Electric City: A Novel (10 page)

Not that Sophie understood any of this at the time. All she knew was that her mother’s once-charming and vivacious spirit seemed to fade
and disappear, at least for a while after the lost baby. Miriam would sit for hours on one straight-backed chair or another, weeping and pale, the kitchen empty of its usual fresh-baked aromas, the many kitchen appliances cold and unused. Friends came and went, filling the table and countertops with their signature dishes, the ones for which they often preferred not to share recipes. The music of their gentle condolences wafted everywhere, accents from long-lost pockets of Europe.

That must have been when Sophie first began to recognize that all of her parents’ friends were immigrants, all with strange names they either did or didn’t choose to Americanize for their new lives. They assimilated at various rhythms, proud of their own cultural backgrounds but wary of how much to show on the outside. With rare exceptions like that mention of Kristallnacht on the night of the blackout, and the brief account of Masha Bernstein, Sophie hardly ever heard any specific stories about the lost Old World. There appeared to be a tacit agreement among their tightly knit circle not to compare notes about what had been left behind.

Especially after the stillborn baby, Miriam’s periodic and occasionally prolonged waves of sadness spoke louder than anything she might have explained about those losses. Her shifting moods alternately darkened and brightened the house like the movements of the sun on a cloudy day. When Sophie came home from school she became accustomed to testing the air when she walked in the door, wondering if she’d find her mother recovered and talkative, her hands and apron dusted with flour, or brooding on the couch, absorbed in a book of poetry.

“I’m home!” Sophie would call from just inside the front door, listening with all of her senses. “Where are you?”

In the seventh year of their marriage, when Miriam was pregnant with Simon, she and David had found themselves hosting a family very much like themselves who came as traumatized refugees from Holland to the United States, having survived not one but two concentration camps, and enduring half a year in a French displaced persons camp after liberation. The house was thick with conversations that didn’t happen; no one able to say out loud what they had witnessed, and how lucky they were to be alive, penniless but saved.

This, Sophie was later told, was how good people behaved: you took each other in, no matter how marginal your own circumstances, and you shared what little you had. Her parents’ couch became a bed, the baby (the refugees had one already) slept in a shelter of pillows on the floor, and at mealtime the table simply filled up with a little more food that stretched onto more plates and fed extra mouths. In fact, David’s favorite admonitions against selfishness seemed to relate directly back to the years when he and his wife had survived on practically nothing. Miriam had worked as a keypunch operator while he finished engineering school, and then he found his first job in Electric City just in time for the birth of their only son.

Sophie couldn’t resist it, sometimes, the impulse to peer down the path of an alternate universe.
If the car hadn’t broken down on the way to that other interview, that other city. If the
Nieuw Amsterdam
had carried her parents to another shore, another continent. If David and Miriam had somehow managed to forge passports with new non-Jewish identities that would allow them to hide in their own backyards until the war ended, and to start over without leaving the Netherlands at all.

Each of these crossroads would have created another Sophie, speaking another language, wearing a stranger’s skin and clothing. Simon would be someone else too, along with an entirely new assortment of
neighbors and schoolmates. There would be a landscape shaped by different hills or flattened altogether, a river with some melodious name, trees reaching higher and wider. She would be a girl calling somewhere else her home.

H
ENRY WAITED WITH
his convertible a few blocks from her house so that she didn’t have to explain to anyone where exactly she was going. Life in a Company town meant seeing its initials everywhere, but this was new: the chrome letters spelling out
MG
on Henry’s dark green trunk made no sense yet. Though it mostly went without saying that her parents wouldn’t drive anything made by Germans, her father insisted that buying American was good for everybody. “We all have to do our part for this country,” was how he put it.

Here she was, opening the door of a secret. Without being asked, Henry told her that the car had been a gift for his seventeenth birthday just one month earlier. It was a little embarrassing, he admitted, to own something so beautiful.

“Impossible to turn it down, though,” Sophie said, stroking the cream-colored leather before taking her seat. This was the first time she’d ever been a passenger in a car without a roof, and already she felt torn between looking at Henry’s profile or the indigo sky.

“What does MG stand for?” she asked, daring him to find her naive.

“Morris Garages,” Henry said. “Which means less to us than it probably does to someone somewhere in England.” He smiled at Sophie long enough for her to start blushing.

“Okay. Seat belt,” he announced, sounding apologetic and fastening his own. “You’re precious cargo.”

Sophie laughed as she complied.
Precious
. All around her, the night felt illuminated and warm, gently wrapping a second skin around hers. The idea of being encircled by Henry’s arms was for the moment a little too much to hope for.

Now his key was turning in the ignition; his plastered left hand rested on the elegant steering wheel. “It gets windy,” he warned, and the engine began singing. She twisted a fist of curls into a knot at the back of her neck.

