by Marc Simon
“So you’re not interested?”
Abe said, “Not in the least, but just out of curiosity, what did Malkin say about her—you know, what does she look like, does she have her old job back, is she married now or seeing someone, not that I care, you understand.”
The front door rattled as Horshushky the butcher entered, sat on a stool, wiped his nose with the back of his bloody work glove and told the bartender it was colder than a dead whore’s twat out there. Davy rocked Alex lightly on his bad hip, as if physical contact with the child would act as an elixir to ease his pain. He fed him bits of beer pretzel, which Alex sucked greedily in his baby-toothed mouth, and sang him a song about a happy whale with a tiny, briny eye. Alex stretched his hands toward Davy’s mouth, trying to touch his lips as the words came out.
Finally, Davy said, “She come to him for a bad tooth.”
“Yeah? What else did he say?”
“You know how Malkin talks, once he gets started, it’s like a sick dog shitting, you can’t get him to stop. You can’t understand half of what the fool is saying, anyway, on account of that accent of his.”
“But what did he say, Davy?”
“She got some job as a waitress somewhere. Near the stadium, I think he said. Anyways, he yanks the tooth, and she tells him she don’t get paid till the end of the week, send me a bill, which of course don’t go down too good with Malkin—no offense, Abe, but you members of the tribe, you got to have your gelt.”
“But what else did he say?”
“For a guy that ain’t interested you sure are interested.”
“Come on, Davy. Did he say where she lives?”
Davy swallowed and closed his eyes. “I told you enough. Go ask Malkin.”
*
That night, Abe was all over the bed, arms and legs flailing even after Irene had reluctantly “serviced” him, as she sometimes described the act to her mother. She acquiesced to his groping out of some nagging sense of marital obligation. She even moved against him a little, as if she were enjoying it. Not that she was. All she got out of it anymore was a momentary feeling of achievement once his business was done, and a wave of relief that at least it was over.
Abe’s arm flopped against her nose. “Abe, wake up. Why don’t you take yourself downstairs and have a pipe or a glass of warmed milk to settle yourself down? You’re moving around enough to spook the Devil.”
He went to the kitchen. In the icebox was a pan of leftover meatloaf and part of a chocolate fudge cake his mother-in-law had brought for the boys. He was surprised they hadn’t finished it. He cut a large wedge and opened a bottle of beer, his fourth of the day. Ever since he’d left The Wheel he hadn’t been able to shake an image of Delia Novak, the white of her skin against the black of her stocking tops in the candlelight of her room. It was all he’d been thinking of as he made primitive love to his wife.
Seeing Delia again was wrong, dead wrong, he knew it, but then, there were many wrongs in this world, weren’t there, and if a man had to live his life always worrying if what he was doing was right or wrong, well, that was no life at all, sometimes you just had to do what you wanted to. You had to be tough and be a man in this world, especially if you were a working-class Jew, and the crap he put up with at work—the word “kike” written on his locker after an argument with Sweeney, the time Grenosovich put his work gloves in a bucket of grease—it would fill a book. Maybe he was going to Hell for his sins, and maybe he wasn’t, he’d let God be the judge of that, but if he were bound for eternal damnation, he wouldn’t be the only fornicator down there.
He chewed his cake. Pain shot through his left incisor. Even if he could reach Delia through Malkin, what made him think she’d even see him? He’d made no promises to her, never led her on to think that he’d be willing to leave Irene and the boys for her. Where would they go, what would they do, live on love? It wasn’t love between them, but it sure was something, something that was making his groin tingle.
He creaked up the stairs. Irene had been on him for weeks to shim the steps, as if he didn’t have enough to do. He paused outside the door to the boys’ bedroom. He’d promised them new baseball gloves for their birthdays; well, he wasn’t about to buy them cheap ones, he’d have to put in some overtime at the shop, which wasn’t so bad, it would keep him out of the house, and with some of the extra money he could buy something for Delia, too, like some more of those stockings, just in case he did see her.
