Bronx Noir

“‘The cake girl’?” She laughed—and for a minute the air in the room got…not so heavy. At least I think it was a laugh, a wheeze and a dry chuckle in her throat, and her head stopped shaking. “The cake girl. Oh, it vould be a pity to vaste that.” She picked up a little notebook on her lap and scribbled in it with a gold pencil. Her hands were thin and very white. They looked more like they belonged to some younger woman than that horrible scarred face. “Now,” she said, “I vill write a poem about the cake girl.”

“A poem?”

“Yes. And someday vhen you’re in college maybe you vill read it and think of me.”

“College?” Me?

“That vas vun thing they couldn’t take away from me—my poetry. Do you like them?”

“Like what?”

“Poems?”

“Dunno,” I said. “They’re okay, I guess. By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water, / Stood the wigwam of—”

“No. No. No,” she said. “Not that drivel. That book you just dropped on the floor? Pick it up, girl, open it and read me a real poem.” She had wheeled her chair to the window, and now she pulled the drapery cord. Light came streaming in, and I could see to read.

I could also see Mrs. Blaustein standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. I cringed, expecting her to yell. But she was looking at the wheelchair lady. “Rachel, I think you might be right.” I never heard her sound so quiet.

“Iss he gone?” The wheelchair lady’s voice was quivery again.

“For now. Just off the boat last year from Bremerhaven, Esther Meyer says.”

The head started shaking again, like this toy I used to have where you turned a key and the tin Chinaman nodded and nodded and nodded. It was like the springs in her neck were broken.

Mrs. Blaustein’s lips got white and thin. She turned to me. “Girlie, do like Miss Cohen says. Read a poem from the book.”

So I opened the book and read. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—/ The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—” I looked up…Pain?…Tombs? But the sound of the words seemed to calm her—Miss Cohen—so I kept reading “…This is the Hour of Lead—/ Remembered, if outlived, / As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—/ First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—”

I was still there when Miss Cohen’s visitor came. The one I got the cake for, I guess. Not many men in suits around our neighborhood. Father O’Mally. Claire Heidenreich’s father. Insurance collectors. Fuller Brush men. But none of them wore suits like this one. It fit him like he was born in gray wool. No knee wrinkles or ass sags. Just shoulders and shirt cuffs, pleats at the belt and a sharp crease down the pant legs. I was old enough to know better, but I gaped at this handsome stranger like a two-year-old until Mrs. Blaustein pressed the dime into my hand. “Here’s your money, girlie. Go on home now. Miss Cohen has to talk to her publisher.”

* * *

“You know the crazy old lady in 4-C?” I said at supper that night. “She’s a famous poet. A publisher came to see her today. What’s a publisher?”

“She’s not crazy and she’s not old,” my father said. “It’s just that they experimented on her in the camps.” He took the bowl of boiled potatoes, ladled out three, spread them with margarine.

“They? Experimented?” The meatloaf looked good. Tomato soup on top and slices of bacon.

“What’re you now, ten, right?” He took two slices of meatloaf and reached for the ketchup bottle.

“Mike!” my mother said. “She doesn’t need to know about such evil—”

“She’s a tough kid. She can handle it.” He gave me a straight look. “You’ve heard of the camps, right?” He poured himself more beer from the Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle.

“You mean, like in the Catskills, where Jessica goes?” “Jeez—what’da they teach you in that school? The concentration camps, I mean. Auschwitz. Dachau.”

He told me, but I didn’t want to believe it. “They really did those things?” That’s how dumb I was.

“Yeah, and worse.” He spooned canned peas next to the potatoes. “That’s what we fought for in the war, to beat those Nazi bastards. If they won, who’da been next? First the Jews and the Polacks and the qu—”

“Charlie!” My mother clamped a hand over his mouth.

He pushed it away and gave a short laugh. He drinks a lot of beer when he’s going on night shift. “Maybe the Irish were next, for all we know. Jews. Micks. This whole neighborhood woulda been wiped out.” He laughed again and took another drink.

I put my fork down. I’d lost my appetite.

* * *

That night there were Nazis in the closet by my bed. I didn’t know what they looked like, not exactly, but I could feel them there. Maybe my father was wrong. Maybe we didn’t win the war. Maybe…