Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘I expect you’re looking forward to going home tonight,’ said Moishe, brushing his hat.

  Barney, who was helping to scoop up buttons, said, ‘No more than usual. Why?’

  ‘Such an oyrech auf Shabbes you’ve got,’ winked Moishe.

  ‘You mean David?’ asked Barney, hefting up a bolt of navy blue union cassimere.

  ‘David?’ said Moishe. ‘I don’t mean David, I mean Leah Ginzburg. You didn’t know she was coming? Her bubbe’s sick, and so her mother’s had to go to Front Street to take care of her, and her father’s still in Jersey, so she’s spending the Sabbath with you. Maybe Sunday, too.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Your mama. Who else? She came up here this afternoon while you were round at Meyberg’s.’

  ‘Leah Ginzburg?’ Barney demanded, throwing down the cloth. ‘How come you wait until now to tell me? Oy gevalt! If I’d known, I would never have invited David. David I asked, with Leah coming! Why didn’t David tell me, for the love of God? He must have known!’

  Moishe, buttoning up his coat, gave Barney a fat, sympathetic grin. ‘Maybe David likes Leah as much as you do. Maybe he likes your mother’s knaydel. Maybe he forgot.’

  ‘Forgot? That nebech never forgets anything.’

  ‘Well, you should be grateful,’ said Moishe. ‘It isn’t every Shabbes you get the opportunity to do such a good deed. You should thank the Lord.’

  Barney looked at him fiercely for a moment, and then relaxed, and laughed. ‘I guess you’re right. Thank you, Lord, for giving me this opportunity to show charity to my fellow man! But with Leah Ginzburg around, I should have David Stein, too?’

  Irving came over, wrapping his long grey woollen scarf around his neck like a failed snake-charmer taking home his exhausted python. His wife always made him wear a scarf, even in summer, in case of what she called ‘wind stiffness’. ‘Listen, Barney,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m kvetching. But we’re family here, right? We can say what’s on our minds. No secrets. Maybe next week we should talk over the whole business, all this ready-made work you’ve been asking Hyman and me to do. It’s not our kind of work. I’m unhappy, for one; and I know that Hyman’s unhappy. And, worst of all, Sussman knows we’re unhappy, too.’

  Barney said: ‘Sussman?’ The amusement faded from his face as rapidly as sensitised silver darkening in sunlight. ‘They’ve made you an offer at Sussman?’

  ‘I can’t tell a lie,’ said Irving.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Barney. ‘If Sussman’s made you an offer, and you’re not happy here, you’d better leave. I wouldn’t want to keep you here against your will. And the same goes for Hyman. Him, neither.’

  Moishe looked at both of them uneasily. ‘Come on, Barney,’ he said, ‘we’re all tired. Let’s leave it till Monday.’

  Barney, without taking his eyes off Irving, nodded slowly. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘And maybe, during the Sabbath, we can all read what the Talmud has to say about loyalty.’

  There was an embarrassed silence. Then Irving went off without a word, closely followed by Hyman. Barney watched the two of them walk between the glowing blue spots of light, their heads bowed; and then he turned to Moishe and said, ‘Well?’

  Moishe shrugged. ‘They’ll come around. But they’re old men, remember, set in their ways. Joel they could accept. He knew how to cut, he knew how to make up, he was his father’s elder boy. He didn’t try to turn the business on its head. You, they’re not sure of.’

  Barney stood with his hands on his hips. The door of the workroom closed behind Irving and Hyman with a vivid squeal, and then a shudder of badly fitting wood. He saw their silhouettes through the glass of the cubicle as they went slowly downstairs.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s leave it till Monday. But don’t let’s forget who’s the baleboss at Blitz’s, huh?’

  Moishe put his arm around Barney’s waist. ‘Take some advice, will you? Rest, pray, and remember that everybody’s got one love in their life, outside of their family. Yours may be money. Irving and Hyman’s, it’s cutting a perfect suit.’

  David was waiting for Barney in the cubicle, wrapped up in a bright brown coat that Irving had once caustically described as ‘the camel’s feedbag’. His near-together eyes were bright with anticipation. ‘Are you ready?’ asked Barney, testily, and David waggled his head up and down with enthusiasm. What a lunatic, thought Barney. And what an oyrech.

