by Marc Simon
“Are you sure? Because if you’re sure, repeat this after me: I won’t tell anyone we’re going to the circus.”
Alex repeated it perfectly.
“It’s our secret.” Delia put her index finger to her lips, and Alex did the same. “Good boy. Now, let’s get the sticky stuff off those hands of yours.”
They walked hand in hand toward the rest rooms. Off to the left, several yards away and beyond their line of sight, two guards yanked a man by the elbows to the security office.
*
As Hannah watched Abe take a second swallow from his flask, the memory of liquor rose in her mouth. She thought about the summer evening three years earlier, at her parents’ 25th anniversary party, when she and the handsome older boy she had a crush on snuck away with a bottle of Cherry Herring liqueur from the cordials table. They went down into the cellar and closed the door to the workroom behind them, and drank from the bottle, and she began to laugh at the silliest things he said. They began to kiss and it felt good for a while, until he began to touch her underneath her dress and pulled her hand inside his open pants front. She shocked but curious at how his thing felt alive in her hands, and how when she tried to pull away from him he told her no, she couldn’t leave him like that, and she wondered, like what,, and she started to cry out but he put his hand over her mouth, and then he put a pair of garden shears to her neck and told her that if she ever told her parents about what was going to happen he would sneak into her house late at night with a butcher knife and kill her parents in front of her and then kill himself. She should just relax and enjoy it, he said, and then he forced her legs open and pulled down her underwear and then there was a sharp pain and he was inside her and she felt wet and nauseated as her head spun, and then he grunted and pushed away and held her head down as she vomited into a tin pail.
“Hannah?” Abe shook her shoulder. “You all right? We better go home now, huh? Let your aunts give you some ginger ale, put you to bed.”
She opened her eyes. There was Abe, looking so concerned. The contortions in her face dissolved into a smile. “No. Please. I’m all right now. It must have been the eggs. I’m partially allergic to eggs. What was I thinking? But I’m better now. Gosh, I must have given you a terrible scare. But I’m fine now, really.” She stood and twirled around. “See? Right as rain.” She took his hand. “Let’s go for a walk, down the path to the pond.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“I’ll bring some bread for the ducks. I love ducks, don’t you? We have so much to talk about. Where will we live, where will Alex go to school? Won’t it be grand?” She tugged his wrist, and they strolled toward the path that led to the pond.
Belle was all for starting after them, but Lillie said, “She looks all right now. Wait until he gets her home.”
*
The Highland Park Zoo chief of security, retired Pittsburgh Police sergeant Joseph Conroy, spilled the contents of Dr. Malkin’s medical bag on his desk. Buried amid the stethoscope, speculum, rubber gloves, tongue depressor, screwdriver, bottles of patent medicine, gauze, pinking shears, tack hammer, meat thermometer, blood pressure cuff, flyers and half-eaten salami sandwich was a train schedule with the Pittsburgh to Philadelphia connections circled in red.
Conroy held the schedule up to Malkin’s nose. “Going somewhere, my friend?”
“Oh, that, yes, I am planning it a future trip to Philadelphia to see it the Libertine Bell.”
“You mean the Liberty Bell.”
“Yes, of course, I meant to say it the Liberty Bell. Sorry.”
Conroy’s assistant muttered, “Greenhorn.”
“You can put your things back, except for these.” Conroy dumped Malkin’s flyers into the trashcan. “Next time you come to the Highland Park Zoo, leave the fliers at home. Folks here want to see the animals, they don’t need you to pester them. Capische?”
“I am begging your pardon, what is the word ‘capische’ meaning?”
“Greenhorn.”
*
They walked down a twisting path. The trickle of water they heard in the distance sounded like a gentle brook, but was in fact runoff from a water treatment plant. Abe helped Hannah step around the bigger rocks. They stopped at a small clearing where a low wood sign pointed to Lindenwood Pond.
Abe brushed leaves and twigs from a large flat rock and they sat down, hips touching. “Feeling better now?”
“Yes, very.”
