Last Respects Page 18

  The motorboat was moored to the far side of the middle barge. No lights were showing. I eased the wagon against the edge of the dock and looked around. Nobody was in sight. I leaned down toward the barge.

  “Chanah’s boy,” I called softly.

  It was the password on which my mother and Walter had agreed.

  “Chanah’s boy,” I called again.

  The ropes creaked. The capstans groaned quietly. The river slapped against the piles. The beams moved uneasily under my feet. Not much. Maybe not at all. But the illusion of movement was very real. It made the whole night seem very unreal. As though everything I had done from the moment I left home to pick up the hike wagon in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House was part of a dream. It had been easy enough to believe in the dream while I was racing from the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House to Old Man Tzoddick’s cellar steps, and Rabbi Goldfarb’s cheder, and back to our house, and down to Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store, and up to the apartment of the Zabriskie sisters, collecting the bottles of Old Southwick. But now the racing was over. It was quiet on the dock. The dream was finished. I felt awake. Awake and scared.

  “Chanah’s boy!”

  “Not so loud, kee-yid.”

  The tall, thin figure in the black turtleneck sweater came easing gently out of the wheelhouse door on the barge directly below me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought nobody was here.”

  Walter laughed. This was only the third time I had met him, but I realized at once that what I had remembered most clearly about him was his laugh. This puzzled me. It wasn’t exactly as though this tall young rumrunner had just done something important. All he’d done was laugh. You don’t get to be fourteen without having heard a certain amount of laughter. There was a great deal of laughter on East Fourth Street. I never thought of it until I met Walter Sinclair because until I met Walter, I see now, I’d had the wrong idea about laughter.

  All my life laughter was a noise you and other people made to protect yourself. A bastard like Mr. Velvelschmidt showed up with his pig eyes and his receipt book to collect the rent, and you didn’t have it, as my mother often didn’t, so you laughed the bastard off, screaming at his remarks as though he was Ben Turpin, and if you laughed loud enough, he stopped threatening with the lawyer letters and went away, thinking maybe you were not just a stupid deadbeat trying to goniff him out of his twenty-three bucks, because a person who laughs at your jokes can’t be all bad, and maybe you were telling the truth about having the rent for him next week.

  Walter Sinclair, however, he didn’t laugh that way. He wasn’t baring his teeth like a dog to keep you at bay so you wouldn’t take a bite out of his tail. When Walter Sinclair laughed he made a sound I’d never heard before. Certainly not on East Fourth Street. It made me feel good.

  “You’re a smart boy,” Walter said. “If nobody was here, how’d the Old Jeff get herself tied up to this here baby?”

  I took a stab at the kind of laughing Walter did. It didn’t come out exactly right. After all, it was my first try. But even so, I could feel the improvement.

  “What I meant,” I said, “I meant I’ve got only about ten minutes, and I don’t want to lose any time.”

  “You won’t,” he said. “Not while Walter Sinclair is around. You got your bottles?”

  “All eight,” I said.

  “Good boy,” Walter said. “Now here comes the rest.”

  He stepped back into the pilot house, came out with a big burlap-wrapped sack, and handed it up to me. “Too heavy?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I got it.”

  “Lay it in nice and easy,” Walter said. “They’re packed good, but it’s five bottles.”

  I put the sack into the wagon at the bottom of the box. By the time I came back to the edge of the dock Walter was holding up a second package.

  “That’s ten, now,” he said. “Ten, plus the eight you collected, that’s the eighteen bottles your mama said she needs for tonight. I could get hung for these ten. I had to steal them from two deliveries. But I promised your mama I’d get them, didn’t I?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  I put the second one on top of the first, then wedged them both with the eight loose bottles. It made a tight fit, but when I got the hasp down and clicked it into place I knew there would be no rattling on the trip west.

  “You all set, now?”

  Walter was standing below me on the barge deck, his hands resting on the edge of the dock, looking up at me with a smile that kept rising and falling gently as the barge rose and fell on the movement of the river.

