Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (7 page)

Mr. Gruber pulled his hearse to a puttering stop alongside the granite curb in front of Kaplan's Loans, and there sat Oboy with his back to the iron lattice. In place of his stool, which must still have been locked up inside the shop, he was perched on an upended Kickapoo crate. It was a pointless fidelity, of course, since Kaplan's had been kept closed for the funeral—though I didn't suppose that Oboy had been informed. And besides, when does a wooden Indian leave the cigar store? He was sitting, as usual, with his canvas cap pulled low on his leathery forehead. Gazing in the direction of the outsize puddle down the street, he looked like someone scouring the horizon for dry land.

He remained in that frozen posture until after we'd stepped out on the sidewalk, when all at once he came to life. He sprang from his crate and, without being prompted, beat my father to the rear of the hearse. Opening the door, he started to tug at the casket as if he'd done this sort of thing before, as if he'd read in my papa's lingering apprehensiveness (he was looking both ways up and down the avenue) a signal to make haste and unload this shipment of possibly dubious goods. After all, in a book, wouldn't this be the part where somebody pulls a switcheroo and the body turns out to be replaced by contraband? But just as Papa was cautioning Oboy to be gentle, the box slipped out of the puller's grip.

It fell to the curb, jarring loose the hingeless lid, which slid open, exposing my grandma to any interested party along the street. Thanks to Mr. Gruber's handiwork, the old lady, who'd never looked too awfully alive, now appeared to be entirely artificial, like a furiously puckered toy papoose. Only the single glaucous eye, which the mortician, for all his craft, had been unable to batten down, identified her as the real thing.

I tried to tell myself that she looked very nice considering, but I was skewered by her open eye. As militantly disapproving in death as it had been in life, it seemed to demand to know why all of this was being done to her. Why could she not have been left to carry on sitting in her unscented stiffness by the apartment window, where she had never really been in anyone's way? This was the point where I had to renew my efforts to believe that, for a change, my father knew what he was doing.

“That's my mamele in there,” explained Papa, completing his admonition to Oboy despite the fait accompli. The puller grunted like he was pleased to meet her, though his place was seemingly not to question why; scruples, so far as I could tell, were not a part of his makeup. Then, closing the lid quickly lest she create a public nuisance, Oboy resumed tugging at the casket. This was how he always moved on those occasions when he was disposed to move: like he was in a hurry. As if he were one of those golems out of my grandfather's antiquated books who must take swift advantage of their quickened bones before they were turned back into inanimate clay.

Mr. Gruber came padding forward to lend his tacit assistance. He was joined by a couple of loiterers with jaws like blue charcoal, with vests displaying old war medals and torn hobnail shoes showing the toes of union suits. I'd seen this before, how these down-on-their-luck characters would appear as if from the steam vents at the least chance of earning a handout. I was left, as usual, with nothing to do.

After unlocking the lattice, my father turned around and began, somewhat uncertainly, to orchestrate the entrance of Grandma Zippe into Kaplan's Loans. As you could tell by the way he was beckoning the pallbearers, with his left hand contradicting his right, the role of director did not come to him naturally. But once he'd backed through the shop door, sweeping aside the show racks that had yet to be hauled outside, my papa was another man. He was competent, even cheerful, a regular impresario leaving no question as to who was in charge. Behind him the pallbearers—who had veered drunkenly at first, grumbling under their burden as they stooped to compensate for Oboy's dwarfish size—followed faithfully where he led. Gingerly Papa steered them down the aisle between the narrow straits of the display cases. Having thus conducted their safe passage, he left them a moment to fend for themselves. He unlatched the little gate that led through his tiny office to the storage area, then strode on ahead to the chicken-wire cage where he kept his so-called valuables.

