Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  He cast a mournful glance over his shoulder at the portrait of his expired spouse, sere-faced and wilted despite a photographer’s best efforts to add color and prop her up. She’d died shortly after giving birth to Naomi, as if in bringing my cousin into the world she’d fulfilled her purpose. Some purpose. I would have liked to credit my uncle with having bored her into an early grave, but you could see from her portrait that being dead must have come naturally to my nebbish Aunt Nettie.

  “Now Morris,” Mama chided him gently, toying with the bangle of her earring, “we mustn’t speak ill of the departed.” But you could tell that she was kvelling fit to burst. One indication was the way she gazed so fawningly at me, which was not her style. Groaning over what a burden I was to bear—that was more like her. But here she was all agloat, her strapping male offspring a testimony to her strength.

  Meanwhile Papa was absorbed by his hard-boiled egg in its bed of charoses, prodding it with his fork as if to coax it into motion. Maybe he expected the tiny bald noggin to lift its hidden face and tell him a story. When he began to speak, it was difficult to tell whether he was talking to the egg or to us. “Your attentions, my brother, have made our Mildred a regular Samson,” he said, peering sheepishly over his spectacles.

  “Another country heard from,” grumbled Uncle Morris, and let it rest. But Mama, for all her ardent blushing, scolded, “Solly, have a heart! You could learn a thing or two from your brother’s example.” Daintily removing a sliver of chicken from her horsey, carmine-stained teeth, she added mysteriously, “Morris has had his disappointments too.”

  I supposed she meant he was disappointed that she’d married Solly instead of him, and from his expression Papa must have guessed it too. He went back to studying his egg like a crystal ball. What he saw—I would have bet on it—was himself snug in his pawnshop, safe from the insults of history and his surviving family. He looked as far away as I felt.

  The maid reappeared to inform Uncle Morris that someone was in the kitchen to see him. His sense of humor reserved now for business hours only, Papa didn’t say it, so I had to say it myself: “It must be Elijah.” This captured the momentary interest of Grandpa Isador, who interrupted his lugubrious chewing on the off chance it might be true. Grousing that this someone had better have a good reason for disturbing his peace on this night of nights, Uncle Morris threw down his napkin and waddled out of the dining room. When the door swung inward, I saw what might have been a burnt gingerbread man, popped from the industrial-size oven in front of which he stood. Not until the door swung to again did I realize that I’d seen my papa’s puller with cap in hand.

  Papa had mentioned that Uncle Morris sometimes “borrowed” Oboy to perform certain odd jobs, and knowing my uncle, I’d figured that they had to be dirty work. This was no concern of mine, but it still came as a shock to see the puller turn up this far from Beale Street. I was aware by now that Oboy’s sphere of activities extended beyond the pavement in front of the shop. Nevertheless, I couldn’t kick the notion that, if I jumped up and sprinted all the way, I would still find him there on his perch outside Kaplan’s Loans.

  Uncle Morris returned huffing in his sour apple face, which meant things of moment were on his mind. Oboy might have brought him the message that his tenants were in revolt; they had torched their slum dwellings and stormed the office of his downtown operations. That was the sort of problem I supposed my uncle would have, though as to the actual nature of his business (real estate, wasn’t it?), I hadn’t a clue.

  “Solly,” he began offhandedly, stabbing his fork at a slippery lima bean, “if a couple of boys, you know what I mean, should drop by your shop, and if these boys should be looking to unload —” All of a sudden he lit up in a phony grin. He swiveled his head dummy-style back and forth from his daughter to me and began to chirp, “Hey kids, don’t you think it’s time to go and look for the afikomen?”

  Ordinarily I would have been offended. I hadn’t hunted for hidden matzohs in years, not since the times when Papa had made a wild-goose chase out of it, complete with hand-drawn maps full of obstacles and false leads. Nor did I care for the idea of teaming up with my cousin, whom I was practically allergic to. On the other hand, it beat having to sit here and listen to my blowhard uncle angling to involve my father in some shady scheme. It beat having to watch my mother chafe in her stays and declare that she was about to plotz. Besides, after repeatedly toasting the clean getaway of the children of Israel, I’d begun to feel a little woozy. A stroll around the rambling house might be just what I needed.

