by Jan Cherubin
Darleen answered the phone. She wanted to know how the weather was in California. Warm and sunny. I asked her a bunch of questions about Travis. She said he didn’t work for Brenda on a regular basis. He was only over there if Brenda called him with a specific job and there was no way to predict when that would be.
“What’s this about?” Darleen said.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“Oh,” said Darleen. “Because, you know, I have a key.”
How stupid of me! Of course Darleen had a key. Darleen and my father stayed close. That didn’t change after Brenda, or Travis. The key was big. I thanked Darleen multiple times. But even knowing I had the key waiting for me, I could not dog it. The rest of the heist had to be planned out with precision. Nothing left to chance. My flight east was in five days. I plotted in bed in the dark, with Fred’s shoulder listing like a ship in the corner of my eye.
I could not simply arrive in Baltimore one day and waltz over to Cedar Drive assuming Brenda was at work as usual and that she wouldn’t be returning until six p.m. I would have to verify that she was actually at Hutzler’s department store, at her desk in accounting. Unfortunately, I could not call her there to determine her whereabouts since we weren’t on speaking terms. A phone call out of the blue would be suspicious. I’d have to get someone else to call her and act as my virtual lookout. Not my mother or Susan, of course. Brenda would have been suspicious of them, too. And besides, Susan didn’t want anything to do with the break-in. Susan could not understand why I would risk so much for his moldy papers. There were other relatives to employ. Uncle Harry hadn’t yet decided that I’d broken the promise I made to my father, and he was also still on good terms with Brenda. If he called her it wouldn’t smell of anything. He was the kind of guy who’d call someone just to shoot the shit, or maybe he had a reason to call but you could never figure out what that might be. At any rate, Uncle Harry agreed to act as lookout. He had his own stake in the take. He didn’t want Brenda throwing away the orphanage photo album.
Uncle Harry still lived out West, but luckily, he was an early riser. The three-hour time difference wouldn’t be a problem. He would ring up Brenda at seven a.m. his time, ten a.m. Hutzler’s time, on the appointed day. As soon as he confirmed that Brenda was at her desk, he would call to give me the all-clear. But where was he going to call me? Car phones weren’t widely in use in those days, and cell phones were unheard of. You couldn’t just phone somebody on the road. The good part about those days, though, was when you called someone at work that person was definitely at work.
So far, great. Uncle Harry would ring Brenda and we’d know she was at work. But if Uncle Harry then telephoned my mother’s apartment where I’d be staying, in order to give the go-ahead, it would take half an hour for me to get to the house on Cedar Drive. If Brenda ditched work early for some reason, she’d be capable of getting home within that same half-hour and could very well catch me in the act, tiptoeing down the hall like the Pink Panther. It was unlikely Brenda would randomly go home sick, but I didn’t want to chance it. I didn’t want to be thinking about her walking in on me. I wanted to pull off the job confident Brenda was far away and preoccupied.
Therefore I had to find a way station close to the house where I could receive the phone call from Uncle Harry. Shana Bloom’s was an obvious choice. She lived only five minutes from Cedar Drive. Shana laughed in delight when I asked if we could use her place as a safe house. She loved the scheme. She was an old commie. Shana hung out with my mother at the YCL in the forties, although Shana denied it. Even her kids didn’t know. But I knew, and figured she still had some red blood flowing in her veins. “I’ll have coffee and cake waiting,” Shana said. Those commies knew how to cater a meeting.
Everything was falling into place. I didn’t need to case the joint. I knew it like I’d grown up there. I had my crew together. Shep would ride shotgun. He was my bagman. I didn’t need a second-story man since it was a ranch house. Shana provided the safe house, and Uncle Harry was lookout.
I was worried about Hoffman, though. Hoffman started getting aggressive after my father died. Sometimes he freaked out around people. He might start barking at Shep Levine. He might even try to attack him. I asked a friend who was a dog groomer about giving Hoffman a dog tranquilizer. “Do I need a prescription?”
She laughed. “It’s called a bone,” she said.
