as fear.
Where ever I go to claim
my flesh, there are entrances
of spirit. And even its comforts
are hideous uses I strain
to understand.
L
EN SHOWED UP UNANNOUNCED
one morning about a week after Judith’s death. He brought along a thermos of strong coffee, several rolls, and two packs of cigarettes. Carol wasn’t with him. I hadn’t spoken to either of them since receiving Clay’s call, and I found Len’s sudden presence in the apartment very disconcerting.
“I thought I’d just come over,” he said.
I led him to the kitchen. He found mugs and plates and an ashtray, and quickly fixed us breakfast. I ate; I was hungry. Len had some coffee and lit his first cigarette.
“You OK?” he asked.
I nodded. “You?”
“OK,” he said.
He squinted at me as if trying to keep me in focus.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “There are some things I need to tell you.”
I watched him smoke. His face was long and angular. Fine creases fanned like spokes from his eyes and especially above his dark brows. His dense beard-growth was peppery grey like his hair, which he wore brushed back from his forehead. The same dark color as Judith’s hair, I realized, but wavy. Hers had been straight, without any hint of grey.
“Such as,” I said.
“I’ve been wondering what Judith told you about her real parents. My sister Lottie and her husband Sam. There’s some things maybe you should know.”
His words left me neutral. I felt no onrush of curiosity, though at the same time I didn’t want him to stop talking. He paused, and when I said nothing, he continued.
“Lottie raised me,” he said. “I mean, she literally brought me up. She was much older than me, twelve years older. When our mother died, I was five. Lottie dropped out of high school — she was in her last year. She got a job in a textile shop downtown. She stayed in that job and kept food on our table till I was fourteen. Then Sam showed up.”
I poured us both more coffee, and Len lit another cigarette with the end of the one he’d just smoked.
“What about your father,” I said. “Where was he?”
“In Russia,” he answered.
“What was he doing there?”
He looked at me quizzically, and I realized that I knew less than he thought I did.
“He lived there,” said Len. “Lottie and I were born there. My father sent my mother and Lottie and me to New York when I was a year old. He was supposed to join us as soon as he got more money together. The three of us stayed with some cousins of his in the Bronx and waited for him, but my mother never heard from him. She never found out if he’d died or been killed, or if he’d left her for somebody else. Of course I didn’t know about any of this, but Lottie did. She remembered him. I can hardly even remember my mother. The only one in my family I really knew was Lottie.
“My sister did everything for me. Food, clothing, shelter — the works. She wasn’t going to let either of us go under. Our mother basically died of exhaustion. I guess she was lost without a husband. But Lottie — she was very, very tough. Once she told me, when I was about ten, to stop being a coward like our mother’d been. I remember that word so clearly: the humiliation of it. I’d never heard her talk like that. It made me furious — I still don’t know why, I can barely remember our mother’s face! I smacked Lottie, though. She grabbed me by the hair and slapped me in the face so hard I got a black eye. And then she said, ‘You listen to me. You’ve only got one chance, so you better decide if you’re taking it.’ That’s the kind of person she was.”
Len paused. I hadn’t been in human company for over a week, and I’d been living without speech. It was difficult for me to take in Len’s words. I felt as if I were listening to someone reading aloud from the middle of a story.
“My sister ruled me, ruled my life, until Sam. Then things changed. Sam was the perfect man. He was tall and good-looking, he worked hard, he was Jewish. His parents were Russians too, and they spoke a little Hebrew. He and Lottie got married in 1911. I was seventeen; by that time I’d known Sam four years, plenty long enough to hate him. Right from the start, he’d taken over our life. Whenever he showed up, he’d move furniture around, lamps and chairs and whatnot, so the place was exactly how he wanted it. We lived on Elizabeth Street, in a small walk-up; Lottie kept it spotless, but Sam was always complaining about the bathtub being dirty, or how the kitchen cabinets were a mess. He’d throw things out that he figured we didn’t need, like newspapers. Sometimes Lottie would get really mad — I mean, she could hold her own in a fight — but mostly she just caved in. I guess she needed someone like him, someone with that much power.
“Sam knew everything. He knew about Zionism, about socialism, about Europe, about Russia. He knew what was going on in the city. He told Lottie about Eugene Debs and dragged her off to all sorts of political meetings. They were quite the radicals, let me tell you.
