In the kitchen, Harry watched his father eye suspiciously the flame heating a kettle. His father trusted nothing in this room. It was stocked with spiteful instruments of doubtful purpose: cans that resisted opening, milk bottles bent on suicide leaps from the table, unwatched kettles boiling themselves dry, whose charred metal odor lingered long after the object had been dumped in the garbage.
A wisp of steam curled upward from the kettle’s spigot. His father thrust his hand quickly to turn off the gas. He smiled in victory. On the table a tall glass holding a tea bag awaited the hot water. His father grabbed the kettle handle and quickly relinquished it, blowing on his palm. He covered the handle with a paper napkin, brought the kettle to the glass and began to tilt it forward. His forehead creased, searching for a memory.
“Hah,” he said, leveling the kettle and holding it at his side while moving around the kitchen and opening drawers. In the third drawer he found a teaspoon which he put into the glass. He poured the water, watching the malevolent glass for signs of cracking despite his precaution. His concentration on disaster was complete. The glass overflowed. He leapt at the puddle, plunging the napkin down to wipe it up. The liberated kettle hit the floor. The water and steam reminded Harry of newsreels of Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone Park. His father looked up from his wet shoes and spread his arms in helplessness. Harry got a mop. His father wrinkled his forehead and stared with blank eyes.
In consultation, Harry thought, as he made the tea and poured himself a glass of milk.
“Heshele, where did you learn to be so handy?”
“From you.”
They laughed.
“What does Dr. Freud think?” Harry asked.
“Oh, he’s very intolerant. He was a very neat man. He would have not allowed me to touch anything in his kitchen, like your mother.”
Again they laughed. Harry loved to see his father laugh. His face was a combination of joy and wonder, as if in awe of the gift. Even his mother could not long resist the infectious invitation.
The front door banged open. Aba stumbled into the kitchen bringing with him the cold draft from the unclosed door.
“Goodness,” his father said, “have I slept for three months and awakened at Purim? Aba, that is a most imaginative costume. Are you Haman or Madame Defarge?”
Aba stared at his father.
“Moishe, can I speak to you alone?”
“Sounds serious. I don’t have five dollars to lend you. Three I might manage …”
“Please, Moishe …”
His father rose, saying:
“Lay on, MacStolz.”
In his room, Aba laid his palm on the tan, fat eiderdown. The fluff rose between his fingers.
“It feels nice,” he said. “I do that often to remember how good you have been to me.”
“Aba, what’s this all about? You know such compliments are not necessary.”
“Maybe they should be?”
Aba was having trouble swallowing.
“Moishe, dear friend, I have something I must tell you …” His voice tailed off. “Moishe,” he resumed, “why are we in Coney Island?”
“Oy, I feel a Stolz theory coming on. All right, I’ll play semi-straight man. We are in Coney because it is cheap and the sea air reminds us of our beloved landlocked Ukraine.”
“It is no accident that we are in Coney Island.”
“True. I remember following a pillar of smoke from Ellis Island to Thirty-fifth Street.”
“First, Moishe, think of the amusement rides.”
“So, I’m dizzy.”
“Where do they go?”
“Up, down, forward, backward, in, out. Who knows? Who cares?”
“Take the Cyclone, Moishe. It goes at great speed, but nowhere.”
“Is it a metaphor for the human race? Aba, have you deteriorated to such banalities?”
Stolz assumed a classic John L. Sullivan boxing stance, left foot pointed toward the opponent, elbows bent, forearms extended fully, fists turned upward.
“Watch out, Moishe, I have been known to give punches.”
“If you knocked me out now, it would be a mitzvah.”
“Moishe, years ago, in Luna Park, people saw an elephant electrocuted.”
“He was hit by lightning?”
“No, Moishe. He was electrocuted by his owners. Thomas Edison himself was involved in the preparation. The execution was advertised. It was an event. A show. Apparently the beast had outlived its usefulness. Thousands came to witness the execution and then dispersed to other enjoyments. It was considered a very successful promotion.”
