“In the morning, I’m leaving the island on the first boat out from Vineyard Haven and I wanted to say goodbye.” He gave the woman’s hand a gentle squeeze. “I’ll wait for her downstairs.”
Before descending to the lobby, Bart went back to his room, washed his face and combed his hair what little there was of it. Then he bent down and felt the pipe under the toilet tank. The metal was dry.
The night the man arrived at the Oak Bluffs Hotel he spotted a ring of wetness pooling on the floor near the toilet. Drip, drip, drip. A steady stream of cold water was bleeding out from the compression fitting. He closed the shut-off valve feeding the tank and went down to the front desk.
“My toilet’s leaking.”
“Oh, dear,” the desk clerk seemed flustered. “Finding a plumber at this late hour on a weekend could be a problem.”
“I’m a plumber.”
The woman’s mouth fell open. “You’re joking?”
“If you can scare up an adjustable wrench, I’ll fix it myself.”
The desk clerk fished a small toolbox from under the counter. Bart rummaged through the offerings, finally settling on a small pair of pliers. “This should do the trick.”
Back in the room, he loosened the fitting and separated the flared section of tubing from its narrower counterpart. The metal was mildly corroded but nothing looked structurally damaged. After washing the crud from the mating surfaces with hand soap, Bart dried the metal.
The trick was to secure the fitting, which looked to be about ten or fifteen years old, tight enough to seal the joint and no more. Even the slightest excess pressure might stress the metal and fracture the delicate tubing. Sliding the pipes together, Bart screwed the compression fitting in place, hand tight with a little play, then opened the water supple. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Grabbing the fitting with the pliers, he twisted the nut clockwise a quarter-turn. Drip. Pause. Drip. Pause. Drip.
Another eighth of an inch. One final drip then nothing.
He wiped the pipes dry and a slick film of moisture quickly reappeared but it was condensation, nothing more. The leak was fixed. He sat down on the edge of the tub. Five minutes later the floor beneath the toilet intake line was still bone dry.
Booth Bay Harbor, Maine. Four decades earlier.
Bartholomew Schroeder and his new bride were settling into their honeymoon suite. A six-foot tall, soft bellied woman of Norwegian descent, Penelope ran the bath water but the tub wouldn’t fill. Using a silver quarter as an impromptu screw driver, Bart loosened the bolts and pulled the chrome lever and face plate away from the wall. The rod that connected the drain and overflow assembly had slipped off its mounting bracket. He crimped the wire and tightened the two bolts holding the mechanism in place but, when he raised the lever and turned the water back on, the gurgling continued unabated.
Coming up behind him, Penelope wrapping her arms around his chest. “What’s the matter?”
“Minor adjustment, darling” he murmured, brushing her cheek with a flurry of kisses. “No need to panic.”
Bart removed the bolts a second time, pulling the entire bucket assembly out through the hole in the tub wall. He adjusted the heavy brass plunger three full revolutions lower and put everything back together. Yes, that did it! Mr. and Mrs. Schroeder took their first bath together as a married couple.
“I’m getting out now,” Penelope said and leaned forward, but her husband held her by the shoulder.
“Open the drain,” Bart said. Penelope reached up with her right toe and nudged the chrome lever upright. The soapy water rimmed with lavender scented bubble bath made a loud gurgling sound before beginning its slow descent.
“Now close it again,” Bart instructed. Curling her toe like a prehensile tail around the lever, she yanked the metal straight down.
Glob! There was an abrupt noise as the brass plunger slammed downward like a guillotine shutting off the rush of water. Silence. Bart released his grip. His bride of six hours rose from the warm bath water but, instead of climbing out of the tub, turned to face him. Penelope Schroeder raised her elbows high in the air, crisscrossing the forearms directly over her head then nonchallantly squatted, her glistening buttocks coming to rest on his stomach. “Now, if you have no objections, I’d like to go in the next room and make babies.”
