Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
Solemn faced, they line up to shake Freddie’s hand. They’re sorry, they say. May her memory be for a blessing. Women hug him, leaving behind on his cheek powders with gray metallic scents. He is ten. Sitting in the chapel next to his father in front of the pine casket containing his mother, he is unsure how to behave. Should he thank them? Nod? Should he be crying? He’s done a lot of that over the last few days. He decides now simply to sit, hold tight to the black yo-yo his mother had given him and think about what his life will be without her.
She had given him his first yo-yo on his fourth birthday. His father thought he was too young, but she reminded him how graceful Freddie ran and how well he could throw a baseball. She showed Freddie how to use the yo-yo in the small yard behind their apartment house, holding her hand over his. “Let it roll off your finger,” she said. “Watch how it comes back up.” Her soft voice reassured him. “That’s it. Do it again.” Freddie liked the precision.
Each year she gave him a new yo-yo. When he was eight, she gave him his first grown up Duncan. “You’re ready for this now,” she said. She could no longer climb the stairs, so she’d stand at the railing of the back porch and watch Freddie practice in the yard. The secret to successful yo-yo play, she told him, was long sleep times. And Freddie had honed his technique of keeping the yo-yo spinning hard at the end of the looped string. He’d flip his right wrist and snap his arm down. The yo-yo zipped to the end of the string and stayed there, spinning so fast it appeared not to be spinning at all. When he sensed it had slowed just enough, a sense that came quickly to him, he’d flick his wrist slightly and the yo-yo would catch and climb the looped string, winding back into his hand. Freddie loved that feeling of control. He knew his yo-yo as a cowboy knows his horse. “Bravo,” his mother would shout.
One hot August afternoon, Freddie was sitting on the guardrail of the bridge over the drainage canal, staring unfocused at the large elms shading the park near their apartment. The aging Chicago summer let out a rheumatic wheeze, barely waggling the leaves. A lone dragonfly hovered above his head, then darted away like an annoyed Tinkerbell. He was thinking about his mother, of how she had nurtured his interest in yo-yos, how she laughed with delight when he learned a new trick, how she reveled in everything he did. And he wondered who would do that for him after she no longer could.
“Freddie?” He hadn’t heard his mother approach. She was already finding it difficult to walk with the pain of multiple sclerosis. Her vision had become blurry. “What’re you doing?”
“Thinking about the yo-yo man, I guess,” he said. The yo-yo man, a demonstrator from the Duncan Yo-Yo Company, would soon be standing outside Carl’s Candy & Toys to show off the new models, demonstrate tricks and, most important, hold the contest that Freddie thought he was ready to win.
“My little dreamer,” she said. “Daddy’s waiting for us, hon. We’re going to have an early dinner. He’s got to be back at work by seven for a meeting.”
“Sure, Mom.” He slid off the railing and walked with here to their apartment.
After dinner, his father gone to his meeting and his mother cleaning up as best she could, Freddie sat cross legged in front of the radio, listening to a detective story while polishing the two halves of his Duncan yo-yo. With his pocketknife, he shaved a small amount off the circumference of the wooden axle, then sanded and waxed it before re-gluing it to the sides. He got out a new looped cotton slip-string and rubbed a candle on the bottom quarter inch. He practiced his tricks until it was time for bed.
“Mr. Carl, when’s the yo-yo man due?”
“Tuesday a week, Freddie. Ten o’clock. Same as I told you yesterday.”
Freddie turned nine. “Just making sure, Mr. Carl.”
He had mastered the basic tricks like Over The Falls, Around the World and Rock the Baby. And he was good at the more difficult two-handed string mounts like Milking the Cow, Punching the Bag, and Shooting the Moon, the kind you had to know if you expected to win a contest. He had taught himself the very difficult Hopalong Cassidy and, with practice, could do it on a consistent basis.
He didn’t win the contest that year, but he was good enough to earn a badge. His mother sewed it on his favorite sweater. It took her a long time and she did it with difficulty. She could no longer walk and now her hands were not following instructions. She was almost blind. The disease was developing rapidly. Freddy spent as much time with her as possible. He’d hold the glass for her so that she could sip water through a straw. He and his father took turns feeding her. She explained to Freddie as much as she knew about the disease and was honest with him about the outcome.
“I barely survived having you,” she told him once during her struggle. She said it with tenderness, holding onto him with her eyes when she could no longer use her arms. Freddie knew he was her legacy. She made that much clear. “Make me proud of you,” she told him and he promised her he would. Freddy knew she didn’t want him to be afraid.
But he was very afraid, both for his mother and for himself. The thought of his mother in pain made his stomach hurt. “I don’t understand,” he cried to his father.
“I don’t understand it either, Freddie. No one does.” His father was a big man, stern and imposing. There were few tender moments between them, but now he held Freddie to him, surrounding his son with his big arms, rocking back and forth. “No one does,” he repeated.
