“I don’t know...”
“I guess not,” he said, and sat down across from me. He brought a cigar out of his breast pocket and lit up, puffing huge clouds in my direction. “So you stole your sister’s key, did ya?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now suppose you tell me what was going through your mind when ya threw that diamond out the window.” Another strange thing to ask. What could it matter to him what I was thinking?
“I guess I thought I could get it after I jumped.”
“It was pitch black. The house backs on a ravine. How’d ya think ya’d find it? I’ve had three men lookin’ for it for the past two hours and they still haven’t turned it up.”
“I dunno.”
“You don’t know much, do ya. You slow or somethin’?”
I paused before answering. “Ya,” I said. “Why else would I throw it?”
He tilted his head and squinted at me, probably to see if I was bullshitting. “I think maybe because you’re a little dumb-ass shit and you thought, if I can’t have it nobody else can either.”
“Okay. Whatever you say,” I answered, not so much because I was defeated or trying to give him any lip, but because I was still figuring out if it was better to appear stupid or spiteful, since he’d presented me with both options.
He leaned over the table and grabbed my throat. His hand was so enormous that his fingers nearly met at the back of my neck. His cigar was bitten between his teeth, and as he spoke, he blew smoke in my face. “What I say, is that you’d better give me some straight answers, and fast, and stop playing me for a chump.”
He stared into my eyes, and I tried to hold his gaze, but I began to tear up from the cigar. I coughed and tried to suck in air, and then all of a sudden he let me go, and we both fell into our respective chairs.
Spiteful. For now, I decided on spiteful.
An hour later, after he’d asked me each question in a half-dozen different ways, slapped me around a little, and choked me a few more times, I was led back into the hallway. My family was still there, but now Bessie’s eyes were puffy, and her boyfriend, Abe, had arrived. He had his arm around her. Lil was now with them too, and just before we reached their bench, the detective handed me over to a uniformed officer and said, “Miss Wolfman, please come with me.”
As we passed in the hall, Lil searched my eyes. Not the way Bessie had, in desperation. Lil was trying to divine some clue from my expression. She wanted to know how much I’d given away. The one time in my life I’ve actually wanted to open my lips to speak, I couldn’t say a word.
St-tropez
My life has been long, with ups and downs that I probably deserved, each one of them. But after everything, I didn’t deserve to be warehoused somewhere waiting to die. Waiting for them to serve lunch, waiting for the damned Sabbath elevator, waiting for my cancer to come back.
Bessie’s son, Warren, and his wife, Susan, said that moving here was for the best, but Glendale Manors was just fine. The five years I spent there after Ellen died were decent ones. I’d been alone long enough before meeting her that reacquainting myself with solitude came easily. I was independent at Glendale. I could come and go as I pleased without anyone taking notice. If I felt like having chopped liver, there were delis nearby. The Health Bread Bakery was a block away, if I felt like a nice caraway rye. The Jerusalem Restaurant was just down the street, and not far, the Holy Blossom Temple. I barely ever attended services, but when I did, I could go and then walk home afterwards. And in my lobby, every spring, they’d have a strawberry social and name one of the ladies Strawberry Queen. That was before the bout of prostate cancer, in remission now. Once that scare surfaced, investigations were done and preparations were made for the move.
Warren designated his son Ari to help. He was back for the summer from McGill, where he was doing a PhD on the famous anarchist Emma Goldman, researching her from an angle I wasn’t sure I completely understood. Ari was a patient a sharp intake of breath · 29 child and grew up to be very well-suited to academics, to all that plodding, meticulous research and to the penetration of their nonsense lingo. Well-suited to help a nostalgic old uncle uproot his life, yet again.
For instance, Ari’s thesis title was Emma Goldman: Character, Courage and (Con)text—An Examination of Radical Resistance and Ethical Action in Historical Perspective. He had to write it out to show me the crazy drivel with the brackets, and then he explained that it was the latest thing in the academic world—brackets in the middle of a word to give it a double, often contradictory, meaning.
I said, “Kind of like a pun, but not as funny, right?”
He stared at me blankly for a few seconds and said, “Yeah, I guess, kind of.”
It would be just like academics to invent a new gimmick for an age-old concept and then pat themselves on the back. I imagined the average person, to understand what Ari was studying, would have to furrow his brow and set his mind deeply into the words, just as I did, but this was something that came easily to him. Still, I could tell that helping me move had tested the limits of his patience, especially when I started through my old photographs. He only perked up when I told him there might be a picture of Emma Goldman and my late sister Lil in there somewhere, but then when we couldn’t find one, he was crestfallen and fell silent.
That boy was far too introspective for any person just out of his teens. Over-analyzed everything, and barely ever made a fuss or a peep. There were times I wanted to shake him and say, “Rebel! Act out! What’s wrong with you, kid?” I was amazed that he and I could be related at all, so different his boyhood had been from mine. His personality was in part a reaction to loud, formerly hippie parents. Bessie’s Warren had married Susan in 1970 and they named their son after Woody Guthrie’s boy Arlo, who they claimed had a Jewish mother. Warren was a Bay Street lawyer now and Susan a big-shot journalist, but on weekends, they sometimes pretended it was the old days and lit up a joint.
I couldn’t imagine Ari ever trying marijuana. He was intrigued by rebellion and protest, but only as ideas to be studied. He was obsessed with Emma Goldman and had been ever since he was a child and Lil told him about when she and Emma were comrades right here in Toronto. I could understand the appeal; I knew Emma too, and she was a formidable woman. She cut a deep swath through our lives, and the brush still hadn’t grown back two generations later. She was tethered to us even in her grave. Ari’s studies had revived her as a name to be spoken aloud, but I had my own reasons to toss her around, privately, during my quietest moments, when I imagined I might have the courage to finally make things right, after all these years. Now that time might be running out, those quiet moments had become more frequent.
Every day for a week before the movers came, Ari showed up at my old apartment and helped me fold clothing, pack dishware, and pick through tchotchkes. He helped me, for the second time in five years, make a lifetime of memories contract ever further. It wasn’t fair. They said old people’s minds discarded memories on their own; why not let us be until then? I went from a stuffed house to a decent-sized one-bedroom, and now to a tiny bachelor with a closet not even big enough to hide a burglar.
I shouldn’t complain—I didn’t really have that many clothes, and who had those kinds of closets anyway? They were almost a myth: you saw them in movies and cartoons, bandits standing upright, behind the door between two overcoats, knife poised. From my own unfortunate experience, I knew that even the wealthiest society folk, with their fancy Rosedale homes, might have closets with built-in shelves, or be too overstuffed with clothes to fit a person inside.
It was ridiculous to be thinking of such things. This was how I measured the worth of an apartment? That it should have a closet a burglar could fit into? Never mind that, in this scenario, I was the burglar. It was all sick, sick, sick. That was just my mind hitting the same detour sign, pointing back, and back, and back once