Old News

by Ed Ifkovic

  She followed my gaze. “A no man’s land. A dump. But you’re right. The men schmoozed and planned lives they never got ’round to leading…fantasies that couldn’t be realized or—or…”

  “Or had dreams that had no hope. Women breathe hope into men’s souls. We temper men’s folly.”

  She chortled. “Ah, a feminist. I should have suspected it. The New Woman. Susan B. Anthony casting off her ritual wig.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “Actually, I’m not. I’m enjoying this conversation. You’re tremendously innocent of things.”

  I bristled. “You make innocence sound childish.”

  “And it isn’t?”

  She stood, tired of the talk, and glanced at the wall clock. “Morrie is late.” She was peering into the back room, dark now, the door half-shut. “What a pigsty. If we sell the place—if I twist his arm enough—it’ll take a month to clear out those shelves and cubbyholes. Can you imagine if it caught fire? A fire you could see from the rim of hell.”

  I stood beside her. “Lucky you.”

  She faced me. “It always surprises me that someone wanted to break in there.”

  I started. “In the back room? What?”

  She laughed pleasantly. “For a nosy detective, you sure miss a lot, Edna Ferber. No one told you? On the same day Ivan was stabbed to death, maybe around eight that night, dark out, someone pried open the back door. Morrie and I were away, maybe at the police station, I don’t know. But when we got back the door was smashed. The latch…”

  “What was taken?” I broke in, eagerly.

  “A small tin box with some change was emptied. The box was knocked onto the floor. Maybe five dollars in quarters, nickels, dimes. Nothing. Pocket change.”

  “Nothing else? Was anything moved around?”

  “Hard to tell. Back then, especially, it was the same disgusting pile.”

  “Did the police investigate?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Well, somebody came out. But keep in mind Ivan’s murder got more attention than some petty burglary. There were other break-ins in the neighborhood that summer. The police thought it was just one more. Some youngsters, bored, daring.”

  I rushed my words. “But didn’t the police make any connection with Ivan’s murder? The same day, a break-in at his store? It seems to me…”

  Her hand in my face. “For Lord’s sake, Edna, you do take wonderful leaps of imagination. By that time they’d already condemned Leah to perdition. Based on what—I’ll never understand.” She smiled. “A body and someone standing over it. Case closed.”

  “But…” I stammered. I wanted to yell: madness, this investigation. Something happened that night, yet no one decided to add one and one to get two.

  “Pittance, Edna. Change. I don’t see how you are connecting those dots. It would be one thing if we stepped on a bloody knife, conspiratorially dropped onto the floor. Or lifted a bloody shirt. Follow a line of bloody footprints out the front door. Or upstairs. Evidence pointing to Morrie. It was nickels and dimes. Hardly a pirate’s booty.”

  “Somebody wanted to get inside that back room, and it had to do with the murder.”

  “Preposterous.” She stepped away. “Enough. Really.” She headed to the front door but shot a glance back at me. “So, my dear, what have we concluded?” The gravelly, irreverent laugh. “Have I given you the answer you need?”

  “I’m thinking about that break-in.”

  Her eyes flickered. “You think it had to do with the murder?”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “Now you’re trying to scare me.” Her voice was hollow.

  I shook my head back and forth. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Late the following morning Esther walked in from watering the flowers on the front porch, a puzzled look on her face. She held up a long white envelope, sealed. “Vos iz dos? For you, Edna dear. And no stamp on it. Dropped onto the porch. How odd.” The envelope simply said “Edna Ferber” in thick black ink that had smudged at the edges. “A mash note?” A twinkle in her eye.

  I took it from her. “More likely a death threat.”

  But those were poorly chosen words because Esther drew in her breath and scrunched up her face.

  “I’m joking, Esther.”

  “I hope you are, Edna. I don’t understand today’s humor. You young folks.”

  Sitting across the table, spreading boysenberry jam on some toast, my mother quipped, “This new generation of young women refuses to be humorous.”

  “No, Mother,” I answered back, “we just refuse to be humored.”

