Old Men at Midnight (2 page)

I sat very still.

She rose from the sofa. “He knows, of course. He has terrible dreams.” She looked around the room. “Tell me, is three o’clock the only time you have?”

“It’s best for me.”

She smoothed her dress. “He will be here on Wednesday, God willing. I thank you very much for your time.”

She went out the door.

From the window of the living room I watched them walk along the street together in the hot shade of the early summer maple trees.

He arrived with his aunt at three o’clock on Wednesday, carrying a yellow pencil and a blue notebook of the kind issued by yeshivas. The notebook had ruled pages, a drawing of Moses ben Maimon, the medieval Jewish philosopher and rabbi, on the front cover, and the Western Wall on the back. He wore dark trousers and a white long-sleeved shirt, and she had on a light-colored long-sleeved dress. She explained that Noah had not wanted to walk alone. She would wait in the living room while he had his lesson.

“You are alone in the house?” she asked.

I told her that my parents were at work and my little sister was at a day camp.

“I will sit here,” Mrs. Polit said. “The heat is terrible outside.”

She took one of the easy chairs.

I motioned to Noah. He followed me slowly through the living room and dining room to the kitchen. He was about an inch shorter than I and walked with a gait slightly favoring his right leg.

“When did you come to the United States?”

“Two week,” he said.

“Two weeks ago.”

He nodded.

“Noah, repeat after me. Two weeks ago.”

“Two weeks ago.”

Inside the kitchen, he stopped and looked around. We had moved into this President Street house a year after my sister, Rachel, was born, and the kitchen had been renovated. He stood looking at the bright tile walls, at the new table and chairs, at the two sinks, at the stove and refrigerator. I asked him if he wanted a glass of milk and a cookie.

“No, I eat already.”

“I
ate
.”

“Yes, I ate.”

“Our home is kosher.”

“I no worry.”

“I’m
not
worried.”

“I am not—worried.”

He followed me through the kitchen into the den.
There were cushioned chairs and a couch, a rug, and a large floor radio. The far wall was mostly two bay windows and a door in between that gave out onto a wooden porch with a round table and chairs and, a few feet away, lounge chairs. Down the stairs beyond the porch a paved path defined a lawn. Inside it a rock border circled a bird-bath and peony bushes. Across the path to the right of the lawn, pink roses rambled along a fence while yellow and white honeysuckle climbed the fence opposite. In this heat the aroma of honeysuckle was particularly strong. Against a wall formed by the rear of backyard neighbors’ garages hung a basketball hoop, a few feet from a swing-and-slide set. The screened bay windows were closed. Fan-cooled air blew from the inside, not a wisp of the air from the outside.

We sat down in chairs, facing each other. He had long thin fingers and a long thin face. His neck was scrawny and fronted with a prominent Adam’s apple, and his face was damp with perspiration.

I said, “Is it okay to call you Noah?”

He said, “My name Noah.” He pronounced it “Noyach.”

“My name
is
Noah.”

“My name is Noah.”

“You can call me Davita.”

“Like David. Davita.”

“Are your aunt and uncle very religious?”

“What means ‘religious’?” The words came out as “vat mins ‘re-lee-gi-us’?”

I said, “Are they shomrei mitzvos?” The Hebrew term means “keepers of the commandments.”

“Oh, yes.”

“What synagogue do they go to?”

“It called Bris Achim.”

“It
is
called.”

“It is called.”

“I don’t know that synagogue.”

“It is small.”

Suddenly he was very still. He sat with his eyes wide and staring. A shimmer of sweat lay across his forehead. He stirred and closed his eyes. Then he blinked a few times. The perspiration lay now dripping on his forehead, and he wiped at it with his open palms.

I said, “Let’s start the lesson.”

“Lesson, yes. Came for lesson.”

The script for the Hebrew alphabet was printed on the first page of his notebook. I turned it over and wrote the letters of the English alphabet on the back page. Then I wrote the verbs
build, speak, write, sleep, wake, dress, eat, walk
—in first, second, and third person singular and plural. I gave a list of words for things he would find around the house and on the street. I explained verb and noun, and tried him on a reader I had used with a previous student. He could hardly make out the words. I told him we would start on an easier book. He sat there, perspiring. I looked up and there was Mrs. Polit, standing inside the entrance to the den. I had no idea how long she had been there.

