Part Two (posted below on June 17th) found our Bull Gang neophytes, Lloyd and Heshy, struggling to keep up with the flow of work. In their ineptness, they were unable to get essential materials to the sheet metal mechanics who were waiting for them, in frustration, on the upper floors. The situation was so serious that the chief of the Bull Gang, the fearsome Eddie Ribori actually threatened their lives. Frantic and counting the days until they could respectably quit to return to college, they were snatched from despair and danger by Joe Muri, a Tin Knocker of legendary repute who, though he lived in the boys’ neighborhood, had studiously avoided ever acknowledging them and their “kind.” But because Lloyd’s father had once helped him when he was down and out, Joe Muri passed along some Bull Gang wisdom; and Heshy and Lloyd, as a result, were able to get the trucks unloaded and the materials onto the hoist and thereby keep up with the men. Weekends allowed the boys to recover and see their girlfriends—Heshy his favorite Siegel twin, Lloyd his German Baroness, Sigrid von Hauptmann, who finally got him to agree to take her for a visit to her version of his exotic Brooklyn.
In Part Three, which follows, we . . . .
I didn’t realize that my father’s sister, my Aunt Madeline would be there when I finally brought Sigrid to meet my parents. I had been driving us all over Brooklyn to show her the sights—the elegant promenade in Brooklyn Heights with its ecstatic views of lower Manhattan, the shabby remnants of the once-glorious Coney Island, the truly exotic flavors of the Arab quarter on Atlantic Avenue, and the rich but dangerous Black enclaves of Bedford Stuyvesant--but more, in truth, this extensive drive-about was to avoid the inevitable encounter with my origins.
“But Lloyd, this is such a charming street,” Sigrid oozed, sensing my nervous hesitation, as we turned off Church Avenue onto my block, East 56th Street. “I love these little houses with their, what do you call them,
stoops? And their gardens . . . “
“I would hardly call them ‘gardens,’ Sig,” I would have preferred her to stop trying so hard, to just let things happen, to let us get it all over with so we could get back to her chambers to both hide out and do other things, “They’re more like patches of dirt.”
“But look at those urns everywhere filled with succulents,” every stoop and front garden had at least two balanced on brick columns or pedestals, “Are they from cement? They make everything feel so secure and indestructible. That is important for growing up—to have a sense of permanence, a lack of threat. You were so lucky my sweet boy.” She slid closer to me, pressing herself to me. I could feel her heat, and was that trembling, as if she were remembering her own devastated childhood.
As we approached 205 East 56th Street, my house, I put my free arm around her to show both comprehension and compassion for that trembling. She nuzzled my neck, right there in full sight of everything and all who had been at the center of so much of my life! This amazing, forgive me,
creature from another world was nipping my bony neck!. And everything and everyone were out there in the street, filling their porches, or leaning perilously from second floor windows to see everything—whatever was to transpire was to be extensively witnessed and then recapitulated and gossiped about after we left for months, perhaps years. It was not every day on this block, on a hot day in late July, that a Sigrid would arrive in a blazing yellow car with the top down.
There was no spot for the car right in front so we needed to park by the Pearl’s house next door, which meant we were required to walk a short gauntlet of eager eyes. I attempted to hurry us, to pull us along into the shade and sanctuary of my parents’ apartment, whatever the consequences, but Sigrid moved at her own languid pace, turning like a giant ballerina on the sidewalk to take in the full arc of 56th Street, things to me so familiar as to be beyond noticing--the huddled two family houses, the occasional punctuation of six storey apartment houses where the Italians lived, the asphalt street softened by the fiery sun (my boyhood playing field demarked by the sewer covers I had told her about that served as our bases and goal posts), and the vacant lots where the rival gangs built their scrap-wood shacks and waged their internecine wars.
Taking in all of this so excited Sigrid that she glowed like a second sun, so radiant and comfortable in her body and on that street, this Saxon goddess right there among them, that I could almost hear gasps of appreciation emanating from those gathered to take in her entrance, appreciation for her endorsing ease and comfort.
The house in which we lived was the most substantially constructed on the block. Or at least it appeared to be that way from its surfaces. We lived on the second floor, and though renting it, from its glossy exterior and my father’s snappy wardrobe of checks and stripes and a series of seemingly flawless cars, we derived the undeserved benefit of appearing to be in much better circumstances than my parents’ actual struggles would suggest.
