and then looked keen.
“Are you?” he asked with a friendly but intense look about his eyes.
“Am I what?” Young answered, and immediately the smile changed to an efficient grimace.
“Oh. Pardon me. No matter. Thank you for your interest, but we are not open today.”
Some kind of Amish, Young bet. He had read about the Amish in a file at the paper, and knew they had odd habits of worship, and he’d remembered about the hats and the long hair and beards, although this man wore a moustache. Still, the file indicated one might encounter Amish of several different stripes, and why not here in Baltimore, which was not very far from Pennsylvania. Perhaps this was a mission or some kind of business enterprise. It was interesting.
At that moment, a young man came out of a house opposite, and as God was Young’s witness, it was the boy of the Berlin photograph, or someone just like him. He had on a sleeveless knitted argyle vest, and a long scar over his right eye. And there was a yellow star sewn to the sweater.
Young stared as if looking at himself in a photograph. He rocked on his heels, put his hand out, and the bearded man hastened down the stairs and took hold of his elbow to steady him. The young man across the street saw them, turned, hurried back into his house.
“Tschah, tschah,” the man said. “It’s all right. He wears it in memory only. He does not wear it in public. It is not a desecration.”
Young stared at the man. Not Amish, Jewish. One of those people from that place: of course, he had seen photographs of them.
“I have been there, too,” he found himself saying. “I have seen a boy like that one. I thought it was that boy.”
He meant only the photograph, he was not intending to lie outright, but the other man stopped where he stood and stayed quiet a long time, holding Young’s elbow lightly enough but so that he should not fall down. The grasp felt like a thing that Young had not known touch could feel like, as if it comprehended him, and as if speech, Young’s tormentor and betrayer, would never be needed again.
But then the man did speak, hoarsely. “And you are not. Yet you have seen.”
He seemed to have no other words. He began to say what Young had to imagine were prayers in some Jewish language, and at once he felt terribly sick, and angry, and disgusted at the feel of the man’s hand on his elbow.
These sentiments must have moved across his face, for the man dropped his hand away, and he said, “I beg you to forgive me. May you live a long time, and may you speak to those who have not seen. Shalom.”
Young felt as if he had entered a brothel and found only men and children selling themselves inside. But from that moment, his every spare moment was spent in the newspaper archives, or writing, or drinking, and when he was not doing these things, he was at the Enoch Pratt Free Library downtown. He found out everything about being Jewish he could learn without asking anyone directly, memorized whole passages of Hillel and such portions of Mishnah as he could find translated and reasonably understandable, and began to dot his conversation with Yiddishisms he heard from comedians on the radio.
He also began to attend the services at the synagogue, silently praying the Rosary in Latin to himself when the congregation or the rabbi began to speak in Hebrew. He found the singing of the cantor unutterably uplifting, and would hum those melodies he could recall to himself as he stood ironing his clothing or frying scrapple in the pan, always ending with, “Queen of the Heavens, Queen of the May,” and nodding toward the sky.
He would later refer to this time as his Second Period of Happiness. He was noticed at the synagogue but never introduced himself. Still, he knew his unconscious, still fallacious admission to the man of the steps had spread, for he was treated by some of the members with deference punctuated by a kind of terror and, he thought, disgust, as if they had to admit to themselves that this thing had happened to themselves. By others he felt as if he were bound to them in blood, and that to speak of what was between them would be to rend the fabric of heaven into tatters even worse than those in which it now found itself.
He found the silence of the people exhilarating, the solitude exactly what suited him, the stares of these strangers he eventually began to label as “Four Eyes,” “Jewest of the Jew Beaks,” “Massive Bosom,” and “Yellow Teeth,” the most blessed and perfect form of communication he had ever experienced. At work he had taken to not talking at all, and his obituaries had become the templates around which lesser men at other newspapers fashioned their own scribblings in despair.
The first day he walked into shul, he had been kindly asked to sit at the back of the room, but not to leave, and eventually his rocking and humming—though he never mastered Hebrew or knew the sense of many of the words—had a perfection of cadence that misled children and strangers. He never sought to ingratiate himself personally into the congregation, was never invited to a meal, was never stopped outside services to share a smoke or a bit of talk. He would leave proudly, trot down the steps as if exiting a beloved alma mater, and walk squarely away down the couple of miles to the corner of Lombard and Stricker, turn right, and sigh as he entered his house.
Thursday Afternoon: You Remember the Kind of Thing
Young never went outside until the sun began to go down, he lived on what the milkman and the bread truck could deliver by day, and he drank by night, nearly never walking up to what had become Dolan’s grocery. He paid his expenses out of a pension from the News American, where he had remained until his left arm had been badly disfigured in an accident two years ago, and because he’d been smart and signed for a settlement, they sent him ten dollars a week, and that was plenty for him, barring a stretch to get through Sundays. He followed his father’s advice and did not drink or smoke in the house, and he would not go to the taverns on Sundays, so those were bad days. He had a feeling that if he could account for his Sundays, he would not be very pleased with himself, but this was a Thursday, and Thursdays were goddamn great.
His father, who had not returned and who Young supposed must have passed on a good while back, was someone Young thought about a lot. He wondered what his father would have made of what Young now called “all that Jew nonsense,” and he thought about this nearly every day. The end of his time at the synagogue had eventually come, of course. A new man had come on to the newspaper in ’47 or ’48, Young couldn’t quite remember now, and they’d met and talked about this and that over the course of the man’s first week, but on Saturday he saw him again as they were leaving the morning service. The man, Martin had been the name, Young thought, raised his eyebrows but didn’t otherwise acknowledge Young’s presence, and he didn’t say anything to him at work the next week. Young didn’t think much of it, but the following Saturday a group of four men stood in the vestibule at the back of the synagogue, and as he entered they approached him.
None of the men seemed very willing to meet his eyes. They stood before him silently for so many moments that Young began to think that one of them might strike him. Finally, the one that Young had named “Young Mr. Shamir” spoke up.
“There is a difficulty,” he began, but at the words Young took a step back, held up one palm as if to stop them all from approaching, though they had not moved. They did not speak, the expressions on their faces showing differing degrees of grief and disappointment. He knew there was nothing to say. He turned, walked down the steps, never went back.
From that moment—and he held no grudge over this with Martin, with whom he’d become rather good pals at the paper—his spiritual life such as it had been was effectively over. His obituaries became so pedestrian that he was finally taken off them and relegated to fact-checker. His schooling, as it had been largely self-directed, seemed to fade overnight, and he began to speak in the slovenly way that characterized him now. He eschewed all women, and the company of most men, and settled down into the drink.
And then the accident to his arm had happened, through nobody’s fault, nobody’s carelessness or drunkenness, and he was at home, with his cat, and his daily round.
Friday Afternoon: Routine Matters
Twilight, now, that was his