The Baker

by Paul Hond

  He descended to his room, too weary and cold to undress, too exhilarated to sleep. He wanted to talk, to touch, wanted to test himself, experiment with his new purity. Wasn’t there someone out there with whom he could seek some kind of communion? Anyone? Was he really this isolated, this estranged from the world? He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the telephone. Should he pick it up, he wondered, put another call through to Donna Childs? Maybe he would have the nerve, this time, to speak to her, though the mere sound of her voice—“Hello?” she’d said: “Hello?”—had, when he’d dared to push those buttons a few days ago, been comforting enough, connecting him, if only briefly, to a hazy, dreamlike region of happiness that was itself like a distant land. Besides, he’d had nothing to say; he barely knew the woman, and now, as he lay back on the bed, he regretted having made contact at all—not because it violated the terms of what was supposed to have been his penal servitude (somehow it had ceased to be that), but because it spoiled the sanctity of what, for him, was an almost holy seclusion. But even this existence seemed to have run its course: out on the bridge he had come, he knew, to an end.

  The fires had gone out on the hearth; the bricks were cold, the oven was at rest.

  Mickey lay back on the whorl of sheets and blankets that after a month smelled deeply of his own smoky musk. The moment he closed his eyes the phone rang. Mickey bolted upright. Past experience told him it must be Dulac, calling to check on things; but as he reached for the receiver and lifted it and pressed it to an ear that still flamed crimson with cold, he was seized with a panic of unpreparedness, a blurry fear of consequences.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Is this Mr. Lerner?” An American voice.

  “Yes it is.”

  “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Lerner, I know it’s late there. This is Pete Flemke.”

  “Yes,” said Mickey. In an instant, the wall between his separate lives had been shattered: he gripped the receiver. “Detective.”

  “Yes sir. I’m calling to let you know that there’s been a couple of arrests in the case.”

  At first, Mickey wasn’t sure what Flemke meant. And then it hit him: “You mean—you caught them?” He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to sound; he hardly even knew what he felt. “Who are they?”

  “I’m not at liberty to disclose that right now, sir,” said Flemke, sounding more coldly formal than Mickey remembered. “It’s procedure, unfortunately. Anyhow, the arraignment is at eleven o’clock tomorrow, downtown. I don’t expect you’ll be able to make it, but if you want some quick answers, you’ll find them there.”

  Mickey placed his hand on his forehead. The world had swept in, had flooded his room. Waves of memory came crashing down on him, receding now, pulling at his ankles, his knees. He felt himself floating among wreckage, the shards and splinters of his former life.

  “Do you have any questions, sir?”

  Questions? “No,” said Mickey. He was dazed, adrift on the bed, clinging to the receiver, to the voice within it. “Thank you.” There was silence on the line. Mickey watched as his hand returned the receiver to its cradle. No: he would not allow himself to be drawn back home; he would return on his own terms. And hadn’t he been prepared to do just that, before Flemke’s call? Hadn’t he been filling with a certain anticipation, a sense of imminence? Mickey felt vaguely cheated of his initiative. He did not want to return for the sake of what was.

  And yet the call had set him in motion: he swung himself to his feet and began packing his suitcase with an excitement that betrayed a suppressed desire; he was ashamed of the fervor with which he gathered his things; it undermined the power of what he’d believed, not a day before, to be his essential, his truthful existence: the solitary man, toiling with dust and fire and water. It was as though he’d been unleashed, delivered from a spell, a trance; but even as he scribbled a note for Dulac on the pad on the nightstand expressing his thanks and his regrets for having taken sudden leave, he felt the vibrations of the first faint alarms sounding in his conscience. Like one who has overslept, he froze for a moment upon the realization: he had missed something: something had suffered from his neglect.

  A fresh panic overtook him. What awaited him at home? Would everything be the same? He reminded himself that no news was good news, that Benjie would have called had there been trouble. Weren’t those the instructions? And wouldn’t he have taken the first flight home, had Benjie needed him?

