The Sea Beach Line (6 page)

Kings Highway was the last elevated stop in southern Brooklyn. I looked down on the crowded business district. People lounged in front of stores, while others dashed back and forth across the wide street with plastic shopping bags. Alojzy had spent a lot of time here. He had been right at home on this strip where Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Turkish, and other languages blended together.

For a while, Alojzy had a girlfriend named Karla who sold jewelry in a little stand in the front of a clothing store on Kings Highway and East Thirteenth Street where Orthodox women shopped. The giant jewels on the broaches Karla sold were impressive, though in retrospect they must have been fake. Cut glass, or even plastic. But her smile had been genuine when she saw Alojzy walk into the store. Karla would close her stand, and Alojzy would take us to eat at a kosher deli owned by a family of Egyptian Muslims, who had bought
the restaurant when the original owner retired to Florida. Alojzy would joke with the countermen in his limited Arabic and they would give us free knishes.

The train rumbled on past Kings Highway. I was conscious of the rolling of the steel wheels as they followed their tracks. The train went down to street level at Newkirk Avenue, and then into the tunnel after Prospect Park. Brooklyn disappeared, leaving me in darkness.

3

IT WAS GETTING ON
toward evening by the time I made it back from Coney Island to the Upper East Side. I got off the subway at Eighty-Sixth Street and walked down Lexington Avenue for a few blocks, then turned back in the other direction. The building where the four of us lived as a family before Alojzy left was only about twelve blocks from Becca's apartment, but I hadn't gone up there since being back in the area. In fact, I wasn't sure if I'd been to the old block, Ninety-Second between Second and First Avenues, even once since we left. After we moved to Long Island, we didn't return to visit. I wondered if Becca ever passed by the block, or if she avoided it.

As a kindergartener, the address had been drilled into my ahead, along with our phone number and the phone number of our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Almanzar. After my experience with Alojzy's building in Sheepshead Bay, I was afraid that this one would be gone too. But it was there, just as I remembered it. Six stories of bright red bricks. The details around the windows had recently been painted green, and the black paint on the stoop's handrail was freshly touched up. Those were the only changes. The stoop looked just as it had fifteen years
ago, when Alojzy would sit on it holding a beer in a brown paper bag, and tell Becca and me stories about bandits and goblins. I sat down in his old spot.

The Stanley M. Isaacs Houses began across the street, and continued down to the river. I wondered if their presence had helped preserve the block, as housing projects scared away transplants. A cab pulled up in front of the building. A thirtysomething couple in business clothes got out and walked up the stairs, swinging their briefcases. I said hello, but they ignored me. Maybe things had changed here, after all. These people were young professionals like Becca and Andrew. Becca hadn't turned her back on where she came from; the city had changed and she'd changed with it.

Becca lived in a newer, doorman building down in the Eighties. It was only a ten-minute walk from our old building, but it felt very foreign to me. It was all glass and steel, with no brick in sight. Getting through my adolescent years on Long Island had always felt like something of a trick; I spent eight years waiting for everyone to figure out I didn't belong. Becca's building aroused in me an even more concentrated version of the same feeling. When I entered that evening, I tried my best to adhere to the shibboleth of saying hello to the gold-epauletted doorman in a superior tone. It was important to always speak in a way that betrayed no weakness. I held my head up high as I walked to the elevator, for fear that if my shoulders slouched for a moment I would feel his hands on them.

I had been back in New York City for the better part of a week. Speaking with Goldov had been my first priority, but I had put it off for several days getting settled, reacquainting myself with the city, and then spending time with Becca and her fiancé, Andrew, who I'd only met a few times before. They held hands when we went places, and Andrew would kiss my sister when he thought I wasn't looking. It was awkward to be around them, but he seemed to make her happy.

Becca and I hadn't lived in the same house since she'd gone to college, but she was very welcoming in letting me stay at her home indefinitely. She thought I'd come to New York solely to find a job and had no idea I was looking for Alojzy.