I told my mother to stop at the butcher’s on the night my plane got in.
“Why does the damn dog need a whole leg of lamb?” my mother said.
“Not the whole thing. Just the bone,” I said. “I want a big one.”
My mother wasn’t sure whether to cook the bone and neither was I. She decided to stick it in the oven. We should have left it raw.
I landed at BWI airport and drove a dark blue Ford Taurus out of the Hertz parking lot and went straight to Darleen’s. She opened the door of her little A-frame house in Catonsville, and before she said hello, she silently handed over the key, knowing how much I needed the physical fact of it. It was just a key, no key ring. From the door, I could see Travis in the back room leaning over his workbench. I put the key in my pocket. I was itching to be on my way, but once Darleen started talking, she kept going and I sensed she was stalling because, as she told me once, the way I talked with my hands and described stuff reminded her of my father, and she missed him terribly. I was finally able to leave, and I drove over to my mother’s apartment. The smell of roasting meat flooded the stairwell. “I got it!” I said, holding up the key. We hugged. My mother wasn’t perfect, but we were friends.
“Something smells good,” I said.
“Leg of lamb,” said my mother.
The next morning, Shep and I met at Shana Bloom’s to wait for Uncle Harry’s phone call. Shana had a crumb cake waiting as promised, and a pot of coffee on a trivet in the dining room, but I wasn’t hungry. I was wired. I had a few green garbage bags—the big kind for leaves—folded up and stuffed in the back pockets of my jeans. The key was in my left front pocket. I kept putting my hand between the layers of denim finding the cool metal, running my fingertips over the grooves. I had the bone in a brown paper bag. I put it on Shana’s coffee table. “Don’t let me forget that,” I said. Shep accepted cake and coffee, cream and sugar. I frowned at him. I didn’t want him getting comfortable.
Suddenly Shana’s living room darkened. Thunder rumbled and a flash of lightening cracked, then the slap and whoosh of rain hitting the asphalt streets and tiny brick houses. The phone rang and I jumped. Shit, could I really go through with this? Would my legs turn into Jello and my feet turn into lead? Would my hands shake so much I couldn’t even try the key? Would I be so afraid that I’d fuck it up? Shana answered the phone. “Hello?” she said, holding back giggles. It was the all-clear from Uncle Harry. Brenda was settled at work, they’d had a nice chat. So Shep and I set out. I was wearing a sweatshirt and I flipped the hood up. Shep held a magazine over his head that he pilfered from Shana’s coffee table and we ran to the car and got in. I drove. We left Shep’s silver Jaguar XKE parked at Shana’s. Way too conspicuous. Besides, the Taurus had a deep trunk.
At the stop sign on Sudbrook Road, I shifted my weight under the steering wheel and slid my hand into my pocket and felt the jagged metal, warm now from the heat of my thigh. I knew the key wasn’t a sure thing. If I were Brenda, I would have changed the locks by this point, no doubt. I would have changed them back in February. But there was a chance she hadn’t. I drove down Alter Street, the windshield wipers whining and slapping. Shep was quiet. I turned left onto Cedar. Even in the storm, the street had the drowsy feel of morning and stirred my heart. There was a particular texture to the weekday hours before noon on Cedar Drive, a sleepy wonderfulness that was the feeling of waking up when you were so little you weren’t even in school. I turned into the driveway and Shep and I got out of the car lashed by the rain once again and slammed the car doors, and ran for the carport. I held the screen door open with
my hip and inserted the key. Somehow my hands weren’t shaking at all, not even a little bit. The key slipped right in and the doorknob turned and the door opened. I was fine. My heart was beating at a remarkably normal rate, and why not? I was home.
I scratched Hoffman behind the ears and gave him the goddamn bone. I was calmer than I’d been in months. The rain pattered contentedly on the gravel roof, the way rain always did in summer. This was the last time I would hear it.
