Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (33 page)

While he was sorting out these thoughts, Karoline began to smile. "I can see what you are thinking."

"You can?"

She cast a deliberate glance at her lumpy mattressed bed. "A little prenuptial."

Before either had completely decided what to do, they were in the bed, Nathan thinking that this was the most wonderfully perverse thing they had done yet—even Mordy might not have done this—and Karoline trying not to think at all, which was her favorite thing about sex.

The police were circulating, looking for anyone who had been on Allen near Stanton Street at about six A.M. that morning. Sonia had heard about it when she went out to the pharmacy. She was now staring at her pregnancy test, wondering why there was no blue line. She knew she was, and yet... She could hear the police loudspeaker outside. José Fishman!

How could she tell Nathan that it was only bad sushi? She never thought anything would make her sick. She grew up in Mexico without ever being sick. Three little pieces of tuna. How was she going to tell Nathan?

Harry waited for Nathan at the casita. But after an hour had gone by, he and Chow Mein decided to go to the
cuchifrito.
"I don't know what happened to him," Harry said. Then, brightening, he said, "I'll bet he got mixed up and he's waiting for us over there." But when they got to the little restaurant with the carryout counter and two tables, Nathan was not there. Harry ordered his usual
lechón.

Afterward, he debated about walking home or going to the copy shop to find Nathan. But the weight of the August heat made him long for home. He sang Berlin back down Avenue A:

My wife's gone to the country, hurrah, hurrah!
She thought it best, I need a rest, that's why she went away.
She took the children with her, hurrah, hurrah!...

He finally got to his building. It was cooling just to enter the lobby. He felt tired and decided to relax on the couch in the lobby before going up the elevator. He whistled and sang: "We may never, never meet again, on the bumpy road to love." He loved that little slide. "But I'll always keep—"

Suddenly the seersucker
fardarter
appeared. "I love that song. Cole Porter, right?"

Harry said nothing as he stiffened, got up from the couch, and went out the door back into the clench of summer. "Cole Porter. Cole Porter," he muttered. "Where do these people come from with this Cole Porter meshuggas?
Genug,"
he said, throwing out his hands. Enough. "Settle this once and for all." Despite the heat, he was soon at the bookstore all the way over by Broadway

On the way back, he struggled to accept the news that the song had been written by the Gershwins. At least it wasn't Cole Porter. He still had plenty of Berlin:

Don't do that dance,
That's not a business for a lady
I tell you Sadie,
'Most everybody knows
That I'm your loving Mose,
Oy, oy, oy, oy
Where is your clothes?

His song was stopped by a sharp blow to the solar plexus. "Oy, oy..." He struggled to continue. He couldn't breathe. He gasped. His arm hurt so badly, he thought he must have broken it. He collapsed to the sidewalk, his cheek scraping along the concrete as he tried to find air. Oh God,
lechón,
he thought. Jews aren't made to eat
lechón.
Then he realized that he might be dying and he had never found the magazine.
Big Black Booty
would be found among his possessions. He groaned out, "Magazine." He could not die with it in his file.

"Magazine" was the last word Harry Seltzer ever spoke.

N
USAN WAS SITTING
on the floor, his clothes torn. "I have had ..." He tried to count on his fingers and gave up. "Nobody knows how many heart attacks I have had. But the
tokhes oyfn tish
is—I never die. No matter what I do, I never die. My brother, my
younger
brother, dies from his first heart attack. And I am still here. For what?"

Ruth didn't want him there. She had never wanted him there. But he had a right to be there. He was Harry's brother. She had learned that lesson.

Nusan's shirt was torn in vertical tears, showing his skin underneath whiter than his yellowed shirt. He had cut deliberate slashes in the lapels of his suit jacket, clean cuts made with scissors. Yet he still did not think to touch the label on his sleeve announcing the purity of the wool. He even cut the brim of his gray hat. A slash in his pant leg exposed a white bony knee. The only clothing spared was the maroon wool scarf—and his bright new running shoes that were for mourning.

The first day of the shiva, Yankel Fink brought what he called egg knishes, eggs—though Felix thought they were life—being for Jews traditional at the meal after a funeral. Fink's egg knishes were mostly potato and weighed more than gold.

By the second day, Ruth, wishing to spare everyone the knishes, had made brisket for eighty people. During the course of the day, more than eighty people visited the Seltzers, but only a few of the uninitiated sampled her brisket. There was also herring. She wanted apple strudel, but when she went to the Edelweiss it was closed—out of business. She had asked Nathan to bake something, but he pointed out that Harry hadn't liked his baking. Or his harmonica playing, Nathan thought to himself.

Nathan was told of his father's death by Mordy who found him while he was walking down First Avenue biting into a
sfogliatella.
His first thought on hearing the news was that he should stop eating the pastry out of respect. His next thought was how he was supposed to have met his father for lunch and instead was
"schtupping
a Nazi"—surely that was how Harry would have put it. This led briefly to thoughts of physical pleasure—and before Nathan realized it, the
sfogliatella
had been eaten. It was a good one, too.

