Jew Store (19 page)

Spending her time visiting was not a viable choice for my mother. Though she greeted the neighbors when she saw them in the yard, there was no visiting with them. Miz Earp, who lived to the south, was a very old lady whose only companion was a dog. She spoke warmly to her dog but, as far as my mother could judge, had social exchange with no other living thing, unless it was the Spanish bayonet plants in her front yard, which she carefully tended, doubtless because under them were the remains of two previous pet dogs. She spoke not a word to my mother in response to her greeting, just gave a quick jerk of her head. Later, there would be no welcome for my playmates and me either, even though, when we cut across her yard, we never went near the bayonet plant area and indeed wouldn't have gone near it with a pole, as we would have said. No, there was no visiting with Miz Earp.

Miz Ezell lived behind. My mother was even less drawn to Miz Ezell, chiefly because her Southern accent was so thick that whatever she said gave my mother a pounding headache, and my mother gave up quickly on Miz Ezell.

As to the Gaskins across the street, it had been Lizzie Maud who had discouraged a visit over there. They were not for visiting; they were, Lizzie Maud had informed my mother one day, white trash.

My mother had not met the Gaskins. She had observed that there were a lot of them, what she took to be parents and children, grown and not grown.

Still, from what she had heard about white trash, the Gaskins didn't seem to fit. She had it in her head that white trash were poor people living on the other side of the railroad tracks, whose “menfolks” sometimes turned up for work and sometimes
didn't, who sat on back porches all day Saturday and drank “moonshine,” whose yards were full of cast-off mechanical items and old iceboxes. None of this figured in the Gaskin way of life. So, my mother had wondered, in what way were they white trash?

They were white trash, Lizzie Maud had said, because of the most recent Gaskin baby. Hadn't my mother noticed that Miz Gaskin was past her time to have babies?

My mother had put together a picture of Miz Gaskin, of a wrinkly woman with gray hair caught in a tiny fist of a bun. Yes, the lady was definitely past her time for babies.

There had been no way for my mother to prepare for what she had then heard. The baby, Lizzie Maud had said, her voice dropping low, wasn't “Mr. and Miz Gaskin's atall,” but Mr. Gaskin's and Miss Evelyn's.

My mother's brain had gone reeling. Miss Evelyn, my mother knew, was a Gaskin daughter. A father having a baby with his daughter? “That can't be!” she had cried, thinking, hoping, it was just something somebody had only “suspicioned.”

Lizzie Maud had given a grunt of scorn. Had somebody made up Miss Evelyn “all the time” sitting on her daddy's lap? And Miss Evelyn going round with “a belly big as a peach basket?”

My mother had been struck dumb. Was it possible? Where was she? In Sodom? In Gomorrah? No, she was in this . . . this . . .
Concordia
. She didn't care that my father said these things went on everywhere; she was convinced that Concordia had more than its share. And, maybe, isolated and insular as it was, it did.

O
n the day of the “suggestion,” Lizzie Maud came out on the porch, an empty pot in one hand, an apronful of snap beans gathered up in the other, and settled across from my mother on the porch swing.

Lizzie Maud wanted to know why my mother was “sitting up but not taking no notice.” She said, “If you don't move once in a while, you gwine seize up.”

My mother was glad to have Lizzie Maud join her. She had gotten so she understood most of what Lizzie Maud said, and she could talk to Lizzie Maud about children and household matters. Of course, when the subject got around to household matters, a vision of Lizzie Maud's sack immediately made its appearance.
Oy
, that sack. A “torn” in her side. And what should she do? Start something she didn't know how it would end? No, she kept telling herself, it was not her business.

“Stop this foolishment, sitting here being lonesome,” Lizzie Maud said to my mother. She dropped a handful of beans into my mother's lap and said, “Here. Help me snap these,” her “help” being “hep.” My mother snapped, tossing the snapped beans into Lizzie Maud's pot. Lizzie Maud, according to my mother, sat, snapped, and looked pensive. In another moment came the proposal: “Whyn't you have you another baby?” she said. “You know, to get you to feeling you got a place for yourself.”

