Snow in August (12 page)

To be sure, Michael had been there only three times. Once, on his fifth birthday, when his mother took him to see
The Wizard of Oz
. That was long ago. Before the war. They came home after the movie, his mother skipping and singing one of the songs about
going off to see the wizard, and then in the kitchen he sat on his father’s knee and felt his rough chin and breathed the
tobacco odor and tried to tell him about the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow who talked. His father laughed,
and then turned serious, and told him about the time Sticky the dog swam to Africa and enlisted the lions and elephants to
fight for Ireland.

“The monkeys built a boat, bigger than Noah’s Ark,” he said, “and they’d have eaten the king of England if it weren’t for
the bloody bad weather. It was so cold, the lions and the elephants jumped in the water and swam back to lovely Africa, and
Sticky had to sail home alone….”

His father took him to the dark movie palace the second time, after the war had started, and they sat in the vast balcony
so Tommy Devlin could smoke, and together they watched
They Died With Their Boots On
. Errol Flynn played a soldier named Custer and the end was very sad. Michael had never before
seen a movie where the hero died. He wanted to cry but didn’t, because his father didn’t cry, and he was sure his father would
laugh at him for crying. On the way home, Tommy Devlin said he would take him to the Grandview again, when he came home, but
he never did. That Monday, he went away to the army and never came back.

His mother took him one more time, when his father was in North Africa. She didn’t smoke, so they sat in the orchestra and
saw a musical called
The Gang’s All Here
. But all through the movie, Michael kept thinking about his father. He wished he could go up the carpeted stairs, past the
candy machines and the bathrooms and the entrances of the mezzanine, all the way to the balcony. He wished he could go up
and down the aisles and find his father sitting alone. Smoking a cigarette. Wearing the blue suit and black polished shoes
that were still in the closet at home. He wished he could hear his deep voice. He wished he could jump on his lap and hear
him tell a story.

For a long time after that, and after they knew that Tommy Devlin was dead, he did not want to go to the Grandview. His mother
never mentioned her dead husband when they talked about a movie at the Grandview. She just said it was “too dear.” Ninety
cents to get in, while the Venus was only twelve cents on Saturdays and Sundays before five o’clock. Still, Michael longed
for the Grandview the way he sometimes longed for his father. He passed it on long walks and gazed in at the murals; he studied
the showcards in their glass cases, telling of coming attractions. John Garfield. Betty Grable. Humphrey Bogart. John Wayne.
At the Venus, all the movies were old; they returned over and over again, the images ragged and often scratched. At the Grandview
they came straight to Brooklyn from the movie houses of Manhattan. Now it might be different. No more
Four Feathers!
No more
Frankenstein!
Now he could see the new
movies at the Grandview out of loyalty to his mother, even if there was a ghost in the balcony.

“Will we get in for free?” he asked.

“We’ll see about that,” she said, and chuckled. “First let me do the work.”

The deal was done. Three men arrived one Saturday morning and took away the coal stove, using hammers and chisels to separate
it from the crusted cement foundations that kept it steady, pulling the stovepipe out of the wall and patching it with a circle
of aluminum. Then they brought in the gas range: white, gleaming, with four jets on top, an oven, legs that looked like the
legs of women, and even a clock. They connected it to the new gas line that ran up the side of the building, tested the jets
and the oven, and then thumped down the stairs, leaving behind bits of broken iron, torn linoleum, drifts of coal dust, and
a chisel. When the other tenants could afford to spend a hundred and thirty dollars for a gas range, they could be connected
too. For the moment, the Devlins had the only one in the house, and it was free.

“Well,” Kate Devlin said, “let’s have a cup of tea. We can clean up the mess later.”

