Except that Jack had no control over this event and he knew it. All of us knew it. He could pace the floor, he could chain-smoke, rave and rant, refuse to eat, exhaust us with his rage, but he didn’t have an ace to play.
My mother, whose reading limited itself to movie magazines and the entertainment section of the paper, fell back upon the movies. Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers, Ruby Keeler dancing off with Dick Powell, or those heroines who sacrificed themselves for love: Irene Dunne living in Back Street because her loved one couldn’t get a divorce; Margaret Sullavan coughing out her lungs from tuberculosis. But what movie had a story like this one, where the man disappears for fifteen years and suddenly returns? Lil believed in clichés: love conquers all; love is sweeping the country. As much as my mother was capable of loving, she loved Bubby and wanted the best for her. But my father guided her perceptions. Was Mister Elkin what Bubby needed? Lil had no answer.
Aunt Bertha showed up in the morning with Uncle Goodman at her side. She removed a small notebook from her purse and read from her list. “Of course you have to see Mister Elkin. For your own satisfaction. Either start again or put an end to it.”
At these words, my father, dressing in the bedroom, slammed out of the apartment without acknowledging the Goodmans, and since he was unemployed, went to kill some hours at Rocco’s, where he bet the last of his cash to ease his anguish over his mother.
“First,” Aunt Bertha continued addressing Manya, “the restaurant will be closed that day. Goodman and I will see that the apartment is in the best shape possible. You’ll wear the dress you bought for Dr. Koronovsky’s wedding. It’s a little dressy for the afternoon, but he said he would see you for lunch. Maybe he wants to take you somewhere, maybe the Lafayette, some nice French restaurant. If you cook, prepare one course, poached salmon with pureed split peas on the side. No appetizers, no soup, nothing fussy. A man doesn’t like to make love on a full stomach. No neighbors here, especially not Ada Levine. In the kitchen, only Lil. She’ll serve lunch. The children should be out of sight. If I’m right about Jack, he’ll stay in the bedroom and not come out for a hello.
“Goodman will be here tomorrow with John, the handyman from our factory. John will measure the kitchen and Lil and Goodman will pick out a nice piece of linoleum on Clinton Street. The kitchen is a disgrace, but it’s very small and can be fixed up in a hurry. We’ll buy curtains for the dining room windows.” Her lip curled at the sight of the short skinny curtains that hung like limp rags at either side of the two windows.
“And we need something for the table,” Aunt Bertha continued. “Look at that shawl. You gave it to clean for Passover and it came back in shreds. I can’t buy a new one. It’s out of style, like flapper dresses from the twenties.”
Then her tone softened. “Manya dear, don’t worry. We have a week. It’s enough. And also, Manya, only you should decide about Mister Elkin. Jack shouldn’t influence you. When you see Mister Elkin, you’ll know.”
She smiled at my mother. “Lil, Goodman will drive us to Macy’s for the curtains, and you can hem them. We’ll buy long ones, almost down to the floor, to cover the walls. And we’ll find something for the table. You can take the subway home when we’re through shopping, and tomorrow Goodman will come with John and bring the packages.”
Jack decided to give Farber a day of work without a commission, and early Sunday morning he left the house before Goodman showed up in his car, followed by John the handyman in his truck. Goodman told John, “You shouldn’t move the refrigerator—God knows what will creep out from under it—and measure around the stove; you’ll get a hernia if you try to push it.”
He did instruct John to take out the kitchen table, and the two chairs and throw them on his truck. The table had three legs, each propped up to level it with bits of old soggy cardboard or the dented boxes that had held the matches for the stove. Even with our beloved table gone—at which we had played cards, listened to poems in Yiddish, served Bubby’s many charity cases, the kitchen was pitifully small. Uncle Goodman had brought a stack of soft old pajamas and clean rags. “That’s for Clayton for later,” he said.
I sat beside John in his truck as my mother and Uncle Goodman led the way to the linoleum store on Clinton Street. We had never made purchases without my father. My mother bit her lip, agitated about choosing the linoleum. Uncle Goodman ruled out a white pattern because it would show the dirt, green because my father considered the color a jinx, red and gray because it was similar to the current dreary floor covering. He chose a modern pattern, dark yellow boxes, like tiles, each with a corner of navy blue. “Very classy,” Goodman said. He added to the store owner, “I don’t have time to bargain. Give me a fair price and no hondling. But you have to cut it for me right now, and a small piece or two for the toilet and for extras.” My mother trembled with uncertainty. “Do you think Daddy will like it?” she asked me. “Is it too much of a vanilla ice cream color?” I agreed with Uncle Goodman: “Classy.”
