Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (33 page)

“You're really taking it like a champ, kiddo,” I assured her, leaning forward to pat her vertebra at the place where her underwear protruded from the back of her gown. Then I told her I supposed the joke had gone far enough, and I was ready if she was (Mr. Big-Hearted) to let the matter drop here and now. I asked her if she didn't think it was time we started for home.

Still not a peep from Naomi, not a tummy rumble. All right, I thought, if she won't cooperate of her own free will, I'll just have to give her a shove. What choice did she leave me except to undo the wondrous thing I'd done?

I began cautiously with the coronet and, meeting no resistance, unhooked the string of pearls. I paused for a moment's regret, then reached around her bodice to unfasten the clasps at her spine. (It might have been less awkward to stand behind her for this operation, but Naomi was slight and my encircling arms were long for my size.) Then I gave a tug at her ruffled shoulders, and in an instant she stood defrocked.

I hadn't anticipated such abrupt results. I'd assumed that Naomi would intervene, having been provoked into taking over herself. But as it turned out, the costume collapsed of its own accord, settling in a sibilant heap about her ankles. Along with it a loose strap of her camisole had been dragged off a shoulder, so that a budding right booby sprang into view. This I pretended not to notice, quickly turning my back to gather her cast-off clothes. As I was picking up the sailor pants and the jersey, everything that was needed to restore Naomi to her former self, I heard a noise behind me. With a sound like a cough giving birth to a whimper, she'd broken her silence for what seemed like the first time in centuries.

When I looked, her tranquil composure had come apart, leaving her racked with shuddering all up and down her bony frame. She was given over to a fit of sobbing, so careless in its transports that she neglected her modesty. I marveled slack-jawed at the way her upstanding pink nipple clung to her joggling breast like a blood tick or a jumping bean. God knows I hadn't meant to disrobe her so violently as to reduce her to such a state—though you couldn't help feeling that, in some respects, this was more like it. Human again, Naomi might now be persuaded to get out of here.

I took a step forward to offer her clothes and maybe some sympathy, then took a step backward to dodge the arm that she was suddenly pointing at me.

“Harry!” she hooted, making it immediately apparent that she hadn't been sobbing at all but laughing hysterically. Moreover, I myself seemed to be the butt of her joke. This might have upset me more if I hadn't been secretly pleased that the first word she uttered after finding her voice was my name.

“Oh Harry.” There it was again. “I never saw anybody look so,”—she practically choked, the words swelling her cheeks till they burst forth in a guffaw—“so scaaared!” Doubled over with laughter, she allowed the cotton vest to slip from her other shoulder and fall to her waist, thus lending her mirth more symmetry.

I supposed it was good that she was able to see the humor in our situation, saw it evidently much better than I. I tried to force a grin myself, hoping to show I could enjoy a good yuck as well as the next, even if it was at my own expense. This was turnabout, after all: having more or less played her for a patsy, it was only fair she should pay me back in kind. Tit (so to speak) for tat.

“Ain't we got fun,” I said, and repeated it was time to go home. I even suggested that some witching hour might be at hand. Hadn't it just today been confirmed in my hearing that Kaplan's sometimes played host to thieves? At any moment they might burst in on us; she should hurry up and take her belongings, which I tried again to dump in her arms. But it was clear that I was wasting my breath.

She did, however, do me the favor of attempting to suppress her hilarity, subduing it to the level of sniffling and the odd adenoidal snort. She even went so far as to affect a fleeting frown, studying her clothes in my hands as if I'd brought her the evidence of a shed chrysalis. Then she gave herself up to a stormier fit of giggling than before.

I couldn't stand it any longer. Dropping her rejected garments into the sawdust on the floor, I told myself that what I was doing was for her own good. She would understand that, no stranger to hysterics, I was administering a kind of first aid. I threw my arms around her bare shoulders and squeezed for all I was worth to calm her down. In a minute she'd be as limp and unresisting as her discarded gown, ready to see reason again.