  ‘You go ahead, I’ll lock everything up,’ said Moishe, producing a fat jangling ring of keys. ‘You have your guests to take care of.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Barney, and clattered quickly down the stairs to the wet street, without looking back to see if David was following. Of course David was following – so closely that when Barney reached the sidewalk, which was jostling with last-minute shoppers and tailors and trimmers on their way to the Turkish baths, and creaking pushcarts, and scampering children, David was right behind him, and bumped into him.

  ‘Shalom aleichem, Moishe!’ Barney called back, up the stairs, although his eyes were on David.

  ‘Aleichem shalom,’ came down the echoing response.

  Barney took David’s arm as unwillingly and impatiently as if it were the handle of a valise crammed with filthy laundry, and tugged him through the evening crowds of Clinton Street to the flat-fronted tenement on the corner of Monroe Street, No. 121, where his mother would already be laying out his clean clothes for the synagogue.

  It began to snow again, in wet, fitful whirls.

  The neighbourhood was quiet when they returned home from the synagogue; enchanted with the particular stillness, that deep sense of rest, that always used to fall over the crowded homes of New York’s Lower East Side at sundown on Fridays. In almost every house and tenement, even in basements where damp marked the walls and the cupboards rustled with rats, wives and mothers and daughters were dressed in the finest clothes they owned, and were lighting up the Shabbes candles.

  ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who has sanctified us by Thy commandments, and has commanded us to kindle the Sabbath lights.’

  The sky above Clinton Street was smudged with clouds; umber ink on wet cartridge paper. It was too warm for snow now, but a thin drizzle slanted between the row houses and the shuttered stores, and the sidewalks shone with wet. In the windows all around, candles flickered; and through the streets the husbands and fathers walked silently home from the synagogue, each of them invisibly accompanied by the hosts of Sabbath angels they had brought back from their prayers. Their footsteps echoed all about them.

  This was slumland, dirty and broken and uncompromising. The garbage from the day’s trading lay sodden in the gutters – cabbage leaves, screwed-up wrapping paper, scraps of bloody meat, fish guts. Even a plateful of noodles, trodden into the filthy slush. Barney stopped on the corner of Monroe Street, opposite the old Rutgers mansion, and for a moment or two he looked around at the rain and the trash and the lighted windows, and he felt a coldness that brought him close to tears.

  David said, ‘What are you waiting for?’

  Barney dabbed at his eye with the handkerchief pinned to his lapel. ‘You wouldn’t understand. Let’s go.’

  David kept pace with him as he crossed the street. ‘You could try me,’ he said.

  ‘Try you?’ asked Barney.

  ‘Well, you’re sad, aren’t you?’ David remarked.

  ‘Isn’t everybody? Tell me what there is to be happy about.’

  ‘Most of the time, you seem like you’re happy,’ said David.

  ‘Most of the time isn’t Shabbes. Most of the time I’m too busy trying to keep the business afloat, too busy arguing with buyers in dry goods stores and department houses, too busy fighting with Irving and Hyman and everybody else. I don’t have a moment to myself; and it’s only when you have a moment to yourself that you feel anything at all. Tonight, it’s sad. So what?’

  ‘So why are you sad?’ David wanted to know. Barney w
as striding along so quickly now that he was panting to keep up.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Barney told him. ‘If I knew, I don’t suppose I’d tell you about it, anyway.’

  David clutched at his sleeve, slowing him down. ‘Do you really hate me that much?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t hate you. Why should I hate you?’

  ‘You hate me because I’m dumb.’

  ‘Listen, David, I don’t hate you.’

  ‘Then why don’t you tell me why you’re sad?’

  ‘Because –’ Barney hesitated, and stopped. They were standing outside his tenement building now. All along the street, the drizzle had turned the gaslamps into sow-thistles. Barney looked down at the six steps which led up to the black-painted front door, and across at the wet iron railings. David waited beside him, shivering, as if he had travelled a thousand miles to hear the secret of the universe from a renowned rabbi.

