“Rashka, ziskeit, tsu hern deyn kul iz a brkhh.” Even though her uncle likes to insist that one language is never enough, he seldom speaks to her in anything but the language of their homelife. Not German like the good Yetta Jews spoke, raising up their Christmas trees, trying to be more German than the Germans. But Yiddish! Especially on the telephone, as if a phone call is a kind of spectral connection, voices thrown over distance, not bound by physical proximity, that must be anchored by a common touchstone of their past. Their vanished lives. Vanished in all ways except how they speak, how they think, what they remember or choose to forget.
She can see him in her mind, her uncle, ensconced like an exiled princeling on the scruffy velveteen sleigh chair that he drags out into the tenement’s hallway to make use of the pay phone. A lit cigar ribboning smoke upward to the tobacco-stained ceiling. She is buoyed by his voice, yet she knows that every conversation with her feter has a price attached. He wants to see her, he tells her. And not just wants to! “It’s essential, Rokhl,” that he sees her. And that she sees him. Normally, these conversations are chock-full of her uncle’s ersatz cheer, but this time, a smear of desperation underpaints his jaunty bravado. It makes her wish she had simply let the phone ring. But she agrees to meet him, because what else can she do? It means she doesn’t go to the grocery to pick up sugar for her husband’s coffee or take his shirts to the cleaners. It means she doesn’t use the morning to clean the oven or vacuum the draperies. Those are tasks she’ll have to leave to the mice if they want to make time. Aaron is tossing the banana peel into the trash as she hangs up, his shirtfront now buttoned and tail tucked into his waistline.
“So, your uncle, huh?” he says, still chewing the last bite of banana but frowning now, as if the mention of her feter has ruined the taste. She knows Aaron believes that her Feter Fritz is an open drain for her. “And how is he?” her husband wonders, lifting a wing tip onto his chair to retie a loose shoestring. “And by that I mean what does he need?” Licking his thumb to rub clean the toe of his shoe leather.
“Nothing,” she assures him. “He doesn’t need a thing. Just inviting me for a coffee,” she insists and retrieves her husband’s coat and hat from the hall tree by the door.
“So you don’t think he’s after another ‘loan.’ And I used that word ironically, since we’ve never seen a dime back.”
“No,” Rachel replies blankly, holding Aaron’s hat. “He’s not after anything.”
“Okay, sorry.” An unapologetic apology. “Don’t mean to sound insulting. It’s just that usually? He is.”
“Is what?”
“After something.”
“He’s not.”
“Okay,” Aaron says again as he shrugs on his coat. “Just don’t get bamboozled is all I’m saying.”
“How can I be, since I don’t even know what this means?”
“It means hold on to your purse.”
“I won’t even pay for his coffee.”
He accepts his hat from her. “Great, so now you’re making me sound like a putz.”
“I am?”
“Just try to keep it manageable is all. Pay for his coffee but make him leave the tip.”
“Yes, sir,” she says with a small salute.
“H’okay,” Aaron sighs, slipping on his hat. The old snood, he calls it. “How ’bout I bring home Chinese for supper? Whattaya want, the lo mein?”
“Surprise me,” says Rachel.
“If you wanna risk it.” He’s ready to go, ready to enter the world beyond the door, but then he wonders something as an aside. Something connected to the pesky problem of his wife’s mental stability. “So you’re not gonna lose track of time, right?”
“Lose track?”
“Aren’t you supposed to see what’s-his-name today?”
“Dr. Solomon. Not until three.”
“Okay.” He gives her a peck on the lips. “Just don’t miss him again, please. We’re spending a fortune on this genius.”
“I won’t miss him,” she promises.
“I’m just sayin’, is all.” Another peck on the lips. “G’bye.”
Leaving the apartment, Aaron’s day doesn’t get better. Rachel has closed the door behind him and is leaning into it as if she might need to barricade herself when she hears the easy, challenging voice of Aaron’s cousin, Ezra Weinstock, coming up the stairs. The Fucknik. “So, shvesterkind!” Ezra calls to Cousin Aaron. “Off to another day schlepping hash? When are you gonna stop screwing around and do something with your life, boychik?” he wants to know.
“Can’t say, Ez,” replies Aaron. “When are you gonna learn to raise the seat on the toilet before taking a piss? Your wife keeps complaining to mine.”
Ezra snorts a laugh. “All I’m saying is a grown man waiting tables?”
“I’m the manager, pal.”
“Sure, the manager. Your mother brags all the time, I’m sure. He’s the manager.”
And now Rachel hears the barely restrained aggression squeeze Aaron’s voice, the sure sign of an anger too complicated and dense to be contained by hallway sparring. “So who are you? Mr. Big Shot Public Defender, playing footsie with pimps and hopheads all day. I bet all those goyim at the courthouse think you’re one superior Jew boy, pal.”
She can hear Aaron pounding down the stairs after this, leaving Ezra shouting after him with snide passion. “Right! Big man! You think you know what it means to be a Jew? Well, I got news, bubbee. What you don’t know would fill a goddamned ocean!”
Rachel leans into the door till there’s silence in the stairwell. Kibbitz at the window has changed his mind, the silly beast, and now is pawing on the glass for entry.
She goes to the window and shoves up the sash, allowing him to hop down to the floor. But the morning air causes a cool shiver to creep through her skin. She shuts the glass and scoops the cat up in her arms, hugging the warmth of this furry feline body against her.
The day had dawned a stony gray on the morning that Aaron had arrived to rescue her from Bellevue. His face was bleached by shock, but it was evident from the deep shame coloring his eyes that it was he himself who felt in need of rescue. It was he who was the suffering one here. Salvaging his wife from the loony bin? More than he had bargained for, was it? God forbid his mother ever hears. All that was unspooling across his face like the headline ticker in Times Square.
***
There’s an old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub in their apartment, with a showerhead installed on a tall pipe and a ring around the top from which a plastic shower curtain droops. Sometimes the water goes cold in the pipes by this point in the morning, but she’s lucky that today it’s still gushing hot, as hot as Rachel can stand. It brings the blood to her skin. She stands under the showerhead, eyes closed, allowing the steamy water to pour over her.
She and Feter had been permitted to come ashore in America by the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, slipping into the country during a narrow spasm of charity on the part of the American Congress as the mass graves of Europe settled into the earth. Their entry was sponsored by members of a Jewish labor board who also helped them get work. She found a spot at a five-and-dime, and Feter Fritz took a job as a janitor in an office building and sometimes ran the elevator. During the day, he worked with a mop and broom, but in the evenings, he re-created a version of his old self, changing into his baggy secondhand suit and sitting with an espresso. He would give his niece a dime and instruct her to walk down to Michnik Brothers Tobacconist on Rivington Street to buy a certain brand of sickly sweet cigars because they were sold two for a nickel. In shlekhte tsaytn, iz a peni oykh gelt, Feter would say. In bad times, even a penny is money. This when they were housed in the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society’s refugee house on Lafayette Street, along with a ragged collection of other Jews who had managed to escape the death’s-head battalions and the crematorium chimneys.