“Where’re you going?”
When Jack turned around, he found himself face-to-face with what was left of his father. The old man’s hair was as disheveled as a used scourer, remains of food still clung to his gray beard, and his eyes were half closed, as if they refused to fully see the ragged body hidden under a stained T-shirt.
“To work,” Jack lied. He disliked lying, but he didn’t want to trouble his father any more than necessary.
“Dressed up like a dandy?” The man hawked as he tried to squeeze a last drop from the empty bourbon bottle. “Damned headache. What time is it?” he sputtered.
“Early . . .” It was getting late. “Have you had your syrup?”
Solomon Beilis didn’t respond. He scratched his armpits and stood looking at his son with glazed eyes, as if searching his brain for the right answer. He didn’t find it. He sat on the couch and turned to Jack.
“Kowalski was here yesterday.”
“Again? And what did he want?” he asked for the sake of asking. Kowalski always wanted the same thing.
“The low-down Polack doesn’t listen to reason. He says he’s sick of waiting for us to pay the electric bills and has people waiting to move into our apartment.”
“He must’ve gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. I’ll speak to him. There’s still some mashed potato in the pot. I’ll see if they’ll give us some bread on credit at the bakery later. Now, put on some clothes, or that chest will never get better.”
“And how about a little something to drink?” the old man replied. “It’s a day of celebration. I’ll have to go out and find a drop or two.”
Jack shook his head. He still couldn’t understand how his father managed to get his hands on alcohol, with no money and in the midst of a prohibition. He watched his father stagger as he headed toward the menorah to light one of the wicks that had gone out. After a couple of attempts, the old man managed to light a match, but it slipped through his fingers.
“You’ll wind up burning yourself, Father. Come on, I’ll take you to your room.”
“Get your hands off me! The Christians have their damned Christmas, and we have our Hanukkah, so I’ll be darned if I’m not going to light this sacred candelabrum. And I’ll light you with it if I have to, boy!”
As he tried to shake his son off, the old man splashed Jack’s vest with wax. Seeing it, he mumbled something like an apology, but Jack ignored him. He cleaned himself up as best he could and left the apartment.
Outside, the wind howled between the buildings, picking up dust and dead leaves. Jack wrapped himself in his raincoat. For days, the sun had remained hidden, as if ashamed to cast light on that landscape of grief and desolation.
He lifted his head to look around him. The apartment where he now lived with his father was on South Second Street, three blocks north of the Williamsburg Bridge, in an old tenement house mostly occupied by Jewish immigrants who had arrived from Europe at the turn of the century and had settled in the area for safety in numbers. Many had Americanized their surnames to make integration easier, but Solomon Beilis was proud of his Russian roots. That was why he had made sure his American son learned the language of his forefathers. Those were different times. Now the hustle and bustle and the children’s laughter that once filled the Williamsburg streets had evaporated, and the neighborhood had become a wasteland of deserted alleyways and barren parks.
Jack saw some people on the streets in spite of the cold, and he stopped reminiscing. He had to hurry, or by the time he arrived at the market, the earliest risers would have torn off the job offers that were sometimes pinned to the notice boards.
He had no luck at the market, or at the building site for the new line on the Independent Subway System, or at the Brooklyn docks, where corporations like Esso, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and D. Appleton & Company hired dockhands from time to time. For hours, he walked from factory to factory, receiving the same shakes of the head as the rest of the throng of unemployed that surrounded him. Even the vast dry docks of Red Hook had limited the number of workers they were taking on, allocating the vacancies to the Italian immigrants who paid protection money to the Mafia families that controlled the docks.
At midafternoon, the businesses closed their gates, and the jobless set off home with their pockets empty, their bones creaking, and their spirits crushed. It was the worst moment of the day, when hunger’s claws were the sharpest.
On the way back to Williamsburg, Jack stopped at the house of charity at Brooklyn Bridge to gaze at what New Yorkers had christened “the breadline.” That day, the line of people hoping to raise a bowl of soup to their lips stretched around the block and disappeared out of sight. Jack recognized Isaac Sabrun, the storekeeper whose furniture business went bust not long after the stock market crash. He was dragging his feet, his gaze absent. A little farther back, he saw Frank Schneider, the River Street lawyer whose sizable investments turned to dust overnight. The poor man said that he joined the breadline after his wife died, but everyone in the line knew that, when he lost everything, she’d run off with a wealthy rancher from Nebraska. Behind Schneider, he spotted the well-known journalist Dave Leinmeyer, who reportedly lived under the bridge, and who’d let his beard and mustache grow so that he wouldn’t be recognized.
Jack pitied them though his own stomach grumbled, imploring him to join them. He wondered whether he should listen to it for once. He hadn’t had a hot meal in weeks, yet something inside him stopped him from accepting charity. Doing so would have been to admit he had lost all hope as well as everything material.
He walked on, head down. He didn’t want anyone to see him gnaw at the scrap of bread he’d surreptitiously picked up from a coffeehouse table earlier that morning.