Up From Orchard Street (6 page)

“Again a shanda,” Bubby protested. “Always a shanda this, a shanda that. The baker Greenspan, he finally gave me that Saturday job, but I had to creep into the store in the dark so people wouldn’t see me and scream ‘shanda.’ And Stein, Misha’s boss, if he thought it a shanda that this educated boy worked for him, why didn’t he try to get Misha a better job? Your grandfather and I, we didn’t believe in shandas.”

Finally, Misha’s diagnosis came: tuberculosis. The officials with whom they dealt were either overburdened or had become hardened by so much disease and suffering that they dismissed the sick man by saying no hospital beds could be found for him. Not a single one in the city, or in that unexplored and alien region known as “Upstate” New York. One afternoon Misha hemorrhaged in front of Stein and with the greatest reluctance, Stein had to let him go. My grandmother took a second job as a prep cook in a restaurant, work she could do in her sleep and often did because she didn’t give up her hours in the bakery.

Misha stayed in bed and swallowed cough syrup, nothing else. They moved to an upstairs room in the same building that had more air and filtered sunlight, then considered the absolute cures for consumption. Every spare hour Manya spent in bed with her husband. They made love feverishly. Unafraid of infection she kissed him on the mouth. She believed she could heal him with those kisses. Twice a month she went to the hospital and begged for a bed for Misha. “It’s a shanda,” the nurse said, “that such a handsome man, refined, should not be getting hospital care, but all I can do is move him up on the waiting list.”

Yet joy smiled at them when my grandmother became pregnant. A man who could make a baby had life and strength in him. The baby! A lucky omen.

Misha sat in a chair at the window as a midwife and Manya delivered my father. The couple could not believe their good fortune and happiness. The possibility of death didn’t enter their minds. Soon the hospital bed would be available; soon Misha would be cured; soon the baby would understand what a gift of God he was, a “golden mitzvah.” They had an almost mythological sense of their destiny. The illness was a setback, not a tragedy. The baby brought them a new sense of innocence. And just as innocently, Misha died.

After that, my grandmother explained, she never feared death. It came, she said, as a whisper, almost silently. Death wasn’t frightening. Only irreversible. Since she hadn’t been raised to believe in an afterlife, she couldn’t console herself with the notion that she would see Misha again. But she kept his memory alive with the tales that she spun more nights than I can remember. Often she would draw me close and confide, “Did I tell you the worst shanda of all? On the day of the funeral, some social worker came to tell me that they had a bed in the hospital. Now
there’s
a shanda.”

Winters tested our endurance on Orchard Street with teeth-chattering, bone-aching cold. Ice and frost covered the windows as if they had been applied with glue. The mildest rain hardened into ice; the snow that we loved to watch turned into icicles. We lined the leaky windows with old towels that grew sopping wet from droplets of ice. Damp, frigid air seeped into every room. In the dining room the wallpaper that my parents prized buckled from the moisture.

To offset the cold, we wore layers of sweaters over our underwear. Sweaters knitted by Lil provided bulk rather than warmth. Our skin, oily and smelly, longed for a warm room and a bath. On rare occasions we bathed in a tin tub filled with water heated in one of Bubby’s vast soup pots. Lil bathed at her friend Ada’s, who lived on East Broadway “by the doctor,” Dr. Hershel. He occupied the top floor, his office as well as his home, while Ada Levine and her family rented the apartment four steps up from the sidewalk, facing East Broadway. A visit to Ada’s three-room railroad flat provided Lil with steam heat and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub adjacent to the kitchen.

Once, I accompanied my mother to Ada’s for a bath, while her daughter, Shirley, and her son, Artie—the same ages as my brother, Willy, and me—played on the stoop. Ada, a short brassy blonde with brassy bleached hair, a brassy voice and a look of naked aggression, could level you to the ground with an unflinching stare. Seeing me undressed in the bathroom, she observed that my vagina resembled a “dried-out knish.”

Hearing this, Bubby responded with outrage. “You, a dried-out knish? You ugly? You have more in one little finger than Ada has in her whole head. Right now you could speak with the president of the United States. If you met the president tomorrow you would know what to say to him. And Ada, that nar, all she knows is to dye her hair and to wink at men. Some married woman—she carries on like a streetwalker, a nafka.” Though Ada’s apartment was warm and her bathtub a treat by my standards, I restrained myself from bathing there again.

Instead, every so often on a late Friday afternoon, I went with Bubby to the public baths on Eldridge Street. The city provided the space and the boiling water for the showers. A hunched-over old crone, dripping wet from the steady stream of hot water, sat at the door and begged to cut your toenails for a few pennies. We couldn’t decide whether she had been born a hunchback or whether years of sitting cross-legged at the door had caused her back to curve into a half-circle. She still wore a wig as in the old country, and a black ragged shawl over an equally black ragged dress. Moving from customer to customer, she resembled a toothless black crow. The old woman terrified me.

