by Ed Ifkovic
“So everybody goes into hiding.” He chuckled, but sadly. “Maybe nobody believes you about the back room, but maybe somebody wonders…what? What’s there? Maybe this Edna knows something. Maybe not the back room but somewhere else. Something hidden—in plain sight? Maybe…Who knows? Someone running around now. Nervous like a chicken with its head cut off. Give themselves away, stupid. I bet Morrie Wolfsy is pulling out the drawers in that room, piling up the papers and junk dating back to the last century.” He chuckled softly.
“I doubt it. Not now. Did you hear Selma after my…performance? She grabbed him and said, ‘I need to get home. Now. Away from here. These people.’”
“The air was filled with poison.”
“Yes, from Edna, the anarchist’s bomb, hurled into a grieving room. A good way to begin shiva.”
Sol shook his head. “Ad took Minna off to the movies tonight. Up at Central Park Theater. A comedy, he tells me. A night like this—a comedy? Can you figure that? Chinese food at Joy Yen Lew’s, to top it off. He tells me as they’re leaving, ‘What in the world was that Edna thinking?’ Minna whispered, ‘A troublemaker, Edna is.’ And I tell both of them, ‘Maybe we need to have more such trouble in our lives.’ So Ad punches me on the shoulder like I’m an old school chum and they go off to laugh at some antics on the screen. Movies—I never seen one, you know. Don’t want to. Young folks, not caring. A movie today. A box of popcorn. A quarter for nothing. A walk home after dark. Young folks. You young folks. Such a generation.” He waved a hand at me.
Though I said nothing, I thought Sol’s definition of “young folks” somewhat skewered. Ad, at forty. Minna, fortyish. Me, careening unhappily toward forty. I was young when McKinley was president. I was young when it was hardly a golden age. Now these were days I reveled in—me, the short story writer in the pages of Ladies’ Home Journal or Everybody’s. Six months in New York, six in Chicago. A novelist. A move from short story land to novel country. Furnished apartments with oriental carpets, Victrolas, and supercilious doormen.
…with my mother…
…whose trunk was a punctuation mark on a failed day.
I stood up. “I’m going to hide in my room.”
Sol winked, grandfatherly. “Under the covers where the goblins can’t get you.”
***
I turned the doorknob slowly. At first the old door refused to give. No one locked that door, I knew, probably hadn’t for years. After all, Levi walked in and out all day, left the door wide open. There was nothing left to steal except his piles of used clothing, unsorted, smelly, worn, sifted through. A vacant room now, though the stink of raw meat and gamey bird lingered, odors that warred with the stink of mouse droppings and old paper pulp. After he shut down his butcher shop, Morrie never locked up. No need to. Everybody knew that. And, maybe, others. At least one other soul who might surprise me.
…with any luck…
Eight o’clock at night, dark now. At the Newmann household all was quiet. My mother was in her room, probably writing letters before she turned in. Esther and Sol in their room. Molly, when I walked into the kitchen for water earlier, was in her bedroom at the back, the hum of a radio on low, some staticky song. I heard her coughing, some phlegmatic jag that alarmed. But then silence. The radio suddenly switched to another station, and then switched off. A house that went to bed early, and happily. That middle-aged youngster, Ad, was at the movies with Minna. Or treating her to chop suey on Clark Street. The house creaked under the summer heat, the steamy attic, and the groaning eaves. Another hot night.
I’d slipped out by the back door, pushing open the screen door, edging my way up the sidewalk until, away from any possible sighting, I hurried toward Maxwell. At the corner I paused to check out Morrie Wolfsy’s second-story apartment over the meat market, but saw only darkness. Home with his wife, probably reviewing my shameful performance. “I told you she was a crazy person, that daughter of Julia’s. Imagine the nonsense that comes out of her mouth.” No one around now. A streetlamp cast flickering shadows on the façade, black-sooted like so many Chicago buildings, the awful dirt and grime of distant I. C. trains carried by wind and rain until so much of Chicago resembled a darkswept Hogarth print.
