More than once, his three daughters had all told him that they couldn’t stand Charlotte, but Bernie didn’t mind her. After all, he didn’t need more than occasional help to get from here to there; to cook his dinner; to vacuum and dust; to do the dishes and pick up groceries. At his old house, the one where he and Joan had raised the girls, you had to drive to get to the grocery store, but when they sold that house and moved to the brick one-story, they were closer to everything, including the Stop & Shop. They were also on a much busier road, but it was only at the narrow side of the house, where a spacious den overhung the garage, that traffic hummed by. It didn’t bother him. Nor, despite her support for various right wing lunatics Trump and her belief in the healing power of prayer, did Charlotte. As Bernie explained to the handful of regular visitors from the synagogue who came to visit him regularly: he and Charlotte didn’t talk about politics. But, but—they said. Q-Anon? Doesn’t that bother you? Does she know you’re Jewish? Even the rabbi got involved, stepping in to tell all the naysayers, including Bernie’s three, middled-aged daughters, to back off. If Bernie is satisfied with Charlotte, let that be an end to it. He’s an old man and alone in the world, bereft of his dear wife, in a permanent, if hazy, state of mourning, longing only for—for what? Certainly not for death, though the thought didn’t scare him. If he knew for sure that Joan was on the other side, waiting for him, it would be different. But he doesn’t know for sure. He’s not particularly sure of much of anything—he knows he’s a Jew, that he misses his wife, that life has gone stale, that he’s much older than he’d ever thought possible, that he still likes to read, that he prefers some of the synagogue visitors to others, and that his live-in helper’s political preferences are probably an abomination. So what? She cooks, she cleans, she has a lovely lilting accent from whatever island she’s from, and in winter and summer, day in and day out, she brushes her lips with the same shimmering silver-pink sheen of silver-pink lipstick. Whereas Joan, when she put on lipstick, wore scarlet. And his daughters—but he doesn’t know from his daughters. There is in fact something vaguely obscene about a man noticing much in the way of his grown daughters’ enticements and self-flatteries.

Not that he notices all that much these days, but what he notices he notices. He still reads, walks (with a cane), enjoys his food, goes to the bathroom to perform his daily miracle (albeit with the help of ample amounts of Metamucil but who’s to judge and in any case who needs to end up in the E.R. with an impaction like his old friend Eric Haldenstein God forbid?) He reads the entire daily New York Times and, because he believes in print journalism, the first section of the Newark Star Ledger. Without help he can get in and out of the shower, where he observes, though without admiration, the long pink husk of his former robust manhood hanging beneath the white fluff of what had once been a veritable jungle of black wires. So why can’t his fussy daughters get off his back about Charlotte? For God’s sake, he’s a retired high school principal. His wife worked in a dentist’s office. He’s lucky that he can afford Charlotte, not to mention this house—

It had been a perfect set-up for the two of them as they aged out of their higgledy-piggledy three-story Victorian, with its front and back stairs and old-growth garden. And then, as it happens, as it always happens, one of them got sick, and in their case it was Joan, and a year later she was dead, and the orange-brick one-story with its side-end on the busy street and its front door opening to its slivered green front lawn was both enormous and lonely. If that wasn’t bad enough, here comes Eva Bronstein from down the street, from where she lives all alone since her own husband died, leaving her alone in something akin to splendor. The Bronstein manse is of large and ample proportions, with high ceilings, significant stonework and even more significant European art. The living room is filled with paintings and, on the surfaces of every table and adorning the bookcases, photographs of Eva’s famous late husband’s famous late face. A marvel he had been, a magician, in his case of the violin, which he played with such delicious mastery that not long after he and his still-alive sister and still-alive parents got themselves from the Soviet Union to Morningside Heights, he was invited to play his magical violin here, there—wherever Jews gathered—and after that, the stuff of legend: invitations to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the Vienna State Academy, and the Manhattan School of Music, followed by—never mind because Eva will tell you all about it.