Nathan was a fortunate man who had reached his late thirties having had little familiarity with death. When Nusan had been Nathan's age, most people he had ever known were dead. Nathan's experiences had been few—that one moment witnessing the violent struggle for life that incongruously preceded Sarah's arrival and now this, this sense that his father was gone, never to return, and he had not said good-bye. When he was in school, he had become close to a student from Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee? He could never remember. After they graduated, she was going back there. And she just left without saying good-bye. Nathan understood. It would have been unbearable for them to have said good-bye to each other. But maybe if they had, he would have forgotten her. Instead he still thought about her, wondered about her, because they had not had an ending. Like Harry and the Polish woman Klara. Now he felt that way about his father. He had left without saying anything.

Nathan was not sure what he wanted to say to his father or what Harry might have said to him, but he was certain that there was more to be said. How could he be gone with so much unsaid? He never even told him how much he liked his stupid Irving Berlin songs that no one else remembered. But he had always had the feeling that if his father had known what he was thinking, knew who he really was, he would not have approved. Just before the end, that day walking down the street talking about Klara, he realized for the first time that his father was a friend he could have confided in. He could have told him about Karo-line. He would have understood. Here he was now at Harry's shiva. And he was thinking of Karoline. That was the real reason that he couldn't bake something. He couldn't bear baking because it reminded him of
her.

He had been so desperate for a confidant, he had told Mordy But his brother only laughed at the gravity he attached to it. "People do this because they enjoy it," Mordy had said. "Look, I'm sure Sonia has done the same thing."

"That's what you don't understand," Nathan had argued. "That's why it is so terrible—so unforgivable. Sonia would never do something like this."

"Well, then you better not tell her," was Mordy's only answer.

Would Harry have understood that his son was in mourning not for him, but for a relationship with the daughter of an SS officer who didn't want him and had just married someone named Dickie? Would Harry have understood that? Nathan didn't know. He didn't know Harry. He hadn't known Harry, and now he never would.

It is always the simplest of remarks that are most regretted. Why hadn't he just eaten
cuchifrito
with his father instead of lecturing him about Tisha-b'Av? Who cared about Tisha-b'Av, anyway? It was just a joke. But Harry had just wanted him along. Karoline—he couldn't go because of Karoline. Would Harry have really understood?
Not now, Dad, I have to go see this woman I've been sleeping with to warn her that Nusan is going to have her father deported because he was an SS officer.

Three times a day, Litvak and Fink would bring over the group from the shul so the Seltzer sons would have a minyan to say kaddish. Nusan would answer the door and Litvak would say, "May the Almighty comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem." And Mordy, for reasons known only to himself, would shake his head and show the beginning of a smile. Nusan let them in and showed them into the dining room just off the living room where everyone was seated, and they said the prayer for the dead, the rhythmic, rhyming Hebrew chant. "Yis-
gadal, yisgadosh..."
And when finished, the men would mill around the living room, determining that all of the food was
traif
and should not be eaten except for Fink's knishes, which they could no longer bring themselves to eat—not even Fink. Then they would pour shots of bourbon into plastic cups, the bourbon they had provided, throw down the whiskey, place the plastic cups back on the table, say a few words to Ruth, and leave. All of which did nothing for Ruth.

Ruth did not worry about how to get through the day, or the seven days of shiva. But what would she do after that? How could she live in this apartment, in this neighborhood, without Harry? How could she ever walk down Second Avenue again? She would move to another part of town. Maybe up to the Bronx with her friend Esther. No, it was too late for that. Nobody moved to the Bronx anymore. And her sons were here and little Sarah, who had so many important things on her mind and did not allow other people to be unhappy Sarah had a bit of her father, a questioner. She would not remember Harry Strange, he had been there every day of her little life, but she wouldn't remember him— except through Ruth. Ruth could not be far from Sarah. But maybe in a different apartment in a different building.

Throughout the day, for days, there were never fewer than twenty visitors in the apartment. Musicians of all kinds came. Nathan never realized how many musicians Harry knew. Harry would have loved having them all in the same room. Mordy found a dark-haired, fleshy woman with a music scale tattooed around her round and soft upper left arm. He had spotted her immediately

"Hey, Nathan," he had whispered, "she's a
saxophone player!
Alto. Have you ever made it with a saxophone player?"

Nathan had to admit that the best he had ever done was a violinist.

"Cellist would be better."

"I guess," said Nathan. "You mean the leg thing."

Mordy laughed and sauntered over to the saxophonist.

"He never saw my play," said Sonia.

"No. He was excited about it," Nathan said. "We've never had anyone in the family who actually did anything before. He told everyone about his daughter-in-law's play."

"Yeah. He always added, 'She's Mexican, you know' "

"He could never get over that. Jewish, but she's Mexican."

"I should have made him enchiladas."

"Yeah."

"How do you make them?"

"Don't know. They have to be better than this brisket, though," said Nathan, looking at an untouched platter of gray brown meat.

Chow Mein Vega came over with the tall and lean Palo, and they helped themselves to large platefuls. Nathan thought of warning them, but then he heard Palo say, "This is good
carne,
bro'."

