Last Respects (40 page)

It was a small daily ceremony to which I had not realized I had learned to look forward until the Germans of Tenth Street sent in all those electricians and carpenters to set up the block party for the arrival of the Melitzer Rabbi.

At the end of two days of efficient hammering they had closed off our block with barricades at the Avenue D and Lewis Street corners. Across the block, from poles set on the facing sidewalks, strings of small red, white, blue, and green electric lights were stretched on black wires that soared like halved barrel staves up, over, and down to the other side of the street. The effect was to make the familiar block an unfamiliar sight. A long sausagelike cavern, like a loosely woven basket designed to hold loaves of French bread, that had been lowered over our heads.

I watched it take shape with astonishment. In the evening, when somebody threw the control switch inside the synagogue and all the colored lights came on with a noiseless explosion, my breath caught in a small gasp of pleasure. But I also had a feeling of uneasiness. Through the green and yellow and red lights I could see the man with the knapsack and the long pole poking his tiny jet of flame at the carbon arcs on the Lewis Street corner. He no longer seemed to be doing anything important. The Germans, intent on giving the Melitzer Rabbi an appropriate welcome, had taken the mystery out of the Fourth Street night.

The night they chose was a mistake.

Anybody on Fourth Street could have told them so. The Jews of Tenth Street, however, rarely listened to anybody but themselves.

Word had come through to them, presumably from the Immigration Department, that the Melitzer Rabbi, who was being processed at Ellis Island after leaving the ship that had brought him from Europe, would be free to leave on Saturday morning. The Jews of Tenth Street decided to meet him at the dock with an appropriate delegation. This, while a tribute to their devotion, was tactically dubious.

Saturday, any Saturday, is a day of worship. It was no day to shepherd home from the Castle Garden ferry at the lower tip of Manhattan a man who was touched by reverence and surrounded by an entourage of nobody quite knew how many members, all washed by the same glow of heavenly light. The trouble was that on Saturdays, Jews who were
frim,
meaning deadly serious in their devotion to the rituals and strictures of their religion, would no more think of moving about in any form of vehicular transportation than they would think of striking a match or even a wife. The trouble was complicated by the fact that the Jews of Tenth Street did not seem to be aware of the distance in terms of miles between their home block and the lower tip of Manhattan.

I cannot believe that the question did not cross their minds. Or the minds of their movers and shakers. Or surely the mind of one leader. They must have had at least one. Germans always do.

In any case, the Germans of East Tenth Street in 1927 acted in a manner that I suppose there will always be people like me to call typical. They divided their forces. Those who were most
frim
came down to the synagogue on Fourth Street carrying their gold-embroidered velvet prayer bags as they did every Saturday morning. The others—I later estimated that at the start there were easily a hundred—set out on foot for the Battery.

During the past many years I have given this one day in my life a great deal of thought. Perhaps more than it deserves. And yet, until the day my mother died and her body disappeared from the Peretz Memorial Hospital in Queens on the day before Christmas, the only concrete result of all those years of thinking was the conviction that my life would have been entirely different if the Germans of East Tenth Street had decided to meet the Melitzer Rabbi, and celebrate his arrival at the Fourth Street block party, on a weekday. They would almost certainly have used the subway. Or the Avenue B streetcar. Or even a few taxis. Money, after all, was not a prime consideration. My point is, that coming up from the Battery on wheels they would almost certainly have arrived on East Fourth Street before dusk. Walter Sinclair and I had assumed they would. Our plan, or rather his, was based on this assumption. That was why, on Saturday afternoon, following the
chulent
and during the
lunch,
I left our flat, climbed the stairs, and let myself into Top Floor Back with the key Mr. Noogle had given my Aunt Sarah in exchange for the seven dollars Walter Sinclair had left in our mailbox.

Chulent
was the staple of the Sabbath meal, a thick, heavy, delicious stew made of meat, beans, potatoes, onions, and spices. Every housewife on the block made her pot of
chulent
on Friday. Before sundown every boy on East Fourth Street carried the family pot up the street and around the corner to Mr. Siegel’s bakery on Avenue D. Here Mr. Siegel placed the pots in the oven to keep warm overnight. They were never labeled. Every family had its own special pot, and Mr. Siegel identified every one of them by their contours as readily as he identified the owners by their sons.

