Coney (4 page)

“But after, Vic, they could squeal.”

Menter smiled.

“We'll make sure they can't.”

“Huh?”

Menter clapped his hands loudly.

“I hate freaks! Almost as much as kike doctors!”

A
DISTANT PHONE RANG, INSISTENT AND ANGRY, LIKE A BABY'S
hunger wail. The governor was calling to commute Harry's death sentence for an unspecified crime Harry had not committed. Harry strained against the straps that lashed him into the electric chair. Only he could answer the phone and save himself. He tried to call for help, but his lips would not part.

He awoke screaming but heard no sound. Wet, fuzzy cotton coated his pillow-buried lips. The ringing went on. He stumbled toward the phone in the living room.

“Hello,” he said.

“Allo, Meester Kaatz.”

“The name is Catzker.”

“No. No. Ze name is Kaatz. Believe me.”

“OK. But this is not he. I'm his son.”

“Is ze fadder by home?”

“No, he's not.”

“Vell, I'm sure you could help me. You see I'm a loyal reader of ze fadder, Meester Kaatz. And all yesterday,
Shabbes
, I vas terrible vorried about vat vass to befall Soorkaleh. Of course I couldn't call on
Shabbos
.”

“Of course.”

“So tell me, does Soorkaleh find out dat dat fine young man vat loves her and vants to marry her did not perish in a pogrom in Russia and right now is by steerage in a shiff on his vay to America?”

“I really don't …”

“And vill she call off dat terrible match dat lousy
shadchan
made for her with dat kosher butcher vat is old enough to be her fadder and alvays has bloody hands, yet?”

“My father doesn't tell anyone what the next installment is, not even my mother.”

“You a good son. But, if you'll please, in my case to make a exceptional. You see it's not only Soorkaleh vat vorries me. Vat about Chaim? Vorking eighteen hours a day for dat rotten sveat-shop owner to bring over his beloved Miriam and zere two beautiful daughters, Rachel and Esther. How can he save enough money? And even if he does, vill ze goyim at Ellis Island discover Esther's sickness—vouldn't even mention it for somevone to hear—and send her back to Poland?”

“I'm sure everything will turn out OK.”

“Tank you. I knew you knew.”

“No. I just said …”

“So vat is goink to happen to dat nogoodnik, Soorkaleh's brother, Schmelik? He's goink to abandon his vife and children for dat
kurveh
, you should pardon ze expression, Malka, vat now calls herself Margery yet?”

“I'm sure by Monday or Tuesday everything will be all right.”

“So tell me how?”

“I don't know. Only my father knows.”

“You not a nice boy.”

“Sorry.”

“In fact, rotten.”

Click.

Harry replaced the receiver. The phone rang.

“Allo, Mr. Kaatzen.”

“Wrong number.”

He laid the disconnected receiver beside the phone. Harry was not supposed to do that. It was his responsibility to speak to readers who were following his father's novel, which was serialized
on weekdays in the Yiddish newspaper
The Morning Journal.
The paper catered to Orthodox Jews, whose religion barred the use of phones on Saturday. By Sunday, many could no longer bear the worry over the perils afflicting the characters.

Today's first call had been relatively short. Often readers invented intricate solutions, demanding that he confirm or deny. Harry enjoyed telling his father the more imaginative scenarios. If his father nodded, it was not because the reader had hit upon the truth. There was no truth until his father wrote that day's installment during the one-hour subway ride from Stillwell Avenue to the Canal Street office of the
Morning Journal.
However, the nods often signaled that the reader had become a coauthor.

Harry returned to his room and laid a record on the turntable of a box-shaped portable phonograph. He watched the disc move in perfect circles, stretching the golden letters until they lost meaning and snaked, as if poured, onto the black label. Harry bent over the record, trying to circle his head to match the seventy-eight-revolutions-per-minute and determine whether a perfect synchronization would unscramble the letters. It was an experiment in relativity. Harry was interested in relativity because his grandfather resembled greatly Albert Einstein.

Harry grooved the needle on the smooth outer rim of the record. Billie Holiday's freakish voice rose from the shiny surface.

“Must you play that junk?”

Harry's mother, palms dug into her hips, stood in the doorway. The light cast through the windows by the low January sun dabbed a blush of orange on her ivory facial skin that clung tightly to the cheekbones and a long, thin, dipping nose. Her large, oval-shaped eyes, lightly rinsed by a translucent blue, blinked often as if accepting endless curtain calls. Thick yellow hair, the color of a Van Gogh haystack, was bunched into a tight bun at the back while loose strands fell at random angles onto her forehead. She was considered strikingly beautiful. Harry did not agree, even though he owed most of his features to her.

“It's Billie Holiday,” he replied reverentially, a calculated irritant.

“It's a sick cat. And why is the phone off the hook?”

“I already had two or three calls. What's so bad if they get a busy signal?”

“What's so bad if …” she mimicked his singsong speech, “your father's son … so bad is that we need the two pennies he makes from that paper, that's so bad.”

