Fourth Street East

by Jerome Weidman

  First of all, he was a Turk, and East Fourth Street was a colony of Hungarians sprinkled with a few Austrians. Secondly, they were obviously rich. Mrs. Mishig owned a Hudson seal coat. The only other woman who had ever owned a fur coat on East Fourth Street, in my time, anyway, was Mrs. Shumansky, whose husband owned the chicken store on the Avenue C corner, and as soon as she got the coat, the Shumanskys moved uptown to the Bronx. Nobody on the block thought this was an act of snobbery. It was the natural thing to do. East Fourth Street was no place in which to spend your life. It was a way station. People lived there because living there cost less than living in other places. As soon as you could afford one of those other places, you left East Fourth Street. To my knowledge, nobody ever did it with regret. That’s why everybody on the block wondered why Mr. and Mrs. Mishig lived among us. They obviously could afford to live elsewhere.

  Even more obviously, they did not enjoy living on East Fourth Street. They never mixed with their neighbors, and their neighbors never stopped wondering what Mr. Mishig did to earn the money with which he bought his custom-made suits and paid for his wife’s fur coat. When my father left our tenement at six-thirty in the morning, everybody knew he was going to the shop on Allen Street where he made pockets. When Henny Leopolstadt’s mother came out of the tenement across the street a few minutes later and started up the block to Avenue C, everybody knew she was going to open the family grocery store. This sort of information was common knowledge about every family on the block. When Mr. Mishig came out in the street every morning, however, and with his proud, arrogant stride started stalking west toward Avenue C in his expensive suit, nobody on East Fourth Street knew where he was going.

  Another thing nobody knew about him was why Mr. Mishig seemed impervious to the threat that hung over every childless man on the block: Furtz Luchel.

  As I recall the attitude of East Fourth Street toward the first war through which I lived, it had very little in common with the spirit that animated Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. To the immigrant population of East Fourth Street, wars and conscription were unpleasant but commonplace facts of life. Many of our neighbors had escaped from their native lands to avoid military service. Like most of his neighbors on East Fourth Street, my father saw very little difference between Franz Josef and Woodrow Wilson. Both, in their desire to put people into uniform, were threats to his existence. This attitude was so general that the busiest man on the block seemed to be Mr. Tannenbaum, the marriage broker. There were several weddings every week, in those days. Nevertheless, as the army’s need for men increased, marriage was not enough to keep a man safe at home. New young husbands were constantly being snatched away for the trip to Fort Slocum. Only the childless young Mr. Mishig seemed to be safe from the draft.

  Naturally, there was a great deal of talk about it. From this talk, I knew that my father was not involved in the general threat because, like the fathers of my classmates, he had become a father long before Miss Kahn had started urging us to save prune pits and buy War Savings Stamps. It was this knowledge that troubled me about the furious words Mrs. Mishig had hurled at my mother when she spurned our offering of white sugar. How could she call my father a draft dodger? He was the father of two children.

  The next day, on my way to school, I ran into Henny Leopolstadt. Or rather, he ran into me. We were not close friends. This was due partly to age and partly to geography. Henny, who was my senior by two years, had left raffia baskets behind, and was struggling with arithmetic in Miss Kitchell’s class. Also, he spent most of his spare time in his father’s store on Avenue C. This was only a block further west than the piece of East Fourth Street on which I lived, but Henny’s attitude implied clearly that the gap was not unlike what one would find between the average desert oasis and Mecca. He was certainly more sophisticated than any of my real friends, and he had a tendency to be contemptuous of boys whose parents bought their groceries from his father’s rival, Mr. Deutsch. Henny had never, however, been openly hostile to me, and on this morning, to my pleased surprise, he was openly friendly. In fact, he had obviously been waiting for me. I soon learned why. Henny had heard about Uncle Berel’s present, and what my mother had done with it.

  “I hear every tenant in the building, they got a couple pounds pure white sugar free,” he said.

  “Everybody except Mrs. Mishig,” I said.

  “How come?” Henny asked.

  I told him.

