Old News

by Ed Ifkovic

  “How did Jacob look?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “She only saw them leaving. She was surprised—and bothered. She doesn’t trust Uncle Ezra.”

  “No one does,” I commented. “Too oily a confection.”

  “Edna, for Lord’s sake.” My mother cast a baleful eye on me.

  I wasn’t happy and drummed my fingers on the table. Ad’s eyes watched my nervous hand, mesmerized. “Jacob had something to say,” I told him. “I’m convinced of it. Ezra wanted him to keep still.”

  “How do you know that?” Ad asked.

  “I don’t.”

  My mother tsked. “Edna, please stay out of this.”

  Impatient, I cut in. “Tell us what happened.”

  “Well, Ezra’s version.”

  “He was there?”

  Ad bit his lip. “Right there. He was trying to shake Jacob out of his blue spell, afraid there’d be another period of…of depression, so he breezed around the streets with Jacob, out to the lake, stopping at a chop suey place on Thirty-first Street, stopping for ice cream at Nathan’s Ice Cream Parlor, even going to a movie at the Vista up on Forty-third Street. Weird, he said, the way Jacob acted there. They saw Within the Law, you know, the Norma Talmadge movie. I saw it last week with Minna. Halfway through the movie, Jacob got agitated, jumping up. He left the theater and Ezra followed him. Outside Jacob said the movie put salt in the wound he’d already opened.”

  “I don’t know that movie,” I said. “Tell me.”

  Ad volunteered. “It’s about this girl, Mary Turner, a shop girl at this emporium, falsely charged with stealing, a trumped-up charge. She’s sent to jail for three years—even though she’s innocent. She didn’t do it. Maybe the scene where she gets out of prison got Jacob all riled up. She wants revenge, but within the law, the people that did her dirt paying for it—but make them pay in a way she couldn’t be touched. Anyway, Jacob ran away from Ezra, up the street, pushing through the crowd, bumping into folks, rude, staggering, loud. Ezra says he caught up with him, grabbed hold of Jacob’s shoulder, trying to hold him back, maybe calm him down, but Jacob shrugged him off. ‘Stay away from me. All of you.’ That’s what Ezra said he kept yelling. Embarrassed, folks staring at them, Ezra stepped back.” Ad paused, hesitant to go on. His mother reached across the table and touched his wrist.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “And Jacob was standing on the corner as the streetcar approached. Ezra said Jacob was quiet, even turning toward him with a slight smile on his face. So Ezra relaxed, as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder with crowds of folks ready to cross the street. But someone jostled the crowd, some woman slipped, someone reached out to grab her, to pull her back to the curb. Everything shifted suddenly and Jacob stumbled, just feet from him, toppling in front of the streetcar. He was knocked to the ground and smashed his head.”

  “Oh, my Lord.” Molly was trembling.

  My mother’s face tightened. A mixture of sadness and accusation. Lightning flashes in my head, a roar in my eardrums, panic. I turned away from her look.

  “Or a suicide,” I said into the silence.

  Esther gasped, covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh no, it had to be an accident. Streetcars hit people all the time. I’ve seen…people stumble…”

  Molly was staring at Ad, her jaw set, rigid. “What do you think, Adolph?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked Ad.

  A long, unhappy silence, Ad fidgeting with the buttons on his shirt until he snapped one off. It rolled onto the floor, and Esther stooped for it. Ad’s mouth went slack, his eyes half-closed. Finally, breathing in and out, almost melodramatically, he faced me. Me—not his mother. His eyes were dull pieces of stone.

  “You wanna know what I think? I think Uncle Ezra pushed Jacob in front of the streetcar.”

  “Adolph, no!” From his mother.

  Molly gasped, clutched at her throat.

  But Adolph gathered steam now, his voice booming across the kitchen. “C’mon. Face it. Uncle Ezra murdered Jacob.”

  “But why?” his mother pleaded.

  “Because Jacob had learned that Ezra was the one who killed Ivan.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jacob Brenner lay in a coma.

  Two days passed, suspended time, all of us holding our breaths, frantic yet calm. Waiting. A deathwatch. Conversation muted, if at all.

