“Pa!”
Two years older than his wife, Morris Barrish had always been a robust, handsome man. Now his eyebrows were long and scraggly. The whites of his eyes were tinged with a slight yellow cast, and a barely noticeable haze covered their gray, once hawklike corneas. The stubble of his beard pure white, the flesh beneath his chin hung looser than Mitchell remembered.
Perpetually a symbol of love and strength, looking at his grandfather, now more than ever, the young man was sadly reminded of the old man’s age. As the two men clasped each other in warm greeting, Mitchell forced himself to hold back tears.
___________________________________________________
Sunday, August 26, 1956 Skokie, Illinois
Finished with his third helping of fried matzo, “In about seven months, Pa,” and his third cup of coffee, “if all goes well,” Mitchell said, “I should be discharged just about the time the baby’s a month old.”
“And now they pay for the hospital, and a real doctor?”
“Well,” Mitchell said, “the doctors at Public Health are real doctors…”
Through eating, “Yes, but now,” Marsha interjected. “now, thank God, I can go to a doctor I want.”
“Yeah, Ma,” squirming, tightening his sphincter against the first onslaught of stomach gas, “and tomorrow afternoon she’s going to start looking for a doctor she wants.”
On his third cup of coffee, too, as glad as Walter was to see his son and daughter-in-law, it was, after all, a clear day with a steady northeast breeze so, If they leave soon enough, he thought, maybe I can still get…
Looking at him, often having the uncanny knack of knowing what her husband was thinking, “Walter,” Myra said, “we don’t see the kids that often that you have to rush through breakfast so you can get to your farshtinkener boat.”
Always mystified at his wife’s feat of, as she so often told him, “knowing you better than you know yourself,” “I’m not rushing! I was, uh,” Walter lied, “thinking of Sam Katz.”
“Sam Katz?”
“Yeah.” Speaking truthfully, “Sam called when you were out Friday.”
“Yes? So?”
“He wanted to know if we’d like to go into a third share partnership with him and his brother-in-law in some kind of a new kind of a restaurant.”
“Some kind of a new kind of a restaurant? Why would we, all of a sudden, want to go into business with Sam Katz and his brother-in-law, no less, in some kind of a new kind of a restaurant?”
“D’know. He said it’s, uh, different. It’s the, so Sam said, the wave of the future. He said he thinks it’ll be big, really big! And that we can go in for a third if we chip in about four grand.”
“About four thousand, from each of us? About twelve thousand dollars for some kind of a new kind of a restaurant?”
“Yeah! And it’s not even really a restaurant.” Thinking a moment… “It’s some kind of a place called a, uh, quick food place.”
“Some kind of a new kind of a restaurant called a quick food place? That’s its name,” Myra said facetiously, “‘A quick food place’?”
“No, a quick food place isn’t its name, but it’s got some kind of a dumb name.” Thinking, “Uh, like in the kids’ song ‘Old Macdonald Had a Farm.’”
Going on in her same mocking tone, “That’s the name of this quick food place? ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’?”
“No!” Becoming somewhat flustered, “Yeah, something like that. But don’t worry, I told Sam that it doesn’t sound like such a hot idea and to count us out.”
****
Amidst hugs, kisses, and fond farewells, its top open to the morning sun, the Ford convertible pulled away from the pie shaped lot in Skokie at 10:40 a.m.…
They’d made this same journey on the day after their wedding. At that time, though, leaving later in the morning and, as it was late December, running into snow flurries in New Jersey that had caused Mitchell to slow up considerably, they had arrived in Seagate at 4:30 a.m. He calculated that this time, in late summer, they should arrive home between two and three a.m.
They drove with the top down until the first gas fill at the last Howard Johnson’s on the Indiana Turnpike. Then, feeling the effect of the sun upon heads and shoulders, Mitchell pushed the button raising the top.
At 6:30, midway across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, they stopped for dinner of hamburgers and Cokes, to use the toilet and top off the gas tank.
On the road again, Marsha sat with her back against the door, her legs folded beneath her at a left angle. Mitchell drove with his left hand on the steering wheel, his right hand as high beneath the cuff of Marsha’s jeans as possible. As tired as he was, holding her calf, he had an urge to move his hand past the crook of her knee, to feel the smoothness of Marsha’s inner thigh.
“Mitchie,” seeing his weariness, attempting to keep him entertained with a stream of humorous chatter, “did I ever tell you about when my uncle Willie was in the Marines?”
Mitchell glanced at his wife. Rhea’s brother, Marsha’s uncle Melvin, so she had told him, was a bookie—a taker of illegal betting—and Eli’s younger brother, Marsha’s uncle Bill, or “Uncle Willie” as she called him, was a fence—one who buys and sells stolen merchandise.
Mitchell sometimes wondered about the family he’d married into: A mother who was, so her daughter had told him, the equivalent of a prostitute, an uncle that was a bookie, another that was a fence, so… “Willie? A Marine?” he asked disbelievingly.