Abe was ready for a cigar, and he’d brought two along, but he was concerned that she might get loopy again from the smell of smoke, although the color was back in her cheeks and that vacant look was gone from her eyes.
Two cardinals lighted on a tree branch above them. Abe, eager for a diversion, said, “Hey, look at them redbirds.”
“They’re a beautiful couple.” She nudged a little closer to him. “We’re like them, Abe. We’re birds of a feather.”
“Yeah?” Abe smiled. Here he was, a workingman Jewish boozer with calluses on his palms and three sons by the time he was twenty-eight and a wife dead and buried and a sometimes mistress, and here she was, pretty as a picture, ripe as a peach, a young Jewish girl, probably educated, sometimes a little, well, unpredictable, that’s for sure, but mostly gentle and loving. “You think so?”
“Oh, of course. We share a religion. We both need someone else to complete us, to make us whole. And we both dearly love Alex. Abe, can’t you see, this is what I’ve been saying, that we belong together?” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, gently at first, but with increasing passion, and he found himself pressing back, feeling her breasts against his chest, and he felt as if he were being pulled into her, and though he wasn’t sure where this was going, she was so lush, she tasted so sweet he couldn’t pull himself away.
As she let his hands explore the small places around her waist and over her thighs, Hannah thought about the desk on the second floor and how as soon as she got home she would destroy all the papers once and forever.
Chapter 24
By three o’clock they had seen all the zoo had to offer three times over. Delia’s feet hurt, Alex’s head hurt, and so they decided to call it a good day.
Delia pushed her way to a forward-facing seat on the trolley. Alex rested his head against her side. The trolley filled up with parents and children that ranged from excited and happy to tired and cranky, their energies as deflated as their helium balloons.
Alex clutched his stuffed elephant. His head had been bothering him since late in the morning, but the excitement of the zoo had dimmed the pain. Something else was on his mind, too. He tugged on Delia’s elbow.
“What, pumpkin?”
“What’s adoption?”
Delia thought, the damnedest things come out of this kid’s mouth—one minute he’s asking her who could win a fight between a lion and a tiger, and now this. “Adoption?” She explained as simply as she could how sometimes children didn’t have a mother and father. Alex interrupted her, telling her that he didn’t have a mother because she was dead, only a father, and did that mean that if his father died, would he be an adoption, but Delia assured him that wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t describe the scenario of children born out of wedlock. “Nice people that want to make an adoption become the child’s mommy and daddy forever. But why do you want to know?”
Alex wanted to tell her the story of Male Child, but now that he knew what adoption was it was even harder to understand everything on the paper. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it, maybe it was a secret only for Hannah to know, like going to the circus was his secret, so he answered, “I read it in a book.”
She hugged him. “Stick to animals, smart guy.”
The trolley, which had been waiting at the stop until it filled up with riders, lurched forward. A man in a dark hat and black frock coat banged on the door, and in jumped Malkin. He bumped up against every leg in the aisle as he made his way to the back of the car. He stopped two-thirds of the way. �
�Oho, it is Miss Novak and the little Alex.”
*
By four o’clock that afternoon the sky had become overcast, the air had turned cooler and Abe and Hannah had left the park. They made it back to the aunts’ house before the first plops of rain began to fall.
Hannah seemed happy, but spoke little and walked quickly on the way home, pulling Abe along. As soon as they went inside, she dropped his hand and bolted up the stairs. Abe watched her go and thought it was a nice view from where he stood, the way her rear end bounced.
He still wasn’t quite sure what to make of her. She’d been acting perfectly normal for weeks, but today, well, one minute she was planning their life together and the next minute she looked as she was in some kind of trance, and the minute after that she was the warm, willing girlfriend men dreamed of having. It was puzzling, yes, and yet he was feeling pretty full of himself, proud that evidently his looks and personality, if that was the right word, were good enough to just about charm the panties off her. It was amazing that a widower with three boys had not one but two good-looking women after him—well, Delia wasn’t exactly after him, it was more like he was after her—but hell, what hen-pecked family man wouldn’t trade places with Abe Miller, ladies man?
