Last Respects Read online

  “No, please,” my Aunt Sarah said. She put her hand on my head. “This is a good boy. This boy not only can signal with a Morse Code flag better than any boy Mr. O’Hare ever saw, but this boy also loves his mother.”

  “Where is she?” Mr. Kelly said.

  “What?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “Your ears seem to be peculiar,” Mr. Kelly said. “Things you want to hear, you pick up with the greatest of ease. Things you don’t want to hear, elicit from you only the word what. The bootlegger who is this boy’s mother. Where is she?”

  My Aunt Sarah wheeled around like a carrousel grunting into action. “Joe,” she said to my father. “Where is Chanah?”

  All at once my father’s face looked as though it had been frozen. “I’m waiting for you to tell me,” he said.

  They stared at each other for a few moments. Then my Aunt Sarah turned back to Mr. Kelly. “My sister Chanah has gone away for a rest,” she said.

  “With whom?” said Mr. Kelly.

  No one spoke. My mother was not there, of course. As I have already indicated, she had disappeared out of our lives the night before, when the red spots started to spread out on the shirt front of Aaron Greenspan. But suddenly, in that tiny kitchen, I could feel her presence.

  “My sister has gone away to take a rest,” my Aunt Sarah repeated.

  “With whom?” said Mr. Kelly again.

  “Huh?” said my Aunt Sarah.

  In Yiddish, of course. It loses in the translation.

  “With whom?”

  I almost jumped. The two words had been uttered by my father.

  “I don’t know,” Aunt Sarah said.

  “Perhaps I can refresh your recollection,” said Mr. Kelly.

  He moved around the kitchen table, into the hall that led like a tunnel to the front door. He pointed to a section of the green-painted wall. Like every other kid on the block, I used the hall leading to the kitchen of our apartment as a blackboard. As high as I could reach with a pencil, anyway. Here I worked out my arithmetic problems, parsed the sentences I had been assigned as homework, jotted down reminders of things I had to do for the scout troop, and even took a stab now and then at verse. Once in a while I tried a bit of sketching. I had no talent as an artist, but I enjoyed making pictures. My mother had never objected. Probably, I suppose, because she could not read what I wrote. Perhaps because she thought the scrawls and jingles and sketches were decorative. I do not think they would have caused the young Tintoretto to go green with envy, but I think the stuff was more decorative than what the landlord had provided. Following Mr. Kelly’s finger, I saw he was pointing to a poem George Weitz had made up a few months ago. It had taken my fancy, and when I came home from school, I had lettered it neatly on the wall:

  So roses are red,

  So violets are blue,

  So sugar is sweet,

  And so-so-so are you.

  Then I saw that Mr. Kelly was not pointing to the poem. He was pointing to the sketch of a man’s head. A head with closely cropped hair. The head of a man wearing a black turtleneck sweater. A man with a smiling face. Young. Attractive.

  “Okay, boy scout,” said Mr. Kelly. He put his pointing finger on the upturned nose of Walter Sinclair. “Tell me, sonny,” Mr. Kelly said. “Who is this man?”

  10

  THE OBVIOUS ANSWER WAS: “You’re the Feds. You’re supposed to know all about this kind of thing.” But even if I didn’t know anything else, I knew it was neither the time nor the place for obvious answers. On East Fourth Street, when there was trouble in the family, you didn’t go running to the police station.

  “I’m not sure,” I said to Mr. Kelly.

  “Now, I find that most interesting,” said Mr. Kelly. “You go ahead and you draw the picture of a man on the wall of your family’s kitchen,” he said. “And then you say you’re not sure who he is?”

  My Aunt Sarah entered the battle. Without much conviction, I’m afraid. “It could be somebody he saw on the street,” she said. “Somebody whose face he remembered, so he made a picture on the wall. The boy draws all kinds of things on the wall. Look.”

  “Is that what happened?” Mr. Kelly said to me.

  I thought of Walter Sinclair. I couldn’t believe he would have wanted me to lie. “No,” I said.

  “Oh, my God!” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “Shut up, Sooreh,” my father said.

