Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (19 page)

I had not entirely ruled out the possibility that Michael was a closet reader, but where was the evidence? Not that I expected him suddenly to acquire the coolheadedness of a Raffles, the cheek of a Richard Hannay or Harry Faversham's calculated recklessness, but Michael remained always only his own stolid self.

“It look like he be steady rasslin with them storybook,” Lucifer had alleged. “Sometime he be trine to get on top of it. Sometime them story, it have thow him on his funky behine.” But when I asked if I could see for myself, Lucifer told me most assuredly, “Nosuh!” Michael was very sensitive about being observed at his reading. I said I was sorry, feeling like I'd asked to spy on some act of intimacy.

After another week of seeing my once prized collection so savagely used, I decided that my part of the bargain had been fulfilled. Hoping to preserve the few volumes that remained on my shelves, if only as souvenirs of my youth, I told Lucifer that my library had bottomed out.

He clucked his tongue and doffed his hat, frowning into it, then looked at me and said, “Tha's a sho nuff cryin shame.” I shrugged and Lucifer concurred—all of this, incidentally, in the presence of his brother, who showed not a trace of disappointment. But no sooner had I relaxed, assured that the subject was dropped, than the wise guy revived it again. “Now wherebouts y'all reckon you might see can you borry some mo?”

I told him that this was no longer my problem. If it was so all-fired important that his brother should be in the business of mutilating books—which he'd done well enough without before I came along—then Lucifer could just go and find the victims himself. I would be happy to lend him whatever advice I could, though if you asked me, there were probably very sound reasons for keeping shvartzers in the dark. No good could come of this kind of indulgence.

Lucifer stood there grinning like he was proud of me for having gotten it all off my chest. Then, politely inquiring whether I was finished, he repeated his request: “Whereabouts you say you reckon?” Hanging my head, I said that there was in fact someone whom I had yet to put the touch on. It was a long shot but I'd see what I could do.

The following Saturday morning I made the trek out to the Parkway, and was left by my uncle's maid to cool my heels in the marble entrance hall. After some minutes she returned with the stiff information that Miss Naomi would receive me in the garden. I told her thanks and gave her a wink. This was to show that she didn't have to stand on ceremony with Harry Kaplan, who was after all a friend of her race. But as she failed to respond, I supposed that the rumors of my dual existence had not traveled among her people as far as the Parkway.

Naomi was sitting on a bench in the shade of a hexagonal cedar gazebo. Its trellised walls, laced in a webwork of vines, sprouted blossoms that might have been poison orchids. There was a small pond full of pea soup and lily pads like floating paw prints, with a putzless stone boy in the middle holding a leaky jug. Beyond the patio was a border of steamy, wax-leaved foliage—the kind that Amazon travelers, lured by bird calls, wander into and disappear.

As I approached her, Naomi was fussily picking lint from her pleated skirt. Her legs were crossed at the white anklets, and the knobs of her knees peeked from beneath her skirt hem like potato faces. Squirmingly she arranged herself into a stiff-backed approximation of what she must have thought was a fetching pose. Without question, she was the strangest fruit in her father's garden.

“Hello Harry. Take a load off, why don't you,” she invited in a tone of voice like the spider to the fly. She was toying with her hair now, which had been braided into a queue like a scorpion's tail. Then she looked up at me for the first time, and registered acute disappointment. It was as if she'd been expecting an entirely different Harry, one who arrives bearing flowers and chocolates. Have a heart, I thought, already beginning to regret that I'd come. But as the morning sun was doing a sultry number on the garden, I ducked under the gazebo roof and plunked myself down.

We sat there for a spell in awkward silence. I rocked on the stationary bench while Naomi blew the bangs from her sweaty forehead. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her, lest she pull some repeat performance of her Seder night funny business. Uncomfortable as I was, however, I took heart in observing how my cousin seemed just as agitated by our proximity. I decided to seize the advantage of her discomposure and come directly to the point.

“I won't beat around the bush,” I blurted with a resolution that startled us both. Then I cleared my throat and tried again. “What I come for is to borrow some books, if it's okay with you. See, I kind of outgrew all that stuff I used to read, you know, like adventures and um, well.   . adventures. Used to be I was gaga for a saga, heh heh. Ahem. So now I'm looking for something more, whaddayacallit, mature.”

