Crossing the Street
There was a day about four months after Harry's death when my grandfather Ben--Zadie to me--saw a boy who looked from the back exactly like his dead child. It was crowded where he walked along Roosevelt Road, with cars moving slowly in both directions, vendors lining the walkways. Stores extended out to the sidewalks, their pots and pans and chickens suspended on hooks, apples, lemons and lettuces in bins, socks and underpants still in the box. But it seemed the same beige jacket that Harry had worn for so many years, bought Zadie imagined off the same racks at Mandel Brothers. It looked like the same hair as his son, pale as hay, curling out at the ears. Even a little longer on the left side just like Harry's because of that nearsighted barber my grandma Ida (my Bubbie) took him to. And outside his jacket the boy was wearing what seemed like the same flimsy holsters weighted down low along his hips by two toy six-guns. The boy was ready for a showdown, though not quite ready at the moment my Zadie saw him. Just then he was staring down at his feet, balancing himself at the edge of the sidewalk as he dipped one foot up and down into the sludge of the gutter, his shoe dark with grime from the pool of winter snow below him in the street.
Zadie's own Harry had abandoned his gun belt maybe four years before the accident when his devotion to Hopalong Cassidy gave way to an even more devout imitation of a slightly pot-bellied Al Capone, and he took off the holsters and began to tuck one of the guns inside his front belt. By the time he was shot, Harry was done with that story too, and was instead a roundheaded reader, such a large almost perfectly round head he had that you thought he would one day have to have a neck like a bull and stand over six foot tall to grow into it. Like this boy. And you thought watching him, as Zadie thought now across the street, staring while people bumped against him on all sides, that a head like that would topple off the boy’s neck if he bent too far to one side.
At eleven, last year, all Harry would do was read, and talk. Mom told me that: how her little brother would talk your ear off making sure you knew all he learned from the front page of the Chicago Daily News or the stories in the Saturday Evening Post. How almost every afternoon on the way home from school Harry would stop at the library at Cermak and Green, take off his cap and smile to the two women librarians. Each day as he came in the librarians would smile, glance at the clock and then back to each other with the tiniest knowing nod at his regularity. He would go sit himself down at the table nearest the corner with the light coming in from the high windows and take up a magazine, a book, a Chicago paper or one from Indiana, New York, Atlanta. Whatever caught his eye. He would read till the windows grew dark, the lights came on in the center of the tables and he looked up and realized that he would be late again for dinner. He worried about worrying other people. As he banged hard on the wooden steps and rushed into the front hall of the tiny apartment, his coat already half off, he was probably lucky to have his head so full of facts, events, anecdotes—the assembly of others' lives—because they insulated him from my Bubbie's complaints. Her chicken was falling off the bone already from him, she might say, or the liver had turned hard as shoe leather he was so late, or the once steaming soup was now cold on the table at his place from waiting. Or she would sit and stare and say nothing for a moment, until she muttered under her breath in a Yiddish just loud enough for him to hear how he worried her sick all the time, didn't he think ever about other people? And to make sure he washed the newsprint from off his hands before he sat down. Her despair her way to welcome him. And it was a blessing then at the meal, my Zadie worn from his time stitching shoes all day, his eyes gazing painfully through his thick glasses, my mother and my Uncle Abe both taciturn from waiting each night for Harry's return; it was a blessing then to have Harry's flood of library stories, his avalanche of memory, to sit like a centerpiece and distract them all through the overcooked peas, wilted cabbage and never quite mashed potatoes.
It didn't take long for my Zadie, still standing there across the street, arrested by his vision of his dead son, to decide, reluctantly, despite his eyes, that this boy was not his Harry but a little boy, his Harry three maybe four years ago now. But our family, we never give up on the dead but carry them to our own graves and find their faces everywhere along the way. My mother who hated her mother by the time Bubbie died saw her whenever she got near some group of yentas walking down Devon Avenue. I will follow men with long black hair for blocks sometimes still a year after my friend Art died, looking at their thick heads of hair for some hint of that distinct bald spot at the crown that grew so prominent in his last days from all the chemotherapy.
