Onion Street

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Koblenz, Pennsylvania, was a tiny town in the Pocono Mountains near the border with New York. It had taken me about five hours to get there. It would’ve taken an hour or two less had I any knowledge of where the hell I was going. Growing up in Coney Island didn’t exactly prepare me for cartography. The only map I knew how to decipher was a subway map. Generally, Brooklynites don’t do maps. We give directions in terms of landmarks and number of streets, up and down, left and right. You go two blocks down, make a left by the Sinclair gas station, go two more blocks up by the new church, and there it is on your right. Without the sun I wouldn’t have known east from west; north from south I learned only because the avenues in Manhattan ran north and south. So now you understand why it took me as long as it did to get to Koblenz. Why I was there in the first place was another matter altogether.

The idea of it came to me in my sleep. Not much else did, certainly not much sleep. How the fuck could I sleep while I was worrying about Lids? Given the state he was in, I had no clue about what he might do to himself or if he really was in danger from the people who’d murdered Billy O’Day. Most people with Larry’s financial resources could have found a safe place to hide, at least for a few days. And hell, the guy dealt drugs, so he wasn’t stupid about surviving on the street. Then there was the fact that he was a goddamned certifiable genius. Somehow none of that was of much comfort to me. Larry wasn’t most people. What did money or smarts or intellect mean when you were as damaged as he was? Pusher or not, he was more fragile than anyone else I knew. My little sister Miriam was made of sterner stuff than him.

I’d called his dad back, neglecting to mention the repetition and rhyming of the words in Larry’s answers or his son’s extreme agitation or his free-floating paranoia. I just lied some more, telling him that I’d spoken to his son and that Larry was calmer, but needed time alone to sort things out. Who knows how much of it he believed? After I’d finished with Larry’s dad, I called the only person I could: Bobby. I told him the bare minimum. I didn’t connect Lids to Billy O’Day or Billy O’Day to 1055 Coney Island Avenue. I just said that Lids had cracked again and was out there alone somewhere. It wasn’t like Lids and Bobby were best buddies. They knew each other from school, from the neighborhood, and Bobby knew Larry was a dealer. He didn’t object. Still, Bobby wasn’t enthusiastic about doing me this favor.

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“C’mon, Bobby, you’ve got a million connections. Please ask around. I’m telling you, Lids is going off the deep end. He could hurt himself, maybe other people too.” I gave him the phone number I’d used to get in touch with Larry. “Don’t call him yourself. He won’t answer. Just see if you can find someone to track him down before it all goes wrong.”

“All right … for you, Moe. I’ll see what I can find out.”

Now, driving along the twisting, snowy roads of Koblenz, that conversation felt like it had taken place a lifetime ago and not the night before. Above me, the heartless winter sun hung low in the sky behind a cataract of gray, nearly opaque clouds. It seemed to know I was around, but not where, exactly. That made two of us. Although I’d spent parts of many summers in the Catskills and should have been prepared for a place like Koblenz, I was so out of my element, so utterly out of place in the Poconos. I think I felt a little like Lids must have felt, my grip on things slippery at best. Three hours of fitful sleep and the long hard trip had no doubt messed with my head, but it wasn’t lack of sleep or the strangeness of the place that was messing with my head. It was fear, plain and simple. For just like that first time when I walked into the fix-it shop on Coney Island Avenue, I was about to step into a situation I was completely ill-equipped to face. Funny how sometimes the best ideas get worse and worse the closer they come to fruition.

I stopped at a general store to buy some flowers and get directions.

“Flowers?” the woman behind the counter looked at me like I was from Mars. “Notice the weather out there, son? This ain’t New York City.”

I forgot how obvious a Brooklyn accent was to the rest of the world. “Yeah, sorry. Stupid question.”

“I’ve got some artificial flowers if you’d like, and some nice dried and pressed flowers one of our local church ladies makes.” She didn’t wait for me to ask to see them and went into the rear of the store. When she returned she was carrying a bunch of godawful pink plastic tulips in one hand, and three small but lovely wreaths of dried and pressed flowers. The flowers were glued to circles of woven twigs.

“Those,” I said, pointing at the wreaths. “How much?”

“Ten bucks for the lot of them.”

