Last Respects

by Jerome Weidman

  “Why?” I said. “You gave him the seven dollars.”

  “And he was glad to take it,” my Aunt Sarah said. “But he’s related to that bloodsucker, Mr. Velvelschmidt. For bloodsuckers taking is easy. Giving back, that’s what they find hard. Take care.” It was her first reference to the fact that my part in the block party might be hazardous.

  “I’ll take care,” I said.

  It was more than a phrase. It was a promise. That’s why, even though it was Saturday afternoon, I climbed the stairs to Top Floor Back on my toes. Every family head in the building was snoring through his nap. I could have gone clumping up those stairs, banging together garbage-can covers like cymbals, without fear of detection. But I tiptoed.

  Inside Top Floor Back, I locked the door behind me and took a quick look around. There was not much to see. Kitchens in uninhabited tenement flats on East Fourth Street tended to look like my science textbook illustrations of lunar craters. My interest, however, was in the vonneh. It looked exactly as it had looked the night before when I had brought up from the dock the last delivery the Jefferson Davis II had made for the block party. I ran my hand over the burlap wrappings that shielded the bottles. The wrappings were still damp, but the river water had run off down the vonneh drain. Handling them would be no problem. I walked out into the front room. It was like walking out into a huge dirty cracker box. No furniture. No curtains. Nothing on the walls except long gray stains from old roof leaks creeping down the plaster like belligerent stalactites. The windows were gray smears. Crossing to them, the long strips of naked floorboard creaked under my then approximately hundred pounds. Through the cracks came the rich, ripe smell that hung over the Lower East Side every Saturday afternoon: the mixed smell of stale urine and fresh chulent. It was a setting that I now see must have been a horror. On that day in 1927, however, it was perfect. Top Floor Back was a corner flat. From the windows of that stinking front room I could see not only the dock, but I could also look down on all of Fourth Street. As soon as I looked, I knew something had gone wrong with Walter Sinclair’s plan.

  The plan had been simple. Since it was Saturday, the block party could not start until the Sabbath ended at sundown. However, Walter wanted the deliveries made before sundown.

  “Get the dough before it gets dark,” he had said to me. “Once the sun goes down you have to make tracks. By the time you do, and you’re far enough away to feel free to count, you’re too far away from where you got the money to do anything about it if the payoff man short-changed you. I want to be the hell and gone out of here before they start hoisting them for this boy from wherever it is he comes from.”

  “Melitz,” I said.

  “Yeah, well,” Walter said, “get the money before he goes back home.”

  “He’s not going back,” I said. “The Germans from Tenth Street, they’re bringing him over to live. I mean he’s going to live here forever.”

  Walter Sinclair laughed. “They’re in for a surprise,” he said. “Nobody lives forever. You get your mitts on that money before this boy unpacks his bag. Your mama tells me they’re going downtown to pick him up early Saturday morning. Seems to me we can count on the welcoming committee getting back here by let’s say sometime in the afternoon.”

  I had counted on it, and I had made my plans accordingly. What I had not counted on was the distance between East Fourth Street and the Battery ferry that brought immigrants across from Ellis Island. Later, when I was putting together the pieces, I could not quite work it out in miles, but I learned it was a four-hour walk for the average citizen. I’m sure I could have made it faster by doing scout pace. The delegation from Tenth Street, however, did not know about scout pace. Even if they had, I am certain they would not have used it on a Saturday when they were heading toward a meeting with the spiritual leader of the European town from which they had emigrated to America. They most certainly would not have used it on the way back from Ellis Island.

  As I was to learn during World War II, a convoy takes its speed from the slowest vessel in the group. The Melitzer Rabbi, as I was to learn somewhat earlier, moved at the speed of a power saw cutting through the trunk of a giant redwood.

  Later I learned what happened that day. The Tenth Street delegation arrived at the Battery shortly after eleven in the morning. The immigration officials were not ready for them. By the time the officials were ready, the Melitzer Rabbi was not. It was, I gather, a matter of protocol. He did not feel that he and his entourage should share the ferry with immigrants of lesser distinction. He was, as I have said, a German.

