Last Respects (9 page)

Night was to the greenhorns what Lent is to the Catholics. Watch out. Forbear. Don’t do. Stay home. They did, including my mother, and so did their sons, including me. Yet here we were, both of us, like hypnotized converts to the dictates of Horace Greeley, heading west. Under the El tracks of First Avenue. Across the cracked but brightly lighted pavements of Second Avenue. Into the frightening gloom of Third Avenue.

Frightening, I grasped in a few moments, only to me. My mother plowed ahead, around the shadowed butt end of Cooper Union, into the ominous open terrain of Astor Place, and swung left into Lafayette Street. She moved with a puzzling kind of leaning-forward directness, as though impatient to reach her destination, but also with an even more puzzling familiarity. My mother, plunging into the semi-darkness of Lafayette Street, could have been crossing our kitchen on East Fourth Street with a paper bag full of pushcart apples toward the cut-glass bowl in our front room. She wasn’t frightened. She had made this journey before. I could tell. No, I could feel it. I could feel it, and I couldn’t believe it. Where were we going?

“Here,” my mother said.

She had stopped in front of a dark brown building. In the light from the lamppost it was easy enough to make out the gold lettering spread in an arc like a movie star’s eyebrow across the street-floor plate-glass window:
Meister’s Matzoh Bakery, Inc.

My stomach jumped. Twice, the day before and tonight, George Weitz had made cracks about my mother and Meister’s Matzoh Bakery. He obviously knew something I didn’t know.

“What are we doing here?” I said.

“They talk English,” my mother said. “I want you to talk for me.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But who are they?”

No answer. She had moved up onto a sandstone step in front of a dark door to the right of the plate-glass window. She was peering at a panel of black bell buttons set like polka dots in a rectangular brass plate. There were no markings under the buttons. This did not seem to bother my mother. She worked at them as though she were doing a puzzle. Muttering to herself in Yiddish, she ran her forefinger horizontally across the black buttons, then down, and making a sharp left, she finger-walked back the way she had come. The muttering stopped. She pressed a button.

Far back inside the house, and it seemed to me above our heads, a bell rang. It sounded somewhat like one of the bells in J.H.S. 64 if you happened to be in the toilet when it went off on the staircase at the far end of the hall. The effect was somewhat the same, too. The sounds of movement behind the dark door. Sounds coming closer, sounds that were unmistakably heel taps. They stopped at the other side of the door.

In the sudden silence, I became aware that I was being watched. I turned nervously. Nobody was in sight. My mother and I were alone on that dimly lighted stretch of Lafayette Street. When I turned back, the dark door was opening. A young man squinted out at us. I was struck by two things. He was wearing the sort of suit Mr. O’Hare wore, and he looked familiar.

“Okay,” he said. He sounded familiar, too. He held the door wide. My mother stepped in. When I followed her, the young man said sharply, “Who’s he?”

“What did he say?” my mother said in Yiddish.

“He wants to know who I am,” I said.

“So why don’t you tell him?” my mother said.

“I’m her son,” I said.

“What does she want to bring her son for?” the young man said.

I translated for my mother.

She said, “I’ll tell his father.”

I translated for the young man. He did not seem pleased, but he closed the door behind us and started to fuss with a complicated metal arrangement that was obviously some sort of locking device. While my mother and I waited for him to work a set of double blue-black steel bars into their slots, I saw why out on the street I’d had the feeling I was being watched. Two thirds of the way up on the door there was a peephole.

“I’ll go first,” the young man said, and he did.

“What did he say?” my mother said as she started to follow and I started to follow her.

“He said he’ll go first,” I said in Yiddish.

“From brains this particular son will never die,” my mother said. “The stupid idiot, he always goes first.”

So my guess was right. She had been here before. When? Obviously during the day. What day? “Always” meant more than once. So she had been here several times. How many? When I was battling plane geometry in J.H.S. 64 and my father was sewing pockets in the pants factory on Allen Street. For the first time since my mother had erupted into the middle of George Weitz’s attempt to wigwag a section of Matthew XXV:29, across the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gymnasium, I stopped being furious about the elimination of Troop 244 from the All-Manhattan rally and I became interested in my surroundings.

