Last Respects (31 page)

I READ YOU.

T
HERE ARE PHRASES THAT
invade the mind like infectious diseases. Or love. Which may not be dissimilar.

I READ YOU.

Strictly speaking, not even a phrase. A combination of syllables invented by a creature from another world. A hero who came out of the East River mists to capture the heart of a young boy. Not to mention the heart of the boy’s mother.

Physiologically, I know this is not quite accurate. But emotionally, as I look back on many years of perhaps needlessly crowded living, the word does the job. I don’t know how to explain or even discuss physical attraction. But I know all about the heart. I was jettisoned into a cram course before I even knew the name of the subject. It happened to me at fourteen and I saw it happen to a beautiful woman well past her youth. My mother. It changed my life. As follows:

When I came home that night on the day after the Shumansky wedding, my Aunt Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table reading the
Jewish Daily Forward.

“Papa has gone to bed,” she said.

The simple statement took me by surprise. I had expected her to ask where I’d been. I think I had also expected my father to be waiting up for me. I say I think because I really was not sure. My father always went to bed early. Not only because he was an early riser, but also because he believed plenty of rest was good for him. On Saturday nights, when I came home from my weekly scout meetings sometime between eleven and midnight, he was always asleep. On other nights, when I came home from my job in Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store, I could hear my father’s snores before I was halfway down the green hall from the front door to the kitchen.

My father in the sitting-up position was a picture that existed only at the kitchen table. The picture included, of course, the consumption of food. From the moment that night when he walloped me after Mr. Kelly left our kitchen, all the pictures changed. It was as though my life, up till then a neatly stacked deck of cards, had suddenly been tossed up in the air, and I had not yet had a chance to see the cards flutter to the ground and settle. That’s what took me by surprise about my Aunt Sarah’s statement. It was normal to the point of abnormality.

“Papa has gone to bed.”

Where else did Papa go every night after supper? I couldn’t say, of course, about the night when our family was accused of being involved in a murder. The night my mother disappeared into the mists of the East River. And the night my father exploded in a fit of astonishing rage that caused him to beat my head against the
lekach
baking pan.

“Do you know where she is?” my Aunt Sarah said.

“No,” I said.

“No what?” my Aunt Sarah said.

“No, I don’t know where she is,” I said.

My Aunt Sarah stared for a few silent moments at the newspaper. “You don’t know where your mother is,” she said. “This is what you are telling me?”

It was a relief to be able to tell the truth. “Yes,” I said. “I don’t know where she is.”

“When you say you don’t know where your mother is,” my Aunt Sarah said, “do you mean you have no idea absolutely and positively where she is? Or do you mean you know like maybe where she might be but you don’t know exactly like how to put your finger on the street number, let’s say, and the house maybe?”

I have in my day, like most people, answered some difficult questions. None was more difficult than this one. “Aunt Sarah,” I said, “please don’t ask me any more.”

She raised her eyes from the
Daily Forward.
I think, as the scene comes back into my head, that it was because of the way she looked at me on that terrible night that I have loved her for all these years. Faith cannot be counterfeited.

“All right,” my Aunt Sarah said. “She’s your mother. But remember this. She’s also my sister. I have a right to ask. But I won’t. Because I trust you. So even though I won’t ask any more questions, there is something I can tell you. All right?”

“All right,” I said.

“What your father did,” my Aunt Sarah said. “The hit?”

My gut tightened. I didn’t want to hear about that. “Yeah?” I said.

“He wasn’t hitting you,” my Aunt Sarah said. “He was hitting something that’s not a person. He was trying to understand what no man ever understands. For this I want you to do me a favor. For me, not for him. For me I want you to do it. You understand me?”

I didn’t, but I knew the answer she wanted, so I said, “Yes.”

“Don’t hate him,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Forget that he hit you.”

“Okay,” I said. And then I uttered the first declaration of love that ever came into my conscious mind. I said, “For you I’ll do it.”

I went to bed with a sense of pleasure and well-being that was totally new to me. The cop around whom I had always had to work for every breath, my mother, was out of the house. The woman with whom I realized I was in love was sleeping on the couch in the front room. Life, which I had always found interesting, was suddenly wonderful. I couldn’t wait to wake up.

