Til the Real Thing Comes Along (32 page)

“Oh, God, don’t let him die,” Rifke murmured softly, and discarded an eight of hearts because she was holding only picture
cards. This time it was a severe heart attack, not a scare or a warning or too much creamed herring like the other times.
There was no doubt in the minds of the doctors who admitted him that Louie was going to die very soon.

As R.J. shifted uncomfortably, the plastic sofa squeaked under her, and even though she wasn’t sure she needed it, she picked
up the discarded eight and inserted it into her hand next to the five and six of hearts, just in case a seven should come
along. The sound of the ambulance’s screaming siren was still vibrating in her head. The ambulance that had come flying down
Murray Avenue while R.J. was on the telephone taking a grocery order from Mrs. Pritzker, who lived at the Moirowfield apartments.

R.J. hated having to work in Unde Shulke’s grocery store again, but she had no choice. It had been a year and a half since
Mona Feldstein Friedman, who had continued to buy R.J.’s ideas for a whik after Francie died, divorced her husband and moved
to New York, hoping to break her act in at the Upstairs At The Downstairs. And R.J., unable to find another comedy writing
job in Pittsburgh, needed desperately to earn money. As always, there was barely enough for her parents to pay the telephone
and the light bill or the rent to Unde Shulke. So there she was again, working every day after school and on the weekends,
waiting on customers, carrying groceries to their cars, unpacking orders, marking the cans and the boxes, and sweeping the
sidewalk in front of Uncle Shulke’s store, which she jokingly called “the downstairs from my upstairs,”

The ambulance was so loud that R.J. had to put a finger on the ear that wasn’t against the phone to block out the howling
siren. But worse than the piercing sound was her sudden realization that it had stopped. With a screech. Outside the store.
She was sure there must be some mistake, until she looked out the window and saw the two men leap out of the front seat, open
the back door, and rush with the stretcher up the outside steps that led to the apartment. The apartment. My God. That was
where her mother had gone only two minutes earlier to get herself a sweater because she felt chilly after cleaning out the
refrigerator case.

“Oy, Gott, mayn Louie,
” she heard her mother wailing now from upstairs. Then she cried out in Yiddish,
“Loz im nit shtarbn.
” Don’t let him die. And by the time R.J. rushed up into the apartment, the two men were on their way down, carrying the blanketed
stretcher with only the chalky face of her father showing. Louie’s eyes were closed and R.J. was afraid he was already dead.
Dead. No.

The men moved swiftly past her and eased Louie into the back of the ambulance. A crowd had already begun to gather near the
front of the store. R.J. could barely make out the familiar faces of the neighborhood merchants and customers as they pushed
in closer to get a look.
Louie, Pop, Mr. Rabtnowitz-she
heard their voices assure one another as she stood helplessly by. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears, and feel
it pounding all the way down to her fingertips. It was so strange to see her mother, who clutched her gray cardigan sweater
in her red worn hands, wait until her husband was safely aboard, then scramble into the back of the ambulance with no one
helping her, as if she’d done it dozens of times.

Maybe, R.J. thought, she’d seen someone do that on television.

The white-coated driver was about to slam the doors shut.

“Wait,” R.J. said and ran forward.
Rosie Jane,
she heard people say.
Poor thing, tsk tsk,
and the driver helped her climb in next to her mother, who was making a moaning sound from deep in her chest

Then the doors dosed. The siren’s scream pierced the
air again, and the wild ride began, tossing R.J. against her mother, and then her mother against R.J. as it lurched and stopped
and careened around corners. R.J. thought of the lightning bugs she and Bubbe used to catch and put into a Rokeach beet borscht
jar. Bubbe would punch holes into the lid so the lightning bugs could breathe. And when R.J. decided they had enough bugs
captured, she would close the lid, shake the jar, and the two of them would watch the lights blink on and off the way the
lights did at night on the buildings in downtown Pittsburgh. Then R.J. would always open the lid and set the lightning bugs
free. She knew that when the ambulance doors opened at the hospital, she and Rifke would feel the way the lightning bugs did
when the lid of the jar was opened.

