“WHY CAN’T GRANDMA move in and take care of us while you’re away?” Esther asked. “I don’t want that other lady to come here.” She knew Penny’s name but she pretended not to, emphasizing the fact that Penny was practically a stranger.
Daddy’s suitcase lay open on his rumpled bed as he packed to leave for boot camp tomorrow. He crisscrossed his narrow bedroom, removing items from his closet, his dresser, his nightstand, checking to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He was taller than the sloping sections of the ceiling but so familiar with the layout of the room that he never bumped his head.
“I already explained it a dozen times, Esther. Grandma can’t climb stairs. And you know pets aren’t allowed. Who would take care of Woofer? And her bird?”
“Penny could take care of them for her.”
“Everything is arranged, doll.”
“I don’t want you to go!” Mama used to scold Esther for using a whiny voice, but she didn’t care. She climbed onto Daddy’s bed, causing the lid of his suitcase to fall shut. Her stomach ached from crying so hard during the past several days, but even her tears hadn’t convinced Daddy to stay home. He wasn’t going to change his mind.
“I’ll only be gone for six or seven weeks. Then I’ll get leave-time after basic training and I’ll come home. Maybe by then Grandma will let you move in with her.”
“But then you’ll have to go away again?”
“Just till the war ends.” He reopened the suitcase lid and stuffed in two more pairs of socks. “Look, your friends’ fathers are all off fighting, aren’t they? And the Hoffmans’ father, next door? I have to do my part, doll.”
“The other kids still have mothers to take care of them.” Esther regretted her words as soon as she spoke them.
Daddy closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I know, doll, I know. But Penny will do a good job taking care of you – ”
“I don’t want her, I want you!”
Daddy sighed and reached out to caress her hair. His hand felt heavy and warm on the top of her head. “I’m sorry, Esther. There’s nothing more I can say.” He turned and walked back to the dresser, removing the framed photograph of Mama that always stood on top of it. “I need to take this,” he said softly. “You mind?”
Esther shrugged, unsure why he asked for her permission. He blew the dust off the glass and swiped it with his hand before placing the picture frame inside the suitcase and snapping the latches shut. He glanced around the room to see if he had forgotten anything, and as he paused, Esther heard the screen door slam downstairs in the kitchen. A moment later, Peter raced up the steps to the bedroom and burst through the door. He flung himself at their father and clung to his waist, squeezing so hard he wrinkled Daddy’s shirt.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Daddy asked. “I thought you were playing outside?”
Peter pressed his face against Daddy’s midsection and didn’t reply. He hadn’t begged or pleaded with their father the way Esther had, or even asked “why?” over and over again. Instead, he had followed Daddy everywhere for the past few days, hanging on to his pant leg or his shirttails or clinging to his waist. Now he began to cry, a thin, muffled sound like an injured kitten.
“Hey, come on, Peter. Don’t make this any harder than it is, okay?”
The bedroom window gaped open, and as Peter continued to whimper softly, Esther heard a different kind of wail in the distance, joining his. She recognized it as sirens, coming from the fire station three blocks away. The sound grew louder and louder until it seemed as though the vehicles were stopping right outside their apartment building. Peter let go of Daddy’s waist and put his hands over his ears to drown out the racket. He hated sirens, probably because they reminded him of the ambulances and police cars at the vegetable market on the terrible day that Mama had died. Daddy crossed to the window and jerked out the screen so he could lean outside to look. “Holy cow!” he shouted. “The synagogue is on fire!”
Esther went to her father’s side and peered out, too. Thick black smoke churned from the rear of the building, and bright orange flames flashed behind the windows. She saw long fingers of fire reach from one of the windows and grab on to the roof, igniting it. She squeezed her hands into fists, wanting the firemen to hurry and put the fire out, wanting the eerie, unnatural sight to go away and the familiar, tan brick building across the street to look the way it always had. On the street three floors below, firemen in black coats and rubber boots were unfolding ladders and uncoiling long fire hoses that looked like flat, gray snakes. Why didn’t they work faster?
