Because I hadn’t been back to the Parkway for a while now, I found myself looking forward to the visit despite my somewhat irregular reason for going. Once she’d finished showing off her several personalities—the pendulum swinging dizzily from lost lamb to fledgling vamp—Naomi had settled down to being not such a bad companion. Of course she was sometimes still a little too eager to please, which made me nervous. She still insisted on breathlessly imparting the contents of her books. Nevertheless, I missed my weekly retreats to her tropical succah of a garden. Giving me a break from my taxing exploits on Beale Street, those trips must have done me more good than I knew. Besides, what with the progress she’d made toward becoming a person in my company, I was anxious to see if my cousin had continued to mature on her own.
I hoped that she hadn’t matured too much, or else she might dismiss my proposition as idiotic—which was how, in the hard light of day, I was inclined to see it myself. I realized I must be crazy to have contemplated such a thing in the first place. If Lucifer hadn’t pinned his outrageous hopes on me, I’d have been happy to call the whole business off. I even considered lying to the wise guy, though I knew he’d see through me in an instant. At any rate, I owed it to him at least to go through the ordeal of asking. After that I could report back with a clear conscience that our project had fallen through.
Meanwhile there was Naomi herself to consider. When I imagined how she might react to such a proposal, I thought I had better sugarcoat it a bit. So I did the unthinkable. I spent my carfare on a cellophane-wrapped box of chocolate turtles from Old Man Levy’s pharmacy. Later, as I headed out to the Parkway, dodging riders in polo attire, I picked a spray of pink and yellow flowers. I felt ridiculous. The nearer I got to my uncle’s palace, the more I realized what my duty entailed. I would have to make a clean breast of things to my cousin. There was no way to get around telling her that I’d been leading her on from the start. And since I’d already muddied the water by dropping so many hints, I knew that it wouldn’t do to tell her anything short of everything.
So why was it, I wondered, that despite a stomach full of dogfighting butterflies, I could hardly wait to see her again?
Up the walk through a gauntlet of trade winds I approached my uncle’s house and was met at the front door, as usual, by the uniformed maid. While she regarded the flowers and candy with suspicion, I beat her to the punch. “I know,” I said. “I should wait in the hall.”
Pacing the marble vestibule, I was trying my best to ignore a certain mush-mouthed voice coming from behind the study door, which was slightly ajar. “… Now your cathouse revenue, that’s skim, that’s small potatoes. But the hot properties fence, I can tell you, he’s the boy that brings in the bucks. Take a shop like Cohen’s on North Main Street, or Kaplan’s on Beale…”
Uncle Morris was up to no good—so what else was new? The words “crooked” and “uncle” were as inseparably paired in my mind as “prune” and “Danish.” Then why did it give me such palpitations to catch him in the act of perpetrating his dirty deeds? After all, I wasn’t exactly a stranger to the dealings of underworld types, many of whom could have had my flabby uncle for lunch. So maybe it was the casual mention of my papa’s shop that gave me a start, and drew me irresistibly toward the study door.
I heard a couple of voices grunt in agreement, then Uncle Morris again, apparently getting down to brass tacks. “I’m counting on you boys to move the stuff before Shavuos. Certain antsy-pantsy parties have already expressed an interest that the goods get delivered on time. And I think you’ll find their gratitude will more than make up for any inconvenience, farshteyn?”
One of the “boys” remarked, while the other sniggered, that he’d heard the hockshop was already filled to capacity. Uncle Morris cut him short with the brusque assurance that room would be made. “It ain’t your business to worry, the shucha will take over at that end.”
I had some vague notion of bursting in on them. In the name of my father I would demand an explanation. Did they think they could get away with such treachery behind Sol Kaplan’s back? Though what couldn’t you get away with under his very nose? The truth be told, I was never really sure about what my father did and didn’t notice. In fact, I wondered if, in his readiness to look the other way, my papa might be a willing accomplice, a silent partner, so to speak.
I was brooding on this when the maid, who seemed to take my eavesdropping in stride, poked my shoulder to inform me that Miss Naomi was waiting, and everything I’d just overheard slipped to the back of my mind.
She was sitting on her bench without the usual stack of books, wearing the wrinkled tartan pinafore of her private school uniform. (She attended the snooty Saint Somebody’s Parochial Academy run by nuns, a secret kept from Grandpa Isador lest he rupture himself over the shame.) This was a switch from the dressier duds she’d put on for my previous visits. Gone too were her tan, faded back into her trademark pallor, and her essence of Sweet Gardenia, which could outcloy the garden. Missing from her hair were the glowworm barrettes worn, I assumed, for my benefit, which had arrested the fall of stringy bangs over her shiny forehead. Also missing was her serenity. Instead she was fidgeting, her head bent over the tangle of fingers in her lap, as if she were more interested in the outcome of their skirmish than in my arrival.
Who could blame me for being disappointed? Only a couple of weeks had elapsed since my last visit, and already she’d retreated into her old nebechel self. So we were back to scratch, me and my cousin, and this one didn’t look like the type who’d be receptive to what I had to say.
I noticed that she was peeking expectantly at my hands. “Oh yeah,” I blurted, having followed her gaze to an awareness that my hands, for a change, were not empty. “These are for you.”
She accepted the flowers and candy with an expression which said that, no matter how sunk, she still knew enough to beware of Harry Kaplan bearing gifts. The flowers were already wilted on their strangled stalks, and the candy, when she’d unwrapped the heart-shaped box, was melted into the semblance of a single cowpat. I thanked her all the same when she offered me some.
