Halloween in Brooklyn
We lived in Coney Island, the very southern tip of Brooklyn, an hour and twenty minutes away from Manhattan by the subway and five blocks north of the ocean and the beach. Hundreds of thousands of people would come on a summer weekend, but they rarely ventured into our neighborhood of mom-and-pop supermarkets, kosher delis and Chinese restaurants.
I had grown up in apartment buildings, one of two boys with my parents on the seventh floor of a 23-story building, each with three sections of eight apartments each, and one of five buildings.
Across the street was a complex of eight more buildings, equally dense and ugly. And two blocks away were five more buildings even uglier. If there was safety for a kid in all those numbers, there was also a depressing anonymity.
It was now a neighborhood of second-generation Eastern European Jews and their immigrant parents, built on the ruins of amusement parks like Steeplechase and Luna Park. Presidents and luminaries had walked the streets where now kids walked to mass-production schools and old ladies pulled their shopping carts.
The mailboxes on the lobby wall of our building had the tenants’ names all lined up by apartment number, embossed on black plastic strips, and I would run my finger over them like they were braille, learning all their names – Abrams, Markowitz, Tannenbaum, B. Schwartz, N. Schwartz, Bernstein, Bernbaum – and trying to think about where they came from and how they came to be in Coney Island, a place they probably heard about but never thought they would wind up in.
But we rarely interacted, except for one night a year: Halloween. For most of these immigrants, Halloween was not a day to look forward to. In fact, it was probably one of the most likely days for the local Cossacks to ride into their small shtetl towns and burn down the synagogue. So they had to be told that no, here in America, all the kids wanted was some cheap candy.
I was 12 that year, and my friends and I dressed up in our costumes and went trick-or-treating up and down the elevators. Stevie was the tallest. He had thick black hair, and every middle-school girl thought he was it, and had a vague notion at the time of what it was.
Bobby was shorter, frenetic and scraggly-haired, and knew every guitar player in every band. He dressed in a skinny black suit and a mop top wig, and went as Paul McCartney.
But I had chosen the costume that fit my mood and temperament at the time. I was Bullwinkle, the cartoon moose. The costume came with a stiff plastic mask, so, unlike my friends, my face was fully covered except for two small eye holes and a slit for my mouth. And the mask’s generous antlers meant there was no way to wear my brand-new eyeglasses.
The buildings were so big, and the old people seemed so scary, and we decided to divide and conquer.
Every neighborhood has a witch, an old person every kid avoids, out of fear of something we couldn’t exactly grasp at 12. They were so foreign to my Yankees-loving, Keds-wearing self – their thick Yiddish accents, their mouths and ears seemingly oversized for their faces, the women smelling like talcum, the men of spittle and phlegm.
But the scariest of them all was Mrs. Pincus, apartment 12B.
Why we thought she was the scariest I don’t know, but it was well-established in local kid lore that she ate kids for dinner, boiled their bones and ground them for meatloaf. We didn’t know anyone she actually had preyed on, but we were all sure that Richie hadn’t actually moved to Baltimore with his family the year before, and that Mrs. Pincus was somehow involved.
Stevie, Bobby, and I played a few rounds of rock-paper-scissors to see who would take which floors of the building. I was hoping for the top third, even though it was one floor fewer, 17 to 23. That’s where the most expensive apartments were, where the factory floor managers lived, leaving the rest of the building for bus drivers, garment schleppers and bakery assistants.
Billy won the first round, and chose the top floors. It was down to Stevie and me, and somehow I came out victorious and chose the middle third. Floors 9 to 16. Oh no, I immediately thought. That includes 12B. The dreaded Mrs. Pincus.
I tried to argue with them, trade even. No use.
It had been a nice life, after all, these past 12 years and four months. I had had some good times, I reasoned, was a good boy and was just beginning to figure out what girls were for. Girls! What a shame I would never know what I would miss.
Stevie and Bobby ran into the building to get a head start, even though it was still light outside. Seven p.m., and the setting sun glinted off the ocean a few blocks away, the last light I would ever see. Ah, sweet but too-short life! All ended by the ogress in 12B. But we had a pact; ring every bell and count to 10. I owed it to them, just as they did to me. They’d do the same, right?
Right?
I steeled myself, adjusted my antlers, and took the elevator to 16, so I could walk down the stairs as I went. I should have been more afraid of the stairs. Dark, foreboding and barely lit concrete slabs with a metal handrail. One unsure step and not only would you crack your head open, but they were so seldom used you wouldn’t be found for days.
The first four floors went well, and the haul was more than adequate. A few full-sized Butterfinger bars – I’d squirrel those away for myself before divvying up the goods, there being little honor among 12-year old thieves.
A few good-hearted but cheap souls gave us certificates for 50-cent contributions they had made for us to UNICEF. I selfishly thought I needed a bite-size Krackle bar or two more than some African kid needed soggy wheat-meal, which is what I imagined poor African kids ate.
I finally got to the twelfth floor, my sack full of Clark bars, mini Almond Joys and Mounds, my mother’s favorite. I’d save those for her, I thought, if I ever saw her again. I approached 12B. We had a pact – ring the bell, count to 10. I pushed the button and counted as quickly as I could.
