He opened a door, held it for her, and waited for Jay.
A woman sat knitting in an old red leather chair. She was about fifty, thick-set, with graying black hair and she studied a magazine pattern. She made a final stitch before putting down a shapeless slab of wool that was part of a sweater.
“For my nephew,” she said. “Can’t follow this goddamned pattern - everything you gotta do piecemeal. Back first, then the front.”
“Want a drink, Sal?” Barney asked.”
Afterwards. Don’t drink on the job.”
“Doesn’t that give you confidence?” Barney said, hoping to make Rhoda smile. He waved a hand and said: “My friends.”
“No names, okay, so long they’re friends of yours is enough.” She pointed to the door, and the men walked towards it.
Jay held Rhoda’s hand and kissed her softly on the mouth. His mouth tasted of beer and cigarettes.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” he said.
“We better get started,” Sally said.
When they had gone, she locked the door and motioned Rhoda into another room. It was a bare room, with bottle green drapes that had faded patches. In the center of the room was a long wooden scrub table with a thin mat placed down the middle, and just by the table was a black metal stand containing bottles, a hypodermic needle and instruments that Rhoda knew were the kind surgeons used. She had seen similar ones in a hospital showcase when Myrna had had her appendix removed.
“First time?” Sally asked. She waited for an answer. “Don’t want to talk? That it? I understand. There’s nothing to be frightened of. I’ve done this a couple hundred times and nothing’s ever happened.”
“I’m not afraid,” Rhoda said. She watched with interest as Sally screwed two metal clamps to the sides of the scrub table.
“Foot rests.” She sniggered. “You know those straps they got in the backs of cars for people to hold on to when they’re getting in or in case of short stops. Well, some people use those for foot rests too.” She finished tightening the clamps and sighed. “There we are, honey. Now you just undress, and it’ll be over before you know.”
Rhoda walked into the other room, opened her bag, and saw that she had four dollars. She closed her bag, and stared at the knitting, which was folded up neatly on the leather chair. Sally came into the room.
“It’s for my nephew’s birthday. Outgrows everything in a week.” She chuckled. “At least it seems like a week. Well, I’m all ready, so you better undress and I’ll give you a little massage that’ll relax you.”
“No, I don’t think I want a massage,” Rhoda said. “I think we’d better forget about it.”
“Forget it? Why?”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“It’s for your own good. I’ve had a lot of experience in this, and you may be sorry after that you missed the chance.”
“That’s my worry.”
“You know I’ve been paid already; twenty bucks and this isn’t a department store. I don’t give refunds.”
“Keep it.”
“I intend to. I’m taking a big chance, you know. I can get ten years for something like this. And your boyfriend isn’t going to like throwing twenty down the drain, with nothing to show for it.”
“Well, he’ll have to live with it. I’d like to go now.”
Sally unlocked the door.
“It’s your life you’re playing with.”
“I’d thought of that.”
“Better explain to your boyfriend, ‘cause I don’t want trouble.”
Rhoda walked quietly down the stairs. There was a group of men at the bottom, and she saw that Jay and Barney were not among them. As she descended she spotted them at the bar with two women all holding drinks and about to clink glasses. She pushed her way through the crowd of men, rank with beer and sweat. Outside, she took a deep breath and started to walk down the street, which was lined with women in doorways, under lampposts, and against the walls of buildings.
“Know how I get to the station?” she asked a woman.
The woman pointed a finger and said:
“Straight ahead . . . just follow your nose.”
“No, thenks, oh, maybe, all right, yes. A little, little, piece. No thet’s too big, I only got a small mouth.” The reluctant eater was Maurice Dobrinski, licensed matchmaker, Talmudic Sophist, and tort expert of the vagaries of premarital difficulties. Sidney Gold had decided to consult him. In Borough Park, men removed their hats when they passed Dobrinski on the street, and women performed a curtsey. A scholar, a savant, the pillar of the temple, a man whose eyes burned with an otherworldly fire and whose mustache was embalmed with the wax of a thousand days, so that it held a hypnotic fascination for all who peered at its sebaceous sheen. This paid meddler into the disputes of his betters supported his arguments with spurious precedents that he barely understood and, if this failed, could summon up a host of irrelevant, obscure logomachies that by their weight, total pointlessness, and the utterly confused manner in which they were delivered destroyed any attempt at sane communication.
