As I arrived at the table Piano was singing to himself. He looked up and said, “Take a pew with a Jew.”
We ate our smoked meat sandwiches, and then I said to him, “Piano, I know business is business but we both know Solly Climans for a long time. He’s a good guy.”
“So he’s a good guy. I even knew his father, Fat. I booked his father’s bets, too. But he owes money, too much money.”
“I’m worried about him.”
“Why worry? If he pays, he’s good.”
“He’s beyond scared, Piano. He says he’s gonna commit suicide.”
“He ain’t gonna commit suicide.”
“I believe him.”
“You believe him?”
“Yeah, I believe him.”
“Jews don’t kill themselves.”
“Believe me, he’s gonna kill himself.”
Piano wiped his lips with his napkin.
Drumming his fingers on the table, he began to hum Birds do it, bees do it, and then he said, reaching out to touch my hand, “Jews don’t kill themselves. They sometimes kill each other but, believe you me, they don’t kill themselves.”
He shrugged, as if I should have known we were helpless before a truth, a truth that allowed him his amiable consideration for me.
“Do yourself a favour,” he said, “try a little dessert, a cheesecake. It’ll look good on you.”
OUR THIRTEENTH SUMMER
I was a child during the war and we lived on the upper floor of a duplex in what was then called a railroad apartment, which was a living room at the front end and a sunroom at the back end and a long hall with rooms running off the hall in between. The apartment below was the same.
“The same,” my father said, “but not exactly the same.”
A chemist and his family lived there. He was an expert in explosives, working with the war department. He was not old but his hair was white. He told my mother that he was working on “a bomb so big that when it hits, when it blows, the war will end up on Mars.”
He was called George Reed. He was a chain-smoker and his teeth were yellow and irregular. He had a port wine stain on the back of his left hand. He often kept his left hand in his suit coat pocket. He didn’t talk much. He seemed to be shy and reticent but I always felt that he disapproved of me, disapproved of all of us, but he didn’t want to be forced to say so, and so he hid how he felt behind his shyness. Sometimes his left hand fluttered in his pocket, and sometimes he couldn’t stop it fluttering, not once it got going. “It’s like he’s got a trapped bird in there,” my mother said.
As for his wife, I heard my mother tell my father once that “she looks like someone who’s been swept over by sadness and has gone strange.”
She was from Vienna. That’s what she had told my mother and father. I didn’t know where Vienna was. “That’s where it all began,” my father told me. “Hitler’s town, except she’s Jewish.” She was short and had thick black hair. When she talked she got excited. She leaned down and breathed into my face, she peered into my eyes, like she was looking for something that was way beyond me, beyond my mother and father, like she didn’t know what she was looking for and yet she was sure it was out there, whatever it was, long gone and lost. And one day she breathed in my face and said, “I’m not Jewish,” and her son, Bobbie, told me the same thing. “My father’s English and nobody’s Jewish.” Bobbie and I played together on the front lawn. He had his father’s wine stain on his neck, just below his left ear. We played war games with toy soldiers and tin tanks in the rockery. There were no flowers in the rockery, only mud and stones because the landlord refused to spend money on flowers. He said money was too scarce because of the war. But Bobbie and I didn’t want any flowers. We wanted the mud and the stones. We could spend a whole afternoon shifting our soldiers from ledge to ledge, country to country. We took turns being the enemy. Whenever he had to be the Germans, even though they always lost, he would say, “Don’t tell my mother, don’t let my grandfather hear us.”
Every day at ten-thirty in the morning and at four in the afternoon his grandfather came out of their sunroom, which was below my bedroom. Bobbie said he slept there and studied his books there with the shades down and then he would come out and take one of his walks, shuffling in his slippers from our house to the end of the street and back. He never spoke to Bobbie. He never spoke to me. He was dressed all in black, in a black suit. He had a long pale face and a long blade nose. He sometimes wore a black broad-brimmed hat and sometimes a shiny black skullcap, and he had long curls of hair that hung down beside his ears. He didn’t wear shoes, he wore his black leather slippers.
