I don’t know your particular brand of crazy, but I know crazy
when I see it.
Although I’m certain my father and Paulina will be banished when Wendy comes back, I’m more determined than ever to make sure they’re gone as soon as possible.
I’ll put my plan into action tonight.
I wait until later, long after my father pulls into the driveway, walks in, and follows Paulina, who has been waiting for him, to Wendy’s bedroom.
I remember an old daily racing form from his horse racing days that’s tucked into one of Wendy’s family photo albums. When I find it, I don’t bother to consider the almost cryptic importance of her having kept this particular racing form, considering her incredible anger at the financial losses he incurred at the track over the years. I think it might be an old memento of his that had been left and overlooked.
I put the racing form into the band of my pants. Next, I creep through my window and out onto the ledge, down the trellis, and around to the backyard, where I buried the fish.
After locating the flounder—a difficult task in the darkness of the backyard—I wrap it up inside the racing form and carry it back to where the trellis is nailed to the wood shingles. I have no choice but to stuff the bundle in the back of my pants and hope that the slimy, muddy fish stays contained within the racing form.
After making it back to my room, I prepare for my next mission. I leave the wrapped flounder on my floor and creep downstairs to the kitchen, where I get a knife from the drawer. As I pass the front door, I unlock and open it. I carefully cut a hole in the screen, directly in front of the front door’s lock and deadbolt. I leave it ajar, so it looks like a break-in, and put the knife back in the kitchen drawer.
Next comes the final and most dangerous element of the plan.
I creep back upstairs, carefully cradling the smelly flounder, and edge my way down the dark hall toward Wendy’s room, where my father and Paulina sleep.
The door is closed, which is a surprise.
Wendy keeps it open, even—to our strong embarrassment—when she’s enjoying “private moments.” I’ve never discussed the things I hear coming from there or the things I’ve seen with my brothers, but I’m sure they’ve gotten an earful and an eyeful as well. Wendy has a problem with boundaries.
In front of the closed door, I start to panic and try to think of a different method to achieve my goal. I stall there, trying to drum up alternatives, but come to the conclusion that there is only one way to complete my mission. I hope I don’t wake either of them. I hear a faint snoring coming from inside. My mouth tastes like iron.
Wait for him to snore again.
During the next rumble I turn the handle. Magically, the door makes no sound as I open it. I creep inside in the darkness, across the floor, until I find the foot of the bed, where I deposit the wrapped fish. I wait until his next snore to make my escape. I see no reason to close the door behind me. I sprint back down the hallway, scramble into my pajamas, and stuff my clothing into my hamper with the clothes I wore to go fishing. They stink. I drag the hamper down into the basement, which is creepy at night—this is practically the hardest part of the whole scheme—and throw everything into the washer. I know it won’t be heard upstairs. I start the cycle.
When I sneak back upstairs I jump into bed, amazed I’ve managed to do what I did. My plan went smoothly. I’m nervous and it takes me quite a while to fall asleep—but tomorrow is Saturday. I think I’ll be able to sleep in a bit.
When I wake up the next morning, groggy, I think I’ve dreamed the entire night’s events. Then I hear the combined voices of Paulina and my father travel down the length of the long hallway from Wendy’s room. I can’t make out what they’re saying, but his voice booms out over Paulina’s whine. I hold my breath. I have no idea what will happen. After a while I hear the sound of a door slamming somewhere downstairs and his voice shouting at someone. I can tell he’s on the phone. A few seconds later, there’s a soft knock on my door. I nervously open it, and I find Moses standing there. I pull him inside.
“Somebody broke in and left a fish on Daddy’s bed,” he says.
“How do you know?” I quiz him, wanting to be certain.
“I heard them talking, and Daddy said he got a message from one of his rookies.”
