Last Respects (30 page)

Going up East Fourth Street, I moved uneasily. I had no idea who was watching me. I had no idea if the people on the block knew that my mother had been missing since the night before. It seemed sensible not to be seen running. In those days people who ran collected stares, or cheers, or jeers, or bullets. If the Imberotti trigger man had me in his sights, I could not escape by running. I hit the street at a walk and started up the block toward Avenue D.

Why? Because night was coming in fast across the river from Brooklyn, and that meant I was due in Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store to relieve his mother behind the counter. Moving along in the gathering darkness through the deeply rutted grooves of habit, I began to think more clearly about Mr. Kelly.

The government man had indicated in our kitchen that he knew all about what had taken place the night before. It seemed reasonable to assume, therefore, he knew that I worked for Abe Lebenbaum in the candy store. Mr. Kelly had made it perfectly clear that he knew about my dealings with Mr. Heizerick. And he knew about the fire in the Zabriskie sisters’ bedroom.

The fire had not until this moment seemed any more important than any of the other events of the night before. Now I began to understand that while I may have forgotten about the fire, the Fire Department had not. I could suddenly hear again the bells of those fire engines as I raced down the fire escape with the hike wagon. I could hear those bells, and I could hear something else. The excited voices of Lya and Pauline and Marie—shivering a little maybe; after all there had been no time to put on any clothes—as they explained to the authorities that they had been minding their own business—who else could they get to mind a business like theirs?—when suddenly they were enveloped by flames.

The key word, I suddenly grasped, was authorities. Whoever they were, meaning cops, the odds were good that they would learn as much as Mr. Kelly had learned. Which meant the cops could very well be waiting for me in Abe Lebenbaum’s candy store. It seemed sensible to let them wait.

At the Avenue D corner I did not turn left toward the candy store. I kept right on going, across Avenue D, toward Avenue C. Halfway up the block my brain started to come to life. I could suddenly see the mess I was in as a two-parter. Part one, what had happened the night before. Part two, what was going to happen as a result of those events.

I knew a good deal about the first. I had no idea about the second. All at once the part I understood, the events in which I had been involved, became more important than they had seemed when I was racing through them. Holes, I saw, had to be plugged. The most obvious one hit me like my father’s slap.

I turned and doubled back toward Avenue D. When I arrived in front of Lenox Assembly Rooms, night had settled in. The great big globes on the black iron poles set in the sandstone balustrades were not lighted. The steps were deserted. Either no bar mitzvahs or weddings were scheduled for that night, or Mr. Kelly had anticipated my move and set a trap for me.

My first instinct, naturally, was to turn and run. I did not turn and run because I could manage only one half of the operation. I turned, and stopped dead. Coming up the street toward me was Mr. Norton Krakowitz and a cop.

The cop was so absorbed in whatever it was Mr. Krakowitz was saying, and Mr. Krakowitz was so absorbed in the sounds he was making, that neither saw me. I turned back and ran up the sandstone steps.

How to describe my feelings when I reached the top and pressed against the front doors and they opened inward? Very simple. I suddenly believed in God. I am convinced He was responsible for getting me from those front doors up the marble stairs to the second floor, down the shadowy corridor, and into the small dressing room, where the night before the velvet cape of the pageboy had been wrapped around my shoulders, and the golden cardboard crown had been pressed on my head.

I thought for the first time about the kid who had actually been scheduled to be the pageboy at the Shumansky wedding. Suppose that boy had not been delayed? Suppose he had arrived under the canopy on time? Would the trigger man have looked elsewhere for the son of the woman who had enraged the Imberottis? Would he have waited to get the woman herself in his sights? My mother? Would Arnold Greenspan now be alive?

The only light in the dressing room when I slipped through the door came from a lamppost out on the street just below the single window. It was enough to show that the Troop 244 hike wagon was sitting exactly where I had left it the night before.