“If he isn’t Jewish, I don’t know who is,” my mother said.
“We’re not Jewish,” Bobbie told me.
“Sure you are, you gotta be,” I said.
He punched me as hard as he could in the chest. When I got my breath, when I wiped away the tears that had come to my eyes from the punch, I told Bobbie to put up his dukes. My father had taught me how to box. He had bought me boxing gloves, and kneeling down in front of me he had sparred with me, teaching me how to jab and hook, and how to block punches and take a punch. He’d hit me really hard two or three times. “That’s so he’ll understand that getting hit never hurts as much as he thinks it’s going to hurt,” he told my mother. “Once you know that, then you won’t worry about getting hurt and you can learn how to hit and hit real good.”
Bobbie put up his fists. I flicked a left jab in his face. He didn’t know what I was doing. He didn’t look scared. He looked bewildered, helpless, as he tried to duck his head. I hit him with a left hook. His nose began to bleed. He tasted his blood, he looked astonished, and then when he saw blood all over his shirt, he was terrified. “My mother will kill me.” He began to bawl, but he was afraid to run into the house. His mother came running out. Her black hair was loose and long and flying all about her head. She screamed and pulled Bobbie behind her, to protect him, but I didn’t want to hit him again. I felt sorry. I wished he hadn’t hit me and I hadn’t hit him.
“Why?” she screamed.
“Because he said I was Jewish,” Bobbie said.
“Because he’s Jewish? He’s not Jewish,” and she swung and hit me in the head, knocking me down. She hauled Bobbie into the house. I looked up from where I was, lying flat on my back, and the old grandfather, who was wearing his skullcap, was standing by their open front window, staring at me, twisting one of his long curls in his fingers.
Later, when I told my father what had happened he said to my mother, “I know they’re terrified. I know they’re from Vienna, but that’s not the point.” And he went downstairs and stood very close to Mr. Reed and said through his teeth, “If either one of you ever hits my boy again, I don’t care how big your bomb is, I’ll knock your block off.”
There was a Jewish family up the street, just north of us. Mrs. Asch was plump, almost fat. She wasn’t too fat because she didn’t waddle, but she had a huge bosom and she would hold my head to her chest. Mr. Asch worked with furriers. He was, my father said, “a cutter.” It sounded dangerous, like he should be a character on Inner Sanctum Mystery radio. But he didn’t look dangerous. He was small, had pasty-coloured skin, a round closely cropped head, and always wore his skullcap, even under his hat. He came home every evening at six-thirty, sat down looking sullen, ate cold chicken that was shiny and pimpled in its boiled white skin, and drank Coca-Cola. We never drank Coca-Cola in our house. “Rotgut,” my mother called it, so I drank Hires Root Beer, telling my friend, my pal, Nathan Asch, that it was a kind of real beer. He didn’t believe me but sometimes we put aspirins in it to give it a boost and he drank it with me, usually saying, “This is living,” and we got a headache that we called a hangover.
Nathan, who was plump like his mother, had one leg shorter than the other. He wore an oxblood boot with a double-thick sole and heel. He couldn’t run very fast and he could hardly skate at all, and so, because I wanted to be a baseball pitcher, he wa
s my catcher. His sister, Ruth, who was a lot older and very pretty and worked in a fur salon modelling coats, had bought him a big round catcher’s glove. It was the best glove anybody on the street had and Nathan knew it. He was proud to be a catcher and I was proud that he was my catcher because he was good at blocking any curve balls I threw into the dirt.
