Strivers Row (28 page)

R
EV
. G. I. M
ORELL
:
F
UNERALS
AND
M
ARRIAGES
P
ROMPTLY
A
TTENDED
TO
ON
S
HORT
N
OTICE

But oh, for the faith of a mustard seed!
Wondering what it would be like to put up his shingle in a storefront. To just start preaching the Gospel and trust in the Lord to provide the believers. Living on whatever they happened to give him. Living on faith. It was what his father had done, even if he didn't believe—

“Hey,
chachem,
whatsa matter? You don't come around here anymore?”

He looked up, startled, realizing that he was at the block of the New Jerusalem already, and Jakey Mendelssohn was calling him over from in front of his would-be department store. Sweeping the detritus of another Thursday night into the gutter, smiling wryly at him around the cigarette perpetually balanced in one corner of his mouth.

Too late to make believe he didn't see him, Jonah walked over. Smiling sheepishly back, acknowledging how oblivious he could become whenever he was chewing over something—but keeping one eye out for him, the cousin, just the same.

“All these little
mamzers,
in from their ships an' their bases,” Jakey was complaining, as usual, sweeping up an empty whiskey bottle, a dustpan full of cigar butts and matchbooks, and discarded condoms. Gesturing at his fellow merchants where they swept away at their sidewalks up and down 144th Street.

“I don't care how much business they bring, you spend half the day pickin' up after 'em!”

“How you doin', Jakey?”

“
Eh,
” Mendelssohn said, shrugging his broad shoulders. “Pushin' along, pushin' along. Been a long time—I thought maybe you was drafted.”

Jonah smiled at the joke, and at Jakey. The man was a hustler, he knew, running one scheme or another, semi- or illegal, out of the back of his department store. But he was the only white store owner in the neighborhood who didn't charge his customers double what they did downtown—the only one who let them have lay-away, and try on dresses and hats before they bought them. Unlike Blumstein's or Koch's or Grant's, any of the other, real department stores on 125th Street, Jakey had always hired colored salesgirls and cashiers, and without being forced into it by Adam's Don't Buy Where You Can't Work campaign. A tall, dark-haired man in his early thirties, with an olive complexion—darker than Jonah was himself—and the face of his Irish father, who had absconded long ago. He had a flattened, boxer's nose, and a bad limp, which Jonah assumed was why he wasn't in the army, though he had never asked. Jakey himself had never volunteered it, always full of jokes and stories, mostly about himself. A sort of sleight of hand, Jonah had recognized, that many whites used to hide their nervousness around colored people, but well-intentioned enough on his part. He liked Jakey—and he had used his services.

It was the cousin who made Jonah dread passing Jakey's store. He spotted him now, behind the glass front door of Mendelssohn's, holding another broom but lingering there, staring anxiously out at the street. His very presence enough to fill Jonah with an irrational sense of revulsion.

He emerged slowly from behind the door now—no more than a teenager, Jonah guessed. Walking out with the broom and an apron over the blocky, European suit he wore every day, sweeping at the black-and-white, diamond-shaped floor tiles of the entranceway. Taking small, tentative steps, his flattened, rust-colored hair falling over his forehead.

“Hey,
bulvan,
you waiting for an invitation? Step on it!” Jakey yelled to him good-naturedly, trying to humor him out of his fearfulness as he always did.

But the boy said nothing. Making a few more hesitant swipes at the tiles, while he looked them over, his eyes fluttering anxiously, sweeping mindlessly back and forth. Jakey clamped his mouth shut around his cigarette.