I flipped open the lid. The wagon was empty. I grabbed the handle, dragged the wagon out of the room, and started back up the corridor. At the top of the divided stairs I stopped. Mr. Krakowitz and the cop were coming up the left wing. They were moving slowly, placing their steps carefully one at a time into the small splash of yellow from the cop’s flashlight. They reminded me of a couple of kids tiptoeing through a string of puddles after a rainstorm. I ducked below the level of the marble rail and pulled the wagon toward the right wing of the stairs. When the yellow splash of light reached the top on the left, I crouched low and started down on the right.

Mr. Krakowitz and the cop were still moving along the corridor toward the dressing room when I reached the lobby. I was through those front doors, down the sandstone steps, and on my way back up Avenue D before the two men could possibly have reached the dressing room in which the night before I had turned over to my mother all those bottles of Old Southwick.

Now that it was dark my problem was simpler. I reached Eighth Street without being stopped or recognized. My confidence went up. When I reached the steps leading down to Old Man Tzoddick’s cellar, the feeling that I was on top of it, the feeling that I had the ball game sewed up, all that vanished abruptly. Old Man Tzoddick’s pushcart was parked in the vacant lot next to the steps.

Only someone who understood the role the pushcart played in Old Man Tzoddick’s life would have known this meant he was at home. Except for the lampposts at the Avenue C and Avenue B corners, Eighth Street was dark. Not a hint of light was visible from the cellar, and there were plenty of places through which light would have leaked. If a candle stump had been burning inside that cellar, everybody on Eighth Street would have been aware of it. Nothing was burning. The conclusion of Senior Patrol Leader Kramer was that Old Man Tzoddick may have been in residence but he was zonked out.

I tiptoed down the stone cellar steps. As I did so, I reflected on how much of my life was being spent these days on the tips of my toes. Before my mother exploded into the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House gym on the night of the All-Manhattan Rally eliminations, I had walked like everybody else. Anyway, like most people. Clumping along, heel and toe. Making the normal amount of noise. Now, since Walter Sinclair and the Federal government had entered my life, it was all on tiptoe.

It was not the sort of reflection that would help me retrieve the stuff from the wagon that I had stuffed into the cave behind the loose stone the night before. I got off my toes, squatted down, pulled out the stone, and started unstuffing it. I had the two cooking pots, the iron grill, and the signal flags safely transferred from the cave to the wagon, and I was reaching for the tied bundle of six-inch pieces of file from the flint-and-steel sets, when there was an explosion behind me.

“You little
momzer!”
Old Man Tzoddick screamed. “You big crook!”

As always, even when flat on my back at the bottom of a set of cellar steps, my first thought was irrelevant: Why don’t you make up your mind? How could a senior patrol leader, sixty-two pounds on the Hannah H. Lichtenstein gym scale, be both a little
momzer
and a big crook?

“You dirty
goniff!”
Old Man Tzoddick screamed.

This was hardly an answer. But it cleared my head. Just in time, too. The filthy old ragpicker was swinging what looked like a stubby length of metal pipe. I rolled over fast, caught the blow on my arm, snatched the pipe from his hand, and shoved him away. He fell back through the cellar door. I grabbed the wagon, dragged it up the stone steps, and set off for Avenue B at a gallop. The length of metal pipe, I discovered, was the long flashlight we kept in the hike wagon for signaling Morse at night.

By the time I got around the corner, I was pretty sure Old Man Tzoddick was not following me. By the time I got down into the basement of the Hannah H. Lichtenstein House, I had recovered the feeling that I was doing the right thing. The troop meeting room was dark.

I flipped on the light and dragged the wagon to the closet. Before shoving it into the space from which Mr. O’Hare had given me permission to take it the night before, I checked the contents. Everything was back in the wagon except the flashlight and the envelope of charred gauze I had used the night before. Nobody would miss that. I decided to hold onto the flashlight. Walter Sinclair was a Morse man. He had told me, if things went wrong, I was to head for the Fourth Street dock and he would communicate with me somehow. Things had sure gone wrong. I closed the wagon, pushed it into the closet, shut the closet door, and flipped off the light. I climbed up the stairs and headed for the dock.

