Last Respects

by Jerome Weidman

  Mr. Krakowitz and the cop were still moving along the corridor toward the dressing room when I reached the lobby. I was through those front doors, down the sandstone steps, and on my way back up Avenue D before the two men could possibly have reached the dressing room in which the night before I had turned over to my mother all those bottles of Old Southwick.

  Now that it was dark my problem was simpler. I reached Eighth Street without being stopped or recognized. My confidence went up. When I reached the steps leading down to Old Man Tzoddick’s cellar, the feeling that I was on top of it, the feeling that I had the ball game sewed up, all that vanished abruptly. Old Man Tzoddick’s pushcart was parked in the vacant lot next to the steps.

  Only someone who understood the role the pushcart played in Old Man Tzoddick’s life would have known this meant he was at home. Except for the lampposts at the Avenue C and Avenue B corners, Eighth Street was dark. Not a hint of light was visible from the cellar, and there were plenty of places through which light would have leaked. If a candle stump had been burning inside that cellar, everybody on Eighth Street would have been aware of it. Nothing was burning. The conclusion of Senior Patrol Leader Kramer was that Old Man Tzoddick may have been in residence but he was zonked out.

  I tiptoed down the stone cellar steps. As I did so, I reflected on how much of my life was being spent these days on the tips of my toes. Before my mother exploded into the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym on the night of the All-Manhattan Rally eliminations, I had walked like everybody else. Anyway, like most people. Clumping along, heel and toe. Making the normal amount of noise. Now, since Walter Sinclair and the Federal government had entered my life, it was all on tiptoe.

  It was not the sort of reflection that would help me retrieve the stuff from the wagon that I had stuffed into the cave behind the loose stone the night before. I got off my toes, squatted down, pulled out the stone, and started unstuffing it. I had the two cooking pots, the iron grill, and the signal flags safely transferred from the cave to the wagon, and I was reaching for the tied bundle of six-inch pieces of file from the flint-and-steel sets, when there was an explosion behind me.

  “You little momzer!” Old Man Tzoddick screamed. “You big crook!”

  As always, even when flat on my back at the bottom of a set of cellar steps, my first thought was irrelevant: Why don’t you make up your mind? How could a senior patrol leader, sixty-two pounds on the Hannah H. Lichtenstein gym scale, be both a little momzer and a big crook?

  “You dirty goniff!” Old Man Tzoddick screamed.

  This was hardly an answer. But it cleared my head. Just in time, too. The filthy old ragpicker was swinging what looked like a stubby length of metal pipe. I rolled over fast, caught the blow on my arm, snatched the pipe from his hand, and shoved him away. He fell back through the cellar door. I grabbed the wagon, dragged it up the stone steps, and set off for Avenue B at a gallop. The length of metal pipe, I discovered, was the long flashlight we kept in the hike wagon for signaling Morse at night.

  By the time I got around the corner, I was pretty sure Old Man Tzoddick was not following me. By the time I got down into the basement of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, I had recovered the feeling that I was doing the right thing. The troop meeting room was dark.

  I flipped on the light and dragged the wagon to the closet. Before shoving it into the space from which Mr. O’Hare had given me permission to take it the night before, I checked the contents. Everything was back in the wagon except the flashlight and the envelope of charred gauze I had used the night before. Nobody would miss that. I decided to hold onto the flashlight. Walter Sinclair was a Morse man. He had told me, if things went wrong, I was to head for the Fourth Street dock and he would communicate with me somehow. Things had sure gone wrong. I closed the wagon, pushed it into the closet, shut the closet door, and flipped off the light. I climbed up the stairs and headed for the dock.

  When I got there I wondered how a communication from Walter would solve anything. Sooner or later I would have to go home. In fact, the later I got home the worse the mess would be. My father and my Aunt Sarah would be sure to be waiting up for me. And yet, just being on the dock made me feel better.

  For the first time since I’d seen the red stains start to spread across Aaron Greenspan’s shirt the night before, I didn’t feel the compulsion to think. I just sat there on the edge of the dock, dangling my feet over the hill of coal on the barge lashed below me. Smelling the oil-dirty yet curiously clean smell of the river. Hearing the creak of the mooring ropes. Catching, without actually listening, the muted whistles and bells from the barges moving across the Brooklyn skyline like flies across a pile of spotted peaches on an Avenue C pushcart. Watching the lights on the tugs in the distance winking on and off like Morse dots and dashes.

  I came awake. I had not realized that I must have dozed off. Half asleep, my mind had been counting those lights winking on and off aimlessly at the other side of the river. Counting them, and timing their length, without knowing I was doing it. Now I realized there had been a pattern to some of them. Long lights were dashes. Short lights were dots. The best Morse man Mr. O’Hare had ever known had recorded those dots and dashes even while half asleep. And the recording had formed the pattern. Dash, dot, dot, dot. B. Dot. E. Dash, dot. N. Dash, dot. N. Dash, dot, dash, dash. Y. B-E-N-N-Y. Benny. Benny? That was me! Benny Kramer!

