Old News

by Ed Ifkovic

  I laughed. “Not quite, that storyline.” But of course it was—a fact that my own mother pointed out and fussed over. “Have you read it?” I asked Jacob now.

  He rolled his eyes, purposely exaggerating the gesture. “A book about unmarried women? Spinsters? You don’t know much about me, do you, Edna?”

  Wryly, my tongue in the corner of my mouth: “What I know is actually too much. Men—young men in particular—spend their time winning battles in wars no one else has heard of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Men love to walk in their own victory parades down imaginary streets.”

  He grinned. “You lose me, lovely Edna. Anyway, Ella and Emma—or is it Emma and Ella?—lived with me and Sadistic Sarah all the years of Mama’s absence. Our own prison sentence. Once Mama returned, Ella and Emma skedaddled, though I’m not sure why. My brother, Herman, who pays all the bills and keeps us all out of debtor’s prison, thought it was a good idea. Clear out. Vamoose. Get out of Dodge. Especially Emma, who was afraid to be there.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Dunno.” A heartbeat. “Maybe the nightmares will return—the ones that made her wake up screaming. So Ella won’t allow Emma to visit now. Afraid she’ll upset Mama.”

  “And your point is what, Jacob? You do trot around a story.”

  “They want to meet you. I told Ella how close you and I once were…”

  I walked away. “Good day.”

  He got serious, ran after me and touched my elbow. “No, no, wait. Please, Edna. I’m a fool. They want me to bring you to tea some afternoon. They share a room—genteel as all get out, them being unmarried and possibly prey to ne’er-do-wells and bounders—the other side of Maxwell on Canal, a rooming house run by Mrs. Goldberg, as scary a woman as God decided to send to torment other souls on Earth. For single women only, guard dogs at the front entrance.” He turned his head to one side, coyly. “Please. I promised them.”

  “Only if you read my novel, Jacob.”

  “I promise.”

  “You are lying to me again.”

  A hiccough. “Yes, I am. I lie to all women. They expect it.”

  “You’re…impossible.” I paused. “But all right. You arrange it.”

  ***

  That night, meeting Ad in the hallway, he whispered to me that Jacob would meet me on the sidewalk the following afternoon at half-past two. “Be discreet.” He leaned in, a goofy smile on his face. “Hide behind the hedges.”

  “Ad, what?”

  “Jacob, though my best friend, is not welcome here since his mother came home and soured the peaceful life of Monroe Street.” He gazed over my shoulder. “If he telephones here, asking for me, he’s told no one is home. Even, I suppose, the person answering the telephone.”

  “And you allow that?”

  He bit the tip of a fingernail. “Does it look like I set the rules here, Edna?”

  The next afternoon, dressed in a light cerise polka-dot sundress with a brimmed straw summer hat with paper roses, I met Jacob, who was planted dramatically and conspicuously in front of the Newmann house. As always, he greeted me with the gentlemanly half-bow, and off he sailed, two or three jaunty paces ahead of me.

  I rushed to keep up with his long strides. “Are we in a foot race, Jacob?”

  He slowed down. “I just assumed you’d naturally fall in at my side.”

  “And I just assumed you had some common courtesy.”

  “I guess we were both wrong.” A wide grin, infectious.

  From Maxwell, we turned down Canal, and stopped before a four-story brick building, squat and ugly, soot-blackened red brick and unpainted wrought-iron fence. A small sign said: “Mrs. Goldberg’s Rooms. Single Women Only.” And then in some bowdlerized German or Yiddish or God-knows-what: Hier wir the Englisch sprech. In sloppy black paint, some passing wag had added the words “Only If” at the end of that sentence, perhaps a bit of sarcasm.

