Til the Real Thing Comes Along (25 page)

Rosie thought how lucky Itzy Friedel was to live in a place as exciting as Atlantic City instead of gray old Pittsburgh. As
she and her mother walked behind the two men, pieces of their conversation drifted back. “So richly deserved,” she heard her
father say, in a voice that sounded as if he was bragging. Rosie had never heard her father brag. His white hairless legs
looked silly sticking out of the too-large plaid suit. They were the same milky-white as the bald spot on the top of his head.

“No kiddin’? Richly deserved?
Mazel tov,”
Itzy Friedel said, patting her father on the back, and when he did, Rosie noticed he was wearing a gold watch. Rich. He must
be rich. To own a hotel
and
a gold watch.

“Maybe a raise?” Rosie heard Itzy Friedel ask her father.

“Vy not?” Rosie heard her father say. A raise. That might mean her mother could have a day off now and then, instead of working
seven days a week in Uncle Shulke’s grocery store. Selling, packing, marking, shlepping, standing on her feet. Rifke never
complained, but on the way to Atlantic City, Rosie had seen a light in her mother’s eyes that had never been there before.

The boardwalk. Rosie turned in a circle to take it all in. It was the most exciting place she’d ever seen. To begin with,
it smelted like fresh roasted peanuts. It was just opposite the beach and the huge blue ocean. There were stores and arcades,
all wide open. No windows or doors. A person could just walk right in. Skee-Ball, saltwater taffy, and agggh—look at that.
A peanut. A life-size peanut. Well, really a person dressed up like a peanut, handing out free little packs, of peanuts.

“Look, Rosele,” her mother said.

Rosie watched the peanut bowing and handing little bags of Planter’s peanuts to the children who were brave
enough to approach him. It was like a dream. If Bubbe were alive she would have said, “Only in America.”

“We’ll come back to the boardwalk tonight,” Itzy Friedel said to Rosie and motioned them all toward a stairway that led down
to the beach. The ocean. The sand was burning under her feet but Rosie, seeing the water for the first time, ran toward it
as if it had some magnetic pull. Along her way, she took in everything her eyes could devour. The tanned men hitting the multicolored
beach ball back and forth and up into the sky, the women in two-piece bathing suits lying on their stomachs with their tops
undone, and the little naked baby at the shoreline who shrieked when the surf nibbled at her feet, then chased it when it
turned to go away. A family vacation.

Maybe now that Joseph Katzman had opened his eyes and realized her father’s true worth, there would be lots of family vacations.
That night the three members of the Rabinowitz family, all of whom had very painful sunburns, were treated to dinner by Itzy
in a restaurant called Shumsky’s.

Before Rosie fell asleep on the cot that the old deaf bellhop put at the foot of her parents’ bed, because Itzy could afford
to give away only one free room, she looked up at the whirring fan and wished the vacation would last forever.

The next morning, while Rifke slept, Rosie and Itzy and Louie took a six
A
.
M
. bicycle ride all the way to Margate, along the empty boardwalk. All the stores and games were dosed, and except for some
other bicycle riders they could see far down the boardwalk ahead of them, there wasn’t another person in sight. The only sounds
as they rode were the rush of the ocean and the squeals of the seagulls. Rosie smiled at the sight of her father riding a
two-wheel bicycle. Even at this hour he had the stub of the Marsh Wheeling cigar stuck into the side of his mouth. Vacations.

One night Itzy took them to the Steel Pier to see the diving horse. Afterward they played Skee-Ball, and though they didn’t
have enough coupons when it was time to go home, Itzy Friedel flirted with the prize lady and she gave Rosie a Kewpie-doll
bank. Then they watched a man demonstrate a gizmo that chopped and shredded and riced and diced who had a spiel that reminded
Rosie of Sid Stone, the man on the Milton Berle show. A lady in a booth was
selling a tonic called Vitalac that was supposed to make old people feel young. And when they got back to The Seaview that
night, Rosie did her imitation of the lady for the three grown-ups, who screamed with laughter as they all sat rocking in
the wicker rocking chairs on the porch of the hotel. Little by little their terrible sunburns were turning into tans, and
Rosie loved the way she looked now. So different when she was all brown and healthy. But tomorrow was Sunday and time to leave.

