A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel Read online

  And he couldn’t turn any of them off.

  My father couldn’t bear to go down into the subway, couldn’t stand to be anyplace that was enclosed. He turned away from the Listening Emporium and started walking, heading uptown, walking all the way up Broadway from 43rd Street to Dyckman Street—one hundred and fifty blocks. And still, when he got there, his head was so full of other people’s stories—all those desires that had stuck there—he could barely tell my mother what was wrong, could only fall on the bed and think about desolate places. Places where there were no people wanting things. The moon. Antarctica.

  He slept for thirty hours. When he woke, my mother was sitting on the edge of the mattress.

  “Maybe you don’t have to be the world’s greatest radio salesman,” she told him.

  He sat up. “I’m thinking I only need to get used to it.”

  It was then he noticed the Speed Graphic camera in her lap.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “Remember Harry Jupiter?”

  “The newspaper photographer?”

  “Not anymore. Says he’s shot his last picture of a dead body. Says he’s giving up the newspaper business.”

  “And you’re going into it?”

  My mother shook her head. “You are taking up portraiture.”

  My father took the camera into his hands. It was boxy, and could be folded nearly flat. A newspaperman’s camera.

  “I’ve never taken a photograph in my life.”

  My mother pointed to the camera. “I’m thinking you can put some of those stories inside there instead of your head.”

  My father put the Speed Graphic up to his face, looked at my mother through the barrier of its lens.

  “What if I’m not any good at it?”

  “Just don’t be too good.”

  But my father couldn’t help being too good.

  Mr. Lingeman’s fiancée portrait for example.

  I was there the day my father shot it, standing inside Lingeman’s News & Novelties, next to a rack of new Superman comics. Mr. Lingeman wanted to show his fiancée in Stockholm how handsome and prosperous he was, and he’d insisted on being shot behind the glass case of cigarettes and chewing gum, next to a display of Movietone magazines. His blond hair had been so full of pomade, it appeared to be glowing.

  But a couple of days later, when my father showed me the final photograph, I saw something I hadn’t seen standing next to the Superman comics. I saw that Mr. Lingeman was wearing the smile he put on every time one of the young mothers in the neighborhood came into the News & Novelties. The smile that made it seem as if he wanted to eat them.

  Mr. Lingeman’s fiancée portrait ended up on a shelf in my father’s closet, along with all the other portraits people had refused to pay him for, refused even to take.

  But there were some photographs my father took that surprised all of us. Portraits of people we had always believed were unattractive—ugly, even—who looked radiant in his pictures. As if his lens had uncovered some hidden beauty in them, something the rest of us had overlooked.

  I never thought of that stack of rejected portraits in the closet as failures, less impressive than the ones that had revealed some unexpected flash of radiance. All were equal displays of my father’s remarkable talent, his ability to capture something true about a person and reproduce it on film.

  A talent that, to me, has always seemed as remarkable as flying.

  Yet the night I came home and found my father wearing the white shirt—something he would do from then on, no matter how many he ruined—I stayed in my room with the door shut, for the first time, preventing my father from practicing his remarkable talent on me.

  Three

  As I lay on the freezing sidewalk outside P.S. 52, empty-aired and panicked from Moon Shapiro’s loose-fisted punch to the diaphragm, I wondered how I hadn’t seen it coming. Perhaps, I thought, as I waited for my lungs to remember how to breathe, my head had been too full of the miraculous scent of Rose LoPinto’s neck. Perhaps it was because he’d waited until the second day I turned up in the glasses to deliver it.

  Moon Shapiro was a big, gangling boy who should have graduated by now to the junior high school on 211th Street. Instead, he remained at P.S. 52, stumbling over words like slavery whenever a teacher called on him. He was the only boy in the school with an Adam’s apple, and wore a light blue yarmulke every day, which he kept fastened to his springy red hair with a circle of bobby pins. His real name was Marvin, but no one who didn’t want to be punched in the head called him by it.

