Kiss Me, I'm Dead

by J. G. Sandom

  And Nixie. Where was Nixie? But I already knew. All that remained of my baby sister was that scrap of christening gown my mother kept on touching with her fingers, rubbing it over and over and over again, as if – somehow – some genie might appear to grant her wishes at the touch. Beside them lay the smallest coffin I had ever seen, no more than twenty inches long. Like a doll’s box, or a toy. Not a real coffin. Something quite make-believe.

  “Brauer! Arvin Brauer,” Goldstein exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

  Arvin stepped up, and took his black felt hat off, and bowed a little bow. “My son was on the Slocum. Dustin. Didn’t you know?”

  “You should be at the Rose. Who’s tending the vats?” he asked, somewhat perplexed.

  “Otto,” my father interrupted. “What are you saying?”

  A portly man with a bald pate and beady light blue eyes, Goldstein began to sputter something, stopped and turned away. He was wearing a midnight blue serge suit with a broad straw boater wrapped in red ribbon. His waistcoat was lined with silk thread, silver and crimson and the deepest ocean blue. His Egyptian cotton shirt seemed to glimmer like gold. His elegant crimson bow tie, wrapped perfectly about his bulbous neck, bobbed up and down each time he swallowed.

  In contrast, my father was dressed in the simplest of suits: dark gray with a plain off-white shirt, and his favorite blue tie with white stars. As tall and stately as Goldstein was short and stout, my father towered over the scene. His spectacles glimmered with sunlight, like a pair of moons in an alien sky. He laid a hand on Arvin Brauer’s shoulder, brought him close. “Ula is lost. I’m sorry, Arvin. I know how you felt about her . . . ”

  Arvin’s heart swelled up with sadness. Ula had been a bright and generous woman, the “bloom of the Golden Rose,” as the men who worked at the tavern called her. More than a moderating influence on Otto, she had always served as his moral beacon, a counterbalance to his indifferences. It had been Ula who had persuaded Otto to take a chance on Arvin. She had seen within the bereft Jew from Schlüsselburg a passion for his art matched only by that strange, delightful thing that she had once seen manifested in her father, Conrad Heinemann, the founder and former owner of the Golden Rose, who had built the finest beer garden in Kleindeutchland, only to lose it to Otto Goldstein when he failed to pay his note on time. Ula had worked hard then to seduce her father’s banker. She had burned dozens and dozens of meals to master his favorite dishes, for it was well known even then that Otto Goldstein was a man who liked to eat. She had swooned effortlessly at his lifeless recitations of Goethe. She had flirted, flanked and parried. And best of all, she had made Otto think that each of her seductions was his move, of his design and authorship, of his most masterful dominion. Less than twelve months after her father had lost the deed to the Golden Rose, Ula found it tucked up inside her trousseau, pinned by red needles and bound in waxy ribbon, the only wedding present she had asked of her new husband. Old man Heinemann died four months hence.

  Arvin looked over at Goldstein. He had wandered off a bit, and stood, and stared – red-eyed and sightless – down at a pale pine coffin. There she lay. Arvin could see her clearly now. But surely this pasty figure, with the broken lips and purple cheekbone, with the open lifeless eyes of some great cod, this water-bag of memory wasn’t Ula.

  Just then, Bingham Goldstein slithered into view. He approached his father hesitantly, like a dog whipped one too many times. He looked down at the woman in the coffin and hesitated, brought his fingers to his lips, biting his clenched fist. Otto turned and saw his son for the first time. His body visibly shook, as if he had been struck by some great weight. Goldstein reeled, steadied himself, and drew back portly arms. “Bingham,” he sighed. “When I saw your mother, I assumed . . . ”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Father.”

  “For what?” said Goldstein quizzically. “You are alive. Thank God!” He pressed Bingham’s face in his hands. He kissed him gently on the brow.

  “Bingham,” Arvin Brauer said. “Have you seen Dustin? Is my son . . . ?”

  Bingham spun about. “He’s alive,” he said, but the words came ominously. He stared at his mother in her box. “He may wish otherwise,” he added at an angle.

  “What does that mean?” asked my father.

  Arvin sighed. “Where is Dustin?”

  “It was him,” said Bingham, glancing at his father. “His fault. His . . . cigarette.”