The door gave, though it squealed and yawned, loud enough to make me hesitate. But not for long. Inside, sweating but calm, determined, I switched on the light, and the miserable room lit up: counters of unsorted clothing, empty butcher-block surfaces, sagging shelves, and on the floor a nasty crumble of old, dried sawdust. Quietly, I moved across the room, reached the back room, found the light switch, and turned it on. I rushed back to the front entrance, switched off that light. The same procedure in the back room, as I located the small bathroom at the back, turned on that light, went back to switch off the back room light. On off, on off, a frantic rhythm. I pulled a hard-backed chair into the bathroom, shut the door but not completely, an inch opening perhaps, and then plunged the small space into darkness.
A little foolish, I sat in complete blackness, hands folded in my lap. And waited. Waited. Waited—though I thought—not only is this most likely a waste of time—but foolhardy. Proving what? A suspicion I’d had the day before—a mishmash of bits and pieces that led me to suspect someone of murder? Impossible to prove—except…maybe this plot…this…this sitting in the dark. Would someone show up? So there I sat, waiting.
A knife had been thrust into a man’s neck, probably a sudden, unplanned moment, quick, quick, the spurt of sudden blood. The horror of it all. Not pretty, any of it. Ivan’s murder had been impulse, chance. I believed that. Someone not used to murder. Someone surprised at the act itself. One of us.
A murderer who now felt safe, untouchable.
Except for something—maybe someone—unable to be controlled.
But…what possibility fifteen years later? So much to lose.
Getting away with murder. The perfect crime, the murderer untouchable. Maybe forever.
I waited.
An hour passed, uneventful. Bored, hot, I nearly dozed off in the tight, close room, windowless, when I heard the creak of the front door. I shot awake, spine stiff, eyes wide. My heart raced. I sucked in my breath.
Now.
My God. Now.
The answer.
At first nothing. Then a tentative step, almost inaudible, the front door closed, a dragging sound as though something were being shuffled across the floor. Through a crack in the bathroom door, I saw the light come on in the back room, though I sat back, in darkness, hidden, scared now, heart pounding. For a moment I closed my eyes: lightning flashes of red yellow blue, blending, colliding, sparks flying. I nearly gasped out loud.
Then I heard it: a wall cubbyhole opened, a drawer pulled out. One drawer, followed by a crash of papers and something metal. Something clanging onto the floor. A pause, deafening. Then a second drawer, opened, rifled through. A rhythm, though sloppy and rushed. I waited.
A tapping. Something moved. Tap tap tap.
I had no choice. I snapped on the bathroom light, swung open the door, and heard a woman’s piercing shriek, breaking at the end.
Molly Newmann faced me, her face ivory with fright, one hand grasping a sheaf of bound papers, the other gripping her cane. Tap tap tap.
I stared, frozen, my mind blank, my throat parched.
A low hissing sound from the back of her throat. “Edna, what…?”
“Molly.” I barely got the name out.
She dropped the papers, spun around, banging into a table with that cane and hobbled toward the door. She hesitated a moment, faced me with sad and stark eyes, ready to blather some excuse—I lost my way, I wandered—I—I don’t know how I got here—
Shoulders dropping, resigned, she ignored me, leaving the back room but, nervously, switching off the light behind her. Plunged into darkness, I reached for the bathroom door, got my bearings, but my body refused to move. Wh
en I touched my cheeks, I felt hot flesh, my skin tingling. I burned with shame. It was like opening a door to find someone naked sitting in front of you. You, the intruder, stammer, apologetic, babbling. The naked soul, aware of her own nakedness, simply watches you. In the case of Molly, she simply walked out the door, though slowly, an old woman’s fragile step. My whole body shook.
***
Molly sat in her kitchen and ignored me when I walked in. I’d stayed in the back room, righting the drawers, obsessed with returning the room to its original look. But it was more than that, really. I couldn’t bear the sight of the aged Molly, crippled now, moving down the sidewalk. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. She was headed to the house where I was a guest. So I lingered, sad and dizzy, until I had no choice but to follow her dead man’s path.
She was preparing a cup of hot tea. As I watched, she carefully removed the tea leaves, added a bit of cream, two teaspoons of sugar, and took a sip. She watched me over the rim of the teacup. A civilized woman, but the cup rattled when she replaced it on the saucer.
