2207 South Green Road

2207

SOUTH

GREEN

ROAD

2207

SOUTH

GREEN

ROAD

a novel of love and dysfunction

Janice C. Spector

Copyright © 2021 by Janice C. Spector

All rights reserved

Published in the United States of America

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Cover design by Duane Stapp

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system—except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine, newspaper, or on the Web—without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-7367064-2-8

Published by Two Bairns Press

Lewes, Delaware 19958

Inquiries: JaniceSpector.com

To Barry, Michael, Elise, Luke, and Joely

____

For my cousin Elliot

You all show me every day that anything is possible if it’s held together with love

Chapter 1

Edna settled into the cubbyhole in her narrow bedroom closet—her favorite hiding place. She had gathered more supplies than usual this morning, including an extra package of Hostess cupcakes she’d been saving. Her Debbie Reynolds paper dolls were meticulously laid out on the small patch of floor, each matching outfit to the right of the cut-out to avoid cupcake crumbs or chocolate stains.

When she’d asked her Grandma Becky why there were only paper replicas of certain people, she’d explained You have to be famous, Edna. You have to be a movie star.

That made sense. As Edna dressed Debbie, she impulsively took a small pair of scissors to slightly reshape the hair. Will I ever be famous? And if I am, will I be a movie star? She could not imagine a paper reproduction of herself. Who would want a figure of a short fat person who had trouble finding clothes that fit?

She downed the second cupcake and stared at its companion—a package of Twinkies. Not really hungry, she ate the cream-filled sponge cakes anyway, pausing to wipe the residue from her hands. Although the closet door was shut, she heard her father shouting at her mother. It would not be long before one of her parents stormed into the room.

It was Friday and most children viewed the upcoming weekend as a reprieve from school, but not Edna. At least tonight would be special. She’d be able to lose herself in the mayhem downstairs on the first floor of the house. She’d recently realized that the type of party that was to occur tonight wasn’t really what most people considered a party, still she was the only family member excited that it was her grandfather Morris Katofsky’s sixty-third birthday. The event would be the highlight of the week for the secretive child, who awoke gleeful about spending the evening with the birthday guests—her grandmother Becky’s brothers and sisters and their spouses—Edna’s great-aunts and uncles.

She knew any party hosted in Becky and Morris’s tiny first-floor apartment had the potential to explode like a powder keg. The family rarely disappointed, always flaunting their best indecorous behavior. They were still talking about the incident—when Uncle Izzie’s Playboy magazine fell out of the folds of the Cleveland Plain Dealer during Yom Kippur.

Their redemption was in their humor. Edna could count on her family to be funny, outrageous, even nonsensical. Like the time Aunt Millie had them all searching frantically for a string of lost pearls only to find they had fallen into her bra. The aunts were also highly judgmental, so much so that almost any innocent remark might be met with a caustic or even cruel retort. Edna viewed this as an odd form of affection because at least, unlike her father, they cared enough to reply.

Edna wondered if the party, as many were, would be cancelled. Maybe Grandma Becky would be sick again. Although Edna considered herself an excellent detective, as good as Nancy Drew, no matter how much snooping she did around the apartments in the two-family house at 2207 South Green Road, she still had no idea what was wrong with her grandmother. She tried, unsuccessfully, to decipher the hints and whisperings of the aunts and uncles whenever they were talking about Becky, but as soon as the adults noticed her, they always stopped the conversation.

Well, Edna. What can we do for you? What do you need? That was how they deflected when they caught her spying. The only answer she ever gave was that she was hungry—and even though the questions sometimes came soon after a full meal had been served, her aunts, uncles, and grandparents always accommodated her with a cookie. Or two. Or three.

Still in her pajamas, her parents unaware that she was awake, Edna dusted away the remaining pastry crumbs and crept downstairs. She pressed her ear to her grandparents’ kitchen door and heard Becky hang up the phone, followed by the clatter of pots and pans. Edna detected a familiar aroma…brisket. She never understood why it was served on every holiday and special occasion, but the comforting scent was a sign that things were on track for the celebration.

