Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue Page 5

  For several years, while he was having these thoughts, they didn't speak. He denied himself those wonderful, thin layered tortes that he desired almost as much as their confectioner. For a time he even refused to get the strudel for his mother, suggesting that they might be Nazis, which Ruth then passed on to Harry's brother, Nusan. Nusan had ways of finding out such things, but he never said anything more about it. Ruth kept buying the strudel. Nathan would sometimes buy it for her. He did not bring up the subject of the Moellens' past again because he thought that perhaps he was protesting too much and would give himself away.

  One day on Tenth Street Karoline kissed him hello, a light touch of her lips on his cheek, close enough for the scent—not butter and sugar: buttered flesh. Buttered sex. He quickly moved down the street. After that he would sometimes see her and feel so overcome with lust that he thought it showed. He would never go to the Edelweiss with his wife for fear she would see his yearning.

  As Nathan entered his apartment on this fated Friday, his destiny had already been set in motion. He had planned to talk to Sonia about Ira Katz and his offer, but when Sonia told him that his mother had asked him to pick up the strudel, panic erased all thoughts of Copy Katz. Fearing his wife would want to come with him, and having already acquired the too quick false voice of an adulterer, he agreed and, taking Sarah with him for protection, mounted her on his shoulders.

  She liked riding up there. She liked playing with his hair, and he liked it, too—tiny fingers stroking, and curling, and gathering up his hair. But now he could feel her recalcitrance above his shoulders. She was not playing with his hair, was not happy They rode to First Avenue, avoiding Sixth Street, where aging men were always in search of Jewish men for their Friday night minyan—one of the things his small daughter on his shoulder could shield him from.

  On Tenth Street the pushers, still discussing the remains of Eli Rabbinowitz, knew to avoid Nathan and his daughter. There was only that fat little boy—a sturdily built little cube of a boy with black curly hair. He reminded Nathan of Fat Finkelstein, who was the meanest kid when he went to school. Finkelstein was the only boy in Nathan's class who had not successfully avoided the draft. He went to Vietnam, and it was an unverified rumor that Fat Finkelstein had died in a place called Khe Sanh. Nathan kept a horror of that name Khe Sanh, the cruel place that had finally given Fat Finkelstein much more than he deserved.

  Now Nathan recognized that this boy was the ill-fated Fat Finkelstein of his generation. It was his belief that, like a Talmudic legend, every generation had its mean but luckless Fat Finkelstein.

  The chubby eight-year-old looked up at Sarah and stuck out his tongue. He always did this, trying to catch her at a moment when she was looking and Nathan wasn't. On cue, Sarah began crying. He was a mean kid, but Nathan had to be sympathetic because the Fat Finkel-steins are all fated to meet a bad end. Nathan had tried to convince Sarah that the boy stuck his tongue out only because she cried and that if she wouldn't cry, it would ruin it for him. But it always made her cry. The Fat Finkelstein of his generation thought that he might have made a mistake in timing. Nathan might have seen him. He waddled up the stoop of his brownstone as fast as he could hoist his pudgy cubic body and then hid in the entrance to his building. The door remained opened a crack, through which he still watched.

  Nathan took Sarah off his shoulders, but she was inconsolable. This was about more than the Fat Finkelstein of her generation. Finally she told him, still sobbing, "They're going to Punim County!"

  "Who is?" asked Nathan, struggling not to laugh because punim is Yiddish for "face," and the county was named Putnam.

  "My best friend, Maya, is going to Punim County."

  "Punim County," Nathan repeated, but Sarah saw nothing funny. Her best friend was hardly ever going to be around this summer.

  "And Daddy," she added pointedly, "she is taking swimming lessons."

  Swimming lessons. There, she was asking again. The Gemorah, the midrash, somewhere in the Talmud, the obligations of a Jewish father are listed. Teaching the Torah, teaching a craft, finding a mate. And one is to teach the child to swim "because his life may depend on it." Nathan asked Rabbi Litvak to explain the significance of learning swimming. "It refers to the Egyptians who drowned when the sea parted. Why? We are our enemies and we must be ready This raises the questions How can we be our enemy? and Ready for what? It is interesting that in most languages both the enemy and the enemy's enemy are called enemy. A killer or a robber has a victim, but an enemy has only an enemy...." In time Nathan excused himself, still not knowing why he had an obligation to teach his child swimming.