She turned away, unable to watch the flames consume the building, and saw Peter standing in the middle of the room, still covering his ears. One of his favorite playthings used to be his toy fire truck, and he used to beg Mama to walk past the firehouse on the way to the park so he could see the big trucks. But that had changed the day Mama died.
“Hey, we’d better shut the windows,” Daddy said, “or it’ll get too smoky in here. Give me a hand, Esther.”
She didn’t move, watching as he quickly closed his bedroom windows and stacked the folding screens against the wall. “Is the whole synagogue going to burn down, Daddy?”
“I don’t know, doll. I’m sure the firemen will do their best to save it. Run and close your bedroom windows, okay?” Daddy hurried downstairs to check the rest of the apartment.
Esther went into the bedroom that she shared with Peter and wrestled out the screen so that the heavy window could fall closed. Then she followed her father and brother downstairs. Daddy was in the living room with his head and shoulders hanging through the open window, watching the spectacle below.
“Daddy, don’t! You’ll fall out!”
He pulled his head inside and closed the window. “What’s wrong, doll? You’re not scared, are you?” Esther nodded and Peter flung himself at their father again, crying as he clung to his waist. “You don’t have to worry. It won’t spread to our side of the street. Come on, we’ll go downstairs and watch.”
Esther didn’t want to watch. Mama had told her that the synagogue was like a church, except that you had to be Jewish like Mr. and Mrs. Mendel in order to go there. Esther wouldn’t want to watch her own church burn down, but Daddy took Peter’s hand in his and led them both downstairs. A haze of smoke already fogged the front hallway. Daddy halted to knock on the landlord’s door.
“Mr. Mendel? Mr. Mendel, are you home?” No one answered. They went outside and Esther saw dozens of their neighbors perched on their front stoops or crowded along the sidewalk to watch. She didn’t see Mr. Mendel standing among them. Mrs. Hoffman from the building next door called to Daddy in a tremulous voice.
“Mr. Shaffer? . . . Oh, Mr. Shaffer? . . . Do you think there’s a chance the fire could spread to our side of the street? Should we evacuate our valuables?” Esther had been inside the Hoffmans’ apartment and couldn’t recall seeing anything valuable.
“Our buildings should be okay,” Daddy told her. “There’s no wind. What a shame about the synagogue, though.”
The Hoffman kids were all out on the sidewalk watching, too. Their son Jack was a year older than Esther and sometimes used swearwords. He got sent to the principal’s office a lot in school. Mama had called him and his younger brother, Gary, “ruffians.” Now the two brothers stood near the fire hydrant, splashing in the puddles from the leaking hoses and annoying the firemen. The look of glee on their faces made Esther shiver.
Jack’s older sister, Lois, was fifteen and boy-crazy. She used to walk to school with Esther, but lately she acted as if she was much too grown up to hang around with her. Lois sat on the front steps of her building, chewing a wad of gum and blowing giant pink bubbles. The neighborhood was much quieter now that Mr. Hoffman had enlisted in the navy. Before that the Hoffmans used to argue all the time, shouting so loudly that Esther could hear them from inside her own building, especially in the summer when the windows were open.
There was no sign of their landlord, Mr. Mendel, but a group of Jewish men with black hats and bushy beards had gathered in front of Esther’s apartment building. She saw such horror and loss in their expressions that she had to look away. One of them pushed forward to plead with the firemen. He was as short as Esther was, with a black hat and snowy white beard.
“Please, you must save the Torah scrolls. They must not burn.”
“We’ll do our best, Rabbi. Now, please step back.”
Suddenly the front door of the synagogue flew open and their landlord, Mr. Mendel, staggered out, collapsing onto the sidewalk. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and Esther recognized him by the striped suspenders he’d had on when they had visited him earlier this evening. A firemen rushed toward him yelling, “I need an ambulance!”
The white-bearded rabbi pushed forward, skirting around the firemen and fire trucks and stepping over the maze of hoses as he crossed the street. “Yaacov! Yaacov!” he called. “Are you all right?”
