Old News Read online

  She never thanked me.

  Both woman sat down in the hard-backed chairs pulled from the table, and I joined them, all three of us quietly sipping lemonade. Julia faced her friend, waiting.

  “Nearly one hundred in the shade today,” I commented slowly. “Three days in a row.” No one answered me. Beads of sweat glistened on our faces. Another housefly buzzed by, and Esther absently followed its progress. She was too tired to swat it. She sat there without talking.

  Avoiding Julia’s stare, Esther finally broke the silence, her fingertips playing with the edge of the strudel dough, already turning brown. “You gotta feel sorry for her.”

  Julia bit her lip and put down the glass with a thud. Flour wafted into the air, a small white cloud. “Esther, you were always the easygoing, soft-hearted sad sack.” A thin smile, kind. “I grant you that. A mensch, truly. What can I say? A little girl hugging stray cats who always scratched you. Giving away your last piece of candy.” Then her voice hardened. “But surely you cannot allow…”

  Esther held up her hand. “Allow? Julia, a woman can live in her own house. What say do I have? Any of us? No laws broken…she has children…”

  My mother returned the hand gesture, traffic-sign style. “In the name of God, Esther. Do you hear the words that come from you? There are young children on this street. Families. Respectable folks.”

  Helpless, Esther turned to me. “Edna, what do you think?”

  I deliberated. “Esther, I have one brief image of Leah Brenner from eighteen years ago. Before the murder, of course. She is standing on her porch dressed for a party in a bright yellow dress. I remember thinking—what a beautiful woman. Jacob’s mother. That memory—which I know is not helping here.” I drew in my breath. “Well, to be truthful, today she’s a little old lady, harmless, still an eye-catching woman, I grant you—but lost-looking, sad.”

  My mother tapped my wrist with her fingertips, her familiar Morse code that communicated my failure to grasp even basic human behavior. “Edna, really. You’re always ready to forgive the worst of humanity.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “And you sometimes condemn the best of humanity.”

  She drew her lips into a thin line. “That makes no sense, Edna.”

  I shrugged, imitating her, and spoke to Esther. “It was so long ago. All I recall are bits of information from the clippings you sent us. I remember that she was sent away, no? But not to prison, if I remember correctly. Some home? So now she is living back at her home? Was she found guilty?” My mother visited Esther three or four times over the long span of years, the last perhaps five years earlier, but she never mentioned Leah to me.

  Both women glanced at each other, conspiratorially, as though considering how to shield a pesky child from grownup indiscretion and scandal. My mother’s crooked mouth suggested disgust—and disbelief.

  Esther peered up at the copper-plated ceiling, disturbed by a wispy dust web hanging off the overhead light. She whispered a word. “Guilty.” She shook her head sadly. “The whole story…I mean, it’s the only story that this street cared about. But there are not many old-timers still living on the street nowadays. When it happened back then, she…froze. They found her bending over Ivan’s body, quiet, quiet. Like…dead. She never said a word…even when they charged her with murder. The whole time—quiet. Only this moaning from deep inside her. She wouldn’t answer. Like she just lost her voice.”

  Julia interrupted. “They never found the knife. I remember that.”

  Esther had a faraway look in her eyes. “I never understood that. They said she probably washed it off, put it back in the kitchen. You know, there were knives everywhere. The wife of a butcher.” She actually smiled wistfully.

  “And they believe she had the presence of mind to do that?” I wondered. “A crime the result of an argument. That strikes me as impossible.”

  Esther shrugged. “So who knows? What can I say? They took her away. Everything happened so fast.”

  “She confessed?”

  “No. Stony silence. What I know is what Jacob tells my Adolph. They are very close, those two…even afterwards. Especially afterwards. Adolph the jokester can’t tolerate nobody talking about that family. Jacob took it real hard. After all, his mama was taken away. So close to his mama, that boy. Always. He’s a young man then, a boy really, crying, crying. Some whispered her silence covered her son’s guilt. A mother will not let a son be taken away. So who knows? So my Adolph he followed Jacob around, the protector always, even as boys. Everyone pointed at Jacob. So sad, the young boy whose mama slices his father…” She squinted. “And Adolph tells me that Jacob says to the police, ‘She didn’t kill Papa.’ Over and over, like a chant, he says. Jacob almost arrested, fighting the police. He wants to rip his mama from the arms of the police. Yet the police don’t believe it. ‘Yes,’ they say, ‘simple story. Wife kills husband. It happens all the time.’”