  “What the hella you care what names she calls you,” Henny said contemptuously. “As long as your old man don’t get one of them brown suits. How’s about your mother giving me a few pounds of that white sugar?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Come up the house after school with a pot or something.” We turned the corner into Lewis Street, while I worked my way back through Henny’s comment on Mrs. Mishig. There was something wrong with it. “Listen,” I said. “What did she mean she don’t want nothing from draft dodgers? My father ain’t in the draft.”

  “No, but if the war goes on long enough, he could be,” Henny said. “They’re running out of guys, see? So they’re starting to take married men with only one kid. Next they’ll start on married men with two kids. That’s why your old lady is having a baby. With three kids your old man’s got a better chance to stay out of Furtz Luchel than with only two.”

  At this point we reached the school entrance, and I was pleased by the opportunity to end the conversation. I did not want Henny to know that this was the first I had heard about my mother having a baby. It was a process about which I knew no more, probably, than most five-year-olds, although on East Fourth Street this could have been a good deal more than in some other places. What I knew most clearly was that while the process was going on, you were supposed to feel thoroughly ashamed of your mother for having become involved in it. I had seen more than one fight start in the P.S. 188 schoolyard, or on the Forest Box & Lumber Company dock, when one boy accused another of having a mother in the condition Henny Leopolstadt had just advised me my mother was in. I thought it very decent of Henny to have slipped me the information as delicately as he had, burying it in an explanation about my father’s draft status rather than taunting me with it. That afternoon, when Henny came into our kitchen with an empty butter tub from his father’s grocery store, I filled it to the brim from Uncle Berel’s sack of sugar.

  “Are you crazy?” my mother said when she came home later with the paper sack of vegetables from her daily shopping visit to the Avenue C pushcarts. “You gave him enough for a dozen families. Now his father he’ll sell it in his grocery store for God alone knows how much a pound!”

  This had not occurred to me, but now that I saw this was probably why Henny had waited for me on the way to school that morning, I didn’t care. Henny had warned me about something that might have been sprung on me unexpectedly from a hostile source. My only problem now was to wait out the shameful period of gestation.

  I had no idea how long it took to have a baby, but I knew it did not happen overnight. For all I knew, it could take years. Although I didn’t really know how long a year was, I knew several of them would have to be lived through before the shame was lifted from my family.

  I lay awake for hours that night, plotting ways and means of survival, but worked out only one practical device. Instead of going to school as I had always gone, around the corner from our tenement into Lewis Street and up to the Third Street entrance to the boys’ side of P.S. 188, I would go west up Fourth Street to Avenue C, south on Avenue C to Third Street, and then work my way cautiously down Third to the school entrance. In this way I would meet fewer, perhaps none, of the boys who knew me and my family well enough to be aware of the shameful secret I had just learned from Henny Leopolstadt.

  The device worked. The next morning I managed to get to the school entrance without meeting anybody I knew, and in the afternoon, following in reverse the same new route on the way home, I was just as lucky. This lifted my spirits a little, and as I opened the door of our roo
ms, I was thinking hopefully that perhaps I might survive the appalling period of trial that stretched ahead. The thought did not last long.

  Our kitchen was crowded with people who did not belong in it. Not at that hour, anyway. My father should not have been there until four hours later. He always came home from work at seven-thirty. Dr. Gropple, who charged fifty cents for an office visit to his brownstone on Fifth Street and a dollar for a house call, should not have been washing his hands at the tap in our kitchen sink. Above all, at three-thirty in the afternoon, my sister should have been doing something on the girls’ side of P.S. 188 with The Blue Birds for Happiness, not pouring glasses of my father’s Passover wine for a dozen neighbors who, when you thought about it for a moment, should have been in their own kitchens, preparing the evening meal for their families.

  “Take him into the bedroom,” Dr. Gropple said cheerfully. It occurred to me from the sound of his voice that perhaps my sister had served him first. “Show him his brand-new brother.”