She said, “You give a long lesson.”

“I lost track of the time.”

We got up off the chairs and started through the kitchen. I asked, “Noah, would you like a cookie?”

“Cookies are not good for him,” Mrs. Polit said.

We entered the living room.

“Wait outside for me a moment,” she said to Noah.

When we were alone she said to me, “It’s not possible for you to have the lesson later?”

“Would four be better?”

“When your parents are home.”

“I have a five-year-old sister. The house becomes noisy.”

“Isn’t there a quiet place you can go?”

“There’s my room on the third floor. We can study with the door open.”

“With the door open all the time?”

“Yes.”

“I worry and my husband worries. You understand.”

“He can come next Sunday at seven-thirty.”

Noah stood on the front stone step. Mrs. Polit came out the double wrought-iron door, and he followed her down the steps to the lower landing, past the hydrangea bushes and the small lawn and the fence. Looking through a living room window, I saw them hurrying beneath the trees.

Minutes later I came out the same double wrought-iron door past the hydrangea bushes and the
small lawn and fence and turned left and walked along President Street. I passed Kingston, Brooklyn, and New York and turned up Nostrand Avenue, crossing the trolley tracks and going past Union Street and the Loew’s Kings movie on Eastern Parkway. On the corner of Eastern Parkway near the movie was Mr. Wolf in his newsstand, and I waved to him and he waved his good arm back at me. The streets shimmered with afternoon heat and were filling with rush-hour traffic. On the wide pedestrian islands of the parkway few kids roller-skated, and fewer old people sat on benches in the shade. It was too hot. A tricycle ice cream cart rode by. The two orange day-camp buses were pulling up in front of the synagogue to unload the children. Rachel came down off her bus and we started home.

She was full of a five-year-old girl’s chatter about her day. The camp was located in Prospect Park, and that day they had gone to the zoo near the park. The elephants and the sea lions and the tigers. And the apes and monkeys. They were so funny, the monkeys. Jumping around. Rachel walked at a rapid pace, loudly imitating the monkeys, screwing up her lovely face and making monkey noises. People looked at her and moved out of her way. Then a block from the house she suddenly needed to go to the bathroom, and we hurried the rest of the way home.

During supper I asked my mother and stepfather if I could teach Noah at seven-thirty instead of at three.

“Why seven-thirty?” my mother asked. She was in her forties, long raven hair flecked here and there with a touch of gray, and smooth-skinned and trim, with petite lips,
pointed chin, and high cheekbones. The visible sadness of our missed life with my father seemed to have left her, though there were times when we were alone together or I came upon her suddenly in a room when I thought I could see the early years in her eyes.

“She wants you or Dad to be home.”

My stepfather was a quiet, courtly man, thin and tall, with hair turning gray though he was in his early fifties. I liked him, I respected him, I carried his name, Ilana Davita Dinn.

“They’re very religious,” I said.

My mother asked, “Where will you teach him?”

“I thought in my room with the door open.”

My stepfather said, “Who are these people? What’s their name?”

“The boy is Noah Stremin, their nephew. The family is called Polit.”

“Polit. I don’t know that name.”

“I have no objection,” said my mother.

“Neither do I,” my stepfather said.

“Is Noah from Europe?” Rachel suddenly asked.

“Yes.”

“If he tells you stories, will you tell them to me?”

“Maybe.”

“Rachel, finish eating,” said my mother.

Her father said he would play her a game of checkers if she finished her food. They busied themselves with her. When I was done eating, I went upstairs.

The door harp that hung on the back of my door went
ting tang tong tung ting tang
. Soft waning daylight came into
the room. I left the windows closed and turned on the fan. My room faced the rear of the house and I looked out at the peony bushes and cyclamens and mock orange blossoms and the maple tree. We had been without rain for two weeks; an intolerable heat lay mornings and evenings over the neighborhood. Rachel was in the den, playing checkers with her father, and I could hear her high and happy voice.

