Oscar grinned. Some things were even better than herring!
To Gertie's unspoken relief and Oscar's disappointment, no one at the Cousins' Club meeting mentioned Evie or the bridal shower. Was it for this he had endured the inevitable gauntlet of cheek-pinching and kisses? (Oscar swore up and down that after some Cousins' Club meetings he could remove the layers of lipstick from his face with a trowel. The scraped-off goo displayed distinct cosmetological strata, enabling the careful scholar to figure out the order in which Oscar's aunts, great-aunts, cousins, and other female relations had assailed him.)
Aside from being transformed into a walking color-sampler for Helena Rubinstein, Hazel Bishop and Max Factor, Oscar's ears rang painfully with countless cries of "Oy! Look at him! Looksobighe'sgetting!" followed quickly by "K'n ein'horeh! P'too-p'too-p'too!" Who had been the first genius to determine that spitting all over a kid would ward off the Evil Eye? Dripping pints of familial saliva, Oscar bellied up to the buffet and was somewhat placated to see that there was not only herring, but also plates of smoked whitefish, sable, and even—O rapture! O luxury!—lox.
The buffet table chatter centered on repeated declarations that all the platters looked so gorgeous that it would be a pity to touch anything. The Visigoths probably said much the same thing about Rome just before they laid the city waste. Alaric and his hordes had nothing on the Gratz family when confronted by the Seven Hills of Smoked Salmon.
Oscar filled up a plate, then cast about for someplace to sit. This was a toughie. Even the sci-fi comic books he adored could not account for the unearthly, mystifying powers of the Gratzes: Bend the concepts space and time how he might, Oscar simply could not explain how all of his relatives managed to occupy every sofa, armchair, ottoman, rocker, stool, and folding chair in the apartment while at the same time never leaving the buffet.
"Oscar, sweetie, here! Come sit by Tanteh Lillian!" A scarlet-clawed hand waved furiously from the far end of the living room as blinding beams of light reflected off a pair of turquoise-colored, rhinestone-studded, harlequin eyeglasses. Oscar swallowed hard and wondered if he had time to escape into one of the bedrooms before—
Too late. His mother had overheard. "Oscar, don't stand there like a goyisher kop. You don't hear Tanteh Lillian calling you? You want the whole family should think both my children got no manners? Go! Go!" She backed up her words with an encouraging shove between the shoulder blades, a shove so hard that Oscar was surprised not to see her hand protruding from the center of his chest, helping itself to a nice piece lox off his platter.
By the time he made his way across the room, Tanteh Lillian had forgotten all about summoning him to her side. She was deep in deliciously scandalized conversation with her sisters, Gloria and Greta (The girls in that movie-mad branch of the family got off much easier than their brothers, Boris, Lon, Valentino and Chico). Feeling his mother's eagle eye still heavy upon him, Oscar wriggled himself onto the sofa between two of the ladies and tried to eat in peace.
It was not to be. The conversation going on above his head proved to be far more fascinating than any succulent sliver of dead fish, even unto a slice of Leviathan itself: They were talking about Benny.
"—the reason why Rifka changed the meeting time! The only reason."
"Sure, that's what I heard, but why—?"
"Why else? Because she's ashamed. Because she doesn't want any of us to see by the light of day what that ungrateful momzer is doing to his own mother! Because maybe this way she hoped a lot of us wouldn't be able to come by, so she wouldn't have so many witnesses to her disgrace, itshouldn'thappentoadog."
"Momzer? Rifka's boy, he served in the war! He was made a captain, yet!" There followed a gloriously elaborate spate of Yiddish maledictions where the only words Oscar could recognize were Hitler, Nazis, mad dog and burn in Hell.
"Captain, shmaptain." Tanteh Gloria waved away Cousin Benny's commission and multiple Purple Hearts with one sweep of her cocktail-ringed hand. "He's how old and still not married? What, I've got to draw you a picture?"
"Shh! Shh! You want Rifka should maybe hear you and burst a blood vessel?" In the way of the women of her tribe, Tanteh Greta sincerely believed that the best way to stifle Gloria was by shushing her loudly. Luckily for the integrity of Rifka's blood vessels, in a room already throbbing with so many other female Gratzes exercising their concept of "indoor voices," Gloria's remark and Greta's cover-up attempt went largely unnoticed.