Laughing, “For three years, when I was five, six and seven, Mother and Daddy told me that Uncle Willie was in the Marines, and every once in a while, on a Sunday, Daddy would borrow Uncle Harry’s car and Mother, Daddy, Bubby Goldman and me would drive all the way out to the Marine base… “
“Marine base?”
“Yeah. But I could never understand why the guards at the gate always searched us and looked through the picnic basket.”
Mitchell liked Marsha’s uncle. After all, it was Bill that had given them this very same car they were driving as a wedding gift. But knowing him, and of him, he did not quite believe that Uncle Willie could ever have been a Marine, or for that matter even have been in the army… But then again, thinking, who knows? “Well, Marcie,” he said, rather stupidly, “maybe it was a secret base, and things there were, you know, kind of secret there.”
Her hand on his atop the material of her jeans, “Yeah, but they only searched us when we came in and I could never understand why guards walked around the walls with rifles, and I especially wondered why Uncle Willie never came to visit us.”
Catching on, “Marcie, where was this, uh, Marine base?”
“When I first started to read,” Marsha went on, “Mother and Daddy made up a game and told me to close my eyes when we got close to the gate, and when I did learn to read and could read what it said over the gate, they stopped taking me when they went to visit Uncle Willie.” Stopping, she waited for him to ask…
“What did it say over the gate?”
“State Penitentiary, Joliet.”
Somehow not too surprised. “What was Bill in for?”
“I’m not sure, but whatever it was, I guess he got caught.”
“Yup, it’s the old eleventh commandment.”
“Eleventh commandment, huh. What’s the eleventh commandment?”
“He didn’t want me to be alone on my birthday, so Ruby came over Friday evening and we had a few drinks and I told him that, according to you, ‘Thou shalt put the toilet seat down’ was the eleventh commandment. But he told me maybe putting the toilet seat down was the twelfth commandment because the eleventh commandment is, ‘Thou shalt not get caught,’ which apparently your uncle did… How long was he in for?”
“Seven years.”
“No shit!” He tried to imagine what seven years out of his life might feel like but, just days into his twenty-second year, seven years was a third of his life and the thought was incomprehensible.
“Oh, yeah! Then there was this time my Aunt Dolly… You remember Dolly? Melvin’s wife?”
“Yeah. Melvin’s the bookie.”
“They were both married to other people before, you know.”
“No! They’d both been divorced?” Mitchell had never known anyone who’d been divorced and now, to add to the mishmash of the characters in Marsha’s family, there was not one, but two, and they were married to each other.
“Yeah, they were… I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, but Aunt Dolly likes to drink a little, and at our wedding…”
“Yeah, I have noticed!”
An attractive, petite, tightly packed natural blonde lady, Aunt Dolly did drink more than a little at their wedding.
“Well,” Marsha continued, “Dolly’s kind of a, uh, to say the least, vain kind of a person and, because she’d had her front teeth knocked out by her first husband, she wears a partial, and Melvin had never…”
Thinking, There’s a wife beater, too? “Her husband beat her up?”
“Dolly’s first husband, yes. Anyway, Uncle Melvin had never seen Dolly without her partial, but she got so drunk at our wedding that she had to go into the toilet to puke and while she was puking she flushed the toilet and…”
“Uh, oh!” Mitchell said.
“Yeah! Uh, oh, indeed! She puked her teeth out and flushed ’em down the toilet.
Seagate, New York
Monday, August 27, 1956
Mottling walls and ceiling, streamers of bright sunlight coming through the edges of window shades and curtains, “Um, hello.”
“Mitch! How you doin’, pal?”
Rubbing his eyes, he looked at the clock: 9:20. “Hi, Rube.” Whispering, “What’s up? Anyone looking for me?”
“Nah. No one here knows from nothing. I just wanted to see if you got in okay, and…”
“Yeah, ’bout two-thirty. Shit! I’m getting too old to drive straight through like that.”
“And also to see if Marsha came back with you.”
Looking at the lump of his wife under the summer blanket, “Yeah, everything worked out just fine. I got to her girlfriend’s wedding at about nine and,” speaking even softer, “Jesus, you should have seen the look on her face when she saw me.”
“A good look?”
“You bet a good look!”
Poking her head out of the blanket, “Who’s that?”
“It’s Ruby, honey.”
“Oh.” Pulling the blanket over her head. “Say hello for me.” Marsha instantly fell back to sleep.
“Marsha says hello.”
“Me, too… So everything’s okay with you two now?”
“Yeah, everything’s just great, and later, when we get up, we’re going to check into finding a doctor… Unless you want me to come in.”
“Nah, take it easy today, Mitch.”
“Thanks. We’ve got to see if she still has a job, too.”
“Glad you guys are back, and back together… See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I’ll pick you up… And, Rube…”
“Yeah, Mitch?”
“Thanks again.”