  Goldstein’s eyes fell into focus. He stared first at his son and then at Arvin Brauer. “What do you mean, his fault?”

  “My fault?” a voice said, and I felt Dustin pass right through me. I felt his legs, his arms, his chest and face. He paused for a moment at the center of my being, and then just slid away. He was gone. “What are you saying, Bingham?”

  “You know exactly what I’m saying.” Bingham glanced up at his father’s face. It seemed as though he could not suffer Dustin’s stare. “The fire,” he continued. “It was his cigarette. Father, I saw it.” He stared down at his mother’s face. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it. How could he have known? But he threw it to the deck and walked away. And it kept burning. The deck began to pitch and roll. It rolled and struck that box of straw and . . . ”

  And then I saw it too. In my mind’s eye. I don’t know how I did. But I saw it roll and spark, and sputter as the straw caught, and the fire billowed into life. I watched it delicately attend the Lamp Room walls. That’s how it happened. Bingham was telling the truth.

  “You’re lying.” Dustin pulled himself up to his full height. He took a step closer to Bingham. “You’re lying – tell them.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it,” Bingham said. “It was an accident.”

  “I’m sure,” said Goldstein. He turned and looked on Dustin with such venom that the boy stepped back unconsciously. “But for Ula and for everyone else. There must be a reason. Someone must be responsible. Fires don’t start themselves.”

  “Who is responsible?” a man with a chocolate-colored bowler added, stepping in. His eyes took in first one face, then another. “Who did you say started the fire? What’s his name?”

  “Dustin Brauer,” Goldstein said.

  “Now wait a minute,” Arvin said. He took a step closer to Goldstein, his palms stretched out before him. “We don’t know what happened. Who can be sure? You’re just upset, Herr Goldstein.”

  “Are you saying my son is a liar?” Goldstein moved a step closer. “Why you ungrateful Jew . . . ”

  “Jew?” the man in the chocolate-colored bowler said. “He’s a Jew?”

  “Let’s all just take a breath,” my father said. “We’re all upset – that’s understandable. I’ve lost my Nixie and my Mallory. Otto, you’ve lost your Ula. We’ve all lost someone. It’s natural to look for something, someone to blame. But we need to think, to reflect and–”

  “He’s a Jew,” Goldstein said. “And his son, too. Dustin Brauer.”

  The man in the bowler turned toward the woman behind him. She was trying to overhear the conversation. Everyone began to turn in their direction. “A Jew started the fire,” someone said. “Did you hear?” someone echoed in turn. “His name’s Dustin. Dustin Brauer.”

  “He shouldn’t have been on the Slocum,” someone said. “On a Lutheran outing, what’s a Jew doing there? Did you hear?” she continued.

  “A Jew, Dustin Brauer. Burned the Slocum.”

  “Who killed my wife?” someone cried.

  “Who killed my daughter?”

  The questions ascended like the crowing of cocks, from one mouth to the next, air light, lifting the blanket of grief that smothered the room. It was him, someone said. A Jew. A Jew set the Slocum on fire. Dustin Brauer. Dustin Brauer. The words billowed like flames, licked the air. Dustin Brauer killed my wife. Dustin Brauer burned my baby. Dustin Brauer. Dustin Brauer. Jew.

  Arvin corralled his son in his arms. He began to move away, back toward the entrance to the pier. Then, without warning, he just ran,
pulling Dustin behind him. They jostled together through the gathering crowd and vanished out the door.

  For a moment no one spoke. Otto Goldstein called his son to his side with a hand signal. My father shifted from one foot to the next, trying to settle his weight. My sister Louisa gathered Helmuth to her thigh and pressed her other hand around my mother’s shoulder. And my mother, as she ran her left thumb around that small white piece of fabric, around and around, wearing the christening gown down – all that was left of dear Nixie – as my mother looked up at my father, she said with a smile, “That Dustin. I knew he was no good. I warned you, Leonard. I warned you.”

  * * *

  I found myself in the streets after that, unable to bear the sharp words. They crackled like shards in my throat. I couldn’t repeat them. I couldn’t let them form on my tongue. I flew and I flew into Captain Van Schaick, in the hospital, with his eye bandaged up like a cyclops, moaning at the gods. He knew his career was kaput. He sat on his bed, staring out of the window, filled with a bottomless longing to erase time, to return – once again – as the steamboat first sailed from the pier, to strains from “Birds of Passage” by Foust, a waltz so loaded now, so burdened down by grief that Van Schaick found it virtually impossible to lift his one eye to the sky. He sighed. It was too horrible to contemplate. The stench of burning human flesh, the flames. It was too terrible, indeed.

