Up From Orchard Street (24 page)

During one of his more adventurous periods some years before, my father had bought Philip Morris stock, mostly because of the ads where the uniformed bellhop cried “Call for Philip Morris,” rather than for any practical information. His investment may have been three hundred dollars, possibly less, with the rest on margin. But to hear him tell the story he had been wiped out of a “small fortune.” On the day of the stock market crash he came home and reported to Bubby, “The Jews took a beating today.” Bubby answered, “Never mind the Jews, how did you do, my son?” Jack shook his head. “It was a pogrom. For me, too.”

We could repeat every line of that saga but Jack enjoyed retelling it, embellishing the facts and giving the impression that he had lost massive amounts on U.S. Steel, the Lackawanna Railroad, Texaco Oil.

Eager to see that his guests were occupied, Hal suggested to me, “Maybe you’d like to take a walk in the orchard.” Willy and I exchanged guilty glances and I flushed. During the period when my mother instructed us to give our address as Orchard Lane, it conjured up visions of the movies we watched of the Deep South. Now I caught my breath. “I’d love to read in the orchard,” I said and quickly headed for the library converted from a sun porch.

It had been haphazardly cleaned after the night before, and books lay scattered in disarray. Estelle Solomon was examining a bookshelf as I came in. She wore a yellow-orange sundress that complemented her hair. “I see that some of the guests made off with the more recent books. These are from the year of the flood.” She pointed to Charles Dickens’s
David Copperfield;
the name and date on the flyleaf read “Elizabeth Morrow, 1910.” As soon as Estelle opened the book, yellowing pages fell from the binding. Both of us sneezed.

“Maybe tomorrow I can try the public library. I saw one in the village.”

“Tomorrow we’ll drive you to the Book Barn. My treat.” She regarded me thoughtfully, but didn’t call me a “funny duck.”

“You’re not swimming with your cousins. Where are you off to?”

“A walk in the orchard.” I could say the word without hesitation or stammering.

By then Willy had met up with Pudge, a coarse overweight boy from Front Street. They were sitting cross-legged tossing cards on the lawn. I walked slowly past the vegetable garden, the cornfield, the wild field of hay that fed the cows, and finally came to the fruit orchard: trees with tiny green pears, pink, red and yellow apples, rosy peaches. I caught my breath and sat under a pear tree, marveling at its perfect dark green leaves stirring faintly in the breeze.

The sky was luminous. Happiness rose up in me for my great luck in being alone on this day, in this place. It wiped out Orchard Street as if it never existed. I nearly forgot my grandmother. A leaf drifted lazily to my feet. I curled up and without intending to, fell asleep.

When I awoke, I thought of writing a story called “The Tree That Made You Forget,” but I didn’t have my notebook with me. Overwhelmed with sudden anxiety—suppose my parents worried about my disappearance—I started running away from the trees, through the hay, past the vegetable garden. The farm seemed asleep, becalmed in the summer heat. A glance at the porch revealed my father playing knock rummy with the man from the stock market. My mother was dozing in the shade, like a child, with her thumb touching her lips. Many of the guests had retreated to their rooms to nap.

Pudge, the charity boy, appeared out of nowhere, seized my arm between his fat fingers and dragged me to the ladders against the east wall of the barn. “Up there,” he said, “it’s a free show.”

He hauled me up from one rung to the next as the ladder shook violently. When I looked down I panicked. “Bubby!” I cried out. “Bubby, save me!” It wasn’t Bubby who came to rescue me, but a young man: Gabe Solomon.

“Hold on, hold on,” he called. Then his arms encircled my skinny body. I cried into his chest as he carefully carried me down. “Don’t cry, you’re fine, a little afraid of heights.” His tenderness, his loving concern, caused me to cry harder.

Gabe called up to Pudge, “What the hell is the big idea?”

“I wanted her to see you fucking. That’s what you were doing up there. I was giving her a free show. Fucking, fucking, fucking,” Pudge cried out, his moon face delighted by his prank, his fat body like an inflated balloon veering back and forth on the ladder.

