Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (2 page)

Not until we'd left the station and taken a taxi to North Main Street did Papa begin to breathe easier. He even screwed up his courage enough to make a wisecrack. “To the ends of the earth we came to see a potato knish?” he quipped at the sight of shops with Hebrew characters scrawled on the windows.

About to introduce us to our new apartment, whose homely virtues he'd already begun to recite, Uncle Morris had taken offense. “So maybe you expected the ladies with their hoop skirts and the darkies singing hymns?” he wheezed. “Maybe you want egg in your julep?”

Wistfully lifting his caterpillar eyebrows like he wouldn't have minded, Papa said that he hadn't meant to seem ungrateful.

“Sol-ly!” Uncle Morris was suddenly all consolation, slapping his brother's back as if to encourage a belch. “Give it a chance.” Then he winked at my grandparents, who'd been deposited along with the luggage beside the curb. (It had been decided that, for the time being at least, they would be more comfortable on North Main, as Uncle Morris's place was currently undergoing repairs.) He chucked my mother under the chin and waved a gesture that seemed intended to make the drab tenement building disappear. “Give the business a chance, and before you know it our Mildred'll be mistress of a grand house on the Parkway.”

The business in question was a pawnshop that my uncle had repossessed, merchandise intact, from its hapless former proprietor. He was turning it over gratis to my father, lock, stock, and cash drawer, as he liked to say, with no strings attached.

“Please don't thank me, Solly,” he kept protesting, though Papa was clearly of a couple of minds concerning his brother's largess. “It's a mitzvah for me,” he insisted, my pious uncle, rolling his eyes whence cometh his reward, clearing his throat like a trumpeting pachyderm.

The shop was located on Beale Street, a place that inspired all kinds of gossip and hearsay. It was there, as Uncle Morris had promised, that my father would find the local color he'd missed on our arrival in the Pinch. It was the street where the shvartzers came to make their crazy music, to kick up their heels and generally misbehave. But the nearest thing to music at my papa's end of the street was the creaking of hinges on shop signs and the jingling of tills. The only musicians were the poor shnorrers, down on their luck, who came in to hock their broken-necked ukeleles, their mouth harps that sounded like breaking wind. So maybe the fabled Beale Street began a little farther down the hill, down past the colored park on the other side of Third. But that was a section of town toward which the merchants on my father's block seldom had occasion to go.

Not that the street was a source of any special curiosity for me. I was no more interested in the locale of my father's business than I was in the business itself, though I could appreciate that it was something of a heroic departure for him. Despite his ill-fated succession of careers, my papa had rarely been called upon to face the public. Now, with a windy bravado that fooled no one, he attempted to infect the rest of us with his bogus optimism. Again and again he repeated his resolution to make a go of it. But it was clear that the strength of his own conviction depended on the family's endorsement; and at the least excuse he would try to inveigle us into coming down to visit the shop.

There was the evening, for instance, when he had everyone down to Beale Street for the maiden illumination of his sign.

“Give a look,” my papa had nudged us, ducking inside to plug in an electrical cord. There was a burst of scarlet neon over the door, whirring like a horde of locusts, spelling out our name in lights: KAPLAN'S LOANS. Back on the street Papa lifted his face so that it was bathed in the flush of his sign. Then, like a knight raising a visor, he ceremoniously pushed back his spectacles.

“This is the work I was born for,” he declared. It was what he said at the commencement of all his disastrous pursuits.

You could only shake your head, but did I worry? After all, I had my own concerns. In my alcove over the unpaved alley that separated our building from Petrofsky's market, I'd kept on reading. Lately my specialties were the kind of stories that began in hidebound studies appointed in glasses of claret and mastiffs asleep by the hearth, and ended up in a godforsaken wilderness amid quicksand and dinosaur bones. I liked unlikely heroes who left their cozy digs to investigate a tap on a windowpane, only to be waylaid by adventure for the next half century or so. I liked it when they stumbled downstairs into prehistory, or fell through a revolving bookcase into a subterranean stream that led to a kingdom of thieves.

