Last Respects Read online

  “Inside her own head, I mean,” my Aunt Sarah from New Haven said to me years later. “The trouble was she never bothered to explain where she was going. When your mother made up her mind to do something, she figured out the steps she had to go through to do it, and then she started out. If you were lucky, you didn’t get in her way.”

  Well, on that evening I was still lucky. I had not yet got in her way. She had merely ruined my chance at the All-Manhattan One-Flag Morse medal, and then made me look like a horse’s ass in front of the yoinehs in Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder. My father, on the other hand, had not been so lucky. She had just switched signals on the subject of his First Neustadter Sick and Benevolent Society meeting. Well, that was his lookout. Life with my mother might have proved interesting to Clarence Day. To me it was a matter of every man for himself.

  “Hello,” I said when I came into the candy store.

  “You’re late,” Mrs. Lebenbaum said.

  Abe Lebenbaum’s mother would have said the same thing if I had arrived in midafternoon. “You’re late” were the only two English words she could pronounce.

  “No, I’m not,” I said to her in Yiddish. I pointed to the twenty-four-inch-in-diameter octagon-shaped walnut-framed Seth Thomas on the wall under the Moxie sign. “It’s not even seven-thirty,” I said. “I’m early.”

  “A brightly lighted and gloriously glowing blessing on your shining head,” Mrs. Lebenbaum said in Yiddish. “That a boy your age should understand in his heart how much my Abe needs his sleep, it’s tokke a miracle.”

  The miracle was not that I understood how much Abe Lebenbaum needed sleep. The miracle was that his mother did not seem to know how little he got. If Abe Lebenbaum had been born forty years later, he could have thumbed his nose at the economics of the candy store business. Let the jobbers take their Tootsie Rolls and drop dead. Or, preferably, their O. Henrys, which in those days cost a dime and were as big as a stunted Hebrew National salami. If fate had been a little more kind with the calendar and made Abe Lebenbaum a young man of today, he could have had his choice of the hero’s role in almost any current Swedish movie or American best-seller. The tragedy of Abe Lebenbaum’s life was that he hit the scene before his time. Think of it. This was only 1927, and already he was a full-fledged, in-there-pitching, totally dedicated sex maniac.

  His physical collapse, which brought me onto Abe Lebenbaum’s payroll, was attributed to inhumanly long hours of overwork behind the cracked marble counter of his candy store. No man can make chocolate malteds and sell Sweet Caps nineteen hours a day and remain on his feet. Or so East Fourth Street was led to believe. Hiring me as his assistant did get Abe Lebenbaum off his feet, but not quite in the manner the people of our neighborhood thought.

  After I appeared on the scene, the schedule in the candy store went like this. Abe opened up at six in the morning. He remained on duty until eleven. His mother came down to the candy store at eleven and relieved him. He went upstairs for a snack and a nap. At one in the afternoon he came down and relieved his mother. Abe remained on duty until about six-thirty, when his mother came down to take over until I arrived, then he went back upstairs for supper and his second nap. At ten he came down so I could go home, and he stayed on the job until one in the morning, when he closed up shop.

  That was the schedule.

  Now to put this schedule together with the sources of income that kept the candy store going. These were three. First, of course, there was the sale of candies, malteds, soft drinks, cigarettes, and an occasional nickel cigar. Second, the slot machine in the back room. And third, the telephone booth in the far corner near the back door.

  The relationship of the sale of Tootsie Rolls, malteds, and cigarettes to Abe Lebenbaum’s profit was not unlike that of a dripping faucet on Riverside Drive to the water level of the Hudson River up at Poughkeepsie. The slot machine, on the other hand, was very important. When the collector came around every Saturday morning and unlocked the steel drawer at the bottom, Abe Lebenbaum received one half the nickels that had accumulated during the week. But it was the telephone booth that kept him in business.

