Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  To coax her into stillness, I eased myself down alongside her; I leaned my weight against her ticklish ribs, suffering her bones, blunted only where her underwear was gathered into a sort of breechcloth. Carefully, I took hold of her wrists.

  “Naomi, shhhah!” I pleaded, my face so close to hers that I felt an eyelash brush the tip of my nose. “You’re making enough racket to wake the —” I waited for the thunderclap, but heard only the continued peal of my cousin’s laughter. “Naomi!” I was about to despair of ever getting through to her, when her voice tumbled forth again. It came this time as an assurance that she found our mutual recumbency funnier than anything yet.

  “You’re a devil, Harry Kaplan!” she squealed between paroxysms of giggling. “You’re a terrible person!” But no sooner had I relaxed my grip on her—for such was the heady effect of her voice—than she jackknifed her hips and bucked me off the box.

  I picked myself up out of the wreckage of what I think was an ant farm, pulling a splinter or two from the seat of my pants. Thoroughly ashamed of myself, I realized that I had been terrible, and I was grateful to Naomi for jolting me back to my senses. What had I been thinking, that I should swarm all over my cousin like a drowning man? Come the first lull in her antic behavior and I would beg her forgiveness. Then she did manage to modulate her merriment a little, so that I now heard only the sound of mild snuffling. But just as I’d begun to frame my apology, Naomi told me to shut up and come here.

  “C’mere,” she said in her old phony femme fatale voice, which even she didn’t seem to be taking seriously. Not that it had ever worked on me when she had—not in her sultry garden or her spun-sugar boudoir. So what was it about the darkness at the back of Kaplan’s that made her summons sound not so phony anymore?

  Because I hesitated, not knowing whether I ought to step forward or turn tail, she reached out and pulled me down beside her again.

  What happened after that is not so easy to say. Is it possible to try and hold on to someone even as you’re trying frantically to break away? Because that’s what was going on with me as Naomi and I started tussling on top of Zippe’s box. Meanwhile, for her part, my kittenish cousin seemed equally confused. So frisky was she that, having just invited me to her side, she now seemed to be trying to throw me off again. Was this the famous fickleness of women? She wriggled, she squirmed, she nudged me with her drumlike tummy, so that I felt her giddiness in the pit of my own. It was a free-for-all, I can tell you, and I was ready to call it a draw. I was ready to call it a night and go home to lick my wounds—while at the same time I ached to cuddle Naomi. Of course I couldn’t have it both ways. At least one of us needed to make up his mind for good and all.

  Not that I could have disentangled myself from the snarl of our limbs if I’d wanted to. Already I’d lost a shoe in the struggle, and I was in danger of losing my pants, my suspenders having been yanked from their buttons. In a desperate attempt to master the situation, I scissored my legs about my cousin’s, but thanks to the sliding ruck of her stockings, she was able to slip neatly out of the hold. I wouldn’t have put it past her to slip out of her skin to elude me, a notion that made me redouble my efforts. For my trouble I got my glasses pried from my face and a finger poked in the eye before I had managed to recapture her hands.

  I nestled hard against her, her tossing hips bruising my middle, causing my breath to come in tremolos like my papa being pummeled by masseurs at the Russian baths. But in the end, with a mighty grunt, I had her; she was pinned. I hugged her in a mortal vise, hanging on as if I thought she might change into something else, a porcelain doll or a daughter of Lilith or a distant icy queen. She might change into an annoying relation or a stranger unless I kept her nailed to the coffin lid, unless I gathered the gang of Naomis in my arms and confined them to a solitary girl, one I might never dare to let go of again.

  But the little minx was still hemorrhaging laughter. It poured out of her in a rising tide that threatened to carry me away along with her if I didn’t act quick. This was serious. There was no telling what might happen if, for the sake of us both, I didn’t take it upon myself to seal her parted lips with mine.

