Margot: a Novel - Softcover

I should begin with the simplest of truths: I am alive.

You might wonder how this is possibly the simplest of truths, when you have thought me dead—when the entire world has thought me dead—for so very long. But this, I promise you, is really quite simple in light of all the rest of it. I breathe, and sometimes I eat and sometimes I sleep. But every morning, again, when I wake up, I find myself still breathing. Simple. Really, it is nothing more than science.

I can already picture you shaking your head. It is not simple at all, you are saying to yourself. Maybe your face is turning an angry red, and you are yelling that the Red Cross lists said I was dead. Maybe you are wondering where I have been, why I haven’t found you yet. I’ve come this far. Why not just stay hidden forever?

But a person cannot really stay hidden forever. We both know that now, don’t we?

The truth is, I have wanted to find you for a long time, but I have been afraid. Afraid of what you might think if I told you everything. Afraid of what you’ve become since I’ve seen you last. Afraid, even, of what you might think of what—and who—I’ve become. I am not a girl anymore. Neither am I a Jew. And I have done things that I can’t understand or explain, even to myself.

But I promise you this, I am alive. There are simple truths about me. I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, where I am a legal secretary by the name of Margie Franklin. . . .

CHAPTER ONE

THE THIRD DAY OF APRIL 1959 SEEMS, AT FIRST, JUST LIKE any other Friday of my American life. I sit at my secretary’s desk in the law office of Rosenstein, Greenberg and Moscowitz, typing out Joshua’s schedule for the following week, gnawing carefully on an apple.

The office is quiet this afternoon, except for the sounds of the girls’ fingers tapping against the typewriter keys and the hum of Shelby’s radio coming from the desk across from me. Nearly all the lawyers have already left for the weekend, including my boss, Joshua Rosenstein, who has gone to Margate with his father, Ezra, who is Shelby’s boss. Ezra Rosenstein is one of the partners in the law firm, so perhaps it is no surprise that he owns both a boat and a house by the ocean in New Jersey, which he and Joshua visit nearly every weekend, especially in the spring and summer.

By this particular Friday, I—Margie Franklin—have been a resident of Philadelphia for nearly six years. I have been Joshua’s secretary for three of those years, which means I have spent somewhere around 150 Friday afternoons like this one, typing at my desk, eating my apple, listening to Shelby’s music.

This Friday, the Platters—Shelby’s favorite—pour softly from her radio, crooning about how the smoke gets in their eyes, which is a song that always makes me think of Peter, even from the very first time I heard it, when I was with Shelby at Sullivan’s Bar last month.

“We’re leaving early today,” Shelby announces to me just after she has devoured a ham sandwich she bought from the cart downstairs. “You’re too thin,” she had proclaimed in between bites. “Have half of my ham.” She’d tried to force it across the desk.

“No thanks,” I’d told her, pulling the apple from my satchel and then saying, “I don’t really like ham.”

“You’re an odd duck, Margie.” She’d shaken her head, but she’d smiled as she’d said it, so I knew she was saying it all in fun, that she had no idea why I would never bring myself to eat pork. And besides, that conversation, we’d already had it thousands of times. Or at least 150. Shelby often eats ham sandwiches, tries to offer me half, and insists I leave early with her when the Rosensteins are away.

Now Shelby switches off her radio and taps an unlit cigarette on the side of her metal desk. “You are going to leave early with me, aren’t you, Margie?”

I shrug, though I know that she will pester me until I agree to do it. It’s almost too warm today for my thin navy sweater, which I wear wrapped around my plaid dress, and I already feel the sweat building in pools under my arms, even in the office, but I resist the urge to fan myself with a file folder or even push up the sleeves.

“Good girl.” Shelby laughs. “And one of these days, I may even get you to try one of these.” She tosses the unlit cigarette in my direction, and then pulls a fresh one from her pack, teasing it between her lips.

“No thanks,” I say, pushing it gently back across the desk. We have played this game many times before, and I know Shelby does not honestly expect me to smoke it. Many girls in the office smoke, but I do not. I still cannot stand what it reminds me of: another time, another place, one which I never wish to go back to in my mind. But these are things I’d never even dream of telling Shelby.

Just past three, Shelby hangs on to my arm as we walk out of the office building and onto the sidewalk. The street is still fairly empty, as most people in the offices around us are still working, and the midafternoon sun glints off the low glass windows of the buildings on Market Street.

