East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (4 page)

“Mir zull nisht vissen fin duss,
We shouldn’t know from that, sickness, an accident.
Gutt zull oopheeten,
God forbid.”

“A joke,” Adler said to him. “What’s the matter with you, you forgot how to laugh?”

There was a real game, a heavy one, scheduled for the following week and the Canarrick wanted to prepare for it. First, the money. He had enough. Then the cards. That was the delicate part, getting the new decks marked, replaced in their wrappers, placed in their boxes and sealed. He always had five or six decks on hand, ready for use.

Having the packs placed in two or three candy stores around where the game would be played, that was the most difficult part. The candy store owner had to be approached by somebody he knew well, usually it was Bulldog, but not always, the decks had to be held somewhere in the candy store so that just before the game when the proper person entered the store and asked for a deck or two of cards, there could be no mistake in selling him the wrong cards.

The Canarrick knew how to play his own game. Usually he played in games outside of the neighborhood, there were games in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, in other parts of Manhattan. He didn’t want to become involved in a game in his own neighborhood, sometimes, God forbid, something could go wrong, it never had, but better to keep it away from where he lived, from his street, from his part of the Lower East Side.

During the first game or two the Canarrick allowed the big shot, the sucker, to win a few dollars, maybe twelve, eighteen dollars, something like that. Then after that cause him to lose. Maybe twenty-five, thirty dollars. Depending. Then a small win, maybe six or seven dollars. Then get him good, a hundred dollars or more, if the sucker had that kind of money, and he usually did. The Canarrick played him real good, flung out his bait and made the sucker want to come back, made him want to up his bidding, made him so eager for the big kill, so he thought, that he was blinded to the fact that he had been hooked and was being taken.

But the Canarrick wanted to move up, he wanted bigger game. He yearned for winnings of five hundred dollars, maybe a thousand, and maybe, maybe, even more. It happened to other gamblers, why couldn’t it happen to him?

Rifkeh had told him that her boss in the blouse factory, Kaplan, a married man, was constantly talking to her, stopping her as she was about to leave the shop after work, telling her, when there were just the two of them in that long loft that he would like to take her out, he really liked her, it was one of those things he couldn’t help. He had been married for over twenty-five years, he just lived with his wife, that was all, they barely had anything to do with each other, they said hello, they said goodbye, they ate together in silence, everything was so polite and cold, the marriage was no marriage no more, it had become an endless terrible habit, something that was killing him.

There were no fights, they were beyond that, what was there to fight about? He gave her everything, she had a fur coat, dresses, jewelry, shoes, whatever she wanted. She got what she wanted, Kaplan had said, but what did he get? Nothing, nothing at all. He wanted someone, he needed someone.

“I know, I know,” the Canarrick had said to her and laughing scornfully and rolling his eyes towards the ceiling, had said, “He wants to talk to you, yeah? Why not?” His tone had suddenly changed as he had said, “But that ain’t all he wants.” Rifkeh had averted her eyes from him. “But I tell you what,” the Canarrick had said. “Invite him here, yeah, bring him. You tell him I’m your brother, I live here. The Bulldog, he’s your brother, it’s no lie and he’s living with his
maydel,
and that’s no lie. He comes around here to see you and the boy, yeah? You can tell Kaplan that too.”

Rifkeh had remained silent, staring hard at the Canarrick as he was speaking. “No,” she said.

“And why not? He’s your boss, he wants to come, let him come. Invite this Kaplan for a glass tea, a little cake. Me, I’ll come in later, maybe a half hour after he comes, me, the brother, we’ll meet. I’ll talk to this Kaplan and later on I’ll talk to him about a game of poker, right here, in this place. He’s got money, this Kaplan, yes?”

“Yeah,” Rifkeh had replied, her eyes shut as she shook her head. “Canarrick, I can’t. Don’t make me do it. It’s not nice. I don’t want to do it.”

