Margot Read online

  My apartment is on the first floor, not far from the main entrance to the building, which is just the way I like it. It is a small studio, containing only a blue couch, a wooden table with two chairs, a single bed, and the tiniest of kitchens. But it is my own small studio, and in the three years I’ve lived in this apartment, it has come to feel like home.

  Friday, after I have left Shelby calling for me on Market Street, I sit on the couch for a little while, letting Katze, my overweight orange tabby, knead his claws into the threads of my blue sweater, then my plaid dress. He cannot settle himself, my Katze. He can never decide exactly where he wants to sit, nor can he bring himself to chase the mice I sometimes hear scurrying in the walls. But I do not hold this against him. I cannot seem to settle myself now either, and I tap my pointy blue pump in an uneasy rhythm against the dark hardwood floorboards.

  Friday nights, I always light a candle at sundown and say a silent prayer. Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu melekh ha’olam . . .

  Words repeat themselves in my brain, even though Margie Franklin, she is a Gentile. My Friday prayer, it is not religion, it’s ritual.

  But now it is not quite dusk yet, and the words repeating themselves in my brain, just after 4 P.M., are Shelby’s: “The Diary of Anne Frank is much too sad for that,” she’d said.

  I push Katze aside and begin pacing across the room. It is tiny enough that I take only ten steps before I have to turn around and start all over again. Back and forth and back and forth.

  Much too sad. I am certain Shelby cannot even fathom that kind of sad. Shelby was born in the United States, a Christian, and during the war she and her sister lived with their parents in a two-bedroom apartment that she describes as small. “There were rations,” she told me once. “We didn’t always have enough to eat. My shoes wore through, straight to the soles.”

  When she told me these things, I’d nodded, as if I were sympathetic to her plight. Then I bit my tongue to keep it from moving, from saying all the things I often think about my own time during the war, but never would dare utter out loud to Shelby.

  You’ve at least read Anne Frank’s diary by now, haven’t you? She’d actually admonished me, standing there on Market Street.

  I stop pacing for a moment by my bed, where my copy of the book sits atop the small shelf above my mattress. Its bright orange cover is tattered, the pages worn from too much use. No, I would tell Shelby, if she ever pressed me for an answer. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to.

  And yet that, like so much else, would be a lie, as I know the words contained within the diary by heart.

  I hold the book in my hand now, flipping through its dog-eared pages. My eyes skim through the mentions of Peter’s name.

  When I first came to America, before I discovered the book, I would often call the operator and ask for Peter, but it has been a long while since I have done that now. Sometimes, though, I still dream of walking into him on the street, by chance. He will look different, with shorter hair, and he will be older, of course, his body thicker, more of a man’s, like Joshua’s. But I will recognize him all the same—his face, or his eyes, blue and clear as the sea.

  We promised each other we’d come here, when the war ended, or if we escaped. Peter picked the city of Philadelphia out of his world atlas. The City of Brotherly Love, he told me. Surely, Jews cannot be in hiding there.

  Peter is dead, I remind myself now.

  But then, so am I.

  I put the book back on the shelf, and I reach for the phone on my small kitchen counter. I turn the dial to 0, but I wait a moment, before letting my finger go.

  “Operator,” a woman’s voice says on the other end.

  I open my mouth to ask for him. Peter Pelt, I want to tell the operator. I need to talk to Peter Pelt.

  There is a movie, Peter. A movie, for goodness’ sake!

  But it has been so long since I have called and asked for him under the new name we agreed on, and now I cannot bring myself to make a sound.

  I look out the small square window behind my couch; it is nearly dark now.

  I hang up the phone and reach underneath my kitchen counter for my Shabbat candle.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE LAW OFFICE OF ROSENSTEIN, GREENBERG AND MOSCOWITZ is on the seventh floor of a wide cement office building near the corners of Market and South Sixteenth streets in Center City, Philadelphia. It is close enough to walk to from my apartment, and also the courthouse, which makes it perfect both for the lawyers and for me.