The house itself was owned by Willie Portnoy, the Lumber Baron, who with his family lived on the first floor. He spared no expense when building it, especially when it came to the externals—we had the slickest face-brick façade, each glazed brick allegedly cost five dollars, and wrought iron, which enclosed and encircled every square foot of side walkway, the driveway that led to the two-car garage (which side my father was assigned to use always caused fierce disputes), and the two tiny weed-strangled plots that constituted the front “gardens.” The steam heat, on the other hand, hidden from street view, never worked. Or perhaps the Baron never turned it on. So my father had a ball peen hammer hanging on one of the radiators that was directly above Willie and Pauline’s bedroom, which, on below-zero nights, he would use to bang on the pipes, yelling, “
Willie you cheap bastard turn up the heat!"
Sigrid, at her insistence, was about to enter into this world. And, still unknown to me, to meet Madeline.
* * *
“Sorry we’re so late. The beach traffic was impossible.”
“
Whaaa?” It was my unexpected Aunt Madeline who was notoriously hard of hearing, actually quite deaf but in complete denial about her condition. This was her universal seagull-caw that indicated she couldn’t hear a thing.
“
The beach traffic,” I hollered back in her direction as she crouched near my parents, a little behind my father as if seeking his protection from this Nordic apparition.
“
The beach? You went to the beach. It’s so
bee-u-ti-full there. You went swimming?”
“No Aunt Madeline, we got caught in beach traffic. That’s why we’re so late.”
“I’m glad you went swimming. The water in Brighton Beach is the cleanest. No one flushes their toilet there.” Sigrid appeared to enjoy meeting my tiny, unpredictable aunt, glowing at all her hollering. We both, though, sensed my parents’ growing embarrassment. This was to be their afternoon, not Madeline’s.
“
I love the water there. I swan there from when I was your age.” Aunt Madeline was totally devoted to the beach, forcing her brother Ben to drive her there all throughout the year. She was a strong swimmer who routinely ventured far out beyond the undertow, past the line of breaking waves to swim relentlessly and effortlessly for hours, back and forth in quarter-mile-long laps. And she was equally devoted to the sun, spending even more hours baking in it, ignoring her doctor’s warnings, so that her skin had assumed the color and texture of a fine Italian pocketbook.
“We can’t stay too long. I have to get Sigrid back to the city. She’s doing research for her philosophy professor and has to complete a project for Monday. And we also need to see Heshy. Sigrid wants to meet him.” Though Sigrid was clearly enjoying Madeline and bathing her in an affectionate smile, I couldn’t be sure things would continue even this well.
“Isn’t it time you introduced
her to your parents?” This finally from my mother who stood with her arms folded across her chest. “Have you forgotten already how you were raised?”
“Of course, I’m sorry, Mom, this is my friend Sigrid von Hauptmann. . . .”
“
Whaaa? What’s he saying?”
“
My friend, Aunt Madeline, Sigrid von Hauptmann.”
“
She’s who? I never heard such a name like that. She’s an American?”
“No, Aunt Madeline,
she’s from Germany. She was born there but goes to college in New York. And Dad,” I struggled to move ahead quickly before Madeline needed further attention, “this is Sigrid. I told you about her. The Barnard senior. Sigrid these are my parents.”
Sigrid appeared to curtsey to them, “I’m so very pleased to meet you after all this time. Lloyd cannot stop telling me about you and his brother, who I know is away at summer camp, and your wonderful family, your wonderful brothers and sisters. Your brother Jack,” she said to my mother, who was now smiling at just the mention of his name, “he sounds like such a fine brother. So generous.” With this reference to the “sainted brother” my father stopped smiling though it was obvious that he was in his own way as fascinated by Sigrid as Madeline.
“And your brother Ralph,” she then turned to my father.
“
Ralph?” Madeline barked having heard her brother’s name clearly enough. “My brother? He’s coming too? He never comes to Brooklyn. Does the mountain ever come to the molehill?” she spat.
