“Want proof?”
“Sleep well.”
Jay’s concupiscent sleep was interrupted right in the middle of a defloration ceremony he was performing with thirty-seven nubile women in the middle of Yankee Stadium with a roaring crowd cheering him on. A hand shook his shoulder firmly.
“You a murderer on the run?” Miriam asked, tightening the knotted belt on her bathrobe.
“Ever been punched in the mouth by a grown man?”
“All cons on the lam sleep in their clothes.”
“Why don’t you take a walk if you can’t sleep?”
“But it’s still snowing.”
“Smart girl. Where’s your sister?”
“Myrna or Rhoda?”
“Rhoda.”
“She’s sleeping in the living room.”
“What time is it, anyway?”
“Dunno. Maybe seven or eight.”
“What time’s everybody get up?”
“Pretty soon. Poppa goes to work half past eight.”
“Oh . . .” Jay hadn’t thought of male authority on the premises.
Miriam opened the door and was about to leave:
“Just a minute. Where you going?”
“To pee . . .”
A few minutes later Jay detected an angry voice booming through the frangible walls.
“I’ll give him. Don’t worry. I’ll give him a bullet up the ass.”
Jay jumped out of bed, and then the door was savagely flung open and a short, gray-haired man - with a fine bristled mustache and tufts of hair peering out of his ears like frightened mice, resplendent in a double-breasted serge that glowed faintly in the early morning light - addressed him:
“Explain!” Jay noticed that he was carrying a hammer. “Explanations!”
“My name is Jay Blackman . . .”
“What kinda name is thet? Arab?”
“Jacob Blaukonski.”
Mr. Gold weighed up this new information for a moment and shifted the hammer to his right hand. It looked heavy, and Jay hoped he had gained ground in the discussion.
“So? Where’s my Rhoda, murderer?”
“Blaukonski!” Jay reiterated. “In the . . .”
“Liar. In the old country, you know what we do to men like you? From a tree, we hang them and then . . .”
“What’s all the screaming?” Rhoda appeared on the scene, wearing a fluffy, pink, woolly nightdress. Jay hoped he would survive to do her proper justice.
“Shame you-self. Walking in front a grown man - a strenger - undressed.”
“Poppa, you should be very grateful. He took me home from the wedding in the middle of the snowstorm. If not for him . . .”
Unpacified, but somehow relenting, Mr. Gold thoughtfully assessed this additional testimony. With the gravity of Solomon, Sidney Gold handed the hammer to Miriam, a born perjurer.
“Put it beck in the closet.”
“Okay, Poppa?” Rhoda ventured.
“Okay,” he replied, throwing his hands in the air.
When they were all robed, and this meant for Jay a quick wash and brushing his teeth with tooth powder and his index finger, they gathered in the kitchen where Rhoda was frying eggs and making toast and coffee while Miriam laid the table. Myrna had already gone off to the shop where she worked, and which did a thriving business in sheet music. Despite the Depression, people still sang at home. Although neither theology nor ontology were his metier, Mr. Gold made a brave attempt at playing the Grand Inquisitor; after considerable persistence he learned that Jay was not an Iberian, and, to his relief, not Sephardic, a sect of Jew he regarded as distinctly Islamic and whose ethnic make-up was as remote and suspect as the Mongolians. He received only tidbits of information and he watched with growing dismay as Jay consumed a five-egg omelet which, with a mental acuity that was indeed surprising, especially in the era of pre-Trachtenberg arithmetic, he subtracted from the slender dowry that was Rhoda’s birthright.
Breakfast ended and a future vague date was made with Rhoda at which time he would meet the rest of the family - her invalid mother who was still sleeping, the musical Myrna, and her married brother. Jay departed with a sweet kiss tingling on his mouth and fifteen cents of Rhoda’s money. The undertaking had revealed a profit, and he could now pass Gluckstern’s restaurant with impunity.
Affairs at Rivington Street, Jay discovered after a long, invigorating walk across the Williamsburg Bridge to save the three-cent trolley fare, the frost billowing from his mouth like chimney smoke, were in a state of turmoil.
