Jew Store (32 page)

In another year T was going to college, to “U.T.”—the University of Tennessee—with Miss Brookie in full support, including financial. When he had told my parents that he was planning to study agriculture, my father said, “You mean to say, Mr. T, you can go to college to learn how to be a
farmer
?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Bronson. There's a whole school of agriculture
in Knoxville specially for us bumpkins who want to learn the best ways to run a farm.”

But didn't T already know how to run his father's farm?

Of course, he did. But he was aiming for more. “I'm fixing to run a big farm someday and learn about government programs and whatall. Hicks like me are going to do big business on the farm one of these days, wait and see.”

My father had at last started to understand—putting business practices to farming made sense to him—but my mother had gone on scoffing, convinced it was just another bizarre Gentile plan. “You want to farm,” she said privately, “you put some seeds in the ground and wait till they come up. Or you get a bucket and go milk some cows. But a farmer going to college? Can one
tokhes
”—one backside—“sit and stand at the same time?”

“Mama, for pity's sake!” Miriam would say. “You think all anybody should be is an old doctor or lawyer!”

My mother tried to deny this. After all, she would say, Joey wanted to be an engineeer, and had she told him no? And “Bertha's Murray” (my first cousin, once removed) was going to be an accountant, and “I'm not stopping him neither.” She thought to close it out. “Farmers going to college! Foolish!”

But Miriam was the one who had the last word. “You won't understand anything in a million years! You just keep thinking everything has to be the way it is with
Jews!
”

I
n preparation for the party, the front room was stripped down to essentials. Rugs had been rolled up and carried to other rooms and furniture had been relocated, so except for the radio and Victrola, the front room was bare. When grape juice punch and sandwiches and cookies had been set up on the table in the breakfast nook and my father had retreated to Joey's room, the house stood ready.

Having been warned to make my presence all but invisible,
I stationed myself—along with T-Dog, the puppy T had given me from his Peggy's litter—just inside the hall. From there T-Dog and I could peek out and watch the “flappers” and the “sheiks.”

I had learned from Miriam that the word
flapper
came from the fad of wearing unbuckled galoshes, so that when the girls walked, their galoshes “flapped” around their ankles. When I asked about
sheik
, she said, “Think.”

I thought. “Rudolph Valentino!” The sheik!

“I 'clare if you ain't the smartest thing!” Miriam said, already putting on her party personality.

As my mother had predicted, the girls were dressed “fit to kill,” as the lingo in Miriam's crowd would have it. Their frocks were mostly of silk, though sometimes of chiffon, georgette, or satin. Beads, feathers, and ribbons perched on heads, encircled hips, cascaded down fronts, balanced on shoe toes. Bronson's notions counter—and no doubt Dalrymple-Eaton's—was always picked clean by Friday afternoon.

Though nobody asked me, I decided Miriam was the most “smashing,” the current word for truly outstanding. This was not surprising, as Miriam was still going to St. Louis and returning with all the latest. On this night she was wearing a yellow silk dress with spaghetti straps and a beaded bodice and a very short, very swoopy hem. “The bees' knees,” she had pronounced it.

The only fashion Miriam resisted was that of the flat bosom. Whereas most of the girls who had anything in that area swaddled themselves to give that day's desirable boyish look, Miriam would have none of it. She lectured often on “bazooms,” the word shortened among her friends to “zooms.” “Tacky,” she pronounced. “It's downright tacky. I'd never wear an old bedsheet around my zooms just to be a slave of fashion. Lord, if you have the brains of a squash, you know that boys like girls whose zooms do something, not just lie there like some old cow flop.”

Party procedure was ritualized. The boys threw their hats on a bedroom dresser, advanced into the front room, stood in a
clump across the room from the girls, and snickered. When one of the boys finally broke ranks and asked one of the girls to dance, the party began.

It surprised me not at all that the boys fought over the next dance with Miriam, as she had a reputation as a wonderful dancer. She had begun bringing dances home from St. Louis, and she and Lizzie Maud always exchanged what they knew.

One interesting thing about the Saturday night parties was what the attendees did with the Vic. They'd wind it tight as it would go to produce rhythms so dizzying that the dancers would fall down just trying to keep up. This happened more and more as the night went on.

While I was stashed in the corner of the bathroom, I found out why. One of the girls came in and said that somebody had spiked the punch, and another said yes, she had seen Earl Hedrick with a jar of white lightning. “Reckon he made some Purple Jesus,” she said, “Purple Jesus” being what grape juice punch spiked with moonshine was called.

When Miriam came in, I informed her that somebody had spiked the punch. Miriam already knew. “And don't you dare tell Mama,” she told me.

I went back to my observation post. I looked at T and tried to see him as the other girls did. He seemed definitely handsome though too fair and snub-nosed to be a true sheik. Also, true sheiks danced, and T didn't. Tonight he was either fooling around with the radio or reading one of Joey's
Popular Mechanics
, which was still being delivered to the house. Then I saw Miriam go over to him and order him to dance.

T stopped what he was doing. There was a shyness about him that I had never seen before. “Reckon I don't know how,” he said.

“Then I'll teach you,” Miriam said.

“You don't want to take time to do that,” T said. “You'll send all these boys into a fit.”

Miriam laughed and said, “They'll bear up.”

T put his magazine down on the radio table and put his
arms out. Miriam called out for somebody to put on something slow and took his hands.

“Box step,” Miriam said to T, propelling him around to a record of someone singing, “Because of you/The skies are blue/Be-lov-ed, Be-lov-ed . . .”

T was holding her as if she were a china doll. Miriam looked at the space between them and said, “I'm not going to shatter.”

