The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats by Hesh Kestin

paper now?” Shushan said. “On
Huckleberry Finn
?”
    “Sure.”
    “Could you write it on the seventeen fucking accents and dialects in it, or the place of theater, or Nigger Jim’s options, or the resolution of sequence, like when...” Shushan stopped. “What’d I do? Russy, shut your mouth a fly will come in.”
    Finally I had to speak. “What is it with you, Shushan? Are you a gangster or what? Every time I look up there’s another literary reference fired off, another allusion. Professor del Vecch—
Del
, an hour ago this guy was quoting La Rochefoucauld to a couple of gumshoes—”
    “The elder or the son?”
    “Père,” Shushan said. “To my mind, the son was nothing.”
    “I concur,” Del said.
    “Père? Would you two just cut it out!” I was livid. “What kind of bullshit gangster quotes a French aphorist of the seventeenth century—in French? The only good part of this is you both have it wrong. The one you call the son was born in the mid-
eighteenth
century, about seventy years after the original one died.”
    “They were both
duc
though,” Shushan said. “Like Snyder.”
    “Probably grandson,” Del added. “I always assumed...”
    “You assumed fucking wrong,” I said. “How can you be the head of an honors program if you don’t know La Rochefoucauld? And how can
you
be a fucking gangster if you do?”
    Maybe I would have gone off further on them—it was as if everything I’d known was upside down—but the door-buzzer sounded and we all turned to watch in a moment of blessed silence as Ira looked through the peephole and unlocked the door. Like a mastiff with a razor-line mustache, he seemed only to come alive when there was a question of defending his owner. Great, I thought, now we’re going to have four members of the Harlem head-bangers who will give us a fucking
a capella
rendition of Handel’s
The Trout
while simultaneously proving Fermat’s Last Theorem on the opened white handkerchiefs from their breast pockets. Wasn’t anything what it seemed, or what it should be?
    But Royce Wilmington and the brothers—the three actually were brothers: Ed, Fred and Ted Lincoln or Jefferson, one of those—were not there to prove a point, except that they had been well briefed on what to bring on a
shiva
visit. Carrying in enough food for an army, they looked like the native bearers in the black-and-white Tarzan films I had seen Saturday mornings at the Loew’s Premier on Sutter Avenue, except a lot better dressed. “S’all kosher,” Royce said. “Y’all know the Second Avenue Delicatessen? Got a certificate right up there on the wall as you come in. Got everything there but the fruit—y’all don’t have kosher and not kosher fruit, do you?”
    These were big men, and so expensively got up they seemed to present a tableau, a kind of staged negritude that declared in no uncertain terms
We is here
. That was unfair, of course, because transliterating their Southern dialect consistently would call for doing the same for Shushan’s, for Del’s, for mine. All of us had grown up with a license to torture the mother tongue, each in his own way. Besides, these four had been speaking their particular form of English, if we include their forebears, for hundreds of years. The four white men in the room—though Ira-Myra’s rarely spoke and at that only in a rumbling whisper—were all first- or second-generation Americans. If anyone had an American pedigree, it was Royce and the brothers, whose silken patois was on the record in
Huckleberry Finn
itself, and on every blues recording for fifty years.
    “Y’all sit on a box, is that it?” Royce said.
    “Some Jews sit on the floor,” I said.
    Royce looked hard at me, as if to ask,
Who you, boy
? He fingered the knot of his white tie, which pushed out on a collar pin from his pink shirt like a signal flag. His suit, cut long and lean, was charcoal with a soft pink stripe. The others were dressed with similar pizzazz: everything of