Up From Orchard Street (19 page)

Jack walked Lil to the door of the employment office on the second floor of Saks. He had prepared a fact sheet with my mother’s name, including her maiden name, her date of birth, her address and phone number in Yonkers, the year she graduated from Seward Park High School and the years she worked at Palace Fashions and Missy Modes.

He didn’t prompt her very much—it would serve to confuse her. Besides, he believed in the proverb “The face sells the merchandise.” And she had the face in spades.

Still, he could sense that her confidence was faltering as he left her. Retracing his steps, he assured her again, “I’ll be outside on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk, waiting. Your appointment is with Miss Sullivan. You’ll do great. Very uptown.” Uptown was the code word for “not too Jewish.”

Jack longed for coffee but he would not leave his post. He stood there and chain-smoked the entire hour.

Lil emerged radiant. “My handwriting was very neat, and, Jack, you know the questions you asked me, why I wanted the job and where I buy my clothes? My answers were perfect. She asked what days I would be available, so I said whenever they needed me, even Sunday. That was my only mistake. Miss Sullivan, this cold fish, she answers, ‘We’re not open on Sunday.’ Of course I was thinking of Division Street. And another thing, I crossed my legs at the knees but she didn’t mind. She asked me if I could learn the stock fast and I said yes, she asked if I kept up with the latest fashions and I said yes. What did she take me for, the wife of a plumber?”

“Did she say if she hired you?”

“Oh, no! She said I would hear from them. Not when, not how, just I would hear from her and thank you for coming. I said ‘Thank you’ and that was that.” She pressed my father’s hand. “I didn’t do too bad. What do you think?”

“I think we should have coffee. There’s a Schrafft’s a few blocks from here.”

“Jack, we shouldn’t spend the money. We need it for Connecticut.”

“The extra few cents won’t make or break us and why should we eat at a diner today?” His interpretation of the interview was that she would not hear from Saks again. Her interpretation was that she had the job.

“Listen,” Jack reminded her, “after the coffee we’ll have a nice long walk to Miss Sussman’s studio. We’ll return the hat and I want to look the place over.”

My mother asked plaintively, “Do I really have to return it? Miss Sussman gave it to me.”

“Lil, don’t be foolish. She told you to return it after the interview and you will.”

“But why? I love this hat. She probably has a dozen more. And since when did you become Honest Abe?”

“Since I want to look her and the studio over. Besides, you won’t wear the hat again. You’re going with the cows and chickens for the summer. The teacher came all the way to our house and didn’t ask for money, not even for her subway fare. Lil, you have to learn to be classy. You want to work at Saks, act like it.”

Much as she wanted to keep the hat, much as she believed her desire justified it, she didn’t argue with Jack on matters of class. He was the mentor, she the student. They walked over to Seventh Avenue and slowly down Broadway. Tears came to her eyes at the prospect of renouncing the hat that she cherished for the moment. Aunt Bertha, who wore hats daily, would provide Lil with any hat in her closet, but Lil wanted this one because she associated it with the interview at Saks.

They found Miss Sussman’s studio in a building with a sign that read Art Studios. Inside the small hallway with hexagonal tiles in the floor, a notice board listed Sussman Drama Studio as 1A, easily reached by a slow-moving elevator. Neither of them had thought to call in advance. Jack rang and when silence followed, Lil’s spirits lifted. Maybe she could keep the hat after all. Then Miss Sussman opened the door.

In my father’s assessment, she was a
meiskite,
a homely one, too small, too dark, too lacking in sex appeal for him to contemplate how he could improve her appearance. The studio, with a window on noisy Broadway, contained a piano, a small stage and several cheap folding chairs. Posters from Broadway plays—he recognized Gertrude Lawrence in Noël Coward’s
Private Lives
—decorated the walls.

My mother handed over the hat with what graciousness she could muster. “Thank you for lending it to me. And this is my husband, Jack Roth. He’s the manager of a ladies’ retail store.”

My father nodded at the poster. “I saw that play.”

Miss Sussman smiled broadly. She had been tidying the studio. Her forehead glistened with sweat. My father rarely lost an opportunity to impress women, even one as unimpressive as Miss Sussman. “The theater and concerts, they keep me busy when the family is away,” he offered. “This summer they’ll be in Connecticut.” The concerts referred to the ones he attended at Lewisohn Stadium with Uncle Jack Simon. They would kill a Sunday night sitting on the cold steps of the stadium, seeking young attractive women with whom they could kibbitz and possibly score.

