Fourth Street East

by Jerome Weidman

  “Oh, my, what a mess we’ve made! Here, let me help you take off those muddy rubbers. There, that’s better. Now, we’ll just put them outside the door, so they can dry in the hall. There we are. And now we’ll take this rag and clean up this mess we’ve made, won’t we? There we are. And now, children, let’s all remember what just happened, because there’s a lesson in this for all of us. Never come into the classroom wearing your muddy rubbers. Always take off your muddy rubbers outside, and leave them in the hall before you come into the classroom. We’ll try to remember this lesson, won’t we, children?”

  I don’t recall that it was necessary to try very hard. As soon as Miss Kitchell started chirping about a lesson, I found myself beginning to listen eagerly. On that June day, however, before she could tell us what lesson was concealed in the way the tugboat captain was maneuvering the Floating Coney to its berth, Monroe Klein spoke up.

  “When they got it docked, Miss Kitchell,” he said, “how’s about you let your class go on for a swim? Recess is a whole hour.”

  I remember my first reaction. Admiration. I wasn’t surprised. Monroe Klein’s suggestions were all brilliant. I was puzzled by how few of them Miss Kitchell adopted. Especially since she obviously shared my feeling that they were brilliant. Monroe was too old, of course, to be in Miss Kitchell’s class, but he always seemed to be around. Perhaps because he was a born politician. Anyway, even though Miss Kitchell never actually said Monroe’s suggestions were brilliant, I could tell she admired them because she always found a lesson in them.

  “I’m glad you made that suggestion, Monroe,” Miss Kitchell said. “Because there is a lesson in it for all of us. Very few people realize how dangerous it is to swim in the East River. Even the city authorities do not realize it. Or perhaps they do not care. If they did, they would not invite the citizens of the city to come on board a boat like this and bathe in the polluted waters of the river. We have it on good medical authority that bathing in the East River is an open invitation to mastoids, scrofula, diphtheria, tuberculosis, meningitis, typhoid fever, German measles, typhus, and many other diseases. I am glad you made your suggestion, Monroe, because it has given me this opportunity to warn you all about the danger of bathing in polluted river water. We’ll try to remember this lesson, won’t we?”

  I tried, but it was not easy. The weather, which had been very warm, turned hot that week. On Men’s Days, as soon as school was over, all the older boys on the block headed for the East River dock. Even some of the fathers, when they came home from work, went over for a dip on the Floating Coney. Not my father. And, on Women’s Days, not my mother. As for my sister and me, we were forbidden to go anywhere near the swimming barge.

  “You and your big mouth,” my sister said bitterly on the first Saturday afternoon after the Floating Coney docked at Third Street. She was watching her friends disappear around the Lewis Street corner on their way to a swim. “It’s all your fault.”

  She was right. It was all my fault. My admiration for Miss Kitchell was such that every night as we ate our dinner around the kitchen table, I would tell my family in detail what new lesson she had taught her class that day. The day the Floating Coney docked at Third Street, I gave an account of Monroe Klein’s suggestion, and the lesson Miss Kitchell had drawn from it for the class.

  “She’s right,” my father said. “I remember once it happened in da heim.”

  The literal translation of these two Yiddish words is “the home.” To my father, as well as to my mother, the words meant something larger: their home. And to each of them their home was more than a house, and not the house in which they were then living. When my mother or father uttered the words da heim, there was in the two small sounds the clear implication that, for both of them, all other homes were temporary resting places on the long journey back to the only home that mattered.

  “With my brothers and other boys,” my father said, “I remember we went swimming in a place behind the forest. The water had a bad smell, and my mother used to say don’t go, you’ll get sick, but you know how it is with boys. They don’t listen. So we went, and we swam, and three days later my older brother and one of the other boys, they got sick, and then a few days later they were gone.”

  “You heard what Papa said,” my mother said. “Nobody from this house is going in that dirty water. You hear?”

  My sister and I nodded, and that would have been the end of it, if Monroe Klein had not been a dutiful son, proud of his father’s role in the life of East Fourth Street, and eager to help him. Mr. Klein earned his living in the hardware store on Avenue C, but what he lived for was the Democratic Party. He was the local captain of the Sixth Assembly District.

  Every year, as the summer started to edge up on Labor Day, Mr. Klein and the Republican captain, a man named Diener, would begin to lay their snares for the votes that the citizens of East Fourth Street would cast on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Mr. Klein had one advantage over his Republican rival: he lived on East Fourth Street. Mr. Diener, who lived on East Seventh Street, had one advantage over Mr. Klein: the Republicans had more money. Anyway, Mr. Diener seemed to have more to spend. He was certainly more generous during the initial phases of the bargaining.

  Years later, when I had reached voting age and started to cast my ballot for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and believed like so many others of my generation that there never would be anybody else to vote for, I began to realize that it was wrong to describe the polling process as bargaining. When I was growing up, however, that’s how the machinery of democracy functioned on East Fourth Street, and nobody thought it was wrong. Certainly not Mr. Klein.