I watched while T brought her to him. And I watched while he brought her closer and closer until he had her tight in his arms. And then Miriam put her head on his shoulder. When some boy came up to cut, she shook her head.

Miriam had stopped propelling him around and just went where he went. Her head never left his shoulder, except when they had to separate at the end of a number; and when another began, T took her in his arms again. They were still dancing after everybody had gone. It certainly looked to me as if Miriam and T had become sweethearts. But this was something else I kept to myself.

My mother noticed on her own. That following Monday morning T came to the house and walked Miriam to school. Soon he was doing this every day. It got so that instead of being with the gang, he and Miriam came home by themselves and stayed on the front porch or took a walk after T's football practice. On Saturday afternoons, they went to the picture show by themselves.

My mother finally asked Miriam, “You got no friends but T?”

“I have plenty of
friends
, Mama. If you're asking me do I have any other
beaus
, the answer is no.”

My mother looked as if she wanted to say something, but she didn't say it.

My mother stayed acutely aware of Miriam and T. There was no way to miss what was happening. When T went away to college, every day a letter came in from him for Miriam, and every day a letter went out from her.

One day in the kitchen my mother looked at the calendar with the picture of the little girl with eyes as big and dark as mud pies over the words
TRAYNOR'S HARDWARE, EVERYTHING FROM A WASHER TO A WHEELBARROW
, and saw there an encircled date. She was sure it had to do with Miriam. More important, did it also have something to do with T?

She came into our bedroom to find out. Miriam was writing. “Who you writing to?” my mother asked Miriam, already knowing the answer. Who did Miriam write to if not T?

Miriam didn't look up from her letter. “T, of course.”

“What do you have to tell him you write so many letters?”

“Oh, you know, Mama. We have lots to tell each other. You know, odds and ends.”

“You write so much odds and ends, what about your homework?”

This was not quite fair. My sister had never been keen on homework, and her new relationship with T had little to do with whether she was more or less keen. “Mama, what on earth are you fussing about?”

“I'm
fussing
about the mark on the calendar.” What was so important that Miriam had to remind herself so early?

It was a party weekend at the University of Tennessee. And it
was
important, at least to the girls who had been invited and perhaps even more important to those who
hadn't
. “It's something at U.T.,” Miriam said. “A couple of the girls are going.”

“So?”

“So I'm going, too.”

My mother assumed battle posture. “Girls fourteen years old going by themselves? And boys and their
dates
there all alone? I never heard from such a thing.”

“I know you haven't. But I want to go.”

“What you want and what will be are two entire different questions,” my mother said, sounding just like my Aunt Sadie.

As the U.T. weekend approached, there was open warfare—
shouted words and slamming doors. My mother's resolution hardened. In the kitchen fixing biscuits one day, she hoped she was saying the final word: “You're not going and that's that.”

“Why can't I?” Miriam shouted. “Give me one good reason! That's all I ask—one good reason!”

“One good reason is I say so! That's good reason enough!”

M
y father probably had paid little attention to the clashes that had been taking place in our house. Remembering the battles among the
mishpocheh
he had lived with in the Bronx, he would have dismissed it as simply what families “do.” And of course it
was
an example of what families “do,” except that with my mother and Miriam there was always something extra. Was it generational? Geograpical—Russia pitted against America? New York versus the South? Religious—Jewish versus Name It? Whatever it was, my mother didn't go to my father with this latest complaint.

But a case could easily be made that my mother was more worried about Miriam (and me) “dating” Gentiles and then
marrying
them than she had been about Joey being bar mitzvahed. Bar mitzvahs came and went, but marriages came, didn't go, were always on view and open to judgment. People should see that one of her daughters was married to a
Gentile? Sadie
should see? My mother carried with her the memory of the Jewish girl in her shtetl who had wanted to marry a Russian. She always remembered the cries of “Over my dead body!” and “I'll see you dead first!” and the other alarums in which the ultimate penalty was always invoked. And
oy
, the talk that went on. There had also been the Jewish boy in her Bronx building who had actually
married
his shiksa. Hadn't the family carried on like people gone crazy with grief, to the extent that a kaddish, a prayer for the dead, had been said in shul for the son? My mother remembered it all.

A
s for Seth's successor in the store, it was Mary Hyams, who had worked in the Oliphant store. Mary Hyams was relaxed and jolly, a good thing in a person who had to put up with Vedra Broome butting in on sales and claiming half-commission.

On her part Vedra confided often that Mary was not up to snuff. My father listened, nodded, and went on undisturbed. Business was so good, he had no time to worry about Vedra Broome and her “cockamamie stories.” My father said, “She's like a
grager
, that one.”

As I found out, a
grager
was a stick attached to a toothed wheel. It could make a terrible noise. During the holiday of Purim, the children took them to shul, and in the reading of the Book of Esther, whenever Haman the Wicked was mentioned, they would go into impassioned
grager
twirling. Yes, Vedra Broome was a
grager
.

My father was indeed too busy to bother with Vedra's grievances. Times were good, Bronson's was flourishing. The factory men came in regularly to pay their bills, and the farmers did the same. If some were short because of other, more important
bills—the doctor or the farm-supply store—my father waved them away and said they were good for it.

Occasionally my father nudged, and once he dunned. This happened with an old landholder living way out in the country who had made his only purchase early on, airily calling out afterward, “Just send me a bill.” Although my father didn't send out bills, he humored the old recluse, only to learn that it was the man's custom to heap all his bills in a top drawer of a chifforobe and each month fish one out randomly for payment. When Bronson's bill never came up a lucky pluck, my father went out to see him. On this one and only visit, the man greeted him by waving his fist and shouting, “You listen here to me, Bronson, if you don't stop your all-fired pesterin', I ain't goin' to put your goddamned bill in the goddamned drawer atall!”