But mom and me, we just look, content with the shadows, the web of loss. We'll admit to ourselves that we’re seeing ghosts, quickly realize how the kids or the wife will laugh when they hear us talk about another sighting like we're standing watch for whales. Zadie would never just watch. The people who owned the small shops near his shoe store knew him and would smile sometimes when they'd see him approaching another stranger. “Looking for his son again,” they'd say; or, “She must be like his mother in Russia,” they'd tell each other. He would sometimes bring them to the store, these strangers, take them in the back for some tea, talk to them until he could separate himself from who he wished they were. It didn't happen so often to bother my Bubbie, or bother her too much, and my mother says sometimes the people would come back bringing their boots or shoes for a new sole here, a pair of laces there.
So it is not surprising that Zadie could stand where he was only so long with the people shouldering by him and turning a little to see why he'd stop in the middle of the sidewalk like a stalled car. Perhaps some of these folks going where their lives led them even followed his gaze across the street, tracing the line of his attention. Though I doubt if they could pick out this particular boy amid the crowd, the one with his hand now in a woman's as he started shuffling along the edge of the curb, resisting the woman's pull forward to keep his shoe skimming the surface of the sludge. Maybe my Zadie would have stared longer before he moved but he saw them, mother and child, angling away. Zadie's eyes would never waver from a face. They never wavered from my face I know as I talked to him about some little house I had drawn or the tunnel I was making with pillows on the rug or asked him to read me something from the newspaper he always seemed to have sitting beside him on the couch. I can picture him staring like a flashlight as he traveled quietly across the street, barely glancing at the cars to make sure he was safe, more concerned not to release the boy from his attention. Perhaps it was the hands he took in most--the woman's over the boy's, pulling the boy along now, gently, down the street, her shopping bag a little fuller and certainly a little heavier as they left the fruit stand with whatever it was—a grapefruit, maybe a pear or two—and barely paused at the neighboring stalls.
As it turned out, he did not take the boy or the woman to the shoe store. The boy—a David—was just a boy, not his boy. He was six, he smiled a lot, was a little slow sometimes getting jokes, never missed a chance to eat a pickle. He liked it when Zadie would tuck him into bed and tell him stories. He liked how Zadie would sometimes suddenly roll his eyes behind the glasses that magnified the whites till they seemed to bulge, ready to explode. He liked how his mother laughed at dinner more, started making brisket once a week, and let him listen to the radio later into the night without noticing. And over the next months he learned he could stare out the small window of his bedroom for long stretches of an afternoon while his mother and the strange man they met on the street talked in a low croon together behind the door of the next room. He eventually forgot the months when Zadie came to live in the apartment, forgot Zadie’s glasses and stories, forgot the new dresses his mother made that year for herself. Another man replaced Zadie in his life, stayed longer, but also disappeared in turn. And by then it was David’s job to support himself, help his mother, take her to movies or the occasional baseball game she so loved.
Polite as Zadie was, soft as his voice was, warm as that smile was that I remember still from when I was small, the woman must have turned, startled, when he put himself in front of her, interrupted her shopping, her morning, her life. She stepped back for a moment, I imagine, especially as he moved one hand out, politely still of course, to touch the sleeve of her coat to stop her, however temporarily, so he could look straight at the boy, could again convince his aching chest that this was not Harry, not his Harry. For until that moment, looking from the dark eyes of the surprised woman to the boy, Zadie must have held on to some hope of Harry's return. The woman stood still, balanced between fear before an unnamable danger and anger at this intrusion that made her yank her arm free of Zadie’s touch, easy as that was since Zadie's fingers hardly blemished the wool of her sleeve let alone aimed to keep hold of it.
Zadie couldn't talk for just that time it took him to see that the boy’s red cheeks were too round, the fingers a little short and wide, the eyes not as bright as his Harry. Just the time it took him to relinquish his hope and descend from his imaginings back to the noisy, crowded street, to the brusque shoulders brushing by his, to the face of a woman and child he didn't know. The ears, though, the ears—and he reached out his left arm to touch the child just above the ear and brush the hair from across the top of it, even as the woman intercepted his efforts, deflected his hand and pushed by him with a stare that was surely meant to register rage but hung between them unsteadily, a mix of shock and worry, while she struggled awkwardly to drag the boy away with her. The boy looked at Zadie for the first time, really, since for the first time he realized that this man mattered--mattered enough for his mother to not want him near. And so David became interested, pulled back from his mother's urging, dropped that still dangling leg of his deep inside the pool of snow and water in the gutter, and kicked up sludge at my Zadie's pants. Then, his balance gone in the aftermath of his attack, David slid suddenly along his other foot until he hit the pavement hard, his guns making a clatter preliminary to the cry that came after the shock of his landing.
