by Ed Ifkovic
“The purpose of this visit is what?” I began.
I knew I’d have to wait for the answer. This was a man who planned his strategies. A day calculated in half-hour blocks, regimented. Intrusive, smart-aleck young women had best cool their heels. He measured out his information in small doses.
So I waited.
We barely talked, but what feeble conversation we had dealt with my visit (“Such wonderful family, the Newmanns”) or my burgeoning fame for The Girls (“Your picture in the photogravure some time ago was much talked of”). Finally, as though we’d sloughed through a barren desert, we drifted into uncomfortable silence.
When we arrived at his home in Lawndale, he purposely slowed down the automobile, inching its way on the long driveway, nodding toward the house. I was expected to ooh and aah, but those exclamations were difficult for me. So I sat there in stony silence, which annoyed him. He kept glancing at me, his brow wrinkly.
The house was a sprawling Tudor with sufficient windowed turrets to provide haven for damsels in distress or to warn of approaching infidels with spears and mace. Set back on a parched yellow lawn, with wilting nasturtiums and petunias in long green window boxes, the house appeared unoccupied—shades drawn, lead-glass windows shut tight despite the dreadful heat—and one of the two lamps left and right of the front door flickered madly.
He frowned at that. “What the hell!” Imperfections on the medieval canvas.
Parked under a manicured sycamore tree, we sat in the hot car for a minute, and he said in a gravelly voice, “The only argument my father and I consistently had was about moving to Lawndale. You know, the night before he died, we had a knockdown drag-out battle. My Papa was a stubborn man, difficult.”
“About what?” Now I was curious.
“Come now, you’ve seen the old neighborhood. The old crowd is moving away, the old German Jewish folks, the Reform—the young ones, ambitious, they move here, or out to the suburbs. Lake View. Morton Park. For twenty or thirty years now, that migration. Things changed. Russian Jews streamed in to Maxwell Street with their burlap sacks and cardboard suitcases. Up and down Halsted. They look at us and say—goy. A dislike for us, the old-timers.” He waved his hand at the landscape. “Deutschland, they call this place. They’re our people, of course, but you’ve seen them.”
“We’re all Jewish.”
“They’re not rushing to become Americans like our families.”
This was not the conversation I wanted. “You wanted your parents to move here?”
He nodded. “Of course. A good life here. But Papa wanted to stay on Monroe Street. He had that failed butcher shop. He and Morrie always fighting. Morrie’d lost interest. The back room was a den of…iniquity. A place to play poker and argue about politics. Everything grimy and messy. I couldn’t budge Papa.”
“What did your mother want?”
“She said it didn’t matter. She’d be happy there—whatever Papa wanted. But the old customers started to go somewhere else. Morrie indifferent, Papa tired of it all. Nathan’s not kashrut enough, they worry, the old ladies. Strictly kosher.” Suddenly he shut up. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“I suppose because you just came from there. Your boyhood neighborhood. Those streets.”
“Maybe. I don’t like it there. You can’t breathe there.”
But the short conversation—this surprising revelation, so out of character with his stuffy demeanor—abruptly ended. He sucked in his cheeks, reached for a cigarette, and lit it. “Papa was a poor businessman. Morrie, too. Talkers, they were. Oh, they made money, sure, in the early days. Morrie lives in a big house now, away from there. He collects rents for the old buildings he owns on Monroe. A landlord who doesn’t fix the broken pipes. But Papa had no head for business.” He preened. “I do.”
“I understand you own a factory?”
He swelled up. “Brenner’s Suits.” He tugged at the lapel of the suit jacket he wore. “The best.” He opened the door, rushed around to open mine, but then walked on ahead, leaving me to follow. I lacked a requisite basket of rose petals to strew in his path.
A man easy to dislike. All it took was a breezy ride in a hotsy-totsy convertible across town. From the peasant’s hovel to the lord’s castle.
“This is my wife, Naomi.”
We approached a woman waiting in the doorway. She glanced at her husband and then shook my hand, immediately turning away, disappearing into a hallway. Herman acted flustered before motioning me into a parlor where two children stood at attention.
“Henry.” A fifteen-year-old boy nodded, a freckled, gawky lad in knickers he’d outgrown, all stringy arms and close-cropped hair, a disarming smile, sweet. “Martha.” A young girl, ten or eleven, dressed in a checkered gingham dress, an enormous bow atop her cascading ringlets, quietly turned away, shy. They both bowed, and I noticed that the boy sneaked a glance at his sister, the slightest trace of an impish smile on his face. I said hello, and we stood there, statues, the children helpless in this mandated audience. Children were difficult because they had their own language and customs, unfathomable. A kinship of sticky fingers and warm-milk breath. Of secret codes and schoolyard loyalties. Finally, Herman dismissed them, and, gleeful, they scooted up the stairwell, the boy fairly whooping at the top of the landing, as if to say he’d narrowly escaped the wicked spinster.
