by Ed Ifkovic
What I found was a drifting conversation that skirted the taboo subject of neighborhood murder. Instead, the chatter was of food: the first course of soup, hearty beef barley soup with marrow balls, with hand-rolled hair-fine noodles, served in a tureen so ornate it seemed a relic from a Roman bacchanal. Esther’s roast chicken, a gigantic bird glistening brown, juices running, the aroma of generous paprika and bay leaf. A stuffing of chestnuts and apples and a hint of red onion, a nutty confection that made my mouth water. Mashed potatoes so fluffy, laced with diced parsley, they seemed cotton candy at the fair, pats of sweet butter melting in the white canyons. A salad of tart brine-soaked dandelion greens mixed with bits of sliced oranges and sugared strawberries, and slathered with a vinegar glaze that seemed lit by fire. A robust feast, a triumph, and my mother discussed all parts of it, a culinary autopsy, praising, celebrating, worshipping. And rightly so, because I relished Esther’s domestic art, her magic touch, that deft reach of spice and invention and love.
We sat around the heavy mahogany dining room table on chairs covered in deep-crimson plush fabric. I faced a fireplace fronted with a fire screen of vaguely oriental design—hummingbirds flitting on bamboo stems. An antique grandfather clock stood across from a built-in china cabinet. Over the mantel was a spread of family photographs in black-walnut frames, sepia-tinted—a formal wedding photograph of Esther and Sol, young and slender, unsmiling, he in an ill-fitting suit with a boutonniere (a sprig of lilac) and she in lace, with wraparound filigreed train, a bouquet of calla lilies held tightly.
So animated was the conversation about food, so heady and almost comical, such a purposeful skirting of what occupied our minds: darling little Edna’s mammoth transgression. Each time I began to say something, one of the women spoke over me. “Such a copper pickle you find at Lyon’s Delicatessen,” Molly blurted out. “I mean, it looks painted green. I swear.”
“A blouse I found on the bargain table at Goldblatt’s—only a small tear I can fix.” From Esther.
I didn’t care.
I wanted to talk about Leah Brenner.
Once, opening my mouth to mention something about my morning stroll through the Maxwell Street marketplace, old Molly, bent over her plate, brightened and shared an anecdote that had no end. In fact, it really had neither beginning nor middle, some ramble about a greenhorn peasant trying to buy a shiffcart, a steamship ticket, at a drug store off Union. It was blather—and welcomed at the table. We waited for a punch line, but none came. Molly was upbeat and sparkling, yet it was forced and deliberate. It tickled me, I had to admit, that chaotic story, because I liked the old woman. She believed it was her job to give direction to her undemonstrative family. Esther, a soft-focus sentimentalist, beamed over her food, and her husband, Sol, a generous man who cultivated serenity, often struck me as asleep when you spoke to him. A little balding man with a scaly scalp and bushy white eyebrows on a blotchy face, he responded to most questions by checking first with his much-adored wife, as though begging her to answer for him. They were as wonderful a couple as God chose to send to this Earth. Old Molly, ancient now and opinionated and fiery, was the bandleader of that family.
“Where’s Adolph?” my mother asked.
Esther pointed to the grandfather clock. “He’s late. That job at Feinstein’s Hardware, I suppose. Some afternoons he works, some mornings…” She waved her hand in the air. “Who knows? He’s picking up Minna.”
Molly addressed me. “Adolph’s intended. A lovely girl, a grade-school teacher.”
Sol spoke up. “Yeah, he’s been intending for ten years now.” He stressed the word, but with affection. “I keep telling him—a little bungalow like they’re building now. Come May One I’ll borrow Sy’s truck.” The first of May, when all of Chicago chose to move, whether they planned to or not.
Molly smiled at her son. “Now, now, Sol. He’s just a boy.”
Sol grunted. “He’s forty, for God’s sake. He hasn’t been a boy since I had hair.” He touched the top of his bald head. “A batten.” A lazy boy.
No one laughed.
Sol was perplexed. “I seen him up on Clark. At Bob’s Quick Lunch. Early this afternoon. He was walking out of there with Jacob. They…” He stopped. “What?”
Apologetically, Esther explained to Molly, “They are old friends, you know.”