  Of course, these obligations were only toward a son and included circumcision. Nathan's father had not taught him to swim, because Harry was afraid of water. But he had to do better than his father. That was the point. Was he supposed to have a summer home in Putnam County? There was no doubt in his mind that he did not want one, but was this something contemporary fathers were supposed to offer? After a couple of millennia, was it time to revise the list of a father's obligations? Preschool, summer home in Putnam County, sell your business and take the money. A modern Talmud might read differently.

  Nathan turned up Eleventh Street, walking toward this Friday's nameless fate. So far, he had learned that he was a financially insolvent claus-trophobe who harbored adulterous lust and had not taught his daughter to swim. And it was only four o'clock.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Calamity in Disguise

  WAS THAT ALL? Was today the Friday he realized all his shortcomings? Or was there some other fate, some unforeseen defining moment still waiting for him? Had he avoided a mistake on the Copy Katz deal by deciding to put off a decision? "I need some time," he had pleaded at the meeting.

  "Sure," said Ira Katz. "Take a couple minutes." Then he laughed and said he was joking.

  Nathan turned up to Eleventh Street with his daughter back on his shoulder, moving away from the drug pushers that Maya's parents probably didn't expose their daughter to. He stopped in to see Sal Eleven, who had the best mozzarella and bread, although Nathan's mother would have neither for Shabbas—though any other day it was a welcome alternative to cooking. Both Ruth and her family welcomed alternatives to her cooking.

  Sal Eleven was short—none of the Sals was tall—with thick dark hair, one bushy eyebrow across his face like a thick black hyphen between his two large ears. He wore disdain the way most people wear simple indifference. He had a television mounted on the wall at exactly his eye level, which was an awkward height for most people. He kept it on a news station, which he greeted with dismissive waves of his hand and disgusted, disbelieving nods of his head.

  "Hey, how ya dew-in," he said, and handed up an olive to Sarah without ever removing his gaze from the television. He always gave her an olive, which resulted in olive oil being rubbed into Nathan's hair, which the anointed father reasoned was a positive thing, though he never understood what became of the pit. At home her mother was still cutting up grapes so she wouldn't choke on the seeds.

  "Terrible about Rabbinowitz, isn't it? He was a nice man."

  Sal brushed away Rabbinowitz's claim to niceness with his usual sweep of the right hand. "So what do you think of the block committee?"

  "The block committee?"

  "Yeah, these cockamamies with the meetings want to push the pushers off." He said this while staring at the television, as though this were the subject of the news program.

  "Well, I guess that's a good idea."

  Sal smiled cynically and dismissed everything with a wave of his hand. "So you got a few Puerto Ricans selling smoke in the neighborhood. As long as they don't let those Dominicans in with the crack. And they won't. Puerto Ricans hate the Dominicans. It's dumb guys and dumber guys. But it's good for the neighborhood. You know why?"

  Nathan knew Sal would wait until he asked, "Why?"

  Then he continued, "Because it keeps the fucking Japanese out."

  Nathan had learned to amuse h
imself by pursuing logic in these conversations that he knew logic would deftly elude. Sarah, who probably looked as though she were not listening from her lofty perch, would absorb it all and later reinterpret it for Nathan in a way that made even less sense than the original. Sal reached up with another olive, more oil for Nathan's hair.

  "How do they keep the Japanese out?"

  "Are you really that naive?" Sal Eleven asked, his brow furrowed in feigned concern. "The Japanese? The Japanese take over everything. First they move in with their sushi, then sesame, then sezayou—before long, it's a Japanese neighborhood. And the Koreans work for them. They worked this all out ahead of time over there in their old country. The Japanese send in the Koreans to work for them. You see all these Korean stores with the soy sauce and the little dried peas. The Japanese put them in business. Yuppies and Japanese. Why do you think that German is pushing this?"

  "German?"

  Sal looked impatient. "That German, Herr Achtung Swinebraten."