The light was on in his bedroom. To his surprise, Irene was propped up against the headboard. Her hair was down on her bare shoulders and the top sheet clung tight around her breasts, and in that moment Abe remembered the pretty, busty, teasing auburn-haired 18-year-old girl that could drive him wild with just a touch, and he felt himself stir under his nightshirt. What was it about women, he thought. Here a moment ago he was pining for Delia and now his wife, without saying a word, had him hard as poker twenty minutes after he’d finished with her. He slid into bed and brushed her thigh with his.
“Before you get too comfortable, Abe, would you please get up and get me a cold wet cloth from the bathroom, my head is pounding something fierce, and while you’re up bring the baby here. I don’t like that cough of his.”
“But right now?” He pushed his hardness against her, hoping she’d get the hint.
“Abe, stop. He may be coming down with something, the croup maybe, or maybe it’s because you insist on bringing him to that smokehouse you call a tavern. It’s unhealthy. I don’t know why in God’s name I let you take him.”
With the moment gone limp, Abe plodded to the bathroom, thinking how Delia’s voice was musical compared to Irene’s. He ran cold water over a thin washcloth. He turned his head sideways and raised his upper lip so he could press his finger to his incisor. It throbbed to the touch and spurted a trickle of blood and pus. Just another damn thing to worry about in a world of sorrows.
Back in bed, he sat Alex up between them. Alex sneezed three times, the sound like water droplets hitting a hotplate.
“Does my little snoogy-woogy has him da sniffles?”
“Irene, you’ll make a sissy out of the boy with that kind of talk.”
“Will you stop, Abe, he’s a baby, and besides, it’s better than the gutter language he hears from those rummy pals of yours at that Squeaky Wheel, which in my opinion ought to be burned down to the ground.”
“Now, Irene, if you’d ever been there you’d see it’s a damn good saloon where a working man can get a decent bowl of beef stew and a hunk of good bread for a quarter. And the boys love our little lad here, you should see their eyes light up when I bring him around, and Davy.”
“Don’t tell me again about the great Davy O’Brien who could have been the world’s next great Irish tenor. He’s just another broken-down drunk.”
“Here you go again on your high horse.”
Alex coughed a phlegm-filled cough. Irene held her hand in front of the boy’s mouth. “Spit, spit it out, baby. Maybe I’d better take him to Malkin although my mother says the man ought to be deported, and by the way, did you ask Shields for that overtime, we need the extra.” She rubbed Alex’s back. “Arthur is sprouting like weeds in the backyard and Benjamin can’t wear his raggedy hand-me-downs forever. Did you notice he’s started to stutter?”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I wish I knew. Come on, Alex, spit it out.”
“Look, Shields gives overtime when he has it, but you think he’s going to give it to a Jew first?”
“Well, that’s your problem, my problem is how to keep three growing boys fed and clothed. I can’t have them going around looking like beggars, and you know I won’t ask my mother for another penny.”
Alex coughed again.
“I’ll take the boy to see Malkin tomorrow, I have to go myself for this damn tooth.”
Alex said, “Damn tooth.”
“Hear that? See how you’ve taught him?”
“Aw, come on, Irene, ain’t it the cutes
t thing, the way he speaks. You know, we’re lucky to have this boy, he is going to be something special, I can just feel it. I have a nose for these things.”
Her voice softened. “He is a little pistol. You know what he did the other day? He counted to twelve. I swear to God. Then he counted backward. I wish someone else was there to hear it, just to make sure I heard what I heard. I asked him how he knew it and he pointed to the clock.”
Abe scratched his crotch under the sheets. “You ever notice that look in his eyes, like he understands everything around him, more than we think he does? You’re a wily little bugger, aren’t you?”
Alex laughed and coughed, and a thumbnail of phlegm plopped into Irene’s hand.
“That’s my good boy, get it all out of your system, my goodness you’re a good boy. He adores his brothers but sometimes they’re as mean as a witch to him. Yesterday I caught them bouncing him back and forth on the sofa, like he was a rubber ball. You need to speak to them about that.”
Abe clenched his fist. “I’ll bust their heads open.”
“Don’t hit them. Just talk to them.”
“All right, I’ll talk. You see, Irene, how we’re having a conversation we’re not yelling at each other.”