I put a twenty on the counter. “I’ll take them and a cup of coffee, milk, no sugar.”

She pointed behind me. “Help yourself, son. Coffee’s on the house.”

When I came back to the counter to collect the flowers and my change, I asked her for directions to the New Lutheran Cemetery.

“Oh,” she said, frowning, “now I understand about the flowers. Sorry, that was rude of me before.”

“Forget it. And from the cemetery, could you give me directions to 11 Post Road?”

She drew me a map so simple even I could follow it. “Here you go.”

“Thanks.”

“Samantha was a lovely girl,” the woman whispered shyly. “Did you know her up in New York?” I guess she knew Samantha’s parents’ address. Then it was pretty obvious to her why I had come.

“She was wonderful: beautiful, smart … She was my best friend’s girlfriend.”

“Then why ain’t he here?”

“I don’t think he’s been able to deal with it yet. He really loved her.”

“Nice of you, though.” I just sort of nodded, but she kept on going. “None of us can figure out how she got involved with all them radicals up there. That wasn’t our Samantha.”

I asked, “She wasn’t like that as a kid?”

She smiled sadly, laughed a little. “Our Samantha? No. Don’t get me wrong, son, she cared about people and animals and justice and such, but she wasn’t like that at all. Samantha would never have been involved with some bomb plot or nothing like that. She must have gotten tricked into it.”

I wasn’t there to have an argument, but the Samantha this woman was describing wasn’t the one I knew. In spite of Mindy’s opinion of Sam as a poseur, Samantha had been really political and understood way more about the radical movements than I ever did.

“I guess,” I said. “Sometimes people just lose their way.”

“Amen to that, son. Amen to that. When you’re at her grave, say hello to her for me. My name is Hattie. Tell her old Hattie misses her.”

“I’ll do that, Hattie, but I’ll leave the old part out.” Then I turned back to her as I was leaving. “And just so you know, this accent is from Brooklyn, not New York.” I winked and left.

The cemetery was on the same road as the general store, so getting there was easy enough. Even as I turned through the rusting wrought iron gates, the words NEW LUTHERAN in block letters painted in gold above me, I still wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there. It was just that in my sleep I’d realized that Mindy had told me what was bothering her that night I found her smoking and drinking. I just hadn’t wanted to pay attention. Then, when Bobby, so oddly melancholy, brought up Sam’s name again, I guess something resonated. After that, it was happenstance. Like I said, I wasn’t a big believer in fate or the hand of God, but I couldn’t escape the fact that I had asked for Aaron’s car as a panicked afterthought. I couldn’t ignore that he’d let me borrow it. I mean, the chances of that were like a million to one. Besides, none of us, not even Bobby, had gone to the funeral. Coming to this place just seemed like the right thing to do.

The caretaker pointed the way to Samantha’s gravesite. Good thing the snow on the ground wasn’t fresh, because if it had been just a little taller, not even the caretaker could have found the grave. Cemeteries, especially in daylight, don’t freak me out. I was never big on ghouls, ghosts, and zombies. You’re alive, then you’re not. The dead were dead. I also wasn’t big on talking to the dead. I hated those scenes in movies and on TV where people walk around a grave, yakking at the grass and headstone. But I’d promised Hattie I would say hello for her and I did. Keeping my word means something to me, if not to a lot of other people. Funny, I’d never been in a gentile graveyard before and I found myself wondering if Christians had as many arcane rules as Jews did about who could set foot on a gravesite. Jews, we had rules about everything — some sensible, some not so much. Our rules about cemeteries were like the rules of cricket: the people who play claim to know them, but only pretend to understand them.

There were some obvious differences, of course: crosses instead of stars, no rocks or pebbles on the gravestones, no names like Finkelstein or Cohen. And then there was the fact that this was a country cemetery. It was simpler, no grandiose mausoleums, no granite archways, no marble benches with bad poetry carved into the stone. In fact, most of the headstones were tasteful little hunks of gray granite with beveled faces where the particulars were inscribed. I liked that. It was simple, just a way to acknowledge that the person buried there hadn’t always been so. It let a visitor remember the deceased as the visitor wished to. Or, in my case, it let a stranger wandering by imagine the deceased however his mood moved him to.

