by Steve Stern
His bow tie was in its crooked, stalled-propeller position, his cuff-linked hands folded modestly in front of his vitals. His fine eagle beak was twitching as if a fly had landed on its tip, or was he about to sneeze? Then I recognized the problem: with his manacled arms pinioned to his sides by the detectives, my papa was trying to work his spectacles back up over the hump of his nose. His weak gray eyes were blinking so much from the sun that, even as he was being hauled off to jail, you’d have thought he’d just emerged from a long incarceration.
He looked around like someone who dimly recollected having once been sovereign of all he surveyed. I burrowed deeper into the rack, though apparently not deep enough: for all his shortsightedness, my papa seemed to have no trouble picking me out from the rest of his irregular merchandise, staring straight at me and shrugging from the eyebrows up.
“The bride and groom here,” he remarked with a melancholy good humor, nodding benignly toward the cop on either sleeve, “they asked me to stand up for them under the canopy. So who refuses such an invitation?”
The good son, if only to distinguish himself from the other spectators, would have fallen to his knees, pleading that they not tear his father from the bosom of his shop—I mean family. That failing, he would have leapt upon the shoulders of the law, shoving their hat brims down around their ears. He would have begged them to take him instead, none being guiltier. But all I could muster under the circumstances was a little more shame on behalf of the Kaplans, though there was already more than enough to go around.
In the end I rallied, able to offer a token something short of standing there like a yolt. “Papa,” I managed as the plainclothes dicks were handing him over to a uniformed officer, who in turn helped him into the rear of the paddy wagon. “Papa,” I said, stepping forward now that it was too late, “what should I do?”
With one foot already in the bed of the van, he turned to me with such surprise that I wondered if he’d recognized me in the first place. Biting his lip in a torment of consternation, my papa was either chewing over my question (which was not a particular brainteaser) or trying to place my face. Then he ended the suspense, speaking in a voice that fell somewhere between an afterthought and the gravity of a deathbed request.
“Be a good boy, Harry,” he bade me, lifting his hands, which, joined as they were at the wrists, seemed to confuse supplication with prayer. “Mind the shop while I’m away.”
As the cop boosted my father into the van by the seat of his pants, I lurched forward; but grabbed by McCorkle or Priest—I never knew which was which—I missed my chance to push his glasses back onto his nose. The door slammed, reducing my papa to four eyes in a window no bigger than a mail slot. Then the slot itself shrunk to the size of a tiny hyphen as the van, with its siren blaring, pulled away. It wasn’t until the vehicle had taken a jouncing corner on two wheels that the detective set me free to wave goodbye.
Released, I shrugged my shoulders like I was shaking off the rumpled evidence of an authentic scuffle. The shamuses were already admonishing the onlookers to break it up, the show was over. I seemed to have existed for them only as a momentary extension of my father’s predicament, and now that he was out of the picture, so was I. Of course I could simply leave the scene if I wanted, in spite of my father’s final injunction, bestowing a responsibility that I hadn’t sought nor wished now to assume. But I wasn’t so remiss in my filial duties, not to say uninquisitive, that I couldn’t stick around another minute or two. And since it appeared they were indifferent about whether I did or I didn’t, I straggled behind the detectives into the shop.
Privy to the logic behind the apparent disorder of my papa’s merchandise, I could see how the place had been done over by the police. Though the aisle was no more blockaded than usual, items had been roughly dislodged from their shelves; whereas it had once seemed a stronghold against it, Kaplan Loans was now officially susceptible to disaster.
At the rear of the shop, the open valuables cage was crammed with people climbing over each other, assuming awkward poses in their efforts to move about. There was a man with a toothbrush mustache and a “Press” tag in his hatband, his foot through a drum. Having rested his camera on the headless neck of the dressmaker’s dummy, he was attempting to unwedge himself from a tight corner. His companion, a sharp-chinned lady in a smart tweed suit, was straddling the animal orchestra in her tottering heels. Even as she struggled to retain her balance, she kept asking questions and jotting down notes. Stripped to his shirtsleeves, the officer from the street was brushing everything in sight—flintlock muzzles, gramophone speakers, a tumbled copper samovar—with a powder like fine black pollen, an activity I associated with spreading goofer dust over headstones to discover the imprint of spirit hands.