  We met the two sisters in the stuffy parlor at the front of the house. They stood side by side, bodies touching, arms hanging stiffly at their sides, both with ridiculous red bows in their hair. Introduced first to an obese Mrs. Goldberg in a black Victorian smock, obviously the moral sentry and resident custodian of maidenly virtue, we then stood in the cramped, overstuffed room among the velveteen-covered armchairs and tuffed settees covered with intricate antimacassars. Embroidered quotations from Scripture hung haphazardly on faded rose-printed wallpaper. Mrs. Goldberg seemed unimpressed by my local celebrity, barely suppressed a belch when one of the twins gushed about The Girls and my picture (with interview) last year in the Chicago Tribune, and then led us to the small dining area at the back of the house, off the kitchen, where a table covered in slick oilcloth held a dangerously lopsided chocolate cake and bargain teacups from Marshall Field’s basement sale. I thought I’d been bizarrely ushered into a failed rehearsal for Alice in Wonderland. No matter: seated, tea poured decorously by one of the twins, cake sliced but vaguely moldy on a plate, the twins began to speak at the same time, their voices overlapping as in an echo chamber. They sang of the delight—the wonder, thrill, pleasure, surprise, fear, panic—of actually meeting me again.

  “Again?” I managed to get out.

  They laughed. “Not again,” one said, in a solo performance now. “We do remember you and your sister, Fannie, following Jacob down the sidewalk…”

  “Please,” Jacob broke in, “I’m blushing.”

  “I never did such a thing,” I lied. Outright. I refused to look at Jacob.

  Ella and Emma giggled like schoolgirls on holiday.

  So the minutes passed in inane blather. Yet, perversely, the more we spoke of Chicago and childhood and Maxwell Street and the World’s Fair of 1893—which neither of the twins went to, though Jacob said he and Ad had seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show there, and, an improper wink, exotic Little Egypt—the more my mind kept darting back to their mother’s arrest for murder. That was my only interest here. Yet Emma and Ella seemed not to have a care in the world, save the collection of tourist postcards from Europe that one of them (Ella?) babbled about and the watercolor landscapes the other (Emma?) threatened to show me.

  Both were tiny, pencil-thin women with parchment complexions and spit-curl hairdos from another century, though the huge red bows struck me as affectations borrowed from a children’s storybook. Both were wearing heavy black patent-leather shoes, square-toed, that I associated with nurses in military hospitals. Both leaned back and forth, bumping into each other like elastic bands that kept snapping back into place. They had the maddening habit of talking as one or, worse, finishing each other’s sentences. It was evident, finally, that one of them—Ella—controlled the other by severe looks, by abrupt words, by touching her sleeve when it was time for her sister to shut up. Emma was the meek one, though she never seemed to shut up. Ella ordered her around (“Emma, pour more tea, please” or “Emma, sit back, you’re blocking my view of Edna”), and Emma complied, tittering nervously.

  “When Ad told Jacob you and your mother were…”

  “…visiting, we said, it’s hard to…”

  “…believe. After…”

  “…all these years.”

  They were Dickensian parlor maids, dithering and bleating.

  But I wasn’t ready to leave. The one story never touched on—Leah Brenner back in her old kitchen—kept me still.

  “It’s amazing how much Jacob looks like your mother,” I began, staring past everyone at a faded chromolithograph hanging crookedly on the wall.

  A moment of silence, palpable, but one woman managed, “Jacob got the good looks, you know.”

  More silence, awkward now. Ella fingered the crumbs on her plate.

  Jacob cleared his throat. “Ella, Mama wondered why you skipped Thursday. You said you would come to visit but…”

  No one pa
id attention to me, Jacob purposely shifting his body away.

  “I forgot the time. We were shopping and the time passed. You know how it is.” She arched her shoulders and sat back. “Cake,” she mumbled, directing my attention to the table.

  “I enjoyed visiting your mother,” I said to her. “She told me she looks forward to your visits.” I was making that up but felt safe fabricating the line. After all, I assumed Leah did want visits from Ella.

  Jacob leaned forward. “You know, Emma, you need to visit Mama, too.”

  Emma turned away from us, facing the door. For a moment her face closed up, eyes half-shut. The color rose in her neck, a muscle throbbed. A hand trembled.

  Ella fussed but said loudly, “I won’t allow Emma to go.” A sickly smile. “You know that, Jacob.”