Shelby wears a short-sleeved white cotton blouse and full green skirt today, because it is April and the sun is warm enough to be without a sweater. But I still have my navy sweater on. I wear a sweater always, no matter what the temperature, so the dark ink on my forearm remains hidden, unseen.

“Any plans this weekend?” Shelby asks me, as if she doesn’t know the answer, the same answer I give her every weekend.

“Studying,” I tell her.

“Oh, good grief, Margie. All work and no play.”

“Joshua thinks I’ll make an excellent paralegal,” I tell her. Joshua is tall, with an oval face and curly hair the color of warm chestnuts. Sometimes I have the urge to reach up and run my finger around a curl, and I have to hold my hands together, to stop them from moving.

“Oh, Joshua does, does he?” She laughs. Shelby’s laugh is like water. Sometimes it’s good, cleansing, even refreshing. Other times, I feel it might drown me. “Come on.” She yanks my arm, turning me in the direction opposite my studio apartment. “I want to see a movie this afternoon. And I don’t like to see a movie alone.”

“What about Ron?” I ask her, referring to her beau, who I have no doubt she’ll marry at a moment’s notice if he ever asks, though some doubt he ever will. They have been dating for as long as I’ve known Shelby, which, as Shelby herself admits, is a long time for a girl to date a boy without any kind of promise.

“Ron is still working. Everyone else is still working. Come on,” she wheedles.

Shelby is always wanting me to go somewhere with her after work. Mostly, it is to Sullivan’s Bar to have a drink, and sometimes I do go with her even though I don’t drink alcohol, but just because she is my friend and her laugh can be so much like water that I want to swim in it, to close my eyes and float away. But at least once a month or so, there is a movie she wants to see. And nearly always it is one that Ron is not able or willing to see with her.

Last month Shelby dragged me to see Some Like It Hot and then went on and on about Marilyn’s curves and her butterscotch voice. I thought the movie was fine, but I did not laugh at the places Shelby did, at Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon’s antics dressed as women. I still do not fully understand the American sense of humor. Hiding is hiding is hiding. What’s so funny about that?

“Come on,” Shelby is still urging. “I’ve read the book and seen the play. The movie will complete the trifecta, and I don’t want to see it alone. The Diary of Anne Frank is much too sad for that.” She pulls her tiny pink lips in a pout, and all I can do is stare at her, not saying anything. I feel a tugging in my chest.

I saw a bit in the Inquirer a while back about the possibility of a movie being made, and something about non-Jewish actors being cast, but then I put it out of my mind. Perhaps if I didn’t read the article or pay attention, it would simply go away? “I can’t believe they’ve made a movie,” I finally whisper.

“Oh, Margie, seriously, I swear it. Sometimes I really do think that apartment of yours is located under a rock.” She shakes her head. “You’ve at least read Anne Frank’s diary by now, haven’t you? Oh, tell me you have!” All I can think is that she’s saying it wrong—not “Frank,” like the American version of hot dog with beans, a dish that Shelby seems rather fond of, but “Frank,” rhymes with “conk,” which is what I’d like to do right about now, conk Shelby over the head with my satchel if she doesn’t stop talking. And she is still talking.

“I’m not feeling well,” I interrupt her, and that is a gross understatement. I am sweating, and my hands shake. Black spots float in front of my eyes, and I close them, then open them again, which only makes the spots turn white. “I think I better go home,” I whisper.

I disentangle my arm and take off briskly, hoping she won’t follow me. “Margie,” she calls after me. “Margie. It’s the sweater. Take off the sweater. It’s too darn hot outside.”

But I don’t stop running until I put the key in the lock, turn, and step inside my apartment.

IN 1959, MY STUDIO APARTMENT IS IN A FIVE-STORY BRICK building with evenly spaced square windows on Ludlow Street, in Center City, Philadelphia. The building is much wider than the buildings on the Prinsengracht, but not any higher. Philadelphia, like the canal district of Amsterdam, is a city of lower buildings, surrounded by water. Shelby told me that because of a law in the city of Philadelphia, no building can rise higher than the statue of its founder, William Penn, which sits atop City Hall. He is like a beacon, this bronze man, watching over all the smaller buildings, and in a certain way that makes me feel protected here. It is a false kind of protection, but still, I feel it nonetheless.

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.

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 ...