Naturally I had no intention of taking a nickel to the twins or, for that matter, ever returning to the famous end of Beale Street again. It was no place for anybody who valued his peace and quiet, not to mention his mortal gizzard. Besides, didn’t I know where I was better off? These days I was content just to hang around the pawnshop. Customers aside, it was entertainment enough just to watch my papa performing his monkeyshines.
The more moping, taciturn, and altogether scarce he was around the apartment, the more versatile it seemed that he became in his shop. On any given day you might see him become a ringmaster, a rug merchant, a connoisseur of antiquities, the keeper of a shrine. There was no expertise that he didn’t pretend to possess. And on the fat chance that I should ever be bored, I still had what I persisted in calling my studies, though books had lately lost a little of their old appeal. All those voyages and caravans and flights by balloon to the perilous ends of the earth now hardly seemed worth the effort. Sometimes I asked myself why all those so-called heroes didn’t just stay home where they belonged.
But at night when I shut my eyes to try and sleep, the black boys snuck into my alcove. They dragged me through the window and up a gangplank, tied me to the mainmast of a mutinied slave ship. A crew of hog-wild Negroes jitterbugged in the rigging and all along the rails, and Lucifer, with his fluorescent grin, manned the helm.
Meanwhile the floodwaters showed no signs of going down. The Harahan Bridge groaned and sagged under the constant procession of bedraggled refugees. They slouched across it like soldiers returning from lost battles, sometimes clogging to save the soles of their bare feet from the burning boards. They rattled in overladen buckboards hauled by teams of children, the elderly lashed to bedsprings and rocking chairs. They washed ashore on chicken crates and stiff beasts of burden, riding painted pianolas and fugitive rooftops, outmoded but still-puttering jalopies upright on pontoons. In this way they swelled the already unmanageable ranks of those dispossessed by hard times.
In the Pinch they made a Hooverville out of Market Square Park. They strung their patched tarpaulins from the limbs of the chestnut and the joints of the jungle gym, until some began to refer to the park as the Casbah; the less resourceful merely squatted in the pavilion or under the beds of their trucks in the wagon yard. Along North Main Street they began to displace the corps of resident luftmenshen, the bearded loons in their ratty caftans among whose number my grandpa had lately been spied. For all their celebrated beggarliness, these crazy old men now seemed hale in comparison to the pitifully uprooted “rivergees.”
At the fairgrounds, according to the local papers, the lucky ones were provided sanitary barracks with flush-toileted latrines. They were given their first taste of oranges, after which their gums stopped bleeding, their spines uncurled, and the clouds passed from their eyes. But the ones who you saw in our neighborhood were still crooked and oyster-eyed, their skin like porridge. With offspring wearing Red Cross flour sacks, scratching heads teeming with beggar lice, they wandered penniless into the shops. They overwhelmed the smells of shoe leather and bug poison, of fresh pumpernickel and pickled meat, with their high bouquet of Delta mud.
For a few nights my papa kept up his show of observing the ritual mourning. Rather than endure the scorn I was assured of if I stayed behind in the shop, I joined him, though it made me feel like a party to a hoax. Admittedly it didn’t require a great change in attitude to behave as if Grandma Zippe were already buried; nevertheless, it seemed kind of indecent that the family should conspire, for the sake of convenience, to forget that she had yet to be interred.
Of course it made sense not to recall such details in front of Grandpa Isador, who was already addled enough with grief. Witness how he rounded up flood refugees to complete the minyans. While there were any number of volunteer mourners around the Market Street shul, my grandpa had to go and impress the shiftless with the promise of a bowl of soup. He’d shepherd them into the apartment in a docile single file, line them up like a rogues’ gallery in front of the sideboard, and lead them in a perfectly incoherent responsive recital of Kaddish. My horrified mama complained that their muddy footprints would be stamped into the carpet in perpetuity. She keened aloud what could have gone without saying: that they weren’t even Jewish.
To this Grandpa Isador, wearing an expression quite reasonable for him, explained that their homelessness gave them a de facto status. “Tahkeh,” he’d add with an admiration reserved for the utterly destitute, “they’re even holier.”