  IV

  Thirteen

  About the time that the Carnival ended and school let out for the summer, the water began to go down. Looking no more or less bedraggled than they had when they’d arrived, the displaced families started making their exodus. They left as they’d come, like a defeated army, in a wobble-wheeled convoy of buckboards full of featherless poultry, in backfiring two-cylinder jalopies and on hobbled shank’s mare. They trailed away toward their various points of the compass with the dust devils bringing up their rear, erasing the dried mud of their tracks from the sun-baked streets. In a few days their numberless ranks were reduced to a handful of stragglers; then they were gone.

  I guess the city heaved something like a universal sigh at their departure: think of my mama loosening her stays at the end of a trying day. But otherwise there was nothing especially noteworthy about the event, no big send-offs that anyone heard of, no fond farewells. In fact, if you hadn’t known that they’d been there in the first place, you wouldn’t have missed them at all, their absence being no more remarkable than the evaporation of dew. On the downtown sidewalks the judges and the cotton brokers in their paisley waistcoats, the shop ladies with their swollen ankles, and the Court Square pensioners in wheelchairs feeding doves went about their business as if nothing had happened. The only difference I noticed was that they all looked slightly distracted, wearing expressions like you see on the faces of people trying hard to remember a dream.

  Surfaced again, the levee was strewn with rubbish—as though it might have been raining one-eyed rag dolls and waterlogged mattresses, captain’s chairs and tea chests spilling crawdads, bloated family Bibles like risen black loaves, long johns stuffed with straw. Canvas baby strollers, grandfather clocks, and a bleating Angora goat were found stranded in the branches of the scrub oaks along the banks. For every few feet the river receded, another terrace of debris was left behind, the cobbles resembling steps down the unearthed stages of an archaeological dig. Had my father chosen to venture the couple of blocks from his shop to the bluff, he might have viewed the sight of so much diverse trash with wonder. He might have thought that heaven had been scattering his own brand of manna.

  During those days North Main Street seemed to have grown a little quieter, at least in our apartment, where there was seldom anyone at home. You’d have thought I might see more of Mama now that she and Uncle Morris had finally succeeded in getting rid of Grandpa Isador. On the pretext of airing him out, they’d taken him one afternoon for a drive in the country, where they had turned him over to the state asylum at Bolivar. I could imagine how he must have battled with the myrmidons as they tried to stuff him into a straitjacket; I heard him howling Yiddish oaths, which the other meshugayim echoed in their respective lost tongues. Not that I believed for a minute that he would find any peace, my grandpa, even in a community of like minds.

  The popular scuttlebutt about Bolivar had it that its inmates were often the subjects of unspeakable experiments. They were housed in kennels, kept naked in all weather, made to operate the hospital generator by running a treadmill. But my mama insisted that the place was a regular country club, situated among the pines like Grossinger’s. And who should know better than she, since Mama and Uncle Morris were finding such frequent excuses to visit. They were checking up on the old man’s progress, so they said; they were taking him his things—though you tell me how an armload of grimy incunabula, some phylacteries, and a couple of moth-eaten suits could require so many day trips, some of which extended far into the evening.

  I thought it a shame that old Isador hadn’t been allowed to take along the console radio, which in his absence I’d begun to conceive a fascination for. It seemed doubly a shame that my grandfather should have been put away when more than ever the radio was bearing out his prophecies.

  If you listened t
o the postscripts of what was going on in Europe, you heard news that out-Isadored my grandpa’s worst fears. Having been denied their God-given license to wander, the Jews were being corralled into cages. The few that escaped were forced to live underground; the overseas relations of our neighbors in the Pinch were disappearing from the face of the planet. They were performing a vanishing act on a scale compared to which the disappearance of the flood refugees was small change. And if rabid voices in certain quarters had anything to do with it, the rivergees were only a dress rehearsal for an epidemic of vanishing that might be spreading our way.