“Sam was cocky. He didn’t have even a touch of humor, and he liked to hear himself talk. Whatever peace there might’ve been between me and my sister went completely to hell with Sam around. Lottie couldn’t take my side — she had to keep Sam at any cost. She was already close to thirty when she married him, and she’d done what she had to do for me. Lottie wasn’t about to lose Sam, even if his way of dealing with me was to chew me up and spit me out. Who knows — maybe she thought I needed a little toughening.”
“Did you get it?” I asked. The question sounded harsh to me, not what I really meant to ask.
“Yes,” he answered. “I did.” His brows raised slightly; the creases above them deepened. He was staring across the room. All at once his face seemed remarkably expressive, but I couldn’t interpret what I was seeing. I closed my eyes and listened.
“Sam knew the streets,” Len said. “Growing up where he did, downtown, he’d gotten into a lot of fights. And he had a temper. I remember one night, it was summertime, stinking hot, and we had to pick up Lottie at some friend’s place. I was sixteen. We took a cab uptown and got out on Second Avenue and started walking east. Suddenly these two guys were in front of us — not too big but strong-looking. They said something in Italian that got Sam’s attention. He said, ‘You take the one on the left,’ and then he swooped down and grabbed an empty bottle from the ground and cracked it open and lunged at the guy on the right — all in one move, like a dancer — and that guy had the side of his face split open before he even knew what hit him.
“The other guy came at me, and I couldn’t move. I mean it: I was frozen. There wasn’t any way I could do what I was supposed to do, which was to fight, because I didn’t want to. It was really that simple. The whole thing seemed incredibly — I don’t know — ugly, ridiculous. I knew I couldn’t win; there was no point in trying, no point in aggravating the guy even more than he was already. I stood my ground, if that’s the way to put it, but I didn’t fight back.
“His first punch took most of the air out of me, and I didn’t straighten up again; I kept my arms over my head and let the blows come. They didn’t come for long, because Sam had basically disabled the first guy, who wasn’t the stronger of the pair as it turned out. Sam jumped the one who was pounding me — by this time I was getting kicked, mostly, because I was bent over — and they went at it for a few minutes. Then Sam laid him out with a couple of short punches.
“I heard those hits, but I didn’t see them. I was still doubled over. It took me a little while to realize I wasn’t getting beat up anymore. Naturally I was in pain, but more than that I was in some other world. It was as if I’d left the street and entered a kind of dream. Not a nightmare, just a dream where stupid pointless things happen over and over till you wake up.
“Sam started talking to me in a very loud, slow voice. He was enraged with me. He called me a shit-scared little coward, a worthless putz, and then he pulled me up to a standing position and screamed at me, ‘Don’t you know how to use your goddamn
hands?
’ And when I didn’t answer, he said, ‘You go like this,’ and he gave me a whack with the flat of his hand across the side of my head.
“It broke my eardrum. I guess they used to call it getting your ears boxed. I blacked out. When I came to, I was in a cab, and then in a few minutes Lottie was there, and Sam was saying something about how the Sicilians should stay in their own neighborhood. He must’ve told her some kind of story — I couldn’t hear too well at that point — because she spoke to me later like she thought I’d fought the Italians, too. I think Sam presented it to her like it was my initiation into manhood.
“After that I made sure never to be alone with him, and I stayed away from the apartment as much as possible. Lottie spent a fair amount of time over at Sam’s family’s place, so I was on my own mostly. Which was fine. I needed to learn how to live by myself.”
The morning sunlight cast sharply outlined shadows on the kitchen table: squares of windowpanes, the thin-lined geometry of a TV antenna. Plump blue veins stood out on the backs of Len’s large hands. He was fiddling with a box of matches; any minute now he would light another cigarette. He’d gone through close to half a pack already. I got up and opened the back door, and a cold backdraft tugged at the smoke. When I sat down again, I knew what my question was.
“Carol,” I said. “You haven’t mentioned Carol.”
He leaned back in his chair, his gaze drifting in what might have been reminiscence or anxiety; I couldn’t tell.
“I met Carol the next year, when she moved here from Chicago. She was broke, but she knew how to get by — she’s always been a hustler. I had no definite ideas about what I was going to do when I got out of high school. All I knew was I’d get a full-time job someplace. I’d already been working several years part-time, in a music store. Carol and I met in that store, actually. She was buying sheet music, and I noticed her. That same night we were eating lousy steaks in some uptown dive and talking about ragtime.
