Last Respects (21 page)

I tried to pull the wagon around Mr. Heizerick in an arc.

“What kinda stuff?” he said.

“Troop meeting,” I said. Very crisp. Very busy. Very gotta-get-on-with-it-mister-so-get-out-of-the-way-please. “Boy scouts,” I said. “Hannah H. Lichtenstein House. Over on Avenue B. I’m the senior patrol leader.”

“Let’s see what’s inna box.”

“Just some signal flags,” I said, keeping up the rapid flow of camouflage schmaltz. “We got the All-Manhattan rally coming up. We did pretty good in the eliminations. Three firsts, two seconds, and a third. Mr. O’Hare feels we got a pretty good chance in the finals. This meeting tonight, he’s got to lay out the program for—”

“Opena box,” Mr. Heizerick said.

I thought fast. This was turning out to be some night. Nobody was giving me a chance to think slow. Thinking fast, I wondered what I could lose by showing this zombie what was in the wagon. Maybe if they’d given me a chance to think slow, I might have wondered something else and the whole game might have come out another way. I don’t know. Forty years later, in the taxi that was carrying me across the Borough of Queens to identify my mother’s body in the morgue, the thing Mr. Heizerick did next still seemed to me as inevitable as it had that night in the back room behind Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store. The man in the gray fedora swung his leg in a curiously graceful arc. His foot caught the hasp on the side of the wagon, flipped it up, and with a slight jogging movement, as though changing the direction of a bullet, his toe kicked open the lid of the box. Mr. Heizerick dipped down, took up one of the burlap-wrapped bottles, and sniffed it.

“Some signal flags,” he said. “How much?”

“What?” I said.

On my word of honor. That’s exactly what I said. Nothing else came to mind.

“Wuddeyeh get for this stuff?” Mr. Heizerick said.

I could have repeated my previous remark, but I sensed that it would put me in a bad light. When you are caught with your pants down, I had already learned, it is pointless to ask the man in the doorway if you are headed in the right direction for the turn-off to Prospect Park.

“I’m not supposed to sell it,” I said.

“You’re selling it now,” Mr. Heizerick said. He tore open the top of the burlap, pulled out the bottle of Old Southwick, and sniffed at the cork.

“Boy, this stuff muss be right off diboat,” he said. “How much?”

The way he held the bottle told me something that the tone of his voice, and his curious manner of running his words together, had caused me to suspect. This strange, doomed man who appeared in our midst out of nowhere to act out his own special dance of death, this poor dopey crazo was just an old-fashioned, common, garden variety
shikker.

“How much?” Mr. Heizerick repeated.

Thinking fast, my reasoning went like this. As of now I was supposed to have in the hike wagon six bottles of Old Southwick. I had only five because Rabbi Goldfarb had copped one. And because of that bastard landlord, I had left the fixed bottle behind me. If I allowed Mr. Heizerick to take another, I would be two behind. I was headed toward the place where, I’d felt since I left Rabbi Goldfarb, I could promote a bottle. Why not, I thought, since I was thinking fast, why not promote two? All I needed was the money, and this strange drunk who thought nothing of shooting the bottom out of fifty bucks’ worth of nickels several times a week certainly seemed to have plenty of money.

“I don’t know how much,” I said. “I don’t sell it. I just collect it for my boss. If he finds out I gave away a bottle, he’ll be sore at me.” This seemed inadequate. Not the words. The way I was rattling them out. There was no heart-throb. No tremor of terror. I thought of Oliver Twist asking for more. He didn’t get it, of course, but the way he asked for it captured the hearts of the English-speaking world. It had made an impression on me. I dipped down at the knees in what I felt was a quite respectable cringe. I crinkled my eyes as though to hold back tears. And I revved up a respectable whine. “He’ll kill me,” I said. “My boss is a gangster. He’ll shoot me dead. You can have the bottle, but please, I don’t want to die, please give me enough to pay him.”

Mr. Heizerick surveyed me with the contempt I am sure I deserved. Then he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a folded wad of money, and peeled off a bill. “This okay?” he said.

