Bad Lawyer (17 page)

“The family,” he told me early on, “you have to know from the family, the way it was.” By family, of course, he meant the Kaplans, the family of his father and his son. I don’t remember my grandfather ever mentioning his daughter-in-law’s name. Not in this connection.

I’ll say this for Itzhak Kaplan. He didn’t romanticize the past. “The rats had it better than us. They got to live in our building for nuttin’; we had to pay for the privilege. Take it to the bank, Sidney, in them days a life wasn’t worth a bag of coal. Which is what for lack of, people froze in their beds. And there wasn’t no welfare, neither. For help, you went to the family.”

There were calamities everywhere, living behind the walls like cockroaches. First and foremost, Hyman Baruch’s death in the wilds of New Jersey and the vagaries of economic survival afterward, a survival complicated by cholera, smallpox, typhus, polio. All aggravated by a pervasive malnutrition.

“Sidney, we wasn’t eatin’. We had no resistance. In 1905, I was seven years old when cholera came to the neighborhood. From everywhere, there was families burying babies. We were afraid to go outside, we were afraid even to breathe. Then I got it and my sister, Molly, also. I lived and she didn’t and that was it. My mother sat
shiva
and the rest of us went to work. We worked right around her, in the apartment, and when the rabbi came to pay a call, he didn’t complain.”

Grampa Itzy’s father, Hyman Baruch, had come to the New World accompanied by two married brothers, a married sister and a dozen children. They were also family and if my grandfather Itzy attended to their needs less dutifully than to those of his mother and siblings, I couldn’t tell from the sound of his voice. All his stories were told in a rush, spoken from whatever corner of his mouth happened to be closer to my ear.

“I’m not saying from this you should conclude we loved each other like in the movies.” He took hold of my arms, stopped me for a moment. I remember it being midwinter, January or February, with the sun seeming to jump from behind the small, intensely white clouds, to blind us with its glare. A bitter wind carried a salt spray that tore at the exposed skin of my face like a sandstorm. “We had plenty bums in the family, criminals even. My cousin Leo and his wife, you couldn’t rely on them for spit. But …” He raised a gloved finger as if testing the wind, grabbed his lapel with his free hand. “… if they should have a problem, they wouldn’t hesitate to place a call.
Schnorrers
the two of them.”

We walked on for a moment, the boardwalk creaking beneath our feet. Off in the distance, a man wearing a knit cap plodded toward us. He was bent far over, trying to keep the wind off his face. Grampa Itzy glared for a moment, as if he’d been deliberately interrupted, and waited until the man turned off onto one of the streets. “When Leo was starting out in manufacturing, the factors had him by the balls. Later on, he made it big. Then he would come to weddings in a limousine. In 1934, the landlord was gonna throw me and your father out from the store and I went to Leo for a loan. Like a beggar I went to him. He told me, ‘Itzy, I haven’t got dollar
one
.’ Meanwhile, he was going around with a showgirl from the Tropicana. A
shiksa
.”

Inevitably, my grandfather’s narrative wandered from relative to relative, as if he, himself, was moving along the strands of a spider’s web, pausing at each junction, examining, explaining, then sliding past. Leo had a mother he neglected. Her name was Rachel and she was too sick to care for herself. Itzy’s Aunt Celia took Rachel in, though Celia was already burdened with a daughter-in-law and two grandchildren.

“Celia was mourning her son, Alan, who died from cancer, but she didn’t say, ‘No, it’s too much for me.’ She took the old lady into her apartment, nursed her for three years. Then, after Rachel died, Leo came around asking, ‘So where’s my mother’s money?’”

I believe my grandfather had a dual purpose for these boardwalk stories. Without doubt, he felt a strong need to pass along the essential truths that had brought him through every disaster, from the death of his father to the ultimate nightmare of the great holocaust, a need brought to urgency as the Kaplans began to drift apart. His own two daughters, Iris and Miriam, had moved out to New Jersey; he saw them on family occasions, at
seders,
weddings,
bar mitzvahs
, funerals. Every summer, he and Ethyl spent a month traveling from one daughter to the other, visits that left him depressed for weeks.

“Sidney,” he once complained, his tone bewildered, almost wistful, “the children, they are like strangers to us. Like the
kinder
of strangers.”

