Up From Orchard Street (46 page)
Sun filtered through the leaves and an immense stillness enveloped my every hour. In the distance the fruit trees with their winter pears seemed to descend directly from the blue sky. The patio furniture had been put away so I lay in the hammock in the shade, half dozing, my thoughts drifting among the new paradoxes in my life. Once all contradictions focused upon Orchard Street: its physical harshness, the lack of money, the illnesses that continually attacked us—yet, there we thrived on rich and varied cultural experiences. And above all, we were always together.
Now I was in Connecticut, alone, proud of my independence in one sense, but plagued by a dull aching fright. What was to happen to this farm I loved, which would soon be torn apart and changed beyond recognition? The adult friends I held so dear—would they be scattered on both coasts and seldom come together again? My own family was a long way from Orchard Street now, but my terror of losing them one by one never left my consciousness. I sought refuge in dreams.
From early morning to summer twilight it felt as if the golden light shed its radiance especially for us. The universe became a painter’s vision of warmth and comfort and stillness, a suspension of time and place that I would recollect forever.
We didn’t speak much except at dinner. In the kitchen with its hotel-sized stove, Gabe prepared coq au vin and blanquette de veau. We drank white wine, mine mixed with water, and all of us got drunk, slipped off our chairs and slipped into bed. Above the remodeled lobby, the upstairs rooms where we slept before remained intact. My bed was still beneath the window from which I could view what had once been the barn flooded with yellow light.
In the fall, as Estelle predicted, my mother went to work for Panache on Madison Avenue, Saturdays only. I accompanied her to her first day’s work, kissed her as she entered the store and recited “Knock ’em dead.” With my nose pressed against the glass, I studied the mannequins in the window, painted gold and dressed in filmy gowns that took my breath away. Lil floated through the boutique and out of view. I could no longer see her, but I remained there, filled with pride and with sadness, searching for the sight of my mother, waving my fingers discreetly, like a toddler who has recently been taught to wave bye-bye. It took me awhile to make myself leave.
Not too many weeks later, while in Panache, happy and as fullthroated as a lark, Lil pivoted on her high heels, reached toward the plush floral carpet and died.
As Jewish custom dictated, she was buried within twenty-four hours. The funeral service was held in the funeral parlor on Canal Street. Every store on Division Street closed for the day in her honor.
Passing the open casket everyone remarked on her youthful beauty. Willy kept repeating, “It should have been me. It should have been me.”
Clayton wept uncontrollably, crying out, “Miss Lillian, don’t leave us,” causing everyone to sob.
Jack removed the handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the lipstick from Lil’s cold lips.
At the grave site it started to rain. I caught a fleeting glimpse of Estelle and heard her say, “Look at the way his daughter holds the umbrella over Jack’s head.”
My father never remarried.
AFTERWORD
Up from Orchard Street
is part memoir, part social history and part fiction. Nevertheless, every word is true.
The Jewish ghetto on the Lower East Side in the 1930s, with its culture, traditions and restraints, no longer exists. As with many diasporas, when the inhabitants of this enclosed, tightly knit universe scattered, they rejected its old customs and possibly attempted to wipe their struggles from memory.
Not I.
Though by now I have lived in Southern California for several decades more than I lived in New York, the sights, smells and physical images that haunt me are of Orchard Street and the overcrowded thoroughfares that surrounded it. In dreams, I am in the tiny freezing apartment, or I walk the streets in the dark, heart pounding, in search of the old tenement that I cannot find.
Today, Orchard Street and its environs are enjoying an esthetic and financial renaissance, and the scenes of my childhood are now filled with trendy clubs, fashionable restaurants and expensive condos. My Bubby was right: “If you live long enough, you live to see everything.”
In 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial and the tall ships, I flew to New York to rediscover 12 Orchard Street. My eyes lit on the water tower that came into my childhood view every morning when I peered out of the window from our folding bed. I began to cry behind my California sunglasses.
The men’s store on Canal Street that I called Jacob’s in these pages was still there, still situated on the ground floor of the derelict tenement. I walked into the store and said in Yiddish, “Excuse me, is there any way I can get inside the building?”
The owner, an aged man, short and grizzled, was arranging boxes of socks on a shelf. He answered, “One time I went with the fire inspectors. I stood on the ladder and we looked inside. Rats and bats, they ate everything. Nothing but shmutz, a few pieces from bedsprings. I wouldn’t look inside again for no amount of money.”
I turned down Canal Street to the funeral parlor from which my grandmother and mother had been buried. Across the street, on the site of Loew’s Canal, with its red-carpeted lobby and gilt-framed movie posters, there was now a shop that sold inexpensive cameras.
