“Rupert, did you notice a journalist in the hall, a man named Brill?”
Rupert emerged from the refrigerator, cottage cheese falling from his eyebrows. “The fatass in the trench coat? He saluted me.”
“But he saw you standing by the door.”
“So what? What can he do, papa? Let him blab to Isaac. Who gives a shit.”
“Isaac was here,” Philip declared with a pull of his shoulder, as Rupert dove into the cottage cheese again. “I said Isaac was here.”
Rupert mumbled with his lips inside the container. “I heard you, papa.” He came up for air, flicking cheese off his nose. “Why did you supply him with pictures of Esther and me?”
“Rupert, he would have torn out the walls. Isaac doesn’t give you much room to breathe. But he wants to help.… Rupert, has he done bad things to you?”
“Papa, you’re a woodenhead. Isaac’s been fucking you blind. You and Mordecai can’t stop paying homage to him. He’s your king. At least Mordecai gets some satisfaction. He brags about Isaac. He talks about the Jewish god who presides over New York City, the kosher detective who can solve any crime. And you, papa? You eat your liver without saying a word. Where’s your terrain? Isaac’s left you his droppings. He’s made you prince of the Essex Street project. You walk around in your three good shirts wishing you were Isaac.”
“That’s crazy,” Philip said. “I don’t envy his success.”
Rupert sucked with wolfish teeth. “Success, papa? That’s it Success to do what? Blow people away? To prance in front of Puerto Ricans and poor Jews. Isaac shits in peace because he has his worshipers and his props. He can enter any church or playground on both sides of the Bowery and be guaranteed a smile. Even the horseradish man bows to Isaac. Papa, if you could learn to despise him, he’d run uptown with a handkerchief over his ears. He’d disintegrate. He’d cry in Riverdale.”
Rupert scooped up his jacket off the floor and began stuffing the pockets with food. After scavenging his father’s refrigerator, he climbed into the jacket and waddled to the door. The pockets hung below his knees.
“I’ll hide you,” Philip said. “You can stay here.”
“What happens when Isaac sweeps under the bed?”
“He’ll find twenty years of dust, and a few missing pawns.”
“Thanks, papa, but I have to go.” Rupert pulled up his sleeves so he could hug his father. Then he rushed into the hall, jars smacking in his pockets. Tony Brill appeared from behind a fire door. “That’s him, Mr. Weil, isn’t it? Rupert himself. I can spot a fugitive by his walk.”
Tony Brill didn’t go after Rupert. He lunged at Philip’s door. Philip locked him out “I can save him, Mr. Weil … trust me.”
Philip returned to the kitchen, ignoring the babble. He was interested in weather reports. Did the television predict snow? Rupert would catch pneumonia in his sneakers. Philip shouldn’t have let him out of the house without a proper undershirt. The boy had no mind for cold weather. His thumbs would have to freeze before the idea of frostbite entered his head. How could Philip signal to him? Should he fly scarves from his fire escape? He laughed bitterly at his own incompetence. He had just enough energy in him to become a father. His wife, a Russian girl with handsome bosoms am a fiat behind, stared him in the eye for eleven years and ran away before Rupert was six. Sonia, the Stalinist, must have found other causes than a man who would die for Trotsky and chess and a boy who looked more like her husband than her self. She was supposed to be in Oregon, living with a band of apple pickers, a gray-haired Russian lady.
Philip berated himself. A father should have the right to make a prisoner of his son, if only for a little while. He mean to jab the boy with questions, brutal questions, not a dialecti cal checklist that would give Rupert the chance to invent a shabby scheme, a rationale for frightening old grocers an sending Isaac’s mother to Bellevue. But Philip was powerless his own questions would glance off Rupert and bite Philip behind the ears. If Rupert had a dybbuk in him, a demon sucking at his intestines, who put it there? Such a dybbul could only be passed from father to son. The violence Philip had done to his body, the gnawing of his own limbs, the sell lacerations that came a nibble at a time, the rot of living in doors, the poison of chess formulas, degrees of slaughte acted out on a board, the insane fondling of wooden men pawns, bishops, and kings, must have created a horrible scratchy weasel that crept under Rupert’s skin, grabbed hi testicles, tightened his guts, and caused conniptions in hi brain. The dybbuk was Philip. No one else.
