by Steve Stern
Still, you had the steadfast few who kept coming back. Paying the recently devalued admission fee of a nickel, they bent their heads low as they entered the room. Sometimes they came bearing little offerings—personal photographs, jars of preserves, which lay strewn around the bed alongside the broken books. They brought snacks in grease-stained bags and, since nobody bothered with the time limit anymore, folding chairs. Numbered among these diehards was a blade-thin church sexton, always with a lady’s stocking on his head. He sat and dribbled his knee like a bouncing ball, horselaughing and exclaiming, “Tha’s a good’n,” as if the dummy were reciting some comical shtick. A stout woman with berries in her hat, who never came without her knitting, would steady her needles from time to time to cup an ear, then proceed at a vigorous clip like she was stitching dictation.
I wanted to ask them what they thought they were doing now that Michael’s lovesong was failing, its words little more than a rattle. Were they waiting for the final extinguishment of the fever that still lit his blasted features? Or did they think that, after it had consumed his body for kindling, Michael’s fever might burn on with an enduring life of its own? It might, once it was no longer confined to the bones of a solitary sick kid, torch the Baby Doll in a bonfire that would spread to the rest of Beale. It would ignite the oily surface of the new lagoon, devour the hill of pawnshops, and advance over those parts of the earth that remained unflooded.
A couple of nights after our Hotel Peabody caper, there was a new wrinkle on the scene—or, rather, a whole sack of wrinkles in the shape of a very old man. In his antiquated getup (celluloid collar and Edwardian serge, beribboned pince-nez) he was seated before a panel of machinery that flickered with tiny bulbs, their orange filaments possibly lit by something predating electricity. He was jotting notes, fiddling with wires, spinning reels that apparently needed cranking by hand. Meanwhile Aunt Honey loomed in the hallway, showing him off.
He was, as she would have us know, an esteemed professor of an unpronounceable discipline from the local Negro college. For a modest sum, which she wasn’t too modest to broadcast to her girls, she’d allowed him to install his equipment to the exclusion of any further visitors.
“The fessor here,” she boasted, laying a hand on his brittle shoulder, which appeared to dislocate, “he own put the Baby Doll on the map. Gon prove siren-tific that a nigger have got a soul.”
I squatted beside Lucifer, who had himself been evicted from the sickroom and was slumped on the floor of the hall. He didn’t have to say anything, I knew what he was thinking. So why didn’t he rouse himself and put his foot through the infernal contraption? But weary, hanging his head like his brain was some ponderous stone, Lucifer didn’t seem to be Lucifer anymore. He was so gray about the gills now that, outside the Baby Doll, he would have been hard to recognize. When at last he spoke, you’d have thought he was repeating a hypnotist’s suggestion, his voice—even less audible than his brother’s—carrying no conviction at all.
“This am the finalest straw,” he said to his feet. He removed his cap and began to massage his patchy scalp, muttering like someone trying to read a barely legible sign. It was high time, was what he haltingly said, for a seat-of-your-britches strategy.
“Just what would you call the Peabody?” I wanted to know.
Beyond taking in any sensible remarks, Lucifer muttered on. He was still stuck on the idea that the queen of the Cotton Carnival’s fleshly presence was the only antidote to his brother’s ills. Since appeals hadn’t worked and kidnap was out of the question, involving as it did such overwhelming technical concerns, there was only one course left open to us: “See, we gots to carry him round where she stay…”
I could imagine what he intended—how we would transport the gibbering Michael on a litter to her ancestral mansion, then abandon him on her colonnaded doorstep for her to find. Or maybe she should come upon him more haphazardly—say, floating in her lily pond. A note would be pinned to his swaddling clothes assuring one and all that despite his damaged appearance he was a gift fit for a queen. The joke had gone far enough. It was time to call a spade, excuse me, a spade.
“Lucifer,” I interrupted him, “what do you think? I mean, what do you really think would happen if Michael ever met his—what was her name? Marvy June?”
But Lucifer only looked at me like any shnook would know. “Why, Mistah Harry,” he said patiently. “Do them meet up, Mistah Harry, she own be b’wootch jus like him. She lie down an die if she ain’t be the mystifyin Michael’s solid good thang.”
