Last Respects Read online

  She said, “Ask him what it is with the Shumansky wedding.”

  I did as I was told. The old man nodded and rubbed his eyes as he wiped his cough-spattered palms on the bathrobe.

  “I know,” he said. Again tired. But also again friendly. “It’s a big order,” he said, sucking in steam. “Eighteen quarts. My sons and I, we must fill the order direct ourselves.”

  “Why?” my mother said.

  The old man sighed. A wheeze, really. It started him coughing again. He clutched the towel over his head with both hands. I had the feeling my mother was annoying but not surprising him. It was as though, in spite of his illness, he had been induced to go to the theater, perhaps because his family had said getting out of the house would do him good, and when he got to the play he found he knew all the jokes before the entertainers uttered them.

  “It’s like this,” he said. “Small orders, a bottle here, a bottle there, fine. This you can handle. And you’ve handled it for us very good. But the Shumansky wedding. Eighteen bottles. For a woman it’s too much.”

  “Why?” my mother said again.

  “Why?” the old man said. “Think why. It’s eighteen bottles. Just to carry alone, it’s impossible for a woman.”

  “I have a son,” my mother said.

  The old man parted the flaps of the towel to look at me. I had a feeling I should stand up and flex my biceps. Or push out my arms to show the spread I could achieve. He was looking at me as though he had just become aware of my presence. I found this embarrassing. I had been talking my head off, translating like crazy. I thought he had grown accustomed to my presence. All of a sudden I felt like an intruder.

  “He’s a kid,” the old man said finally. He paused to inhale a large gulp of steam. “I can’t take a chance,” he said. “He’s a nice boy. I can tell. I know nice boys. I’m glad you got one. But I can’t take a chance on a kid. He—” The old man’s voice stopped. His chest went on working. As he caught the explosions of phlegm in his palms, he huddled deeper into the towel hood and examined me more closely. Finally, on a series of low gasps, he said, “What’s that he’s wearing?”

  “My scout uniform,” I said. “I’m senior patrol leader of Troop 244 in the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House.”

  “Jesus,” the old man said. He turned to his son. “Like the cops?”

  “No, no, no,” said the young man. “It’s like—oh, Christ.” He scowled at the glass of Moxie on the table in front of him, then said, “Like the Boys’ Club? On Avenue A and Tenth?”

  “The Hannah H. Lichtenstein House,” I said, “is on Avenue B and Ninth.”

  “I know, I know,” the young man said irritably. “I’m just trying to explain.” He turned back to his father. “It’s like to keep them off the street, Pop. They play games. They make bandages. They tie knots. It has nothing to do with the cops.”

  “You sure?” the old man wheezed.

  “Positive,” the young man said. “You want more hot water, Pop?”

  The old man shook his head. He reached out and patted my hair. He did it as though he was testing it for springiness. It was springy enough. In those days I grew a skullcap of tight little kinky black curls.

  “A nice boy,” the old man said. “He’s working yet?”

  I translated as though he were talking about Chink Alberg or Hot Cakes Rabinowitz.

  “After school,” my mother said. “In Lebenbaum’s candy store on Avenue C.”

  “Very nice,” the old man said. “Very good. How old?”

  “Fourteen,” my mother said.

  “Good,” the old man said. “Very good. All of mine, the whole four, I started them the same age. It makes them understand.”

  “He understands,” my mother said.

  “What?” the old man said.

  “He understands it’s a family,” my mother said. “Everybody has to help. If I tell him to carry, he’ll carry.”

  “He’s carried before?” the old man said.

  “No,” my mother said. “Up to now I didn’t need help. One bottle, two, anybody can carry. But the Shumansky wedding, eighteen bottles, he’ll help me.”

  The old man was taken by a yawn. His body shook. The shaking ended in a belch.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s this thing in my chest. Like a load of cement. I have to go to bed. Listen. About the Shumansky wedding, I’m sorry. We’ll fill the order ourselves. Other things, you can do like always. All right?”

  Before I finished translating, my mother stood up.

  “No,” she said.

