Education of Patrick Silver

by Jerome Charyn

  Isaac had been born into this world to plague Guzmanns. That’s what Papa believed. Every man has a personal devil, according to Marrano law. Isaac was Papa’s devil. What other explanation could there be for a cop who tossed his badge out the window so he could come to the candy store with tales of banishment from the Manhattan police and dig into the flesh under Papa’s heart. Moses could have turned him away. But he followed the instincts of his forebears, the crypto Jews of Portugal, chamberlains and monks who wouldn’t have let a devil out of their sight. It was better to hug Isaac and sniff the color of his urine, a pale yellow and blue.

  Papa should have whispered in Jorge’s ear; Jorge knew how to clog a devil’s windpipe. Only Papa was wary of cops. He’d killed another policeman years ago and had to flee Peru. He wanted Isaac to suffer a more natural death. The Guzmanns had been sophisticated poisoners for a century and a half. But Papa didn’t have to cultivate toxins for Isaac. He sat Isaac at his table, fed him pork, tripe, and black pudding. No devil could survive Guzmann food. Papa and his boys had enough acid in them to purify a field of wormy pudding (the family lived out of a garbage pail during Papa’s first years in the United States).

  Isaac’s skin began to turn. His sweat was dark green. His ears had ugly secretions in the morning. The Chief was dying bit by bit. A fingernail would come off. His bushy sideburns, the envy of Manhattan, thinned to lusterless shreds of hair. He tramped Boston Road in a constant state of dizziness. But Papa couldn’t get him to fall down. He escaped the Guzmanns by walking out of the candy store and returning to Manhattan.

  And Papa suffered ever since. He lost his hegemony in the Bronx. It did him little good to bribe the cops of his borough. The green sedans didn’t come from there. Isaac held all the ganglions at Headquarters like puppet strings. He could tug at the Guzmanns from Centre Street. Papa shut the candy store in May and retired to Loch Sheldrake, where he had a small farm with orchards and a country well. But those ganglions could shake a blackberry bush. Isaac reached into Loch Sheldrake. He got the FBI to burn Papa’s farm. The fuckers would have kidnapped Jerónimo if Papa hadn’t hid the baby in his well.

  He relied on Patrick Silver now. Papa had no one else. If Patrick failed him, devil Isaac would hurl the baby into the sinking lime under Headquarters. Marranos couldn’t sleep in an unholy grave. That’s why Papa kept a cemetery in Bronxville. The baby would scream for a thousand years without Marrano earth in both his eyes. Could a father ignore such screams? Papa would haunt Manhattan borough like a golem, slaying policemen until Isaac disinterred his boy. He shuddered to think of the consequences. Manhattan would swim in cops’ blood. On the death of his sons Papa had no mercy.

  A broadnecked bandanna girl hobbled into the candy store with a blind man clutching her arm. The blind man had yellow cheeks, brittle glasses on his nose, and a white cane that was longer and thinner than a fisherman’s rod. The bandanna girl unraveled her clothes. Jorge emerged. Papa hugged his middle child. He threw Jorge’s bandannas, skirts, blouse, shoes, and apples (meant for tits) into a barrel under the soda fountain. He scowled at the blind man.

  “Zorro, you know how much Isaac admires you. Why did you come here?”

  Zorro snapped the eyeglasses off his nose and got rid of his white cane. “I wanted to sit with my brothers.” He had candy fish for Topal and Alejandro, and purple fudge from Atlantic City.

  Papa couldn’t control his youngest child. The Fox of Boston Road had to spite those green cars and peek into his father’s candy store.

  “You missed Jerónimo,” Papa said. “By two minutes.”

  “I saw him,” Zorro said. “Did you expect me to stand in front of Isaac’s car and bow to Jerónimo? How’s Patrick Silver?”

  “Why don’t you visit his church on Bethune Street? You can ask him yourself.”

  Zorro mashed his teeth. “I don’t trust that Irish prick. He came out of Isaac’s belly. Just like Coen.”

  “Coen never harmed us. And where would we put Jerónimo if we didn’t have the Irish?”

  “Jerónimo could stay with me.”

  “Wonderful,” Papa said. “He–ll sleep in a telephone booth with his brother. He’ll live on whores’ snot. You’ll wash his handkerchiefs in the rain. Pretty. Very pretty.”

