Up From Orchard Street (8 page)

My contempt for Shirley Levine arose from her lack of brains. Like her mother, Ada, she liked to talk about dresses—when she bothered to talk at all. She would repeat endlessly, “My mother is buying me a red dress, with a petticoat to match.” Neither the dress nor the petticoat materialized, a promise, typical of Ada, that she had no intention of fulfilling. For her daughter, that one sentence, “My mother is buying me a red dress, with a petticoat to match,” summarized the extent of her conversation.

Yet just as I admired and feared my Grandma Rae’s impeccable housekeeping, I admired and feared Shirley Levine’s physical agility. She roller-skated for years, not on learners but on real skates with steel wheels, and in the coldest weather she wore socks, not stockings, a fashion my mother associated with the upper class.

The second Shirley I loathed was Shirley Mathias, who lived with her brother, Nate, and her parents above their men’s hat store on Canal Street. The Mathias Hat Company had a citywide reputation and the store itself was a marvel: gleaming wooden shelves, dozens and dozens of hats stacked one on top of another: derbies, fedoras, snap-brims, hats made from real fur, beaver hats fit for a Czar, curly gray Persian lamb hats with side flaps that generals sported in movies, top hats for the opera. During the summer Mr. Mathias displayed stiff straw skimmers with tricolored hatbands, soft Panamas with perforations for air at the crown, caps for boating, caps for golf, white visors for tennis. Everything we knew about sports—and it was painfully little because on the Lower East Side handball reigned: slapping a hard ball against an equally hard wall—we learned from the Mathias Hat Company. My father, considered a paragon of sartorial splendor, always bought his fedoras—worn with the brim turned down on all sides—at Mathias.

But little Shirley Mathias possessed the tongue of a devil. Each time I walked on Canal Street she would shout, “Skinny pickle, skinny pickle,” darting her head in and out of her father’s store like a snake’s. And as soon as I started kindergarten, she yelled, “She got left back, she got left back!” a wound not easily forgotten.

True. Thanks to the odious Ada Levine, my mother had registered me at the Hester Street P.S. 21 at the age of four. Ada always referred to me not by name but as “That one.” “That one has a dried-out knish.” “That one has an old lady’s head.” “That one can read all the signs on Orchard Street.” Ada advised my mother to start me in school a half year early, to say that I was born in September, instead of January. “That one,” she told my mother, “will be the smartest one in kindergarten. Get her out of the house. How long is she going to hold her Bubby’s hand and go shopping? Get rid of her.”

I had nothing to say in the matter. My mother brought me to register at school. She claimed she had lost my birth certificate but swore, smiling winsomely, that I had been five in September. Then, as she left me at my classroom, she repeated again, “Remember, when the teacher asks you when you were born, say September seventh.” I must have appeared stricken, because she cajoled me, “You’ll get all the books you want to read. Free.”

On the first morning of school, no one inquired, but on the second, Mrs. Clarke, an imperious woman with a pince-nez around her neck, asked everyone to state their name and date of birth. Automatically, I told the truth and repeated it. I was sent home immediately—the class was burgeoning with children, as many as forty-five—with a note saying that unless my mother could produce my birth certificate, I wasn’t to return.

My mother screamed, “Dummy, didn’t I tell you what to say? Why didn’t you say what I told you? What are you, stupid?” She began to shake me. Bubby came to my rescue immediately, “What are you crazy, you have to listen to everything that Ada Levine tells you? So your child told the truth, and for this you are yelling and screaming? She’s four years old, she can stay with her Bubby a little longer. She’ll be a professor six months later.”

“A professor?” my mother protested. “Who will marry her if she’s so smart? Who, who,
who
?” And she burst into tears, crying almost as hard as when she thought she would be having another baby.