For a split second I was almost taken in. Then I couldn’t contain my aggravation anymore. If I’d ever humored the kid, I was sorry, and resolved to make amends.
“You don’t believe that!” I accused him, loud enough (I hoped) to penetrate his thick skull. “If you believe that”—I pointed toward the sickroom—“then you’re as crazy as he is! If they met up, I’ll tell you what she’d do. She’d call the cops is what!”
The first to drop were his tired eyes, followed instantly by the collapse of his puckered chin. Then his shoulders sagged, and had I bothered to blow in his direction, I could probably have crumbled the rest of him like a house of cards. So I guessed that I’d reached him. Of course this was nothing I hadn’t seen before; in fact, it was getting to be almost a matter of routine. It was another of his ploys, I suspected, meant to sucker me into feeling sorry for him.
“And don’t think I feel sorry for you either,” I was suddenly moved to add, though he was evidently too absorbed in self-pity to hear me.
To look at him, you might have thought that he and his brother were suffering from two unidentical halves of the same disease. It was a case of the draykopf following the dummkopf into hopeless insensibility, unless somebody hurried up and turned him around. Somebody who was wise to the wise guy, cagey enough to pull the leg puller’s leg. And just who would you suppose that somebody might be?
Over the whir and click of the professor’s machinery, you could still occasionally make out some babbled phrase of Michael’s: the lady was trapped in a topaz stickpin on a take-out man’s lapel; she was spinning the smoke from Pee Wee’s back room into her bridal veil. Inwardly I petitioned the Lord of Grandpa Isador to help me help His servant Lucifer, who, come to think of it, had saved yours truly from dying a bookworm. Then it came to me, a brainstorm, an idea so implausible as to bear the authentic stamp of Lucifer’s own peculiar brand of folly.
“Listen,” I said, “this is what we’ll do. We’ll get hold of my cousin Naomi. She’s not so hard to look at, my cousin, and we can dress her up all farputz—you know, like a regular queen. Then we’ll introduce her to Michael. Don’t all white girls look the same to you people? He’ll think she’s the genuine goods and it’ll bring him around. It’ll work, you’ll see. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know.”
Having said as much, I found myself wondering, Why not? After all, Michael was already so far gone, what was the difference? One thing was as likely to snap him out of it as another—not that I really believed that anything would snap him out of it. Still, you couldn’t overlook a certain sympathy between the dummy and my cousin. Though they might not know it, they were actually two of a kind, both of them addled in their respective ways by their sick yen for stories. There was something almost star-crossed in my idea of bringing them together, something that brought out the matchmaker in me. Anyway, what could it hurt? It was certainly no more harebrained a scheme than Lucifer’s, and not nearly so hazardous. At the worst, Michael would only ignore Naomi the way he did everyone else; on the other hand, you never knew but I might be doing them both a favor. Not to mention the mitzvah I’d be doing the wise guy into the bargain. It was worth a try.
Lucifer’s response was slow in coming. Having raised his raw pink eyes to mine, he gazed at me swimmingly like a drunk, like he was seeing double and the images refused to resolve themselves. In the end, however, the two Harry Kaplans must have merged into one, because Lucifer relaxed, and, like a
wedge of moon dredged out of dark water, his old reliable grin began to reappear. Then he pinched my cheek and gave me a convivial cuff on the ear with his cap. He jumped up and slapped the cap against his hip, dancing a few steps of an impromptu buck-and-wing.
“Mistah Harry,” he declared with a jubilation that my gut greeted with righteous fear, “sometime I gin to thank you ain’t so dumb.”
Twelve
Because I hadn’t been back to the Parkway for a while now, I found myself looking forward to the visit despite my somewhat irregular reason for going. Once she’d finished showing off her several personalities—the pendulum swinging dizzily from lost lamb to fledgling vamp—Naomi had settled down to being not such a bad companion. Of course she was sometimes still a little too eager to please, which made me nervous. She still insisted on breathlessly imparting the contents of her books. Nevertheless, I missed my weekly retreats to her tropical succah of a garden. Giving me a break from my taxing exploits on Beale Street, those trips must have done me more good than I knew. Besides, what with the progress she’d made toward becoming a person in my company, I was anxious to see if my cousin had continued to mature on her own.