I took the bill. A ten-spot. He’d handed me ten-spots many times, whenever he needed nickels for the slot machine. But this was a whole new ball game. I wasn’t making change for a compulsive gambler. I was doing business on my own. There was no point in trying to think slow. This insane night had conditioned me to thinking fast. I went right on doing it. Like this. I did not know how much my mother was going to charge the Shumanskys for the bottles of Old Southwick. But I had to get enough out of Mr. Heizerick to buy two bottles before I got to Lenox Assembly Rooms. I had no idea what I would have to pay for them, but the more cash I had the better my chances would be to get them. If this drunk in the pearl gray fedora was willing to throw me a ten, why shouldn’t he throw me two tens?

“My boss will kill me,” I said. I listened to a replay of my voice. Not quite up to Oliver. I sank a little lower. Almost to my knees, but not exactly to my knees. I didn’t want to soil my freshly washed khaki breeches. “He’ll murder me,” I whimpered. “He’s a gangster. He carries two guns. He shoots people for nothing. If I don’t come back with the bottles, or with the money to pay for them—”

My voice petered out. Too much Oliver. The whine was making me sick. It seemed to have the same effect on Mr. Heizerick. He tore another ten-spot from his wad, crumpled the bill, and threw it at me. Not inappropriately, it hit me in the mouth. Words failed me.

“Hee-yuh, hee-yuh,” Mr. Heizerick said. “Now git the hell odda hee-yuh, yuh liddle bastid.”

I still think that “bastid” was uncalled for, but I obeyed instructions. I lugged the hike wagon out into the store and loped on the double toward the front door.

“I’ll be right back!” I yelled to old Mrs. Lebenbaum in Yiddish. “Don’t go away! I’ll be back in just a few minutes!”

“Benny!” she called after me. “Benny, are you crazy?”

For forty years, whenever this scene invades my mind, I have found it helpful to assure myself that Mrs. Lebenbaum’s question was rhetorical. After all, Mrs. Lebenbaum was not really interested in my answer. Suppose I had called back across my shoulder, “You bet I am! Nutty as a fruit cake!”

For one thing, I would not have known how to say that in Yiddish. And what other language did Mrs. Lebenbaum understand? For another, what would have been accomplished if she had understood? Benny is crazy? My poor son Abe, he pays a boy five dollars a week because Abe has a good heart, and the boy turns out to be crazy! And finally, I didn’t quite understand the situation myself. My emotions were not exactly orthodox.

I was tense and nervous about whether I would have enough time to carry out my part of the plan Walter Sinclair and my mother had cooked up. But I was also excited. I’d had a one-bottle setback from Rabbi Goldfarb, true. But I’d made it with ease past the hill of that louse Mr. Velvelschmidt. And while I’d slipped back another bottle at the hands of Mr. Heizerick, the stone-faced drunk had handed over two ten-spots. Never in my life had I held such a sum in my hands.

Any man, and that’s how I thought of myself at the time, any man who had twenty dollars to work with, and couldn’t fashion the course of history, didn’t deserve to be trusted by people like my mother and Walter Sinclair. Racing up Avenue D, dragging the wagon behind me, I realized for the first time how much I wanted their approval. Approval? What was I talking about? I wanted their admiration. And I knew how to earn it, too.

If it is possible, while dragging a wagon that contains four quarts of Old Southwick, to race up six flights of tenement stairs, then I raced up to the top-floor door behind which the Zabriskie sisters lived and plied their trade. Here, with my hand raised to knock, I didn’t. I was suddenly assailed by my lack of knowledge of the terrain I was invading.

I knew Abe Lebenbaum was behind that door, being entertained by Lya. But who else was there? I stood motionless in the smelly hall, closed my eyes, and forced myself to summon into my mind the appointment book clipped under the shelf in the candy store telephone booth. Who was booked for tonight? More accurately, who had been booked for six-thirty?

The Zabriskie sisters usually worked half-hour shifts. It was now shortly after seven. Whoever was in that flat getting his ashes hauled had started the treatment at six-thirty. But who was he? He? Christ, it could be they. There were three Zabriskie sisters. It was rumored that some elements of their treatment were so unique that some of the biggest spenders uptown had never heard of them. And they were reputed to have customers who paid handsomely for treatments so unique that they could not be described. Except, perhaps, by George Weitz, and he was notoriously unreliable because, while he claimed he got his information from his father’s medical library, I suspected he made it all up, like his jokes. Once, when he was telling me there was a form of hauling ashes that involved three women and one man, and I refused to believe him, George drew me some diagrams to prove it. I was not exactly convinced. There is something about a diagram, especially of a woman, that lacks verisimilitude. Especially when you’re fourteen.