  “What did happen?” Mr. Kelly said.

  I hesitated. Not because I didn’t know how to tell a plausible lie. I hesitated because I didn’t know how to tell this particular truth. “He’s a man I met on the dock,” I said finally. “He gave me a dime to buy candy.”

  “That’s all you know?” Mr. Kelly said.

  I gave the question some thought. Again, not because I was unequal to the task of inventing a lie that would work. I took some time with the question because I wondered if I did know any more. I thought about my mother on the barge, the night we had met Walter. I thought of her face. I decided to stop thinking.

  “That’s all I know,” I said.

  “Well, then, maybe I can help you,” Mr. Kelly said. “It might interest you to know that the man whose picture you drew on the wall is a man the government has been looking for.”

  “Oh, my God,” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “Because he is a gangster,” Mr. Kelly said. “And what seems to be starting here in this neighborhood is a full-fledged gang war. That Greenspan kid last night could be only the beginning. Whatever is about to happen, it’s our job to stop it.”

  “Everybody in this house,” my Aunt Sarah said, “believe me, we wish you success with your job.”

  “Is that why you are here in New York, ma’am?” Mr. Kelly said. “To help me and the government achieve this success?”

  “Why am I here?” she said. “I am here because I am a human being. Because I have a sister named Chanah. And this morning, in my own home in New Haven, Connecticut, I received a call on the telephone from this—this—”

  My Aunt Sarah’s right arm, which could easily have accounted for at least twenty of her two hundred or more pounds, hurled itself out toward my father.

  “This Mr. Kramer?” Mr. Kelly said.

  “My brother-in-law,” said my Aunt Sarah. “My brother-in-law said on the telephone Chanah has disappeared,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Come quick.”

  “And that is all you have to tell me?” said Mr. Kelly.

  “What more can I tell?” my Aunt Sarah said. “The price of the railroad ticket how much it costs from New Haven? That the President is we have a man named Coolidge? The handles on the clock on Grand Central how they stood when I reached New York? A family is a family. You get a call from your brother-in-law on the telephone. He says your sister she’s disappeared. You say I’ll be there by the first train. Here I am. You’ll try a piece of this lekach, maybe? I just baked it fresh. It’s nice and cool now.”

  “Some other time, perhaps,” Mr. Kelly said. “Right now I think my time would be better employed if I set you and your brother-in-law and your senior patrol leader nephew straight about what your situation is. The government feels your sister is connected with the death of that Greenspan boy.”

  “You are calling my sister a murderer?” said my Aunt Sarah.

  No whisper this time. No scream. This time ice.

  “I am calling her a person who has information about what happened last night,” Mr. Kelly said. “Information that we want, and will continue to want, from your sister. Where is she?”

  “I told you from the minute you came in here in the house,” my Aunt Sarah said. “I don’t know. My brother-in-law doesn’t know. That’s why he called me on the telephone in New Haven.”

  “How about you?” Mr. Kelly said to me. “Where is your mother?”

  I had no trouble with this answer. “I don’t know,” I said.

  Mr. Kelly clapped his notebook shut. “Very well, members of the Kramer family,” he said. “I suggest you find out where she is,
because if you don’t, the government will, and then you will all learn for yourselves a very revealing lesson in how the government of the United States treats people who break its laws.”

  He picked up his hat, set it on his head as though he were recapping a fountain pen, and disappeared into the long green corridor. When the door slammed shut behind Mr. Kelly, something happened that I still find it difficult to believe I actually witnessed. My father stood up, came around the kitchen table, and stopped in front of me.

  “You little liar,” he said.

  If he had said How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child, I could not have been more astonished. After all, I knew a little something about Shakespeare, even if I had learned this particular fragment from Mr. Norton Krakowitz, but what did I know about my father? I now found out.

  “Joe!” my Aunt Sarah said.

