Last Respects Read online

  “What do you think?” she said.

  The tall man smiled again. “I think you could deliver anything, ma’am,” he said quietly.

  Why this reply should have made my mother blush, I don’t know, but it did, and in the pause I had a couple of moments to ponder the way the tall man talked. I had noticed it when he first referred to me as the kid. He had not said kid. He had said “kee-yid.” Now I noticed when he called my mother ma’am he had pronounced it “may-yim.” Just the same it seemed pretty late in this conversation for my mother to blush because of the way the tall man in boots pronounced his words. There was something more to it, I felt. I was dead right, but I didn’t know what I was right about. It was my first contact with a southern accent.

  “I knew what was happening,” my mother said. “A fool I’m not. On eighteen bottles Imberotti wants the profit for himself. I went to see him last night and I told him. I said if I’ve been good enough for five years for a bottle for the schul and a bottle or two for a bar mitzvah, then I’m good enough for the eighteen bottles for the Shumansky wedding.” My mother paused. She sat up straighter on the bench. “That’s why I came to you.”

  “How did you know about me?” the tall man said.

  My mother nodded toward the wheelhouse window. “We live up there,” she said. “The building on the Lewis Street corner. I’ve been watching you make deliveries for a long time. I don’t know for who, but I know what you deliver. If you give me the eighteen bottles for Shumansky’s wedding, I’ll give you half the profit.”

  The tall man started pacing again. This time, however, I noticed that he wasn’t watching his boots. He was watching me.

  “Ma’am,” he said finally. “I think this is something you and I better talk over alone.”

  I translated. My mother blushed again. What was the matter with her? She looked like a pomegranate. Pomegranates were very big on East Fourth Street. Even with people who had never heard of the Song of Solomon. On the Avenue C pushcarts pomegranates were cheaper than oranges. My mother looked down at her hands.

  “All right,” she said finally. She said it to me. “You go back to the candy store and tell Papa to go home,” my mother said. “But don’t tell him anything else. You understand?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What did she say?” the tall man said.

  I told him.

  He smiled. “You’re a smart boy,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  Sharply, my mother said, “What did he ask?”

  I told her.

  “Ask his name first,” she said.

  I did.

  For some reason the question made the tall man laugh. “Walter,” he said. “Tell her my name is Walter.” I told her, and he said, “What’s yours, kid?”

  “Benny,” I said. “Benny Kramer.”

  “And your mama’s name?” he said.

  “Mrs. Kramer,” I said.

  Walter laughed again. “I know that,” he said. “I mean her first name.”

  Nobody had ever asked me that before, but my father called her Chanah, so I said, “Chanah.”

  “Chanah,” Walter said. “That’s very nice.” He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a dime. “Here you are, Benny,” he said. “You go get yourself some candy and don’t come back. I’ll see your mama gets home safe after we finish our talk.”

  I was across Lewis Street, halfway up Fourth toward the Avenue D corner, before it occurred to me to wonder how, with the translator out of the way, they could do any talking.

  7

  FORTY YEARS LATER, ON my way out of the Battenberg Funeral Home, I was still wondering.

  Up to this day of her death in the Peretz Memorial Hospital, after living in this country for more than sixty years, my mother had managed to learn just about enough English to get her through the check-out desk of the supermarket around the corner from her apartment house on 78th Avenue in Queens, but no more. On the night in 1927 when Walter Sinclair came into our lives out of the northern reaches of the East River, my mother had not yet learned any English. As for Walter, he may have later learned some Yiddish. But on that first night, when we met on the barge to which he had moored the Jefferson Davis II, he did not even know what a goniff was.

  When Walter found out, it didn’t do him much good. It is a word that defies pronunciation by people born south of the Mason-Dixon line. Walter Sinclair had been a Chattanooga boy. Perhaps he still was. Or rather, perhaps he had gone back to being one. On this gloomy Sunday when I was setting out to identify the body of my mother in the Queens County morgue, I had not seen or heard about Walter Sinclair for forty years. Once we left East Fourth Street, my mother never mentioned his name.

  Mentioning it now to myself, as I came out into the street, gave me an uneasy feeling. All the memories that were part of those early East Side days had been tucked away for years, at the back of a bottom drawer in my head, a drawer that I never opened. I signaled to a taxi coming my way up Queens Boulevard.

  “Where to?” the driver said after I climbed in.

  “Queens Memorial Hospital,” I said. “Is it far from here?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” the driver said. “Twenty. Somebody sick?”

  “No, somebody dead,” I wanted to say.

  But I didn’t. I suddenly couldn’t believe she was dead. Because suddenly I was not seeing the shriveled, broken old body lying in a hospital bed, the scarcely held together scraps of skin and bones to which I had muttered soothing platitudes a few hours before Dr. Sabinson called that morning to tell me “It’s all over. She went in her sleep sometime during the night.”

