When the Night is New, Marvin Rabinovitch [intellectual books to read .txt] 📗

Late at night, in the small hours of the morning, when a cottony hush fell over Tzvi’s, Adele’s mind would dart from its hole and scurry around inside her skull like some nocturnal predator sniffing the spoor that promised nourishment. Memories, elusive as timid deer, were the objects of her hunt. Memories were already phantoms, growing fainter and more evanescent with each passing month. Without mental exercise, lying in wait to pounce, they would slip away irretrievably.

Movie stars whose first names were William. The handsome one, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, it was on the tip of her tongue. H-something or D-something. Never mind now. The craggy faced one with the shifty eyes, a minor actor in D movies, but still, she had a soft spot in her heart for him, he reminded her of Uncle Berl who always sent the kids twenty-five dollars in Chanukah gelt, money for the holiday. Ben-something. Wait, like a washing machine. Yes, Bendix, William Bendix, the evil first mate of a sailing ship, the black-hatted, black-hearted western villain. She devoured her kill with a smacking of chops.

And success bred success, perhaps the smell of figurative blood attracted her original prey. William the handsome, Holden of course. Oh, what a satisfaction and pleasure to own names! She let them sift through her cerebral fingertips like a miser toying with his gold. Holden and Bendix, Bendix and Holden, they would never escape her, she wrapped them tight in the moneybags of her brain and hefted their weight. They were her life savings, she was not bankrupt yet.

The third William, however, remained beyond her reach. And he had been her favorite. Not because of his looks or talent, no. It was the first time she’d set eyes on that demi-god among men, Yasheh Heisswasser, known by some (mainly his brother) as Ike, the English diminutive of Isaiah, and by others as Rothschild for his lordly ways. Her girlfriend, Doris Kaplan, had him in tow when Adele stepped out of the movie house, the old Arden on Citadel Street corner of Richelieu. There, a memory like a steel trap. She hugged the new names to her, Arden, Citadel, Richelieu, a holy trinity because they were the venue of that first meeting.

The first blush of sunset was coloring the sky when Adele emerged from the cinematic gloom. The early summer air was balmy with the promise of July and the evening breeze carried the delicate odor of lilac. She blinked in the roseate light as the other girl hailed her by name. Yashe turned a sullen face elsewhere as they chatted for a moment. Was he hostile? She got the feeling that he disapproved of her. Why that should be she had no idea. No doubt her own shyness was delivering a false message.

“Oh, ‘The Thin Man’,” Doris gushed. “I just love Myrna Loy.” And William something, something with a P or an L. She curled her toes in frustration.

“Me too,” Adele agreed. “And Saturday matinees are half price.” Plus her father worried himself sick when she went out at night, especially by herself. Poor Pa!

Doris and Yashe were going dancing. The YMHA was organizing an impromptu ballroom for young couples in its basement gym. No orchestra but loudspeakers and many records. Yashe had free admittance on condition that he got up on the platform and sang for at least half an hour. Would Adele like to tag along?

She blushed. “Oh, I couldn’t.”

“Really, it’ll be fun. Why not? Yashe won’t mind.”

“Of course not,” he said, still not looking at her.

“My Pa will worry,” she said, coloring with embarrassment. She was over eighteen and still housebound, like a little girl. But the old widower had nobody but her.

“Oh, pooh!” Doris said. “Just for half an hour.”

Doris was assistant forelady at Tartan Garments where Adele stitched buttonholes. Her generosity and temper were legendary. People thought twice before refusing any request or offer she might make. In the end, Adele gave in.

“But only for a few minutes,” she insisted. As it turned out, however, two hours passed before she escaped.

Pa was asleep, snoring softly in his living room Murphy bed when she got home. Saturday was his busiest time of the week, peddling union suits to families in the little French Canadian towns of the Laurentian shield. She let her gaze settle fondly on his worn features. Poor old man. Not that he was really old. But life had been such a struggle since the death of his wife.

Adele could barely remember her mother. The framed sepia photo on a middle shelf of the old mahogany bookcase showed a girl barely older than herself. Sonia Valdman nee Hirsch, a slight frown or perhaps squint incising two lines, like inverted commas, above the bridge of a nondescript nose. A victim of cancer in her twenty-seventh year.

“What time is it?” Yaacov Valdman murmured in Yiddish. His speech was slurred because the dentures which enabled him to enunciate clearly lay at the bottom of the water-filled glass on a bedside table.

Adele bent down tenderly and kissed the weathered cheek, smoothed the thinning grizzled hair. She was his wife now, or as close to one as she could make herself. Of course she had little idea of what wifehood constituted, but what did it matter? They had no one but each other.

“Still early, Pa,” she said. “Have you eaten?”

“A sandwich and tea at Yvonne Bolduc’s.” He meant the widow where he kept the old Ford pickup parked, in the outskirts of St. Jerome, the center of his territory. His relations with the Joual-speaking villagers had become very friendly.