Eva also doesn’t like Charlotte, but unlike his daughters and the synagogue people who take it upon themselves to visit with him, she either hadn’t been warned by the rabbi or hadn’t heeded his warning to lay off. She said: “Haven’t you noticed that your shvartze companion leaves Christian brochures all around the house? This doesn’t insult you?”

It didn’t, though, or at least not much. Now, as she plucks a brochure from a large crystal dish on the coffee table, he notices with a pang that Jesus looks like any number of the blue-eyed American rock stars that once upon a time had so disturbed and excited his daughters. But Jesus he isn’t interested in. He’d long since come to the conclusion that if Jesus had in fact been a real live person and not just a collection of stories written by a bunch of crazy, terrified, and confused Jews, he would have looked more like Yasir Arafat or Osama Bin Laden than like a member of the Grateful Dead. 

A month after Charlotte had moved in, Eva Bronstein had begun visiting regularly, sometimes dressed as if for Rosh Ha Shana, in a formidable suit of some expensive cloth and cut, a severe hat on her head, and at other times wearing nothing but furry slippers, pajamas, and a fuzzy blue bathrobe. Never did she call beforehand, nor, when Bernie pointed out to her that he “did” email, did she take the hint. At first mainly she talked about her late husband, his great brilliance, his charm, and had she told Bernie how they’d met? Well, she said, she, Eva, was just a young teenager when she and her mother, by the grace of God, arrived in Brooklyn. Why Brooklyn? Because her mother had a cousin there. She was a second cousin actually—maybe even a third—but who’s counting, especially since all the other cousins, as well as the siblings and uncles and aunts and grandparents and neighbors and babies and every Jew in the entire town and all the towns around them had died in the camps. So. In Zdundek, where once upon a time Eva’s father kept a harness supply and black-smithery, and her mother rented out two rooms to lodgers at the top of the house, and the house and black-smithery were in the center of town where all the peasants came to get their harnesses repaired and their horses shod, and in fact her father’s best apprentice was a goy of about fifteen named Jerzy who would take little Eva on his knee as if she were his baby sister, well then: it was nice until it wasn’t, but because of Jerzy, who lived with Eva’s family because his own family lived too far away, way out in the countryside, and they were grateful to Eva’s father for taking him in as an apprentice where he took all his meals and slept and even on occasion was invited to join the family for a family party or l’chaim, well, it was because of Jerzy and his family that Eva and her family didn’t starve. And then when they did begin to starve and Eva’s father left his hiding place way out in the country where Jerzy’s family was trying to protect them, they continued to try to help them but since they couldn’t help themselves—well, those were terrible times. All of them—all seven or eight of them, however many there were in Jerzy’s goy family, they too were dead. But Eva’s mother put then-tiny Eva under Eva’s mother ragged cloak and snuck her into the Nazi camp and when she went to work every day before dawn she instructed Eva to hide under the tatters that were their blankets and boards that were their beds and, returning, would provide a scrap of moldy or maggoty or stale bread, and in this way, both Eva and her mother managed not to perish.

“How awful, but how wonderful too, that you and your mother–” Bernie would say, only to be prevented from completing his thought when Eva clamored on. 

“And that’s how I met my wonderful Bruno!” she’d conclude without any bridge material or plot device or, for that matter, narrative development at all. “I saw him from across the room. It was at the YMHA I think. Or maybe not. Maybe it was at the YIVO. He was playing his violin—that’s how he’d make money, Jews would hear about him and hire him to play at their events. I was there to help with the food. My mother and I went: she was helping out and I was helping her help out. I couldn’t have been more than fifteen. When Bruno picked up his violin, what came out was magic. Pure magic! Ah! If only you’d heard him! You’d be in love too.”

