Mitla Pass (38 page)

Richard was on his feet and yanking on the butler’s cord as though it were a fire alarm.

After the disastrous meal, made more so when Leah ordered liver and onions and there were none to be found, she made herself comfortable on a settee and turned the pages of the latest Jack London work, the novel
John Barleycorn,
with exacting slowness. Richard frowned when she lit a cigarette, but said nothing. He decided to let Leah have that one out with his mother, directly.

She looked over the top of the book to her badly disoriented husband. “Jack London,” Leah said, “stands for socialism and the working class. How many people does your father employ?”

“Including the department store—and we sell farm equipment and supplies, and there are some orchards, which are share-cropped—and the traveling peddlers and vendors ... I would say there are about fifty.”

“I suppose the word ‘union’ is a dirty word by you?”

“We don’t think about it too much on the Eastern Shore.”

“To say the least. They don’t even know the Civil War is over the way they treat the
shvartzers
on the Eastern Shore.”

“Don’t you think we ought to turn in, Leah. You know ... turn in?”

“You take a snooze, Richard. This book has me absolutely enthralled.”

Well past midnight, Richard Schneider still lay awake. When Leah had had her fill of Jack London, he could hear her move about, and this caused him to breathe audibly. He waited and waited, but she did not come to bed. Richard turned on the bedside lamp to see Leah sleeping on the chaise longue. He pulled himself together, flung off the quilt, and fell to his knees beside her.

“Leah,” he cried, “Leah!”

She stirred, ever so slightly. “Richard. You woke me up. I was in a deep sleep. You don’t wake someone up from a deep sleep shouting at them.”

“I want you!” he croaked, stroking her hair clumsily.

“Oh, my dear Richard. I am so sorry. I’m having my menstrual period. I have terrible cramps and my back doesn’t feel good, either. Why, Richard, your face is soaking wet with perspiration. You shouldn’t have such a look in your eyes. You look like a madman.”

B
Y THE FIFTH NIGHT
, Richard was exhausted from the lack of sleep. Erma remarked several times about how badly her son looked, but Morris knew what was what.

“They’re honeymooners,” Morris said; “a little too much nooky.”

“Morris! Don’t use that revolting word!”

“Lovemaking,” he corrected.

Richard had a silent dinner with his parents. Leah was under the weather, again. When the meal was done, Richard stormed up to his suite, entered angrily, and slammed the bedroom door behind him. “I can’t stand it any longer!” he shouted.

“You’re so impetuous.”

“I demand my husbandly rights!”

“Richard, I’m still not well.”

“You are! I checked.”

“You did what?”

“I checked the trash can in the bathroom.”

“Oh my God, that’s disgusting.”

“Just which one of us is being disgusting?”

Leah wept very softly. “You have to understand, I’m quite delicate, Richard.”

“I realize that. But ... but after all, we’re married. ... Please don’t cry, Leah, please don’t.”

When the bedroom was darkened, Leah slipped beneath the covers filled with determination now to get through this experience, not only without being hurt, but holding the upper hand. Leah removed her nightgown and waited.

Richard groped for her and, upon touching actual flesh, completely lost control. “Oh my God,” he repeated, as his hands found breasts and buttocks, “oh my God!”

Leah strung it out. She waited ... waited ... encouraged a bit ... then held him back. He was going completely wild. As suddenly as he had begun, he stopped, then started crying.

“Oh, Richard,” she said, “you’ve made a mess all over the sheets. Oh, it’s awful ... awful ... shame, shame, shame.” She threw off the covers, ran into the bathroom, and slammed and bolted the door.

Richard rolled over in agony, grabbing the sheets and shaking with anger and mortification.

E
ACH NIGHT FOR
the balance of the honeymoon, there was a variation of the same theme: attempt without success. Leah fine-tuned each occasion to force him into an exterior ejaculation and then capitulation without actual consummation.

After each crushing setback for Richard, Leah felt a swell of victory. It came as a relief for him to know that the honeymoon would soon be over and he could return to the familiar surroundings of the store in Salisbury.

In the end, he no longer attempted to make love to her, but fell quickly asleep from an accumulation of weariness and medication. While he slept, Leah found contentment watching him thrash, again unable to perform. Leah knew a sensation of fulfillment she had never known.

