Snow in August (7 page)

She shook her head.

“I started drifting off,” she said. “I thought I was in Ireland.”

She looked again at her book.

“Mom?”

“Yes, son?”

“The stories about Ireland,” he said. “You know, Finn MacCool and CúChulainn and Balor and all. Are they true?”

“Of course.”

“Seriously?”

She chuckled. “Well, when I heard them from my father, God rest his soul, I was told they were true.”

“So where did they all go, Finn and Usheen and all of them?”

“I asked just that question,” she said, “and my father said they didn’t go anywhere, they were still there, hidden, invisible,
and when Ireland needed them, they’d be back.”

“So why didn’t they come when the English invaded?”

“Maybe they didn’t want to get their hands dirty,” she said, and laughed.

He was glad to see her happy and left her with her book and retreated to his room. He gazed out the window facing the snowy
fire escape, wondering how Mister G was doing in his hospital room, and where Frankie McCarthy was at that very moment, and
whether the rabbi up on Kelly Street knew what had happened in the candy store on Ellison Avenue. He imagined CúChulainn on
a mighty horse, a
steed
, as they called them, his eyes all red and his beard like fire, a sword as thick as a door in his belt, coming through the
snow on Ellison Avenue to find Frankie McCarthy and punish him.

Then he sat on the floor, with his back to the bed, thinking about the
Captain Marvels
scattered on the floor of Mister G’s candy store, and how, when a real man was being hurt, he could utter no magic words
to ward off evil. He started reading
Crime Does Not Pay
, wondering if someday they’d run a story about Frankie McCarthy. Written by Charles Biro. Drawn by Norman Maurer. The story
would start in Brooklyn, and they’d show him stomping a drunk outside Unbeatable Joe’s, then hitting Mister G with the telephone,
the blood spurting, calling the old man a Jew prick, then towering above the stricken man with the dead weight of the cash
register. Then Frankie would graduate into the rackets, and have big
cars and sharp clothes, surrounded by dames in New York nightclubs. And then he’d go too far: the cops would chase him down
and catch him, and he’d go weeping to the hot seat.

Yeah.

Except they never used the word
prick
in comic books.

Or the word
Jew
, either.

He lay there thinking about this and saw through the window that the snow was falling again, very softly. And he remembered
the rabbi, calling to him that morning through the snow and wind. He couldn’t believe now that he had been so scared about
entering the darkened vestibule of the synagogue and switching on a goddamned light.

Abruptly, Michael got up. He stepped quietly into the living room. His mother was asleep in the chair, the book on her lap,
a thumb wedged in the pages where she’d stopped reading.

He went past her to the bookcase where they kept the blue books of the
Wonderland of Knowledge
. This was an encyclopedia his mother bought by sending coupons away to a newspaper, enclosing a dime for each volume. He
picked out the volume marked
Jes-Min
, with a drawing of construction workers on the cover, one welding steel beams, the other carrying stones in a basket on his
bare back, with pyramids in the distance. He turned to “Jews” and found the entry on page 2080.

Persecution, hardship, and war have marked the long story of the Jews, a Semitic people who trace their ancestry back to the
days of Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations. The 16,000,000 Jews in the world today have retained a purity hardly equaled
by any other division of man, but their valuable contributions to the world have been of an international character. Greatest
of these contributions is in the realm of religion. As the oldest people to believe
in one God, the Jews laid the foundation of Christianity and other faiths based on this principle….

Amazing: first came the Jews, and
then
the Catholics! As he read the text, his excited eyes moved from a statue of Moses, heroic, stern, as muscled as Tarzan, to
a picture of a beautiful woman named Judith. The caption told him that Judith entered a city called Bethulia accompanied only
by her handmaiden, murdered the Assyrian general, and seized the town. In the picture she was wearing a headband, her long
black hair tied in pigtails, and jeweled bracelets on her wrists, along with necklaces and earrings. She was walking proudly,
swinging her arms. Behind her on the left was a bearded guy on a horse. Obviously he was behind her because Judith was the
boss, the commander. On the right was a bare-shouldered woman in a striped dress, her head downcast under a shawl, carrying
a bag. She must be the handmaiden, Michael thought, some kind of maid, the one who polished Judith’s bracelets and necklaces
and earrings. There were more horses and a lot of guys with spears, and off in the distance there was the outline of a walled
town. Bethulia.