While the linoleum was being cut we went across the street to a small furniture store. Lil protested that we could do better at the Allen Street secondhand shop where she had bought the telephone table, but Uncle Goodman discarded her entreaties. “We’re doing this once, we’re doing this right. No secondhand.” The problem was to find a table small enough to fit into the space that had once held two washtubs. Uncle Goodman settled on the first one that would not crowd the kitchen, imitation pine with a high sheen. “It’s junk,” he said, shrugging, “but it’s clean. Clean is a must.”
Lil suggested we could ask Weinstock-the-agent for the kitchen paint. Again, Goodman pinched her cheek and laughed. “I have this one day to give you. Next year I won’t remember what I spent. A few dollars more, a few less, the mind forgets, the eye remembers.” Lil borrowed that sentence about the eye as a selling point, to use along with “food is like a wilted flower.”
Clayton staggered in as John was carrying the linoleum up the stairs. His hair was filled with feathers, and he smelled terrible, outdoing even the smells of the toilet and hallways.
Of the events that made up this busy day, none seemed as crazy as what happened next. Goodman went into the dark room where we stored our beds, withdrew the tin bathtub, set it in the hallway outside our door, filled the tub with hot water and told Clayton, “Get into this hot water and scrub yourself all over. Then put on these pajamas.”
Without a murmur of protest, Clayton stripped off his clothes. We took note of his dark uncircumcised penis, his flat behind with black hairs crawling from beneath the crack. He scrubbed himself with the brown bar soap bought for the floor, followed by Palmolive for his hair. Then he eased himself out of the dirty water, wiped himself with one of the soft rags and stood naked in front of me and Willy without the slightest urge for modesty. His penis seemed large enough to touch his knees, or so we imagined.
Uncle Goodman was short and fat, Clayton tall and skinny. He donned Uncle Goodman’s pajamas and with his shins bare, lifted the tin bathtub and sloshed the dirty water down the stairs. Then he began to paint the kitchen wall where the old table had stood. It was rank with dirt, caked with food that had to be shaved off the wall with John’s hand drill before they could start painting. John did the cabinets; Clayton the hard parts, up and down rhythmically: the wall, the filthy surface above the sink, under the sink, the wall again. Uncle Goodman cried, “It needs two coats, maybe three, but it’s better than before, cleaner. And we don’t have time.”
“Tomorrow,” Bubby offered, “Clayton can paint the kitchen again.”
Goodman shook his head. “Tomorrow he has to paint the toilet, maybe twice. John goes home as soon as he puts down the linoleum in the kitchen. You know that movie with Charlie Chaplin,
Modern
Times
? That’s what we’re doing here. Shnell, shnell, gefinished.”
The patterned linoleum with its small and large squares and touches of blue at the edges was beautiful. It transformed the entire kitchen, the shining yellow reflecting light, reflecting newness. Hundreds of roaches had emerged in a flurry when the old linoleum was ripped off; they ate green killing powder for breakfast. But the paste applied to hold down the new linoleum killed each and every roach. “So why didn’t we do this before?” Uncle Goodman demanded. “Did we have to wait for Mister Elkin to come back before we could make these improvements?”
Compared to the kitchen, with its fresh paint, linoleum and new table, the dining room appeared doubly shabby. Clayton slept on the kitchen floor the entire week, ready to help Lil install the new peach curtains, diaphanous and summery, that hid the glare from the outside but could not disguise the stained dining room seats, the balding carpet, the buckling wallpaper.
In the twitch of an eyelash, it was already Friday night. For reasons that I couldn’t fathom, I decided to clean Bubby’s cooking shoes. I needed a knife to scrape off the dirt from the soles and two or three coats of Shinola paste followed by liquid shine before the leather was clean. I held them up for Bubby’s admiration and said, “Bubby, you’ll need clean shoes when you go with Mister Elkin.”
My father, who had spent the week killing time, suddenly raised his voice to me.
