Last Respects (16 page)

The man stroked his long blond-fuzzed chin, sent a quick glance out the wheelhouse window, then said, “From who?”

“From you,” my mother said.

“Why do you want to come to me to buy whiskey?” the man said.

He spoke casually, as though he were talking about the weather, and I tried to keep my translations on the same emotional level, but I sensed a tightening in the man’s voice. Not in my mother’s. She sat up straight on the oilcloth-covered bench, her hands folded in her lap, and spoke quietly but firmly, as though she knew exactly what she was saying because she had given a great deal of thought to her words, and she did not want to be distracted or misunderstood by irrelevant comments.

“Those sacks,” she said. She nodded to the pile of sacks the tall man had transferred from his motorboat, carried across the barge through the wheelhouse, and dumped on the dock-side deck. “Grade A milk for Sheffield’s store you’re not delivering.”

After my translation the man took a few steps, four to the door of the wheelhouse, four back, watching his legs as he did so. They were neatly encased in attractive and obviously not inexpensive dark brown boots that laced up to a couple of inches below his knees. Finally he looked up. Gently, through a small smile that did not hide the edge in his voice, the man said, “Ma’am, I think you better tell me who you are.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” my mother said. “I’ve been working for Imberotti.”

“How long?”

“Since Prohibition,” my mother said. “Almost eight years.”

I was too busy translating to do justice to my own astonishment. Eight years? That meant from the time I was six. How could she have been doing anything for so long without my being aware of it? Answers later, I told myself hurriedly. What had the man just said?

“Ask her how much work she’s been doing for Imberotti,” he said.

“First only a little,” my mother said. “They needed a bottle for the
schul
for Simchas Torah, but this Prohibition it said no, so I found out about Imberotti, and I said if you gave me a bottle I would bring back the money after I sold it to the
schul
.”

“Imberotti trusted you?” the man said.

“Why not?” my mother said. “I look like a crook?”

The tall man had been watching her as I translated, but now he seemed to bend down slightly, as though to bring my mother into sharper focus. “No, ma’am,” he said finally. “You certainly don’t look like a crook, ma’am.”

“So why shouldn’t Imberotti trust me?” my mother said.

The tall man smiled. It put little nicks into his cheeks just above the corners of his mouth. “Ma’am,” he said, “Imberotti would be a fool not to trust you. But now you want to buy from me, so I assume it’s you that don’t trust him.”

“No,” my mother said. She shook her head firmly and again said, “No. I trust Imberotti. He is an honest man. But not with me. He is not treating me right.”

“In what way?” the tall man said.

“For five years, a bottle for the
schul,
a bottle for a bar mitzvah, two bottles for a wedding, maybe three, all right, for that I’m good enough.” An unmistakable touch of bitterness surfaced in my mother’s voice. “Don’t misunderstand me,” she said. “For what I’m good enough to Imberotti, I’m also grateful. It’s bitter here on Fourth Street. Very hard. Bread and butter costs. My husband doesn’t bring home much to the table. In the slack season he doesn’t bring home anything. Everybody has to help. My son, here, he works in Lebenbaum’s.”

“What’s that?” the man said.

“The candy store on Avenue C,” my mother said. “Between what my husband makes in the shop, and what the boy makes in the candy store, and what I make from Imberotti, we’ve been eating. But not a penny to put away if somebody gets sick. You live for a little extra. This Shumansky wedding it could be a little extra.”

“What Shumansky wedding?” the man said.

“This dope, he has the chicken store on the Avenue D corner,” my mother said. “His daughter in a couple weeks she’s marrying a boy from uptown by Lenox Assembly Rooms. I went to see Shumansky and I asked him how many bottles he’ll need. Eighteen, he said, but he wasn’t sure he could buy from me.”

“Why not?” the tall man said.

“A man came to see him, Shumansky said. The man said he shouldn’t buy from me because I couldn’t deliver such a big order.”

“Is that true?” the tall man said.

My mother gave him a look. Don’t ask me to describe it. Go read a biography of Queen Elizabeth. Not the one married to the polo player. I mean the virgin. The way she looked at the Spanish ambassador. Or some other jerk she thought was a jerk. That might give you some idea, but only an idea. I am convinced nobody ever looked at anybody the way my mother looked at that tall man in the high-laced boots and the black turtleneck sweater on that moonlit night in the wheelhouse of that barge moored to the Fourth Street dock on the East River.

