Up From Orchard Street (9 page)

The wind was biting and cruel. We had heard on the radio that the temperature was ten degrees, and my grandmother viewed our excursion with alarm. “Where are you going in Siberian weather?”

“A few blocks. Some fresh air. Besides, Ada has steam heat.”

As usual, my brother kept his head down, barely keeping in step. I held on to my mother’s arm. The three of us were out of breath within minutes, struggling against the wind and cold. We hardly saw a soul on the streets. The sky darkened and icy patches lay like traps on the sidewalk.

Nevertheless, we managed to traverse Canal Street and to cross over to East Broadway. We passed the
Jewish Forward
building. Across from the public library was the Educational Alliance, known for giving free classes in English and the arts. The “Edgies” also had offices where people could get free legal advice. The classes, as scruffy as the public schools, provided shabby textbooks, broken crayons and secondhand donations from God knows where. Once when I started to take a class in Hebrew at the Edgies my mother put a stop to it in a hurry. I would surely come home with lice, she cried, and moreover, I was already fluent in Yiddish and knew some Russian. What was I doing at the Edgies with immigrants?

That day the Edgies loomed as a welcome landmark and we might have ducked in for a moment to relieve the cold, but it was closed on Saturdays. Besides we were just two streets away from Ada’s. We plowed along like runaways crossing a frozen tundra.

For once Ada’s house appeared like a haven. We gasped with relief when we lumbered up the steps and were met with a rush of warm air at her door. Ada greeted us in a frayed pink chenille wrapper, her hair in tin curlers; she hadn’t as yet brushed her teeth or fixed her coffee. “In this weather, you’re out?” My gorgeous muff and Willy’s shiny jacket escaped her notice. She yawned noisily, exhaling stale breath. My mother drew back a step. “How come you’re not working?” Ada asked.

“Too cold. No customers.”

“You came to take a bath?”

It was a mistake to have made the trip, though my mother pretended not to notice that Ada had stayed in bed all morning. Possibly her children were sleeping late as well. I pulled Willy to the bottom step of the stairs that led to the doctor’s apartment and brushed my face against my beautiful muff for comfort. Willy’s lips were blue and as cold as his nose.

“Mother, let’s go home,” I said. She ignored us and stepped inside Ada’s apartment.

Within minutes, Shirley and Artie joined us in the hall. On this blustery cold day Shirley Levine wore socks over her brown oxfords. “Hide-and-seek!” Artie cried. Tapping my brother, Shirley yelled, “You’re it!” Both Levine children dashed out the front door into the street. With reluctance we followed them outdoors. Neither was anywhere in sight. Maybe they were hidden under the steps of the stoop; maybe they were just around the corner. In fact, they had reentered the building while we were looking for them and locked the outside door from within. We tried with all our strength to open the door. We failed.

The wind stiffened. We stood on the sidewalk, Willy and I, buffeted by the wind. Our one desire was to get home and though we twisted around in the wind, we were certain we were walking in the right direction. We kept our heads down. It started to snow.

We must have walked three blocks before we realized that neither the public library building nor the Edgies was visible. We had wandered away from the direction of Orchard Street into unknown territory. Unknown and potentially dangerous. At the end of the street stood a group of teenaged boys.

“Sheeny on your own side!” one of them yelled.

“Guineas!” screamed Willy. “Guineas from Little Italy!”

It couldn’t have been an Italian gang—we were miles from Mott, Mulberry, Cherry or Elizabeth streets. Reversing ourselves immediately, we pounded down the pavement as fast as we could. Did the boys in pursuit want to beat us? Did they long to steal Willy’s shiny new jacket or my brand-new white muff? I was terrified for Willy. He lost his breath easily. In my mind’s eye I could see those big boys knocking us down, stomping Willy to death. His gloved hand in mine, I pulled him through street after street.

