The clock ticks as all cheap windup clocks must in the mid-sixties. Its sound incessant, louder than the sirens outside; louder than the Harvard students searching for a townie; louder than Mister Johnson just back from his night job, lumbering up the stairs. Louder than the laughter from 3A, right over her room, where a grad student rolls around with the waitress he’s picked up.

Hannah lies in her bed. Since her mother died three years ago, her father sleeps next to the clock in the other room. They are separated by an ancient, freestanding fireplace left over from when this building was a large, gracious house. When these two rooms formed a double parlor. Before someone turned the entire building into a rooming house. Before her parents survived the Shoah and somehow made their way out of the refugee camps and through the convoluted immigration process. They picked Boston as home, where even the New England winters couldn’t approximate Poland’s cold and ice. Here, they would raise their only child, certainly grateful for that one, when only a few years ago, neither had hoped to live at all. 

And didn’t the city have the right history? A haven for the Puritans who fled persecution. A place for two disillusioned and grieving Jews. In Boston they bought the boarding house as a refuge, a way to make money, and now as the place where Hannah would grow up motherless. The Nazis couldn’t kill her parents, but rheumatic fever had demanded payment at last.

She doesn’t need the scream of the alarm to wake her. Her father slams his fist on the clock and finally disappears downstairs to the kitchen. They have taken the rooms that no one would have. The two on the first floor. A kitchen and bath in the basement. So dingy that even Hannah is afraid there, no matter how long she’s lived in this house. Is it haunted, she wonders, both wanting and fearing the answer.

She makes her way to the kitchen, clutching her bathrobe around her. Her father has cautioned her not to let the tenants see her like this. She must be properly dressed before them. Even at sixteen, she is too innocent to wonder why, and her father doesn’t explain. All she knows is that she has an old-country body, her mother’s full breasts and hips that have nothing to do with Twiggy and girls screaming for the Beatles. She sounds like an American but looks like a peasant. Her father has told her so.

In minutes she has brewed his strong coffee. Then she makes oatmeal, like every day, so she won’t be hungry at the demanding school where she studies Latin and German, so close to the Yiddish she already speaks. And English, her favorite because she loves books. She’s one of the few Jewish students at the private girls’ school. She imagines the Board of Directors loving the Holocaust story of her life. Relishing the details: the rooming house, her father’s luncheonette, where he, once a mathematician, reproduces his mother’s brisket from the old country. And what did they think of her father’s fighting with the partisans, the little Jewish guy with his Molotov cocktails and a handgun left over from the first war? They must have adored the drama of the mother’s illness. Hannah cast as a tragic heroine in the making. The school offered a full scholarship.

 

It is in English class that she is baptized. Somehow the other girls, with names like Cindy and Debbie, Carole and Kate, don’t understand why she is Hannah. It’s just not modern enough, not enough of their world.

“No one has that name anymore,” they insist. “It’s just too old-fashioned, like Chastity.”

“Or Mercy,” one girl adds. “Or Prudence, like the Puritans.”

“Or Ernestine and Augusta, like the Victorians,” another offers.

Finally, Jane Austen provides the answer. “We’ll call you Harriet,” one girl decides. “Like Harriet Smith—the poor girl Austen’s Emma takes on.”

The others giggle at this renaming. No matter that Harriet is just as old-fashioned as the names they hate. But there is special meaning, isn’t there? The lowly girl with a mysterious background who needs the wealthy Emma’s charity.

Her father is furious. His eyes dark, his voice cracks with anger. “Your mother gave you that name. They’re trying to erase you like the Nazis. They hate that you’re different—not Yankee like them.”

“They don’t understand,” she tries. “They have no idea what was in Europe.”

“Then that damned school better teach recent history and not just the stories of dead authors. I’d put you in public school, but your mother had her heart set…her heart.” His thoughts wander.

His anger surprises her but she knows he is right. She retreats to the kitchen where she can hide before the sink of dirty dishes. At the table behind her, her father sits, smoking his cigarettes and tapping yellow-stained fingers on the table. 

“Hannah was your grandmother’s name,” he says. “You have a right to your own name. A right to hold the dead close.” 

For a moment she wonders if he blames her for not stopping the girls. But he starts to chop onions for the next day. The kitchen forever smelling like smoke and onions.  

Confusion and sadness also hover there, and now, she thinks, their kitchen holds her father’s anger as well.  

 

She seeks out the guidance counselor, who blushes daily above her cashmere twin sets. Whenever an unruly thought crosses her mind, she changes color—skin mottled red and pink, her neck the map of an unknown country.

 She studies Hannah’s record with dedicated interest. “All A’s and the teachers write glowingly of you. And then your background. It doesn’t matter what our girls call you, does it?” 

“I feel…” she starts. “That my real name is a kind of protection. Like my mother…”

“Yes, so sorry about your mother.”

Hannah wants to say that without her name she feels as though a skin is pulling off. That she is nothing to these girls but a joke. A lumping together of all the poor and motherless girls—fictional or real. That she’s only a pitiful stranger with a father who talks funny. They understand so little. After the funeral they even left flowers in the hallway when everyone should know that Jews prefer rocks to fragile flowers that follow the dead too quickly. Lingering at the bottom of trash cans within days. 

“It was my grandmother’s name,” Hannah tries. “And my father is terribly angry. I haven’t seen him so angry—not even when my mother died. Please, could you please ask them to give me back my name?”

“I’ll tell them to call you Hannah,” the counselor says, stroking her neck, “but sometimes they’ll continue. Especially if they think you’re upset. You understand, don’t you?”

What Hannah understands is that no one here will ever know her. And, for the first time she thinks, neither will her father.

