At first, my mother was annoyed. Not because our social life was complicated and Esta Mollka was disrupting it. We had no social life. What we did have was what every family on East Fourth Street had: a routine of existence that was as invariable as the tides. Sunday was the day for catching up: for me and my sister, with school homework; for my mother, with household chores such as mending and ironing; in the case of my father, when he was not out begging, with paper work involving the bringing-over process. Unexpected visitors upset the routine. They had to be entertained.
After her first few Sundays, it began to become apparent that Esta Mollka did not expect to be entertained. Making polite conversation, discussing the weather, commenting on the political situation, being offered glasses of tea, these things embarrassed her. One Sunday, when we were all feeling a bit desperate about how to entertain her, she showed us. She took off the jacket of her Sunday suit, rolled up the sleeves of her shirtwaist, and tackled my mother’s ironing. Esta Mollka had it finished long before supper, so she went to work on the silver, which my mother had not planned to do until the middle of the week. From then on, Esta Mollka’s Sunday visits were no problem. On the contrary. They were a convenience on which we all leaned. But none of us ever said so. On Sunday mornings, while my mother piled up the ironing, and my sister accumulated her stockings that needed darning, and I got out the sweater I wanted mended, there would be a great deal of weary sighing, long-suffering eye rolling, and hopeless shoulder shrugging. Esta Mollka, that boring dope, was coming.
One Sunday she didn’t come. For an hour or so we were unaware of her defection. She always came in quietly. She always went to work without comment. By mid-afternoon, when it was clear that on this particular Sunday Esta Mollka was more than merely tardy, we all exploded with anger. All except my father. He was, as always, totally absorbed in a batch of documents he had brought from HIAS the day before. The rest of us, however, let the absent Esta Mollka have it. How dare she not show up? Who was going to iron the shirts? What about my sweater? And the stockings my sister had been counting on wearing that night? The least that stupid greenhorn could do, if she didn’t intend to show up, was let us know. In our rage, we didn’t suggest how she could have done this. Our tenement flat was not equipped with a telephone.
The following Sunday, when Esta Mollka showed up, looking pale and tired, and we learned that she had been in bed for almost a week with the grippe, we were properly sympathetic. But we also had the ironing piled up and waiting.
I cannot remember how long this relationship continued but I remember, as clearly and vividly as though it had happened this morning, the day Esta Mollka announced she was going to get married. She was standing at the ironing board in the kitchen, working on one of my shirts. My mother, my father, my sister, and I were seated around the kitchen table, finishing our breakfast. My mother, who was forcing more bread on my sister, looked up.
“What did you say?” she said.
“I’m going to get married,” Esta Mollka said.
We all stared at her. I think that was the first time, after all those years, I really saw what she looked like. She was not a pretty girl. In fact, it occurred to me all at once that she was no longer a girl. She must have been in her late twenties when she arrived in America. At that time I had been in Miss Kitchell’s 2A-1 class in P.S. 188. I was now in Miss Hallock’s R.A.1 class in Junior High School 64. Six years had gone by. Almost seven. Esta Mollka was a woman in her thirties.
She was short, and stocky, and matronly. Her brown hair was done in a style that was popular at the time with young girls: two large puffs, one over each ear, called Castle Clips. They made Esta Mollka look ludicrous. Wondering why, and examining her more closely to see if I could discover the reason, it occurred to me that the attempt at a complicated, youthful hairdo merely underscored the round, innocent, simple face out of which Esta Mollka’s guileless blue eyes stared with a look—
My mind seemed to jump, as though, rolling along smoothly in an attempt to put together a portrait, it had struck an unexpected bump in the pavement of my thinking. Innocent and guileless and simple were accurate enough, but not completely accurate. Simple-minded was more like it. It occurred to me, with a sudden small stab of terror, that there was something mentally wrong with this girl, this woman who had become almost a member of our family. All at once I could see the door in our schoolyard that was always kept locked on the inside, a door from behind which, as we filed up to class in long orderly rows after first bell, we could occasionally hear wild screams that clawed at the nerves like fingernails drawn down a blackboard. Nobody I knew could say what went on behind that door. The room the door shielded we all called “the crazy class.”
“Who?” my mother said. “To get married, there must be a man. Who is he?”
“Monty,” Esta Mollka said.
“Monty?” my mother said. “What kind of a name is that?”
“It’s his name,” Esta Mollka said, ironing away busily.
Suddenly suspicion clouded my mother’s face. “He’s a Jew?” she said.
Esta Mollka did not answer. She stared down sullenly at the ironing board.
“I asked a question,” my mother said. “He’s a Jew?”
“I don’t know,” Esta Mollka said, and even I knew she was lying.
“Jewish girls don’t marry men called Monty,” my mother said. “Watch what you’re doing with the iron, there. You just broke a button on that cuff.”
No more was said until Esta Mollka had finished the ironing, mended my sister’s stockings, sewed my new merit badge on the sleeve of my boy scout uniform, polished the silver, laid out our Sunday supper, cleared the table, washed the dishes, and swept the kitchen. At ten o’clock, as she always did on her day off, Esta Mollka started putting on her hat and coat for the trip back to Amsterdam Avenue. There was one change in her routine on this Sunday night. After she had kissed each of us in turn, instead of going to the door, Esta Mollka turned to my father.