“You’re inventing …”
“No, no, Moishe. I read it in a serious history of Coney Island. But what I can’t get out of my mind is: How do you electrocute an elephant?”
“What does the book say?”
“It doesn’t say how it was done, just that it was done.
“I imagine this: The elephant is brought out by his trainer. The beast, a seasoned performer, is overjoyed at the large crowd because applause brings food. Then six men carry out a gigantic electric chair and place it near the elephant. The trainer smiles to the beast. This is a signal that he is to be taught a new trick. The trainer shows the elephant how to sit in the chair. There is no need to strap him in because the beast is unaware of any danger. Electrical devices which will deliver massive current are attached to the elephant’s body. The beast is happy. It is the first new trick he has learned in years. All is ready.
“A lottery is held. The lucky winner will pull the lever that will unleash the electricity. Before doing so, the winner clasps his hands over his head in a show of triumph. He pulls. The elephant’s trunk lashes the air, creating a wind that sends people in the front rows reeling. Its mouth opens to a width no one thought possible. It trumpets a last desperate cry which fades to a mournful note that snakes through the Byzantine spires of Luna Park. The dead elephant rolls to the ground, coming to rest on its back, its four gigantic legs pointed heavenward. The crowd cheers. The trainer slices off an ear and gives it to the executioner. Parents instruct their children to remember what they witnessed today: man, triumphant.”
“You have been reading too much Céline.”
“Wait, Moishe, wait. There is more. Years before this execution, when Coney Island was an elegant resort, men like Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman spent time here. Whitman said that he loved the bathing and the loneliness. Especially, he said, to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer or Shakespeare to the surf and the seagulls.”
“So now we have one dead elephant and one live poet. I am keeping count, Aba. You will be asked to bring them together.”
“And so I shall. When Walt Whitman was in Coney Island there existed a hotel in the exact shape of an elephant. It was called The Colossus of Architecture, and indeed, it was, being 122 feet high, with legs 60 feet in circumference. In one leg there was a cigar store. The other contained various shops. The head faced the ocean, offering a wonderful view. Whitman must have stayed there. How could he resist? I see him in the elephant’s head, reciting Homer and Shakespeare as the gulls settle on the elephant’s ear, to better hear Walt.”
“They were gullible. Oy, desperation has reduced me to punning. Is the end in sight?”
“Soon, Moishe, I promise. But one thing more you must know: Because of this elephant hotel, the elephant became the symbol of all American amusement parks that followed. No one really knows why. Some learned doctors say it was due to America’s repressed sexuality.”
“No wonder Freud hated America.”
“Freud visited Coney in 1909.”
“And stayed in the elephant?”
“No, the elephant was gone by then.”
“Poor Siggy. Can you imagine the oedipal wisdom present in the belly of an elephant?”
“Now we come to Al Jolson.”
“Aha, I’ve got it. The solution to this verbal charade is the elephant and the Jewish question.”
&
nbsp; Stolz shook a threatening fist.
“Now, what is Jolson’s favorite phrase?”
“Get me a shiksa.”
“It is: You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”
“He sounds like a man trapped in a room with Aba Stolz.”
“Right. He has caught the essence of America.”
“Oy.”
“Moishe, isn’t that what this country is always saying? Isn’t it like a magician who performs the impossible and then makes it seem tame with his next trick? So, Coney Island, the trickiest, the most you ain’t heard or seen nothin’ yet, is the soul of America. And we inhabit and guard America’s soul, even when it is dormant.”
“A dormant soul. I like that, Aba. The rest you can dazzle Lockerman with.”
“Moishe, have you ever been to Steeplechase?”
“Heshele keeps asking. Should I go with him?”
