The One-Star Jew: Stories

by Evanier, David

  “Then when my daughter found out I had sold a coat she gave me to Jenetta for ten dollars, she burst into tears and screamed at me. She said she would rather take a scissors and cut the coat into little pieces rather than give it to a colored girl. So I talked to Jenetta. I told her how much the coat was worth. She said would I take another five dollars for it. I said okay. Then I had to tell my daughter. You know what she said? My daughter threatened not to come to my funeral.”

  The pictures of Minnie are of a face edged with sour despair. The mascara is thick over the eyes. She is a heavy blonde. I recognize the look on her face, and I stare at it.

  The sour, blank look, emptied of all hope and striving, is familiar to me. It is the expression on my own mother’s face.

  I recognize it immediately, even though I have not seen my mother in twenty years.

  It has always been difficult to answer questions about my mother, since she lives a few miles from my house. It is particularly difficult when Mrs. Blocker asks me, but I answer her the same way I answer everyone else.

  “Where is your mother?” Mrs. Blocker asks me one day.

  “My mother? My mother is dead.”

  XV

  After my parents were divorced when I was ten years old, I stayed with my father on weekends.

  One Sunday evening after we heard Tallulah Bankhead sign off at the end of “The Big Show” by singing “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You,” after Winchell and apples and watermelon, my father drove me home.

  I took the elevator to the top floor, where I lived with my mother, and instead of ringing the doorbell, I tiptoed to the staircase leading to the roof, and walked silently up the steps. I looked at the trees in the moonlight, the breeze stilled my pounding heart. I would not lose my temper. I would understand. I would remember what, my father had explained, caused my mother to act so mean to me: the death in the last year of her father and mother “who had done everything for her”; the fact that she had been forced, if she wanted the divorce, to go to work. The married neighbors seemed to side with my mother against me: they knew her familiar waddling walk, the pretty face and small body and wide behind, high heels unsteadily pecking away at the pavement, her arms loaded down with bundles of food and antiques. She had a ready smile for them, and I did not know how to talk to them.

  I walked slowly back down the steps from the roof and rang the bell. She smiled at the door, removed the latch, and let me in.

  “Bruce, don’t you have a kiss for your mother?”

  I kissed her.

  She served me cookies and milk in the kitchen.

  After I finished the milk, I walked into her bedroom. She was seated on the chaise lounge, her legs folded under her, and on her lap she held a new pink telephone.

  She laughed, she flashed her pretty teeth. “How do I look?”

  “Beautiful.”

  She placed the phone on the floor and held her chin in her hand.

  Suddenly she turned to me and said, “Wash your face, Bruce. You look like a nigger.”

  I stared at her.

  “Come on. Be a good boy.”

  “Negro.”

  “You’re starting in?”

  “No. But I wanted to say what I feel.”

  “All right, professor, if you put it that way, I said what I feel. You look like a nigger, period. End of argument. All right?” She smiled.

  “It’s not all right. It’s insulting to Negroes.”

  She fingered the phone. “Come on. You just got home. Do me a favor and wash your face. You don’t look like a nigger.”

  I walked into my room and slammed the door.

  A tap at the door. A small voice. “Bruce.”

  I opened it. I thought I knew what was happening. She was still under the sway of the pink telephone. No grudges tonight.

  “Bruce?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “No more fights. Come sit with me in the living room.”

  In the living room, my mother took the plastic sheets off the couch and folded them neatly. I sat down, and she sat down beside me. She crossed her legs and folded her hands.

  “How’s the car?”

  “What?”

  “The car.”

  “What car?”

  My father had sworn me to secrecy about the new car he had bought. He said it would “make mommy feel bad about divorcing me.”

  “Mrs. Caruso downstairs told me she saw your father driving around in a red Ford.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “What did you do over the weekend?”

  “Oh, the usual. We went to the Laffmovie and the Automat—”

  She laughed. “That cheap bastard. Where does he leave it at night?”

