A Castle in Brooklyn(43)

No one would have guessed it, though, for the more anxious the child became, the more perfect was his pretense. Not even the great Lionel Barrymore could have done so well. For when he heard the soft knock against the door, and Mama’s voice announcing that dinner was on the table, Jacob unclasped his hands from behind his head, brought his knees to his chest, and moved off the bed. He didn’t bother to put the shoes, their soles still laden with dust, on his feet before rushing past his brother and seating himself at the kitchen table. “Roast chicken! My favorite!” he announced excitedly, picking up a metal fork. Yes, he thought, I am the greatest actor in the world.

Jacob’s world fell into a dull routine of school, races down the winding cobblestone blocks with his two best friends, Victor and Aaron, home to do more work for school, and in a few more months, Ziegler’s grocery, where he stocked the shelves with cans of lima beans and big sacks of flour. And before long it was the date of Leon’s bar mitzvah. It was a small and tidy affair in the local synagogue, each line of verse overseen by the old rabbi whose ragged fingers shook as he held the yad against the sacred text, and Leon’s voice, strong and confident, filled the air. The tiny synagogue remained empty save for the bare minimum, including his family and the men, none younger than fifty years of age, skullcaps on their heads, crying into their prayer books. And there was Mama, dressed in her fine royal-blue suit, a round matching blue hat set firmly over her fine curly hair, a net touched only by her long curving lashes. And there was Papa, his shoulder pressed against Leon, who wore his one brown tweed suit that Mama had washed already twenty times and ironed on the white kitchen table as the room streamed light through the window above the sink. And Jacob off to the side, watching Leon and the men’s lips mouth the words in unison. He looked then at the fine seams, stitches sewn meticulously into his new tallit, which Papa had purchased for Leon a year earlier from Herschel’s Judaic Goods Shoppe in another town. The writing a majestic gold and sky blue, the braided fringes a snowy white at the edge, hanging straight and pristine.

Jacob stood quietly dressed in a gray suit and striped shirt, a suit that had been his brother’s only six months earlier, and one that, though his legs had grown as fast as stalks of corn, according to his mama, was yet too large for his eight-year-old body to fill. On his head was the skullcap knitted by his father’s mother, a grandmother he never knew. His father wore the same, and so did Leon. All the same suits and skullcaps. All the same except for the tallit that Jacob was yet too young to wrap about his shoulders. For that, he would have to wait another five years. The music and Leon’s voice swelled, sailing high into the air, escaping through the walls of the old temple constructed no less than eighty years ago.

Sometimes when he lay in his bed at night with only the amber glow of a nearby streetlamp spreading across his coverlet like a rippling wave, he swore he could hear that music—the melody of Leon’s haftorah ascending into the air like the voices of angels. He pushed his head deeper into his soft white pillow then, wishing somehow that he could sail up into the air with that sound, up and away. Where would he go? Anyplace, he resolved, anyplace but here. But instead of escaping, Jacob only went as far as his dreams, for the next morning there he was again, rubbing the crust from his eyes to peek over at Leon’s bed, still unmade, hearing the slam of the kitchen door as his brother and father left early for the brick school building five blocks away.

Each day, it seemed, as his mama adjusted the cap on his head and kissed him goodbye, there was another shop closed down, the Judaica Shoppe being among the first to go, glossy door shattered, the graphic yellow lines that Jacob came all too soon to comprehend, spray-painted on the windows, the shelves empty, shattered with the shells of ceramic menorahs and broken wine goblets. Soon after there was the kosher butcher owned by his father’s second cousin, Mordy, the stationery shop, even the corner grocery that had been in the Goldman family for two generations, looted, stripped even of its counter and hanging green light fixture. By the time Jacob had turned fifteen, Papa was hearing rumors that it would not be long before the schools would find their doors shut. And then what would they do?

Jacob himself had changed too. As more shops, the library, and even the synagogue had turned into little but ghostlike structures, relics of the past, Jacob had grown so tall that he needed to bend his back each time he crossed the threshold to the bathroom, and his sturdy new shoes with the laces would become useless after only three months’ time. No longer were even Leon’s hand-me-downs useful for six feet two inches, as this stranger son, as Mama often lamented, had grown a full head taller than his older brother. She would often tell Jacob with a sigh that he took after her big brother, Gershon, who had grown to nearly six and a half feet. It was Gershon, she said, who besides being the eldest brother of five whom everyone looked up to in more ways than one, had such promise. He was on his way to becoming a surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon, or a bone doctor, as many liked to say, when one day while doing his rounds at a small hospital in Berlin, he contracted pneumonia, and in a week’s time had succumbed to the disease.

In truth, Jacob remembered little of his tall bushy-haired uncle except that each time he would visit the family, he brought cinnamon-flavored cookies, which he would present to Jacob and Leon with a smile and a wink. Jacob liked to think that he was like his uncle Gershon in more ways than one. That he had promise. When he was younger, and he and Mama were alone in the hours after school was done, he would ask her to tell him stories about Gershon—the kinds of clothes he wore, the books he liked to read. And if she wasn’t too tired, she would take him onto her lap, and as he angled in close, letting his long legs dangle to the side, she would tell him what little she remembered of Gershon. “What a mensch he was!” she said. Jacob absorbed the information as if it were manna from heaven, in the same ways he would look at the pictures in the book under his bed, as he let his head fall against her bosom and inhaled the air of her, the soap and talc as if she had just stepped out of a bath.