At the time, Jack Kopinsky was still little enough to confuse the world gallach with challah. So when his mother said they were going to Boyle’s house to see the gallach he thought she meant they were going for another holiday feast of some kind, where there would be bumpy bread. But it was growing cold and the holidays were over, as far as he knew it, although they were recent enough – not even a month ago - so memories still lingered in his body. These were not the succulent memories of fat honey cakes or warm puddings dusted with almonds, dark sugar and cinnamon. They were the stinging memories of a whipped and welted hand, a hand so punished it had hurt to make a fist.He got that way from the handkerchief game, his first. The boys played it each fall, in the school-free holiday season, when they filed out in their gloom suits after shul and tasted the sunlight. They took off in droves, a dark-draped, edgy tribe, for the cracked sidewalks of Hancock Field, a field where the cigar and cigarette butts had long ago burned the green out of the grass. Their ordeal of being cooped up bowing and praying for entire mornings and afternoons, bombarded with the acrid breath of their eternally rebuking elders, did not leave the boys in states of holy radiance when they finally were released to the open streets. As they surged towards Hancock Field they mangled the white handkerchiefs their mothers had primped and fluffed and stuffed into their breast pockets. They rolled and braided the crisp cloth into long, white cylinders, taut as rope, then knotted the ends hard and tight. And sometimes even dipped these ends in vinegar brought from home, to make the knots harder and tighter, like cured rawhide.With these self-fashioned knouts they played their palm-flogging game. They bucked up, yelling numbers and shooting out one or two fingers to determine whose turn it was. Jack had never played before. They way it shook out, he found himself bucking up against the identical twins, Marvin and Milton, two snake-eyed creatures lanky as pythons and twice his height. They were so identical they even drooled the same way, the spittle boiling over identical creases in the left corners of their mouths as they brayed through their adenoids about their buck-up victory over Jack.“We won,” said Marvin – or Milton. “Both of us.”One snagged Jack’s arm at the elbow. The other looked as though he would smash Jack’s face if he didn’t open his hand.“Both of you? Why both of you?”“It’s the rules. You lost. We won.”He knew the rules, but not the nuances. He had watched the game since kindergarten, itching to play, just as he was itching to smoke, and smoke soon. He was in the Fourth Grade. Marvin and Milton were in the Sixth. They snapped their knotted handkerchiefs like they were cattle whips. And their whole lanky bodies snapped like even bigger whips, giant belts of human skin coming down on him.The game was the game. The more lashes you took, the higher your score. Those were the rules, even when it was two against one. Jack had never known it could be two against one. But Jack had never played before. This was his very first year. And Marvin and Milton weren’t exactly two, either; they were one, in a way. They were the same one, but double.He gritted his teeth, offered his palm and took it. Until the tears dribbling from his eyes matched the drool coming from the mouths of the twins. Marvin and Milton raised their knouts higher, snapped even harder taking turns; attacking his hand like it was a scorpion they had to kill.“This will get you ready for Feeney. It’s good practice. You should thank us.”Feeney was the principal of Jack’s school, the only male on the faculty. Every other teacher in the Charles Sumner school was an ancient Miss. There was Miss Murphy, Miss Flanagan, Miss O’Shaughnessy, Miss Donahue, Miss O’Hara. They were Boston schoolteachers. Not nuns exactly, but seldom-smiling women who easily could have been nuns. And all their pupils were Feinbergs and Steinbergs and Lishnoffs and Lefkowitzes. That was how the Boston Schools ran its diocese of Little Israel, an enclave in the Roxbury district.Feeney was the man the Misses made you see when they deemed your misconduct too severe for normal punishment. Feeney had the bulging figure of a jolly Santa man and the grim, thin lips of a prison warden. He had the brilliant, glinting eyes of a scientist and the blunt jaw of a cop. In his office closet he kept a tapered rattan stick, said to cut the hand three times harder than the toughest knotted, vinegared handkerchief. The boys who were sent to Feeney wore the stripes on their palms for weeks. They were icons, like penitentiary heroes in the movies who survived torture and solitary confinement.But of all the boys in the school, Jack was likely the last who would ever be sent to Feeney. Miss Flanagan had pulled him to her bosom – so hard his teeth