his flashlight. 'You,' he said. 'You come with me.'
He led me into the crowd that was emptying out of the lobby and through a door he unlocked with a key and then up a narrow stairway that I recognized from when Sandy and I had been brought here to see the Madison Square Garden von Ribbentrop rallies. 'How old are you?' the usher asked me.
'Sixteen.'
'That's a good one. Keep it up, kid. Get yourself in more hot water.'
'I have to go home now,' I told him. 'I'm going to miss my bus.'
'You're going to miss a lot more than that.'
He rapped sharply on the famous soundproof door to the Newsreel's projection booth and Mr. Tirschwell let us in.
He was holding the note from Sister Mary Catherine.
'I don't see how I cannot show this to your parents,' he told me.
'It was just a joke,' I said.
'Your father's coming to pick you up. I telephoned his office to tell him you were here.'
'Thank you,' I said as politely as I had been taught to say it.
'Please sit down.'
'But it was a joke,' I repeated.
Mr. Tirschwell was preparing the reels for the new show. I saw when I got to looking around that many of the signed photos of the theater's renowned patrons had been removed from the walls, and realized that Mr. Tirschwell had begun to gather together the mementos he was taking to Winnipeg. And I realized too that the gravity of such a move might alone have been enough to account for the sternness with which he was treating me. Yet he also struck me as the exacting sort of adult whose sense of responsibility often extends to what is none of his business. It would have been hard to tell from either his looks or his speech that he'd grown up in a Newark tenement with my father. He was an understated, distinctly more polished and prideful version than my father of the scantily educated slum child who'd lifted himself out of his parents' immigrant poverty almost entirely by virtue of a vigilant, programmatic industriousness. Ardor, for these men, was all they had to go on. What their Gentile betters called pushiness was generally just this-the ardor that was everything.
'If I go outside,' I said, 'I can still get the bus and be home in time for dinner.'
'Stay where you are, please.'
'But what did I do wrong? I wanted to see my aunt. This isn't fair,' I said, dangerously close to crying. 'I wanted to see my aunt at the White House, that's all.'
'Your aunt,' he said, and he gritted his teeth so as to say no more.
Of all things, his disdain for Aunt Evelyn triggered my tears. Here Mr. Tirschwell lost his patience. 'Are you suffering?' he asked sardonically. 'What, what are you suffering? Do you have any idea what people are going through all over the world? Did you understand nothing of what you just saw? I only hope that in the future you're spared any real reason to cry. I hope and pray that in the days ahead your family-' He stopped abruptly, clearly unaccustomed to an undignified eruption of irrational emotion, particularly in the handling of an insignificant child. Even I could understand that his argument was with something other than me, but that didn't lessen the shock of my having to bear the brunt of it.
'What's going to happen in June?' I asked him. It was the unanswered question that I'd overheard my mother ask my father the night before.
Mr. Tirschwell continued scanning my face as though trying to determine how lacking in intelligence I was. 'Pull yourself together,' he finally said. 'Here,' and handed me his handkerchief. 'Dry your eyes.'
I did as he told me, but when I repeated, 'What's going to happen? Why are you going to Canada?' the exasperation all at once disappeared from his voice and something emerged both stronger and milder-
'I have a new job there,' he replied.
That he was sparing me terrified me, and I was again in tears.
My father arrived some twenty minutes later. Mr. Tirschwell handed him the note I'd written to get myself into the theater, but my father didn't take the time to read it until he had steered me by the elbow out of the theater and into the street. That's when he hit me. First my mother hits my brother, now my father reads the words of Sister Mary Catherine and, for the first time ever, wallops me, without restraint, across the face. As I am already overwrought-and nothing like as stoical as Sandy-I break down uncontrollably alongside the ticket booth, in plain view of all the Gentiles hurrying home from their downtown offices for a carefree spring weekend in Lindbergh's peacetime America, the autonomous fortress oceans away from the world's war zones where no one is in jeopardy except us.
6
May 22, 1942
Dear Mr. Roth:
In compliance with a request from Homestead 42, Office of American Absorption, U.S. Department of the Interior, our company is offering relocation opportunities to senior employees like yourself, deemed qualified for inclusion in the OAA's bold new nationwide initiative.
It was exactly eighty years ago that the U.S. Congress passed the Homestead Act of 1862, the famous legislation, unique to America, which granted 160 acres of unoccupied public land virtually free to farmers willing to pull up stakes and settle the new American West. Nothing comparable has been undertaken since then to provide adventurous Americans with exciting new opportunities to expand their horizons and to strengthen their country.
Metropolitan Life is proud to be among the very first group of major American corporations and financial institutions selected to be participants in the new Homestead program, which is designed to give emerging American families a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move their households, at government expense, in order to strike roots in an inspiring region of America previously inaccessible to them. Homestead 42 will provide a challenging environment steeped in our country's oldest traditions where parents and children can enrich their Americanness over the generations.
Upon receipt of this announcement you should immediately contact Mr. Wilfred Kurth, the Homestead 42 representative in our Madison Avenue office. He will personally answer all your questions and his staff will courteously assist you in every way they can.
Congratulations to you and your family for having been chosen from among numerous deserving candidates at Metropolitan Life to be among the company's first pioneering 'homesteaders' of 1942.
Sincerely yours,
Homer L. Kasson
Several days had to pass before my father could summon the composure to show the company's letter to my mother and to break the news that as of September 1, 1942, he was being transferred from the Metropolitan's Newark district to a district office opening in Danville, Kentucky. On a map of Kentucky that had been included in the Homestead 42 packet presented to him by Mr. Kurth, he located Danville for us. Then he read aloud from a page in a Chamber of Commerce pamphlet entitled
