Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online

Harry as trouble. Added to Ruth's frustration, he did not care if their house was orderly and he far preferred going out to dining in. But Friday night was Ruth's weekly bout with domesticity.
    Nathan, the family allrightnik, avoided his mother on Fridays because she would ask him to "stop off and buy a little strudel from Mr. Edelweiss." It was not Mr. Edelweiss he dreaded. It was his daughter, Karoline. For the past twenty years, Nathan had dreamed of tearing the clothes off of Karoline's fleshy body and devouring her nakedness like an apple strudel. He didn't know why he felt this way. She was an ordinary-looking woman. He was certain that most men barely noticed her short brown hair, her porcelain blue eyes, or the fact that when you were close to her body, she had the scent of fresh butter. Was it because of all the butter in the pastry shop? Had her body somehow absorbed butter fumes?
    Nathan would watch other men not look at her and feel reassured that she was not a particularly attractive woman. But he could not look at her without imagining. Would her entire body smell of butter? He once came very close to finding out.
    He had planned to take her to dinner, only the second non-Jewish date of his life, but thank God his mother never learned about this. Karoline lived in an apartment in the building with the pastry shop. Her parents lived on the upper floors. And of course, that entire building smelled of butter.
    But once they were alone and she got close to him, his dairy-driven libido went wild. He grabbed her, squeezed her, pulled her toward him, ran his nose along the soft line of her flesh—but, for some reason that he would ever after regret, he decided that they should have dinner first, as planned.
    At dinner, over an appetizer of mussels at an Italian seafood place on Seventh Street, they somehow blundered onto the subject of Germany. Maybe they both thought it would have been too unnatural not to. She knew he was Jewish. He knew she was German. She said that her father came from Berlin and that he arrived in New York in 1949. Nathan couldn't resist pointing out that this was the same year that his uncle Nusan was found with numbers on his arm. She said that there "was a lot of confusion in Europe in those years" and volunteered that Moellen wasn't her father's real name.
    "Really," said Nathan, failing at disinterest. "What was his real name?" He wanted to suggest Eichmann as a little joke, but he used restraint. She didn't know what his real name was. He grew more curious, asked more questions, grew less polite about it. She grew suspiciously defensive and finally accused him of suggesting that her father was a Nazi. He, misquoting Shakespeare, said that she "doth protest a bit much."
    Later he had to admit that you couldn't really protest too much about your own father being accused of being a mass murderer, but at the time he thought it was very significant that she took such exception to his questions. They both went home full of anger. But he never got the scent of her from his nostrils—more than butter, maybe butter and sugar? Even after he was married, he sometimes lay in bed at night imagining Karoline Moellen naked in his bed.
    For several years, while he was having these thoughts, they didn't speak. He denied himself those wonderful, thin layered tortes that he desired almost as much as their confectioner. For a time he even refused to get the strudel for his mother, suggesting that they might be Nazis, which Ruth then passed on to Harry's brother, Nusan. Nusan had ways of finding out such things, but he never said anything more about it. Ruth kept buying the strudel. Nathan would sometimes buy it for her. He did not bring up the subject of the Moellens' past again because he thought that perhaps he was protesting too much and would give himself away.
    One day on Tenth Street Karoline kissed him hello, a light touch of her lips on his cheek, close enough for the scent—not butter and sugar: