Up From Orchard Street (30 page)

In the morning, as soon as Lil heard Mr. Jacob moving boxes in his store below our apartment, she stole out of bed, dressed in her sailor pants and striped top and signaled me to come with her.

We stepped over Clayton in the kitchen and he awoke immediately and ran with the broom handle to bang on the top step and scatter any animals that had lodged on the stairs during the night. My mother linked her arm in mine as she greeted Mr. Jacob.

“Can I use your phone, darling?”

I had no idea what she was up to—she didn’t confide in me—but she needed my moral support.

“What, your phone upstairs is out of order?”

Lil winked and patted Mr. Jacob on the cheek.

“It’s a surprise for Jack, I don’t want him to know. Later, Manya is making blintzes, I’ll bring you some.”

Jacob was pleased. It had been a long time since we wanted his phone. He brushed up against my mother. “You’re a knockout. Never looked better. What did you do, fall asleep in the sun? That tan, it’s not from tar beach.”

Lil could stop traffic with her golden hair, her golden skin, her trim figure. Jack may have appeared out of place as he traversed the sidewalk under the Third Avenue El in his spiffy clothes, slicked-back hair, three-pointed handkerchief perfect in his breast pocket, but Lil could pass for a society girl who had wandered downtown by mistake. Her restlessness since she had returned from Connecticut translated itself into a sexual energy that men reached for, hoping to capture. She glanced at the clock. Ten to eight. Not too early to call.

“Two minutes on the phone, Jacob dear, no more.”

“Stay the whole day. Maybe you’d like to work for me, such an adorable girl, you could sell men’s clothing easy.”

She gave the number to the operator with great care. I waited outside as the lookout in case Bubby came down. Then Lil emerged smiling, winked at Jacob before taking my hand and hurried across the street to The Grand Canal, acting with unusual determination.

At the entrance of the cafeteria—that great threat to our restaurant business—I hung back. After my one trip with Jack when we tried a few dishes, I had refused to walk on that side of the street. “What are we doing here?” I asked.

“I’m trying to help Bubby. Come, come, we’ll be out in a few minutes.”

Moe, short and hairy, who had been in class 2A with Lil, was in charge of the counter. His arms, chest and back were covered with a heavy pelt that showed through his undershirt. Maybe he had shaved before coming to work, but his face bristled with stubs of beard. His muscled arms could lift fifty-pound bags of potatoes or massive cartons of canned goods. The street urchins called him “Bluebeard” and no one messed with him. Strong, tough, fearless, a true child of the streets, he could have crossed over to Little Italy and become a big shot if he had relinquished his Jewish upbringing.

“Lil Roth!” Moe blushed, the skin under his eyes a sudden pink. “What can I do you for?” He had a quirky smile that revealed crooked overlapping teeth, some chipped or half broken. Engaged to Tzipke Goldberg for twelve years, he always replied to inquiries about why he wasn’t married, “Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?” This form of heartache was common among men in the Jewish ghetto. Moe found the idea of leaving his widowed mother intolerable and Tzipke, who kept the books for her widower father, a printer on Allen Street, suffered from the same constraints.

“Could you make me a half a tuna sandwich?” Lil asked seductively.

Moe flashed his crooked teeth.

“A half a sandwich. What’s that, like a bucket of steam?”

Lil fluttered her lashes. “To tell the truth, I just want a taste. In Connecticut they made tuna sandwiches. I wanted a drop, not a whole sandwich.”

Moe shouldered his way through the swinging doors to the kitchen and returned with a tray of tuna salad that he set into the counter of ice. “This hot weather is murder for salads with mayo. You don’t keep it iced, you’re serving poison on top of poison.”

Lifting the serving spoon from the tray, Moe leaned over and placed it to Lil’s lips, his cheeks and forehead tomato red.

“Feh.” Lil spit the tuna into her hand. “It’s pure salt.”

“It’s pure dreck, the worst.” Moe laughed. “We buy these big cans, bits and pieces of fish, a lot of it is blood meat from the bottom of the fish that Jews are forbidden to eat. They put it in brine and we pour out the salty water, dump the tuna with a jar of Kraft’s dressing. The fish is too salty, the dressing too sweet. We sell a ton of it on white bread.”

“How can people eat it?”

“America goniff. Americans steal what they can. It makes them feel American. The only good thing is the celery.”