The annulment came six months later. Most of that time Leah had spent with her mother in Baltimore. Hannah knew, Hannah consoled, Hannah had been right about men all along. In order to avoid a public scandal, or the airing of Leah’s charges that Richard was impotent, the Schneiders gave up their claims for repayment of the contract money in view of the “damage” done to Leah’s fragile psyche.

After the annulment papers were signed, Erma seized the wardrobe and four Gladstone bags. Leah returned to her mother’s flat as impoverished as when she had gone.

1917–1918

WAR! WAR! WAR! WAR!

Leah checked the mailbox in the vestibule when she heard the shriek from upstairs, unmistakably the voice of her mother.

“Gevalt! Vay iss mir! Got in himmel!”
Hannah cried in unabashed anguish. “God in heaven! Have mercy!”

Leah ran up the steps and flung open the door to see her mother on the overstuffed sofa, being ministered to by Fanny and Pearl with cold compresses to the forehead.

“Momma!” Leah cried. “What happened?”

“My heart! My heart!” Hannah wept, bouncing between Yiddish and English.

“Will somebody tell me what’s going on!”

That no good shmuck of a brother!” Fanny pointed to Lazar, who, with Uncle Hyman, cowered near the upright piano.

“He enlisted in the Navy!” Pearl cried.

“A thirty-year-old man with bad eyes and a weak back. What do they need him for, a cripple’s brigade?” Hannah said, coming to a sitting position. “So, you’re going so you should join your brother, Saul, in the ground?” Upon mentioning the deceased, Hannah went into another cycle of wailing.

“Shame!” Leah joined the chorus of banshees. “Shame, shame, shame.”

“Momma,” Lazar said, trying to wedge in a sentence edgewise. “I have a very special profession which is badly needed. It’s not like I’m going to be a foot soldier.”

“Need!” Leah shouted. “So maybe the great American Navy needs you more than your mother and sisters?
Nu,
be a great big mister hero and leave us here to starve.”

“Gevalt!”
Hannah wailed.

“Nobody under this roof is going to starve,” Uncle Hyman interrupted as he pounded a proud hand on Lazar’s shoulder.

“He’s half blind,” Hannah said.

“As my personal contribution to the war effort, I will continue to pay Lazar’s salary to you, Hannahile. If I so much as miss a single paycheck, my name is not Hyman Diamond.”

When the choir of rebuttals had simmered down, Uncle Hyman continued. “And what is more, you have my sincere word of honor that when this boy returns from the war, I will establish him in his own drugstore.”

“And what if he doesn’t return, or what if he comes back in a basket without arms and legs?”

“Or without eyes?”

“Or shell-shocked?”

“Enough, dammit!” Lazar snapped with an authority they were not used to. He walked over to Hannah and squeezed her shoulder firmly. “I’m going, Momma,” he said softly; “that’s all there is to it.”

F
OR THE FIRST
time in its American experience, the Jewish population was sizable enough to respond to a national call to arms, and for the first time since biblical days the Jews had a country they loved fiercely. They were swept up by the war fever.

The initial hysteria of the Balaban women was soon transformed, like a miracle, into a feeling of thundering patriotism. A little pennant with a blue star was hung in the shop window, denoting a home with a son in the armed forces.

Lazar’s photograph went up on the mantel in a place of honor, next to that of his brother, Saul. Lazar had, at last, won both liberation and lionization and was now the object of endless bragging, the new glory of his sisters and adopted mother.

Because Lazar had a profession much in demand, he was awarded the instant rank of Chief Pharmacist’s Mate. He was immediately assigned to a hastily formed medical detachment of a few hundred naval physicians, surgeons, enlisted pharmacists’ mates, and hospital apprentices, who were to establish a medical service for the Marine Corps, a small elite prewar force of fewer than ten thousand men.

A brigade consisting of the 5th and 6th Marine regiments was rushed to France in the vanguard of the American Expeditionary Force. The Marines were the soldiers of destiny, preordained to make up in valor what they lacked in numbers in some of the bloodiest and vital battles of the war.

The moment he boarded the crowded troopship
Henderson,
Lazar Balaban felt, for the first time in his life, a sense of freedom. He was free of his detested father, free of the red-necked bigotry that had killed his brother, and free of the Balaban women.