Holly Heatherton wore a print dress, her hair tied back in a French braid when she joined him in the lobby. Bart led the way back up the main drag toward the Steamship Authority landing where they watched as an endless stream of cars, motorcycles and produce trucks crept out of the belly of a docked ship. When the last vehicle left the hold, the ferry began loading passengers headed back to the mainland.
Bart turned away from the pier and, in no great hurry, retraced his route toward the town center. He ducked into a building where a crowd of parents and young children were queuing up to ride the musical carousel. The hardwood floor was littered with pop corn, the nonstop calliope music deafening. Riders leaned far forward gripping the horses’ reins with one hand as they lunged for brass rings dangling from a wooden chute positioned at a steep angle. Each time a rider managed to snare a ring, another one slid down to take its place.
Bart bought bags of popcorn. They went out in the street where the sun was almost down. A trawler that might have been the same ship he had seen on the morning that Holly joined him for breakfast was lurching in to shore. “There’s something I want to show you.”
He led the way back to the hotel and brought the girl up to his room. “Sit there.” He indicated a Windsor chair with curved armrests and spindly legs splayed at a generous angle. Next to the chair was a bedside table that Mr.. Schroeder had dragged to the center of the room.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” Holly indicated a collection of plumbing supplies—tubing cutters, copper fittings, emery cloth, lead-free solder and rosin flux.
“Hardware store.” Mr. Schroeder reached for a propane torch. “I’m going to teach you what little I’ve learned about this beautiful and sordid world we live in. Are you ready?”
Holly Heatherton, folded her hands in her lap. “Yes, I’m ready.”
Half an hour later he shoved the night table back where it belonged. “That’s all I have to say,” Mr. Schroeder muttered. “Did you understand what I told you?”
“Yes, emphatically.”
Shrouded in a twilight haze, objects in the room were beginning to lose definition, blend and blur. The nautical pictures hanging over the brass bed had shed their vivid colors in favor of more somber, elegiac tones, while the reading lamp was dissolving into the night table. “So what did you learn about the human condition?”
“Copper tubing must be bone dry and heated to the proper temperature,” she said, “before solder flows into a fitting sealing the joint.”
“Patience is a virtue. What else?”
A muggy breeze from the open window carried with it an acrid potpourri of decomposing fish, slimy seaweed, salt spray roses and fresh-mown grass. “Some plumbers dress the joints by cleaning away excess flux and solder but the final step is more a matter of professional pride and not absolutely necessary.”
“You’ll be alright, then?”
“Can’t imagine why not.”
“Here, take this,” he handed her a small piece of emery cloth stained with flux, “to remember me by.”
“A talisman of sorts.”
In the morning for his last meal on the island, Mr. Schroeder ordered the salmon omelette with Monterey jack cheese, chive and diced scallions. The ferry departed promptly at eight o’clock. For the first time in over a year, he felt free and unencumbered, as though a slab of stone as thick and weighty as a granite cemetery monument had miraculously lifted from his heart.
Return to Table of Contents
Five Hundred Forty-three Parishioners
Mortimer Goldfarb was replenishing a bin of 3-inch molly screws in his uncle’s hardware store when a tall, heavyset black man with a sour expres
sion lurched through the door. “Abraham Lefkowitz?”
Morty’s uncle, a gaunt, sallow-faced man with a mop of thinning hair that he seldom bothered to run a comb through, stepped out from behind the counter. “What can I do for you?”
The black man yanked a thick wad of papers from his back pocket. “You’re hereby summoned to appear in district court on the eighteenth of September.” He jiggled a pen in front of the hardware store owner’s nose. “Sign here.”
The old man’s’ face blanched. “What, I committed a crime?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Paperwork explains everything.” Retrieving the clip board, the black man disappeared out the door.
Morty removed the papers from his uncle’s trembling hands and scanned the document. “Florence Catelli, that divorcee who worked here a month and a half, ... she’s suing you for sexual discrimination.”
The old man shook a fist in the air. “I never laid a hand on that frumpy bitch!”
“Apparently, you didn’t have to.”
Florence Catelli came to work at Lefkowitz Hardware the middle of August doing bookkeeping three days a week. A month into the job, she approached Abe Lefkowitz and announced she was leaving early for a doctor’s appointment.
