Grace
New York, 1946
Grace poured sugar into her coffee, watching it disappear into the blackness below. She looked up, taking comfort in the sight of Frankie hunched over a file across the office and the uneven hum of the radiator.
It had been a full week since she’d left the photos at the British consulate. She’d wondered if it would be hard to go back to normal, as if the whole business with the girls had never happened. But she had slipped back into her old life like a comfortable pair of shoes. The room at the boardinghouse, now graced by her mother’s plastic hydrangeas, felt more like home than ever.
Still, she often thought about Mark and how puzzled he must have been to wake up and find her gone. She’d half expected him to call, but there had been silence. She thought about the girls, too, and about Eleanor and why she had betrayed them.
Pushing aside the questions that had sent her on the crazy quest in the first place, Grace resumed typing a letter to the housing board. Frankie crossed the room and handed her a file. “I was hoping you could fill this out for me.” She opened the file. There were papers from the Children’s Aid Society for the placement of a child with a family. Grace was surprised; usually they referred these types of matters to Simon Wise, over on Ludlow, who specialized in family law. But then Grace saw the names on the form and she understood why Frankie was handling this one. The child to be fostered was Samuel Altshuler. And he was being placed with none other than Frankie himself.
“You’re taking Sammy in?” she asked, almost not believing.
“The kid deserves a solid home, you know? And what you said about it being hard to get involved, that really stuck.” Grace’s mind reeled back to their conversation over the phone when she was in Washington. She had said it as a caution. But he had taken it the other way and jumped in with both feet. “So I’m going to take him. At least if they’ll let an old bachelor have a kid.”
She reached out and squeezed his arm, her admiration soaring. “They will, Frankie. They definitely will. He’s the luckiest kid to have you. I’ll get these typed right away and I’ll deliver them to the agency myself.”
It was nearly two o’clock that afternoon when Grace returned from the courthouse. The office was empty, but Frankie had scribbled a note: “Gone to get some things for the kid’s new room. Back soon.” His words seemed to crackle off the page with excitement and purpose.
Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she had missed lunch. She picked up the bag containing her egg salad sandwich and started for the door. Time for a quick bite on the roof before Frankie returned.
She opened the door to the office, then stopped short. There, in the corridor, stood Mark.
“Hello…” she said uncertainly. Their encounter on the street last time had been a coincidence. Now he had come here purposefully, looking for her. Surprise and happiness and anger seemed to rush through her all at once. How had he found her? Her mother, or her landlady perhaps; it would not have been that hard.
“You left,” he said, his voice more wounded than accusing.
“I’m sorry.”
“Was it something I said? Or did?”
“Not at all.” She could see how confused he must have been. “Things between us just felt, well, complicated. And then I found this.” She reached in her bag and pulled out the wireless transmission that proved Eleanor’s guilt. She had almost destroyed it after returning to New York. But she hadn’t, and despite trying to put the whole matter behind her, she kept the paper with her. “Finding out the truth about Eleanor, plus everything between us, it was just more than I could take. I was overwhelmed.”
“So you left.”
“I left.” But running away had changed nothing. Eleanor’s guilt was still there, plain on the page. And so were her feelings for Mark. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything.”
“It’s okay. All of us have things that we keep hidden. There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” He paused. “When we were in Washington you asked about my time with the War Crimes Tribunal. I wasn’t ready to talk about it then, but I am now. You see, I was finishing up law school when the war broke out. I wanted to enlist, but my father insisted I take a deferment and finish school before going abroad. He’d banked everything on my school and my being a lawyer was needed to keep us afloat. So I doubled my classes to finish early. I enlisted the day after graduation and they put me in the JAG corps and deployed me. But by then it was all over, just the cleanup.
“One of the first cases I faced in Frankfurt was the Obens trial. Have you heard of it?” Grace shook her head. “I didn’t think so. They worked hard to keep it out of the papers. Obens was an American GI in one of the companies that liberated Ravensbrück. He and the others were sick with what they had seen, not right in the head. When they captured a German who had been a guard at the camp, Obens shot him, in cold blood, and in violation of the rules of war.” Grace blanched, imagining good men just like Tom, only too far gone. “I wanted to prosecute the matter. It wasn’t combat—it was murder, pure and simple. But my superiors would hear none of it. They were only focused on trying Germans and they didn’t want to dilute the story of the Allied victory.
“I wouldn’t leave it alone. So they came up with a story about how I was doing it because my family was German.” She recalled his surname: Dorff. Some part of her had known he was of German descent, but she hadn’t wanted to ask. “They called it treason.”
“So you resigned?”
“Before they could court-martial me, yes. You must think I’m a coward. I’m sorry for not telling you sooner.”
“No, I think what you did was brave. But why are you telling me now?”
“Because I think you blame yourself for Tom’s death and that’s why you keep running. But none of it is black-and-white. Not your choices, not my choices and not Eleanor’s either. I’m sure there were reasons for what she did.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore. But I’m awfully glad you’re here.” The words came out before she realized she was saying them. She could feel her cheeks flush.
“Really?” He took a step closer. “Me, too.”
“Even if it’s complicated?”
“Especially then. I’m not here for easy.”
He wrapped her in his arms then and they stood motionless for several seconds. She looked up and their eyes met. He looked as though he might kiss her and this time she really, truly wanted him to. She closed her eyes as his head lowered. Their lips met.
There was a noise behind them. “Grace, would you believe I got Sammy a bike and…” Frankie’s voice trailed off as Mark and Grace broke apart, too late.
Grace cleared her throat. “Frankie, this is Mark Dorff. He was a friend of my husband’s.” The explanation just seemed to make things worse.
She watched as Frankie looked from her to Mark, then back again, braced for what he was going to say. She could not tell from his expression if he was angry or amused.
“I wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” she offered.
“Yeah, well, remember that woman you asked me to check on?” Frankie looked uneasily at Mark, as if unsure he should speak in front of him.
“It’s okay. Mark knows everything.”
“I was over at immigration earlier, checking on some things for Sammy’s adoption papers. I saw my buddy at customs. He found her entry file.”
“Eleanor’s?”
“There wasn’t much to it. She came to America a day or two before she died, arrived by plane.”
Grace nodded, her heart sinking again. She knew that much from the passport she’d seen at the consulate. What had she expected, really? A customs form could hardly tell what had gone on inside Eleanor’s mind, what she was doing in New York and whether it related to her betrayal of the girls. “Thank you,” she said to Frankie, still grateful for his efforts to help her.
“The only other thing in the file was this.” He pulled a small tablet from his jacket and opened it, pointing at the notation he had made. “This was the address she listed as her destination in America.” Grace scanned the entry. Her spine began to tingle. An apartment in Brooklyn. And below it, in Frankie’s chicken-scratch writing, the entry from the log: “Person(s) receiving.” As she read the name he’d scribbled below it, her blood ran cold.
“I have to go,” Grace said, reaching for her bag. “Thank you!” She kissed Frankie so hard on the cheek that he fell back in his chair.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Mark called after her.
But Grace was already out the door. There were some things a woman had to do alone.