Last Respects

by Jerome Weidman

  “I think maybe it would be good to tell Mr. Lebenbaum I’m sick,” I said.

  My Aunt Sarah nodded. “I will keep him from coming over.”

  She did. And she kept everybody else from coming over, so that by the time my father got home from the shop that night, we had put the buffer of a quiet day between us and the visit of Mr. Kelly. I spent most of that day in the front room, pretending to do my school homework. Actually, I kept looking out at the dock, wondering what my next move was going to be. I knew it would be dictated by Walter Sinclair, and I knew the dictation would come from the river. I kept so close to the window that I did not hear what was going on in the kitchen. All I knew was that my Aunt Sarah was cooking. The smells told me that. A person would have to be nailed down by the world’s champion head cold of all time not to be aware that a Hungarian goulash, Berezna style, was being put together on the premises. But the opening and closing of doors escaped me.

  So that when the angry voices erupted in the kitchen, I was not quite sure to whom they belonged. I soon found out.

  “Benny!”

  I ran to the door that led into the kitchen and opened it. At once I understood something my teachers in P.S. 188 and J.H.S. 64 had been mumbling about for years: Pandora’s box. They were right. Some things are better left unopened. Mainly because you can’t close them. I certainly couldn’t close that door between our front room and kitchen. My Aunt Sarah was leaning against it. All two hundred pounds of her.

  “Benny,” she said. “You know this man?”

  “Mr. Velvelschmidt is our landlord,” I said.

  Mr. Velvelschmidt seemed to expand inside his fly-front topcoat with the gray velvet collar as though he were a balloon into which an extra blast of air had been pumped.

  “And a landlord is entitled to his rent,” he said. “Where is it?”

  On this last question Mr. Velvelschmidt turned, and I saw my father sitting at the kitchen table. He was staring down into a plate of goulash.

  “It’s in the shop where my brother-in-law works,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Now is the slack season. When things get busy he’ll start earning again. He’ll bring home money from the shop, and you’ll get your rent.”

  “And in the meantime?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said. “Me and Mrs. Velvelschmidt and my children, God bless them? What are we supposed to live on?”

  “What you live on now,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Bloodsucking.”

  Mr. Velvelschmidt’s face, ordinarily the color of General Robert E. Lee’s uniform, now took on abruptly the color of General Grant’s. He turned to my father. “Where’s the missus?” he said.

  My father’s absorption in the plate of goulash, which had been deep, now became total.

  “What’s the missus got to do with it?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “What have you got to do with it?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

  “I’m her sister,” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “So why aren’t you with your family?” the landlord said. “Wherever they are, why aren’t you with them? What are you doing here?”

  “Cooking for my brother-in-law and my nephew. This is a crime?”

  “It could be,” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

  “To cook for a brother-in-law and a nephew?” my Aunt Sarah said. “This is a crime?”

  “Yes, if you’re cooking for them because the missus who should be doing the cooking she’s hiding from the police,” Mr. Velvelschmidt said.

  “This you’re saying about my sister?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “I’m saying where is she?” Mr. Velvelschmidt said. “Everybody knows the Greenspan boy, two nights ago, Aaron his name was, the poor boy, less than a minute after the rabbi said he was married to Rivke Shumansky he was killed under the chuppe in Lenox Assembly Rooms. Everybody knows who brought the schnapps to the wedding. Everybody knows everything except where is Mrs. Kramer?”

  “So because Mrs. Kramer is not here in the house,” my Aunt Sarah said, “this by you means she’s hiding from the police?”

  “If she’s not,” Mr. Velvelschmidt said, “where is she?”

  “She’s where it’s none of your business,” my Aunt Sarah said. Mr. Velvelschmidt staggered back with a small, chirping scream of astonishment as she shoved him toward the hall. “What kind of a world is this?” my Aunt Sarah demanded. “Where a person can’t get sick and go away to the country to rest for a few days without dirty rotten bloodsuckers breaking down the doors to call her names?”

  “Who is breaking down doors?” Mr. Velvelschmidt almost whimpered. “I knocked like a gentleman, and you let me in.”

