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  “I don’t think I should come here to work,” William said.

  “Oh no, William,” Irving replied. “You should come and make no mention of the fact that you are Jewish. Simply take down the sign.”

  He looped his arm through William’s.

  “But I wonder, don’t you,” his uncle said in his wry understated way, “how ever are they able to keep the dogs out, since there’s no barbed-wire fence.”

  WILLIAM HAD NOT looked forward to the conversation at the Hennings dinner table and when dinner was served, any pleasure he might have had in the evening was gone—except there was a brief exchange initiated by Mrs. Hennings that figured in his present life and had started that evening.

  “So,” she had asked. “You came to this country when?”

  “Nineteen thirty,” William replied, which was true, though much of what he told them later was not.

  “From Lithuania,” he added. “I came to Washington, D.C., with the intention of getting an American education to live with my uncle who came to America before the War and stayed. But my plan was always to return to Lithuania.”

  “Ahhhh.” Dr. Hennings rested his long chin in his fist.

  William realized too late—he ought to have known from Dr. Hennings’ “Ahhhh” that the conversation was likely to go downhill.

  “So it would be difficult for you to go back home now, I presume,” Dr. Hennings said.

  “We’re Presbyterians,” Mrs. Hennings said as if that were the conversation in play. “Do you have a religious practice?”

  A religious practice, William thought. Did he have a religion?

  “I don’t,” he said.

  The don’t was emphatic but nothing was going to stop Mrs. Hennings from executing her plan for the evening.

  “Then,” Mrs. Hennings said, so pleasantly William found himself wondering how the wet vegetables would look on her lavender summer frock should he choose to spill them. “You must be a cultural Jew.”

  “Actually,” he said, weighing his love for their daughter against his hatred for them. “I am not a Jew at all. I’m a lapsed Catholic.”

  And that was that. He couldn’t be a Protestant in Lithuania, but he could be a Catholic.

  They married the following summer, June 1936, in Ann Arbor at the First Presbyterian Church and went on a honeymoon on the Bone River to spend the summer with seventy-five young boys between the ages of eight and seventeen.

  BEHIND HIS CANOE, William could hear Clementine’s low bluesy voice, and it sounded as if she were arguing with James. All he could hear from James—the next canoe, just behind his, the air noisy with rain and low rumbling thunder in the far distance— was his high-pitched Please, Miss. Please just listen.

  Clementine was disagreeing of course.

  When the camp cook got sick in late May and canceled for the summer, William called his uncle, for whom Clementine had cooked since she was a teenager. Without thinking of the implications, at least not consciously considering them, he asked could Clementine have six weeks off her job to join the camp staff. And Irving agreed.

  No, William, Clementine had said. Under no circumstances am I coming to the northern wilderness of Wisconsin to spend a summer as cook for undiscriminating white boys.

  William had just hung up the phone when she called back.

  Unless I can bring Roosevelt.

  WHEN WILLIAM’S MOTHER DIED shortly after he had arrived at his uncle’s house in January 1930, he did not know what to do with the overwhelming sadness. He spent the days working construction at an office building on Dupont Circle and evenings in the kitchen, where Clementine was cooking—roasts and stews for dinner, pudding and rich fruit pies—floating around the kitchen like a dancer—high-bottomed, long-legged, small breasts, straight back and strong arms whipping cream, rolling dough for the pie crust, mixing muffins light as air.

  Flour whisked with the juices from the roast on the stove— bottles with vinegar on the counter and canisters with sugar and flour, butter softening in a crock, yellow cream, shaved choco late, the smells so rich and warm he fell into them as if they had materialized with actual shape. Clementine left at nine after the dishes were done, her skin glistening with sweat. She took off the bandana she wore to cook, shook out her hair, washed her face, and said she’d see him in the morning.

  Mr. William, she called him.

  “Don’t call me Mr.,” he said. “Just William. Call me by my name.”

  He called her Clem.

  “So, I’m twenty-four,” he said.

  “Hmmm.”

  “Well?” he asked. “How old are you?”

  “l’m old enough to cook your dinner,” she said.

  She came early in the morning to make biscuits for breakfast— there were eight of them living at his uncle’s house: his uncle’s children, his sister, and Clem’s mother, who was the “live in” maid. William often got up on those days to be there when Clementine was making the biscuits, cutting in the butter, rolling out the dough, making the round shapes with a cookie cutter. His fantasy—he’d imagine it at night before he went to sleep—was that she take the cookie sheet of golden hot biscuits out of the oven, open a biscuit, slip in a pad of soft butter and pop it in his mouth.

  WHEN WILLIAM GOT WORD from his uncle Irving, who got word from a woman in their village, that the Nazis were a threat to the Jews in Lithuania, he finally told Josie that he was Jewish.

  “I said I was Catholic so your parents would permit me to marry you,” he told her. “I don’t intend for them to know anything else, but you are my wife whom I adore and you should know.”

  He thought at that time, early in their marriage, she was flattered, even pleased that he had lied to win her as his wife. Besides, she couldn’t argue. Her parents were quietly enraged at her decision to marry him, which was really not a decision at all but an inevitability.

