Snow in August (23 page)

She turned to another page.

“The bowler hat, the bowler hat. Let’s see… a man’s hat, that usually means, uh, emotional sorrow,” she said. “Losing your
hat, that means watch out for false friends. A new hat is a sign of wealth. A big hat means joy and prosperity. But a
bowler
hat? Jeez, I dunno. Even Madame Zadora doesn’t get into
bowler
hats. You know anyone that owns one?”

“No. I’ve seen them in the movies, but never in real life.”

She looked hard at him now.

“You got a lot of things on your mind, don’t you, kid?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “Everybody knows what happened to Mister G.” She sipped her tea. “And everybody
knows Frankie McCarthy did it and could go up the river for a long stretch. Especially if you turned rat. So you’re worried
about that, which it’s natural. And that’s in all the dreams, I guess, that
worry
. And the ghost walking through the rooms? That’s your father, Michael, God rest his soul. You wish he was here. You wish
he could go with you and beat the crap out of that Frankie McCarthy.” She put out the cigarette. Michael counted six butts
in the saucer. “But he’s not here. And you can’t run away.”

“So what do I do?”

“Pray,” she said. “And keep the faith. You believe hard enough things’ll work out, they will. Mark my words.”

That night, he didn’t dream. Each morning now, he prayed. He stayed alert to danger. And on the streets, nothing happened.

Michael was careful leaving the house. He watched the rooftops, fearful of falling bricks or garbage cans. He made certain
the doors to the flat were always locked. He got permission from his mother to increase the wattage of the bulbs in the hallways.
He took different routes through the parish on his journeys to see Rabbi Hirsch or to serve mass at Sacred Heart. Going to
mass was always the easiest; Frankie McCarthy and the Falcons didn’t get up until noon.

Sonny tried to keep the three of them calm. From his aunt’s house next door to the Venus, he could see into the poolroom.
Frankie was there, all right. Hour after hour. Smoking. Playing pool. Laughing with his boys. But Sonny never saw him go out
on a patrol. Never saw him act as if he was looking for anyone.

“Maybe he figured out it’s not us,” Michael said.

“Nah,” Sonny said. “He’s a crafty prick. Like a snake. He knows if anything happens to us, the bulls will drop a fuckin’
subway car on him.” He chewed the inside of his mouth. “He’ll wait. He won’t forget.”

The boys waited too. They went to school. They played in the street. Michael stopped in the synagogue to learn new words and
phrases. He added
fressing
to his vocabulary, meaning eating like a slob. A
momser
was a bastard, a son of a bitch.
Latkes
were potato pancakes, and the word for dirt was
shmootz
. But Frankie remained a presence in his mind, like a bad tooth in a jaw. Even when life seemed normal.

On the Sunday before Easter, while hundreds of people were strolling through the parish with palm crosses stuck in their lapels,
Kate Devlin took Michael by subway to Orchard Street in Manhattan. The train was filled with women like her, taking their
children to be outfitted for Easter. Most of them had saved for months to buy clothes, and the clothes on Orchard Street were
the cheapest in New York. At the Delancey Street station, they emptied the train, and hundreds of them climbed the stairs,
dragging their kids into the parish they all called Jewtown.

This was the first time that Michael had come to Jewtown with his mother, and he was excited by its jammed, narrow streets,
tiny stores, bearded men, racks of clothing climbing ten feet above the sidewalks. He imagined himself into the Fifth Quarter
in Prague. The ghetto. The air was pungent with strange odors. Men and women shouted back and forth in five or six languages.
Music played from unseen radios, adding to the din. Everyone seemed to be bargaining, in a frazzled routine of declaration,
rejection, compromise, fingers being used to emphasize numbers. Young men in yarmulkes, black pants and collarless white shirts,
with straggly beards and sidecurls dangling over the ears, measured waists and chests and trouser lengths with worn yellow
tapes, marked them with chalk, then
shoved hanging clothes aside to allow a customer to stand before a mirror. Kids looked panicky at the sight of themselves
in strange clothes. Mothers tugged at seams and felt the fabrics and told the kids to stand straight. Michael felt sure that
if he stayed long enough he would see Rabbi Lowe. Or Brother Thaddeus, his baldness disguised with a wig.

