Jew Store (23 page)

A
s time went on, the relationship between us and the neighbors grew closer and closer. They lent and borrowed, we lent and borrowed. We exchanged little gifts. If we sent around items from the St. Louis magic, they sent us pies and cakes (carefully unlarded in deference to my mother's sensibilities). My mother crocheted soakers for new babies; the neighbors sent around aprons and tea towels, which they had “run up” on their sewing machines. And they were Bronson customers to the core.

I was a creature of the neighborhood. Betty May Nipper and Ouida Kimball went with me to the Sunshine Girls, and when we got to be school age, we walked together to Westerly, where we were in the same class. I scooted on the scooter of Chloe Campbell, who was a year older, until I got one of my own. It was her brother who provided me with my first glimpse of male embellishment, when we peeked through the bathroom keyhole while he was in the bathtub. Since there were no riding academies or even riding stables in Concordia (it not being that kind of town), if you wanted to ride, you went to somebody's backyard, and I went to Lois Stanback's and rode her Peaches (our Willy didn't understand about somebody on his back). At the house of Rosemary Buffaloe on the corner, she and I climbed her crab-apple tree and threw crab apples at squirrels.

Miz Reeves across the street finally had a baby, and I visited him every afternoon. I felt I was indispensable since Miz Reeves depended on me around the baby's bath time, to fetch talcum powder and such.

One day I found in the house across the street Miz Reeves's niece Dorissey, from Jackson. Miz Reeves explained that as her niece, Dorissey was the baby's cousin. Dorissey was my age and a cousin to somebody real! I knew I had some cousins, but they were in New York and might as well have been on a page in a book.

Dorissey said she had something to show me and led me to
a bedroom closet, from which, standing on a chair, she withdrew a dress of bright yellow organdy, circled by a sash so white it shimmered. She laid it on the bed, went over to the dresser, and opened a drawer. From it she extracted a tiny reticule of ivory satin gathered together with a silky cord—a miniature of the accessory that accompanied ladies to elegant occasions. She put it beside the dress on the bed.

In what breath I had left, I managed to ask whose they were.

“Whose do you think? Mine, of course,” Dorissey said, I stared. “What are they for?”

Dorissey played with the ends of the sash. “I'm fixing to wear them this Sunday.”

“Where you going this Sunday?” I asked her, not wanting to hear the answer.

I heard it anyway. Dorissey slid open the reticule drawstring and drew forth a dainty mirror. She looked into it and, crinkling her eyes and pursing her lips, said, “To church.”

“Everybody around here goes to church,” I said to Dorissey.

“You don't,” Dorissey answered.

My voice declined to a mumble. “It ain't so much anyway.”

“It is when you go for something special.”

“What something special?”

Dorissey tossed her head, and her straight, dark blond hair leapt about. “We're sprinkling the baby this Sunday.”

Sprinkling the baby
? Was he, like my mother's garden, in need of regular watering? “I know it,” I lied.

“You don't know nothing of the sort.” Dorissey's blue eyes appraised me. “Why's he getting sprinkled if you know so much?”

I didn't know so much. “Why?” I asked miserably.

“To make him into a Methodist, that's why.”

My chin trembled, my lips quivered against each other. I let out a loud wail, and Miz Reeves came running in.

She took in the scene in one glance. “Run, Stella Ruth,” she said. “Run ask your mama can you come with us.”

I ran. “Mama! Mama! Miz Reeves wants to know can I go help sprinkle the baby!”

“‘Sprinkle'? What means ‘sprinkle'?”

“It's something they do in church!”

“Oh. Church.” My mother began to turn away.

I grew frantic. “But it's for
babies
, Mama! And little children are supposed to be there!”

This seemed to make an impression. “Oh, it must be Sunday school,” my mother said.

“Yes! It must be Sunday school!” Was this a lie or, hopefully, just a fib?

My mother might have thought about Miz Reeves and the plant cuttings and the sweet baby and the fact that the Reeves family traded at Bronson's, but whatever the reason, in the end she said I could go. “But only to Sunday school,” she cautioned me.

