When my eyes cleared some—ears took a lot longer—I saw Esau lying on the floor. He wasn’t moving.
If it was just me, the way I was feeling, I’d likely have left him lying there till the neighbors started complaining. But… see, I already told you how Willa and me, we were always supposed to watch over our baby brother—protect him in those schoolyard fights, make sure he did his homework, all that—and I guess old habits die hard. I said, “Esau? Esau?” and when he didn’t answer, I tried to get to him, but he seemed an awful long way off. Susie helped me. She’d been crying, but she stopped, and she got me to Esau.
He was trying to sit up by the time we reached him, and we helped him onto his feet in a while. He looked like pounded shit, excuse my French, what with his nice shirt in rags, and that tie Susie liked gone, and an arm of his suit jacket dangling by a few threads. I’d seen him wear that same jacket on the TV, I don’t know how many times. His face was gray. I don’t mean pale, or white—it was gray like old cement, old grout, and it was like the gray went all the way through. Susie and me, we might be the only people in the world ever saw him like that.
He actually tried to smile. He said, “I should have made you check your guns at the door. Where on earth did you pick up that trick?”
“Just got pissed off,” I said. “And I’ll do worse if you’re not out of here in two minutes by Papa’s watch. Susie stays.”
Esau shrugged, or he tried to. “Got to catch a plane tomorrow, anyway. Back to the old grindstone.” He looked at Susie. She kind of edged behind my shoulder some, and Esau’s smile widened. He said, “Don’t worry, my dear. You really should have stayed dead, you know, but it’s not your fault.” He turned back toward me. “Your doing, of course.”
“Watching those folks pile in,” I told him. My head was still ringing. “That whole crew, all those people come to paint up your homecoming for the world to see. Couldn’t help thinking there ought to be someone like Susie there too. Like Donnie Schmidt. I swear, I was just thinking on it.”
“Glad it wasn’t Donnie who showed up,” Esau murmured. He tugged on the loose arm of his ruined jacket; it came free, and he dropped it on the floor. “Sneaky old Brother Jake,” he said. “You’ve likely got more of the family inheritance than I do. Just like in Papa’s Bible, after all.”
I was still feeling hollowed-out, burned-out, not by anything he’d done, but by whatever it was I’d had to do. I said, “I can’t let you go on, Esau.”
He smiled. “You can’t kill me, Jake. We both know you better than that.”
“You might not know me well enough,” I said. “Gone as long as you’ve been. There’s worse things than killing you. Maybe way worse.”
And he saw. He looked into my eyes, for a change, and he saw what I had it in mind to do. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said in a whisper. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“I wouldn’t dare not do it,” I answered him straight. “You’re a time bomb, Esau, you’re a loaded gun. Didn’t matter before, when I could pretend I didn’t really know—but now, if I don’t take the bullets out of you, I’m as bad you are. Can’t see that I’ve got a choice.”
He’s Esau. He didn’t beg, and he didn’t bother with threatening. All he said was, “It won’t be easy for you. It’s my life you’re talking about. I’ll fight you for it.”
“I know you will,” I said. “And you’ll have a better chance than Donnie Schmidt.”
“Or me,” Susie said, standing right next to me. “Goodbye, Esau.”
He gave her a different kind of smile than he’d given me—practically kind, practically real. It looked nice on him. He said, “Goodbye, Susie. See you on the six o’clock.” And he was away, that fast, vanished into the dark. I looked after him for some while, then said what I had to say, and closed the door.
Susie had heard me, of course. “He always meant to be a good God,” I told her. “A good God, a good angel, whatever. Don’t know how he got to be… what he was.”
Susie picked up Esau’s torn-off sleeve and turned it around and around in her hands, not looking at it, not looking at anything much. She said finally, “I read once, in India they’ve got gods that are also demons. Depends on their mood, I guess, or the time of year. Or maybe just their lunch.”
“Well, I wasn’t planning to go into the god business myself,” I told her. “Really wasn’t looking to set up in competition with any Angel of Death. Piss-poor job, you ask me. No benefits, no paid vacations. And damn sure no union.”
