Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  I’ve lots of other regulars, but maybe the strangest are two guys, Harold Kizerman and Morrie Feigenbaum. They meet here every Tuesday and Thursday for lunch. They both sport beards, white and not very well trimmed, and they eat with their caps on. Feigenbaum, a large man, must weigh somewhere around 300, maybe more, rides in on a motorized chair. Kizerman is slender, tall, with a permanently somewhat pissed-off look. They take one of the center tables—in his chair, Feigenbaum can’t fit in a booth—and usually stay at least two hours.

  One day a year or so ago, Kizerman left a large black spiral notebook behind. I couldn’t resist looking inside. In a scrawling handwriting he had written what I guess are a number of poems. One, with the title “Climate Change,” ended with these words:

  Tsunami and fire, earthquake, tornado, and storm,

  Disaster’s man’s lot, misery henceforth the norm.

  Not very cheery stuff, if you ask me, but then no one’s asking, certainly not Kizerman, and what he does is his business.

  One day, heading back to the kitchen, passing their table, I noted they were reading aloud to each other, each holding a bunch of typewritten pages in his hand. I couldn’t make out what it was, and later, after they had gone, I asked Gladys, their waitress, who has been at Rappaport’s since my father’s day, if she knew what the reading aloud was about.

  “They’re writing a play,” she said, “leastwise that’s what they told me.”

  Gladys, who has waited on them for years, had earlier filled me in on what she knew about Feigenbaum and Kizerman. They’re both in their mid-eighties. Feigenbaum was formerly an accountant, Kizerman in mail order. Both are longtime-widowers. During their married days, they lived in Skokie, and met through their wives, who played mah-jong together. They bowled on the same B’nai Br’ith bowling team.

  Feigenbaum is confined to his motorized chair because of his weight and varicose veins; he also suffers from gout, which hasn’t slowed down his appetite. He lives in an apartment at The Wrenwood. Not long after his wife died, Kizerman moved in with his plastic-surgeon son Gary and his family, who have a four-bedroom condo at The Barry Apartments on Sheridan Road.

  Gladys’s story is she married an Irishman, who worked at Bethlehem Steel and who deserted her maybe thirty years ago, leaving her with two young kids. She brought up the kids by herself, waitressing full time. Her son Tony is now a cop, her daughter Beverly teaches kids with disabilities in Lawndale. I wish I had ten Gladyses working at Rappaport’s. She’s always on time, completely reliable, no crap about her. She’s Polish—maiden name Rostenkowski—but she’s been around Jews so long by now she’s practically Jewish herself. She probably knows as many Yiddish words as I do. She smokes, but only in the alley behind the restaurant. If she ever needed me for anything, I’d be there to help without hesitation. I think she knows it.

  I don’t hire college kids or people in their twenties as waiters. Their minds aren’t really on the job. Where their minds are I don’t pretend to know, but a customer the other day told that me in L.A. if some young person tells you he or she’s an actress, you reply, “Oh, yeah, at what restaurant?” I hire older women, the occasional gay man, to wait tables. They stick around, are pleased to have the job, aren’t dreamy. My busboys, mostly Puerto Ricans and some Mexican Americans, come and go. I’ve had good luck with my two short-order cooks, Juan Diaz and José Esposa, who have been with me for two-and-a-half and four years respectively. Impossible to run a deli these days without knowing a little Spanish. I’ve learned just enough myself to get by.

  Five weeks ago, a rainy Tuesday, Feigenbaum and Kizerman fail to show for lunch. They’re not there again on Thursday. The next week they don’t show either. I asked Gladys what’s the story? She doesn’t know. Maybe one or the other is in the hospital. Guys in their mid-eighties, they could crap out at any time. I started checking the obits in the Trib. Nothing. One day I called The Wrenwood to see if Mr. Morris Feigenbaum was still a resident. He was. I hung up before they asked if I wanted to be connected to his apartment. Maybe it was Kizerman who was ill. I wasn’t about to call his son’s apartment. I mean, what’s it my business?

