Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (4 page)

“On the road to Mandalay,” he sang in a false baritone, “where the hmm-hmm fishes hmm…” This as he stacked his ledgers. “And the dawn comes up like hmm-hmm…” He'd turned to a coatrack, lifting a sleeve to blow off the lint; then he lingered as if he'd taken the hand of a friend he might not see again. Until now I'd been no more eager than he was to step outside, but I found I was growing impatient with Papa.

We were going, we weren't going—the suspense was getting to me. Once I'd turned my thoughts toward leaving, though, I began to become a little excited. The prospect of making our way back to the Pinch in a squall smacked of high adventure, or as close to it as a Kaplan was likely to come. Giving up on Papa, I decided to make the first move myself. I opened my umbrella, enjoying an act that flew in the face of superstition.

“Are you coming or not?” I put the question to Papa and received for an answer only his deferred big finish: “… Out of China ‘cross the hmmm.” On that note I was out the door in a howling blast of rain.

It was my conviction that my father would never allow his only son to negotiate such a gully washer on his own. But by the time I'd toiled up the hill as far as Second Street, I wasn't so sure. Drubbed by the elements, soaked to the skin through my flannel knickers, I was already beginning to think I'd had enough. I was about to turn back when I saw him coming. He was ducking from awning to awning, aiming his umbrella into the wind as if he meant to poke out the eye of the storm.

I waited for him to catch up with me, and together we huddled in the doorway of a pharmacy at the corner of Main Street and Beale. When the streetcar appeared, it struck me that a streetcar might not have appeared, since the power was off all over the place. But there it was, which now seemed slightly miraculous. It was concentrating the rain in the sweep of its headlights, churning like a steamer up the washed-out thoroughfare.

On board the passengers were as chummy as if they had in common being snatched from the jaws of certain disaster. They wore yellow slickers and peaked caps made out of newspapers, some of them carrying frightened chickens from the market. So they could face one another, they'd reversed the convertible wooden seats. They burlesqued the thunder and told corny jokes to which the stock response was always, “You're all wet!” A couple were trying to inspire the rest to join them in spirited song: “Oh Noah, he built him, he built him an ark-ie ark-ie …,” but they were drowned out by the drumming of rough weather on the trolley car roof.

For all we could see through the windows, draperied in streaming lights, we might as well have been making the journey by submarine. Were it not for the good instincts of the conductor—he shouted “Commerce Street!” with a fervor better suited to “Land ho!”—we would never have known where to get off.

During the short sprint to our building, buckets were dumped on us. We drooped from the weight of our saturated clothing as we slogged into the passage, leaking rivulets that cascaded behind us down the stairs. On the landing, pausing pointlessly to wipe my glasses in a wet handkerchief, I noticed that Papa was doing the same. He was such a sight, with the rain dangling in beads from his earlobes and nose, that I had to laugh. So maybe I looked similarly ridiculous, because Papa got tickled too. He laughed, shaking off raindrops, pointing a finger first at himself and then me, declaring, “Ain't we got fun!” It was bracing to think that my father and I had shared an actual escapade and survived to tell the tale. “Out of the storm we came,” he proclaimed in mock triumph, knocking on wood, “but at least we ain't orphans, eh Harry?”

We were still in stitches when the apartment door opened and Grandpa Isador met us, babbling woe. “Ek velt!” he bleated, wringing his hands in the scrubby bib of his beard, which I'd have sworn had turned a shade whiter in our absence. Behind him Mama, not ordinarily given to indulging the old man's outbursts, looked on dolefully.

“For such a greeting we defied the hurricane?” complained Papa. His lightheartedness should have been enough to dispel whatever anxiety the family might have had on our account. But in the midst of his efforts to calm Isador's hysterics, I saw in my father's altered expression that he'd sniffed what I had also begun to discern. The long-standing fishy odor of our apartment, whose source—it was no secret—was Grandma Zippe, had become almost unbearably ripe. What's more, her cushioned chair by the window was empty at an hour when she was normally seated there. This led to the conclusion, confirmed by my mother, that the old lady had taken to her bed.