On the weekends when Bobbie Reed’s mother and grandfather walked up the street together to the grocery store on Dupont Street, they would pass the Asch house, and most of the time in the summer the Asches would be sitting out on the front porch listening to Mel Allen broadcast the Yankee games on WBEN Buffalo, or Ruth would have her portable record player set up by the porch stairs, playing Frankie Laine singing:
I must go where the wild goose goes,
wild goose, brother goose, which is best,
a wandering fool or a heart at rest…
and the old man dressed in black would sometimes get a hitch in his step and hesitate and glance up the walk to the porch. He always wore some kind of white tasselled cloth under his suit coat that looked like a piece of torn sail. If Mr. Asch was sitting on the porch, he’d glower at the old man and if Mrs. Reed looked at him, then Nathan’s father would get up, still small no matter how tall he tried to stand, and he’d push his chin out and down and spit. This seemed awful to me, particularly because Mr. Asch was no good at spitting and whatever he hocked out of his mouth it always went splat and sat there on his own porch stairs. I didn’t understand why he was so angry and why he was spitting at a woman and I didn’t understand spitting on your own stairs. I didn’t understand any of this at all. The second time it happened, I asked Nathan and he said, “It’s because Bobbie and the whole bunch of them tell everybody they’re not Jewish. My father hates them for that.”
“I never heard the old man say he wasn’t Jewish,” I said.
“He don’t say nothing,” and Nathan shouted, “You don’t say nothing,” hoping the old man would hear him. “You might as well be from Mars.”
I watched Mrs. Reed thrust out her chin and quicken her stride as the old man unbuttoned and then buttoned his suit coat, shuffling away from us. He looked bonier and sharper in the shoulder blades than I’d thought he was, but then, I’d always thought of him as slumped through the shoulders and he wasn’t slumped. His shoulders were very straight, though he did push his feet along the sidewalk like he was tired when he walked.
“Just look at him like he’s not there,” my mother said. “That’s best.”
“But he is there,” I said.
“So you say,” she said and laughed.
About two months after Nathan shouted at the old man it was time for Nathan’s birthday. August was always a big month for the kids on the street. August was the last month of the summer holidays. Nathan’s birthday was at the beginning of the month and Bobbie’s birthday was at the end, and all of us were always invited to wear paper hats and blow whistles, bob for apples, eat cake and play hide-and-seek down the alleys between the houses after dark, before we went to bed. I didn’t like my birthday because it was in February and it was too cold to play outside. But this year Nathan’s party was different. It was smaller. There were kids there that I didn’t know and the kids I knew and expected to see weren’t there. Nathan told me that this wasn’t going to be his real birthday party. His real birthday party was going to be his bar mitzvah because he was turning thirteen and he was going to be a man. After we ate the cake and his mother’s cookies, when I said goodbye to him at the door and he thanked me for my gift – a Yankee baseball cap my father had brought from New York – he said, “I can’t see you so much anymore.”
“What?”
“My father says I can’t see you so much, not now that I’m a man.”
“Why?”
“’Cause you’re a goi.”
“What’s that?”
“One of the goyim. You eat unclean food so you got unclean hearts.”
When I came home early, surprising my mother, she was standing alone out on the sidewalk under a street lamp that had just come on. I was crying quietly, not quite sure why because I had done nothing wrong, or maybe it was because Mrs. Asch was never going to hold my head against her big bosom again. The Reed front windows were open and there was loud music coming from the windows as I told my mother what had happened with Nathan and she folded me into her arms and said, “There, there. There’s nothing you can do with some people.” She sounded very sad but I could tell she was also very angry. As we walked up to our door into the duplex I could hear the music and see the Reeds spinning and twirling, Mrs. Reed with her head thrown back, laughing, and I asked my mother, “What’s that they’re doing?”
“Waltzing,” she said. “That’s the way they dance in Vienna, they waltz.”
“Like that?”
“It can be very graceful,” she said.
At the end of August, Bobbie turned thirteen, too. I was playing more and more by myself. Once or twice I lay on my bedroom floor with my ear to the floor to see if I could hear Bobbie in the old man’s bedroom below me but I never did hear him. Sometimes I heard the old man complaining and singing a kind of moan and once, as he was going out walking, he paused beside the rockery and looked down at me as I lined up two Lancasters at the bottom of the stones. I looked up and he looked down. “Bombers,” I said. Another time I had my baseball and my glove beside me and I asked, “Hey, you wanta play catch?” He looked startled and then he laughed. Not a loud laugh, but quiet, like a chuckle. “You speak English?” I asked. He took two steps away and then stopped, turned around, and said in a voice that seemed to be as much heavy breathing as it was a voice, “Of course,” and then he kept on walking without looking back.
