“No,” she said. “No, Rene. I don’t, I’m trying.”
Garrigue was admirably patient, exhausted as he was. “He just making sure you, the grandbabies, the rest of us, we never going to be bothered by Compe’ Alexandre no more.” His gray eyes were shining with prideful tears. “He thought on things like that, Ti-Jean did. Knew him all my life, that man. All my life.”
Patrice slept between her and Antoine that night: the police psychologist who had examined him said that just because he was showing no sign of trauma didn’t mean that he might not be affected in some fashion that wouldn’t manifest itself for years. For his part, Patrice had talked about the incident in the surprisingly matter-of-fact way of a four-year-old for the rest of the day; but after dinner he spent the evening playing one of Zelime’s mysterious games that seemed, as far as adults could tell, to have no rules whatsoever. It was only when he scrambled into bed beside his mother that he asked seriously, “That man? Not coming back?”
Noelle hugged him. “No, sweetheart. Not coming back. Not ever. You scared him away.”
“Gam’pair come back.” It was not a question.
You’re not supposed to lie to children about anything. Bad, bad, bad. Noelle said, “He had to go away, Patrice. He had to make sure that man wouldn’t come here again.”
Patrice nodded solemnly. He wrapped his arms around himself and said, “I hold Gam’pair right here. Gam’pair not going anywhere,” and went to sleep.
UP THE DOWN BEANSTALK: A WIFE REMEMBERS
—SPECIAL TO THE CUMULONIMBUS WEEKLY CHRONICLE, AS RECOUNTED BY MRS. EUNICE GIANT, 72 FAIRWEATHER LANE, EAST-OF-THE-BEAN, SUSSEX OVERHEAD—
The first draft of this story was written by hand on a yellow legal pad, while I curled up in an armchair in a hotel lobby in Houston, Texas. After some polishing drafts on the computer, it appeared in Troll’s Eye View, a collection of fairy tales seen from the angle of their classic villains. I’d first asked if I could reimagine Rumplestiltskin, but I made my request too late, and someone beat me to it. Even so, I had a great time being Mrs. Eunice Giant, and I’m quite proud of her. She’s a woman who definitely has her priorities in order. Not to mention her kitchen.
He seemed like such a nice boy.
And he was a nice boy, really, for all the vexation he caused. They always are, I’ve never eaten a bad one yet. Oh, there’s some don’t care for the crunchiness, I know that, and there’s others who complain about that sort of salty aftertaste. But you clean the palate with a couple of firkins of ale, and where’s the harm, that’s what I say. No, I like boys just fine. Always have.
The funny thing is that poor old Harvey didn’t like them, not really. Oh, he’d eat one now and then, if we were having dinner at someone’s house—I mean, you have to be polite, don’t you? But for himself, no…. you could keep that man perfectly happy with a couple of cows, a couple of horses smothered in sheep, the way my mother used to do them, he loved that. Which wasn’t exactly what you might call labor-saving, because, after all, cows and horses don’t come running to you, do they? I mean, you have to go out and get them, and then you have to carry them all the way home. Not like people—you see what I’m getting at?
It’s funny, the way most of them think that boy—Jack, his name was, I keep getting their names mixed up—most of them think that Jack was the first to climb up here. Truth of it is, you can’t hardly keep them away. See a beanstalk, they’ve just got to climb it. It’s their nature, I suppose, like kittens with a curtain. Practically all over the place they are, some seasons, what else can you do but eat them? I used to tell Harvey, I don’t know how many times I warned him to get that beanstalk trimmed back, so it wouldn’t be quite so noticeable. But you know how men are, they just put things off and put them off, and then they tell you you’re nagging. I think now, if I’d only nagged him a bit more, who knows? Ah, well, mustn’t complain.
They tell some story down there, a whole business of magic beans, and trading the family cow to a crafty peddler, something like that. Now there’s nonsense for you. What happened, the cow was wandering loose—whose fault was that, I’d like to know?—and Harvey brought her home, so I could have breakfast in bed. Of course that boy naturally followed her tracks right straight to the beanstalk, and maybe he saw her back legs or something vanishing into the sky, that could be. Anyway, he went right up after her and pops into my kitchen, because of the way Harvey trained that beanstalk to grow. I call that clever of him, don’t you?