“Please, Uncle Joe,” she said. “I want the bankbook.”
“The bankbook?”
My father was obviously confused. Not my mother.
“Why?” she said sharply. “Late Sunday night, the bank is closed, what are you going to do with the bankbook on Sunday night?”
Esta Mollka had obviously expected resistance. Even more obviously, she had been briefed on how to meet it.
“It’s my bankbook,” she said in a voice that sounded strange in my ears. “It’s my money. I want the book.”
“To give to this goy,” my mother said. “This Monty. You stupid fool. He’s not going to marry you. All he wants is your money.”
“That’s a lie,” Esta Mollka said, and now the voice once again sounded familiar, even though there were tears in it. “It’s not the money.”
“Then why do you need the bankbook?” my mother said.
“It’s mine,” Esta Mollka said stubbornly. “I want it.”
“You listen to me, you stupid pudding head,” my mother said. “If you take that bankbook and you give it to this Monty, don’t you ever come into this house again. You hear?”
Evidently Esta Mollka did, because she hesitated. But not for long.
“It’s my book,” she said finally. “I want it.”
“All right,” my mother said. “But remember what I said. Never again in this house.” She turned to my father. “Give her the book.”
Now another strange thing happened. Strange to a boy who had never before seen his father contradict his mother.
“No,” my father said.
“What?” my mother said in a startled voice.
“If it’s a goy,” my father said, “this Monty. If just for the money he’s marrying you, then no. I won’t give you the book.”
Now clearly more surprised than angry, Esta Mollka said, “But it’s mine. It’s my money.”
“It’s your blood,” my father said. “The years of work in your place, that’s what’s in that
book. The years. Not money. Your blood. Your blood you’re not giving away to somebody I never saw. For this I didn’t help your uncle, he should rest in peace, he should bring you over from Poland. This Monty, he wants to marry you, he wants your bankbook, let him come here like a man, on his own feet, and ask for it.”
When he did, the following night, the surprise was so great on so many levels that for a while I was more concerned with sorting them out than with understanding what was happening.
For one thing, Esta Mollka came with the man called Monty, and I found this difficult to grasp. I had never seen her “place” or any other immigrant girl’s “place.” But for years there had been in my mind a picture—I didn’t really know where it had come from—of Esta Mollka and all those other girls being kept under lock and key for six days, as though they were in a prison; then, on Sundays, the gates unlocked and the girls allowed out for a few hours. How had Esta Mollka managed to get out on a Monday?
Another thing that confused me about Monty was his appearance. I knew absolutely nothing about marriage except what my mind, unaware that it was doing so, had recorded from my observation of the married people by whom I was surrounded. These observations indicated, among other things, that husbands were usually older than wives, and wives were usually more attractive than husbands. Neither was true in the case of Esta Mollka and this man called Monty.
He was tall and slender and handsome, with broad shoulders and powerful hands. I don’t know, of course, how old he was, but he looked much younger than Esta Mollka.
The most startling thing about this strange couple now standing in our kitchen, however, was the fact that I could not see them as a couple. Esta Mollka looked like a terrified, feeble-minded peasant in one of those Russian newsreels I saw occasionally in the American Theatre on Third Street, Monty looked like the young bodyguard—his knowing eyes glinting steel, flashing to right and left—who walked a couple of steps behind the leader of the mob in the gangster movies. Even before Monty opened his mouth, I knew my mother had been right. It was impossible for a man who looked like Monty to marry a woman like Esta Mollka.
“I hear you said if she wants her bankbook,” he said to my father, “I should come with her to get it.”
At least his voice was no surprise. He sounded exactly like those tough-talking gunmen who shielded the leader from the hoods of the rival mob.
“That’s right,” my father said.
“Okay,” Monty said. “I’m here. Get me the bankbook.”
“Show me first the marriage certificate,” my father said.
“How’s that?” Monty said.
“Esta Mollka says you and she, it’s going to be a wedding,” my father said. “To her husband I’ll give the bankbook. Not to anybody else. Come back with a marriage certificate, your name on it and hers, and I’ll give you the book.”
Monty lifted his huge right hand, closed it into a fist, and smashed the fist into my father’s face. He fell back against the icebox. My mother screamed. My sister yelled something and started toward my father. I followed her. With one hand Monty grabbed me by the seat of my pants, and with his other hand he caught my sister’s elbow. He shoved us back, toward my mother, and the three of us tumbled to the kitchen floor. As I went down, I caught a glimpse of Esta Mollka’s face. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, but she had not moved.
“Get the bankbook,” Monty said.
“When you come back with the marriage certificate,” my father said through his bloody lips.
Monty reached out, pulled my father away from the icebox, and again smashed his fist into my father’s face.
“Get the book.”
“No,” my father said.
After the fourth blow, my mother screamed, “I’ll get it! I’ll get it!”
She ran out into the bedroom and came back with the small pale blue envelope. Monty took it, slid out the bankbook, examined it for a moment, then put the book into his pocket.
