Up From Orchard Street (7 page)

Bubby kneaded yeast dough as she reminisced, running her hand over the silky dough, pulling it up high, then pounding it back into a vast lump, only to repeat the process until her hands had the feeling that the dough could soon rise. Then she placed it in a large brown ceramic crock and covered it with a towel. She had an order from an uptown customer for a braided challah and afterward, Clayton would deliver it along with a note that my mother wrote in a large childlike hand, “This bread is for Mrs. Davis at 124 West 12 Street from Manya’s. The boy who carries it works for us. Oblige, Lil Roth.” Clayton carried the note in case someone stopped him on the bus and accused him of stealing the bread.

On this particular day the dough for the challah served as a welcome distraction because my mother wept intermittently, refusing any consoling words. Bubby set the crock of dough on a warm part of the gas range, at its very edge.

The next moment in a last irrational act before she accepted the inevitable, my mother scrambled to the top of our small refrigerator and jumped off. She did it with such speed and such a thump that the pot of yeast dough crashed to the floor and scattered jagged pieces of crockery and lumps of dough everywhere, some landing on Lil who had fallen with her legs under her.

Tears cascaded down Bubby’s face as she went to Lil. As gently as she could, Bubby tried to untangle those beautiful legs from beneath Lil’s thin body, asking, “Is anything broken?” Lil shook her head. The rebellion had gone out of her, along with her drive and vitality.

Bubby ran her fingers over my mother’s ankles, her calves, her thighs. “Does it hurt? Does it hurt?” Lil, eyes closed, shook her head. My grandmother lifted my mother in her arms.

At that moment Clayton opened the door. When he had bread to deliver he always came to our house early in order to fill himself with food, especially chopped liver. As soon as he saw Bubby holding my limp mother he, too, began to cry, “What happened? What happened to Miss Lillian?”

“She fell down. The pot broke, she fell over it. Please help me.” Clayton carried Lil to her bed as she whimpered, “Don’t drop me, please don’t drop me.”

The wall against which the bed stood had a huge white plaster patch, a jagged circle that covered almost the entire surface. It had been there ever since a pipe burst in the wall years before. Every year the agent, Weinstock, promised to have the wall properly mended, sealed and painted because even on the hottest summer days it felt moist to the touch. But every spring, during the season to ask for repairs, my mother refurbished the main room. After all, that was where we made our living and Weinstock’s funds were limited. Some years he paid only to have the dining room baseboards and the windowsills painted. Occasionally he granted us fresh wallpaper, mottled ivory with brown strips pasted into squares to resemble paneling. Very classy for Orchard Street.

Carried in by Clayton, my mother turned to face the dirty runny patch and closed her eyes. Bubby sat on the bed and said softly, “Did I ever mention how I wanted a child with Mister Elkin?”

Lil’s voice was muffled. “You wanted a baby, a real baby with Mister Elkin even though you had Jack?”

Bubby fanned herself with her apron. “Mister Elkin was the only one I wanted to marry, the only one who made me think of having a child. It happened to my own mother the same way. I left for America, she missed me. The next year she had a baby, my sister, Bertha, the one who lives in Yonkers.

“I had Bertha brought to America when she was maybe six years old. She stayed with me a few years, then she went to a cousin who couldn’t have her own child. My sister, Bertha, she married right here in this apartment. I made her wedding in this house, and I bought the dress from Milgrim’s,” Bubby rattled on, gazing into Lil’s face as she told the familiar tale. My mother gripped her hand. “Ma. I have terrible cramps. Terrible.” She grimaced with pain.

“Blood, any blood?” As she asked, Bubby raised the blanket. Abruptly she left my mother, and ordered Clayton to run and fetch Dr. Koronovsky.

Everywhere on the Lower East Side, Clayton was known as “Manya’s boy,” as in child. When asked to bring Dr. Koronovsky, he didn’t have to be told the office address on East Broadway. Bubby told him with some urgency, “If he has a patient, knock on the door. Tell him Lil is bleeding.”