“I need to understand.” I sat opposite her.
She watched me for a while, her face horrible, wrinkled, old, old. “It wasn’t supposed to come to this.”
“Tell me.”
“I knew you’d come to suspect”—she faltered, the word catching—“him.”
Her clipped words, so blunt and hurting, were like a jolt to the system. Of course, she’d sensed that I knew. The little slip-ups. The little nagging suspicion and inconsistencies that suddenly came together, flashed before me, emblazoned.
“Ad.” One word, awful in its fearsome weight.
She closed her eyes.
She mouthed one word: Adolph.
Her hand knocked the tea cup, the tea sloshing out.
For I had realized, earlier, that I’d known it on a gut level for a day or so now. Maybe more. The little things, I reflected. I found my voice. “Little things you said. When you heard Sarah screaming, you stepped out of your room to find Ad standing in the hallway. Another time you said you knocked on his door, and he was waking up from a nap. A small inconsistency, true, but it made me wonder. And that nonsense about Sarah being part of the fight the morning that Ivan and Leah had. You were forgetting things, slipping up, and so you rambled, threw stories out, helpless, trying to push me away. You were forgetting what you’d told me. What you’d told the cops.”
A thin smile. “There was never a reason for me to rehearse a story.”
“Until I arrived. Until Leah came back home.”
She shuddered. “A seductive hoyden, that one.”
“Tell me.”
“I never knew anything.” She refused to look at me, her voice dipping.
I broke in, angry. “Of course, you did. Molly, you’re lying to me.”
A long pause, the rattling of the cup. “He’s my grandson. My favorite boy. The one blessing to this family.”
“I wondered about the boys in the back room. I grant you that. Something always bothered me. In all the stories Ad was different. Under Levi Pinsky’s moralistic instruction, he frowned on the others teasing about Leah, though I gather he once did so and Ivan yelled at him. That deadly conversation he had with Jacob on the porch. The day before the murder. The failed rabbinical student, a lark for a moment, intrigued by Levi’s stories, but he saw himself as chivalric, the one who had a rarefied view of women. Levi’s insidious gift to him. It explained his long, unfulfilled engagement to Minna. So many times he saw himself as a hero. The clay hero, or mud, saving others. A little thing, but maybe not.”
Molly shook her head. “Maybe. Maybe not. But even when he was a small boy, he had a boyish crush on Leah. His best friend’s mother. A beautiful woman who teased him then. He became a little…protective…” A sigh. “The hero nobody needed.”
“Or possessive.”
Bitterness in her tone. “That fight Ivan had with Leah. That morning. Adolph hated Ivan—so many times, hearing them fight, he—seethed. Adolph with his hot temper. Back to when that man hurt poor Minna—shattered that poor girl. Adolph stepped in, sorry for her. Always the knight hungry for a—a battle to show off. Adolph didn’t want to marry her—he wanted to defend her.”
She stopped talking, her eyes watching the doorway.
“Go on, Molly.”
She breathed in. “That morning he wanted to go there—to fight Ivan. He was afraid for Leah. ‘I got to help her. That…that bastard!’ The way Ivan smacked Jacob the day before—hated his own son, mocked him. Adolph, the protector. Adolph, the savior.”
“But you left, went to Maxwell Street.”
“I made him go shopping with me—to get him away. But I could see the fury in his face. His eyes—so…crazy. I lied and told everyone we were together the whole day, as if we’d never left each other’s sides. And we were—most of that day. The truth. But later on, back home, I napped in my room. I heard screaming. Sarah screaming.” For a second she closed her eyes. “You know, I’d heard Adolph running up the stairs a short time before, out of breath, sobbing, slamming into his room. It woke me up. No, Adolph wasn’t in the hallway. When he came out after I called him, he was scared. Shaking. His hands shook. I knew. But what could I say? My boy. Adolph. Everyone calls him Ad. Everyone loves him—a good boy. Edna, he never found his way. He’s an unfinished boy.”
“A scared man.” I waited a second. “You never asked him?”
