Up From Orchard Street (17 page)

“And you never came to see me, never wrote me?”

“I couldn’t. Whenever I thought of it, I was ashamed, afraid.”

“You afraid.” She paused. “Did you ever marry?”

His eyes, those deep unreadable eyes, shifted from her face. “Manya, I couldn’t stop thinking of you. How many nights I didn’t sleep wanting you. And you, Manya, what did you do when I disappeared?”

“I waited, I suffered. I waited some more.”

“Oh, Manya, Manya, after all these years, you can still break my heart.”

“Mine broke long ago. I tried to find you. Everywhere we looked. We put a letter in ‘Der Bintel Brief’ in the
Forward
. We hired a detective.”

Mister Elkin rose to his feet, pulled the other fancy chair close to her and sat down. “Manya, you hired a detective? You hired a detective like I was some common thief?”

“I was only trying to find you. I thought maybe you died in South America, maybe you got sick on the ship and died.”

“A real detective?”

“What then, a false one? Of course a real detective. For real money, for a real two years.”

Mister Elkin smiled. I could see a tremor shooting through his right hand and to cover it he straightened his tie and patted his carefully barbered hair.

“Manya, I bought a present for you. In my excitement I left it in the car. I’ll get it for you. Less than five minutes.”

Mister Elkin didn’t look to the right or to the left, didn’t say good-bye. On the fire escape, my father watched him walk briskly to his Oldsmobile, get in and drive away. None of us stirred. We waited ten minutes, fifteen. My father emerged from the bedroom. “He’s gone. He won’t be coming back.”

“His soul is like a raisin,” Bubby finally said. “Sweet on the outside, nothing inside.” She kicked off her blue satin shoes and called to me, “Elkaleh, bring me my clean cooking shoes.” Not once did she return to the subject of Mister Elkin, another case of “up gevishen der lippen und shah”—wiping your lips and remaining silent. Whatever she thought or felt she kept to herself.

11

Prelude to Connecticut

MOST SUNDAYS MY father sought out my Uncle Jack. Of my mother’s seven brothers, only Uncle Abe had kept his original name. At an early age, all the rest adopted names they preferred. My Uncle Jack took my father’s name when Jack Roth was courting Lil. No one could remember Uncle Geoff’s original name. In Yiddish it was Yuffie, but when Gene Tunney dominated the pugilistic scene, he decided that Gene sounded more manly. Though he liked Jeffrey he didn’t want his name confused with the cartoon “Mutt and Jeff.” After much tinkering he came up with Geoffrey as suitably distinguished.

The brothers were divided between the light ones, meaning fair of hair and complexion, and the dark ones. My mother, originally one of the dark ones, credited my father with transforming her. The brothers were also divided between the smart and average, and Uncle Geoff and Uncle Jack towered over the rest. My father influenced their reading and dressing habits, their interest in movies and theater. Everyone agreed that not one of the Simon brothers could compare in wit, repartee or writing to my father. But Uncle Geoff forced himself to become cultivated and Uncle Jack had natural artistic abilities and loved classical music.

Uncle Geoff was the first one in the family to buy a small house. It was in the Midwood section of Brooklyn and when my mother took us there, she invariably remarked, “Children, today is a day in the country.” To her, Brooklyn was as much the country as Yonkers was to me.

Uncle Geoff had no artistic talents though he forced himself to learn the violin, which he tortured rather than played. But he did enjoy reading and he had a special bookcase in his house for what he called “erotica.” The bookcase, kept under lock and key, contained such treasures as
Fanny Hill,
Joyce’s
Ulysses,
D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and Gertrude Stein’s
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
.

My father tolerated Uncle Geoff in small doses, and found his conversation sometimes stimulating, but he didn’t like him. Too cold, too self-serving, arrogant, Geoff lacked heart. Besides, he kept a steady mistress in an apartment, a new one every year. In spite of my father’s freethinking, he couldn’t conceive of ongoing infidelity, or of a woman to whom he paid money. My mother pretended not to know of her brother’s arrangement because she and Aunt Bea had been friends as neighborhood children. Bubby advised me not to reveal Uncle Geoff’s separate life. “Up gevishen der lippen und shah,” she told me. I considered Bubby’s confidence in me as sacred and kept up the charade.