After those token nights of mourning my father began to keep even longer hours in his shop. Nor was there any recurrence, at least around the apartment, of the galloping light-heartedness he’d shown on the morning of the aborted funeral. Sometimes leaving before the family had woken up, often returning after everyone was long asleep, my papa was as lost to the life of North Main Street as his departed mama. Uncle Morris, however, was much in evidence. Wreathed in cigar smoke and reeking of after-shave, combing the fine hairs forward from the back of his head over an otherwise bald scalp, he was forever reassuring his sister-in-law that she could lean on him. Then, purring and tittering, my mother would tell him that, widowed as she was by the pawnshop, it was nice to have a man around for a change.
Some of the prosperity that Uncle Morris had promised, always saying it was just around the corner, was actually starting to appear. Even as the mirrors remained covered to keep us mindful of the recent passing, newfangled appliances began making their way into our apartment. Electrical modernism had dawned in Mama’s bread-line kitchen. Her work was revolutionized now by a three-speed Mixmaster and an oven with a window, through which you could observe her chickens in flames. A humming monitor-top Frigidaire replaced the old icebox, whose runoff had warped the floorboards, leaking through the Ridblatts’ ceiling downstairs. Armstrong linoleum concealed the rotting floor. There was a chrome-plated hand iron that spat steam like a dragon, a clothes wringer that also rolled dough, a shining fan-shaped toaster that discharged the bread in a breathtaking twin trajectory.
To think that my father was responsible for the dramatic changes in our standard of living was just too farfetched. On the other hand, it was equally hard to believe that Uncle Morris was playing Lord Bountiful purely out of his generosity of heart. For his own reasons my grandfather seemed to share my skepticism. The more he played the broken record of his resolution that he would soon follow his wife’s lead, the less he was inclined to accept the things of this world. Progress was vanity, and all labor-saving devices the fruits of Mammon. His censure, however, did not extend so far as to include the new free-standing Zenith radio, for which he had reserved the right to be fascinated. With an ear to the cloth-muffled speaker in its mahogany cabinet, atop which he’d placed a faded tintype of himself and Zippe (at Coney Island, their heads superimposed above cardboard surf bathers), the old man was oblivious of everything else.
He spun dials that alternated from a whirring wind to a sizzling static like rain. When he finally found voices, he listened so intently that you’d have thought they were revealing prophecies, issuing instructions for his ears only. He seemed to take everything personally, from the news of bloody labor strikes to “The Town-Crier” persiflage to the Lone Ranger’s endangered anonymity. The crackling artillery and wholesale homicide on “Gangbusters,” the failure of aspiring talent on “Major Bowes,” the diaspora from the dust bowl, the scandal of Kate Smith’s flatulence, the lament for humanity upon the wreck of the Hindenburg—everything apparently served to confirm his worst fears. An earful of Father Coughlin’s tub-thumping, for instance, elicited from Grandpa Isador the same fearful “oy!” as the trials of Fibber McGee, especially when the radio shnook, like a latter-day Pandora, released the cataclysm from behind his closet door.
When he’d heard enough, my overwrought grandfather would take to the streets. “Zol gornisht helfen!” That was the watchword with which he regaled the bench in front of Jake Plott’s: Nothing will help. Not that this was news to the worn-out alter kockers and the walking wounded of North Main.
The week arrived when the already dense population of the Pinch was even further increased by relations come to visit for Passover. Whether for the convenience of being within an easy stroll of the synagogue or out of the necessity of escaping their floodbound homes, mishpocheh flocked to North Main Street from all points. They crammed themselves into the stuffy little apartments above the shops until the walls began visibly to bulge. With their faces pressed against the windows, they leered at the street strewn with human flotsam, as if the neighborhood was under siege. On the lips of all the neighbors was the complaint that they were being eaten out of house and home: Elijah himself would have to be turned away.