I reversed my course. The Third Avenue El was gone, the Bowery remained the same. A street sign indicated that I stood on Division Street, but I saw little that was recognizable. There was a public school on the right side of the street.
I whirled around as a man’s voice asked, “You looking for someone?”
“A store,” I answered. “My dad’s store. Elite Fashions.”
“You’re in the wrong place. I been on this block thirty, forty years, never heard of that store.”
“My mother worked where the school is. My father started his business close to where you’re sitting.”
The man shook his head. “Nah, nah, it happens all the time, mistakes in location.”
I grew exasperated. “Listen, our name was Rackow. My grandmother had a private restaurant, Manya’s. Everyone knew her.”
In an instant he shed fifty pounds, rose from his chair and spread his arms. “Oh, my God, it’s Jack the horse player’s daughter! I didn’t make a nickel on a nag after your father moved away.”
It would be inappropriate not to report on some of the people who appear in these pages.
My extraordinary Bubby, whose influence on my life never faltered, died of a kidney ailment that today is curable. At her funeral, Clayton wept piteously, “Bubby, don’t leave me.” He ran out after the services and did not accompany us to the burial site. In the confusion of getting in and out of cars, we didn’t realize he had gone—forever. Our search and inquiries led nowhere. For years I kept insisting he had traveled to California and in my mind he remained as he had appeared in his youth. I bless him still.
During my adolescence I spent many an afternoon with Lil in the offices of eminent cardiologists. Often I would be asked, “Why isn’t your father here?” and I would answer truthfully, “He’s too anxious. He can’t bear to hear bad news.” If I heard the sirens of an ambulance I automatically started running, assuming my mother was on the way to a hospital. The lines from Webster’s
Duchess of Malfi
echo still: “Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.”
As for my brother, Willy shuttled between various psychiatric hospitals and Jack’s house, where he occupied a small bedroom whenever he was deemed well enough. The last time I saw him he was living in a nursing home in West Sayville, Long Island. I took him to an elegant restaurant for lunch; he ordered lobster and cheesecake for dessert. We sat outdoors; dappled sunlight came through the branches of tall stately trees. We held hands as we talked about his favorite philosopher, Bertrand Russell. Suddenly he said, “If anything happens to me, promise that you won’t mourn because my personal torment will be over.” That winter he suffered a stroke, and a few days later died of aspiration pneumonia.
Jack passed into legend. After smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for all those years, he gave his last breath to emphysema. My sons, Matthew and Jonah, and I still speak of him as if he were alive, especially during the Belmont Triple Crown race, a track he frequented for years. Once I had dinner with one of the leading horse trainers in the United States, and my regret was that I couldn’t tell Jack about it.
I extend my gratitude to my cadre of California doctors for their devotion to me: Dr. George Dennish, who enjoyed it most when I brought a few pages of my novel and read them out loud to him; Dr. John Hassler, whose optimism never faltered; and Dr. Herman Serota, who provided me with an excellent mantra: “When you’re tired, hungry, lonely, sleepless—write.” And Dr. Donley McReynolds, who joked, “I’ll pay you to sit in my waiting room and just tell stories to my patients.”
I extend my deep thanks to my companions Carmen Palacios and Samuel Calvarios; my cousin Professor Edward Turk; my dear friends Julia Sundt, Kira Kaufman, Jan Percival, Vita Sorrentino and Ilan Shrirer; and my editor, Mariam Kirby. But most of all, I appreciate the unfailing love of my daughter-in-law, Colleen, and my two sons.
—Eleanor Rackow Widmer
La Jolla, California
October 2004
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ELEANOR WIDMER, who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, had a varied career as a scholar, a critic, a teacher, a passionate defender of freedom of expression, and for twenty-six years, a noted food and restaurant critic in the San Diego region, where she made her home.
She earned her master’s degree at Columbia University and a doctorate in English literature at the University of Washington in 1956, writing her thesis on women novelists of the nineteenth century. (It was when she was studying for her Ph.D. that she won a cooking contest in Seattle for her apple pan dowdy recipe.) She was an expert witness in an obscenity trial involving banning the sale of Henry Miller’s novel
Tropic of Cancer
in San Diego, a case that culminated in 1964, when the Supreme Court ruled that the book was not obscene.
Eleanor Widmer died in La Jolla, California, on November 8, 2004, at the age of eighty, not long after she had completed revisions on
Up
from Orchard Street
. Two sons and two grandchildren survive her.
UP FROM ORCHARD STREET
A Bantam Book
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2005 by Eleanor Widmer
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2005046405
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-41868-5
v3.0