Up From Orchard Street (20 page)

Neither of us spoke. Her words weren’t complicated, only hard.

“Do you still love him?”

“No. When the dream goes, when the fantasia goes, it’s gornisht.”

“But when you talk about Misha, I hear love in your voice.”

“Elkaleh, Misha was a brenfire. From the minute I met him, fifteen years old, there was a fire between us. When I leaned on his shoulder, already the heat could melt Odessa snow.”

I thought this revelation would keep me awake. Instead, I burrowed myself deep into my Bubby’s warm body and dropped off into dreamless sleep.

12

Summer in Connecticut

COLCHESTER, CONNECTICUT, WAS 120 miles from midtown Manhattan. The food my grandmother prepared for the trip—sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, cold chicken, slices of cake, cookies, cherries, strawberries, peaches, plums—could feed us for days. Lil, a great fruit lover, often ate the summer’s harvest with bread. The fruit and bread were stored in a large basket, a gift from Yussie Feld delivered empty. “Heaven forbid,” Jack had said ironically, “he should fill it with fruit from his shop.” We lacked for nothing except cold drinks, which increased our anticipation when we stopped for them en route.

Surely Dr. Wolfson would have suppressed a laugh, as I did, when Uncle Geoff walked in at nine in the morning sporting a navy blue French beret on his thinning blond hair. He handed my father an identical beret. Instead of mocking the notion of wearing a beret to the country, Jack clapped it on his head, though he had decided on casual dress for the occasion: no tie, turned-up shirt cuffs and gray gabardine trousers that had seen better days. Thus attired, he lifted one of our two suitcases; Uncle Geoff carried the other. Willy insisted on lugging the basket of fruit, while Bubby, accustomed to heavy loads, brought down our lunch in a corrugated box.

Cousin Lenny ensconced himself in the front seat of the Packard between the two men, while Aunt Bea, with Alice in her lap, sat in their customary places in the back. Allegedly, the car once belonged to a bootlegger. How else account for the secret storage compartment under the seats? Our suitcases went in there. I gave Bubby, usually the recipient of my unlimited kisses, the barest peck on the cheek, lest I cling to her and start crying at the prospect of leaving her behind. Jack, on the other hand, peppered his mother’s face with kisses until she drew away, dabbed her eyes with her apron and urged me in a quavering voice, “Zulst mir schrieben.” We waved at her until she diminished in view on the sidewalk. Willy and I, on our knees in the backseat, continued to blow kisses to her from the rear window as the car moved beyond Canal Street.

Directions for our journey were accompanied by a crackle of the road map Uncle Geoff had marked in red ink. He and my father discussed the roads by number: 64, 22, 37. Once out of the city, my elation swelled like a giant balloon that could have floated to the sky. Cousin Alice, who rarely spoke out loud, cupped her chubby hand over Aunt Bea’s ear and whispered that she had to do number one. Aunt Bea dutifully relayed the message to Uncle Geoff who roared, “No number one or number two until we finish twenty miles.”

“But Geoff,” Aunt Bea protested.

“No ifs, ands or buts.” He flashed his cold green eyes to the backseat. “We’re making five stops. I worked it out with precision. If she really has to go, I’ll pull over to the side of the road. But she can eat anytime.”

Aunt Bea had instructed her daughter as a baby, “Chew and swallow.” But repetition has nothing to do with learning, and Alice took large bites of whatever she ate, pushed them to the back of her mouth and swallowed. Within a few minutes, she could polish off a meat sandwich that Willy and I shared for two meals. Slipping off Aunt Bea’s lap, she rooted around in the corrugated box for a sandwich with enough beef brisket for two of our restaurant’s entrees. She made short work of it, folding the waxed paper neatly when done. The fruit basket had been placed on the shelf behind the backseat and Alice finished off every single peach. Later, when we stopped and Uncle Geoff asked for a peach, Aunt Bea covered her daughter’s gluttony by explaining, “All of us ate them.” Not easily fooled, he raised his hand, reached back with a glancing blow to Alice’s head and commanded, “Don’t do that again, dummy, moron.” She had learned not to eat in front of him, so became a secret eater, gorging herself as soon as her father turned away.

