Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (37 page)

“Ha-a-ar-ry!” greeted my mother, her voice bloodcurdlingly shrill. Never quite trusting the wires to carry sound, she'd always felt obliged to shout.

“Mama, where are you?” I cried, as if she might have spokenfrom a cloud, the pompadoured coif of a dark thunderhead. I was amazed at how much I suddenly wished she was here.

“Harry, listen, I'm over at your Uncle Morris's. Too many tongue-wagging yentes on North Main Street, if you know what I mean. So Morris says I should come and stay on the Parkway till this business gets settled. He says tell Harry he's welcome too. Of course I tell him Harry's a big boy, he takes care of himself. The original Mister Does-As-He-Pleases. But you know your uncle, such a worrier—God forbid anybody ain't accounted for. So he insists I should give you a call. Harry?”

I was that close to telling her I was on my way, when I thought to ask exactly which business it was that she was referring to.

“You mean you ain't heard the news about your father?”

“Oh,” I said, glad to at least get that much straight. But still I was troubled, because this Uncle Morris she mentioned—she should correct me if I was wrong, but wasn't this the same Uncle Morris who I knew for a fact had been instrumental in effecting his own brother's ruin? Wasn't he the one who was as good as holding his ruined brother's wife (whom I forthwith absolved of any collusion) a hostage?

All this I had it in mind to tell her, plus the assurance that this same momzer uncle would never get his clammy mitts on his nephew, who was wise to his tricks.

“Mama,” I began assertively enough, only to feel my voice break, my high horse gone lame in mid-stride. After a moment's snuffling I tried again, this time not so much telling as asking: “Mama, can I please talk to”—pronouncing her name like a quiet abracadabra—“Naomi?”

“Wait a minute, Harry,” said my mother. I could tell that she had briefly muffled the receiver at the other end, after which she formally announced, “Your uncle would like a word with you.”

“Hello, Harry.” It was the voice of the enemy, brisk as usual, a voice that slaps your back as it sticks the knife in. He was full of his in-the-bag confidence, his crumpled cellophane breathing. “Look, don't worry—who's worried, right? Your uncle here has got everything under control. Solly's bond? No problem, it's good as taken care of. He'll be back on the street by tomorrow A.M. A little patshed in the dignity department maybe, but knock on wood, that ain't never killed nobody yet. Anyhow, he could use a little vacation, see how the other half lives, probably even make some new friends if I know my brother. And as for the shop—make a phone call here, scratch a back over there, if you take my meaning…”

I don't think I ever truly hated my uncle before. But as I listened I got chilled, my spine supplanted by a tree of ice whose branches reached as far as my fingers and toes. My tongue. I should kick myself if I'd ever thought of him as nothing but a harmless old blowhard. Now I knew him for what he was, your authentic arch-villain, your regulation nemesis. While he continued laying it on about how he proposed to fix this, fix that, I conceived an overriding desire to fix my Uncle Morris. I saw myself, a slingshot clenched in my teeth, scaling a mountain of moneybags that he squatted on top of, big as the
Hindenburg
. I would lay him low, mortally wounded in his Achilles potbelly, nothing left of him but flapping jowls and leaking gas. Then I'd make off with the prize of his daughter. Mama, I suddenly decided, he could keep.

But who was I kidding? Just the effort of trying to despise my uncle as much as he deserved had tuckered me out. Nor could you stay chilled for very long in our stuffy apartment. My spine become liquid, I drooped onto the edge of the kitchen table and asked myself where I got off apportioning blame. Especially as, in this case, the recipient was a man whom it behooved me to regard as my prospective father-in-law. Mishpocheh, I should remember, was thicker than water. After all, Uncle Morris wasn't the only culprit in this affair; there was my papa's own tacit complicity to take into account. There was the fact that lies and deceit seemed to run in the family, myself a chip off the block in that respect.

In the end, who could say which of us was really the more culpable—Uncle Morris for his double-dealing, mother-stealing, Judas-kissing treachery, or me, his miserable nephew, who'd forsaken his only friends for the sake of a small-time gonif's daughter, for my princess first cousin, whose nasal intonation I would have given what was left of my soul to hear again.

