On the Sunday before Easter, while hundreds of people were strolling through the parish with palm crosses stuck in their lapels, Kate Devlin took Michael by subway to Orchard Street in Manhattan. The train was filled with women like her, taking their children to be outfitted for Easter. Most of them had saved for months to buy clothes, and the clothes on Orchard Street were the cheapest in New York. At the Delancey Street station, they emptied the train, and hundreds of them climbed the stairs, dragging their kids into the parish they all called Jewtown.
This was the first time that Michael had come to Jewtown with his mother, and he was excited by its jammed, narrow streets, tiny stores, bearded men, racks of clothing climbing ten feet above the sidewalks. He imagined himself into the Fifth Quarter in Prague. The ghetto. The air was pungent with strange odors. Men and women shouted back and forth in five or six languages. Music played from unseen radios, adding to the din. Everyone seemed to be bargaining, in a frazzled routine of declaration, rejection, compromise, fingers being used to emphasize numbers. Young men in yarmulkes, black pants and collarless white shirts, with straggly beards and sidecurls dangling over the ears, measured waists and chests and trouser lengths with worn yellow tapes, marked them with chalk, then shoved hanging clothes aside to allow a customer to stand before a mirror. Kids looked panicky at the sight of themselves in strange clothes. Mothers tugged at seams and felt the fabrics and told the kids to stand straight. Michael felt sure that if he stayed long enough he would see Rabbi Lowe. Or Brother Thaddeus, his baldness disguised with a wig.
For an hour, he and his mother examined suits and rejected them. Too expensive. Too cheesy. Too small. Too big. They went slowly up one side of Orchard Street and back down the other. At the corner, Michael gazed down Delancey Street and saw the dark, ugly outline of the Williamsburg Bridge, its towers crowned with knobby pronged spires. He thought: Prague. Rabbi Hirsch must have seen the spires of St. Vitus this way, as he walked from the ghetto toward Old Town Square. Except our tunnels are subway tunnels. Not the evil tunnels of Prague, where fanatics seethed and babies were strangled in the dark. Here on Orchard Street, Michael thought, he was even safer than a Jew in the ghetto. Here, Frankie McCarthy would never find him.
Then his gaze fell upon a dark blue suit hanging just above sidewalk level in a small store across the street. Neat lapels, dark buttons. That was the suit he could wear when he was twelve. It would be fine for Easter, but it would be better after he turned twelve. In that suit, he would look older: thirteen, maybe even fourteen. In that suit, he could start looking like a man.
“Look at that one, Mom,” he said, and led her through the crowds, suddenly anxious that someone else might find it first. A young clerk came out. His face was very thin, framed with red hair; he was wearing a yarmulke. Kate Devlin touched the fabric and asked the price.
“For you, fourteen dollars,” the young man said, in an accented voice.
“It’s very dear,” she whispered to Michael.
“Es iz zaier taier,” Michael said.
The clerk looked startled.
“You’re Jewish?”
“No,” Michael said. “Irish.”
“Irish? Ah, ains fun di aseres hashvotim. One of the lost tribes.” The clerk laughed.
“Three dollars off!” he said, lifting down the suit.
“You’re kidding,” Kate Devlin said.
“Three and a half,” the clerk said. “You are die mutter?”
It sounded like mooter, but she understood.
“Yes,” she said, and smiled uneasily. “Can he try it on?”
“Yes, yes. In there.” He pointed to a dark niche burrowed among clothes. Then to Michaeclass="underline" “Your mother wants ain glazel tai?”
“Mom, you want a glass of tea?”
“That’d be nice,” she said.
“Mit tzuker?” the clerk said.
“Bitte,” Michael said, knowing his mother took sugar with her tea. “Zait azoy gut.”
While Michael changed, the clerk pushed through the bunched clothes and disappeared into a deeper part of the shop. Michael emerged first. The suit fit almost perfectly. His mother made him turn around, and nodded approval. He pushed aside some clothes and saw himself in a cracked mirror. It was like gazing at a stranger. Maybe even a sixteen-year-old stranger.
“I love it,” he whispered. Kate smiled. Then the clerk returned, holding three glasses of tea. A wooden clothes hanger was tucked under his arm. He handed one glass of tea to Kate.
“Azoy shain!” the clerk said. Beautiful. “You look like a man.”
“We’ll take it,” Kate said.
“The hanger is free,” the clerk said, smiling and handing a glass of tea to Michael.
“A dank,” Michael said.
They clinked glasses in a toast.
“Lang leben zolt ir,” Michael said. Long life to you.
“God bless America,” said the clerk.
“Up the Republic,” said Kate Devlin, hugging her American son.
20
Back in the parish, Michael hurried to see Rabbi Hirsch to brag about his Orchard Street adventure. It was like a story out of a library book: he said the magic words and — Open, Sesame! — something amazing happened. It wasn’t Shazam! The words were Yiddish. Words that came from Rabbi Hirsch. But they had worked.
The synagogue on Kelly Street was locked. The front door remained sealed. He hoped the rabbi was all right, but the day was so fine, with the sky blue and the streets washed clean by the spring rains, that it didn’t seem possible anything bad could happen to anyone.
He walked around the front of the armory and looked at the bronze statue of the World War I hero with his small tin hat and wrapped leggings and wondered why there were no statues for the men who died in the Battle of the Bulge. Maybe it was too soon. Maybe they were making them in some studio or foundry, in Washington maybe, or in Paris, France, where the artists all lived. He sat on the steps and gazed at the green buds on the elm trees, and the sparrows chattering in the pale green branches, and wondered how far it was from Paris, France, to Prague. There must not be a ghetto anymore in Prague. The Nazis must have killed everybody who lived there. Then images of the camps unspooled in his mind, those newsreels he’d seen in the Venus, of hollow-eyed men and scrawny, skeletal women and bodies piled like the junk in Jimmy Kabinsky’s uncle’s yard. How could they have done that? How could anyone do that? And why didn’t anyone help? And where was God? How could He let so many people die? Men. Women. Babies.
And suddenly he thought: They must have killed the rabbi’s wife.
They must have killed Leah.
Of course! Those goddamned Nazi momsers must have taken her to the concentration camp. They must have put her in the gas chamber. Or starved her to death. Or shot her. Or buried her alive.
Of course!
That’s why Rabbi Hirsch sometimes glances at Leah’s beautiful face in that browning photograph and seems to feel such an awful sadness. And maybe that explains another thing. He told me once that when he was young, he tried to live without God. Then he went back to God and became a rabbi. He didn’t make a big deal about it. But it must have meant something to him, or he never would have mentioned it. Maybe now… maybe because of what happened to Leah, what happened to millions of other Jews, maybe now he has changed his mind again. Sometimes, the look on his face is… well, it’s not exactly confused. It’s not even unhappy, because in a minute he can change back again and teach me a new word in Yiddish or talk about Ziggy Elman. No: in that little flash, that glance, he looks… bitter. Like he’s pissed off at God. Or maybe even worse, like maybe he’s a rabbi who doesn’t believe in God.