Now, what I always do, I scatter things like rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper, a bit of basil, all around that hole in the floor—that way, they’re already seasoned, you can just whisk them right onto the grill. But this Jack—my goodness, he was so quick! I had to chase him all around the kitchen with a broom, if you’ll believe it, before I finally got him backed into a corner. And then—now I know you won’t believe this—the dear boy looks up at me, just as calm as you please, with his little hands on his hips, and he says, “Where’s my cow, you thieving giant? I want my cow back!” Cheeky? I ask you!
“I ate your cow on a breakfast tray,” I says, “and a tough old thing she was, too. And we’ll be having you for lunch, as an appetizer, so behave yourself!” None of that grinding his bones to make my bread, by the by—I mean, who’d ever want to make bread like that, all gritty and nasty?
Anyway. That Jack, he says right back to me, bold as brass, “What about that hen of yours? The one that lays the golden eggs? I’d consider that fair exchange for my cow.”
“Golden eggs?” I says. “Golden eggs? Whoever put that in your quaint little head?” The things they believe about us down there! I says, “What would Harvey and I ever want with an egg we couldn’t scramble? Now hop up on that grill, and don’t be fussing at me so!” Because I was already starting to get one of my heads, you know how I am. It’s their voices, I think, that must be it. So shrill, they just go right through my temples, but do they care? You’ve got a hope.
“Well, then, what about that harp?” Jack demands—still just as cheeky as he can be. “I know all about that singing harp, and it’ll talk to you too, and tell you the future. Hand it over, and I’ll be gone, and we’ll say no more about it.”
Now you can’t help admiring impudence like that, can you? I know I can’t.
But. “No harp, no hen,” I says, “and if you aggravate me any more than you already have, I’m going to be really vexed with you. I’ve never known an appetizer to cause so much trouble.” I’m sorry, sometimes you just have to be firm with them.
Now all this while, mind you, I’d been moving closer, step by the tiniest step I could manage, me not being exactly built to sneak up on things. But he was too sharp for that; he zinged and darted around the kitchen like a fly. I hate it when they do that. They never taste nearly as good when they’ve been overexerting themselves. And if by chance you step on them, or you lose your temper and swat them…. well, you can just forget it, you know that as well as I do. There is just no salvaging a squashed human.
I’d have called for Harvey to help me, but I knew where he was—off with his great boon companion Claude, helping him to fix his septic tank or drain a field, something like that. I have, personally, never been able to stand Claude. He’s loud, and he’s extremely vulgar, and he’s never clean, not what you could call clean, and I always thought him a terrible influence on Harvey. But there, try to say that to a man, and see what it gets you. The more I expressed my opinion of Claude, the closer friends they became. I should have known better than to say a single word, but honesty’s my weakness, always has been. Anyway, I didn’t waste any time looking around for Harvey. As much as he and Claude drank when they got together, he’d not have been much use anyway.
But that Jack! I was closing in on him, narrowing down his escape routes—there’s a trick to it, I’ll show you—but I couldn’t ever quite get my hands on him. And he couldn’t get past me to the hole in the floor, either, so there we were, both just dancing round and round, you
might say, and it would have been funny, except that I was starting to get really hungry. It’s a blood sugar thing, I think.
“For goodness sake, we can’t keep this up forever,” I said to him. I was puffing a bit, I don’t deny it, but he was losing speed too by then. “Why can’t we just sit down for a moment, and get our breaths, and talk like people?”
“Because you’re not people, ma’am,” says he, not giving an inch. “You’re a monster and you’ll crunch me up if I take my eyes off you for a solitary minute. Deny it if you can, monster lady.”
“I’m not either a monster!” says I, straight back in his face. I mean, that really hurt my feelings, him saying that, as I’m sure you’d have been hurt the same. “I’m big, yes, and I’ve got dietary needs like you or anyone else. But that certainly does not make me any monster.”
“Yes, it does, ma’am,” Jack says—flat, like that. He still wouldn’t let me come any nearer, and he obviously wasn’t about to trust me even one pennyworth. So I did the only thing I could do—I just sat down myself, whether he sat or no. Oh, I stayed close enough to that hole so that I could block him with my leg if I missed with a grab. Just in case he really thought we were all as stupid as the stories say.
