Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  “Keep your shirt on, Solly!” he cautioned my father, who had yet to say a word; meanwhile my uncle’s own sweaty shirtfront was bunching out of his vest. “Everything’s under control,” he assured us, groping at his breast for his heart or a monogrammed hankie with which to mop his brow. He would have us know that he was phoning certain parties who had their own way of taking care of business. Pressure would be brought to bear on the office of the mayor himself, we could count on it. Don’t worry, the place would be drained by noon.

  Good-naturedly, as if they were playing a game that he thought he might like to join in, my papa asked if someone would please tell him what was going on.

  Everyone spoke at once, fracturing the morning’s tranquillity with a babel of cross-purposes, until Mr. Gruber interceded, stepping forward to hush them with his imperturbable graveside manner. His eyes were demure, his bald spot (when he bowed) a yellow egg in the nest of his oily hair.

  “The cemetery is under water,” he patiently explained. “I been to the site myself. The headstones look like bell buoys. You can’t bury no Jews there today.”

  On my mama’s arm Grandpa Isador let go his most bloodcurdling “Vay iz mir!” He tore the lapels of his caftan, leaving them to hang like a pair of vestigial fins. Some of his cronies from Jake Plott’s shuffled over, but instead of offering conventional words of comfort, they joined my zayde in his moaning desolation. Think of an Old World version of barbershop harmony. The rest of the neighbors, competing with Uncle Morris’s renewed fulminations, jockeyed for openings wherein they could offer advice.

  “Consult the rabbi!” called out some greenhorn, probably from force of habit, since the Market Street shul had never been able to support a full-time rabbi. There was a recommendation that the body be cremated—this from Mr. Loewy the jeweler, a man known to consort with freethinkers in the Green Owl Cafe. Immediately he was shouted down. Then came a suggestion concerning the Reform cemetery, which was situated in a suburban setting on high ground. Maybe under these circumstances they might agree to make room …

  At this Grandpa Isador came alert. Miraculously rearing up on his fallen arches, he bellowed, “Hab rachmones! My wife you would put in unhallowed ground?”

  Mr. Gruber, who had only to open his mouth to create a lull, submitted that things could be worse. After all, at Mr. Kaplan’s insistence, the deceased had been prepared against decomposition, and could thus be stored indefinitely in Gruber’s establishment for a mutually acceptable fee.

  Snarling at the undertaker, Uncle Morris turned to defend himself, explaining (while Mama covered Grandpa Isador’s ears) that Zippe hadn’t exactly been embalmed. “This is strictly according to Jewish custom. They use Diamond kosher salt or something.” Then he turned back around to give full vent to his outrage over Gruber’s seeking to make a profit from our family’s misfortune. Working himself toward a stroke, he wanted to know who was in charge here, Morris Kaplan of the Parkway, a fully assimilated and well-connected man of business, or this moldy, two-bit, North Main Street Litvak shmuck? As he ranted, my uncle strangled the balmy air.

  All along the procession of cars there were honks and heads leaning out to demand we get the show on the road. Having given up on a practical expedient, the neighbors in front of Gruber’s had begun to argue among themselves. They were debating what motives the Lord might have had for inundating a graveyard. It was at that point that my father chose to come forward and tug at his brother’s sleeve.

  “Never mind, Morris,” said Papa, still chipper under the influence of the vernal morning. “Tell you what I’ll do.” It was avoice I’d heard him use in the pawnshop, its tone implying satisfaction guaranteed. “I’ll…,” he began, then abruptly left off. He must have sensed that all eyes were upon him, that it was presumptuous of him to volunteer a solution when it was Morris who made the decisions around here. Or was it just that he’d opened his yap without any real solution in mind? In either case, having stuck his foot in it, Papa looked at a loss for some graceful way to pull it back out. “I’ll…,” he tried again, and fell silent.

  Just then the sun broke through a bank of khaki clouds for the first time in a week. Coming into view, it struck the lenses of my father’s glasses, which blazed like a pair of molten medallions. At that moment, with everyone shading their brow against the brilliance of his spectacles, my papa might have been something other than he was. He might have been great and terrible—a renegade high priest from the continent of Pellucidar, say, with deadly ray-beam eyes.

