Too Jewish (32 page)

"What'll we do for fixing food?" I said.

"Try self-service," my mother said. "They'll think it's an adventure. "And they can have Hydrox and chee-wees and Kool-Aid like regular people, thank you very much."

"God, Mama, we're not that poor."

"All the more reason not to act like we give a damn," my mother said. "You're starting to sound like your grandmother."

She knew that would shut me up. It almost made me want to change my mind about the party.

* * *

I invited all the same girls who'd been at Linda's. I made my mother send Daddy and me out to do the shopping. Daddy let me get all the right brands of snacks, though he did draw the line at chunk light tuna. He said mayonnaise was all anybody ever tasted anyway. I hugged him at the checkout counter. I think people already thought it was strange, a man and a kid together buying groceries, but he didn't care. He understood it if I wanted to fit in just for one night.

I cut off the sleeves and legs of my silk pajamas. I did it very carefully using a straight edge, and then I used a lot of pins and a lot of stitches to hem them so they turned into yellow silk shorty pajamas. They weren't perfect looking, but I thought they were a great improvement.

It felt like a much better party than Linda's, probably because it didn't start out with doing math homework. It was funny, even though I was giving the party and that meant I was doing everything for everybody, I didn't feel taken advantage of at all simply because nobody was asking me to tutor her. They wanted to be with me just to get to know me.

We were all over the living room. My house wasn't like Linda's house, which had extra rooms, each devoted to a different purpose. We had a living room, period, instead of a living room that nobody went into, plus a television room, plus what they called a family room where they entertained friends. We had a really good old rug in the living room that Grammy gave us, and I was worried somebody would spill Coke on it. I figured that was why Linda's family room had a terrazzo floor. I was pretty nervous, and I could see nobody paid much attention to the Cokes or the Fritos crumbs, which were really greasy. Well, it wasn't like the rug was important to anyone but Grammy. Except Daddy would have to pay to have it cleaned.

"Everything in your house is so cute," Meryl said.

"Thanks, I guess," I said.

They noticed everything. We had bookshelves with actual books. That was a novelty. We had a desk. What was that for? Oh, was
that
where we had drawers to keep stuff in? They thought the drop-leaf was like a great invention, even though the desk was about two hundred years old. The desk was cute.

"So how come you don't have a maid?" Meryl said.

I was tempted to say we didn't need one. But Rena was a person. "I have a maid," I said. "I didn't want her hanging around watching the stuff we might do."

Susan said, "I don't believe you."

"Her name's Rena," I said. "You want to see a picture of her?"

"You've got a picture of your
maid
?" Susan said.

Of course I had a picture of Rena. When I was little, she sometimes was the one to hold me still for the camera. I went over to the bottom drawer of the desk to fish one out.

"So is this where those letters from your Nazi grandmother are?" Linda said, trying to peer into the drawer.

I pulled my hand back from the drawer fast. "She was not a Nazi. I told you that. I'm Jewish. My father's Jewish. His mother was Jewish. You can't be a Jewish Nazi."

Linda put down her Coke, which didn't stand up exactly straight on the rug. "So show us her letters," she said, and she started moving toward the desk.

I edged myself into a sitting position where my back was up against the drawer. "They're in German," I said. "What good is that going to do you?"

"You read German," Linda said. "You're some kind of genius, but not that much of a genius that you could look at letters and make up something different from what they say."

I thought,
Oh, you don't know me very well,
but this wasn't the time for calling people horseshit. "If I read you one, will you believe me?"

"Maybe," Linda said, "if it sounds like she's not a Nazi."

"What's a Nazi sound like?" Susan said.

"I'll know," Linda said.

I moved away from the drawer just enough to open it and reach in to pull out the packet of letters. I could see the ribbon hadn't been moved since the time I put the ends of the bow in that unusual position. No sooner had I lifted it out very gently than Linda took it away from me and untied the ribbon all messily so the letters all fell onto the floor.

I grabbed for them before they could get out of order. "Hey! Be careful!" I said.

Linda said "Sor-ry," like a third-grader.

I managed to get the letters back into their original order. I knew that Daddy had kept them in the order he received them, which meant the one on top was the worst one, the last one. But I opened it anyway. Translating as I read was going to be hard. I'd never done that before.

