by Ed Ifkovic
Ad started to walk across the room. “I didn’t.” He smiled at Molly. “Are you sure? We talked about it, you and me, as we went shopping. That was all we talked about. That I remember. I know their house was quiet when we walked by—the fight over with, but…no, Sarah was not part of it. This is the first I’m hearing about it.” A heartbeat. “What is this all about?”
“I must be losing my memory.” She lifted a dishcloth off the platter of chicken to inspect her work. “It was a brutal fight, those two.”
“Do we gotta relive it all over again?” Ad complained. “Didn’t it color too much of our life? Days afterwards, horrible. The world turned upside down. Maybe if I’d gone over there, that day…wouldn’t have happened.”
Molly cried out, “Oh, Lord no. I didn’t want you anywhere near that craziness. Ivan would have turned on you. Leah waving that knife…You could have been…” She stopped, her voice shaky. “You could have been hurt.” Her voice shook. “Exhausting it was, listening. Then, later on, Sarah crying out like that. To wake the dead, that woman’s screams. I can still hear it. I woke from my nap and thought the screaming was here—in this house. I thought somebody—my Esther—fell, maybe—hurt. I rushed across the hall and pounded on Adolph’s door.”
“And scared me half to death. You yelled, ‘Something happened to your mama.’” He shook his head. “But I knew it was Sarah, I could hear her myself.”
Molly’s lips quivered. “Everything changed then. Everything. Leah, that harlot…”
Esther tsked, glanced at Adolph as though he were five and not forty. “Now, now.”
“That woman.” Molly smiled. “I was right what I said then. You do reap what you sow. So many times I was convinced that Ivan would kill Leah. He had such a temper, that man. A husband made a fool of. Sooner or later he’d kill her. She drove him to it. That woman was too…alluring. You gotta know—that beautiful woman was a curse on both our houses.”
Chapter Fifteen
Another Saturday afternoon on Monroe Street, the pavement breathing its silence. Shops closed, doors shut, no distant sounds of two-wheel pushcart vendors drifting over from Maxwell Street. A family in black moved down the center of the street, headed to shul. Mostly the street was silent, deserted under a white hot July sun, heat waves rippling above the pavement. A toddler squealed in its mother’s arms. A street that watched and sighed under a day meant for God.
By myself, I strolled the empty streets after lunch, listening to the bark of a chained dog or the sudden blare of an unreligious horn or the profane violation of a husband and wife spat or the hint of the passing Illinois Central.
Back home at mid-afternoon, I found Sol Newmann sitting on the front porch with Ezra Brenner. That gave me pause. But of course they knew each other, friends from years back. But not exactly the friendliness of two old men leisurely smoking cigars on a hot afternoon—Ezra sat upright, one hand holding the arm of the chair as though ready to flee. Although his posture might have been the result of spotting me strolling up the sidewalk.
I cringed. How I disliked the man, especially after that unnerving altercation the other day as he tried to drag an unwilling Jacob into his automobile.
Sol waved to me, cheerful. “Edna, you disappeared after lunch.”
“A walk through the quiet streets.”
Sol continued, “My favorite day on Monroe. You can almost hear the prayers in folks’ houses.”
Ezra frowned at him. “Sol, you’re not a religious man.”
“No, Ezra,” Sol answered, a smile on his face. “And you’re not a religious man. No decent Jew wears such a tie on Shabbas.”
For, indeed, Ezra, dressed in a sharp-pressed gray linen suit, sported the most ostentatious turquoise tie and accompanying handkerchief. With his black-and-white shoes and snappy spats, his white hair under a summer straw sailor hat, he resembled a barker from a rag-tag Punch-and-Judy revue.
Ezra laughed. “Jealousy is an awful thing.”
“Are you visiting next door?” I asked him. I waited a second. “And found no one at home?”
“Edna, with such a tart tongue you’ll not find a husband.”
“Then I need to employ my tongue even more than I do now.”
Ezra leaned into Sol. “Ah, the modern woman, Sol. Bicycles and lawn tennis and Camel cigarettes and dance slippers and…and miscast votes.”
