Kiss Me, I'm Dead Read online

  What am I to do with this? All that I see, so many birthday presents. I cannot open them all.

  * * *

  By the time Otto and Bingham Goldstein returned to their apartments above the Golden Rose, it was almost midnight, and it was dark. The servants had lit the light in the entrance to the tavern. Peter, the youngest of the housekeeper’s four children, slept on the stairs with a blanket on his legs. He was waiting for the master of the house. He was there to offer him a towel and bowl of water.

  The Goldsteins came in without speaking. Peter could sense the silence between them like something you could touch. It was membranous and fleshy. It stretched when you pressed it in the center. It was invisible but it was there. The boy handed them both a towel, waited as they washed their hands, and then dashed back into the shadows. The Goldsteins removed their coats and Peter crept back into view only long enough to grab them. It wouldn’t pay to tarry on this night. The masters were out of sorts.

  Goldstein stepped into his private dining room. There was a small bottle of schnapps on the carving table. He snatched it up and wrestled with the cork. Bingham scurried through the darkness toward the rear stairwell when he heard his father say, “Where are you going? I want to talk with you.”

  Bingham stopped. He spun about in the darkened corridor and made his way back toward the dining room. His father was standing by the fireplace. A few embers still burned in the hearth, and he warmed his glass in the glow. “Come here, Bingham.”

  Bingham crept into the room. He moved toward the head of the table and then paused by the chair to the right. This was his seat. He was used to the world from this angle. He sat down and folded his hands.

  “Tell me what really happened.” Goldstein spoke without turning. He continued to stare at the fire.

  And Bingham repeated the tale. How Dustin had made his way into the Lamp Room to get away from the crowd – the Lutherans. How he had tossed his burning cigarette to the deck, how the steamship had rolled, and the cigarette had spun along the planking toward that box of straw. How it had burst apart, the bright head sputtering like a Roman candle, how it had leapt into the straw and eaten it, consumed it piece by piece with bright fire. How it had licked the walls and climbed like some incendiary ivy, up the bulkhead, up, up. Reaching for the sky. And how he had just run, then, simply run. He hadn’t even tried to put out the fire.

  “And you were there the whole time? You witnessed the entire thing?”

  Bingham straightened, played with his shirt. “Yes, father.”

  “This is not some trick, Bingham. I will not suffer them again, your tricks. I’m warning you. This is the truth this time?”

  “It is. I swear. I’m not lying.” And then most cutting of all: “Mother would have believed me.”

  “Indeed,” said Goldstein. He took another swig from his glass. He spun the liquid around. “It’s time you were in bed. You’ve had a hard day, Bingham.”

  “What about you, father?”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Bingham turned and vanished out the door. Goldstein could hear his footsteps as he climbed the stairs. They echoed through the tavern.

  Goldstein surveyed his establishment through the door. It was a grand spectacle, to be sure. With three private dining rooms, an expansive beer garden, and a forty-foot bar and salon, the Golden Rose was the queen of Kleindeutchland. No other beer garden in the district could compare. Each room was painted with scenes of the old country: great fields of grain with haystacks towering; majestic river valleys, dotted with castles; the Rhine, in all her splendor, studded with boats; black forest, rugged mountaintop, step-cut by ice. The furniture was an exact replica of what Goldstein had once seen at the Brass Bull in Hamburg. Sturdy and dependable. Decisive and yet, ultimately, unobtrusive. It was all these things that made the Golden Rose the flower of Kleindeutchland. But there was something else.

  Otto finished his glass of schnapps. He stared down at the fire. And that was the problem. For, in the end, the Golden Rose was her beer. It was why men came from throughout New York to see her. It was why the crowds waited to be served, packed tight like herring in a crate, each Saturday. It was her dream, her promise, and her fulfillment. And none was more famous than the tavern’s pale ale, the beer that had made Goldstein a legend. He had gotten rich off of that recipe. And it wasn’t even his. It belonged to that Jew, Arvin Brauer. He had arrived one day on the stoop with that batch of fresh yeast and a longing in his heart. And Ula had invited him in. She had seen the promise in that bowl covered with blue cloth. That yeast! That golden yeast! It was the goose that laid the golden egg, that helped ferment uncounted vats of ale, which each day made him richer.

