Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground

  Steve Stern

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1991 by Steve Stern

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-937854-13-3

  eBook Cover Design by Awarding Book Covers

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For Lizabeth Smith and her Ladies

  and for Kathy the Brave

  It wasn’t a dream, it was a flood.

  —Frank Stanford

  I

  One

  During the spring of the flood I took up with a couple of colored boys down on Beale Street. I was fifteen years old and my father had recently plucked me out of a book to put me to work in his pawnshop. Of course I would have preferred to remain in the exotic landscapes of my reading, in the muggy jungles and pastel deserts and the remote mountain fastnesses where you lived forever, along the moondrenched, hoof-beaten highways and the bounding mains. But when I saw the way that the swollen river had transformed the city, which I’d never paid much attention to before, I began to have a change of heart.

  The water had risen to the height of the rockbound bluff, inundating the levee. The lowlying cotton warehouses were swamped to their second stories, stranding the pin-striped classers (who dispatched their porters in washtubs to fetch their lunch) in marathon poker games. The paddle-wheeled excursion boats bobbing high above their customary stages, their pipe organs blowing bubbles, looked from a distance to be floating in midair.

  The river itself, having climbed the levee as far as Front Street on its east side and spilled over the Arkansas bottoms on the west, was broadened to the width of a sluggish inland sea. Outhouses, church pulpits, windmill propellers, suites of parlor furniture, and the bloated carcasses of cows rode the current. Whole families were regularly washed ashore. Clutching soggy bundles, questionable heirlooms, and mildewed children on tethers, trailed by attenuated shadows and wet dogs, they squatted in the public parks and wagon yards. They huddled under the department store awnings and theater marquees along Main Street. In the hot afternoons their shrunken garments sent up threads of steam, which made them appear to be smoldering or about to evaporate.

  But what I personally couldn’t get over was how so much of my papa’s own Beale Street was under water. The surrounding Gayoso Bayou had backed up, overflowing its banks, so that it washed into the basin of the block between Hernando and Third. Now, in place of trolley tracks and asphalt with the cobbles showing through, there was a rippling, sun-splintered lagoon. Back and forth across it in an unending poor man’s regatta, the Negroes ferried themselves in wooden skiffs.

  My family had been in the South just a little over a year when it happened. We’d come down from New York City when my father, after the failure of half a dozen business ventures, had claimed a sudden attack of wanderlust. Mild-mannered, goodhumored, and slight behind nickeled spectacles, his six feet diminished by posture like a question mark, Papa had never had any prior history of such complaints. At least not to my knowledge. So far as I knew, despite all his pipe dreams about farflung commercial concerns, he’d always been a confirmed homebody. From the familiar headquarters of our dingy duplex apartment in Brighton Beach, he kept his head thrust firmly among the clouds. This was what he was known for; though my grandfather, who was hardly one to talk, sometimes accused him of keeping his head stuck in less ethereal places.

  Then one afternoon, when no one had asked him, Papa took it on himself to declare, “Brooklyn ain’t America!,” jerking his thumb toward a window overlooking a street where Yiddish was still lingua franca. Propping his glasses on the slope of his forehead, he covered his eyes with one hand and spun a standing globe of the world with the other. “Round and round she goes,” he chanted, a carnie at a wheel of fortune no less. He was always the kidder, my papa, though games of chance had never really been much in his line. In any case, with a skidding forefinger he eventually stopped the world; he uncovered his eyes to announce that fate had designated for our new home a place called Memphis in the state of Tennessee.

  I might have pointed out that the finger of fate had actually come to rest somewhere in the vicinity of the Outer Hebrides, but I wasn’t fooled for a moment by this phony random selection. I knew, as who didn’t, that behind it all was my father’s relocated older brother, my well-heeled if somewhat shady Uncle Morris. Despite the lean years for almost everyone else, Uncle Morris, following instincts he proclaimed as surefire, had made a killing down south in real estate. That was the story, and it had kept him virtually out of touch for almost a decade. Then shortly following the death of his chronically ailing wife Nettie (whom scarcely anyone seemed to remember), he began to find frequent excuses to make trips to New York. On those occasions, professing a slavishness to the sacred idea of family, Uncle Morris would invite us all to come to Memphis and share the spoils.