I waited for this presentation of damaged goods to make a bad situation worse, but Naomi was, as ever, full of surprises. Heaving a sigh like she would take what she could get, she straightened herself up on her bench. All of a sudden she was a girl of modest dignity, accustomed to receiving gifts from her suitors; she was aware that gifts were often a prelude to some proposal, which she showed herself ready to hear out.
I wanted to tell her not to jump to any conclusions, that whatever she might have in mind, she shouldn’t. On the other hand, this seemed as good a moment as I was likely to get for speaking my piece.
“Naomi,” I said, reciting lines that should have been better rehearsed, “I am here to enlist your aid in a matter of life and death. If there was any other way, I would bite my tongue before asking, but you gotta come with me down to Beale Street tonight.”
When I paused for effect, I saw that Naomi had pooched out her lower lip. Bracing myself against what was coming, I lost the thread of my speech. I realized I was doing it again, tramping into her garden, demanding favors I would never return. It served me right if she should cloud up and sulk.
On closer inspection, I observed that my cousin wasn’t pouting so much as considering thoughtfully. She assisted the process with a sniff of the flowers drooping from her hand. With the forefinger of the other she probed the box of candy—the several turtles fused into one sizable snapper. Raising the candy-coated finger to the tip of her tongue, she licked it inquisitively, as if the taste of the chocolate was the issue in question. Then she gave a pert nod and said, “Why not?”
“Why not what?” I was confused.
“Why not go with you to Beale Street,” said Naomi, starting up there and then from her shady gazebo.
With a firmness that shocked us both, I grabbed her by the shoulders and sat her back down. “Not so fast!”
Having opened her mouth to speak, she promptly shut it again. Here Naomi had shown herself willing to comply, with no questions asked, so what do I do? But the problem was, I still had a tale to tell. Besides, it didn’t seem right that my cousin should be in such a hurry to leave her fragrant bower. Even I had hesitated before daring to enter the haunts of the shvartzers, and I never had any garden to kiss goodbye.
“Don’t you even want to know why?” I asked her, trying to soften my bullying tone.
There followed a revival of Naomi’s contemplative moue. She shrugged another “Why not?” and made a little fuss of arranging herself in a listening attitude.
I blew out my cheeks and dropped onto the bench beside her, accidentally dragging my fingers through the candy box. When I pulled them out of the goo, I saw on my cousin’s face a look of predatory tenderness; she might have snatched my fingers and licked them clean if I hadn’t hurried to wipe them on the mossy bricks. After that I sat up and proceeded to dump the entire improbable megillah in her lap.
“You won’t believe it,” I assured her, exhilarated to be finally spilling the beans, “but it happened like this…” Once I’d launched into the telling, however, I found that I kept needing to back up. The more outlandish parts lacked authenticity unless corroborated with further details. Naomi insisted that this wasn’t necessary; I should get on with my story without so many interruptions. She was happy, it seemed, to accept as gospel what would have sounded to any intelligent person like pure cock-and-bull.
She didn’t even get angry when I described the false pretenses under which I’d made away with her library. If anything, she tended to view the duplicity as an interesting twist. It was as if all that I related, though stranger than fiction, was just another story cribbed from a book.
“It’s the truth, for crying out loud!” I insisted, and my cousin assured me that she had no cause to doubt it.
This was infuriating; it took all the fun out of confessing. Where she should have been astonished and scandalized, Naomi was only amused. It made me want to see how far I could push at the bounds of her complaisance. If the facts didn’t move her, I could do better than facts. I began to touch up my descriptions, adding lush harem trappings to the decor of the Baby Doll, suggesting more than friendly relations with its resident females. Talk about gilding the lily, I even went so far as to exaggerate the effects of the dummy’s shpiel: how it could modulate in pitch to cause internal bleeding and set off alarms in your cavities; how, during his more ardent outbursts, he levitated above the bed.
I know I should have been ashamed of myself, but I was too busy adding refinements to my narrative to care. Blame it on Naomi, whose gullibility kept egging me on. Myself, all I wanted was to make her understand that, give or take the odd embellishment, this story was based on actual fact. She should appreciate that, beyond the neat fuchsia border of her pungent preserve, Harry Kaplan was consorting with Negroes. He was fraternizing with undesirables in places dangerous to his health, and had himself become quite a rascally piece of work.
“It happened, so help me!” I threw in whenever I thought the story needed further guarantees. Then I crossed my heart and went on inventing lies.
By the time I got to the part where I had to tell Naomi just how she figured into all this, I was worn out. Though I tried to inject some excitement into my voice—“See, we’ll dress you up all farputz” and so on—it wasn’t any use. By now my mind was practically a blank. I felt so out of touch with the actual Beale Street that it was almost as if I’d never really been there. I’d replaced my own honest adventures with something like “Jack Armstrong Goes to Tan Town.” Not that it mattered to Naomi, whose mind had been made up all along. One trumped-up reason was just as good as another when you were as anxious as she was to leave your father’s garden for the world.
“So what do you say?” I asked her for the sake of form at the weary conclusion of my tale. Then I mouthed along with my cousin a silent “Why not?”
“Sounds like a lot of laughs,” she tossed in for good measure, Miss Been-Around-the-Block-a-Time-or-Two, and was on her feet again.
“Will you hold your horses!” I pleaded without bothering to get up myself, since it was obvious that no one could hold her horses for her. “You think we’re talking about snooping after matzohs here? This kind of thing takes planning, split-second timing. In the first place, we’ll have to wait until it’s late at night…”
Naomi was pacing the patio, thinking aloud. “We’ll have to do it late at night.”