  The malteds Zorro drank as a child must have shrunk his ears. He still had a grudge against Manfred Coen. Coen was dead. They grew up in the candy store, Manfred and Zorro. They were schoolmates. They did their lessons with ice cream in their cheeks. They fed pigeons on Boston Road. They picked bugs out of Jerónimo’s hair. But Coen went to work for Isaac, became a blue-eyed cop, and lost his life in a crazy accident. He caught a bullet in the throat at the end of a ping-pong game. Patrick Silver used to chase bandits with Coen. He was one of Coen’s many partners until the Police Commissioner took Patrick’s gun away.

  “Zorro, the Irish loves Jerónimo. Don’t abuse him. Where’s cousin Isidore?”

  “He’s safe, Papa. Our friends carried Isidoro out of Atlantic City.”

  “Did you get mourners for him? I don’t want my cousin to remain unblessed.”

  Zorro was a blind man again. He put on his brittle eyeglasses and found the thin white cane. “Papa, would I spit on cousin Isidore? I gave him more blessings than he deserves. It cost me a hundred bills to find a cantor who would pray for him.”

  The Fox kissed Jorge, Alejandro, and Topal, muttered a goodbye, and started to leave the candy store, tapping with his cane.

  “Zorro, be careful,” Papa said. “The dark glasses don’t mean shit. Police cars run over blind men too.”

  Zorro didn’t wave. Hunching his shoulders, he sniffed the air, and stepped into the gutters of Boston Road.

  5.

  THE Congregation Limerick sits on Bethune Street between a Chinese laundry and a hospital for cats and dogs. No one can remember its proper name. In the delicatessens and bars around Abingdon Square it is known as the Irish synagogue, or Patrick Silver’s shul. A crumbling brownstone, its stained-glass windows are shuttered with pieces of cardboard, and its awning, extravagant in 1930, is now an ugly stretch of cloth.

  This is a suffering shul. It exists without a president and a governing board (the elders of the synagogue, a disabled troop of bachelors and widowers, do not have the energy to govern). It is attached to no other congregation in the world. It doesn’t commune with the chief rabbi of Dublin, or the old synagogues of Cork. No rabbinical council in the United States can claim any ties with the Irish synagogue of Bethune Street. It has no sisterhood to perform charities in Greenwich Village and search for odd bits of stained glass that are missing from the windows. It cannot afford a cantor’s fee; no one comes here to lead the chant for the dead.

  Bethune Street has a rabbi, Hughie Prince, a tightlipped man who was never ordained. Ask him where he studied. Hughie didn’t come out of a rabbinical college. The elders chose him because he was the single person among them who understood a word of the Mishna and the Gemara. Hughie brought talmud to the Irish synagogue, limiting his pronouncements to five or six sentences a week about the laws of dispersion as they applied to Limerick Jews. He cuts glass for a living, and you can only find him at the synagogue mornings and evenings. Most of the time Hughie is out repairing windows; you have to go up and down Hudson Street screaming “Rabbi Hughie Prince,” if you expect any religion from him.

  Patrick Silver runs the shul. He’s the unpaid “beadle.” He won’t allow besotted Irishmen to piss in the study hall. He feeds the poor (gentile and Jewish beggars can always get a sandwich from Patrick in the shul’s tiny kitchen). He settles arguments between parishioners by thwacking both parties on the left ear. He goes into the streets to collect bodies for Rabbi Prince (without Patrick’s minyans the shul would forget to pray). He travels through the synagogue with a shillelagh of a broom, slapping mosquitoes off the wall, clubbing rats out of the damp holes in the cellar, lopping off the head of any evil nail in the pews that might scratch the pants of unsuspecting widowers, po
king for weak spots in the chapel’s crooked ceiling to prevent the synagogue from falling on Hughie and the sacred scrolls, banging dirt from the underside of the awning, scaring off burglars and bill collectors, and occasionally sweeping the floors.

  Even when he had his gun, Patrick lived at the shul. He would shuffle from Bethune Street to the First Deputy’s office, with bottles of Guinness in his shirt. Most of his salary went into the shul. Congregation Limerick was a firetrap. Inspectors and City marshals received their monthly “tithes” from the shul and ignored the rumblings in the walls.

  Then Patrick lost his gun. A few days after he quit the police, building inspectors arrived with flashlights, complaining about mud in the cellar and rats nesting in the pipes. Patrick needed a fresh supply of cash. He had nothing but muscles to sell. No white man would hire him. The gangster families of Atlantic Avenue and Mulberry Street were suspicious of Patrick Silver. They couldn’t understand the pedigree of an Irish Jew. They figured a big commissioner still kept him on a string.