  “What?” From me, stupefied.

  She spoke in a clipped, artificial voice, “She’ll get too emotional and say the wrong thing. I’ve forgiven Mama, of course, but she won’t. She can’t. It’ll be awkward.”

  Emma was on the verge of tears.

  Jacob spoke again, “She misses you, Emma.”

  What she said next stunned me. “She murdered Papa.”

  So bold the line, said so innocently, a throwaway comment as if about the heat of the day or the price of butter at a market stall.

  Ella nodded, a half smile on her face. “See what I mean?” she said to no one in particular. Then, a sidelong glance at me, “She doesn’t have a forgiving heart.”

  Emma was ready to say something, perhaps to counter that notion, but she shook her head and looked down into her lap.

  Jacob, flustered, nodded at me. “Edna, do you see how this matching set of humanity has found one subject to disagree on?”

  Ella spoke up, nonplussed. “We don’t talk about it, Jacob. Emma has her own views.”

  Which, I thought, you so emphatically reinforce. Emma, browbeaten, servile. Her story squelched.

  Yet Ella was smiling at her brother, and even Emma assumed an adoring look as she gazed at him. They loved him dearly, I realized, doted on the gadabout wag, loving his teasing—even, I supposed, his indifference.

  “I found your mother delightful,” I forced myself to say again. The teacup rattled in my hand. And then, with cool deliberation, I added, “A woman wronged, frankly. I don’t believe she killed your father.”

  Emma yelped and said too loudly, “The police told us…”

  I interrupted, “A peculiar case, uninvestigated, a belief that your mother’s silence and fright constituted confession. Frankly, that was the conclusion of some vainglorious police sergeant or detective who never thought of what your mother was going through.”

  Emma was anxious. “But the captain told me…” She breathed in. “He said…definitely…”

  “And you listened.” I answered in a biting tone. “Men tell me things all the time, and I ignore most of it.” Quietly, I sipped lukewarm tea and sat back.

  “You’re confusing me.” Emma was nearly in tears.

  “I don’t mean to. But, truthfully, all of you were willing conspirators in the easy condemnation of your mother.”

  Ella cleared her throat. “Well, I never believed it. She just never seemed capable of it. I mean, she always ran away from fights with Papa. But the police…” A helpless shrug. “We had to listen to someone. We were all…drifting.”

  Jacob was squirming in his seat, uncomfortable, mumbling about leaving. “I have to be somewhere.”

  I eyed him cautiously. “No, you don’t.”

  Startled, he grinned. “Yeah, that’s true, but this place gives me the willies.”

  Yet the visit was an opportunity I’d not have again, so setting down my teacup and pushing away my untouched slab of congealed cake, I said, “You were all there that day. In the house. Didn’t you see anything?”

  Silence, heads turned toward the doorway. Finally Ella whispered, “Emma and I were up in the room we shared. Papa was home sick that day.” She squinted, ignoring Emma’s short audible breaths. “In the morning he and Mama fought, yelling so loud it scared us. We hid behind our closed door.” Her voice was mournful. “We’ve told this story over and over. I mean—years ago we did. I went to the attic to get some fabric and when I stepped into the hallway, I heard Aunt Sarah screaming in the parlor. Emma rushed out of the room, white as a ghost, and the two of us ran downstairs. Papa was slumped on the sofa, bent to the side. He…”

  Emma finished. “His head was back. All the blood on his neck, his shirt. Mama was bent in front of him, quiet, you know, stunned by her bloody fingers.”

  Ella went on, “Aunt Sarah screamed and screamed. We didn’t know what to do.”

  Jacob added, “I had just fallen into bed, ready for a nap, half asleep, and the screaming jarred me. When I ran downstairs, it was—like pandemonium.”

  “You’d just come home?” I asked.

  He squirmed as he tried to remember. “Yeah, maybe a little while before.”

  “Did you walk through the parlor?”

  He was uncomfortable. “In the hallway, yes. Not into the parlor but in the doorway.”

  “Your father was there?”