The water for the showers came on at intervals of three minutes and lasted for three minutes. You had to wash and rinse quickly unless you wanted to stand and wait for the next cycle to begin. Most women languished at the public baths for an hour, but my grandmother got me in and out in a hurry, lest I catch cold walking home with damp hair. She’d bundle me in a large towel, hand me a fresh
shtinik,
a white cotton slip that served instead of an undershirt, and then put on my smelly sweaters again. I soon rebelled against the public baths. “I feel shanda,” I told my grandmother. I hated the cracked tile floor, the yellowing tile walls, the odd shapes and forms of strangers’ bodies. During our many years together, my grandmother’s policy and philosophy rested on not sabotaging my wishes. “You shouldn’t feel shanda in the public baths,” she soothed me. “In Russia, every Friday women run to the public baths to make themselves clean for Shabbas.” “I can’t stand this place!” I cried in rebellion.

“See how she opens a mouth to her bubby,” a woman in the next shower complained.

My grandmother bustled me out and offered to buy me a charlotte russe displayed in a candy store window—slices of imitation sponge cake placed on a circle of cardboard and topped with fake whipped cream and a cherry.

I refused, not easily placated after what I considered a humiliating experience at the public baths. “All right,” she said. “You don’t want a charlotte russe, why don’t you read me the signs as we walk home.” Bubby knew that I enjoyed reading the letters out loud and then sounding out the names of the signs. To be sure, I had them all memorized and it wasn’t much of a challenge, but afterward Bubby told everyone that even before kindergarten I could read every sign on Orchard Street. On the next to the last time that I visited the public baths, we went to a sweater store and Bubby bought me a thin maroon vest to wear next to my shtinik, and a navy blue one for my brother. “With such a nice vest,” she said with a smile, “you won’t feel a shanda if you have to go to the doctor and take off your middy blouse.”

4

Doctor, Doctor

THE DOCTOR WAS a constant in our lives. My mother, who was diagnosed with what was euphemistically called “a weak heart,” laughed and laughed when the insurance doctor told her that she couldn’t obtain a life insurance policy because he detected multiple murmurs and an uneven beat. When he remarked, “You’re too young to have such a weak heart,” Lil thought it a big joke. “Who doesn’t have a weak heart on the Lower East Side?” she asked as she skipped out of the house in her high heels, her blonde hair perfect, her dress and coat as fashionable as any woman uptown. How could she take her heart problems seriously when my father had bad lungs and walked around with a thermometer in his mouth; my brother suffered from asthma and wheezed his way through the nights; and later I contracted rheumatic fever and stayed in bed for weeks.

Nor were we the isolated few. A diphtheria or measles epidemic would spread catastrophe through the Lower East Side. When polio raged, children seemed to be carried away overnight. In fact, we were among the privileged because of our private doctor.

Dr. Koronovsky—again no first name—lived with his two sisters in a luxurious elevator apartment on Grand Street furnished with, among other possessions, a piano covered with a shawl more intricate than ours, and wall-to-wall carpeting. The doctor had his own room with a bedroom set that he had bought at Jones Furniture, which sold “the best” to uptown people; a plum-colored couch and upholstered chairs in the living room; and two radios, one in the living room and one in his private quarters. In the second bedroom his maiden sisters, Etta and Yetta, slept in twin beds—everything of the finest quality, Bubby reported. She had been in the apartment several times to cater small dinner parties.

Still, Dr. Koronovsky carried an air of sadness with him. He sported a small goatee, a vest that displayed a gold chain with his Phi Beta Kappa key as well as his gold watch, and Hickey Freeman suits in various states of disrepair. What accounted for his misery? His two sisters had made every sacrifice to send him to medical school, serving as janitors for the building in which they lived in exchange for free rent. They scrubbed the steps, pulled garbage cans to the sidewalk, mopped animal urine and feces; no job too cruel for them because their brother had to be a doctor. Their parents expected it; they had martyred themselves to send their children to America.

After Koronovsky finished his residency at Beth Israel Hospital he was offered the chance to buy into a private practice close by on West Sixteenth Street. But his sisters, tiny black-haired women with worn-out eyes and bony hands, refused to move uptown. Koronovsky, easily the best doctor on the Lower East Side, kept his office on East Broadway, charged more than anyone and did consultations uptown. To ensure his sisters’ happiness he didn’t marry. But he did have “a friend,” a woman refined and educated whom he loved and visited once a week.

