The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  “Your people?” I said.

  “Professional associates,” Shushan said. “Also...” he nodded in the opposite direction, where three cars were parked separately from the rest, as if they were visiting a grave at the site reserved for the Loyal Sons of Bielsk. From one car three men emerged, one carrying a camera. Only cops could dress that badly. From each of the other two cars a lone photographer emerged. I was wrong: In the matter of bas couture, the press actually outdid the police. One of these press photographers—probably from the Daily Mirror itself, which covered organized crime the way the New York Times covered Congress—stood on his car’s rear bumper the better to take in the field. Ira-Myra’s came up to us. Shushan shook him off. “We don’t want a scene,” he said. “Let the vultures lunch.” He turned back to me. “Russy, if I read it I’m gonna cry. People don’t want to see that. You read it. I got confidence.”

  4.

  For a supposed illiterate, a man whose deses and doses seemed to scream Brooklyn, it was a hell of a eulogy. Written in a neat hand that probably had not changed since seventh grade, it was clean, clear and grammatical. And organized. I could have used it as a model term paper at Brooklyn College. It began with a topic sentence meant to catch attention—“Goldie Cats was not a great woman but a good woman, who raised her children with love and was kind to everyone she liked and hell on wheels to those she didn’t”—and then proceeded into biography. Born in Eastern Poland, Cats mère had come to New York as a young girl, worked in a sweat shop, and lived most of her American years in the same railroad flat in Brownsville, tub in the kitchen, little heat or hot water, and after her husband’s passing had been forced to take in piecework from the garment district to support the children she taught to respect their elders, work hard and be good to each other. Her daughter had grown up to be a professional, her son a businessman. That’s what it said, businessman. She was semi-literate in English, her ability to write minimal, but she had a good command of her native tongue, and kept diaries in flawless Yiddish on the back of bills and wrapping paper. More than once she was called in to confront her son’s exasperated teachers; always she defended him. It was not that either child could do no wrong, but that when it came to the outside world she would defend her children to the end. She lived by a code, and this extended to giving. No matter how little she earned she always set a portion aside for charity. A blue-and-white tin pushka from the Jewish National Fund always hung on a nail in the kitchen—every month or so someone came around the neighborhood to collect pennies and nickels from the Jewish hovels. She taught her children right from wrong, how to welcome guests, and never to take an insult. “When someone hits you, hit him back ten times,” she would say. “Pound him into the earth. The Nazis never disappeared—they’re all around us. Nobody loves the Jews because we didn’t accept that a simple rabbi from Galilee is God.” She tried to send her son to Hebrew school in the afternoons, but he was too busy with American things like basketball and, later, “business.” He did not graduate from high school, but her daughter earned a BA magna cum laude in psychology from Hunter College, then the city’s institution for women, an MA from Columbia in social work, then a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She now “helped people help themselves” as a therapist in private practice on the Upper East Side. Both her children took care of Goldie, supporting her financially as soon as they could, and always making sure to visit at least once a week. They begged her to move to a more comfortable dwelling, but she preferred to live modestly, to the end of her life in the same cold-water flat. “Goldie Cats was a good woman all her days,” I read from the neatly handwritten pages. “She did not set out to be great, to have university degrees or fame or riches. She became great by being good to those who deserved it, defending those she loved from anyone who would threaten them. She was the shining light of pure goodness, and her greatness was in one simple and indisputable fact. She did not know it.”

  Getting an audience to start bawling is no great accomplishment at a funeral service, but here even the rabbi and the mortician lost it. An Hispanic looking man standing to Shushan’s left began sobbing so heavily the lapels of his light gray suit began to turn as black as his shirt—I watched as he kissed Shushan on the cheek, his tears transferring to the bereaved son. Beyond the few family members and the crowd from the Bhotke Society I could see the Italians wiping their eyes with their white breast-pocket handkerchiefs, and the black hoodlums as well letting tears fall on their black silk suits. Most of the Chinese remained poker faced, possibly because they were as little acquainted with English oratory as its deceased subject—though two younger men in long overcoats turned away so as not to weep publicly.

  Over my shoulder I was aware that pictures were being taken. It was not a sound. The clicking of shutters would not be heard over the muted persistent cries of the mourners. The photographers’ presence was reflected in the faces of the crowd. Once a camera appears few people are so single-minded not to pose, even if the pose is to feign ignorance of the lens.

  The rabbi made a final blessing and gave Shushan a prayer book, out of which he read, haltingly but respectably, the prayer for the dead, which in Jewish practice is a hymn of praise to God. Shushan then picked up a spade and began shoveling dirt into the open grave. One by one—except for the cops and press photographers—all the males present did the same, even the Italians and the blacks and the Chinese. When they were done, I picked up the shovel. I must have been shoveling for a long time—three spadefuls are considered adequate—when I felt a hand on my elbow. When I looked up I saw the cops and the press photographers packing up. The Hispanic-looking individual, having regained his composure, was helping Shushan’s sister into a long limousine. Ira-Myra’s stood silently by the red Caddy. The show was over.

  “You done good, kid,” Shushan said. “I want you should help out a little more, with the mourning period, and then you’re a free man.” Under his reddened eyes he offered a wan smile. “If you want to be.”

