by Steve Stern
She didn’t even get angry when I described the false pretenses under which I’d made away with her library. If anything, she tended to view the duplicity as an interesting twist. It was as if all that I related, though stranger than fiction, was just another story cribbed from a book.
“It’s the truth, for crying out loud!” I insisted, and my cousin assured me that she had no cause to doubt it.
This was infuriating; it took all the fun out of confessing. Where she should have been astonished and scandalized, Naomi was only amused. It made me want to see how far I could push at the bounds of her complaisance. If the facts didn’t move her, I could do better than facts. I began to touch up my descriptions, adding lush harem trappings to the decor of the Baby Doll, suggesting more than friendly relations with its resident females. Talk about gilding the lily, I even went so far as to exaggerate the effects of the dummy’s shpiel: how it could modulate in pitch to cause internal bleeding and set off alarms in your cavities; how, during his more ardent outbursts, he levitated above the bed.
I know I should have been ashamed of myself, but I was too busy adding refinements to my narrative to care. Blame it on Naomi, whose gullibility kept egging me on. Myself, all I wanted was to make her understand that, give or take the odd embellishment, this story was based on actual fact. She should appreciate that, beyond the neat fuchsia border of her pungent preserve, Harry Kaplan was consorting with Negroes. He was fraternizing with undesirables in places dangerous to his health, and had himself become quite a rascally piece of work.
“It happened, so help me!” I threw in whenever I thought the story needed further guarantees. Then I crossed my heart and went on inventing lies.
By the time I got to the part where I had to tell Naomi just how she figured into all this, I was worn out. Though I tried to inject some excitement into my voice—“See, we’ll dress you up all farputz” and so on—it wasn’t any use. By now my mind was practically a blank. I felt so out of touch with the actual Beale Street that it was almost as if I’d never really been there. I’d replaced my own honest adventures with something like “Jack Armstrong Goes to Tan Town.” Not that it mattered to Naomi, whose mind had been made up all along. One trumped-up reason was just as good as another when you were as anxious as she was to leave your father’s garden for the world.
“So what do you say?” I asked her for the sake of form at the weary conclusion of my tale. Then I mouthed along with my cousin a silent “Why not?”
“Sounds like a lot of laughs,” she tossed in for good measure, Miss Been-Around-the-Block-a-Time-or-Two, and was on her feet again.
“Will you hold your horses!” I pleaded without bothering to get up myself, since it was obvious that no one could hold her horses for her. “You think we’re talking about snooping after matzohs here? This kind of thing takes planning, split-second timing. In the first place, we’ll have to wait until it’s late at night…”
Naomi was pacing the patio, thinking aloud. “We’ll have to do it late at night.”
“Right,” I concurred. Now we were getting somewhere. “So after my papa comes home, what I’ll do is, I’ll swipe his keys. Then we can get into his shop, where he keeps these costumes…”
“You can carry me down from my bedroom like Helen of Troy,” she went on, her anticipation having taken a dreamy turn. Catching sight of me, however, she sobered a bit. “Well, maybe you better just whistle—that is, if you know how to whistle. Or do you think you can throw some rocks without breaking the window?” She turned toward me for confirmation, and saw that my jaw hung open, inviting flies. Then Naomi smiled and waxed dreamy again.
“You’ll be standing in the shadows under the sycamore tree, and I’ll slide down the trunk into your arms.”
I watched her shiver at the thought, and understood that I was definitely in over my head.
“Now what’ll I wear?” she wondered, coiling a lock of hair about a finger as she considered. “Basic black, of course, though I’ve got this cashmere thing with a hood, only it’s jade—excuse me?” She was challenging me to interrupt. “Let’s see, there’s my sailor pants which are navy, but that’s close enough, and my turtleneck jersey, y’know, like a safecracker’s. Espadrilles will have to do, but what do you think is more suitable for the head? A scarf—Cathy Earnshaw wore scarves—or maybe a beret?”
She sounded like a girl who was planning her elopement, and far be it from me to suggest that Kaplan’s Loans was less than the perfect setting for a honeymoon.