  I rose a bit shakily and followed my cousin from the dining room. Behind us my father was grumbling vaguely, my uncle charging that somebody had to take care of business. It was, after all, “the boys” who made possible what amounted to a charitable foundation.

  Naomi and I crossed the vestibule and mounted the carpeted staircase beneath a glorified jack-o’-lantern of a chandelier. Feeling no pain, I was at the same time in need of a focus, some point of reference to help steady the tendency of the stairs to tilt. So I fixed on Naomi’s oily topknot, which looked about to tumble, like an unraveling ball of twine. Then I lowered my sights to the hem of my cousin’s dress. The material, typically coordinated to match the floral wallpaper, swished to and fro above her scrawny calves. It was a rhythmic swish, a kind of fabric metronome, accompanied by the whisper of her stockings and a jungle drumbeat in my head. It was the sort of thing that could induce hypnosis. So I asked her, if only to break the spell, “Where do you think he hid it?”

  She turned at the head of the stairs without replying and gave me a look that seemed to ask what I meant by following her. “The matzoh,” I persisted in hopes of refreshing her memory. “Where …?” But, fanning my lips with my fingers b-b-b-b, I gave it up in mid-question, suddenly unsure whether Naomi and I were playing the same game.

  She tottered in her wobbly pumps down the long hallway, dimly lit by electric candles in brass sconces. Their flickering reflections made altars out of a row of mullioned windows facing the street. A ghostly woman bearing a candelabra, her I could have seen myself pursuing down such a hallway; my flesh-and-mostly-bone cousin was something else. But since my forward momentum seemed anyway irreversible, I thought I might just as well see where she went.

  It turned out to be a bedroom so intensely pink it could shrivel your petsel. The precious furnishings looked almost edible, spun-sugar ornaments on a cake. There was a canopied four-poster with a hand-painted headboard, the mattress heaped with satin pillows to protect the princess from the pea. A ruffled curtain in the shape of a valentine framed a cushioned window seat cradling a stuffed-animal zoo. A wide mantelpiece supported a row of delicate porcelain and china dolls in gingham and lace. Their pantaletted gowns formed an awning over a fancy arched fireplace, tucked inside of which was a modest bookcase. With its bowed and slanted shelves, the volumes in disarray, the case looked as if it had been dumped down the chimney. In the midst of all that cloying prettiness, the books seemed out of place.

  They were her poor relations, Naomi’s books—ghetto urchins who have crashed a fancy-dress ball to hide beneath the unwitting skirts of the ladies. So tell me why I thought that, for all its prevailing frivolity, my cousin’s boudoir revolved around those books. Was it because, without their ballast, that airy confection of a room was in danger of floating away? Or was it just that everything else looked untouched? Whereas the books, with their broad creased spines and torn dust jackets showing stitches like undressed wounds, had obviously been the objects of constant handling. Though I couldn’t read their titles from where I stood, I suspected that Naomi’s books might be pretty heavy going by my standards. They might even belong to the same exclusive brother hood of tedious stuff I’d lugged home from the Front Street library.

  My cousin was poised on the edge of a chair in front of her skirted dressing table, gazing intently into a circular mirror as if she couldn’t quite place the face. Then she reached up, dislodging a shoulder pad in th
e process, and removed a pin from her hair. The untidy bun collapsed like a burst bubble of ink, trickling in a twist down her neck. Taking up a silver brush, she proceeded with luxurious strokes to rake her meager tresses into a mild electrical storm. She persisted until her split ends were in full levitation.

  She was behaving as if she were in her element, as if she belonged to all that fluffy pink sissification. But I wasn’t fooled for a second. Nobody knew better than I the type she was—a slave to books. She could pretend all she wanted, but the books told the story. She would be shackled to them her entire life, dragging ever thicker volumes behind her. They would weigh her down if she tried to grow up. They would see to it that she ended the long solitude of her days as a pixilated old maid, her calendar full of other people’s birthdays and yahrzeits.

  Standing in the door of her bedroom, I felt stupid. Also a little nauseous, like I’d eaten too much cotton candy. But just as I started to turn away, I could have sworn I heard her speak.

  “Maybe it’s in here?”

  For a moment I thought she’d posed the question to the mirror. “Beg your pardon?”

  “The matzoh, silly. Maybe it’s in here.” She turned to me, aiming one of those pointedly significant looks I’d been dodging throughout dinner.

