Carriage Trade (31 page)

I made a solemn promise to the city, then, and to the lights. Never again, I told myself, never again will I let myself be pushed around by a man. Never again will I let myself be used like that, never, ever, as long as I live, as long as I have air to breathe, never will I let what happened to me with David Belknap happen again, ever, so help me God.

It was as though the lights of the city had witnessed my vow and were winking back their approval. And I knew, more surely than ever before, that someday I was going to run my father's store. The winking lights agreed. They signaled their assent. They would conspire to help me.

Of course David didn't come back. The next day, he sent a sheepish-looking friend of his around to collect his things. I made no attempt to hide my swollen lip, and I'm sure the friend knew what must have happened.

Of course, looking back, I wonder if I wasn't to blame for that particular quarrel. I certainly helped start it. I certainly could have helped stop it. Maybe the things I said were needlessly harsh and cruel. Unnecessary roughness, they call it in sports, and players get penalized for it. Maybe he was genuinely sorry for what he did. It doesn't really matter. A month later, I read that he'd become engaged to a pretty blonde from East Orange.

The only thing I know for sure is that I'd done something my famously beautiful, ladylike mother would never have done, and I'm proud of that.

Maybe I'm just not cut out to be partners with anyone. Maybe anything I do I'll have to do on my own. Maybe I'm just not designed to be … a partner.

But listen to me! Whatever you're writing is supposed to be about my father, and all I've been doing is talking about myself. It's not me you're interested in, is it? Is it?

I'll tell you one story about my parents that may interest you, because it shows the differences in their attitudes toward things. Neither one of them really approved of the fact that David Belknap and I were living together, though neither of them actually said anything about it. Not long after we broke up, my mother said to me, “When are you and that nice David going to get married, darling?” She was on her way out to one of her lunches, and she was checking in her purse for her keys and gloves.

“He hit me, Mother,” I said.

“That's nice,” she said. “It shows how much he cares about you, darling.” Then she was out the door.

With my father, I tried a different approach. “David and I have broken up,” I told him.

“Good,” he said.

“He hit me.”

“I may be old-fashioned,” he said. “And I know that many young unmarried couples live together nowadays. But in your case, it just wasn't good for the store's image.”

It was like—and I still remember this—when I brought home my first report card from Brearley. It was all A's, except for one B—in Citizenship, if I recall.

My father said, “You're going to have to work to bring that B up to an A, Miranda.”

My mother said, “Remember, darling, that boys aren't attracted to girls who seem to be too smart.”

So I'd pleased neither of them.

I remember thinking to myself, Doesn't anyone care about me but me?

Part Two

ROSE'S CHILDREN

14

Mrs. Rose Tarcher (interview taped 8/27/91)

Well, you're finally coming around to me, the one who finally knows something. If it hadn't been for me, there wouldn't have been any Silas Tarkington, because how can there be any son if you don't have a mother in the first place? Answer me that. It was I who started everything. Well, here it all is.

My husband, Abraham Tarcher, was born in 1888 in Bialystok, which was then in Russian Poland. If he was alive today, my Abe would be a hundred and three. Think of that. He was named after his grandfather, whose name was Avram Tarniskovsky, but Tarniskovsky was I guess too much for the immigration people and so it came out Tarcher on the official papers, and my Abe told me his parents were too scared of the authorities to try to change it back again to what it should have been, so they settled for Tarcher, the way it was on the papers.

My Abe had two sisters, one older and one younger. The older one was murdered. When he was only nine years old, my husband was forced to watch as his older sister was raped by a gang of Russian soldiers. After that, they cut her stomach open, and he was forced to watch that too. Think of it. He used to have nightmares about that, even years later, after he and I were married and our own children were growing up. His younger sister died earlier, from some childhood disease I think it was, so when the family came to America there were just the three of them, Abe and his parents. That was in 1902, when Abe was fourteen.

