Old News

by Ed Ifkovic

  An explosion in the room. Sol let out an unintended belch, immediately frowned upon by a decorous Minna standing near him, still holding that platter. My mother, uncertain, sat down and then stood back up, though she never took her eyes off the ponderous grandfather clock, as though she coveted the power to turn back time. Molly gasped for breath as Esther reached for her glass of lemonade, an involuntary sob coming from the back of her throat.

  I was growing nervous now, aware of my impolite behavior and suspect talk. After all, I was a guest—at least for the remainder of the next week. Short story writer for the national weeklies be damned: I was simply the pushy daughter of an old friend, and not a nice one at that. Edna Ferber, ace reporter, once again ruining one more suppertime. I thought of Jacob’s cruel doggerel. Edna Edna not nice…

  But still…“She seems so…lost. A dark Rebecca on that porch, watching…” I breathed in. “I kept thinking of the beautiful woman in a Walter Scott romance…Ivanhoe, you know…And what evidence? Really! You know, they never found the knife. Not in that room. Not in the kitchen. Not in the body. Wouldn’t the knife be in the body? In the neck? Strange, no? Given her paralyzed stare when they found her, leaning over the body, speechless, and for years afterwards, how could she have had the presence of mind to…?” I stopped. Enough.

  Esther was sobbing quietly. “Ever since she got back—like three years ago now—we avoid her. We don’t see her, but we know she’s there in that house. It’s like a huge boulder fell onto the street. It’s ruined everything. Leah was a friend of mine. We shopped together. We visited in each other’s kitchens, had coffee. Picked kirshen from the tree out back…cherries for pie. Yes, she was a little…different. I don’t know what word to use…”

  “I do,” said Molly, her ragged voice breaking. “A Jezebel. A harlot. A temptress. Take your pick.”

  “Mama,” Sol began. “Not again. Please.”

  She silenced him with a ferocious glare. “That…that sickening moment with Morrie, that horrid butcher. Yeah. The men always gaping at her, joking, the improper wink. What kind of decent Jewish mother, that woman?” She turned to Ad, who avoided her face. “You remember how the men talked about her, sitting in that grimy back room of Nathan’s, that fleyshmark, the meat market I never went into, refused to, those groups of strange men, tongues out, yammering on and on. That dark hole. And she loved it, don’t tell me she didn’t, I could see—the attention of stupid, stupid men. Ivan was a hard-working slob with a wife who moved like a courtesan. Yeah, the man could be hard. How could he not be?” A rasp from the back of her throat. “She brought Sodom and Gomorrah onto this quiet street.”

  Esther sobbed into her plate and Sol gently touched her shoulder, let his fingers rest there. It was, I thought, as loving a gesture as any old married couple could share.

  “I’m sorry to ruffle everyone’s feathers,” I went on. “But”—a nod at Ad—“what does Scripture say about love? Ah—‘God wants the heart.’ Right? Doesn’t Leah deserve that?”

  Ad was still smiling, but a quiet, mischievous boy’s smile. Though I liked him, it dawned on me then that Ad thought me a frivolous woman, a silly meddler, one not to be taken seriously. I was a rabble-rouser who at the moment was amusing him. That rankled, surely, and I wondered how shallow he really was. His knee-jerk sympathy for the marooned—and maybe railroaded—Leah had the depth of oilcloth. Maybe I shouldn’t like him so much.

  Molly was trying to stand, grasping the edge of the table and gripping her cane. Her voice trembled. “A supper ruined.” Eyeing me sharply, she stepped away from the table.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t.

  My mother spoke to the clock. “A lifetime of ‘I’m sorry’ from a daughter who digs the hole for my early grave.”

  “I’m…” I began again, penitent, but stopped. I wasn’t sorry.

  Molly began her slow move away from the table, tap tap tap, but she paused, and I watched her teeth chatter in the hot, hot room. She faced me. “A lifetime lived here,” she whispered, “and that woman changed everything.” She slammed the floor with her cane.

  She turned to her son, Sol, who seemed baffled by her fierce stare. Then, quietly, she repeated her awful line: “That woman changed everything.”

  Now her eyes were on me.

