Big League Dreams (Small Worlds)

by Allen Hoffman

  Matti settled for a soda and took it with him into the office. He closed the door for privacy. Often he had called Penny from here. Sipping the icy drink, he stared at the black telephone and then at his pocket watch. It was a touch too early, so with evident relief he called his mother.

  “No, my friend can’t make it, Ma. He’s busy.”

  “What’s so busy that he doesn’t eat supper?” she asked.

  “You’ll have to ask him. I’ll be over by seven,” he said.

  He spoke to her in a loud voice, so that anyone listening would be able to hear clearly. After hanging up, he casually finished the soda, then checked his watch. This was it. By now Malka should be out in the junkyard, receiving the peddlers’ daily collections. Matti had seen the ragtag procession with their handcarts, the more fortunate with their horses and wagons, lining up next to the scale house, waiting their turn to approach Malka. She, with her big black purse under her arm, weighed their loads and paid in cold cash right on the spot, regally refusing to discuss her prices. She had better be out of the house, or Barasch would never be able to leave, not once she knew he was speaking to Matti.

  Matti could hear the phone ringing in the kitchen.

  “Hello,” Barasch said.

  “Bernard?”

  “Yes, speaking.”

  “Bernard, I’m calling from the Soffer match factory,” Matti said, identifying himself as Barasch had insisted.

  “How’s everything at the factory?” Barasch asked. Matti could hear the excitement in his voice.

  “Not so good. Tomorrow afternoon at ten after one, Weinbach will have the upper hand,” Matti answered. “Can you hear me?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon Weinbach has the upper hand at ten after one,” Barasch repeated.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Matti said. He added, dropping any attempt at disguise, “Be careful. Don’t let her see you go out.”

  “Don’t worry about a thing. She’s not even around,” Barasch fairly bubbled.

  “She’s not down in the yard receiving the peddlers?” Matti asked suspiciously.

  “No, I had the children turn them away. No one’s in the yard.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “As long as she’s not here, what do we care? Just relax. Tomorrow afternoon Weinbach has the upper hand at ten after one, right?” Barasch recapitulated.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Matti said with no enthusiasm.

  “Good, I understand. Good-bye,” Barasch said with enough enthusiasm for both of them.

  The conversation should have ended there, but Matti quickly called, “Bernard,” before Barasch could hang up.

  “Yes?” Barasch asked, somewhat surprised.

  “Gut Shabbos.” Matti hung up. He stared at the black earpiece in his hand as if it could give him a clue as to why he had at the last minute felt compelled to wish Barasch a good Sabbath. What did the Sabbath that would begin at sundown have to do with anything? Was it because they both seemed to be on their way back to Krimsk—Matti thinking about Jews and goyim all the time, and Barasch lurching around like Beryl Soffer’s private scarecrow? What would Barasch make of such nonsense? Matti smiled ironically. Barasch would attribute any strange behavior to Matti’s pure, innocent, unrequited love for Miss Penny Pinkham. Matti wasn’t about to tell him about his surprise phone call to his true love.

  Matti replaced the earpiece in its cradle and decided that he felt like a beer, even if he had to descend into that rathole for it. Barasch was in such a rush, he would probably have all the bets down before the beer got to the filthy table. But where was that horse Malka? She was a crafty one, and her absence bothered him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MALKA HAD MADE A TELEPHONE CALL, CHANGED FROM her coveralls into a black dress, climbed into her beat-up Dort truck, and driven out of the junkyard without bothering to close the gate behind her, something she never forgot to do.

  At the moment, she didn’t give a damn about the yard; the peddlers could wait until tomorrow morning for all she cared. If they went to some other junk dealer, she could always raise her prices and bring them scurrying back. Her pride and joy, her physical delight, the father of her children (her “little red-haired bastards,” as she herself publicly referred to them) worried her to distraction. How could she raise her price to bring Barasch back when she didn’t even know what the price was? For no apparent reason he seemed hell-bent on destroying himself, the wonderful and noble creation that she referred to as her glorious “Commodore Vanderbilt.”