The skin on her father’s bald head was dry, and his mouth was open. There was a tube in his nose and an intravenous tube in
his arm. R.J. looked away at the white-coated medic who sat across from her instead. The man was holding her father’s wrist
and checking his pulse with the watch on his own wrist. He wore a white coat and a plastic tag with his name on it. Hugo Dunlop.
Please, Hugo, R.J. wanted to beg him, don’t let my father die. She could feel the ambulance go around corners on two wheels,
and she was very afraid that she would throw up and be embarrassed in front of Hugo Dunlop. Probably he was used to people
throwing up. A man with a job like that. Please, Hugo Dunlop, don’t let my father…

I.C.U. I.C.U. Peek-a-boo, I.C.U. That’s where Hugo Dunlop and the other man rushed Louie, ran with him down the hall when
they arrived at Montefiore Hospital. To I.C.U. And then a doctor came out and told R.J. and her mother that it didn’t look
good, which struck R.J. as so funny she had to hold in a macabre giggle. To stop herself from saying “No kidding, doctor,
when they found my father clutching his chest and retching and then carried him out of our house on the stretcher, we thought
that it looked sensational, and now you’re telling us that it doesn’t look good? How
could
you?” But she didn’t say a word.

“Gin,” Rifke said, and for a moment, as if she’d forgotten where she was, thinking only of her triumph over her daughter’s
usually expert card game, she laughed out loud. Then she regained her deathwatch composure and said, in Yiddish,
“Lomech sheyn lachen.
” I should only be allowed to
laugh under such terrible circumstances—which is what she had said earlier when she and R.J. watched Myron Cohen perform on
the Ed Sullivan show on the waiting-room television set.

R.J. looked up at the clock. It was five minutes before four in the morning. The hospital rules said that one member of the
immediate family could visit Louie in the ward at five minutes before each hour.

“Mama, du vilst arayngeyn?”
R.J. asked her mother. Do you want to go in?

Her mother shook her head no in a way that didn’t just say
No, I don’t want to,
but rather
No, I couldn’t stand it,
and then she gestured for R.J. to go. R.J. patted her mother on the arm, stood, and walked out into the corridor, down to
the ward and pushed open the door. She parted the curtain that separated her father from the other patients and walked close
to the bed.

“Daddy,” she said to him. Her jaw quivered in her effort to talk quietly and hold her screams inside. Screams that started
at the bottom of her feet and forced their way up into her chest and throat, fighting her to let them out. Her father’s breathing
sounded bubbly. Maybe the tube in his nose had been put in wrong. Maybe there was blood in it and she should go and find a
doctor.

“Daddy,” she said, “Mama and I watched the Ed Sullivan show tonight in the waiting room, and guess who was on. Myron Cohen.
He was so funny that after it was over, even Ed Sullivan was laughing. First he told the one about the lady in Florida who
tells her friend that she feels sorry for her husband because while she’s lying there in the sun, he’s back in New York, working
like a horse. And the friend asks her, ‘So vy you didn’t bring him along?’ And the woman says, ‘Who needs a horse in Florida?’”
That was the place in which her father would have chuckled. R.J. hoped he was hearing her and laughing inside. Maybe, please,
God, this would make him feel better, hearing about Myron Cohen, and he would come around. “And then he did the one about
the woman who told her son if he fools around with girls he’ll go blind, and the son says, ‘Maybe I’ll just do it until I
need glasses.’” Then she laughed a little burst of a laugh which she had to catch as it turned into a cry. And when she felt
as if she had pulled it back inside, she spoke again.

“Daddy, it won’t be long until I find out if I’m accepted to the drama department at Carnegie Tech,” she said.

Her father had been so worried about the money for her college tuition. He had sat with her at the kitchen table, filling
out endless financial aid applications, but so far she hadn’t heard back from any of the lenders. Probably it was worrying
about how to get the money that had done this to him. That and his anger at Uncle Shulke, “that capitalist bastard,” as her
father always called him. He wouldn’t lend R.J. a penny. In fact, he had not only turned down her request for the loan, but
while he did he laughed at her—that big Uncle Shulke laugh, where he threw his head back so you could see all of his back
teeth. And every one of them was gold.

