Old News

by Ed Ifkovic

  Ad shrugged. “He hasn’t been happy since that horrible day.”

  So that was Morrie Wolfsy, the man who’d had that pathetic indiscretion with Leah, immediately regretted, who saw himself as a catalyst of the awful death. Or maybe not. Yet a man frightened out of living the life he had built for himself, stumbling, hiding out, yet still on the street. He interested me, this Morrie Wolfsy—what part did he have in that calamitous afternoon?

  On the sidewalk Esther tucked her hand into Ad’s elbow, protectively. “I never liked that Levi, Adolph.”

  He glanced back over his shoulder. “Nobody likes that man.” Then he added, “He made Jacob nervous. The talk about his mother, wagging his finger at him.”

  We met Minna Pittman for a bowl of soup at Katz Dairy Restaurant off Halsted, Ad’s intended grabbing a lunch break from her job. A grade-school teacher during the fall and winter, she worked a summer job as a seamstress. She had an hour break for lunch and was waiting when we arrived.

  Ad was out of sorts, rattled by Levi’s accusations. So scattered were his monosyllabic responses that Minna, a twitchy woman to begin with, became all jerky angles and jutting head. She kept asking, “You all right, Ad?” Over and over, a tinny question said too often, and never answered by Ad.

  A curious couple, these two, with their epoch engagement, Minna’s abiding trust that she’d be Mrs. Adolph Newmann someday. Esther had told me she’d bought her white lace gown after the engagement announcement a decade back, taking it in periodically as she lost weight. But Ad was in no hurry to commit to anything. He liked his unstructured, desultory life, the jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

  They struck me as a couple who’d been married for decades, comfortably so, happily so, an old man and an old woman who knew the little things about the other: no strawberry jam on the rye toast, never bring roses or carnations, don’t mention the crying jag five years ago in that restaurant on Des Plaines. That sort of picayune trivia—the stuff of a long but durable marriage. What was lacking was romance. No touching of hands, no fluttering eyes—no talk of moonlit nights. No picnicking in the park. No whispers as they watched the salmon-pink sunset over Lake Michigan. They were dependable, stalwart, loyal, dedicated. They simply were.

  I asked Ad about Levi’s comments, though I could tell the topic rankled him. “Why did Jacob sit by when the men said those things about his mother?”

  Ad squirmed. “You know how it is, Edna. Or maybe you don’t. It was easier to smile than to say something. Thinking back on it now, it seems like speaking out would have been easy to do. But we were young men sitting with older men. We wanted to be a part of things. That back room was the place to be. Our—hideout. Everybody talking at once—politics, baseball.” He smirked. “Even religion, when old Levi had the floor and deemed us all sinners. These older men let us stay—that meant something then. Me and Jacob. Not Herman so much. Three or four times and he stayed away.”

  “Levi says you were quiet.”

  He cast a sidelong glance at Minna. “I was the holy of holies then. A make-believe rabbinical student kneeling before a wisdom-spouting Levi Pinsky. I was a moral prig, I admit. I didn’t like the teasing. I liked Jacob’s mama. She made me welcome at her home. Ivan didn’t. At suppertime I had to leave their house. His rule—only family sitting at the table—and silence.”

  “He had his rules,” Esther said. “The children could not talk during the meal. Imagine that.”

  Ad nodded at Minna. “Yeah, I thought his mama was beautiful. Everyone did. She was like…like Lillian Russell on the vaudeville stage. I was giddy when she smiled at me. One time I even said so to Jacob in earshot of his papa, Ivan the Terrible. ‘Jacob, your mama looks like Lillian Gish,’ I said. Or some star like that. I can’t remember now. But Ivan told me I was an ass. And I was. But Jacob said nothing—it tickled him in some way to have a beautiful mother. Well, he was beautiful—like her. Mirror images. He liked that. When you talked about her, you were also saying something about him. But I was the one they all made fun of—too serious that year, too much the one who didn’t fit in. The prude. I was Levi’s special project, the old religious Jew mentoring me, giving me direction, choosing me. Jacob was the only one who liked me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was the one who told him what he wanted to hear.”

