Story
by Paul Silverman • Photo by Jill Burhans
 If he told the story once he’d told it a hundred times, told it while they scribbled: the day Abraham grabbed the leather case, shuttered the store early, and shooed Jacob towards his car, which he called “The Machine,” a midnight blue Pontiac with an Indian head crowning the hood. “No more setting rat traps in the cellar,” Jacob’s grandfather announced, without even bothering to attempt English. “I’m going to show you something today.” The Pontiac plunged into the sea of inner city traffic, rolling across the cobblestones and occasional manure piles from the horse-drawn peddler wagons that still plied the Boston streets. Abraham drove past the vast shark-noses of battleships crowding the harbor berths. They stopped at corner after corner as flocks of sailors in their whites trotted past the chrome Indian head, making their way from the water to the watering holes of Scollay Square. They drove on and put a good hour of distance between the Pontiac and the great gilded clock of the Custom House, and then Abraham veered onto a broken street of broken buildings in a place Jacob had never seen. From one end of the windshield to the other he encountered looming edifices of soot-smeared red brick; dark hulks set against a river that looked infected. Its olive-drab churn and yellow foam made Jacob think of a dirty city gutter surging after a hurricane, flooded to ten thousand times its normal size. After reaching the river, Abraham wrenched the car from a pot-holed yet paved road onto a narrow alley of hardened muck, studded with craters and ruts. When he finally pulled up the emergency brake they were outside a brick behemoth the color of a rusted barrel. Rows of windows, several stories of them, stretched into the distance on either side of the entrance, which was a slapdash-painted metal door shielded by a padlocked chain link enclosure. Each and every window revealed nothing but the same yawning blackness within. Abraham produced a ring of keys. He unlocked the chain link fence; he studied the different configurations strung along the ring and selected one, which he pushed into the keyhole of the entrance door. But before he could turn it the door swung open on its own. Behind it came a filthy, gap-toothed man who had a flashlight and a hammer jammed in his overalls – a watchman. When he recognized Abraham the man slinked and ground his fists into his eyes, as though he had been caught sleeping in a coal bin. They climbed a buckling staircase, followed the flashlight through a suffocating corridor filled with the watchman’s smell – an aura of engine oil laced with harsh onion - and came out on an interior balcony where there was enough light to reveal a cavernous space below. The area was as large as a warehouse or a small stadium. It was inhabited by gargantuan shapes, ponderous angular contraptions shrouded in dusty canvas. Months later Jacob would begin to understand what they were: looms for spinning, winding and twisting, machines for dyeing, finishing and cutting, and a sparse herd of worn-out pallet trucks. But today he was too terrified to care. The terror did not abate until the watchman had gone away and he was alone with Abraham in an office that looked out across the arena of canvas-draped machines. Inside the office everything was draped too – until Abraham, in a moment of drama, pulled away the canvas that hid the big oak desk. His desk, he announced proudly. “No more piles of rags in a store,” he said. “Now we make the goods. We make miles of them. You’ll see.” He tried to calm Jacob with a wave of his paw. He plunged it into the leather case and produced the framed picture, which he set down like a prize in the center of his new desk. “You’ll see,” he said, and stood next to his grandson, tall as a tower. His pose was not unlike the one in the photograph. •••
“How tall were the flames?” The toxic air made Jacob’s eyes sting, but the ATF agent, a woman, asked the question in a matter-of-fact tone. She could have been blandly asking Jacob directions to one of his mill buildings, or to the cafeteria, or to the steepled tower where he was accustomed to governing from the topmost suite, peering out like a restless eagle to scan his domain and the river rushing at its side. But all of it was now an acrid heap; smoldering hulks and dying embers. The firepit was as gargantuan as the mill complex had been less than twenty-four hours ago, when it was humming along. Even the giant steel machinery – some of it dating from the Abraham days, Bapa Avram, avasholom - had melted. The flood of smoke still smothered the sky; for miles, the black fumes ruined the rising dawn. Avasholom. Rest in peace. Or in piece goods. Or in pieces. Even at this dreadful, harried hour Jacob was suited up impeccably. Double-breasted Italian cloth, the sure hand of his Milano tailor in every nub and stitch. A waste of the needle indeed; the suit was as smoked as a Russian sturgeon, and no chemical on earth could get the damage out. The ATF agent wore something more economical: a