Their staccato conversation went from simple to silent as Henry steered them away from Sophie’s neighborhood. Past the unlighted windows of Friendly’s, past the post office where they had met, past the fragrant Rose Garden as they entered Central Park. They stopped at an empty parking lot for Iroquois Lake, where the almost-full moon gazed at its reflection in the water.

“I hope you don’t mind not going to the movies,” Henry said.

“It’s lovelier here,” Sophie said.

“We’re now at the highest elevation in Electric City.” Somewhere behind them, the logo floated out of sight. Henry turned on the radio just as the deejay announced the next song. Simon and Garfunkel, “Sounds of Silence.”

They adjusted the seats and leaned back to gaze upward. Stars were starting to appear. Sophie thought of that cold night in November when she watched the sky lighten and the constellations fade away.

“Were you away at school during the blackout?”

Henry nodded; in fact the song had been reminding him of the same thing.
Hello darkness my old friend
. “We all thought it was a prank at first,” he said. “And then after a while, people kept asking me what was going on, just because they knew I came from Electric City.”

“
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light . . .
” Sophie sang along with the radio.

“Someday this will be a place to get far away from,” Henry said. “Don’t you think? I mean, my family has been in this town forever.”

“We pretty much just arrived,” Sophie said. Moonlight gleamed on the chrome details of the car. Her hands were folded in her lap, waiting for Henry to reach for them. But he didn’t.

“I can’t imagine being new,” he said. “Though I like the idea.”

“We’re sort of opposites that way,” Sophie said, turning toward Henry enough to see that his eyes were closed.
We’re different in so many ways
, she thought, unsure if this was a good thing or not.
Opposites attract; like forces repel
—such were the certainties in her father’s world of magnets. “I don’t know the feeling of belonging to a place,” she said. “Instead of just borrowing it.”

Henry opened his eyes and reached over to place his fingertips on her collarbone. “You belong here as much as anyone,” he said.

Searchlights swept broadly across their faces just then, and they both flinched from the glare. A voice came at them, amplified by a bullhorn: “This parking lot closed at sunset,” it blared. “That means YOU.”

Henry leaned close enough to whisper into Sophie’s ear. “I know somewhere else we can go.”

There were always reasons for things. Being forced away from the lake was a kind of relief, since Henry had been worried about kissing Sophie. Whispering into her ear had brought his lips so close, though. And her hair smelled like apple trees in blossom.

The cooling night pushed its way around the windshield and behind their shoulders. Pensive during the drive across town, they saw few other cars even when they passed the hospital. Human life seemed to be missing from the scenery. Slowing down on Wendell Avenue, Henry parked near the bottom of a long driveway, and the engine ticked into silence. “Built by my grandfather,” he said, pointing uphill to where the house loomed.

They both got out of the car to stand for a moment under a streetlight, one of the older style, a throwback to the days of gas lamps. Sophie was trying to make out the shape and size of the half-hidden Van Curler mansion, but Henry was watching the empty lot across the street, a grassy square framed by leafy oaks and maples on three sides.

“That’s where Charles Steinmetz used to live,” he said. Instead of porcelain sinks and overstuffed armchairs, the organic lushness of nature seemed so inviting. Maybe he could bring Sophie closer by going the long way around; he strode ahead and beckoned to her.

“I’ve seen pictures of him,” Sophie said, hesitating.
Modern Jupiter
. She didn’t want to admit to thinking of Martin with his stack of books.

“Really?”

“At the library.”

Henry looked for her expression but couldn’t read its details. She rubbed at her arms, which made him notice goose bumps himself. A cloud of moths rushed past, and cricket song rose as though some volume dial had been turned.

“The house got torn down,” he said. Toward the back corner of what must have been a foundation wall, there was one low stone ledge surrounded by nothing. Henry used his good hand to sweep debris from its surface.

“What a loss,” she said, catching up to take a seat beside Henry on the cool granite, their thighs just barely touching. “I would have thought—”

Henry took her hand and she squeezed his fingers in response. It was amazing to realize that such a small amount of contact could transmit signals like this, enough to cause such a commotion on the inside. “People save the wrong things sometimes,” he said. “Then all of a sudden it’s too late.”

The arm with the cast felt heavy and muffled in contrast to the hand now holding on to Sophie. He could have asked her to sign the plaster, but that seemed foolish. It was coming off the next day. And he’d rather ask for something more lasting, a photo of her to take back to school with him. Or maybe he could give something to her instead.

The crickets paused, and in the unexpected silence, a small rustling sound drew their attention to a spot just at the edge of the property, lit by the partnership of moon and streetlamp. Later, Sophie would remember this moment as though she and Henry had invented the scene together, conjuring the visitation by way of their intertwined fingers. Behind their backs, the ghost of a house no longer casting shadows, the murmur of a creek beneath the tangle of bushes. Pulsing heartbeats signaling back and forth, skin to skin. And a red fox, poised so motionlessly it might not have been real.