School was out for the summer. It was a time when Freddie would normally be outside with his friends, playing line ball on the street, at the park pool, on his bike. But now he was at home with his mother. His dad would dress her and put her in the wheelchair in the morning before he left for work. Neighbors would stop by during the day to help with feeding and the laundry. “Freddie, go, get some sun. I’ll stay with your mother until you get back,” said Mrs. Roth. “Go.” But he couldn’t go. He was tethered to his mother like the cotton slip string tethered to his yo-yo. She was the source of his energy.
The night before she died, the rabbi visited. He sat by her bed, held her hand and said a prayer in Hebrew. He translated it for Freddie and his father: “May the One who was a source of blessing for our ancestors, bring blessings of healing upon Laura Levy, a healing of body and a healing of spirit. May those in whose care she is entrusted be gifted with wisdom and skill, and those who surround her be gifted with love and trust, openness and support in her care. And may she be healed along with all those who are in need. Blessed are You, Source of healing.”
“Amen,” Freddie thought, but he knew there would be no healing. The color had drained from his mother. She was no longer able to talk. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was shallow, more seen than heard. Freddie’s father held ice chips to her mouth, but she was no longer able to suck on them. As the rabbi was leaving, the doctor arrived to confirm what everyone knew.
At the funeral chapel, the rabbi leads the mourners now in reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm. He tells the assemblage what a fine wife and mother the deceased had been, dedicated to her family, a pillar of the community. At the conclusion of the funeral, he announces that the internment will be at the Beth Am Cemetery on Montrose Boulevard and that the Levy family will sit shiva at their apartment on Troy Street. His voice is deep and solemn and Freddie is comforted by it.
The black hearse and its trailing train of cars move slowly through the northwest side of Chicago from Weinstein’s Funeral Chapel like a long articulated caterpillar, inching through intersection after intersection. People on the street stop in respect, hats doffed, hands on heart. In 1948, that’s what you do, whether the deceased was a prominent politician or a simple, ordinary person like Laura Levy.
~~~~~
Freddie doesn’t feel up to practicing with his yo-yo, yet alone competing. His father copes with his wife’s illness and death by working. “Leo’s taking it well,” people say. “He’s getting on with his life.”
“Getting on with his life.” Freddie repeats the phrase to himself. It sounds like a good thing, like finishing ones vegetables. He wonders what it will mean for him. Most nights he takes out a photograph of his mother and talks to her. He tells her not to worry, that he’s playing with his friends again. It isn’t true, but he thinks it will make her feel better. He tells her he is doing okay in school and that he is practicing very hard to win the next yo-yo contest. “You’d be proud of me,” he whispers. In the sixth month after his mother’s death, Freddie begins again the serious job of mastering increasingly difficult yo-yo tricks.
He is at Carl’s by nine-thirty the next morning and watches the new yo-yo man set up. He is a small man, thin with short black hair and a dark complexion. He wears black slacks and a white shirt under a white cardigan sweater festooned with Duncan badges. He notices Freddie and winks.
“How ya doin’, champ?”
“Fine,” says Freddie, “can I help with anything?”
“Thanks kid, I think I’ve got it.” He notices the badge on Freddie’s shirt. “Third place in ‘46. Great. Pretty young for a third place finish.”
“I was eight,” says Freddie, looking down. The yo-yo man says he’s impressed, that he wishes he had been there to see it. He asks about last year. Freddie tells him that his mother had died and he didn’t compete.
“Sorry about that, kid. So you looking to grab it all this year?”
“I’m going to try,” Freddie says.
“Well, if you do win it and get to go downtown for the city-wide, you’ll meet the Governor. He’ll be presenting all the awards.”
The yo-yo man completes his set up in front of Carl’s and begins demonstrating tricks, while the crowd of young boys and a few girls form around him. He moves like a boxer, floating, crouching, stretching, gliding. The sparkle in his dark eyes, the set of his jaw, the smile, all testify to his assurance. His yo-yo rocks and darts through the temporary latticework of the tethered slip-string. A lightning flick of the wrist and–whoosh–it is safely back in his hand.
Freddie smiles, wondering what he would say to the governor if he won, wondering what his mother would want him to say. He snaps his wrist. The black yo-yo, the one his mother had given him, rockets to the end of the slip-string, hovering barely half an inch off the ground. There it sits, whirling faster than the eye can see. Whirling as if it will never stop.
Robert Sachs' work has appeared most recently in The Louisville Review, the Chicago Quarterly Review, and the Delmarva Review. He earned an M.F.A. in Writing from Spalding University in 2009. His story, “Vondelpark,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2017. Originally from Chicago, he currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky. He serves on the board of Louisville Literary Arts. Read more at www.roberthsachs.com.