Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  “… So you’ll come over here, you’ll have a nice nosh in the peace and quiet of my humble abode, away from all that yehtehtehteh in the Pinch,” Uncle Morris still prattled. “Come on, palsie, whaddaya say—yes Uncle, no Uncle, nu?”

  “Uncle!” It came out like “enough already,” though I tried to suppress my impatience. “Can I talk to Naomi?” Then my mind wouldn’t wait to begin the conversation: “Naomi, it’s me!” “Oh Harry, sweetie, kepeleh, it’s always been you! I missed you like crazy! Mmm mmm kiss kiss kiss…”

  “Naomi?” Uncle Morris seemed to be considering, and for an anxious second I thought he was going to deny that he had a daughter. “Why, she’s up in St. Louie with my sister-in-law, her Tante Frieda Green. I thought you knew. Course, you never met Frieda, did you? Such a pisk on that girl, I’m telling you, a born matchmaker if ever there was. Always she’s shushkening, ‘Naomi, meet this one, a Rothschild! And that one’s papa made a killing in BVDs.’ But you know something, Harry, I’m glad you finally hit it off, you two. It’s naches when cousins get along…”

  Again I smelled a rat. Here was more of his mischief: he’d sent Naomi away to spite me. He’d deliberately put her beyond my reach and in the way of more acceptable suitors. In fact, hadn’t he killed two birds for the price of packing one Naomi off to her aunt? While protecting his daughter from unwelcome advances, he had also cleared the coast to bring home his locked-up brother’s zaftig wife. It was all very neat. On the other hand, I was vaguely aware that Naomi went to St. Louis every summer, and even if she’d wanted to, she couldn’t have reached me to say goodbye.

  Then I remembered something else, that I had behaved in a fashion that was practically a tradition among Kaplan males, who often lost their women through being preoccupied. Left unattended, their chosen ones frequently died or went away. I remembered also how it was with my cousin, who was sometimes so excitable, such a spitfire; sometimes, unless you had some talent for noticing, you would hardly even know she was there.

  My desolation complete, I said thanks all the same to my uncle and hung up the phone.

  It occurred to me that I ought to be hungry, since I couldn’t have told you the last time I sat down with my family to a proper meal. As there was no one around to remind me, I had to remind myself that I should keep up my strength. So I opened the refrigerator, which was badly in need of defrosting. But when I got a load of its neglected contents—the potato pancakes like powder puffs, the gelatin ring like an inner tube, the coral-green brisket, an overripe melon, a squished jelly blintz, a geranium, a pair of shoes—I lost what little appetite I had.

  I went to my alcove and sprawled facedown on the hide-abed. With a motion that used to be second nature, I reached for one of the books on my nightstand, a frayed cloth edition of a G. A. Henty saga, as it happened. Leafing through it, however, I quickly concluded that the book had too many words. I tossed it aside on my mattress and took up another from a small pile of survivors on the floor. This one turned out to be the good old reliable Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, profusely illustrated and morocco-bound. Here was the stuff I’d been missing: dangerous exploits pressed tidily between hard covers, which kept them from spilling over into the reader’s real life.

  But this book was also giving me trouble. For all its colorful drawings of Arabian stallions and rainbow-plumaged birds of paradise, not to mention thugee assassins held captive in clouds of Baker Street pipe smoke, the book might as well have been written in a foreign tongue. That’s how little patience I had left for stories. So I dropped the book beside the other, disturbed by the way their splayed-open bindings resembled the double pitches of rooftops in a flood.

  Fourteen

  I don’t remember falling asleep, though I did notice how the evening stepped especially hard on the heels of the afternoon. Then it must have been late, because the commercial bustle of North Main Street had given way to other noises: the moaning of a barge below the levee, the rattling of a freight train over the bridge, the skirling of crickets, a tinkling toilet, a scratching mouse. Lying in the dark, I isolated every sound in the hope of discerning something particular. Just what it was I was listening for I couldn’t at first have said; then it came to me. I was listening for the sound of a turning knob, an opening door, the signal that my father had come home from his pawnshop for the night. Funny how you could miss a noise you never even remembered having heard.

