The One-Star Jew: Stories

by Evanier, David

  What am I doing here, and what is my connection to this old woman who is so fragile she looks as if she could break at a touch, with a voice that carries a wallop?

  I sit opposite her thinking, and I hear her voice saying wistfully: “If only I had a wheelchair … I could get around.” She had returned from the hospital in one, but had called them to come and pick it up. “I had to return it. It wouldn’t be honest.”

  My wife and I glance at each other. We make a note to try to get Mrs. Blocker a wheelchair. That is something we can do. Then she will be able to get around.

  VI

  A walker is an embarrassing thing. It is embarrassing to Mrs. Blocker. When she looks out at the other windows, she closes the blinds. “People see me with the walker and feel sorry for me. The only thing that I hate is pity.”

  She has five canes. “I got a lot of canes—I got everything. My son gave me a black cane to make me look beautiful.”

  I find the walker and the canes embarrassing too. I am ashamed of myself, but I do, at first, feel that way. I have seen old people in the street inching along, leaning on the walkers, and I have looked away. It is a strange badge of humiliation, a means of transportation that goes nowhere, that allows the old to move a few inches.

  At first we sit gingerly in the living room, staring at each other. Mrs. Blocker smiles constantly. (In the kitchen, the black case worker from Home Care, Mrs. Sally Crawford, whispers to me: “I told her she looks pretty when she smiles. And she does, yet she would never smile … and now she’s smiling all the time!”)

  My wife and I are not professional social workers. We don’t know why we are here, but we are, or what we are doing, but we do it. The complaints stop. There is silence. And then we hear Mrs. Blocker talking to us.

  “I have a will. Tell me if I don’t. My husband felt sick. He suddenly said, ‘Annie, I want to talk with you.’ We went into the living room and he sat on the chair where you’re sitting, opposite me. ‘I’m sick, Annie. I won’t always be here. It’s true. I want you to promise me you won’t give up the apartment when I’m gone and that you won’t live with the kids; you won’t go into a home; you’ll stay here.’

  “Three hours later he was dead. That was his will to me. And I won’t leave. We had a good life. I won’t leave the bed I slept in with my husband for fifty years. Why should I leave? I have a stone—double—for my husband and me. And a grave. All I need is a box.

  “Every night I call to my husband to take me … I tell him I need him … why leave me here? I talk to him all night.”

  Mrs. Blocker takes her cane and walks to the window. “At night I prowl from room to room. I can’t sleep. I look out at the parking lot and I count the cars. Last night I got 102 cars. I counted them—today only fifty!”

  VII

  We get the wheelchair for Mrs. Blocker. Now we can take her down into the street. Suddenly she refuses to go. She does not want to be seen by her old friends on the block in a wheelchair.

  The second Sunday we persuade her. Bundled up in the wheelchair, she seems pleased. “Just like a prince!” she says.

  But she becomes uneasy as we enter the park where the neighbors sit. As we roll by them, she keeps her nose high in the air. A few women call out to her, but she doesn’t respond.

  One of them waves and shouts, “How are you, Mrs. Blocker?”

  Mrs. Blocker looks at her and says haughtily, “What’s the matter, just because I’m in a wheelchair there should be something wrong with me?”

  She looks up at me. “Come on. Get rolling.”

  Each Sunday one of the women talks to her briefly, but they are sick themselves and wrapped up in their problems. They talk briefly about their grandchildren and they pass on, even though Mrs. Blocker always invites them to visit her.

  One Sunday there is actually a knock at the door. Becky, a lady we met in the park. I get her a chair before she can back out the door.

  They are shouting away at each other. “Let me talk!” Mrs. Blocker shouts. “I’m older than you!”

  “Listen to me,” Becky says. “My granddaughter brought me a book about people in their seventies and eighties. Know what I mean? They say in the book that in their marriages they still have sex, and if it’s not good, nothing else is good.”

  “Sure,” Mrs. Blocker says, nodding, poised forward, very happy with the company.

