Israel (52 page)

The look on Danny's face stopped Abe. The color had drained from the boy. His brown eyes burned with hatred. He's going to cry, Abe thought, softening, willing the tears from Danny's eyes. Cry, and then I can embrace you and say I'm sorry.

“I hate you.” Danny's tone was feral, deep and low beyond his years. “Why don't you die, old man? Then you'll be with her. You'd rather that than here with us.”

“That's not true, Danny—I—” Abe, at a loss for words, merely shook his head.

Danny turned on his heel, looking for something—anything—to lash out against to relieve his fury.

“Danny, listen to me—”

The boy swept a row of canned vegetables from the shelf.

“That's money, damn you,” Abe shouted, his anger refueled and flaring more intensely than before.

Danny viciously booted the tins out of his path and stomped out of the store. The bell above the transom gaily jingled as he straight-armed the door open. It quietly closed itself in his wake.

Abe sagged against the counter, his breath coming in ragged sobs. Sixty-three years old and he felt like a hundred. His heart was pounding and in his mouth was the metallic taste of adrenaline mixed with bile. He had to be careful. The doctor had told him not to get excited, not to put a strain on his heart.

His medical rejection certificate was still in the front window. The paper was torn and yellowed and the inked
medical terms had faded to illegibility, but now Abe knew what the draft board doctor meant. For several years his heart had been whispering of death.

“He never knew her,” Rebecca said, “not like we knew her.” She was standing at the foot of the stairs that led up to the apartment above the store.

“You heard? He won't got to school. You watch. It's going to be the same thing as with the bar mitzvah. Did you hear him wish me dead?”

“He didn't mean it.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Just like you didn't mean it when you cursed him.”

Abe nodded. “Yeah, you're right. I'm too old to have such a son. What can I do to understand a thirteen-year-old boy? When I was his age I wouldn't have understood him—”

“Oh, Father.” Abe watched his daughter as she walked toward him. He remembered his vague but real disappointment when it was evident that Becky was not going to look like her mother. Oh, there was some of Leah around Becky's nose and eyes and in her thick, dark hair—how absurdly angry Abe had been the day that Becky cut her hair to shoulder-length. But Leah was a slight, thin woman with narrow hips. Becky was big-boned with wide hips and a buxom figure. She wasn't plump; her baby fat had been just that, now she was a strong, healthy girl with a flat belly and firm arms from helping with the boxes in the store. Even though she was demure of manner and dress, Abe had seen the way she caught the young men's attention and was glad of it. He wanted his daughter to have the conjugal bliss that had been his while his wife was alive. He loved his daughter and he wanted her to be happy.

“We knew Mama,” Rebecca was saying as she hugged Abe. “She's a real person to us. To Danny she's just that strange woman beside you in the photograph. When you tell him to do things or not do them on account of Mother,
it's like—” Becky furrowed her brow. “It's like what the goyim go through when their priests warn them not to betray Jesus.”

Abe pulled away, putting his hands over his ears. “Please! You want to put me in the wrong?” He pointed at the tin cans, some dented, scattered on the floor. “When that animal did this, did he betray me? Tell me what I've done that's so bad for him. I feed him and clothe him and give him a roof over his head. He goes to school and every year I put something away for his college education. But he acts like a dunce, insulting his teachers, and he wishes me dead.”

“You wished him dead first.”

“Shut up,” Abe growled, angry because he knew she was right. “Don't be a wiseacre. Are you going against me as well?”

Becky bent to pick up the cans.

“Are you?” Abe demanded.

“No.”

Abe nodded, satisfied, and then sighed. “I'm exhausted. I'm going upstairs for a while. You'll manage here?” Without waiting for an answer Abe left the store to trudge upstairs to the apartment. He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the cot in the kitchen. Since Becky's adolescence she'd had the privacy of the bedroom. Danny slept on a foldout couch in the living room and Abe slept here, his old bones kept warm by the gas stove. They could have moved to larger quarters—Stefano had insisted that Abe continue on as the figurehead owner of the building, but he didn't mind if Abe and his children chose to move. Stefano also offered to have one of the larger apartments in the building vacated, but how could Abe give up these rooms where Leah lived? I would freeze to death in any other apartment, Abe mused drowsily. Here Leah keeps me warm. I should let strangers live here?

