A Master Plan for Rescue

Named a Best Book of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle

From the bestselling author of Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln, a magical novel about the surprising acts we are capable of in the name of love.

Set in 1942 New York and Berlin, A Master Plan for Rescue is an enchanting novel about the life-giving powers of storytelling, and the heroism that can be inspired by love. In essence, it is two love stories. It is the story of a child who worships his parents, then loses his father to an accident and his mother to her resulting grief. And it is the story of a young man who stumbles into the romance of his life, then watches her decline, forever changing the arc of his future. Each is propelled by the belief that if he acts heroically enough, it will restore some part of what—or whom—he has lost.

But when they meet, this boy and this man, their combined grief and magical thinking will allow them to dream the impossible. Sharing stories of the people they have lost, they are inspired to join forces and act in their memory. To do something so memorable that it might actually bring their loved ones back—even if only in spirit.

A Master Plan for Rescue is a beautiful tale, propelled by history and imagination, that suggests people’s impact upon the world doesn’t necessarily end with their lives, and that, to some degree, we are the sum of the stories we tell. |

“Unforgettable… A Master Plan for Rescue balances beautifully on the thin line between wishful thinking and reason, between the imagination and the intellect. In this elaborate tale of appearances and disappearances, Newman employs not only the language of photography but also code-o-graphs, literal and metaphoric…The cumulative effect is wondrous. Like magic.” –The San Francisco Chronicle
 
“[A] moving adventure.” –Woman’s Day

“A magical novel with the power and resonance of a fable. A Master Plan for Rescue is about seeing and being seen, the importance of bearing witness, the lengths we will go for love, and the enduring capacity for hope.” —Christina Baker Kline, CBK, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Orphan Train 

“Newman makes vivid the daily risks and courageous choices individuals face in wartime.” -BBC.com
 
“This is a touching story about war and grief…Newman's novel stands out because of her superb writing. This one will linger.” –BookRiot
 
“The skillful characterization and superbly-paced plotting would be enough on their own to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in World War II-era literature. But Newman’s descriptive and insightful writing punctuates the pleasure with “aha” moments of recognition and delight.” -Historical Novel Society

 “[A Master Plan For Rescue is] told with insight and an almost-magical belief in possibilities.” —Booklist

"A fantastic novel that's impossible to put down. Janis Cooke Newman's writing is epic and cinematic, compassionate and moving— she's a wonderful writer who completely cracks open our preconceived notions of love. I can't wait to read whatever she writes next." —Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans

“A delicate, surprising novel about the ties that bind family and those we love over the ravages of time. This is a World War II novel, but unlike any I’d read before. Janis Cooke Newman is just so wonderful at bringing details of the past to life. She is one of the best historical novelists we have today. I loved this book.” —Katie Crouch, author of Girls in Trucks and Abroad
 
“Captivating. Newman has a rare ability to completely inhabit totally disparate characters. In this World War II era story, two strangers come together and attempt the impossible, and Newman breathes pulsing life into what we thought was history.” —Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories

| Janis Cooke Newman is the author of the novel Mary: Mrs. A. Lincoln, and the memoir, The Russian Word for Snow. She is the founder of the Lit Camp writers conference. |

One

This is the moment I spend the rest of my life trying to return to:

The three of us sitting around the table my father and I have painted red to match The Flash’s cape. A shade, I now know, that doesn’t belong in a kitchen, but it was my father who suggested bringing the comic book to the paint store on Dyckman Street.

It’s early December, and the clanging of the radiator mixes with the violins that spill from the speakers of the Silvertone radio. I know the Silvertone is on, because it is always on. My grandfather, a man once known as the Gentleman Bootlegger, a man who is dead by this time, claimed that music during meals is what separates man from beast, and so my mother—his daughter—puts on music. But we never listen to it. Instead, we sit above bowls that smell of gravy and spices and talk over each other, sometimes banging our silverware on the red table for attention. The three of us—my father, mother, and me—in our small apartment at the northern tip of Manhattan.

In this moment, though, there is only the clanging of the radiator and the violins. We have stopped talking so my father and I can watch my mother add up numbers inside her head.

Because that is what she can do. Her ability.