“Right,” I concurred. Now we were getting somewhere. “So after my papa comes home, what I’ll do is, I’ll swipe his keys. Then we can get into his shop, where he keeps these costumes…”
“You can carry me down from my bedroom like Helen of Troy,” she went on, her anticipation having taken a dreamy turn. Catching sight of me, however, she sobered a bit. “Well, maybe you better just whistle—that is, if you know how to whistle. Or do you think you can throw some rocks without breaking the window?” She turned toward me for confirmation, and saw that my jaw hung open, inviting flies. Then Naomi smiled and waxed dreamy again.
“You’ll be standing in the shadows under the sycamore tree, and I’ll slide down the trunk into your arms.”
I watched her shiver at the thought, and understood that I was definitely in over my head.
“Now what’ll I wear?” she wondered, coiling a lock of hair about a finger as she considered. “Basic black, of course, though I’ve got this cashmere thing with a hood, only it’s jade—excuse me?” She was challenging me to interrupt. “Let’s see, there’s my sailor pants which are navy, but that’s close enough, and my turtleneck jersey, y’know, like a safecracker’s. Espadrilles will have to do, but what do you think is more suitable for the head? A scarf—Cathy Earnshaw wore scarves—or maybe a beret?”
She sounded like a girl who was planning her elopement, and far be it from me to suggest that Kaplan’s Loans was less than the perfect setting for a honeymoon.
That night I lay in my alcove far past the time when I usually snuck back out to join the twins. Because I’d made such a habit of coming and going, catching my winks on the run, I felt like an interloper in my own bed. I was some night-prowling orphan who’d crawled in through the open window of a strange apartment, who was curled up and listening to the lullaby of North Main Street as he took refuge in the dark. It was a notion so cozy that it soothed my jumpy nerves, and despite myself I dozed off for a spell.
I had a dream that I was living comfortably in a tree house, which turned out instead to be a one-man ark on the crest of a mile-high wave. The wave was about to come crashing down on the nappy black heads of the children of Israel. But they were too busy praising the Lord and kicking up their heels to hear me when I called to them to get out of the way.
Look out who? Who look out?
I opened my eyes to find myself sitting bolt upright in bed with a hammering heart. In the glow of a lamp just beyond the open French doors to my alcove stood my father, looking as shaken as I felt. His bushy brows had inched themselves halfway up his long forehead, and he was clutching his hat over his chest like a shield. Presumably he had just returned home from work.
“Who did you want should look out?” he was asking in a sweat. “You shouted ‘Look out.’”
“I guess I must of been dreaming, huh Papa,” I told him, though wasn’t it his place to reassure me? He also seemed to come to this realization once he was convinced that he shouldn’t take my dream warning personally.
“You were dreaming, kiddo, that’s all,” he affirmed, showing me the inside of his hat, as if its empty crown somehow meant I had nothing to fear. “Go back to sleep. Everything’s shipshape in the land of Nod.”
He switched off the lamp, but when my eyes readjusted, I could see that he still hadn’t moved. Then he was gone.
I listened for the flush of the toilet and the opening and closing of doors, then got out of bed. Stuffing the covers—though I doubted there would be any more visits tonight—I dressed and tiptoed into the hall. I waited until I heard my father’s stertorous snoring begin to mingle with my mother’s whimpered burbles. From the adjacent bedroom I could also hear my grandpa’s tortured crepitations, as if his beard were crackling flames that he was trying to blow out.
I snuck into my parents’ bedroom. From a doily on top of their dresser, beside a photograph of Mama feeding Papa a piece of wedding cake, I lifted my father’s key ring. The theft went off without a hitch, naturally, since stealth had become my middle name. In fact, I’d become so adept at it that I sometimes wondered if I could call attention to myself now if I tried.
Minutes later I was in the alley behind Petrofsky’s market, where I took the liberty of borrowing his delivery boy’s bike. Along the bridle path of the Parkway, lurking branches threatened to unseat me, the bushes lashing out at my arms and shins. By the time I reached my uncle’s, I had scars to show for my journey. I aimed the pebbles at my cousin’s window with the precision of one whose skills have been perfected through adversity.
Naomi was as good as her word. She appeared at her window in the outfit of a cat gonif, done up in black from head to toe. With her face half concealed by her upturned turtleneck and her hair hidden beneath a babushka tied turban-style, she was a shadow wearing the mask of my cousin’s eyes. With the attitude of a creature accustomed to walking on air, she stepped from her window ledge. She caught hold of a limb of the sycamore and, while I chewed my nails to the quick, traveled the length of it hand over hand. She shinnied down the trunk with a nimbleness that suggested a dress rehearsal or two in her dreams.
When I held my arms wide to catch her, I was disappointed that she didn’t seem to need my help. Once she’d reached the ground, she moved with an authority (further affirmed by the finger she held to her lips) that discouraged me from even opening my mouth. Without prompting she padded over to the bicycle, which I’d left leaning against a stone lion, and motioned me to come and sit astride it. Then, rather than flop into the basket behind the seat, she mounted the handlebars with the poise of a hood ornament on a limousine.
Strenuously pedaling through the soft and sticky brink-of-summer night, I honored Naomi in silence. She held my admiration all the way to the corner of Second Street and Beale, where I turned east into the pawnshop district.
I had already begun to scour the shopfronts, making sure that the street was closed up tight. I was satisfying myself that the moneylenders and—especially in the case of Kaplan’s—their pullers had all gone wherever they go, when Naomi let out a gasp: “What’s that!” She nearly lost her balance, having turned loose one of the handlebars to point at the lagoon, which was as spangled as ever with barn lanterns on bumping skiffs. All of a sudden my cousin wasn’t so at home in the night anymore.