I become confused. I’m afraid my “mafia message” has been misinterpreted and will lose its intended effect. But then I realize Moses misheard the word. My father said “bookie.” I know this because he repeats the word several times to various people on the telephone as the morning goes on. I know what a bookie is, having read The Godfather, and I become satisfied he’s made the right connection from my message. I can’t remember any specific mention of my father’s bookies, and I don’t know enough about bookies to know why they might be blamed for the fish delivery. But I do have a clear understanding that he lost more money than he won at the track, and that caused trouble for him. In using the old racing form, I somehow hit the jackpot of my intention.
An hour later, my father and Paulina drive away without a good explanation regarding their quick exodus. He tells us Wendy feels better and might get back from the hospital in a few days. He feels sure we can take care of ourselves.
He also tells us he’s arranged for Jack to visit us and check in once a day to make sure everything is all right. This seems unlikely, but Jack shows up, and he ends up staying with us until Wendy’s discharged from the hospital two weeks later. Maybe he just wants to be sure he’s still got a free place to sleep, or maybe he thinks Wendy might die after all and he feels bad about the possibility we’ll be put in orphanages.
Jack teaches me how to make spaghetti and tomato sauce from scratch. It’s his one culinary masterpiece—he learned it from his Italian mother—and I become equally masterful. He also takes us to the drive-in movies and go-cart racing, and he buys a huge carton of vanilla ice cream that my brothers eat in about ten minutes.
People can be very surprising sometimes.
When Wendy comes back from the hospital she wears a neck brace and is still fairly immobile. She stays either on the couch or her bed. She holds court from both places to a constant stream of visitors—her new friends, the Boston chapter of the Hells Angels.
One day, I overhear her telling the true story behind my father’s quick exit.
Not surprisingly, Howard originally left Withensea after having accrued immense gambling debts, which was his biggest reason for not announcing his presence for the previous six months. When he got the “sleep with fishes” message I left wrapped in the racing form from the day of his biggest single loss—which Wendy had spitefully kept without his knowledge—he assumed his bookie had found him and that he had sent the death threat.
Before that day at the races, my grandfather had given him twenty thousand dollars as an investment to build-on a restaurant next to the Little Corporal. My father lost the money at the track, and Wendy said he’d doubled the loss in loans he took out with a particular bookie named O’Reilly in an effort to try and win it back.
Wendy, the only other person besides his bookie who knew about the loans, still lay in the hospital the day he found the fish in his bed. So he ruled her out as a suspect. Which left only O’Reilly.
In an arrogant attempt to bully the bookie into backing off from what he thought was a death threat, he called O’Reilly and announced he wasn’t going to be “intimidated by some two-bit thug.” O’Reilly, confused about Howard’s fishy accusations, at first denied his involvement, but he must have felt it an opportune time to collect on the loans he’d made to him.
Howard had been laying low in Withensea while he was under probation for petty larceny in Florida. He’d been flying down there every few months to meet his probation officer and pretend he still lived there and was looking for a job. O’Reilly had heard about Howard’s situation through mutual friends, and now he threatened Howard with exposure to local law enforcement for violating the terms of his probation in F
lorida. I guess he also threatened to break his kneecaps, or at least that’s what Wendy says.
Howard fled Withensea because a dead flounder convinced him O’Reilly had his number.
He went back to Florida and served a short prison sentence for skipping probation, and when his new probation terms were met, he moved all the way to California. So we didn’t see Howard again for a while, which was fine with me. The next time we saw him, Paulina wasn’t with him. They were divorced.
Wendy told us Paulina’s kids had been living with her ex-husband because she lost custody of them during her first divorce. Her husband left because she’d been having an affair. Paulina developed a drinking problem, the kids stopped going to school, and the neighbors called Social Services. The kids were put into foster homes temporarily, and afterwards Paulina’s ex-husband won custody.
Howard met Paulina two years after this sequence of events. I think he felt embarrassed by her status as a deadbeat parent and how it reflected on him, which is why he was paying for the lawyer to help Paulina regain custody. I thought it was pretty hypocritical—he never seemed embarrassed or apologized for his neglect of us, after all.