Oscar, however, did notice. "What kinda picture, Tanteh Gloria?" he asked. "I mean, I thought it was only bad if girls didn't get married."
The three sisters exchanged a look that spoke volumes, all of them written in the key of Oy. Before they could come up with an answer or—more likely—shove Oscar back in his mother's direction, the unthinkable happened: A hush fell over the Gratz Cousins' Club.
Benny had arrived.
Benny had not arrived alone.
Looking back, Oscar couldn't put his finger on the exact moment that the whispers began. They were simply there, like the brown horsehair sofa under his rump, like the smell of Uncle Max's cigars, like the mustard-and-spinach-patterned wallpaper. They were real whispers, too, not Gratz whispers: whispers fit for a Connecticut country club, whispers proper to an Episcopalian funeral, whispers where you could not hear every word clearly from a distance of ten feet away. It was all very frustrating for Oscar, to say nothing of confusing. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out why his extended family was acting so weird.
Cousins' Club Standard Operating Procedure required that when someone showed up accompanied by a non-family member, the sluice gates opened and the women streamed forward, shrieking and clucking and demanding "So, who's this? When are you two getting married?" No one saw anything pushy or impolitic about the latter question. If you brought someone to Cousins' Club, you wanted to marry them. That, or you wanted to end the affair, and exposing them to the full force of the Gratz women was the coward's way to do it. Either way, it was like the scene in The Jungle Book where Mowgli and the new cubs were displayed for the inspection of the wolf pack, only without old Akeela there to declare "Look well, O Gratzes!"
This time no one moved, no one swept down upon Benny and his escort, no one clamored to know the identity of that charming person in his company nor when the wedding day would be.
How could they? Benny had arrived with another man.
There was something vaguely perturbing about the gentleman in question. Though his pale face, dark eyes and pitch-black hair were commonplace to the Eastern European branches of the Gratz clan, he carried these as no Gratz had ever done, with a disquieting air of the exotic, the forbidden, the . . .goyish. He stood only a little taller than Benny—who at six-foot-one was no slouch in that department, unless he did slouch—yet where Benny was robust and well-muscled, this guy was so thin that he seemed to tower over Tanteh Rifka's son. He wore his suit like a panther's pelt. Benny was no slob, but next to his companion he looked positively scruffy.
And next to his companion he stayed: Stayed, stood, walked, sat down, you name it. They stuck so close to one another that they might as well have been joined at the hip. It was like watching a sister act.
Oscar didn't get it. Sure, if someone showed up at Cousins' Club accompanied by a person of the same sex, no one could fire off the Marriage Cathechism ("So, when—?" "So, where—?" "So, a ring—?" "So small?") but in those cases the relatives would still surge in to make the newcomer welcome and add him or her to the official family fix-up list ("So, you're Benny's friend? Such a good-looking man like you, and not married? Come, you should meet my daughter.") That wasn't happening either.
In all the seething mass of Gratzes, only Oscar stared. To be fair, the boy had a built-in excuse for such impolite behavior: It was the first time he had ever seen his cousin Benny in the flesh. The man had left to serve his country when Oscar was still an infant in arms. Yet to be honest as well as fair, even if Benny had been more familiar to Oscar than a face fr
om a photograph lovingly displayed on Tanteh Rifka's sideboard, his entrance, appearance, escort, and the reactions that these had elicited among the gathered Gratzes still would have made gawking inevitable.
The rest of Oscar's relatives were being incredibly assiduous about not staring, not even casting a casual glance in Benny's direction. If concerted inattention could render a person invisible, Benny would have become a phantom on the spot. Oscar was utterly at sea. Why the silence, then the real whispers, then—hideously unnatural act for any Gratz!—why the deliberate minding of their own business?
Only Tanteh Rifka seemed untouched by the plague of intentional indifference. She alone rushed up to Benny and his friend, threw her arms around her son and embraced him fiercely. "And this must be Kazimir," she said. Her lips curved up in a grimace so taut, so false, so petrified, so downright horrific that green hair or no green hair, in Oscar's eyes Tanteh Rifka had clinched her claim to Jokerhood.
