Last Respects Read online

  “What a wonderful family this is!” he exclaimed. Not said. Exclaimed. When Mr. Velvelschmidt was not exclaiming, he chirped. “A landlord comes into a house to see one of his tenants, and what does the tenant do? He asks his son who is this man? What a marvelous joke!” To prove it, Mr. Velvelschmidt released a few bars of his barking laughter. “When you think of it,” he said after he regained control of himself, “I suppose you could say it’s only natural, because I mean we’ve never met before—no, Mr. Berkowitz?”

  “Who is Berkowitz?” my father said.

  Again the laughter came pouring up out of Mr. Velvelschmidt like air out of a pinpricked balloon. He was short and fat and very well dressed, but somehow he looked naked. Not the way a human being or most animals look naked. There were no signs of hair on Mr. Velvelschmidt’s scalp, face, or hands. He looked naked the way a pig looks naked hanging on a hook in the window of one of those stores on First Avenue with a single word painted on the glass: PORK.

  “Who is Berkowitz?” he chirped. “What a joker! Who is Berkowitz he asks! You’re Berkowitz, Mr. Berkowitz!”

  “I’m Kramer,” my father said.

  Mr. Velvelschmidt turned to me, eyes wide, pink snout tilted toward the gas pipe that hung from the kitchen ceiling. “Your father is not Berkowitz?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Who is he, then?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

  “He’s my father,” I said.

  “But you’re Heshie Berkowitz, no?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then who are you?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

  “Benny Kramer,” I said.

  Mr. Velvelschmidt frowned. He flipped the pages of his receipt book. An idea apparently pushed its way into his mind. He stepped back to our front door and opened it. He looked at the number painted in black on the brown tin sheathing outside. The frown vanished.

  “Of course you’re not Berkowitz,” he said. He closed the door and came back into the kitchen. “Berkowitz is 6-E in the next building next door. You’re Kramer.”

  “I have been for a long time,” my father said.

  I gave him a quick glance. Where had he picked up this new way of talking? Sort of a little bit like George Weitz, except in Yiddish. I had never before, of course, heard my father utter a word except in the presence of my mother. Even a fool would have guessed that there was some connection between this fact and the way my father sounded now when my mother was absent. I was late for the Shumansky wedding, and getting later, but in spite of George Weitz’s insistence to the contrary, I was no fool. “To tell you the truth,” Mr. Velvelschmidt said through his barking laughter, “I’m glad you’re Kramer.”

  “So am I,” my father said. “I’ve been Kramer all my life. I’m too old to change now.”

  Mr. Velvelschmidt was wearing a snappy sharkskin topcoat with a fly front and a gray velvet collar. If he had worn anything else, I would have been surprised. On East Fourth Street this was the uniform of the rent collector. The uniform now seemed about to burst as Mr. Velvelschmidt’s roly-poly figure took a stab at what anybody could have told him was impossible: doubling up. Not with that gut. But apparently there was no other way for him to laugh. He did it the way the contraption at the top of the Mississippi River boats in the movies pumped their paddle wheels: sawing up and down.

  “Oy gevalt!” Mr. Velvelschmidt gasped. “He’s too old to change now! Did you hear that?” he chirped—well, no, he exclaimed—to the gas jet at the end of the ceiling pipe. “He’s too old to change now!”

  Mr. Velvelschmidt’s laughter came to an end the way coal pouring down a chute into a cellar from a Burns Company coal wagon came to an end when the wagon was empty. With an abrupt, total, and unpleasant cessation of sound.

  “Where is the missus?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” my father said.

  The answer did not strike me as odd. My father rarely knew where my mother was. At the moment, I didn’t know, either. All I knew was that she would be waiting for me when I got to Lenox Assembly Rooms with the loaded hike wagon. If I ever did get there.

  “You don’t know where the missus is?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

  “No,” my father said.

  The way he said it must have struck Mr. Velvelschmidt as unusual. Perhaps for the same reason my father’s words had struck me as unusual a little while ago. But I’m not sure. All I’m sure about is what Mr. Velvelschmidt, who up to now had been wearing the face of a laughing pig, suddenly seemed to be wearing the face of a pig that was about to bite.