  “Solly Solly Solly,” he would grieve, clucking his tongue over the crumb-strewn oilcloth of our kitchen table, flapping his jowls and flicking cigar ashes onto his plate. “When are you gonna get wise?”

  Then he’d repeat his standard lament about how my papa was wasting his talents (what talents?) in the ghetto. He should come already to the land of the honeysuckle and the mockingbird, where his fortune was waiting to be made. “The family should be together,” he would solemnly intone, insisting that he meant it from the bottom of his heart—a place I imagined as full of extinguished cigar butts. “Mama and Papa can enjoy a temperate climate in their sunset years, and Mildred here”—he leaned across the table with his labored breathing to pat my mother’s hand—“Mildred we can make into a lady of leisure.”

  This gesture on the part of my uncle always sent my mama—not a bad-looking woman if you liked them in the full-figured department—it always sent her into fits of tittering laughter, which wasn’t ordinarily her style. Generally speaking, my mama was quite a sober person, the firm set of her lips perhaps compensating for the careless curve of my father’s smile. But a touch from Uncle Morris and you’d have thought that the brother-in-law had started in munching her fingertips, or worse.

  In fact, it was common knowledge among the Kaplans that my mother had been courted by both brothers in their youth. How she finally wound up with Papa was a question I’d heard my mama ask herself aloud more than once. It was a way she had of trying to needle my father out of his dreaming, though you had to wonder how much of it was actually in jest. You wondered if—when she compared the portly Morris with his much vaunted assets to her spare and feckless husband Solly—my mama sometimes had honest second thoughts.

  Occasionally Uncle Morris would bring along on his visits his mousy daughter Naomi, and everyone would always try to throw us together. She was a droopy-drawered, goggle-eyed dishrag of a girl, my cousin, shy to the point of affliction, and I for one had never been moved to draw her out. Over the years of what I’d assumed to be a mutual hostility, we’d exchanged no more than a token couple of words. Hello and goodbye, with maybe a sortie as far as gesundheit, comprised the bounds of our intimacy. That the two bookworms would at last have some time for each other, this was one of the pros (there were no cons) in my uncle’s relentless argumen
t for our moving south. Needless to say, such a proposition sounded to my ears less like a promise than a threat.

  Anyway, with his avowed faith in his current enterprise and in the one that followed after its failure, with his insistence on the wealth of opportunities that lay close to home, it took a while for my father to see the wisdom in his brother’s advice. It took the collapse of a series of mostly imaginary business ventures (a telephone pollstering service, a mail-order toiletries outfit, an independent, not to say unlicensed, investment-consulting and brokerage firm) before Papa allowed Uncle Morris to call his bluff.

  At the announcement of the family’s exodus, Grandpa Isador, for whom any change was a change for the worse, carried on in the way that we’d come to expect. “A shvartz yor!” he moaned, wringing his hands, making as if to pull off his face by the fringe of his wispy, yellowing beard. He complained that his son was as good as delivering us into the hands of Cossacks; he opened his Scriptures to the riot act. It was the same performance he’d given whenever Uncle Morris suggested that he and my grandmother come south for their health.

  Though in their case, given my papa’s perpetually empty pocketbook, this was maybe not such a bad idea. After all, why remain in humble circumstances with a poor son when the rich one was extending an open invitation? Not that my uncle had ever exactly stipulated that the old couple live exclusively with him, an omission that may not have been lost on Grandpa Isador. So it’s possible that, as much as he disapproved of my papa, my grandpa disapproved of Uncle Morris even more. But then he’d always asserted that, having already crossed an angry ocean, Brooklyn was as far from Byelorussia as he intended to budge. The rest of the country was anyway infested with pogromchik wild Indians.