blue-black hooded rain-shell with the huge letters of her department stamped across her back. It made her seem even stouter than she was. Even under the massive stress of the catastrophe, Jacob couldn’t help but regard her as a slightly amusing creature, a sweating, breathing toy to sport with. And why not? – it made no difference now. He had seen the grotesque rail of iron twisting upwards, clawing haplessly at the putrid sky. It was all that was left of his tower office, a single trace of the winding stairs that once climbed to it. Stairs he had purposely placed above and beyond the soaring elevators. “What do you mean how tall were the flames?” “You were here, you saw them. Take a guess.” A guessing game. That’s what she wanted. Then that’s what he would give her. But in fact, when Jacob had arrived on the scene there were no more flames, and no more buildings either. Only the smoking ruins, a rancid shroud over the spume of the Merrimack. Well after midnight he picked up a voice mail. He was at his summer home and the drive was unbearably long. The firefighters had already been on the scene for hours, hacking and hosing. A ring of police cars blocked him from his own property. From the outset, the police surprised him. He had expected deference, but they were gruff and rude. One of them ordered Jacob to identify himself, but after examining the license the officer refused to let him drive through the cordon. In fact, he directed him into the back of one of the police cars. “I’ll take you up,” he said flatly, slamming his hand on the button that locked all four doors. But as they drew closer to the hell zone, the policeman grabbed his dashboard mike and Jacob heard a very different voice. Bristling with an eerie glee. “I’ve got the owner,” the policeman said. The ATF agent stiffened her legal pad and raised her ballpoint pen. Jacob almost hissed, “You are what my taxes pay for.” The words were on the tip of his tongue. Drops of acid he wanted to spit. But instead he fixed his eyes on her and declared, “The flames were 148 feet tall.” In a flash the pen dropped to the pad and went wild. “You know the exact height,” the agent said. “That’s really something. How do you know all that?” Jacob had merely given her the distance from the parking lot to the top of the tower. The woman was an ignoramus; so thrilled at her question – and at his answer – that a bubble of saliva leaked out of the corner of her mouth. When she finally released him from the interview he felt the skin of his hand sweating against the skin of the fine Hermes wallet. He was unaware of ever having pulled it out of his pocket, but there it was, wet and thick in his palm; and he was also unable to determine whether it was his hand or the wallet that shook so hard. The wallet was in his left hand. He pulled out the old picture with his right hand, and now that hand shook wildly. Until two months ago the picture had been in a small frame in his tower office. The wallet – he picked it up in Paris – happened to have more slots than its predecessor. On a whim he had removed the picture from the frame and slipped it in, one slot from where he had put his wrinkled social security card, signed with his teenage signature. •••
Morton, the uncle with the sharpshooter’s eye, the soldier boy, he was the one who’d snapped the picture with the Leica, the camera he brought back from Rotterdam after the war. It was a time exposure, carefully composed, and though the print was small it was rich in the dark energy that makes the old photos deep as oil paintings, even in black and white. The scene is the tall grandfather, his sideburns not yet grey, and his scrawny grandson, the two of them posing monumentally on the steps of the shul. The pillars are at their back, their velvet tallit bags are under their arms, their dark suits and hats are a perfect fit, collars and ties smooth and tight. Abraham was so pleased with the picture he brought it to the store, and eventually had it matted and set in an ornate frame. He chose to keep it in a corner on top of the safe, a private space far from the cash register. On busy days, Abraham patrolled the sales floor, which consisted of large tables piled end to end with the goods, a hive of shelf-cubes spanning floor to ceiling on all available wall space, and an overhead squadron of paddle fans that rustled the goods and cooled the women as they pecked around, enjoying the escape from the street. The inventory was large – which Abraham preached was the key to piece goods retailing. His sales floor stock alone was the largest on the avenue, and half as much again was stored in the cellar, down steep and shaky wooden stairs. At the bottom it was cold as a well, even though there were no paddle fans to chill the air, only the dank stone and rubble of the foundation. The cellar was Jacob’s domain, except when the old man was setting or emptying the traps. From time to time the boy would hear a snap and a squeal, or smell a carcass, as he clambered up the ladder to fetch a bolt and bring it to the world of light above. Carrying