Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  The more moping, taciturn, and altogether scarce he was around the apartment, the more versatile it seemed that he became in his shop. On any given day you might see him become a ringmaster, a rug merchant, a connoisseur of antiquities, the keeper of a shrine. There was no expertise that he didn’t pretend to possess. And on the fat chance that I should ever be bored, I still had what I persisted in calling my studies, though books had lately lost a little of their old appeal. All those voyages and caravans and flights by balloon to the perilous ends of the earth now hardly seemed worth the effort. Sometimes I asked myself why all those so-called heroes didn’t just stay home where they belonged.

  But at night when I shut my eyes to try and sleep, the black boys snuck into my alcove. They dragged me through the window and up a gangplank, tied me to the mainmast of a mutinied slave ship. A crew of hog-wild Negroes jitterbugged in the rigging and all along the rails, and Lucifer, with his fluorescent grin, manned the helm.

  Meanwhile the floodwaters showed no signs of going down. The Harahan Bridge groaned and sagged under the constant procession of bedraggled refugees. They slouched across it like soldiers returning from lost battles, sometimes clogging to save the soles of their bare feet from the burning boards. They rattled in overladen buckboards hauled by teams of children, the elderly lashed to bedsprings and rocking chairs. They washed ashore on chicken crates and stiff beasts of burden, riding painted pianolas and fugitive rooftops, outmoded but still-puttering jalopies upright on pontoons. In this way they swelled the already unmanageable ranks of those dispossessed by hard times.

  In the Pinch they made a Hooverville out of Market Square Park. They strung their patched tarpaulins from the limbs of the chestnut and the joints of the jungle gym, until some began to refer to the park as the Casbah; the less resourceful merely squatted in the pavilion or under the beds of their trucks in the wagon yard. Along North Main Street they began to displace the corps of resident luftmenshen, the bearded loons in their ratty caftans among whose number my grandpa had lately been spied. For all their celebrated beggarliness, these crazy old men now seemed hale in comparison to the pitifully uprooted “rivergees.”

  At the fairgrounds, according to the local papers, the lucky ones were provided sanitary barracks with flush-toileted latrines. They were given their first taste of oranges, after which their gums stopped bleeding, their spines uncurled, and the clouds passed from their eyes. But the ones who you saw in our neighborhood were still crooked and oyster-eyed, their skin like porridge. With offspring wearing Red Cross flour sacks, scratching heads teeming with beggar lice, they wandered penniless into the shops. They overwhelmed the smells of shoe leather and bug poison, of fresh pumpernickel and pickled meat, with their high bouquet of Delta mud.

  For a few nights my papa kept up his show of observing the ritual mourning. Rather than endure the scorn I was assured of if I stayed behind in the shop, I joined him, though it made me feel like a party to a hoax. Admittedly it didn’t require a great change in attitude to behave as if Grandma Zippe were already buried; nevertheless, it seemed kind of indecent that the family should conspire, for the sake of convenience, to forget that she had yet to be interred.

  Of course it made sense not to recall such details in front of Grandpa Isador, who was already addled enough with grief. Witness how he rounded up flood refugees to complete the minyans. While there were any number of volunteer mourners around the Market Street shul, my grandpa had to go and impress the shiftless with the promise of a bowl of soup. He’d shepherd them into the apartment in a docile single file, line them up like a rogues’ gallery in front of the sideboard, and lead them in a perfectly incoherent responsive recital of Kaddish. My horrified mama complained that their muddy footprints would be stamped into the carpet in perpetuity. She keened aloud what could have gone without saying: that they weren’t even Jewish.

  To this Grandpa Isador, wearing an expression quite reasonable for him, explained that their homelessness gave them a de facto status. “Tahkeh,” he’d add with an admiration reserved for the utterly destitute, “they’re even holier.”