I concentrated on the appointment book inside my head. I had made no entries in the book tonight, of course. Tonight I had not yet taken up my post in the candy store. But the night before had been peppy. I recalled that the phone had not stopped ringing from the moment I came on duty. I retraced in my head the entries I had made in the book. Two or three had been the usual replacements for dates scheduled for the night before. That happened all the time. Men got excited, picked up the phone, made a date, then found out when they got home that the little woman had also made a date. Aunt Tillie was coming from Bensonhurst. Aunt Tillie and the Zabriskie sisters were mutually exclusive. Result: another phone call. Most of those I had taken had been, as always, for the weekend. Those weekends. God. I still wonder how those three poor girls ever got through their Saturdays and Sundays. Group therapy, no doubt.

Then the electric light bulb inside my head went
boing!
The guy who had called the day my mother had mysteriously appeared in Rabbi Goldfarb’s
cheder
to make sure I got home for supper on time. The night my mother had refused to let my father go to his Erste Neustadter Krank und Unterstitzing Verein meeting. The night she had led me to the dock to meet Walter Sinclair. The night this slob had called from a phone booth on Fourteenth Street for a date with Pauline, refused Marie, and settled for Lya. The slob named Ted Werner. He had apparently been satisfied with Lya’s treatment. He had called back the night before, to make another date for tonight. At six-thirty. How Lya was handling both Abe Lebenbaum and Ted Werner was none of my business. George Weitz and his diagrams might have brought it closer to my business, but now there was no time for that. I had to get to the Shumansky wedding, and I had two more stops to make before I even pointed myself in the direction of Lenox Assembly Rooms. Knocking on the door of the Zabriskie sisters’ flat would be a mistake. There were at least two men in there. I didn’t want company or witnesses. I wanted my two bottles of Old South-wick.

I turned and ran toward the skylight steps. Then my brain started functioning and I turned again, ran back, and grabbed the hike wagon. I couldn’t leave that outside the door of the Zabriskie sisters’ flat.

I dragged the wagon up the skylight steps and pushed my way through the iron door to the roof. The fact that there was still plenty of daylight was refreshing. It was as though I had been given the present of having the clocks turned back to assure me I would accomplish every step of my assignment and not be late for the meeting with my mother.

I dragged the wagon across the buckling tar-paper roof to the fire-escape ladder on the side of the tenement where the Zabriskie sisters lived. Luckily, their flat faced the courtyard. Nobody would see me from the street. As I eased the wagon over the edge of the roof, I paused for a quick look around. To the east I could see the back of our tenement on the Lewis Street corner. Beyond it, I could see the Fourth Street dock jutting out into the river. To the west and north I could see the two bulging spires of Lenox Assembly rooms, like great big fat onions stuck on the tops of flagpoles. I climbed over the edge, got a good grip on the wooden crossbar of the wagon, and started down the black iron ladder. It wasn’t much of a climb, but I had to do it holding the wagon away from the ladder with one hand so the banging of the box against the metal would not announce my arrival. I got down to the fire escape outside the Zabriskie flat without a single bang. I leaned the wagon gently against the dirty brick wall, knelt down on the iron slats of the fire escape, and peered into the window.

To begin with, I had never before in my life seen a completely naked woman. Parts of naked women, yes. But a whole naked woman, no. Mr. O’Hare had twice taken the troop to Coney Island on hot August Sundays when a hike to the Palisades had seemed too difficult and potentially unpleasant. These trips to Coney Island proved to be eyeopeners.

In the men’s locker room of the Birnbaum Baths on Surf Avenue, where I changed into my bathing suit with the entire Raven Patrol, George Weitz and I had discovered a couple of knotholes in the cheesily hammered together wooden wall that separated us from what proved to be the women’s locker room. In those days, of course, my life was run more or less by the elevated standards of the Scout Law. Just the same, when I found a knothole I forgot all this nonsense about a scout is courteous, and share and share alike. When I found a knothole I hung onto it.

As a result, by the time I found myself on the fire escape outside the Zabriskie sisters’ bedroom, I had seen my share of female blubber. Maybe more than my share. Who could possibly have parceled out equitably the women who in my youth changed bathing suits in the locker room of the Birnbaum Baths at Coney Island?