Collected Short Stories: Volume IV

  Five minutes later the girl, who looked to be in her early thirties, returned and sat down at the kitchen table. “You’re from the hardware store?” Her English was impeccable with barely the hint of an accent. Morty nodded. “Everybody knows Mr. Lefkowitz.”

  Now that Morty had all the broken glass dug from the window, he chipped away at the last few remnants of brittle putty then grabbed a small propane torch. The woman stared at him in disbelief. “It’s to soften the putty.” He ran the flame over the window frame briskly several times then scraped the last few remnants of debris away.

  “What are those little shiny things?”

  Morty held up a tiny, wedge-shaped piece of metal. “They’re called glaziers’ points.” With the flat blade of a screwdriver, he pushed one down into the wood snug against the new glass. “The stays hold the glass in place, while the putty is setting up.” He gestured at the book. “Lituma en los Andes. Is that Death in the Andes?”

  The woman’s forehead furrowed. “You’ve read it?”

  “Only in English translation.” Morty replied. “Llosa is a wonderful writer, but, unfortunately, the book’s a flawed masterpiece.” Now that the window frame was cleaned up, he repositioned the glass, securing the new pane in place with more of the metal glaziers’ points, which he pressed into the soft wood. “Unfortunately, the author tried to stretch what should have been a novella with a thin plot into two hundred pages.”

  The young woman smiled engagingly and crossed her arms over her breasts. “Well, I’ve only finished the first chapter so I couldn’t argue the point even if I disagreed.” With her fleshy shoulders and thick torso, Mrs. Lopez’ granddaughter was far more matronly than Rubenesque, but the girl possessed a modestly pretty face with a flat nose and limpid brown eyes.

  Morty opened the can of glazing compound and rolled a pencil-thin snake between the palms of his hands. Jamming the putty into the upper corner of the window, he ran a triangular bead at a sharp angle the entire length, trimming the excess away with the opposite end of the tool. “You speak good English.”

  “I came from Guatemala as a little girl so English was never a problem.” She stared at him with an amused expression. “Do you usually install the glass?”

  Morty finished shaping the bead around the top of the window and was working on the opposite side. “No, not as a rule.”

  When the job was done, he packed up the tools.

  “I’m finishing my degree in journalism at Brown,” the girl said.

  “Well, then we have something in common. I studied comparative literature there.”

  “But you work in a hardware store?”

  He shrugged. “Things don’t always turn out the way we plan.” He washed his hands in the kitchen sink. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Maria. Maria Escobar.”

  “Morty Goldfarb.”

  Mrs. Lopez, who had come back into the room a few minutes earlier, placed a twenty dollar bill on the table next to the tools. Morty took the bill and placed it back in the old woman’s hand. “No pay today. Free installation.” She handed him back the money, which Morty promptly deposited on the kitchen table.

  “You nice people. Muchos gracias!”

  Maria Escobar accompanied Morty down to the car. “That was very sweet of you.”

  A group of college students sauntered by on their way to class. Morty watched the students until they were almost gone from sight. “Does the name Louisa Morales mean anything to you?” Maria shook her head. “My uncle got himself into a legal bind and I don’t know what to do.” He told her about the lawsuit and his disastrous visit to Garret, Myers and Morales.”

  “What a shame!” She made a face. “Sexual harassment is the hot button issues on campus lately.”

  “Every premenstrual, bra-burning feminist,” Morty noted, “with a chip on her shoulder will want Abe Lefkowitz’ head mounted on a stake.” He blew out his cheeks in frustration. “Even with a good lawyer, I don’t see how my uncle can get a fair deal.”

  It didn’t matter if Abraham Lefkowitz was a leading advocate of women’s rights, a philanthropist, lover of small children, bunny rabbits and baby ducks. Fling enough dung at a guileless individual and something foul was bound to stick. Afterwards, the person could spend the better part of a lifetime trying to undo the damage. “I shouldn’t be burdening you with our problems.” Morty turned the engine over and drove off.

  When Morty got back, his uncle asked, “Did you fix Mrs. Lopez’ window?”