When I got there I wondered how a communication from Walter would solve anything. Sooner or later I would have to go home. In fact, the later I got home the worse the mess would be. My father and my Aunt Sarah would be sure to be waiting up for me. And yet, just being on the dock made me feel better.

For the first time since I’d seen the red stains start to spread across Aaron Greenspan’s shirt the night before, I didn’t feel the compulsion to think. I just sat there on the edge of the dock, dangling my feet over the hill of coal on the barge lashed below me. Smelling the oil-dirty yet curiously clean smell of the river. Hearing the creak of the mooring ropes. Catching, without actually listening, the muted whistles and bells from the barges moving across the Brooklyn skyline like flies across a pile of spotted peaches on an Avenue C pushcart. Watching the lights on the tugs in the distance winking on and off like Morse dots and dashes.

I came awake. I had not realized that I must have dozed off. Half asleep, my mind had been counting those lights winking on and off aimlessly at the other side of the river. Counting them, and timing their length, without knowing I was doing it. Now I realized there had been a pattern to some of them. Long lights were dashes. Short lights were dots. The best Morse man Mr. O’Hare had ever known had recorded those dots and dashes even while half asleep. And the recording had formed the pattern. Dash, dot, dot, dot. B. Dot. E. Dash, dot. N. Dash, dot. N. Dash, dot, dash, dash. Y. B-E-N-N-Y. Benny. Benny? That was me! Benny Kramer!

I leaned forward on the edge of the dock and concentrated. I knew who was trying to communicate with me. He had said he would. He was a Morse man. The lights that were forming the pattern were coming from a dark lump lying low in the water all the way across the river. It was surrounded by larger lumps, tugs and barges, but these larger lumps were moving. This smaller lump was motionless. I grasped that this was why the lights had been making a pattern. The other lights also winked on and off but they had no meaning because they hurried away from themselves, like scattered confetti. But these lights from the smaller lump lying low in the river at the far side of—

— • • •

•

— •

— •

— • — —

BENNY.

— • • •

•

— •

— •

— • — —

BENNY.

I was suddenly pleased with myself. I had been smart to hold onto the long flashlight when I repacked the wagon. I was pleased because I saw that Walter Sinclair had expected me to be smart. Sometimes, at fourteen, you have to make your own medals.

I stood on the dock edge, hesitated, then jumped down to the barge. I hit the coal, felt my knickers tear over the right knee, then started up the pile. When I got to the top, I was eight or ten feet higher than the edge of the dock. I got myself set in the coal and started to flip the switch of the flashlight on and off.

—

• • • •

• •

• • •

THIS

• •

• • •

IS

— • • •

•

— •

— •

— • — —

BENNY.

I signaled it again. And again. And again. Praying that the batteries would hold.

THIS IS BENNY.

THIS IS BENNY.

THIS IS BENNY.

In the middle of my seventh signal the pattern of lights from the other side of the river took on a new shape. I stopped signaling and started to read the new arrangement of dots and dashes. I caught the letters without any trouble. But they made no sense. I wished desperately that Chink Alberg or Hot Cakes Rabinowitz was crouching at my knees with a pad and a pencil. What I wanted was to call the letters as I read them without having to try to make words out of them. But what you want and what you have are not always the same. Life.

So I kept reading the letters over and over again. The same letters:

• •

• — •

•

• —

— • •

— • — —

— — —

• • — •

I READ YOU.

My mind recorded the dots and dashes about eight times. Maybe more. Then the signaler obviously assumed I had it. Anyway, the signal changed. I had no trouble with the new words. They were very simple. I didn’t need Chink Alberg or Hot Cakes Rabinowitz to translate for me the message that came in across the river in winking lights.

YOUR MAMA SAFE DO NOT WORRY JUST KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND YOUR EYES OPEN FOR FURTHER MESSAGES YOU ARE A GOOD KID.

Using the troop flashlight, I signaled to the
Jefferson Davis II
at the other side of the river the words that were now perfectly comprehensible and, for almost half a century, always would be. They still are.