In our apartment after he diagnosed my father’s bronchitis—he scoffed at the barber and his burning cups—or Lil’s sore throat, Dr. Koronovsky would sit in the kitchen with Bubby to speak of his dilemma. “After what my sisters did for me, how can I bring a strange woman into the house? My wife would run my house! What would happen to my sisters?”

“Emmes,” Bubby replied, “absolutely true.” She paused to formulate what she said next. “But your life: you deserve a life. It’s coming to you. When will you begin living, when your sisters are gone? Then it will be too late.”

Dr. Koronovsky dipped rugulach into his raspberry tea served in a filigreed holder and refused to answer Bubby’s question. “What about you, Manya? You didn’t remarry. You had chances. Quite a few.”

Bubby nodded in agreement. “More than a few, but not one meant anything to me. One man was not too smart, another couldn’t hold a job, a third . . . Can you imagine . . . this man, he asked me to marry him after knowing me two weeks. He said we should take Jack, about three years old, and while he played in the park, we should sneak away and leave him there. I should forget about my one and only child, leave some stranger to find him, for that grub yung? What was he, crazy? I told him, ‘Don’t find your way back here, or I’ll soap up the stairs and slide you down.’

“Another meshugana, almost the same story. I should bring Jack to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum and say I’m too poor to take care of him. ‘Manya,’ he told me, ‘without your child we will always be on a honeymoon.’ ” Bubby leaned forward for emphasis. “Do you know what he meant by that? I should hand over the restaurant to him, he should make jokes with the customers, drink slivovitz and do nothing else. And all the time my boy, my one and only child, would be in an orphanage.”

Reflection filled their temporary silence. Finally the doctor wiped his mouth and asked, “But what about Mister Elkin? A real love with no shanda.”

The subject of Mister Elkin always caused my grandmother to fight back her tears. “After my husband, Mister Elkin was the only man I ever loved. The others, a hug here, a kiss there. Gornisht. With Mister Elkin, a deep love, for both of us.”

“What a shanda that he deserted you.” Dr. Koronovsky stroked his goatee. “A tragedy.”

If Manya seemed about to cry, she didn’t allow the tears to fall. She busied herself adding a few butter cookies to the doctor’s plate.

“The loss of Mister Elkin, that wasn’t a shanda, it wasn’t a tragedy. Only sad. Very very sad. When my husband died, now that was a tragedy. He left a child without a father, me without a husband, and his own life, gone too soon. Did you know that in Odessa they called him Misha the tzadik, the wise one? Who knows what he would have become if he lived?”

Dr. Koronovsky rose from his chair. “We’ve had sad lives. Both of us.”

“No,” my grandmother protested. “It will change soon for you.”

“Please, don’t wish what you are thinking on my sisters.”

“I’m not thinking what you are thinking. Doctor, forgive me, I don’t want to feel shame for what I’m telling you, but one pubic hair is stronger than ten oxen. Just marry the woman you love and bring your wife into the same house with your sisters. You’ll find a way. You’ll be happy. And excuse me again if I didn’t speak right.”

Dr. Koronovsky blushed and added graciously, “Manya, you and I understand each other. There’s no offense.” He turned for the door. “See that your daughter-in-law takes the powders I left her.”

The powders, crushed aspirin with possibly a dash of codeine, came in folded waxed papers and Dr. Koronovsky always carried a boxful. He distributed them for each and every ailment.

“Manya, let me know how Lil’s sore throat is. If it’s not better in two, three days, call me.”

As it developed, Lil’s sore throat wasn’t the problem. She took the powders in water. She gargled with kosher salt; painted her throat with tincture of iodine, wrapped her neck in cold compresses followed by hot. The dry pain in her throat eased, but she started to throw up. Every morning. She felt sick to her stomach. Her breasts hurt.

My grandmother and mother didn’t argue or fight. But when Bubby suggested, “Maybe you’re pregnant?” Lil snapped at her, “What are you crazy? Do you think I’m out of my mind?”

“From your mind is not how you get pregnant.”

Lil was vain about her excellent figure, the flatness of her stomach, her incredible dancer’s legs. To this she added the fact that she had become a saleswoman on Division Street, in the very store in which she had packed coats into boxes. Lil had given birth to two children because it seemed the conventional, appropriate thing to do. The prospect of a third child horrified her. When she learned that she was in fact pregnant, she cried out, “How could this have happened to me? What did I do to deserve this?” as if beset by the plague.