  After those token nights of mourning my father began to keep even longer hours in his shop. Nor was there any recurrence, at least around the apartment, of the galloping lightheartedness he’d shown on the morning of the aborted funeral. Sometimes leaving before the family had woken up, often returning after everyone was long asleep, my papa was as lost to the life of North Main Street as his departed mama. Uncle Morris, however, was much in evidence. Wreathed in cigar smoke and reeking of after-shave, combing the fine hairs forward from the back of his head over an otherwise bald scalp, he was forever reassuring his sister-in-law that she could lean on him. Then, purring and tittering, my mother would tell him that, widowed as she was by the pawnshop, it was nice to have a man around for a change.

  Some of the prosperity that Uncle Morris had promised, always saying it was just around the corner, was actually starting to appear. Even as the mirrors remained covered to keep us mindful of the recent passing, newfangled appliances began making their way into our apartment. Electrical modernism had dawned in Mama’s bread-line kitchen. Her work was revolutionized now by a three-speed Mixmaster and an oven with a window, through which you could observe her chickens in flames. A humming monitor-top Frigidaire replaced the old icebox, whose runoff had warped the floorboards, leaking through the Ridblatts’ ceiling downstairs. Armstrong linoleum concealed the rotting floor. There was a chrome-plated hand iron that spat steam like a dragon, a clothes wringer that also rolled dough, a shining fan-shaped toaster that discharged the bread in a breathtaking twin trajectory.

  To think that my father was responsible for the dramatic changes in our standard of living was just too farfetched. On the other hand, it was equally hard to believe that Uncle Morris was playing Lord Bountiful purely out of his generosity of heart. For his own reasons my grandfather seemed to share my skepticism. The more he played the broken record of his resolution that he would soon follow his wife’s lead, the less he was inclined to accept the things of this world. Progress was vanity, and all labor-saving devices the fruits of Mammon. His censure, however, did not extend so far as to include the new free-standing Zenith radio, for which he had reserved the right to be fascinated. With an ear to the cloth-muffled speaker in its mahogany cabinet, atop which he’d placed a faded tintype of himself and Zippe (at Coney Island, their heads superimposed above cardboard surf bathers), the old man was oblivious of everything else.

  He spun dials that alternated from a whirring wind to a sizzling static like rain. When he finally found voices, he listened so intently that you’d have thought they were revealing prophecies, issuing instructions for his ears only. He seemed to take everything personally, from the news of bloody labor strikes to “The Town-Crier” persiflage to the Lone Ranger’s endangered anonymity. The crackling artillery and wholesale homicide on “Gangbusters,” the failure of aspiring talent on “Major Bowes,” the diaspora from the dust bowl, the scandal of Kate Smith’s flatulence, the lament for humanity upon the wreck of the Hindenburg—everything apparently served to confirm his worst fears. An earful of Father Coughlin’s tub-thumping, for instance, elicited from Grandpa Isador the same fearful “oy!” as the trials of Fibber McGee, especially when the radio shnook, like a latter-day Pandora, released the cataclysm from behind his closet door.

  When he’d heard enough, my overwrought grandfather would take to the streets. “Zol gornisht helfen!” That was the watchword with which he regaled the bench in front of Jake Plott’s: Nothing will help. Not that this was news to the worn-out alter kockers and the walking wounded of North Main.

  The week arrived when the already dense population of the Pinch was even further increased by relations come to visit for Passover. Whether for the convenience of being within an easy stroll of the synagogue or out of the necessity of escaping their floodbound homes, mishpocheh flocked to North Main Street from all points. They crammed themselves into the stuffy l
ittle apartments above the shops until the walls began visibly to bulge. With their faces pressed against the windows, they leered at the street strewn with human flotsam, as if the neighborhood was under siege. On the lips of all the neighbors was the complaint that they were being eaten out of house and home: Elijah himself would have to be turned away.

  Except when my grandfather brought back the occasional shnorrer for dinner, we were thankfully spared the overcrowding. What we weren’t spared was the disoriented presence of Sol Kaplan, obliged to close his shop early in deference to the first night of Pesach. For hours he wandered around the apartment as if under a curse that wouldn’t let him sit down. Kaplan’s Loans, which was the center of his operations, must also have been my father’s center of gravity, because away from the shop he seemed unsteady on his feet. He alternately complained of headache, nosebleed, a dull griping pain that would not locate itself. At dusk he posed the illogical proposition that it might be a real fling for the family to make a holiday retreat to the pawnshop. Halfheartedly chopping liver with a gadget like a dynamite plunger, Mama let him know that he was getting on everyone’s nerves.

