Last Respects (39 page)

This was the Yiddish word for the white enamel bathtub with a long slope at one end and four metal claw feet that finally invaded most of the Lower East Side. In 1927, however, at least on East Fourth Street, the
vonneh
to Mr. Velvelschmidt’s tenants was a spectacular innovation. Nobody living in 390 East Fourth Street had ever seen one.

This was obviously the reason why Mr. Velvelschmidt felt his experiment would pay off. With a gleaming white
vonneh
occupying almost half the kitchen, he clearly felt it was a cinch to collect more rent for Top Floor Back than he had been collecting before. I still don’t understand what was wrong with his thinking. If I had owned 390 East Fourth, and if I had been a bloodsucker, I believe I, too, would have felt that by installing a
vonneh
in Top Floor Back, I would have had the inhabitants of East Fourth Street beating a path to my door. They didn’t.

Maybe what was wrong was the price. The rent on Top Floor Back in its washtub days had been nineteen dollars a month. With the
vonneh,
Mr. Velvelschmidt set the price at twenty-five. To his surprise, there were no takers. Six dollars a month on East Fourth Street in 1927 was more than the traffic in non-smelling would bear. An occasional dime, it was discovered, however, was not. Mr. Noogle made the discovery.

While the flat stood empty he got busy. Sloping along in his basset-hound style, he would approach tenants who were carrying down garbage or lugging up coal and offer to let them use the bathtub in Top Floor Back for a fee. In the beginning there was no time limit. You paid Mr. Noogle a dime and he gave you the key to Top Floor Back. You carried up your towel and soap and took a bath. When you were dressed you came down to his Ground Floor Back apartment and returned the key. Inevitably, the dime-payers soon discovered that two could bathe for the price of one. Before long, entire families were soaping themselves for a single fee. This improved the smell of the 390 East Fourth hallways, but it held down the amount of Mr. Noogle’s extra income. He laid down a rule. For a single fee only one person could use the back bathtub, and the bather could remain in the apartment for no longer than a half hour. Mr. Noogle enforced this rule in person. He owned a dollar Ingersoll watch. From the moment a tenant carrying soap and towel handed over his or her dime, Mr. Noogle remained outside the door of Top Floor Back, watch in hand.

I did not know how many customers every day handed over their dimes to Mr. Noogle. I did know, however, from the note Walter Sinclair had left in our mailbox, that I had seven dollars with which to perform the task he had assigned to me. Thus I became involved for the first time in a lifelong and usually losing struggle with the complexities of mathematics.

The computation should have been fairly simple. The seven dollars were intended to carry me through to the night of the block party that had been planned to celebrate the arrival of—in Yiddish it emerged as “the coming of”—the Melitzer Rabbi. That meant I had to tie up the
vonneh
in Top Floor Back for at least forty-eight hours. Say fifty. Even Walter Sinclair, in whom my faith now unhesitatingly rested, was entitled to a margin for error. Indeed, my infatuation was such that I felt he was entitled to more than a margin. I decided to give Walter Sinclair the broad ribbon of an extra day. Seventy-two hours.

To do this properly, I started with the word “assuming.” Thus: assuming that Mr. Noogle’s customers purchased their half hours in the
vonneh
around the clock, at a dime for each half hour, his maximum take for the seventy-two-hour period could be no more than one hundred and forty-four half hours multiplied by a dime, or fourteen dollars and forty cents.

Trouble. I had only seven dollars. Back, therefore, to the word “assuming.” It was clearly inappropriate. Who, after all, came knocking at Mr. Noogle’s door at one or two or three o’clock in the morning to buy a crack at the
vonneh?
It seemed reasonable to conclude: nobody. How many hours, then, would it be reasonable to assume the
vonneh
was sought after? And by how many inhabitants of 390? My mind was not accustomed to the beat of the drummer who ultimately sent people like Einstein to the mathematical heights. I settled for a quick estimate. Half.

Thus the seven dollars entrusted to me seemed not inadequate. I shoved the pencil-lettered note into one pocket of my pants, the thirty dollars into my other pocket, and climbed the stairs. My Aunt Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table, as usual reading the
Daily Forward.
Studying it, anyway. From the bedroom beyond the kitchen came my father’s rasping snores.

