Old Men at Midnight Read online

  “There’s my room on the third floor. We can study with the door open.”

  “With the door open all the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “I worry and my husband worries. You understand.”

  “He can come next Sunday at seven-thirty.”

  Noah stood on the front stone step. Mrs. Polit came out the double wrought-iron door, and he followed her down the steps to the lower landing, past the hydrangea bushes and the small lawn and the fence. Looking through a living room window, I saw them hurrying beneath the trees.

  Minutes later I came out the same double wrought-iron door past the hydrangea bushes and the small lawn and fence and turned left and walked along President Street. I passed Kingston, Brooklyn, and New York and turned up Nostrand Avenue, crossing the trolley tracks and going past Union Street and the Loew’s Kings movie on Eastern Parkway. On the corner of Eastern Parkway near the movie was Mr. Wolf in his newsstand, and I waved to him and he waved his good arm back at me. The streets shimmered with afternoon heat and were filling with rush-hour traffic. On the wide pedestrian islands of the parkway few kids roller-skated, and fewer old people sat on benches in the shade. It was too hot. A tricycle ice cream cart rode by. The two orange day-camp buses were pulling up in front of the synagogue to unload the children. Rachel came down off her bus and we started home.

  She was full of a five-year-old girl’s chatter about her day. The camp was located in Prospect Park, and that day they had gone to the zoo near the park. The elephants and the sea lions and the tigers. And the apes and monkeys. They were so funny, the monkeys. Jumping around. Rachel walked at a rapid pace, loudly imitating the monkeys, screwing up her lovely face and making monkey noises. People looked at her and moved out of her way. Then a block from the house she suddenly needed to go to the bathroom, and we hurried the rest of the way home.

  During supper I asked my mother and stepfather if I could teach Noah at seven-thirty instead of at three.

  “Why seven-thirty?” my mother asked. She was in her forties, long raven hair flecked here and there with a touch of gray, and smooth-skinned and trim, with petite lips, pointed chin, and high cheekbones. The visible sadness of our missed life with my father seemed to have left her, though there were times when we were alone together or I came upon her suddenly in a room when I thought I could see the early years in her eyes.

  “She wants you or Dad to be home.”

  My stepfather was a quiet, courtly man, thin and tall, with hair turning gray though he was in his early fifties. I liked him, I respected him, I carried his name, Ilana Davita Dinn.

  “They’re very religious,” I said.

  My mother asked, “Where will you teach him?”

  “I thought in my room with the door open.”

  My stepfather said, “Who are these people? What’s their name?”

  “The boy is Noah Stremin, their nephew. The family is called Polit.”

  “Polit. I don’t know that name.”

  “I have no objection,” said my mother.

  “Neither do I,” my stepfather said.

  “Is Noah from Europe?” Rachel suddenly asked.

  “Yes.”

  “If he tells you stories, will you tell them to me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Rachel, finish eating,” said my mother.

  Her father said he would play her a game of checkers if she finished her food. They busied themselves with her. When I was done eating, I went upstairs.

  The door harp that hung on the back of my door went ting tang tong tung ting tang. Soft waning daylight came into the room. I left the windows closed and turned on the fan. My room faced the rear of the house and I looked out at the peony bushes and cyclamens and mock orange blossoms and the maple tree. We had been without rain for two weeks; an intolerable heat lay mornings and evenings over the neighborhood. Rachel was in the den, playing checkers with her father, and I could hear her high and happy voice.

  I brought Noah upstairs the next Sunday, and the sounds of the harp startled him as I opened the door to my room. He stopped at the door and looked at the harp, listening to the ting tang tong tung ting tang of the balls.

  He asked, “What it is?”

  “What is it?”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  I explained that the guitar-shaped door harp was made from a piece of butternut wood, nearly one inch thick and twelve inches long. Four maple-wood balls were attached to four varying lengths of fish line from a thin strip of wood near the top and lay against four taut horizontal wires. When you moved the door the balls struck the wires and made the sounds. I told him the harp had hung over the front door of every place we had lived. When my mother and Mr. Dinn were married, they gave the harp to me.

