Last Respects

by Jerome Weidman

  “When you’ve lived the kind of life I’ve lived,” my mother said, “then you can talk, and then you can call names, but until then you hold your stupid filthy mouth shut.”

  My mother’s voice stopped. Her breath was coming fast. She went to the sink and turned on the tap. She took a glass from the drainboard and let the water run into it.

  “Chanah,” my Aunt Sarah said.

  My mother shook her head. My Aunt Sarah moved away, a few more inches, toward the far side of the sink. My mother took a swallow of water. She turned off the tap. My father seemed to come alive. Slowly. His body moved like a hibernating snake starting to uncoil. He turned on his side. He put one hand to the floor. My mother came back and stood over him. My father stopped moving. He remained on his side, one hand flat on the floor.

  “I have a chance,” she said. “For the first time in my life I have a chance to make things better. Not like it was over there.” She gestured behind her, as though she were flinging away something obscene. I realized she was referring to Europe. “The way I was told it would be over here,” my mother said. “And it never was. Never. But now I’m going to make it better. Now I know how to do it.” She paused, and she took a sip of water, and she said to my father, “Don’t you or anybody else try to stop me. You hear? Don’t even try.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Go,” my Aunt Sarah said to me.

  I ran down the green tunnel and opened the front door. George Weitz faced me.

  “They’re coming in,” he said.

  I stared at him. George was at the top of my list. What was he doing here? Then I remembered. I had hired him and Chink Alberg and Hot Cakes Rabinowitz to help me move the bottles from Top Floor Back to the schul.

  “Wait,” I said.

  I slammed the door in his face and ran back down the green tunnel. On the way through the kitchen into the front room I saw that my father had come up off the floor, but I did not stop. At the front-room windows I looked down on Fourth Street. George was right. Dusk was beginning to clap down. The red and blue and green and yellow bulbs had been turned on. Under them I could see people moving. They were crowding around a tall man in a shtrahmel, a wide-brimmed black hat trimmed with brown fur. I could tell from the way he acknowledged what were obviously obsequious greetings that the Melitzer Rabbi had arrived. So had the time to get going. I ran back through the kitchen and to the front door and opened it.

  “What the hell’s going on?” George Weitz said.

  Since the morning after the eliminations finals for the All-Manhattan rally, his position at the top of my list had never been challenged. I needed his help, and Walter Sinclair had authorized me to pay for it, but I didn’t owe him any explanations.

  “Where’s Chink and Hot Cakes?” I said.

  “Upstairs on the Fourth,” George said. “Waiting.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Come on.”

  They were waiting, all right. Outside the door of Top Floor Back. I opened the door with Mr. Noogle’s key and led them to the vonneh.

  “One bundle each,” I said. “Wrap it in newspaper. Get going.”

  “Money first,” George Weitz said.

  I fished from my pocket three of the twelve quarters Walter Sinclair had given me. I gave a coin to each of my three fellow members of Troop 244.

  “Next quarter when you come back for your second bundle,” I said.

  “Whatsa matter?” George said. “You don’t trust us?”

  “Chink and Hot Cakes, maybe,” I said. “Not you. Get the lead out. I’ll be here when you get back.”

  They pocketed the coins, took their bundles, and went out. I ran into the front room for another look down at Fourth Street. It was getting darker. The colored lights looked brighter. The people under them seemed animated. I turned and ran out of Top Floor Back. I locked the door and ran down to our flat. When I came into the kitchen my father was standing near the sink. My Aunt Sarah was on his left. My mother was at the kitchen table. For a few moments I couldn’t understand what was happening. It was as though I had stumbled into one of those paintings where some action has been frozen for reproduction on canvas. Then I heard my father’s voice.

  “If I’m what you call me,” he said, “it’s because of this rotten country where everything was going to be better. Better? Sewing pockets in pants on Allen Street? Getting paid only those weeks when they have pockets to sew? Hiding in corners from bloodsuckers like Mr. Velvelschmidt? You think for me it’s better than it is for you?”

