Solitaire Read online

Barney took her hand. It was sticky with congealing gore, as if it had been painted. ‘Feigel …’ he said. He had never called her by her name before. ‘Birdy.’

  ‘You love me, don’t you?’ she pleaded. ‘You won’t leave me?’

  ‘No,’ he told her. He was crying now. ‘No, Feigel, I won’t leave you.’

  ‘It’s been so long,’ she said. Blood was welling out of the side of her mouth now, and on to the linoleum. ‘Don’t leave me any more. Please, Jacob.’

  Her eyes stayed open, but they lost their life. Her arm fell to the floor. Barney looked up, his mouth pursed with grief, and saw Leah standing in the doorway, stiff with fright.

  ‘I’ve killed her,’ said Barney. ‘My own mother.’

  Leah backed away from the kitchen, her hands raised to her cheeks. She accidentally bumped into David, who was standing in the corridor distraught, biting his nails. She stared at him as if she did not know who he was.

  Barney stood up. He wiped the tears away from his eyes, and marked his face with his mother’s blood. When Dr Seligman finally arrived, an hour later, he was standing by the kitchen range, his head in his hands, waiting for the kettle to boil.

  ‘Tea?’ he asked Dr Seligman. Dr Seligman took off his pince-nez, looked around at the blood, and quickly shook his head.

  He found Joel’s letters after the funeral. He was sitting on his mother’s bed, sorting through her jewellery and her papers, and there they were – three of them, carefully folded away in a scarf.

  The first was from Liverpool, England. The Atlantic crossing had been rough, and Joel had been seasick for three days; but now the weather had cleared and he was enjoying himself. He still loved her, and he sent his love to Barney. The Liverpudlians were a curious race of people, who never spoke of walking anywhere, but always ‘legging it’.

  The next letter was from Capetown. ‘Mama, you must be sure to tell Barney what a place this is! What opportunities!’ The third letter, more stained and crumpled than the other two, had arrived only two weeks ago from Oranjerivier, South Africa. Joel had invested his seaman’s wages in a small farm, and he was working the land. ‘Please let Barney come out to join me – I need the help badly, and I know Barney would love it. Don’t keep him in the tailor’s shop – Moishe can manage just as well. Mama, we’ll make our fortune if we can work together out here. This is the real goldeneh medina!’

  Barney folded up the letters and tucked them back in their envelopes. He sat on the bed for a long time, looking at them, not moving. Outside in the corridor, he heard Leah’s mother say, ‘Such a levaya I wouldn’t have given a dog! Did you hear what the rabbi said?’

  He had not understood until now how much his mother must have suffered. She had loved his father so much that she had seen his death as deliberate desertion. The Lord would not have made her suffer so much. It must have been Jacob’s fault. And so when Joel had left, too, her suspicions had been confirmed. There was some hereditary quirk in the Blitz family which made their young men footloose, and disloyal. Soon, she was going to be left all on her own, useless and unloved.

  Barney looked down at his right hand, at the crooked white scar which ran an inch between his thumb and his index finger. Dr Seligman had said nothing at all when Barney had asked him to sew it up, but maybe Dr Seligman had known what was inevitably going to happen. Maybe he should have seen it himself.

  There was a hesitant knock at the bedroom door. He said, ‘Come in.’

  It was Irving and Hyman, embarrassed and dithery. Irving said, ‘I guess we’ve come to say how sorry we are. Such a shock, you know, and your mother such a fine woman. A saint.’

  ‘A saint?’ said Barney. There was an embarrassed pause. Hyman, nervous and apologetic, shrugged.

  ‘You’re going to keep on the business?’ asked Irving. ‘Blitz, Tailors?’

  ‘Any reason why I shouldn’t?’

  ‘No, not at all. Just asking.’

  ‘That’s okay then,’ said Barney. ‘As long as you’re happy. You’ve always got Sussman’s to go to, if you’re not.’

  ‘Sussman’s,’ said Hyman. ‘I should cholilleh go to Sussman’s?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Barney. ‘I’m selling my share of the business to Moishe. I’m pulling out.’

  Irving frowned. ‘You can’t do that. This is your father’s business.’

  ‘My father’s dead, in case you’ve forgotten. Now my mother’s dead, too, and that leaves me with no responsibility to keep the business going whatsoever. I’ve had enough, Irving. I’m sorry.’

