“I moved the Metz family to eleven,” he said. There was no recrimination in his voice.
Closer she could see the imprint of papers creasing his cheek. “You were here all night again, weren’t you?” she accused. “You’re wearing the same suit, so don’t try to deny it.” She immediately regretted the observation. Hopefully, he would not realize the same about her.
He raised his hands in admission, touching the spot near his temples where his dark hair was flecked with gray. “Guilty. I had to be. The Weissmans needed papers filed for their residency and housing.” Frankie was tireless when helping people, as though his own well-being did not matter at all.
“It’s done now.” She tried not to think about what she had been doing while he had been working all night. “You should get some sleep.”
“Don’t lecture me, miss,” he chided, his Brooklyn accent seeming to deepen.
“You need rest. Go home,” she pressed.
“And tell them what?” He gestured with his head toward the line of people waiting in the hallway.
Grace looked back over her shoulder at the never-ending stream of need that filled the stairwell. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by all of it. Frankie’s practice consisted mainly of helping the European Jews who had come to live with relatives in the already teeming Lower East Side tenements; it sometimes felt more like social work than law. He took all of their cases, trying to find their relatives or their assets or get them citizenship papers, often for little more than a promise of payment. He had never missed her salary, but she sometimes wondered how he kept up the lights and rent.
And his own health. His white shirt was yellowed at the neck and he was covered as always in a fine layer of perspiration that made him seem to glow. A lifelong bachelor (“Who would have me?” he’d joked more than once) approaching fifty, he was a dilapidated sort, five-o’clock shadow even at ten in the morning and hair seldom combed. But there was a warmth to his brown eyes that made it impossible to scold and his quick smile always brought out her own.
“You need to at least eat breakfast,” she said. “I can run and get you a bagel.”
He waved away the suggestion. “Can you just find me the number for social services in Queens?” he asked. “I want to freshen up before our first meeting.”
“You’ll do our clients no good if you make yourself sick,” she scolded.
But Frankie just smiled as he started out the door for the washroom. He ruffled the hair of a young boy who sat on the landing as he passed. “Just a minute, okay, Sammy?” he said.
Grace picked up the ashtray from the corner of his desk and emptied it, then wiped the top of the table to clear away the dust left behind. She and Frankie had, in a sense, found each other. After she had taken the narrow room with a shared bath off Fifty-Fourth Street close to the West River, she’d quickly run through what little money she had and started to look for a job, armed with no more than a high school typing class. When she’d gone to answer an ad for a secretary for one of the accountants in the building, she had walked into his law office by mistake. Frankie said he’d been looking for someone (whether or not that was the case, she would never actually know) and she’d started the next day.
He didn’t really need her to work there, she quickly came to realize. The office was tiny, almost too small for the both of them. Though his papers were seemingly tossed in haphazard piles, he could put his fingers on a single page he needed within seconds. The work was hectic, but he could do it all by himself; in fact, he had been doing it all for years. No, he hadn’t needed her. But he sensed that she needed the job and so he had made a place. She loved him for it.
Frankie walked back into the office. “Are you ready?” he asked. She nodded, though she still wanted to go home for a bath and a nap, or at least find coffee. But Frankie was headed purposefully toward his desk with the young boy from the landing in tow. “Sammy, this is my friend Grace. Grace, I’d like to introduce Sam Altshuler.”
Grace looked behind the boy toward the door for the others. She had been expecting a whole family, or at least an adult, to accompany him. “Mother? Father?” she mouthed silently over the boy’s head so he could not see.
Frankie shook his head gravely. “Sit down, son,” he said gently to the boy, who could not be older than ten. “How can we help?”
Sammy looked up uncertainly through long eyelashes, not sure whether to trust them. Grace noticed then a small notebook in his right hand. “You like to write?” she asked.
“Draw,” Sammy replied with a heavy East European accent. He held up the pad to reveal a small sketch of the queue of people waiting on the stairs.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. The details and expressions on the people’s faces were stunningly good.
“How can we help you?” Frankie asked.
“I need sumvere to live.” He spoke the broken but functional English of a smart kid who had taught himself.
“Do you have any family here in New York?” Frankie asked.
“My cousin, he shares an apartment vith some fellas in the Bronx. But it costs two dollars a veek to stay vith them.”
Grace wondered where Sammy had been living until now. “What about your parents?” she couldn’t help asking.
“I vas separated from my father at Vesterbork.” Westerbork was a transit camp in Holland, Grace recalled from a family they had helped weeks earlier. “My mother hid me vith her for as long as she could in the vomen’s...” He paused, fumbling for a word. “In the barracks, but then she was taken, too. I never saw them again.”
Grace shuddered inwardly, trying to imagine a child trying to survive alone under such circumstances. “It’s possible that they survived,” she offered. Frankie’s eyes flashed above the boy’s head, a silent warning.
Sammy’s expression remained unchanged. “They vere taken east,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact. “People don’t come back from there.” What was it like, Grace wondered, to be a child with no hope?
Grace forced herself to focus on the practicalities of the situation. “You know, there are places in New York for children to live.”
“No boys’ home,” Sammy replied, sounding panicked. “No orphanage.”
“Grace, can I speak with you for a moment?” Frankie waved her over to the corner, away from Sammy. “That boy spent two years in Dachau.” Grace’s stomach twisted, imagining the awful things Sammy’s young eyes had seen. Frankie continued, “And then he was in a DP camp for six months before managing to get here by using the papers of another little boy who died. He’s not going to go to another institution where people can hurt him again.”