Up From Orchard Street (28 page)

I held Bubby’s hand tightly as we walked into the dining room and her entrance created a buzz of rumors equal to the occasion.

“Have you heard, Manya Roth was an actress in the Jewish theater. Estelle told us.”

“No, it’s the young one, the daughter, she sang in the movies.”

“Manya’s husband, he died young, he was a famous writer.”

“No! Was he a Bolshevik?”

“They came to America way before. From his youth he published poetry.”

“So how did she come to be a chef?”

“You can’t make a living from poetry.”

“I thought she was an actress. She must have been. You can’t take your eyes off her.”

“But those grandchildren! How come they have no looks?”

“Maybe they’re adopted. Maybe they’re refugees from Europe, they’re so skinny. That must be it. Adoption.”

“You saw the little girl with her grandmother? She calls her ‘Bubby.’ That’s no adoption.”

“You heard about that girl? She never eats, she only reads.”

Had my parents been listening, they would have denied nothing. They accepted whatever story was told about them, relished, embroidered, exaggerated it.

For this special dinner the med students and Maurey dressed in white shirts and black trousers. They carried out the huge challahs on broad planks, ordinarily used as table extensions. They marched around the dining area to rounds of applause. Three vast poached salmons followed, on platters surrounded by red marinated beets topped with hard-boiled egg slices.

Lil, Bubby and I had worked in the kitchen explaining how each individual plate should be presented. Years as Bubby’s assistant made Lil a pro at arranging dishes. Possibly when the guests viewed the whole salmons they assumed them to be part of the New England dinner. But they couldn’t ignore the beets, or the glistening sauce that I called “Holland sauce,” or the pureed split peas that accompanied this first course.

The three helpers—Margie, Mrs. Gladkowski and the dark-skinned Belinda—each crossed herself as the servings went out into the dining room. Lil and Bubby prepared the first half dozen plates; after that the assistants did their best to imitate our style, with Bubby poking a finger here, adjusting the sauce there, and Lil wiping the edges of the dishes with clean white towels.

Sweat poured from Mr. Pankin’s face and dampened his white shirt as he repeated over and over again, “Small portions, small portions, they’re not expecting too much food.” After the fish course, each entrée plate held one stuffed cabbage, two slices of brisket, a well of kasha and natural gravy, and one glorious mashed-potato pancake. Bubby, Lil and I slipped back to the dining room but not before Bubby emptied two gallons of fresh fruit compote into bowls and arranged one plateful of strudel and rugulach for each table.

I can’t say with certainty that I ate anything. Mr. Pankin wanted to add his tomato slices to the fare, which Bubby vetoed. Nor did it bother her that the guests slathered the challah with butter and dipped it into the meat gravy. Many demanded seconds of the stuffed cabbage and brisket. Not a scrap of food remained in the kitchen.

To complement the dessert, Maurey and Hal brought out bottles of port wine and Maurey did the honor of the toast. “To chef Manya. No meal in France could equal this.” He then played “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” on the piano.

Jack helped Bubby to her feet. She stood in her white lace blouse, her long blue silk skirt, her Cartier comb, and nodded her head from side to side. Mr. Pankin, now in a fresh shirt, declared, “To one of the best meals we’ve had the privilege to serve.” Everyone clapped. Bubby continued to hold my hand as the guests crowded around to thank her for her cooking, for being a former actress, for having a writer for a husband, and a daughter/daughter-in-law who sang in the movies.

In the morning Estelle drove Bubby and me to the Book Barn. Because of the Labor Day weekend many people decided on the Barn as their destination, so it was impossible to browse or to have a sense of the enormity of the building with its thousands of books. A young man with long auburn hair sat on a wooden stool at the door absorbed in his own writing.

“He reminds me of my husband,” Bubby said.

“Was your husband a writer?” Estelle asked.

“When he wasn’t working or making love he wrote or read every minute. Those pintelach, those tiny black dots on the paper, were everything to him.”

We couldn’t navigate from aisle to aisle; the crowds as pushy as the Delancey Street Woolworth’s on Saturday. Estelle ushered us outside.

“Did you ever save anything your husband wrote?”

Bubby’s lovely black-and-white summer dress, her luminous face and white hair, were at odds with the sudden pause in conversation.