“… So you'll come over here, you'll have a nice nosh in the peace and quiet of my humble abode, away from all that yehtehtehteh in the Pinch,” Uncle Morris still prattled. “Come on, palsie, whaddaya say—yes Uncle, no Uncle, nu?”

“Uncle!” It came out like “enough already,” though I tried to suppress my impatience. “Can I talk to Naomi?” Then my mind wouldn't wait to begin the conversation: “Naomi, it's me!” “Oh Harry, sweetie, kepeleh, it's always been you! I missed you like crazy! Mmm mmm kiss kiss kiss…”

“Naomi?” Uncle Morris seemed to be considering, and for an anxious second I thought he was going to deny that he had a daughter. “Why, she's up in St. Louie with my sister-in-law, her Tante Frieda Green. I thought you knew. Course, you never met Frieda, did you? Such a pisk on that girl, I'm telling you, a born matchmaker if ever there was. Always she's shushkening, ‘Naomi, meet this one, a Rothschild! And that one's papa made a killing in BVDs.' But you know something, Harry, I'm glad you finally hit it off, you two. It's naches when cousins get along…”

Again I smelled a rat. Here was more of his mischief: he'd sent Naomi away to spite me. He'd deliberately put her beyond my reach and in the way of more acceptable suitors. In fact, hadn't he killed two birds for the price of packing one Naomi off to her aunt? While protecting his daughter from unwelcome advances, he had also cleared the coast to bring home his locked-up brother's zaftig wife. It was all very neat. On the other hand, I was vaguely aware that Naomi went to St. Louis every summer, and even if she'd wanted to, she couldn't have reached me to say goodbye.

Then I remembered something else, that I had behaved in a fashion that was practically a tradition among Kaplan males, who often lost their women through being preoccupied. Left unattended, their chosen ones frequently died or went away. I remembered also how it was with my cousin, who was sometimes so excitable, such a spitfire; sometimes, unless you had some talent for noticing, you would hardly even know she was there.

My desolation complete, I said thanks all the same to my uncle and hung up the phone.

It occurred to me that I ought to be hungry, since I couldn't have told you the last time I sat down with my family to a proper meal. As there was no one around to remind me, I had to remind myself that I should keep up my strength. So I opened the refrigerator, which was badly in need of defrosting. But when I got a load of its neglected contents—the potato pancakes like powder puffs, the gelatin ring like an inner tube, the coral-green brisket, an overripe melon, a squished jelly blintz, a geranium, a pair of shoes—I lost what little appetite I had.

I went to my alcove and sprawled face-down on the hide-abed. With a motion that used to be second nature, I reached for one of the books on my nightstand, a frayed cloth edition of a G. A. Henty saga, as it happened. Leafing through it, however, I quickly concluded that the book had too many words. I tossed it aside on my mattress and took up another from a small pile of survivors on the floor. This one turned out to be the good old reliable Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, profusely illustrated and morocco-bound. Here was the stuff I'd been missing: dangerous exploits pressed tidily between hard covers, which kept them from spilling over into the reader's real life.

But this book was also giving me trouble. For all its colorful drawings of Arabian stallions and rainbow-plumaged birds of paradise, not to mention thugee assassins held captive in clouds of Baker Street pipe smoke, the book might as well have been written in a foreign tongue. That's how little patience I had left for stories. So I dropped the book beside the other, disturbed by the way their splayed-open bindings resembled the double pitches of rooftops in a flood.

I don't remember falling asleep, though I did notice how the evening stepped especially hard on the heels of the afternoon. Then it must have been late, because the commercial bustle of North Main Street had given way to other noises: the moaning of a barge below the levee, the rattling of a freight train over the bridge, the skirling of crickets, a tinkling toilet, a scratching mouse. Lying in the dark, I isolated every sound in the hope of discerning something particular. Just what it was I was listening for I couldn't at first have said; then it came to me. I was listening for the sound of a turning knob, an opening door, the signal that my father had come home from his pawnshop for the night. Funny how you could miss a noise you never even remembered having heard.

Once I'd closed my eyes, I had a hard time prying them open again. By the time I did, sawing with my fingers at the gluey lids, it was morning; streamers of sunlight were making a Maypole of the mimosa outside my window. I yawned luxuriously as I raised myself on my elbows, creating an avalanche of tumbling books. Thus surrounded by the rubble of a day that had yet to begin, I recalled how unhappy I was.