Saturday at noon, when the family heads started coming home from the synagogue, the sons headed back to Mr. Siegel’s bakery. Here the
Shabbes goy,
a gentile who was paid to perform tasks on the Sabbath forbidden to devout Jews by Holy Writ, would remove the pots from the oven with a long wooden shovel, and we would carry them home, piping hot, for the midday meal. After every scrap had been eaten, the head of the household lay down for a postprandial nap that was known as the
lunch.

The word came from the piece of furniture on which these naps were taken: a brown leather couch with a headrest at one end. In shape, the one we owned, which was exactly like every other on the block, was not unlike the object on which in popular paintings of the period Madame Récamier is seen receiving the guests in her salon. To every family on the block this piece of furniture was known by the word under which the manufacturers of Grand Rapids had sent the model out into the world of immigrant America: a lounge. On East Fourth Street the word was pronounced
lunch.

I waited until my father lay down and covered his face with the black and red polka-dotted bandanna he had owned since his service as a conscript in the cavalry of Emperor Franz Joseph.

“You want help?”

It was my Aunt Sarah, speaking from the kitchen sink. I stopped on my way to the front door.

“No,” I said.

“You sure?” she said.

I was positive. Walter Sinclair had laid it all out. “Yes,” I said.

My Aunt Sarah addressed the big brown pot from which she was scrubbing away the last scraps of
chulent.
“Sometimes things happen,” she said.

Maybe they did. But not when Walter Sinclair was in charge. My mind, dominated by visions of the
Jefferson Davis II,
corrected the image at once. I shouldn’t have said not when Walter Sinclair was in charge. The correct phrasing was: not when Walter Sinclair was at the helm. I had just started to read Conrad.

“Nothing is going to happen,” I said. What else do you say and believe at fourteen?

“I’m glad to hear it,” my Aunt Sarah said. “Because tomorrow I have to go back to New Haven.”

My heart jumped. During the few days since the Shumansky wedding, when my mother had disappeared, I had grown accustomed to the presence of Aunt Sarah in the house. I liked her better than my mother. I had extended this feeling into the certainty that my Aunt Sarah was going to be with us forever. I had conveniently forgotten that she had a family of her own in New Haven.

“You’ll come back?” I said.

“If everything is all right,” my Aunt Sarah said.

“In New Haven?” I said.

“No,” she said. “Here.”

That settled any lingering doubts I may have had about the day’s plan. “Everything is going to be all right,” I said.

“Good,” my Aunt Sarah said. “But watch out for Mr. Noogle.”

“Why?” I said. “You gave him the seven dollars.”

“And he was glad to take it,” my Aunt Sarah said. “But he’s related to that bloodsucker, Mr. Velvelschmidt. For bloodsuckers taking is easy. Giving back, that’s what they find hard. Take care.” It was her first reference to the fact that my part in the block party might be hazardous.

“I’ll take care,” I said.

It was more than a phrase. It was a promise. That’s why, even though it was Saturday afternoon, I climbed the stairs to Top Floor Back on my toes. Every family head in the building was snoring through his nap. I could have gone clumping up those stairs, banging together garbage-can covers like cymbals, without fear of detection. But I tiptoed.

Inside Top Floor Back, I locked the door behind me and took a quick look around. There was not much to see. Kitchens in uninhabited tenement flats on East Fourth Street tended to look like my science textbook illustrations of lunar craters. My interest, however, was in the
vonneh.
It looked exactly as it had looked the night before when I had brought up from the dock the last delivery the
Jefferson Davis II
had made for the block party. I ran my hand over the burlap wrappings that shielded the bottles. The wrappings were still damp, but the river water had run off down the
vonneh
drain. Handling them would be no problem. I walked out into the front room. It was like walking out into a huge dirty cracker box. No furniture. No curtains. Nothing on the walls except long gray stains from old roof leaks creeping down the plaster like belligerent stalactites. The windows were gray smears. Crossing to them, the long strips of naked floorboard creaked under my then approximately hundred pounds. Through the cracks came the rich, ripe smell that hung over the Lower East Side every Saturday afternoon: the mixed smell of stale urine and fresh
chulent.
It was a setting that I now see must have been a horror. On that day in 1927, however, it was perfect. Top Floor Back was a corner flat. From the windows of that stinking front room I could see not only the dock, but I could also look down on all of Fourth Street. As soon as I looked, I knew something had gone wrong with Walter Sinclair’s plan.

