With a widening smile, which reveals his nine or so gold and silver amalgam or are they mercury fillings, crowded around the tenth, his patinate tongue: loose, frayed threads of bronze, sickly blue, white and yellow, he holds out a pair of gray gabardines, draped over his forearm, pleated with tiny pools across its ribs, here, here, and here around the cuffs, too, onuses, dried into an off crusty residue. That, and the pockets have been long ago cut out. As the mensch’s licking his fingers, trying to rub these blots out and away, he’s shuffling forward, hunching his head into the doorway, foot firmly against the lowermost hinge…his face rising into a squint to gradually assemble, through the middling fallow field of his trifocals, a girl, a woman, perhaps the mothering wife of the house, he thinks, Rubina, hanging onto the handle of the door, her face locked with a frown.
Batya toddles toward them, past Hanna’s hands and between Rubina’s legs to smile beatitude at this latest of guests.
If they keep showing up like this, she’s thinking, maybe there’ll be no bedtime — or, mightn’t his presence sentinel yet another course, she’s hoping a dessert after dessert, perhaps, an eternally refillable treat?
Undeterred, he’s known worse, he asks her is maybe your father home?
You give me…Batya’s holding out a hand sticky with honey and lint, change spared out from under the sofa’s cushions, the couches’ waxwork stems and nesting twigs, she’s insistent — this girl, asking of him again and again a demand, her voice whining from within her tiny fist, shaking out her words of schmutz: You. Give. Me? You! Give! Me!
A hug, love, such dessert — and an endless bedtime story to tell, keep the lights in the hall on all night…
That you can get from your mother…he says in a disappointed whisper, a sigh, hanging his head and chazzaning to the pitch a little prayer of repentance even the Hasids out in Lakewald don’t know, as Batya and Rubina, two daughters the youngest and eldest, just then and whether in his voice or his eyes find in the mensch maybe something, hymn — an incarnation of a forefather known only from the unsmiling frames hung on the staircase’s landings; and possibly Batya only then remembers what her mother’s warnings are regarding talking to strangers: forget it.
Mensch’s confused, pats his breast pocket for his medication: it’s not there, which means he’d taken it, but if that’s so then why doesn’t he remember having taken it? Did it work, is it working, it took? Batya turns to her mother in tears, buries her face underneath her swell, in her crotch, shaking her head in a No to tuck in even deeper, don’t wake me. No thanks. The mensch gathers himself to peep through the doorway, the entryhall through to what he best guesses is the diningroom, leans his miniaturized weight against the jamb, shading his dark over the threshold as Hanna takes Batya’s wrist, slaps it lightly, and Batya, face removed, tots away from her in a fit, kicking at the pedestals and plinths lining the hallway away from the rooms dining and living, family, den, and into the kitchen, bringing their miscellaneously artistic idols and vases stuffed with flowers both lifelike and silklike and all of them real in their ruin down to the floor, crashes with her crying quietly again up the stairs to her room not to be seen or heard from again the whole night. Meanwhile, the other daughters have made their ways to stand behind their mother, passing through the hallway amid its trunks and boxes and packing supplies, mind the scissors, the tape sticking to the fringes of their garments, their trims tangled in twine, with Israel following as if whisked by the wind of their skirts, the guests left to themselves and to Wanda who’s serving — and soon the family entire’s assembled at the door, even her belly’s boy, and Hanna comes calmed, with more assurance, strengthened and safe in her home, frowning from under and staring impassive from over her nose, having gotten a whiff of what to expect, a scent and an eyeful, too, the inclination of an ear: attentive to the chink of mensch inhabiting the crack, and to the drafty drift of the spiel guaranteed now forthcoming.
And sure enough, the mensch mumbles what, it’s impossible to say…a For You Good Price pitch, st-stuttering now of fine material, of finer workmen-schship, a how it’s lasted him for years testimonial, rubbing now a pant leg between two fingers as if summoning a species of foreign dybbuk.
Nowhere! he oaths, because menschs like him have foresworn swearing, nowhere will you find gabardines like this, of worsted cloth the best, made of warm and wefty wool, or coddled cotton, of silk and rayon twill, he stretches out a leg — whichever you want, let them be. Much too long for myself, anyway, much too wide; wicks the leg out almost onto her pregnancy, proffering it to her as if a scarf for the winter outside, waving a cuff between two of her chins.