  Goldstein stood back from the fire. He glanced at the portraits lined up on the mantel. Their features seemed to move and quiver in the lambent firelight. He picked up the portrait of Ula. She was smiling at him demurely. It was a false pose. There had never been anything demure about Ula. She had engaged demurely, from time to time, when it served her purpose, but she was not demure. She was too busy attending to her diffidence and self-effacement to be demure . . .

  It hurts to be so self-deluded. It burns. I can feel it like the sting of countless insects swarming in my heart. I cannot stay here. It hurts to be in Otto Goldstein.

  Goldstein arched his back. He felt his body shudder, and he put the portrait back. He straightened the edges to line them up with the lip of the mantelpiece. It did not pay to have things out of place. He looked down at his dead wife, smiled, and said, “I’m sorry, Ula.”

  * * *

  My parents’ rooms were humble. We lived in a tenement on Chrystie Street. We shared three rooms, all six of us – well, four, now. Although Nixie hadn’t taken up much room. And I generally slept in the sitting room, in my father’s chair. The bed in the rear sleeping room was so big that it left only the smallest passageway along one wall where you could stand and change your clothes before climbing in. There was only one bed, and we shared it all. We shared it all, and it was wonderful!

  The main room was also the kitchen. It smelled of potatoes and cabbage. No matter how fastidiously my mother cleaned, the odor never quite retreated. The landlord had installed plumbing only a few years earlier, and there was running water and a metal sink. We still had to share the bathroom in the hallway with our neighbors, but we didn’t mind. Simply having running water was incredible to my father. To him, running water represented the kind of luxury most commonly associated with the ruling classes. Such things were not meant for simple men.

  Father, I loved you so much when I was alive. How unsurprising that I would love you even more now, when I am in your skin. You don’t have to prove a thing to me. You never did.

  He sat there quietly, in the adjoining room – my father. He was reading a book by a man named Gillette called The Human Drift. It was a tiny printing; there wasn’t much call for such Utopian thinking. Gillette longed to create a People’s paradise. How ironic that when his book failed – and it would – he would invent the safety razor, transforming products for the first time into disposable commodities. He’d invent consumer dependence, and – as a result – create a fortune for himself. Even my father, the stalwart Socialist he was, would adopt his safety razor in a year or two, abandoning forever the little tufts of paper he used to patch himself up with after shaving.

  My sister and Helmuth lounged together on the floor beside my father’s feet. Mother sat on the small settee, beside my father’s reading chair, trying to sew. It was like any other night – yet, it was different. I wasn’t there this time. Neither was Nixie. Nixie was nowhere to be seen. We were two shadows, cast without shape. We were just memories. Like phantom limbs.

  My mother rubbed her patch of christening gown. “As I foretold you,” she said.

  “‘We are all spirits and are melted into air,’” my father said. He pursed his lips. “I’m sorry. As you foretold me.”

  “As I foretold you,” she continued, “I saw i
t even then.”

  “Please stop it, Minna. You’ll drive yourself mad. Think of the children.”

  “It’s the children I was thinking of. Of Mallory, your daughter. He tried to make love to her for months – your young apprentice.” She laughed, and he felt a sudden fear as he watched her lip curl over pearly teeth.

  “Dustin’s a good boy. No matter what young Goldstein says. And a good watchmaker. I know him, Minna. I work with him every day.” My father shook his head. “I tell you, Minna. He doesn’t know how to be negligent. It’s just not in his nature.”

  “First he wormed his way into your heart. Then he tried worming his way into your daughter’s heart. Who’s next? No, I stand by what I said. Bingham was too good for Mallory, but not that dirty little Jew.”

