Solitaire

by Graham Masterton

  Barney closed the apartment door behind him. And even though his mother was screaming, ‘Don’t come crawling back to me! Don’t you ever come crying for money!’ She stopped in mid-sentence at the almost inaudible click of the lock – silent, aghast, frozen, in case it was actually him, Tateh himself, Barney’s father, returned from the cemetery with his smile and his moustache and his best broadcloth suit.

  ‘Mama,’ said Barney, gently.

  Slowly, like a woman in a theatrical production of her own personal tragedy, Mrs Blitz came towards him, her arms outstretched, and she clutched him so tight around the chest that he could feel her bony ribs through the thick fabric of his vest, her terrible scarecrow thinness, and it was all he could do to embrace her like a son, and consolingly stroke her frayed black hair, and whisper, ‘Mama … another tarrarom? … now what for?’

  Joel, his older brother, appeared at the far end of the kitchen. Joel was slighter than Barney, with his mother’s dark hair and his mother’s thin, intense face. His shirtsleeves were rolled up tight, and there was a purple marking-pencil behind his ear. He looked at Barney, and then across at the range, and then he walked over and took off the burning goulash pot.

  ‘Well, it’s a good think the neighbourhood wasn’t hungry tonight,’ he remarked, fanning away the smoke with his hand. ‘Mama just burned enough goulash to feed everyone from here to Cherry Street.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Barney, still holding his mother close, but more stiffly now.

  His mother raised her head. It was difficult for Barney to believe that she was the same bright, fierce woman who had brought up the Blitz family – the same woman who had fed them with meatballs and clothed them in flannels and sung them songs of Münster, in ‘the good old days’. It was even harder to associate her with the pretty girl who laughed from the pinchbeck photograph frame in the parlour, the girl who clung with pride and delight to the arm of that smiling, puff-chested man who stood beside her, all top hat and well-brushed moustaches.

  But four years ago, on the seventh day of Tishri, that man had died of consumption in his upstairs bedroom; and while she waited outside his door, listening to the mumbling of the rabbi and the doctor, Feigel Blitz had slowly come apart, not just mentally, but physically as well, so that her eyes no longer seemed to fit her face, and her mouth appeared to speak without her forehead realising what she was saying. She could look elated, and say something moody and odd. She could look unhappy, and say something cheerful. The woman who stared up at Barney now was a scrambled jigsaw of the mother he had once loved dearly. The neighbours upstairs called her a meshuggeneh, a crazy woman. The rabbi, when he visited, would always take Barney’s hand, and squeeze it, as if to say, I understand your problems, but, nu-nu, she’s your mother, after all.

  Barney repeated, ‘What’s wrong, Joel? What’s happening here?’

  Joel shrugged. Mrs Blitz said, ‘He’s leaving. He’s packing his trunks.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’ asked Barney.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Joel. ‘And if it hadn’t been for the Great Fire of ’45 here, and all this shouting and screaming, I would have had the chance to tell you decently.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Barney. ‘You mean you’re packing now?’

  ‘He’s packing now,’ put in Mrs Blitz. ‘Shirts, shoes, even his pants!’

  ‘You want I should leave my pants behind?’ retorted Joel.

  ‘Barney, you tell him,’ wept Mrs Blitz. But, just as abruptly, she turned around and screamed at Joel, ‘You’re just like your father! That’s what your father did – he left me! He went! Right when I needed him most of all!’

  Barney held his mother’s shoulders tight. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘yelling isn’t going to get us any place at all.’

  ‘No more is whispering!’ cried Mrs Blitz. ‘Yell, cry, what’s the difference? Maybe I should sing him a song! Ein Knabchen sah’ ein Röselein steh’n … Röselein auf der Heide … You remember that? But what’s the difference? He’s still going to walk out … a first son walking out on his own mother, on his own brother! God should bring down a curse on you, Joel!’

  ‘God already did!’ Joel shouted, and banged the door so hard that dry plaster showered down from the laths around the frame.

  Feigel Blitz clutched Barney’s wrist. She did not say anything, but her face twitched as if she could feel something crawling up her back. Then she released him, and suddenly turned away.

  ‘You’re hungry?’ she asked Barney. She picked the goulash pot out of the sink, lifted the lid, and inspected its charred contents.

