The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (3 page)

Esther looked intently at me while I looked at her. On closer examination she was not Marie-Antonetta, but might have been if Marie-Antonetta had had something going on behind those liquid brown eyes aside from food, make-up and grindingly slow dancing. This version had the same hair but cut short, pixieish à la Zizi Jeanmaire, the French dancer, not piled on top of her head, a petite face dusted discretely with rust powder over deeply tanned skin and heavily-shadowed eyes that made her seem at once alert and somnolent, and small, rounded lips like fish, one above the other and each facing a different way so that her mouth appeared pursed in silence yet pregnant with some phrase designed to hit me where Celeste’s brothers had missed. “You’re just a kid,” she said. From her standpoint that was true: she was younger than her brother, but had a good ten years on me.

“Yeah.” I would have said yes to anything. But I couldn’t leave it at that. “Like you.”

“Yes,” she said. “Like me.” With that she started to cry so hard it was all I could do to keep from putting my arm around her, and I might have done so, but we were already pulling up to the Bhotke Society subdivision, a barren neighborhood with a few headstones and a lot of discrete markers to indicate room for the inevitable depopulation explosion.

What we had come to wasn’t a funeral. It was a collection of crowds. At my father’s funeral there couldn’t have been more than twenty. Here there seemed to be two hundred, standing in clumps as though representing a broad array of conflicting ideologies in some politically unstable republic. Probably there had not been so many people for a funeral in Beth David since Louis Gelb, the loan shark, died suddenly and his debtors, according to the
Daily Mirror
, showed up to make sure. (I read the
New York Times
and the
Herald Tribune
every day as well, but that was merely citizenship: in the tabloids was all the stuff that would be on the final.) Quickly I ran around the rear of the car and helped Esther out, watching her heel sink into the soft ground like a signet ring into warm wax. She hung on my arm as though we had been friends for a long time, but aside from the heady smell of her—not perfume but some sort of musk rising from her dark helmet of hair—I barely felt the incipient lust that was my companion night and day, and which was neither subtle nor discriminating. Perhaps it was my sore body, or the presence of the dead, or her brother, or all these people.

The main group, standing around the grave with its back to the plot of the American Fellows of Gompitz, were familiar faces from the society, sixty at least, with Feivel/Franklin standing in front looking athletically despondent, like a sprinter who has once again come in last, and with him a generic rabbi, probably supplied by the funeral home, whose representative stood on his other side, all shiny suit, morose expression and pecuniary interest. Like the rabbi, a small man with a white goatee and a homburg, the mortician was what he was.

I realized instantly that Shushan Cats, like any mourner, probably did not know what to do. With Esther on one arm I collected Shushan as he stepped out of the car on the other side and brought them to where the trio of officials stood before the grave.

“Are these the children?” the rabbi asked. He muttered something in Hebrew and then, out of nowhere, in his hand appeared a blade.

In retrospect it could hardly have taken minutes for what was to transpire, though it seemed to: the birds stopped singing, the wind stopped blowing, even the crisp November sunlight seemed to dim as I saw it all as if in a dream, the unrelentingly slow this-is-happening-but-is-not-happening union of fear and wonder that leaves us all as mute as an audience at a concert where the soloist falls off the stage or like an eyewitness at an accident as one car slowly, inevitably hurtles into another. But in dreams and concert halls and on highways we are never this close: Ira-Myra’s stepping forward from behind his boss, his thick arm in a perfect right cross pushing his open hand almost lyrically to seize the rabbi’s, the big man’s fingers wrapping the rabbi’s wrist, pushing it up and then down and around until the rabbi was on his knees, Ira-Myra’s’s own knee poised over him for the kind of kick that would have buried the rabbis’ white goatee in his own teeth.

There they stood, frozen, a tableau waiting for resolution, until someone shouted, “Whoa—it’s just the rending of garments. Let him go!”

Along with everyone else’s Ira-Myra’s’s eyes moved to the speaker. I followed their gaze. They were looking at me.

Me?

