Last Respects Read online

  “Most emphatically yes,” said Mr. Norton Krakowitz. “We saw you extrude your leg, or perhaps I should say foot, and thus cause the toppling of Senior Patrol Leader Kramer to the stone steps of this edifice.”

  When he wasn’t singing “Me and My Shadow,” Mr. Krakowitz was talking like an educated Arab.

  “And who the hell are you?” said Mario Imberotti. “My good man?”

  This was a mistake. Norton Krakowitz was not a real man, good or bad. He was a public image to which Mr. Krakowitz spent his life adding brush strokes intended to create the illusion of reality.

  “I am Norton Krakowitz,” he said. “Owner and president of Krakowitz’s Men’s and Boys’ Clothes, Inc., located at 47 Avenue B. I am also the district leader of the Boy Scouts of America for the Southern Manhattan area,” said Mr. Norton Krakowitz to the skinny body encased in the little gangster’s Rogers Peet suit. “My business status in this community, as well as my official position as the executive in charge of the welfare of the youth in our area, have provided me with a number of significant and important friends in the police department. I refer specifically to the hierarchy of the Seventh Precinct, with which I am sure you are familiar.”

  Mr. Norton Krakowitz paused to make two sweeping adjustments to his sideburns. He used his palms. A couple of garden rakes would have been inadequate. Mr. Norton Krakowitz had gray-white hair that was made of tightly kinked rolls of steel wire. Nothing he did to it with his hands could possibly affect the way the growth hugged his scalp and the side of his head. Like shining barnacles on the hull of a ship. But the gesture had an astonishing effect. As though with the two backward brushing motions of his palms Mr. Norton Krakowitz had set a frame around his head. It made him look like those pictures of senators and emperors on Roman coins.

  “In short and in summary and in conclusion, Mr. Mario Imberotti,” he said, “and I trust you will make note of the to you perhaps surprising fact that I know your name, and I also happen to know the activities in which you and the members of your family are engaged, if you don’t answer Mr. O’Hare’s question at once, young Mr. Imberotti, I can promise you that before this night is over, you and the other members of your family will find yourselves in very big trouble. In short and in summary and in conclusion, young man, don’t you fool around with Norton Krakowitz.” The Jewish Roman Emperor of Avenue B turned to Mr. O’Hare. “You may ask your question again,” he said. “Speak freely, Mr. O’Hare. You will be answered.”

  “It isn’t really a question,” said the scoutmaster of Troop 244. “I merely stated what you, too, saw, Norton, namely and to be specific, as we approached these steps we saw this young man reach out his foot and trip my senior patrol leader, Scout Kramer, thus endangering the property of Troop 244, namely and to be specific, this hike wagon. I would like to know why Mr.—What did you say his name is?”

  “Imberotti,” Mr. Norton Krakowitz said. “Mario Imberotti.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. O’Hare said. “I would like to know why Mr. Imberotti would do such a thing. Will you tell me, please, Mr. Imberotti?”

  I now saw, or rather sensed, that there was more to Mario Imberotti than his suit. He looked at Mr. O’Hare and Mr. Krakowitz with what they apparently thought was great respect. I did not share this thought, and I was at least thirty years younger than either of these two jokers. How come I was smarter than my scoutmaster and the president of Krakowitz’s Men’s and Boys’ Clothing, Inc.? Very simple. The look in Mario Imberotti’s eyes reminded me of the way I had looked at Mr. O’Hare when he got in my way at the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House and I had to shoot him a load of bull to get my mitts on the hike wagon right under his nose.

  “It’s like this,” Mario Imberotti said. “My father he’s a good friend of Yonkel Shumansky.”

  “Who is he?” Mr. O’Hare said.

  “The father of the bride,” Mario Imberotti said. “This wedding that’s going on here tonight.” The young gangster gestured up the sandstone steps toward the Lenox Assembly Rooms. “It’s Mr. Shumansky’s daughter. He’s very proud she’s getting married, and my father wants everything should go okay, because he and Mr. Shumansky they’re good friends, so my father sent me over to make sure nothing goes wrong.”

  Mr. O’Hare’s acres of face began to look a little the way all that skin had looked the Saturday night my mother had appeared on the floor of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym while George Weitz was wigwagging to me Matthew, XXV, 29.

