“Maybe you shouldn’t have turned off your word processor,” said M on the same occasion, when the two came back into the kitchen after closing the water valve under the mobile home. “But then you may not be able to work anyway.”
She was right, to a certain extent: right, write, rite. Damn. Griefs of the mobile home owner. It hadn’t occurred to him when Jess was still here, fixing a leak in the little valve in the copper tubing leading to the evaporative cooler — it hadn’t occurred to him that the small pilot light in the heat tape, which was wrapped around the water pipe that supplied kitchen and bathroom, might be on, while the tape itself was burned out. Such had apparently been the case. For when he went outdoors first thing in the morning after breakfast to check on whether the job was effective — after a cold night, with the temperature dropping to the low twenties — although he had let a small trickle of water run from the kitchen faucet as additional safeguard and kept a 100-watt lamp burning under the “trailer,” he noticed damp semicircles on the cement at places where the skirting at the bottom of the mobile home touched the patio. Evil omen. He hadn’t noticed those damp half-moons yesterday, and the night before last had been just as cold. Well, maybe it was just precipitation, cold air coming in contact with the relatively warmer skirting. Ah, man and his fond hopes. So he and M had gone out and raised one of the “hatches” in the skirting in order to ascertain the cause, the origin of the damp places on the cement, in order to verify their hopes that condensation indeed was responsible, and not a break or crack in the water lines.
“No, it doesn’t look very hopeful,” M had said, when Ira pointed to the cement at the edge of their neighbor’s skirting — which seemed bone-dry. If the cause of the wetness had been condensation of cold air on the skirting, why wasn’t her patio strung with half-round splotches? Everything pointed in the right direction: the heat tape was shot, burned out, done for. And so it was. And last night, having assured himself everything was in order, 100-watt lamp on, the holes of the nearby ventilation strip in the skirting duly masked with a sheet of plastic, and a slender stream of water flowing in kitchen sink and bathroom lavatory, he had slept as he hadn’t slept in many a night, the sleep of the just, and he awoke almost pain-free. Fool’s paradise. Well. He had poked his arm into the open hatch, and crooked the elbow so that he could run his fingers along the near edge of the floor, and encountered a kind of shallow channel there, for what reason it was there he didn’t know, but moist it was, more than damp: wet. Hélas!
V
Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereial sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to Arms.
“Well, where is he?” Mom’s voice came to Ira as if across the centuries, from the present to the time Milton wrote Paradise Lost. He had finished reading the lesser poems, finished Comus and Lycidas, and begun reviewing the first six books of Paradise Lost for the midterms.
“Who? Pop?” Ira looked up from the page.
“Pop, shkrop, the sire, the shmire,” Mom found satisfaction in the pejorative echo. “You can’t trust him at all.” She opened the kitchen window — on the immediacy of bare wash lines in the cold, darkening backyard. Pushing aside the butter dish and half-full quart bottle of milk in the window box, she brought in the freshly prepared jar of horseradish. Its tarnished metal cap was tightly screwed down over a scrap of brown paper that covered the mouth of the jar. Next she took out of the window box an enameled pot — gefilte fish balls, Ira conjectured — that she had set out in the cold to congeal the sauce into aspic. And finally, she brought into view a glass bowl of fruit compote, prunes and raisins and dried apples. Ingredients of the Shabbes supper, of Friday-night fare, they were as familiar as the pair of solid brass candlesticks on the cloth-covered table.
“It grows wintry,” Mom remarked as the cold draft from outdoors invaded the close air of the kitchen.
“Yeah, well, it’s November, Mom,” Ira agreed. He could almost see the cold air coil itself within the humid, prevailing odor of chicken soup issuing from the large kettle on the gas stove.
“It’s shivery out. Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought the food in yet. Who knows when he’ll come?” She set the compote and horseradish on the sink sideboard, shut the window.
“It’s still early, isn’t it? Not even five.” Ira held aloft his notebook and Collected Poems of John Milton while Mom spread the white tablecloth beneath his elbows. He let his eyes wander over the lines he had just read: Him the Almighty Power/Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereial sky. . What lingo! It made you hold your breath. “Minnie isn’t even here yet,” he said absently.
“Minnie east at Mamie’s on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Three times a week. Have you forgotten?” Mom set the brass candlesticks on the tablecloth. “She goes to your college at night.”
“Oh, yeah.” Minnie had enrolled in a business course and a speech course given in the evening at CCNY. And to save shuttling from west to east from her job, and rushing through supper at home, and then back again from east to west to CCNY, she had arranged with Mamie to have supper there the nights she attended classes. Thus she could stay within easy reach of the West Side subway.
“It’s growing dark,” Mom said. “It’s time for me to bensht lekht.” She planted the pale candles in the candlesticks.
“Go ahead.”
Mom was a wavering demi-agnostic: whenever she referred to God, she invariably added (unless in the presence of Zaida) “. . if there is a God.” Still she blessed the Sabbath candles, bensht lekht, just as she had been taught to do from girlhood. The practice was too deeply ingrained to abandon, but there again, she would often finish the Hebrew prayer by saying: “Why I do this, I don’t know.” Without religious faith himself, a self-proclaimed atheist, an Epikouros, as Pop with his manifold superstitions dubbed his son, Ira nevertheless enjoyed the ritual. He found it touching; the balm of candlelight, the rich, mellow candlesticks, the hush of ceremony awoke in him a remnant of reverence still lingering from childhood. He welcomed the occasion. Maybe it was because it was Mom who officiated at it, and not Pop, that Ira remained solemn and pensive throughout the short invocation, neither condescending nor snide in witticism, as he invariably was when Pop presided over Jewish festivals, especially those that were celebrated a second night: the Rosh Hashanah and the Passover. Above all, he found the second recital of the Passover insufferably tedious. To have to sit through a second time the circumstances of the Exodus from Egypt, a second time consecutively, Pop droning unintelligibly and interminably as he conducted a fuming Ira twice in succession out of Egypt. “This is the bored of affliction” was Ira’s favorite quip, when the matzah was displayed, which fortunately only Minnie understood at first, although after a while Pop took umbrage at his son’s irreverence. Pop became particularly irritated when Ira insisted on repeating the same remark whenever his father’s recitation of the Haggadah reached the page which contained the engraving of Moses smiting the recumbent Egyptian: “Boy, think of all the suffering we Jews would have been saved if it was the other way. If the slave driver smote Moses, and we had settled in Egypt like all the rest of Pharaoh’s subjects. But no, we have to be different.”