“Do you like classical music?” she inquired.

“I’m bored to death with Chy-kow-sky’s ‘Refrain from Spitting.’ ”

The smile left Miss Sussman’s face.

“I beg your pardon.”

My father hated the implied rebuff from this oily-skinned drama teacher whom he doubted ever had a good lay in her life.

“Nothing, a street joke, not worth repeating.” It irritated Jack that he had been caught in a smart-aleck crack that didn’t go over uptown. Miss Sussman shifted gears.

“I’ll be in touch with you in September.”

“If the class is on Saturday,” Jack pointed out, “we’ll send my daughter with our cab driver. I don’t let her ride in the subway alone and my wife and I are at business.”

“I look forward to working with her.”

“The pleasure is mutual.” Jack prided himself on the way he closed a sale. He took equal pride in closing the conversation with Miss Sussman.

Still, this did not keep him from feeling out of sorts. There were only a few coins jingling in his handsome summer suit, and he had put a great deal of effort into the morning of my mother’s interview; with little to show for it. Once home, he searched the mailbox for his unemployment insurance check. Not there. At loose ends, he called Uncle Jack at his office on Maiden Lane where he did hand engraving for wedding invitations. “Tell me,” my father asked, “what’s wrong with saying ‘I’m bored to death with Chy-kow-sky’s “Refrain from Spitting” ’?”

“In the first place, it’s Chy-kov-sky pronounced with a
v,
not a
w
. In the second, it’s a mark of ignorance to make a bad joke about a famous work. It’s uncouth.”

“Uncouth? What did you do, swallow a dictionary?”

“Jack, you’re having a bad day.”

He was. He consoled himself with the idea that Lil was rid of Saks Fifth Avenue forever, though he confided to Rocco that she would be a steady extra for the fall season. The word spread across the Italian and Jewish quarters within hours. My mother accepted congratulations with due modesty, because why would Jack say such a thing if it wasn’t going to happen? Dr. Scott Wolfson complimented her, too, saying the job would make her summer in Connecticut. It did.

The week before we left for Connecticut, Aunt Bea traveled to Orchard Street to buy overalls and short-sleeved shirts for Lenny and cotton jumpers or pinafores for Alice. Aunt Bea pointed out to my mother that each child needed two pairs of overalls, one that could be washed while the other was in use. My mother widened her eyes at such extravagance. “One overall is plenty,” she remarked.

Nor would she budge when it came to buying me some pinafores for the evening. She had her own ideas. I tried on my dresses from the summers before that she hoped to restore for another season. She attached a yard of lace to the short hems. I was wearing one of them when Ada Levine came to pick up Lil to go shoe-shopping. She regarded me in this apparition of a dress and said, “That one looks like a lampshade.” Bubby flushed and the vein in her neck beat visibly.

“Lil,” Bubby said, “for once Ada is right. How could you send your child for dinner at a hotel in that narad?”

“On Alice it would look lovely,” replied Lil.

The physical characteristics of her children remained a source of continuing grief to my mother. She of the ravishing legs had children with knobby knees, no curve to their calves and thighs as puny as lead pipes. Willy, under the encouragement of Dr. Wolfson, declared that he wouldn’t wear shorts. I caught the pain in my mother’s eyes when I wore them. Standing in the dress with the wobbly lace hem, I didn’t bother to glance down—I could visualize my shapeless legs.

“All right,” my mother sighed, “take it off.” She opened a box of odds and ends of material saved for such purposes—too small in size to make anything for herself, large enough for one or two jumpers.

It should be said on my mother’s behalf that she could cut freehand, with no pattern, any outfit she had in mind. She found scraps of cotton material, took her shears and cut out two shifts, basted one quickly, and had me try it on. Then Ada interrupted her by asking, “Are you going for shoes or not?” My mother wanted a low-heeled summer sandal for walking on unpaved country roads. She said, “We’ll finish this later,” and left me standing in this tentlike garment as she and Ada dashed out.