“Oh, that,” I replied coolly over the croak of the bicycle seat. After all, wasn’t it time she recognized how her cousin was a party to things she’d never dreamt of in her storybooks? “Where you been, you never heard of the flood?” I said.
Naomi kept quiet until I’d wobbled the bike to a halt in front of my papa’s shop. Then she slid from the handlebars, rubbing her tochis, and in a chastened undertone admitted that she’d never been to Beale Street before. “My father always forbid me,” she apologized. “He always calls it a ‘nigger sink.’ He says ‘shlecht,’ then spits out the side of his mouth.”
She looked toward the lagoon as if to say, A sink isn’t bad enough, but this one has to be clogged. She seemed suddenly so much the babe in the woods that I wondered if I might have made a terrible mistake. For the first time since I’d hatched this ridiculous scheme, I considered the consequences. What if, for instance, my hot-headed uncle should discover how I’d led his only daughter into the precincts of depravity?
“Well, it’s too late to turn back now,” I declared for the inspirational sake of us both—only to have the words turn into a question before leaving my lips. Naomi, who looked no less fearful for refusing to let us both off the hook, retorted, “Who said anything about turning back?”
Grumbling something about how we’d already been out on the sidewalk too long, I began to move fast. I leaned the bike against a window, stuck the key in the padlock, and worked at folding the lattice. Going pssst a couple of times to no effect, as Naomi was gawping at the standing water again, I stepped up behind her and took her by the hand. Gently, then not so gently, I tugged her across the rubber mat at the threshold of Kaplan’s Loans.
To avoid exciting the suspicions of some strolling cop on the beat, I thought better of turning on the lights. This presented a problem, since the aisle between the display cases was bottlenecked with junk and, having scarcely set foot inside for almost a month, I no longer knew my way around. No sooner had I cautioned Naomi—who kept a sweaty hold of my hand—to watch her step than I barked my shin on something that clanged like a gong. Starting at the noise, I knocked over something else that sounded like clattering bones. Then I stepped on God only knew what, which was soft and doughy and exhaled a nasal sigh. After that I paused to thank my own foresight for having remembered to bring along some matches.
When I’d managed to disengage myself from my cousin’s clutch, I struck one. Shadows scattered as if we’d caught them doing something they shouldn’t, and Naomi grabbed my hand again. On either side of us the shelves above the cases were bowed from the weight of gizmos defying description. You had model cars whittled from salt licks, animal mugs and assorted whirligigs, clocks like a gallery of clucking tongues. There were Prohibition radios that converted into bars, a nickelodeon shaped like the Heinz red-tomato man. A whole new generation of outré merchandise had found its way into the shop in my absence, much of it overlaying the stuff I’d been familiar with.
“Hock shop, shlock shop,” I blustered, hoping to dispel a little the freakish atmosphere. But to judge from my cousin’s moon-eyed condition, it didn’t work. She was looking around like she couldn’t believe that we’d entered such a place without a password, without rolling aside a boulder and making some scaly beast retract its claws. As she tightened her grip till my fingers went numb, I felt a twinge of pride in the sheer magnitude of my papa’s peculiarity.
Again I freed myself to strike another match and moved forward past the cash register counter to unlock the wire cage. The door opened with its spooky mewling on the cache of items that my papa considered to be specialties.
Slowly Naomi entered the cage behind me as I yanked on the overhead bulb. While she blinked in stunned silence from the sudden glare, I shielded my eyes to look over the recent acquisitions. There were some new additions to the taxidermed orchestra, for example, more varmints with mechanisms that let them play cymbals and drums. There was a life-size stand-up poster of the Philip Morris midget, hung with primitive box cameras, Torah amulets, and rosary beads. Some of the artificial limbs had been attached to one another with leg irons, and an oxbow posing as a pair of giant handcuffs leaned against the open safe. The rack of fancy-dress shmattes now included a few butternut tunics and a lost boy’s squirrel costume from a production of Peter Pan. There were a couple of pairs of overalls shaggy with feathered fishing lures.
Naomi was still looking on in open-mouthed astonishment, the reluctant guest at a surprise party in her honor. Worried that she might be about to go into shock, I decided to get to work without further ado. From a hanger I tore off a frilly ball gown, then another, dancing them in front of my cousin’s un-focusing eyes. The effort of having to choose, I reasoned, would soon bring her into the spirit of the masquerade. But Naomi stood blinking like she’d come to a morgue to identify a body and couldn’t find anyone she recognized.
As patiently as I was able, I told her, “These are costumes. Pick one. Let’s get the show on the road.” Still, nothing.
Flinging aside the dresses in my hands, I made yet another selection. A hill of taffeta and shot silk, velvet, crepe, muslin, and bombazine had begun to grow between myself and my cousin, who’d ceased paying attention to the dresses at all. Instead, with a gesture that threatened to become a habit, she was pointing at a knotty pine box that was all but hidden under miscellaneous junk. She must have assumed, from its oblong shape, that what it contained was out of the ordinary even by the standards of the surrounding company.
“What?” she demanded apprehensively.
I came that close to saying, “Three guesses,” since I figured that she already had a pretty good idea. But this didn’t seem like the moment to remind her of our family’s unfinished business and of how we were standing in what passed for our grandmother’s crypt.
“That? Oh, nothing.” I tried to sound offhand. “That’s just, um, you know…” I chuckled unconvincingly. “Just an old crate full of more rags and bones.” If ever there was a cue for the dead to contradict the living, to sit up in an eruption of curios and call me a liar, it was now. But Grandma Zippe thankfully remained as immobile in death as in life.