Bubby returned to the bedroom. My mother moaned without cease, every now and then letting out a sharp cry of pain. For once I asked Willy to turn up the music on his Zenith radio: “We’re having a heat wave / A tropical heat wave.” Thought it was only 3:30, the sky had darkened and the wind seeped in from every windowsill. Clayton was a fast runner, yet he couldn’t make it to the doctor in less than ten or fifteen minutes. Whenever my mother screamed, I bit my lip, unable to sit still, and peered out of the begrimed windows, hoping in the gathering dusk to spot Dr. Koronovsky’s dark blue Ford, familiar to everyone in the ghetto. Or I expected Clayton to burst through the door, exclaiming dramatically, “The doctor is coming.”

A new song on the radio began: “These foolish things remind me of you . . .” My usual strategy when I panicked—if a rat crossed my feet on the stairs, or a drunk came out of our toilet unexpectedly with his fly open—was to run for my grandmother’s lap. But she wasn’t available to me now. In my imagination a full-term baby would emerge from my mother, although I had no idea how long she had been pregnant. I remembered every tale from the old country told by Mrs. Finkel, Mrs. Feldman, Mrs. Kleinfeld, about babies born with heads of chickens, babies born blind, deformed, with no arms or legs because their mothers tried to get rid of them. I was close to hysterics by the time Dr. Koronovsky called, “Manya, how’s Lil?” I hadn’t heard him come in.

At once the apartment filled with bustle and crackling tension both worse and better than what had preceded it. In his doctor’s case, Dr. Koronovsky carried a hand brush with which he scrubbed before any examination. On this occasion he also poured antiseptic over his hands and smelled up the whole kitchen. My brother, Willy, at last detached his ear from the radio; the fumes made him sneeze. Dr. Koronovsky said, “Very clean towels, Manya.”

We were the only ones in the building who used a professional laundry for our linen—tablecloths, sheets, napkins, towels. My grandmother reached for our stack of napkins on the bureau but Dr. Koronovsky shook his head. “Still wrapped in laundry paper if you have them.” From the dark cavern of the storage room I brought the unopened package.

“You know that I’m going in,” he said. My grandmother and the doctor exchanged a quick glance. If Bubby saw that I saw, she merely pressed her lips together and carried in a vast enamel bowl of hot water.

At the door of the bedroom, the doctor said, “Manya, stay out until I call you.” Again that meaningful flicker as their eyes met. Bubby became aware that in the last hour she had failed to acknowledge my presence. “Don’t cry. It will be all right. Dr. Koronovsky, he’s the best. It will be finished, ended, in half an hour.”

We heard a high piercing cry that stunned and rooted us in place. Not one of us—Bubby, Clayton, Willy, me—breathed during that scream. Bubby’s arms trembled as she gathered me and Willy to her. “That’s it. Finished.”

Silence was broken by the doctor asking, “More hot water, please, and a newspaper.” Bubby held on to us as Clayton brought both to the bedroom door. After another interval the doctor said, “Manya, would you come here, please.” She sped inside.

When the two of them emerged a few minutes later, the doctor wiped his pink-stained hands on a fresh linen napkin and my grandmother held a tiny packet wrapped in newspaper. In his most professional manner the doctor gave instructions. “Sitz bath three or four times a day. Towels, napkins, all sanitary. Buy a very large box of Kotex. Don’t use old flannel or rags. And a sanitary belt.” He looked directly at me. “You’ll remember these things, won’t you? Sanitary belt and Kotex from the drugstore. Warm water wash several times a day. Bed rest.” As if he knew or suspected that the neighbors gathered outside the kitchen door—there were no secrets in this building—he said very loudly, “Miscarriage after a few weeks. Nothing more.”

His exit scattered the neighbors. Bubby reported that my mother was sleeping and warned Willy and Clayton not to go inside the bedroom until she cleaned up. Then she said to me matter-of-factly, “Elkaleh, cum mit mir.”

I took her hand without question. We walked into the toilet in the hall. She said, “Don’t look,” but I did. A bloody mass fell from the newspaper. Did I see a form there or did I imagine it? My grandmother pulled the chain on the toilet once. A residue of pink rose to the top. She flushed again. Then she gathered my hand in hers and we walked back inside.

