Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [178]
The comrades like to shit their pants.
My dad screamed and slapped me in the face in front of everybody. I went to the door. “I’m an American! I’m an American!” I shouted.
“Come back here,” my dad demanded.
“Go fuck yourself,” I said and ran for it. I ran all the way to the train yard and jumped a freight part of the way back to Baltimore and hitched the rest of the way.
Well, the next week Dad was expelled from the Party and wrote me that he’d never forgive me. Two weeks later he was all over me to start writing him letters again. He never admitted it, but I had done him the biggest favor of his life.
My brother-in-law, Al Singer, had always had a struggle. Al had painted many houses so well that he finally got an opening to buy out a retiring contractor.
“Lazar, I need your help,” he petitioned.
Al was no go-getter, but he was honest. I loaned him the money he needed to buy the business. I had to wait a little too long, we had a lot of fights, but he paid me back every dime. Al and Fanny and their children finally moved out of the second-floor flat on Monroe Street to a place of their own.
With space now available in Bubba’s house, Molly and her husband, Danny, moved from Norfolk, mainly so she could take care of Gideon. What that boy needed more than anything else was something of his own. I gave him a little dog as a present. Gideon worshipped that animal. Dinky he called it. A mutt, but, like Gideon, he was a street fighter. He rode in Gideon’s bicycle basket and slept on Gideon’s chest. The tricks that dog would do for that boy.
For a brief moment, with Molly now in Baltimore, life looked a little better for Gideon. Then disaster struck, bang, bang, bang.
Leah returned from one of her affairs and just moved right into the boy’s bedroom, so he had to sleep on a couch in the kitchen. Gideon went on a weekend field trip with his schoolmates, and while he was gone, Leah had the animal shelter people pick up Dinky and put him to sleep.
Leah didn’t tell Gideon about it and he was certain the dog was stolen, because Dinky would never have run away from him. For a month the boy searched high and low, walking through all the adjoining neighborhoods and shouting for his puppy. It was pathetic.
One night he heard his mother speaking in Yiddish to Bubba and confiding that she had sent the dog to the pound.
“He was filled with fleas. Gideon was terribly allergic. I only did what I thought best. I didn’t know he would carry on like this.”
I don’t know if he ever fully forgave his mother for that, but it was as though a part of him had died, and what came back in its place was anger.
A few weeks after Gideon learned Dinky had been put to sleep, Danny Shapiro was hit by a truck and hospitalized for an indefinite period, with a fractured skull and several broken bones. Molly was a poorly paid secretary and her salary couldn’t cover the medical bills, much less support herself, her husband, her mother, and her brother. Dom and I dug into our pockets again.
But, thank God for small favors, there was one less mouth to feed because Leah was soon gone again. This time it was to Washington, where she married a little shoe clerk who worked in Sears, Roebuck and did nice things with women’s feet and got to steal a quick glimpse up the leg sometimes, when offered. It actually appeared that she would settle down with this guy for a while.
Then came the third blow, the terrible blow, the death of Bubba Hannah, God rest her soul. She went in her sleep, thank God, from a heart attack. The impact on the family was shattering, the most terrible event of our lives. Gideon, already weakened from blow after blow, seemed to be the one hurt the most.
Bubba always