  I leaned forward on the edge of the dock and concentrated. I knew who was trying to communicate with me. He had said he would. He was a Morse man. The lights that were forming the pattern were coming from a dark lump lying low in the water all the way across the river. It was surrounded by larger lumps, tugs and barges, but these larger lumps were moving. This smaller lump was motionless. I grasped that this was why the lights had been making a pattern. The other lights also winked on and off but they had no meaning because they hurried away from themselves, like scattered confetti. But these lights from the smaller lump lying low in the river at the far side of—

  — • • •

  •

  — •

  — •

  — • — —

  BENNY.

  — • • •

  •

  — •

  — •

  — • — —

  BENNY.

  I was suddenly pleased with myself. I had been smart to hold onto the long flashlight when I repacked the wagon. I was pleased because I saw that Walter Sinclair had expected me to be smart. Sometimes, at fourteen, you have to make your own medals.

  I stood on the dock edge, hesitated, then jumped down to the barge. I hit the coal, felt my knickers tear over the right knee, then started up the pile. When I got to the top, I was eight or ten feet higher than the edge of the dock. I got myself set in the coal and started to flip the switch of the flashlight on and off.

  —

  • • • •

  • •

  • • •

  THIS

  • •

  • • •

  IS

  — • • •

  •

  — •

  — •

  — • — —

  BENNY.

  I signaled it again. And again. And again. Praying that the batteries would hold.

  THIS IS BENNY.

  THIS IS BENNY.

  THIS IS BENNY.

  In the middle of my seventh signal the pattern of lights from the other side of the river took on a new shape. I stopped signaling and started to read the new arrangement of dots and dashes. I caught the letters without any trouble. But they made no sense. I wished desperately that Chink Alberg or Hot Cakes Rabinowitz was crouching at my knees with a pad and a pencil. What I wanted was to call the letters as I read them without having to try to make words out of them. But what you want and what you have are not always the same. Life.

  So I kept reading the letters over and over again. The same letters:

  • •

  • —
•

  •

  • —

  — • •

  — • — —

  — — —

  • • — •

  I READ YOU.

  My mind recorded the dots and dashes about eight times. Maybe more. Then the signaler obviously assumed I had it. Anyway, the signal changed. I had no trouble with the new words. They were very simple. I didn’t need Chink Alberg or Hot Cakes Rabinowitz to translate for me the message that came in across the river in winking lights.

  YOUR MAMA SAFE DO NOT WORRY JUST KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND YOUR EYES OPEN FOR FURTHER MESSAGES YOU ARE A GOOD KID.

  Using the troop flashlight, I signaled to the Jefferson Davis II at the other side of the river the words that were now perfectly comprehensible and, for almost half a century, always would be. They still are.

  I READ YOU.

  12

  THERE ARE PHRASES THAT invade the mind like infectious diseases. Or love. Which may not be dissimilar.

  I READ YOU.

  Strictly speaking, not even a phrase. A combination of syllables invented by a creature from another world. A hero who came out of the East River mists to capture the heart of a young boy. Not to mention the heart of the boy’s mother.

  Physiologically, I know this is not quite accurate. But emotionally, as I look back on many years of perhaps needlessly crowded living, the word does the job. I don’t know how to explain or even discuss physical attraction. But I know all about the heart. I was jettisoned into a cram course before I even knew the name of the subject. It happened to me at fourteen and I saw it happen to a beautiful woman well past her youth. My mother. It changed my life. As follows:

  When I came home that night on the day after the Shumansky wedding, my Aunt Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table reading the Jewish Daily Forward.

  “Papa has gone to bed,” she said.

  The simple statement took me by surprise. I had expected her to ask where I’d been. I think I had also expected my father to be waiting up for me. I say I think because I really was not sure. My father always went to bed early. Not only because he was an early riser, but also because he believed plenty of rest was good for him. On Saturday nights, when I came home from my weekly scout meetings sometime between eleven and midnight, he was always asleep. On other nights, when I came home from my job in Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store, I could hear my father’s snores before I was halfway down the green hall from the front door to the kitchen.

  My father in the sitting-up position was a picture that existed only at the kitchen table. The picture included, of course, the consumption of food. From the moment that night when he walloped me after Mr. Kelly left our kitchen, all the pictures changed. It was as though my life, up till then a neatly stacked deck of cards, had suddenly been tossed up in the air, and I had not yet had a chance to see the cards flutter to the ground and settle. That’s what took me by surprise about my Aunt Sarah’s statement. It was normal to the point of abnormality.

  “Papa has gone to bed.”

  Where else did Papa go every night after supper? I couldn’t say, of course, about the night when our family was accused of being involved in a murder. The night my mother disappeared into the mists of the East River. And the night my father exploded in a fit of astonishing rage that caused him to beat my head against the lekach baking pan.

  “Do you know where she is?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “No,” I said.

  “No what?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “No, I don’t know where she is,” I said.

  My Aunt Sarah stared for a few silent moments at the newspaper. “You don’t know where your mother is,” she said. “This is what you are telling me?”