The profanity reverberated across the afternoon stillness. Though on firm ground now, I could still feel the shaky ladder beneath me and continued weeping. Gabe carried me to a cool patch behind the barn. “Don’t cry, sweetie,” he said. No one had called me sweetie before. Even Hal couldn’t do better than “funny duck.”

Then Gabe jogged back to the ladder and yelled up at Pudge, “Get down here at once. If you don’t, I’ll come up and drag you down.”

“I dare you, I double dare you, you Jewish faggot.”

The other med students, who may have been studying or resting in their loft dormitory, swarmed out of their quarters, plucked Pudge from the top of the ladder and began to heave him, heavy as he was, into the air holding tightly to one arm and one leg. “Apologize!” they cried in unison. “Drop dead, you fairies,” he answered. They allowed him to catch hold of the ladder and scamper down.

“Pack your stuff,” Gabe shouted at him. “Hal will be back from the lake and he’ll call your social worker.”

I sat behind the barn in the shade where Gabe placed me, and when my heart returned to its normal beat and my head cleared, I realized that I was also in love with Gabe. I loved Dr. Scott Wolfson because he wandered into our lives from another world; I loved Hal because of his energetic concern about me; I loved Gabe because he was gentle and tender. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, to be with a man who called me sweetie, brought me water, bathed my face, and didn’t care that back home the phrase “skinny pickle” taunted me.

So I wasn’t paying attention to anyone but myself when out of the back door of the barn came Uncle Geoff, standing in the brilliant sunlight buttoning the fly of his pants. He didn’t see me, he couldn’t see me in the shadows of the tall grass. Margie followed close behind him, scattering hay from her skirt. Her half-opened blouse revealed flesh as soft as goose down and wisps of hay floated from her bosom into the air like feathers. Uncle Geoff strode directly to the main house. Silently, Margie slid into the fields.

When I was sure they had both gone, I ran to find my mother. Neither Willy nor my father were in sight, but I found Lil dozing on the chaise. I cupped my hand over her ear and whispered. “Mother, Mother, Uncle Geoff came out of the barn with Margie. With Margie, Mother, and he was closing his pants.”

Lil bestirred herself. The buttons of the thin chaise pad had pressed their shape into her cheek. She didn’t bother to sit up. She kept her eyes shut as she said, “Don’t be silly. You imagined it.”

I recognized the impossibility of her accepting the truth. She always managed by molding reality to her own needs, to the dictates of the moment. She set her face away from me. I shrugged and walked up the porch steps, feeling faint. Too much had happened in a single afternoon and I hadn’t had a bite to eat all day. In the kitchen, Belinda, the Negro woman who prepared the fried chicken, was moving about slowly, pitting cherries, soft peaches, soft plums—throwing them in a pot of boiling water. “Hey, girly girl,” she said cheerfully, “you want a snack-sickle? You starving?” I nodded.

“How about a juicy plum?” Belinda asked. “Juicy plums goes good this time of day.” The plum juice squirted down my chin. She came from behind the table and wiped my chin with a soft rag. “Girly girl, how come you don’t have fat on those bones? You come in here any time, I’ll fatten you up.”

During the short period that I rested in the kitchen, my mother managed to navigate the steps up to our room. When I opened the door, I found her sitting on the bed with my father. “Guilty as sin,” he pronounced, “I tell you, he’s guilty as sin.”

On his bed Willy was studying the pictures in an old
National
Geographic
. His eyes didn’t meet mine. He must have watched what Pudge did to me in the barn, but he needn’t have worried. I wouldn’t tell my mother that Willy was too in awe of Pudge himself, too anxious to please his first real friend, to come to my defense. I couldn’t betray Willy in his first act of betrayal toward me.

A sharp rap on the door was followed by the appearance of Uncle Geoff. “Jack, can you be ready to leave in half an hour, forty minutes? I thought we’d get an early start.”

“Didn’t you want to wait until the Sunday traffic calmed down? Don’t you want to have a bite to eat?”

For once Geoff studied his shoes instead of issuing orders. “We don’t need their dinner and if we’re stuck in traffic, at least we’ll be in our own beds tonight.” He pulled his winning card from his sleeve. “Manya will be glad to see you. You can be home with your mother by midnight.”