I got out of bed and began to wander the apartment without pausing to change the clothes I'd slept in. To stand still was to invite unkind thoughts; add any more to what I was already shlepping around and I wouldn't be able to budge. Keep moving, that was the ticket. Stay busy—though I was hard pressed to think of what to do next. Maybe I should make some coffee; people made coffee in the morning. And while I didn't really care for the taste of it, I liked the musical trickle that the percolator made. It was a pleasant distraction from the silence of the apartment, which the hubbub outside called too much attention to.

Things picked up a little more when, cracking some eggs into a bowl, I turned on the electric mixer. I went into the closet, hauled out the Hoover, and plugged it in. Soon I was conducting a regular symphony of whir, gurgle, and drone, pleased at the way that they simulated the sounds of a lived-in apartment. But now that I'd turned on every appliance in the house, I began to have the uneasy feeling that the appliances were about to turn on me.

This, of course, was nonsense. Nevertheless, in a sweat I switched everything off. In the ensuing silence I realized that I was only being sensible. Beyond the obvious impracticality of running household appliances to no purpose in an empty apartment, the noise might have drowned out the news—which was surely at hand—of my papa's release on bail. Any minute now the door would open, the telephone ring, so I sank into an understaffed armchair to wait. But for all his promised pulling of strings, I suspected that Uncle Morris was taking his own sweet time.

I turned on the console Zenith, consecrated by their portrait to the memory of my grandparents, and listened half expecting to hear some word of my father's difficulties, that he had become an international episode. But while there was no mention of any Kaplan scandal, there was certainly plenty of tsuris to go around. The nation's waters having proven unruly, other elements were getting into the act. The heartland was dust, its silos like desert relics inundated by time. Kindled by the friction of feet that the marathon dancers had fallen asleep on, a dance hall on Long Island was in flames. A lady flier known as the sweetheart of the jet stream had been taken for its own by thin air, and somewhere in the country where misfortune never struck, a baby had slipped down a hole.

You think you got problems? After the expense of son Clifford's wedding (which had to be annulled when it was discovered that the bride had a past), “One Man's Family” were having to tighten their belts. In “Portia Faces Life,” Portia was patently refusing to do so, having lost her third fiancé to a freak accident. There was trouble at the lodge hall, the Kingfish bilked out of the treasury by a designing female. Jimmy Durante was mortified, Mortimer Snerd afraid, and the Answer Man stumped by a question concerning the nature of truth.

Spies were in the unions, union defectors among the factory scabs, the criminal element in every walk of life. There were swing fanatics at Roseland, driven certifiably mad by Benny Goodman's horn. There were homegrown loudmouths complaining that Benny's style of music could be blamed for the current hekdish in Europe, where, according to H. V. Kalten-born's pea-shooter delivery, the murder tallies were announced like the scores of sporting events.

Where had I been that nobody told me how God's Depression-green earth was going straight to hell? Not that you could pin that one on me. If anybody had contributed to the sorry shape the world was in, it was my screwball family. Myself, all I'd done was go about my own business, abandoning everybody I knew.

As the morning wore on and the apartment filled with suffocating heat, I gave up on my father's return. I raised myself with a groan from the armchair and plodded downstairs into the blistering street, where there was still not much to be found in the way of fresh air. A sitting duck for my own dark thoughts and the relentless largess of North Main, I decided that my first impulse was best: I should just keep moving.

Putting the Pinch behind me at Poplar Avenue, I crossed over into Main Street proper and trudged along in the hothouse sunshine. The air was dense with yellow vapor, smelling a mix of roasted peanuts and carbon monoxide, with a tinge of fresh poop from the horses of the mounted police. Clerks in sweaty seersucker dispatched couriers in a tocsin of bicycle bells. Ladies flashed their legs as they got out of taxis, drawing wolf whistles from the ranks of loafing bankers' sons. Negro porters sniffed for some hint of a breeze, leaning at impossible angles to pull their laden handcarts rickshaw-style. Nobody seemed to be actively ignoring me, nor did they regard me with any special fondness or disdain.