  Once I’d closed my eyes, I had a hard time prying them open again. By the time I did, sawing with my fingers at the gluey lids, it was morning; streamers of sunlight were making a Maypole of the mimosa outside my window. I yawned luxuriously as I raised myself on my elbows, creating an avalanche of tumbling books. Thus surrounded by the rubble of a day that had yet to begin, I recalled how unhappy I was.

  I got out of bed and began to wander the apartment without pausing to change the clothes I’d slept in. To stand still was to invite unkind thoughts; add any more to what I was already shlepping around and I wouldn’t be able to budge. Keep moving, that was the ticket. Stay busy—though I was hard pressed to think of what to do next. Maybe I should make some coffee; people made coffee in the morning. And while I didn’t really care for the taste of it, I liked the musical trickle that the percolator made. It was a pleasant distraction from the silence of the apartment, which the hubbub outside called too much attention to.

  Things picked up a little more when, cracking some eggs into a bowl, I turned on the electric mixer. I went into the closet, hauled out the Hoover, and plugged it in. Soon I was conducting a regular symphony of whir, gurgle, and drone, pleased at the way that they simulated the sounds of a lived-in apartment. But now that I’d turned on every appliance in the house, I began to have the uneasy feeling that the appliances were about to turn on me.

  This, of course, was nonsense. Nevertheless, in a sweat I switched everything off. In the ensuing silence I realized that I was only being sensible. Beyond the obvious impracticality of running household appliances to no purpose in an empty apartment, the noise might have drowned out the news—which was surely at hand—of my papa’s release on bail. Any minute now the door would open, the telephone ring, so I sank into an understaffed armchair to wait. But for all his promised pulling of strings, I suspected that Uncle Morris was taking his own sweet time.

  I turned on the console Zenith, consecrated by their portrait to the memory of my grandparents, and listened half expecting to hear some word of my father’s difficulties, that he had become an international episode. But while there was no mention of any Kaplan scandal, there was certainly plenty of tsuris to go around. The nation’s waters having proven unruly, other elements were getting into the act. The heartland was dust, its silos like desert relics inundated by time. Kindled by the friction of feet that the marathon dancers had fallen asleep on, a dance hall on Long Island was in flames. A lady flier known as the sweetheart of the jet stream had been taken for its own by thin air, and somewhere in the country where misfortune never struck, a baby had slipped down a hole.

  You think you got problems? After the expense of son Clifford’s wedding (which had to be annulled when it was discovered that the bride had a past), “One Man’s Family” were having to tighten their belts. In “Portia Faces Life,” Portia was patently refusing to do so, having lost her third fiancé to a freak accident. There was trouble at the lodge hall, the Kingfish bilked out of the treasury by a designing female. Jimmy Durante was mortified, Mortimer Snerd afraid, and the Answer Man stumped by a question concerning the nature of truth.

  Spies were in the unions, union defectors among the factory scabs, the criminal element in every walk of life. There were swing fanatics at Roseland, driven certifiably mad by Benny Goodman’s horn. There were homegrown loudmouths complaining that Benny’s style of music could be blamed for the current hekdish in Europe, where, according to H. V. Kalten-born’s pea-shooter delivery, the murder tallies were announced like the scores of sporting events.

  Where had I been that nobody to
ld me how God’s Depression-green earth was going straight to hell? Not that you could pin that one on me. If anybody had contributed to the sorry shape the world was in, it was my screwball family. Myself, all I’d done was go about my own business, abandoning everybody I knew.

  As the morning wore on and the apartment filled with suffocating heat, I gave up on my father’s return. I raised myself with a groan from the armchair and plodded downstairs into the blistering street, where there was still not much to be found in the way of fresh air. A sitting duck for my own dark thoughts and the relentless largess of North Main, I decided that my first impulse was best: I should just keep moving.