We could hear the gang’s footsteps behind us and we raced ahead blindly, crossing streets without watching for cars. Miraculously, no car hit us as we crossed from East Broadway to Canal. At that point we could have paused because we were back in our own neighborhood, with people who could protect us. But we thought we still heard thundering footsteps, and the cries of “Sheeny on your own side” swelled in our ears. Our tears had frozen our eyelashes; we could hardly see. We pounded on, past Loew’s Canal, past Mathias Hats, Jacob’s Clothing, not once glancing at The Grand Canal Cafeteria. My legs were icicles encased in frozen leggings. In yanking Willy across the streets I had fallen twice and skinned my knees and once my muff hit the slush. But all we could feel was fear—as frigid as the air and the ice on the sidewalk. Finally, our house. We rounded the corner to Orchard Street. No one followed us.

We gasped our way upstairs. Willy threw himself into my grandmother’s lap. “Bubby, Bubby, the Guineas, the Guineas!” He was beside himself with terror.

Quickly, Bubby brought us to the cold water tap and ran the water over our fingers. Compared to their icy state, the cold water felt boiling hot. She removed our gloves and wordlessly wiped off our faces, our lashes still iced together, our mouths frozen.

For a woman built close to the ground Bubby was surprisingly limber. She quickly brought us her wedding feather blanket and took care of Willy first, removing his wet shoes and socks and placing her ear to his wheezing chest. “The Guineas! the Guineas!” he kept screaming. She wrapped him in the blanket, placed his feet in a basin of warm water and retrieved a bottle of ephedrine tablets for his asthma. She placed a pill between his icy lips, hugging and kissing him and repeating, “My kind, my sise kind.”

Both of us kept crying. We couldn’t stop. “My muff—it fell in the water,” I sobbed.

“A little water is gornisht. A little water is nothing.”

My coat and dress came off easily; the major problem was the leggings, covered with ice. I watched Bubby stand quietly, her hand to her head. The sharpest knife in her kitchen, a butcher’s knife, could not cut through frozen leather. Then it came to her—how to get rid of those accursed leggings.

She warmed some oil in a pan and holding on to my skinny body, she poured the oil around the edge of the leggings, at least a quart, until at last I could wiggle my toes, my legs. Then she lowered my stockings and simply lifted me out of the leggings.

She worked with such unwavering concentration that she didn’t utter a sound until I was free. Then a smile spread over her face. Her white hair had escaped from her haphazard bun during these exertions so she looked slightly wild but triumphant as she threw the leggings into a corner of the kitchen.

My legs were blue with cold. She rubbed their oily surface until I felt some sensation.

She acted as if no recent trauma had occurred. “Roasted chestnuts or hot sweet potatoes?” she asked as she rolled the hot potatoes over our chests as if they were poultices. Periodically Willy would cry out, “The Guineas, the Guineas,” and each time Bubby would answer, “Not here. Not on Orchard Street.”

Unexpectedly my mother came through the door. She seemed to take our presence for granted. “Listen,” she said, “I decided to call myself Shirley for my middle name after all.”

My father staggered out of the bedroom. He had been taking a nap.

“Jack, what are you doing home?” she asked.

“Sent back. Not a soul on Division Street. Now it’s snowing. The radio says it’s a major storm.”

“Listen, Jack, tell me the truth. What do you think of Shirley for my middle name?”

My father scrounged around in an old tin box that once held Louis Sherry chocolates. He had given them to my grandmother for Mother’s Day, ate almost every one of them, and since then often replenished the lavender box with the best chocolates he could afford. He had instructed me at an early age on the eating of expensive chocolates: “A Belgian chocolate is not a peanut. You don’t bite into it. You let it dissolve on your palate.” Now he extracted a chocolate cream—he preferred dark bitter chocolate filled with delicate cream—and let it dissolve in his mouth slowly before answering.

“Shirley is like Margie, it’s like Mary. Everyone is called Shirley these days.” He inspected the tin box thoughtfully. “Why don’t you call yourself Sherry. You know, like Louis Sherry chocolates.”

“Sherry? Is that a woman’s name?”

“Of course it’s a woman’s name. Where do you think sherry liqueur comes from? Probably from some gorgeous woman.”

“Sherry,” my mother repeated. “Lil Sherry Roth.” She regarded my father with awe. “Jack,” she said, “sometimes I think you’re a genius.”