These seemed to be a long, dark hall. Then the young man turned right, my mother and I followed, and we were crossing what looked like an enormous storage room. It was stacked from floor to ceiling with long white boxes, each one tied with string. The room was poorly lighted, but when we passed a spot under one of the bulbs that hung from the ceiling on lengths of long black wire, I saw that all the boxes were marked in the same way as the plate-glass window out in front:
Meister’s Matzoh Bakery, Inc.

I had never heard of Meister’s matzohs. My mother was partial to Horowitz Bros. & Margareten. Anyway, that’s what she always bought when Passover rolled around. Could it be that my mother was shifting her matzoh allegiance? It could be, but I doubted it. My mother may have been illiterate, but she was loyal. Also, how did George Weitz hear about it?

“Easy going through this part here,” the young man said. “The ovens are hot.”

“He said...” I started to say to my mother in Yiddish.

“I know what he said,” my mother said. “The idiot always says the same thing. He thinks I’m an idiot like him who wants to get burned.”

We were moving single file through a long room that smelled vaguely of fresh bread. It seemed to be lined on both sides with a series of shoulder-high tin boxes about ten feet wide. There were spaces between the boxes almost as wide as the boxes themselves. On these spaces lay strips of metal belting that seemed to be made from woven bicycle chains. It was like moving past Mr. Pollock’s blacksmith shop on East Fourth Street when his forge was going. You could feel the heat from the tin boxes. The young man led us out of this room into a hall colder and darker than the one we had entered from the street. Here the smell was different. Sharp and odd but not unpleasant. Like fresh wrapping paper. The young man snapped on a flashlight. He turned the beam on my mother’s shoes.

“Watch the corners,” he said. “These bundles sometimes have sharp pieces of wire sticking out.”

“He said...” I started to say to my mother in Yiddish.

“I know what he said,” my mother said.
“You
watch the sharp pieces of wire sticking out.”

The flashlight beam sliced up and across the wall on my left. I caught a brief glimpse of stacked burlap bundles. The smear of light picked out some of the wires that held the burlap tightly cinched in, the way my father’s belt held his belly.

“Now he’s going to say watch the steps,” my mother said in Yiddish.

“What did she say?” the young man said.

“What did he say?” my mother said.

“He said what did you say,” I said in Yiddish.

“Don’t tell him,” my mother said.

“You heard me, kid,” the young man said. There was no mistaking the threat in his voice. “What did she say?”

“She said was I okay,” I said.

“She sure worries a lot about you,” he said.

“She has to,” I said. “I’m the only one in the family talks English.”

“Well, watch the steps,” the young man said.

They were worth watching. They looked like the floor of the toilet in the American Movie Theatre on Third Street. Black and white marble tile. At the top of the stairs the young man shoved the flashlight into his pocket and opened a door. He held it wide for me and my mother and, as we entered, yelled across our heads, “Hey, Pa!”

In through a door at the other side of the room came a tall, heavy man with almost white hair. He was yawning and rubbing his eyes with one hand. In the other he carried a steaming white kettle from which the enamel was chipped here and there like small blue bruises. He wore carpet slippers and a quilted bathrobe, both not unlike my father’s, but newer. My father never bought anything new. Everything he owned he had already owned the day I was born. The heavy man needed a shave. So did the young man, but it wasn’t this similarity that made me realize why, when he opened the street door, the young man had looked familiar. It was the way he had yelled, “Hey, Pa!” Alone, he had been a tough-looking wise guy in an uptown suit. In the same room with his father, he became part of a team. They looked like all the Italians who lived on Ninth Street.

“Look who’s here,” the young man said.

The old man looked, then said, “Who’s the kid?”

“Her son,” the young man said.

“Oh, Jesus,” the old man said. “That means she wants to talk.”

“I told you last year you better learn Yiddish,” the young man said. “You want me to get her out of here?”

“No, no,” the old man said. He sounded tired but not unfriendly. “She’s the only one we got on Fourth Street.”

“We got that other one,” the young man said. “You know. The fat Polack with the hair.”