  “What on earth could go wrong?” he said.

  “On earth, who knows?” Mario Imberotti said. “On the second floor of the Lenox Assembly Rooms, the guests could go blind.”

  “Blind?” Mr. O’Hare said.

  It occurred to me that when David picked those stones from the brook and wound up his slingshot and let Goliath have it, Mr. O’Hare had the perfect voice for the boy on the Philistine side who said, “In the forehead?”

  “Sure,” Mario Imberotti said. “People go blind all the time from drinking the wrong kind of stuff.”

  “From drinking what?” Mr. O’Hare said.

  Mr. Norton Krakowitz was no Philistine. Or maybe a man who sold men’s and boys’ suits had to have an instinct for picking the winning side. He took a couple of swift swipes at his steel-wire sideburns and stepped forward.

  “Mario,” he said. “If your father is supplying the liquid refreshment for this wedding, I am certain nobody is going to go blind.”

  “My father is not involved in this wedding except as a close friend of Yonkel Shumansky,” Mario Imberotti said. “That’s why I tripped this young snotnose.”

  “You will please be good enough to watch your language,” Mr. O’Hare said. “The eleventh Scout Law says a scout is clean, and Scout Kramer has never to my knowledge violated any of the ten preceding it or the twelfth that follows it. Am I correct, Scout Kramer?”

  Well, I was not a snotnose. “No, sir,” I said.

  “You admit, then, that you tripped Scout Kramer on these steps?” Mr. Norton Krakowitz said.

  “I had to,” Mario Imberotti said.

  “You had to?” Mr. O’Hare said.

  Come to think of it, I don’t believe the Philistines could have stood this bastard.

  “What else could I do?” Mario Imberotti said. “I had to see what’s in that wagon.”

  He walked toward it. He reached down to take the hasp. I thought of Walter Sinclair. “Take care of your mother.” The words gave me strength. They even did something for my aim. The toe of my shoe caught Mario Imberotti in one of the world’s great targets.

  The little gangster screamed and did a Four Wings and Scram. When the law of gravity brought him back to the sidewalk, he toppled to the left. Mr. Norton Krakowitz caught him.

  “Who the hell did that?” Mario Imberotti yelled. “Who’s the son of a bitch did that?”

  Mr. O’Hare stepped forward. “I did,” he said.

  I was pleased but not surprised by this intervention. I had suspected for a long time that Mr. O’Hare was crazy. Mr. Norton Krakowitz, staring at the scoutmaster, clearly thought so, too.

  “What the helldjewanna do a thing like that for?” Mario Imberotti said, rubbing the area where I had connected.

  “Because I know what is in that hike wagon,” Mr. O’Hare said. “It is, as I’ve told you, the property of Troop 244. Only members of the troop are allowed to handle our hike wagon. We do not allow strangers to paw about among our possessions. You are a stranger, Mr. Imberotti.”

  “All right, I’m a stranger,” Mario Imberotti said. “I’m just trying to see what’s in there, that’s all.”

  “What’s in there,” Mr. O’Hare said, “is the equipment with which Scout Kramer will give his demonstration here tonight.”

  “His what?” Mario Imberotti said.

  Maybe if the Philistines got fed up with Mr. O’Hare, they would look with favor on this young bastard? Rogers Peet suits were very adaptable.

  “His demonstration,” the scoutm
aster said. “Come along, Scout Kramer.” He grabbed the hike wagon with one hand and my arm with his other. “Norton?” he said.

  “Coming,” said Mr. Norton Krakowitz. He stepped up beside me and took my other arm. He turned to the little gangster and said, “You can go home now, Mario. Tell your father he has nothing to worry about so far as his friend is concerned. Mr. Shumansky’s daughter’s wedding is in good hands.”

