Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (12 page)

She was behaving as if she were in her element, as if she belonged to all that fluffy pink sissification. But I wasn't fooled for a second. Nobody knew better than I the type she was—a slave to books. She could pretend all she wanted, but the books told the story. She would be shackled to them her entire life, dragging ever thicker volumes behind her. They would weigh her down if she tried to grow up. They would see to it that she ended the long solitude of her days as a pixilated old maid, her calendar full of other people's birthdays and yahrzeits.

Standing in the door of her bedroom, I felt stupid. Also a little nauseous, like I'd eaten too much cotton candy. But just as I started to turn away, I could have sworn I heard her speak.

“Maybe it's in here?”

For a moment I thought she'd posed the question to the mirror. “Beg your pardon?”

“The matzoh, silly. Maybe it's in here.” She turned to me, aiming one of those pointedly significant looks I'd been dodging throughout dinner.

I might have suggested that we forget the whole business, but instead, a good sport, I shrugged and stepped into her room. In making a show of hunting the afikomen, however, it's possible I went a little overboard in my thoroughness. Suddenly I was the scourge of hidden matzohs. I scattered the throw cushions in the window seat, playing havoc with the quilted unicorns. I manhandled her gallery of dolls, interfering with the cobwebs that moored them to the mantel, coughing over their odor of stale potpourri. With the bookcase I was no more respectful, rifling fat volumes and lean alike, fanning their pages without any temptation to stop and browse.

I was at some pains to conceal my enjoyment from Naomi, nor did I want to see how appalled she must be by my disdain for her things. So I dropped to all fours and stuck my head underneath her bed. What I saw there among the dust kittens was a maverick cache of books with luridly colorful jackets.

“Nothing here,” I quickly assured her, bumping my head on the bed frame as I started to rise. This was at least partly due to a sudden movement of my cousin's, which kept me on my knees.

Pivoting away from her vanity as she hummed a lively air (“Ma, He's Makin' Eyes at Me,” I think it was), Naomi had hoisted one spindly leg high over the other. Studying me all the while like I was the object of a laboratory experiment, she raised the hem of her dress to her thigh. She did this with a painfully slow deliberation, allowing her humming to dwindle into silence, all the better to savor the
shush
of the dress against silk. Then she hitched up a baggy stocking. She pulled it taut, indolently stroking the long blue vein of the underseam. As if to punctuate the whole affair, she snapped a garter—the sound penetrating my chest like a gunshot—and inquired with point-blank sincerity, “Harry, do you ever have fun?”

From my half-crouch I tried hard to pretend that here was nothing out of the ordinary. She was fixing a stocking, for God's sake; with legs as skinny as hers, it was no wonder they wouldn't stay up. But my eyes betrayed me. While I made an earnest effort to lift them far enough to meet my cousin's, my eyes found a level of their own, falling irresistibly on Naomi's legs. I was interested, despite myself, in the way the wine-dark sheen of her stocking top met the milk-pallid flesh of her thigh. It looked warm, her naked thigh, a desert island beach where the sea, redolent of roses, washes onto a sandy shore. Then there was the wispy hint—forgive me—of a grotto that beckoned just out of view.

I wanted to ask if this was her way of inviting me to leave no stone unturned in my search for the matzoh. But that was the Passover wine speaking, and something told me that joking would only make things worse. After a first failed attempt during which I felt a little faint, I got up with the intention of giving Naomi an honest reply.

“Do I ever have fun?” I repeated thoughtfully, then tried to turn it into a bold-faced statement: “Do I ever have fun!” But it still came out sounding like a question under consideration.

I suppose you could say that I'd been having a good time in the pawnshop, but ever since I'd crossed over the water on Beale, things had been different. I was different, like a traveler who'd come back from distant lands disguised as a pawnbroker's son. Meanwhile familiar places had begun to seem new to me. For instance, I had become addicted to the rival aromas of North Main Street—boiling cabbage versus baking strudel, rust versus rising sap—as they wafted through my alcove window at night. I liked listening to the neighbors, picking up snatches of their gossip. I liked when their gossip was drowned out by scratchy Galli-Curci or a breeze that carried some phrase of a swing clarinet. I liked trolley bells and sirens and the foghorns from the river barges, baleful as shofars blown by giant Chassidim. And so help me if I didn't take pleasure in looking up my puny cousin's wallflower dress.