  “What?”

  “Does he rent parking space?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “There’s one thing I hate in this world, and that’s a sneak. You’re just like your father.”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “Go to bed. Sneak. Dirty rotten sneak. You’re the spitting image of him. You tell that son of a bitch for me that he can drop dead with his new car.”

  She slammed her bedroom door.

  In my room I listened. Sometimes she came back.

  I got undressed and put on my pajamas.

  In bed, I tried to think about my father … about the film we had seen at the Laffmovie on Forty-second Street that afternoon: Edward G. Robinson and Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom as two ex-cons who take over a luggage shop next to a bank in order to drill an underground hole to the bank. I thought about the mashed potatoes at the Automat.

  My mother opened the door to my bedroom. “What year is the car?”

  I put my hands in front of me.

  “I hate sneaks.” She slammed my door, and slammed the door to her bedroom.

  XVI

  Every Sunday evening when we are ready to leave, Mrs. Blocker tries to press things on us: coats, hats, shoes, toasters, bags, sweaters. She is so eager that she forgets her walker and her cane. Her booming voice shouts at us: “Don’t gyp me!” She shuffles firmly across the room holding a sweater for my wife. “In the first place, she’s so cute,” she says to me. “She’s an angel, I’m telling you. I got twenty sweaters. Please, dolling, take it.”

  We shake our heads.

  “When I die, my daughter will just throw everything in the incinerator. I know her. Please, dolling.”

  We think up new ways every time to get out of taking anything.

  At the door, she says: “Please promise you’ll come to my funeral.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Blocker,” we say, kissing her and taking her in our arms together.

  XVII

  “People around here are not so good. I sit on the bench. They say: ‘So-and-so’s husband died. So now she’s sleeping with her boarder.’ ‘So?’ I say. ‘Good luck to her! What is it your business?’ And I take my walker and I walk away. There are two hundred benches down here. You think I don’t know what’s going on? The man comes up to the lady and says: ‘You get social security. I get social security. How about it? We’ll keep each other company.’ And if he has a car, my God! With a car you can get anything …

  “Before my granddaughter got married the second time, you think they just held hands before marriage? He held her in another place! Mrs. Blocker is no dummy … well, well, well …

  “But a woman has to be able to walk. A woman has to be able to lay good. I’m like a stone alone. At least big stones have little stones. Anyway, if I had legs, I would marry. A man needs legs!

  “Oh, yi yi! What’s going on today. Even the priests. You know, I wondered how they had babies. Then I found out. I was at a bingo night. A young priest was talking to a young girl, a doll. The next time I looked they were in the next room and, boom boom boom!” Mrs. Blocker claps her hands.

  “What can you do? Love—love is like a fire.” She spreads her hands. “Then 123—poof!”

  XVIII

&nb
sp; She says the doorbell and the phone never ring, but over the months, there is a steady parade of social workers, volunteers, young girls who are getting paid for summer visits. (They always say: “What can we do for you?” Mrs. Blocker knows the question. She folds her hands and says: “I don’t know, dolling. What can you do for me?”) People with good intentions, as well as the Home Care workers who are waiting for their checks, blur in her memory. She forgets the doctors who see her once every three months, but becomes agitated when she hears that the doctor is “afraid” to come to see her without a nurse to accompany him. She perks up her ears at this. “Afraid of me?” She beats her hand on the table. She insists on knowing what the doctor is afraid of, and she is upset for a long time over this.

  XIX

  She points to her legs and arms. “I have a hitching in my skin like a fire. I’m like a peeled onion. My head is drying up. What’s the use of all this? I’m licked. They call me up and want me to go to dances, to camps, to picnics. Should I sit in a corner and cry? I’m better here, to cry alone, to laugh alone.”

  XX

  When she answers the phone she asks: “Who is dot?”

  And when she calls us at home, before we can say anything, she says: “Dot is Mrs. Blocker!”

