Collected Short Stories: Volume II

  “Very devout.”

  “Yes, when he’s not chasing whores, he is the model of spiritual virtue and godliness.”

  The odd remark caught the carpenter off guard. “Where does a rabbinical student in the Holy Land find prostitutes?”

  “In Jerusalem, there are many Jewish refugees recently emigrated from Russia. The women arrive with no money… can’t speak the language or find meaningful work. The more desperate women sell themselves for a few liras.” She ran a second coat of paint over the wood to touch up the bare spots. “A handful of these downtrodden Russians also find their way to America.”

  Mark had to get back to the sheetrock, but lingered a moment longer. “Does your father know about his son’s shenanigans?”

  Miriam squatted down on her haunches, took a wooden stirrer and mixed paint, which had begun separating from the base coat. “About a month ago, my father spoke with a shadchan, a Jewish matchmaker, about finding my brother a suitable match and weaning him away from his perverted pastime.”

  “And?”

  “Saul’s future bride is still a work in progress.” Mark shrugged and went back to work.

  *****

  On the ride home following Miriam’s first full day of work at Fournier Construction, a cell phone with a decidedly minor-keyed melody chimed and Miriam fished about in her pocket “Nu?... Gar nicht. Ich bin fahrtig.” She hung up the phone, glancing at the driver self-consciously. “My mother… she wanted to know if I’d been molested or forced to bow down before graven images.”

  Mark, who was becoming accustomed to the girl’s eccentric mannerisms smirked. “Why do your parents dress like they’re still living in the Middle Ages?” They were a mile from home as the car pulled up at a traffic light.

  “We’re Hasidic Jews. The Eastern European tradition goes back to two hundred years.”

  Which tells me nothing.”

  Miriam stared out the passenger side window for the longest time before replying “According to Hasidic tradition, everyone must have two pockets, so they can reach into the one or the other, according to need.” Mark flipped his directional on as they neared Hathaway Street. “In the right pocket are to be the words: ‘For my sake was the world created,’ and in the left: ‘I am dust and ashes.’”

  The truck pulled up in front of the slate blue house with the shutters. “That makes perfect sense. See you tomorrow, Miriam Applebaum.”

  *****

  Three months passed. Bit by bit, Miriam learned construction. Not that she was anything more than a carpenters helper, rank novice, gofer - go for this, go for that - or fledgling apprentice. Still, she got up every day, and, even when her back ached, hauled her weary carcass off to work.

  At first her father showed no interest one way or the other in his daughter’s aberration. To his way of thinking, that’s all it was – a fleeting mental derangement. The Goyim weren’t necessarily bad or misguided; they just did things differently. Religious Jews led perfectly sensible lives. Nice Jewish girls didn’t pound nails. They didn’t work in blue collar trades, building homes for people who worshiped several gods at once and had spent the last two thousand years tormenting God’s Chosen People.

  But by the third week of the second month, Morris Applebaum had seen enough. “Meshugenah! What is this craziness?”

  Miriam had just returned from work. She unbuckled her leather carpenter’s tool belt and let it fall on the floor next to the bed. “We finished the senior center today,” she said ignoring his belittling tone. “Tomorrow we’re renovating that mill complex over by the YMCA. High-end luxury condos—that’s what the developer wants.”

  “And this is a job for a nice Jewish girl?” Rolling his eyes, Morris Applebaum began pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind his back. “Nothing good can come of it.”

  Miriam momentarily drifted into the bathroom where she stripped her clothes off down to her underwear. Pulling a bathrobe over her limbs she returned to the bedroom. “Fifteen pounds,” she said. “I lost fifteen pounds since I started this job, and I never felt so healthy in my life.”

  “You know what you are?” The father suddenly wheeled around waving a finger menacingly in the air. “You’re a Babel… an female incarnation of Isaac Babel!”

  “Gotenu! Bite your tongue to say such a thing!” Miriam’s mother was standing in the doorway. The large-bone woman placed a trembling hand over her mouth. “Isaac Babel was no better than a traitor,… a Molotov-cocktail-throwing, self-hating Jew who joined the Cossacks, the very people who persecuted our race. How could you say such a thing?”