Did I ever have fun? I'd had a little, I guessed, but the
real
fun, the
famous
fun—that, I felt, had yet to begin. So to Naomi's question I had only this to reply, my voice skipping up the register till I cleared my throat: “Not much.” Then I turned my head from left to right and asked her where else the thingie, the afikomen, might be hidden.

Peevishly, Naomi dropped her hem over her knees and went all shmulky on me again. With a weary impatience she told me to go and look in the dumbwaiter where her father hid the matzoh every year.

In bed that night I had shpilkes something awful, if you know what I mean. The whole town was cockeyed in the aftermath of the disaster, and I guessed I was no exception to the rule. I'd had my glimpse of the world beyond Third Street, and had finally to admit that all it gave me was an appetite for more. This is not to say that my alcove wasn't cozy, and the pawnshop always had its moments, provided you could find the space to watch them from. But outside, the overrun city was more interesting than any book I knew. There were local attractions as rare as anything that Richard Halliburton, Memphis's home-grown Marco Polo, had crossed oceans to observe. Or so I'd heard.

There was Happy Hollow, for instance, the shantytown at the bottom of the bluff, below the Pinch. That's where the victims of murders, their flesh peeling off like wet paper, were said to wash up under the pilings of houses on stilts, houses constructed out of packing cases and Moxie signs. Towheaded and whey-faced, with eyes like Orphan Annie and shriveled limbs, the citizens of Happy Hollow were popularly bruited to be the issue of fathers and daughters, cousins and cousins, and so forth. There was Mud Island, low-lying as a whale's back in the middle of the river, formed from silt accumulated around a steamboat sunk before the Civil War. That's where the fisherfolk lived in their patchwork tents and converted automobiles, who drank sacramental moonshine on Sundays and danced before the Lord with rattlesnakes in both hands. Also, according to the Chamber of Commerce literature, there was a museum in a pink marble mansion that once belonged to a bankrupt millionaire. There was an aerodrome housing a dirigible as big as Goliath's lung, and a view of three states from a café on top of the Cotton Exchange.

But when I closed my eyes that night after my uncle's Seder, I was voyaging with shvartzers again. This time, for reasons that would not come clear, we had abducted a young white girl bearing an unfortunate resemblance to Naomi, though the girl in question was more amply endowed. We were sailing through fog toward a cannibal-infested coast in search of a legendary lost mine of unleavened bread.

The next afternoon I went back to the famous end of Beale Street. I'd been hanging around the pawnshop, which now bulged so at the seams that Papa talked of annexing the colored dentist's office upstairs. While he was at it, he would take up Joshua's trumpet—which must have been somewhere in stock—and blow down the walls between us and Uncle Sam's Loans on one side, Pinsky's Custom Tailor on the other. Kaplan's would occupy an entire city block, become a Kaplan's World of Loans.

To his regular clientele, Papa had recently added the flood refugees, who straggled in with items that were questionable even by his standards. Nevertheless my papa, with his unquenchable passion for novelty, took in their crocheted samplers and whittled ax helves, their impermeable ascension shrouds, their divining rods like outsize slingshots, and their foul-smelling panacea herbs. But not before he'd heard their sad stories, jotting down the occasional note.

The inventory ledgers took up as many volumes as a Talmud. Their columns of lengthy descriptions and bewildering numerical entries were limned with glosses that overwhelmed the margins, thus giving the pages the actual look of commentary and responsa. This was a recent feature of my father's behavior, how he labored over his ledgers like a scribe, refining and expanding the texts. It wasn't enough, for example, that a wooden crutch belonged to a man who had lost his foot to a snapping turtle; but a cane pole, no apparent relation to the crutch, might once have caught a turtle that slipped from the hook to leave a human foot dangling in its place. In this way my papa endeavored to connect various items along family lines.

It was a method that drove at least one auditor to smoke two packs of Luckys and leave the shop in disgust. It caused the detectives from the pawnshop detail, McCorkle and Priest, to curse the day they'd attempted to make heads or tails of Kaplan's books. I'd watched them flipping the pages in frustration, unable to distinguish the fishy from the legitimate. It was a sight that put me in mind of overgrown cheder boys struggling with a haftorah portion.