Molly wasn’t happy with the direction the talk was going. “A bad influence, that Jacob.”
“Two drifters,” Sol added.
Molly turned to me. “A drinker at the taxi-dance halls, that Jacob, I tell you. People tell me things. Adolph tells me but makes excuses for him.” She smirked. “Jacob calls himself a poet. What kind of money can a poet make?”
“A poet?” I asked.
“Yes, Jacob Brenner, the idler, he tells everyone he’s a poet. A…wastrel, he is.” Molly raised her voice.
Esther’s voice was hurried. “Jacob is always so polite to me.”
“Only to women,” Molly grumbled.
I cleared my throat. “Not every woman.”
“Edna, really,” my mother sniped.
Esther was chuckling. “Our Monroe Street Romeo without a balcony.”
Sol muttered, “And his sidekick is our Ad. The two running off to the movies at the Biograph. I seen them. Even at the Tivoli on College Grove, fancy-spancy, one dollar a ticket. Crazy. Throwing away money neither one got.”
Molly breathed in. “Now you leave Adolph alone, Sol. A good boy with a big heart.”
“Two playboys with polished shoes and flashy spats,” Sol added. “Ad and Jacob. The Katzenjammer Kids up there on the stage. One jumps left, the other jumps right.”
A vaudeville cue, it seemed, because the front door opened and Adolph strolled in, unhurried, trailed by a wisp of a woman, a nervous grin on her face.
“I’m late, I know,” Ad said with no apology in his voice, a wide grin on his face. “It’s Minna’s fault.” He bowed toward the woman, still grinning but now red-faced.
“Don’t believe him,” she said softly.
“We never do,” Sol said.
“C’mon, Papa.” Ad swirled around clumsily, the loose-jawed clown.
He’d changed since my fleeting acquaintance with him eighteen years before. Then he was a gangling young man, early twenties, prominent Adam’s apple and cowlick, though attractive in a farm boy way—an ah-shucks goofiness. Of course, he was no dashing Jacob, his next-door buddy and ne’er-do-well wanderer in the streets. But Ad Newmann had a shyness that made you like him, smile at him—as though he was genuinely surprised when someone noticed him and—liked him. I liked him because of his breezy manner, the way he seemed tickled to find himself drifting somewhere in the solar system. When Jacob said something vaguely risqué, though out of earshot of his parents, Ad blushed. He was Sir Galahad, a shining knight that no one needed.
He grabbed his father from behind and squeezed him. “You love me, Papa.”
“Only on rainy days.”
Everyone laughed.
“You know I’m your favorite son, Papa.”
“Ah, clever—my only son.”
Ad had added flesh to those long stringy bones, and the effect was pleasing: a hail-fare-thee-well soul, a little beefy but still appealing, if slick and smooth in his rumpled summer linen suit. Another perennial bachelor, Esther insisted, though his endless engagement to the doe-eyed Minna Pittman, a teacher out in Lawndale, occupied much of the suppertime talk when Ad was absent. Ad once played with the notion of becoming a rabbi, caught up in Talmudic studies for what seemed a wasted year—his family holding its breath—but since then he’d had too many jobs. He worked as a puller on Maxwell Street, wooing customers into Wittenberg’s Clothiers; but, painfully honest, he pointed out the faulty seams in the pants he peddled. So he did this, then did that, and nothing for very long.
The atmosphere of the dining room shifted
when Ad and Minna sat down. Ad’s smart-aleck affection for his family caused Esther to tsk tsk at his rolling nonsense and Sol to betray his impatience with the son who liked to stay in bed most mornings. But everyone seemed to relax. Because, most times, the conversation of the dowager Molly and her son and daughter-in-law, though friendly, was peculiarly formal. Ad was the yeast that bubbled the surface of things. He even got my mother to smile when he described his battle with a peddler on Maxwell.
“So he says to me, ‘Gay avek, nudnik,’ and I say back, ‘You’re a gantser kener,’ and he says, ‘You call that English?’”
I struggled a little with the translation. Get out of here, you pest. You’re a know-it-all.
