Electric City: A Novel (9 page)

When Sophie started reshelving a series of books on astronomy, she noticed someone vaguely familiar: a brown-skinned young man whose face was mostly hidden by the curtain of his black hair. A stack of books perched on a small table next to his chair, and several piles stood on the carpet near his feet. It wasn’t until she got a look at him from another angle that she recognized him from homeroom at school. She even knew his name, Martin Longboat. The Quiet Guy, she had already called him.

He always nodded when roll was called, but suddenly the memory that came to her was from the morning of the blackout, when he had been sent to the principal’s office for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance along with the rest of her homeroom. He had stayed in his chair, like some of the antiwar protesters now appearing more and more frequently on the news, the ones who sat in the street until being dragged off and arrested. Mr. Turner hadn’t touched him, though. Just pointed to the door.

She saw it all again: Martin gathering his notepads and books and leaving the room, never looking at anyone on his way out. The students all resumed the routine of saying the Pledge, with various sideways looks at each other, and a few low-voiced curiosities muttered when the bell rang to mark the end of homeroom. When Martin returned the next morning, he stood up when it was time to address the flag, but Sophie observed that his lips never moved.

This memory stayed with her as she returned to the checkout desk, as her hands continued their tasks of opening books to the
DATE DUE
page and pressing the stamp into its box. She noted a certain satisfaction
about getting the numbers perfectly lined up without smudging the ink, although she could see that the other library workers tipped the dates at various angles.

Martin, now coming out of the men’s room, looked straight at Sophie and raised his chin very slightly. She felt herself reddening as she nodded back. Then he tilted his head to one side, regarding her for an uncomfortably long moment, and smiled.

As if that weren’t confusing enough, Mrs. Richardson summoned her and pointed at the telephone, whose red light was blinking.

“A call for you,” she said, frowning even more deeply than usual. “Don’t forget to keep your voice down.”

Going pink-faced all over again, Sophie picked up the phone and punched the blinking button, assuming it was her mother calling to say she’d be late. But it was Henry.

“Wow,” she said, without meaning to.

“Is this okay?” he said. “I mean, calling you at work?”

During their talk yesterday, Sophie had mentioned her job, but it hadn’t occurred to her that Henry was paying such close attention.

“I’m supposed to be whispering,” she said.

He whispered back. “Oh, right. It’s the library.”

“You don’t have to on your end,” she said.

He laughed, and his voice came back at full volume. Sophie pictured his eyes again, blue as the sky. “Listen. I’m calling to ask if you want to see a movie with me.”

Her heartbeat, already racing, picked up even more speed. She grinned into the mouthpiece.

“Tonight,” he added.

Mrs. Richardson pushed her glasses a fraction of an inch higher toward the slight depression at the bridge of her nose, and Sophie could
tell she was counting the seconds. A little blond girl and her mother were approaching the counter, each cradling an armful of books.

“That would be great,” she said into the phone.

“Yes, glittering!” Henry said.

B
EFORE HER SHIFT
ended, Sophie found herself unable to resist a peek at what Martin Longboat had been reading. The area where he had been sitting was empty of every sign of him except for one book, lying facedown on a stool he’d been using as a table. When she turned it over and read the title, she felt rooted in place for several minutes, losing track of what she was supposed to do with this object. She imagined she could detect Martin’s fingerprints on the pages, as though he had been reading a text printed in Braille.
Modern Jupiter,
the jacket said.
The Story of Charles Proteus Steinmetz
.

And then Martin was standing beside her, though she’d been sure he had left the building. Fighting an urge to turn away, she looked into his eyes, dark as obsidian, pupils and irises merging together, and with a bright gleam that made her think of the last point of light at the center of a TV screen.

Sophie’s eyes were green, flecked with gold.
Almost the color of the river
, Martin thought, and there it was, a miraculous current of intimacy. He scanned back to his earliest memories of seeing her, when they sat a full three rows apart in homeroom. He could picture the texture of her winter coat, the dark waves of her hair.

He said, “I used to watch you sometimes between classes. I’ve always liked the way you walk.”

“How do I walk?”

He thought about the lineup of jocks at the high school, the ones who seemed to have nothing better to do than lean against the walls, ogling as the girls went by. Martin hated the idea that she might think he was one of them.

“Don’t get self-conscious about it,” Martin said, looking away. “Forget I said anything.”

Sophie held the Steinmetz book and let her hands change the subject. “He looks like someone related to me,” she said, pointing at the jacket photograph. “But I never knew my grandparents.”

There was a thicker space between them now, filled by the nearby sounds of a mother shushing a giggling child. Sophie often wished the library could allow for more laughter.

“What about your grandparents?” she said, testing her courage. “Did they speak to you in another language?”

