Old News

by Ed Ifkovic

  “For God’s sake, Naomi,” he yelled.

  “I’m sorry. We did talk about it then, you know.”

  “Ezra?” I asked. “Your father’s brother. The lawyer…”

  “Who’d moved back to Chicago from Philly around then.”

  “Naomi, tell me why you mention him.”

  She spoke through clenched teeth, a flat speech that sounded rehearsed. “He hated the butcher. He’d thought he was going to marry Leah, but she chose Ivan, the nebbish butcher with the bloody apron and the loud snoring, the dull man who fell asleep at the supper table. Not Ezra, the dapper lawyer with the Stutz Bearcat and the Chesterfield coat and the French cigarettes. A greedy, sneaky man, moving back after his wife died, stopping in all the time, grinning and teasing Leah.”

  Herman was fussing with the cuff of his shirt. “Now, Naomi, I know you like to believe…” He didn’t finish.

  She went on, louder now. “And he always hated you, Herman. And you hated him. He mocked all the children. Jacob, the wastrel. Ella and Emma, the wallpaper in the nursery, he called them. Now he befriends poor Jacob. Ever since Leah is back home, he’s a…presence again. Edna,” she held my eye, “Jacob and Ezra spend a lot of time together. Jacob relies on him, the shifty, treacherous…fop.”

  Herman added, “Jacob is so lost he can’t tell a good sort from a bad one.”

  “And you’re a good sort?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am.” He stood now, pointed to his watch. “It’s getting late.”

  I remained seated a moment longer. “Why do you bother, Herman?”

  “Let me tell you, Edna. All sorts of shenanigans were happening then—because of Ezra. Even because of Morrie, who wanted to end the partnership. Morrie had that cheap moment with my mother. I didn’t trust anyone. I still don’t trust Ezra. That house is in my name, as well as my mother’s. I’m in control. Before Papa died, we talked about it. He was afraid if anything happened—well, Jacob and the twins would be clay in Ezra’s hands. Even Sarah, flattered by Ezra into imbecility, though she once spat in his face. So we agreed that I would take over. My name on the deed. I’m a businessman. After his death, I sold the family share of the butcher shop to Morrie—for a pittance, true. To get rid of it—and him. I pay all the bills now while Jacob and Sarah rock on the porch and drink lemonade. Through Ezra, Jacob started going to the gambling houses on Clark Street. To drink at Magnum’s, off the Loop. Can you imagine what would have happened if he had a share in anything?”

  I turned to Naomi. “And you believe Ezra killed his brother?”

  She wore a blank look. “Back then—maybe. I don’t know now. No—I don’t know.”

  “Why back then?”

  She waved at her husband, helpless. “He still loved his brother’s wife. He refused to accept her decision. Read the Bible. The blueprint is there, I believe. Coveting—and all that.”

  Herman headed to the door, still talking. “My father knew I’d protect the family. And I will.”

  He opened the front door and stood too close to me. His breath on my neck: a hit of cinnamon from the apple cake. A hint of garlic, noxious, hot and dry. “Remember that, my dear. I will fight for my family. Even against you, Edna Ferber.”

  Chapter Nine

  Ezra Brenner. The name stayed with me. In the past two days his name had popped into the conversations, first with Jacob and Leah, and then with Herman. The uncle who was the first suitor of the lovely Leah.

  One afternoon, staring out the kitchen window, I’d spotted a sleek ebony Ford roadster convertible idling in front of the Brenner home, a man sitting at the wheel, arm half-slung out of the window, a cigarette ash flicked to the sidewalk. Called by my mother into the parlor, I’d not waited to see who was visiting the home. But on Tuesday morning, after my unsettling supper with Herman and Naomi, I sat on the front porch with coffee and a newspaper, instead of staying with my mother and Esther in the kitchen debating the merits of the smoked goose breast Molly had bought at Lyon’s Delicatessen on Jefferson during her morning walk. So maddening their trivial preoccupation—“You figure the smoked chub is good, so why not? You’d think so, yes?”—that I escaped the hot room to the hot porch, though I sheltered myself in the shade of the overhanging roof.

  Again, that sleek, expensive motorcar, a compact two-seater runabout, with a purposely noisy exhaust system and, occasionally, the driver’s rude leaning on a horn that seemed a circus chime. Wooza wooza wooza. A boy with a new toy.