 

So when the other graduate student upstairs asks her to go to a soda fountain, she goes. He’s the shy one, glasses sliding down his nose and unruly hair hanging over them. Every week for a month he buys her a chocolate soda with chocolate ice cream. He says that he wants to be a writer but can’t tell his parents. Hannah realizes then that everyone is afraid.

It’s dusk one evening and her father will be home soon. When the student tries to kiss her, she jumps back.

“I want to be your first,” he says in a soft voice as if he’s about to conquer some secret territory. His lips press to hers and his tongue is there. She is intrigued and disgusted at the same time. She can feel the hardness of his thing, she can’t name it, rubbing against her. And he’s breathing heavily in her ear. A wind tunnel, disorienting, dizzying. A dislocation.

“No,” she insists. “My father. Home soon.” She pushes him back and thinks of Hester Prynne and the scarlet letter she was forced to wear for what must have been passion like this. She knows how girls get into trouble. Her mother said once. 

He leaves her alone in the hallway. She is in bed at seven, complaining that she is sick, while her head can’t count all she’s feeling. She wanted the student to kiss her, didn’t she? Didn’t run when he pulled her to him. Didn’t turn her head so he hit her cheek instead, with saliva and that slimy tongue. She must be to blame.

She thinks her mother knows the terrible thing she has done. But the photo by her bed remains the same: her mother forever queenly in black and white. Light brown hair rolled up at the sides, that ubiquitous red lipstick that reads almost black. Hannah remembers her mother’s lips always poised to kiss her cheeks, her neck, her hands. Now Hannah thinks about those other kisses too. And is ashamed.

 

Some days when she doesn’t know what to do, when she wants to run away, she boards the local bus. She knows she can ride the whole line before the driver will ask for another fifty cents. She’ll ride for hours before she must go home. She passes the Boston landmarks, crosses train tracks out of town, rides along fields of trash. People climb the steps and stay for a while. She’s made a curtain of her hair that hides her.

Someone finally asks, “What’s your name?” When she answers, the woman thumbs a Bible in her lap. “Good name, you know.”

Hannah wants to crawl into the woman’s arms and tell her everything: the dead mother, the unknowing father, the wet kiss. The stupid girls and her own isolation and loss. But the woman gets off in two stops to disappear into a row of small brick houses. The moment is lost.

She must have slept for it is darker now. 

The driver is getting ready to go off shift. A new one has climbed on. Hannah is alone on the bus and they are talking about her. The first one pointing. Holding up three fingers. Three times she’s put fifty cents in the till.

The first driver walks to the back. “Little girl,” he says, “you’re too young for this bus. You gotta go home. Can’t watch out for you ’cause the passengers get rowdy ’bout now.”

When she doesn’t answer, his voice gets softer. “You got somewhere to go, right? You don’t look like one of them homeless hippie girls.” Like he can read her, he asks, “Things all right at home? No one touchin’ you or hurtin’ on you?”

“Not that,” she tries. “My mother.”

“Your mother is the bad one, then?”

The thought shocks her silence. “No,” she cries. “She died.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” the driver says. “C’mon. I’m gonna drive you home.”

In the car she tries to explain what has happened. He laughs when she describes the kiss. “You tell that boy you’re too young for him,” he insists.

When they pull up to the rooming house, the driver whistles. There are police cars in front and all the outside lights are on. Her father is on the sidewalk. Alternatively yelling and crying to the police.

“You must find my daughter,” she can hear. “People don’t just disappear here.” 

The driver takes her hand. “Brought her back,” he tells everyone. “She rides my bus all day. From one end of town to another. Hasn’t eaten nothin’ all day.”

Her father is himself again. Impossible to thank anyone for good fortune. As if he can’t believe she’s back when all the while he’s been expecting a black hole where she used to live. Always the worst fate—never a happy thought or a wish. One day like the other. Even here in this new land.

“Don’t run off, Hannah,” her father calls when she turns down the stairs. The dark welcomes her this time. The furnace room, odors from the ancient coal once kept there, the heater, a bulky, clanging thing, provides a hiding place. Furthest from the door, she squeezes beside it, careful not to touch the hot metal. There is space for one girl. 

Her father is in the room. He leaves the light off and starts to talk. “I don’t know much. Not how to raise a girl by myself. Not in a place where the rules change with the music on the radio. Your mother understood everything. Nothing was a mystery to her, like she was always part of another world. Shouldn’t need to die to get her kind of knowledge. Hannah.”

She is silent, breathing in old coal dust and recent oil that now fires this heater. 

He is pacing in front of the door now. “You’ll have to help me, Hanneleh. Teach me how to talk to you.”

 His voice stops mid-throat as though a mass has blocked it there. The way hers did when she tried to say goodbye to her mother. 

Then, “Can you forgive me?” 

She weighs the question. They are the only two left. 

He has gone into the kitchen, and she follows him. Washes her hands. Takes another knife, skinning the onion easily, her small pieces joining her father’s pile. To feed customers who are grateful for a plate of savory meat and potatoes.

The luncheonette, the rooming house, her dreams. Stories of the war and her father’s bravery. Of her mother in hiding. Of her mother’s joy when Hannah was new. Stories of their time together in Boston when they were three. The past supporting the future.  

In this moment Hannah sees her father like Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, so damaged by his own life. Perhaps the truth is in the books she loves, Hannah thinks. Perhaps she will understand if she waits long enough.

 

Phyllis Carol Agins has, for many years, divided her time between Philadelphia and Nice, France. Two novels, a children’s book, and an architectural study were published during her Philly years. Recently, more than 50 short stories have appeared in various literary magazines, including: Nova Literary-Arts Magazine, Lilith, and The Madison Review. Please visit: phylliscarolagins.com