Solitaire Read online

  Feigel Blitz touched her forehead with her fingertips, as if she were blessing herself. ‘Maybe it’s your father’s fault,’ she muttered. ‘He was devout, yes, but he cut off the payess, tried to make himself American. Americans don’t wear payess, he said! Have you ever seen an American with side-curls? Two days after we came here, two days off Ellis Island, and he cut them off, and later his beard, too. But the day he cut off the payess, I cried all day. Your poor father.’

  David put down his fork. ‘I know you,’ he said to Leah, with childish abruptness. ‘I met you before.’

  Leah looked at Barney. Barney, very slowly, shook his head.

  The Shabbes feast went on, punctuated only by occasional skirmishes of quirky anger from Feigel Blitz, and empty, tangential comments from David. By the time it was over, Barney was trembling, wound up as tight as a hundred feet of silk lining, too tense to say anything sensible, or even devotional. He left the table, and went straight to his room, where he stood in the darkness with his fists clenched, and his teeth clamped together, and prayed for strength more ardently than he had ever prayed before.

  Oh God, King of Heaven, give me strength to survive my mother. Give me faith so that I can be what she wants me to be. Give me peace.

  And more than anything else, O Lord, let me know, deep within myself, that I am a real Jew. Let me feel in my bones and my blood that I have inherited my father’s beliefs, and the beliefs of his fathers, and of their fathers.

  There was a light tapping at the door. Barney opened his eyes, and turned around. The tapping came again. ‘Barney? It’s me, Leah.’

  He opened the door. He was sweating. In the dim light that fell along the corridor, he could see her eyes glistening, the shine on her lips. He said, with more gentleness than he had ever spoken to anybody before, ‘Leah? What is it?’

  ‘I wanted you to know that it’s not your fault,’ she whispered. ‘The dinner, what your mother said. I know that she’s not –’

  ‘The neighbours call her a meshuggeneh,’ said Barney, baldly. After the performance his mother had given during dinner, he no longer felt so loyal. But he still found it difficult to hold back an unexpected prickling of tears.

  Leah touched his hand. ‘I understand. That’s why I came to say that … well, I don’t hold it against you. I’m fond of you, Barney. We’ve always been friends.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, in a hoarse voice.

  They stood watching each other in silence for almost a minute. Barney, for one vivid second, could remember sitting beside her under a pushcart on the corner of Hester and Clinton, concealed from the street by the drapes and folds of fabric that hung down from the cart on every side. It had been shady in there, their own private house, and grown-ups had been nothing more than a shuffling parade of disembodied boots and shoes. Leah must have been seven then, or maybe eight. The summer of 1858, when Barney’s father, unknown to his family, was being kept alive by Leah’s father. Leah had worn an emerald-green dress, and she had smelled of warm child, and perfume. If Barney could ever think of a moment when he had fallen in love with her, it was then.

  Leah reached up and touched Barney’s cheek. ‘Don’t let her make you too unhappy,’ she said.

  He shook his head.

  They paused for one more instant, and for the rest of his life Barney never forgot the way she looked then, her head slightly tilted to one side, her lips touched by a smile.

  ‘I love you,’ he told her, not so much as a lover would, not trying to tell her anything except that he loved her for being Leah, and for being a friend when he needed one.

  She smiled a little more widely, and then she went off down the corridor towards the kitchen. Barney could see his mother in there, clearing dishes. He could also see David, leaning awkwardly against the door-frame, munching on a dill pickle. What a Sabbath, he thought, and closed his bedroom door again. In the dark, he cupped his hands over his face, so that it was even darker.

  He knew he had friends. He knew he had meshpocheh who would help him. But that wasn’t really enough. He was only nineteen years old, and to have to keep the tailor’s business going, especially with such cranky opposition from Irving and Hyman, and to have to cope with his mother’s incessant tantrums, that was almost too much. What was even more distressing was that he had not heard from Joel in six months, not a single letter. He felt as if he were carrying the whole of Blitz’s and the whole of his mother’s madness by himself, like a sackful of wriggling goats.

