Coney (22 page)

The front door opened. Albert-Alberta strode snappily into the room, swinging a black walking stick whose silver handle bore a coat of arms. He swatted at Otto's barbell.

“I slave all day at Child's abatoir and come home to this outrage. Where is that muscle-bound moron? And look at you two: Has the photographer left without informing you?”

Fifi shook her head.

“Ah, Albert-Alberta. You make happy. Is good.”

“Yes, jolly old me. Except I was fired today. Can you imagine? One of the customers recognized the half-man et cetera and told the manager, who didn't believe I had a twin brother-sister.”

“Merde!”

“No, Fifi. It shows I am a star. Recognizable. I shall demand a large raise this summer. In any case, the best laid plans of mice and men et cetera.”

Fifi and Harry straightened and stared.

Albert-Alberta brandished his stick.

“Not one step closer. This opens to a sword, usually reserved for unruly Bulgarians. What's got into you two?”

“Albert-Alberta, what you say of mice and ze men? You know ze rest about ze gang?”

“Blimey, I've stumbled into the Robert Burns society.”

She handed him the book

“What it mean,
Gang aft a-gley
?”

“It means that the best plans made by mice and men often don't turn out as planned. They get screwed up. It's Scottish, as I am on my maternal side.”

“But why ze mice and ze man?”

“Well, old Bobby Burns didn't mean exactly mice. It's a contrast, you see. From the weakest to the strongest, the biggest to the smallest, the same applies: What you aim for is not necessarily what you get even if you figure it out real well.
Capeesh
?”

“Ze disappointment,” Fifi said, nodding.

“Yes, Fifi my love, but more than that. It's that the cards are stacked against you from the start. Deal them out anytime, any way, and you're a loser.”

Fifi looked at Harry and shook her head.

“Is not true. No, is not true.”

Albert-Alberta shook his head.

“Fifi love, you sound like Otto when he decides that night is day and would rather walk around like a blind man than admit there is no light. Look at me, you and the rest. Do we have anything to look forward to except being shat upon?”

Fifi's fingers curled into fists. She tapped the knuckles against her forehead. The sound was like footsteps.

“Yes, you right, but for we freaks.” She opened her hands and let them fall onto Harry's lap. “But not for zis
petit
. He will do anyzing he want. He will have much love and happy and make for ozer people happy.”

“I hope so Fifi, but …”

Harry had put his hands on top of Fifi's. He intertwined their fingers and squeezed. He inhaled her odor, trying to deposit it in some part of himself where he could reproduce it at will. He wanted her never to leave him.

H
ARRY WATCHED
B
AMA STUFF INTO AN IRON GRINDER CLEANED CARP
destined to become gefilte fish. She stepped aside to allow him to tamp down the fish with a heavy wooden block, then grasp the grinder's handle and turn it to the crunching sound of flesh and cartilage being ripped apart. Wormlike squiggles oozing through the grinder's tiny holes, falling into a tan ceramic mixing bowl while he breathed as infrequently as possible the released fumes, were the staples of his Friday afternoons.

Bama was uncharacteristically silent. He thought she might be ill.
A
few times he had caught her looking at him with sad eyes. Perhaps it was his slight resemblance to Zadeh.

“
I
saw the Polar Bears running into the ocean last Sunday,” he said, trying to cheer her. “How come you weren't there?”

She did not answer immediately. Instead, she was opening and closing kitchen cabinets to no purpose.

“
I
don't do that anymore. Never again,” she replied.

“Why?”

“Never mind, Heshele.”

She laid her palms on his cheeks. Her movement was jerky as though choreographed by an incompetent puppeteer. Her fingers mashed his nostrils, forcing him to breath through his mouth. He looked into eyes blind to external sight. He felt his breathing threatened by an unearthly force.

“Bama!” he yelled

“What? What? What?”

Her eyes focused. She looked at her hands. Terror spread across her face.

“
Oy
, I hurt you. I hurt my precious Heshele.”

“No, Bama. No!”

“Forgive me. Please forgive me. I don't know what I do. If I do, I chop my hands off.”