  Finally, after the flourish of one more annoying horn blast, the driver stepped out and peered up at the house. The door opened and a disheveled Jacob, buttoning a cuff as he ran, yelled, “Hold on, Uncle Ezra.”

  I paid attention.

  Uncle Ezra reminded me of one of those Broadway johnnies I spotted at stage doors in Manhattan: tall, rail thin, long angular face, bronzed, dressed in a white summer cotton suit with oversized gold buttons, a silver-blue silk cravat, a diamond tie pin that caught the morning sunlight, and a flash of lilac handkerchief in a breast pocket. On his feet black-and-white country-club shoes, his long legs encased in expensive on-the-town spats. A dapper Dan dropped incongruously onto proletarian Monroe Street, the smooth operator who took the wrong turn in town.

  Ezra shook his head at the errant Jacob, who rushed by him and jumped into the passenger seat. Uncle Ezra, unhappy, didn’t move—he simply stood there, finished the cigarette he was smoking and then ground the stub out under his feet. A trace of a smile as he whistled loudly, a dissonant shrill sound that carried up to me on the porch. Within seconds, he slid into the automobile and sped quickly from the curb, the tires spitting up pebbles and dust. In the open convertible Ezra threw back his head, laughing. But Jacob, I noted, hugged the door, sinking into the seat. He appeared to me—although some distance away—unhappy to be there.

  So this was the older brother who escaped smoke-blackened Chicago, went to Columbia University in New York, became a lawyer in Philadelphia, married, buried a wife, and came back a few months before his brother died. A man who never relinquished his love for Leah.

  I stood at the balustrade facing the Brenner household, as Esther and Ad walked out from behind me.

  “Edna, what are you doing?” Esther asked.

  I flicked my head to the street. “Uncle Ezra.”

  Ad bristled. “Did Jacob go off with him?’

  I nodded. “In a jazzy roadster.

  Ad grumbled, “Not good.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like him. Never did. Never will.” He caught his mother’s eye. “He had no business coming back years ago and—and stopping in there, bothering Jacob and his mother. Especially his mother. He comes back, Ivan dies, and Ezra sits on the front porch. And now, suddenly, he’s around even more these days.”

  “Because Leah is back home?”

  He didn’t answer, but his mother did. “He sort of disappeared again after they sent Leah away. But three years ago she’s home and…”

  “He’s back,” Ad finished.

  “It’s unseemly. It’s—it’s like he thinks he can start all over, like before Ivan, before the murder. Back to school days when they were all young.” Esther’s voice was hollow.

  That surprised me. “So he’s bothering Leah? How does she deal with him?”

  Ad spoke up. “She ignores him, so Jacob tells me. She won’t be alone in the same room with him. He stops in, she leaves—hides away. So it’s—‘C’mon, Jacob. You and me, let’s go get a sandwich and coffee at the one-arm lunch room on Clinton.’ Jacob nods. He always agrees because he doesn’t know how to say no. Ezra is real…slimy.”

  “A snake,” I said.

  Ad grinned. “In the grass, Edna. In the grass.”

  Esther said she and Ad were going to lunch, though my mother and Molly were staying home. “Come with us,” Esther pleaded. “A walk. You haven’t been around
much the last couple of days.”

  So the three of us walked down the block toward Maxwell in a comfortable silence. The heat of the day was rising, and Ad said, almost mournfully, “The paper says this’ll be Chicago’s hottest summer. Brutal.”

  Esther smiled at him. “You sound like your Papa, Adolph. That’s his favorite topic—the heat. Every day he begins with the weather.”

  “I spend each summer in Chicago,” I told them. “New York in the winter—for Broadway, my publisher, walks in Central Park. But I need Chicago in the summer—Jackson Park, Hyde Park near the water, picnics in the woods south of the city. The Point. Lake Michigan. The Marshall Field’s on State Street. The…”

  “The heat from a blast furnace,” Ad finished for me. “The red glow from the steel mills. The stink of slaughtered pigs.” Ad wrapped his arm around his mother’s shoulder. “It’ll kill us, Mama.”

  “What will kill me is your father telling me the same story every day.”