  Mickey stopped: he thought he smelled smoke: but no: it was only the faded incense of ashes, of scorched brick. The smell was in his nostrils, buried in his skin; he would carry it with him always.

  He placed the last items in the suitcase. He would go to the airport, exchange his ticket for the next flight home and pay the difference in cash.

  The suitcase bulged with smoky woolen rags, his sweaters and shirts, the raiment of this short, strange life. It took strength to walk away from something you loved, and as one who knew what it was to have the world torn apart in an instant, he was pleased to be able to declare this break himself, feeling, as he buttoned his coat, a sense of urgency, as if he were responding instinctively to a far-off call, marshaling himself for some great sacrifice, some grim adventure of return. His old life had reclaimed him: soon he would be swept into the hubbub of airports and clerks and rocky flight, of crying children and unwieldy bags; already he could feel in his bowels the drop in altitude, the immense waiting of the ground, the wheels touching, the wing flaps opening tense as an animal’s fear. Suitcase in hand (it seemed lighter, the bag: his arms had gained muscle from so much kneading), he turned off the light in the room and went to the foot of the stairs, where he looked, for the last time, at the workspace in which he had discovered consolation. It was pitch-dark, but he thought he could make out the forms of the table and, behind that, the oven, which, even at rest, had about it the faintest glow, a breathy, billowy memory of its own light.

  Mickey extended his arm in the darkness, wanting to touch the vestigial glow within, the heat that he had created and endured. His hand trembled slightly as he held it out; his fingertips disappeared into the blackness and came back, five pale pearls of light, the tang of yeast still fast under the nails.

  23

  Mickey had been to the courthouse only once, to get married; and it was on account of Emi that he came there again.

  His transit had been so relentless that he’d barely had the chance to fathom not only the unsettling shift of place (it didn’t seem right, somehow, that one’s feet could land on both continents in the space of a day: was the world really as small as that?), but a sense which had struck him the moment he stepped off the plane in New York; a sense of a kind of national violence: the air was different, charged. He had arrived in a big, electric, unruly place, the pitch and pace of which tormented him with visions of chaos.

  He was stopped by an armed guard at the courthouse doors. With his rumpled clothes, frosty beard and overstuffed luggage, he looked like an aging street revolutionary come to settle a score with the government. But when he identified himself as the husband of Emilie Lutter, whose case was supposed to be heard today, and explained that he’d just arrived from Europe, he was respectfully admitted through the metal detector, his suitcase cursorily inspected. It seemed strange to him that he should be allowed to proceed, that the guard was directing him to the appropriate courtroom. Did he not look the part of the vengeful husband?

  No one seemed to notice him as he approached the door. He loitered for a moment, trying to listen to the chatter of the reporters as they spoke in low tones into tape recorders and microphones. He heard the name of his wife (as ever, she had become the property of others, a name for the papers), but could make out little else; he strained to listen, amazed by his own calm, yet fearful that it might not hold, that the very sight of the suspects would send him lunging for their throats. But in the next moment there came a commotion: the group made a stampede toward the door, causing Mickey to back out of the way. What was happen
ing? The door opened, and Mickey, fighting for position, could see, through the small crush of reporters and flashing cameras, a short procession of court officers, followed by a young, haughty-looking black boy—he couldn’t have been more than fifteen—dressed in an orange jailhouse jumpsuit, hands bound in steel in front of him. Behind him, another black boy appeared, also in a jumpsuit, his head down, followed by what must have been his court-appointed lawyer, a young bespectacled white man with a sandy mustache. That explained why Flemke had been mum, Mickey thought; the suspects were underage and therefore protected by idiotic laws. He followed the surging crowd, trying to get a look at the culprits, to catch the eye of one or the other (the gunman must be the first one, Mickey thought; the second, more subdued, probably had a plea bargain in the works), though certainly there would be time for that, plenty of time for penetrating looks and sizings up, there was a whole trial ahead, assuming these boys had pleaded innocent.

