After a while, I had seen Ninety-ninth Street and still no Bluma. Even though it was comfortable, I felt more than a little incongruous, like a crumpled stalk of celery on top of an ice-cream sundae instead of the compact maraschino cherry. When a law-abiding citizen is the celery in the sundae, he fears the law. What’s wrong with celery on a sundae? Nothing! It’s healthier, seething with vitamins, and won’t rot your teeth, but it doesn’t look right, and because our hearts are corrupt, we judge only with the eye. Corrective lenses can make us all retinal chief justices: regular appearance is propriety. Strangeness is guilt. And there I sat, fearing what a policeman circling about the drug-infested, crime-related, alcohol-inebriated, homicide-saturated Upper West Side would think of my 44-long sprawled on the Siamese standpipe of Two-fifty West Ninety-ninth Street. As the patrol car pulled to the curb, I would take the offense, “Officer, righteousness is a two-way street.” “Yeah, pal, a two-way street. No loitering. Get moving.” “Officer, do you believe in God?” “Not north of Ninety-sixth Street. Let’s go.” The cop car that does roll down Ninety-ninth Street doesn’t bother to slow down. The cop does look at me. What is he thinking? He’s probably thinking that if he had a dollar for every German shepherd who pissed on that standpipe, he’d be a millionaire, a thought which has crossed my mind from time to time even though, thank God, the standpipe has been freshly painted.
And there I sit, hoping that nobody I know will come walking down the street. What would I tell them? I don’t have to tell anyone else anything at all. People stare at me from a distance, but they give me a wide berth when they pass. And when they pass, they don’t look at me; I look at them. A few even cross the street. Shuffling past, the junkies and winos smile fearfully at this ungainly, sedentary invasion of their glass-eyed world. If strangeness is guilt, it is also fear, the most negotiable commodity on the Upper West Side. I explore my newfound power and even stare at people with dogs large enough to fool the parlor-bound Off-Track Betting crowd: my, that’s a hairy horse. Big deal! Two St. Bernards later I’m bored. Where is she? Where’s Bluma? What’s taking her so long? A panicky feeling creeps over me. What if she never returns? I’ll have to sit on this pipe forever. What choice do I have? None. I sit. They stare. They fear. They look away when they pass. They tug on the leashes to save the beasts from me. I wait for her, and as I do, there is something familiar about the strangeness. Something similar to stepping (or in this case sitting) outside the realm of normal — that is to say, identifiable — behavior. Where else could it have been? It had something to do with the shtibl. But where was Bluma? I keep my eye on the corner of Broadway. It’s a two-way street. She has to return. The baby can’t nap all afternoon.
As I stare intently toward Broadway, I hear a voice call, “Hey, Hal darling! Over here!” I swing around to discover Bluma standing in front of the AL NDA E near West End Avenue. Bluma as Daniel Boone. At her feet are one shopping bag and one old beat-up suitcase.
“You drink tea, Hal?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You got a box.”
“Bluma, you want this back?”
“Bags! Bluma’s got a million bags!”
“No, the suitcase?”
“Suitcases, too!”
We walked to Broadway together.
“Thanks, Bluma.”
“Don’t mention.”
“I’ll see you in the shtibl Tuesday.”
“We’ll see.... Now I gotta go over there and sit down. It’s comfortable, no?”
“Yes, it is. You could use a rest.”
“I’ll say. Be well, Hal.”
“You, too. And thank you.”