“You sick?”
“Pregnant.” The woman, who was well into her second term, walked out the door and promptly dropped off the face of the earth. No notice. No nothing. Abe called Florence’s house a half dozen times and left messages on an answering machine but she never returned his calls.
“You asked her to bring you a note from the obstetrician.”
“Yeah, what’s the harm in that?”
Morty thumped the legal brief with his index finger. “Asking pregnant women for a doctor’s note is against the law without a written company policy.”
“Such stupidity!”
A contractor entered the store and requested ten pounds of roofing nails. Still clutching the court papers, Morty went off to the back of the store to fill the order. While his uncle was ringing up the sale, he drifted out the front door. Across the street at a diagonal loomed a new office building - high rent, executive business suites. A sign on the front lawn read Garret, Meyers and Morales, Attorneys at Law.
Louisa Morales’ name was prominently listed on the summons. Morty shook his head in disbelief. Florence Catelli probably waltzed across the intersection to Garret, Myers and Morales as soon as she left Lefkowitz’ Hardware Store on her last day at work.
Emotional damages. Psychological abuse. Loss of income. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching! The woman with a penchant for lottery tickets and frittering her weekends away stroking the one armed bandits at Foxwoods Casino just over the state line in Connecticut must have thought she died and flew straight up to heaven when Ms Morales told her what Abraham Lefkowitz’ indiscretion might be worth.
At four-thirty, while his uncle was talking to a contractor, Morty ducked into the back room and called the law firm. “Ms. Morales, please?”
“Who should I say is calling?”
“Mort Goldfarb. I need to speak with her regarding my uncle, Abe Lefkowitz.”
After a brief pause a woman came on the line. “Yes, can I help you?”
“Your firm is representing Florence Catelli.”
“Are you a lawyer?” The voice was frigid.
“No, I’m Abe Lefkowitz’ nephew, but I thought -”
“If your uncle wants to negotiate a settlement that’s fine,” the woman brought him up short, “but otherwise Mr. Lefkowitz needs to hire an attorney. Under Massachusetts state law, neither he nor a family member can represent the corporation.”
“It’s a family-owned hardware store hardware, not some goddamn Fortune Five Hundred conglomerate!”
“That’s irrelevant. Is your uncle ready to settle?”
There was an uncomfortably pause. “You can’t be serious,” Morty blustered.
By way of a reply, Louisa Morales hung up the phone.
Ten thousand dollars for emotional damages and lost wages plus legal fees—that’s what the suit was demanding. And the language was brutal:
“With total disregard for Ms. Catelli’s modesty, Mr. Lefkowitz demanded my client provide him with medical information of a most private and confidential nature. .... Ms. Catelli felt violated, degraded, humiliated by the store owner’s insensitivity to her condition as a pregnant woman well advanced into her second trimester.”
“From the outset of her employment at Lefkowitz Hardware, Ms. Catelli was treated in a most condescending and patronizing manner, as the several examples listed below will attest.”
The examples were hogwash, a figment of Florence Catelli’s deviant mind and Louisa Morales’ creative writing skills. With a master’s degree in literature, Morty Goldfarb knew perfectly well that the lawyer had embellished Florence’s verbal diarrhea. Abraham Lefkowitz, a devout, orthodox Jew who would carry a lady bug outside on a Kleenex rather than harm the insect, was demonized, vilified and transformed into the employer from hell! Every pregnant working woman’s worse nightmare!
From the outset, Morty had a bad feeling about the woman and tried to talk his uncle out of hiring her. Florence Catelli’s employment history resembled Swiss cheese. A week here. A month and a half there. Endless holes. The red head talked too fast in a loud garish voice and, during the job interview, her eyes flitted about the hardware store in a distracted manner. But his uncle prevailed. “Give the woman a chance. Maybe she’ll surprise you.”
Surprise! Surprise!
“Where’re that legal papers?” Abe asked around five o’clock as they were getting ready to lock up for the night.
“Let me read it over at home later tonight,” Morty deflected the request, “and we can review it in the morning.”
