The Catchfly
by Robert Sachs
Published in the Delmarva Review, Vol. 10 (2017)
And God spoke to Cogan as if in a dream. “Herman, go forth and multiply.” This kind of dream, if that was what it was, this kind of encounter with God, was not unusual for Cogan during the period surrounding the high holy days. He was a spiritual person, caught up in the tumult of preparation that swirled through his northwest Chicago neighborhood. Apartments were scrubbed, tablecloths ironed, suits pressed, shopping, cooking, more shopping, searching for kosher brisket at the best price. Everyone apologizing to everyone for transgressions, slights, impure thoughts. Who could blame him for having sacred dreams? Two years ago, on the morning before Rosh Hashanah, he awoke convinced he had seen Abraham standing over Isaac with a knife and smiling. Cogan shuddered when he saw his own face looking up at Abraham. This latest dream was more positive.
“You mean I should find a wife and have children?” Cogan asked.
“What part of ‘multiply’ do you not understand?” the Holy One intoned, seemingly impatient. Cogan knew He could be a wrathful God.
“It’s not as if I haven’t been looking,” Cogan replied. He was thinking of Fern Wexler. They had met recently at a community center square dance. She was a niece of his friend Stern, the druggist. “Your uncle is a great man. His advice to me over the years has proven invaluable,” Cogan said as he executed the allemande left with Fern as his corner.
Fern smiled. “He gives me advice even when I don’t ask for it,” she said.
They went out to dinner one evening and after, when Cogan leaned in to kiss her goodnight, Fern backed away. “I don’t think so,” she said, looking at him as if he were a vampire, and holding up an index finger as if it were a protective crucifix.
“Try Sandra Greenspan,” the Lord commanded.
A cloud lifted and Cogan, no longer as if in a dream, found himself sitting at his desk in his insurance office on Kedzie Avenue. “Sandra Greenspan,” he said to himself. The name did not ring a bell.
It was 1956. The north side of Chicago was in a collective depression because the Cubs ended the season deep in the cellar, thirty-three games out of first. Like most in Albany Park, Cogan was a Cubs fan. It was a time to look elsewhere for succor.
The call from Cogan’s mother the next morning awakened him. “Mom, it’s what, four in the morning by you? Why are you calling so early? Is everything okay?” Cogan’s mother ignored the questions. Aunt Tybie’s daughter was coming to Chicago for a couple of weeks. “She knows no one. I want you should take her to services on the high holy days.” The granddaughter’s name was Tanya Greenberg. “You remember her, don’t you?”
Cogan did and he didn’t. The last time he saw her—this according to his mother—was when he and Tanya were three. He knew the name, but there was no actual memory of her. She would call him when she got in, his mother said.
Cogan, unsure if this was a bad dream or some horrid reality, knew what his mother was up to. For years she had trolled the Jewish world to find a suitable mate for her only son. He repeatedly begged her to stop. But instead of ending, the assaults mutated into his mother’s idea of subtle. Look who’s here, Herman. It’s Malke and her daughter Ruth. What a coincidence! He wouldn’t put it past her to have arranged—and paid for—Tanya’s trip to Chicago. She and Aunt Tybie, who was not really his aunt at all, but a girlhood friend of his mother, were masters of the art of matchmaking. He entertained the idea that his mother had been talking to God, giving Him instructions. Tanya Greenberg. Sandra Greenspan. The similarity in names sent a shiver through Cogan.
He dressed and went next door to Stern Drugs and waited while the Alka-Seltzer tablets dissolved in a glass of cold water. He let out a low sigh, which brought Stern to him. “Bad day?” the druggist asked.
“My mother called.”
“Ah,” said Stern, as if that alone explained his friend’s blue funk.
“A young woman named Tanya is coming to town and mom wants me to accompany her to services. Tanya Greenberg.”
Stern said, “She’s at it again, huh? Well, you never know.”
But Cogan was good with odds—he was, after all, in the insurance business—and he knew that a romance between him and the as-yet-unmet-as-an-adult Tanya Greenberg was not in the cards.
“She’s probably more embarrassed by this than I.”
