Short Stories: Five Decades (21 page)

“Momma,” Helen said gently. “Poppa’s been dead fifteen years. How much difference can one day make to him?”

“Never mind,” Madam Rechevsky said, with magnificent, resounding resignation. “Forgive me if I have troubled you on this trifling matter. Go. Go to your appointments. Go to the beauty parlor. Go to the cocktail parties. I will take the subway to your dead father’s grave.”

Helen closed her eyes. “I’ll pick you up in an hour, Momma.”

“Yes,” said Madam Rechevsky decisively. “And please don’t wear that red hat. For your father’s sake.”

“I won’t wear the red hat.” Helen lay back and wearily put the phone back on its pedestal.

“This is a fine car to be going to a cemetery in,” Madam Rechevsky was saying as they drove out through Brooklyn. She sat up straight as a little girl in school, savagely denying her seventy-three years with every line of her smart seal coat, every expert touch of rouge, every move of her silken legs. She looked around her contemptuously at the red leather and chromium of Helen’s roadster. “A sport model. A great man lies buried, his relatives come to visit him in a cream-colored convertible automobile.”

“It’s the only car I have, Momma.” Helen delicately twisted the wheel in her eloquent, finely gloved hands. “And I’m lucky they haven’t taken it away from me by now.”

“I told you that was the wrong man for you, in the first place, didn’t I?” Madam Rechevsky peered coldly at her daughter, her deep gray eyes flashing and brilliant, rimmed beautifully in mascara, with a touch of purple. “Many years ago I warned you against him, didn’t I?”

“Yes, Momma.”

“And now—now you are lucky when you collect alimony six months out of twelve.” Madam Rechevsky laughed bitterly. “Nobody ever listened to me, not my own children. Now they suffer.”

“Yes, Momma.”

“And the theater.” Madam Rechevsky waved her hands fiercely. “Why aren’t you on the stage this season?”

Helen shrugged. “The right part hasn’t come along this season.”

“The right part!” Madam Rechevsky laughed coldly. “In my day we did seven plays a year, right part or no right part.”

“Momma, darling …” Helen shook her head. “It’s different now. This isn’t the Yiddish Theater and this isn’t 1900.”

“That was a better theater,” Madam Rechevsky said loudly. “And that was a better time.”

“Yes, Momma.”

“Work!” Madam Rechevsky hit her thighs emphatically with her two hands. “We worked! The actor acted, the writer wrote, the audience came! Now—movies! Pah!”

“Yes, Momma.”

“Even so, you’re lazy.” Madam Rechevsky looked at herself in her handbag mirror to make sure that the violence of her opinions had not disarranged her face. “You sit back and wait for alimony and even so it doesn’t come. Also …” She examined her daughter critically. “The way you dress is very extreme.” She squinted to sharpen the image. “But you make a striking impression. I won’t deny that. Every one of my daughters makes a striking impression.” Madam Rechevsky shook her head. “But nothing like me, when I was a little younger …” She sat back and rode in silence. “Nothing like me …” she murmured. “Nothing like me, at all.…”

Helen walked briskly beside her mother through the marble-crowded cemetery, their feet making a busy scuffle along the well-kept gravel walks. Madam Rechevsky clutched a dozen yellow chrysanthemums in her hands and on her face was a look of anticipation, almost pleasure, as they approached the grave.

“Perhaps …” A bearded old man in holy black, all very clean and pink-faced, came up to them and touched Madam Rechevsky’s arm. “Perhaps you would like me to make a prayer for the dead, lady?”

“Go away!” Madam Rechevsky pulled her arm away impatiently. “Abraham Rechevsky does not need professional prayers!”

The old man bowed gently, spoke softly. “For Abraham Rechevsky I will pray for nothing.”

Madam Rechevsky stopped, looked at the man for a moment. Her cold gray eyes smiled a little. “Give the old man a dollar, Helen,” she said and touched the man’s arm with royal condescension.

Helen dug in her bag and produced a dollar and the old man bowed gravely again.

Helen hurried after her mother.