“Sit by the window,” Mr. Gold said to Dobrinski. “You’ll get a better view.”
Dobrinski pointed to the top part of his skull and said:
“The view’s in here.”
“They should be here soon. I told them two o’clock.”
“They’re all coming?”
“I hope so.”
“The boy’s mother and father are very important. They’ll make him do the right thing by Rhoda.”
“After you’ve spoken to them.”
Dobrinski ruffled some papers in his briefcase.
“All the authority I need, I got in here.”
“And if thet doesn’t work?”
“You let me worry . . . I have never lost yet,” Dobrinski said with a smile.
Several minutes later they heard a dull thud, as though the door was being rammed, and the house’s delicate foundations seemed to sway. Mr. Gold stormed to the door.
“Missus Bleckman?” he asked.
“Mistah Gold?” Celia replied.
“Why don’t you dense?” Morris Blackman said furiously.
“Not funny. Where is . . . ?”
“The murderer? Hiding behind his mother,” Morris shouted.
“Come in and welcome to mine home.” He ushered them into the living room where Dobrinski had commandeered a table, stacked his papers neatly, and was giving the impression of meticulous officialdom at work. He was busily changing nibs on all of his pens, and he had set out two inkwells.
“Would you please sign?” he said to the Blackmans, pushing a ledger in front of Morris.
“Sign what? I didn’t come here to vote and thet’s the only time I sign. But I don’t vote. When they put up a Jewish president, I’ll vote.”
“It’s not to vote,” Dobrinski hastily explained, “but for mine records. Nine thousand signatures I got already.”
“Nu, so what you need mine for?” Morris replied contentiously. Dobrinski dealt him one of his seraphic smiles, opened his arms as though to embrace him, flicked a paper out, which Morris took, tried to read, and then in despair handed back.
“You see who has signed it?”
“I see it’s signed. But I don’t understand . . . ?”
“It is a document giving me certain powers . . . signed by the Chief Rabbi of Palestine.” Actually it was a receipt for clothes received that a Jewish orphanage had issued to the donor, namely Dobrinski, who had spent three months collecting them in order to peddle the best of them to a secondhand dealer with whom he had a working arrangement. When he was satisfied that Blackman was impressed, he went on to add: “So far in thirty years I have solved four thousand disputes, and this book is mine record.”
“What is all this about?” Morris turned to Gold, who was smiling and rubbing his hands together. Dobrinski was costing him ten dollars, and he wanted his money’s worth. “A telegram you sent me. I never got before a telegram.”
“I never sent one before,” Gold said. “I gave good directions?”
“I’m here, no?”
“We’re here,” Celia said. She turned to Jay and squeezed his hand reassuringly. “A mother’s love you’ve got.” He held her tightly and looked morosely at the ceiling. They needed a paint job.
Gold felt it was time to get down to business.
“May I present mine adviser, Mistah Maurice Dobrinski.”
“At your service.” Dobrinski extended a hand to Blackman. He loved him already.
“What for adviser?” Morris growled.
“Your boy didn’t explain you?”
Jay received three sets of surprised glances, which he carefully avoided. Rhoda would pay for this, he’d make her pay!
“Nothing about mine Rhoda?”
“No, not a word.” Celia shook Jay’s arm.
“Per-epps, I should explain,” Dobrinski interceded.
“They been goink together for now” - Gold counted on his fingers – “seven months . . . kippink company.”
“Never a word to me,” Morris said. “Who knows where he goes? He’s a bum.”
“Thet we know,” Gold said, shooting a dagger look at Jay.
Dobrinski flapped a quire of foolscap paper at Gold, indicating that he was prepared to commence.”
