by Ed Ifkovic
I worried. Had I fostered this emotional wreck? And Leah’s words as I sat with Sarah—those heartfelt, if bitter, words stayed with me. A shattered family had finally assumed some semblance of quiet, and I blazed into their lives, the cocky reporter on a mission. Was I wrong? And yet—
And yet I believed the story hadn’t been told. Or, rather, the story had been given the wrong ending, trumped up, convenient. Strings tied around a bloody package. That bothered me.
At breakfast Ad listened absently as I pummeled him with questions about Jacob’s state of mind. He didn’t want to talk about it, fumbling with the coffee pot, flipping over the pages of the newspaper he held, even eying the doorway into the hallway. Idly, he emptied the drip pan from underneath the icebox, carelessly splashing water on the hard-swept floor.
“Jacob looks so unhappy,” I summed up. “I’m bothered, Ad. Aren’t you?”
He grunted and turned away.
At that moment my mother was walking in, settling into a chair opposite me. “Is it any wonder?” Her good-morning greeting. “Edna, stay out of it. For Lord’s sake. Must we be the guests who arrive with pestilence and doom?”
I ignored her. “Can you talk to him, Ad?”
He shrugged. “You know, Jacob keeps things to himself. Private.”
“But Jacob will listen to you.”
Esther and Molly walked in, Molly rubbing her lower back. Tap tap tap. The cane banged into a cupboard. She’d been muttering to Esther about her lumpy feather mattress but, hearing the end of my words with Ad, she straightened up. “Do you begin every morning at full gallop, Edna?” No kindness in her words, and my mother nodded furiously.
“It’s conversation,” I said emphatically. “I’m just talking. Ad and I.”
Ad eyed his frowning grandmother and grinned. “Jacob’s not gonna listen to me.”
“I don’t want to hurt him.”
“A little late for that,” my mother grumbled. Ad poured coffee for everyone. My mother slathered a roll with butter, licked her fingers, and watched me over the top of the cup. Her look said, brutally: Stop this! Stop this insanity now! I refused to look at her.
“You should talk to him, Edna,” Ad said finally. “But he’s afraid of you.”
“Impossible.” I was smiling. Then I added, “People like me.” A pause. “Jacob likes me.” Another pause, purposeful. “Everybody likes me.”
Said, my words brightened the mood in the kitchen, a ripple of laughter growing.
My mother whooped, spilling her coffee, and Esther giggled. “Your daughter is a hellion, Julia.”
“I’ve heard other words used, I’m afraid.”
“I will talk to him,” I said to Ad. “He has nothing to fear from me.”
Everyone at the table chortled, except for Ad, who shook his head. When I caught his gaze, he saluted me with a wave of his hand. Esther had tears in her eyes but reached over and touched my wrist affectionately. She was still giggling.
Molly wasn’t happy and wanted the last word. “Sooner or later everyone you meet will be afraid of you.”
***
Of course, Jacob didn’t cower in fear when I met him on the sidewalk. In fact, he seemed eager to walk to Maxwell Street with me. The handsome face was drawn, true, but he gave me a wispy smile.
“Everyone says you’re afraid of me.”
That startled him. A long drawn out “Nooo,” though there was question in his eyes. “I admit I’ve been a little…morose. Is that the word I want? You rattled me, Edna. Let me just say that. I still don’t know what to think. I don’t like to think about things, really, and you…” He went on babbling, a little incoherent. What was really going on? Finally, the sputtered nonsense stopped. “I’m afraid of what you said.”
“About your mother being innocent?”
“Yes, of course.” His lips trembled. “I hate to think of what they did to her.” A heartbeat. “What we did to her. Me!”
“Because you love your mother.”
“Yes.”
As we walked, he became jittery. He darted ahead of me as though in a rush, only to stop, lag behind, shuffling from one foot to the other. Peck’s Bad Boy, sent home from school.