Of course Bernie had heard him—both he and Joan had—many times. Then Joan got sick and Bernie became too frail to do much in the way of going out, which had happened more or less concurrently with the onset of Bruno’s decline. But during the long period of his vigor, Bruno Bronstein had sat on the bimah yearly to play Kol Nidre. Sometimes he played it on his cello (his second instrument but still sublime) but more often he played it on his priceless Barbieri, and surely, when he played, the angels wept, even more, they said, then when Sarah wife of Abraham died at the age of 127, after having endured the spectacle of her son Isaac’s being taken to Mount Moriah, Which was another place where Bernie and Joan had gone: Jerusalem had been glorious in the golden sun. How they’d loved to travel, taking cruises to the islands and sunning themselves on the sunny white beaches of the Bahamas, she in the modestly cut, checkered shorts-and-conical-coned-top two-piece bathing suits that she preferred; he stretched out in madras and reading a book on the chaise lounge. 

“Even God smiles when he hears my Bruno play the violin,” Eva would say.

One year, for Hanukkah, Joan had gone out and bought two of Bruno Bronstein’s records, the Mozart Serenades 3 through 8 and some Bach. She and Bernie had sat in the living room—this of course would have been in the old house—to listen. While the records spun on the turntable, Joan, with a small and wily smile on her lips, worked on a needlepoint cover for the foyer bench, depicting a bucolic scene: lambs, a shepherd, spreading trees in the fullness of their greenery. 

“Mr. Zeigler,” said Charlotte one day. “That neighbor woman. The one who always be coming around here and batting her eyelids. I don’t like her, not one bit, she’s after something.” 

Charlotte had called Bernie “Bernie” since the day she moved into the back bedroom at the end of the hall, and in fact had only called him “Mr. Zeigler” one other time, and that was to claim that in her opinion a certain middle-aged woman from the synagogue—a vibrant, black-haired painter of some small but real repute—should no longer be running errands for him, and when he’d asked Charlotte why on earth she thought so, she’d pressed her lips together, sniffed expressively, and said: “You  mark my words, Mr. Zeigler.” He hadn’t marked her words and the painter, along with a half dozen other volunteers from the synagogue, continued to do errands and run chores for him—a lift to the dentist’s office one week, a delivery of home-made split pea soup the next. There was an entire crew of them, these busy, happy, productive and usually middle-aged helpers at the synagogue. The mensch brigade. That’s what they called themselves. 

Even after Bernie explained the meaning of the word, Charlotte didn’t refer to them as mensches. She called them menaces. “The menace brigade is coming again, are they?” Then she’d fiddle with the small gold cross at her neck, smack her lips, and disappear into the back of the house. 

“You mark my words,” said Charlotte now in her lovely lilting island accent, the scent of the soft green-blue salty sea, the breezes rustling the palm trees. “That crazy old lady, she be sniffing after something.”

*

If Eva was after something it wasn’t money. For starters, he didn’t have any. What he had was arthritis, bursitis, high blood pressure, and coronary artery disease. He also had a hip replacement, a slight palsy in his left hand, and skin the color and texture of the kind of perfumed tissue paper that ladies’ underthings used to come wrapped in. Also, it was too absurd: since when did the hoity-toity Bronsteins deign to have social intercourse of all but the most superficial kind with the Zeiglers?

Oh, how their pleasant condescension had annoyed his Joan! And how hard she’d tried, and with such cheerful determination, to educate herself up to their lofty standards. Such was the occasion of the records she’d bought and then insisted on listening to with the kind of attentiveness that usually she gave only to her cooking and children. Joan didn’t much care for classical music. She preferred Broadway musicals, light jazz, Peter, Paul and Mary, and the Kingston Trio. There were exceptions, of course: for “Peter and the Wolf,” which Joan had insisted that their little girls listened to, all of Gershwin, and, for that matter, most of Copland as well. How hard she’d tried to appreciate the higher art of Bruno Bronstein’s Viennese training, and how hard she’d been on herself in matters large and small as she compared herself, and by extension, her high-school principal husband, to the elegant, refined and altogether superior Bronsteins, whose children, roughly the same ages as their daughters, inevitably grew up to be, respectively, a neurobiologist, a classical pianist, and a professor of mathematics.