the rolls of cloth, Abraham said, would give him practice for carrying the Torah scrolls at shul, which he would do when he was of age. On slow days the two of them would sit in the corner by the safe and the picture. Reports from Jacob’s school – where they all called him Jack – written comments from teachers to his mother, singled out his odd habit with words. His mind seemed to snag on certain ones, but not because he was slow at reading. It was more that he fixated on the spaces in them as well as the letters, as if the spaces made the words into games and puzzles. This amused Abraham. He saw it as brilliance and curiosity in his grandson, so he encouraged it. He delighted in letting Jacob take him on, the native-born juvenile lecturing the immigrant elder. A woman came in, a regular customer, and finicky. She combed through the table-stock, her mind set on a particular linen and none other, and when nothing filled the bill she turned to Abraham, exasperated from the luckless search. He smiled to settle her down and turned to Jacob at the cellar door. “Geh fur,” he said, penciling the stock number on a slip of paper. “Geh fur.” But Jacob didn’t move. He saw the moment was right to make a point. “Why do you say geh fur, Bapa? Talk English. Say, ‘go for.’” Abraham set his lips and spoke just above a whisper, so the woman wouldn’t hear. “Go fur,” he said. “No, Bapa. “Go for. Go for.” He tried again, and it was the best he could do. “Go fer. Go fer. Gofer.” •••
The arson investigator they assigned to dog him was fat and loathesome, a ham-faced Southie thug in a tight crewcut, the hair tonsured one level up from skinhead. To look at the two of them across a desk – Jacob in his Italian suits and Eagan in his stained, lumpy jerseys and big-and-tall jeans – one would have assumed Jacob was dressing down a janitor or hiring a legbreaker. Eagan had earned the right to boat around in unmarked cars and plain clothes, but for Jacob’s taste his body would have been better packaged in a uniform and badge. They would meet in a sweat-reeking windowless room at the State Police barracks, or among the French-polished antiques in the partners’ parlor at Jacob’s lawyers’ suite. In a blink, the walls of the contrasting rooms demonstrated just how horrid or splendid the color green can be. Eagan would always begin with a personal detail that made Jacob turn to his defense counsel and indicate, with a wince, that half-digested food was now coming back up the tract to his mouth. “Guess what my doctor told me, Jacob. He said cut out coffee, but not because the coffee was giving me diarrhea. He said it was making me constipated.” “We don’t need any coffee, please. You don’t have to apologize. Just do what you have to do. Get on with it.” “Tell me again about those accelerants you use in fabric production. Did your grandpa use them too? Jacob, I never knew I was a walking torch in my fleece parka.” "My grandfather never made fleece parkas," Jacob wanted to say. But the very idea of conducting a textile economics lesson for this Neanderthal repelled him. When Abraham bought the mill in Lawrence the whole industry was on the run, fleeing beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, even crossing oceans to find peon labor. But woolens were still woolens, bolts of cotton originated only in the black earth, and the world knew nothing else. Did Eagan have an inkling that the fleece in his parka was made by alchemists re-deploying molecules harvested from plastic soda pop bottles? Alchemy was what Jacob had brought to his grandfather’s business, when it was as dead as he was. And it was alchemy that had brought the business back to the Merrimack River. And grew it till it could grow no more – and was worth more as ashes. Jacob and Eagan sparred over each other’s qualifications. Far as Jacob could see, Eagan’s sole credentials were a six-week course at the Northeastern University law enforcement program. A night course. “That’s what made you a state fire marshal? That’s it?” He finished the question despite the under-table foot nudge from his counsel. “Getting back to business here…What time was it you got to the mill, Jacob… What did your platinum Rolex say?” “Once again, Mr. Eagan, around 4 a.m.” “Once again, how come you saw flames?” The counsel had worked against Eagan before, and considered him viler than vile. As they drove away from the interview he warned Jacob that Eagan would sacrifice limbs to win an arson case. “You’re the biggest target he’s ever had. We’re not even at the Grand Jury yet and he’s stoking the press. I can’t hide this from you. I’m very sorry.” The reporter, Riordan, who looked and sounded so much like Eagan he could have come from the same uterus, popped out of his sewer before twenty-four hours had passed. “One way or another I’m going to do a piece on this,” the reporter said, and Jacob slammed a door on him. Soon afterwards he said the exact same thing on the phone, word for word, and Jacob slammed the receiver on him. But that word the reporter used – piece – it stuck into Jacob’s brain