How did this happen? Only two days before I was spending my days in happy fornication and my nights too, in between smoking the odd joint, going out with friends to hear jazz in the Village—for months I was a regular at a dive called The Showplace, where the angrily percussive bassist Charlie Mingus once fired the piano player in mid-set, saying “We have suffered a diminuendo in personnel”—or drinking irresponsibly with a series of young women whose names and embraces run together like a medley of old songs, and from time to time visiting Brooklyn College where my professors allowed me to skip classes as an honor student so that I could spend time in a carrel at the library researching Milton or Mark Twain or Melville, so that I could deliver papers at term’s end and within one more term graduate. And do what? I didn’t know. I did know I spent as little time at the library as possible, but somehow delivered A-papers that I wrote a week before the end of the term, tossing in footnotes, a good many fictional, like some mad chef spicing a dish before it went into the oven. Look here, I wanted to say now: this is not my funeral, not my place, not my bodyguard, not my rabbi, not my anything entirely.

At least for the moment, Shushan relieved me of my burden. “Ira,” he said quietly. “Let the nice rabbi go. He’s supposed to cut my coat, not my throat.” He looked to me. “Also Esther’s?”

This was out of my theological league.

Helped to his feet by Ira-Myra’s, the rabbi nodded yes.

Oddly, I seemed to be the only one shook by this pocket violence. Everyone around us merely looked on with the same respectful attention while the rabbi made a cut in Shushan’s left lapel as though from time to time it was normal for a rabbi to be wrestled to the ground by a mourner. The rabbi said a prayer in Hebrew, which Shushan clearly did not understand—he said “Amen” only when the rabbi translated it into English: “Blessed are Thou, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, the true Judge.” He then did the same, making a smaller slit, on the very edge of Esther’s coat—careful so as not to offend a woman’s modesty even in the face of death, a rabbi normally takes pains to make a miniscule tear that threatens to reveal nothing—and then summarized the benediction: “Blessed be the true Judge.”

Beyond that it was your normal garden-variety funeral, except when Shushan took me aside and pulled a sheaf of typed papers out of his vest pocket. “You done good,” he said.

“I’m trying, Mr. Cats.”

“Shushan. Could be more flowers.”

“Shushan.” What was I supposed to say—next time?

“I want you should read this.”

“Now?”

“Yeah, because otherwise you won’t be familiar with the words.”

“I have to be familiar with the words?”

“It’s the eulogy.”

Sometimes time passes slowly, sometimes super-fast. Time was now making up for lost time. “The eulogy?”

“I want you should read it.”

It occurred to me that perhaps Shushan was illiterate. Somebody had to read it. He couldn’t. So he chose me. Made perfect sense. “Maybe the rabbi would be a better choice. Or Feivel, the Bhotke president.” Or Walter Cronkite, or John F. Kennedy. Anyone. Just not me.

“You’re the man.”

“I never met your mother, Mr. Ca—Shushan. I mean, it would be... strange.”

“I wrote it,” he said, “But I can’t read it.”

“You wrote it.”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s all true. She was a wonderful mother. She deserves a good reading.”

“Me?”

“Who else, Ira-Myra’s?”

I looked at him. “You?”

“Not me,” he said.

Not him. “If you don’t mind my asking...”

Shushan nodded in the direction of the Gerwitz Association real estate to our right where several groups of individuals hovered in bunches, as carefully arranged as battleground figurines, the sun glinting off their sunglasses and silk suits like so many search lights. A good forty were clearly
goombahs
, the kind Hollywood would shortly be making a stream of movies about, their names ending in vowels and their lives ending, it would seem, in either a bullet to the head or prison. These were not people who died in bed. Several feet away, standing in a clump of their own, were more of the same, thirty or so, but black, each one more elegant than the next in double-breasted black suits, bright white shirts, black ties, and on their heads broad brimmed black hats. The Italians were a mixed group, mostly older men in glasses and given to paunch, along with a sprinkling of muscular youngsters who were either their sons or their soldiers, or both. The blacks were rangy, big men who had gotten to where they were because they were handy with their fists. Further along, several yards separating them, stood a dozen or so Chinese, short, chubby, dressed straight out of Brooks Brothers’ window, none of them wearing hats, probably because not one had ever before been to a Jewish funeral. I watched the mortician walk up to them and hand them black skull-caps. Each examined the item, then placed it on his head so gingerly it was as if it might cause some sort of explosion.