  “What?” the old man said.

  Not a question. Another explosion.

  “She said no, Pop,” his son said.

  “You shut up,” my mother said to the young man. “To talk for me, I brought my own son.” She shoved my shoulder. “Tell him, the stupid idiot.”

  Something told me something else: it was wiser not to tell this old man what my mother had said.

  “My mother says,” I said to the young man, “you should she says please let me do the saying of what she says.”

  “Jesus, all right,” the old man said. “But what’s there to say?”

  I translated with nervous care. The low hum from the flywheel on top of the refrigerator, and the louder noise from the motor on the floor beside it, suddenly seemed to be filling the room like the raging waters in the picture of the Johnstown Flood that hung on the wall of Mr. McLaughlin’s office in P.S. 188.

  “There’s this to say, Mr. Imberotti,” my mother said. The name came as a relief. I had not realized until now that I was troubled by the gap between what it said on the window downstairs and the fact that this father and son looked like all the Italians on Ninth Street. Italians were not called Meister. Imberotti was more like it. “A bottle for a bar mitzvah,” my mother said, “two bottles for the schul on Purim, for this I’m good enough. But for the Shumansky wedding, because it’s eighteen bottles, where a person could make herself a dollar, for this I’m not good enough.”

  The old man waited patiently for my translation, then said, “That’s not the way to look at it.”

  “I work for you to put bread on the table for my husband and son,” my mother said. “Now there comes a piece of cake, so you take it away from me. How should I look at it, Mr. Imberotti?”

  “Like this,” the old man said. “You’re a person we like. You’re a person we trust. For three years we’ve worked together like friends. Why should we stop being friends?”

  “We shouldn’t,” my mother said. “To stay friends, all you have to do is let me take care of the Shumansky wedding. I’m entitled to it.”

  The old man shook his head sadly. The towel flapped. Mr. Imberotti caught the ends. “I can’t,” he said. “The order is too big.”

  “You mean the profit is too big,” my mother said.

  “Listen, Pop,” the young man said. “This broad is getting off base.”

  I didn’t translate that. I pretended I hadn’t heard it. I was beginning to worry.

  “No, she has a right,” the old man said. “But her right doesn’t change that she’s wrong.” He patted my head again. “Tell that to your mother.”

  I did, and my mother did a surprising thing. She also patted my head. Exactly the way the old man had patted it.

  “It’s time to go,” she said.

  I stood up and came to her side.

  “You’re angry?” the old man said.

  “No,” my mother said. “I’m going home to bake you a lekach.”

  “Will you still be working for us?” the old man said.

  “You’ll find out,” my mother said.

  She took my hand and led me toward the door.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” the old man said.

  My mother gave him the kind of look I’d seen her give my father every day of my life, but she didn’t give him the dialogue that usually followed that look.

  The old man came up out of his chair on an explosion of wheezing. “What are
you going to do?” he gasped.

  “You’ll find out, you Italian bastard,” my mother said.

  I didn’t translate that, either.

  “Help them get out,” Mr. Imberotti said to his son.

  His voice rasped. I wasn’t surprised. The word “bastard” needs no translation. Its meaning wallops around for all to understand in the sounds that send it out into the world. What little I could see of the old man’s face through the towel hood indicated he understood. The sounds he made in reply made my stomach churn. My mother, I knew, had made a mistake.

  “Mario,” the old man said, and that’s all he did say before the coughing fit hit him. But at least I had finally learned the name of the young man in the Rogers Peet suit. “Mario,” the old man said again, and before the coughing fit floored him, Mr. Imberotti managed to get this much out to his son: “We got a bad one on our hands, Mario.”

  3

  PERHAPS THEY HAD. I say perhaps because the words had no precise meaning for me. I’d never thought of my mother as a bad one. Perhaps she even was a bad one, whatever the words meant to Mr. Imberotti. Whoever he was. But none of it held my attention for very long. I had other things on my mind. More precisely, one thing: what had happened in the gym of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House the night before.