When I did, my father had carried his
moogin
off to the shop, and my Aunt Sarah was doing something my mother had never done. She was cooking breakfast.

“Farina,” she said.

I stared in amazement. With my mother, breakfast was always a roll and a glass of milk.

“Be careful,” my Aunt Sarah said. She set before me a soup plate from which arose a delicious steaming smell. Into the center of the plate she dropped a lump of butter as big as a walnut. “Eat slow,” my Aunt Sarah said. “It’s hot.”

It was hot. And I ate slow. And it made me feel like Romeo telling the whole story to that foolish friar. I had given my heart to the right girl.

“More?” my Aunt Sarah said.

I nodded. She refilled my plate. When it was empty she carried the plate to the sink, came back to the table, and sat down facing me.

“It’s different from yesterday,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

I did, but I wasn’t quite sure. “Why?” I said.

“Yesterday, when you went to school, when you went to
cheder,
it was before that Mr. Kelly,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Now, today, everything you do, every place you go, he’ll be watching.”

The thought had occurred to me. But I had not explored it. I could tell my Aunt Sarah had. So I waited.

“I said last night I won’t ask any questions,” she said. “But I didn’t say I won’t do something to help a little. Till she comes back, your mother, my sister, we have to do something. Are you listening?”

“Sure,” I said.

“So why do you sit there without talking?” my Aunt Sarah said.

“Tell me what you want me to do,” I said.

“Be sick,” my Aunt Sarah said.

“Be what?” I said.

“Be smart,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Don’t go where that Mr. Kelly he can follow you. I’ll go to school and tell the teacher you won’t be there today because you’re sick. Me he can follow, and what good will it do him? Then I’ll go to Mr. Lebenbaum and tell him you won’t come to the candy store tonight. If you’re sick you can’t come. And Mr. Kelly he can follow me there, too. Then I’ll go to Rabbi Goldfarb and tell him you won’t be in
cheder
today because you’re sick—and Mr. Kelly can
plotz.”

I thought that over. My thinking seemed to annoy my Aunt Sarah.

“Now you can talk,” she said. “There’s nothing more to listen to.”

I had a feeling she’d left something out. But I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

“You don’t have to go to all those places,” I said. “A lot of kids don’t come to school every day. The teachers don’t do anything about it until a kid doesn’t show up for three or four days. Then they report it to the principal. Abe Lebenbaum, too, he won’t worry too much. His mother will be there until he comes down from his sleep. Besides, he probably doesn’t want any trouble with the Zabriskie sisters.”

“The who?” my Aunt Sarah said.

“They work sort of like customers for Abe Lebenbaum,” I said. “The night this terrible thing happened at the Shumansky wedding, these girls, the Zabriskie sisters, they had a fire. I think Mr. Lebenbaum wouldn’t want anybody asking about that.”

“Why not?” my Aunt Sarah said.

“Mr. Lebenbaum doesn’t like trouble with cops,” I said. “He has a slot machine out in back.”

My Aunt Sarah nodded. The relationship of the slot machine to police authorities had apparently penetrated to the immigrant culture of New Haven.

“So he won’t say nothing?” my Aunt Sarah said.

I thought of Abe Lebenbaum up there in the apartment of the Zabriskie sisters. I mean I thought of the view from the fire escape. It seemed to me Abe’s mind would not be on conversation.

“I’m pretty sure he won’t,” I said.

“But if you don’t come to work in the store tonight?” my Aunt Sarah said.

I thought some more. The nighttime was now my time. My only time. The
Jefferson Davis II
would not risk making contact during the day.

“I think maybe it would be good to tell Mr. Lebenbaum I’m sick,” I said.

My Aunt Sarah nodded. “I will keep him from coming over.”

She did. And she kept everybody else from coming over, so that by the time my father got home from the shop that night, we had put the buffer of a quiet day between us and the visit of Mr. Kelly. I spent most of that day in the front room, pretending to do my school homework. Actually, I kept looking out at the dock, wondering what my next move was going to be. I knew it would be dictated by Walter Sinclair, and I knew the dictation would come from the river. I kept so close to the window that I did not hear what was going on in the kitchen. All I knew was that my Aunt Sarah was cooking. The smells told me that. A person would have to be nailed down by the world’s champion head cold of all time not to be aware that a Hungarian goulash, Berezna style, was being put together on the premises. But the opening and closing of doors escaped me.

