Miriam’s mother was standing by the stove with her face buried in her cupped hands crying noisily. “Okay. Okay,” Mr. Applebaum spoke in an unnaturally furtive, high-pitched tone. “It’s not the end of the world. Now, let me go upstairs and get my checkbook.”
“What happened?” Miriam asked when her father was out of earshot.
“Saul was arrested for soliciting a prostitute.”
“One of the immigrant Russian girls?”
“Ten times worse!” the mother wailed. “An undercover police officer. They got my baby, the future rabbi, locked up in the pokey.”
Mr. Applebaum returned. He had changed into a freshly ironed shirt. “I’ll go with you,” Miriam said, draping her tool pouch over a chair. On the short ride to the police station, Mr. Applebaum was unnaturally quiet. An air of resignation, more like defeat, had settled over his grim features. “It’s not like someone was maimed or murdered,” Miriam spoke softly. “I can think of a hundred things worse than what Saul did.”
Her father cleared his throat. “Name one.”
Incest. Sodomy. Pedophilia. Fratricide. Almost immediately, Miriam regretted her last remark.
“What he did isn’t the problem.” Mr. Applebaum looked straight ahead. “The schlimazel never learns from his mistakes.” Like a blind person groping his way down an unfamiliar street, the older man tripped and faltered over his words. “He doesn’t understand why it’s wrong to do what he does.” The older man’s lips trembled. “It’s the ‘why’, not the act itself, that worries me.”
At the Brandenberg Police Station, Mr. Applebaum craned his neck to one side, scrunching his shaggy eyebrows together while sniffing the humid air. “Well, your brother’s definitely been here.” The undeniable scent of St. Johns Bay rum with a hint of West Indian lime seemed embedded in every permeable object.
They discovered Saul waiting docilely in a cramped jail cell. Out of a sense of compassion – or was it sick humor? – the door had been left wide open. There he sat with his neatly-trimmed, wispy beard, wire-rimmed glasses and paisley yarmulke like a traveler seated on a bench waiting for the next bus to pull up to the curb.
“What happened to your hands?” Miriam asked.
Saul stared at his bony fingers which were smudged with dark stains. “They fingerprinted me.”
Miriam could just picture her brother having his fingers rolled over a pad of blue ink. Then the humiliating mug shot. Did he even have the good sense to remove the yarmulke? If the picture appeared in the local press, the entire Jewish community, not just immediate family, would be scandalized!
A thirty-something blond with a voluptuous figure was sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup thirty feet away. Her top, a low-slung halter trimmed with frilly sequins, was overly tight. She had kicked off a pair of patent leather, stiletto heels, which lay to one side on the linoleum floor. The woman was chatting energetically to a uniformed officer. At one point she glanced brazenly over at Miriam’s brother but just as quickly averted her eyes. In her left hand she clutched an official-looking document, most likely the police report identifying Saul Applebaum as the dim-witted ‘John’ who propositioned her earlier in an otherwise uneventful evening.
“You couldn’t keep your lousy schmeckel in your pants,” Mr. Applebaum, who was staring morosely at the well-endowed under-cover officer, growled. “Now the whole family’s disgraced.”
Saul cringed and seemed to wilt under the crass indictment. Miriam, who had never heard her father use foul language, felt her brain grow numb. The penultimate insult - now, not only had her brother victimized the Russian immigrant women, but his parents as well. What was it she told to her mother only a week earlier? The past has an uncanny habit of doubling back and biting you squarely on the tuchas. With the vengeance of a deranged pit bull, it rips your tender ass to shreds.
“Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.” Mr. Applebaum’s voice had gotten even softer, almost childlike. Not a good indicator of things to come. He turned to the officer who had brought them into the rear holding area where the prisoners were held. “Now we will pay the bail and go home.”
At the front desk, Saul had to sign for his belongings: a gold watch – a cheap knock-off of a Rolodex he bought from a street vendor on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City, his belt, wallet, some pocket change, a handkerchief with his initials embroidered in wine colored thread and two lubricated condoms wrapped in plastic. “Why two?” Miriam thought. “Was he planning to move from one brothel to the next?”
*****
Around ten o’clock Mark Fournier heard the doorbell chime. Miriam was standing on the front stoop with a pillow and an overnight bag. “Was wondering if I could crash for the night.”
Mark held the door open. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with the cop car in front of your place earlier this afternoon?”
She told him about her brother soliciting the undercover police officer. “He gave her thirty bucks so they got him dead to rights.”
“Tough luck.”
Miriam grinned. “No, fitting justice. His name will be printed in the Brandenberg Gazette police log along with all the sordid details.” She tossed the pillow onto the sofa, depositing the bag on the floor. “In the morning, my father will call the shadchun and withdraw Saul’s name as an eligible suitor. Ellie Gorelnik will be free to look elsewhere.”
“You seem a little …” Mark didn’t quite know how to finish the sentence. “Can I get you something to drink? A cup of soda or tea?”
“Why don’t you ever ask me out on a date?” She blurted the words with such force that he took a full step backwards.
“You’re an Orthodox Jew. I figured - ”
“Well maybe you figured wrong. Remember, I’m the heretic, the Isaac Babel of the female set.”
Mark leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. “Don’t talk nonsense. You’re not like that.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. “I want to sleep with you tonight. In your bed.”
“I don’t have any protection.”
Miriam fished a Trojan condom from her shirt pocket.
“Where did you get that?”
“While my father was downstairs berating my brother, I went rummaging through his dresser. He had a whole carton full.”
“Guess he won’t need them any time soon.” Mark pulled her close and felt her warm cheek wedged against his neck. “That Hasidic saying about the two pockets—tell it again.”
“According to Hasidic tradition, everyone must have two pockets, so they can reach into the one or the other, according to need.” Her voice was tinged with a dreamy, effervescent quality, a breathy, musical sonority such as he had never heard before. “In the right pocket are to be the words: ‘For my sake was the world created,’ and in the left: ‘I am dust and ashes.’”
“And what are we?”
“Too soon.” She rose up on tiptoes, brushing his ear with her lips. “Ask me again in the morning.”
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