  I flew and I flew and I found myself within the thick walls of the Knickerbocker Steamboat Company, in lower Manhattan, where the piteous Miss Hall sat bereft, tallying columns and columns of numbers. Someone had told her, I could tell. Thoughts of the Slocum assailed her. The fire still burned in her head. I could still feel the flames. They crackled with guilt and with pain. Yet she would not look up from her ledger, for fear of what lingered ahead.

  I flew and I flew into William O’Gorman, city coroner, as he sat at his late Sunday breakfast, dissecting his plate of mixed grill – two eggs, over easy, and a shot of Scotch whiskey, prix fixe. I felt the strong rush of tobacco as he puffed on his Jamaican cigar.

  And he was gone . . . and I was up and falling into someone else, a placid, quiet empty place – Henry Lundberg of the U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service, still dreaming the same dream he’d dreamed for the last seven weeks since his betrothal to Miss Mabel Smith. In only four days. Four days of liberty – no, irresponsibility. Four days of self-serving bliss before the axe fell and he was no longer free. The tragically beautiful Henry Lundberg.

  I could not stand the sweetness of his breath. It smelled of lavender and mint. I could not stand the source of his tumescence, that view of Miss Smith with her leg up, revealing her white upper thigh, and that patch of intolerable longing – that dream of his. I was ready to fly once again when his landlady knocked on the door. “The Slocum,” she cried. “She is sunk, Master Lundberg. Wake up.” Indeed! Wake up, young Henry, and see what you’ve wrought. And he rose and he dressed, and made his wooly-headed way with much haste to his offices. I felt him plop down with a thump on his chair. He stared at his desk. And then, with a start, he reached for the telephone, saying, “Get me long distance, please, operator. Fire Island 4622. Mr. Frank Allan Barnaby.”

  And with that, I was gone, through the wire that ran down the street, across lower Manhattan and under the river, the Long Island Sound, to that great house which stood on a hill. The telephone rang and kept ringing. Barnaby stood in a closet, wrapped round his wife’s parlor maid, a French girl from Brittany with the hands of a child. He was bonded to her like a vine, until the steady drilling of the phone cut short his deep grunting, and he pulled out and charged down the hall, still half-dressed. Where were the servants, he wondered, when you needed them most?

  Lundberg’s voice was remarkably clear. “The Slocum’s burned down to the keel,” he gave up with surprising dispassion. “Off the Bronx. We’re in trouble.”

  They talked in soft murmurs thereafter. They whispered until they hung up. Then Barnaby made his way back to the closet where the naked young maid was still waiting. She was shivering alone in the dark. “I must go,” he said bluntly. “To the office. Get me my striped charcoal suit.”

  We returned to Manhattan together, to his office where the piteous Miss Hall still obsessed over columns of numbers. Barnaby looked deep within her eyes with the same electric charge that he had used to seduce Marie-Claire – yes, that was her name – only hours before. Miss Hall barely stirred. “Yes, Mr. Barnaby. As you wish, sir,” she said. “Life jackets were already on order.”

  Where can I go from here? What must I do? And why won’t you give me your hand?

  Chapter 4

  June 15, 1904

  Twenty-sixth Street, New York City

  I went to Dustin, as I always did. I followed him along the streets and avenues. He was unable to ascend a streetcar for fear of being recognized and chased along the city thoroughfares back down to Kleindeutchland. When they had finally returned to their tenement, Arvin and Dustin clambered up the stairs with the weariness of mountain climbers, exhausted after a quick ascent.

  The main room, the kitchen and bathroom, faced the sitting room, a stilted assemblage of hand-me-down furniture, pilfered from the streets. Dustin collapsed into a chair in the sitting room. He stared out the window at the traffic below.

  “It is always the same,” Arvin said. “Those who should love you the most desert you the quickest. Even in America.” He paced the kitchen floor, burning off steam. “In the old country, at least, you could tell them by their coats. But here . . . ” He sneered. “These goyim of New York.” Then he stopped and looked down at his son. “Tell me what happened, Dustin.”