  Renovation completed, the five-room apartment we’d booked at the Windermere Hotel in Hyde Park was ready for us, lovely spacious rooms, morning walks to Lake Michigan one block away, to Jackson Park. My routine for summers: writing nine to four, a walk, back home for a bath. Quiet rooms, except for the rumble and toot of the Illinois Central suburban trains as they passed.

  But now I was hesitant to leave the Newmann home. Not yet, a few days more, graciously invited by Esther and Sol, and the reason was Jacob Brenner. Though my mother said nothing, I sensed she also wanted to be nearby. A harsh woman, my mother, but one easily made sad by the agony of others.

  Esther busied herself in the kitchen, baking a Black Forest cake that we’d all ceremoniously carry to Leah’s home that afternoon. I’d called, asked whether such a visit might be acceptable, and Leah hadn’t spoken for a moment. An awkward moment, but she finally said yes, though I could hear the hesitation in her voice.

  Hearing of our planned visit, Molly balked. She was snide. “Have a good time.”

  “Please,” Esther begged her.

  “You bring cake after a funeral,” Molly insisted. “Not before.”

  “We’ve known Jacob all our lives.”

  Molly said nothing. The old woman was sitting on a kitchen chair, her lethal cane resting on her lap. At Esther’s “Please” she gripped her cane, tapping firmly on the floor, her fiery punctuation.

  Molly turned to my mother. “You going, Julia?”

  Tap tap tap.

  My mother was startled, unhappy being singled out. She glanced at Molly, and in a croaking voice said quietly, “This visit is for Jacob, Molly.”

  Molly snorted, struggled to stand, waved the cane menacingly in the air, barely clipping Esther, who ducked, and slowly tottered out of the room, exaggerating her movement, her slight limp.

  Esther whispered, “I’ll pay a price for this long after you two leave.”

  I spoke up. “Leah will wonder where she is, no?”

  Esther shook her head. “She’ll know. Molly harbors a lifetime of resentment. You don’t give up such dislike easily.” A thin, mischievous smile. “Her first words about Leah, I recall: ‘A beautiful woman ain’t no gift from God.’ Then she said, ‘No good will come of this. You mark my words.’ So, I suppose, Ivan’s murder and Leah’s arrest proved her…her dire prophecy. Molly has never been one to forgive—or forget. Ask her about the time Sol was fifteen and forgot to come home from a park for her birthday.” She shuddered. “Still talked of.”

  “She has one weakness, though,” I noted.

  “What?” Esther stared into my face.

  “Ad. She indulges your son as though he’s the golden child,”

  Esther bit her lip. “I know. Poor Adolph, the heir to the throne. But what throne? My Harriet, two years younger than Adolph, a quiet and pretty girl, smart as a whip, was ignored.”

  “How sad!”

  “That’s why she married young and moved to Cleveland. She got tired of sitting in darkness, though Sol and I fawned and flattered. Adolph got all the smiles. So…so Old Country, no? The man is the…chosen of God.”

  My mother, surprisingly, muttered the old ritualistic prayer. “‘Thank God I was not born a woman.’”

  “How sad!” I repeated.

  Of course, I’d spent a lifetime in the shadow of my sister, Fannie, now married and happily away from my life. True, my mother grudging
ly accepted the generous alms I offered from my increasingly large bounty. A short story sold to Cosmopolitan garnered her that new fur coat she coveted or some glittery bauble, shrilly demanded but then denigrated. So I understood Harriet’s flight from family…but I was bound, the indentured servant in the Ferber household…

  Esther was talking softly. “Molly has spent all of my married life waiting for me to blunder. After over forty years of a good marriage, Sol and I, I still got to prove myself.” She sighed as she glanced toward the doorway. “It gets a little…exhausting.”

  As she said that last word—an “exhausting” that was world-weary but strangely comical, elongated and in a purposely Old Country inflection—my mother and I burst out laughing. Then Esther, surprised at herself, joined us, and we sat there, giggling like small girls in a schoolyard.