The plan had been simple. Since it was Saturday, the block party could not start until the Sabbath ended at sundown. However, Walter wanted the deliveries made before sundown.

“Get the dough before it gets dark,” he had said to me. “Once the sun goes down you have to make tracks. By the time you do, and you’re far enough away to feel free to count, you’re too far away from where you got the money to do anything about it if the payoff man short-changed you. I want to be the hell and gone out of here before they start hoisting them for this boy from wherever it is he comes from.”

“Melitz,” I said.

“Yeah, well,” Walter said, “get the money before he goes back home.”

“He’s not going back,” I said. “The Germans from Tenth Street, they’re bringing him over to live. I mean he’s going to live here forever.”

Walter Sinclair laughed. “They’re in for a surprise,” he said. “Nobody lives forever. You get your mitts on that money before this boy unpacks his bag. Your mama tells me they’re going downtown to pick him up early Saturday morning. Seems to me we can count on the welcoming committee getting back here by let’s say sometime in the afternoon.”

I had counted on it, and I had made my plans accordingly. What I had not counted on was the distance between East Fourth Street and the Battery ferry that brought immigrants across from Ellis Island. Later, when I was putting together the pieces, I could not quite work it out in miles, but I learned it was a four-hour walk for the average citizen. I’m sure I could have made it faster by doing scout pace. The delegation from Tenth Street, however, did not know about scout pace. Even if they had, I am certain they would not have used it on a Saturday when they were heading toward a meeting with the spiritual leader of the European town from which they had emigrated to America. They most certainly would not have used it on the way back from Ellis Island.

As I was to learn during World War II, a convoy takes its speed from the slowest vessel in the group. The Melitzer Rabbi, as I was to learn somewhat earlier, moved at the speed of a power saw cutting through the trunk of a giant redwood.

Later I learned what happened that day. The Tenth Street delegation arrived at the Battery shortly after eleven in the morning. The immigration officials were not ready for them. By the time the officials were ready, the Melitzer Rabbi was not. It was, I gather, a matter of protocol. He did not feel that he and his entourage should share the ferry with immigrants of lesser distinction. He was, as I have said, a German.

How this problem was resolved I do not know, but from a member of the entourage it was learned that halfway across the bay from Ellis Island to the Battery it struck the Melitzer Rabbi that he was on board a vehicle driven by an internal combustion engine on the Sabbath. Some sort of scene took place. The issue was settled on the Manhattan shore. The Melitzer Rabbi conducted a religious ceremony on Bowling Green.

It was probably somewhat different from the ceremonies Peter Stuyvesant used to conduct in the same place, but the results were not dissimilar. Gorges that had risen, fell. Tempers that had flared, sputtered out. Hysteria that had reigned, was driven from office. Gastric juices started gnawing at the walls of empty stomachs. Prayers stopped. The march northward started, toward East Fourth Street and
chulent.

I knew nothing of this at the time, of course. At the moment when I looked down on East Fourth Street from the filthy front room windows of Top Floor Back, the Melitzer Rabbi, his entourage, and the Tenth Street welcoming committee were plodding uptown with stately grace somewhere between City Hall and Broome Street. Below me their destination, East Fourth Street, was as deserted as the room in which I was standing. The street looked better, of course, because the dome of arched wires with dangling electric bulbs that had been built over the block gave promise of imminent festivity. But my problem was not cosmetic. My problem was to get eighty bottles of booze out of the
vonneh
behind me and up the block to the synagogue near the Avenue D corner.