  “I remember a woman our age in Brownsville,” Becky continues. “She married a nice man, a tailor. I talked to her one day on the stoop. How’s by you, I say. She’s not happy. She says, ‘I want a man!’ This is after three weeks. ‘Nothing,’ she says.”

  “Sure!” Mrs. Blocker says. “Like Hebrew National corned beef—something!”

  VIII

  Becky never comes again, and Mrs. Blocker forgets her. She forgets people, and confuses them. Her life is a whirl of pain. “I forget so much. Yesterday to me is … history!”

  IX

  “When I could still walk, I had a dream from my husband. ‘Annie! I’m wet—I’m drowning. The water is pouring over me.’

  “I called my sister. She was still alive. I had no carfare. She had the money and we took the train to New Haven to my husband’s grave. You couldn’t see the grave. All you saw was water. It had been raining for days. I had them take the water out. Connecticut is known for that—water—it’s very bad for graves.”

  She was born in Vilna. She had twelve brothers and sisters. All are dead. There is a large, formal, round picture behind glass over her bed of her brother, a cantor, killed by a car. He has a tuxedo on, and a watch fob, but his tie knot is an inch below the collar. Her entire family, except the sister and brother who came to America, are dead, not due to natural causes, but to Hitler.

  She was named after her father’s mother. Her father was a rabbi, and his picture hovers over us as we talk. “I sat on my father’s lap when I was a little girl. He called me mamele. I took a comb and combed his little whiskele and moustache.”

  She met her husband when she was sixteen at a dance hall in Vilna. One day when we are there she comes across the picture. Taken at the dance hall: a beaming Annie and the boy she has just met: Sam Blocker.

  Her husband fled the Czar’s army and came to America. She joined him in five months. From 1913 to 1964 they lived on the lower East Side in this neighborhood. Sam Blocker was a tailor and had his own shop.

  “He had a name, my husband. The elevators here weren’t working last week. I was stuck on the floor above. The colored man Alfred—the janitor—carried me down the stairs. He remembered my husband. He told me. He brought pants to my husband in the shop and didn’t have enough money. My husband said not to worry about it. And he still remembers. My husband was known for his kindness. He had a name, I’m telling you.”

  But times change, and she is alone in an apartment where the doorbell never rings. Along with the pain, the thoughts and memories go back and forth in her head all day and most of the night, interrupted by the Home Care workers who tolerate her and by the suffering of her children. She has a dish of pill bottles and each week she tells us to bring her the dish. She shows us each bottle and checks with us as to what the instructions say. The pills relieve the pain less than they did, and she thinks they confuse her sense of time.

  Things still happen to her. Life comes to her from the parking lot. “The things I see from my window. Young girls in cars at night. I hear a girl say, ‘Please let me go.’ Then he says, ‘Not till I’m finished.’ Then he tosses her out of the car onto the ground.”

  The fuses blow out. She calls the phone company. “Mister dolling,” she says, “my name is Mrs. Blocker. I’m a handicap and I’m alone in the darkness. Please help me.”

  The man answers: “You don’t belong in my unit!” Later he calls her back: “We found out what kind of a woman you are, Mrs. Blocker … we will help you.”

  A black boy with a red hat comes to her door. She releases the chain. He comes through the door and moves back and forth. There is a knif
e in his back pocket. He claims he has a package for her, but that he has to go downstairs to get it. “How much?” she asks. “Twenty dollars,” he replies. She notices that some money she had on the table is already missing.

  “I sat down on the bed. I was trembling.

  “‘Lady,’ he says, ‘why are you trembling? Lady, you’re a very nice lady. I was wrong. The package is six dollars.’”

  She gives him six more dollars, and he leaves.

  X

  As the months pass, the walker and the wheelchair become familiar to us, and we discover the things we have in common with Mrs. Blocker.

  One of these things is a sense of hope. Mrs. Blocker says of her body: “Everything is broken”; she says often that she is a lost pigeon, and that God is punishing her by not taking her.

  But there is always something she wants—the wheelchair, a lamp to read by in the bedroom, the electric fan that I cart across town from May’s for her in the summer, new medicine—that lights up her face with new hope. It fades quickly, but I see it and recognize it so well.