  “Go back to Beale Street already if you don’t like it here,” she snapped. It was the tone I’d heard taken with local greenhorns who dared to express nostalgia for the old country.

  Then Uncle Morris arrived with an offer we couldn’t refuse: he insisted that Mama drop the preparations for her Passover meal and invited us to a Seder at his stately home out on the Parkway. “The maid’s an old-timey Shabbos nigger, makes a real pesadig feast. All right, all right, you can bring your Jell-0 mold.” Suspicious as always of my uncle’s motives, even I had to admit that the rescue was timely.

  A shady, genteel street at the northern boundary of the Pinch, whence it embarked on a loop of the city, the Parkway was the seat of all that North Main Street yearned for. Its median, arcaded in pink and white dogwoods, was one long bridle path. There it was not unusual to see the equestrian Jewish daughters of doctors and department store owners, wearing jodhpurs and brandishing leather crops, looking indistinguishable from the shiksas who rode alongside. The street was flanked by Mediterranean-style houses with screened-in sleeping porches, roofs of emerald-green tile, verandas furnished with wicker chaise longues, and stone lions recumbent on manicured lawns. Everyone in the Pinch, to hear them tell it, was going to be neighbors on the Parkway by and by. “Next year on the Parkway,” the popular saying went, the street being about as accessible to most as Jerusalem itself.

  We piled into Uncle Morris’s Studebaker touring car and were driven in style to his opulent abode. The shamrock-shuttered windows in walls of eggshell stucco, the wrought-iron balconies, the classical frieze over the vaulted front door—all rose like a palace conjured out of the flames of its flowering azalea bed. It was all Grandpa Isador needed to see. On the short trip over, bemoaning some injustice he’d overheard on “Death Valley Days,” the old man had already begun to get out of hand. Now, as the enemy of conspicuous wealth, he positioned himself on the porch beside an urn spewing geraniums.

  “I pish on this temple of Baal,” he declared, actually reaching for the buttons of his fly when my mama slapped his liver-spotted hand. She hustled him briskly through the marble vestibule, where the mirrors on adjacent walls contained receding infinities of chastised Isador Kaplans.

  In her dudgeon, Mama complained to anyone who might be listening that something would have to be done about the old man. And the sooner the better. “Insti-too-shnalize,” pronounced so that you wanted to say gesundheit, was becoming her favorite word. Roughly she seated Grandpa Isador in the heraldic dining room, which had walnut wainscoting and halberds crossed above a retouched studio portrait of my anemic Aunt Nettie, whom I’d never met. She tucked a napkin into his collar, muttered something about its being handy in case she needed to gag him, and continued to kvetch to Uncle Morris.

  Forgotten but not gone, my father felt called upon to put in a word in his own father’s defense. “He’ll come around as soon as all this mishegoss in Europe blows over.” Grandpa Isador, interpreting the news broadcasts according to his whim, had seized on a master focus for his forebodings: projecting from his own personal woe a worldwide epidemic, he’d concluded that the chancellor of Germany was about to murder all the Jews.

  At the mention of Europe the old man folded at the chest, emitting a sound like he’d swallowed a harmonica. Papa leaned over to comfort him, suggesting that he might come down to the pawnshop tomorrow. There my papa would see to it that he was kept safe from the doings of the momzer Hitler, may his name be blotted out. At the head of the table Uncle Morris exchanged a meaningful roll of the eyes with my mama at the foot. With their eyes, they seemed to be making a pact to wash their hands of the pair of them, Solly and Isador. Wondering if their pact included me, I wanted to tell them: You’re too late, I beat you to it. I’ve washed my own hands already.