From under the candlestick where Bubby kept money she took a dollar and handed it to Clayton. I repeated to him what my mother needed: a big box of Kotex and a sanitary belt. Then my grandmother went into the bedroom alone, gathered the stained linens that lay on the floor and stuffed them into an old pillowcase. The pillowcase went into a crumpled paper bag and into the garbage can.

As soon as Clayton returned, Bubby gave him a handful of change and said, “You’re a good boy. Tomorrow, I’ll make chopped liver, fresh, just for you.”

That night, my insomnia was worse than ever. My grandmother said to me in Russian, “Even the ocean is resting. Why aren’t you?”

“Bubby,” I answered, “is what we threw in the toilet today, was that a shanda?”

I thought she had dozed off, or possibly hadn’t heard me. I didn’t have the courage to ask twice.

“No,” she finally replied, kissing the top of my head. “It was nothing. Just some blood. No shanda at all.”

5

Shirley, Shirley and Shirley

MY MOTHER RESPONDED to her convalescence by turning it into a celebration. She languished in bed for days, accepting visitors and presents as if they were her due. Because of her good looks and slightly flirtatious air she had become a favorite with the shopkeepers and customers at our restaurant.

Pandy, her beautician, bestirred herself after hours to bleach and set Lil’s hair, using basins of hot water that Bubby happily fetched from the kitchen. Mother’s friend Ada brought two pairs of peach-colored step-ins with lace edges. Orloff, the silk dealer, offered a silk nightgown with a froufrou at the throat, an uptown special. “How I got it don’t ask,” he remarked as he planted a kiss on Manya’s cheek. The neighbors chipped in and purchased a box of Loft’s chocolates, parlays: cigar-shaped confections filled with walnuts and caramel and covered with milk chocolate. My father, the chocolate maven, preferred very dark Belgian chocolates, but like the rest of us, he had to make do.

Weinstock-the-agent gave the best present of all. “He took his hand away from his heart,” Bubby explained. Weinstock sent the plasterers in one day to cover the massive patch on the bedroom wall. A week later the painters, pronounced “paintners” by Weinstock, showed up. My mother chose a pale yellow color that bathed the room with sunlight.

The cozy interlude pleased us. My parents slept on the floor of the dining room during the repair of their bedroom. My mother sang along with the radio, and to entertain her, my father recounted movies with heightened style. Since he was a voracious reader and had already read Theodore Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy,
he combined its contents with the old movie of the same name starring Phillip Holmes and Sylvia Sidney, one of his preferred actresses because she was Jewish. When the troubled hero drowns his pregnant girlfriend, my father’s version of this melodramatic tragedy had us weeping. We also adored his telling of James Cagney in
Public Enemy
and Paul Muni in
Scarface.
My father claimed these movies. They were his to embroider or elaborate on as he saw fit, telling different versions depending on his mood. He romanticized gangsterdom, as did many of his generation.

During my mother’s convalescence, her friend, brassy Ada Levine, came to visit. My father disapproved of her. He recognized her as cold and stony to her core, and despised her lack of scruples at the pettiest level, observing that she would easily steal pennies from blind men who sold pencils in the street. Surprisingly, though, he defended Ada’s earliest love affair at age fourteen with Ruby-the-Runner, a petty gangster of sixteen who was gunned down in the street for failing, more than once, to hand over the dimes and quarters he collected from people who bet on numbers.

After Ruby died, Ada went to work in a brassiere factory, attaching by sewing machine the elastic backing for hooks and eyes. My mother and Ada had attended the same grade school and lived next door to each other in a tenement on Rivington Street, but that could not explain my mother’s fascination with her friend. Ada had no schooling, no interest in the theater the way my parents did, and the only female movie star with whom she identified was Mae West. Ada’s one contribution to any party or extended conversation was her imitation of Mae West intoning, “Beulah, peel me a grape.”

Ada married Irwin Levine because he rescued her from the brassiere factory. Sappy with desire for her, Irwin worked as a shoe salesman on Delancey Street. He was good-natured, a good provider and a good dancer. Ada’s one requirement as a wife concerned sex— first thing before Irwin went off to work and last thing at night. Irwin paid no attention to the fact that before she met him, Ada had lived openly with a local hood.