Sunday morning, after Louie packed the Plymouth and cleaned off the windshield, which had been thick with the residue of the
sea air, he looked at his boyhood friend. Itzy Friedel wiped away a tear, put a big loving hug around all of them, and Rosie
was reminded again of how much he looked like the Cowardly Lion, especially at the end of the movie when Dorothy was saying
goodbye to all of them. “Every year,” he said. “You’ll come back every year.” Louie smiled a smile that meant he wished that
would be possible and then they were back in the Plymouth on their way home. Home. None of them wanted to go there. Rifke
would be back on her full-time schedule at the grocery store the minute she walked in the door, and Louie had fall classes
to get started, the athletic activities to organize. Vacations. Why were they so short?

It was the very next morning that Louie’ went into work to be called into Joseph Katzman’s office. A raise, Louie thought.
Now he’ll, tell me about a raise.

“Pop,” Joseph Katzman said. Katzman, despite his seventy years, was still dapper. He was a fine man and Louie was proud to
have been chosen by him all those years ago. Louie had been standing in front of Katzman’s desk for a long moment before he
realized there was someone else in the room. A boy who was sitting on the sofa against the wall, under the huge family portrait
of the Gelman family, the rich people who endowed the center.

“I’d like you to meet Larry Zeitman. Larry is going to be your new boss.” Louie turned to look at Larry Zeitman and for a
second a smile flickered across his face, because he looked at this
pisher,
green behind the ears, a boy who didn’t seem to be much older than his Rosie, and it seemed as if Katzman had just said…

“Nice meeting you,” the
pisher
boy said to Louie. “We’ll get together in a few days, as soon as I’ve had an opportunity
to assess the program and decide how we should proceed.”

Louie looked from the boy to Katzman and back to the boy again. They both stood stiffly, and he realized that he had been
dismissed. The two of them were waiting for him to leave Katzman’s office now so they could go about their business assessing
the program and deciding how to proceed. His boss.

Of course. It was no longer important for them to have someone who spoke Yiddish and had a way with the immigrants, because
the immigrants had all moved to better neighborhoods. The new man was experienced in dealing with the colored element, and
that was what the neighborhood had to deal with now. When Louie went to Joseph Katzman the next day to tell him he was leaving
the Settlement House, that’s what Katzman told him. Then, with simply a nod, Katzman accepted his resignation, after thirty-five
years of service. Louie started for the door.

“Pop,” Katzman said. For the first time the name made Louie cringe. “You understand that things have changed around here a
great deal, and the boy, he comes from Chicago. And he has a master’s degree.”

Thirty-five years, and not only wasn’t there a party for him or a going-away present from anyone, but on the day he left,
no one even came to his office to say goodbye. Just Clarence Schroeder, the janitor, who came up and said, “Too bad, Pop.
Too bad.” And Louie, with tears in his eyes, moved the stub of the Marsh Wheeling cigar from the right corner of his mouth
across his bottom lip to the left corner of his mouth, took a deep breath, and walked out of the Settlement House forever.

He tried to get other jobs as a social worker. When he applied to the State of Pennsylvania, they told him he was too old;
at the community center in McKeesport, they hired someone else; and after nearly three months of looking, he was working for
Uncle Shulke too. It made Rosie sad for him, especially after Cousin Mottie’s wedding to Sol Befferman’s daughter. Uncle Shulke
had been sitting at a nearby table, and Rosie overheard him say to Uncle Munish, who was in the button business in downtown
Pittsburgh: “If he’s so smart, a goddamned college graduate, so how come he has to work for me? And he believes in Communism.
You know why? Because Communism is for poor people.
So is equal rights. Equal shmequal. Equal rights is their way of saying I’m equal even if I’m poor. I guarantee you I write
Louie Rabinowitz a check for fifty thousand, he wouldn’t give a good goddamn about poor people. Of course, I ain’t writing
so fast ” he added as a joke, and he and Uncle Munish laughed, and Rosie was glad her father was at the buffet table and didn’t
hear them.

One night when the store was open late, and Rosie had finished her homework, she came downstairs to help her parents. Just
as they were ready to close the doors, a man entered. Dirty and unshaven, he had one shoe that was ripped open so you could
see his filthy toes. And the man said to Rosie’s father: “I’ve been out of work for a year, because I’m sick, and I don’t
have enough money to provide for my family.” There was a long silent moment and then Rosie’s father handed the man a big basket
and said to him: “Fill it up. Take what you need. It’s free.” And when Rosie’s mother put her hand on her husband’s, as if
to remind him that the food belonged to Uncle Shulke and not him, he said, “Let Shulke take it out of my pay.”

