by Paul Hond
But he would not have spoken so much had she not seemed so interested; she questioned him, now like a reporter, again like a child, and listened carefully as he explored the limits of his knowledge. She was easily fascinated, and despite himself he offered what he knew she wanted: anecdotes of his childhood, of the boxing gym, of incidents at the bakery and the stories of certain colorful customers he’d known, all spoken in a local dialect which he’d never really heard in his speech until now.
She, on the other hand, was less forthcoming; if he asked her a question about her past she’d turn it around—I am here to make a new life, she’d say—and the next thing Mickey knew they were driving down to Percy Street, with him pointing out familiar addresses, the faded paint on brick façades, the boundaries of football games waged in traffic.
The next few weeks were like a dream. They held hands in restaurants, took walks in the woods. Mickey pointed out trees, flowers; Emi practiced the names. They drove across the Chesapeake, ate cherrystone clams in tiny colonial-style inns as March storms whipped up all around them. Emi had suggested taking him to New York for a few days (“I’ll show you the city,” she said, “I have friends in Harlem”)—an offer that signaled to Mickey, among other things, her desire to sleep with him again. But Mickey wasn’t able to juggle his schedule at the bakery, and besides, the idea made him nervous: what the hell was he suppose to do in Harlem? What sort of “friends” did she have there? No, he couldn’t do it. And while it pleased him to cite his important business doings as an excuse—he fed a community, after all, he couldn’t just up and go—he was even happier to submit her idea to the future. In April, then, during Passover; the bakery would be closed. They would go to New York, get a decent hotel in a decent area—Joe Blank knew some places. April would make a month since their episode on the bakery table; a whole month. That was enough, Mickey thought. They’d started over and done it right. The next time would be like the first time. Their restraint would be rewarded.
It was a Thursday afternoon in early April. Mickey was standing behind the counter, sleeves rolled to his elbows. Mrs. Applebaum was looking up at him.
“I can get the same buns a nickel cheaper at Sobel’s,” Mrs. Applebaum said. “They’ve got good bargains there.”
“I don’t like to knock the other guy,” Mickey said confidentially, “but they’ve also got roaches like you wouldn’t believe. The size of your finger.”
The shop door opened. It was Emi.
Mickey lit up: this was a surprise. Maybe she’d come to tell him that she’d set things up for New York; they’d been planning to go the following week. “Excuse me, Mrs. Applebaum,” Mickey said. “Morris’ll take care of you.”
Mickey walked around the counter and joined Emi at the door. They were out of earshot, but Mickey knew that his uncle was watching with a critical, mischievous eye. Morris had yet to be introduced.
“Mickey,” Emi said. “I must speak with you.” She looked upset.
“Are you okay?” said Mickey. “How did you get here?”
“I took the bus.”
Someone knocked at the window. It was Joe Blank. His white Rambler was double parked.
Mickey placed his hand on Emi’s shoulder. “Excuse me a minute,” he said. He’d known Joe since they were little kids, sneaking into The Cluster to watch the westerns, and maybe only two or three times had he seen such an expression on Joe’s dark face. Always for a death.
Mickey went outside. “What is it?” he said, thinking maybe something had happened to Joe’s wife or kid.
“Didn’t you hear?” said Joe, narrowing his small eyes.
“Hear what?”
Joe looked up and down the street. “You’d better close up the store and get the hell home,” he said. “There’s gonna be trouble.”
“What is it?” said Mickey.
Joe lit a cigarette. “It’s all over the radio,” he said. “Somebody shot Martin Luther King. Killed him. The fellas down my place says it’s gonna be murder around here.”
“Jesus,” said Mickey. That explained Emi’s demeanor, he thought. “Where did it happen? A white guy did it?”
“Bet on it,” said Joe.
Mickey shook his head. “Son of a bitch.”
“I gotta go,” said Joe. “I’ll talk to you later.” He hurried off to his car.
Mickey looked across the street. Where Klein’s Shoes used to be, a group of six or seven Negroes stood around, drinking, carrying on as usual. The sky was a deep, day-ripened blue. A soft breeze picked up.
He then heard a police siren, coming closer.
Joe’s Rambler sped off.
Mickey went back into the bakery and made an announcement: “We’re closing a little early tonight. Everybody out.” Better safe, he thought.
“Everybody out?” said Mrs. Applebaum. “Is that any way to treat your customers?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. A.,” Mickey said. “It’s nothing personal.” He glanced at Emi, but she was looking out the window. “Everyone to the register.”
“Your father, God keep him, should hear the way you speak. There was a man who knew from polite. Oy, how he used to walk the older ladies to the streetcar! Your mother never appreciated him.”
Mickey hopped over the counter.
“What is it?” said Morris.
Another customer, a colored woman, looked at him.
“Take,” Mickey said abruptly. “Everybody take what you want.” He began grabbing bread from the shelves and stuffing it into bags; with Passover coming up, all this leavened bread would end up in the garbage anyhow, assuming he kept the store closed tomorrow.
