Last Respects

by Jerome Weidman

  Thus the seven dollars entrusted to me seemed not inadequate. I shoved the pencil-lettered note into one pocket of my pants, the thirty dollars into my other pocket, and climbed the stairs. My Aunt Sarah was sitting at the kitchen table, as usual reading the Daily Forward. Studying it, anyway. From the bedroom beyond the kitchen came my father’s rasping snores.

  Looking back on it now, it strikes me as an eerie scene. The tenement kitchen. Lighted by a faint dot of flickering blue and gold and white flame at the end of the curved gas jet hanging from the ceiling. Sending shadows like delicate waves across the green corridor walls covered with my scribblings. The big square black iron stove banked for the night, smoking slightly. The beautiful fat woman in a coarse flour-sack apron bent over the newspaper. And the knowledge that she was there because my mother had disappeared. My heart jumped with excitement. My gut quivered with fear. My Aunt Sarah spoke.

  “It says here a man named Greenspan died today in Washington,” she said. “He owned a department store.”

  “A lot of people are dead,” I said.

  “Like Aaron Greenspan,” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “I didn’t mean him,” I said.

  “He’s the one the government they mean,” my Aunt Sarah said. “In the paper, you read the paper, the government when they go after someone, they always catch people.”

  Not people like Walter Sinclair.

  “They won’t catch Mama,” I said.

  “You know where she is?”

  “No,” I said, “but I know she didn’t kill Aaron Greenspan.”

  “Who killed him?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “Mr. Imberotti’s son,” I said.

  I said it the way, if I had been asked the name of my scoutmaster, I would have said Mr. O’Hare. At that time, as I recall, life presented many difficulties, but no uncertainties. Facts did not have to be tested. All they had to be was accepted. There were no shaded areas between guesswork and evidence. Logic worked. I had heard Mr. Imberotti threaten my mother: Do not try to supply the Shumansky wedding. My mother had disregarded the threat. She had supplied the Shumansky wedding. Mr. Imberotti had carried out his threat. Not in person, of course. Nobody inhaling steam out of a teakettle on the Saturday night my mother and I had visited Mr. Imberotti could have been well enough on the night of the Shumansky wedding to carry a gun across from Lafayette Street to the Lenox Assembly Rooms. But Mr. Imberotti’s son had been there. If the government was as good at catching people as the Daily Forward said it was, when Mr. Kelly caught the killer of Aaron Greenspan, he would not be catching my mother. Q.E.D.

  “How do you know this?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “I know it,” I said.

  She gave me a long look. By long I don’t mean she took a long time doing it. I mean my Aunt Sarah wrapped it around me, like a rope, tying me to the simple statement until she was satisfied I could not escape from it.

  “All right,” my Aunt Sarah said. “What should we do now?”

  It was the moment when I crossed the line from boyhood into maturity. In the complicated machinery that ran the world, I had suddenly been moved up to the control panel.

  “Here is for Mr. Velvelschmidt,” I said. I pulled the roll of bills from my pocket and counted out onto the blue-and-white checks of the oilcloth on the kitchen table two tens and three singles. “For the rent,” I said. I then put down the two ten-spots I had received from Mr. Heizerick. My heart thumped as I said, “And this is for you.”

  My Aunt Sarah nodded. “And?” she said. She said no more. I knew she understood how I felt.

  I counted out the five and the last two singles. They covered a large part of the kitchen table. In those days paper money was about the size of the pages torn from copies of Boys’ Life.

  “This is for Mr. Noogle,” I said.

  16

  I THINK NOW THAT perhaps all our lives would have been different if those seven dollars had not been made available to shmeer Mr. Noogle. On the other hand, different does not mean better.

  “It’s like a horse, they put on those things to cover his eyes, and they give him a shtipp, and he starts moving the way the owner wants him to move,” my Aunt Sarah said to me years later, on the day of my father’s funeral. “The horse has nothing to do with it, and neither have we. We go the way we’re fixed to go from the beginning. We can’t stop it.”