  “This is a mistake I will never make again,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Get out of here,” she said. She gave him another shove. “And don’t ever push your fat lottke face into this house again.”

  Stumbling backward down the long green hall covered with my pencil scrawls, Mr. Velvelschmidt screamed nineteen terrifying words.

  “I won’t have to come back! What’s going to come back here to this house is a moof tzettle!”

  It was, on East Fourth Street, the ultimate threat.

  Mr. Shumansky might become a bit nasty about the fact that you had not paid for your last Sabbath chicken. Mr. Deutsch could threaten to cut off your credit unless you made at least a token payment on your grocery bill. The Burns Coal Company on the Fourth Street dock would coldly refuse to deliver the two tons of anthracite you needed to take you through the winter unless you put your cash on the bookkeeper’s counter. Life on East Fourth Street in those days was, in fact, an endless series of threats evaded, thrusts parried, and warnings disregarded. Nobody, however, evaded or parried or disregarded a moof tzettle.

  First, because it was not a verbal statement but a typewritten document, and the typewriter was to East Fourth Street what the Lilliputians were to Gulliver. Second, because it was typed not in Yiddish but in English, and English was to East Fourth Street what the knife is to a throat. And third, because the moof tzettle was always delivered in person by a member of the politzei, a word that meant to the immigrants of East Fourth Street any two-legged creature from a Russian officer with drawn sword leading a cavalry charge in the Ukraine against a huddled mass of unarmed Jewish peasants, to a corpulent Irish minion of the New York City Municipal Court performing his civil function of advising tenants in arrears that by failing to pay their rent they had violated the law, and unless they removed themselves and their possessions from the splinter of private property they were now illegally occupying, the police would arrive and do it for them.

  The core of the terror in this threat taught me something at a time when I was totally unaware of the learning process. I was picking things up the way the collar of a blue serge suit picks up dandruff. The truth of what I picked up from the moof tzettle was for many years unacceptable: shelter is more important than food.

  For years I knew, but did not want to believe, that if you have a roof over your head, you can listen with reasonable equanimity to the grinding of the rapacious digestive juices prowling through your stomach for their raw material. But if rain is banging down on your forehead, the noises in your empty stomach are louder and they hurt more. Our family had never been hit with a moof tzettle. But we had been many times elbow to elbow with families that had. So, apparently, had my Aunt Sarah up in New Haven. I could see the smear of fear wash across those extraordinary blue eyes like a painter’s brush slashing across a virgin canvas.

  “Don’t worry,” I said as the door at the end of the green corridor slammed behind Mr. Velvelschmidt. “The rent, it’ll be paid before he sends the moof tzettle.”

  “How?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  I could have told her. I had in the pocket of my knickers the two ten-spots Mr. Heizerick had given me two nights ago in Abe Lebenbaum’s back room for the bottle of Old Southwick. They were not enough. But I had other resources. My faith. My faith in a stranger named Walter Sinclair was not unlike the faith of Miles Standish in John Alden. But my father was in the room. He w
as no longer staring into his plate of goulash, Berezna style. My father was staring at me.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said to my Aunt Sarah. And I started down the long green corridor.

  My Aunt Sarah called after me. “But I’m making lekach!”

  “I’ll eat it later,” I called back.

  She was calling something else after me as I ran through the front door and down the gray stone steps to the street, but I did not catch the words and I did not pause to ask her to repeat. It was the bottom of the ninth. The Kramer family was behind. And the sun was going down so fast, the game might have to be called on account of darkness. This was no time to waste precious minutes on reading signals from the dugout. I had to swing at the next pitch. To my surprise, it was delivered by Abe Lebenbaum.

  I say surprise because I had assumed, as I ran up the street to Avenue D, that when I came into the candy store I would be greeted, as I was every night when I arrived on the job, by Abe’s mother with the only two words she was able to speak in English: “You’re late.” Instead, I was greeted by Abe. He was standing behind the fountain, cleaning away with his pocket-knife the black sugary encrustations around the spout of the Moxie syrup pump. And his greeting consisted of four words: “What do you want?”