Unfortunately, the dirty man, who lived in the neighborhood, thought he was doing a good thing by telling everyone how generous
the man in the grocery store was. When the news got back to Uncle Shulke, he fired Rosie’s father too. Now Louie sat in the
apartment above the grocery store every day and read the
Jewish Daily Forward
and didn’t talk much. He was only fifty-nine years old, but he rocked in the chair while he read, like a very old man, and
he ate too much, and he had heartburn so bad that one night they thought he was having a heart attack until he took a Bromo
Seltzer and it went away.

Now they had less money than ever. Rosie would have to get a job after school and on the weekends and in the summer. She was
thirteen, and very shy, and it was hard for her to go into the stores on the same block as Uncle Shulke’s grocery store and
ask the merchants to hire her, but she did.

Teitelbaum the fish man laughed and said Rosie was so little his customers wouldn’t even be able to see her over the counter,
and besides, his son Jakie helped him after school. Rosie was relieved. The smell of Teitelbaum’s fish store always made her
sick to her stomach. Mr. Hyman, the owner of the children’s store, said she was just a child
herself and that the mothers wouldn’t want her to wait on them. Schwartz the cleaner did everything himself. Mineo’s Pizza
had all the help they needed.

So when Rosie’s mother went to talk to her brother Shulke, her heart ached. She wanted Rosie to have time after school to
enjoy her life, not to be in the dreary grocery store the way she herself had been for the last fourteen years, dealing with
all the
meshugge
customers and their demands and complaints.

“She’s very responsible,” Rifke told Shulke halfheartedly, hoping he would say “I don’t need her.”

“Sold,” he said instead. “Sold American. Every day after school until closing time at ten. Every Saturday all day. In the
summer all day every day. That way she’ll learn the stock. Otherwise I don’t need her.”

And so Rosie worked beside her mother every day after school, selling, marking, packing, shlepping the groceries. And after
much bargaining and many tears from Rifke, Uncle Shulke agreed that instead of giving Greenberg the sign painter, who was
a stranger, money to paint the signs that were taped into the storefront windows once a week, he would give the same money
to Louie for painting them.

So the kitchen table became Louie’s workshop, and using his drawing talent, the signs became his source of pride,
ROKEACH BEET BORSCHT
39
CENTS
, he painted in red on white posterboard.
SCHAV
39
CENTS
, he painted in green on yellow posterboard. In September he did a beautiful one in Hebrew that said
L
’
SHANA TOVA
—Happy New Year. And when Rosie came up from the store to do her homework she would peek in, see him there, and she would
come in and give him a kiss before she started her homework. While he painted he always kept the cigar in the side of his
mouth, and always he would sing the same song.

“I’m forever blowink bobbles, priddy bobbles in de air. Dey fly so high, nearly rich da sky. Den like my drimz, dey fade and
die. Fortune’s alvays hidink. I’ve looked everyvere. I’m forever blowink bobbles, priddy bobbles in dee airrr.”

1957

B
y the time he was five years old, Davey Malcolm had seen all his mother’s films at least twice. Except for
Woman On the Run,
which he’d seen seven times because that was his father’s favorite, and that was the one his parents showed most often after
dinner parties, in the screening room. And when they did, Davey in his Little Slugger baseball pajamas would curl up in his
mother’s lap and put his face near her sweet perfumed neck and watch. Unless the party was just for grown-ups and Davey was
hurried off to bed. In which case he would wait in his room until he was certain the screening room was dark, tiptoe back
downstairs, slip into the back row, and watch anyway.

Davey knew at exactly which moment he should slip out of the screening room, too, and that was right after his mother took
Gino in her arms, while the dying gangster was lying there in the street in a puddle of blood, right where they’d shot him,
and she said, “Ahhh, Gino, why did you have to let this happen? I thought we were going to have our whole lives ahead of us.…
I love you more than anything, and now… it looks like you’re leaving me.” Boy, she was beautiful when she said that, holding
onto Gino’s coat like she didn’t even mind the blood.