He flung his arms around her neck and drew her to him. It is, he realized, the first time I pulled her or anyone to me. They pull me. I wonder if I'm doing it right. She kissed his neck.

“Forgive me, my precious.”

He pushed her to arm's length and flexing his biceps in imitation of Otto's showmanship, said: “You didn't hurt me. You made me strong …” He smiled. “Like a Polar Bear.”

Something overtook her again.

“Heshele, maybe you should go home now. I'll see you later with the Mama and Papa. I want to rest. Yes.”

“Bama, are you sick?”

She shook her head.

“No, no, Heshele. Don't worry about me. I just must think about something.” She jabbed her index finger at her forehead. “I'm not as smart as my Heshele. I go slow.”

On his bike, pedaling distractedly, he thought:
Is she dying
? He chased away the idea. Bama was indestructible. She could chase death as easily as the evil eye.

In a few hours his parents and he would make their obligatory monthly pilgrimage to Bama's
Erev Shabbes
meal. The other three Fridays, Harry alone represented the Catzkers. With some time to kill, he pedaled toward one of his favorite Coney attractions: Lazar, the tailor.

Lazar was a man in perpetual motion. He ran and jumped around his tiny shop as if competing in a decathlon. He was a magician extracting endless pins from his mouth to design a road map of alterations on a dress or suit, an explorer hunting through
hanging clothes for a garment promised that day, or an angel surrounded by clouds released by his pressing machine. Seated, his pace did not slacken. His foot pumped as he guided cloth through an ancient Singer or he rapidly sewed by hand, biting off excess thread. His face dripped sweat as his long, curly black hair bounced to the rhythm of his decisive movements.

Harry entered the store. Lazar spit out some thread.

“Hello Heshele,” he said, elevating a button on an overcoat by winding black thread beneath it. “You didn't visit me last week. I missed you. You weren't mad on me?”

“No,” Harry lied.

His eyes led Lazar to the pressing machine, which measured about five feet long and two feet wide. To operate it, Lazar would smooth a garment onto the waist-high, stationary bottom slab which was covered with tan cloth. The matching top, an arm's length above, was pulled down by its protruding wooden handle until it snugly sandwiched the material. Simultaneously, Lazar depressed a pianolike pedal which shot wrinkle-smoothing steam through the jacket, trousers or dress.

The last time Harry had visited, Lazar had not used the machine. He had teased Harry with false starts. After an hour Harry had left without saying good-bye.

Lazar smiled. “OK
boychik
, here I go. How can I resist such a boy.”

He rummaged through a pile of clothes and pulled out a dark-blue double breasted suit.

“Mr. Menter. Fine material. In hell may his deformed bones rot for the money he takes from me.”

Lazar approached the machine. Harry stood behind him.

After positioning and steadying the suit jacket, the tailor stood on tiptoes to tug at the handle. The top and bottom came together with an explosive hiss. Harry closed his eyes for an instant. When he opened them Lazar was a man in the clouds. A man in hell. A man entering heaven.

Lazar repositioned the jacket. Louder hisses. Thicker steam. Harry saw only unrecognizable shapes. It was the Creation. It was
In the beginning.
It was more magic than on ten Bowerys. And it was his alone!

Lazar neatly placed the suit on a hanger, handling the material with crisp familiarity. He turned to Harry, who stood, head bowed to fulfill his part of the bargain. Lazar tousled his hair and pinched his cheek. Harry didn't like his cheek pinched, but it would have been worth it even if Lazar were a violent flesh grabber, which the tailor was not.

The expected flow from Lazar's eyes slowly made of the tailor's cheeks a riverbed surrounding an island of thin nose. Lazar's wife and two children had been suffocated to death by thick smoke from a Nazi incendiary bomb rising into the family's Berlin apartment from the tailor shop below.

At home his father was seated on the couch in the living room reading a large, thick book that rested in his lap. His mother had not yet arrived.

“Hello, Heshele,” his father said, smiling and rubbing the tip of his nose. “I am a clairvoyant. I see in by my crystal nose that you have just come from a gefilte fish factory.”