With my chin clamped tight against her hair, I inhaled her closeness, her talcum and stale gardenia fragrance. I felt her sticky warmth glued to my shirtfront, through which I was tickled by her jiggling thingamabubs. It frightened me so much, this dazzled proximity, that I couldn't tell where her spasms of laughter left off and my shaking began. Again I tried to assure myself that I was doing nothing wrong—or if it was a sin to hug your half-naked first cousin, then it was the kind that even my grandfather's Scriptures must have made allowances for. Especially in the case of emergencies such as this.

When she pulled her face clear of the hollow of my neck, freeing her gleeful mouth, I saw a worried set of myselves reflected in the wet depths of her eyes. One worried Harry being all I could handle, and as the glare from the overhead bulb was anyway too harsh, I reached up and pulled the cord. In the dark I told Naomi to hush and, though I doubted that she heard me, suggested she might like to lie down for a spell. “Just until the craziness passes,” I said. With one arm still hooked about her fitful waist, I guided her in the direction of Zippe's casket. I groped in front of us until my free hand made contact with the knotty pine, then swept wildly from left to right, clearing the coffin lid of bric-a-brac and, judging from the way that it bonged across the floor, an empty samovar.

Apparently amused by all the noise, Naomi renewed her cackling, stumbling a bit as I urged her forward. What she'd tripped over, as I discovered with my foot, was the clump of her party gown, which had yet to be unraveled from her ankles. Crushing the material with my heel, I took Naomi under the arms and lifted her—helplessly giddy featherweight that she was—out of the gown. Think of separating a mermaid from her vestigial fishtail. After that I encouraged her to lie back on the coarse-grained lid of the box, then climbed on board myself to keep her company.

To coax her into stillness, I eased myself down alongside her; I leaned my weight against her ticklish ribs, suffering her bones, blunted only where her underwear was gathered into a sort of breechcloth. Carefully, I took hold of her wrists.

“Naomi, shhhah!” I pleaded, my face so close to hers that I felt an eyelash brush the tip of my nose. “You're making enough racket to wake the —” I waited for the thunderclap, but heard only the continued peal of my cousin's laughter. “Naomi!” I was about to despair of ever getting through to her, when her voice tumbled forth again. It came this time as an assurance that she found our mutual recumbency funnier than anything yet.

“You're a devil, Harry Kaplan!” she squealed between paroxysms of giggling. “You're a terrible person!” But no sooner had I relaxed my grip on her—for such was the heady effect of her voice—than she jackknifed her hips and bucked me off the box.

I picked myself up out of the wreckage of what I think was an ant farm, pulling a splinter or two from the seat of my pants. Thoroughly ashamed of myself, I realized that I
had
been terrible, and I was grateful to Naomi for jolting me back to my senses. What had I been thinking, that I should swarm all over my cousin like a drowning man? Come the first lull in her antic behavior and I would beg her forgiveness. Then she did manage to modulate her merriment a little, so that I now heard only the sound of mild snuffling. But just as I'd begun to frame my apology, Naomi told me to shut up and come here.

“C'mere,” she said in her old phony femme fatale voice, which even she didn't seem to be taking seriously. Not that it had ever worked on me when she had—not in her sultry garden or her spun-sugar boudoir. So what was it about the darkness at the back of Kaplan's that made her summons sound not so phony anymore?

Because I hesitated, not knowing whether I ought to step forward or turn tail, she reached out and pulled me down beside her again.

What happened after that is not so easy to say. Is it possible to try and hold on to someone even as you're trying frantically to break away? Because that's what was going on with me as Naomi and I started tussling on top of Zippe's box. Meanwhile, for her part, my kittenish cousin seemed equally confused. So frisky was she that, having just invited me to her side, she now seemed to be trying to throw me off again. Was this the famous fickleness of women? She wriggled, she squirmed, she nudged me with her drumlike tummy, so that I felt her giddiness in the pit of my own. It was a free-for-all, I can tell you, and I was ready to call it a draw. I was ready to call it a night and go home to lick my wounds—while at the same time I ached to cuddle Naomi. Of course I couldn't have it both ways. At least one of us needed to make up his mind for good and all.

