Sitting there next to an IV bag dripping electrolytes and antibiotics into the woman’s left arm, the thought occurred to him: for all their literary posturing and pretense, not one of the other members of the writer’s group could critique a Berryman poem with the insight of the frail woman lying next to him. At their last meeting, the housewife in the skin-tight jeans and plaid shirt had been only too happy to jibber jabber at great length about a trend in American literature that she knew absolutely nothing about.
“Hope I’m not tiring you.” When there was no response, Benny looked up. Irma was resting comfortably sound asleep.
The nurse, who had been busying herself in the kitchen, stuck her head in the door. “I gave her a shot of Demerol just before you arrived so Irma may sleep for a while.” She slipped a heavy winter coat over her shoulders. “I’m leaving now. Her brother, Edward, should be by in an hour or so.”
“Okay.” Benny stared out the window. Snow from the last storm was heaped up against the curb, the sidewalks a messy maze of slush and jagged ice. The temperature, which hadn’t crawled much above twenty degrees by noon, would dip back again into the single digits once the sun went down. Twenty minutes passed. Irma hadn’t stirred since the nurse went home. Benny rose noiselessly and drifted to the doorway.
“In the dresser,” the dying woman’s gossamer voice, brought him up short, “there’s something for you.”
“The dresser?” He stared at a sturdy piece of furniture fashioned from birdseye maple.
“Bottom drawer on the right.”
Benny eased the drawer open and removed a carton full of random scraps of paper; some were typed, others covered in cursive script with the quaint, muddy scratchings of a fountain pen. “It’s my writing … my life work. I’d like you to have it.”
Benny approached the bed and took hold of her free hand. “Thank you, Irma. I’m honored.”
A week passed. “What’s that?” Benny’s wife asked.
Irma’s poems were splayed out across the living room table. “The old lady from my writing class … I went to see her.”
“And how did that go?”
“She gave me her poems.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Don’t know. Problem is, the writing isn’t very good.” The woman with the masterful command of the English language, had squandered all her literary talent on nasty invectives and bilious rants. Gathering the pages back into a heap, he returned them to the cardboard box, wedging it at a cockeyed angle on a shelf in the bed room closet behind his summer-weight clothing and a pair of tennis shorts.
“Irma’s poems aren’t very good.” They were lying in bed a little after eleven.
“I was just falling asleep,” his wife hissed.
“Atrocious might be a better choice of words.”
“You already said that earlier today. What’s the point?”
“She didn’t entrust them to me so I could toss her life work out with the recyclable paper and plastic.”
“For god’s sake, go to sleep,” his wife whined.
“I can’t. This thing’s got my nerves on edge.” If Irma hadn’t given Benny the poems, the visit would have sufficed. It would have brought closure, at least from his point of view. “I don’t know what to do.” After a short pause he added, “I’m meeting with Rabbi Schneerson.”
“From the Orthodox synagogue?”
“He’s supposed to be brilliant.”
“I heard the rabbi is eccentric and has a sadistic temper.”
“Where did you hear that?”
There was no immediate reply. His wife had dropped off to sleep.
Rabbi Elliot Schneerson was a man with as many detractors as rabid admirers in the Jewish community. His father was a scholar and bibliophile who had written a number of notable commentaries on traditional halachah. The short, stocky man with the coarse beard ushered Benny into his study and closed the door. The cluttered room stank of stale tobacco.
“You mentioned an ethical dilemma?” the rabbi sat behind a desk littered with manuscripts. Benny told the Rabbi about Irma Bradshaw, his visit to her apartment and the poems. Rabbi Schneerson sat back and listened, head drooping forward as though he was dozing off to sleep. When Benny finished, the rabbi said, “Such a sad story!”
Without bothering to look up, he suddenly raised his hand and, with a limp index finger, sketched the sign of the cross in Benny’s general direction. “It was very nice meeting with you, Mr. Epstein. You can see yourself out.”
“Excuse me?”