They arranged to meet for lunch the day before Rosh Hashanah at the Gold Coin. It was a modest restaurant just down the block from Cogan’s office. He had been going there since high school and knew all the waiters and waitresses. It was a place where he felt he had the home court advantage. He was there sipping coffee half an hour before the agreed upon time. He saw the cab as it pulled up. A tall, slender woman stepped out. As she turned toward the restaurant, Cogan noticed her deep-set green eyes, her soft red lips and her long black hair. Aphrodite! She walked—no, glided—in and Cogan fancied he heard violins, a harpsichord, perhaps. There was a celestial quality about her that caused everyone in the restaurant to stop their eating and arguing and taunting, and turn their attention toward Tanya Greenberg.
Cogan started to rise from the booth he had chosen, but Tanya was suddenly in front of him. “Don’t get up, Herman,” she said, extending her hand. “I’d know you anywhere. Your mother’s photos.” She sat across from him. “I have regards from both your mother and mine. We’re not related, right? I get confused because I’ve always called your mother Aunt Flora.”
Cogan laid out the story, as he knew it: The two women were the closest of friends through elementary and high school. They married only months apart to two men who were themselves close friends, and had their first children within three years of the weddings: Cogan and Tanya. The two kids played together as infants for a few years, perhaps less, and then Tybie and her family moved to Los Angeles. “Do you remember any of that?” he asked. She didn’t. Neither did he.
“Mom claims she likes L.A. What do you think?” Cogan asked. His mother had left Chicago three years ago, tired finally of the cold winters, and yearning to renew her friendship with Tybie.
“What’s not to like? It’s L.A. The two of them are together almost everyday,” Tanya said. “I think your mother loves it.”
Cogan was going to ask more questions about his mother when Bony Fishbein, a balding motorcycle enthusiast who was no more than an acquaintance of Cogan’s during their thirty-five years of life in Albany Park, approached the booth. “Hi ya doin’, Herm?”
Cogan motioned with his hand in an ambiguous way, as if he hadn’t decided whether to welcome Bony or shoo him away.
“And who have we here?” Bony said, ignoring him.
Cogan went through the introductions. Tanya extended her hand. Bony looked at the smooth, white appendage, with its long, slim fingers and red fingernails as if he wasn’t sure whether to shake it or kiss it. He held it for an awkward few seconds and then said, “Carlton Fishbein, but call me Bony.”
In the lull that followed, Pretzels and Moosie, two more of Cogan’s friends from the neighborhood, joined him at the booth, grinning. It seemed to Cogan that everyone he ever knew wanted to say hello. Such was the attraction of Tanya Greenberg.
“Interesting names,” she said once they had gone.
“Boyhood stuff. We’ll probably still be using the nicknames when we’re ninety. Pretzels is Fred and Moosie is Arnold.”
“And you, Herman. What’s your nickname?”
“Just Cogan,” he said, wondering, perhaps for the first time, why he didn’t have one and whether that made him more or less attractive. They made arrangements to meet at his apartment the following evening and walk the two blocks to the synagogue for the erev Rosh Hashanah service.
“You’re a godsend, Herman,” Tanya said. “I’m here on business and hate walking alone into a shul where no one knows me. Especially on the high holy days.” She hugged him briefly and kissed him square on the lips before leaving the restaurant and hailing a cab. Her dewy scent reminded Cogan of the sweet-smelling catchfly.
It was four years ago. His only trip outside the United States. A week in England, part of a sales award from the insurance company he represented. It was there he met Laura Cunningham, an agent from Madison, Wisconsin. One evening they walked the Dungeness National Nature Reserve on the coast of Kent. Laura picked a flower and held it under Cogan’s nose. “It’s called a catchfly,” she said. “Blooms at night. Smells like heaven. In Victorian times flowers had secret meanings and the red catchfly, like this one, meant youthful love.” They kissed and held each other and made promises that night that did not survive the flight back.