I was calm, but Shep wasn’t calm. As soon as we got inside he put his back flat against the wall, which made me laugh. He wasn’t laughing, or even smiling. I couldn’t see the dimples that normally made grooves in his cheeks. I had been so worried about involving Darleen’s husband, yet I minimized the risk Shep was taking on my behalf. Shep had no trusting relationship with Brenda to breach, which was good, but in that case then, what the hell was he doing in her house? Gee, I don’t know, Officer.
“Hurry up!” Shep said.
What was the matter with him? Things were going fine. I was just exactly where I wanted to be, where I had been trying to get to all along. I had no fear at all, strangely. The pictures of me all over the place helped. The goddamn Indian table was still there. She didn’t have a clue, that Brenda. I went into his bedroom. The sailor suit photograph was back on its nail. I popped it off and into the leaf bag, then wandered around the house struck with wonder. All the life that went on there. I had to snap out of it, so I focused and went in search of the suitcase with the Bakelite handle. No way she’d put it back in the closet. If she hadn’t thrown it out already, and that was a possibility, she would have hidden it somewhere. I looked in the closet anyway, and there it was. Packed and ready to go. Shep went outside and plopped it into the deep Taurus trunk. I continued working on the den, scooping papers and clippings from the bottom desk drawer into the leaf bag. The little pink giraffe gazed down from its perch on the desk blotter. “Don’t worry. I won’t forget you,” I said. I wrapped it in a Kleenex.
“Hurry up!” Shep said again.
Everything was fine. Hoffman was slurping at his bone in the hallway, holding it between his paws licking and clacking the bone against his teeth.
“We have to get out of here,” said Shep. “I’m pretty sure the lady next door saw us. She was peeking out of her curtains.
“The slides from Ireland! I forgot about these.” Four little orange Kodak slide boxes. “Shep, can you get the ladder from the utility room?”
“You must be kidding,” Shep said. He moved sideways down the hallway like a cop in the projects. I tried not to laugh. “Someone saw us next door,” he said.
“Mrs. Rollins? On the carport side?” I said. “She knows me. She’s nice. She and her husband helped me shovel the walk after the big snowstorm.”
“She’s Brenda’s neighbor, Joanna. I’m not comfortable with this.”
“We have to get the ladder. I have to go into the attic.”
“It’s time to go, Joanna.”
Shep carried out my father’s Jackson Pollack imitation. It was too big for the trunk so he put it in the backseat. Then he came back in and took me by the shoulders. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but this is all you’re taking. We have to get out of here. No more time.”
Goodbye! Goodbye house. Rain on the gravel roof, the smell of summer through the screen, the neglected garden, my father gone. Shep steered me around Hoffman who ignored us, his world was all bone, through the kitchen door and down the driveway, rain splashing our faces. I forgot something. I ran back and turned the key and I was in before Shep could stop me, scooted inside and grabbed the Indian table with the elephant legs and I ran out again, closed the door tight, down the driveway, lowered the table into the trunk and slammed the trunk shut, got into the driver’s seat with Shep already riding shotgun, and I backed out. “All right!” I yelled. I was triumphant, unlike the last time I tried to get my stuff and backed out of the driveway. We didn’t get everything, but we had a pretty good haul.
Shep relaxed. “Baby, we did it!” he said. His grin was back, dimples and all. I felt like a million bucks. We talked and laughed the whole way to Shana’s where I dropped Shep at his Jag. Euphoric though we were, Shep admitted being relieved to part company with the likes of me. I drove straight to Mailboxes Unlimited, dropped off a shipment, and headed to the airport. For the six-hour flight to LA I stayed put in my seat—no bathroom breaks—my lap weighed down, my arms wrapped around the suitcase with the yellow handle.
CHAPTER 54
At first, Brenda didn’t notice anything missing. She didn’t even register the blank space outlined by a rectangle of dust where the Pollock imitation had been hanging on the dining room wall. It wasn’t absence that tipped off Brenda. It was presence. What was there that shouldn’t have been there? The bone. Where on earth did Hoffman get that lamb bone? And who would commit such a hateful act? Everyone knew you didn’t give a cooked bone to a dog. Now Brenda had to worry about bone shards perforating Hoffman’s colon. She went next door to ask if Mrs. Rollins had seen anything suspicious lately.
