Jew Store (29 page)

Manny jumped up. No “hello,” no “
Nu
, so how's business?,” just bewilderment, asking my father, “What's all this, Aaron? What's all this Hannah is telling me?”

My father had no answers. He had nothing to offer that could possibly comfort. He said, to say something, “Ladies cut off their noses to spite their faces.”

Manny pushed his face up to my father's. “It ain't up to the
ladies!
It's up to Hannah. That's all who it's up to!”

My father tried to tell Manny about Hannah, about who Hannah
was
, but Manny wouldn't listen. “These sisters of hers have turned her so she don't know which way is up no more,” he said.

Manny looked to my mother. “How come you did this thing?” he asked her. “I'm really surprised. I always thought you liked me, Reba.”

My mother felt a hard blow to her heart. “As much as a brother I liked you!” she cried out to him.

“So now you don't like me no more? So now all of a sudden I'm maybe a murderer or a thief?” Manny's eyes were dark as night. “For God's sake, so what's wrong with me?”

My mother used to say, in one of her most memorable mixed metaphors, that she was reaching in the barrel and finding there not a leg to stand on. What was wrong, she said to Manny, not really believing it, not really
dis
believing it, was that she now foresaw no bed of roses for Hannah. “Let it be, Manny,” she said. “I beg you let it be.”

Manny would not let it be until he had heard again from Hannah. He touched Aunt Hannah on the cheek. “Tell me what you want, Hannah. Don't be afraid.” He had it right. Aunt Hannah was afraid. Afraid of sister Sadie, afraid of leaving Philip, afraid. Aunt Hannah said she couldn't leave her family. “It's not in me,” she said to him.

Poor Manny. He had had the misfortune to fall in love with a family darling.

I
f the Manny and Hannah story seemed enough misadventure for one day, there were misadventures yet to come.

After Manny had left, all of us, except for Aunt Hannah, moved into the kitchen. The meal began as a silent one. My father was angry, but as I knew so well, he would not stay that way for long. When my mother was angry, she could persevere, but my father had no fortitude for this. His anger always had only a brief stay, and when it was gone, it was gone.

He had done his best with Hannah, but he had figured all along that she would not listen to him. Although he thought she was a very foolish girl, a noodle, well, if she preferred something else to Manny, it was up to her. Her reasons were her own. Ah, women, he would have thought, go figure.

At the table he pretty soon brought out a story from the store, about a customer who had grudgingly allowed Seth to wait on him and ultimately had bought not only the shirt he had come in for but also two ties. “What did I tell you?” my father said. “The man's a born sal-es-man.” For Seth's show of enterprise, my father had put him on commission.

My father had instituted the practice of commissions some time ago. Not only would it give the clerks an extra incentive but would also allow them a share in the store's prosperity. Vedra Broome was very much in favor and rushed around the store, as my father noted, “going like sixty,” as we said in the days when sixty miles an hour was a blazing speed. The commission added two percent of sales to seven-dollar-a-week wages.

My father's offer of conversation went unaccepted. All heads stayed bent over the soup.

After supper, Joey and Miriam left, and my mother brought over the glasses of tea. For me there was my usual: a small amount of tea and a large dollop of jelly.

Aunt Sadie gave a look to my mother, left her tea standing, slid out from the nook, and went into the front room. This was all very portentous. It was obvious that my mother wanted to talk, and to talk
serious
, as she would say, to my father. I scrunched into a back corner.

The aunts were leaving, we all knew that. Though most of us were going to at least miss Aunt Hannah, my father was not going to miss either one of them.

Even my mother found it hard to regret Aunt Sadie's upcoming departure. Most of Sadie's complaints she could put up with, but on the subject of the bar mitzvah, Sadie had been a “torn” in my mother's side. Run from Sadie though my mother did, run from
herself
though my mother did, Aunt Sadie always managed sooner or later to catch up and pile on the guilt. As to Joey already being almost thirteen, the magic age, Aunt Sadie said Joey was a smart boy and with double Hebrew lessons “could do it easy.”

On this night my mother introduced the bar mitzvah discussion with a reminder to my father that her sisters would be leaving soon. He said he'd try to survive. “But some job I'll have to live through it.”

“And Sadie and I have been talking.”

My father gave my mother one of his fake looks of disbelief. “You and Sadie been
talking?
Remind me to tell it to the
Sentinel
.” He took a long, noisy sip of tea. “I ain't exactly in the mood for no more talking from you and Sadie.” And worse, my father knew exactly what was on my mother's mind.

My mother tried for a way to say it. She started with the thought that there was nothing in Concordia for the children, but she always said she knew immediately it had come out all wrong.

It certainly sounded all wrong to my father. “Nothing here but family and friends,” he snapped. “Nothing here but what to make them happy.” He was waiting for my mother to say that Joey should go to New York with Sadie. When she didn't say it, he said it for her. “Is that what you mean, Reba?”

I held my breath for the answer.

My mother didn't say yes or no. She just said it was a chance for Joey to go with somebody looking after him.

So who had decided that Joey was going in the first place, my father wanted to know. “When did we decide this? Do I remember deciding this?”

“We all know what has to be,” my mother said to my father.

My father just turned and yelled for Joey to come into the kitchen. He wanted to hear from the horse's mouth, as he said, if we all knew it had to be.

My brother came in. He too knew what it was about.

Straightaway my father asked, “You want to go to New York and be a bar mitzvah boy, Joey?”