  XXI

  Watching the TV news, she is furious at Nixon and Rockefeller: “What the hell is going on in this country?” She wants to adopt one of the Vietnamese orphans: “Who will feed them? Where will they live? We have seven-and-a-half-million unemployed. I would adopt them, but I have no hands, no feet, no eyes.” She watches the news about Happy Rockefeller’s operation. “A poor person would be dead. With money you get honey.”

  It is only when she can do something for us that she forgets her troubles. She insists on paying us for the string to tie the electric fan securely so she won’t tip it over. “Only cash—no mortgage!”

  She wants to give all her old clothes away, but finds that people are too proud to take any more. “Where are the poor people?” she asks. She sees a woman in the park she has given a sweater to, and the woman doesn’t say anything. Mrs. Blocker goes up to her: “Lady, don’t you recognize me?”

  XXII

  How real is her pain to me? A few times I wake up in the night and I feel that my body is wracked with pain in the places Mrs. Blocker has described. If I cannot sleep, sometimes I think of Mrs. Blocker prowling her apartment until 5 A.M. If I am uncomfortable in bed, I think of how she cannot lie down without pain, or sit up without it, or walk, or see; of how her head throbs; of her constipation; of her inability to swallow sometimes, or bend down at all, but I can never put all these things together to get a sense of how she really feels.

  But I do know she thinks of us as her friends. I know this not so much because she kisses our hands when we say good-bye, as because she shows us her gnarled hands with their blue veins. She says quietly, in explanation: “Swollen … old, you know.”

  XXIII

  Before the news broke about Rabbi Ribman and his network of nursing homes, Mrs. Blocker had heard all about the homes. She was herself briefly in a Riverdale nursing home when she was sick, and her purse had been stolen. She asked to see someone in charge who could help her. No one came. She pleaded with a guard: “Haven’t you got someone for the poor people?”

  One afternoon she had sat next to a woman in the park with a nameplate on her wrist. “So I said, ‘You’re from a home?’ She cried. ‘If you say the food is bad—if you say anything—they take you before the jury and there’s a trial.’ And she said, ‘I saved all my money and worked and gave it all away for this.’”

  I read stories about Rabbi Ribman carefully and tell some of them to Mrs. Blocker, who has already been following the story on television. Of the patients beaten by guards, left to sit in urine and feces.

  One night I have a dream about Rabbi Ribman. He is the guest of honor at a dinner given by the Jewish organization I work for. Since he is the guest, the people in the audience address questions to him from the floor, but they are gentle questions, avoiding the issue of the nursing homes. They don’t want to say anything too disturbing. But I notice that people are walking out in droves as a way of expressing how they feel toward him. I want to say the following, but I don’t know how to phrase it congenially so that I won’t lose my job: “Actually, Rabbi, there is really little difference between what you did and what the Nazis did, is there?”

  While I struggle with myself, I hear Ribman answering another question from a member of the audience. Ribman is moving his lips, but his words, and his voice, are those of California poet Charles Bukowski. In my dream, I sit in the audience watching Ribman speak Bukowski’s words: “My father was a cruel bastard,” Rabbi Ribman says. “He made me mow the lawn, back and forth. He would put his head down, to the grass, eye level, and look for one blade of grass. Naturally he would find one out of the thousands. Then he beat me, he beat me anyway, every day. And I sometimes realize that I’m acting like him, that I’m being like him, and I don’t like that. It scares me.”

  XXIV

  It is Mrs. Blocker’s eighty-fifth birthday. She is especially excited, as my father is coming up to pay her a visit for the first time.

  We have carefully explained to her that my father has a girl friend named Rosie. Mrs. Blocker has questioned us carefully about her, although she does not hear all our answers.

  “How big is your father’s apartment?” she asks.

  “One bedroom.”

  “That’s all? So where does he keep her—on the floor? on the table?”

