Big Silence (28 page)

“I’m going to college” was Tisa’s answer.

She turned and walked away. Butchie finally got his hands on the knife, thus covering Tisa’s fingerprints. Then he slid down the wall and died, a very puzzled look on his face.

On that night, two homeless men in their fifties but looking at least eighty had an argument where they lived over a warm-air exhaust behind a Thai restaurant on Clark Street. Both men, strange as it seemed, even to them, were named Tom Evans. One was black. One white. Other homeless people they knew and the people at the Salvation Army had taken to calling both of them Long Tom. Now the two of them were arguing loudly over who deserved the nickname.

“I’m taller,” said white Tom.

“I’m thinner,” said black Tom.

They were in each other’s face now. They kept repeating “I’m taller.” “I’m thinner.” Their noses almost touched. Since they both had the same terrible breath, they didn’t notice the smell. White Tom had spent much of his life in state mental hospitals. Black Tom had owned a successful used car lot on the South Side. A black gang, which he felt should support black businesses, had started extorting money from him. Soon there were no profits. Soon there was no business. Black Tom had gone into a terrible depression and wandered, winding up in this alley.

White Tom threw the first punch. It caught Black Tom on the forehead, breaking two knuckles on White Tom’s right hand. It also gave Black Tom a terrible headache. He threw his punch and caught White Tom in the stomach when he wasn’t ready. White Tom bent over. Even in the dim light Black Tom could see that his friend and enemy was spitting blood. He could hear him moan.

“Oh, shit,” said Black Tom. “Sit down. I’ll get some help. Don’t die. You’re Long Tom. You got respect. Don’t die.”

When Black Tom ran down the alley, White Tom repeated, “I’m Long Tom, dammit,” and smiled.

His stomach cancer was far advanced, and the punch had done him no good. He sat down still smiling.

That night the dog with no name stood in the shadows and watched the two men who smelled of human excrement shout and fight. When one of the men fell down, the dog smelled the blood. It was not the good blood smell but the smell of something bad.

The dog watched the other man run down the alley, and then the dog ran past the fallen man whose eyes were closed. He ran silently. Something inside told him to go to the place where the man had talked to him like a person and had given him food.

That man was a puzzle, something curious. Maybe he would talk again, give him food. But those weren’t the only reasons the dog was running silently through alleys for miles.

The man had smelled of, sounded of, something the dog had never known, something that made him feel calm, even safe. The dog wanted to feel that again.

On that night Dr. Mustapha Aziz sat in the one-bedroom condo he had bought a month after his wife and daughter had been killed. The house and all its possessions had been sold at a significant loss.

The condo was in an old building in Evanston right past the turn on Sheridan Road beyond the cemetery. It was rumored that Marlon Brando and Wally Cox had once shared the large third-floor apartment two buildings down. That apartment, like Dr. Aziz’s, faced Lake Michigan. Even in the darkness, with his lights out Aziz could see occasional whitecaps along the waves that hit the rocks. He could also hear the lazy powerful
whoosh
of the waves as they rolled and crashed.

There were nights when he would sit till two or three in the morning listening, watching. There were nights when he would fall asleep in his chair. The chair was deep and comfortable. Most of the furniture had been picked up by a cousin in the Oriental rug business who had connections with furniture dealers in the Arab Moslem community.

Aziz’s pleasures were few. He had given away his collection of classical CDs and records. His family had died coming home from a concert. Any classical music was a reminder. Now he watched old movies on television, read articles and books on psychiatric treatment, had an occasional evening and meal with relatives and friends, and listened to the lake.

Since the accident, Aziz had begun to get more and more referrals of patients suffering from extreme grief. The assumption was that these patients would be more willing to talk to someone who had also suffered and that he would be more capable of dealing with their problems because of what they had suffered.

In a sense, they had been right. Aziz had more referrals than he could handle. The rich, the old, the young, the nearly poor came to him with a pain he recognized even when it was masked with anger or defiance. Many of them dared him to help. Others came in the hope of getting something that he knew he might not be able to deliver.