Martin didn’t want to answer yet. He pulled a spiral notebook from his bag and opened to a pair of pages on which a half-constructed bridge was sketched across them both. There weren’t any words, but the drawing was one of his favorites, filaments stopping in midair.

“Unfinished spider web?” she asked.

Martin shook his head, tucking the pages away and heading toward the exit. “Maybe I’ll tell you some other time.”

Carrying the Steinmetz book to the reshelving cart she had emptied, she saw it also held one more book,
The History of Mohawk Skywalkers.
A photo of construction workers sitting casually atop a giant steel-framed building graced its cover
.
Sophie promised herself she would study the
book on her own, when no one was else was looking over her shoulder.
Bridges and skyscrapers. Modern Jupiter
.

The reference area of the library darkened behind her as she watched out the door for her mother’s car streaming through the rain. On the way home, passing storefront windows along State Street and the heart of downtown, she was startled to notice so many empty ones with signs saying
CLOSING OUT
and
EVERYTHING MUST GO
.

Some disturbances were becoming impossible to ignore. Where every streetlight might have once symbolized new life, the future appeared to be turning upside down. Was this the promise of change made by that blackout, a warning of what else could go wrong? Electric City was flickering and dimming, right in front of her eyes.

T
HE PORTABLE
TV was on in the kitchen, and Walter Cronkite was reporting on Vietnam in his courteous grim voice. Sophie had to swivel around to see the small screen on the kitchen counter near the telephone, but the words came at her even if she didn’t turn to listen.

There was a jungle war being fought on the other side of the world, and increasing signs of a war at home too, not just in her country but in her own household. A week earlier, Simon came very close to being arrested at an antiwar demonstration in front of City Hall, and his parents were pleading with him to stay out of it. They were genuinely afraid, Sophie could tell.

“War is about dying—if not you, then everyone you love,” Miriam said.

“That’s exactly my point,” Simon replied.

Sophie chewed her chicken and realized this was the first time all four of them were having dinner together since Simon had been home from college.

When she rehearsed the sentences for telling her family about the date with Henry, knowing the way she had said yes to him without hesitating, she almost choked on her food. There was no question about her parents’ ideas on the subject; they were both absolutely clear about
wanting her to date only Jewish boys. Did Simon have a girlfriend hidden away somewhere, possibly even in California?

Maybe, Sophie thought, it would count in his favor to mention Henry was Dutch and leave out the rest.

Before Sophie was born, when they first came to Electric City, her parents had lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a cluster of identical brownstone buildings called Sheridan Village. Miriam and David joked that it could have been a fairytale version of Holland, with its miniature pretend windmill on the front lawn.

There was an L-shaped shopping area within walking distance, providing a druggist and grocery store and dry cleaner and shoe repairman, just enough conveniences to allow them to manage with one car. Sometimes Miriam drove her husband to work in their moss-green Chevy station wagon, dropping him off at the research lab with his briefcase and thermos to join a parade of men just like him in matching overcoats and hats. Then, like all the other housewives temporarily in the driver’s seat, she turned the car around and headed back home.

The Levines had arrived in America in late April 1939, both sent as twenty-one-year-old emissaries to the New World by families with foresight. Leaving behind their extended family in the Netherlands, the newlyweds embarked to cross the Atlantic with one trunk apiece, carrying only the basics for beginning an American life. They stood waving from the deck of the ship called
Nieuw Amsterdam
, which turned out to be one of the last passenger ships to make it out of Europe before the Nazi occupation.

Sophie used to imagine her young parents holding hands and locking their knees, hopeful and terrified and of course unaware that nearly every single one of their beloved relatives and friends would—within a few short years—be deported, gassed, and turned to ashes. An ocean would stretch between themselves and everything left behind, and the newspapers would bury most of the terrible news in the fine print on page seventeen. There would be dwindling letters, cables, cryptic postcards, until finally, they were left with desperate, permanent silences. Her parents waited in vain for death certificates with black satin edges, though none ever arrived.

“When we left, we just had to hope for the best,” David said to his children, on the rare occasions he spoke about the past. “I wasn’t even the smartest of my brothers, not even the healthiest.” He would pull a handkerchief from his back pocket and blow his nose, remarking on the persistence of his allergies, shaking his head.

“Life isn’t fair,” he said. It was a statement he repeated often, much more often than Sophie liked. Sometimes she tried to figure out what
American
fathers believed about fairness and “liberty and justice for all.”

She was born on December 31, 1949. Instead of getting to call herself a New Year’s baby, the first one born just after midnight in the new decade, she had come to enjoy saying that she was born on the last day of the ’40s. Sophie Esther Levine.

Both she and her brother, Simon, had been named after relatives who were murdered. When she was four and Simon was seven, their mother had a third pregnancy that ended prematurely with a stillbirth, another daughter who would have been named Lily, also in memory of some ghostly person who now seemed to have died twice.