Last Respects (38 page)

“Probably not,” I said.

“The girl, she looks like your mother,” Herman Sabinson said. “When she was young, I mean.”

“Could be,” I said. “Like everybody else, she was obviously young once.”

“What about the man?” Herman said.

I shrugged. “Just some guy riding a whale,” I said. “Did she say anything? My mother?”

“Say anything?” Herman said.

“Like ‘Kismet, Hardy’?” I said. “Or Lord Chesterfield?”

“Well, no, not exactly like that,” he said. “I mean, what she said made no sense to me. But maybe it will mean something to you.”

“Try me,” I said.

“Your mother,” Herman said. “Just before she died. Her last words. Your mother said:
I could have had a life if only the Melitzer Rabbi had stayed home.”

S
HE MAY HAVE BEEN
right. But the ifs of history are like the anagrams in the morning paper. Even when you’ve worked one out, where are you? Waiting for tomorrow’s paper.

The truth about the Melitzer Rabbi was that he probably would have preferred to stay home. Unfortunately, he had no more control over his destiny than my mother had over hers.

It was a time when the Jews of the Lower East Side were beginning cautiously to come up out of the storm cellars and take a look around. Everybody on East Fourth Street, for example, including my mother and father, had arrived from Europe in that universal vehicle of the persecuted: a crouch. Fleeing from Cossacks. Cringing from the knout. Looking backward with apprehension, forward with hope. Cowering in this new land behind locked doors to avoid
moof tzettles.

Then came the war, and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and some people started to earn a little more of the New World’s coin of the realm than the amounts needed to pay for food and shelter. Not all, but some. And an odd thing started to happen. Like the passion for gambling in tulip bulbs that a century earlier had swept Holland, a passion for importing religious leaders swept the streets between Delancey and 14th, the avenues from Second down to the East River.

I have always had a feeling that the drive was not purely spiritual. The Rotarian overtones were obvious. If the people on East Fifth Street, most of whom were Austrian, chipped in to bring over a rabbi from some town near Salzburg, the people on East Sixth Street, who were predominantly Polish, would get together at once and raise the money to bring over a “bigger” rabbi from somewhere near Warsaw. The word bigger did not refer to the rabbi’s height, weight, or girth. It referred to how close his European congregation had been located physically to a large city.

Perhaps this was why my parents did not seem to get caught up in the general passion. Even after all these years, and the investment of a modest sum in the publications of Rand McNally, I have never been able to find on any map the town of Berezna in Hungary where my mother was born. As for my father, his devotion to the Erste Neustadter Krank und Unterstitzing Verein seemed to exhaust whatever chauvinistic instincts he may have possessed. Rand McNally is no more illuminating about the province of Neustadt in Austria than it is about the town of Berezna in Hungary.

I cannot believe there were no rabbis in Berezna and Neustadt. It would be like believing that there were no midwives or
mohels.
Children must be assisted from the womb to the family bosom. Male offspring must be circumcised. The citizen’s soul must have an intermediary with God. But I suspect that neither Berezna in Hungary nor Neustadt in Austria was located close enough to a large city to arouse the Rotarian instincts of the men and women who, like my mother and father, had fled a mapless dot to settle in the
goldene medina.

A common enough trait. If you were born in Paramus, New Jersey, and under pressure from enemies, emigrated to Australia, would you devote much time, energy, or money to bringing over to Brisbane the math teacher who coached the basketball team at the Thomas Alva Edison High School in East Orange? I have noticed that the only people who boast they were born in Ride-It-Easy, Arkansas, are politicians, gossip columnists, actors, fashion designers, and orthodontists who have made it in the big time on our Eastern Seaboard. In 1927, on East Fourth Street, my parents had not.

Others had, however. Mr. Shumansky, for example. George Weitz’s father, the doctor. Even Abe Lebenbaum. Or maybe it pleased them to think they had. I cannot remember which one started the ball rolling, or even if it was one of these three. I do know they were all deeply involved in the project known as “bringing over the Melitzer rabbi.”

