Old News

by Ed Ifkovic

“I’m not saying anything.”

  He sneered. “Oh, yes, you are.”

  As we neared his home, a few houses away, I spotted Uncle Ezra’s roadster at the curb, with Ezra in the driver’s seat. Seeing us, he gunned the automobile, spinning away from the curb, cruising alongside us and braking so abruptly I smelled burnt rubber. Jacob started, jumped back.

  “Uncle Ezra, I was almost home.”

  But Ezra was focused on me, none too kindly. Staring back, I tried to look winsome, Lillian Gish venturing out onto an ice floe with girlish trepidation. My palms on my cheeks, the helpless ingénue. Menaced virtue, the maiden scanning the horizon for a hero.

  “I’ve been waiting,” he snarled.

  Jacob faltered, turning from me to him, his face sagging. “We were taking a walk, Edna and me.”

  “I’m not blind, Jacob. I can see the two of you walking.” He stressed the word, stretching it out, fierce. He wasn’t happy.

  His shoulders sinking, Jacob leaned on the fender of the automobile, as though stabilizing himself. The automobile rumbled, idling in place.

  “Ezra,” I said softly, and waited. “Ezra, we were talking about you.”

  He ignored me. “Get in, Jacob,” he said in a harsh, guttural voice laced with fury. “Now, dammit.”

  When Jacob didn’t move, paralyzed there, his hip against the fender, one hand holding the back of his neck, Ezra leaped out of his seat, slammed the door behind him and glowered. I marveled at the transformation: the sleek, polished man who sat opposite me as I sipped a chocolate egg cream, so purposely charming, the schmoozer, was gone now. Instead the distinguished face was flushed and dark, the old man seeming much older now, threatening. The lines around his mouth and under his eyes deepened, got blood red, but what most alarmed me was the look in his eyes: gleaming, frozen agates. I caught my breath.

  “What did you tell her?” he yelled at Jacob as he pointed at me.

  Jacob stammered, “Nothing. We were just talking…”

  His voice broke. He wagged a finger at Jacob. “She wants to pin the murder on you!”

  “I do not.” I threw back my head, indignant.

  “She’s got you all confused. This was not an innocent walk.” Fire in his eyes now, a catch in his voice. “She is not an innocent girl.”

  Jacob rocked back and forth, his body slipping from the automobile. Ready to sink to the pavement, to curl up, he sputtered like a frightened child.

  I touched Jacob on the shoulder. His look scared me—starved, pleading.

  “Get your hands off him,” Ezra seethed.

  Jacob swung around and actually smiled at me, a madman’s smile, empty and dangerous.

  “What are you afraid of, Ezra?” I was blunt.

  “Leave him alone.”

  I turned to Jacob. “Your uncle is scared. He believes you might be the murderer.”

  Said, the words punched the air like an exploded firecracker.

  Jacob found his voice. “Uncle Ezra is afraid that you think he is the killer.”

  Ezra stalked around the automobile and grabbed at Jacob’s sleeve. Jacob fought him, pulling away, but Ezra pushed him against the automobile. “Just shut the hell up, Jacob.”

  Jacob struggled to break free, but Ezra, though an old man, kept a tight grip on Jacob’s shoulder. Jacob shook like a caged animal as Ezra kept barking. “Shut up, just shut up. You always say too much.”

  “Or not enough.”

  Ezra glared at me. “You’ve ruined everything, Edna Ferber. Everything.”

  At that moment, in a blind frenzy, he smashed his fist into Jacob’s shoulder, so sudden an assault that Jacob, groaning, toppled away, bounced off the fender of the automobile. Freed, he let out a squeaky wail, a mouse trapped, and he broke into a run. He moved sloppily, as if he hadn’t run in years, this middle-aged man who ran by twisting his ankles and bending his knees, a parody of flight. He headed not to his home behind him but toward Maxwell Street. Wailing, sobbing, distraught. Heads turned, people stepped out of the way.

  Ezra stared at me, icy. “Do you see what you’ve done?”

  “You hit him, Ezra, not me.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The heat wave stayed with us. Waking up in the morning, the streets still dark, the windows wide open with night creatures brushing against the screens, I could feel the day’s heat. The temperature never seemed to drop with nightfall. Everyone moved with beads of sweat running down their skin, clothing sodden and sticky, irritation swelling in their bellies. Another blistering, appalling day.

