Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (11 page)

Forgotten but not gone, my father felt called upon to put in a word in his own father's defense. “He'll come around as soon as all this mishegoss in Europe blows over.” Grandpa Isador, interpreting the news broadcasts according to his whim, had seized on a master focus for his forebodings: projecting from his own personal woe a worldwide epidemic, he'd concluded that the chancellor of Germany was about to murder all the Jews.

At the mention of Europe the old man folded at the chest, emitting a sound like he'd swallowed a harmonica. Papa leaned over to comfort him, suggesting that he might come down to the pawnshop tomorrow. There my papa would see to it that he was kept safe from the doings of the momzer Hitler, may his name be blotted out. At the head of the table Uncle Morris exchanged a meaningful roll of the eyes with my mama at the foot. With their eyes, they seemed to be making a pact to wash their hands of the pair of them, Solly and Isador. Wondering if their pact included me, I wanted to tell them: You're too late, I beat you to it. I've washed my own hands already.

I'd had it up to here with the family Kaplan. What had happened to everyone since Zippe's passing that they behaved so ludicrously? Like the bubbe had been an anchor or something, and now they were all set adrift. Not that Papa was really any screwier than usual. But more and more I was coming to see the ways my father took after his own, making me resolve that whatever loose screws had been passed down from father to son should stop with him. This is not to say that I joined with my mother and uncle in their holier-than-thou alliance; as far as I was concerned they deserved each other.

Neither did I exempt my cousin Naomi, seated across the table from me, whose mere presence was enough to remind me that things could be better. All dolled up for the occasion, she drooped nevertheless, the shoulders of her dress enfolding her like the limp wings of a taffeta bat. Her stringy black hair, pulled into a listing topknot over her bangs, bristled with stray strands. Whenever I happened to glance in her direction—which was as seldom as possible—she instantly lowered her perennially moist eyes. But when I wasn't looking, I sensed that she stole occasional glances, the way you sneakily pick food from somebody else's plate. It made me feel that she might want to steal a peek into my mind, which I forthwith tried to make a perfect blank.

On a lordly cue from Uncle Morris, all casual table talk came to an end. We donned the silk skullcaps, opened the food-soiled Haggadahs, and began an uninspired reading of the Passover service. As the male child, it fell to me to recite the Four Questions, but I had trouble mustering the proper enthusiasm. Rusty with the Hebrew, I garbled it under my breath, and was almost as incoherent with the English translation.

“Whyzissnighdiffren…” I mumbled until they asked me to speak up, after which I vociferated like a quiz show emcee, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Then, to my amazement, I made a sound like a buzzer and said, “Sorry, your time is up.” The silence that followed shamed me into asking the remaining questions in an appropriate tone of voice.

Next, treading heedlessly on each other's words, the family read a collective explanation of the holiday's significance. They told the part about how the slaves stuffed their cheeks with cracker crumbs and escaped through a God-made hiatus where the sea used to be. At least a couple of miles away, I was thinking of a miniature sea where before there had been only dry land.

With Uncle Morris holding up every item like an endorsement, we repeated the stories behind the symbols of salt water, shank bone, and bitter herb. Then, following a custom that called for sympathetic bleeding, with all eyes on old Isador lest he open a vein, we dipped fingers in our goblets and dripped wine across our plates. (Licking my pinkie, I was pleasantly surprised, the tepid grape juice of my childhood having been replaced by the authentic fruit of the vine.) Throughout, my grandpa, that his wellsprings shouldn't run dry, gnawed sticks of horseradish with his rattling dentures to summon more tears.

Just when you thought it was safe to put down your Haggadah, Grandpa Isador cried out, “Dayenu!” This was the signal to begin a recitation of the blessings heaped on the heads of the Israelites. At the end of each blessing in an endless list, you were supposed to shout “Dayenu,” which meant, “It would have been enough.” But Uncle Morris nipped this in the bud.

“Enough is enough is enough,” he broke in. “Let's nosh!” Then he wadded up his yarmelke and tossed it over his shoulder. “Shinola!” he bellowed toward the kitchen, turning to tell us confidentially, “I call her Shinola, get it? Come to think of it, what
is
her name?” Now that all the mumbo-jumbo was out of the way, my uncle was our genial host again. In fact he was hamming it up. Taking a large carving knife and a sharpening steel, he proceeded to fight a duel with himself, then plucked a hair from his forward-combed locks to demonstrate the sharpness of the blade.