I went with the Reeveses in a pink organdy dress with a green sash. On my arm hung a pink sateen purse.

The Reeves kin were at the church. Miz Reeves's granny was there—a small, wrinkly lady with veins on her hands like tree roots raising up in the ground. “My, what a nice little girl,” she said to me. “Are you a Methodist, too?”

I could see Miz Reeves, standing to one side of me, frantically shaking her head. “No, Granny,” she managed to say, “she's the little girl from across the street.”

“The Jew child? Oh Lord Jesus have mercy,” her granny said.

The preacher threw drops of water over the baby's head, repeated his name several times—Loomis Joyner Reeves—and held him while he said a Jesus prayer.

I came home. I waited for my mother's questions.

“Did the baby enjoy it?”

“Guess not. He screamed his head off.”

This seemed to be all the questioning there would be.

I went to Sunday school the following Sunday with Dorissey.
After Dorissey left, I made Sunday school rounds with a selection of Baptists and Presbyterians as well as Methodists.

How do I explain my mother's acquiescence in this? My mother, who winced at the word
Jesus
? Who quailed at the sight of a cross? There's no ready answer other than that she had it in her head that Sunday school had nothing to do with religion or perhaps that my being born Jewish automatically immunized me against untoward influences. I think, however, it was chiefly that in the matter of religion for the children, my mother stressed only Joey's need to have a bar mitzvah.

Well, what
was
Sunday school? It was hearing a lot of Old and New Testament Bible stories and coloring a lot of pictures of Jesus and Mary (which I was careful to leave behind in church). Maybe I
was
vaccinated at birth, but these Sunday schools meant to me only more ways to play. Given my mother's focus on Joey and my father's disregard of religion, I didn't give a whole lot of thought to the subject. Still, like most early experiences, these Sunday mornings have no doubt turned up in one form or another (perhaps through the poet's “wandering vegetative dreams”), sometimes to bite me and sometimes to give me a nice little nuzzle.

So Joey was my mother's target, and religion for him meant religious
training
. She said so often that Joey needed to go to Hebrew school, that all of us, not just Joey, were tired of hearing it.

Joey always protested that he knew a lot of Hebrew. On one particular day, as my mother sat on a chair crocheting, he was doing his protesting from the floor, where he was playing with his erector set. In his hand was one of the perforated metal pieces for an elevator he was planning, one that would actually go up and down by means of the string and wheel provided in the set. “The whole alphabet,” he said to her.

This did not impress her. Joey should be learning
lessons
. Exactly what he should be learning my mother wasn't clear about, but whatever it was, it had to be learned in the Hebrew
school. “You need to go to cheder,” she said to him, her crochet needle going in and out furiously.

My father interrupted. “So what do you want the boy should do? You act as if something could be done about it.” He rattled his newspaper, a sure sign that irritation had set in.

Maybe, my mother thought, she had been too quick to dismiss Gladys's Nashville suggestion. She put it to my father.

The paper rattled wildly in my father's hands. “What? If that ain't the limit! You might as well say New York!” No, he needed his “stockroom boy.” What would he do without his right hand on Saturday mornings?

He went back to the
Sentinel
, turning the page to find the Bronson ad. Lately he had been doing this with some want of confidence: Three weeks earlier the paper had left out the
R
in the ad banner that was supposed to read
BIG SHIRT SALE
. “So you'll stop already, Reba, yes?” he asked my mother.

My mother rose, and leaving her needle and crocheting in the chair, motioned Joey into the kitchen, to get away from my father's rattling paper. She slid into the breakfast nook and Joey slid in across from her.

Joey tried to say that everything he needed to know was in history books. He tried to impress my mother with all the learning that was in the books Uncle Philip had been sending—not just general history, but Jewish history as well, and the philosophy of Jewish scholars through time. But though my mother accepted without argument that the books were full of important information, learning from books was not the point.