"My dearest Bernie. It seems so long since I have word from you. I want to say I am sorry that I did not listen to you when you told me to come to America."

Lisa asked what that meant. Linda told her to shush. But not in a reverent way.

I read the whole letter, and as I went along I got better at translating, mostly because the handwriting got more familiar. "I think you know people on Park Avenue. People on Park Avenue have money. I know a man who can get me passage to Lisbon for 400 deutschemarks. Please ask your friend for help. I don't know why I don't hear from you. I send all my love. Your devoted mother." Mother was
mutter.
That was always so unbearably sweet to me for some reason. I was struggling not to cry.

"Are you all satisfied?" I said.

"God, she didn't get it, did she?" Meryl said.

"Did your dad know a lot of rich people?" Linda said.

I couldn't answer. So Linda said, "Well, how come your father didn't just go over and get her? I mean, just get on a plane or something? That's what I'd've done. Your dad's messed up."

There wasn't a thing I could have said even if I could have gotten words out. I looked around to see if they all were like Linda. Meryl was looking at her with an expression that let me know she wanted it clear she wasn't that dumb. "So what happened next?" Meryl said.

"She fucking died in a concentration camp," I said.

I didn't wait for anyone else to say anything. I put the letters back together, replaced them neatly in the drawer, and picked up my sleeping bag. I crawled off in a far corner, curled up, and pretended to be asleep until I really was.

Mrs. Walter was having fun with polygons at the board. She would circumscribe them in circles and then break them into triangles from the center and make us figure out the total degrees in the external angles in the different shapes. She was going to work her way up to the circle. It wasn't exactly like listening to a compelling story, but I was a lot more entertained than the rest of the class, and at first I didn't notice Mrs. Prescott standing in the doorway. Neither did Mrs. Walter. She finished her thread of thought before she went over.

No one could hear what Mrs. Prescott said, but we heard the upshot. "She'll come to the office at the end of the period," Mrs. Walter said. She was a lot more powerful than the principal. There were ten girls in the class, and most of the others probably wondered what kind of trouble they were in. I'd never been called to Mrs. Prescott's office before, so I wasn't worried, and when I found out at the end of the period that I was the one, I got an awful rush of adrenalin, the kind that would make me run to the bathroom if I didn't get reassurance soon. "Mrs. Prescott says to go get all your books first," Mrs. Walter said.

Mrs. Prescott didn't say a word to me beyond "okay, let's go" and "we'll take my car." She wasn't being mean, I could tell. She was being northern; that was the only way I could explain it. She didn't know what to do or maybe what was going on, and even though she was an important person who knew how to handle people, sometimes she handled people by leaving them alone. I could tell when we turned left on St. Charles that she was taking me home. I knew that was bad. And when we turned into my street and I saw two police cars and my grandmother's car in front of the house, I knew I wanted the car to stop, turn around, and take me back to the early morning. "I'm terribly sorry, Darby," Mrs. Prescott managed to say when I got out of her car. She didn't look terribly sorry, but that was the kind of face she had.

I didn't want to know who was dead. I knew somebody was dead. It was one of my parents. I wasn't going to let myself think about which one I wanted it less to be. I didn't want to let myself think even for a second about what the two possible futures would be. I knew one of my parents was dead. That was the only reason Mrs. Prescott was bringing me home. I didn't want to walk through the door.

The lock was off, and when I walked in the first thing I noticed were the policemen. Then Rena. And then I saw that my grandparents and my mother were there, but not my father. My father was dead. I screamed. "It's Daddy. Where's Daddy?"

Grammy came toward me and tried to put her arms around me. She never did that under ordinary circumstances, and I couldn't think of anything worse now. I started moving into the room to escape her. "This is about Daddy," I said. "Please don't tell me something horrible. Please don't."

"I'm sorry, your father killed himself," Grammy said.

"Mother!" Mama screamed.

I screamed. A long drowning scream.