I shlepped that suitcase down Broadway. Daniel Boone only had Indians to worry about. I had roaches. I knew I was in trouble when I put the bag down to wait for the light at Ninety-sixth, and the bag started running home by itself. I was tempted to follow it to find out where Bluma lived, but that hardly seemed fair after all the trouble she had taken in circling the block. Bluma definitely had uptown roaches who had no interest in exploring Ninety-third Street. I had to carry them the whole way. They just wouldn’t walk in my direction. As I spotted some moving about the bag, I was tempted to throw everything into a large wire litter basket on the corner. I fought the off feeling. It would be too dangerous to have a wire basket careening riderless uptown. And how did I know Bluma wasn’t watching me now? But I did know I couldn’t bring those things into the house. When I got back, I took them straight to the basement and gingerly examined their contents next to the collected refuse. The infested clothes were out of the question. The tea looked pretty bad, too. The Jewish calendars were in good shape, but the most recent one was four years old. We had a current one upstairs and how many garish pictures of Moses coming off the mountain with the golden rays of light hitting his head could one apartment tolerate? Then I came across a short, ugly metal lamp. Maroon, without a bulb or lampshade. It seemed difficult for a roach to penetrate, so I decided this was the object to cherish. I also kept an old coffee pot. I didn’t want the lamp to feel alone. Stamping my feet in self-defense, I backed my way onto the elevator. Upstairs, I also washed the gifts. By the time I finished, I needed a rest. I sat down — on a chair.
Several Tuesdays later, I waited for the others to leave before I offered Bluma an envelope.
“No. Keep it.”
“It’s for you.”
“Listen, Hal, you keep it. If I need it, I’ll get in touch.”
“How can you get in touch, you don’t have my number?”
“Yeah, good idea. Write it for me.”
I put the envelope back in my pocket and gave her my number.
“What was it? A five-dollar bill?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s good.”
We walked outside together.
“Hal darling, during the winter, you’ll miss me.”
“Why?”
“My dear man, I should slip and fall on the ice? Feh! Feh! Feh! What are you talking about? I’ve got to be careful.”
“I’ll miss you, Bluma.”
“Of course you will.”
I didn’t see Bluma all winter. Nor did I hear from her. I thought it strange that Bluma should disappear for the winter like a bear because she couldn’t hibernate. She had to awaken every morning. Well, I figured, that’s how Bluma wants it. I thought about her from time to time, especially when my daughter wore the blue pullover or I turned on the ugly maroon lamp. Something else reminded me of her. I finally recalled the activity outside the realm of normal public behavior that had haunted me when I was camped out on Bluma’s standpipe. It involved the moon. Let me explain.
The Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar. The first day of the new month is celebrated as a minor holiday. During the Sabbath service preceding the new moon (new month), we intone, “Let it be Thy will to renew us for a good and blessed month.” And “May He who miraculously redeemed our fathers from slavery to freedom, quickly redeem us and gather us from our Diaspora to the land of Israel, for all Jews are brothers.” The Blessing of the New Moon is performed outdoors at night. The new moon, a fragile crescent, can be blessed during the period of its renewal, from the time it is easily seen until it becomes a full moon. Traditionally, it’s done on Saturday night after the evening services because when we bless the moon, we encounter the Shechinah, God’s Holy Presence, and consequently Sabbath attire is appropriate. Immediately following the service, every one of us in the congregation grabs a prayer book, and we go piling down into Ninety-first Street in search of the moon. Depending on the season, sometimes we simply cross the street; other times we must go all the way down the block and even cross West End Avenue to get an unobstructed view. “C’mon! It’s over here!” And the properly attired horde goes racing down the block and across West End Avenue to glance quickly at the crescent moon. After a quick glance at the moon, everyone hastily opens his book and begins furiously chattering away.
How can we read the blessing
so quickly in the dark? The Blessing of the Moon is printed in extra large letters because of this difficulty. Indeed, all large letters are referred to in Hebrew as Blessing-the-Moon letters. And we read quickly. “The heavenly bodies are ecstatically happy to do the will of their Creator, the true Producer, whose production is truth. And the moon was commanded to renew itself as a glorious crown for those not yet born, for they are to be renewed in the future as the moon is, and they will glorify their Creator for His glorious majesty. Blessed are You, O Lord, who renews the months!”