“I only meant,” Sigrid picked up, now including both Madeline and my father in her radiance, “I only was trying to say, my English is not so perfect, yes?” to which my mother nodded, “that your brother Uncle Ralph was so kind to let Lloyd and Heshy have such a good job for the summer. They are learning so much, making so much money,” my mother nodded again, “and look at the wonderful muscles Lloyd is developing.” She reached over to touch my biceps, which I could not help but alternately tense and flex to accentuate their enhanced definition. “His coach will be so pleased when he sees him in September.” This again engaged my father who had dreams for me of athletic glory and thus he resumed his open adoration.
“Since you have to run so soon,” my mother said, “maybe you want a bite to eat. I prepared some salads and got smoked fish from the appetizing store. We also have fresh bagels and bialys.”
“We already ate at Nathan’s in Coney Island. I wanted Sigrid to try their hot dogs. She ate three of them. So why don’t we go into the living room and talk for a few more minutes and then I’ll take Sigrid over to Heshy’s.”
“
What did she eat?” Aunt Madeline interjected yet again. “
A dog? I didn’t know they did that in Germany. I thought just in China.”
“No Aunt Madeline
we had hot dogs, frankfurters at Nathan’s. You know Nathan’s? We used to go there together.”
“
I never liked the Germans. Even before the war.” I began to think I needed to find a way to get us to Heshy’s in the next few minutes.
“I would love to have something to eat,” Sigrid said, still smiling, not allowing Madeline to upset her or ruin our visit. “Lloyd has also told me about all the wonderful Brooklyn food you make. Your wonderful stuffed cabbage. I lived on cabbage and turnips during the war. It was so terrible there. In Germany.” I cringed—now she was talking about Germany! “My bother and I were sent to our grandmother in the country. To be safe.” Everyone became silent. “So please, yes, let us have something to eat. Lloyd is always in such a hurry. I would like very much to have, what you called ‘a bite to eat.’ Yes, a bite would be very fine.” And with that my mother escorted us to the dining room table, which was reserved for only very occasional special occasions.
“
Ach, a table just like my grandmother’s,” Sigrid exclaimed as we moved through the swinging door that separated the breakfast room from the dining room. It was massive, of dark wood with sturdy legs that must have been turned on a heavy lathe, my mother’s pride. “The only good piece I have,” she would say in front of my father when they were fighting about something, when she wanted to particularly upset him, “A gift from my parents when we got married.” Surely not something he had been able to provide. This usually drove him into long, sulking sieges of silence.
“Seeing this table, just like my grandmama’s, it makes me feel so at home, if I may say that.” My mother moved to put her arm around Sigrid, which was an effort since Sigrid was at least a foot taller.
“You are always welcome here, dear,” she said, looking up at Sigrid, recognizing what Sigrid was feeling, “If you are a friend of Lloyd’s, this is your home too.” Sigrid stooped so that she could rest her head on my mother’s solid shoulder. And seemed silently to be crying. But just for a moment before quickly regaining her composure and cheeriness.
“I am so happy to be here with all of you. I so much miss my family back in Germany.”
“
Whaaa?
Germany again?” Aunt Madeline appeared to have no difficulty hearing “Germany.”
I sensed the approach of imminent doom and desperately tried to change the subject, “Dad, tell Sigrid about your chess.” I thought that might work since he was devoted to it, playing out and analyzing the championship games reported each Sunday in the
New York Times. “Sigrid plays too. She even competed in a few tournaments, like you. I know she’ll tell you she’s not very good,” I was groping to find something other than Germany to talk about, “but she really is.” Sigrid exchanged a quick look with my father, as if to say, “Isn’t your son still such a little boy.”
But my father, also perhaps concerned where his sister might take us, picked up my lead, “Well, I do play a little. There is a chess club I go to Tuesday nights in downtown Brooklyn. There are some good players there, of could not like in Europe,” he was rarely this gregarious with someone whom he had just met, “In Eastern Europe of course, Russia particularly. And in Germany? I do not know about the German players.” I began to shift in my seat, fearing what might next erupt from Madeline. But though he too did not hear well and as a result usually could match his sister in volume, he was careful to pronounce “Germany” and “German” in an uncharacteristically muted manner. Madeline did not rouse. She was quite preoccupied with her eating.