Jack jumped up and started to throw his shirts into his fake leather suitcase. My uncle said, “As soon as I shower, we’ll take off.”

Jack didn’t bother to shower. He said philosophically, “Guilt is stronger than love.” In less than an hour both fathers were gone.

14

The Arrival of Maurey

INVARIABLY LIL SHED a few tears whenever Jack left her; this parting was no different than the others. Like the Gershwin song that began, “I could cry salty tears,” she shed a few outside the farm when she acknowledged that Jack would not be returning in the evening.

I was less than three years old when I sat on the dining room table while Bubby fed me chicken soup with noodles, as two ambulance men carried Lil to the hospital because of double pneumonia. The windows were caked with ice; the walls dripped with water; the kitchen oven could not create enough warmth to seep into the bedroom. Dr. Koronovsky had no alternative than to suggest a warm hospital. Jack cried, my mother cried, and Bubby, whose fear and hatred of hospitals had been imprinted on the entire family, busied herself with me rather than walk alongside the ambulance gurney.

But she cried, too, cried until her tears fell into my soup and I asked, “Bubby, is this tear soup?” She stopped feeding me, drew me to her copious breasts and assured me, “It’s from cutting onions.” Bubby talked about “tear soup” for years, and whenever a financial or health crisis befell us she announced with the little cheer she could muster, “Today we’ll have tear soup.”

As we entered the dining room in Colchester after my father left, Lil sighed, “I guess we’ll have tear soup for dinner.” Tear soup would have been an improvement on the Sunday evening dinner: tomato slices and watery cottage cheese, which Margie referred to as spring salad, and bowls of blueberries for dessert. Willy and I ate our berries with sour cream in time-honored Russian fashion, but Aunt Bea regarded sour cream as lower class and poured sweet cream over the berries for Leonard and Alice. Since their father was not present, they let out a howl of protest that the cream smelled funny, followed by a sirenlike sound from Cousin Alice: “I’m hungry, I want a sammich.” Her sentiment was repeated throughout the dining room. Gabe had left to return Pudge to Hartford; Hal was cloistered with his father discussing the wisdom of following Sybil to Cape Cod.

Ronny and Sam, two med students who served a different corner of the room than ours, did their best to quell the rebellion, which was made more difficult because several women who had been bidding farewell to their husbands now came late to their tables. Ronny Silver, a nice young man studying internal medicine, called out, “Tuna sandwiches coming up.” He and Sam Green ran back into the kitchen, presumably to open cans of tuna.

With reluctance my mother made herself a tomato sandwich on “goyisha” Wonder bread and called it a night. “Good thing Daddy isn’t here,” she said. “He wouldn’t open his mouth for such food.”

It took forever for the tuna sandwiches to be brought out, lathered with Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Cousin Alice wolfed down her first and grabbed a second. Lil nodded at me. “Want to take a walk? Willy, how about it?”

He had found a cardboard puzzle in the library, a map of the United States, and since it was similar in shape to our game Geography, he said he would rather stay upstairs to work on it. But not before he shot me a pleading glance, afraid that I’d inform my mother about his role as a conspirator with Pudge. “It’s a don’t-tell,” I whispered. His skinny face melted with relief.

My mother, who was wearing her striped pajama outfit, walked briskly with me down the road. Instead of wandering in the direction of the village, we decided on the first left, a deserted patch of road where we wouldn’t be bothered by cars leaving for their city homes on Sunday night. My mother hooked her arm in mine and leaned against me.

In New York, when we walked to Ada’s on blustery days, my mother “crossed me over,” that is, she held my hand as we crossed the busy intersection. On occasion, I walked beside her when we went window-shopping, but she didn’t loop her arm with mine or allow me to lean close to her body.

“Did you ever eat such dreck in your life?” she exclaimed. “We haven’t had soup once. The fried chicken I could go for right now.”

“Maybe they think it’s a health farm where people try to lose weight.”

“Where do you read such things?”

