Up From Orchard Street (43 page)

The star of the show, “straight from the heart of New York,” appeared in a long black dress, her hair parted in the middle and fashioned severely in the Spanish manner with a giant red silk flower tucked over her right ear. Estelle had created the costume and hair-styling.

Maurey’s generous instruction enabled Lil to sob on cue, “Take me in your arms before you take your love away.” She and the audience were captivated by the lament and she sang it twice to satisfy her admirers. Miraculously she remembered every word, every nuance, and the throb of her voice depicted her heartache. Calls of “Bravo!” resounded until Hal announced “Our theme song, written by the one and only, the talented Jack Roth.” The entire ensemble broke into, “And another year is coming and we don’t give a darn / we’ll leave the wife and children and come back to Pankin’s Farm.”

The house shook from the hours of dancing and the piano-playing of Maurey and Hal, who alternated at the keyboard. The mood was carnival-like.

Everyone, male or female, insisted on one dance with Lil, who floated across the dining room floor without holding her heart, without fear, without caution. She accepted each person’s kisses as if they were her birthright. Most especially from Maurey, who again drew an invisible curtain around the two of them, and murmured, nibbled, licked, touched, whirled, dipped, kissed short, kissed long until, out of her head with emotion, it was a marvel that Lil did not faint.

When the dancing finally ceased, Gabe and Hal carried her up the stairs. Estelle removed her dress and Lil passed out amid her finery, smelling of the Chanel No. 5 on the scarlet silk flower pressed against her cheek.

Willy and I dropped our clothes to the floor. Drunk with the desire for sleep, I forced myself awake from hour to hour to certify that my mother was in her bed, that she hadn’t crept out the door like a sleep-walker. Once, to anchor her, I even reached out for her leg. She didn’t stir. Remarkably her breathing was serene, as if in a hypnotic trance. At last I allowed myself to sleep undisturbed.

The sun loomed high in the sky when I awoke to a shrill piercing whistle, a New York whistle, the whistle petty thugs used to mean, “Cheez it, the cops.”

Why was a whistle like this invading our country privacy? It sounded again and yet again. I heard the scuffling of feet, the slam of a car door, the whoosh of tires on the gravel.

Lil and Willy slept on. I leaned on my elbow and surveyed the mess on the floor, towels, clothes, shoes, no space to walk. It seemed an enormous effort to leave my bed. Then I heard slow, labored footsteps, a tentative knock on the door.

“It’s me, Hank Pankin, Hank.”

I debated sending him away, reporting that my family was still sleeping. Except that the owner of our beloved farm had never before come to our room.

“Just a minute.”

I gathered up the stuff on the floor and threw it into the closet, while rousing Lil. “Mother, Mother, it’s Mr. Pankin.” I shook her awake. “He’s waiting outside. Maybe Daddy is on the telephone.” Quickly I brushed my teeth and splashed water on my face.

“Just a minute,” Lil repeated.

No time to remove last night’s stage makeup. She rinsed out her mouth. Her hair a bird’s nest, strands stuck together with pomade from the Spanish hairdo.

“Open the window, open the window.”

“You mean the door?”

“No, the window. It must smell awful here.”

Chastely she drew the sheets to cover her bosom and told me, “Smooth the covers, then let him in.”

“Sorry if I disturbed you.” Hank lumbered over to the one vacant chair in the room.

“I came to tell you. I thought you’d better know that your brother was here. Mr. Simon. He drove a new black Cadillac, very big, top of the line. He whistled. His wife and children heard the whistle, they jumped right into the new car. No hello, no good-bye, they drove away.”

“Did they pack, take anything with them?”

“Nothing. He whistled, they went with him.”

Hoarse from last night’s exertions, Lil’s voice had a falsetto edge. “That’s how Geoff made up with her: he bought a new car. You must have heard . . .”

Willy yawned. Mr. Pankin did not acknowledge any talk but his own.

“One more thing. Maurey, Hal, Gabe and Estelle, they left right after they put you to bed. They didn’t want any fuss, any good-byes. I’m telling this to you because you’re family, so you know how I felt when I waved good-bye. Hal doesn’t want any changes in the farm, neither does Estelle. I don’t know what I want, what I’m doing or why.