  “You never discussed the nasty stuff about his mother? The two of you when you were alone? You must have.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. “But after a while I never mentioned it. I could tell Jacob got uncomfortable. It wasn’t my business.”

  “But then Ivan was murdered.”

  Ad shivered. “Then everyone got serious—not only me. Everyone blamed everyone else.”

  Minna sipped her soup. “All we do lately is talk of Leah Brenner and the murder.” She pouted.

  I narrowed my eyes. “It seems to me that the event still colors Monroe Street.”

  She grunted and stirred her soup with a spoon. “I know. It’s such a…sad street.”

  The line seemed a mournful benediction, so we rose, Ad heading off for his afternoon job of stocking shelves at the hardware store, Minna returning to alter the hem of a dress. Esther and I walked to the markets.

  Esther whispered, “I felt Levi was attacking my Adolph for being good.”

  “He was.”

  “I never liked that man. Religion made him—horrible. He’s sour.”

  “He’s old and poor.”

  “Being old and poor shouldn’t make you bitter.”

  “Sometimes you don’t have a choice, Esther dear.”

  ***

  Late afternoon, idling on the front porch with a book on Dutch immigration to Chicago, scribbling notes into a pad, I spotted Ezra’s roadster speeding up the street, slamming to a stop in front of the Brenner home. Jacob jumped out but seemed reluctant to say goodbye to his uncle, standing on the sidewalk, his body leaning against the door.

  I realized why: Aunt Sarah, arms folded, was perched on the top step, her body rigid, her steely eyes locked on Ezra, who’d switched off the ignition. Finally the man got out of the automobile. His intention, it struck me then, had been to visit Leah, who was nowhere in sight. But the sight of the indomitable Sarah, the hound of hell, stayed his movement. He stood sheepishly, ignored by Jacob, who didn’t know what to do.

  I tottered off the porch and called to Jacob. “Jacob, a minute?”

  Alarmed, he was ready to flee, eyes darting in a continuous sweep from me to Ezra, even up to Sarah.

  “Edna.” A rasp, unhappy.

  “So this is Edna Ferber.” Ezra bowed, too grand a gesture, overly dramatic, mocking. “Jacob has done nothing but talk about you.” Nothing friendly in his tone.

  Shielding his eyes from the sun, Jacob hunched his shoulders, his head tilted away. A beaten child.

  “Jacob, hello.” I smiled at him.

  With that, he fled into the house, bumbling up the steps, brushing past Sarah who never turned to watch him. No, she kept that unforgiving look at Uncle Ezra. Her dislike of her sister’s brother-in-law was obvious. A dangerous man, her look conveyed. And probably rightly so.

  “Uncle Ezra,” I said to him.

  “Charmed.” Again the Prussian bowing from the hip.

  The sun glinted off the diamond in his stickpin, making it seem a blinding sunburst.

  “Jacob seems troubled.”

  His eyes searched the porch. Sarah had disappeared into the house and Jacob was nowhere in sight.

  “We should talk, Edna Ferber.” Ezra’s voice dipped an octave, some of his words muffled. His voice had a natural high ring to it, fake laughter undercutting the spaced-out words. A glib man, practiced and imperfect, much as I remembered the gigolos from my post-war sojourn in Paris, those men voulez-vou-ing me in the night cafés.

  “About Jacob?”

  “Ab
out a lot of things.”

  He opened the passenger door and I slipped in. As we pulled away from the curb, I shifted in my seat and spotted Sarah peering out the front window, half-hidden by a curtain. And then, glancing up, I saw Jacob in a second-story window, his face pressed against the panes. I’d become, as my mother had warned, the neighborhood scourge. An indiscreet one, as well.

  At Clark’s Confectionary I drank a small chocolate egg cream with Ezra downing cup after cup of black coffee, which he declared vile. Each sip elicited a grimace from him, as though he were ingesting foul medicine.

  “Don’t drink it,” I told him.

  He ignored that and took another sip. “Jacob told me about your…nosiness about the death of my brother.”

  I smiled disingenuously. “I’ve come to like Leah. A melancholy woman, and—a wronged woman.”

  The soft features hardened. “So I hear. Do you really think your probing is prudent?”