“Your people?” I said.

“Professional associates,” Shushan said. “Also...” he nodded in the opposite direction, where three cars were parked separately from the rest, as if they were visiting a grave at the site reserved for the Loyal Sons of Bielsk. From one car three men emerged, one carrying a camera. Only cops could dress that badly. From each of the other two cars a lone photographer emerged. I was wrong: In the matter of
bas couture,
the press actually outdid the police. One of these press photographers—probably from the
Daily Mirror
itself, which covered organized crime the way the
New York Times
covered Congress—stood on his car’s rear bumper the better to take in the field. Ira-Myra’s came up to us. Shushan shook him off. “We don’t want a scene,” he said. “Let the vultures lunch.” He turned back to me. “Russy, if I read it I’m gonna cry. People don’t want to see that. You read it. I got confidence.”

For a supposed illiterate, a man whose
deses
and
doses
seemed to scream Brooklyn, it was a hell of a eulogy. Written in a neat hand that probably had not changed since seventh grade, it was clean, clear and grammatical. And organized. I could have used it as a model term paper at Brooklyn College. It began with a topic sentence meant to catch attention—“Goldie Cats was not a great woman but a good woman, who raised her children with love and was kind to everyone she liked and hell on wheels to those she didn’t”—and then proceeded into biography. Born in Eastern Poland, Cats
mère
had come to New York as a young girl, worked in a sweat shop, and lived most of her American years in the same railroad flat in Brownsville, tub in the kitchen, little heat or hot water, and after her husband’s passing had been forced to take in piecework from the garment district to support the children she taught to respect their elders, work hard and be good to each other. Her daughter had grown up to be a professional, her son a businessman. That’s what it said, businessman. She was semi-literate in English, her ability to write minimal, but she had a good command of her native tongue, and kept diaries in flawless Yiddish on the back of bills and wrapping paper. More than once she was called in to confront her son’s exasperated teachers; always she defended him. It was not that either child could do no wrong, but that when it came to the outside world she would defend her children to the end. She lived by a code, and this extended to giving. No matter how little she earned she always set a portion aside for charity. A blue-and-white tin
pushka
from the Jewish National Fund always hung on a nail in the kitchen—every month or so someone came around the neighborhood to collect pennies and nickels from the Jewish hovels. She taught her children right from wrong, how to welcome guests, and never to take an insult. “When someone hits you, hit him back ten times,” she would say. “Pound him into the earth. The Nazis never disappeared—they’re all around us. Nobody loves the Jews because we didn’t accept that a simple rabbi from Galilee is God.” She tried to send her son to Hebrew school in the afternoons, but he was too busy with American things like basketball and, later, “business.” He did not graduate from high school, but her daughter earned a BA
magna cum laude
in psychology from Hunter College, then the city’s institution for women, an MA from Columbia in social work, then a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She now “helped people help themselves” as a therapist in private practice on the Upper East Side. Both her children took care of Goldie, supporting her financially as soon as they could, and always making sure to visit at least once a week. They begged her to move to a more comfortable dwelling, but she preferred to live modestly, to the end of her life in the same cold-water flat. “Goldie Cats was a good woman all her days,” I read from the neatly handwritten pages. “She did not set out to be great, to have university degrees or fame or riches. She became great by being good to those who deserved it, defending those she loved from anyone who would threaten them. She was the shining light of pure goodness, and her greatness was in one simple and indisputable fact. She did not know it.”

Getting an audience to start bawling is no great accomplishment at a funeral service, but here even the rabbi and the mortician lost it. An Hispanic looking man standing to Shushan’s left began sobbing so heavily the lapels of his light gray suit began to turn as black as his shirt—I watched as he kissed Shushan on the cheek, his tears transferring to the bereaved son. Beyond the few family members and the crowd from the Bhotke Society I could see the Italians wiping their eyes with their white breast-pocket handkerchiefs, and the black hoodlums as well letting tears fall on their black silk suits. Most of the Chinese remained poker faced, possibly because they were as little acquainted with English oratory as its deceased subject—though two younger men in long overcoats turned away so as not to weep publicly.