Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  Uncle Morris (had she telephoned him?) was already at hand, saying “There, there” as he escorted Grandpa Isador out of the sickroom. Leaning on his stout son, the self-appointed rock of our family, the old man was weeping buckets. Between wrenching sobs, he managed to insist on the traditional exequies: the body sponged in Jordan water by tenth-generation lavadors, laid out on the floor facing east with six-foot candles at either end. It must be interred without a coffin, in a sailcloth winding sheet smeared with Jerusalem mud. To all his demands Uncle Morris responded with approving nods of the head, which he alternated with conspiratorial winks at my mother.

  Changed out of the rumpled clothes that he’d slept in all week, old Isador had wasted no time in donning the accessories of mourning. He was wearing the silk-trimmed caftan that reached to his knees, below which his legs were bare but for his gartered socks. On his head was the molting fur shtreimel that Papa used to say was standard issue at the Wailing Wall. For a hat, he said, it had a lot in common with the rotary brush of a chimney sweep. But Grandpa Isador was obviously convinced that mourning became him. Moreover, so absorbed was he in his tearful vision of the perfect funeral that he failed to notice the arrival of the undertaker, Mr. Gruber.

  This was the less surprising, as the long-faced Mr. Gruber was anyway almost invisible with unobtrusiveness. With a knack for being present without occupying space, he seemed to hover above the carpet as he conferred with my mother. Then, turning with a barely perceptible nod, he stage-managed the two assistants who had furtively followed him in. Identified by armbands as members of the synagogue burial society, they slouched toward the sickroom with an empty litter. Moments later they reappeared with a sheet-covered burden, Zippe’s habit of a gray serge shirtwaist folded neatly on top. Mr. Gruber held the door as they departed, closing it behind him with a regardful click. It was an operation that would have served as well for robbing a grave as for lawfully removing a body to prepare for interment.

  Now that most of the evidence of my bubbe’s occupancy had been spirited away, her absence from the chair next to the samovar made the room feel somehow askew. The emptiness surrounding her chair was almost palpable. Not that I actually missed my grandmother sitting there by the window; it’s just that it seemed easier to think of her being alive now that she wasn’t.

  The next thing I knew, the place was swarming with neighbors, their faces benign with solicitude. They had come bearing covered dishes of cholent and steaming compotes, trays of assorted nosherai. There were cold cuts and golden kugel, almond cookies in drifts of powdered sugar, milk bottles filled with bathtub shnaps. With every gift they contributed to a medley of aromas that turned our once malodorous apartment into a culinary nosegay. What I couldn’t figure, though, was how word of Zippe’s passing had gotten out so fast, unless the Pinch had a sixth sense about such things. Or was it that you only needed a sense of smell? In any case, the neighbors quickly made themselves at home, beginning to behave in a way that I wasn’t sure was altogether appropriate to the occasion. For all their protestations of sympathy and heartfelt condolence, our guests seemed more in a mood for celebrating than paying respects.

  In no time their faces had dropped the solicitous formality. The ladies were recommending beauticians, swapping tidbits about the indiscretions of film stars; they sniped at absentee members of their mah-jongg circle until said members arrived. Conceding that business was universally in the toilet, their husbands got down to cases. They told indecent stories about the exploits of Yudl the peddler, slapping backs with a hardiness that launched more than one macaroon. Our apartment—with its piebald carpet and tacky apple-blossom curtains, its tallow-encrusted candelabra on the sideboard, the faded print of a shepherd playing his harp at the foot of a king—had taken on a frankly festive atmosphere.

  At last my duly summoned father appeared at the door. He was met by Uncle Morris, holding old Isador upright with one arm, squeezing Mama’s hand with the other. When he managed (without letting go of the others) to draw Papa into the circle of his embrace, it was like a bid to become literally the family’s sole support.

  “Solly,” he sighed, his cigar shifting from one corner of his mouth to the other, “she was a woman in a million, an institution, our zelig mameh.” My father allowed himself a sorrowful nod on his brother’s shoulder, then cocked a brow as if trying to match the words against his memory. “It’s like it says in Talmud,” continued Uncle Morris, a philosopher no less, “life is dreck, but what can you do?”