Of course, Rocco, my father’s bookie on Mott Street who considered himself the conduit through which all services flowed, crossed himself before he confided to my father. “Listen, Jack, you know I’m a good Catholic, confession every week, don’t eat meat on Friday, church on Sunday, God should burn my tongue out if I don’t believe that each child has a soul that will go to heaven. But you know how it is, Jack. You run across a bimbo every now and then and she’s in trouble. I mean, I’m not saying who got her that way, but after all, that’s life, a man loses himself for a minute and God forbid his wife or mother should find out. Anyhow, here’s the story, and no disrespect to Lil, but this woman, she’s clean as a whistle, immaculate and she does a perfect job in half an hour.” Rocco wrote a name and address on a piece of paper. “A Mrs. O’Brady. In east New York. She wears a cross,” Rocco added.

My father put a match to the paper.

Everyone admitted that the Gypsy fortune-tellers who lived right under the Williamsburg Bridge sold pills that brought on a woman’s period. Buy pills from Gypsies? Jack paced the floor, chain-smoking. “Who knows what Gypsies are selling? Could be cyanide. Could be made from cat’s piss, God knows what. Those pills are out of the question.”

“All right,” Lil sobbed, “no pills, no Irish midwife.” She added wildly, “What am I supposed to do, jump off a bridge?”

As soon as the words flew out of her mouth, Lil bought a jump rope and every morning and every night she jumped rope a hundred times in the kitchen. My grandmother fanned herself with her Hoover apron. “Please,” she protested, “you’ll get a heart attack. You’ll kill yourself with this jumping.”

“I used to do double Dutch when I was a girl, up to a hundred.”

“You’re not a little girl now. What’s worse, having a baby or having a heart attack?”

For jumping rope Lil wore an old pale nightgown that once may have been pink but now had faded into gray, the color of Lil’s skin as she persisted with her rope skipping. Her blonde hair bobbed up and down as she counted with increasingly shallow breath, “Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.” As she reached twenty-five, as if possessed by some childhood demon she called out, “Crisscross,” and twirled the rope to jump inside it at one count and out at the other. We could hear her panting as she counted, “Thirtyfive, thirty-six, thirty-seven . . .”

Lil went dead white. The rope slipped from her fingers as she crumpled to the floor. My grandmother ran to her side, wiping the sweat from her face, crooning softly to her, rocking her in her arms. Bubby put her ear to Lil’s heart. “It goes too fast, too fast. I hear it like an ocean, rocking like the ocean on the boat from Odessa.”

Her voice held a note of panic as she asked me to bring the slivovitz liqueur from its accustomed jug in the kitchen cupboard.

“A bissel,” she instructed me, “a little.” The whole scene frightened me. My hands shook with the responsibility of the task but I poured a few drops into a water glass. Bubby took the glass and brought it to Lil’s lips. “A drop,” she coaxed, “try to drink one drop.” Lil didn’t drink alcohol except for some Manischewitz wine at the Passover seder, and little at that. Bubby forced a few drops into her mouth, then placed the glass on the floor and sprinkled the slivovitz on Lil’s lips and nose. We could see her chest heaving through the material of her nightgown but her eyes began to flutter. She sat upright in my grandmother’s arms and slowly the two pulled themselves to their feet.

Lil rested in bed while Bubby hovered over her, bringing her sips of chicken broth, one or two strawberries that she had preserved during the summer served over a bite of sponge cake. “Sugar is good for you, some fruit it’s very good, it will make you feel stronger.”

Lil dozed fitfully, but at 7:30 she rose and took hot water from the tea kettle that seemed never to run dry. Bubby helped her sponge her entire body. When Lil dressed in a navy blue shift with an all-pleated skirt that showed off her shapely legs Bubby said, “You know, Lil, if women could do away with pregnancies by jumping rope, the Gypsies and the midwives would be out of business.” Then she looked up at me and Willy and reminded us, “Don’t tell!”

My father, home from work on Division Street that night said, “Lil, you look like a million bucks. Want to go out for chinks?”

My brother, Willy, and I gaped with wonder at the way my mother had transformed herself from a woman with a near heart attack to one with carmined lips and a touch of Chanel No. 5 at her ears.

But during the next several days my mother cried and cried, demanding, “What have I done to deserve such a thing?”

“What have you done? What everyone does,” Bubby replied. “When I was a girl I thought frya libbe was really free. But in this life, everything costs. A kiss, a hug, it costs. A night of love, it costs the most. Look what happened to me and Mister Elkin. We would send Jack to the movies and right on the floor, on the Persian rug, we had those stolen kisses, always worried that Jack would find us.

“You know the kitchen lock, you can open it with a hairpin, so Elkin and I would be rushing and holding each other, lost in a dream. Always we thought, if only we didn’t have to feel like two bandits, stealing an hour together, stealing our own kisses from each other.”