Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (5 page)

"When do you think they will move this thing?" he said to a heavy-set woman with a square jaw standing in front of him.

He knew he had sounded a little too desperate, but if he could just talk to her until the train moved, he would be all right. She shrugged and inched herself to a barely perceptible but safer distance.

"I'm sorry," said Nathan, springing to his feet, realizing that his own movement could relieve the anxiety of the train not moving. "Do you want this seat?" She didn't, but Nathan gave it up anyway and began pacing the car. Why didn't they move the train while there was still oxygen left? Not much was left. Could he talk to someone? Not the thin man in leather with gold oval dark glasses that made him look like an insect. Not the gaunt man with an African face in the powder blue suit and black silk shirt with tan-and-black patent-leather shoes that he tapped to a religious song that engrossed him. It was a hymn. Like on the deck of a sinking ship. Was he praying?

Of course, Nathan was being completely irrational, and he only had to gain control until the train moved. If he didn't, he would have a heart attack! It could start at any minute. The heart attack. Or the train. Maybe it wasn't going to move at all. It could be stuck for hours. Or even a half hour. He couldn't make it! If only it could get into the West Fourth Street station, probably not far away at all, he would get out and never take a subway again. It was a solemn pledge. A bargain he was offering.

The difference between swimming and drowning was just state of mind. Swimming! It had all started with swimming. Sarah wanted swimming lessons. But he couldn't think about that now. No. He needed to think of something. Think about swimming lessons. Of the $500,000 offer. Money for swimming lessons. It didn't matter. What mattered? Breathing mattered! No, something else. Sex. Sex could always clear everything else out of the way. What would sex be like with someone on this train? He looked frantically through the car. Not good. He could have sex with Sonia. This was no time for sex with his wife. You can never distract yourself by sex with your wife. He found this thought funny. He may even have been distracted by it for a second. If only the train had moved. The German pastry maker's daughter. What would it be like to remove her clothes article by article?

The train lurched. They were gliding into West Fourth Street. He could get out and walk across Fourth Street. But the door didn't open. They were going to keep going without letting anyone off!

The train stopped. The doors opened. Slowly the air came back. His skin cooled off The sweat was cooling on him. It was over.

This had never happened to him before. Had he contracted a case of claustrophobia? Could it happen like that? Was it a disease that was picked up somewhere? Was it curable? Could he never again take subways or elevators? That would be possible if he stayed in his neighborhood, the way his father did because he feared rivers, Nathan didn't know why Something had happened as a child and now his father feared the East River, even got uncomfortable as he got closer to Avenue D. Nothing was ever mentioned about the Hudson on the other side. Was Nathan, too, now trapped in his neighborhood by his fears? Was he afraid of all confinement or just subways? Maybe it was just the F train. Maybe it would never happen again.

This could be a turning point in his life, just like the $500,000 Katz deal. But Nathan knew that neither of these conflicts was what he had woken up dreading. Something would make this a bad day. A worse day On this Friday he was meeting with an ill-fated destiny.

On Friday night, bakeries on Second Avenue sold challah. The one on Fourth Street was still kosher but sold out by three in the afternoon, not because that many Jews had to have their challah kosher, but because the kosher bakery did not make many, on the assumption that few kosher people were left. Since all the kosher people knew this, they bought early. By three o'clock the action shifted to the bakery on Seventh Street, which was not kosher but at least was Jewish. Once that bakery had sold its last loaf of braided egg bread, anyone who wanted challah had to resort to Chaim's. Chaim's was one of the oldest bakeries in the neighborhood, but several years earlier Chaim, having decided to spend his remaining years pondering a blue sea he never wanted to step into, had moved to Boca Raton and sold his bakery to an industrious Korean family.

