Last Respects Page 15

  This put me into a conspiracy with my mother against my father. I still wonder why this made me uncomfortable. I had never had very strong feelings about my father. I knew, of course, that he was dominated by my mother. Most East Fourth Street fathers were. So why was she all of a sudden scared of him? I could think of no answer, of course. So I did what my mother told me to do. My mother and Walter Sinclair. For over a week, nine days, in fact, I stashed the eight bottles of whiskey, two at a time, in the various places to which I had access. I didn’t doubt that I would be able to complete the assignment to which Walter Sinclair and my mother had committed me. When I reached the front of the cheder on Columbia Street, I was sure of it.

  The two cones of ashes on top of the garbage cans had been picked flat. The kids from Goereck Street and the Edgie were gone for the day. No trouble ahead. Well, just a touch. I had trouble finding any rocks. I had to dig all the way down through the ashes to the garbage underneath. The two rocks I finally did find should have been ashamed of themselves. They were nothing the Prudential Life Insurance Company would have wanted to photograph for the front of their policies, but they were big enough for my purpose. As rocks went, I didn’t need the strength of Gibraltar.

  For the climb up the decayed stairs, however, I needed a little more strength than usual. This time I was lugging the wagon behind me. Even empty it weighed something. When I reached the cheder door I crouched low and got into position, as always, then eased the door open. The big rat was on the job, nibbling away at the edge of the hole in front of the gold-embroidered purple curtains. I took aim and let go.

  Again, no bull’s eye, but the rock hit the edge of the hole. The rat squealed and took a dive. I ran into the cheder. I set the wagon near the ark that held the Torahs, climbed up to the top of the ark, and pawed around behind the Sheffield Farms milk-bottle crate. My hand found the two burlap-wrapped packages I had hidden there a week before, the day Walter Sinclair made his first delivery to my mother.

  I took the wrapped bottles down one at a time, put them into the wagon, and headed for the door. Before I could reach it, something cut at my left ankle like the sting of a red-hot whip. I staggered and turned. Rabbi Goldfarb had just come out of the toilet. He was still buttoning his fly with his free hand. The toilet door was still slowly swinging shut. Rabbi Goldfarb abandoned his fly. When a good shot came into his sights, Rabbi Goldfarb obeyed the instincts of any White Hunter. His toilette could wait. He swung the polished chair rung and caught me on the right ankle. I yelped. It occurred to me that I sounded not unlike the rat I had just sent down the hole. Louder. Rats don’t have ankles.

  “You bastard,” I said.

  “What did you say?” Rabbi Goldfarb said.

  “Ouch,” I said. In English, of course.

  “Now say it in Yiddish,” Rabbi Goldfarb said.

  The polished wood cut me across both Achilles tendons. It served me right. Lesson learned that day in cheder: When facing an aroused Jewish White Hunter, don’t stand with both feet planted close together.

  “You dirty rotten louse,” I said. “Go to hell!”

  “This is by you Yiddish?” Rabbi Goldfarb said. The chair rung came swishing down. My body went up. Like a scythe swinging across barren ground, the weapon swept harmlessly under my shoes. Rabbi Goldfarb staggered. I came back to the decayed floor with a thump. “You little momzer,” Rabbi Goldfarb said. He came around in a swinging stagger. This brought the chair rung up and out, pointing at my chest like a sword. “What are you doing in cheder at this time?” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “Why weren’t you here this afternoon when you should have been?”

  “My father is sick and I couldn’t come. But I need something,” I said, keeping the hike wagon between me and the wooden sword. “I came to get it.”

  “What did you come to get?” Rabbi Goldfarb said. He had an afterthought. “You big liar,” he said.

  He was right. I was a liar. I was fairly big, too. That’s what made me sore.

  “For the troop meeting.” I flipped up the tail end of my royal-blue neckerchief as though I were waving an identification card in his face. “The boy scouts,” I said. I pointed to the insignia sewed above the breast pocket of my khaki shirt. “I’m the senior patrol leader,” I said. “In the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House on Avenue B. The boy scouts.”

