by Ed Ifkovic
“Esther,” my mother laughed, “you cry when the first flower blooms in spring.”
Cracking my door slightly, I heard my mother telling Esther that lamentably, we’d not stay the full two weeks—another cousin insisted we visit in Evanston for two or three days. Blather and nonsense, of course, simply an excuse to secret her wayward daughter from the explosive household.
Yet another reason kept me in my room, tucked into a chair by the window and staring out at the leaves of the sugar maple tree wilting under the unrelieved heat. An awful reason: the visit with Jacob to Emma and Ella’s rooming house. Jacob’s careless dissembling, that slip about what he saw on the day his father was murdered. Perhaps meaningless, perhaps not—but curious. And Ella and Emma’s spirited defense of his memory—and that curious sleight-of-hand maneuver of having Emma recite his poem, a preamble to my being shooed out the door. It bothered me, his failed memory. You’d remember every step you took on such an awful day, no? Stunned at that moment, of course, dazed, but later, recollecting in the painful days to follow, you’d order your thoughts, check off the moments in your head. But maybe not the helter-skelter Jacob—and his two bizarre sisters, his hip-hip-hurrah cheering team, panicky in their defense of a much-loved brother.
What to make of it all?
I waited until I heard Molly, Esther, and my mother leave the house, headed to the markets, then went downstairs into the kitchen for coffee and Esther’s butter-slathered rye rolls. But the house was not empty after all. Ad was munching on toast, his face buried in the morning newspaper. He yawned and smiled. He was wearing a crisp white cotton shirt, unbuttoned at the neck to reveal a sunburned neck.
“Good morning, Ad.”
“You hiding, Edna?”
“I thought everyone was gone.”
“They’ve gone shopping.” He chuckled. “I guess you were not invited. Papa’s at the cigar store, of course. Only Lazy Ad stays home to masquerade as the leisure class. Lawn tennis at noon with Mrs. Potter Palmer, then a spin around the Loop in her ritzy fliv.” He smiled. “Actually I’m leaving now. I’ve been helping Old Man Feinstein in his hardware store—he pays me practically nothing, but it keeps the folks from exiling me from the castle.” He started to fold the newspaper. “Jacob told me you visited Ella and Emma yesterday at Mrs. Goldberg’s. That woman scares me. The twins scare me. Ah, Edna, you and your acts of courage.”
“Why? I found them delightful.”
He narrowed his eyes as he smirked. “Yeah, sure, Edna. Convince me of that, can you? The silly Siamese twins. Ella giving marching oom-pa-pah orders to her sobbing sister. You probably didn’t witness Ella screaming for hours at poor Emma, ‘You don’t have the brains you were born with.’ It ain’t pretty, let me tell you. Even though they put on a great act for the world to see, they don’t like each other. That’s clear. And yet they share a small, cramped room. Talk about your prison sentences. They hide from the world—they squeal if I say hello to them. They’re so…scattered, those two. Yet, I suppose, harmless.”
Ad’s face got tight. Standing, he placed his cup in the sink and tucked his folded newspaper under his arm. “Jacob was bothered by what you said, Edna.”
“What did I say?” I poured myself coffee, sat down, watching as he faced the outside window.
He hesitated, as though debating what to say to me. “I don’t know exactly. Jacob only tells me just this much.” He held up a thumb and index finger and punctuated the this. “He avoids sensitive talk, you know. Stuff about his mother. He thinks you’ve been asking a lot of questions about what folks remember.” His hand flew to the air, a dismissive gesture. “He says you badgered Ella and Emma.”
“I badgered him.”
That startled. “Why?”
“He contradicts his own story.”
A quizzical look. “So what? Why now? What does it matter?”
I munched on a bit of the delicious bread, moist, warm, scented with chewy caraway seeds, crispy outside, creamy inside. “Because now he suspects his mother is innocent of murder.”
Ad started to cough, doubled over. When he leaned back, rubbing his cheek, he wore a quizzical smile. “He didn’t tell me that you said that. That news must have stopped him cold in his tracks. Good God, Edna. You are something else. I can see why Jacob got depressed.”
“Depressed?”
“He got moody. Maybe not real depressed. Sometimes he gets down in the dumps. There’s no being with him those times. I back away. It’s like this wave of melancholy drowns him.”