  “Good as new.”

  “She try to pay you?”

  “Twenty dollars. I gave her back the money.”

  “Good boy.” Abe Lefkowitz seldom charged any of the cash-strapped customers full price on anything. When Morty challenged him on his pricing philosophy, he said, “I charge them what I think they can afford.”

  “Then you should inflate the price when some grossermacher buys stuff.”

  “That would be dishonest, and anyway, Mrs. Lopez is devoutly religious… a regular saint.”

  “That so?” Morty scratched an earlobe thoughtfully. “How would you, an orthodox Jew, know about Mrs. Lopez’ religious habits?”

  Abe slit open a cardboard box containing small containers of pumice and rottenstone. “I drive past Our Lady of Guadalupe church every day on the way to work, and more often than not that woman is coming or going from the building.”

  “Is that a fact?” Morty rubbed his chin. “How many Spanish speaking people do you figure you taught English since you started with the literacy program?”

  “Hard to say. A couple hundred or so.”

  “What other church do they attend?”

  “There’s no other church that caters to Hispanics. They all go to Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

  “What about the middle class.”

  His uncle waved his hand impatiently. “The Mass is in their native tongue. They all go there.” He resumed sorting the polishing agents.

  Morty couldn’t get the phantasmagoric image of Louisa Morales out of his brain. The voluptuous, dark-skinned goddess utterly lacking in the milk of human kindness. “We can’t put this off any longer. We have got to talk about the legal papers.”

  “And I agree.” Abe Lefkowitz draped a hairy forearm around his favorite nephew’s shoulder and steered him into the cluttered office. Pushing him down in a chair, the older man rested his buttocks on the edge of the desk. Lifting the phone off the hook, he covered the receiver with a greasy towel. “I’m gonna talk and you’re gonna listen.”

  The previous afternoon, while Morty was trying to match wits with Louisa Morales, Abe Lefkowitz went to the synagogue to pray over his latest misfortune. “I was reciting the Shma Yisrael Adoinoi Eluhainu, Adonoi achod, when suddenly my whole body went numb and I heard a voice.”

  “What sort of voice?” Morty gawked at his uncle uncomprehendingly.

  “God spoke to me… here.” He pointed to his heart. “It was no different than Moses on Mount Sinai.”

  “Moses got the Ten Commandments,” Morty wasn’t buying any of this metaphysical nonsense. “What did you get?”

  “God said not to worry. He would smite my persecutors, shame and humiliate them in the eyes of their own kind.”

  Florence Catelli was suing them for ten thousand dollars plus legal expenses and Abraham Lefkowitz was hearing celestial voices from the cosmic beyond. “God intends to smite your persecutors?” Morty jumped up from the chair and began pacing the tiny office like a wild man. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Morty rubbed his eyes with the spatulated tips of his fingers. There were times—floods, natural disasters, unavoidable human tragedy—when a soul required divine intervention, when nothing else but God’s personal solace could set things right in the universe. Other times you needed a hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners lawyer. “Maybe,” Morty was clutching at straws, “you had a spiritual epiphany, an intimation of divine solace and -”

&nbs
p; “He said no lawyers.”

  “What?”

  “The last thing God said was no lawyers. He would handle Florence Catelli on his own, divine terms.” The man’s features were suffuse with a radiant, ecstatic glow as Abraham Lefkowitz replaced the telephone on the hook and went back out to check on customers.

  The rest of the afternoon flew by in an emotional blur. The day after the ‘miraculous pronouncement’, as Abe described it, Morty visited his mother. “Uncle Abe’s been acting strange.”

  “In what way?”

  Morty told her about the law suit and his clandestine meeting with Louisa Morales.”

  Sarah Goldfarb filled a small pan with water and turned the stove on. The woman had a fetish about tea kettles. She hated them. To this day, Morty still had no idea why his mother wouldn’t use a whistling kettle. “All right, so some lousy, former employee is trying to chisel a few crummy bucks out of my brother. You hire a lawyer. What’s the big deal?”