  Suddenly the taxi and my grim errand seemed to fall away around me, like the shell of a hard-boiled egg. Suddenly it was like being in a movie theater. No, in the movie itself. Suddenly I was seeing a beautiful girl. Gold-yellow hair piled high on her head. Her willowy, restless body encased in one of the black sheaths she sewed for herself. Her high cheekbones, pink with excitement, in her gaunt white face. Her blue eyes bright with anticipation. Suddenly, in the taxi that was taking me to the morgue where I had to identify her body, I was seeing my mother not as I had seen her the day before in the Peretz Memorial Hospital, but as she must have looked in 1927 on the night of the Shumansky wedding.

  She wasn’t dead because she wasn’t real. She was better than real. She was Mary Pickford. Made-up, costumed, waiting with every nerve tingling for Mr. Griffith to summon her before the cameras. And talking Yiddish, of course.

  “Either eat fast,” she said. “Or stop eating. There’s a lot to do tonight.”

  My father and I were sitting at the kitchen table. He had not gone to work that day. His shop had entered the annual slack season, and he was working half-weeks. My mother’s remark could have been addressed to either one of us. But I was aware of what had to be done that night, and my father was not, so I knew my mother had addressed him. My father swayed away from his plate, as though my mother had snatched at it.

  “I’m finished,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” my mother said. “All of a sudden my kreplach are not good enough for you?”

  “They’re A Number One,” my father said. “The best you ever made. But tonight all of a sudden sopper is so early. So my moogin is surprised.”

  “Carry your moogin over to the Erste Neustadter Krank und Unterstitzing Verein,” my mother said. “That always does you more good than a krissteer.”

  There was some truth in this remark. After his daily dose of Saratoga #2, my father’s favorite home remedy was an enema, but the salutary effect of his monthly burial society meeting on his bowels was not to be dismissed.

  “The special meeting is tomorrow,” my father said.

  “You’re crazy,” my mother said.

  She could have said you’re wrong, but not in our house. In her conversations with my father, my mother did not shillyshally. She went for impact.

  She said, “The meeting is tonight.”

  My father looked
startled, but that did not stop him from swaying out of my mother’s reach as she grabbed his plate.

  “It said in the postal tomorrow,” my father said.

  It had. I’d read the postcard carefully when I brought it up from the mailbox four days before. It was important, my mother had told me, to get my father out of the house on the night of the Shumansky wedding. She had hoped his burial society special meeting would take place on the same night. My mother had relied on hope because she had no way of actually checking the date. Her contempt for my father’s one activity that took place without her supervision was so great, and of such long standing, that she had never bothered to note exactly when his meetings took place.

  When I gave her the card indicating the special meeting was scheduled for the night after the Shumansky wedding, I thought: Uh-oh, trouble. Not, however, to my mother. She handled the small obstacle in a way that, I see now, was typical.

  She put the postcard on the sideboard in the front room, next to the cut-glass bowl full of pomegranates, oranges, and bananas. This was the resting place for all mail that came into our house. When he came home from the shop my father read the card and put it back on the sideboard before he came out into the kitchen for supper. None of us ever carried mail from the sideboard in the front room into other parts of the house. Not even the gas bill. Communications from the outside world were treated like visitors from an upper level of society to which we could not even hope to aspire. Until we found out why they had condescended to call upon us—it was always reasonable, and therefore safest, to assume that strangers had hostile intentions—it was better to do a little bowing and scraping and obsequious tugging at the forelock. So mail, like guests, was handled in the front room.

  The following morning, as soon as my father went off to work, my mother tore the card to bits and flushed them down the toilet. Now, three days later, she was telling him he was crazy.

  “But, Chanah,” my father said. “I read the postal. It said the meeting is tomorrow.”

  “You’re crazy,” my mother said. Like many people of much vigor but little imagination, she believed firmly in the persuasive powers of repetition. “Hurry up and get out of here,” she said. “Do you want to be late?”

  It was like asking Napoleon if he wanted to come straggling in for his coronation. What else did the poor bastard have to live for?

  “You want more?” my mother said when my father was out of the house, on his way to a meeting that was scheduled to take place the following night.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

  I was also not very fond of my mother’s kreplach. She made them, as she made everything else she put on our table, grudgingly. As though she felt her time could have been better employed in some more useful pursuit. Years later, when I thought of my mother in the kitchen, I would get a picture in my mind of Madame Curie. Not only because they looked somewhat alike, but because I could imagine how the discoverer of radium might have felt at a moment when she was dragged away from her cauldrons of pitchblende to darn one of Pierre’s socks.

  “It doesn’t matter,” my mother said. “There will be a lot of good things to eat at the Shumansky wedding.”

  “We’re not guests,” I said.

  “We’re better than guests,” my mother said. “Without us they wouldn’t have a wedding. If you’re late I’ll save you some kishke.” She looked at the alarm clock on the icebox. “Better get dressed. It’s under the mattress.”

  I went out to the combination storage closet and bedroom at the far end of the flat in which I slept. My freshly laundered scout uniform was laid out neatly under my mattress for its final press. I put it on with a certain amount of uneasiness. I had not worn my uniform since the night my mother dragged me out of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym during the One-Flag Morse contest. When I came back into the kitchen she said, “You look nice.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Better go now,” my mother said. “There’s a lot to do.”