“Listen, standing there when it was nearly light, waving, smiling, a piece of my heart tore out of my body, it was such a wrench, such a pain to watch them go. I didn’t know how to comfort myself. I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

I couldn’t do anything either, just try to create a safe place for myself by rocking gently in the bed with the pictures from the photo shoot and my Tolstoy books locked to my chest.

23

The Circle

AGAINST HER CARDIOLOGIST’S advice, Lil returned to work at Saks, Saturdays only. Her one concession was to eliminate the subway ride in favor of taking Abe’s taxi to and from her job. Always punctual, she walked into the department store refreshed and with a private thrill of condescension because she hadn’t struggled on the subway or the bus like the other salespeople. This aura of superiority impressed the store’s managers, and in early November she was transferred to evening wear, a mark of status.

Lil’s happiness at selling evening gowns served to compensate for her minuscule salary—taxis and the need for handsome clothes ate into the stash of money that she was saving for living room furniture. Her conversation now centered on satin gowns, or taffeta or georgette, off-the-shoulder or jacketed, low-backed, decorated with seed pearls, bugle beads or discreet sequins.

Customers had to make an appointment to view the latest gowns. Since my mother had a mannequin’s figure, at work she wore a long silver lamé dress with a black velvet bib, along with flat-heeled silver sandals. She decided to buy the dress, which she paid for on an installment plan. Her hair, parted in the center, was enhanced by an added braid of real hair placed at the nape of her neck. Every Friday night Pandy washed and adjusted this elaborate hairstyle, appropriate for the opera or charity galas, and wrapped it in a heavy net to keep it in place while Lil slept. When she stepped into Abe’s cab in the morning, my mother came as close to representing a movie star as she ever would.

Upon her return early each Saturday evening, Bubby helped her remove her elegant dress, no matter that its wear and tear came out of her salary. She would sink into bed immediately and amuse herself while still awake by adding the sum of her day’s wages to her account book.

There was a hectic period before New Year’s Eve, followed by the postholiday clearance sales. Then she took the following weekend off and accepted the invitation from the architect of our building, Pete Peterson, to attend a wholesale furniture sale on Saturday morning. She decided that I should go with her to bolster her morale.

Peterson selected an ivory-colored couch with a skirt that fell over the legs. It was covered in a linenlike fabric treated to withstand dirt, and its deep cushions were edged in bands of satin. We had not encountered a sofa of such subtle beauty before and the possibility that she might own it brought my mother to tears. She barely managed to nod her head when Pete asked whether she liked it. He put a sold tag on it immediately.

As we searched for two armchairs to be placed in front of the windows, Peterson spied a low, long teak table, the exact length of the couch. “We’ll take this, too,” he said.

“I thought you hated coffee tables,” I said.

“It’s not a coffee table. It goes behind the sofa for the display of a few choice art objects.”

“
Behind
it?” Lil repeated.

“Yes. It’s both a room divider and a display table, for art books, a few whatnots and of course a vase with fresh flowers. Fresh flowers are a must in a civilized home. A few daisies will do the trick.”

Finally catching her breath, Lil said, “Jack should have come with us.”

“He’ll love this sofa and table,” Peterson assured her. “Jack is a man of innate taste. I sometimes think taste is an inherited characteristic. Don’t you?”

My mother grew dizzy from having to assimilate this lesson in esthetics.

In a dark corner labeled “Twice Removed” Lil spied a square deep chair with an ottoman. Peterson winced at its faded purple color and brocaded fabric.

“Macy’s basement,” he declared.

“It’s for Manya. For her bedroom. She can look out the window and rest her feet.”

“There’s one almost like it in dark blue velvet.”

“It’s more expensive and I’ve run out of money.” Unexpectedly, my mother began to cry. Out of frustration. Out of embarrassment. Out of longing.

“There, there,” Peterson said gently. “I’ll put it on my account. You’ll pay me back when you have it.”