  Perversely, I declined to open the envelope, though both women insisted I do so. Molly, hobbling in, wondered what the fuss was about. Told of the note, she gave me an in-my-day-no-respectable-girl look that left nothing unsaid about decorum and civility and suspect missives dropped casually onto a fair maiden’s doorstep.

  Back in my room, hurriedly, I ripped opened the envelope. What I found intrigued me: a yellowing piece of paper, typescript on one side, and neat penmanship on the back. It was, bizarrely, from Jacob, though I was baffled why he chose to drop it onto the front porch.

  “Edna,” it began. “It came to me—at last—about years ago. I finally remember you. I was cruel.” Below that:

  Edna, Edna, sugar and spice,

  An orchid locked in frozen ice.

  Edna, Edna,

  Not nice—

  Dramatically he’d drawn a huge “X” through that bit of old childish doggerel, and below it wrote:

  Edna, Edna

  Let’s hope I’m wrong.

  When I sing you a comrade song

  That goes on too long.

  Edna Edna

  Here’s some advice

  An orchid in ice

  Please be nice.

  And below it, separate from the silly verse, were two words in bold block letters:

  TO ME!

  Please be nice to me!

  At the bottom he also scrawled: “This is the first poem I’ve written in seven years.”

  Hardly poetry, I thought. Not exactly a love-smitten Robert Browning writing to (and wooing?) the frail and welcoming Elizabeth Barrett. The scribbling was, frankly, unsettling.

  None of this made sense, except as indications of Jacob’s disturbed state of mind. Jacob, playing a game. Jacob, groping along in some darkness he’d fallen into.

  Jacob’s mind taking him back to the past—and remembering me. Finally. But also, I wondered, what other bits and pieces of the past were at last surfacing in his mind these days.

  The paper crackled in my hand like opening an old letter, long stowed away in a drawer, brittle. On the back I found what was obviously an old poem from the days when he listened to some poetic muse. Poorly typed, under the title “Poem,” with cross-outs, hatched lines, a fading typescript read:

  The movement of my mother

  Suddenly turning in her beautiful flesh

  Makes us watch

  Stars move through untouched heavens

  And the boys gather from the street:

  She lifts pots from the stove

  And licorice from the cabinets.

  In summer she sees them to their end.

  I shouldn’t be here, this moment—

  Lapping tongues that mock.

  Not my fault.

  Even the dead know more than I do.

  I reread the old words—a rough draft? Rambling, confused, and, for some reason, I thought of Stephen Crane’s stark, enigmatic verse, which always intrigued me, though I never liked it. Was it an accident, Jacob’s choosing this old sheet of paper with that particular poem in order to pen the doggerel intended for me? Who knew?

  What was he telling me?

  Jacob
worried me. I watched for him to leave his house. I drifted to the side windows overlooking the Brenner yard, or read on the front porch, or glanced out my bedroom window late at night, unable to sleep. I waited, holding my breath.

  Which, surprisingly, was how I finally spotted him: at midnight, the houses and street silent as dust.

  Just after midnight, as I sat reading by a small table lamp, unable to sleep, I noticed a light switched on at the back of the Brenner house—on for a minute or so and then extinguished. I switched off my own light and peered outside, where I noticed a faint shadow moving out from the back steps, someone leisurely walking around the side of the house toward the street. A man, I could tell from the build. Jacob Brenner, obviously. The erstwhile poet wandering under a hazy moonlit sky.

  Hurriedly, foolishly, I threw on my robe over my dressing gown, tied a sash at the waist, and quietly, cat-like, opened my bedroom door, closed it carefully, and moved down the stairs. The old house creaked and moaned with night noises, the labored breathing of old boards, so my careful footfall on the oak stairs produced a few groans and sighs as I walked. I wasn’t certain of my behavior. Certainly I could never follow the nomadic man through Chicago streets at this unseemly hour, especially dressed for bed and unchaperoned by my dowager mother. Yet curiosity overwhelmed me. The front door squeaked as I opened it, so I paused, waiting. No one in the house stirred. Molly probably popped awake—but so be it. The rest of the household sound sleepers, I trusted—as I usually was.