Apparently pacified, Naomi seemed to breathe easier, as if aware of having escaped a brush with an uncomfortable fact. Maybe now she’d be ready to get on with the business at hand. She still hadn’t rolled down her turtleneck, which must have been smothering her in that sweltering shop, but since all that was identifiable of Naomi were her eyes, she seemed to me ripe for changing into somebody else.
“Now how about this?” I coaxed her, crinkling the gathered furbelows at the hem of the antebellum creation in my hands. “And these?” I teased the tiny rosettes at the neckline, the flounced leg-of-mutton sleeves. “Or maybe you’d prefer something a little more what we like to call in the trade ali mode?” I was beginning to think I’d found a missed calling. “Take this chichi little number, which they’ll be wearing on the cover of Hotsy-Tchatchky this season.”
I was hamming it up, dangling a slinky confection like the skin of a rainbow trout. When she failed to take the hint, I moved right along, though the pickings were getting slim, trying again with a flapper affair in gossamer and beads. But Naomi was hardly even showing any vital signs. That’s when I came to the end of my patience.
“What do you think, this is my lady’s chamber? You think we got all night?” Then right away, seeing how she’d been pushed close to tears, I relented. I gave her the go-ahead with my hand and told her, “Listen, I’m sorry, take your time. Take all the time you need—two, three minutes? I don’t care.”
I had it in mind to back off and leave her to try on the costumes in privacy, which was anyway the gentlemanly thing to do. But before I could get clear of the cage, I stumbled over her voice in its plangent appeal: “Harry, don’t leave me.”
By the time I turned around, her head had already vanished in the black web of her turtleneck. Then she peeled off the jersey, leaving her knotted scarf in place but revealing a pale pink garment to the waist. With no more ceremony than if she’d been alone, she kicked off her sandals, unlaced her slacks, and stripped down to a pair of fine-spun tap pants. After that she reached for a strap of her cotton camisole and was beginning to pull it over her shoulder. “Stop!” I shouted. “That, uh, won’t be necessary,” I hastened to add, swallowing hard.
Naomi shrugged, leaving the strap to droop down her scrawny arm. Her eyes remained skittery, but in her voice, just beneath what was still mostly an appeal, I thought I detected the suggestion of a dare.
“You dress me, Harry,” she said.
My throat went dry, my tongue like something washed up on a beach. When I managed to speak, I think that I actually muttered some caution against her taking a chill, though the heat in the rear of Kaplan’s couldn’t have been more dense. Turning in a full circle before I was able to locate the rack, I snatched up one of the remaining frocks. It was some lavender period piece, as it happened, with an upstanding bodice scalloped in lace-trimmed brocade: Guinevere meets Little Bo-Peep.
Without inquiring whether the gown was at all to her taste, I flung it over Naomi’s head the way you might throw water to douse a flame—but not before I’d taken a sneaking account of her spindle-shanked anatomy, which included, item: the furuncular knobs of her shoulders; the bumps like mosquito bites under her bow-tied camisole, which was short enough to show a navel so convex that it seemed to be coming unbuttoned; the frosting of down on her coltish legs, knock-kneed below the edges of her baggy drawers. None of it was lost on me: how she looked, my near relation, like she’d just been hatched from an egg. Only nominally human, she nevertheless gave the impression that she was on her way toward becoming something else. A word I didn’t know I knew—sylph—popped into my head, and I wondered if I was about to come into a knowledge beyond my years.
Turning away from her again, I started to rummage through the squat iron vault. “Accessories,” I muttered; that’s what I was looking for, or was it my scattered wits? In a tray containing—alongside the costume jewelry—fake eyeballs and prosthetic hooks, snake rattles and hollow fangs, wishbones, a devil doll, and a sulphur-yellow rock labeled “Philosopher’s Stone,” I found a conservative strand of tiny seed pearls. I faced my cousin a little stiffly, like I was bestowing them by virtue of the power vested in me as…what?, and fastened the pearls around her meager stem of a neck.
While I was asking myself what ought to come next, Naomi read my mind. Stooping, she retrieved a drawstring leather bag from the pocket of her shucked sailor pants. This she pressed into my hands before returning to her passivity of a moment ago, only now she didn’t appear to be so floored into confusion by it all. Give her a gown and some jewelry, and all of a sudden she’s posing, the pitsvinik; she’s above having to wait on herself. Who did she think she was, putting on airs like a princess? Who, for that matter, did I think she was?
Inside the leather bag I discovered a variety of cosmetics: Tangee compact cases and aromatic puffs, lipstick tubes, eyebrow pencils, swabs. These were the sort of things that required an exacting touch, the sure hand that delivers the coup de grace. “Oh no.” I was shaking my head, pleading inexperience. “What do I know from glamour?”
But in my mind I was giving testimony: I knew the show ladies at the Palace, their dressing tables crowded with toiletries like an Emerald City; I knew the ladies of the Baby Doll with their henna and hare’s-foot unguents, their bezoar powder, their bleaching compounds for cutting coffee complexions with cream. What, come to think of it, didn’t I know from glamour?
Besides, it didn’t take a genius to apply a little lipstick. I’ll admit I was worried at first that I might be hurting her, the way her mouth got so inflamed and her lips tightened to a slit. But when she released them in a slow impression of scarlet petals unfolding, I relaxed. Next came the eyes, which I caught on to pretty quick. If you stirred the little brush in the palette of shadow, then gently etched her quivering eyelids in soft greens and blues, you could create all kinds of effects. You could give her startled eyes a deep sadness or, with a deft stroke at the corners, a touch of boldness or even ferocity. You could turn them from the eyes of a girl to those of a tigress, then soften them with your fingertips until the frightened doe peeped through. You could make them fathomless and full of mystery.