I knew I should have felt more alarmed by the news of her illness, but the shameful truth was that for some time now my bubbe had been little more to me than part of the furniture. And as far as I could tell, the indifference was mutual. Of course there were still moments when you might almost think she was conscious of my presence: an eyelid might flicker as if to hint at some private understanding; but I was satisfied that this was nothing but a tic. There were occasions over the years when she'd gone so far as to thump the table, admonishing the fussy eater, myself, to eat his zoop; and sometimes, when I was out of sorts, she found the wherewithal to pronounce the dread word “Cristiyer!”—the signal for Mama to bring out the enema bag. But these, I was sure, were only reflexes left over from more vital days.

If I'd tried, I guess I could have jarred loose some long-lost memory: the old woman rolling up her sleeves, say, to punch the lights out of a hill of risen dough. I might have recalled how the ensuing cloud of flour powdered her cheeks and made her sneeze. I might have reached back in my mind to a time when she was stuffing derma or humming a freilach or decanting tea from her tarnished copper urn. But the samovar with its gilded dome and ivory-handled spigot, shlepped all the way from the Russian steppes, had stood empty now for a decade or more, and Grandma Zippe seemed to have dried up along with it.

She had never, to anyone's knowledge, suffered a stroke or any other ailment that would have left her terminally indisposed. The doctors had given up on locating a specific disorder. It was just that, at some point in her mature years, she'd retired from an active involvement in life, commencing an early rehearsal for the long stillness to come.

“Mrs. Sitzflaysh,” as Grandpa Isador called her, she'd done nothing for years but mark time beside her copper keepsake, adding fuel to her husband's lamentations. On occasion the old man had been heard to grumble, “I ain't her husband no more. She's the bride of that empty jug.”

It was a gripe that raised in my mind the question of the chicken or the egg: Which came first, Zippe's clamlike withdrawal or old Isador's breast-beating distress? Was my grandmother's incapacitation the cause or the effect of my grandfather's Torah-thumping otherworldliness? Because, when he wasn't trussed in the thongs of his tefillin, a hostage to piety, my zayde was chasing through moldering texts after the rumor of the Holy Shechinah. This was the elusive female aspect of the divine.

He pored over glosses on commentaries relating the finer points of a dialogue between Daniel and a scholarly lion; he split the hairs that Delilah had snipped from Samson's head. They were activities that, when all was said and done, might make a person no better a companion than an empty samovar.

All day long she sat beside it, staring steely-eyed out the window, her puckered face in the hand-painted babushka like a pitted prune in a sling. In the evenings she rose briefly as Mama turned her chair to face the living room. But beyond the necessary, beyond her involuntarily blurted “Feh!”s and her spontaneous gestures against the evil eye, she never stirred.

Then there was the business of her odor. Nobody could say exactly when it had started, so long had the odor pervaded our household, but it was generally agreed that it dated from around the time when Grandma Zippe sat down for good. So maybe it had attached itself to her back in her ambulatory days, a stray aroma that had followed her home from the market. It had found in her once bustling person (for reasons who could say) the perfect host, and invaded the somber privacy of her shirtwaist. It had hung its wreath so heavily about her shoulders that she gave in at the knees.

For a while the smell seemed impersonal and unlocalized. It was possibly something rotting in the icebox, which Mama scrubbed as she did everything else, in a deodorizing passion. But as the reek became stronger, it left no doubt as to its point of origin; and unlike my grandmother's forbidding presence, her fishy smell was not so easy to ignore. You might almost have said it had a personality all its own.

Naturally we learned to live with it, but every time you adjusted to the latest level of fetor, it seemed to have been turned up a notch or two. Full-bodied and dense, with a richness that brought tears to the eyes, it scented our clothing and flavored our meals. It caused otherwise decorous guests to hold their noses and whisper “Pee-yoo.” It soiled the air with an olive cast and filtered into your sleep, giving you troubled dreams of stagnant seas. While every measure was taken to ensure that my grandmother was antiseptically cleansed and disinfected, nothing worked. No amount of sitz bathing the old lady in aromatic bath salts or soaking her garments in lye, no rings of pink-smoking germicidal smudge pots—nothing had succeeded in purging our apartment of her odor.

It was hoped that she might lose it during our move to the South; she might leave it where she'd found it in our old neighborhood by the sea. This was a point that Uncle Morris had had the doubtful taste to raise more than once. But the odor had traveled well. In fact, owing perhaps to the oppressive humidity, it had become even more exquisitely intense. And now that it was nearly unbreathable, we understood how it had been all along the smell of her dying.