Cogan could dream of a life with Tanya, but he knew they would never be a couple. He was of the neighborhood. Albany Park. An insurance man. She was of some broader vista. Beautiful, brilliant, self-assured. She took taxicabs. Cabs in Cogan’s world were reserved for dire emergencies, an appendicitis, a birth, not simply to get from downtown to the Golden Coin. That’s what the elevated train was for. No, it will never happen, he told himself. And, despite the kiss at the restaurant, he accepted the law of probability.
When they entered the synagogue all heads turned to stare. It was almost as if Cogan were a holy man carrying a sacred Torah scroll. Word of the kiss had swept through the neighborhood like ragweed in spring. “You must be used to this,” he whispered to Tanya. She smiled and took his hand. They sat. Both the cantor and the rabbi were looking as she crossed her long legs. At the conclusion of the service there was a rush of people wanting to say hello to Cogan and his new friend. Where are you from? How long are you here? I think I remember your mother. Can you join us for break the fast?
Cogan was both elated and miserable. He loved being noticed as the man with Tanya, but he knew she would leave after Yom Kippur and that would be that. This sadness outweighed the joy. It reminded him of his bar mitzvah. His father, of blessed memory, missed the service. He was busy getting sloshed in a bar not ten minutes away.
During the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur it seemed to Cogan that he and Tanya were the major topic of conversations in the neighborhood. Stern confirmed this from behind his busy counter. Tanya was staying downtown at the Palmer House and working out of an office in the Loop. Cogan didn’t see her again until erev Yom Kippur.
As before, they agreed to meet at his apartment and walk over to the synagogue for the Kol Nidre service. His neighbor, Mrs. Michaels, invited them for dinner, after which the twenty-five hour fast began. It made no sense for Tanya to go all the way downtown after services only to come back the next morning, so Cogan arranged for her to stay the night with Mrs. Michaels.
Tanya knocked on Cogan’s door in the morning. “Mrs. Michaels is under the weather,” she said. “If she feels better later, she’ll meet us at shul.” Only a handful of people saw the two of them emerge from the yellow brick, six-flat apartment building that morning, but that was enough. By the time they reached the synagogue, the word around the neighborhood was that Tanya had spent the night with Cogan. A debate raged as to whether Cogan, a regular at the synagogue and a pious man, would have had sex with Tanya Greenberg—or any woman—during Yom Kippur.
“Strictly forbidden,” Bony said. “He’d never do it.”
Moosie smiled. “The lucky bastard.”
Both Cogan and Tanya were unaware of the rumors churning through the shul. As before, she took his hand walking down the center aisle of the sanctuary to their seats. Cogan could feel the coolness of some of the women and the heightened interest of some of the men.
Mrs. Michaels joined them just before the beginning of the afternoon service. Cogan moved over so that she could sit between them. She was feeling better, she said. Later in the service she was approached in the women’s bathroom. “Isn’t it terrible,” the woman said. “Mr. Cogan of all people. And that woman!”
Mrs. Michaels made it clear that Tanya had stayed the night with her and not with Cogan. Word filtered swiftly into the sanctuary, like mustard gas. Some congregants were relieved. Others were disappointed. None were ashamed of their thoughts, of the conclusions jumped to.
“We have sinned against You through sexual immorality.” This was the part of the Yom Kippur service where the congregants beat their breasts in communal confession. There was a long list. “We have sinned against You by idle chatter.”
Tanya reminded Cogan she must leave before the evening service of Ne’ilah. A plane to catch. He walked with her to the back of the sanctuary. She hugged him and kissed him goodbye. “You’ve been great. Thanks for taking care of me. Your mom will be pleased.”
So that was that, thought Cogan. A brief interlude. He wasn’t likely to see Tanya again, but to his surprise, he wasn’t despondent. Better that it happened than that it didn’t happen, he told himself.
“I’ve been getting phone calls from people wanting to fix me up with their daughters, their cousins,” Cogan told Stern a week after Yom Kippur. I’ve gone on dates twice in the last three days. Can you believe it?”
“It’s the way of the world, Cogan,” Stern said. “They figure if you are good enough for someone like Tanya Greenberg, you must certainly be good enough for their daughters. And you know, my friend, they’re not wrong.”