Really, I had put off going to Coney Island because I was scared. What if Goldov had provided proof that Alojzy was dead? I wouldn't have known what to do with that knowledge. A book would have snapped shut on my fingers. But Goldov had only muddled things, and raised more questions. My search had begun, and I needed to keep going. First thing in the morning, I would go downtown to find this man Mendy.

My sister and Andrew generally worked pretty late into the evening—she was a junior executive at a credit-card company, and he managed a hedge fund—so I had the apartment to myself for a while. I was still getting used to the luxury unit Becca lived in. The old walk-up on Ninety-Second Street hadn't been renovated since probably the '50s. Bernie's house on Long Island had been much nicer, though sparse. He had lived there with his first wife, who died long before he met my mother. Even that had felt like a place I didn't belong in. I once accidentally smashed a window, messing around, and was scared for a week that Bernie would throw us out because I had damaged his nice house. This was no reflection on Bernie; he'd never done anything to give the impression that he didn't want Becca and me around. It was just that I always felt I belonged in a walk-up apartment with uneven floorboards, not in a big suburban house. And certainly not in a luxury apartment in a doorman building, with marble counters and floor-to-ceiling windows. Ninety square feet of glass I had to be careful not to break.

It was a bit past six so I decided to make myself macaroni salad for dinner. Having been so caught up in memories, I wanted a physical task to occupy myself as much as I wanted something to eat. While the macaroni boiled, I grated the carrots and chopped the pickles and red pepper. When the macaroni was nice and soft, I drained it in the colander, then poured it into a bowl. I put mayonnaise in fast, so the macaroni didn't clump up, mixed in the vegetables, and poured in some pickle juice, making sure to leave enough brine in the jar so that the remaining pickles didn't dry out. The pickles were Becca's. I didn't know how long I'd be staying with her, and I felt like a mooch living in her apartment for any amount of time, so I'd made sure to stock up
on my own supply of pasta, peppers, and carrots. She told me several times that I was welcome to any food in the house, but I wanted to maintain some minimal sense of self-sufficiency. It was okay, by my rules, to use her pickles and mayonnaise, though, because that was just using some condiments from a jar. It wasn't really eating her food.

After I ate, I made a cup of tea (my teabags, her honey), settled into Becca's big leather armchair, and tucked into a paperback I had borrowed from Bernie's shelf before I left New Mexico. The cover picture of a young man with a kippah and
payis
, swinging a scimitar above his head, had caught my eye. Once colorful, the cover had been rubbed down over time. The book itself was thin, owing more to the quality of the yellow pages than to the story's length.
The Yeshiva Bocher
, the cover read,
The Rediscovered Treasure of Benjamin IV
.

When I asked Bernie if it was worth reading, he had shrugged and said, “It's a book. I suppose it's on my shelf for a reason. Before Benjamin IV was Benjamin III, but that was just a character.” I didn't try to get anything else out of him. Bernie hardly spoke at all anymore, unless prompted. It wasn't that he was depressed, or unfriendly, just that he was retreating deeper and deeper into his world of numbers and written words. He didn't need the world of the living. This frustrated my mother, who was more full of life than she'd ever been, at least within my memory. During the day Bernie worked in his home office, dissecting files for clients back in New York. Evenings, he sat on the back patio and read books of American or Jewish history, or occasionally a mystery novel from his childhood or before. My mom mostly did her own thing—like running around to workshops and gallery openings with her art collector friends—but she and Bernie seemed happy enough together. Weekends, Bernie obliged my mother by driving her to craft fairs in yuppie-hippie towns throughout the Southwest where she sold her candles.

The paperback was a 1963 Jewish Publication Society translation from the original Yiddish. According to the blurb on the back, the author—whose real identity was unknown—published three books in Warsaw under the pen name of Benjamin IV, between 1926 and 1938.
The Yeshiva Bocher
was the only one that survived.

