Snow in August

5

That evening, as his mother ladled tomato sauce over two bowls of spaghetti, Michael Devlin tried to explain what had happened in Mister G’s candy store. The words spilled out of him. He described what was said, leaving out the curse words, and the way Sonny and Jimmy ran outside, and how Frankie McCarthy wrecked the store and tried to destroy Mister G. She smiled thinly when he told her about calling for an ambulance, but the smile faded when he told her how he ran out of the store, panicky, afraid the police would think he had something to do with hurting Mister G. Jimmy and Sonny had vanished, he said, but Michael stood in the doorway of 378 Ellison Avenue and saw the ambulance coming slowly through the boulders of frozen snow, followed by the first of three police cars. All of them parked far from the doorway of Mister G’s candy store because of the huge piles of snow. Men came out of Casement’s Bar to watch, and Michael joined them. They smoked and talked about the way this kind of crap was ruining the parish, and Michael felt safe in their company. The men wouldn’t let Frankie McCarthy harm him.

Then he saw Mister G’s wife coming along the snow-packed sidewalks from Garibaldi Street, a small, thick woman in overcoat and boots, with a large bag of groceries in her hands; saw her pause a block away, as she squinted at the ambulance; saw her suddenly hurrying, slipping and jerking on the packed snow. And then, as Mister G was carried out on a stretcher, the attendants straining and heaving to lift him over the snowbanks, Michael could hear her scream and saw her run, and the grocery bag fell from her hands and broke open and cans of Campbell’s soup and a box of Wheaties and two rolls of toilet paper spilled across the snow.

He told his mother all of that, and she pressed his shoulders to her warm body, then took a small glass from a shelf and poured herself some of the sweet wine she liked, a dark purple wine called Mogen David.

“Holy God,” she said. “That poor woman. That poor man.”

Michael did not tell her about his own confusion.

On the street and in the schoolyard, he’d heard all the stories about Jews being greedy and sneaky Christ-killers. But when this man, this Jew, poor Mister G, had been beaten so savagely, Michael had felt no elation. If Jews were bad, then Frankie McCarthy should be a hero. But in that candy store, it was Mister G who had spoken up to defend Sonny. And in return Frankie had been as scary and vicious as any gangster, while Sonny ran away. Michael struggled with that confusion. He also couldn’t express his own fear, the shameful cowardice that had stopped him from trying to help the old man. He could not get around one awful fact: while Frankie McCarthy was battering Mister G, Michael said and did nothing. Sonny ran; he thought, but I froze. And when it was over, and Mister G lay bleeding, and Frankie had told me to forget what I’d seen, I just nodded my head.

“He’s a bad fella, that McCarthy,” Michael’s mother said. “He comes from bad people and he’ll end up in the gutter.”

“I think he’s a little crazy, Mom.”

“He might be,” she said. “Stay away from him.”

“But why would he do it?” the boy asked. “Why would he hurt Mister G so badly?”

“Bad people do bad things,” she said, curling her spaghetti on a fork, using a large spoon to control it.

“Was it because Mister G is a Jew?”

“I hope not.” She paused. “But from what you say, son, it sounds like that was part of it.”

She talked about Hitler then, and how he hated Jews so much he killed millions of them. The Nazis were crazy Jew-haters, she said, and before they were finished, millions of other people were dead too. Not just the Jews.

“But why did they hate Jews?” Michael said.

“Och, Michael, most of it’s plain old jealousy, if you ask me,” she said, taking a sip of wine. “They’ll give you a lot of malarkey about killing Jesus and all that, but the same idjits don’t even go to church. Hitler didn’t go to church. Neither does Frankie McCarthy, I’d bet.” She paused, picking her words carefully. “The Jews get educated, that’s one thing. Maybe that’s what makes ignorant people so mad at them. Their kids do their homework. They go to college. A lot of them, their people came here without a word of English and they ended up doctors and lawyers. I wish to God our people would do that.”

“I heard Mister G has three sons in college,” Michael said. “You know, the ones who work in the store in the summer?”