  “Into the earth with you and your boy scouts,” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “Let their heads grow underground like onions. What have the vershimmelte boy scouts on Avenue B got to do with my cheder on Columbia Street?”

  The chair rung lunged at my chest. I feinted with the hike wagon. Rabbi Goldfarb’s thrust slid harmlessly over my shoulder. Athos would have been proud of me. Porthos and Aramis, too.

  “We have a meeting tonight,” I said. “After I put on my uniform, I remembered I left something here, so I came to get it.”

  “What did you leave, what?” Rabbi Goldfarb said.

  He had me there. I couldn’t think of an answer fast enough. He obviously didn’t expect one. He sent a lunging stab to the right with the chair rung. I ducked to the left. Rabbi Goldfarb came back in a low crouch. His free hand caught the hasp on the wagon. He flipped it free and dragged up the wooden box cover. The two burlap-wrapped packages stared up at us.

  “So,” Rabbi Goldfarb said. He snatched up one of the packages, tore away the burlap, and pulled out the bottle labeled Old Southwick Scotch Whiskey. “So,” Rabbi Goldfarb said again. He held the bottle up above his head like Moses coming down from the mountain with the tablets. “So this is what you forgot here in cheder? This is what you need for the scout boy meeting in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House on Avenue B?”

  A number of answers came crowding into my mind, elbowing each other for precedence. I examined them for a moment, then decided to let them race ahead. To the question Rabbi Goldfarb had asked, none of them could be considered an adequate answer. The high black fedora and the greasy suit, separated by the beard through which words emerged, seemed to share my feeling. Rabbi Goldfarb went on to construct his own answer.

  “The boy scouts in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House on Avenue B,” he said. “What are they? A bunch of shickeerem? To have a meeting they must have two bottles of vishnick to drink?”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t drink whiskey.”

  “Then why do you need this?” Rabbi Goldfarb said. He waved the bottle under my nose. “What does it say here in gold and red and black, so fancy?”

  “Old Southwick,” I said. Then inspiration struck. The bastard couldn’t read English. “Golden Yellow Malted Milk,” I said.

  Rabbi Goldfarb’s eyes, ordinarily a couple of dirty Fu Manchu slits between his black fedora and his forest of beard, now spread wide into a couple of big fat shiny lemon gum-drops.

  “So what I’m holding in my hand it’s not vishnick?” he said. “It’s malted?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Nu, then,” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “You have two bottles, so one for your scout boys it’s enough. The second bottle, it’ll be for your rabbi a present, no?”

  Inspiration, I thought bitterly, for other people, you strike. For me, you erupt.

  “Not tonight,” I said. “Tonight for the meeting we need two bottles. But I’ll get another one for you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow is tomorrow,” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “But today is today. A poor man who makes a living teaching boys to be good Jews, when does he need a bottle malted? Today or tomorrow?”

  “I’ll get you two bottles,” I said. “Two bottles tomorrow.”

  “No,” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “Tomorrow you have to get me only one. Because here I already have one of the two.” He shoved the bottle of Old Southwick into the huge pocket of his greasy black coat. “And remember,” he said. The chair rung swung back and forth under my nose like the punkah in an opium den in an Anna May Wong movie. “Don’t come to cheder tomorrow without the second bottle,” Rabbi Goldfarb said. “Or you won’t be able to walk home.”

 
; I didn’t manage to do more than get up on the balls of my feet. My body never left the ground. The chair rung fanned the air like a machete. Both strokes found their targets. The door slammed shut behind Rabbi Goldfarb. I was left with two throbbing ankles and one bottle of Old Southwick. To describe my state of mind, the language of Shakespeare and Milton is inadequate. I must fall back on the language of my mother. As follows: “Oy!”

  My job in the plan for the Shumansky wedding had been clearly laid down. Kind as I have always enjoyed being to myself, I could not say at this moment in Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder that I was doing my job well.

  The first two bottles I had tried to collect had been reduced to one. Even if I now collected all the other bottles I had stashed away, I would arrive at Lenox Assembly Rooms one bottle short.

