Beach Music (29 page)

“No,” I said. “Because you can.”

“Let’s call Leah again,” Dallas suggested.

“Great idea,” I said, getting up and walking to the screen door.

“Something’s up,” I heard Dupree say.

“What’s that?” Dallas asked.

“No one’s seen John Hardin,” Dupree said. “Grandpa checked his house and there’s no sign of him anywhere.”

“He’ll turn up,” Tee said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Dupree said, looking out into the darkness. We could see the lights of the hospital now, downriver.

I
do not know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.

During long evenings in Rome, at dinner parties full of pretty countesses, the scent of Pinot Grigio on their breaths, their laughter infectious and bright, I could find my mind drifting westward despite my promise that I would never return to my native state. But I carried Waterford around with me the way a box turtle conveys its own burdensome shell. Tender cries of homesickness would lightly echo through me until I found myself closing my eyes and walking the airy streets of Waterford made weightless by the buoyancy of my nostalgia.

Now, walking down Blue Heron Drive toward my father’s and brother’s law office, I found myself longing for the rough disharmony and noise of Rome. I mounted the steps quickly and made my way to the second-floor offices, which gave the appearance of the second-rate and the down-at-the-heels.

Dallas was writing on a legal pad and finished his thought before he looked up to see me.

“Hey, Jack,” Dallas said. “Welcome to my money machine. Let me finish this and I’ll be right with you.”

Dallas wrote a bit more and then stabbed a period with great
flourish. “I lost two more clients today. Clients react badly when they see the firm founder throwing up in a gutter.”

“Is the law firm making money, Dallas?”

“Money
magazine’s doing an interview with me today,” Dallas said and there was a dark cynical edge to his voice.
“Fortune
magazine wants to erect a statue of me outside this building because of my cash flow.”

“Bad, huh?”

“Not good.”

“Dad any help at all?”

“When he’s sober. He dries out a couple of times a year,” said Dallas. “It’s sad because then I get to see what a brilliant legal mind he really has. He’s been really bad since Mom got sick.”

“He’s been really bad for over thirty years,” I said. “Jesus, he gives liquor a bad name.”

“He still loves Mom.”

“I thought the new husband would make him see the light,” I said.

I looked at Dallas, straight and handsome behind his desk.

“Why don’t you go out on your own?” I asked.

“He needs me, Jack. This is all he’s got,” Dallas said. “He doesn’t have anyplace else to go. You may not’ve noticed, but our father’s a tragic man.”

“What does he contribute to all of this?” I asked.

“Because he was a very respected judge,” Dallas said, “that’s something. He makes a good appearance in a courtroom when his brain isn’t marinating in a quart of bourbon.”

“How’s Grandpa?” I asked. “Can he still handle it when the Yankees come down to hunt deer?”

“He can still field strip a deer faster than you can tie your shoelaces,” Dallas said with pride in his voice. “Before you go back, we all ought to go over there and have an oyster roast.”

“Sounds good. But it depends on Mom getting on her feet,” I said.

“Any new word?”

“Haven’t been down there yet today,” I said. “The sheer psychic
weight of the family’s wearing me down. Dupree and Tee are already over there. I’ll get down there this afternoon.

“I’ve got to see Max,” I said. “He’s been leaving messages all over town for me.”

“He’s still a client of this firm,” Dallas said. “Max is a rock.”

I started to leave, then paused and looked back at my brother, and said, “If you ever need any money, Dallas, would you let me know?”

“No, I wouldn’t, Jack,” Dallas said. “But thanks for offering.”

Back in the street, I made my way past the familiar stores whose very existence was threatened by the opening of shopping centers and Wal-Marts. I nodded to people I had known all my life, but I knew there was an aloofness in my greeting that registered with those who greeted me back. I did not want to linger and catch up on old news. The best thing about a small town is that you grow up knowing everyone. It is also the worst thing.

I crossed the street and entered Max Rusoff’s department store. I went straight up the stairs and into the office where Max was going over accounts with a pencil. That pencil, in the age of computers, was the key image in any assessment of Max Rusoff.

“The Great Jew,” I said and Max rose up to greet me.

