A Fine and Private Place

Chapter 5

Mrs. Klapper had set the alarm for nine-thirty, and now she waited patiently for it to ring. She lay on her side, facing away from the clock, her legs drawn up and one arm under the pillow. The blankets had been pulled so tightly up to her chin that they had come loose at the end of the bed and her feet were uncovered. She crossed her ankles and rubbed her feet against each other, but her feet remained cold, and she felt oddly vulnerable.

Rolling over on her back, she flung out an arm and became aware, as she did every morning, that nobody was there to be hit and snarl a complaint out of a half-dream.

The bed was too big, she thought. She'd go down to Sachs today or tomorrow and trade it in. "What do you need with a double bed, Klapper?" she demanded of the ceiling. "You expecting guests?"

The alarm clock made a small, self-satisfied click, and Mrs. Klapper tensed in expectancy. But the alarm did not ring, and the clock hummed innocently to itself. "So ring already!" Mrs. Klapper relaxed disgustedly. "It's by now ten o'clock, ten-thirty. What do you want, I should send you an engraved invitation?" The clock expressed no preference.

"Ai, the wonders of science," said Mrs. Klapper and turned groaningly over to look at the clock face. Her eyes looked cautiously out through her heavy lids, like two sentinels spying out enemy territory. She brushed her hair away from her face and looked closer at the dial. "You're supposed to glow in the dark, you know," she reminded it conversationally. "So glow a little." She finally made out the time to be nine-fifteen.

Mrs. Klapper fell back onto the pillow. "Fifteen minutes. I still got fifteen minutes." She was silent, then turned back to shout at the clock, "So what do I do for fifteen minutes? Tell myself jokes?" She turned over and burrowed into the pillow.

She could always get up, of course, she thought. It would at least give her the pleasure of shutting off the alarm. The idea delighted her. She reached out an arm toward the clock and then pulled it back. There wasn't any rush.

If I don't get up, she thought, I'll get such a headache. That nearly got her out of bed; she feared pain and endured it, when it came, with the stoicism of the deeply afraid. She pushed the covers back and started to sit up. Halfway erect, she changed her mind. And if I get up, all I got to look forward to is not getting a headache. Big deal. She lay down again.

An urge possessed her to look over her shoulder at the clock and find out how many minutes she had to go before she could get up in honesty. But that would have been a moral victory for the clock, and Mrs. Klapper knew the value of moral victories. She collected them. So she lay motionless, one arm lying heavy on her thigh, and thought quite directly about the strange small man in the cemetery. She had thought about him a lot during the twelve days that had passed since she had visited her husband's tomb.

The small man bothered her because she could not come to any definite conclusion about him. A gentleman, she had decided tentatively. A gentleman with a screw loose. But the decision did not satisfy her. Mrs Klapper had met gentlemen with screws loose before; Morris's law firm had seemed to specialize in them. The man she had met was not one of these.

This clock was electric and guaranteed noiseless. Actually, it made a small humming sound that Mrs. Klapper found infinitely annoying. Ticking she understood, and she loved the sound for the memories it brought back of the nights when she and Morris had lain side by side on the low bed with the thin mattress and there had been no sound but the jagged ticktock teeth biting pieces out of the night. Sometimes, if she listened for a long while, the ticking had seemed to speed up, to rush and thunder through dark tunnels in search of something just ahead, something that would be waiting only a little farther on, hunched and glowing redly. Then she would grasp Morris's arm, as if it were a banister on a long and crooked stairway, and pull herself close to him, holding him so tightly that he would move sleepily and say, "Gertrude, a little air here, please. You are not married to an accordion."

And then it would be all right. Morris was there, solid and warm and complaining, and the clock was just a clock, and she would just lie awake for a minute more, breathing deeply and quietly, and then she would turn in to face Morris and go to sleep—

The alarm went off, buzzing like a dentist's drill, and Mrs. Klapper sprang out of bed and pounced on it, shutting it off. Then she sat on the edge of the bed and said, "Hell," in an abstracted tone. Her head did hurt a little.

