A Master Plan for Rescue by Janis Cooke Newman Page B

and hard, and attached with a shoulder harness that sprouted pull cords running the length of my father’s arm to the aluminum wrist. These cords made it possible for him to move the fingers of the hand, but my father preferred to bang its hard metal side against whatever was closest, the kitchen table, the stovetop, the soft spot where my neck and shoulder met.
    I was a terrible disappointment to my father. He couldn’t understand how the son of the great war hero Gustav Hauck could have difficulty with something so simple as breathing. The first time I had an asthma attack with my father in public, we were on Lexington Avenue. We lived in Yorkville then, where all good Germans lived in New York City. All good Germans who had fled the Fatherland during the years of economic hardship that came after having lost the Great War. It was a freezing cold day, and we were on our way back from grocery shopping, an activity my father considered beneath the dignity of a man. But this was shortly after my mother disappeared and he would have to endure this indignity for another couple of years, until I was old enough to do it for him.
    My father was walking fast, perhaps so no one would see him with his bags of food, and as I hurried to keep up with him, all the breathable air turned to concrete. I stopped and stood on the sidewalk with my mouth wide and gasping, trying to force solid air into my frozen lungs. After some steps, my father stopped as well. He turned his head and looked at me. Then, as if he didn’t know me, he continued walking.
    I watched his broad shoulders and the back of his blond head moving up Lexington Avenue. As he turned the corner at 92nd Street, the cold winter sun glinted off the fingers of the Cauet hand.
    The second my father vanished, I remembered the nebulizer in my coat pocket. The nebulizer I had to remember to take with me every day, now that my mother was no longer there to remember it for me. I felt for the rubber bulb with numb fingers, and when I found it, I stood on the sidewalk of Lexington Avenue pumping bittersweet chemicals down my throat.
    When I arrived home, the door to our apartment was locked. I knew my father would be on the roof with his pigeons, and I could have gone up there to ask for the key, but instead I sat on the floor with my back against the door to wait for him.
    I hated watching my father with his pigeons. Hated how he took them out of their coop and let them climb onto his aluminum hand, their clawed feet making obscene scratching sounds. I couldn’t watch him look into their red eyes, speak to them in a musical German I never heard, calling them
Liebchen
and
Schatzchen
. Couldn’t bear how he put his thick lips close to the birds’ heads before he sent them into the sky. It was disgusting to kiss pigeons. I hated especially how my father held out the Cauet hand to call the birds back, as if they were also war heroes, and how as each would land on the shiny aluminum hand, he’d stroke its head with his real one, the one made of flesh, the one he never put on me.
    The only real hand I remember being touched by belonged to my mother, and it was a thing of unbelievable softness. It was plump and cushioned like a pillow, and it often smelled of cinnamon and sugar and cloves. My father was always shouting at her, calling her something in German that I believed translated into
swine.
One day she was gone. Vanished like the middle of a magic trick. And when I asked my father where she was and when she was coming back, he told me we were never to speak of her again.
    It was inevitable that I would follow my father into the German American Bund. I was happy in the Bund. Not because I loved Hitler, who by this time—1936—was already in control of Germany, and not because I hated the Jews. At twenty, I had no opinion on either subject. No opinion that was not my father’s. I was happy because my father couldn’t dress up his pigeons in the shiny black boots and gray shirt of