  Beyond what was confirmed by the radio, there were rumors afoot, tales carried by a handful of greenhorns who’d fallen through cracks to land in our neighborhood. Remove one Isador and half a dozen others spring up to take his place. But these mournful shnorrers were passing on stories that even my grandpa might have hesitated to repeat, which isn’t to say they were heeded any more seriously. Still, it was not so uncommon these days to see the ordinarily sociable merchants of North Main Street making like ostriches.

  Having gotten the jump on whatever evil happened to be in the air, my papa had made himself a virtual missing person. So scarce had he become that his wife, in keeping with time-honored tradition, had turned to his surviving brother for support. And if Sol Kaplan had uttered any squeak of protest—if, for instance, from his own asylum he’d objected to old Isador’s institutionalization—he made sure that nobody heard him. Nor did anyone hear him if he offered me congratulations on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday.

  Of course, I wouldn’t have been in any mood to celebrate. After you’ve betrayed your only friends, who felt like celebrating? Who cared anything for birthdays when you no longer dared to show your face at the famous end of Beale Street? Miserable wretches such as I didn’t deserve to have birthdays. I was no better than a leper, a candidate for the colony that some said still existed on the far side of Mud Island.

  I knew what I was, all right. I was a despicable blue-gum Jew, harmless enough in appearance but liable to turn at any moment, his bite more poisonous than a cottonmouth’s. Or was I only flattering myself? If I’d had a hair on my tochis, I’d have jumped off the Harahan Bridge. Weeks later a fisherman snags his hook and up I float, flesh flaking like soggy piecrust, eyes nibbled away by gars. But none of the names that I called myself nor the mortifications I imagined could make me feel any worse than I already did.

  I felt awful not so much because I missed the twins as because I didn’t seem to miss them enough. Of course I would have given a lot to know how they were getting along, but wasn’t that only curiosity? The truth was that ever since the night I’d denied them to Naomi, Lucifer and Michael had faded to dim apparitions in my mind. If I missed them at all, it was in the way that you miss a story someone once told you, a story you’re still very fond of though the details have become kind of vague.

  I reasoned with myself that they were probably okay. The floodwaters had gone down, restoring everything to the way it was before. Having weathered the crisis of a mostly imaginary malady—I mean, who besides comedians on “Major Bowes” ever died from talking too much?—Michael was once again pushing his broom. He was shadowing his brother, who, freed from the nuisance of ofay apprentices, was at this moment making his prompt underworld rounds. Whatever the case, there was certainly no future in fretting about the twins. No news of their circumstances would ever reach me, not here in my exile on North Main Street, a place that had nothing much to offer a guy who’d been where I’d been.

  In fact, the old neighborhood wasn’t quite the same after the flood. It had changed, if possible, for the worse, become even shabbier in the wake of the departed river refugees. The shopkeepers and their wives looked worried, their troubles increased, as if the uninvited guests had left behind more in their care. The buildings themselves seemed untended and forlorn, more than ever overwhelmed by invading creepers, which snaked through the broken windows and wrenched loose the strangled fire escapes. The whole street looked as if it had been trussed in leafy cargo nets, ready to be hauled away. Storks might snatch it up and set it down again in some far-off valley of milchik and flayshik, a land more rich and plentiful than the Parkway. People would stumble out of their shops and tenements to the realization that their season in Memphis had been a bad dream. A clammy, unventilated dream of a stagnant atmosphere that was not very conducive to carrying a torch for your cousin.

  The more I tried not to think about that night in the pawnshop, the more my thoughts returned to it, the way your tongue will seek a cavity. I kept remembering how—after we’d toppled off the casket and I pulled the cord to see if she was all right—it was suddenly over. The damage was done. We were both self-conscious again. Oh why had I needed to turn on the light? I offered to switch it off again but the mood was already spoilt; Naomi was peevishly scrambling for her clothes. And I, beyond embarrassment, had assumed an awkward pose to conceal a chafing dampness at the fly of my pants.