It was my mother who told me how after the shooting Zadie and Bubbie said almost nothing to each other, in the kitchen or the dining room, morning to night. They were silent too in their bedroom, under the covers, turned away from each other, their backs rubbing stiffly one against the other in their tiny bed. And silent in the store, where they would serve customers as if nothing had happened, serve even the curious who came in because they'd heard about the shoe store where the little boy (my Uncle Abe) shot his younger brother when they were playing with the pistol their father kept under the cash register. Kept hidden and ready because Zadie had always been afraid of theft, there had been so much of it in his little village in the Ukraine. My mother told me about Zadie’s walks, how he would get so restless in that store, hour after hour. He would not stop work for lunch but instead, sometime after three, would just look up from whatever he was doing to the street outside the window, move to the clothes hook, pick up his hat, and depart, not saying anything to anyone. Bubbie would not even glance at the door when the bell on the top rang. She’d call my Uncle Abe from the back room where he would help after school with the gluing and cleaning to come up front to watch for customers, never pausing in her own work. Zadie didn't wear a winter coat those days, just the dark black suit with the suspenders I remember him in years later and the white shirt and the black bow tie, and his hat, slung low over his eyes, as if he were walking into an eternal snowstorm.
Zadie was wearing the hat that day too, when he turned his attention to the woman in the tumult of the child crying unhappily on the pavement. She abandoned the mesh bag of food as she tried at once to comfort the boy and hasten his movements, urge him up rapidly so they could escape this man who she looked at now with even more fear for upsetting her afternoon. It was then, I think, that she first saw Zadie’s eyes, with their look of greed and emptiness. Her body froze, kneeling beside the boy. Zadie apologized then, explained then. She must have offered some sort of smile then too, or at least a nod. I imagine her lowering her eyes, while Zadie bent to pick up the lettuce and fruit now soiled from the sidewalk. He offered a hand to help her up, offered it again to the child with a few kind words and a glance at the child’s leather shoe now soaked through with the cold slush of the late afternoon. He asked if he might buy her a tea and the boy some hot chocolate, there was a little restaurant where they could sit just at the corner and the boy could have a cookie perhaps and might he carry her bundles. She moved her chin only slightly in agreement or acquiescence as Zadie softly took up her bags while she grasped David’s hand tightly in hers to insure herself that her son was safe. Zadie looked down at the boy now looking up at both his mother and this man, and led them two or three stores down the street to the little restaurant run by the old man and his sister Tamara. The restaurant known for the painted china that came from St. Petersburg. And for Tamara, who never got out of her slippers all day, shuffled along on them with their flattened heels and her worn brown stockings with the tiny holes delivering teas, sandwiches and cookies among the tables, never lifting her feet off the ground, the soles making a kind of whooshing noise like someone whispering for quiet.
The three of them went back to that little restaurant often in the next weeks, met there in fact most days as Zadie began to come down that way each afternoon, his wandering at a halt, a destination in hand for the first time in months. She was a widow, her husband gone from some freak accident in the tanning factory over on Wabash. She did sewing at home, like my Bubbie, but a little more practiced, more fine work, for more money, though still barely enough to pay for her little apartment.
Even when he moved in a few months later, a key in his pocket, Zadie always called it her apartment, always thought of himself as just visiting for a time, while the time grew from afternoons to nights, from days to months. My Bubbie never met her that I know, never would talk about her, and only reminded my Zadie of his days with her by silence and the long blunted looks that passed for intimacy in my memory of holiday dinners each Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, Chanukah and Passover before Zadie died.