His cousin, he beat up, and he had to go into hospital,” Morris said. Dobrinski made a quick note of this and shook his head sagaciously at Jay, then wagged a finger. “But he brings home money now. How’s thet possible? His momma and me is afraid to ask, because we think he goes with a gun.”
“Not a word about mine Rhoda?”
“Where’s your wife, Mr. Gold?” Celia asked.
“Nine years an invalid. It would kill her if she knew.”
“Tch, tch, tch,” Celia pursed her lips.
“And she’s a good girl, Rhoda. But when she brought him home, I became worried.”
“In Poland they know how to treat boys like him,” Morris said.
“And in Russia, too. You give a cossack fifty kopecks . . .”
“Please, please” - Dobrinski got to his feet – “nothing can be settled in this way.”
“His uncle sent over the police looking for him.”
“Genug, Moishe,” Celia said.
Dobrinski, his notes set on a music stand, his dental plate revolving at fifty r.p.m., launched into the fray. He began with a short history of Judaism. The travails of its people under Pharaoh, the glories of Joseph, Abraham, the hairy brother, and the unhairy brother, David and Goliath, all were recounted in his most confidential raconteur style occasionally livened by fist-waving to enforce his points. After this, there followed a request for old clothes for the starving children of Palestine and an injunction to donate generously to Borough Park’s Synagogue. He collected twenty-nine cents from Morris Blackman under protest. It was when he suggested that they should adjourn for tea that Morris rose to his feet and in a thunderous voice demanded to know why the conclave had been assembled in the first place.
“Two hours’ traveling for a murderer and I’m here an hour, and I don’t even know why I’ve come,” he protested. “Now we’re drinking tea? I could have stayed home and drank tea there.”
“Not a thing am I mentioning,” Gold countered, his face the color of horseradish. “Rhoda . . . Rhoda . . . in here,” he shrieked. Rhoda appeared, her eyes bloodshot and circled with black lines. She stood to Dobrinski’s right, averting her eyes, and he patted her affectionately on the behind. “Not a thing am I mentioning . . .” Gold continued. “But look at that girl, a beautiful girl, a wonderful sister and daughter. You see her?” Morris shook his head in some confusion. “Thet’s not a gas belly she’s got. From chopped liver, she didn’t get such a belly. She’s not a big eater at home. So I ask you, from who did she get such a belly?”
At this Dobrinski approached the Blackmans with his papers.
“Statements by people who know what he did and have sworn to God to me personal that he’s the one.” He handed the documents to Morris who examined them carefully.
“That’s truth,” Gold averred.
“Please explain me what this means?” Morris said. “You are cordially invited on the 6th of August 1936 to attend the Bar Mitzvah of Mordecai Bernstein at the Menorah Temple, 3 p.m. How does he know to invite me?”
“A mistake,” Dobrinski replied, snatching the paper from Blackman.
“She’s pregnant?” Celia asked rhetorically.
“Who the hell started all this?” Jay said.
“I swear I didn’t say a word,” Rhoda cried. “I wanted to go away and have it on my own.”
“Then who told them?”
“Myrna.”
“Myrna! None of her goddamned business.”
“No swearing in this house,” Gold said. He shook Dobrinski’s lapel. “We have a man of God here.”
“In the year 1906 in the case of Esther Meltzer and Hymie Tenser - the very same situation - it was decided that the man was responsible and under the Latvian Convention of 1840, he had to marry the aforesaid Esther. Here” - he handed Jay some tattered onionskins – “read for yourself what it says. And even more recent, the case of Selma Horowitz and Jacob Petzel, the very same thing.”
“You’re welcome to him,” Morris said to Rhoda.” I never had nothing but trouble from him. Maybe you’ll make a mensch outa him.”
“And in the Bible, not to mention the Torah, it says . . .”
“But he’s mine baby,” Celia cried.
“Such a son-in-law. God’s punishing me.”
“I wish him good luck and good-bye,” Blackman said.
“. . . that a man of the Levy Tribe who did the same thing and upon refusing to marry was stoned to death in Mesopotamia . . .”
Jay realized that the situation was hopeless, and he was condemned to marry Rhoda. Sneeringly he asked her: “What do you want?”