For a moment he stopped and faced me. “I have to tell you—you got me thinking, Edna, and not good thoughts.” His face tightened. “I can’t sleep at night. But I’m not mad at you. This has to do with me. Maybe I have to do this. You opened wounds. In me.”
A troubled face, a welter of confused emotions. How handsome, I thought—still, after all the years—but bags under his eyes, ragged lines at the corners of his mouth, wrinkles in his forehead. Puffiness around the jawline. The face of a late-night rouser, some café patron. The man who never slept.
His voice got lazy and confidential. “Your words reminded me of how much I hated my father.”
“What are you telling me?”
“These past few days I keep asking myself—why? Why did it happen that way? To my mother. Why? But I mean—how was I a part of it?”
“Were you?”
He winced. “That’s just it. I don’t know. Did I do something? You know, that—that thing with Papa the day before when he overheard me and Ad talking nonsense. The way he slapped me in the face. I saw his face, all bloated and red and…and you know what I saw there? Disgust. He didn’t like me. My own father. I always knew it, though he never said anything outright. The way he ignored me. The way he slapped Herman on the back, praised him—‘What a mind for finance, my boy! You’re a chip off the old block, son’—and I was the Romeo fool writing stupid limericks for the girls who followed me home. I was the one who resembled Mama.” A wry smile. “That was my biggest sin. He thought there should be no one else like her.”
“He didn’t understand…”
He snapped. “I hated him.”
“But why hate the man, Jacob?”
A perplexed look on his face. “I couldn’t help it. I started hating him when he came home from the shop, a bloody apron in a bag for Mama to wash. Blood everywhere. Then the way he slobbered his food. His dirty fingernails. The way he got drowsy and slumped at the table late at night, a bottle of Manischewitz tipped over. The sweet sickly smell on the tablecloth. You know how little things start to drive you crazy? The way he held a glass of water. The way he kicked his shoes under the sofa. Stupid, stupid things like that. And then that day he slapped me. Twice. Me, a grown man. Ad running home like a scared little boy, shocked. His papa never touched him—ever. I used to envy the Newmann family because Sol was the father I could only dream of. Lucky Ad. And I felt a little dirty because the slap had to do with Mama and the way men talked about her. Ad and me talking about it. It made me feel unclean.”
“And the next day he died.”
“And the next day he was murdered.”
“But not by your mother.”
A helpless look, pleading. “But that’s what they told me—us.” A sob escaped his throat. “I was in a daze, crying, crying. Edna, I said nothing to defend my mother. I accepted…”
“But now your mother is back home.”
“And I still don’t know.”
“Jacob, you have no idea what happened?”
He stopped walking, planting his body in front of me. His cheeks were streaked with tears. “You know why I can’t tell you exactly where I was—what I did? Every story I tell is different?”
He waited as I shook my head.
“Because I blacked out. A whole chunk of time is dead to me. How did I get downstairs? They tell me I was upstairs, as I told everyone. Or just coming home. I don’t know.”
“What are you saying, Jacob?”
“I’m saying that maybe I killed Papa.”
I drew in my breath. “Jacob…”
He held up his hand. “I don’t know.” He started up the sidewalk, hurrying, ai
mless, brushing the shoulder of another stroller. Over his shoulder he said, “I can’t answer any of your questions.” He stopped, ten or so feet ahead of me, waiting.
But at that moment, staring at him, mesmerized by his rocking stance, his arms wrapped around his chest, I felt that he knew something. I didn’t know why I felt that, only that he was hiding something—possibly something he’d not understood himself, something buried in that roiling, frenzied brain. A secret he would not—maybe could not—face.
It was an awful moment, a close one, but I believed that Jacob’s despair stemmed from some kernel of knowledge of who the murderer was. Something had clicked inside him…something bit into his soul…
Part of him believed he’d been the killer. Another part said…no…it was—
But he didn’t have the answer yet.