I brought Noah upstairs the next Sunday, and the sounds of the harp startled him as I opened the door to my room. He stopped at the door and looked at the harp, listening to the
ting tang tong tung ting tang
of the balls.

He asked, “What it is?”

“What
is
it?”

“Yes, what is it?”

I explained that the guitar-shaped door harp was made from a piece of butternut wood, nearly one inch thick and twelve inches long. Four maple-wood balls were attached to four varying lengths of fish line from a thin strip of wood near the top and lay against four taut horizontal wires. When you moved the door the balls struck the wires and made the sounds. I told him the harp had hung over the front door of every place we had lived. When my mother and Mr. Dinn were married, they gave the harp to me.

Noah listened and when I was done he asked, “Harp is where from?”

I said the harp had come from Europe. My father’s older brother was in the American army in France during
the First World War. He bought the harp in France. Then he was wounded at Belleau Wood and sent back home, and before he died he gave the harp to his younger brother.

Noah stood inside the doorway gazing into my room. The rear wall and its three windows faced the back yard and the gardens. Across the room to my left was my maple desk and to the right were my bookcases and, on the wall, my photographs of my father and Jakob Daw. I saw Noah looking at my paisley-pattern rose bedspread, at my small oriental rug, at the books on my shelves and the pictures on the walls. Then a corner easy chair, a dresser, a closet. The bookcases stood across the room opposite my bed. There were not many nights when I went to sleep without my father or Jakob Daw, whose presence was real to me and not to be talked of here. I heard my mother call to Rachel. At the same moment the telephone rang in the living room. It rang twice more before it was picked up.

Pointing to the bookcases, Noah said, “Books from your gymnasium, your school?”

“These books are mine.”

He said something in Yiddish.

“I don’t understand.”

He pointed to my eyeglasses. “Always wear?”

“Yes.”

“Brother Yoel always glasses.”

“Your brother Yoel?”

His eyes glazed. He brushed over them with his hands. “Yes.”

“What happened to your brother Yoel?”

“Always glasses,” he said. He looked at the wall of photographs. “What are horses?”

“That picture belonged to my father.”

“Horses running?”

“On an island near Canada.”

The name seemed to startle him. “Ca-na-da?”

“The country north of the United States. Prince Edward Island.”

I heard my mother call again to Rachel.

He said, looking at the wall, “This your father?”

I nodded.

“And this?”

“He was a writer. A very close friend of my family. Jakob Daw. He died in France during the war.”

There was a silence. Looking at the photographs of my father and Jakob Daw, Noah said quietly, “You have pictures. I have nothing.”

I did not know what to say.

“No remember, Papa’s and Mama’s faces. No remember. Yoel, I remember. Reb Binyomin, I remember. With animals and birds and flowers. Not Papa and Mama. Not all uncles and aunts and cousins.”

I had brought a chair to the desk, and he sat opposite me, squinting his eyes at the blue notebook. His eyes focused on the notebook and on the right hand that lay across it. Finally he said, “Begin lesson?”

We reviewed the words I had given him Wednesday and then I assigned him additional vocabulary. He read
haltingly from a second-grade primer. We worked hard on pronunciation.

When we were done I went down with him. At the door, he said dismally, “So much to learn.”

My heart went out to him. New language. New culture. “You’ll learn enough this summer.”

“You can do?”

“Yes.”

He went out into the heated evening. I started back upstairs. The door to Rachel’s room was open. My mother sat on Rachel’s bed, reading her a story. I went to my room.

The next day I ran into him while crossing the trolley tracks on Nostrand Avenue, walking toward Union Street and the Loew’s Kings movie. He had turned onto Eastern Parkway, carrying a heavy paper shopping bag. I went on Nostrand Avenue toward the corner with the newsstand. Mr. Wolf waved his good arm at me. He had been with the American army just south of Soissons and his right arm and shoulder had been smashed by a high-explosive shell. He was a short, thin-built man with a high voice, craggy features, and thin, graying hair. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. I went over to read the headlines, keeping an eye out for the camp buses.