  I’ve never wanted to believe that. I think as I look back on my life that there are places where I didn’t have to go. I went because the way was open. Or easy. Or because it looked attractive. Or because someone I was stuck on wanted to go that way. The reasons are always reasonable. But not necessarily compelling. In every instance I know, now, that I could have gone up another street. But I cannot say that I would have ended up in a better place.

  I can, however, say now what for years I refused to say even to myself: my mother went the way she went because she was trapped. I learned that the night of the block party for the Melitzer Rabbi.

  One of the peculiar things about this block party is that nobody was sure just what time it would take place.

  The project had started somewhere in the confused machinery that ran the synagogue near the Avenue D corner. The main reason for the confusion was that the synagogue had been built sometime between the end of the Grant administration and the beginning of the new century by immigrants from Melitz. They had made a mistake. Melitz was a town about sixty miles northeast of Berlin. The immigrants who built the synagogue on East Fourth Street apparently had good reason to believe that they were building their house of worship on what was going to continue to be a German block. They were wrong.

  I don’t know how the shift came about, but when my father arrived from Austria and somewhat later my mother arrived from Hungary, the Germans in the area had moved on and nested solidly on Tenth Street. Synagogues cannot be moved like other personal possessions. They can be sold, however, like other forms of real estate, and I understand that the German Jews of Tenth Street tried to sell their synagogue to the Austrian and Hungarian Jews on Fourth Street. No luck.

  Fourth Street, my piece of it, anyway, was not a very prosperous block. I don’t know what synagogues were going for in those days, but whatever the price the residents of East Fourth Street either could not get it up or were not interested in buying anything from Germans. I suspect the latter was the more compelling reason. I never heard a good word said on East Fourth Street about a German.

  Not even on Saturdays when they came down from Tenth Street in surprisingly large numbers to worship in the synagogue they had left behind them years ago. I never thought it odd, not in those years, anyway, that on the Sabbath, when the Germans came pouring into Fourth Street carrying the gold-embroidered green and blue and red velvet bags containing their siddurs and prayer cloths, the citizens of East Fourth Street poured out in other directions, toward synagogues that were housed in rented lofts in rat-infested structures like the one in which during the rest of the week Rabbi Goldfarb conducted his cheder on Columbia Street.

  The parallel is not quite parallel, but the situation does remind me now of Berlin after the end of World War Two. The city sits in the Russian zone. By treaty we have access to it. But the access makes for uneasiness. Sometimes for ugliness. The period of the Berlin airlift was no fun. Here again the parallel is not quite parallel, but it is difficult to overlook. When the Germans of Tenth Street decided to bring over the Melitzer Rabbi and install him in their synagogue on Fourth Street, they were embarking on a complicated and dislocating venture in if not quite hostile then certainly unfriendly terrain. Who, on East Fourth Street, gave a damn about the coming of the Melitzer Rabbi?

  The answer, surprisingly enough, was not only my mother. She had what might be described as the catering concession. But it takes—anyway, in 1927 it took—more than booze to make a block party. It took an exercise in tactical synchronization.

  The block party was scheduled for a Saturday night. On Thursday morning carpenters and elect
ricians began to arrive on East Fourth Street. German carpenters and electricians. The distinction is important for a curious reason: there should have been no distinction. There were no carpenters or electricians on Fourth Street. I mean the way there were grocers and butchers and tailors and blacksmiths—one blacksmith, anyway—and chicken merchants. Repairs that required carpentry skills were always made, rarely with skill, by the tenement janitors. At 390, for instance, by Mr. Noogle. As for repairs involving electricity, all the tenement homes on the block were lighted by gas. The only electricity on East Fourth Street came from the two lampposts on the Avenue D corner. The lampposts on the Lewis Street corner were still lighted by carbon arcs.