  The only private phone in the area was in the home of Dr. Weitz on Fourth Street between Avenue D and Avenue C. He needed it for his business. And he could afford it, of course, because in the end his patients paid for it. But it was not available to the residents of the neighborhood. I mean a resident of East Fourth Street could not ring the doorbell of the Weitz brownstone and say to George’s father, “I’d like to use your phone, please, here’s a jit.” A jit was a nickel. Derivation: the fare for a ride on what was then the city’s main form of public transportation: the jitney bus. Okay, so Dr. Weitz has been ruled out, but the resident of East Fourth Street still wanted to communicate with someone by telephone. What other avenues were available to him? He could go up to Lesser’s drugstore, on the corner of Avenue C and Eighth Street. Mr. Lesser had a phone booth. Or he could use the phone booth in Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store.

  Very few people did either. Making telephone service available to all on East Fourth Street was not unlike dotting filling stations all over the Garden of Eden. Who needed it? Answer: the Zabriskie sisters.

  When I first became aware of the Zabriskie sisters, there were four of them. Anyway, that’s what people on East Fourth Street said, or believed. But I never saw the Zabriskie sisters in a group. Except as a piece of gossip on the block, therefore, I don’t really know of my own knowledge that shortly before I joined Troop 244 one of the Zabriskie sisters married a barge captain who put in regularly with his loads of lumber at the Fourth Street dock, and went to live with him on Staten Island.

  The three that remained, Lya, Pauline, and Marie, I saw quite frequently. But I always saw them one at a time. I was never sure which one I was seeing because they all looked alike: short, squat, and solid. Not uncomely, but not fragile. Built close to the ground and, with undergarments of rubberized strength, built up. Bright red hair, obviously dyed, of a crinkly steel-wool type. I can see the Zabriskie sisters now, looking exactly like the wardrobe mistresses in Warner Bros. movies starring Ruby Keeler about backstage life. Sex symbols change, of course, and I was not a very good judge of the time. What kept me awake at night were images of Viola Dana locked in complicated contortions with a senior patrol leader of Troop 244 wearing a uniform that looked, from the merit badges sewed to the sleeve, suspiciously like mine. But the Zabriskie sisters must have had something, because whatever it was they called their mouse trap, the world of the time certainly made a beaten path to their door. It was on the sixth floor of the tenement next to the one in which Abe Lebenbaum lived with his mother.

  I would not be surprised, since they were so similar in appearance and I never saw more than one at a time, to be told at this late date that there had been only one Zabriskie sister, a lady who had moved around fast and preferred to be known as three. I wouldn’t be surprised, but I wouldn’t believe it, either. No one person could have handled the traffic that moved through that sixth-floor tenement flat.

  This traffic was controlled by the telephone booth in Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store. I’m not saying that during my hours on the job, I didn’t sell an occasional Tootsie Roll or once in a while whip up a malted. But most of my time was spent running to the phone booth and taking messages for the Zabriskie sisters. The bell started to ring while Mrs. Lebenbaum was knotting the bandanna more securely under her chin. She lived in constant fear that when she stepped out into the street, some random gust of wind would blow the sheitl from her head. Hurrying down the store to the phone booth, I called back across my shoulder to the old lady, “Where’s Abe?”

  I knew where Abe was, but it was part of the ritual of my job to pretend I didn’t.

  “He went upstairs a little early,” Mrs. Lebenbaum said. “I came down early so he could go up and get a little extra sleep. The poor boy, he’s so tired.”

  He’d be more tired by the time she got upstairs. I grabbed the phone.

  �
�Hello, Pauline?”

  True, my voice had not yet changed, but what kind of an idiot was this to mistake me for Pauline?

  “No,” I said. “This is the candy store downstairs.”

  “Oh, you the kid takes the messages?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Listen, this is Ted Werner.”

  “Wait a minute. Let me get the pencil.” It was tucked into the small notebook Abe Lebenbaum kept in the clip nailed under the shelf below the instrument. I pulled it out and flipped it open. “Okay,” I said. “Who’d you say?”

  “Ted Werner. I wanna come over tonight.”

  “Pauline?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hold it.” I checked the reservations Abe Lebenbaum had scribbled during the day. “Not till eleven o’clock,” I said.

  “Eleven o’clock? It’s not even seven-thirty now. What the hellmy gonna do until eleven?”