  As the crowd moved toward the elevators, Mickey had an urge to identify himself to the reporters, draw their attention, then punish them by refusing comment. He had more of a right to those boys than did any newsman, he felt; but he kept his distance. The absurd youthfulness of the suspects seemed to mock his anger, shame it. What could he do? What could he say? He was then struck by a sudden image of them as bastard angels sent to perform an act of mercy on a dying woman—an image he quickly dismissed, though he was still gripped with a need to touch them, to lay his hands on them, not so much to beat them as to fix them in his sight, to hold them and demand from them with his eyes an explanation, demand their very souls, urge the very life-light of them to the surface for a single devout reckoning.

  Yet somehow this desire went beyond vengeance, went beyond even the boys themselves; but before Mickey could make a further inquiry (for there was something, he felt; something he must get at), the elevator car opened and the two suspects were swallowed, along with the attorney and two officers, by the doors. The reporters gathered in front of the neighboring elevator, into which they threw themselves the instant the doors opened, and Mickey, responding to their excitement, had no sooner thrust his arm out to repel the closing doors and join them in their pursuit than he heard his name being called behind him. He turned to see Flemke—a big Saint Bernard of a man with sagging, fleshy jowls and enormous hands—detach himself from a group of tough-looking red-nosed men and stride hugely toward him.

  “Looks like you’re a minute late,” Flemke said, seeming to note, in his detective’s manner, Mickey’s suitcase, his growth of beard. Mickey felt he was being examined, but for what? He shook Flemke’s hand firmly. “You just get off the plane?” Flemke said.

  “My feet’ve barely touched the ground,” said Mickey.

  Flemke laughed with what Mickey thought was a kind of local reverence for a cosmopolite; the same laugh Mickey’d used so often in the company of Emi’s set. Mickey then hung his head as Flemke briefed him: the suspects, both fifteen years old and charged as adults with murder in the first degree, had pleaded not guilty; the trial date had yet to be set; the district attorney would be in touch with him soon regarding his possibly testifying. Flemke then added confidentially that the case was a strong one, what with the recovery of the weapon and the taped confessions. “Of course,” Flemke said, “with the jury system these days, you never know.”

  Mickey nodded, sighed. He wasn’t too crazy about the idea of taking the stand—he’d been through enough reenactments in his mind, he didn’t need to be led through one in real life—but he’d do whatever he was asked. He looked up at Flemke to communicate this reluctant willingness, but his eye was drawn beyond the detective to the doors of the courtroom, from which emerged what appeared to be the grandmother of one of the suspects, a hefty middle-aged woman in a green dress, an old blue pelerine and a black pillbox hat that made Mickey think of the words “Sunday best,” sobbing into a crumpled tissue, her elbow held by an elderly, slightly stooped black man in a dark blue suit—either her father or pastor, Mickey supposed—who took slow shuffling steps (she was supporting him, Mickey now saw) and then stopped and turned his head to the doors, through which now issued—Mickey’s heart rippled with bitter compassion at the sight—a fat young woman in her early thirties, wrapped in a denim coat and wearing black stretch pants and white sneakers. The broad corridors, the high-sounding inscriptions on the walls, the oil portraits of the titans of American justice, the rooms designed and furnished to the specifications of a single great idea—these things had nothing to do with her, she looked lost amid them, dislocated. As a mother—and she must be the mother of one of the suspects, Mickey thought—she had failed; and Mickey could read the shame in her dazed face as the well-tailored white man by her side whispered patiently in her ear.

  And where, Mickey wondered mordantly, where, pray tell, was the father?

  “The next right,” Mickey told the cabbie. “You can let me out on that parking lot.”

  There it was: the bakery. He felt he was looking at it for the first time, or rather, that he was seeing it for the first time, seeing it as a symbol of himself, the way one might glance at a pair of one’s shoes on the floor and feel a jolt of recognition.

