Up From Orchard Street (3 page)

The enlarged room became an asset and Weinstock took the credit for the idea. At first jealously flared among the neighbors because Manya had the largest living room in the building, but they all agreed that her restaurant brought class and distinction to everyone who lived at 12 Orchard Street. Eventually the talk about the enlarged room died down.

To a significant degree Jack’s vision of how life should be lived came from the movies. He attended every change of program at the neighborhood theaters and walked to Second Avenue for the latest ones. During one of those pseudo-British films in which Constance Bennett trilled her r’s and said “rawther” every other minute to certify that she was a genuine Brit, she leaned against a grand piano covered with a heavily embroidered shawl with a border of luxurious fringe. Bug-eyed at the sight, Jack had to have one like it for Orchard Street. He depended on his mother to obtain the shawl.

Physically, Manya was both appealing and aristocratic in her bearing. It wasn’t her copious white hair that attracted men, her flawless white skin, her billowing breasts, but the innate womanliness that emanated from her. Even when she wore her cooking clothes—a mammoth Hoover apron that she slipped on over her head and tied around a baggy dress or her cardigan sweater, a dull brown thing appropriate for shopping—she exuded a sympathetic femininity.

Manya didn’t give much thought to her appearance. More often than not she washed her face and body with the brown kosher soap that contained no fat from forbidden animals, and wrapped her hair in a haphazard bun held together with several large imitation-turquoise hairpins. Her cooking shoes were splattered with chicken and goose fat, bits and oddments of duck, salmon roe, even calves’ brains. Because she had been raised on the Black Sea, she loved caviar, so every now and then a glistening bead would fall upon her well-fed shoes. The smell of food on her body made her no less alluring. More than one male customer winked and said he would like to feed upon her.

When her precocious son demanded the embroidered shawl for the dining table she cried out, “Where will I get it? On a pushcart? In a store down here? Maybe we have to ride uptown. Maybe I have to put on my good shoes and a blue silk dress. You can’t walk into uptown stores like a beggar.”

“Someone will get it for you. But you must be charming.”

“And who should I charm? Sophie Gimbel? Madame Hattie Carnegie?”

Jack began his characteristic pacing as he thought through his scheme. Abruptly he stopped and answered, “Orloff.”

“Orloff, the silk man? Meshugana,” his mother protested. “Everything in his store is from fire sales, water sales, damaged dye lots, with colors that no one wants and he has to sell two cents a yard above cost. From him you’re expecting a shawl with fringes like in the movies?”

Jack leaned over and kissed her cheek. He loved her overwhelmingly and he often averted his glance from her lest he betray how deeply he felt. He parceled out his kisses for the same reason.

“No, Maminyu, I don’t think Orloff sells a silk shawl, but he knows where to find one. I’ll go with you when you ask him. I’ll be waiting outside the door, or under the steps. If he gets fresh, I’ll be there to protect you.”

It was a well-known fact that Orloff had a crush on Manya, despite his marriage and his three children. He would have abandoned his waterlogged silks and charred remnants and rattled down the steps for one real kiss from Manya.

My grandmother tried to impose logic on her son’s fantasy about the shawl. During business hours, they spread white cloths on the large mahogany table that she had bought on Clinton Street with her first earnings and on the folding tables that they put away after dinner. What need would they have in the evening for a luxury item?

Jack asserted that the shawl was necessary for their souls.

My father never explained his need for things of beauty, and although his mother realized that the shawl represented art as much as a painting, a vase or the candlesticks she had brought from Odessa, she faced the reality of her limited means. She indulged Jack in every way possible, but an item that cost three weeks of work in her kitchen— well, for once she would deny what she regarded as a temporary fancy. She had not, however, counted on the strength of his desire. Every morning when he brushed his teeth at the kitchen sink and late at night when he piled on two or three sweaters for sleeping, he asked, “Are you getting the silk shawl or not?”

Business in her restaurant came to a virtual halt on Saturday. The merchants were busy with uptown bargain seekers and stayed in their stores; they didn’t take time out to eat until they closed their shops and went home. The Orthodox wouldn’t handle money on Saturday and always ate with their families. Many of the neighbors criticized Manya for cooking on Saturday morning and serving an occasional customer a snack. She ignored this. She clung to her notion of acceptable behavior as she had done in the years when she worked in Greenspan’s bakery on Saturdays. If men opened their stores on Saturday, why couldn’t she do the same with her restaurant? Still business merely trickled in and Manya regarded Saturday as her day off.

So it came to pass that one warm Saturday morning, Manya took a thorough wash at the kitchen sink, donned the brassiere that she wore for special occasions, and pulled on her corset from the Orchard Corset Discount Center. Of her two good dresses, she selected the watery blue silk as the best for a stroll down Orchard Street. She took special care with her long white hair, braiding the strands in the front and piling them to the top of her head to form a tiara. With a tiny dusting of Coty’s face powder, she sallied forth in her patent leather pumps to Orloff’s House of Silks.

