Coney (24 page)

“Nah,” he answered, preoccupied with the thought of meeting his wily adversary of the boardwalk races.

The swastika reappeared.

“Follow me.”

They were escorted to the bridge. Ziegenbaum was a beefy man, not dissimilar in build and even facial appearance to Max Schmeling, the boxer who had beaten Joe Louis and then had been destroyed in one round in a rematch. Harry was disappointed by the absence of the arrogant white scarf which injected adrenaline into his pedaling.

He only wears it at sea
, he told himself, guarding personal enmity.

“Gentlemen,” Ziegenbaum said, his voice substituting for a heel click, “I am at your service.”

“Just a few questions,” Stolz said. “We have been interviewing passengers and they seem delighted with the
Bremen …”

“As well they should be,” Ziegenbaum interrupted. “We take great pains with every detail. Nothing is left to chance.”

“Of course,” Stolz said, “how could one doubt German efficiency. But my colleague and I were wondering: Are the racial policies of Chancellor Hitler affecting your passenger volume?”

Ziegenbaum set his jaw firmly.

“We are at capacity.”

“Are there many Jews?”

Ziegenbaum grimaced.

“We do not inquire into the racial background of our passengers. Now, if you will excuse me, I …”

“Just a few moments more,” Stolz said. “This young man, who is the son of my publisher, has a great interest in transatlantic liners and particularly, he has told his father, in this ship, which is why he is accompanying us. I wonder if he could ask you a question?”

Ziegenbaum beamed at Harry.

“Of course.”

Harry spoke rapidly. He had formed the question and had practiced it silently.

“Is it true, as I read in a book, that originally the
Bremen's
funnels were so low that cinders and oil fell onto the deck and onto passengers and subsequently some height had to be added?”

Ziegenbaum pursed his lips. It seemed as if he were about to spit at Harry.

“Design of the ship was not and is not part of my duties. The passengers are more comfortable on the
Bremen
than on any other ship.”

He turned his back to them.

“But I will add this as to design, I remind you that on our maiden voyage we captured the
Blue Ribband
emblematic of the fastest time for crossing the Atlantic: four days and seventeen hours.”

“And forty-two minutes,” Harry added as they were hurried off the bridge.

Stolz and his father sandwiched Harry in a squeezing, pinching embrace.

“Hero of the Jewish people,” Stolz cried.

“Descendent of the Maccabees,” his father said, then relinquished Harry to give full force to a laughing fit, stoked by
and forty-two minutes, and fortly-two minutes, oy, Heshele.

The bell signaling visitors ashore sobered them. In Bama's cabin, Velia and Bama sat stone-faced Bama leapt at Harry, crushing him to her.

“
Oy
, Heshele where were you? I was so worried I would not see you before the ship goes.”

“We saw the captain,” Harry said.

“The captain?” Velia said. “Did you give him good instructions on how to sail the boat?”

A swastika stuck his head inside the door.

“Visitors ashore, please.”

Harry tried to break away from Bama. She clutched him more tightly.

“You will visit me, Heshele.” Her voice skidded through sobs. “You promise.”

“Yes.”

She wet his face with kisses.

He walked toward the door. His mother stood up. She faced Bama. The two stared at each other, similar jaws clamped. Velia stepped toward her mother. Bama rocked forward like a Jew at prayer. They fell into each other, sobbing.

“You, too, Leah. You could visit.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Harry, his parents and Aba stood on the dock amid the pointing, waving crowd. Harry scanned the hundreds on the decks but could not find Bama. Was she in her cabin, crying? How lonely she must be. He chastised himself for having fun while she wanted to share her last moments in America with him. He had wanted that also. But the call to adventure by the two men he tried to emulate had outweighed all else.

“They're all going back like good Germans to defend
das Vaterland
from attack by Belgians and Martians,” Stolz said.

For the first time he could remember Harry resented Aba's cynical eye. The moment was too sad. His mother gripped his father's sleeve, resting her head on his shoulder, as if unable to stand on her own.