  Monday morning I am one of the first people to arrive at the office, at least according to the elevator attendant, a small brown-skinned man named Henry, who I find to have sympathetic brown eyes.

  “Anyone else here yet?” I ask him, hopeful.

  “Only Mr. Rosenstein,” he says. “The younger one.” I smile to myself as Henry ushers me through the elevator door. By Monday morning, both Shelby’s voice and my call to the operator have dimmed. So there is a movie, I told myself on the walk to work this morning. So what? It will be no different from the book. Then I reveled in the fact that today it is Monday, and that means I will get to see Joshua again. That thought now turns my cheeks warm as I step off the elevator and walk into the large open center room of the law office.

  My metal desk sits face-to-face with Shelby’s in this center room, where all the lawyers’ secretaries have their desks. We are surrounded by the lawyers’ offices, which are behind closed doors all along the sides. Joshua’s office is just to the right of our desks, and Ezra’s office is the next one over. The other partners, Saul Greenberg and Jason Moscowitz, have offices on the other side of the room, closer to the elevator, but I suspect Ezra likes to be on this side so he can keep an eye on his son.

  Joshua’s office, like the others, has a small rectangular window by the door, and I watch him for a moment now, through the glass. He is sitting at his desk, studying something carefully. His forehead creases when he does this, as if concentration is either an art or a science. I can’t decide. Joshua looks up from his desk, catches my eye, and smiles at me. I smile back before I walk to the break room and brew some coffee. I pour Joshua a cup with two sugars the way he likes it, and then I tread carefully back to his office and rap lightly on the door.

  “Come in,” he says. His voice floats, in a way that told me, even the very first time I met him, that he has never known anything like I have. Joshua’s life in America has been charmed, I suspect, even when he was a teenager, during the war, with the rations. But I don’t hold this against him. “Good morning, Margie.” He smiles again. His smile is one of those warm American smiles where nothing is held back, where joy is uncontained. I hand him the coffee, and he thanks me. “How was your weekend?” he asks.

  “It was fine, thank you,” I say, even though I spent most of it cooped up nervously in my apartment. Saturdays, I always still keep as a day of rest, though this particular one had not felt very restful. Sundays, I normally take my correspondence work to Fairmount Park to study by the banks of the Schuylkill River, though this Sunday I walked to the Reading Terminal Market and perused the fruit instead, knowing I would be unable to concentrate on my studies. Across the street I’d spotted the cinema I have gone to with Shelby before, and I saw it there, on the marquee, in hideously assaulting red letters: The Diary of Anne Frank. I stared at the picture of the unfamiliar woman on the movie poster out front. I watched her face, her deep brown eyes, as if she too could stare back at me. Look at you, my sister said, laughing, in my head. Living your American dream in a thick black sweater. When I returned home, I thought about dialing the operator again. But something stopped me. Now I shake the thought away. “How was your weekend?” I ask Joshua.

  He shrugs. “I’ve had better.” Joshua and his father don’t always get along. I learned this on my third day of work, when I heard their raised voices coming through the paper-thin walls of Joshua’s office. Their
disagreements have become, over the past three years, a fairly regular occurrence. Shelby says Ezra used to be nicer before his wife, Joshua’s mother, died the year before they hired me. But this is something I would never ask Joshua about, though I feel a hole in the pit of my stomach for him, thinking about the empty space where his mother used to be. I wonder if she was the one who loved him better, the way it was with my mother and me. My sister was Father’s. I was Mother’s.

  But all I allow myself to say now is, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  He shrugs again. He is so casual about his family squabbles, the way all the Americans I’ve met seem to be. Once Shelby got into a fight with her mother, and they didn’t speak for three months. Then, one weekend, they went out to lunch, and Shelby told me it was “water under the bridge.” From the sound of her voice I understood that she was no longer angry, but I did not understand the reference to water and bridges, or how she could let go of her anger, just like that.

  “Well.” I stand. “I should get to work.”

  “Margie.” He taps his fountain pen gently against his desk. “How are your paralegal studies coming?”