It escaped no one, Joan and Eva included, that when it came to social relations, the Zeiglers– with their American bonafides going back all the way to the start of the modern era–were and should have been considered  a cut above, and not the other way around, because even if the late Bruno Bronstein played the fiddle like Heifetz, even if he played with an artistry even greater than Heifetz, Eva Bronstein was born and forever remained a Yid: in her case,  squat, square-faced, puffy-haired, talky, gesturing, and freely perspiring Jewish girl from the Lithuanian back of beyond who just happened to have been plucked from the gnashing and clambering jaws of the Nazi machine and plunked down in New York, where for some reason—who knew the ways of Love?—she attracted the attentions and then the adoration of a musical genius.

And so forth.

And now here she was, yet again, dressed in a shimmering blue gown trimmed with faux pearl beading, and topped with a fox fur shawl sort of thing—Bernie could never be sure of the endless categories that women’s outerwear came in. Through his windows it was spring, with daffodils pushing up along the concrete pathway that led from the sidewalk to his front door. Where Eva was pressing the doorbell continuously, making a continuous chiming.

“Can you get the door please?” Bernie said to Charlotte, who in any case knew that it was her job to get the door, and not his, and not because he couldn’t but rather because he moved so slowly that often the doorbell ringer would assume no one was home and leave.

“Oh, I thought I might have to wait forever!” said Eva as she made her way past Charlotte and into the sunken living room as Charlotte glared. Arranging her gown under her ample backside, and taking a seat on the sofa, Eva whispered, “What’s with the shvartze?

“I don’t know what you mean. How are you, Eva?”

“You know what? In the camps mame kept me alive, I don’t know how. She hid me, is what she did. And then, liberation. I thought the DP camps were paradise. I thought we were in Berlin, or even Paris. No. We were in some pisher nothing of a town in southern Germany. Who knew?”

“I see.”

“But you know what? It was wonderful. Wonderful! Every night, a dance, a party it was! There were gypsies there, and Romanians from Romanov, and a whole jingle-jangle. In the camps, and afterwards, in the DP camps, well, you did what you had to do to keep alive. Maybe that was enough.”

“I suppose it was.”

“It was the whole world in those camps. I already had Yiddish, of course, and some Polish and German but now also I learned to speak French and Italian. Russian I never learned. My Bruno spoke Russian like Tolstoy. He had to.”

Bernie himself knew no languages other than the southern American English he’d absorbed in his Norfolk, Virginia, childhood and a smattering of what he remembered from high-school French. Joan didn’t even have high school French and never thought twice about it. 

Eva was putting her bejeweled hand on Bernie’s pathetically skinny left knee.

“You know what I think?” she said. 

“I don’t.”

“I think you need to fire that awful, sourpuss schwarze. First, because you can do better. Second, because who needs bad news? And third—” but Eva was now onto the story of her first date with Bruno, and there was no third.

She had a point—the same point that his daughters and even his friend Eric Haldenstein made. But what of it? Eric himself was reliant on a changing cast of dark-skinned, heavily accented women whose names he sometimes forgot, but Eric had considerably deeper pockets than Bernie had, and what’s more, ever since the bowel obstruction that had landed him in the emergency room, he’d required considerable assistance. But bowl obstruction was not Bernie’s problem. Nor was memory loss. Hearing loss, yes—but he was a faithful user of the tiny hearing aids that his doctor had insisted would help him. There was in addition a slight weakness in the chest and blurriness of the vision. A trembling inside his bones when he attempted to stand. A lightness in his limbs, the general sense that he was not there at all when he lay in bed. The way words printed in books became words printed in the air. How more and more often he himself floated out of his body and back in time, once to see his mother searching for Indian arrow heads along the Ohio River in Kentucky with other girls and boys, light and colorful as sparrows. 