“Aha, you’re home. I said the bum would come home,” his father growled, emerging from his usual sullen pandiculation which alternated between taciturn inertia and, at its most active after a two-hour spell of keeping his legs on the windowsill, stomping about the apartment to “wake up” his numb feet. “A whole night your momma is walking around, crying, praying that you’re still alive. Did I say he would come home when he got hungry?”
“You said,” Jay’s brother Al affirmed.
“You shut up, before I shut you up,” Jay retorted.
“Fighting?” Morris Blackman interposed.
“Where’s Momma?”
“Sleeping and no thanks to you,” Al said.
“Your Uncle Sol called why you didn’t go to work last night.”
“He’s very annoyed,” Al added.
“A two-dollar-a-week pretzel salesman doesn’t have to tell me who’s annoyed,” Jay shouted. “I’m keeping everybody on my ten dollars.”
“But Al can’t work in the market with his bad back,” Morris complained. A reference to the strain Al incurred during his first and only night’s work in the Washington Market and which resulted in nine medical examinations by the labor compensation doctor, confirming what Jay had said in the first place: that Al was too heavy for light work, and too light for heavy work.
“Why can’t he work? He’s older than I am.”
“But you’re stronger,” his father said.
“I wouldn’t bet on that. The two of you ought to get jobs.”
“Jobs!” Al laughed
“Jobs? Where is there jobs? They grow on trees?”
“He’s got imaginitis,” Al said, giving Jay a fishy look.
“If you look, you find. There’s a job as a dishwasher going at Immie’s.”
“A dishwasher? That’s the way you talk to your father?” Al was scandalized.
“I suppose you can’t afford to work, now that you’re collecting Relief.”
“I go down to the unemployment office every day, smart guy.”
“Yeah, and wait for someone to buy you coffee.”
“I go to union meetings.”
“I know! I know! You’re much too busy to work.”
Morris Blackman had digested Jay’s suggestion.
“A dishwasher!”
“There are no jobs, I repeat jobs, for bookkeepers,” Al said.
“Who ever said you were a bookkeeper?”
“What did I go to night school for for a year then?”
“Don’t ask me! I think you were playing with yourself.”
“To learn bookkeeping and now that I know it and passed tests there’s nobody hiring.”
“Dishwashing!” Morris snarled.
“Some day when I’m making big money, you’ll come on your hands and knees begging for a job,” Al said.
“Meanwhile, you’re sitting on your ass and eating food that I pay for.”
“Out! Out! Out!” Morris screamed, pointing a finger at Jay. “Language like that in mine house.”
“The lease is in your name . . . nothing else. If I get out I take all the furniture and Momma too.”
“She’d never come,” Al said.
“Well, she can’t stand him, so she’d have nothing to lose. I’d probably get the lease put in my name if I asked the landlord.”
“Cause you hump his daughter, that’s why,” Al said, morally outraged. “There’s more to life than humping shiksas.”
>
“Get married and we’ll be rid of you,” Morris said.
