But he stopped, suddenly not sure he could do this. What would he say to this woman? How would she react? A smell of apple strudel permeated his thoughts—grandpa’s strudel, an old family recipe grandpa had loved to bake—and this gave him courage. He walked in.
“Hello,” he said in the direction of the three matronly women who stood behind the counter and looked up at him as a clanking bell on the inside of the door announced his presence. Not a single one of them looked anything like his great-great-grandmother. “Can I help you?” one of them said in a soothing Jewish accent that he’d heard only in the movies.
“Uhm, yes…” he began, not quite sure what to say. “Does a Mrs. Sarah Harris work here?”
Just then he heard a rustle from the back. His great-great-grandmother walked out from behind a curtain, carrying some sort of cake in an open box.
“Sarah, a boichik to see you,” one of the women said with a laugh.
Jeff felt like shouting with joy. He suppressed this, along with the urge to jump over the counter and hug her. She looked great—like her best picture, from a bar mitzvah of someone named Sol, come to life.
Sarah was smiling, a wonderful smile he had seen in his father and some of his aunts and uncles and his grandfather. “You look like I know you,” she said. “You’re one of Louie’s grandsons?”
“Right, Louie,” Jeff answered quickly. His mind sped through family history. Louie was Sarah’s older brother. The two had come with a middle brother—Hymie—to New York around 1900. Sarah was a little girl then, about five, and Louie was like a father to her. Her real father and nine other brothers and sisters she would never see again. Louie—Uncle Louie, Jeff’s grandfather had always called him—had moved to the West Coast after World War II. He had fathered a big family himself, and Jeff recalled that these in turn had given Louie dozens of grandchildren who from time to time showed up at weddings and bar mitzvahs on the East Coast. Good. Jeff for now would be one of them.
Sarah took off her apron and moved out from behind the counter. “I’m taking the rest of the afternoon off,” she said to the matrons. “You tell Murray I’ll make up the time this weekend, OK?”
“No, no, please, Mrs. Harris,” Jeff raised his hand and smiled. He didn’t think he could take more than a few minutes with his great-great-grand-mother in this first meeting. “I’ve got just a little over an hour before an appointment downtown, and I don’t want you to lose time from your job. How about we go for a cup of tea at the Dairy Restaurant by Lydig Avenue? It’s kosher, right?” He had checked out this whole neighborhood a week ago.
Sarah laughed heartily. “It seems you know me and this area very well. OK, let’s go to Lydig. Tell Murray I’m back in an hour,” she said over her shoulder to the counter.
“So it seems you know my name but I don’t know yours,” Sarah said as the two walked the half block around the corner to Lydig Avenue.
“I’m Jeff. Jeffrey Rosenberg.” Jeff was 99 percent positive that Rosenberg was Sarah’s maiden name.
Sarah’s eyes widened in pleasure. “Yosef was the name of my father. Wonderful of Shlomo to name you after him. We have only one son, and we named him after my husband’s—Yitzhak’s—mother. So you’re Shlo-mo’s boy, then?” Now Sarah’s eyes furrowed in some confusion. “Or are you Harry’s?”
Jeff smiled and thought frantically as they entered the restaurant. He ushered Sarah to a table, and once seated, ordered two cups of tea—with lemon for Sarah, milk for him—from the elderly waiter who looked like he had about five minutes left to live.
He knew that Sarah prided herself on perfect recall of every relationship in her extended family. Right now she was probably realizing that as far as she knew, Shlomo had no son named Jeffrey, and neither did Harry. Jeff breathed in sharply. Time to talk about the impossible.
“I’m not really Louie’s grandson,” he said slowly.
In another time and place—in fact, in most times and places, including this one—such an admission would have been cause for alarm for Sarah. But her powerful intuition told her this was not a stranger to be feared—not a stranger at all.
“You’re much closer to me than Louie’s grandchildren,” Sarah finally said. Her eyes looked loving, not challenging, to Jeff.
“You’ve traveled very far in your lifetime, Sarah,” Jeff said softly. “Do think it might be possible to travel across years, across time, just like you’ve traveled across great distances?” The tea arrived.
Sarah chuckled. “You mean like angels? Or maybe like the meshugenas on the Twilight Zone?” She pronounced the “w” like a “v,” so the show sounded like Tvilight Zone.
Jeff couldn’t help laughing. He would have sworn that the only TV this woman would have ever watched, other than the news, was the Lawrence Welk Show. “Yes, something like that.” Jeff felt much better after laughing. He put his teacup down. “Sarah, I’m going to tell you something now You’re a very intelligent women, and what I’m going to tell you will seem totally crazy. But please hear me out. It will take just a minute. And then I’m going to ask you to do a very important favor for me. You don’t have to agree now, but please promise me that you’ll think about it.”
“It’s about what Hitler did in Europe?” she asked with a cry in her voice. Her hand shook, and she spilled some of her tea, though the cup was only half full. Jeff suddenly felt very guilty. His great-great-grandmother looked so much younger than he had pictured her, seen her in most of her pictures, that she had seemed at first not so old to him. Now she looked every one of her sixty years, and Jeff felt terrible that he was stirring up these demons about the Holocaust and who knows what else. But he had to finish what he had started here.
“No, it’s not about Hitler.” He paused. “I’m your great-great-grandson, Jeffrey Harris.”
A small shriek came from Sarah, and the blood left her cheeks. “Sarah, please.” Jeff took her hand. “I have to leave now. But I need you to do something for me that is very very important—my life may depend upon it. In twenty-five years, you’ll get to know my grandfather, when he was just a little boy and you’ll be much older.” Jeff realized there were tears in his eyes. “And you’ll be a wonderful grandma to him, believe me. But I want you to promise that you’ll tell him—your little grandson—about this meeting. I’m not asking you to believe me now. You can tell your grandson that you had this meeting with a crazy man who claimed to be your great-great-grandson years ago. But everything depends on your telling him something—something about me, about this—twenty-five years from now.”
Sarah’s head shook—not no, but from tremors. Her eyes were a confused mixture of anger, uncertainty, love. Now she slowly shook her head no. “I don’t know you,” she whispered.
“I know. But I’m part of you—I’m your DNA, your blood.” Jeff stood up, then leaned over and kissed her. “I love you, Sarah, I always will. Go by your instincts in this.” He put a five-dollar bill on the table, and hurried out the door.
Now the April breeze caught his face, seemed to move him along. He walked in a daze, not really knowing where he was going, to the Pelham Parkway station. He paid his fare, walked through the wooden turnstile—nearly getting a splinter in his thigh—and sat down on the rotting green bench to wait for the train.