  Last night Sol grumbled, “The hottest Chicago summer on record. And I’ve been here sixty years. Too hot to live.”

  Lying in my bed, I rolled over: too hot to live. Like being in the open flames of the steel mills, the red glow that washed the sky.

  Esther was in the kitchen, setting the table for breakfast. As I walked in, she was humming softly to herself, preoccupied, and I startled her. She tittered, “Good Lord, Edna dear, you walk as softly as a kitten.”

  I gave her a quick hug, “Yet I growl like an old lion.”

  She chuckled. “Edna, some folks are born to rile the world. You may be one of them.” She winked at me. “But that might not be a blessing.”

  “You’re being kind, Esther.”

  “I do love your visit, dear. Remember that.” She kissed me on the cheek, then stepped back, eyes twinkling. “It’s gonna be another hot day, Edna. Again. Sol will talk of nothing but the weather. He’ll quote the newspaper. Only on Shabbas does he stop about the weather. For a few minutes, at least.” Laughing, she handed me a cup of coffee. “Fresh and hot. You like it black.”

  The tap tap tap of a cane as Molly, grumpy and sleepy, walked into the room. “I’m gonna die of the heat.”

  “Some coffee?” Esther handed her a cup. “Fresh rolls from the oven.”

  “Least downstairs there’s a little breeze from the backyard. Though not much.” Molly frowned at me. “You’re in my old room, Edna. Upstairs. Hottest room in the house, sorry to tell you. The only good thing I got from the stroke I had last year was moving downstairs to the back.” She grinned at Esther. “Of course, I had to take over Esther’s sewing room.” She glanced back at me. “Your room is hell, Edna.” Molly was happy with that shared news—the proper place for the errant guest.

  “I don’t mind. We can’t have you falling down the stairs.”

  “Don’t get old, Edna,” she told me. “A curse, it is.”

  Behind her, Esther rolled her eyes.

  “It’s something I’m looking forward to,” I said. “Then I can speak my mind.”

  Molly smiled but never blinked. “I think you got a head start on that, dear.”

  Molly sat down while Esther waited on her. She kept the cane at her side, gripped in her right hand, every so often tapping it on the linoleum. Then she’d rub her lower back and groan. I caught Esther’s eye, her swift glance telling me Molly would have one of her crotchety days. She’d find fault with her daughter-in-law, the quivering hausfrau that Esther was, though Esther had learned something I refused in myself: patience with whiners and malcontents. Molly, at eighty-eight—she insisted she was eighty-six, as though that shifted the axis of the earth dramatically—thought it her privilege to kvetch, to make everyone around her stand at attention. My mother attended the same school.

  She turned to me, her chin trembling. “You’re up early, Edna. I heard you in the kitchen late last night. Rattling around.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. A glass of water. I was trying to be quiet, Molly. I swear. How’d you know it was me?”

  “I heard you clear your throat. Twice, in fact. An old lady is a light sleeper. After all these years, I know the souls of my own home.”

  Grinning, I teased her. “Molly, you’re our Sherlock Holmes.”

  Cranky: “No, just an old la
dy who likes a quiet house at night and would prefer for folks not to wander around in the dark.”

  Lord, I’d tiptoed downstairs, aware of Molly’s bedroom behind the kitchen, her door open to catch a breeze, moonlit shadows in the hallway. I’d lingered by the front kitchen window, idly watching the house next door shrouded in blackness except for a light switched on at the back of the house, probably Leah’s bedroom. Two in the morning, someone sitting up, a lamp casting a glow out into the backyard. Leah, unable to sleep? Leah, hungry for light? A woman afraid of darkness.

  Molly was watching me. “Edna, you enjoying your visit?” Slyness in her tone, an unfriendly sidelong glance at me.

  It was an untoward question, and Esther gasped. Hurriedly, Esther began chatting about the warm bread on top of the stove, the black pumpernickel, the failure of the yeast in the dead air. The cold mutton and apple sauce she’d be serving that night. The cherry cobbler, lumpy, dry. Babble, all of it, a little crazy, though I appreciated her attempt to salvage civility.