  Catastrophe. It was for me a totally new experience. My first earthquake, so to speak. I didn’t know what to think about it, so I didn’t think. I stewed. I don’t recall that I had ever until then had a sleepless night. Perhaps that one wasn’t actually sleepless. But I did an awful lot of tossing and turning. In the morning, when I left the house for school, I felt rotten. As though the earthquake had ended but the threat remained. The rumbling underfoot had stopped. Masonry and shattered glass had ceased falling. But what was I going to do about the fires crackling all around me? What was I going to say to George Weitz and Chink Alberg and the others?

  Luckily, the first one to whom I had to say anything was Hot Cakes Rabinowitz. I met him near the Avenue C corner as he came out of his tenement with his schoolbooks.

  “Hey,” he said, “you missed it.”

  I had a sudden vision of a lynching party setting out to find me and coming back empty-handed. Should I sigh with relief? Turn and run? Or brazen it out?

  “Missed what?” I said.

  “We won,” Hot Cakes said.

  I didn’t believe him, of course. But it seemed sensible at the moment not to say so. Calling Hot Cakes a liar could lead to only one thing: a denunciation for the role I had played in the troop’s defeat. Besides, Hot Cakes was not a wiseguy like George Weitz. Hot Cakes was a quiet kid with thick glasses and no sense of humor. He never laughed unless he was tickled. Hot Cakes was what we then called a yoineh. Today the nearest equivalent to a yoineh is a square. I did not think then, and I do not feel now, that either word is pejorative. It is a label. Hot Cakes did not make jokes. They were made about him. Mainly because his real name was Ira. The name vanished from East Fourth Street the day his mother, on her way out to the Avenue C pushcart market, left her son doing his homework at the kitchen table with instructions to keep an eye on two honey cakes Mrs. Rabinowitz had going in the oven. Ira forgot his mother’s instructions. The honey cakes burned to a couple of inedible crisps. And to the kids of our block, Ira Rabinowitz became Hot Cakes Rabinowitz.

  “We won what?” I said.

  “The eliminations,” Hot Cakes said. “You should have been there.”

  “My old lady pulled me out,” I said. This was hardly news to Hot Cakes. He was George Weitz’s reader-receiver. He had seen it happen while squatting at George’s knee the night before. I tried harder. “My aunt got sick,” I said, and then my powers of invention stalled. In those days I had trouble telling lies. Not because of any moral convictions. It was simply that I had not yet learned how to fit the pieces together. It is a simple art. Simple and degrading. I learned how to manage it as I grew older. At that time, however, I merely tried. “My aunt from New Haven,” I said. “She came down to visit us.” No, I thought, hold it. If she came down to visit us, and she got sick, she would now be in our house, which she wasn’t. Try again. “She started out to visit us,” I said. “But she got sick on the way and my mother needed me to go along with her to the place where my aunt was sick so I could talk English for her.” This would go down, I felt. Hot Cakes, like almost every kid on the block, also had to talk English for his mother. “So she came and got me,” I said with more confidence. “My mother.” Here I stalled again. I could see what was coming up next. The place where my mother had taken me to talk English for her about my sick aunt. I suddenly knew I could not negotiate that hurdle. My powers of invention, limited at best, are at their worst when I am desperate. Instead, I said, “How’d we win?”

  “We took three firsts,” Hot Cakes said. “Bandages with arterial pressure points. Then the knot-tying, and also the flint-and-steel. We got a second on bridge-building. We got a third on camp hygiene, and we got a second on basket-weaving. The only thing we got nothing on was One-Flag Morse.”

  How could we not? With the troop’s ace wigwagger not at his post but heading across town to Meister’s Matzoh Bakery?

  “My aunt,” I said nervously without conviction. “She got sick. My mother, she had to go, so she needed me to come along and talk English for her.”