  ‘I’m sad because I can never be what my father was,’ said Barney, more to himself than to David. ‘My father came here to New York when he was fifteen, with my grandfather. He brought some of the old ways along with him, he remembers what the old country was like. But I’m an American. I can’t help being an American. But I can’t carry on the old traditions the way my father did. Do you understand what I’m saying? I know what the old ways are. I study whenever I can, even on the streetcar. But they’re not part of me, and I’m not really part of them.’

  He wiped rain from his eyelashes with the back of his hand. ‘I feel like I don’t belong. I’m not really one of the Deutsche Jehudim any more, and I’m not really an American. I feel, I don’t know, shut out.’

  David silently chewed his lips. It was impossible to tell if he understood any of what Barney was saying or not.

  Eventually, in a curiously childish lisp, he said, ‘Remember thou wast a prisoner in the land of Egypt.’ And without explaining himself any further, he climbed the steps to the front door. Barney stayed where he was for a while, feeling the drizzle on his face as if it were some kind of uncomfortable penance for doubting his Orthodox beliefs. Then he took out his keys and followed David inside.

  Leah Ginzburg was standing in the hallway when Barney opened the door of the apartment. There was a rich aroma of roasted chicken and soup, mingled with the musty, penetrating smell of spices. ‘You’re soaked,’ she said gently.

  David grinned at her. ‘It’s God’s tears,’ he said, and then turned back towards Barney and grinned at him, too. Barney gave him a quick, embarrassed smile.

  ‘Your mama was afraid you were going to be late,’ Leah told Barney.

  Barney did not say anything. He did not want to be uncharitable to his mother on the Sabbath, and tell Leah that his mama’s usual terror was that he was not going to come home at all.

  ‘She’s in the parlour?’

  Leah nodded. Barney had known Leah, and had a crush on her, ever since he was seven years old. The Ginzburgs used to live across the street, on the third floor of No. 129. In the dusty summers of his childhood, Barney had played with Leah on the front stoop, or round the wheels of the pushcarts where Polish and Armenian Jews with their beards and their kaftans sold fish, and sewing notions, and fruit. Those had been hot crowded days, those early days on Clinton Street and Hester Street, and all that had mattered in Barney’s world had been his parents’ doting affection, and a whipping-top that hummed, and a six-year-old girl with a pretty, heart-shaped face, and curls that strayed out from under her scarf.

  Leah’s father had started out with a pushcart, selling second-hand clothes. Then he had rented a small store on Hester Street, and started a dry goods business. Because of the poverty of his customers, the dry goods business had soon expanded into a pawnbroker’s business; and before long, Mr Ginzburg had invested enough money to be able to move out of Clinton Street and buy a modest house further uptown. These days, he was a senior partner in Loeb & Landis, the finance company. But he had never forgotten his friends from the Tenth Ward; Moishe Teitelbaum, and Irving Finkelstein, and – while he was still alive – Barney’s father, his old chevra who had helped him when he was freshly bewildered off the boat, the fellow Jews who had fed him with soup and given him places to sleep when he first arrived.

  Barney’s mother did not know it, and Barney himself had only discovered it when he had gone through Blitz’s books after Joel had left, but Nathan Ginzburg had lent Blitz’s over a thousand dollars, interest-free, just to keep going through the slump of 1857. The money had never been paid back.

  But here was Leah, a guest for the Sabbath, in a simple white dress with a white lace overlay, and a white silk scarf over her head, dark-skinned and beautiful, with those brown eyes that looked like the eyes of an Eastern European gypsy. There was something wild about Leah. Barney had always been able to imagine her mouth stained in berry-juice, and gold rings on her toes; and, on some nights, in dreams, he had imagined her naked – small, only an inch over five feet, but big-breasted for her height, with skin so soft that it electrified his fingertips – and on those nights he had woken up sweaty and confused and ashamed.

  ‘This is David Stein,’ said Barney. Leah had been dressing when they had first come home to wash and to change their clothes. Barney’s mother, fidgety but reasonably friendly, had not wanted to disturb her.