“That’s not what we ate in Connecticut.”

“Musta been albackmore, all white tuna packed in water. Top of the line. Saperstein carries it. It’s like day from night. The best.”

“Thanks for the advice and the taste, Moe. You’re the best, too. You think you’ll come to an agreement with Tzipke?”

“When the moon comes over the mountain.” He started to laugh but sighed instead.

“It’s hard to leave your mother,” Lil agreed. “I could never leave Manya. Never. We had some scare when we thought she might remarry. Touch wood, that’s over.”

We waved our good-byes. Tzipke met us on the sidewalk, yellow sheets in hand. “Here’s your ad for Manya’s. A hundred sheets, fifty cents.”

The paper was thin and gaudy, the print smudgy. Yet the words, MANYA DELIVERS stood out boldly.

“Great. Food or cash?”

“Cash.”

Years of working in dark quarters of the print shop had given Moe’s betrothed a ghostly pallor and a permanent expression of despair. Whatever youthful appeal she once possessed had vanished over their conflict about marriage.

Lil put her hand on Tzipke’s scrawny arm. “Listen,” she said kindly, “you shouldn’t wait longer. Take Moe to City Hall. A Jewish wedding comes later.”

“My father says no. His mother says no.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right. Get married. Even if you live in one room, you’ll be together. Moe is a good boy. He loves you, you love him. Who lives where is not the question.”

Tzipke began to cry. Shortly after eight on a stifling Sunday morning on Canal and Orchard streets, I lingered while Lil consoled the weeping woman. “Love will find a way,” she said. And meant it.

“Don’t forget the fifty cents.”

“We won’t.”

It would have to wait. Jack’s unemployment check might be in the mail—if he was entitled to one more.

When we got home, Bubby was leaning over the kitchen sink pouring warm water on Jack’s hair as he washed it. “So where were you? You think it’s Connecticut, you can take a walk before breakfast?”

“We sampled the tuna at The Grand Canal. Such chozerei you can’t imagine. We found out that Saperstein carries the best white tuna. Moe said so. Ma, do you think he will ever marry that poor girl, Tzipke?”

Bubby couldn’t answer. The phone rang. Uncle Goodman for Jack. He’d be down later for a little talk. My mother smiled triumphantly. Her early morning phone call had done the trick. She went back to bed.

Very late the night before, Jack had stumbled into the dining room, smoking furiously. Dragging a chair to the open window near our bed, he blurted to his mother, “What do you think, Ma, will I lose my job at Farber’s?” He worked there for so many years that it did not occur to him to seek employment elsewhere.

Manya waited a long minute before answering. “The whole thing could be a blown-out egg. If Joe Brenner wanted Farber’s business he would answer right away and Farber would tell you right away. Small men like Farber, they like to talk big. That store, it’s shmutzig, it smells. Not for you, it would be closed long ago. Nothing happened. Maybe Joe Brenner even laughed in Farber’s face.”

Jack’s cigarette lit up in the dark. “A week or two later, Brenner could change his mind,” he said.

“He should leave Russeks for a whole lot of headaches on Division Street? It’s a wonder the customers don’t get asthma from the rotting walls. A greenhorn leaving Germany because of Hitler, he might think it’s a wonderful store.”

I lay quietly in the folding bed beside Bubby trying not to move, not to breathe. The air hung with their unspoken thoughts.

Abruptly, Jack announced, “You know Lil’s brother, Geoff Simon? He tells me I’m a failure because I don’t own my own business.”

“I own my own business and we don’t have two pennies to rub together. Jack darling, if you want to buy in with Farber, be his partner, think about it. You want it, you’ll have it.”

“And what will you use for money? Your earrings that are in hock? The back payments on the Morris Plan?”

I hoped Bubby would answer but she let the silence extend until like a rubber band it stretched and broke.

“My credit is good, but only once. You have to tell me what you want. I can ask one time, not more.”

Jack lit another cigarette with his stub. “You mean Uncle Goodman?”

“He begs to help me because I brought Bertha over from Odessa when she was a child. He told you the story a hundred times. Small things I let him help me. Big, I never asked.”

Jack didn’t answer. Out of cigarettes, he lurched to his bedroom, hoping to put an end to the whirligig in his brain. Lil had been listening, which was why she and I rushed to Jacob’s store before eight. She didn’t want Bubby to ask Uncle Goodman for money for Farber’s store. She asked.