  “Whatever you need,” I said. And I meant it. This was possibly the first selfless thing I had ever done, and done well, and despite having been dragooned into it, I did not want it to stop. I let Shushan guide me toward the gangsters who stood in three distinct groups, like separate species, at the far end of the Bhotke Society lot.

  “I gave Feivel the dentist some bills to take the Bhotke people to lunch,” he said. “They were nice to come. My mother—”

  “She was a fine woman,” I said. “You wrote a beautiful eulogy.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “But you read it good. My mom, she would have been proud to see this crowd, very respectable people.”

  At which point we came up to the less respectable. Starting with the Italians each kissed Shushan Cats on the cheek with a warmth it was hard to square with the fear they must have caused every day of their lives. The blacks took Shushan’s hand and clasped him tight, not kissing but squeezing the smaller man in a bear hug and clapping him—once, twice, three times—on the back. One of these, who wore mirrored aviator sunglasses so that a third of his face was covered, said: “Your mama sound just like my mama, Mr. Shushan. I got faith they in heaven together.”

  “It’s got to be, Royce,” Shushan said. “No bullshit segregation upstairs.”

  “Amen,” Royce said, as the entire group of his colleagues joined in.

  When he came to the Chinese each made a little bow, not a Japanese deep bow, but a tiny inclination of the chin, and each said something I could not catch it was muttered so low.

  Shushan shook their hands, then stepped back, raising his voice and speaking to all of his professional associates, his eyes finding theirs. “You guys want to join me in something to eat?” Silence. He turned to the goombahs. “There a decent Italian place out here?” The gavones shook their heads. One of them, a thin elegant man in his seventies wearing small dark glasses, who might have been their leader, addressed the others in Italian. Again they shook their h
eads. Shushan then looked at the black guys, but didn’t even ask. Who knew what shvartzers ate? Ribs probably, and with waffles yet. The Italians wouldn’t go along. The negroes nodded yes. “Okay, then it’s us minorities,” he said. He turned to the Chinese. “You gentlemen know a good place for chinks?”

  5.

  From what I could see, either Shushan Cats lived in hotel rooms or where he really lived was a secret. Both turned out to be true. For the mourning period he took me to a three-bedroom suite in a residence hotel on East Sixty-Third Street, where the staff seemed to know him.

  The Westbury was one of those old fashioned places that have gone the way of cars with fins and family magazines like Life and Look and the Saturday Evening Post—over the next decade all three weeklies would bite the dust. It was the beginning of a period of change in America. Vietnam was a gathering cloud on the horizon, Castro had consolidated his power in Cuba as a Davidian rival to America’s Goliath, the threat of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union hung in the air like stale smoke, and the Dodgers—having left Brooklyn to stew in its own bitter juice—were in Los Angeles: a footnote to an historical footnote, but a landmark to Brooklynites, who for once were at a loss for words. We had called them Bums when they were in Brooklyn, so it was difficult to think of an epithet. Someone suggested “the former Bums,” which at least had a finality to it. About the players diehard Dodger fans never faltered. We knew the move was not the fault of the heroes we had rooted for and loved: Carl Furillo, Duke Snyder, Sandy Koufax, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Peewee Reese. Things were changing, and the Dodgers were just a part of it. The month before the Saturday Evening Post trumpeted a story on its cover entitled: A Distinguished Negro Reporter Asks: ARE MY PEOPLE READY FOR EQUALITY? That week Life ran a photo of Bob Hope on its cover, plus headlines of stories to be found inside: INCOME TAXES—Why they must be cut now, IQ TESTING—A scandal in our schools, and HOW THE MOB CONTROLS CHICAGO, the fourth in a series called Crime in America.

  If this sounds like another time, it was. In New York most of the West Side was still raffish, downtown down-at-the-heels, and the Upper East Side an island of tranquility. Among the townhouses and high-rises were still residence hotels like the Westbury, where the tiny lobby led to a couple of small elevators opening out to narrow corridors carpeted in beige and rose, which in turn led to rooms of such size, even grandeur in some haute bourgeois way, that they might be considered the other side of the telescopic lens from the city’s palatial hostelries, where grand lobby flowed into grand lobby, banks of huge elevators standing to one side like brass-lined bank vaults, these letting out to endless broad corridors until the ultimate let-down of tiny rooms, scaled down furniture and bathrooms you could not turn around in without shutting the door. The Westbury later was turned into a condominium. Shushan did well with it.

  He had inherited the place by paying the gambling debt of the hotel’s owner. For this individual—the father of a much-married and combed-over real estate developer who these days likes to put his name on buildings—this was not a good deal but the only one. With interest on the loan mounting at two percent a week—the lenders in fact may have been at Shushan’s mother’s funeral—in a year he would lose all of what he owned. When Shushan came in as white knight, both buyer and seller profited. Shushan invested in redoing a couple of floors, and set up a plan for upgrading the rest. Shushan was not a hotelier, but he was a businessman. And he liked having the use of the hotel.