  I wondered whose hands the dope meant. As they marched me up the steps of the Lenox Assembly Rooms, with the hike wagon dragging behind us, it seemed to me I was in worse trouble than I had been in when Mario Imberotti had tripped me on the stone steps. These two boobs clearly believed what I had told Mr. O’Hare in the troop meeting room at the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House earlier in the evening, namely, that I was going to the Shumansky wedding to entertain the guests by putting on a demonstration of boy scout skills. The wagon we were all lugging up the sandstone steps contained, they believed even more clearly, the troop equipment I had actually shoved into the stone cave on Old Man Tzoddick’s cellar steps. When Mr. O’Hare and Mr. Krakowitz and I reached the top of the Lenox Assembly Rooms steps, and they led me through the big front doors, and we came out into the lobby through which I had once seen Eugene Victor Debs carried on the shoulders of men who had helped him out of a hay wagon, my temporarily stalled memory machine started to turn over again. On the sidewalk Mario Imberotti had said to Mr. O’Hare, “On the second floor of the Lenox Assembly Rooms, the guests could go blind.” So I had one piece of information that I had not had when I arrived and discovered my mother was not there to meet me.

  “Mr. O’Hare, sir,” I said.

  The scoutmaster turned. “Yes, Scout Kramer?”

  “Thanks very much for your help,” I said. “You, too, Mr. Krakowitz. But now I’d better get upstairs to meet my mother.”

  “Your mother?” Mr. O’Hare said.

  He sounded as though I had announced my intention to keep an appointment with Typhoid Mary.

  “She told me to meet her here,” I said. I could see the what-on-earth-for bit beginning to shape up inside his brain pan. I did not feel this would help. I headed him off at the pass. “My mother was the one arranged with Mrs. Shumansky I should give this demonstration at the wedding,” I said. “I mean, Mr. O’Hare, it was my mother’s idea.”

  And so was Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.

  “How splendid,” said Mr. O’Hare. He turned to Mr. Norton Krakowitz. “One never knows where one’s strongest advocates come from, Norton, does one?”

  “Never,” said Mr. Norton Krakowitz. “You must remind me some day to tell you the story of the coalition we were able to put together to elect Mayor Hylan. We put all of Avenue B behind him. From Krakowitz’s Men’s and Boys’ Clothes all the way up to Fourteenth Street. People who had never seen a ballot before. Immigrants, most of them. Immigrants like Scout Kramer’s mother, and yet as politically aware as any Tammany chief.”

  “Where do you intend to meet your mother?” Mr. O’Hare said.

  “On the second floor,” I said. “That’s where the Shumansky wedding is being held.”

  Uptown, I learned years later, weddings took place. On East Fourth Street they were held.

  “Well, then,” Mr. O’Hare said. “We’d better get cracking.”

  That’s exactly what my mother would do if I showed up with these two schlemiels. And what she would start cracking was my skull.

  “You don’t have to bother,” I said. “Thank you very much. I know where the second floor is.”

  “Good,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Then you may lead us to it.”

  Jesus, I thought. Screwed again.

  “It’s nothing special,” I said. “Just a second floor.”

  “But a second floor on which a Jewish wedding is about to take place,” Mr. Norton Krakowitz said. “The reason Mr. O’Hare asked me to accompany him here tonight, Scout Kramer, is that your scoutmaster has never seen a Jewish wedding. I assured him it was a spectacle that he would enjoy very much. We will all go up together.”

  What was the alternative? Going up separately? We went up together. The stairs circled like a bridge across the ground-floor hall in which years ago I had fallen asleep before Eugene Victor Debs could begin to speak. It was very quiet on the stairs. Then, when we came out on the second floor, we were met by an explosion of noise. From a door down the hall on the right came the sounds of a band playing “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” On the left there were four doors, spaced perhaps ten feet apart. From one or more of them came the sounds of voices raised in argument. I couldn’t make out any words, or decide from behind which doors the voices were hammering at each other.

  “Scout Kramer,” Mr. O’Hare said. “Wait here.”

  He dropped the handle of the hike wagon and made a gesture to Mr. Krakowitz. The two men went down the corridor and stopped at the door on the right through which the music was blasting out into the hall. Whatever they saw must have interested them, because after a couple of moments the two men stepped through the door and disappeared. Okay. With them out of the way, I thought, all I had to do now was find my mother, and that was as far as my thinking went, because at that moment she came out into the corridor through the door nearest me on the left.

  “Hey, Ma!”

  She gave me a sharp look, shot another one down the hall, then ran toward me. She grabbed my arm and the handle of the wagon.

  “Ma,” I said. “I was looking for—”

  “Hold the tongue!” she said.