“Those things happen,” he shrugged philosophically. “She was a kid, fourteen, so now she’s a respectable married woman and lives on East Broadway and we have two children.” Irwin Levine had a fleshy face and a heavy torso and sweated a lot, so he needed a freshly laundered shirt every day. Ada considered it a small demand for her respectability as a wife and mother. As for sex, no one knew whether Ada passively complied or longed for it.

Ada noisily inspected the newly painted bedroom and confided that she never ever refused her husband, even when she had her monthlies, even when she had the flu, even in the last hour of her pregnancies.

Sitting a few feet away, trying to read one of my brother Willy’s books from school, I drew in my breath when I heard Ada admit in her coarse voice, “I can do it sitting down, standing up, laying down, front, back.” Her raucous laughter rang with pride. “I’m a great lay,” she boasted.

Perhaps she had made this claim before and it hadn’t registered with my mother, whose first and only man was my father. Perhaps the recently redecorated bedroom added to sexual activity. That night when my mother thought we slept, I could hear her asking my father exactly what men considered a good lay. Weren’t all woman good lays, just by being women?

I realized that my father found her naïveté endearing. He took pride in the fact that the Lower East Side, with its vulgarities in speech and aggressive behavior, had not rubbed off on her. My mother accepted the double standard without question—men had the right to sexual liberties, women did not. Lil’s brothers, who visited us often, talked openly about their sexual escapades and it didn’t bother her. Street language that rang with obscenities had no effect on her. Few who lived on the Lower East Side understood the meaning of repression or puritanism; the most ardent Catholic women in Little Italy accepted sex and violence as twin aspects of human existence. As a mark of her innate propriety, Lil insisted that we call her “Mother,” not “Mom” or “Ma,” and referred to sex as “all the good things.”

“When you grow up, you’ll marry a nice businessman, you’ll have all the good things,” she informed me. This was the extent of my sexual instruction. Between my grandmother’s “frya libbe” and my mother’s “all the good things,” I conceived of lovemaking as a state of perpetual hugs and kisses that lasted until one tired.

I awaited my father’s reply about a good lay with more than ordinary curiosity.

“It’s a woman who loves it,” he said slowly. “She wants it and she needs it, she admits it. She goes after sex like a man.”

“That’s it? That’s all? I guess that makes Ada a good lay.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my father shot back. “Ada lets men do it to her. That’s not the same as wanting it.”

“But how about Ruby-the-Runner? They did it three times a day. Maybe more. That’s what she told me.”

“Ada was fourteen and Ruby sixteen. At that age anyone who breathes can do it four times a day.” My father laughed softly. “Here’s one that you won’t believe. My friend Shimon, we know each other since we were kids, I call him the other day, ask him if he’d like to come down, dope out some horses, maybe take the train to Belmont, he tells me no, he can’t. I say why not and he answers, ‘I always go home for lunch. I leave my dry-cleaning store and go home for lunch. Only we don’t eat. The kids are in school, we do it till my thing almost falls off. I swear, Dory, my wife, can’t get enough, I have to put my hand over her mouth, she screams so much my neighbors think I’m maybe killing her. That’s why I married her. She’s so skinny, she could do a flip in a putty blower, but in bed . . .’ ”

“How could we carry on like that?” my mother asked plaintively. “Your mother and the children are in the next room, and in the afternoon the customers are here.”

“Lil,” my father assured her, “don’t you worry. You’re the best. The very best.” Appeased temporarily, my mother settled in quietly, though not for long.

Shortly after that conversation with my father about sex, my mother began to display a restlessness that we hadn’t witnessed before. Instead of resting at home as the doctor instructed her after the miscarriage, she dressed early in the morning, slipping into her high-heeled pumps and one of her best dresses topped with a heather tweed coat whose white lynx collar could flatter any movie star. Where did she go? To S. Klein on the Square, to Russeks to inspect furs, to Gimbel’s to try on hats, searching for a new identity through clothes that she didn’t need and whose prices she couldn’t afford.