  I changed the subject. “Ad, Jacob didn’t look too happy getting into Ezra’s automobile. He pushed himself against the door, huddled there like a reprimanded child.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “Yes and no, I suppose. He does like his Uncle Ezra, who dotes on him, flatters, spends time and money. Stuffs dollar bills into his pocket. Ezra is nearly seventy now, the fashionable gentleman with the fancy clothes. Jacob probably looks at his uncle and understands how he’ll look as an old man. The same good looks. Not like his father Ivan—Herman is that—but like a romantic lead in a burlesque review.”

  “Really, Adolph,” his mother chided. “You’re exaggerating.”

  “No, I’m not,” Ad protested. “Jacob is my best friend, but he’s—he’s a weak man. You can lead him anywhere. And Ezra does. A foolish man. I mean—Jacob. All Ezra talks about is Jacob’s mother. ‘Leah this, Leah that.’ Jacob gets…uncomfortable. That’s what he tells me over and over. Ezra calls and Jacob rushes out. Driving around the city—Jackson Park to the Midway, to Washington Park, to Garfield. Driving, driving, driving. Quail dinners with apple pie at the Palmer House. Tickets to the White Sox games at Comiskey Park. Every day is a holiday. It’s intoxicating. He won’t listen to me.”

  “You don’t go with them?”

  A pause. “I ain’t invited.”

  “Thank the Lord,” Esther said.

  “But,” Ad went on, sneaking a glance at me, “to answer your question, no, Jacob being miserable’s got nothing to do with Uncle Ezra.” He lowered his voice. “And I think you know why?”

  “Why?” From Esther, doe-eyed.

  “The comments I made?” I asked.

  Ad’s head bobbed up and down. “Jacob doesn’t like it when things get confused for him. He doesn’t like it when he has to…” Ad stopped short. “You rattled him, Edna.” A quick glance at his mother, but he spoke to me. “You made him doubt the police.”

  I took a step ahead. “Good.”

  “Hey, I don’t know if it’s a good thing.” He rushed to catch up with me.

  “Of course, it’s good.”

  At the corner at Maxwell, I noticed the front door of Nathan’s Meat Market was propped open. Standing inside the doorway, facing out, was the old man I’d spotted there before, bent over, intent on adjusting an armload of wrinkled old clothing. A pair of tiny eyeglasses rested on the bridge of his nose. A black yarmulke on his head.

  Ad saw me staring. “Levi Pinsky.”

  “And just who is he?”

  “A junk man. A ragpicker. An old friend of Morrie. Maybe ninety years old now, maybe more, Orthodox you know, from a shtetl in Poland, and he’ll tell you all about it. Once a shochet, a ritual meat-slaughterer. That’s how he got to know Morrie way back when. A hanger-on from the old days, he lives in the Hebrew Home for the Aged off of Maxwell. Morrie lets him sort out the used clothing he scrounges up on the unused tables now, store his stuff, wander in and out at will, nap in back, then on Sunday he hauls it out to Maxwell. Pennies and nickels and dimes.”

  Ad waved to the old man who squinted, pushed back his eyeglasses. “Yes?”

  “It’s me, Adolph Newmann.”

  “I thought so,” Levi said in a creaky voice. He stepped back into the room and dropped a pile of clothing onto the counter that once held butchered and trussed chickens.

  Ad and Esther continued walking, but deliberately I turned into the doorway.

  “Edna?” Esther called.

  “I’d like to see the inside of the old butcher shop.”

  Esther frowned. “Why?”

  Ad tugged at my elbow, but I resisted.

  Levi backed up and leaned again the counter.

  “I’m Edna Ferber. I’m visiting the Newmanns. I’m…”

  He turned his back on me, pushing his arms into a pile of clothing, but then faced me.

  A small wizened man, stooped, his nearly bald head covered with a yarmulke, tzitzit from his waist. Dull black pants, a tear at the back of one knee. A scraggly white beard, spotty. Splotchy, old-man skin, pale with dull red patches, bony arthritic fingers, and broken yellowed fingernails.

  “So?” A word said without interest.

  I surveyed the abandoned butcher shop, heavy trails of sawdust covering the floor. The rancid scent of dried blood and old wood, the whiff of decay and sweat, although the heaps of used clothing accounted for much of that. Used shoes stacked in a corner, laces hanging out like tangled eyes from old potatoes. Abandoned, this store—mouse droppings on the counters, the stink of old pulp newspapers piled in an uneven stack, yellowed now and sickly sweet with flakiness.