  Later, in the parlour, by the light of the Sabbath candles, he read aloud from the book of Deuteronomy. ‘Thou shalt not sacrifice unto the Lord thy God any bullock, or sheep, wherein is blemish, or any evil-favouredness: for that is an abomination unto the Lord thy God.’

  His mother sat opposite, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes peculiarly half-closed, so that Barney could just see them glittering under the lids. David did not even seem to be listening. He was fiddling with the tassels that hung down from the tablecloth and grinning from time to time at Leah. Leah herself was attentive, but obviously uncomfortable. Sometimes, as Barney read, she whispered the words of the Torah along with him.

  ‘If there be found among you … man or woman … who hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun or the moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded; then thou shalt bring forth that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die.’

  At last, early, they retired to bed. Barney’s mother went without a word, without even a blessing. Leah was to sleep in Joel’s old room, and David was going to spend the night in a makeshift bed on the sofa. That sofa, sagging and shiny with wear, had been a bed of refuge for more oyrechs than Barney could remember. He and Joel used to help their father lug it down the stairs to the back yard to fumigate it with Persian Insect Powder, guaranteed to kill bedbugs, croton bugs, and fleas.

  Barney, in his nightshirt, stood by the rain-freckled window of his bedroom and looked out at the back yard, and at the mean tenements all around. Washing-lines were suspended from every kitchen window, and on some of them, heavy with damp, hung sheets and bedcovers. Up above the washing-lines was the night sky, pale with cloud.

  He climbed into bed. Beside him, on a small wooden shelf he had put up himself, was the leather-bound Torah that his father had given him, along with his prayer-shawl, his tallis, on the day of his Bar Mitzva. There was also a dim, out-of-focus daguerreotype of Joel, already faded by the sunlight which fell through Barney’s bedroom window for only an hour each day.

  Quietly, his head on the pillow, he said a prayer. He blessed his mother and hoped that the Lord would see fit, in his mercy, to make her well. He prayed for Joel, wherever he was; and he prayed for himself, for patience, and for wisdom, and for enough strength to carry him through the coming years.

  He slept, and dreamed almost straight away of Leah. He dreamed he was running after her along Hester Street, in the direction of the Bowery, shouting at her in a strangely strangled voice to stop. But she kept on running ahead of him, not turning around, mingling with the crowds of midday shoppers, her white dress lost in a kaleidoscope of light and shade. It was a stifling day, the Lower East Side in August. He could hardly breathe, and his body seemed to be drained of energy. He felt as if he were going to collapse into the gutter from sheet weakness.

  Then, abruptly, he woke up. His eyes wide, his ears alert. He could hear Leah gasping in the next bedroom – odd, choking gasps, as if she were suffering from asthma, or throwing a fit. But then she moaned, ‘No – no, David – no!’

  Barney ripped back his bedcovers, rolled out of bed, and tugged open his bedroom door. Leah’s door was already wide open, and her bedside lamp was still lit, although the wick was guttering so low that Barney couldn’t see anything at first but harlequin shadows. Then Leah cried out again, and wrestled around on the bed, and he understood what was happening.

  It was David. Childish, ridiculous David. He had flung himself on to Leah’s b
ed, right beside her, one leg across her hips. His borrowed nightshirt had ridden right up, and Barney could see his fat bottom, and a glimpse of his stiff purple penis. He was wrenching at Leah’s nightdress with the jerky, insistent movements of a vicious marionette, a rabid Pinocchio. Leah’s arms were twisted above her head, caught up in her bodice and lacy sleeves, and she was struggling to break free. Barney saw, with aroused horror, her wide-brimmed nipples, the curve of her thighs.

  He caught David by the scruff of his nightshirt, tearing it loudly. Leah screamed, and tried to wriggle out of the way, but David shoved Barney away from him with lunatic strength, and dropped back on top of her, hugging her possessively close. Barney grabbed him again, and managed to heave him off the side of the bed on to the floor.

  ‘You’re crazy!’ yelled Barney, so harshly that he hurt his throat. ‘You’re crazy!’

  David scrambled crabwise across the rug, his big white bottom up in the air. Barney kicked him, and knocked him against the green-painted bureau. David yipped, clutching his head.

