by Carol Zoref
My mother rose quietly, her bandaged arms dangling at her sides. I tiptoed past my father, uncle, Noah, and Flat Sammy, all of whom were also sleeping on the floor. Ruth was on the couch, where she always slept; there had been no room to open Sammy’s cot. The warmth of so many bodies filled the room with a smoky heat. Sammy, curled on his side, stirred as I passed. There was only a thin sheet over him, through which I could see the outline of his knees pulled to his chest and his hands balled into fists beneath his chin. Ruth had her face turned to the back of the couch, but my father, uncle, and Noah were all sleeping on their backs and snoring. I could also see through the sheet that Noah had an erection. I do not know if my mother saw this too or if she cared. I followed her to the kitchen.
“Get a pencil,” she said. She pointed to the shelf where my aunt stored the small distractions she kept at hand for Sammy. “And a paper. I want you to write.” The back glow from yet another streetlamp draped a corona around her face.
“I’m not very...”
“I’ll go slow.”
Why not wake Noah, who could certainly write faster than me?
“Dear Momma and Daddy,” she began. She exhaled, her breath full of ocean sounds, her windpipe filled with mucous from hours of crying.
My mother wrote letters to her parents in Zyrmuny every week describing the dailyness of our lives. That’s something to tell Grandma and Grandpa, she said when Helen took her first steps. Or when Noah, reading Hamlet for the first time with Miss Finn, recited the Dane’s soliloquy at dinner one night. Or when Sofia and I found a brown bottle on the sand with a piece of paper in it, just enough water having leaked through the wax corking to wash the inky message off the page. She would put all of those things in her letters.
Now, she looked at her useless hands, at the blank piece of paper, cleared her throat, and began again:
Dear Momma and Daddy,
Nothing in the world you ever told me or taught me or promised would happen prepared me for this moment when I have to write that our girl Helen died yesterday. What kind of world did God make that I have to tell you it couldn’t have been more my fault if I had killed her with my own hands, the washtub sitting in the kitchen and my darling girl running and falling into the scalding water. If it wasn’t a sin I would spare the others the shame of living with me, a murderer now, though I don’t understand why that shame is worse than any other. Nor do I understand why Helen is dead and Sammy, this sad and pathetic drooling boy, is alive. Is that what this is about? God didn’t manage to take all of Sammy when he wanted him, so he can’t leave our Helen alone? How many lives does God need?
“That’s all,” said my mother. Some hair fell across her face when she looked up again. She brushed it aside by wiping her cheek against her shoulder, but the hair drifted down again, like strands of corn silk. I gathered it, looping it around her ear the way she would do for me. It was a strange feeling, touching her that way, taking care of her. But that is what it was.
“How should I sign it?” I asked.
“There’s nothing to sign,” she said.
“But who...?”
“It’s not from anyone.”
“Momma, who...”
“Tear it,” she said.
“What about Grandma and Grandpa? What you wrote?”
“They can’t read it,” she sighed. “They don’t know English.”
My parents, after they immigrated to New York, never heard their own parents’ voices again, just the way I never heard their voices again after they died. This will not happen to my children, who have so many versions of their father’s voice on film and video. Mine, too. I think it is comforting to them, much in the way that I have spent these last two years sleeping in Walker’s T-shirts because the scent of him lingers in the fibers.
“You write to them every week!”
“In Yiddish. Which you can’t write. Now tear.”
Noah would have refused. I just know.
“But the envelopes you send: I can read them.”
She brought her elbow down hard on the kitchen table. “Enough questions. American mailmen don’t read Yiddish. Tear.”
I held out the pieces for her to see.
“Smaller,” she said. “Again.”
I shredded until the pile on the table was confetti.
“Take it downstairs to the trash barrel. Quick.”
“Dad says I can’t leave the apartment alone.”
“And I’m telling you: go.”
