Jew Store (27 page)

In answer Aunt Sadie gave a look that said, Are you trying to kid
me
?

The aunts' Gladstone bag—of yellow leather stiff as a wooden crate—held presents: hand-knitted scarves from my grandmother; books from Uncle Philip; boxed chocolates; a whole box of Hershey bars just for me; a string of amber beads for my sister; a gossamer shawl with wide satin ribbon borders for my mother; and, for my father and brother, shiny embroidered white silk yarmulkes, though we all knew that despite my mother's pleadings, they no longer wore caps even on Friday nights.

In our room Aunt Sadie immediately vetoed the begonias (“They smell funny”), and at the first meal, which starred pot roast, Aunt Sadie wanted to know if the meat was kosher.

My mother knew her sister was just “trying” her, as the neighbors might say, since she knew very well it wasn't kosher. She told Aunt Sadie to do as she did, which was not to think about it. “Keep it out of your head,” she advised her.

“How can I keep it out when it's already in there?
Nu
, do
you expect me to eat
traif
?” she asked my mother, and gave the word that she and Hannah would eat only dairy. “Just eggs and cheese and whatever else you got in the dairy line,” she said, adding serenely that, after all, she and Hannah were not used to eating what we ate, we being “regular
traifnyaks
.”

When Aunt Hannah tried to smooth things over, said, “I don't mind, Sadie, whatever we eat is all right with me,” Aunt Sadie answered, “And you, you stop jumping up for anything new.”

When Sadie said this, my mother, doing her best to stay focused on why her sisters were in Concordia in the first place, brought Manny instantly to mind. Could Manny not be considered new? Of course he could. My mother, unlike her sister Sadie, wished with all her might for Hannah to jump up for this something new. “Jump up, Hannah,” she said silently. “Jump up and grab him.”

T
hough Aunt Sadie was a trial—always acting like a boss whose workers were talking strike, my father said—the Bronson aunts (“aints” in Concordia) were instant celebrities. By virtue of living near them, the neighborhood children became celebrities in their own right and visited often to maintain status. They all had aunts of course, but theirs were too much like their own mothers to be intriguing. And, boy howdy, one of the Bronson “aints” (Aunt Sadie) wore black all the time, and they spoke in what could have been tongues.

The neighbors came to call, and after they left, Aunt Sadie would say, “What you see in them ain't worth talking about. They're just so goyish.”

What made them so goyish I didn't know. That they said
y'all
instead of
youse?
That they either had very straight hair or got it curled at the Cinderella?

I could not believe that Miss Brookie would not want to meet the aunts from New York, so I ran and got her. She said she
had been planning to come. “Think I'd pass up a chance to visit with some New York people?”

My mother was all open arms. “It's been so long,” she said to Miss Brookie. My mother thought this was the moment when a peace treaty would at last be signed.

Sadly, it wasn't. Miss Brookie declined to grant forgiveness, just gave my mother a cool “Hey, Reba.”

She sailed into the kitchen, joined the aunts in the breakfast nook. My mother put a glass of tea in front of her, and Miss Brookie, no doubt from the years of watching my parents, knew just what to do. Her only misstep was in swallowing the whole sugar cube at once. When she had got the sip down, she said, “What's doing in New York, ladies?”

Aunt Sadie said, “Same old thing,” and gave a shrug.

Miss Brookie said you could say “same old thing” about Concordia but not about New York. She thought New York “totally irresistible.” Miss Brookie's “take” on New York, as they say now, was very different from that of the rest of the Concordians, who thought New York was the next worst thing to a sugar ditch.

“Never mind irresistible,” said Aunt Sadie, who, though she had always made clear that New York was the only place to live, was not about to agree with Miss Brookie. “I can resist it plenty.”

I suppose by now it had come through to Miss Brookie that these were not the “New York people” she had hoped for. She finished off her tea, said, “Have a nice stay in Concordia,” slid out of the nook, and, having sailed
into
the house, she now sailed
out
of it.

O
ne night, in an effort to divert our guests, Joey and Miriam and I decided on a soiree like the ones at Miss Brookie's. We would get up acts.