  Though the night remained unrelentingly hot, a slight chill made me shiver. Nights in Chicago usually shuddered under the wind that came off Lake Michigan. Even in the dog days of summer, boiling, no one could forget the awful power of any Chicago winter. So now I shivered, drew in my robe tighter, and huddled in a corner of the porch. Silence: no one visible. Jacob Brenner, disappeared.

  Gingerly, in violation of all I considered proper, I walked down the steps, surreptitiously secreting myself behind an overgrown bank of hedges, and peered up the block. Not an automobile, not a soul in sight. The darkness was relieved at regular intervals by fuzzy streetlamps. Dim lights in some apartments, here and there. A tomcat disappeared under a car fender. But mostly blackness on this quiet, respectable street of hard-working lives. The streetlamp in front of the Brenner house cast blocks of yellow onto the pavement.

  Moving in the middle of the street, slowly, dully, was Jacob’s shadow. From my hidden spot, I could discern his lanky figure moving, moving, moving, and steady, with purpose. At the corner where Monroe met Maxwell, he stopped, conveniently under a streetlamp. A tiny figure now, almost difficult to see, except for the movement of arms that waved at nothing in particular. He stopped directly in front of Nathan’s Meat Market—that lodestar at the heart of his papa’s murder. He stood there for a long time, though perhaps it was but minutes, and soon I saw the ghostly silhouette headed back.

  Quietly, I slipped into the house, tiptoed into the parlor where I stood by the front window, concealed in darkness, my hand pulling back the curtains. Within seconds, Jacob reappeared, still in the middle of the street, as though savoring the exquisite freedom of a city street with no automobiles, no bustling strollers, no noontime yelling and rattling.

  Yet he danced around, loose-limbed, a marionette freed from the confining strings, because he swirled, stepped left, stepped right, a tap dance on the pavement. I heard—or imagined I heard—a humming, or was it a plaintive keening coming from his throat?

  He stopped, stooped down, hunched over, and rocked on his heels. He stared at his dark home. Silent now, arms folded on his chest. He was waiting for something. But what?

  Then he moved quickly. I jerked back in the parlor, gasped as I bumped a table, a box falling to the floor with an loud thud. Energized, he walked toward the Newmann home. Had he spotted me on the porch earlier? Had he caught my reflection in the window, a shadow caught by moonlight and flickering street lamp?

  He stopped in front of the house—directly in front of the window where I stood, paralyzed now, helpless to move. As I held my breath, he crouched down again, the same frog-like stance he’d assumed before his own home. Now, rocking like a children’s play toy, he stared at the Newmann home and I feared he’d be there all night, with me—the nosy investigator—afraid to shift my body lest he catch sight of me. Dawn would find Jacob still on watch, and my mother would discover her wayward daughter wrapped in a parlor curtain like a pesky servant spying on the household.

  I waited.

  But of course Jacob finally moved, standing, nodding as though waking from a dream, and walking home. No jerky movement now, no flailing of arms, no danse macabre. Simply a man strolling home without a care in the world.

  I slipped into an armchair and realized I was breathing heavily, my heart pounding. Good Lord, I thought, what was that midnight romp all about? What demons drew poor Jacob from his hot bed and compelled that midnight trek?

  My mind sailed to the scrap of doggerel he’d sent me—a message? Trivial, a lingering vestige of the old, flirtatious Jacob? The ladies’ man, Romeo, the foolish gigolo. But then I thought of the poem on the back, that dark poem to his mother, the neighborhood cynosure of the hungry boys, and that haunting last line:

  Even the dead know more than I do.

  The dead? His father? For, indeed, his father knew his assailant. Yes, I thought: Ivan let the killer come near. No stranger, of course, that killer. Someone free to approach him, to bend over and stab the man to death. A knife to the neck. A curious place to strike—as if by chance, anger, confusion. Unpremeditated?

  Ivan knew his killer. And well.

  At that moment, I guessed that Jacob knew the name of the killer.