They divided the janitorial work. His mother changed the hall lightbulbs when they burned out and polished the brass mailboxes
every other week. Together they rolled the battered metal garbage cans from the back of the hall to the sidewalk for pickup.
They struggled with the much heavier ashcans, filled with ashes from the coal stoves that remained in the other apartments
and from the coal-fired hot water boiler in the cellar. The other tenants came in to examine Kate Devlin’s wonderful gas stove,
but they still used coal stoves for cooking and heat in the kitchens, while kerosene heaters warmed their living rooms. The
women expressed envy and hope that they would
have such a glory soon, if only their husbands would stop wasting money in Casement’s Bar, or if they could finally win the
Irish Sweepstakes. Mr. Kerniss sent word that he would install central heating the following year—steam heat!—but would have
to raise the rent to pay for the new boiler, the pipes, the radiators. For now, the coal stoves produced their many pounds
of ashes. Since Michael was usually at school when the sanitation trucks came by on weekday mornings, his mother returned
the empty cans to the back of the hall. Each evening before dinner, Michael would go to the cellar and shovel coal from the
coalbin into the furnace, so that everyone in the building would have hot water. If there was snow, Michael shoveled the sidewalk
and sprinkled ashes on the pathways so nobody would slip on the ice.

He worked hard at these chores, but one other task filled him with a kind of mindless joy: cleaning the halls. Every Saturday
morning, after serving mass, after stopping at the synagogue on Kelly Street to turn on the lights, after greedily consuming
buns and hot tea in the company of Rabbi Hirsch, he would race to Ellison Avenue. He would start at the roof door with a broom
and sweep his way down four flights to the ground floor. He was always amazed at how much litter would be dropped in seven
days: soda bottles, bunched newspaper, candy wrappers, pebbles, birdseed, dirt he could not name. Michael never saw anybody
drop this stuff: that was the mystery; it just seemed to erupt and
be
there. But no matter where it came from, his job was to deal with it. On the ground floor, he would sweep the litter into
a dustpan and drop it in a paper bag which he then shoved into a garbage can.

Then he would start again at the top with a mop and a bucket of hot water. When his mother first took the job, Mr. Kerniss
bought them a new aluminum two-gallon bucket with
a roller at the top and a great thick ropy mop. After Michael swept, his mother would descend the stairs splashing Westpine
disinfectant from a bottle, and the pungent scent would fill Michael’s head as he moved behind her with the mop. Once the
odor was so strong he had to turn away, gasping, and return to the apartment to wash his eyes with cold water and blow his
nose. But he actually loved the smell: its clean, cutting odor erased the smells of food and stale beer, dead roaches and
unwashed bodies.

And while Michael washed the hall, his mother was sweeping the apartment, straightening up, changing the bedsheets and pillowcases,
washing underwear by hand in the sink, and all the while listening to Martin Block on the staticky old radio. Usually with
the door open. Music made the work easier for Michael, smoother somehow, a
pleasure
, the mop moving to the rhythms of a dance band, his body bending and twisting, his skin beaded with sweat on the coldest
days. The static didn’t matter. He hummed along with Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, sang the words with Bing Crosby, Buddy
Clark, and Frank Sinatra. It was like being in a movie, where people always had music in their lives. Music came from the
other apartments too—opera music from Mr. Ventriglio, classical music from Mrs. Krauze—and sometimes Michael would wonder
again what Jewish music sounded like, what songs the rabbi would sing when he was alone, what songs he had heard while dancing
with his wife, long ago in Prague.

T
he rabbi was cleaning the stove, scrubbing hard with a rough cloth. While he did this, he murmured a litany of his jeweled
new English words:
stove, cleaning, teapot, cleanser, oven, range, jet, matches
, with Michael occasionally correcting his accent. There were now scraps of paper Scotch-taped around the room, naming each
object in English:
door, table, sink, wall, bookcase
, with the Yiddish word written underneath in English letters.
Tir, tish, vashtish, vant, bikhershank
. They were there for Michael. Occasionally the rabbi would stop in midsentence and point at a door and Michael would shout
back:
Tir!
Or he’d touch the low ceiling and Michael would bark:
Sofit!
Their lessons were continuous and practical, with an undertone of magic; like magicians, they were showing each other that
nothing was what it seemed to be, that one name for a thing might be hiding another name. A secret name.