Sprawled across my hide-a-bed, I would hold an open book like the helm of a ship. Or sometimes like a sprung steel trap or a pair of wings about to flap and fly away. Nothing short of the boldest illustrations—I'm talking flashing gold sabers and crimson sails—could distract me from my regard for the printed page. Not the kids at the Market Square School with whom I wasn't too popular, owing I suppose to my Yankee accent and my habit of keeping to myself, but did I care? They didn't bother me any more than did my righteous grandfather, who would have had me visit the ritual bath for handling unsanctified texts. (“Chozzerai!” he'd lament at the sight of me poring over my sagas, then stick a finger down his throat.)

From virgin whiskers I might scratch my pimply cheeks till they festered, but my concentration remained unimpaired. Neither shmeikeling shopkeepers nor clattering streetcars, not church bells or factory whistles or steamboat calliopes, or the cries of newsboys announcing no end in sight of hard times—nothing could turn my head away from the stories that had turned my head.

Once, however, my father had caught me off guard with a chance remark. A real card who read the funny papers if he read anything at all, he managed to strike a nerve.

“Haven't you heard, boychikel? Books'll make you blind.”

This sounded vaguely insinuating, as if when he said “books” he really meant something else, “books” being a code word for the unspeakable. Then I told myself: Hold your horses. What did I have to feel guilty about? Nothing at all. So why was I suddenly blushing as if I'd been caught at some shameful practice? All of a sudden I was embarrassed to find myself, at the relatively advanced age of fifteen, still hostage to boys' adventures when I should have already outgrown these silly tales of voyaging princes in disguise. It was maybe time I should begin to put away childish things in favor of more high-minded pursuits.

From the red sandstone library on Front Street I started lugging home thick volumes with no illustrations. The drier the topic, the finer the print, the yellower the page, the more sophisticated I felt. I tried books on a wide range of subjects to broaden my interests—from marketing strategy to parliamentary procedure, insect lore, oral hygiene, and agricultural reform. Books with titles like
Systems of Statistical Mechanics, The Future of the Federal Whatsis
, and
Principia Youtellme
.

My idea was that a saturation diet of deadly boredom would accelerate the process of maturing. It would make me the serious person that I had taken it into my head I wanted to be. But anxious as I was for results, I lacked the heart for this particular method. A club from whose membership I would've been restricted even if I was old enough to join, the books conspired to snub me, their big words obstinately refusing to turn into heroes or foreign parts.

As a compromise between my accustomed frivolous fare and self-inflicted tedium, I took up reading poetry. I read it aloud like a haftorah offering, safe in the assumption that it wouldn't make sense to me anyway. But while I was in no immediate danger of acquiring a taste for the stuff, its substance wasn't entirely lost on me.

I noticed, for instance, that poets went in for a wide variety of concerns. You had your hearts and flowers, your silvery beams and assorted la-di-da, but there were other things as well: the odd voyage of a ghost ship into waters that spilled off the map, treachery and mortal combat and desperate characters with too much full moon in the blood, gypsy daredevils and sorcerers who resided in caves of ice or languished in towers with mile-thick walls. And then there was this business of what poets called their muse.

As best I could make out, a muse was a species of phantom lady who inspired you to feats beyond your ordinary means. Under her auspices a nebbish might prevail against overwhelming odds in pitched battle. An illiterate could compose three-handkerchief dramas, a bumpkin with no sense of direction travel to hell and back to fetch her souvenirs. While I wasn't exactly certain I would know a muse if I saw one, I began to think that, weak-chinned and four-eyed though I was, I might like one of my own. And as long as I was in the business of wishing, I might as well cite her specifications to order.

She would be ample of breast and hip, my muse, bare of shoulder, platinum-haired, azure-eyed, and ruby-lipped, wearing a diaphanous gown with (God help me) nothing on underneath. In the small hours she would glide into my alcove, whispering with cinnamon breath, suffering me to touch the hem of her garment, which had risen on the wind above her knees. Then I would be transported instantly to someplace out of one of my books.

Sometimes I half suspected that the ticket was to get off your tush and actively seek your muse. But where would you look in such a jerkwater town as Memphis, such a far cry from its namesake on the Nile? It was a dingy city without a trace of class, with never the hint of a hanging garden or a necropolis, a city where no self-respecting muse would hang her hat. There was just nothing here to excite the curiosity, and since my regimen of boredom had more or less backfired, I was beginning to feel a little restless.

