Bronx Noir

We didn’t go to church anymore, not since Father O’Mally said little Maxie Isaacs was a baby Christ-killer and that he would burn in hell instead of going to heaven like a good little Catholic child. We’re big on hell in my neighborhood. So I went to P.S. 86 instead of Our Lady of Angels, and I didn’t have to wear a uniform, and Mrs. Marrs didn’t yank my braids when she caught me hiding a book on my lap during Math.

I walked that coconut cake into the courtyard, past the stoop, up the three steps. The lobby smelled like apple kugel, the second-floor landing like Mrs. Costigan’s cats, the third like sauerkraut with weird Jewish stuff in it, caraway seed, maybe. A radio was playing piano music, but suddenly it stopped with a crash that almost made me drop the cake, then started again from the beginning. Not the radio, then. A real piano. I had just rounded the fourth-floor stairs when Mr. Schmidt came out of 4-C, Mrs. Blaustein’s apartment, with his big toolbox. “Vot you doing here, girlie?”

Mr. Schmidt was our new super. German. My daddy said all supers in the Bronx were Krauts. I hoped they weren’t all the same kind of Kraut Mr. Schmidt was, with a voice that crunched like broken glass. Mr. Schmidt scared the hell out of me. Maybe it was how big he was, fat, with fists like Sunday hams. Or the way he was always chewing, jaws going from side to side like that hippopotamus at the Bronx Zoo. Or maybe it was his daughter Trudy, the only other not-Jewish kid in my fourth-grade class at P.S. 86. She gave the nastiest Indian burn of any kid on Sedgwick, Trudy did, then batted blue eyes like an angel at the poor kid’s parents. Even Lennie Foreman walked the other side of the street when Trudy Schmidt was on the sidewalk. But not me. Not even then. If anyone even tried it I would’ve bent their little pinkie back till it snapped. Nobody messed with me—not even Trudy Schmidt—not after my daddy taught me the cop moves. Did I say he was a cop? Well he is, and a good one.

“Vot you doing, girlie?” I never knew anyone before who shaved his whole head, but Mr. Schmidt did, and the red stubble made it look like it was coated with corroded rust. Corroded. I like that. It’s a good word. Corroded.

“Just around Mrs. Blaustein a coconut cake.” The super had eyes on the cake box, but I slipped past him without another word. My mother said you had to watch out when he came around—things would go missing. Cookies or muffins. The week before, when he was working on the pipes in our kitchen, a pork chop disappeared. A pork chop! Cooked! And her with five mouths to feed. So I held the cake box tight to my chest and got past Mr. Schmidt safe, and this was the first time I was ever in 4-C. Mrs. Blaustein came rushing to the door, all out of breath, said to wait a minute and she’d get me a dime for a tip (a whole dime!), but she had to go talk to someone first. Then she went out of the apartment, fast. So I nosed around. It was a big place, two bedrooms. Nothing like our one-bedroom apartment with five people sleeping in shifts night and day. This living room was…classy. Pictures on the walls—actual paintings. A piano in one corner. Glass doors with sheer curtains leading into yet another room. Through the half-open door I could see into this second room—shelves and shelves of books, like a library. They were a magnet to me, those books. I couldn’t help myself.

At first I thought the gloomy room was empty. The drapes were closed, except for one little slit in the middle, and dust danced in the narrow light. Narrow light. Maybe I read that somewhere: narrow light. I tiptoed over to the nearest shelf. Mrs. Blaustein wouldn’t mind if I looked at just one book…

“Iss he gone yet?” It was a woman’s quivery voice.

I dropped the book and screamed.

A gasp came from right behind me, and a small woman hunched in a wheelchair spun around. “Mein Gott. I thought you vere Hilda.” Her accent was sort of like the Jewish mommas who schlepped their folding chairs in front of the building on sunny mornings and talked and talked and talked. Something like the mommas—but different. More like music. “Vere’d you come from, child?”

“From the baker.” This must be the crazy lady. She was scary, all right, one eye pulled down, a huge red puckered scar from her forehead to her chin, one shoulder higher than the other. Her eyes were open really, really wide, even the droopy one. Her head was shaking on her neck. I wanted to get out of there—bad. But I wasn’t leaving without my money. Where the hell was Mrs. Blaustein? “I’m the cake girl.”