Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  20 – Duty and Family

  Before I left for work on Thursday morning, I put a piece of brisket in the slow cooker, along with some potatoes and carrots, so that there’d be a warm welcome home dinner for Lili by the time she returned.

  We drove up to Friar Lake, where I met with Joey Capodilupo, answered emails, and filled out a lot of college forms relating to the agreement to rent out our facilities to the group represented by Professor Backus.

  I took Rochester out for a walk around Friar Lake when I was finished. I missed Lili, and it was hard to remember how I’d functioned as a single man. Well, I hadn’t done all that well, at least not until Rochester had come into my life and given me his unconditional love, as well as the need to feed, groom, walk and play with him.

  Back when I was married, I’d relished Mary’s occasional business trips for the chance to be on my own, and it was always a bit of a letdown when she returned home. Guess that should have told me something. We left for the airport soon after that, and once again I blasted Springsteen through the Bluetooth connection to my phone. Let Bruce wash all my cares away.

  As I neared the airport I saw a skinny black shirtless guy, his torso covered with tattoos, walking along the verge waving at passing cars. Another homeless guy like Joel Goldberg? Or just a free spirit?

  I expected Lili to be happy to be home and away from her mother’s demands, but she didn’t look all that pleased when she got into the car. Of course she leaned over and kissed my cheek, and scratched behind Rochester’s ears, but I could tell there was something wrong.

  It’s the eternal conundrum between couples. Do you poke and prod for the source of the pain, risking an explosion? Or wait for your significant other to open up, with the possibility that she’ll think you uncaring because you didn’t ask?

  Fortunately, Rochester helped me out. From the back seat, he kept woofing and leaning forward to sniff Lili until finally her bad mood evaporated. Good dog.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said eventually, as we sped up the highway toward home. “My mother needs more than I can give.”

  Another one of those booby-trapped comments, and I had to tread carefully. I remembered the rabbi’s commentary about the first fruits of the harvest offered at the Temple, the idea that you gave back to the one who had given you life – either God, or your mother.

  “You love her,” I said. “The most important thing you can do is let her know that.”

  “But who’s going to help her out when she goes back to her apartment?” Lili asked. “We can hire an aide, but how can I be sure that person can be trusted to take care of her? What happens when she falls again? Is it fair to shift all the burden to Fedi and Sara? She took care of both of us for years, decades even. Don’t I owe her that same duty?”

  “Duty’s a heavy word,” I said. “In the end, what’s our duty to each other? You know my favorite definition of Judaism.”

  “The one from Rabbi Hillel?”

  “Exactly.” Rabbi Hillel, one of the early Jewish sages, had been challenged to state the essence of Judaism while standing on one food. He had said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

  “And what does that have to do with my mother?” Lili demanded.

  “That you love her as you love yourself. You recognize that she has good and bad points, just like each of us does. And that your love for her has to be equal to your love for yourself. You don’t owe it to her to turn your whole life upside down to take care of her—just to make sure that she’s safe, and well-cared for, that she has a roof over her head, food in her belly, and that she knows you love her.”

  “You’ve been hanging around with that rabbi,” Lili said, but she smiled. “That sounds like a very Talmudic observation.”

  “And a selfish one,” I admitted. “I love you and I only want the best for you. I don’t want you to be torn up over what happens to your mother, just to be happy that you’ve done all you can.”

  “But is this all? Occasional visits, telephone support? She gave me and Fedi a home, after all. Shouldn’t I do the same for her?”

  “She already has a home,” I said gently. “You told me yourself, she loves her apartment and she doesn’t want to move out of it. You were infants, and then kids, and you couldn’t fend for yourselves, so she had to take care of you. Now you’ve got this balancing act to handle, letting her do as much as she can for herself, and then picking up the slack between you and your brother.”

  “Sounds good in theory,” she said. Then she turned toward the window and we didn’t speak again for the rest of the trip.