The pawnshop detail detectives, their thick backs pressed into quilting against the wire mesh, edged around the storage area for a better vantage. I watched as one of them lit his cigarette with the butt of another, while his partner, cocking a hat brim, wiped his brow with what might have been the warrant for my father’s arrest. Both of them grinned obligingly when the camera flashed.
McCorkle or Priest, anyway the one with the cigarette and the codfish jowls, was sounding off about how they had been on top of this one from the word go. “We likely come that close to apprehendin yer alleged felon red-handed, which it ain’t to say we don’t have a pret-ty good lead”—his partner ahemmed—“which we are natcherly not at liberty to tell y’all what it is at this time.”
“Yes ma’am,” concurred his colleague, Priest or McCorkle, the one with the brow like an éclair and the five o’clock shadow at noon, “we had our eye on this place all along. Fact is, we known they was somethin, shall we say, unkosher about Kaplan’s.” He rolled his eyes meaningfully. “Jes been waitin on the big heist to prove it. Course, this is strictly off the record, understand.”
“Course, tween us’n you,” his partner took over, “we’d a probably tore up the premises from here to Sunday, cept”—another ahem, which the speaker ignored—“cept somebody left this ol casket half open like they mighta almost wanted us to find the goods. Don’t know as how we ever come acrosst the dang thing on our routine inspections, did we Earl?”
“Oh, I seen her all right, Leslie. The thing looked suspicious from day one, but I figured to wait for the choicetest chance to check her out.”
“The hell you say, Earl.”
“You would question my word?”
“I would question yer Burma Shave.”
But they both managed to exchange collaborative grins as the camera flashed again.
Wanting to protest the violation of my father’s holy of holies, I stepped out into the open like this was the limit. But as no one paid the slightest attention to my huffing and puffing, I quickly lost interest in being outraged. To tell the truth, none of these odd goings-on seemed to have much to do with me. If I hadn’t been hovering so close to the outside of the cage, I might have let the whole business go. I might not even have bothered with poking my nose through the wire to see what sort of tsimmes had finally brought down the law.
Just then, announced by their stumbling over obstructions in the aisle, another couple of cops arrived on the scene. Mutt and Jeff in their respective statures, they were trying to be cute, whistling as if they might have ulterior motives. The detectives reminded them that precinct headquarters was expecting the evidence, “So don’t get no idears about takin no detours via Honolula, Howareya.”
Everyone was resorting to all manner of contortions to make room for the newcomers to enter the cage. That’s when—as the new cops rolled up their sleeves and maneuvered to lift it—I got my first unobscured eyeful of the oblong box on its steamer trunk bier.
What the open lid revealed in place of my grandmother’s remains was a scintillating hill of plunder. Light from the naked bulb winked and ricocheted off lockets and brooches like fired reports. Whole crisscrossed grids of light, echoing the facets of red and green gems, coruscated fro
m rings, torques, tiaras, and charms. To examine such a lode through my father’s jeweler’s loupe would have been to ensure your own blindness. As it was, too much of that skirmishing light got trapped inside my specs, which I had to take off in order to rub my eyes.
When I replaced my glasses, I saw things more clearly. The ropes of gold necklaces, for instance, no longer seemed to resemble the braided hair of Midas’s daughter; the polished baubles were just that, not the eyes of beasts turned by magic to bijouterie in Aladdin’s cave. This was, after all, no dead man’s chest found on an uncharted island at the farthest corner of the seventh sea. It was only my old bubbe’s vacated casket full of stolen property, a treasure not so much for voluptuously plunging your arms into as for impounding.
Once they’d hoisted the goods to their uneven shoulders, the cops were so unsteady under their burden that McCorkle and Priest were forced to pitch in and help. Grumbling, the gumshoes first removed their jackets and threw them over the jewels as if to put out their fire.
“Okay, folks,” they barked, “the party’s over. Everybody out!”