  When the Avenue D lamps needed attention, the city took care of it. I cannot remember just how. Perhaps some minor official arrived when I was in school or at cheder and installed a new electric bulb. In those days they all had a sharp point at the bottom. We were told in J.H.S. 64 science class that this was caused by the men in the factory who wore asbestos gloves with which they sealed the bulb by twirling the hot molten glass between thumb and forefinger. Maybe they did. I have learned to doubt many of the things that were fed me as hard fact in J.H.S. 64 science class. Anyway, the electric lights at the Avenue D corner of Fourth Street were a minor puzzle to me. The carbon arcs at the Lewis Street corner presented no such difficulty to the mind of a senior patrol leader.

  Every day, just before dusk, a man came walking down the block wearing a sort of almost black, certainly very dark gray, knapsack humped up between his shoulder blades and a shiny leather cap or helmet on his head. He carried a long stick with an odd trigger handle. It was not unlike the implements that became commonplace years later for reaching up, grasping, and bringing down boxes of corn flakes from the top shelves of supermarkets. The man would reach up with this stick, slide the head in under the glass dome on top of the lamppost, and do something to the triggerlike handle at the bottom. A tiny spurt of flame would dart up to the carbon arcs. The facing points would ignite. A lovely warm glow would pour down on the corner of Lewis Street and Fourth. The man would do the same to the other lamppost, and move on.

  It was a small daily ceremony to which I had not realized I had learned to look forward until the Germans of Tenth Street sent in all those electricians and carpenters to set up the block party for the arrival of the Melitzer Rabbi.

  At the end of two days of efficient hammering they had closed off our block with barricades at the Avenue D and Lewis Street corners. Across the block, from poles set on the facing sidewalks, strings of small red, white, blue, and green electric lights were stretched on black wires that soared like halved barrel staves up, over, and down to the other side of the street. The effect was to make the familiar block an unfamiliar sight. A long sausagelike cavern, like a loosely woven basket designed to hold loaves of French bread, that had been lowered over our heads.

  I watched it take shape with astonishment. In the evening, when somebody threw the control switch inside the synagogue and all the colored lights came on with a noiseless explosion, my breath caught in a small gasp of pleasure. But I also had a feeling of uneasiness. Through the green and yellow and red lights I could see the man with the knapsack and the long pole poking his tiny jet of flame at the carbon arcs on the Lewis Street corner. He no longer seemed to be doing anything important. The Germans, intent on giving the Melitzer Rabbi an appropriate welcome, had taken the mystery out of the Fourth Street night.

  The night they chose was a mistake.

  Anybody on Fourth Street could have told them so. The Jews of Tenth Street, however, rarely listened to anybody but themselves.

  Word had come through to them, presumably from the Immigration Department, that the Melitzer Rabbi, who was being processed at Ellis Island after leaving the ship that had brought him from Europe, would be free to leave on Saturday morning. The Jews of Tenth Street decided to meet him at the dock with an appropriate delegation. This, while a tribute to their devotion, was tactically dubious.

  Saturday, any Saturday, is a day of worship. It was no day to shepherd home from the Castle Garden ferry at the lower tip of Manhattan a man who was touched by reverence and surrounded by an entourage of nobody quite knew how many members, all washed by the same glow of heavenly light. The trouble was that on Saturdays, Jews who were frim, meaning deadly serious in their devotion to the rituals and strictures of their religion, would no more think of moving about in any form of vehicular transportation than they would think of striking a match or even a wife. The trouble was complicated by the fact that the Jews of Tenth Street did not seem to be aware of the distance in terms of miles between their home block and the lower tip of Manhattan.

  I cannot believe that the question did not cross their minds. Or the minds of their movers and shakers. Or surely the mind of one leader. They must have had at least one. Germans always do.

  In any case, the Germans of East Tenth Street in 1927 acted in a manner that I suppose there will always be people like me to call typical. They divided their forces. Those who were most frim came down to the synagogue on Fourth Street carrying their gold-embroidered velvet prayer bags as they did every Saturday morning. The others—I later estimated that at the start there were easily a hundred—set out on foot for the Battery.

