This shocks Aaron. Stealing? “How, Pop?”
“Never mind. It does is all,” his father assures him firmly, placing the ten in its proper spot in the cash drawer. “I’m trying to teach you something, Aaron,” he explains with a frown. His face is set in a serious affect, trying to get through to this domkop son of his. Trying as hard as he can. “I’m trying to teach you something,” he repeats. “There are two kinds of people in the world. Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, I’m listening to you, Pop.”
“There are two kinds of people in the world,” his father explains. “Those people who don’t care if they do it wrong and those who work hard to do it right. Now which kind should a man be?” he asks, his voice muted but demanding.
Now, two decades later, Aaron stands in front of the bathroom mirror. He has never veered from his answer. The man who works hard is the man who does it right. It’s the man he will be. Must be. That much is chiseled in goddamned stone. But sometimes he wonders why. Sometimes he wonders what’s the point, ya’ know? To work and to die and to leave what behind? His pop left him behind when the old man’s heart burst an artery.
Standing behind the counter punching the keys on that holy cash register he was so damned proud about. The R.P.P.C. Cash Register from Burl & Kenny on Atlantic Avenue. Leased, not owned! But that was top secret information. God, how Pop worshipped that thing. It was his tabernacle. Not because he gave a shit about money, ’cause, really, everybody knew that money was like water running through his fingers. He never learned how to hold on to it. Mr. Generosity. Mr. Soft Touch to the whole fucking neighborhood. But that machine was a sacred talisman of menschenschaft. The orderly cash drawer was the sign of the orderly mind. The orderly soul. The ethical soul. It showed that he was somebody. A man who ran a cash register out of his own business, made his own buck, was a cut above.
But after he died, the guys from Burl & Kenny came and carted it off, and what was left? So they buried another mensch in Washington Cemetery off the Bay Parkway. So what? What was left of Pop? Only his children? A son, a daughter. A blessed memory to his wife. What else? Nothing else. I’m trying to teach you something, Aaron. So when it’s Aaron’s time to be planted in the ground, what will he be leaving behind? A shadow? Shadows don’t last, but maybe that’ll be it. Maybe a shadow on the ground, on a wall, on a door is the only mark he’s ever gonna make.
On his first day back in New York after the army, he’d stepped out into the cathedral concourse of Grand Central and felt the buzzing crowds sucking him in. Like he could step into the throng of people zigzagging though the station and be borne anywhere. Swept up into a vast, bustling chaos, and God knows where he would end up! Over the moon maybe. He’s spent the prime of his life in the service. And now he was twenty-three years old, standing there with his duffel bag beside him, kitted out in his khaki service dress. Technical Sergeant Aaron S. Perlman, Serial No. 47 412 997. Tie tucked into his uniform blouse, garrison cap at a slight angle on his head.
He’d been shipped from California to Fort Sam Houston in Texas to be mustered out after serving the standard duration plus six. Like a million other schmoes, he’d been drafted in ’43, but lucky him, he’s never seen a minute of combat. A lot of the men from basic ended up in some desert death trap in North Africa, but Aaron had spent the war as a quartermaster sergeant battling U.S.O. caterers in Culver City.
Now he was back home. Back home to New York, standing on the precipice of the Greatest Fucking City in the World. He lights one of his issue Lucky Strikes. Even the smoke is sucked into the swirling, gorgeous pandemonium of destinations.
But in this giant world, where is he going next? To the most constricting address in the world is his answer: 360 Webster Avenue in Flatbush.
Home.
1950
The year they marry at Brooklyn City Hall is the year that the Knesset passes a resolution that Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel. It is the year that Alger Hiss is sentenced to prison for perjury and that a senator named McCarthy announces that the State Department is home to 205 Communists. Not 204, not 206. It is the year that the Kingdom of Jordan annexes the West Bank, that President Truman sends American troops to defend South Korea from the North. A gallon of gas costs about twenty-seven cents and three cans of Campbell’s pork and beans costs a quarter. They honeymoon for six days in the Poconos at the Paradise Resort Hotel, where Aaron steps in poison ivy and blows up with toxins. It is also in this momentous year that Aaron takes his bride, the younger Mrs. Perlman, to the home of his mother, the elder Mrs. Perlman, to celebrate their first Seder together as wife and husband. Husband and wife.
It’s an hour’s trip on the bustling Sixth Avenue Local. Crossing under the river, the train thumps through the tunnel’s heat, and Rachel lets herself be bobbled by its rhythm. Finally, at Eighteenth Avenue, they get out and walk ten minutes. It’s not the first time Rachel has visited the house on Webster Avenue where Aaron spent his childhood. There have been suppers, there have been drop-bys on their way back from Coney Island on the B.M.T., smelling of sea salt and suntan oil. (Well, look who got some color!) Drop-ins to pick up this or that item for “setting up housekeeping” as his mother always calls it. The old vacuum cleaner from the synagogue. (It still works! Why buy a new one?) The oscillating electric fan and the brass floor lamp. The kitchen gadgets that Aaron bought for Mother’s Day but that his mother never bothers with. (You should just take them, dear. Make them useful.)
But this is their first holiday gathering. The house is one in a row of functional, well-kept, two-story brick or wood-frame dwellings with shingled porches and small grassy patches of yard that form a fringe against the sidewalk. Trees shade the street at uneven intervals, but otherwise the sun brightens the springtime greening and shrinks the shadows under the porch roofs.
“God knows she’s been cleaning like a maniac since Purim,” Aaron advises Rachel. Still outside as they are heading for the front door. “You won’t find a particle of schmutz for fifty miles in any direction,” he says, “so mention how spotless the house looks, and you’ll be in like Flynn.”
At the door, a mezuzah. Nothing too fancy. A functional little brass casket inscribed with the holy seal of God. Aaron performs his usual tap-and-kiss routine and doesn’t notice that his wife breaches the barrier without any such gesture. He is already busy announcing their arrival in his favorite singsongy Yiddish bubbe’s voice, thick with diphthongs. “Halloo! Cherished mishpocha peoples! Guess who it is come from the big city!”
Inside, the sun’s bright edge fades as it’s filtered through the drapes. A homey, murky veil of daylight hues color the living room. The house is small on the inside but appears content with its crowd of bulky furnishings. The armchairs and living room couch are comfortably padded but not voluptuously so. The bureaus and tables are thick, dark mahogany. The rugs on the floor vacuumed half to death. The air pungent with the deeply simmering aroma of chicken soup and matzah balls.
“So, Ma, I see you took the slipcover off the sofa,” Aaron calls to his mother in the kitchen, then turns to Rachel and takes her jacket. “You must be very special,” he says. “She never does that. I’m serious. The Prophet Elijah could actually walk through the front door, and she wouldn’t take the slipcovers off the sofa for him.”