“It was Carol who came up with the plan of selling pianos. Being with her, I saw that Lottie had taken me over. I didn’t really know how to do anything that wasn’t Lottie’s idea. With Carol it was different: she saw the person I really was. Not a fighter, not a radical, not even a first-class tradesman like Sam, who would show the world what a
bren
he was, how he was going to leave his mark.
“Carol knew exactly who Sam was, too. She didn’t need explanations. ‘He’s mean,’ she said to me once. ‘He’s the kind of man who would whip a kid for no reason.’ At that point I hadn’t said a word about the scene on the East Side. A few weeks after we were married — that was in March of 1912, in a courthouse — I told her about the fight. She said nothing at first. We were both only eighteen. I think Carol couldn’t help being scared of what it would mean to go up against Lottie and Sam. She had no family in the city — her people were still in Chicago, and she’d basically left home for good. In a sense my sister and her husband were all Carol had in the way of family.
“Of course they didn’t think much of Carol. She wasn’t serious enough for them. Sam was especially rough on her, always saying she wasn’t well informed, didn’t know what was going on in the world. He used to tease her about being an empty-headed blonde. Carol took it well. She’s easygoing that way. Lottie and Sam both thought I’d married her too soon — in fact, Lottie thought I’d gotten Carol pregnant.”
Len passed a hand over his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose briefly between thumb and forefinger. He didn’t look at me as he resumed.
“I should’ve guessed then, but I didn’t. Something about the way Lottie said that to me, the harshness of it …I heard it, but I didn’t know what it meant. Now it’s obvious — Lottie’s jealousy — but I didn’t get it then. Not that it would’ve made any difference in what happened, ultimately. But it would’ve changed how we felt.”
He stood, walked to the back door, and leaned against its frame. I didn’t shift in my chair to look at him. Our bodies faced in opposite directions, yet he commanded my attention. His words sat at the center of my consciousness, pushing out all the rest: Hayden, Clay’s voice, the color of blood oranges.
“A few months later,” Len said, “things fell apart between us and them. Carol went over to their apartment one evening to visit Lottie. She was nervous. It was the first time she’d gone over on her own like that, spur of the moment, but I encouraged her. I thought it might be one of those things that would bring Lottie and her together.
“It turned out Lottie wasn’t home, but Sam was. He told Carol to come in, and they had a glass of sherry. That particular detail always strikes me — I just can’t imagine Sam drinking sherry, but it’s what he offered her. They talked about Carol’s job. At that time she was working in the same music store as me, in the back; the owner didn’t like women on the floor of the shop. Carol was the bookkeeper, and she sat behind a closed door.
“Sam poured himself some more sherry and said a few things about how women weren’t supposed to work with numbers, it wasn’t what they were good at. Carol got understandably a little het up about that — I mean, she wasn’t any suffragette but she’s always known the value of work. She didn’t like what Sam seemed to be saying, and she let him know it. She got up to leave. He stood in front of her, placed one palm on each of her collarbones, and gave her a quick, hard shove. Naturally she toppled backward, onto the sofa.
“Sam was on her, one hand clamped over her mouth and another under her skirt, when she shoved him, I guess pretty hard. He must’ve figured she’d fight, so he let go and made her stand up and compose herself. Those being his words, I should say.”
Len shook his head. “Carol doesn’t scare easily, but Sam scared her. She told him if he stepped any closer, she’d kill him with the thing she was holding in her hand — a silver letter opener that usually lay on the table by the sofa. I remember it — it was Lottie’s. Actually, it had been our mother’s. It was Russian, one of our only souvenirs.
“I guess Sam took her at her word. Carol’s someone you’d believe in such a situation. But he barred the door and wouldn’t let her go till he’d said a few more things. About what a tramp she was, how her hair was never combed, how she looked like some goyische blond out to snare good Jewish men and ruin their lives — wasn’t that her plan for her husband, after all? What kind of Jewish girl leaves her family and moves to a place like New York by herself? She deserved whatever happened to her; no man should take her seriously. At least she hadn’t propagated herself, he said. Those were his words. ‘No babies from you,’ he said, ‘blessed be God.’ And then he turned, opened the door, and added, ‘or from Lottie, either. What kind of world is it when Jewish women can’t have babies?’