“Yeah, but she don’t go no further east than Avenue B,” the old man said. “I’ll talk.”

“You want me to wait?” the young man said.

The old man said to me, “Ask your mother, kid, ask her if she wants to talk to me alone, or is it okay my son hears?”

I translated for my mother.

“I don’t care,” she said.

“My mother doesn’t care,” I said.

“Maybe then you better stay,” the old man said.

“Okay,” the young man said.

He pulled out the four chairs that surrounded a table in the middle of the room. He did it slowly, with great care, as though he were one of those butlers in the movies preparing the places for a conference of diplomats.

“Sit, please,” the old man said.

My mother and the old man sat down facing each other. He set the steaming kettle in front of him and dipped down toward the spout. As I took the chair on my mother’s left, and the young man took the chair on her right, the old man pulled a thick towel from around his neck and put it over his head to form a hood.

“Jesus,” the young man said. “I never realized before, Pop, she’s pretty good.”

“Shut up,” his father said, sucking in gulps of steam from the kettle spout. “The kid.”

The young man took his eyes from my mother and said, “Yeah, I forgot.”

“People who forget,” the old man said, “they go early.”

“I’m sorry, Pop.”

The old man said to me, “What are you looking at, kid?”

I was looking at the kettle and the towel hood from under which he was speaking, but I thought my staring had annoyed him, so I said, “That thing.”

I pointed to a huge white enamel box against the wall behind him. On top of the box a flywheel as big around as a basketball was humming. The wheel was attached by a leather strap to a motor on the floor as big as an automobile tire. The sounds from the motor were louder and more irregular than the smooth hum from the flywheel.

“It’s a refrigerator,” the old man said. “Give the kid a drink.”

The young man stood up, went to the white enamel box, and with a grand double-handed gesture, opened the two doors the way Mr. Seaman, the undertaker on Avenue C, opened the back of his hearse. The inside of the box was lined with wire shelves. They were loaded with bottles and the kinds of strangely shaped and oddly packaged foods that hung in the windows of the Italian groceries on Ninth Street. The young man lifted out a dark bottle. He slammed the white enamel doors shut. He pulled the cork from the bottle by hooking it into and twisting it out of a gadget fastened to the wall near the refrigerator. He took three glasses from a cupboard. He emptied the contents of the bottle into them. He did all this like a juggler. No pause between steps. I had the feeling he thought of us as an audience. He slipped the empty bottle into a wooden box between the cupboard and the refrigerator. He brought the glasses to the table. He set them before me, my mother and himself. He sat down. I wondered if we should applaud.

“What is it?” my mother said.

The old man clearly understood the Yiddish question. He did not ask for a translation. He pulled the bathrobe up around his neck, hunched himself more deeply into the towel hood, and said to me, “Tell her not to worry. It’s Moxie.”

Go explain Moxie to my mother. A woman who had never put anything on her table except milk and sink water.

“Ma,” I said, “it’s like milk or sink water.”

“Milk is white,” my mother said. “Sink water is no color.”

The old man obviously sensed from the tone of my mother’s voice that she had no confidence in the refreshment his son had served us.

“Tell her to take a taste,” he said to me. He took a deep, heaving, sucking inhalation of steam from the kettle spout. In a choked voice he said again, “Tell her to take a taste.”

I told my mother to take a taste. Cautiously she lifted her glass and took a sip. Her opinion was obvious from the way she set down the glass. I did not bother to translate her one-word comment:
“Pishachgst!”

“Well, anyway, all right,” the old man said. He sounded as though he were talking underwater. “I’ve got this thing in my chest,” he bubbled. “The doctor says I should stay in bed. Tell her to say what she has to say. I have to get back in bed.”

He coughed into his cupped hands while I translated for my mother.

She said, “Ask him what it is with the Shumansky wedding.”

I did as I was told. The old man nodded and rubbed his eyes as he wiped his cough-spattered palms on the bathrobe.

“I know,” he said. Again tired. But also again friendly. “It’s a big order,” he said, sucking in steam. “Eighteen quarts. My sons and I, we must fill the order direct ourselves.”