Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (9 page)

"There are still good dairy restaurants in Brooklyn," said Sonia. This observation met with silence. Neither Harry nor Ruth could go to Brooklyn. In a perfect marriage to a man who feared rivers, Ruth feared bridges. She would take the Midtown Tunnel to Queens or the two tunnels to New Jersey, but Brooklyn, she feared, required a bridge. Subways went through tunnels but some went over bridges, and she could never remember which trains, and not wanting to ever find herself suspended on a bridge in a subway car, she avoided Brooklyn.

Impressive amounts of herring were consumed, probably because everyone knew the brisket was next. Mordy, however, didn't eat fish. In fact, between political convictions, economic restrictions, and a general belief that most food had been poisoned by someone, Mordy ate almost no food at all. To Nathan, who had seen how much herring Nusan had already eaten on Sixth Street, it was striking to see how much more herring he ate now. And Harry loved herring.

But soon the dreaded moment arrived, and Ruth carried out the large chunk of meat, jagged as though it were a handful yanked from the side of a stringy animal, cooked for hours until it was reduced to a bundle of fibers languishing in mawkish brown liquid.

"I'm a vethetarian," Naomi announced in a rapid preemptive strike. "So ith Mordy"

"The strings would get caught in your rings," suggested Sarah, who herself refused to eat brisket.

"That's not nice, Sarah," said Sonia.

But Sarah reached toward a silver ring that was looping an eyebrow. Naomi let out a breathy shriek and Sarah pulled back. "I just wanted to see what it is for." Naomi put up her forearm defensively

But since Sarah had innocently raised this interesting issue, Harry decided to pursue it. "Isn't it a problem for eating? And for ..." He decided not to ask her about kissing.

"Just a small slice," said Nathan, who also hated brisket. In fact, they all did. Ruth hated it, too. But her mother always made brisket on Friday nights. She vaguely remembered it being better. The packaged onion soup mix might be a mistake. Ruth always made enough for several families, and after a small amount was eaten the rest was wrapped up and given to Nusan, who rarely spoke during the meal.

"Not only have we lost the last dairy restaurant," said Harry, "but Moishe Apfel is closing."

Everyone looked down at their plates, not daring to look at one another, especially not daring to look at Ruth. Moishe Apfel owned a kosher butcher on the ground floor of their building. He was the source of the hated brisket.

"And that's the last kosher butcher in the neighborhood," Harry pronounced gravely.

Thank God, thank God, they were all thinking. Ruth had lost her source for brisket.

"What are you going to do?" Nathan asked his mother, trying not to sound cheerful.

"Now I'll have to go all the way to Elizabeth Street," said Ruth, crushing all the hope in the room.

"I couldn't find another butcher. I ended up renting to the Japanese. Carryout sushi."

"Ohh," squealed Naomi, "I love thuthi. Mordy won't eat it."

"The Japanese are cleaning out the oceans," said Mordy. "Besides, the fish is all full of mercury."

"Well," said Harry, "I am ashamed of renting a Jewish store to the Japanese."

"You don't mind eating German pastry," said Mordy, and Nusan smiled malevolently

"I have known Bernhardt Moellen for forty years," Harry said defensively

"Fifty would be better," Nusan muttered in a barely audible voice.

"He is a good man. I like him. All the kids like him. You kids used to love going over there, remember?"

"You still like going over there, don't you, Nathan," said Ruth.

Nathan wondered why she had said that.

At last the shredding carcass was removed. As the apple strudel, which had been placed on a long, ornate silver tray and redusted with powdered sugar, was brought out, Nusan hurled the look at Nathan that he always gave him at this point. It was a reminder that Nathan suspected the pastry maker of being a Nazi. Nathan wished he would forget. Nothing was found. There was nothing to it. Just racial stereotyping because he happened to be German. It would be like suspecting the three Sals of being connected to the Mafia—which, actually, he did suspect. "You could call me," she had whispered. Call me for what? What had she meant by that?

Harry cut the strudel, dividing it carefully into equal pieces so there would be no leftovers. Nusan refused to take the German's strudel home.