  Patrick had to go into Harlem and become the bodyguard of a black policy bank. This nigger bank liked the idea of a giant with a yarmulke in his pocket. Patrick’s soccer shirt was soon a familiar item on St. Nicholas Avenue. The bankers grew fond of him. They introduced him to an Abyssinian shul near Mt. Morris Park. Every congregant at this shul was considered a rabbi. Patrick read torah with the black rabbis of Mt. Morris Park and discussed the laws of Moses with them. The rabbis had their own Book of Genesis. Jacob was white, the rabbis said. But Moses and Esau were Abyssinian. “Rabbi Silver, you’re as black as any of us.” Patrick couldn’t agree or disagree. Didn’t some of the Irish say that St. Munchin, the first bishop of Limerick, had come out of Africa with a colony of leprous Jews?

  Patrick’s seat in Harlem didn’t last. The nigger bank had to let him go. The cops downtown were flying kites over Seventh Avenue. Policy runners were being nudged off the street. “Shit,” the bankers said to Patrick. “Somebody’s got it mean for you. Irish, we can’t afford you any more.” The bankers didn’t leave Patrick stranded without a job. They tossed him to the Guzmanns.

  That’s how Patrick inherited Jerónimo. But the boy came with a dowry of sores. The morning after Patrick returned from Boston Road, a squad of Isaac’s “children” descended upon the shul. Nine blue-eyed cops broke into Patrick’s room and caught him sleeping with the baby (the cellar room couldn’t hold more than one bed). Patrick reached for his shillelagh with his prick out. He wouldn’t wear pajamas at the synagogue. Jerónimo remained under Patrick’s summer blanket, his face wet from the energy of a fourteen-hour sleep (he’d been dreaming about his brother Zorro). All the blue-eyed cops had Detective Specials in their hands. They stayed clear of Patrick’s enormous broom. Their spokesman, a detective-lieutenant with a blond mustache, began to bray.

  “St. Patrick, we haven’t come to harm you. Praise the Lord, we’re on a peaceful mission. The First Dep is in the hospital. He had a hemorrhage in the middle of the night. I didn’t see him but I hear the blood poured out of his neck. There’s a priest with him now. The Father’s laying holy oil on old Ned while they’re pumping new blood into him. Isaac doesn’t want him to die without a peek at your face. So don’t cause trouble for us, St. Patrick. We’re taking you to the hospital one way or another.”

  Patrick kept his chin on the broom. “Isaac must be shaky if he had to send nine dogs like you.”

  “He’s conservative,” said the mustache (Lieutenant Scanlan), with an eye on Jerónimo. “He knows how ferocious a Jewish saint can get. Isaac has faith in numbers. He thought nine of us would be enough to discourage you. St. Patrick, do we have to wreck your little church?”

  “Put your guns away. They stink of metal. And close your eyes. Me and Jerónimo have to dress.”

  Isaac’s “children” wouldn’t slap their guns into their holsters, or shut their eyes; they watched Jerónimo’s balls as he wiggled out of bed. The baby climbed into underpants that came down to his knees. He wore sweaters rather than a shirt, and his trousers had a shrunken seat. He pulled earmuffs out of his pocket, winding the tin band around his elbow. Patrick had to lace his shoes.

  The cops giggled at the two gray-heads and prepared to march them out of the synagogue. “Not so fast,” Patrick grumbled. “This aint an amusement park. Scanlan, you’ll have to lend me a few of your pretty boys. They’ll be darling Jews for half an hour. Isaac won’t object. I’m not leaving until I find ten live customers.”

  He pushed through the detectives and stationed himself at the doorway. Six old men stood in the corridors. Stalwarts of the congregation, they hung out on Bethune Street and were the hub of Patrick’s minyans. They carried their prayer shawls in soft velvet bags, these friends of Patrick’s dead father. Patrick shouted into the corridors.

  “Where’s Hughie?”

  The old men shrugged at him. “Hughie’s shitting somewhere, or chopping glass.”