“How could I, Edna? How?”
“And he let Leah take the blame.”
She didn’t answer except to say, “He changed after that day. I could see it. He’d stare, he’d get white in the face, he’d get that faraway look in his eyes. He lost…ambition. Minna pursued him, got him—but what did she get? A shell, a vacant-eyed wanderer, lost in this house, on the streets. A thousand jobs.”
“But Leah…”
She raised her voice. “Leah was sent to a home. Not a prison. I could see how he thought that saved everyone, like Leah was visiting out-of-state relatives. He stopped thinking about it. I doted on him, but he’d see me watching him because he knew I knew. The way he looked that day when I came out of my room. And now and then he’d spot me staring at him, something in my eyes that he saw there. I don’t know. At those moments I saw fear, a look that said: Don’t tell, help me, don’t tell help me I don’t know what I did help help help me. Like words strung together without a breath between.”
“But he watched Jacob have a breakdown. Jacob, filled with his own self-doubt. Jacob, blaming himself, Jacob willing himself to die.”
A sob escaped her throat. “You saw how Jacob drew apart from Adolph lately, no? Adolph was baffled. Your doing, Edna. You put that doubt into Jacob’s head, and he obsessed about it and somehow wondered about Adolph. A suspicion, maybe, the way Adolph acted. Back then.”
I agreed. “That’s what got me thinking about him, Molly. God knows how Jacob’s mind worked, but something triggered such thoughts. He sent me a poem, asking me to be nice to him, but talking about a ‘comrade song.’ Something that made no sense. What ‘comrade song’ did he have? Only one. Written on the back of an old poem about the boys watching his mother. He must have known Ad’s attitude toward Leah. I wondered about that. And his last conversation with Ad—something about it being time. ‘Don’t you know it’s time?’ His best friend, he realized—and it was time to come clean. Time!”
Molly’s face was tear-streaked. “How Adolph hated Ivan.” She shuddered. “And adored Leah.”
“Ad on a moral crusade, starting in that back room.”
“A good boy…”
“Somehow when it came together for Jacob, he couldn’t be around Ad. It bothered him. It ate at him.”
“You scared me at Leah’s this afternoon, Edna. You made me wonder. What does Edna know? Did I miss something? It made no sense, but I couldn’t take a chance. A whole part of me knew there wa
s nothing in that back room—how could there be? why would there be?—but I couldn’t sleep. I’m an old lady—confused. Fifteen years—of course nothing, though Morrie left it cluttered, untouched. I had to be there. I couldn’t ask Adolph.”
“And so you headed there.”
“The evidence still there? Impossible. Fifteen years. But that news about the break-in that same night. I never heard that before. Never. A locked back door—broken into. It frightened me. I could see Adolph doing that. I thought—yes, I thought—yes, hide something. Hide a knife. Adolph broke in, hid the knife and bloody clothing so that the police would blame Morrie.”
“I don’t think the police even considered…”
A sharp look. “That’s why I thought…maybe…”
“But there’s no evidence. I never believed there was any.”
A dusky chuckle. “Which is why Adolph went to the movies. He knows there’s nothing there. And anybody else hearing you today. Everybody else but…but me.” She eyed me. “You knew I would do something. That news about the break-in that same night. You probably saw my face.” A sickly smile, those ivory-blue false teeth. “The only hope you had was—me.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t know. But there was no other way to prove my theory. Too many years have gone by. Who would believe me? What proof? The only way was to get the only other person I suspected who knew what happened that day to…to go there.”
“Me.” She could barely get the word out. “An addled old lady. Adolph believed he was safe.”
“You didn’t.”
Her voice broke. “I had to go there.”
“And so did I.” I sighed. “Molly, I swear I didn’t want to see you there, but there was no one else who would come. The only person who might come—you.”
Her laugh broke at the end. “So in walks this little old lady, crippled, banging away with her cane.” She saluted me with her teacup. “I was panicky. Yes, that’s the way he thinks. Blame Morrie. Stupid Morrie—the philanderer.” She locked eyes with mine. “The idea drove me—crazy. But, you see, I couldn’t take a chance.”