She pressed a bit closer to his shoulder and thought about how big and strong and dangerous he looked when she first saw him in East Liberty at the movies, so unlike the boys her mother had wished upon her, the proper Catholic prep school boys with their neatly combed hair and clean shirts and ties. Abe was all angles and guff and trouble, and she was looking for trouble. He had courted her with daffodils and whiskey, and one mild night, as they walked along Highland Avenue toward the park, he told her his story.
Abe’s father, Jacob, had come to America in 1880, when he was 18, from a village in the hills of western Austria-Hungary. He had $22.13 in his pocket, an unpronounceable last name and his Uncle Morris’s address on a scrap of paper. Morris, who had changed his own unpronounceable last name to Miller, changed Jacob’s, too. He put him to work in his pushcart business, selling soup, sandwiches, coffee, plug tobacco, cigarettes, candy, headache powders and such to the men coming off or going on shifts at National Tube Works in McKeesport, twenty miles south down the Monongahela from Pittsburgh. Uncle Morris also found Jacob a nice Jewish girl to marry, his 16-year-old niece Helen Rottenstein, who died from excessive bleeding 10 days after Abe was born.
Before long, Jacob realized he despised McKeesport in general and the pushcart business in particular. His passion was sketching, and he fancied himself an artist, and so he decided to follow his dream; after all, there was nothing to keep him in McKeesport except a miserable job and a bawling baby boy, and besides, wasn’t America the land of opportunity? Wasn’t the pursuit of happiness a fundamental part of the American credo? He took off for New York two months after Helen died, leaving Abe to his Uncle Morris. After several months, he found work as a window dresser at Macy’s Department Store. He died from consumption 13 years later. With no money in the bank and no relatives to claim his body, he was buried alongside other indigents at Potter’s Field Cemetery on Hart Island.
When Uncle Morris, a confirmed bachelor, died 20 years later, Abe inherited his house and fleet of pushcarts. He sold the lot and moved to Pittsburgh. Following Morris’s advice that real estate was the best investment in America you could ever make, they called it real estate because it was real, he bought the house on Mellon Street.
Irene was head over heels for Abe, but her mother hated him right off, which made Irene like him all the more. He had a steady, good-paying job and owned his own house—not a fancy house, but decent, with six rooms and a yard that she could pretty up. She was determined to show her mother that she wasn’t the only woman that knew how to manage a household and raise a family, and as for his religion, she didn’t give a hoot about her own Catholicism that seemed so damn important to her mother, so what did it matter whether he were a Jew or a Hindu?
Abe said, “Irene, you remember the dances at Renziehausen Park when we’d sneak away from the bandstand? That perfume you wore, I wanted to haul your dress off right there.”
“Oh shush.” She pulled his hand to her breast and stroked each finger against her nipple. She thought about how he used to be fun, how they used to be fun before two boys and a miscarriage and now this little one sitting between them.
Alex pointed a tiny finger at Abe and said, “Delia.”
Abe turned crimson.
“What’s he saying, Abe? What’s that, sweetheart?”
“Delia and Daddy.”
“What’s he saying, Abe?”
“Christ, I don’t know. It’s just baby talk.”
“You know damn well what he said.” She pushed Abe’s hand away. “Delia. It’s that whore Delia Novak, you’re seeing her again, aren’t you?”
“By God, I swear I haven’t seen the woman, she isn’t even in town.”
“Isn’t in town? How the hell do you know where she is or where she isn’t?”
Alex said, “Davy said Delia.”
“Shush, boy.”
“Don’t you yell at him, don’t you ever raise your voice to him.”
“I’m not yelling.”
“You’re always yelling. Lower your voice, you want to wake the other boys, too?”
Abe hissed, “I’m whispering, all right? I’m telling you I never seen the damn woman.”
“You know what, Abraham, go ahead and see your Delia. I don’t even care, how’s that?”
“I’m not seeing no one, there’s nothing going on. What do I have to do to make you believe the words coming out of my mouth?”
“I said lower your voice.” She turned her face to her pillow.