Except when my grandfather brought back the occasional shnorrer for dinner, we were thankfully spared the overcrowding. What we weren’t spared was the disoriented presence of Sol Kaplan, obliged to close his shop early in deference to the first night of Pesach. For hours he wandered around the apartment as if under a curse that wouldn’t let him sit down. Kaplan’s Loans, which was the center of his operations, must also have been my father’s center of gravity, because away from the shop he seemed unsteady on his feet. He alternately complained of headache, nosebleed, a dull griping pain that would not locate itself. At dusk he posed the illogical proposition that it might be a real fling for the family to make a holiday retreat to the pawnshop. Halfheartedly chopping liver with a gadget like a dynamite plunger, Mama let him know that he was getting on everyone’s nerves.
“Go back to Beale Street already if you don’t like it here,” she snapped. It was the tone I’d heard taken with local greenhorns who dared to express nostalgia for the old country.
Then Uncle Morris arrived with an offer we couldn’t refuse: he insisted that Mama drop the preparations for her Passover meal and invited us to a Seder at his stately home out on the Parkway. “The maid’s an old-timey Shabbos nigger, makes a real pesadig feast. All right, all right, you can bring your Jell-0 mold.” Suspicious as always of my uncle’s motives, even I had to admit that the rescue was timely.
A shady, genteel street at the northern boundary of the Pinch, whence it embarked on a loop of the city, the Parkway was the seat of all that North Main Street yearned for. Its median, arcaded in pink and white dogwoods, was one long bridle path. There it was not unusual to see the equestrian Jewish daughters of doctors and department store owners, wearing jodhpurs and brandishing leather crops, looking indistinguishable from the shiksas who rode alongside. The street was flanked by Mediterranean-style houses with screened-in sleeping porches, roofs of emerald-green tile, verandas furnished with wicker chaise longues, and stone lions recumbent on manicured lawns. Everyone in the Pinch, to hear them tell it, was going to be neighbors on the Parkway by and by. “Next year on the Parkway,” the popular saying went, the street being about as accessible to most as Jerusalem itself.
We piled into Uncle Morris’s Studebaker touring car and were driven in style to his opulent abode. The shamrock-shuttered windows in walls of eggshell stucco, the wrought-iron balconies, the classical frieze over the vaulted front door—all rose like a palace conjured out of the flames of its flowering azalea bed. It was all Grandpa Isador needed to see. On the short trip over, bemoaning some injustice he’d overheard on “Death Valley Days,” the old man had already begun to get out of hand. Now, as the enemy of conspicuous wealth, he positioned himself on the porch beside an urn spewing geraniums.
“I pish on this temple of Baal,” he declared, actually reaching for the buttons of his fly when my mama slapped his liver-spotted hand. She hustled him briskly through the marble vestibule, where the mirrors on adjacent walls contained receding infinities of chastised Isador Kaplans.
In her dudgeon, Mama complained to anyone who might be listening that something would have to be done about the old man. And the sooner the better. “Insti-too-shnalize,” pronounced so that you wanted to say gesundheit, was becoming her favorite word. Roughly she seated Grandpa Isador in the heraldic dining room, which had walnut wainscoting and halberds crossed above a retouched studio portrait of my anemic Aunt Nettie, whom I’d never met. She tucked a napkin into his collar, muttered something about its being handy in case she needed to gag him, and continued to kvetch to Uncle Morris.
Forgotten but not gone, my father felt called upon to put in a word in his own father’s defense. “He’ll come around as soon as all this mishegoss in Europe blows over.” Grandpa Isador, interpreting the news broadcasts according to his whim, had seized on a master focus for his forebodings: projecting from his own personal woe a worldwide epidemic, he’d concluded that the chancellor of Germany was about to murder all the Jews.
At the mention of Europe the old man folded at the chest, emitting a sound like he’d swallowed a harmonica. Papa leaned over to comfort him, suggesting that he might come down to the pawnshop tomorrow. There my papa would see to it that he was kept safe from the doings of the momzer Hitler, may his name be blotted out. At the head of the table Uncle Morris exchanged a meaningful roll of the eyes with my mama at the foot. With their eyes, they seemed to be making a pact to wash their hands of the pair of them, Solly and Isador. Wondering if their pact included me, I wanted to tell them: You’re too late, I beat you to it. I’ve washed my own hands already.