My mother decided immediately to talk it over with my father. I was finally to be a topic for discussion.

The moment to talk about it came when my mother was helping out in the store on the first day of the Easter rush. The day started like any Monday morning, with my father going to the bank before the bank was open, knocking on the door, and being admitted by the head teller, Mr. Hedgepeth. Mr. Hedgepeth would then offer, “Morning, Mr. Bronson. Looks like our calendar ain't lying. You're here so must be Monday all right,” and my father would reply, “Yes, sir, time to deposit the Bronson millions.”

Once in the bank, my father would walk across the brown wooden floor to the tellers' windows in the back and plop down a small cloth bag containing Saturday's receipts. Afterward, back in the store, he would pull out his checkbook and write a check for five dollars to my grandfather.

My mother, watching on this particular Monday, felt a sudden rush. So stirred was she by my father's writing of the check to her father, so joyful, she blurted it out. She told my father that she wanted to have another baby. My father took it in stride. If my mother wanted another child, with business so good, why should he object? That's what you want?” he said to my mother. “So that's what you'll have.”

M
y mother knew she was pregnant when the smell of Lizzie Maud's breakfast bacon gave her true nausea rather than just the usual queasiness. On the other hand, my mother's own breakfast did not go down well with Lizzie Maud. She would shower my mother with cautions and admonitions. “I swan, Miz Reva, you is the color of whitewash,” she might say. “You best eat some of this here breakfast meat before you scare the chickens.”

Though for church Lizzie Maud's hair was ironed and straight, at work it was either caught up in the rag snippets my family had seen on that first day or braided into short and numerous pigtails that stuck out like twigs on a newly plowed field. Holding a piece of “breakfast meat” in front of my mother, she would say, “Do you a sight more good than that mess you eat.” My mother's “mess” would be either soda crackers crushed in milk—which Lizzie Maud predicted would turn my mother into a “lick of chalk”—or the crappies that neighborhood fishermen were always bringing by—which, if too many of
them
were eaten, would turn my mother into a “puny slippy thing with fins going every whichaway.”

It was a little later in the pregnancy that my mother had a caution of her own. She had come fully awake during the middle of one night with the realization that they had made no plans for a boy baby. A boy! A boy had to be circumcised!
Oy!

“Aaron! Aaron! Listen to me!” my mother cried out on that night to my father, shaking him hard. “We can't have no baby!”
“What are you talking?” My father was finally awake and looking at my mother, my mother used to say, as if pregnancy had made her lose her mind. “We're having it. How can we not?”

The possibility of having a baby with a penis was the problem. A
bris
—the ceremony at which the snipping of the fore-skin of the penis is . . . is the word here
celebrated?
—would have to be held. “But what if it has a
putzel?
” my mother shouted, leaping out of bed and charging about the room. “We got to
do
something!”

My father told her to stop galloping, that everybody would think they had Willy in the room.

Actually, in Nashville there was a
mohel
—a religious functionary whose job it was to perform circumcisions according to the rites and regulations—who made a practice of going to little towns when his services were required.

So Joey, my father said, would write to the rabbi, to alert him, and when the time came, a long-distance call would be made. Everything settled, my father told my mother to come back to bed.

My mother had started to climb back in when another alarm went off. How could they have a circumcision without a minyan, the ten men needed for the ceremony?

My father said so there wouldn't be ten men, there'd be just him: “The
mohel
will forgive us.”

But what about the
bris?
What would people say about a
party
for cutting off a piece of a penis? “Like savages they'll say the Bronsons are,” my mother said to my father.