  You’re a Babel… a female incarnation of Isaac Babel!

  Miriam understood perfectly well what Morris. Applebaum meant by the outlandish remark. Isaac Babel was a haskelah Jew, an enlightened soul equally comfortable among Bolshevik rabble rousers as mystical Jews. His stature as a great writer only complicated matters. Hero, traitor, lunatic, visionary, political agitator, heretic, prophet – how one understood the anomaly that was Isaac Babel depended as much on one’s personal biases as what side of the bed he woke up on.

  Mr. Applebaum threw both hands up in an attitude of despair and rushed from the room almost knocking his wife down in the bargain. When he was gone, she slumped down on the bed next to her daughter, took Miriam’s hand and kissed it. Then she turned the palm over. “Your beautiful fingers… they’re covered with calluses.”

  “From honest labor.” In the yard adjoining their property, a lawnmower fired up. Miriam retrieved her framing hammer from where she abandoned it in near the closet. “Kenny, the man who does all the fancy work, showed me how to properly set nails.” She raised the shank chest high. “Your arm is just an extension of the tool.” She snapped her wrist and let the head of the hammer fall in a broad sweeping arc, striking an imaginary nail dead center. “I can set a sixteen-penny framing nail in three strokes. No wasted effort. Perhaps it’s not as impressive as studying the Midrash but still it’s an accomplishment of sorts.”

  Miriam’s mother kissed her cheek and sighed. “What we have here,” she waved a hand fitfully in the air, “it’s not enough for you?”

  “I’m going to take my shower now,” Miriam replied evasively.

  Before she reached the doorway, her mother said, “In a fit of anger, your father compares you to Isaac Babel.” The older woman spoke in a confidential tone so the words wouldn’t carry beyond the threshold. “But deep down, in his heart-of-hearts, you’re the ben h’bachoor.”

  “The first-born son,” Miriam translated from the Hebrew. The tacit implication was both flattering and unsettling. The first-born son inherited the father’s fortunes; he honored and preserved his family’s good name. Saul, the religious zealot and sexual glutton, was not up to the task. Wrong man for the job. Miriam was the newly annointed ben ha’bachoor – by default, the Applebaum dynasty’s heir apparent.

  Her father could rage about the house, muttering to himself, arms flailing like a madman, but squirreled away behind the fierce eyes and bushy eyebrows was an inchoate fear - the fear of losing his beloved Miri, the indisputable ben habachoor.

  Mr. Applebaum followed all the precepts of his religion. He recited his prayers, never straying from Hasidic custom. When he crawled out of bed in the morning, the stoop-shouldered man carried the added burden of two thousand years of Jewish tradition on his portly frame. But not one word in the many dozens of frayed books that lined his study ever taught the devout seeker of eternal truths how to love his wayward daughter with moderation.

  “Any news from the Shadchun?

  “Your father met with Mr. Gorelnik on Tuesday and they discussed certain possibilities.”

  “What about a meeting?”

  “Things haven’t progressed that far yet.”

  Miriam lowered her voice. “What Saul does with the Russian girls isn’t right… not for Jew or gentile. Some of those girls are here without work permits or proper visas. If someone abuses them, they have no place to turn.”
>
  “Once your brother is engaged,” her mother replied nervously, “all that ugliness will be in the past.”

  Miriam laughed abruptly making an unfeminine snorting sound through her nose. “Our religion teaches the past has consequences that can come back to haunt you.”

  *****

  On Saturday afternoon, Miriam walked over to Mark’s house, where she found him in the driveway hosing down the truck. “I want my own circular saw.” Over the past few months she had been borrowing a reconditioned Ryobi model that the crew used for odds and ends.

  Mark ran a soapy sponge over the tires and muddy hubcaps. “They got a real nice seven-and-a-quarter inch Rigid over at Home Depot for a little over a hundred with discount if we put it on the company account.” He rinsed the wheels off and carried the bucket of soapy water around to the opposite side of the truck. “That’s worm drive, not traditional.”

  “Worm drive?” Miriam repeated.

  “The motor housing runs parallel with the saw blade and uses gears to increase torque,” Mark explained, “so it’s better suited for the type of heavy-duty construction we do.”