  ‘But you were doing so good.’

  ‘You didn’t seem to think so a few days ago. Bespoke, you wanted, not ready-to-wear. Come on, Irving, you mustn’t let sentimentality cloud your better judgement. You’ve been in the tailoring business for forty years. A young upstart like me should tell you what suits to make?’

  ‘We delivered the tunics to the Academy,’ said Hyman. ‘They said the workmanship was excellent. They’ll order again.’

  Barney gathered up the letters and the papers on the bed – his mother’s identity papers, her birth certificate, the letters from friends and relatives left behind in north Germany.

  ‘That’s good news,’ he said, without lifting his eyes. ‘Too bad you’ll be going back to private orders only.’

  There was another knock, and Leah looked around the door. Barney stood up, and offered his hand to Irving in the confident manner of a man who wants friendship, but not forgiveness. Irving took it, and gave him a regretful smile.

  ‘I’m sorry to see you go. Blitz’s won’t be the same, with no Blitz.’

  ‘It’ll probably be better,’ said Barney.

  Irving and Hyman left, and Leah stepped into the room. She stood staring at Barney for a long time before she spoke.

  ‘Moishe Teitelbaum told me you’re going to sell up,’ she said, gently.

  He nodded.

  ‘You’re not – well, you’re not acting too quickly, because of what happened on Friday night?’

  ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘I’ve been wanting to go for a long time. Ever since Joel left.’

  ‘Are you going to stay here, in New York?’

  ‘For what? For this rundown apartment on Clinton Street? For the sake of my mother’s memory?’

  ‘For me?’ suggested Leah.

  Barney laid his hand on the cold brass bedrail. The bedroom seemed suddenly very confined, and stuffy, and stale. His mother’s silver-backed hairbrush lay on the dressing-table, still clotted with her own wiry hair. Unlike many Ashkenazic Jews, Feigel’s family had not held with shaving their daughters’ hair when they were married. There was nothing in the Bible which decreed that a woman had to wear a shaytl, a wig, Feigel’s mother had protested, and a scarf was far more becoming.

  ‘I have to go,’ said Barney. ‘There’s nothing to keep me here but bad memories.’

  ‘I love you,’ said Leah, boldly.

  Barney took her hands. They were small, and cold.

  ‘You think you love me,’ he said. ‘But who else have you met? All those prissy boys your mother invites around for tea? Anybody would look lovable, compared to them.’

  ‘But,’ she said, more firmly, ‘I love you.’

  He kissed her forehead. ‘I’m going to have to go. I want to be rich, Leah. I want to be able to come back to New York and buy a mansion on Third Avenue. Give me two years, that’s all, and I’ll come back and deck you out with gold. That’s if you still want me.’

  She stroked his cheek with the back of her fingers. ‘Mother always says you look like one of those toughs from the Bowery.’

  He gripped her wrist. Then he lifted her fingers against his lips, and kissed them. Her eyes glistened with tears.

  ‘You won’t forget to come back, will you?’ she asked him.

  He shook his head.

  There was another knock at the door. It was Rabbi Levitz, stocky and fussy, with his thick ginger beard, and his tiny spectacles.

  ‘Come in, rabbi,’
said Barney. ‘We were only talking about the funeral.’

  The rabbi lifted his hands. ‘Bless you,’ he nodded. ‘You make a fine couple.’

  Leah turned to go. ‘One day, maybe,’ she said, softly.

  Rabbi Levitz smiled at her as she walked out of the room. ‘That was just what I wanted to talk to you about,’ he told Barney. ‘Isn’t it time you were thinking of marriage? You could certainly do worse than Leah Ginzburg.’

  Barney rubbed his eyes. ‘I’m tired, rabbi. I’ve just buried my mother. I don’t want to talk about marriage.’

  ‘But you’re going away, aren’t you? So Moishe tells me.’

  ‘That’s right. I was thinking of going to California. But there’s a letter here from Joel, from South Africa. He says he’s bought a farm there, and he wants me to help him. So, well – I guess I’ll go.’

  The rabbi held his arm. ‘You should take a Jewish bride out with you. Maybe a girl like Leah. You never know what kind of woman you’re going to meet in Africa. Maybe a schmartzeh.’

  Barney couldn’t help smiling. ‘They have Jewish girls in South Africa, too, rabbi.’