“I meant something kosher,” Adele said with a smile. It was their never-failing private joke. Yaacov acknowledged it with a mechanical grimace, thankful that he did not have to specify the other non-kosher nourishment the widow Bolduc afforded him.

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” he said. “Would you like to take the streetcar to the top of the mountain?”

Their routine varied. Some Sundays they rode east to the botanical gardens, other times to the zoo in Lafontaine park. In the full bloom of spring, however, their customary destination was the summit of the round-backed hill at the center of the city. Among the sugar-maples they hunted for mushrooms and lay in the tall fragrant grass. Later, she would throw bits of bread to the ducks and Canada geese which paddled placidly in the scum-topped waters of Beaver Lake.

Now she hesitated and blushed. “Do you mind very much staying home tomorrow?” she stammered, “Or going by yourself?”

Instantly he was alarmed. “Why, aren’t you feeling well?” His young wife had begun her descent in just this way.

“No, no,” she assured him, “Nothing like that.”

“Then what?”

“Oh….” She shrugged, embarrassed. “Some friends invited me to go walking with them. Around the bandstand and the monument. Do you mind very much?”

He laughed with relief and clasped her hand. “Silly little woman. I’m glad.”

“Because if you’d rather,” she blurted on, “I can easily cancel. Your plans come first.”

“My plans,” he assured her, “Are to sleep as late as possible tomorrow morning, have a bite to eat, and then go back to sleep.”

Would he be as cheery, she wondered, hearing that the invitation had not come from friends but a strange man she’d just met? During a waltz she could barely stumble through, Yashe Heisswasser had broached the idea.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” she mumbled. “What would Doris think?”

“Why should she think anything?”

“Well, she’s your girl friend.”

He snorted with derision. The hot breath from his nostrils scorched her neck and she shrank from him a little.

“I don’t have a steady girl friend. We’re just acquaintances.”

If he hadn’t had the voice of an angel, she would have refused the offer. But he sang like a younger Jack Leonard, at least to her untutored ear. The master of ceremonies called him up to the stage, and he sang “All the Things You Are”. He sang “Falling in Love with Love”. He sang “I’ll be seeing you” and winked at her. Or was it really a wink? She couldn’t be sure. But his voice was so mellow, it didn’t matter. She felt his eyes on her. He was seeing her…

In all the old, familiar places;
That this heart of mine embraces;
All day through.

I’ll find you in the morning sun;
And when the night is new;
I’ll be looking at the moon;
But Ill be seeing you.

He was a terrible smoker. The heavy smell of cheap tobacco enveloped him like the air in a curing shed. But she didn’t care, liked it in fact. It was a masculine scent, a pheromone.

“You should sing professionally,” she told him shyly when he bought the girls ice cream cones on the way out.

“Oh, but I do,” he said with a self-satisfied smile, and lit another cigarette, blowing twin jets of smoke through his nostrils. He had a way of striking kitchen matches off one thumbnail as if he were a being of flint and steel. To show off in front of girls, he sometimes added the flourish of sweeping the match-holding fist across his teeth and producing flame with a snap of igniting sulfur like some fire-breathing dragon. Adele pretended not to notice.

“Yes, he makes a lot of money in kol nidrei on the high holidays,” Doris confirmed. “He was a child prodigy.”

“’Was’ is right,” Yashe laughed. “Yeshayaleh, God’s treble clarinet.”

“But you’ll ruin your voice with smoking,” Adele cried.

He laughed again, a rumbling in the lower registers. “My hormones took care of that. No more sweet soprano for the swooning graybeard masses. Now I mostly conduct and do the chorus. Pretty soon, I’ll have to start working for a living.” From his conversational tones, you would never guess the celestial pipes that lodged in his throat.

Sunday afternoon, he took her to the roller skating rink on Frontenac east, way east, so far into habitant territory it scared her. A susurrus of Norman French accosted her ears like the rising voice of rapids foaming in the middle distance downstream. Though she knew her father associated with these people in the farm lands north of the city and was kindly regarded by them, indeed earned his livelihood from their good will, she couldn’t repress a shiver of fright. The academic French she had studied in high school had nothing in common with the impenetrable patois that issued from their lips. They chattered among themselves with animalistic abandon, their nasal hootings wild and uninhibited, their gesticulations instinct with violence.

“Why’re you trembling?” Yashe asked, one arm boldly encircling her waist, his other hand clutching her elbow.

“I’m not,” she said, “It’s just that I can’t keep my balance.”

“Didn’t you tell me that skating was an enjoyable passtime?”

“I meant in the abstract. It looked like fun.”

He shook his head in exasperation. There, she had made an enemy of him. Or at the very least induced second thoughts. But he held her firmly and steered her round the rink until, with a start, she realized that it was fun, gliding smoothly up and down the hardwood floor, the whirring of metal wheels across the solid, polished, fibrous surface like the jolly hum of a carpentry shop. None of the other skaters