I do not begrudge the girl I was for having a grand sense of importance as I ran down those steps. I thought our tragedy made us exceptional. How could a child know that history is the world’s story of human suffering? This is what Walker was referring to when he would say, please understand, that God is a war criminal.
There was an orderly row of garbage pails on the street, each one with the building number, 121, painted in black on the top and side. Somewhere a horse was clopping up another cobblestone street. My heart was thumping. I struggled to pull a lid from a pail. Something grey scratched up and over the rim. I jumped. How was it that for the second time in two days I was outdoors in my pajamas without shoes? Two days. If I did not sleep through the night, would it always be only two days? It is an equation I have tried again since to halt the progress of pain, even if I come up with the same, hopeless results. But why not try? Why set out a welcome mat for misery?
The smell of rotting trash in the barrel was dull compared to the stench of Barren Shoal. There was no smell of raw flesh. There was no smell of raw flesh burning. I dropped the shredded letter and dropped the lid.
The sound of the horse came closer, as did the ping ping ping of glass bottles. Then the horse itself came into sight, drawing a Sheffield Farms milk wagon. It was a simple draft horse, her shoulders wide from years of pulling. She had a chestnut-colored coat and blonde tail.
“Girl,” the driver called to me. “What are you doing there?”
The draft horse came to a dead halt when the milkman spoke.
“Your folks know you’re out here in your pajamas?”
I raced back inside without answering.
The door was open, the hallway light was on, but my mother was gone. I checked the kitchen. Empty. The door to my aunt and uncle’s bedroom was closed. It was hard to believe that my mother had gone back to bed and left me.
My mother, it turned out, never went back to bed. Who can blame Aunt Sara for not noticing? No one even knew until Mr. Aryeh knocked on the door to say that my mother apparently spent the night on the roof with his pigeons. She was still up there. Uncle David woke my aunt; my aunt came to the living room to get my father.
“I could hear my pigeons through the open window, some big commotion upstairs,” said Mr. Aryeh. “When I get up there, the door to the coop is wide open. Mrs. Eisenstein is sitting on the parapet wall, pigeons roosting on her head and her arms like she’s one of those marble Italian statues. How she got their attention, I don’t know. I didn’t know what to do. I say I’ll come down and get you. She says no; it’s the middle of the night and you should sleep. So I offer her a cigarette to get her away from the ledge.
“She doesn’t smoke,” said my father. “She dis—”
“She does now,” said Mr. Aryeh. “Or at least she did last night. But forget about the cigarettes. They’re nothing. You got to keep her off the roof.”
“Come on, Aryeh, did she bother your lousy pigeons?” asked Uncle David.
“It’s not about pigeons, damn it. You people should keep an eye on her. There are things she said last night you don’t tell people. You don’t even think them.”
“The woman just lost her baby, for God’s sake. You don’t think you’d say crazy things? You go nuts when one of your Homers doesn’t come back!”
“Are you forgetting my boy?”
“Damn it, Aryeh. I didn’t mean...”
“The children,” cautioned Mr. Aryeh. I was the only one standing there. Ruthie had slipped out with Sammy fo
r a walk. Noah had taken her place on the couch and was reading Uncle David’s union paper.
“They don’t need to hear...” said my father.
“What they need is a mother alive and in one piece,” said Mr. Aryeh.
It was Mr. Aryeh’s cigarettes that kept my mother from jumping off the roof that night. She and Mr. Aryeh evidently burned through the better part of the pack of Lucky Strikes while he told her all about the habits of English Trumpeters, Fantails, Jacobins, Pointers, and Tumblers. He recounted for her the heroic adventures of the Homers that had perched on her arms. When I say it was cigarettes that saved her, I mean Mr. Aryeh and his smoking habit. What one person calls coincidence another calls destiny, except it only looks like destiny after it happens. All that matters is that he was kind.
My father went upstairs to get her.
“I want to go home,” my mother announced when they came back down. They were standing in the little entrance vestibule at the door, but we could hear them in the living room.