Next it seemed that a little face powder might be in order. So I took up a puff and proceeded to raise a storm of fine white dust, from which Naomi emerged with an unearthly pallor. In a hurry to restore her vitality, I dipped my fingers in a tiny paint pot and daubed her with an excess of rouge. By rubbing circles over her cheeks, however, I was able to reduce the garish clown splotches to the merest phantoms of a blush. After that I closed an eye to peer at my cousin over the top of my upraised thumb, and judged that the results were perfection.
I even liked the way the tight black babushka, which still hid her hair, brought out the dramatic features of her face. I liked the way it contrasted with her lavish gown. Still, I knew what was missing. Beginning to shuffle among the bonnets and ruglike toupees on top of the costume rack, I brought down a couple of faceless wooden heads wearing wigs. The wig I chose was a high-piled, blond-ringleted concoction, more of a tawdry Madame du Barry than a Queen Marva June, but it was close enough and so roomy that you could pull it conveniently over Naomi’s scarf.
When I looked, however, I saw that my cousin had already whipped off the scarf and was in the process of shaking out her hair. And now that the secret was out, it looked to me like it might be a job to cover it up again. For one thing, she seemed to have more hair than I remembered, or was it just that she’d washed it for a change? In any case, taking a silver-spined brush out of her bag, she began to stroke the shock of it into a dark and static-crackling tawniness. With every brush stroke her hair seemed more abundant, acquiring a kind of corona from the overhead light, which gave me another idea. I tossed aside the dusty wig and went casting about in the vault again, this time coming up with a delicate rhinestone coronet. Using it as a comb to sweep back her veil of bangs, I positioned it in Naomi’s hair. Then I stepped away to watch its blue-black sheen catch the fire of those winking and shooting stones.
I gave a nod, turned again, and began rooting around under the costumes, searching for a suitable pair of shoes. I didn’t look over my shoulder when I heard her in motion again; I didn’t need to. The whispered susurrus alone was enough to carry me back to that sidetracked afikomen hunt on a distant Passover evening, so I knew that Naomi was pulling on a pair of silk stockings (in dark indigo, I imagined, or smoke), hoisting them over her azure-veined thighs.
Taking a deep breath, letting it out, I kept my mind on the matter at hand. From among a mismatched assortment of galoshes and clogs, elevators and carpet slippers with upcurling toes, brogans caked in the mud of Verdun, I selected a pair of blue satin dancing pumps. Hoping they would fit, I swiveled around on my knees to help Naomi try them on. She obliged me by steadying herself, placing a hand benediction-style on the top of my head. With her other she lifted the rustling organdy of her gown, raising it as far as her ankle. This was a perfectly functional action on her part, nothing you would call especially Cinderella. So why did a certain organ in my chest choose that moment to do its impersonation of a landed fish?
When I stood up to get the full effect of my labors, I found I didn’t quite know how to look at her anymore. I averted my eyes and said I supposed that she wanted to get a load of herself. “Don’t go away,” I told her, which struck me as funny, as if I’d said it to a manikin instead of a living girl.
I flung about outside the cage for another minute or two. Eventually I turned up what I was looking for, wrapped in a bullet-riddled flag: a cloudy oval mirror in its burnished frame. I went back and held it in front of my cousin’s face. I stood just behind her, holding up the mirror, kibbitzing her reflection over her shoulder—so that together we seemed to be gazing at the portrait of one shayne fair lady. In this way I was able to make an objective assessment of my handiwork.
She was a dream, the one in the mirror. She had a comeliness that could have presided over pageants, be they in the city of Memphis or the palace of Belshazzar. She was the type that could tease a dozen suitors, playing each against the other, while behind her fan she exposed the wickedness of his most trusted adviser to the king. She was a corker, all right; she could have fooled anybody. She could have fooled her own father. She could have fooled blithering Michael, shimmering into his field of vision like a lavender-blue flame—a flame composed of all the careless sparks that had flown from his mouth in the course of his long delirium. In fact, she could have fooled me.
As I craned my neck to peer into the mirror, I could no longer see past her radiance to the original shrimp underneath. The difficulty was possibly due to the murkiness of the glass, which I promptly put aside. But when I took her by the arm to turn her around, gingerly, as if she might break, it was even worse. She was beautiful. The thought came to me then that I was seeing my cousin for the first time as she truly was—which was ridiculous. After all, wasn’t I the author of her transformation? I was the one responsible for having just made her up, and I knew what was real. Still the thought persisted like an itch that you’re embarrassed to scratch in public. So who was in public?
“Naomi?” I said, the way you’d ask, Is anybody home? I resisted an impulse to tap on her forehead. Then she had to give me this smile. It was a close-mouthed smile, gentle and self possessed but nonetheless cruel. A smile by way of informing her cousin that she refused to be so kind as to disillusion him.
That was all it took. Suddenly I had a dilemma on my hands. Which was the greater crime, I asked myself: to run out on the twins in their hour of dreadful need or to come to their aid by handing over my cousin for them to do with as they pleased? Because that’s what it boiled down to, didn’t it? I could either forsake my colored acquaintances—since to turn up empty-handed now would be as good as forsaking them—or give them the tender, night-blooming Naomi at the risk of her health and well-being, not to mention her honor. There was nothing in between.
Of course I couldn’t leave my old pal Lucifer in the lurch. Weren’t we practically blood brothers under the skin and all that? Didn’t I owe him for all the adventure I’d ever known? To abandon him at such a time would make me the lowliest kind of traitor, a rat and a worm. It was unthinkable. On the other hand, how could I place my defenseless cousin, this knockout darling in her party attire, in such uncertain peril? How could I lead her into all that shvartzer chaos on the notorious side of an unnatural body of water that stunk enough to stain the very air?
