Then one evening, after weeks of silence between us, punctuated only by grunts, Dzia-Dzia said, “That’s boogie-woogie music.”
“What, Dzia-Dzia?” I asked, startled.
“Music the boogies play.”
“You mean from upstairs? That’s Marcy.”
“She’s in love with a colored man.”
“What are you telling him, Pa?” Mother demanded. She had just happened to enter the kitchen while Dzia-Dzia was speaking.
“About boogie-woogie.” Dzia-Dzia’s legs jiggled in the bucket so that the pink water sloshed over onto the linoleum.
“We don’t need that kind of talk in the house.”
“What talk, Evusha?”
“He doesn’t have to hear that prejudice in the house,” Mom said. “He’ll pick up enough on the street.”
“I just told him boogie-woogie.”
“I think you better soak your feet in the parlor by the heater,” Mom said. “We can spread newspaper.”
Dzia-Dzia sat, squinting as if he didn’t hear.
“You heard me, Pa. I said soak your feet in the parlor,” Mom repeated on the verge of shouting.
“What, Evusha?”
“I’ll yell as loud as I have to, Pa.”
“Boogie-woogie, boogie-woogie, boogie-woogie,” the old man muttered as he left the kitchen, slopping barefoot across the linoleum.
“Go soak your head while you’re at it,” Mom muttered behind him, too quietly for him to hear.
Mom had always insisted on polite language in the house. Someone who failed to say “please” or “thank you” was as offensive to her ears as someone who cursed.
“The word is ‘yes,’ not ‘yeah,’” she would correct. Or “If you want ‘hey,’ go to a stable.” She considered “ain’t” a form of laziness, like not picking up your dirty socks.
Even when they got a little drunk at the family parties that took place at our flat on Sundays, my uncles tried not to swear — and they had all been in the army and the marines. Nor were they allowed to refer to the Germans as Krauts, or the Japanese as Nips. As far as Mom was concerned, of all the misuses of language, racial slurs were the most ignorant, and so the most foul.
My uncles didn’t discuss the war much anyway, though whenever they got together there was a certain feeling in the room as if beneath the loud talk and joking they shared a deeper, sadder mood. Mom had replaced the photo of my father in his uniform with an earlier photo of him sitting on the running board of the car they’d owned before the war. He was grinning and petting the neighbor’s Scottie. That one and their wedding picture were the only photos that Mom kept out. She knew I didn’t remember my father, and she seldom talked about him. But there were a few times when she would read aloud parts of his letters. There was one passage in particular that she read at least once a year. It had been written while he was under bombardment, shortly before he was killed.
When it continues like this without letup you learn what it is to really hate. You begin to hate them as a people and want to punish them all — civilians, women, children, old people — it makes no difference, they’re all the same, none of them innocent, and for a while your hate and anger keep you from going crazy with fear. But if you let yourself hate and believe in hate, then no matter what else happens, you’ve lost. Eve, I love our life together and want to come home to you and Michael, as much as I can, the same man who left.
I wanted to hear more but didn’t ask. Perhaps because everyone seemed to be trying to forget. Perhaps because I was afraid. When the tears would start in Mom’s eyes I caught myself wanting to glance away as Mrs. Kubiac had.
There was something more besides Mom’s usual standards for the kind of language allowed in the house that caused her to lose her temper and kick Dzia-Dzia out of his spot in the kitchen. She had become even more sensitive, especially where Dzia-Dzia was concerned, because of what had happened with Shirley Popel’s mother.
Shirley’s mother had died recently. Mom and Shirley had been best friends since grade school, and after the funeral, Shirley came back to our house and poured out the story.
Her mother had broken a hip falling off a curb while sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house. She was a constantly smiling woman without any teeth who, everyone said, looked like a peasant. After forty years in America she could barely speak English, and even in the hospital refused to remove her babushka.
Everyone called her Babushka, Babush for short, which meant “granny,” even the nuns at the hospital. On top of her broken hip, Babush caught pneumonia, and one night Shirley got a call from the doctor saying Babush had taken a sudden turn for the worse. Shirley rushed right over, taking her thirteen-year-old son, Rudy. Rudy was Babushka’s favorite, and Shirley hoped that seeing him would instill the will to live in her mother. It was Saturday night and Rudy was dressed to play at his first dance. He wanted to be a musician and was wearing clothes he had bought with money saved from his paper route. He’d bought them at Smoky Joe’s on Maxwell Street — blue suede loafers, electric-blue socks, a lemon-yellow one-button roll-lapel suit with padded shoulders and pegged trousers, and a parrot-green satin shirt. Shirley thought he looked cute.
When they got to the hospital they found Babush connected to tubes and breathing oxygen.
“Ma,” Shirley said, “Rudy’s here.”
Babush raised her head, took one look at Rudy, and smacked her gray tongue.
“Rudish,” Babush said, “you dress like nigger.” Then suddenly her eyes rolled; she fell back, gasped, and died.
“And those were her last words to any of us, Ev,” Shirley wept, “words we’ll carry the rest of our lives, but especially poor little Rudy—you dress like nigger.”
For weeks after Shirley’s visit, no matter who called, Mom would tell them Shirley’s story over the phone.
“Those aren’t the kind of famous last words we’re going to hear in this family if I can help it,” she promised more than once, as if it were a real possibility. “Of course,” she’d sometimes add, “Shirley always has let Rudy get away with too much. I don’t see anything cute about a boy going to visit his grandmother at the hospital dressed like a hood.”
Any last words Dzia-Dzia had he kept to himself. His silence, however, had already been broken. Perhaps in his own mind that was a defeat that carried him from failing to totally failed. He returned to the kitchen like a ghost haunting his old chair, one that appeared when I sat alone working on penmanship.
No one else seemed to notice a change, but it was clear from the way he no longer soaked his feet. He still kept up the pretense of sitting there with them in the bucket. The bucket went with him the way ghosts drag chains. But he no longer went through the ritual of boiling water: boiling it until the kettle screeched for mercy, pouring so the linoleum puddled and steam clouded around him, and finally dropping in the tablet that fizzed furiously pink, releasing a faintly metallic smell like a broken thermometer.
Without his bucket steaming, the fogged windows cleared. Mrs. Kubiac’s building towered a story higher than any other on the block. From our fourth-story window I could look out at an even level with the roofs and see the snow gathering on them before it reached the street.
I sat at one end of the kitchen table copying down the words that would be on the spelling test the next day. Dzia-Dzia sat at the other, mumbling incessantly, as if finally free to talk about the jumble of the past he’d never mentioned — wars, revolutions, strikes, journeys to strange places, all run together, and music, especially Chopin. “Chopin,” he’d whisper hoarsely, pointing to the ceiling with the reverence of nuns pointing to heaven. Then he’d close his eyes and his nostrils would widen as if he were inhaling the fragrance of sound.