“Yom Kippur starts tomorrow night,” said my father. “We should stay, be with the family.”
I have no doubt she would have gotten up and gone had she been able to travel alone to Barren Shoal.
“You think I need to atone for killing Helen,” she argued.
“There was an accident,” he said. “A tragic accident. God knows the difference between misfortune and malice.”
“What makes you so certain that God knows anything about this? About anything at all?”
“Let’s take a walk,” Uncle David said to Noah. “I need some papers from the union hall.”
“Me too?” I begged. I did not want to be alone with this. Things were already so awful. I did not want to be around if my parents were going to fight.
“You can help me,” said my aunt.
“Why can’t I go with them?”
“Because I asked you,” she said.
My aunt motioned for me to follow her into the bedroom. She pointed for me to sit on the bed while she packed my parents’ things in their carpetbag, starting with the blue dress that my mother wore yesterday, which was hanging in the closet.
“How are you holding up, my darling?” she asked me. My aunt called everyone darling.
“I’m all right,” I said. I was sitting on my hands the way I had during Miss Finn’s lesson on hygiene. I had been doing that a lot lately, at a loss for what else to do with them.
“Your mother is going to need you even more until her hands heal.”
“Will it take long?”
“A couple of weeks, at least. Probably more.” She folded my father’s shirt, undershirt, and good trousers. She laid his tie neatly on top.
A couple of weeks is not an impossible amount of time in the overall scheme of things, but what could I have known about that?
“Then things will be okay?” I asked.
“Okay? Okay? What’s ‘okay,’ Marta? No one knows what’s going to be other than how it is right now. You’ll go to school, Noah will go to school, your father will go back to work. That’s the beginning of ‘okay.’ Your mother’s hands will heal a little better every day. Then they’ll be as ‘okay’ as they’re going to get and that, my darling, is a life.”
She did not say anything about Helen’s role in this equation.
“Maybe we should stay with you until she’s better.”
She sat on the bed. “How many nights can you sleep on the floor, Marta?” she asked.
“Sofia does every night,” I said.
“That was a rhetorical question. Do you know what this is? ‘Rhetorical’?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a question when you don’t expect an answer.”
“So why ask?”
“To make a point.”
“Why not just make it?”
She pulled me close and kissed the top of my head. “You ask too many questions.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re trouble,” she said, and kissed my head some more.
My aunt packed up every bit of food that could safely travel with us, from the rest of Mrs. Mendelssohn’s noodle pudding to a whole chicken that she had roasted and which she expertly cut away from the bone. She filled Mrs. Paradissis’ cookie tin with home made mandelbrodt for the holiday. “Wash out the tin good before you return it,” she reminded me.
My uncle came back with Noah, both of them loaded down with packages they had stopped for on the way home. Noah was all worked up because my uncle had introduced him to a man who, it turned out, was waiting to tell my uncle about a meeting with Carlo Tresca, the labor leader, but who did not want to “talk with the boy around.” Plans were underway to organize the factory where David worked.
My uncle took Noah and me aside. “Sara, please join us. You kids, you’re good children. You need to be better than good until things settle down. It won’t be so hard. I promise.”
It was not clear what he was promising.
To Noah he handed a box around which a cord was tied into a handle. Noah himself had carried it upstairs.
“Go on, my darling,” said my aunt.
Noah pulled aside one of the flaps. Beneath it was a radio, used, of course, but beautiful.
“You polish it up. It plays good. Real mahogany,” said Uncle David.
“And you, young lady, are the beneficiary of my good fortune. Look at this: a genuine Kodak won in the New York Post contest. I played our house number, 121. Never won anything before in my whole darn life.”
What did I know about cameras?
“Mr. Aryeh will give you some pointers,” he added, reading my mind.
“They’re not staying tonight,” said my aunt. “Rachel’s worn out. She needs to be home. Let them go easy, David.”