She got up and went from window to window, opening the blinds to let the sun flow into the big room. Standing in the sunlight, blinking a bit, she stretched and yawned with the same sensual appreciation of a good stretch and yawn that animals and children have. "A little exercise maybe, Klapper?" she asked herself aloud. "Bend down and touch your toes." Looking incuriously at her bare feet, she decided against it. "Silly way to start the morning."

Wandering slowly in the direction of her dresser, she caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror set into the closet door. She began to take off the faded blue pajamas. "Vey Gott, Klapper, you look like a bunch of bananas." She opened the closet quickly and looked inside for a slip.

Mrs. Klapper dressed slowly, picking her clothes carefully. It was hot already; wherever she turned, she could feel the sun on the back of her neck. She made a mental note to take a shower that night, and to wash her hair as well. As she dressed, she sang a small song about a girl whose mother offered her a choice of husbands-elect, all of them rich, successful men, but who refused them all to marry a penniless rabbinical student. "Dope," she said at the end of the song, as she always did, but, as always, she said it with kindness.

Dressed, her face washed—she had worn no makeup since Morris's death—she went into the kitchen to boil a couple of eggs. She set the timer for fifteen minutes, because she liked her eggs hard and firm, and because it was fifteen minutes during which she could move quickly around in the kitchen, running water and shutting it off, lighting small fires on the stove and then turning them off, ferreting in the refrigerator and cupboards, planning her meals for the rest of the day, and sometimes the days beyond. The dining room was quiet and much too big, and she did not like eating there any more. She continued eating at the too long table, however, because she was very much a creature of habit. Habits were secure and comforting and lent a certain purpose to the day.

She made toast as an afterthought and brought it and the eggs into the dining room. After setting them on the table, she went back into the kitchen for a container of milk. Mrs. Klapper ate with gusto, for she enjoyed food.

While she ate, she thought about Mr. Rebeck again. His abrupt leave-taking at the cemetery gates bothered her. So maybe he did lose his watch, she reflected. This happens. She stabbed the last of the boiled eggs with her fork. But to walk all the way back to find it, and not knowing if maybe you dropped it along the way or lost it on the subway or left it home—this, believe me, is crazy. She shrugged, spreading the toast with cherry preserve. So maybe he's got a wife, he doesn't want to go home just yet. Don't be nosy, Klapper.

Did he have a wife? Mrs. Klapper bit off a piece of toast, liking the crunching sound. Since when does a married man go wandering around a graveyard like he's taking inventory? A married man goes to a graveyard, he goes to see his wife's relatives. Maybe he wasn't married, then.

He did look like Morris, she thought. Morris was a little bigger, maybe, and his eyebrows were bushy, like the tails of angry cats, but the eyes were the same, and the shape of the head. Morris crouched over whatever he was doing, whether it was playing chess, reading a book, or preparing a brief. She had teased him about it, saying, "Morris, you keep on sitting like that, you will go to your grave hunchbacked. A special wing they'll have to stick onto your coffin."

Morris had given that slight laugh of his that you could miss if you weren't listening closely and said, "I like to think of myself as looking like a question mark." And now, seeing this small man playing chess all by himself, hunched over the board as if he were about to spring on it—

"Stop it, Klapper," she said sharply. "You are a grown woman. An overgrown woman, if I may say so." She poured a glass of milk, gulped it hastily, and took the dishes back into the kitchen.

After washing the dishes, which she did with much unnecessary splashing of water and fiddling with the faucets, she opened the broom closet near the refrigerator and took out a broom and a dustpan. She was not a good sweeper. The motion utilized in sweeping is not a particularly natural one, nor is it usually graceful, and the quality of the sweeper can almost always be judged directly from his form. Mrs. Klapper swept the floor as if she were expecting it to wince under the broom. She hated dustpans because whenever she squatted down and choked up on the broomhandle to sweep the dirt into the pan there was always a little dust left over at the rim. She would move the pan back and, subvocalizing curses, attack the dust again. But there would always be a thread of dust left on the floor, and she would finally rise with a snort of disgust and sweep the dust under the refrigerator.

