Jerome Charyn - Bronx Noir

Mr. Schmidt was our new super. German. My daddy said all supers in the Bronx were Krauts. I hoped they weren’t all the same kind of Kraut Mr. Schmidt was, with a voice that crunched like broken glass. Mr. Schmidt scared the hell out of me. Maybe it was how big he was, fat, with fists like Sunday hams. Or the way he was always chewing, jaws going from side to side like that hippopotamus at the Bronx Zoo. Or maybe it was his daughter Trudy, the only other not-Jewish kid in my fourth-grade class at P.S. 86. She gave the nastiest Indian burn of any kid on Sedgwick, Trudy did, then batted blue eyes like an angel at the poor kid’s parents. Even Lennie Foreman walked the other side of the street when Trudy Schmidt was on the sidewalk. But not me. Not even then. If anyone even tried it I would’ve bent their little pinkie back till it snapped. Nobody messed with me — not even Trudy Schmidt — not after my daddy taught me the cop moves. Did I say he was a cop? Well he is, and a good one.

“Vot you doing, girlie?” I never knew anyone before who shaved his whole head, but Mr. Schmidt did, and the red stubble made it look like it was coated with corroded rust. Corroded . I like that. It’s a good word. Corroded .

“Just around Mrs. Blaustein a coconut cake.” The super had eyes on the cake box, but I slipped past him without another word. My mother said you had to watch out when he came around — things would go missing. Cookies or muffins. The week before, when he was working on the pipes in our kitchen, a pork chop disappeared. A pork chop! Cooked ! And her with five mouths to feed. So I held the cake box tight to my chest and got past Mr. Schmidt safe, and this was the first time I was ever in 4-C. Mrs. Blaustein came rushing to the door, all out of breath, said to wait a minute and she’d get me a dime for a tip (a whole dime!), but she had to go talk to someone first. Then she went out of the apartment, fast. So I nosed around. It was a big place, two bedrooms. Nothing like our one-bedroom apartment with five people sleeping in shifts night and day. This living room was… classy. Pictures on the walls — actual paintings. A piano in one corner. Glass doors with sheer curtains leading into yet another room. Through the half-open door I could see into this second room — shelves and shelves of books, like a library. They were a magnet to me, those books. I couldn’t help myself.

At first I thought the gloomy room was empty. The drapes were closed, except for one little slit in the middle, and dust danced in the narrow light. Narrow light. Maybe I read that somewhere: narrow light. I tiptoed over to the nearest shelf. Mrs. Blaustein wouldn’t mind if I looked at just one book…

“Iss he gone yet?” It was a woman’s quivery voice.

I dropped the book and screamed.

A gasp came from right behind me, and a small woman hunched in a wheelchair spun around. “ Mein Gott . I thought you vere Hilda.” Her accent was sort of like the Jewish mommas who schlepped their folding chairs in front of the building on sunny mornings and talked and talked and talked. Something like the mommas — but different. More like music. “Vere’d you come from, child?”

“From the baker.” This must be the crazy lady. She was scary, all right, one eye pulled down, a huge red puckered scar from her forehead to her chin, one shoulder higher than the other. Her eyes were open really, really wide, even the droopy one. Her head was shaking on her neck. I wanted to get out of there — bad. But I wasn’t leaving without my money. Where the hell was Mrs. Blaustein? “I’m the cake girl.”

“‘The cake girl’?” She laughed — and for a minute the air in the room got… not so heavy. At least I think it was a laugh, a wheeze and a dry chuckle in her throat, and her head stopped shaking. “The cake girl. Oh, it vould be a pity to vaste that.” She picked up a little notebook on her lap and scribbled in it with a gold pencil. Her hands were thin and very white. They looked more like they belonged to some younger woman than that horrible scarred face. “Now,” she said, “I vill write a poem about the cake girl.”

“A poem?”

“Yes. And someday vhen you’re in college maybe you vill read it and think of me.”

“College?” Me?

“That vas vun thing they couldn’t take away from me — my poetry. Do you like them?”

“Like what?”

“Poems?”

“Dunno,” I said. “They’re okay, I guess. By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water, / Stood the wigwam of—”

“No. No. No,” she said. “Not that drivel. That book you just dropped on the floor? Pick it up, girl, open it and read me a real poem.” She had wheeled her chair to the window, and now she pulled the drapery cord. Light came streaming in, and I could see to read.

I could also see Mrs. Blaustein standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. I cringed, expecting her to yell. But she was looking at the wheelchair lady. “Rachel, I think you might be right.” I never heard her sound so quiet.

“Iss he gone?” The wheelchair lady’s voice was quivery again.

“For now. Just off the boat last year from Bremerhaven, Esther Meyer says.”

The head started shaking again, like this toy I used to have where you turned a key and the tin Chinaman nodded and nodded and nodded. It was like the springs in her neck were broken.

Mrs. Blaustein’s lips got white and thin. She turned to me. “Girlie, do like Miss Cohen says. Read a poem from the book.”

So I opened the book and read. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—/ The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—” I looked up… Pain?… Tombs? But the sound of the words seemed to calm her — Miss Cohen — so I kept reading “…This is the Hour of Lead—/ Remembered, if outlived, / As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—/ First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go—”

I was still there when Miss Cohen’s visitor came. The one I got the cake for, I guess. Not many men in suits around our neighborhood. Father O’Mally. Claire Heidenreich’s father. Insurance collectors. Fuller Brush men. But none of them wore suits like this one. It fit him like he was born in gray wool. No knee wrinkles or ass sags. Just shoulders and shirt cuffs, pleats at the belt and a sharp crease down the pant legs. I was old enough to know better, but I gaped at this handsome stranger like a two-year-old until Mrs. Blaustein pressed the dime into my hand. “Here’s your money, girlie. Go on home now. Miss Cohen has to talk to her publisher.”

“You know the crazy old lady in 4-C?” I said at supper that night. “She’s a famous poet. A publisher came to see her today. What’s a publisher?”

“She’s not crazy and she’s not old,” my father said. “It’s just that they experimented on her in the camps.” He took the bowl of boiled potatoes, ladled out three, spread them with margarine.

“They? Experimented?” The meatloaf looked good. Tomato soup on top and slices of bacon.

“What’re you now, ten, right?” He took two slices of meatloaf and reached for the ketchup bottle.

“Mike!” my mother said. “She doesn’t need to know about such evil—”

“She’s a tough kid. She can handle it.” He gave me a straight look. “You’ve heard of the camps, right?” He poured himself more beer from the Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle.

“You mean, like in the Catskills, where Jessica goes?” “Jeez — what’da they teach you in that school? The concentration camps, I mean. Auschwitz. Dachau.”

He told me, but I didn’t want to believe it. “They really did those things?” That’s how dumb I was.

“Yeah, and worse.” He spooned canned peas next to the potatoes. “That’s what we fought for in the war, to beat those Nazi bastards. If they won, who’da been next? First the Jews and the Polacks and the qu—”