  Josie was a virgin. At the beginning, there was about her body a kind of sexual desperation that delighted him.

  Later when she fell into a depression, he blamed himself.

  The very fact of who he was and where he had been born.

  He grew up in a small village outside the old city of Vilnius, Lithuania. His father was a doctor, and his mother raised her three boys with affection and lack of judgment—he didn’t realize until he left home how rare that was—but theirs was, by whatever terms a family life can be assessed, a happy home in a small village of mostly Jews. They were religious and though he chafed against the do’s and don’ts—what sometimes seemed the foolishness of religion, any religion—the shape it gave their lives, the repetition of their days, felt rich and necessary.

  He left at his father’s insistence. His older brothers had gone to school in England, where they had another uncle, and William came to America because, as his father warned him, his quick temper and impetuous nature might be better suited to a New World country than to one in the Old World. William didn’t know what that meant, if anything, but he knew he had a wild streak, so perhaps they considered he’d adapt better to a place where anything was considered possible.

  He liked America, or what he knew of it. There was a spirit of fluidity and promise or he never would have directed a boys’ camp for rich Protestant boys in northern Wisconsin.

  Nor married Josephine Hennings.

  But safety as his parents had imagined America? Maybe not.

  “I DON’T THINK of you as Jewish,” Josie said when William asked her. “I think of you as my husband.”

  They were sitting in the living room of their apartment in Chicago, Georgianna sleeping. A rare lovely night as William remembered—winter, windy of course and cold, but they were inside—watching the weather, the lake in the distance, the sliver of moon hanging in their window, lights from the buildings around theirs scattered like stars.

  Willliam wanted their conversation to move across the room into the night, to somewhere that softened what it was between them. Or not even between them. Just with Josephine, who w
as still her parents’ daughter first and not his wife. Maybe that was at the heart of her frigidity.

  Frigidity?

  He could still hold her in his arms, but when she felt him rise against her body, she pulled away.

  “Are you sorry we married?” William asked, thinking if she could say Yes, I am sorry, then they could begin again.

  This was all before the baby boy was conceived, when Georgianna was still sleeping in a crib.

  And then late May, still chilly in Chicago, they were walking to a café for supper and Josie reached for him, her arm around his waist.

  “Let’s try tonight,” she said leaning over, kissing his coat.

  BEHIND WILLIAM’S CANOE, there was a string of three boats, close together. The water was suddenly rough enough to induce caution, so they were sticking close in case of trouble, which, with that kind of current, made the paddling difficult. The last canoe, roped to James’ boat, contained supplies. James paddled in the stern of the third canoe, Clementine in the bow.

  She must be crazy mad by now, William thought. He had promised that the trip upriver would not be difficult. She could sit in the bottom of the boat, take in the sun and breeze and watch the trees pass by. But her strong arms got her the place in the bow. Certainly Adelaide, sitting in the bottom of the canoe, in the middle, a wisp of a girl who was the camp bookkeeper, was no match for Clem.

  They were just coming around a bend in the river, a small turn, barely noticeable, and Roosevelt raised his paddle in the air.

  “Tree,” he called.

  William dipped his paddle in pushing the water away to slow the canoe to a stop.

  “A tree’s down ahead,” he shouted to be heard above the wind.

  “Can’t go any further,” Roosevelt called back.

  WILLIAM HAD ALWAYS hoped to have Roosevelt come to camp when he was old enough. It pleased him now to watch the boy’s broad back, the straightness of it as he paddled, the muscles in his arms. But it would not have been possible to bring Roosevelt to Minnie HaHa as a camper, so William was paying him the same stipend he paid the others to work on buildings and grounds. The grounds were grounds, the camp carved out of forest mainly pines, cabins nestled in the trees above the river, and the cabins took keeping up. There were ten boys and a counselor in each one. Metal beds, no bathroom—the bathrooms, real bathrooms with flushing toilets, were in a building near the main hall. No windows in the cabins, just screens and no electricity. The boys had flashlights to go to the latrine. Lights out just after sundown.

  Roosevelt would stay on the second floor of the main lodge—two dormitory rooms upstairs, one quite small for two women—Adelaide, and this summer, Clementine.

  William had not told Clem where she would be sleeping yet. She was going to have a fit.

  William’s family had a two-bedroom cabin, primitive, but it did have a bathroom and running water, good since Josie wasn’t well and would not be willing to traipse to the latrine. Beyond their cabin was James Willow’s very small cabin, which James shared with the mice.

  William loved James. He was excellent at his work, particularly with the younger boys, and helpful to William in every way except with Josie.

  James had never liked Josephine. Something he never mentioned, but William knew and it gave him pause.

  WILLIAM AND ROOSEVELT pulled their canoe to shore.

  “Tie up,” William called to the others behind him, “We’re going to have to portage way off the path to get around this tree.”

  He lifted Georgie out of the canoe and set her on the bank, where she stood shivering next to Roosevelt. It was very cold for June, and he wrapped his arms around her, rocking back and forth to warm her up.