  “Why don’t you know?” he said.

  “What’s it your business?” my father said.

  I admired his standing up to Mr. Velvelschmidt, but I couldn’t understand why he was doing it. Landlords were something you were polite to, and got out of the house as quickly as possible. Arguments, I had learned, did not make anything move faster, especially landlords.

  “My business is your rent,” Mr. Velvelschmidt said. “Maybe I never saw you before because maybe here in these rooms you’re not the one who pays the rent.”

  He paused, as though waiting for my father to deny this, but my father didn’t. My father, I noticed, had recovered from whatever it was that had made him for a brief period seem a stranger to me. My father looked average again.

  “My rent it was coming to me last Thursday,” Mr. Velvelschmidt said. “Everybody in the building they paid me last Thursday. Everybody except your missus. She said to me she didn’t have the rent last Thursday. I should come tonight, she told me. Tonight she’d have the rent for me, she said, your missus. So here I am, it’s tonight, and there’s not only no rent, there’s also no missus.”

  What my father did next annoyed me. He swayed from Mr. Velvelschmidt the way he always swayed away from my mother. He did it very quickly, as though it was a skill he had forgotten he possessed, and he wanted Mr. Velvelschmidt to see the talent had not abandoned him.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” my father said.

  “So who does know?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

  “I do,” I said.

  The landlord turned to me. The look on his face seesawed back and forth, as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether he would lose ground if he abandoned the look of a pig that was about to bite and went back to the look of a pig that smiled.

  “What is it, then, that you know?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

  “My mother will get the rent for you tonight,” I said.

  “You mean I should wait?” the landlord said.

  “No,” I said. “I mean my mother will get the money tonight. You come back tomorrow. She’ll give it to you tomorrow.”

  Mr. Velvelschmidt turned to my father. “This is true?”

  My father swayed away from the now jovial voice and said, “My son is not a liar.”

  He should have heard me giving it to Rabbi Goldfarb and Mr. O’Hare.

  “You better not be,” Mr. Velvelschmidt said. “Or you can tell your mother from me, Mr. Benny Kramer, you can tell her what she’ll get herself in the letter box is a nice lawyer letter from me.”

  He slammed out of the house. My father and I looked at each other. The alarm clock on the icebox was banging away louder than ever. I knew what he wanted to ask me. It was what I would have wanted to ask him: How did I know my mother was going to get the rent tonight?

  I hoped he wouldn’t ask me. I had promised my mother not to say anything to anybody about her business relations with Walter Sinclair. Anybody included my father. If he did ask me, I would have to lie to him. Ordinarily, I would not have minded that. Any more than I had minded lying to Rabbi Goldfarb and Mr. O’Hare. For a few minutes, however, when my father first came into the kitchen and then when he talked back to Mr. Velvelschmidt, it had not been ordinary. It had been something unusual.

  The unusual thing had disappeared as soon as the landlord had turned on the screws, but I remembered it. My father apparently didn’t. Anyway, he didn’t act as thou
gh he did. He dropped his glance and swayed away from me as he always swayed away from my mother.

  “You better go to your meeting,” he said.

  I wished I could. Mr. O’Hare and his slabs of fat were a cinch compared with what I still had to face. I dragged the hike wagon downstairs, up Fourth Street, around the corner to Avenue D, and into Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store. Abe’s mother was behind the fountain. Hiding inside her sheitl the way Mr. O’Hare hid inside his fat, the little old lady was performing her daily ritual: emptying the cream from the tops of the Grade A milk bottles into a small pitcher. Sheffield’s delivered six bottles of Grade A every morning. When he opened the store in the morning Abe Lebenbaum took these bottles from the doorstep and put them into the ice cream chest. They were not needed during the day because almost nobody came in until eight at night or later to order a malted. On East Fourth Street a malted was, for those who could afford it, a nightcap. In the early evening, after Abe’s mother relieved him and waited for me to arrive, she managed to skim off almost a full pint of cream from the six bottles. People who ordered malteds didn’t know the difference.

  “Benny,” Mrs. Lebenbaum said. “You’re late.”