He hugged me and I felt the extraordinary power of his arms and body even though his head only came to my chest.

“So, Jack. Where have you been? Max is now last on your list. I should have been among the first,” Max admonished.

I stepped back and put out my hand. “Shake, old man. See if you still got it, Max.”

Max smiled and said, “My hands aren’t old, Jack. Not my hands.”

Before me stood a squat, powerful man, built low to the ground and shaped like a fire hydrant. His neck, by itself, always looked strong enough to harness a plow to and I had seen him toss hundred-pound feed bags to my grandfather as though they were hotel pillows. He seemed deeply rooted and spread out. When I was smaller, shaking hands with Max seemed as painful as getting my hand caught in the door of a Buick. It was like being bitten by something mechanical, larger than life.

From the time I was a teenager, I had tried to put Max on the floor when we shook hands. I thought my manhood would be assured on the day I made Max beg for mercy beneath the power of my grip. But that day had never come. It was always me who ended up on my knees begging for Max to desist as the bones of my right hand were crushed together in agony.

We shook hands and Max played with me for a couple of seconds before he brought me yelping to my knees. Rubbing my hand, I took a seat in the bright, well-appointed office with its breathtaking view of the river.

“Making any money?” I asked, knowing how much delight Max took in the poor-mouthing language of the American salesman.

“Paying the bills,” Max said, “but barely. Things could not be worse.”

“I hear you’re making millions,” I teased.

“If we have a roof over our heads next year, it will be a miracle,” Max intoned. “But I understand the cookbook business has not made you the banker’s worst enemy either.”

“It didn’t sell enough copies to buy my daughter a pair of shoes,” I complained.

“It sold over ninety thousand copies and went through fourteen printings,” Max said. “Do you think I do not keep up with you? Even though you hide yourself like a bandit in Italy? I understand the tax man smiles every time you write him a check.”

“He doesn’t have a bad day when you pay your taxes either, Max,” I said.

“Speaking of money,” Max said, “Mike told me he saw you. They throw money at my grandson in Hollywood. Did he tell you he got married for the fourth time? Another Christian girl. Beautiful like all the rest. But you would think after four times he could marry at least one Jewish girl and make his parents happy.”

“Mike’s trying to make himself happy,” I said, defending my friend.

Max shook his head and said, “Then that is Mike’s greatest failure of all. He’s out there with the
meshuganahs
. He works with only crazy people. He hires only crazy people. Or he makes them crazy. I do not know which is which. I visited him with my wife out in this
Tinseltown. His children, they all have blond hair. They have never heard of such a thing as a synagogue. He lives in such a house as you have never seen. Big as this town this house seems to me. I tell you the truth. His wives get younger and younger and I’m afraid he will next marry a twelve-year-old. His swimming pool is so big, he could raise whales in it.”

I laughed and said, “He’s done very well.”

“Tell me. How is your mother? How is Lucy?”

“Doing better, but we are afraid to count on it,” I said.

“I am very sad for you all,” Max said, “but happy for me. It brings you back to Waterford when nothing else can. Why did you not bring Leah?”

“You know why, Max,” I said, looking away from him at a pattern in the oriental carpet.

“I want you to talk to Ruth and George while you’re here.” I shrugged. “Do not shrug your shoulders so at Max. Who gave you your first job? That I ask you.”

“Max Rusoff,” I answered.

“Your second.”

“Max.”

“Your third, fourth, fifth …”

“Max, Max, Max,” I said, smiling at Max’s strategy.

“Was Max good to Jack?”

“The best.”

“Then make Max happy and go see Ruth and George. They have suffered too much already. They made a mistake. They know it now. You will see.”

“It was a real big mistake, Max,” I said.

“Talk to them. I will set it up. I know what is best. You are just a boy and what does a boy know.”

“I haven’t been a boy for a long time.”

“You will always be a boy to me,” Max said.

As I rose to leave I said, “Good-bye, Max. I tell everyone I meet in Italy about the Great Jew. I tell them about the Cossacks and the pogrom, about your coming to America.”

