Last Respects Read online

  I don’t know why. Nobody ever told me to stay off the docks at night. Certainly not my mother, who until the night before had never indicated that she knew what I did or where I went when I left the house. My friends and I never discussed it. But they obviously knew what I knew, even though I don’t know how I learned it: that once night came crashing down on East Fourth Street, the dock was a dangerous place. We stayed away.

  During the past twenty-four hours my mother had done so many things I would never have dreamed her capable of doing that now, when she led me across Lewis Street into the darkness of the dock area, I was not really surprised. I was still confused. I was still convinced that of the two of us, it was she and not I who had gone crazy. But I did not shake my hand loose as she led me toward the river.

  It was clearly visible up ahead. The moon, smashing silently in and out of a sky full of cotton-candy clouds, was bright enough to bring little dots of light to the tips of the gently heaving water. When we crossed from the cobblestones that formed the top part of the dock to the timbered section that jutted out into the water, I could see three barges moored in a line on the downtown side. They must have arrived while I was in cheder, too late in the afternoon to be unloaded. The piles of coal on the barge decks stood up high against the Brooklyn skyline like great big black ice cream cones turned upside down. Only two barges were tied to the uptown side of the dock. They had apparently come in early that morning, while I was in school, or late the day before. Except for a few scattered boards below the wheelhouse, their stacks of lumber had been unloaded. The third mooring, at the end of the dock, was vacant. My mother led me to the end of the first of the two barges.

  “Are you cold?” she said.

  This time I was surprised. I’d had the feeling that from the moment we left the candy store she had forgotten my presence.

  “No,” I said.

  “Sit down.”

  My mother sat down on the broad raised beam that formed the perimeter of the dock. She sat at an angle, so that while her knees pointed toward Brooklyn she faced uptown, looking out across the empty mooring to the place where the river seemed to spread out in all directions, like the splayed end of a lollipop stick that’s been chewed too long. I sat down beside her, also at an angle, facing the way she was facing, and all at once I became aware of the silence.

  It seemed a curious word, especially in the mind of an adolescent, because as soon as I was off my feet I became aware of all sorts of sounds around me, but they seemed to be knitted together, like the wool of my sweater, to form a protective layer against the noises behind me, the noises that belonged at the other side of Lewis Street, where it was safe to be at night.

  I could hear the creaking of the ropes that held the barges to the black iron capstans. And the delicate slap of the water against the piles. Small hissing sounds, like George Weitz spitting out the seeds of an orange he’d chiseled in the schoolyard during lunch hour. And the gentle groaning of the planks under me as the dock fought and held the endless back-and-forth movement of the river. And the choked purr of a tug engine guiding a string of barges somewhere behind me or out of sight up ahead. And the occasional muted boom of a steam whistle. And somewhere far away the tinkle of a bell carrying some message from one part of a barge to another, sounds that had meaning for the mysterious men who worked on the river, but to me were only part of a silence I had never heard before.

  Laced through the silence was the sour smell of oil-streaked water. The sharp pleasant stink of rotting piles. The clean cold knife-edge breath of the hosed-down piles of coal. And the gummy odor of the stacked lumber. Over it all, over the smells and the knitted-together silence, the clouds hung low, shoving and poking and wrestling each other as though fighting for the privilege of protecting the moon from wasting too much of its yellow light on me and my mother.

  She made a funny little noise, as though she had tried to stifle a cough. I turned to look at her, and I suddenly remembered a picture in my history book. A picture of two Indians on a bluff, staring out across the broad Mississippi, watching LaSalle and his men come down the great big river that until this moment had belonged to them. The breath caught in my throat. My mother had that same look on her face, a look of wonder, as though she was seeing something she had never seen before. Then I heard the low rhythmic chug of a motor. I turned back to the river, and I saw what my mother was seeing.

  A motorboat had appeared out of the broad, uptown part of the river, the part that seemed to spread out in all directions like that chewed end of a lollipop stick. The boat was shaped like a small tug, except that there was no smokestack, and it sat very low in the water. I knew most of the river traffic, but I had never before seen a boat like this one. I wondered if that was why my mother was watching it with that strange look on her face, and then I realized that was exactly what this boat was doing. It was cutting across the river at an angle, heading toward us.

  I took another look at my mother. The look on her face had changed. Now she seemed pleased. Then the motor cut out and I turned back to the river. The boat was gliding in toward the Fourth Street dock. When it eased past the open mooring, the boat turned gently toward the second barge, almost directly below the place on the raised plank where my mother and I were sitting. The boat slid along the river side of the moored barge. There was a low scraping noise, a slightly louder bump, and then the boat disappeared behind the wheelhouse of the barge.

  My mother leaned forward. She was obviously listening. So was I, but all I could hear was the slap of the river against the piles and the creak of the ropes tugging at the capstans.

  “Ma,” I said.

  “Ssshhh!” she said.

  It was not exactly a spirited exchange, but the two syllables seemed to unlock something that had been sitting between me and what was happening. All at once I was excited. My mother must have sensed this, because she put her hand on my shoulder as though to soothe me. I think that was the first moment in my fourteen years when it occurred to me that maybe I liked her.