Grampa Itzy’s daughters weren’t the only Kaplan children to move away. The family had money, now; its sons and daughters pursued careers far removed from those of their parents and grandparents. They attended colleges in distant cities, moved up to the mainstream model, the nuclear family, a split-level in the suburbs, a station wagon in the garage. I suppose, in the late 1950s, when most of these conversations took place (and while my
bubbe
was still alive), the losses couldn’t have amounted to much. But Grampa Itzy was always shrewd; he had an ability to sniff the air, taste disaster on the wind.

Years later, I came to realize that my grandfather had a second reason, this one more personal, for our trips to Brighton Beach. He wanted to tell
his
story, the story of the Kaplans, and whenever he tried it in the house, he butted heads with his wife. Not only did they disagree on the details, they disagreed on whose family history was to be preserved.

“I was a Fidelman before I was a Kaplan,” she insisted. “From 1875 my family was here.”

“
Nu,
you shouldn’t remind me.” With the exception of a cousin or two, Grampa Itzy disliked the Fidelmans. Descendants of a famous rabbi, the most important goal in their miserable lives (or so he loudly proclaimed) was to out-orthodox friends and relatives. “They wouldn’t eat in our house,” he once told me, “because we are not enough kosher. My dishes might send them to hell on the express train. Meanwhile, they don’t got two pennies to rub together.”

When my grandparents really got excited, they broke into Yiddish and I eventually learned the language well enough to follow their arguments. My darling
bubbe,
it turned out, had been a union organizer and a socialist in her youth, a rabble rouser who made impassioned speeches in Union Square. Grampa Itzy found her efforts to extend the obligations imposed by family to the society at large pitifully naive. She, on the other hand, declared his capitalist
macher
aspirations nothing more than
chutzpah
.

“You owned a store on the Lower East Side, Itzy,” she told him in Yiddish. “And you think it makes you a John D. Rockefeller.
Feh
.”

All of their arguments eventually came down to this essential difference in their worldviews. And when I heard the term
rachmones,
I knew the discussion had reached its zenith. It might be my grandfather accusing Ethyl of being excessively compassionate, using the word like conservative politicians use the phrase
bleeding heart
. Or Ethyl accusing her husband of possessing a heart of stone. A
shtarker
is what she called him, a tough guy, though I doubt very much if she understood how perfectly the word suited his self-image.

After my grandmother died, Grampa Itzy went from sitting
shiva
directly to his son’s spare bedroom. I don’t remember him ever returning alone to his own house. It was my job to accompany him as he arranged to close and sell his home. Magda, though she didn’t work, was never a possibility.

Grampa Itzy still spoke of his family as we waited for this or that relative to cart away this or that piece of his life, but the basic theme of his narrative took a definite turn.

“We was tough kids,” he told me. “We had to be tough. When Papa died the family helped out, also Jewish relief and the Bialystokers, but there was never enough.”

I remember him getting up, pacing with his hands behind his back as if we were still on the boardwalk. His house was slowly emptying and the faded carpet in the living room showed a brilliant blue in the space once covered by his sofa.

“The rich
goyim
called us street Arabs. To this day I don’t know what it means. We was always running wild through the streets. Fist fights was an everyday thing. When the Italian kids from Mulberry Street came to the neighborhood there was regular wars.”

My aunt Sylvie arrived a few minutes later, she and two men who worked in her husband’s appliance store. The men covered the walnut breakfront, a massive piece, with furniture pads, then hauled it to a van parked in the driveway. Aunt Sylvie watched them like a hawk. “They’ll break it for spite,” she told us after the van drove away. Then she hugged my grandfather. “Thank you Uncle Itzy. I know
Tante
Ethyl would have wanted it this way.”

Later, as we approached my parents’ home, Grampa Itzy slapped his hands together, shook his head as if clearing it after a blow. “The furniture, it has to go to the family, this I know. But I’m telling you, Sidney, if the house burns down tonight, I wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep.” He led me into the backyard, sat on the edge of a small patio. It was early summer and the grass was ankle high.

“I better cut this before the weekend,” I said, “or Dad’s gonna be pissed.”

