Oh, yeah, how well it began — could he recapture it? His introducing first the fact that the sort of backbiting his parents were engaged in was entirely proscribed on Shabbes bay nakht, Sabbath eve, time of serenity, when every Jew was a king, a potentate. And God forgive him now because he couldn’t forget the deplorable wisecrack he was guilty of making: that Pop was a mashed potentato; mawkish verbal incontinence, responsibility for which he wriggled out of by laying the blame at the foot of Joyce. Sing heavenly muse how Mom had reminded Pop that he had blackened the eyes of the son of the master artisan, before quitting the artisan’s employ. And she had gone on to pun that the deed was in keeping with his blacksmith’s calling. Her twitting earned her his harassed glare.
Yet again, but in a variegated fashion, Mom told Ira the familiar story of Pop’s first trip to America. A few days after Pop fled from his apprenticeship and came home, she recalled, he had purloined a sufficient sum from his father’s wallet to pay for steerage passage to America, purloined the cash and absconded with it to Hamburg, port of departure for America. Once in New York, he telegraphed his brother Gabe for additional funds for his fare to St. Louis. Both of these things Pop himself related to Ira years later, laughing at the memory of his youthful misdemeanor. Pop did have a glint of humor — but usually long after the fact. In short, Pop had avoided New York with its sweatshops, its opportunities severely limited to the needle trades, its virulent discrimination against Jews, its crammed tenements, infested with vermin and breeding grounds for tuberculosis and cholera, its teeming Jewish multitudes scrounging and toiling for a living. Instead, he had traveled by railroad coach to the West. The West — where so many Jews in the nineteenth century had already gone, not the hordes of Jews who composed the early-twentieth-century influx from the persecuted, orthodox shtetls of East Europe, with their narrow, rabbinically defined horizons, but adventurous, cosmopolitan Jews of German origin, who settled in the West and in many instances made their fortunes there.
The year in which Pop set out, 1899, was almost like a watershed in time, separating the arrival of the German Jews from that of the East European ones. To St. Louis Pop had first gone, and — again with a laugh — he told how he had backed a cart loaded with scrap metal collected from his brother Gabe’s junkyard over the dock and into the Mississippi. The two had quarreled.
“Oh, with whom didn’t my spouse quarrel?” Mom observed with due redundancy.
Pop had quarreled with his brother, felt sorry for himself, felt neglected, deserted, and lonely. Poor man — he must have been deprived of mother love, youngest in the family, and not regarded as either prudent or shrewd, and he wasn’t. Still, the baby of the family — of about eight or nine children — should have been cherished, but he wasn’t cherished either. How many times had Ira studied his paternal grandmother Rivkeh’s photographic portrait hanging on a wall in the front room: the rigidity, the forbidding rigidity, of her lineaments was such that Ira would think of her later as the Jewish twin of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Deprived of mother love, maybe — to do a little homespun psychologizing — not deemed perspicacious, shrewd, a khukhim, either with respect to money matters or to study. Again, Ira recalled Mom’s saying how delicate in constitution Pop’s next-older brother was, Jacob, and devoted entirely to the study of the Talmud — and how Pop had tormented his weaker sibling, even provoked him into a scuffle. He had mauled Jacob so badly that Pop had to go into hiding for a week in order to avoid a paternal caning. Keeping out of sight during the day, he had skulked in the dark at night outside the house, waiting for his mother to circumvent her husband’s wrath by surreptitiously providing her wayward son with the leftovers from supper.
Anyway, in America, in the expansive American West, Pop naturally became homesick, and he returned to Galitzia.
How like his son, Ira reflected, not without bitterness: how like him his son was in hundreds of ways.
If there existed any differences in character between them, Ira and his own execrable father, they probably derived from Mom, and salient among them was that Ira couldn’t permit himself the subterfuge to which Pop invariably had recourse, when he sought relief from the consequences of his impetuousness, his folly, his execrable judgment: it was all the fault of the Devil. The Devil always came to Pop’s rescue. “The Devil prompted me,” Pop invariably said. And so now: “The Devil prompted me. I became homesick. I yearned to see my mother.”
And see her he did. He traveled back to Austro-Hungary. He not only saw his mother, but there, alas, he also found Leah, the woman who was to become Ira’s mother.
Old story. Still fuming over the fancied lost verve of the prose the computer had robbed him of, old story, Ira told himself. Well, you’ve patched up the lacuna, after a fashion, bridged the gap, more or less. Get on with the tale, get on with your Shabbes bay nakht, goddamn the luck.
VII
“
Indeed.” The single word seeped irony as Mom leaned over the table to clear the dishes.
“It wasn’t so?” Pop looked up at her.
“I said indeed.”
“Nag.” He goosed her, chirruping genially at the same time, chirruping the way he had urged on his horse when he was a milkman. “Tlkh, tlkh.”
“When you’re frozen by the past, embarrassed, yes, molest your wife.” She bumped his hand away.
“Uh-uh. She’s excited.” Her reaction never failed to amuse him.
“Spare me your endearments.” Mom paused on the way to the sink. “You still owe me two dollars balance from my allowance for the week. I would appreciate receiving that more than your endearments.”
“On Shabbes bay nakht?” Pop indulged in mock dismay. “The candles are still burning, shedding their holy light. How can you ask me for two dollars? It’s a sin. I’m a Jew, no?”
“My pious Jew. Tomorrow is also Shabbes. Until evening. And what new excuse will you find then? Yesterday was Thursday. You could have settled the score then. Sunday begins a new week.”
“I’ll pay you, I’ll pay you. I’m not fleeing the country.”
“You could flee into your grave.”
Pop chuckled. Mom glowered. It was the stock confrontation between them. Too bad Minnie was absent, the only one capable of entreating and cajoling Pop into ending the petty crisis. She had a way with him, softly beseeching and pleading as Ira never could. She probably would persuade him to give Mom the balance of her allowance when she got home — but until she got home, the air of conflict that he hated more than anything else hung about the kitchen: conflict over money, and in particular the tag end of Mom’s allowance.
Oh, hell, guilt again: Jesus, had Ira been out working, bringing home a pay envelope, the way the other kids on the street did, how different, how much easier for Mom — having to wrangle with the old bastard for all of two bucks.
He gazed at the candles, trying to make up his mind whether to get his copy of Milton’s poems from the shelf under the china closet, or to try to protect Mom, interject some witticism, maybe, divert her fixation on the subject of her allowance. How she tormented herself over it, and how Pop enjoyed prolonging her torment. No, he couldn’t lose himself in Milton. Not on Shabbes bay nakht. Not with Pop digging his mother’s grave before him.