  During the past many years I have given this one day in my life a great deal of thought. Perhaps more than it deserves. And yet, until the day my mother died and her body disappeared from the Peretz Memorial Hospital in Queens on the day before Christmas, the only concrete result of all those years of thinking was the conviction that my life would have been entirely different if the Germans of East Tenth Street had decided to meet the Melitzer Rabbi, and celebrate his arrival at the Fourth Street block party, on a weekday. They would almost certainly have used the subway. Or the Avenue B streetcar. Or even a few taxis. Money, after all, was not a prime consideration. My point is, that coming up from the Battery on wheels they would almost certainly have arrived on East Fourth Street before dusk. Walter Sinclair and I had assumed they would. Our plan, or rather his, was based on this assumption. That was why, on Saturday afternoon, following the chulent and during the lunch, I left our flat, climbed the stairs, and let myself into Top Floor Back with the key Mr. Noogle had given my Aunt Sarah in exchange for the seven dollars Walter Sinclair had left in our mailbox.

  Chulent was the staple of the Sabbath meal, a thick, heavy, delicious stew made of meat, beans, potatoes, onions, and spices. Every housewife on the block made her pot of chulent on Friday. Before sundown every boy on East Fourth Street carried the family pot up the street and around the corner to Mr. Siegel’s bakery on Avenue D. Here Mr. Siegel placed the pots in the oven to keep warm overnight. They were never labeled. Every family had its own special pot, and Mr. Siegel identified every one of them by their contours as readily as he identified the owners by their sons.

  Saturday at noon, when the family heads started coming home from the synagogue, the sons headed back to Mr. Siegel’s bakery. Here the Shabbes goy, a gentile who was paid to perform tasks on the Sabbath forbidden to devout Jews by Holy Writ, would remove the pots from the oven with a long wooden shovel, and we would carry them home, piping hot, for the midday meal. After every scrap had been eaten, the head of the household lay down for a postprandial nap that was known as the lunch.

  The word came from the piece of furniture on which these naps were taken: a brown leather couch with a headrest at one end. In shape, the one we owned, which was exactly like every other on the block, was not unlike the object on which in popular paintings of the period Madame Récamier is seen receiving the guests in her salon. To every family on the block this piece of furniture was known by the word under which the manufacturers of Grand Rapids had sent the model out into the world of immigrant America: a lounge. On East Fourth Street the word was pronounced lunch.

  I waited until my father lay down and covered his face with the black and red polka-dotted bandanna he had owned since his serv
ice as a conscript in the cavalry of Emperor Franz Joseph.

  “You want help?”

  It was my Aunt Sarah, speaking from the kitchen sink. I stopped on my way to the front door.

  “No,” I said.

  “You sure?” she said.

  I was positive. Walter Sinclair had laid it all out. “Yes,” I said.

  My Aunt Sarah addressed the big brown pot from which she was scrubbing away the last scraps of chulent. “Sometimes things happen,” she said.

  Maybe they did. But not when Walter Sinclair was in charge. My mind, dominated by visions of the Jefferson Davis II, corrected the image at once. I shouldn’t have said not when Walter Sinclair was in charge. The correct phrasing was: not when Walter Sinclair was at the helm. I had just started to read Conrad.

  “Nothing is going to happen,” I said. What else do you say and believe at fourteen?

  “I’m glad to hear it,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Because tomorrow I have to go back to New Haven.”

  My heart jumped. During the few days since the Shumansky wedding, when my mother had disappeared, I had grown accustomed to the presence of Aunt Sarah in the house. I liked her better than my mother. I had extended this feeling into the certainty that my Aunt Sarah was going to be with us forever. I had conveniently forgotten that she had a family of her own in New Haven.

  “You’ll come back?” I said.

  “If everything is all right,” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “In New Haven?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Here.”

  That settled any lingering doubts I may have had about the day’s plan. “Everything is going to be all right,” I said.

  “Good,” my Aunt Sarah said. “But watch out for Mr. Noogle.”