  ‘I can eat out,’ said Barney.

  ‘No, no … I can easily make you meatballs … maybe some sauerkraut?’

  ‘Mama –’

  ‘Well,’ she said, replacing the lid on the pot. ‘I know what you’re thinking. He’s a big boy now, he has a right to do whatever he chooses. But he has a family. Now his father’s gone, he’s the head of the table. You don’t think that’s a responsibility?’

  Barney took a breath. He said, ‘Yes, Mama, that’s part of it.’ Beside him, on the kitchen wall, was a calendar for 1868, a gift from Mrs Jana across the landing. There was a Polish quotation from the Bible for today’s date: ‘Badźcie nasladowcami moini, tak jak ja jestem naśladowca Chrystusa’.

  ‘I have herring, too,’ suggested Barney’s mother.

  Barney stood in the kitchen for a moment, watching his mother dither from the scratched deal table to the sink, and back again, and smile at him with that infectious, dotty, frighteningly vacant smile. ‘You’d like a herring?’ she asked.

  ‘I have to talk to Joel,’ Barney told her. ‘Now, please – promise you’ll wait here, and make me some supper – and don’t start yelling again. Will you, please?’ He was very conscious, in his mother’s home, of how American he sounded.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ she asked him, in that ambiguous way that always infuriated him.

  He opened the door at the far end of the kitchen, and walked along the dark narrow corridor to Joel’s bedroom. The door to his mother’s room was open, and he glimpsed as he passed the high sawn-oak bed, the stolid dressing-table, the pictures of the old country. There was the smell, too, of stale violets and powder, of a middle-aged woman sleeping on her own. He felt a wince of pain. She’s your mother, after all.

  Joel had the larger of the two other bedrooms. Its grimy window looked out over Clinton Street, where the gaslamps were already lit, although it was only seven o’clock, and late in April; and the rain was rattling in the gutters. Joel’s two trunks were laid open on his iron-frame bed, and he had almost finished packing. His striped nightshirts, his books on geology and sailing, his best brown boots.

  Barney stood in the doorway and watched him. Barney was tall for his age, nineteen, and meaty across the shoulders. Everybody in the family said he took after his elter zayde, his great-grandfather, Yussel Blitz. It had been Yussel who had first started the coat-cutting business by making winter jackets for the farmers and butchers in his home village of Drensteinfürt, near Münster, on the grey Westphalian plain. Not that Yussel had looked much like a tailor: he had been strong, and husky, from a poor but respected mishpocheh. Barney had been told over and over again that he had inherited Yussel’s brown curly hair, and wedge-shaped forehead, and that nose of Yussel’s which looked more like the nose of a prize-fighter than a Jewish schnoz.

  All Barney had inherited from his mother were his eyes – deep-set, and bright, and brown, as shiny as the toes of Joel’s best boots.

  ‘You didn’t warn me,’ Barney told Joel, quietly.

  ‘Well – it was sudden,’ Joel replied, rolling up a last pair of hand-knitted socks. ‘I didn’t even decide myself until last night. I was having tea with Moishe last night … and I just suddenly decided. But what’s the difference? You know the business as well as I do. Now, it’s yours.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ Barney demanded. ‘The difference is that you’ve left me st
uck with the whole thing, and nobody to help me. That’s the difference!’

  ‘Moishe will help.’

  Barney rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted after a long day over his desk, and walking around the stores. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you wanted out?’ he asked. ‘We could have talked about it, found some kind of solution.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything to talk about, and the solution is that I’m going,’ said Joel, flatly. ‘Barney, I’m sorry. If you don’t want to carry on with the business, then sell it. Buy Mama a home uptown. Let the kuzinehs look after her.’

  ‘Ruchel and Rivke? Those two old crows? They’d kill her in six months. And, besides, what about everybody who works for us? Ten people, including David. What are they going to do if I sell?’