Despite his best intentions, Uncle Geoff made several wrong turns and we had to retrace our path, so it was late afternoon when we reached a fork in the road and saw a sign that read Colchester. Coming upon the village, all of us, except for the sleeping Alice, were deeply moved. From one end to another lay a swath of green, perfectly mowed. There was a church with a white steeple, and a squat white stucco building flying the American flag that signified it was the school. The drugstore and the public library nestled side by side, like cutouts in a book. People walked along the narrow paths, straight-backed and spare. They looked like characters in a silent film. I worried that our New York cadences would shock the locals. Even arrogant Uncle Geoff spoke softly when he stopped to ask a passerby, “Which way to Pankin’s Farm?”

“Straight to the end of the village, first dirt road to the right.”

Aunt Bea straightened Alice up, combed her hair and wiped off the thumb she had been sucking throughout her long sleep. We bumped onto the first dirt road, wobbling a bit over harrows and potholes. “If this isn’t the sticks, what is?” Jack commented. We drove slowly for one mile, then two. A vast gray barn rose like a prehistoric creature on a small hill, the words
Books B-o-o-k-s
painted on every side. Small farms came into sight, the cottages surrounded by livestock: cows and chickens. We said in unison, “Cows,” as if we had made a discovery known to our eyes only. Then came a burst of voices and the sounds of bustling: Pankin’s Farm at last.

The photograph in
The Inns of Connecticut
did not do justice to the main house. Painted white, five broad steps led to a veranda that encircled the entire house. The roof, far from being flat, was pointed like a steeple, and beneath it I saw the round dormer window of a small room that I wanted to claim as my own for reading. As it turned out, a young couple had taken possession of it for three weeks while they were studying for the Connecticut bar examination. I knew more Russian and Yiddish than I did words like
bar examination,
and the fact that the young woman occupant studied every day until four o’clock gave me pause. Then we discovered that all the waiters were second-year med students at Harvard. Hal Pankin, the oldest son, who greeted us, leaped down the front steps in two casual jumps, hardly the hick my father anticipated.

He was thin, wiry, muscular, with thick black hair worn naturally, not slicked back. His deep-set eyes assessed us at a glance. If our New York speech startled him, he did not reveal it, but we had to accustom ourselves to the way he spoke: ahnt, cahnt, yahd, cah. There were no r’s in his sentences.

“The Roths and the Simons,” my father announced. “Jack and Lil, Geoff and Bea.” We children remained nameless.

“I’m Hal Pankin, Hank Pankin’s son,” he replied with an infectious grin. “Your waiter and valet is Gabe Solomon. Gabe plans to be a surgeon so watch out when he cuts your fish or meat.” Gabe, red-haired, his pale skin dotted with freckles, arrived as Hal said this. “I’ll take up your bags and then I’ll pahk the cah,” he said.

Lil ascended the porch steps with no effort, but when we entered the tiny lobby we confronted a flight of stairs that went straight up, almost to the attic. “You’re in the original house,” Hal explained. The steps, very old and very steep, required more than usual effort, and after a half dozen, Lil had to pause and catch her breath. Hal, who had run up, saw her gasping and raced back down.

“Mrs. Roth, I’m so sorry. If we had been told, we would have put you in one of the new cottages.” Carefully, gingerly his fingers tapped her pulse. I half expected him to pull out his stethoscope but he only asked, “Atrial fibrillation? Tachycardia?” Lil smiled at him seductively. The terms meant nothing to her, though Dr. Wolfson may have explained them. “Lil. Please call me Lil. And it’s nothing. A weak heart from childhood.”

Hal placed his arm under her elbow. “We’ll do this slowly. Lead with your right foot and bring up your left. Take each step with your right. Pause. Right. That will be less strain for you. The first cottage that comes available is yours.”

But we never moved to one of the newer buildings. Not that summer nor the summer thereafter, especially when Lil learned that our bedroom formerly belonged to Maurey, the youngest son. The Simons were given Hal’s old room.

I loved our room at sight. From the side window we could view the barn and the small back window framed cornfields and beyond them tall stands of gnarled fruit trees, more summer fruit than on all the downtown pushcarts combined.

There was a double bed for our parents and twin beds at right angles for me and Willy, as well as a sink. The toilet was outside our door.

“What’s the sink for?” asked Willy.