Alex leaned toward his father and said “Delia” once more, and Abe knew that his son had understood every word that had passed between him and Davy. He needed to be much more careful about what he said around him.
*
Back in December of 1907, a fire had destroyed most of the row houses on Sheepslayer Way in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood. Dr. Malkin, newly arrived in Pittsburgh via Ellis Island, bought three burned-out units on the cheap. During the reconstruction phase, he lived under a canvas tarp in one of the shells and hired two Greeks and a Slovenian to make the other two at least look habitable. For immigrant families used to far worse conditions in their native homelands, a roof, four walls, rooms separated by doors and a concrete floor seemed palatial.
By 1909, Malkin was collecting $30 per month per unit—how many people/families living in them was not his concern. When his renters didn’t have cash, he took in-kind payment: food, coal, live chickens, lumber, copper, fixtures and sometimes sex, although that was not his preference. He was a businessman first, a lech second.
He set up his ragtag surgery on the second floor of his unit, once the Greeks had finished the planking. To augment the archaic instruments he’d brought with him from the old country, he periodically scavenged discarded medical paraphernalia from the refuse bins of nearby St. Margaret’s Hospital. His treasures included an almost new stethoscope and a tarnished speculum.
Sheepslayer Way was then two blocks long, and so narrow the little sunlight that found its way through the Pittsburgh smog created a sense of perpetual twilight. Children and dogs chased each other around the street’s one fire hydrant and through the tiny back yards, where hung laundry provided the demarcation between homes. In the evenings, the women swept the stoops and sat out while men smoked cigars and pipes under the street lamps.
The morning after his fight with Irene, Abe got off the trolley that ran along Penn Avenue, holding Alex on his shoulder. At 4547 Sheepslayer Way, he saw the small plaque with Dr. Malkin’s name lettered in both English and Cyrillic. He knocked rapidly. Malkin shouted from a second-floor window, “Come up already, come.”
The first floor opened to a small living room with a massive sofa that touched each opposing wall. To the left, through the short hallway, Abe smelled beets and
cabbage boiling.
Dr. Malkin’s half-sister Masha, a plump woman with thinning orange hair and heavy, loose triceps, emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands with on her brown dress. She took one look at Alex and said, “Oh my goodness, this little thing it is too precious for the words, no? Look at him, he is the sweetest little boychick. Wait, is he hungry, I could feed him a little bit borscht, I’ll cool it down special for him.” She smiled a gold-toothed smile and extended her arms.
“He don’t need none of that,” Abe said, although he himself wouldn’t have minded a big bowl of borsht with a fat dollop of sour cream. “We’re here to see the doctor, he already knows we’re here, he said to come right up.”
“Such a cute little fellow, I could just eat him up.”
Abe thought, if I give her half a chance, she probably will with those gold teeth of hers. He took the stairs two at a time. A door was open at the end of the short hallway.
Malkin stared down into a microscope, holding a partially eaten chicken leg under the lens. Abe cleared his throat. Malkin jerked the leg away from the lens. “Oh, Miller, you should have knocked, I was looking in here to make it a scientific investigation is all, you know you could learn it a lot from a piece of chicken, but pay this no mind. What is it I can do it for you today? I see you brought him the little one. I wish mine hand to God if only I could fit him under the microscope.”
“My boy here has a cough his mother thinks could be something more, but if you ask me there’s nothing to it.”
“So let us have it a look while I give him the examination, if you please.” He stood Alex on a piece of plywood laid over two sawhorses that served as his examination table. “Do you remember me, little mister, it was me what did brought you into this great and cruel world.” Malkin listened to Alex’s tiny heart and lungs. He placed him on a produce scale he’d gotten from Horshushky in exchange for a Salvarsan compound the butcher needed for a bout of syphilis. From a paint-stained filing cabinet he took a folder named Little Miller and wrote down Alex’s weight and the date, and noticed the regular progressive weight gain with each of the boy’s six-month visits. If there were a pattern to his growth, it was beyond Malkin’s understanding. On the spur of the moment, he placed the boy’s pinky under the microscope lens. “For the closer look, Miller, it does not hurt the boy one bit.” All he saw were larger fingerprints.