  Through the windows he could see Morris alone behind the counter.

  He paid the driver and dragged his suitcase from the seat with the grunt of a man for whom airports and courthouses and the heft of luggage may well have been routine. “Thanks,” he said, and slammed the door. The report sounded across the lot.

  Mickey approached the bakery slowly. He’d never known this feeling in his life, this strange triumph of return. For the first time, he would be able to measure himself in terms of the impact of his absence. He was aware of his weight, his relationship to air, to gravity. What should he expect? What if nothing had changed—if his being away hadn’t mattered in the least? What if he hadn’t been missed at all?

  But when he entered the bakery—when Morris looked up at him and had to take off his glasses—Mickey’s heart leaped to his throat, so moved was he by the sight of family, of one of his own.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Morris.

  Maybe it wasn’t a mob scene and cheers and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” but the look on Morris’s face was worth all of that. For the first time that Mickey could remember, the old man’s face lit up: the child in him rose to the surface just briefly, and in that flicker of boyish light Mickey felt a strange longing, as of a desire to make good on promises, to live up to a heroism that seemed to have been heaped upon him the moment he walked through the door.

  Mickey set down his suitcase and looked around. Everything appeared just as he’d left it, save for maybe the snowflake decorations. The breads and cookies and cakes were all set out in the usual way. Yet Mickey was aware of indiscernible changes, like how you can walk into your room and know instantly that someone has been there.

  “Where’s Benjie?” he said.

  “In the back.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  Morris put on his glasses, and his face grew ashen with what Mickey realized was anger. “We’ve managed,” he said.

  Mickey was chilled by his uncle’s manner; just a moment before he had seemed so pleased. It was as if, at his age, he hadn’t the time to stick with any one emotion for too long: he was at the end, and there was so much to feel, so much he had never allowed himself to feel until now. Mickey longed to reach out to him, but Morris took up the broom as if in defense of that, then turned his back and began sweeping the floor with slow, calculated strokes.

  Mickey scratched his nose. “They caught the kids that killed Emi,” he said.

  Morris stopped sweeping, but kept his back turned. “Is that right?”

  “Got both of them. Yesterday. Two kids.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Morris. He turned around to face his nephew. “So is that why you’re back, Mickey?” It was like an accusation.

  Mickey nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Partly.”

  �
��We thought maybe you were gone for good.”

  “Well, I’m here.” Mickey knew that his uncle had a million questions (“Where were you? What have you been doing?”), and that something in his own bearing—the suggestion of an obscure fame—must have given the old man pause.

  “Shvartzes?” said Morris.

  “What?”

  “The killers.”

  “Two kids,” said Mickey. “They’re caught.”

  “Good,” said Morris. “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

  “I’ll go see Benjie,” Mickey said. He walked to the back.

  “They ought to take and kill the bastards,” Morris said. “The old-fashioned way, a bullet right through the heart. They ought to—” He had fallen out of earshot.

  Mickey looked around: the kitchen area appeared clean, orderly. The office door was closed. Mickey reached for the knob, then, on second thought, raised his fist to knock. He stood there for a moment, unsure of himself—he hadn’t even thought of what to say, how to act—and then watched helplessly as his hand rose up and rapped with confidence upon the wood.

  “Who is it?” came a cautious voice.

  Mickey hesitated. What did his hand know that he didn’t? “It’s your father,” he said. His voice, strong and clear, surprised him.

  The knob turned, and the door opened slowly. Ben appeared in the crack, looking much older than he had in November. He wore a white shirt and a tie that Mickey recognized as one of his own, and in the eyes lay a faintly harried, hunted look, such as Mickey had worn during his early days at the bakery, down on North Avenue, when customers would corner him with demands and complaints, and papers would pile up on the desk.

  “Dad,” said Ben. There was, Mickey thought, a note of awe in his voice.