I have a blurred mental
image of my mother coming home from my daddy’s funeral. She is wearing a veiled
black hat that scares me. I am two years old and had been left at home, put to
bed for my nap by a big colored lady. But I can’t sleep. The house feels too
quiet. Something big is wrong. I stand up in my crib and scream. No one comes.
Finally I am taken downstairs. Grown-ups in dark clothes
are standing around whispering. There is the cloying smell of sweet pastries,
the sound of china; ladies in aprons are busy in the kitchen. One of them gives
me a cookie. She is crying. I have never seen a grown-up cry before and I start
to wail. A man picks me up; his face feels scratchy. I scramble down and look
for my mother.
I see her sitting in a big chair and run to her. She
pulls me onto her lap. I tug at the black veil knocking off her hat but, still,
I cannot stop crying. “Babette, honey, shh, don’t cry, it’s all right,” she
murmurs. I feel her heart pound through my dress and, weeping, hang onto her
until someone wipes my runny nose and pulls me away.
My mother sits quietly in
the big chair listening to the noises of the kitchen and the murmur of the
mourners’ voices. Hearing a piercing screech she thinks it came from her own
mouth. But no one turns to her and she realizes it was a screaming tea kettle.
She stares at the mourners in their dark clothes and sorrowful faces as they
move about the dining room table laden with platters of herring, smoked
whitefish, smoked salmon, cream cheese, hard-boiled eggs, bagels and Kaiser
rolls. Home- made sponge cake, macaroons and fig newtons, baked by the ladies
in the kitchen that morning while her husband was being buried.
Upstairs, my daddy’s suits hang limply with their empty
sleeves, neatly arranged by color and season, the dark blues and grays giving
way along the rack to the summer creams and whites. Shallow drawers hold rows
of jeweled cuff links, a rainbow of ties stretches along a wall, and dozens of
stiff-collared silk shirts hang neatly in whites and pastels.
Now the mourners
are filling the large, proud living room after first washing their hands from the pitcher on the
front stoop. (Someone had set up the ancient Jewish funeral ritual as if this
were a benign death and you could wash off the wreckage.) My mother looks
around for my brother, a tow-headed blue-eyed boy of six, but he has already
escaped into the backyard our daddy had
equipped with swings, jungle gyms, even a child-sized car. Peering through the
window she sees him riding his car on the hard, gray snow, his correct little
tie off and already a rip in the scratchy suit jacket bought especially for his
father’s funeral.
Earlier, at the burial, he had dutifully thrown a small
handful of dirt into the freshly dug grave as the rabbi muttered the Kaddish. I
see him there in the shimmer of a dream and imagine heat rays emanating from
the open grave like the disturbed air of hell. Suddenly my mother’s knees
buckle under her. The funeral director with his neat, black suit and blank eyes
reaches out and steadies her with the expressionless efficiency of his
profession, corpses and collapsing widows as unremarkable to him as an
accountant’s pencil and adding machine. Her dizziness is actually due to the
pill given her by a Dr. Magio who is said to be kept on a retainer for the time
a bullet or two has to be discretely removed, and who was called when my mother
was unable to stop screaming. She feels shame in her near-collapse and
extravagant sorrow -- mixed as it is with a curious and confusing measure of
relief that Lou Rosen’s vitality and violence are now subdued six feet under.
She is only 27 after all, her flesh still young, her thighs still slender and
surely not meant never to open to a man again.
But if she imagines freedom and options with a pounding
heart she learns soon enough that the dead do not leave. Even without the
lingering scent of his aftershave, the damp towel across the bed, the diamond
stick pin and gold cuff links on the bedside table, Lou is an ongoing gauzy
presence, everywhere and nowhere, hovering over her, over all of us.
Now, sitting in
the living room, my mother watches a group of three men as they enter her house and hang up their
coats and fedoras on the racks provided by the Berkowitz Funeral Home. She
knows that the big man, the one with the drooping eyelids and heavy glasses,
ordered her husband’s murder--she wonders if the two men with him were the
actual killers. She also knows that the hundreds of white carnations and roses
covering his casket were sent by their polite murdering hands. But she is not
afraid; she has been a bootlegger’s wife long enough to know that as long as
they keep their silence widows and children are sacrosanct. She has been a
bootlegger’s wife long enough to understand the code; no one will harm her
unless, of course, she breaks it and reveals his name, which she knows to be
Joe Lonardo, the Cleveland Mafia boss who is now offering his clean hand to her
in solemn-faced sympathy. She shakes his hand and feels her stomach rise to her
throat. She is afraid she will vomit on his wingtips.
The rabbi in his
black suit and beard and woeful expression is standing with Marvin, brother of
the deceased. Marvin has thick black hair that looks windblown, or mussed from
making love. Talking to the rabbi, gesturing with his hands, he is smiling as
if he’s at a wake with believers of an afterlife, even for Lou Rosen. The rabbi is eating a
wedge of sponge cake. He wipes his mouth with a dinky embroidered napkin. There
are crumbs in his beard. He puts his empty plate down on the grand piano,
straightens his yarmulke, and crosses
the room to my mother. He leans over and kisses her on the cheek; she feels his
beard brush her face and has an impulse to grab hold of it. She feels like
laughing and has to duck her head and hold her handkerchief to her mouth.
“Mrs. Rosen--Are you all right?” the rabbi asks. His
voice is deep, concerned.
She nods. She even
smiles. She wonders if she is going crazy.
Although
the rabbi is older than she by at least a decade, she thinks he is too young to
have anything to say to her. She wants him to go away, to leave her alone. But
he sits down in a chair at her side, looks into her eyes and speaks. What? What
did he say? She is too preoccupied to hear. She wants to ask him if her husband
killed anyone before he was killed; if God had punished him, an eye for an eye.
She wants to ask him if a bootlegger can get into heaven. Or a bootlegger’s
wife, for that matter. She wants to ask him if there is a heaven. She wants to
ask him if there is a God. Foolish woman! Not a question for a rabbi. But the
truth is she receives little comfort from his respectful attendance or his
pieties or from the funeral service or the Kaddish her son, a child of six, had
dutifully repeated in a clear child’s voice at graveside, and has no hope of
heavenly intervention into the life she has already found to be absurd. Sitting
there, receiving condolences, she feels that God is unaware of her small
mistaken existence and that it would be dangerous to get the attention of such
a capricious deity who maybe has it in for orphan girls who get mixed up with
gangsters. So she says nothing as the rabbi rises to leave, lowering her eyes
and retreating into the hushed respect reserved for the newly widowed.
Read more of
Lost & Found by author and model, Babette Rosen Hughes
OR read her novel,
The Hat, a story of a bootlegger's wife.
Sequel, The Red Scarf, to be release in July 2013