“What will happen to her, Moishe?” she asked, her voice slipping into childhood conundrums only a parent could solve.

“I don't know, Velia. It can't be good. But if anyone can land on their feet, she can. That woman has guts. Crazy as it is, what she is doing is somehow right. She won't accept the space on the shelf reserved for her.”

Harry silently thanked his father for his mother and himself. He felt like a member of a family.

The four walked to the Times Square subway stop, where Stolz left to pursue facts in the 42nd Street Library. On the trip home, his mother clung to his father, finally falling asleep.

“So, Heshele,” his father said, “how do you feel?”

“I feel as if Aba, you and me shouldn't have had a good time.”

“No, no, Heshele. One can laugh at a funeral before crying.”

“Was it her funeral?”

“Haven't you yet learned metaphor in school?” His father smiled, but his eyes remained sad.

“What was my grandfather, your father, like? You never talk to me about him?”

His father looked down at his sleeping wife. He beckoned Harry to bend forward, so that he could whisper.

“Perhaps this is the right moment. I don't know. I just know the joys of fatherhood. There is no manual on the responsibilities …”

He whispered the story of the pogrom and murder. Long before he finished, both cried.

“God, Pop. How did you … what did you … feel?”

“I don't know, Heshele. I think I turned it into a nightmare. That it really wasn't happening. That when I woke up he and I would hold hands and walk back to the house. For months, maybe years afterward, every time I saw a goy, I had to restrain myself from leaping on him.”

“Should I never trust goyim. Should I hate them?”

“Do you know many?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“A soldier who was gassed in the World War. A dwarf who runs a bike shop. Freaks like the fat lady, the world's ugliest woman, the dog-faced boy …”

“They all sound like honorary Jews,” his father interrupted.

He closed his eyes, rubbed and pressured them with the backs of his index fingers, then opened then and shook his head.

“I don't know what to tell you about goyim. Europe was easy: Stay away. Don't be where they can reach out for you. But America confuses me. There is anti-Semitism, but a kind I don't understand. They don't like the Jews, rather than hate them. They don't want to go near them, rather than kill them. It seems to be live and let live, but separate lives.”

He sighed and smiled.

“But as you could have guessed there is
on the other hand
. A few days ago, I covered a German American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden. There were twenty-two thousand people there and I don't know how many were turned away. I saw a crowd of
pogromchiks
. I saw men who killed my father. Are they what America is becoming?

“On the third hand, there is the American national anthem—
Don't push me around
—and that seems to go for pushing your neighbor around. So Heshele, I have given you, what else, a Talmudic answer. As the sages in the Gemara, after arguing a point for one hundred pages, proclaimed:
pilpul
, which means
no conclusion …
who knows?”

“It was a good answer, Pop.”

“It certainly was, Moishe,” his mother said, opening her eyes. She lifted her head, smiled, and in a perfect imitation of Bama's Yiddish, snapped:

“Shit in the ocean!”

F
OR
H
ARRY, AS FOR CONEY, THE HERALD OF SPRING DID NOT RIDE
nature's zephyrs, but rather entered on the crashing sounds of hammers and the whine of saw teeth ripping through lumber and releasing the perfume of sawdust. Hearing that message, Harry pedaled toward it, anticipating the source: a concession owner repairing damage inflicted on hibernating wood, rubber and metal by the salt-breathing, insomniac Atlantic.

These men always were eager to interrupt their labor to compare the ravages of winters past with the most immediate, and to boast that, while listening to weather reports in Miami and other warm climes, that they had been able to calculate precisely the effect of nature on their enterprise. Harry listened closely to these recitals, excited at the idea of truth distilled at long range. It was magic, like a blindfolded mind reader stationed in limbo.

A
flash of black fur changed Harry's itinerary. Not since early February had he checked on the wild dogs. Fifi, the world of freaks and Woody had claimed most of his out of school time.

Calling himself a traitor, an abandoner of the abandoned, he hunched over the handlebars and sprinted to a spot overlooking mounds of garbage waiting for collection. Here the pack would emerge to feed.