Rupert was on the run. He had to fight the weight in his pockets, the shifting, sliding bottles and jars, the wind that slapped the enormous collars of the jacket he stole out of a grubby bungalow that belonged to the housing cops. His belly gurgled from the pickles he swallowed in his father’s apartment. He couldn’t dash across a housing project with burgeoning pockets and also digest pickles and cottage cheese. Hiccoughs broke his miserable stride. He avoided the shoppers huddling out of the bialy factory on Grand Street with their bags of onion bread. They might have recognized him, in spite of his jacket. They would scream, splinter bialys in his face, and call for the big Jewish Chief, Isaac Sidel, or the nearest housing cop. He didn’t have the patience to dodge bialys and pick onions out of his eyes. He was going to Esther Rose.
Rupert couldn’t grasp all of Esther’s fervors. She’d come out of a Yeshiva in Brownsville that would only accept the daughters of the Sephardim of Brooklyn. Stuck in a neighborhood of Puerto Ricans, blacks, and rough Polish Jews, it had gates on every side. The Yeshiva was impregnable. None of the Polish Jews could gain access to its prayer rooms and library. The girls were rushed in through a door in the back. They had little opportunity to examine what existed outside the Yeshiva’s front wall. They understood the hypnotic candlepower of a 25-watt bulb. They could feel bannisters in the dark. They had a gift for reciting Ladino, the gibber of medieval Spanish and Hebrew that was used exclusively at this Yeshiva. The Sephardic priests who ran the school took it upon themselves to push every girl towards hysteria. The girls had to consider what worthless creatures they were. They became despondent over the largeness of their nipples, the untoward shape of their breasts, the sign of pubic hair, the bloody spots in their underpants. Nothing on this earth except the lowly female was cursed with a menstrual flow, their teachers advised them. Husbands had already been selected for the girls by a system of bartering inside their families. Only a girl with the resources of her family behind her could command a proper husband, usually twice her age.
Esther was taught the rituals of marriage at the Brownsville school for Sephardic girls, the veils she would wear, the menstrual charts she would keep to warn her husband of the exact days of her impurity. Esther had seven years of this, muttering prayers whenever she touched her nipple or her crotch by accident, dreaming of her life as a workhorse for her future husband and his family, trading pubic hairs with a sinful schoolmate, feeling razors in her womb at the onset of her periods, despising bowel movements, sweat, and the color of her urine. A month before she was scheduled to marry a merchant with hair in his nose, Esther ran away. She drifted through Brooklyn, working for the telephone company. Then she joined the JDL. Her parents, who lived in an enclave of Spagnuolos (Sephardic Jews) between Coney Island and Gravesend, included Esther in their prayers for the dead. They couldn’t tolerate the existence of a daughter who would shun a marriage contract to embrace the Jewish Defense League. Zionism meant nothing to Esther’s people. Israel was a place for Germans, Russians, and Poles, barbarians to most of the Sephardim, who remembered the kindness of the Moors to Spanish Jews. The ancestors of Esther Rose, mathematicians, prophets, and moneylenders, had flourished under Arabic rule; it was difficult for the south Brooklyn Sephardim to hold a legitimate grudge against Egypt and Saudi Arabia, or the Syrians and Lebanese of Atlantic Avenue.
Rupert first bumped into Esther Rose outside the Russian embassy in Manhattan half a year ago. She was carrying a placard denouncing Soviet intrans
igence towards the State of Israel. She harassed policemen and the citizens of Fifth Avenue, wearing an old, smelly blouse and a wraparound skirt that exposed her unwashed ankles and knees; she flew at her adversaries with uncombed hair and fingernails that had all the corrugations of a saw. Rupert couldn’t take his eyes off Esther Rose. He had never known a girl who lived at such a raw edge. Esther noticed the chubby boy staring at her. She didn’t bite his eyebrows. She looked beyond the pedestrian nature of fat cheeks. This wasn’t a boy she could frighten with placards or a rough fingernail.
She had coffee egg creams with him at a dump on Third Avenue. He blurted his age: fifteen. She’d picked up a child (Esther was two years away from being twenty). The fat cheeks had an erudition that could touch a Yeshiva girl under her brassiere. This baby talked of Sophocles, Rabbi Akiba, St. Augustine, the Baal Shem, Robespierre, Nikolai Gogol, Hieronymus Bosch, Huey P. Newton, Prince Kropotkin, and Nicodemus of Jerusalem. He had the delirious, twitching eyes of a Sephardic priest, the sour fingers of a virgin boy. She would have climbed under the table with Rupert, licked him with coffee syrup on her tongue. The egg cream must have made him reticent. He was suspicious of lying down in a field of cockroaches and candy wrappers, under the gaze of countermen.