Her sweeping finished, she looked at the wall clock. "Ten-forty," she said. "Good. See, it goes faster than you think. You got to keep busy." She remembered her sister's saying that to her. Maybe she ought to visit Ida today. Anyway, she ought to go out. She put away the broom and pan and went to look out of the window.

"Ai," she said softly, "such a morning." The sun was high and hot, dazzling her with its reflection off thousands of windows. She turned and walked slowly into the living room. It was a big room, lined on three sides by Morris's bookcases. Mrs. Klapper had had it refurnished a month ago and was sorry about it now. The new chairs and the new sofa were plump, springy, and ungiving. They could not be pounded or worn into comfort. As soon as the momentary brightness they had brought into the house was gone, she had wanted the old ones back.

"So what do I do today?" She leaned against a bookcase and ran her hands idly over Morris's books. They were always "Morris's books." Mrs. Klapper did not read much, nor had Morris, after a few teasing attempts in the first years of their marriage, ever made any serious efforts to get her to read. She had liked to be read to, but she always fell asleep, and Morris had smiled, patted her affectionately, and played chess with himself.

"I got to go shopping." She counted on her fingers. "Let's see—I got to go by Wireman's and get a loaf of bread, and some milk, and baking powder maybe—" She frowned. There must be something else. Wireman's was just two blocks away.

"If I go to Ida's I go past the butcher near the subway, and I could stop in and get maybe a pound chopped meat and a couple lamb chops." She would go to see Ida, then. "My own sister, you'd think I'd say hello once in a while. We're like strangers." Ida, the older of Mrs. Klapper's two sisters, had never married, and Mrs. Klapper had never felt right about bringing Morris over for supper. During the twenty-two years of her marriage she had snatched an awkward, silent lunch with her sister no more than twice a year.

Always, she remembered, always the look in the back of her eyes. I talk to her, I make jokes so she laughs and says, "Ai, Gertrude, everything changes but you"—and always, in back of the laughter: This one also has a man, and I got nobody. A look like that, you choke on your celery. What can you say?

Now, she thought, it might be all right to go to Ida.

The living room had always been Morris's domain, just as the bedroom had been hers. Each had intruded into the other's realm with something of the arrogance and curiosity of king visiting king. Morris was dead, but the room was still loyal to him, and the stranger pictures on the walls stared at her with the hatred of the conquered. She left the room quickly and went to the closet to get a light coat.

So I'll go see Ida, she thought, rummaging in her purse to make sure she had enough money, and we'll have lunch and talk about things and maybe take a walk in the park, and then I'll say, "Look, Ida, I got all this food; I got a whole pound chopped meat and nobody but me to eat it. Come on home with me and we'll make hamburgers and schmooze like we used to."

The idea pleased her. She won't go till late, she thought. That well I know Ida.

At the door she paused and muttered, "Sei gesund, Morris." She had never been able to break herself of the habit of saying "Be well" to her husband before she left the house, nor did she really want to; but she whisked the door shut behind her as she always did to keep herself from waiting for the soft "Geh gesund" from the living room.

Outside the air was warm and dry, and she breathed it with real pleasure as she walked slowly toward the grocery. Early summer in New York is at its most beautiful in the mornings, but few people ever notice it. The children go away to summer camps, and their parents' two weeks off usually come in late July or early August, when the days are sticky with boredom. Only old people know these early summer mornings, old people and the men who sell ice cream in public parks. They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last—these people who know that nothing lasts. The vendor buys an ice-cream cup from himself and sits down on the grass to eat it, or at least he thinks about doing it. The policeman sings to himself and stops to talk with the candy-store man, who has come out to get a little air before the wind becomes hot and sour. They talk about going swimming or going to the ball game, but it is enough for them to be there on the street corner talking to each other about it. And the old women move their chairs to follow the sun and do not speak to each other at all. They will in the afternoon, but that will be a different season, a different world. Now, in the morning, they stare across the street and do not blink when the cars go by.