My father loped after her. As soon as she ascended the flight of stairs to Orloff’s store he planted himself across the street, shading his eyes against the spring sun and squinting to make out the images through Orloff’s windows.

At the sight of Manya—unannounced and unexpected—Orloff’s bald head glistened with sweaty excitement and his beady eyes darted. “Manya, Manya, mine libbe,” he cried dramatically and lunged for her lips. She sidestepped; the kiss landed on her jaw. Too polite, she did not wipe off the spot.

“Hand to God,” Orloff sighed, “the Czarina was never as beautiful as you.”

“Orloff, you’re a married man with three children. Don’t act foolish.”

“For you I would be foolish, crazy, stupid, smart. What do you want?”

“I want a large silk shawl, a light color, with embroidery and fringes.”

Orloff took a step backward. His pursed mouth, often smelling of garlic and chicken fat rubbed on pumpernickel bread, fell open. “Manya, you need that shawl for the opera? You’re going to the opera, to the ballet?” He pronounced it “bahlee.”

“No, it’s not for me to wear. It’s for my table, my dining room table.” As if to forestall any comments about so decorative an item on Orchard Street, she added imperiously, “And I’m getting a Persian rug. You’ll help me with both of them.”

“And what will you give me if I help you?” He edged closer to her.

She rolled her eyes heavenward and slid out the door.

Five or six weeks later, the perfect shawl arrived from uptown. He, Orloff, had taken the subway to Fifty-seventh Street, to a shop with fancy prices, and he sold it to her at cost, hand to his heart, not a penny did he take for himself because Manya’s happiness came first.

Young Jack regarded the shawl with awe. It was pale ivory silk, with cabbage roses embroidered in red, lavender and white thread. The heavy ivory fringe swept down almost to the floor. “Classy,” my father said.

From a knot in her stocking Manya retrieved twenty dollars, turning chastely away so that Orloff did not catch a peek at her snowy thigh. After he consumed a meal of made-on-the-premises pickled herring, barley mushroom soup, duck with red cabbage and potato pancakes, Linzer torte and three glasses of tea with four lumps of sugar and raspberry jam on the bottom, served in a filigreed holder, Orloff pretended to give Manya a receipt. Instead he kissed her full on the lips. She shooed him out with a quick push and a slam of the door. A few months later, a rug peddler staggered in with a secondhand Persian rug, almost good as new, taken from a Turkish boat that very morning. What with the silk shawl for the table and the Persian rug, my Bubby’s salon became the talk of the neighborhood.

2

Paradoxes

CUSTOM DICTATED THAT Jack have his rite of passage as a man, his bar mitzvah, when he reached the age of twelve instead of thirteen, because he had no father. Already taller than his mother and dressed in a gray suit with a white shirt and navy blue tie, he wowed the guests and the various officials at shul with his rapid-fire readings of the Hebrew text and his speech in English so elevated that he could compete with any young man a decade older.

After the services Bubby served a sit-down dinner at home for selected guests: the Lipinskis and Bertha; Weinstock and his wife, who was his former sister-in-law whom he had married when his first wife succumbed to the flu; Orloff and his wife, not as yet adapted to American ways and still wearing an outdated wig, a sparrow’s nest, on her head; Greenspan from the bakery without his wife and free to grow roaringly drunk during the first hour; Saperstein, her sturgeon and caviar purveyor; and Stein the butcher, who had been the first to race to her side when her husband died. And then there was Dr. Koronovsky, fresh out of medical school and already a legend for his handling of epidemics that bore away dozens of inhabitants in a single day.

Of the many toasts in Jack’s honor, the most stirring was provided by young Dr. K., who assured everyone that Jack Roth, with his gift for language, was destined to become a brilliant lawyer, possibly a judge, and undoubtedly, if Jews were permitted this privilege, a government official. After these rousing words he handed Jack a five-dollar gold piece.

Bubby shed tears of joy. Jack, slick of hair and adult in bearing, grew two inches taller from the praise. After dinner the doors of the apartment were thrown open and everyone, whether invited or not, could partake of the “sweet table”: slices of cheesecake, bundt cake, strudel, rugulach, strawberry shortcake prepared with sponge cake, honey cake, macaroons, chocolate cake, Linzer torte, nut cookies, lemon cookies, sugar cookies, hamantaschen, prune Danish and cinnamon twists— mountains of everything. “Manya’s affair” created buzzing gossip and conversation for years to come. What other bar mitzvah could match free food of such variety and quality?