“Do not call me this Great Jew thing,” Max ordered and his voice was pained and flummoxed. “This name. It’s embarrassing.”

“I call you this because that’s what everyone calls you,” I said.

“This name it follows me wherever I go,” Max said. “It is like a tick I got in the forest … easy to pick up but hard to get rid of.”

“It comes from your story in the Ukraine.”

“You know nothing about the Ukraine or what it was like,” Max protested. “Everything gets exaggerated.”

“And it comes from your life in Waterford,” I said. “My grandfather told me that part and Silas doesn’t exaggerate.”

“You’ve not been to see your grandfather,” Max said. “He’s hurt.”

“I’ve been chasing his wife around the city streets,” I said. “Ginny Penn made another break for it yesterday.”

“Still, he wants to see you.”

“My time’s limited, Max.” Max shook his head. “Show me what you used, Max,” I said, changing the subject. “Show me your weapon.”

“It is a tool,” he said. “It’s not a weapon.”

“But you used it as a weapon once,” I said. “I know the story.”

“Only once was it a weapon.”

“It’s the only thing you brought from the old country.”

Max walked over to the corner of his office and began to turn the numbers of a safe he had kept since I first knew him as a child. Reaching in the safe once it had clicked open, he pulled out a homemade box. He took off the top and unwrapped a velvet cloth and pulled out a meat cleaver that he still kept sharp. The cleaver’s blade caught the light and looked like a slim mouth.

“It was from my home, Kironittska,” Max said. “I was a butcher’s apprentice.”

“I want to hear the story, Max,” I said. “I want to hear it again.”

“One does not know where love will take you,” Max said, beginning the story I had heard a dozen times as a boy growing up in Waterford.

Max had been born in the Ukraine, at a time when all Jews were forced by decree of the Tsar to live their lives out in the Pale of Settlement. There they led lives of desperate poverty in the twenty-five western regions that made up the Pale.

He was born on March 31, 1903, in the small city of Kironittska, the fourth of four children. The last thing the family needed was another mouth to feed, for this was a world that could barely sustain those who already existed. Poverty ennobles nothing but marks everything and it touched Max with an indelible imprint, made even more horrible by the fact that his father was a professional beggar who made his uncertain living by begging for alms each day, except the Sabbath, along the winding merchant streets in the Jewish Quarter. No one was ever glad to see the unctuous approach of Berl, the Schnorrer, who would fill the air with his high-pitched cries and entreaties. He often took his children with him on these humiliating forays to ask for money from people who had worked hard to earn it. While Jews tolerated their beggars more than people of most religions, one could not sink lower than to be Berl, the Schnorrer.

The family lived in a hovel in the poorest section of the already poor town where hunger was the only companion that many families could count on to be at their table. Max’s mother, Peshke, sold eggs at the open market in the town square every day of the year and the weather had marked her plain face with the harsh graffiti of Russian winters. Early in the morning, before sunrise, she would go out to buy eggs from the peasants; then she would take her place in the square where she had a legal permit to carry out her trade. The tax she paid for that permit gave them the only legitimacy her family knew. It was a difficult trick to sell enough eggs to buy food for dinner each night, and so it was with great bitterness that she watched her husband slink into the square, his loud, flapping presence causing her to think that Berl was put on earth solely to cause her shame.

For the first years of his life, Max was raised and nurtured by his sister Sarah, who was ten years old when he was born, and was given the entire responsibility of taking care of both Max and his older sister, Tabel, who was seven.

When Max was three, Tabel was sent to work at a button factory and so his father took Max on his rounds of begging through the alleyways of the city. Berl had taught Max how to walk up to rich people with a small box and ask for alms at the same time displaying his irresistible smile. Berl had been amazed by how much a
handsome little boy like Max could entice from the purse of a manufacturer. Max suddenly seemed like a good-luck charm for the whole family.

Peshke heard the first screams coming from the street leading to the river, screams accompanied by the hoofbeats of the Cossacks’ horses and cries of alarm. The peddlers scooped up as much merchandise as they could carry and ran in utter pandemonium as six Cossacks entered Mullenplatz with their swords drawn and already bloody.