Last Respects Read online

  “Would you do me a favor?” she said.

  “A question to ask!” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “Just say what.”

  “He came here straight from school,” my mother said. “The glass of milk, the plate of lekach, I just baked it this morning, they’re standing on the kitchen table. When you finish with him here, you could maybe tell him he shouldn’t go any place else? He should come right home straight?”

  The notion that I would even dream of doing anything else was astonishing. I mean, to me. Then I saw that it was equally astonishing to Rabbi Goldfarb. She simpered at him. I know it sounds foolish, even insane. But I saw it happen. My mother simpered. And she got what she obviously wanted. Rabbi Goldfarb swung the chair rung at my ankles.

  “Ouch!” I yelled.

  “You heard your mother!” he thundered.

  4

  NOBODY HEARD HER MORE clearly than my father. And nobody seemed more indifferent to what he heard.

  Not rude. I don’t believe he would have dared that. Come to think of it, I believe he would have been incapable of it. My father was polite the way other people are short or tall or red-headed. He couldn’t help it. But he managed in his own way to scurry through my mother’s fusillade without being gunned down. I did not appreciate his skill, or even understand it, until one day years later, when East Fourth Street was far behind me, I saw some sandpipers on a Pacific beach.

  I had never before seen sandpipers. I was lying on the beach, pleasantly dazed by the afternoon sun, watching the surf roll in and wash out. All at once I became aware of these tiny birds, sitting high as lollipops on their matchstick legs. As the surf came in, they raced swiftly toward me up the sand, without fear, their matchsticks twinkling industriously, keeping their feet clear of the water. The foaming edge of the surf rolled slowly to a halt, hesitated, and started washing back to sea. Without pause or hesitation the sandpipers turned and, on perkily hurrying legs, sped after the receding crest of foam. Back and forth, back and forth, like a metronome, without excitement or relief or, so far as I could see, even interest. As though that was all they had to do in life.

  My father, of course, had to do more. He had to get up at five in the morning because he was due in the pants shop on Allen Street at seven. The walk took at least a half hour. Between his bowels and his other preoccupations, the hour and a half between five, when he got out of bed, and six-thirty, when he got out of the house, was just about adequate for him to touch all the bases of his routine. If he put his back into it, that is, and pushed. Consider what my father had to do every morning in those ninety predawn minutes.

  First, get out of bed without waking my mother. Easy enough, perhaps, for Dolly Madison in the White House. Not on East Fourth Street. Each of the four legs of the bed in which my parents slept was set in an empty Heinz pickle jar full of kerosene. Fourth Street bedbugs were tough. I’ve seen them come at you as big as olives. I’ve known them to get up after being whacked with the heel of a shoe, shake themselves, and start coming at you again. But I’ve never seen one survive my mother’s traps. Up the side of the jar, over the edge, down into the moat of kerosene, and it was curtains for the bedbug. The only trouble with this device was that the slightest movement by anybody in the bed made the four jars start tinkling like a carillon. My father didn’t weigh much, true. But what got him noiselessly off the nuptial couch every morning was not his weight, or lack of it, but his skill as an avoider. He twinkle-toed his way out of that bed every morning like a sandpiper on a beach skittering away from the edge of rolling surf.

  But that was only the beginning. Now he sneaked his dose of Saratoga #2 from the case under the bed, got it out into the kitchen, and drained the bottle. All this had to be done fast. If the stuff didn’t work by the time he left the house, he got caught on the walk to Allen Street. That’s why my father always cut across Hamilton Fish Park on his way to work. The free toilets were open twenty-four hours a day.

  So, he obviously felt, were my mother’s eyes and ears. Everything he did was done with one foot poised in the direction of escape from her. After the bottle of Saratoga #2 went down, he prepared his breakfast: a cup of hot water into which he poured two tablespoonfuls of honey, and a tumbler full of “sweet” cream, which he purchased every evening on his way home from work and kept overnight on the window sill outside the kitchen to prevent it from going bad. The hot water and honey and the cream were for his moogin, the top of his intestinal tract, as the Saratoga #2 was for its bottom. He had no fears for the sections in between. It was not unlike taking care of a transcontinental railroad by every day industriously polishing the furniture in the New York and San Francisco terminals without paying the slightest attention to the three thousand miles of track in between.