I didn't know about her until I left my own wife and children in my mid-forties for a woman I didn't mention to my mother but she was warning me against anyway. It was when I was driving her downtown along the Eisenhower Expressway. She talked about how when she was fourteen she'd been sent to live for more than a year at her Aunt Sarah's and how I must not, ever, let anything like that happen to her grandchildren no matter what. Zadie and Bubbie were both dead by then, he long since buried after the operation for ulcers that turned into an infection that burned through his insides, and she only in the grave a few months after her years of widowhood suffering through arthritis and diabetes with only the conviction of fated misery to console her. My mother said nothing of a David, little of the woman. She told me only that Zadie left Bubbie, moved in with another woman he met she didn’t know how. And how in her grief Bubbie, beside herself, cursing the man and the world that made him and killed her child, sent her other children away, one to each sister—my mother to Aunt Sarah, Uncle Abe to Aunt Sophie. She and Abe saw nothing of Zadie that year, little more of Bubbie. So my mother never met the woman, never saw if there was a David. I know the woman—some woman—existed, know that David must have too, know that something like this happened sometime that year, in those quiet days, weeks, and months that came after the shooting.
He came back, my Zadie, my mother never knew why or how. He never said a word to her about his time away. He hugged my mother when he came to get her and her suitcase from Aunt Sarah's, thanked my great-aunt and hugged her too, helped my mother into the cab he had hired, held her hand all the way home, where Bubbie waited with her overcooked chicken and lumpy potatoes already on the table and Uncle Abe, disconsolate, already in his chair. Dinners were more quiet than ever after that, the whole of the week was quiet after that. My mother told me how rarely Zadie, never much of a talker, spoke now, even as Bubbie grew more restless year after year. The radio, when they could afford to buy one, must have been a blessing.
Zadie would still take long walks but at night now, after dinner, until maybe nine when my mother would hear the door open and he would come in, hang up his suit jacket, smile quietly and settle into the corner of the sofa under the lamp to read the paper until long after everyone else was in bed. I remember him in the same corner of that same sofa years later when it was my turn on his weary knee, or as he watched me play marbles on the rug at holidays, or when he would put the paper over his face while the adult talk went on around him on the Friday nights we were there for dinner. My mother adored him all her life. But it was Bubbie she would see as she walked from one store to the next in her neighborhood, while I commune with Zadie, sitting still in that corner of the sofa, the light above his head, his slight mustache barely shading his upper lip, his smile wary, his eyes tired, so tired, anxious to help and ready for sleep.
That my father was a quiet man, that he was undemonstrative, that he was the one we always counted on and he was always there, that he never walked away into the dark, that he kept himself from strangers with a formal shyness, this of course comes as no surprise.
There was a day about four months after Harry's death when my grandfather Ben--Zadie to me--saw a boy who looked from the back exactly like his dead child. It was crowded where he walked along Roosevelt Road, with cars moving slowly in both directions, vendors lining the walkways. Stores extended out to the sidewalks, their pots and pans and chickens suspended on hooks, apples, lemons and lettuces in bins, socks and underpants still in the box. But it seemed the same beige jacket that Harry had worn for so many years, bought Zadie imagined off the same racks at Mandel Brothers. It looked like the same hair as his son, pale as hay, curling out at the ears. Even a little longer on the left side just like Harry's because of that nearsighted barber my grandma Ida (my Bubbie) took him to. And outside his jacket the boy was wearing what seemed like the same flimsy holsters weighted down low along his hips by two toy six-guns. The boy was ready for a showdown, though not quite ready at the moment my Zadie saw him. Just then he was staring down at his feet, balancing himself at the edge of the sidewalk as he dipped one foot up and down into the sludge of the gutter, his shoe dark with grime from the pool of winter snow below him in the street.
Zadie's own Harry had abandoned his gun belt maybe four years before the accident when his devotion to Hopalong Cassidy gave way to an even more devout imitation of a slightly pot-bellied Al Capone, and he took off the holsters and began to tuck one of the guns inside his front belt. By the time he was shot, Harry was done with that story too, and was instead a roundheaded reader, such a large almost perfectly round head he had that you thought he would one day have to have a neck like a bull and stand over six foot tall to grow into it. Like this boy. And you thought watching him, as Zadie thought now across the street, staring while people bumped against him on all sides, that a head like that would topple off the boy’s neck if he bent too far to one side.