This was my papa's holy of holies, the cache in which the really vintage rubbish had been culled from the garden-variety—a fine distinction that required a more discerning eye than my own. A little too fastidiously, under the circumstances, Papa cleared a space among the lady-shaped mood lamps and the fractured Victrolas, the model locomotives and the dumbbells endorsed by Eugene Sandow, the alleged papyrus scrolls. He posed a dressmaker's manikin, outfitted like a headless Marie Antoinette, as a sentry beside the open door of his bauble- and gadget-filled vault. He dumped a brace of dueling pistols and some rubber Walt Disney rodents into a nest of fancy crinoline gowns. He shoved aside the colonnaded ant plantation, the plaster of Paris saints, the clutch of prosthetic limbs, and the taxidermed beaver with a windup mechanism that caused it to spank a bare-bottomed baby doll with the flat of its tail—arranging them all like witnesses at a nativity. He dragged in a couple of sticker-covered steamer trunks to use as a makeshift catafalque; then “Chop-chop,” Papa clapped his hands and summoned the pallbearers to lumber in with the casket.

The two volunteers especially seemed to be overstating the effort of carrying what was, after all, just an old lady. This was obviously for the sake of sweetening their gratuity, or else it was further evidence of the way that my grandma commanded a gravity beyond her nominal size. In any case, amid universal groaning, they lowered her box too fast. They dropped it onto the steamer trunks in an agitation of dust, which left you expecting them to vanish behind it like magician's assistants. When the dust cleared and all were accounted for, Papa shooed everybody out of the cage. He tipped the pair of vagrants to get rid of them, though not before shaking their hands, then turned to settle with Mr. Gruber. Meanwhile Oboy had begun to yank at my father's sleeve.

“This here yo mama's ticket,” the puller flatly submitted, offering Papa the stub of a receipt stamped with the name of the shop. It was the kind of liberty I'd seen the little whosits take once or twice before, like it needed his involvement to make things official. Like he thought he had to cover for his boss's oversights. But this time it was the puller who had the wrong idea. An expired bubbe in temporary cold storage shouldn't be confused with the other superannuated property of Kaplan's Loans; and I waited for my papa, with his fresh new assertiveness, to notify his employee of said fact.

But instead, Papa took the ticket without hesitation, smiling like he and Oboy were thick as thieves. He even went so far as to give a playful tug at the bill of the puller's cap, pulling it over his eyes, which Oboy never bothered to correct as he groped away. That's when I began to worry that my papa's pack-rat instincts had finally gotten out of control, knowing as I did how an item in Kaplan's pawn might molder away forever without being redeemed.

When the shop was cleared of vagrants and morticians, and Oboy had reassumed his post outside, Papa went whistling back into his cage and began to reorganize the displaced merchandise. In moments the entire top of the casket was covered with assorted junk, its knotty pine hardly apparent to the uninformed eye. Then, brushing his palms and snatching an eye-shade from a hook, adjusting his necktie by the reflection in a silver serving spoon, my father stepped forth to greet the customers who had started to trickle in.

He began formally, with an unusual reserve—as if, instead of bringing in their worthless goods to pawn, they had come by to pay their last respects. But soon Papa dropped any pretense of formality, succumbing to the infectious high spirits of his clientele. There was one old shvartzer, for instance, a rake-thin, bow-backed regular known as Cousin Jabo, who leaned on his whittled cane to click his heels. “The river she up, and the cotton she down!” he sang out like a password—he might have mistaken our shop for a speakeasy. At the same time his partner, another old scarecrow in a motley of calico patches, shook his bristled head contemplatively. “Unh unh unh,” he opined, “them foty days and nights sho do go fast when you havin fun.” Then both of them started cackling in a way that made you feel like ripe fruit was dropping on your head.

A little later a trio of stout, tight-skirted ladies stationed along the length of an oriental rug, their bottoms graduated according to width, congaed into the shop like a darktown version of a Chinese New Year dragon. After them some joker, whose open dustcoat revealed an old-fashioned bathing costume, came in looking to make, of all things, a purchase. He went away happy after Papa had outfitted him in a full-length diving suit complete with helmet.

The rain had driven everybody out of their minds. In the face of things, the wisest course would naturally have been to crawl into the front window with book in hand, but in the confusion surrounding Zippe's postponed funeral I'd come unprepared. I was a captive audience. But every so often, on the flimsy excuse of dusting off the show, of passing the time with Oboy, for whom time always seemed to stand still, I ducked out the door. I checked to make sure that the Beale Street bayou had not disappeared before I had the chance to get a proper eyeful.