  There was only one solution. In addition to collecting all the bottles I had hidden during the week, I would have to dig up one extra. It meant rearranging my schedule, but there was no other way. Rabbi Goldfarb had fixed that.

  The original plan had not involved our own home. As I have said, my mother did not want my father to be aware that she was engaged in the Shumansky wedding enterprise. But I was now short one bottle. I did not want Walter or my mother to know I had been outsmarted by Rabbi Goldfarb. A moment of cunning stabbed at me. A moment of caution came crowding in. Indeed, a moment of warning. But the moment of cunning won. Why not? it asked. It is the sort of question for which even in later years, I have never been able to find an answer. The desire to retrieve what has been lost, whether it is time or fortune, is irresistible.

  My mother kept the kerosene for the legs of our beds in an old whiskey bottle on the sill of her bedroom window. My father kept his carafe of Passover wine on the bureau in our front room. I could dump the kerosene down the sink, rinse the bottle, and fill it with a mixture of half Passover wine and half sink water. The color might not be the same as the color of Old Southwick, but I could conceal that by wrapping the doctored bottle in the wrappings from the bottle of Old Southwick that Rabbi Goldfarb had not taken from me.

  Who would know the difference? Except perhaps the Shumansky guests who found the stuff in their glasses? And would they really know? If I kept that doctored bottle at the bottom of the hike cart? And they started drinking from it after they had put away seventeen bottles of the genuine stuff? I had seen some drinking in my then still short lifetime on East Fourth Street. Mostly by the goyim from the barges who frequented the dock saloons. My observation, completely unscientific, of course, told me that after seventeen bottles of Old Southwick, one bottle of Benny Kramer’s Mixture would not attract any special attention.

  I carried the hike cart down into the street and started back toward Fourth Street. The clock over the Standard Bank now showed almost seven, so I was still okay on time. Crowded a little, but still okay. I was sure I could swing it even though it would have to be an in-and-out job.

  The in part worked fine. I got to our flat, parked the hike wagon in the kitchen, and went into the bedroom. I took the kerosene bottle from the window sill, carried it out to the kitchen, emptied it into the sink, and rinsed the bottle. I then brought the wine carafe from the front room, poured some of the wine into the empty whiskey bottle, and filled the rest with water. All that remained was tidying up. I was all finished, and was about to place the doctored bottle in the wagon, when the door opened. My father came in.

  We stared at each other the way years later I learned husbands in passing taxis stare at their wives when they see them coming out of strange apartment houses at unexpected hours of the day.

  “What are you doing in your uniform?” my father said.

  When he went off to his meeting of the Erste Neustadter Krank und Unterstitzing Verein he had left me at the kitchen table wearing my school sweater and knickers and eating kreplach. When he went off to the meeting he did not know my mother had lied to him about the date because she wanted to get him out of the house. I decided to start all over again.

  “Mr. O’Hare called a special meeting,” I said. “He’s planning the program for the All-Manhattan rally.”

  “I hope he’s a better planner than your mother.”

  It was a totally unexpected remark. It had things in it I had never before heard come out of my father’s mouth. Not only the tone, which had an edge to it. But also the meaning of the words, which could be interpreted only as a criticism of my mother. I did not want to do any interpreting. The alarm clock on the icebox had shifted from ticking to banging. Each bang said clearly: “Shake it up, kid.” Time was beginning to hunch over my handlebars. But my father’s unexpected remark made me look at him as though I had never seen him before. In a way I never had. Who looks at the hole in a bagel?

  My father was not handsome the way my mother, I had just learned during the past week, was pretty. On the other hand, he was not ugly in the way that the first sight of some people makes you wince and mutter, “Oh, God, will you please go away.” My father had a pleasant face. Pleasant the way a clean street of no particular importance or distinction is pleasant. Distinction? No. Importance? No. But my father’s face was certainly clean. It looked not unlike a plate from which somebody hungry had just wiped up all the gravy. Leaving nothing but an expanse of crockery. Clean crockery. He was of average height. In fact if Noah Webster had not put the word average into the dictionary, my father might never have been noticed, not even by his own son. His average height was five, six and three-quarters.