  I began to pick up some of the scattered costumes, making a sullen effort toward restoring a little of its original order to the cage. I was anxious now, and feeling that Naomi might be deliberately trying to get my goat, because once she’d made herself more or less decent, she’d started to dawdle.

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered, hoping to frighten her into hurrying, succeeding only in heightening my own nervousness. Every item in the dark recesses of the shop began to resemble a hunkering Oboy watching over us. “Let’s beat it already!” I hissed, practically prepared to remove her, if necessary, by force, while at the same time afraid of touching her again. Then, as I wondered what she might for God’s sake be waiting for, I took a stab in the dark. “Look,” I told her with no less aggravation, “I love you—okay?”

  It’s possible that I’d said this before, back when we’d been so inseparable on the lid of Zippe’s casket. It’s possible that I’d said it in such a way as to alter the course of our grappling, puncturing the humor, pitching us both into a tender loss of equilibrium. But that was then, a time that already seemed like long ago. And now, at this raw early hour of dawn, the words had blundered out as if a toad had plopped from my mouth, a rude little monster that I regarded with horror and Naomi with a certain sly amusement, like she thought it might make an interesting pet.

  It seemed that we were in love, my cousin and I—so what was the trouble? The trouble was love. It was enough already for me to try to accommodate my guilty conscience toward the shvartzers without having to share the same space with an overcooked passion for my cousin. It was just too much to fit inside one skin. Other things, such as memory and common sense, would have to be tossed out to make room. After all, we’re talking about the teary-eyed, lackluster nishtikeit who used to so royally gripe my can. That’s all she was, barring the occasional botched audition as tenderfoot temptress, excluding her headlong excursions into storytelling, night prowling, and masquerading as the queen of heartbreak. But that was it, the complete inventory on Naomi, except for maybe a shtikl of something else.

  Something that made me feel as if my heart wore a crown of candles that the ill wind of my conscience kept blowing out, though not before I had the chance to make a wish. So what did I wish? I wished that I could rid Naomi of the something extra. I wished I could shrink her—my darling, my dove, the sweet angel changeling muse—back into a pest again. I wished I could forget all about her.

  Whenever I was overcome by the urge to go and give my cousin a squeeze, I remembered the deceit that made me unworthy. I remembered that she was taking up the space in my mind that should have been exclusively reserved for my remorse over the wards of the Baby Doll Hotel. Then I would begin to miss her so much, my Naomi—as if I were marooned on some desert galaxy with a bad case of homesickness. I would feel that my love for my cousin was a punishment inflicted on me for having double-crossed the twins.

  So I didn’t try to see her, and except for those rare occasions when my mama was around (which m
eant that the line was generally engaged anyway), I took the phone off the hook. Eventually, in case she should attempt to contact me in person, I stayed away from home. After a week spent lying around the apartment doing nothing, spinning dials on the radio, I’d taken to the streets. I knocked about along the levee for a while, but in the end I went where you went when there was nowhere else to go.

  I hung around Kaplan’s Loans, which like myself was stuffed full of more junk than it could reasonably contain. Having no pride left to swallow, I thought it might now be fitting if I buried myself in the shlock alongside my papa. Then it seemed cruelly inconsiderate of my father to have surrounded himself with worthless merchandise to the exclusion of the living members of his family.

  So I hung around out on the sidewalk next to Oboy and his three-legged stool. If the bullet-headed little golem appeared to have no use for me, I could assure him that he was likewise no friend of mine. It was bad enough knowing as I did that his loyalties were divided between my father and Uncle Morris, but what irked me the most was the perfect impunity with which he moved between the shop and the Parkway and the famous end of Beale. Anyone who lived his life in more than one place—which was as good as aspiring to more than one life—this person was highly suspect in my book.

  Even worse than loitering with Oboy, however, was loitering on the spittle-flecked pavement in front of Kaplan’s all alone. Which was how I found myself on a morning when the puller, beyond aloof, was entirely absent. It was an event so unheard of that I was tempted to take it personally.