“Maybe it’s time someone in that family paid some attention.”
Ad pulled a chair out, swiveled it around, straddled it. The newspaper slipped to the linoleum floor. Nervously, he lit a cigarette. “You don’t think Jacob did it, do you?” Breathless, staring into my face.
“I don’t know.”
Ad didn’t expect that answer and thumped the table with his fist. “Lord, Edna, do you hear yourself? This is Jacob. Sweet Jacob. He loves his mother. He never wanted his mother to be the one accused. But that’s the way it happened. Problems with his father, everybody did, but he wouldn’t kill him.”
“He wouldn’t be the first son to kill a father.” I stared into his troubled face. “Sometimes those who love find themselves killing. That’s the way it is. Because of the love, Ad. In a rage. A momentary fit. Passion. I read the articles in the Chicago Tribune about the murder, Ad. All of them…”
“What? Why?”
“I’m a reporter. It’s in my blood.”
“But it’s so…long ago.”
I bit my lip. “Yes, I know. Old news. Your grandmother so aptly dismissed it that way. That’s the sentiment of the whole neighborhood. The only problem is that Leah has come back home. That’s a wrinkle no one counted on.”
He wagged a finger at me as though I’d said something amusing. He thought me one more nosy neighbor.
“You know, Edna, I just realized—you want a different ending. Leah Brenner fooled you, too. God, even now she can seduce, you know, entice. How many men fell under her spell and now…”
I cut him off. “You’re missing the point, Ad. She didn’t kill Ivan.”
Ad’s face got hard, his eyes dark and hooded. “Let me tell you something about Jacob.” He counted a beat and then went on. “You gotta know this. When his father was murdered, Jacob got…miserable—crying jags, blubbering, sad, hiding in his room all day and night. Everything shut down inside him. It was horrible to watch. He fell apart, my best friend. Everyone but his sisters left him alone because they didn’t know what to do. No mother, no father, and an aunt who didn’t like him. His brother, Herman, kept saying that he should shape up and be a man, and ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ His sisters baked him too many pies, like they piled up on the kitchen counter, insane. They gave him books of poetry by…by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, you know. ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.’ That kind of stuff. They’d read it at him. His Uncle Ezra mocked him. Ezra, his father’s brother, a nasty man who was never around. Jacob cried all the time—I didn’t know what to do with him. I thought he’d kill himself, so bad it was. He was a lost boy, really. I got scared of him. For him.” Ad brought his face close to mine. “He ain’t a strong guy, Edna.”
I stood up. “Don’t worry, Ad.”
“I am worried. Don’t make this into a game.”
“I would never…”
With a sharp wave of his hand he left the kitchen. I sipped my coffee. It was cold.
***
Upstairs in my bedroom, restless, I dabbled with my notes, reviewing some typed sheets, drawing a line here or there, striking out a paragraph, bored. Again, determined, I planned on a midnight run to the Haymarket, the South Water Street marketplace. I wanted to witness those dedicated Dutch truck farmers from outside Chicago bringing in their produce in the deep of night—the piv
otal scene in my novel Selina or So Big—I couldn’t decide which title I liked— Selina in her ramshackle wagon with her sleepy little boy Dirk nestled in blankets. But, again, that dirt farm grubbing world was far removed from the gritty pushcart world of Maxwell Street. The rich soil of New Holland had nothing to do with the tar and asphalt of Jewtown and Yiddish gab. Herring snacks on black pumpernickel. No—it wouldn’t work for me. Not yet. I’d have to get away from Monroe Street.
Leah’s story nagged at me like an old dog at my heel.
Downstairs, standing in the kitchen doorway, peering out the screen door, I could hear tinny music wafting across the yards. Someone in Leah’s home was playing the radio loudly—fragmented words of that ridiculous popular song, “No No Nora” by Eddie Cantor. I find most popular ditties tedious. Eddie Cantor with that wazza wazza crooning drove me to distraction. That adenoidal screeching. A house of noise—Sarah’s booming music and Jacob’s banging his way through the rooms. And Leah sat quietly by herself. But I lingered there, listening—and wondered: What had anyone in the Newmann household heard that morning years ago? Yes, they’d heard screaming. I knew that. Leah and Ivan’s battle royal. But what else? What was said? The wailing of Ivan when he was knifed? The screams and weeping of Sarah and the children? Who heard what?