  Noah listened and when I was done he asked, “Harp is where from?”

  I said the harp had come from Europe. My father’s older brother was in the American army in France during the First World War. He bought the harp in France. Then he was wounded at Belleau Wood and sent back home, and before he died he gave the harp to his younger brother.

  Noah stood inside the doorway gazing into my room. The rear wall and its three windows faced the back yard and the gardens. Across the room to my left was my maple desk and to the right were my bookcases and, on the wall, my photographs of my father and Jakob Daw. I saw Noah looking at my paisley-pattern rose bedspread, at my small oriental rug, at the books on my shelves and the pictures on the walls. Then a corner easy chair, a dresser, a closet. The bookcases stood across the room opposite my bed. There were not many nights when I went to sleep without my father or Jakob Daw, whose presence was real to me and not to be talked of here. I heard my mother call to Rachel. At the same moment the telephone rang in the living room. It rang twice more before it was picked up.

  Pointing to the bookcases, Noah said, “Books from your gymnasium, your school?”

  “These books are mine.”

  He said something in Yiddish.

  “I don’t understand.”

  He pointed to my eyeglasses. “Always wear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brother Yoel always glasses.”

  “Your brother Yoel?”

  His eyes glazed. He brushed over them with his hands. “Yes.”

  “What happened to your brother Yoel?”

  “Always glasses,” he said. He looked at the wall of photographs. “What are horses?”

  “That picture belonged to my father.”

  “Horses running?”

  “On an island near Canada.”

  The name seemed to startle him. “Ca-na-da?”

  “The country north of the United States. Prince Edward Island.”

  I heard my mother call again to Rachel.

  He said, looking at the wall, “This your father?”

  I nodded.

  “And this?”

  “He was a writer. A very close friend of my family. Jakob Daw. He died in France during the war.”

  There was a silence. Looking at the photographs of my father and Jakob Daw, Noah said quietly, “You have pictures. I have nothing.”

  I did not know what to say.

  “No remember, Papa’s and Mama’s faces. No remember. Yoel, I remember. Reb Binyomin, I remember. With animals and birds and flowers. Not Papa and Mama. Not all uncles and aunts and cousins.”

  I had brought a chair to the desk, and he sat opposite me, squinting his eyes at the blue notebook. His eyes focused on the notebook and on the right hand that lay across it. Finally he said, “Begin lesson?”

  We reviewed the words I had given him Wednesday and then I assigned him additional vocabulary. He read haltingly from a second-grade primer. We worked hard on pronunciation.

  When we were done I went down with him. At the door, he said dismally, “So much to learn.”

  My heart went out to him. New language. New culture. “You’ll learn enough this summer.”

  “You can do?”

  “Yes.”
/>   He went out into the heated evening. I started back upstairs. The door to Rachel’s room was open. My mother sat on Rachel’s bed, reading her a story. I went to my room.

  The next day I ran into him while crossing the trolley tracks on Nostrand Avenue, walking toward Union Street and the Loew’s Kings movie. He had turned onto Eastern Parkway, carrying a heavy paper shopping bag. I went on Nostrand Avenue toward the corner with the newsstand. Mr. Wolf waved his good arm at me. He had been with the American army just south of Soissons and his right arm and shoulder had been smashed by a high-explosive shell. He was a short, thin-built man with a high voice, craggy features, and thin, graying hair. He wore jeans and a T-shirt. I went over to read the headlines, keeping an eye out for the camp buses.

  “Ilana, ninety-seven hot enough for you?”

  I said, “Hot enough.”

  “Tomorrow they say’ll be ninety-nine.”

  I looked along Nostrand Avenue and saw Noah going into a greengrocer.

  “Buses coming,” Mr. Wolf said.