  Rabbi Levitz made a deprecatory face. ‘Dutch, maybe. But no landsleit. No Germans.’

  They stood side by side for a while in silence.

  ‘Well,’ said Rabbi Levitz. ‘I shouldn’t take up your time. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about your mother. I remember Feigel when she was such a pretty, gay girl. She and your father were my favourite young couple.’

  ‘My mother’s in Heaven?’ asked Barney. ‘Despite …?’

  The rabbi nodded. ‘She was possessed by a devil, a dybbuk, and she exorcised it the only way she knew how. She pierced her flesh to let it out. Your mother is in Heaven, Barney, with your father. She led a good life.’

  ‘And me?’ asked Barney. ‘Is there a place in Heaven for me?’

  ‘There shouldn’t be?’ frowned the rabbi.

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as if I can’t keep a grasp on my faith. Sometimes I feel more like an American than a Jew.’

  ‘You can’t be both?’

  Barney looked away. ‘I’ve tried. But when I think of my father, and my grandfather, and my great-grandfather … I feel like I don’t belong any more.’

  The rabbi grasped Barney’s shoulder. ‘You belong,’ he said, simply. ‘You’re not the only young man I’ve talked to who feels the way you do. Your father used to feel it. He cut off his payess to make it easier for him to do business with Gentiles, and because he wanted to show that he’d left the past behind him. It happens with every generation – questioning, doubt, who am I? A German, or a Jew? An American, or a Jew?’

  Barney said, ‘What, then? What’s the answer?’

  ‘The answer is to study the Torah, to seek enlightenment in the word of God, and to perform your sacred obligations with a happy heart. That is all.’

  ‘That’s enough?’

  The rabbi smiled. ‘Some of the greatest men in Ashkenazic history have devoted their entire lives to those three tasks, and have still died unsatisfied.’

  The small funeral party began to disperse after an hour. Mr and Mrs Ginzburg came into the bedroom to offer Barney their condolences – Mr Ginzburg mournfully shaking Barney’s hand, and Mrs Ginzburg tightening her lips and looking scornfully around the shabby apartment like an inquisitive chicken. When all the guests had left, Mrs Kowalski came down from her apartment upstairs to clean up. Mrs Blitz had always looked down on Mrs Kowalski – that ignorant Poylish opstairsikeh – but Mrs Kowalski washed up the wine glasses carefully, and swept the kitchen floor, and asked Barney in a motherly way as she wiped her hands on her apron if he wanted ‘a bite supper’.

  Barney, sitting alone at the kitchen table with a last glass of wine, said, ‘No, no thank you. I have to get used to doing things for myself now.’

  Mrs Kowalski hung up her apron behind the door. ‘You should get a wife,’ she told him, with a wide grin. ‘What’s a man, with no wife?’

  Moishe bought out Barney’s share in Blitz, Tailors, for $2123, although he was only able to raise $750 of that in cash. The rest was pledged as a mortgage on Moishe’s brownstone-fronted house on Suffolk Street, which he owned, and by Moishe’s cousin Avrum, who was part-owner of a kosher butcher’s in Brooklyn. Barney took $150 straight away to the Inman steamship office on Broadway and bought himself a ticket to Liverpool on the City of Paris. Afterwards, he went to Lord & Taylor and kitted himself out with a new lightweight suit, in khaki; two pairs of stout canvas walking boots; shirts; underwear; and thick socks. He also purchased a Colt Shopkeeper’s revolver, since Joel had described Cape Colony as ‘very wild’.

  The evening before he was due to sail, he climbed the stairs to the workroom of Blitz’s for the last time. Everybody had gone home, but as he stood in the centre aisle between the workbenches he could imagine them all there, and hear the chatter of the girls, the slicing sound of the scissors, and the thump-thump-thump as Hyman rolled over a bolt of broadcloth. He ran his hand along the worn woodwork, and tried to remember how his father had looked, bent over a pattern, with his black business vest and his dangling gold watch chain, in those days when Barney had been sent along the street by his mother to take him a tray covered by a white napkin. Latkes, usually, or cold gefilte fish. His father would sit Barney on his knee while he ate, and say, ‘One day, you and me, we’re going to be working here side by side.’

  The workroom door squeaked open. It was Moishe. He came puffing along to the end of the benches, and handed Barney a small package, wrapped up in brown paper.