For an hour, he and his mother examined suits and rejected them. Too expensive. Too cheesy. Too small. Too big. They went
slowly up one side of Orchard Street and back down the other. At the corner, Michael gazed down Delancey Street and saw the
dark, ugly outline of the Williamsburg Bridge, its towers crowned with knobby pronged spires. He thought:
Prague
. Rabbi Hirsch must have seen the spires of St. Vitus this way, as he walked from the ghetto toward Old Town Square. Except
our tunnels are subway tunnels. Not the evil tunnels of Prague, where fanatics seethed and babies were strangled in the dark.
Here on Orchard Street, Michael thought, he was even safer than a Jew in the ghetto. Here, Frankie McCarthy would never find
him.

Then his gaze fell upon a dark blue suit hanging just above sidewalk level in a small store across the street. Neat lapels,
dark buttons. That was the suit he could wear when he was twelve. It would be fine for Easter, but it would be better after
he turned twelve. In that suit, he would look older: thirteen, maybe even fourteen. In that suit, he could start looking like
a man.

“Look at that one, Mom,” he said, and led her through the crowds, suddenly anxious that someone else might find it first.
A young clerk came out. His face was very thin, framed with red hair; he was wearing a yarmulke. Kate Devlin touched the fabric
and asked the price.

“For you, fourteen dollars,” the young man said, in an accented voice.

“It’s very dear,” she whispered to Michael.

“Es iz zaier taier,”
Michael said.

The clerk looked startled.

“You’re Jewish?”

“No,” Michael said. “Irish.”

“Irish? Ah,
ains fun di aseres hashvotim
. One of the lost tribes.” The clerk laughed.

“Three dollars off!” he said, lifting down the suit.

“You’re kidding,” Kate Devlin said.

“Three and a half,” the clerk said. “You are
die mutter
?”

It sounded like
mooter
, but she understood.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled uneasily. “Can he try it on?”

“Yes, yes. In there.” He pointed to a dark niche burrowed among clothes. Then to Michael: “Your mother wants
ain glazel tai
?”

“Mom, you want a glass of tea?”

“That’d be nice,” she said.

“Mit tzuker?”
the clerk said.

“Bitte,”
Michael said, knowing his mother took sugar with her tea.
“Zait azoy gut.”

While Michael changed, the clerk pushed through the bunched clothes and disappeared into a deeper part of the shop. Michael
emerged first. The suit fit almost perfectly. His mother made him turn around, and nodded approval. He pushed aside some clothes
and saw himself in a cracked mirror. It was like gazing at a stranger. Maybe even a sixteen-year-old stranger.

“I love it,” he whispered. Kate smiled. Then the clerk returned, holding three glasses of tea. A wooden clothes hanger was
tucked under his arm. He handed one glass of tea to Kate.

“Azoy shain!”
the clerk said. Beautiful. “You look like a man.”

“We’ll take it,” Kate said.

“The hanger is free,” the clerk said, smiling and handing a glass of tea to Michael.

“A dank,”
Michael said.

They clinked glasses in a toast.

“Lang leben zolt ir,”
Michael said. Long life to you.

“God bless America,” said the clerk.

“Up the Republic,” said Kate Devlin, hugging her American son.

B
ack in the parish, Michael hurried to see Rabbi Hirsch to brag about his Orchard Street adventure. It was like a story out
of a library book: he said the magic words and—Open, Sesame!—something amazing happened. It wasn’t Shazam! The words were
Yiddish. Words that came from Rabbi Hirsch. But they had worked.

The synagogue on Kelly Street was locked. The front door remained sealed. He hoped the rabbi was all right, but the day was
so fine, with the sky blue and the streets washed clean by the spring rains, that it didn’t seem possible anything bad could
happen to anyone.

He walked around the front of the armory and looked at the bronze statue of the World War I hero with his small tin hat and
wrapped leggings and wondered why there were no statues for the men who died in the Battle of the Bulge. Maybe it was too
soon. Maybe they were making them in some studio or foundry, in Washington maybe, or in Paris, France, where
the artists all lived. He sat on the steps and gazed at the green buds on the elm trees, and the sparrows chattering in the
pale green branches, and wondered how far it was from Paris, France, to Prague. There must not be a ghetto anymore in Prague.
The Nazis must have killed everybody who lived there. Then images of the camps unspooled in his mind, those newsreels he’d
seen in the Venus, of hollow-eyed men and scrawny, skeletal women and bodies piled like the junk in Jimmy Kabinsky’s uncle’s
yard. How could they have done that? How could anyone do that? And why didn’t anyone help? And where was God? How could He
let so many people die? Men. Women. Babies.