“What do you think?” she said.

The tall man smiled again. “I think you could deliver anything, ma’am,” he said quietly.

Why this reply should have made my mother blush, I don’t know, but it did, and in the pause I had a couple of moments to ponder the way the tall man talked. I had noticed it when he first referred to me as the kid. He had not said kid. He had said “kee-yid.” Now I noticed when he called my mother ma’am he had pronounced it “may-yim.” Just the same it seemed pretty late in this conversation for my mother to blush because of the way the tall man in boots pronounced his words. There was something more to it, I felt. I was dead right, but I didn’t know what I was right about. It was my first contact with a southern accent.

“I knew what was happening,” my mother said. “A fool I’m not. On eighteen bottles Imberotti wants the profit for himself. I went to see him last night and I told him. I said if I’ve been good enough for five years for a bottle for the
schul
and a bottle or two for a bar mitzvah, then I’m good enough for the eighteen bottles for the Shumansky wedding.” My mother paused. She sat up straighter on the bench. “That’s why I came to you.”

“How did you know about me?” the tall man said.

My mother nodded toward the wheelhouse window. “We live up there,” she said. “The building on the Lewis Street corner. I’ve been watching you make deliveries for a long time. I don’t know for who, but I know what you deliver. If you give me the eighteen bottles for Shumansky’s wedding, I’ll give you half the profit.”

The tall man started pacing again. This time, however, I noticed that he wasn’t watching his boots. He was watching me.

“Ma’am,” he said finally. “I think this is something you and I better talk over alone.”

I translated. My mother blushed again. What was the matter with her? She looked like a pomegranate. Pomegranates were very big on East Fourth Street. Even with people who had never heard of the Song of Solomon. On the Avenue C pushcarts pomegranates were cheaper than oranges. My mother looked down at her hands.

“All right,” she said finally. She said it to me. “You go back to the candy store and tell Papa to go home,” my mother said. “But don’t tell him anything else. You understand?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What did she say?” the tall man said.

I told him.

He smiled. “You’re a smart boy,” he said. “What’s your name?”

Sharply, my mother said, “What did he ask?”

I told her.

“Ask his name first,” she said.

I did.

For some reason the question made the tall man laugh. “Walter,” he said. “Tell her my name is Walter.” I told her, and he said, “What’s yours, kid?”

“Benny,” I said. “Benny Kramer.”

“And your mama’s name?” he said.

“Mrs. Kramer,” I said.

Walter laughed again. “I know that,” he said. “I mean her first name.”

Nobody had ever asked me that before, but my father called her Chanah, so I said, “Chanah.”

“Chanah,” Walter said. “That’s very nice.” He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a dime. “Here you are, Benny,” he said. “You go get yourself some candy and don’t come back. I’ll see your mama gets home safe after we finish our talk.”

I was across Lewis Street, halfway up Fourth toward the Avenue D corner, before it occurred to me to wonder how, with the translator out of the way, they could do any talking.

F
ORTY YEARS LATER, ON
my way out of the Battenberg Funeral Home, I was still wondering.

Up to this day of her death in the Peretz Memorial Hospital, after living in this country for more than sixty years, my mother had managed to learn just about enough English to get her through the check-out desk of the supermarket around the corner from her apartment house on 78th Avenue in Queens, but no more. On the night in 1927 when Walter Sinclair came into our lives out of the northern reaches of the East River, my mother had not yet learned any English. As for Walter, he may have later learned some Yiddish. But on that first night, when we met on the barge to which he had moored the
Jefferson Davis II,
he did not even know what a
goniff
was.

When Walter found out, it didn’t do him much good. It is a word that defies pronunciation by people born south of the Mason-Dixon line. Walter Sinclair had been a Chattanooga boy. Perhaps he still was. Or rather, perhaps he had gone back to being one. On this gloomy Sunday when I was setting out to identify the body of my mother in the Queens County morgue, I had not seen or heard about Walter Sinclair for forty years. Once we left East Fourth Street, my mother never mentioned his name.