  “Ready to go,” I said.

  “You take care of your mama, now,” Walter said. “You hear?”

  I must have looked puzzled. I certainly felt puzzled. Being told to take care of my mother was like being urged to make sure the sun rose the next morning. Who had to take care of a force of nature?

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Walter laughed again. “You calling me sir,” he said. “Like I was your teacher or something.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I mean—”

  My voice trailed away. I didn’t know how to say what I meant. I was suddenly confused by an astonishing thought. I had never really liked anybody. There were people I preferred to others. Chink Alberg, for instance, gave me less of a pain than Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. But neither was a big deal in my book. My father was someone to whom I was loyal because that was expected of me. But I was well aware that he was generally considered to be a fool, and I didn’t really like fools. My mother was the cop who ran my life, and the rule with cops was simple: smile when you pass them. Mr. O’Hare was a dope from uptown whose approval I valued because it made me a big shot in the troop. My teachers were custodians of the world I had discovered when I left the three rooms where for the first five years of my life I had never spoken anything but Yiddish and Hungarian, and who warms up to custodians?

  What I’m getting at is that up to this moment on the Fourth Street dock the people with whom I had spent my life had been people with whom I had to get along in order to survive, and I was the boy who knew how to work that little trick. This tall, slender, curly-headed man in the turtleneck sweater with the smile that was as warming as our kitchen stove in January was the first person I had ever met from whom I didn’t want anything. Well, no. That wasn’t quite true. There was something I wanted from him. All of a sudden I wanted Walter Sinclair to like me.

  “Well, you go along, now,” he said. “You be a good boy and you take care of your mama. She’s a real fine lady. Not many boys got mamas as fine as you got. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, but I didn’t exactly know what I was saying okay to. How could I take care of my mother? It was the other way around, wasn’t it? She was always taking care of me. But this man obviously thought highly of her, and I liked him, and he wanted me to take care of her, even if I had to invent ways to do it. “Okay,” I said again. “You don’t worry.”

  Walter laughed, reached up over the edge of the dock, and punched my shoulder lightly. “Worry?” he said. “Me? Not while I’ve got me a smart boy like you in my corner.”

  It occurred to me I’d better get out of his corner fast, and over to the Lenox Assembly Rooms, or my mother would take me into a corner of her own and give me a piece of her mind. It was, I see now, a pretty good one, but the pieces she gave me had sharp edges. I still bear some of the scars. On that night in 1927, dragging the Troop 244 hike wagon toward the Shumansky wedding, I did not want to add to my collection. As soon as I turned into Avenue D, I switched to scout pace.

  This brought me past the clock over the Standard Bank at twenty-five minutes past seven. I had two blocks to go, and five minutes in which to cover them. Everything had worked out. It didn’t seem possible, but everything had worked out. I would be at Lenox Assembly Rooms on time.

  I had been inside the place only once in my life, years before, when I was a little kid. It was during an election campaign, and
a man named Eugene Debs was running for President on the Socialist ticket. Eugene Victor Debs. Word spread on East Fourth Street that this man was actually a prisoner in jail. How could a prisoner run for President? Nobody on Fourth Street seemed to know, but everybody on the block enjoyed talking about it, including my father.

  One night he came home with the news that this man named Debs was coming to Lenox Assembly Rooms on Saturday night to make a speech. My mother told my father to stop talking like a fool and eat his kalbfleish. My father ate his kalbfleish, and when my mother went to the stove, he told me in a way that must, I suppose, be described as out of the corner of his mouth—although my father was not a corner-of-the-mouth type—that it was true, Mr. Debs would appear at Lenox Assembly Rooms on Saturday night. My mother came back from the stove and told my father—in a manner that could not possibly be described as out of the corner of her mouth—to stop being crazy. I don’t recall how he was able to convince her he was complying with this request, but my father must have swung it, because my mother dropped the subject.

  On Saturday, at supper, he asked her if he could go to the meeting. My mother said she didn’t care what he did. What my father did was take me along.

