don’t want lobster either.” I reached for any justification other than the fact that I was a pussy. “People can’t eat shellfish.”
“Oh, can’t they?”
“I mean, shouldn’t. It’s wrong.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“At the synagogue.” They had warned us about pepperoni too, but shellfish seemed far more serious.
“What synagogue? Who took you to the synagogue?”
“Bernie.” Since we’d moved in with Bernie, he’d started taking us to shul with him every Friday evening. He and my mother also sent me to a religious instruction class on Saturday mornings and to a Hebrew class on Wednesday evenings. Alojzy had no time for such institutions.
“Who’s Bernie. Nu?” I wasn’t sure how to answer this question. It felt as if Alojzy and Bernie existed in two completely different worlds, and there would be no way to explain one to the other.
“You know who Bernie is. My stepfather.”
“No. Wrong. Stepfather? What’s that? He’s your mother’s husband.” He turned on the burner. “I’m the only kind of father you got.”
“I know.” I nodded my head in affirmation.
“Good. It’s good that you know.” The beer began to boil. Soon the crabs would die a hard death in the pot. I took a deep breath. It was okay. I went into the cabinet, found some plates and silverware, and began to set the table.
The crabs were surely dying now. Soon they would be dead and cooked. My father and I would crack them open with butter knives and eat their flesh with dessert forks. The meat would be the richest thing I’d ever had in my stomach, and bits of sand we had not managed to wash off would grind down my teeth. The crabs were dead, but I was alive and my father was alive, and we were together.
I had started on a path with Alojzy that day, then later diverged from it. There was a lot more I could have learned if I had stuck with him. He knew secrets of the streets that a thousand years in college couldn’t teach me. He knew the difference between the real stories and the sentimental fabrications. Now I needed to find him, or at least the path he had left for me.
I caught a Manhattan-bound express train at the Sheepshead Bay station, and watched southern Brooklyn intently from the elevated tracks. A man stood on a rooftop, swinging an orange safety flag on the end of a stick. White pigeons circled above him as he called them home to their coop. On the way down to Coney Island, I’d been too busy anticipating my meeting with Goldov to pay attention to the outside world.
In college I knew several kids from Park Slope, and other parts of brownstone Brooklyn, who liked to talk about how much their neighborhoods had changed. But southern Brooklyn was a different world from theirs, and it moved at a slower speed. The area had not changed all that much in the past ten years, aside from the scattered newer condo buildings. Even some of the billboards and faded graffiti on the old rooftops was the same. My fingers remembered tracing the letters on the train window when I was twelve years old.
Kings Highway was the last elevated stop in southern Brooklyn. I looked down on the crowded business district. People lounged in front of stores, while others dashed back and forth across the wide street with plastic shopping bags. Alojzy had spent a lot of time here. He had been right at home on this strip where Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Turkish, and other languages blended together.
For a while, Alojzy had a girlfriend named Karla who sold jewelry in a little stand in the front of a clothing store on Kings Highway and East Thirteenth Street where Orthodox women shopped. The giant jewels on the broaches Karla sold were impressive, though in retrospect they must have been fake. Cut glass, or even plastic. But her smile had been genuine when she saw Alojzy walk into the store. Karla would close her stand, and Alojzy would take us to eat at a kosher deli owned by a family of Egyptian Muslims, who had bought the restaurant when the original owner retired to Florida. Alojzy would joke with the countermen in his limited Arabic and they would give us free knishes.
The train rumbled on past Kings Highway. I was conscious of the rolling of the steel wheels as they followed their tracks. The train went down to street level at Newkirk Avenue, and then into the tunnel after Prospect Park. Brooklyn disappeared, leaving me in darkness.
IT WAS GETTING ON toward evening by the time I made it back from Coney Island to the Upper East Side. I got off the subway at Eighty-Sixth Street and walked down Lexington Avenue for a few blocks, then turned back in the other direction. The building where the four of us lived as a family before Alojzy left was only about twelve blocks from Becca’s apartment, but I hadn’t gone up there since being back in the area. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I’d been to the old block, Ninety-Second between Second and First Avenues, even once since we left. After we moved to Long Island, we didn’t return to visit. I wondered if Becca ever passed by the block, or if she avoided it.
As a kindergartener, the address had been drilled into my ahead, along with our phone number and the phone number of our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Almanzar. After my experience with Alojzy’s building in Sheepshead Bay, I was afraid that this one would be gone too. But it was there, just as I remembered it. Six stories of bright red bricks. The details around the windows had recently been painted green, and the black paint on the stoop’s handrail was freshly touched up. Those were the only changes. The stoop looked just as it had fifteen years ago, when Alojzy would sit on it holding a beer in a brown paper bag, and tell Becca and me stories about bandits and goblins. I sat down in his old spot.
The Stanley M. Isaacs Houses began across the street, and continued down to the river. I wondered if their presence had helped preserve the block, as housing projects scared away transplants. A cab pulled up in front of the building. A thirtysomething couple in business clothes got out and walked up the stairs, swinging their briefcases. I said hello, but they ignored me. Maybe things had changed here, after all. These people were young professionals like Becca and Andrew. Becca hadn’t turned her back on where she came from; the city had changed and she’d changed with it.
Becca lived in a newer, doorman building down in the Eighties. It was only a ten-minute walk from our old building, but it felt very foreign to me. It was all glass and steel, with no brick in sight. Getting through my adolescent years on Long Island had always felt like something of a trick; I spent eight years waiting for everyone to figure out I didn’t belong. Becca’s building aroused in me an even more concentrated version of the same feeling. When I entered that evening, I tried my best to adhere to the shibboleth of saying hello to the gold-epauletted doorman in a superior tone. It was important to always speak in a way that betrayed no weakness. I held my head up high as I walked to the elevator, for fear that if my shoulders slouched for a moment I would feel his hands on them.
I had been back in New York City for the better part of a week. Speaking with Goldov had been my first priority, but I had put it off for several days getting settled, reacquainting myself with the city, and then spending time with Becca and her fiancé, Andrew, who I’d only met a few times before. They held hands when we went places, and Andrew would kiss my sister when he thought I wasn’t looking. It was awkward to be around them, but he seemed to make her happy.
Becca and I hadn’t lived in the same house since she’d gone to college, but she was very welcoming in letting me stay at her home indefinitely. She thought I’d come to New York solely to find a job and had no idea I was looking for Alojzy.
Really, I had put off going to Coney Island because I was scared. What if Goldov had provided proof that Alojzy was dead? I wouldn’t have known what to do with that knowledge. A book would have snapped shut on my fingers. But Goldov had only muddled things, and raised more questions. My search had begun, and I needed to keep going. First thing in the morning, I would go downtown to find this man Mendy.
My sister and Andrew generally