  ***

  Leah’s house was an oven. The windows were shut against the afternoon heat, the quiet rooms deadly. As Sarah let us in, deftly taking the cake from Esther’s hands and disappearing into the kitchen with it, we noticed Leah standing back against the fireplace mantel. She was staring over our shoulders, probably for Molly, but I was watching my mother, whose exclamation of “The nerve!” had begun my treacherous journey into the facts of the murder. A flicker of disapproval in her face, though she was long practiced in the art of deception, the actress who’d learned to deal with the annoying patrons of the family notions store she once ran back in Appleton. So her smiled “Hello” was acceptable, though I noticed she didn’t extend her hand. Leah pointed to chairs in the dining room, and we sat down around the table.

  Sarah served iced tea and the cake, but she said nothing, watching us warily. Once, accidentally, I caught her eye, but her stare was difficult to read—peculiarly, a trace of anger that baffled me, though in seconds her eyes assumed the blank look she always wore. That also troubled me.

  Surprisingly, Leah was dressed in a current style, not the dowdy, matronly dress she’d worn before, but, rather, a modish lavender blouse with filigreed lace around the neck, and a straight-lined black skirt, snug at the hips, knee-length, modern. She looked younger than her sixty or so years, nervously jumpy—someone wide-awake because something unexpected might happen. Her snow-white hair, luminous, was pulled into a schoolmarm bun, secured with a black velvet bow.

  “Any news on Jacob?” Esther asked.

  Leah shook her head and suddenly, gulping, began to sob. She turned her head away, closed her eyes, and breathed in. “No, he’s dying.”

  Said, the awful words stung the room, sucked the air out of us.

  “Oh, my Lord,” Esther whispered. “We’re sorry.”

  “He never woke up.”

  “A horrible accident,” Esther said.

  Sarah made a growling sound, deep and loud, that made us start.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “There are all kinds of accidents,” she told us.

  “But Ezra said…”

  Sarah broke in. “Ah, yes, beloved Uncle Ezra, tour guide through the dangerous Chicago streets, the guardian angel.”

  Leah snapped at her. “Stop this, Sarah. For heaven’s sake.”

  “I’m only saying what you are thinking.”

  The two sisters eyed each other, a penetrating look I couldn’t read.

  “You’ve never been able to read my mind, Sarah,” Leah countered.

  Sarah smirked. “Just as well. Dark, unchartered territory there.”

  Leah made a clicking sound, her dark eyes flashing.

  Esther was following the nasty exchange, confused, ready to cry. Exasperated, my mother bridled, shifted in her seat, half-rising. She adjusted the sleeve of her dress, pulling at it, a nervous gesture I recognized—a signal to me that she was ready to leave.

  “Nu,” she said, “we must go.”

  No one had touched the iced tea or the cake.

  But I wasn’t ready to leave. “Sarah, certainly you don’t think someone pushed Jacob in front of that streetcar? On purpose?”

  My mother screamed. “Edna, have you no decency?” She glanced at Leah, who was watching me carefully. At that moment our eyes locked, and I realized she’d also wondered. She was nodding her head.

  I didn’t apologize but addressed Sarah. “Now what are you saying, Sarah?”

  “You’ve met Uncle Ezra.”

  Leah reached out and touched her arm. “Maybe not now, Sarah.”

  Sarah jerked back her arm. “Then when?”

  “Not now.”

  Sarah flicked her head to the side and rolled her tongue over her lips. Flushed, jittery, she was readying some remark when the doorbell chimed. Leah turned to her sister. “Who?”

  Reluctantly, Sarah ushered Ella and Emma into the dining room. They stood behind the chairs, not happy to discover the neighbors sitting at the table. Speaking in a low, trembling voice, one of them said to Sarah, “We’ve come from Mount Sinai.”

  Leah tensed up, her hand raised against her cheek. “And?”

  “Nothing. No change.” She stared blankly at her mother.

  “Sit down, Ella. Please.” Then she spoke to the other sister. “Emma, I’m happy you’ve come.”