“Twenty silver dollars for the gentleman in the balcony,” Harry replied, imitating the voice of Dr. I.Q., host of a popular radio quiz show.

He sat beside his father.

“What does Dr. Freud say about gefilte fish?”

“It's not Freud,” his father said, pointing to the title at the top left-hand corner of the page.

“Hey,” Harry said, “
Hamlet
. We read that in school last week. Some of the kids call it ‘Omelet.'”

“You think that's funny, Heshele?”

“Not really, Pop.”

“Good. How did you like it?”

“Pretty good. I could see Errol Flynn playing Hamlet, especially that last dueling scene. And Boris Karloff as his father's ghost. Although you might have to change the ending. Errol Flynn never dies.”

His father laughed.

“How about the language?”

“There was a lot I didn't really get. But some of it was like when Aba recites his poetry or when I hear Fats Waller play the piano. It puts a rhythm in your body.”

His father's eyes widened. He looked surprised. But Harry recognized an expression of admiration. He drank the sweetness.

“What about Polonius?” his father asked.

“Who?”

“Polonius, Ophelia's father.”

“Oh, yeah. Hamlet kills him, right?”

“Right.”

“What about him, Pop?

“He's the best-drawn character in the play. In fact, one of the greatest of literary creations.”

“Why, Pop? I hardly remember him.”

“One day you will, Heshele. He is not for your age.”

“What's so great about him?”

“He's a bore. A boring old fool.”

“And that makes him great?”

“Yes, Heshele. Because Shakespeare puts this dullard's thoughts into language so exquisite, so beautiful to the ear, that banality is transformed into wisdom and the most unoriginal man imaginable seems a creative sage.”

His father turned the thin pages, creasing them with heavy fingers. His excitement when discussing literature changed a phlegmatic man of slow movement into a frenetic enthusiast, eager to share his ardor.

“See, see here!” His father's nicotine-stained finger ran over the small print:
This above all: to thine own self be true,/And it must follow
,
as the night follows day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

His father patted Harry on the lips with the tips of his fingers, a habit he had learned from his own father, a scholar who thus readied pupils to ingest wisdom.

“Not a comma of originality. Pure bourgeois homily taken from the book of common banal prayer. But Shakespeare, the miraculous tailor, wraps it in Joseph's glittering coat. You understand, Heshele?”

“Well …”

“Wait,” his father interrupted. “See here:
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; For loan oft
…”

Harry heard the front door open. His father obviously did not. His mother stopped at the threshold of the room and listened.

“Hah,” she snapped, “I'd like to see the day that you became a lender, Mr. Rothschild.”

His father shrugged.

“Velia, you have an intensity of focus that I envy. I am surprised that you are not rich.”

She jabbed an index finger at him.

“
We
are not … Well, are we going to our monthly poisoning? It is time.”

“Velia …” his father began.

“Moishe, I don't care if the world and Mars are about to blow up, you are coming.”

The narrow entrance to Bama's bungalow home framed actors walking onto a stage. Harry strode in, confident of his reception. Velia took short, tentative steps, like a bather testing the ocean's temperature, as she tried to read Bama's mood. The final entrant lacked correct wardrobe: bedroom slippers and trousers slit up the leg, the uniform of prisoners walking
the last mile
to the electric chair. Catzker shuffled in, tripping over the raised threshold and stealing center stage with a tottering star turn.

Bama, wrapped in a soiled apron, kissed Harry, nodded to her daughter and shouted to her son-in-law not to fall on the
porcelain knickknacks that infested the room. She walked to a table on which four place settings of thick ironstone dishes, Woolworth wine and water glasses and gleaming silver cutlery were laid out on a damask tablecloth whose edges almost touched the floor. A challa, a bottle of kosher wine and an ornate pewter kiddush cup were lined up in front of one setting.

When each stood behind a chair, she lit the white Shabbes candles dwarfed by their thick silver candleholders, while sing-songing a prayer welcoming the Sabbath.

She nodded to Catzker who overfilled the narrow kiddush cup with wine, marking the cloth.