  How this problem was resolved I do not know, but from a member of the entourage it was learned that halfway across the bay from Ellis Island to the Battery it struck the Melitzer Rabbi that he was on board a vehicle driven by an internal combustion engine on the Sabbath. Some sort of scene took place. The issue was settled on the Manhattan shore. The Melitzer Rabbi conducted a religious ceremony on Bowling Green.

  It was probably somewhat different from the ceremonies Peter Stuyvesant used to conduct in the same place, but the results were not dissimilar. Gorges that had risen, fell. Tempers that had flared, sputtered out. Hysteria that had reigned, was driven from office. Gastric juices started gnawing at the walls of empty stomachs. Prayers stopped. The march northward started, toward East Fourth Street and chulent.

  I knew nothing of this at the time, of course. At the moment when I looked down on East Fourth Street from the filthy front room windows of Top Floor Back, the Melitzer Rabbi, his entourage, and the Tenth Street welcoming committee were plodding uptown with stately grace somewhere between City Hall and Broome Street. Below me their destination, East Fourth Street, was as deserted as the room in which I was standing. The street looked better, of course, because the dome of arched wires with dangling electric bulbs that had been built over the block gave promise of imminent festivity. But my problem was not cosmetic. My problem was to get eighty bottles of booze out of the vonneh behind me and up the block to the synagogue near the Avenue D corner.

  If the Melitzer Rabbi and his welcoming committee had arrived when Walter Sinclair had calculated they would, the block below me would have been as busy as one of those slabs of honeycomb in the window of Mr. Lesser’s drugstore. Nobody would have paid any attention to me as I moved back and forth, up and down the block, from Top Floor Back to the synagogue, carrying several bottles at a time wrapped in the old copies of the Jewish Daily Forward I had carefully accumulated beside the vonneh.

  On a deserted street, however? Who knew what eyes were watching from what windows? Chulent caused some people like my father to snore insensibly through their naps. There were others on Fourth Street, however, in whom it was rumored chulent produced a fiercely dyspeptic insomnia. How did I know that it did not cause its victims to spend their hours of agony staring down into the street?

  I didn’t know. But I did know I could not turn to Walter Sinclair for advice. He had promised to bring the Jefferson Davis II into the dock just before dusk to collect the take. I also knew I had promised him I would have the money waiting on that dock.

  Like better men before me, I rose to the occasion.

  I left the flat, locked the door carefully, tiptoed down the stairs, and started up the block. I was engaged in what I learned later, during the war, to call a recce party. I wanted to see if the arch of wires and bulbs over the street was dense enough to conceal a senior patrol leader from the eyes of possible sleepless chulent consumers seething with heartburn. I never found out. Perhaps ten feet before I reached the entrance to the synagogue, a man stepped out in front of me.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “An old friend. How are you, sonny?”

  My heart did its irritating flip-flop. The man was Mr. Kelly.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Going anywhere?” Mr. Kelly said.

  Once more I wish I did not have to say I thought fast. Nonetheless, facing Mr. Kelly on the sidewalk in front of the East Fourth Street synagogue on that
Saturday afternoon in 1927, I did think fast. I had to.

  “I’m going up to Sheffield’s,” I said.

  “For a bottle?” Mr. Kelly said.

  I got it faster than I used to get most things in those days. It is one of the disadvantages of sarcasm. It tips its mitt. Even fools grasp at once that someone is trying to make them look foolish. They react.

  “Yes,” I said. “Grade A.”

  I moved on up the block. I turned left into Avenue D and broke into scout pace. At the Third Street corner I turned left again. I belted down to Lewis, turned left a third time, and raced back to Fourth Street. I didn’t stop for breath until I was up the stairs and into the long green tunnel decorated with my scrawls.

  “Aunt Sarah,” I said.

  “Ssshhh,” she called from the kitchen. “Papa is sleeping.”

  I came out of the tunnel, and stopped short. I felt exactly the way I had felt down in the street when Mr. Kelly had stepped in front of me. Unexpectedly, I was in the presence of an enemy.

  “Hello, Ma,” I said.

  I had not seen her since the night of the Shumansky wedding. Since then Walter Sinclair, making his deliveries to me on the dock, had assured me several times she was all right. I did not know what the phrase meant. I knew, of course, that it was meant to be reassuring. But even today I feel about it the way I felt then: I don’t quite believe it.

  “Is that all you have to say to your own mother?” my mother said.

  Most people, of course, lie to themselves. I am no exception. I’m rather good at it. I’ve been doing it for years. It pleases me to set down, therefore, a completely truthful statement. There was a time when I did not understand the wonderful therapeutic value of lying to yourself. To my mother’s question—“Is that all you have to say to your own mother?”—the truthful answer was: “Yes.” But who had the courage to say it? Especially at my age? My Aunt Sarah, who knew everything there was to know, stepped in.

  “What else is there you want him to say?” she said.

  “He could say he’s glad to see me,” my mother said.

  I wondered if I was. My Aunt Sarah sensed, of course, that I was wondering.

  “Say it,” she said.

  Getting through life consists of slipping out of tough spots. The trick is to find the way out. When somebody points the direction, I am grateful.

  “I’m glad to see you,” I said gratefully.

  “Listen to the way he sounds,” my mother said. “You call this glad?”

  My Aunt Sarah said, “Do you care if he’s glad?”

  My mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table, looked annoyed. “When a boy sees his mother,” she said, “he should be glad.”

  The young woman who now sat at our kitchen table seemed to have almost no connection with the person who only a few days ago had been my mother. She had yellow hair piled gaily, carelessly high on her head like the whipped cream on a charlotte russe. There was even a small comb fastening stabbed saucily into the top of the pile. It looked like a tortoise-shell cherry. She was wearing something that was known on East Fourth Street as a gamp. I learned later that the word was actually guimpe. A dress cut wide at the throat, with narrow shoulder straps, not unlike a man’s overalls, to set off the fluffy blouse with long sleeves and many ruffles that was worn under it. I had never seen this sort of thing worn by anybody but young girls. I had certainly never seen one like my mother’s. It looked like a holiday. Her guimpe was a beautiful soft pink. On East Fourth Street this was a totally frivolous color. The blouse was so full of ruffles billowing up around her neck that she seemed to be surrounded by smoke, like the girl with the Spanish combs in the Cuban cigar ads. Most important of all, though, was her face. There was no fear in it.

  “Stop talking like a fool,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Of course he’s glad to see you. Maybe he’s a little surprised, the way I was when you came in, but glad? How can you even say such a thing?”

  “He doesn’t look glad,” my mother said.

  My Aunt Sarah turned to stare at me, as though to check the accuracy of this preposterous statement, and then I could tell from her face that she had suddenly thought perhaps it was not so preposterous.

  “Benny,” she said. “What’s happened?”

  “The street is empty,” I said. “They haven’t come back yet. The Melitzer Rabbi and the Germans. The whole street is dead. Nobody. But in front of the schul he’s standing there.”

  “Who?” my Aunt Sarah said.

  “Mr. Kelly,” I said.

  “From the government?”

  It was my mother’s voice. High. Alert. Startled. So I knew she understood what had been happening. And at once I also knew how she had understood it: from Walter Sinclair.

  “Yes,” I said.

  My Aunt Sarah nudged my shoulder. “Yes, what?” she said.

  Thus I understood that she did not quite understand what my mother understood.

  “Yes, Ma,” I said.

  My mother rose from the kitchen table. I don’t like the verb, but I can’t think of a more appropriate word. She didn’t stand up. She didn’t shove back her chair and push herself erect. My mother rose. Like Venus coming up out of the shell in the framed picture Miss Hallock, my R.A.I teacher in J.H.S. 64, had hung on the inside of the door to the supplies closet. More clothes, of course. Venus was not wearing a pink gamp and a white blouse dripping ruffles. But the gestures, the movement, the flow were the same.

  “You mean we won’t get the money?” my mother said.