  Emma glanced at Ella, as if to say: Are you satisfied? I came, after all. Emma, the twin who believed in her mother’s guilt. The prodigal daughter, grudgingly visiting the home she’d left three years ago. She sat down and avoided the staring faces, the stranger at the wrong party.

  Ella had an edge to her voice, “Emma wanted to come.”

  Emma scowled as her head bowed into her folded hands in her lap. But when she caught her mother’s watchful eye, her face softened. “I’m sorry,” she said simply. Then, a catch in her throat, she echoed her own words, but louder now. “I’m sorry.”

  So she’d moved past the belief in her mother’s guilt, at least for now, perhaps because of Jacob. Or, more likely, Ella’s emphatic order. No matter, because her words “I’m sorry”—heartfelt, spontaneous—cracked something within her, and her body slumped in the chair. She’d wanted to come home, I realized. She’d wanted this overdue reconciliation. Silent now, but content as an old cat by the hearth, she half-closed her eyes as though ready for sleep. A curious transformation—the reluctant daughter back at home. Strangely, though, Ella, the sister who visited her mother, the one who professed her mother’s innocence, now was on edge, anxious, her eyes blinking rapidly, as if she’d been accused of some transgression and didn’t know how to respond. She was the one ready to flee the room.

  Leah asked Emma about Hull House. “I understand you’re working for Jane Addams with the young Russian immigrant girls.”

  Emma seemed surprised that her mother had heard that news. “Volunteering. Three afternoons a week. I’m teaching sewing to young girls. And English at the same time.”

  Ella grumbled. “There’s no money coming in.” She shot a look at Emma. “This won’t last.”

  “I like it.” Emma’s voice rose. She smiled at me. “I was working two days a week as a seamstress. For a cruel woman. We both did, me and Ella.”

  Ella’s tone got bitter. “But we need money for the rent, Emma.”

  Emma frowned. “No, we don’t. Herman pays…”

  “For everything,” Sarah finished. “The rich brother.”

  “I don’t like it,” Ella said. “Emma is making a mistake.”

  Leah put her hand to her head as though squelching a headache. “You can move back here, Ella.”

  Ella jumped. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “We may have to,” Emma said, surprisingly. Then she whispered, “Although I think I’d like to live on my own.”

  Emma, the dormouse under Ella’s severe control, had found some spunk. Feisty, I thought, this girl who’d had a taste of independence, and now, so late in her life, was daring to counter her sister.

  “A s
ingle woman can’t live…” Ella began, but stopped.

  Sarah snickered, “Just like when you were little girls. If one said left, the other said right.”

  Ella bristled. “I always knew what was best for Emma. Because…”

  Emma glared at her.

  Leah finished for Ella with a nervous laugh, “But they both ended up headed in the same direction.”

  “Because of Ella.” Emma’s voice had no kindness in it.

  Ella glowered at Emma, the muscles prominent in her neck. “Not anymore.”

  Silence in the room, my mother again mumbling about leaving. This time, nudging me, she stood, adjusted the seams of her dress.

  The doorbell chimed again, but before Sarah or Leah could move, the front door opened. Uncle Ezra walked in. Nothing sheepish about his entry, unannounced, because he planted himself in the entryway, his face flushed. Leah started to speak but Ezra spoke over her words. “No one answers the telephone in this house. Why pay for that infernal contraption if it’s not used? It seems to me…”

  “Because we knew it was you,” Sarah said snidely.

  He narrowed his eyes. “I told you I’d call at nine, Sarah.”

  “I know,” Sarah said again, cheerfully. “As I said, we knew it was you.”

  “I was at the hospital,” Leah said, placating. “I didn’t…”

  Ezra addressed Sarah, “At times like this, a family must come together, support…” He paused. “You know…mish pokhe…the family.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “Oh, please, Ezra, don’t you get tired of being an ass?”

  “Enough,” said Leah. “Ezra, please sit down. Join us. We have guests.”

  But he didn’t. He surveyed us all, his steely gaze condemning. Finally he rested his stern glance on me, and waited.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m surprised you are here, Edna.”

  “I’m concerned about Jacob—and Leah.”