Though to be more accurate, it’s my father who is watching her. I am watching him. And I’m realizing, for the first time—and probably because I am so close to turning twelve—that it isn’t the feat of her adding up those numbers he enjoys so much. It’s the way she’s sliding the tip of a No. 2 pencil into and out of the gap between her front teeth.

And now that I’ve noticed this, I cannot remember a single time my father has taken that pencil back and checked her answer. I can only remember him doing exactly what he’s doing now. Gazing at her mouth, her eyes—the exact shade of green the Hudson River gets on a clear day—her long swoops of black hair.

In the pocket of the black Mass pants I have not yet had time to change out of is something rare I am waiting to show my father. This morning, during Father Barry’s sermon, I found the stub of a Mass candle caught under my kneeler, and I’ve spent the past hour melting its wax into the hollow of a perfectly round beer bottle cap, creating an object I believe will make me unbeatable at the game of skully.

I’m, at best, a mediocre skully player. However, with this new skully cap—this Holy Skully Cap—it will be as if God Himself is directing my thumb every time I flick my cap across the chalked squares of the board. As if His Mighty Force is propelling my cap into that of another player, one filled merely with the wax of a melted crayon.

As I wait, I imagine myself dropping the Holy Skully Cap into my father’s hand, telling him the story of finding the candle, melting the wax. I know that when I’ve finished this story, my father will lift his eyes—brown like mine—and run them over me, reading me. I know, too, that he will understand all the powers I believe the Holy Skully Cap to possess without me having to say them aloud.

Because that is what he can do. His ability.

I do not yet have an ability. I am only an almost-twelve-year-old boy, small for my age, black-haired like my mother, wanting no more than for the life I have to keep going as it is.

All these things are held in that moment. Everything I am about to lose. My mother adding up numbers inside her head. My father watching as she slides the tip of a No. 2 pencil into and out of the gap between her teeth. Me with something rare I am waiting to show my father.

It has been a cold day, the temperature barely making it into the twenties. But the chill has thinned the air and the sky is clear. The last rays of sunlight slant through the front windows of our apartment, and though it is only mid-afternoon, there is a sense of the day ending. That nostalgic Sunday afternoon feeling of wishing to remain exactly where you are.

Those things, too, are held in that moment, the moment before the violins turn into words. Turn into

Surprise attack and Japanese bombs and Pearl Harbor.

It is my father’s hand I’m looking at when my eyes go bad.

My father’s hands are not like anyone else’s. The skin in the creases has been bleached white by the chemicals he uses to develop his photographs. My father shoots portraits, and I think of these white marks as the ghosts of every picture he has ever taken.

It’s these white marks that disappear first, blurring into nothingness, like ghosts vanishing. Then the hand itself. The edges melting away, dissolving into a table painted a red that doesn’t belong in a kitchen.

My eyes dart around the room, but everything has turned into a mass of color, as if the outline of each object—the icebox, the stove, the window over the sink—has been erased, as if the boundaries that keep the color of one thing from invading another no longer exist. And what I think—what I can only think—is that it is the Japanese. That they, with their bombs, have knocked the entire world out of focus.

I search for my father, stare into the space where a second ago, he was sitting. But there’s nothing there except the brownish-red smudge of the wallpaper, and it feels like those bombs have sucked all the air out of the room along with the outlines of things, because I cannot breathe, can only gasp.

I hurl my arm into the place where my father had been, stunned that the Japanese could have taken him from me, amazed at their evil magic. My hand collides with something, the bones of his chest, the worn fabric of his shirt. My father shifts in his chair, drops his hand over mine, and I realize that his reddish hair, the Sunday stubble on his face, his brown shirt have all merged with the wallpaper behind him, turning him invisible. I press the flat of my hand against his chest until I can feel his heart beating.

