Mekhasheyfe

Ghost,

When Uncle Al died, leaving Leon grieving, and Rachel drifting into depravity, the last bit of my forebears’ lambency blinked out with him. Rachel, 12 years younger than Al, was a sort of big sister to me, at least before she started to spiral. Rachel’s descent into her own darkness preceded Uncle Al’s passing by several years. As such things tend to unfold, by the time I needed Rachel most, she had already begun to deteriorate, a reality which I only pieced together over time.

I had known Rachel since I was 9 and she was 15. Mother hired her to watch after Kittie and me on weekends. This was just before Kittie got sick and died, which was the tragedy that changed everything in our kikel.

Before, Mother would walk us up the stairs to our grandparents on the weekends. Rachel lived on Grandma’s floor, and she would come across the hall when we got there. For various reasons, Mother rarely left us solely in Grandma’s care. Rachel seemed always to be there, and often, Uncle Al would come around, too, everyone crowding into their tiny apartment teeming each day with stuff and more stuff.

Before, I would moon over all the different, beautiful things in Grandma Minnie’s apartment. Kittie and I entertained ourselves with make-believe. Or we played hide-and-seek with Rachel, each little room so overflowing with things that we could hide from her within the same room where she counted.

Before, I would make up stories for Kittie about where the different pieces came from, about how our grandparents snuck them past the customs officials at Ellis Island (who got paid, who got shot) and Kittie would sit there listening to my made-up stories with her perfect mouth hanging open. I think she believed me, every word, before!

Sometimes we would pull at Grandma’s house dress and demand that she to tell us something. Then, in a circus of languages, Ukrainian and Yiddish and English and Ukidlish, she would tell us her own fantastic stories which seemed on their face too outrageous and magical to be true. But Grandma came from a place and a time where magic still happened, so we weren’t always sure, before.

Grandma told Rachel and Kittie and me to each pick something from her menagerie to keep after she died. Rachel chose grandma’s grand Singer sewing machine, now supporting several boxes of men’s dress shoes Grandpa Aaron had picked up from a street vendor one afternoon when he and his taxi had been stuck in traffic. He negotiated a good price through his window, making the exchange before the light changed. Grandma had two end tables with olive green leather skivers and gold inlay, concealing a little drawer jammed with stuff - paper clips and safety pins, old eyeglasses and an old glass eye, rusty nails and chocolate bars, a scattering of playing cards, cellophane-wrapped bon-bons, Grandma’s tampons. ‘Oh Grandma! Please let us have those end tables!’ I cried, and Kittie, who was 5, hid behind my skirt, smiling wordlessly.

Then the squall engulfed us, and it was Uncle Al who alone among our family never blinked. The windows shook then shattered in the shearing storm. The walls were lashed with driven wet. Furniture hung sodden upon soft floorboards, rotted then warped in the relentless rutilance which followed the deluge. The fecundity of forgotten food festered in the ice box; we were overwhelmed. Pertinacious pests crawled from the walls and the cracks in the parquet floors. Al was constant, impervious to the entropic forces decimating us, illuminating the way through the dark valley and her towering, defunctive shadows.

Then Al died. The shadows grew cold. G-d stood diffidently by.

*****

Ghost,

At around the time that Kittie got sick, and the light leached from her eyes, Sarah noticed the mice nesting in the walls of the Baron home, and she realized they were the carriers of the sickness which had infected Kittie. It was her first indication that your mother was to blame for Kittie’s illness, for it was through her carelessness that the mice had found sustenance in the home.

While Kittie was sleeping Sarah began straightening the little room, and she was surprised, and annoyed, when her broom brought forth a clattering plate of now stale rugelach, the crumbs scattering across the floor. Your mother had been leaving morsels out for the mice. They were nesting in the walls, and when they came out at night to eat the crumbs your mother had left for them, they were crawling over the girls’ little bed, leaving a trail of spit, and piss and shit on Kittie’s pillowcase, and in her underwear drawer, biting her subtly and infecting her with their rodent disease.

When the doctors told Sarah a blood cancer killed Kittie, she demanded to know whether it couldn’t have been passed to her daughter by the mice in the walls. And though the doctors sought to reassure her that this was highly unlikely, Sarah was not reassured. She knew her surviving daughter summoned the infestation, like a mekhasheyfe bringing forth the shedim. She knew they had taken Kittie’s light.