  Meanwhile his wife, my adamant Grandma Zippe, as usual expressed no emotion whatsoever beyond her frozen, all-purpose frown.

  My mother, however, surprised us all. Despite a strict allegiance to her mah-jongg circle and her active Hadassah involvement, for all her traditional hard-headed skepticism with respect to her husband’s schemes, she seemed perfectly amenable to his latest big idea. She even went along with the pretense that the idea had originated with him. For his part, Papa behaved as if he were almost disappointed that his wife hadn’t bothered to show more resistance to the move.

  As for me, I suppose I might have put up a fight if I’d given it much thought; I was after all being torn from the bosom of the only home I’d ever known. Still, it would have been hard to get sentimental over our cheesy apartment, located as it was a few blocks from a beach that, even in the middle of my second decade, was mostly a rumor to me. Besides, in those days I had other priorities.

  I was living in books, so preoccupied with my reading that I could hardly remember having ever done anything else. I was out of reach, immersed in the picturesque pages of John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Baroness Orczy and Captain Marryat. With hungry (if myopic) eyes, I ate up The Prisoner of Zenda; I was absorbed beyond recall into the depths of Ardistan and Djinistan, hopelessly abandoned to Propeller Island and The Lost World. From painted howdahs and the hollow trunks of baobab trees, from behind a taffrail or a gaslit lamppost, or from under the grid of an oubliette, I might spy now and again upon the antics of my family. But the haunted escarpment and the vaulted catacomb, the uncharted archipelago in its peculiar wrinkle of time, these occupied the foreground of my attention. So why should I care which corner of the material planet the Kaplans might decide to call home? Brooklyn, Memphis, the Outer Hebrides, they were all the same to me.

  In Memphis we took an apartment that Uncle Morris had found us above a little bakery on North Main Street. A cramped and shabby two-bedroom affair, it was not so unlike our vacated shoebox in Brooklyn. It had the same rolling floorboards and musical plumbing, though added to these standard features was a dusty skylight the color of beer. It was situated in a clamorous downtown neighborhood that everyone, for some immemorial reason, called the Pinch.

  Perched atop the bluff a stone’s throw from the river, North Main Street was wall-to-wall mama-and-papa shops, each of them crammed with hustling Jews. And every one of those merchants was getting the hell out of the Pinch next month, next year, just as soon as business improved. In fact, but for the dank humidity that turned your lungs to wet cellophane and the summer heat that drove families to sleep on their tenement roofs, but for the way the weeds and toadstools sprouted from telephone poles and grew out of cracks in the walls, we might almost have been back in Brighton Beach. Never mind the corners enshrined with Civil War cannons and plaques commemorating victims of various plagues; the gunsmiths and feed emporiums and storefront Pentecostal missions; the truckloads of yokels dressed for blood sports. In any case, there were enough starving cobblers and piecework tailors around to keep Grandpa Isador from perishing of homesickness.

  There were also enough similarities with home to calm my father, whose pioneering spirit had not survived the train ride down. The miles of monotonous flatlands, littered with tarpaper shacks amid boneyards of eviscerated automobiles, had taken their toll on his enthusiasm. When the shoeless families on rural platforms—their eyes like old money—peered into our coach, he sank into his collar until he was practically headless. Just outside Memphis he was still twisting around in his seat as if he thought it might not be too late to turn back.

  Not until we’d left the station and taken a taxi to North Main Street did Papa begin to breathe easier. He even screwed up his courage enough to make a wisecrack. “To the ends of the earth we came to see a potato knish?” he quipped at the sight of shops with Hebrew characters scrawled on the windows.

  About to introduce us to our new apartment, whose homely virtues he’d already begun to recite, Uncle Morris had taken offense. “So maybe you expected the ladies with their hoop skirts and the darkies singing hymns?” he wheezed. “Maybe you want egg in your julep?”

  Wistfully lifting his caterpillar eyebrows like he wouldn’t have minded, Papa said that he hadn’t meant to seem ungrateful.