As I came alongside him, he strutted ahead. “Wait, Jacob,” I called out. “You can’t tell me this stuff and then run away.”
He scrunched up his face. “I told Sarah about it back then, fifteen years ago, about my…blackout…and she told me to keep still—that no one would believe me. I should just accept the way things happened.”
That bothered me. “Tell me about Sarah.”
“What’s to say—a woman you can’t get at. Like…she put up this shell years ago, and speaks at you and never says anything.”
I broke in. “I don’t know that I believe that blasé front she’s created.”
He shrugged. “Who cares? When Mama came home, which none of us expected, she put on this act. All lovey dovey. My sister, my sister! Welcome home! It didn’t even sound like her, to tell you the truth. But I’d catch her at odd moments—her lips drawn into a thin line, her eyes just slits. You could tell she was angry.” He spat out the words. “She plays the radio so loud—like she wants to make the walls crumble.”
“She was used to a household without your mother. You and Ella and Emma.”
He gave out a false laugh. “She barely spoke to us those years. Herman was paying the bills, grudgingly. When she had to, she talked to us.”
“But why? Help me to understand.”
“An unhappy woman. She lived her life in the shadow of my mother. ‘Oh, you’re Leah’s sister? Really?’ That’s gotta wear after a while. You get sick of being the other one in any family. The drab sister, though I gotta say a smart one. Trust me, I know.”
“Do you ever fight with her?”
“No, we dodge around each other.”
“What about the…lover who died in the Spanish War?”
Again, the phony laughter, exaggerated now. “Yes, we heard all about him. She claimed he took her for a ride in a Victoria with two chestnut horses, and the two drank chocolate at a carnival—unchaperoned, no less. Grandfather lost his mind. She made it up. She made it all up. He was more a story than a flesh-and-blood man. I never met him. Nobody did. The story surfaced years after the war was over. One day she mentions how my grandfather put the kibosh on her romance. I remember Mama saying, ‘What are you talking about, Sarah?’ Then the story comes out. We stared at her like she was crazy. She was crazy. Abie’s Irish Rose. Sarah’s Irish Moze.” He laughed at his own joke. “It was a convenient tool for my aunt to take the light off my beautiful mother.”
“You’re hard on the woman.”
“She hasn’t made life in that house easy these years.”
I waited a second. “You could have moved out.”
“And go where?”
“A life, an apartment, a wife, children. A bungalow on the North Side.”
Now he was serious. “I wanted all that. A Lake Shore home, eventually. But I didn’t know how to make it happen.” He scratched his head. “There was always another pretty girl who stared at me when I went to Dreamland or to a basement club. I got”—he closed his eyes a moment—“lost.” Then his eyes got wide, brilliant. “I left that life to Herman. Money, a cold fish of a wife, a boy and girl we never see. Ever. We are diseased, we folks on Monroe Street. Herman, I think, believes too much socializing with me, or Sarah, or even the evil twins, will sully the chosen children. We’re kept at a distance.”
“Unfair.”
“Well, you’ve met Herman.” A grin. “By the way, he’s on the warpath. Against you. Rumor is afoot in the Jewish oral tradition we cultivate here in the quarter. You, Edna Ferber, sort of a female dybbuk with a pad and haystack hair. He sits in temple and prays: May the Lord protect me from Edna. Her evil eye.” He laughed out loud. “They sell incense on Maxwell to remove jinxes, you know.”
“Yeah, and Dragon’s Blood herbs down in the Black Belt.”
“Ah, superstitions. Not Herman’s cup of tea.”
I frowned at that. “I’ll deal with Herman.”
“A greedy man who treats Ella and Emma like invisible waifs who disappear when you blink your eyes. He watches Ella browbeat Emma, and says nothing. And me, the vagabond non-poet who hasn’t written a line in years, the son who still worships his mother.”
“What do Ella and Emma think of Herman?”
“They’re scared of him, mainly.”