That night I lay in my alcove far past the time when I usually snuck back out to join the twins. Because I’d made such a habit of coming and going, catching my winks on the run, I felt like an interloper in my own bed. I was some night-prowling orphan who’d crawled in through the open window of a strange apartment, who was curled up and listening to the lullaby of North Main Street as he took refuge in the dark. It was a notion so cozy that it soothed my jumpy nerves, and despite myself I dozed off for a spell.
I had a dream that I was living comfortably in a tree house, which turned out instead to be a one-man ark on the crest of a mile-high wave. The wave was about to come crashing down on the nappy black heads of the children of Israel. But they were too busy praising the Lord and kicking up their heels to hear me when I called to them to get out of the way.
Look out who? Who look out?
I opened my eyes to find myself sitting bolt upright in bed with a hammering heart. In the glow of a lamp just beyond the open French doors to my alcove stood my father, looking as shaken as I felt. His bushy brows had inched themselves halfway up his long forehead, and he was clutching his hat over his chest like a shield. Presumably he had just returned home from work.
“Who did you want should look out?” he was asking in a sweat. “You shouted ‘Look out.’”
“I guess I must of been dreaming, huh Papa,” I told him, though wasn’t it his place to reassure me? He also seemed to come to this realization once he was convinced that he shouldn’t take my dream warning personally.
“You were dreaming, kiddo, that’s all,” he affirmed, showing me the inside of his hat, as if its empty crown somehow meant I had nothing to fear. “Go back to sleep. Everything’s shipshape in the land of Nod.”
He switched off the lamp, but when my eyes readjusted, I could see that he still hadn’t moved. Then he was gone.
I listened for the flush of the toilet and the opening and closing of doors, then got out of bed. Stuffing the covers—though I doubted there would be any more visits tonight—I dressed and tiptoed into the hall. I waited until I heard my father’s stertorous snoring begin to mingle with my mother’s whimpered burbles. From the adjacent bedroom I could also hear my grandpa’s tortured crepitations, as if his beard were crackling flames that he was trying to blow out.
I snuck into my parents’ bedroom. From a doily on top of their dresser, beside a photograph of Mama feeding Papa a piece of wedding cake, I lifted my father’s key ring. The theft went off without a hitch, naturally, since stealth had become my middle name. In fact, I’d become so adept at it that I sometimes wondered if I could call attention to myself now if I tried.
Minutes later I was in the alley behind Petrofsky’s market, where I took the liberty of borrowing his delivery boy’s bike. Along the bridle path of the Parkway, lurking branches threatened to unseat me, the bushes lashing out at my arms and shins. By the time I reached my uncle’s, I had scars to show for my journey. I aimed the pebbles at my cousin’s window with the precision of one whose skills have been perfected through adversity.
Naomi was as good as her word. She appeared at her window in the outfit of a cat gonif, done up in black from head to toe. With her face half concealed by her upturned turtleneck and her hair hidden beneath a babushka tied turban-style, she was a shadow wearing the mask of my cousin’s eyes. With the attitude of a creature accustomed to walking on air, she stepped from her window ledge. She caught hold of a limb of the sycamore and, while I chewed my nail
s to the quick, traveled the length of it hand over hand. She shinnied down the trunk with a nimbleness that suggested a dress rehearsal or two in her dreams.
When I held my arms wide to catch her, I was disappointed that she didn’t seem to need my help. Once she’d reached the ground, she moved with an authority (further affirmed by the finger she held to her lips) that discouraged me from even opening my mouth. Without prompting she padded over to the bicycle, which I’d left leaning against a stone lion, and motioned me to come and sit astride it. Then, rather than flop into the basket behind the seat, she mounted the handlebars with the poise of a hood ornament on a limousine.
Strenuously pedaling through the soft and sticky brink-of-summer night, I honored Naomi in silence. She held my admiration all the way to the corner of Second Street and Beale, where I turned east into the pawnshop district.