  No one was prouder of Barasch’s unexpected metamorphosis than was his ungainly and unchanging mate. She too found her bent-wing butterfly a symbol of New World blessings, taking a stubborn, perverse, patronizing pride in his ability to Americanize so successfully.

  She worked hard in her fitful, inconsistent, cutthroat manner and made a good living for them. Although he did not work, he never had to ask her for money; she gave generously, even affectionately. Working in an old army overcoat and unlaced boots in the junkyard, she could turn away from the brass pipes she was sorting, call Barasch over, and present him with a ten-dollar bill, saying, “Just look at you, go downtown and get yourself a new pair of shoes. Some Commodore Vanderbilt I have.”

  This last epithet was particularly dear to her; although Barasch had been among the last of the older generation to arrive, he spoke the best English and occasionally passed himself off successfully as a Dutchman who had fallen off a windmill as a boy. In her voracious way, Malka employed the story for her own purposes. Lifting the blanket from her massive, pale flesh, she would command him to enter by saying, “Maybe the little Dutch boy wants to try the windmill again?” And her Barasch would accept with a gracious, “Yes, my dear.”

  High as his perch was, here he was well-rooted, with a sturdy limb, and he never slipped. He was consistent, always treating his wife with dignity and respect. In their conjugal unions she was capable of many moods—from wild, pig-eyed passion to cool, ironic detachment, as if two old neighborhood acquaintances had bumped into each other at a department store basement rainwear sale. Then she might become casually conversational and inquire, “What do you say?” Barasch would always say, “May God bless us with healthy, kosher children,” continuing his forceful efforts toward that end. An answer that even the shameless Malka did not ridicule until she bore five stout, ruddy babies, who all looked like her, with square jaws, pig eyes, and hair the color of rusting iron in the junkyard outside the window. (Years later, as they grew to majestic heights, his genetic contribution would become noticeable.)

  When carrying the first child, she taunted him that he had never dreamed he was so potent. He told her that he had already proven himself with Faigie, Beryl Soffer’s wife. Malka burst into ribald, preening laughter and lifted up her skirts, and the invitation to the “Dutch boy” of windmill fame gave way to one for “Beryl Limp Legs to come guard your yard.”

  Sex was the real thing. She was more than amused; she was proud to have shared her Barasch with Faigie Soffer, the grand dame of Krimsk, and to share him with the American-born goyish professional ladies of the night. She wisely permitted him to roam and to romp; after all, he was a gentleman. But in her slovenly way, she was confident, and with good reason. She knew that she could always better the competition’s offer. When the juices flowed, and there was no drought in those regions, she thrust and clutched and ravished him with kisses that came close to dislodging his head. Of course, the next time, she might command him to enter and hold him in an inescapable bearlike embrace and then proceed to “fart like a windmill,” to her sly, chuckling delight. Love was always so astonishing to Malka!

  In public, too, she was proud as a peacock of her man. She never missed a chance to sit next to him at a Krimsker gathering—he in his elegant sartorial splendor and she in a plain rag, as if someone had dropped a poorly cut kitchen curtain over a bulky wood-burning stove. With her legs wide apart and a heavy purse on her lap—as if to advertise that she had all the merch
andisable goods in any market—she would survey the throng with a gap-toothed smile that suggested it was their good fortune that cannibalism was out of style. Through all the aggression and power, the rapacious scorn and ribald challenge, a femininity—situated between her thighs to be sure—never left her even as she waxed rich in the purse above.

  Malka understood excess better than anyone alive. If Barasch returned drunk, she sobered him up in a businesslike way with cold water. Not cruelly, but not kindly either. “Thank God you’re a cripple, Barasch Limp Legs. How the world would suffer!” she would guffaw between buckets. But suffer from what? From Barasch who as a whole man would be capable of Herculean feats of debauchery? Or from Barasch the whole man who would have no need to treat the world with such unbalanced, immoderate excess? Not one given to idle speculation or dreams, she never did say.