At eleven, last year, all Harry would do was read, and talk. Mom told me that: how her little brother would talk your ear off making sure you knew all he learned from the front page of the Chicago Daily News or the stories in the Saturday Evening Post. How almost every afternoon on the way home from school Harry would stop at the library at Cermak and Green, take off his cap and smile to the two women librarians. Each day as he came in the librarians would smile, glance at the clock and then back to each other with the tiniest knowing nod at his regularity. He would go sit himself down at the table nearest the corner with the light coming in from the high windows and take up a magazine, a book, a Chicago paper or one from Indiana, New York, Atlanta. Whatever caught his eye. He would read till the windows grew dark, the lights came on in the center of the tables and he looked up and realized that he would be late again for dinner. He worried about worrying other people. As he banged hard on the wooden steps and rushed into the front hall of the tiny apartment, his coat already half off, he was probably lucky to have his head so full of facts, events, anecdotes—the assembly of others' lives—because they insulated him from my Bubbie's complaints. Her chicken was falling off the bone already from him, she might say, or the liver had turned hard as shoe leather he was so late, or the once steaming soup was now cold on the table at his place from waiting. Or she would sit and stare and say nothing for a moment, until she muttered under her breath in a Yiddish just loud enough for him to hear how he worried her sick all the time, didn't he think ever about other people? And to make sure he washed the newsprint from off his hands before he sat down. Her despair her way to welcome him. And it was a blessing then at the meal, my Zadie worn from his time stitching shoes all day, his eyes gazing painfully through his thick glasses, my mother and my Uncle Abe both taciturn from waiting each night for Harry's return; it was a blessing then to have Harry's flood of library stories, his avalanche of memory, to sit like a centerpiece and distract them all through the overcooked peas, wilted cabbage and never quite mashed potatoes.
It didn't take long for my Zadie, still standing there across the street, arrested by his vision of his dead son, to decide, reluctantly, despite his eyes, that this boy was not his Harry but a little boy, his Harry three maybe four years ago now. But our family, we never give up on the dead but carry them to our own graves and find their faces everywhere along the way. My mother who hated her mother by the time Bubbie died saw her whenever she got near some group of yentas walking down Devon Avenue. I will follow men with long black hair for blocks sometimes still a year after my friend Art died, looking at their thick heads of hair for some hint of that distinct bald spot at the crown that grew so prominent in his last days from all the chemotherapy.
But mom and me, we just look, content with the shadows, the web of loss. We'll admit to ourselves that we’re seeing ghosts, quickly realize how the kids or the wife will laugh when they hear us talk about another sighting like we're standing watch for whales. Zadie would never just watch. The people who owned the small shops near his shoe store knew him and would smile sometimes when they'd see him approaching another stranger. “Looking for his son again,” they'd say; or, “She must be like his mother in Russia,” they'd tell each other. He would sometimes bring them to the store, these strangers, take them in the back for some tea, talk to them until he could separate himself from who he wished they were. It didn't happen so often to bother my Bubbie, or bother her too much, and my mother says sometimes the people would come back bringing their boots or shoes for a new sole here, a pair of laces there.
So it is not surprising that Zadie could stand where he was only so long with the people shouldering by him and turning a little to see why he'd stop in the middle of the sidewalk like a stalled car. Perhaps some of these folks going where their lives led them even followed his gaze across the street, tracing the line of his attention. Though I doubt if they could pick out this particular boy amid the crowd, the one with his hand now in a woman's as he started shuffling along the edge of the curb, resisting the woman's pull forward to keep his shoe skimming the surface of the sludge. Maybe my Zadie would have stared longer before he moved but he saw them, mother and child, angling away. Zadie's eyes would never waver from a face. They never wavered from my face I know as I talked to him about some little house I had drawn or the tunnel I was making with pillows on the rug or asked him to read me something from the newspaper he always seemed to have sitting beside him on the couch. I can picture him staring like a flashlight as he traveled quietly across the street, barely glancing at the cars to make sure he was safe, more concerned not to release the boy from his attention. Perhaps it was the hands he took in most--the woman's over the boy's, pulling the boy along now, gently, down the street, her shopping bag a little fuller and certainly a little heavier as they left the fruit stand with whatever it was—a grapefruit, maybe a pear or two—and barely paused at the neighboring stalls.
