Stella became a manicurist after Hymie’s death, and as a year passed and another with no sign that she wanted to marry again, my mother came to love her deeply, quite as though her noble loyalty were demonstrated. In fact, Stella dealt with countless men in the barbershop and never married and said to me once many years later as I bent forward to get my neck hair cut, “Kid, there was one Hymie and that was it.” As they used to say, a tough broad. She never lost her loud, cynical, wide-mouthed laugh—as though what she was finding funny was the whole world. I lost track of her for decades, until one pessimistic late afternoon in 1961, walking down Broadway at Twenty-fourth Street, I saw a barbershop and was seized with the hopeful idea of a haircut. Looking in the window to check the place out, I was shocked to see what could only be Stella’s back, slightly arched at a certain familiar angle of defiance as she conversed with a customer smoking his cigar while his few hairs were being trimmed. I walked in. She did not turn. Now I saw that she had her manicuring tray in one hand. Her hoarse voice, that exciting and embarrassing yappy sound. She had to be nearly seventy by now. My stomach went cold at the thought of her recognizing me. I had only recently separated from Marilyn and could not bear questioning on the subject, which I was sure would fascinate her, but neither could I walk away from one more meeting with Stella. The barber indicated the chair next to where she was standing. I sat in it and quietly said, “Stella?”
Forty years had passed since Hymie’s collapse, and now my mother and all the other Barnetts—the only family she had ever had—were dead. And I became aware as she began turning toward me that in my resemblance to the Barnetts I was the last of the line she’d be likely to see. Her face as she turned showed an ironic readiness to banter with another customer, but when she saw who it was, there was a softening around her hard mouth, an instant’s loving vulnerability that she quickly banished behind a tough grin. “Arthur,” she said, in a level, comradely voice. My clothes as usual were unpressed, and once again I was overdue for a haircut, so unlike the far worthier Hymie, a man of style and class, who would never be seen in public looking as stale as this. I found myself sharing her doubtless rekindled amazement at life’s injustice that the wrong man had been allowed to survive. All the fascinated timidity I had felt in her exotic presence so many years ago returned, and I was at her mercy.
Which she instantly sensed, asking, “What’re you doin’ around here?” “Here” was a second-rate office area that successful people fled at five o’clock. Naturally I could not be living in such a neighborhood, which at the time also consisted of seedy apartment houses and a few hotels ranging from ruined to rank.
“I live near here,” I said. Instantly the winds of my social descent went whistling past my ears as I plummeted into oblivion. “In the Chelsea Hotel.”
Her expressions moved through shock, disbelief, amusement, and finally a kind of pity. But at least I was not beneath her very interested notice; I was glad to see the shifting focus of her questioning mind—is he down, broke, hiding out, maybe off his nut? Her steady and absolutely unsentimental gaze humbled me. “I been readin’ about it,” she said, referring to the recent breakup of my marriage. I nodded, acknowledging that we were both sitting in the same bath of life. “It’s too bad,” she commiserated.
She seemed to assume that I must be in a state of unrequited longing. “It is and it isn’t,” I said, looking into her gray eyes. “It couldn’t go any further than it did.”
Surprise lit up her face, and a certain disapproval, I thought, that I was not going to lean on the piano and ask Sam to play it again—a reaction I would find repeated through the years. Her tone changed, cooled, as she asked after my children, whom she had never seen, and my brother and sister. She had been in touch with Joan, whose career as a stage and film actress she said she was avidly following. When the barber came over and began working on me, she wandered back to her little table in a corner of the shop, where she fell into conversation with a middle-aged man who with infinite care was getting his jacket buttoned around his belly while inspecting his newly shaven face in the mirror. I could hear her glassy laughter with him, her professional interest in his case, and I wondered then why her approval seemed to mean so much to me. She was a crass woman whose idea of heaven would undoubtedly have been to get the nod from a George Raft or even an Al Capone or Bugsy Siegel, to be publicly honored by one of their sincere looks and a “How ya doin’, toots?”
Her stout customer was now leaving, and she began packing up her equipment. I noticed that a sign had been hung in the door pane, so I was the last customer. There would be time for a chat now. But she was implicitly refusing. Could I have reminded her too powerfully of Hymie and the life she damn near had? I could see her in the mirrors that faced each other along both walls, slipping out of her white coat, putting some finishing brush strokes to her thinning hair, for the ten thousandth time inspecting herself like a girl of eighteen with the whole world in front of her. She seemed like some legendary bird whose slain mate remains an image in her eye forever. How strange that this woman, with whom I could not have spent more than a few hours in my entire life, should be so important to me. How terrible it seemed then that she should have been so transfixed by a man for a lifetime, a man she had known for hardly more than a year, yet as she leaned into the mirror pressing her rouged lips together it seemed she was preparing to meet him tonight in her empty apartment—the flashed image of Hymie so quickly gone was still, I thought, upholding her morale and strength. And the image came of her standing in the light of a 110th Street window in a fur-collared white cloth coat while Hymie, with his magical dexterity, floated an accordion of connected picture postcards back and forth in front of my seated mother, showing the Florida resorts of their honeymoon tour. I had not wanted Hymie to notice my mother’s coolness to Stella, and so I managed to get the cards out of his hands and to ooh and aah about each beach and swimming pool they were going to visit, and for the first time succeeded in making him notice me. In the barber chair I could still recall the thrill of his attention, which I suppose was his gratitude. Hymie liked, admired me!—the brother my mother loved by far the best, the one whose death she would never forgive God. In that instant he and I shared the same unearthly light of her love.