  They did that, and even though he wasn’t much to see, the sight was a great relief to me. There was nothing wrong on East Fourth Street about new babies. It was waiting for them that was shameful. My relief was so great that it confused my sense of gratitude. I didn’t know whether I should be grateful to my mother or to my new brother or to Dr. Gropple, but I did know that I was grateful for being spared the long shameful period of waiting. I entered cheerfully into the share of the celebration that was assigned to me, and it seemed highly appropriate that the person chosen to assist me should be Henny Leopolstadt.

  “Henny is here he should take you to his father’s store,” my father said, handing me a list he had scribbled on the blank space above the masthead of a copy of the Jewish Daily Forward. “Come back quick because the guests are already coming, and we have only in the house wine and leftover sugar cookies from Friday.” My father then gave Henny five two-dollar bills. “If it costs more,” my father said to Henny, “I’ll come in tomorrow and pay, tell your father.”

  Henny did not get a chance to convey this message, because when we came into his father’s store Mrs. Mishig was standing at the slicing counter, holding her Hudson seal coat tightly wrapped around her with both hands and arguing with Mr. Leopolstadt about the way he was carving her order of belly lox.

  The reason my mother did not patronize Mr. Leopolstadt’s store regularly was that, unlike Mr. Deutsch, Henny’s father was not really a grocer. He owned what was known on East Fourth Street as an appetizing store. Mr. Leopolstadt sold smoked fish, fresh olives, and other spiced delicacies, items that the people of East Fourth Street could afford only on special occasions, such as the one on which my own family was at the moment embarked: celebrating the birth of a new baby. Mr. and Mrs. Mishig, to my knowledge, were the only people on our block who were rich enough to shop regularly at Mr. Leopolstadt’s, and in spite of my excitement about the party that was about to take place in our house, there was room in my head to note how appropriate it was for me and Henny to find the small, arrogant young woman not only buying belly lox, the most expensive kind of smoked salmon Mr. Leopolstadt sold, but also to be arguing about the way it was being sliced. She stopped when Henny and I came into the store, because his father, a large, cheerful man, released a roar of laughter and waved the large knife over his head as though it were a baton.

  “To the new brother, a big hello!” Mr. Leopolstadt shouted. “And to the new mother, go give my congratulations!”

  “Some citizen you are,” Mrs. Mishig said coldly. “To go around congratulating people they’re having children so they can stay out of the draft!”

  “Why people have children, it’s not my business to ask,” Mr. Leopolstadt said. “All I know, when they have them, I give them the congratulations, and I sell them the sturgeon and the muslinniss for the party. That’s why you came,” he said to me. “No?”

  I nodded and handed over the list my father had given me. Henny handed over the five two-dollar bills. I didn’t speak, because the look on Mrs. Mishig’s face made me uncomfortable. Also, I could not forget the savagery in her voice when she had slammed the door in my mother’s face two days before.

  “Your father, the whole block he must have invited,” Mr. Leopolstadt said, looking up from the list. “Ten pounds knubble carp, I never yet had in the store so much at one time. Henny, you go with him to Shmeelick’s, and tell them it’s for me for the store. By the time you come back with the knubble carp, the other things on the list, I’ll have them ready.”

  “Okay,” Henny said to his father, and to me, “Come on.”

  “They should be ashamed of themselves,” Mrs. Mishig said in a loud, clear voice as Henny and I turned to go. “Giving parties with knubble carp because they got a new baby to keep the father a draft dodger out of Furtz Luchel.”

  “Mrs. Mishig,” Mr. Leopolstadt said, “I don’t with my belly lox for the same price give my customers advice, but you and Mr. Mishig, a big healthy young man like your husband, nobody knows how long this war it’ll last, a baby or two if you had, it wouldn’t hurt, you know. A married man, with no children, I’m surprised they didn’t grab him up to Furtz Luchel long ago already.”

  As Henny and I went through the door of his father’s store into Avenue C, I saw Mrs. Mishig do something I never heard about until years later when I began to read novels: she tossed her head.

