The other kids didn’t leave him alone for long. “Hey, Arthur, how’s your mom?” Sandra Schulman asked with a high-watt smile when we filed out for lunch. He ducked his head and moved off.
In class I couldn’t stop watching him. I knew that if he’d been there with his mother that morning, he would have thrown a coat over her and led her by the hand back to their house and closed the door and hidden her from the eyes of the neighbors who told their kids about her shame. But he must have been sleeping the morning it happened. Probably he didn’t even know she’d left the house. Probably the ambulance sirens woke him up.
A few weeks later he was absent again, and he never came back to school. Melvin Kaplan and his little sister said that Arthur’s father couldn’t take care of him, so he had to go live at the Vista Del Mar Home, which was for kids who didn’t have any parents. Would I be sent to the Vista Del Mar Home someday?
But sometimes my mother seemed all right. She’d be with me and talk to me as though nothing terrible had ever been wrong, and I’d almost forget how sick she’d been. Sometimes she’d even talk about her family in Europe. We’d be in a restaurant maybe; I’d fiddle with my milkshake straw or try to act casual in some other way, but I’d hold my breath to listen. I yearned to know something—anything—about where I came from, though I never dared ask lest my questions trigger another bad episode.
“When I was ten years old,” she reminisced on my own tenth birthday in 1950, when she took me to the Famous Restaurant on Brooklyn Avenue, “I already worked in seven different jobs.” She enumerated them on her fingers. First, she helped out in her mameh’s tiny grocery store; then she sold onions and cabbages in the shtetl market; then she was a maid for a rich family in Prael; then she took care of children for a family in Dvinsk, the city fifty miles away; then she untangled balls of wool in a Dvinsk shop where they wove cloth; then she was a milliner’s apprentice; then she was a tailor’s apprentice.
“All those different jobs I had by the time I was ten years old. Then when I knew what I needed to know, I went to work by a tailor as a regular seamstress.” She held her teacup with delicacy, her pinkie finger raised like some fine lady’s in the movies, and sipped. “So that’s what I did in my life until I was eighteen and came to America,” she sighed.
“But why did your parents let you go away to work when you weren’t even ten?” I knew she’d never ever let me go away from her.
“We had no food. If I lived somewhere else, the people there had to feed me. If I lived at home, my tateh and mameh had to feed me, and they had plenty other mouths to feed without me,” my mother said without rancor. “At home, most of the time we got only black bread and potatoes to eat, and maybe a few carrots or cauliflower. Maybe, if we were lucky, on Friday night everybody got a little piece of fish or some meat in a tablespoon.”
It had never occurred to me that anyone could be that poor. Though we lived in an ugly furnished room, I always had food, and here we were in the Famous Restaurant and I’d just filled my belly almost to bursting with lamb chops and potato latkes and chocolate cake.
One evening in a Brooklyn Avenue delicatessen she’d ordered a plate of chopped herring for herself. That was when she talked about Hirschel, whose name I’d heard before only through her shrieks. “I was maybe nine years old,” my mother said now, “so that means Hirschel was a year old, and my mameh gave me a few kopeks and told me go to the market and buy a herring.” Enchanted now, I saw my mother as a little girl, a nine-year-old with big dark eyes and curly black hair. “I always carried Hirschel around with me in my hands when I was at home because he was the baby, and my mameh was busy with everything else she had to do and couldn’t watch him all the time. He was so darling, with his round little head and his little hands with dimples on them.” We laughed together at this sweet vision, as though he, a baby still, were happily cooing before our eyes, and I adored them both, my mother, who was a child, and my uncle, the baby, whom I would never see at any age. “We loved each other like I was the one who was the mameh,” my mother said.
“So I go to the market and I’m carrying Hirschel, and I buy a herring just like my mameh told me, and the lady wraps it in a little piece of paper. I carry Hirschel, but I’m so hungry that I can’t stand it no more. With my teeth I unwrap the piece of paper, and I just lick at the herring. It’s so good, just to have at least a little bit of the salty taste. I lick and lick—and Hirschel falls out of my hands. Right away I got worried, because he was crying till his little face was red like fire. When I get home with him and the herring, he’s still crying, and I’m crying too. We’re both crying our heads off, and it’s black in front of my eyes. I have to tell my mameh what happened, but she didn’t say much because it didn’t look like he was hurt bad, only a few scratches. Except that when he started walking, he had a big limp. And my mameh said it was because of me, that I dropped him because I was busy licking the herring and I was the one who made him a cripple.” I leaned my head against her bare arm and stroked her fingers that rested on the table. So that was why it was always his name that she cried. If I’d been her mameh, I’d never have said those things to hurt her.