At high school, Jack zoomed ahead, grew bored and restless with the bland subjects. Who knows whether he would have fulfilled his destiny as a lawyer if he hadn’t walked over to Division Street just for laughs and been hired immediately to sell coats to women who knew little about fashion and less about speedy, eloquent speech. Within months, working only on Saturday and Sunday, Jack became known as “the man who loved to dress women.”

My father was a womanizer, yet he never sustained an affair with a woman. His standard opener for flirtations consisted of, “Darling, how does it feel to be beautiful?” No hypocrisy fell from his lips. In fact, attractive women filled him with wonder and his immediate response led him to plan their improvement.

“You know,” he would suggest, “green is not your best color. It does nothing for your complexion and makes your skin look sallow.”
Sallow
intrigued them. Uncertain of its meaning, they submitted to the man who could express himself so grandly.

Colors were part of Jack’s artistry and like a painter he expounded on them. He hated greens and browns and asserted as if set in concrete that only middle-aged women preferred purple. He dismissed white attire as “ice cream suits” but adored every shade of blue; azure suggested morning, periwinkle the afternoon and navy blue the evening.

Because many women in adjacent Little Italy rarely discarded their black mourning clothes, Jack advised black in small doses: black with a pinstripe; a black skirt topped with a white jacket à la Chanel, especially if worn with an expensive fur. “Never put a rat on your back,” my father would instruct me as we rode the subway together, and he would point out every fur in the subway car. By rats he meant squirrel or muskrat, though in more confidential moments he admitted that minks and sables in their natural state resembled glossy rodents.

For my father, the worst offense was a print dress, especially fabrics that sprouted flowers. “You want flowers,” he chided, “buy a hat, visit a milliner.” Five minutes after he met a customer at the store where he worked, or a woman at a social gathering or in the lobby of a movie house, and he engaged her in conversation, he gently removed her lapel pin, invariably made of colored glass. He permitted my mother, Lil, to wear a long string of fake pearls that, in the current style, descended to her waist, but in general he despised costume jewelry, imitation gold bracelets that jangled, plastic buttons and flat-heeled shoes: “Like Greta Garbo out for a walk.” In matters of taste, my mother conceded to my father without question.

When Jack first met Lil, he rejected her boring monochromatic attire: brown shirtwaist, long brown skirt. “The only thing to do with that outfit is burn it,” he told her. We heard the story until it passed into legend of their first date, when he commanded her to lift up her skirts. They were in my grandmother’s living room, the same one in which my brother, Willy, and I grew up.

“What gams,” he exclaimed. “You could make it in the Follies.”

My mother hung her head, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the room, the Persian rug and the embroidered silk shawl with long fringes that graced the table. She could hear Jack’s mother, Manya, busy in the kitchen, an inhibiting factor.

My mother asked, “You mean that?” and dropped her skirts.

“No, I’m just an uptown guy who feeds a pretty girl a line, then forgets her.” He called out, “Ma, come here.”

Bubby moved to the doorway of the living room.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Zee iz zayer yung,” she said in Yiddish, to spare young Lil the embarrassment.

Throughout the many years that they lived together my grandmother defended any deficiencies in my mother with the same phrase, “She is very young.”

My father wasn’t asking for his mother’s approval. At the age of fourteen, when he sprang up to six feet, he had started parading the young girls before his mother. She responded to them democratically: fed them, exchanged a few words of politeness, then closed her mouth as well as her eyes. Ritual taught her that the next day or the day after there would be another girl, skinny, wide-eyed, undernourished, badly dressed. Still, she paused to consider his question about Lil.

“Where shall I begin?”

“With the head.”

As my grandmother later told me, she was referring to whether or not my mother could keep up with her fast-talking, quick-witted son. He, on the other hand, concentrated on the color of Lil’s hair. “Blonde or red?”

“Rayt vee un Tzigeunner?”

“You’re right, red is for gypsies. We’ll go for natural blonde.” And he marched the sixteen-year-old Lil to Pandy’s beauty parlor on Clinton Street.

Did my mother protest when Jack discussed the shade of hair he desired with the beautician, Pandy? Did she ask a question, possibly offer her own suggestion? She sat there mute, gaga-eyed with instant love, mesmerized by this tall, thin young man with his gleaming black hair, his suit complete with vest, and the disarming way he appraised her.

Jack took an intense interest in every aspect of Lil’s revitalized hair, holding her hand while the color dried as if she were a patient about to undergo a medical procedure that required soothing words. He told her that he, Jack Roth, had a perfect eye, the way some musicians had perfect pitch. More often than not his vocabulary confounded her, made her wonder in astonishment what he was saying. She was sixteen, and she earned her living wrapping coats and suits into tissue paper before she boxed them at a store on Division Street; she hadn’t finished high school because her family of seven brothers and two sisters needed the money she earned. Yet here she sat with a City College man.