But Ezra was through with the banter, bored, his eye watching the street. “I wondered if Ad has had any luck?” A question to Sol. Again, the sweep of the sleepy street.
Sol followed his eyes. “Poor Jacob.”
I moved closer, panicked. “What happened?”
Sol made a dismissive wave of his hand. “The lad wanders. You know that.”
Ezra fretted, tapping his cigar against the rail of the chair. “As you know, poor Jacob, distressed over the latest turn of events”—with this, he narrowed his baleful eye at me, registering blame where he supposed it to be—“has pretty much hidden in his room, even cold-shouldering Ad. I thought I’d drive over to take him for a spin.” He sucked in his breath. “I seem to be the only one he’ll talk to. Even poor Leah finds herself excluded. But he’d—fled.”
“Ad went searching for him?”
Sol spoke softly. “I sent him. We think maybe Jacob went to visit with an old school friend, Sy Bloom, over to Roosevelt Boulevard. Ad, too, old friends from school, but years ago. Sy calls now and then. A wild goose chance, we figures, but why not?”
“We got to do something,” Ezra said.
“I never knew what was wrong with that boy.” Sol shook his head.
Ezra was nodding. “A lad who never had roots, that one. An adventurer.”
Yes, I thought: an adventurer who never stepped away from his father’s home, the middle-aged man who wrote one poem in a magazine and then drifted through five or six streets, this adventurer who now hid in his mother’s house. Hardly the circumnavigating hero headed around the world. A man committed to nothing, though he wrestled with demons inside that no one took seriously or, at worst, ever even noticed. Poor Jacob, indeed.
“So you’re worried?” I asked Ezra who was doing his best to act friendly toward me, a plastered-on smile covering his features, though his eyes were wary, distrustful,
“Of course. It’s as though the murder of Ivan happened yesterday. It’s an open wound with him, that emotional, that…” He hesitated.
“That unanswered,” I finished for him.
A flash of anger in his eyes. “So you say. Poor Jacob talks like a crazy man, colorful nonsense. He acts like a…” His voice trailed off.
A shock to the system, that sputtered sentence, because at that moment, like a wallop, I experienced an epiphany: Ezra feared that Jacob in his confused, rambling state would say something. But what? A confession? Or something else? Maybe something about Ezra? Or someone else? Staring at Ezra, the polished mannequin so shallow and decadent and fin de siècle, I realized that he might believe Jacob was, in fact, the murderer. He wanted to shield him—or shut him up—or…or what? To silence him.
All along I’d felt Jacob had something to say but perhaps didn’t realize what it was. Now, more than ever, I was convinced of it. Something crucial, deadly.
“…a murderer?” I finished for him.
“No,” he stumbled. “God, no!” His voice broke as he hurriedly went on. “Edna, no one seriously considered Morrie Wolfsy, the disgruntled partner, the smarmy…seducer. Did you know that the day before—the day before, let me repeat—Morrie waved a cleaver at Ivan? They were at each other’s throats, and Ivan got so scared he hid in the small bathroom in the back room. He locked himself in. All the time he’s yelling, ‘Help! Help! Call the police!’ While in front Morrie is waiting on customers lined up, weighing out a pound of lean beef, some rib-eye steaks. A customer told me this later, of course. Customers were lined up, and Ivan in b
ack hollering ‘Help! Help!’ It was almost comical, really, some zany skit out of a Yiddisher nickel show.”
“What happened?” asked Sol, fascinated.
“Nothing, it turns out. They always fought, even before the…the thing with Leah. A half hour later, calmed down, Ivan opened the locked door, stumbled out, and got behind the poultry counter. ‘May I help you, Mrs. Rabinowitz?’ he says to the next in line. ‘A good-looking bird, plump, this one, the best, look at this wonder.’”
“Then why do you say they should consider Morrie as a murderer? If, in fact, they entertained each other with these little spats.”
Ezra drew in his cheeks. “Because Morrie never took them seriously, but Ivan started to. He did. Near the end. A game to Morrie, the customers even laughing, but after Leah and the nonsense there was a look in Ivan’s eyes—and at the end Morrie saw it. The violence under the chitchat. Hair-trigger moments. Sooner or later…”
I wasn’t happy. “Based on what? All the police information puts Morrie solidly in the shop that morning.”