Mrs. Klapper knew some of these women, but she did not nod to them as she passed the line of folding chairs. In a vague sort of way, she had always felt a certain contempt for them. She thought of them as yentas. Some of them aren't any older than me, she thought, and they sit there like stones and don't knit or read the papers or anything. What kind of way is that to live? You got to keep busy, keep moving, visit people. She walked faster, pleased with her decision to see Ida, and turned into Wireman's Dairy Grocery.

Wireman was behind the counter, a small pear-shaped man in a gray sweater and brown slacks. His eyes were black and sleepy, and he kept them fixed directly on whomever he was talking to. The skin on both sides of his wide face was slack and sagging, giving the effect not so much of jowls as of a face relaxing and crumpling like a robe thrown carelessly into a corner. He had been established on the corner before Mrs. Klapper and Morris had moved into the neighborhood, and she could not remember him as looking any different then or as changing notably during the twenty-two years. His wife, his children, his store had all grown, aged, and expanded during the time, but Wireman remained Wireman. She always wondered how she looked to him.

"So," he said when she came in. "So how are you today?"

"Just fine," Mrs. Klapper said. "How's your wife?" She nodded to his daughter, Sarah, who was sitting on an empty milk-bottle crate, reading a magazine.

"Who can complain?" Wireman shrugged. "She's on her feet, she eats. More you shouldn't ask from God."

"You hear from Sam lately?" Wireman's son had married six months before and moved to the West Coast.

Wireman looked quickly over his shoulder into the back of the store. When he turned back to her his face had gone dead. "No. What can I do for you?"

"A loaf rye bread," Mrs. Klapper said; "should be seedless. Also two bottles milk and a can of baking powder."

As Wireman turned to go to the back of the store, where his refrigerator was, Mrs. Klapper suddenly became freezingly aware of the way he walked. His shoulders were humped under the gray sweater, and he walked with small steps, one foot sliding ahead of the other and the other foot hurrying to catch up. His hands made very small pawing motions at his sides, and he looked as if over the years the air in which he moved had gradually changed to water.

"So old," Mrs. Klapper said aloud, and then realized that Sarah must have heard her. She looked guiltily at her; the girl nodded and kept reading her magazine.

"So, Sarah," she said because she could not bear the silence. "How are you doing?"

"Fine," said Sarah. How old was she—eighteen, nineteen? She was fat for her age, pimpled, and, Mrs. Klapper had always suspected, the brightest in the family.

"When you getting married already?" she asked loudly and was completely disgusted with herself when she saw the anger in Sarah's eyes. What do you care? she demanded of herself. Why is everybody around here so interested when everybody's getting married?

Sarah Wireman smiled determinedly. "Not right away, Mrs. Klapper." Her voice was completely without inflection, and Mrs. Klapper knew that she had given the same answer to a great many other old women while her father was getting their orders. She didn't want Sarah to lump her with those women, but she knew she had a long time ago, and she kept talking, thinking that there must surely be a sentence to remedy the situation.

"Well, you'll pretty soon be an aunt," she announced, thinking, Klapper, shut up! Just keep the mouth shut, please.

The girl's smile was as straight and thin as a dagger. "I sure hope so, Mrs. Klapper."

Shut up, shut up, Klapper! What are you becoming? She turned away from Sarah and stared hard at the Wheaties, Kix, and corn-flakes packages that lined one wall of the store. She could hear the girl's soft sigh of relief, and she herself sighed as if she had just gotten off an elevator in which she and a stranger had carefully not looked at each other. Then Wireman was shuffling in with her bread and milk and baking powder, putting them on the counter, and adding up her bill, mumbling the sums to himself as he wrote out the total. "You want I should charge you?"

"Yes," Mrs. Klapper answered. Wireman put the order in a brown paper bag and stuffed the bill in after it. She took the bag and started for the door.

"Tell your wife I said hello." She closed the door behind her, cutting off Wireman's short reply.

Having decided to visit Ida, she hoisted her bag into the crook of her left arm and set off down the block. The sun restored her good humor, and in two blocks' walking she had almost forgotten the weary politeness in Sarah Wireman's voice.