  I refrained from making the obvious suggestion, and turned the page.

  “How about Marie?” I said.

  “Not again, that broad. Jesus. How about Lya?”

  “Hold it,” I said.

  I did not have to thumb another page. All I had to do was look at the clock. Lya was Abe Lebenbaum’s current favorite. I pulled my head back into the booth and made a calculation. Mrs. Lebenbaum had said her son had gone upstairs early. When it was Pauline or Marie, he always went upstairs at six-fifteen. But whatever it was Abe did with Lya did not take as long. With Lya he said I should give him a half hour. Thirty-five minutes to be on the safe side. Abe Lebenbaum was devoted to his mother. He made it a point every night to get out of the Zabriskie flat, scoot across the roof to his own tenement, get down to the flat in which he lived with his mother, and be seated at her kitchen table, eating the evening meal she had set out for him, before she came up from the candy store after I relieved her at seven.

  “How soon can you get over?” I said into the phone.

  “I’m on Fourteenth Street,” Mr. Ted Werner said. “Say a half hour?”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Werner, you said?”

  “Yeah, Ted Werner.”

  “Okay,” I said, writing down his name. “Please be on time. She’s very busy.” I came out of the booth and said to Mrs. Lebenbaum, “Could you wait a few minutes? I have to deliver a message.”

  “Could I wait?” the little old lady said. “Of course I could wait. What’s more important than business?”

  I don’t know if she completely understood the nature of the business, but I’m pretty sure she knew the telephone messages helped pay the rent on the store. She had told me many times that she regretted her inability to speak English because when she was alone in the store, she couldn’t answer the phone, and she was sure this meant a loss of revenue. Actually, it didn’t. Most calls for the Zabriskie sisters came during the evening, when I was on duty, or later, when Abe Lebenbaum came down to relieve me. Between the two of us, Abe and I booked them through the night. Abe himself took all their spare time, for which he did not pay. The girls could not have made a living without his phone booth, and if it had not been for the quarter he charged them for every message we took and logged into the notebook under the shelf in the phone booth, he probably would have had to sell out and go back to the pants shop on Allen Street.

  “Be right back,” I said to Mrs. Lebenbaum.

  “A blazing delight on your golden head,” the old lady said. “Don’t run or you’ll fall.”

  But I did run. The prosperity of the Zabriskie sisters depended on timing. I was out of breath when one of them opened the door for me. I had given up long ago trying to figure out which was which.

  “For Lya,” I said. “Half past seven. A guy named Werner.”

  “Half past seven,” the sister in the doorway muttered, fumbling in the pocket of her red and green kimono. “Werner.”

  She pulled out her small leather purse, snapped it open, fished up a quarter, and gave it to me. Even though I was out of breath, I ran all the way down the six flights of stairs and back to the candy store. I hated to leave Mrs. Lebenbaum alone in the store with the ringing phone. The sound made her nervous. As though the store was a sack of flour and the ringing phone was a hole through which the contents were running out. When I came into the store the phone was ringing, but that was not what made me nervous. What made me nervous was the sight of my mother and father standing at the marble counter. They were talking to Mrs. Lebenbaum across the seltzer taps. Anyway, my mother was talking. My father was swaying away from her, as though he had been nailed to the floor at her side but was trying to dissociate himself from whatever she was cooking up. I stopped in the doorway.

  “Benny, answer!” Mrs. Lebenbaum shouted. “Answer!”

  I ran down to the store and into the phone booth and answered. I don’t know if I answered properly. I had a dim feeling it was a call for Pauline, and the man wanted to spend the night next Tuesday, and I must have written it down properly in the notebook, because I don’t recall being bawled out later by Abe Lebenbaum for getting anything wrong. But I handled the transaction automatically, staring all the time out the glass window of the phone booth at the trio up front. I was absolutely certain my mother had not set foot in Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store more than once a week on the day she came to collect my salary. I was even more certain my father had never set foot in the store. What were they doing here now?

  “Well?”

  Not “well,” of course. It was actually Nu? In a loud accusatory tone. I came out of the phone booth on the double.