“ ’Bye, dear,” Stella said, pausing behind me on her way out. In the mirror I saw that she was wearing a nicely cut British raincoat and a mannish felt hat and a dark purple foulard. Terrific morale. When I insisted on turning to reach for her hand, she stepped around the barber and stood for a moment beside me, relenting, it seemed. And all at once I saw that I had brought all her losses into the shop with me, including my recently dead mother, whom she had come to adore and who in so many ways was like her. They shared a lust for foul jokes, filthy punch lines, sex scandals, relationships, the whispered world of frank women and their scents.
I took her hand, but all I could manage was a grin. I was thankful when she leaned down and kissed my cheek.
“I’ll come by again,” I said, with the foreboding that I would not because nothing was left of any life between us, or that if I did she would not be here. She nodded and seemed to know this too, and walked to the door and into the dark street at the end of another day. The barber, finishing up, slipped off my semi-shroud and shook the hair off it onto the floor, saying nothing. He had caught her coolness, the disturbance I had brought to her.
Twenty-third Street was already deserted though the sun had hardly set. The wholesale toy stores with their cheap Hong Kong windups and fake silverware, the secondhand office supply places and used electric motor stores, were all shut for the night. Embedded in the concrete in front of a parking lot a few yards off Seventh Avenue were the large brass letters PRO, the word breaking off at a seam in the sidewalk. So many years since my father had reminisced about Proctor’s Opera House, which had stood here in his youth, the most exciting theatre in New York for vaudeville and the big shows. The parking lot now was empty for the night. The city kept plu
cking out its memory as it fled hysterically toward the future. I stood waiting for the light to change and saw quite simply that my style as a playwright had been influenced by Stella no less than by my mother, that somewhere down deep where the sources are was a rule never if possible to let an uncultivated, vulgarly candid, worldly, loving bleached-blonde woman walk out of one of my plays disappointed. … How odd these underground connections always are; I begin with a library lady unintentionally frightening me and end with a widow, with cemeteries and death, a veritable delta fanning out into the sea, and somehow it is all propelled, far, far back, by the anti-Semitic quandary.
But the more overtly Jewish memories, in fact, are suffused far less with fear and flight than with power and reassurance: sitting in the lap of my long-bearded great-grandfather Barnett in the 114th Street synagogue, his basso voice resounding in my ears as he prayed, swaying back and forth and moving me with him like a horse on a merry-go-round, and occasionally putting his big hand on my head to press me aside as with a great expulsion of breath he spat out the open door beside his special seat a stream of tobacco juice that I would watch dripping off the fire escape. Naturally I could not read at four or five years of age, let alone Hebrew, but he would keep turning my face toward the prayer book and pointing at the letters, which themselves were magical, as I would later learn, and apart from their meanings were lines of an art first inscribed by men who had seen the light of God, letters that led to the center of the earth and outward to the high heavens. Though I knew nothing of all that, it was frightening at times and totally, movingly male—the women having been consigned to the balcony with the privilege of looking on and admiring, captive and saved, until they got home, where of course they ran everything.
From where I sat, on my great-grandfather’s lap, it was all a kind of waking dream; the standing up and then the sitting down and the rising and falling of voices passionately flinging an incomprehensible language into the air while with an occasional glance I watched my mother up in the balcony with her eyes on me and Kermit, on my great-grandfather and grandfather and father all in a row. She sometimes wept, I think, with the pride of it up there. Even my inability ever to find out what was happening seemed inevitable and right, every question of mine being greeted with a holy and violent “Shhhhh!” lest God turn an impatient eye my way. So I shut up and invented my own religion composed of close-up views of beard roots, eyebrows, nostrils, backs of hands, fingernails, and longer shots of the Torah scrolls being sometimes touched or lifted out of their Ark, where they lived together and talked when the doors were shut, or tenderly removed from the Ark and carried around the whole congregation for everyone to kiss, for they were the Law, the heart of hearts, that which the earth kept trying to hurl away into space so that it could fly apart and die of its sins, but could never let go of. Without fear, of course, there can be no religion, but if one small life in the 114th Street synagogue means anything, the transaction called believing comes down to the confrontation with overwhelming power and then the relief of knowing that one has been spared its worst. But I learned this, as I did most things, apparently, in a somewhat odd fashion.
