Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (6 page)

We went down to North Main Street, where the wind from the river had a brisk, maritime quality—like it had traveled all the way up from some island in the Gulf just to tease your hair. The shops sported their pyramids of moisture-spangled produce, the racks of irregular pants, the solitary shoes intended to discourage thieves. The rain-washed windows were grease-penciled in freshly slashed prices, in certifications of strictly kosher. The awnings flapped like barbers' bibs. But the businesses must have been manned by skeleton crews.

This I assumed from the caravan of droning automobiles that was stretched for several blocks along the curb. The street was backed up bumper to bumper from Auction down to Commerce, as long as the gangster corteges that used to pass through Brighton Beach. Every vehicle was stuffed to its rumble seat with a well-scrubbed North Main Street family in their Shabbos best.

I doubted it was Zippe's popularity that had brought them out in such numbers, twice in as many days. I knew that the Orthodox cemetery was located in the woods to the south of town, a place said to be ideal for picnics and strolls. So you had to suspect that, where yesterday she'd served as an excuse for a party, today Grandma Zippe provided an opportunity for a community excursion. But that's not what it looked like. What it looked like was a neighborhood that had turned out en masse to give my grandmother a send-off in high Pinch style.

At the forefront of the line of cars was Mr. Gruber's pride and joy, a regular jewel box of a hearse. It had polished brass sidelamps and chromium everything else: hubcaps, S-handles, ornamental winged diety on a louvered hood. It had windows like an oversize fishbowl through which you could view the anomaly of a rough-hewn wooden casket. This was the single concession to the traditional affair that old Isador had envisioned; it was a compromise between no coffin at all and the grand sarcophagus that Uncle Morris claimed he could get at cost. In the bed of that fancy hearse, however, the knotty pine looked like it was incubating, about to transform itself into something worthy of such a vehicle.

Parked directly behind the hearse was a freshly waxed Packard limousine, its elliptical rear window framing the unhappy face of my cousin. She looked all the more pained for having twisted her neck a good hundred and eighty degrees to peer out. How was it, I wondered, that on such a pleasant morning Naomi could still manage to look like the victim of a kidnapping? Like she expected that you should personally arrange for her rescue—but from what? Just seeing Naomi was enough to put a crimp in your day, let alone the nuisance of having to unstick your own eyes from her sullen tarbaby stare. It took the sudden outbreak of a ruckus in front of the storefront funeral parlor to break the spell.

A discordant delegation of worried-looking neighbors had burst forth from Mr. Gruber's crepe-hung door. In their midst was Uncle Morris, puffing portentously and clenching his chubby fists, flapping his jowls. Despite their strident efforts, neither Mr. Petrofsky the grocer nor Sacharin the fishmonger, Alabaster the tinsmith or the otherwise internally battling Mr. and Mrs. Rosen, could appease him. He was threatening to have the undertaker's job. When he saw my family approaching, Uncle Morris held his hand up palm-forward like we should cease and desist.

“Keep your shirt on, Solly!” he cautioned my father, who had yet to say a word; meanwhile my uncle's own sweaty shirt-front was bunching out of his vest. “Everything's under control,” he assured us, groping at his breast for his heart or a monogrammed hankie with which to mop his brow. He would have us know that he was phoning certain parties who had their own way of taking care of business. Pressure would be brought to bear on the office of the mayor himself, we could count on it. Don't worry, the place would be drained by noon.

Good-naturedly, as if they were playing a game that he thought he might like to join in, my papa asked if someone would please tell him what was going on.

Everyone spoke at once, fracturing the morning's tranquillity with a babel of cross-purposes, until Mr. Gruber interceded, stepping forward to hush them with his imperturbable graveside manner. His eyes were demure, his bald spot (when he bowed) a yellow egg in the nest of his oily hair.

“The cemetery is under water,” he patiently explained. “I been to the site myself. The headstones look like bell buoys. You can't bury no Jews there today.”

On my mama's arm Grandpa Isador let go his most bloodcurdling “Vay iz mir!” He tore the lapels of his caftan, leaving them to hang like a pair of vestigial fins. Some of his cronies from Jake Plott's shuffled over, but instead of offering conventional words of comfort, they joined my zayde in his moaning desolation. Think of an Old World version of barbershop harmony. The rest of the neighbors, competing with Uncle Morris's renewed fulminations, jockeyed for openings wherein they could offer advice.