At the sound of her mother’s voice, Edna scurried back upstairs. She squeezed into her closet crawl space to wait for the commotion to stop, resigning herself to being late for school again. She regularly missed the bus, her departure dependent on how long her father spent raging around the second floor. She often arrived at her classroom in crumpled clothes with a hastily scrawled note pinned to her blouse that read Family Emergency. She listened now as Esther flitted nervously around the apartment and her father raced from room to room, slamming each door with a thud.

The aunts and uncles seldom agreed on anything, but beyond hatred was how Edna heard them describe their singular attitude toward Edna’s father, Harold. They constantly changed their opinions about what was wrong with her mother, Esther, Becky and Morris’s only child, but they were unified in their fondness for their great-niece.

Edna was a smart girl, plagued throughout childhood with illness. She had chronic ear infections that caused her to miss most of the second grade, but she advanced nonetheless because scholastic testing indicated she was the brightest child at Belvoir Elementary School. The family, except for Becky’s youngest sister, Aunt Ceal, stayed focused on Edna’s academic potential and discounted her emotional difficulties. They saw nothing wrong with the girl being thirty pounds overweight by the time she was in the fifth grade.

To keep Edna engaged, Ceal crafted extraordinary plans. Responding to a newspaper ad, she’d arranged for Edna to audition for the role of one of the Polynesian children in a production of South Pacific at the Hanna Theatre in downtown Cleveland. After all, Ceal reasoned, Edna was learning French in school. When Edna, the only non-Asian child there, sang Dites-moi pourquoi in full force, Ceal shouted, Louder, Edna! ignoring the wincing producers. When Edna was rejected, Ceal consoled her with a huge ice cream sundae at the Old Mill Restaurant, explaining to her great-niece they had wanted someone more French and less Jewish.

Had the family understood that Edna’s emotional issues rivaled those of her mother, they would have been perplexed. They were sympathetic to the strange behavior of Esther, who, although they believed her to be a nice girl, seemed oddly agitated and occasionally disconnected from ongoing conversations. Yet, they had grown accustomed to their niece’s peculiarities, ignoring Morris Katofsky’s concerns about his daughter’s welfare, presented to them in a sometimes hard-to-follow combination of Yiddish and English. Harold was another case. If blame was to be cast, it would most certainly rest with Edna’s disagreeable father. To discourage him from attending family functions, the aunts and uncles displayed open hostility toward him whenever he entered the room.

As the target of their animosity, Harold Kotkin viewed himself as a proud warrior—and even at her age, Edna understood he was an exceedingly narcissistic man who battled life daily. He reveled in the family’s open rejection of him and retaliated by escalating his verbal abuse of Esther and constant tirade against Edna. When Harold agreed to move into the apartment upstairs from his in-laws, he had viewed it as hitching a ride on the gravy train and was shocked and belligerent when Morris insisted he pay rent. Harold had counted on a subsidized place to live, freeing his money for numerous get-rich-quick schemes. It’s costing me an arm and a leg, he complained to Esther on a regular basis—and emphasized his displeasure by always forgetting Edna at birthdays and holidays.

The only visitor to the house at 2207 South Green Road whom Harold liked was the maid. Harold adored Lurlene, who addressed him as Mr. Harold, which he deemed appropriate. Lurlene often helped clean the apartment, working around Mr. Harold and never asking him to move, no matter how difficult it became to maneuver through the piles of newspapers and toys. Harold so enjoyed Lurlene’s deferential treatment, he intentionally turned the upstairs of the house into a pigpen, increasing the anxiety of the obsessively clean Esther. Becky struck back by threatening to charge Harold for the overtime she had to pay, while Lurlene attempted to calm the family by lavishing extra attention on Mrs. K.