When I got to eight, the door opened a crack, held back by a chain lock, but I saw no light from the apartment, just a flash of white hair and an eye with a droopy lid. “Yes?” she said quietly.
“Uh…uh…” I totally forgot what I was there for.
“You’re not here to play a trick on me, are you, young man?” Her accent was the familiar Eastern European Yiddish sing-song I had heard my grandparents use. “Would you like to come in?”
It’s a trap! my 12-year old brain thought. The chain rattled like in those old Frankenstein movies I used to watch late on Saturday night. The door opened and I took a tentative step inside. She was tall, ramrod straight in fact, in a neat long-sleeved burgundy blouse and long black skirt. Her white hair was thin but plentiful, cascading down her shoulders.
I immediately thought she had been a teacher. She gave off teacher vibes.
“Would you like some ice cream, young man?” she said, motioning me to her kitchen table, a dark wooden antique, like much of her other furniture. “You can take off your mask. Are you supposed to be a moose? Moose aren’t very scary.”
“Uh, uh…” Why couldn’t I talk?
“You aren’t a mute boy like Harpo Marx, or the child who cannot ask from Pesach, are you?” she said, taking my hand. “Maybe you’re Elijah, just with poor timing. I have some chocolate ice cream left over from my birthday. It was my birthday last week, you know. A gentleman won’t ask which, but since you don’t seem to be able to speak, I’m not concerned.”
I regained my composure. “Trick or treat?” I said.
“Well,” she said, “we certainly can’t have any tricks here, can we?”
I sat down in one of her elegant wooden upholstered chairs. My grandparents had chairs like this, but they were covered in plastic and no one was allowed to sit in them. Everyone in our neighborhood had chairs no one was allowed to sit in.
She took a pint of store-brand chocolate ice cream out of the freezer, and reached to the top shelf of her cabinets for a bowl. As she reached high, her blouse’s sleeve fell back, and I saw a blue mark that looked like writing on her right arm. As she strained for the bowl, I saw it more clearly. They were numbers, faded and stretched from her youth.
She saw me staring at them, looked at me and then at her arm, and pulled her sleeve up abruptly.
“Now where did I put that scoop?” she said, fumbling awkwardly in a drawer. She gave me two scoops of ice cream in a cracked bowl, etched with winged angels and the words “BREMEN” in capital letters around the edge.
I dug into the ice cream, not realizing anything. My grandparents never talked about where they came from before Brooklyn, and like the Passover child, I didn’t know enough to ask.
“Do you like the ice cream, young man?” she said, watching me, smiling but with folded arms. “It’s been so long since I sat with a boy of your age. You’ll have a bar mitzvah soon, won’t you? Are you studying for it now? Can you recite some of it for me?”
I had been studying with a tape from a local rent-a-rabbi for about four months, and I had come close to mastering the short blessings before the Torah and Haftarah readings. The readings themselves were and would remain totally beyond me. “Baruch ata Adonai, melech ha-olam,” I mumbled, and stopped, searching for the next part.
“Asher bachar banu mikol ha-amim,” she sang in the correct melody with a strong clear voice that belied her years. “I taught in a cheder in, well, many years ago. I would help them practice. Even then. Even there. I haven’t sung that in at least 30 years. Thank you, young man.”
She sniffled a bit, and took a tissue to her eyes.
“But no matter,” she said, her voice suddenly different. “What’s past is past, and a young man like you shouldn’t be burdened with the memories of an old witch like me. I know what the children call me. Please tell your friends I’m not…”
And she stopped.
“You know, maybe you shouldn’t tell your friends. Let them think I’m an old witch, but you’ll be my special friend. It will be our secret.” She raised her right sleeve and showed me her number tattoo, plainly in front of my face. “Like this. Some people are ashamed of theirs. To me, it is a badge of honor.”
She rolled her sleeve down.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Sometimes I talk too much. I’m sure you have other old ladies on your candy route. I’m sorry I don’t have any to give you. You don’t hate me for that, do you?”
I looked at her, knowing something was going on that I was too young to completely comprehend, that I was just a kid and didn’t have to deal with adult things like loss and regrets, like the horrible obstacles fate can give to you, forcing you to overcome them or die. Not yet at least.
I left her apartment, decided to break my pact with Stevie and Bobby, and went back home to my parents. Not that I would or could share any of this with them. They wouldn’t get it; they’d just look at me funny and go back to doing whatever parent things they were doing.The hell with Halloween, I thought. I had a lot to think about, and I had to think about them alone.
Need more great Halloween reads? Check out stories from the past at the MockingOwl Roost.
- Witchling – Poetry
- Graveyard in the Attic – Fiction
- Mrs. Morris and the Vampire, a Halloween Novel Review
- Of Bats and Ravens at the Black Orb – Fiction
- Attention! Important Public Safety Announcement – Flash Fiction
- The Banquet – Flash Fiction
- The Witch’s Familiar – Flash Fiction
- One Small Bite – Poetry
- The Decent, a Halloween Novel Review
Jerry Slaff
Jerry Slaff is a nationally produced playwright dipping his toe back into prose. His play LIES won the grand prize award from Writer's Digest in 2019, has been produced and read across the country and will have its next production in Santa Barbara, Cal., next fall.