“Come on,” he said to Esta Mollka.
She followed him without a word.
About a year later an employee of the city’s Welfare Department came to see my father. An unidentified woman had been found wandering in the rain on Third Avenue near Forty-second Street. She did not know who she was. She could scarcely speak. The words she uttered were unintelligible. In her sodden purse they found a ten-year-old receipt for a steerage passage from Antwerp to New York. It had been made out to Esta Mollka Unger in care of Joseph Tadeus Isaac Kramer at our address on East Fourth Street. My father accompanied the social worker to Bellevue. The woman was Esta Mollka, all right.
She did not recognize my father. She did not recognize him for thirty years. During all that time he never failed to visit her twice a year in the upstate asylum to which she was committed: once in February, on the anniversary of her arrival at Castle Garden; and again in late August or early September, just before the High Holidays.
My father always brought with him a homemade sponge cake. My mother always grumbled, but she always baked it. For the last ten years of Esta Mollka’s life, during which my mother’s accelerating arthritis began to make it difficult for her to do any baking, my father would always go down to Delancey Street, on the day before his semi-annual trip to the asylum, and buy a sponge cake. It had to be golden yellow, not dark brown, and it had to come with the crinkled paper in which it had been baked still stuck to it. These details were important, and Delancey Street was just about the only place left where you could get a cake like that.
On the day Esta Mollka had been brought to her uncle’s home on East Third Street from Castle Garden, the people who had gathered to celebrate her arrival from Poland had eaten slices of golden yellow sponge cake cut from a loaf still sitting in the nest of crinkled paper in which it had been baked. It was the only detail Esta Mollka remembered of her six lucid years in the Golden Land.
When she died, a year ago, my father was the only person who went up from New York to attend the funeral. Out of his Social Security check, he set aside a five-dollar deduction every month to pay for the stone that will ultimately mark Esta Mollka’s grave. He arranged, through the rabbi of his synagogue, to take on the burden of saying Kaddish, the prayer for the dead that must be said daily, morning and night, for a full year to insure the safe passage of the soul of the departed into heaven.
About a month ago, when I saw him alive for the last time, my father told me he still had six weeks of Kaddish ahead of him before Esta Mollka’s soul would be safe.
As I figured it, when my father dropped dead sixteen days ago he had worked off a little over two weeks of this period, thus leaving the soul of Esta Mollka one month short of the sanctuary my father wanted her to achieve.
That night at sundown, and every night after that, I knew where I was going. For about four weeks, anyway. With a little effort I was able to make it sometimes in the mornings, too.
2
Draft Status
WHENEVER I HEAR OR read a reference to the First World War, my mind leaps to the subject of sugar cookies. I haven’t eaten or even seen one since I was a boy on East Fourth Street. It seems odd to recall that once they were as regular a part of my life as the chore of going down with my father to the Fifth Street dock every summer Thursday, buying a ten-cent lump of ice, trundling it home in the wagon my father and I had constructed from an old egg crate and four discarded skate wheels, and then, when the ice was in the icebox, wrapping it carefully with old copies of the Jewish Daily Forward. This, it was believed on our block, made the ice last longer.
Every mother on East Fourth Street did the week’s baking for her family on Friday, and my mother was no exception. What she baked was almost exactly what every other mother on the block baked: two loaves of ceremonial white bread for the Sabbath (store-bought rye was eaten only on weekdays); a honey cake, or lekach, to last through the week for male guests who dropped in for a talk with my father and for a glass of his homemade Passover wine; a sponge cake for women guests; an
d sugar cookies to go with the glass of milk my sister and I were forced to drink every afternoon when we came home from school.
My mother felt about milk the way I imagine the Rockefellers feel about oil. She believed in it. The sugar cookies were a bribe to get us to share her belief. The bribe must have worked. I still drink milk with pleasure, and somehow drinking milk always reminds me of the day when I was struck by the sudden realization that the world as I had known it all my life had taken a sudden and unexpected turn into the terrifying unknown.
On that day I had come home from P.S. 188, where I was one of the three best raffia-basket weavers in Miss Kahn’s kindergarten class. On the kitchen table was set out my mother’s usual afternoon treat: two old jelly jars full of cold milk and, between them, a plate of sugar cookies. My sister had not yet come home, but this was not unusual. Her class was 1A on the “girls’ side” of P.S. 188, and while I did not really know what went on there, I knew it was different from the activities on my, or the boys’, side of the school.
On the girls’ side, for example, they had a club called “The Blue Birds for Happiness.” I learned years later that it had been inspired by Maeterlinck’s famous play, but I never did learn just what the members of the club did, or why it kept my sister in school after classes were dismissed. I was not interested, either, because it did not affect the sugar cookies.
My mother always placed six on the plate. Three for me, three for my sister. It did not matter how late she came home. The rules had been laid down, and we both observed them. After I finished my third cookie, if I wanted more, I asked my mother. My sister’s three were never touched. What shocked me that day into an awareness that the world I had known all my life had suddenly changed was the fact that unlike every other afternoon I could remember, I had no desire to touch my sister’s three cookies, or even finish my own.
Fourth Street East Page 4