My mother, characteristically, had put out a bountiful spread of delicatessen and appetizing store salads and cold cuts. Madeline, who never ate more than a quarter of a small chicken at any meal, she was so concerned about her weight, spending any of her rumored accumulation of money, and what she called her “numbers,” by which she meant her cholesterol, in contrast, when at my parents or her brother Ralph’s on Long island, where they were paying for the food, she was known to fill her plate many times; and her chewing was so, shall I say, enthusiastic that it generated enough sound that it alone drowned out for her any conversation and thus we would have a window of time to get in a few sentences before she put down her fork and rejoined us. Only a very few moments since she was also the fastest eater in the family.
And thus before Sigrid could say much about her own chess, much less its status in Germany, Madeline raised her head from her plate, where it had been substantially buried. “
What did she say? I couldn’t hear because I was eating. Do you have any cake?” she shouted at my mother.
“You know I do. Why don’t you let the rest of us eat something and talk and then I’ll put it out.”
Sigrid had been telling my father about a young grandmaster who she felt might one day contend for the world championship. He was, she said, at age twelve already the German national champion.
“
She can’t stop talking about Germany.” Since Madeline was still focused on Germany, and filled with food, I felt we were now going to move rapidly toward disaster. I checked my watch. It was nearly 4:00. How much longer before we could respectably escape?
“Mom, I think we will skip dessert. As I told you, we need to go over to Heshy’s house.”
“My Harry, he was in Germany,” Madeline continued, but now more subdued, maybe digesting. “He was a soldier, in the army.” Harry was Madeline’s third and last husband, the last as well to commit suicide. All three had done so for the same reason. He was the only one of the husbands who interested her enough to inspire her to have her hair done any place other than at the local barber school. He on the other hand decided he too had had enough after just two years of marriage—life with Madeline for him was literally deadly. In truth, everyone in the family was more sympathetic to Harry than to Madeline’s endless grief.
“He saw action over there.” We were sill in Germany. “But he never told me any stories, except those about how he threw away his knapsack and carried a dice table on his back so whenever they had time he would run a Crap game. He came home from the war with a lot of money. He loved to gamble,” she seemed lost in these memories. “But I also know he saw and had to do terrible things. Terrible. I loved him so much, that funny little man.” She was actually smiling. “You can see, I am ugly. No, no,” she said as Sigrid rose to protest. “It is true. But he made me feel beautiful.”
And with this she began to sob so uncontrollably that my mother had to snatch away her dish to prevent Madeline from lowering her head into her leftover whitefish salad.
Sigrid was sitting next to her and reached over to try to comfort her. “Leave her alone,” my father bellowed, recovering his full voice, “She always does this at the end of every meal. Just ignore her. She’ll stop once she has a piece of cake.”
“But she is so unhappy,” Sigrid insisted though careful not to appear to disagree with my father who certainly knew his sister. The huge wormwood table was trembling from Madeline’s crying. But my father was right, I could testify--this is what Madeline always did before dessert.
“But you know, your being here,” he looked at Sigrid, “and my sister talking about the war, reminded me of something I haven’t thought about for a long time.” I couldn’t begin to imagine where this might lead. I feared again, not to a good place. “I was too old for the service. The draft board kept turning me down so I volunteered to be an Air Raid Warden. I wanted to do something to contribute to the war effort other than eating rationed meat once a week. They gave me a helmet and a whistle and taught me what all the Nazi planes looked like. From their silhouettes.” I had never heard any of this before and was so stunned that I forgot what Sigrid might be thinking about my family’s continuous talk about Germany and the war.
“My job was to check to see if any lights, even from radio dials, were showing behind the blackout shades that everyone was required to have. Heshy’s father, Mr. Perly, made them. I think it’s the only time he ever made a decent living,” he chuckled at that recollection. “If a light was showing I would ring their doorbell and tell them to pull their shades all the way down or cover their lampshades with towels. So in case the Nazis sent planes over Brooklyn they wouldn’t be able to see any lights on the ground and use them as targets for their bombs.
“And then after everyone was asleep and all the lights were turned out there was no need for us to walk the streets, and so they sent us up onto apartment house roofs to look into the sky through binoculars to search for enemy planes. I spent hundreds of nights on the roof of that building there, right across the street,” he pointed to the apartment house where all the Italians lived. Sigrid, equally riveted by my father’s story, even got up to peer at it through the window, seemingly imaging what it must have been like on that roof top those pitch-black nights when who knows what she had been doing at the same time on the other side of the ocean.