  “Tell you what.” He was having another go at it, this time in a remarkably even voice. “I’ll keep our mama in my shop till the water goes down.”

  As suddenly as it had appeared, the sun was gone again, leaving Papa in a state of blinking chagrin. Nervously he removed his glasses and breathed on the lenses, clearing his throat like he might have spoken out of turn. He chuckled, it was only a joke: that’s Solly Kaplan all over, always with a line. But nobody was laughing. Instead, with pulletlike jerks of the head, they were looking from one to another. They were shrugging nifter-shmifter, so why not, waiting for Uncle Morris or anyone else to point out the obvious flaws in Papa’s plan. I don’t know who was more astonished, my father or the rest of the street, to discover that he’d been taken seriously.

  Four

  As Papa and I rode down Front Street in the plush-upholstered cab of Mr. Gruber’s smooth-running hearse, I saw for the first time just how far the river had risen. The old paint-chipped, cast-iron classing houses that lined the eastern side of the street were hidden behind tall stacks of cotton. This was cotton salvaged from the deluged warehouses at the bottom of the bluff below. Precariously balanced, the bales formed a bulwark of chalk-white palisades, which overlooked the pools of prune-purple water down the slope where the levee had been. To the west the drifting plain of what they call the Big Muddy had no visible bank at all. In fact, there was no horizon to let you know when you were sailing out of the navigable (if hazardous) gunmetal currents into the unmapped gunmetal skies. Only a stranded stubble of unsubmerged trees marked the spot—rest in peace—that once was Arkansas.

  The foot of Beale Street was also under the river, which lapped now about the pilings of the Illinois Central Railroad overpass. On top of the elevated trestle a gang of scruffy truants were dangling their skinny legs, pointing at a floating silo that rolled like a lolling leviathan under a flock of barnyard fowl.

  I recognized a couple of them from my school, snot-nosed shaygets hooligans who mocked me for a Yankee or a Yid or a four-eyed bookworm if they spoke to me at all. Among their ranks was also a wild Jewboy or two, from whom I’d received much the same treatment, not that I had any use for the lot of them. Friends had always been a commodity that I could mostly do without, thank you very much. They were forever goading you to join them in their pointless games and explorations when you had much better things to do. So maybe it was just that I happened to be wearing a suit on a morning when bare feet would have been more in the mode, that I somehow resented my exclusion from their tomfoolery. Then I had to remind myself that while they were wasting their time, I was involved in an important, even sacred, commission.

  As we rounded the corner into Beale, my papa, who’d been thoughtfully silent ever since we’d left the Pinch, looked back to observe, “It’s like the view from Mount Ararat after the ark runs aground.” This was untypical of his off-the-wall remarks, which didn’t ordinarily include references to the Bible.

  We were headed up the hill toward Main Street in time to meet a convoy of gear-grinding trucks coming down. To the rattling wooden tailgates and running boards of these trucks, their beds piled high with bags of sand, dozens of colored men were clinging for dear life. Some of them were wearing the county-issued striped pajamas, while others were dressed nattily in seersuckers, level straw skimmers, and spats. Armed police in dark glasses and mud-spattered spit shines, poised like they were squiring dignitaries, drove their motorcycles on either flank. Bewildered, I
turned to ask Papa what he thought was going on, but got only this curt reply: “Mr. Crump decided to build a pyramid—how should I know?”

  He seemed frankly a little on edge, my papa, constantly looking over his shoulder as if to make sure that we’d made a clean getaway. Like he wanted to reconfirm that the funeral cavalcade had not followed us from North Main Street, calling more attention to our enterprise than it needed. Of course I was also relieved on that score, glad that we were on our own again and that Mama and Uncle Morris had volunteered to stay and look after Grandpa Isador. Moreover, I was pleased to have been elected, even though I hadn’t asked, to ride shotgun (so to speak) on my grandmother’s next-to-last journey. Honestly, I didn’t know what had gotten into me lately—that instead of sitting alone with a book, I should be hanging out the window of a murmuring hearse, determined not to miss a single detail of this unusual day.