  Chapter Six

  The next morning I hailed a taxi on Halsted and headed downtown toward the Loop, and finally, refreshed with coffee at Moe’s, walked into the Chicago Tribune building. Using the name of an old friend, Tim Boyden, a features editor now living in New York—and employing my own current celebrity—I managed to get hold of a small stack of clippings in a manila folder at the Tribune morgue. The meagerness of the file surprised me because I’d expected a wealth of newsprint spilling out. After all, this was a Chicago murder story, one that happened in the safe and quiet Jewish neighborhood off Maxwell—not like the recent whoop-it-up gangland murders Chicago was beginning to wrestle with since Prohibition became the law of the land.

  But there was so little information, and contradictory at that, most facts repeated day after day, then spottily, until a month later a small paragraph buried deep in the paper chronicled Leah’s quiet removal to an asylum. Hardly splashy news, this domestic murder, not newsworthy. A woman—with a rumored sub-rosa reputation, wink wink wink—kills her loyal and faithful husband in a blind rage after a violent argument, then sinks into silence and solitude, and is finally defined as mad. What amazed me was the cavalier tone of the reportage—Leah cattily recalled by neighborhood women and even some men as notoriously flirtatious, sometimes irreverent, non-observant, this Jewish mother—a woman with a flippant remark, a reckless laugh. A woman already talked about, and not nicely.

  So little about the actual murder.

  Such a paucity of facts. The investigative detectives located no knife, no bloodied clothing, and there was no confession. A man slumped over, a cruel gash on the right side of his neck, dead from choking on his own blood. Nothing, save a woman paralyzed over the dead form of her husband. Her fingertips smeared with his blood. Blood splattered on his shirt collar, on the sofa cushions, on the floor.

  The very first news account accused her. As the first patrolman on the scene noted, “She looked like she did it.”

  That said it all. Case closed. Hang her. Stone her.

  I raced through the clippings, my fury growing. A glib, skewered portrait of a woman with questionable character. Innuendo, suspicion. One cagey reporter shared cigars with a bunch of men gathered in the back room of Nathan’s Meat Market, cracker-barrel philosophers all, the wisdom of Solomon at the ready, men who praised Ivan as sweet and friendly and Leah as—a vamp.

  “She never fit into the neighborhood,” one man told the reporter.

  Murder in a fit of anger, a burst of sudden madness, a marrow-deep depression, and a slow descent into the dark corners of the irrational mind.

  Leah, by all accounts glass-eyed and frightened, said nothing, a piece of beautiful clay moved from one spot to the next. The Chicago House of Corrections. The Cook County Hospital. She answered no questions.

  The judge quietly signed papers to commit her.

  No one, I realized, got her to talk about what happened.

  When Detective Tom O’Reilly was asked by a noisome reporter about the whereabouts of the knife, he blithely remarked, “A butcher’s wife’s kitchen. Come on. Her kitchen.”

  Not really an answer at all.

  So my morning at the news morgue did little to answer my questions, though the hour there firmed up my initial sense of Leah’s innocence. Detectives entertained no other suspects. The case had been simply too easy to wrap up, to file away. The same way Leah was conveniently filed away in a small cell far from home, like Hester Prynne with her nagging inner thoughts and mournful reflection. A woman sat alone, forgotten, until one day she decided she’d had enough of silence and found her v
oice again.

  She came home.

  ***

  I left the Chicago Tribune and wandered, window shopping, making the mistake of boarding the slow-moving, jam-packed streetcar on Indiana Avenue, hopping off, buying ice cream, but finally ended up back on Halsted Street, that long, long street everyone ended up on sooner or later. Tired, my mind back at the news morgue, I ambled down Maynard, off Maxwell, a poor stretch of wooden shanties, soot-blackened tenements, dark basement apartments without baths or light. The world of sweatshops, rows of skinny boys in black-brimmed caps and tzitzis hunched over tables, boys who never saw daylight.

  Here on this bright afternoon the East European shtetl emptied out into tenements that once housed German Jews, who were now abandoning the area for the green lawns and pristine boulevards of West Chicago. And yet—not everyone. Esther and Sol and Molly, and Leah and Ivan—they stayed on, wanting the old neighborhood. The children left, but they remained. I wondered why.