It told the story of a cocky young yeshiva student who spends a Shabbos dinner at the home of his rabbi. The rabbi has another guest, a visiting Torah master. The student drinks too much wine and steps outside to relieve himself. On his way back to the house, the tsar's army sweeps him up and takes him off to fight in the Crimean War. He serves for several years, becoming an expert rifleman. He kills twenty Englishmen, and just as many Frenchmen, though some of those may have actually been Sardinians. By the time he has killed his fifth man, he has forgotten every word of Aramaic. By the time he has killed his tenth man, he has forgotten every word of Hebrew. By the time he has killed his twentieth man, he has forgotten every word of Yiddish.

On the journey back to Russia, Black Sea privateers capture him and sell him to the Turks as a slave. He works his way up from the quarry to a position in the palace, where he seduces an Ottoman princess, who frees him so he can become her husband. A woman like that cannot be trusted, though. She betrays him in their sixth year of marriage, and plots with her Azeri lover to kill him.

At the last moment, he escapes by switching his poisoned wine for his wife's untainted glass and then takes to wandering. The onetime yeshiva bocher, now well into his fourth decade, was walking down the road toward Isfahan when I heard the key in the lock. I glanced at the digital display on Becca's DVD player. Nine thirty-three p.m. I turned to the kitchen counter to make sure I'd finished cleaning up. Becca was proud of her marble counters and said even water could stain them disastrously. Her house, her conception of reality. Luckily, I had remembered to clean up.

It was Andrew, not my sister, who came through the door. He had a place of his own down in Hell's Kitchen, but slept over here with Becca most nights, so it wasn't a surprise to see him. He'd taken off his tie, and the collar of his striped shirt was unbuttoned. There was something slightly sweaty and crumpled about him, but it was hard to pin down because he walked in the door standing up straight, like always. The man had a confident posture and a strong physique, which his closely tailored suits made clear. He blinked twice when he saw me, then grinned.

“Hey there, Edel the Kid.” He called me that because I was Becca's kid brother and because I'd been kicked out of school for illegal activities. He meant it in a friendly way, and to be honest, I liked the outlaw sound of the nickname. It wasn't really a joke. Toward the end of my drug use, I had crossed the line from mischief and experimentation to actual crimes. I was lucky not to have been caught in possession and sent to jail. I was glad that hadn't happened, but didn't regret my actions.

“Hi, Andrew,” I said. He had said his buddies all called him Wolfie—his last name was Wolfson—and I should too, but I couldn't bring myself to call him anything but Andrew. He swung his briefcase and a black plastic bag up onto the kitchen counter, and extracted a six-pack of imported beer from the latter.

“Brew?” He tipped a bottle my way.

“Sure, why not.” He tossed me the beer, which I caught with two hands. My catch was overwrought and embarrassing, and Andrew grimaced. Maybe I had closed my eyes. I just didn't want to drop it, and get beer and broken glass all over Becca's freshly waxed parquet floor.

Andrew became aware of his grimace, and forced it back to a grin. He wasn't a bad guy. He tried his best. The same traits he found alluring in Becca—a slight, boyish frame, soft brown eyes that never met anyone else's, a general refusal to laugh at good-natured jokes—he found simply off-putting in me. Still, he tried to treat me in a big-brotherly way, because I was his girl's little brother.

“How was work?” I asked him. The beer was a nice gesture, and I wanted to meet it with one of my own.

“Rough.”

“Yeah?”

“Some of these guys are really gunning for me. It's a cutthroat business.” I wasn't exactly sure what business he was in. A hedge fund involved funds. So finance, I guessed. But not stocks. Something different. “But I can hold my own.”

“Sure you can, man.”

“Yeah. Yes, sir. It's a lot of stone-cold bastards out there, though.”

“It's true. I see them everywhere I go.”

Andrew coughed out a chuckle. It was genuine, but I couldn't tell if it was directed at me or at the bastards.

“Yeah, I bet you do.”

He picked up the remote and turned on the TV. Some cartoon characters were sitting around a bar, drinking bottles of beer and telling jokes.