  I don’t think my mother ever thought about my father’s preoccupation with his bowels. He bought his own cream and honey and Saratoga #2 out of the meager sum she allowed him as pocket money each week from his wages. Once the stove was going, it cost nothing to heat water. Financially, my father and his internal organs were self-supporting. They were no concern of hers.

  Yet my father lived his life as though convinced that if my mother caught him preparing his breakfast, she would at once notify the immigration authorities and have him deported. The slightest sound from the bedroom would send him scurrying from the stove, where he was waiting for the water to boil, into the front room, where he pretended to be busily lacing his shoes, until the sounds out in the bedroom died down.

  With the Saratoga #2, the hot water, the honey, and the sweet cream inside him, he would twinkle-toe out of the house, pumping his skinny legs desperately, like a sandpiper racing up the beach away from the pursuing surf. How he walked the pavements to Allen Street—fast? slow? head high? crouched over?—I don’t know. I had never paid much attention to my father outdoors. He came alive for me only in the evening. I use the word “alive” advisedly. After all, he did breathe. Rather noisily, in fact. You could hear him coming up the stairs. Not because he panted. I don’t recall that there was ever anything wrong with his lungs. But as he climbed he helped himself along with a sort of gasping singsong: “Puff-puff-puff,” he chanted. “Puff-puff-puff. Puff-puff-puff.” It sounded somewhat like a prayer. As though he were seeking divine help to get him through another “sopper” time. God knows (I’m told He does) my father needed it.

  Not that anything overtly unpleasant ever took place between the time my father came home from work and I came home from Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder, and when I went off to my job in Mr. Lebenbaum’s candy store. It was merely that my mother ran our home the way Charles Laughton ran the Bounty. Nobody had to be flogged or put on bread and water. The captain’s authoritative presence was always around you.

  It kept my father moving. If my mother approached the kitchen sink as he was washing up, my father swayed out of her reach toward the window. When my mother brought a dish from the stove to our table, he swayed away from her toward the wall. When she came back to clear away the dishes, he went to the front room to get his Jewish Daily Forward. The performance was not without grace. It was a little like being caught for an hour and a half in a ballet choreographed not to music but to invisible steel runners to which the participants were lashed inexorably until the end of the performance.

  This always came, for me anyway, when I left for Mr. Lebenbaum’s candy store. There was, however, one exception on the nights when my father attended the regular monthly meeting of the Erste Neustadter Krank und Unterstitzing Verein. Translation: First Neustadter Sick and Benevolent Association.

  This was a burial society the members of which were all men who, like my father, had come to America from the environs of Neustadt in Austria. I had no idea at the time about the purpose of the organization. Almost half a century later, when my father died and I paid my first visit to the Battenberg Funeral Home in the Borough of Queens, I learned the function of a burial society: to defray the cost of the funeral of one of its members to the extent of fifty dollar
s.

  My father paid monthly dues to the First Neustadter Sick and Benevolent Association for sixty-six years. His funeral, a modest one, set me back about fifteen hundred dollars. It would have cost me closer to sixteen hundred if the First Neustadter Sick and Benevolent Association had not come through with the aforementioned fifty dollars. For anybody who is not near the top of his class in long division, I have worked out the arithmetic. Fifty dollars divided by sixty-six years of contributions comes to roughly seventy-five cents a year. I say roughly, because I have worked it out to only four decimal points: seventy-five cents and .7575 of the seventy-sixth cent.