As it turned out, he did not take the boy or the woman to the shoe store. The boy—a David—was just a boy, not his boy. He was six, he smiled a lot, was a little slow sometimes getting jokes, never missed a chance to eat a pickle. He liked it when Zadie would tuck him into bed and tell him stories. He liked how Zadie would sometimes suddenly roll his eyes behind the glasses that magnified the whites till they seemed to bulge, ready to explode. He liked how his mother laughed at dinner more, started making brisket once a week, and let him listen to the radio later into the night without noticing. And over the next months he learned he could stare out the small window of his bedroom for long stretches of an afternoon while his mother and the strange man they met on the street talked in a low croon together behind the door of the next room. He eventually forgot the months when Zadie came to live in the apartment, forgot Zadie’s glasses and stories, forgot the new dresses his mother made that year for herself. Another man replaced Zadie in his life, stayed longer, but also disappeared in turn. And by then it was David’s job to support himself, help his mother, take her to movies or the occasional baseball game she so loved.
Polite as Zadie was, soft as his voice was, warm as that smile was that I remember still from when I was small, the woman must have turned, startled, when he put himself in front of her, interrupted her shopping, her morning, her life. She stepped back for a moment, I imagine, especially as he moved one hand out, politely still of course, to touch the sleeve of her coat to stop her, however temporarily, so he could look straight at the boy, could again convince his aching chest that this was not Harry, not his Harry. For until that moment, looking from the dark eyes of the surprised woman to the boy, Zadie must have held on to some hope of Harry's return. The woman stood still, balanced between fear before an unnamable danger and anger at this intrusion that made her yank her arm free of Zadie’s touch, easy as that was since Zadie's fingers hardly blemished the wool of her sleeve let alone aimed to keep hold of it.
Zadie couldn't talk for just that time it took him to see that the boy’s red cheeks were too round, the fingers a little short and wide, the eyes not as bright as his Harry. Just the time it took him to relinquish his hope and descend from his imaginings back to the noisy, crowded street, to the brusque shoulders brushing by his, to the face of a woman and child he didn't know. The ears, though, the ears—and he reached out his left arm to touch the child just above the ear and brush the hair from across the top of it, even as the woman intercepted his efforts, deflected his hand and pushed by him with a stare that was surely meant to register rage but hung between them unsteadily, a mix of shock and worry, while she struggled awkwardly to drag the boy away with her. The boy looked at Zadie for the first time, really, since for the first time he realized that this man mattered--mattered enough for his mother to not want him near. And so David became interested, pulled back from his mother's urging, dropped that still dangling leg of his deep inside the pool of snow and water in the gutter, and kicked up sludge at my Zadie's pants. Then, his balance gone in the aftermath of his attack, David slid suddenly along his other foot until he hit the pavement hard, his guns making a clatter preliminary to the cry that came after the shock of his landing.
It was my mother who told me how after the shooting Zadie and Bubbie said almost nothing to each other, in the kitchen or the dining room, morning to night. They were silent too in their bedroom, under the covers, turned away from each other, their backs rubbing stiffly one against the other in their tiny bed. And silent in the store, where they would serve customers as if nothing had happened, serve even the curious who came in because they'd heard about the shoe store where the little boy (my Uncle Abe) shot his younger brother when they were playing with the pistol their father kept under the cash register. Kept hidden and ready because Zadie had always been afraid of theft, there had been so much of it in his little village in the Ukraine. My mother told me about Zadie’s walks, how he would get so restless in that store, hour after hour. He would not stop work for lunch but instead, sometime after three, would just look up from whatever he was doing to the street outside the window, move to the clothes hook, pick up his hat, and depart, not saying anything to anyone. Bubbie would not even glance at the door when the bell on the top rang. She’d call my Uncle Abe from the back room where he would help after school with the gluing and cleaning to come up front to watch for customers, never pausing in her own work. Zadie didn't wear a winter coat those days, just the dark black suit with the suspenders I remember him in years later and the white shirt and the black bow tie, and his hat, slung low over his eyes, as if he were walking into an eternal snowstorm.