I’d had it up to here with the family Kaplan. What had happened to everyone since Zippe’s passing that they behaved so ludicrously? Like the bubbe had been an anchor or something, and now they were all set adrift. Not that Papa was really any screwier than usual. But more and more I was coming to see the ways my father took after his own, making me resolve that whatever loose screws had been passed down from father to son should stop with him. This is not to say that I joined with my mother and uncle in their holier-than-thou alliance; as far as I was concerned they deserved each other.
Neither did I exempt my cousin Naomi, seated across the table from me, whose mere presence was enough to remind me that things could be better. All dolled up for the occasion, she drooped nevertheless, the shoulders of her dress enfolding her like the limp wings of a taffeta bat. Her stringy black hair, pulled into a listing topknot over her bangs, bristled with stray strands. Whenever I happened to glance in her direction—which was as seldom as possible—she instantly lowered her perennially moist eyes. But when I wasn’t looking, I sensed that she stole occasional glances, the way you sneakily pick food from somebody else’s plate. It made me feel that she might want to steal a peek into my mind, which I forthwith tried to make a perfect blank.
On a lordly cue from Uncle Morris, all casual table talk came to an end. We donned the silk skullcaps, opened the food-soiled Haggadahs, and began an uninspired reading of the Passover service. As the male child, it fell to me to recite the Four Questions, but I had trouble mustering the proper enthusiasm. Rusty with the Hebrew, I garbled it under my breath, and was almost as incoherent with the English translation.
“Whyzissnighdiffren…” I mumbled until they asked me to speak up, after which I vociferated like a quiz show emcee, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Then, to my amazement, I made a sound like a buzzer and said, “Sorry, your time is up.” The silence that followed shamed me into asking the remaining questions in an appropriate tone of voice.
Next, treading heedlessly on each other’s words, the family read a collective explanation of the holiday’s significance. They told the part about how the slaves stuffed their cheeks with cracker crumbs and escaped through a God-made hiatus where the sea used to be. At least a couple of miles away, I was thinking of a miniature sea where before there had been only dry land.
With Uncle Morris holding up every item like an endorsement, we repeated the stories behind the symbols of salt water, shank bone, and bitter herb. Then, following a custom that called for sympathetic bleeding, with all eyes on old Isador lest he open a vein, we dipped fingers in our goblets and dripped wine across our plates. (Licking my pinkie, I was pleasantly surprised, the tepid grape juice of my childhood having been replaced by the authentic fruit of the vine.) Throughout, my grandpa, that his wellsprings shouldn’t run dry, gnawed sticks of horseradish with his rattling dentures to summon more tears.
Just when you thought it was safe to put down your Haggadah, Grandpa Isador cried out, “Dayenu!” This was the signal to begin a recitation of the blessings heaped on the heads of the Israelites. At the end of each blessing in an endless list, you were supposed to shout “Dayenu,” which meant, “It would have been enough.” But Uncle Morris nipped this in the bud.
“Enough is enough is enough,” he broke in. “Let’s nosh!” Then he wadded up his yarmelke and tossed it over his shoulder. “Shinola!” he bellowed toward the kitchen, turning to tell us confidentially, “I call her Shinola, get it? Come to think of it, what is her name?” Now that all the mumbo-jumbo was out of the way, my uncle was our genial host again. In fact he was hamming it up. Taking a large carving knife and a sharpening steel, he proceeded to fight a duel with himself, then plucked a hair from his forward-combed locks to demonstrate the sharpness of the blade.
A door swung open and a colored maid padded in, her crisp, white-aproned uniform strained fore and aft by her generous dimensions. On her broad face was an expression of tolerance under pressure, an expression that made you wonder if there might be something funny about the gefilte fish she was placing before us. That’s what comes of taking too much note of the hired help. When she returned a second time, with a hen on a platter, I avoided studying her face.
As Uncle Morris set about slicing the bird, he faked ecstasies over its texture and the aroma released from its stuffing. Then he fell into his habitual doting on Mama. He congratulated her on her patient fortitude in putting up with him and all of the pesky Kaplan clan.
“If only my Nettie, may she rest in peace,” he sighed, dabbing an eye with the corner of his napkin, “if only she’d had your strength.”
