Free Exile: a novel by Richard North Patterson Page A

“far away from that miserable village.”
    David could only guess how much their marriage meant to Harold. Of six children and their parents, all but he had perished in the Holocaust— Carole was their future, the only one of her kind. Turning to David, Harold clasped his shoulders and pressed his forehead to David’s. Deep feeling was hard for Harold to articulate—he was better at showing than expressing. But there was no missing the amplitude of Harold’s joy; in this man’s bear hug, David felt a warmth he had seldom shared with his own father.
    “Seven months,” Harold told them in mock chagrin. “Why so long?”
    David grinned, setting aside the events that had shadowed his morning. “It’ll take that long for Carole to make out the guest list.”
    “So you’re complaining? That means more gifts for you.” As they sat, Harold clasped his only child’s hands in his. “At last a wedding,” he added with a smile, “for your mother, at the Temple Emanu-El.”
    This was said lightly, but there was an undertone of rue and remembrance—Carole’s mother had died the previous year, still pursued by the indelible fears of sixty years before. “We had to negotiate the wedding contract,” Carole answered with a self-mocking smile that took in David. “All the ways in which David promises to be satisfactory. You know me, Dad—leave nothing to chance.”
    Harold spread his arms in an elaborate shrug that said that men andwomen must be patient with each other. “I hope,” he told Carole, “that you made a few promises of your own. Maybe one unplanned day each month.”
    Harold surely knew his daughter, David thought. Fondly, he regarded the man, two years ago a stranger, who had become so central to his life.
    At seventy-six, Harold Shorr had a high forehead, receding iron-gray hair, a full mouth and strong chin, and deep-set brown eyes beneath eye-brows that arched to punctuate his remarks. He was stocky but not fat, with shoulders that seemed hunched to bear weight, or resist pressure. On his face, watchful and expressive, often played a faint smile that, to David, betrayed a hint of melancholy.
    There was also a shyness that, David thought, bespoke a deeper reticence. Part was a lack of education mixed with an immigrant’s sense that his speech was halting and inelegant—even though Harold’s vocabulary was apt and his command of American vernacular keen and flavored with humor. Far deeper was his fear of calling too much attention to himself, imprinted a time long ago, when to be invisible might be to live another day. That Harold had raised so accomplished and confident a daughter was, to him, a constant source of pride and wonder.
    So the Shorrs’ smiles conveyed that they were part of each other’s journey in a way few families could grasp. Watching, David was aware of a bond that belonged to them alone. Its depth came from something within Harold that he had never expressed to David—in this particular, as in others, Carole had spoken for her father, fulfilling her imperative that David comprehend them both.
    Carole was four, she had told David, when she had first recited the numbers on his wrist.
    They were sitting at the breakfast table. Eight, she said with a child’s precocity and pride, three, five, seven, one. Encouragingly, Harold recited the numbers with her.
    Her mother had turned away.

    Though she did not know why, from early childhood Carole sensed that the numbers held a mystical power.
    Her parents never spoke of this. But she knew that the adults who gathered in their home often wore such numbers, and no one else did. Perhaps, Carole reasoned, only people not born in America had numbers. But those same people sometimes switched from English to Yiddish when Carole was present, speaking in somber voices about something they did not wish her to know. When she saw her classmates’ grandparents, she realized that there was no one old in the lives of those with numbers. Then a family