Hearing the early morning ruckus, my father left his bed and came in to settle the disturbance. “Look,” he said to my mother, “does it put you ten ahead if she starts now or six months later? In a few months she’ll be five, you’ll bring the birth certificate, you’ll behave like a lady. And you can tell your friend Ada Levine she can show her ass in Macy’s window for all I care. Let her put her own daughter in school six months early.” Then to soften the message, he smiled at her and said, “Come on, Lil, we’ll have Danish and coffee at Ratner’s, my treat.”

Since there were no secrets in the Jewish ghetto, this kindergarten mishap soon reached Shirley Mathias, who rarely failed to taunt me that I had been “left back.”

The third Shirley who drove me crazy was Shirley Feld, the granddaughter of Mrs. Feldman who lived in the apartment one floor above us. Mrs. Feldman, a widow three times over, admitted, “I’m burning like fire” in between mates. Her only child, Yussel, whom my father still called Yussie, had shown an affinity for fresh fruit from his earliest years. Not eating it, but lifting it from pushcarts, stands and fruit stores.

Notorious throughout the streets for his quick fingers and for the voluminous sweater under which he adroitly tucked apples, oranges, grapes, bananas, even watermelons larger than his head, Yussie made off with the fruit as the helpless vendors watched, unable to give chase because that would lay them open to ten other thieves. Yussie could drive a truck by the age of twelve, and though he was a runt, with red-rimmed eyes and a snotty nose, he was agile, fast and bursting with self-assurance. Not only did he jimmy open a parked truck, but in broad daylight he emptied out a fruit warehouse on Front Street. He couldn’t work nights because he had to stay home with his mother.

Caught in the act, Yussie was convicted of two counts of robbery, the truck and the fruit, and lived “out of town” for several years. When released at sixteen, however, he confided to my father, “They beat the shit out of me,” and went straight after that, as ambitious as ever, loving fruit as ever, but now conducting himself on the up and up. As an adult and married man he now lived on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, sported a pinky ring with a large yellow diamond, wore hand-tailored expensive clothes and drove a Cadillac.

Having changed his name legally to James Feld, he opened a gourmet fruit store on Fifty-seventh Street. His gift baskets graced the best homes in the city, and were photographed in the staterooms of French liners leaving for Europe.

One Sunday every month Yussie came to see his mother in the role of the dutiful son and to expand his chest as he flashed his engraved business cards: James Feld, Fruit Fit for Royalty. Even his West Fifty-seventh Street address was catchy.

Yussie had married Martha, a girl from the Bronx, a high school graduate who had hoped to attend Hunter College before he swept her off her tiny feet. Yussie towered over her. He and his wife were perfectly matched, she docile, adoring, proud of James. But one glimpse of their daughter, Shirley, revealed that she didn’t dine on her father’s fancy fruit.

She wasn’t pleasingly plump, just fat. Her fancy outfits couldn’t disguise the short chunky legs, the round stomach, the moon face. Shirley Feld’s permanent wave produced curls in the manner of Shirley Temple. The fourteen-karat gold bracelet on her wrist bit into her flesh, and the two gold rings on her left hand were buried in puffy skin.

Yussie paid the street urchins to watch his car during the hour he spent chatting with his mother on Orchard Street, yet he wouldn’t part with a cent for his favorite meal, which Bubby invariably prepared for him—an entire duck with orange sauce, which he called “duck à l’orange.” To display his generosity, he always brought Bubby three navel oranges for the sauce and every now and then a one-serving pocket-sized jar of commercial jelly, surely a joke. Bubby’s preserves, put up in gallon jars, were famous.

But Bubby laughed rather than complain. Remembering Yussie from his early days, she didn’t take his pomposity seriously.