  “I saw him on the sofa. I thought he was sleeping.”

  “Slumped over?”

  He flinched, nervous. “I glanced in, I think. I can’t remember. Sometimes he napped there. I knew he was home sick from the butcher shop. I didn’t say anything. I went upstairs, washed my face, lay on my bed.”

  I waited a beat. “Jacob, you didn’t tell the police that you saw your father on the sofa.”

  He sputtered. “Well, of course, I did. I saw him…”

  “No,” I said firmly, “I’ve read the newspaper accounts”—that surprised the three of them—“and I remember the police were quoted as saying you hadn’t seen your father since breakfast—and you said you had been napping for an hour—that you’d been in your room since lunch.”

  “I don’t think…”

  But I knew what I’d read in the news clippings. Jacob specifically said he’d heard his parents quarreling earlier and he’d hidden in his room, emerging only after hearing Sarah’s wailing.

  Now he sputtered, “Maybe I’m remembering wrong.” He snickered, “It was fifteen years ago, for God’s sake. You know, a person can forget things. It was a bad time—I wanted to block out some things. I don’t remember what I told the police.” Now there was an edge to his voice. “C’mon, Edna, you expect me to remember stuff like that. Maybe I’m thinking of another day. You know, Papa slept on the sofa a lot. A lot of times I walked by, and he was there.”

  “But not during the day. He was usually working at the store.”

  “Sick that day, yes. I don’t know…” His voice broke at the end.

  Emma spoke up in a clipped voice. “Jacob never had a memory for things.”

  Ella shot her a cautionary look, nodding furiously. “He can’t remember what he did yesterday.”

  Emma agreed, echoing, “Yesterday.”

  “Jacob is always a little boy.”

  “A boy,” Emma echoed. She was smiling at her sister.

  Jacob’s eyes dipped into his lap, his lips quivering. “It’s all a jumble in my head. So long ago…”

  Ella spoke loudly. “You know he’s a poet, Edna.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I answered. “But what does that have to do with his memory?”

  “Nothing, but you can’t expect a man like him…to…he’s a wonderful writer, Edna.”

  “Brilliant,” Emma said.

  “You know Poetry, the magazine here in Chicago? Real prestigious.”

  I admitted I did. In fact, I knew Harriet Monroe, though faintly. A friend of Lillian Adler, my friend who ran the Maxwell Street Settlement House. I’d watched her teach dancing to awkward Polish and Russian and Jewish girls. />
  “They published his poem.”

  Jacob interrupted, “Emma, that was five years ago. One poem.” He smiled sadly. “About our grandmother who’d died when we were all very small. My Bubbe.”

  And then, as though auditioning to be the best student in elocution class, Emma stood, prompted by Ella. “Now, Emma, now. Yes, now.” Still holding her teacup, Emma recited in an oddly stentorian voice that doubtless carried out into the street and gave Mrs. Goldberg an immediate heart palpitation:

  My grandmother

  Was supposed to live till ninety

  Though she had no legs

  (We’d wheel her around

  Until the flowers were dust)

  She died at eighty-one

  Not quite making it.

  When I was small

  She made old-country challah

  Covered herself with eggs flour salt

  Until the bread rose in the oven

  Like evening in her eyes

  And the smell took us both back

  To a land I never saw

  She’d never see again.

  When she finished, Ella applauded, and I followed suit, though self-consciously. Jacob was pleased, though he pooh-poohed the whole performance.

  Emma bowed and sat down.

  Jacob stood up. “Edna, it’s time we left.”

  Both twins immediately began clearing the dishes. Neither one looked at me.

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning, lying in bed but wide awake, I delayed going downstairs for breakfast. Though my door was closed, I could hear muffled voices—Esther’s high soprano laugh and my mother’s deep rumble —bits and pieces of their discussion of a theater performance they’d seen five years ago at Glickman’s Yiddish Theater. An absurd rendering of King Lear. Der Yiddisher Kainag Lear. My mother kept saying it was too melodramatic and far-fetched; Esther insisted it was so sad she cried just thinking about it.