  Too late. It was like the day after the All-Manhattan rally eliminations when I tried to placate George Weitz in the schoolyard during lunch hour by holding out my two pieces of fruit and he gave me a shot in the mouth. I could see my father’s arm go up and his outspread palm start down, but it never even occurred to me to duck because I didn’t believe what I was seeing. Even when my father’s slap caught me across the face and I fell into the baking tin on the kitchen table, I still didn’t believe it.

  “Look what you’ve done to my lekach,” my Aunt Sarah said.

  I said nothing. Not out loud, anyway. Inside my head, however, what I said seemed to me perfectly reasonable. “Pa,” I said in the stunned silence of my mind, “you never hit me before.”

  11

  HE NEVER DID IT again. Not once during all the remainder of his eighty-two years. But how was I to know that? I mean in 1927 on the evening following the day of the Shumansky wedding? I didn’t know it. So I turned and ran. Up the green corridor, through the front door, and down the steps. On the stoop I slowed down. It occurred to me that everybody on the block knew what had happened the night before at the Shumansky wedding. East Fourth Street in those days was a place that did not surprise easily. But murder gets around. That much I’d learned during the earlier part of the day. What I had not learned was whether the people on the block were aware of my mother’s connection with the death of Aaron Greenspan.

  It was a connection that could be described as accidental. I would have felt easier in my mind if I had been able to describe it that way, if only to myself. But I couldn’t. The mechanics of what had happened were sharp and clear. Any kid on East Fourth Street would have understood it.

  Mr. Imberotti and his family were the leaders of an apparatus they had fashioned to produce revenue for themselves. They had recruited my mother and she had become a part of that apparatus. The Imberottis had been pleased with her role. But she had refused to remain in her role. Ambition had seized her. My mother had demanded a larger part in the play. The Imberottis could not tolerate such demands. Larger parts were reserved for the family actors, and my mother was not a member of the Imberotti family. This had not stopped her. In fact, I think it inflamed her. She tended to suppress her pride because in this New World she did not know the retaliations waiting to destroy people who were guilty of the sin of pride. But pride runs on its own motor. In my mother’s case it escaped her normally cautious controls. It seeped out under pressure in unexpected corners of her life. I suspect the corners took her by surprise.

  She should have accepted the rules Mr. Imberotti laid down. Given a normal situation, a normal period in which to think, I believe she would have accepted it. The guiding principle of her life was survival. But the situation created by the Shumansky wedding was not normal. It stirred something beyond my mother’s normal instincts for caution: greed.

  It has been my experience that when you are hungry you will eat whatever crumbs drop your way. Once the crumbs have eased the cutting edge of desperation, however, watch out. The loaf from which the crumbs have fallen suddenly begins to look within reach. Why not? If somebody else owned a loaf, somebody no more spectacularly endowed with brains or talent than you, why can’t you own a loaf? I think that’s what happened to my mother.

  She had earned small sums through the Imberottis. In doing so, she had earned larger sums for them. Instead of being grateful, they proved to be hateful. A phrase that seems to have slipped out of the language describes, I think, my mother’s reaction. She saw red. It is not a good color. Whom the gods destroy they first make mad, I was taught in high school. If my mother had not gone mad, Aaron Greenspan would probably not have been killed under the blue velvet canopy at his own wedding in the Lenox Assembly Rooms.

  On the other hand, I might have been the one who was killed. Because I knew in my bones that the Imberotti family trigger man who had killed Aaron Greenspan had been drawing a bead on somebody else. Somebody whose death would scare off this ambitious woman who had forgotten her place and was threatening the apparatus. Her son. Me.

  I was grateful, of course, that the bullet had missed its mark. I was aware, however, that an apparatus that would attempt to eliminate an irritation by killing a pageboy under a wedding canopy would not abandon the effort merely because a first try did not work. In short, I was still the target.

  Going up East Fourth Street, I moved uneasily. I had no idea who was watching me. I had no idea if the people on the block knew that my mother had been missing since the night before. It seemed sensible not to be seen running. In those days people who ran collected stares, or cheers, or jeers, or bullets. If the Imberotti trigger man had me in his sights, I could not escape by running. I hit the street at a walk and started up the block toward Avenue D.