Yussie ate Bubby’s food in his mother’s kitchen, but after a while the family would troop downstairs to our apartment and Shirley Feld, in a red velvet dress in winter and a red flowery one with ruffles in summer, honored us with a recitation. She took elocution lessons, a word that burned itself into my heart. Each and every time she recited the same piece. Since my parents worked on Division Street on Sundays, always a busy day, they would arrive home exhausted and the last thing they wanted was to array themselves in chairs on the Persian rug and listen to Shirley Feld. But after much stumbling and pausing, gazing down at her Mary Jane pumps, and then upward at our ceiling, Shirley managed to get through the same few lines:

When I was a beggarly boy
I lived in a cellar damp.
I had not a friend nor a toy
But I had Aladdin’s lamp.

When I could not sleep for the cold
I had fire enough in my brain
And builded with roofs of gold
My beautiful castles in Spain.

My parents and my grandmother applauded dutifully. Mrs. Feldman and Yussie’s wife, Martha, beamed.

But on the Sunday that Shirley Feld recited wearing a white rabbit muff on her right hand, I could bear it no longer and ran into my parents’ bedroom. Shirley scarcely noticed because after the recitation she was busy polishing off an entire plate of butter cookies sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar. As they got ready to leave, Yussie left his card with us for the hundredth time and Martha dramatically shook out Shirley’s winter coat with its gray Persian lamb collar and cuffs.

“What a four-flusher,” I heard my father say with distaste. “I wonder if he ever told his fancy wife with her fancy mink that he once stayed out of town for three years.”

“Shah,” my grandmother replied. “It doesn’t pay to talk like that.”

“But he’s such a phony.”

Bubby paused before replying. “Yussie has something to be phony about. He used to hitch rides on the back of trucks, the biggest goniff on the streets. So, if he wants to show off, you should laugh at him.”

Then she rushed into the bedroom to find out why I was crying.

My mother hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t in the dining room. Standing on her high heels from ten in the morning until seven at night, Lil worked on commission only, with no base pay. On Sundays, when the store was particularly crowded, she came home with her feet aching. To her credit, it did not occur to her to envy a mink coat or a fancy car. It had to do mostly with her image. She earned her own money. For work she dressed like a movie star. In her own small world she carried more respect than Martha Feld.

Moreover, my mother was warmed by my father’s love and the admiration of the men around her. When she stood up to sing at parties or social events, she felt herself bathed in a yellow light, and when the applause sounded she didn’t need the Grand Concourse or a store that sold fruit baskets wrapped in yellow cellophane and red ribbons. Any day or year now we would move uptown. Lil never doubted that.

So when she kicked off her high heels on that Sunday night, I did not appear on her horizon. My grandmother came to me in the bedroom.

I was curled up in my parents’ bed, wrapped in the seal fur jacket that my father would later toss out the window. “Why are you crying?” she asked me.

“Because I hate Shirley Feld.” Bubby stroked my less-than-clean hair. “Why should you hate her? She doesn’t have in her whole body what you have in your little finger.”

“I can’t stand her and her elocution. I can’t stand the same poem every time.”

“So you’ll recite the next time. Next time you’ll recite and you’ll show everyone how you speak like a chuchim.”

“I don’t take elocution.”

“Is that why you’re crying? You want lessons in how to recite?”

I thought this over carefully. I didn’t have to lie to Bubby because the withdrawal of love didn’t exist, nor was there fear of punishment or censure. But in order to be honest with her, I had to be honest with myself. Or as close to honesty as I could achieve. It took me several minutes of having Bubby pat my hair and caress my back before I answered with difficulty. “It’s the white muff. I want a white muff.”

“Like a czarina in Russland, riding in a troika?”

“It’s in the books with pictures, little girls in white fur hats and white muffs. They skate on ice. They dance with their muffs.”

“In Russia they have dancing bears, but the bears don’t have muffs.”

“Bubby, don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing.” She spoke softly. “It’s like your father with the shawl for the table. It’s magiicheskii,” she added in Russian. “But if you want it, if you need a white fur muff, you’ll have it. Uncle Goodman will be here this week. I’ll tell him to find you a muff, like you want.”