When my mother wasn’t sick, it was sometimes hard to believe that there would be crazy times again. She bought a little radio, a brown plastic box, and on Friday nights we cuddled on her bed, my leg draped over hers, and we listened together to Dorothy Collins or Snooky Lanson or Gisele MacKenzie sing the romantic songs she loved on “The Lucky Strike Hit Parade.” Later I rose on my knees in the bed and sang them again for her, or sometimes I hopped down and did a tapless tap dance or a wildly acrobatic ballet to accompany my singing. “Again” was her favorite. I was pretty sure she was thinking of my father when she heard it, but it didn’t really matter because she was looking at me and listening to me and he was thousands of miles away. I pirouetted around as I sang, and my mother moved her lips along with me, bobbing her head in agreement at the important phrases. “Again, this couldn’t happen again,” we sang. “This is that once in a lifetime. This is that thrill dee-vine.”
“I’m not a good mother to you,” I heard her say one night after she turned the lights out and I lay in my own bed, waiting for sleep, the words of songs still going through my head.
“Don’t say that!” I scolded in the dark. “You’re the best mommy in the world.”
“I don’t know why I get so crazy sometimes,” she sighed. “I can’t help it.”
For a while, Rae and Mr. Bergman would come to take us for a Sunday drive to Ocean Park Beach, but he didn’t like it when my mother said my aunt was a choleryeh, and finally he wagged his finger at her and told her that in the future she’d have to ride the streetcar if she wanted to go to the beach. But he was really a kind man, and when it came right down to it, he’d do anything my aunt wanted. He’d drive her across town to East L.A. so she could bring us some dish she’d made, and no matter how mad he was at my mother, he’d always slip her five dollars and instruct her, “Buy something nice for Lilileh,” little Lilly, as he called me. “She’s a good girl. Good as gold,” he said.
“Good as gold.” My aunt bobbed her head, defending me now and against all future incidents and slipping a dollar bill into my own pocket before she left. “What else do I still work for?” she said when I once tried to give it back because I was afraid my mother wouldn’t like it.
But most weeks Rae was a ghostly memory. She lived far away, on the other side of town, and I was alone with a sick mother. I could tell by looking at my mother’s face when a bad time was coming: there would be a deep flush on her cheeks and neck and chest, and her mouth would change. She’d keep swallowing her lips, or she’d spit out an imaginary speck that would not be gone from her tongue. Her eyes would change too. Someone else looked out from them, a person who barely saw me, not even when I stood in her line of sight to distract her attention from the terrors in her head.
“I did a bad thing!” she howled, and I knew—I had figured it out now—tha
t it wasn’t just because she’d dropped her baby brother. It was also because she’d been busy with Moishe when she should have been finding a way to rescue her family. “God punishes me,” she wept. She beat her head, her chest.
“Mommy, stop it, stop it, you’ll hurt yourself!” I groped for her banging hands. “You have to be all right—what will I do if they take you away?” I cried, hunting for the words that would make her stop.
Something always triggered the spells; often it was a May Company bag. The women at Schneiderman’s, her shop, brought their work dresses with them and changed from their street clothes. One woman, a Hungarian whose three brothers had been killed by the Nazis, carried her work dress in an old May Company bag, and that created an excruciating dilemma for my mother. If she carried her own work dress in a May Company bag it would mean that, like the Hungarian woman, she didn’t have a brother anymore. But maybe her own brother hadn’t been killed. Nobody knew for sure that he had. No one knew anything except that the Jews who were in Prael the summer of 1941 were all murdered. But maybe Hirschel wasn’t in Prael that summer, or maybe he escaped and hid somewhere. Maybe he was a displaced person now and would show up in America soon.