When these words were spoken by Goodman, they signaled a gift, phrased to save my family the humiliation of seeming like shnorrers, people who exploited Goodman’s generosity. But Pete Peterson, the uptown architect, wasn’t from Lil’s world. Adrift, but not wanting to disgrace herself, she desired his good opinion of her.

For once, honesty came to her rescue.

“It’s taken me months of waiting on women and zipping up evening gowns on Saturday and then selling coats and suits on Sunday, and saving every penny, every cent. My cardiologist would be upset if he found out I worked Saturday and Sunday, but we need the couch and of course the stunning table. I don’t have a penny more, or know when I can pay you back.”

“It’s not a Russian bond,” he laughed. “The Bolsheviks won’t come after you. Besides, you’re right. Manya needs this chair. We mustn’t let numbers stand in our way.” He paused. “The Roth family helped smash my stereotypes about downtown inhabitants.”

She didn’t understand his vocabulary but his tone and his courtesy soothed her. “Thank you,” she replied.

The day the furniture was delivered Willy and I stayed home from school and Jack from Elite Fashions. The sofa emphasized how far we had traveled from Orchard Street, but it was the table behind it that caused an uproar.

“What a knockout, what style, what class!” Jack announced.

The ring of the outside bell heralded two gifts from Pete Peterson. Inside a box stamped “Breakable: Handle with Care” was a hand-blown vase with a tiny sticker that read “Made in Denmark.” Pale blue swirls thin as fine ribbons encircled the delicate glass. The second box had a florist’s label and within were two exotic flowers as long as swan’s necks: deep orange surrounded by equally deep green fronds. Pete’s enclosed card read, “May these birds of paradise symbolize your new surroundings.” When the vase and the flowers were placed on the table behind the couch, we looked at them enthralled, possessions we hadn’t conceived of in our dreams.

And yet! Ah, but for that yet!

Lying in her bed with its splendid headboard, an unopened
Silver
Screen
magazine at her elbow, Lil was resting on her side, her legs drawn up and her green eyes small pools of sadness. I wondered if her thoughts were with Maurey. It wasn’t their age difference that stood between them, but their backgrounds. It was one thing to steal a walk, a quick embrace, a kiss—my conscience did not allow me to envision more—but suppose they had an entire day together, a weekend, a week?

In October, we received a picture postcard of the Harvard Quad. It was addressed to The Roths, 444 Grand Street, Apt. 4, and it said, “Miss you, love you, wish you were here. Dead tired from work.” Signed “Hal, Gabe, Maurey.”

The card revived Lil. Her lethargy eased. She started to sing again, her step quickened and she reported to Dr. Frank that she was less tired than she had been. He urged her not to give up her medication or her rest periods. She replied, “I may be taking a short trip to Boston soon.”

That shook me: didn’t she realize that Maurey studied at Yale, was in New Haven? That the card had been written by Hal? She showed it to everyone she met and when the edges began to fray she placed it in her underwear drawer. Before she left the house she would kiss it as if it were a mezuzah on the door.

I also worried about Bubby, who was doing her best to accept her new role as caterer. It kept her busy, but so much of what she loved in her old life had been lost. Her business came from more distant merchants, so we rarely encountered customers, and our open door that had once welcomed Yiddish poets and journalists, local merchants and new arrivals from Europe, Negroes and Caucasians seeking a free meal—all these had vanished. Either they didn’t make the effort to find us—Mr. Jacob would have provided our address in an instant—or the world now revolved on a different axis in which Manya no longer starred.

It had been Uncle Goodman’s idea that we lease a food vendor’s truck and park it at the Garden Terrace. The truck was manned by Clayton and two of his local associates. At midmorning Clayton’s helpers used the truck to make deliveries of prepared lunches to distant merchants. They returned in time to restock the truck and sell Manya’s food to the people who gathered in front of the building at noon.

We bought the ingredients for the lunches that she provided from wholesalers. Clayton laid out four kinds of bread on the long kitchen counter, slapped tuna salad, kosher bologna, egg or chicken salad on the bread, doused the second slice with a mixture of mayo and mustard, added lettuce and tomato and slipped the results onto squares of waxed paper. We sold out each weekday.

