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Chapter Three
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Chapter Three 1. As soon as Riklin left, my father slipped out of doors to stick the knife with which our guest had peeled the blood orange into the loose earth. Mrs. Adler, who was polishing her window, stopped work for a second, ran her fingers through her thin, uncombed hair, and inquired whether he was intending to open a knife nursery in the yard. My father tried not to smile and replied without glancing up at our goitrous neighbor that one might think a rabbi’s daughter would know what must be done with a dairy knife that had come in contact with meat. Unaccustomedly, my mother was waiting for him at the door when he returned. She touched him lightly on the shoulder and whispered that the two of them had better do something about me before it was too late and I fell like a ripe fruit into Leder’s hands. My father, who hadn’t heard a kind word from her since the summer, sensed the change at once and promised that he would come straight home from synagogue that evening without staying for Reb Simcha Zissel ’s Talmud lessson. It had been ages since the two of them had last sat down to eat together . Through the half-shut kitchen door I could hear them talking in muted voices. After about half an hour my mother opened the door wide and signaled me to come in and wait while my father finished the grace after meals. My father sat at the head of the little table, his lips moving inaudibly while he ran the back of a knife over the hearts-and-tendrils pattern of the oilcloth. My mother donned her apron and remarked, leaning over the sink, that she had thought she would turn gray at Behira Schechter’s today when she had seen me traipse in with that degenerate. If she didn’t insist on getting answers right now to all the questions that were torturing her, it was only because she was afraid they might snap her heartstrings in two. “You’re not the first one in this family to fall in love with some bum,” she said to me, glancing over her shoulder at my father, who kept crumbing the table while staring steadfastly at the flame of the memorial candle on the window sill. “Why don’t you,” she went on, pointing with a soap hand at the candle, “tell your darling son what the alter bochur did in Vienna?” My father gritted his teeth angrily, ignoring her request, and asked me why Mr. Rachlevski’s son Haim never came to visit anymore. He spoke highly of my fellow classmate and said that he was a model boy whose poems and compositions appeared in children’s magazines and whose drawings were hung for all to see next to the principal ’s office in the lobby of my school. It would be good for me to spend more time with him and other boys my age instead of associating with undesirables. My mother, however, refused to change the subject. My father’s first wife, she announced, the anniversary of whose death was tonight , had known Leder well during his days in Vienna. If I were to hear even a fraction of what she had had to say about him, I would awake at once from his spell. “Don’t. Why bring up all that dirt now?” my father practically begged, adding in Yiddish, while playing with the knife among the pile of bread crumbs, that silence was golden for all things olden. Yet my mother persisted and declared that on the day Leder died, he deserved to be buried with his rear end up so all should know what he had lived from. There wasn’t a house of shame in Vienna he hadn’t been in. Why should my father want to sweep it under a rug that he had debauched Abbale Tsipper and snatched him from the arms of his young wife, who had never gotten over the disgrace? “Enough, enough,” murmured my father, burying his face in his hands. “Do you want the boy to lose all respect for his teachers?” Neither he nor my mother knew, though, that Leder himself had already mentioned those days to me during my second meeting with him, about a year before this scene took place. 33 } [34.234.83.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:27 GMT) 2. A...