It was like a scene from a movie.

Michael could see it now, in Technicolor, on the screen at the Venus. Hedy Lamarr slips into the town. She and the maid walk
around, the general sees her, he looks at her in that certain way they have in the movies and he tells the maid to wait outside.
The general takes her to his room. He’s telling her stuff and offers her wine, and as he lifts his own goblet to drink, taking
his eyes off her,
Hedy Lamarr cuts his goddamned throat!

The movie scene vanished. Michael read on, all about how God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, thus setting up the laws we
were supposed to live by, most of them the same ones
he had to memorize from the Baltimore Catechism. There was nothing about turning on light switches. And none of what he was
reading was like the stuff he heard on the streets. There was no mention of the Jews killing Jesus. There was nothing about
Jews being greedy and sneaky and vengeful. Were the people who wrote the encyclopedia
hiding
something?

The story in the blue book did say that the Jews, who were nomads, also set up laws about health and cleanliness. And they
gave the world the Bible and the first alphabet. The goddamned
alphabet!
And music too!

The music of the Jews also has come down to modern times as a special contribution to art. It is a unique form of music—full
of pathos and melancholy melody, yet beautiful and tender
.

Michael realized he’d never heard Jewish music. He knew Catholic music, like “Tantum Ergo” and “Mother Dear, O Pray for Me.”
He knew all the words, in English and Latin. And he had come to love jazz music, listening to it on the radio, wishing he
could play some instrument. A piano. Or a trumpet. But Jewish music… what did it sound like? He read the words again—
full of pathos and melancholy melody, yet beautiful and tender
—and thought it must sound like the blues.

He glanced out at the falling snow, saw the blurred red neon sign of Casement’s Bar, and again felt a sudden darkness in his
mind. What if the encyclopedia was lying? Maybe this was a terrible trick. Maybe a Jew wrote the story in the book. Or paid
someone to write it the way the Jews wanted it to appear. To fool the Christians, make them let down their guard. That’s what
they’d say down on Ellison Avenue. That’s probably what they’d say if he took the blue book across the street to Casement’s
and said: What do you think of
this
, pal?

But that couldn’t be. This was an
encyclopedia;
if it was full
of lies, someone would write to a newspaper or the mayor or some other big shot; they’d expose the lies. If they were lies.
Maybe the stuff he heard on the street was the real lie. He would have to ask his mother about it. Or Father Heaney. Father
Heaney was tough, but he wasn’t mean. He didn’t say much, but shit, neither did Gary Cooper. Father Heaney would tell Michael
the truth. The boy didn’t completely trust what he heard on the street. The grown-ups knew a lot more than he did about most
things. But he also knew that some of what they had to say was what they all called bullshit. Until he died, they talked lots
of bullshit about President Roosevelt. They were talking bullshit now about Jackie Robinson. Maybe they were also talking
bullshit about the Jews.

He turned from the falling snow and resumed reading through the entry, his eyes glazing over the details, seeing words like
Talmud
and
Torah
, and a long history of dates going all the way back to 722
B.C
., about things that were done to the Jews and how, in spite of everything, they continued to survive. He wanted to find out
more about Judith, but there was nothing else. Down near the bottom, his eyes widened.

Today persecutions and oppressive measures are still carried on in some European nations. In Germany the dictatorship of Adolf
Hitler has deprived Jews of political and civil rights which they previously enjoyed. The result has been a gradually increasing
exodus of Jews from Germany. Poland, where oppressive measures have existed for many years, has more than 3,000,000 Jews….