  The brisket was tender by the time we got home, the aroma filling the house with warmth and welcome. I threw a loaf of frozen garlic bread into the microwave, opened a bottle of wine, and we sat in the kitchen and ate in a companionable silence. I had missed Lili while she was gone, and I was glad to have her home. I told her so, and she said she was happy to be back home, too, even if it meant she had left things hanging in Florida.

  We were relaxing on the sofa, our feet entwined as we read, when Lili asked, “Did Rick propose to Tamsen yet?”

  “Don’t know. The only thing we’ve been talking about is murder.”

  “Do you think Rick is stalling?”

  For a moment I thought she was talking about the investigations into the two murders. Then I realized she wondered about his proposal to Tamsen.

  “He’s got a lot on his plate right now,” I said. “Lots of petty crimes in town, and this murder, too. If I were him, I’d want to wait until I could give Tamsen my full attention.”

  “I just hope he doesn’t wait too long.”

  I turned to look at her. “Why? You think Tamsen might get impatient and break up with him?”

  “I’m sure I’m just projecting. But both Philip and Adriano proposed to me on the spur of the moment, and both times I accepted without thinking too much. If we’d waited, I might have seen the warning signs and never agreed to get married.”

  “Rick sends off warning signs?”

  She pushed at my side. “Don’t go interpreting too much. Both of them have baggage, and if something big comes up before they’re committed, who knows what might happen. Suppose Justin gets sick, or Tamsen does. Or Rick gets hurt on the job. Or that crazy ex-wife of his comes back to mess up his life again.”

  I slid onto my side so I was facing her. “We’re good, though, aren’t we?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m here for you whatever happens with your mother,” I said. “In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, all that stuff. We don’t need a ceremony or legal paperwork to confirm that, right?”

  She leaned in and kissed me. “I love you, Steve Levitan. Things feel different with you from what I felt with Philip or Adriano. Like we’re in this for the long haul. So yes, I agree with you, we’re good, and we don’t need anyone else to confirm that.”

  We kissed again, and then Rochester scrambled up between us, eager to get in on the love fest. We laughed and pushed him away, and then got busy demonstrating that commitment we felt.

  21 – Who is Sylvia

  Lili warned me Friday morning that she’d probably be at her office all day catching up on work. “Don’t count on me for dinner. I’ll grab a sandwich or something.”

  “I was thinking I’d go back to Shomrei Torah tonight,” I said. “I want to ask Rabbi Goldberg about the document that I found at the old shul, see if his brother might have been able to understand it. I’ll feed and walk the hound before I go.”

  She kissed me goodbye and went upstairs to shower and dress for work, and Rochester and I left the house a few minutes later. On my way to Friar Lake, Henry Namias called my cell. “Daniel Epstein left me a message I should talk to you,” he said. “Of course, now that I call him back, he doesn’t answer. What am I supposed to talk about?”

  I explained about the testimony found by Joel Goldberg. “I understand you knew Myer Hafetz.”

  “Wh
o told you that? Epstein? What a mouth he has on him.”

  “I also read a story you told my mother for the Oral History Project,” I said. “Maybe you remember her? Her name was Sylvia Gordon before she married my father.”

  “Sheindeleh Gordon! Of course I remember her. You’re her son? Why didn’t you say so?”

  I hadn’t heard anyone call my mother by her Yiddish nickname in years. Her aunts and uncles called her that when I was a kid, and my father often used it as a term of either endearment or frustration. “I didn’t think you’d remember her,” I said. “Could I talk to you about what you remember about Myer Hafetz? And my mother, too. I lost her too early.”

  “What a shame,” he said. “I was at the funeral. Is your father still alive?”

  “He passed a couple of years ago,” I said, grateful that Namias didn’t remember my father’s service, or that I hadn’t been able to attend because I was incarcerated. “Are you going to be at Shomrei Torah tonight?”

  “Where else would I be? You want to talk after services? A little Shabbos wine goes a long way to opening up the memories.”