The next morning, before school, Joey wrote to the rabbi. When the letter was finished, my father, handwriting being a big thing to my parents, took time to approve eight-year-old Joey's. Joey's penmanship followed the Palmer method being taught in school, which allowed a couple of curls here and there but in the main was neat and precise, with all the letters leaning to the right like trees bending to the wind. My father much admired
Joey's handwriting, since his own had remained unruly despite the efforts of the Savannah girls to teach him Palmer. But it remained for Miriam's to capture my father's highest praise. When it came her turn to learn, she too was taught Palmer, but she soon developed a style of her own, one so abounding in frills and furbelows, the words danced off the page. It was perhaps what a graphologist would have described as Spencerian revisited. She cared not at all that this brought her a D in penman-ship, and neither did my father. He loved her exuberant style, and, perhaps in homage, his paraph—“that wavy thing when you sign your name,” my mother called it—grew ever more baroque.

When the doctor came on a cold early morning in February of 1922, all the planning went pretty much out the window. With my father and Miss Brookie and Lizzie Maud standing by, my mother delivered not a someone sporting a little
putzel
, but an unadorned baby girl. I was finally on the scene. And with me came those semi-obligatory Cossack features.

My naming followed the Jewish custom of honoring deceased relatives, and so it was that my first name, Stella, came from my father's grandmother, Sprintza, which my parents took upon themselves to Americanize, and my middle name came from my mother's Aunt Raizel, Americanized into Ruth. And, following Miss Brookie's dictate (“The itty bit of sugar is a Southerner, don't you know”), everybody called me Stella Ruth.

O
f course I don't have much of a grip on the first couple of years of my existence, and what little I do remember may well not be actual memory at all but family lore, so often told. I know that my father's store was prospering and that whatever my mother's continued grievances, he at least was well satisfied with existence in a town in northwestern Tennessee. As for my brother and sister, they were happy with the town, their playmates, and just about everything else in their young lives.

We lived in Miss Brookie's house for several years after I was born. As I progressed from a bassinet (once Billy Sunday's) in my parents' room to a crib (likewise previously owned by Billy Sunday) in the other bedroom, Joey was put on the “Victorian affliction” divan (buttressed by pillows and quilts) in the front room, where every morning he woke the house by plunking on the harp, thereby producing what Miss Brookie called “a little twelve-tone number from Schoenberg.”

The harp was in the corner of the front room behind the grand piano. It was golden and much admired, though Lizzie Maud had given up dusting it—“all them teeny tweeny places”—and
there was now, as she would grumble to anyone in hearing distance, dust on it so thick “you could plant ‘gemiums.'” She would say, “That thing don't belong in our front room nohow.” Where it belonged, according to Lizzie Maud, was in the funeral parlor.

Miss Brookie didn't play on the harp anymore. Required too much muscle, she said, so she indulged her musical yearnings on the piano. She played whenever she had a moment and in a transported way, throwing her head back and closing her eyes, oblivious to the fact that her sheet music had slipped to the floor.

If Joey was trying to compete as a harpist with Miriam as a pianist, he had a long way to go. Miriam's daily afternoon piano lessons from Miss Brookie had convinced Miss Brookie that she had talent. Miss Brookie “vowed and declared” that Miriam was truly gifted. “And so
devoted
,” she would say. “Bless my soul if she doesn't practice on her own
volition
, if you can feature such a thing.”

On occasional evenings we had a recital—what Miss Brookie called a “soiree”—when Miriam played her pieces for an hour or so. Never mind Miriam's talent: My mother and father were surprised to find themselves the parents of a piano-playing daughter at all. In the Bronx it was only the offspring of the affluent who played the piano, and my parents knew no one who did. The custom among Bronx Jews was for sons, and occasionally for daughters, to play the violin, as had been traditional in the old country, where, the joke went, violins had been the instrument of choice because when the Cossacks were chasing you out of town, you couldn't run with a piano under your arm. At any rate, my parents were grateful for the presence of a piano in Miss Brookie's house and for her willingness to teach Miriam. It was a serendipitous circumstance, what they called
mazel
.

Still, my mother had to confess that as she sat and watched
Miriam's fingers run over the keys and her long brown hair toss and her shoulders rise and fall, her thoughts would fly northward, to her family.
Oy
, how she wished for them to see. She longed for Miriam not to be just a rose blooming in the wilderness. But, my mother would always say later, that was what she thought
then
, before she grew up.