  “It was my fault. I’m sorry, father,” he said. “Perhaps Bingham was right. Mallory, forgive me. Can you ever forgive me?”

  It was a cry so plaintiff that I felt it fill my breast. Dustin was crying. For me!

  “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that again. Do you hear me?” said Arvin. “You are not guilty. I know you’re not. Never. Promise me. Promise me!”

  “Alright, I promise.” Dustin continued to cry. I felt myself sucked underwater. I drowned in his tears. “Mallory,” I heard him say once again, before the shaking stopped.

  “We should eat something,” Arvin said. “Some chicken soup, perhaps. And some bread.” He began to root about the larder. “You must be starving.”

  “Tell me why, father.”

  “Tell you what?” Arvin stopped fussing. He stood perfectly still. “Tell you what, Dustin?”

  “Everyone I love. Everyone who comes close to me dies,” Dustin said. “First mother. Now Mallory. Everyone I love.”

  “Please, don’t, Dustin. You know that isn’t true.” Arvin sidled over to his son. He ran a hand round his neck. He drew him close.

  Dustin settled for a moment in the enclave of his father’s chest, then shook his shoulders like a dog. “Leave me alone. Do you want to die too? Is that what you want?” he said.

  Arvin circled the table. He hesitated. He stopped. He looked down at his son, then leaned, the slightest distance, forward. He cocked his head, as though listening for a distant sound – the hoot of an owl between branches. “You will not lose me, Dustin,” he said matter-of-factly. “No matter what. God will see to that.”

  Dustin’s eyes went wide. He stood up slowly, painfully. Like an old man. He pushed his chair in underneath the table. He started for the door. “God has enough to see,” he answered quietly. “He’s been busy all day.”

  He wandered out of the apartment, and began to climb the stairs up to the roof. The landlord, old man Wallenberg, had made a great production of his landings and his stairs. Painted pastoral scenes adorned each sconce and window treatment. The tenement was not called the Delancey Gardens for nothing – as if the name would somehow help the residents forget the roaches and the smell, the paper-thin walls, the shrill parade of other people’s lives.

  The tenement at 97 Delancey Street provided Wallenberg with an ample source of income a
nd would, eventually, enable him to move to Astor Place. It had been the biggest gamble of the tailor-turned-landlord’s life, for he had spent roughly $8,000 of his hard-earned cash to complete the building. He imagined the thousands of pricked fingers, the hundreds of blossoms of blood he had endured throughout the years, down on his knees, pinning the cuffs of other men. His nest egg was full of blood. But the gamble had paid off. In 1890, Wallenberg’s personal wealth stood at only $1,800. By 1904, the value of his real estate holdings alone had ballooned to $25,000. He finally sold the property on Delancey Street in 1906, raking in more than $39,000 for the five-story building.

  A 700 percent return, I calculated. Almost. But why, and how? Mine had never been a head for numbers. How strange. How odd! What did I care of real-estate investments, of finance? No. It was Dustin’s head. It was he who calculated and configured. It was he whose mind’s eye dwelled upon the landlord, Wallenberg, adding up his actions and inactions, tallying patterns and plans. His brain performed each calculation effortlessly, as easily as his legs pumped as he hurried up the stairs, ever higher, as he climbed the last few rungs of the small ladder, and he was out, and free, and on his own.

  Dustin wiggled out of the small hatchway. He breathed the twilight air. There, in the distance – he gathered up some wayward molecules of smoke. He spun about and stared out to the east and north. He could still see the black plume of the Slocum as she burned, bobbing and bouncing, drifting from North Brother Island to Hunts Point.

  The boat herself was out of sight, reclined behind some other tenement. But the smoke rose skyward through the distant clouds. Like a prayer – a kind of reaching out and upwards. A kind of plea.

  Dustin’s shoulders sagged. He sighed. I could feel him think of me, or who he thought I was. I could see the image brighten in his head. I was smiling and running just ahead of him, just out of reach, down a sidewalk along Stanton Street. I was turning, looking back, and my smile was broken by slim wisps of golden brown hair, flying backward in the breeze. My eyes looked like they were on fire. My cheeks were flushed. I was out of breath for looking at you, Dustin. I could barely breath, I was so in love. And you could see it in my eyes. You knew, Dustin. You knew!