"One thing is certain," Harry began his pronouncement while slicing into the strudel, and everyone knew what would follow, "whoever killed Eli Rabbinowitz is an anti-Semite." It was usually at this point in the meal that Harry would review his list of anti-Semites. Recently added to the list were Vice President George Bush, Ronald Reagan, the Republican National Committee, the black mayor of New York, the Jewish ex-mayor of New York, Woody Allen, and Fidel Castro. Jews and non-Jews alike were subject to Harry's list.

"Who's Eli Rabbinowitz?" asked Mordy, who was only now recuperating from the knowledge that Naomi knew how to say the
motzi.

"How do you know the killer was anti-Semitic, Dad?" said Nathan.

"Yes," said Ruth. "How do you know who killed Rabbinowitz? If you don't know who, how do you know why?"

Sonia picked up a notebook and pen that she kept on the table in front of her and wrote something down. Sarah then picked up her notebook and drew several lines. Sonia was writing a play, and she kept a notebook with her to record snippets of dialogue that she thought might be useful. She was particularly interested in the way Ruth spoke. "There could be a lot of other reasons for shooting Eli Rabbinowitz," Sonia cautioned.

"Someone could have killed him because they didn't want him living in their house," suggested Sarah. This was beginning to worry Nathan. He should try again to explain about the mouse.

"Why would someone bring down the last dairy restaurant? Who is that attacking?" Harry argued.

"And where did they put his head?" Sarah offered, notebook at the ready.

But no one responded because they had all given up the argument, knowing that Sonia was about to say what she always said at this point: "Some people accused Emma Goldman of being an anti-Semite." That always ended the conversation, because nobody understood what it meant and they had all learned to avoid letting Sonia stay too long on the subject of Emma Goldman. Instead they all stood up and began clearing the dishes off the table.

"Who wath Emma Goldberth?" asked Naomi.

Mordy a head taller than Naomi and half her width, led her to the door. They said good-bye. Naomi dutifully thanked Ruth for the wonderful meal, though she had eaten only the herring. As she spoke, Ruth studied the movement of the silver rings in her lips.

As soon as they left, Harry said in a quiet voice, "What a nogood-nik." Everyone shrugged. "You know, it's a
shanda.
A Jewish girl like that."

"What?" said Nathan. "I thought it was a
shanda
if it wasn't a Jewish girl."

"No, I mean the rings and the tattoos. It's against Jewish law. Mutilation of the flesh. Any time you see a Jew with a tattoo it's an offense to God."

Nusan laughed an unkind, quiet chuckle.

Nathan held Sonia that night. He was safe. Everything was all right. Nothing had happened and the day was over. Unless it was something that he couldn't see. Some little thing that would reach far into the future. The police said that the killer was waiting for Eli Rabbinowitz because he always made his deposit at the same time. It was a decision he had made years ago based on some forgotten calculation that yesterday had caused the end of his life. Kant was right.

Nathan shuddered slightly and then held his wife, her long fingers reshaping his muscles, and soon they were making love, quickly, quietly, gently, with Sarah sleeping in the next room and a vague rhythm from overhead that might be Harry singing Irving Berlin. When it was over, Nathan was feeling peaceful. But then he thought, Am I a claustro-phobe? And Sonia sat up on one arm, her curly hair running wild, still looking a little sexy, and said in a soft but stern voice, "Why didn't you use a condom?" And they went to sleep without another word and barely spoke when they woke up.

B
IRDIE
N
AGEL
preyed on single men. If Harry had left his apartment with Ruth, she would not have approached him. But he flew out of his apartment on a song, waving a salutation to the mezuzah on his door, and as he descended in the elevator, his song—really Berlin's— filled each floor:

Cohen owes me ninety-seven dollars And it's up to you to see that Cohen pays, I sold a lot of goods To Rosenstein and Sons On an IOU for ninety days.