A figure was coming up the street toward her, but it took her a while to identify it because she was looking into the sun. When she finally recognized Lena Wireman she winced. Vey, she thought, now comes the heavy artillery. Maybe if she hoisted her shopping bag up in front of her face, Mrs. Wireman might not recognize her. But she had no real hope for this; she was one of the few women in the neighborhood who bothered to speak to Mrs. Wireman, and Mrs. Wireman knew her own.

She was a thin woman who had once been fat. Skin hung loosely on her forearms, between her knuckles, and around her elbows. The flesh was orange-white and seemed almost transparent. She always wore flat-heeled white shoes, having admired them on nurses, and tied her hair on top of her head in a knot about the size and shape of a prune. Once she had worked in the store with her husband, but for the last ten or twelve years she had sat in a metal-and-cloth chair in front of the store when it was warm, or on a milk-bottle crate inside the store when it rained. She never went across the street to sit with the old women in their folding chairs, and she always arranged her own chair so that she sat with her back to them.

"Hello," she called to Mrs. Klapper when they were twenty yards apart.

Mrs. Klapper lowered her shopping bag. My God, what eyes. She sighed, preparing herself for at least a ten-minute harangue. Be polite, Klapper. Somebody's polite to you and you're polite to somebody else and so the world goes around. She arranged her face in a wide smile of welcome.

"Lena!" she exclaimed. "How are you? You look wonderful!"

Mrs. Wireman shrugged and said, "Ahh," which meant that she was resigned in the face of chaos. "All right. How are you doing?"

"Ah, so-so. I just came by your husband's."

Mrs. Wireman's eyes were the very pale gray of an old egg; they were large eyes with wide rings of white, and she narrowed them now to look up at Mrs. Klapper. "How come you don't come around so much no more?"

"What are you talking about? I do come around." With her free hand Mrs. Klapper pointed at the package. "I got to eat too, like everybody."

The grocer's wife shook her head firmly. "I remember every two days, regular, I say to Avrom, 'Get the milk and eggs ready now so, comes Gertrude Klapper, you shouldn't keep her waiting.' Now all of a sudden, two days, three days, four days, no Gertrude Klapper. What are you, a stranger? You saving your money?" She looked accusingly at the younger woman. "You buying someplace else?"

No friend like an old friend, Mrs. Klapper thought wryly. Aloud she said, "Lena, twenty years I been buying at your place, I should change now? What is it with you? I got food in the house, I don't come in for a couple of days, suddenly it's by you a run on the bank." She spread her feet a bit and settled her weight; she'd be here a while yet. "Remember, I'm just buying for me now, I don't eat for two people, Lena."

Mrs. Wireman lowered her eyes. "All right, forgive me, I forgot about Morris. Excuse me."

"That's all right," Mrs. Klapper said. "It's over a year already."

To herself she said, Morris, forgive me that I should even think of forgetting you, but I am not going to talk about you to this one.

"So when you going away, Gertrude?" Mrs. Wireman was looking at her again.

"Going away?" Mrs. Klapper blinked in real bewilderment. "Lena, what is this? Who's going away?"

"Every day I say to Avrom, 'Gertrude is all by herself now, so why is she putting her money in the bank? Why doesn't she take a trip somewhere, go maybe to Florida? She's got a little money, she should use it now, go somewhere.' "

"Lena—" Mrs. Klapper began.

"I got a cousin"—Mrs. Wireman did not so much cut her off as run her down—"I got a cousin went to Florida, Miami Beach." She leaned closer to Mrs. Klapper. "She was there two weeks, bang!" She snapped her lean fingers. "Married like that. A rich man, too."

Well, you asked for it, Gertrude, Mrs. Klapper told herself. Next time, maybe you'll lay off Sarah. She took a deep breath. "Lena, I am not going anywhere, Florida or anywhere."

Mrs. Wireman squinted her eyes even more. "What are you saving up for, a big house with nobody in it? Better you should take a trip, have a good time."

"Lena, I don't want to go anywhere. I live here, I cook, I keep the house neat, I go for walks, I got you to talk to." God forgive you, Klapper! "Why should I go somewhere where I don't know anybody? Don't be in such a hurry to go rushing me off to Florida. I like it here."