And that’s better, but only a little. Because now Aunt May—my mother’s sister—and Uncle Glenn are in our kitchen, which I know only by the sound of their voices. The two of them, up from their apartment one floor below. And I have the sense from the confident movement of their blurs—Uncle Glenn’s pudgy and beer-colored, Aunt May’s still in the navy blue suit she wore to Mass—that they do not see our kitchen as an unnavigable smudge of color. And I’m figuring out, by the way Aunt May is clattering what sounds like rosary beads on the table, and saying we should all go straight back to Good Shepherd and repeat a thousand Hail Marys for peace, saying to my father, “Yes, even you, Denis,” my father having long declared that Ireland more than cured him of Catholicism; and by the way Uncle Glenn keeps repeating that first thing tomorrow morning he’s going to Whitehall Street and joining up; and by how the black-haired blur of my mother is heading for the living room, shouting back that everybody needs to pipe down, because she can’t hear the radio, that it is only me who is seeing the world this way.

And that is worse. Much worse.

I take my hand off my father’s chest and press both palms into my eyes until I see sparks of light, and then I press harder, as if that light is a mechanism for fixing what has gone wrong. But when I open my eyes, nothing has changed. Or, I suppose, everything has.

I have to say something, I’m thinking. Tell somebody. But I can’t pull enough air into my lungs for speech. And even if I could, everybody is talking. About the Japanese. And their bombs.

Except my father, who hasn’t moved, hasn’t spoken. Who, I believe, has been running his eyes over me, reading me.

“Jack,” he says. “How many fingers?”

But I cannot tell he has raised his hand.

Two

The following day, my father took me to see Dr. Shaperstein, the optometrist on Broadway and 207th Street.

Dr. Shaperstein’s office was nothing more than a brown blur, except for a model of an eyeball the size of a grapefruit that appeared to be floating in space and Dr. Shaperstein’s white coat, which hovered over me.

“Tell me what you can read on the chart,” Dr. Shaperstein said.

I squinted into the brownness.

Dr. Shaperstein dropped his hands on my shoulders and pushed me forward a foot.

“Better?”

I shook my head.

His hands fell onto my shoulders once more, and he pushed me again. Then he kept pushing me, asking every foot or so what I could see. Not until I was near enough to touch the chart, press my palms flat against it, did I finally say, “E. I can see E, the big letter at the top.”

Dr. Shaperstein turned to my father. “Your son has the most remarkable case of myopia I have ever encountered.”

He did not say remarkable as if I had developed a special skill like flying. He said it as if I might have wandered over from the Coney Island sideshow.

My father told him my eyes had been fine only a couple of days before, and Dr. Shaperstein said it wasn’t uncommon for boys on the cusp of puberty to experience a sudden deterioration of vision. Then he moved me back and forth in front of the chart to see exactly what I could and couldn’t read, and repeated remarkable a few more times, until my father said, in his voice that still contained enough Irish to push around the American, “How about you knock it off and see about making him some glasses.”

After that, there was the noise of wooden drawers opening and shutting, and finally, Dr. Shaperstein said, “You’re in luck. The luck of the Irish.”

“I believe history has shown,” my father said, “that the Irish have never been particularly lucky.”

•   •   •

Dr. Shaperstein told us the glasses wouldn’t be ready for a week. Because I couldn’t go out without someone to guide me, I spent that week at home. Mostly, I listened to the radio, sitting on the green and brown checkerboard linoleum in front of our big cherrywood Silvertone, spinning the dial, searching for something familiar, some program that hadn’t been preempted by war news. But like my eyes, everything that poured out of the Silvertone’s speakers seemed to have been altered by those Japanese bombs.

I tried to put my faith in Dr. Shaperstein and whatever he’d found in those wooden drawers. Told myself that the glasses he was making would restore the world to order, reinstate the boundaries between objects, send the colors back within their borders.

I decided, too, that the Holy Skully Cap was a kind of relic, as potent as Holy Water, or the Communion Host after Father Barry had blessed it. During the day, I kept it in my pocket, running my fingers over its scalloped edges. Each evening, I placed it—always with two hands—on my night table next to my luminous-face alarm clock. Then I prayed to it—this beer bottle cap filled with melted wax—asking it to grant my request for the gift of sight.

I did not want to believe that something fundamental might have shifted. That for me, much like for the rest of the world, nothing would be the same.

•   •   •

When we returned to Dr. Shaperstein’s office, he again placed me in front of the eye chart, this time settling the glasses on my nose. The weight of them was like coming down with a head cold.

“Well?” he asked.

Without hesitation, I read the rows of letters, my eyes stopping smartly against each sharp, black line.