I asked Bobbie if he was going to have a bar mitzvah, too. He sneered at me and said, “Of course not. What d’you think I am?” Then I realized that every night, just before supper, Bobbie and his father were putting on boxing gloves in their living room and Mr. Reed, who probably didn’t know anything about boxing, was trying to teach Bobbie how to box. One late afternoon as I stood out on the lawn watching their heads and shoulders duck and weave, I realized that the old man was standing near me and he was watching, too.
“Hi,” I said.
He just looked at me, a strange look, like for a minute he thought I was someone else that he was surprised to see, but he didn’t say anything. He sighed and went into the house.
Two days before his birthday, Bobbie’s mother stopped my mother and me. Usually they said something nice to each other without meaning it, but this time his mother didn’t bother. She said, “From now on, nobody calls Bobbie Bobbie anymore. His name is Robin. A man’s name. Robin Reed.” Bobbie looked kind of mopey, so I said, “Well, Robin, I don’t hardly see you anymore, not even on the weekend.”
“I go with my father on Saturdays now.”
“Where?”
“To his lab. He takes me to his lab.”
“What for?”
“To teach me chemistry, to teach me what he does.”
“Terrific,” I said. “He makes bombs.”
“He doesn’t let me make bombs,” he said. “Not yet.”
On the afternoon of his birthday, I was all alone. My father was away again and my mother was out shopping. Mr. Reed came home early, his head down, his left hand in his suit coat pocket, fluttering. I thought he was home to get ready for the party, but not long after, Robin came out onto the front lawn wearing boxing gloves and carrying another pair for me. I thought it was really strange, the gloves were the exact same colour as the wine stain on his neck. He said his father had told him that he had to box me before there could be any party. “He says I’m turning thirteen, you know.”
For the first time in my life I just suddenly felt all tired, like my whole body was tired. And sad. I tried to laugh while the two of us stood there with great big gloves hanging off the ends of our arms, but I felt so sad I was almost sick. Though I could tell right away, as soon as Robin put up h
is gloves, that he was still the same old Bobbie, that he didn’t know how to box at all, I only remembered the last time I’d hit him, the blood, and how sorry I felt. I was half leaning toward him while I was thinking about that when he swung a wild looping left that caught me behind the ear and knocked me down. I wasn’t hurt, and he didn’t know that I knew he couldn’t hurt me no matter how hard he hit me because my father had taught me how to take a really hard punch and not to be afraid. So I got up and pawed the air around Robin, trying not to let him hit me, not really punching him because I felt too tired even if I had wanted to punch him. He cuffed me a couple of times, but he didn’t know how to punch off the weight of his back leg, so I staggered a little. I saw that Mr. Reed was standing in their front window, his hands flat on the glass, a great big glad smile on his face, but the old grandfather had come out onto the cement stoop beside the rockery. He had on his broad-brimmed black hat and he stood with his arms folded across his chest, the torn sail hanging out from under his arms. He was silent and intent. I let Robin take a bang at my body. I was glad my father wasn’t home. He’d have been ashamed and angry and I would have had to fight, had to really beat up Robin or Bobbie or whoever he was. Instead, I wanted to cry. Not because I was hurt. I just wanted it all to be over so that I could cry and so I sat down on the lawn and stayed there because no one I loved could see me, no one I loved was there to make me do anything I didn’t want to do. Robin, totally astonished, turned and ran into the house, ran into his father’s arms.
I got up and went down the lawn to the sidewalk, sat on the curb and slowly undid the laces to the boxing gloves with my teeth and pulled the gloves off. I wasn’t really sniffling. The Reeds were crazy if they thought I was going to get up and go to Robin’s birthday party, but I didn’t know why they were actually crazy. Then I heard shuffling leather slippers behind me. I thought he’d gone into the house, too, to be with them, but he was standing close behind me, and when I turned and looked up I was almost angry at him but he was smiling, looking down from under the wide brim of his hat and shaking his head with a kind of bent sorrowful smile.
All the Lonely People Page 6