“Still the same,” he told Jonah, and spat out of the side of his mouth onto his newly cleaned sidewalk. “Wait, did I say the same? No—I think he's gettin'
worse.
”

Jakey had made him come in to see the boy the first week he had arrived, just over three months ago. Dragging him back through the displays of cheap living room sets, the draperies and bedding, and the bolts of raw cloth piled up nearly to the ceiling. Into the back storeroom, filled with mysterious, empty liquor bottles and taped-up boxes, where he conducted his other businesses, whatever they were. Where Jonah himself had gone, to his incalculable shame, for the extra ration coupons he used for his special purposes—insisting on paying the full price for them even though Jakey had tried to give him a discount.
Because I am a man of the cloth—

He had an outsize, electrified orange sign stretched over the front door—a sign slightly wider than the entire storefront, declaring it
MENDELSSOHN'S DEPT. STORE.
But for all of his pretensions, the store was half the size of Blumstein's, or S. H. Kress. There was an air of desperation about the enterprise—and to Jakey—that was readily more apparent the farther one penetrated into the store. The dresses and suits on the mannequins in his front windows always a little dowdy and out of fashion, even to Jonah's eye. The piled fabrics, the tablecloths and bedsheets and slipcovers in the back so ugly and flimsy they were depressing just to look at.

The boy had sat there amidst them, propped up on a stool as if it were his throne.
Jakey was right,
thought Jonah, remembering. Originally, he
had
seemed less nervous and fearful than he was now. Remarkably cool, in fact, at the end of this five-thousand-mile journey, through God only knew what. Speaking in a matter-of-fact voice and savoring a cigarette, while Jakey alternately translated for him and urged him on. Growling over and over again at him—
“Tell him! Tell him what's going on over there!”

The boy had obliged them. Telling them of all the things he had witnessed in Poland. Things that had seemed incredible at the time—not least because of his strangely offhand manner. His family had lived in Berlin up until
Kristallnacht,
just managing to dodge the rampaging Nazi bullyboys who set fire to their synagogue, and turned the streets of the city into rivers of shimmering, broken glass. They had managed to flee to relatives in Lodz, in Poland— the wrong way. Trapped there with all the other Jews of Poland. Everyone, without exception, sorted out and pinned with yellow stars.

“Every one of them, the rich and the poor,” Lazar's words had come, translated through Jakey's now shaken hustler's mouth— more terrifying in its sudden uncertainty than anything in the boy's own calm voice.

“It didn't matter who you were...or what you did... They took them all together,” Jakey interpreted, piece by piece, the horror becoming bitterness with each new word. “They made everybody walk over to the old ghetto...with only what they could carry in their arms...while the goddamned Poles stood by and laughed!”

Incredible, medieval stories. Locked into a walled ghetto. Other, even more unbelievable things, that Lazar, the cousin, had only glimpsed or heard of, while he was making his way out of Poland. Jews shot and beaten, even raped, right out on city streets. The long trains, made up completely of cattle cars, that they loaded up at the ghetto with people every week. Hauling them to factory camps where the smokestacks worked twenty-four hours a day, but where nothing was made, and from which no one ever came back.

“The sons a bitches. You know what they're doing!” Jakey had implored Jonah when they had heard all of it. His eyes welling with tears of helpless rage.

“You gotta do somethin' about it!”

Jonah understood what he was referring to. His political connections—his
father's
political connections, with the O'Kanes, now nicely ensconced in Ed Flynn's machine, up in the Bronx.

But what were they to do about it? Some Irish wardheelers, faced with such profound and incalculable changes in the world?

There had been more of the usual rallies. Led by the fuming little mayor, before full houses at Madison Square Garden, putting the leaders of the fascist countries on trial for crimes against humanity, in order to raise money for Jewish relief. Jonah had even been to a couple of them. In the dark of the Garden, they bore an unconscious, uncanny resemblance to the Nazis' own night rallies, he thought—or one more prizefight, or a hockey game. The spotlights sweeping majestically across the arena, the smoke from thousands of cigarettes and cigars trailing wearily up toward the ceiling, and the disembodied loudspeaker voices shouting out brave sentiments. The usual reformers on hand to speak—La Guardia presiding, and Norman Thomas and Sidney Hillman; the Reverend Holmes and Rabbi Wise—expressing the full measure of their horror and indignation. Adam, recruited by Maurice Rosenblatt at the Amalgamated, outdoing them all.