  Moon dropped his weight onto my back, pushing air out of my lungs. He pounded at my sides, digging his hard knuckles into all the soft, vulnerable organs that lay beneath the skin—organs I imagined were the same bright colors as those inside the Visible Man. My cheek was pressed into the gravelly dirt around a sad, little tree, and I had the idea—I don’t know why—that if Moon hit me in the face, if he knocked off the glasses, he’d knock my vision back into order.

  Or maybe I just wanted him to hit the glasses.

  I lifted my cheek, tried to put my face within range of Moon’s fists. But his hard-knuckled punches never strayed above my shoulders, as if Moon Shapiro was operating from a code of instructions, a set of rules that prohibited him from interfering with the reason I was being beaten up in the first place.

  At a point in time known only to him, Moon gave me one last punch in the side. Then he grunted in a tone of finality, as if we’d both completed some strenuous task, and his weight lifted off me. Cold, snow-smelling air rushed into my lungs.

  I pushed myself to sitting. Moon Shapiro was already a blue-jacketed blur halfway up Academy Street. The people who’d stopped to watch began to drift away, the backs of their coats moving into and out of focus, as if I were discovering something about them, and then forgetting it.

  I sat on the cold sidewalk brushing gravel off my cheek, thinking about the afternoons I’d come out of P.S. 52 and seen Declan Moriarity on the ground, the leg with the polio brace bent at an odd angle, or Francis D’Amato, his flesh-colored eye patch going grimy in the dirt. When you sat in the front row, a beating by Moon Shapiro was an inevitability. Fighting it would be like fighting fate.

  I got to my feet, feeling the world tilt, then right itself. Yanking on the side of my jacket, trying to flatten the spot where it had bunched up from Moon sitting on me, I walked home, my sides aching with every inhale.

  • • •

  By the time I got there, it had started to snow. Aunt May was in our kitchen, still wearing her coat.

  “Glenn went up to the roof an hour ago with a bottle of rye and my best bedspread,” she was telling my mother. “Now he’s just sitting there with it over his head and snow blowing in his face. Says he’s not coming down.”

  My mother lit a cigarette and handed it to her sister. Aunt May was short where my mother was tall, curved where my mother was angular.

  “Any idea why?” my mother said.

  “Well, he finally got inside Whitehall Street.”

  Uncle Glenn had been going down to the induction center at Whitehall Street every day for a week. But the line of men trying to enlist had been so long—around the block most days—the office had closed before he’d managed to put one foot inside the door. That day, though, he’d gotten inside. Made it to the physical. Stood shirtless as an army doctor put a stethoscope to his chest and listened to his lungs, all the while Uncle Glenn talking about how eager he was to go overseas and kill Nazis.

  “How long have you had asthma?” the army doctor had asked him.

  “Pretty much all my life,” Uncle Glenn told him.

  My uncle’s asthma would come on him like an ambush. More than once, I’d found him slumped on the stairs of our building, sucking on his inhaler, Aunt May’s groceries spilled on the floor at his feet, a burst bag of flour drif
ting up around his ankles like snowfall.

  “And what happened?” my mother said.

  “They declared him 4-F,” Aunt May told her. “Unfit for service.”

  I pressed my hands to my sides, pushing them against all the sore places. Uncle Glenn must have been standing in front of that army doctor at the same time Moon Shapiro was sitting on my back, at exactly the same time.

  My mother noticed me in the doorway and asked me why I was touching my side like that, asked me if I needed anything. I told her no, nothing.

  Then I went into the living room, turned on the radio and concentrated on Superman, pretended I lived in Metropolis, pretended I had nothing to do with anything that was going on here.

  When my father got home and my mother told him about Uncle Glenn on the roof, he rummaged around the coat closet for an old horse blanket, got his own bottle of rye, and went up there himself. He didn’t come down until after I’d gone to bed, bringing into my room the mingled scent of developing chemicals and whiskey.

  “This 4-F business,” he said. “That’s only between Uncle Glenn and the U.S. Army.”

  His white shirt glowed in the darkness of my room.

  “Nothing about it is the same as you.”

  I nodded in the dark.

  “And about the other thing,” he said, “I could take you down to Murray’s gym tomorrow. Show you some moves.”

  “That’s okay.”

  The white shirt stopped at the door. “You heard what I said? About it not being the same?”