Grammy tried to talk over me. "I'm so sorry. Letty. Darby." I screamed louder. Grammy tried to put her arm around me again. This time I wriggled away from her. Now I was angry. "Where is he?" I looked around the room, thought about going to their bedroom, needed someone to hold onto, saw my mother all knotted up, ran to Rena, who pulled me to her and didn't let go. Rena was tall and skinny, but she was a great hugger. She probably was the person who taught me how to hug.

A policeman walked slowly toward me, like I might bite him. "Honey, this happened in his office. But he's not in there. Do you mind if we ask you some questions?"

"He killed himself," I said. "I didn't do it. I don't want to talk. Why do I have to talk? Mama, why'd he kill himself?"

"That's what the policeman wants to find out," Mama said.

I looked at Grammy. "He probably killed himself because you're so mean about him."

"Please talk to the policeman," my mother said to me. "Please?" Grammy just stood there looking at me. She looked like she was just waiting for me to be proven wrong.

The other policeman came up behind his partner. "Can I show you something?"

I was worried it was going to be a picture. That's what they always did on television, show people photographs of bloody dead people. "It's not something scary, is it?"

"They're not going to upset you," my mother said.

"Right," I said.

The policeman invited me to sit on my own sofa, patting the seat. I dragged Rena along with me and made her sit in the middle. She was going to be a filter that I could look through. It wasn't fair to Rena, and I knew it. She was kind of trembly, and her face was wet from crying, but she was the only person I trusted in that room, and she knew what she had to do because I wasn't fully grown.

The policeman went into a file folder and brought out one of my grandmother's letters from Germany. I recognized it for what it was right away because I'd never seen onionskin paper like that anywhere else. He unfolded it, and I saw someone had written on it over the original letter. In big letters, printed like someone my age would print, it said, "
HITLER DIDN'T KILL YOUR MOTHER YOU KILLED YOUR MOTHER.
"

I let out a moan without meaning to.

"You know what this is," the policeman said, almost in a whisper. "Someone mailed it to your father."

All I could think about was that Daddy had let me buy Oreos and Fritos. "Daddy even bought them the right kind of cookies," I said.

Grammy said, "Darby, please make sense."

"Hush, Mother," Mama said.

I let go of Rena's hand and walked over to the desk. I didn't know why Mama hadn't checked the bottom drawer, since she knew about the letters. But I opened it myself. The space where the letters always had been no longer held the packet. Instead there was a slip of paper, taken from our kitchen, I figured, while I was sleeping, framed by the ribbon that once had tied the letters together. And on the slip of paper was written, "
YOU'RE NOT SO SMART
."

I thought it was dreadful that Daddy was going to be buried in Metairie Cemetery. It wasn't the cemetery itself; it was the fact that it was in Louisiana, which was really a nowhere place in the United States. This was not where a person like Bernie Kuper should have been expected to spend eternity, even if it was only his body, which of course would rot fast, because my mother only could afford a plot in the section where people were put in the ground. I thought Daddy should have at least been shipped to New York, which was closer to Europe.

I was the one to call Axel to tell him, and he talked to me for a long time on the phone that night, even though he was going to come down for the funeral. He said my father had no good place to be buried because Stuttgart was where they built Volkswagens which meant they were cars of the German people of the Reich, and people in New York got buried in New Jersey anyway, so why not be dead in New Orleans since he'd been dead here for so long anyway? That made me stop crying for a few minutes because I realized I could know Axel now, and I was comfortable. Even though I could tell he was a man who'd taught himself never to cry. Daddy was like that, too. Daddy only cried in his sleep.

Axel came to New Orleans on what he told us was an open ticket. He was here for the funeral, yes, but he owed it to my father to stay until he thought my mother was all right. "You might have to stay forever," my mother said when he told her that. I knew that was true for me. Just for starts, I wasn't going back to school ever. I wasn't even planning on leaving the house. Though being in the house and never seeing my father was making me cry all of the time. Rena was no better, but she came to work anyway. Grammy said right away that she'd pay Rena her salary, and Rena said, No thank you, she would get by on whatever my mother could pay, and if my mother couldn't afford to pay her, well, she'd find a job night-sitting and try to drop by during the day to help out. Mama hugged and kissed her. Rena could go into Daddy's office. Mama was never going to be able to go into Daddy's office, not even if it would mean she could make a million dollars a day if she did.