Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (30 page)

“Listen,” I said, “this is what we'll do. We'll get hold of my cousin Naomi. She's not so hard to look at, my cousin, and we can dress her up all farputz—you know, like a regular queen. Then we'll introduce her to Michael. Don't all white girls look the same to you people? He'll think she's the genuine goods and it'll bring him around. It'll work, you'll see. Don't ask me how I know, but I know.”

Having said as much, I found myself wondering, Why not? After all, Michael was already so far gone, what was the difference? One thing was as likely to snap him out of it as another—not that I really believed that anything would snap him out of it. Still, you couldn't overlook a certain sympathy between the dummy and my cousin. Though they might not know it, they were actually two of a kind, both of them addled in their respective ways by their sick yen for stories. There was something almost star-crossed in my idea of bringing them together, something that brought out the matchmaker in me. Anyway, what could it hurt? It was certainly no more harebrained a scheme than Lucifer's, and not nearly so hazardous. At the worst, Michael would only ignore Naomi the way he did everyone else; on the other hand, you never knew but I might be doing them both a favor. Not to mention the mitzvah I'd be doing the wise guy into the bargain. It was worth a try.

Lucifer's response was slow in coming. Having raised his raw pink eyes to mine, he gazed at me swimmingly like a drunk, like he was seeing double and the images refused to resolve themselves. In the end, however, the two Harry Kaplans must have merged into one, because Lucifer relaxed, and, like a wedge of moon dredged out of dark water, his old reliable grin began to reappear. Then he pinched my cheek and gave me a convivial cuff on the ear with his cap. He jumped up and slapped the cap against his hip, dancing a few steps of an impromptu buck-and-wing.

“Mistah Harry,” he declared with a jubilation that my gut greeted with righteous fear, “sometime I gin to thank you ain't so dumb.”

Because I hadn't been back to the Parkway for a while now, I found myself looking forward to the visit despite my somewhat irregular reason for going. Once she'd finished showing off her several personalities—the pendulum swinging dizzily from lost lamb to fledgling vamp—Naomi had settled down to being not such a bad companion. Of course she was sometimes still a little too eager to please, which made me nervous. She still insisted on breathlessly imparting the contents of her books. Nevertheless, I missed my weekly retreats to her tropical succah of a garden. Giving me a break from my taxing exploits on Beale Street, those trips must have done me more good than I knew. Besides, what with the progress she'd made toward becoming a person in my company, I was anxious to see if my cousin had continued to mature on her own.

I hoped that she hadn't matured too much, or else she might dismiss my proposition as idiotic—which was how, in the hard light of day, I was inclined to see it myself. I realized I must be crazy to have contemplated such a thing in the first place. If Lucifer hadn't pinned his outrageous hopes on me, I'd have been happy to call the whole business off. I even considered lying to the wise guy, though I knew he'd see through me in an instant. At any rate, I owed it to him at least to go through the ordeal of asking. After that I could report back with a clear conscience that our project had fallen through.

Meanwhile there was Naomi herself to consider. When I imagined how she might react to such a proposal, I thought I had better sugarcoat it a bit. So I did the unthinkable. I spent my carfare on a cellophane-wrapped box of chocolate turtles from Old Man Levy's pharmacy. Later, as I headed out to the Parkway, dodging riders in polo attire, I picked a spray of pink and yellow flowers. I felt ridiculous. The nearer I got to my uncle's palace, the more I realized what my duty entailed. I would have to make a clean breast of things to my cousin. There was no way to get around telling her that I'd been leading her on from the start. And since I'd already muddied the water by dropping so many hints, I knew that it wouldn't do to tell her anything short of everything.

So why was it, I wondered, that despite a stomach full of dogfighting butterflies, I could hardly wait to see her again?

Up the walk through a gauntlet of trade winds I approached my uncle's house and was met at the front door, as usual, by the uniformed maid. While she regarded the flowers and candy with suspicion, I beat her to the punch. “I know,” I said. “I should wait in the hall.”