It was around this time that my father invited me to come and work in his shop, an invitation hardly even deserving of an answer, since in those days Papa himself took every opportunity to play hooky from Kaplan's Loans.

“Thanks anyway,” I had muttered without bothering to look up from my book. Fallen back on old habits, I was belly-down on my hide-a-bed, reading the rattling tale of an ace cricketeer who is also a crack second-story man. But as Papa continued to stand over me, I experienced another twinge of the shame he'd caused me to feel a few weeks before.

Ordinarily Papa would have shrugged and walked away. That would have been in keeping with the unwritten pact between us, whereby we observed a mutual lack of interest in each other's affairs. He never interfered in what he referred to as wasting my formative years in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, and by the same token I never accused him of squandering the family resources on his crackpot careers. But on this particularly mild March afternoon, my father stood fast, so that in the end I had no choice but to look up at him.

He was peering at me over the rims of his glasses, his usually bemused smile inverted. His feelings, it appeared, had been hurt. This was not an entirely new development, given how temperamental he'd been since coming to Memphis. In fact, for all of his sanguine talk talk talk, it was clear that he was still unresigned to his latest occupation. I suppose it wasn't so surprising, considering the way that the pawnshop had flushed him out, forcing his reluctant public exposure. As a consequence, trying to wean himself from the apartment while at the same time unable to keep to his shop, Sol Kaplan was neither here nor there.

“So, Mr. Diligent,” he persisted now that he had my attention. He was keeping up a front of being sociable, rocking back and forth on his heels. “What do you do with your afternoons? Still with the reading?”

I had to fight the urge to deny what was perfectly self-evident. “How did you guess?”

Papa stopped his rocking and stiffened, lifting a trigger finger on the verge of warning me not to get fresh. Then, perhaps remembering what a dud he was for scolding, he relaxed, or rather deflated, into a crestfallen sigh. “Harry,” he nearly implored me, “come down to Beale Street, why don't you. You'll learn the business, you'll be a mensch. Ain't it time you took a gander at real life?”

Under my breath I said to him, “Give a listen to the voice of experience here.” I hadn't actually meant for him to hear me, but I could tell by the way he hung his head that he had. I wanted to tell him I was sorry, I'd spoken out of turn, while on the other hand I couldn't help thinking, Some macher, some big man of commerce. One of his boondoggles finally boots him outside the family circle, and what does he do? He tries to drag the family along with him.

He had already made his appeal to Mama, who had lately begun putting on airs—she'd declared that a pawnshop was no place for a lady. He'd even tried drafting Grandpa Isador out of retirement, an old man who'd beaten himself batty over a cobbler's last for half a century. (Grandma Zippe had naturally been regarded as a lost cause.) And now, as a last resort he'd set his sights on yours truly.

Well, it wouldn't work. Nobody was going to tear me away from what, in a desperate effort to lend dignity to misspent time, I'd begun to call my studies. My extracurricular field of endeavor. Nevertheless, I'll admit that it gave me a royal case of heartburn to see my dewy-eyed papa looking so all alone.

Once he'd succeeded in suckering me into his employ, my father was at a loss to tell me exactly what I should do. Except for the times when he had me assist him in his ongoing inventory, I was left pretty much to my own devices. This confirmed my suspicion that I'd been imported from North Main Street for no better reason than to keep him company.

Every once in a while, between customers, he might take me aside to explain some of the finer points of the business. Then he would make a show of grooming me to take over someday, assuring me that if I played my cards right, this whole heap of rubbish could be mine. But despite his whispered disclosures concerning foolproof methods of separating base metal from gold, of measuring the grade of a precious gem by the degree of its luster and so forth, Papa never offered me a single practical demonstration. Words he must have picked up from his colleagues along the street—like “touchstone,” “nitric acid,” “avoirdupois”—he pronounced the way someone else might say “hocus-pocus” or “Shema Yisrael.” He cracked his knuckles like a concert pianist before pressing the keys of his Gilded Age cash register, and stroked the bill of his leather eyeshade like an admiral on a bridge. But it was ten-to-one that he was making it all up as he went along.