I didn’t answer because just then we spied a dilapidated farm, the slats of the gate broken, the grass wheat-colored and uncut. A swarm of children was running about, six or seven of them, their mouths purple either from berries or grape jam, their blond hair filthy, their undershirts torn and too short to cover their belly buttons. As we watched, two little boys peed against a tree, then one squatted to do number two. A boy no older than three, with long whitish hair, danced on the edge of the tumbledown porch, pulling on his penis. Simultaneously, he jutted his pelvis forward and screamed “ahhh.” The older girls yelled, “Ma, he’s doing it again! He’s doing it again!” No adult voice responded.

“Maybe the mother is Mary the Sugar Bum, drunk—the charity case Estelle told me about,” my mother said. “Her husband’s a fisherman. He comes once a year, gets her pregnant and then leaves. The county supports her. Mr. Pankin gives her leftover food. But the children, what a shanda! That little boy, playing with his birdie in public. Let him go in the bushes and play with his birdie all day long, who would care? But no, the mother doesn’t teach him that much.”

When we rounded a turn in the road, we glimpsed a half-destroyed hammock, its seat a mass of loose strings, the ropes attached to the trees frayed and in danger of throwing the occupant to the ground. We caught a side view of the mother, swinging slowly back and forth.

“What is she dreaming of?” my mother asked.

“Maybe her husband.”

“That’s it! She’s dreaming of her husband’s brand.” Lil resorted to this phrase often. “She likes his brand,” she’d remark, as if sex were a product like Palmolive or Lux, something you could buy from a shelf. “She likes his brand, so she lets him make her pregnant and she doesn’t care what the children do.”

We walked on leisurely, the sun at our backs. My mother’s arm in mine was golden, relaxed. I marveled at her gleaming hair that hung down to her shoulders, the face without makeup, those incredible green eyes. I didn’t envy her good looks as much as admire them. I knew Lil wasn’t motherly; I accepted that she had little understanding of her children, but she emanated a light, like a full moon that draws the tide, like a remote but heart-stopping falling star. She cleared her throat. “What I wanted to speak about is . . . what you saw with Uncle Geoff, that’s a don’t-tell.”

“Who would I tell? Cousin Alice? She’s a moe-ron.” I pronounced it the same way my uncle did.

“Don’t be silly, a moron has spit coming from his mouth. Alice has a good appetite. She’s a terrific dancer. She doesn’t say much, it doesn’t make her a moron. Anyway, don’t tell Aunt Bea. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Daddy will tell Bubby.”

“Bubby knows and hears everything. She won’t tell. Besides, that’s how men are. What does Daddy call it?”

“The double standard.”

“That’s right. One rule for men, the other for women.”

“Yes, but the men are doing it with women.”

My mother stopped. “That’s what Estelle Solomon said. She doesn’t believe in the double standard because the men are having affairs with women. So both are cheating.”

At the last fork in the road we reversed our steps.

“I don’t believe in the double standard either,” I said.

My mother’s mouth fell open. “What are you talking about? No matter what Uncle Geoff does, he provides a wonderful life for Bea and the children. They have a car, a beautiful home with upstairs and downstairs, nice clothes, vacations. Aunt Bea graduated high school as a bookkeeper, but she didn’t have to work, not once from the age of seventeen, the day she married.”

My silence confounded my mother. We walked three or four minutes without exchanging a word.

“So how come you’re not saying anything?”

“I would hate Aunt Bea’s life. You live on Orchard Street but you have a better life.”

“How can you say that? I would love Aunt Bea’s life.”

“You wouldn’t. You’d be crying all the time, because everyone is afraid of Uncle Geoff, and you’re not afraid of Daddy. Daddy doesn’t give you a house and a car, but he’s proud of you. He loves the way you sing, the way you look. He told Rocco a hundred times about your interview at Saks. Uncle Geoff treats Aunt Bea worse than a pushcart peddler.”

My mother dropped my arm. “How can you say such things? How can you think such things?”

I studied those innocent green eyes. Lil had acquired some street smarts. She could charm men. Yet, standing under the summer sky, in a golden universe, my mother appeared childlike.

“Do you know what Sybil told me, Hal’s girlfriend?” I replied. “That she wants to live in Italy, see the world before there’s a war, that she hates Colchester and Hal loves this farm too much.”