Then I turned to my father, sitting on the other side of the room, wanting to see his expression. But his features—his eyes, his slightly freckled skin, his mouth—had gone soft-edged and smeared, as if somebody had rubbed an eraser over them.

Starting to feel breathless again, I ran my eyes around Dr. Shaperstein’s office. Some of the things were clear. The floating eyeball, three feet away, the fountain pen next to it. But when I looked across the room at my father, he remained blurred.

I pushed the glasses closer to my eyes, slid them down my nose. But my father stayed out of focus, and the room was starting to feel airless.

“Something’s wrong,” I gasped.

“With myopia this bad, there’s a trade-off,” Dr. Shaperstein said. “Correct for distance, and you lose what’s close up. Correct for what’s close up, and you lose the distance.”

I walked across Dr. Shaperstein’s office, keeping my eyes on my father’s face, bringing his features back into sharpness, turning them recognizable. But when I got too close, close enough to touch him, they began to drift out of focus again.

“What if I want to see something up close?”

Dr. Shaperstein lifted the glasses from my face and rested them on the top of my head.

“Now I can’t see anything.”

“Get closer,” he said.

I stepped closer to my father, close enough to smell the chemicals he used to develop his photographs—a smell that was both bitter and sweet, a smell that made me think of science. His face moved back into focus.

“What exactly did you correct him for?” my father said.

“The best I could,” Dr. Shaperstein told him. “Something in the middle.”

He pushed the glasses back in front of my eyes and handed me a mirror. I stretched out my arm to put myself into better focus.

The glasses he’d made for me had black frames and lenses as thick as the bottom of a Nehi soda bottle. They looked like the X-Ray Specs advertised in the back of comic books. The ones that claimed they would let you see through walls and ladies’ dresses. They took over my whole face.

I pushed the mirror back at Dr. Shaperstein.

“Any chance he’ll grow out of this?” my father said.

“Anything’s possible,” Dr. Shaperstein told him. “But probably not that.”

As my father and I walked back down Broadway, the people coming toward us—men in overcoats, women wearing hats—snapped into and out of focus without warning, as if they possessed the power to control how much of themselves they would allow the world to see.

I kept shutting my eyes, opening them again, willing everyone to stay still, stay in the three-foot distance where I could focus. But they kept moving, going from blurred to clear to blurred again.

“I’m thinking you’ll get used to that,” my father said.

“What about how they’re staring?”

“That might take some time.”

•   •   •

When we arrived home, my mother lifted the glasses off my face and held them in front of her own eyes.

It’s possible what happened next was the power of the lenses, possible their strength was more than she’d been expecting. But the moment my mother looked through them, her head startled back, as if those thick lenses had shown her something she didn’t want to see.

She took the glasses away from her face, set them back onto my nose.

“Your eyes won’t stay bad,” she told me.

“I suggested that same possibility to the doctor,” my father said.

“And?”

My father repeated what Dr. Shaperstein had told us.

“What does he know?” My mother shrugged.

And what did he know—this doctor who could only correct me for something in the middle—against a woman who had no belief in her own bad luck. A woman who had witnessed her father—that man known as the Gentleman Bootlegger—shot point-blank on three separate occasions. And on three separate occasions, had seen him rise unharmed.

It was a story my mother repeated often. I suspect because it was about signs—in which my mother placed a good deal of faith—and also because I think she liked talking about the time she and her father lived in the warehouse full of illegal alcohol on Tenth Avenue. When it had been only the two of them, Aunt May having gone off to the convent school in Poughkeepsie, believing she possessed a vocation.

The first shooting had occurred at mid-morning, not a time a man expects to be shot. My grandfather had just finished his second cup of coffee and was about to head out the back door to the privy, when Red Nolan, a small-time nightclub owner, burst through the front door and shot him in the chest. My grandfather staggered back, exclaimed, “You should not have done that, sir,” then took out his gun and shot the stunned nightclub owner in the center of his forehead. Not until he and my mother, who was fourteen at the time, dragged Red’s lifeless body to the back of a saloon on West 37th Street did my grandfather show her the dented timepiece in his breast pocket.

