While We're Far Apart
Esther's father halted the lazy swaying of the porch swing. "Listen," he said. "There's something I need to tell all of you." The darkness in his voice made Esther's skin prickle. He had used the same phrase, the same tone, when he'd told her that Mama had gone to live up in heaven.
"I've been thinking ..." He paused, kneading his forehead as if his head hurt. He looked so sad. Esther wished she knew how to make him smile again.
They had walked to Grandma Shaffer's house for lunch after church, and Daddy had barely spoken all afternoon. But that wasn't unusual. Grandma had filled the long silences with news about Uncle Steve, who was fighting the Japanese, and Uncle Joe, who was being shipped off to North Africa soon. Grandma's next-door neighbor, Penny Goodrich, had come over to sit on the porch, too, and they had all watched Esther's brother, Peter, chase Grandma's dog around the backyard. It had been such a pleasant afternoon -- until now.
Daddy cleared his throat. "I've ... um ... I've made a decision." their lunch boxes for school every day and helped them study for spelling tests and took them to church on Sunday. The house did seem much too quiet, and he never sang or played the piano the way Mama used to do. And he didn't tell bedtime stories about people in the Bible, either. They ate a lot of canned soup instead of meat and potatoes, but that didn't matter to Esther. She just wanted Daddy to stay with them in their own apartment, not go away to war and leave them with Grandma.
She put her hand on his arm as she searched for something to say, but when he turned to her and she saw tears in his eyes, she couldn't speak. What if she said the wrong thing and he started crying during the night like he did right after Mama died? Esther remembered the terrible, helpless feeling it gave her to hear her father weeping, especially when she couldn't stop crying herself and there was no one in the whole world to comfort either one of them. Daddy had done his best to console her, but his embraces felt brief and stiff as if he was afraid Esther would break if he hugged her too hard. He was tall and lean, and his callused hands were stained with grease from repairing cars all day. Mama had been soft and warm, and she would hold Esther in her arms for a long, long time.
"Don't do it, Eddie. Please," Grandma begged. "Think of your children. Go down there tomorrow and tell the army you changed your mind."
"I can't. It's too late." He spoke so softly that Esther thought she might have imagined it. For sure Grandma hadn't heard him. But then he cleared his throat and said in a louder voice, "I already resigned from my job. I leave for basic training in two weeks."
His words gave Esther the same empty, floating feeling she'd had after Mama died, as if she were a fluff of dandelion, no longer tethered to the earth. What was going to happen to her? How would she keep from sailing away on the slightest breath of wind?
"Saints above, Eddie! Two weeks? How could you do such a stupid thing?"
Peter must have heard Grandma yelling because he stopped running around the backyard with Woofer and hurried over to the porch. He was three years younger than Esther and as thin as a stick figure -- not at all like most rough-and-tumble boys his age. His hair was the same shiny auburn color that Mama's had been. Esther could always look at Peter when she needed to remember. He stumbled up the porch steps, his cheeks flushed, his hair sweaty, and looked from one of them to the next. "What happened?"
Daddy didn't seem to hear him. "I have to do this, Ma. Don't you see?"
"No. I most certainly do not. How can you do this to your children? After everything they've been through? Are you crazy?"
"No ... but I might go crazy if I stay here much longer."
"I have nothing more to say to you." Grandma struggled out of her rocking chair and stormed into the house, slamming the screen door -- something she yelled at Esther and Peter for doing. The chair continued to rock after she abandoned it, and Esther reached across Daddy's lap to make it stop. Mrs. Mendel from the apartment downstairs used to say it was bad luck for a chair to rock with nobody in it -- and they didn't need any more bad luck, that's for sure. Again, an eerie silence settled over the backyard. Then Penny Goodrich, Grandma's next-door neighbor, broke the silence.
"Eddie?"
"Yeah?"
"I'll watch them for you."
Esther had forgotten that Penny was even there. Everyone had forgotten her. But that's the way Penny was -- so quiet and unimportant that you could look right at her and never see her. Esther had no idea why Penny always showed up at Grandma's house on Sunday afternoons when they came to visit. She was just one of those nosy neighbors with no life of her own, who watched other people's lives as if watching a movie.
Penny was younger than Daddy but looked like she was old enough to get married. Daddy said that she had lived with her parents on the other half of Grandma's duplex since he was a boy and Penny was a baby. Mr. and Mrs. Goodrich must have been very old when Penny was born -- like Sarah and Abraham in the Bible -- because they were ancient now, even older than Grandma was.