  Like Caesar who, after he crossed the Rubicon, was stuck with iacte alea est, Mrs. Lebenbaum was stuck with the only two words she could say in English.

  “I told you yesterday I’d be late today. And I’ll be even a little later,” I said. “I have to pick up something and make a delivery. Only a few minutes, Mrs. Lebenbaum.”

  “It’s business?” she said in Yiddish.

  “What else?” I said.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “In the back,” I said.

  “Be quiet,” she said. “Mr. Heizerick is by the slot machine.”

  Jesus, I thought. But Jesus I did not say. Not while wearing my scout uniform. “How long has he been out there?” I said.

  “From not even a minute after Abe went upstairs for supper,” Mrs. Lebenbaum said. “You wouldn’t believe it. Like almost a miracle. I came in the store. Go upstairs, I said. Eat and sleep, I said. Abe went upstairs. The door it closed behind me like to you I’m talking now, Benny, and it opened again. Mr. Heizerick came in, and he gave me ten dollars. I’m lucky I had enough nickels.”

  Luck, of course, had nothing to do with it. Mr. Heizerick’s appearance in the candy store at least twice and sometimes three times a week was as expected as Mr. Velvelschmidt’s monthly appearance in our flat. In preparation for these visits Abe Lebenbaum went regularly to the Standard Bank and laid in a supply of rolls of nickels the way the owner of an opium den might regularly lay in a supply of poppy fruit for his favorite addict. Froyim Heizerick was as hung on the slot machine in the back room of Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store as Edwin Drood was hung on the juice of papaver somniferum.

  I hurried into the back room to pick up the four bottles of Old Southwick I had hidden there two at a time three nights ago and the night before.

  They were sitting behind the crates of Sheffield empties. I had made a small nest between the crates, which were reasonably stable because Sheffield picked up its empties only twice a month, and the door to the toilet, which was never closed because both hinges had rusted over the years into solid blocks of crumbling red metal. The slot machine stood against the wall at the other side of the room. Mr. Heizerick, feeding nickels into the slot and pulling down the lever, had his back to me. I eased the wagon past him and maneuvered the carriage wheels into the open space in front of the toilet. The click of the nickels going home, and the clunk of the lever going nowhere, continued steadily behind me as I eased the four burlap-wrapped bottles out from behind the Sheffield crates, put them into the wagon, and fastened the hasp. When I stood up and turned, I found myself facing Mr. Heizerick.

  “Whatcha got innair?”

  I can’t remember what surprised me more: the fact that I had heard words coming out of Mr. Heizerick’s frozen face, or the fact that they had been spoken in English. The only two places in which I ever heard English spoken were J.H.S. 64 and the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House.

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I said. “Just getting some stuff out.”

  I tried to pull the wagon around Mr. Heizerick in an arc.

  “What kinda stuff?” he said.

  “Troop meeting,” I said. Very crisp. Very busy. Very gotta-get-on-with-it-mister-so-get-out-of-the-way-please. “Boy scouts,” I said. “Hannah H. Lichtenstein House. Over on Avenue B. I’m the senior patrol leader.”

  “Let’s see what’s inna box.”

  “Just some signal flags,” I said, keeping up the rapid flow of camouflage schmaltz. “We got the All-Manhattan rally coming up. We did pretty good in the eliminations. Three firsts, two seconds, and a third. Mr. O’Hare feels we got a pretty good chance in the finals. This meeting tonight, he’s got to lay out the program for—”

  “Opena box,” Mr. Heizerick said.

  I thought fast. This was turning out to be some night. Nobody was giving me a chance to think slow. Thinking fast, I wondered what I could lose by showing this zombie what was in the wagon. Maybe if they’d given me a chance to think slow, I might have wondered something else and the whole game might have come out another way. I don’t know. Forty years later, in the taxi that was carrying me across the Borough of Queens to identify my mother’s body in the morgue, the thing Mr. Heizerick did next still seemed to me as inevitable as it had that night in the back room behind Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store. The man in the gray fedora swung his leg in a curiously graceful arc. His foot caught the hasp on the side of the wagon, flipped it up, and with a slight jogging movement, as though changing the direction of a bullet, his toe kicked open the lid of the box. Mr. Heizerick dipped down, took up one of the burlap-wrapped bottles, and sniffed it.