Celia Blackman emerged from the bedroom. She was a smallish, stout woman, with close-cropped gray hair, wearing a dressing gown patterned with bright sunflowers that matched the drapes in the room. She smiled at Jay, revealing a mouth full of gold teeth, which her father had invested in when she was fourteen, fearing that his small capital would be seized by creditors during imminent bankruptcy proceedings, and she would be denied a proper start in life. Eleven teeth had been removed from an unprotesting Celia, and her father had gone to his grave a happy man. Everyone to whom he owed money denounced the unwitting accomplice of his scheme. Until a magistrate declared that teeth, even by the loosest interpretation of Polish law, could not be termed assets, several plans were afoot to kidnap Celia, but they came to nothing. The remainder of her teens was spent trying to disengage herself from the label “Gold Mouth,” which greeted her every public appearance. Morris Blaukonski’s appearance on the scene stilled wagging tongues, and gave her a respectability that she had not dreamed possible, and which she was grateful for, even after she came to despise him. The period of her disenchantment with him began when in a fit of temper he set fire to the textile shop that had employed him for five years, after an altercation with the owner who had proved incontestably that he was colorblind. The flight from Lublin to Lvov with two small children had all but killed her. A career as a grain salesman augured well for the reformed pyromaniac and they prospered until Morris came under the spell of a Russian mill owner, by name Alexis Pyotr Markevitch, who had formed a syndicate to grow wheat in Russia’s uncharted Taiga region. Enthusiastically enrolled as Markevitch’s principal agent, Morris squeezed what he could from Lvov’s businessmen to finance the venture. The enterprise came to an abrupt end two months after Jay’s Viennese expedition, when Markevitch strangled his wife with a leather bootlace and absconded with the investors’ money, leaving his agent to face an enraged mob, bent on drawing and quartering him. Morris’s first impulse was to burn Lvov to the ground, but the town had grown too large for a single incendiary to deal with it. Flinging curses at Lvov that would last an eternity, he despatched his wife and four children to Rotterdam with his last two hundred thousand zlotys, instructing Celia to book a passage to America. Half-crazed, he set off with two drums of paraffin to the deserted Markevitch mill, narrowly missing a squad of Russian police, and proceeded with great energy to remove the symbol of his humiliation; the conflagration would have got him an immediate commission with General Sherman’s raiders had his destiny taken him to Georgia. His arrival in New York coincided with the height of the Depression, and added fuel to his already iron resolve to abandon work forever and live off his children whose respective births were in his view designated to secure this end.
Jay went over to his mother, put an arm round her shoulder, and hugged her.
“I was so worried about you that something happened.”
“He’s a loud mouth,” Al said.
“When he gets married it’ll straighten him out.”
“Or he should join the army,” Al added, confident that he himself could never pass the medical examination.
“Plenty time for marriage,” Celia said.
“He’s twenty-three and strong as a horse,” Morris replied in one of his infrequent verbal exchanges with his wife.
Celia kissed Jay on the cheek, and he held her tightly in his arms; his father and brother looked away angrily.
“It’s a disgusting way a grown man carries on with his mother.”
Al nodded and stretched his legs on the windowsill, beating Morris to his familiar retreat by a second; Morris scowled at him, and Al removed his legs.
“You always picking on him,” Celia said. “If not for Jake we’d be on the street.”
“And you defending him?” Morris spiritedly shook a fist at his wife. “Against me all the time. No respect . . . in Poland he would have respect. Honor thy father and mother it says.”
“And thy brother,” Al added.
“That’s right . . . for an older brother respect too. The way that boy talks it shames me. And that’s what I kill myself to bring to America.”
“Poppa, you never killed yourself for nothing, not even yourself.”
“It’s not a mouth he’s got but a garbage can.” “Garbage can.”
“One more word out of you, Al, and it’ll be lights out.”
“See the way he threatens your own son,” Morris groaned.
“A career he’s got as a murderer. Why don’t you join your friends in Brooklyn, they get paid for killing people.”
Celia touched Jay’s hand affectionately.
“You had breakfast?”
“Yeah. I met this girl at a wedding that Barney took me to.”
“Whose wedding?”
“Dunno. And I took her home.”
“And you stayed all night? What kind of a girl . . . ?”
“A nice one. It was snowing too hard to come home, and I slept in her sister’s room.”
“A filthy boy . . .”
“She was nine years old, Poppa.”
“Nothing do I put past you, brother.”
“Honest, Mamma, don’t listen . . . she’s a nice girl and her father’s a businessman.”
Morris sprang to his feet, the bones in his legs cracking, seized his newspaper, rolled it up truncheon fashion and slammed it on the table so hard that a cup and saucer, as though on a trampoline, flew off and smashed on the floor. As a prelude to a morose spell of impotent, silent rage that could last as long as three days and which curtailed his activities so that he would leave his bed only to go to the toilet, he would always grind his teeth with such rancor - his jaw white and terrifying from the exertion - that blood would appear on his gums and he would rush to the bathroom and gargle salt water for an hour before taking to his bed, his post at the window ceremoniously guarded by Al.