“You want us to get married?” the Canarrick had asked, and Rifkeh, her eyes open, had nodded. “So we need some money to get married. I don’t want you working in that shop no more, not my Rifkeleh. We got this Kaplan now, I take him for what I can get, a thousand? maybe two? who knows? I’ll have enough to open up a shop with Bulldog, maybe a few other partners and then we’ll get married, I promise you.”

Rifkeh had pondered that for a while staring at the tabletop as her finger had made meaningless invisible patterns on it. As if the words had difficulty in being enunciated she had said, “But what about Leo? I don’t want him mixed up in this
chazzarai,
this mess.”

“The boy’ll be all right. We know each other a long time, him and me. He calls me Uncle now, so to this Kaplan I’ll be the boy’s real uncle.”

Rifkeh had remained silent for what seemed a long time. Shaking her head suddenly she had pushed herself up slowly from the kitchen table, heaved a great sigh and had said, “We’ll get married? You mean it this time? You promise, Canarrick?”

“Yeah,” he had replied looking up into her face. “I told you before. I promise.”

Kaplan came to the house and sitting in the kitchen with Rifkeh, he was delighted. His eyes constantly followed her as she moved across the room. She served him tea and a slice of dark brown honey cake. He looked at her, a great smile on his face as she placed the glass of steaming liquid in front of him.

“Ai, Rifkeleh,” he said to her between short sips of tea. “A
balabusteh,
a real good housekeeper. I expected that from you. See, I could tell from the shop. I could see it even there.” She sat down at the table, dropped two cubes of sugar in her glass of hot tea and stirring the tea looked down into the swirling amber liquid. Kaplan said, “You got a nice place here, you keep it nice.” Rifkeh took a sip of the hot tea and Kaplan said as he looked around the flat, “But you don’t belong here, not in a place like this. You should have better than this. I mean it.”

“Kaplan,” she said to him as she held her glass motionless near her lips. When he had just entered the flat she had called him Mr. Kaplan as she always had but he had immediately insisted that she call him Kaplan. And now she said to him with a sad smile, “I can only afforda this. I got a boy to support, you know that. You should pardon me,” and she began to laugh mirthlessly as she put her tea glass down on the table, “but right now I wish for a living, that’s all. You know what I get paid.”

Kaplan ate a small piece of cake. “Good honey cake,” he said. Staring at her he swallowed, wiped his lips carefully, leaned forward over the table to be closer to her and said, “And so
schayn,
so pretty.” He let the napkin drop to the table and said, “Listen to me, you don’t belong in a shop, you don’t belong here, in a place like this. Not you. Never. You’re a-a-a-a princess,” he said. And with a deliberate nod of his head, “I mean it. I don’t lie, Rifkeleh.”

She smiled a wan smile thinking how she hated all of this, this deception, this luring on of this old man whose senses had become blinded by the onset of his old age, his grasping for more out of life than a marriage gone wrong, that had become meaningless, of living in an empty house, with his three children gone, departed. Rifkeh had heard they lived in scattered sections of America, where? where? in some lost great beyond far away from New York.

And what about her? She was, what? A sort of
almooneh,
a widow. Yet, even worse. Like an
almooneh
she too lived without a husband, but Rifkeh’s husband had not died, he lived lost and buried somewhere in that vast distance away that was the Old World, he was still alive. An
almooneh
received respect, the husband had died, been taken away, and that was final.

But with herself, Rifkeh, it was different. She was discussed in a terrible way, she knew what the gossip was. What was it that Mottel had found in her that had forced him to run away from her, to leave her and his son abandoned? What were her great hidden faults? Men thought about that when they were with her, she knew it. Those who had come somewhat close to her during those empty forlorn years when she had struggled alone, those men had kept a certain emotional distance from her. They had wanted only one thing, something shameful and defiling to her, something she could not do. She could not become their unpaid whore, their human mattress.

They promised nothing, yet wanted everything from her. She could not do it. Only the Canarrick had promised to marry her, only he had uttered those words she so desperately had wanted to hear. Only he had struck up some sort of a relationship with her son, those others they had disregarded Leo, her son,
her son,
and to them he had been merely a piece of furniture in the flat, if that.