  Pulling on my sweater, I said, “Walter knows?”

  “Of course he knows,” my mother said irritably. “What do you think?”

  Think? I had forgotten what the word meant. All I did was worry. I had not seen the tall man with the southern accent and the turtleneck sweater since the night on the dock when my mother and I had surprised him unloading sacks of booze from the Jefferson Davis II. But I knew my mother had seen him because her whole plan for the Shumansky wedding had been built around Walter’s cooperation. My father may not have known what was going on, but I did. Anyway, I thought I did. I had heard my mother tell Walter that first night on the barge that she would split her profits with him. They had obviously agreed, after I left the barge, on how to do it. I decided then, as I have decided many times in subsequent years, that the smartest thing to do was not to think. Worry, yes. What could you do about that? But think? Who needed it?

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Don’t talk to anybody,” my mother said.

  This proved to be surprisingly easy. What was working for me was the time of day. It was a few minutes before six. The starers were indoors. It was the hour when most families on the block were having their evening meal. I got all the way up Fourth, along Avenue D, and into Ninth Street without seeing anybody I knew.

  Near the Avenue B corner, as I was approaching J.H.S. 64, I saw my old R.A.I teacher coming out of the building. It was pretty late for a teacher to be leaving the school, but Miss Hallock had a reputation as a nut who never went home until she had finished correcting every paper the members of her class had turned in that day. I slowed down until she crossed Avenue B and disappeared into Tompkins Square Park on her way to the Astor Place subway station. Then I put on a burst of speed. I made it around the corner and into the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House without anybody seeing me. Anyway, without my seeing anybody who might have been interested in seeing me.

  I was swept by a feeling of pride. Since that night on the dock, when she had put her hand on my shoulder and it had occurred to me for the first time that I liked her, I had wanted my mother to think well of me. Crossing the white marble lobby, and trotting down the stairs to the troop meeting room, I couldn’t help thinking my mother had put her faith in someone worthy of her.

  This opinion changed abruptly the moment I opened the door. Mr. O’Hare was sitting at the table in front of the room. He looked up in surprise from his black looseleaf program book. He had apparently been making notes in it with his gold Eversharp.

  “Well, I do declare,” the scoutmaster said. “It seems to be our long-lost Benjamin.”

  It also seemed to be curtains for my mother’s plan. My part in what she and Walter Sinclair had cooked up depended on my getting in and out of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House without being stopped or even noticed. That’s why I was wearing my scout uniform. A boy in khaki breeches with a royal-blue bandanna held in place around his gullet by a neckerchief slide woven from gold braid was as conspicuous in the corridors of a settlement house as an onion in a goulash. Except to his scoutmaster, of course, and who would have expected Mr. O’Hare to be in the meeting room on an ordinary weekday evening? Not the senior patrol leader of Troop 244. To my knowledge, the fat man never even set foot in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House except on Saturday nights.

  “Hello,” I said. Somehow that didn’t seem to be enough, so I added, “It’s nice to see you, sir.”

  “If I may return the compliment,” Mr. O’Hare said, “it’s nice to see you, too, Benjamin. In fact, you could not have come at a more appropriate moment.” He tapped the notebook with the gold Eversharp. “I came down here tonight to complete the plans for our participation in the All-Manhattan rally. As you may have heard, in spite of certain disruptive circumstances, the troop did rather well at the eliminations.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Oh, then you did hear, did you?” Mr. O’Hare said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Hot
Cakes told me we took three firsts.”

  “Indeed we did,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Knot-tying, flint-and-steel, and bandages with arterial pressure points. Did you say Hot Cakes?”

  “Hot Cakes Rabinowitz,” I said. “He’s in the Raven Patrol.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mr. O’Hare said. “I believe he is more appropriately known as Ira, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Ira may also have told you that we took a second in bridge-building, another in basket-weaving, and a perfectly respectable third in camp hygiene, did he not?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  If I have to say it once more, I thought, there could be trouble. My gut was grinding.

  “All in all, we did quite well, I think,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Of course, we would be in a better position if my expectations in connection with One-Flag Morse had been realized, but then, one can’t have everything, can one?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  That helped a little, but not much. “No, sir” sounds a lot like “Yes, sir.” Especially to a jumpy gut.

  “I had hoped after what happened on that ill-fated night,” Mr. O’Hare said, “I had hoped my senior patrol leader would have had the courtesy of a true scout to come and explain to me the nature of the disruption. The cause, so to speak, of what was surely one of the most startling experiences to which the troop had ever been subjected, won’t you agree?”

  Not with a “Yes, sir.” I couldn’t.

  “It was my aunt, sir,” I said. “She got very sick all of a sudden. In fact, she was dying, and they sent for my mother, but my mother doesn’t speak English, so she had to come and get me because she needed someone to do like, you know, to do the translation for her.”

  I said a lot more, droning on and on without thinking about what I was saying, snatching at remembered bits and pieces I had used on Chink Alberg and George Weitz the day after the disaster, because whatever thinking there was room for in my head was circling around the question: How was I going to get rid of this fatso and do what my mother and Walter Sinclair had sent me here to do?