“Oy, gevald, what they have done to my merry little Moishe?” Dressed in some dark, satiny cloth, Baba sat motionless, staring at her son. “My precious, happy child, my good child, my first son, they’ve turned you into a stone.”
“Not a stone, Mamaleh. A soldier. A staff sergeant beside. They wanted me to reenlist, Mamaleh; my colonel told me, ‘Reenlist, Morris’—he called me Morris—‘you’re my regimental sergeant.’”
“But you’re home now,” Baba appealed. “My Moishe, my Yiddish child, come back to us.” She raised both hands, imploring: “Moishe, hear!”
“A regimental sergeant, and I wished myself a hundred times dead.”
“Leave him alone,” Zaida commanded. “In time he’ll come to himself. He’s home. He’ll become Moishe again— May they be slaughtered, all who stunned him in that charnel house he had to abide. Ai, ai, ai, will they ever come to their senses? Ai! What lies and rots under the earth because of their madness. Kaddish, v’ yiskadaish, shmai raboh.”
“I’ll go to shul with you, this evening, Father, if I may. God knows what will help me.”
“Noo, come to the shul with me this evening? What else?”
“Why is everyone so troubled?” Mamie interjected. “What’s wrong with us? We stand about him as if, as if, God knows, as if the Almighty didn’t return him to us unscathed. He’s here! He lives! And nothing maimed. It will all be forgotten soon. What is it with us? He’ll be a headwaiter again. Perhaps soon he’ll go into business. He’ll open a restaurant. He’ll be a success. With life he’ll be all this. Come, let’s rejoice. Gevald, what is this? I know what you need, brother!” Mamie shook her finger at Moe. “I know very well. I’ll bring it, and you’ll be another man. At once!” She hurried into the kitchen, came back in seconds with a glass tumbler and a seltzer siphon. “You’re still my little brother,” she wheedled as she proffered the glass. “Here. This will restore you. Like old times when you were a busboy: a glass of seltzer. This will make you our Moishe again. Here, quicken your heart!” She pressed the lever of the cold-sweating siphon, squirted a tumblerful of bubbling water into the tumbler he held, until it almost brimmed over— “Drink, drink, dear brother. It’s good and cold, the way you always liked it. You’ll belch heartily. See if that won’t restore you.”
Everyone stood or sat about watching him, avid for him to imbibe, to enjoy. “L’chaim,” he raised the tumbler to his lips, swallowed — one mouthfuclass="underline" His teeth clamped the rim of the glass, crunched, as if it were some kind of brittle food. He pitched back in his chair. His campaign hat snapped away from his cropped, blond head and fell behind him to the floor. The hand — holding a broken glass — dropped to his lap, staining the khaki-covered thigh. He had bitten a great piece out of the tumbler, and now its jagged edge gleamed between clenched teeth.
“Gevald! Gevald! Moishe! You hear me? Wake up!” Zaida fanned his son’s face with his yarmulke. “Moishe! Moishe!” Zaida lashed Moe’s cheek with his yarmulke. “Gevald! Help, someone! Don’t let him swallow! Saul! Max! Before he’s destroyed!”
Mamie screamed hysterically. So did Ella and Sadie. Ira wept, Stella sobbed. Saul tore at his cheek, screaming, “Moe! Moe! Come back!” Baba seemed about to faint, her eyes shut, and would have pitched out of her chair were it not for Mom, who seized her swaying mother and called hoarsely to Harry to run for a doctor. Only Max kept silent. His face pale, the lobes of his nostrils distended and oily, he kept his brown eyes fixed on the edge of glass between his brother’s teeth. Moe’s tongue arched, his jaw dropped. Deftly, as if they were forceps, Max jabbed two fingers between his brother’s lips, and extracted the shard of glass.
“I’ll give you ten seconds to get up that fuckin’ hill, you sonofabitch.” Snarling, Moe glared at his brother with glazed eyes, at the same time drawing the broken tumbler as if it were an imaginary weapon against his thigh. Then he dropped the glass and slumped.
“Oh, woe is me, out to perish before our very eyes,” Baba moaned. “Oh, I die.”
“No, no, he’s coming to himself,” Mom assured her. “Mama, listen to me. Open your eyes. See! See! He breathes. He moves. Your son is saved.”
Moe revived. He looked at the spreading water stain on his khaki breeches — and smiled, his old smile, simple and stolidly arch, as if he were a youth on the East Side again, saying: “Ich khom mikh bepisht?”
“You didn’t bepiss yourself, brother,” Mamie brought her face almost against his. “It’s only seltzer water. It’s nothing.”
“Nothing it isn’t,” Moe smiled. “Seltzer cust gelt.” He laughed weakly. “Noo, Mamaleh, I’m home. I’m your Moishe.”
“My poor child,” Baba wept.
“Don’t fall on his neck, all of you!” Zaida shouted. “Leave him alone!”
“I’m all right, Father,” said Moe, and smiled at Baba: “Mamaleh, don’t weep. I’m a soldier no longer: Ich bin aus-soldat, aus-sergeant.” And to Mamie: “Noo, Shwester, where’s the seltzer?”
“I’m afraid to give you any more,” said Mamie. “Shall I give him more?” She asked for advice.
“No. Don’t!” Everyone else concurred. “Wait. Wait till he’s come to himself entirely.”
Moe chuckled indulgently. “Try me with the siphon, sister. The spout—” he chuckled again, sought his campaign hat behind him. “I haven’t teeth enough to break the spout. Ah, azoy.”
So, although the Great War had ended months ago, for Ira, watching his uncle in khaki uniform gulping seltzer water directly from the dull metal spigot of the siphon and belching afterward with beatific grin, it was only then the Great War ended.
PART THREE
I
“
I want to be a soldier, Uncle Louie,” Ira said, when Louie in postman’s uniform next gladdened the house with a visit. “I want to go to West Point and learn to be an officer.”
Uncle Louie smiled his gold-crowned smile, and shook his head: “They don’t like Jews at West Point.”
“They don’t?” His disappointment spread within him like some sort of mildew, vitiating his dreams irrevocably. Uncle Louie wouldn’t lie; Uncle Louie knew; he had been a soldier himself. “They don’t, Uncle?” Ira repeated. He seemed to look at something stricken within himself.
The shake of Uncle Louie’s head was slight, his sympathetic smile full of consolation. “No.”
“And where do they like Jews? Where?” Mom bantered.
“He can’t wipe his butt properly, and he’s going to be an officer,” said Pop.
“No, Chaim, he’s only a boy,” Uncle Louie demurred. “A child. I was a soldier, too. It’s natural for a child here in America to want to be a soldier. My two boys also want to be soldiers. It isn’t Galitzia where they cut off a Jewish boy’s toe so he won’t be conscripted—”
“Didn’t they do that to Ben Zion, my father?” said Mom.
“What else?” said Louie. “We Jews did that to a thousand, thousand infant boys to keep them out of the military, that they won’t have to eat pork, worst victuals, or, treife of all, to go into battle — and who knew? at times against other Jews, fellow-Jews in the opposing army. Why? We had no country, no?”