  “Good,” I say, feeling guilty now about having ignored them this weekend. Next weekend I will do double, I promise myself. “Two more correspondence classes left.”

  “Great. I’ll talk to my father soon about finding a position for you when you’re done,” he says.

  I smile at him, and I stop at the doorway for a moment.

  He smiles back at me, his warm American smile again lighting up his face. “By the way, how’s Mr. Katz?” he asks.

  I laugh, the way I always do when he turns Katze, the orange tabby, into a Jewish-sounding man, most definitely a lawyer. It is doubly funny because there is a Mr. Katz who works in the district attorney’s office, a portly man with a skinny black mustache who makes Joshua grimace whenever he has to go up against him in court.

  “Mr. Katz is well,” I tell Joshua. “Getting fatter by the day.”

  Joshua was the one who found him, right after I started work here. Katze was gaunt, crying in the back alley near the lot where Joshua parks his car. Joshua kept him for a month until he felt bad about leaving him all the time to go back and forth to Margate, and that was when I volunteered to take him home.

  “I’ll have to stop by to visit him sometime,” Joshua says now.

  I nod. He is always saying that, though he has never once actually stopped by to visit.

  I am still feeling warm from my conversation with Joshua when Shelby breezes in at five past nine, plunking her satchel down on her desk with a thud. “Well,” she says, without even taking a breath. “The movie was fabulous. Of course. Millie Perkins was to die for. Absolutely perfect for the role, if you ask me.”

  “Who?” I ask, looking up from my typing. But the warmth, it is already gone, and for a moment I am chilled, even in my sweater.

  “You do know who I’m talking about, don’t you, Margie?” I shake my head. “All work and no play. Very dull.”

  “Who did she play?” I ask, my curiosity suddenly getting the better of me. Though as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I want to take them back.

  “Who did she play?” Shelby laughs. “Anne Frank herself, of course. I read an interview with her in McCall’s last month, and the darling girl—she was a model, didn’t even want to be an actress, but she was so touched by Anne’s story she took it on. And she was just fabulous. To see her and Peter . . . I nearly died I was crying so hard.”

  My stomach clenches at the sound of his name, in her voice. She is saying it wrong, of course. Not Peeter, Payter.

  “I’m telling you, Margie, you really missed out.”

  “I’m sure,” I murmur. And Shelby looks at me and frowns as if she’s caught on to something.

  My lying is a second skin by now, so easy to forget it’s there, so I don’t always remember that lying is actually an art, and those who aren’t meticulous about it are easily exposed.

  I look up and Shelby is still frowning. “It’s way too hot in here for that sweater, Margie.” Today I am in a black sweater over a pale pink top and a high-waisted gray skirt.

  “I’m rather comfortable,” I say, but when she finally sits down at her desk and begins her typing, I lower my head and wipe carefully at the beads of sweat on my brow with a handkerchief.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE REST OF THE DAY PASSES WITHOUT INCIDENT, AND THE second the clock by the elevator chimes 5 P.M., Shelby stops her typing—maybe midsentence—turns to me, and says, “I’m meeting Peggy for dinner. Want to come?”

  Peggy is Shelby’s sister, and not just her sister, but her twin. They are fraternal twins, though, so they look surprisingly different. Peggy is tall and brown-haired, while Shelby is petite and blond. Peggy works as a nurse at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, and mostly she must work odd hours and is not free to meet Shelby for dinner.

  “I don’t want to intrude,” I say, though I have been to dinner with Shelby and Peggy many times in the last three years. Peggy is calmer than Shelby, and I imagine if I’d known them both together, Peggy and I would be more natural friends.

  I glance through the glass window by Joshua’s office, and I see he is still working hard, his head bent over at his desk. Lately, I have been staying late, just in case Joshua might walk out of his office after everyone else has left and ask me if I would like to catch dinner, or a drink, as he did once before, in January, on the day Alaska became the forty-ninth state. “Do you know what we should celebrate tonight?” he’d said to me with a smile that nearly tumbled me out of my secretary’s chair when he walked out of his office after six that night.