I got down on my hands and knees by Sam’s low headstone and wiped away the snow that had accumulated around it. I laid the dried flower wreaths in an overlapping pattern against the foot of the stone. I didn’t pray, didn’t talk except to pass along Hattie’s message. I just remembered her, remembered the first time we met. I smiled a big smile, recalling that I had been thrilled to know there were women like her out there in the larger world. I stood, wiped off my knees, and almost unconsciously said, “Bye, Sam.” I took a few steps toward Aaron’s Tempest, then stopped in my tracks. For the second time in less than an hour, I turned back. I stared down at the inscription on the headstone:

SAMANTHA JANE HOPE

LOVING DAUGHTER

1941–1966

That couldn’t be right, I thought. Those dates had to be wrong. Samantha seemed older than us, sure, but she wasn’t twenty-five. She couldn’t have been twenty-five. I’d find out soon enough.

I had to pass through the actual town of the town of Koblenz on my way to Sam’s parents’ house. And there, right next to the library and the police station, was Koblenz’s town hall. I pulled into a diagonal parking spot in front of the building and went inside. A chubby woman, with a pretty smile and a lazy left eye, pointed me to the public records room.

“You’re going to have to help yourself, I’m afraid,” she said. “Millie’s out with the grippe today.”

“That’s fine,” I assured her, trying to take the Brooklyn edges off my accent. “I appreciate it.”

It took me a while to figure out the town’s — Millie’s, more likely — filing system, but I found it, the record of Samantha’s birth on November 5, 1941. There was a doctor’s name, but no hospital listed next to her name. I guessed she’d been born at home. I’d never known anyone of my generation born at home. I don’t know why knowing that about Sam made me smile, but it did.

As I drove from town hall to the Hope house, I noticed that the sun had vanished completely now and that snow was definitely in the air. I was heartened by the fact that it hadn’t started falling yet and that the guy on the radio said I’d have a few more hours until it did. The house at 11 Post Road was a neat, L-shaped ranch with white clapboards, snow-filled window boxes, a white picket fence, and a detached garage at the end of a semicircular driveway. It didn’t exactly evoke Norman Rockwell images of God, country, and apple pie, but it sure didn’t evoke images of Brooklyn either. It was easy for me to picture Samantha as a little girl playing in the front yard, her blonde hair blowing into her eyes as she ran to greet her dad coming home from work.

I pulled up the driveway, parked by the front door, got out, and knocked. It didn’t take long for the door to pull back. There, standing behind the storm door, was a lovely woman who was, at most, in her late forties. It was like looking at Sam’s much older sister, but I knew it was her mom. Sam was an only child. She gestured for me to open the storm door and I did.

“You’re Samantha’s friend from Brooklyn,” her mom said. “Old Hattie from the general store called and mentioned you were in town. Please come in.”

I wiped my shoes on the welcome mat and stepped inside. “Yeah — I mean, yes, ma’am, I’m Moe, Moe Prager, and I knew your daughter.”

“You went to visit with her. Hattie told me about the flowers too.”

“I did.”

Mrs. Hope asked, “Did you have a nice visit with her?” I must have looked completely confused by the question, so she came to my rescue. “Sorry, Moe, that’s between you and Sam.”

“No need to apologize, really.”

“Moe,” she said, “is that short for something?”

“Moses.”

“My favorite figure from the Old Testament.”

“My brother’s name is Aaron, and my little sister is Miriam.”

That turned Mrs. Hope’s polite smile into a beacon. “Good for your folks. Come in, sit down. You must be hungry. Can I fix you something to eat, get you a drink?”

“Thank you, yes, Mrs. Hope. I’d like that very much.”

“That’s settled, then. Take your coat off and sit yourself down at the table. We can talk while I get your lunch ready.”

I did as she asked. The interior of the house was a mirror of the outside: neat, simple, clean. The furniture was all clean lines and upholstered cushions. The dining room set was colonial. A big copper lamp that had been refitted for electricity hung over the table for light. Then, as I scanned the walls, my heart did that flip-floppy thing. It wasn’t the pictures of Sam at different ages that did it to me, but rather all the plaques in the living room that featured the names of various police organizations and images of badges and stars.

“What does Mr. Hope do for a living?” I called into the kitchen, but there was no answer.

