Saul Bennett
What Came After The Last
Cheyenne Warrior Departed Harlem
In Harlem, paid a quarter, my mother baby-sat summers in the heat
of the Coolidge years for the Zipes girls, Elaine and Flossie,
whose mother Rose's knuckle nose, coal-brewed eyes and clumpy black
braids reminded her children of the Cheyenne brave on the 1924 nickel.
Only a dime or so older than her charges, mother was branded "Schnookie"
by Rose, whose ambitious husband snubbed the Harlem-to-the-Bronx interregnum,
instead sailed them across the East River to the New World ~ Astoria, in Queens,
where my father took me years later, at 6. in FDR's third, to Flossie's wedding
reception at Rose's home. Scores swayed across a 2-family-attached ocean
of rooms, dropping down warmed salty cashew nuts with apricot and
blackberry schnapps, before wetting themselves good in creamy herring pools
with onions. In the kitchen later my father, alone with me. rarely in his life
addressing drink but adoring sweets always, I watched remove chunk
after chunk of break-up dark chocolate with raisins and nuts from a
brown paper sack larger, even, than my scarlet-fevered infant sister
Schnookie sat over at home. Why I conjure now, who knows, Schnookie
succoring a sick child in that nice morning light 2-bedroom over
a third cup of Holland House drip, all ears to swallow the joyful shouts
a mile away "Guh'bye! Guh'bye!" poured by guests on the departing
bride,
at 24 the span of Schnookie's grandddaughter, my first child, at death?