Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  Lucifer stood there grinning like he was proud of me for having gotten it all off my chest. Then, politely inquiring whether I was finished, he repeated his request: “Whereabouts you say you reckon?” Hanging my head, I said that there was in fact someone whom I had yet to put the touch on. It was a long shot but I’d see what I could do.

  The following Saturday morning I made the trek out to the Parkway, and was left by my uncle’s maid to cool my heels in the marble entrance hall. After some minutes she returned with the stiff information that Miss Naomi would receive me in the garden. I told her thanks and gave her a wink. This was to show that she didn’t have to stand on ceremony with Harry Kaplan, who was after all a friend of her race. But as she failed to respond, I supposed that the rumors of my dual existence had not traveled among her people as far as the Parkway.

  Naomi was sitting on a bench in the shade of a hexagonal cedar gazebo. Its trellised walls, laced in a webwork of vines, sprouted blossoms that might have been poison orchids. There was a small pond full of pea soup and lily pads like floating paw prints, with a putzless stone boy in the middle holding a leaky jug. Beyond the patio was a border of steamy, wax-leaved foliage—the kind that Amazon travelers, lured by bird calls, wander into and disappear.

  As I approached her, Naomi was fussily picking lint from her pleated skirt. Her legs were crossed at the white anklets, and the knobs of her knees peeked from beneath her skirt hem like potato faces. Squirmingly she arranged herself into a stiff-backed approximation of what she must have thought was a fetching pose. Without question, she was the strangest fruit in her father’s garden.

  “Hello Harry. Take a load off, why don’t you,” she invited in a tone of voice like the spider to the fly. She was toying with her hair now, which had been braided into a queue like a scorpion’s tail. Then she looked up at me for the first time, and registered acute disappointment. It was as if she’d been expecting an entirely different Harry, one who arrives bearing flowers and chocolates. Have a heart, I thought, already beginning to regret that I’d come. But as the morning sun was doing a sultry number on the garden, I ducked under the gazebo roof and plunked myself down.

  We sat there for a spell in awkward silence. I rocked on the stationary bench while Naomi blew the bangs from her sweaty forehead. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her, lest she pull some repeat performance of her Seder night funny business. Uncomfortable as I was, however, I took heart in observing how my cousin seemed just as agitated by our proximity. I decided to seize the advantage of her discomposure and come directly to the point.

  “I won’t beat around the bush,” I blurted with a resolution that startled us both. Then I cleared my throat and tried again. “What I come for is to borrow some books, if it’s okay with you. See, I kind of outgrew all that stuff I used to read, you know, like adventures and um, well. . adventures. Used to be I was gaga for a saga, heh heh. Ahem. So now I’m looking for something more, whaddayacallit, mature.”

  Naomi’s drooping eyelids began to flutter. Heaving a sigh that seemed to express a preparedness to do her duty, she gave me a sidelong smile accompanied by an exaggerated wink. I had the crazy thought that this was in some way a delayed response to the wink I’d given the maid; it was a wink bespeaking a knowledge of dark secrets I should understand were safe with her.

  “I think we can take care of you,” my cousin archly advised me—a discreet clerk to the customer involved in some humiliating purchase. I could feel a pimple on the back of my neck throb and come to a head.

  “Now see here, Naomi,” I protested, sounding a little like a phony Jack Benny. “I think you’re jumping to the wrong conelusion.” Somehow it didn’t help matters that the garden was practically narcotic with a medley of humid fragrances, musical with a chorus of twittering birds. “Look,” I explained through gritted teeth, “I came, like I said, to borrow some books of enduring literary merit, all right? So don’t get any funny ideas.” And in case she hadn’t gotten the point yet, I added, “Besides, don’t you know that first cousins have kids with two heads and three tochises?”

  Naomi’s oval face began to cloud up with confusion as she assured me, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her pooched lower lip started to quiver like a plucked bowstring.