“If a black man will give a hundred dollars for freedom,” he yelled out, leaping up and holding out a hundred-dollar bill in the spotlight, “what will you Jews do?” The crowd roaring back its approval, carried beyond themselves by his challenge. Men and women rushing into the aisles, holding up their own money, raising record amounts for the refugees—what refugees there were.

But what no one spoke about, Jonah knew, was just what this sort of fund-raising, this outrage-building would do. The Jews were still in Europe, still far away, being hauled off to those mysterious factories every day.

“The murdering
chaiserim,
” Jakey said now, spitting again on the sidewalk. His eyes imploring and accusatory at the same time. “There must be
something
we can do—”

He had continued to rage against each new atrocity. Raising refugee money, Jonah knew, from the other store owners in the neighborhood, contributing his own meager earnings—even, it was rumored, soliciting from his gangster pals. Searching for any role he could play—

What Jakey didn't understand, Jonah thought, was that this war was something wholly new, just in its scale alone.
A rift in the world. The birth of a whole new human existence, perhaps. Randomly bombing cities from the air. Trampling out entire peoples, casually burning them up in factory furnaces. Something soulless and faceless and unremitting, beyond the old ideas of human heroism, or evil. Ripping away the face of God.

Or was it new at all? Was it waiting there all along, inside the human beast, only now we have the tools to finish the job?
The more he thought about it, the less incredible he found it.
Of course they would take the opportunity to get rid of everyone they hated. Of course they would, if they thought they could get away with it. Look what they've done to us—

He made his excuses and broke away from Jakey. Reminding himself not to turn into the block from Seventh Avenue again, making sure not to look back at that dull-eyed, frightened boy. Still not sure why he actively loathed him. He was just a boy, after all, another refugee.

Was it for stripping away his own personal immunity? That one description Jakey had told him, lingering in his brain.
They were all taken away together.
All of them, all of the Jews.
And if the Jews, why not us next?
Or was it seeing the boy for what he himself would become, if he left? Fleeing, frightened and desperate. Always looking out, always knowing what he had done in order to survive—

He all but ran through the nave of the church. Glad, for once, to finally get back to his office. Settled somewhat by the familiar, institutional, blue-green walls; the back-church smells of old flowers, and pork-and-bean suppers, and floor cleaner.
Listening for it, as he always did—the rasping inhalations of his father.
The very walls of the church seeming to undulate with his every breath—

Jonah went to check on him first, but the old man was still asleep, as he usually was now in the early morning, after staying awake all night. Lying fully dressed on his metal cot, only the top of his huge, rutted head visible to Jonah. Sleeping just as he always had, flat on his back, snoring away in great, congested chuffs. His mother had always joked about it—
Lord, but it's impossible to get any sleep around that man! Between his appetites and his snoring
—

He crept back down to his own vestry office, situated directly under his father's apartment. Calling in his secretary, Delphine, to take letters and go over the day's schedule. It was a busier summer Friday than usual, with so much still to catch up on from his vacation—Jonah working briskly, just as happy to take his mind off what he had to do later.

There were the regular weekly meetings with his assistant ministers, and the seminary students doing their summer work at the New Jerusalem; with the head usher, the custodian, the organist. Meetings on the quarterly budget reports with the directors of youth programs, and the church nursery and the day-care center, and the penny savings bank. Another, blessedly interminable meeting with a representative from the Colored Orphans' Asylum, up in Riverdale, who informed him that the asylum had just decided to accept white orphans for the first time, in light of the pressing need created by the war—Jonah barely able to keep himself from smiling at the irony of the news.

So the war
is
bringing us closer together as a nation, after all. If only to take care of their orphans—

His burden was nothing, he knew, compared to Adam's over at the Abyssinian, which had over fifty separate clubs, plus its own print shop, and baseball and basketball, and six-man football leagues. The workload not nearly as bad, either, as only a few years before, when it seemed to Jonah as if he and every other minister in Harlem spent all their waking hours at the churches' employment and housing bureaus, and the soup kitchens. Searching the streets, every day and night for years, trying to find anyone who might be hiring. To find members of his congregation he hadn't seen, and whom he was worried were too proud or stubborn to come to him for help even though they might be starving.