Chow Mein agreed, scraping his plate with a fork. "I wonder if it's kosher. Jews make good
carne."

"It reminds me of my mother's
ropa vieja."

"Better."

"When did you have my mother's
ropa vieja?"

"Your mother made it every Sunday and everyone in the barrio used to hide."

Palo smiled. "Me too. It was terrible. I forgot about that. I used to try to eat over at Ramito Sanchez's so that I could get out of the
ropa vieja.
It was like
ropa vieja,
like somebody's old clothes. But this stuff is good," he said as he refilled his plate.

When Chaim Litvak and Yankel Fink came, they were careful not to eat anything. Fink brought another aluminum foil platter of knishes—spinach, mushroom, kasha—all mostly potato, of course, and no one ate them but Chow Mein and Palo. Then Saul Grossman came over with his celebrated
pasteles.

"Now that's a knish," said Palo.

Ruth explained to Leo Sussman, their lawyer, who liked the herring and the knishes, that she was trying to sort out Harry's papers. "I think we are broke," she said with a distracted smile.

"How can you be broke?"

"I don't know. I can't find any bank accounts with money in them. We have lots of property, but no money I think we will have to sell something. But it's hard to sort out the property, too."

She had tried. In the room she had rarely entered, she sat in his worn wooden office chair, which he had proudly carried home after finding it on Tenth Street with "only one broken arm" that he had repaired with glue. She ran an index finger over the crack. "It will hold," Harry had correctly predicted thirty years earlier. She fondled a small brass bust of Irving Berlin that she had given him, half in jest, on their twenty-third wedding anniversary. Or twenty-fourth? She opened up the first gray metal filing cabinet. On top was a
Time
magazine from 1962 and a theater program, a not very funny Yiddish comedy by Korn-blith that they had seen on her birthday one year. There were other playbills, other magazines. Some deeds, some bills. A Giants program from the Polo Grounds with the scorecard filled out in pencil. Had he taken the boys? She tried to remember. She tried not to remember. There were tax records and crayon drawings by Mordy and Nathan. No signature required. Nathan was a realist, with demanding detail in a young but skilled hand. Mordy had stubbornly remained abstract, with wild strokes and an almost sophisticated sense of color.

Old copies of the
Forvitz
and menus from restaurants and flyers from forgotten concerts, some of which had never happened. In time, Ruth could recognize the financial folders so that she could separate them. She wanted to have a pile to hand to her lawyer. Why did he keep so many magazines? She filled an entire large black plastic garbage bag with old magazines. Should she save the program from the
Broadway Concert for Peace
in January 1968, where they had seen Leonard Bernstein and Barbra Streisand? "And Harry Belafonte," she could hear Harry's voice over her shoulder, sounding so real that it made her jump.

Sal A arrived with a tray of freshly baked
sfogliatella,
whose warm ri-cotta fragrance seemed to chase away years of brisket and herring. But now Nathan felt guilty about
sfogliatellas,
maybe because he had eaten one instead of mourning at that first moment, or was it that he was not feeling good about pastry anymore? Oh, Karoline, are you in Bermuda doing the same wondrous bad things with Dickie? Dickie.

"I don't know what to do," Nathan confided to Chow Mein. "I didn't want to sell the shop. My father told me not to sell. But now we really need the money."

"So sell it if you need the money."

"I don't like these guys. I don't want them taking over the neighborhood."

"That's what everybody says. But they are taking over the neighborhood, because everybody is selling. They all say, 'I don't want to.' Then they sell. If you don't want them to take over, don't sell to them. Stand up, man. It's time to put your
tokhessobre la mesa.
Just say no."

"What did you say?" asked Nathan.

"Say no."

"No. About
tokhes sobre la mesa?"

"Yeah. Put it on the table. Stand up and be counted. Put up or shut up."

"That's
what it means! Where's Mordy?" He looked around, but his brother and the saxophonist were both gone. "Where did you learn that?"

"Put your
tokhes
on the table? I learned it in the Catskills."

When Nathan noticed Mordy missing, an inappropriate thought slipped into his consciousness. Without his brother, there would not be a minyan for the evening kaddish. According to Jewish law, kaddish for your father was one of the primary obligations, but there were too many obligations. He gave his daughter swimming lessons.
Genug,
as Harry used to say when an argument went on too long. Enough. Harry had never been one for davening. Though he had gone to synagogue once a year to say kaddish on the anniversary of his own father's death. Standing with these men, repeating in rhythmic Hebrew the words about God's greatness, was not helping Nathan. And he could see that it didn't help his mother, either. It was for Nusan. Nathan too was doing it not so much for Harry as for Nusan. Or because he couldn't not say it in front of Nusan.

The evening knock on the door. The greeting, "May the Almighty comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem." The parade of elderly men into the dining room. And Nathan waiting coyly for the discovery that a tenth man was missing. He looked around the room. At the moment, there were no other Jewish men there. And then Mordy walked in, looking dazed and slightly silly, the way he usually looked.