Ezra scoffed. “Yeah, that reliable witness, Levi Pinsky.”
“Do you know anything?”
Ezra stood. “I told you everything I know.”
And with that, positioning his hat on his head, adjusting it carefully, and putting out the cigar in an ashtray, he nodded at Sol but not at me, and stepped off the porch.
***
That night, long after sundown, the heat of the day making the air sticky and close, I left by the kitchen door, skirted by the Brenner yard—there was only one light switched on, at the back of the house—and strolled up the block toward Maxwell. People sat on front stoops, fanning themselves. A few children ran after balls in the street, though such activity was listless. The whole street seemed to sweat, to wilt. Ad had never returned home, so I didn’t know if he’d located Jacob. An automobile squealed by, Ezra with the top down, elbow resting on the open window ledge, a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. Coming from Leah’s? Searching for Jacob? I doubted that—the preening peacock. I disliked the fact that such a dissembling, devious weasel could so infuriate me.
A light flickered in the front room of Nathan’s Meat Market, the door propped open, and I expected to see a doddering Levi Pinsky issuing a proclamation rescinding woman suffrage, scribing his diatribe on a piece of ragged linen cut from a five-cent tattered trouser leg.
Sitting quietly in the center of the room, leafing through a stack of papers under an overhead naked light bulb, was an old woman, eyeglasses slipping off her snub nose. I was staring, true, surprised, but she stared back, then raised a welcoming hand in the air.
“Edna Ferber,” Harsh, bold, her voice dropping.
I started. “Why, yes.”
“My husband described you perfectly.”
“I can imagine…”
“Late thirties, sallow skin, short, reedy, a nose from one of the lost tribes, and a hayfield bonnet of wiry hair.”
“How attractive.”
She grinned. “Morrie is not a nice man. And never to women, unless they’re beautiful and in need of money.”
“You’re his wife, I take it.”
“A badge of dishonor I refuse to relinquish, don’t ask me why.”
“Why?” I asked, stupefied.
Her eyes got wide, not amused.
She was a smallish woman with a little girl’s bony frame, four-feet-five if she exaggerated, thin papery arms and neck, so scant they resembled twigs, breakable; a face lined with deep wrinkles that nearly eclipsed the small nickel-sized round eyes, as metallic as dull silver. A homely woman, one who’d never been pretty, but a woman who, with advancing age and teeth-clenching grit, had become doggedly handsome, like a piece of ancient statuary rusted and weathered in a forgotten park. The patina of forgotten silverware. As I watched, she simply dropped the stack of papers to the floor where they scattered, some sliding under the chair she sat on. She shrugged and ignored them.
“I’m Selma Wolfsy. You gathered that already. You’re smart. At least you’re smart enough to realize that Leah Brenner never killed Ivan.”
That shocked me.
“You know that, too?”
“Of course.” She smiled at me.
“But you never told the police.”
She roared in a thick, whiskey voice, ending by coughing into the back of her wrist. “What do I know? Do you think I have evidence? I’m talking common sense here.”
“Then who…?”
She groaned. “Oh, please don’t ask me that. You’ve probably bored everyone on Monroe Street with that tired, unanswerable question. Do you really expect an answer from one of the crowd around these parts? Everyone naming Leah but secretly pointing to their least favorite person. A wink—look at him. Look, look. It’s bad enough my husband thinks you’re planning to pin the murder on him—the fool—an idea whispered by our own resident misanthrope, Levi Pinsky, who fears he might actually touch my hand by accident someday—so Morrie spends his waking hours hiding upstairs and running from you.”
“Does he have anything to hide?”
She laughed and wagged a finger at me. “Dear, we all have things to hide. By the time you’re my age—I’m seventy next month—you’ll probably be annoyingly famous and hated by most folks you’ve skewered in your writing, and living alone, hiding your loneliness with wisecracks.”
A beat. “I do that now.”
“So you found your destiny early, young lady. Good for you.”
“Why are you sitting here alone?”