  Why? Because night was coming in fast across the river from Brooklyn, and that meant I was due in Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store to relieve his mother behind the counter. Moving along in the gathering darkness through the deeply rutted grooves of habit, I began to think more clearly about Mr. Kelly.

  The government man had indicated in our kitchen that he knew all about what had taken place the night before. It seemed reasonable to assume, therefore, he knew that I worked for Abe Lebenbaum in the candy store. Mr. Kelly had made it perfectly clear that he knew about my dealings with Mr. Heizerick. And he knew about the fire in the Zabriskie sisters’ bedroom.

  The fire had not until this moment seemed any more important than any of the other events of the night before. Now I began to understand that while I may have forgotten about the fire, the Fire Department had not. I could suddenly hear again the bells of those fire engines as I raced down the fire escape with the hike wagon. I could hear those bells, and I could hear something else. The excited voices of Lya and Pauline and Marie—shivering a little maybe; after all there had been no time to put on any clothes—as they explained to the authorities that they had been minding their own business—who else could they get to mind a business like theirs?—when suddenly they were enveloped by flames.

  The key word, I suddenly grasped, was authorities. Whoever they were, meaning cops, the odds were good that they would learn as much as Mr. Kelly had learned. Which meant the cops could very well be waiting for me in Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store. It seemed sensible to let them wait.

  At the Avenue D corner I did not turn left toward the candy store. I kept right on going, across Avenue D, toward Avenue C. Halfway up the block my brain started to come to life. I could suddenly see the mess I was in as a two-parter. Part one, what had happened the night before. Part two, what was going to happen as a result of those events.

  I knew a good deal about the first. I had no idea about the second. All at once the part I understood, the events in which I had been involved, became more important than they had seemed when I was racing through them. Holes, I saw, had to be plugged. The most obvious one hit me like my father’s slap.

  I turned and doubled back toward Avenue D. When I arrived in front of Lenox Assembly Rooms, night had settled in. The great big globes on the black iron poles set in the sandstone balustrades were not lighted. T
he steps were deserted. Either no bar mitzvahs or weddings were scheduled for that night, or Mr. Kelly had anticipated my move and set a trap for me.

  My first instinct, naturally, was to turn and run. I did not turn and run because I could manage only one half of the operation. I turned, and stopped dead. Coming up the street toward me was Mr. Norton Krakowitz and a cop.

  The cop was so absorbed in whatever it was Mr. Krakowitz was saying, and Mr. Krakowitz was so absorbed in the sounds he was making, that neither saw me. I turned back and ran up the sandstone steps.

  How to describe my feelings when I reached the top and pressed against the front doors and they opened inward? Very simple. I suddenly believed in God. I am convinced He was responsible for getting me from those front doors up the marble stairs to the second floor, down the shadowy corridor, and into the small dressing room, where the night before the velvet cape of the pageboy had been wrapped around my shoulders, and the golden cardboard crown had been pressed on my head.

  I thought for the first time about the kid who had actually been scheduled to be the pageboy at the Shumansky wedding. Suppose that boy had not been delayed? Suppose he had arrived under the canopy on time? Would the trigger man have looked elsewhere for the son of the woman who had enraged the Imberottis? Would he have waited to get the woman herself in his sights? My mother? Would Arnold Greenspan now be alive?

  The only light in the dressing room when I slipped through the door came from a lamppost out on the street just below the single window. It was enough to show that the Troop 244 hike wagon was sitting exactly where I had left it the night before.

  I flipped open the lid. The wagon was empty. I grabbed the handle, dragged the wagon out of the room, and started back up the corridor. At the top of the divided stairs I stopped. Mr. Krakowitz and the cop were coming up the left wing. They were moving slowly, placing their steps carefully one at a time into the small splash of yellow from the cop’s flashlight. They reminded me of a couple of kids tiptoeing through a string of puddles after a rainstorm. I ducked below the level of the marble rail and pulled the wagon toward the right wing of the stairs. When the yellow splash of light reached the top on the left, I crouched low and started down on the right.