  “How soon could I get it?”

  He came out from behind the truck, tossing what remained of the soap out across the lawn. “Let me clean up and we’ll drive over there right now.”

  At Home Depot they went directly to the tool department. “The handle feels a bit strange.” With the fingers of her right hand wrapped around the grip, Miriam hoisted the tool up in the air and made several passes over an imaginary sheet of half-inch plywood.

  “Once you get use to it, you won’t feel comfortable with anything else.” He grabbed a carbide-tipped, Freud blade off the display rack. “You’ll want a decent blade to compliment the new saw. My treat.”

  After paying for the tools, they drove to Friendlies for coffee and dessert. “My father’s unhappy with my choice of careers.”

  “Can’t imagine he would be.”

  “He called me a modern-day Isaac Babel.”

  Mark stared at her blankly. “A turn-of-the-century, Russian Jew,” she explained the obscure reference, “who ran off and joined the Red cavalry.” “Babel was on familiar terms with rabbis, thieves, Cossacks, religious mystics, anti-Semites and murderers. Being a traditional, goody-two-shoes Jew was never enough.”

  “So, what happened to him?”

  “Under Stalin’s reign of terror, Babel was arrested by the Soviet secret police, tortured and executed.”

  Mark shook his head in disbelief. “A story with a not-so-happy ending.”

  “Yesterday in the late afternoon,” Miriam’s mind scurried off in another direction, “Tom McSweeney was hanging sheet rock in the vestibule.” Tom McSweeney, an immigrant Irishman, was painfully shy. Not much of a talker, he arrived fifteen minutes early to work every morning with a metal lunch box, thermos of hot chocolate and piece of fruit. he was always kind and respectful. The previous week, when the fire-coded wall board that lined the stairwell leading to the second floor arrived, Tom warned Miriam, “Don’t try lifting that stuff alone.” Interrupting his own work, he helped her lugged the absurdly heavy sheets to the where a metal staging had been erected in the stairwell.

  No one on the crew could hang drywall as fast or accurately as Tom. At six-foot-four, the gangly Irishman with the scraggily red beard was constantly in motion, measuring cutting and screwing the gypsum boards in place. Like a whirling dervish, he snapped a line of blue chalk every sixteen inches, hoisted the board in place against the studs, then ran a vertical row of black screws from ceiling to floor leaving an endless row of dimpled impressions in the paneling.

  Tom started the vestibule a little after four and by five-fifteen had the entire room covered with the gypsum board from sub-floor to the scruffy furring strips that crisscrossed the ceiling joists. Letting the electrical cord slither through his fingers, the tall man gently lowered his screw gun to the floor. Removing his dark-frame glasses, he wiped the lenses clean. “Here, let me give you a hand with that.” He grabbed a push broom and began sweeping up the white powder and scattering of blue-black sheet rock screws that littered the perimeter of the room.

  As they were leaving work that day, one of the other carpenters offered Tom a pair of tickets to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. “Thanks but I got choir practice all week.”

  In response to her questioning look, Tom explained, “I sing liturgical music in a church choir. We’re getting ready for our annual concert with full orchestra. Carmina Burana.”

  “Carmina what?”

  “It’s a collection of religious songs dating back to the Middle Ages,” Tom noted. “Pretty intense stuff.”

  Miriam leaned across the table. “If I hadn’t come to work at Fournier Construction, I’d never have met someone like Tom.”

  “He’s married and the wife’s pregnant with their third kid, so don’t get any ideas.”

  Miriam made a face. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  Mark sipped at his coffee. “There’s Tom and there’s foul-mouthed Ralphy, who slaps his diabetic wife around, goes on a bender and drinks up all the grocery money.” Mark shook his head from side to side. “You’re glamorizing a mundane task; it’s just Tom, a journeyman carpenter, working at his chosen trade.” He gulped down the last of the coffee. “I got to get home and make some calls.”