And by and by…. well, I won’t say he actually sat, but he did sort of crouch down on his heels—eigh, dear, what it is to have young legs—and we did chat, in a bit of a way. I asked after his mother, I remember, and about his brothers and sisters—they have them in absolute litters, you know—and did he climb lots of things, or was it just beanstalks? Making conversation, that’s all.
And he was actually answering my questions, most of them, and even asking one or two of his own, in his cheeky way—would you believe it, he wondered where we ever got underpants in our size—when who should come lumbering in but Harvey! Harvey, with Claude right behind him. Harvey and Claude, laughing and bellowing, with their filthy great boots absolutely thick with mud—if that’s what it was—and tracking whole squishy black chunks of something all over my nice clean kitchen floor. I could have wept. I just could have wept.
But I didn’t. I screamed at them to get out of my kitchen, and of course old Claude was gone the moment I opened my mouth. Harvey was so drunk that he’d never have caught sight of Jack if the boy had only stayed still, but of course he was up on his feet and scurrying along the wall, dodging every which way like a good’un. Harvey let out a yell—“I’ll get him! I got him!”—and he made this wild swipe, and Jack actually ran right between his legs, and I couldn’t help it, I just wanted to cheer. I’d never tell anybody that but you, but I did! I really, really wanted to cheer.
Well, Harvey kept yelling, “I’ll get him for you! I’ll get him!” but he couldn’t have pulled up his own mucky socks, the mess he was, clumping and stamping and scattering more dirt with every step. And that Jack, he could see how distracted I was, and quicker than scat he dived for the hole in the floor. Never mind cows, hens, harps, whatever, that boy was on his way home.
And he’d have made it, too, except Harvey somehow lunged and blocked him away, and what happened, Jack lost his balance and sort of skidded on the linoleum. He didn’t quite fall down, but he was waving his arms, trying to keep his feet under him, and Harvey would have had him in another second. Another second, that’s all it would have taken, even for Harvey.
Now I’m not going to swear that I did it out of spite…. what I did. And I’m not even going to tell you that I did it a-purpose, because I don’t know to this day. I don’t. I’m just going to tell you what happened, which was that Harvey lunged again, and he…. all right, he somehow tripped over my foot and went straight down through that hole. Harvey was always tripping over things.
It’s a long way down, but we heard the crash. And we stood there, Jack and I—do you know, I never did get his last name?—we stood looking at each other for…. minutes? Hours? I’ve no idea. The boy finally said, “Well. I guess I’ll be going.”
“And that’s it?” says I. “That’s it? You break into a lady’s house, you call her a thief and a monster, you murder her husband, and now you guess you’ll be off somewhere? I thought better of your manners than that, I don’t know why. Go on, then, run along with you, by all means. I’m sure I don’t care.”
Jack looked flustered, as he never had when I was chasing him with my broom. “Well, ma’am,” he says, “what would you like me to do? I’ll surely do what I can to oblige you.”
“You could stop for a cup of tea,” I answered him straight out. “That’s what civilized people do when they’ve killed somebody’s husband.”
So he stayed on for tea, sitting by the hole with his legs dangling down—a bit rude, I must say, and me too stricken by my loss to have much of an appetite—and we chatted some, and he apologized for saying I was a thief, since it wasn’t me stole his cow, and I told him please to give my best regards to his lady mother, and he even helped me clean up a bit, best way he could. He said he’d get the whole village together to bury Harvey, and I asked him to say a few words about Harvey being such a good speller, and a very good social dancer, and he said he would. I mean, Harvey had his faults, no denying that, but fair’s fair.
No, I haven’t remarried, nor likely neither. I’m quite content as I am, thank you, and well enough occupied with my embroidery and my reading. And people do keep climbing my old beanstalk, no matter how poor Jack runs all over, warning them not to, so there’s any amount of company, and I hardly ever have to eat out. It’s princes, mostly—they don’t taste any better than anyone else, no matter what you hear—and once there was this whole bunch of dwarves, the dearest little fat fellows. Perfect timing, that was, because my bridge circle was meeting over here that day. So I stay interested, that’s what’s important—being interested.
But I do miss Harvey sometimes, I’ll admit it. He was always so good at getting the oven going on a cold morning.