A door swung open and a colored maid padded in, her crisp, white-aproned uniform strained fore and aft by her generous dimensions. On her broad face was an expression of tolerance under pressure, an expression that made you wonder if there might be something funny about the gefilte fish she was placing before us. That's what comes of taking too much note of the hired help. When she returned a second time, with a hen on a platter, I avoided studying her face.

As Uncle Morris set about slicing the bird, he faked ecstasies over its texture and the aroma released from its stuffing. Then he fell into his habitual doting on Mama. He congratulated her on her patient fortitude in putting up with him and all of the pesky Kaplan clan.

“If only my Nettie, may she rest in peace,” he sighed, dabbing an eye with the corner of his napkin, “if only she'd had your strength.”

He cast a mournful glance over his shoulder at the portrait of his expired spouse, sere-faced and wilted despite a photographer's best efforts to add color and prop her up. She'd died shortly after giving birth to Naomi, as if in bringing my cousin into the world she'd fulfilled her purpose. Some purpose. I would have liked to credit my uncle with having bored her into an early grave, but you could see from her portrait that being dead must have come naturally to my nebbish Aunt Nettie.

“Now Morris,” Mama chided him gently, toying with the bangle of her earring, “we mustn't speak ill of the departed.” But you could tell that she was kvelling fit to burst. One indication was the way she gazed so fawningly at me, which was not her style. Groaning over what a burden I was to bear—that was more like her. But here she was all agloat, her strapping male offspring a testimony to her strength.

Meanwhile Papa was absorbed by his hard-boiled egg in its bed of charoses, prodding it with his fork as if to coax it into motion. Maybe he expected the tiny bald noggin to lift its hidden face and tell him a story. When he began to speak, it was difficult to tell whether he was talking to the egg or to us. “Your attentions, my brother, have made our Mildred a regular Samson,” he said, peering sheepishly over his spectacles.

“Another country heard from,” grumbled Uncle Morris, and let it rest. But Mama, for all her ardent blushing, scolded, “Solly, have a heart! You could learn a thing or two from your brother's example.” Daintily removing a sliver of chicken from her horsey, carmine-stained teeth, she added mysteriously, “Morris has had his disappointments too.”

I supposed she meant he was disappointed that she'd married Solly instead of him, and from his expression Papa must have guessed it too. He went back to studying his egg like a crystal ball. What he saw—I would have bet on it—was himself snug in his pawnshop, safe from the insults of history and his surviving family. He looked as far away as I felt.

The maid reappeared to inform Uncle Morris that someone was in the kitchen to see him. His sense of humor reserved now for business hours only, Papa didn't say it, so I had to say it myself: “It must be Elijah.” This captured the momentary interest of Grandpa Isador, who interrupted his lugubrious chewing on the off chance it might be true. Grousing that this someone had better have a good reason for disturbing his peace on this night of nights, Uncle Morris threw down his napkin and waddled out of the dining room. When the door swung inward, I saw what might have been a burnt gingerbread man, popped from the industrial-size oven in front of which he stood. Not until the door swung to again did I realize that I'd seen my papa's puller with cap in hand.

Papa had mentioned that Uncle Morris sometimes “borrowed” Oboy to perform certain odd jobs, and knowing my uncle, I'd figured that they had to be dirty work. This was no concern of mine, but it still came as a shock to see the puller turn up this far from Beale Street. I was aware by now that Oboy's sphere of activities extended beyond the pavement in front of the shop. Nevertheless, I couldn't kick the notion that, if I jumped up and sprinted all the way, I would still find him there on his perch outside Kaplan's Loans.

Uncle Morris returned huffing in his sour apple face, which meant things of moment were on his mind. Oboy might have brought him the message that his tenants were in revolt; they had torched their slum dwellings and stormed the office of his downtown operations. That was the sort of problem I supposed my uncle would have, though as to the actual nature of his business (real estate, wasn't it?), I hadn't a clue.