“To take a pee,” my father answered. “In the middle of the night you don’t want to step outside, you pee in the sink.”

“Jack,” my mother protested, “the sink is to wash your hands and face. We’ll get a milk bottle for peeing.”

Uncle Geoff and Aunt Bea had better accommodations, and paid more for them. One of their closets had been converted into a bathroom with a tiny toilet and a shower.

“Dinner is at six to six-thirty, New England meal,” said Hal, who had returned to inform us. “The salmon came in fresh from New London this morning.”

“Do you think they make gefilte fish from salmon?” Lil asked.

My father fell on the double bed with relief. Maybe we would have taken a nap after our long journey, but Aunt Bea came in without knocking. “Geoff made a schedule for showering. The women and girls first, in and out in a hurry, so we can dress for the dining room. Then Lenny and Willy and last the men.”

“We don’t need a shower,” my mother lied smoothly. “All of us bathed yesterday.”

Uncle Geoff overheard my mother from across the hall.

“Please don’t show your origins,” he snapped. “We’re covered with dust and sweat. All of us will shower every night before the evening meal. We don’t pay for the hot water or walk to the public baths. Come on Lil, there’s soap and shower caps on the bureau.”

We hesitated to reach for the hotel soap and shower caps. We wanted to squirrel them away and take them home to show them off during the coming year. But Uncle Geoff planted his short legs firmly at our door, hands on hips, eyes green like my mother’s but harder than aggies. In my mind I always thought of him as The Ice Man, cold and needing a pick to touch his heart.

Aunt Bea asked Lil, “Where are your children’s robes?”

“They’ll run across the hall in their underwear,” Lil answered.

“Be sure that the underwear is fresh,” Geoff barked, and returned to his own suite.

“I can’t wait until he leaves,” said my mother under her breath.

My father leaned over and tried to tussle her onto the bed. “I’ll be gone, too, and what will you do without your hot papa?”

“Jack, the children,” my mother protested, suddenly full of propriety.

“What, they don’t know their origin?”

We hastened into the Simons’ quarters to shower. The Camay soap, tiny hard squares, didn’t lather.

Fortunately for me, my mother paid no attention to my choice of dress, the one embroidered by Mrs. Rosinski with the red strawberries across the chest. I was not beautiful, not cuddly like Alice with her blonde, Louise Brooks short bob whose front ends curved upward naturally. No dress could disguise my bony legs, my too-wide mouth, my dusky skin. Still, I had my father’s lustrous hair and my brown eyes were flecked with orange. In my new dress I felt important, even without Bubby to praise me.

My mother and I did not resemble each other in any feature. She was easily the prettiest woman in the dining room, with her golden hair, her shapely figure and silk dress. If I had been introduced as my mother’s niece, no one would have given it a second thought, or Willy as her nephew. Still, we looked as well as we could; my mother had no need to be ashamed of us.

The dining room, to the left of the stairway, occupied an entire side of the house. An upright piano stood against one wall, which had French doors that led to the veranda. Tables covered with white cloths lined both sides of the room and extended to the far end of the building. Since we had eight in our party we didn’t have to share a table.

As we were to learn, this area had once consisted of a formal parlor, a dining room and two bedrooms. When his wife died, Mr. Pankin retired from his construction company in New Haven and moved here, to the country, with his teenage sons, Hal and Maurey. Within months he started to renovate, tearing down walls, adding bathrooms, and finally building new cottages with modern conveniences.

As we entered the dining hall, Hal played some chords on the piano and introduced us, the Roths and the Simons, each by name. Some guests nodded to us, others said, “Good evening.”

The young couple studying for the bar exam came in last. They had a table to themselves in front of the French doors. Her brown hair was long and frizzy and she wore a sack dress such as Bubby donned for cooking; I could tell she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her not-quite-clean feet were shod in backless clogs, as if she meant to cast them off in a hurry. Her husband or boyfriend—we never discovered which—had sopping-wet hair. We discovered that he customarily jiggled the rusty handle of the outdoor pump, doused his head, and then stepped through the French doors to their table. The fact that water was running down his neck and shirt seemed not to concern them. They held hands across the table, ate in great haste and bolted out as soon as they finished. We could hear their laughter as they hit the dirt road for their nightly walk.