Mr. Mendel had been carrying a dark bundle, and the fireman handed it to the rabbi, then motioned for him to go back across the street to wait. Esther could feel the heat of the flames and knew it must be even hotter in front of the synagogue. Daddy released her hand as he hurried over to the rabbi.
“Is that Mr. Mendel?” he asked. “Is he okay?”
The white-bearded man lifted his shoulders as he nodded sadly. “Yes, it is him. We must pray that he will recover. He did a very brave thing to save our Torah.”
“I’m Mr. Mendel’s tenant,” Daddy told him. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” The man didn’t seem to hear Daddy as the others gathered around him to unwrap the bundle, talking in a language Esther couldn’t understand.
“Any idea how the fire started?” she heard Daddy ask one of the men. The man shook his head. “No, but I wonder . . . with so much hatred in the world, it would not surprise me if it was deliberate.”
At last the ambulance arrived, the siren howling so loudly that Peter covered his ears again. So did Esther. She watched the men carefully lift their landlord into the back of the vehicle, remembering how they had lifted Mama’s limp body the same way. The vehicle drove away again, sirens wailing.
Meanwhile, some of the firemen began climbing their ladders so they could aim their hoses at the roof of the synagogue. More firemen were smashing the lower windows with axes and pouring water into the first floor. Police cars arrived from two different directions and pulled to a stop in the middle of the street, blocking traffic. The patrolmen jumped out, leaving their doors wide open. They began pushing back the crowds, shouting for everyone to stay clear. “Out of the way, folks. Let the firemen do their work.”
Esther took Daddy’s hand again, and Peter gripped his other one as they moved onto the front porch of their apartment building to escape the smoke and heat. Only the headlights on the fire trucks lit the dark night, along with the eerie glow of the flames. Brooklyn’s streetlights had been turned off months ago, and the air-raid warden had ordered everyone to hang blackout curtains in their windows to disguise the city from enemy U-boats and airplanes. If there was a moon out tonight, the sky was too smoky for them to see it.
They watched for a long, long time. The firemen worked until they were exhausted, but they couldn’t save the synagogue. Esther’s eyes burned and itched from the smoke. She could taste it in the back of her mouth and throat.
“Yeah, my eyes burn, too,” Daddy said when he saw her rubbing hers. “Let’s go inside.” They walked up the stairs together. The excitement had helped Esther forget that Daddy was leaving tomorrow, but now her grief returned in full force.
“Are you still going away, even though there was a fire and Mr. Mendel got hurt?”
Daddy nodded sadly. “There’s nothing I can do about either one, doll. Get ready for bed, okay? You too, Peter.” Daddy came upstairs to tuck them in after they had washed their faces and brushed their teeth.
Esther had trouble falling asleep. A sheen of smoke hung in the beam of light beneath her door. Her eyes burned whenever she tried to close them, and she didn’t know if her tears were from the smoke or her sorrow. Maybe both. This was the last night that Daddy would be home for a long, long time, the last night that he would tuck her into bed and kiss her good-night. She could hear Peter sobbing into his pillow.
She was still awake hours later when Daddy came to bed. He stood in the doorway gazing at them before finally coming inside and bending over Peter’s bed to stroke his hair. Esther pretended to be asleep when Daddy turned to her bed. He pulled the sheet over her and touched her hair, too. She longed to say something to him, but she was afraid he would be mad because it was very late and she was still awake. At last he turned away and closed the bedroom door.
The synagogue across the street was one more loss in Esther’s life that could never be replaced. Mama was gone. Nice Mrs. Mendel who baked honey cake and cookies was gone, too. Now the synagogue had been destroyed and Mr. Mendel had been rushed away in an ambulance. Esther’s world was slowly coming apart, unraveling like the favorite pink sweater she’d once had. It had begun with a small hole after she’d snagged the sleeve on a nail, and as time passed, the broken strand of yarn kept growing longer and longer until the hole was so huge she could no longer wear the sweater. Tomorrow Daddy would leave her, too.
And she couldn’t do anything about it.