Seventh Avenue (3 page)

“You’re not Goldfarb - he limps.”

Sensing danger through his mouthful of boiled carp, Jay replied.

“I never said I was.”

“Then who . . . ? May one ask?”

Fingering his seventh roll and with flowing sleeve, Jay said:

“I’m a Ratkin, but there wasn’t room at the family table.”

“Aha, that explains it,” Plotnik said.

If only the chicken would come, then I can go, Jay thought.

“From where originally?”

“Well, yes . . . certainly.”

“Pardon?”

“Essen . . .”

“Essen? I thought you people come from Pinsk . . .” Plotnik turned to a woman who was obviously the chronicler of the Ratkin dynasty.

“Pinsk,” she pronounced with ethnic certainty, “all from Pinsk.”

Reinforced, Plotnik continued: “Sophie says Pinsk!”

“Maybe she’s made a mistake,” Rhoda said.

“Sophie?” Plotnik was already writing out the order to certify Rhoda. “How can she make a mistake when she’s a third cousin on Ratkin’s - God rest her soul - mother’s side.”

“I’m not really my father’s son,” Jay said, confounding even Sophie, who glared at Rhoda.

“Enjoying?” a whispering voice behind Jay asked; M himself doing a poll of the guests before retiring to his lair.

Get rid of him quickly before
they
start asking him questions.

“Mr. M, how can you of
all
people ask such a question? We’re eating food prepared in your kitchen, Kischka stuffed by your own hand. How could it be less than magnificent?”

Mr. M took a step back, patted Jay’s shoulder affectionately, bowed his head like a king before the pope, and his facial muscles tensed, approximating a smile . . .

“Good . . . so long you’re enjoying,” he said, backing away.

“Not your father’s son? What a thing to say! Sophie?” Plotnik demanded justice.

“What a thing to say!” Sophie rejoined.

“I’m the son of my father’s sister-in-law, who lived in Essen, and when my father came to Essen from Pinsk for my mother’s funeral, he adopted me.”

Plotnik drummed the table for several minutes, and then with a nod from Sophie said: “That explains.”

“That explains,” Sophie seconded him. “But from Pinsk they come.”

Having performed major surgery on half a chicken that would have done a jackal proud, Jay saw Barney coming towards him and got up from the table.

“Stuffed your guts, huh?”

“There’s still dessert.”

“Well, I’m cutting out.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll come too.”

“Hey, what about me?” Rhoda said indignantly.

“Who’s your friend?” Barney asked.

“Miss Borough Park, 1934.”

“I want to come too.”

“I’ll kill the first one who stops you,” Jay said.

“With you, I mean.”

“Look, honey. I’m a man of few words: yes or no? If yes, have you got a room, and are your parents sleeping?”

“The answer’s no, but I’m still coming with you.”

“Suit yourself. But I’m not interested.”

“But a wedding’s a . . .”

“A wedding.”

“It’s an omen.”

“Yeah, like the electric chair.”

As they passed the cloakroom, Rhoda took out her coat check.

“It’s got a black fur collar,” she said to the attendant. “Have you got a nickel, Jay?”

“A dime . . . my last one.”

“Well, give it to me and I’ll get change. What’re you waiting for? Give it to me. Be a
gentleman.
It’s not so much to pay for the meal you’ve just had. The people who work the checkroom don’t get any money. They live on tips.”

Reluctantly Jay handed her a dime and held out his hand for the change that never came.

“It’ll pay for the carfare back to Borough Park.”

“But I’ll need a nickel to get me back.”

“It’s okay, sport, I’ll treat you,” she said, handing him her coat to hold.

Borough Park was neither a borough nor a park. The borough was Brooklyn and the only park of note or size that supported anything remotely verdurous was called Prospect, and this was located in a precinct - so fanciful is the Brooklyn gift for place-name fabrication - known as Grand Army Plaza. These names must have been devised by an illiterate madman given unlimited access to an unabridged version of General Cornwallis’s Brooklyn telephone directory. Undaunted and unburdened by anything resembling a sense of history, Jay padded down Rhoda’s street on Twelfth Avenue, a prisoner of her self-deluded ecstasy. His shoes were wet through to the newspapers that lined them. The street was tree-lined, and the heavy snow that fell caused a vellication of bare, lifeless limbs that made him think he was on his way to a funeral.