6

Promises

THOUGH MY PARENTS were in the business and sold furs and cloth coats I noticed that my grandmother didn’t rely on them or think of asking them for the muff. They would say, “Yes, of course,” and forget. It wasn’t that they were liars, but that the spoken promise meant nothing on the Lower East Side. Phrases like, “I give you my word,” “my word of honor,” “I promise,” had no meaning. They were not brought up to understand them.

People who came to our restaurant or whom my parents met socially promised one thing or another: samples, yards of cloth, items of clothing, rides in their cars, parties. But the second they left, the commitments flew out of their heads. There was no tradition of keeping one’s word. How many times had James Feld promised Bubby a basket of fruit, only to show up with three lousy oranges? Orloff had bought the embroidered shawl for the table, but he was driven by lust, by fantasies that propelled him to keep his word.

My own mother broke her promises routinely.

For some years I was enchanted by the prospect of seeing the lighted Christmas trees at Macy’s. They advertised on radio that the indoor tree rose three stories tall, covered with over one thousand lightbulbs, an equal number of ornaments and three hundred pounds of tinsel. I repeated these numbers to myself and said them out loud with the radio. While my mother painted her toenails in front of the hot, open-doored gas range in the kitchen, I asked, “Mother, do you think you could take me to see the Christmas trees at Macy’s?”

“Maybe,” she answered, without taking her eyes from her toes. A translation of
maybe
meant
no
.

But my need to see this wonderful tree overwhelmed me. A few days later, I repeated my request adding, “Mother, if you’re going shopping uptown, maybe we could run in and see the Christmas tree.”

“It’s all the way on Thirty-fourth Street. Too far.”

A few days later, “You could try on hats at Gimbel’s. Lilly Daché hats. Then across the street is Macy’s.”

“Gimbel’s doesn’t carry Lilly Daché. For that we would have to go to Saks Fifth Avenue. Too far.”

“But sometime,” I persisted, “just once.”

“Maybe,” she replied. We were back where we had started.

Possibly to placate me, she allowed me to walk with her to visit Ada, which she regarded as a treat. Ada pushed her children out of the house when she and my mother whispered together. Secrets. Whether it rained, snowed or sweltered, Shirley and Artie frequented the streets or the long hallway outside their apartment door. On this particular day neither of Ada’s children was home, and Ada gave my mother a wink. As was the custom, they sat in the kitchen. Ada could brag about her dining room set but she used it for ceremonial occasions, Passover seder and the meal following the Yom Kippur fast. The table, veneered with imitation mahogany, was highly polished and decorated with two candlesticks.

You couldn’t find a newspaper, a magazine, a book in Ada’s apartment. I had nothing to do and she wouldn’t turn on the radio for my sake—it was then believed that switching on the radio or plugging in an iron used vast kilowatts of electricity and cost a great deal of money. In our house, Bubby paid no attention to petty sums, and our radio hummed at all hours. Not at Ada’s.

Lil said in a conciliatory way, “Why don’t you walk down the hall and open the door to the backyard. There’s a big Christmas tree there. With lights and everything.”

“Really a Christmas tree?”

“I swear,” said Ada. “A real Christmas tree.”

Racing down the outside hall I tugged and tugged at the door that led to the yard. Something held it from opening. With all my strength I pulled until it yielded possibly an inch. I peeked through. Black coal, piled as high as my eye could see. Dull, dirty black coal.

“Mother!” I cried out, “Mother!” Then I banged on Ada’s front door. My mother regarded me without guilt, shame or surprise.

“There’s nothing but coal.”

She paused as if she couldn’t believe that I had believed her. “What would a Christmas tree be doing in a Jewish neighborhood, and in a backyard on East Broadway?” Her question, offered without malice, rendered me a fool. She felt no guilt for misleading me, because I had been silly to accept her statement.

A series of such incidents made me wary of promises, even one given by Bubby to obtain this magical muff for me.