Pacing the marble vestibule, I was trying my best to ignore a certain mush-mouthed voice coming from behind the study door, which was slightly ajar. “… Now your cathouse revenue, that's skim, that's small potatoes. But the hot properties fence, I can tell you, he's the boy that brings in the bucks. Take a shop like Cohen's on North Main Street, or Kaplan's on Beale…”

Uncle Morris was up to no good—so what else was new? The words “crooked” and “uncle” were as inseparably paired in my mind as “prune” and “Danish.” Then why did it give me such palpitations to catch him in the act of perpetrating his dirty deeds? After all, I wasn't exactly a stranger to the dealings of underworld types, many of whom could have had my flabby uncle for lunch. So maybe it was the casual mention of my papa's shop that gave me a start, and drew me irresistibly toward the study door.

I heard a couple of voices grunt in agreement, then Uncle Morris again, apparently getting down to brass tacks. “I'm counting on you boys to move the stuff before Shavuos. Certain antsy-pantsy parties have already expressed an interest that the goods get delivered on time. And I think you'll find their gratitude will more than make up for any inconvenience, farshteyn?”

One of the “boys” remarked, while the other sniggered, that he'd heard the hockshop was already filled to capacity. Uncle Morris cut him short with the brusque assurance that room would be made. “It ain't your business to worry, the shucha will take over at that end.”

I had some vague notion of bursting in on them. In the name of my father I would demand an explanation. Did they think they could get away with such treachery behind Sol Kaplan's back? Though what couldn't you get away with under his very nose? The truth be told, I was never really sure about what my father did and didn't notice. In fact, I wondered if, in his readiness to look the other way, my papa might be a willing accomplice, a silent partner, so to speak.

I was brooding on this when the maid, who seemed to take my eavesdropping in stride, poked my shoulder to inform me that Miss Naomi was waiting, and everything I'd just overheard slipped to the back of my mind.

She was sitting on her bench without the usual stack of books, wearing the wrinkled tartan pinafore of her private school uniform. (She attended the snooty Saint Somebody's Parochial Academy run by nuns, a secret kept from Grandpa Isador lest he rupture himself over the shame.) This was a switch from the dressier duds she'd put on for my previous visits. Gone too were her tan, faded back into her trademark pallor, and her essence of Sweet Gardenia, which could outcloy the garden. Missing from her hair were the glowworm barrettes worn, I assumed, for my benefit, which had arrested the fall of stringy bangs over her shiny forehead. Also missing was her serenity. Instead she was fidgeting, her head bent over the tangle of fingers in her lap, as if she were more interested in the outcome of their skirmish than in my arrival.

Who could blame me for being disappointed? Only a couple of weeks had elapsed since my last visit, and already she'd retreated into her old nebechel self. So we were back to scratch, me and my cousin, and this one didn't look like the type who'd be receptive to what I had to say.

I noticed that she was peeking expectantly at my hands. “Oh yeah,” I blurted, having followed her gaze to an awareness that my hands, for a change, were not empty. “These are for you.”

She accepted the flowers and candy with an expression which said that, no matter how sunk, she still knew enough to beware of Harry Kaplan bearing gifts. The flowers were already wilted on their strangled stalks, and the candy, when she'd unwrapped the heart-shaped box, was melted into the semblance of a single cowpat. I thanked her all the same when she offered me some.

I waited for this presentation of damaged goods to make a bad situation worse, but Naomi was, as ever, full of surprises. Heaving a sigh like she would take what she could get, she straightened herself up on her bench. All of a sudden she was a girl of modest dignity, accustomed to receiving gifts from her suitors; she was aware that gifts were often a prelude to some proposal, which she showed herself ready to hear out.

I wanted to tell her not to jump to any conclusions, that whatever she might have in mind, she shouldn't. On the other hand, this seemed as good a moment as I was likely to get for speaking my piece.

“Naomi,” I said, reciting lines that should have been better rehearsed, “I am here to enlist your aid in a matter of life and death. If there was any other way, I would bite my tongue before asking, but you gotta come with me down to Beale Street tonight.”

When I paused for effect, I saw that Naomi had pooched out her lower lip. Bracing myself against what was coming, I lost the thread of my speech. I realized I was doing it again, tramping into her garden, demanding favors I would never return. It served me right if she should cloud up and sulk.

