92 - Portland, Maine
The warmth of the Goldberg-Goldhersh reunion at their Portland home struck Shapiro like a hard bite on an aching tooth. He’d hardened himself to the expectation that he would return from Washington to find a house empty of his wife and son by using the same technique he used to prepare for a bad jury verdict: visualizing the awful result repeatedly. He’d developed a habit for surviving the empty interval at the close of trials between when jurors trudged from the courtroom to begin deliberating and the moment they marched back in, ready to announce their verdict. During that interregnum he’d sit by himself and mentally rehearse, over and over, the jury foreman saying “defendant” in response to the court clerk’s question, “Do you find for the plaintiff” – Shapiro’s usual client – “or for the defendant?”
If the foreman answered the way Shapiro rehearsed, well, it wouldn’t hurt as badly since Shapiro had already lived through it fifty times. If, as happened more often than not, the jury found for Shapiro’s client, then what a pleasant surprise that always was.
During the long quiet hours of the drive back and forth to Washington, Shapiro had rehearsed driving up to a dark house, opening the front door and hearing nothing but echoes. If that happened, well, he’d already have experienced it. If it didn’t happen, what a pleasant surprise it would be.
As clever a trick as that was, it failed to compete with the tragic reality he’d faced when he returned home. He still expected to be able to pick up the telephone to let Sally know he was on his way. His arms had not given up the ghost feelings of holding his son to his chest and ruffling his brown hair.
One effect of Sally’s death on Shapiro was that he distanced himself from Judy Katz, who had somehow become a part of the group of strangers he appeared to have become allied with. While Shapiro thought he was in the midst of being rejected by his wife, a sexual liaison with Judy had transformed from a married man’s fantasy to a real possibility. Now, after Sally’s death, it seemed wrong, almost repulsive to Shapiro.
The first night at the Portland house, Sarah let Ben and Judy guide her as to their sleeping arrangements. Sarah told them Debra was in the large guest room, leaving only the smaller guest room available. Before Katz could answer, Shapiro said he’d be fine on the living room sofa. Katz lay wide awake most of that first night, alone in the guest bedroom. After all that had happened, a romantic fling with a handsome older lawyer had dropped to a low priority.
She was stunned by the sudden turn her life had taken. Just a few weeks earlier she was happily chasing gangsters. Now she was hiding from her own government, hiding with a group of strangers who seemed unlike any criminal she had ever encountered.
Worst of all, there was no answer at her grandmother’s house. She tried calling the few friends she knew her grandmother had. Nobody answered. Of course, her Nana’s few friends were all Jews, all part of what they called their Canasta Crew. They’d all gone to Washington. It had been an adventure for them, chaperoned by their rabbi, joined by their entire congregation of elderly Jews.
There was no word from them now. The Canasta Crew is in a concentration camp, Judy Katz thought. How surreal has reality become. It was unbelievable. But they aren’t the only grandmothers behind barbed wire, she thought. The ones from the ships, the grandmothers, the children, everybody from those ships. Was freedom so fragile, she wondered, that all it took was a few violent events to shatter into fragments, to lock my Nana behind barbed wire?
Where does that leave me, Judy wondered. I’m an American. My government is doing this. Shit, a week ago I worked for that government. Maybe I should report back to work, help the office get through this emergency. Then she remembered the secret meetings, the meetings before the arrests, the meetings she was excluded from. She lay back in bed, eyes closed. She saw an image of her grandmother standing behind a wire fence, her thin fingers poking through holes in the wire mesh, staring at her, wondering when her Judilah would take her away from this oh-so-familiar hell, a hell from her darkest, oldest memories.
My grandfather was just a tailor. He fought them. I can’t do less than him, Judy Katz thought. Hold on, Nana. She finally fell into a restless sleep, wondering if her grandmother was sleeping, wondering what nightmares she dreamed.
Downstairs, Shapiro didn’t know what to make of the other woman he was introduced to at the house in Portland, Debra Reuben. He’d never heard of her, either as a New York newscaster or as an Israeli cabinet member. She seemed unaffected by the turmoil that filled the Goldberg-Goldhersh household. She seemed to live in a void filled by staring out the window at the busy street, and by alcohol.
Shapiro quickly recognized in Reuben an emptiness that he shared. She, too, seemed to be waiting to see somebody walk through the front door, somebody her conscious mind knew would never arrive, somebody her emotions had not yet accepted as gone forever.