Susie shook her head and laughed a little bit, but after that she got quiet again, and sort of broody. By and by, she said, “There’s a union. There’s always been others like you, Jake. The ones who mend the world.”
“The world’s no torn shirt,” I said. My insides felt like they’d been scooped out, dragged over gravel and put back. “I got a store to run.” Susie looked at me, didn’t say anything. I said, “There’s others like him out there, I don’t know how many. Can’t stop them all.” I put my hand on Susie’s shoulder to steady myself.
Willa came in behind us in her bathrobe, looked around at the dining room, and demanded, “What was all that tarryhooting around in here after we went to bed? Did you and Esau get to wrestling or something?”
“Kind of,” I mumbled. “Boys with beers. I’ll clean up, I promise.”
Willa shrugged. “Your house. I was just afraid you’d wake up the kids. Esau already gone?” I nodded, and she peered at me in that older-sister way of hers. “You sure nothing happened between you two?” She wasn’t expecting an answer, so I didn’t have to fix one up. She studied Susie a lot more closely and carefully than she’d done during dinner, and there wasn’t any question what she was thinking. But what Willa thinks and what Willa says never did spend a lot of time together. This time she just said, “Good of you to take the time with Ben, Susie. I was just frazzled out, dealing with those crazy TV people and Carol-Ann.”
“It’s been some time since I’ve been around children,” Susie said. “I like yours.”
Willa said, “Stay the night, why don’t you? It’s late, and there’s a spare bedroom downstairs.” As she left, she said over her shoulder, “And I make great Mexican eggs. My husband loves them, and he’s Mexican.”
Susie looked at me. I said, “If you aren’t worried about compromising your reputation, that is, staying over in the house of a widower man. There’s still folks in this town would raise their eyebrows.”
Susie laughed full-out then, for the first time. That was nice. She said, “I’m older than I look.”
Well.
What else? The network never ran that show, of course, what with one thing another. Didn’t get the chance. Seems like it all started turning bad for Esau, just about then, slow but steady. That stock-option business. Those people who sued the whole network about his fouled-up dirty bomb story. The sexual harassment charges. Those got settled out of court, like a bunch of other stuff, but there was a mountain landing on his head and he couldn’t duck it all. Still, he hung on like a bullrider. He’s almost as stubborn as I am. Almost.
Tell the truth, he might have ridden that bull all the way home, if he’d still been selling the same kind of stories. But the things that had made him who he was, the big disasters and the common-man nightmares, somehow there just weren’t as many of them as there had been. The news got smaller, and so did he.
Did I feel bad? Interesting, you asking me that. Yeah, I did feel bad for him, I couldn’t help it. I still wonder how he felt when he woke up—the morning after the night he told the country all about those Kansas cult-murders, with the ritual mutilating and all—only it turned out they hadn’t ever happened, even though he’d made them up just as pretty and scary as all the other lies he’d always made real. How’s the Angel of Death supposed to do his job with clipped wings?
I got a call in the store that day. Picked up on the second ring, but when I said hello there wasn’t anybody on the line.
The guns were the last straw.
The automatics and the Uzis and whatever in his office, in the dressing-room, those were bad enough, the tabloids had a field day with those. But trying to go through Los Angeles airport security with a pistol butt just sticking out of his coat pocket… lord, that did him in. Network hustled him out of there so fast, his desk was smoking behind him. That wasn’t me, by the way, all those guns. That was just the state he was in by then. Poor Esau. All those years jumping off things, he still never did learn how to land.
Or maybe I should have chosen my words better as he walked away that night. Probably would have, if I’d had more time. All I knew then was I had to speak up before he did. Jam my foot in the door.
“My brother thinks he’s an angel,” I’d said. “He thinks he can change anything in the world just by saying so. But that’s crazy. He can’t do that.”
Didn’t know what else to say. Might have had a little too much what we used to call English on it, but I done what I could.