“There you go,” she said. “You’ll never hear about any of the McCarthy’s going to college. They’re a worthless lot.” She looked at him. “Don’t, for God’s sake, be like them.”

They finished the spaghetti. His mother sipped the last of the wine, then rose, took the plates, and laid them in the sink. In a quick, busy way, she fixed tea, with milk and sugar, and some Social Tea cookies, humming an Irish tune that he didn’t know. Michael thought she looked relieved to be finished with the discussion about Jews and what had happened to Mister G and he did not go on with it, even though pieces of the scene in the candy store still scribbled through his mind. When she asked Michael what else his friends were talking about, besides the blizzard, he was relieved too. The subject was all too confusing and scary. He mentioned that the Dodgers were thinking about bringing up a minor league player named Jackie Robinson, who was colored. But everybody down on the avenue said he could never make it in the major leagues.

“They say colored players aren’t as good as white players,” the boy said. “They don’t work as hard, or something.”

His mother knew little about baseball; she glanced at the photograph of Private Tommy Devlin as if wishing he were there to talk to Michael.

“Well, they wouldn’t be giving him a chance,” she said, “if he didn’t work hard to get it.” She sipped her tea and restrained him from dunking his biscuit into his own cup. “You can be sure he wasn’t standing on some street corner, making remarks, when they signed him up.”

They did the dishes together, her face very tired. As Michael dried the plates and glasses, and stacked them in the cabinet, she walked slowly into the living room. For weeks, she had been reading a fat book by a writer named A. J. Cronin, and when Michael was finished with the dishes he followed her into the living room. She was sitting in a large gray armchair with a standing lamp beside it, lost in the book. The kerosene heater made the room feel hot and close. The windows were opaque and filmy. Michael drew faces in the steam with his fingers and stared down at the snow-packed streets and wished she would tell him some Irish stories, the way she did when he was small.

Those stories were even better than the comics, better than the books at the library on Garibaldi Street. Magical tales of Finn MacCool, the great Irish warrior, who in the midst of some bloody battle had reached down, grabbed at a hill with one mighty hand, and heaved it at his enemy. Finn was so big and powerful and the hunk of earth so gigantic that when it landed in the Irish Sea it became an island, the one now known as the Isle of Man. Or Usheen, his son, who followed a woman with golden hair to the Land of Youth, where he lived for three hundred years, never growing old, until at last he grew homesick for Ireland. He was told that his white horse knew the way home but if he once dismounted, he could never return. Trying to save some poor men who were about to die under the weight of an immense flagstone, he fell from the horse and instantly became a withered, blind old man. It was like that movie he’d seen at the Venus, Lost Horizon, where everybody lived in a valley called Shangri-La and stayed young forever but got old if they left.

Or she could tell him again the story of Balor, who had an evil eye so huge that it required eight men to pry it open; when it was open the eye paralyzed every enemy warrior who dared to gaze upon it. If Balor had only been at Mister G’s, he could have paralyzed that goddamned Frankie McCarthy. And Finn MacCool could have thrown him to New Jersey. When Michael was five and six and learning to read, his mother told him of giant pots in ancient Ireland where the food was never exhausted, of silver trees with golden apples glistening in the sun, of spells cast by wizards that made men sleep for forty years, of magical swords that always found the enemy’s neck, of rainstorms turned into fire by druids and women transformed into mice, mice into warriors. There was a magic cauldron, found in a lake, into which dead warriors could be plunged to emerge alive, though unable to speak. Or she told tales of the great CúChulainn, who had seven pupils in each eye and seven fingers on each hand and seven toes on each foot and had the power to move one eye to the back of his head to watch his enemies. Or she told him about the great bull of Cooley that could carry fifty boys upon its back. All of this in Ireland, where she came from, across the foggy seas.

But Kate Devlin was tired now, her shoes off, her feet swollen and sore. He tried to remember whether his mother was there when his father told his stories of Sticky, the magic dog. No. We were in the park. It was summer. On a bench. He saw his mother nod and then snap suddenly awake. She looked at him and smiled.