Great-grandfather, I later came to believe, liked me and enjoyed having me by his side in shul, as totally out of everything as I was. He would pray with his big hand resting on my shoulder, his powerful smells so bracing and unique, a mixture of musty linen, tobacco, slivovitz, and humanity—and there was a good dose of humanity by Friday night when he had not bathed since the previous Saturday. People seemed to depend more on smells in order to recognize or identify one another in those days. Certainly to a small boy every individual had a different scent, and my great-grandfather was an orchestra of scents—when he lifted his arm around me, flapped his prayer shawl over his powerful broad shoulders, combed fingers through his beard, or leaned over to one side to get his handkerchief out of his back pocket, each gesture smelled different.
I had entered into what seemed a dark and beautiful tapestry whose patterns both flowed and remained unchanged in their relationships to each other. At the center, of course, there was me under the high dark ceiling, beside Great-grandfather and his deep voice unspinning the Hebrew language from the book, my brother beside me already understanding everything, handsome, clean, and unspeakable in his rectitude, more and more resembling my father. As he would throughout his life when in a synagogue, my father, however, was searching the prayer book for “the place.” He could piece out enough Hebrew to feel good about it, but whenever our glances crossed he’d give me a poker-faced blue-eyed wink, as though to say, “Hang in there, it’ll be over soon.” As for Louis Barnett, my grandfather, I could even then get little from him but a boring solemnity, as humorless and ungenerous as his own father’s spirit was free and flowing and smiling. The human race is forever taking one step forward and one step back.
The climax of my thus far fascinated but unilluminated religious life came one late afternoon when Great-grandfather, with whom I seem to have been alone that day, instructed me to cover my eyes and not look, and then did an inconceivable thing. He took off his shoes, showing his naked white socks. Standing up, he raised his prayer shawl over his head, gave me final warning not to look, waited for me to place my fingers over my eyes, and then, evidently, walked off and left me alone in the short pew facing the side of the altar and quite close to it, his honored elder’s seat.
I obediently waited there in my darkness, hearing deep male voices gathering in greater and greater number near the altar a few yards ahead of me. Above the altar, which bore the weighty candelabra and the tasseled cloths of red velvet and gold braid, was the Holy Ark, a small shoulder-high closet with two carved doors behind which rested the great scrolls of the Torah as in a miniature toy house. Naturally, what fascinated were the small doors, about three feet tall, just big enough for me to pass through, which I’d have loved to do. I had always enjoyed watching them being opened and shut, and the tender way the scrolls, which were just about my size too, were carefully laid against the shoulder of the man who’d been given the honor of carrying them, a ritual that had always made me hold my breath, since I knew that I would have dropped them and been banished straight into darkness, no question about it.
Now, my fingers pressing with all the power of religious obedience against my closed lids, I heard, of all things, the voices of men beginning to sing! Not in unison like a chorus, but a dozen or more individually, softly, all kinds of different melodies, and then I heard muffled thumps, and then more, deeper thumps and the voices rising louder, some of them seeming to be calling out above an undertone of baritone worrisomeness, and then a sudden tenor flight taking air like a pigeon and the thumping getting faster. My rising fear separated two fingers over one eye, and I peeked through the fuzz of eyelashes and saw the most astonishing thing—about fifteen old men, bent over and covered completely by their prayer shawls, all of them in white socks, dancing! I gasped in fright. One of them must be Great-grandfather, and I was seeing the forbidden. But exactly what was the forbidden part? That they had their shoes off? Or maybe that they were so undignified! Or maybe that in some hidden and mysterious way they were being happy even though they were old. For I had never heard a music like this, so wild and crazy, and each man dancing without any relation to another but only toward the outer darkness that enveloped the spaces beyond family and men, the spaces you might say listened to prayers.
Now the heads began to uncover and I quickly hid my eyes, a faker who would have to sit there and wait for Great-grandfather to return and permit me to see again. Especially wounding, this particular fraudulence, when I had undoubtedly sensed even so early—as the vividness of memory about him attests—that he loved me much, and that in some osmotic way it was he I would strive to imitate as a writer though he died before I even started to go to school.
The man’s reputation for telling stories was very big, and while I understood no Yiddish I would sit beside my mother after dinner, with a dozen or more family l
istening to him there at the end of the table going on and on through his great beard, pausing only to spit or drag on a cigarette, no doubt enjoying the center of the stage he had so securely won, and when I asked my mother to interpret something he had said, she would wave down at me and yell, “Shhh,” so I was left to concentrate on the pure spell he wrought and the music of his expressive voice. I can only recall a fragment of one story that my mother did take the time to translate for me as the old man spoke. A man in the old country was taking a shortcut home one night through a cemetery when out from behind a gravestone stepped a … “Wait, wait!” she said, breaking off to hear what my great-grandfather had to say next, her eyes as wide as a child’s, her lips open. One minute passed as the old man spoke, two minutes. Unable to wait anymore, I pulled her sleeve for the translation. “Shhh!!” she shot down at me. It was hopeless, and I could only stare down the length of the table at that spellbinder and those grownups he held so helpless in the palm of his hand.
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