  This was the cue for Grandpa Isador to try the full range of his anguish. Inviting martyrdom or admitting envy, who could say, he let loose a cry that stopped conversation for the space of a syllable or two. “It should have been me!” he groaned. The tears swelled to freshets, overflowing the troughs beneath his eyes, following well-sluiced courses down his hollow cheeks. Several representatives from the liars’ bench in front of Jake Plott’s barber shop, themselves done up in their most chapfallen gabardines, gathered round him to commiserate.

  Meanwhile, set adrift by Uncle Morris, my papa looked a little unsteady on his feet. In fact he seemed uncertain, in the face of our packed apartment, as to whether he’d even entered the right place. He was fiddling with his bow tie like he was trying to crank a propeller, having a hard time choosing an attitude suitable to the circumstance. It was as if, since Isador had a monopoly on grief and Uncle Morris had cornered the market in consolation, there was nothing left for him to do. All the same, by the arrival of the next wave of neighbors, Papa appeared to have determined a proper line of behavior. He greeted the guests as if they were bringing their covered dishes to pawn.

  From my spot beside the hat tree, I decided that I’d seen enough of the proceedings to get the general idea. No one was paying me much attention anyway, apart from the occasional consolatory mussing of my hair. So I was headed for my alcove, where I would shut the double doors and slip between the covers of a book. In seconds I would have swapped the tummel of North Main Street for the clangor of scimitars, the echoing reports of service revolvers in the Khyber Pass. But on the way I happened upon my cousin Naomi. She was wedged between an overstuffed cushion and the raveled arm of the sofa, looking as if she’d been dumped from a considerable height. She must have been there all along.

  Her dress of faded violets served as camouflage against the threadbare floral fabric of the sofa. It drooped from her shoulders like it could have been still on a hanger; from the closet to my cousin, the dress had scarcely acquired a dimension. Her magenta beret was tilted at an angle that you might have called rakish on somebody else, though on Naomi it was only lopsided. An ice pack would have achieved the same effect. Then there was the business of her sullen eyes, too large for her narrow face to ever grow into. This was probably why she tried to conceal them behind a fringe of stringy bangs, which, had they been any longer, would have lapped over her nose like a wave around a fin.

  She was a sad sack all right, my nebbish cousin, and I’d always tried to avoid her like she might be contagious. Having shown myself proof against the family’s best efforts to encourage our friendship over the years, I saw no reason to let my guard down now. But maybe in deference to our common loss, I ought to let hostilities rest for a spell. I paused and gave Naomi a sort of smile, then waited for her to make the next move, until I’d digested the fact that it was still up to me to open.

  At length I asked her above the noisy company, satisfied that the question was as neutral as they come: “When did you hear?”

  She looked up from an intensive study of her lap as if I’d clashed a pair of cymbals in her ear. “Wha?” was all she said.

  It made me want to tell her I was sorry I’d bothered her, forget it, a mistake. It made me want to screw up my eyes and flap my cheeks, or at least suggest she zipper her still-parted lips before the flies got in. But instead I was civil enough to repeat the question.

  “Hear what?” wondered my cousin, still at sea.

  That tables have legs, that
birds can fly, that Joshua blew his bugle and Wall Street collapsed. Was she deliberately trying to make things difficult, or could it be possible that I was the first to inform her that something was wrong? She was said to be some kind of a whiz kid at the private school she went to, a straight-A student who did algebra backwards and could recite the whole Constitution in her sleep. But you couldn’t have proved it by me. Still, for the sake of our blood relationship, which I guessed ought to count for something, I resolved to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “You know,” I submitted hopefully, “about Grandma Zippe.”

  “Oh.” She nodded.

  Had I missed something? Ordinarily I’d have been happy to let it go, having no doubt gotten what I deserved. This was what came of your good intentions to try and touch base with your cousin. But now that I’d put my foot in it this far, I couldn’t help feeling that some principle was at stake.

  “So when did you hear?” I persisted.

  Naomi slumped down farther into the sofa, tugging at her beret until it covered her ears. She tucked her chin against her chest in an attitude suggesting that she didn’t like to be bullied. Stirred by the ceiling fan, her inky bangs (which made me think of a Cyclops’s eyelash) fluttered petulantly. “Sometime, I dunno,” she mumbled into her collar.