Eventually she responded, “Misha, my husband, was very sick and not having the hospital care he needed. Jack, my baby, was maybe six or seven months old. I left them together in bed and went to work. I was a baker’s helper.

“In the middle of the day I ran home. We lived on the fourth floor. I thought the sun was better for him on the top floor. I ran up the steps, three at a time. The door was never locked. The whole apartment was one big room with a bed and a gas burner for cooking. Misha was on his side, his face white. I thought he slept. But the baby was covered with blood, the papers on the bed, my husband’s writing, soaked in blood. He had a hemorrhage and died.”

I had not heard this part about his blood-soaked papers.

“How terrible, what a horror for you.”

“I couldn’t save one page of his writing. I couldn’t save my husband.”

The sun in Connecticut was brilliant. The sky, the trees, appeared fresh as a painted landscape. The light, the softness of the late summer air, Bubby in her dressy clothes, were a universe apart from the one she had described.

A delicate moment of silence elapsed. “It must have taken a long while to forget this tragedy.”

“Forget? Impossible. I try to put it in a small corner, like a box you hide with an ugly present in it. But when I’m cooking or baking, when it’s summer again, and the fruit is wonderful and walking in the street is wonderful, I turn to look for him, I feel him beside me, and at night when I can’t sleep . . .”

“And you didn’t consider remarrying?”

“Almost once. Almost lately. It wasn’t beshert. Also, I have four children. Jack and Lil, they are like a couple that’s keeping company. Grown up but not. Married with children, but not. Their children are my children. I raised them since they opened their eyes.”

“You’ve given your children everything.”

Bubby shrugged. We parked at the village square. Slowly, slowly, we walked around the green, the tearoom eliciting a passing glance. My conversation with her yesterday about moving to Connecticut need not have taken place.

“I think that I held my son back,” Bubby continued, following her own thoughts. “He wanted us to live together, to be together. Did you know that Lil came to me when she was sixteen? In all these years, not a bad word between us. She’s baked in my heart, like my own flesh.” She laughed ironically. “I don’t say blood—you know why.”

“How could you hold them back when you gave them so much freedom?”

“Maybe they would have done different work if they hadn’t worried so much about me and my restaurant. Jack especially. He’s very artistic, and shouldn’t be selling women’s clothes.”

“Fashion is very artistic.”

“Maybe he would be closer to the theater. He loves the theater. Sometimes in the winter when he has a cold or a sty on one eye, even then he doesn’t stay home on his day off but runs to the theater.”

To confirm this, Willy suddenly appeared, waving frantically. “Daddy is writing a play for tonight. He needs you. He wants you and Cousin Alice to sing and me to whistle. And he’s writing a song for the end of it.”

Estelle’s voice rose with disbelief. “In a few hours he’s going to whip up an entertainment?”

“He’s a brenfire.” Bubby laughed with satisfaction.

It wasn’t a play but a series of acts, a vaudeville that Jack prepared. He worked in the library, assigned the songs and dances. Maurey directed the rehearsal. Gabe and Ronny Glass, our other waiter, raced through the village inviting everyone to attend our show. They stopped off at Grey’s Hotel, which was expecting talent from the Catskills, and posted a notice in the lobby about our early entertainment.

In his professional script Jack had written down the order of the acts:

Jack: Intro

Girls: Button Up Your Overcoat

Lil: Still Get a Thrill

Med students: Lazy, I Want to Be Lazy

Original song by Jack: Another Year Is Coming

“Cousin Alice and Lil are with Maurey in the dining room,” Jack told me. “Do a run-through of ‘Button Up Your Overcoat.’ Just remember if you make a mistake, if you repeat the same line twice, keep on singing. No one will notice the difference. And forget those Eddy Cantor hand movements. This isn’t a minstrel show. Hands on hips or point to the audience when you say, ‘You’ll get a pain and ruin your tum tum.’ No matter how much people applaud, run offstage as soon as possible. Your mother is the star. We don’t want people tired before she comes on. You know, like vaudeville.”

For his stint as master of ceremonies, Jack selected a white-on-white shirt, open at the throat, and oxford gray pants. No tie, but hair slick as a seal.

“Good evening, ladies and gentleman, I’m Jack Roth and though I hate to begin with a complaint, I have to tell you what bothers me about Pankin’s Farm.” He held a cigarette between his right-hand fingers and ad-libbed the entire show, confident, urbane, relaxed as if he did this every night of the week.