  He had an average smile: nice, because he had good teeth and his cheeks creased pleasantly—but once he turned the corner, you would probably have trouble remembering you had seen him. He wore average clothes. Gray? Yes, I think gray. But wait. Blue maybe? Could be. How about black? Well, not very black black. I mean not the kind of black you would notice, Fulton Sheen black. In my father’s case it was average black. Mixed in with average blue and average gray to form—well, to form my father’s color.

  His voice? I always thought of it as a grocery store clerk’s voice. Men behind the counters of delicatessens have strong voices. They have to. If they didn’t, how could you hear their jokes over the noise of the knives slicing pastrami? Butchers are hearty. To lie convincingly about the weight of a chicken, you must sound as though you believe what you’re saying. My father never did. He always sounded like the man in the white apron who says apologetically, “I’m sorry, we’re all out of the bran flakes, but these things called Nutty Pops, people seem to like them.”

  Even my father’s financial life was average. He never made a living in the strict meaning of the phrase, meaning by strict meaning that he never earned enough to support himself and his family. If he had, my mother would probably not have become a bootlegger, although I’m not sure. She had other things eating her besides the compulsion to pay the rent that her husband was incapable of paying. On the other hand, except for being a bit late for the rent once in a while before my mother started adding to the family income, I don’t think my father was ever in debt. How could he be? He never earned enough to attract the attention of the Internal Revenue Service, and what he couldn’t afford to buy he did without. That’s why his clothes always looked like that. He never bought anything to provide himself with pleasure. He only bought things to last.

  During the early years of my life, when I was almost totally unaware of his existence, I think my father fitted squarely in the middle of what I then understood the word schlemiel to mean. Years later, when I got to like him, I realized the turning point had been that night of the Shumansky wedding, and it wasn’t only because of what he had said about my mother’s talents as a planner. It was because of what happened after I said, “You mean your society had no meeting tonight?” After I said that, the door opened and Mr. Velvelschmidt, our landlord, came in.

  “Good evening,” he said. “I’m interrupting like maybe sopper, I hope not?”

  He wasn’t, of course. We’d had our meal an hour ago. There are all sorts of talents, however, and in the
area of supper-interrupting Mr. Velvelschmidt could hardly be dismissed as a slouch. If he had been around at the time, I think he could have been counted on to interrupt the Last One.

  “Who are you?” my father said.

  At first I thought he was joking. Not knowing your landlord on East Fourth Street was like not knowing your warden at Sing Sing. Then I remembered that Mr. Velvelschmidt always appeared between three and three-thirty in the afternoon, when my father was bent over his sewing machine in the pants shop on Allen Street. What was he doing in our house at seven? On a night when all I had left was thirty minutes to round up all the bottles of Old Southwick for the Shumansky wedding?

  “Who am I?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said. “Ask your son who I am. Go ahead, ask him.”

  My father looked at me.

  “It’s the landlord,” I said.

  I must have sounded not unlike the way Ham or Shem or Japheth, briefing Noah on the latest developments, might have sounded when they said, “It’s the rain, Pa.”

  Landlords on East Fourth Street were something you accepted and made preparations for, but in whose existence when they arrived you didn’t quite believe. Mr. Velvelschmidt was more unbelievable than most. Unlike our old landlord, Mr. Koptzin, he was a doctor. And perhaps because he was a doctor, his hours as a landlord were limited. He had, therefore, installed as janitor and guardian of the building his brother-in-law Mr. Noogle. However, Mr. Velvelschmidt could not deny himself the pleasure of collecting his own rents. I don’t know, of course, how much Mr. Velvelschmidt saved by doing so, but it must have been enough to compensate him for the loss of pride involved in dropping for a day each month the “doctor” in front of his name for the commonplace “mister.” Whatever he lost in this respect, however, was amply repaid by the fun he had. Mr. Velvelschmidt enjoyed being a bastard.