I use the word project in an attempt at precision. I am moved to make the attempt because I have been out of touch for some years with the process of bringing over to America rabbis from Central Europe. Times change. A man grows stale. I recall distinctly, however, that in 1927 the process was quite different from bringing over a beekeeper or a wheelwright. In those days you didn’t move a rabbi the way you moved a member of his congregation. In those days you moved a rabbi the way the army today moves a division. Support troops must be transported along with the men who will do the actual fighting, or the actual wrestling with God. At the receiving end, in this case East Fourth Street, arrangements had to be made for accommodating not only the rabbi but his entourage. The arrangements included welcoming ceremonies appropriate to the stature of the spiritual leader. Melitz is a town not far from Berlin. The people on East Fourth Street who were in charge of bringing over the Melitzer rabbi decided that the appropriate welcoming ceremony should be a block party.

I had been aware in a vague way for some time that our block was about to receive a distinguished visitor from Europe called the Melitzer Rabbi. In an equally vague way I was conscious of the fact that a block party was being planned. My vagueness was not due to stupidity. Or lack of interest. It was simply that I was imbedded up to my epiglottis in a time of life when anticipation played second fiddle to reality.

The promise of an Eskimo Pie next Saturday was not unpleasant to contemplate. If you were the contemplative type, which I was not. But it was today’s gum ball that made my heart go fast. Upcoming block parties for rabbis from places called Melitz were exciting to hear about. But it was the eliminations for the Boy Scouts of America All-Manhattan Rally that squeezed the juices of life so totally out of the present moment that you could die. I almost did. The night I tried to collect my salary from Abe Lebenbaum so I could give my Aunt Sarah the twenty-three dollars with which to pay our rent to Mr. Velvelschmidt the bloodsucker.

Nothing pulls the rug out from under the human spirit so successfully as defeat. If on that terrible night in 1927 I had collected my five dollars from Abe Lebenbaum, would I have gone crawling back to our tenement at 390 East Fourth Street, hugging the building lines to avoid being recognized by classmates and neighbors? Before I say no, which I will, note that I stop at classmates and neighbors and do not add friends. Since the night of the Shumansky wedding, when my mother had disappeared, the word friend had vanished from my consciousness. When the world turns against you, you don’t look for help. You look for applecarts to tip, hides to claw, things to destroy, opportunities to strike back.

Abe Lebenbaum with five dollars a week had earned my devotion. When he refused to pay it, he earned my hatred. He had plucked from my grasp, willfully and—I think I was bright enough to figure out—illegally, the wherewithal to set my life back on an even keel. I did not understand what my mother was up to. I understood my feelings about Walter Sinclair even though I could not quite connect them with my mother. My feelings about my father stood in the way. But I understood clearly about my Aunt Sarah.

I had left our house with the certainty that I would bring back the money she needed to get Mr. Velvelschmidt and his dreaded
moof tzettle
off our backs. I came slinking home with the knowledge that I had failed. I had only Mr. Heizerick’s two ten-spots. It was not enough. Is it any wonder that I stopped in the downstairs hall?

I stood there, examining my surroundings. Not because I admired or disliked them, but because I could not bring myself to push through the hall door and climb the stairs. As a result, I saw for the first time that the white marble floor and walls of the downstairs hall must have cost a lot of money. Certainly more than the brown stamped tin that lined the halls of the rest of the building. Even the panel of mailboxes set into the west wall of white marble seemed to me all at once a thing of beauty. I had never before given it a thought. Now it occurred to me that the broad sheet of brass, cut up into numbered boxes, must have cost more than the twenty-three dollars we owed Mr. Velvelschmidt.

I think what drew me across the hall to examine the mailboxes was a not quite clearly thought out thought. Brass was valuable. It was the sort of stuff Old Man Tzoddick brought back every day in his pushcart from uptown. Shiny metals were what I had seen him lugging from the pushcart down the stone steps to his cellar. Maybe I could tear this sheet of brass from the white marble wall and sell it to Old Man Tzoddick? Maybe I was going crazy?

This did not seem a dismaying or even remote possibility. I recall pretty clearly that when I was fourteen going crazy fell into pretty much the same category as going to Coney Island. All you needed was the fare. Just the same, how did one go about tearing a plate of brass mailboxes out of a white marble wall? The question must have been more than rhetorical.

If it wasn’t, why was I suddenly running my hands over the metal? Clawing at the edges with my fingernails? Stopping short when I realized there was a flash of white paper showing through the grille of the box marked
Kramer.