He cast a mournful glance over his shoulder at the portrait of his expired spouse, sere-faced and wilted despite a photographer’s best efforts to add color and prop her up. She’d died shortly after giving birth to Naomi, as if in bringing my cousin into the world she’d fulfilled her purpose. Some purpose. I would have liked to credit my uncle with having bored her into an early grave, but you could see from her portrait that being dead must have come naturally to my nebbish Aunt Nettie.
“Now Morris,” Mama chided him gently, toying with the bangle of her earring, “we mustn’t speak ill of the departed.” But you could tell that she was kvelling fit to burst. One indication was the way she gazed so fawningly at me, which was not her style. Groaning over what a burden I was to bear—that was more like her. But here she was all agloat, her strapping male offspring a testimony to her strength.
Meanwhile Papa was absorbed by his hard-boiled egg in its bed of charoses, prodding it with his fork as if to coax it into motion. Maybe he expected the tiny bald noggin to lift its hidden face and tell him a story. When he began to speak, it was difficult to tell whether he was talking to the egg or to us. “Your attentions, my brother, have made our Mildred a regular Samson,” he said, peering sheepishly over his spectacles.
“Another country heard from,” grumbled Uncle Morris, and let it rest. But Mama, for all her ardent blushing, scolded, “Solly, have a heart! You could learn a thing or two from your brother’s example.” Daintily removing a sliver of chicken from her horsey, carmine-stained teeth, she added mysteriously, “Morris has had his disappointments too.”
I supposed she meant he was disappointed that she’d married Solly instead of him, and from his expression Papa must have guessed it too. He went back to studying his egg like a crystal ball. What he saw—I would have bet on it—was himself snug in his pawnshop, safe from the insults of history and his surviving family. He looked as far away as I felt.
The maid reappeared to inform Uncle Morris that someone was in the kitchen to see him. His sense of humor reserved now for business hours only, Papa didn’t say it, so I had to say it myself: “It must be Elijah.” This captured the momentary interest of Grandpa Isador, who interrupted his lugubrious chewing on the off chance it might be true. Grousing that this someone had better have a good reason for disturbing his peace on this night of nights, Uncle Morris threw down his napkin and waddled out of the dining room. When the door swung inward, I saw what might have been a burnt gingerbread man, popped from the industrial-size oven in front of which he stood. Not until the door swung to again did I realize that I’d seen my papa’s puller with cap in hand.
Papa had mentioned that Uncle Morris sometimes “borrowed” Oboy to perform certain odd jobs, and knowing my uncle, I’d figured that they had to be dirty work. This was no concern of mine, but it still came as a shock to see the puller turn up this far from Beale Street. I was aware by now that Oboy’s sphere of activities extended beyond the pavement in front of the shop. Nevertheless, I couldn’t kick the notion that, if I jumped up and sprinted all the way, I would still find him there on his perch outside Kaplan’s Loans.
Uncle Morris returned huffing in his sour apple face, which meant things of moment were on his mind. Oboy might have brought him the message that his tenants were in revolt; they had torched their slum dwellings and stormed the office of his downtown operations. That was the sort of problem I supposed my uncle would have, though as to the actual nature of his business (real estate, wasn’t it?), I hadn’t a clue.
“Solly,” he began offhandedly, stabbing his fork at a slippery lima bean, “if a couple of boys, you know what I mean, should drop by your shop, and if these boys should be looking to unload —” All of a sudden he lit up in a phony grin. He swiveled his head dummy-style back and forth from his daughter to me and began to chirp, “Hey kids, don’t you think it’s time to go and look for the afikomen?”
Ordinarily I would have been offended. I hadn’t hunted for hidden matzohs in years, not since the times when Papa had made a wild-goose chase out of it, complete with hand-drawn maps full of obstacles and false leads. Nor did I care for the idea of teaming up with my cousin, whom I was practically allergic to. On the other hand, it beat having to sit here and listen to my blowhard uncle angling to involve my father in some shady scheme. It beat having to watch my mother chafe in her stays and declare that she was about to plotz. Besides, after repeatedly toasting the clean getaway of the children of Israel, I’d begun to feel a little woozy. A stroll around the rambling house might be just what I needed.
