Sandwich by Catherine Newman

Author:Catherine Newman [Newman, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Hours later, the candles have burned down on their plates into pools of translucent wax. The sun has set, the mosquitoes have come and gone, and our dishes are pushed away. I ended up pan-roasting the striper and served it with a caper-lemon-butter sauce. It was perfect. The corn was burstingly sweet, the star pasta simple and good, the tomatoes bright and restorative. Nick has opened a second bottle of wine. A third. Maya has pulled the bed out in the living room, and she and Jamie are lying down in the lamplight. Now it’s just my parents, Nick, Willa, and me outside still. Talking some, laughing, picking at the good chocolate bar I’ve broken into pieces. I am full to bursting in every way.

“We didn’t hear from them,” my dad is explaining, about his grandparents. “Some people we knew got letters from friends or relatives saying, ‘We’re being deported,’ or, ‘They’re rounding up the neighborhood.’ We didn’t hear anything at all. A holiday card one year, and then boom, nothing. Silence.” He shakes his head. “My aunts would come over and my brother—your uncle Sal—and I would eavesdrop. We were just kids, remember. We didn’t really understand what we were hearing, and nobody thought it was appropriate to explain it to us. We listened to the conversations, to the radio. We tried to piece it together.”

“That must have been so confusing, Grandpa,” Willa says, and he nods.

“It was. But we were kids. We wanted to play stickball. Broomball. We all got metal roller skates and we wanted to roller-skate around the streets, buy a hot dog from the hot dog guy. It wasn’t just one thing.”

I picture my dad and uncle in their one-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, trying to listen to the grown-ups talking. Trying not to. Maybe this is what I did too.

Willa dips her fingertips into the melted wax, peels it off and rolls it up, pokes it back into the candle to melt again. The candlelight illuminates her apple cheeks. I think, My baby! and keep this thought to myself.

“Do you know when your family knew for sure?” she asks. My father nods.

“I think—and I may be wrong about this—but I think we got a letter in 1944. Maybe 1945, though I’m pretty sure it was before the end of the war. From Warsaw neighbors of theirs who’d been deported to Siberia. I think—and again, I’m not sure—but I think they’d seen my grandparents get put on a freight car. Though why wouldn’t the neighbors have been rounded up then too? I’m not sure. I might be confused about this.”

“Did your parents read you the letter?” This is my mom asking. I note that she, also, seems not to know this whole story, which I find strangely reassuring.

“No, no,” my dad says. “I don’t know how we heard about it. Probably we just overheard it. I remember, though, that my father cried out. A sound I’d never heard him make. I never heard it again.

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