Goodman, Aunt Bertha’s husband who manufactured purses, invited her to his factory to pick out anything she wanted in the new spring line. For spring he was heavily promoting patent leather—envelope shapes a yard long, or multipocketed large purses that from a distance resembled my grandmother’s oilcloth shopping bags. Goodman adored and admired my mother. Short, broad of chest, thin of leg, he was a Humpty-Dumpty of a man, generous of spirit and amazed by his good fortune, his house in Yonkers, his wife, Bertha, his two children, who thanks to his money attended private schools in Westchester. He filled an entire small carton with his samples and gave them to Lil after patting her on the behind and pinching both her cheeks. He called her
tsotskele,
little toy.

Jack vetoed most of the purse samples. The red patent leathers were too garish, the envelope shapes brought to mind a lady lawyer. He despised the fake crocodile clutches as well as the bucket-shaped “marshmallow” of fake leather. Happily, my father consented to let me keep a small patent leather purse with an imitation gold snap and a link chain handle. Lil selected an identical one in a larger size.

My mother dispensed with the rest of the purses, and donated the bucket-shaped number to her mother, my Grandma Rae, who lived on Jefferson Street with her sons.

I liked some of my mother’s brothers, my young uncles who set up a roof garden at the top of their apartment house. They lived on the fifth floor and whenever we went to visit my mother rested on every second floor because of her irregular heartbeat. Grandma Rae had more children than she could handle, displayed affection for none, was a compulsive cleaner, and each and every day cooked the identical menu in a two-foot-tall cast-iron pot: meatballs and potatoes. She made me uneasy. On every visit she lifted the hem of my skirt to inspect my underclothes. They rarely met her standards, but after remarking on them or the shabby state of my middy blouse, she ignored me.

She impressed us by the cleanliness of her windows, the floor, the bedclothes. Like most apartments on the Lower East Side, even Ada’s “by the doctor,” you entered directly into the kitchen, and then the rooms followed each other in a row. Each was filled with beds and some straight-backed chairs. The beds in Grandma Rae’s house could have passed muster in the army. Their gray wool blankets, squared at the corners and pulled tight, signaled that no one dared disturb their symmetry.

In our house, someone was always occupying my parents’ double bed—my father or my mother, or I’d rush home from school, roll into the bed and begin reading. Such behavior would have been unthinkable for Grandma Rae. Though Clayton did the cleaning, the tray under our gas burners did not sparkle as hers did, and when we stored our folding beds, the sheets jammed inside every which way.

During her early married years Lil used to bring cookies and cakes from Manya’s generous kitchen when she visited her mother. But Grandma Rae would respond by saying, “What is this, charity, we don’t have enough to eat?” So my mother soon stopped the practice.

After three quarters of an hour at Grandma Rae’s my mother would suggest that we walk along Delancey Street—she always enjoyed the weekly display of new shoes at A.S. Beck. During one of these strolls, no sooner did we stop at the window of Beck’s than she sucked in her breath. In the window, leaning against a pair of high-heeled pumps, was a black envelope purse decorated with a monogram of fake gold letters. Small
a,
large capital
B,
small
s
. My mother fluffed up her lynx collar and we stepped inside to inquire about the letters on the purse.

“It’s for A.S. Beck,” the skinny clerk explained. “The
B
is in the middle for Beck and the
a
and
s
for first and middle name.” He paused and gave my mother a grin to show a half-broken front tooth. “Here,” he continued, “I’ll print it for you. What’s your name?”

“Lil Roth.”

Carefully he printed a large
R
with a small
I
on the left. “Your middle name?” he asked. My father, born Abraham Jacob, signed his name Jack A. Roth, but my mother had no middle name. “I think it’s Leah,” she replied.

I pulled at her elbow and whispered. “That’s your Jewish name, that’s why they call you Lil. You can’t call yourself Lil Leah, it’s the same thing.”

“Fine,” replied the skinny salesman, “that’s easy,
I R I
.” My mother thanked him and we hurried home. “I must have a middle name,” she declared. Grasping at the first one that came to her mind she asked, “How about Shirley? Lillian Shirley Roth.”

I knew three Shirleys: one more hateful to me than the next. They may have been named during the Shirley Temple craze when so many of the Jewish Sarahs, Sylvias and Shoshanas became Shirley. And here was my mother, a grown woman, wanting to adopt the name for herself.