Mom Meets Her Maker

by James Yaffe

  “All right, I’m only asking the question. So tell me about earlier last night. I saw the boy getting arrested on the television news. He didn’t look so happy.”

  I told her about the arrest in detail, and then I repeated the talk Ann and I had had with Roger at the jail. Mom listened intently, but her only comment came when I described Rabbi Loewenstein’s part in rescuing Roger from the police and in hiding him out earlier.

  “The rabbi yet!” I could hear the pleasure and surprise in Mom’s voice. “It goes to show, you shouldn’t jump at conclusions with anybody in this world. Even a rabbi can turn out to be a mensch!”

  “But what are your thoughts about the murder, Mom?”

  “There’s too many different things to think about,” she said. “I don’t have the time to sort them out right now. In ten minutes I’m expected at the YMCA, they’re having a Christmas party for the poor kiddies, and I’m Santa Claus.”

  An incredible image came into my mind. “Mom, you don’t mean you’re putting on a long white beard and stuffing a pillow in your coat—”

  “You think I’m meshuggenah? I’m bringing some food and toys over to the party. So are plenty other people. This is what I mean by Santa Claus. I’ll tell you what. We’ll meet this afternoon, we’ll go together to the Nutcracker, by that time maybe I’ll have some thoughts in my head.”

  “What nutcracker?”

  “The Nutcracker Ballet. From Tchaikovsky. With the little children and the snowflakes? They do a matinee of it every Christmas Day in this town. It’s a tradition, you didn’t know that? I’ve got a couple tickets, it begins at two o’clock but you’ll meet me at a quarter of so there’s time for us to settle down in our seats and read the story in the program.”

  “What are you doing with an extra ticket?”

  “Mrs. Archuleta from the house next door was supposed to go with me, but I got a call from her early this morning, she’s sick with the flu so she’s spending Christmas eating aspirin and breathing steam. I was going to sell the ticket at the box office, but who wants to sit next to a stranger? Maybe it’ll be a heavy breather, or somebody who fans himself with his program. It’ll be much nicer sitting next to you, my son who hasn’t got any bad habits.”

  “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t planning to take in the Nutcracker Ballet this afternoon. There’s a football game on television.”

  “You prefer a football game to an inspiring cultural experience? All right, all right, it’s your choice. If you’ll enjoy more watching a bunch of apes kicking out each other’s teeth instead of listening to beautiful music and looking at beautiful dancing with your mother, and afterwards maybe talking over your murder case with her! This murder case, if I understand you, that you and your boss don’t have any idea what you can do to help your client.”

  “You can tell us what to do?”

  “The ballet, a quarter of two,” Mom said, and she hung up the phone.

  So I read the morning paper, grinding my teeth over the latest Hatfield editorial. He commended the police department for apprehending a dangerous fugitive, then he hinted broadly—but didn’t quite say it in so many words—that it was too bad they hadn’t caught him a little sooner, before he managed to strike again.

  I realized I was in no mood for the football game. Something else was on my mind, something I wanted to do. It was ten-thirty, I still had time to get there.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, at eleven o’clock on Christmas morning, I sat in the back row of the Church of the Effulgent Apostles and watched and listened while Saint Chuck Candy was given his send-off to heaven.

  His funeral would be held Monday morning, a private family affair, but this memorial service was open to the public, and it looked as if a large segment of the public had accepted the invitation. Candy’s congregation was there in full force, of course, and so were plenty of others, drawn by religious fervor or maybe lowdown curiosity. How can you tell the difference? The people who gather around a bleeding accident victim on the street, are they filled with the compassionate urge to give the poor fellow moral support, or do they get turned on by the sight of blood and the sound of groans? Chances are they don’t even know which themselves.

  Anyway, the Church of the Effulgent Apostles had never had such a crowd in its history. It was a big barn of a room, inelegant, and somehow going to seed, though the building had been put up less than ten years before; but every seat was taken, with a lot of squeezing going on. There were dozens of standing room customers in the back, and the side aisles were packed too.