“I just want us to be happy.”
“Will you be happy if we get married?”
“Only if you want to.”
There was a sudden hush; even Dobrinski stopped.
“All right,” Jay said, and he felt lifted high in the air, dizzy, frightened, and somehow delivered.
“We’re good for each other,” she said.
“Better you than me,” Morris said. “Have him with mine compliments.”
Dobrinski, prepared for any eventuality, now began a sermon dealing with the nature of marriage, what was expected of the partners, how the children should be raised. When he had finished he handed them about twenty address cards of firms that would give them special discounts if they mentioned his name, and for whom he acted as unofficial agent. He said a prayer for them and for the child and urged them to call on him if it was a boy, as he was licensed to perform circumcisions and he would undercut everyone else’s prices because of the unusual circumstances of their meeting.
“You see, I told you, let me worry,” he said to Gold as he counted the money he had been handed. “God smiles on such marriages.”
Jay knew with a certainty as deep and unchanging as a geometric axiom of Euclid that his love for Rhoda - if indeed it had ever existed and he wondered about this - was stillborn. Neither money nor social position, neither time nor place, neither blood ties nor the prospect of paradise, would alter this. If he had ever felt anything towards her, apart from a rampant urge to sleep with her, he could not remember it, and he thought this peculiar because he possessed, to an uncanny degree the power of memory, of minute mental reconstruction of face, feeling, situation, place, moment, time. He could not only remember how he had come to get a scrape on his knee when he was four years old, but he could also recall the exact street of the occurrence, the time of day, who his companions had been, the color of the brick on the wall, the smell of burning wood fires and the arc of the smoke trailing up in the air like a bird without a body, something felt, elusive, evanescent. His first sexual encounter he could reconstruct down to the las
t detail of shape, position, emotion, and movement, both his own and those of his thirteen-year-old accomplice, an indentured Slovak domestic with hair like a flaxen wheat sheaf, long muscular legs, yellowish eyes tinted with gamboge, fists as raw as a hambone, and a body odor like something that had been hung in a smokehouse for a decade. He could still see how she wiped the almost endless spume that continued to shoot forth from him on her striped blue apron. But of his dealings with Rhoda he could remember virtually nothing, except that she was for him an abstract principle in a determinist universe, which, by force of circumstance, final and immutable, had deprived him of his freedom and altered the course of his destiny.
At her suggestion, he retired from the ranks of food peddlers. Her value to her employer, the chief of Modes Dress Shoppe, was similar to that of a Prime Minister’s to his Sovereign. In fact, Rhoda was Modes Dress Shoppe; she sold dresses, bought them, hired staff, and did all the fittings. Her chief, a Mr. Finkelstein, who had spent nearly thirty years as a wholesaler in burlap sacks, did not even trust himself with the bookkeeping, a duty which, with a sigh of relief, he had delegated to Rhoda after her second week in the store. What precisely Mr. Finkelstein did in the shop would be almost impossible to say, for it would involve a form of scientific speculation better left to physicists. He occupied a place in the store adjacent to the cash register and perched on a three-foot-high stool, nodded to whoever came in. He was incapable of composing a coherent sentence, and so had developed a type of truncated verbal shorthand that was comprehensible - so complete was their communion - only to Rhoda, who translated these signals into action. So total was Mr. Finkelstein’s reliance on Rhoda that he would even have let her shave him if she had been willing; for with the exception of gray wiry hair which seemed to be fitted to his skull by some kind of cilia-producing machine, and trousers that were all creases, bearing the impression of every chair he had ever sat in, the only distinguishing characteristic Mr. Finkelstein possessed was a face permanently bleeding from razor wounds. Like decorations for valor, he wore four or five toilet paper plasters every morning. On the particular morning that Rhoda brought Jay to the store to meet him, Mr, Finkelstein had stumbled in, ashen-faced and bleeding - so truculent had the combat been that he had nearly slashed his throat - resembling a volunteer at a barber’s college, run by madmen, and specializing in a new and sinister type of assassination.
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