  Leah curtsied to David, and David grinned again. Barney expected that his mother had already told Leah that David was retarded. Or maybe she had not. She was so abstracted these days, so unpredictable; her mind was like a smashed mirror.

  Mrs Blitz came out of the parlour. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked. ‘You’re saying your prayers in the hallway?’

  Barney said, ‘I’m sorry, we’re coming.’ But the sight of his mother had given him a sharp, unpleasant thrill. For the first time in years, she was wearing her wedding-dress. It was yellowed, and part of the hem had come loose, but it was the same extravagant white dress of silk and Dresden lace which she had worn in Germany on the day that she had married Barney’s father. It looked dated and almost macabre. It was tight as a sausage-skin around her waist, and under the armpits it was already stained with nervous perspiration. Barney could feel something off-key, something unpleasant, in the way his mother waved him into the parlour. Her wedding-dress? Why?

  The parlour was small, but it was their best room. The walls were papered with flower baskets on a dark red background, and the drapes were best red velour. There was a cheap rosewood chiffonier on which the Shabbes candles burned, and a dining-table which Barney’s father had brought all the way from the Pig-Market on his back. It smelled stale, as if every Sabbath past had been celebrated here and breathed here and the window had never been opened – as if Barney’s mother had tried to entrap in this room all the ghosts of her vanished happiness.

  Barney took his place at the head of the table. Leah, sitting on his right, smiled at him shyly. He did not want to look at David, whose lacquered, toy-soldier grin had not left his face since he had walked into the apartment. Nor could he look for long at his mother.

  With a dry throat, he said, ‘Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it …’

  He blessed the wine, and made the broche for the Creation of the Sabbath, and for the departure out of Egypt. He had already silently said a broche to himself when he had seen Leah in her Sabbath dress; that special broche reserved for seeing beautiful people. He sipped the wine from the Kiddush cup, and he was aware when he lifted his eyes that Leah was watching him carefully. In a whisper, she sang the prayer to welcome the ministering angels which had returned home with him from the synagogue.

  ‘May your coming be in peace, may you bless us with peace, and may you depart in peace …’

  Barney’s mother, even before Leah had finished, began to spoon chopped chicken livers and olives on to their pl
ates. Leah’s voice faltered, but Barney raised his eyes to her in encouragement, and she finished the prayer just as Barney’s mother pushed in front of her a mounded plateful of liver that would have stopped Moishe Teitelbaum in his tracks.

  ‘Sabbath feasts are not what they were,’ complained Feigel Blitz. ‘When your father was alive, Barney, he made it holy! The whole family gathered round the table, Joel and Barney, and whichever oyrech Barney’s father had brought home with him from the gutter! Holy, that’s what they were! And a family! So where’s my family now?’

  Leah reached across the white linen tablecloth and held Mrs Blitz’s hand. ‘Mrs Blitz,’ she said softly, ‘we’re your family now. Nobody’s forgotten you.’

  David was staring down at his plate of liver in bewilderment, as if he could not work out where it had come from. Then, fastidiously, he picked up his fork and began to nibble away at the edges of it.

  ‘All the reverence, that’s gone,’ Feigel Blitz was saying loudly, to nobody in particular. ‘Father would sit where Barney’s sitting now, and describe his prayers in the synagogue. What he’d felt in his heart! The nearness to God! But now, what do these young Americans know of caring for their tortured mother? What do they care of the mitzvoth? Leah! Tell me, what do they care?’

  Leah glanced at Barney, and blushed. The gentle grip she had on Mrs Blitz’s wrist was abruptly reversed, as Mrs Blitz seized her arm and stared at her in indignation. ‘You think of marrying such a gonif? You think of taking him away? Oh, no, he has duties! Duties to his mother! You’ll see! That young man is wedded already to his faith! Tonight, that young man is going to be married! Not to you, my fine young lady! Oh, no. To his duties! To me!’

  Riboyne Shel O’lem, thought Barney. That’s why she’s wearing the wedding-dress.

  ‘Mama,’ said Barney. ‘Can we just eat the dinner, and leave the talk until later?’

  Leah said, ‘This chopped chicken liver, it’s delicious. Do you think I could take the recipe home to Mother?’