Minna Pittman said little and seemed thrilled with Ad’s performance. The Ben Franklin eyeglasses on the small, tight oval face gave her face a pinched look, with a worrywart’s nervous habit of darting eyes and twitching nose. She was dressed in a prim summer smock with too many girlish blue periwinkles dotting the fabric, the woeful look of an older maiden aunt, one good for darning one’s socks and embroidering a frilly parlor antimacassar. A mean-spirited depiction, I admit, but Minna Pittman kept staring at Ad Newmann with the unadulterated adoration of a frenzied girl gaping at a Saturday-afternoon matinee idol. A little disconcerting, and wholly delusional.
Ad monopolized the supper, as I suspected he often did—a rollicking, if insipid, spiel of zany stories from the marketplace. At one point he began an anecdote about a friend and his battle with chopped liver—“So a pan of gehakte leber slips into her lap and…and…and the man says”—which suddenly veered dangerously into the risqué, though, I realized, Ad was oblivious of the double entendre he was executing, which made it all the more delightful. But his father, rolling his eyes, grumbled, “This from the sad rabbinical student.”
That failed vocation was a sore spot with his father. Ad, I knew from his mother’s long in-kitchen catalogue of her son’s occupations, had especially disappointed his father when he’d abandoned his studies. Ad’s yearlong fevered fascination with a religion he’d paid scant attention to most of his life had resulted from an old man who sat for hours at the butcher shop, the cracker-box Talmudist in the back room. Ad lingered there with Jacob, a scoffer at the strictures of his own religion. But not so Ad, enthralled by the old man’s devotion to storytelling…the ancient and mysterious lore of Judaism. Jacob had little patience with Ad’s new passion.
The result, unfortunately, was that Ad reinforced his image among the men as a moralistic prig, tinged now with a bit of the mystical medieval Jew, a scholarly diversion at odds with his fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants life. When that ended, Ad worked as a handyman, a pushcart vendor of hot dogs, a helper at Nathan’s Meat Market after Morrie Wolfsy went it alone for a few months after Ivan’s murder. “That was so short a time,” Esther told me. “The spine-chilling squawk of a chicken beheaded sent him out the door.” An encyclopedia salesman, a shoe salesman, a pretzel maker, and now, a jack-of-all-trades gadabout at Feinstein’s Hardware up on Halsted.
Perhaps Sol was resigned to his son’s wanderlust, though his impatience seeped through his love for his son. But the cult of adoration was not the sole province of Minna, at that moment picking gingerly at a chicken wing. No, the charter member of that familial club was old Molly herself. Severe and crotchety though she might be, and a magpie of neighborhood gossip, she doted on her only grandson.
“She always has,” Esther told my mother and me earlier. “Her special boy. She blames Jacob Brenner for Ad’s lack of…of focus, you can say. She doesn’t like Jacob.”
Sol and Esther’s other child, a younger daughter named Harriet, lost in the shadows created by Ad’s sunshine, married young and retreated to Cleveland with a husband and three children, returning only for the High Holy Days. And only sometimes, at that.
Molly left the room for something, beating that cane on the hardwood floor, tap tap tap, forcing us to stop talking, and, as she passed Ad’s chair, her gnarled fingertips caressed the back of his neck. He smiled up at her, a little boy’s grateful glance. It was, frankly, a loving gesture that communicated to the rest of us that there should only be two people at the dining room table. I caught my mother’s eye. Her glance said, emphatically, This is how devotion is supposed to look. Pay attention, Edna.
I supposed it was hard to dislike the scattered Ad because, well, we tend naturally to like children.
I’d been watching him, lost in thought, enjoying his schoolboy banter, so I’d missed something. I wasn’t paying attention to what was said, but the air in the room got heavy. Sudden stillness at the table, every head turned to Ad. Molly, returning to the room, had stopped walking, teetering there on her cane. No tap tap tap now. She swayed, then fell into a chair, her face grim.
“What?” Ad asked, puzzled. “You all crazy? All I said was that we met Jacob sitting on his porch as we were walking here tonight. He told us Edna stopped in to see his mother earlier today.” He glanced at me. “They had iced tea or…or something. And…” His voice trailed off.
“This afternoon,” Minna finished. “I think.”