  Putting the Pinch behind me at Poplar Avenue, I crossed over into Main Street proper and trudged along in the hothouse sunshine. The air was dense with yellow vapor, smelling a mix of roasted peanuts and carbon monoxide, with a tinge of fresh poop from the horses of the mounted police. Clerks in sweaty seersucker dispatched couriers in a tocsin of bicycle bells. Ladies flashed their legs as they got out of taxis, drawing wolf whistles from the ranks of loafing bankers’ sons. Negro porters sniffed for some hint of a breeze, leaning at impossible angles to pull their laden handcarts rickshaw-style. Nobody seemed to be actively ignoring me, nor did they regard me with any special fondness or disdain.

  When I turned left into Beale, entering the hurly-burly of the pawnshop district, I actually felt a kind of smartness insinuate itself into my step. I began to breathe a little easier as I drew nearer my father’s shop, to feel despite myself a little more like the resourceful Harry of old. But the feeling was short-lived, snuffed out by the sight of the bantam puller, pointlessly restored to his stool before the locked façade of Kaplan’s Loans. There he sat for no earthly good reason, the living reminder of everything that was wrong.

  Touching a desiccated finger to the bill of his nautical cap, he gave me his mechanical salute, after which he had the temerity to croak, “You is late.”

  This was more than the traffic would bear. Here was the two-faced creature himself, my uncle’s functionary and my father’s demon, the one who’d swapped my grandma for a box full of sparkles—and even in that he’d bungled the job so thoroughly that the cops wondered if the operation was queered on purpose. He had a nerve showing his prune puss around Kaplan’s, instead of staying down whatever funkhole he’d made off to when I spotted him last.

  “Late for what, you stinking nigger troll!” I shouted so that the whole farcockte street could hear me—let them hear! And when words did nothing to dent the puller’s stolid composure, I spat full in his monkey face.

  I prepared to stand my ground as he sprang for my throat. Together we would roll into the gutter, splashing blood on the cobbles, biting out plugs of flesh, and spitting teeth. Spectators trying to intervene would themselves be mangled. Meat wagons would draw up as bets went down. But while the gob of spittle slid snail-like down a crease of his stubbled cheek, Oboy remained unruffled. In fact, dabbing with a threadbare sleeve at his wrinkled punim, he actually looked to the cloudless sky like he thought it might rain. Then he leveled his sallow eyes at mine.

  “Mistah Harry,” he rasped, and a squawking sound came from his diaphragm, making me think he was about to launch into a speech. That a reticent shvartzer should suddenly let loose a stream of tortured diction was nothing new to me. Go ahead, I thought, do your worst. But laconic as ever, Oboy said only, “Mistah Harry, looka here.”

  He produced from his pocket what I had to assume was some instrument for settling the score with me. But it was nothing but an ordinary bobby pin, which he was holding forth like a prize I’d won for spitting in his face. While I tried hard to hang on to my anger, in the presence of such knuckleheaded irrelevance it slipped away. The shrunken homunculus had cheated me out of my moment. He hadn’t even done me the courtesy of calling me hypocrite, of accusing me to my miserable face of running out on my father just like he had.

  Or had he? Because, as I turned my head to hide the waterworks that were starting up in my eyes, I had another thought: with its cover blown, Kaplan’s Loans could no longer front for anyone’s funny business. You could credit Oboy with having, however inadvertently, bought the pawnshop a reprieve. Okay, so he’d secured it at the expense of my grandma’s remains. But in playing broker to her posthumous mixed marriage, hadn’t he also released her from a sort of Ellis Island of the soul?

  And now, was it in some similar spirit of emancipation that he was waving this bobby pin under my nose? Like it was the key to the mystery of all his dubious motives? If for no other reason than to end his taunting, I turned back and made a grab for the pin, but the puller snatched it out of my reach. As I was shrugging to show that I’d had it with his stupid game, he hopped down off his stool. He scuttled over to the door of the shop and, lifting the python-thick chain, began to jimmy the giant padlock.

  “Nix!” I told him, looking nervously east and west for lurking detectives. “Cheezit!” When he paid no attention, I stepped toward him and turned my back, making a feeble attempt to shield him from view. I nodded and grinned idiotically at the passers-by, a couple of whom responded with a knowing wink. At one point, turning enough to observe the puller’s progress, I saw that he’d already sprung the lock. He was unwinding the chain—the sound bringing to mind the scene in “Captain Blood” where they release the galley slaves—and folding the lattice. I stood a hotfooted lookout as Oboy nipped inside the shop and tore the sheriff’s notice from the window. In an instant he was back at the door, which he flamboyantly held open for me.