  It was just this type of contrariness that made you want to press her for details. You wanted to demand to know precisely what she’d heard and where she was when she heard it—while shouts went up all around that you were hounding the witness. But I’d had enough of my cousin’s conversation to last me a lifetime and, shrugging, I started to walk away. She could sink into the sofa till it swallowed her for all I cared. In future I would sit on it smugly, never letting on how Naomi, mysteriously vanished, had become part of the decor.

  But I stumbled, hung up on whatever was snagging my left leg. I turned to discover my cousin, her eyes still meditatively downcast, clutching the elastic bottom of my knee pants. My first thought was not rational: She wants to take me with her. Like the nymphs that dwelled (according to my grandpa) under the waters of the mikveh, she wanted to drag me down.

  I was about to give some audible expression of my horror when Naomi—using her free hand to part the veil of her bangs—looked up at me to inquire, “Do you think they were ever in love?”

  It was my turn to say, “Come again?”

  “Zippe and Isador. Do you think they were ever in love?”

  The note of desperation in her voice made me want to jump clear of my skin and bolt without a backward glance. I whipped my head left to right, half looking for help, half hoping that nobody saw my predicament. I hoped I wouldn’t have to leave my pants in her hand.

  Without pausing to consider, wanting only to put an end to a game I hadn’t asked to play, I blurted out, “Yeah, I guess.” A stab in the dark, it must have nevertheless been on the money, because she right away let me go. I shuddered to think what might have happened had I answered in the negative.

  I backed up slowly, in case Naomi should make any more sudden moves, then wheeled about and made a beeline for my alcove. Closing the doors, I drew aside the dimity curtain to make sure that she hadn’t followed. Still in a slump, she was shoved even farther into her corner by a pudgy couple who’d commandeered the rest of the sofa. They were wolfing down food as if in competition, each playfully stealing forkfuls from the other’s dish. Despite them, however, my cousin had returned to her prior state of contemplation.

  All around her, guests were partaking of the general conviviality. They dipped their noses, frosted with powdered sugar, into spirits-laced cups of tea; they tossed meatballs into the air and caught them in their laughing gobs. They elbowed their way to the table, which sagged from the weight of its bounty, falling into impromptu waltzes as they maneuvered to get by. Only where they clustered around the members of my family did they moderate their horseplay, trying to keep in check an otherwise irrepressible bonhomie.

  Holding court beside a standing lamp, my grandfather had attracted the largest audience. He was narrating his sorrow to a bunch of alter kockers who appeared to be saying, at proper intervals, “Amen.” I watched his crooked fingers with their tufted knuckles tenderly sculpting the air, fashioning it, I was certain, into a likeness of his lost Zipporeh: how she blushed in her maiden ripeness, carrot-haired in a hay-scented pinafore, modestly wringing a kerchief or the neck of a chicken, blowing a kiss through lips stained a feverish pink from beet soup.

  By next morning the rain, which we’d come to accept as a fact of life, had finally played itself out. The sky above the alley was like the skin of a pearl-gray balloon, bulging copper at the place where a thumb was pressed against it from the other side. That was the sun trying finally to shine through.

  According to the custom of a house in mourning, I’d slept with the window cracked open. Now, as I poked my head out, my cheeks were bussed by soft breezes, my eyes stunned by a riot of unruly colors. When I put on my specs, the colors resolved themselves into wildflowers spilling out of fissures in the brick walls. Lush weeds sprouted from puddles, and creepers slithered out from under stones. They twined about the axles of an overturned soapbox racer and the rusty barrel of a popgun; they spiraled the mimosa until its trunk looked like a jungle barber pole. There were sprays of pink and white blossoms, like uncorked bottles of floral champagne, and air so fragrant it made a harp out of your nose hairs. Suddenly it seemed to be spring.

  Then Papa was at the foot of my hide-a-bed, which he’d already begun to fold up, announcing that I should forget about going to school. “Get dressed already,” he charged me, “we’re burying your grandma today!”