  Once again, turning toward the Newmanns’ house, I stood in front of Nathan’s Meat Market, that touchstone to the past. Empty now, abandoned, the interior dark.

  “Edna.” A sweet voice from behind.

  Jacob Brenner stood near me, a loaf of bread cradled to his chest.

  “Jacob, you startled me.”

  “You seemed lost in thought.” He pointed at the butcher shop. “The only kosher butcher on this block. Der kosherer katser. You know, Morrie Wolfsy kept it going for half a year after Papa died, though he seemed to lose interest. He’d forget to open some days.”

  “It sits empty?”

  Both of us peered through the dark front window. Someone had left a light on in the back room.

  “He owns the building. He keeps an apartment upstairs, but his wife hates the neighborhood, sticks up her nose at it. Too poor now. They got a grand house out in Lawndale, a la-di-dah place with a concrete fountain in front like it’s Versailles, but Morrie wanders back here, stays in his old apartment upstairs or sits in his back room where all the guys used to spend useless hours. Me included. The boys’ club. Forbidden poker. French postcards even. Craps. Sometimes.” He laughed. “Chickens beheaded and the politics of America argued over and over.”

  “You’d think he’d rent the store.”

  “He won’t. Won’t give a reason. But he owns a couple of the apartment houses on Monroe. He comes back here once a month to collect the rents. He lives on that money now—the butcher shop is history. He runs his rental properties from the upstairs apartment. That’s the only time we see him in the neighborhood. He’s old, tired. Hey, Morrie’s not a bad sort. Sometimes, back then, a spell of religion would overtake him—the result of old Levi the ragpicker thumping his fist at the infidels—and Morrie’d boot us all out. When Papa died, some folks blamed him.”

  He stared into my eyes. “There was even a rumor that he killed Papa. No one believed that, even though they didn’t get along. But afterwards, though, he just went through the motions at work. Like his soul died. Like his heart was pierced. He stopped being friendly, snubbed folks. Customers drifted away.”

  “Did you think he murdered your father?” I asked bluntly.

  Jacob didn’t flinch at my words. Nor did he answer me. He shrugged as if I were discussing the ongoing heat spell.

  “Wanna look inside?”

  He stepped to the front door and turned the knob. It opened.

  “Morrie never locks it. Nothing inside of value anymore, really.” He lowered his voice. “I think he hopes the old gang will stop back in, especially those times he’s upstairs counting his money. But there is no old gang left. He knows I sit by myself here at night. Alone.” Then he grinned. “I used to slip in to write my poetry at night—when I did that sort of thing. Waiting for inspiration that never arrived. It’s quiet here.”

  He stepped inside but I didn’t follow him into the shadowy dark room. “No, Jacob. No.” A violation, I felt, trespassing. I walked away from the shop but glanced back at Jacob in the doorway, as he shut the door.

  He joined me. “You shouldn’t ask me that question, Edna. I still have…nightmares. I still…” Then, a helpless shrug. “Well, I guess everyone was a suspect.” A hint of a smile. “Even me. I was upstairs that day.”

  He started to move away. “Jacob,” I called to him, and he stopped.

  His melodious voice, always so cooing and seductive, suddenly got brittle, harsh. “I don’t want to talk about that. Not anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He stepped back, in his eyes a flash of—not anger, but pain. “No, you’re not, Edna. I can see this…that horrible event fascinates you.”

  I nodded. “True, but I don’t want to hurt you—or your mother.”

  A sad smile. “Me—you can’t hurt. At least most days. I don’t care about most things these days. I get morbid, curl up inside. Too many years have passed me by. After the murder, I got depressed. Before that, I was the rah-rah playboy of the neighborhood. Me and Ad all night at the Booster Club on the roof of the Morrison Hotel. Everyone wanted me there. Bert Kelly’s band struck up a song when I walked in. I was popular then. The girls circled me like I was gold in the street. I thought I’d be young forever. Lord, Edna, I’m gonna be forty years old this year. I make my money running numbers in a speakeasy on Clark Street.”

  “But you’re a poet.”

  Now he laughed long and hard. “Edna, Edna, I don’t think you realize how funny you can be.” He got a faraway look in his eyes. “I do wish I could remember you from…what? Eighteen years ago, right?”