“See,” Madam Rechevsky was muttering as she charged along. “See. Dead fifteen years and still he is famous, all over the world. I bet that old man hasn’t offered to pray for anyone free for twenty-five years.” She turned on Helen. “And yet you didn’t want to come!” She strode on, muttering, “All over the world.”

“Don’t walk so fast, Momma,” Helen protested. “Your heart …”

“Don’t worry about my heart.” Madam Rechevsky stopped, put her arm out sharply to stop her daughter. “We are in sight. You stay here. I want to go to the grave alone.” She spoke without looking at Helen, her eyes on the massive gray granite tombstone thirty yards away, with her husband’s name on it and underneath his, space for her own. She spoke very softly. “Turn around, Helen, darling. I want this to be private. I’ll call you when I’m ready for you.”

She walked slowly toward the tombstone, holding the chrysanthemums before her like a gigantic bride’s bouquet. Helen sat on a marble bench near the grave of a man named Axelrod, and turned her head.

Madam Rechevsky approached her husband’s grave. Her face was composed, the lips set, the chin high, out of the smart seal collar. She knelt gracefully, placed the chrysanthemums in a compact spray of yellow on the cold earth against the granite. She patted the flowers lightly with one hand to make a pattern more pleasing to the eye, and stood up. She stood without speaking, looking at the even, dead, winter-brown grass that spread across the grave.

Slowly, still looking at the faded grass, she took off first one glove, then the other, and absently stuffed them into a pocket, leaving her white and brilliantly manicured hands bare.

Then she spoke.

“Abraham!” she cried, her voice ringing and imperious and fiercely intimate. “Abraham!” the proud, useful voice echoed and re-echoed among the marble on the small rolling hills of the cemetery. “Abraham, listen to me!”

She took a deep breath, and disregarding the formal stone, spoke directly to the earth beneath her. “You’ve got to help me, Abraham. Trouble, trouble … I’m old and I’m poor and you’ve left me alone for fifteen years.” The resonance and volume had gone from her voice, and she spoke quietly, with the little touch of impatience that comes to women’s voices when they are complaining to their husbands. “Money. All your life you never made less than fifteen hundred dollars a week and now they bother me for rent.” Her lips curled contemptuously as she thought of the miserable men who came to her door on the first of each month. “You rode in carriages, Abraham. You always owned at least four horses. Wherever you went everybody always said, ‘There goes Abraham Rechevsky!’ When you sat down to eat, fifty people always sat down with you. You drank wine with breakfast, dinner and supper, and fifty people always drank it with you. You had five daughters by me and God knows how many by other women and every one of them was dressed from Paris from the day she could walk. You had six sons and each one of them had a private tutor from Harvard College. You ate in the best restaurants in New York, London, Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Rio de Janeiro. You ate more good food than any other man that ever lived. You had two overcoats at one time lined with mink. You gave diamonds and rubies and strings of pearls to enough women to make up three ballet companies! Sometimes you were paying railroad fare for five women at one time crossing the country after you, on tour. You ate and you drank and you always had a baby daughter in your lap till the day you died, and you lived like a king of the earth, in all respects.” Madam Rechevsky shook her head at the grave. “And I? Your wife? Where is the rent?”

Madam Rechevsky paced deliberately to the foot of the grave and addressed herself even more directly to her husband. “A king, to the day you died, with a specialist from Vienna and three trained nurses and four consulting doctors for an old man, seventy-seven, who had exhausted himself completely with eating and drinking and making love. Buried … buried like a king. Three blocks long. The line behind your coffin was three blocks long on Second Avenue at the funeral, thousands of grown men and women crying into their handkerchiefs in broad daylight. And I? Your wife? Forgotten! Money spent, theater gone, husband dead, no insurance … Only one thing left—children.”

Madam Rechevsky smiled coldly at her husband. “And the children—like their father. Selfish. Thinking of themselves. Silly. Doing crazy things. Getting mixed up with ridiculous people. Disastrous. The whole world is disastrous, and your children have led disastrous lives. Alimony, movies, trouble with girls, never any money, never … Relatives are dying in Germany. Five hundred dollars would have saved them. No five hundred dollars. And I am getting older day by day and the ones that can help won’t, and the ones that want to help, can’t. Three times a week the dressmaker calls me with old bills. Disastrous! Why should it happen to me?”