Hitler was now dead, so this must have been written before the war. He looked at the small type in the front of the book.
Copyright… 1938? That was almost
nine
goddamned years ago. So even then, long ago, before the war, in
1938
, when Michael was three years old, people knew what Hitler was doing. And what he was going to do. His mother was right:
Hitler hated Jews and killed millions of them. But if people knew, why didn’t anyone stop him from doing it? Why did they
wait until it was too late? Better: why didn’t some Judith go in and cut his goddamned throat?

The United States, where religious and political freedom have attracted Jews from all lands where they have been oppressed,
has the greatest number of Jews
, the blue book said.
In the forty-eight states and possessions there are 4,229,000, of whom nearly 2,000,000 live in New York City
.

Michael suddenly realized that he knew almost no Jews. There was Mister G, of course, and Mr. Kerniss, the landlord, who was
about seventy years old and came around every month to collect the rents from the super. Now there was this rabbi on Kelly
Street, but he didn’t really know him. He’d
met
him, but he didn’t
know
him. He didn’t even know his name. Almost everybody else in the parish was Irish, Italian, or Polish, or as some of them
said, Micks, Wops, and Polacks. They were Americans, of course. But they described themselves on the basis of where their
parents or grandparents came from. Michael was Irish. Like his mother, who came from Belfast in Northern Ireland. Or his father,
who came from Dublin. And Sonny Montemarano was Italian. And Jimmy Kabinsky was a Polack. No matter where their people came
from, almost all of them were Catholic. There were a few Protestants around too; they went to the public school and the Protestant
church on White Street and played in the street like the others. But they were just plain Americans; their parents never talked
about the Old Country; they acted as if they had been in Brooklyn since Indians roamed in Prospect Park.

But there were no Jewish kids at all. Even Mister G’s three kids were like phantoms. They didn’t hang out in the parish. They
didn’t play on the streets in summer. They were just
blurry faces in the back of the candy store. Michael had never seen any young people going in or out of the synagogue on Kelly
Street. Not one. On Saturday mornings, there were only a few old men and women on the sidewalk. How could that be? If there
were two million Jews in New York City, where did they live? Where were their kids? Did they play stickball? Were they Dodger
fans? Did they pitch pennies in the summer and trade comics and read about Captain Marvel? Why weren’t more of them around
here
?

He wanted to wake up his mother and ask her all these questions. He wanted to tell her about his discoveries about the Jewish
laws and the health codes and the alphabet. He wanted to ask her why all those Jews had been killed by Hitler if
even before the war
everybody knew what he was up to. He wanted to ask her if she’d ever heard Jewish music and where those two million Jews
lived in the city of New York.

But she looked exhausted, tired from the long hike through the snow to the hospital and the harder walk back, when the snow
was deeper. Her jaw hung slack, her mouth open. He touched her forearm. Her eyes opened.

“Mom,” he said, “you better go to bed.”

She looked startled. “What time is it?”

“It’s late,” he said. “Go to bed.”

In his own room, with the door closed, his teeth brushed, warm under the covers, Michael lay awake. The walls glowed brightly
from the freshly falling snow. There was no wind and no sounds as the snow fell all over the parish. In the back room of the
candy store, while the snow piled up on the sidewalk, Mister G’s wife was probably weeping. Her husband had been taken away
in an ambulance, unconscious, his face a swollen, bloody mess. Everybody saw the ambulance and the police cars and nobody
said anything. At the synagogue on Kelly Street,
the snow was gathering on the doors and the front steps and the roof, while the bearded man with the sad eyes listened, Michael
was sure, to Jewish music, beautiful and tender.

The rabbi was from over there. Somewhere in Europe. Michael knew that from the accent. He wasn’t from here. But how did he
escape? The newspapers said that maybe six million Jews were killed. Why wasn’t he one of them? Was he from Poland too? Did
the Nazis come to his door? Did he hide in an attic or a closet? Did he pick up a gun and fight? The rabbi had to have a story,
and Michael wondered what it was.

Just before sleep came, he thought about what it would be like to meet Judith, with her bracelets and earrings and jeweled
hair, and touch her golden skin. Then he pushed her from his mind too, as an occasion of sin, whispering the words of the
Hail Mary to keep himself pure as a snowy hill in Prospect Park.