Last Respects (12 page)

Crouched low, my ammunition at the ready, I eased the door open and peered in. The synagogue in which Rabbi Goldfarb conducted his
cheder
was a single large room. It looked like the illustration in my school history book that showed the log cabin birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. Whatever had been done to the rough wooden boards since they had been put up to form these walls had been done not by paint but by the weather. The floor could have been brought untouched from the prairie. It was as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.

One hole slowly gathered my roving glance like iron filings drawn to a magnet. It was near the gold-embroidered purple curtains that shielded the closet or ark in which the Ukrainian burial society kept its two Torahs. At the edge of this hole crouched a big rat, who was nibbling away at the edges of the hole as though the floorboards were Mary Jane candy bars. Who could blame it? Nothing else in the building was edible.

Gently I pulled the door wide enough to give me a free, full swing. I took aim and let go. I did not achieve the success George Weitz had scored the night before with the tip of his Morse flag when my mother’s shove sent Mr. O’Hare tumbling backward in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein gym. But it was not a bad shot. I winged the bastard. He squealed, leaped, and disappeared down the hole. All his pals went with him down their own holes.

Stepping through the door, I could hear them slithering underfoot and through the walls, playing what sounded like a pretty fast-paced basketball game on their way back to wherever they came from so they could rest up until Rabbi Goldfarb’s class left for the day and they were free to come back and start feeding again.

To encourage their departure, I fired two of my remaining three rocks into different corners of the room. They hit nothing but the walls. The booming noise, however, was very satisfactory. The door behind me opened. Rabbi Goldfarb came in as I was winding up for my last shot.

“All right, enough,” he said. “Get the
Chimish
.”

The
Chimish
was a set of battered texts from which Rabbi Goldfarb taught Jewish history by leading his pupils in chanting aloud every day a new section of Our Heritage. The books were kept in an old Sheffield Farms milk-bottle crate on top of the gold-embroidered curtains so they would be out of reach of the rats. By the time I brought the crate down, Rabbi Goldfarb had disappeared into the toilet and about a dozen other pupils had arrived. Each boy carried at least one or two rocks. These were fired against the walls, even though no rats were visible, while I set out the
Chimish
texts on the three long tables that formed the instruction area of the
cheder.

Except by sight, I did not know any of my classmates in Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder.
They came from below Delancey Street or east of Goereck Street, and they went to schools like J.H.S. 97 on Mangin Street and to settlement houses like the Educational Alliance on East Broadway. I had nothing against “97” or the “Edgie,” but between J.H.S. 64 and the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, my life was pretty full. I had no desire to enlarge my horizons, or dilute my pleasures in what I did have. These kids were not friends. They were just a group of voices with which I did a little chanting every day in a Columbia Street outpost of my world because my mother thought it was good for me. I had never even bothered to learn the names of my fellow chanters. In a vague way I identified them in my mind by their physical characteristics. Sweat Nose. Wart Face. Four Eyes. Fat Ass. Knock Knees. It came as no surprise to me one day to learn that I was known as Wishbone. I was tall for my age, thin for any age, and bow-legged.

I slapped down a copy of the
Chimish
in front of each boy, piled the rest at the head of the table, and slipped into my seat as Rabbi Goldfarb came in from the toilet buttoning his fly. He picked up his chair rung, hit the edge of the table, and we were off.

I don’t remember how long we were at it. You didn’t have to think about what you were chanting to keep Rabbi Goldfarb at bay. What he wanted was noise. I remember only that Rabbi Goldfarb had taken his cut at the ankles of three latecomers, and we were all bellowing our way into “
Ah-ahl kayne, ibber dehn, arroll siffisoyim, ungeshtuppte leftzin
,” when my mother came in.

The chanting stopped. Rabbi Goldfarb smiled. Anyway, I think he did, because he was always obsequious to parents. But you couldn’t prove it, because smiling is done with the face and Rabbi Goldfarb had no face. What he had was a furry black fedora with a greasy band that seemed to start somewhere near the ceiling and came down to his eyebrows, and a thick black beard that started under his eyeballs and came down to his plump little belly. In between could be seen a blob of pink. It didn’t look like anything I had ever previously seen attached to a human body by natural growth, but it must have been a nose because Rabbi Goldfarb was constantly blowing it into a red bandanna with dirty gray polka dots that suggested they had once been white. Above the blob of pink were two watery fried eggs with tiny black yolks that were undoubtedly his eyes.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” my mother said. “I came to see if my son is here.”

