from Romania, not White Russia. Peasants-Yehudim and goyim alike-must have made it the same way all across Eastern Europe.
He slathered horseradish on the tender, fatty meat now, for the same reason he salted his beer. He hadn’t needed to do that when he was living with his mother. Well, that was a long time ago.
Leon ate tongue and carrots and potatoes with a two-year-old’s enthusiasm and lack of manners. He used a small, blunt-tined fork. Sometimes the food went into his mouth. Sometimes it ended up all over his face. After he finished, Aaron plucked him out of the high chair and carried him to the kitchen sink under one arm. Something not far from steam cleaning followed. Leon wiggled and spluttered and laughed, all at the same time.
“Coffee?” Ruth asked.
“Sure,” Howard said. Roxane also nodded. Aaron wondered how often they could afford it, or a feast like this. By the way Howard stuffed himself, he hadn’t eaten so well in a while. And whom did he have to blame for that but himself?
But Aaron couldn’t wag his finger at Howard too hard. He’d been light on hours at Blue Front himself lately. Anyone would have thought that atom bombs falling on a city were bad for business or something. Now he’d had a couple of pretty full weeks, so Ruth could splurge a little.
And he couldn’t wait for Roxane and Howard to go home so he could tease his wife. He’d said they would pitch a fit when they saw Truman’s letter. How often did a man get a legit chance to tell his nearest and dearest Told you so? And how often did a prophet turn out to be without honor in his own house?
–
Marian Staley kissed Linda good-bye. “See you in the afternoon, sweetie,” she said.
“?’Bye,” Linda answered without looking back as she trudged into the tent that held her class.
Do I laugh or do I cry? Marian wondered. Even in a place as awful as Camp Nowhere, her daughter was growing up a pretty normal little girl. She knew she had to go to school, and she also knew she didn’t need her mommy while she was there. The teacher would take care of whatever went wrong between now and dismissal time. Having started late, they weren’t bothering with summer vacation. That made adults happy, if not children.
Bill would have been proud of his daughter. He might even have been proud of Marian for the job she was doing of raising Linda as a pretty normal little girl. But he wouldn’t be proud of anything ever again. Either he’d burned to nothing when his B-29 went down in flames in Siberia or the Russians had dragged what was left of him from the dead plane’s wreckage and buried him thousands of miles from where he should have been.
Every so often, usually when she was looking the other way, so to speak, loneliness would reach up and stab her in the back. It wasn’t happening so often as it did right after she got word Bill was dead. Whenever it did, though, it hurt as bad as ever.
Fayvl Tabakman said passing time made things easier to bear. If anybody knew what he was talking about along those lines, Fayvl was the one. He’d watched his wife and children go to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The Nazis had decided he was strong and healthy enough for them to work him to death instead of just killing him.
Somehow, they didn’t quite manage to do it before they started losing the war too fast to let them finish. So Tabakman came to America and opened his little cobbler’s shop in Everett. The Russian atom bomb didn’t quite manage to do him in, either.
And now he was in Camp Nowhere, too. He took all the camp nonsense in stride more readily than Marian could. Unlike her, of course, he’d been in worse places. They gave people enough to eat here. It might not be great food, but there was plenty of it. Doctors in the camp could and would do as much for their patients as doctors outside.
No, Auschwitz hadn’t been like that. There, if you didn’t starve, the camp doctors might use you for a guinea pig and experiment on you. From the news that came out of the war-crimes trials, they would use you up as casually as if you were a guinea pig, too.
Shuddering at the idea-why, it seemed nearly as inhumane as dropping atom bombs on sleeping cities!-Marian walked over to the enormous tent where the camp’s inmates got fed. She thought breakfast was especially bad, but she tried not to complain where Fayvl Tabakman could hear. He worked hard at being a gentleman, so he wouldn’t have told her what a jerk she was, but he wouldn’t have been able to keep a sardonic glint from his eye, either.
Scrambled powdered eggs this morning, with chunks of sausage as chewy and flavorful as bootsoles. Linda would be getting the same thing in her tent; they’d started bringing breakfast into the school instead of worrying about kids being tardy because they got stuck in long, slow lines. Marian could see why they shipped the sausage to Camp Nowhere by the boxcar. Plainly, it would keep forever. Add in scorched toast and instant coffee and you had a breakfast she wouldn’t have given fifteen cents for out in the real world.