I had already begun to scour the shopfronts, making sure that the street was closed up tight. I was satisfying myself that the moneylenders and—especially in the case of Kaplan’s—their pullers had all gone wherever they go, when Naomi let out a gasp: “What’s that!” She nearly lost her balance, having turned loose one of the handlebars to point at the lagoon, which was as spangled as ever with barn lanterns on bumping skiffs. All of a sudden my cousin wasn’t so at home in the night anymore.
“Oh, that,” I replied coolly over the croak of the bicycle seat. After all, wasn’t it time she recognized how her cousin was a party to things she’d never dreamt of in her storybooks? “Where you been, you never heard of the flood?” I said.
Naomi kept quiet until I’d wobbled the bike to a halt in front of my papa’s shop. Then she slid from the handlebars, rubbing her tochis, and in a chastened undertone admitted that she’d never been to Beale Street before. “My father always forbid me,” she apologized. “He always calls it a ‘nigger sink.’ He says ‘shlecht,’ then spits out the side of his mouth.”
She looked toward the lagoon as if to say, A sink isn’t bad enough, but this one has to be clogged. She seemed suddenly so much the babe in the woods that I wondered if I might have made a terrible mistake. For the first time since I’d hatched this ridiculous scheme, I considered the consequences. What if, for instance, my hot-headed uncle should discover how I’d led his only daughter into the precincts of depravity?
“Well, it’s too late to turn back now,” I declared for the inspirational sake of us both—only to have the words turn into a question before leaving my lips. Naomi, who looked no less fearful for refusing to let us both off the hook, retorted, “Who said anything about turning back?”
Grumbling something about how we’d already been out on the sidewalk too long, I began to move fast. I leaned the bike against a window, stuck the key in the padlock, and worked at folding the lattice. Going pssst a couple of times to no effect, as Naomi was gawping at the standing water again, I stepped up behind her and took her by the hand. Gently, then not so gently, I tugged her across the rubber mat at the threshold of Kaplan’s Loans.
To avoid exciting the suspicions of some strolling cop on the beat, I thought better of turning on the lights. This presented a problem, since the aisle between the display cases was bottlenecked with junk and, having scarcely set foot inside for almost a month, I no longer knew my way around. No sooner had I cautioned Naomi—who kept a sweaty hold of my hand—to watch her step than I barked my shin on something that clanged like a gong. Starting at the noise, I knocked over something else that sounded like clattering bones. Then I stepped on God only knew what, which was soft and doughy and exhaled a nasal sigh. After that I paused to thank my own foresight for having remembered to bring along some matches.
When I’d managed to disengage myself from my cousin’s clutch, I struck one. Shadows scattered as if we’d caught them doing something they shouldn’t, and Naomi grabbed my hand again. On either side of us the shelves above the cases were bowed from the weight of gizmos defying description. You had model cars whittled from salt licks, animal mugs and assorted whirligigs, clocks like a gallery of clucking tongues. There were Prohibition radios that converted into bars, a nickelodeon shaped like the Heinz red-tomato man. A whole new generation of outré merchandise had found its way into the shop in my absence, much of it overlaying the stuff I’d been familiar with.
“Hock shop, shlock shop,” I blustered, hoping to dispel a little the freakish atmosphere. But to judge from my cousin’s moon-eyed condition, it didn’t work. She was looking around like she couldn’t believe that we’d entered such a place without a password, without rolling aside a boulder and making some scaly beast retract its claws. As she tightened her grip till my fingers went numb, I felt a twinge of pride in the sheer magnitude of my papa’s peculiarity.
Again I freed myself to strike another match and moved forward past the cash register counter to unlock the wire cage. The door opened with its spooky mewling on the cache of items that my papa considered to be specialties.
Slowly Naomi entered the cage behind me as I yanked on the overhead bulb. While she blinked in stunned silence from the sudden glare, I shielded my eyes to look over the recent acquisitions. There were some new additions to the taxidermed orchestra, for example, more varmints with mechanisms that let them play cymbals and drums. There was a life-size stand-up poster of the Philip Morris midget, hung with primitive box cameras, Torah amulets, and rosary beads. Some of the artificial limbs had been attached to one another with leg irons, and an oxbow posing as a pair of giant handcuffs leaned against the open safe. The rack of fancy-dress shmattes now included a few butternut tunics and a lost boy’s squirrel costume from a production of Peter Pan. There were a couple of pairs of overalls shaggy with feathered fishing lures.