Naomi's drooping eyelids began to flutter. Heaving a sigh that seemed to express a preparedness to do her duty, she gave me a sidelong smile accompanied by an exaggerated wink. I had the crazy thought that this was in some way a delayed response to the wink I'd given the maid; it was a wink bespeaking a knowledge of dark secrets I should understand were safe with her.

“I think we can take care of you,” my cousin archly advised me—a discreet clerk to the customer involved in some humiliating purchase. I could feel a pimple on the back of my neck throb and come to a head.

“Now see here, Naomi,” I protested, sounding a little like a phony Jack Benny. “I think you're jumping to the wrong conelusion.” Somehow it didn't help matters that the garden was practically narcotic with a medley of humid fragrances, musical with a chorus of twittering birds. “Look,” I explained through gritted teeth, “I came, like I said, to borrow some books of enduring literary merit, all right? So don't get any funny ideas.” And in case she hadn't gotten the point yet, I added, “Besides, don't you know that first cousins have kids with two heads and three tochises?”

Naomi's oval face began to cloud up with confusion as she assured me, “I don't know what you're talking about.” Her pooched lower lip started to quiver like a plucked bowstring.

So maybe I had overdone it a bit. It was possible that I shouldn't have assumed that there was more at stake here than the issue of borrowing books. My turtlelike cousin works herself up to stick her neck out, and I throw cold water in her kisser; she beats a hasty retreat back into her shell. I should have been ashamed of myself. Not only had I hurt Naomi's feelings but I'd probably blown my chances of walking away with a new batch of books for Beale Street. Now I'd have to face Lucifer with a report of the failure of my mission. Together we would mourn the absence of fresh titles to be mangled in the terrible wringer of somebody's reading, and that would be that. It made me almost want to cheer.

Then Naomi was speaking again, though not in the sulky way you would have expected. You might have said she sounded downright haughty, with her plum-veined eyelids aflutter again, her impressive Kaplan nostrils flared.

“Anyway”—she picked up where she'd left off—“who do you think you are? You think you're the sheik of North Main Street or something? You think you're the prize in the box of Wheaties, is that it? You open up your breakfast cereal and bingo! Instead of Jack Armstrong's hike-o-meter, there's Harry Kaplan and your morning is made. Well, let me tell you for the record, Harry, you're no prize!”

I guess you had to hand it to the little nishtikeit, the way she spat out my name like a piece of rancid treyf. It occurred to me that I might not know Naomi so well as I thought. But in any case, the joke was on her, wasn't it? Because if she'd known the truth about me, she'd have to eat her words. After all, unbeknownst to my cousin, there was a red-blooded sensation of nocturnal derring-do sitting next to her. So what if my physique was a little on the puny side. Granted, my feet tended toward flatness, my hair looked like black excelsior, and my eyes were foggy green bubbles behind their horn-rims. And despite the hours I'd logged in the company of certified ladies of the evening, I'd yet to touch the pinkie of a living girl. I might look outwardly harmless—no more striking a specimen than, say, my moody cousin herself—but what better cover could I have chosen? Harry Kaplan was the perfect disguise.

It would have served her right if I'd spilled the whole story of my dazzling exploits then and there. She would have begged my forgiveness if she didn't just swoon from the shock. Still, I sometimes wished there was someone I could trust with my secret.

We sat stewing in our mutual hostilities while all around us birds sang, boughs dripped, frogs croaked like rusty bed-springs. The dragonflies, which Lucifer called snake doctors, were riding piggyback, which only served to further my aggravation. I was contemplating how I should leave, whether I owed her an excuse or just an abrupt goodbye, when Naomi ventured to mumble, “So you want to borrow some books or what?”

I shrugged and told her, like I was the one who was doing her the favor, that I guessed it would be all right, I'd be willing to take a look at a couple of volumes. But, just in case there was any question about the seriousness of my motives, I was quick to stipulate, “Something weighty, know what I mean? Kind of stuff you can sink your teeth in.” Naomi cocked a tweezered brow. “Kind of stuff where the hero gets all farmisht because somebody died, or he lost his girlfriend or his whatsit, his muse.” Then her other brow went up, making me wonder if I'd given too much away.