  This time I didn’t bother to nod.

  When I think of it now, I have to look for the logic. But then I was a boy, the son of a mother who had faith in signs. And in my mind, Moon Shapiro waiting until the second day I’d been moved to the front row to knock me to the dirt beneath that sad, little tree was a sign as clear as my grandfather’s shootings. Moon’s hard-knuckled fists had stamped 4-F into my flesh as assuredly as the army doctor had stamped it onto Uncle Glenn’s paperwork. We were unfit for service. Whatever that service might turn out to be.

  • • •

  Over the next weeks, Moon Shapiro beat me up on a schedule only he could predict. Sometimes I’d come through the chain-link fence and find Declan’s face in the dirt, or Francis flat on the sidewalk. Other days it would be only Moon, leaning against that tree, making it bend like he was a gale force wind. Then it would be my cheek pressed into the gravel, my colorful organs his fists would seek. And each time they landed, I’d think 4-F, 4-F, 4-F.

  Nearly every day, walking home, I’d see another blue star appear in another window of an apartment building. A Son in Service star, hung whenever someone in the family had enlisted, joined up to fight in Europe or the Pacific. Each time I spotted one of these stars, I felt more useless, more 4-F. Because they only reminded me that everybody—except me—was doing something for the war effort.

  My father had taken a second job, working a graveyard shift at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—although he claimed he possessed no discernible mechanical skills. My mother was now doing the bookkeeping for the businesses of men who had gone to war. Aunt May got a job stitching together uniforms in a converted dress factory on 34th Street. And during the National Boy Scout Scrap Metal Drive, I’d had to walk around the block to avoid Bobby Devine—dressed in his uniform—who was on Dyckman Street collecting old signs and car bumpers.

  Uncle Glenn had joined Civil Defense. After that night on the roof, he’d spent a couple of weekends training on Staten Island, and now he had a certificate signed by Fiorello La Guardia, a white Civil Defense helmet and armband, and a piercing silver Civil Defense whistle.

  Every night, Uncle Glenn put on his white helmet and armband, and patrolled the neighborhood, blowing his whistle up at the window of anybody who hadn’t pulled his blackout shades all the way down. One night, when we were on our way to see a Roy Rogers movie at the Alpine theater, Uncle Glenn made us miss the newsreel because he’d stopped to blow his whistle at somebody’s window for five minutes.

  “Can’t you maybe take one night off from Civil Defense?” Aunt May had asked him.

  “You don’t see Hitler taking the night off,” he told her.

  I asked Uncle Glenn how old someone needed to be to join Civil Defense, and he said definitely older than twelve. But the next day, he brought me a pack of enemy aircraft spotter cards.

  These were regular playing cards printed with the silhouettes of enemy planes—German and Japanese—and they were a coveted item at P.S. 52. Standing on the playground with your face turned to the sky, praying for the sight of a Focke-Wulf Kurier or a Mitsubishi Reconnaissance to come rumbling over the roof of the school so you could identify it, had replaced skully as the favored recess pastime.

  That night, I sat on my bed and memorized the shape of all the German aircraft—the ones I thought most likely to find their way over New York City. I didn’t worry too much about my eyes, how they had not been corrected as well for distance. The planes were big, and I only needed to recognize their forms.

  The following afternoon, I took my place beside the other boys gazing into the sky.

  It was one of those clear, blue-sky days New York sometimes gets in the wintertime. So clear, I couldn’t tell how far up I was seeing, because it’s difficult to gauge depth when everything is the same featureless blue.

  Still, after ten minutes or so, I was certain I had seen the glint of something silver—possibly the wing of a plane—high in the sky.

  “There,” I called out.

  “Where?” said Bobby Devine.

  “Above the Chesterfield sign.”

  “That?” Bobby Devine breathed his Juicy Fruit breath onto my face. “Jesus, Quinlan, that’s a pigeon.” He shook his head. “Honestly, an entire battalion of Messerschmitts could come flying over Queens and you’d miss it completely.”

  That day, walking home, it seemed there were dozens of new Son in Service stars in the windows of the apartments on Academy Street and Nagle Avenue, dozens more on Dyckman Street. No matter where I looked, I was surrounded by them, entire constellations of blue stars.