“In the winter,” he now turned to me, “to keep me warm through the nights, and we had real winters back then, your mother sent me out with a thermos of hot coffee. Also to keep me awake. Because some of the men fell asleep. Actually,” he caught Sigrid’s eye, “there were women too doing this. To fall asleep on that roof, I felt, was to let my neighborhood down, my country down.” He paused and all we could hear was Madeline still sobbing with her head still resting on the table.
“You know what was the worst?” We all looked toward him, no one speaking, “it was the silence, the utter silence. It was not a restful, peaceful silence, but a silence filled with threat. I longed to hear even a simple dog’s bark. To break that sense of danger. To pull me back into the familiar world of family and going to work and listening to a ballgame on the radio. Just the
thought of the sounds of a game late at night coming in all the way from Saint Louis. If we could only get back to that I thought we would all be safe. Especially you and your brother. All I wanted was for you to be safe.”
And with that, Madeline arose from the table shouting “
Where’s the cake. I’m ready for the cake.”
My father at that human bark emerged from his reverie and said, “I think maybe it’s time for you to go over to Heshy’s.” He was protecting us again. “I know you have to get Sigrid back to the city.” And with that it felt all right to say goodbye, exchange hugs and kisses, and leave.
Heshy’s was just across the way. Just on the other side of the vacant lot.
* * *
I said, “Let’s walk. I’ll leave the car where it is.” It was covered with kids who were draped on all four fenders, waiting for us to emerge as were all the porches and stoops still filled with the neighborhood yentas who leaned forward to get a better look at Sigrid, who would be the featured subject at their coffee klatches for weeks to come. “Heshy’s is just around the corner on Church Avenue.”
Sigrid decided to give them a good show—she pulled herself up to her full statuesque six-feet, plus three inches from heels; and although she had dressed demurely for the sake of our visit with my parents, once on the street she pulled back her shoulders so as to put her perfect breasts on best display and with her hands flipped her skirt to reveal glimpses of waxed thighs as she stretched out her stride. I needed to jog alongside to keep up. Mrs. Pearl, who lived next door literally slid out of her folding chair, with it collapsing on top of her, as she strained to get a better look. An enterprising kid could have made a fortune selling front-row stoop seats.
We walked by the vacant lot that separated Heshy’s and my bedrooms, the lot we attempted to bridge with various homemade communication devices, one less effective and more dangerous than another; it was still piled high with discarded car tires that “crazy” Herbie Bender in his autism climbed endlessly like Sisyphus; then by John Inusi, in his shoemaker’s shop that Sunday to catch up on the work that typically accumulated during the summers, he was still there, as during my childhood, bent a bit now from the years, at his ancient grease-slicked stitching machine that he brought with him on the boat from Italy; he too, who always had an eye for the ladies, squinted out through his crusty store window to take a look at the majestic Sigrid; then we passed quickly by a store piled high with steam boilers and air compressors that represented a neighborhood mystery—no one was ever seen to be there though the rent had been paid for decades; some said it must be a front for the Mafia—there could be no other explanation; and next came to a door that led up a flight of steps to the second-floor apartment and office of Dr. Honey Traub, the decorated war hero dentist, who both lived and worked up there until he made enough money to build the neighborhood’s most expensive and elaborate house across Church Avenue, a “showplace” it was declared by those same yentas, on what was at least a half acre of vacant land—his life with his two golden sons, Ricky, my friend, and Bobby, my brother’s, more than anything to that time represented the full expression of America’s promise: to move from an airless apartment above a shoemaker’s shop to such a house on such a vast piece of real estate--because it was just that, real estate, decidedly not a vacant lot, with such a wife, Gertrude, about whom half the men on the block lusted, if they had the strength at the end of a long work day--this meant that anything was possible; and at the corner of East 56th Street and Church Avenue, directly across from Krinsky’s candy store, was Dr. Smith’s pharmacy, the only person on the block who appeared not to have a first name—all his diplomas and certificates of certification listed him as “P.K.R Smith, Jr.”-- the “Doctor” we added, he had never earned one, except in the eyes of all of us who he treated extra-medically, at no charge, for deep cuts just short of requiring stitches, gingivitis, epidemics of “trench mouth,” and, I always suspected, the Italians for a variety of unmentionable forms of venereal disease beyond the ken of our or their family doctors; and finally we passed The Elegant Lady beauty parlor, where my mother went every Saturday morning to have her hair washed and roots touched up, but perhaps more to escape for a few hours to a sanctuary of women who desperately needed respite from their ceaseless chores, and more in truth from their “men.”