  She leaned forward to look down on the barge, and I did the same. Thus I became aware of a new series of sounds from the river side of the barge, at the place where the boat had vanished.

  Dull thumps. As though sacks were being dropped on a wooden floor. Several squeaks. Hinges? A stuck window being forced? More squeaks. No, not a window. More like a door. Then a surprising thing happened. The door of the barge wheelhouse, the door facing the dock, came open with an angry snarl of squeaks, exactly like the sounds I had heard from the other side of the wheelhouse. Out the open door came a tall, slender man in a black turtleneck sweater. That’s all I could see in the moonlight. A tall silhouette. And a black sweater that came up around his neck. Thin sort of guy. Wiry. He was carrying what looked like a sack, an awkwardly shaped package that seemed familiar. Another thing I noticed. He carried it without effort. The weight didn’t bother him.

  He dropped the sack on the barge deck and went back into the wheelhouse. A few minutes later he came out again with another package. He dropped it on top of the first and again went back into the wheelhouse. He did this several times, while my mother and I, hidden by the shadows from the wheel-house, watched. There was something about the way he did it that made pleasant watching. He moved easily, smoothly, and efficiently. Everybody else I had ever seen who carried things did it with resentment. The street cleaners who showed up on our block to empty the garbage cans did it as though they were being forced at the point of a gun to handle something detestable. This man handled these sacks as though he had made them himself and was proud of them. By the time the man came out again and there were six packages on the deck, I knew what it was about them that had looked familiar.

  These packages were exactly like the ones I had seen the night before, stacked in the Meister’s Matzoh Bakery storeroom through which my mother and I had been led by Mr. Imberotti’s son on our way upstairs to the meeting in the kitchen. The same kind of sacking. The same belt of tightly cinche
d wire around the middle. The same odd, clean, brand-new smell, as though the packages had been put together from freshly woven sacking and wire that had just come out of the factory.

  “Call him,” my mother said in Yiddish.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Him.”

  She nodded down toward the deck of the barge. The tall, wiry man in the black turtleneck sweater was moving back into the wheelhouse. He disappeared.

  “What’s his name?” I said.

  “How should I know?” my mother said. “To call somebody, you have to know his name?”

  The man reappeared in the wheelhouse door, lugging the seventh package wrapped in burlap and belted with wire.

  “Hey,” I said.

  In English, of course. Or so I thought. I was too inexperienced to realize that this single syllable is the cornerstone of Esperanto.

  “Hey,” I said again.

  What the man did when he heard my voice told me at once that whatever activity he was engaged in was not one the cops would consider amusing. He dumped the seventh package as though he had suddenly discovered it was red-hot, and he dived back into the wheelhouse.

  My mother muttered something savage. In Yiddish, of course. Which is what jolted me. In English it’s not so dirty. Before I could figure out if she had addressed me, the heavens, or the man in the turtleneck sweater, she had swung her legs over the side of the dock. And before I could figure out what was happening, my mother had heaved herself down from the dock to the deck of the barge. She gave me no time to worry or think. My mother reached up and dragged me down after her.

  “Give your legs a shake,” she said.

  Shaking her own, she was in the wheelhouse, across the narrow floor, and out the door at the other side before the man in the turtleneck sweater could get his second leg over the edge of the barge. My mother grabbed the first one with both hands and hauled. She tumbled back into my arms. The man in the turtleneck sweater tumbled back into hers.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  Then, for a few moments, nobody said anything. Not counting grunts, that is. Everybody was doing that. All three of us. Then the grunting stopped and we were frozen in a tableau that I think would undoubtedly have been funny to an observer. But there was no observer. Just the three participants. My mother, the tall man in the turtleneck sweater, and me. And we were sitting on the barge deck, in a small circle, the way the teacher used to arrange us in kindergarten class for a game of patty-cake, staring at each other in the moonlight. I was still too confused to be really scared, but whatever fear may have remained with me began to ease away as I stared at the man in the turtleneck sweater.

  Looking down on him from the dock, I had noted only his height and the rangy ease with which he moved and jockeyed the wire-belted sacks. Now, sitting on the barge deck, I was looking up into his face. It was like all the rest of him, long and lean, and quite clearly trembling on the edge of some expression to which he didn’t seem to be quite sure he wanted to succumb.

  Fast, in a matter of seconds, as though my mind were clicking off a series of quick camera shots, I recorded that he was good-looking, his hair was blond as my mother’s, he needed a shave, and on the side of his boat, which was tied to the barge rail behind him, appeared a name in large gold letters: Jefferson Davis II. Then the man succumbed to the emotion about which he had seemed not to be certain. He started to laugh.

  “Jesus,” he said. “A broad and a kid.”

  My mother said to me in Yiddish, “Tell him I want to talk to him.”

  I told him, and the man said, “Why you talking for her?”

  “She’s my mother,” I said. “She don’t speak English.”

  The laughter eased out of his face. He gave my mother a sharp look, hit me with another one, then said, “Okay, but let’s get the hell inside. We don’t want an audience.”

  He stood up, took my mother’s hand, and pulled her to her feet. There was something about the way he did it that was not East Fourth Street. Courtliness was still outside my real-life experience.