hit the pearl buttons of her dress – on the day she announced to the class that Jack had won the Courtesy Award – for model behavior, the best behavior in the whole Fourth Grade. But three days later she caught him whispering during a silent period and said, in a voice meant so everyone could hear it, “Jack, do you want to be sent to Mr. Feeney?” He shook his head, folded his hands and bent his brow like a slave as Miss Flanagan marched back up the aisle to her blackboard.So Feeney was always a threat, even to a winner of the Courtesy Award. And, in a way, the twins were right – the handkerchief game at Jewish holidays was practice for the even greater whipping possible at school.The outcome of the holiday contest was never really in doubt, not from the moment Marvin and Milton lit into him. Jack held his hand out until the twins thrashed it to the color of raw steak. But a point came when he had to give in. He sank to his knees sobbing. Then it was his turn to hit. His strokes were so pitiful the tall twins could have stood there all day, laughing and drooling as he fanned the air, doing no more damage than a feather or a falling leaf.So he took his hand home and his mother flew into a great flutter over it, shrieking and wailing, behaving like a giant barnyard bird whose chick had been bitten by a pair of foxes. She swooped him up and brought out cloths and witch hazel and mercurochrome. She prepared an icy potion and made him soak his fingers until the tips numbed over.As the day waned, Jack didn’t need to ask where his father was, because he already knew. Harold Kopinsky would be out all night, as he was every night, working the counter at his business, feeding the shady after-hours people, the miscreants too big for Feeney’s rattan. Then there was the business after the business…“Is he going to Chinatown?”That was all Jack had to ask. He wasn’t sure what going to Chinatown meant. He only knew it was his mother’s way of saying his father would be much later on this night than on others. Not home by dawn when his all-night shift ended, perhaps not even home by noon.“Yes, Chinatown,” Sylvia Kopinsky said, hovering over the gas jets and stirring the last of the holiday soup until it steamed. She poured the mixture into two bowls and they sat close, watching each other eat.“It’s sundown. The holiday’s over,” she said, her tone as flat and automatic as the clock hour-hand advancing to a new numeral.“Does he like Chinese food? Does he like it so much?”But the only answer Jack got was a shrug and more soup. “It’s all for us, every drop,” she said, tipping the pot so the last of the pearly liquid spilled into his bowl. “All this soup is for you and for me. Lehs im zu.”Jack knew enough Yiddish to grasp what she had said. Let him go, let him do.After dinner they sat close on the couch and watched programs on the television set, the new Philco Harold had brought home one day, completely unexpected, and months before Jack’s friends’ families had even thought of buying themselves televisions. His father was that way, and even with things bigger and more expensive than televisions. He could change cars as abruptly as if they were hats or socks. A new chrome-boat would show up out of the blue, fenders and whitewalls gleaming. As Jack sat on the couch with his mother she kept opening his beaten palm and kissing it, until he began to yawn and doze, and finally he felt ripples of sleep lap at him and take him like a dark, rising lake. When he awoke in the morning he found himself in his own bed, under the covers, and she was looking at him sleepily from a chair in the corner of his room. He sat up in bed and noticed he was now in his pajamas. The string at the waist was tied in a neat bow.That day his father did not return at all. But the phone rang in the evening and his mother said he was back in the deli as usual; something had made him late, too late to come home, and he had gone straight to work, not even able to manage a change of his counterman clothes.“Chinatown,” she said – in answer to the question Jack had in his mind. “Chinatown with Cats.”She pronounced the word as though it were the name of a human being, not the word for felines, domestic and wild - and Jack never forgot it. One night he overheard her Bridge Club friends buzzing about a place in Chinatown, a restaurant that the police had shut down. In the kitchen the police had found skinned cats hanging on meat hooks. Cats. He turned the word around in his head as though it were something solid, an oddly-shaped piece in a jigsaw puzzle, but so oddly-shaped he could not fit it anywhere. A puzzle-piece from a different puzzle entirely, accidentally put away in the wrong box.