The second night after his arrival at the house, Shapiro found himself sitting on the living room sofa late into the evening, alone in the room with Debra Reuben. Earlier, Shapiro and Abram Goldhersh had worked their way through the remaining half of a bottle of Lagavulin. The label on the bottle said it was distilled at Scotland’s oldest distillery. To Shapiro, who enjoyed the warm feeling good single malt scotch left him with, the distillers on the long ago and far away island of Islay off Scotland’s foul southwest coast deserved full credit for the magical effect their concoction had on him. The scotch finally, or at least momentarily, released him from the overwhelming sense of disbelief that his wife and son were gone forever.
Debra Reuben was familiar with that relief.
Sarah and Abram had long since gone to bed.
Now, on their second night in Portland, Judy Katz stayed awake in the living room with Shapiro and Reuben until midnight, then announced with an exaggerated yawn that she was going up to what she described as “that cold, cold bed.” She did not expect any response from Shapiro. He met her expectation. It would have been nice to have somebody to hold her, to tell her it would be all right, that Nana was OK. She said good night and trudged up the stairs, leaving Shapiro and Reuben in the living room, him on the sofa, her in an overstuffed armchair.
“My wife used to tease me for being a Pollyanna,” Shapiro said, trying not to let any hint of a slur slip into his speech, despite the scotch warming his stomach like a peat fire. “That’s what I would always say, don’t worry, it will turn out for the best. That was me. Pollyanna Shapiro she used to call me. She should hear me now. I don’t see any hope, any way this situation is going to turn out for the best.”
Debra Reuben had taken an instant liking to this attorney. Hearing how he escaped from the FBI agents at his home, she’d sensed the same self-confidence that had attracted her to Levi. He did not seem like a man who would give up easily. That he sounded so despondent now was either an indication of the desperation of the situation or a result of his tragic loss, she concluded.
Or it indicated that an intelligent man had made a realistic assessment of a hopeless situation.
She sensed that he wanted to talk. Perhaps it was easier for him to speak to a stranger, she thought. She said nothing in response to his statement, but looked at him expectantly, inviting him to continue.
“My whole life has been devoted to solving problems, other peoples’ problems, sure, but taking on what they thought were impossible battles and fighting them. Sometimes I won.”
He looked up, directly into her eyes, and smiled.
“I won a lot more than I lost, you know,” he said. “I was pretty good. I was a damned good trial lawyer.”
The way he said that, in the past tense, made it seem as if that life was behind him, as if he’d decided that the rest of his life would be different from what had come before, even if he had not yet consciously informed himself of that decision.
“I believed in the system, the legal system, even the political system. The Rule of Law, that’s what they called it in law school. This country is built on the Rule of Law, the professors told us. I used to believe that, you know.
“I believed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution a lot more than I believed in the Ten Commandments, I’ll tell you that. And I even believed that politics was like a pendulum, sometimes it swung my way, sometimes the other way. But it always swung back, and always toward the center, never too far one way or the other.”
“And now, what do you believe now?” Reuben asked, drawn into his story as he’d drawn so many hundreds of jurors into his way of seeing the facts of a case.
“You heard him on TV, didn’t you?” Shapiro said, angry. “You know, I voted for the guy, Quaid. I liked him, moderate, liberal but not too liberal to get elected. That’s OK, acceptable to me. Never in a million years would I have expected him to give in to, to, I don’t know, to the dark side this way.”
He smiled at the Star Wars reference. Reuben smiled back, drawn in by the way Shapiro spoke without pretense, holding no feeling to himself. She unconsciously echoed his emotions, angry when he was angry, smiling when he smiled. That was the effect a good trial lawyer giving a good closing argument hoped for from a jury.
“I can’t accept that all those people, all those hundreds of thousands of people who stood and sat and cheered and clapped right in front of me in Washington, all those people are now behind barbed wire in some sort of American concentration camps. The man has lost his mind.”
“But don’t you think there are people who will stop him?” Reuben asked. “There are people in the Senate, in Congress who won’t stand for this, aren’t there?
“Evidently not,” he replied bitterly. “You saw on TV, you saw what Congress did. Suspended habeas corpus. My God, maybe because I’m a lawyer, but I know what that means. It means they locked the doors to the courthouses and handed Quaid the keys.
“It isn’t the Constitution by itself that protects people’s rights, you know. It’s the courts, the courts that enforce the rights the Constitution gives. Without courts to enforce those rights, the Constitution is an old piece of paper that gets hung on a wall. And that’s what they did today. All those people being held, those people have no right to run into a court and have a judge say the government can’t hold them. My God, they can stick hot bamboo under their fingernails and there’s nobody who can stop it. This is not my America. Quaid sure knocked the Pollyanna out of me.”