  * * * * *

  The following Saturday afternoon when Miriam returned home from work, she found a police cruiser pulled up in front of the house. She could hear her father bellowing like an ox from fifty feet away. Inside the house a uniformed officer, hands on hips, was glowering at the older man. “Don’t shoot the messenger, Mr. Applebaum.” The officer was clearly in a rotten mood. “I drove over here as a courtesy to you and your family.” Without waiting for a reply, the officer spun around on his heels, lumbered back to his cruiser and drove off.

  Miriam’s mother was hunched over by the stove, her face buried in cupped hands crying noisily. “Okay. Okay,” Mr. Applebaum spoke in an unnaturally furtive, high-pitched tone. “It’s not the end of the world. Now, let me go upstairs and get my checkbook.”

  “What happened?” Miriam asked once her father was out of earshot.

  “Saul was arrested for soliciting a prostitute.”

  “One of the immigrant Russian girls?”

  “Ten times worse!” the mother wailed. “An undercover police officer! They got my baby, the future rabbi, locked up in the pokey.”

  Mr. Applebaum returned. He had changed into a freshly ironed shirt. “I’ll go with you,” Miriam said, draping her tool pouch over a chair. On the short ride to the police station, Mr. Applebaum was unnaturally quiet. An air of resignation, more like catastrophic defeat, had settled over his grim features.

  “It’s not like someone was maimed or murdered,” Miriam spoke softly. “I can think of a hundred things worse than what Saul did.”

  Her father cleared his throat. “Name one.”

  Incest. Sodomy. Pedophilia. Fratricide. Almost immediately, Miriam regretted her last remark.

  “What he did isn’t the problem.” Mr. Applebaum looked straight ahead. “The schlimazel never learns from his mistakes.” Like a blind person groping his way down an unfamiliar street, the older man tripped and faltered over his words. “He doesn’t understand why it’s wrong to do what he does.” The older man’s lips trembled. “It’s the ‘why’, not the act itself, which worries me.”

  At the Brandenberg Police Station, Mr. Applebaum craned his neck to one side, scrunching his shaggy eyebrows together while sniffing the humid air. “Well, your brother’s definitely been here.” The undeniable scent of St. Johns Bay rum with a hint of West Indian lime seemed embedded in every permeable object.

  They discovered Saul waiting docilely in a cramped jail cell. Out of a sense of compassion – or was it sick humor? – the barred door had been left wide open. There he sat with his neatly-trimmed, wispy beard, wire-rimmed glasses and paisley yarmul
ke like a traveler seated on a bench waiting for the next Greyhound bus to pull up to the curb.

  “What happened to your hands?” Miriam asked.

  Saul stared at his bony fingers which were smudged with dark stains. “They fingerprinted me.”

  Miriam could just picture her brother having his fingers rolled over a pad of blue ink. Then the humiliating mug shot. Did he even have the good sense to remove the yarmulke? If the picture appeared in the local press, the entire Jewish community, not just immediate family, would be scandalized!

  A thirty-something blond with a voluptuous figure was sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup thirty feet away. Her top, a low-slung halter trimmed with frilly sequins, was overly tight. She kicked off a pair of patent leather, stiletto heels, which lay to one side on the linoleum floor. The woman was chatting energetically to a uniformed officer. At one point she glanced brazenly over at Miriam’s brother but just as quickly averted her eyes. In her left hand she clutched an official-looking document, most likely the police report identifying Saul Applebaum as the dim-witted ‘John’ who propositioned her earlier in an otherwise uneventful evening.

  “You couldn’t keep your lousy schmeckel in your pants,” Mr. Applebaum, who was staring morosely at the well-endowed under-cover officer, growled. “Now the whole family’s disgraced.”

  Saul cringed and seemed to wilt under the crass indictment. Miriam, who had never heard her father use foul language, felt her brain grow numb. The penultimate insult - now, not only had her brother victimized the Russian immigrant women, but his parents as well. What was it she told to her mother only a week earlier? The past has an uncanny habit of doubling back and biting you squarely on the tuchas. With the vengeance of a deranged pit bull, it rips your tender ass to shreds.

  “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.” Mr. Applebaum’s voice had gotten even softer, almost childlike. Not a good indicator of things to come. He turned to the officer who had brought them into the rear holding area where the prisoners were held. “Now we will pay the bail and go home.”