If Benny's friend noticed that the warmth of Rifka's welcome was forced, he gave no sign. Bowing, he raised one of her plump hands to his lips, kissed it, then met her eyes. "My pleasure," he said. His smile was cold and brilliant as a winter's midnight sky.
Oscar heard that low, powerful voice, recognized the foreign accent weighing down every word. He snapped to attention where he sat, idle curiosity sharply changed to intense focus, like a fox terrier suddenly catching wind of a rabbit. The man's pallor mirrored Benny's own, except the lips that had just touched Tanteh Rifka's hand were so red they might have been rouged. His gaze was cold, hypnotic. When Tanteh Rifka urged the two men towards the buffet, Benny ate without relish, like an automaton, but despite a display of succulent foods fit to tempt the prissiest palate, his companion Kazimir did not eat at all. In fact, he showed a positive aversion to the acutely fragrant end of the table that proffered platters of salami, pastrami, tongue, and the garlicky delights of carnatzlach sausage and p'tcha. (He stood in good company as to that lattermost dish: To young Oscar's eyes p'tcha—a redolent, translucent, unnerving concoction of calf's foot jelly—looked like something that a Martian would sneeze.) And he did not drink . . . Manischewitz. Or Dr. Brown's cream soda. Or even a nice glass of tea.
All at once, in a revelation worthy of thunderbolts and Wagnerian crescendos, Oscar knew!
As to what he knew, before he could put down the lox and blurt any word of his epiphany, a thick, stubby finger jammed him in the ribs so hard that it knocked half the breath from his body.
"What, boychik, you never seen a faigeleh before?"
The question as to whether this were the first time Oscar had seen a man's man (in the Oscar Wilde rather than Ernest Hemingway sense of the term) was rendered almost unintelligible by the low, raspy, carton-of-Camels-a-day voice that uttered it. There could be only one source: Bubbeh Gratz.
To speak the name of Bubbeh Gratz was to invoke the ageless power of pure, primal, run-screaming-wet-your-pants terror. She was Bubbeh, not bubbeh: The absolute magnitude of her authority and dominion within the family was more than lower-case letters could bear. She was also Bubbeh only by courtesy, for she was no one's grandmother nor, indeed, mother. Born Louisa Claire (a.k.a. Leah Chaviva) Gratz, she had stayed Louisa Claire Gratz despite the best efforts of the family to drag her down with them into the depths of marital bliss. She had not just proved to be unmarriageable, she had actively fought to stay single with the same zeal she'd brought to all her other battles, whether for workers' unions, women's votes, Colored People's rights, or the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland.
Squat as a trodden toad, with steel-gray hair, steel-gray eyes, steel-rimmed pince-nez spectacles, and a body as white and blobby as a ladleful of mashed potatoes, Bubbeh Gratz was the oldest living member of the family. She wore contention for her crown and wielded spleen for her scepter. It was foretold by one unnamed member of the Gratz tribe whose hand had strayed to the forbidden art of tea-leaf reading that on the day Bubbeh Gratz found anything she did approve of in this world, she would depart for the next. Thus she was assured of unnatural immortality.
Again the short, fat finger rammed the boy's ribcage. "You don't talk back, someone talks to you?" Another jab. Oscar could have sworn he heard his young bones give up a faint, pitiful crack, but pain was immediately engulfed by panic when he noted that he and Bubbeh were the only two people left on the sofa. The assorted aunts had turned terror into transmigration, vanishing from the living room to rematerialize in the safety of the kitchen doorway where they huddled like hens in a thunderstorm. He sat alone, noshing herring with the dragon.
"I—I'm sorry, Bubbeh." Oscar borrowed courage from imagining that he was a hero like the Batman or Tarzan or Flash Gordon, though the Joker, the Leopard Men, and Ming the Merciless all rolled into one were still strictly bush-league next to Bubbeh. "I don't know what that means, faigeleh."
"No?" She tilted her head back, looked down her nose at him and then, without wasting words or one instant's worry about whether the boy's parents wanted him to have the information, she told him. She spoke of the matter casually, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. She didn't even pause in her ongoing task of wrapping up the bounty of her buffet plate in sheet upon sheet of waxed paper and stuffing her cavernous pocketbook with packet after packet of cold cuts and smoked fish. (Whoever hosted the Cousins' Club knew that all the womenfolk came prepared to use purses and coat pockets to cache as many alleged leftovers as they could "Fahlaydah, it shouldn't go to waste." Their hosts budgeted and bought food accordingly.)