Why did the gallach, with his priest’s collar, bear such a striking resemblance to Feeney? It was as though they were cut from the same black cloth. The thin lips that seemed to be frowning even when they were smiling. The eyes that seared and pierced. Only the jaw was more refined; more a detective’s probing, reflective jaw than the blunt shovel jaw of the cop on the beat. In its contour there briefly emerged something other than Feeney’s darkness. It was a glint of reprieve. But it sank away and the resemblance gnawed at him again the moment Boyle and Boyle’s wife ushered them into their chairs at the lace-draped table. The gallach first, in his black everything, the only white on his body the stiff collar that seemed to squeeze his face even redder than it already was.What brought them to Boyle’s house for dinner at all was a mystery to Jack. By everything he believed, it should have been the other way around, Boyle coming to the Kopinsky house hat in his hand, because who was Boyle but a peon of Harold Kopinsky?When Harold ranted about the dumb help he had working for him Boyle was always high on the list. Boyle was fat, Boyle was lazy, Boyle sat all day in the deli kitchen holding court like he was some kind of little Mayor Curley. Boyle never peeled enough onions, never chopped enough carrots, Boyle never got his white apron dirty because he was too busy chatting up cops and cabdrivers and two-bit City Hall workers who sat on their porky asses in city buildings just as Boyle did in Harold’s building, fed and clothed by graft and Civil Service. These human leeches kept calling on Boyle, paying him homage, pushing their way through the door of the deli kitchen to get to him. Around election time they swarmed around him. One man in particular, a white-haired polio cripple, was with Boyle so much Harold shook with rage. “He rolls in there in his wheelchair every day, white flower in his lapel, like he owns the place.” And Harold never put a stop to it, he only ranted and said some day he would kick Boyle’s ass back to Ireland.On top of everything Boyle was stupid as a beast of burden. Once Harold asked him to change the lettering on the large bill of fare that hung above the glass counter and steamtables. He was supposed to make the letters say there was a dinner special of baked macaroni. “He spelled it baked maracorn,” his father said. “Maracorn. What the hell is that? Nobody knew what the stuff was, nobody ordered it. I had to throw the whole thing in the swill. Somebody else would have docked the son of a bitch. Docked him or clocked him.”As the Kopinskys sat down at the dinner table the gallach crossed himself. Then Boyle and Mrs. Boyle crossed themselves. There were crosses all over the Boyle house. Wooden and metal and porcelain, and pictures of crosses too. They reminded Jack of the day the runt of a girl, her eye swollen black and blue, ran up to him at Hancock Field and asked him why he had killed Christ. She ducked her head, dodging a punch he never threw and never intended to, and she skipped away, not waiting for the answer he couldn’t give. When he told his father about the girl his father was cocking a razor in his hand and his face was thick as a snowdrift with lather. His shirt was off too, and the big eagle tattoo on his right arm bulged every time he put the razor to his face. “Your mother keeps telling me this is a sin, a Jewish sin,” he said, nodding at the winged tattoo. “It’s a blue scar, that’s all it is. Don’t believe everything you hear.” He slapped on shaving lotion and peered into the mirror, admiring his own jaw line and his fine Clark Gable mustache, flexing his blue scar every time he stroked the newly shaved skin.But Harold Kopinksy flexed nothing at all during this strange, unfathomable dinner; not even a black, rakish eyebrow, let alone his proud blue scar of an eagle. Neither did he flex the inner power Jack knew he had, his old, swaggering authority over Boyle and all Boyle’s kind. For the first time in his life, Jack watched his father cower and grovel. Before the gallach, and even before Boyle, in the way the schoolboys who had faced Feeney cowered and groveled in Feeney’s presence.“Do you like corned beef, Father?” Boyle addressed this question to the gallach collegially and fraternally, as though the two of them were on a higher plane than anyone else at the table. As though the gallach was the only one Boyle and his wife had to concern themselves about pleasing.Mrs. Boyle, a wan sheet of a woman, her arms half the girth of Jack’s mother’s arms, brought a huge platter of meat and vegetables to the table, all of it colorless. To Jack it was an apparition of food – food the way it might appear to people who were color-blind, everything as drained as newsprint. As Jack watched her bring in the platter he was aware of her wake, the wider space she walked through. In this space he saw patterned shapes of linen and lace the color of parchment. They were doilies, and they were everywhere, shrouding every piece of furniture. Years later, as he remembered Mrs. Boyle in a dream, the