  Although Malka willingly subsidized Barasch’s wastrel pursuits, she would not tolerate one thing about Barasch—his suffering. She could not stand to see him in physical pain or the object of ridicule. When the damp cold attacked his maimed joints with arthritis or rheumatism, she would carry him in her arms like a baby into the truck and from the truck straight into the sweltering steam bath, oblivious of the other customers, who, grabbing their sheets about them, would howl with indignation. She would leave a healthy tip with the attendant to make sure that Barasch would be massaged and coddled until she came back at the end of the day to help him home. When it came to ridicule, a junkman or driver who unwisely made some remark about a “gimp,” a “limp,” or a “crooked scarecrow” tasted her anger and, if close enough, felt her pummeling blows.

  Malka gripped the steering wheel as she recalled one distant Sunday afternoon when she was walking on her gentleman’s arm to visit a Krimsker acquaintance in St. Louis. Suddenly two less than virtuous women across the street recognized Bernard and burst forth in girlish giggles and catcalls that ended in their chanting, “Bernie, Bernie, he’s our boy! Faigie, Faigie, oy, yoy, yoy!”

  There was no mistaking whom they were yelling at, nor who they were. Barasch tried to calm her by patting her arm and telling her to pay them no mind, but his wife and protector was not to be denied. In her shapeless black tent, she leaped into the street with deadly bovine grace and was upon the two buxom, corn-fed girls. With the momentum of her sudden and unexpected arrival, she dealt the first a blow to the face that broke her nose and sent her sprawling on the sidewalk. The second made the first of two mistakes in not fleeing, and lost two teeth. She crumpled to the ground at Malka’s feet and then committed her second error; she started to get up. By gripping her beribboned hair, Malka assisted her ascent until she was high enough to receive a ferocious kick in the backside that sent her sailing through the air. Like a monstrously large rag doll, she flew over the recumbent figure of her associate.

  Breathing heavily from the outrage—the exertion itself compared to her daily workout throwing metal in the junkyard had proven minimal—she returned to Barasch’s arm.

  “Darling,” Barasch said, “they’re just silly children.”

  That very night she lifted the blanket and ordered, “Beryl Limp Legs, how about a little ‘Faigie, Faigie, oy, yoy, yoy’?” He answered, “Yes, dear,” and that night he fathered their first healthy, kosher child, a pig-eyed lusting prince of the junkyards, as she, Barasch’s devoted wife, mixed and served her loving husband a medley of passion, farts, medical history, and low comedy.

  Such sweet marital memories brought tears to her eyes, and she squinted through them to see the road. How wonderful it all had been! She pulled the truck to the side of the road and stopped to wipe her eyes, but before she could do so, the tears had already turned to bitter stinging anger as she thought of Matti Sternweiss and his effect on her man. Since Barasch’s friendship with Matti had begun, he seemed to return to the way he had been in Krimsk. She, too, had noticed the ungainly equine Krimsk gait. How could she not have noticed? His derby was dented and filthy from tumbling off his head into the dust, and he kept retracting his upper lip and baring those large teeth with a snorting sound. When she spoke to him about his appalling regression, he responded with an uncouth, horsey laugh that she had not heard since the night he had proposed in Krimsk.

  Uncomfortable as she was with his deteriorating appearance, she was equally distressed with his constant running off to the bookie to play Matti’s incessant tips. Often successful, Barasch inevitably bet the winnings and never finished with so much as a cent. And Malka knew that these small but dangerous bets were part and parcel of Barasch’s degeneration at the hands of that sordid, arrogant little Matti Sternweiss. That baseball clown had to be stopped, and Barasch had to return to his role as the ideal American gentleman.

  Well, thought Malka, not quite everyone saw Barasch as a symbol of New World blessings. Her sexually puritanical brother Boruch Levi, who was responsible for Barasch’s immigration and indirectly responsible for his well-being and high lifestyle—he had set up Malka in her own junkyard—disapproved of him totally. Once, observing the transformed Barasch as he gallantly charmed a social gathering, Boruch Levi muttered to his sister with disgust, “Over there he licked asses, here he pinches them.” Delighting in her brother’s revulsion, she smiled and replied, “Yes, brother, that’s true, but don’t forget that here it’s a rich soup for all of us. Over there, there was nobody to pinch my ass, and there certainly wasn’t anybody to lick yours!” With a scowl that would cause every junk peddler in the city to cringe, Boruch Levi walked away from his sister’s vulgar mouth.