Esther relied on ingenuity. She picked Atlantic Avenue, where she knew of a mattress they could rent by the hour. Rupert wouldn’t go. It violated his sense of purity. He brought her to an abandoned building on Norfolk Street. They un dressed in the rubble, Esther’s knees sinking through the floorboards. The boy was passionate with her. He fondled Esther with a sly conviction, and soon they were eating dust off one another’s body. Esther was a Brooklyn girl. Norfolk Street remained a mystery to her. But she could love a building with missing staircases, rotting walls, and windows blocked with tin. She gave up the question of Palestine for Rupert’s sake. She two-timed the JDL, staying near Norfolk Street to become Rupert’s permanent “mama.”
Rupert slinked away from his father’s house, crippled by jars in his pockets. He was trying to shake that journalist, Tony Brill. He stumbled in and out of street corners, his ankles beginning to swell from the pressure of jars sliding off his hips. Esther had to jump from building to building, protecting herself from nosy people and cops of the Puerto Rican and Jewish East Side. Rupert found her on Suffolk Street. She was a choosy girl, hiding in a tenement with gargoyles near the roof, rain spouts with broken noses. He entered through a window on the ground floor, grabbing his pockets and heaving them over the sill. He could follow Esther’s ascent in the building by the drawings over each set of stairs. She’d crayoned faces next to the landings, faces with swollen foreheads and frothy mouths: men and women drugged with the burden of their own heavy brains. The drawings stopped abruptly at the fourth floor. Rupert didn’t have to peek any higher. “Esther,” he called. “It’s me.”
She sat on her haunches in deep concentration, wearing a blanket, like a Brooklyn squaw (Esther depised street clothes). She was cooking something in a pot, with the Sterno can Rupert had given her. The stink coming off the pot settled under Rupert’s tongue; he walked around the room biting his jacket to keep from swallowing his own poisoned spit. “What the hell are you making?” he shouted with Esther’s fumes in his eyes.
“Food,” she said “Food for Isaac.”
“Isaac’s not a schmuck. He won’t drink mud out of a pot”
“Then I’ll feed it to him. I can stuff Isaac anytime.”
“How?” Rupert asked. “Are you going to mail him some doctored horseradish?”
“No. I’ll sneak it into his lousy Headquarters.”
“Esther, Isaac’s got a fortress on Centre Street. You know how many guns there are on every floor? Detectives sleep in the woodwork. You can’t pee without an escort.”
“So what?” she said. “I’m not going to hold Isaac’s prick.” “Esther, listen to me. You haven’t eaten in four days.” He smacked the bulges in his pockets. “I have my father’s sour pickles. I have stuffed cabbage. I have grape leaves.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Esther had been cold to Rupert over the past week; she blamed him for losing Stanley Chin. They’d all gone out to Corona because Manhattan was flooded with cops and gorillas from Mulberry Street. They were shrewd enough to outrun the gorillas, who seemed stranded outside Little Italy, and couldn’t tell the difference between a ski mask (Esther’s contribution to the gang), a wool helmet, and a winter scarf; these gorillas must have come from a warmer climate, where a sane person wouldn’t think of putting a rag on his head. But the lollipops weren’t so sure of the police; cops came smart and dumb, and even a dumb cop could signal Isaac with a portable radio.
Corona was Rupert’s idea; he intended to plague Isaac from a fresh neighborhood. The lollipops would attack grocery stores, spit Isaac’s name at their victims. But a gang of baby Chinamen had followed them out on the Queensboro line, old compatriots of Stanley Chin’s from his days as a strong-arm boy for merchants and Republican politicians on Pell Street. The gang was seeking revenge; Stanley had insulted his former employers, the Pell Street Republican Club, with his raids on Chinatown as a member of the lollipops. These baby Chinamen, called the Snapping Dragons by their enemies, had no interest in Rupert and Esther Rose; they weren’t out to punish a pair of round-eyed Jews. They jumped on Stanley’s back outside the subway stop in Corona, wrestled him to the ground, broke every single one of his fingers and toes, while Esther screamed and dove into their ranks, and two unoccupied Dragons held Rupert by his arms. Esther forbid explanations from Rupert. With her head burrowing in the groin of a Snap Dragon, she’d heard the pop of Stanley’s fingers. Rupert had come out of Corona unmarked.