*****

Ghost,

That first horrible night, when Abe had returned, alone, to the silent home, he noticed the floor lamp behind the white velveteen high back chair nearest the curtains begin to flicker, and he spied a mouse cross the parquet like a shadow, disappearing behind the floor length curtains. He made a mental note to pick up some traps in the morning.

He stripped his clothes as he walked down the herringbone hallway, leaving his shirt and trousers on the floor, stripping his socks and underclothes on the white and black bathroom tile. The tiles were cool on his feet. It was a relief to free his crotch and his middle, which had been gradually expanding over the years, from his constricting clothes.

The bathroom was illuminated only by a small night light behind the door. He extended himself awkwardly across the bathtub to adjust the shower nozzles on the wall. Pulling the shower lever too soon, the cold water jetted into his hair and splashed off his fleshy back. He stepped away from the edge of the tub, striking the base of the pedestal sink with his broad lower back, scraping the soft skin along his vertebrae as he straightened.

Goddamnit! He slammed the wall with the palm of his hand. He leaned his head against his forearm. He sobbed. Goddamnit!

Goddamnit!

As Abe padded back to his bedroom across the hall, a large towel wrapped around his expanding middle, he heard some scratching squeaking in the girls’ wall. It sounded like it was adjacent to the bathroom.

Goddamnit!

Sarah’s end table lamp flickered for a moment, before blinking into darkness.

*****

Ghost,

The infestation came forth even as Kittie lay sick and dying in her hospital bed. Abe set traps, but they were useless against the rising tide. The brutes chewed through first one wire and then another, and gradually each lamp blinked out in turn.

Abe swept their droppings away each morning, collecting another dozen dead and bloating mice from his traps, but it was not enough to stanch the rising tide. He heard them scratching and squeaking in the walls at night. He saw them darting across the floor. A mouse ran across his face as he lay on his back staring into the blackness.

Kittie died.

The apartment filled one night with people and with food. Every lamp cord had been chewed through, only ceiling lamps and candles illuminated the home.

The mice were so loud in the walls that mourning guests were forced to yell their condolences if they wished to be heard above the incessant clawing and scraping and screeching. Mouse shit piled in the corners. Urine streaked the floorboards.

The mice had grown large and bold, demanding, and indolent. They huddled in the corners and under the dining table, waiting for scraps like hyenas before the pride. They fought over scraps like alley cats, rising on their hind legs, showing their claws and their sharp incisors, malevolence glinting in their black eyes and gleaming smooth coats.

A mourner who was there that night told me Sarah wielded her broom like a mace, battering the mice into walls, crushing them in corners, splitting them with a ferocious thrust of the bristles, leaving their juices to puddle about their leaking, round bellies like peaches left too long to molder on a counter. Furiously sweeping away piles of dead mice and mouse shit beneath the shoes of the mourning guests.

She donned long rubber gloves. She gathered a bucket. She washed the floorboards, scrubbing between the thick legs of mourning well-wishers. At last, every guest was sated. They wandered back into the night.

Then it was just the Baron-Kagan family: Sarah, Abe, your mother, Minnie and Aaron, Al and his partner Leon, and Rachel from upstairs.

Still the mice scraped and squinted and clawed. The dim ceiling lamp in the herringbone hallway flickered. And went out.

Sarah sat in a corner beneath a tall stool. Her hands were dressed in long yellow gloves up to her elbows, which she rested on her knees. She howled. It was a howl. Piteous, and defiant, it started as a moan and ended in a scream. It was the howl of a wounded beast. It was heard in every apartment, and through every open window. It was a howl to raise the dead. It flew out the kitchen window, and swirled about the courtyard, and settled itself among the headstones of the Cedar Grove cemetery along the Neponset River three stories below. I believe it rang still in your mother’s ears as she herself lay dying, her cold hand painfully gripping mine, at the end of her long and painful illness.