And suddenly he thought: They must have killed the rabbi’s wife.

They must have killed Leah.

Of course! Those goddamned Nazi
momsers
must have taken her to the concentration camp. They must have put her in the gas chamber. Or starved her to death. Or shot
her. Or buried her alive.

Of course!

That’s why Rabbi Hirsch sometimes glances at Leah’s beautiful face in that browning photograph and seems to feel such an awful
sadness. And maybe that explains another thing. He told me once that when he was young, he tried to live without God. Then
he went back to God and became a rabbi. He didn’t make a big deal about it. But it must have meant something to him, or he
never would have mentioned it. Maybe now… maybe because of what happened to Leah, what happened to millions of
other
Jews, maybe now he has changed his mind again. Sometimes, the look on his face is… well, it’s not exactly confused. It’s
not even unhappy, because in a minute he can change back again and teach me a new word in Yiddish
or talk about Ziggy Elman. No: in that little flash, that glance, he looks… bitter. Like he’s pissed off at God. Or maybe
even worse, like maybe he’s a rabbi who doesn’t believe in God.

Michael stood up, his stomach churning, wondering how he could have been so stupid, not to have thought of this before. He
knew now that he had to ask Rabbi Hirsch about more than words, about more than distant Prague. He had to know what had happened
to the woman named Leah, the rabbi’s wife. Had to find out her story. And the rabbi’s, too.

And then he saw Rabbi Hirsch in the distance, trudging heavily under the spring trees on Kelly Street in the block leading
from the park. From that distance, he seemed small and vulnerable, in his black coat and black hat. Michael started to run
to him. He wanted to tell him how sorry he was for failing to understand about his wife, Leah. He wanted to tell him a lot
of things. And then he saw that Rabbi Hirsch was carrying two shopping bags. The rabbi’s face brightened as he saw Michael
running toward him.

“Hello, Michael.
Vos makhst du
?”

“Okay, good.
Zaier gut, a dank
,” Michael said, taking the first shopping bag and reaching for the second. The rabbi pulled the second bag away, saying they
could each carry one.

“You’ll never believe this,” Michael said in an excited voice, “but we saved three and a half dollars on a suit today
because of Yiddish
!”

He told the story while the rabbi unlocked the door. The rabbi was chuckling, asking Michael to repeat the Yiddish phrases,
as they went to the kitchen and placed the shopping bags on the table. The boy glanced at the photograph of Leah, but he could
not ask about the way she had died. The rabbi seemed too happy. They unpacked two bottles of wine and boxes of matzoh and
three cans of soup.

“What’s all this for?” Michael asked.

“
Pesach
. How you say it in English? Pissover?”

“
Pass
over,” Michael said. “
Piss
over, well,
piss
is the word for, uh, urinate. And—”

They briefly discussed the phrases
taking a piss
and
pissing in the wind
and being
pissed off
. And when they finished laughing, the rabbi told Michael about Passover. He explained about the time when the Jews were slaves
in Egypt and how God sent a series of plagues against the Pharaoh to convince him to free the Jews. The tenth plague was the
last one, and the worst of all. It killed only the firstborn children of Egyptian families. But the Angel of Death passed
over the homes of the Jews. The angel knew which homes were Jewish because they had been marked on the doorposts and lintels
with the blood of a lamb. Michael was thrilled at this tale; a magic sign had saved them. When this happened, the pharaoh
finally got the point and decided to let the Jews go free. Michael tried to picture the Angel of Death, soaring above Egypt,
with black wings and a ferocious, stern face, like the statue of Moses he saw in the encyclopedia. He pictured the weeping
Egyptian mothers. He saw the Jews gathering at dawn, to head north to the land of milk and honey.

“Ever since, we gather on the… anniversary? Yes, the anniversary, to celebrate and to give thanks to God. Eight days it lasts.
A big dinner we have the first night: a seder. The family, the friends, everybody eats and prays. Pesach—Passover, the great
feast of the spring. The feast of the free.”