Read Always and Forever Online
Authors: Cynthia Freeman
Always and Forever
A Novel
Cynthia Freeman
To my own beloved family and to my devoted family of readers.
Chapter 1
K
ATHY ROSS AWAKENED EARLY
one unexpectedly sultry October morning in 1945 with an instant realization that it was to be a landmark day. She lay motionless, and for a few moments her sometimes hazel, sometimes green eyes remained closed. But her thoughts raced forward to nightfall, when she would board an ocean liner en route to Southampton, England, the first stop to her ultimate destination of Hamburg, Germany. For once in her life, she thought with satisfaction, she was about to do something useful.
Every school day of the past four years, when she had climbed down from their apartment above the family’s candy store on Thirteenth Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, she had battled guilty feelings over the fact that she was on her way to classes at Barnard when she ought to have been enrolled in the WACS and doing something for her country.
For all her first-generation American patriotism, her mother had been hysterical when Kathy first mentioned joining up. Her father had been speechless with fear. Their baby—their only child—off to fight in the war? Aunt Sophie, the family’s Rock of Gibraltar, had persuaded her that it would be more sensible to stay home and earn a college degree, then go to Columbia at night for a master’s in social work.
“In the WACS you could be killed,” Aunt Sophie had said matter-of-factly, with the faintest trace of a German accent. “This way, even if you quit work at sixty-five, you can contribute over forty years of service to people who’ll need you. One thing you have to learn, Kathy,” Aunt Sophie had admonished, but with love in her voice, “you must see the whole picture, then decide what to do.”
Only Aunt Sophie truly understood why she was sailing tonight with a volunteer group out to help resettle some of those millions just released from such horror spots as Belsen and Auschwitz and Dachau. Aunt Sophie understood Kathy’s obsessive need to contribute to the world in which she lived.
For Aunt Sophie the war had evoked a very personal pain. She had been born in Germany and had expected to spend her life there, until her father abruptly moved the family to New York City. And Kathy knew she felt a fierce pride that her grandniece was among those eager to help the victims of Hitler and the Nazis. Somewhere in Germany the Rosses had left behind cousins. How many had died in the concentration camps? Long ago Aunt Sophie had lost touch with family in Germany.
Aunt Sophie—in truth, her Great-Aunt Sophie—had been part of the immediate family since before she was born. Dad’s mother and his Aunt Dora had both died in their early sixties, before Kathy was born. Like herself, Dad had been an only child. Aunt Dora’s two daughters had moved to California, and in their new-found prosperity preferred to forget their cousin in Brooklyn who ran a small candy store that dealt in pennies.
Aunt Sophie was, to his knowledge, Dad’s only surviving relative other than the California cousins. She had taken care of the apartment and cooked and watched over their only child while Kathy’s parents put in the required sixteen hours a day in the candy store. Small and seemingly fragile at seventy-seven, though the years rested lightly on her, she continued to be the family’s strength in time of crisis.
Kathy pulled herself up in bed, taking guilty pleasure in sleeping late this morning. She had quit her job as a law office receptionist the week before, in order to allow herself the luxury of a few days off. The leader of their group had been blunt in warning them of the heavy workload that lay ahead.
“You’ll see sights that will turn you sick, horrible examples of man’s inhumanity to man. Sights we must make sure never come to be again.” Brian Holmes had been a war correspondent with the American forces that had liberated the concentration camp at Belsen in April. “You’ll work till you drop because there’s so much that has to be done.”
For a while it had appeared that their project would never get off the ground, but Brian had been persistent. Europe was in chaos. The presence of relief organizations was desperately needed. Finally, he was able to pull the right strings. Bureaucratic red tape was cut. The group acquired passage to Europe, though Kathy had refrained from telling her parents that there was serious concern about the return trip, with every inch of space on ships from Europe to America slated for returning GIs.
Conscious now of the unseasonable heat, of her perspiration-dampened pajama top, Kathy left her bed and crossed the tiny bedroom to head for the shower. Dad had opened the store at six. Mom always joined him an hour later. Only Kathy and Aunt Sophie were in the apartment. They and the voice of WNEW radio, she thought with a flicker of humor. Aunt Sophie was addicted to the radio.
“Kathy?” Her aunt’s voice drifted to her above the mid-morning radio news.
“I’m going to shower,” Kathy called back, reaching for a cap to cover her lush, dark, shoulder-length hair. “God, what a hot night.”
“I’ve got fresh coffee perking,” Sophie reported. “And I’ll put up the French toast the minute you tell me you’re out of the shower.”
“Great.”
Kathy loved her aunt the way she loved her parents. Sometimes she felt closer to Aunt Sophie than to them. Despite her age, Kathy thought tenderly while she adjusted the water’s temperature, Aunt Sophie was more modern in her thinking than Mom. Even in those long-ago days back in Berlin, Aunt Sophie had argued that women should have the right to vote. And here in New York in 1912 she had marched with other feminists down Fifth Avenue to declare the equality of women with men.