The second shooting occurred in the early evening, while my mother and her father were setting out poison pellets for the rats that liked to nest in the straw that came packed around my grandfather’s Canadian whiskey. This time the would-be murderer was called Johnny Nack, though his reason for wanting to kill my grandfather was much the same as Red Nolan’s—a short shipment. On this occasion, my grandfather’s life was saved by his great fondness for the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Indeed, he read one of Mr. Yeats’s poems at Johnny Nack’s funeral, reciting from a volume that had a bullet hole in its cover.

The third shooting took place at night. My mother and her father were on their way home from the Saturday pushcart market under the Ninth Avenue El. My mother was carrying a bag of peaches, and my grandfather was carrying nothing because he believed that gentlemen did not walk in public with groceries in their hands. The two of them turned the corner at West 39th Street and Billy Cremore, another speakeasy owner who’d been shorted, stepped out of the dark and fired his gun. Billy Cremore aimed for my grandfather’s head, but it was dark and Billy Cremore wasn’t much of a marksman. The police never did figure out why Billy’s killer left a bruised peach perched on his chest.

“These shootings were a sign,” is how she would finish this story. “God had taken my mother and wanted to make the point that He was done. Nothing bad would ever happen to anyone I loved.”

“God sent Red Nolan, Johnny Nack, and Billy Cremore to shoot at your father to make a point?” my father would tease her.

But she’d only smile, showing him that gap between her teeth, and he’d have no further argument.

As for me, I would much rather believe my mother than Dr. Shaperstein. And that night, after I took off the glasses, I walked around my room, squinting at the objects there—the Holy Skully Cap on the night table, a model airplane on a shelf, the cowboys and Indians riding across my bedspread—attempting to pull the color of each thing back within its boundaries, trying to hurry along what my mother believed would happen. And it did seem after a while that the edges of things were growing more sharp.

But deep in the night, I woke to the sound of my glasses clinking against the lamp, and caught the scent of my mother—her unlikely smell of new cut grass. I sensed her standing beside my bed, looking at me, then I heard her bare feet crackle along the linoleum to the kitchen. After a moment there was the splashing of water, and I realized she was washing my glasses.

I lay there thinking about all the reasons my mother might have gotten up in the middle of the night to wash my glasses. Or perhaps I was thinking about all the reasons that weren’t what I already suspected, what I might have already figured out, that washing the glasses was a ritual—practiced alone and in the dark—for luck. That my mother—who put so much faith in signs—had made a connection between clearing the lenses and clearing my vision.

I can’t say if it had been those Japanese bombs, or what she’d seen through the thick lenses of my glasses, but whatever it was, I feared that the belief my mother had in our own good luck had been knocked out of focus as surely as my sight.

My mother’s footsteps moved back along the linoleum toward my room. I tried to slow my breath, make it sound as if I was still asleep. But I could feel it moving fast and shallow in my chest, and I could only hope my mother would think I was in the middle of a nightmare. And somehow, as she set the glasses back on my night table, she didn’t notice my breath, so I can only assume she was in the middle of her own nightmare.

•   •   •

The moment I stepped through the chain-link fence that surrounded P.S. 52 wearing the glasses, people who had been throwing balls stopped and held them motionless in the air, people who had been shouting ceased and stood openmouthed in the cold. I focused on my feet as I moved across the macadam, heading for the overheated building. No one will notice me inside, I was thinking. It will be like I’m invisible.

I slid into my seat and kept my head down, staring at the pencil-carved initials on the top of my desk, initials that were now soft-edged and blurry from the glasses. As the rest of the class rumbled in, bringing with them the smell of wool coats and bologna sandwiches, I felt everybody’s eyes on me, crawling over my face, over the glasses—exactly like the X-Ray Specs in the back of comic books—making me feel exposed, like the Visible Man. The man on the poster Miss Steinhardt unrolled when we studied biology, a man with his skin peeled back and all his colorful organs exposed—blue lungs, orange kidneys, purple spleen.

Even Miss Steinhardt was not immune to the power of the glasses. They revolved her from the chalkboard as if the thick lenses produced gravity, forcing a startled, “Well . . . Jack . . . glasses,” from between her vermillion lips.

It was quiet for a moment, and then Miss Steinhardt asked me if I could see the board from where I was sitting.

