Shadows of Berlin

31.

Shemp Howard Is Dead

The days are growing colder. Rachel witnesses Daniela changing a diaper, and she watches with disbelief. The safety pins. The pail full of smelly diapers. The small, naked baby squiggling at the center of attention, eyes goggling with curiosity. Daniela is planning for her mikveh after childbirth. The Jewish Women’s Club has made her an appointment at a mikveh on the Upper West Side. A ritual bath and a cleansing of the soul. It sounds so inviting to Rachel. To be so well cleansed.

At home, Rachel throws up in the toilet. She washes her mouth in the sink. Gargles with a cup full of Listerine and flushes the evidence into the plumbing. When Aaron asks if she’s okay, knotting his tie in her vanity mirror, she tells him she shouldn’t have eaten his leftover kung pao shrimp from the fridge. He accepts this explanation without question, stubbing out his cigarette in the seashell ashtray. “Kung pao,” he says, frowning. “Not for amateurs. You should let the professionals handle it, sweetheart.”

She takes the train to the Village. She finds Naomi is less of a mess in that she is no longer teary. No longer wearing a ragged sweatshirt with stains and has started bathing and washing her hair again. The long chestnut ponytail is still hanging down her back. But life is not perfect. Much less than perfect. Naomi makes that clear. She pulls out the bottle of wine, but Rachel finds she doesn’t have a taste for it and declines to join her. Naomi doesn’t seem to care. About that or much of anything. She dirties ashtrays, lights cigarettes, and sighs out smoke, her eyes clouded, staring, ringed with sleepless purple shadows.

Perhaps Rachel has come to say something, to make an intimate announcement. To use her sister-­in-­law as practice, as a test case for her news. To run it up the flagpole and see who salutes, isn’t that the expression? But she can see that Naomi is deaf to the world, so she keeps her announcement to herself.

Snow flurries sweep mindlessly around the park at Washington Square, but the game squares are still filled by players, wrapped in coats and sweaters, shivering against the chill of the concrete benches. She finds the scruffy white beatnik kid with the dirty horn-­rims and uncombed hair. He’s wearing an earthy brown jacket from an army surplus store and must be freezing. His breath frosts, for heaven’s sake. “Haven’t seen him,” the kid tells her when she asks about Tyrell. “Not since Yaakov kicked the bucket.”

Rachel is surprised. The grand master?

“Yeah,” the boy tells her. “Middle of a game, just keeled over, boom. Heart attack,” the kid cites. “Pieces flew everyplace.”

Crossing the square, Rachel sits on the wall around the fountain, facing Washington Arch, and lights a cigarette. She is surprised when she hears his voice.

“Hello, Mrs. Perlman.”

She turns her head. “Hello, Mr. Williams.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you, actually,” she admits.

He stands with his hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. “Well,” he says and looks away as if the pigeons bobbing around them have caught his interest. “If you’re here because Naomi sent you, Mrs. Perlman…”

“I’m not. She doesn’t know I’m here. Nobody knows.”

Now he faces her with a mild frown. “So why then?”

“Won’t you sit, Mr. Williams? It’s hurting my neck looking up at you.”

His expression says he’d rather not. But maybe he’s just too well mannered, so he sits, leaving a few steps separating them.

“I’m sorry to hear about Mr. Yaakov,” she says. “About his heart attack.”

The frown stays. “How’d you know about that?”

“The boy with the glasses told me.”

“Pete,” says Tyrell.

“What?”

“That’s the name of the kid with the glasses. Pete.”

“Were you there when he died?” she asks.

“There? I was playing him,” Tyrell says with a small snort at grim fate. “We were in the middle of a game.”

“A rematch?”

“I guess you could call it that.”

“It must have upset you.”

He shrugs at this. Maybe, maybe not. “It’s not like I’d never seen a person die before.”

“The boy said that chess pieces flew everywhere.”

“Yeah, well. That’s true. What’s also true is that I was getting creamed. Lucky for me, the old man dropped dead before I had to resign.” He says this and then removes a chess piece from his pocket. The black king.

“This was yours?”

“Nah. This was his.”

“Oh. So you were white,” says Rachel.

And now Tyrell surrenders half a smile. “Yeah. I was white.”

“And this is your trophy?”

“Not trophy,” Tyrell decides, absently twirling the king by its crown. “More like a memento mori I guess you could call it.” A talisman of the dead.

Rachel pauses and expels smoke from her cigarette before she says, “Naomi is still very devastated,” she says.

Tyrell expels a heavy-­bottomed sigh. “Mrs. Perlman…”

“Please call me Rachel.”

“She doesn’t understand.” He’s certain on this point.

“No? She’s very smart.”

“Not about this. Naomi is wonderful. Beautiful. Brilliant. Yes, I know. But she has no idea what it would be like for us in the long term. What it would be like for us out of the bubble we’re in. Here, things are easier. Possible. But the world is not Greenwich Village.”

“No. The world is Mississippi.”

“Exactly,” Tyrell agrees.

Rachel agrees. She nods lightly, but she has started staring blankly at the pavement.

“Rachel?” he asks.

She looks up at the sound of her name. “Ikh bin mit kind,” she says aloud.

Tyrell blinks. Shakes his head as if he’s gone deaf maybe. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”

“I’m with child,” Rachel repeats, this time in English. “I’m going to have a baby, and I’ve told no one. Not even my husband.”

Tyrell looks flummoxed. “Yet you’re telling me?”