I rose a bit shakily and followed my cousin from the dining room. Behind us my father was grumbling vaguely, my uncle charging that somebody had to take care of business. It was, after all, “the boys” who made possible what amounted to a charitable foundation.
Naomi and I crossed the vestibule and mounted the carpeted staircase beneath a glorified jack-o’-lantern of a chandelier. Feeling no pain, I was at the same time in need of a focus, some point of reference to help steady the tendency of the stairs to tilt. So I fixed on Naomi’s oily topknot, which looked about to tumble, like an unraveling ball of twine. Then I lowered my sights to the hem of my cousin’s dress. The material, typically coordinated to match the floral wallpaper, swished to and fro above her scrawny calves. It was a rhythmic swish, a kind of fabric metronome, accompanied by the whisper of her stockings and a jungle drumbeat in my head. It was the sort of thing that could induce hypnosis. So I asked her, if only to break the spell, “Where do you think he hid it?”
She turned at the head of the stairs without replying and gave me a look that seemed to ask what I meant by following her. “The matzoh,” I persisted in hopes of refreshing her memory. “Where …?” But, fanning my lips with my fingers b-b-b-b, I gave it up in mid-question, suddenly unsure whether Naomi and I were playing the same game.
She tottered in her wobbly pumps down the long hallway, dimly lit by electric candles in brass sconces. Their flickering reflections made altars out of a row of mullioned windows facing the street. A ghostly woman bearing a candelabra, her I could have seen myself pursuing down such a hallway; my flesh-and-mostly-bone cousin was something else. But since my forward momentum seemed anyway irreversible, I thought I might just as well see where she went.
It turned out to be a bedroom so intensely pink it could shrivel your petsel. The precious furnishings looked almost edible, spun-sugar ornaments on a cake. There was a canopied four-poster with a hand-painted headboard, the mattress heaped with satin pillows to protect the princess from the pea. A ruffled curtain in the shape of a valentine framed a cushioned window seat cradling a stuffed-animal zoo. A wide mantelpiece supported a row of delicate porcelain and china dolls in gingham and lace. Their pantaletted gowns formed an awning over a fancy arched fireplace, tucked inside of which was a modest bookcase. With its bowed and slanted shelves, the volumes in disarray, the case looked as if it had been dumped down the chimney. In the midst of all that cloying prettiness, the books seemed out of place.
They were her poor relations, Naomi’s books—ghetto urchins who have crashed a fancy-dress ball to hide beneath the unwitting skirts of the ladies. So tell me why I thought that, for all its prevailing frivolity, my cousin’s boudoir revolved around those books. Was it because, without their ballast, that airy confection of a room was in danger of floating away? Or was it just that everything else looked untouched? Whereas the books, with their broad creased spines and torn dust jackets showing stitches like undressed wounds, had obviously been the objects of constant handling. Though I couldn’t read their titles from where I stood, I suspected that Naomi’s books might be pretty heavy going by my standards. They might even belong to the same exclusive brother hood of tedious stuff I’d lugged home from the Front Street library.
My cousin was poised on the edge of a chair in front of her skirted dressing table, gazing intently into a circular mirror as if she couldn’t quite place the face. Then she reached up, dislodging a shoulder pad in the process, and removed a pin from her hair. The untidy bun collapsed like a burst bubble of ink, trickling in a twist down her neck. Taking up a silver brush, she proceeded with luxurious strokes to rake her meager tresses into a mild electrical storm. She persisted until her split ends were in full levitation.
She was behaving as if she were in her element, as if she belonged to all that fluffy pink sissification. But I wasn’t fooled for a second. Nobody knew better than I the type she was—a slave to books. She could pretend all she wanted, but the books told the story. She would be shackled to them her entire life, dragging ever thicker volumes behind her. They would weigh her down if she tried to grow up. They would see to it that she ended the long solitude of her days as a pixilated old maid, her calendar full of other people’s birthdays and yahrzeits.
Standing in the door of her bedroom, I felt stupid. Also a little nauseous, like I’d eaten too much cotton candy. But just as I started to turn away, I could have sworn I heard her speak.
“Maybe it’s in here?”
For a moment I thought she’d posed the question to the mirror. “Beg your pardon?”