  I might have suggested that we forget the whole business, but instead, a good sport, I shrugged and stepped into her room. In making a show of hunting the afikomen, however, it’s possible I went a little overboard in my thoroughness. Suddenly I was the scourge of hidden matzohs. I scattered the throw cushions in the window seat, playing havoc with the quilted unicorns. I manhandled her gallery of dolls, interfering with the cobwebs that moored them to the mantel, coughing over their odor of stale potpourri. With the bookcase I was no more respectful, rifling fat volumes and lean alike, fanning their pages without any temptation to stop and browse.

  I was at some pains to conceal my enjoyment from Naomi, nor did I want to see how appalled she must be by my disdain for her things. So I dropped to all fours and stuck my head underneath her bed. What I saw there among the dust kittens was a maverick cache of books with luridly colorful jackets.

  “Nothing here,” I quickly assured her, bumping my head on the bed frame as I started to rise. This was at least partly due to a sudden movement of my cousin’s, which kept me on my knees.

  Pivoting away from her vanity as she hummed a lively air (“Ma, He’s Makin’ Eyes at Me,” I think it was), Naomi had hoisted one spindly leg high over the other. Studying me all the while like I was the object of a laboratory experiment, she raised the hem of her dress to her thigh. She did this with a painfully slow deliberation, allowing her humming to dwindle into silence, all the better to savor the shush of the dress against silk. Then she hitched up a baggy stocking. She pulled it taut, indolently stroking the long blue vein of the underseam. As if to punctuate the whole affair, she snapped a garter—the sound penetrating my chest like a gunshot—and inquired with point-blank sincerity, “Harry, do you ever have fun?”

  From my half-crouch I tried hard to pretend that here was nothing out of the ordinary. She was fixing a stocking, for God’s sake; with legs as skinny as hers, it was no wonder they wouldn’t stay up. But my eyes betrayed me. While I made an earnest effort to lift them far enough to meet my cousin’s, my eyes found a level of their own, falling irresistibly on Naomi’s legs. I was interested, despite myself, in the way the wine-dark sheen of her stocking top met the milk-pallid flesh of her thigh. It looked warm, her naked thigh, a desert island beach where the sea, redolent of roses, washes onto a sandy shore. Then there was the wispy hint—forgive me—of a grotto that beckoned just out of view.

  I wanted to ask if this was her way of inviting me to leave no stone unturned in my search for the matzoh. But that was the Passover wine speaking, and something told me that joking would only make things worse. After a first failed attempt during which I felt a little faint, I got up with the intention of giving Naomi an honest reply.

  “Do I ever have fun?” I repeated thoughtfully, then tried to turn it into a bold-faced statement: “Do I ever have fun!” But it still came out sounding like a question under consideration.

  I suppose you could say that I’d been having a good time in the pawnshop, but ever since I’d crossed over the water on Beale, things had been different. I was different, like a traveler who’d come back from distant lands disguised as a pawnbroker’s son. Meanwhile familiar places had begun to seem new to me. For instance, I had become addicted to the rival aromas of North Main Street—boiling cabbage versus baking strudel, rust versus rising sap—as they wafted through my alcove window at night. I liked listening to the neighbors, picking up snatches of their gossip. I liked when their gossip was drowned out by scratchy Galli-Curci or a breeze that carried some phrase of a swing clarinet. I liked trolley bells and sirens and the foghorns from the river barges, baleful as shofars blown by giant Chassidim. And so help me if I didn’t take pleasure in looking up my puny cousin’s wallflower dress.

  Did I ever have fun? I’d had a little, I guessed, but the real fun, the famous fun—that, I felt, had yet to begin. So to Naomi’s question I had only this to reply, my voice skipping up the register till I cleared my throat: “Not much.” Then I turned my head from left to right and asked her where else the thingie, the afikomen, might be hidden.

  Peevishly, Naomi dropped her hem over her knees and went all shmulky on me again. With a weary impatience she told me to go and look in the dumbwaiter where her father hid the matzoh every year.

  II

  Six

  In bed that night I had shpilkes something awful, if you know what I mean. The whole town was cockeyed in the aftermath of the disaster, and I guessed I was no exception to the rule. I’d had my glimpse of the world beyond Third Street, and had finally to admit that all it gave me was an appetite for more. This is not to say that my alcove wasn’t cozy, and the pawnshop always had its moments, provided you could find the space to watch them from. But outside, the overrun city was more interesting than any book I knew. There were local attractions as rare as anything that Richard Halliburton, Memphis’s homegrown Marco Polo, had crossed oceans to observe. Or so I’d heard.