  ***

  A police car pulled in front of the Brenner household, and the street held its breath. Late afternoon, a lazy and sweltering day, I sat on the front porch with my mother, Esther, and Molly, scarcely moving, nursing tart lemon phosphates and saying little. Too hot for conversation. Earlier Molly had asked me what I was doing roaming around the house late last night. “I recognized your steps in the parlor. Something dropped on the floor—knocked me wide awake.”

  “Sleepless,” I’d told her. “The heat.”

  Still eying me suspiciously, she dozed off, a whisper of a snore coming from the back of her throat. Every so often a passing car—a horn tooting or an explosive backfire—would startle her and she’d open her eyes, surprised to see the rest of us staring at her. Esther was talking in a weary drawl about the wilting of her petunias alongside the front steps.

  My mother pointed. “Look.”

  The policemen stepped from the squad car, adjusted their trousers, and one shifted his body and nodded to the other.

  Roused, excited, Molly wanted to walk to the Brenner home, but Esther, alarmed, held up her hand: No, please, no. Not our business. No.

  Within minutes the front door opened and the two lawmen escorted Leah and Sarah out.

  Molly made a rasping sound and shook her head. “What new black spot is that woman bringing to our street?”

  Esther stared her down. “Really, now, Molly.”

  I walked to the edge of the porch, quietly watching. What I saw told me that this was no arrest. The police walked alongside the two women, one of them leaning into Leah’s neck, saying something. But the way he held his body—the tilt of his neck, the way he held onto Leah’s elbow—suggested comfort, solace.

  And Leah looked shattered, drawn, stooped over, an old dragging woman. None of the vibrancy or spunk I’d seen in her before. Even Sarah, stone-faced with her head thrown back, her fingers gripping a handkerchief, seemed unusually solicitous, her hand touching Leah’s lower back. That rare display of intimacy scared me more than the policeman’s reassuring touch. Sarah, the woman with sass and vinegar, her sister’s harsh critic, now lending comfort.

  It had to do with Jacob. I felt it to my core. Standi
ng there, I trembled.

  Then, like that, they were gone.

  Molly’s craggy, lined face was ghostly, white. The life of the street had shifted again, and she knew it to her marrow. The new twist on old news. When I turned to Esther, she was sobbing.

  ***

  We knew nothing until later that evening when Ad, ashen and shaky, walked into the house. Sol, home from the cigar store, was the first to approach him, his hand grazing his son’s shoulder.

  “My boy,” Sol said, his voice a rumble. We stood, all of us, to greet him, panicked.

  Ad pulled out a kitchen chair and toppled into it.

  “Ad…” his mother said anxiously.

  He was shaking.

  “Jacob?” More my statement than a question.

  He nodded, his eyes moist.

  “He’s dead?” From Esther.

  “Thank God, no.” Ad smiled thinly at his mother. “But he’s hospitalized. He’s unconscious. In a coma.”

  “Tell us,” I demanded.

  Across from me my mother sat with her eyes closed.

  Ad sighed. He didn’t know where to begin, a run of incoherent speech, a voice so soft that his mother nudged him quietly. “Please, Adolph. I don’t understand.”

  His voice cracked. “I heard it on the street so I stopped back at their house. Leah was at the hospital but Sarah had come home.” He sucked in his breath, his words broken. “Sarah told me the horrible news.”

  “Is he going to be all right?” Real concern in Molly’s voice. “That poor boy.”

  Ad deliberated. “I don’t know.”

  “But what happened?” I begged. “Jacob doesn’t leave the house. He hides away.” Except nights, midnight ghosts in the deserted street. The dancing shadow silhouetted against a white-hot sky.

  “Uncle Ezra got real worried. He stopped in but Jacob refused to see him.” A sad smile. “The same with me, his oldest friend. Shutting us out. Going a little crazy, maybe. But Ezra kept at him, even banging on Jacob’s bedroom door. He talked to Jacob, whispering through the door, demanding, according to what Leah told Sarah. Leah told Ezra to leave him alone. But he convinced Jacob to go with him. Leah, rushing in from the kitchen, saw them speeding off in Ezra’s car.”