My father still wanted to stay through Yom Kippur, anxious, no doubt, about being with my mother without my aunt or my uncle to help. Noah would have been glad to stay in Brooklyn forever, maybe become a regular at the union hall. He had been soaking up every word of Mr. Paradissis’ Daily Workers. He was hungry for a piece of the action, as they call it.
And me? I wanted Helen to be alive instead of the tragic figure who would haunt us all of our lives the way Joey’s dead parents haunted him. I wanted to get home to Barren Shoal as much as I never wanted to see Barren Shoal, or that washtub, or Helen’s empty bed ever again.
CHAPTER 8
Joey was shoveling green, stringy matter into a transfer cart when our boat docked at Barren Shoal. The usual blue rag knotted around his brow kept the sweat from his eyes. He was clenching a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, as always, to camouflage the smell. A bunch of horses arrived along with smaller animals jumbled into who-knows-what-size lots. There could have been one dog; there could have been twenty. Scummy residue floated scrim-like on the surface of the oily water. Sofia was sitting on the mooring, still dressed for school. She was laughing.
The wind was low; the sickly burnt-caramel stench from the factory was startling. I tell people to think of a dead mouse beneath a radiator the first time the heat comes up for the winter. Surround by raw, unrefrigerated chicken that has been left out overnight. Multiply by a thousand, a million. Whatever it takes until it is the only smell that you smell. You will know.
“Hey!” I cried. My voice cracked. It was an unfamiliar, plaintive sound that caught me by surprise. Helen was dead; my mother was crazy with grief; the architecture of our family was collapsing. I was afraid that things would get worse because new troubles amplify the old, the same way that new joy intensifies the happiness that preceded it. I had already felt this as a child. Now, at 80 years, it is still true.
The captain put in at the moor and Mr. DeWitt emerged from the guardhouse. I stepped on the ledge of the boat and jumped. Sofia rose to steady me even though it was not much of a stretch and I made a solid landing. Noah leaped past us with the radio box in his hands. Mr. DeWitt lashed the boat to the mooring and the captain dropped our carpetbags onto the dock.
He then helped my father, who half guided/half carried my mother to shore.
“We’re almost home now,” said my father.
My mother shrugged.
“Are you sure you can manage?”
She shrugged again and started off in the direction of home. She had not said a single word the entire trip over. The last thing she said to me was the night before, when she told me to shred her letter.
“I missed you,” I told Sophia. I missed everyone. A new feeling. I missed how our lives had been only two days before.
Noah called Joey over to see his new radio. Joey kept shoveling, though he slowed down. Mr. Boyle approached them both.
“Save it for later, boys,” he muttered through a big puff of cigar smoke. There was nothing harsh about the way he said this. He was just doing his job, which was to make sure that Joey did his. And so on. It was just that way.
Sofia smoothed the lines of her navy blue dress matter-of-factly. “I’ll walk you,” she offered.
“Help me with these,” I asked.
We each lifted a carpetbag while my parents moved slowly through a gauntlet of men offering fresh words of condolence. Mr. Boyle told them to get out of my parents’ way. It was one thing for Joey to slow his shoveling. It was another thing for the plant to come to a halt, which is what Mr. Boyle told them.
Sofia and I were soon far ahead of my parents. The carpetbags were bumping against our legs. A seagull took a couple of passes to see if the carpetbags were something to eat. It flew so close I could hear its wings.
“I hate it,” I said.
Sofia changed hands so that the carpetbag she was carrying was on the outside.
“It’s a stupid seagull.”
“Not that,” I said.
“We’ll be sad for a long time,” she replied.
My father returned to the cutting room two days later. There was no such thing as personal leave from the factory. The only policy was No Work, No Pay. My mother had been holed up in their room since we returned, but I did not mind so much. I was afraid to see her. She did not emerge until the morning my father went back to work. When he asked if she wanted some bread and butter, she shrugged. When he asked if she was hungry for something else, she shook her head.