  I craned my neck while the service was going on, trying to see who was there. Most of the faces in the crowd were the gaunt, sagging, woebegone type that was a specialty in this section of the country: thin-lipped, narrow-eyed people who looked as if all the juice had been squeezed out of them somewhere along the way. There were old ones and young ones, and a lot of babies in arms or toddlers in hand, but somehow they all looked to be the same age. Or maybe what I mean is that the age had been squeezed out of them too. And the effect was reinforced by what everybody was wearing—dark suits and dresses mostly, too tight or too loose because they hadn’t been put on for years. Everybody was fidgeting and looking out of place, and the men were especially uncomfortable, tugging at their neckties as if they were nooses.

  The show didn’t have any more life to it than the audience. There was a small choir of twelve elderly ladies and three elderly gentlemen, and they hardly even made the pretense of singing the same notes at the same time. In the audience nobody did what audiences always do at revival meetings in the movies. Nobody screamed or had fits, nobody jumped into the aisles or up to the altar to writhe.

  Gabriel Candy was a disappointment too. He lifted his arms in the air and invoked his father’s name as if he fully expected this death to be followed by a Second Coming. He shouted “Hallelujah!” and “Jesus loves us!,” and the congregation dutifully shouted after him. But much of this was spoiled by the unfortunate tendency of Gabe’s voice to turn into a squeak at the top of his crescendos. And though he called on the crowd for all the appropriate emotions, nobody seemed to have their heart in them very much.

  He delivered his father’s sermon, pretty much as I had read it in his office a few days ago. I didn’t notice it galvanizing anybody to more than a few perfunctory “Amens.”

  Then he delivered his own sermon. It began with him whooping it up for the deceased, letting God and Jesus know how lucky they were to be joined by the new arrival, who no doubt would soon be turning the Trinity into Quadruplets. Then he lowered his voice and said he wanted to express “some personal feelings on this tragic occasion.”

  The personal feelings stretched into a rambling reminiscence of the first time his father made him get on his knees to pray. “And in my innocent five-year-old heart, I knew at that moment—friends and brothers and sisters, at that moment I knew—that God was with me! His right hand was touching me on the shoulder, and his left hand was on the top of my head, and he was loving me and I was loving him, and Daddy was loving us both, and we were loving—”

  I tuned out for the rest of this orgy.

  It ended eventually with Gabe crying out, “God bless you at this holy Christmas season, my mother and I are grateful to you for coming, love Jesus, and we’ll see you in church next Sunday!”

  But he wouldn’t be seeing as many of them, I thought, as his father had seen.

  I moved through the front door with the rest of the congregation and found a long line forming on the porch. This line was filing slowly past Gabe Candy and his mother, standing next to him and half a head taller. Each departing mourner got a handshake from Gabe and a nod from Mrs. Candy, though her face was covered with a black veil so there was no way of seeing her expression. Every once in awhile Gabe clasped a particular hand longer than he had clasped the others.

  Ahead of me in the line I saw Mrs. Connelly. She wore a black dress, and her blonde hair was reined in by a gray bandanna. Her fac
e was red; I was sure it was from crying.

  Finally I got to the front of the line. It seemed to me that Gabe gave a little start when he saw me, and said some words under his breath to his mother. But he shook my hand without giving out anything more than his standard polite murmur.

  I went down the front steps of the church and started across the lawn, when I heard a voice calling out to me. It was Gabe; he had left his post among the mourners to run after me.

  “Just want to tell you something,” he said, a little out of breath as he stopped in front of me. “It’s nice of you to come pay your respects to Daddy. You didn’t have to do that. I truly appreciate the kind gesture.”

  I muttered something, fidgeting. The fact is, I didn’t have the slightest idea why I had come. Vulgar curiosity more than anything else, I suspected.