“Listen,” he told me. “Why are you so excited about Mister Elkin? You’re supposed to take after me, to be the smart one, but you’re the dummy, a moron, an ignoramus. Don’t you realize that if Bubby decides to marry Mister Elkin that she’s finished with you? What do you think, that she’ll take you along on her honeymoon? That you’ll live with her on Riverside Drive while the rest of us stay here on Orchard Street?
“Mister Elkin doesn’t know you and doesn’t care about you. He wants Bubby, alone to himself. Why do you think I’ve been upset? If you’re smart, why couldn’t you figure this out? If Bubby gets married, it’s not like when you go with her to Yonkers. It’s the four of us, stuck in this dump. No restaurant, no bakery orders, no nothing. But especially no Bubby. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
His words had the effect of an intense physical blow. My hair stood on end. My throat constricted. My heart burned with anguish and fear. “Do you think she will take you on her honeymoon?” rattled in my head until I felt dizzy, blinded by the knowledge that everything I had relied on since I was born would terminate. I dropped the shoes I had been cleaning, ran into the hallway toilet, sat on the new toilet seat and shed enough tears to fill a bathtub if we’d had one.
For days we had been playing a game called, “What does Mister Elkin look like?” Was he fatherly like Lewis Stone? Suave like Warren Williams? Intelligent like Lionel Barrymore? Sitting in the clean toilet smelling of the two coats of fresh paint and the new linoleum, I understood my father at last. Why had we bothered sprucing up the house if it meant losing the person who gave it meaning? Lying next to Bubby in bed at last, I was deadly silent. So was she. Neither of us did much sleeping that night.
Because of the general tension that pervaded our home—my father’s hostility, my mother’s conflicting attitudes that changed from hour to hour and my sudden secret sorrow—I hadn’t paid attention to what I would wear when Mister Elkin came calling. I settled for my periwinkle blue skirt and pink blouse.
My mother dressed Bubby in her gray-blue lace, with the tiny diamond earrings and the seed pearl necklace that Mister Elkin had given her. She did not show off Dr. Koronovsky’s comb in her hair. She smelled wonderfully of Chanel No. 5 and a dusting of Coty’s powder. At the last minute Uncle Goodman drove up with two dining room chairs, on loan from his house in Yonkers. The seats were covered in black and gray brocade material and they had carved wooden armrests. Seated in the handsome chair, Manya appeared composed and regal.
As Aunt Bertha predicted, Jack sequestered himself in the bedroom, chain-smoking. More accurately, every few minutes he stepped out on the fire escape where he could see the length of Orchard Street to Allen Street, the better to spot the arrival of a car. My father was the only one who could recognize Mister Elkin. To the rest of us he was an imagined figure.
At last, we heard the words, “He’s here.” My mother put her hand to her heart. So did Bubby. I almost cried from nervousness. Each of us listened for his footsteps. A quick knock at the door. My mother opened it and in a falsetto voice asked, “Mister Elkin? I’m Manya’s daughter-in-law.”
“How do you do?” he said in perfect English. We had been instructed not to peek but both my brother and I did. We saw a man in a well-cut double-breasted banker’s gray suit, a matching vest, a white shirt and a conservative blue tie. He was gray haired, big chested and even featured, and his eyes blazed with a cold steady light, slightly demonic. I could have founded a religion on the basis of Bubby’s eyes, but not on Mister Elkin’s. Some thought, some image behind Elkin’s eyes flickered mysteriously. It had captivated Bubby once; maybe it would again. Compared to Bubby, he conveyed a high degree of Americanism.
As if he had left her side only a short while ago, he entered the dining room and cried out, “Manya, Manya. More beautiful than ever.”
Bubby arose from her chair and immediately Mister Elkin kissed her lips, her eyes, her throat. “Manya, my love.” Within seconds his eager hands dug into her dress and extracted the mountainous white breasts. My mother leaned against me for support. Were they going to fall to the floor for frya libbe?
Bubby pulled herself together and chastely covered her breasts with her hands. “Elkin, all these years, where have you been?” Caught up by his passion, he blurted out the truth. “Right here in New York. I have a business. I manufacture industrial belts for big machines.”
He was on his knees, petting her, kissing her hands, then burying his head in her breasts.
“You never went to South America?”
“I thought about it and changed my mind.”