Rabbi Goldfarb pointed the chair rung at me. He could have been the owner of a famous collection of paintings who at the end of a guided tour for a distinguished visitor had paused at last in front of his most prized possession.

“Today,” Rabbi Goldfarb said, “your son was the first.”

My mother came across to the table and said, “You didn’t come home after school.”

There was no accusation in her voice. Nor was there even the hint of a question. She had simply stated a fact. I was unaccustomed to this. My mother never stated facts simply. When she got her hands on one, she reissued it to the world, meaning me and my father, like a papal bull framed in electric lights.

“I couldn’t,” I said. “I got kept in after class. If I’d gone home to leave my books I would have been late for
cheder
.”

“He wasn’t late,” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “He was first.”

My mother smiled as though he had told her I stood at the head of the class. “I’m glad,” she said. “I don’t like he should be late for
cheder
.”

The tone of her voice bothered me. I had never heard her sound like this. Like what? I thought. I concentrated. I struggled. Friendly? Relaxed? Gentle? The words all fit, and yet they didn’t even come near what I felt. I was confused the way I had been confused the night before. The night before, she had been an astonishing stranger, determined, hard, implacably embarked on a single-minded course of action from the path of which she swept all opposition with a ruthless hand, a dose of startling English, and a total disregard for consequences to others. Now, a day later—no, eighteen hours later—she was another kind of stranger. A feminine creature in a male world, a little blond thing with bright blue eyes, uneasy about intruding, hoping for no more than the answer to a question that had been troubling her.

“If all my boys were like yours,” Rabbi Goldfarb said, “I would have no troubles.”

My mother smiled again. My stomach jumped as though it had received a dose of something indigestible and was taking action to get rid of it before the trouble started. Blond little thing or not. Big blue eyes or not. She was still my mother. What was my mother doing in the late afternoon vamping a hill of greasy fedora and bellybutton-length beard who smelled like his own toilet?

“Would you do me a favor?” she said.

“A question to ask!” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “Just say what.”

“He came here straight from school,” my mother said. “The glass of milk, the plate of
lekach,
I just baked it this morning, they’re standing on the kitchen table. When you finish with him here, you could maybe tell him he shouldn’t go any place else? He should come right home straight?”

The notion that I would even dream of doing anything else was astonishing. I mean, to me. Then I saw that it was equally astonishing to Rabbi Goldfarb. She simpered at him. I know it sounds foolish, even insane. But I saw it happen. My mother simpered. And she got what she obviously wanted. Rabbi Goldfarb swung the chair rung at my ankles.

“Ouch!” I yelled.

“You heard your mother!” he thundered.

N
OBODY HEARD HER MORE
clearly than my father. And nobody seemed more indifferent to what he heard.

Not rude. I don’t believe he would have dared that. Come to think of it, I believe he would have been incapable of it. My father was polite the way other people are short or tall or red-headed. He couldn’t help it. But he managed in his own way to scurry through my mother’s fusillade without being gunned down. I did not appreciate his skill, or even understand it, until one day years later, when East Fourth Street was far behind me, I saw some sandpipers on a Pacific beach.

I had never before seen sandpipers. I was lying on the beach, pleasantly dazed by the afternoon sun, watching the surf roll in and wash out. All at once I became aware of these tiny birds, sitting high as lollipops on their matchstick legs. As the surf came in, they raced swiftly toward me up the sand, without fear, their matchsticks twinkling industriously, keeping their feet clear of the water. The foaming edge of the surf rolled slowly to a halt, hesitated, and started washing back to sea. Without pause or hesitation the sandpipers turned and, on perkily hurrying legs, sped after the receding crest of foam. Back and forth, back and forth, like a metronome, without excitement or relief or, so far as I could see, even interest. As though that was all they had to do in life.