  “Abe got so upset he sought God’s advice.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And God talked to him.” Morty was watching as the tiny bubbles accumulated at the bottom of the pan near the center then multiplied and mushroomed into a frothy sea. Maybe his mother enjoyed witnessing her water come to a full boil, something you couldn’t do with a closed tea kettle. That made perfect sense. “Since when does God talk to hardware salesmen?”

  Sarah poured the tea, a cup for Morty and one for herself. “Even from when he was a little boy, my brother was very religious.”

  “A religious nut, maybe? A metaphysical oddball prone to delusional excesses?”

  “No, a hundred times no!” his mother blew on her tea and added a splash of milk. “Abe is the most down to earth, levelheaded member of the family.” She pushed the carton of milk across the table toward him “Now, if your meshugena aunt Trudy said she jibber jabbered with God that would be a totally different matter.”

  His mother went to the cupboard and returned with a bag of Oreos. Morty twisted the two halves, separating the chocolaty wafers. “I asked him if God ever spoke to him in such a fashion before and he said this was the first time.”

  His mother sat staring into space for the better part of a minute. “God said He would smite Abe’s persecutors?”

  Morty nodded with a sick expression. “Shame and humiliate them in the eyes of their own kind.”

  “Your uncle is sixty years old,” his mother spoke haltingly, “and devoutly religious. This is a guy who believes in tzidakah, righteousness. You spend a lifetime doing good deeds and keeping your nose clean in the here and now… the rest takes care of itself. It’s a Jewish thing.”

  His mother brushed some crumbs into the palm of her hand. “You always hear about those hellfire and brimstone televangelists. It’s ‘Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!’ until you read in the newspaper that the Reverend Goody-two-shoes has been shtupping his neighbor’s wife for the past year and a half.”

  Morty stared at his mother in disbelief. He had never heard her use such language. But then, the circumstances were unusual, to say the least. “Your uncle never made a fuss over his religious beliefs, so you do it his way or no way.” “Now go home,” the woman ordered, “and figure out how to help your Uncle Abe.”

  In graduate School, Morty spent a semester in an honors class, studying Russian Literature. He wrote his final term paper on one of Tolstoy’s lesser novels, The Resurrection. Later that night as he was lying in bed, a scene—really nothing more than a tiny snippet— from the end of the novel floated back to him. A young boy, no more than four or five, and his older sister are traveling to the family’s summer estate in the Russian province.

  Their horse-drawn carriage is delayed up as a ragged band of prisoners is being lead through the street to an awaiting ship where they will be transported to a prison colony. As the chained and filthy prisoners stumble across the road, the sister flies into a tantrum over the minor inconvenience. The younger brother bursts into inconsolable tears at the sight of people treated worse than animals. Vintage Tolstoy! Just as he felt an overpowering moral affinity towards the younger brother, Louisa Morales reminded Morty of the malicious sister.

  Tzidakah.

  His mother’s words floated back to him in a confused muddle. How could anybody resist the lethal juggernaut that Attorney Morales intended to unleash? She would attack the righteous Jew for days, weeks, months and years on end until Abraham Lefkowitz was consigned to the poor house or gave her unscrupulous client what she wanted.

  While he was waiting to meet with Louisa Morales, a stream of attorneys rushed back and forth to the front desk with reams of paperwork that they needed copied or mailed off to various parties. A middle-aged woman with a pair of bifocals dangling from a beaded chain placed a stack of papers three inches thick on the counter. How many Abe Lefkowitzes were being euthanized, sodomized, castrated and lobotomized in the seemingly innocuous, pile of documents?

  Earlier in the afternoon at the hardware store, Morty helped a customer choose a router. They settled on a Ryobi with a quarter inch chuck and circular depth gauge. The fellow was originally considering an industrial, production grade Makita, but the tool was four times as costly and made no sense for a ’weekend warrior’, a homeowner who only needed the tool for occasional projects.