  ‘I went round to your apartment,’ he said, mopping his forehead. ‘Mrs Kowalski told me you’d probably be here.’

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Barney, holding up the package.

  ‘Open it and see.’

  Barney slowly tore open the paper. Inside was a flat cardboard box, and inside that, neatly folded, a new prayer shawl. Barney lifted it out, and laid it carefully over his arm.

  ‘I’m touched,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s from all of us. Irving and Hyman too. We want to wish you good luck, but not to forget us.’

  ‘I couldn’t forget you. I’m sorry I’ve let you down.’

  ‘Let us down? How’s that? You’re young, you have yourself to think about. You have to follow the voice inside of your own head. Your father came to America to seek his fortune. You have to go someplace else.’

  Barney wrapped the prayer shawl up again. ‘I’m going to miss Clinton Street,’ he said, ‘for all of its problems.’

  Moishe gripped his shoulder affectionately. ‘Clinton Street is going to miss you.’

  It was cold, dry, and windy the next morning, when Barney closed the apartment door behind him and stepped out into the street. He hefted his worn brown leather valise, and walked the length of Clinton Street to the intersection with Hester Street with his head bent, not looking at the sad landscape of his past. On the corner of Hester Street, the wind was so piercing that he had to turn his coat-collar up.

  The City of Paris, one of the first screw-driven Atlantic steamers, held the blue riband for the fastest crossing from Liverpool to New York, at thirteen and a half knots. But during Barney’s voyage, in the first two weeks of November 1868, the ocean was so tumultuous, like a vast encampment of grey army tents which were constantly being raised and then struck, and then raised again, that the steamship rolled and wallowed for six days at less than eight knots. Barney, huddled on the second-class deck in oilskins, had never felt so sick or so battered-about in his whole life, and by the end of the first week he began to believe that he had spent years on this tilting deck, under this barr granite sky, and that he was doomed to churn across the Atlantic for ever. To pass the time, he read magazines, or played cards with an earnest seven-year-old English boy who was never sea-sick and won three games out of four. He prayed, in the cabin he shared with a tall Scotsman, who was all tweed and elbows; and sometimes he and the Scotsman
would struggle their way around the deck together, gripping the rails and the ropes, and scurrying in a hilarious pas-de-deux from one side of the promenade to the other when the ship heeled over in the waves. The second-class steward cheerfully described their progress as ‘labouring, pitching, lurching, and spraying all over’.

  It was drizzling when they docked at Liverpool. The City of Paris was two days late, and Barney had missed by six hours the sailing of the White Star steamer Rubric to Lisbon, and then down the coast of Africa to Cape Colony. In a noisy shed with a corrugated iron roof, he bought himself a ticket instead for the German ship Weser, due to sail in four days. Then, lugging his valise, he walked through the wet cobbled streets of Liverpool looking for somewhere to stay.

  He felt utterly alone during those four days. He stayed at a small bed-and-breakfast house, run by a massive woman with a blaring laugh and a taste for topping up her cups of cheap bright tea with straight gin. Her husband was away in South America, she told Barney, and she was always glad of comfort. He took ‘comfort’ at first to mean liquor, but when on the second night she came tapping at his door to ask if he cared to come along to her room and share a nightcap, he was left in little doubt that she was looking for what a coarse friend of his father used to call ‘a yentz’. For one unbalanced moment, he was almost tempted. It was still raining, he was thousands of miles away from home, and to lie in anybody’s arms would have been reassuring. But he told himself that God was with him, and so were the best wishes of his friends, and he turned over in his narrow horsehair bed and tried to get to sleep. A steamship’s siren blew him a mournful and echoing goodnight.

  On the third afternoon, he walked along by the Mersey, watching the gulls swoop over the grey, rain-speckled water. Behind him were the docks, the funnels of coasters and packet ships and Atlantic steamers; and a stolid Victorian skyline of prosperous stone office buildings. Ahead of him was the dismal stretch of the estuary, and, on the far side, the wet green hills of Cheshire.

  He thought of his mother, and for some odd reason he began to imagine that she was walking beside him, just one or two paces back, out of his line of sight. He stopped, and turned around, but there was nothing. Only the reflecting cobbles of the quay, and the rainy sky. He said a prayer for her. He wanted to think about her the way she had been before his father died – gentle and smiling. The bloody leer in the kitchen was a picture he would have to discipline himself to forget.