Once more, for a moment, Madam Rechevsky’s voice went high and clear and echoed among the small graveyard hills. “Why should it happen to me? I worked for you like a slave. I got up at five o’clock in the morning. I sewed the costumes. I rented the theaters. I fought with the authors about the plays. I picked the parts for you. I taught you how to act, Abraham. The Great Actor, they said, the Hamlet of the Yiddish Theater, people knew your name from South Africa to San Francisco, the women tore off their gowns in your dressing room. You were an amateur before I taught you; on every line you tried to blow down the back of the theater. I worked on you like a sculptor on a statue. I made you an artist. And in between …” Madam Rechevsky shrugged ironically. “In between I took care of the books, I hired the ushers, I played opposite you better than any leading lady you ever had, I gave you a child every two years and fed all the others other women gave you the rest of the time. With my own hands I polished the apples they sold during intermission!”

Madam Rechevsky slumped a little inside her fashionable seal coat, her voice sank to a whisper. “I loved you better than you deserved and you left me alone for fifteen years and I’m getting older and now they bother me for rent.…” She sat down on the cold earth, on the dead winter grass covering the grave. “Abraham,” she whispered, “you’ve got to help me. Please help me. One thing … One thing I can say for you—whenever I was in trouble, I could turn to you. Always. Help me, Abraham.”

She was silent a moment, her bare hands outspread on the grass. Then she shrugged, stood up, her face more relaxed, confident, at peace, than it had been in months. She turned away from the grave and called.

“Helen, darling,” she called. “You can come here now.”

Helen left the marble bench on the plot of the man named Axelrod and walked slowly toward her father’s grave.

The Deputy Sheriff

M
acomber sat in the sheriff’s swivel chair, his feet in the waste-basket because he was too fat to lift them to the desk. He sat there looking across at the poster on the opposite wall that said, “Wanted, for Murder, Walter Cooper, Reward Four Hundred Dollars.” He sometimes sat for seven days on end looking at the spot that said “Four Hundred Dollars,” going out only for meals and ten hours’ sleep a night.

Macomber was the third deputy sheriff and he took care of the office because he didn’t like to go home to his wife. In the afternoon the second deputy sheriff came in, too, and sat tilted against the wall, also looking at the spot that said, “Four Hundred Dollars.”

“I read in the newspapers,” Macomber said, feeling the sweat roll deliberately down his neck into his shirt, “that New Mexico has the healthiest climate in the world. Look at me sweat. Do you call that healthy?”

“You’re too goddamn fat,” the second deputy sheriff said, never taking his eyes off the “Four Hundred Dollars.” “What do you expect?”

“You could fry eggs,” Macomber said, looking for an instant at the street blazing outside his window. “I need a vacation. You need a vacation. Everybody needs a vacation.” He shifted his gun wearily, where it dug into the fat. “Why can’t Walter Cooper walk in here this minute? Why can’t he?” he asked.

The telephone rang. Macomber picked it up. He listened, said, “Yes, no, the sheriff’s taking a nap. I’ll tell him, good-bye.”

He put the telephone down slowly, thought in his eyes. “That was Los Angeles,” he said. “They caught Brisbane. They got him in the jail there.”

“He’ll get fifteen years,” the second deputy said. “His accomplice got fifteen years. They can sing to each other.”

“That’s my case,” Macomber said, slowly, putting on his hat. “I was the first one to look at the boxcar after they bust into it.” He turned at the door. “Somebody’s got to go bring Brisbane back from Los Angeles. I’m the man, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’re the man,” the second deputy said. “That’s a nice trip. Hollywood. There is nothing wrong with the girls in Hollywood.” He nodded his head dreamily. “I wouldn’t mind shaking a hip in that city.”

Macomber walked slowly toward the sheriff’s house, smiling a little to himself, despite the heat, as he thought of Hollywood. He walked briskly, his two hundred and forty pounds purposeful and alert.