  Did the legal staff at Garret, Myers and Morales derive the same satisfaction as Morty did with the hardware customer, when they ripped the gizzards out of a hapless defendant? At one point when Morty was telling Louisa Morales about his uncle’s work at the Literacy Center, the woman arched her left wrist over her should and began sawing back and forth with the right hand to mimic a violinist in concert. She reduced twenty years of selfless dedication to little more than maudlin sentiment.

  A week passed. Like a brick phallic symbol, the luxury office suites across the street seemed to grow taller and more intimidating. Mrs. Lopez returned with her granddaughter to buy a gallon of paint and a brush. While the old woman was choosing the color, Maria pulled Morty aside. “I need to talk to you about a couple of things.” She lowered her voice and leaned closer. “I told my grandmother about your uncle’s legal difficulties.”

  At the far end of the aisle, Abe Lefkowitz was loading a can of eggshell white latex paint into the automated mixer. “And?”

  “At first she said, ‘I’ll pray to the Blessed Mother’, but then she came back an hour later and muttered that sometimes it pays to hedge one’s bets.”

  “Your grandmother said that?”

  “Well not exactly in those words.” Maria Escobar told him what the old woman suggested.

  “Yes, that makes perfect sense,” Morty replied. “Two things… you said there was something else you had to tell me.”

  “You were right about Death in the Andes. Llosa’s book was ridiculously long for such a skimpy plot.” She tapped him on the sleeve. “Stop by our apartment after supper,” she whispered, “and we can discuss strategies.”

  As the two women were leaving,, Morty could have sworn that Maria’s grandmother winked and curled her lip in a defiant, toothless grin.

  “What did you charge her for the paint?” Morty asked when they were gone.

  “I think I’ll go to lunch,” his uncle muttered, ignoring the question.

  Around two in the afternoon a skinny teenager wandered into the store. “Can I help you?” Morty asked.

  “No I’m all set.” The youth was holding a can of carburetor spray. His face was marred with stubborn blotches of acne and one of the front teeth on the top was chipped.

  “Car problems?”

  “Yeah, engine won’t turn over.” He shook his head and a mop of greasy brown hair fell down over his eyes.

  “You were in here just a week ago with the same problem.”

  “Yeah, well it’s an older car.” His eyes flitted about the room. “Piece of junk, really.”

  “Maybe you just need a tune up.”

  The young man began rocking b
ack and forth on the balls of his feet impatiently. His fly was open and the left cuff of his pants was torn and dragging on the floor. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  “Let me see your driver’s license.”

  “Left it home,” he shot back without missing a beat.

  “You’re sniffing carburetor fluid to get high.”

  “You got some goddamn nerve!”

  “I can smell it on your breath. You probably sprayed five minutes ago. Filled a plastic garbage bag with fumes and took a one way trip to la-la land.”

  “Go to hell!” The youth spun around on his heels and headed for the door.

  On Friday a registered letter arrived from the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination notifying Abraham Lefkowitz that his case would be heard on the fourteenth of the following month. He read the letter and tossed it in the trash. “Florence has lawyers. We’ve got something better.”

  “Amen to that!” his nephew chirped.

  Saturday evening, Morty, who usually slept late most weekends, set the alarm clock for six-thirty. In the morning he dressed in his best suit and drove over to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, where he found a seat in the farthest row behind a pillar. It was his first Catholic service. He sat through all the gospel readings and even hummed along during the responsorial. After the Mass as the faithful rose to receive Holy Communion, Morty slipped out the back door and drove to his parent’s home.

  “Jews and Catholics share the same God.”

  His mother cocked her head to one side and stared at him uncertainly. “After a fashion, yes,” she said. “Let’s not forget the Inquisition, Auschwitz, Pope Innocent the Third and a few other catastrophic bumps in the road.”

  “What if the deity that spoke to Uncle Abe wasn’t of the Jewish persuasion?”

  Mrs. Goldfarb shook her head in exasperation. “I haven’t a clue what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “You said it yourself—if it’s all about tzidakah, righteousness, then it doesn’t make a bit of difference whether a Jew or an orangutan performs the good deeds.”

  His mother placed a hand on the side of her head. “Mortimer, my son, you’re beginning to scare me.”