I decided that with my father at work and Lil in bed I’d deliver the yellow printed sheets that announced “Manya Delivers.” Clayton insisted on walking with me as soon as he bathed. He removed a pan from under the sink and reached for the old cigar box that held his personal soap, his shampoo and his hair gel. Stripped naked and shameless, he lodged his feet into the pan and poured water from the kettle over his head. He didn’t like his hair to be “nappy.”

His expensive hair straightener stank up the house, so to apply it, he would climb up to the fifth floor and sit on the step leading to the roof. The merchants in the neighborhood labeled him as “Manya’s boy,” but if some passerby caught sight of him on the roof they might call the police and report him as a prowler. On the days he applied the stinky stuff to his hair, he sat upstairs for an hour until the solution “took.” What it took was clumps of hair from his scalp—the rest remained black, tightly wound springs.

Often he bathed at the kitchen sink while Bubby rattled her pans. Sometimes I peeked while he washed himself, fascinated as always by his long penis that arched from a thicket of black pubic hair. While soaping, it would stand straight out and he would gargle “Ahhhh” with a mixture of pride and joy. Bubby cautioned him from the next room, “Clayton, nisht far de kinder.”

He understood Yiddish like a trouper, spoke it with ease. On this fiery day he cooled himself by pouring pans of cold water directly from the cold faucet over his torso.

Since his return from “out of town” he had taken to wearing white chef jackets. How he came by the two that he owned we didn’t bother to ask—his confessions were more fantasy than reality.

This Sunday he brought forth a new one, not like the other two that he rinsed until they were spotless and then ironed. He was quite a sight on Orchard Street with his gelled hair, his sweet cologne and his white chef’s jacket over black waiter’s pants.

Bubby loved him fiercely, and once had a screaming fight with Markowitz from the dry-goods store across from our house because he wouldn’t wait on Clayton, who loved new underwear.

Markowitz sold Bubby the shorts by the half dozen—for hard cash—no bartering for food. One Saturday when Clayton stayed out all night, he returned without his underwear. Bubby didn’t mind the cost—“Ah nickel ah shtickel”—but she hated climbing up and down the stairs and crossing the street in her cooking clothes. She sent Clayton with the money and waited an hour and a half before she stormed into Markowitz’s. Clayton was crouching in the corner, waiting to be waited on.

“Beautiful Manya,” Markowitz announced at the sight of her. She was in no mood for false compliments. “An hour and a half my boy is here, what’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t wait on niggas.”

“You don’t wait on niggas? You’re over in America a few years; the Bolsheviks should have sent you to Siberia. This boy is mine since he is seven years old, like my own child. You won’t sell to him? You paskudnock, you Cossack!” She banged the outside door in rage as she left. It broke the hinges.

Jacob tried to broker a peace between Manya and Markowitz. “Markowitz is a bulvan,” Jacob declared. “What does he know? Your customers treat Clayton with respect. Even your doctors. Markowitz is a grub yung.”

Sensing that public opinion was against him, Markowitz delivered a peace offering, socks for me and Willy. Bubby returned the box. Lil longed for free goodies but didn’t dare cross Bubby; Markowitz kept to his own side of the street. Bubby spoke to Brody down the block, whose store was behind the pushcart that sold “Manhattan suspenderlach a quarter a pair.” Brody treated Clayton royally.

Though he was determined to help me distribute leaflets, the unexpected presence of three customers made it necessary for Clayton to stay and help Bubby. Lil had snuggled cozily in bed. Willy accompanied me instead.

No sooner did we hit the street than Willy burst out with his news. Having asked Clayton why he had been “out of town” a few months ago, Clayton replied, “sex raid.” Dropping off the leaflets along the shops of Canal Street as we headed toward East Broadway, I asked, “Does it mean he was at a noisy party and the police came?”

For once Willy replied with condescension, “For a noisy party he would be out in a few days, a week at the most. It has something to do with sex.”

“A sex party?” We regarded ourselves as both knowledgeable and unflappable when it came to sex—we heard about it everywhere, at school, at home, in the streets, at the restaurant. Can you be arrested for a sex party? we wondered. Our visualization of such events was limited to silent movies at the Loew’s Canal, mostly biblical epics in which lightly clad maidens roiled on marble floors showing their thighs to insatiable men with bared teeth.