A fanatic about proper word usage, Uncle Geoff went berserk if someone called the sidewalk “the floor” instead of “the ground.” He agonized over his children’s names. His firstborn, a son, was tentatively called Robert because Geoff believed that the short version, Bob, sounded blond American. But his younger brother, Reuben, quickly appropriated Robert for himself and then another brother, Isaac, decided that he, too, needed the name Robert. Thus there were two Simon brothers, one Bob, one Rob, both officially Robert Simon. To avoid confusion, Isaac took his former first name as his middle initial, and became Robert I. Simon, occasionally called Robby. Reuben assimilated to Bob but not Bobby.

Having the name Robert debased by two of his brothers meant that Geoff had to begin over again for his son, and after much pondering he decided on Leonard, for Leonardo da Vinci, without any diminutive— Geoff addressed his child as Leonard. Aunt Bea, his mother, wanted to use Leon, but my father always called his nephew Lenny, and so did we.

At the birth of his daughter, Geoff hastily selected Elsie. Within twenty-four hours he realized he had blundered, switched to Elsa—too European—then to Elissa, as in Elissa Landis, the movie star. So he retreated to Alicia, and in a rare moment of common sense settled on Alice. Aunt Bea had nothing to say about this matter.

Cousin Alice was older than I, but just as people assumed that Willy was my younger brother, everyone took it for granted that Alice had been born after me. Uncle Geoff with his steely gray-green eyes and bullying manner terrified Alice and she could scarcely say her name or answer the simplest questions. Her father repeated, not once but a hundred times, that Alice had inherited the dumb side of his family, and he pinned his hopes on Leonard, who had to bear the burden of his father’s ambitions. Ironically, Lil would have been satisfied with a daughter like Alice because of her conventional prettiness, light hair and fair skin, and pudgy but well-turned legs. Alice sat quietly and did as she was told, and though her eyes stared vacantly except when tears welled in them, my mother considered her a perfect candidate for marriage.

I had no complaints about Alice except that she was an aching bore. Every summer, our family and the Simons went away together. During the two or three weeks that we spent together, Alice didn’t open a book, squirmed when we watched a movie and couldn’t master the simplest card game. But she excelled in dancing, and could execute the steps to the latest dance craze as readily as my mother.

My father and Uncle Geoff always decided where and when we would travel without consulting Lil or Aunt Bea. He accepted his family’s need for a vacation, not only because the city sweltered in July and August but because family pride and status would suffer if it had been otherwise.

This pride was bought at great sacrifice: with a loan from the Morris Plan, a banking firm that lent to the poor at exorbitant rates; and going to the hock shop to leave my mother’s Singer sewing machine and Bubby’s fur coat, earrings and pearls for several months.

Uncle Geoff, the ultimate snob, did high-quality printing, some of it for small book companies, so he considered himself part of the artistic world. For a man who owned a two-story home, had well-behaved, well-dressed children, his boyhood sweetheart as a wife, and a mistress whom he could turn over like a found penny, vacation spots had to elevate his status.

One year we traveled to Long Branch, New Jersey, another year to a small hotel in Atlantic City. My mother sang, “By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea,” but the ocean or any body of water terrified her and thus Willy and I expressed terror as well. Cousins Alice and Leonard splashed at the water’s edge, but as soon as Lil felt the cold Atlantic lapping at her ankles she cried out, “My heart! my heart!” and convinced us that swimming or dunking brought on heart attacks.

Still, if Lil failed at the water’s edge, she triumphed as a non-bathing beauty, eliciting praise for her “stunning” figure in the bathing suit that she chose with such care. Each summer she affected a large straw hat and sat on her beach towel in various studied poses. She was the envy of most of the women and the object of lustful stares from men. After dinner at our hotel when we strolled along the boardwalk, my mother’s flirty swirly skirts, windblown blonde hair and pride in her appearance created a stir.

By comparison, Aunt Bea was plain, her hair thin, her nose broad; while she had good legs, she did not project energy or sexiness. Uncle Geoff’s philosophy, “There’s no such thing as love; there’s only sex,” led us to assume that Aunt Bea made him happy in that area. During each summer’s vacation, either on Sunday night or early Monday morning when the men returned to New York City, Geoff would race to his mistress, Jack to his mother.

One day in late June, the Simons showed up at Orchard Street. Uncle Geoff was carrying a book entitled
The Inns of Connecticut
. “Our next vacation spot,” he announced, “a farm that takes guests.” My father wavered and my mother looked alarmed. “Connecticut?” she asked. “Where is that, upstate New York?”

Uncle Geoff explained, “We could go native there,” and winked at my father. But Jack was not won over readily, so to persuade him, Uncle Geoff suggested we take the ferry to Staten Island and talk it over. Connecticut had fired Geoff’s imagination. Any outing made my heart beat faster. Since I was in my clean phase, with underpants washed every night and a fresh blouse ironed by me, I no longer had to be ashamed of appearing like an Orchard Street urchin. For once my Aunt Bea, almost as uncharitable with compliments as Ada Levine but not as harsh or vulgar, complimented me on my shiny hair.