The Koreans carefully learned the recipes and continued all the traditions, even though they found many of the foods unpronounceable. Halvah was a particularly daunting oral challenge. They never ran out of challah, baking it fresh every day because they did not understand that it was for Friday night. This destroyed the Edelweiss challah business. The Edelweiss too had tried selling challah on Friday night, but most Jews would rather get their challah from a Korean than a German, even if most of the Jews in the neighborhood regarded the Edelweiss as the best bakery. The store had been there since the 1940s, the late 1940s—that was the problem. No one knew where Mr. and Mrs. Edelweiss came from. They had posters of Heidelberg and Munich's Oktoberfest on their walls. But Nathan happened to know that their real name was Moellen and they came from Berlin. Actually, he wasn't sure that Moellen was their real name. There was no reason to be suspicious of them, and even Nathan's mother bought their strudel. In fact, she loved their apple strudel.

Ruth served the same meal every Friday night: pickled herring in sour cream, brisket with boiled vegetables, and Edelweiss's apple strudel. Ruth Seltzer was not a great or imaginative cook. She had never wanted to be a good homemaker. She would have liked to go to college and thought she would have liked being in business. But her parents saw no point in that and were relieved when their only daughter found a man to marry. They accepted Harry's claim of impresarioship without question, turning over the family business affairs to him. Ruth understood that Harry's important credential to her parents was being male. She was angry but remained silent. She had an idea that she could manage the holdings much better, but if she had questioned Harry's business skills to her father, he would have said, "So why are you marrying this bum?" Besides, everyone loved Harry, and if she ever criticized him to anyone, the response would have been that she was unappreciative for "all Harry was doing." Harry, it was said, had kept their holdings solvent in the 1960s and 1970s, when crime and poverty drove down the little value neighborhood property had once had.

"Thank God for Harry," Ruth's oldest friend, Esther, who had moved to the Bronx decades ago but still visited, would say. "He keeps this neighborhood alive on charm alone. You're lucky to have a charmer."

"Oboyoboy," was Ruth's only answer.

Ruth knew that for all Harry's charm, the family was not as solvent as everyone imagined. She could have managed the properties and made money. Even in "the bad times" you could charge rent and make people pay the way other landlords did. But she would be hated for it, because everyone loved Harry

Her revenge was to refuse domesticity She said, "A woman who cooks too well is asking for trouble." It can never be certain that she would have been capable of cooking well if she had chosen to.

"What kind of trouble?" Esther would ask. Ruth would shrug and point at Harry Esther would think that Ruth was difficult and she was lucky she had a man like Harry.

No one thought of Harry as trouble. Added to Ruth's frustration, he did not care if their house was orderly and he far preferred going out to dining in. But Friday night was Ruth's weekly bout with domesticity.

Nathan, the family allrightnik, avoided his mother on Fridays because she would ask him to "stop off and buy a little strudel from Mr. Edelweiss." It was not Mr. Edelweiss he dreaded. It was his daughter, Karoline. For the past twenty years, Nathan had dreamed of tearing the clothes off of Karoline's fleshy body and devouring her nakedness like an apple strudel. He didn't know why he felt this way. She was an ordinary-looking woman. He was certain that most men barely noticed her short brown hair, her porcelain blue eyes, or the fact that when you were close to her body, she had the scent of fresh butter. Was it because of all the butter in the pastry shop? Had her body somehow absorbed butter fumes?

Nathan would watch other men not look at her and feel reassured that she was not a particularly attractive woman. But he could not look at her without imagining. Would her entire body smell of butter? He once came very close to finding out.

He had planned to take her to dinner, only the second non-Jewish date of his life, but thank God his mother never learned about this. Karoline lived in an apartment in the building with the pastry shop. Her parents lived on the upper floors. And of course, that entire building smelled of butter.

But once they were alone and she got close to him, his dairy-driven libido went wild. He grabbed her, squeezed her, pulled her toward him, ran his nose along the soft line of her flesh—but, for some reason that he would ever after regret, he decided that they should have dinner first, as planned.

At dinner, over an appetizer of mussels at an Italian seafood place on Seventh Street, they somehow blundered onto the subject of Germany. Maybe they both thought it would have been too unnatural not to. She knew he was Jewish. He knew she was German. She said that her father came from Berlin and that he arrived in New York in 1949. Nathan couldn't resist pointing out that this was the same year that his uncle Nusan was found with numbers on his arm. She said that there "was a lot of confusion in Europe in those years" and volunteered that Moellen wasn't her father's real name.