Grampa Itzy ignored my comment. “Starting tomorrow,” he announced, “we don’t see each other so much. Sitting around in somebody else’s living room don’t agree with my constitution, so I’m going to the store with your father.” He grinned, showing tiny, faded teeth. “I’m gonna make a comeback.”

I was well into my teens by then, a prisoner of my hormones. The time for a boy and his grandfather was past and both of us knew it.

“When things was tough,” he said after a moment, “we was all
gonifs
. We stole from the peddlers on the street, food and sometimes clothes, a pair of pants or a dress. My brother, Nathan, would start a commotion, a fight, maybe, and I would snatch and run. We got vegetables this way, also butter and eggs. Sidney, the first few times I was so scared I nearly
plotzed,
but when the belly hurts, you do what you gotta do.” He leaned down to me, his eyebrows rising into narrow black semicircles. “After a while, I got used to the stealing, then I got to like it. A few times the Irisher bulls chased after me, but I knew the alleys and the basements and the rooftops. Itzhak Kaplan they couldn’t catch. Never.”

A static image, as complete as a photograph, jumped into my consciousness at that moment, an image I can pull up to this day. A small, thin, bandy-legged boy wearing an oversized coat and a cap that falls below his ears charges down an alleyway. The featureless walls on either side of the child narrow to a thin rectangle and the light from that rectangle frames the child. At the mouth of the alleyway, a helmeted policeman, a giant, waves his billy over his head. The cop’s breath steams in the air and he appears to be shouting. From behind the boy, a white dress streams like the plumage of an exotic bird.

F
OR THE NEXT SEVERAL
hours after Guzman’s call I sat in my chair (sat there in a state of suspension, like a pickled frog in a jar of formaldehyde) while Caleb and Julie tried to solve our mutual problem. I remember their measured conversation in bits and snatches, remember that I was preoccupied not with survival, but the sudden, internal flip from big-time, New York lawyer to hapless, hopeless jerk. Self-pity was the emotion of the hour. Self-pity as a tightrope suspended over a pit of clinical depression.

“I wasn’t about to shoot anyone,” Caleb insisted. “The point with the gun was to find out if they were punks. It was a test and they passed.”

“That doesn’t make them kingpins in the Cali cartel.” Julie’s voice was firm, without the slightest quaver of indecision. “In fact, I’d bet my left hand that Gomez is a low-level jerk who got in over his head. The key is what he said at the very end. He
has
to get the money, because he has to pay off his own suppliers. If he doesn’t …”

I don’t remember Caleb arguing that or any other point until Julie got to the bottom line of her argument, until she said, “What we should do, Caleb, is stall until we track them down, then … Then we should protect the family.” Julie was sitting next to Caleb, bent slightly forward at the waist, her crossed forearms resting on crossed knees.

“Just like that, huh? Just take a life and forget about it?”

“Actually,” I finally interrupted, “I like the stalling part.” I tried, and failed, to smile reassuringly. “Look, today’s Friday and Guzman isn’t calling back until Monday. Let’s take the time to check him out and see what develops. It’s too early to make any hard decisions.”

“I know what it’s like,” Julie insisted, “to be a dog locked up in a back room waiting for massa to come in and kick me. I’m not going back to that.” She shifted in her seat, frowned, jabbed a bony finger in Caleb’s general direction. “Just find them.”

“Well, I don’t plan to sit on my ass and wait for Gomez to come looking for me.” He sat back, chuckled manfully. “Course he wouldn’t actually be looking for
me.
Uh-uh. Most likely, ole Gomez’d come looking for Sid.” When his joke fell flat, he shrugged, continued: “Way I see it, Julie, it might be that Gomez and his boyfriend are just a couple of messenger boys. That the real muscle stayed home.”

I was up early the following morning, before 6 A.M., staring into the bathroom mirror. Tracing the lines of my face with the ring finger of my right hand. The rims of my eyes were swollen and nearly purple with fatigue. My nose was heavier than I remembered, the bridge shot through with curling red veins; my lips drooped at the corners except when I smiled and I couldn’t bring myself to smile.

And what I understood, as I turned on the shower and waited for the hot water to rise, was that I didn’t have the energy for a second comeback. If Priscilla Sweet told me to get lost (or, just as bad, if I simply walked away from the case and hoped Gomez and Berto got the message), I’d spend the rest of my life chasing the rent.