After supper the audience was ushered into the front room, while we prepared. As the youngest performer, I insisted that it was my prerogative to go last.

Joey did his tumbling act first, dashing through the door of the space-heater hall and throwing himself into a contained (of necessity) somersault. He segued into a backbend, and walked a foot or two like an upside-down spider. Everybody applauded.

My sister went out next. She danced energetically to a record on the Vic and, when it came to an end, kept dancing to her own humming and pretty soon was out of breath.

I wasn't ready. Miriam rested a bit and then did some more dancing and, when needed, some more humming.

I still wasn't ready. Joey brought in his bridge model and gave a little lecture. Everybody applauded some more, though the volume was weakening. My father yelled out, “Enough already, Stella Ruth. You got your customers complaining.”

I finally glided out. My upper body was draped with the Spanish shawl that had formerly draped Miss Brookie's piano, before being cast aside in favor of one with a more ponderous fringe. A paper rose drooped behind my ear; my mother's fox fur piece, its teeth gripping its tail, encircled my neck; my sister's rhinestone earrings (hitherto hidden from my mother) dangled from my earlobes. Laughter and applause greeted me.

Like the lady I had seen at the recital in Chautauqua, I placed the palms of my hands together and lay them alongide my cheek. I opened my mouth to sing. Unfortunately, the song I had chosen was “Oh, What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

I knew the word
Jesus
was not employed at our house, but this was a
song
, one in much demand at backyard bird interments. On this occasion, however, its opening lines made everything go ka-boom.

My father took the coward's way out and shot out of the room, impacting several chairs on the way. My mother shrieked “Stella Ruth!” and Miriam slipped from her chair to the floor, her dress flying up and bloomers coming into view.

Aunt Sadie jumped up as if a bug had bitten her sharply on
her bottom. “Reba!” I heard her shout. “Is this child saying what I think she's saying? Is she? Is she?”

In a moment Joey had rushed up and clapped his hand over my mouth as if to stanch a broken hose. Over his thumb I saw Aunt Hannah hiding a grin and my mother clutching at her heart.

Joey put my shawl around me and dragged me out of the room.

Aunt Sadie stayed on it a long time. “Church songs! Christian hymns! That my ears should hear such things!” There were sudden, similar bursts all evening. “Is this the way you bring up Jewish children? Is this what these children have been learning, Reba? Are you crazy?”

My mother tried to answer with apology, justification, reason. Finally she said, “It's so awful hard down here. You don't know how it is with no nothing Jewish. Can I keep my eyes on them every second? They're out playing. How can I know every little thing they're doing?”

“And who are they playing with? Tell me with who.” Aunt Sadie glared. When she had glared at everybody in turn, she stomped off to bed.

Miriam and I made for bed as well. But if the excitement in the front room was over, in Joey's bedroom it was not. No, in Joey's bedroom a little more excitement began when Miriam was undressing on the bed, yanked her dress up over her head, and, with her head completely enclosed, began to sing. And what was she singing, softly to be sure? Nothing other than the first verse of “Oh, What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” It seemed to me the most delightful thing in the world, a siren song, so tempting, so inviting that all I could do was pull my own dress up over my head, scrunch over, and join my voice to hers. And what could Miriam and I do but sit with our heads together, dresses up over them, and sing verse after verse and laugh ourselves silly?

It was time to implement the main plot. My mother had made a long-distance call to the Rastows, in which she'd mentioned as casually as she could that she wanted them to come to dinner on Sunday to meet her sisters. When Gladys had asked for some sort of facts about the sisters, my mother had broken it off with, “So you'll come on Sunday and you'll see for yourself.” Gladys had said “Delighted” in the way that meant she wasn't delighted at all.

As the visit neared, my mother's hidden agenda was completely exposed. The aunts understood it all plainly, and Aunt Hannah at least had no objections. But she had plenty of questions. “Is he . . . uh, handsome?” she asked Miriam.

“Very,” Miriam answered her.

“Handsome” could mean something besides pleasing features, well arranged. Did it also mean Manny was tall?

Miriam had to say that he was not exactly tall, but tall enough for Aunt Hannah.