“Much farther . . . ?”

“It’s the house after the lamppost. You’ll have to take your shoes off because they’re all probably sleeping.” She stopped in front of a largish, conjoined structure that had its chimney over the roof of one house, its water pipe narrowly missing the bay window of another, and its doorway in peripheral alignment with the place they were actually entering; a perfect example of the architectural mutations ably produced at the turn of the century by a firm of cement contractors. Unaccustomed to this type of grandeur, Jay thought he was on to a good thing.

“You can’t go home now,” Rhoda said.

Jay agreed without pressing the point.

She led him into a darkened room that had the aroma of a year’s sleep bottled, endemic to people who despise fresh air and conduct most of their activities in bed. Rhoda pointed at a sleeping figure in a bed by the door.

“My kid sister, Miriam,” who at that precise moment passed some wind. “It’s her tonsils and adenoids . . . that’s why we can’t open the window.”

“Uh, I see,” replied Jay, not seeing and least of all understanding.

Rhoda picked up her nightdress and opened the door. “Where you going?”

“To change.”

“What? You kidding? I
schlep
all the way to Oshkosh . . .”

“Borough Park . . .”

“To have you change in another room?”

“Shush, you’ll wake Miriam.”

“What is this? I could’ve stayed home if I wanted to go to bed wit the papers.”

Charmed by the directness of his approach, Rhoda still, however, refused to yield.

“It’s only the first date. We’ve got to get to know each other.”

“Get to know?” incredulous. “What’re you talking about?”

“You can’t get blood from a stone.”

“Who ever said anything about blood from a stone? I think maybe you don’t understand me. I’m not here for conversation . . .”

“Isn’t the snow beautiful?”

“Or weather reports. I want to know about the weather I listen to a radio.”

“Calm.” Rhoda’s voice was firm.

“I am calm.”

“You’re losing control.”

“Look, give me a nickel and let me go home.”

“It’s a blizzard.”

“Honestly, I don’t know where I am. I’ve never been to this part of Brooklyn.”

“I’ll make you breakfast in the morning. I’ve got the day off work.”

“You’ve got a job?” She was definitely a catch.

“I’m the manageress of Modes Dress Shoppe.”

A flash of insight revealed to Jay that she was like a set meal that he had to eat in sequence - without jumping courses.

He wanted his fears confirmed.

“Aren’t we going to sleep in the same room?”

“Course not.”

“I might grab your sister.”

“She’s only nine and she bites people.”

“Second thought, forget it.”

Rhoda came up close to him and gave him a lingering kiss on the mouth; when she felt Jay about to grab her in a headlock, she gently moved away. Her breasts on his chest felt marvelous; her body was heavy and warm, and it excited him. By way of a compliment he said: “You weren’t made with a finger, sister.”

“Oh, gee, what a dirty mouth you have. You should get yourself a job in a burlesque house in Jersey, they can use your kind of talent.”

“I say something wrong?”

“No, it’s all right. You’re just a pig, a good-looking pig.” A terrible fear infected Rhoda. “You are Jewish . . . ? I mean with your dark hair and dark skin you could be . . .”

“Want proof?”

“Sleep well.”

Jay’s concupiscent sleep was interrupted right in the middle of a defloration ceremony he was performing with thirty-seven nubile women in the middle of Yankee Stadium with a roaring crowd cheering him on. A hand shook his shoulder firmly.

“You a murderer on the run?” Miriam asked, tightening the knotted belt on her bathrobe.

“Ever been punched in the mouth by a grown man?”

“All cons on the lam sleep in their clothes.”

“Why don’t you take a walk if you can’t sleep?”

“But it’s still snowing.”

“Smart girl. Where’s your sister?”

“Myrna or Rhoda?”

“Rhoda.”

“She’s sleeping in the living room.”

“What time is it, anyway?”

“Dunno. Maybe seven or eight.”

“What time’s everybody get up?”

“Pretty soon. Poppa goes to work half past eight.”

“Oh . . .” Jay hadn’t thought of male authority on the premises.

Miriam opened the door and was about to leave:

“Just a minute. Where you going?”

“To pee . . .”

A few minutes later Jay detected an angry voice booming through the frangible walls.