  I agreed that I’d see him that evening. I remembered when I was a kid I’d stumbled on a book of translations of English songs and poems into Yiddish. There was “Affen Shpitz Alten Smoky,” or “On top of Old Smoky,” and one that had a particular resonance—Shakespeare’s short poem, “Who is Silvia?”

  I had immediately looked up the poem’s text in a Shakespeare compendium I’d found in our basement – one of my mother’s old college textbooks. The poem became one of my favorites, because I adored my mother and at that age, she could do no wrong, and because her named matched in both English and Yiddish.

  Who was my mother, anyway? A devout Jewish woman, in her way. We never kept kosher, but she and my father fasted on Yom Kippur for years, they observed the Yahrzeits of their parents, and she chauffeured me to Sunday school and Hebrew school for years.

  She spent her working life as a bookkeeper and secretary, read voraciously, and loved to garden. So little to sum up a life, and yet I was pretty sure she’d been happy with what she accomplished. A comfortable home, a loving marriage, an educated son.

  Like Victor Namias had described his wife Esther, my mother was a balabusta, a woman born to run the world. She volunteered at Shomrei Torah, chaired the Lakes Garden Club, looked after her elderly relatives, ran our household.

  And yet none of those things got to the essence of who she was. Do we ever really know our parents, no matter how much time we spend with them, how much we analyze their behavior?

  Those ideas continued to circle around in my head until I left Friar Lake around four, fed and walked Rochester, and then went to Shabbat services at Shomrei Torah. Daniel Epstein wasn’t at the door greeting congregants, and I didn’t see him in the pews either. I hoped he wasn’t feeling under the weather. I ought to give him a call, take Rochester over for a visit. I’d seen how the attentions of my generous golden had made Epstein look better.

  After the service was over, I approached Rabbi Goldberg, and I realized I had barely paid attention to the sermon, my mind full of my parents and my own history.

  But I wanted to talk about his brother, not his sermon. “That document I found at the old shul was a testimony from the Yad Vashem holocaust center,” I said. “Would Joel have recognized the Hebrew name of the center at the top of the page?”

  “I think so,” the rabbi said. “Like me, Joel took years of Hebrew and he often went to temple with me and our parents after his bar mitzvah. So he certainly knew the alphabet. And as I think I told you, he was very interested in the Holocaust, to the point where he was convinced that America was at risk of another one. All the political name-calling and putting blame on immigrants. He was afraid that if the wrong people got into power, they’d start going after the Jews again.”

  He sighed. “I know it was paranoia from his illness, but I can’t help believing there was some truth in what he believed.”

  Another congregant came over to speak to the rabbi, and I found Henry Namias by the platter of petit fours, a plastic cup of wine in his hand.

  “So you’re Sylvia Gordon’s boy,” he said. “I haven’t thought of her in a long time. A very smart young woman, a real go-getter.” He leaned forward and peered at my face. “You look like her, a little. The nose and mouth.”

  “I’ve been told that,” I said.

  “She was four years younger than I was,” Namias said. “I knew her from shul and I was excited when she asked to interview my father. I convinced him to say yes.”

  “I read the transcript,” I said. “Daniel Epstein saved it. Did you know him when you were a boy, too?”

  “Only by name. He’s much older than I am, you know. Six years. A lot to kids.”

  “He told me that you knew a man named Myer Hafetz. That you might be able to tell me something about him.”

  “Cousin Myer? What do you care about a man dead fifty, sixty years ago?”

  I explained about the testimony I’d found at the old shul, though I didn’t mention it was Rochester who’d nosed it out. “I was fascinated and I wanted to know more about him.”

  “I think I was ten years old when he came to stay with us. I don’t know how he was connected – maybe a landsman, maybe a distant cousin of my mother’s. He was German and had been in Auschwitz and he used to sit for hours talking to my mother in Yiddish and broken English. My father gave him a job at our family junkyard on New Street, and in the evening, after he had finished work and we had all had dinner, he told me stories of the old country so I could help him with his English.”