It had not been easy for Mom and Dad to see her through Barnard, even as a day student with a weekend job, Kathy reminded herself. Even though the Depression was over, Mom and Dad’s income was more suited to Hunter or City College. Aunt Sophie had argued that she should go to a prestigious school, that good times were ahead and a degree from Barnard would be money in the bank. But Kathy had taken the first job offered to her at graduation because she had known it would be of short duration.
Kathy remembered the Depression. Those frightening times when Dad and Mom were terrified they would lose the store. When Aunt Sophie conjured up new ways to make potatoes and rice and spaghetti more appetizing. She wore the same two blouses and two sweaters through the last three years of elementary school. At first they were all too large, because Mom bought them to “grow into”—then they were embarrassingly small. But Mom had been proud that they never had to go on Home Relief. She had realized times were better, Kathy thought whimsically, when Dad started to bring home lox and bagels on Saturday nights to enjoy with the Sunday
Times.
Kathy stood under the stinging spray of the shower and remembered how she and Marge—her best friend from Erasmus High—had been fascinated for a while in the late thirties by the fiery street-corner speakers who climbed atop wooden cartons on Thirteenth Avenue and talked about a world where no one went hungry. Once they had taken the subway to Columbus Circle on a Saturday night to blend with the hordes of humanity that roamed about the Circle, listening to first one soap-box orator and then another. It had seemed exciting and idealistic to hear such eloquence on behalf of the segment of the American population that Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed.”
They had taken the subway into Manhattan for the May Day parade six years ago when veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which had fought against Fascism in Spain, gave the marchers the Popular Front clenched-fist salute. This was one of the rare occasions when she had argued with Aunt Sophie.
“Idealistic fools,” Aunt Sophie had said, scoffing at the Americans fighting against Fascism in Spain. “What’s the difference, Fascism or Communism? Both are bad,” she had said with contemptuous rejection. “The Russians don’t like the Jews. I remember the stories I heard back in Berlin about what Czar Alexander III did to the Jews in Russia.”
Kathy’s father had told her how Aunt Sophie had left a young man she had loved behind in Berlin. He was a student who had fled Russia to save himself from persecution. Aunt Sophie had never married. She was always there to “help the family through a bad time.”
Kathy stepped out of the shower when she heard the phone ring. Dripping wet, with a towel draped sarong fashion about her petite, slender body, she raced to respond.
“I’ll get it,” she called to her aunt and charged into the living room to pick up the phone. “Hello,” she said breathlessly.
“I’ll pick you up at two o’clock,” Marge reported. “I finally convinced Joe he had to let me have the car to drive you to the pier, though he cried bitter tears about how much gas I’d use.” Two of Marge’s brothers stayed out of the army via defense jobs. The third was 4-F.
“Oh, wonderful. A taxi into town would have cost a fortune.” Marge was picking her up at two o’clock, Kathy mentally noted, which would give them time for a long farewell. “I still wish you were going with us.”
“I know,” Marge sighed. “I gave it a lot of thought. It’s not for me. But I’m going to get out of New York as soon as I’ve saved up enough to take me to San Francisco and to live on until I find a job. I’ve had all I can take of Mom telling me the only way for me to go is to marry and have eight kids—or to be a nun.”
“Start saving, Marge.” Kathy knew Marge was determined to escape from the tyranny of her mother and three brothers, all of whom lived in the pleasant three-story O’Hara family house on Fiftieth Street that had been converted in the dark Depression days to a three-apartment house.
“How’s the group shaping up?” Marge asked. “Anybody really exciting?”
“If there was,” Kathy laughed, “you’d be joining us.” Marge had sat in on those first emotion-laden meetings at the West End bar favored by Barnard and Columbia students. The volunteer group was being financed by a syndicate of wealthy American Jews, impatient with delays of the various governments to cope with the problems of those released from the torture chambers of the Nazis. They had campaigned immediately among Columbia-Barnard seniors, known for their liberal leanings. “But they’re really dedicated to the cause. Everybody’s friendly. Except that one character, who rarely opens his mouth,” Kathy conceded. “Probably he’s still recovering from his residency at Bellevue.” Everybody knew how hard interns and residents worked. Especially at Bellevue. “I think his name is David Kohn.”
“Does your mother know?” Marge giggled. “She’d love to see her daughter married to a doctor.”
“Marge, I’m not going on this trip in search of a husband. I have no intention of getting married for a long time, if ever. After this I have to settle down to working for my master’s.”
“I’ll settle for a master who’s good-looking and sexy and has a terrific job.” Marge sighed. “That was what I hated about Hunter. No men. At least at Barnard you had all those Columbia guys.”
“Not really. I was a commuter student.” Marge had been a commuter at Hunter. “You know what happens. On Thursday or Friday evenings—depending upon class schedules—commuters take off for home. Maybe those in the dorms have some social life with Columbia guys.”