Aunt Hannah's level of expectation probably took a steep drop. She said in a rueful voice, “A midget in the circus is tall enough for me. . . . I suppose he has kinky hair, too?” She was now fearing the worst.

When she heard that Manny's hair, though dark, was straight and parted in the middle, she brightened. “Like John Gilbert?” she asked Miriam.

“You know, he
does
favor John Gilbert.” Miriam wanted Aunt Hannah to know that Manny was full of fun. “He's just a bear for cutting the fool,” she said.

“Cuttin' the fool?” Aunt Hannah always tried her best to imitate Southern talk. “Ah 'clare, your Manny sounds
purely scrumptious
, hear?”

Aunt Sadie had my mother on the stand, first to find out what kind of living this “boyfriend” of Hannah's made.

“Sadie, stop!” my mother cried. “You know he ain't no boyfriend!” But she was happy to be able to inform Aunt Sadie that
Manny made a lovely living from a lovely store. And in a nice little town.
Nice little town?
What was she doing, my mother, flopping around in these strange waters?

Aunt Sadie crinkled her nose, as if getting a whiff of a thing too long in the icebox. “And a shul? They got a shul?”

“You know they don't have no shul.”

My father tried to float my mother a life preserver and reminded her of the
mohel
.

Aunt Sadie was not impressed. “So a
mohel
comes in, gives the
putzel
a cut, and leaves. And the baby grows up an ignoramus singing Christian hymns.”

“Well, at least he'd be singing circumcised,” my father said.

I
t was a snowy Sunday the day the Rastows came. At the door Gladys Rastow immediately took in Aunt Hannah's finger—the third finger, on the left hand—which, my mother said later, must have looked to her as bare as a dogwood branch in winter.

Gladys Rastow greeted both aunts coolly. Aunt Sadie returned the favor. When they spoke to each other, it was as if they were biting off tough crusts of rye bread.

My mother had improvised a table that could seat the whole crowd. When dinner was announced, Gladys rushed to a chair on one side of Aunt Hannah and sent Delores to the other. Manny managed to foil her by seating himself directly opposite Aunt Hannah and not taking his eyes off her.

After things had been passed, Gladys pointed to Aunt Hannah's plate. On it were some lonely-looking garden peas. Gladys looked at them and asked of anyone whose attention she could enlist, “Can it be that these Bronx ladies eat only
peas?
”

It was a remark that led Aunt Sadie to expound a principle: that if you're a Jewish person, you don't make exceptions. After she had expounded it, she said, clearly addressing a lesser person, “That's the way we live, Mrs. Rastow, Hannah and I.”

Suddenly all eyes went to Aunt Hannah. As if the copper of her hair had descended into her cheeks, her face was agleam. And then she had bent her head over her plate. She might have been saying, Please God, please make them stop talking.

In another moment she had risen from the table and, murmuring “Excuse me, I got something to do,” was running for the front door. I ran after her.

Aunt Hannah and I were sitting on the swing, not talking, just being cold, when here came Manny.

“Such arguing ladies,” he said. “They might be having a good time, but believe me they're spoiling my appetite.” He sat down across from us. “Yours, too?”

In case he was talking to me, I said yes, and Aunt Hannah said she wasn't really hungry anyway.

Manny ran to his buggy. He grabbed up a blanket from the back seat, brought it back, sat down between Aunt Hannah and me, and tucked the dark green plaid over us. “So you'll warm up a bit,” he said.

Aunt Hannah said how surprised she was to find cold in “the sunny South.” There it was again: “the sunny South.”

He took hold of one of Aunt Hannah's hands, and she didn't take it away. I sat there aware of every nuance of speech and movement, and if someone had asked, I could have said when they used each other's first names and which of their fingers were interlocking. Manny said for Aunt Hannah to wait for him next Sunday. “You hear me what I'm saying, Hannah?” Where they were going was to Deerfoot Lake.

I was delighted. Deerfoot seemed to me ideal for a courtship or, for that matter, for any kind of good time. In summer it served as our spot for picnicking and swimming, although it had ragged gray trunks of trees sticking out of it, reminders that Deerfoot had once long ago been not a lake but a forest.