As he drifted off, Becky's recriminations rose in his
mind to haunt his dreams. God, forgive me for what I said to my son. Make me better. I'll do what's right for Danny if I can, but it's not my fault if I don't—can't—love him.

Abe fell asleep the way he always did, in his fantasy world. Leah was alive; they cuddled together every night, and by day they laughed and played with their children, magnificent Rebecca and their laughing, loving, respectful blond and blue-eyed son Haim.

Becky finished reshelving the fallen tin cans just as the late afternoon rush began. With the exception of the glass-fronted refrigerated meat counter, which her father had installed several years ago in the rear of the store to replace the barrels of smoked meat and fish, the market was set up to be self-service. Adult shoppers did serve themselves; still, later afternoon invariably brought a flurry of children bearing shopping lists from their mothers. Sometimes a dollar bill or so was wadded up in the folds of the note, but more often the lists closed with a directive to put it on the bill.

Making up orders while the children waited was a nuisance. Becky also had to run the meat counter and check out the customers at the cash register. Still, the children's shopping lists had to be filled, just as credit had to be given. It was these extras that gave a small independent grocery a chance against the larger, much better stocked supermarkets with their cut-rate prices and newspaper advertising.

The afternoon wore on. There were jam-ups at both the meat counter and the cash register, but the majority waited patiently for Becky to get to them.

Becky resisted the temptation to call her father to lend a hand. He needed what little rest he could get. She knew he wasn't sleeping very well at night, and the fight with Danny had clearly taken a lot out of him. Besides, she
worked better when her father wasn't around to peer over her shoulder and criticize everything she did.

Danny came back a little after seven. He used his key, for Becky had locked up for the night. She was kneeling behind the meat counter, scrubbing the big squat wooden chopping block. He stood watching her, his hands in his pockets. “Want me to finish that for you?”

“I'm almost done.” A tendril of hair had fallen across her eyes. She tried to blow it off of her face but couldn't. Her hand rose to brush her hair behind her ear, but then she hesitated. Her fingers had been in the scrub water. Becky hated the smell of it on her hands and certainly didn't want it in her hair. Danny came around the side of the counter and brushed back her hair.

“Thanks.” Becky smiled. Danny stood beside her, affectionate yearning in his eyes and posture. Becky dropped the scrub brush into the bucket and straightened up, wiping her hands on a towel. Danny stood just chest high to her. He seemed small and defenseless against their father's aloof, gruff manner. “I'll say to you what I told him. Neither of you really meant what you said.”

“Doesn't matter,” Danny said too brightly, “but I think he did mean it, Becky. Pa's not proud of it, but it's still the way he feels.” He gazed at his sister, his eyes hard, daring her to contradict him. “I can't stand it when we get into fights like that. My guts get all tight, you know?”

“Maybe you should try to please him a little more.”

“I can't. He hates me! He can't stand to have me around. You know that.”

“I don't.” Becky clasped his shoulder.

“He won't let me help in the store.”

“That's because he wants you to use the time to study. He wants you to have an education.”

“That's what he says. The real reason is that he
doesn't want me here with him. At night at the supper table he never looks me in the eye or talks to me.”

“He'll change,” Becky said, “and so will you. You'll see.”

“He'll never change.”

“I did. About you, I mean. When Father took me out of high school to work in the store I hated you.”

“You did?” Danny looked up at her, his eyes wide with apprehension.

“Father said, ‘You're the oldest and can help me best, and you're a girl, so what do you need with an education? To get married, to have babies? For that a girl doesn't need school lessons.'”

She twisted her face into their father's scowl and her raspy voice perfectly captured Abe's tone and inflections. Danny giggled in appreciation.