One evening during the festival of Sukkot, Mrs. Michaels rang Cogan’s doorbell. As he opened the door, he imagined he smelled the sweet fragrance of the catchfly. An evanescent memory of romance on the Dungeness shore. Mrs. Michaels was standing next to a young woman with twinkling blue eyes and a soft reddish ponytail. “Mr. Cogan, I’d like you to meet my niece. She’s visiting from New Jersey. Herman Cogan, this is Sandra Greenspan.”
“You mean I should find a wife and have children?” Cogan asked.
“What part of ‘multiply’ do you not understand?” the Holy One intoned, seemingly impatient. Cogan knew He could be a wrathful God.
“It’s not as if I haven’t been looking,” Cogan replied. He was thinking of Fern Wexler. They had met recently at a community center square dance. She was a niece of his friend Stern, the druggist. “Your uncle is a great man. His advice to me over the years has proven invaluable,” Cogan said as he executed the allemande left with Fern as his corner.
Fern smiled. “He gives me advice even when I don’t ask for it,” she said.
They went out to dinner one evening and after, when Cogan leaned in to kiss her goodnight, Fern backed away. “I don’t think so,” she said, looking at him as if he were a vampire, and holding up an index finger as if it were a protective crucifix.
“Try Sandra Greenspan,” the Lord commanded.
A cloud lifted and Cogan, no longer as if in a dream, found himself sitting at his desk in his insurance office on Kedzie Avenue. “Sandra Greenspan,” he said to himself. The name did not ring a bell.
It was 1956. The north side of Chicago was in a collective depression because the Cubs ended the season deep in the cellar, thirty-three games out of first. Like most in Albany Park, Cogan was a Cubs fan. It was a time to look elsewhere for succor.
The call from Cogan’s mother the next morning awakened him. “Mom, it’s what, four in the morning by you? Why are you calling so early? Is everything okay?” Cogan’s mother ignored the questions. Aunt Tybie’s daughter was coming to Chicago for a couple of weeks. “She knows no one. I want you should take her to services on the high holy days.” The granddaughter’s name was Tanya Greenberg. “You remember her, don’t you?”
Cogan did and he didn’t. The last time he saw her—this according to his mother—was when he and Tanya were three. He knew the name, but there was no actual memory of her. She would call him when she got in, his mother said.
Cogan, unsure if this was a bad dream or some horrid reality, knew what his mother was up to. For years she had trolled the Jewish world to find a suitable mate for her only son. He repeatedly begged her to stop. But instead of ending, the assaults mutated into his mother’s idea of subtle. Look who’s here, Herman. It’s Malke and her daughter Ruth. What a coincidence! He wouldn’t put it past her to have arranged—and paid for—Tanya’s trip to Chicago. She and Aunt Tybie, who was not really his aunt at all, but a girlhood friend of his mother, were masters of the art of matchmaking. He entertained the idea that his mother had been talking to God, giving Him instructions. Tanya Greenberg. Sandra Greenspan. The similarity in names sent a shiver through Cogan.
He dressed and went next door to Stern Drugs and waited while the Alka-Seltzer tablets dissolved in a glass of cold water. He let out a low sigh, which brought Stern to him. “Bad day?” the druggist asked.
“My mother called.”
“Ah,” said Stern, as if that alone explained his friend’s blue funk.
“A young woman named Tanya is coming to town and mom wants me to accompany her to services. Tanya Greenberg.”
Stern said, “She’s at it again, huh? Well, you never know.”
But Cogan was good with odds—he was, after all, in the insurance business—and he knew that a romance between him and the as-yet-unmet-as-an-adult Tanya Greenberg was not in the cards.
“She’s probably more embarrassed by this than I.”
They arranged to meet for lunch the day before Rosh Hashanah at the Gold Coin. It was a modest restaurant just down the block from Cogan’s office. He had been going there since high school and knew all the waiters and waitresses. It was a place where he felt he had the home court advantage. He was there sipping coffee half an hour before the agreed upon time. He saw the cab as it pulled up. A tall, slender woman stepped out. As she turned toward the restaurant, Cogan noticed her deep-set green eyes, her soft red lips and her long black hair. Aphrodite! She walked—no, glided—in and Cogan fancied he heard violins, a harpsichord, perhaps. There was a celestial quality about her that caused everyone in the restaurant to stop their eating and arguing and taunting, and turn their attention toward Tanya Greenberg.