“I’ll give him. Don’t worry. I’ll give him a bullet up the ass.”

Jay jumped out of bed, and then the door was savagely flung open and a short, gray-haired man - with a fine bristled mustache and tufts of hair peering out of his ears like frightened mice, resplendent in a double-breasted serge that glowed faintly in the early morning light - addressed him:

“Explain!” Jay noticed that he was carrying a hammer. “Explanations!”

“My name is Jay Blackman . . .”

“What kinda name is thet? Arab?”

“Jacob Blaukonski.”

Mr. Gold weighed up this new information for a moment and shifted the hammer to his right hand. It looked heavy, and Jay hoped he had gained ground in the discussion.

“So? Where’s my Rhoda, murderer?”

“Blaukonski!” Jay reiterated. “In the . . .”

“Liar. In the old country, you know what we do to men like you? From a tree, we hang them and then . . .”

“What’s all the screaming?” Rhoda appeared on the scene, wearing a fluffy, pink, woolly nightdress. Jay hoped he would survive to do her proper justice.

“Shame you-self. Walking in front a grown man - a strenger - undressed.”

“Poppa, you should be very grateful. He took me home from the wedding in the middle of the snowstorm. If not for him . . .”

Unpacified, but somehow relenting, Mr. Gold thoughtfully assessed this additional testimony. With the gravity of Solomon, Sidney Gold handed the hammer to Miriam, a born perjurer.

“Put it beck in the closet.”

“Okay, Poppa?” Rhoda ventured.

“Okay,” he replied, throwing his hands in the air.

When they were all robed, and this meant for Jay a quick wash and brushing his teeth with tooth powder and his index finger, they gathered in the kitchen where Rhoda was frying eggs and making toast and coffee while Miriam laid the table. Myrna had already gone off to the shop where she worked, and which did a thriving business in sheet music. Despite the Depression, people still sang at home. Although neither theology nor ontology were his
metier,
Mr. Gold made a brave attempt at playing the Grand Inquisitor; after considerable persistence he learned that Jay was not an Iberian, and, to his relief, not Sephardic, a sect of Jew he regarded as distinctly Islamic and whose ethnic make-up was as remote and suspect as the Mongolians. He received only tidbits of information and he watched with growing dismay as Jay consumed a five-egg omelet which, with a mental acuity that was indeed surprising, especially in the era of pre-Trachtenberg arithmetic, he subtracted from the slender dowry that was Rhoda’s birthright.

Breakfast ended and a future vague date was made with Rhoda at which time he would meet the rest of the family - her invalid mother who was still sleeping, the musical Myrna, and her married brother. Jay departed with a sweet kiss tingling on his mouth and fifteen cents of Rhoda’s money. The undertaking had revealed a profit, and he could now pass Gluckstern’s restaurant with impunity.

Affairs at Rivington Street, Jay discovered after a long, invigorating walk across the Williamsburg Bridge to save the three-cent trolley fare, the frost billowing from his mouth like chimney smoke, were in a state of turmoil.

“Aha, you’re home. I said the bum would come home,” his father growled, emerging from his usual sullen pandiculation which alternated between taciturn inertia and, at its most active after a two-hour spell of keeping his legs on the windowsill, stomping about the apartment to “wake up” his numb feet. “A whole night your momma is walking around, crying, praying that you’re still alive. Did I say he would come home when he got hungry?”

“You said,” Jay’s brother Al affirmed.

“You shut up, before I shut you up,” Jay retorted.

“Fighting?” Morris Blackman interposed.

“Where’s Momma?”

“Sleeping and no thanks to you,” Al said.

“Your Uncle Sol called why you didn’t go to work last night.”

“He’s very annoyed,” Al added.

“A two-dollar-a-week pretzel salesman doesn’t have to tell me who’s annoyed,” Jay shouted. “I’m keeping everybody on my ten dollars.”

“But Al can’t work in the market with his bad back,” Morris complained. A reference to the strain Al incurred during his first and only night’s work in the Washington Market and which resulted in nine medical examinations by the labor compensation doctor, confirming what Jay had said in the first place: that Al was too heavy for light work, and too light for heavy work.

“Why can’t he work? He’s older than I am.”

“But you’re stronger,” his father said.