Naomi was still looking on in open-mouthed astonishment, the reluctant guest at a surprise party in her honor. Worried that she might be about to go into shock, I decided to get to work without further ado. From a hanger I tore off a frilly ball gown, then another, dancing them in front of my cousin’s un-focusing eyes. The effort of having to choose, I reasoned, would soon bring her into the spirit of the masquerade. But Naomi stood blinking like she’d come to a morgue to identify a body and couldn’t find anyone she recognized.
As patiently as I was able, I told her, “These are costumes. Pick one. Let’s get the show on the road.” Still, nothing.
Flinging aside the dresses in my hands, I made yet another selection. A hill of taffeta and shot silk, velvet, crepe, muslin, and bombazine had begun to grow between myself and my cousin, who’d ceased paying attention to the dresses at all. Instead, with a gesture that threatened to become a habit, she was pointing at a knotty pine box that was all but hidden under miscellaneous junk. She must have assumed, from its oblong shape, that what it contained was out of the ordinary even by the standards of the surrounding company.
“What?” she demanded apprehensively.
I came that close to saying, “Three guesses,” since I figured that she already had a pretty good idea. But this didn’t seem like the moment to remind her of our family’s unfinished business and of how we were standing in what passed for our grandmother’s crypt.
“That? Oh, nothing.” I tried to sound offhand. “That’s just, um, you know…” I chuckled unconvincingly. “Just an old crate full of more rags and bones.” If ever there was a cue for the dead to contradict the living, to sit up in an eruption of curios and call me a liar, it was now. But Grandma Zippe thankfully remained as immobile in death as in life.
Apparently pacified, Naomi seemed to breathe easier, as if aware of having escaped a brush with an uncomfortable fact. Maybe now she’d be ready to get on with the business at hand. She still hadn’t rolled down her turtleneck, which must have been smothering her in that sweltering shop, but since all that was identifiable of Naomi were her eyes, she seemed to me ripe for changing into somebody else.
“Now how about this?” I coaxed her, crinkling the gathered furbelows at the hem of the antebellum creation in my hands. “And these?” I
teased the tiny rosettes at the neckline, the flounced leg-of-mutton sleeves. “Or maybe you’d prefer something a little more what we like to call in the trade ali mode?” I was beginning to think I’d found a missed calling. “Take this chichi little number, which they’ll be wearing on the cover of Hotsy-Tchatchky this season.”
I was hamming it up, dangling a slinky confection like the skin of a rainbow trout. When she failed to take the hint, I moved right along, though the pickings were getting slim, trying again with a flapper affair in gossamer and beads. But Naomi was hardly even showing any vital signs. That’s when I came to the end of my patience.
“What do you think, this is my lady’s chamber? You think we got all night?” Then right away, seeing how she’d been pushed close to tears, I relented. I gave her the go-ahead with my hand and told her, “Listen, I’m sorry, take your time. Take all the time you need—two, three minutes? I don’t care.”
I had it in mind to back off and leave her to try on the costumes in privacy, which was anyway the gentlemanly thing to do. But before I could get clear of the cage, I stumbled over her voice in its plangent appeal: “Harry, don’t leave me.”
By the time I turned around, her head had already vanished in the black web of her turtleneck. Then she peeled off the jersey, leaving her knotted scarf in place but revealing a pale pink garment to the waist. With no more ceremony than if she’d been alone, she kicked off her sandals, unlaced her slacks, and stripped down to a pair of fine-spun tap pants. After that she reached for a strap of her cotton camisole and was beginning to pull it over her shoulder. “Stop!” I shouted. “That, uh, won’t be necessary,” I hastened to add, swallowing hard.
Naomi shrugged, leaving the strap to droop down her scrawny arm. Her eyes remained skittery, but in her voice, just beneath what was still mostly an appeal, I thought I detected the suggestion of a dare.