  Then the third week, a Wednesday, Kizerman walks into the restaurant alone. He takes a booth. The booth isn’t in Gladys’s station, but I arrange for her to wait on him anyway. He orders a corned-beef on an onion roll, coffee, nothing more. Half an hour and he walks out. I’m at the register, and when I ask him how’re things going, he mumbles, “They’ve been better.”

  I call Gladys over. “Where’s Feigenbaum? What’s with these guys?”

  “I’m going on my smoke break,” Gladys says. “Meet me outside and I’ll fill you in.” Gladys takes a ten-minute break for a cigarette every hour. Anyone else, I wouldn’t allow it.

  In the alley behind the restaurant, Gladys lights up a Marlboro, exhales, through her nose and mouth, a terrific cloud of smoke.

  “I asked Mr. Kizerman how Mr. Feigenbaum was,” she said, “and he replied that he wouldn’t know. He was reading the paper with his lunch and didn’t even bother to look up.

  “‘Nothing wrong, I hope,’ I said. ‘Hope to see you and Mr. F back here soon.’

  “‘Not likely,’ he said, still not looking up from his paper. He then told me that Feigenbaum insulted him. I didn’t think it was my place to ask him how.

  “‘Sorry to hear it,’ I said. ‘You two go back a ways.’

  “‘Nearly 60 years,’ he said. ‘Can I get some more coffee?’”

  The following Friday Feigenbaum shows up, alone. His motorized chair is so large he needs help with the door. Usually Kizerman holds it open for him. Today I do. He motors in and drives to his usual table. I follow him.

  “Expecting Mr. Kizerman to join you?” I say.

  “Not for a long while,” he says.

  “Nothing wrong with his health?” I ask, pretending not to know there’s been a serious falling out.

  “No. Just with his brain,” Feigenbaum answers.

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s a long story. Got a minute? Sit down.” Before Kizerman begins, Gladys comes up to take his order: a large bowl of kreplach soup, a brisket sandwich on rye with a side of fries, a Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda, coffee and cheesecake for dessert. Not one for “The Liter Side” of our menu, Morrie Feigenbaum.

  “Anyhow,” he begins, “my old friend Hal Kizerman comes to me six, maybe seven weeks ago, to announce he’s thinking about remarrying. He’d not mentioned any woman before, you understand, and Hal and I are pretty close. I held back. Offered no opinion. Where’d he meet this lucky lady? I ask him. At a benefit dinner for Rush Memorial Hospital, he tells me, where his boy Gary is on staff. What does she do? I ask. Some hospital volunteer work, he says. How old? I ask. Sixty-two, he says, which would make her twenty-three years younger than Kizerman. Married before? Three times actually, he tells me, no children. Is currently living at Imperial Towers, on Marine Drive. Will I get to meet her? Soon, he says.

  “So maybe a week or so later, I get an invitation to dinner at Kizerman’s son’s apartment, where I’m to meet this broad who’s caused my old pal to lose his normal good sense.”

  Gladys arrives, sets a bowl of kreplach soup before Kizerman and brings a cup of coffee for me. Kizerman plunges into his soup. He’s one of those guys who can talk and eat without losing the rhythm of either. He’d already done a pretty good job on the bread basket. But I guess that’s how you get to be 300 pounds or whatever he is.

  “Anyhow,” says Feigenbaum, “at Kizerman’s son’s place I get to meet my old friend’s new heartthrob. Her name is Deborah Shapiro. She’s good-looking, expensively dressed, goes a little heavy on the warpaint, is obviously a woman still on the attack. The only other people there are Dr. Gary Kaiser (Kizerman’s plastic-surgeon son, who did a bit of rhinoplasty on his own name), his wife Robin, and me. Kizerman is wearing a suit I haven’t seen before, ver
y Italian. He and Ms. Shapiro stick close together. I get the strong impression that, jacked up on Viagra or something more powerful, he’s canoodling her, if you take my meaning.

  “At dinner she tells me that Harold has told her about our collaborating on a play together. I tell her we have been working on it for more than a year now and hope to have it performed at the retirement home where I live, and that it’s a play about growing up in the Depression and its effects on two young boys with artistic instincts, sending them into the business world.