“I think I can … ,” she started, whirling about, setting her braid in motion so that I had to duck the barrette. Then Naomi was on her feet. With her hands clasped behind her, she began to pace the bricks, which were flushed with purple herbs like spilled wine.

“What you want is, let me see,” she was thinking out loud as if jimmying a lock in her brain. When the lock sprung, an entire card catalogue tumbled forth. The air was suddenly thick with authors and titles that Naomi proposed and then discarded as not quite the thing. Some of the books that she mentioned I recognized, though their reputations had always made them seem forbidding, like they shouldn't be attempted by mortal men. One of them,
The Metamorphoses
, which I associated only with a stunt once performed by Houdini, was the cradle of most of the heroes you'd ever heard of, if you could believe my cousin. There was Ulysses, always trying to scheme his way out of hot water, and Hercules, who wore a poison shirt, the lot of them doing battle with your one-eyed, snake-haired, thousand-headed monsters.

“But what you want is the more romantically inclined,” she said. Was she gloating or did I imagine it? “Like Pygmalion, who makes a statue of a lady which he falls for, because you know what, she comes alive! And Orpheus, whose precious drops dead so he goes straight to you-know-where to bring her back. Come to think of it, he's not the only hero that goes to blazes for the sake of a loved one…”

Having struck this theme, she pursued it a while, using examples from the knights of the Round Table who were forever being driven mad by love. (Knights I was incidentally unfamiliar with from Howard Pyle.) It seemed that they frequently conceived infatuations, which resulted in brain fevers and saints' diseases, and left them wearing grass skirts and gibbering in trees. Then there was the knight she was particularly fond of, who was exceptional for having first been driven mad by books before advancing to love. This one liked to wear a shaving basin on his head and to convince scullery maids that they were of noble birth. What a line.

She was having a fine time, my cousin, dropping names from all over the map: Tristan and Werther and Mr. Rochester, Sidney Carton and the Man Who Laughs. Occasionally she might even blow raspberries or cross her eyes to show the extremes to which love could reduce a hero. This was not a Naomi I'd seen before, neither the shrinking nebbish nor the amateur femme fatale. But as she unclasped her hands to wave aside the sunbeams that hung like heavenly flypaper around the garden, you might almost have thought that this was the most authentic Naomi of all. So involved had she become in relating her stories that I was afraid she wasn't paying attention to where she was pacing. Any moment she might stumble headlong into the lily pond and be swallowed by a giant hibiscus. Next spring, when the flower reopened, there would be my cousin, still chattering away.

Listening to her, I felt a twinge or two of my old greediness for books, and for an instant I thought I might like to know what Naomi knew. Then it passed and I became impatient, remembering that the books were intended for a dumb shvartzer who might not even know how to read.

“Naomi, slow down already!” I tried to interrupt. “What, are you gonna recite the whole history of Western literature?”

But she ignored me, still pacing, her steps describing an ever-widening arc around the pond. It was a pendulumlike movement, on the downswing of which she alluded to the tale of some disinherited momzer and his beloved. Then, on the counterstroke, wondering aloud if the book was still on its accustomed shelf, she continued across the patio and vanished through the double doors of the solarium.

With the memory still fresh of what happened the last time I followed Naomi, you couldn't blame me for taking my time. In the glass-roofed solarium the maid, who might have been stationed there for the purpose, shook her duster in the direction of a flight of back stairs. I coughed a thank-you, climbed the stairs, and found my cousin in her bedroom, her arms laden with a daunting stack of books. Some of them looked old enough to be rarities, with hand-tooled leather bindings and marbleized pages. Some fell from her teetering pile and lay open, showing tissue-covered illustrations, pages blemished with thumbprints of people probably long dead.

“Boy, have you come to the right place!” exclaimed Naomi, dumping the whole hefty stack in my unready hands. For some reason this put me in mind of a shikkered rabbi on Simchas Torah, how he might pass the holy scrolls with the same abandon. While I assured her that these were more than enough, she had already stooped to snatch more books from her shelves.