Looking back on it now, it strikes me as an eerie scene. The tenement kitchen. Lighted by a faint dot of flickering blue and gold and white flame at the end of the curved gas jet hanging from the ceiling. Sending shadows like delicate waves across the green corridor walls covered with my scribblings. The big square black iron stove banked for the night, smoking slightly. The beautiful fat woman in a coarse flour-sack apron bent over the newspaper. And the knowledge that she was there because my mother had disappeared. My heart jumped with excitement. My gut quivered with fear. My Aunt Sarah spoke.

“It says here a man named Greenspan died today in Washington,” she said. “He owned a department store.”

“A lot of people are dead,” I said.

“Like Aaron Greenspan,” my Aunt Sarah said.

“I didn’t mean him,” I said.

“He’s the one the government they mean,” my Aunt Sarah said. “In the paper, you read the paper, the government when they go after someone, they always catch people.”

Not people like Walter Sinclair.

“They won’t catch Mama,” I said.

“You know where she is?”

“No,” I said, “but I know she didn’t kill Aaron Greenspan.”

“Who killed him?” my Aunt Sarah said.

“Mr. Imberotti’s son,” I said.

I said it the way, if I had been asked the name of my scoutmaster, I would have said Mr. O’Hare. At that time, as I recall, life presented many difficulties, but no uncertainties. Facts did not have to be tested. All they had to be was accepted. There were no shaded areas between guesswork and evidence. Logic worked. I had heard Mr. Imberotti threaten my mother: Do not try to supply the Shumansky wedding. My mother had disregarded the threat. She had supplied the Shumansky wedding. Mr. Imberotti had carried out his threat. Not in person, of course. Nobody inhaling steam out of a teakettle on the Saturday night my mother and I had visited Mr. Imberotti could have been well enough on the night of the Shumansky wedding to carry a gun across from Lafayette Street to the Lenox Assembly Rooms. But Mr. Imberotti’s son had been there. If the government was as good at catching people as the
Daily Forward
said it was, when Mr. Kelly caught the killer of Aaron Greenspan, he would not be catching my mother. Q.E.D.

“How do you know this?” my Aunt Sarah said.

“I know it,” I said.

She gave me a long look. By long I don’t mean she took a long time doing it. I mean my Aunt Sarah wrapped it around me, like a rope, tying me to the simple statement until she was satisfied I could not escape from it.

“All right,” my Aunt Sarah said. “What should we do now?”

It was the moment when I crossed the line from boyhood into maturity. In the complicated machinery that ran the world, I had suddenly been moved up to the control panel.

“Here is for Mr. Velvelschmidt,” I said. I pulled the roll of bills from my pocket and counted out onto the blue-and-white checks of the oilcloth on the kitchen table two tens and three singles. “For the rent,” I said. I then put down the two ten-spots I had received from Mr. Heizerick. My heart thumped as I said, “And this is for you.”

My Aunt Sarah nodded. “And?” she said. She said no more. I knew she understood how I felt.

I counted out the five and the last two singles. They covered a large part of the kitchen table. In those days paper money was about the size of the pages torn from copies of
Boys’ Life.

“This is for Mr. Noogle,” I said.

I
THINK NOW THAT
perhaps all our lives would have been different if those seven dollars had not been made available to
shmeer
Mr. Noogle. On the other hand, different does not mean better.

“It’s like a horse, they put on those things to cover his eyes, and they give him a
shtipp,
and he starts moving the way the owner wants him to move,” my Aunt Sarah said to me years later, on the day of my father’s funeral. “The horse has nothing to do with it, and neither have we. We go the way we’re fixed to go from the beginning. We can’t stop it.”

I’ve never wanted to believe that. I think as I look back on my life that there are places where I didn’t have to go. I went because the way was open. Or easy. Or because it looked attractive. Or because someone I was stuck on wanted to go that way. The reasons are always reasonable. But not necessarily compelling. In every instance I know, now, that I could have gone up another street. But I cannot say that I would have ended up in a better place.

I can, however, say now what for years I refused to say even to myself: my mother went the way she went because she was trapped. I learned that the night of the block party for the Melitzer Rabbi.

One of the peculiar things about this block party is that nobody was sure just what time it would take place.