THE RABBI’S HOBBY
I was never bar mitzvah (which, for those of you who are not Jewish or don’t happen to know, is a specific religious coming-of-age ceremony for thirteen year-old Jewish boys, and literally means “son of the commandments”). My brother was bar mitzvah, though—our parents left the choice up to us—as were most of my male childhood friends. So I’m more or less familiar with the ceremony, and I know something of my narrator’s struggle with Hebrew and with his fearful attitude toward the whole ritual in general. I have also met more than one rabbi as wise and patient and sensitive as lucky Joseph’s Rabbi Tuvim, and know the world is better for them. Beyond that, I can only say with certainty that like “The Rock in the Park,” and several other favorite stories of mine, “The Rabbi’s Hobby” was born out of my old neighborhood, and out of a time and a culture grown more intensely real and clear to me today than perhaps it was then. Back then I was mostly reading science fiction, and listening to baseball games on the Crosley radio in the kitchen….
It took me a while to get to like Rabbi Tuvim. He was a big, slow-moving man with a heavy-boned face framed by a thick brown beard; and although he had spent much of his life in the Bronx, he had never quite lost the accent, nor the syntax, of his native Czechoslovakia. He seemed stony and forbidding to me at first, even though he had a warm, surprising laugh. He just didn’t look like someone who would laugh a lot.
What gradually won me over was that Rabbi Tuvim collected odd, unlikely things. He was the only person I knew who collected, not baseball cards, the way all my friends and I did, but boxers. There was one gum company who put those out, complete with the fighters’ records and a few lines about their lives, and the rabbi had all the heavyweights, going back to John L. Sullivan, and most of the lighter champions too. I learned everything I know about Stanley Ketchel, Jimmy McLarnin, Benny Leonard, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, Tommy Loughran, Henry Armstrong and Tony Canzoneri—to name just those few—from Rabbi Tuvim’s cards.
He kept boxes of paper matchbooks too, and those little bags of sugar that you get when you order coffee i
n restaurants. My favorites were a set from Europe that had tiny copies of paintings on them.
And then there were the keys. The rabbi had an old tin box, like my school lunch box, but bigger, and it was filled with dozens and dozens of keys of every shape and size you could imagine that a key might be. Some of them were tiny, smaller even than our mailbox key, but some were huge and heavy and rusty; they looked like the keys jailers or housekeepers always carried at their belts in movies about the Middle Ages. Rabbi Tuvim had no idea what locks they might have been for—he never locked up anything, anyway, no matter how people warned him—he just picked them up wherever he found them lying loose and plopped them into his key box. To which, by the way, he’d lost the key long ago.
When I finally got up the nerve to ask him why he collected something as completely useless as keys without locks, the rabbi didn’t answer right away, but leaned on his elbow and thought about his answer. That was something else I liked about him, that he seemed to take everybody’s questions seriously, even ones that were really, really stupid. He finally said, “Well, you know, Joseph, those keys aren’t useless just because I don’t have the locks they fit. Whenever I find a lock that’s lost its key, I try a few of mine on it, on the chance that one of them might be the right one. God is like that for me—a lock none of my keys fit, and probably never will. But I keep at it, I keep picking up different keys and trying them out, because you never know. Could happen.”
I asked, “Do you think God wants you to find the key?”
Rabbi Tuvim ruffled my hair. “Leben uff der keppele. Leave it to the children to ask the big ones. I would like to think he does, Yossele, but I don’t know that either. That’s what being Jewish is, going ahead without answers. Get out of here, already.”
The rabbi had bookshelves stacked with old crumbly magazines, too, all kinds of them. Magazines I knew, like Life, Look and Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post; magazines I’d never heard of—like Scribners, The Delineator, The Illustrated London News, and even one called Pearson’s Magazine, from 1911, with Christy Mathewson on the cover. Mrs. Eisen, who cleaned for him every other week, wouldn’t ever go into the room where he kept them, because she said those old dusty, flappy things aggravated her asthma. My father said that some of them were collector’s items, and that people who liked that sort of stuff would pay a lot of money for them. But Rabbi Tuvim just liked having them, liked sitting and turning their yellow pages late at night, thinking about what people were thinking so long ago. “It’s very peaceful,” he told me. “So much worry about so much—so much certainty about how things were going to turn out—and here we are now, and it didn’t turn out like that, after all. Don’t ever be too sure of anything, Joseph.”