  “‘I’m a big fan of Hal’s poems,’ she says.

  “I ask her about her own life. She says that her father was a liquor distributor. Her maiden name was Weiss. The family lived in West Rogers Park. She went to Mather High School. Shapiro, her third husband, did something with fire insurance that wasn’t clear to me, but didn’t sound quite strictly on the up and up. Her second husband died of congestive heart failure, four years ago, at seventy-eight. Which suggests that maybe she has a thing for older men, a father complex maybe, who knows? About her first husband she didn’t speak.”

  Feigenbaum has by now finished off his soup with their two large kreplach. (“They’re Brobdingnagian, Daddy,” Sheryl, my youngest daughter, the English major, used to call our kreplach.) Gladys arrives, and sets before him his brisket sandwich and fries and Dr. Brown’s.

  “But I sensed,” Feigenbaum says, “something out of kilter. I looked at her and thought, this is a woman whose life hasn’t worked out. This is not a happy woman. Something has gone profoundly wrong for her. She’s in choppy waters, adrift, and looking for something to cling onto to get to shore. My friend Hal maybe.”

  “What made you think that?” I asked.

  Kizerman reached for another slice of pickle.

  “Instincts,” he says. “Disappointment is written in her eyes. Of course I said nothing about it. I kept my own counsel. The dinner went on. Pretty dull talk, I thought, but not for my old friend Kizerman. You could tell he was delighted to have been taken up by a still good-looking woman more than twenty years younger than himself. You reach a certain age, you no longer think of yourself as in the hunt, if you know what I mean.

  “My first suspicion is that she is a gold-digger and has taken Kizerman for loaded. As someone who has done his taxes for the last forty or so years I can tell you he isn’t. He gets by, not much more. You know the line about older men seeking out rich widows, how’s it go, they’re looking for ‘a nurse with a purse,’ that’s it. We need something similar for women going after older men, ‘An old babe who forgot to save,’ maybe. In any case, if Ms. Shapiro is a gold-digger, in Harold Kizerman she’s working the wrong claim.”

  Kizerman’s cheesecake arrives. Gladys sets it down along with a cup of coffee, which he drinks black with three heaped spoons of sugar.

  “My problem was what to do about it. Should I warn my old friend that he is making a big mistake? Or should I let it go, let things play out, as they figured inevitably to do? I decided on the latter.

  “Then less than a week later, Kizerman calls to inform me that he is going to propose marriage to this broad, Ms. Shapiro. Does a good friend stand by, despite his own forebodings, say congratulations and wait for the disaster that is sure to follow? Or does he say what he thinks?

  “‘Hal,’ I say, ‘I think you may be making a grievous error here.’

  “‘Grievous?’ he asks. ‘How so, grievous?’

  “‘I think it’s a dumb idea to marry at our age, and even if it wasn’t I don’t think this is the woman to do it with. This is an unhappy woman, Hal. See her, screw her, do anything you like, but don’t marry her is my advice. This is a woman likely to ruin your last years. Don’t do it. Big mistake,’ I say.

  “‘Who’re you, Ann Landers?’ he says. ‘Deborah is a beautiful and dear woman, and she needs my protection.’

  “‘Protection from what?’ I ask.

  “‘From the world,’ he says. ‘It’s a damn cold and cruel place, especially for a woman alone. If you’d get your fat ass out of that chair every so often, maybe you’d notice.’

  “So, there it was. We got to the insult stage that fast. I stopped it before it got to the shouting stage.”

  “‘Look, Hal,’ I say to him, ‘You’ll do what you want. I wish you nothing but the best.’

  “‘Like hell you do,’ he says. ‘You obviously take me for an idiot.’

  “‘Look,’ I say, ‘if I’ve done anything to hurt your feelings, if I’ve gone too far, I apologize.’

  “‘I know envy when I see it,’ he says. ‘You’re envious of my having a good life with an attractive woman. I’m not a goddamn moron.’

  “‘Envious’?” Feigenbaum says to me. “I swear it hadn’t occurred to me to be envious. I saw a dear friend in danger of going down the tubes with the wrong woman, nothing more.”