  "Mr. Edelweiss?"

  "Mr. Edelweiss. Whatever. I'll tell you something. Nobody knows his real name, but it's not Edelweiss."

  "I know. I just always called him that. It's Moellen."

  "Yeah, nobody knows his name," Sal reasserted as though Nathan had not really spoken. "The Germans, the Japanese." He held out his hands as though comparing the weight of the two nationalities. "They are always in it together, remember that. The Germans. The Japanese."

  "And the Italians."

  "Get out of here. You want a mozarrell'?"

  From Sal's they turned the corner to First Avenue, which had its own Friday competition. Rosa's Pizzeria made bacala pomidora for the weekend. Rosa was from Naples, and her shining long hair, the color of chrome, and deep-set chocolate eyes and carefully placed cheekbones gave her a beauty that stayed with age. There were still people left in Naples who ate salt cod and tomato sauce on Fridays, but none on First Avenue, where the dish was remembered as one of the reasons for leaving. Joey Parma, who grew up eating it, would not sample Rosa's, even though she offered him a taste for free.

  Yet she went all the way to New Jersey, to a Portuguese neighborhood, to buy the best salt cod she could find, fish dried stiff as a quarter-inch plank of plywood. She soaked it in her apartment because customers complained of the smell in her shop. At home, where her husband claimed to like the smell and their children had left years ago "for reasons such as this," according to her oldest son, the fish occupied a basin in her bathtub until Friday morning, when it was thick and soft as a flaky fresh fish. It was fried in olive oil, and a sauce made from summer tomatoes and oregano grown on her windowsills was added. She made only a small amount and by Sunday afternoon managed to sell most of it. This caught the attention of Sal First, who felt that his mother's bacala in the Sicilian way with olives and capers would sell better than Rosa's Neapolitana salt fish and tomatoes. But it didn't until he started adding hot pepper to entice the Puerto Ricans. Now he was living in fear that his mother would come into the store on a weekend and find out what he had done to her bacala.

  Nathan liked to try out Sal First with his Sal Eleven information. And today of all days, he wanted many opinions before he decided on anything. Sal First was short and dark like the soon-to-be-elected President Dukakis. Sal First's hair stuck up and pointed the wrong way, as though it were misdirected by static electricity. For a few years, Sal's hair had been vanishing, and then one day he added rows of dark tufts so that his head took on the appearance of a freshly planted rice paddy. Soon his hair was growing back, but some mistake had been made and it was growing in the wrong direction, making him permanently appear as though he had just gotten out of bed.

  "So what do you think of the block committee, Sal?"

  "What do I think?" Sal said, seemingly outraged. He looked around the store to see who was listening and then leaned forward furtively "I think I don't give a good flying shit. Oh, sorry," he apologized, looking up at Sarah and covering his mouth. "Here," and he delicately handed her a half artichoke bottom. More olive oil for Nathan's hair.

  "I hope they arrest that man," declared Mrs. Skolnik, who had worn white pearl rhinestone-studded 1950s pixie glasses, the kind that came to a sharp point at both temples, for so long that they had come back into fashion. Mordy called her "the shoelace patrol," because every time she had seen him in the last forty years, she had followed him down the street, calling, "Mordy, Mordy," and when she got his attention, which was always difficult, she would point at his shoes and say, "You are going to trip." And he would smile pleasantly and continue walking.

  "What man?" said Sal at the meat slicer, curling off paper-thin pro-sciutto.

  "The one who shot Mr. Rabbinowitz."

  "Forget about it. They're still trying to piece together his face." Nathan pointed at Sarah above him with his eyeballs, trying to get Sal to stop. But he continued, "It's like a broken teacup or something. You can stand there all day with the fucking glue, but there's always a few pieces missing."

  "I gave the police a description," Mrs. Skolnik confessed nervously

  "Who knows where the missing pieces are. You never find them."

  "I very carefully described the man to them."

  "You saw him?" said Nathan.

  "Who?" asked Sal.

  "Yes. I heard the gunshot and I saw a man running up First Avenue."

  "How do you know it was the man who shot him? Did he have a gun?" Nathan probed.