“At the very end of the rides, the last amusement on the ticket, there is something called an Insanatorium. You must pass through it to get out. And what it does is make performers out of the people who are leaving. They emerge onto a stage where a clown torments them. But what the spectators are waiting for is any good-looking girl who will be maneuvered to stand over a hidden grating, through which a sudden, strong updraft of air lifts her skirt above her thighs and reveals pink or white underthings.”
“This is what my Heshele is yearning to see?”
“Moishe, I am in the audience waiting. Here comes this gum-chewing, five-and-ten-cent shopgirl. She is over the grate. There is her underwear. I am her human superior in every way. Her vocabulary is barely enough to make her primitive needs known. Her voice makes one wish for deafness. Yet, at that moment, I would do whatever she wants—give up all my rhymes, cluck like a chicken, bark like a dog—to see and hold what is between her legs. For me that screeching, embarrassed idiot, clumsily trying to pull down her dress, holds between her legs at that moment a mystery that gives me physical pain, because I need to solve it. And, in my mind, she torments me, saying: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! How true. Millions hiding from me what is between their legs.”
“Aba, at last we have arrived at your favorite subject, but was it necessary to get there by way of an elephant inhabited by Walt Whitman?”
“I thought the picture would appeal to you.”
“It did. But why all this Cafe Royal banter? Especially here and now.”
“I wanted to entertain you.”
“Aba, I don’t understand.”
Aba sat heavily on the bed. He buried his head in his hands.
“I was putting off telling you the great harm I have done you.”
“What harm?”
Stolz’s hands fell between his thighs. He intertwined his fingers and staring at them, spoke:
“There is a cripple called Victor Menter, a gangster, an anti-Semite, whose useless legs bestride Coney Island like a parodic Colossus of Rhodes …”
When he had finished, he rose and stretched out his arms.
“Forgive me, dear friend, we are trapped.”
They hugged, seeking each other’s strength, and finding the odor of fear.
IN THE CHERRY TREE: APRIL 18, 1937
Aba: Heshele, let us talk of Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky.
Harry: I know Stalin. My grandfather punches his face every time he sees his picture in The Forward.
Aba: And does he punch Trotsky also?
Harry: I don’t know what Trotsky looks like, so I don’t know if he punches him. But chances are that he does.
Aba: Trotsky was one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution.
Harry: Was he a great man?
Aba: Stalin does not think so. He exiled him to Mexico and now he says that Trotsky is conspiring with Germany and Japan to form an alliance against Russia.
Harry: For Mexico?
Aba: No, the Mexicans are disinterested in the quibbling of grumpy Russians. It is a personal charge against Trotsky.
Harry: So is Stalin saying that it will be Germany, Japan and Trotsky against Russia?
Aba: It appears so.
Harry: What does Trotsky say?
Aba: Comrade Trotsky says a new revolution is needed to overthrow Stalin. He says that Stalin should be eliminated, but not killed. Perhaps something was lost in the translation.
Harry: Aba, will your poems be translated?
Aba: Into which language, Heshele?
Harry: English.
Aba: To what purpose?
Harry: So everybody in America can read them.
Aba: American boy, Americans do not read poetry.
Harry: Yes they do. A man I know named Schnozz reads poems that are written every day in the Daily Mirror.
Aba: What does he say of this poetry?
Harry: He is amazed at how many words rhyme.
Aba: My poetry does not always rhyme.
Harry: Can you fix it?
Aba: As easily as Trotsky can fix Stalin.
MARCH 1939
CHAPTER
20
WALKING ALONG WEST 40TH STREET ON HER LUNCH HOUR, VELIA Catzker shivered even as the bright March sun sucked hated sweat from her skin. A familiar coldness had invaded her, denying outer warmth. Why, after all these years, she wondered, has the dread retained its power to possess me?