After Howard and Paulina moved to California, he found a job at a car dealership. The two of them socialized fairly often with his new boss and his family. They even spent time at his boss’s beach home on weekends. I guess this guy had a teenage son, and Paulina and the teenager spent a lot of time alone. Paulina’s inability to follow adult conversation may have influenced this activity.
One day, Wendy told me, Howard’s boss walked in on Paulina and his son in the bathroom. Paulina was sitting on the edge of the sink, and his son was bent over, his head under her skirt and between her legs. When Howard’s boss demanded to know what they were doing, Paulina claimed she was showing him a birthmark on her thigh. I guess he didn’t buy it, because Paulina got arrested for child molestation and Howard got fired.
Wendy loved to tell that story.
Eleven
Samuel, 69years | August, 1979
BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS
UNTIL NOW I thought I am writing this for you, Chavalah. Now I know I am also writing this, my story, for myself. This is the way I write all the things I would not ever say. All the things I could never speak. Maybe these things will remain on the page and leave my brain.
September 19th, 1924. Ivnitza, Russian Empire.
“Look at me, Szaja!” my younger brother Idel shouts at me.
His dark head is bobbing and shimmering a brilliant bronze glow in the sunlight.
My sister Reizel, her husband, Berl, my brother Oizer and I have been pulling potatoes since dawn in the fields of what used to be my bubbe’s vegetable gardens. We pull potatoes while my twin sisters, Ruchel and Sura, make soap back at home. This new trade, soap-making, we began this year to make ends meet.
It has been a year since my parents left with the young ones for America. It feels like forty. Much has changed.
Potatoes grow easily, and they have become the one crop we can legally grow since the Red Army seized control of the village farms. The apple and cherry orchards remain. They stand like silent soldiers. Their limbs produce more fruit than our family can harvest, and we can no longer pay workers. Now the orchards are framed by rows of long earthen hills. Within those small hills we grow our farm’s main crop—potatoes. I hate potatoes. They smell of drudgery. When we dig them, they create small kartofl blisters on my fingers. Their smell ekes out of my pores.
But they feed us. We are left with almost nothing after the tithing we are forced to offer to the Russian armies.
Berl works beside me. He has become more than a brother-in-law this year—he has become my good friend. Berl, a man who usually remains composed, is kind and gentle.
I think of an evening early this spring when we rested wearily in the field after digging potato trenches all day. The sky had begun to darken into the color of steel, and we waited for the first spittle of the rain that had teased us with its entrance all day. I asked Berl about his missing toes and, with great sadness, leaning his chin against the handle of his shovel, he told me of what he and his brother had endured in Poltava, in Southern Ukraine.
“My father was led away to join the army, and me and my younger brother suffered the agony of our mother’s eventual death during the droughts and the famine. We became two of the bezprytulnimore—the orphans who sometimes rode on top of the trains from town to town—searching for work and food. One freezing morning, I awoke with terrible throbbing pains in my feet; my toes are numb.” Berl dropped his forehead to the handle with an exhausted thud. He wept as he continued his story. “I tried to wake my brother and realized his heart had stopped. Hundreds of children died a frozen death that night on top of the trains.”
My fingers, hands, arms, and back ache. This pain distracts me from my memory. Reizel and Oizer use the potato forks while Berl and I dig, twist, and pull with our hands.
“Look, look at me Szaja; I am the red-haired basket maker in the market,” Idel says. He stuffs two large potatoes into his shirt, and with the one arm not hanging in a sling he holds his potato breasts as he dances in the muddy field.
I stretch up and arch my back, straightening the square of my shoulders and flexing my fingers into my palms. I feel too cross and tired to laugh, but his show is too funny to stifle a smile.
Idel giggles with joy and runs to Oizer, Berl, and Reizel to show them his new body.
Idel.