  “And I—” Gabe hesitated, and I saw he was blushing a little. “—I wanted to ask you something. Your opinion. I figure you don’t go to too many occasions like this one. So I figure you can give me an impartial opinion. What’d you think of the service? Tell me honestly.”

  “I was very moved,” I said. “It was very sincere.”

  “Well, that’s true enough. I made it as sincere as I could.” He was smiling, but then his smile wavered. “The trouble is, they didn’t want what I gave them.”

  I was beginning to feel embarrassed. I couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

  “The thing about Daddy—he wasn’t an educated man. He had to quit school at age thirteen, he was needed to work the farm. He never finished high school. It’s a lucky thing the Bible College didn’t have a high school degree for one of its requirements. But one thing you could always say about him—he gave the people what they wanted. He just knew what it was, every time. Without any book-learning or anything like that.”

  He made an effort and firmed up his wavering smile. “I’m going to learn how to do that. That’s the big challenge I’m facing. In my ministry. That’s what I have to learn.”

  After an even more tremendous effort, he managed to bring out a laugh. Joyous and confident. “And I’m going to do it. Christ is with me. How can I fail?”

  He stood there smiling a little longer, and then he turned sharply and headed back to the porch and the mourners who were waiting to shake the hand of his father’s son.

  * * *

  I got home a little after twelve and watched the first quarter of the football game, while I munched a baloney sandwich for lunch. Mom would’ve been horrified, so I wouldn’t upset her by telling her. I washed it down with a glass of beer, and then it was time to go to the ballet.

  Every middle-sized town across the United States does the Nutcracker Ballet during the Christmas season, so there’s no point retelling the plot or describing what happens on the stage. In our town the performance—one matinee on Christmas day, and always sold out—was sponsored by the local Symphony Guild, with the City Council letting them have the auditorium for nothing. This was the auditorium of General Wagner High School, a huge barn of a room with mediocre acoustics and sightlines, but there was nowhere else for the performance to take place; the voters keep turning down all proposals to build an up-to-date performing arts center with taxpayer money.

  In the pit would be the Mesa Grande Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Ludwig Mandelbaum, who was starting a promising career as a young conductor in Austria when the Nazis chased him out in 1937. On the stage would be a platoon of local dancers, led by the chairman of the dance department at Mesa Grande College and his wife, who also taught at the college; they had once been second-string soloists with the Ballet Theatre. Also on the stage would be a dozen devastatingly cute child dancers, chosen after a series of viciously competitive auditions which every year created everlasting bitterness among mothers all over town.

  I got to the high school exactly on time, but naturally Mom was in the lobby already, pacing up and down and looking at her watch. I knew I wasn’t late—so why did I feel late?

  “Any brilliant thoughts?” I said, as I walked up to her and kissed her.

  “I’m getting closer,” she said. “There’s only one little bit I can’t fit it in yet. I’ll make my mind a blank, I’ll look at the ballet dancing, and maybe it’ll sneak up on me. Some things, Davie, they only come to you when you aren’t looking.”

  I had to be satisfied with this, so I opened my program and read the story of the ballet—which doesn’t make much sense, but who goes to ballets for sense?—and began to look forward to the performance. Shirley used to drag me to this sort of thing back in New York, and I always complained bitterly; it was a matter of self-respect that the guys in Homicide should never find out I was developing a taste for the stuff.

  Maestro Mandelbaum appeared, a wrinkled hunched-over figure with wispy gray hair, but he moved to the front of his orchestra with the springing step of a young man. The prospect of making music seemed to invigorate him, and the sight of him invigorated everybody else. We gave him a round of applause, which he cut off by lifting his baton and shooting a stern look at those who were still applauding. Then he tapped the music stand in front of him, lifted his baton again, and the overture to The Nutcracker began.

  Since I’m far from being an expert on ballet, I won’t give you a play-by-play report on the performance. I’ll only say that the production may have had a certain tackiness to it, the combined result of lack of funds and lack of professional talent, but somehow I found it enjoyable. The way a baseball game between a couple of kids’ teams can sometimes be more exciting than a pro game, not in spite of but because of the enthusiastic errors that everybody makes.