  There was Happy Hollow, for instance, the shantytown at the bottom of the bluff, below the Pinch. That’s where the victims of murders, their flesh peeling off like wet paper, were said to wash up under the pilings of houses on stilts, houses constructed out of packing cases and Moxie signs. Towheaded and whey-faced, with eyes like Orphan Annie and shriveled limbs, the citizens of Happy Hollow were popularly bruited to be the issue of fathers and daughters, cousins and cousins, and so forth. There was Mud Island, lowlying as a whale’s back in the middle of the river, formed from silt accumulated around a steamboat sunk before the Civil War. That’s where the fisherfolk lived in their patchwork tents and converted automobiles, who drank sacramental moonshine on Sundays and danced before the Lord with rattlesnakes in both hands. Also, according to the Chamber of Commerce literature, there was a museum in a pink marble mansion that once belonged to a bankrupt millionaire. There was an aerodrome housing a dirigible as big as Goliath’s lung, and a view of three states from a café on top of the Cotton Exchange.

  But when I closed my eyes that night after my uncle’s Seder, I was voyaging with shvartzers again. This time, for reasons that would not come clear, we had abducted a young white girl bearing an unfortunate resemblance to Naomi, though the girl in question was more amply endowed. We were sailing through fog toward a cannibal-infested coast in search of a legendary lost mine of unleavened bread.

  The next afternoon I went back to the famous end of Beale Street. I’d been hanging around the pawnshop, which now bulged so at the seams that Papa talked of annexing the colored dentist’s office upstairs. While he was at it, he would take up Joshua’s trumpet—which must have been somewhere in stock—and blow down the walls between us and Uncle Sam’s Loans on one side, Pinsky’s Custom Tailor on the other. Kaplan’s would
occupy an entire city block, become a Kaplan’s World of Loans.

  To his regular clientele, Papa had recently added the flood refugees, who straggled in with items that were questionable even by his standards. Nevertheless my papa, with his unquenchable passion for novelty, took in their crocheted samplers and whittled ax helves, their impermeable ascension shrouds, their divining rods like outsize slingshots, and their foul-smelling panacea herbs. But not before he’d heard their sad stories, jotting down the occasional note.

  The inventory ledgers took up as many volumes as a Talmud. Their columns of lengthy descriptions and bewildering numerical entries were limned with glosses that overwhelmed the margins, thus giving the pages the actual look of commentary and responsa. This was a recent feature of my father’s behavior, how he labored over his ledgers like a scribe, refining and expanding the texts. It wasn’t enough, for example, that a wooden crutch belonged to a man who had lost his foot to a snapping turtle; but a cane pole, no apparent relation to the crutch, might once have caught a turtle that slipped from the hook to leave a human foot dangling in its place. In this way my papa endeavored to connect various items along family lines.

  It was a method that drove at least one auditor to smoke two packs of Luckys and leave the shop in disgust. It caused the detectives from the pawnshop detail, McCorkle and Priest, to curse the day they’d attempted to make heads or tails of Kaplan’s books. I’d watched them flipping the pages in frustration, unable to distinguish the fishy from the legitimate. It was a sight that put me in mind of overgrown cheder boys struggling with a haftorah portion.

  So filled to capacity was the pawnshop that Grandma Zippe, were she ever to be properly buried, would first have to be disinterred. Nor had it escaped my attention that the curios surrounding her casket—the ram’s horn deaf aids and the painted bisque Betty Boops—had recently been joined by an empty copper samovar.

  So how did my dotty papa manage to keep from going belly up? Because, for all of his foolhardy squandering of capital, the cash drawer still seemed bottomless, and the level of our family’s newfound affluence had not been reduced. We still enjoyed the freshest whitefish and the choicest cuts of brisket from the butcher, not to mention the most up-to-date in household conveniences, the latest being an electric Hoover, which my mama maneuvered as if she were wrestling the tail of a cyclone. If you subscribed to the theory that my uncle was behind our prosperity, then you had to suppose also that the time would come when he would seek to collect what he was owed.