  I interrupted, peeved. “And the whole street believes it.”

  My mother whispered, “They’d had a big fight that morning, Leah and Ivan. A horrible fight, bloody. Everyone talked about it.”

  “Married folks fight,” I offered.

  A slap of sarcasm from my mother. “So how would you know?”

  A familiar barb. Me, unmarried at thirty-eight, the spinster novelist who drifted from Chicago to New York, suitcases and mother at her side. My sister, Fannie, happily married now with daughters. Though my mother harped on my unmarried state, I also knew—as she knew, deep down and resolutely—that she demanded this spinster daughter remain so, and stationed at her side.

  I pursed my lips. “Because that’s all I used to see.”

  My mother and I both tried to look sorry—a tired skirmish, that one.

  “Anyway,” Esther went on, “I guess they decided she was crazy, like she’d lost her mind in a fit of anger—she’d have to be, Jacob told Adolph, so the judge or someone put her away. Not jail but…”

  Julia burst out, “Not over to Dunning, the asylum for women, but to Jacksonville, an asylum hundreds of miles away from here. A seven-by-eight cell, I heard.”

  Esther concluded, “The family told everyone she went to stay with cousins in New York. Down Hester Street. We just nodded at them. What could we say?”

  “Good God,” my mother cried, “a bed in Bedlam for her. A murderer, after all.”

  “But life went on. You gotta go on. So Jacob and Leah’s older sister, Sarah, lived in the house, along with her twins, Ella and Emma. The older son, Herman, got married right away, ordered everybody around. He makes a lot of money and moves away.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Rich and more rich, that man. Gelt geyt tsu gelt.” Money goes to money. “After a while people stopped talking about Leah Brenner, the butcher’s crazy wife. Now and then someone babbled something and Rabbi Kurtz would knock on the door. Silence, please. A little respect. A family shattered. My Adolph, then so religious—the Talmudic scholar, would you believe?—he quotes, ‘One shouldn’t open his mouth to Satan.’ Like evil talk brings the devil into the house. So Adolph shut the gossipers up.”

  “But now she’s back on her porch.” My mother pointed through a kitchen wall, her bony finger trembling. “A dreadful reminder. When you romp with the devil, you infect the neighborhood.” Again, the shudder. “This cannot end well.”

  Esther shrugged as she moved to refill the lemonade glasses. “Now you sound like my Adolph quoting Scripture.” She went on. “Around three years ago we heard she was back. Maybe less. No one knows exactly when. She was let out for some reason. I don’t know the facts. But one day, casual-like and without warning, Jacob tells my Adolph his mother was back at home, but hidden inside. He seemed…happy, my Adolph said, but he didn’t know how to talk to her. We never seen her, maybe a fleeting glimpse through a window…if you were passing by and glanced over there. The summers went by, and she never came outside. You knew she was ins
ide that house. Like a shadow on the wall. It was a little…scary or something.”

  “What about her family?” I asked.

  “You’d see Sarah heading to Maxwell Street to shop, you’d see some strangers knocking on the door and disappearing inside, you’d see Herman in his Chesterfield topcoat and silk hat and cigars parking the town car at the curb and going inside to see his mother. But never with his wife and little children. You never saw Leah outside, gossiping over the back fence like the old days. Or hoeing in the vegetable garden like she always liked to do.” She sighed. “Leah and I used to share coffee at this very table…so many mornings. She was my friend.” She touched the strudel dough gingerly. “Then Jacob stopped talking about it. Adolph had nothing to tell me.” She stressed, “And I did ask. What can I say?”

  I ran a finger down the sweaty glass I sipped from, puzzled. “But today she’s on her porch. She’s outside.”

  Esther whispered. “Well, maybe she got a little crazy inside that house. Wouldn’t you? Like, go crazy? A world outside and you can’t go to it. No air to breathe, you know. This hot, hot summer, so brutal. Maybe she got tired of staring at those walls. How many cages do a woman gotta live in? Yes, I’ve seen her out there one other time, a week ago. It made my heart race. I even nodded at her as I passed to market. She turned away.”

  My mother was impatient. “Esther, you were always too forgiving.”

  A surprisingly sharp look from Esther. “Leave the woman in peace, I say. Please, Julia dear. The woman’s been through hell.”