  I thanked him and turned right onto Eastern Parkway and waited at the synagogue for the buses. Rachel was wearing her two-piece blue sunsuit and wide-brimmed yellow sun hat and came off the bus amid a tumult of campers and parents. She looked bronzed in the sun, vividly dark-eyed, lustrous. Her dark hair was done in two braids, and wisps of it lay helter-skelter on her neck and face, while her fingers and arms went into an account of what had happened that day.

  She walked beside me, prattling on about how the boys in her group kept chasing her. The camp had again been taken to the zoo. The tigers and elephants and leopards and seals. The new lion, prowling in his cage. The monkeys screeching and jumping.

  We started along Nostrand Avenue. Sunlight fell in great cascades broken sharply by the shadows of buildings. And there was Noah, emerging from a candy store, with an empty shopping bag in his hand. He did not see us. He wore a long-sleeved shirt and dark trousers, and he moved slowly in and out of the afternoon sun that bathed him alternately in light and shadow.

  I called out, “Noah, hello.”

  He was standing in the sunlight and he raised his left hand to his forehead, shading his eyes. For a moment he was lost among the people who passed between us. Then he saw me.

  “Davita.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  He briefly raised the shopping bag.

  “Delivering?”

  “Yes, delivering.”

  “This is my sister, Rachel.”

  Still shading his eyes with his left hand, he looked at Rachel.

  “Noah is one of my students who is learning English.”

  I could see Rachel looking closely at Noah. The sun was hot on my face and arms. We were a small island in the middle of the street, and people kept eddying around us.

  Rachel suddenly asked, “You like baseball?”

  “Bezbol?”

  “You like to play?”

  “American soldat play bezbol.”

  “They play in Prospect Park.”

  “Who play?”

  “Boys like you.”

  “She means Hasidic boys,” I explained. “Hasidic boys play running bases.”

  “I not Hasid.”

  “They play near the lake.”

  “I not Hasid,” he said again.

  “I am not a Hasid.”

  “I am not a Hasid.”

  Rachel reached up and tugged at my hand. “Ilana.”

  “What?”

  “I need to make pee-pee.”

  “Then let’s go home. Noah, I’ll see you on Wednesday.”

  But I saw him again the next day on Nostrand Avenue, a block from where I had seen him the day before, in front of a jewelry store. He carried the shopping bag and entered the store. I waited in the shade of an awning and he emerged and stood for a while in the sunlight, staring at the glittering watches and rings in the window. I walked past the newsstand and glanced at the headlines. Mr. Wolf nodded and waved his arm. I went up Eastern Parkway to pick up Rachel, and when we were again on Nostrand Avenue, I looked along the street and did not see Noah.

  He came to the house the following evening, and when I opened the front door to let him in I felt the heat thrust against me. All day the air had been sweltering and now had become an implacable brownish mist. The windows were closed in the house and the fans were on. He brought inside an odor of hot, stagnant air. Beads of perspiration ran down the sides of his face and chin.

  I closed the door. He stood breathing with difficulty.

  “Are you all right?”

  He said something in Yiddish.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Never Poland hot like this.”

  “I’ll get you a glass of water.”

  I hurried into the kitchen. My parents were in the den, listening to the radio. I did not see Rachel. Fans whispered in rhythmic undercurrents to the voice of a radio announcer. As I put ice cubes from the refrigerator into a glass, I heard news about British forces in Palestine moving to intercept surviving European Jews and interning them on the island of Cyprus. I glanced into the den and saw my mother and stepfather looking at the radio. I filled the glass with water from the faucet and went into the living room.

  Noah was standing in front of the fireplace, peering inside. It was two feet deep, lined with red brick and fronted with a wire-mesh screen. I handed him the water and he recited the blessing and drank with his head tipped back, his Adam’s apple bobbing, liquid sounds issuing from his throat. I heard the tinkling of the ice cubes and, at the same time, someone hurrying down the stairs. Rachel, wearing a one-piece yellow sunsuit and carrying drawing pencils and a coloring book, halted at the foot of the staircase and stood watching Noah drink.