It was decided that he was too old to go to school—to start all over again in an American school, which would have meant going to first grade—so he started the way everybody else did in those days, with a pushcart on Hester Street. There were other streets on the Lower East Side, of course, but Hester Street was the main one. It was where everybody shopped. It was where all the pushcarts were. Sometimes you could hardly walk down Hester Street because of all the pushcarts. What you did was, you built your own. My Abe built his pushcart out of an old wooden crate and a set of old baby-buggy wheels he found in an alley. He started out selling borscht, which is a soup made with beets and sour milk that his mother made on her own stove. His mother was famous for her borscht. The secret was cow parsnips. She told me that after he and I were married. She boiled cow parsnips and added that to the beets. It was delicious, if I do say so. Anyway, he started with the borscht, and later he added fresh bagels, which his mother also baked in her own oven. Still later, he branched out into undershirts and buttons, and when I met him he was selling watches, ladies' and gentlemen's watches. Nice watches, too. Anyway, that was Hester Street.

I have a good title for your book, if you want one: “From Hester Street to Heather Lane.” What do you think of that?

My own family was of a cut above. We were considered to be of a better class. My parents came from Hungary, which is considered to be a better place to come from than Poland, and I was born in the United States, which made a big difference in those days. My family had a better name, too: Roth. My father used to say that we were probably related to the Rothschilds. He said Rothschild means Child of the Roths. He was full of baloney. It means Red Shield, but I didn't know the difference. Anyway, we considered ourselves superior types. My mother nearly died when I said I was going to marry a Polack, and my father sat shivah for me when I married him—think of that! He tore his shirt in ribbons and sat shivah for seven days, as though I was a dead person, all because I was a native-born American and my husband was a greenhorn with an accent.

Of course, when my father saw how successful my husband would turn out to be, what a good provider he was for me, he changed his tune—but fast! Times are different now, but back then it was a very bad thing for a girl to marry against her father's wishes. But I was always a very independent type. I said to my father, “This is America! The land of the free! I'll marry whatever man I want to!” And I did.

So. Where was I? Oh, yes, my family background. We were considered a cut above. My father was a scholar of the Talmud; my husband's father worked in a shoe-repair shop. All this background is important, you'll see, when you try to understand my son Solly—or Silas Tarkington, as he called himself, after all that other business happened.

Oh, I'm not saying my family was rich. We weren't rich at all. I suppose we were as poor as everybody else, but I never thought of myself as coming from a poor family. I was very strictly brought up, and we always seemed to have enough to eat. We lived on the Lower East Side too, at number fourteen Henry Street, in a little apartment—they called it a railroad flat—one room in front and one in back; the toilet, it wasn't even a bathroom, was on the floor below, and we shared that with four other families. Baths were in the kitchen sink. It was a sixth-floor walk-up, but I didn't mind the stairs. I thought we lived in the lap of luxury. Living here now, in an elevator building,
really
in the lap of luxury on what they call the Gold Coast of Florida, remembering that two-room apartment on Henry Street, I think, Oh, my!

It's funny. They talk about what a bad place the Lower East Side was to live in, but I didn't think it was all that bad. It was the smells of Hester Street that I liked best, wonderful smells. There was always the smell of food cooking, delicious smells of onions, cabbages, carrots, fresh-baked bread. There was also the smell of the sea, like there is here, because the Atlantic Ocean wasn't very far away. The smell of the sea would be mixed with the smell of a brisket boiling—salt and cloves—and then there was the smell of people, because Hester Street was always filled with people. But even though nobody took baths that often, I don't remember any bad people smells. The people smelled as sweet as newborn babies. I remember my mother's skirts always smelled of starch, and my father always smelled of cigars and mustache wax—my father had this great, black, bushy mustache that used to tickle me when he kissed my cheek. But I'm getting away from my story. Back to my mother, who is really a very important part of the story of Solly Tarcher. You'll see how she fits in. Without her and without me, Solly Tarcher would have been nothing but a schlepper, or maybe even worse.