Had the police even talked to the Newmanns about it? I doubted that. After all, they scarcely talked to Leah.
Within minutes, standing on the sidewalk in front of Leah’s home, I could hear the radio playing, but muted now. Impulsively, I climbed the stairs and knocked on the front door. Someone pulled back a curtain in a side window and then, finally, the door opened. Leah smiled at me. “I couldn’t imagine who was here. Family always comes to the kitchen door.” She pointed behind her. “Or through the back screen porch.”
“I heard the music.”
Leah raised her eyebrows and shook her head. The razzle-dazzle music was coming from an upstairs room, but at that moment the volume swelled so loudly that Leah and I had to raise our voices. Someone was fiddling with the knobs, searching for a station perhaps. A needle under the skin, that dissonant, staticky noise. I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate. Claptrap music, utter novelty for a world of dancing fools in a speakeasy tavern.
“Sarah is telling me something,” she yelled. “Ever since I got back home, she has discovered the volume control. Paul Whiteman thrills her—and he enters my nightmares. I tell her, beg her, but she goes against my wishes. Jacob pleads with her, but then he runs off. What can I do?” A weary shrug.
A sudden break in the music, a run of static as Sarah shifted the dial. But another crash of noise—stomping, a foot drummed on the floorboards, a fist slamming a wall. Bam bam bam.
“What?” I caught Leah’s face.
She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “My Jacob.”
“I don’t understand…”
“A battlefield, Edna. Jacob staggers home and, like a restless boy, he thrashes around his room.”
“A protest against Sarah’s musical taste?” I joked.
She frowned. “The stomping around—a caged animal—even when Sarah is at the market.”
“How can you bear the noise?”
She shrugged. “I have no choice.” Again, the glance upward. “Jacob watches me too closely the last few days.” She bit her lip. “His eyes accuse Sarah as she puts supper on the table.”
Someone upstairs yelled, the music soared, the crash of a boot against the floorboards.
I motioned toward the Newmann house. “Join me for coffee.”
She started. “Oh no. I—not there—Molly—”
Stepping close to the staircase, I raised my voice over the din. “No one is home, Leah. Molly and the others are out shopping. They’re lost on Maxwell till afternoon. They’ll linger at Nathan’s Ice Cream Parlor. Trust me. I’ve been shopping with them. A sale at Louis Gabel’s Clothing, and the hours go by. Come. There’s coffee on the stove. Please. This noise is…impossible.” I touched her elbow, though she backed away. “Please.”
Numbly, almost mechanically, she stepped out onto the porch, shutting the door behind her. But her slow walk alongside me was a prisoner’s plodding death march: short shuffling steps, a baby’s tentative exploration. Once she sat opposite me in the Newmann kitchen, she sighed, relaxed in the chair, and folded her arms across her chest. “I haven’t been in Esther’s kitchen for—years.”
“Did you come here often?”
She thought about her response, as if impossible to answer. “We were friendly. I liked her. She liked me, I knew. But she was always nervous here.”
I smiled. “The shadow of Molly.”
A slight wistful smile. “Molly didn’t like me. Never liked me. Didn’t trust me.” A pause. “A makhasheyfe, she called me.” A witch.
“I know.”
Suddenly she stood, and I thought she’d flee. Instead, her hands fluttering, she walked to the sink and stared out the window toward her own house. Her back to me, she spoke quietly. “We moved here exactly one year after the Newmanns bought their place. May Day. May first. I mean, Sol and Esther, with Molly in tow, had already settled in, knew people, the rabbi.” She turned her head, and I stared at her profile. “More than forty years back, a real neighborhood of greenhorns and off-the-boat boarders…and on windy days the sickening smells from the stockyards, sometimes from the I. C. trains. Our first home. Sol and Esther, new married. Me and Ivan, new married. Our home a wedding gift from his parents.”
Now she faced me. Her eyes swept the kitchen as she ran her fingers across the counter, letting them rest on a cutting board. Her eyes took in the white-painted cabinets. “Nothing has changed here. Nothing. I used to sit in Esther’s kitchen, here, friendly, you know. And then Ivan and Sol sat with cigars in the basement, arguing about something in Forwards, maybe. Molly made believe friendly, you know. But somehow—one day, maybe—Molly caught her Sol, a young man then, smiling at me a little too long. I was talking of something, and he laughed a little too long. Maybe.”