  “Some signal flags,” he said. “How much?”

  “What?” I said.

  On my word of honor. That’s exactly what I said. Nothing else came to mind.

  “Wuddeyeh get for this stuff?” Mr. Heizerick said.

  I could have repeated my previous remark, but I sensed that it would put me in a bad light. When you are caught with your pants down, I had already learned, it is pointless to ask the man in the doorway if you are headed in the right direction for the turn-off to Prospect Park.

  “I’m not supposed to sell it,” I said.

  “You’re selling it now,” Mr. Heizerick said. He tore open the top of the burlap, pulled out the bottle of Old Southwick, and sniffed at the cork.

  “Boy, this stuff muss be right off diboat,” he said. “How much?”

  The way he held the bottle told me something that the tone of his voice, and his curious manner of running his words together, had caused me to suspect. This strange, doomed man who appeared in our midst out of nowhere to act out his own special dance of death, this poor dopey crazo was just an old-fashioned, common, garden variety shikker.

  “How much?” Mr. Heizerick repeated.

  Thinking fast, my reasoning went like this. As of now I was supposed to have in the hike wagon six bottles of Old Southwick. I had only five because Rabbi Goldfarb had copped one. And because of that bastard landlord, I had left the fixed bottle behind me. If I allowed Mr. Heizerick to take another, I would be two behind. I was headed toward the place where, I’d felt since I left Rabbi Goldfarb, I could promote a bottle. Why not, I thought, since I was thinking fast, why not promote two? All I needed was the money, and this strange drunk who thought nothing of shooting the bottom out of fifty bucks’ worth of nickels several times a week certainly seemed to have plenty of money.

  “I don’t know how much,” I said. “I don’t sell it. I just collect it for my boss. If he finds out I gave away a bottle, he’ll be sore at me.” This seemed inadequate. Not the words. The way I was rattling them out. There was no heart-throb. No tremor of terror. I thought of Oliver Twist asking for more. He didn’t get it, of course, but the way he asked for it captured the hearts of the Eng
lish-speaking world. It had made an impression on me. I dipped down at the knees in what I felt was a quite respectable cringe. I crinkled my eyes as though to hold back tears. And I revved up a respectable whine. “He’ll kill me,” I said. “My boss is a gangster. He’ll shoot me dead. You can have the bottle, but please, I don’t want to die, please give me enough to pay him.”

  Mr. Heizerick surveyed me with the contempt I am sure I deserved. Then he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a folded wad of money, and peeled off a bill. “This okay?” he said.

  I took the bill. A ten-spot. He’d handed me ten-spots many times, whenever he needed nickels for the slot machine. But this was a whole new ball game. I wasn’t making change for a compulsive gambler. I was doing business on my own. There was no point in trying to think slow. This insane night had conditioned me to thinking fast. I went right on doing it. Like this. I did not know how much my mother was going to charge the Shumanskys for the bottles of Old Southwick. But I had to get enough out of Mr. Heizerick to buy two bottles before I got to Lenox Assembly Rooms. I had no idea what I would have to pay for them, but the more cash I had the better my chances would be to get them. If this drunk in the pearl gray fedora was willing to throw me a ten, why shouldn’t he throw me two tens?

  “My boss will kill me,” I said. I listened to a replay of my voice. Not quite up to Oliver. I sank a little lower. Almost to my knees, but not exactly to my knees. I didn’t want to soil my freshly washed khaki breeches. “He’ll murder me,” I whimpered. “He’s a gangster. He carries two guns. He shoots people for nothing. If I don’t come back with the bottles, or with the money to pay for them—”

  My voice petered out. Too much Oliver. The whine was making me sick. It seemed to have the same effect on Mr. Heizerick. He tore another ten-spot from his wad, crumpled the bill, and threw it at me. Not inappropriately, it hit me in the mouth. Words failed me.

  “Hee-yuh, hee-yuh,” Mr. Heizerick said. “Now git the hell odda hee-yuh, yuh liddle bastid.”

  I still think that “bastid” was uncalled for, but I obeyed instructions. I lugged the hike wagon out into the store and loped on the double toward the front door.