Everybody but me, I assumed, since what could it matter to them whether I stayed or went? As the reporters, still jotting and flashing, fell into the single file that the passage demanded, I hung back. Feeling no special need to conceal my presence, I stood at a corner of the cage, waiting to be locked up inside the shop. It was my fate, I decided, to remain in Kaplan’s Loans until I rotted, taking up where my grandma’d left off.
Snapping the lid on his dusting kit as he exited the cage, the black-powder policeman paused to poke me in the ribs. When I sluggishly refused to budge, I thought he might mistake me for another curio and cover me with powder as well. This would have left me virtually indistinguishable from the bunch of plaster lawn jockeys I was standing beside. Unfooled, however, the officer only seconded the detectives’ decree, saying, “You too, buckaroo. Amscray!”
Shoved toward the door, I took my place at the back of the weaving column, trying to tell myself it wasn’t a total loss: I was representing the family in what amounted to my grandmother’s absentee funeral procession. Moreover, during its safe deposit in Kaplan’s, Zippe’s box had increased incalculably in value, to say nothing of how much interest had accrued …
Back outside things were wound up with dispatch. The lidless casket with its dazzling contents was slid into the bed of a second police wagon. McCorkle and Priest themselves dragged in the show racks, though they neglected to remove the puller’s stool. Then, while one of them pulled shut the lattice, the other wove through it a thick length of chain, clasping the chain with a padlock as big as a handbag. Before starting away they dispersed a few persistent bystanders, former customers of Kaplan’s who’d ignored their previous warnings but now departed readily enough. In seconds I was left alone on the sidewalk to study the sign taped to the inside of the pawnshop window:
These Premises Closed
Until Further Notice
By Order Of
The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office
Not for all its authority could you have called it a striking sign. It needed a little something more than its understated black-and-white lettering to catch the attention of the ordinary passer-by. What it needed was my papa standing in front of his shop as on the night when he’d inaugurated his (now extinguished) name in scarlet neon. It needed him calling on one and all to “Give a look!”
On the trolley ride back to North Main Street, dog-weary, I took the only available seat. I’d traveled all the way to Market Square Park before the hostile stares of other passengers alerted me to the fact that I’d been riding Jim Crow. A total misfit, I got off before my stop and began the short walk to our apartment. I walked slowly, dragging my feet as if my heavy heart were fastened to them by an ankle chain.
Wherever I passed, heads shook and tongues clucked, which I took to mean that they considered me a sorry sight. Then I recalled how our neighbors seemed to practice a sort of telegraphy in their arthritic bones, and thought otherwise. I guessed that the news of my father’s downfall must have already reached them. How else could you account for such acts of unsolicited philanthropy?
First came Mrs. Rosen waddling out of her delicatessen, tugging at a strap of her overburdened brassiere as she consoled me with a jelly-filled blintz. Old Man Petrofsky offered me a cantaloupe, thumping it once or twice in a show of good faith. As I trudged past the garlic-hung door of their shop, Mr. and Mrs. Krivetcher—who appeared to be rearing up on hind legs—waved the shoes they were wearing on their hands by way of telling me I should take my pick. The bewhiskered Mrs. Sacharin leaned over her window box to toss me a geranium. The alter kockers on their bench in front of Jake Plott’s awarded me a unanimous “Och un vey!” But even as they competed to endow me like a prodigal returned, I stayed wretched. I thought that this kind of charity, it was what they might have extended to some vagabond shnorrer they suspected of being Elijah. For one of their own they wouldn’t have made such a fuss.
I don’t know why I should have been thankful to find the apartment unlocked, as who ever locked doors in the Pinch? I don’t know why it should have disappointed me that no one was home. Slogging through the front room to my alcove, I unfolded the hide-a-bed and fell over it, then lay there trying to make my mind a blank. But tired as I was, my thoughts insisted on sorting through the events that had led me to this sad state of affairs. I got no further in my efforts, however, than recalling the torrential rains that brought the flood. I recalled them so vividly that my brain began to feel like a sponge—a sponge trying desperately to absorb the rising water, some of which had started to leak out my eyes. Then the telephone rang.
