I asked Sammy what Pessie meant by helping the other boys, and he said she wanted him to start a group for Chassidish boys who’d been molested.
“Are you going to do that?” I asked.
“Probably not,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
Sammy shrugged.
“You know,” I said, “I had a very hard time after Mommy died and I went to Israel. I went to talk to a doctor and he gave me medication. It made me feel better.”
“I don’t need crazy pills, okay? I just need to be left alone.”
I decided not to argue, and a few weeks later I saw a HELP WANTED sign in the window of a Mobil gas station that was walking distance from the house. I convinced Sammy to go apply, and he got the job-which wasn’t much of a job: just a six-hour shift unloading trucks of beer each Monday and Thursday. On the second Thursday, Sammy met Ryan Hall.
Ryan was riding in the truck with his father, who worked for a beverage distributor out of Albany. He invited Sammy to a bar to hear a band that night. At first I didn’t realize he’d fallen in love. Sammy hadn’t said he was gay, and I assumed he broke off the engagement to Pessie because of the abuse, or maybe because he didn’t want to live a frum life and she did. But after that first night, all he talked about was Ryan. I didn’t mind Ryan. He was polite and I was glad Sammy had a friend who wasn’t Pessie. But then I saw the tattoos. Ryan was coming out of the shower with just a towel around his waist one evening as I was coming up the stairs to drop my things after work. He turned the corner to go into Sammy’s bedroom and there on his right shoulder blade was a swastika.
I went to the kitchen and waited for them to come down. I waited for hours. The sun went down. I drank a whole bottle of wine as I waited. Our mother survived the Nazis. She was born in the Warsaw ghetto and in 1942, when she was six months old, her parents got notice they were to go to Treblinka to a work camp. They died there, of course, like everyone else, but before they went they left her with my father’s former employer, a Catholic butcher named Josef Soskowitz. The penalty for protecting a Jew was death, but Josef and his wife told the Nazis my mother was theirs. There was so little food in the ghetto that my mother barely weighed ten pounds, so the officers believed the Soskowitzs when they said she was a newborn. When the war was over and my grandparents-like three million other Polish Jews-did not come back, the Soskowitzs followed the instructions they’d left and wrote to an uncle in what would soon be Israel. A few months later, Josef escorted four-year-old Bracha to Switzerland, where her mother’s cousin met them and brought my mother to Jerusalem to live with his family.
My mother told this story to us every year on Yom HaShoah. When I was ten, someone spraypainted a red swastika on the outside of our shul and my mother took us to see it.
“This is why we live the way we do,” she said. “This is what they want to do to us.”
I had nightmares about the swastika. Over and over, I dreamt that the man who painted it was chasing me, spraying poison. My mother told me that she had nightmares, too, and that the nightmares were Hashem reminding us that the world is a dangerous place for a Jew.
But Sammy never knew my mother. He never heard her tell her stories. When he and Ryan finally came downstairs they were high. Sammy kissed the top of my head and Ryan opened the refrigerator door and brought out three cans of beer. Suddenly, he frightened me. I thought, if I confront him now he will kill us both. I got up and told them good night and then I went upstairs and threw up the wine. It came out in a tidal wave. Sammy and Ryan went out and Sammy didn’t get home until the next afternoon. I was still in bed. I felt paralyzed by what that swastika on Ryan’s back meant. Sammy had to have seen it. Did he think it didn’t matter? When I heard him coming up the stairs I opened my door and he smiled at me. He looked happy.
“I wish you had come,” he said. “The music was really good.”
“Does Ryan know you are Jewish?” I asked him.
He looked puzzled for a moment, then he leaned against the door frame and looked down. “Yeah,” he muttered.
“And what did he say about that?”
“He doesn’t care.”
“Are you certain about that?”
“I don’t consider myself Jewish anymore,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter what you consider yourself, it is what you are.”
“It’s not what I am,” he said. “I don’t believe any of it. Neither do you.”
“That doesn’t mean I go with people like him!”
“You don’t even know him.”
“I know he has a Nazi tattoo.”
Sammy rolled his eyes. “It’s an old tattoo. His dad made him get it, okay? What do you care? You hate them, too. You’re the one who said it was a cult. I mean, Shoah was, like, a hundred years ago but all they do is talk about how it excuses everything. It’s bullshit.”
“Sammy,” I said, slowly, “Shoah is not bullshit.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Where did you get an idea like that?”
“Like what? I’m saying they’re corrupt. They don’t care about me or you. They only care about everybody following the rules. Like robots! That is bullshit.”
“It is one thing for it to be bullshit and another thing for you to bring a Nazi into my house.”
“He’s not a Nazi!”
“When Isaac finds out he won’t want him to come here.”
“Why would you tell him? It doesn’t matter!”
“It matters to me. And it will matter to Isaac. What about his friends? All these people you are hanging around with. Are they all… like him?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Aviva. You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe you should take your medicine and call me in the morning.” He laughed, suddenly confident, alive in his meanness. I had never seen him like that before and I was surprised at how much it hurt. I thought I knew him because I knew his secrets and he knew mine. I thought we were the same because we both left. But we are not the same.
After that, Sammy didn’t bring Ryan around anymore. And he started staying away for days at a time. He didn’t return my phone calls, and when he did come home he barely spoke, just locked himself in his room. I spent most of those next few weeks in bed. Every time I heard the front door open, I sat up and waited for him to knock on my door so I could tell him how much I loved him and that I just wanted him to be safe and happy. But he never knocked. And I started to feel sick again. Sammy was the last piece of family I had, Rebekah. He was the boy I was supposed to save. I slept and slept and it was never enough to make me feel awake. I stopped going to my cleaning jobs. I didn’t bathe. Isaac came upstairs with peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of water. Sometimes I ate them. When Sammy had been gone a whole month, I pleaded with Isaac to find him and bring him to me. Please, I said. I need him.
“Give him space,” said Isaac. “He’s in love.”
But he couldn’t stop me. The next Thursday I got out of bed and drove to the Mobil station and waited for Ryan and his father. His father was covered in tattoos. He had a skull and the SS lightning bolts on his enormous arms. He had a spiderweb on his neck with a swastika in the middle. Ryan was wearing shorts, and I saw he had a skull on his leg. The skull had an open mouth and wild eyes. It was laughing at me. They were both wearing sunglasses and to me they looked like soldiers. Soldiers without an army, with only their anger. I almost ran them over, right there in the parking lot behind the gas station. I wish I had. Instead I followed them. They drove out of New Paltz and up the Thruway past Kingston. After almost an hour, they turned west onto a state route I’d never been on. I was down to an eighth of a tank of gas when I followed the truck down a dirt driveway under a thick patch of trees. Three trailer homes and one old house shared the entrance. One trailer was new, but the other two were sagging, aluminum skirts cracked and split and missing in places, one just sitting on cinder blocks. On the porch of the old house sat an old, legless woman smoking cigarettes. She was sitting in a wheelchair wearing a long t-shirt, the stumps dangling over the edge of her seat.