“Were you Samantha’s boyfriend there in New York?” she asked instead.

“No,” I answered, standing up, walking into the living room. “I’m her boyfriend’s best friend.” Apparently, old Hattie hadn’t shared all the information with her friend. “His name is Bobby Friedman and he’s still too broken up about what happened to deal with it.”

That was the second time I’d said those words or ones just like them in the last few hours, but I hadn’t thought about them, really considered them until that moment. Were they true? Yeah, probably, but I couldn’t help wondering why Bobby hadn’t come here for the funeral after Sam’s body was released to her family. We never discussed it. Maybe we should have.

I stood in front of one of the many plaques on the wall and read silently to myself:

For service above and beyond the call of duty on the date of August 6, 1956, this commendation is awarded to Trooper Samuel Hope.

All the plaques and awards were much alike except for Samuel Hope’s rank; he’d risen to the rank of colonel. I’d often wondered why Samantha didn’t talk much about her family or where she was from. I understood now. Tough to think of your dad as the enemy. Samantha didn’t resemble her dad at all, but they had had many photos taken together, many of which were on proud display — some on the walls, some on the coffee table, others on the mantel over the fireplace. I went and sat back down in the dining room.

“Was Samantha named for her dad?” I called in to Mrs. Hope.

“Yes. Samuel desperately wanted a son to follow in his footsteps. Strange though, that husband of mine loved his daughter more than he could ever have loved a son, I think. They were close, much closer than Samantha and me. They were inseparable, those two. Here you go,” said Mrs. Hope, stepping from the kitchen into the dining room. She carried a floral print metal tray. On it was a glass of milk, a white bread sandwich containing some sort of pink-hued meat — probably ham — potato chips, a pickle spear, and an apple.

Clearly, Mrs. Hope wasn’t up on the rules of keeping kosher. Technically, Jews can’t eat dairy products and meat together, and they can never eat pork, dairy or no dairy. Me, I would never be mistaken for a Talmudic scholar or an observant Jew, though the concept of milk and meat, ham or otherwise, did make me a little queasy. The queasiness didn’t improve when I found that the ham was slathered not with mustard, which I loved, but with mayonnaise. Yet, I didn’t want to insult my hostess or lose whatever goodwill I had earned with her.

“Delicious,” I said, taking big bites and swallowing with little chewing. I savored the chips and the odd-tasting pickle. Kosher dill pickles weren’t sweet, but this pickle spear tasted like it had been cured in sugar syrup. I kind of liked it.

She wouldn’t sit. Instead she hovered, fussing over me, brushing crumbs away, getting me another napkin. “I’m so glad you’re enjoying it.”

“So, Sam’s dad is a state trooper. Must’ve been tough on your husband when … I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re right, Moe. It nearly killed Samuel to think that his girl had gotten all tangled up with radicals and hippie types. We will never understand how that happened. Her whole life, up until the time Samantha left for college, all she ever wanted to be was a trooper like her father. But people change, kids grow up, and you don’t know them anymore.”

“There are female cops, aren’t there?” I said.

She let out a laugh. “Not in this family. My husband wouldn’t hear of it. No daughter of Samuel Hope was going to wear a badge and strap on a gun. It was the only thing those two ever fought about. So, Moe, if you don’t mind me asking, can you tell me about what Sam was like the last year before … you know?”

With that, I regaled Mrs. Hope with tales of her daughter. I explained about how all the guys had secret crushes on her, but not only for her beauty. I told her we thought her daughter was smarter and more worldly than any woman we’d ever met. I explained how, in spite of Bobby’s politics, that he was a good and loyal boyfriend who loved her daughter to distraction. I told her how we too were surprised by what had happened, that no one would have expected either Samantha or Marty Lavitz of being involved in any violence.

After I washed up, I told her that snow was in the forecast and that I had to get on the road. She thanked me and gave me a long hug. I hugged her back.

“You take care of yourself, Moses Prager,” she said, winking at me. “You come back and visit too. Sam was lucky to have a friend like you.”

“Thank you. One thing, Mrs. Hope, if you don’t mind?”

“Anything.”

“Well, I guess we knew Sam was older than us, but I had no idea she was twenty-five.”

“She did always look young for her age and she had that energy, you know?”

I did.