  Seventy-five and three-quarters cents a year are, as the phrase makers put it, better than nothing. I know some phrase makers who would say seventy-five and three-quarters cents a year are not to be sneezed at. I am not sneezing at them because this small statistic—the result of dividing fifty dollars by sixty-six years of contributions—gives a remarkably accurate picture of my father’s grasp of fiscal matters. He felt about his visits to the monthly meetings of the First Neustadter Sick and Benevolent Association as the devout Moslem thinks about his pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Mecca. Only death could have stopped him from making the journey.

  Only death or my mother.

  What makes that evening memorable, the evening after the semi-finals for the 1927 All-Manhattan rally, is that my mother did something as odd in our own house as she had done the night before in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym.

  Supper was finished. My mother came to the kitchen table to collect our dishes. My father swayed away toward the wall, and in the same graceful movement, up out of his chair and into the bedroom.

  “What are you doing?” my mother said;

  “Getting dressed;” he said.

  “Dressed for what?” my mother said.

  “The society meeting,” my father said from the bedroom. “It’s First Neustadter tonight.”

  “Not tonight,” my mother said.

  My father appeared in the bedroom doorway. “Sure tonight,” he said. “The postcard came last week.”

  He disappeared into the bedroom and came back with a postcard. I don’t know if second-class mail had at that time been invented. If it had, no examples of it had yet penetrated to East Fourth Street. Aside from occasional letters sent by my mother’s relatives in Hungary and my father’s mishpoche in Austria, only three things came out of our mailbox in the hall downstairs every month: the gas bill, my copy of Boys’ Life, and the postcard reminding my father of the monthly First Neustadter Sick and Benevolent Association meeting. He waved it at my mother.

  “No,” my mother said.

  “What do you mean no?” my father said. It is a difficult question to ask in the sort of tone one gathers Oliver Twist used when he held up his bowl, but my father swung it. He said, “It says here on the card tonight is the meeting.”

  “What it says on the card you can forget,” my mother said. “What you should remember is what I’m telling you. No meeting. Not tonight. Tonight you’re staying home.”

  “But I have to go to the meeting,” my father said.

  “Next month you can go twice,” my mother said. “Tonight you’re staying home.”

  “Why?” my father said.

  “I want somebody here at home,” my mother said. She jerked her head in my direction. “Something might happen tonight while he’s at Lebenbaum’s.”

  5

  MY MOTHER’S CONCERN FOR what might happen while I was at Lebenbaum’s was as puzzling as her appearance earlier that day in Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder.

  What could happen at Lebenbaum’s had been happening with unexciting regularity day after day during the eight months I had been working in the candy store. Aside from the dollar a night Mr. Lebenbaum paid my mother for my services, I did not see how anything that went on in the store around the corner could interest her. Certainly none of it seemed to offer even a remote reason for keeping my father from attending his monthly meeting of the Erste Neustadter Krank und Unterstitzing Verein.

  Not because Mr. Lebenbaum had confided in me, but because after eight months certain aspects of a situation in which you are imbedded tend to become clear, I knew that my boss was disappointed in his candy store.

  Abe Lebenbaum was a bachelor in his late thirties. He lived with his mother on the top floor of the Avenue C tenement in which his candy store shared the street floor with Baltuch’s Hardware Store. Abe Lebenbaum’s personal history was not unlike that of my father. He, too, had come to America shortly before the First World War from some town in Austria. Both men had evaded the draft. My father by getting married and producing me. Abe Lebenbaum by hacking off his left thumb with a meat cleaver borrowed from Shumansky’s chicken store. Like thousands of other immigrants, both men had been hustled—nobody went voluntarily; everybody was steered into the shops by other immigrants who were already enmeshed—into the men’s clothing sweatshops of Allen Street. Here the similarity between Abe Lebenbaum and my father grows fuzzy.

  With the savings from his first American wages Abe sent for his Austrian mother. I think my father would have done the same but he didn’t have a mother. Abe began to be dissatisfied with his long days over a sewing machine in the Allen Street pants factory. My father may have been dissatisfied, too. But he had a wife and a son. He was forced, or felt the compulsion, to bring home a few dollars at the end of every week to get the family food on the table. Abe Lebenbaum obviously had to do the same. He had a mother up there on the sixth floor of his tenement. But he had something else, something my father did not have: a feeling that this was not the way things should be.