  “Why?”

  “Because, after all these years, I think you still like me.” A sheepish grin.

  “And others don’t?”

  He frowned, his eyes darkening. “When everyone wants to be around you ’cause you’re good-looking, you keep waiting for them to get tired of begging for your attention. You end up…” He trailed off.

  “You end up feeling sorry for yourself.” I paused. “Or despising yourself.”

  He chuckled. “God, you don’t let a soul get away with anything, Edna.”

  “No reason to.”

  Suddenly he put his face close to mine. “I don’t want my mother hurt.”

  I waited a heartbeat. “Jacob, I think your mother has found her own way. Maybe, like you, she can’t be hurt anymore. She’s found a peace she can live with.” I paused. “But I don’t know if I believe you. I think you can be hurt. You lie to the world, Jacob. You’ve been hurt—badly so.”

  He sidestepped that. “You know, I’m real glad you talked to Mama. Maybe you’re right—she’s made her peace with the world, but it doesn’t help that the other women on the street shun her.”

  “I know. Molly Newmann, for one.”

  A fake shiver. “An unforgiving woman, that one. But she didn’t like Mama from the start. When I was real small, I remember she snubbed her—gossiped. Mama was just too…pretty.” But then he sighed. “Esther was the only one who was friendly. I mean, Esther invited Mama into her kitchen for coffee. They went shopping.” He frowned. “The women of Monroe Street have made a devil’s pact to make certain my mother never is happy again.”

  “Horrible,”

  “You’re not like that.”

  “Jacob, I don’t think your mother murdered your father.”

  That statement stopped him cold, and for a second he flinched, turned his head away as though afraid our talk might be heard by eavesdroppers. Sweat covered his brow. Finally, he said, “I think you’re wrong, but, as I say, I don’t care anymore. Papa was a tough man, brutal.”

  I was indignant. “I can’t believe you’d say that. You’d accuse your mother?”

  He tried to look apologetic. “Look, Edna. It’s got nothing to do with my love for Mama. That’s there. Always. She and I…always close. We had—have—a special bond, the two of us. But…who else
? The police told me…”

  “I wish I knew.” Then, turning my head, “Yes, the police had all the answers.”

  He walked away but turned back. “Please don’t, Edna. Don’t make things messy again. That was an awful time for all of us. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “Yes, especially for your mother.”

  “C’mon, Edna. Really.”

  I fumed. “Jacob, you’re not very attractive when you’re so…callow.”

  His eyes popped. “You think I don’t know that?” A bow. “I gotta go. Get back to the old fortress.”

  “The fortress?”

  “Me and my buddy, Ad, the two bumble brothers, each barricaded in our bedroom caves in the old homestead, fending off the Amazon women warriors. Me—my Aunt Sarah, who hates me ’cause I’m still there. Ad, smothered to death by a bubbe who wanted him to be the golden child, the revered rabbi, the heir to the covenant of the ark…” Another bow. “Hey, we hide away and dream of being little boys all over again. Goodbye, dear Edna from eighteen years ago.”

  But then he changed his mind, circling around me like a bratty child.

  “What?”

  “I just remembered something. Speaking of women warriors, you may have heard of my twin sisters, Ella and Emma.” He laughed. “Or is it Emma and Ella? I can never tell them apart.” I glared at him, and he fumbled. “It’s an old joke. I never tire of it.”

  “Perhaps you should. I already have. Yes, I know you have two younger sisters. In fact, I have a dim memory of two wide, startled faces peering out a second-story window as I stood on the sidewalk—this, of course, eighteen years ago. They had to be seventeen or eighteen back then.”

  “Four years younger, unmarried, spinsters now, identical except for one important fact.”

  “And that is?”

  “One won’t visit our mother nowadays, the other one does, grudgingly.”

  “Interesting. And they have what to do with me?”

  He chuckled. “Ella—the bossy one who visits once a month like clockwork, the one with the hickory stick, the one who orders meek and trembling Emma around like a dumb house servant—gave my mother your novel The Girls when she heard you were visiting next door. She loved it—three generations of women in Chicago or, as I overheard her tell Mama, a story of how insufferable dominating mothers can be.” His eyes flashed wide. “A message to Mama, perhaps?”