  Josephine was still in the canoe, her head down, resting on her knees, and William walked in his high boots and rain gear into the water, reaching out his hand, leaning in close. She pulled away.

  “Josie,” he said, his breath in her face. “Are you doing alright?”

  She was not. Either it was too difficult for her to get out of the canoe because of her accumulating weight or she didn’t feel well or both.

  He reached under her arms to lift her forward so she’d have momentum holding onto the sides of the canoe.

  “Don’t get close to me with your terrible breath smelling like bad meat,” she said.

  He lifted her anyway. And she gave in to the strength of his arms and he helped her up and out of the canoe, his arm firm around her waist crossing the shallow water to the bank and turning his head away from hers so she could not smell his breath.

  WILLIAM HAD NEVER given marriage any thought, not in the sense of considering it something a man and woman work at in the hope of achieving some level of contentment.

  But recently he had been thinking about marriage.

  His life with Josephine was not going well.

  His parents had married the community, his grandparents a half a mile away, their synagogue and market and café a short walk which they often took together, greeting neighbors on the street, chatting back and forth. They were as one at dinners in their own houses, at temple, in conversation—William could go right up the road, house to house, and everyone he knew would be living more or less the same life. He’d sit down at their table as if it were his own.

  His was not the kind of temperament who spent time thinking about the things in his life he could not change, although he thought he should be able to change his life with his wife.

  Just that spring he had found himself restless and irritated with Josie, a flash of irrational temper lurking just below the surface. A fleeting mental vision of slapping her rosy cheeks, of pushing her down the steps of their apartment building into the avenue, of pouring hot coffee on her hand when he served her breakfast.

  He worried about himself. He needed to pay attention.

  “Is something bothering you, Josie?”

  “Of course,” she said pulling herself up the bank holding onto a branch and to him for support. “Of course there is.”

  “Will you tell me later tonight?” he asked. “When we get to Missing Lake?”

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  The men took the canoes one at a time along the top of the bank, climbing over roots and fallen branches, a bed of sodden pine needles. The women waited, except for Clementine, who joined the men carrying the canoes.

  “Is the weather going to be like this for the whole trip?” Roosevelt asked.

  “I certainly hope not,” William said.

  “It’s supposed to clear,” James said. “But you can never tell if weather along this river is going to last for days or not. It always feels as if it will last for days.”

  “I hope there’ll be no more trees in the river,” William said, his back aching from paddling, from the weight of the boats, the bow of the canoe heavy with supplies.

  “So William,” James said, his hand on William’s arm, walking back after they had dropped the supply canoe in the water. “Who is this woman, Clementine?”

  “She’s an excellent cook who works for my aunt and uncle,” William said. “When Patricia dropped out as cook this summer, I asked my uncle if Clementine could have the summer off.”

  “And Roosevelt?”

  “Her son.” William said, hearing the tension in his own voice. “I’ve known him since he was a baby, and I’d always planned to hire him for the camp when he reached eleven just to get him out of the wicked summers in Washington.”

  “Not a lot of colored people up here,” James said.

  “No,” William agreed, but he was startled by James’ remark.

  “You should have called me about a cook,” James said. “I know a great one in Madison who’s out of a job.”

  IT TOOK THEM a couple of hours in the rain and cold to move the canoes to the other side of the tree, eating jelly sandwiches while they worked.

  “Missing Lake tonight?” James asked.

  “There’s no good place to pitch our tents before that,” William said. H
e sat down on the damp ground with Josie, a tarp beneath them.

  “I want to go home,” Josie said.

  “Chicago?”

  “Ann Arbor.”

  William had been afraid of this.

  “We’re going to camp first,” he said. “Whatever you decide after that, we’ll get to camp tomorrow not long after three. It will still be light.”

  “I want to be certain you do understand I’m not staying at camp this summer.”

  They were sitting down away from the rest of the group lined up on the bank, finishing lunch—everyone but Clementine, seated against a tree trunk away from the bank, her hat, the kind that fireman wear, pulled down over her eyes so she could barely see out.

  Trouble, Clementine.

  JAMES WAS SITTING down beside her in what William assumed was a gesture of friendship, but he noticed that she did not lift her hat.

  All Clementine could see in the space between her hat and the wet ground was James Willow’s fisherman boots, green with a black border.

  “So you’re Clementine,” James said.

  He reached out and dropped an orange in her lap.

  He already knew her name—they’d been introduced that morning.

  “So how did you end up coming along on this trip?” he asked. “You’re a friend of William’s?”

  He lit a cigarette.

  “Mind?” he asked, brushing the pine needles off his boots. “A Washington acquaintance of his, right? I was his student in high school in Chicago.”

  She shrugged.

  “I cook for his uncle’s family,” she said. “One of my jobs, but in summer people go away on long vacations.”

  “I’ve been to William’s apartment,” James said, sensing that might make a difference to her. “You can see the lake from the windows in the living room.”

  “Nice.”

  She pulled her hat lower on her brow.

  Clementine would have liked to see the place where William lived, to see how he was living these many years after he had been with the Groves, in the small bedroom without a closet at the top of the stairs when she had known him better.