In LA, I sifted through the contents of the suitcase cataloguing my trove, and I discovered poor people left quite a paper trail, compelled as they were to seek help from government agencies. The manila envelope I believed was full of boring bureaucratic correspondence turned out to be full of fascinating bureaucratic correspondence. Had my father read this stuff? Among the contents, a social worker’s notes describing “domestic disputes” between his mother’s family and his father’s family, and piles of memoranda from charity workers. My mother said if he’d been through the file, he never spoke of it. Possibly he glanced at it, but didn’t read as closely as I did, and did not note as I did, that his father, Isaac Aronson, had done time in New York at a prison on Hart Island, and that even more interestingly, he had quite possibly changed his name to Thomas Marmot, and had likely fled to Chicago. Maybe my father knew but pretended to believe his father simply vanished into thin air. I could understand it. The unknown was infinite and mysterious. The known was just sad.
March 8, 1925
Mr. H.S. Lurie
Jewish Social Services Bureau
1800 Selden St.
Chicago, ILL.
My dear Mr. Lurie:
May we solicit your kind interest in behalf of our client, Mrs. Ruth Aronson of this city, whose husband Isaac Aronson left her and their five infant children on July 18, 1924, since which time he has neither communicated with nor contributed a single penny towards their support, as a result of which the family has fallen a burden upon the local charities and Mrs. Aronson has been compelled to commit her two oldest children to an orphan asylum.
In 1922, Mr. Aronson absconded with $1800 from the Majestic Tailoring Co., by whom he was employed and he was committed to the penitentiary on July 7, 1922. He was released on May 24, 1923, and subsequently lived with his family until the aforementioned date of July 18, 1924.
We have just received word from the United Hebrew Charities that a friend of Mr. Aronson’s has reason to believe Mr. Aronson is living in Chicago under the assumed name of a Mr. Thomas Marmot.
I will therefore thank you to follow up on this clue and advise us of your findings. According to our source, “Mr. Marmot” has apparently applied for a position at the Carson Pirie Scott and Company. Isaac Aronson, also known as Thomas Marmot, is 35 years old, 5 feet 11 inches tall, 150 pounds, black hair, black eyes, arrived in this country in 1891 from Russia, and worked as an insurance agent. The family consists of five children, Clyde 7, Harry 5, Vivian 4, Alvin 3, and the infant Gertrude.
Thanking you for your kindness and awaiting your early reply,
Charles Zunser,
National Desertion Bureau, New York
March 16, 1925
Mr. Charles Zunser
National Desertion Bureau
799 Broadway,
New York, N.Y.
My dear Mr. Zunser,
In reply to your letter of March 8th we wish to adv
ise you that we visited at Carson Pirie Scott and Co. and were informed that “Thomas Marmot” was in their employ for one week, upon which time he did not show up for work again. The address he gave them, and they provided us, turned out to be erroneous.
If you are able to obtain better information, we shall be glad to complete the investigation.
Very truly yours,
Henry S. Lurie
District Supervisor
Jewish Social Service Bureau, Chicago
I was so engrossed in reading the file I didn’t hear the phone ring, and the answering machine picked up. Officer Smythe with a Y from the Baltimore County Police Department asked that I please call back about a “domestic dispute.” Oh, the sins of the fathers.
Anne Brighton urged me to ignore the message. She thought I’d be fine, I just had to remember not to answer the phone, or show my face in Baltimore. “Ever?” I said. Well, at least for a while. Shep Levine’s instincts had been correct. Mrs. Rollins peeked through the curtains and saw us. “I can’t believe Joanna did this,” Brenda confided in Darleen, unaware Darleen had provided the key. “I’m shocked. I never would have guessed Joanna, of all people, was capable of taking such a risk.” I agreed with Brenda. I, too, hadn’t known what I was capable of. “She’s damn lucky, too,” Brenda added. “Hoffman didn’t even get sick. He could have died.”