  I’d had it up to here with the family Kaplan. What had happened to everyone since Zippe’s passing that they behaved so ludicrously? Like the bubbe had been an anchor or something, and now they were all set adrift. Not that Papa was really any screwier than usual. But more and more I was coming to see the ways my father took after his own, making me resolve that whatever loose screws had been passed down from father to son should stop with him. This is not to say that I joined with my mother and uncle in their holier-than-thou alliance; as far as I was concerned they deserved each other.

  Neither did I exempt my cousin Naomi, seated across the table from me, whose mere presence was enough to remind me that things could be better. All dolled up for the occasion, she drooped nevertheless, the shoulders of her dress enfolding her like the limp wings of a taffeta bat. Her stringy black hair, pulled into a listing topknot over her bangs, bristled with stray strands. Whenever I happened to glance in her direction—which was as seldom as possible—she instantly lowered her perennially moist eyes. But when I wasn’t looking, I sensed that she stole occasional glances, the way you sneakily pick food from somebody else’s plate. It made me feel that she might want to steal a peek into my mind, which I forthwith tried to make a perfect blank.

  On a lordly cue from Uncle Morris, all casual table talk came to an end. We donned the silk skullcaps, opened the food-soiled Haggadahs, and began an uninspired reading of the Passover service. As the male child, it fell to me to recite the Four Questions, but I had trouble mustering the proper enthusiasm. Rusty with the Hebrew, I garbled it under my breath, and was almost as incoherent with the English translation.

  “Whyzissnighdiffren…” I mumbled until they asked me to speak up, after which I vociferated like a quiz show emcee, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Then, to my amazement, I made a sound like a buzzer and said, “Sorry, your time is up.” The silence that followed shamed me into asking the remaining questions in an appropriate tone of voice.

  Next, treading heedlessly on each other’s words, the family read a collective explanation of the holiday’s significance. They told the part about how the slaves stuffed their cheeks with cracker crumbs and escaped through a God-made hiatus where the sea used to be. At least a couple of miles away, I was thinking of a miniature sea where before there had been only dry land.

  With Uncle Morris holding up every item like an endorsement, we repeated the stories behind the symbols of salt water, shank bone, and bitter herb. Then, following a custom that called for sympathetic bleeding, with all eyes on old Isador lest he open a vein, we dipped fingers in our goblets and dripped wine across our plates. (Licking my pinkie, I was pleasantly surprised, the tepid grape juice of my childhood having been replaced by the authentic fruit of the vine.) Throughout, my grandpa, that his wellsprings shouldn’t run dry, gnawed sticks of horseradish with his rattling dentures to summon more tears.

  Just when you thought it was safe to put down your Haggadah, Grandpa Isador cried out, “Dayenu!” This was the signal to begin a recitation of the blessings heaped on the heads of the
Israelites. At the end of each blessing in an endless list, you were supposed to shout “Dayenu,” which meant, “It would have been enough.” But Uncle Morris nipped this in the bud.

  “Enough is enough is enough,” he broke in. “Let’s nosh!” Then he wadded up his yarmelke and tossed it over his shoulder. “Shinola!” he bellowed toward the kitchen, turning to tell us confidentially, “I call her Shinola, get it? Come to think of it, what is her name?” Now that all the mumbo-jumbo was out of the way, my uncle was our genial host again. In fact he was hamming it up. Taking a large carving knife and a sharpening steel, he proceeded to fight a duel with himself, then plucked a hair from his forward-combed locks to demonstrate the sharpness of the blade.

  A door swung open and a colored maid padded in, her crisp, white-aproned uniform strained fore and aft by her generous dimensions. On her broad face was an expression of tolerance under pressure, an expression that made you wonder if there might be something funny about the gefilte fish she was placing before us. That’s what comes of taking too much note of the hired help. When she returned a second time, with a hen on a platter, I avoided studying her face.

  As Uncle Morris set about slicing the bird, he faked ecstasies over its texture and the aroma released from its stuffing. Then he fell into his habitual doting on Mama. He congratulated her on her patient fortitude in putting up with him and all of the pesky Kaplan clan.

  “If only my Nettie, may she rest in peace,” he sighed, dabbing an eye with the corner of his napkin, “if only she’d had your strength.”