“Insults! Insults . . .” he raged. In his haste to leave the room, one of his slippers fell off, and he flung it against the wall. Celia followed him to the bathroom.
“Always have to upset him, don’t you? A man who does no harm,” Al said.
“He has no feelings for anything or anybody,” Jay said.
“Someday when you’re a father, just remember how you treated him.”
“He’s never been a father to me.”
“You’ve never allowed him to be one.”
“Look, let’s stop the bullshit. Sylvia told me what he did to Momma when she was pregnant with me.”
“I wouldn’t believe anything Sylvia told me if she swore on a stack of Bibles.”
“Well, she’s your sister too, and she’s got no reason to lie. She was twelve years old at the time. Don’t look at me as though I was nuts. Why do you think she married Harry when she was fifteen - a man she hardly knew? Because she wanted to get away from Poppa.”
“Honest, Jay, what’s the point of all this old crap?”
“Because it was me not you that Momma was pregnant with when the old man pushed her down the stairs, that’s why. Why do you think she hates him?”
“Momma doesn’t hate him . . . she just loves you more - that’s what’s caused the trouble. That’s what’s made him bitter.”
“I may as well talk to the wall. Momma loves all of us and if not for her we’d be dead and buried somewhere in Poland.”
“I don’t know why Sylvia tells you these stories. Rosalee hasn’t got any bad feelings against him. She never mentioned . . .”
“How the hell could she? She was four, you were two, and Momma was pregnant with me, so how could she know a goddamned thing?”
Celia came back into the room and sat down heavily on a chair at the kitchen table.
“Please boys, no more arguing. Poppa’s not well.” She handed Al and Jay glasses of tea, and they sat for some moments in uneasy silence.
“Jake, I don’t like to ask . . .”
“All I’ve got’s a dime.”
/>
“The Relief don’t come till next Wednesday.”
“I get paid tonight and I’ll bring home some vegetables.”
“I’ll make a soup. A nice thick one like you like with marrow bones.”
“Oh, Momma. Don’t worry, you’ll be all right as long as I’m alive.”
It snowed again that night, a thin, powdery, sugar-fine snow that concealed the heavy glazed underseal of ice on the sidewalk and glinted under the street lamps. The streets were dark and deserted, except for the drone of a lonely car skidding on the road. Jay tried not to think of the cold and walked slowly. He flexed his toes with every step he took to keep the circulation going, and he felt tired and hungry. A long night of unloading fruit crates and sacks of onions and potatoes awaited him and the thought of it almost defeated him. He passed row upon row of darkened shops of all kinds: delicatessen, butcher, jewelry, clothing, and he wondered if he ought to risk a robbery. A jewelry shop, with a mound of zircons parading as diamonds, caught his eye; a sign in the window announced: BEST PRICES FOR OLD GOLD, ALL PAWN TICKETS MUST BE REDEEMED IN THIRTY DAYS. Then in the corner of the window a statement of policy: CREDIT MAKES ENEMIES, LET’S BE FRIENDS. He had to have a car with a driver if he smashed the window; there was probably an alarm in the shop, and there were police patrolling every few minutes. It was too icy to try to make a run for it.
The snow suddenly changed to hailstones, and he moved his muffler up to his face, but the hailstones got through and cut into his skin. He reached the market about half an hour later than usual and saw that the night shift had begun. He entered an office where a checker was busily comparing invoices against the goods the men unloaded. A slow, joyful smile irradiated the checker’s face whenever he came upon a shortage, and he would shout for the boss’s son to report the discovery. A mutated scutcheon in embossed brass revealed a hand holding a scimitar over some amorphous melon-like object; a legend written in the style of a penmanship textbook proclaimed the firm’s motto: “Buy from Solomon Bell, the man who knows his onions.”
“Late tonight, aren’t you?” the checker said without looking up.
“No money for carfare, so I had to walk.”
“Yeah, well the boss’s sure to be understanding. Here” - he handed Jay a stained brown envelope – “your pay.”
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