  “She doesn’t live with him—”

  “In the bookcase maybe?”

  She tells the caseworker to go home to her husband: “Skiddoo! You know what that means? You go home. Kiss Willie or someone else will.”

  This is a new caseworker, a black woman named Dorothy Williams. Mrs. Blocker has formed an affectionate relationship with her, and says she “counts the minutes and hours” when she is away.

  “Okay,” Dorothy says.

  “Do it!” shouts Mrs. Blocker. As Dorothy kisses her goodbye, Mrs. Blocker nods to us: “Dot’s a woman! My God!”

  After Dorothy leaves, Mrs. Blocker prepares for my father’s arrival. She puts in her false teeth. “I’m dolling it up for my lover,” she says.

  My father has recently recovered from an automobile accident. He spent several weeks in the hospital. He still has a stiff neck from it. On the Sunday he comes to see Mrs. Blocker, he has also been to the unveiling of his closest and best friend, Jake.

  My father used to enjoy going out in his Cadillac with Rosie. His Cadillac was smashed in the accident, and so he travels today on the subway to see Mrs. Blocker.

  Mrs. Blocker is plainly impressed when he enters and gives him a sweeping look. She leans forward in her walker and smiles at him, scrutinizing him. My father takes a seat beside my wife on the couch to the left of Mrs. Blocker, who sits in her chair. He tries to turn his head toward her to be polite despite his stiff neck. They are both hard of hearing and shout at each other.

  “You’re not a young man yourself,” she shouts. “Jack Benny died at thirty-nine. How old was he?”

  My father smiles and nods politely, and says to me that Mrs. Blocker has a very strong voice.

  “But I wouldn’t swear to what he did last night,” she says about my father.

  My father strains to turn to her. “As a matter of fact, I took out a lovely young lady,” he says carefully, letting her know they are not in the same league.

  “You took out a young lady?” she shouts.

  “Yes.”

  “How young, may I ask?”

  “Rosie is fifty-one years old.”

  “On the right side or on the left side?” Mrs. Blocker says, with her hands shaking one breast at a time.

  My father cannot believe what he sees.

  The atmosphere is charged. My father no longer tries to turn to Mrs. Blocker, or even to stare ahead. He turns the other way, to my wife: “You
act so polite, so interested. You have to do this every week?”

  My wife says that we enjoy seeing Mrs. Blocker.

  “I hope you don’t mind my saying this. She has such a strong voice. She must have money. She’s got it made. Maids every day of the week.” Now he turns to me. “I don’t mean to offend you, but this woman isn’t what I expected at all. I thought you were going to see some poor unfortunate creature! I thought you were doing a good deed. What a voice she has!”

  Mrs. Blocker cannot hear a word. She keeps her eyes trained on my father and is shouting at him all the time, and he is trying to ignore her completely.

  She tries a new tack. “Mister. I got a neighbor, a beautiful lady. Only sixty years old. She wants, if she gets married, a husband mit a car, money, insurance—”

  My father laughs and laughs. “She wants? I know hundreds of women of forty who would be happy to get a man without a car, without money, and without insurance. And the fact that she lives on the lower East Side doesn’t help her either.”

  My father says all this staring straight ahead.

  “Look,” Mrs. Blocker says to us, “he can’t turn his neck. Age, I’m telling you.”

  My father raises himself up carefully and turns to her with a sweet smile. “My stiff neck, for your information, happens to be due to an automobile accident I had on New Year’s Eve.”

  Mrs. Blocker is laughing. “I wouldn’t swear to what he did last night.”

  My father rises, tells Mrs. Blocker how happy he is to have met her, takes his hat and says good-bye.

  XXV

  We are seated with Mrs. Blocker at the kitchen table after my father has left, although she has not eaten any of the birthday cake we have brought her. “I’m a gnosher,” she suddenly says, and picks up the cream pitcher and drinks from it and grabs some of the cake and eats it with her fingers.