Then we faced Perly’s Glass Works—no sign announced it but everyone knew that if a kid drove a baseball through one of your windows, or if a cat shredded the tape on a Venetian blind, or if a mirror needed reglazing, you knew where to find Mr. Perly, that is unless he was out wandering the neighborhood, clutching his
Daily Worker, muttering incomprehensively to himself in a patois of two or three languages.
I had alerted Sigrid to the fact that to get up to Heshy’s apartment, above the store, we needed to use the stairs at the back and thus we might encounter Mr. Perly; and if we did I could not predict what might happen. But if we kept moving, we would find Heshy holed up in his bedroom. She said, “I hope we do meet him. I would love that. He sounds so exotic.”
I had not been there for some years but everything remained as I remembered it—I had spent some time there with Mr. Perly, getting him coffee and cigarettes from Krinsky’s and even occasionally the
Worker. The floors were still strewn with half empty putty cans, unfinished shades and blinds hung as if in tatters from hooks screwed into the ceiling, and his work table was even more eroded from the caustic mixes he used to glaze his mirrors. The single unshaded light bulb still drifted in the air we stirred as we moved toward the back. But it was the smells compounded from the putty and Silver Nitrates that evoked for me the strongest memories of my one night, very late, when Mr. Perly asked me to help him make some mirrors for Mrs. Pearl—she was redecorating again. This felt as if it were from such a different time. Or so it seemed, with Sigrid clutching me.
We did find Heshy in his room, curled on his cot, reading by the light filtering in from the space between our houses. When he saw us he slipped the book quickly under his pillow. He was the same old Heshy, I thought, whose collection of “dirty” books was known well beyond our street—who knew what he had been reading and was trying to hide from us.
I introduced Sigrid who couldn’t have been more pleased to be finally meeting Heshy. He suggested we go into the kitchen where we could sit and have some coffee. Which we did. Sigrid sat facing the window and said pointing, “Oh Lloyd, look there is your bedroom. Please, Heshy, tell me about the smoke signals you made to each other.”
He was at the stove heating water for the percolator. “We
never did that,” he said in a soft monotone.
“But Lloyd told me you did. And the hose you talked through, no?”
“The speaking tube we did try—it didn’t work, the distance is too great and to be heard we had to shout. But never smoke signals,” he still stood facing the stove even though the water was already perking, “Lloyd, you may have noticed, has a lively imagination.”
“Lloyd?” Sigrid turned to me plaintively, “No smoke signals? I thought you made-believe you were Indians. Just like that Indian on the radio you told me about, no? He was Tonto? Heshy, you told me, was Tonto and you were the Ranger?”
Heshy had joined us and now looked directly at Sigrid, saying with some bite, “The Lone Ranger. He always saw himself that way and me as his sidekick, you know, his ‘faithful companion,’ like Tonto.”
“But in my country, there is great interest in Cowboys and Indians, especially Indians who are seen to be a part of nature,
die natur, not tainted by civilization. We see them to be victims. Cowboys to be their oppressors. From what I felt, if I may say this Heshy,” she was smiling at him in the filtering light, “it felt to me, if I may be honest, as if you did not want to be that Brave, that Tonto. This I do not understand.”
“I never saw it that way. Everyone here wanted to be the noble cowboy, not the ‘noble savage,’ the unaccomodated man, advancing on the wilderness, a solitary, beyond the reach of towns becoming cities, uncorrupted and uncorrupting. Quite a myth. Like Cooper’s Leather Stocking. Do you know him? I mean Cooper?”
“Yes I do. I have read much of him. I know many think
The Deerslayer is a book for young boys, like
Huckleberry Finn was once thought to be, but it is a very profound book about American consciousness.”