  Barney felt a rage so fierce that it filled his lungs like a wind at sea. He dragged David on to his feet, throwing him against the bureau so that he struck his back, and fell to the floor again in a clattering shower of hairbrushes, combs, and hairpins.

  ‘You’re filthy!’ Barney screeched at him. ‘Filthy and crazy and sick!’

  David groped for the bedside table to lift himself up again. His face was white, and there was phlegm swinging from the end of his nose. Barney seized him again, and tried to raise him up on his feet, but the soft worn cotton of his nightshirt tore right down the front, and David collapsed inside it like a conjuring trick.

  Barney reached inside the nightshirt and snatched David’s hair, pulling his head clear, and tearing out a whole bloody lump of scalp. There was nothing that could reach Barney now, no control, no reasoning, no sanity. He punched David in the side of the face with his fist, and then right between the eyes. He shook him, and kicked him, and pummelled at him, while David flopped heavily from one side of the floor to the other, squeaking and crying with every punch.

  At last, his teeth chattering with shock, Barney stood over David, exhausted. Leah was kneeling up on her bed, her blanket clutched around her, her face as familiar but as ghostlike as the face that appears when you bend over the water of a washbasin.

  ‘Barney –’ she said, desperately. ‘Barney–’

  Barney heard her, but did not want to answer. He was still bursting with his own anger. ‘As if everything else isn’t enough,’ he breathed at David. ‘As if the business isn’t enough, as if Irving and Hyman aren’t enough. And now you! What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to look after you for the rest of your life? I’m supposed to hold your hand, you foul-minded golem? I can’t do it! I don’t want to do it! You’re crazy, you’re nothing but a crazy lunatic!’

  He leaned against the bureau, breathing in short, frustrated gasps. David was still hunched up on the floor, dabbling at the blood that dripped from his nose, and mewling.

  ‘That lousy business is lousy enough without you!’ Barney shouted at him. ‘A whole stinking roomful of bad-tempered old men and stupid women! All cloth, and gas, and struggling to keep the whole thing going! My God in Heaven, David, if it wasn’t for that madwoman who calls herself my mother, I would have left it years ago! Joel had the right idea, he got out! Well, that’s what I should do, and leave the whole whining, crazy, kvetching lot of you to choke on your own problems!’

  There was that kind of total silence when you feel that someone, somewhere in the world, must have died. David crept blindly over to the bed, coughing, his torn nightshirt decorated with splatters of blood. Leah was crying, her tears shining in the dim light of the burned-down oil lamp, her fingertips pressed against her lips.

  ‘Madwoman?’ asked a soft, disturbing voice.

  Barney looked towards the door. In the corridor, still wearing her wedding-dress, stood his mother. Her hands were demurely held together as if she were posing for a wedding-picture. Her hair was dishevelled, and she wore no shoes, but she was smiling.

  ‘Mama?’ said Barney. ‘Mama, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I lost my temper. This – David here was attacking Leah. I saw red. Mama?’

  ‘You’d leave me?’ said Mrs Blitz. ‘You’d go, like your father went, like Joel went? You’d leave me all alone? Is that what you’ve wanted to do all along?’

  ‘Mrs Blitz,’ put in Leah, her words crowded with tears. ‘Mrs Blitz, he didn’t mean it.’

  David mumbled bloodily, ‘Thou wast a prisoner in the land of Egypt.’

  ‘Well, now I know the truth,’ said Feigel Blitz. ‘Now I know everything. A madwoman he calls me. Mad! And after all our years of marriage! Did you think I was mad the day you married me? Did you look at me when we were dancing together, and think, this girl is crazy? Did you think that all those years ago? What? Jacob – I’m asking you a question!’

  The sound of his father’s name gave Barney a sensation like being prickled with needles all over. It was scarcely ever mentioned, either by Feigel or by Barney, and even their family friends had grown to learn that the name of Jacob was almost a holy word in the Blitz household, a name that Mrs Blitz did not like to hear mentioned lightly.

  ‘Mama?’ Barney said, stepping slowly towards her. ‘Mama, it’s me, Barney.’