  Molly was oblivious, prattling on. “You prefer the occupants next door.” A grimace that showed ivory-blue false teeth, stained.

  Esther chatted on. “Well, that Jacob is a handsome…”

  Molly interrupted her. “It’s bad enough our Adolph insists on keeping that… friendship with that lad. Such a bad influence on Adolph. The mistake we made years back of moving into this house. He could have—I suppose he will”—she deliberated—“flower.” She sipped coffee and peered at me over the rim of her cup. “Had Jacob not been next door, Adolph would be a rabbi.”

  Esther frowned. “Adolph played at that, Molly. The way he plays at being a puller, or a handyman, or a…”

  Molly drew her lips into a straight line. “He looks like my father, you know. In the old village. The spitting image, really. So wonderful. I look at him, feel a tug at my heart. His great-grandfather’s nose, the jawline, the eyes, even the way he walks—that shuffle, as though he is afraid the earth beneath his feet will cave in. Like my father, he’ll marry late and find happiness in old age.”

  Like you did, I thought horribly, though I was pleased at my own observation.

  Sipping coffee, she’d become almost rhapsodic, a beatific smile on her lips, though I noticed Esther, doubtless often the recipient of this blissful song to her shiftless son, fiddled with the loaves of bread and paid no attention. In the middle of this paean to one man’s uncharted future, Ad trooped in, his father and my mother close behind him.

  My mother was rubbing her eyes.

  “Mother, you all right?” I asked.

  She put on her aggrieved face, one I’d seen since I stumbled around in pigtails in a Kalamazoo kitchen. “A sleepless night.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “This is an upside down household,” Molly said.

  Sol grunted at his mother. “The heat is driving everyone crazy. People crack from the heat—go nuts. The papers said…”

  His mother, cane tapping the floor, hissed, “We can’t change the weather, Sol darling.”

  “All I’m saying is that…”

  “All right, Sol.” Esther affectionately drummed her fingers on his shoulder as she moved to the stove.

  Molly smiled at her grandson, slumped over the table, head to the side, heavy-lidded eyes, not even trying to stifle a yawn. One leg of his gray cotton trousers was tucked into a high-laced shoe, the other hanging loose. He tugged at it with his fingertips but finally sat back, reaching for a buttered roll Esther slid across the table at him.

  “Hmmm.” The picture of contentment, the family pet finally fed.

  Then, gulping coffee and sitting up, Ad spoke to me, a tickle in his voice. “What happened yesterday, Edna?”

  “A lot of things happened yesterday, Ad. Could you be more specific?”

  He made a crooked smile, one lip turned up. “With Jacob.”

  “We went for a walk.”

  “I was coming home from the hardware store, and I cut through the park on Halsted and Elm. Jacob was there, bent over on a bench, sobbing.”

  A catch in my throat. “Sobbing?”

  “Yeah, and he wasn’t happy to see me approaching. ‘Go away, Ad,’ he yelled. ‘Can’t a man sit by himself?’ But he mumbled your name—or at least I think he did. You…and Uncle Ezra. What in God’s name happened?”

  Every face on me, waiting, unhappy.

  “He had a spat with Uncle Ezra.”

  “Edna,” Molly asked, “what did you tell Jacob?”

  I shrugged. “We were talking.”

  Ad smiled, the rabble rouser. “She made him cry.”

  My mother sighed. “Sooner or later Edna makes everybody cry.”

  I ignored her, compelled to say, “Sooner or later everyone tells me that.”

  Molly grumbled. “That is an unstable family. Look at the lot of them. Jacob—I know you persist in that dead-end friendship, Adolph—is a bomb ticking away, getting worse. I see him from the porch. A farblondzheter, that boy. Lost.” A lost soul, baffled, confused. “He ambles, he talks to himself, he stumbles, he laughs out loud at a joke only he hears in his head. He slams the front door.”

  “I don’t care,” Ad insisted. “A boyhood friend.”

  Molly rolled on. “The twins are squeamish little mice, though that Ella can be a bully. I’ve heard her. Lord! Ezra, well, I’ve known him for decades. He’s always one step away from a shady deal. You can’t trust a man who wears a diamond stickpin.”

  “Molly, please…” pleaded Esther.