“Consult the rabbi!” called out some greenhorn, probably from force of habit, since the Market Street shul had never been able to support a full-time rabbi. There was a recommendation that the body be cremated—this from Mr. Loewy the jeweler, a man known to consort with freethinkers in the Green Owl Cafe. Immediately he was shouted down. Then came a suggestion concerning the Reform cemetery, which was situated in a suburban setting on high ground. Maybe under these circumstances they might agree to make room …

At this Grandpa Isador came alert. Miraculously rearing up on his fallen arches, he bellowed, “Hab rachmones! My wife you would put in unhallowed ground?”

Mr. Gruber, who had only to open his mouth to create a lull, submitted that things could be worse. After all, at Mr. Kaplan's insistence, the deceased had been prepared against decomposition, and could thus be stored indefinitely in Gruber's establishment for a mutually acceptable fee.

Snarling at the undertaker, Uncle Morris turned to defend himself, explaining (while Mama covered Grandpa Isador's ears) that Zippe hadn't exactly been embalmed. “This is strictly according to Jewish custom. They use Diamond kosher salt or something.” Then he turned back around to give full vent to his outrage over Gruber's seeking to make a profit from our family's misfortune. Working himself toward a stroke, he wanted to know who was in charge here, Morris Kaplan of the Parkway, a fully assimilated and well-connected man of business, or this moldy, two-bit, North Main Street Litvak shmuck? As he ranted, my uncle strangled the balmy air.

All along the procession of cars there were honks and heads leaning out to demand we get the show on the road. Having given up on a practical expedient, the neighbors in front of Gruber's had begun to argue among themselves. They were debating what motives the Lord might have had for inundating a graveyard. It was at that point that my father chose to come forward and tug at his brother's sleeve.

“Never mind, Morris,” said Papa, still chipper under the influence of the vernal morning. “Tell you what I'll do.” It was avoice I'd heard him use in the pawnshop, its tone implying satisfaction guaranteed. “I'll…,” he began, then abruptly left off. He must have sensed that all eyes were upon him, that it was presumptuous of him to volunteer a solution when it was Morris who made the decisions around here. Or was it just that he'd opened his yap without any real solution in mind? In either case, having stuck his foot in it, Papa looked at a loss for some graceful way to pull it back out. “I'll…,” he tried again, and fell silent.

Just then the sun broke through a bank of khaki clouds for the first time in a week. Coming into view, it struck the lenses of my father's glasses, which blazed like a pair of molten medallions. At that moment, with everyone shading their brow against the brilliance of his spectacles, my papa might have been something other than he was. He might have been great and terrible—a renegade high priest from the continent of Pellucidar, say, with deadly ray-beam eyes.

“Tell you what.” He was having another go at it, this time in a remarkably even voice. “I'll keep our mama in my shop till the water goes down.”

As suddenly as it had appeared, the sun was gone again, leaving Papa in a state of blinking chagrin. Nervously he removed his glasses and breathed on the lenses, clearing his throat like he might have spoken out of turn. He chuckled, it was only a joke: that's Solly Kaplan all over, always with a line. But nobody was laughing. Instead, with pulletlike jerks of the head, they were looking from one to another. They were shrugging nifter-shmifter, so why not, waiting for Uncle Morris or anyone else to point out the obvious flaws in Papa's plan. I don't know who was more astonished, my father or the rest of the street, to discover that he'd been taken seriously.

As Papa and I rode down Front Street in the plush-upholstered cab of Mr. Gruber's smooth-running hearse, I saw for the first time just how far the river had risen. The old paint-chipped, cast-iron classing houses that lined the eastern side of the street were hidden behind tall stacks of cotton. This was cotton salvaged from the deluged warehouses at the bottom of the bluff below. Precariously balanced, the bales formed a bulwark of chalk-white palisades, which overlooked the pools of prune-purple water down the slope where the levee had been. To the west the drifting plain of what they call the Big Muddy had no visible bank at all. In fact, there was no horizon to let you know when you were sailing out of the navigable (if hazardous) gunmetal currents into the unmapped gun-metal skies. Only a stranded stubble of unsubmerged trees marked the spot—rest in peace—that once was Arkansas.