  “I’m not thinking about you any more,” my mother said. “I’m finished with you,” she said. “From now on I’m thinking only about myself.”

  Behind me the front door opened and slammed shut. I turned toward the approaching footsteps. Walter Sinclair came out of the green tunnel, and it was as though something had suddenly gone wrong with my eyes. I knew it was Walter, and yet I didn’t seem to recognize him. I blinked stupidly at the blond hair, the tall slender figure, the easy smile, the black turtleneck sweater. All the pieces of the portrait, so to speak, were in place, and yet the total of all the pieces added up to something unfamiliar. I had the feeling that I didn’t really know this man. He could have been an imposter. He didn’t belong here.

  “Benny,” he said. “Be dark very soon. Your mama and I, we got to get the old Jeff Davis away from that dock. What’s holding things up, Benny?”

  “You know my son?”

  Walter turned toward my father. So did I, and all at once I knew what was wrong. The look on my father’s face told me. It was a look of fear. For the first time in all the years since he had come to America, my father was seeing the face of the New World.

  “I know Benny very well,” Walter Sinclair said, and I knew why he had seemed out of place, why I’d had the feeling he was an imposter who did not belong here. He didn’t. Walter Sinclair belonged to the open air in which I had met him. The dock. The barges creaking at their moorings. The smell and movement of the river. And the continent behind the river. The continent that had made a glowing promise to my father but had not kept it. The continent that did not have to keep any promises to Walter Sinclair. He was part of it. He owned it. He would always be out of place in a tenement kitchen on East Fourth Street. He was part of the fresh air of the New World. My father had never breathed that air. I could see that at last my father understood why. His face told me. I had never seen a human face look like that.

  “You know my wife, too?” he said.

  Walter turned toward my mother. His smile changed slightly. “Why, yes,” he said. “She introduced me to Benny.”

  He came further into the kitchen, still smiling. Then I heard a slap and a thump, and the smile fell from Walter’s face. He leaped forward. I turned, and for a frightened moment, I did not grasp what had happened. Then I realized my mother was shielding her face from another blow. Walter Sinclair reached her before my father’s swinging arm did. Walter covered her with his left arm. With a short, hard, chopping movement of his right fist, he knocked out three of my father’s upper front teeth. He went down clutching both hands to the blood spurting from his mouth.

  “Sorry about this,” Walter Sinclair said. “I always heard you guys from Europe were gentlemen, bowers from the waist and all that. Try to live up to what I heard. Don’t touch that girl again.”

  The door banged open. Chink Alberg came running in. He was carrying the bundle wrapped in pages of the Daily Forward. “Benny!” he screamed. “Benny, they got George and Hot Cakes!”

  Walter Sinclair stepped across my father. He grabbed the front of Chink’s sweater. “Who got them?”

  “Imberotti, from over Lafayette Street,” Chink said. “I mean he’s the only one I know. I recognized him. But the others, the other guys—”

  Walter knocked the breath out of him with a hard shove. Chink staggered back against the wall. Walter stood there for several moments, scowling down at the floor. He was trying to figure the next move. I was watching him so closel
y that I did not see my father get up. He had reached Chink and pulled the package of bottles out of Chink’s hands before anybody in the kitchen was aware of what was happening.

  “All right,” my father said. “All right.” The words came spitting out on a spray of blood from his smashed lips. “I’m what you say I am,” he said. “I’m a nothing. And now I’ll show you what a nothing can do.”

  For several moments after he was gone I wondered stupidly why I seemed to be waiting for a familiar sound. Then I realized that with his hands full, my father had not been able to slam the door behind him.

  17

  FORTY YEARS LATER, IN the Queens apartment out of which thirty-two days ago with a broken thigh my mother had been carried to the Peretz Memorial Hospital from which on this cold day before Christmas a few hours earlier her body had disappeared, I could still hear the deafening silence of that door being unslammed in 1927.

  “He must have been crazy,” Herman Sabinson said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Your father,” Herman Sabinson said. “On the Saturday they gave that block party for the Melitzer Rabbi. Your father must have been nuts.”