  I notice his cheesecake’s gone.

  “Anyhow, I say to Hal. ‘See you on Tuesday, at Rappaport’s.’

  “‘I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘Nor Thursday or any other day. I wish you well, Morrie, but, as the Jews used to say about the Tsar, not too close to me.’ And he hangs up. And that’s where things stand. A nearly sixty-year friendship, down the crapper.”

  I hadn’t said a word while Feigenbaum recounted all this, but the fact was that I knew Deborah Shapiro, or at least I knew her when she was Deborah—called in those days by everyone Dinky—Weiss. She was one of the most popular girls at Mather, went out with the star of the basketball team, a guy named Teddy Levinson, who went on to play for Ohio State, though he spent most of his career there warming the bench. A looker, too, Dinky Weiss, at least in those days, tall, slender, dark, well-built. The Weiss family lived in a sprawling ranchhouse on Francisco and Coyle. Liquor distributor, which Feigenbaum mentioned her father was, was one of those occupations that had its origins decades before in bootlegging, and you didn’t have to search too far to find those who practiced it usually loosely connected with the Mob. A clutch of successful bookies and other men in the jukebox, slot-machine, and other illicit businesses lived on those blocks off Francisco between Morse and Touhy. In those days Dinky Weiss, rich, popular, good-looking, was out of my league, certainly not someone I would ever have had the nerve to call for a date. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that as the ladyfriend of Hal Kizerman she had come down in the world—way down, with a thump.

  Please don’t ask why, but I decided to call Deborah Shapiro. I’m not sure exactly why. Curiosity mostly. Was she still good-looking? What had time done to her to put her in the position of needing Hal Kizerman’s protection, if she really did need it? She was in the phone book under D. Shapiro on Marine Drive, and when she answered the phone I mentioned my name, but—no big shock here—she didn’t remember it, or know who I was. I lied and said that I was chairman of a planning committee for our class’s 45th Mather High School reunion, and was calling to ask if she would be willing to serve on the committee. She said that she wasn’t in the least interested. I told her I understood, and suggested if she had an hour or so free to talk about the old days at Mather someday I would love to meet her for coffee. I was surprised when she said “Sure, why not?” We agreed to meet two days later, at three in the afternoon at a coffee and pastry joint called Jules Minhl, on Southport, off Addison.

  I arrived ten minutes early. The scattering of customers in the place were mostly women. The lunch menu was all salads and quiches and female sandwiches. The pastry on display was also for less than hardy eaters: croissants, muffins, small cookies. In this joint any of my regular customers would have seemed like they came from another planet.

  I recognized Dinky the moment she hit the door. She was still tall, lean, her hair dark, probably now with the help of a beautician. She was wearing designer jeans, moderately high heels, a long red sweater. She had one of those deep poolside tans that Bobby, my wife, used to call “extra crispy.”
The look was high maintenance, a touch on the hard side.

  I thought about ducking out, but she must have noticed me staring at her, because she came over to my table.

  “You must be Jerry Rappaport,” she said. “Hi, I’m Deborah Shapiro, formerly Weiss.”

  “You’re still recognizably the girl I knew in high school,” I said, “and that’s a compliment.”

  “I’ll take it as such,” she said. “And please forgive me for not recognizing you, on the phone or here, though you do look vaguely familiar.”

  “I spent a lot of my free time at Mather working in our family restaurant,” I said.

  “Then you’re a Rappaport from Rappaport’s on Devon and California. My Dad used to take me and my brother Donny there for Sunday morning breakfast.”

  “Are you still in touch with any of the kids we went to school with?” I asked.

  “I was when I lived in Glencoe with my first husband. But during my second and third marriages, living in the city, I fell out of touch. You married?”

  “A widower,” I said.

  “If it doesn’t sound too cruel, I wish I were a widow, at least where my third husband is concerned, but I guess you can’t have everything.”

  We ordered coffee, and she walked over to the pastry display and brought back a croissant, which she nibbled at.

  “Are you seeing anyone at present?” she asked.

  “Not at the moment. The restaurant—we’re now on Broadway near Addison—keeps me busy. How about you?”