Then it was funny that the scheme didn’t seem so farfetched anymore; clearly it had been a brilliant strategy all along. She was perfect for the part, Naomi, just what the doctor ordered to bring this whole cockamamy situation to a head. Like a living poultice, she could have drawn out the infection of moonstruck yearning from the sick kid’s system. The septic boil that his heart had become (which he might have done better to wear on his dusky behind) would have burst in a spray of fleeing demons at the sight of her; it would have survived, Michael’s heart, exquisitely seared but knitted whole again by the cautery of her touch. She could have done that—what couldn’t she do, the angel? But she was mine.
So I told her it was all a joke.
“Naomi,” I said, “I got a confession to make. You know all that stuff about the colored twins? Well, it was all just a load of bunk.” It was, I told her, just a line to get her to come down to the pawnshop after hours. “And why, you might ask, would I want to do that?” This was a very good question indeed, and one for which I had no ready answer.
Stumped, I looked to Naomi, hoping unreasonably that she might provide an answer herself. You wanted to see how far I would go for your sake, she might have suggested, and I’d have wagged my head idiotically and said, “Bingo.” But as no help was forthcoming from her quarter, I blundered on.
“I was curious to find out how, I dunno, gullible you were. It was kind of an experiment,” I submitted, which didn’t even make good sense. Aware that I was probably hanging myself with every word, I nevertheless seemed unable to curb my tongue. “I guess you’re pretty gullible, aren’t you? I mean, just imagine trying to pass you off as the queen of the Cotton Carnival.” Here I filled the air with bogus laughter.
Throughout my foot-in-mouth performance, Naomi had yet to give anything away. A little pity or even righteous anger would have been a relief, but no such luck. If her limpid eyes betrayed anything, it was, Look at what you’ve done to me, Harry. I hope you’re satisfied.
“You’re really taking it like a champ, kiddo,” I assured her, leaning forward to pat her vertebra at the place where her underwear protruded from the back of her gown. Then I told her I supposed the joke had gone far enough, and I was ready if she was (Mr. Big-Hearted) to let the matter drop here and now. I asked her if she didn’t think it was time we started for home.
Still not a peep from Naomi, not a tummy rumble. All right, I thought, if she won’t cooperate of her own free will, I’ll just have to give her a shove. What choice did she leave me except to undo the wondrous thing I’d done?
I began cautiously with the coronet and, meeting no resistance, unhooked the string of pearls. I paused for a moment’s regret, then reached around her bodice to unfasten the clasps at her spine. (It might have been less awkward to stand behind her for this operation, but Naomi was slight and my encircling arms were long for my size.) Then I gave a tug at her ruffled shoulders, and in an instant she stood defrocked.
I hadn’t anticipated such abrupt results. I’d assumed that Naomi would intervene, having been provoked into taking over herself. But as it turned out, the costume collapsed of its own accord, settling in a sibilant heap about her ankles. Along with it a loose strap of her camisole had been dragged off a shoulder, so that a budding right booby sprang into view. This I pretended not to notice, quickly turning my back to gather her cast-off clothes. As I was picking up the sailor pants and the jersey, everything that was needed to restore Naomi to her former self, I heard a noise behind me. With a sound like a cough giving birth to a whimper, she’d broken her silence for what seemed like the first time in centuries.
When I looked, her tranquil composure had come apart, leaving her racked with shuddering all up and down her bony frame. She was given over to a fit of sobbing, so careless in its transports that she neglected her modesty. I marveled slack-jawed at the way her upstanding pink nipple clung to her joggling breast like a blood tick or a jumping bean. God knows I hadn’t meant to disrobe her so violently as to reduce her to such a state—though you couldn’t help feeling that, in some respects, this was more like it. Human again, Naomi might now be persuaded to get out of here.
I took a step forward to offer her clothes and maybe some sympathy, then took a step backward to dodge the arm that she was suddenly pointing at me.
“Harry!” she hooted, making it immediately apparent that she hadn’t been sobbing at all but laughing hysterically. Moreover, I myself seemed to be the butt of her joke. This might have upset me more if I hadn’t been secretly pleased that the first word she uttered after finding her voice was my name.
“Oh Harry.” There it was again. “I never saw anybody look so,”—she practically choked, the words swelling her cheeks till they burst forth in a guffaw—“so scaaared!” Doubled over with laughter, she allowed the cotton vest to slip from her other shoulder and fall to her waist, thus lending her mirth more symmetry.
I supposed it was good that she was able to see the humor in our situation, saw it evidently much better than I. I tried to force a grin myself, hoping to show I could enjoy a good yuck as well as the next, even if it was at my own expense. This was turnabout, after all: having more or less played her for a patsy, it was only fair she should pay me back in kind. Tit (so to speak) for tat.
“Ain’t we got fun,” I said, and repeated it was time to go home. I even suggested that some witching hour might be at hand. Hadn’t it just today been confirmed in my hearing that Kaplan’s sometimes played host to thieves? At any moment they might burst in on us; she should hurry up and take her belongings, which I tried again to dump in her arms. But it was clear that I was wasting my breath.
She did, however, do me the favor of attempting to suppress her hilarity, subduing it to the level of sniffling and the odd adenoidal snort. She even went so far as to affect a fleeting frown, studying her clothes in my hands as if I’d brought her the evidence of a shed chrysalis. Then she gave herself up to a stormier fit of giggling than before.
I couldn’t stand it any longer. Dropping her rejected garments into the sawdust on the floor, I told myself that what I was doing was for her own good. She would understand that, no stranger to hysterics, I was administering a kind of first aid. I threw my arms around her bare shoulders and squeezed for all I was worth to calm her down. In a minute she’d be as limp and unresisting as her discarded gown, ready to see reason again.
