Something overtook her again.
“Heshele, maybe you should go home now. I’ll see you later with the Mama and Papa. I want to rest. Yes.”
“Bama, are you sick?”
She shook her head.
“No, no, Heshele. Don’t worry about me. I just must think about something.” She jabbed her index finger at her forehead. “I’m not as smart as my Heshele. I go slow.”
On his bike, pedaling distractedly, he thought: Is she dying? He chased away the idea. Bama was indestructible. She could chase death as easily as the evil eye.
In a few hours his parents and he would make their obligatory monthly pilgrimage to Bama’s Erev Shabbes meal. The other three Fridays, Harry alone represented the Catzkers. With some time to kill, he pedaled toward one of his favorite Coney attractions: Lazar, the tailor.
Lazar was a man in perpetual motion. He ran and jumped around his tiny shop as if competing in a decathlon. He was a magician extracting endless pins from his mouth to design a road map of alterations on a dress or suit, an explorer hunting through hanging clothes for a garment promised that day, or an angel surrounded by clouds released by his pressing machine. Seated, his pace did not slacken. His foot pumped as he guided cloth through an ancient Singer or he rapidly sewed by hand, biting off excess thread. His face dripped sweat as his long, curly black hair bounced to the rhythm of his decisive movements.
Harry entered the store. Lazar spit out some thread.
“Hello Heshele,” he said, elevating a button on an overcoat by winding black thread beneath it. “You didn’t visit me last week. I missed you. You weren’t mad on me?”
“No,” Harry lied.
His eyes led Lazar to the pressing machine, which measured about five feet long and two feet wide. To operate it, Lazar would smooth a garment onto the waist-high, stationary bottom slab which was covered with tan cloth. The matching top, an arm’s length above, was pulled down by its protruding wooden handle until it snugly sandwiched the material. Simultaneously, Lazar depressed a pianolike pedal which shot wrinkle-smoothing steam through the jacket, trousers or dress.
The last time Harry had visited, Lazar had not used the machine. He had teased Harry with false starts. After an hour Harry had left without saying good-bye.
Lazar smiled. “OK boychik, here I go. How can I resist such a boy.”
He rummaged through a pile of clothes and pulled out a dark-blue double breasted suit.
“Mr. Menter. Fine material. In hell may his deformed bones rot for the money he takes from me.”
Lazar approached the machine. Harry stood behind him.
After positioning and steadying the suit jacket, the tailor stood on tiptoes to tug at the handle. The top and bottom came together with an explosive hiss. Harry closed his eyes for an instant. When he opened them Lazar was a man in the clouds. A man in hell. A man entering heaven.
Lazar repositioned the jacket. Louder hisses. Thicker steam. Harry saw only unrecognizable shapes. It was the Creation. It was In the beginning. It was more magic than on ten Bowerys. And it was his alone!
Lazar neatly placed the suit on a hanger, handling the material with crisp familiarity. He turned to Harry, who stood, head bowed to fulfill his part of the bargain. Lazar tousled his hair and pinched his cheek. Harry didn’t like his cheek pinched, but it would have been worth it even if Lazar were a violent flesh grabber, which the tailor was not.
The expected flow from Lazar’s eyes slowly made of the tailor’s cheeks a riverbed surrounding an island of thin nose. Lazar’s wife and two children had been suffocated to death by thick smoke from a Nazi incendiary bomb rising into the family’s Berlin apartment from the tailor shop below.
At home his father was seated on the couch in the living room reading a large, thick book that rested in his lap. His mother had not yet arrived.
“Hello, Heshele,” his father said, smiling and rubbing the tip of his nose. “I am a clairvoyant. I see in by my crystal nose that you have just come from a gefilte fish factory.”
“Twenty silver dollars for the gentleman in the balcony,” Harry replied, imitating the voice of Dr. I.Q., host of a popular radio quiz show.
He sat beside his father.
“What does Dr. Freud say about gefilte fish?”
“It’s not Freud,” his father said, pointing to the title at the top left-hand corner of the page.