  “That family teeters on the edge of a cliff. Sister Sarah won’t give you the time of day. Over the years I tried to be friendly.” A deep breath. “And need I mention the unpardonable sinner, Leah, with the knife in the poor slob Ivan’s neck?” She stopped, triumphant.

  Esther gasped, hid her face over a pot on the stove. Ad stared at his grandmother, dumbfounded, unhappy. Sol tsked and reached for his pipe.

  My mother spoke up. “Really, Molly, your words stun the breakfast table.”

  Molly harrumphed with a good measure of Victorian bile and venom. “I don’t care. A subject long buried when Leah…left us. Over with. Finished. Thank God. Justice in an unjust world. And now, unwanted, back at us. We talk and talk—and our eyes shift over to that horrible house.” She aimed her cane at the kitchen window. “And you, Edna, the reporter on holiday, no less. Needling a weak Jacob, having coffee with that murdering woman, throwing our world into chaos. It’s unforgivable.”

  I said nothing because I wanted this conversation to end.

  Esther cleared her throat. “You know, that horrible day, that hot, hot day, we sat in this kitchen and listened to Ivan and Leah fighting.”

  “You could hear it here?” I asked.

  Esther nodded. “It was that loud. Summer. The windows open. A hot summer. I knew to my soul that life would never be the same. A strange feeling in my gut. It had nothing to do with us—with me—but a chill sweeps through me. Such yelling I never heard. Nasty and cruel and bitter, with crying and…and awful silences in between. Never in my life, I tell you now. Like something ripped open a part of the street, this neighborhood, this quiet block of good Jewish people, law-abiding, God-fearing, and said, Look, look inside, all this simmering evil is here, underneath, waiting, waiting, everywhere…I swear I never thought of people the same after that.” She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet.

  A long speech, especially for Esther, and so deadened and low that many of the words were lost or slurred, though we all listened closely.

  “It was that bad?” I asked. “The fight.”

  Ad nodded. “Edna, it scared us. You can hear noise from over there, people on the porch, the radio, the gramophone.” He smirked. “Leah cranking away her Caruso records. Listening to opera on KYW. But that was…ferocious. Mama is right—it went up your spine.”


  “Adolph wanted to go over there,” Molly told us. “We were going to leave, the two of us, shopping downtown, meeting a friend of his, but we just listened. We couldn’t move. I told Adolph, no, please no. Stay here. They have to deal with it.”

  “What was said?”

  Molly frowned at Esther, who glanced at Ad. “It started about Ivan hitting Jacob the day before. Leah had just learned of it—from what she was screaming. Then the—you know—little kiss with Morrie, Leah’s apology, her pleading.”

  “I got real afraid,” Ad said. “Ivan was scary.”

  For the first time Sol spoke. “Such a bitter man, that Ivan. Once so good to everyone. A friend. We smoked cigars together.”

  “He wouldn’t hit Leah?” I asked.

  Ad shrugged. “I was afraid of that. We all were. After all, he did hit Jacob twice. A mean man, but he never was…violent. And I knew Jacob wasn’t home—I saw him walking up Monroe earlier.” He exchanged looks with his grandmother. “You should have let me stop it, Bubbe. Look what happened afterwards.”

  Molly wasn’t happy with the conversation. “You could not have stopped that. In the middle of such craziness. Family business.” She paused. “Then, suddenly, it stopped. Just like that. Adolph and I left and I saw Leah carrying a water pail from the front porch to her garden out back. Like a normal day. Daily chores. She didn’t look up as we walked by. Silence in the house, Ivan somewhere inside. Silence.”

  “You didn’t hear anything later on?”

  “We were gone a long time, came back later, tired, Adolph and I upstairs in our rooms. I woke from my nap to hear screaming. At first I thought something happened to Esther because it sounded so close. But then I thought it was Leah’s howling and thought, oh no, here they go again. But Adolph comes flying out of his room and yells to me, no, it’s Sarah. Sarah is hurt. Something was wrong. You could hear her—like someone was killing her. Adolph ran over, Esther behind him. The neighbors. You know the rest.” She frowned. “I’ve told the story too many times.” She bit her lip. “Too many times—and now again.”

  “The day was hot like today,” Sol commented.