  "You see, the police said the exact same thing. But you could see he was a killer. You could see he had just killed."

  "Did he kill him because he didn't want him in his house?" asked Sarah.

  The woman looked over Nathan's head in confusion. "He just looked like a killer."

  "Daddy," said Sarah, "where is my notebook?"

  "What did he look like?" Sal asked.

  "Daddy," Sarah half whined and half shouted, "I need my notebook!"

  "He was very large and had a lot of black hair and wild crazy eyes like a killer."

  "Daddy, I need it now!" Her mood was starting to turn, and Nathan knew he had to leave.

  "The police said they needed more details, but what more do you need? They should arrest him. He was from the neighborhood."

  "Daddy, I want to take notes. Now! I want to!"

  Nathan was running out of time and drifting dangerously close to Sixth Street, where the minyan grabbers were waiting. He gingerly walked up to the Edelweiss window and looked past the rows of won-drously layered tortes. Moellen and his wife were behind the counter under a poster of Heidelberg, a city with which they had no connection. Karoline was not in. It was a better day than he had thought. He did not want to see her today He had almost had sex with her in his mind on the F train earlier.

  Not wanting to add cookie crumbs to his oily hair, he lowered Sarah off his shoulders and walked in.

  He baked and she sold. When caught together, they smiled. They smiled much more than either of them ever did separately—as though it were a competition between them. He was lean and tall and seemed stern, except that he had an unpredictable sense of humor that functioned better in the unpredictably dark world of children. Without warning, he would be on the floor pumping off five push-ups, then standing up with arms raised, flexing his biceps. Sarah looked dutifully frightened when his lips protruded and he put on his stern Teutonic face. She understood that this was the game and that soon he would do something funny.

  His wife was not robust like him, and she never did anything funny She was thin and fragile looking. Her hair fell straight down and was gray. She had never colored it. Her face was delicately but not unpleasantly lined with age. Oddly, there was a slight crease vertically down her right cheek, almost as though tears had left a scar. Nathan didn't remember ever noticing this line before, but surely it had been there for a very long time. He thought back on all the years he had known her and was horrified to realize that since boyhood he had always found something very desirable about her, and though she
was now quite old, it was still there. She looked as though she desperately wanted to be held. Was that what drew him to her daughter also? He could not remember.

  "Why do you come in here with your big eyes?" Moellen snapped. Sarah, taking her cue, looked worried. There was always a treat to eat at the end of the game. "Ven big-eyed children kom in hier, you know vat I do. No? I show you." And with his lanky stride he went to the kitchen doorway "Look! You see? Jah. An oven. Into de oven mit dem all. Und den, vait, I show you."

  Nathan was frozen to his place, filled with horror, though a smile of feigned delight was painted too broadly on his face. Moellen quickly returned from the kitchen with a baking sheet. Now Sarah smiled.

  "Take one!" he ordered. "It may be one of your friends." Sarah squealed and gurgled laughter as she looked at the tray of gingerbread men, chose one, and started to nibble on a foot.

  "Yes," commanded Moellen. "Start mit a leg—one of your friend's legs. Und den—den, vat do you eat next?"

  Sarah only laughed. Mrs. Moellen smiled distantly until the door opened. Nathan did not have to turn to know who it was, and no, her appeal was entirely different from that of her mother.

  "Come on, Sarah, let's get the strudel. An apple strudel, please."

  "Achh!" said Moellen. "Now dat you have eaten the legs of your fwiend, you must eat"—he looked around his shop—"a head!" He presented a plate of garish pink marzipan heads with kelly green hats. "You better eat one."

  Sarah hesitated and looked at her father. "I think you've had enough," he said. "It will make you sick."

  "No, it won't."

  "And your mom will blame me."

  "Let's not tell her!"

  That sounded like an enormously good idea. Sarah ate one of the bright little heads, sadistically nibbling a feature at a time, the nose, the chin. Nathan tried not to think of Eli Rabbinowitz's face. How well this German understood children, and they loved him. Nathan too as a child had loved going to the Edelweiss to be teased by the funny German. Was that where this interest in things German began? Nathan wondered.