  “She created her…”

  Esther stood. “I feel sorry for her.”

  “She ruined her family, Esther.”

  For a second Esther closed her eyes, then popped them open. Her eyes were bright. “I sometimes wonder if that’s true. We sit in this kitchen and have all the answers.” She grinned now. “Enough talk, this sadness. A short visit, Julia, you and dear Edna. After all these years. And Edna getting real famous, too.” She smiled affectionately at me, a twinkle in her eye. “Who’d have believed it? The short stories in the magazines that come in the mail. The novel The Girls. Your picture in the Tribune, no less. Everyone talking about the Ferber girl who is a New York wonder. A writer. And when I heard you were writing a new book on Chicago—about the Dutch truck farmers outside the city, High Prairie, the marketplace Haymarket, maybe even Maxwell Street, what do you call it? Selina? Or So Big?—I don’t know, I remember you told me, Julia—I says to my Sol that an invitation is overdue. She can visit the marketplace so close by, a block away, the peddlers, the hot dog stands…” She stopped.

  A throat cleared, a rheumy grunt. We stared into the doorway. Esther’s mother-in-law, Molly, unseen, listening from the hallway.

  Julia was mumbling, “Dear Esther, we do have rooms being readied in the Windermere at Hyde Park in a couple weeks—the painting will be done then. Edna likes to be in Chicago in the summer—to write. The energy, she says.”

  “I do love it,” I added. “To walk to the stores off the Loop, a block from Lake Michigan with the soft breezes, up and down State Street, lazing in Jackson Park, the theaters on Randolph and…”

  “It ain’t this old neighborhood,” Esther broke in. “Here”—and now she smiled at me—“you come for atmosphere.”

  “And your cooking.” I laughed and patted her on the wrist. “Your pot roast makes me slobber like a family dog. So succulent, so perfect.”

  Esther spoke to my mother. “But I don’t know how Edna can finish her book in this scorching heat. Is it the hottest Chicago summer ever? Such a life we live here in Chicago. Every day in the nineties.”

  “I think 1923 will go on record as…”

  We stopped, all of us turning. Tap tap tap. The loud banging of a cane on the hardwood floor of the hallway, purposely, deliberately, Molly stood there, her wrinkled face set in a censorious glare. While we watched, she emphatically banged the cane. Tap tap tap.

  “Molly,” Esther faltered, “you were napping?”

  A quivering voice, laced with iron. “What napping can an old lady do with the three of you yammering out here about stuff you got no business talking of?” She stepped into the room but didn’t sit, staring at us.

  The tall, thin woman was slightly stooped now, one shoulder lower than the other, the slight hint of a sagging cheek. Molly Newmann, family matriarch, redoubtable, the fierce head of this household, a woman who stymied conversation in a room and then, begrudgingly, would permit it to resume. Molly Newmann, felled by a piddling stroke last year that did nothing to temper her power, save for her reluctant reliance on a thick black walnut cane and too much peach-tinted rouge on that failed cheek. Brilliant white hair maneuvered into an incongruous French pompadour, always impeccable, a face ravaged by wrinkles I didn’t remember, the martinet in her late eighties. A face dusted each morning as though flouring a table for strudel. Long, stringy arms, liver-spotted, arthritic in the fingertips, but awesome in their power to demand. Once she’d been famous for her aristocratic mien, the erect spine, the absolute pronouncements, that unyielding stare that made her daughter-in-law quake and sputter; now, crippled, she refused to believe she was mortal.

  I’d heard Esther whisper to my mother that she was dying, the doctors warned them, but Esther added that no one, especially Molly the near-nonagenarian, accepted the inevitable. “She’ll bury us all.”

  Molly adored my mother—a kindred dictator—and tolerated me, but was notoriously indifferent to her son, Sol. Yet she doted crazily on her forty-year-old grandson, Adolph, affectionately called Ad by everyone but his mother and grandmother, unmarried and living upstairs, a gadabout bachelor who spent most of his free time flattering the old woman when he wasn’t promising to marry Minna, his adoring girlfriend of ten years. A Jewish patient Griselda, long-suffering.

  “Molly,” Esther reported, “Leah is on her porch again.”

  I spoke up. “We were surprised, my mother and I. We’d gone to pick up some things at Marshal Field’s and…”

  Molly tapped her cane, lethal punctuation. Tap tap tap. “So what?”

