Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty Read Free Book Online Page B

postcards to Lena to assure her he was all right. Joey remembered the day Lee returned. Isaac was playing with Joey in the street, showing him how to wind the rubber-band propeller on a model plane, when Lee sauntered up to them from a nearby trolley stop. As soon as Lena saw him, she said something like “When you come from California, you’ve got to take a bath,” and took him inside the apartment. Joey glanced up at his father, who was gripping the model high in his hand: a trembling airplane silhouetted against the sun.
    *   *   *
    FOR SOME TIME , Isaac had complained of stomach pains, and Lena noticed his stools were black as coal. Later, she believed the prodigious amount of cake he ate every night led to his bleeding ulcers.
    One day, not long after Joey turned four, his family held a party. He hadn’t seen his father for days, and Isaac was not around that afternoon. Joey’s mother dressed him in a nice suit and pointed to a line of cars parked outside the apartment. The cars’ interiors were hot. He didn’t want to take a ride. Older boys from the neighborhood, also wearing suits, approached him to try to nudge him into a backseat, but he ran from them, thinking it was a game. Finally, he was forced to make the trip. Everyone got out of the cars in a large garden that had a stone bench and a rail fence. The day was brilliantly sunny. Adults, many of them strangers, fussed over Joey. An aunt he barely knew gave him a dollar. If he heard the word funeral, he didn’t know what it meant.
    Years later, he would learn from his sister that their father had gone into Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan for an operation on a stomach ulcer. Apparently, the surgeons stitched him poorly and he died of internal bleeding. He was forty-two years old. Sylvia, not quite thirteen, accompanied Lena on the subway into Manhattan when they received news of Isaac’s death; Lena could not read the subway maps. Sylvia got them to Times Square, but she became confused at that point, misidentified a train, and led them astray, deep into the Bronx. The day, and their grief, seemed endless.
    Possibly, Lena sent Joey to relatives the week before the burial so he would not be upset by the mourning and the ritual of sitting shivah. Later, he could never recover any memory of this period. In the week following the funeral, Sylvia wore heavy black dresses every day, though the late afternoons were broiling. Finally, one evening, Lena told her, in a gentler tone than usual, to put on something lighter and go down in the street to cool off.
    The 1930 census lists Lena as “head” of the household, still without outside employment. Lee (Elias) is recorded as a “bookkeeper.” Lena and the children moved across the street to a slightly cheaper, though similarly sized, apartment (with the first month’s rent included free), next to a sandy trench dug for a trolley line, that all the neighbors called Railroad Avenue. The building was owned by an Italian family named Provenzano. Once the Hellers’ belongings were out of the old place, Lee handed Joey a broom, picked up another broom, and told his little brother they were going to sweep out the empty rooms they had left behind. When Joey asked why, Lee replied he didn’t want the new tenants to think the Hellers were slobs. Shortly after settling into the new place, Lee saved some money and bought Lena a brand-new radio.
    What followed was a period of relative calm, at least on the surface; for Joey, it was a cozy, peaceful time. Lee was out of the house, working most days, returning in the early evenings. Lena shopped for, and cooked, dinner every night: smoked whitefish, kasha, and potato knishes deep-fried in vegetable oil. Lena bought these from a neighbor woman who sold homemade foods on the street—the knishes were a nickel apiece. The woman carried them from block to block in a kettle covered with black