“Hey,” Harry said, “Hamlet. We read that in school last week. Some of the kids call it ‘Omelet.’”
“You think that’s funny, Heshele?”
“Not really, Pop.”
“Good. How did you like it?”
“Pretty good. I could see Errol Flynn playing Hamlet, especially that last dueling scene. And Boris Karloff as his father’s ghost. Although you might have to change the ending. Errol Flynn never dies.”
His father laughed.
“How about the language?”
“There was a lot I didn’t really get. But some of it was like when Aba recites his poetry or when I hear Fats Waller play the piano. It puts a rhythm in your body.”
His father’s eyes widened. He looked surprised. But Harry recognized an expression of admiration. He drank the sweetness.
“What about Polonius?” his father asked.
“Who?”
“Polonius, Ophelia’s father.”
“Oh, yeah. Hamlet kills him, right?”
“Right.”
“What about him, Pop?
“He’s the best-drawn character in the play. In fact, one of the greatest of literary creations.”
“Why, Pop? I hardly remember him.”
“One day you will, Heshele. He is not for your age.”
“What’s so great about him?”
“He’s a bore. A boring old fool.”
“And that makes him great?”
“Yes, Heshele. Because Shakespeare puts this dullard’s thoughts into language so exquisite, so beautiful to the ear, that banality is transformed into wisdom and the most unoriginal man imaginable seems a creative sage.”
His father turned the thin pages, creasing them with heavy fingers. His excitement when discussing literature changed a phlegmatic man of slow movement into a frenetic enthusiast, eager to share his ardor.
“See, see here!” His father’s nicotine-stained finger ran over the small print: This above all: to thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night follows day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
His father patted Harry on the lips with the tips of his fingers, a habit he had learned from his own father, a scholar who thus readied pupils to ingest wisdom.
“Not a comma of originality. Pure bourgeois homily taken from the book of common banal prayer. But Shakespeare, the miraculous tailor, wraps it in Joseph’s glittering coat. You understand, Heshele?”
“Well …”
“Wait,” his father interrupted. “See here: Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; For loan oft …”
Harry heard the front door open. His father obviously did not. His mother stopped at the threshold of the room and listened.
“Hah,” she snapped, “I’d like to see the day that you became a lender, Mr. Rothschild.”
His father shrugged.
“Velia, you have an intensity of focus that I envy. I am surprised that you are not rich.”
She jabbed an index finger at him.
“We are not … Well, are we going to our monthly poisoning? It is time.”
“Velia …” his father began.
“Moishe, I don’t care if the world and Mars are about to blow up, you are coming.”
The narrow entrance to Bama’s bungalow home framed actors walking onto a stage. Harry strode in, confident of his reception. Velia took short, tentative steps, like a bather testing the ocean’s temperature, as she tried to read Bama’s mood. The final entrant lacked correct wardrobe: bedroom slippers and trousers slit up the leg, the uniform of prisoners walking the last mile to the electric chair. Catzker shuffled in, trippin
g over the raised threshold and stealing center stage with a tottering star turn.
Bama, wrapped in a soiled apron, kissed Harry, nodded to her daughter and shouted to her son-in-law not to fall on the porcelain knickknacks that infested the room. She walked to a table on which four place settings of thick ironstone dishes, Woolworth wine and water glasses and gleaming silver cutlery were laid out on a damask tablecloth whose edges almost touched the floor. A challa, a bottle of kosher wine and an ornate pewter kiddush cup were lined up in front of one setting.
When each stood behind a chair, she lit the white Shabbes candles dwarfed by their thick silver candleholders, while sing-songing a prayer welcoming the Sabbath.
She nodded to Catzker who overfilled the narrow kiddush cup with wine, marking the cloth.
“Klutz,” Velia said.
He recited the kiddush, sipped, then tore off a piece of challa, raced through the blessing of the bread and sought Bama’s permission for all to be seated.
Bama retreated to the kitchen to fetch the first course: gefilte fish.
“Go help her,” Velia said to Harry.
“She always tells me she doesn’t need help.”
“So. Let her say it. You understand nothing.”
In the kitchen, he was turned away but allowed to accompany her and the fish. She doled out the lumps which resembled giant amoebae. Harry watched his father inundate his portion with powerful white horseradish to kill the taste.
“So,” Velia said to her mother, “what’s new?,”—bending back to her food while awaiting a perfunctory answer.
Bama was silent.
Velia raised her head.
“I am going back to Warsaw,” Bama said, her eyes seemingly already there.
“You are what!” Velia shouted. “You take a trip now, with everybody talking about war?”
“Not a trip. Forever. And I am going to be married.”
The Catzkers stared open-mouthed as if directed to register simultaneous shock.
Bama laid an envelope on the table.
“My sisters arranged everything. They sent the boat ticket. I leave next Wednesday. I will marry Salik Rabinowitz, the husband of my dear childhood friend Manya Persky, may she rest in peace. We will live in Warsaw in his apartment. He is a wealthy man and an Orthodox Jew. He would never think of coming to godless America, so I will be safe.”
Velia’s mouth moved but fashioned only strangulated sounds, like a Hollywood Indian repeating ugh. Catzker stared at Bama, blinking periodically, as if to confirm a shaky reality by its reappearance. Harry, feeling a need to break the ominous silence, chose the automatic response to an announcement of marriage:
“Mazel tov, Bama.”
His mother uttered a short shriek which unlocked her verbal capacity.
“Mazel tov! Mazel tov! A monster I have brought into this world.”
She turned to Bama.
“Mama, are you crazy? Europe is on the brink of war. One war in Warsaw was not enough for you?”
Bama waved off the words.
“All my nine sisters say there will be no war in Poland They are in Warsaw. They know better than you.”
She reached into the envelope and extracted a passport-size photo, which she handed to Harry.
“This is Salik Rabinowitz.”
The man’s features were hardly distinct. The certainties were baldness, ears attached his head at not much less than a ninety-degree angle and a large, round nose. Harry immediately thought of a turtle he had seen recently in an animated cartoon.
He smiled, nodded his head and offered the photo to his mother, who pushed it away. The photo fluttered to the floor. He bent down to retrieve it. Bama’s arm restrained him.
“Let her do it.”
“Tell her!” Velia screamed at Moishe.
His father, who, absentmindedly, or inadvertently, had been spooning pure horseradish into his mouth, began to cough violently. He grabbed for a pitcher of water and knocked it over. The water ran off the table. His mother jumped back and up. Bama snatched the wet photo and ran for a mop. Harry followed her to the kitchen, filled a glass with water and put it in his father’s hand. He gulped greedily. The coughing stopped. Tears covered his face.
“Tell her,” his mother commanded, standing away from the table where Bama vigorously swished the mop.
“Mrs. Fishman,” he said, asking for her attention which remained with the mop. He shrugged and continued:
“Things are not good for Jews in Europe today …”
“And they were good yesterday,” Bama interrupted. She straightened, returned the mop to the kitchen and emerged wiping the photo with a kitchen towel.
“No,” his father agreed, “things were not wonderful before, but now there is Hitler, who is pledged to expel all Jews from Europe, if not kill them. You see what he has done in Germany.”
“Germany is Germany and Poland is Poland.”
“I cannot argue that point, but all the experts expect Germany to make war on Poland.”
“Experts! Hunchbacks and cripples! Catzker, shall I live out my life alone in this hovel?”
His father was silent. Even his mother seemed swayed.
“What will you do with all your things?” she asked.
“The silver, the kiddush cup and the candleholders, I will take. The rest you can give to that goy god army that plays trumpets.”
“I would like Zadeh’s Bible,” Harry said, because he felt it was somehow wrong that it fall into the hands of the Salvation Army.
Bama pulled him against her.
“Of course, Heshele. Of course you shall have it. And the chess set too, so you can remember all the tears he drained from you. The big philosopher. Bigger than God.”
She kissed the top of his head.
“You will visit me in Warsaw. Oy, my sisters will love you.”