“Ha-a-ar-ry!” greeted my mother, her voice bloodcurdlingly shrill. Never quite trusting the wires to carry sound, she’d always felt obliged to shout.
“Mama, where are you?” I cried, as if she might have spokenfrom a cloud, the pompadoured coif of a dark thunderhead. I was amazed at how much I suddenly wished she was here.
“Harry, listen, I’m over at your Uncle Morris’s. Too many tongue-wagging yentes on North Main Street, if you know what I mean. So Morris says I should come and stay on the Parkway till this business gets settled. He says tell Harry he’s welcome too. Of course I tell him Harry’s a big boy, he takes care of himself. The original Mister Does-As-He-Pleases. But you know your uncle, such a worrier—God forbid anybody ain’t accounted for. So he insists I should give you a call. Harry?”
I was that close to telling her I was on my way, when I thought to ask exactly which business it was that she was referring to.
“You mean you ain’t heard the news about your father?”
“Oh,” I said, glad to at least get that much straight. But still I was troubled, because this Uncle Morris she mentioned—she should correct me if I was wrong, but wasn’t this the same Uncle Morris who I knew for a fact had been instrumental in effecting his own brother’s ruin? Wasn’t he the one who was as good as holding his ruined brother’s wife (whom I forthwith absolved of any collusion) a hostage?
All this I had it in mind to tell her, plus the assurance that this same momzer uncle would never get his clammy mitts on his nephew, who was wise to his tricks.
“Mama,” I began assertively enough, only to feel my voice break, my high horse gone lame in mid-stride. After a moment’s snuffling I tried again, this time not so much telling as asking: “Mama, can I please talk to”—pronouncing her name like a quiet abracadabra—“Naomi?”
“Wait a minute, Harry,” said my mother. I could tell that she had briefly muffled the receiver at the other end, after which she formally announced, “Your uncle would like a word with you.”
“Hello, Harry.” It was the voice of the enemy, brisk as usual, a voice that slaps your back as it sticks the knife in. He was full of his in-the-bag confidence, his crumpled cellophane breathing. “Look, don’t worry—who’s worried, right? Your uncle here has got everything under control. Solly’s bond? No problem, it
’s good as taken care of. He’ll be back on the street by tomorrow A.M. A little patshed in the dignity department maybe, but knock on wood, that ain’t never killed nobody yet. Anyhow, he could use a little vacation, see how the other half lives, probably even make some new friends if I know my brother. And as for the shop—make a phone call here, scratch a back over there, if you take my meaning…”
I don’t think I ever truly hated my uncle before. But as I listened I got chilled, my spine supplanted by a tree of ice whose branches reached as far as my fingers and toes. My tongue. I should kick myself if I’d ever thought of him as nothing but a harmless old blowhard. Now I knew him for what he was, your authentic arch-villain, your regulation nemesis. While he continued laying it on about how he proposed to fix this, fix that, I conceived an overriding desire to fix my Uncle Morris. I saw myself, a slingshot clenched in my teeth, scaling a mountain of moneybags that he squatted on top of, big as the Hindenburg. I would lay him low, mortally wounded in his Achilles potbelly, nothing left of him but flapping jowls and leaking gas. Then I’d make off with the prize of his daughter. Mama, I suddenly decided, he could keep.
But who was I kidding? Just the effort of trying to despise my uncle as much as he deserved had tuckered me out. Nor could you stay chilled for very long in our stuffy apartment. My spine become liquid, I drooped onto the edge of the kitchen table and asked myself where I got off apportioning blame. Especially as, in this case, the recipient was a man whom it behooved me to regard as my prospective father-in-law. Mishpocheh, I should remember, was thicker than water. After all, Uncle Morris wasn’t the only culprit in this affair; there was my papa’s own tacit complicity to take into account. There was the fact that lies and deceit seemed to run in the family, myself a chip off the block in that respect.
In the end, who could say which of us was really the more culpable—Uncle Morris for his double-dealing, mother-stealing, Judas-kissing treachery, or me, his miserable nephew, who’d forsaken his only friends for the sake of a small-time gonif’s daughter, for my princess first cousin, whose nasal intonation I would have given what was left of my soul to hear again.