“My Rosele Jane,” he had said. “If you want to be a teacher I say okay. You want to be a medical secretary I say okay. But
you wouldn’t get one ruble from me for no goddamned school of drama.” When he said
drama,
it sounded a lot like the way he pronounced the city in Florida which he was on his way to, for his annual vacation. “My
Yama.”

“Uncle Shulke,” R.J. had tried, hoping her quavering voice wouldn’t give away the fact that she wanted to do anything in the
world rather than have this conversation. She could hear both of her parents moving around outside the swinging kitchen door,
shushing one another so they could take turns listening in. “I want to major in writing.”

“Writing, shmiting,” Shulke said, and dipped a piece of kichel into his cup of tea, held it there until the end was as soggy
as he liked it to be, then took a big bite out of it.

“A woman gets one degree,” he said with a mouth full of kichel. “The one with the letters M.R.S. Meantime she becomes a teacher—in
case, God forbid, she has to fall back on it. You want my money, kiddo, that’s the only way you’ll get it.”

R.J. had looked down at the orange-and-brown linoleum floor. An ant carrying a crumb was passing under her chair. She watched
it move forward and disappear behind the Frigidaire.

“I got rules, honey girl,” Uncle Shulke told her. “And one of the rules is no drama.” He popped the rest of the kichel in
his mouth, then took another big swig of tea.

R.J. wanted to pour the tea over his head. She wanted
to let the tears come, but if she did, her eyes would be red and today was her interview. So she shook her head and left the
kitchen through the swinging door, which just missed her mother, who stood on the other side of it clucking her tongue in
disappointment. R.J. went into her room to sit on her bed and collect her thoughts. She could hear Uncle Shulke in the kitchen
talking to her mother. He was talking loudly, but the only words she could make out from the conversation were “I ain’t paying
for no goddamned drama,” and then she heard her mother repeating again and again to the older brother she not only idolized
but who, according to family history, had carried her out of Russia on his back: “I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you.”

R.J. touched her father’s hand now. Over and over tonight her mother had said that he started to die the day he walked out
of the Settlement House. Painting the signs the last few years for Shulke’s store was his only means of income. The one thing
that excited him, besides his Labor Zionist meetings, were the drawing classes he taught to the little children at the Hebrew
Institute. For free. Finally using the drawing talent he had hoped to use in architecture school, though he’d never gotten
there. That kind of thing would never happen to her. Nothing, especially Uncle Shulke, could ever change her mind about writing.
Even after Francie’s death, R.J. continued to write the school Follies. Late at night, after working in the store and doing
her homework, she sat on her bed and wrote down funny sketches and songs that made her giggle out loud. When she turned them
in to Mrs. Joseph and the drama group, they loved them too, so in a rush of confidence she decided to mail in her work with
an application to the drama department at Carnegie Tech.

The minute she heard the letter drop in the mailbox across the street from the store, she wished she could find a big can
opener to open the box and pull it out. Why would they ever take her into that school? Because she’d written stupid songs
for a fonner travel agent to sing in the back of a delicatessen? Or dumb sketches for a bunch of high school kids who were
in the school show just to get out of going to classes?

When the call came from the drama department that they wanted to see her, she was sure they’d made a clerical error. On the
morning of the interview she was so sick with
nerves that she threw up and was going to cancel the appointment, because she was sure she’d never get through it.

Still shaky from her sick stomach, she went to the telephone that sat on her father’s cluttered desk and called Information
to get the telephone number of Carnegie Tech.

“One moment,” the operator said, and while R.J. waited, she opened the desk drawer absently to find a pencil and paper so
she could write the number down. The paper she pulled out had the blank side up, but when she turned it over, she realized
it was a draft of a letter her father had written to Mr. Katzman, his former boss at the Settlement House. Writing in the
English that was still stilted after all these years in America, Louie had tried to state all the ways in which the Settlement
House had been unfair to him. The letter made R.J. ache with sadness. One of the grievances her father had listed was the
Settlement’s failure to reimburse Louie’s bus fare to a social workers’ convention in Philadelphia which they’d asked him
to attend. And to tell them that he needed the money very badly to pay bills. The amount of the bus ticket was $3.55. R.J.
closed her eyes and held tightly to the telephone receiver. The Information operator came back on the line. “Would you like
Fine Arts? Administration? Technical offices? Or the department of Architecture…”