  I wiped a smear of chocolate from my lips. “When I was a reporter in Milwaukee, I covered the Schmattie murder trial there—a rich family, brewery people, scandalous, man’s utter ugliness toward his fellow man. I learned that there is often a hefty price you pay for justice.”

  “And you’re that instrument?”

  A slight smile. “Possibly.”

  “Edna, the case was closed years ago. Fifteen years—a lifetime. Life has moved on. You are only stirring up old resentments, opening old wounds.”

  “Old news?” I tossed out Molly’s glib summation.

  His eyes got wide. “Exactly. Well said.”

  “Nonsense, Ezra. Nonsense. False accusations cannot remain…old.”

  “But Leah is home at last—and content.”

  “Content? Do you hear yourself?”

  “Yes, I do.” His voice dipped, harsh. “Would you have the street talk of this all over again? The busybodies of Monroe Street? The smirks, the pointing, the cruelty. Leave Leah to be…content.”

  “I don’t think she’s content.”

  “I know her better than you do.” He stared into my eyes, unblinking.

  “You’re bothered about Jacob.” My tone was blunt.

  He sat back, breathed in. “Well, yes, I am. A gentle lad, breezy, carefree—at least he was. But now he’s withdrawn, moody, quick to flare up. He snaps at me. That’s your doing, Edna.”

  “He was convinced his mother was a murderer. Everyone told him that, the police…”

  He interrupted me. “And now he isn’t sure. You put doubt in him. You know what he said to me? ‘Edna asked me where was the knife? Wouldn’t it have been there? Wouldn’t my mother be holding it in her hand?’ He expects me to have an answer. I don’t.”

  “Doubt, maybe some guilt.”

  He was seething now, though he tried to hide it. When he went to light a cigarette, he dropped the match. “How dare you, young lady? Tell me—guilt about what?”

  “Hold on. I don’t mean he’s a murderer. I would never accuse him. I have no proof of that—”

  “Yet?” he broke in, snidely. “Is that what you mean?”

  “He’s guilty of keeping his eyes closed. He allowed injustice to prevail.”

  “Are you aware of how his behavior has changed?”

  “Yes. And the question is—why? Why so sudden this… moodiness? What does he know?”

  He blew smoke across the table into my face. “He knows what the rest of us know—poor Leah, perhaps in a panic, killed my brother.”

  “And you believe that?”

  A long pause. “Yes.”

  “And yet I understand your visits have increased to the house these past three years. You…squiring Jacob here and there. You knock on their door. You once loved Leah. You wanted to marry her—it was expected by the families. Before she chose your brother.”

  He actually grinned. “I’ll never understand that misguided decision by Leah. Ivan the plodding, the overweight dullard.”

  “And you? The sleek expensive animal.”

  He laughed out loud, enjoying the description. “Good God, Edna, how you do go on. I’m not a beast. Yes, I love beautiful women. And Leah, to this day, still has about her that… exotic aura, that dark-skinned Rebecca out of a romantic novel.”

  I winced, recalling my own description of Leah as that memorable heroine out of a Walter Scott novel. “Anyway…”

  “She’s almost sixty and…you’ve seen her. I thought we’d marry someday, but Ivan stole her from me. I never knew how.”

  “Perhaps Leah was hoping for something beside a glossy finish.”

  He pulled in his cheeks. “Ah, a cruel and easy barb, my dear. The slings and arrows of the outrageous Jewess. And unworthy of you. Ivan had a secret weapon, which I discovered too late.”

  “And what was that?”

  “He didn’t talk about himself.”

  “And you did?”

  He chortled, choked on the cigarette smoke. “All the time. I was trying to impress.”

  “It never works that way.”

  A light laugh. “So I ran away. I refused to go to the wedding—to the horror of my devout family. I buried myself at school, then in a marriage I paid no attention to. A wife who died too young in childbirth, though it was a convenient way for her to leave an unhappy husband. I practiced law in Philadelphia, and then drifted back here—just in time for the horrors that happened in that house. Bad timing, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, especially for Ivan.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “You weren’t close to Ivan?”

  “Well, we spoke. We argued. He thought I’d come back to steal Leah away.”