Except when we went to bed, our kitchen door stood open all day during summer—not for air but for easy access to the street and for sociability. We were the first to view who came and went, whether it was the matchmaker for Mrs. Feldman or the Polish Mrs. Rosinski with her bundle of men’s pants. Summers were Mrs. Rosinski’s high season, and every morning she walked to the factory in Chinatown and returned with dozens of unfinished men’s trousers.

I was standing in our kitchen in the unfinished tent dress when Mrs. Rosinski came up the stairs, huffing and lugging her two sets of trousers. She left one package at our threshold, and climbed on up, resting at each floor, until she reached her tiny immaculate apartment. When she came back down to collect the package, she and Bubby chatted in several languages, mixing them up like a heady exotic stew. The “two Mrs. R.s,” as I called them, spoke a bit of Russian, Polish, Yiddish, English, and understood each other perfectly. A glance at me in the basted sleeveless dress made her beckon me to come with her. “I gefinish,” she said to Bubby, and holding the second unfinished pinafore in her hand, Mrs. R. and I plodded up to the fifth floor.

At the side of her sewing machine she had contrived a makeshift series of shelves. From the top shelf she took a Louis Sherry tin that Bubby had given her, which had her needles and pins arranged on a blue velvet lining, possibly a gift from Orloff. Speaking to me in multilingual phrases, she quickly pinned the sides of the pinafore and the hem of the skirt. Her skin was ashen, and the dried sweat under her armpits gave off a scent like the bottom of Bubby’s mead barrel, but saw her narrow face radiated happiness as she pinned the dress.

In her bedroom—empty but for an iron bed and an overhead light — she located a towel, gray and threadbare, and covered my shoulders after she removed the dress. I watched her sew, marveling at her stitches, each tiny and exactly the same size as she pulled the thread through, her hands fluttering over the material like birds. She sewed the sides of the dress by machine. The top straps and the hem were hand-stitched so fine that a single stitch would have been the envy of any expert.

Then she retrieved a set of tiny wooden hoops from another box, and clamped them close to the neckline. From threads of every color, she chose red, deftly sewed the outline of a strawberry, and filled it with a hooked stitch that raised the height of the embroidery. She moved the hoops from place to place until the entire bodice of the dress was covered with red strawberries, one smaller than the next. “Like?” she asked.

To prevent myself from crying, I gave her kisses identical to the ones for Bubby, ten on each cheek and then one on her parched mouth. She hugged me with delight. “Go you,” she replied, and I skipped down the flights of stairs to show my embroidered jumper to Bubby. “Isn’t it beautiful? I mean the strawberries, and you can’t imagine how fast she does it. I gave her a thousand kisses, that was all I had.”

The following morning she brought down the shift I had left with her and a new dress with puffed sleeves. Where or how she came by the material—whether she had it in a drawer in her house or she bought it for me—we never inquired. But there it was, small red and white checks with a stitch called faggoting across the chest, large perfectly spaced stitches, each one following the other like birds resting on high wires. The collar and the trim at the edge of the puffed sleeves were white and the hem had perfect cross-stitches. Mrs. R. stood there watching me, her face as golden as the summer light on one of her religious pictures. Without shame I took off my nightgown and slipped the dress over my head, afraid to move lest I spoil this perfect moment. Bubby applauded.

Finally, it was the night before we were to leave on vacation. Lying in bed with Bubby, my belongings all packed, I couldn’t close my eyes.

“Vus tract du?”

By then, everything had jumbled together in my mind: the vacation, the separation from Bubby, the prospect of not seeing Dr. Wolfson for three weeks, Clayton’s disappearance, my always-present fears for Bubby’s health. What I blurted out came without bidding: “Bubby, are you sorry about Mister Elkin?”

“How sorry?”

“That he left in such a hurry? Did you want to go away with him?”

“Ich vayst nisht.”

“Whenever I ask you about him you say, ‘I don’t know.’ Why do you say that?”

“Because I don’t know.”

“How could you not know?”

“I loved him long ago. Later you can’t remember if it was a dream, a fantasia, a story you made up in your head.”

“But when you saw him again, what did you think?”

“Right away, it started with kissing. Who could think? I can’t answer. It went too fast. My lips were wet with his kisses when he rushed to leave me because I said ‘detective.’ He didn’t like that. Maybe I thought of him as a swindler, a common thief, a man with secrets, maybe with two families, not one. It happens, in this life it happens.”