“Was I asleep a long time?” she asked.

“Maybe ten seconds,” he said.

She shook her head.

“I started drifting off,” she said. “I thought I was in Ireland.”

She looked again at her book.

“Mom?”

“Yes, son?”

“The stories about Ireland,” he said. “You know, Finn MacCool and CúChulainn and Balor and all. Are they true?”

“Of course.”

“Seriously?”

She chuckled. “Well, when I heard them from my father, God rest his soul, I was told they were true.”

“So where did they all go, Finn and Usheen and all of them?”

“I asked just that question,” she said, “and my father said they didn’t go anywhere, they were still there, hidden, invisible, and when Ireland needed them, they’d be back.”

“So why didn’t they come when the English invaded?”

“Maybe they didn’t want to get their hands dirty,” she said, and laughed.

He was glad to see her happy and left her with her book and retreated to his room. He gazed out the window facing the snowy fire escape, wondering how Mister G was doing in his hospital room, and where Frankie McCarthy was at that very moment, and whether the rabbi up on Kelly Street knew what had happened in the candy store on Ellison Avenue. He imagined CúChulainn on a mighty horse, a steed, as they called them, his eyes all red and his beard like fire, a sword as thick as a door in his belt, coming through the snow on Ellison Avenue to find Frankie McCarthy and punish him.

Then he sat on the floor, with his back to the bed, thinking about the Captain Marvels scattered on the floor of Mister G’s candy store, and how, when a real man was being hurt, he could utter no magic words to ward off evil. He started reading Crime Does Not Pay, wondering if someday they’d run a story about Frankie McCarthy. Written by Charles Biro. Drawn by Norman Maurer. The story would start in Brooklyn, and they’d show him stomping a drunk outside Unbeatable Joe’s, then hitting Mister G with the telephone, the blood spurting, calling the old man a Jew prick, then towering above the stricken man with the dead weight of the cash register. Then Frankie would graduate into the rackets, and have big cars and sharp clothes, surrounded by dames in New York nightclubs. And then he’d go too far: the cops would chase him down and catch him, and he’d go weeping to the hot seat.

Yeah.

Except they never used the word prick in comic books.

Or the word Jew, either.

He lay there thinking about this and saw through the window that the snow was falling again, very softly. And he remembered the rabbi, calling to him that morning through the snow and wind. He couldn’t believe now that he had been so scared about entering the darkened vestibule of the synagogue and switching on a goddamned light.

Abruptly, Michael got up. He stepped quietly into the living room. His mother was asleep in the chair, the book on her lap, a thumb wedged in the pages where she’d stopped reading.

He went past her to the bookcase where they kept the blue books of the Wonderland of Knowledge. This was an encyclopedia his mother bought by sending coupons away to a newspaper, enclosing a dime for each volume. He picked out the volume marked Jes-Min, with a drawing of construction workers on the cover, one welding steel beams, the other carrying stones in a basket on his bare back, with pyramids in the distance. He turned to “Jews” and found the entry on page 2080.

Persecution, hardship, and war have marked the long story of the Jews, a Semitic people who trace their ancestry back to the days of Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations. The 16,000,000 Jews in the world today have retained a purity hardly equaled by any other division of man, but their valuable contributions to the world have been of an international character. Greatest of these contributions is in the realm of religion. As the oldest people to believe in one God, the Jews laid the foundation of Christianity and other faiths based on this principle….

Amazing: first came the Jews, and then the Catholics! As he read the text, his excited eyes moved from a statue of Moses, heroic, stern, as muscled as Tarzan, to a picture of a beautiful woman named Judith. The caption told him that Judith entered a city called Bethulia accompanied only by her handmaiden, murdered the Assyrian general, and seized the town. In the picture she was wearing a headband, her long black hair tied in pigtails, and jeweled bracelets on her wrists, along with necklaces and earrings. She was walking proudly, swinging her arms. Behind her on the left was a bearded guy on a horse. Obviously he was behind her because Judith was the boss, the commander. On the right was a bare-shouldered woman in a striped dress, her head downcast under a shawl, carrying a bag. She must be the handmaiden, Michael thought, some kind of maid, the one who polished Judith’s bracelets and necklaces and earrings. There were more horses and a lot of guys with spears, and off in the distance there was the outline of a walled town. Bethulia.