“What has that to do with Aunt Bea and Uncle Geoff?”

“Uncle Geoff won’t let Aunt Bea think for herself or say such things.”

The farm loomed ahead of us. Unexpectedly Lil announced, “Estelle says you’re unusual. Is that good or bad?”

“Does she mean unusual like smart or unusual like looney tunes?”

“Not looney tunes.”

We laughed together. When we got back we found many of the guests in the dining room area listening to the Sunday night radio shows—reruns of Eddie Cantor at the moment. My mother joined them. I went upstairs immediately, homesick for Bubby yet torn with longing to live here forever.

I loved the farm on Monday, not merely our first one there, but every Monday that followed. A quiet descended, a calm that I couldn’t experience anywhere else, not even in Yonkers.

Some of the guests left with their husbands. Some women busied themselves with hand laundry and took turns at the iron in the laundry room next to the kitchen. Standing midlawn, I listened to the swaying of the leaves, the quiet hum of the bees, and shared the sense of laziness that descended on the farmhouse.

My notoriously thrifty mother washed and rinsed our overalls in the laundry room, scrubbing them on an old-fashioned washboard with a corrugated metal surface. Uncle Geoff had tipped Margie in more ways than one, and she attended to the Simons’ clothes in an old washing machine cranked by hand. My mother enjoyed hanging our clothes, a lot easier here than when she was a little girl balancing herself on the roof to help her mother with wet sheets and bushels of diapers.

We found Estelle Solomon on the shaded porch in her sundress, leaning forward, listening intently for the car that would bring her husband, Philip Sullivan, and her son, Gabe, back to her. Having deposited Pudge in Hartford, Gabe had driven on to New Haven and stayed at the apartment of his mother and stepfather. Estelle wasn’t a beauty—you wouldn’t notice her in a crowd except for her red hair— but her expectancy made her appear girlish. When the Buick with her husband and son chugged over the potholes she ran down the steps of the porch rippling with laughter.

Phil Sullivan reminded me of Orloff: short, thick-chested, bald. He carried a briefcase and wore a seersucker suit, a white starched shirt, no tie. His navy blue tennis shoes were his only concession to country living.

Estelle kissed him gently on the mouth and asked, “You didn’t bring your work, did you?”

He winked affectionately. “Just the Sunday
Times
and a few back issues of the
Wall Street Journal
.”

Gabe unfurled himself from the wheel of the car. “Breakfast on your terrace or in your room?”

“Terrace,” Estelle answered and she and her husband walked arm and arm to the new cottages. Gabe parked the car, but before racing toward the kitchen, he called, “Hey, sweetie pie, did you miss me?”

I nodded my head but he disappeared quickly, to return in a few minutes with a tray laden with a pot of coffee, scrambled eggs, toast and a fresh jar of orange marmalade Phil had brought with him. The last glimpse I had of the Solomon-Sullivan couple was at the table on their terrace. After breakfast, they went inside their room and weren’t seen again until he left before dark that night.

As if reading my thoughts, Hal appeared and explained, “They read the whole Sunday
Times
down to the crossword puzzle, then take long naps.”

I hadn’t caught a glimpse of him since noon yesterday. Obviously he had decided not to follow Sybil to Cape Cod. I had been afraid to ask. “I spoke to your mother,” he smiled, “and she’s fine about our going to the Book Barn. I’ll bring the truck around.”

“I hate that truck,” I said.

“Good for you. It’s one of the things Hank and I discussed last night. We’re ordering a new one today. We thought we’d wait until Maurey came back because here it’s one-man-one-vote on everything dealing with the farm. But it would be a nice surprise if we picked Maurey up in a new truck, with all the extras.”

“May I run upstairs for a minute?”

“Don’t run, walk.”

But run I did. For my dollar hidden in my sock. Hal lifted me into the front seat.

“You’ll love this barn. Wait until you see it. People come from every part of the country to browse there. It has thousands and thousands of books. Jenkins the younger spends his time at book auctions; Jenkins the elder minds the store. The place is old and musty. Anyone can take junk from the stall marked ‘free books.’ When Jenkins the elder buys an estate, he gets junk with the good stuff.”