“Yes,” I told her, without lifting my head.

“Can you tell me what I’ve just written on it?”

I looked up and squinted. Miss Steinhardt’s chalk marks resembled nothing except the snow clouds building up outside the window.

“The date?”

Miss Steinhardt used her piece of chalk to point to the front row.

“Why don’t you bring your desk up here?” she said

Only the defective sat in the front row. Declan Moriarity, who could not bend his left leg all the way because of the polio brace buckled to it. Francis D’Amato, who had a lazy eye and was forced to wear a flesh-colored eye patch over the good one. And Rose LoPinto, who despite the complicated hearing aid she wore, still couldn’t hear well enough to sit any farther back.

The legs of my desk made a horrible squealing sound as I pushed it up the aisle. Inside my head, I couldn’t stop seeing the picture of Jesus from my Child’s First Catechism, the one of him carrying his own cross up the dust-covered rise of Golgotha.

Miss Steinhardt pointed to an empty place next to Rose LoPinto. With more squealing, I pushed my desk into it.

“Rose,” she said, “you can read for Jack anything he can’t see. And Jack,” she looked at me, “you can repeat for Rose anything she can’t hear.”

Then she turned back to the board.

This close, I could see what it was Miss Steinhardt had asked me to read.

Manifest Destiny.

I could also see Rose’s hearing aid, which was called a RadioEar. It had three parts: a silver, lozenge-shaped receiver she wore pressed against the bone behind her ear on a metal headband; a microphone the size and shape of a box of matches, which she pinned to her collar; and a battery case the size of a pack of cigarettes she kept in a pocket. All of Rose’s clothes, I guessed, had to have pockets.

The first thing I had to repeat for Rose was the Annexation of Oregon. I leaned over to whisper it into the lozenge-shaped receiver behind her ear, but Rose shook her head and pointed to the microphone box pinned at her collar.

I bent down and brought my mouth close to Rose’s throat. The skin there was smooth and olive-colored, and smelled impossibly like chocolate and coconut. Like a candy bar.

It was a smell that stopped the Annexation of Oregon in my mouth.

“Are you talking?” Rose said, reaching into her pocket and shaking the battery case.

But I couldn’t answer, too distracted by what felt like a cold stream that had started running just beneath the surface of my skin.

All that morning, I whispered important historical facts about the Monroe Doctrine and Mexican Cession into the microphone box pinned at the base of Rose’s smooth, olive-colored throat. In return, she read various significant years off the chalkboard into my ear. And for the first time in more than a week, I didn’t think about my eyes going bad.

Unless you count this. Listening to Rose, I noticed that none of her words had sharp edges. Her consonants were blurry, and her vowels out of focus. It was as if the way she spoke was the vocal equivalent of how I saw.

And also this. There was one piece of her black hair that kept breaking free of the metal headband, trying to curl itself around the silver lozenge of the RadioEar receiver. A piece of black hair I couldn’t pull my eyes from.

That piece of black hair made me wish Dr. Shaperstein had corrected me better for things that were close up.

•   •   •

When the bell rang for lunch, I dashed out to the smooth stretch of playground where the skully boards were chalked. All morning, the Holy Skully Cap had sat in my pocket giving off emanations, assuring me I didn’t belong in the front row with Declan Moriarity, whose polio brace prevented him from getting down on the ground low enough to flick a skully cap. Or Francis D’Amato, whose eye patch so interfered with his depth perception, his caps went veering off in bizarre directions.

Bobby Devine and a pack of boys were already standing around the chalked squares, the steam from their breath hanging in the frigid air. All of the girls—and possibly some of the boys—were in love with Bobby Devine, with his black hair and his blue eyes, and his breath that always smelled of Juicy Fruit, even when he wasn’t chewing any.

They were deciding the rules—or more accurately, Bobby Devine was deciding the rules, and everyone else was waiting. A pack of boys, flipping their skully caps over in their palms, eager to start playing, poised for Bobby Devine to give the word.

I joined them, the Holy Skully Cap already in my hand, the steam from my breath mingling with theirs before settling to the ground.

“Sorry, Quinlan.” Bobby Devine never called you by anything except your last name. “Too