A finger poked him between the shoulder blades. He turned, and there were Belle and Lillie staring at him, arms akimbo. A cigarette hung from the corner of Belle’s mouth, like a tough cop.
Christ, he thought, they looked as if they were ready to take him out and skin him alive with a potato peeler, no questions asked. He was about to ask them what was wrong, since obviously something was, when Belle said, “Got a drink for me, Miller?”
“What?”
Lillie tapped Abe on the front of his coat, pushing his flask against his ribs. “You wanted to get our niece drunk, didn’t you?”
“Now hold on.” Abe tried to explain how he never intended on letting her have any liquor, it was only when she looked so out of sorts that he was going to give her just a little taste to shake her out of it.
“You give your kids booze when they’re sick?”
No, he explained, but Hannah wasn’t a kid, in case they hadn’t they noticed. He only offered her a nip when she got a little pale, on account of her allergy to eggs.
Belle said, “Eggs?”
Before Abe could answer, something slammed on the second floor and Hannah’s voice yelled out, as if she were in physical pain, “Damn it all.”
The sisters grabbed each other’s hands. Lillie shouted, “Hannah, what happened? Are you all right?
“Yes, I just banged my knee.” Then, in a quieter voice, she said, “I’m fine, I’ll be down in a second.” She went back to searching through the Carson Home album and the rest of the desk, hunting for the missing adoption certificate. Where could it be, where could it have gone, things don’t just grow legs and walk away.
She hadn’t looked at the papers for two years, not since she held the album open on her knees as she sat on the floor and wept for hours and made her aunts stay away as she held a corkscrew up to her throat like the handsome boy had done with the garden shears, and finally she wrote Blood Money! on the receipt on the last page, and then took all of her family photographs and tore them to shreds and was about to light them on fire when her aunts grabbed her and convinced her to calm down, none of it was her fault.
No one knew about the album and the papers except her and her parents and her aunts. No one else had been upstairs in the house for years except her and her aunts.
And Alex.
“Hannah?”
She swallowed hard. “In a minute. I’m changing. Give Abe some lemonade.”
She dropped her lace dress in a heap at her feet. It felt so good she wanted to run downstairs in her underwear, and if her aunts weren’t there and it were just Abe, she would have. She slipped on a yellow sundress.
With the missing certificate and what Abe had said about adoption, now it all made sense. Her little Alex must have taken it. There was no other explanation. She loved him so much, but well, even the best little boy in the world could misbehave, and she made up her mind to give him a good talking to, or maybe a little more, just until he told her what he’d done with it, just until he absolutely understood very well it was wrong to take things that weren’t his.
Two minutes later she was downstairs with a smile on her face. She implored her aunts not to be cross with Abe, it wasn’t his fault about the flask, other women her age can take a drink, so naturally he would bring one along, and how should he know she didn’t imbibe? It was Abe that had the decency not to let her drink, and also wasn’t it true, even though the aunts said they’d seen them together, that they didn’t see her drink, did they?
Belle said, “I guess that’s true.”
Oh, Belle, she went on, if it was anyone’s fault it was her own, the eggs made her woozy, and thank goodness Abe had the maturity and wisdom not to try to force alcohol on her, he’d only offered it out of concern for her, he’d actually done an honorable thing with his gesture, and instead of criticizing him they should thank him for being so kind and concerned.
“Well,” Lillie said, “when you put it that way.”
The entire time Hannah spoke Abe was silent, his mouth slightly open.
“Anyway,” Hannah said, turning to him, “thank you for such a wonderful day in the park.” She kissed him on the cheek with decibels less intensity that her open-mouthed kisses an hour earlier. “I’ll see you tomorrow with Alex, bright and early.”
Abe said his goodbyes, feeling happy about his reprieve and not clear at all as to why he’d received it.
After the screen door closed behind him, Hannah said, “Aunt Lillie, can I help with dinner?”