7

Misadventures

MY PARENTS STARTED taking me to the Roxy, the Palace, or to Broadway plays after Yussie Feld remarked during one of his visits that he and his wife had accompanied Shirley to a Saturday matinee on Broadway and she enjoyed it. “Oh,” my mother said, “we work weekends. During the week, we treat our children all the time.”

In late winter, business slowed on Division Street. On Wednesdays my parents sometimes kept me from school and we set out for a matinee. Sitting with them on the subway and then in some movie or vaudeville house uptown brought me to tears of pride.

Every act and headliner enchanted me; it was my American experience, as compared to the Second Avenue Yiddish theater with Bubby, a European event. Afterward, riding home on the subway, people noticed my father with his slick black hair, his expensive hat and a three-pointed handkerchief peeping from the breast pocket of his dark, well-tailored coat, and my mother elegant in the latest fashion. I felt awe and alienation. In my dull sailor dress and too-small overcoat, how did I relate to this sophisticated couple? I was Orchard Street; not they.

Once home, my father retold the jokes he had memorized watching the stage show. “So this man goes into a restaurant, and after he eats the owner asks him how he liked the dinner. The customer says the food satisfied him, but he needed more than two slices of bread. The next time the customer comes in the owner gives him four pieces of bread and still the man complains, ‘I need more bread.’ A few days later his plate holds eight pieces, eight whole pieces of bread, and the diner still shakes his head, ‘More bread.’ Well the restaurant owner says, ‘I’ll fix him’ and he takes a loaf of bread as big as the table and cuts it in half and hands it to the customer. Then the owner asks, ‘Well, was everything all right?’ and the man answers, ‘Great, great, but tell me, why did you go back to two pieces of bread?’ ”

Our entire family laughed. The news flew from door to door that I had been with my parents uptown to see a show, wearing my best dress. The sailor dress hung on a nail in the bedroom until the next big event.

However, no theatrical event could compare to a visit to Yonkers and a stay at the home of Aunt Bertha and Uncle Goodman. For a short period the Goodmans shared our Orchard Street Passover seder, I awkward and embarrassed at spending the evening with the teenaged Goodman children, Flo—Florence—and Henry, both of whom spoke with accents as different from ours as actors in a British movie. They used the English
a,
calling Bubby “Ahnt Manya,” and my father “Cousin Jack.” Every year Flo would remark, “I don’t really prefer this menu.”

Aunt Bertha struck me, not as my grandmother’s baby sister, but as some movie star, say Kay Francis, whose high-fashion style she emulated. Ravishing furs tumbled from Aunt Bertha’s coats; over her suits she draped double silver foxes, their mouths clasped together, their eyes bright brown beads. In the dead of winter she swept up our steps in a floor-length mink. She wore wide-brimmed hats, cloches, turbans of silk, hats trimmed with flowers or feathers, that she kept on her head during her visits. Her diamond rings glittered on her fingers like shiny pebbles. I was dazzled.

To obtain Bubby’s agreement to visit Yonkers took weeks of urging and planning. My father opposed it on principle and Bubby did not feel comfortable having to dress up, worry about her English and forsake the routine of which she was so fond. Besides, when we stayed in Yonkers I couldn’t let myself appear defective in English so I called Bubby “Grandmother.” She created one excuse after another for avoiding Yonkers but finally, and mostly for my sake, she would consent to the trip.

The preparations took as much time as getting ready for a week in the country. Bubby cooked a vat of stuffed cabbage because it thrilled Goodman; a brisket for sandwiches; a challah; and every cake, cookie and strudel in her repertoire.

Goodman would pick us up on Friday night for the drive to Yonkers and my grandmother and I sat in the capacious leather-lined front seat of his black Lincoln. Once, he made a halfhearted effort to invite Willy to come along, but my brother, much too shy, cringed at the idea. Nor were my parents part of the equation. This was Manya’s treat, and she couldn’t conceive of leaving me behind.