Lord, don’t I wish I had a movie of you for the last half-hour or so, the way you’ve been looking at me. You’d get to keep that, anyway, even though there won’t be nothing on your tape tomorrow, nor nothing in your memory. Couple of hours, you couldn’t even find this house again, same as your editor won’t ever remember giving out this assignment. Because nobody talks about my brother anymore. Nobody’s talked about him in years. And it’s a sad thing, some ways, because being Esau Robbins every night, everywhere, six o’clock… that mattered to him. Being the Angel of Death, that mattered to him. They were the only things that ever filled him, you understand me? That’s all he ever could do in his life, my poor damn brother—get even with us, with people, for being alive. And I took all that away. Stole his birthright and shut down the life he built with it. That don’t balance the scales, nor make up for all he did, but it’s going to have to do.
Esau Robbins no longer exists. He’s not dead. He’s just… gone. Maybe someday I’ll go and look for him, like an older brother should, but right now gone is how it stays. Price of the pottage.
Thanks for the Blanton’s, young man. Puts a smile on my face, and even though it isn’t her drink Susie will certainly applaud your thoughtfulness.
You’ll likely be finding a bonus in your next paycheck. Nobody in accounting will be able to explain why—and you sure as hell won’t, either—but just you roll with it.
THE RABBI’S HOBBY
It took me a while to get to like Rabbi Tuvim. He was a big, slow-moving man with a heavy-boned face framed by a thick brown beard; and although he had spent much of his life in the Bronx, he had never quite lost the accent, nor the syntax, of his native Czechoslovakia. He seemed stony and forbidding to me at first, even though he had a warm, surprising laugh. He just didn’t look like someone who would laugh a lot.
What gradually won me over was that Rabbi Tuvim collected odd, unlikely things. He was the only person I knew who collected, not baseball cards, the way all my friends and I did, but boxers. There was one gum company who put those out, complete with the fighters’ records and a few lines about their lives, and the rabbi had all the heavyweights, going back to John L. Sullivan, and most of the lighter champions too. I learned everything I know about Stanley Ketchel, Jimmy McLarnin, Benny Leonard, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, Tommy Loughran, Henry Armstrong and Tony Canzoneri—to name just those few—from Rabbi Tuvim’s cards.
He kept boxes of paper matchbooks too, and those little bags of sugar that you get when you order coffee in restaurants. My favorites were a set from Europe that had tiny copies of paintings on them.
And then there were the keys. The rabbi had an old tin box, like my school lunch box, but bigger, and it was filled with dozens and dozens of keys of every shape and size you could imagine that a key might be. Some of them were tiny, smaller even than our mailbox key, but some were huge and heavy and rusty; they looked like the keys jailers or housekeepers always carried at their belts in movies about the Middle Ages. Rabbi Tuvim had no idea what locks they might have been for—he never locked up anything, anyway, no matter how people warned him—he just picked them up wherever he found them lying loose and plopped them into his key box. To which, by the way, he’d lost the key long ago.
When I finally got up the nerve to ask him why he collected something as completely useless as keys without locks, the rabbi didn’t answer right away, but leaned on his elbow and thought about his answer. That was something else I liked about him, that he seemed to take everybody’s questions seriously, even ones that were really, really stupid. He finally said, “Well, you know, Joseph, those keys aren’t useless just because I don’t have the locks they fit. Whenever I find a lock that’s lost its key, I try a few of mine on it, on the chance that one of them might be the right one. God is like that for me—a lock none of my keys fit, and probably never will. But I keep at it, I keep picking up different keys and trying them out, because you never know. Could happen.”
I asked, “Do you think God wants you to find the key?”
Rabbi Tuvim ruffled my hair. “Leben uff der keppele. Leave it to the children to ask the big ones. I would like to think he does, Yossele, but I don’t know that either. That’s what being Jewish is, going ahead without answers. Get out of here, already.”