The sisters looked at each other. “Well, you could put some water on to boil and shuck the corn. We’re having cold chicken.”
Hannah skipped off to the kitchen, humming. Lillie took her sister’s arm and walked her to the front porch. “I’m getting too old for this girl. But I have a question.”
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“Go ahead.”
“Since when is she allergic to eggs?”
*
Upon learning that Alex was suffering from a headache, Dr. Malkin was quite concerned, primarily for his own future, for if there were something seriously wrong with the boy beyond his limited medical understanding, and the boy was confined by some sort of special treatment, his plans to show off him at the impending conference on childhood diseases, and beyond, could be in jeopardy. He was counting on the little freak to be healthy.
“If I may,” he said to Delia, “I would like to touch it this instrument to the boy’s head, just to make it here the preliminary examination.” He dug his stethoscope from his medical bag and held it up to Alex’s forehead.
“Ain’t that thing for listening to his heart and lungs?” Delia said.
“Yes, of course, I was merely testing it to hear if there was an abnormal pounding of the blood, you see. This is done as a precaution in some medical circles, and I have learned it myself from my Uncle Dmitri, may he rest in peace, an excellent physician also.”
“Well?”
Alex said, “Well?”
“Ah, the boy talks, it is a good sign. But perhaps it would be it the best idea if you could bring him now to my surgery, where I have it the more elaborate medical equipment to conduct the assessment of the boy’s headache condition. I am sure his father would want me to have it a thorough look.”
“The last time Abe saw you he socked you in the nose.”
Malkin winced. “But surely we must let it the bygones be the bygones. I bear him no bad will and have instructed my attorney of law not to proceed in the matter further or in any way.”
Alex took his orange cap off and rubbed his head.
Delia watched his face twist in pain. This was all she needed now. A headache in a little boy, that could be a sign of something worse. A sick Alex would ruin her one shot
at leaving The Wheel and the stink of the city behind. This Malkin was a damn odd bird, but maybe in his long-winded way he could help the kid get some relief, and she hated to see him suffer. It was worth a shot, anyway. She knew Abe would hit the roof when he found out she let Malkin put his mitts on the kid, but she could deal with him later. She glanced again at the pain on Alex’s face. “Your office nearby ?”
“Yes, just several stops from here.” A fat man and two children pushed by him. “Ah, a seat two rows back. I shall take it and come when it is time to get off.”
*
Traveling in the opposite direction from Alex, Delia and Malkin, Abe stared out the window of his trolley, watching the rain and trying to make sense of the day’s events. They go on a picnic. The girl gets sick. Then she gets well and she’s all over him like a tigress. He takes her home. She runs upstairs. Her aunts lay into him with both guns blazing. She runs downstairs and explains it all away like she’s a city hall lawyer, and by the time he leaves, everything with her is hunky-dory again.
So what was he supposed to do now, get married? She seemed hell-bent on it. But something was off with the girl. Maybe it was her parents’ death, that might explain some things, but not everything. He thought about how she had almost passed out when he had said the word “adoption.” Strange. The whole situation made his head hurt, which made him think of Alex. The boy had been complaining of headaches off and on. It was time he took him to a real doctor. Probably Hannah or her aunts knew a good one, but if she found out something was wrong with Alex she’d probably go into a fit like she did at the park.
He picked up a newspaper from the empty seat across the aisle. More countries ready to get into the damn war.
The streetcar jolted to a halt. He could see a horse-drawn cart stopped in the middle of a curve in the tracks. The horse was slumped on its forelegs. In the gutter, blood mixed with rainwater. What a goddamn world.
*
Had Dr. Malkin been practicing medicine—or at least his brand of medicine—in the mid-1800s, his specialty may well have been phrenology, also known by the less flattering term, “bump-ology.” Malkin was intrigued by the idea that a person’s aptitudes, talents and tendencies could be ascertained by feeling the bumps on their head. What’s more, becoming a phrenologist seemed to require no special training or expensive equipment, only educated fingers.