“But, believe me, you’ll get paid for only one. So croak away and don’t stop for a second, because I will not sleep and if you do, the Lord will hear from me.”
Pincus babbled. Harry caught “David,” and thought: Little David was small, but, oh my, he smote Goliath, who lay down and dieth. Little David was small but oh my. He sought to translate the lyric into Hebrew, but could find no equivalent for oh my. He searched his mind for incidents from the Bible in which someone is taken by surprise and says it. No use. People didn’t say oh my to God.
Pincus pulled a chair between the two coffins. His words receded deeper within him and fell from his lips as a hum. Silhouetted by candlelight, Pincus was a rocking overcoat and hat. Harry saw Claude Rains as the Invisible Man and Zadeh as the Mummy.
“Heshele,” Bama whispered, “come closer to me.”
Their chairs touched. She tilted his head onto her shoulder. His lips touched her neck. Through smell, he tasted gefilte fish.
“Heshele, I was remembering in Warsaw, before, when my grandfather died. I was a girl, like you are a boy, and my grandmother was crying and telling me how terrible it was when her grandfather died, and her grandmother and …”
Harry watched a movie of calendar pages exfoliating. Years flashed and disappeared. He figured: It is now 1939; she was, say, thirteen, we’re back to about 1889. Two more grandmothers back, now it’s 1769. I am hearing words that were spoken before there was electricity, before there was America. Where we’re sitting, Indians powwowed, while in Warsaw, my great-great-great-grandmother cried.
The room began to fill: George Washington; Errol Flynn as General Custer; Maimonides; Attila the Hun, sword raised; regiments of Cossacks; bearded prophets wearing sandals and carrying staffs; dinosaurs in combat; and then grandmother after grandmother, all with Bama’s face, telling boys about grandfathers, until there was David, fussing with a slingshot, being told of his grandfather’s death. A white pillar of smoke became a swirling blackness. It was before the Creation, Sohoo V’Vohoo. Harry said: oh my.
The swirl was buffeting his shoulders, jerking him back and forth. He heard God call his name. He answered as did Adam:
“Heneni.”
God said: “Heshele, wake up.”
He opened his eyes, as commanded. God was his father. His mother stood beside him. As deities, they wore black.
“Heshele, it is morning,” God said.
“Of which day?”
God smiled.
“Come out of the dream, Heshele. You are in Gutterman’s, where you fell asleep last night. They said you were sick.”
Harry looked around the room. Mr. Litovsky, Pincus and Zadeh were gone.
“Are you hungry?” his father asked. “We brought you a peanut butter sandwich.”
He handed Harry a square of wax paper.
Harry’s need to eat went beyond hunger. He ripped away the wax paper and, using both hands, shoved the pumpernickel bread in his mouth, cramming in the entire sandwich as if packing an overstuffed suitcase. The peanut butter stuck to his palate, immobilizing his tongue. His cheekbones cracked as he widened his mouth to gain leverage.
“I assume you are no longer sick,” his father said.
His mother turned away, registering disgust.
His father handed him a black overcoat with a velvet collar.
“Here, put this on. Lazar the tailor said it would fit. A Hasid left it there last year.”
He wiggled into it. It rested on his sneakers.
“Lazar is no bespoke tailor,” his father said.
He walked beside his parents and Bama into the chapel. Faces, vaguely familiar but too fleeting to identify, floated by like balloons on strings. On the raised stage Pincus sat beside a coffin.
Rabbi Elfenbein, an old friend of Zadeh’s, walked onto the stage, faced the audience and cleared his throat.
Elfenbein and Zadeh had been chess and Talmudic adversaries. Their jousts, held at his grandparents’ home, invariably provoked shouted insults. In chess, the loser claimed unfair, disturbing tactics such as lighting a pipe, clearing the throat or breathing too hard at a crucial juncture. Differences in Talmudic interpretations led to mutual charges of idiocy which, if let loose upon the world, would visit irreparable harm on the Jewish people. At the appropriate moment, Bama would enter with tea and honey cakes which they slurped in renewed friendship.