“I wouldn’t bet on that. The two of you ought to get jobs.”

“Jobs!” Al laughed

“Jobs? Where is there jobs? They grow on trees?”

“He’s got imaginitis,” Al said, giving Jay a fishy look.

“If you look, you find. There’s a job as a dishwasher going at Immie’s.”

“A dishwasher? That’s the way you talk to your father?” Al was scandalized.

“I suppose
you
can’t afford to work, now that you’re collecting Relief.”

“I go down to the unemployment office every day, smart guy.”

“Yeah, and wait for someone to buy you coffee.”

“I go to union meetings.”

“I know! I know! You’re much too busy to work.”

Morris Blackman had digested Jay’s suggestion.

“A dishwasher!”

“There are no jobs, I repeat jobs, for bookkeepers,” Al said.

“Who ever said you were a bookkeeper?”

“What did I go to night school for for a year then?”

“Don’t ask me! I think you were playing with yourself.”

“To learn bookkeeping and now that I know it and passed tests there’s nobody hiring.”

“Dishwashing!” Morris snarled.

“Some day when I’m making big money, you’ll come on your hands and knees begging for a job,” Al said.

“Meanwhile, you’re sitting on your ass and eating food that I pay for.”

“Out! Out! Out!” Morris screamed, pointing a finger at Jay. “Language like that in mine house.”

“The lease is in your name . . . nothing else. If I get out I take all the furniture and Momma too.”

“She’d never come,” Al said.

“Well, she can’t stand
him,
so she’d have nothing to lose. I’d probably get the lease put in my name if I asked the landlord.”

“Cause you hump his daughter, that’s why,” Al said, morally outraged. “There’s more to life than humping
shiksas.”

“Get married and we’ll be rid of you,” Morris said.

Celia Blackman emerged from the bedroom. She was a smallish, stout woman, with close-cropped gray hair, wearing a dressing gown patterned with bright sunflowers that matched the drapes in the room. She smiled at Jay, revealing a mouth full of gold teeth, which her father had invested in when she was fourteen, fearing that his small capital would be seized by creditors during imminent bankruptcy proceedings, and she would be denied a proper start in life. Eleven teeth had been removed from an unprotesting Celia, and her father had gone to his grave a happy man. Everyone to whom he owed money denounced the unwitting accomplice of his scheme. Until a magistrate declared that teeth, even by the loosest interpretation of Polish law, could not be termed assets, several plans were afoot to kidnap Celia, but they came to nothing. The remainder of her teens was spent trying to disengage herself from the label “Gold Mouth,” which greeted her every public appearance. Morris Blaukonski’s appearance on the scene stilled wagging tongues, and gave her a respectability that she had not dreamed possible, and which she was grateful for, even after she came to despise him. The period of her disenchantment with him began when in a fit of temper he set fire to the textile shop that had employed him for five years, after an altercation with the owner who had proved incontestably that he was colorblind. The flight from Lublin to Lvov with two small children had all but killed her. A career as a grain salesman augured well for the reformed pyromaniac and they prospered until Morris came under the spell of a Russian mill owner, by name Alexis Pyotr Markevitch, who had formed a syndicate to grow wheat in Russia’s uncharted Taiga region. Enthusiastically enrolled as Markevitch’s principal agent, Morris squeezed what he could from Lvov’s businessmen to finance the venture. The enterprise came to an abrupt end two months after Jay’s Viennese expedition, when Markevitch strangled his wife with a leather bootlace and absconded with the investors’ money, leaving his agent to face an enraged mob, bent on drawing and quartering him. Morris’s first impulse was to burn Lvov to the ground, but the town had grown too large for a single incendiary to deal with it. Flinging curses at Lvov that would last an eternity, he despatched his wife and four children to Rotterdam with his last two hundred thousand zlotys, instructing Celia to book a passage to America. Half-crazed, he set off with two drums of paraffin to the deserted Markevitch mill, narrowly missing a squad of Russian police, and proceeded with great energy to remove the symbol of his humiliation; the conflagration would have got him an immediate commission with General Sherman’s raiders had his destiny taken him to Georgia. His arrival in New York coincided with the height of the Depression, and added fuel to his already iron resolve to abandon work forever and live off his children whose respective births were in his view designated to secure this end.