As his specialty as a grief therapist grew, Aziz feared it would lead him into an even deeper depression, but he gradually realized that the opposite had happened. He wanted to help. He had returned to his religion in a cautious manner and begun to have some life, had even thought, with the urging of his family, that he might some day consider marrying again. He was a young man.

With his return to religion had come an interest in his culture and the food of his culture. He had begun to collect art work — vases, paintings, furniture — made by Israeli Moslem artists. Gradually, he knew, these acquisitions would replace all the furnishings with which his cousin had decorated his apartment. The culture in which he had grown and to which he had paid scant attention in his hope of escaping from it now interested him as few things did.

Although he was not a happy man, Dr. Mustapha Aziz had taught himself how to be a man reasonably at peace with himself. It was the goal he set for his patients.

A particularly large wave crashed against the shore below him.

Aziz smiled and closed his eyes.

The heavy, homely sad face of Lieberman’s brother came to him as he quickly moved into sleep. There, Mustapha Aziz was sure, was someone whom he might be able to help.

On that night, 106 babies were born in Chicago hospitals and who knows how many in bedrooms, washrooms, and alleys. Five adults and teens died as a result of homicide. Births still outnumbered the deaths. Television and fear made a bad problem seem worse. Less than 1 percent of the deaths in Chicago each year were results of homicides. It wasn’t even close statistically to other causes, and that night was no different.

Agnes Sheffer was a fifty-two-year-old African American nurse at Michael Reese Hospital. That night she helped deliver a baby, and the mother, who was rich and white, said she wanted to name the baby Agnes. Agnes had saved her tears till she was alone in the women’s room. Agnes had been through this before.

In the morning, free from drugs and after a talk with her husband, the woman whose baby she had helped to deliver would apologize to Agnes and say that she had been carried away by the nurse’s kindness and the baby had to be named after a grandmother or someone. Agnes understood. Over the years, though, there had been three girls named Agnes born and named. Now Agnes cleaned up, checked the clock, got into her street clothes, and went to the OB desk to be sure her replacement had come. She had. It was a little after five and still dark when Agnes left the hospital and crossed the parking lot. She could have asked for an escort. She should have asked for an escort. But she didn’t and nothing happened to her. She would work for a dozen more years and then retire to Mobile where she had family.

That night Lieberman walked through the door of his house prepared to eat quickly and work with his granddaughter on her science project. The child had chosen causes of death in the United States, a subject about which Bess had worried and which Lieberman found not in the least bit morbid.

“People die,” said Lieberman.

“God knows,” Bess had said.

“And so do I,” Lieberman had said as they sat in the kitchen one night almost two weeks earlier having tea and some hard, toasted bagels. “We’ll take her to the library, get some poster board. She’s got crayons. The other kids in her class will love it. They must be sick of seeing sprouting potatoes and two plastic bottles taped together with water inside them. Morbidity is not morbid. It’s life.”

“She’s eight,” said Bess.

“If she wants this to be the time she knows, let it be,” said Lieberman.

Now, Lieberman walked through the door prepared to say good-bye to his daughter if she were still there, have a quick dinner, and work with Melisa, but it was not to be.

The dining room table was alive with people, and the smell of kosher food was beautifully overwhelming.

“You’re late, Abe, but we waited,” Bess said, sitting at the far end of the table.

He had forgotten. It was Friday,
Shabbat.

There were the kids, Maish and Yetta, Lisa and her husband, Marvin.

“Maish brought the food,” Yetta said.

Maish always brought food when he came to the Sabbath dinner. It was always prepared with special care by Terrell.

The men and Barry were all wearing
kepuhs.
There was one at Lieberman’s plate. Lieberman recognized it. It was one of the purple satin ones given out at some wedding at the temple last year. For the moment, Lieberman couldn’t remember who it was who got married. He would check inside the little cap where the names and date were written.

“I’ll wash my hands,” he said, and Bess knew that meant he would put his gun in the drawer and take off his holster. “Maish, did you? …”

“I did,” Maish said looking normally glum.

“Later we’ll talk,” Lieberman said, heading for his and Bess’s bedroom.