Elfenbein began to speak. His Adam’s apple, a large nugget, glided up and down like the gonger on the high striker. The eulogy tumbled past Harry’s ears which were filled with a chorus of thousands of crickets. He grasped at familiar phrases:
“The Lord is my shepherd …”
Harry saw his grandfather as a sheep, layers of wool expanding him to the size of a cow. The beast turned. Its face was another layer of wool.
“Under the cover of His wings forever …”
The Lord, an eagle with the face of Paul Muni, swooped and snatched the sheep-cow in its talons. They soared up, up, up, the bird’s wings blotting out the sky until they became the sky. The sheep dangled like a magician’s assistant, levitated.
On the ride to the interment, Harry sat next to his father on the jump seats of the limousine facing his mother and Bama. The women stared straight ahead, clamped teeth protruding identical cheekbones, eyes firing hate. His father slumped, hat tipped forward, but unable to disappear completely. Harry wished him a sombrero.
As the coffin was being lowered into the grave, Bama leapt forward to kiss it, teetering at the hole until a gravedigger grabbed her.
Harry noticed a group of his parents’ friends gathered in a circle like a huddled football team. Lockerman, the playwright, whispered something. The others strained to keep from laughing. Harry remembered that Lockerman, in answer to a request from the management of the Jewish Daily Forward to its employees for money-saving ideas, had suggested the elimination of toilet paper from bathrooms since all the writers had no use for it due to piles.
As dirt covered the coffin, Zadeh, dead at fifty, spoke to Harry, promising long life, the reward for ever-empty bowels.
IN THE CHERRY TREE: NOVEMBER 5, 1938
Aba: Did you hear the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds?
Harry: No. But everyone at school was talking about it.
Aba: What did they say?
Harry: Many said they heard it and were not afraid.
Aba: Do you believe them?
Harry: Yes. We know that radio is made-up stories.
Aba: Don’t they ever frighten you?
Harry: Yes, but not in a real way. They just make me afraid of things that I am afraid of, like the dark or a creaking floor. They make me remember what I am afraid of.
Aba: What do you think of all those people who ran into the streets with handkerchiefs over their mouths to protect themselves from Martian poison gas?
Harry: They are like my mother.
Aba: How is that?
Harry: They are sure everything bad will happen.
Aba: One person called a newspaper and asked, “What time will the world come to an end?” Could that have been your mother?
Harry: No. If the world were coming to an end, she would already know the time.
Aba: The world is coming to an end, Heshele.
Harry: When?
Aba: In a few months, maybe a year.
Harry: How do you know?
Aba: I heard it on the radio.
Harry: You believe The War of the Worlds could come true?
Aba: No, but I did hear it on the radio, a few weeks before.
Harry: On what program?
Aba: It was a voice describing how the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia and the people threw flowers at Hitler.
Harry: But that is not a made-up radio program. It is true.
Aba: Yes, Heshele, and no one ran into the streets and screamed.
CHAPTER
13
DURING THE RIDE BACK FROM THE CEMETERY, BAMA TURNED CATZKER into a caterer, demanding
to know how many mourners would return to the house from the cemetery. How many at the chapel, who had not gone to the cemetery, would show up? How many schnorrers would read the notice and arrive for free food and drink? What was the grand total? How quickly could he get to the A&P on Mermaid Avenue and return with the quantities of food necessary to feed that number, which she would increase by twenty-five percent, because he knew absolutely nothing about such matters?
Each question received a mumbled number or protestation of ignorance.
“Such a big man with such big thoughts can’t remember a few pieces of bread.”
“No, no, Mrs. Fishman. It is just that I want everything to be perfect. Therefore, Heshele will come with me. He has a memory like a genius elephant.”
His father had kicked him gently in the ankle to alert him to start him remembering.
Now, as they pressured perfect footprints into the snow that had been accumulating all day, his father took Harry’s hand.
“Heshele, how are you?”
“OK, I guess.”
“Are you very sad?”