The foot of Beale Street was also under the river, which lapped now about the pilings of the Illinois Central Railroad overpass. On top of the elevated trestle a gang of scruffy truants were dangling their skinny legs, pointing at a floating silo that rolled like a lolling leviathan under a flock of barnyard fowl.

I recognized a couple of them from my school, snot-nosed shaygets hooligans who mocked me for a Yankee or a Yid or a four-eyed bookworm if they spoke to me at all. Among their ranks was also a wild Jewboy or two, from whom I'd received much the same treatment, not that I had any use for the lot of them. Friends had always been a commodity that I could mostly do without, thank you very much. They were forever goading you to join them in their pointless games and explorations when you had much better things to do. So maybe it was just that I happened to be wearing a suit on a morning when bare feet would have been more in the mode, that I somehow resented my exclusion from their tomfoolery. Then I had to remind myself that while they were wasting their time, I was involved in an important, even sacred, commission.

As we rounded the corner into Beale, my papa, who'd been thoughtfully silent ever since we'd left the Pinch, looked back to observe, “It's like the view from Mount Ararat after the ark runs aground.” This was untypical of his off-the-wall remarks, which didn't ordinarily include references to the Bible.

We were headed up the hill toward Main Street in time to meet a convoy of gear-grinding trucks coming down. To the rattling wooden tailgates and running boards of these trucks, their beds piled high with bags of sand, dozens of colored men were clinging for dear life. Some of them were wearing the county-issued striped pajamas, while others were dressed nattily in seersuckers, level straw skimmers, and spats. Armed police in dark glasses and mud-spattered spit shines, poised like they were squiring dignitaries, drove their motorcycles on either flank. Bewildered, I turned to ask Papa what he thought was going on, but got only this curt reply: “Mr. Crump decided to build a pyramid—how should I know?”

He seemed frankly a little on edge, my papa, constantly looking over his shoulder as if to make sure that we'd made a clean getaway. Like he wanted to reconfirm that the funeral cavalcade had not followed us from North Main Street, calling more attention to our enterprise than it needed. Of course I was also relieved on that score, glad that we were on our own again and that Mama and Uncle Morris had volunteered to stay and look after Grandpa Isador. Moreover, I was pleased to have been elected, even though I hadn't asked, to ride shotgun (so to speak) on my grandmother's next-to-last journey. Honestly, I didn't know what had gotten into me lately—that instead of sitting alone with a book, I should be hanging out the window of a murmuring hearse, determined not to miss a single detail of this unusual day.

We crossed over Main Street and started down the long hill into the pawnshop district. That's when we were presented with the sight that caused even the unflappable Mr. Gruber, suddenly sucking in air, to miss a gear. From Main down to Third, the street was still business as usual: the pullers lollygagged among the show racks while the eye-buyers swarmed the sidewalks, golden balls dangling over their heads like King Midas's apples—the whole place with a sharp, freshly minted clarity in the aftermath of the rains. But just below Third Street everything was changed. Stranding the row of garish old buildings on the right-hand side of the street and pouring over into what you could call the sunken gardens of Handy Park on the other was a sizable body of water. Its coppery surface, ruffled by the wind, was even further disturbed by a crazy flotilla of wooden fishing dinghies and skiffs. Gliding and colliding back and forth across the water in helter-skelter navigation, they looked like aquatic bumper cars.

What floored me the most, however, was not the mere fact that Beale Street had been so outlandishly transformed—this you could sort of explain. What knocked me for a loop was how natural everything looked. The startling existence of the water seemed to have erased the memory of the original thoroughfare. One glimpse and I could hardly think back to a time when that crowded lagoon hadn't been a regular feature of the local landscape.

As I was leaning a bit too far out the window, Papa reeled me back into the front seat by my coattails. “Our catastrophes,” he sighed, “they're the shvartzers' holidays.” This was maybe his effort to restore a sobriety more in keeping with our solemn errand, though I could have sworn I saw the good humor beginning to tug at the muscles around his mouth. And his eyes blinked the suggestion that, on such a strange day, who could help behaving like shvartzers?