  But Hot Cakes was not interested. We had reached the school. Hot Cakes disappeared into the crowd waiting for the first bell. I was left alone with something new: a feeling of resentment. I had assumed my skill with a Morse flag was the core around which Mr. O’Hare had built his hopes for the troop’s success. It had never crossed my mind that without me Troop 244 had a prayer. Yet without me my friends had won. Anyway, I had always thought of them as my friends. Some friends. My feeling of resentment gave way to a sense of betrayal. You couldn’t trust anybody. Your own mother. Your fellow scouts. Even the man who had stated in public that you were the best Morse wigwagger he had ever known. Bitterness seized me. It is not a good thing to be seized by.

  I spent the morning inventing plans for murdering my mother, and ducking George Weitz. This was easy enough between first bell and lunch because George and I were not in the same class. Once the lunch bell rang, however, it was not so easy. George was a pig. I do not mean that he looked like a pig. Actually, he was tall and slender and quite handsome. George was a pig about food. He couldn’t stop eating.

  The lunch he brought every day from home was always much larger than the lunch any of the rest of us brought. This was only natural. Since his father was a doctor, we took it for granted the Weitz family was rich. Rich people ate more than poor people. What was unnatural was the way George disposed of these substantial lunches.

  He always started eating on the staircase while the classes filed down from the classrooms to the yard. By the time the rest of us had found places to squat—there were no chairs, tables, or benches in the schoolyard—and began opening our paper sacks, George had finished the meal he had brought from home. He would then spend the rest of the lunch hour moving from group to group, begging for food. Very few boys refused him. I know I never did. Not because I had too much, or because I wasn’t hungry, but because I rarely liked what I had in my paper bag.

  My mother was a rotten cook. As a result, what we didn’t finish at our evening meal had to be thrown out. There were never any tasty leftovers to put in my lunch bag the next day. Furthermore, my mother never seemed to get the hang of making a sandwich. I don’t mean fancy three-deckers, or the tricky four-color inventions that now separate the short stories from the sanitary-napkin ads in our national magazines. I mean any old sandwich. Occasionally, when I offered to show my mother how the mothers of the other boys in my class made their sons’ sandwiches, she told me to hold my excessively overgrown mouth. I translate literally. In Hungarian the admonition doesn’t sound so awkward. Merely nasty.

  Nobody ate sandwiches in Hungary, my mother said, and she had not come to this country to learn stupi
d tricks. Anything she did not know how to do was stupid. As a result my lunch usually consisted of a big toochiss roll cut down the middle and smeared liberally with butter or chicken fat, a couple of pieces of fruit, and a pale green empty Saratoga #2 bottle refilled with milk. My father always kept a case of Saratoga #2 mineral water under his bed. He drank a pint bottle every second morning of his life. My father worried constantly about his moogin, Yiddish for bowels.

  My worry on that morning after the All-American semifinals remained just as constant. What was I going to tell George about what had happened the night before? As he headed toward me, I saw George was munching a cabbage leaf. He had just chiseled it from Chink Alberg. Chink’s mother used cabbage in his sandwiches the way, I learned years later, uptown women use lettuce. It was obvious that if I wanted to hold George off, I would have to do better than cabbage leaves. I examined my lunch bag. I had finished my roll and milk, but I still had a banana and an orange. I pulled them from the paper bag.

  “Here,” I said, holding out the fruit. “You can have these.”

  “And you can have this, you little louse,” George said.

  A few stunned moments had gone by, and I could actually see George walking away from me, back across the yard toward Chink Alberg, before I realized that my banana had joined George’s fist in delivering the belt in the kisser.

  I don’t feel I should go into my character as of today. Anyway, I don’t want to. The years take their toll. But in those days I was not a coward. Until that day in the J.H.S. 64 schoolyard, nobody had ever laid a hand on me without getting paid back. George was the exception. I stood up and went across the yard to the toilet, turned on the tap, and washed the squashed banana from my face. I did it without resentment. The night before, George had been within sight of a medal. I had kicked it away from his outstretched hand. I had earned my humiliation.

  Earned it, yes. But liked it, no. Before the bell rang summoning me back upstairs to class, I had taken care of my face by washing it, and I had pulled together the cracks in my ego by adding George Weitz’s name to what my mother called her verbissennah list. Some day, I didn’t know when or how, I would pay him back for that shot in the mouth.