“Solly,” he began offhandedly, stabbing his fork at a slippery lima bean, “if a couple of boys, you know what I mean, should drop by your shop, and if these boys should be looking to unload —” All of a sudden he lit up in a phony grin. He swiveled his head dummy-style back and forth from his daughter to me and began to chirp, “Hey kids, don't you think it's time to go and look for the afikomen?”

Ordinarily I would have been offended. I hadn't hunted for hidden matzohs in years, not since the times when Papa had made a wild-goose chase out of it, complete with hand-drawn maps full of obstacles and false leads. Nor did I care for the idea of teaming up with my cousin, whom I was practically allergic to. On the other hand, it beat having to sit here and listen to my blowhard uncle angling to involve my father in some shady scheme. It beat having to watch my mother chafe in her stays and declare that she was about to plotz. Besides, after repeatedly toasting the clean getaway of the children of Israel, I'd begun to feel a little woozy. A stroll around the rambling house might be just what I needed.

I rose a bit shakily and followed my cousin from the dining room. Behind us my father was grumbling vaguely, my uncle charging that somebody had to take care of business. It was, after all, “the boys” who made possible what amounted to a charitable foundation.

Naomi and I crossed the vestibule and mounted the carpeted staircase beneath a glorified jack-o'-lantern of a chandelier. Feeling no pain, I was at the same time in need of a focus, some point of reference to help steady the tendency of the stairs to tilt. So I fixed on Naomi's oily topknot, which looked about to tumble, like an unraveling ball of twine. Then I lowered my sights to the hem of my cousin's dress. The material, typically coordinated to match the floral wallpaper, swished to and fro above her scrawny calves. It was a rhythmic swish, a kind of fabric metronome, accompanied by the whisper of her stockings and a jungle drumbeat in my head. It was the sort of thing that could induce hypnosis. So I asked her, if only to break the spell, “Where do you think he hid it?”

She turned at the head of the stairs without replying and gave me a look that seemed to ask what I meant by following her. “The matzoh,” I persisted in hopes of refreshing her memory. “Where …?” But, fanning my lips with my fingers
b-b-b-b
, I gave it up in mid-question, suddenly unsure whether Naomi and I were playing the same game.

She tottered in her wobbly pumps down the long hallway, dimly lit by electric candles in brass sconces. Their flickering reflections made altars out of a row of mullioned windows facing the street. A ghostly woman bearing a candelabra, her I could have seen myself pursuing down such a hallway; my flesh-and-mostly-bone cousin was something else. But since my forward momentum seemed anyway irreversible, I thought I might just as well see where she went.

It turned out to be a bedroom so intensely pink it could shrivel your petsel. The precious furnishings looked almost edible, spun-sugar ornaments on a cake. There was a canopied four-poster with a hand-painted headboard, the mattress heaped with satin pillows to protect the princess from the pea. A ruffled curtain in the shape of a valentine framed a cushioned window seat cradling a stuffed-animal zoo. A wide mantelpiece supported a row of delicate porcelain and china dolls in gingham and lace. Their pantaletted gowns formed an awning over a fancy arched fireplace, tucked inside of which was a modest bookcase. With its bowed and slanted shelves, the volumes in disarray, the case looked as if it had been dumped down the chimney. In the midst of all that cloying prettiness, the books seemed out of place.

They were her poor relations, Naomi's books—ghetto urchins who have crashed a fancy-dress ball to hide beneath the unwitting skirts of the ladies. So tell me why I thought that, for all its prevailing frivolity, my cousin's boudoir revolved around those books. Was it because, without their ballast, that airy confection of a room was in danger of floating away? Or was it just that everything else looked untouched? Whereas the books, with their broad creased spines and torn dust jackets showing stitches like undressed wounds, had obviously been the objects of constant handling. Though I couldn't read their titles from where I stood, I suspected that Naomi's books might be pretty heavy going by my standards. They might even belong to the same exclusive brother hood of tedious stuff I'd lugged home from the Front Street library.

My cousin was poised on the edge of a chair in front of her skirted dressing table, gazing intently into a circular mirror as if she couldn't quite place the face. Then she reached up, dislodging a shoulder pad in the process, and removed a pin from her hair. The untidy bun collapsed like a burst bubble of ink, trickling in a twist down her neck. Taking up a silver brush, she proceeded with luxurious strokes to rake her meager tresses into a mild electrical storm. She persisted until her split ends were in full levitation.