  I stared at Herman Sabinson with a sense of confused astonishment. Until this moment I had not realized I’d been telling him about that Saturday in 1927. I had never told anybody else. Not even my wife. Why Herman? He must have suddenly found he was asking himself the same question.

  “Look,” Herman said. “I don’t mean to be nosey. But we’re a couple of guys having a drink. Killing time while waiting for a phone call. I think it’s probably made you feel a little better, sort of eased the tension sort of, to tell me about it. But if you feel you’ve told me too much, forget it. I’ve got nobody to repeat it to, even if I wanted. The only time Sandra listens to me is when I tell her how much I’m depositing in her checking account. But if it embarrasses you, or sort of makes you feel, you know, uncomfortable like, like I say, forget it. You don’t have to say any more. Us Jewish boys, boy, have we got memories.”

  I wondered where his had started.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Yes, indeed.

  “Just the same,” Herman Sabinson said, “I can’t help thinking, from what you told me about that day, the day of the block party for the Melitzer Rabbi, your old man must have been a little nuts.”

  I had always thought so. It had never occurred to me that anybody else might think so. I looked at Herman Sabinson in a way that it embarrasses me to confess was new: with interest. “Why do you say that?” I said.

  Herman sloshed the drink in his glass. He looked uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, “of course, I never knew your father in those days, but for a long time, the last dozen years before he died, he lived right here in this apartment.” Herman looked around the living room hung with pictures of my youth as though to reassure himself that he was in the right place. “You see a man two, three times a week, maybe you think all you’re doing you’re checking his blood pressure, you’re counting his pulse, and of course you’re doing that. Just the same, you’re also getting a picture of the guy. What he’s like as a human being. You’re absorbing it without knowing. You know what I mean?”

  I didn’t, but I nodded and said, “Sure.” All at once I had the feeling that if Herman kept talking I might learn something. At my age, it was high time.

  “The picture I got all these last dozen years,” Herman Sabinson said, “the picture I got was a nice, sweet, gentle sort of person. Not on account of he was an invalid in a wheelchair. Believe me, I’ve got some patients, they’re invalids in wheelchairs, their characters, the way they act, believe me, they’re giving Hitler a bad name. Some of the bastards I have to take care of, don’t quote me, but wow!” Herman rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

  “I’ll bet,” I said.

  “But your father, no,” Herman Sabinson said. “And I’m not saying that just because I’m talking to his son. He was one sweetheart of a guy, your old man, he really was.”

  I thought of the day after the Shumansky wedding. The day my mother disappeared. The day my Aunt Sarah came down from New Haven. The day Mr. Kelly visited us in our Fourth Street kitchen. The day my father belted me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Just the same,” Herman Sabinson said, “I never got the feeling of a very bright guy. I don’t mean he was dumb. But let’s face it. Einstein he wasn’t.”

  Not Albert, anyway. “No,” I said, “Einstein he wasn’t.”

  “That’s what I mean about the way he acted that day,” Herman Sabinson said. “The day of that block party. I mean he must have known by that time what the score was. The government guy made that pretty damn clear, it seems to me. Your old man must have known your mother was running booze.”

  “Hooch,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I liked it better before,” I said. “When you called it hooch.”

  Herman Sabinson gave me a peculiar look. Who could blame him? He had just come to the conclusion that my father had been nuts. And having studied in a reputable medical school, Herman must have had some knowledge of the Mendelian laws.

  “Whatever you call it,” Herman said, “your father must have known your mother was running it, and he must have known that this was dangerous because that kid was killed at this wedding. That kid who was marrying the chicken guy’s daughter? You know?”

  “Aaron Greenspan,” I said.

  “Right,” Herman Sabinson said. “Well, Jesus Christ, that was gang stuff. Those wops? You know the name?”

  “Imberotti,” I said.

  “Those boys,” Herman Sabinson said. “They made it perfectly clear they were not going to let your mother get away with it. Your father knew that.”

  The trouble was, of course, that he knew more than that.

  “I don’t think he was a very worldly sort of guy,” I said.