  The answer was simple enough. But I had not intended to make it to Abe Lebenbaum directly. In fact, I had not anticipated the question. I had worked out in my mind very clearly, when I left my father and my Aunt Sarah in our kitchen, how I would tackle the next problem in what was beginning to impress me somewhat nervously as an extremely complicated life for a member of the Manhattan Council. I was struck by something that I still feel I was too young to be struck by: the unfairness of the problems that are pitched to the young, most of whom don’t even have the muscles to bring a regulation-size bat up to their shoulders.

  Abe cringed back against the mirrored wall behind him. “Stay away from me with your German measles!”

  I had just about decided he had gone crazy, when I remembered what I had told my Aunt Sarah at the breakfast table she should tell Abe about why I would not be coming to work: I was sick, with the most popular ailment of the day: German measles.

  “It’s all gone,” I said. “I’m cured. Mr. Lebenbaum, where’s your mother?”

  “Upstairs cooking sopper,” Abe Lebenbaum said. “Stay away from the counter! German measles nobody cures so quick. Where do you expect her to be?”

  The fact that I had expected his mother to be behind the fountain now seemed irrelevant. I looked at the Seth Thomas under the Moxie sign on the mirrored wall. To my astonishment the clock showed a few minutes after six. The fight with Mr. Velvelschmidt in our kitchen had seemed to me interminable. I saw now that it could have taken no more than a few minutes. I was an hour and a half early for work.

  “I thought it was time to come to work,” I said.

  Bright? No, not very. But at least honest. I had not realized my life had fallen an hour and a half behind the rest of the world.

  “Your thinking, from now on,” Abe Lebenbaum said, “you can carry out to the garbage pail. Here, in this store, we don’t need it.”

  I was pretty smart for my years. Anyway, my mother kept telling me I was. I could read the handwriting on the wall even when the wall was Abe’s invisible larynx and the face he presented—who, after all, would have paid to see it?—to the world. A lump of soaring time had come down to earth with a sickening splash. An era had ended.

  “I can explain,” I said.

  “You little bestitt!” Abe Lebenbaum said, and I was glad the stained marble fountain top was between us. The blade of his pocketknife swept angrily through the air. Not threateningly. Probably for nothing more than emphasis. But this was a man who had hacked off his thumb to avoid the draft. With only four fingers he probably did not have complete control over that swinging knife. A gummy pellet of Moxie syrup hit me on the head. Abe Lebenbaum said, “You rotten little traitor.”

  Abe was, of course, an immigrant like his mother. He, and later she, had come to America when he was a grown but still young man from those same Carpathian mountain slopes that were my mother’s native land. Abe spoke English adequately, but with a marked accent. The word “bestitt,” when he hurled it at me, was not a surprising rendition of the word bastard. But where had Abe Lebenbaum come up with the word traitor? Pronounced impeccably in English.

  “Who, me?” I said.

  I was a pretty scared senior patrol leader at the moment, and my mind was fixed on what I had come to get, but I could not help feeling a jolt of surprise. It was the snarl in his voice. I had always thought of Abe Lebenbaum as a gentle person. He was a tall, thin man who always seemed to be on the verge of dipping down to pick up a dropped coin: his right arm was longer than his left, and at the end of it, his surprisingly large right hand hung like a ham that kept him doubled over, swinging out of control somewhere around his knee and keeping him off balance. It was probably an accurate representation of his physical state. Abe couldn’t have been very far from exhaustion when he came tottering into the candy store every evening from his daily session with the Zabriskie sisters. But it was Abe Lebenbaum’s face that made you want to drop what you were doing and hurry over to help him find that coin he was groping for. It was the sort of face I found years later carved into the statues of saints in European cathedrals. Out of those sad features, arranged in that look of suffering supplication directed toward God—the eyeballs always turned upward—should come a growl that would have been appropriate to a lion in the zoo? It didn’t seem right.

  “Listen, Mr. Lebenbaum,” I said.

  “I should listen?” Abe said. “You do the listening, you and your whole rotten family, you hear? I don’t want you should ever come in this store again, you hear? You’re troublemakers, all of you, and I want to turn around and look the other way like I never saw you before, any of you, you hear?”