Birdie Nagel, a small woman whose rust-colored, wiry hair was teased straight up, as though trying to make her taller, heard him from her apartment. She ran out, stopping only to blow a kiss to the mezuzah on her doorway, which was a bird with the Hebrew letter
shin
on its breast, and flew down the stairs. "Mr. Seltzer?"

"'Levi brothers don't get any credit.'... Yes, how are you?" He lightly held her right hand and continued, " 'They owe me for a hundred yards of lace.' "

"Mr. Seltzer, can you help me?"

If you promise me, my son, You'll collect from everyone, I can die with a smile upon my face.

"I want to feed the birds on Eleventh Street, and I don't want to be alone with that killer out there. Will you come with me?"

"Eleventh Street? I have to go get some money on Fifth Street. I'll come back and get you on my way back."

"Oh, Mr. Seltzer, you should live to a hundred." She fumbled in a small leather handbag and produced three crumpled $1 bills. "Could you stop at Third Street and get me some birdseed? The mixed seeds. They like that."

"Sure, Mrs. Nagel," said Harry, as though Third Street were on the way.

"And you should be careful at the bank. Remember Mr. Rabbi-nowitz, not such a nice man, really, may he be in heaven, though I doubt it."

"I'll be back in a few minutes," said Harry escaping back into song for the moment:

Old man Rosenthal is better now, He just simply wouldn't die somehow....

And he was out the door. He stopped in at the newspaper shop, which he had rented to a man named Mohammed. The shop was next to the butcher, soon to be carryout sushi.

"Salaam, Mohammed," Harry said.

"Shalom, Harry, my friend," said Mohammed, taking his hand. It was one of Harry's caprices, like Soma's enchiladas. He did not understand that Mohammed, being from Pakistan, was not an Arabic speaker. It had begun one Yom Kippur. Mohammed had seen Harry on the street with a white yarmulke, and knowing it was a holiday and wanting to say something, Mohammed said his one word of Hebrew. Harry, wanting to respond in kind but having no idea what language Mohammed spoke, replied in his one word of Arabic. And then it was set. No changing it now. He bought a
Times,
realized he had no money, and used one of Birdie Nagel's dollars.

"Harry, my friend, the new
Foreign Affairs
has an article on Israel." Mohammed always looked for articles of Jewish interest for Harry. Harry thought Mohammed tried too hard. "A philo-Semite. He probably hates us."

At the bank on Fifth Street, the deposit box had been cleaned and the police crime scene tape and chalk had already been removed. But there were flyers on the wall giving a number to call if anyone had information about the killing of Rabbinowitz.

Poor Rabbinowitz, Harry was thinking when a large man with an unruly tangle of thick black hair and a sleepy, friendly face, a face that reminded him somehow of his son Mordy opened the door for him. Harry thanked him and went to the bank machine, withdrawing $100—five $20 bills.

The large, dark-haired man held the door for him again. "Can you spare a little change?"

"Look," Harry said gently, "this isn't any kind of business. People come here because they are out of money and they leave with nothing but twenty-dollar bills. So why do you think this is the place to get change from people?"

"I—I don't know Because they stop here."

He handed the man Birdie Nagel's remaining crumpled bills. "Here, but I think you ought to look for a better idea."

After Harry walked away, the large man shoved the bills in his pocket and, realizing that he had enough, quickly left the bank.

José the fish man, who had been selling fish for so long that everyone in the neighborhood called him José Fishman or even Mr. Fishman, ran by Harry, pushing his slightly misshapen shopping cart full of fish and melted ice. Jose walked to the Fulton Fish Market every morning and, by plan, was the last one there. He bought what was left over for bargain prices, covered it with ice, and pushed it back up to his shop on Fourth Street. It was not difficult in the winter, but in the summer he had to run to get the fish out of the morning heat, the melting ice leaving a zigzag trail behind him. "Good morning, Seltzer-san," he shouted to Harry, not stopping or even turning to look. "Have to hurry, say-onara, Seltzer-san."