Becky’s sisters also liked Lurlene but considered her an unnecessary luxury. They viewed Becky as living an extravagant lifestyle because she was the only one of them who did not work, even though she occupied much of her time keeping the books for Morris’s floor-scraping business. "Writing out checks to the goyim, you call that working?" Ceal often complained to their middle sister, Libby, using the Yiddish word for all non-Jews.

The aunts and uncles assumed that when Becky was not on the telephone connecting with the rest of the family, she was either eating, cooking, or both. The phone, which hung on the bright yellow wall of the Katofskys’ kitchen, began ringing at seven every morning, including weekends. The aunts and even the uncles—Izzie and Arthur—discussed their schedules, peppered with all sorts of unimportant information. Edna never questioned any of this behavior.

________

In a few hours, the guests coming to Morris’s birthday party would cram into the living and dining rooms. The house on South Green Road was far too small to host everyone comfortably. It was one in a row of seven identical, brick, two-family dwellings. Morris and Becky had been eager to flee the cramped inner city of Cleveland, where segregated tenements evoked painful memories of their childhoods in Kiev and Latvia. Morris chose the location in University Heights at the urging of one of his fellow Jews from Eastern Europe, his lantsman, developer Sy Koppelman, who lived next door. When Morris broke ground in 1950, the lot sat directly opposite a golf course. Over the years, as the Jewish community flourished, the golf course was sold, becoming the Green Road Synagogue, and the traffic from the congregation became a major irritant to the Katofskys.

At first, South Green Road had seemed perfect to Becky. Idyllic. One block from 2207 was a small group of retail establishments—Weintraub’s Grocery, the New York Bakery, Heights Pharmacy (where Harold worked), and Edelman’s Kosher Butcher. Becky ordered all her groceries by phone and had them delivered. She liked dealing with the Weintraubs because the husband-and-wife team ran the store the same way she ran Morris’s floor-scraping business—employing only blue-collar non-Jews whom they assumed would work more cheaply.

All the architectural details of the Katofskys’ house were out of proportion. A huge wrought iron K adorned the front door of 2207. With Becky’s approval, Morris fashioned an elaborate yard for the tiny dwelling. Evergreens flourished in the front, offset by eight randomly placed, bright-pink plastic flamingoes. The side of the house was bordered by huge blue and white peony bushes. The flowers targeted the back door of Morris’s cherished Chrysler DeSoto in the summer, leaving a film of sticky pollen as he barreled in and out of the driveway.

A granite path led from the screened-in porch to the backyard. Edna numbered each flagstone in colored chalk, ready for a game of hopscotch. The child had her own swing set, positioned squarely in front of the two cherry trees. Birds plagued these trees as soon as they bore fruit, and Edna often joined her grandfather as he shouted obscenities in Russian and waved away the invaders with a broomstick. A large garden, nestled at one side of the house, displayed more gorgeous pink and yellow roses, always victim to Japanese beetles. The only flowers Becky permitted Edna to pick and bring indoors were on the far side of the garage, bordering the Koppelmans’ property. There, wild bright-orange tiger lilies grew uncontrollably and overflowed into the neighbor’s backyard. Sy Koppelman, his always-present cigarette dangling from his mouth, would curse under his breath as he hacked them away.

Visible through the trees at the back of the Katofsky property were undeveloped lots where Edna and Esther spent summer days picking huge baskets of wild raspberries and blackberries, which Becky would make into jam. In the middle of the yard was a circular bed, which served as a platform for a small concrete column adorned by a bright, silver-blue glass orb about the size of a basketball. Everyone admired it, although no one was quite sure what it was. Edna told her few friends it was a magic crystal ball.

The tiny house was designed for efficiency—milk boxes at the side door for the daily dairy delivery, built-in mail receptacles in the front of the house, and laundry chutes in each of the two apartment bathrooms to send wadded clothes—and sometimes toys, rocks, and whatever else Edna could find—to the concrete basement floor.