“Oh, Mom, how will they know we're not talking to someone?”

“Those Jews”—she distorted her face by puffing her cheeks and spreading her nostrils—“those Jews! Don't worry, they'll know.”

She thrust her face toward him.

“Pliss, Miss Op-er-at-or, if you'll be so kind, you could check dis number to see anyone is talking. It's ah terrible emergency. Off ze hook. Dank you so very much … Allo, Mr. Editor, what kind of person is it you have to write by your paper what vouldn't talk to readers? Such an insult!”

Harry walked past her and replaced the receiver.Immediately, the phone rang.

The caller had discovered blanket salvation: the Irish Sweepstakes. At his sixth sweepstakes winner, Harry's father plunged through the front door, rushed past him, grabbed a book from the crammed bookshelf and flopped onto the couch. He turned the pages ferociously until his small brown eyes alit on wisdom.

As he read, the broad Slavic face, dominated by a wide, flat nose and a massive forehead lined with furrows resembling the Palmer Method exercises for good penmanship, expressed puzzlement, then tentative agreement and finally epiphany.

Harry was not sure of the book's title, but he knew its author: Sigmund Freud. Dr. Freud was being consulted for psychological insight into whatever mishap had befallen Moshe Catzker during this morning's battle with a l934 Model T Ford.

The Ford was a present given to his father a year ago by a reader, who had bought a new car, and rewarded the writer for years of happy endings.

At the time of the gift, Moses Catzker was thirty-six and had never driven a car. His relationship with things mechanical was adversarial. A single victory, the use of a can opener, was a talent he preferred not to test often.

Immediately, the car had inspired him to consult with John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser in planning trips across America. He, Aba, and other friends would circle the parked vehicle like unhorsed Indians, first touching, then entering. All eyes swept the road for danger, cheering as his father wrenched the steering wheel of the stationary vehicle.

The Negro delivery boy from a local grocery, hired to teach him to drive, quit after the first lesson, actually ten minutes into it. His successor, an off-duty cop, lasted a bit longer by insisting that lessons begin at five AM, with the understanding that the appearance of another moving vehicle automatically ended the session. Eventually, the cop suggested a driving school, which was expensive but guaranteed a license.

Two weeks later Moses Catzker had been licensed by the State of New York to operate a motor vehicle. He told Harry that he had passed the test with flying colors, quoting the inspector: “I've seen enough. Wow! But a deal is a deal. You pass, buddy.”

America beckoned, but leaving Brooklyn presented a formidable obstacle. On the first attempt to make Manhattan, his passengers, the same three who had cheered his stationary heroics, convinced him to turn back and try again on a cloudy day so as to avoid the sun's glare that was distorting his vision. Thereafter, they declined to accompany him, citing the joys of “soloing” à la James Cagney and Pat O'Brien.

After much pleading, he had agreed to take Harry, but only for a drive limited to around the block. As the ignition sparked the engine, Harry lost the father he knew. The usual hunched, slack shoulders turned as square as Frankenstein's monster. White knuckles strangled the steering wheel. He eyed the empty street for five minutes before bucking away from the curb. At the first intersection,
a pedestrian, glancing through the windshield, had been moved to say:
Mister, mister, take it easy.

Soon dents of unexplained origin began to appear. Upon examination, Harry concluded that most were the results of contact with pushcarts, trees, fences and fire hydrants.

Eventually, the car was becalmed except for his father's dawn drives which always provoked consultation with Dr. Freud.

Freud was his father's family physician, seemingly a phone call away. The same familiarity extended to other residents of the book-shelves. A discussion between his father and Aba drew no distinction between Mani Leib, a Yiddish poet living in California, and Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or Proust. All were spoken of as if they were friends who happened to be out of town for the moment.

His father closed the book with a triumphant clap, winking as he walked past Harry, who offered the receiver to share a torrent of Yiddish. His father circled the air with his index finger, poked the side of his head, whispered “meshugah” and disappeared into the kitchen.

The caller was saying: “So after Muttel wins the sweepstakes he has enough money for Leah's operation, isn't it?”

“Sure,” Harry said. “I sure hope it all turns out the way you say.”

“Trust me,
boychik
, it will. I am a man what knows life. Give your father a greeting from me and tell him David Mersky prays for him.”

In the kitchen, his parents sat at a table protected by a covering of blue oilcloth. His father dunked toast into a cup of coffee, bent his head to the rim and slurped the soaked dough. His mother strained her coffee through an oblong of white sugar clamped between her front teeth. Both dragged on cigarettes, swallowing smoke with liquid.

“Ah, Heshele,” his father said, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his tweed jacket, “there is something I must tell you.” His father's English was cemented under the dual coat of Yiddish and Russian.
A year ago, when his mother became convinced that money could be made speaking in English on Yiddish culture to synagogue men's clubs and assimilated fraternal groups, his father, at her insistence, had enrolled in a diction school which guaranteed to denude all foreign elements. After three weeks he had quit, saying: “I did it for my teacher. He was starting to sound like me.”