  “Mr. Mishig is not afraid of Furtz Luchel,” she said. “When his country wants him, Mr. Mishig will go. Mr. Mishig and I have decided not to have children until the war is over, so nobody can say he’s a draft dodger!”

  The door of Mr. Leopolstadt’s appetizing store slammed shut behind me and Henny. I did not, of course, understand why it was such a terrible thing to be called a draft dodger, but I did know that for the second time in two days the wife of the only man on East Fourth Street who was not open to the accusation had insulted my father, and I had done nothing about it. I felt awful. Henny must have understood this, because as we walked up the street he made a short remark about Mrs. Mishig that though it was not new on East Fourth Street, I did not then know was universal. It seemed wise to change the subject.

  “What’s Shmeelick’s?” I said.

  “He’s the wholesaler they give my father his stuff for the store,” Henny said. “It’s on Houston Street.”

  I was familiar with Houston Street. The part that came down to the East River formed the southern boundary of P.S. 188. Shmeelick’s, however, was near First Avenue, a part of Houston Street I had never before visited. Henny Leopolstadt said he had been there many times, on errands for his father. For this reason he did not seem to be as interested as I was in the neighborhood. It was not, like the part of Houston Street I knew, a residential area. The further west we moved, the more warehouses and trucks we were surrounded by. Shmeelick’s looked like most of its neighbors: a gray, evil-smelling building with a loading ramp and an office tucked away at one side of the arched entrance. A woman with several pencils stuck into her mound of white hair listened to Henny for a couple of moments, then pulled one of the pencils from her hair and scribbled something on a pad.

  “We’re all out of knubble carp,” she said. “Go over to Friedlander’s on Fourteenth Street and give them this order.” She tore the top sheet from the pad and handed it to Henny. “You won’t have no trouble finding the place. It’s between Sixth and Seventh Avenue.”

  We didn’t have any trouble, but I was afraid we might, and I think Henny shared my fear. Neither of us had ever before been in this part of town. We walked slowly, and examined everything we passed with care. There was a great deal to see. The Sixth Avenue El, for example. This was my first glimpse of it. The piece of it that loomed up ahead of us as we walked west on Fourteenth Street did not look different from the First Avenue El or the Third Avenue El, both of which I had seen many times. But because it was new to me, there were things about the Sixth Avenue El that looked different. At the bottom of the long flight of steps that led up to
the green station house, for example, I saw something I had never seen at the bottom of the steps that led up to any of the stations on the First and Third Avenue Els with which I was familiar.

  A man was sitting on the sidewalk, his back against the railing, one elbow resting on the lowest step. His clothes were ragged, his face dirty, and his hair matted. In his lap he held a filthy old brown felt hat. As people passed him on their way up the steps to the El station, some would pause, dip their hands into their pockets, pull out a coin or two, and drop them into the man’s hat. As Henny and I came closer, I saw that the man had a sign hung around his neck. In crude letters, it read, “Please Help I Am A Cripple.” A moment after that, I recognized the man’s mustache. It had been rumpled, like his hair, but there was no mistaking those two distinctly separated sections that stood out from his upper lip like a set of miniature bull’s horns. Then I saw the trouser leg pinned up over the stump that helped keep the felt hat full of coins steady against the young man’s good leg.

  I did not realize Henny had seen what I was seeing until I heard him say, “Jesus Christ, no wonder he’s not afraid of Furtz Luchel!”

  My own reaction was entirely different. I don’t know why. I remember thinking, “So this is how he pays for those expensive suits and his wife’s Hudson seal coat!” Then the fierce look that came out of those bright black eyes that seemed to have no pupils swung toward me and caught my glance. It must have caught Henny’s, too, because we both turned and started to run at the same time.

  I don’t know when Henny told his father about what we had seen on Fourteenth Street, but I waited until Dr. Gropple said it was all right for my mother to get out of bed. Since this happened on a Friday, the first thing she did, after she gave my new brother his bottle, was start the week’s baking. When I came home from school in the afternoon, the two jelly jars of cold milk and the plate with six sugar cookies were set out on the table.