He launched into the joke about getting two pieces of bread for dinner and asking for more. Reaching the punch line, where he explains that Mr. Pankin cuts an entire loaf in half to satisfy him, Jack threw away the question with expert casualness, “Pankin, tell me the truth, so why did you go back to two pieces of bread?”

The crowd in the dining room, the terraces and those listening via loud speakers on the lawn laughed and applauded. Jack went right on with the monologue. “So I say to Hal, a Harvard man, a nice college boy, ‘There’s a fly in my soup,’ and what do you think he answers— ‘What were you expecting, Fred Astaire in a top hat?’”

He nodded at Maurey who improvised on the piano while Jack announced, “The Pickle Sisters.” Maurey broke into “Button Up Your Overcoat.” Cousin Alice didn’t bother to open her mouth. She danced, she whirled, she tapped, she bounced her head back and forth without tiring. Jack had to waltz Alice off the stage. People in the audience remarked, “Are those girls cute or what? Not Shirley Temple, but adorable.”

Waiting for the commotion to subside, Jack lit a cigarette, inhaled slowly and announced, “The Star of Stars, Miss Lilyan, straight from theater halls of New York.”

My mother, in a smart, unadorned navy blue dress, her hair in a French knot, could have stepped into the spotlight from a cabaret. She walked to the piano, crossed her arms over her chest and through half-lidded eyes, her voice heaving with sobs, she slowly, slowly began,

“Oh I still . . . get a thrill . . . thinking of you, and I still feel your lips . . . kissing me too.” Jack stood to one side against the piano. Lil gazed at the audience sitting on folding chairs that reached from the dining room to the lawn. A hush fell over the crowd. After my number, I raced to sit beside Bubby. As Lil sang I silently mouthed the words. “I still remember . . . the night . . . under the moon . . . I recall that it all . . . ended too soon.”

She had been a brilliant student. “Although our love is gone . . . memories linger on . . . and I still get a thrill . . . thinking of you.”

Not a man in the area failed to fall in love with Lil, desire her, want and long for that thrill. Her encore, fast and peppy, was “It Had to Be You,” with the line, “For nobody else gives me a thrill / With all your faults dear, I love you still . . .” They screamed, whistled, clapped, stamped their feet.

The woman behind us exclaimed, “Didn’t I tell you she was an actress?”

Her friend replied, “The whole family is on the stage. Like the George Cohans.”

“That’s Jewish blood for you, full of talent.”

The med students came out with their pants rolled up, mops on their heads for wigs, cavorted around attempting to do the cancan, and fell to the floor singing, “Lazy, I want to be lazy.”

For the finale, they stood up along with Willy and formed a semicircle around Jack, who had written an original song that ended:

We’re on our way, we’re here to stay.
We’re gonna make whoop whoopee every day.
Another year is coming
And I don’t give a darn,
I’ll leave the wife and children
And come back to Pankin’s Farm.

Everyone joined in the singing, the guests learning the words by osmosis. They adored the line, “We’re gonna make whoop whoopee every day” and shouted it out repeatedly. They clapped until their hands were raw.

Bubby and I retreated to her cottage and we talked until dawn.

We had two aching disappointments. In the middle of the night Hal and Gabe set out for med school in Boston and Maurey for New Haven, and Estelle and Philip Sullivan left without saying good-bye.

Bubby drove home with the Simons at midmorning but we stayed until Labor Day. A special train went directly to Grand Central in New York, and Mr. Pankin drove us to the station. He handed over three fresh blueberry pies securely tied in boxes, and saw us to our seats. He gave each of us a card. Jack’s read, “Thanks for the unforgettable Pankin’s Follies—and much more,” and was signed by every one of the med students. Willy’s read, “The best whistler in this or any other state.” Mine said, “Complete set of Charles Dickens is yours.” Lil’s was from Estelle, “See you in New York.”

Mr. Pankin, tears in his eyes, explained hoarsely, “Three more things.” He kissed Lil on the right cheek. “From Hal.” He kissed her on the left: “From Gabe.” Smack on the lips. “From Maurey.” He ran the length of the car and waved as the train pulled out. For separate reasons, Lil and I cried all the way to New York.