Zadie was wearing the hat that day too, when he turned his attention to the woman in the tumult of the child crying unhappily on the pavement. She abandoned the mesh bag of food as she tried at once to comfort the boy and hasten his movements, urge him up rapidly so they could escape this man who she looked at now with even more fear for upsetting her afternoon. It was then, I think, that she first saw Zadie’s eyes, with their look of greed and emptiness. Her body froze, kneeling beside the boy. Zadie apologized then, explained then. She must have offered some sort of smile then too, or at least a nod. I imagine her lowering her eyes, while Zadie bent to pick up the lettuce and fruit now soiled from the sidewalk. He offered a hand to help her up, offered it again to the child with a few kind words and a glance at the child’s leather shoe now soaked through with the cold slush of the late afternoon. He asked if he might buy her a tea and the boy some hot chocolate, there was a little restaurant where they could sit just at the corner and the boy could have a cookie perhaps and might he carry her bundles. She moved her chin only slightly in agreement or acquiescence as Zadie softly took up her bags while she grasped David’s hand tightly in hers to insure herself that her son was safe. Zadie looked down at the boy now looking up at both his mother and this man, and led them two or three stores down the street to the little restaurant run by the old man and his sister Tamara. The restaurant known for the painted china that came from St. Petersburg. And for Tamara, who never got out of her slippers all day, shuffled along on them with their flattened heels and her worn brown stockings with the tiny holes delivering teas, sandwiches and cookies among the tables, never lifting her feet off the ground, the soles making a kind of whooshing noise like someone whispering for quiet.
The three of them went back to that little restaurant often in the next weeks, met there in fact most days as Zadie began to come down that way each afternoon, his wandering at a halt, a destination in hand for the first time in months. She was a widow, her husband gone from some freak accident in the tanning factory over on Wabash. She did sewing at home, like my Bubbie, but a little more practiced, more fine work, for more money, though still barely enough to pay for her little apartment.
Even when he moved in a few months later, a key in his pocket, Zadie always called it her apartment, always thought of himself as just visiting for a time, while the time grew from afternoons to nights, from days to months. My Bubbie never met her that I know, never would talk about her, and only reminded my Zadie of his days with her by silence and the long blunted looks that passed for intimacy in my memory of holiday dinners each Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, Chanukah and Passover before Zadie died.
I didn't know about her until I left my own wife and children in my mid-forties for a woman I didn't mention to my mother but she was warning me against anyway. It was when I was driving her downtown along the Eisenhower Expressway. She talked about how when she was fourteen she'd been sent to live for more than a year at her Aunt Sarah's and how I must not, ever, let anything like that happen to her grandchildren no matter what. Zadie and Bubbie were both dead by then, he long since buried after the operation for ulcers that turned into an infection that burned through his insides, and she only in the grave a few months after her years of widowhood suffering through arthritis and diabetes with only the conviction of fated misery to console her. My mother said nothing of a David, little of the woman. She told me only that Zadie left Bubbie, moved in with another woman he met she didn’t know how. And how in her grief Bubbie, beside herself, cursing the man and the world that made him and killed her child, sent her other children away, one to each sister—my mother to Aunt Sarah, Uncle Abe to Aunt Sophie. She and Abe saw nothing of Zadie that year, little more of Bubbie. So my mother never met the woman, never saw if there was a David. I know the woman—some woman—existed, know that David must have too, know that something like this happened sometime that year, in those quiet days, weeks, and months that came after the shooting.
He came back, my Zadie, my mother never knew why or how. He never said a word to her about his time away. He hugged my mother when he came to get her and her suitcase from Aunt Sarah's, thanked my great-aunt and hugged her too, helped my mother into the cab he had hired, held her hand all the way home, where Bubbie waited with her overcooked chicken and lumpy potatoes already on the table and Uncle Abe, disconsolate, already in his chair. Dinners were more quiet than ever after that, the whole of the week was quiet after that. My mother told me how rarely Zadie, never much of a talker, spoke now, even as Bubbie grew more restless year after year. The radio, when they could afford to buy one, must have been a blessing.
Zadie would still take long walks but at night now, after dinner, until maybe nine when my mother would hear the door open and he would come in, hang up his suit jacket, smile quietly and settle into the corner of the sofa under the lamp to read the paper until long after everyone else was in bed. I remember him in the same corner of that same sofa years later when it was my turn on his weary knee, or as he watched me play marbles on the rug at holidays, or when he would put the paper over his face while the adult talk went on around him on the Friday nights we were there for dinner. My mother adored him all her life. But it was Bubbie she would see as she walked from one store to the next in her neighborhood, while I commune with Zadie, sitting still in that corner of the sofa, the light above his head, his slight mustache barely shading his upper lip, his smile wary, his eyes tired, so tired, anxious to help and ready for sleep.
That my father was a quiet man, that he was undemonstrative, that he was the one we always counted on and he was always there, that he never walked away into the dark, that he kept himself from strangers with a formal shyness, this of course comes as no surprise.