  Joel closed the lids of his trunks, and began to buckle up the leather straps. ‘Barney,’ he said, controlling his voice, ‘the simple truth is that I don’t care. I know how it sounds. I know you think I’m letting everybody down, you included. But I’ve been choking for years, and if I don’t get out now, then I’m going to end up like Father before I’m thirty. I’m choking, Barney. On chalk, on barathea, on thread. I’m choking on Clinton Street. And more than anything else, I’m choking on Mama’s –’

  He paused, ashamed of what he was going to say. ‘I’m choking on Mama’s love, and Mama’s temper. I can’t be a stand-in for tateh for the rest of my life. I can’t measure up. I don’t even want to measure up.’

  Joel stood silent, his hands on top of one of his trunks as if it were a piano, and he was going to pick out some lost, sentimental tune.

  Barney said, ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ve signed on to a passenger steamer, the Stockdale. She sails tonight, from the Cunard Liverpool Steamship Wharf, in Jersey. She’s bound for England, and then for South Africa.’

  Barney walked across the green and yellow linoleum floor to the window. There was hardly anybody around now. It was supper-time, and still raining hard, one of those wet New York nights when it seems as if the whole city is out at sea. Across the street, on the opposite sidewalk, a bagel-seller stood by his smoking cart, his shoulders hunched, water cascading from the brim of his hat.

  ‘I’m going to miss you,’ Barney told Joel. ‘Soixow, I always thought we were going to stay together for the rest of our lives. You know, partners.’

  Joel attempted a smile. ‘I’m not going away for ever,’ he said. ‘I just want to breathe for a while, that’s all. I’ve had ten years of vests and linings and lapels. Come on, Barney, you know what it’s like.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Barney, without turning away from the window. ‘It’s all sweat and toil and not much money. It’s Moishe, and David. It’s trying to cope with Mama’s tantrums, trying to eat your way through a meal that was cooked for six people, just so you won’t upset her. But what would Tateh think, if he knew?’

  ‘Tateh’s dead,’ said Joel, emphatically. He looked up at Barney, and then he reached out his arms for him, and the two brothers gripped each other close, cheek against cheek. Barney, in spite of his disappointment in Joel, or maybe because of it, found that his eyes were sticky with tears.

  ‘Joel,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘I have to go, Barney,’ said Joel. ‘I’m going to miss you … I’m even going to miss Mama … but I have to.’

  Barney stood up straight. He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief, and blew his nose. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  Joel said: ‘Hey … you remember the time we sewed up the cuffs of Tateh’s best pants?’

  ‘I remember,’ said Barney. ‘He got straight out of bed, pulled them on, and fell flat on his face. Laugh?’

  Joel gripped his younger brother’s shoulder. ‘He belted us, remember? “A shtik like that you should try on your father!” ’

  They didn’t know what else to say to each other. Barney knew Joel well enough to realise that, whatever he said, Joel was going to leave. Joel had always been that way. Quiet, determined, and stubborn. Maybe he had too much of his mother in him.

  ‘South Africa, huh?’ he said. He tried to sound conversational. ‘The land of the schwarzers?’

  Joel smiled, and then laughed. ‘You’ll manage without me. When I’m sitting in a grass hut, stuffing myself with elephant-flavoured bialys, you’ll be turning out broadcloth pants by the dozen!’

  Barney said, ‘Yes. I guess so.’ He felt sadder than he could possibly explain.

  Mrs Blitz appeared in the bedroom doorway, clutching her hands together. Barney glanced at Joel, and then said, ‘Mama?’

  ‘It’s ready,’ she nodded. Her eyes darted from side to side like tropical fish.

  ‘Okay, then, we’re coming,’ said Barney. ‘Joel – you’re going to join us at the table?’

  Joel looked at his strapped-up trunks. ‘I can’t be too late. The ship leaves at ten.’

  ‘You’ve got time for a last meal,’ said Barney.

  They went into the kitchen, still smoky, where bread and meatballs and cold gefilte fish were laid out for them on heaped-up plates, enough to feed ten ravenous men. Joel pulled out Mrs Blitz’s chair for her, and she sat down primly at the end of the table.

  ‘Well,’ she said, serving out meatballs, ‘have you decided what you’re going to do?’

  Joel picked up his fork and eyed his mother carefully. ‘I’m leaving, Mama. I told you.’

  ‘Didn’t you listen to what Barney told you?’

  ‘Barney didn’t tell me anything. Barney knows what I feel. Anyway, it’s a chance for Barney to run the business. It’s good experience.’