  • • •

  As winter—and the war—wore on, sugar, meat, and rubber were rationed. One afternoon, Miss Steinhardt passed out colored ribbons for us to wear around our necks. Blue meant you lived near enough to P.S. 52 to risk running home during an enemy air strike. Red meant you had to take your chances of dying under a desk with Miss Steinhardt.

  Those of us with blue ribbons spent most of the day praying for the shrill sound of the air raid siren—anything to break up the stuffy monotony of Miss Steinhardt’s classroom. I prayed doubly hard, gazing at the twin bands of blue ribbon on either side of the microphone box pinned at Rose’s throat, imagining myself leading her to safety as we ran down Academy Street, away from the strafing of a Heinkel 115. Away from the round face of Moon Shapiro, peering out of a P.S. 52 window, his red ribbon a noose around his neck.

  Rose and the radio were my only consolations that winter.

  Every afternoon, I went straight for it, draping my body over the top of its cherrywood console, as if that might cause the tubes inside to warm up faster. Then I stretched out on the floor in front of it, pressing my back against the green and brown checkerboard linoleum, pushing my glasses onto the top of my head, so that nothing in my real world would be in focus.

  One of those afternoons, I was listening to The Lone Ranger in the dark. That was something I did. Pulling down the blackout shades and leaving off the lamps, so the only illumination would be the amber light shining from behind the small glass plate at the front of the Silvertone. It was late March, a sleeting day more like winter than spring. Moon had kept me pressed against the sidewalk a long time, and the front of my jacket was so soaked, I’d thrown it over the radiator to dry.

  The Lone Ranger and Tonto were riding across the Texas plains, chasing after
the Butch Cavendish gang, and suddenly I smelled those plains, a dry and dusty smell—though that might have been my jacket on the radiator. Still, a second later, I saw those plains, saw the flat, parched expanse of them, the long line where they met the horizon, and then the pale brown dust kicked up by the churning legs of Silver, the Lone Ranger’s horse, moving in time with the hoofbeats coming out of the Silvertone’s speakers.

  I saw it all—in every distance, and more clearly than I could have in real life. The pearl handle of the Lone Ranger’s gun, each strand of Silver’s pure white mane, every feathery tip of Tonto’s headdress fluttering in the wind.

  I sat up, my head too full of these pictures to remain on my back, and stared into the amber light behind the glass plate. The light I’d always imagined was shining directly from whatever station the radio was tuned to, directly from the broadcasting studio into my living room.

  Pictures kept tumbling from the speakers into my head, clearer than I’d seen anything in a while. The vast darkness of the western sky at night. The Lone Ranger’s campfire, flaming up orange. I got to my knees, crawled to the radio, and pressed myself against the Silvertone’s cherrywood bulk. Then I shut my eyes and let the amber light from the broadcasting station fall warm onto them.

  I stayed pressed to the radio, its speakers vibrating against my chest, for all of the evening’s serials. I saw the flakes of new snow catch in the thick fur of the malamute Yukon King. Watched the shimmers of blue-edged light play across the surface of Lamont Cranston’s martini. Could see how when the Dragon Lady lit her cigarette, her shiny red fingernails reflected the flame like ten tiny mirrors.

  Later—much later—I heard footfalls behind me.

  “You’re seeing that, aren’t you?” my father said. “You’re seeing the radio.”

  And what I heard, bumping up against his words, was that he did not think it as wondrous as I did.

  • • •

  Once I began to see the radio, I did nothing but listen to it. Every afternoon, before the glass tubes had warmed enough to catch sound, I’d be waiting on the checkerboard linoleum, waiting to see the purple and gold pennants of Jack Armstrong’s All-American high school whipping in the wind, the knockout gas billowing from the end of the Green Hornet’s gun like steam rising from subway gratings. I’d remain in front of the radio until my mother called me into the kitchen for dinner, but as soon as I could, I’d be back, the music from Death Valley Days filling my ears, my eyes trained on a distant line of covered wagons rolling across a sun-blasted landscape.