  So maybe I had overdone it a bit. It was possible that I shouldn’t have assumed that there was more at stake here than the issue of borrowing books. My turtlelike cousin works herself up to stick her neck out, and I throw cold water in her kisser; she beats a hasty retreat back into her shell. I should have been ashamed of myself. Not only had I hurt Naomi’s feelings but I’d probably blown my chances of walking away with a new batch of books for Beale Street. Now I’d have to face Lucifer with a report of the failure of my mission. Together we would mourn the absence of fresh titles to be mangled in the terrible wringer of somebody’s reading, and that would be that. It made me almost want to cheer.

  Then Naomi was speaking again, though not in the sulky way you would have expected. You might have said she sounded downright haughty, with her plum-veined eyelids aflutter again, her impressive Kaplan nostrils flared.

  “Anyway”—she picked up where she’d left off—“who do you think you are? You think you’re the sheik of North Main Street or something? You think you’re the prize in the box of Wheaties, is that it? You open up your breakfast cereal and bingo! Instead of Jack Armstrong’s hike-o-meter, there’s Harry Kaplan and your morning is made. Well, let me tell you for the record, Harry, you’re no prize!”

  I guess you had to hand it to the little nishtikeit, the way she spat out my name like a piece of rancid treyf. It occurred to me that I might not know Naomi so well as I thought. But in any case, the joke was on her, wasn’t it? Because if she’d known the truth about me, she’d have to eat her words. After all, unbeknownst to my cousin, there was a red-blooded sensation of nocturnal derring-do sitting next to her. So what if my physique was a little on the puny side. Granted, my feet tended toward flatness, my hair looked like black excelsior, and my eyes were foggy green bubbles behind their horn-rims. And despite the hours I’d logged in the company of certified ladies of the evening, I’d yet to touch the pinkie of a living girl. I might look outwardly harmless—no more striking a specimen than, say, my moody cousin herself—but what better cover could I have chosen? Harry Kaplan was the perfect disguise.

  It would have served her right if I’d spilled the whole story of my dazzling exploits then and there. She would have begged my forgiveness if she didn’t just swoon from the shock. Still, I sometimes wished there was someone I could trust with my secret.

  We sat stewing in our mutual hostilities while all around us birds sang, boughs dripped, frogs croaked like rusty bedsprings. The dragonflies, which Lucifer called snake doctors, were riding piggyback, which only served to further my aggravation. I was contemplating how I should leave, whether I owed her an excuse or just an abrupt goodbye, when Naomi ventured to mumble, “So you want to borrow some books or what?”

  I shrugged and told her, like I was the one who was doing her the favor, that I guessed it would be all right, I’d be willing to take a look at a couple of volumes. But, just in case there was any question about the seriousness of my motives, I was quick to stipulate, “Something weighty, know what I mean? Kind of stuff you can sink your teeth in.” Naomi cocked a tweezered brow. “Kind of stuff where the hero gets all farmisht because somebody died, or he lost his girlfriend or his whatsit, his muse.” Then her other brow went up, making me wonder if I’d given too much away.

  “I think I can … ,” she started, whirling about, setting her braid in motion so that I had to duck the barrette. Then Naomi was on her feet. With her hands clasped behind her, she began to pace the bricks, which were flushed with purple herbs like spilled wine.

  “What you want is, let me see,” she was thinking out loud as if jimmying a lock in her brain. When the lock sprung, an entire card catalogue tumbled forth. The air was suddenly thick with authors and t
itles that Naomi proposed and then discarded as not quite the thing. Some of the books that she mentioned I recognized, though their reputations had always made them seem forbidding, like they shouldn’t be attempted by mortal men. One of them, The Metamorphoses, which I associated only with a stunt once performed by Houdini, was the cradle of most of the heroes you’d ever heard of, if you could believe my cousin. There was Ulysses, always trying to scheme his way out of hot water, and Hercules, who wore a poison shirt, the lot of them doing battle with your one-eyed, snake-haired, thousand-headed monsters.