  “Worldly, shmerldly,” Herman Sabinson said. “How worldly do you have to be to stay away from guys with guns?”

  “I don’t think that was on his mind,” I said.

  “Well, it should have been,” Herman said. “That’s what I mean when I say he must have been a little nuts. He knew these Imberottis, a few days, before he knew they’d shot up this Greenspan boy. Then he also knew from this kid, the one came running in with the bundle of bottles—”

  “Chink Alberg,” I said.

  “That kid, yes,” Herman Sabinson said. “We had a Chink at the Edgie. Chink Rosen.”

  “There’s a Chink on every Jewish block in the United States,” I said.

  “On account of how his eyes slanted,” Herman Sabinson said. “Chink Rosen. That’s why we called him Chink. I imagine it was the same on your block. So when your father saw this kid come running into your kitchen, he knew the Imberottis were down there in the street. He knew they didn’t go around slapping wrists. He knew those boys did it with guns. But in spite of what he knew, what did your father do? He grabbed the bundle of bottles from this kid, this Chink whatever his last name was, and your father he says he’ll make the delivery to the schul himself, and he runs out with the bottles. Right into the arms of these guys with the guns, who shot him into a wheelchair for the rest of his life. You call that a sensible way to act?”

  “No,” I said, “I guess not.”

  “After forty years,” Herman Sabinson said, “you’re still guessing?”

  I looked at him with renewed interest. Of course I was. That was the problem. The feeling that I might learn something grew stronger.

  “Listen, Herman,” I said.

  He started to. I could tell by the way he tapped the gold sign of Caduceus on his tie. But just then the phone rang. I went out to the foyer.

  “Hello?”

  “Dr. Sabinson there?”

  “One moment, please.” I covered the mouthpiece and called, “Herman, for you.”

  He came into the foyer and took the phone.

  “Yes?” Herman listened for a few moments, then said, “You s
ure?”

  The speaker at the other end must have been. Because Herman kept nodding for several moments as he listened. Soaking it up, whatever it was. Agreeing.

  “All right,” he said finally. “Thank you.” Herman hung up and turned to me. “Everything is okay.”

  He couldn’t have uttered a more irritating phrase. I have learned not only to distrust it, but to be angry with people who employ it. Everything is never okay.

  “Spell that out, please,” I said.

  Herman Sabinson nodded in a troubled way. He understood my irritation. “What I mean is,” he said, “I mean I’ve got the facts.”

  “What are they?” I said.

  “It’s one of those dopey mistakes,” Herman said. “The ambulance, the one they sent from the Queens medical examiner’s office to the Peretz Memorial Hospital, the guy driving it, it turns out, he’s new. They just hired him. Or he was just assigned to the job a few days ago. A Puerto Rican kid, I understand.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” I said.

  “Nothing, I suppose,” Herman Sabinson said. “A driver who is not a Puerto Rican would probably have made the same mistake.”

  “What mistake?” I said.

  “He went to the Peretz Memorial Hospital and he picked up your mother’s body around eleven-thirty this morning,” Herman Sabinson said. “But he had two more pickups. The Evangeline Booth General down near Throg’s Neck, and the Francis Xavier Special Surgery on Columbus Avenue.”

  “In Manhattan?” I said.

  Herman Sabinson nodded. “That’s what caused the trouble,” he said. “On account of it’s the day before Christmas, and a Sunday yet, too, they’re short-handed all over town, so they gave him this Manhattan pickup. I mean, ordinarily he would have done only the Queens hospitals and gone back to Queens General. This pickup in Manhattan, though, Francis Xavier Special Surgery on Columbus Avenue, he got his signals crossed. The driver. He thought he was ordered to carry all the bodies to Francis Xavier. Which is what he did. You can imagine what a snafu that caused. Anyway, they’ve just got it straightened out. What they want you to do, you don’t have to go to Queens General again. All you have to do is go over to Francis Xavier. You can identify your mother’s body right there, in Manhattan. They understand it’s their fault, the mix-up, I mean, so they’re trying to make it easy for you.”