Bubby cooked two days ahead for Friday, when the menu consisted of brisket of beef, roast chicken and Russian-style hamburgers. The
Forward
did a feature story on the best Friday lunch in town, but the diners went to our truck at the Garden Terrace, where Bubby did not appear.

The article in the paper inspired Lil and me to walk over to the paper. Ostensibly, we wanted to thank Shimon Gross for writing the review, but our real intention was to seek out the old buddies who had frequented our Orchard Street kitchen.

In the pressroom I recognized one former acquaintance and asked him for Avrum Liebowitz, who answered letters to the editor and wrote feature stories. “Don’t you read the
Daily News
?” came the reply. “He’s now A. S. Lang and he covers obituaries for them. He sits the whole day in the basement called The Morgue and you can reach him there. He’d rather be in the basement of an American paper than stuck here.”

The poet Zalman Glick, who thought years ago that Manya had literary connections, sat at a corner desk. He was sweaty and distracted, and we could see he was annoyed by our appearance. So after circling the pressroom and noting all the writers pretending not to recognize us, we abandoned our scheme. Manya and Aunt Bertha did call on our Wall Street clients, whose polite handshakes and compliments lasted five minutes.

One Sunday, James Feld, together with his wife, daughter and Mrs. Feldman, appeared at our apartment and were disappointed to find that Manya no longer cooked on that day except for the family. From the moment we left Orchard Street, Yussie had approached several matchmakers for his mother. One candidate caused him to boast to us that he had bagged an American widower, and he spent almost an hour describing their soon-to-be wedding and their apartment in a newer project on East Ninth Street. But these plans collapsed when the daughters of the seventy-year-old groom-to-be revealed that their father had recently undergone surgery for prostate cancer. The one quality Mrs. Feldman could not abide was impotence, and then there was the prospect of taking care of a sick man. The marriage plans evaporated.

Riddled with envy at our apparent prosperity, Yussie Feld moved his mother into a studio apartment in one of the more modest buildings on East Broadway. She visited Bubby twice a week, placed a sugar cube between her teeth as she sipped tea and chattered like a schoolgirl about possible marriages her son hoped to arrange for her. Bubby tolerated these monologues with a straight face.

One by one the other tenants from 12 Orchard Street also came by, marveled, stuttered and spat softly to ward off the evil eye. They gossiped in the kitchen in hushed tones, slightly in awe of their surroundings, eager to rush back to their familiar squalor. More than once I found Bubby in our bedroom, sitting in her velvet chair and staring out the window, enveloped in unspoken loss.

Ironically, when the time came for me to enter junior high school the person who spoke up with the greatest intensity about my future was my mother. Jack and Bubby took it for granted that I would select an academic program that led to college entrance. Lil, on the other hand, envisioned me as a secretary—the very word brought a blush to my cheeks—and she spoke up vociferously for courses in bookkeeping, typing, and shorthand.

“Just think,” she announced seductively, “you can buy all the clothes you want, have lots of spending money. You might marry a businessman, a man in business who will take good care of you.”

The fact that she had met the Pankin brothers and Gabe Solomon, two brand-new doctors and a would-be lawyer, did not alter her thoughts about my prospects. What did shorthand and bookkeeping have to do with me?

“Just try it,” she cajoled. “In six months, if you don’t like it, you can switch over. I’ll write you a note and you can change.”

My homeroom teacher in junior high was white-haired Mrs. Wilson, whose glasses dangled from a chain around her neck. She had a vacant sweet smile derived from years of not listening to the hysterical babble of her multilingual charges. On one side of the blackboard she wrote Algebra, History, English, French, and on the other Basic English, Accounting, Typing, Civics. I refused to look at the latter side.

Then, a magical event occurred. Mrs. Wilson clapped her hands for silence and read out loud from a typed sheet of paper. “The following students are in rapid advancement classes. They will complete three years of work in two.” My name was called. Academic classes qualified students for the advanced program. Saved! Saved by the system.