  Considering the decibels of sound Abe was uttering, it seemed to me Walter Sinclair, somewhere out there on the river in the Jefferson Davis II, could also hear him. Somehow I found this reassuring. I was not alone. My spirits, which had been dragging, now went up. Unfortunately, they went up too far. I should have asked Abe Lebenbaum to give me what I had come for. Instead, I succumbed all at once to an instinct I had never felt before: the compulsion to defend my family.

  “Who wants to come in here?” I said. “Crazy people, maybe. Not my father or my mother. Not me even. This is a rotten place. I don’t want to come back. My mother doesn’t want me to come back. Just give me my money and I’ll get out of here for good.”

  “What money?” Abe Lebenbaum said.

  “What money?” I said. Not a question. A scream. I imagine that’s how most revolutionaries get started. Not with a whine but an explosion. “The money for my work,” I screamed. “The last time you paid me was last Monday. I worked here a whole week since then. I want my money.”

  I was right up there. I’d never seen or heard of a barricade. But the noise I was making would have held its own with the best that was produced at the fall of the Bastille. It was my first experience with the joy of irrelevant noisemaking. It had an astonishing effect. It brought from the back of the candy store the snappily tailored figure of Mr. Heizerick.

  “What the helliz gawn nahn out here?” he said.

  Abe Lebenbaum snapped shut the blade of his pocketknife. “Gangsters,” he said. He didn’t say it in a way that could be described as friendly. Snarls seldom are. But on a barricade Abe Lebenbaum would not have stood out. “You hire a boy to help you in the store,” he snarled. “You trust him.” There was no savagery in Abe’s snarl. Just a kind of irritated wail. He didn’t want to kill anybody. He merely wanted the world to know he had been betrayed. “Why shouldn’t you trust him?” Abe said. “He’s a scout boy. He wears a uniform covered with medals. He’s got a mother she comes in regular to see he’s doing his job right. So what happens?”

  Mr. Heizerick came up to the counter and
placed a dollar bill on the stained marble. I was startled. I had never seen him put down anything smaller than a ten-spot.

  “Maw nickels,” he said.

  Across the stone face of the suffering saint, rolling the carved eyes down from their permanent glimpse of heaven, came a look of petulance. “Om tellinyuh what people do to other people,” Abe Lebenbaum said bitterly.

  “Maw nickels,” Mr. Heizerick said.

  “Only a dollar?” Abe said.

  “Maw nickels,” Mr. Heizerick said.

  Abe shrugged, punched the No Sale key that clanked open the cash register, and clawed out a handful of nickels. A glance into his palm indicated that there were not enough. Abe pulled out a cylinder of nickels. He cracked the paper sausage-casing wrapper against the edge of the cash-register drawer as though it were an egg he was cracking open against the rim of a frying pan. The nickels showered out into the drawer and Abe started scooping them up and shoving them across the counter two at a time toward Mr. Heizerick.

  “Ten, twenty, thirty. His mother it turns out, she’s a bootlegger, that’s what she is. Selling schnapps to weddings. Seventy, eighty, ninety, one dollar.”

  Mr. Heizerick swept the twenty nickels from the marble counter into his cupped palm and slapped down another dollar. “Faster,” he said.

  “Ten, twenty, thirty,” Abe Lebenbaum said, forking nickels out of the pile with the forefinger and middle finger of the big right hand that normally swung like a swollen pendulum around his knees. “Forty, fifty, sixty.”

  “No,” Mr. Heizerick said. “Fifty-five.”

  “What?” Abe said.

  “Yirra nickel shawt,” Mr. Heizerick said.

  Silence in the candy store. Except for the hammering of my heart. And the scrape of coins across the stained marble as Abe counted again the nickels of the second dollar. There was nothing I could do about my heart. It was banging against the wall of my chest like a carpenter’s hammer driving a nail. Why not? I had thought getting the rent for my Aunt Sarah would be easy. I had the two ten-spots Mr. Heizerick had given me two nights ago for the bottle of Old Southwick. All I needed was three dollars more. Circumventing Mr. Velvelschmidt’s threat about the moof tzettle had seemed a cinch. Abe owed me a week’s pay. All I had to do was pick it up. I had looked forward to seeing my Aunt Sarah’s face when I came home with the money. Benny the hero!