  “Sol-ly!” Uncle Morris was suddenly all consolation, slapping his brother’s back as if to encourage a belch. “Give it a chance.” Then he winked at my grandparents, who’d been deposited along with the luggage beside the curb. (It had been decided that, for the time being at least, they would be more comfortable on North Main, as Uncle Morris’s place was currently undergoing repairs.) He chucked my mother under the chin and waved a gesture that seemed intended to make the drab tenement building disappear. “Give the business a chance, and before you know it our Mildred’ll be mistress of a grand house on the Parkway.”

  The business in question was a pawnshop that my uncle had repossessed, merchandise intact, from its hapless former proprietor. He was turning it over gratis to my father, lock, stock, and cash drawer, as he liked to say, with no strings attached.

  “Please don’t thank me, Solly,” he kept protesting, though Papa was clearly of a couple of minds concerning his brother’s largess. “It’s a mitzvah for me,” he insisted, my pious uncle, rolling his eyes whence cometh his reward, clearing his throat like a trumpeting pachyderm.

  The shop was located on Beale Street, a place that inspired all kinds of gossip and hearsay. It was there, as Uncle Morris had promised, that my father would find the local color he’d missed on our arrival in the Pinch. It was the street where the shvartzers came to make their crazy music, to kick up their heels and generally misbehave. But the nearest thing to music at my papa’s end of the street was the creaking of hinges on shop signs and the jingling of tills. The only musicians were the poor shnorrers, down on their luck, who came in to hock their broken-necked ukeleles, their mouth harps that sounded like breaking wind. So maybe the fabled Beale Street began a little farther down the hill, down past the colored park on the other side of Third. But that was a section of town toward which the merchants on my father’s block seldom had occasion to go.

  Not that the street was a source of any special curiosity for me. I
was no more interested in the locale of my father’s business than I was in the business itself, though I could appreciate that it was something of a heroic departure for him. Despite his ill-fated succession of careers, my papa had rarely been called upon to face the public. Now, with a windy bravado that fooled no one, he attempted to infect the rest of us with his bogus optimism. Again and again he repeated his resolution to make a go of it. But it was clear that the strength of his own conviction depended on the family’s endorsement; and at the least excuse he would try to inveigle us into coming down to visit the shop.

  There was the evening, for instance, when he had everyone down to Beale Street for the maiden illumination of his sign.

  “Give a look,” my papa had nudged us, ducking inside to plug in an electrical cord. There was a burst of scarlet neon over the door, whirring like a horde of locusts, spelling out our name in lights: KAPLAN’S LOANS. Back on the street Papa lifted his face so that it was bathed in the flush of his sign. Then, like a knight raising a visor, he ceremoniously pushed back his spectacles.

  “This is the work I was born for,” he declared. It was what he said at the commencement of all his disastrous pursuits.

  You could only shake your head, but did I worry? After all, I had my own concerns. In my alcove over the unpaved alley that separated our building from Petrofsky’s market, I’d kept on reading. Lately my specialties were the kind of stories that began in hidebound studies appointed in glasses of claret and mastiffs asleep by the hearth, and ended up in a godforsaken wilderness amid quicksand and dinosaur bones. I liked unlikely heroes who left their cozy digs to investigate a tap on a windowpane, only to be waylaid by adventure for the next half century or so. I liked it when they stumbled downstairs into prehistory, or fell through a revolving bookcase into a subterranean stream that led to a kingdom of thieves.

  Sprawled across my hide-a-bed, I would hold an open book like the helm of a ship. Or sometimes like a sprung steel trap or a pair of wings about to flap and fly away. Nothing short of the boldest illustrations—I’m talking flashing gold sabers and crimson sails—could distract me from my regard for the printed page. Not the kids at the Market Square School with whom I wasn’t too popular, owing I suppose to my Yankee accent and my habit of keeping to myself, but did I care? They didn’t bother me any more than did my righteous grandfather, who would have had me visit the ritual bath for handling unsanctified texts. (“Chozzerai!” he’d lament at the sight of me poring over my sagas, then stick a finger down his throat.)