Sometimes, after he returned from these out-of-body excursions, he’d notice that Charlotte had refreshed her collection of Christian pamphlets or left a new one out in a place where Bernie was bound to see it. But he never really got angry with her, not even when one evening as she was serving him his dinner she announced that she was going to vote for Donald Trump because Kamala Harris was a lesbian who sold young girls into sexual slavery.

“Is that so?” Bernie said before returning to his baked chicken breast. It was of course meant to be the kind of rejoinder designed to express common respect, but Charlotte apparently read his remark differently, and sniffing, said: “Yes indeed! Indeed! Indeed!”

She half-walked, half-limped out of the room, talking to herself in her lovely lilting language before descending with a series of thuds down the half-flight from the kitchen to what the realtor who’d first shown the house to Bernie and Joan had hopefully called “the family room.” Because Charlotte was often given to drama, Bernie didn’t think anything of it. It was only later, when she didn’t reappear, that he found her in a heap at the bottom of the stairs.

Bending over her as best he could, Bernie determined that though she was still breathing, something terrible must have happened. A ghastly pallor had come over her. The last time he had seen someone look like that had been never, and he’d seen his share of death. He had of course been with Joan when she’d died, passing from life to death as gently as a breeze. Beep beep beep from the machine that was helping her stay alive, until she stopped breathing, and the machine went quiet and his heart broke and he noticed was that his bladder was overfull. Joan wasn’t the first he’d seen out of the world: at his age, he’d done his share of sitting by bedsides, waiting for death, the vigil, the prayer. And that wasn’t counting the time he’d put in for Uncle Sam in the Korean War.

Charlotte’s killer was an advanced tumor of the liver that had burst out of its original site and caused all kinds of additional damage in addition to the damage it had already caused by seeding Charlotte’s soft plump body where it could, in cavities and bones and tendon, in blood and synapse, in organs and glands. She was taken to the hospital, where she lay unconscious and moaning or, worse, opening her eyes just long enough to register the full strength of her vocal cords and let out a terrible scream. Bernie sat with her for a little while but couldn’t bear her suffering and went home.

Letting himself in the side door, he found Eva Bronstein waiting for him in the kitchen. She had brought stuffed cabbage. “The back door was wide open,” she said before telling him about the food she’d eaten in the DP camps, how when you’re starving gruel and groats are ambrosia, and then, after she and her mother had landed in New York, she’d stuffed herself with Hershey’s chocolate and hotdogs. Bernie, enjoying the stuffed cabbage, didn’t remember to thank her until she was leaning towards him, exposing the top of her big bosom in its V-necked robe.

“It was really very thoughtful of you to bring this over,” he said.

“Oh that!” Eva said, but instead of answering, she opened the freezer door and said: “Where on earth do you think your shvartze did with the ice cream I brought over?”

Ice cream or no, Eva was a bit cracked. Worn at the edges. Soft at the seams. But he wasn’t worried about Eva’s neurological health. He called the rabbi, who called someone else, and the next thing he knew a volunteer from the mensch brigade whom he’d never met before was driving him to the hospital so he could sit with Charlotte a second day, though he didn’t really want to. Enough. Enough with the screaming and moaning and horrible, shocking horror of it all, her eyes rolling back in her head, the terrible whites of her rolling eyes. But when, on a third day, he tip-toed into her room, Charlotte opened her eyes, trained them on Bernie, and shouting “That neighbor lady bitch put a hex on me,” died.

And maybe Eva had put a hex on her, and maybe she hadn’t, but Bernie, so alone in the world, no longer was, not with Eva by his side, with her cakes and puddings, her endless astonishing stories that she’d miraculously plucked from the land of the dead, her purring, her prattling, and her soft warm body next to him at night. 

 

______

 

Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently You’ve Told Me Before, short stories in the Yiddish tradition publishing in September of 2025 (University of Wisconsin Press.)  Her essays, poetry, short stories and opinions pieces have been widely published.  She is also a painter.  Her website is www.jenniferannemosesarts.com

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