“The matzoh, silly. Maybe it’s in here.” She turned to me, aiming one of those pointedly significant looks I’d been dodging throughout dinner.
I might have suggested that we forget the whole business, but instead, a good sport, I shrugged and stepped into her room. In making a show of hunting the afikomen, however, it’s possible I went a little overboard in my thoroughness. Suddenly I was the scourge of hidden matzohs. I scattered the throw cushions in the window seat, playing havoc with the quilted unicorns. I manhandled her gallery of dolls, interfering with the cobwebs that moored them to the mantel, coughing over their odor of stale potpourri. With the bookcase I was no more respectful, rifling fat volumes and lean alike, fanning their pages without any temptation to stop and browse.
I was at some pains to conceal my enjoyment from Naomi, nor did I want to see how appalled she must be by my disdain for her things. So I dropped to all fours and stuck my head underneath her bed. What I saw there among the dust kittens was a maverick cache of books with luridly colorful jackets.
“Nothing here,” I quickly assured her, bumping my head on the bed frame as I started to rise. This was at least partly due to a sudden movement of my cousin’s, which kept me on my knees.
Pivoting away from her vanity as she hummed a lively air (“Ma, He’s Makin’ Eyes at Me,” I think it was), Naomi had hoisted one spindly leg high over the other. Studying me all the while like I was the object of a laboratory experiment, she raised the hem of her dress to her thigh. She did this with a painfully slow deliberation, allowing her humming to dwindle into silence, all the better to savor the shush of the dress against silk. Then she hitched up a baggy stocking. She pulled it taut, indolently stroking the long blue vein of the underseam. As if to punctuate the whole affair, she snapped a garter—the sound penetrating my chest like a gunshot—and inquired with point-blank sincerity, “Harry, do you ever have fun?”
From my half-crouch I tried hard to pretend that here was nothing out of the ordinary. She was fixing a stocking, for God’s sake; with legs as skinny as hers, it was no wonder they wouldn’t stay up. But my eyes betrayed me. While I made an earnest effort to lift them far enough to meet my cousin’s, my eyes found a level of their own, falling irresistibly on Naomi’s legs. I was interested, despite myself, in the way the wine-dark sheen of her stocking top met the milk-pallid flesh of her thigh. It looked warm, her naked thigh, a desert island beach where the sea, redolent of roses, washes onto a sandy shore. Then there was the wispy hint—forgive me—of a grotto that beckoned just out of view.
I wanted to ask if this was her way of inviting me to leave no stone unturned in my search for the matzoh. But that was the Passover wine speaking, and something told me that joking would only make things worse. After a first failed attempt during which I felt a little faint, I got up with the intention of giving Naomi an honest reply.
“Do I ever have fun?” I repeated thoughtfully, then tried to turn it into a bold-faced statement: “Do I ever have fun!” But it still came out sounding like a question under consideration.
I suppose you could say that I’d been having a good time in the pawnshop, but ever since I’d crossed over the water on Beale, things had been different. I was different, like a traveler who’d come back from distant lands disguised as a pawnbroker’s son. Meanwhile familiar places had begun to seem new to me. For instance, I had become addicted to the rival aromas of North Main Street—boiling cabbage versus baking strudel, rust versus rising sap—as they wafted through my alcove window at night. I liked listening to the neighbors, picking up snatches of their gossip. I liked when their gossip was drowned out by scratchy Galli-Curci or a breeze that carried some phrase of a swing clarinet. I liked trolley bells and sirens and the foghorns from the river barges, baleful as shofars blown by giant Chassidim. And so help me if I didn’t take pleasure in looking up my puny cousin’s wallflower dress.
Did I ever have fun? I’d had a little, I guessed, but the real fun, the famous fun—that, I felt, had yet to begin. So to Naomi’s question I had only this to reply, my voice skipping up the register till I cleared my throat: “Not much.” Then I turned my head from left to right and asked her where else the thingie, the afikomen, might be hidden.
Peevishly, Naomi dropped her hem over her knees and went all shmulky on me again. With a weary impatience she told me to go and look in the dumbwaiter where her father hid the matzoh every year.