One afternoon, Michael squatted down and eased a tall leather-bound book from the bottom shelf of the bookcase.
He opened it and saw an illustration of a huge, looming castle, its spires rising into fog. It looked like the place where
Dracula lived, in the movie that had sent Michael running for the sunshine one Saturday afternoon from the slithery darkness
of the Venus.

“Is this Prague?” he asked, turning the open book to the rabbi. The words were all in Hebrew.

The rabbi slipped his glasses to the tip of his nose.

“Yes,” he said. “Prague.”

He looked at the drawing, then leaned closer.

“That is St. Vitus Cathedral, in Hrad
any,” he said. “The Castle.”

“Man, it’s scary-looking.”

“Yes.”

“Was Prague a scary place?”

“Sometimes,” the rabbi said. “In the bad times.” He took the book from Michael, holding it open with both hands. “But also
beautiful.”

He laid the open book upon the table.

“Yes,” he repeated. “Beautiful.”

The cleaning stopped now, and the rabbi sat down and tried to explain faraway Prague to the boy from Ellison Avenue. Michael
listened as the man talked about how it was on Prague mornings in spring, walking along the banks of the Vltava with the trees
budding and the light a pale green. Michael began to visualize the crowds on the bridges in summer. “Always pretty girls,
with boyfriends,” the rabbi said. “Priests. Old rabbis…” As he slowly turned the pages, Michael walked with him through the
palace where the Hapsburgs stayed when they came over from Vienna. He gazed at the guards who marched outside in polished
boots and plumed hats and gold scabbards, even when the kings and queens were gone. He strolled with
Rabbi Hirsch through the royal gardens where the Hapsburgs grew their tulips in vast dazzling rows. They peered together at
the orange tile roofs and cobblestoned streets and weeping willows of the Mala Strana, at the foot of the Castle on the left
bank of the river, and saw the old aristocrats and the rich artists and heard their horses trotting on the wet stones after
a summer rain.

Michael went with the rabbi to the 1920s, and the rabbi’s father was with them as they took long walks and heard about history
and stopped before houses that were built in the thirteenth century. Imagine: on these very streets, Schiller once strolled
with his head full of poems. And there, down that path where the rabbi’s father was pointing, just beyond the gurgling fountains
and the beech trees, there are the Waldstein Gardens.

“Waldstein, he was a
meshuggener
, a crazy man, a general, one of those, how do you… men of destiny?” He smiled. “The Thirty Years’ War, he started with a
murder. No:
three
murders! Three of his enemies he had thrown out from the window in the Castle. But it was a happy ending his story, that
you would like. He was killed by an Irisher! A dragoon that put a dagger in his heart!”

“What was an Irishman doing in Prague?”

“Making a living,” the rabbi said. “Killing, in those days, it was a job.”

Then they were together on another street in the Mala Strana, and in that corner house lived the violin makers, and up the
street was the Italian Hospital and the Lobkowicz Palace, and Michael imagined nuns in starched white habits moving down bright
corridors and a princess walking barefoot on marble floors in the moonlight. And there, that small house? That was where Mozart
stayed when he came to Prague for the world premiere of
Don Giovanni
.

“The first time
Don Giovanni
I saw,” the rabbi said, “I am your age. I have never seen anything like it ever before. The music. The beauty.”

Michael didn’t know who Mozart was or what
Don Giovanni
was about, but he listened carefully and pictured the orchestra with the musicians all in tuxedos and the balconies full
of powdered women, and chandeliers glittering on the ceiling, like in
The Phantom of the Opera
with Claude Rains. And there in the crowd, beardless, smaller, his blue eyes wide, was Rabbi Hirsch. Then they were walking
together on a weekday along the river in Prague and crossing into the little island young Judah Hirsch said was called Kampa.
They were the same age, and they watched the young woman washing clothes on the banks of the river. Or it was Sunday and families
held picnics on the grass. There were artists everywhere, a forest of easels pitched along the riverbank, men in berets painting
the bridges and the turrets of Charles University across the river, and the sky above them all.