"Really," said Nathan, failing at disinterest. "What was his real name?" He wanted to suggest Eichmann as a little joke, but he used restraint. She didn't know what his real name was. He grew more curious, asked more questions, grew less polite about it. She grew suspiciously defensive and finally accused him of suggesting that her father was a Nazi. He, misquoting Shakespeare, said that she "doth protest a bit much."

Later he had to admit that you couldn't really protest too much about your own father being accused of being a mass murderer, but at the time he thought it was very significant that she took such exception to his questions. They both went home full of anger. But he never got the scent of her from his nostrils—more than butter, maybe butter and sugar? Even after he was married, he sometimes lay in bed at night imagining Karoline Moellen naked in his bed.

For several years, while he was having these thoughts, they didn't speak. He denied himself those wonderful, thin layered tortes that he desired almost as much as their confectioner. For a time he even refused to get the strudel for his mother, suggesting that they might be Nazis, which Ruth then passed on to Harry's brother, Nusan. Nusan had ways of finding out such things, but he never said anything more about it. Ruth kept buying the strudel. Nathan would sometimes buy it for her. He did not bring up the subject of the Moellens' past again because he thought that perhaps
he
was protesting too much and would give himself away.

One day on Tenth Street Karoline kissed him hello, a light touch of her lips on his cheek, close enough for the scent—not butter and sugar: buttered flesh. Buttered sex. He quickly moved down the street. After that he would sometimes see her and feel so overcome with lust that he thought it showed. He would never go to the Edelweiss with his wife for fear she would see his yearning.

As Nathan entered his apartment on this fated Friday, his destiny had already been set in motion. He had planned to talk to Sonia about Ira Katz and his offer, but when Sonia told him that his mother had asked him to pick up the strudel, panic erased all thoughts of Copy Katz. Fearing his wife would want to come with him, and having already acquired the too quick false voice of an adulterer, he agreed and, taking Sarah with him for protection, mounted her on his shoulders.

She liked riding up there. She liked playing with his hair, and he liked it, too—tiny fingers stroking, and curling, and gathering up his hair. But now he could feel her recalcitrance above his shoulders. She was not playing with his hair, was not happy They rode to First Avenue, avoiding Sixth Street, where aging men were always in search of Jewish men for their Friday night minyan—one of the things his small daughter on his shoulder could shield him from.

On Tenth Street the pushers, still discussing the remains of Eli Rabbinowitz, knew to avoid Nathan and his daughter. There was only that fat little boy—a sturdily built little cube of a boy with black curly hair. He reminded Nathan of Fat Finkelstein, who was the meanest kid when he went to school. Finkelstein was the only boy in Nathan's class who had not successfully avoided the draft. He went to Vietnam, and it was an unverified rumor that Fat Finkelstein had died in a place called Khe Sanh. Nathan kept a horror of that name Khe Sanh, the cruel place that had finally given Fat Finkelstein much more than he deserved.

Now Nathan recognized that this boy was the ill-fated Fat Finkelstein of his generation. It was his belief that, like a Talmudic legend, every generation had its mean but luckless Fat Finkelstein.

The chubby eight-year-old looked up at Sarah and stuck out his tongue. He always did this, trying to catch her at a moment when she was looking and Nathan wasn't. On cue, Sarah began crying. He was a mean kid, but Nathan had to be sympathetic because the Fat Finkel-steins are all fated to meet a bad end. Nathan had tried to convince Sarah that the boy stuck his tongue out only because she cried and that if she wouldn't cry, it would ruin it for him. But it always made her cry. The Fat Finkelstein of his generation thought that he might have made a mistake in timing. Nathan might have seen him. He waddled up the stoop of his brownstone as fast as he could hoist his pudgy cubic body and then hid in the entrance to his building. The door remained opened a crack, through which he still watched.

Nathan took Sarah off his shoulders, but she was inconsolable. This was about more than the Fat Finkelstein of her generation. Finally she told him, still sobbing, "They're going to Punim County!"