To most of his mates, the war was the answer to boyish dreams of high adventure and the stuff of spellbinding romance. Tough, apple-cheeked young men, untouched by the decades of warfare the Europeans endured, had come fresh off the farms and cities of a largely rural and unsophisticated country.

France! My God! France meant women ... POON ... doing it in the French way, whatever that meant. They listened to the nightly bull sessions of magically woven tales rendered by the old-time Marines who had been on the Shanghai detail and the Yangtze patrol.

For a young and naïve America, which had never engaged in a great international conflict, it was the end of innocence.

By mid-1917 the 6th Regiment had landed in St. Nazaire. The boys were so hyped up, they could not see the awful realities that lay beyond.

W
HEN
L
EAH EMBARKED
on her ill-fated marriage to Richard Schneider, Hannah used the contract money to take out a long-term lease on a building with a shop front on Fayette Street. Not only was the location more desirable for business, it afforded them living quarters such as they had never had. Hannah and Leah had private bedrooms for the first time in their lives, and look, such things existed ... a separate living room with a genuine mohair sofa.

The Balaban women fell into lockstep with the war effort. Jobs in the garment industry, once scorned for their raw exploitation and working conditions, now became attractive and well paying. A former notorious sweatshop, Ginzburg Brothers, won a lucrative contract for making Army uniforms. The factory near the Camden Station of the B&O Railroad was only a skip and a holler away from their home. Leah and Fanny went to work as seamstresses at double peacetime pay.

Pearl, the youngest, found a fabulous job as a welder in the shipyards at Sparrows Point, so they were able to afford a full-time
shvartze
to keep the house. The Balaban coffers tinkled, another first.

There were numerous military installations about Baltimore, including a major overseas staging center at Camp Meade. Jewish soldiers and sailors on liberty found their way to the two synagogues on Lloyd Street and a nearby servicemen’s canteen, and they were taken in and adopted by the community. The Balaban sisters got their share. With the war on and the large number of Jewish boys in uniform as a rationalization, the Balaban rage against the male species was suspended for the duration. There were nightly dances at the canteen and the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, where the sisters could usually get the pick of the litter.

The Balaban house on Fayette Street was open to the boys and the table was filled with Jewish dishes so they wouldn’t forget home. Although some foods were difficult to find, Hannah was an old-time
balabosta
and could always put something together from the vast Lexington Street Market, and her baking sent out an aroma of welcome.

Each Tuesday she closed the shop early and baked past midnight. Wednesday morning found her at the Central Post Office to mail a dozen or so packages overseas. Some fifty of her “boys” got at least one package a month. Their letters were read aloud, over and over, and their photographs lined an entire wall.

Fanny never got much better at the piano, but some improvement was bound to result from the nightly songfests. Bittersweet time. So they came through, Jewish boys from as far away as Texas and Alabama, and they went off to war with a lovely memory of Baltimore.

Since her exercise with Richard Schneider, Leah had grown bolder in setting the initial bait for men. Yet as each relationship unfolded, it began to take on a repetitious pattern. The deliberate lure, the pleasant romance—which Leah drank in as flattery of her beauty—a serious turn, and then, disaster: arguments, confusion, and a bulwark thrown up against further advances. In the end, Momma always turned out to be right about men.

During the war, the Balaban home was an enlisted man’s domain. The Jewish officers belonged to the uptown German Jews. Rank begat rank. That was why Lieutenant Joseph Kramer of Joplin, Missouri, was a marked man when he stepped into the B’nai Israel Synagogue.

Never mind that Fanny saw him first. Leah, with her honed skills, snatched Joe from her sister with vampish boldness. Fanny never fully forgave her sister for years, but her initial pain was tempered when she became serious about a fellow of her own.

Leah reckoned that Alan Singer was more suited for her sister Fanny, anyhow. Al was a nice boy from Cleveland. Before he was drafted, he worked for his father, a small painting subcontractor. That was plenty good for Fanny, who wasn’t exactly a knockout, but rather basic, dull, and giggly. Al was two cents plain, down on Fanny’s level. Anyhow, they made each other laugh a lot. Leah’s conscience was clear.