image his sleeping mind conjured was of a woman draped in gray, with an apron of doilies hanging from her shriveled stork neck and tied around her wan waist.The meat on the platter was gray as a dead dog, as was the rest of the steamed material surrounding it, the cabbage and the potatoes. In the deli Jack had seen his father lord it over the huge wooden barrels of Jewish corned beef, ordering minions like Boyle to pop the staves and fire up the kitchen burners under large silver vats filled with water; and he would have them boil a dozen of the large meat slabs at a crack. The cooking smells, the sharp vapors of brine and pickled meat would drive Jack delirious. The briskets themselves, gleaming in their jackets of white fat, were a bright reddish pink when they emerged from the bubbling water, alive with a salty heat that reached beyond the kitchen and made the very air of the restaurant delectable to inhale – even in nooks and corners where there were phone booths, a juke box, a cigarette machine.In the deli, if Boyle had ever presented Harold with gray corpse-meat such as this Harold would have had him shaking in his boots and begging for his job. Yet here, at Boyle’s table with the gallach - the man Boyle called Father - Harold kept his head bowed, his eyes low and his lips silent; and he picked at his food with an obedience Jack had never seen before. He seemed uncomfortable in his clothes too, a dark suit Jack could not recall him wearing before. To him it was a shul suit, but Harold never, ever went to shul. He was never, ever home when Jack’s mother lit the Shabbas candles and mumbled her brochah, covering her eyes before the fiery brass and dancing shadows. It was a matter of business hours, the dinner rush. Each afternoon Harold rose from sleep and put on his deli whites; white canvas pants and a short-sleeved white shirt; and when he returned the next day, from work or from Chinatown – from Chinatown with Cats - the white shirt and pants were stained with splattered meat juices and blotches of mustard.Jack ate at Boyle’s table as his father ate, as if submitting to a punishment. When he looked up at his mother, he saw a different woman than the one he knew, the buxom woman whose skin gleamed with the same joyous white fatness as the deli briskets. Today her lips became pursed and pinched every time she raised her fork, as though the food she was forcing into her throat was decayed or poisonous.The gallach put down his fork and knife and stared directly at Jack’s father, a stare so piercing it seemed to lift Harold’s head.“Food is a blessing, Mr. Kopinsky, not to be taken lightly.”Jack watched his father stop chewing, but not a word came out of his mouth. At that moment his lips could have been stone or ivory, hard and immobile as the teeth behind them.“You are a man who feeds people, Mr. Kopinsky. You give the blessing of food.” The gallach folded his hands and straightened his back, as though he were about to say a prayer.Instead he said two simple words. “It counts.”He delivered those two words as though he were standing on a mountain. Then he leaned forward and smiled, and Jack saw a smile creep onto his father’s lips as well. And onto Boyle’s lips.“It counts,” the gallach said. “It’s a beginning.”“Thank you,” Harold Kopinsky said. And lowering his voice to a near whisper he added, “Thank you, Father.”Jack thought of the words Our Father who art – and wondered if he had just heard his own father say a prayer, or at least a kind of prayer, for the first time ever.When the plates were cleared Jack asked to go to the bathroom. As he left the table he could hear Boyle boasting to the gallach:“Nice son he has, you see? And he feeds the poor too, Father. I’ve seen him give away bread, but he won’t tell you himself. He won’t, but he should. Go ahead, Harold, tell him about the bread, tell him yourself…”Boyle’s wife led Jack to a narrow, unlit hallway. But even in the shadows he could make out the stark elements of the large poster framed on the wall, the sea of skeletal hands reaching up past darkened skyscrapers, reaching towards a face in the sky, huge as the sun.It was the face of Curley, the old boss of Boston. Above the face and above the begging hands was a headline in bold, defiant type: Curley, Mayor of the Poor.On a white patch in the right side of the poster was a prominent message, hand written with pen and ink. To Pat Boyle, one of the best. My gratitude always, James Michael Curley.