  One example of the amateurishness of this Nutcracker production: The old toymaker who gives the magic nutcracker to the little girl was played by a local insurance man who had been doing the part for the last ten years. The character was supposed to wear a skullcap, in the nineteenth-century bourgeois style, but the inept lighting blotted it out from the audience’s sight completely and, to the accompaniment of irreverent giggles, made the old toymaker look as if the top of his head had been sliced clean off.

  Another example: one of the little boys attending the first-act Christmas party in nineteenth century St. Petersburg was chewing gum all the time he was on stage, and on several occasions large pink bubbles emerged from his mouth. The gigglers loved this touch too.

  And then, about twenty minutes into the first act, came the scene where there was a big Christmas tree on stage, and the little girl stood in front of it and lifted up on her toes, and an ecstatic look appeared on her face, and the lighted-up Christmas tree started getting bigger and bigger. And the music built up to a crescendo the climax of which was—a sudden explosion coming out of Mom. “Oy!”

  Everybody around us turned to look at her. She blushed and lowered her head.

  The act ended half an hour later, and Mom and I went out to the lobby for intermission.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her. “For a few minutes there you seemed to be having some sort of fit.”

  All Mom answered was, “Didn’t I tell you it would be an inspiration, this ballet? That Tchaikovsky, what a genius! A hundred years he’s been dead already, and out of his grave comes the truth!”

  “The truth about what?” I said.

  “We’ll see the rest of the ballet,” Mom said. “We still have to get to the sugar plums. And after it’s over, you’ll come home with me, and I’ll give you a nice cup coffee and a schnecken, and we’ll decide who’s doing all these killings.”

  Christmas Night

  Three hours later, at eight o’clock on Christmas night, Ann and I got together in her office, and I gave her the benefit of Mom’s chain of reasoning.

  I didn’t exactly tell her who that chain came from. Mom always makes me promise I won’t; she says that people don’t believe things if old ladies say them, and I’m afraid she’s got a point there. On the other hand, I didn’t take credit where I hadn’t earned it. I never once claimed, either dir
ectly or by hints, that this chain of reasoning originated with me. If Ann assumed that it did, it was positively no fault of mine.

  I also gave her Mom’s suggestion as to how we should handle things with Francesca Fleming tonight. The suggestion made sense to Ann, and we agreed that’s how we would proceed.

  Ann called Francesca at Fleming’s Flake and told her we wanted to see her. Francesca said she was much too busy, there was nothing that couldn’t wait until after the holidays, she positively refused to submit to this bureaucratic harrassment. Ann just kept repeating her request; she comes from this section of the world, and there’s a good deal of the bronco-buster in her. Eventually Francesca told us to come along.

  Fleming’s Flake was packed. People who can afford to eat out don’t like to stay home and cook on Christmas night. We maneuvered ourselves through the crowd, weaving in and out of the tables, ducking waiters, getting sawdust in our shoes. Finally we went through the swinging doors in back and knocked on the door of Francesca’s office. She shouted for us to come in.

  She was sitting behind her desk, and the first thing I noticed was her clothes. No Indian headbands or trailing shawls, nothing exotic at all. Jeans and a plain yellow jumper, and a pair of pale-rimmed glasses tilted forward on her nose. During business hours, it seemed, she dressed for business.

  She didn’t ask us to sit down, but Ann plumped herself down in a chair anyway. Then, as matter-of-factly as if she were making a remark about the weather, she said, “We know who killed Chuck Candy.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Francesca said. “Your client killed him.”

  “Our client was framed for killing him. That’s all come apart now. There really isn’t any point in going on with it.”

  “I’m sure,” Francesca said, meeting Ann’s eyes with perfect steadiness, “that I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’ll let Dave tell you. He’s the one who worked it out.”

  So I told her. I went through the whole thing, step by step, just the way Mom had gone through it with me a few hours earlier.…