Raoul Wallenberg, a thirty-two-year-old Swedish businessman, volunteered to go to Nazi-controlled Hungary during World War II as a diplomat in order to help rescue Jews. When he arrived in Budapest in June of 1944 he learned that the Nazis had already deported four hundred thousand Jewish men, women, and children to the death camps. With daring, courage, and ingenuity, Wallenberg tirelessly dogged the Nazis, pressuring them to accept the Swedish identification papers he created, snatching Jews from deportation trains and death marches, and providing food and shelter in "safe houses" under the protection of the Swedish flag. He is thought to have saved as many as one hundred thousand Jews who remained in Budapest.
When the Soviet army arrived to liberate Hungary, Wallenberg and his driver left Budapest on January 17,1945, to visit the Soviet military headquarters, telling friends he planned to return in about a week. He and his driver have been missing ever since.
According to the Russians, Raoul Wallenberg died of a heart attack in a Soviet prison on July 17,1947. But to his family and to the thousands of Jews who consider him a hero, a satisfactory explanation for his arrest and disappearance has never been given. The government of Israel designated Raoul Wallenberg as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations."
He paused once again, and the air went still as if the breeze had hushed to listen. Woofer finally stopped barking, and even the traffic on Brooklyn Boulevard a few blocks away seemed to have halted.
"What is it, Eddie?" Grandma asked. "You look so serious. You feeling all right?"
"I'm going to enlist, Ma."
"What?"
"I said, I'm going to enlist in the army." He spoke louder this time because Grandma was hard of hearing, but Esther could tell that she had heard him plain enough the first time.
Esther hugged her skinny arms to her chest, feeling a chill. At age twelve, she was old enough to know exactly what "enlist" meant. She listened to the news reports about the war on the radio every night. She watched the newsreels at Loew's Brooklyn Theater before the Saturday matinee started. Oh yes. She knew it meant that her daddy would go far away like her two uncles had -- and that he might never come back. The afternoon felt ten degrees colder, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud.
"Saints above, Eddie!" Grandma shouted. "Are you out of your mind? You can't enlist! You have two children to think about. Who's going to take care of them?"
"Well... that's what we need to talk about. I was hoping you would. You said if I ever needed anything ..."
"Are you crazy? What in the world are you thinking? ... How on earth ... ?"
"The war can't last forever. I'll be back."
Grandma gave his shoulder a shove. "And what if you don't come back? Huh? What then? What if you end up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean like Millie Barker's son? Then what? You want these poor children to be orphans?"
Esther understood the finality of death. She knew she would never see Mama again until she died and went to heaven herself. She also knew that lots of men were being killed in the war. Grandma had hung a little flag in her window with two stars on it, one for Uncle Joe and one for Uncle Steve, and she had explained to Esther why Mrs. Barker across the street now had a flag in her window with a gold star.
Esther wanted to cry and beg Daddy not to go, but she didn't want to make him angry. The love they shared felt as fragile as spider webs, and Esther was never quite certain that she had his attention, let alone his affection. Sometimes it seemed as though Daddy wasn't home even when he was. She decided to let Grandma argue with him.
"Nothing's going to happen to me, Ma. I'll be in the army, on land."
"You don't think soldiers are dying in the army, too? On land?"
"Listen, I was hoping Esther and Peter could live here with you until I get back."
Grandma stared at Daddy with her mouth open as if she was about to take a bite out of something. Esther tried to imagine living here, and it made her stomach hurt. Grandma had so many rules like "don't leave the door open or the dog will get out," and "don't bother my parakeet," and "don't make noise because it will disturb the next-door neighbors," and "don't touch my stuff" -- which lay heaped in piles everywhere. Esther didn't mind visiting on Sunday, but by the time she and Daddy and Peter boarded the crosstown bus for home, she always felt as though she had been holding her breath for three hours.
"How can they live here?" Grandma asked Daddy. "What about school? Did you consider that? They would have to change to a different school if they lived with me. Besides, there's no room for them in this house."
"Ma, listen -- "
"No, you listen. I love Peter and Esther, you know I do ..." Grandma tossed the comment in Esther's direction like a foul ball at a baseball game. It sounded great when it smacked against the bat, but in the end, it didn't count for anything.
"But saints above, Eddie, I'm too old to raise children! Helping with homework and worrying about measles and chicken pox... It's too much! They would be too much for me to handle all day and all night. Let somebody else fight the Nazis. You're thirty-three years old, for heaven's sake. You have responsibilities here at home."
Esther looked up at Daddy to see if Grandma's arguments had convinced him, but the expression she saw on his face sent another chill through her. His lips had turned white and he seemed to be holding his breath. Grandma must have noticed it, too. "What? What's wrong?" she asked him.
"It's too late. I already enlisted."
"You -- what!" Grandma exploded like a shaken soda bottle, reaching out to cuff Daddy's ear as if he were a little boy.