“I agree. I am also very interested in issues of consciousness.” Things were now going well—for a moment I had thought there would again be problems and I would have to find a way to extract us without unduly insulting Heshy. “In fact,” Heshy continued, “when you came in, I was looking again at Sartre.” I thought, well done Heshy, sure, Sartre is under your pillow! “Lloyd had told me that you were working on a project about Sartre and consciousness.” He peered at her, and she at him. “This interests me as well. No one, in my view, has done better jat delineating the contradictions that were, in my view, the principal consequences of the First World War.” Sigrid was nodding; I was worrying that again soon we would be talking about her War.
“I do though think he is now feeling a little dated, don’t you agree?” Sigrid was now nodding vigorously and had placed her elbows on the table so she could get closer to it and to Heshy. I was beginning to think that maybe there were now other reasons to try, very soon, to get us back to the city.
“I think there is some newer, better thinking going on among the current younger generation on the Continent.” Heshy added. “We will here be hearing about them soon. Of that I am certain. That will be good for us here—we need this critique; we continue to be so naïve in our optimism.”
“Yes that is true,” Sigrid said, “It is America’s greatest weakness.”
And just as she uttered those words about America Mr. Perly appeared, looming in the doorway. Ignoring us, more like we weren’t even there, he said, as if to himself, “Coffee.” He went over to the stove and poured himself a cup, and, still not acknowledging our presence, sat down between Heshy and Sigrid. He spread out his paper and muttered, “Dogs.
Hunde. It is not the German problem; it is the American problem. Their treats. Their
Americanisa bombs. It is a wonder, no, anyone is still alive?”
“Ah, Mr. Perly,” I tried to interject and shift subjects, though I knew from the past that that was not possible, “I want you to meet my friend, Sigrid, from college.”
“There will be a comeuppance, this I assure you,” he rolled his paper into a weapon and slammed the table with it so that Heshy and I jumped with a start—Sigrid didn’t move. She had her eyes locked on him. “Soon, it will be soon. There will be a reckoning, a
reckoning I tell you for these running dogs.”
“You know, Mr. Perly, that I am too from Germany,” I leaned back from the table to be closer to the door. “And you are wrong.” He slammed the table again in response, this time with both hand and it rocked on its chrome legs.
“I am telling you that it is
der system here. Never the people. The workers here too give both their money and blood to these
farstunkena fascists in Washington and Wall Street.”
“Yes, I do agree, there is an American problem. I too know about American capitalism. It can be a cruel system. But there is also very much a German problem.” She shifted tone, looking directly at Mr. Perly, not backing off, “I was there. I saw the consequences. I saw the dead. I ate scraps of garbage.” Mr. Perly looked up at her.
“This was not something the Americans did. It was us, the Germans who caused that. My family too.” She was no longer smiling or radiant. Just a little girl in a long body, forlorn in the fading light of Brooklyn.
Mr. Perly sat motionless, no longer flailing. He pushed his chair back slowly and then raised himself. I slid mine back as well, yet closer to the door. It felt as if all the oxygen had suddenly left the room. He approached Sigrid and stood behind her, totally still. She was bent, slumped toward the table. I had never seen her in anything resembling that kind of posture.
He then reached out toward her and gently placed his acid-gnarled hands on her magnificent shoulders, the contrast startling. And said, “You will be well,
mein kinder.” And more incredibly, leaned over, still from behind, and placed a long kiss amidst the curls of her blondest hair.
* * *
Sigrid asked me to raise the top on the car. She wanted to shut off the outer world. She curled up beside me, and we drove toward Manhattan. Nestled together. Silent for quite some time.
When we were half way across the Brooklyn Bridge, Sigrid said, “I wish I had grown up with you and Heshy. Then I would have something to remember. Now I have only things to forget.”
* * *
The next morning, Monday, when changing in the construction shanty, I noticed that Heshy had a book stuffed in his sack that appeared to be written in French while I was still working my way through
The Stranger. With everything that was happening, it was looking as if it would take me the whole summer to finish it.
While pulling on our overalls, studiously avoiding any references to Sigrid’s visit to Brooklyn, Eddie Ribori approached us and said, “There’s a big fan arriving today—they say the biggest ever made, twenty tons, twelve feet tall—today you two’ll be working with me and the men.”
To be continued . . . .
