LILLY DID NOT LIKE boats and the way they troubled her stomach and pummeled her sense of balance. During the crossing from Europe, she swore she could feel the chug of the engines and the slap and surge of every wave as the ship bobbed on the uncertain waters of the Atlantic. So why, then, was she queuing with crowds of tourists—mothers and fathers sweating in the noontime heat, children crying as ice cream cones melted down their fat pink fists—to board a ferry for the Statue of Liberty? The ferry looked like a child’s toy among the ocean liners. Even at the dock, it sputtered and belched black smoke into water choked with the refuse of the earlier tourist hordes. As her foot touched the deck, the ferry lurched and she placed a protective hand over the body of her camera. Before she could get her bearings, the others jostled past her for space along the rail and she again asked herself what could have compelled her to make this journey. But she knew: it was Josef’s fault.
Lilly and Josef had made a twenty-item list before she left Prague: Things for Lilly to Do in New York. Josef knew that she would devote all of her time to her work. Yes, she would explore the city block by block, but she would seek out its forgotten corners, and she would do it with a camera around her neck, on the hunt for the next shot. Her late nights would not be spent at the city’s hottest nightclubs; she would not drink gin and dance to jazz among tuxedoed gangsters. No, she would spend her nights in her darkroom, getting drunk on the fumes rising from the developing tray. Josef had spelled out this vision of her time in New York and Lilly couldn’t disagree. To save her from herself, he had started the New York List with items culled from Busby Berkeley movies and a brochure printed by the Foundation. WELCOME TO NEW YORK! was emblazoned in bright red letters across the first page. The inside was a slick, linear map of the city, all bright colors and sharp angles—a city of candy and chrome. Numbered dots signaled the can’t-miss attractions, each briefly and ecstatically described.
The Museum of Modern Art: The world’s newest great museum!
Chinatown: The mystery of Old China in the middle of Manhattan!
The World’s Fair: The World of Tomorrow is waiting for you! (coming April 1939)
“It’s going to be waiting a long time for me,” Lilly said. “Can you imagine the crowds?”
“That’s why you go,” Josef said. “The crowds. The energy. And when you come home, you can tell me what the future looks like.”
They were sitting on the sofa in Josef’s apartment—the one that he would be evicted from in May—and as he wrapped one arm around her and drew her close, she pressed her head to his chest. They stayed that way for a moment, and then a moment longer. She could feel his heartbeat. “I don’t care about the future,” she said. “I just want today.”
All through dinner that night, Josef continued to add items to the list. Tea in Chinatown, he wrote. The Statue of Liberty. Top of the Empire State Building. Walk across Brooklyn Bridge.
“What’s so special about a bridge?” she said. “And what is Brooklyn, anyway?”
“It’s the place on the other side of the bridge,” Josef said. “You don’t have to go there, but the bridge is very famous. Sometimes lunatics and the brokenhearted jump off it.”
“To their death?”
“I assume so.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
Josef left it on the list, with one notation: Walk across Brooklyn Bridge (do not jump!).
Lilly stubbed out a cigarette and surveyed the ever-growing list. She wasn’t a tourist. She was going to America to work.
Josef laughed at her haughty expression, her defense of her art. “Upon your return, I am going to require thrilling stories about your adventures in America,” he said. “If I ask, ‘What did you do in America, my darling?’ and your only answer is ‘I took photographs, my pet,’ then I am going to be very, very disappointed. And very bored.”
Lilly still had the list. She carried it with her on the ferry, just as she had carried it all over the city, in the hope that she might stumble across one of Josef’s planned destinations. The list was in his handwriting, and along with the few letters she had received and one photograph—Josef smiling behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, looking quite dashing—it was all that she had of him. How could she have taken only a single photograph of Josef? She had come upon him talking and drinking with friends at a café near the Liberated Theater and before he saw her, she had framed the shot and clicked the shutter. But only that once.
There were twenty items on the list and she had crossed off only two.
On Monday, just before her appointment with Mr. Crabtree, she had found herself on the sidewalk trying to believe it was still possible to save Josef despite Mr. Musgrove’s flight to Mexico or wherever fate had whisked him. She took the list out of her purse as a way to fortify herself, and the first words she saw, in Josef’s abysmal handwriting, were Shopping on Fifth Avenue. She had scoffed at that one. “Home to the world’s most exclusive retailers,” the brochure had called Fifth Avenue, and even Josef had laughed. “Someone had better tell Paris they’ve been supplanted,” he said. But there it was on the list, and here she was on Fifth Avenue. She wandered into a shop a block north of the Foundation’s offices and purchased a silk scarf: bold and flame-like, an almost lurid red. It was an extravagance, but she’d been careful with the money the Foundation had given her and if Josef teased her—You are Madame Bloch’s daughter after all!—then she would blame it on him and his list. And anyway, the scarf reminded her of him, and of the night they had met at her friend’s party. They left the party together and walked, late into the night, by the banks of the Vltava. They crossed the Charles Bridge and wound through the lanes that approached Prague Castle. On a silent empty street chalked in gray stone and moonlight, they saw a brilliant red dress draped over the wrought-iron rail of a balcony. Was it drying in the night air? Had it been tossed there in a fit of passion? Was it a signal to a lover to come calling? They had speculated, joked, invented preposterous explanations. The only thing they were sure of was its beauty.