like an icepick. It dug around under his skull and tripped wires. It sent Jacob to his knees on the living room carpet, in front of a roaring fireplace. As he went down he heard a seam rip in his hand-made suit. In that sound of rending cloth he heard something else, a murmur from the marrow of his own bones, that made him pull the picture out of the wallet, just to defend himself against what he had heard. And once he had it in his hands, he tore it into so many pieces, fingers twisting and shaking, that no one piece was bigger than a snowflake. Each time he ripped the photographic paper, the sound of rending cloth grew louder. After hundreds of rips the roar was so loud Jacob knew the next thing that might rip was the seam that held his skin together. He gathered up the pieces and fed them into the red mouth of the fireplace, scorching the cuffs of his shirt. •••
On the day of the Grand Jury, the counsel ordered up a car long enough for them to have privacy. Behind glass, and out of earshot of the driver, he peppered Jacob like a boxing trainer working to revive his contender. “If the insurance company has to pay you it will break their bank. That’s why they’re pushing Eagan so hard, and soaping him too, but I can’t prove it. On paper they can show motive, nine figures worth. For a grand jury that’s too good to let go. I’m very sorry, very. Do you know what I’m saying, Jacob? Do you hear what I’m saying? Answer in English.” •••
When he was let out and formally hospitalized, Jacob Kopens had a whole team of psychiatrists to hurl his thunderbolts at. “My childhood was so powerful I could never escape it,” he intoned, as if no mansions had been accumulated, no worlds had been traveled, no wives won and not an offspring launched. “That is your perception now because you are depressed,” the senior psychiatrist said. “These are extreme feelings. Will they burn out? – I don’t think so. They’re your eternal flame, so to speak. But they will die down.” And under his breath he added, “one way or another.” “You can’t change me,” said Jacob, grey and gaunt from pushing away so many trays of the bothersome food that accompanied his meds. “I am that thing…” “That animal, yes. We’ve heard about him.” The senior psychiatrist wiped his glasses and leafed back through his yellow legal pad. “The gopher.” “No,” spat Jacob. “No, no, no, no, no.” The psychiatric team members hummed and nodded at each other, concurring the interview had hit a stone wall. They rose as swans rise from an open cesspool, imperiously miffed. They marched away and left Jacob alone, sniffing his sour pajamas. He had the look of a gulag prisoner; all skin and bones, nails and nose hairs growing wild. The tinnitus, now in both his ears, had reached the pitch of a war alarm. The shocks and aftershocks from the treatments refused to stop; he claimed they felt alive and permanent, like a subway third rail that was always being stepped on. Long after the psychiatric team’s departure, he heard the electricity screeching and squealing in every cranial blood vessel. An orderly finally ejected him from the empty treatment room. He escorted Jacob down the stairs to the institution’s manicured grounds. Jacob went back to his room, but he didn’t rest. He exploded into a frenzy of clawing and digging, turning the place upside down. He was after the picture. He had to find it. If not the whole picture, at least a piece of it. Any piece. He tore into the sheets, the mattress. When they yielded nothing he tore into the walls, or tried to, even though the walls were painted cinder block. A piece of the picture, any piece. He pawed the oak finish of his bureau until it was covered with jagged scratches and there were splinters under his broken nails. In the morning they found him burrowed into a tangle of bloody rags, the remains of the sheets he had ripped and shredded. Jacob’s fingers bled and his eyes rolled. “It’s happened before,” the senior psychiatrist said, “and it will happen again.” •••
“You’re getting too used to being confined,” said Jacob’s wife, the daughter of the yacht club commodore making a brisk change of course. “You’ve spent your entire parole in this place.” She had a plan, and approached the senior psychiatrist with it. When he balked, she snapped him to attention with the nib of her gleaming fountain pen. A few swift strokes and the dip in the institution’s capital campaign was no more. On the kind of day she believed in, a day of fair winds, the wife, Jacob and the driver pulled up at Abraham’s gravesite. Jacob was on double meds and slouched like a sack for most of the trip, even when they passed under the cemetery arch. They extracted him from the car and the wife took his arm. The sky was a blue jewel.“When you see that he’s resting under the sun,” she assured him, “you’ll rest too.” She held onto his arm, and the driver held him too. But Jacob broke away and fell on all fours before the stone. He blathered something about a piece, a picture, and pawed the grass and the ground beneath it, pawed it like an animal, screaming he was a gopher. |