She stared at his unwieldy jacket. “Take that thing off,” she said. “It makes you look like a traffic cop.”
Rupert obeyed her. He stood with goose bumps sprouting on his chest. He couldn’t get her away from that concoction she was brewing for Isaac. His motives were simple: he wanted Esther to fuck. Rupert had a perfect right to be lascivious with her. He worshiped Esther’s body, loving the damp skin of a Yeshiva girl, the exquisite bends in her shoulder, her arching wings, the salt he licked out of her navel, the swampy aromas from the underside of her knee, the scissoring of her thighs. He had touched one junior-high-school girl before Esther, felt the exaggerated pimple on this girl’s chest, dry, odorless skin, and the random hairs that grew out of the hems in her underpants. But he couldn’t have conceived the delicate, moist machinery of a female’s parts without Esther. Rupert would have murdered the whole of Essex Street for the privilege of putting his face between Esther’s legs, or fucking her until her neck throbbed with the power of her orgasm.
She would give him nothing today. Rupert understood that. Esther was punishing him for Stanley’s fall. Should he break his own thumbs to please her? The denial of her body terrified him. He would have groveled on the dirty floor to suck Esther’s kneecaps if he knew this might arouse her, or at least catch Esther off her guard. He stuck his hands in his armpits to keep them warm. He shivered and sulked, the goose bumps snaking up and down his spine.
Esther whipped one elbow and cast her blanket out at Rupert, drawing him into her reach. They stood belly to belly in the cold; then Esther relocated the blanket, and they descended together, with a rub of their hips, while Rupert’s pants came down. They rolled on the blanket, Rupert amazed by his sudden change of luck. No matter how many times their bodies clapped, he would never fathom Esther’s needs. But he didn’t question the grace of sleeping with Esther. She’d grounded him in a blanket, and he was stuck with bits of wool over his ears, Esther underneath. He crept into her, loosening her thighs with a fist that hadn’t quite lost its baby fat. Esther had her frenzy with Rupert’s hair in her mouth. Now she lay still, watching the agitation build in his nose. Esther knew what it means when a man begins to blow air. She brought Rupert out of her with a great squeeze of her abdominal muscles before Rupert had the chance to snort in her fa
ce (Yeshiva girls didn’t believe in condoms, diaphragms, or coils). Rupert dribbled on her chest He wasn’t surly. He tried to paint her bosoms with his come, draw on Esther with a sticky finger, but she wouldn’t let him. She snatched up her blanket and returned to the pot.
“I need some ammonia for the soup,” she said.
Rupert put on his pants. “Why ammonia?”
“Just get some for me.”
“Esther, I can’t trade in pickles for cash. Who’s going to give me free ammonia?”
“Steal it,” she hissed into his ear. “Don’t come back without my goods.”
Rupert fled the building with the same bottles and jars (he’d forgotten to empty his jacket). He stumbled out into the narrow gutters of Suffolk Street, his sneakers sliding over raw stone. He hitched up his pockets and tried to remember if the Cuban grocery stores carried ammonia. He couldn’t determine the nature of Esther’s stew; whatever she was feeding Isaac, would it come hot or cold? A fat man in a vague, military coat cornered him on Norfolk Street. It was Tony Brill. Rupert sneered.
“Follow me, man, and I’ll torture your balls. You know what I do to people. I’m Rupert Weil.”
Tony Brill ran after Rupert. Soon both of them were huffing insanely for air. The journalist managed to claw three words out of his throat. “Talk to me.”
They rested on opposite sides of a lamppost Rupert extended his palm. “Cash, you fuck. Gimme all your money.”
Tony Brill urged a torn dollar into Rupert’s palm. “That’s it. Now will you talk?”
Rupert made a fist, the dollar showing through his fingers. He had his ammonia money; he was too exhausted to steal from a grocery.
“Rupert, you can be a famous man. Tell me, do you suffer when they call you an urban bandit? What’s the significance of your refusal to touch cash? Is it blood you want, not money? Will you and Esther raid stores without Stanley Chin? Are you a different kind of Robin Hood?”
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