We crammed into Uncle Geoff’s Packard. I sat on my mother’s lap, Alice on Aunt Bea’s, Leonard up front with the men and Willy in the back with the girls and our mothers. The children were not allowed to speak or utter a sound when we were with Uncle Geoff.

Once on the ferry, we left the car to stretch our legs and inhale the “sea” air. The two fathers leaned against the railing and immediately turned to the subject of Connecticut and the farm. “It’s far away enough and close enough,” Geoff argued. “And it’s very inexpensive. You can stay for a month for what it would cost us in Atlantic City for a week. The kids don’t need fancy clothes, just some overalls and shirts. There’s not been a case of polio reported there.”

Polio was a nightmare terror in those years, and the very word struck fear in Jack’s heart. He carried his thermometer in his vest pocket in case he or anyone in our family felt the slightest chill. An inexpensive vacation with open spaces, one that required no fancy clothes, did not appeal to him as much as the absence of polio. “But I hate the sticks,” he protested. “What do they do in the evening? They don’t even have sidewalks to pull in after dark.”

“There’s a big hotel down the road and Pankin’s Farm has a piano. You and Lil can sing your hearts out.”

“Who will we entertain, the chickens?”

“No, their guests come from New Haven and New London. Eugene O’Neill loved New London.”

“Puts me ten ahead.”

“You can educate them. Give them some of your razzmatazz. Besides, it’s a different experience. Unique.”

The word
unique
caused Jack to capitulate. As he leaned against the railing of the ferry, I could see him dreaming up skits and songs. Grudgingly, he agreed. “It’s on your head if we hate Connecticut.”

In a moment my spirits, ten feet off the ground, crashed into bruising reality. A white-uniformed man on the ferry sold ice cream sandwiches, kept frozen in the square white container slung over his shoulder by a thick strap. Uncle Geoff treated Aunt Bea, Leonard and Alice to ice cream. Jack, absorbed in the book about inns of Connecticut, paid no attention. My mother pulled me roughly by the arm and hissed into my ear, “Don’t ask for ice cream. If Uncle Geoff treats on the way over, Daddy will have to treat on the way back.”

Standing on the ferry, I swore to myself that I would not ever emulate my mother. She was beautiful. Yes. She could melt your heart with her singing. Yes. I could not equal her ease with men. But I didn’t want to grow up and be like her.

We waited on the ferry until it reversed direction for the return trip. I kept silent as we drove to Orchard Street. My mother was content; my father hadn’t had to treat for anything and Bubby would soon supply everyone with hot food. In any case, we would be going to Connecticut, to Pankin’s Farm, and staying at least two weeks, possibly three. I folded up my rage against my mother into a tiny packet, no larger than a dime, and stored it away in some remote corner of my brain.

Before we left for the country two major events took place that changed my mother. The restaurant business, still slower than usual, persuaded Bubby to fill her days by buying fresh fruit—cherries, blueberries, strawberries, mulberries—and preparing jam. The house smelled sweet and her gallon jars—scrubbed, boiled and filled, then sealed with paraffin—provided jam for the coming year.

For a week or two Clayton and Bubby were out on Hester Street as soon as the fruit pushcarts came into sight. He carried home the black oilcloth bag stuffed with fresh fruit in one hand and a ten-pound sack of sugar in the other. For her summer customers, Bubby cooked a lot of dairy: schav, called sorrel soup by Americans; cold borscht; blintzes; salads without dressing. Every fruit—bananas, strawberries, blueberries—was served to our diners with mountainous quantities of sour cream. Any money that came into the restaurant was plowed back into fruit or saved for the rent.

For weeks Bubby had saved the sheet of paper Yussie Feld had given her, the one with the name of Shirley Feldman’s drama teacher, the one planning a recital for her students. Bubby spoke to my mother softly and persuasively about calling the teacher for me. Did I deserve less than any of the three Shirleys, one now living by Battery Park, the other for the whole summer in the mountains, the third skating up and down the streets straight to the East River?

“But Ma,” my mother protested, “we don’t have the money. We have to save every penny for the vacation.”

“These lessons, they don’t start until September. By then we’ll all be working.”

“And if not?”

“If, if. If I had a man’s you-know-what I’d be the children’s grandfather. I can’t live on
if
. We’ll have the money. Gut vil zine unser tateh.”