*****

Ghost,

As the lights blinked out in the apartment, so they began blinking out in the Baron-Kagan family. First Kittie’s light blinked out. And then, though she would still draw breath for several years, Sarah’s light flickered and went dark. Lucy believed she was the first to notice the flickering of her mother’s light. Sarah had intentionally damped the lamp in her eyes when she looked at Lucy. Lucy said Abe was the last to notice because he refused, principally out of loyalty and devotion, to see how far into the valley and the shadow Sarah had descended. I say principally because at first, before the light seemed to fail, Sarah damped her lamps toward specific people, first Lucy and then Alma and then all the girls, and eventually all her neighbors. But she preserved a little light, albeit one that gleamed but dimly and intermittently, for Abe, and even after the light seems to have failed in her entirely, after Aaron, and then Minnie, followed Kittie to sheol, Abe was still able to draw forth a little luminescence, a precious little ember of recognition, that seemed to gutter briefly in her eye, even for a moment, and it was enough for him to keep going.

Lucy told me the other person who could bring out Sarah’s light was her uncle Al. He could draw a smile out of his sister even in her darkest moments. He had a gravity-defying ability to laugh at the notions tormenting her the most. Sarah would laugh, or produce a rueful smile at least when Al, in his round cadences, teased her about the night she massacred the mice. And even though it was the night of the repast, and even though it had ended so piteously, in Al’s mirthful telling Sarah at least could smile.

Uncle Al blinked into the darkness, like dirty headlamps peering through smoke. He could not avert the slow tragedy. Like an infestation of mice which traps alone are insufficient to arrest, so the darkness eventually defeated even Al’s gamely lambent illumination.

The tragedy of losing Kittie and then her mother, was now compounded for Lucy by losing the light her father had always kept burning in two lamps behind his eyes for her. It was not intentional with him, and if he ever noticed what had happened it was far too late even to elucidate a sense of loss or sorrow in his breast, for it was circumstances which were changing Abe. He was just trying to cope, and being but a man, there were parts of his soul that he allowed unconsciously to atrophy, and eventually permanently to somnambulate, and among these pieces was his Lucy-love.

*****

Ghost,

After Kittie died, and life returned to what he imagined would be a new sort of stasis, Abe spent more time building up his business, reasoning that at least in that capacity his natural qualities - an indefatigable work ethic, a fierce attention to detail, an indomitable competitive spirit, a passion for thrift - would be put to good use. His business thrived, even in the increasingly difficult economic conditions of the early 30’s. However, there is no such thing as stasis, and a second project - trying to reason with his father-in-law about finances - was less successful, and without Sarah’s moderating influence the relationship began to deteriorate in ways that seemed, to Lucy, to drain even more light from their home.

Abe and Aaron would go weeks without talking. Lucy tried playing mediator as both men spiraled to increasingly less reasonable positions. In this hateful role, she realized that Aaron and Minnie were living increasingly in the magical world of their childhood. Soon they would no longer be able to care for themselves. Given Sarah’s state who would care for them? She tried to make her father see, but he was only a man and so consumed with Sarah-worry and Aaron-loathing that there was simply not enough space to rationally consider the situation.

Uncle Al was just emerging from Mother’s bedroom, where he had been sitting at the edge of her bed, making her laugh by reminding her of a practical joke he had played upon Maureen Katz when they were all in Sunday School together. Al had convinced Maureen that the rabbi knew about a liaison between she and Jacob Shpall, and that her parents were meeting at that moment with the rabbi in his office down the hall. He convinced Maureen that the best thing to do would be to walk down to the rabbi’s office now and admit everything to her parents and to him. What made this so funny was that he had told Maureen that the reason the rabbi knew about the incident at all was that Al had felt honor bound to tell him, when in fact Al had no actual knowledge of such an encounter, having made the story up from whole cloth. Even all these years later neither of them was sure why Maureen reacted with such horror, or what must have happened when she knocked on the rabbi’s door, since he of course had no knowledge of any of this. Al joined Lucy and her father at the table, still wiping a mirthful tear from his eye, in time to hear the end of their conversation, and he offered an interesting solution. Rachel was now out of high school, the Kagans knew her well, and she adored them. Why not ask Rachel to help around the place a few days a week? And in the coup de grace that won Abe to the idea, Al offered to pay for the service himself.

Your Ma always said that Al was like that, a bit of bioluminescence in the darkness.