  Henry Namias got a faraway look in his eyes and I could see he was remembering those years. “He was a real raconteur, and Berlin before the war came alive in his stories. He was a very clever man, and he was able to evade the Nazis for years, hiding in abandoned houses, scavenging for food. One day he was so hungry that he dared to go out in the daytime, and he was stopped and the police demanded he drop his pants to see if he was circumcised. As soon as they saw, they arrested him, and he was sent to Auschwitz, with the rest of the Jews from Berlin.”

  I couldn’t help shivering. What must that have been like, living in constant fear? Most boys born around the time I was in the United States were circumcised, so my missing foreskin wasn’t as clear a symbol of my Jewish identity as it would have been for a German Jew in the 1940s. How would I have felt, being forced to drop my pants on a public street, knowing what it would reveal?

  “He was lucky,” Namias continued. “He was young and strong and they put him to work, and the war ended before they could wear him out and gas him. He felt like God had saved him for a reason, to tell his story. That’s why he filled out that form from Yad Vashem.” He peered at me. “You read Yiddish?”

  I shook my head. “I had Daniel Epstein translate it for me.” I paused for a moment. “How long did Hafetz stay with you?”

  “Only a few months,” Namias said. “Then one night he didn’t come home for dinner, and my mother sent me over to New Street to get him. The junkyard was locked up and I was confused. Where was cousin Myer? I called his name but he didn’t answer, so I started looking around. When I went into the alley beside the building I found him there, on the ground.”

  His voice quavered as he remembered. “I kneeled down and shook him but he didn’t wake up. There was blood coming out of his belly and I got some on my hands. I ran home like I was on fire and when my mother saw the blood she nearly fainted. She sent my father to the junkyard and she cleaned me up.”

  He looked me in the eyes. “That was the last time I saw Cousin Myer.”

  22 – Hardy Boys

  As I left the synagogue with Rochester I felt a chill—maybe from the cold air, or more likely from the story Henry Namias had told me. No one had been willing to tell him what happened to Hafetz when he was a boy, and by the time he was an adult he’d pushed away the dark memory of discovering the body.

  When I got
home I went back over the police detective’s report on the death of Myer Hafetz. There was no mention of a boy discovering the body, and I assumed that the Namiases had kept their son out of the investigation. What else wasn’t mentioned? There was no way to know.

  By the time we returned from Shomrei Torah, Lili was home, and I pushed aside all thoughts of murder, past and present, to be there with her and my puppy.

  Saturday morning I took Rochester for a long walk, then snuggled back into bed beside Lili and dozed. Around ten, my phone trilled with Rick’s ring tone. Lili was closest to the phone so she reached for it. “I wonder if he proposed,” she said as she pressed the button to answer.

  “No, it’s Lili,” she said. “Have you asked her yet?”

  He said something that appeared to be no, and she continued, “What are you waiting for? I thought you were going to do it this week.”

  She listened for a moment, then said, with a deep sigh, “Oy. Here’s your brother from another mother.” She handed the phone to me. “Another murder. And I thought Stewart’s Crossing was such a safe little town when I agreed to move in with you.”

  “What happened?” I asked Rick.

  “The man who did that translation for you. What was his name again?”

  “Daniel Epstein. Why?”

  He groaned. “I thought that was it. I’m afraid someone made sure that Mr. Epstein would no longer be with us. I’m here at his house in Crossing Estates. Maid came in to clean this morning and discovered the body. Fortunately she called 911 before she started to clean up.”

  “You’re going to find my fingerprints there,” I said. “I spent a couple of hours at Epstein’s house on Wednesday morning, going through some of his old files.”

  “Did you clean up after yourself?”

  “What are you, my mother? Of course I did. Why would you ask something like that?”

  “Because it looks like the person who killed Epstein ransacked his house, in particular his office on the second floor. Files dumped out, papers scattered everywhere.”