“I don’t know. I know I should be. But what does it mean to be sad?”
His father stopped. He cupped his free hand to let the snow gather. It quickly turned from an inviting white coating to black-specked gray water.
“Sadness is in my hand. In a second, a thing of beauty becomes dirty water; innocence leaves a child’s eyes; he who strived for immortality lies forgotten under weeds. Sad is missing the love that death has sealed in the ground or that life has denied life to.”
“Then I’m sad. When you took my hand, I remembered how he took my hand when we went to the pier to fish. And I thought: That will never happen again. And then I thought: Up until now I never understood the word never, and there was a lump in my throat.”
His father pulled him into a bear hug. “Heshele,” he said, “Aba once began a poem like this: ‘Make simple God, the words I make.’”
He pushed Harry to arm’s length to be admired, and laughed.
“Oy, Heshele, that coat. Lazar has some idea of fit. You look dressed for a Purimspiel. A dimwit Hasid.”
Harry looked himself up and down in the storefront glass of Maslow’s Insurance Company. He curled imaginary payess. They hugged, laughing.
The return to Bama’s house, each clutching to his side two heavy bags of groceries, was a dangerous passage through slippery streets. After two near-tumbles, his father abandoned the sidewalk for the gutter and slid his shoes though the snow as if he were ice-skating, at which he was expert. He began to “la la” Over the Waves. Laughing and singing off-key, they glided side by side.
Half a block from Bama’s house, his father eased to a halt.
“Now, Heshele, we must stop laughing. The dead demand respect.”
“Can’t you respect someone and still laugh? There were a lot of funny things about Zadeh.”
“Yes, Heshele. And you keep them and laugh about them. Laughter with the dead is the only living quality we can share with them. Sadness, regret, pain, are all one-sided. But now we must as T.S. Eliot, an anti-Semite, but yet a poet of some value, has written: “prepare a face to meet a face.”
“Is that the right thing to do?”
“No, but it is the thing to do, even though we are aware that it is against our nature “
Crushing the bags to his sides, Harry spanned the three outside steps in one stretch of legs and twisted the knob of the front door so that it flew open before his weight. He staggered wildly, trying to stop his momentum by finding a stable center of gravity. The eyes of small groups in hushed conversation fixed on him, wondering whether he was merely a disturber of decorum or an unhinged bereaved about to wail the raw emotion which would link this shivah to the millennia of Jewish sadness.
Harry stumbled into the kitchen, almost flattening his mother against the refrigerator. The wet bottoms of the bags parted, disgorging jars and cans.
“Klutz,” his mother said. “Well, just don’t stand there. Pick it up.”
On his knees amid the pickles, tuna fish, crackers and cookies, he watched Bama rush at his father.
“Did you see the hunchback?” she screamed. “Such an evil eye for the Papa’s shivah! Catzker, throw him out.”
“Mrs. Fishman, I must continue a conversation with Rabbi Elfenbein …”
“To hell with Elfenbein. All he knows is to eat cake and fart. Throw out that angel of death.”
“Mrs. Fishman, as much as I respect your wishes in your own home, I cannot do as you ask. The gentleman you speak of is Label Feinschriber, a talented poet.”
“Another big man with big thoughts. So why can’t he think away his hump?”
His father’s small Tartar eyes darted like panicked gerbils before beginning to blink rapidly. Now, Harry knew, his father would use words—any words—like defensive fists, to ward off the unpleasant or boring.
“Mrs. Fishman, we should not be so hard on other people’s infirmities. After all, we are all God’s creatures, and it is his wisdom that made us what we are. I realize there are superstitions surrounding such deformities and they continue to carry a tribal message, but intelligent people, like yourself, Mrs. Fishman, cannot be governed by mystical powers that have their basis in the luck of the genetic draw.”
“Shit in the ocean,” Bama spat.
Bama pulled Harry to her. “Don’t look at the hunchback,” she whispered. “You have not finished growing yet.”