  My mind had not gone that far. All I had been worrying about was how to carry out the part of the plan that Walter Sinclair had assigned to me. I saw now that this was not far enough. My reactions to financial problems had been picked up from the reactions of my parents. Particularly my mother. Once a month, every month, we—actually, she—were on the brink. The moment we—she—got up the twenty-three dollars that held off the enemy, the threat vanished from my mind. I grasped now that it did not vanish from my mother’s mind. It may have receded, but it did not vanish. The sigh of relief was to me the gift of freedom for a month, which at my age seemed forever. Not to my mother. The relief that came with paying the rent did not wipe out the terror that next month the enemy would be at the gates again. On that Saturday afternoon, at that strange moment, from the tone of her voice, for the first time in my life I had an inkling of what my mother was after: security.

  “No,” I said, and then I corrected myself. “I mean I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you know?” my mother said.

  Today a mother speaking like that to a child would provide Dr. Spock with the raw material for at least a fat chapter. Possibly a new career.

  “Because Walter said I should start carrying the bottles to the schul during the lunch,” I said. “Walter said all those people with the Melitzer Rabbi they’d be here after chulent and the street would be crowded. Walter said nobody would notice me. But the street is empty. The Melitzer Rabbi and all those people, they’re not here yet. The only person down there in the street, it’s that Mr. Kelly. Walter wouldn’t want me to carry the bottles in the empty street, with Mr. Kelly watching. That’s why I don’t know if we’ll get the money,” I said. “If I get caught by Mr. Kelly we won’t get the money. I have to ask Walter what to do.”

  “Who is Walter?”

  I turned. My father was standing in the doorway from the bedroom. He did not look very good. Nobody looked good on Saturday after rising from his nap after chulent. But I had never seen my father look as bad as this. His face was the color of the stone sides of the Hamilton Fish Park Branch of the New York Public Library. His eyes had spidery red lines running in crazy little darts from both sides across the whites toward the pupils, as though they were trying to extinguish the bright gleam in the middle. It was not a very reassuring gleam. And I saw for the first time why my father was always so fussy about combing his hair straight back. It was tumbled forward now. The bald circle on top was clearly visible. My fathe
r was barefoot, but he still wore the pants and shirt in which he had gone to schul that morning. Except that he had removed the collar. The gold stud dangled from the unfastened neckband. The suspender elastic had slipped from his right shoulder and was slapping gently back and forth against his thigh. I hated the way my father looked.

  “He’s a man I’m in business with,” my mother said.

  “Business?” my father said.

  “Business,” my mother said.

  “What kind of business?” my father said.

  “None of yours,” my mother said.

  They were speaking, of course, in Yiddish. If their words lose something in the translation, I’m glad. Pure hatred is terrifying.

  “I’m your husband,” my father said. “Everything you do is my business.”

  “I paid the rent two days ago,” my mother said. “If you want to make it your business, I’ll take back the twenty-three dollars, please.” She held out her hand.

  My father came out of the bedroom doorway into the kitchen. “Where did you get the money?” he said.

  “From a place where you couldn’t,” my mother said.

  “You haven’t been home since the night of the Shumansky wedding,” my father said. “Where have you been?”

  “Doing what you don’t know how to do,” my mother said. “Paying the rent.”

  My father gathered his spittle with a low, grinding roar and spat it in my mother’s face. “Koorvah,” he said.

  My mother’s hand came up, out, and down, as though she were waving bon voyage from a dock to someone at the rail of a departing ship. The result was astonishing. To me, anyway. By the time my mother’s arm returned to her side my father was flat on his back.

  “Don’t you ever use that word to me again,” my mother said. “Or you’ll never speak another word to anybody again.”

  Her words emerged slowly, with precision, as though she did not want any of them misunderstood, and the decibels of sound on which she sent them out were not very high. But the effect in that tenement room—as I leaned back, terrified, against my own scrawls on the green walls of the hall, and my Aunt Sarah cowered back, confused and frightened, against the black cast-iron sink—was as though each of my mother’s words was a nail, and she was hammering it squarely, neatly, securely into my father’s supine body.