  We crossed over Main Street and started down the long hill into the pawnshop district. That’s when we were presented with the sight that caused even the unflappable Mr. Gruber, suddenly sucking in air, to miss a gear. From Main down to Third, the street was still business as usual: the pullers lollygagged among the show racks while the eye-buyers swarmed the sidewalks, golden balls dangling over their heads like King Midas’s apples—the whole place with a sharp, freshly minted clarity in the aftermath of the rains. But just below Third Street everything was changed. Stranding the row of garish old buildings on the right-hand side of the street and pouring over into what you could call the sunken gardens of Handy Park on the other was a sizable body of water. Its coppery surface, ruffled by the wind, was even further disturbed by a crazy flotilla of wooden fishing dinghies and skiffs. Gliding and colliding back and forth across the water in helter-skelter navigation, they looked like aquatic bumper cars.

  What floored me the most, however, was not the mere fact that Beale Street had been so outlandishly transformed—this you could sort of explain. What knocked me for a loop was how natural everything looked. The startling existence of the water seemed to have erased the memory of the original thoroughfare. One glimpse and I could hardly think back to a time when that crowded lagoon hadn’t been a regular feature of the local landscape.

  As I was leaning a bit too far out the window, Papa reeled me back into the front seat by my coattails. “Our catastrophes,” he sighed, “they’re the shvartzers’ holidays.” This was maybe his effort to restore a sobriety more in keeping with our solemn errand, though I could have sworn I saw the good humor beginning to tug at the muscles around his mouth. And his eyes blinked the suggestion that, on such a strange day, who could help behaving like shvartzers?

  Mr. Gruber pulled his hearse to a puttering stop alongside the granite curb in front of Kaplan’s Loans, and there sat Oboy with his back to the iron lattice. In place of his stool, which must still have been locked up inside the shop, he was perched on an upended Kickapoo crate. It was a pointless fidelity, of course, since Kaplan’s had been kept closed for the funeral—though I didn’t suppose that Oboy had been informed. And besides, when does a wooden Indian leave the cigar store? He was sitting, as usual, with his canvas cap pulled low on his leathery forehead. Gazing in the direction of the outsize puddle down the street, he looked like someone scouring the horizon for dry land.

  He remained in that frozen posture until after we’d stepped out on the sidewalk, when all at once he came to life. He sprang from his crate and, without being prompted, beat my father to the rear of the hearse. Opening the door, he started to tug at the casket as if he’d done this sort of thing before, as if he’d read in my papa’s lingering apprehensiveness (he was looking both ways up and down the avenue) a signal to make haste and unload this shipment of possibly dubious goods. After all, in a book, wouldn’t this be the part where somebody pulls a switcheroo and the body turns out to be replaced by contraband? But just as Papa was cautioning Oboy to be gentle, the box slipped out of the puller’s grip.

  It fell to the curb, jarring loose the hingeless lid, which slid open, exposing my grandma to any interested party along the street. Thanks to Mr. Gruber’s handiwork, the old lady, who’d never looked too awfully alive, now appeared to be entirely artificial, like a furiously puckered toy papoose. Only the single glaucous eye, which the mortician, for all his craft, had been unable to batten down, identified her as the real thing.

  I tried to tell myself that she looked very nice considering, but I was skewered by her open eye. As militantly disapproving in death as it had been in life, it seemed to demand to know why all of this was being done to her. Why could she not have been left to carry on sitting in her unscented stiffness by the apartment window, where she had never really been in anyone’s way? This was the point where I had to renew my efforts to believe that, for a change, my father knew what he was doing.

  “That’s my mamele in there,” explained Papa, completing his admonition to Oboy despite the fait accompli. The puller grunted like he was pleased to meet her, though his place was seemingly not to question why; scruples, so far as I could tell, were not a part of his makeup. Then, closing the lid quickly lest she create a public nuisance, Oboy resumed tugging at the casket. This was how he always moved on those occasions when he was disposed to move: like he was in a hurry. As if he were one of those golems out of my grandfather’s antiquated books who must take swift advantage of their quickened bones before they were turned back into inanimate clay.