  Mrs. Blocker says in Yiddish (translating for us), “Men think and God laughs.”

  XI

  She wages daily combat with the black Home Care workers. Mrs. Blocker is fanatically clean. The apartment glows; the dishes shine; her face gleams. Seated at the kitchen table with us, she suddenly bends forward, trying to get up. She just avoids falling back into her chair. She runs her finger under the rim of the chair and shows us the dust. “I like clean. Clean is my whole life.”

  The workers change with the seasons. “My new girl. I don’t know what. She lies on the floor with nothing on. Yesterday, she lays down on the floor in my bedroom with just panty hose on”—she cups her hands under her breasts—”everything hanging out … no shoes … she says to me, ‘This is the way we do it in my country.’ What country is she talking about? I’m afraid people will come in and see.

  “I know she don’t like Jews. She don’t say it. So the other day I asked her. She said, ‘Jew, schmoo, what do I care?’ The way she said Jew, I knew. I said, you know I’m a rabbi’s daughter? She said, ‘Rabbi, schmabbi, what do I care?’

  “I tell her to buy me borscht and she brings me back low-calorie. I’ve lost fifty pounds and she buys me low-calorie borscht.” Mrs. Blocker laughs. “What can you do?

  “She looks at things in the apartment and says to me: ‘Give that to me, you don’t need it.’”

  In the third month that we know Mrs. Blocker, she begins to talk about her new daily Home Care worker, a woman from Jamaica, Mrs. Gordon. Mrs. Gordon falls on the floor in fits of fury, mumbling, crossing herself again and again, and thrashing with her feet. “Mrs. Gordon says to me her husband has red hair—and white skin just like mine. I said to her, ‘Dot’s wonderful, dolling.’ What could I say?” She laughs.

  When Mrs. Gordon’s checks come, she stands over Mrs. Blocker demanding her signature, shouting: “Sign it! Sign it!”

  The next Sunday that we visit Mrs. Blocker, she is crying. Mrs. Gordon had put her in the shower, turned on the hot water and walked out. Mrs. Blocker screamed for help, and Mrs. Gordon did not come. Mrs. Blocker crawled out of the shower along the floor to the bedroom. “Please help me!” she screamed to Mrs. Gordon. “Please take a towel and wipe me.” Her body was red from the hot water. Mrs. Gordon reluctantly dried her.

  Mrs. Sally Crawford, the weekend worker, tells us that something is wrong. “Mrs. Blocker must never be left alone in the shower like that. And her skin was almost blistered.”

  We call Home Care and tell them what has happened. We say that Mrs. Gordon appears to be unbalanced. The Home Care nurse says to us over the phone: “We’ve had trouble with Mrs. Blocker before; she always complains.” We call the Jewish agency we are working with. “We’re afraid something terrible will happen,” we say.

  The Jewish agency contacts Home Care, and Mrs. Gordon is replaced.

  The replacement is a young girl named Jenetta Brown. When we arrive on Sunday, we are eager to hear Mrs. Blocker talk about the improvement.

  “She’s a pretty goil, I’m telling you. She comes in, and sits down on the sofa in her high boots, her hair made up like a doll, with her homework. And she don’t do nothing. When I tell her to do the housework, she tells me not to boss her, she says to me: ‘I’m a grown lady.’

  “‘And I’m an old lady, ‘I tell her.

  “She can’t stand my false teeth. ‘Leave them in the bathroom!’ she screams at me. ‘I can’t stand to look at them.’

  “‘I’ll leave them,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll leave them in the toilet.’

  “‘You are a young woman,’ I told her. ‘Maybe you need a man. You can get one for the weekends.’

  “She tells me, ‘Mrs. Blocker. I’m not a slave.’ What is a slave? Tell me, what is a slave? I thought that was in jail, where they put you in chains.

  “I told her, ‘Have pity on me and pity on you. Go to the doctor and find out what’s wrong with your head.’”