Our Yonkers routine didn’t vary. On Friday night we ate the food that we brought from home. But on Saturday night, Goodman, Aunt Bertha, Bubby and I went to a Hungarian restaurant noted not for its food but for its Gypsy violinist. Repeatedly, Goodman remarked, “The cooking can’t compare to yours, Manya, and it’s not as lively as Moskowitz and Lupovitz on Second Avenue, but we want you to have a good time.”

Stuffed into her corset, her pumps and her gray-blue crepe dress, Bubby pretended that she did, but there was no pretense for me. I was transported to a world that fulfilled all my fantasies.

The Goodman house itself, its large rooms and high ceilings, impressed me. The wide outside porch with its swinging chaise, the entryway called the “foy-aye,” and the living room with identical couches that faced each other reminded me of illustrations in a magazine. The grandeur of Dr. Koronovsky’s Grand Street apartment, which I had once glimpsed, could not equal this setting.

I claimed the sunroom for my own. It faced the broad street sheltered by tall trees, and I luxuriated in the white rattan chaise amid plump green cushions. Best of all were the magazines:
The Saturday
Evening Post, Colliers, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar
and every movie magazine imaginable. Given my choice, I would have sat in the chaise or on the window seat of the sunroom and read magazines the entire length of my stay.

At home, I hated being outside, though outdoors was often less cold than our damp apartment. I rejected skipping rope, despised playing potsie, was terrified of the swings in Hester Park. My mother often threatened me with the prospect of learning how to roller-skate, a pastime that could only accentuate my awkwardness. And even if I had been able to skip rope, do double Dutch, swing up to the sky, skate down the sidewalks without fear, none of which I mastered, I would always wear the same clothes I wore to school.

At least once every visit, Goodman would ask, as if it were the Passover seder, why this night was different from all other nights. “Did I ever tell you how I happened to meet Bertha?” he said. His children listened, too polite to groan, and Goodman, beaming, went on uninterrupted.

“I was eating at Manya’s, and there stood Bertha, so tall, so beautiful. I said to Manya, I said, ‘Are you going to introduce me to this kretzavitz? Is she your daughter?’ Manya laughed and said, ‘That’s my baby sister. She’s an American, doesn’t remember a word of Russian, speaks Yiddish like a shiksa.’ ” At this point Goodman paused. “Do you know what I told Bertha? I said, ‘Bertha, I’m going to marry you. I’ll stay here day and night until you tell me you’ll marry me.’ Bertha laughed, ‘You’ll be in the wrong place because I don’t live on Orchard Street.’ So I answered, ‘Then I’ll wait outside your door wherever you are. I’ll sit on the steps and won’t let you out of my sight. And I’ll make you very happy.’ ”

Goodman glanced at Bubby. “Manya, iz dus der emmes? The truth?”

“Emmes,” Manya replied.

Goodman jumped up. As Bertha toyed with the string of pearls at the neck of her blue and gray striped silk dress, he kissed her on the cheek. More than twenty years of marriage had not dimmed his ardor. He regarded every diamond and every jewel that he bought her as a kiss from him to her; a head shorter than she, he was a roly-poly enthralled with his tall elegant princess. Aunt Bertha would cry out flirtatiously, “Goodman, you’ll never change.”

“And why should I change, why shouldn’t I tell the woman I love that she’s wonderful?” His enthusiasm, his buoyancy, his good nature carried the day. Aunt Bertha had made an excellent marriage—not one based on early passion on her part, but one that provided her with devotion and with luxury that no little girl from Odessa could have imagined.

On Saturday morning, Aunt Bertha, who did not observe our dietary laws, refrained from preparing bacon and eggs for her children. Rather, we had Saperstein’s lox and sturgeon, and my Bubby’s challah and coffee cake with our coffee, Bubby uneasy about not fussing in the kitchen. Then she and I went for a walk in the neighborhood, my eyes literally tearful at the sight of houses set back on wide lawns. When the plants and trees were in bloom, I would envision myself as the heroine in
The
Secret Garden
.

In early evening, as soon as it grew dark, Aunt Bertha would remind me kindly, “It’s time to take your shower.” The words were magical. I went upstairs to the main bathroom, and with Bubby’s help removed my navy blue sailor dress and enjoyed the spraying water, not ashamed as at the public baths but elated, imagining this house as the finest hotel. In Yonkers I forgot my skinny, shapeless legs and the ribs that showed through my chest. Here I poured shampoo from a bottle on my hair and afterward was bundled into an enormous bath towel.