  She dragged me and the wagon through the door out of which she had just come, and pulled it shut. I didn’t have much chance to look around, but I got the impression that I was in some sort of dressing room. There was a beat-up old leather couch against one wall, and against another wall, a table with a mirror over it. On the table I saw a pincushion, an ashtray, a pair or scissors, and what looked like scraps of pink ribbon.

  “Where have you been?” my mother said.

  She was bent over the wagon, struggling with the hasp.

  “Downstairs,” I said. I dropped to one knee and gave her a hand. The hasp came free. “Out in front,” I said. “Where you told me to wait. Where you said you’d meet me.”

  My mother tapped the bottles, muttering to herself as she counted.

  “In the big ones,” she said, pointing to the large sacks Walter Sinclair had turned over to me on the dock. “How many?”

  “Five each,” I said. “Eighteen bottles all together. Where were you?”

  “I was here, upstairs,” my mother said. “I was watching for you from the window. When I saw you coming on Avenue D, I ran down. Then I saw him, the momzer, waiting on the sidewalk, so I ran back up here.”

  “The gangster?” I said. “Imberotti’s son?”

  My mother was ramming the hasp back into place. She looked up. “How did you know?”

  “He was waiting down there when I got to the front,” I said. “He tried to stop me coming in the building.”

  My mother stood up. “He saw what was in the wagon?”

  The mixture of anger and fear in her voice gave me a chance I could not resist. “What do you think I am?” I said. “A dope? I told him to beat it.”

  My mother looked at me with a frown. I could tell I had overdone it. She went quickly to the window, peered out, and turned back to me. “He’s still there,” she said.

  Okay, boy, get yourself out of this one. “I can’t chase him away,” I said. “All I could do is tell him.”

  “What are you talking about?” my mother said.

  I nodded down toward Mario Imberotti. He was leaning against the stone balustrade, staring idly up Avenue D. “The gangster,” I said to my mother. “I told him to beat it. I didn’t mean he should go away. I meant he wasn’t going to look in my wagon, and let me tell you something, he didn’t. I came upstairs and I was looking around for where to go find you, when you came out of here and pulled me in.”

  My mother gave me another o
f those long looks. She must have known I was full of malarkey. What her glance was saying was: How full?

  “All right,” my mother said at last. “You wait here.”

  She dragged the wagon out of the room and pulled the door shut behind her with one of those bangs that say more than I am closing a door, kid. I didn’t worry too much about what that more was. My first feeling was a sense of relief. I had been ordered to collect the eighteen bottles of Old Southwick and deliver them to my mother in front of the Lenox Assembly Rooms at seven-thirty. I had done the job. If she would not remember to be proud of me, I was sure Walter Sinclair would.

  My next feeling was a little more confused. I had lied to my mother about how I had managed to get past Mario Imberotti with the hike wagon. There was no reason why this should have made me uneasy. I had been lying to her for years. I did it as easily as I ate her honey cake. Just the same, this time I didn’t feel relaxed about it. On the contrary. I felt I had left something out. What had I forgotten? A moment later I knew what was wrong. I should have told my mother Mr. O’Hare and Mr. Norton Krakowitz were loose in the building. A moment after that the door opened and two women came in. They came in the way my mother came into our kitchen. As though nobody was going to be dopey enough to question her right to enter. These women were wearing beaded dresses, and their hair was combed in a complicated way, and they had roses pinned to their shoulders. What they had pinned to their faces were those sweaty fat smiles of women up to their ears in the arrangements for a Jewish affair. The smiles took a sock in the kishke when they saw me. They gave me the hairy eyeball, then turned the X-ray looks on each other.

  “It’s a uniform,” one woman said. “He’s wearing a uniform.”

  The second woman turned back to me and said, “You’re the pageboy?”

  I was a very confused boy scout.

  “My mother told me to wait here,” I said.

  The two women looked at each other again. Then they shared a shrug and hurried across the room to the leather couch. From behind it they pulled a large white cardboard box. From the box they drew a blue velvet cape with gold embroidery at the edges. It could have been one of the curtains behind which Rabbi Goldfarb kept the Torahs. The women brought the cape across the room. I stood there like a dope while they hung it around my shoulders and fastened it at my throat with a brass clasp. I had a moment of desperation. What was going on? How did this fit in with my mother’s plans? Should I shove my way out of the room and run? They stepped back and cocked their heads to one side. Then they tipped their heads the other way, and they shared another shrug.