On Saturday, when Goodman came to pick up his order of baked goods, he delivered the muff, pristine in its whiteness, with a fake turquoise bracelet attached to it and a Macy’s label sewn right inside.

My mother rewarded him with a hug. Her hair had been coiffed the night before for work, and a glow radiated from her in the early morning light. “You shouldn’t have,” she said to Goodman seductively.

Goodman laughed. “The muff, it’s not for you, Lil, it’s not for the child. It’s for Manya. She sent for my Bertha from Odessa, cared for her, loved her. She brought the two of us together. We had the wedding in this apartment, the chuppa, everything. We have a big house in Yonkers. We beg Manya to come for a week. We’ll wait on her, take her to shows. Anything she wants. She always says no. No to staying a week, no to anything we would be glad to give her. So when she asks me for a muff for her grandchild, it’s already done, it’s bought, so Manya can have pleasure.”

My grandmother replied, “Yes, when my Elkaleh has naches, I have naches.”

Goodman always brought his own box from his factory for what he referred to as “the sweet table.” That day he had left his home early because he worried about the ice that hardened on the East River highway. The temperature had fallen to twenty degrees and a fierce wind was ripping across the city. “Stay healthy,” Goodman called to us and rushed to his car.

Some months before, a man who sold leather goods on Clinton Street stopped my mother and said he had a present for her. The jackets he sold, sewn from bits and pieces of leather, hung on hooks outside his door. On this day he handed my mother a pair of leather leggings.

“I don’t know what they’re for. It’s a sample, maybe for horseback riding, maybe for a very small or skinny child. Take them. A salesman, he don’t know what to do with this sample either and I saved it for you, for your girl with very skinny legs. Manya won’t let me starve after she sees these leggings.”

My mother tore home, elated with her treasure. The moment she saw me, she urged my legs—in dirty cotton stockings—into them. The side zippers could not unlock; the brass catches had broken off. I stood up and wiggled my bony legs inside. From the first moment it was apparent that there would be problems getting them off, but my mother was awash in ecstasy. “Horseback riding boots. Just like in the society magazines. They’re warm, they’re classy, they fit like a glove. Turn around. Model them for me. How do they feel?”

If the leggings cut off my circulation, if my legs felt encased in cement I would not have said a word, because those leggings thrilled Lil. From birth I disappointed her because like my father I was olive-complected and dark-haired. Often she remarked about my brother, Willy, “Can you believe it, that he has white skin that any girl would be proud of and she’s dark? When they take a bath, Willy is all pink and she’s all yellow.”

“It’s from the Odessa side, the dark skin,” my father decided, ignoring his mother’s milky complexion. “Maybe someone had Gypsy blood.”

“How do Jews come to have Gypsy blood?” my grandmother retorted.

“Odessaniks have every kind of smarts, every kind of talent and every kind of blood,” answered my father.

“And this maydel, my Elka, is like my husband, Misha, and not some Gypsy,” said my grandmother, putting an end to it.

But I longed to look like my mother or at least to appear the way she wanted me to. So I wore the leggings. To school during the day, to bed at night, round the clock. On the icy morning that Goodman brought me the white imitation rabbit muff, our beds cluttered the dining room, and my leather leggings, with my dirty long stockings under them, showed beneath a ratty nightgown covered by two sweaters. The weather was miserably cold, so there was no question of giving us baths. My hair hadn’t been washed for weeks, and God knows how I smelled. But the muff transformed me instantly into a girl with well-proportioned legs, recently bathed and smelling of dusting powder, and hair as golden as my mother’s.

At that moment, Jacob called from the street. The windows were too frozen to open so he stumbled into our hallway and yelled upstairs, “No work today, Lil. Your store just called. Too cold. Who’s going to come out on a day like this? By me the same. No business.”

Suddenly maternal, my mother decided to wash my hair. This involved removing my clothes, dousing my hair with warm water from the kettle and lathering it with Lux bar soap. The whole procedure was hateful. I had to scrub ears, neck, arms and chest in the freezing apartment. Nothing was washed below the waist, because of my leggings.

