High-stepping in procession around a semicircle of chairs, they played a ragtime number whose base melody the Padauers identified as, remarkably, the fraylekh standard “How Does the Czar Drink Tea?” They played an array of instruments — clarinets, bass fiddles, snare drums — with exaggerated gestures and flourishes, marching about the raised platform long enough to give the audience an opportunity to appreciate their gnomish anatomies and outlandish garb. Their burnt-cork features beamed from globular heads like faces painted on balloons, balloons from which dangled stringy torsos and bantam legs. Shod in spangled buskins, they wore top hats and spike-tailed coats stitched together from swatches of calico, croker sacks, and colored glass. When the general hilarity was subdued enough for the tune to be heard, the bandleader, no taller than the others but perfectly proportioned, signaled the troupe to halt. “Gemmun,” he called in a nod to Negro dialect, “be seated.” Though forceful enough, his voice was that of a child, as were the soft honey curls that peeked from under his tall hat in contrast to the minstrel makeup.
Once seated, the players performed another spirited number, this one a syncopated but ill-disguised version of “Zing, Faygele, Zing.” The Padauers exchanged puzzled glances, wondering that the goyim didn’t lose patience with such a hybrid program — though in fact the audience, unacquainted with Old Country klezmer, seemed to accept the performers as a variety of authentic blackface minstrelsy. Then the bandleader doffed his stovepipe, releasing his profusion of curls, and presented himself as “Your humble interlockator.” Again the juvenile voice was at odds with his authority, as he begged permission to introduce “two chaste and elegant gen’lemen.” “Mr. Tambo,” he called, and a sprightly little musician leapt forward from one end of the orchestra, shaking his tambourine. “And Mr. Bones.” Another pygmy musician sprang forth from the opposite end of the chairs, clacking knucklebones. “In their inimminable Ethiopian pah-de-do.” Upon which the interlocutor surrendered the stage to Tambo and Bones, who bowed to one another, bumping heads.
Tambo (earnestly inquiring): “Mistah Bones, yo’ mammy and pappy, am dey siblinks?” The dialect was Negro but the accent pure Galitzianer.
Bones (just as concerned): “Nu, Mistah Tambo, do y’all still have from nature a ’fection for it, despite what it done to you?” Again Negro with a Litvak inflection.
Tambo: “How mizzable am our lot, Mistah Bones. Plagues we got, pogroms, the Ku Klux Klan … Sometime I tink we been better off not to be born.”
Bones: “But who has dat much luck, Mistah Tambo? Not one in a thousand.”
Their dialogue accelerated to a rapid-fire exchange, each joke graduated in saltiness (“Do y’all with your wife make love doggy style, Mistah Tambo?” “I sit up and beg while, tahkeh, she rolls over and plays dead, Mistah Bones”), punctuated with rim shots on the drums. So shocked was Rose Padauer that she clapped her hands over Benjy’s ears but couldn’t help sharing a furtive smile with her husband.
The antic pair concluded their routine with a brief skit involving a change of gender by Mr. Bones, who adopted for the part a princess petticoat and a sheitl wig. (He’s a lady in a café who lets fly a fart then tries to deceive the other patrons by scolding the waiter: “Stop dat!” The waiter: “Absolutely, madam, which way were it headed?”) Then the minstrels struck up a raucous choral rendition of “When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band,” to which Tambo and Bones commenced to dance.
Their capers began as a combination of cakewalk and (as the Padauers perceived) a mother-in-law dance of the type seen at Jewish weddings, but soon progressed to acrobatics bordering on the hyperkinetic. They were joined by other band members juggling their instruments and spinning dreidls that disappeared in multihued whirlwinds. Bedlam reigned onstage until a Lilliputian trumpeter blew some shrill notes on a spiraling ram’s horn, and the interlocutor reappeared with his winsome face scrubbed clean of burnt cork.
“Ladies and mentschen,” announced the squeaky-voiced trumpeter, “we now present for your delectification the kindshaft phenomenum Master Splendido, hypnotist and animal magnet extry-ordinaire.”
The minstrels performed another roistering walkaround, playing a march tempo version of “Nokh a gletzl vayn” while circumambulating their featured entertainer, before exiting through the sequined curtain. That left the audience to admire the comely boy who stood before them, having swapped the interlocutor’s tatterdemalion for a silk-lapeled coat whose tails swept the floor.
As Mama Rose removed her hands from his ears, Benjy fidgeted in the face of all he beheld. Suffering their hijinks, he couldn’t help but gloat over the situation of his former brethren, who’d cast him out of their underground kingdom only to be cast out themselves by the aftermath of the quake. He could picture with relish the collapsed catacombs that sent them scrambling up into the province of mortals, where they were met with a flood that dispersed them even farther afield. Seeking a more hospitable environment, they had apparently forsaken their habitual meddling in the lives of the Jews to assume this ludicrous imposture on higher ground. But while he might take some satisfaction in their reversal of fortune, Benjy harbored no lasting resentment: they’d merely done to him what they’d done to generations of antiquated ogres; countless like him had been switched for rosier human types and left to soldier on as best they could in the upper atmosphere. But you could bet your second sight that few had found accommodations as favorable for a haimish ever after as were his with the Padauers. Even now, when forced to acknowledge his alien origin, they continued to treat him as their cosseted ward, and he regretted that the skimpy gifts he was able to give them were so unequal to the attentions he received in return.
Now, however, he was in a position to give them the supremest gift imaginable: he could reintroduce them to their stolen child. It would be the greatest sacrifice a fake kid could make for his adoptive family. But the shretelekh were an essentially selfish breed, not known for a generosity of spirit, and the substitute Benjy, who couldn’t even recall his original name, had never supposed himself to be better than the rest.
Meanwhile the callow headliner, Master Splendido, had invited volunteers from the audience to step onto the stage. Charmed by his cherubic face and piping voice, a goodly number accepted his invitation, the gents helping the ladies onto the platform where all took the chairs vacated by the minstrels. The volunteers were a largely youthful contingent in dinner jackets and cotton voile frocks, slightly lit and eager to participate in whatever frolic was requested of them. Master Splendido wasted no time in exploiting their receptiveness. He addressed the house, reeling off his credentials without a trace of the former mock dialect: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am Splendido, who was initiated into the mysteries by the stupefying sorcerers of Sfat …” The audience was as transfixed as they were amused, if only by the distinction between the child’s reedy voice and the inflated claims he made. The performer removed from a coat pocket the small tin figure of a grass-skirted African dancer and turned the key in her back. Then he held the shimmying doll at their eye level as he paced back and forth in front of the row of volunteers.
“From this moment everything I say, no matter how stupid, will become your reality. But first, go to sleep …”
At their table Rose and Morris Padauer were as spellbound as the volunteers, for they’d recognized the windup doll as the very twin of the one they’d replaced for the unshapely replacement of their kidnapped baby boy. Surely a coincidence, since it was as absurd to believe they could have begotten a Master Splendido as it was to think they’d spawned the little bogey seated between them. The boy onstage was nothing like the infant they’d lost — except for his fair hair and beryl blue eyes, the snub nose, the poppy petal mouth … Between them their surrogate child saw his guardians in the process of making a stupendous connection, dismissing it, then tentatively beginning to entertain it again. Benjy sucked his vestigial tooth: a reckoning, he understood, was at hand. The Padauers had perhaps only to declare themselves for a joyous reconciliation to unfold before the assembled, leaving the cast-off “peanut” hung out to dry.