I hoped that she hadn’t matured too much, or else she might dismiss my proposition as idiotic—which was how, in the hard light of day, I was inclined to see it myself. I realized I must be crazy to have contemplated such a thing in the first place. If Lucifer hadn’t pinned his outrageous hopes on me, I’d have been happy to call the whole business off. I even considered lying to the wise guy, though I knew he’d see through me in an instant. At any rate, I owed it to him at least to go through the ordeal of asking. After that I could report back with a clear conscience that our project had fallen through.
Meanwhile there was Naomi herself to consider. When I imagined how she might react to such a proposal, I thought I had better sugarcoat it a bit. So I did the unthinkable. I spent my carfare on a cellophane-wrapped box of chocolate turtles from Old Man Levy’s pharmacy. Later, as I headed out to the Parkway, dodging riders in polo attire, I picked a spray of pink and yellow flowers. I felt ridiculous. The nearer I got to my uncle’s palace, the more I realized what my duty entailed. I would have to make a clean breast of things to my cousin. There was no way to get around telling her that I’d been leading her on from the start. And since I’d already muddied the water by dropping so many hints, I knew that it wouldn’t do to tell her anything short of everything.
So why was it, I wondered, that despite a stomach full of dogfighting butterflies, I could hardly wait to see her again?
Up the walk through a gauntlet of trade winds I approached my uncle’s house and was met at the front door, as usual, by the uniformed maid. While she regarded the flowers and candy with suspicion, I beat her to the punch. “I know,” I said. “I should wait in the hall.”
Pacing the marble vestibule, I was trying my best to ignore a certain mush-mouthed voice coming from behind the study door, which was slightly ajar. “… Now your cathouse revenue, that’s skim, that’s small potatoes. But the hot properties fence, I can tell you, he’s the boy that brings in the bucks. Take a shop like Cohen’s on North Main Street, or Kaplan’s on Beale…”
Uncle Morris was up to no good—so what else was new? The words “crooked” and “uncle” were as inseparably paired in my mind as “prune” and “Danish.” Then why did it give me such palpitations to catch him in the act of perpetrating his dirty deeds? After all, I wasn’t exactly a stranger to the dealings of underworld types, many of whom could have had my flabby uncle for lunch. So maybe it was the casual mention of my papa’s shop that gave me a start, and drew me irresistibly toward the study door.
I heard a couple of voices grunt in agreement, then Uncle Morris again, apparently getting down to brass tacks. “I’m counting on you boys to move the stuff before Shavuos. Certain antsy-pantsy parties have already expressed an interest that the goods get delivered on time. And I think you’ll find their gratitude will more than make up for any inconvenience, farshteyn?”
One of the “boys” remarked, while the other sniggered, that he’d heard the hockshop was already filled to capacity. Uncle Morris cut him short with the brusque assurance that room would be made. “It ain’t your business to worry, the shucha will take over at that end.”
I had some vague notion of bursting in on them. In the name of my father I would demand an explanation. Did they think they could get away with such treachery behind Sol Kaplan’s back? Though what couldn’t you get away with under his very nose? The truth be told, I was never really sure about what my father did and didn’t notice. In fact, I wondered if, in his readiness to look the other way, my papa might be a willing accomplice, a silent partner, so to speak.
I was brooding on this when the maid, who seemed to take my eavesdropping in stride, poked my shoulder to inform me that Miss Naomi was waiting, and everything I’d just overheard slipped to the back of my mind.
