Bronx Noir

Mrs. Blaustein called the next day. My mother frowned. “Rachel Cohen must be lonely. She seems to have taken a liking to you. You want to go have cake with her?”

“Okay,” I said. I don’t know why. I didn’t really want to.

Mrs. Blaustein had set the table with a lace cloth and some nice china dishes with gold rims. Very la-tee-dah, my father would have said.

“I don’t like cake,” Miss Cohen said. “But you go right ahead.” She drank cup after cup of the blackest coffee I ever saw from what looked like dolls’ cups, while I ate two slices of coconut cake. The filling was so sweet I almost couldn’t taste the lemon, so sweet it made my teeth ache. I loved it.

Miss Cohen talked almost the whole time. About knives and needles. About acid and electric shocks. About cattle cars full of Jews. About barbed wire. About ovens that weren’t for baking cakes in.

“The day they took us away, I put on my white linen dress with the eyelet embroidery. I thought if I looked nice, they’d know I was a nice girl,” she said. “Stupid. I was twenty when I went in…a pretty girl. When I came out seven years later I was a hundred and twenty. Can you imagine it?”

I could. All too well. It was time for me to go home.

“You come see me again,” she said, “and I’ll read you some of my poems.”

“Okay.” But I didn’t think I could stand it, to go back again.

There were two more slices of cake left, on a yellow china plate. How could she not like cake? Poor Miss Cohen.

When I got home, I looked all over for my communion dress, white with eyelet embroidery, and then I buried it in the very back of the closet where nobody, not even the Nazis, would ever find it, behind my father’s old wedding suit that didn’t fit anymore. All night long something tried to drag me through thick, hot air into the dark depths of the closet.

“You been up to 4-C, ain’t you?” Katy-Ann Cooper skated around me in circles, her wheels rolling thumpeta-thumpeta over the sidewalk cracks.

“What’s it to you?”

“My daddy says just because that lady’s famous doesn’t mean she’s not a Jew and a Commie. He knows. He alla time used to listen to Father Coughlin. You should stay out of 4-C—she’s nutso.”

“Is not.”

“Is so.”

I wanted to grab that chain around Katy-Ann’s neck, the one that held her St. Christopher medal and her skate key. I wanted to grab it and twist. Katy-Ann’s big mouth was the one thing that made me decide to go back to 4-C.

Or maybe it was the two leftover pieces of coconut cake. Or maybe it was just because Miss Cohen said I should come, and I was a good girl who did what I was told.

They were horrible, Rachel Cohen’s poems, two books of them, and some in magazines. We sat in the library by a table covered with medicine bottles. Tall brown ones with skinny necks. Small fat green jars. But the poems were beautiful/horrible, if you know what I mean. Like—fascinating. That’s another good word, fascinating. Blood. Bone. Shoes and wedding rings and greasy smoke.

She read them out loud, one first and looked at me, and then another and looked at me, and then just when I wanted her to stop she wouldn’t stop. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but my mother taught me to be polite. I wanted to run out of the apartment. I got up to leave, but she kept me standing by the door while she read one about a red-haired guard named Heinrich.

Helpless. Helpless.

I was his brown-eyed

Dolly. His daily treat.

He gobbled me up in slices,

In blood and bone and ashes.

I was his nobody.

His nothing.

His sweetie, sweetie, sweetie.

Oh, shame. Oh, shame.

No mercy left to me.

No anodyne.

It was the worst of the poems and I had my hand on the knob of the library door, but that last word kept me there. I was…snagged…by it. “What’s an-o-dime mean?”

“Anodyne. It means painkiller. I studied to be a pharmacist before the war. I learned all about the drugs you could take to ease pain. And cause it. Now I’m good for nothing but to sit in this damned chair—” she smacked the armrest. “Sit in this goddamned chair—and remember.”

“What happens to people’s souls to make them do such…bad…things?” I really wanted to know, and I thought if anyone could tell me, she could. In spite of how much her poems terrified me, I kind of admired Miss Cohen. She knew all about words.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” she replied.

“But not you and me, right? We could never do anything evil, right?”

“Maybe you’d better go home now, girlie.”

I peeked in the kitchen on my way out. One slice of cake left, sitting under a glass dish. The red cherry tempted me, but I got past it okay. The faucet on the sink was dripping bad.