“Anyway, I used to cry in bed every night, missing my schoolmates, thinking I was never going to be anybody all because you were the boy and I was the girl—”

“I'm sorry.”

“Hush. I didn't tell you to make you feel bad. For one thing, working in the store has turned out to be good training for me. I wanted to study retailing in school. Here I do most of the ordering and keep the books, just as Mother once did. I've learned plenty that will be useful someday, when I can get a real job in a big store.

“No, Danny, I told you about my feelings only to prove to you that people do change. Someday when you're a little older, you and Father will act differently to one another.”

“That's forever from now.”

Becky chuckled. “Not so long, and in the meantime I'll speak to him.”

“You will?” He gazed up hopefully.

“Uh huh. I'll see if he'll let you help in the store.” She took on a mock stern expression. “But you've got to
prove that you're a man. You study hard and make Father proud, and we'll see about you helping out around here.”

“That's a deal. You know, if Pa let me help, you could look for that real job you wanted.”

“Yes.”

“It'd be sorta like I was making it up to you for having to leave school.”

“Oh, Danny—” Becky hugged her brother. “I love you, Danny.”

“I love you, too,” Danny murmured. After a moment he asked, “Are you going to the library later?”

Becky glanced at the Coca-Cola wall clock. “If I can,” she said. “It closes at nine-fifteen.”

“Then I'm going back out too.”

“Danny, it's after dark.”

“I don't want to be here alone with him.”

“Well, at least get your coat. You'll freeze in a sweater.”

Danny looked reluctant. “I'd rather not go upstairs for it. He might wake up.”

“I'll get it for you.” Becky tiptoed up the stairs and passed quietly through the kitchen into the living room. She pulled Danny's coat out of the closet, checked to see that his muffler was stuffed into its sleeve and returned downstairs, pretending she hadn't heard Abe calling for her. If Danny heard her talking to her father he might run out without his coat.

“Thanks.” Danny tugged on the garment and patiently suffered Becky to wrap his scarf around his throat.

“Not too late coming home,” she called to him as he ran out.

Becky was going over the credit accounts when Abe came downstairs. She'd turned off the opalescent ceiling fixtures to save on electricity and worked in the small pool of light cast by the goose-neck lamp clipped onto the cash
register. She'd emptied the cigar box of credit vouchers onto the wooden counter. She was in the process of sorting the slips by name, adding up the amounts, and stapling the vouchers together when she noticed her father. His wrinkled face was still puffy with sleep, his right cheek scored by the pillow. His hair had gone iron grey after his wife's death, and in the last couple of years it had pretty much thinned out so that there was a horseshoe fringe around his ears, and a few feathery wisps on top. He hadn't shaved in the last day or so.

“We were busy tonight,” she reported. “We ran out of chopped meat.”

Abe grunted acknowledgement. His baggy rumpled trousers hung around his hips and his cardigan was misbuttoned across his paunch. “The Schwartzes pay?” he asked, fingering the neat stacks of credit slips.

“You kidding?” Becky chuckled absently, her mind on her addition.

“Sons of bitches,” Abe said mildly. He stuck a pencil above his ear, licked his finger and began to rifle through the slips of paper. “You give to Ronzi?”

“I gave,” Becky replied, “because you told me to, but look at their bill. Six dollars they owe us. Today they bought two pounds of sirloin, two pounds at thirty-nine cents a pound. Rib roast at a quarter a pound wasn't good enough.”

Abe chuckled. “You sound just like your mother.”

Becky looked away. “Please, Father, you know I don't like it when you say things like that.”

Abe shrugged. “Anyway, she always wondered why I gave credit. She forgot how all the boys in the union chipped in to give me the stake to open this place. And then in '33, you remember the day the banks closed, how people were running wild in the streets? All those drunken Irish gangs came to Cherry Street and for a few bad
minutes we thought they would break our windows and loot the store.”

Becky nodded. “I was crying, I was so frightened. Everybody from the neighborhood lined up in front of the store. ‘Get out,' they told the Irish ruffians. “This is our neighborhood and our store and you're not going to wreck it.'”