“Isn’t that what you came for?” The rabbi grabbed a pair of nail clippers from a drawer and began paring his nicotine-stained nails. “You wanted me to absolve you of any further responsibility for this pathetic creature and her equally pathetic prose.”
“Poetry,” Benny corrected. “And I never used such damning language.”
“When a Catholic does something morally reprehensible,” The rabbi continued with his original train of thought, “he goes and sits in the confessional. ‘Father I have sinned.’” Rabbi Schneerson raised both hands high above his head in a magnanimous, if somewhat, theatrical gesture. “Recite ten Hail Marys, go and sin no more!” Making a rather revolting snuffling sound through his large, hairy nostrils, Rabbi Schneerson seemed to derive great pleasure from the sacrilegious performance.
“There are over two hundred poems in the box. What should I do with them?”
Having finished with his nails, the rabbi tossed the silver clipper aside. “How do Jews honor the dead?”
“By lighting a Yahrzeit candle.”
“A Yahrzeit candle would be nice, but Ms. Bradshaw deserves something more durable than a crumby glass full of white wax.” The rabbi snickered as though at some private joke; he lit what was left of a Crooks rum-soaked cigar and blew a cloud of aromatic smoke up into the air.
“Such as?”
“A legacy. Something future generations might remember her by.” A newspaper was resting on the edge of the desk. He pointed at a picture plastered across the top portion of the front page. A defendant flanked by police officers was being led into Brandenberg District Court. As Rabbi Schneerson explained it, a middle-aged man with some mental issues lived with his grandmother. After a heated argument, the man whacked granny on the back of the skull with a hammer. Then he hit her a second time for good measure, crammed the old biddy in the hall closet and there she lay for the next two months. The police came in response to neighbors’ complaints about a foul odor. “That’s you,” he said. “The one in handcuffs.”
“How is that me?” By now, Benny had considered putting an end to the farce. He would just get up without saying another word and see himself out. Let the deranged rabbi prattle on – a supercilious monologue - as the ashes that he never bothered to clear away cascaded onto his lap.
“Just as the murderer couldn’t dispose of the corpse, you can’t seem to decide what to do with the ineffectual poems.” He sucked on the cigar, short little inhalations that caused the ash to turn crimson momentarily and lengthen, before blowing another stream of white smoke across the length of the room. “Of course, in some ways, you’re in a worse predicament.” Again, the rabbi chuckled maliciously. “I’ll bet you even brought the poems here tonight. Maybe they’re outside sitting in a box on the passenger seat of your Volvo.
Benny cringed. Actually, he had placed them next to the spare tire in the trunk, because the thought of Irma’s life work laying there on the passenger seat freaked him out.
“Why don’t you go get them? We could recite a few Hebrew prayers, strike a match in the fireplace and be done with it. The woman’s life work up in smoke. C’est la vie!”
“I came here, rabbi,” Benny made no effort to mask his rage, “to learn what to do.”
“What to do?” the rabbi shot back. “You must do the right thing. That is, the right thing by Irma Bradshaw.”
“She wants her poems published.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere!”
“Not really. What publisher or literary agent in his right mind would publish this dreck?”
The rabbi stubbed the cigar out in a metal ashtray. “Go home. I’ll call you in a day or two.”
“That’s it?” Benny couldn’t believe his ears. “That’s the best you can do?”
“Go home, Mr. Epstein. I’ll be in touch.” For the second time that night, Rabbi Schneerson lowered his eyes, signaling that the meeting was over.
I’ll call you in a day or two.
When an entire week passed and Rabbi Schneerson didn’t call, Benny knew he had been played for a fool by the irascible cleric. Autocrats ruled by decree. They were domineering, self-willed, dictatorial, condescending and despotic. Rabbi Schneerson fit the mold to a tee. There was something bordering on the maniacal in the way he compared Benny’s predicament with that of the dim-witted psychopath who stuffed granny’s carcass in the hall closet. And what was the idiotic implication – that Benny could no more dispose of the poems than the killer could divest himself of the rotting corpse? What a farce! An unmitigated joke! He had sought the rabbi out for spiritual solace and, in its place, came away with a metaphysical boot in the ass.