  “Had you?”

  He bit his lip and leaned in. “You want to know something? She was foolishly, annoyingly in love with my brother. He’d become a harsh man, terrible to Jacob, even worse to Leah who fought him over Jacob, but she still was loyal to him. But Ivan didn’t want me around, he said. I supposed I oogled his wife too much.” He tapped the table with a fingertip. “To this day, a whole part of me refuses to believe she killed him. It seems impossible. You’ve met her. Impossible. But sometimes I think—why not? A nasty man with a cruel tongue. There were times I wanted to kill him.” He waited a heartbeat. “But I didn’t. Don’t pursue me, Edna Ferber, with your pack of sniffing bloodhounds. There are times I blame her—too seductive, too unconsciously the siren, you know—though that added to my ardor. The naturalness of her attractiveness. Do you understand that? Yeah, she knew she drew me in, but she never understood how…how compelling was her power.” Still the tapping on the table, rhythmic. “We were school sweethearts. Once you love Leah, you don’t ever stop.” A faraway look in his eyes. “Even now when she is an old lady.”

  “But she didn’t kill Ivan.”

  “You keep saying that—without proof. You actually stunned poor Jacob, knocked him for a loop. Do you plan on spreading that venomous rumor far and wide?”

  “Yes. Until someone tells me something.”

  “A dangerous pursuit, Edna Ferber.”

  “How so?”

  He didn’t answer.

  He took a dollar from his wallet and placed it under a cup. “Even if Leah killed Ivan, I’d still marry her today.” He winked. “This afternoon—if she’d have me.”

  I waited. “Is that your plan?”

  “I don’t have a plan.” He went to put his wallet back into his vest pocket, but deliberated. He withdrew a small photograph mounted on hard cardboard, like a nineteenth-century carte de visite. He slid it across the table. I saw Ezra and Leah, youngsters, laughing into the camera. Perhaps they were seventeen or eighteen. Younger. He was dashing and handsome, dressed in some sports outfit—billowing pants tucked into black boots, a cotton jersey that said, quaintly, Maxwell Street Bengals, a cap on his head. Football? I had no idea. Leah stood
there in a flowing wraparound sports skirt, a velvet bow in her hair, her dark hair resting on her shoulders. The ivory cast of her skin and those jet black brows. She was exotic, fire in her eyes, head tilted up, and, above all, a stunning face that held you, mesmerized. Circe and her awful powers. The whispering siren who wrecked ships that dared approach.

  “A beautiful woman,” I commented.

  “She’s still beautiful.”

  “You still love her?”

  He sighed. “Yes, even though she now has a past.”

  “So do you,” I said glibly. “But yours is harder to understand.”

  Chapter Ten

  Sarah opened the front door but said nothing. She watched me closely, and for a second I thought she’d slam the door in my face. But she stepped back, frowned, and said in a low growling voice, “Leah is napping. I don’t suppose you’ve come to visit me.”

  “I could.”

  She scoffed. “I saw that miscreant Ezra dropping you off. How could you get in that rattletrap machine with such a man?”

  “You don’t like Ezra?”

  “He’s not an easy man to like, Edna.”

  “True,” I conceded, “but he’s become a presence again in this house these past few years.”

  She clicked her tongue. “He’s up to no good, of course. Whatever he’s whispering in Jacob’s ear is making him irritable and plain difficult. He’s not a delight in the best of worlds with his breezy, bumbling manner. A fool staggering home from a speakeasy—such a nice Jewish boy. Add morbidity to that mix and these rooms are an undertaker’s front room.” She laughed at her own humor, though I didn’t.

  She motioned me into the room.

  “I wanted to see Leah.”

  She drew in her cheeks. “My, my, my.” She made a face.

  What was there about her that intrigued me? Was it the calculated, blasé attitude she created? Her whole demeanor suggested indifference, a quick shrug of her shoulders and a cavalier rolling of her eyes. I could respect that in a woman—a curious defense against a world that routinely ignored her, this unmarried woman dependent on others for shelter and companionship. She did not strike me as a chronic whiner nor a gummidging soul. In a world she couldn’t forgive, she’d found a way to survive.