"Look, look, how angry she gets!" Mrs. Wireman smiled, exposing long, wide teeth. "So who's rushing you? Just say a hello to your old friends once in a while."

Mrs. Klapper sighed. "I tell you, I'll drop in, a day or two, and we can sit and talk." She thought of a way to change the subject. "You can tell me about Sam, how he's doing."

The thin, orange and white face hardened into an expression of disgust. "About Sam and the bitch he married, I'll tell you nothing. Anything else we talk about. Not Sam."

"She looked like a nice girl, Eleanor." Mrs. Klapper remembered Sam's wife as a tall, pleasant-faced woman who had tried to help out in the store before she and Sam were married.

"A bitch," Mrs. Wireman said flatly. "Strictly no good, believe me." She looked at Mrs. Klapper as if daring her to say something in Eleanor's defense.

"I got to go, Lena," Mrs. Klapper said finally. "I got some more shopping to do." She began to edge around Mrs. Wireman, who made no move to let her pass. "Look, I'll come over soon, and we'll sit outside and schmooze a little, okay?"

"All right," Mrs. Wireman answered. "But you think about what I said, about Miami Beach."

Mrs. Klapper was safely past her. "I will, Lena. Take care of yourself."

"Sei gesund," Mrs. Wireman said, turning to go. "To your pretty daughter," Mrs. Klapper called after her, "say a hello for me."

Mrs. Wireman did smile then.

"Ya," Mrs. Wireman said, and went up the street. She walked faster than her husband, but her shoulders were hunched and crooked.

Mrs. Klapper stood in the middle of the sidewalk and watched her until she was gone. Then she half turned to go on down the block, stopped, and began to walk back the way she had come. She walked very slowly, taking small steps.

She could hear little Schwartz, who drove a fruit truck, crying his wares in the distance. His voice was high and musical, but he was too far away for her to make out the words. A woman she knew smiled as she passed and said, "Hello, Gertrude." Mrs. Klapper nodded and hurried past, not wanting to stop and talk.

To laugh at the Wiremans, she thought, this is easy. Lena is stupid, she knows from nothing, she's fun to talk to like a flounder. Wireman knows nothing but the store. His feet are flat from standing up all these years; sitting down he's forgotten. To both of them, money is God on earth. Sarah—she did not want to be hard on her—all right, so Sarah is smart. What good does it do her? In such a family, to be born smart is a curse. Better she should never have learned to read. She sighed. But I feel for them. Do me something. I feel for them. Am I so smart I should laugh at Lena? Am I so popular I should sit with the old women and say, "Lena Wireman sits by herself, good. Just so she don't sit with us"? Who are they? Her husband runs a store, he sells things to people. Are they so useful? Am I?

Mrs. Klapper was not an introspective woman, or, usually, a very analytical one. Thinking about Lena Wireman irritated her, and she walked quickly when she passed the grocery again, having no desire for a return match. She saw Sarah through the window for a second and wondered if she had seen her go by.

Some other time I'll go over to Ida's, she decided. Today I don't feel like walking. The baking-powder tin, atop the loaf of bread, caught her eye, and she tried to remember why she had bought it. I could bake a cake, maybe, and then call up Ida and say, "Look, come on over, we'll get fat together. Who can eat a whole cake?" She nodded. First she would bake the cake, then call Ida.

Passing the line of chairs—Morris had once called them "Murderers' Row"—she recognized old acquaintances. Sitting, as always, under the green awning of the corner candy store, which spot was hers owing to both seniority and squatter's rights, was a tiny gray-haired woman named Lapin. She had been old when Mrs. Klapper had moved into the neighborhood, and guesses as to her exact age ranged between eighty and one hundred. She was a dried-up comma of a woman, but Mrs. Klapper liked her and had found her good company.

"Hey, Lapin," she called loudly, Lapin's first name was Bella, but nobody ever used it. "Lapin, look up, say a hello."

Lapin looked up slowly from her omnipresent knitting needles and hank of black yarn. "Hello, Gertrude," she said in a surprisingly deep voice. "So how are you?"