But if she carried her work dress in the May Company bag, she was “making” him be dead. It didn’t mean that! It did mean that! She forced herself to shop at the May Company, fighting her superstitions. The bags sat in a folded pastel green heap on the dresser and she eyed them, tormented. She put her work dress in a May Company bag with trembling hands, she took it out, she put it in again, she took it out again.
Through the whole ordeal, no matter how long the spell lasted or how bad it was, she got up at six-thirty and was out the door by seven. She almost never missed a day of work. How she controlled herself, how she steadied her hands enough to drape dresses on a mannequin so that she could support us, I can’t imagine.
From the Malabar Public Library I borrowed “adult section” books. “They’re for my mother,” I swore to the blue-haired librarian who wanted to foist The Secret Garden and the Nancy Drew books on me when I brought up to her desk for a check-out stamp Personality Maladjustment and Mental Hygiene, You and Psychiatry, Keeping a Sound Mind.
I didn’t understand most of what I read, but, sitting on my bed or on the milk crate that Fanny kept as a chair on the front porch, I kept reading as though it were a matter of life and death. On the next page might be the simple answer, and I’d learn what to say or do to help my mother. Someone had to do something. Who else was there but me?
I grew up in the shadow of my mother’s tragedy.
And, for a while, I caught her sickness. It didn’t take the same form; it wasn’t full-blown, but the germs were there.
“Good night, Mommy,” I said every night from my bed to hers.
“Good night, Lilly.”
“Sleep tight, Mommy,” I said.
“You too. Sleep tight.”
“See you in the morning, Mommy.”
“Okay. See you in the morning.”
“Good night, Mommy.” I waited for her response to the trinity again. “Sleep tight, Mommy.” “See you in the morning, Mommy.” And then a third time, “Good night, Mommy…” She had to chorus back each statement. If she didn’t, she would be dead before the night was over. I was certain of it. She must have understood the unspoken rules because she always answered me.
I had another ritual for the mornings, before she left for work. “Watch the way you cross the street, Mommy,” I said. “Look both ways, Mommy.” “Don’t come home late, Mommy.” She had to acknowledge each warning, and I had to repeat this trinity three times as well. If we didn’t do it right, I knew that something terrible would happen to her that day and I’d never see her again.
Even if we did do it right, most days I was afraid I’d never see her again. At four-thirty every weekday afternoon, I waited at the bus stop across from the Evergreen Cemetery until she came. I never let my toes point directly toward the cemetery because that would mean her death. The second the bus slowed, I peered through the windows, trying to decipher her form in the rush-hour crowd, feeling my face flush hot and hotter. I placed myself squarely in front of the door the instant the bus stopped, and the people who descended before she did had to walk around me or trip over me. When I saw her I was swept by a torrent of cooling relief, and I threw myself at her as though she’d been gone for a month.
If she wasn’t on the four-thirty bus, I forced myself to pretend calm and wait for the four forty-five bus. If she wasn’t on that one, waiting for the five o’clock bus was like being under a sentence of death and watching without hope for a reprieve. I paced up and down the sidewalk, running to the corner every couple of minutes to look at the big street clock whose hands dragged in diabolically slow motion. I was almost certain she wouldn’t be on the five o’clock bus, and that could mean only one thing.
I learned the meaning of the expression “to be beside oneself” at that bus stop: when she wasn’t on the five o’clock bus, my mind took leave of my body, which ran up and down the street, frenzied, possessed, the decapitated chicken cut loose from the noose, crying scalding tears that I was aware of only because I couldn’t breathe through my nose, and my face smarted as though coals had pelted it. She’d been killed, I was certain of it. I would be sent to the Vista Del Mar Home now. I had nobody in the world anymore because Rae had left me to get married and my mother was dead.
3. CRUSHED
WHEN SHE CAME to see me these days, Rae didn’t say I was skinny like a stick anymore. Alone in bed at night, nightgown hiked up, I ran my hands over my body, and it felt as though it belonged to someone else. Where it had been flat and bony on the top part of me, now there was a startling, unfamiliar, soft roundness. Where it had been smooth on the bottom part of me, now I could feel tiny, wiry hairs.