Yes, Jack had registered at college, and yes, he attended a few classes sporadically. But he was too enchanted with life, with young women, with his sporty clothes, with Broadway plays, with movies, with his desire to dress and clothe women appropriately to bother with sitting in classrooms. He read voraciously. He told Lil about deep plays that he had seen by Eugene O’Neill, or novels by Ernest Hemingway that made her blush. Later, my mother cried because God had made me take after him instead of her when it came to reading.

An autodidact, my father loved to dispute H. L. Mencken’s articles out loud. He read three newspapers a day, but mostly he enjoyed the tabloids, explaining to Lil about yellow journalism. He wished he could write like Winchell or Damon Runyon, idolized Ben Hecht and Mark Hellinger.

When Lil’s hair came out the exact shade he desired, Jack gazed upon her as if he had created a masterwork. In fact my mother became an ongoing creation of which he rarely tired.

A zealot about every article of her clothes, he chose her dresses and coats as well as her shoes. Though our apartment resembled a bitter hell in the winter with its windows covered with ice, he didn’t allow her to sleep in flannel nightgowns. No matter if she wore a sweater over her nightie, it had to be silk or crepe, soft to the touch. “Flannel is for old ladies, older than Bubby,” he declared when he lectured me on his favorite topic, “How Women Should Dress.”

Once in a rash moment, he bought my mother a fur jacket made from bits and pieces of seal fur, a patchwork shortie. My mother hated it on sight, and possibly in revolt against Jack’s rigid code, on arctic days she defiantly wore it to the toilet in the hall. Subsequently, she thought of a better purpose for it, namely as a partial bedspread that covered their shoulders and ears.

My father tormented himself for that mistake. How could he have made such a purchase? What was he, blind, a beggar with a box of pencils, some greenhorn off the boat conned by the bargain price? But I assumed that most people had fur bedspreads, and loved to nap under the seal pelt. My father’s sense of disgrace rekindled every time he looked at it, and one day when the weather skyrocketed to unseasonably warm, he tossed the fur out the window on the Orchard Street side. Immediately, a passerby in full retreat claimed the unexpected bounty, and Jack’s blunder disappeared forever.

My mother was a golden person, or at least Jack transformed her into one. Sometimes, when in a playful mood, Lil instructed my brother, Willy, and me to state our address as “Orchard Lane,” bringing to mind the movie version of southern mansions surrounded by hundred-year-old leafy trees in perpetual bloom.

Not that our location really bothered Lil. Variously, she borrowed the street number of Jacob’s Men’s Clothing, a store on Canal Street directly under our apartment, or decided on her friend Ada’s address on East Broadway, two blocks south of the
Jewish Forward
building. In bolder moments she announced that we resided in the Amalgamated buildings, an apartment complex funded by money from the garment workers’ union. She had New York street smarts and could have devoured the entire city with her seductive smile and white teeth. The ethics of survival dictated how my mother acted or what she said; expedience was all.

I always cringed when sightseeing buses rumbled down Orchard Street with the bus guide shouting through a megaphone, “Here we are on Orchard Street where they sell black for blue and blue for black.” Street urchins ran after the bus, the girls raising their shabby skirts to show their dirty underpants, the boys yelling, “Monkeys in the zoo, they look the same as you.”

The tour buses never fazed Lil. Always fashionably dressed, she wore high-heeled shoes even when walking to the toilet in the hallway. She regarded herself as sophisticated enough to move uptown in a wink, if only she and Jack had the money. The Orchard Street apartment was Bubby’s, and though Lil moved in the day she married Jack, and was to hand over her two children to be raised by Manya, she regarded the arrangement as temporary. Some act of magic would one day whisk the whole family off to West End Avenue, the middle-class Jewish mecca for which she yearned.

Every Friday, on their day off, Jack and Lil rode the subway uptown, maybe to the Palace or the Roxy, possibly to Radio City Music Hall, although the live entertainment at Radio City did not suit my father. He loved Broadway musicals with singable tunes—Ethel Merman was his favorite—and whenever possible he bought tickets to her shows. On the return trip, if a vendor was standing at the steps of the Forty-second Street subway, my father bought a song sheet printed on cheap green paper that provided the lyrics to the latest popular tunes. As soon as they danced through the door of the apartment, my mother began to sing, not stopping until she had gone through all the lyrics on the sheet.

That was the best part of Lil: singing. She sang throughout the day, accompanied by music from the radio or by songs in her head. She had neither the style nor the cadence of great women vocalists, but her voice came through without affectation and she could instinctively deliver a tune. Her greatest failure was her haphazard memory. She couldn’t remember lyrics from one song to the next, and in midtune and at a loss, she didn’t scat sing like Louis Armstrong; she either jumbled some nonsense syllables together or she snapped her fingers and I provided the words.