So filled to capacity was the pawnshop that Grandma Zippe, were she ever to be properly buried, would first have to be disinterred. Nor had it escaped my attention that the curios surrounding her casket—the ram's horn deaf aids and the painted bisque Betty Boops—had recently been joined by an empty copper samovar.

So how did my dotty papa manage to keep from going belly up? Because, for all of his foolhardy squandering of capital, the cash drawer still seemed bottomless, and the level of our family's newfound affluence had not been reduced. We still enjoyed the freshest whitefish and the choicest cuts of brisket from the butcher, not to mention the most up-to-date in household conveniences, the latest being an electric Hoover, which my mama maneuvered as if she were wrestling the tail of a cyclone. If you subscribed to the theory that my uncle was behind our prosperity, then you had to suppose also that the time would come when he would seek to collect what he was owed.

But on that afternoon following the Seder, the future of my family was hardly even in the running with my major concerns. Besides, with only a minimum of floor space left to accommodate the customers, wasn't it clear that my own services, marginal at best, were no longer required? What choice did I have but to take up a post out on the sidewalk next to Oboy? From there I could at least keep vigil with the puller until my papa had finished walling himself up alive. And after that we could signal prospective customers to pass on.

Of course I had been a little uneasy around Oboy since the night of our rowboat ride. I was grateful on the one hand that he hadn't brought it up, which was as good as saying that my secret was safe. But on the other hand I resented that, for him, the event apparently wasn't worth mentioning. The problem, I suppose, was that I just didn't know how to read such a character—though I decided the best policy was to settle on distrust. Hadn't I seen with my own eyes that he was the servant of at least two masters? What functions he performed for Uncle Morris, I didn't even want to guess. If this so-called puller was making it clear that he didn't need my company, I could assure him the feeling was mutual. That's why, when Papa came out in his apron to hand me a fifty-cent piece, asking me to nip around to Segal's for some seltzer and heart-attack buns, I was glad of an excuse to get away from Kaplan's Loans.

As I walked down toward the bayou overflow, the afternoon sunshine felt intimate, as if it were getting under not only my clothes but my skin. Dutifully I rounded the corner into the dry side of Third Street, heading straight for the delicatessen, but the clamor from across the lagoon kept distracting me. The Negro flood refugees, having been forbidden from the barracks at the fairgrounds, had made their encampment on the little rise of Handy Park. I could see them, just over the road from where I'd paused to look, beating time on their number 9 washtubs, strumming cigar-box banjos, and presiding over the mounted halves of smoking oil drums. I could see the whole show, or all that I needed to anyway, from my own side of the street, though it was hard to distinguish one voice from another. But then why would anyone want to do that? And besides, my papa was waiting for his pastries; I would be missed if I was away too long. Moreover, after the ferry, it wouldn't be nearly as exciting just to walk across Third Street here, above the water-line. Though you had to admit that it involved a good deal less fuss.

Jumping over a gutter full of swimming tadpoles that turned out to be wider than it looked, I had a sensation of leaping on board a departing raft. Then I was in the park and surrounded by voices vying for dominion; snatches of howled and rasping lyrics assailed me from all sides. Someone had a mule as hard-headed as a woman, and vice versa, while someone else had nasty habits that high water couldn't wash clean. One had a boll weevil in his jelly roll, and another was fixing to swap his pillow for the railroad track. There was a preacher on a stump with his thumbs stuck in his armpits like a flapping crow, spouting Pentecost and citing sinners by name: “They's ol Tyrome don't think Jesus know he talkin that talk, and Do Funny Weeums, he jus waitin on Mistah Zero, gon give him a thousand-dollah bill.” Behind the preacher a circle of hunkering men, lassoed by smoke, were passing a jar and saying prayers to a pair of yellow dice. They were aped by a bunch of ragged boys gathered around an ashcan lid, tossing knucklebones snatched by a dog half hairless with mange. Broad-beamed mamas balanced clouds of dirty laundry on their heads, cackling evil rumors as they sauntered past: “The gal cain't have no back-do man ef she ain't have no back do.” A young girl hollered in her bare-foot hokey-pokey as if the patchy grass were on fire; an old man cooed to a catfish in a hubcap full of sputtering oil.