We sat at an oak dining table, Herman, Naomi, and the tremulous dinner guest in a room with glass cabinets of porcelain knickknacks and gaudy bric-a-brac and silver-plated bowls, served a dinner of apple chestnut salad, followed by a prairie chicken glazed with honey and mint, currant jelly, with pureed carrots and creamed onions the color of stagnant water. All passable, even the salad, but dismissible. The servant girl, a slip of a thing in a uniform, spoke in a thick Russian accent, but successfully ignored Naomi’s clipped, abrupt orders.
“You have delightful children,” I lied, which they expected.
Neither said thank you because both didn’t believe what I was saying.
We talked of Chicago childhoods, of bitter winters with brutal wind off Lake Michigan (recalled fondly), of the recent heat wave (record-setting and unbearable), of their love of music (a Mel-O-Dee player piano occupied a wall in the parlor—if I wanted, they could play me Paul Whiteman, a favorite), until Herman, clearing his throat and watching the servant girl disappear with an empty platter, whispered to me, “Neither of my children knows anything about what my mother did.”
A horrendous line, hurled into the quiet small talk. I stammered, “I won’t say a word.”
“We’ve lied to them,” Herman frowned. “It’s best. We are always afraid Jacob will slip up. He’s not good with…lying.”
I thought of an old Yiddish line. A ligmer darf hoben a guten zikoren. A liar needs to have a good memory.
“Someday they’ll hear of it.”
Herman rushed his words. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“But people talk…”
“You talk, Edna. You!”
“I…” I stopped talking.
The servant girl reappeared. Silence.
Naomi had said perhaps ten words to me, none memorable. A cold woman in that hot room, a woman who never laughed. A white rose pinned to her white dress, a blue ribbon cinched at the narrow waist. Decorous, to a fault. She kept eyeing Herman, who did the evening’s rehearsed narration, following his cues, supplying nods and at times a quiet “Yes” or “No,” as needed.
The servant girl buzzed around us, deferential, seamlessly moving plates away, and our conversation was purposely circumspect in her earshot. I waited. Afterwards, the girl dismissed, the three of us sat in the parlor with coffee and a poppy-seed apple roll, and I waited. Herman offered me a cigarette, which I took. That seemed to surprise and annoy him. He seemed unhappy striking a match to light my Lucky Strike.
Obviously
, not so lucky a strike.
“Ah, you’re a modern woman, Edna,” he said. “The New Woman I read about in Everybody’s.”
“What can I say?” I ran my tongue over my upper lip. “Give a girl a reporter’s pad and the dusty streets of Milwaukee, and hell and damnation come knocking on my door.”
“What?” From Naomi, puzzled.
Herman waved his hand. “I’ve been talking to Jacob about your visits to my mother. You’ve been—become—prominent in our family, Edna.”
“I like your mother.”
“And Jacob?”
“Jacob is sweet…”
His hand flew up into my face. “Jacob is a ne’er-do-well, Edna. Let’s be frank. A man who plays at his life. He’s a Loop hound, nights traveling the El. He and that Ad at Dreamland, dancing with the Italian girls. He thinks every day is a…farce.”
“You’re very different people, you two brothers.”
“Most definitely.” Herman snubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray. He was tempted to reach for another, actually tapping the pack in his breast pocket, but decided against it.
Naomi spoke up. “My husband is the only success story in that family. He’s held his family together.”
I was tempted to remark on the very obvious unraveling of the Brenners but bit my tongue. Something was being told to me here, and I wanted to hear it.
“I’m glad you support your mother,” I said into the silence.
That surprised him. “I’ve never stopped talking to her. I visited her at that…place, though the first years were hard. She stared at the walls and muttered back at me. Nonsensical syllables. Gibberish. But I would talk to her…telling her about Jacob and Ella and Emma. I didn’t know what else to talk about.” He squinted. “Then, one day, they told me she was talking.”
Naomi faced me. “Herman came back a changed man.”
Herman sighed, settling back into his seat, comfortable as a satisfied cat. Had he come to believe that he’d wrought that transformation in Leah with his chitchat? Yet I had to admire his loyalty to his mother—all those visits. That did say something positive about the man.
Herman watched me closely. “Her voice came back.” A smile that was hard to read. “But there was too much silence. She often refused to see me.”
Naomi made a tsking sound.
“What could I do? I still had to visit, no? She’s my mother.” A sigh. “No matter what.”
I stared at him, perplexed. Had my initial dismissal of him as a self-important fool been premature? Usually my first impressions were on target, especially with smug and cocky men, certainly with moneybags rich men who took themselves too seriously. Yet Herman may have had a soul beneath that suit he conceived, manufactured, and sold to himself. Or not. He was a hard man to read.
“She startled me when she asked about Ella and Emma.”
“Why?”
“Because I expected her to ask about Jacob, always her favorite. The boy who had to be taken care of, coddled. The darling boy, the little prince who wrote poems for her birthday and stuck them on her mirror.” He smirked. “I was the doorstop that held the door open. It was, ‘Tell me about Emma and Ella.’ Very strange. Ella and Emma, bookcases without books in them.”
An odd image, needlessly derogatory, but I left it alone.