Cogan started to rise from the booth he had chosen, but Tanya was suddenly in front of him. “Don’t get up, Herman,” she said, extending her hand. “I’d know you anywhere. Your mother’s photos.” She sat across from him. “I have regards from both your mother and mine. We’re not related, right? I get confused because I’ve always called your mother Aunt Flora.”
Cogan laid out the story, as he knew it: The two women were the closest of friends through elementary and high school. They married only months apart to two men who were themselves close friends, and had their first children within three years of the weddings: Cogan and Tanya. The two kids played together as infants for a few years, perhaps less, and then Tybie and her family moved to Los Angeles. “Do you remember any of that?” he asked. She didn’t. Neither did he.
“Mom claims she likes L.A. What do you think?” Cogan asked. His mother had left Chicago three years ago, tired finally of the cold winters, and yearning to renew her friendship with Tybie.
“What’s not to like? It’s L.A. The two of them are together almost everyday,” Tanya said. “I think your mother loves it.”
Cogan was going to ask more questions about his mother when Bony Fishbein, a balding motorcycle enthusiast who was no more than an acquaintance of Cogan’s during their thirty-five years of life in Albany Park, approached the booth. “Hi ya doin’, Herm?”
Cogan motioned with his hand in an ambiguous way, as if he hadn’t decided whether to welcome Bony or shoo him away.
“And who have we here?” Bony said, ignoring him.
Cogan went through the introductions. Tanya extended her hand. Bony looked at the smooth, white appendage, with its long, slim fingers and red fingernails as if he wasn’t sure whether to shake it or kiss it. He held it for an awkward few seconds and then said, “Carlton Fishbein, but call me Bony.”
In the lull that followed, Pretzels and Moosie, two more of Cogan’s friends from the neighborhood, joined him at the booth, grinning. It seemed to Cogan that everyone he ever knew wanted to say hello. Such was the attraction of Tanya Greenberg.
“Interesting names,” she said once they had gone.
“Boyhood stuff. We’ll probably still be using the nicknames when we’re ninety. Pretzels is Fred and Moosie is Arnold.”
“And you, Herman. What’s your nickname?”
“Just Cogan,” he said, wondering, perhaps for the first time, why he didn’t have one and whether that made him more or less attractive. They made arrangements to meet at his apartment the following evening and walk the two blocks to the synagogue for the erev Rosh Hashanah service.
“You’re a godsend, Herman,” Tanya said. “I’m here on business and hate walking alone into a shul where no one knows me. Especially on the high holy days.” She hugged him briefly and kissed him square on the lips before leaving the restaurant and hailing a cab. Her dewy scent reminded Cogan of the sweet-smelling catchfly.
It was four years ago. His only trip outside the United States. A week in England, part of a sales award from the insurance company he represented. It was there he met Laura Cunningham, an agent from Madison, Wisconsin. One evening they walked the Dungeness National Nature Reserve on the coast of Kent. Laura picked a flower and held it under Cogan’s nose. “It’s called a catchfly,” she said. “Blooms at night. Smells like heaven. In Victorian times flowers had secret meanings and the red catchfly, like this one, meant youthful love.” They kissed and held each other and made promises that night that did not survive the flight back.
Cogan could dream of a life with Tanya, but he knew they would never be a couple. He was of the neighborhood. Albany Park. An insurance man. She was of some broader vista. Beautiful, brilliant, self-assured. She took taxicabs. Cabs in Cogan’s world were reserved for dire emergencies, an appendicitis, a birth, not simply to get from downtown to the Golden Coin. That’s what the elevated train was for. No, it will never happen, he told himself. And, despite the kiss at the restaurant, he accepted the law of probability.