The dogs would be cautious. Early spring was a time of danger.
A
collarless dog was considered a carrier of rabies.
ASPCA
wagons patrolled. Cops and concession owners shot. As the days
warmed, the pack turned increasingly furtive, traveling not bunched up, but in a shifting single file, as if to deny any friendship or connection. By summer, they had disappeared.

During their first summer of absence, Harry had thought them captured or killed. But during the subsequent late autumns a few veterans always had reappeared, joined by the newly abandoned, who would from time to time detach themselves from the pack and race up a street, only to return moments later. These dashes went on for about a week—the time it took, Harry figured, to erase the memory of having once been a pet.

Bear's head eased across the shadow of the boardwalk. She sniffed, moving tentatively, ready to retreat. Assured, she walked onto the Midway.

Harry was startled. Her teats were rounded and drooping. She had given birth. The pack followed. Another surprise: WK, the cowardly Weasel King, pranced behind her like a proud racehorse. Was he the father? Did he, like Douglas Fairbanks, now travel on the queen's business?

Lindy, hopping and tilting on his three legs like a drunk looking for a bathroom, and Curly, half covered with fur and halfbald, as if groomed by a lunatic, had survived the winter. Rabbi, mostly white, mostly terrier, with a black marking that smeared a beard across his square jaw, was gone. There were no new members. Winter was not a time of abandonment.

Bear's snout poked gingerly into a garbage pile, while WK burrowed in until his great head had disappeared among the paint cans, rags, paper and residue of hot dogs and hamburgers.

Where were the pups? Harry wondered. Had they survived? Was Bear still nursing? Perhaps Rabbi was alive—baby-sitting? WK's head snapped back into view, a decapitated mouse in his jaws. He dropped it before Bear. Bear hunched forward. The sun glinted off the spittle on her teeth.

Thunder. Bear's head exploded, becoming part of the garbage heap. Blood flowed. Confettilike innards grew out of her
headless body. She lay beside the mouse, two corpses seemingly decapitated by the same executioner.

At the sound of the gunshots WK had leapt high in the air and run toward the beach, his front left leg elevated, waving like an erratic metronome.

Two cops walked toward the garbage pile. The silver buttons on their blue jackets reflected pinpoints of sun, reminding Harry of the magical light that announced fairy godmothers in the movies.

Harry recognized them. They were the
twinnies
, so named because one was rarely seen without the other. Rumor had them father and illegitimate son. They did resemble each other, but, Harry had concluded, no more than any other two Irish cops. Tim, the older one, strode swaybacked, a domed stomach forming a blue hill. His face lived in the shadow of a Jimmy Durante nose, on which swollen veins meandered. Walking hip to hip with Kevin, whose nose already was lightly tinged, he presaged his thinner partner in twenty years.

They were the designated bagmen for the precinct. Harry had seen them in the bike store, joking with Woody, shoving him playfully, but always with an undercurrent of menace. After Woody had handed over the Friday envelope, he would stand stone-faced as Tim's hands kneaded his hair, a prelude to the unvarying parting words:

“That gives us another week of luck.”

The two cops looked down at the corpses. Kevin held his revolver barrel up to his lips. He blew into it.

“Hey Kevin,” Tim said, lighting a cigarette, “you got a mouse.”

“The fuck I did. I got that dirty mutt. Blew his head clean off.”

Tim dragged and exhaled. A comic strip balloon of white smoke hung over his mouth.

“You sayin'
I
shot the mouse?”

“I ain't sayin, nothin'. Look at this.”

Kevin pointed to dark spots on the ground leading to the beach.

“One of us got the big one. Let's go finish 'em off.”

“Nah,” Tim said, holstering his gun, “let 'em bleed to death. He threw his lit butt at Bear and spat:

“I hate dogs. They're asshole smellers.”

“So are a lot of freaks and homos around here.”

“Oughtta shoot them too.”

Tim removed his black-peaked hat, fished out a white handkerchief from the lining and wiped his face and the back of his neck. He tilted his head toward the sun and spotted Harry.