  “Sorry,” I said in Yiddish to Mrs. Lebenbaum. “I had to write down the message.”

  “Business?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The little old lady beamed. “Good,” she said. “So I’ll say good night.”

  She said it to my mother and my father, then to me, and left the store, one hand on top of her head to keep the sheitl from being whipped away by the nonexistent wind.

  “You come with me,” my mother said.

  When I realized she had addressed me, I said, “Now?”

  It seemed to me she was repeating the scene we had played the night before when she had appeared in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein gym.

  “Yes,” my mother said. “Now.”

  “But I’m working.”

  I wondered all at once if she had gone crazy. She had certainly acted that way the night before. She had been acting that way today. It occurred to me that maybe that was why she seemed to me to be a stranger.

  “Come on,” my mother said.

  “The store,” I said. “I’m all alone in the store.”

  “Never mind the store,” she said. “Your father will stay here and take care of the store.”

  Grasping the insanity of this reply did not stop my mind from clicking into place the answer to why my mother had not allowed my father to go this night to his regular monthly meeting of the First Neustadter Sick and Benevolent Society. She had planned this. She had wanted him available to replace me in Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store.

  “He can’t answer the phone,” I said in Yiddish. “He doesn’t speak enough English.”

  “He doesn’t have to speak good English to let it ring,” my mother said. “Stop wasting time. I’m in a hurry.”

  6

  MY MOTHER LOOKED STRANGE as she led me around the corner from the candy store toward our tenement. Her neat little face was set in the tight, turned-inward look that I had noticed for the first time the night before when she had led me west from the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House to the meeting with Mr. Imberotti in Meister’s Matzoh Bakery on Lafayette Street. Seeing that look now for the second time, I saw what Mr. Imberotti’s son must have seen in the kitchen over the matzoh bakery. That look made my mother look sexy. The notion that my mother was sexy was irritating. What was she doing looking sexy when I was fighting to retain my sanity by trying to figure out the nature of her insanity?

  All I could see, when we reached the fro
nt of our tenement at the Lewis Street corner, was that she was not heading for home. My mother took my hand, led me past the entrance to our house, and across the street to the east side of Lewis. Where we were heading was obvious. That’s what made it unbelievable.

  What made it unbelievable was that night had come down on East Fourth Street. Not twilight. Not dusk. Not the warm glow of evening. Night. And it did not descend, or come creeping along on tiny cat feet, or ease its way in like rosy-fingered dawn. Night came to East Fourth Street the way, years later, nuclear fission came to Hiroshima. Boom. End of daylight.

  Street lighting provided by the city stopped at the lamppost in the middle of the block between Avenue D and Lewis Street. After that it was every citizen for himself, and if he could see in the dark he had a better chance than most for continuing to be a citizen. At the Lewis Street corner the only available outdoor light came filtering through the dirty windows of Gordon’s saloon, and what filtered through was not much more than you could get in the middle of the night from the numbers on the radium dial of an Ingersoll dollar watch. After sundown, at the other side of Lewis Street, just before the dock area began, you either carried your own light, or you did not cross to the other side.

  To my knowledge, until that night nobody, at least nobody I knew, had ever crossed to the other side of Lewis Street after dark. Beyond the Lewis Street boundary lay the dock, and the dock was gentile terrain.

  This area was divided in half. The left or uptown side belonged to the Forest Box & Lumber Company. The right or downtown side belonged to the Burns Coal Company. Both were supplied by barges that were shoved up and down the river by jaunty little tugs. From my bedroom window I could see them, usually during the day, once in a while at night, easing the barges stacked with lumber or piled with coal into place against the Fourth Street dock moorings, or towing them out empty for the return trip up the river or down. The bargemen were all gentiles. So were the men who worked for the Forest Box & Lumber Company and the Burns Coal Company. This did not stop me and George Weitz and Hot Cakes Rabinowitz and Chink Alberg and the other kids on the block from roaming the dock area. But only during the day. Once night clapped down like a box top on East Fourth Street, the docks and the river became forbidden ground.