It was like a scene from a movie.

Michael could see it now, in Technicolor, on the screen at the Venus. Hedy Lamarr slips into the town. She and the maid walk around, the general sees her, he looks at her in that certain way they have in the movies and he tells the maid to wait outside. The general takes her to his room. He’s telling her stuff and offers her wine, and as he lifts his own goblet to drink, taking his eyes off her, Hedy Lamarr cuts his goddamned throat!

The movie scene vanished. Michael read on, all about how God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, thus setting up the laws we were supposed to live by, most of them the same ones he had to memorize from the Baltimore Catechism. There was nothing about turning on light switches. And none of what he was reading was like the stuff he heard on the streets. There was no mention of the Jews killing Jesus. There was nothing about Jews being greedy and sneaky and vengeful. Were the people who wrote the encyclopedia hiding something?

The story in the blue book did say that the Jews, who were nomads, also set up laws about health and cleanliness. And they gave the world the Bible and the first alphabet. The goddamned alphabet! And music too!

The music of the Jews also has come down to modern times as a special contribution to art. It is a unique form of music — full of pathos and melancholy melody, yet beautiful and tender.

Michael realized he’d never heard Jewish music. He knew Catholic music, like “Tantum Ergo” and “Mother Dear, O Pray for Me.” He knew all the words, in English and Latin. And he had come to love jazz music, listening to it on the radio, wishing he could play some instrument. A piano. Or a trumpet. But Jewish music… what did it sound like? He read the words again—full of pathos and melancholy melody, yet beautiful and tender—and thought it must sound like the blues.

He glanced out at the falling snow, saw the blurred red neon sign of Casement’s Bar, and again felt a sudden darkness in his mind. What if the encyclopedia was lying? Maybe this was a terrible trick. Maybe a Jew wrote the story in the book. Or paid someone to write it the way the Jews wanted it to appear. To fool the Christians, make them let down their guard. That’s what they’d say down on Ellison Avenue. That’s probably what they’d say if he took the blue book across the street to Casement’s and said: What do you think of this, pal?

But that couldn’t be. This was an encyclopedia; if it was full of lies, someone would write to a newspaper or the mayor or some other big shot; they’d expose the lies. If they were lies. Maybe the stuff he heard on the street was the real lie. He would have to ask his mother about it. Or Father Heaney. Father Heaney was tough, but he wasn’t mean. He didn’t say much, but shit, neither did Gary Cooper. Father Heaney would tell Michael the truth. The boy didn’t completely trust what he heard on the street. The grown-ups knew a lot more than he did about most things. But he also knew that some of what they had to say was what they all called bullshit. Until he died, they talked lots of bullshit about President Roosevelt. They were talking bullshit now about Jackie Robinson. Maybe they were also talking bullshit about the Jews.

He turned from the falling snow and resumed reading through the entry, his eyes glazing over the details, seeing words like Talmud and Torah, and a long history of dates going all the way back to 722 B.C., about things that were done to the Jews and how, in spite of everything, they continued to survive. He wanted to find out more about Judith, but there was nothing else. Down near the bottom, his eyes widened.

Today persecutions and oppressive measures are still carried on in some European nations. In Germany the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler has deprived Jews of political and civil rights which they previously enjoyed. The result has been a gradually increasing exodus of Jews from Germany. Poland, where oppressive measures have existed for many years, has more than 3,000,000 Jews….