  Malka laughed now as she put the truck into gear, just as she had laughed that night; but it wasn’t a laughing matter any longer. She had dressed this afternoon as a “lady” so as not to offend her brother, the pious aristocrat of the junk business. Although she had welcomed him home after his visit to Krimsk—only a madman would want to go back there!—she had never really apologized for the incident before he left. This afternoon she would even apologize if necessary; there was nothing he loved more than that. Yes, she would do what was needed to soothe his injured pride. Afterward, she could always bruise it again easily enough, but for now she had better be respectful, very respectful.

  As she turned onto the levee, the cobblestones caused the truck to bump and shake. She slowed down to protect the beat-up old truck and quiet the palpitations of her own heart. Rough, brawling Malka was fearful. She had protected her man against all comers, but could she protect Barasch from himself?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ALTHOUGH HE HAD ARRIVED LATE, BORUCH LEVI HAD put in a very productive day on the levee. He had supervised the loading of two boxcars with wiping rags and a third with roofing. Two more cars of scrap metal left the yard for the mill. Skipping lunch, he sipped two coffees from the diner next door while doing business on the phone with various junk shops in southern Illinois. In the midst of his buying and selling, he had managed to squeeze in a call to the Krimsker Rebbe’s sexton. Mentioning that he had just visited Krimsk and had regards for the rebbe, Boruch Levi spontaneously asked whether he could do anything for the wondrous spiritual leader. To his delight and surprise, Reb Zelig requested that he attend prayers at the rebbe’s beis midrash this very Friday evening.

  Boruch Levi had established contact with the rebbe for the first time since leaving Krimsk almost twenty years ago, and he had been invited to the beis midrash. This also solved the problem of where Boruch Levi himself would pray and made him confident that he would resolve the problem posed by Rabbi Max’s insubordination. In an optimistic mood, he settled into his office and assumed his favorite position.

  Boruch Levi loved to sit back in his rolling swivel chair with his feet up on the desk as his workers filed through the office on their way home. His reclining position reflected both the boss’s royal prerogative and his denigration of the white-collar world of accounts and pencils. For all his financial success, Boruch Levi had never mastered English, although he could read rudimentary street signs and write his own name.
With his precocious memory and aptitude for figures, he had no need to. The business was in the buying and the selling. For that you needed a good quick head. The scale house was more important than any desk. Boruch Levi never put his feet up on the balance arm of a scale. That was where you fed your family. The office was simply a perquisite of success, somewhere between a good cigar and a fine automobile.

  More than mere possessions, Boruch Levi valued his close friendship with Michael O’Brien, chief of police. He also cherished his place in the synagogue next to the holy ark on the eastern wall (although there were undeniably some minor problems at the moment in that sphere). Once he had established such bonds, they remained fixed, and he would remain faithful though the sky turn to brass and the earth to iron. Boruch Levi—the right hand of both powers, secular and divine. Seated at his desk on a Friday afternoon, or next to the chief himself on the way to a raid, Boruch Levi inspired in any onlooker the biblical phrase, “the proud man’s contumely.”

  For all his social pretense and scornful haughtiness, Boruch Levi had a perverse, brutal honesty that saved him from his most pompous self. He still enjoyed rags, scrap metal, and used bottles. They constituted an economic reality that he understood above all others. In the junkyard he was a full captain, and nobody’s lieutenant. If society’s esteem—which Boruch Levi craved and pursued—did not extend to junk, too bad for society. Boruch Levi, for all his airs, was not about to reject his basic identity. There was no dilemma for him. Proud and loyal, he honored that particular cornucopia—in this case waste and scrap filled—that bestowed upon him its riches.

  Business was going very well, and his relationship with the chief and other top police brass—how he loved those shiny, orderly double-breasted buttons—couldn’t be better, especially after last week’s raid. The chief’s hand had improved, and he was back at his desk at headquarters.