  “But what you want is the more romantically inclined,” she said. Was she gloating or did I imagine it? “Like Pygmalion, who makes a statue of a lady which he falls for, because you know what, she comes alive! And Orpheus, whose precious drops dead so he goes straight to you-know-where to bring her back. Come to think of it, he’s not the only hero that goes to blazes for the sake of a loved one…”

  Having struck this theme, she pursued it a while, using examples from the knights of the Round Table who were forever being driven mad by love. (Knights I was incidentally unfamiliar with from Howard Pyle.) It seemed that they frequently conceived infatuations, which resulted in brain fevers and saints’ diseases, and left them wearing grass skirts and gibbering in trees. Then there was the knight she was particularly fond of, who was exceptional for having first been driven mad by books before advancing to love. This one liked to wear a shaving basin on his head and to convince scullery maids that they were of noble birth. What a line.

  She was having a fine time, my cousin, dropping names from all over the map: Tristan and Werther and Mr. Rochester, Sidney Carton and the Man Who Laughs. Occasionally she might even blow raspberries or cross her eyes to show the extremes to which love could reduce a hero. This was not a Naomi I’d seen before, neither the shrinking nebbish nor the amateur femme fatale. But as she unclasped her hands to wave aside the sunbeams that hung like heavenly flypaper around the garden, you might almost have thought that this was the most authentic Naomi of all. So involved had she become in relating her stories that I was afraid she wasn’t paying attention to where she was pacing. Any moment she might stumble headlong into the lily pond and be swallowed by a giant hibiscus. Next spring, when the flower reopened, there would be my cousin, still chattering away.

  Listening to her, I felt a twinge or two of my old greediness for books, and for an instant I thought I might like to know what Naomi knew. Then it passed and I became impatient, remembering that the books were intended for a dumb shvartzer who might not even know how to read.

  “Naomi, slow down already!” I tried to interrupt. “What, are you gonna recite the whole history of Western literature?”

  But she ignored me, still pacing, her steps describing an ever-widening arc around the pond. It was a pendulumlike movement, on the downswing of which she alluded to the tale of some disinherited momzer and his beloved. Then, on the counterstroke, wondering aloud if the book was still on its accustomed shelf, she continued across the patio and vanished through the double doors of the solarium.

  With the memory still fresh of what happened the last time I followed Naomi, you couldn’t blame me for taking my time. In the glass-roofed solarium the maid, who might have been stationed there for the purpose, shook her duster in the direction of a flight of back stairs. I coughed a thank-you, climbed the stairs, and found my cousin in her bedroom, her arms laden with a daunting stack of books. Some of them looked old enough to be rarities, with hand-tooled leather bindings and marbleized pages. Some fell from her teetering pile and lay open, showing tissue-covered illustrations, pages blemished with thumbprints of people probably long dead.

  “Boy, have you come to the right place!” exclaimed Naomi, dumping the whole hefty stack in my unready hands. For some reason this put me in mind of a shikkered rabbi on Simchas Torah, how he might pass the holy scrolls with the same abandon. While I assured her that these were more than enough, she had already stooped to snatch more books from her shelves.

  “In this one the star-crossed lovers”—and she paused to savor the phrase—“they don’t even know what the other one looks like. See, they can only meet in the dark…”

  The more volumes she tried to unload on me, accompanying them always with some tempting snatch of narrative, the more embarrassed I became by her generosity. Never mind that the books, most of which had already seen action enough, were destined for such an unkind end. Where they were going, Naomi’s treasures would be brutally cracked open, their contents devoured, leaving only their unrefundable shells for me to return. Besides, my arms were so stretched from the mounting heap, which I held clamped in the vise of my chin, that I thought my shoulders would pop from their sockets.

  “Uncle already!” I cried, hoping that by accident I hadn’t roused the lord of the house. But my plea fell on deaf ears.

  Having substantially pruned the bookshelves, Naomi was now on her knees beside the four-poster, plundering her cache of lurid jackets.

  “I think you’re gonna like this one,” she teased, “and this one, ayayay!” It was her version of hard sell.