His uncle shrugged. “So, how does it feel having a bona fide sexual pervert for an uncle?”
“Pretty much the same as it did before we knew the sad truth.” His nephew turned the lights off and locked the front door. When his uncle drove away, Morty put the car in gear, but instead of bearing right out of the driveway as he usually did, he snaked his way across the street to the new office building and took the elevator to the sixth floor.
“Is Ms. Morales in?”
“Do you have an appointment?” the secretary asked. “We spoke on the phone briefly earlier today,” he replied vaguely. “I only need a moment of her time.”
The receptionist went off down the corridor. In a room off to the right, Morty could see a mahogany conference table with a set of matching faux leather chairs. Row upon row of legal books lined the shelves. The artwork which decorated the walls was an eclectic mix of post-modern Jackson Pollack and the organic minimalist, Paul Klee.
“Third door on the right.” The receptionist had returned.
“Mr. Goldfarb?” Louisa Morales looked up from a stack of legal briefs she was perusing on her desk. Inordinately large, charcoal-colored eyes lay deep-set like precious jewels in buttery smooth, pecan-colored skin. Decked out in a sky blue, ruffle-hem jacket dress with vented cuffs, the woman was voluptuously stunning.
With Morty, on the other hand, there was no pleasant way of putting it: since college, the man had put on considerable weight, and at five feet six, a hundred and eighty pounds, he was a physical wreck. A victim of male pattern baldness, all the hair covering the top of his head had fallen away. A few tufts still clung to the temples and skin around the ears, but the general impression was that of a relatively young, overweight man going completely, utterly and indisputably bald.
Beyond the first disdainful once over, Louisa Morales averted her eyes and assumed an air of bored disinterest. “You’ve got five minutes and then I’m throwing you out and calling the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination to have Mr. Lefkowitz’ case officially calendared.”
Gazing out the window six stories down, Morty could just barely recognize Lefkowitz Hardware Store across the street. By comparison, the building looking shabby and unapp
ealing. “Morales,” Morty said, “that’s Hispanic?”
“Your question’s irrelevant.”
“We’re Sephardic Jews,” Morty ignored the sarcasm. “My family can trace our ancestors back to 14th Century Portugal. My Uncle Abe speaks both fluent Spanish and Ladino, which, as I’m sure an educated woman such as yourself would know, is a romance language derived mainly from Old Castilian with many borrowings from Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and French.”
Louisa Morales scowled and cracked her knuckles one at a time. “Why are you telling me this?”
Morty pulled a tattered news clipping from his breast pocket and laid it on the woman’s desk. “My Uncle Abe teaches English as a second language, mostly to immigrants from Latin America. Twenty years now he’s been doing it. The city honored him with a citation last year.” Morty pointed at one of the legal briefs littering the woman’s desk. “He’s not the callous and depraved monster you described in the court papers.”
Louisa Morales leaned back in her chair causing her breasts to jut suggestively. The erotic display was a playful taunt. There on the sixth floor of the swanky law offices, Louisa Morales was a legal star on the rise, a gorgeous, well-educated Latina; Morty Goldfarb was a low rent shlemazel, a regrettable forgettable nobody. “Your uncle’s generosity is commendable.” She handed him back the clipping without bothering to look at the picture. “Now, Mr. Goldfarb let me tell you how the legal game is played.”
Louisa Morales was demanding ten thousand dollars, not a penny less. The sum was nonnegotiable. If the suit before the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination failed, Louisa Morales would simply bump the case up to the next highest civil court and so on and so forth. Like a diabolical, perpetual motion machine, she would pursue Florence Catelli’s sexual discrimination case all the way to the Supreme Court (Morty thought she might have been posturing but wasn’t completely sure). Over the long haul, court costs and legal fees would be astronomical—in the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Truth, justice, fairness—such noble virtues and sentiments didn’t factor into the equation. This was the American judicial system at its finest! A blood sport bordering on blackmail.. The moment Abraham Lefkowitz told Lenore Catelli to bring a doctor’s note the game was on.