When they entered the synagogue all heads turned to stare. It was almost as if Cogan were a holy man carrying a sacred Torah scroll. Word of the kiss had swept through the neighborhood like ragweed in spring. “You must be used to this,” he whispered to Tanya. She smiled and took his hand. They sat. Both the cantor and the rabbi were looking as she crossed her long legs. At the conclusion of the service there was a rush of people wanting to say hello to Cogan and his new friend. Where are you from? How long are you here? I think I remember your mother. Can you join us for break the fast?
Cogan was both elated and miserable. He loved being noticed as the man with Tanya, but he knew she would leave after Yom Kippur and that would be that. This sadness outweighed the joy. It reminded him of his bar mitzvah. His father, of blessed memory, missed the service. He was busy getting sloshed in a bar not ten minutes away.
During the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur it seemed to Cogan that he and Tanya were the major topic of conversations in the neighborhood. Stern confirmed this from behind his busy counter. Tanya was staying downtown at the Palmer House and working out of an office in the Loop. Cogan didn’t see her again until erev Yom Kippur.
As before, they agreed to meet at his apartment and walk over to the synagogue for the Kol Nidre service. His neighbor, Mrs. Michaels, invited them for dinner, after which the twenty-five hour fast began. It made no sense for Tanya to go all the way downtown after services only to come back the next morning, so Cogan arranged for her to stay the night with Mrs. Michaels.
Tanya knocked on Cogan’s door in the morning. “Mrs. Michaels is under the weather,” she said. “If she feels better later, she’ll meet us at shul.” Only a handful of people saw the two of them emerge from the yellow brick, six-flat apartment building that morning, but that was enough. By the time they reached the synagogue, the word around the neighborhood was that Tanya had spent the night with Cogan. A debate raged as to whether Cogan, a regular at the synagogue and a pious man, would have had sex with Tanya Greenberg—or any woman—during Yom Kippur.
“Strictly forbidden,” Bony said. “He’d never do it.”
Moosie smiled. “The lucky bastard.”
Both Cogan and Tanya were unaware of the rumors churning through the shul. As before, she took his hand walking down the center aisle of the sanctuary to their seats. Cogan could feel the coolness of some of the women and the heightened interest of some of the men.
Mrs. Michaels joined them just before the beginning of the afternoon service. Cogan moved over so that she could sit between them. She was feeling better, she said. Later in the service she was approached in the women’s bathroom. “Isn’t it terrible,” the woman said. “Mr. Cogan of all people. And that woman!”
Mrs. Michaels made it clear that Tanya had stayed the night with her and not with Cogan. Word filtered swiftly into the sanctuary, like mustard gas. Some congregants were relieved. Others were disappointed. None were ashamed of their thoughts, of the conclusions jumped to.
“We have sinned against You through sexual immorality.” This was the part of the Yom Kippur service where the congregants beat their breasts in communal confession. There was a long list. “We have sinned against You by idle chatter.”
Tanya reminded Cogan she must leave before the evening service of Ne’ilah. A plane to catch. He walked with her to the back of the sanctuary. She hugged him and kissed him goodbye. “You’ve been great. Thanks for taking care of me. Your mom will be pleased.”
So that was that, thought Cogan. A brief interlude. He wasn’t likely to see Tanya again, but to his surprise, he wasn’t despondent. Better that it happened than that it didn’t happen, he told himself.
“I’ve been getting phone calls from people wanting to fix me up with their daughters, their cousins,” Cogan told Stern a week after Yom Kippur. I’ve gone on dates twice in the last three days. Can you believe it?”
“It’s the way of the world, Cogan,” Stern said. “They figure if you are good enough for someone like Tanya Greenberg, you must certainly be good enough for their daughters. And you know, my friend, they’re not wrong.”
One evening during the festival of Sukkot, Mrs. Michaels rang Cogan’s doorbell. As he opened the door, he imagined he smelled the sweet fragrance of the catchfly. An evanescent memory of romance on the Dungeness shore. Mrs. Michaels was standing next to a young woman with twinkling blue eyes and a soft reddish ponytail. “Mr. Cogan, I’d like you to meet my niece. She’s visiting from New Jersey. Herman Cogan, this is Sandra Greenspan.”