  She said, in her high voice, “I had a class in swimming today.”

  Noah finished the water. I turned to Rachel. “What did they teach you?”

  “I learned the backstroke.”

  Noah handed me the glass.

  Rachel looked up at him. “Do you swim?”

  “Swim? I no swim. No.”

  “You should learn to swim.”

  I said, “Let me take this back to the kitchen,” and left them there. In the den my parents were still listening to the radio. Demonstrations were taking place in Tel Aviv. When I returned to the living room—I could not have been gone more than two minutes—Rachel was saying, “All right, draw something.”

  Noah said, in a barely audible voice, “No, cannot.”

  Rachel said, “You just told me you can.”

  “No do now.”

  Rachel stood with her head firm, her lips set. Dark eyes suspicious. “Why not now?”

  Pale color had risen to his neck and face. His right hand moved up as if to ward off her anger. His left hand held tightly to his notebook and pencil.

  He turned to me. “Lesson now upstairs.”

  Rachel insisted. “Draw the house you lived in.”

  A look of dread came upon his face. “The house?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “In Kralov?”

  “Yes, yes, in Kralov. Draw the front of your house.”

  “No.”

  “The front, just the front.”

  “No, no.”

  She stamped her sandal-shod right foot.

  He said in a low, tight-lipped tone, “Can no draw now.”

  She announced suddenly, “You don’t play baseball, you don’t swim, and you don’t draw. Don’t you have fun?”

  “Fun?” Noah asked.

  “I don’t think fun is important to Noah,” I said.

  She gave him a puzzled look and marched off toward the kitchen.

  Noah stood very still in the ensuing silence, his eyes soberly following Rachel.

  “What happened when I was in the kitchen?”

  “Ask if she use pencils for coloring or for drawing, and she say coloring, and she ask if I draw.”

  “Can you draw?”

  “Once I drawed.” />
  “Once I drew.”

  “Once I drew.”

  “Can you draw now?”

  A vague tremor shuddered across his face. “I no draw. No want to draw.”

  From the den came Rachel’s voice raised to a cry.

  “Hurt Rachel?” Noah said, sounding distressed.

  “It probably has nothing to do with you,” I said.

  He followed me up the stairs. We could no longer hear Rachel crying. A while into the lesson he asked if he could have a glass of water, and I went across the hall to the bathroom. There was no ice, but it was good Brooklyn water. I filled a glass and brought it to him.

  The walk through the hall to the bathroom, letting the water run to cool down, filling the glass, bringing it to him in my room—it all couldn’t have taken two minutes. I found him at my desk drawing with his left hand on one of the pages of his notebook. The fluorescent light from my desk lamp illuminated his moist face and pale fingers. His hands were shaking. He sat with his face close to the pencil and the paper. A drop of sweat gathered at the tip of his nose, hung there quivering, and then tumbled onto the lower right corner of the paper. I stood there watching him draw. He seemed unsure of himself; there were marks of hesitation; it all took a long time. Straightening, finally, he put the pencil on the desk and took a tremulous breath.

  “We live inside,” he said, pointing to the drawing. “Reb Binyomin live floor on left side.” He folded the page along the inside edge and tore it from the notebook. “Please give to Rachel.”

  I took the drawing.

  “No want make Rachel cry.”

  I told him I didn’t think he had made Rachel cry.

  He wasn’t listening. “First hear many people cry. Then years no hear anyone cry. No little child, no anyone.”

  I stared at him.

  “I go home now.”

  I glanced at my wristwatch. “Now?”

  “Very tired.”

  “I’ll see you on Sunday.”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you rather go to the park on Sunday?”

  “The park?”

  “Come here at about two-thirty and we’ll take the subway.”

  “Have lesson in the park?”

  “Yes. We’ll sit under a tree or on a bench.”

  “I ask Aunt Sarah.”

  “If you want me to, I’ll call her.”