"Managing. You look fine, Lapin."

The old woman tapped her chest. "I got a rattle in here two days now, and in my stomach it's all the time growling. Sit down already."

Mrs. Klapper shook her head. She had time, but the idea of taking even a temporary place in the row of chairs always frightened her. "I got to go in a minute, Lapin. Eat a little, so your stomach won't growl so much."

Lapin shook her head. "I been talking to the rabbi. He says at my age I got to be prepared. Why should I stuff myself? Any day—boom!" She smiled at Mrs. Klapper. "Any day."

"God forbid," Mrs. Klapper said. "You will outlive me and the rest of the buzzards. The rabbi too."

"Any day." Lapin's voice sounded a little petulant. She beckoned Mrs. Klapper close with a long-nailed forefinger. "But I'm ready, believe me. When I die the House of Sages will say Kaddish, regular like Rosh Hashonah."

Mrs. Klapper knew what question was expected of her. "So what about your nephews? Better the family should say Kaddish."

Lapin's mouth twisted, and she wrinkled her nose. "Kaddish they don't believe in, my nephews. For their children they wouldn't say it." Her face relaxed again. "For me the House of Sages will say Kaddish."

For at least thirty years, Mrs. Klapper knew, Lapin had lived off the sums her three nephews sent her every month. She needed very little to live, and so she kept a steady current of five-dollar bills flowing into the House of Sages. Once or twice Morris had been prevailed upon to send ten dollars in her name, and Mrs. Klapper had done so more often than she had let Lapin know.

"The House of Sages will give me a good funeral," Lapin said contentedly.

"Lapin," Mrs. Klapper said, "I only got a few minutes. Talk about something else, please."

The old woman went on, her eyes closed. "I will be buried in my robes." She had fallen into Yiddish. "And there will be some earth from Israel in the coffin."

"Why is it with you always funerals?" Mrs. Klapper asked a little nervously. Lapin kept on in Yiddish, her voice low and droning.

"And I will live in a beautiful house of my own. I will live forever. I will live in God—"

"So?" Mrs. Klapper's voice was harsh and querulous. "So how many floors will there be in this house, Lapin? And who will be the landlord?"

Lapin seemed to withdraw into her shawl. "Don't make fun. I don't care how many floors."

Mrs. Klapper regretted her words. "I'm sorry, Lapin. So have a beautiful funeral, live in a beautiful house. You got it coming."

The black eyes stared at her, and Lapin pointed the long forefinger. "You come to the funeral."

"Me?" Mrs. Klapper recovered quickly. "All right, Lapin. I'll come."

"Tell my nephews I said they should give you a ride to the cemetery." Lapin was staring absently down the street. "The rabbi will tell everybody how holy I was."

"Sure, Lapin. I got to go now. Take care." Mrs. Klapper had almost turned the corner when she heard the old woman call, "Gertrude!"

She turned and walked back to Lapin's chair. "So?"

"I was thinking," Lapin said slowly. "The funeral."

Mrs. Klapper waited, but Lapin said nothing. "What were you thinking, Lapin?"

"For you it's all right." Lapin turned her head stiffly to look up at Mrs. Klapper. "You come to the funeral, you say good-by, Lapin, you cry, you go home. You go home and have supper." She kept knitting her black yarn. "Me, I got to stay there. You'll all go home and have supper and leave me there."

Mrs. Klapper muttered something, patted a bony shoulder, and fled.

She almost ran the rest of the way home, stopping only in the lobby to catch her breath before she rang for the elevator. A straight-backed bench stood near the elevator door; she sank into it as if it were a hot bath. Her breathing became slower and shallower, and she gradually unclenched her hands that clung together in her lap. "Hoo-boy!" she said aloud. "What a morning!" The elevator arrived, and she stepped into it.

Lapin's predictions of and plans for her own death were nothing new to Mrs. Klapper. They were issued on a regular basis, like weather forecasts and stock-market reports. Morris had laughed at them, referred to them as "the ghetto preoccupation with a superghetto," but Mrs. Klapper had been brought up in a house and a neighborhood where even the mention of death was warded off with a "God forbid." A certain pride was to be taken in the knowledge that your children or your relatives would see that you were buried properly and with all honor, but Mrs. Klapper felt that Lapin was overdoing it a little.