“They moved out when your mother returned.”
“Herman thought it best. Better for everyone. It would make the household less tense. Emma believes Mama murdered my father because they told her that. She’s afraid to change her mind. Ella—well, she’s hard to read. Yes no, yes no. Each sees the other as another limb on the same body. So many years now that they can’t separate. Herman feeds them money. He feeds everybody money, enough to reinforce his hold. It’s a curious form of slavery, wouldn’t you say? Buying people. Money takes away the desire for freedom.”
“Did it work with you?”
That gave him pause, though he smiled. “Of course. He paid for this summer suit I’m sporting.” A boyish smile. “Actually, he manufactured it. His label on the collar. He put a tag on me in case I get lost along the way.”
“You don’t have to bear it, Jacob.”
“Oh, but I do. It’s my own medieval hair shirt, Edna. Jacob Brenner howling in the wilderness. I spit three times to protect myself in this unclean place.”
I pointed to the entrance of Katz’s. “Coffee?”
He checked his watch. As he did so, he grumbled, tapped it emphatically. “Another gift from Herman. Order, precision, time, cleanliness, discipline, morality. Lord, my parents gave birth to a Semite Ben Franklin.”
“I believe in hard work, too.”
“I don’t.” He bristled. “But I need to get back. Uncle Ezra is picking me up.”
“Ezra. The uncle who lingers on the edge of all your lives.”
His face tightened. “What does that mean?” He headed home, and I scurried to walk alongside him. He slowed his pace.
“I gather he’s around more these past few years now that your mother is back.”
He eyed me suspiciously. “That’s being mean, Edna. He is my uncle. A blood relative, a…”
“How much was he around those years when your mother was away? Tell me that.”
He spat out his response. “Mean, Edna. You’re mean.”
“I’m only asking.”
“Ezra was always around.” But I could tell he didn’t believe his own words.
“Did he get along with your father?”
He walked for a while, dragging steps. “No, of course not. You’ve seen him—dapper Dan. Razzle-dazzle man. He sparkles in the sunlight with all those diamonds. Papa was a butcher—down to earth, blunt, happy in his easy chair.”
“But Ezra came around after he moved back from Philadelphia?”
“For a while we thought he was interested in Aunt Sarah. A marriage that would be made in hell, frankly.”
I touched his sleeve and he stopped moving. I could feel a tense muscle in his forearm. “Uncle Ezra still loved your mother, Jacob.”
; “Good God, Edna.” He stomped his foot on the sidewalk.
“He did. But let me ask you one thing, Jacob. Was he aware of the fight you had with your father? When your father slapped you. Or the fight your mother and father had that morning?”
“Why do you ask?” He started walking faster.
“Humor me.”
He stood still then, hands interlaced behind his back, swaying back and forth. A puzzled look on his brow. “There was no reason for him to know all about the fights—mine or Mama’s. Yes, he stopped in that morning. But real early. Before the fight. I remember seeing his car in front, parked there. I remember thinking—so early he comes to visit? I remember hearing laughter. My mother was in the back garden. Before anybody was awake. God, she’d be out there weeding before the hot sun forced her inside. Laughter. Uncle Ezra’s roar. But then, later, as I left, I noticed the car was gone.”
“Where was your mother?”
“I could hear her in the kitchen. Singing.”
“Did she say anything?”
“I didn’t talk to her. I left.” He paused. “There was a package on the hall table. Uncle Ezra sometimes dropped off books for me.” He was nodding his head, happy. “That had to be it—he dropped off books, said hello to Mama, and left.” He reflected, “I know Herman stopped in because I heard him talking to Papa on the porch. Loud—they always boomed at each other, like they were talking at each other from twenty feet away. Ezra was long gone by then.”
“So he wasn’t around during or after your parents had that fight?” I drew in my cheeks. “Where was he?”
He didn’t answer at first. Then, “I don’t like what you’re saying, Edna.”