Now every eye centered on me. At that moment I realized—how had I not?—that my visit to Leah Brenner, which had devastated my mother and infuriated Molly, the unspoken topic of conversation at supper—had surfaced. The lethal river sloughing under our pleasantries and bonhomie had burst to the surface. Edna, the trespasser in the Garden of Eden.
Esther sighed. “Adolph, we know all about that.”
Ad was perplexed. “Well, what’s the problem? Jacob was downright happy about it. He…he was happy. And Jacob ain’t happy very often. It’s strange, that household. His mother hides away, and nobody knows what to do with her. I stop in, but I know I shouldn’t. I gotta meet Jacob…elsewhere. Jacob said Edna, here”—he nodded at me, smiling—“Edna, here, made his mother…you know…”—fumbling, fumbling—“happy.”
Molly smiled without any humor. “This is not suppertime conversation, Adolph dear.”
Helpless, faltering, with a trace of anger, he replied, “She is our neighbor.”
“I know who is my neighbor,” Molly snarled.
Baffled, he spoke to his father. “Papa?” But Sol was focused on his plate.
Of course, it was the only topic I was interested in, and so I began. “How is Jacob dealing with his mother, Ad? I’m sure, after the years away, and now back at home, he…”
My mother’s scream broke in. “Edna, really!”
“You must admit it’s an interesting household. A woman accused, sent away, deemed mad, returned, a killing that remains a mystery.”
Ad was watching me, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Edna, we don’t talk about Leah Brenner in this house. Or Ivan. Or that horrible day. The dark blot on the street.”
His grandmother sighed. “Adolph, dear, we’re not monsters. The way you paint us. It’s just best to bury the past. Such sadness then…that woman…”
I spoke up. “But clearly you haven’t buried anything. That wound is still open, frankly, if it’s a taboo subject here and the merest mention raises everything to the level of high drama.”
“Edna.” My mother barely squawked out the word. Only Julia Ferber could make my drab, unlovely name seem a curse. “Edna!” She’d been cutting a piece of chicken and she held the knife in mid-air as we all stared at it.
Ad answered my question. “He says his mother is quiet. Lonely. By herself. Waiting for visits from her children. He skirts around her because he doesn’t understand what’s going on. There are days he’s real depressed…like he doesn’t know what to do. You can’t talk to him those days.”
“So he hasn’t made peace with her return.”
Ad nodded. “She’s his mother but, you know…”
Molly hissed, “She killed a good man.”
“A mean man. Rotten.” But then Ad was sorry for the remark. Moll
y frowned at him.
I went on. “Does Jacob believe his mother killed his father?”
My mother rose, dropped her napkin to the floor. She still held out the knife, menacingly, but, spotting it gripped in her fingers, let it drop onto her plate. It clanged and slid onto the lace tablecloth. At that moment the grandfather clock chimed the hour and she yelped, like a shaken child. “My Lord, Edna, are there no boundaries?”
Ad was enjoying this, the smile still there. “He’s happy she can talk to someone like you. A writer like you. She likes you. He’s glad.” A glance at his grandmother and then at his mother. “I’m glad, too. The Talmud says”—he winked at his father—“if I can remember from my scholarly days, ‘It is fitting for a great God to forgive a great sinner.’ Maybe we should obey.”
“Obey!” thundered Molly. “We’re not God, sorry to say.” A wry smile. “The Talmud also says, ‘Let yourself be killed but do not kill.’’ She banged the table. “All right, enough. Let’s clear the dishes. Esther made strudel to die for.”
Minna, who’d been swiveling her head back and forth, panicked, jumped up and grabbed a platter. “Shhh, Ad,” she whispered to him. “Sha! Quiet! You know how this will end up.”
I laughed nervously. “It’s the reporter in me, I suppose. A curiosity. Back in Appleton the great Houdini and I solved a murder, the two of us a team. I covered a gruesome murder and trial in Milwaukee and…” I stopped.
My mother’s look was venomous. “An unmarried girl on the streets of that beer-besotted hellhole. Thank God for Prohibition.” She faltered a bit, observing the bottle of Manischewitz on the sideboard. “My daughter, the alte moyd.” The old maid.
I would have none of it. “I’m sorry. I don’t believe Leah Brenner killed her husband. Not one bit. Where was the knife? A dazed woman wouldn’t plan…” Again I stopped.