Becky furnished her apartment on the main level in metallic colors and leather. An enormous brocade couch, covered in plastic, ran against the back wall of the living room, giving the appearance of a mantle for the copper and silver wall-clock, designed to look like a sunburst. Although the clock never told the correct time, the Katofskys refused to repair or replace it. A huge leather chair and ottoman sat next to the prized Motorola phonograph. The curtains—a heavy green satin trimmed in gold—had begun to sag and Morris promised to rehang them.

Behind the television was a cabinet where Becky kept garish painted china objects. Edna’s favorite was a replica of a seventeenth-century carriage, drawn by two horses led by a man with a pompadour. Stepping out of the vehicle was a woman in a blue-and-white ball gown, her hair fashioned in the same manner as the coachman’s. If Edna pushed a button on the base of the piece, it lit up. It was in this living room—with her grandparents and away from her parents—that she tried to spend most of her time.

Gold wall-to-wall carpet connected the living room and dining room where the extended family always gathered. The white leather chairs were lined up like an expectant audience. There was a huge mahogany buffet with solid brass handles where Becky displayed desserts across from built-in cabinets housing her good Noritake china, stamped Made in Occupied Japan. When held to the light, the base of her wine goblets revealed an etched Star of David.

________

As afternoon approached, Becky arranged those goblets on the table. She did her best to ignore the number of times the doors upstairs slammed. Anxious about tonight’s party, her thoughts darted from one family member to another. Would her prying sisters, eager to glean any information they could about the Katofskys’ finances, begin to suspect how successful she and Morris truly were? Would Harold make a scene? Her son-in-law still owed them this month’s rent, complaining bitterly that Becky had raised the payment by ten dollars. And Morris had been babbling for the past few days about some man named Larsh. Who was this Larsh—this Pole who had befriended her husband? Would Morris mention this mysterious new friend and business advisor to her brothers Izzie and Arthur?

Eager to rid her mind of these concerns, she rummaged through the kitchen cabinets, searching the contents of several pill bottles for the familiar gray-and-red capsules. In her haste, two receptacles fell, one spilling as it landed in the sink. Not able to remember what the medication was, she pushed the soggy mess down the drain. She found the bottle she had been searching for, swallowed three capsules, and went back to cooking.

The screen door creaked open and a familiar voice called, I’m here, Mrs. K. Don’t go touching those dirty pots and pans—Lurlene will gets them for you. Standing in the kitchen entranceway, her wide, six-foot frame towering over Becky, Lurlene inhaled the familiar kitchen aromas and with Mrs. K. smiling her approval, began to help with the preparations.

The thumping on the second floor continued, distracting Lurlene. She wondered if the upstairs occupants would join the party tonight. They sound upset already, and the day not even begun. She fastened an apron around her waist. The child is bound to come down for sure. As for Edna’s parents, she was not as certain.

Chapter 2

Morris Katofsky was tired. He stared at his two heavy steel sanding machines and decided he would have to ask George and Willie to help him load the equipment into the trunk of his car. The two men had grown accustomed to seeing old man Katofsky (the only proper name they used in referring to Morris) lift the massive machinery by himself at the end of each workday. It had been years since they had offered the Russki or cranky old Jew any help with the equipment.

Both men detected unusual irritability in Katofsky this Friday and obediently grabbed the sander as soon as Morris asked. As the three of them struggled with the second piece of floor-scraping equipment, Willie lost his grip, and the machine slid toward the pavement, denting the trunk of Morris’s red-and-white DeSoto. Willie nervously eyed Morris to see if the boss was angry. He was indeed annoyed but, succumbing to his exhaustion, only muttered something indecipherable in Yiddish. Willie regained his grip on the second sander as he and Katofsky pushed it into the DeSoto, slamming the trunk closed.

Willie and George had remained silent today when Morris decided to sit on the opposite side of the hotel ballroom as they ate lunch. The routine the three men followed always found them side by side during their break, with George doing most of the talking. Occasionally, and today was one of those days, George would insist on plugging in his black, sorely battered, Motorola clock radio and blasting pop music during the entire lunch hour. The throbbing cacophony