  “This okay?”

  The man had led my mother into the wheelhouse and was gesturing toward a bench covered with checked blue-and-white oilcloth.

  “What does he want?” my mother said.

  “He wants to know if you want to sit there,” I said.

  My mother gave the man a suspicious look. “What difference does it make where I sit?” she said.

  I translated, and the man said, “I want her to be comfortable.”

  “He wants you to be comfortable,” I said to my mother.

  She sat down and said, “To be comfortable on a ship a person has to be a fish.”

  “Okay,” the man said. “If you don’t mind, now, ma’am, you mind telling me what you’re doing here?”

  “I want to buy eighteen bottles of whiskey,” my mother said.

  The man stroked his long blond-fuzzed chin, sent a quick glance out the wheelhouse window, then said, “From who?”

  “From you,” my mother said.

  “Why do you want to come to me to buy whiskey?” the man said.

  He spoke casually, as though he were talking about the weather, and I tried to keep my translations on the same emotional level, but I sensed a tightening in the man’s voice. Not in my mother’s. She sat up straight on the oilcloth-covered bench, her hands folded in her lap, and spoke quietly but firmly, as though she knew exactly what she was saying because she had given a great deal of thought to her words, and she did not want to be distracted or misunderstood by irrelevant comments.

  “Those sacks,” she said. She nodded to the pile of sacks the tall man had transferred from his motorboat, carried across the barge through the wheelhouse, and dumped on the dock-side deck. “Grade A milk for Sheffield’s store you’re not delivering.”

  After my translation the man took a few steps, four to the door of the wheelhouse, four back, watching his legs as he did so. They were neatly encased in attractive and obviously not inexpensive dark brown boots that laced up to a couple of inches below his knees. Finally he looked up. Gently, through a small smile that did not hide the edge in his voice, the man said, “Ma’am, I think you better tell me who you are.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” my mother said. “I’ve been working for Imberotti.”

  “How long?”

  “Since Prohibition,” my mother said. “Almost eight years.”

  I was too busy translating to do justice to my own astonishment. Eight years? That meant from the time I was six. How could she have been doing anything for so long without my being aware of it? Answers later, I told myself hurriedly. What had the man just said?

  “Ask her how much work she’s been doing for Imberotti,” he said.

  “First only a little,” my mother said. “They needed a bottle for the schul for Simchas Torah, but this Prohibition it said no, so I found out about Imberotti, and I said if you gave me a bottle I would bring back the money after I sold it to the schul.”

  “Imberotti trusted you?” the man said.

  “Why not?” my mother said. “I look like a crook?”

  The tall man had been watching her as I translated, but now he seemed to bend down slightly, as though to bring my mother into sharper focus. “No, ma’am,” he said finally. “You certainly don’t look like a crook, ma’am.”

  “So why shouldn’t Imberotti trust me?” my mother said.

  The tall man smiled. It put little nicks into his cheeks just above the corners of his mouth. “Ma’am,” he said, “Imberotti would be a fool not to trust you. But now you want to buy from me, so I assume it’s you that don’t trust him.”

  “No,” my mother said. She shook her head firmly and again said, “No. I trust Imberotti. He is an honest man. But not with me. He is not treating me right.”

  “In what way?” the tall man said.

  “For five years, a bottle for the schul, a bottle for a bar mitzvah, two bottles for a wedding, maybe three, all right, for that
I’m good enough.” An unmistakable touch of bitterness surfaced in my mother’s voice. “Don’t misunderstand me,” she said. “For what I’m good enough to Imberotti, I’m also grateful. It’s bitter here on Fourth Street. Very hard. Bread and butter costs. My husband doesn’t bring home much to the table. In the slack season he doesn’t bring home anything. Everybody has to help. My son, here, he works in Lebenbaum’s.”

  “What’s that?” the man said.

  “The candy store on Avenue C,” my mother said. “Between what my husband makes in the shop, and what the boy makes in the candy store, and what I make from Imberotti, we’ve been eating. But not a penny to put away if somebody gets sick. You live for a little extra. This Shumansky wedding it could be a little extra.”

  “What Shumansky wedding?” the man said.

  “This dope, he has the chicken store on the Avenue D corner,” my mother said. “His daughter in a couple weeks she’s marrying a boy from uptown by Lenox Assembly Rooms. I went to see Shumansky and I asked him how many bottles he’ll need. Eighteen, he said, but he wasn’t sure he could buy from me.”

  “Why not?” the tall man said.

  “A man came to see him, Shumansky said. The man said he shouldn’t buy from me because I couldn’t deliver such a big order.”

  “Is that true?” the tall man said.

  My mother gave him a look. Don’t ask me to describe it. Go read a biography of Queen Elizabeth. Not the one married to the polo player. I mean the virgin. The way she looked at the Spanish ambassador. Or some other jerk she thought was a jerk. That might give you some idea, but only an idea. I am convinced nobody ever looked at anybody the way my mother looked at that tall man in the high-laced boots and the black turtleneck sweater on that moonlit night in the wheelhouse of that barge moored to the Fourth Street dock on the East River.