Oscar's lower jaw dropped like the parachute ride at Coney Island. "Two guys?" His voice cracked as badly as his rib. "Together? Doing that?" He watched, appalled and fascinated, as Kazimir leaned close to Cousin Benny and whispered something in his ear. Benny nodded dumbly and followed his "friend" down the hall. What might have been a simple request to be shown the toilet became something far more freighted with forbidden meaning as Oscar realized that this was the same hall that led to the bedrooms.
"With each other? Benny and that guy are—?" He shook his head. "You're wrong."
"What, you don't believe me?" Bubbeh dropped yet another parcel of salami into her purse. "Just because it's not something they write about in that science fiction drek you read?"
Now drek—a.k.a. manure, either literal or figurative—was one Yiddish word Oscar knew, though customarily applied by his father to the doings of Senator Joseph McCarthy. This was the first time Oscar had heard it used to describe his favorite reading matter. "It's not drek! It's—it's real good! Educational! It's all about ideas and stuff!"
"Nu, what isn't?" Bubbeh Gratz chuckled. "Educational is what you tell your parents, they shouldn't stop you from reading it. 'Educational . . .' Life is educational, boychik. What you read by science fiction, it's all spaceships, bug-eyed monsters, ray-guns, alien princesses with a pair tsatskehs on them, the poor girls can't hardly stand up straight! It's got nothing to teach you about real life."
For an instant, Oscar had a scary thought: What if Bubbeh Gratz conveyed her dangerously anti-sci-fi attitude to his parents? As the oldest living Gratz, her words would carry more weight than her orthopedic shoes already did. If she that sci-fi was worthless, useless, drek, Ma and Dad might very well believe her and then—
No. No, never, k'n ein'horeh, p'too-p'too-p'too, the accursed outcome did not bear thinking on. Oscar's heart beat faster: Bad enough, what he'd just concluded about Benny and that Kazimir creep, but worse by far the realization that Bubbeh Gratz might cause him to lose the one thing that opened up doorways to the stars in a life that was otherwise circumscribed by school, shul and herring.
"Oh, yeah?" He shouted his defiance full in her face. Fear had made him bold. "Well, if sci-fi's not about real life, how come I'm the only one here who knows the difference between a faigeleh and a vampire?"
Alas for Oscar, he spoke out at the instant when every other conversation in the Strauss apartment hit a coincidental stop. The fateful words echoed throug
h the sudden silence and promptly turned it into something greater than itself: The hush heard 'round the world, the acoustic equivalent of negative space and anti-matter.
The first sound to creep back into the room was a low, thin wail of anguish from Tanteh Rifka. This quickly blossomed into racking sobs. The women swarmed over her like ants on a caramel, jabbering wildly as they dragged her into the kitchen. The men, abandoned, turned their attention to Oscar. Even kindly, torpid Uncle Max was glaring at him.
It was at this moment that the doorbell rang. It rang loudly and repeatedly, each peal longer and more emphatic than the one before, until finally the doorknob turned and Oscar's sister Evie let herself in.
"Hi, everyone," she said. Her face, her entire body was tense; she was clearly bracing herself for the onslaught of questions about her friend Joanie's bridal shower, followed fast by "well-meaning" comments concerning her own ongoing failure to land a husband. There was really no way to calculate the sheer magnitude of the shockwave she experienced upon entering the Cousins' Club venue and finding her unmarried self most unnaturally ignored, even by her own parents.
"Evie!" Oscar broke away from the ring of scowling menfolk and flung himself on his sister with terrifying enthusiasm. "Boy, am I ever glad to see you!"
Evie pried herself free of her little brother's suspiciously eager embrace and held him at arm's length. "Okay, Oscar, what did you do now?"
Little did she know it was a loaded question until it went off in her face. The torrent of explanations from all sides swept her to the brink of insensibility before she fought her way back up the narrative stream, gasped, and managed to ask: "So since when is Cousin Benny a queer vampire?"
Universe Vol1Num2 Page 34