Normally, a prayer service in the shtibl is a free-form event, but there is some structure. Under the moon, however, it is completely unstructured and each of us takes off helter-skelter for himself, but there is some group interaction. At a specific point in the prayer, each worshiper must exchange greetings with three other individuals. He looks up from his prayer book and taps someone. “Shalom aleichem, Peace unto you!” The other must interrupt his prayer to respond, “Unto you, peace!” In turn this individual will address three greetings and receive three responses. The threefold exchange washes through the group like a mad tidal wave of greeting, leaving eddies and lone swells of peace in its murmuring wake. One of our less learned congregants refers to the ceremony as “praying to the moon.” This is, of course, blasphemous. In fact, when one utters the line “As I dance opposite you, O Moon, and I am not able to touch you, thus may my enemies not be able to do me harm,” we are adjured to dance in a manner that clearly suggests blessing of the moon and not worship. Monotheistic choreography dictates that one leap stiff-legged so as to avoid any bending of the knee that might be misinterpreted as idolatrous worship. This admonition is carefully respected. The effect is a mad, stiff-legged happening that looks like a Buster Keaton movie run at twice the usual herky-jerky speed. With one notable exception — Reb Meir Hurwitz is so inspired by this line in the service that he plants each hand on the shoulder of a tall neighbor and with a quick thrust of his short, powerful arms goes sailing above the throng, almost launching himself into lunar orbit.
How do we appear then, on a dark street corner in the middle of the night? An unshaven (we have not been permitted to shave since the Sabbath began) but well-dressed group of Jews rocking and chanting cacophonously, lickety-split as they tap each other while they leap about like stiff-legged kangaroos with the exception of one, Reb Meir Hurwitz, who sails over the group like an ecstatic, lock-legged version of Rodin’s statue of Balzac, and all this directed toward the banana moon rising a quarter of a million miles above Daitch Shop-well supermarket, where hordes of real bananas can be had for seventeen cents a pound. Passers-by tend not to cross at our corner. Those who must pass us often step into the street and rarely look directly at us.
We all read as quickly as we can for the obvious reason: the hapless shmendrik who finishes last will have all the prayer books foisted upon him, and he must shlep the towering, heavy stack across the street, down the block, and up the stairs into the shtibl, opening two doors unaided. But that is only the obvious reason; there is another, even more powerful one. Who wants to look and feel like a fool? Strangeness is guilt. Blessing the moon might put us in the presence of God (certainly a good deed), but it also exposes us to people’s fearful faces. And that calls for a fast finish. This is the Diaspora, baby!
After that realization, every time we blessed the new moon, I thought of Bluma and my having sat on her standpipe amidst the incredulous, fearful stares. Bluma and the moon both moved me from the realm of the inconspicuous, the dwelling place of the complacent. The stubby thumb had better be more powerful than any camouflaged finger. It has to be, to survive. So Bluma and the moon began to be associated together in my mind — a vague enough but real sort of relationship. Initially, I simply considered it a curiosity.
As I performed this mitzvah month after month, something was happening. I was finding a pleasure, a sense of satisfaction in it. More often than not, I was the shmendrik who shlepped the prayer books back to the shtibl.
Bluma reappeared one raw spring day. Not in the shtibl, but across the street.
“Hal darling, over here.”
“Bluma, how are you?”
“Don’t ask, a single person should never be born.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Use your head!”
We stood there a moment.
“Bluma, why didn’t you come into the shtibl?”
“Who needs them? Hyah! Hyah! Hyah!”
Horselike, Bluma tilted her head and chomped her teeth to utter the cruel, neighing “hyah.” I looked at Bluma. The red socks had not made it through the winter. The cane was gone, too. Bluma leaned on a baby-carriage axle that looked harsh and vicious. Held vertically, it also resembled a degenerate ski pole. The presence of one broken ski pole suggested instability. Bluma spoke rapidly, punctuating her remarks with the explosive neighlike hyah-hyah-hyahs! She spoke against people.
“The rabbi’s no good! A beard for people, but not for God! American rabbis! Feh! Feh! Feh! I give him three dollars for a big mezuzah like the shtibl has — and he gets me a little one. I told him I didn’t like it, but did he give me the three dollars back? What kind of rabbi is that? A gonif! A thief! A gonif! You’re not like that. You’re from the other side. Rabbis aren’t like that on the other side, are they?”