Hitler was now dead, so this must have been written before the war. He looked at the small type in the front of the book. Copyright… 1938? That was almost nine goddamned years ago. So even then, long ago, before the war, in 1938, when Michael was three years old, people knew what Hitler was doing. And what he was going to do. His mother was right: Hitler hated Jews and killed millions of them. But if people knew, why didn’t anyone stop him from doing it? Why did they wait until it was too late? Better: why didn’t some Judith go in and cut his goddamned throat?

The United States, where religious and political freedom have attracted Jews from all lands where they have been oppressed, has the greatest number of Jews, the blue book said. In the forty-eight states and possessions there are 4,229,000, of whom nearly 2,000,000 live in New York City.

Michael suddenly realized that he knew almost no Jews. There was Mister G, of course, and Mr. Kerniss, the landlord, who was about seventy years old and came around every month to collect the rents from the super. Now there was this rabbi on Kelly Street, but he didn’t really know him. He’d met him, but he didn’t know him. He didn’t even know his name. Almost everybody else in the parish was Irish, Italian, or Polish, or as some of them said, Micks, Wops, and Polacks. They were Americans, of course. But they described themselves on the basis of where their parents or grandparents came from. Michael was Irish. Like his mother, who came from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Or his father, who came from Dublin. And Sonny Montemarano was Italian. And Jimmy Kabinsky was a Polack. No matter where their people came from, almost all of them were Catholic. There were a few Protestants around too; they went to the public school and the Protestant church on White Street and played in the street like the others. But they were just plain Americans; their parents never talked about the Old Country; they acted as if they had been in Brooklyn since Indians roamed in Prospect Park.

But there were no Jewish kids at all. Even Mister G’s three kids were like phantoms. They didn’t hang out in the parish. They didn’t play on the streets in summer. They were just blurry faces in the back of the candy store. Michael had never seen any young people going in or out of the synagogue on Kelly Street. Not one. On Saturday mornings, there were only a few old men and women on the sidewalk. How could that be? If there were two million Jews in New York City, where did they live? Where were their kids? Did they play stickball? Were they Dodger fans? Did they pitch pennies in the summer and trade comics and read about Captain Marvel? Why weren’t more of them around here?

He wanted to wake up his mother and ask her all these questions. He wanted to tell her about his discoveries about the Jewish laws and the health codes and the alphabet. He wanted to ask her why all those Jews had been killed by Hitler if even before the war everybody knew what he was up to. He wanted to ask her if she’d ever heard Jewish music and where those two million Jews lived in the city of New York.

But she looked exhausted, tired from the long hike through the snow to the hospital and the harder walk back, when the snow was deeper. Her jaw hung slack, her mouth open. He touched her forearm. Her eyes opened.

“Mom,” he said, “you better go to bed.”

She looked startled. “What time is it?”

“It’s late,” he said. “Go to bed.”

In his own room, with the door closed, his teeth brushed, warm under the covers, Michael lay awake. The walls glowed brightly from the freshly falling snow. There was no wind and no sounds as the snow fell all over the parish. In the back room of the candy store, while the snow piled up on the sidewalk, Mister G’s wife was probably weeping. Her husband had been taken away in an ambulance, unconscious, his face a swollen, bloody mess. Everybody saw the ambulance and the police cars and nobody said anything. At the synagogue on Kelly Street, the snow was gathering on the doors and the front steps and the roof, while the bearded man with the sad eyes listened, Michael was sure, to Jewish music, beautiful and tender.

The rabbi was from over there. Somewhere in Europe. Michael knew that from the accent. He wasn’t from here. But how did he escape? The newspapers said that maybe six million Jews were killed. Why wasn’t he one of them? Was he from Poland too? Did the Nazis come to his door? Did he hide in an attic or a closet? Did he pick up a gun and fight? The rabbi had to have a story, and Michael wondered what it was.

Just before sleep came, he thought about what it would be like to meet Judith, with her bracelets and earrings and jeweled hair, and touch her golden skin. Then he pushed her from his mind too, as an occasion of sin, whispering the words of the Hail Mary to keep himself pure as a snowy hill in Prospect Park.