To be sure, I wore the same underwear from the day before, but when my hair was towel-dried it fell into a natural wave, and Aunt Bertha would remark on how beautiful it was. “It’s like your father’s,” she said. “Jack has beautiful hair, too.”

Bubby washed her face before the evening’s entertainment and recombed her hair. Long ago Aunt Bertha had bought her a robe called a housecoat, which remained in the guest room closet for our visits. Slipping out of the housecoat, she now pulled her dress over her head, and groaning slightly, forced her feet into her pumps. Then Uncle Goodman brought the car out of the garage and we drove off to The Gypsy Cellar.

No food at this Hungarian restaurant could reach the professionalism of my grandmother’s cooking. The stuffed cabbage was watery and filled mostly with rice; Hungarian stew proved salty, as if it had been reheated. Soggy dessert crepes stuffed with apricot jam completed the meal. Bertha, the most knowledgeable diner in our group, ordered chicken paprikash, a combination of chicken, sour cream and paprika. I hardly tasted a bite of the potato pancakes and roast chicken that my grandmother and I shared, too intent on waiting for the strolling violinist.

He was dressed in a puffed-sleeved white shirt with a frill down the middle, a red cummerbund and tight black shiny pants, and he played a variety of Hungarian/Russian/Rumanian songs with lots of fancy fiddling, though most of the tunes sounded similar to my ears. The dark room, wood paneled and smoky, smelled of stale food. When the violinist came to our table, I rose, stood on the chair and without any hesitation sang, “Orchichornia.” My father’s instructions, “Mother sings, you listen,” had no relevance at The Gypsy Cellar. Uncle Goodman hushed everyone around us so that my thin voice could be heard.

To this day I don’t know whether I had the Russian quite right, but unafraid, I sang with great passion. “Orchichornia, orchiyasnia, orchikrasnia, imagushnia, suk ba yee, yavas, kok lublu yavas, orchichornia, I love you so.”

Uncle Goodman led the applause. Bubby wiped tears from her eyes. Aunt Bertha said, “Manya, I see why you’re so proud of her.” At other tables I could hear diners ask, “How old is she? Where did she learn to sing Russian?” Needless to say, as my mother’s prompter, I could sing every song in her repertoire, but at The Gypsy Cellar I feared to press my luck and simply repeated endless choruses of “Dark Eyes.”

After tea and inferior pastries, we left for the Yonkers house. Uncle Goodman tipped everyone lavishly and the waiters in their Hungarian costumes, with red braid on their jackets and down the sides of their pants, complimented me, my beautiful grandmother with her white hair, and Aunt Bertha in her toque hat trimmed with feathers. All the while, little Uncle Goodman smiled, smiled, giving off enough electrical energy to light a stadium.

At daybreak, while Bertha and the Goodman children slept, we crept out and Goodman drove us back to Orchard Street. At the door, he pressed money into my grandmother’s hand. She resolutely refused. He handed it to me and I accepted, another one of our rituals. Then Bubby started to bustle about the kitchen to prepare for Sunday’s lunch customers and I took off my navy blue sailor dress.

On a dark February evening several months later, we set out again for Yonkers with our usual packages and pots of food but in the car I started to feel sick. Wedged between Bubby in her seal coat and Uncle Goodman, I said that I had a stomachache. Uncle Goodman assured me that I would feel better soon.

For once, the sight of the sunroom and the stacks of magazines failed to lift my spirits and I could hardly keep my head up. I lay down on the bed in the guest room upstairs. The white ceiling swam above me. I had to hold on to the side of the bed or fall off. Aunt Bertha heated my grandmother’s brisket, but I couldn’t make it downstairs. Bubby suggested that I sleep for a while and I did, fitfully, hearing the laughter and voices below, wishing I could be with them but unable to raise my head even when I tried. A minute or an hour later Bubby put her hand on my head and asked for a thermometer.