His mother pleaded a headache that demanded air, and fled the shivah. She entered the candy store where her father had tasted the joys of pinball and waited outside a phone booth while a fat man ended an agitated conversation with a slammed receiver and a volcanic eruption of smoke. He ripped at the metal handle on the wooden-framed glass door, which folded inward and momentarily wedged against his belly.
“It’s all yours,” he said to Velia, covering her face with cigar smoke.
Velia waited outside the booth, letting it air out. The cigar smoker, now sitting at the counter slurping an egg cream, jerked his head toward her.
“Cigar smoke’s good for you, lady. It puts hair on your chest.”
A group of teenagers gathered around the pinball howled appreciative wolf calls. Velia stepped into the booth.
“Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.” The voice was drained of energy, barely audible.
Marie, Velia thought. What a greeting!
“Mr. Barbetta, please.”
“I’ll connect you,” Marie said, as if responding to a request for a favor.
“Mr. Barbetta’s office,” Sybil sang in operatic high spirits.
“Sybil, this is Velia. Is Mr. Barbetta in?”
“Oh Velia, I’m so sorry about your father.”
“Thank you, Sybil.”
“I’ll connect you.”
“Hello Velia. I am sorry I could not get to the funeral service. But as you know, today was a day of critical negotiations.”
The voice leaked a trickle of hoarseness through a timbre that caressed like a blanket of penetrating steam in a Turkish bath. The words were formed carefully. Barbetta never spoke rapidly or used contractions. Like a stammerer who avoids the terrors of m and t, he feared the speed and compression of his boyhood Neapolitan that lurked, champing for outlet.
“That’s all right, Lu …” She wondered if Sybil, hand smothering the mouthpiece, was listening. Maybe even Marie was allowing the switchboard to blink and buzz while plugging her ears into Luigi’s line. The hell with it.
“It’s really OK, Luigi. I understand. But now I need you.”
“Where is the shivah? I will come as soon as I am finished here.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I do not understand.”
“I want to be alone with you.”
The receiver crushing her ear, a habit of a childhood in which privacy was an admission of sin, fell silent. She saw Luigi’s shinning, soothing black eyes, immobilized by the failure
of a stock answer to carry a situation. He would be staring at the phone as if the correct words were about to wriggle through its holes like angel hair pasta. Sniffs of air, bowed on the black hair curled inside his wide nostrils, rasped in her ear.
“But Velia, today. How …?”
“Luigi, I must see you. Isn’t that enough?”
“Of course. Of course. Let me see …”
Now, she knew, his free hand patted his thick black-and-white hair, an even split, as if landscaped by a compulsive gardener.
“I could be at the … I can be there by seven-thirty, maybe a little later.”
“You are a wonderful man.”
“Yes.”
She looked at her watch: Five-thirty. Where to go? The shivah was out of the question. She and her mother were a word away from a screaming match. Moishe’s friends—they were hers too, but she always thought of them as his—were settled into their high-toned drivel and probably, no, definitely, ridiculing her father. Yes, he was ridiculous. But she gave them—no less ridiculous—no right to maul him on their rotting gums.
She left the candy store as a teenager whistled The Bear Came Over the Mountain to the rhythm of her buttocks. The snow had begun to freeze. She took small steps, testing her high heels before committing her full weight. Climbing the ramp to the boardwalk, she could see over her shoulder the window of the room at the Half-Moon, rented by the Amalgamated, that would be her sanctuary. Her heel hit an icy patch. She slipped to her knees, sliding part-way down the ramp until a pair of hands on her buttocks stopped her. She heard Joe Baker’s usual greeting.
She was not afraid of Joe. He was like Aaron, the idiot milkman in Warsaw, whose deliveries included a proud exposure to which housewives had learned to say, “How nice,” whereupon Aaron would carefully stow his treasure until the next admirer.
Her shredded stockings lay on reddened knees. A mirror, she imagined, would reflect a snot-ridged face and the hairdo of an anarchist. All in all a fitting companion for Joe Baker, who was something to prevent her from falling again.
“Hello Joe.”
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