“Bluma,” I explained, “I’m not from Israel. I’m from St. Louis.”
“That’s not around here, is it?”
“No.”
“You’re from the other side.... See!”
And I heard about legal actions — falls, insurance, lawyers. I could never understand any of the stories. I would ask why a lawyer had taken a particular action:
“Why? A farmer puts an egg under a chicken! You know what that means? You don’t know? It means he takes two. Shut your mouth! You got to be intelligent! Hyah! Hyah! Hyah!”
Bluma, who had always guarded her private life and personal history so closely, was suddenly revealing things inadvertently and not caring.
“How do I know so much about courts?” she would yell. “That Irishman I married. He changed his fait’ for me, the alcoholic. I was always in the court for non-support. I used to sit and listen to the other cases. You can learn a lot.”
And I heard about her dog for the first time.
“Bluma, you have a dog?”
“Yeah, what’s wrong with that? She’s good company. Shut your mouth! She’s intelligent; she listens. Brownie understands Yiddish. That’s better than you.”
Still, I heard the old Bluma. “God is with the righteous. Don’t worry about God.” But I was most moved when I asked if I might give her some money.
“Money’s not everything. What about yener velt, the world to come?”
“You’re right, Bluma, but can I help you a little?”
For the first time that morning she softened and some of the frantic tension left her.
“Hal darling, I retired. I got another check, a little money. Others need more than me.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“We’ll see. Maybe from time to time you’ll give me a little something. I know some very poor people and, after all, Bluma has to give a little ‘righteousness,’ too.”
“Sure, Bluma.”
“But, Hal darling, we’ll still talk. You gotta talk to people. You know that, Hal, don’t you?”
“We all have to talk.”
“Now shut up and listen. Don’t interrupt all the time. It’s not right!”
BLUMA had returned, but the winter of loneliness had taken its toll. Much of her charm and style had disappeared with the red socks. Spring, a new season, and even the DiMaggios can’t play forever. Bluma could not move as well, the legs heavier and slower. Apparently our relationship had changed as well. I had survived her brutal winter. Now we were old friends. We talked. How we talked. For Bluma, I became a chance to converse with a world which wouldn’t see, which wouldn’t listen, which wouldn’t care.
�
�Look at me. Only the police look me in the eye. They understand me. They laugh. Are you observant? Do you study people? I observe them. The policeman said to me, ‘Bluma, you should be a detective!’ I study people.”
We began speaking on the phone. Everyone in her building was an addict or an alcoholic or a thief or murderer. The manager was no good. The super was a sex maniac. I believed all of this. A welfare hotel offers more human degradation than hell ever could.
“It’s terrible, my dear man, I can’t stand it.... Yes, I live in the Whitehall. You guessed. You’re not as dumb as you act.”
She would no longer take any money, but she still insisted that I take from her. What I didn’t drag home! My pregnant wife could not believe it. What could she say? Nothing.
In the summer during my vacation I had agreed to pick up a load. It was humid and in the nineties. It struck me as madness. What in the world could come out of such a project? I went out the door and was met by the wall of brilliant, sticky heat. I headed uptown. At ten in the morning, the harsh heat and heavy air hung over Broadway like a motionless, fly-covered beast. As I walked, I wondered how in blazes I ever got here. Something must have gone wrong with my life somewhere.
When I approached Ninety-sixth Street, I saw a very tall young woman with a dog. They were walking in the same direction as I was. I could see her legs. I thought it must be the mind-joggling heat. Those legs looked like they belonged to Peggy Hartridge, my freshman flame at Harvard. She had nice legs all right. I walked behind her for a block. The woman seemed very young; too young to be Peggy. It had been years. So I just walked behind her, focusing on those lovely young legs and basking in memory to escape the insufferable heat.
Kagan's Superfecta: And Other Stories Page 18