It seemed to Harry that Jose was trying to speak Japanese, and he wondered why. Harry returned with the seeds to the lobby, where Birdie Nagel was waiting patiently for him on the original black leather couch placed there by his father-in-law in the 1920s and chained to the wall by Harry in the 1970s. They walked to Eleventh Street, and Birdie began spreading seed with extravagant sweeps of her arms, bringing more than a hundred oily-necked cooing and fluttering pigeons to the sidewalk. Harry would have rather left poison.

"Hello, Harry Seltzer."

He turned and saw the black woman who was usually in this part of the neighborhood. She was as tall as he was, and her dark flesh was bursting out of the edges of a very small, shiny, black lace dress as though she had been inflated after being placed in the dress. She had once walked up to him and said, "Hi, my name is Florence," and he had reflexively responded, "How do you do? Harry Seltzer."

Then she said, "You look lonely," and he realized he had made a mistake. But it was too late. She had his name, and now, three years later, she still remembered it. It was embarrassing having her always call him by name. He could see that Birdie Nagel was giving him an odd look. Who was Birdie Nagel to give other people an odd look? Florence was a nice woman, always pleasant and friendly.

"Hello, Florence, how are you today?"

"Not today, Harry Seltzer?"

"No, not today, Florence."

"You wouldn't be sorry," she said, and she walked past him, wiggling the bright red polish on the nails of her right hand to say good-bye. Harry couldn't help watching her walk away, the direction that showed off Florence's best side. Harry wondered how anything that large and that soft could keep its shape.

Nathan looked down at Eli Rabbinowitz, who had muttered as he often did something that was not quite audible. Nathan leaned closer and Rabbinowitz repeated the words, "You could call me." Funny, the words were not that significant after all. Then there was an explosion and Rabbinowitz's head, bloodlessly vanished.

The side of Nathan's head was being swatted by an awkward and loving little hand.

"Daddy?" said Sarah. "Daddy?"

"Yes," Nathan answered, trying to shake off the dream.

"You are very, very bad," Sarah said in a scolding voice.

"I am? What did I do?" Nathan asked, almost afraid of the answer.

"It is a game. You are a bad boy and I am going to put you in your house."

"Okay."

Sarah had collected pillows and couch cushions from throughout the apartment and was distributing this cache on top of her father, one pillow at a time, until Nathan saw no more daylight, and then he felt a forty-pound creature pounce on the pillows, pushing them into him until there was no more air. "Accidental suffocation" was the phrase that came to Nathan, and he realized that he was about to die. He sat up, sending the creature and the pillows rolling off the bed. As Nathan heaved his chest, struggling for air, a worried Sarah looked up. "What's wrong, Daddy?"

Nathan smiled, though Sarah could tell he didn't mean it. "Nothing. What are you doing down there?"

Sarah could see that there was something wrong and concluded that he really had been bad and couldn't talk about it. She understood. She had often been caught in the same situation. She patted Nathan's hand sympathetically.

On Saturday mornings Sonia gave Nathan a massage, and this Saturday would not be an exception just because Sonia was barely speaking to him. Sonia had, according to Nathan, "the world's greatest hands." This morning he could feel some anger in those great hands, an urge to cause pain. She lingered disapprovingly along his sides where they were becoming a little pudgy. "You should give up pastry," she said. Her fingers were long and slender and had great strength. They could search out the imperfections in muscle fiber and knead them out like ... like a skilled pastry maker working a dough until it was silken. What had she meant, "You could call me"? Her scent was still in his nose. But he should not be thinking these things, because his wife's fingers felt as if they could penetrate his thoughts. It was possible that it was her hands with which he had first fallen in love. Even the first afternoon on Thirteenth Street. Now, only four years and a daughter later, he was lying on her table analyzing someone else's phrase, "You could call me."

Sonia was explaining progress on her play about Emma Goldman, the Lithuanian-born, early-twentieth-century American anarchist, and Margarita Maza, wife of the nineteenth-century Mexican leader Benito Juarez. Emma is completely opposed to property. Margarita does not oppose it. She just thinks it is wrong that she has it and most Mexicans don't. "But that was exactly Emma's point, you see? That was why she called property
robbery.
Because it was the product of all the people who had none, you see?"