She tried to make the point. “You can read till your eyes fall out, it won't do you no good for bar mitzvah,” she said to Joey. The point was her dream, her dream of the bar mitzvah ceremony, where my brother would stand with a lustrous white satin yarmulkeh on his head and a magnificently embroidered prayer shawl on his shoulders and read from the Torah in exquisitely enunciated Hebrew.

She suddenly began to see that there was really only one way out: Joey must go to New York. What my father had intended as a joke was taking hold in her head.

T
aking hold also was one of her headaches, and she slid out from the bench and went to lie down. As she lay on the bed, she was thinking that soon she would have to talk to my father. And when she did? His blue eyes would go dark as if in sorrow for her wrongheadness. She closed her eyes, but there was no relief. In a few minutes she went into the kitchen and filled a napkin with sliced raw potatoes.

W
e had a new residence, and business being what it was—that is to say, very good—my father bought a new automobile to go with it. It had been Joey's idea. He had convinced my father that automobiles were no longer a joke, that they could now be started with a key instead of a crank. “And they don't bounce all over the road,” he informed my father.

When my father could resist no longer, he and Joey went to St. Louis and bought one. Given two driving lessons by the salesman, twelve-year-old Joey drove the car home.

The car was a Studebaker. It was long and it was dark green and was called a “touring car,” a type of car that featured roll-up isinglass windows and a roll-down fabric top.

If not the first car in town, it was the longest, and as such was the object of much curiosity. Parked in front of the store, it drew a crowd. One man said, as my father told it, “I swan, Mr. Bronson, if Concordia 'twas on the Mississip, you could sail this thing clear down to Orleans.”

We were keeping the carriage. My father had decided— crank or no crank, bounce or no bounce—not to learn to drive.

So, at the wheel, as we said then, was Joey.

Miss Brookie came to see the car, but she really wanted to have a talk with my mother, and not about cars. It was about children working at the shoe factory. “What are we,” she asked, meaning my mother and she, “going to do about it?”

Do? My mother was startled.

Miss Brookie thought they should go out to the factory and have a talk with Roscoe Pinder. She knew with not “one iota” of doubt the factory management was working children for twelve and fourteen hours a day. Furthermore, they weren't hiring Negroes anymore, since they could get the children to do the work more cheaply.

My mother was of two minds about going with Miss Brookie: “To the bottom of my feet,” as she would say, she wanted to go, but the bottom of her feet were also warning her that we were in business, and how could she go and tell the boss of the factory, the factory that meant everything to the business, that he wasn't doing right? Miss Brookie might not care if the boss got mad, but my mother had to.

My mother was right about one thing: Miss Brookie didn't care if the boss was mad, glad, or perched on a poker. When she was expressing one of her “truths,” if people chose to respond with what she called “weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth,” so be it.

My mother being so reluctant, Miss Brookie finally gave her an option: She could just be along for the ride and would not have to say a single word. “All right?” she asked.

Though my mother could resist no longer, it was not “all right.” And when she told my father about it, it wasn't all right with him either. If Miss Brookie “starts up,” he said, my mother was to stay out of it. “Remember,” my father told her, “you don't never spit into the wind, you're liable to get it back in your face.”

On Wednesday afternoon Miss Brookie picked me and my
mother up in her buggy, and we trotted off behind Harold Lloyd on the north road to the shoe factory. Miss Brookie had called Roscoe Pinder, and he had invited us to come on out for tea.

“We're in for a right social occasion,” she said to us.

“A
what
?” my mother asked in alarm.

Miss Brookie told my mother not to come “all unglued.” She wasn't, she said, going to wrestle Roscoe Pinder to the ground.

I saw the two of them on the floor, Miss Brookie on top, pummeling a hapless Mr. Pinder into submission.

I was exceedingly pleased to be going to the factory, the place that figured so prominently in our lives and seemed to me to be so glamorous. Miss Brookie, on the other hand, thought a factory was dangerous and that I should have been left at home.