I sat in front of the gas range with a blanket draped around me while my hair dried. Like my father’s, it was naturally wavy. He slicked his hair with pomade, but mine fell in deep waves and my mother tried in vain to set it in bottle curls. This artificial coif neither suited me nor stayed in place. On this stormy day my mother had no patience for fiddling with my hair. She was too eager to get to Ada’s and show off my new muff with its Macy’s label.

My mother loved labels. If clothes were supposed to make the man, then labels made the clothes for Lil. The store in which she worked on Division Street attracted a moneyed clientele. Instead of coming to sales at Bergdorf Goodman or Henri Bendel, women patronized The Palace with its pink spotlighted mannequins in the windows because it offered copies of high fashion at half the price.

While customers tried on the garments, the labels on their own clothing sometimes fell onto the carpet. My mother would snatch them up as if she had come upon lost treasure. To be sure, she asked her customers if they wanted the labels resewn by the on-the-premises tailor who adjusted hemlines and sleeve lengths. Usually, they didn’t bother. This meant that some of the outfits that my mother bought at S. Klein’s or at sales on Clinton Street had the spiffiest labels, cross-stitched by Lil herself. My mother was even more excited by the Macy’s label than I by the muff.

In a magnanimous mood, she agreed to take my brother, Willy, along with me to visit her friend Ada. Willy had no desire to walk in the cold or to play with Artie Levine, a good-natured boy who looked like his father, Irwin, gorged himself on bread with chicken fat, ate potatoes at every meal, and topped everything off with one or two candy bars. He was his mother’s favorite, and Ada had once pilfered an entire box of Baby Ruths from a local store to keep him in sweets.

Willy had no interest in Artie, or in any playmate for that matter. Given the choice, he would never have left our apartment at all. If my mother held the title of family singer, my brother, Willy, could win prizes as the whistler. He whistled with or without two fingers in his mouth, in perfect pitch, creating clear ringing sounds. His favorite song was “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” and his rendition of it almost broke my heart. Lil, not given to praise, had to admit that he could go on the vaudeville circuit with his whistling.

Willy preferred to stay home and practice whistling, listen to the radio or print. He wasn’t particularly good at school; neither his reading nor arithmetic was more than average. But he loved printing numbers and letters—he taught me how to make an eight by placing two balls one on top of another. And like the rest of us he adored movies, so if my mother had offered to “walk him” into Loew’s Canal—children were not admitted without adults—he would have been happy. But a trip to Ada Levine’s on a freezing day sent him into hiding, first in the dark room behind the folding beds and then behind my grandmother’s skirt. To no avail.

The reason for my mother’s obstinacy—she usually allowed Willy to do what he pleased because he placed no demands on her—was to show off a fake leather jacket lined with imitation sheepskin that she had bought for him from Jacob’s downstairs. The black and shiny jacket weighed a ton. Possibly Artie Levine with his stocky build could have done justice to it; on Willy, it hung like a heavy wet sack, the sleeves inches below his wrists and the hem well below his knobby knees. If I was taunted with “skinny pickle,” Willy was mocked as “broomstick” because of his awkward arms and legs, his concave chest and his skeletal body. Though like us all he was surrounded by mountains of food, Willy lived on clear chicken soup and Bubby’s baked goods. Jacob sold Lil the jacket at cost. Usually he opted for the barter system and accepted meals from our restaurant. But business was bad that winter and paying cash from my mother’s slim paycheck seemed preferable to feeding Jacob.

At last we set out for Ada’s, my brother in his bulky shiny jacket and matching hat with earflaps, I in my leather leggings and last year’s navy blue coat, inches too short and of no consequence compared to my new white muff. My mother, as usual, was resplendent in a mouton lamb coat, which she tried to pass off as sheared beaver.