In three minutes, he was back at his place across from his wife. He put on the purple
kepuh
and Bess started immediately with the blessing over the candles. The women covered their eyes, held out their hands, and prayed. The loudest was Melisa. Then came the blessing over the wine. Lieberman didn’t bother to ask his brother if he wanted to say the blessing. In the past, before David died, Maish had always shrugged and said, “Why not?” and said the blessing. He hadn’t said the blessing since. So Lieberman said it, holding up the
kiddish
cup, pouring the wine, a bottle of the good kosher California red, not the sweet, sweet kosher of his childhood. The cup was passed, everyone drank. Maish hesitated and drank and the cup came back to Lieberman empty.

Melisa said the
hammotzeh,
the blessing over the
challah,
and proceeded with great gusto to tear the bread into pieces, sprinkling a little salt on each piece and passing the pieces around.

Only then did Abe pass the wine bottle while Yetta and Bess brought in the food from the kitchen. Matzoh ball soup, chicken in the pot, noodle kugel.

“Marvin and Lisa have an eleven o’clock flight,” said Bess. “I said we would drive them.”

“Can we go?” asked Barry, looking not at his mother but his grandfather.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” said Lieberman. “You can sleep in the car on the way back if your grandmother says okay.”

“Okay,” Bess said, passing the food.

Lieberman noticed that Marvin Alexander’s dark hand touched Lisa’s from time to time and Lieberman’s daughter smiled when it did. From time to time she touched his shoulder. Alexander was the best-dressed man at the table. This was a holy weekly dinner and he planned to respect it. Not for the first time, Lieberman wondered what this doctor who spoke Hebrew and knew the classics saw in his moody but brilliant daughter. It was a puzzle Abe would never solve.

In contrast to Dr. Marvin Alexander, Maish was an indifferent
shlump.
He wore a wrinkled white shirt and no tie and a jacket that was beginning to show signs not only of decay but impending doom.

“Basketball practice starts next week at the JCC,” said Barry. “Just found out today. Grandpa, I told them you’d coach again.”

“Maish, you gonna help again this year?” Abe asked.

Maish shrugged noncommittally. Abe was sure his brother would help. He might be able to scorn God for a while, but the lure of that basketball, which he handled like a magic floating ball when he was younger, would be too much to resist. Maish knew the rankings of all the college teams. Maish knew the stats and standings of every NBA team and even the women’s league. He had worried about Michael Jordan’s threats to retire and hoped Kobe Bryant wouldn’t burn out young. He searched nearly in vain for a Jewish player.

Sad to say, Barry had not inherited his grandfather’s or his granduncle’s ability on the court, but he had inherited their heart and no sense of fear. He was of average height, but he was one of the top rebounders in his age bracket.

“Bar Mitzvah,” Bess reminded all present.

“I’ve got it down,” said Barry. “English, Hebrew, the
Torah
reading, my speech. Rabbi Wass says I’ve got it down.”

“We’ll be back for the Bar Mitzvah,” said Marvin.

“You gonna convert, Marvin?” Barry asked, cutting into an extremely tender piece of chicken.

“I don’t think so, Barry,” he said. “Methodist, Methodist is my belief. I’m a Methodist till I die. Till old grim death comes knocking at my door, I’ll be eating Methodist pie.”

“If you eat too much pie, it clogs your arteries and you die of heart disease,” said Melisa. “That’s a heart problem. More people die of heart problems in the United States than anything else, twenty-two percent.”

“That’s interesting,” said Marvin, who, Lieberman was sure, as a pathologist, could tell the child more about failed and diseased hearts than she could ever learn from the library.

The dinner went well, right down to the rice pudding dessert, which was low cal and low fat. Lieberman’s stomach had not fully recovered from his lunch with El Perro, but it had come back enough to enjoy the meal that had been placed in front of him tonight.

“We have to go,” Bess said, checking her watch.

“Maish and I will clean up,” Yetta volunteered.

Maish said nothing.

“A word with Maish while Marvin and Lisa get their bags,” said Abe.

Bess and Yetta began to clear immediately. All the men and Barry removed their
kepuhs
and placed them on top of each other on the table. Maish and Abe moved into the living room.