  The next week she is crying when we arrive. “I asked Jenetta to take me down in the wheelchair. She took me all right. I asked her to wheel me around the block. She says, ‘I don’t wheel people!’ She said she would be back, and she left me in the park. And she didn’t come back. I was outside in the cold for two hours. I cry, and finally somebody takes pity on me and takes me inside.

  “When she gets back here, I’m sitting and crying with the cold and I ask her to help me undress. She sits in the corner, her legs crossed, smiling, and didn’t make a move. She refused to do anything.

  “All niggers are no good,” she says furiously.

  My wife and I look at each other, and we are silent. A speech is dying to get out, but it will have to wait.

  The rules with eighty-four-year-old crippled women are different, and I keep my mouth shut. For the moment.

  XII

  “I think of my son Sammy dying … my daughter, crazy and sick … my grandson with his crazy wife … and it takes a piece of me.”

  Sammy, in the picture of him, has a handlebar moustache and quizzical eyes with eyebrows that curve upwards. He is smiling.

  He is fifty-nine and dying of cancer. His wife drives him to visit his mother. He sits for five minutes, lies down on her bed and his wife says that she will have to take him home. Mrs. Blocker places forty dollars in her hand.

  A hospital bed is brought to Sammy’s home, and an oxygen tent. Mrs. Blocker calls and wants to speak to him. They hesitate, and finally they wheel the bed near the phone.

  “How are you, Samele?”

  “Now that I’m talking to you, Mamele, I’m all right.” Then he says, “Mamele, if only I could eat your chicken soup, I would get better.”

  His daughter is finishing college in Boston, and Mrs. Blocker is paying her rent—fifty dollars a month—out of her disability and social security checks and her savings account in which she has $600 remaining.

  Her checks come to $184 a month. Her rent is $38. She pays for her food and rent and the rest goes to Sammy, to her granddaughter, and to her grandson. They all come by, and they all leave with money. The grandson calls her on the day her check arrives.

  He drives a taxi three days a week, and is married to a German refugee. Mrs. Blocker tells us that he had a steady job working nights in the post office, but on the honeymoon night his wife told him: “Me, sleep alone nights? It’s me or the post office.” He chose her. She refuses to work, and spends the day playing bingo and the horses. “What a monstrous creature,” Mrs. Blocker says.

  The grandson comes by during the week to take a shower at her house. “His long hair reaches down to his big stomach.”

  Her daughter says of the grandson: “My son is dead.”

  She tries to divide the money fairly among all of them.

  The granddaughter visits and tells Mrs. Blocker to save the china cabinet for her when she dies. “That’s mine, grandma— don’t forget. You don’t know what you’ve got there.”


  XIII

  Of Sammy, she says: “Such a good man! A young man! I visited him. He tried to hold up his hand in the bed for me to kiss him … he couldn’t lift his hand … it fell back.

  “I cry too much—I’m going blind.”

  She has talked the day before to Sammy on the phone, she tells us. Her daughter-in-law held the phone while he talked.

  “‘Mamele’—he calls me like when he was a baby—

  “He says: ‘How are you?’

  “‘HA HA HA’—I laugh like that—‘I’m fine! I’m swell!’ I’m saying, and he says, ‘It’s so nice to hear you smile.’ The tears are falling off my dress while I’m talking but I say, ‘I’m cooking, Samele—chopped meat, split pea soup, kugel. Why not come over and eat with me—’

  “‘I’m so glad you’re all right, Mamele.’”

  I don’t know what to say to Mrs. Blocker. “You made him feel better,” I say.

  “That’s right. That’s right.” She shakes her head.

  XIV

  In the hallway of Mrs. Blocker’s apartment there hangs a sign. It says: “God bless this miserable house.” It was placed there by Minnie, Mrs. Blocker’s daughter. Mrs. Blocker does not read English. We ask her if she knows what it says. She says, “Sure! God bless this lousy apartment!”

  She tells us again that when she told her daughter over the phone that she was very sick, Minnie replied, “Listen, you’re lucky to be alive at all. I won’t make it to your age.”

  Her daughter hasn’t visited her in six months. When she came, she saw a hat she had given her mother on the head of Jenetta. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve,” she shouted at Mrs. Blocker.