There was a moment when Lionel, who still thought of himself as Secret Glory, thought that the stories he hadn't yet managed to write were also the only stories he would write. He even thought of choosing some death of honor. The novel he thought of writing about Joseph Rayna, whom his mother had told him about with her eyes filled with youthful mischief, refused to be written. He published some short stories in important journals with small circulation. And once he wrote a letter to Rebecca Schneerson in Palestine. Her answer was matter-of-fact: if you're really a mature person, you will probably understand how much your fate can't touch my heart, you're in America with your mother and I'm not, I'm busy in the cowshed and with the almond trees, the war didn't pass over us, Nehemiah died on the shore of Jaffa, you asked about my son who's wandering around Europe. I don't know, I think he was killed, the adulterer Joseph Rayna didn't make me children, but on the other hand nobody can know for sure who was the father of my son, yours, Rebecca Schneerson.
When Lionel was thirteen, he loved a twelve-year-old girl who lived on the other side of the city. She lived in a big house surrounded by a fine garden, planned by an English landscape architect especially for her father, the main Ford dealer in the area. Lionel would bring her flowers he picked in the fields, wrote poems to her, and told her about the stories he would write when he grew up. The girl's name was Melissa and she had bright and beautiful oval eyes and sparkling brown hair. One day Melissa threw away the flowers, turned her face away, and said in a voice choked with weeping whose subtleties he didn't understand: My mother told me I'm big enough not to be a girlfriend of some Jew from Poland. Lionel returned home, sang lieder to the toilet, and wept behind the locked door. Rachel said: That happens in Poland, not in America. He listened to her and said: Maybe it shouldn't happen here, but it did. A month later, Melissa got sick. The doctors couldn't diagnose her illness. Melissa asked her mother to call Lionel and he came. By now she had little breasts and her eyes became more white than bright and Lionel shut his eyes which were almost weeping and saw the angel of death sitting between Melissa's eyelashes. Later on, when he would come out of the hayloft and fight the Germans he would do that to save Melissa and her parents, he would feel that he was returning them good for bad. Lionel wanted to pray but didn't know what God they prayed to in the elegant house of the main Ford dealer. He stroked Melissa and told her how much he loved her. She showed him pictures of movie actresses filled with sweet smiles and he told her she was more beautiful than they were. Her sweet eyelashes and her face were now full of something he knew was death. But Melissa's parents, who tried not to see Lionel, said: She's got the flu and in a few days she'll get better. Lionel pleaded with them to send her to the hospital in New York, but they said angrily that the doctors of New York were no better than the doctors of their city. He told Melissa: I think of you, I'll always love you, and she told him she'd always love him and in secret they signed a lifetime contract. The contract was hidden in Lionel's pocket and Melissa asked him to forgive her for what she had once said to him. After I told you what Mother told me to say, I wept all night long! she said. Her eyes dimmed, he saw how close death was and called her mother in alarm, and her mother told him: She's tired and you should go now, Lionel. He told her: My name is Secret Glory, and she looked at him, saw the flash of wrath burning in his eyes and something primeval and ancient made her tremble even though she didn't even know what it was. Her parents brought young Brook to read her the history of the struggle for the Connecticut River from the journal Our Connecticut, a bimonthly and a source of pride for many buyers of cars from Melissa's father. Melissa lay with her eyes shut, pale and transparent as a butterfly and with a slight effort she managed not to listen to young Brook.
He didn't go to Melissa's funeral. Two years later, he went to New York to school. His mother and her husband moved to New Jersey. In New York, he clung to a girl who talked about class warfare and her cunning and elusive body wasn't at all like the purity in Melissa's eyes. Lionel wrote a few more stories, and to descend to the masses, he tried to live with the woman who cleaned his father's house, was unfaithful to her with a girl from Radcliffe, went on a long trip around the world, a trip that lasted six years, and then he spent two years closed in a room and wrote a novel that wasn't accepted by any publisher, and then he went to a small city, started teaching in a college, and for three years he collected old cars, ambulances, locomotives, tow trucks, and buses, and parked them in a lot he leased and would walk among those cars and think, Why do I collect this garbage? I don't even like to drive and detest every car and every bus I collect.
Saul Blau expanded his business and opened a few shirt shops. Lionel met the woman who had once been an elusive girl and talked about class warfare, now she took Lionel to her old parents' house and during the Kiddush, she raised her glass to toast the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which, in her words, liberated the toilers from the malice of the capitalist war. Lionel scolded her, he yelled that she was Jewish filth, words she treated with such abysmal tolerance and contempt that she almost burst out laughing. Then Lionel went to enlist in the Canadian brigades at the Canadian consulate in New York, and went off to fight as we said, because of that woman for the lost Jewish honor. He of course couldn't tell her that he was going to fight for Melissa, for Melissa's parents and their Ford cars. The lot of cars, buses, and ambulances he sold. His stepfather told him: Don't worry, Secret, you're all right in my hands, I'll invest your money and add as much and more, you'll be both a hero and rich.
Saul, Rachel's husband, liked to pound his hand on the table and say: Oh, just be healthy! He conquered the field of cheap shirts with diligence, guile, and restraint. He said: I push the shirts on them so my parents who were murdered in a pogrom will lie in warm shirts in their grave. Rachel, who didn't understand the connection between his dead parents and the shirt stores spreading over the city, loved in her husband the lack of Joseph's madness. At night, she secretly longed for the forests, Rebecca, the language of syllables, and one day, she said: Someday I'll visit Rebecca in her forest in Palestine.
When Rachel heard the Nazis singing on York Avenue and saw their goose-step marching, she locked the shutters of Lionel's apartment right over a big bar whose owner was passing out wine and cakes to those in the parade, and she asked Lioneclass="underline" What will be? He told her he would fight them for her too. She said: Lionel, you're not a child, you're a grown man, forty years old, not married, not settled, without a serious profession, and they're strong. Watch out for them, and when she looked into his eyes she saw a smile capering in them, some weary and glowing splendor of dignity that reminded her of Joseph Rayna's face and she was sorry, so sorry, she had had to grant her son a father like Joseph Rayna, which would surely bring destruction on him in the war against the Germans now shouting in the street below. Weariness and life did their work and she had neither the strength nor the will to tell her son who his father was. Suddenly she said: The words of Joseph Rayna could have been a reply to those satanic parades. After Lionel enlisted, Rachel waited for him behind the locked shutters. Every week she went to his apartment and would arrange his books.
Lionel came to Cologne as an interrogator of prisoners. He came there on the same day that Ebenezer Schneerson and Samuel Lipker came to Paris, where they started performing in a small nightclub. In Cologne, Lionel met Lily Schwabe. When he saw her he understood that Melissa hadn't died, and children who had once shot at airplanes near the destroyed factory now stood almost naked in the street and pointed at Lionel, who strode to the temporary headquarters. The city was destroyed. Lionel helped a local Jewish committee find Jewish children hidden in monasteries and other hiding places and weren't told that the war was over. After thinking about Lily, he made a decision to give her up from the start. He was also afraid that another Melissa would die on him.