  “I don’t know. What should we celebrate?” I’d murmured, feeling warm and stunned, and thus completely missing the joke.

  “Juneau,” he said, laughing. “The capital of Alaska.”

  “Oh.” I’d felt my cheeks turning red at my stupidity.

  “I bet Ike’s already back in Gettysburg toasting his new state. Or Mamie probably is anyway.” He laughed again, and this time I got the joke, as Shelby was always telling me things she read about Mamie Eisenhower having a problem with drinking.

  I laughed, and he turned his head to the side and looked at me. I am medium height and too thin. My dark brown hair tumbles past my pale cheeks, nearly to my shoulders, and I wear round glasses that hide my leather-colored eyes. I dress plainly, in conservative dresses and sweaters, the way any good secretary would. But the way Joshua was looking at me then, it made me wonder if he was seeing something else in me, something more than a secretary. It was just a moment, and then Ezra stormed out of his office, yelling at Joshua about something. Still, it is a moment I want to get back to, and so I often try to wait him out.

  “Come on,” Shelby is saying now. She pokes my forearm with her finger, hard enough so it hurts a little, even through the sweater. “It’ll be fun. I promise. And Peggy thinks you’re swell. She’d rather have dinner with you than me anyway.” She laughs. And this time her laugh falls over me, like a stream.

  I think about it for a moment, and I wonder if Shelby is finished talking about the movie. I’ve noticed Americans, Shelby included, have the ability to focus on something for only a little while, and then they move on to something else, so I am hopeful that the time has already passed for this. To Shelby, it is just a movie, after all. It is not real life.

  I glance again through the window in Joshua’s office. But I want to go eat with Shelby and Peggy. So I stand up and gather my things and follow Shelby to the elevator.

  Shelby and I walk down the city block, arms linked, our shadows stretching against the reflection of the office buildings and the soon-setting sun. We head toward Casteel’s Diner, a short silvery building with wide square windows and a neon red sign, just down South Seventeenth Street. We walk inside, and it is loud and smells of grilled hamburger. It is
crowded at this hour with men in suits and women in their work dresses, and the sound of something fast that I don’t recognize pours from the jukebox. I spot Peggy still dressed in her starched white uniform, sitting in a red leather booth by one of the large windows, sipping on what looks like a tall chocolate malt. When she sees us, she stands up, waves, and then reaches for her sister.

  She and Shelby, they hug, and then they kiss each other quickly on the cheek. I stand back, and suddenly my heart feels like it’s bleeding out in my chest. When I see them together, the way they look when they hold on to each other, I remember again that something is missing from me, something that feels like the phantom weight of a stolen limb or internal organ, something so grossly essential that I’m not quite sure how I remember to keep breathing all the time without it.

  I close my eyes, and I can still remember the feel of my sister’s hip, resting against mine as we lay next to each other on her small bed, both writing in our diaries, our pens scrawling across the pages, nearly in unison.

  My sister would sometimes put her diary down on her chest, put her head on my shoulder, and close her eyes. “You’ll wake me, if anything exciting happens?” she’d whisper in my ear. Then she’d fall asleep, and I’d lie there, wide-awake, listening to the soft sounds of her breathing, her chest humming slowly as it moved up and down. She seemed so peaceful asleep, as if she was just back in her bed at home on the Merwedeplein, off in some distant dreamland where she forgot where and who we were. I always watched the door when she was sleeping, listening closely for even the softest of movements. I did not want her to be pulled out of her dreamland by the Green Police. I wanted to protect her. Which makes what happened, what I did, at the very end, feel even worse.

  “Margie.” I look up at the sound of Shelby’s light voice. Shelby and Peggy are both sitting there, next to each other now in the red booth, shoulders touching, staring at me. Two different sets of eyes, but really they could be one. Everything else about Shelby and Peggy is so different except for their eyes, rich brown, the color of milk chocolate.