  I was a little disappointed to see that, among her hidden volumes, there were no such titles as Betty’s Petticoat Nights. Instead, they were mostly novelized versions of movies of the day, with cover portraits of Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford in dishabille. Nevertheless, after the hidebound standards of her formal library, you’d have thought Naomi might be ashamed to haul out such junk. But what was apparent was that for my cousin, be it high literature or cheap romance, a story was a story. Rather than presenting them like tawdry secrets, Naomi seemed to bring out the books with pride. She looked like someone who’d finally gotten around to spring cleaning, clearing away her stuffy volumes to make room for these bright novelettes.

  “You’ll die when you read this one,” she was impishly promising. “There’s this girl with red hair and—you know vilder moid? I mean, this girl is wild…”

  “Naomi, shah! I already got more than I can carry.”

  “… No man can hold her, she gives them all the slip, keeps running off to join the Ziegfeld or the Gold Rush or…”

  Unable to clap my ears, I shut my eyes, shaking my head so vehemently that I chafed my chin on the grainy top of my stack.

  “But it’s only light reading,” she urged.

  “No more!” Peering at her over the books, I gave my cousin a look that was meant to convey my profoundest obstinacy.

  That’s when she started to shrink again. Before my eyes she was turning back into the old Naomi, the one I could do without. The one with the wounded-doe weepers and the eternally quivering lower lip. She was sitting cross-legged on the fluffy pink carpet in the shadow of a leaning tower of books, which I had half a malicious mind to let topple back into her hands—idle and quiet as they now were in the lap of her skirt. Then it seemed to me that I had done precisely that. Though I still held the books, I felt that I had somehow dumped my ballast in her lap, then risen into the air. I was watching my cousin grow smaller as I helplessly drifted away in a balloon.

  “When you finish those,” she was saying, her voice becoming faint and almost out of earshot, “you’re welcome to come back for some more.”

  “Thanks a million,” I muttered, resisting the impulse to shout down to her. “Maybe I’ll do you a favor sometime.”

  Maybe one day I would tell her of the humanitarian service she’d rendered, how her books had been placed in the hands of the needy, who tore them asunder in the name of higher literacy. I would explain how, even while she’d endured such exemplary sitzflaysh in her garden, she had been instrumental in helping me pull off a conspiracy. Then she would understand it was not for nothing that she’d parted with her precious cargo. But just now Naomi looked to be completely out of reach, and I’d done all the favors I had it in me to do for one day.

  Nine

  Just because I’d had to go to such lengths to keep up my part as librarian didn’t mean I still wasn’t
having fun. Since my father seemed to have forgotten all about grooming me for his successor, my association with the pawnshop was no more than nominal. Nowadays I considered myself an apprentice confidence artist or an aspiring “sweet man,” which is a kind of outlaw shadchen who makes matches at hourly rates. I had begun to take a studious interest in Lucifer’s so-called errands, though it was often difficult to distinguish between the official ones and the ones he’d trumped up for a lark. Business and pleasure were such near relations, by his lights, that you could almost have called them twins. In any case, these errands involved such a variety of destinations that we were never at a loss for excitement or for excuses to make expeditions beyond the immediate vicinity of the Baby Doll Hotel.

  On the strength of a whispered complaint from one of the ladies, for instance, we might be sent after graveyard dirt, popularly known as goofer dust. This, along with certain bodily discharges and the bones of black cats—not to mention the gris-gris made from the devil’s dandruff and imported from New Orleans—was an essential ingredient in recipes for casting spells. To get it we would make a moonlit trek to the potter’s field behind the bayou, where Lucifer maintained that the twins’ mama was buried. This was a pretty safe bet, since the weathered wooden markers bore only numbers instead of names. (Not that it would have mattered, since Aunt Honey—the only available source of information concerning their birth—never managed to recollect the same surname for the brothers twice. As for their mother’s given name, it was sometimes Junipurr, occasionally Beulah Love or Nectarine. Their father was always John.) Also, I noticed that Lucifer seldom led us to the same grave site, that it varied according to his disposition like odds in a policy game. Nevertheless, he took every least occasion to steer us through the lot, never failing to place some dandelions or a sprig of chicory on a grave.