Her face tightened. “It ain’t my fault, Edna. Well—that day it wasn’t. I was always blessed—or cursed—with the looks, you know. My mother warned me. Trouble, my little Leah. Trouble for you. My Papa said if we was Catholic I would be hidden away in a nunnery for good.”
She shook her head back and forth slowly and dreamily. “A curse I didn’t see coming, Edna. So Molly spotted Sol that day, real innocent it was…you know Sol, a nice guy always—you know him, such an innocent man—but Molly yells at him, and then at me as I sat there with a red face, and the rumors start.”
For a moment she turned her face away, her lips trembling.
I stood up, touched the coffee pot on the stove to see if it was still warm, took the milk pitcher from the icebox, then lifted cups from the cabinet. She took one from my hands. Her fingers cradled it, turning it, and she whispered, “Nothing has changed.”
Quietly, she poured coffee for herself, then took my cup from my hand. “I used to pour Esther’s coffee while she chatted. Like sisters. It was…” A sigh. “Then she’d listen for Molly’s step.” We sat back down, but she jumped up to put the milk pitcher back into the icebox.
I waited until she sat back at the table. “Rumors.”
A nod. “The fingers wagging. Coldness to me. At shul the whispers. People don’t nod at me in the street. The families were very religious then, the first years in the neighborhood, always to temple, morning prayers, food. Esther didn’t know how to handle it—she’s just so…sweet and good. But Molly—I guess she was in her forties then—was cranky, sarcastic always, a gossipmonger. She had the rabbi knock on my door. The poor man, embarrassed, babbling, Molly’s reluctant messenger. But it made my Ivan angry and he stayed away from shul.”
I sipped my coffee but watched her eyes. “She wouldn’t talk to you?”
Solemn, eyes locked with mine. “No.
Forty years now, maybe.”
I clicked my tongue. “She hasn’t changed much, though the unforgiving part has become set in stone. Even with the stroke she has…a tongue on her.”
Leah shook her head. She ran her fingertip around the rim of the coffee cup. “She got a tough life, Molly does—so Esther told me. The old village in Germany near the Polish border, Jews beaten, stones thrown, her home destroyed at Passover when the goyim accused a cousin of blood libel, killing a Christian child for blood to bake matzoh, horrible, horrible.” She breathed in. “Then the long days in steerage, poor, a husband dying young and her alone with little Sol. A seamstress for years. In a sweatshop on Canal Street in New York. A grubby life till Sol grows and works in a cigar-making factory.” Leah grinned. “Her biography is told over and over like a legend in that family. Struggle.”
“As well it should be.”
She stared into her cup. “So you can sort of see how the hardness takes over a person—gets in the blood. America saved her. Made her safe—allowed her dreams. So she thought I was a home-wrecker, maybe. So much to lose. I had no eye for Sol, of course. Believe me. A quiet, mind-your-own-business guy. Slap-on-the-back kind of guy. ‘Come in, come in. My Esther gives you hot tea.’ I had my own Ivan, a good man before he got mean. Molly badmouthed me and told the women to watch their husbands. That started my loneliness.”
That last word jarred her. Standing, she walked to the doorway, peeked around the corner, then moved back to the sink. Again, she stared across the yards to her home as though somehow, in the minutes passed, it had vanished. Her eyes caught a framed piece of Esther’s embroidery on the wall—a bucolic landscape of English cottage and trellised roses. Her fingertips traced the roses as she mumbled, “Esther’s romantic world.” A loving touch, lingering.
I raised my voice. “Well, you’re still a beautiful woman, and you don’t have to apologize for what God saw fit to give you. A gift.”
She ignored that. “I confess something to you, though. I let the attention of the men go to my head. You know, Ivan and Morrie got the butcher shop together, but the real life of the shop was the friends who met there to socialize. Morrie didn’t care for selling, really. He wanted the friends around him. That’s all. Lord, you could walk into the back room there and you got six or seven men lounging around, a glass of beer or wine and a stack of cheese sandwiches—you know, like a second breakfast, Zweite Früstück they calls it—cigar smoke like a cloud you can’t get through. Storytelling, laughing, bragging, arguing politics all day long. A club, you know. And when I went there for something, their…eyes, you know.”