Only one person she had met really saw it. Her brother-in-law, Mordy, would eagerly talk to her about it. But he told her, "I think they are from different latitudes but similar longitudes, which is always what happens to relationships. Margarita needs to get on Emma's longitude. You need the commonality of longitudes." And thus far, she was thrilled to have such an insight. But from there he went for a very long time into his theory of "longitudinal separation," and Sonia had to admit that whatever it was that Mordy was trying to say, they were on different plays.

Mordy, after spending his undergraduate years on electronic music, earned two graduate degrees: one in Western philosophy and one in biochemistry. He thought the biochemistry work would lead to skills in designer drugs. But that degree proved disappointing. The Western philosophy degree, on the other hand, he felt had paid off

The only other person who liked to talk to Sonia about her play was Arnie. Arnie loved Emma Goldman and, though he knew nothing of Juarez or his wife, could talk for hours about what Emma thought. And miraculously, one afternoon as she walked up Avenue A, Arnie presented Sonia with a copy
of Living My Life,
Emma Goldman's autobiography It was a hardback edition published by an anarchist press in the 1930s and found by Arnie on a curb of Essex Street along with an electric fan that no longer worked. The frontispiece was a black-and-white photo of a severe-looking, short-haired woman with black, round glasses frames holding thick lenses behind which two magnified, worried eyes appeared to stare out at two different angles. For a second, Sonia was surprised that this woman looked nothing like Ruth, whose eyes were glowing with passion and whose face was soft and feminine. Only the thick black eyebrows looked similar. Sonia read the opening:

It was the 15th of August 1889, the day of my arrival in New York City. I was twenty years old. All that had happened in my life until that time was now left behind me, cast off like a worn out garment.

A
worn out garment.
Sonia pondered the phrase. She, too, only a few years earlier, not quite one hundred years after Emma, and on an August day as well, maybe even the fifteenth, had arrived in New York with the exact same feelings. Not twenty but over thirty, she too was casting off her past and beginning a new life—as a playwright. But then she did something Emma wouldn't. "Marriage and love have nothing in common," Emma once wrote. Emma had been married but did not make the mistake of prolonging it, and the divorce was the occasion for her moving to New York to begin anew. Sonia had not divorced but had left behind a confining relationship. And then in her new life, she got married! Then Sonia thought of Sarah, and like a plant wilting in heat, her resolve was gone. She thought about Nathan's seriousness. Whenever she thought of her love for her husband, that was what came to mind. She loved him for his moral conundrums. She smiled as she thought: Who else could spend six months debating about someone trying to give him half a million dollars for nothing?

Sonia pointed out to Arnie that the book was probably worth something and she should pay him, but Arnie looked up from the sidewalk, his beret defiantly askew, and said, "Emma wouldn't approve."

Sonia smiled and added that Margarita wouldn't have, either.

As she kneaded Nathan's shoulders, she was talking about the dress. Not the "worn out garment"; Sonia was fascinated by a dress Benito Juarez gave to his wife that she took into exile and wore to meet Abraham Lincoln. "But she apologized to him in a letter for dressing in expensive clothes while Mexicans were suffering. Do you think Sarah can learn these things? Will she ever apologize for having too much?"

"Will she ever have too much?" Nathan replied, but he was really thinking about the words "You could call me."

It was still early for Mordy to be outside, and he was walking on his toes, unconsciously sneaking down the street, hoping to find strong coffee before someone ran into him and forced him to speak. Too late.

"You're Mordy Seltzer, aren't you?"

"Owww," he slowly groaned in a nonresponse.

"I am Naomi's father."

"Ohhh." Why was this happening?

As Mordy deciphered the words in vibrato echoing from a distance, he gathered that the father was worried because Naomi was not married and she was twenty-four. "Every year she will be less and less desirable."

"Yes," Mordy groaned in a soft voice barely audible to the father. "Because every year she gets more holes and tattoos. You should marry her off while she still has unused portions of skin."