Morris said, “What the hell’s going on?”
Mickey looked at the colored woman, but could not meet her eyes. He pushed a bag into her arms. Without a word, she turned and walked out.
“What’s the idea?” said Morris.
“Just take the money out of the register and the safe,” Mickey said, shoving more bags into the arms of the other customers.
“I don’t need all this bread,” said Mrs. Applebaum, peeking into the bag Mickey had given her. “It’s going to be holiday already.”
“So feed it to the birds,” said Mickey.
There was a babble of questions and protests, but Mickey managed to herd everyone through the door. “Sorry to inconvenience everyone,” he said. He locked the door and displayed the CLOSED sign.
“Mickey, what is it?” said Emi.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Morris, dumping the register drawer into a money bag.
Mickey scratched his head. “Martin Luther King was—murdered. It could mean trouble.”
Emi placed her hand over her mouth. Apparently this was the first she’d heard of it.
“I’ll be damned,” said Morris. “What’s it going to be next?”
They left through the back way; Mickey’s white Buick was parked there.
The balmy air had a cool underside to it, like the feeling you get when you remove a bandage.
Emi insisted that Morris sit in front.
“You’ll come home with me,” Mickey told her. He hadn’t planned on bringing her to his house, not yet, but the situation seemed to demand it. It was like being in a storm, a hurricane, like hearing word of approaching missiles. He wanted to hold her. This was life. He didn’t want to be alone.
Morris turned around in his seat and held out his hand. “I’m Morris, by the way,” he said. “The uncle.”
“I’m Emilie.”
Mickey started the engine.
“Where are you from?” Morris said.
“Many places. Mostly I am from France.”
“Is that right?”
Morris had no use for the French—poodles to the Germans, he called them. He said, “I knew some fellas personally that landed on Normandy—one died in the water. They kept me back, though, on account of my eyesight. I helped build ships down there in the harbor. Ever heard of the John W. Brown?”
“She doesn
’t want to hear your life story, Morris.”
“How do you know?” Morris said. He turned back to Emi. “Try spending an eighteen-hour day in a shipyard in the middle of January.”
Mickey turned on the radio. A voice said: “… had been in Memphis to lead protests on behalf of striking sanitation workers. President Johnson has—”
He switched it off. Not now, he thought. He could be jealous of this news, he realized, jealous of its power over the emotions. He wanted Emi to himself.
“So, this is it,” said Emi as they walked up the front steps. “Your house.” They had just dropped Morris off at his house near the racetrack. “I like it very much.”
“When my father died, I had a choice. Sell it or keep it.”
“I love the look of bricks.”
Mickey laughed. “I could show you some houses.” He imagined leading her on a little tour of the city—all those Victorian row houses of brick and stone, the church steeples and cupolas and conical turrets of corner houses blackened like witches’ hats against the orange sunset; he’d tell her that the word Baltimore was Gaelic for “place of the great house,” and then show her some of his favorites.
He opened the door. He supposed he should be a nervous wreck—it wasn’t often that he brought home a woman, let alone one of this caliber—but the news of the day had rescued him, had deepened the afternoon, widened it. Once inside, he went straight to the bay window and opened the curtains. “Ever grow African violets?”
“No,” said Emi. “I don’t keep plants. They would die.”
“Too busy, is that it?”
“No,” she said. “I think it is a gift, to be able to nurture something. I admire this talent in others. For myself, I don’t have it.”
“Sure you do,” said Mickey. “Everyone does.” He looked at his plants. Damned things. A bunch of happy green leaves. They couldn’t care less if they flowered, and here it would have been nice to have had some blossoms on display for Emi. “Can I get you anything? Coffee?”
“No, thank you. Is there a radio?”
“Upstairs,” Mickey said. “Or you can watch the television.” He pointed to it: a brand-new Zenith from Diamond Electric, with big fat dials and antennae stretched to a giant V. Jack Diamond had given him a hell of a deal.
“Upstairs? Is there a bed?”
“Are you okay?”
“Just tired,” she said. She seemed distracted, as if there were something else.
Mickey led her upstairs. He was glad he’d made his bed that morning. Usually he didn’t.
She entered his room without hesitation and sat on the edge of the bed. “This was your parents’ room?” she said, eyeing the relics that the elder Lerners had left: the antique hat tree in the corner (several of his father’s hats still hung there), and the curved vanity table against the wall, where Rose Lerner would brush her wavy red hair in front of the mirror. Her gold-plated brush was still there, hairs and all, along with the tiny glass figurines—elephants, giraffes, camels—that she had collected and fondled with the simple amusement of a queen.
“Yes,” said Mickey. “This was my parents’ room.” He went to the cedar chest of drawers, upon which stood his parents’ wedding portrait: the bride in a chair, bouquet spilling over her knees, barely smiling; the groom standing by, hand on the back of the chair, his casual stateliness seeming to have been strenuously arrived at under the photographer’s fussy direction. “This isn’t a great picture of them, but—”
“Mickey?”