  “Minna, please!”

  “Shut up. Both of you,” Louisa turned and screamed. “Just be quiet.” She pressed her palms to her ears.

  “Louisa,” my mother said. She was incredulous. She had never heard her daughter speak this way before. Neither had I.

  Louisa got up from the floor. “All day long, everyone’s been blaming Dustin. I can’t stand it anymore. So what if he’s a Jew. He’s ten times the boy Bingham is.” She started to cry. “Mallory is gone. And Nixie too. Must we lose everyone?”

  My father stood and wrapped his arms about her. Louisa collapsed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My little flower.” He brushed his fingers through her hair. “It’s late. Why don’t you put your brother to bed? We’ll be right there.”

  Louisa lifted Helmuth to his feet. My brother was silent and obedient, for once. I think Louisa’s outburst must have frightened him. They vanished into the rear room and closed the door.

  Now, there were no more procrastinations. No more distractions and delays.

  “That dirty little Jew, as you call him, is my protégé,” father said, looking down. “He was and is my best apprentice, my only apprentice now, Minna. There are things he can do with his hands that I can’t even remember I’ve forgotten. I’m no longer young – look at me. Look at me, Minna! My eyes have aged before the rest of me.”

  “I warned you, Leonard.”

  “Yes, my dear,” my father said. He bowed his head. “You warned me. Over and over and over. Come now. Let’s go to bed. This day has been long enough.”

  “What about Mallory and Nixie? They can’t go to bed.”

  My father shuffled over to the candle on the mantle and picked it up. “They are already sleeping.”

  No, I’m right here, I heard myself reply, but it was voicelessly.

  I watched my parents make their way into the back room. I saw them close the door, only to see Louisa reappear. She crept across the kitchen to the sitting room. She made her way to the window. She opened it and a summer breeze washed over her. She looked northeast, at the night sky. The smoke was hidden now, black on black. Louisa sighed. I could feel a solitary tear begin to well up in the corner of her eye. I could feel it gather force, descend, and run across her cheekbone. She was crying for me. I could see it as she shuddered in the dark. I could feel the heaving of her chest. She was crying for me! Until, with one great sigh, she hung her head, she closed her eyes and whispered almost out of reach, “Dustin.”

  Part II

  Chapter 5

  June 16, 1904

  Kleindeutchland, New York City

  It’s odd what you abandon when you die. Things that before seemed vitally important, momentous, fade and wither. And yet small things, too small to keep in memory – the slightest turning of the wrist, a wink, a nod – live on forever. Life is a line of little things.

  Now that I’m dead, I look upon the year 1904 with equanimity. Some people linger in the certainty: That warm June afternoon ruined countless lives. And it did. Of course it did! But carried like seeds, like thistles on a stocking, attached to all that pain, dreaming of rain, were countless opportunities that sprang up from the void. They say nature abhors a vacuum. So does good fortune if you let it come.

  By the end of the year, Kleindeutchland was no more. We drove them out, Nixie and me, and all the rest of us. How could you stay when every corner of the street reminded you of your dead wife, your daughter, sister, mother, aunt, your former life? Within a year, nearly everyone in Kleindeutchland was gone, moved away, relocated. They ran to Yorkville, or to the countryside, or to some other state. We haunted them away.

  Yet so much more transpired. In 1904, a man invented the ice-cream cone at the World’s Fair in St. Louis. There were the first engagements of the Russo-Japanese and the Herero wars. So many things began or ended: the opening of the first New York City subway line; the conclusion of construction for the first tunnel underneath the Hudson River; the manufacture of the very first Rolls-Royce. How wonderful! While one man dreamed up ice-cream cones, another invented the caterpillar track, which was to revolutionize all future wars.