The dread had entered her life at dusk on an icy side street in Warsaw, a month after her expulsion from the convent. She had been walking quickly to reach home before dark. Suddenly an explosion filled the street, surrounding her, vibrating in her ears as it ricocheted off solid rows of houses. Five feet in front of her a man floated forward as if executing a swan dive. He landed face down on the cobblestones and lay still. A finger-length fountain of blood spouted from a jagged hole in his black overcoat.
Velia, then Leah, breath held in, legs frozen in midstride, created a mannequin of imminent or just completed motion. Behind her pounding boots echoed through the twilight.
Two peasant policemen had questioned her, pawing at the tiny swellings on her chest, slobbering over the heat of this twelve-year-old Jewess, conjecturing as to growth of pubic hair. Only the arrival of her mother, screaming that Leah had brought everything upon herself by being on that particular street at that time, had prevented a vaginal probe.
The next day a presence had followed her. She heard footsteps. Strong fingers tried to capture her shoulders. She told her mother, who warned that fantasies provoked pogroms.
She could not face the street where constricting arms waited to crush her. She begged friends to walk with her even if it was out of their way. She refused shopping errands. Thrown bodily from the house by her mother, she would flatten herself against an outside wall, waiting for a friend. If no one came by, she returned empty-handed, rushing into the bathroom feigning or experiencing cramps.
Her pursuer’s intentions were clear: to rip off her nipples and pull out her few pubic hairs. Six months passed before she could venture out alone, but only in daylight and never without the dread.
Three years later, during her five-week journey to America, seasickness and vigilance against men who pressed against her and tried to drag her to dark, isolated places denied her sleep. At Ellis Island she collapsed during the medical examination to determine her admissibility to the United States. In a private room she was poked at by slobbering men who claimed to be doctors. She knew better.
At fifteen, to thwart her pursuers, she shaved her triangle of fine blond hair, bloodying herself and her father’s straightedge razor. He commanded her to discard the untouchable object far from the house.
He barred her from contact with boys. She obeyed gladly. Closeness to a boy nauseated her. She ran, sweating, from their touch. They called her sweatstink, holding their noses. Approaching sixteen and yearning to be invisible, she was the opposite: a fully developed woman who drew whistles and propositions. She tried to flatten her breasts by knotting brassieres tightly, but her flesh overflowed and bounced.
She felt physica
lly dirty. At every class break she ran to the bathroom to wash. At home she took long baths though the water was barely heated. She feared crawling things entering her. She scratched at her vaginal lips until they bled.
One day she found, in the school bathroom, a movie fan magazine. Her parents had barred her from the movies, which taught filthy ideas. The magazine told of a life as clean and orderly as the regimen in the convent. Theda Bara’s sparkling dark eyes reminded her of the Mother Superior. No wonder she made men her slaves. She and the nun shared the mystical power to bend others to their will. She stole movie magazines from candy stores, hiding them under her mattress and awakening at first light to enter their world.
Late one hot summer night, unable to sleep, she put on a robe and sat on the stoop of the tenement, reading by the light of a street lamp. A gang of hoodlums grabbed her, stuffed a dirty handkerchief in her mouth, and were carrying her to a roof for a gang rape when a cop happened by. During the ordeal, she had remembered stories of girls raped and thrown off roofs to their deaths. She was not frightened. Death would end her torment and return her to the convent.
Suicide enticed her. However, she decided on resurrection. Leah committed suicide, and Velia, the enslaver, was born. Leah had been dirty, mired in the shit of the tenements. Velia was as clean as a blond, gentile nurse. Leah had shut her eyes to escape from reality to darkness. Velia needed only a blink to enter a wish life.
When her initial flight from Leah through Schrafft’s was halted by her father, she knew that she must escape her parents. The where was not important. She choose the most accessible path: Moshe Catzker.
Catzker, a twenty-year-old deliverer of beds and mattresses for Kaplan’s Bedding on Stanton Street, who called himself a poet, had been pestering her for almost a year. He would wait for her outside school and walk beside her reciting poems in Yiddish. When she ran, he dared not pursue.
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