So that when the angry voices erupted in the kitchen, I was not quite sure to whom they belonged. I soon found out.

“Benny!”

I ran to the door that led into the kitchen and opened it. At once I understood something my teachers in P.S. 188 and J.H.S. 64 had been mumbling about for years: Pandora’s box. They were right. Some things are better left unopened. Mainly because you can’t close them. I certainly couldn’t close that door between our front room and kitchen. My Aunt Sarah was leaning against it. All two hundred pounds of her.

“Benny,” she said. “You know this man?”

“Mr. Velvelschmidt is our landlord,” I said.

Mr. Velvelschmidt seemed to expand inside his fly-front topcoat with the gray velvet collar as though he were a balloon into which an extra blast of air had been pumped.

“And a landlord is entitled to his rent,” he said. “Where is it?”

On this last question Mr. Velvelschmidt turned, and I saw my father sitting at the kitchen table. He was staring down into a plate of goulash.

“It’s in the shop where my brother-in-law works,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Now is the slack season. When things get busy he’ll start earning again. He’ll bring home money from the shop, and you’ll get your rent.”

“And in the meantime?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said. “Me and Mrs. Velvelschmidt and my children, God bless them? What are we supposed to live on?”

“What you live on now,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Bloodsucking.”

Mr. Velvelschmidt’s face, ordinarily the color of General Robert E. Lee’s uniform, now took on abruptly the color of General Grant’s. He turned to my father. “Where’s the missus?” he said.

My father’s absorption in the plate of goulash, which had been deep, now became total.

“What’s the missus got to do with it?” my Aunt Sarah said.

“What have you got to do with it?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

“I’m her sister,” my Aunt Sarah said.

“So why aren’t you with your family?” the landlord said. “Wherever they are, why aren’t you with them? What are you doing here?”

“Cooking for my brother-in-law and my nephew. This is a crime?”

“It could be,” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

“To cook for a brother-in-law and a nephew?” my Aunt Sarah said. “This is a crime?”

“Yes, if you’re cooking for them because the missus who should be doing the cooking she’s hiding from the police,” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

“This you’re saying about my sister?” my Aunt Sarah said.

“I’m saying where is she?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said. “Everybody knows the Greenspan boy, two nights ago, Aaron his name was, the poor boy, less than a minute after the rabbi said he was married to Rivke Shumansky he was killed under the
chuppe
in Lenox Assembly Rooms. Everybody knows who brought the
schnapps
to the wedding. Everybody knows everything except where is Mrs. Kramer?”

“So because Mrs. Kramer is not here in the house,” my Aunt Sarah said, “this by you means she’s hiding from the police?”

“If she’s not,” Mr. Velvelschmidt said, “where is she?”

“She’s where it’s none of your business,” my Aunt Sarah said. Mr. Velvelschmidt staggered back with a small, chirping scream of astonishment as she shoved him toward the hall. “What kind of a world is this?” my Aunt Sarah demanded. “Where a person can’t get sick and go away to the country to rest for a few days without dirty rotten bloodsuckers breaking down the doors to call her names?”

“Who is breaking down doors?” Mr. Velvelschmidt almost whimpered. “I knocked like a gentleman, and you let me in.”

“This is a mistake I will never make again,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Get out of here,” she said. She gave him another shove. “And don’t ever push your fat
lottke
face into this house again.”

Stumbling backward down the long green hall covered with my pencil scrawls, Mr. Velvelschmidt screamed nineteen terrifying words.

“I won’t have to come back! What’s going to come back here to this house is a
moof tzettle!
”

It was, on East Fourth Street, the ultimate threat.

Mr. Shumansky might become a bit nasty about the fact that you had not paid for your last Sabbath chicken. Mr. Deutsch could threaten to cut off your credit unless you made at least a token payment on your grocery bill. The Burns Coal Company on the Fourth Street dock would coldly refuse to deliver the two tons of anthracite you needed to take you through the winter unless you put your cash on the bookkeeper’s counter. Life on East Fourth Street in those days was, in fact, an endless series of threats evaded, thrusts parried, and warnings disregarded. Nobody, however, evaded or parried or disregarded a
moof tzettle.