By the close of the weekend the rain had sown its wildest oats, settling down into a permanent pelting gray monsoon. It was a fitting accompaniment to the prevailing gloom of our apartment. The silver-haired Dr. Seligman, a little vague as to actual causes—“At her age it's always a combination of things”—had assured us that my grandmother's passing was only a matter of time. At this stage of her illness the hospital would be a needless expense, he'd said. Why put the old lady through the ordeal when she could be made so much more comfortable at home?

Over corn flakes on Monday morning Papa told me not to bother coming down to the shop after school. Business was going to be slow thanks to the weather, and I could make myself more useful at home. But I surprised myself by arguing that I would rather go to work; in the apartment I would only be in the way. Already the place was filling up, somewhat vulture-like, with Mama's friends from the local synagogue auxiliary. Offering a token assistance invariably diverted by gossip, they doted more on the visiting doctor (a bachelor) than on the failing patient herself.

Meanwhile Grandpa Isador, a tallis draped over his head like a cloth draped ineffectively over a canary cage, warbled prayers as unrelenting as the rain. Uncle Morris came and went, preceded by a paunch that strained the limits of his corsetlike waistcoat, blustering all the while as if he believed that God could be bribed. His stale cigar competed with the carbolic acid and atomizers of cheap perfume, deployed by the ladies in their futile efforts at fumigation. Compared to all this, the pawnshop was a regular safe haven. And it wasn't fair that my father, with whom I'd endured a trial by hurricane, should keep the benefits of his sanctuary to himself.

She died toward the end of the week. I knew it even before Dr. Seligman, sloping out as I entered, gave me his sympathetic cluck of the tongue. I knew it before I saw Mama being fanned by the Hadassah ladies as they coaxed her to take a cup of tea. I knew it the moment I opened the door and for once my stomach didn't churn or my eyes smart from the smell. For once you could inhale the fresh challah that the Ridblatts were baking downstairs. You could identify garlic and orange pekoe, molasses and rising damp, all the odors that had surfaced since their yoke of oppression was lifted. Whatever the corruption that had occupied old Zippe's brittle anatomy, it had finally fled. It had escaped, presumably along with her soul, into the great out-of-doors—which smelled, as I'd sniffed it on the trolley ride home from the shop, unmistakably of fish.

When I came in, my mother excused herself from her ministering ladies to ask in an accusatory tone, “Where's your father?” The question was of course rhetorical, since where else would he be but in the pawnshop, where I'd left him not half an hour before. Nevertheless, she succeeded in making me feel guilty by association, as if I might be covering up for something unseemly. As if, instead of attending to business, my father and I had been lying doggo, afraid of facing the music of Zippe's inevitable end.

In the midst of gloating over my discomfort, Mama suddenly unsmirked her lips. She rolled her eyes and slapped her forehead theatrically, maybe for the sake of the ladies, then recalled aloud, silly her, that in her shock she had forgotten to phone her husband. It was not an oversight you'd have expected of Mama, for whom the telephone was ordinarily an extension of her arm.

Uncle Morris (had she telephoned him?) was already at hand, saying “There, there” as he escorted Grandpa Isador out of the sickroom. Leaning on his stout son, the self-appointed rock of our family, the old man was weeping buckets. Between wrenching sobs, he managed to insist on the traditional exequies: the body sponged in Jordan water by tenth-generation lavadors, laid out on the floor facing east with six-foot candles at either end. It must be interred without a coffin, in a sailcloth winding sheet smeared with Jerusalem mud. To all his demands Uncle Morris responded with approving nods of the head, which he alternated with conspiratorial winks at my mother.

Changed out of the rumpled clothes that he'd slept in all week, old Isador had wasted no time in donning the accessories of mourning. He was wearing the silk-trimmed caftan that reached to his knees, below which his legs were bare but for his gartered socks. On his head was the molting fur shtreimel that Papa used to say was standard issue at the Wailing Wall. For a hat, he said, it had a lot in common with the rotary brush of a chimney sweep. But Grandpa Isador was obviously convinced that mourning became him. Moreover, so absorbed was he in his tearful vision of the perfect funeral that he failed to notice the arrival of the undertaker, Mr. Gruber.