  Years later, when I discussed this with my mother, she said the only reason she allowed me to accompany my father was that she did not know what a meeting was. Neither did I. After all these years I’m still not sure that what I saw was a meeting.

  This is what I saw.

  The sidewalk in front of Lenox Assembly Rooms. Exactly like every other sidewalk I had ever seen except that this one ended not against the front stoops of tenements, but against a set of wide sandstone steps that rose elegantly inside a set of curling stone banisters. On both banisters were set fat black iron posts surmounted by round yellow carbon arc lamps as big as basketballs. They hissed. A lot of people were waiting on the sidewalk in front of the sandstone steps. I recognized some of them, but many were strangers. There was a great deal of back-and-forth movement, as though the waiting people couldn’t decide from which direction Mr. Debs would arrive. What interested me most were those great big round yellow lamps. I liked the way they hissed.

  Suddenly, from out of Third Street, a wagon emerged. A hay wagon. It was drawn by two enormous horses. The driver sat up high, flailing away at the air with a whip, hitting nothing and laughing his head off. He guided the wagon around in a swinging arc and pulled up in front of the sandstone steps under the hissing lamps. A cheer exploded from the people on the sidewalk. I couldn’t see why. All I could see was the flat bed of the wagon, which was piled high with hay. The smell was pleasant, but that’s all.

  Then the hay began to move, and out of the middle, sliding down on his rear end toward the tailgate of the wagon, came a baldheaded man who seemed to be all angles. As soon as I saw his face I understood why the driver had been laughing. The man sliding out of the wagon was laughing in the same way. It was the way Walter Sinclair laughed years later. The people on the sidewalk moved forward. The cheering grew louder. I was astonished to notice that my father was cheering, too. The people nearest the tail gate grabbed the baldheaded man, lifted him to their shoulders, and carried him up the stone steps. My father pulled me along.

  At the top of the steps two wide doors opened into a high hall from the ceiling of which hung a crystal chandelier. The crowd moved across this hall, making a lot of enthusiastic noises many of which were shouted words I did not understand. I understood clearly, however, that the words were enthusiastic. Suddenly, pulled along by my father as though I were on a leash, we erupted into an auditorium lined with benches.

  The people carrying the man from the hay wagon moved on forward to a platform up front. They climbed the steps while the people down on the floor scrambled for seats. My father, who always moved so unobtrusively at home, astonished me by the speed and skill with which he darted around, never dropping my hand, and managed to find a couple of clear places on a bench about halfway down toward the platform. He shoved me onto the bench and then sat down beside me. The men on the platform set the baldheaded man down on his feet. He raised his hands high in the air. The crowd exploded. My father beat his palms and shouted. I remember thinking he was acting funny, and that’s all I do remember.

  More accurately, when next I became aware of my surroundings, I was in bed at home, and it was morning. I never heard a word of what Eugene Victor Debs said the night before about why his listeners should vote for him for President. But I saw him. It was quite a sight. I never saw anything like it again. Not even in the Lenox Assembly Rooms on the night of the Shumansky wedding.

  The first thing I saw when I pulled up with the hike wagon in front of the sandstone steps caused me to think all at once that maybe my mother was not as smart as Walter Sinclair had said she was. She had told me to meet her in front of the Lenox Assembly Rooms at seven-thirty. It was now seven-thirty, and I had made it to the front of the Lenox Assembly Rooms, but my mother had obviously not. Instead of my mother, what was waiting for me was another familiar figure: the young man in the Rogers Peet suit who had opened the door of Meister’s Matzoh Bakery on Lafayette Street for me and my mother the night of the All-Manhattan eliminations. He was leaning against one of the curling stone banisters, directly under the lowest of the big fat round hissing carbon arc lamps.

  “Hi, kid,” he said. “Don’t you ever take off that uniform?”

  I was so confused by my mother’s absence and his presence that I did not grasp at once what he meant. Then I remembered I had been wearing my uniform that Saturday night and I was wearing it now.

  “Troop meeting,” I said. “I’m going to a troop meeting.”