With my chin clamped tight against her hair, I inhaled her closeness, her talcum and stale gardenia fragrance. I felt her sticky warmth glued to my shirtfront, through which I was tickled by her jiggling thingamabubs. It frightened me so much, this dazzled proximity, that I couldn’t tell where her spasms of laughter left off and my shaking began. Again I tried to assure myself that I was doing nothing wrong—or if it was a sin to hug your half-naked first cousin, then it was the kind that even my grandfather’s Scriptures must have made allowances for. Especially in the case of emergencies such as this.
When she pulled her face clear of the hollow of my neck, freeing her gleeful mouth, I saw a worried set of myselves reflected in the wet depths of her eyes. One worried Harry being all I could handle, and as the glare from the overhead bulb was anyway too harsh, I reached up and pulled the cord. In the dark I told Naomi to hush and, though I doubted that she heard me, suggested she might like to lie down for a spell. “Just until the craziness passes,” I said. With one arm still hooked about her fitful waist, I guided her in the direction of Zippe’s casket. I groped in front of us until my free hand made contact with the knotty pine, then swept wildly from left to right, clearing the coffin lid of bric-a-brac and, judging from the way that it bonged across the floor, an empty samovar.
Apparently amused by all the noise, Naomi renewed her cackling, stumbling a bit as I urged her forward. What she’d tripped over, as I discovered with my foot, was the clump of her party gown, which had yet to be unraveled from her ankles. Crushing the material with my heel, I took Naomi under the arms and lifted her—helplessly giddy featherweight that she was—out of the gown. Think of separating a mermaid from her vestigial fishtail. After that I encouraged her to lie back on the coarse-grained lid of the box, then climbed on board myself to keep her company.
To coax her into stillness, I eased myself down alongside her; I leaned my weight against her ticklish ribs, suffering her bones, blunted only where her underwear was gathered into a sort of breechcloth. Carefully, I took hold of her wrists.
“Naomi, shhhah!” I pleaded, my face so close to hers that I felt an eyelash brush the tip of my nose. “You’re making enough racket to wake the —” I waited for the thunderclap, but heard only the continued peal of my cousin’s laughter. “Naomi!” I was about to despair of ever getting through to her, when her voice tumbled forth again. It came this time as an assurance that she found our mutual recumbency funnier than anything yet.
“You’re a devil, Harry Kaplan!” she squealed between paroxysms of giggling. “You’re a terrible person!” But no sooner had I relaxed my grip on her—for such was the heady effect of her voice—than she jackknifed her hips and bucked me off the box.
I picked myself up out of the wreckage of what I think was an ant farm, pulling a splinter or two from the seat of my pants. Thoroughly ashamed of myself, I realized that I had been terrible, and I was grateful to Naomi for jolting me back to my senses. What had I been thinking, that I should swarm all over my cousin like a drowning man? Come the first lull in her antic behavior and I would beg her forgiveness. Then she did manage to modulate her merriment a little, so that I now heard only the sound of mild snuffling. But just as I’d begun to frame my apology, Naomi told me to shut up and come here.
“C’mere,” she said in her old phony femme fatale voice, which even she didn’t seem to be taking seriously. Not that it had ever worked on me when she had—not in her sultry garden or her spun-sugar boudoir. So what was it about the darkness at the back of Kaplan’s that made her summons sound not so phony anymore?
Because I hesitated, not knowing whether I ought to step forward or turn tail, she reached out and pulled me down beside her again.
What happened after that is not so easy to say. Is it possible to try and hold on to someone even as you’re trying frantically to break away? Because that’s what was going on with me as Naomi and I started tussling on top of Zippe’s box. Meanwhile, for her part, my kittenish cousin seemed equally confused. So frisky was she that, having just invited me to her side, she now seemed to be trying to throw me off again. Was this the famous fickleness of women? She wriggled, she squirmed, she nudged me with her drumlike tummy, so that I felt her giddiness in the pit of my own. It was a free-for-all, I can tell you, and I was ready to call it a draw. I was ready to call it a night and go home to lick my wounds—while at the same time I ached to cuddle Naomi. Of course I couldn’t have it both ways. At least one of us needed to make up his mind for good and all.
Not that I could have disentangled myself from the snarl of our limbs if I’d wanted to. Already I’d lost a shoe in the struggle, and I was in danger of losing my pants, my suspenders having been yanked from their buttons. In a desperate attempt to master the situation, I scissored my legs about my cousin’s, but thanks to the sliding ruck of her stockings, she was able to slip neatly out of the hold. I wouldn’t have put it past her to slip out of her skin to elude me, a notion that made me redouble my efforts. For my trouble I got my glasses pried from my face and a finger poked in the eye before I had managed to recapture her hands.
I nestled hard against her, her tossing hips bruising my middle, causing my breath to come in tremolos like my papa being pummeled by masseurs at the Russian baths. But in the end, with a mighty grunt, I had her; she was pinned. I hugged her in a mortal vise, hanging on as if I thought she might change into something else, a porcelain doll or a daughter of Lilith or a distant icy queen. She might change into an annoying relation or a stranger unless I kept her nailed to the coffin lid, unless I gathered the gang of Naomis in my arms and confined them to a solitary girl, one I might never dare to let go of again.
But the little minx was still hemorrhaging laughter. It poured out of her in a rising tide that threatened to carry me away along with her if I didn’t act quick. This was serious. There was no telling what might happen if, for the sake of us both, I didn’t take it upon myself to seal her parted lips with mine.