  I can feel the balance more than I perceive it. Even the fire itself resulted in unknowable and unanticipated good. Because Kleindeutchland was emptied, two people avoided death. One, a Mrs. April Kleiner, would have been run over by a streetcar in two months over on Houston Street. It’s true. I can see her head split open on the cobblestones, the life rushing out of her. All of that blood and brains. But she didn’t, or she won’t die. It’s hard to say. How do you anchor life when time itself is cast adrift? And the other, a man named Henry Slope, would have been murdered. Robbed first, and then murdered, right there, before me, in the street. But Henry wasn’t there to be robbed and murdered. Because of me, and Nixie, and so many others who died that day, Henry was in Peekskill on that fateful afternoon. He failed to attend his execution. He was, somehow, reprieved.

  And in a darkened auditorium, I can see flickering lights. I hear hushed voices under music. I see the events of that day flashing across a screen – in a movie called Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable, William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Mickey Rooney, who played the Gable character as a child. It was filmed quickly, designed to turn a modest profit at the most . . . certainly not to set the public mind ablaze, which it did.

  How could I be angry with Louisa? When there is so little love in this world, how could I begrudge my sister a small piecrust of happiness?

  Jealousy makes no sense when you are dead. In fact, now, all of those feelings – hatred and jealousy, anger and pride – seem, well, beside the point. Not bad or evil, malevolent or vile. Not bankrupt morally, but tasteless, bland. Unbeautiful, I guess. Yes, that’s it. Not ugly – just unbeautiful.

  Perhaps I’d known about my sister’s secret love for Dustin all along. It’s hard to say. Or, perhaps, I’d been too caught up in my own feelings to see or care about her sentiments. That would have been like me. Not that I was selfish, mind you – just self-preoccupied. I wasn’t bad, or mean, insensitive or vain. No, none of these. I was just . . . alive.

  I sit beside my stone memorial in Queens. I sit and wait and watch. I see the things that happened, or were to happen, or might someday transpire. You could go mad with your fingers in this knot. There is no certainty in this continuum, and yet all is connected. Each reality, each scene, can be played out, or just as easily revoked. The slightest thing, the smallest wink or nod or turning of the wrist, and ships burn. All perishes to make room for the new.

  New York was overcome with grief. I could see that. That was preeminently clear. I could see black bunting raised and wrapped round City Hall by Mayor George McClellan, Jr., son of the controversial Union army general. Each flag in New York State was lowered to half-mast. I could see the Reverend Haas of St. Mark’s Church weeping over the death of his wife in his back rooms, and yet still finding time for others who had lost so much. I could see stacks of coffins being unloaded outside the various undertakers of Kleindeutchland. Since so many parishioners had died, the Reverend Haas had decided that there were to be no funerals at St. Mark’s Church. Instead, all services were to be conducted in funeral parlors or in private homes. And I could see my fa
ther mounting two white ribbons on the front door of our tenement on Chrystie Street – tap, tap – white for children – tap, tap – besides dozens and dozens of black ribbons, flapping like crows’ wings in the warm summer breeze.

  It was at this time that I was finally torn loose from the wreckage. The diver’s name was Fitzgerald, William A. He had come over a few years earlier from Galway, and worked first as a riveter in Boston, before learning how to weld, and then to dive, and then to weld while diving. He’s the one who finally tore me lose. He grabbed me by the shoulders and heaved, and I just came undone, tore down the center of me. He brought me topside and laid me out, just another body on that raft, floating with all those other rafts. We simply lay there in the sun, trying to dry off. My body was crushed beyond recognition, my face ravaged by crabs. Who are you? I asked, looking down. What happened to your pale blue eyes? Once upon a time, there was a boy who thought me beautiful. Dustin, do you remember? I’ll let you go if you promise you’ll never forget?

  Chapter 6

  June 18, 1904

  Middle Village, Queens

  They gave it the name Black Saturday. An enormous crowd gathered at the funeral of the Reverend Mrs. Haas. It was almost like the coronation of a queen. Everyone wore something new. No one, it seemed, could stand to look at that old dress again, that old suit hanging in the closet. Not any longer. They were all tainted now, those clothes, with memories.