Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [135]
“It’s all for the best,” Hannah assured her daughter. “What’s the matter, Al, there’s no houses to paint in Baltimore?”
The family was almost in place now, where they should be, Hannah thought. If only Joe Kramer would see the light. What was the great honor to live in Joplin, Missouri?
ON AN EVENING late in 1920, it was raining cats and dogs outside and turning to sleet and hail. Hannah was suspicious of such weather. It was usually a harbinger of bad news.
Moses, upstairs, had become almost completely useless. His big thrill in life came from helping to make up a minyan, a quorum, when needed, to sit shiva and pray for a dead soul. He thumped on the floor with his cane when he needed attention. This evening he pounded in tune with the falling hailstones.
Hannah, who was closing shop for the night, was unnerved. “Shut up, you nudnik!” She threw her hands open futilely and was starting up to him when she was detoured by a ring of the front door bell.
Leah stood there, drenched from the downpour, with little Molly clutching her momma’s hand and shivering. A half-dozen suitcases sat on the pavement.
“My God! Leah! Molly!”
“Oh, Momma! Momma!”
Leah was hustled into the vestibule and sobbed as her mother dragged in the luggage.
Molly was taken upstairs and given a hot tub and fed and tucked in, before the two women settled in the kitchen. A glass tea and a hot water basin for Leah’s feet.
“Nu, darling, what happened?”
“Momma, it’s been horrible! Ghastly!”
Only then did Hannah notice her daughter’s multicolored bruises around the left eye.
“Joe Kramer beat you up?”
“Oh, Momma,” she wailed.
“I never trusted that boy. Not for one minute. He didn’t lay a hand on little Molly, did he?”
“He tried, but I threw my body across her to protect her, and he doesn’t care if he ever sees her again, his only child. He said a hundred times, if he said once, that he felt like a caged animal. A beautiful family I gave him. Momma, I tried. God in heaven knows that I tried. It’s a terrible thing to say, but he should have died an honorable death in France. At least the memory wouldn’t have to be so bitter. Don’t look at my eye. Do you have any idea what a horror story Joplin, Missouri, is? Thank God he didn’t find out about Richard Schneider. He might have killed me.”
“Leah, Leah, you poor child. You’re home now.”
“Joe drank every night like a Cossack.”
“Hub him in dreard,”
“I did everything. I went on bended knees. I scrubbed. I baked. I gave in to some very weird desires.” She whispered into her mother’s ear.
“He made you do that! The pervert!”
“That’s not half of it. The games he played, like making me dress up like a prostitute. It was disgusting. I worked my fingers to the bone. Don’t look at my hands, they’re raw. He’d go days without picking up dear little Molly. Not so much as a pat on the head he’d give her. I was a goddess on earth to that man.”
The thump of Moses’ cane on the floor interrupted. Hail pelted against the window. “I want somebody to take me to shul!” Moses shouted.
Hannah found Al sitting on the bed in his room, playing solitaire, dressed like a peasant in his underclothing. He played cards with himself, while his wife slaved at the Ginzburg Brothers factory.
“Al, take the alter kocker to synagogue.”
Al flung the cards down. “Shit, a guy can’t find no peace here.”
“For three months you’re sitting. Go find a house to paint.”
“Shit.”
“And the roof of B’nai Israel won’t fall in if you join in the prayers.”
“Shit.”
Molly was awakened by the shouting and, seeing herself in a strange place, hollered at the top of her lungs for her mother, who had resumed weeping loudly.
Thump, thump, thump. “Will somebody take me to shul!”
LEAH FAILED to relate to her mother a significant part of the story. Joe Kramer returned from the war a sorely hurt man from mustard gas.