He is playing in a wheelbarrow with neighbor children a few weeks ago and broke his arm. Not the same arm he broke when he fell out of the apple tree, his healthy, good arm. I worry what to do with Idel. He’s trouble. Why didn’t Foter take him to America? He is useless as a field hand. Still, he does provide wonderful amusement, and I feel gratitude for any distraction offered.
This is our life. We grow vegetables and fruits for the Volga—the Russian Army and the administrators who occupy our village—and they let us keep a part of our property.
AFTER FOTER LEFT, we are visited by the new general’s officers with an official deed stating that our property had been divided for the “benefit of the community.” And it is so. No explanation. No financial compensation. Our return comes in the form of our lives. We hear of the families sent to prison camps—or worse, killed—because of their disobedience.
We are Jews. We are easy marks.
The administrators have begun what will be a focused program for the Volga regime: the “redistribution” of almost all the land in the Ukranian countryside. It is not only the Jews who are being forced to give up our lands. Our farm is one of the few remaining working farms dotting the countryside.
We enjoy a more fortunate life than anyone we know here in our tucked-away village hidden by forests. We have been spared many of the tragedies that have torn apart our neighbors’ families. We are simple farmers and until the last few years the politics and wars around us hadn’t influenced us in ways that caused much change to our daily lives. Now, with our village’s new Russian military presence, everything has changed.
Yes, Gershon died, and Ruchel still suffers from frailty caused by the same typhus epidemic, but the rest of us have been spared this and other illnesses plaguing the Ukraine. Besides Gershon, my only other true sadness has been the loss of our beloved bubbe, who died an old woman and who lived a good life with our family and our love.
But now we live on a tightrope.
Wars and the pogroms have taken many Jewish lives in these years. It is ironic that Jews feel safer under our current Soviet rule than we did with the Ukranian nationalists, who rarely protected us. The Polish army massacres Jews as they retreat from the Soviet forces in Kiev. As though the Jews are responsible for their defeat.
Idel has his ideas, however. He remains certain that we will be left alone if we befriend the Russian soldiers. He often goes to visit with them. They live close by and occupy the largest estate in the countryside, the former home of the great Russian e
ntomologist the Baron de Chaudoir, who died long ago.
Idel, an ingratiating spirit, entertains the soldiers, who are weary with war. They enjoy the presence of the dark-haired, blue-eyed young boy with the engaging smile and silly antics. He must remind them of their own young brothers. Or maybe he reminds them of themselves before the war, before this terror.
Oizer digs in the row next to me. He looks like an old man with his spectacles, although he is a year younger than me. He is the resourceful one and has the financial brains in the family. Oizer has arranged a way to channel almost half of what we produce on the farm to a marketer from Zhytomyr, who sells the produce for half the price to yet another distributor. We never declare this income when we pay our taxes. We save at least twice what we lose on these half-price sales. Oizer’s plan has brilliance, but the interchange holds risk. If the Russians find out, we might all be sent to prison, or worse. Oizer set the plan in motion without consulting anyone. He came home with the rubles in his pocket and told us we could start to plan our departure to America with the money we would be saving.
We will not have to wait for Foter to send for us. We will send ourselves after we save enough.
The money makes us jubilant and careless.
Idel prances in the potato field. Reizel tries to usher him back to her row, to rein him in and focus the rest of us back to the task of pulling up the crop.
Harvesting potatoes is dirty, backbreaking work. We use wooden, spiked forks and our fingers to turn the potatoes up. We start at dawn, fortified with the latkes Reizel makes from the same potatoes we pull each day.
Latkes. I’ve grown sick of latkes. Even the slices of dried apple Reizel adds are not enough to sweeten the taste of the starchy wafers.
We will have them for dinner as well. This has been our meal for weeks. We wait until the next market day to bring us the more varietal foods our taste buds and our bodies crave. I dream maybe we will have a chicken. The ones we’ve bred have been requisitioned by the army. Requisitioned. I envision the chickens wearing uniforms and caps, marching in formation, before meeting their eventual doom on the chopping block.
The Belief in Angels Page 10