“How did your meeting with the rabbi go?” Thelma asked.
They were upstairs getting ready for bed. Benny pulled a pair of cotton pajama bottoms up over his underwear. “It was a disaster.” He told her how the rabbi baited him almost from the minute he walked through the door.
“He hasn’t called back all week?” Benny shook his head. “So what are you going to do?”
Benny set the alarm clock. He had an early morning class. “Don’t know.”
Thelma rolled over on her side. “Rhonda Burkowitz went to see Rabbi Schneerson in December when her husband ran off with that receptionist from the tennis club. She said the rabbi was a fountain of wisdom. Those were her exact words – a fountain of wisdom.”
“It’s an overworked cliché,” Benny muttered. “And anyway, the filthy lech probably just wanted to get into Rhonda’s panties.”
“According to Rhonda, “Thelma ignore the tasteless humor, “Rabbi Schneerson’s guidance saved her sanity.”
“Certainly didn’t save her marriage.”
“You’re just in a snit because he tweaked your ego.” Thelma reached over and flicked the light off. Fluffing the pillow, she lay back down. “Did you want sex? Perhaps that would make you feel better… take your mind off your problems.”
“If it were that simple,” Benny groused, “I’d be fondling you even as we speak.”
His wife patted his shoulder. “Rabbi Schneerson’s gonna save the day. Mark my words.”
Tuesday evening Benny was at the library with the writers’ group when his cell phone twittered. “The rabbi called,” his wife said. “I told him you were teaching, but he wants you to stop by his house after you finish at the library.”
Benny felt his brain go numb. The class seldom got through much before nine. By the time he drove into Providence and made his way up the east side to the rabbi’s residence, it would be pushing ten o’clock. “I suggested,” Thelma said, anticipating his thoughts, “that maybe you could come another day when it was mutually convenient.”
“And?” Benny felt a knot in his stomach.
“He said to come tonight or not at all.”
Benny gazed out over the class that was busy with another flash fiction exercise. Imagine someone engrossed in a hopeless double bind. The subject matter can be as serious as a Greek tragedy or bathetic as slapstick comedy.
“So what are you going to do?”
“Don’t wait up.” He snapped the phone shut.
By the time Benny reached Tillman Drive on the East Side of Providence, the clock on the dashboard of his Volvo registered nine-forty. “I would have called last week, but I was missing several things and needed to order supplies.” The rabbi didn’t bother to elaborate which supplies or for what purpose they were needed.
“My father was a rabbi.” Rabbi Schneerson seemed thoroughly relaxed, almost friendly. “Here, let me show you.” Strolling over to the bookcase, he removed a thick volume bound in hand-tooled leather with gold leaf lettering on the elegant, ribbed spine.
“Your father was an author as well?”
“Oh no,” the rabbi chuckled. “An amateur bookbinder. “He refurbished many of the older religious manuscripts in this library.” Rabbi Schneerson gestured with a sweep of his hand at the several bookcases that lined the four walls. “Before he died, he taught me to bind books from scraps of paper, glue and cardboard; and now I pass the tradition along to you.” The rabbi grabbed a small book with a wine colored cover from the desk and thrust it into Benny’s hands.
Irma Bradshaw: the collected poems
edited by Benny Epstein
Opening the cover he thumbed through the pages all of which were bare. “I don’t get it,” Benny mumbled.
“I threw the book together,” Rabbi Schneerson explained, “in my basement earlier today after the bookbinding supplies arrived.” “Irma Bradshaw is dying. Her poems are her legacy. I will teach you how to transform the mishmash of papers into a perfectly attractive and presentable hand-bound edition. You take a few over to the woman before she dies; she can pass them along to family as a keepsake. Then you do up another dozen or so to be placed in libraries throughout the Providence area. As a professor of English, you shouldn’t have any trouble convincing the library staff handling new acquisitions. Make sure you tell Irma about the libraries.”
Benny ran an index finger over the sleek binding. He opened and closed the front cover, marveling at how the creased hinge slid effortlessly in either direction. “I don’t know the first thing about bookbinding.”