They sat silently in the living room, Shapiro exhausted both by the scotch and the depth of his despondency.
Reuben’s pain was softened by the now familiar soothing of alcohol. She identified with Shapiro’s loss, the direct loss of people he loved and the general loss of optimism, of hope itself. “I know what you mean. I’ve lost my country, too,” Reuben said softly. “Both countries, actually, but especially my adopted home. My friends, my neighbors, the baker I bought my loaf of bread from every few days, the librarian who put each new Creighton book aside for me, I loved those books. All those people.
“I don’t know if they’re dead or alive. Maybe some of them are in camps, detention camps over there. I don’t know which would be worse. Maybe a quick death would have been more merciful.”
She looked up from the floor, where she directed her words, and noticed that Shapiro was weeping silently. She continued speaking nonetheless. She spoke to herself as much as she spoke to him anyway. “I hoped coming here I could change things. I hoped Chaim and I could make it better. Now he’s gone and my hope is gone, too.”
Shapiro’s sobbing stopped. His eyes, although red from the tears, were focused, as if the crying, and the expiation of his distress, had cleansed him.
“You came to America with more than hope,” he said. “You brought something with you.” He gestured toward the window. Outside the window was the swimming pool, its cover still in place.
“You must have had something in mind when you brought that.”
“Honestly, I didn’t have any plans for that, Thing,” she said. “At first, all we knew was that we had to get it out of the country, we couldn’t let the Arabs get their hands on it. That was reason enough.
“Later, once I got it away from Israel and the boat took me to Spain, I wasn’t prepared to dispose of it. It’s not something that you can leave in a trash can, is it?”
“I suppose not,” Shapiro said.
“I wanted to get back to America. That was all I knew then, as much planning as I was able to do. I found Levi and that boat he had and it made sense to bring the Thing with me. I even thought I might turn it over to the government for safekeeping. Once we got here, though, and I saw that America was not going to be Israel’s white knight, that America was not going to make everything better again, I realized that maybe I was here, with what I had with me here, for a purpose.
“You know, Ben, I truly believe that there is a reason why I’m here, why all of us are where we are right now, and that reason also includes what we have out there in the pool.”
Shapiro looked at the woman. They were strangers two days earlier. They’d both gone through recent personal tragedies. Even greater, perhaps, they’d both lost something that had been with them since childhood, their faith in the wonder and majesty and righteousness of the United States.
America had done right, in their minds, and America had at times done wrong, but America had always been the good guy for them. Now America had lost its special place. It was just another country, another England, another Russia, another Germany.
Another Germany.
Germany. A childhood fantasy bubbled up from Shapiro’s long-faded memories. A game he and his friends played, huddled under Jay Sosnick’s picnic table, a table transformed into a midget submarine they’d navigated up some German river to the heart of Nazi Berlin, American spies on a secret mission. Jews fighting Hitler.
And they killed him, killed him before he started the war, before he rounded up the German Jews.
Wouldn’t a righteous tzadik have killed Hitler if he had the chance, Shapiro wondered.
“Have you thought of what that one bomb can do,” Shapiro asked.
Reuben did not answer. Instead, she stood up slowly from the chair and took a step toward the sofa. She leaned down toward him and softly kissed him on the right cheek.
“I hurt too much to talk about the bomb now. Good night, Ben,” she said. “I enjoyed talking with you. I think we’ll both sleep better tonight.”
She took two steps toward the stairs, then stopped and turned toward him.
“Ben,” she said, a new sadness coming to her voice. “Ben, I know better than anybody else in the whole world what that bomb can do. I’ve lived, in a way, with what that bomb can do. You’re right, it would change everything. Everything. I just don’t know how it would change, if one more bomb, a third bomb, can possibly make better what the first two bombs made so terribly wrong. All I know is that what is happening has to be stopped. I have no doubts about that. And I suspect that it is us,” she gestured upstairs, toward where Judy Katz, where Abram and Sarah Goldberg-Goldhersh were sleeping, “It is this group who will be making that happen.”
“If they don’t arrest us first,” Shapiro said flatly, aware they were in the house of a woman who’d been on the speakers’ list for the March, a woman the government knew had escaped that day.
“Yes, that clock is ticking isn’t it?” she answered, then walked up the stairs. Shapiro laid his head back against the pillow and, fully dressed, without bothering with sheets or blanket, fell instantly into a deep, healing sleep.