On closer inspection, I observed that my cousin wasn't pouting so much as considering thoughtfully. She assisted the process with a sniff of the flowers drooping from her hand. With the forefinger of the other she probed the box of candy—the several turtles fused into one sizable snapper. Raising the candy-coated finger to the tip of her tongue, she licked it inquisitively, as if the taste of the chocolate was the issue in question. Then she gave a pert nod and said, “Why not?”

“Why not what?” I was confused.

“Why not go with you to Beale Street,” said Naomi, starting up there and then from her shady gazebo.

With a firmness that shocked us both, I grabbed her by the shoulders and sat her back down. “Not so fast!”

Having opened her mouth to speak, she promptly shut it again. Here Naomi had shown herself willing to comply, with no questions asked, so what do I do? But the problem was, I still had a tale to tell. Besides, it didn't seem right that my cousin should be in such a hurry to leave her fragrant bower. Even I had hesitated before daring to enter the haunts of the shvartzers, and I never had any garden to kiss goodbye.

“Don't you even want to know why?” I asked her, trying to soften my bullying tone.

There followed a revival of Naomi's contemplative moue. She shrugged another “Why not?” and made a little fuss of arranging herself in a listening attitude.

I blew out my cheeks and dropped onto the bench beside her, accidentally dragging my fingers through the candy box. When I pulled them out of the goo, I saw on my cousin's face a look of predatory tenderness; she might have snatched my fingers and licked them clean if I hadn't hurried to wipe them on the mossy bricks. After that I sat up and proceeded to dump the entire improbable megillah in her lap.

“You won't believe it,” I assured her, exhilarated to be finally spilling the beans, “but it happened like this…” Once I'd launched into the telling, however, I found that I kept needing to back up. The more outlandish parts lacked authenticity unless corroborated with further details. Naomi insisted that this wasn't necessary; I should get on with my story without so many interruptions. She was happy, it seemed, to accept as gospel what would have sounded to any intelligent person like pure cock-and-bull.

She didn't even get angry when I described the false pretenses under which I'd made away with her library. If anything, she tended to view the duplicity as an interesting twist. It was as if all that I related, though stranger than fiction, was just another story cribbed from a book.

“It's the truth, for crying out loud!” I insisted, and my cousin assured me that she had no cause to doubt it.

This was infuriating; it took all the fun out of confessing. Where she should have been astonished and scandalized, Naomi was only amused. It made me want to see how far I could push at the bounds of her complaisance. If the facts didn't move her, I could do better than facts. I began to touch up my descriptions, adding lush harem trappings to the decor of the Baby Doll, suggesting more than friendly relations with its resident females. Talk about gilding the lily, I even went so far as to exaggerate the effects of the dummy's shpiel: how it could modulate in pitch to cause internal bleeding and set off alarms in your cavities; how, during his more ardent outbursts, he levitated above the bed.

I know I should have been ashamed of myself, but I was too busy adding refinements to my narrative to care. Blame it on Naomi, whose gullibility kept egging me on. Myself, all I wanted was to make her understand that, give or take the odd embellishment, this story was based on actual fact. She should appreciate that, beyond the neat fuchsia border of her pungent preserve, Harry Kaplan was consorting with Negroes. He was fraternizing with undesirables in places dangerous to his health, and had himself become quite a rascally piece of work.

“It happened, so help me!” I threw in whenever I thought the story needed further guarantees. Then I crossed my heart and went on inventing lies.

By the time I got to the part where I had to tell Naomi just how she figured into all this, I was worn out. Though I tried to inject some excitement into my voice—“See, we'll dress you up all farputz” and so on—it wasn't any use. By now my mind was practically a blank. I felt so out of touch with the actual Beale Street that it was almost as if I'd never really been there. I'd replaced my own honest adventures with something like “Jack Armstrong Goes to Tan Town.” Not that it mattered to Naomi, whose mind had been made up all along. One trumped-up reason was just as good as another when you were as anxious as she was to leave your father's garden for the world.