“What are you, walking?” Sol said, seeing Ben.
“I parked behind.”
“Yourself? What if people see?”
“What people?” Ben said, laughing.
“People. There’s always people. You should know that.”
“Just saving the studio money,” Ben said, brushing it off.
“You and who else?”
But he dropped it, tugged by Fay to start up the stairs.
“Rabbi Magnin’s doing it himself,” she said to him, leaning in. “Say something to Esther. She’s thrilled.”
Lasner turned slightly to Ben. “Come sit with us,” he said.
But Ben held back, already imagining Bunny’s scowl, Fay’s appraising glances. Liesl was getting out of a car with Dick Marshall, a little excitement running through the spectators.
“Dick! Over here!” Almost a squeal as he waved, flashing the Marshall grin.
Ben kissed Liesl on both cheeks, a European family greeting.
“You look nice.”
She smiled, relieved, but still tentative. “Wardrobe. I think from the Wehrmacht,” she said, touching one of the padded shoulders. “You know Dick?”
But Dick was flashing the grin again for one of the photographers.
“Save me a dance later.”
“What?” she said, slightly thrown, not sure if it was a double-entendre.
“At the Grove. Sam hired the band, too.”
“Oh. Yes, that would be nice.” Letting her eyes stay on him, talking.
More car doors were slamming, voices getting louder, rising like heat waves.
“Better get inside. There’s Polly,” he said, spying her farther down the row of cars.
“No, we’re supposed to talk to her.”
Dick, seeing her, put his arm around Liesl. “Hey,” he said to Ben, drawing a blank.
Liesl put on a public smile and started to turn.
“Have fun,” Ben said, sliding away, heading for the stairs.
“So glad you could come,” Pilcer said as they shook hands. “You know Esther?”
“Congratulations. You must be proud.”
“Ask me after,” she said pleasantly. “It’s still touch and go with the Hebrew.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said, a meaningless reassurance. But wasn’t it always? How many had he seen-struggling through their readings, rabbis at their sides, but always ending with elated grins. He remembered a whole season of them, the year Danny was thirteen, dreading the boredom of the service, all of it alien to them, who weren’t being instructed, who weren’t in their friends’ eyes even Jews. Otto had been indifferent and their mother gentile, so they’d escaped the Hebrew lessons, the tedious weeks of preparation. The services themselves were exotic, a series of risings and sitting downs and words repeated phonetically, just to go along. Most of the boys used the synagogue in Fasanenstrasse and afterward there would be a formal lunch across the street at the Kempinski, all good manners and politely smiling grown-ups. Years later, after they had left, it had been torched on Kristallnacht. Now there was nothing, a few shell-like walls.
“He’s reading from Esther,” Sam was saying. “For his mother. It’s a nice touch, don’t you think? What did you read? I’ll bet you don’t even remember.”
Ben shook his head. “I didn’t. My father wasn’t observant.”
“Like Sam,” Esther said, nodding to him. “‘A lot of work and who remembers?’ But I think it’s important. Now, I mean.” She faltered a little, embarrassed. “You know, after-”
“Yes,” Ben said, helping her.
“Of course, you would,” Sam said. “You know what he’s making at the studio?” But someone had taken his elbow. “Abe. Wonderful to see you. Esther, you remember Abe Lastfogel. The Morris office.”
“Congratulations again,” Ben said to Esther, letting her go. “He’ll be fine.”
“It’s just, you know, it’s important to have a sense now,” she said, still making a case to herself.
“Yes,” Ben said, moving inside. But was it? Had it mattered before? Even Mischling s had been taken, one parent, people who’d had no teaching at all.
He picked up a yarmulke from a pile on a sideboard. Inside, through the marble arches, people were settling in, waving to friends, the hum before a show. All religion was a kind of theater. He smiled to himself as he walked in. At least here they knew their audience. The whole vaulted ceiling, a night sky, was covered with stars.
He sat with Hal Jasper behind the Lasners, close enough to be in the party without taking anyone’s place. Bunny, who’d also put on a yarmulke, was next to Fay and took his cues from her, rising when she did, mumbling during the unison response. Rabbi Magnin, in wire-rimmed glasses, led the Shabbat service in one of those pleased-with-itself oratorical voices Ben remembered from his childhood. Jonathan sat waiting on the bema, dwarfed in a chair that made him look no older than eight. All of it just as expected. In a few minutes they’d open the ark and walk the Torah through the congregation, letting people reach out to touch it, then finally open it for Jonathan to read and then they’d all go to the Ambassador.
Fasanenstrasse. Otto hadn’t believed in any of it, only allowed them to go because it would have been impolite to refuse the invitations. Drehkopf s, he called the rabbis, head spinners. A hostility that Ben had never really understood until now. No room for two religions. But he would have been killed for either. As a Communist, Genia had said, not as a Jew. But that had only been a matter of time. Ben looked around- all these well-dressed lucky people, faintly bored, waiting to congratulate Sam and go to lunch. It could have been any of them, except they’d been here, out of the way. And Otto had stayed.
He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. It always came back to that. Why make Danny run the same risk? They knew what would happen if they were caught. What did happen, at least to Otto, denounced. And now his denouncer gone, connected somehow to Danny, the link he couldn’t understand but must be there. Could Otto really have believed in it that much, when he didn’t believe in anything else? Or did he know, somehow sense, that he’d left it too late, that he could only help save the others now, before he became one of the millions, no matter what he believed. Somebody Ben had seen standing on the platform and then never saw again.
On the bema Magnin had finished and the cantor got up and walked to the lectern. Another endless wail, Ben thought, another thing he’d hated about the services. He looked at Bunny, wondering how he was reacting, one of the few there for whom this wouldn’t even be a memory, the yarmulke just a prop of respect. Thinking about the studio maybe, or how Polly’s talk had gone with Liesl, a hundred things. How to protect Jack MacDonald.
The first note, high and clear, wavered in the air, dropped, then rose again, a call reaching out. Ben felt his head go up, as if the note were lifting it. A second phrase without a breath, lonely, the voice its own music, but so beautiful that it filled the great room, hushing it. It hung there for a minute, a pure abstraction, and then the imagination rushed in around it, adding color and suggestion as the music began to float, a haunting stream of notes. A few heads nodded, familiar with it, but Ben couldn’t move. A sadness so knowing that it felt like an actual fingertip on his heart. Not a wail, not even a lamentation, but an endless sorrow. He imagined it vibrating through thin air, over bleached rocks, stretches of dry waste, desert music, meant to carry long distances, across emptiness. Had it really been written there, a tribal heirloom, or much later in some Polish village, the desert by then more a story than a memory. There were notes in Gershwin like this, bent midway in a kind of ache. He didn’t know the words-it might have been a simple hymn of praise-but what he saw were figures wrapping a body in linen, laying it into a shallow ditch, rocks and sand. And the body, he knew, was Otto. The day, the temple, had triggered the memories, all the old questions. There hadn’t been a service for him. No details of the death itself, so that it seemed not to have really happened, the official letter a kind of missing persons report. But now here he was in the music, everything he’d denied being, the string that connected Ben to this room of survivors, not lessons but blood.