  But Hughie appeared. He had a warped back from bending over glass so long, and his fingers were nicked from all his cutting tools. He wouldn’t wear the traditional fur hat (with pigtails) that identified the rabbis and wise men of Eastern Europe. And he didn’t have a yarmulke done in gold to set him apart from ordinary men. He came in a simple cap, threadbare at the rims, with a crown that was permanently collapsed; it had goggles sitting on the bill that kept glass splinters out of his eyes. Hughie wouldn’t remove his goggles inside the shul. He saw no contradictions between torah and his trade. You couldn’t be a good rabbi and a bad glazier, according to Hughie. He cut glass with the fingers of Benjamin, Jacob, and Elijah on his wrist.

  Hughie stared at the detectives and their arsenal of guns. “Patrick, chase them out. They don’t belong in a synagogue.”

  “Not to worry, Rabbi. I invited a couple of the lads to pray with you.”

  Three detectives were left behind. They hiked upstairs with Hughie and the six old men of the shul. They had to pass the kitchen, the study hall, the toilets, and the winter room (open to beggars from November to March), before they got to the chapel. The detectives snickered at the circumstances of these Limerick sheenies, who prayed in a dunghill. It was the most abominable church they had ever stumbled upon. The pews were shoved into the corner like a line of bishops in ragged clothes; the carpets running from the pews had trails in them that could have swallowed a yarmulke, or a mouse. The women’s gallery, two gnarled porches over the cops’ heads, had been stripped of all its benches, since women no longer came to the synagogue.

  The chapel itself was in ruins. The furniture made no sense: silk rags on a broken closet, a platform with feeble bannisters, a chair nailed to the wall. They asked Hughie about the odd dip of that chair.

  “Rabbi, do you drop your sinners out of the bucket?”

  “That’s Elijah’s chair. It faces north, to Jerusalem, Baghdad, and the Irish Sea. That’s the path Elijah takes when he zooms over the world. Next time he comes down from heaven, he’ll sit with us.”

  Isaac’s three “children” couldn’t believe the gullibility of Irish Jews. Donkeys out of Limerick. (Scanlan, their boss, was descended from Donegal Bay.) Limerick had always been the idiot’s house of Ireland.

  The sheenies began distributing prayer shawls, and each detective was obliged to bury his head in a huge linen shawl with broad stripes and primitive tassels that were no more than knotted strands of cloth. The detectives were called to the praying box (that miserable platform at the center of the shul), with Hughie and the six old men. They stood on the bottom step, trapped in Patrick’s minyan. They heard sounds that froze to the linen on their heads. The minyan bellowed and moaned like a company of sick cows. The detectives would rather have prayed among Rastafarians, or another lunatic cult, than fall into the maw of a prayer shawl.

  The Irish synagogue was only three blocks from St. Vincent’s hospital, but the lieutenant had to take his fleet of cars. He couldn’t walk Silver and the dummy Jerónimo across Abingdon Square with guns in their
backs. Silver was practically a saint on Bethune Street. Idiots would pour out of the bars to retrieve him from Scanlan, who would be charged by some civilian board with kidnapping church officials. So Scanlan kept them off the streets.

  He was sick of Guzmanns. He’d been exiled to the Bronx since June, riding up and down Boston Road like a Mississippi pilot. You could ground yourself in a pothole, disappear into the crumbling gutters. A Bronx detail couldn’t guarantee your life. He would have been happy to get rid of Jerónimo, make one less Guzmann in New York, but he couldn’t move on the baby with Patrick Silver in the car.

  “St. Patrick, should we stop for a lick of ice cream? Jerónimo won’t survive the morning without his chocolate mush.”

  Silver wouldn’t talk. He sat with his knees against the door, thinking of Commissioner Ned. He wasn’t a total ignoramus. He could have gone to Headquarters from the synagogue, or the Kings of Munster, and visited with O’Roarke. He didn’t forget the route. Only his legs wouldn’t carry him there. The First Dep had half a floor to himself. Patrick dreaded those rooms. They’d nurtured him for over ten years.

  Patrick was the mad cop of Centre Street, a Limerick lad with a yarmulke, the only kike who belonged to the Shillelagh Society (a brotherhood of Irish detectives). He brawled with the Shillelaghs, whored with them, met them at weddings, wakes, and society dinners, but Patrick didn’t go to Mass with his brothers, or follow them on retreats. He pissed into a bottle at Headquarters. He napped with a yarmulke over his eyes. He broke away from an assignment to nab victims for morning and evening prayers. No one but Patrick had a key to the shul. Field commanders couldn’t punish him for his lapses. Commissioners were forced to smile at him. Patrick Silver had the biggest rabbi in the universe: First Deputy O’Roarke.