“Sure, Bama. I’d like that.”
“Mama,” his mother said, “promise me that if there is danger, you will come back.”
“Go shit in the ocean, Leah. Unless you come to Warsaw, you have seen the last of me.”
CHAPTER
23
THE NEXT WEDNESDAY, AT EIGHT IN THE MORNING, THE CATZKERS and Stolz pulled up in a cab at Bama’s house. She was transporting more than silver. Stolz and Catzker could barely lift a metal steamer trunk the size of a chest of drawers, which did not fit in the cab’s trunk. The driver refused to help because of a hernia which he described in great detail as Stolz and Catzker courted the affliction. He agreed to tie down the top of his trunk on condition of an immediate one dollar tip and verbal indemnification against flat tires, chassis damage and a ticket for a driving violation.
Bama looked on imperiously at the grunting men, refusing to relinquish Harry’s hand so that he might help.
“They need the exercise,” she proclaimed, smoothing her unbuttoned black Persian lamb coat which, parting, revealed a tight-fitting green suit and askew silk stocking, bunched into high-heeled, pointed black shoes.
Harry never had seen Bama other than in the kitchen or in mourning uniform. Her face, under a black lace veil suspended from a green, plumed hat surely copied from Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood attire, seemed remote, unavailable. She was dressed for the world, no longer exclusively his property. Betrayal awakened a baby voice angrily complaining: “Bama go way!”
Stolz sat up front with the driver who quizzed him on hernia symptoms. In the rear, Harry and his father crouched on jump seats. Mother and daughter shouldered themselves into opposite corners, like boxers between rounds.
“So,” Velia said to no one, “the weather seems calm. It should be a smooth departure.”
Bama also spoke to the air.
“If it were a hurricane, it would be a pleasure to leave this godless country.”
“When did you become so Orthodox?” Velia asked.
“When I live with big philosophers who know nothing with nothing. My luck. All my sisters tell me don’t marry that apostate, but I know bett
er.”
“Mrs. Fishman,” Catzker said, trying to head off a mother-daughter brawl, “your late husband was a freethinker, not an apostate. He never renounced being a Jew.”
“Another big philosopher heard from. Shit in the ocean.”
Tacit agreement sealed the rest of the trip in silence.
At the foot of West 38th Street, the driver inspected his cab for damage while two porters wrestled Bama’s trunk onto a cart. Bama and Veila followed him. Catzker and Stolz feigned negotiation with the cabby until the women were of sight. Harry stayed with them.
The three walked onto the vast covered pier. Bright sunlight revealed the pigeon droppings and other filth on the angled glass roof. On the left, a gigantic red-and-black swastika flag hoisted between the two squat funnels of the Bremen was whipped by the stiff March sea breeze. Snatches of Deutchland Uber Alles drifted in and faded as if transmitted from an underpowered radio station.
“My God,” Catzker said, grimacing at the flag, “don’t her sisters live in this world?”
“Bama said Hamburg is the closest port to Warsaw,” Harry explained.
“Heshele, if one can skirt Hell, it is best to take a little longer,” his father said, staring at the flag, which had frozen his attention.
“Moishe,” Stolz said, “did you know that this ship was once owned by Jews, as was the whole North German Lloyd Line? And as Heshele the expert can tell you, it once held the record for the fastest crossing from Europe to America. A Jewish record.”
“Is that true, Heshele?” his father asked. “Your friend Aba tends to convert his imagination to facts. Good for poetry, but not so good for unimportant things like building ships or making a living.”
“Aba is right about the record,” Harry affirmed, “and that record was broken by its sister ship, Europa.”
They were stopped at the gangplank by a sailor wearing a swastika armband.
“Is needed visitor pass,” he said.
Catzker showed his Morning Journal police pass and Stolz flashed credentials from the long-interred Polish newspaper. The sailor pretended to read, then nodded his head.
“Yah, but what about das boy?”
“He is the son of my publisher,” Stolz replied, “a powerful man, who has interviewed Chancellor Hitler.”
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