Soon after the meal with the gallach, Jack heard his mother smirk, “no more Chinatown,” and his father began to appear in the shul suit again and again. Not that he wore it to synagogue, however. From the whispered Yiddish that went between Sylvia and Harold, Jack gleaned that his father wore it downtown to one of the big marble Boston city buildings. At least twice a week he put the suit on, right after returning from work at dawn, and left the house without sleeping at all. On those mornings he was monochromatic inside and out, suit as black as ink and face as white as paper or a bursting flashbulb, the nightlife swagger so absent from his eyes and lips it was as though acid had etched them away. And Jack, without knowing exactly why, began to feel the acid eating at him too, burning an emptiness into the part of his heart that had nothing to do with pumping blood, but was the axis on which all things turned.This was the point in time when Jack learned that Cats was only the pronunciation, but the name was Katz. He learned it from the twins, Marvin and Milton, whose tongues lolled as they gloated over the dark, ink-smeared newspaper photo showing Katz’s arrest. He was surrounded by cops, who were pulling him towards a police car. It was forty years from the time Katz had been lightweight boxing champion of New England, and still he was a blunt bulldog of a man, a man who chewed his cigars as though he were trying to bite them to death. His punch-flattened nose and slits of eyes, hooded by scar tissue, made him seem armored in his own skin, and impossible to hurt. Jack sensed these things about Katz just from staring at the murky newspaper photo; and when he stood ten feet away from the flesh-and-blood Katz in the yellow glare of the deli he saw how right his impression had been. Even indoors, Katz had a dapper Fedora planted on his squat head. Its elegance was in such contrast to the caveman savagery of his face it made the caveman stand out all the more.Jack’s mother had hurried him out of the house and taken him along with her to the deli, saying she had papers for his father to sign at once, lawyers’ papers. But Katz stood in the way, snarling at Harold over something, a point about money Jack couldn’t fathom. “Let her wait,” Katz said. “This is more important, you idiot fool.”When the argument was over Katz had Harold make him up a platter on a tray: black bread, an onion and a large bowl of sour cream. “Put the whole pint in there, you chicken bastard,” he said, and swiped the tray off the counter. He pushed his way to a table and ate rabidly, the white sour cream smearing his lips and chin like foam from his mouth. Watching him eat, Jack recalled words from the caption accompanying the newspaper the leering twins had thrown into his face. Shrapnel-words, they came shooting out of the paper and tore into him. Katz, underworld figure, drug ring. Herman Savitz, a druggist whose pharmacy stands next to the restaurant/delicatessen. Harold Kopinsky, the owner…
When he balked at the squealing steel tracks in the cobblestone avenue his mother grabbed his sleeve viciously and yanked him onto the streetcar. The first time she told him where they were going he didn’t even hear it right; he was mixing up everything. She said, “we’re going to Charlestown.” He thought she’d said, “we’re going to Chinatown.”The streetcar rattled and swayed and the air inside was thick with decades of sweat, but it only led to yet another streetcar, and after that the screeching subway from Dudley Station – so many transfers to get across the river to Charlestown. Why were they on the streetcar anyway? Why not the car, the chrome-boat? Where had his father’s car gone, what had happened to the car – to all the cars?“Ask Judge Mulcahey,” his mother said. “I’m sure he prefers it to riding around in his wheelchair.”“What Judge?” Jack tugged her sleeve, begging her. “The man in the kitchen? The man with Boyle?” But by then they were in a swirl of people, transferring again, pushing against legs and handbags to get through the turnstiles at Park Street – and she ignored his questions about the judge; no matter how wildly he asked her, no matter how frantic he got.“You just keep your little mouth shut,” she said. “For your own good. And your father’s.”She thought he knew something, but what he knew amounted to no more than the few slips of the tongue she scattered his way, puzzle-pieces that were never enough to make a picture he could really see. On the last leg of the subway she muttered something about the gallach too, what a good gallach he was, how he had done what he could do…“Thank the gallach he’ll get out of here long before Katz will.” She said this as they trudged across the dismal span called Prison Point Bridge and approached the vast black wall, the wall that stretched like a tidal wave turned to gravestone.At school the next day Miss Flanagan marched down the aisle with her pointer, ordering them all to fold their hands and be silent. Compared to the aisle-marchers in operation behind the black wall, what was Miss Flanagan? As he did what she ordered with his hands, interlocking them, he opened his mouth and said in a sing-song, “yes, Miss Fuckbitch.” She pulled him up by the ear and dragged him out of the near-rioting room, down the long corridor to Feeney.