“I tell you because you will understand why I’m so terrified. I’m terrified because the world is Mississippi and sometimes worse. Because it eats children alive. Poisons them. Burns them up and casts their ashes into the pits.” She shakes her head, smears the dampness from her eyes. “It’s just so strange. And so frightening. To have another human being, separate from you, yet growing inside you.”

“You should tell your husband,” says Tyrell. “He’s got a right to know.”

She nods. “Yes. I’m sure you’re correct,” she agrees. Then, “What time is it?” she asks and then balks at the answer. “Oh, I have to go. I have an appointment. Thank you for listening to me. And for your understanding.”

“Sure,” Tyrell tells her. “Sure.” Covering it all.

“And you should think about calling Naomi. I believe the two of you need each other. More than you are willing to see.”

He straightens. Expels a breath. Gazes off toward the tall marble arch. “Yeah,” he answers quietly. “Sometimes… I dunno. Sometimes I think that’s true. How stupid are people in love, Mrs. Perlman,” he wonders.

She sticks out her hand to shake, like at the end of the chess game. He takes it.

“How stupid is the world, Mr. Williams,” she answers.

It’s been how long? A week since their argument in the Orchard Café? But the telephone call came, as Rachel knew it would. “Nisht gefonfit, Feter!” she’d insisted. No hedging. No double-­talk. She wanted an apology.

So here they are, not at one of her feter’s usual preserves but at the Bickford’s on East 23rd Street. Bickford’s, where the grisly yellow fluorescent lighting competes with the daylight washing through the tall glass windows. Rachel is reserved. Maybe she is here for his apology, but what is he here for? The coffee steams in a cheap ceramic Bickford’s cup. It tastes overcooked and slightly vinegary. A skim of oil greases the dark-­brown surface with a purplish rainbow. Feter dumps sugar into it, gulping it down, drinking it like a punishment. He speaks to her now in Yiddish.

“I must make an admission, Rokhl.” Du bist geven gerekht. “You were correct,” he says. “I was attempting to exploit your talent. It’s true, and I only hope you can forgive me,” he tells her. “But it is also true that you have your mother’s gift. And I do believe,” he says carefully, “that for your good, and yes, for my good as well—­I can find a gallery for your work.”

Her tolerance for Feter’s schéma grandiose is limited. But she cannot deny a weak, dizzy hope at such a possibility, even now. Therefore, she must be clear. “What exactly are you proposing, Feter? A business relationship?”

A business relationship? A partnership, he thinks, is a better word.

“As you had with Eema?”

He shrugs lightly with open palms. “Would that be so intolerable?”

Rachel breathes deeply. “So. You haven’t said a word,” she observes.

“Haven’t I?” he wonders.

“You haven’t asked me a thing. But maybe you don’t need to. Are you still connected, you and her?”

His face grays. “We were not ‘connected’ as you put it, no. I simply played the role of her messenger.”

“So you don’t speak?”

“We do not,” he admits thinly.

“Do you know she is dying?”

“Yes,” he answers. “But who isn’t, Rashka, my dear? Who isn’t?”

Days pass. A gush of cold air blows in as Rachel opens the kitchen window. Kibbitz leaps out on the prowl. Snowflakes dance through the air. She hesitates for an instant longer, then shoves the sash closed.

“Hey, Shemp Howard is dead.”

“Who?”

Aaron is seated at the table over his breakfast, a grapefruit, since he’s been putting on a little weight, he thinks. “Shemp Howard.” He repeats the name. “He was one of the original Stooges.”

A shrug. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

“The Three Stooges. You know,” he insists, as if she should know. As if who could possibly not know. “Once, there was a fourth stooge?” he says. But then gives up, surrendering the paper. “Anyhow. Here, you can read all about it. I gotta get my ass in gear.” He stretches from the lower back up, extending his arms and yawning out a spacious breath. Then he’s up, heading for the bedroom to tie his tie, singing along to the radio to “Sixteen Tons” in a faux bass voice. “Ya dig sixteen tons—­whattaya get? Another day older and a cherry-­red Corvette…”

But Rachel is not listening. She has suddenly seized the page of obituaries. A headline and picture.

Mrs. Angel Mendelbaum, wife to Mr. Irving Mendelbaum of the construction firm of Mendelbaum & Sons, sadly fell to her death yesterday morning from the terrace of the couple’s penthouse apartment on East 91st Street and Fifth Avenue. Mrs. Mendelbaum was alone at the time of the accident. Born in Berlin, Germany, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1947 and will be remembered as a generous supporter of Jewish charities as well as a patroness of the arts.

Staring at the photograph, Rachel hears the voice and looks up at the face.

You didn’t imagine that I was going to allow myself to be victimized by the ravages of a disease, did you, Bissel?

The woman who fills the chair across from her is not the matron Rachel faced in the park. She is the gnä’ Fräulein, in lace gloves and fine fabrics. She has resurrected herself as the exquisite murderess from the Prenzlauer Berg. The Red Angel of Berlin, her vanity intact even after death. And then she is gone. Her final murder victim was herself.

Aaron reappears, flapping his arms into his jacket, and belches lightly. “Oy, that grapefruit is so full of acid,” he complains, but she isn’t really listening to him until he steals the piece of toast from her plate.

“Thief, that’s my toast.”

“Sue me,” he suggests, chewing. “You know, my pop had the same breakfast every day for forty million years. One poached egg on toast with pickled herring. That and a glass of prune juice.” He says this and downs the last swallows of coffee from his cup.

“Coffee won’t help a sour stomach,” she points out.

He shrugs. Whattaya gonna do? “Life is suffering. I gotta run.”

“I’m pregnant,” she says. The words fall out.