  I might have stood there debating the issue if I hadn’t been so anxious not to make more of a spectacle than we already had. So I hesitated only long enough to give the puller a put-upon sigh, then stepped quickly into the shop. Still, it wasn’t lost on me how Oboy’s ordinarily inscrutable puss—just before he darted forward to resume his perch—had about the liver lips an unprecedented touch of smugness. It was an expression that made me feel eerily as if everything that had happened to date was a part of some devious plan. It had all been by way of arranging a moment when I would walk into these off-limits premises by myself. A dumb idea, I put it behind me as I hurriedly shut the front door.

  Then I wished somebody would tell me what to do next. Of course it didn’t take an Einstein to figure that, in a place as stuffy as this, you might switch on the ceiling fans. And since the lights were attached to the fans, it involved no extra energy to shed a little light on the subject.

  The shop was naturally no less a shambles than it had been the day before, a disorder that took my father’s scrupulous chaos a step or two further. The thought of his upset merchandise was undoubtedly causing Sol Kaplan to turn over in his cell. So I asked myself where was the crime if the proprietor’s son straightened up a bit in his absence. Even as I wondered why bother, I was already going through the motions. I was making myself useful—did I hear somebody say “for a change”?

  At first, afraid that at any second I might be detained by the arm of the law, I worked hastily. I shored up the Saratoga trunks and the toppled Gladstone bags, stood the gardening tools at attention, sorted a shelf of items that were graduated in size from pipes to saxophones. I wound the clocks, plugged in the Wurlitzer, rebaled the scattered magazines and sheet music, stacking them in solid bluffs on either side of the aisle. This was more like it, I thought, and began to relax a bit. I took the time, as I righted the overturned bottles of patentless elixirs, to read their labels: one boasting certain spirit-banishing properties, another the dual attributes of shrinking hemorrhoids and restoring hair. I picked up a stray pair of opera glasses and looked through both ends, examined here a fallen jacket, there a sword in a tarnished silver scabbard, and thought: item, one shiny black clawhammer tailcoat, once owned by a preacher said to have raised the corpse of a man who died owing him money; item, one parade saber with bronze hilt and serial notches, passed according to tradition from expiring father to surviving son at Manassas, San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood …
>
  It didn’t altogether delight me to find that I still had such amazing recall of my father’s ledgers. Here was information that my already overloaded mind could have done without. On the other hand, it was maybe not entirely to my detriment that my head remained a depository for my papa’s accounts, because when I looked in the narrow cubby that he’d set aside for his office, I saw that the top of his old wooden lectern was bare. The cops must have also confiscated his books.

  So it seemed that, with my peculiar knack for remembering, I was in a position to render my father a service. Rather than let him come back from the pokey only to be crushed by the loss of his precious ledgers, I could duplicate them, almost verbatim if I wanted. With identical binders and a little speculation as to prices and rates of interest, I could make a virtual facsimile edition—I could even reproduce the crabbed handwriting that overwhelmed the margins like a flight of crows. Wasn’t my penmanship at least the equal of my papa’s for illegibility? With the exception of the crap acquired during my sabbatical, I could recite for the record the origin of almost every item I recognized and make educated guesses (such as who would know the difference) about those I didn’t. I could invent what I couldn’t copy from memory; it was my talent. But why would I want to do such a thing?

  Why should I be a party to the perpetuation of my papa’s legacy of woolgathering and outright lies, especially now when I had the chance to start from scratch? Because, with Sol Kaplan temporarily out of the way, I found myself possessed of a rare opportunity. Given the run of the place and minus the nuisance of my father’s supervision, I could make some progress toward putting Kaplan’s Loans to rights. There were worse ways of spending your time, I decided, than in taking inventory. If I applied myself, who knew but I might have the new books ready before my father was let out of jail. He’d return to find his accounts in apple-pie order. Every entry would be described with a pruned economy, each debit and credit column a model of sound commercial arithmetic. While I was at it, I might even make a few other changes.