“I can show you now. Tonight.” He led the way down a narrow hallway to the kitchen, which smelled of gefilte fish and horse radish. A door led down to an unfinished basement, where a collection of tools lay scattered across a workbench. Benny took silent inventory; there was a pot of milky glue, a carpenter’s awl, blunt-nosed needles and Irish linen thread, metal rulers, clamps and an odd looking contraption that Rabbi Schneerson identified as a bookbinder’s sewing jig. “Shall we begin?”
“I considered calling the police,” Thelma quipped tongue in cheek, when Benny finally returned home a little after three in the morning.
“Things went a little longer than planned.” He hung his coat in the hall closet.
His wife lifted up on her toes and kissed his cheek. “Four hours and the alarm clock will be clattering in your ear. Come to bed.”
Benny undressed, throwing his clothes in a heap. On Thursday he had one final session with Rabbi Schneerson. The older disheveled man would teach him how to letter the cloth spine and join the finished text block to the Davies board covers. Over the weekend, Benny would do up the first couple of books in a rust-colored cloth that was particularly attractive and pay one last visit to Irma Bradshaw.
Return to Table of Contents
A Room without a View
When the Richardsons, Melvin, Clarissa and their teenage daughter, Sade, moved into the split-level ranch house on Hemlock Circle, the neighbors were pleasantly surprised. A black family in the community – how wonderful, how deliciously delightful!
Unfortunately, the euphoria didn’t last.
By Late August of the first year, Billy Ray Hooper, who owned the ranch house that abutted the Richardsons property was ready to burn a cross on the black family's front lawn. In lieu of anything quite that extreme, he just refused to mow the lawn to the left of his house, a not-so-subtle way of letting the dark-skinned neighbors know what he thought of them. The stringy grass grew tall and turned to seed. Dandelions, crabgrass, goldenrod and an assortment of ugly, tenacious weeds predominated - but only on the left-hand side, close by th
e Richardsons’ property line. Elsewhere, Billy Ray spread Scotts Miracle-Gro and TurfBuilder fertilizer on his lawn. He added weed killer plus a generous dusting of lime everywhere else. He positioned petunias, pansies and geraniums in potted plants on either side of the front stoop and trimmed the flagstone walkway with a gas-operated weed whacker. But Billy Ray left the other side of his property resembling a war zone. All that beauty and meticulous attention to detail from sheer spitefulness!
Thirteen year-old George Weiner, who lived in the house in back of the Richardsons, watched events unfold with mild confusion. George’s seventh grade class was studying the history of western civilization and had only reached to the Visigoths. He didn’t know if Billy Ray Hooper’s feud with the Richardsons was in any way similar to the cataclysmic upheavals he was learning about in middle school. Not that he cared all that much. He got along with black people just fine and was in two classes with the Richardson’s daughter.
“Why’s Mr. Hooper so mad at your father?” George asked one day.
Sade – the name was African and pronounced Shar-day. It meant ‘honor bestows a crown’ in Swahili or some other African tribal tongue. “Mr. Hooper was mowing his lawn on Sunday morning and my father told him to stop, because that’s the Lord’s Day, the day of rest. But Mr. Hooper said he works six days a week at the automotive supply store and the only time he has free is Sunday.” They were outside in the driveway of the Richardson’s home. Sade’s father had bought a top-of-the-line basketball court with spring-loaded rim and transparent, adjustable-height backboard. Tall and big-boned, Sade played center on the girls’ basketball team. George went to all the games. “My father lost his temper and called Mr. Hooper a really bad name. That’s when all the trouble started.”
Billy Ray Hooper lived in the same home since he was a child, no bigger than George and took over the property when his parents passed away. That was over twenty years ago. The Richardsons moved on Hemlock Terrace only three years ago. George watched the girl drive to the hoop from the right side and shoot a layup. The ball ricocheted off the rim and landed in a clump of honeysuckle. She tried the same move from the opposite side, dribbling with her left hand as a defensive measure. “What name?”