A Master Plan for Rescue by Janis Cooke Newman

pressing his body against the woman’s, bending hers into the C shape of the wall.
    But it was always people with secrets, never Nazis.
    Still, I kept looking. When I ran out of money in the
My First War Bond
book, I went down to Aunt May and asked if she needed me to go to Mandelbaum’s for her. Aunt May was still cooking for us, still making those horrible recipes out of
Victory Meat Extenders
—Codfish Casserole and English Monkey, which thankfully did not have any actual meat in it. If Aunt May had already been to the store, I took the change out of my mother’s purse, which she left on a chair near the front door, ready for five o’clock Mass. Since my mother never went anywhere except Good Shepherd, she never seemed to notice.
    •   •   •
    I was still looking at the end of the summer, when my mother went back to her work as bookkeeper for the now-legitimate restaurants and supper clubs that belonged to her father’s former customers. I don’t believe she would have gone back at all, if Mr. Puccini hadn’t knocked on our door every day for two weeks in August, asking about the rent.
    For the first few days, she headed out wearing the black dress. Finally, Aunt May came by and said it would do everybody good if she put on something more cheerful.
    “I don’t feel cheerful,” my mother told her.
    “None of us do,” Aunt May said. “But most of us are at least pretending.”
    The next morning when my mother left the apartment in the black dress, Aunt May was waiting for her on Dyckman Street. She took hold of my mother’s black sleeve and made her look up at all the windows where blue Son in Service stars had once hung, blue stars that had more recently been replaced with gold ones.
    “You’re not the only widow on the block,” she said, spinning my mother around on the sidewalk. “You’re not even the only one in the building.”
    The next morning, my mother put on a brown skirt and a brown blouse. They were the color the leaves on the trees in Fort Tryon Park turn before they give up and fall to the ground at the end of autumn. Aunt May told her it was an improvement, though not much of one.
    My mother said it was as much pretending as she was capable of.
    She wore some version of that color every day for the rest of the week. Some version of that color for the rest of the month. My mother must have gone out and bought a small wardrobe of clothes the color of dead leaves. It was as if fall had come early to our apartment.
    •   •   •
    The Tuesday after Labor Day, Aunt May handed me five dollars and sent me to the Thom McAn on Broadway to buy new shoes for school. Buying shoes for school was something I’d always done with my father, the two of us taking our time to examine the paired-up samples in the window, standing together on the tiles that spelled out THOM MCAN while I made up my mind, going through the glass door to sit in the velvet seats joined at the arms like the seats at the Alpine movie theater. The Thom McAn shoe salesman always had a mustache and would take off my dirty sneaker with two hands, as if it was something precious, as if he were afraid of dropping it. My father knew that the metal instrument the shoe salesman used to measure my foot was called a Brannock Device. Once, even the Thom McAn shoe salesman hadn’t known that.
    Now I walked down Broadway by myself, stood alone on the tiled letters examining the paired shoes, sat in the joined-up chairs with no one next to me. When the shoe salesman, whose upper lip was clean-shaven, placed my baggy-socked foot on the metal plate to measure it, the words
Brannock Device
boomed so loud in my head, I couldn’t hear myself say the style number.
    Perhaps the shoe salesman hadn’t heard me right, or perhaps I’d been too distracted thinking about how I didn’t want to be standing out on Broadway with only my two feet on those THOM MCAN tiles, but the shoes the salesman brought me were the same terrible tan color