  Mr. Gruber came padding forward to lend his tacit assistance. He was joined by a couple of loiterers with jaws like blue charcoal, with vests displaying old war medals and torn hobnail shoes showing the toes of union suits. I’d seen this before, how these down-on-their-luck characters would appear as if from the steam vents at the least chance of earning a handout. I was left, as usual, with nothing to do.

  After unlocking the lattice, my father turned around and began, somewhat uncertainly, to orchestrate the entrance of Grandma Zippe into Kaplan’s Loans. As you could tell by the way he was beckoning the pallbearers, with his left hand contradicting his right, the role of director did not come to him naturally. But once he’d backed through the shop door, sweeping aside the show racks that had yet to be hauled outside, my papa was another man. He was competent, even cheerful, a regular impresario leaving no question as to who was in charge. Behind him the pallbearers—who had veered drunkenly at first, grumbling under their burden as they stooped to compensate for Oboy’s dwarfish size—followed faithfully where he led. Gingerly Papa steered them down the aisle between the narrow straits of the display cases. Having thus conducted their safe passage, he left them a moment to fend for themselves. He unlatched the little gate that led through his tiny office to the storage area, then strode on ahead to the chicken-wire cage where he kept his so-called valuables.

  This was my papa’s holy of holies, the cache in which the really vintage rubbish had been culled from the garden-variety—a fine distinction that required a more discerning eye than my own. A little too fastidiously, under the circumstances, Papa cleared a space among the lady-shaped mood lamps and the fractured Victrolas, the model locomotives and the dumbbells endorsed by Eugene Sandow, the alleged papyrus scrolls. He posed a dressmaker’s manikin, outfitted like a headless Marie Antoinette, as a sentry beside the open door of his bauble-and gadget-filled vault. He dumped a brace of dueling pistols and some rubber Walt Disney rodents into a nest of fancy crinoline gowns. He shoved aside the colonnaded ant plantation, the plaster of Paris saints, the clutch of prosthetic limbs, and the taxidermed beaver with a windup mechanism that caused it to spank a bare-bottomed baby doll with the flat of its tail—arranging them all like witnesses at a nativity. He dragged in a couple of sticker-covered steamer trunks to use as a makeshift catafalque; then “Chop-chop,” Papa clapped his hands and summoned the pallbearers to lumber in with the casket.

  The two volunteers especially seemed to be overstating the effort of carrying what was, after all, just an old lady. This was obviously for the sake of sweeteni
ng their gratuity, or else it was further evidence of the way that my grandma commanded a gravity beyond her nominal size. In any case, amid universal groaning, they lowered her box too fast. They dropped it onto the steamer trunks in an agitation of dust, which left you expecting them to vanish behind it like magician’s assistants. When the dust cleared and all were accounted for, Papa shooed everybody out of the cage. He tipped the pair of vagrants to get rid of them, though not before shaking their hands, then turned to settle with Mr. Gruber. Meanwhile Oboy had begun to yank at my father’s sleeve.

  “This here yo mama’s ticket,” the puller flatly submitted, offering Papa the stub of a receipt stamped with the name of the shop. It was the kind of liberty I’d seen the little whosits take once or twice before, like it needed his involvement to make things official. Like he thought he had to cover for his boss’s oversights. But this time it was the puller who had the wrong idea. An expired bubbe in temporary cold storage shouldn’t be confused with the other superannuated property of Kaplan’s Loans; and I waited for my papa, with his fresh new assertiveness, to notify his employee of said fact.

  But instead, Papa took the ticket without hesitation, smiling like he and Oboy were thick as thieves. He even went so far as to give a playful tug at the bill of the puller’s cap, pulling it over his eyes, which Oboy never bothered to correct as he groped away. That’s when I began to worry that my papa’s pack-rat instincts had finally gotten out of control, knowing as I did how an item in Kaplan’s pawn might molder away forever without being redeemed.