Still, she reflected, entering her apartment, what else has Lapin got to talk about? Her nephews throw dice, the loser should go visit her; the rabbi comes over to tell her the House of Sages will give her a good funeral; what else can she talk about? At least it's not gossiping all day long like the others. She kept seeing the long row of chairs and the old women leaning to one another like bushes in the wind.

Don't worry, Klapper. She hung up her coat and walked slowly into the kitchen. For you there is also a seat waiting in Murderers' Row. Drop in any time. She put the milk in the refrigerator and wandered into the living room.

"So now what?" She looked defiantly at the books and paintings. "It is now twelve o'clock and I'm back where I was at eleven. Any suggestions?" But the living room belonged to Morris. It had no intention of suggesting anything.

Mrs. Klapper had, as a child, woven sturdy legs and a lot of curiosity into a real talent for getting lost. Even as an adult she was perfectly capable of getting lost in Brooklyn or Queens. If there was one emotion she could recall in totality it was the feeling of standing on a strange street under a five-o'clock sky, making tentative, trotting casts in one direction after another, knowing that each was the wrong one. She had always been afraid to ask people, for they looked gray and thick-fleshed, not at all like the people of the Bronx, and they went by without looking at her, except the children, who knew she was lost and delighted in it. There were no familiar subways, and the buses were colored differently and had strange numbers. So she might remain, as balanced between forces as the hub of a wheel, for half an hour or an hour before she called home and her father—later on, Morris—came and got her. So she remained in the living room, her hands at her sides, seeking a reason to move from the dark square of rug on which she stood.

She thought again of Jonathan Rebeck and wondered if he had found his watch. A watch is a small thing, she thought. You could look for days. Remembering that she had planned to call Ida, she went to the telephone, lifted the receiver, and slowly replaced it in its cradle.

So I call Ida and I say, "Ida, come over because I'm an old woman and I don't know what to do with myself." She watched the second hand sidling around the face of the kitchen clock. What do you do tomorrow, Klapper? Better start counting your relatives.

As she turned from the telephone, her glance fell on the small framed photograph of Morris she had kept hanging in the foyer. She stared at it, remembering the long jaw and the high, prominent cheekbones, the cattail eyebrows and the wisps of hair that clung to his head as scraps of meat do to a gnawed bone. Morris had been fifty-nine when he died, but his face was strikingly smooth and unlined, as if wind and water had rolled over him for thousands of years, whittling and polishing his face, eroding away the scars of human anger; not so much a face at peace as a face from which the marks of war had been worn away.

I could go down to the cemetery, Mrs. Klapper thought, and maybe keep Morris company a little. She toyed with the telephone dial but did not lift the receiver again. I got no place else to go. A few more days like this, I'll go looking for Lena Wireman, we'll sit down on boxes and talk about how lousy people are. This I don't need.

She headed for her closet. Besides, it's quiet, and I could maybe think about what I should do for the next thirty years.

After a long deliberation, she chose her new light wool coat and went into her bedroom to look at herself in the mirror.

"Hmmmm," she murmured in admiration. "Beautiful, Klapper. Like a young bride. Only—" She took off the coat and went back to the closet. "Only a young bride would not be going out to a cemetery. Act your age, Klapper."

A little regretfully, she put on a dark spring coat and went to the mirror again. "Nu, it'll do. To a cemetery you don't wear a trousseau." She smiled at the mirror and sighed. "Be a little honest with yourself, Klapper. With Morris also."

She turned off the light and went from room to room, making sure that all the lights and gas jets were off and that all the faucets were shut. Finally she stood in the hall with the door open and looked back at the darkened apartment.

"Morris," she said softly, "I feel a little bit guilty because I'm not sure if it's just you I'm coming to see." She hesitated. "Morris, I would bring you something. I would do something for you, only I can't think of anything you need."

Mrs. Klapper closed the door behind her and walked to the elevator.