  Abe Lebenbaum’s view of America, as I heard him express it many time to cronies in the candy store, started where every immigrant’s view started: it was the goldene medina. Streets paved with gold. Public fountains spouting milk and honey. Every man a millionaire. Every man, that is, who was serious about becoming one.

  Nobody was more serious than Abe Lebenbaum. It did not take him long to appraise the gap between his seriousness and his achievement. He took a good hard look around him. Between East Fourth Street and Allen Street there was a surprising amount to see. What Abe saw most clearly was that the people who came closest to his notion of a millionaire were those who did not work for others, as he was doing, but owned their own businesses. The achievement of this clarity of vision coincided with the death of the owner of the candy store on the street floor of the tenement in which Abe and his mother lived. The widow wanted to get out. By borrowing the purchase price from several relatives, Abe got in.

  He didn’t exactly get in over his head, but he got in deep enough to make breathing difficult. The hard breathing provided a lesson in economics. Abe had not earned much in the pants shop on Allen Street, but what he had taken in had been his to carry home, and once he got home he could stop thinking about the shop until he had to show up for work the next morning. Now that he owned his own business, things were different.

  Abe had no way of knowing what he earned. He learned soon enough a lot of things he wished he did not have to learn. When he took in a penny for a Tootsie Roll, for example, or a nickel for a malted, or eleven cents for a pack of Sweet Caporals, Abe knew that a piece of that penny or nickel, a part of those eleven cents, had to go to the jobber who had sold him the candy, the malted powder, the chocolate syrup, and the cigarettes. Fair enough, of course. Why should a jobber give Abe Lebenbaum free Tootsie Rolls? He didn’t expect charity. He was a businessman. An American businessman. Abe expected to be treated like every other American businessman. He was. And that was the trouble.

  Like every other businessman Abe had to pay rent for the place in which he did business. He had to pay for the electricity that enabled him to display his wares. For a charwoman to come in and sweep. For a janitor to cart away his rubbish. For things Abe did not understand and so had to pay a bookkeeper who came in once a week to write the details into complicated forms that were then mailed to City Hall. />
  If all this added up to a lesson in the economics of the goldene medina, it also provided a lesson in what happens to the human body when it is transplanted from a small town in Austria to Avenue C in New York. Making a living by working from seven in the morning to six at night in an Allen Street pants factory was tough. Making a living by opening a candy store at six in the morning, so men on their way to jobs in Allen Street could buy their cigarettes, and keeping the candy store open until one in the morning, so the local whores would not be deprived of the only telephone in the neighborhood through which they conducted their business, was something else again. In fact, it was impossible. About a year after he stopped being an American sweatshop slave and became an American businessman, Abe Lebenbaum collapsed.

  That’s how I got my job.

  Walking toward it the night after my mother caused Troop 244 to lose the elimination finals in One-Flag Morse for the 1927 All-Manhattan rally, I was not so scared as I had been in the morning on my way to school. My big worry then had been what I was going to say to George Weitz, and George had solved that during lunch hour in the schoolyard by giving me the shot in the mouth that had landed him on my verbissenneh list.

  I never worried about people on that list. Once they were on it they became, in my mind, immobilized. There was nothing more they could do to me. They were now on a shelf, waiting their turn for whatever it was I could one day do to them.

  With George out of the way I was free, as I walked up Fourth Street toward Avenue C, to try to make some sense out of three events that made no sense to me at all. One, the visit to Mr. Imberotti and his son the night before in Meister’s Matzoh Bakery. Two, my mother’s appearance that afternoon in Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder. And three, her refusal to allow my father to attend his monthly burial society meeting tonight. The sequence made no sense. But my mother always made sense. I had my Aunt Sarah’s word for it.