  “I guess the old reporter in me…you know…it’s a intriguing story, that murder, filled with…”

  Molly drew in her parched cheeks, and the multitude of deep-ground wrinkles shifted like some sudden seismic upheaval of landscape. “We will not discuss that woman in this house. That harridan. Poor Ivan, a good man, stabbed.” Her words leaked out of her barely open lips.

  “I caught her eye and…” I stopped.

  Again, the rhythmic tapping of that cane. Fierce, demanding. Tap tap tap. One hand gripped the table, her fingers carelessly squishing the hardening strudel dough. “Old news. That’s all it is. Over now. Lord, we lived though it once. Next door to reporters and noisy folks and prying idiots and weeping children and pathetic Jacob hiding out upstairs here with Adolph when he wasn’t baying at the moon…I’ll not have it in my home.” Her voice bounced off the ceiling. “I won’t.”

  With that she turned, nearly toppling, stabilized the cane, and left the room.

  Esther picked up the knife and gazed at the table. “My God, I’ve ruined the strudel.”

  Chapter Three

  On Friday night and on Saturday till sundown, Monroe Street was quiet. The reverential shade of Shabbas, the suspended breath and the intoxication of prayer. You could hear the long wail of the Illinois Central trains. Sometimes you could hear the wind off Lake Michigan. You heard the low hum of soft voices as folks strolled to temple, a murmur that lulled me, especially after the roar of New York City on a brilliant Saturday morning. I lingered on the front porch, waved off invitations to attend services, and fiddled with the pad in my lap, sketching out the midnight scene at Chicago’s rough-and-tumble Haymarket, my heroine, Selina, loading her vegetables onto a two-horse wagon and venturing with her little boy, Dirk, into man’s territory.

  It didn’t wor
k, that scene—not here, not under a blazing sun and an Old World tableau of black-clad congregants, men with beards and bewigged women, a line of bedraggled children behind them. A street now home to Russian Jews, devoutly Orthodox, who eyed the old guard worldly Germans with suspicion and sometimes anger. The Newmanns were nominally religious, German Reform, the men and women sitting together and the men without kippahs outside shul. Years back, a previous owner of the Newmann home had nailed mezuzahs on the entrances, though no one in the family ever touched them as they passed in or out. An occasional service, on the High Holy Days, of course, or to hear Rabbi Emil Hirsh speak at Temple Sinai on Grand Boulevard. But everyone went to hear that august man who inspired even the lackadaisical believer.

  But on Saturday night Shabbos was over. The street began to percolate, children streaming outdoors, folks gathering on sidewalks, on stoops. And on Sunday morning, early, the sun peeping out, Monroe Street came gloriously alive. I rose at dawn to the distant who-wah who-wah of auto horns and excited sidewalk chatter and children yelling. Outside of my second-story bedroom—Mother across the hall, snoring contentedly, with Sol and Esther one door away, quiet—I saw the street bustling and jumping as souls headed to Maxwell Street, baskets over arms, canvas bags slung over shoulders, carts dragged behind them, little children tucked into sides.

  Hurriedly, I dressed, intent on being in that swell of people, lost in that robust spirit, believing it would make my Selina come alive, my prose sing. When I came alive, my heroines did, too. A quick cup of strong black coffee in a chipped mug, a chunk of homemade, butter-slathered pumpernickel, a hard-boiled egg, and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice—and I was out the door.

  Walking by the Brenner household, I noted its shabby respectability, the chalky white paint peeling off the sagging clapboards, a pale green shutter slipping from a hinge, a few missing roof tiles, the untrimmed boxwood hedges lining the cracked walkway. It was a house the inhabitants forgot about, and so different from its twin next door. There, proudly, Sol Newmann manicured the hedges, edged the sidewalk with an artist’s eye, slapped on a fresh coat of sunny yellow paint to the clapboards at the end of winter, accented the shutters with a dark green tint. And Esther doubtless was responsible for the glittering windows, so hard-polished they seemed not even there. Rows of petunias and larkspurs and marigolds banked the sidewalk, a wash of brilliant color. English ivy dripped from boxes positioned on the porch railings. A showplace, really. In front of the Brenner home was a yellowing parched lawn. A large fallen tree limb rested in a clump of evergreens—an ugly remnant from the harsh, icy Chicago winter.