Mickey froze. There was something in her tone.
“Mickey,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
Mickey placed his hand on his belly. Pregnant. The very sound of the word! Worse than cancer—those ugly medical syllables, so much like “malignant,” or “stagnant”—and Emi, protected by the armor of a half-learned language, pronounced it gamely, managing to draw up from the roots all its stigmatic horror.
“Jesus,” Mickey said, and then it hit him like a shot: it wasn’t his child, but someone else’s. Shaw’s, he thought. The black pianist.
“Mickey—what should we do?”
It took a moment for him to understand. “Whoa,” he said. The room seemed to tilt under his weight, and everything he had thought a moment ago shifted the other way. “Are you sure?” he said. “From one night?”
“I’m sure.”
He dared not suggest that she may have been with someone else; what good would it do, anyway? She’d just angrily deny it, turn against him entirely, maybe even resort to something desperate. He saw scandal, threats—
“Mickey.”
He couldn’t look at her. “Just give me a second,” he said, holding up his hand. He thought back to their night of passion, now a fateful night. And hadn’t he known it, even then? Hadn’t his climax come with a certain shrewd eye toward the future? And hadn’t her passion also been colored by a vague sort of ambition? Was this really such a shock?
He walked over and kissed her forehead, not quite sure what he was doing, trying his best to follow his instincts. He sat and put his hand on her shoulder, gently brought her head to his chest. He could feel, in the way she yielded, a pity for his awkwardness, and so found himself trapped in the embrace, holding her head as though it were an incriminating object that someone had thrust into his hands in a crowd.
He stood up, making the withdrawal seem natural by going straight to the chest of drawers and straightening the wedding portrait. The faces there were too young to reprove or advise; it was their innocence that stung the eye, their simple propriety.
“Mickey. Are you angry?” She was now curled up on the bed, her head propped up on one hand.
He turned to her. “No, no,” he said. He felt a surge of tenderness—a measure of his need for an ally, he supposed. “I’ll do anything you want.”
“What’s there to do?”
“I don’t know. What do people do? Get married?” He tried a laugh. “See one of those doctors?”
Emi said nothing, only smoothed her hand over the blanket. Mickey remembered how she had gotten dressed that night at the bakery, those slow, deliberate movements that suggested poise after a narrow escape.
Mickey sat down next to her on the bed, moved a strand of hair from her face. She smiled weakly.
He said, “We have options.”
She took his hand in her own and closed her eyes. “I think I’m afraid,” she said.
“Don’t be. Everything’s going to be fine.”
The wet, metallic smell of the window screens mixed with the scent of the twin fir trees that flanked the front of the house; soon the azaleas would burst all pink and red and white in the flower bed, insects would crawl, mists of pollen and drizzle would glaze the windowsills.
Mickey said, “I’ll let you get some sleep.”
That night there came a knock at the back door. It was Joe. He had a six-pack of National, which meant they’d be discussing his marriage. “You got a few minutes?” he said.
Mickey stepped aside as Joe entered. “Sure.”
Joe set the beer on the kitchen table and plopped down in a chair. “Barbara wants me home in an hour. Laurie’s got the chicken pox. This is my life.” With a wave of the hand he dismissed that life. “Don’t have kids,” he said, and opened a beer.
Mickey joined him at the table. “I saw you today, you were gone like a bat outta hell.”
“That’s what I came to talk to you about. I wasn’t just blowing air out of my asshole when I said there was gonna be trouble. Did you look at the news tonight? All the politicians are calling for calm. They know what’s gonna happen—Detroit all over again.” He shook his head, sighed. “Christ, I shoulda moved the store out of the city years ago. You too. And Buddy and Marv and the whole bunch of us. Now we’re stuck down there. Sitting ducks.”
“Well, look, Joe, nothing’s happened yet.”
“Ducks on the pond.”
“This could blow over. And besides, if worse comes to worse, insurance’ll
cover you.”
“What, for theft? Big deal! They can take all the parts and tires they want.”
“So what are you worried about?”
Joe looked at him. “Fire, for Chrissake. Getting burned to the ground. That’s what I’m worried about.” He slurped his beer and set the bottle down hard. “We both took out the same policy, right? Well, I talked to a fella today. ‘Damage incurred in a civil disturbance isn’t covered,’ he says. Meanwhile, they want an arm and a leg.”
Mickey tapped his fingers on the tablecloth. “I think you’re getting yourself worked up over nothing. As much as the area’s changed, have you ever had a problem?”
“But this is different. This is Martin Luther King, for Chrissakes.”
“That’s right, and his way was always the peaceful way. Nonviolence. He always told the colored: nonviolence.”
Joe snorted. “You think every black in the city is lining up at a church right now?”
“How should I know?”
“That’s the problem with you, Mick. You have too much faith in people. You’re gonna get screwed.”
“Look, I know how rough it is. I see the same things you do. But the colored who come into my store are always as polite as anybody else. Better, in fact. You never hear a complaint.”
“So you feel secure then, is that it? Invincible?”