  “Here in Lenox Assembly Rooms?” the young man said.

  “What?” I said.

  I didn’t really mean “What?” I meant “Jesus Christ, what’s going to happen now?” But who could I ask?

  “When you and your mother came over to see my father, you said your scout troop they have their meetings in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein. Remember?”

  Actually, I didn’t. To compensate for this deficiency, however, my mind came up with the recollection that Mr. Imberotti, the young man’s father, had addressed this little bastard as Mario.

  “That’s where I’m going,” I said, and then I said something stupid. “I just stopped off here a minute to see my mother.”

  To see my mother? What was the matter with me? Didn’t I remember what had happened to Little Red Riding Hood when she had been dumb enough to tip her mitt in exactly the same way to the wolf?

  “What for?” Mario Imberotti said. “Give her a kiss, maybe?” His sardonic voice and his puzzling words did nothing to clear up my confusion. He must have grasped that the only thing racing around in my mind was the not very productive question: What the hell is this guy talking about? Mario said, “You give your mother a kiss every time you go to a meeting?”

  There was only one reply any red-blooded East Fourth Street boy could make to that remark. Even a red-blooded East Fourth Street boy who was also chicken-livered. Scout uniform or no scout uniform, I made it, then I swung the wagon around in a wide arc and started up the stone steps. I had no idea where I was going. Into Lenox Assembly Rooms, sure. But what part of Lenox Assembly Rooms? It was a four-story building, with meeting halls all over the place. How did I know in what part of the building the Shumansky wedding was taking place? I didn’t. But I did know my mother had contracted to supply the booze for the occasion, and I knew I had just broken my back for an hour and a half collecting the stuff, and I knew I had the giggle water tucked away neatly in the troop hike wagon. I also knew that if I wanted to get the tail I had just broken back into one piece, I had better get the stuff to my mother, and I knew there was some connection between my mother not being out on the sidewalk to meet me, as she had promised, and the presence of this bastard in the uptown suit standing in the place where my mother had said she would meet me.

  She had laid it on the line to Mr. Imberotti
in the kitchen over the matzoh bakery. I had heard her say it. I had also heard Mr. Imberotti’s answer. Even huddled in a towel and breathing steam out of a kettle, I could tell from Mr. Imberotti’s voice when he told little Mario that he felt in my mother they had got themselves a bad one, I could tell the old man was not just making a rueful remark for the record. I suddenly remembered what Walter Sinclair had said. “Take care of your mother.” The words didn’t seem so silly now. All of a sudden I was scared.

  The moment the feeling of fear hit me, something hit my ankle. I fell sprawling—what the sportswriters call supine when they mean prone—spread-eagled on my kisser against the stone steps. I could hear the wagon bumping back down behind me, step by step, to the sidewalk. I swung around on my back and desperately shoved myself up on my feet.

  “You rotten bastard,” I screamed at the bastard who had tripped me, and I lunged for the handle of the wagon. I missed. The wagon’s carriage wheels hit the bottom step. The wagon went up in the air. I cringed back against the sandstone steps, waiting for the crash. It never came. At the bottom of the steps, standing on the sidewalk, were Mr. O’Hare and Mr. Norton Krakowitz. The scoutmaster’s fat body moved faster than I would have thought he could make it go. He caught the handle of the wagon about a foot from the ground. Mr. Krakowitz, who always moved fast, especially when he was asked to sing “Me and My Shadow,” shot out a helping hand. They managed to get the wagon to the sidewalk without a crash. Just a slight bump.

  “Look here, my good man,” my scoutmaster said to Mario Imberotti. “May I inquire just what it is you think you are doing?”

  My good man? To this junior gangster? Oy! I could see the whole Boy Scouts of America empire tottering.

  “And you do some looking here, too, you fat slob,” said Mario. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Protecting the property of Troop 244,” said Mr. O’Hare. “Of which I happen to be the scoutmaster. This hike wagon belongs to my troop. We saw you trip this young man, did we not, Norton?”