She was sitting on her bench without the usual stack of books, wearing the wrinkled tartan pinafore of her private school uniform. (She attended the snooty Saint Somebody’s Parochial Academy run by nuns, a secret kept from Grandpa Isador lest he rupture himself over the shame.) This was a switch from the dressier duds she’d put on for my previous visits. Gone too were her tan, faded back into her trademark pallor, and her essence of Sweet Gardenia, which could outcloy the garden. Missing from her hair were the glowworm barrettes worn, I assumed, for my benefit, which had arrested the fall of stringy bangs over her shiny forehead. Also missing was her serenity. Instead she was fidgeting, her head bent over the tangle of fingers in her lap, as if she were more interested in the outcome of their skirmish than in my arrival.
Who could blame me for being disappointed? Only a couple of weeks had elapsed since my last visit, and already she’d retreated into her old nebechel self. So we were back to scratch, me and my cousin, and this one didn’t look like the type who’d be receptive to what I had to say.
I noticed that she was peeking expectantly at my hands. “Oh yeah,” I blurted, having followed her gaze to an awareness that my hands, for a change, were not empty. “These are for you.”
She accepted the flowers and candy with an expression which said that, no matter how sunk, she still knew enough to beware of Harry Kaplan bearing gifts. The flowers were already wilted on their strangled stalks, and the candy, when she’d unwrapped the heart-shaped box, was melted into the semblance of a single cowpat. I thanked her all the same when she offered me some.
I waited for this presentation of damaged goods to make a bad situation worse, but Naomi was, as ever, full of surprises. Heaving a sigh like she would take what she could get, she straightened herself up on her bench. All of a sudden she was a girl of modest dignity, accustomed to receiving gifts from her suitors; she was aware that gifts were often a prelude to some proposal, which she showed herself ready to hear out.
I wanted to tell her not to jump to any conclusions, that whatever she might have in mind, she shouldn’t. On the other hand, this seemed as good a moment as I was likely to get for speaking my piece.
“Naomi,” I said, reciting lines that should have been better rehearsed, “I am here to enlist your aid in a matter of life and death. If there was any other way, I would bite my tongue before asking, but you gotta come with me down to Beale Street tonight.”
When I paused for effect, I saw that Naomi had pooched out her lower lip. Bracing myself against what was coming, I lost the thread of my speech. I realized I was doing it again, tramping into her garden, demanding favors I would never return. It served me right if she should cloud up and sulk.
On closer inspection, I observed that my cousin wasn’t pouting so much as considering thoughtfully. She assisted the process with a sniff of the flowers drooping from her hand. With the forefinger of the other she probed the box of candy—the several turtles fused into one sizable snapper. Raising the candy-coated finger to the tip of her tongue, she licked it inquisitively, as if th
e taste of the chocolate was the issue in question. Then she gave a pert nod and said, “Why not?”
“Why not what?” I was confused.
“Why not go with you to Beale Street,” said Naomi, starting up there and then from her shady gazebo.
With a firmness that shocked us both, I grabbed her by the shoulders and sat her back down. “Not so fast!”
Having opened her mouth to speak, she promptly shut it again. Here Naomi had shown herself willing to comply, with no questions asked, so what do I do? But the problem was, I still had a tale to tell. Besides, it didn’t seem right that my cousin should be in such a hurry to leave her fragrant bower. Even I had hesitated before daring to enter the haunts of the shvartzers, and I never had any garden to kiss goodbye.
“Don’t you even want to know why?” I asked her, trying to soften my bullying tone.
There followed a revival of Naomi’s contemplative moue. She shrugged another “Why not?” and made a little fuss of arranging herself in a listening attitude.
I blew out my cheeks and dropped onto the bench beside her, accidentally dragging my fingers through the candy box. When I pulled them out of the goo, I saw on my cousin’s face a look of predatory tenderness; she might have snatched my fingers and licked them clean if I hadn’t hurried to wipe them on the mossy bricks. After that I sat up and proceeded to dump the entire improbable megillah in her lap.
“You won’t believe it,” I assured her, exhilarated to be finally spilling the beans, “but it happened like this…” Once I’d launched into the telling, however, I found that I kept needing to back up. The more outlandish parts lacked authenticity unless corroborated with further details. Naomi insisted that this wasn’t necessary; I should get on with my story without so many interruptions. She was happy, it seemed, to accept as gospel what would have sounded to any intelligent person like pure cock-and-bull.