Now looking at the man across the table from her, she thought, Kaplan, Kaplan, Kaplan. Go home. You’re an old man, forget about such things like you’re thinking. Go back to your wife, to what you have. You got more than me, more than most people. What do you want, the world? Go.

The Canarrick entered the flat then. Rifkeh introduced him as her brother to Kaplan, the two men shook hands. All three of them now seated at the table, Kaplan asked the Canarrick what he did, the Canarrick told him that he worked in the garment center, he was a finisher. Kaplan nodded.

Sipping his tea that Rifkeh had just served, the mist of steam rising up from the glass, the Canarrick asked Kaplan, “And you? What do you do?”

Kaplan formed a small smile, laughed softly, and said in a bantering tone of voice, “I work in a shop too. Blouses. For women.” He gave a sly glance at Rifkeh, laughed once more, and said, “You could say Rifkeh and me, we work together, yeah, Rifkeh?”

“Yeah, sure,” Rifkeh replied hating all of this. “We work together.”

Leo entered the flat, Rifkeh introduced him to Kaplan. She could see Kaplan studying the boy. “You did your homework?” she said to the boy. He nodded as he stared at Kaplan. “You got more studying to do?” Again he nodded. She pointed to the second bedroom and said, “Go in the room and study.” For a moment Leo remained in the kitchen, glancing towards the bedroom not knowing how to make an appropriate exit, grasping for something adequate yet completely elusive to say to the stranger, Kaplan. “Go,” his mother said. “Mr. Kaplan knows you want to say goodnight to him.” The boy mumbled something to Kaplan who smiled at him.

As Leo entered the bedroom Kaplan said to Rifkeh, “You got a nice boy there, I can see that right away. It comes from someplace, it shows what kind of a mother you are.
De appeleh fahlt nisht fahr fin de boim,
the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.”

Rifkeh smiled then, a true smile. “He is my life,” she said.

“And why not?” the Canarrick said. “A good boy is precious like gold.” Leo had shut the door of the bedroom. The Canarrick was talking to Kaplan, leading him slowly to a discourse of what he, Kaplan, did in his spare time. They talked on for a short while and finally the Canarrick asked, “Do you like cards? Me, I like to play. Poyker.”

“Me too,” Kaplan said.

“Sometime we’ll play, yeah?” the Canarrick said casually.

“Here?” Kaplan asked looking at Rifkeh.

“Of course, here,” the Canarrick said. “Why shouldn’t it be here?”

So it had started. Once or twice a week, after work, Kaplan came to the flat where Rifkeh served him tea and cake. Kaplan met Bulldog and one of Bulldog’s friends, someone who always joined the games that the Canarrick and Bulldog had set up.

Before Kaplan’s second visit to Rifkeh’s flat, Leo, finished with his homework went down to the street, stood on the stoop of the tenement when Kaplan appeared. Stopping near the boy Kaplan said, “Ah, Leo, yeah? That is your name?” The boy nodded slowly to the stranger. “Here,” Kaplan said as he fished in his pocket for a coin. “Here’s ten cents. For you. Go. Get something for yourself in the candy store. Enjoy.”

Leo stared down at the hand holding the coin. He wanted that coin, oh, how wanted it! It was a magnet from which his eyes could not tear away. He wanted it but he could not take it, not from this Mr. Kaplan whom he did not know, whom he didn’t really want to know, what was Mr. Kaplan doing there seeing his mother, why?

Leo, in the bedroom, had overheard the Canarrick in the kitchen telling his mother about the plans to ensnare this Mr. Kaplan and it had all seemed too wrong to Leo. How could the Canarrick do this, how could Leo’s mother? Wrong was wrong.

Cautiously, as if it had a life of its own, his arm became extended, he watched as his hand took the coin from the man, and his eyes averted, he mumbled, “Thanks.”

“Now that’s what I like, a good boy who says thanks,” Kaplan said with a smile.

In that first poker game Kaplan won approximately eighteen dollars. Bulldog and the Canarrick both lost a total of nineteen dollars, the other player won about a dollar.