All that afternoon we heard the sirens. We saw the press gangs of police rounding up errant Negroes for the purpose, as we learned, of sandbagging the levees. A number of refugees from forced labor, undiscouraged by my father, found their way into the shop, and always they brought with them some late-breaking rumor: The water was still rising; there were plans afoot for evacuating the city. The mayor's council had moved its offices on board the
Island Queen
, which had slipped its moorings and drifted away. Memphis was without any government. But Beale Street never surrendered to the general alarm. Pawnbrokers and merchants alike stood in their doorways with folded arms, showing themselves prepared to sink or swim. No disaster was so great that it could disrupt their appointed hours of business, nor deter them from an opportunity of turning a profit. And my father no doubt prided himself on being a member of this fraternity.

But around dusk Papa got one of those phone calls from my mother, which usually spelled trouble. From where I stood I could hear her voice over the line, sounding a little like a muted kazoo. Whatever she was demanding, Papa was resisting, trying for all he was worth to pass the buck.

“Listen Mildred, we're awful busy here,” he protested, his cheeks coloring slightly with shame. “Can't Morris …? Can't Dr. Seligman …?”

By now I'd assumed the nature of her summons: Grandpa Isador must have been inconsolable again, his pacification requiring all available hands. That's why I had to sigh aloud when Papa volunteered, “Okay, I'll send Harry right over,” as if that settled everything. To my relief the proposal, which had overtones of sacrifice, apparently did not meet my mother's terms.

While his lips continued to mouth a few more silent
but but buts
, in the end Papa sulkily conceded to her wishes. With such tender consideration did he remove his sleeve garters and visor that I thought he was going to kiss them, like sacred vestments, before returning them to their respective hooks.

“C'mon Harry.” His voice was approaching a whine. “We got to go home.” It was a pathetic echo of this morning's rousing call to the funeral. Of course the family ought to be together at the end of such a day, just as we'd been together at the beginning, but the idea of going home now seemed like a kind of defeat. It meant returning to where we'd started, as if everything were the same as before the flood. But if nothing had changed, why was I seized with the impulse to say what I said?

“You go ahead. I'll stay and mind the shop for a while.”

Papa looked at me like, Whose little boy are you? “Look, it's Shabbos already,” he pointed out, as if this were supposed to mean something, coming as it did from one who'd told his own father that the Sabbath was a luxury a man of business couldn't afford. For this I figured “Nu?” was enough of an answer. Then he tried another angle, telling me that my presence would be required to help make a minyan. I asked him since when did the ritual mourning come before the burial, and besides, Jews didn't sit shivah on Shabbos.

“A k'nocker I got here,” Papa said to the bossed tin ceiling. “Awright, Mr. K'nocker, I ain't got time to argue.” He gave me a look that I guess was intended to probe my murky depths, then hunched his shoulders to signify that I'd won. But this was too easy. Defiant sons aren't supposed to overthrow their father's mandates so handily, are they? And the realization that I'd done just that resulted in my immediate loss of nerve.

My sinking heart, on its way down, passed my papa's on the rise. With a proud hand on my shoulder, he shrugged again, plucked a wayward thread from my lapel, and tossed me his keys. “Okeydoke, Mr. Big Shot, today you're a man,” he informed me. “Don't stay open too late.” And he was out the door in an arpeggio of chimes.

His parting words, however intended, resonated odiously in my ears. They sounded to me like the kind of command you gave some flunky accomplice, that he should stand lookout while you returned to the scene of the crime.

“This is just ducky,” I said to the ceiling, catching myself in an impersonation of my father. Was it fair to say that Sol Kaplan was finally certifiably meshugge? Not happy with having turned his pawnshop into a museum of derelict rubbish, he'd gone himself one better: he'd made it a mausoleum as well.

I resolved to try and make the best of it, though I could have done with a little more in the way of a commencement exercise. What happened to the part where I recited the Moneylender's Creed? Still, I supposed I was glad Papa hadn't made a big thing of it. Better that he should treat my taking over as a matter of routine. Because, if I'd thought of it otherwise, at the appearance of my first customer—a sartorial darkie in a bug-back coat, with powder-gray temples and serious, blood-rimmed eyes, carrying what looked to be a grainy black doctor's bag—I would have panicked.