  Feigel Blitz looked from one of her sons to the other. ‘I hope you’re not trying to tell me you’re both in this together?’

  Barney, chewing meatball, said, ‘I can’t persuade him to stay, Mama. He’s my older brother. He wants to go, and that’s it.’

  ‘You’re really leaving?’ snapped Mrs Blitz.

  Joel put down his fork again, and pushed away his plate. ‘I told you, Mama. I’m going. And I really think it’s better if I do it right now.’

  ‘Sit down,’ ordered his mother, coldly. Her face was white, and set.

  ‘Mama, I’m going. There’s nothing in this whole world that can –’

  ‘Shah!’ shrieked Mrs Blitz. ‘You think I made you this supper for nothing – that you should eat it, and then leave me? What kind of son are you? What’s your father going to say? Are you crazy, leaving the business? Blitz, Tailors? How can you turn your back on it?’

  ‘Mama, please,’ pleaded Barney. ‘He’s going to leave, whatever you say. Can’t we just eat and say Shema and let him go with a blessing? Mama?’

  Mrs Blitz swept her arm across the table, hurtling plates and meatballs and gefilte fish all over the kitchen floor. Then she seized the long sharp knife she used for slicing bread, and stabbed wildly at Joel’s hands. Joel jumped back, lost his footing, and stumbled over his chair. Mrs Blitz got up from the table and went for him, the knife held over her head in both hands.

  Barney was quicker. He overturned the deal table with one hefty thrust, so that it fell on top of his sprawling brother. Then he lunged for the knife in his mother’s hands, yelling, ‘Mama! What are you doing? Mama!’

  He was too late to stop her first downward stab. The black-bladed knife, worn thin and keen from years of constant whetting, sliced right through the skin between Barney’s thumb and index finger, and into the raw muscle. Blood spattered everywhere, scarlet exclamation points. Barney gripped his wrist in pain, and sank sideways on to his knees.

  There was a hideous silence. Mrs Blitz stared at her sons in shock. Joel eased the overturned table off his legs, and stood up, brushing egg and fish and breadcrumbs from his trousers. Barney, bleeding, crouched on the floor amongst the chairs and the meatballs, his teeth gritted and his face grey like newspaper.

  From another apartment, they could hear an unsteady violin playing a mazel tov dance. Young Leib Ginzberg, practising for his sister’s wedding. I
t sounded ludicrously jolly.

  Joel, without a word, tore a long strip from the tablecloth, knelt down beside Barney, and wrapped it around his thumb. Mrs Blitz stayed where she was, swaying slightly, as if she were on the deck of a ferry, the knife still clutched in her hand.

  ‘I’ll get you round to the doctor,’ Joel told Barney. ‘That’s going to need stitching.’

  Barney shook his head. ‘You’ll miss your ship. It’s eight o’clock already.’

  ‘You’re my brother,’ argued Joel.

  Barney shook his head even more decisively. ‘I can go to the doctor by myself. I want you to catch that ship. If you don’t leave now, you never will.’

  Joel looked towards his mother.

  ‘Leave,’ insisted Barney. ‘Isn’t this exactly why you’re going, this kind of scene? Isn’t this exactly what you want to leave behind?’

  Joel stood up. He was flustered now, undecided. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. His mother looked at him with an expression that could have been resignation, or regret, or just plain contempt for everything and everyone, including herself.

  Joel said, ‘Mama –?’

  But Mrs Blitz simply turned away, and walked off towards her bedroom. They heard her close the door behind her, and turn the key in the lock. The brothers looked at each other in silence.

  ‘If you’re not careful, she’ll kill you one of these days, chas vesholem,’ said Joel.

  Barney said, ‘No. She’ll kill herself first.’

  ‘I’d better say goodbye,’ Joel told him, without any enthusiasm at all.

  He went to his mother’s bedroom door, and knocked. There was no answer. He made a face at Barney, shrugged, and shouted: ‘Goodbye, Mama!’

  ‘Go!’ Mrs Blitz screeched back at him. ‘And a choleria on you!’

  Joel hesitated, then sighed. ‘I’d better go fetch my trunks,’ he said to Barney. ‘I’ll take them down to the street, and call a cab. You go straight round to the doctor. Don’t wait.’