The rabbi had bookshelves stacked with old crumbly magazines, too, all kinds of them. Magazines I knew, like Life, Look and Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post; magazines I’d never heard of—like Scribners, The Delineator, The Illustrated London News, and even one called Pearson’s Magazine, from 1911, with Christy Mathewson on the cover. Mrs. Eisen, who cleaned for him every other week, wouldn’t ever go into the room where he kept them, because she said those old dusty, flappy things aggravated her asthma. My father said that some of them were collector’s items, and that people who liked that sort of stuff would pay a lot of money for them. But Rabbi Tuvim just liked having them, liked sitting and turning their yellow pages late at night, thinking about what people were thinking so long ago. “It’s very peaceful,” he told me. “So much worry about so much—so much certainty about how things were going to turn out—and here we are now, and it didn’t turn out like that, after all. Don’t ever be too sure of anything, Joseph.”
I was at his house regularly that spring, because we were studying for my Bar Mitzvah. The negotiations had been extensive and complicated: I was willing to go along with local custom, tradition and my parents’ social concerns, but I balked at going straight from my regular classes to the neighborhood Hebrew school. I called my unobservant family hypocrites, which they were; they called me lazy and ungrateful, which was also true. But both sides knew that I’d need extensive private tutoring to cope with the haftarah reading alone, never mind the inevitable speech. I’d picked up Yiddish early and easily, as had all my cousins, since our families spoke it when they didn’t want the kindelech to understand what they were talking about. But Hebrew was another matter entirely. I knew this or that word, this or that phrase—even a few songs for Chanukah and Pesach—but the language itself sat like a stone on my tongue, guttural and harsh, and completely alien. I not only couldn’t learn Hebrew, I truly didn’t like Hebrew. And if a proper Jew was supposed to go on studying it even after the liberating Bar Mitzvah, I might just as well give up and turn Catholic, spending my Sunday mornings at Mass with the Geohegans down the block. Either way, I was clearly doomed.
Rabbi Tuvim took me on either as a challenge or as a penance, I was never quite sure which. He was inhumanly patient and inventive, constantly coming up with word games, sports references and any number of catchy mnemonics to help me remember this foreign, senseless, elusive, boring system of communication. But when even he wiped his forehead and said sadly, “Ai, gornisht helfen,” which means nothing will help you, I finally felt able to ask him whether he thought I would ever be a good Jew; and, if not, whether we should just cancel the Bar Mitzvah. I thought hopefully of the expense this would save my father, and felt positively virtuous for once.
The rabb
i, looking at me, managed to sigh and half-smile at the same time, taking off his glasses and blinking at them. “Nobody in this entire congregation has the least notion of what Bar Mitzvah is,” he said wearily. “It’s not a graduation from anything, it is just an acknowledgment that at thirteen you’re old enough to be called up in temple to read from the Torah. Which God help you if you actually are, but never mind. The point is that you are still Bar Mitzvah even if you never go through the preparation, the ritual.” He smiled at me and put his glasses back on. “No way out of it, Joseph. If you never manage to memorize another word of Hebrew, you’re still as good a Jew as anybody. Whatever the Orthodox think.”
One Thursday afternoon I found the rabbi so engrossed in one of his old magazines that he didn’t notice when I walked in, or even when I peered over his shoulder. It was an issue of a magazine called Evening, from 1921, which made it close to thirty years old. There were girls on the cover, posing on a beach, but they were a long way from the bathing beauties—we still called them that then—that I was accustomed to seeing in magazines and on calendars. These could have walked into my mother’s PTA or Hadassah meetings: they showed no skin above the shin, wore bathing caps and little wraps over their shoulders, and in general appeared about as seductive as any of my mother’s friends, only younger. Paradoxically, the severe costumes made them look much more youthful than they probably were, innocently graceful.
Rabbi Tuvim, suddenly aware of me, looked up, startled but not embarrassed. “This is what your mother would have been wearing to the beach back then,” he said. “Mine, too. It looks so strange, doesn’t it? Compared to Betty Grable, I mean.”
He was teasing me, as though I were still going through my Betty Grable/Alice Faye phase. As though I weren’t twelve now, and on the edge of manhood; if not, why were we laboring over the utterly bewildering haftarah twice a week? As though Lauren Bacall, Lena Horne and Lizabeth Scott hadn’t lately written their names all over my imagination, introducing me to the sorrows of adults? I drew myself up in visible—I hoped—indignation, but the rabbi said only, “Sit down, Joseph, look at this girl. The one in the left corner.”