  ‘You won’t leave me,’ she told him, shaking her head with a cramped, sideways motion. ‘You won’t ever leave me. Not any more.’

  She turned, and walked unevenly along the corridor to the kitchen. She closed the door behind her, and turned the key.

  Barney let out a breath. ‘You’d better go clean up,’ he said to David. ‘There’s a jug of water and a bowl on my dresser.’

  David edged out of the room, keeping as far away from Barney as he could. Barney ignored him, and looked instead towards Leah.

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if you wanted me to take you someplace else,’ he said. ‘Maybe to Mr and Mrs Feinbaum.’

  She said, ‘No. I’ll be all right. I’m upset, more than anything. He didn’t hurt me.’ There were still tears in her eyes, and her shoulders were shaking.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Barney told her. ‘I don’t know how I can ever make amends.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Barney. You weren’t to know.’

  ‘That’s twice tonight you’ve had to forgive me.’

  ‘Don’t you want to be forgiven?’ she asked him.

  He rubbed slowly at his knuckles. There was a chip of skin flapping up from his fist where he had hit David in the teeth. ‘I just wish I was anyplace else but here,’ he said. ‘Anyplace at all but here.’

  ‘I think I’d like some tea,’ said Leah. ‘Do you think it would be breaking the Sabbath to make some?’

  Barney said, ‘No. Not after this. I’ll go put the kettle on the range.’

  He went back to his room and shrugged on the worn-out maroon robe that had once been his father’s. David was over in the corner, carefully bathing his swollen lips with cold water. He did not say anything when Barney came in, but he stopped dabbling in the washbasin, and he waited tensely until Barney had left the room again.

  Barney went to the kitchen and tried the door. It was still locked, so he tapped at it. ‘Mama? Open up, it’s Barney.’

  There was no answer. He rapped once more, and called louder, ‘Mama! You have to open the door!’

  He wondered if maybe she had locked the door behind her and gone out. If so, he and David and Leah were shut in, because ever since their old friend Daniel Lipschitz had enlarged the kitchen for them by bricking up part of the corridor, the only way to the bedrooms was by passing through the kitchen. He pounded on the door again.

  ‘Mama! Listen – I’m not going to leave you! I promise! Just open the door!’

  He heard a shuffling noise inside the kitchen. Then a pillowy thump – as if his mother had fallen against the door.

  ‘Mama? Are you okay? Do you
hear what I’m telling you?’

  ‘You promise?’ his mother asked, in an indistinct whisper.

  ‘Mama, I promise. I was mad, that was all. David was messing with Leah and I went off my head. Can you understand that, Mama? Mama?’

  He waited. He rattled the doorknob impatiently. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘you’re going to have to open this door. I mean it.’

  At last, he heard the key slowly turn, and the cheap lock levers click back. He pushed the door, and it opened a few inches, but his mother seemed to be leaning against it.

  ‘Mama, can you step back?’ he said. ‘What are you doing, Mama? You’re leaning on the door. Can you step back?’

  His mother made a gargling noise. He realised then that something terrible had taken place, that his mother had done something hideous. He shoved hard against the door, and squeezed himself through. It slammed shut behind him, swung by the listless weight of her body. She stared at him, and laughed at his horror.

  She had attacked herself with the kitchen knife. Her forehead was speckled with small triangular wounds where she had attempted to dig the point of the knife into her head. Her cheeks were in bloody slices, and there were ribbons of blood running down her neck. The front of her wedding-dress was a chaos of lace and gore, where she had furiously mutilated her breasts. All around the kitchen there were bloody handprints and bright red splatters.

  Barney felt dizzy. The whole kitchen seemed to tilt like a weighing-scale around the fulcrum of his mother’s leering face. Then, with an incongruous chuckling sound, she slid sideways to the floor.

  ‘Leah!’ called Barney. His voice echoed inside his head. ‘Leah, help me!’

  David put his head around the door, his chin red with bruises. He blinked at Mrs Blitz, and the splashes of blood, and he said, with the desperation of a child, ‘What’s happened? Barney, what’s happened?’

  Barney knelt down beside his mother. Her eyes, masked in blood, turned towards him. She whispered, ‘Jacob?’