The project had started somewhere in the confused machinery that ran the synagogue near the Avenue D corner. The main reason for the confusion was that the synagogue had been built sometime between the end of the Grant administration and the beginning of the new century by immigrants from Melitz. They had made a mistake. Melitz was a town about sixty miles northeast of Berlin. The immigrants who built the synagogue on East Fourth Street apparently had good reason to believe that they were building their house of worship on what was going to continue to be a German block. They were wrong.

I don’t know how the shift came about, but when my father arrived from Austria and somewhat later my mother arrived from Hungary, the Germans in the area had moved on and nested solidly on Tenth Street. Synagogues cannot be moved like other personal possessions. They can be sold, however, like other forms of real estate, and I understand that the German Jews of Tenth Street tried to sell their synagogue to the Austrian and Hungarian Jews on Fourth Street. No luck.

Fourth Street, my piece of it, anyway, was not a very prosperous block. I don’t know what synagogues were going for in those days, but whatever the price the residents of East Fourth Street either could not get it up or were not interested in buying anything from Germans. I suspect the latter was the more compelling reason. I never heard a good word said on East Fourth Street about a German.

Not even on Saturdays when they came down from Tenth Street in surprisingly large numbers to worship in the synagogue they had left behind them years ago. I never thought it odd, not in those years, anyway, that on the Sabbath, when the Germans came pouring into Fourth Street carrying the gold-embroidered green and blue and red velvet bags containing their
siddurs
and prayer cloths, the citizens of East Fourth Street poured out in other directions, toward synagogues that were housed in rented lofts in rat-infested structures like the one in which during the rest of the week Rabbi Goldfarb conducted his
cheder
on Columbia Street.

The parallel is not quite parallel, but the situation does remind me now of Berlin after the end of World War Two. The city sits in the Russian zone. By treaty we have access to it. But the access makes for uneasiness. Sometimes for ugliness. The period of the Berlin airlift was no fun. Here again the parallel is not quite parallel, but it is difficult to overlook. When the Germans of Tenth Street decided to bring over the Melitzer Rabbi and install him in their synagogue on Fourth Street, they were embarking on a complicated and dislocating venture in if not quite hostile then certainly unfriendly terrain. Who, on East Fourth Street, gave a damn about the coming of the Melitzer Rabbi?

The answer, surprisingly enough, was not only my mother. She had what might be described as the catering concession. But it takes—anyway, in 1927 it took—more than booze to make a block party. It took an exercise in tactical synchronization.

The block party was scheduled for a Saturday night. On Thursday morning carpenters and electricians began to arrive on East Fourth Street. German carpenters and electricians. The distinction is important for a curious reason: there should have been no distinction. There were no carpenters or electricians on Fourth Street. I mean the way there were grocers and butchers and tailors and blacksmiths—one blacksmith, anyway—and chicken merchants. Repairs that required carpentry skills were always made, rarely with skill, by the tenement janitors. At 390, for instance, by Mr. Noogle. As for repairs involving electricity, all the tenement homes on the block were lighted by gas. The only electricity on East Fourth Street came from the two lampposts on the Avenue D corner. The lampposts on the Lewis Street corner were still lighted by carbon arcs.

When the Avenue D lamps needed attention, the city took care of it. I cannot remember just how. Perhaps some minor official arrived when I was in school or at
cheder
and installed a new electric bulb. In those days they all had a sharp point at the bottom. We were told in J.H.S. 64 science class that this was caused by the men in the factory who wore asbestos gloves with which they sealed the bulb by twirling the hot molten glass between thumb and forefinger. Maybe they did. I have learned to doubt many of the things that were fed me as hard fact in J.H.S. 64 science class. Anyway, the electric lights at the Avenue D corner of Fourth Street were a minor puzzle to me. The carbon arcs at the Lewis Street corner presented no such difficulty to the mind of a senior patrol leader.

Every day, just before dusk, a man came walking down the block wearing a sort of almost black, certainly very dark gray, knapsack humped up between his shoulder blades and a shiny leather cap or helmet on his head. He carried a long stick with an odd trigger handle. It was not unlike the implements that became commonplace years later for reaching up, grasping, and bringing down boxes of corn flakes from the top shelves of supermarkets. The man would reach up with this stick, slide the head in under the glass dome on top of the lamppost, and do something to the triggerlike handle at the bottom. A tiny spurt of flame would dart up to the carbon arcs. The facing points would ignite. A lovely warm glow would pour down on the corner of Lewis Street and Fourth. The man would do the same to the other lamppost, and move on.