Naomi spoke quietly to her husband. “Before I forget, Herman—while you were gone, Ella telephoned me. I meant to tell you. She said Emma insists on taking a job at Hull House on Halsted with that Jane Addams woman. Some sort of settlement work with poor Russian girls. Ella said you needed to do something about it—she wants you to stop it. She isn’t happy. Emma hadn’t told her she’d gone there.”
Herman harrumphed. “Good for her. Ella should do the same.” A sickly smile. “This doesn’t sound like Emma, though. I never thought Emma’d have the courage to disobey Ella.” Then a pronouncement: “Unmarried women find value in settlement work.”
I drew in my cheeks and arched my neck. “We old maids are good for something.”
There was no apology in his response. “I meant no…offense.”
“That’s not how it sounded, Herman.”
He eyed me. “You don’t know how to read a man like me, Edna.”
“I’ll leave that chore to your wife.”
Naomi, who’d been following the exchange with her head swinging back and forth, made a clucking sound, very barnyard, and Herman frowned her into silence.
He withdrew a cigarette, tapped it on the arm of the chair, and lit it. A puff of smoke, followed by a clearing of his throat. He punched the air. “Jacob tells me you don’t believe Mama killed our father.” Flat, out there, blunt. He waited, his eyes narrowed, his head lost in wispy smoke.
“No, I don’t.”
“Based on what, my dear?”
“Instinct, for one.” He scoffed at that, and sucked on the cigarette. “And,” I added, “the fact that there was no knife found—and so little blood on her. A neck stabbing, a vein punctured, blood all over his shirt, and just a smattering on her fingertips? Really. Given her mental state when discovered, it seems to me she’d not have had the presence of mind to tidy up, hide bloodied clothing, scrub the knife…”
“Folderol!” he blurted out, and I jumped. Naomi bit a fingernail. “You are, indeed, the writer of fiction, Edna.”
“I am that. But I was first a reporter.”
“And you feel the need to solve a crime already solved?”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but—“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“I believe Mama has told you she’s content now—made her peace with it all—wants only to live a quiet life.”
“In which, I gather, she cannot see her grandchildren.”
“So…”
“And she lives with the knowledge that her own children believe her guilty.”
“The police…”
“Did a shoddy, perfunctory investigation. No investigation, really. I’m tired of hearing what the police told you and the others. A cop observed a paralyzed, frightened woman, he notes blood on her hands—she probably reached out to her husband, disbelieving what she saw, a loving wife’s panic—and he thought it was a simple case of husband-wife murder. After all, they’d had that nasty row in the morning.”
“Still and all, Edna.” He shot a look at his wife. “Please. Your voice.” He pointed at the ceiling. “The children.”
Frankly, had I been his fifteen-year-old son, I’d have spent the evening tying sheets together to lower myself out the upper-story window. A freight train to California, my belongings tied in a bundle on a stick.
I spoke with quiet fury. “No, listen to me. Let me be frank here. Your mother was—is—a beautiful woman. Men usually forgive such women anything. But those same men also happily and romantically condemn beautiful women when they kill in a fit of—passion or a heated fight or some frenzy. They know too many melodramas. They saw your mother as a woman who asked for trouble because, as neighbors happily told the police, your mother flirted, though innocently—and liked the attention she got. A lonely woman, hungry. She was found guilty not of murder but of being a loose woman—a violation of motherhood. Or womanhood. The obedient Jewish mother. Think about it. Men wink at such women but are ready to throw the first stones.”
Herman was fuming, restless in his seat. “That’s a lovely speech, Edna. Such talk comes of giving women the right to vote. Three years ago. Preposterous. This country sliding to perdition.”
I laughed out loud. “I’ll never win any arguments with you, Herman.”
“I didn’t think we were arguing. I’ve listened to you give me a long-winded essay on human misunderstanding.”
“Edna, Herman, please.” From Naomi, wide-eyed.
“So you believe your mother is a murderer. All those years you visited her when she was away.”
>
“In my soul I believe she’s guilty.”
“And you still visit her, this woman who murdered your father. Jacob believes it, too, and he lives there.”
“She’s my mother.”
“So like others—you both threw stones.”
He shuddered. “A little extreme, no?”
“No other suspects?” I waited.
He exchanged looks with his wife. “Of course, back then—we hoped the police would find someone else—you know—but who? Some thought—Morrie? Jacob? Sarah? Aunt Sarah resented everything and everybody. Still does. The twins? For heaven’s sake, Edna. They’re afraid of their own shadows. The police even questioned me.”
“Why?”
“I stopped by that morning to see Papa. I knew he was home sick. I drove there.” He shook his head vigorously. “A brief visit, running in and out. People saw me talking to him on the front porch as I left. We’d raised our voices. Ridiculous.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “I did not kill my father.”
“No, you believe your mother did.”
“I can’t help what I believe.”
He peeked at the clock on the mantel, and I suspected my visit was ending.
Naomi had become agitated when her husband mentioned his being questioned by the police. For the first time the cold, expressionless face cracked, and she hissed, “Ezra.”