Mentioning it now to myself, as I came out into the street, gave me an uneasy feeling. All the memories that were part of those early East Side days had been tucked away for years, at the back of a bottom drawer in my head, a drawer that I never opened. I signaled to a taxi coming my way up Queens Boulevard.

“Where to?” the driver said after I climbed in.

“Queens Memorial Hospital,” I said. “Is it far from here?”

“Fifteen minutes,” the driver said. “Twenty. Somebody sick?”

“No, somebody dead,” I wanted to say.

But I didn’t. I suddenly couldn’t believe she was dead. Because suddenly I was not seeing the shriveled, broken old body lying in a hospital bed, the scarcely held together scraps of skin and bones to which I had muttered soothing platitudes a few hours before Dr. Sabinson called that morning to tell me “It’s all over. She went in her sleep sometime during the night.”

Suddenly the taxi and my grim errand seemed to fall away around me, like the shell of a hard-boiled egg. Suddenly it was like being in a movie theater. No, in the movie itself. Suddenly I was seeing a beautiful girl. Gold-yellow hair piled high on her head. Her willowy, restless body encased in one of the black sheaths she sewed for herself. Her high cheekbones, pink with excitement, in her gaunt white face. Her blue eyes bright with anticipation. Suddenly, in the taxi that was taking me to the morgue where I had to identify her body, I was seeing my mother not as I had seen her the day before in the Peretz Memorial Hospital, but as she must have looked in 1927 on the night of the Shumansky wedding.

She wasn’t dead because she wasn’t real. She was better than real. She was Mary Pickford. Made-up, costumed, waiting with every nerve tingling for Mr. Griffith to summon her before the cameras. And talking Yiddish, of course.

“Either eat fast,” she said. “Or stop eating. There’s a lot to do tonight.”

My father and I were sitting at the kitchen table. He had not gone to work that day. His shop had entered the annual slack season, and he was working half-weeks. My mother’s remark could have been addressed to either one of us. But I was aware of what had to be done that night, and my father was not, so I knew my mother had addressed him. My father swayed away from his plate, as though my mother had snatched at it.

“I’m finished,” he said.

“What’s the matter?” my mother said. “All of a sudden my
kreplach
are not good enough for you?”

“They’re A Number One,” my father said. “The best you ever made. But tonight all of a sudden sopper is so early. So my
moogin
is surprised.”

“Carry your
moogin
over to the Erste Neustadter Krank und Unterstitzing Verein,” my mother said. “That always does you more good than a
krissteer
.”

There was some truth in this remark. After his daily dose of Saratoga #2, my father’s favorite home remedy was an enema, but the salutary effect of his monthly burial society meeting on his bowels was not to be dismissed.

“The special meeting is tomorrow,” my father said.

“You’re crazy,” my mother said.

She could have said you’re wrong, but not in our house. In her conversations with my father, my mother did not shillyshally. She went for impact.

She said, “The meeting is tonight.”

My father looked startled, but that did not stop him from swaying out of my mother’s reach as she grabbed his plate.

“It said in the postal tomorrow,” my father said.

It had. I’d read the postcard carefully when I brought it up from the mailbox four days before. It was important, my mother had told me, to get my father out of the house on the night of the Shumansky wedding. She had hoped his burial society special meeting would take place on the same night. My mother had relied on hope because she had no way of actually checking the date. Her contempt for my father’s one activity that took place without her supervision was so great, and of such long standing, that she had never bothered to note exactly when his meetings took place.

When I gave her the card indicating the special meeting was scheduled for the night after the Shumansky wedding, I thought: Uh-oh, trouble. Not, however, to my mother. She handled the small obstacle in a way that, I see now, was typical.

She put the postcard on the sideboard in the front room, next to the cut-glass bowl full of pomegranates, oranges, and bananas. This was the resting place for all mail that came into our house. When he came home from the shop my father read the card and put it back on the sideboard before he came out into the kitchen for supper. None of us ever carried mail from the sideboard in the front room into other parts of the house. Not even the gas bill. Communications from the outside world were treated like visitors from an upper level of society to which we could not even hope to aspire. Until we found out why they had condescended to call upon us—it was always reasonable, and therefore safest, to assume that strangers had hostile intentions—it was better to do a little bowing and scraping and obsequious tugging at the forelock. So mail, like guests, was handled in the front room.