My mother was a seamstress, a beautiful seamstress. She taught me to sew when I was just a little girl, and after a while she began letting me help her with her sewing. There wasn't anything my mother couldn't do with a needle, but her specialty was hats—beautiful hats that she designed and made herself, hats with embroidery and sequins and silk flowers and feathers, lacy veils and ribbons and all sorts of trimmings—and I used to help her, and by the time I was in my teens Leah Roth's hats were quite famous. So while my father studied his holy books, my mother had a nice career of her own.

A lot of uptown society women heard about my mother's work and started ordering hats from her. No two were alike, of course, and I remember when I was eighteen I started delivering hats to the great Mrs. John Jacob Astor, who lived in a great big house on Fifth Avenue and whose husband went down on the
Titanic
. Mrs. Astor only wanted black hats, because she was in mourning for her husband, you see, but even her black hats were awfully pretty. I used to just hand the hats in their boxes to the butler at the front door, but one day I met the great Mrs. Astor herself. She was just a little thing, just a girl, really, and she didn't seem much older than myself. That surprised me, somehow. I had thought Mrs. John Jacob Astor would be an enormous woman, but here was this tiny little creature, with a whispery little voice. “Oh, how lovely,” she whispered—like that—as she lifted the hat out of its box and tissue paper.

All this is important; you'll see, when I get to that point in my story. Because I used to tell Solly about how I'd met the great Mrs. John Jacob Astor, and it stuck in his mind. It influenced him.

Anyway, about that time I met my future husband. I was walking home from school one afternoon with my books, and some older boys started to tease me. There were six or seven of them, and they gathered in a circle around me and wouldn't let me through. I was pretty in those days, believe it or not, and I was a little frightened. The boys kept pushing closer, asking me to give them a kiss. Well, my future husband saw what was happening, and he pushed right into that crowd of boys with his pushcart, and the boys went flying. Then he got a friend to mind his pushcart, and he walked me home to Henry Street.

It was love at first sight, or so it seemed at the time. He wasn't tall, and he wasn't very handsome, but he had nice dark eyes, and every afternoon he'd wait for me outside school and walk me home. Sometimes we'd stop at Mr. Levy's drugstore where they made good egg creams, and I think we both knew we were in love, though we didn't talk about getting married. I knew my father would not like the idea of me marrying a man who was seven years older and sold watches from a pushcart. Abe only mentioned marriage once. He said, “In America, when you're twenty-one years old, you can do as you please. You don't have to ask your parents' permission for anything.” I knew what he meant. That was proposal enough for me.

On my twenty-first birthday, Abe Tarcher and I went down to City Hall and got married, just like that. That was when my father screamed and raged and carried on, tore his shirt into shreds, and said “My daughter is dead!” He said he was going to sit shivah for me and told me never to darken his door again. I didn't care. I was that independent. I had my new husband now, with his own place to live. I just stuck out my tongue at my father, marched out the door, and slammed it in his face, expecting never to set foot in fourteen Henry Street again. My Abe was waiting for me on the street downstairs. “We're free!” we kept saying. “We're free!” And we held hands and skipped down the street like children. That was in 1916.

My Abe had rooms in Norfolk Street, number thirty-five, which was really not that many blocks away, and I was very happy keeping house for my new husband. Oh, we were very happy, and I loved tidying the rooms while he was off on the street at work. In the corner of the front room, he kept a pile of old magazines. Sometimes I would pick up one of those magazines to read, which made him very nervous, and I wondered why. The magazines—
Collier's, Saturday Evening Post
, and so on—were all very old, and there wasn't very much of interest in them, and one day I said, “Abe, why don't we throw all these old magazines out? They're just taking up room.” “No!” he cried. “Don't ever touch those magazines!” Then he showed me why.

At the bottom of the pile, the magazines were stuffed with lots of dollar bills: ten-dollar bills, twenties, even fifties. That was where he kept his money. He didn't trust banks, and he figured no burglar would be interested in running off with a lot of old copies of the
Saturday Evening Post
, you see. It made a certain amount of sense. We counted out the money that he had saved there. It was more than a thousand dollars! It seemed like a fortune at the time, but that was what he had saved from his pushcart business over the years.