  It was a relief to be able to tell the truth. “Yes,” I said. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “When you say you don’t know where your mother is,” my Aunt Sarah said, “do you mean you have no idea absolutely and positively where she is? Or do you mean you know like maybe where she might be but you don’t know exactly like how to put your finger on the street number, let’s say, and the house maybe?”

  I have in my day, like most people, answered some difficult questions. None was more difficult than this one. “Aunt Sarah,” I said, “please don’t ask me any more.”

  She raised her eyes from the Daily Forward. I think, as the scene comes back into my head, that it was because of the way she looked at me on that terrible night that I have loved her for all these years. Faith cannot be counterfeited.

  “All right,” my Aunt Sarah said. “She’s your mother. But remember this. She’s also my sister. I have a right to ask. But I won’t. Because I trust you. So even though I won’t ask any more questions, there is something I can tell you. All right?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “What your father did,” my Aunt Sarah said. “The hit?”

  My gut tightened. I didn’t want to hear about that. “Yeah?” I said.

  “He wasn’t hitting you,” my Aunt Sarah said. “He was hitting something that’s not a person. He was trying to understand what no man ever understands. For this I want you to do me a favor. For me, not for him. For me I want you to do it. You understand me?”

  I didn’t, but I knew the answer she wanted, so I said, “Yes.”

  “Don’t hate him,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Forget that he hit you.”

  “Okay,” I said. And then I uttered the first declaration of love that ever came into my conscious mind. I said, “For you I’ll do it.”

  I went to bed with a sense of pleasure and well-being that was totally new to me. The cop around whom I had always had to work for every breath, my mother, was out of the house. The woman with whom I realized I was in love was sleeping on the couch in the front room. Life, which I had always found interesting, was suddenly wonderful. I couldn’t wait to wake up.

  When I did, my father had carried his moogin off to the shop, and my Aunt Sarah was doing something my mother had never done. She was cooking breakfast.

  “Farina,” she said.

  I stared in amazement. With my mother, breakfast was always a roll and a glass of milk.

  “Be careful,” my Aunt Sarah said. She set before me a soup plate from which arose a delicious steaming smell. Into the center of the plate she dropped a lump of butter as big as a walnut. “Eat slow,” my Aunt Sarah said. “It’s hot.”

  It was hot. And I ate slow. And it made me feel like Romeo telling the whole story to that foolish friar. I had given my heart to the right girl.

  “More?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  I nodded. She refilled my plate. When it was empty she carried the plate to the sink, came back to the table, and sat down facing me.

  “It’s different from yesterday,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  I did, but I wasn’t quite sure. “Why?” I said.

  “Yesterday, when you went to school, when you went to cheder, it was before that Mr. Kelly,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Now, today, everything you do, every place you go, he’ll be watching.”

  The thought had occurred to me. But I had not explored it. I could tell my Aunt Sarah had. So I waited.

  “I said last night I won’t ask any questions,” she said. “But I didn’t say I won’t do something to help a little. Till she comes back, your mother, my sister, we have to do something. Are you listening?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “So why do you sit there without talking?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “Tell me what you want me to do,” I said.

  “Be sick,” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “Be what?” I said.

  “Be smart,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Don’t go where that Mr. Kelly he can follow you. I’ll go to school and tell the teacher you won’t be there today because you’re sick. Me he can follow, and what good will it do him? Then I’ll go to Mr. Lebenbaum and tell him you won’t come to the candy store tonight. If you’re sick you can’t come. And Mr. Kelly he can follow me there,
too. Then I’ll go to Rabbi Goldfarb and tell him you won’t be in cheder today because you’re sick—and Mr. Kelly can plotz.”

  I thought that over. My thinking seemed to annoy my Aunt Sarah.

  “Now you can talk,” she said. “There’s nothing more to listen to.”

  I had a feeling she’d left something out. But I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

  “You don’t have to go to all those places,” I said. “A lot of kids don’t come to school every day. The teachers don’t do anything about it until a kid doesn’t show up for three or four days. Then they report it to the principal. Abe Lebenbaum, too, he won’t worry too much. His mother will be there until he comes down from his sleep. Besides, he probably doesn’t want any trouble with the Zabriskie sisters.”

  “The who?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “They work sort of like customers for Abe Lebenbaum,” I said. “The night this terrible thing happened at the Shumansky wedding, these girls, the Zabriskie sisters, they had a fire. I think Mr. Lebenbaum wouldn’t want anybody asking about that.”

  “Why not?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “Mr. Lebenbaum doesn’t like trouble with cops,” I said. “He has a slot machine out in back.”

  My Aunt Sarah nodded. The relationship of the slot machine to police authorities had apparently penetrated to the immigrant culture of New Haven.

  “So he won’t say nothing?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  I thought of Abe Lebenbaum up there in the apartment of the Zabriskie sisters. I mean I thought of the view from the fire escape. It seemed to me Abe’s mind would not be on conversation.

  “I’m pretty sure he won’t,” I said.

  “But if you don’t come to work in the store tonight?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  I thought some more. The nighttime was now my time. My only time. The Jefferson Davis II would not risk making contact during the day.