“And I don’t know what to believe. I half believe, half not. But go through the motions I must. I can’t help myself. Would to God I got the comfort out of it you get. You see: I don’t believe and I call on Him in whom I don’t believe. It’s a form of madness.”
Mom laughed her apologetic, contralto laugh. “Then you’re half an Epikouros.”
“Indeed. Perhaps more than half.” Mrs. Shapiro rested her puffy hand on the white ceramic doorknob. “To me, He doesn’t make sense either.”
“What? What do you mean, Mrs. Shapiro? How can He not make sense for you?” Minor surprise, minor perplexity, oscillated fleetingly within Ira’s mind. Was she serious, twitting him, or what?
“You’ll forgive me: I don’t know. That is for the educated.”
“Oh.” Ira relaxed. He was about to chuckle.
“When one speaks of sense, of wisdom, then for the educated, the Epikouros, it must spring from here, no?” She touched the thin, graying hair of her temple.
“I suppose so.” This time Ira did chuckle. “And for you?”
“Only when I go to buy something, if it’s worth the money, if I can get it for less, from the seller or somewhere else.”
“Yes?”
“But of God I can’t think. He doesn’t spring from the same place, because as you know, I’m an illiterate woman. He has no place, so He makes no sense.”
“Oh, boy.”
“But on Friday nights, erev Shabbes, He seems to alight here.” She spread a hand over her heavy breast. “Here where the tears flow from.”
“I see.”
Here where the tears flow from. How bitter the taste of his own lips, and how fitfully they matched together again. He exhaled breath in a gust.
“Noo, Mrs. Stigman.” Mrs. Shapiro turned the doorknob. “You’ll read me the rest of the roman tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
“Ihr zolt hub’n a gitten Shabbes.”
“A sheinem dank. Ihr aukh.” House keys clinking, Mrs. Shapiro padded out from kitchen into hall.
“She’s smart,” Ira acknowledged.
“Indeed, she retains more from my reading to her about political matters than I do myself. She retains more and construes better.”
“Yeah?” He sat down in his favorite chair.
“Are you going to become a guest?” Mom said, after a pause.
“You didn’t worry about me?”
“One night. I’m used to that.”
“I’m afraid I’m really going to become a guest, Mom.”
“Yes? When?”
“Beginning now.”
“Azoy?” She moved her forearms across the strawberry-and-white sheaves printed on her housedress, until her elbows locked against her abdomen. “Are you staying here tonight?”
“No, I’m staying at Edith’s apartment.”
“Azoy. And for how long?”
“That’s what I came to tell you. I don’t know.”
Edith had asked him to bring some of his belongings to the apartment. Now that he was her lover, she saw no reason why he shouldn’t stay overnight more often. She would rather he did, she said: she missed his company. And that way too, staying with her often, he would avoid, avoid as much as possible, a recurrence of the ugly situation at home. Ugly situation, she called it. There was his father to consider, Edith emphasized: the always latent violence between them.
“Have you got a carton in the house?” Ira asked.
“For what?” And then she nodded. “I can empty one. It has summer curtains in it. A large one I don’t have.”
“I don’t need a large one. I’m only taking a few things: some socks, my BVDs, a couple of ties, a couple of shirts — what else? My new pair of pants. A few books. I gotta carry my briefcase in the other hand.”
“And the heavy underwear, Ira? It’ll soon be December, you know. How about a sweater?”
“Maybe the one without sleeves.”
Mom sighed. “I’ll go empty the carton.” She went into the other part of the house. Even though the kitchen door was shut, he could hear the familiar thump and slither of cardboard. She was probably emptying the contents of the carton on her bed. .
Foreboding. . What the hell was the matter with him? Foreboding and cuckoo combinations of disparate quotes: Woe is me, my mother, that I was ever born to set it right. Foreboding of long journeys: “Oh, who is this one has done this deed?”
Mom brought the carton into the kitchen: medium-sized, sturdy, all four flaps intact. “It’s a handsome one,” she said. “Joey Shapiro brought it to me from the drugstore.”
“Let’s see if I can get my arm around it.” Ira stood up. He rested the carton on his hip. “Just about.”
“And while you’re collecting your belongings, I’ll make a little snack.”
“Don’t bother. I’m going to have supper with her tonight — dinner, they call it.”
“A little snack won’t mar your appetite. I have smoked whitefish.”
“Please, Mom.”
“A little Muenster cheese and a bagel. My son, my only son, how can it harm you?”
“Okay, okay.”
“And a little jabah.” She always punned bilingually on the English word “java,” making it sound like the word for frog in Yiddish.
The cardboard of the carton was cold to the touch when he picked it up — as cold as his dreary little bedroom when he entered it — his single bed with the coat across it. Maybe Minnie would sleep in it now — nevermore to return.
Couldn’t help his thoughts, though, his goddamn swoon of fantasy. He began packing the carton from the drawers in the mirror-surmounted bureau in the front room. Socks, oh, two pair — you could always wash them. BVDs, a couple. All right? One pair of gray flannel pants? Joke: how many pair of gray flannel pants you got? And two laundered shirts pinned to cardboard. Oh, where has the chinky Chinaman gone who gave you litchi nuts on the East Side? Hey, you know? It’s you you’re forsaking, you who took the litchi nuts. Well, bless my soul. . No neckties with gravy spots. Jesus, no room for old cardigan either. Hey. Look up there, will you? — on the wallpapered walclass="underline" Zaida, Baba, Mom’s parents, wearing earlocks he, and wig she, with what horror watching their young crazy grandson about to go live with a shiksa. Oy, vey iz mir! Well, not so bad, Zaida, Baba: Which is better? A little dump of a Harlem habitat with everyone crammed into the kitchen, or a cozy little corner of a Greenwich Village apartment under lemony lampshade on a card table? Or lusting after your sister or tearing off a paltry piece of your kid cousin — that, or being a shiksa’s lover. A petite Ph.D.’s pet, a petite shiksa’s lover-lad — such a sweet sound. Now, there’s one for you. Propound me that: untutored sister or ungifted kid cousin — or refined shiksa? There’s one for Solomon, for Shloimeh ha Mailackh. Gotcha there. . Look out the north window, through the lace curtains, at the red-brick six-story, sick (sic) story dump, where Mrs. Green in her dingy white shift used to lean on her mop handle — mop handle in hand, mind you — framed in the first-floor window. Goodbye. Not bad, huh? And farewell, a long farewell to the little Dresden wolf and sheep and the shepherdess on the mantelpiece. Oh, fare thee well. And you too, dirty old lime-daubed bricks across the airshaft. Jesus, how you used to peal out, when that wasn’t a coat got laid across the bed. Like morning stars when they sang together. Comin’ through.
Carton under arm, he returned to the kitchen, relegating the cold behind the closed door. Strong aroma of Mom’s primitively brewed jabah, jabah coffee wafted through the room. On the table, two, no less, bagels, gold slab of whitefish, thick, inelegantly sliced Muenster cheese, big wedge of butter right out of the tub, were set out in hopes of filial seduction.