My first instinct, as always, was to turn and run. What stopped me was the realization that a scout who was trustworthy, loyal, helpful, all the way down to and including reverent, could not also be a fool. Whatever it was that showed through the grille of our box, it could not be the
moof tzettle.

After all, the bloodsucker had made his threat only an hour ago. Perhaps less than an hour ago. In 1927 the mails were admittedly in sounder shape than they are today, and
moof tzettles
seemed to move faster through the postal system than any other form of communication, but even so, it seemed reasonable to a senior patrol leader, who had just assured himself he was not a fool, to assume he was staring at something else.

I picked the brass door open with my fingernail. No tenant in our building owned a key to his mailbox. Landlords like Mr. Velvelschmidt provided nothing for their victims that would have to be retrieved when they were thrown out for nonpayment of rent. From the mailbox I pulled an envelope. On the front, in penciled block letters, was a single word:
BENNY.

I thumbed open the sealed flap and found a piece of paper folded several times around what felt like a wad of toilet paper. Spongy. I unrolled the paper. The wad consisted of two pretty ancient ten-dollar bills, a five, and five singles. On the paper, in the same penciled block letters, appeared the following message:

YOUR MAMA SAYS GIVE TWENTY-THREE DOLLARS TO YOUR FATHER TO PAY THE RENT THE OTHER SEVEN DOLLARS FOR MR. NOOGLE TO LET USE EMPTY BATHTUB APARTMENT TWO NIGHTS UNTIL BLOCK PARTY YOUR MAMA FINE DON’T WORRY DON’T FORGET MAKE DEAL WITH MR. NOOGLE.

I
N YIDDISH THE WORD
noogle
means nail. In our tenement the word
noogle
meant “the bloodsucker’s apprentice.” Mr. Noogle was Mr. Velvelschmidt’s janitor. He was also our landlord’s brother-in-law. Which probably accounted for the dichotomy in Mr. Noogle’s character that confused the tenants of 390 East Fourth. As a brother-in-law, dependent for his family’s bread and butter on a bastard like Mr. Velvelschmidt, it was understandable that Mr. Noogle should be nervously relentless in carrying out the bloodsucker’s orders about riding herd on the tenants. What was not so understandable was Mr. Noogle’s foolhardy eagerness to risk making a crooked nickel behind Mr. Velvelschmidt’s back. A cringing coward on the one hand; on the other, a courageous crook. You never knew which one to expect.

Mr. Noogle was tall, thin, chinless, and ageless. He walked as though he counted on his swinging arms to keep him from toppling forward on his face. Not unlike a skinny ape. His sad eyes hung out over sagging pockets of dark, bruised flesh in which any reasonable-sized kangaroo could have accommodated a set of triplets. He looked foolishly harmless and yet gave you the impression he was capable of malevolence. As though a basset hound, while staring up at you with a look of mournful devotion, was actually calculating how much he could get in a pawnshop for the gold fillings in your teeth.

When a tenant behind in his rent reached the end of a string of assurances, promises, lies, and pleas that led to the inevitable
moof tzettle
and the burly representative of the sheriff’s office arrived—in years of intimacy with the species, I have never encountered an emaciated eviction officer—to dump the family’s lares and penates on the sidewalk, it was Mr. Noogle who held the hand of the weeping wife, consoled the frightened children, and assured the mortified husband that he must not despair, because when you were flat on your back, things were bound to look up. On the other hand, it was Mr. Noogle, in a voice that would have been the envy of Gyp the Blood, who told you from the corner of his mouth that if you knew which end was up, you would keep your trap shut about the dime you paid him for the privilege of taking a bath in Top Floor Back.

Taking a bath on East Fourth Street was not an easy thing to do. The architects of the tenements had never taken scrubbing into consideration. Why should they? Their job was to provide as many scraps of space as possible in which human life could be maintained at a minimal level. Then the Top Floor Back on East Fourth Street was cleared out by a
moof tzettle.
And as a result Mr. Velvelschmidt was unexpectedly brushed by the bracing winds of progress. He tore out the gray cement washtub that occupied one quarter of the floor space in every kitchen on East Fourth Street and installed a
vonneh.