My father, of course, had to do more. He had to get up at five in the morning because he was due in the pants shop on Allen Street at seven. The walk took at least a half hour. Between his bowels and his other preoccupations, the hour and a half between five, when he got out of bed, and six-thirty, when he got out of the house, was just about adequate for him to touch all the bases of his routine. If he put his back into it, that is, and pushed. Consider what my father had to do every morning in those ninety predawn minutes.

First, get out of bed without waking my mother. Easy enough, perhaps, for Dolly Madison in the White House. Not on East Fourth Street. Each of the four legs of the bed in which my parents slept was set in an empty Heinz pickle jar full of kerosene. Fourth Street bedbugs were tough. I’ve seen them come at you as big as olives. I’ve known them to get up after being whacked with the heel of a shoe, shake themselves, and start coming at you again. But I’ve never seen one survive my mother’s traps. Up the side of the jar, over the edge, down into the moat of kerosene, and it was curtains for the bedbug. The only trouble with this device was that the slightest movement by anybody in the bed made the four jars start tinkling like a carillon. My father didn’t weigh much, true. But what got him noiselessly off the nuptial couch every morning was not his weight, or lack of it, but his skill as an avoider. He twinkle-toed his way out of that bed every morning like a sandpiper on a beach skittering away from the edge of rolling surf.

But that was only the beginning. Now he sneaked his dose of Saratoga #2 from the case under the bed, got it out into the kitchen, and drained the bottle. All this had to be done fast. If the stuff didn’t work by the time he left the house, he got caught on the walk to Allen Street. That’s why my father always cut across Hamilton Fish Park on his way to work. The free toilets were open twenty-four hours a day.

So, he obviously felt, were my mother’s eyes and ears. Everything he did was done with one foot poised in the direction of escape from her. After the bottle of Saratoga #2 went down, he prepared his breakfast: a cup of hot water into which he poured two tablespoonfuls of honey, and a tumbler full of “sweet” cream, which he purchased every evening on his way home from work and kept overnight on the window sill outside the kitchen to prevent it from going bad. The hot water and honey and the cream were for his
moogin,
the top of his intestinal tract, as the Saratoga #2 was for its bottom. He had no fears for the sections in between. It was not unlike taking care of a transcontinental railroad by every day industriously polishing the furniture in the New York and San Francisco terminals without paying the slightest attention to the three thousand miles of track in between.

I don’t think my mother ever thought about my father’s preoccupation with his bowels. He bought his own cream and honey and Saratoga #2 out of the meager sum she allowed him as pocket money each week from his wages. Once the stove was going, it cost nothing to heat water. Financially, my father and his internal organs were self-supporting. They were no concern of hers.

Yet my father lived his life as though convinced that if my mother caught him preparing his breakfast, she would at once notify the immigration authorities and have him deported. The slightest sound from the bedroom would send him scurrying from the stove, where he was waiting for the water to boil, into the front room, where he pretended to be busily lacing his shoes, until the sounds out in the bedroom died down.

With the Saratoga #2, the hot water, the honey, and the sweet cream inside him, he would twinkle-toe out of the house, pumping his skinny legs desperately, like a sandpiper racing up the beach away from the pursuing surf. How he walked the pavements to Allen Street—fast? slow? head high? crouched over?—I don’t know. I had never paid much attention to my father outdoors. He came alive for me only in the evening. I use the word “alive” advisedly. After all, he did breathe. Rather noisily, in fact. You could hear him coming up the stairs. Not because he panted. I don’t recall that there was ever anything wrong with his lungs. But as he climbed he helped himself along with a sort of gasping singsong: “Puff-puff-puff,” he chanted. “Puff-puff-puff. Puff-puff-puff.” It sounded somewhat like a prayer. As though he were seeking divine help to get him through another “sopper” time. God knows (I’m told He does) my father needed it.

Not that anything overtly unpleasant ever took place between the time my father came home from work and I came home from Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder,
and when I went off to my job in Mr. Lebenbaum’s candy store. It was merely that my mother ran our home the way Charles Laughton ran the
Bounty.
Nobody had to be flogged or put on bread and water. The captain’s authoritative presence was always around you.