Not that I could have disentangled myself from the snarl of our limbs if I'd wanted to. Already I'd lost a shoe in the struggle, and I was in danger of losing my pants, my suspenders having been yanked from their buttons. In a desperate attempt to master the situation, I scissored my legs about my cousin's, but thanks to the sliding ruck of her stockings, she was able to slip neatly out of the hold. I wouldn't have put it past her to slip out of her skin to elude me, a notion that made me redouble my efforts. For my trouble I got my glasses pried from my face and a finger poked in the eye before I had managed to recapture her hands.

I nestled hard against her, her tossing hips bruising my middle, causing my breath to come in tremolos like my papa being pummeled by masseurs at the Russian baths. But in the end, with a mighty grunt, I had her; she was pinned. I hugged her in a mortal vise, hanging on as if I thought she might change into something else, a porcelain doll or a daughter of Lilith or a distant icy queen. She might change into an annoying relation or a stranger unless I kept her nailed to the coffin lid, unless I gathered the gang of Naomis in my arms and confined them to a solitary girl, one I might never dare to let go of again.

But the little minx was still hemorrhaging laughter. It poured out of her in a rising tide that threatened to carry me away along with her if I didn't act quick. This was serious. There was no telling what might happen if, for the sake of us both, I didn't take it upon myself to seal her parted lips with mine.

About the time that the Carnival ended and school let out for the summer, the water began to go down. Looking no more or less bedraggled than they had when they'd arrived, the displaced families started making their exodus. They left as they'd come, like a defeated army, in a wobble-wheeled convoy of buckboards full of featherless poultry, in backfiring two-cylinder jalopies and on hobbled shank's mare. They trailed away toward their various points of the compass with the dust devils bringing up their rear, erasing the dried mud of their tracks from the sun-baked streets. In a few days their numberless ranks were reduced to a handful of stragglers; then they were gone.

I guess the city heaved something like a universal sigh at their departure: think of my mama loosening her stays at the end of a trying day. But otherwise there was nothing especially noteworthy about the event, no big send-offs that anyone heard of, no fond farewells. In fact, if you hadn't known that they'd been there in the first place, you wouldn't have missed them at all, their absence being no more remarkable than the evaporation of dew. On the downtown sidewalks the judges and the cotton brokers in their paisley waistcoats, the shop ladies with their swollen ankles, and the Court Square pensioners in wheelchairs feeding doves went about their business as if nothing had happened. The only difference I noticed was that they all looked slightly distracted, wearing expressions like you see on the faces of people trying hard to remember a dream.

Surfaced again, the levee was strewn with rubbish—as though it might have been raining one-eyed rag dolls and waterlogged mattresses, captain's chairs and tea chests spilling crawdads, bloated family Bibles like risen black loaves, long johns stuffed with straw. Canvas baby strollers, grandfather clocks, and a bleating Angora goat were found stranded in the branches of the scrub oaks along the banks. For every few feet the river receded, another terrace of debris was left behind, the cobbles resembling steps down the unearthed stages of an archaeological dig. Had my father chosen to venture the couple of blocks from his shop to the bluff, he might have viewed the sight of so much diverse trash with wonder. He might have thought that heaven had been scattering his own brand of manna.

During those days North Main Street seemed to have grown a little quieter, at least in our apartment, where there was seldom anyone at home. You'd have thought I might see more of Mama now that she and Uncle Morris had finally succeeded in getting rid of Grandpa Isador. On the pretext of airing him out, they'd taken him one afternoon for a drive in the country, where they had turned him over to the state asylum at Bolivar. I could imagine how he must have battled with the myrmidons as they tried to stuff him into a straitjacket; I heard him howling Yiddish oaths, which the other meshugayim echoed in their respective lost tongues. Not that I believed for a minute that he would find any peace, my grandpa, even in a community of like minds.

The popular scuttlebutt about Bolivar had it that its inmates were often the subjects of unspeakable experiments. They were housed in kennels, kept naked in all weather, made to operate the hospital generator by running a treadmill. But my mama insisted that the place was a regular country club, situated among the pines like Grossinger's. And who should know better than she, since Mama and Uncle Morris were finding such frequent excuses to visit. They were checking up on the old man's progress, so they said; they were taking him his things—though you tell me how an armload of grimy incunabula, some phylacteries, and a couple of moth-eaten suits could require so many day trips, some of which extended far into the evening.