  Old Levi watched Ad and scratched his head. “I remember you, lad. You’re Adolph. The rabbinical student.”

  Ad grinned. “One of my many failures. Yes.”

  The old man narrowed his eyes. “No, one of my many failures.” He shook his head back and forth, a look of disgust on his face. “The old days. Before Morrie lost interest. You and Ivan’s boys. Herman and—Jacob.” A deep sigh. “That Jacob.”

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “Those were bad days here, you know.” He arched his back, stretched out his withered limbs. “We sit in the back room”—he pointed behind him—“and I’d smoke my cigar while the fools carried on.”

  “The fools?”

  “They were all fools.” He leaned into Ad. “You remember, Adolph. You were a fool, but a boy. So maybe you I can forgive. You and silly Jacob and even Herman with his nose up in the air, sitting with the old fools who waited till Ivan left the room and then smirked and giggled about that beautiful woman. A mother, she was. Godless, them all.”

  Ad spoke up, “That was a long time ago, Levi. A lot of nonsense. Yeah, it was wrong, all that.”

  Levi spat out of the side of his mouth. “Respect for the womens, yes?” He wagged a bony finger. “I cursed at that Jacob—‘This is the way you let the mens talk of your mama? Shame, boy, shame on you. You, Adolph, you was being a rabbi, yes?—you alone shut up, turned away. I seen your red face.”

  Ad was flustered, unhappy with the horrible conversation. “I told Jacob to say something. I didn’t like that—it was about his mama.”

  “Yet you smiled. You was nervous.”

  “What could I do?” Helpless, his hand waving in the air.

  He yelled out in a shaky voice. “You curse them. What I did. That’s what you do. I yelled at Morrie, the others. This is a married womans, the wife of your partner.”

  Ad, helpless, glanced at his mother. “Ivan seemed to find it…funny.”

  Levi exploded. “You simple boy. A man hears his wife talked of that way, and he likes it? A boy, you are. Listen to me. Such a rabbi you would have been, a fool.”

  A shrug. “That was a long time ago.”

  Levi narrowed his eyes. “It was yesterday, Adolph. Yesterday because the wife walks in and you can
see she likes the way the mens looking. Eve in garden, temptress. And what happened? The worm in the soul. The spider in the web. A man dies. A knife. A good man.” Angry, spitting out of the side of his mouth.

  Ad was fidgeting, anxious to flee, stepping from one foot to the other. “Yeah, I told Jacob to ignore the talk.”

  A cackle, ragged and phlegmatic. “What? You the knight in shining armor? I sat with you, helping with the studies, read the holy words, talking, talking to you. How to behave.” He touched his temple. “But behave is not idea—but action.”

  Esther spoke up. “Levi, what could Adolph do? A young man, involved with his Talmudic studies then, loyal to a friend.”

  “Jacob has a dark spot on his soul,” Levi said. “He smirked with the rest.”

  Ad had moved to the front of the store. Sarcastically, he muttered, “A pleasure seeing you, Levi. You haven’t changed. You’re still the angel of no mercy.”

  Levi’s eyes became slits. “I am the voice crying in the wilderness, and you and Jacob were little girls picking daisies in the field. Bah on you, boy.”

  At that moment footsteps sounded on the stairwell in a back corner and a small, squirrelly man, hurrying down, stopped in his tracks. He sucked in his breath, a nasally whistle, and turned, ready to flee back upstairs.

  “Morrie,” Adolph yelled. “You here today?” He smiled. “Vi geyt bay dir?” How’s by you?

  “I heard noise. Levi, yelling.”

  Levi frowned. “No yell. I’m talking. You remember Adolph the almost rabbi, his mama, and…”

  No matter the introduction here because Morrie disappeared up the stairs and out of sight.

  Esther turned to me. “Ivan’s partner, Edna. He keeps the upstairs apartment, which his wife won’t come to. I guess he likes the old neighborhood…”

  “But not the people in it,” Ad added. “A couple nights a week he’s upstairs heating soup by himself.”

  “Yet he lets the store stay empty—unrented?”