  The suite itself was furnished attractively but impersonally, the rooms elegant but neutral. The residents were mostly people from the nearby United Nations or businessmen being rotated in and out of New York for several weeks or months. The furniture was what was then known as Danish modern, inoffensive teak and mahogany, and there were no zebra-skin rugs or outrageous paintings on the walls—though a close look at the only painting, a black-on-black abstract over the fireplace, would have shown that it was by Max Ernst’s son Jimmy, in its understated elegance itself a statement about the man who resided here: you could not tell precisely what it was. In the large living room two green-leather sofas faced each other, dominating the room, the carpeting a deeply patterned tan and eggplant wool, the walls putty, and the drapes sheer. When Shushan showed me to where he had chosen to receive guests for the shiva period I expected his sister would be installed in the second bedroom, but I learned that Esther—she liked to be called Terri; her brother demurred—preferred staying at her own place ten blocks uptown, where she also maintained her practice.

  “She’s not what you’d call a traditional girl,” Shushan said. He had taken a seat on a low wooden crate facing both green-leather sofas, the crate a symbol of mourning within what struck me as a stage setting: refined, unostentatious, clearly expensive but quietly so. “I wanted her to stay here, make a united front. We don’t have much family. There were people in Europe but they didn’t make it. My mom couldn’t get them out. They couldn’t get out. Who knows what happened? Well, you’re a smart boy. You know what happened.”

  “I know.”

  “Esther, she’s a modern girl. I don’t even think she’ll get married. Maybe when she’s older. I’d like to be an uncle.”

  “You’re not married either.”

  “In my line of work it’s not a pleasure for the wife. The dagos they keep their women in the kitchen and spend their nights with all kinds of bimbos, some of them a long time. I mean decades with the same goomah. A habit from the old country. A man who didn’t have a belly and a mistress he wasn’t a man. The black guys and the Chinese I couldn’t tell you. They got their ways. You know that Royce. Thirty-six years old and he’s a grandfather. Give him credit he takes care of the family. But mostly they’re not nesters, you know. Must be some African thing, or from slavery. The Chinese they’re a whole puzzle inside a mystery inside a...” Here he paused, as though either unsure of the word or unwilling to say it.

  “An enigma,” I said.

  “Yeah, a enigma.”

  “Winston Churchill,” I said. “You’re quoting Winston Churchill.”

  “Tough man,” Shushan said. “Without him Hitler would be sitting in that palace...”

  “Buckingham Palace.”

  “Yeah, but he stood up and got counted.”

  Despite my curiosity I restrained myself from asking what a two-bit bum the tabloids liked to call Shoeshine Cats was doing quoting Churchill. I doubted anyone at the funeral, except maybe the more cerebral members of the Bhotke Society, knew enough to quote Churchill. “If you don’t need anything I’d better be going.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  The rush was this: I didn’t work for Shushan Cats, had done enough as shanghaied representative of the Bhotke Society, and had a life. I had to clean up what was left of my apartment, decide what to do about my car, which since it was already pretty smashed up on Eastern Parkway was probably stripped of wheels, radio, battery and anything else of value, and I had to be at school the next morning for a conference with the professor who had excused me from class on the basis of a promised paper on Huckleberry Finn. Aside from that I was still in bad shape from Celeste’s brothers. And aside from that this was getting a little claustrophobic. “No rush,” I said. “But I think my work here is done.”

  “You hungry?”

  “We just ate Chinese.”

  “Well, you know what they say,” Shushan said, clearly straining. “Ten minutes after you eat a Chinese girl you’re hungry again. How about a drink? I could use one. There’s a bar in the kitchen. Whatever you want, help yourself. I’ll have a vodka from the freezer. Just as it comes. You like vodka?”

  “I do, sir.”

  “Forget sir. Shushan. You know it’s the name of a city?”

  “The capital of Persia at the time of—” For the first time I got it.

  “Purim. That’s how we got named. For the holiday. I got the city. Esther got the queen’s name. My mom and dad, they didn’t know much English, but they knew their Jewish stuf
f. She always said if they ever had another kid he’d be named for Mordecai. That’ll make a tough kid in Brooklyn. But the old man was out of the picture before it could happen.”

  “My father too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I mean, he died three years ago. He’s actually buried near your mom, my mom too. Practically neighbors.”

  “I didn’t see you go over to another grave,” Shushan said. “You’re supposed to put a pebble on it, to show you visited.”

  “I was busy,” I said. “And I don’t like graves.”

  “Me neither.”

  We sat in silence for a while, he on the crate, myself on the couch, until I got up and found a bottle of Stolichnaya, then an unknown brand, in the little fridge. I poured a slug into a water glass. It came out half frozen, slow and thick. What the hell. I poured myself one as well.

  “It’s okay for me to drink,” Shushan said. “I read up on Jewish mourning. You got to cover mirrors so you won’t look at yourself after a death. And you don’t greet people. I mean, when they come in you don’t say hello. You just take them in stride. You talk with them, about anything. There’s no limit. But you don’t say hello and goodbye. A greeting is supposed to be joyous. They’re supposed to bring food. Also no music. And you’re not supposed to change your clothes or wash more than so you don’t make people uncomfortable. And someone is supposed to be with you, take care of things like.”