One morning, after my mother left for work, I stripped my nightgown off and gazed at my naked self in the dresser mirror. The reflection confirmed what I’d felt even more than looking down at myself could. My waist was the same, but my hips had definitely grown out of their little-boy shape. And farther, down there, little tendrils spread from the center like delicate new twigs on a tree. But it was the flesh on my chest that awed me the most—not like my mother’s full breasts, but beautiful in its own way, soft and so tender, almost like something seen through mist.
No doubt about it, I was on my way to becoming a woman. Standing there opposite the mirror, I envisioned myself in the ravishing trappings of womanhood that I’d adored on actresses—flounced and draped gowns and opulent furs, seamed nylons and high heels, glossy lips and come-hither eyes. But the pleasure in my new self was bittersweet, really. I was leaving childhood. I would never be a child star. I’d failed in my life’s first mission.
***
In a decayed old building on the corner of Wabash and Evergreen avenues, there was a radio and phonograph repair shop, and in its window stood an ornate record player and a cunning statue of a dog whose head wagged perpetually at his master’s voice coming from a giant horn. Most days on my way home from school I stopped to stare at the dog and the record player and, farther back in the window, the dusty assortment of wooden radios and tape recorders with big reels. Suddenly they were all gone. Through the window I could see that the shop was empty of everything but dust. For weeks it stood empty.
Then, a few months before my twelfth birthday, two plaster masks—comedy and tragedy—appeared in that same window (spotlessly clean now), surrounded by pink satin toe shoes and black patent leather tap dancing shoes, and above, in a grand flourish with gilt paint, a sign announced, THEATRE ARTS STUDIO! OPENING SOON! REGISTER NOW! Next to it hung a picture of a woman—with blond hair that fell to her shoulders in shiny waves, full lips that turned up in a fetching smile, a scooped blouse that revealed creamy skin. IRENE SANDMAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, it said under the picture (the title alone dazzled me, though I had no notion what an executive director was). I could hear myself breathing throu
gh my mouth. Could it be true? Could there suddenly be a place like this in East Los Angeles, with a woman who looked like a movie star, an EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR who might show me the way to Hollywood?
I came back every afternoon to try to find out what register now! meant and to gaze, slack-jawed, at the beautiful picture, but the door was always closed.
One day, finally, though the inside was still dark, the door to the Theatre Arts Studio was open, and there stood the woman of the photograph, hanging a watercolor of little tutued ballerinas on the wall. My heart shook. I’d never seen anyone so splendid-looking in the flesh, so statuesque on her high heels and long legs, her deep slim waist clenched by a broad golden belt. I stood at the door and her heavy perfume reached me. My head whirled.
Her arms stretched gracefully to straighten the framed picture, then she turned. I’d startled her, and she blinked. Violet blue eyes with long dark lashes. I hadn’t known such eyes existed off the movie screen.
“May I help you?” Her voice was movie-actress rich. Later, when it played itself in my head over and over, I called it liquid gold, though I’d never seen such a thing. I imagined liquid gold would be as bright as a brand-new penny, yet mellow somehow, and smooth.
My cheeks felt stiff. My tongue—a dry, useless wad—must have mumbled something.
“We’ll be starting classes on April first,” she answered. “What aspect of theater arts are you interested in?”
I must have said acting. Later I remembered that she’d said I could take private lessons for $1.50 an hour. I must have left the magical dimness where Irene Sandman stood and gone back outside to the daylit street. I must have gotten home. But I know I didn’t see anything that was in front of my eyes, and my ears were deaf to everything but her golden voice.
My mother gave me the money. I knew she would, because wasn’t this the beginning of what we’d dreamed about for so long? My teacher was Sid Sandman—the Acting Director of Theatre Arts Studio, Irene called him. He was waiting for me the afternoon I went for my first lesson. He took me into the large room, which was separated only by a thin whitewashed partition from the little front office where I’d first seen Irene Sandman’s gorgeousness. I recited “To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” for him, and he watched with judicious eyes, legs crossed, chin resting on the palm of his hand. With his black lacquered hair and pencil-thin mustache and his brown belted jacket with a scarf around his neck, which he tucked under his shirt like an ascot, he did look as I’d dimly imagined a director might. He nodded approvingly at my attempts to sound like Milo, in wonderment at the marvels of Mulberry Street. “I’ll write a dramatic monologue for you,” he declared.
Naked in the Promised Land Page 5