She waved a hand around the room. “I want to sell this firetrap. I’ve been begging Morrie for years since he closed up shop. I rarely come here. But I had to sort through some delinquent leases. Apartments we own. The Russians we rent to make believe they can’t read English. They’re all hiding in shul today, of course. Morrie is visiting someone over on Canal. He’ll be back in a bit.” She grinned. “You better not be here, Edna Ferber. You’d hate to see an old sickly man topple over in fear, right?”
“Will Morrie sell?”
“Morrie is a sentimental fool. He remembers with affection the old days, the rough-and-tumble off-the-boat days, the romance of being poor in squalid houses. He holds onto the old ball of string that tied his first rump roast together. Lord! I’m a practical woman. I like my new kitchen with the electric refrigerator and the electric stove and…and my green lawn and sycamore trees. Even if Morrie comes with the package.”
“A loving marriage.”
She watched me closely. “Sarcasm is unattractive in a young woman. In an old woman it’s sometimes all we have left.”
I leaned against the doorjamb. “You don’t care for him?”
“Of course I do. I love him. It’s just that I’ve never forgiven him.”
“For Leah Brenner?”
She grunted. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“Tell me.”
A harsh, unfriendly grin. “You are a public nuisance, my dear. The rumors about you don’t do your peskiness justice. In other centuries they’d have burned you at the stake. To thunderous applause, I’d say.” She laughed at her own joke. “Leah Brenner. Ah, where do I begin? A woman born to woo ships into the rocky harbors. Not her fault, you’ll say. Let me ask and answer all the questions here. Well, that’s true, but it’s no great consolation for a plain Jane like me. Or, sad to say, you, my dear. We’re the scraggly ragweed growing on the side of the road, wild-blown, dusty, as the speeding roadsters sail past with Lorelei with her red lipstick cooing in the driver’s ear.”
“You can’t just blame a woman. A man—your man—is part of the equation.”
She shook her head back and forth. “And don’t I know it, but I can still condemn Leah. Look, dear Edna Ferber, Leah was only one, maybe the last, of a series of women over the years. Some I closed my eyes to, ot
hers I confronted. Leah was one frivolous afternoon, a second in time. Nothing happened. There were so many others—a week, a month, so long as Morrie had nickels and dimes for the nickelodeon—or an evening at Haverley’s Minstrels followed by supper at Gold’s. Cheap girls, all spangled up and shiny under a streetlight. He destroyed our marriage years ago, but Leah was off-limits. She was the partner’s wife. Ivan’s wife. Lord, there have to be some boundaries, no? You can’t be friends with a woman who looks—looked—I mean, she’s an old woman now—like that.”
“She suffered a horrible fate—for a murder I don’t believe she did. But to accuse her because she was beautiful…”
Sharp, angry. “Who cares? C’mon. Who cares?” A sliver of a smile. “I actually met her a few days after Ivan unearthed—is that the word?—the tawdry moment, the kiss heard round the shul? She was shopping with sour Sarah of the salt mines. That unhappy woman. Leah approached me, brazen, and apologized. Can you believe that? Her arms filled with packages, the dutiful hausfrau, shopping for Shabbas supper, and she gets teary-eyed and begs forgiveness. I turned away.”
I swallowed. “But it must have pained her. It took courage to do that.”
“Sarah stood there with a smirk on her face. A big joke to her. Laughing at me.”
“But Leah wasn’t laughing.”
For a second she closed her eyes. “Everyone in the neighborhood was. A disgraced woman—me. Not her. I kept away from shul for a month. ‘Here’s the prune-faced wife. How sad! How horrible! Married to a squat, spindly Lothario with loose coins jangling in his pockets.’”
“You stayed married to Morrie to make him pay?”
A slow, lazy grin made the old wrinkled face contort. “Now, at last, you understand the whole story.”
I shuddered. “I wouldn’t be you for a million dollars.”
“I agree. I wouldn’t be me for a million dollars.”
I glanced toward the back room, jerked my head in that direction. “All the fantasies and foolishness that came to life in that room. Men with their games. What happened in there, I believe, was the hotbed that ended with the murder of Ivan. Something those men never expected.”