  I suppose that he meant this respectfully, but in my drowsiness it sounded for all the world like Papa was declaring a holiday.

  I got out of bed and shuffled down the hall to the cardboard wardrobe to reclaim my old bar mitzvah suit from mothballs. Opening the door, I released a heady smell of camphor, a smell with character, as if I’d set loose a captive genie. But the camphor promptly met its match in another decidedly unfishy aroma, the coffee that Mama was brewing in the kitchen. I could hear her humming (since when did she hum?) a peppy rendition of “A-Tisket A-Tasket,” Papa gargling accompaniment from the john across the hall. Moments later he passed by on his way to the kitchen, ostensibly seeking help with his tie, while his eyebrows performed a sort of hubba-hubba dance. Then, was I dreaming or did my mama squeal coquettishly, “Solly, shame on you!” It was a morning that seemed to admit, beyond reinstated aromas, the revival of a lost sound or two.

  Even Grandpa Isador, despite the sag of his woeful features, looked almost waggish this morning in his miniver hat. You might have taken him for a species of ghetto Davy Crockett—whom Papa, the chozzer for local lore, had told me was a patron saint of the town. As we headed out the door, I had to remind myself that we were going to a funeral, not embarking on some lark of a family outing.

  We went down to North Main Street, where the wind from the river had a brisk, maritime quality—like it had traveled all the way up from some island in the Gulf just to tease your hair. The shops sported their pyramids of moisture-spangled produce, the racks of irregular pants, the solitary shoes intended to discourage thieves. The rain-washed windows were grease-penciled in freshly slashed prices, in certifications of strictly kosher. The awnings flapped like barbers’ bibs. But the businesses must have been manned by skeleton crews.

  This I assumed from the caravan of droning automobiles that was stretched for several blocks along the curb. The street was backed up bumper to bumper from Auction down to Commerce, as long as the gangster corteges that used to pass through Brighton Beach. Every vehicle was stuffed to its rumble seat with a well-scrubbed North Main Street family in their Shabbos best.

  I doubted it was Zippe’s popularity that had brought them out in such numbers, twice in as many days. I knew that the Orthodox cemetery was located in the woods to the south of town, a place said to be ideal for picnics and strol
ls. So you had to suspect that, where yesterday she’d served as an excuse for a party, today Grandma Zippe provided an opportunity for a community excursion. But that’s not what it looked like. What it looked like was a neighborhood that had turned out en masse to give my grandmother a send-off in high Pinch style.

  At the forefront of the line of cars was Mr. Gruber’s pride and joy, a regular jewel box of a hearse. It had polished brass sidelamps and chromium everything else: hubcaps, S-handles, ornamental winged diety on a louvered hood. It had windows like an oversize fishbowl through which you could view the anomaly of a rough-hewn wooden casket. This was the single concession to the traditional affair that old Isador had envisioned; it was a compromise between no coffin at all and the grand sarcophagus that Uncle Morris claimed he could get at cost. In the bed of that fancy hearse, however, the knotty pine looked like it was incubating, about to transform itself into something worthy of such a vehicle.

  Parked directly behind the hearse was a freshly waxed Packard limousine, its elliptical rear window framing the unhappy face of my cousin. She looked all the more pained for having twisted her neck a good hundred and eighty degrees to peer out. How was it, I wondered, that on such a pleasant morning Naomi could still manage to look like the victim of a kidnapping? Like she expected that you should personally arrange for her rescue—but from what? Just seeing Naomi was enough to put a crimp in your day, let alone the nuisance of having to unstick your own eyes from her sullen tarbaby stare. It took the sudden outbreak of a ruckus in front of the storefront funeral parlor to break the spell.

  A discordant delegation of worried-looking neighbors had burst forth from Mr. Gruber’s crepe-hung door. In their midst was Uncle Morris, puffing portentously and clenching his chubby fists, flapping his jowls. Despite their strident efforts, neither Mr. Petrofsky the grocer nor Sacharin the fishmonger, Alabaster the tinsmith or the otherwise internally battling Mr. and Mrs. Rosen, could appease him. He was threatening to have the undertaker’s job. When he saw my family approaching, Uncle Morris held his hand up palm-forward like we should cease and desist.