Joey didn't say yes or no either. Joey has always said that at that moment he was too full of my father needing him on Saturdays, full of school, full of Concordia. No, he didn't want to go, he didn't want to go in the worst way. He said to my father, “Mama wants me to.”

It sounded awful to my mother. “It ain't like we want you to
go away!” she cried. “We don't! We don't!”

My father would have none of this. He told my mother to tell it right. “And how it is, is you want him to go. Otherwise, why are you making all this fuss? You want him to go, ain't that right?” My mother couldn't understand this fine point. Of course she wanted Joey to go, but of course she
didn't
want him to go. Why was my father saying it like that?

My father persisted. “Say it, Reba, say it. Say you want him to go.”

My mother finally said it. “All right already. I want him to go. He's a Jewish boy, and a Jewish boy has to have a bar mitzvah.”

“Tell me, Reba,” my father said, in a
very
quiet, ominously quiet, voice, “is it right that a bar mitzvah should break a little boy's heart? And his mother's and father's, too?”

My mother answered that sacrifices had to be made, that they had to be good Jewish parents. She said, “Aaron, don't you see? We have to do right!”

“Right by who?”

“Right by God,” my mother said, as if finally stating a something no one could argue with.

She reckoned without my father. “What God? Who God?” he cried out to her. “What God do you know? You only know people who say they speak for God. Can't you see that?”

My mother was scarcely listening. By now she was only trying to pacify. She already had Joey in cheder. “He'll be back before you know it,” she said.

My father knew better. It would be almost a year before Joey would be back, and it would seem a very long time indeed. He glanced over at me. “The little one will have a hard time remembering she's
got
a brother by the time he comes back.” He looked at Joey and said, “No, Joey, I don't have no way to explain. It don't make no sense to me neither.”

And, as he pushed himself out from the table, my father was
saying, “So that's how it is. And how it is is how it is.”

T
he next day my mother went with my brother to withdraw him from school. I went along. Going to one of the “real” schools was to me an adventure not to be missed.

“We've so enjoyed having Joseph with us,” said Miss Ada, the principal of the sixth- through twelfth-grade school. She could have been a twin to Miss Mattie: hair done up over a similar rat, same protruding shirtfront suffering from starch overload.

Miss Ada pulled out Joey's records from a yellow oak file cabinet. “These will show what a good pupil he's been,” she said as she handed the papers to my mother. She hoped they would take time to appreciate him in “that great big school he's going to.” “Lord knows,” she said, “he's been pure inspiration around here.”

My mother went home with the papers, and Joey and I went around to T's classroom. We waited in the hall for recess. When the class came out, Joey caught T by the arm and pulled him over to the wall. “Got something to tell you,” he said.

T wanted to know if Joey wasn't going to recess.

“Nope,” Joey answered him, “I'm going to New York.”

“On a visit?”

“Nope, I'm going to school there.”

“You folks moving?”

“Nope. Only me's going.”

T did his thing of flicking his eyes up. “You telling me a story?”

“Nope, I got to go to study for my bar mitzvah.” Joey has always said that at that moment, he “wished to his soul” (an expression from Concordia that he still uses) that T could go with him. How could he go to the home of “the Broncks” without T?

T hit the wall softly with his fist, turned back, and said to the air, perhaps to the world, “This is so sorry, there ought to be
a law.”

T
he records were given to Aunt Sadie. Joey was to live with our grandparents, and Aunt Sadie would enroll him in the nearby public school. “It's a lovely school with a lovely playground,” she informed him.

Miriam said Concordia had a lovely school with a lovely playground.

Aside from hostile exchanges between Miriam and Aunt Sadie, in these last few days there was little else in the way of talk. Aunt Hannah neither asked a question nor answered one. She did her packing by dropping things haphazardly into the Gladstone bag, after which she would sit on the front porch.

My father was almost as silent, though on one memorable occasion, he lashed out at Aunt Sadie. “Why did we need you anyway?” he asked her. “We had a nice family in a nice little town with a nice business. Who needed you to come here and turn everything into I don't know what?”

Though it was obviously a rhetorical question, Aunt Sadie's lips gathered together, made a little knot in her face, and she said, “I'm only looking out for the family, like always.”

To which my father replied that so far, with her looking out for the family, everybody was miserable. “Hannah ain't happy, and ditto for the rest of us.” He gave her a look. “Okay, you win. Pack up your soft-boiled eggs and go on home.”

My mother, according to my father, was also to blame. “Look what you done, Reba. And for what? For who?” For the first time in my life, I was seeing my father
furious
with my mother, not joshing her, not teasing her, but mad and meaning it.

With my father's anger so intensely upon her, my mother's already shaky confidence all but collapsed. She was suddenly aware of a longing for bed, for green eyeshades.

T
he train was an early-morning one. Only my mother and I were with Joey at the depot. My father was not there, no reasons given. He had simply gotten up before sunrise, readied himself for work, and gone silently out the door.

My sister was not there either. Although her teacher would surely have excused her for such important family business, she had nonetheless grabbed up her satchel and headed off for school, yelling as she went, “Will somebody please
explain
this to me?” Seth took us to the depot in the wagon.

Even though I had been to our outdoor depot many times, today everything about it seemed strange. There was no real light, and shadows fell in curious angles.

My mother was straightening Joey's collar, fussing with his tie, pushing at his hair. “If you've forgotten anything, I'll send it right away,” she was saying.