  He would drop in some evening late in August, tweak my sister’s cheek, run his hardware-store-toughened hand through my hair and my brother’s hair, and ask my mother what she would like to have “for the cold weather.” The approach was, of course, correct. Winter was the difficult time on East Fourth Street.

  The tenement flats were not equipped with central heating. The coal stove in the kitchen, which the year round was used for cooking, in the winter provided the only heat. This meant that the further you moved from the kitchen, the colder you were. After November, for example, only about one third of our front room was habitable. It was the third near the door, which opened directly into the kitchen. Similarly, one third of the bedroom was reasonably comfortable. Again, it was the third near the door, which also opened directly into the kitchen, at the other side of the stove. I have been inside butchers’ iceboxes that were more comfortable than this bedroom. It was at the end of our railroad flat. By the time you got to the middle of this room, all exposed parts of your body began to tingle. By the time you got to the end, your eyes teared, your cheekbones stung, and your nose ran.

  What Mr. Klein and Mr. Diener had to offer in exchange for the votes they coveted was protection against what winter could do to you on the banks of the East River. The form of protection was, of course, a matter of choice. Some voters asked for heavy underwear for their families. Others preferred rubber boots. Mrs. Lichtblau, I remember, always held out for a winter coat for her Benny, enough wool with which to knit thick sweaters for herself and her husband, and four bottles of Stoke’s Expectorant.

  “The only thing you can be sure on East Fourth Street it’ll happen in the winter,” I remember her once saying to my mother when they were comparing notes on their negotiations with Mr. Klein and Mr. Diener, “you can be sure the whole family they’ll start coughing. You got enough Stoke’s in the house, you’ll live through to Passover.”

  My mother’s price for the two votes she was able to deliver was always the same: two tons of anthracite. She did not call it anthracite. She called it what everybody on East Fourth Street called it and very few could afford: hard coal. It was more expensive than soft coal. It did not throw off as much soot. And it burned longer. Two tons, my mother had learned, would get us comfortably through the winter, and for two tons she was willing to learn how to recog
nize the names of either Mr. Klein’s or Mr. Diener’s candidates when she entered the polling booth so she could place her “X” in the proper place. She could not read.

  There was nothing very delicate about these negotiations, and yet they were carried on, with all the formality of a minuet, in a series of moves that never varied. Mr. Diener, for example, never came calling before Mr. Klein. Perhaps because Mr. Klein lived right there, in our building, whereas Mr. Diener had to come all the way from East Seventh Street. Perhaps because the two men had an understanding. Mr. Klein, even though he always ended by giving my mother the two tons she demanded, always began by saying two tons were more than he could afford, and he would have to think it over. While he was thinking it over, Mr. Diener showed up. He always seemed more hurried than Mr. Klein, so my sister was spared the cheek tweak, and my brother and I didn’t have to go through the hair rub. Mr. Diener, perhaps because he was rushed for time, never wasted any of it.

  “Whatever Klein said he’d give you,” he always said, “I’ll give you more.”

  My mother’s reply was also always the same. “I’ll think it over,” she said.

  I don’t think she ever did. Because she always, in the end, did the same thing. As a result, I never found out what the “more” was—three tons? four?—that Mr. Diener offered. Before he could get around to naming the size of his larger offer, my mother always accepted Mr. Klein’s two tons. One of the reasons for this was clear. For the rent he paid on his rooms, every tenant in the building was entitled to the use of a kemmerel in the cellar. A kemmerel was a crudely constructed wooden bin designed for storage. I suppose they would have been adequate for storing Chippendale furniture and Bristol glass, but I don’t recall ever seeing a kemmerel put to this test. Almost every tenant in our building used his kemmerel for the same purpose: storing coal. Our kemmerel could take two tons comfortably, and two was all we needed to get through the winter. Why take more and create a storage problem for yourself? So, I think, my mother’s reasoning went on practical grounds.

  About how her reasoning went on political grounds, I am not certain, and I was never able to get her to tell me. Her reticence is my only clue. My mother was not a very complex person. That is, once you grasped how her mind worked in pursuit of the things she wanted. The things she wanted were always things she needed. For herself and for her family. And the things she needed, she had learned during her hard youth in Europe, were the things that kept you alive.

  I never, for example, heard her mention, much less discuss or covet, finery for herself. But I have watched her scheme to get soup bones free out of Mr. Kanervogel, the butcher on the Avenue D corner, by promising to urge the women in our building to patronize him rather than Mr. Gottlieb on Lewis Street. My mother never kept the promise, and even at my then tender age I knew she wouldn’t when I heard her make it. She had got what she wanted. No, what she needed. That ended her interest in the matter. A discussion of ethics, the pros and cons of keeping a pledged word, was to my mother a waste of time. Time that could better be devoted to the acquisition of something else she needed to keep herself and her family alive.

  I don’t think it bothered her that she never kept her promise to Mr. Klein. I think what troubled her was the fact that my father knew she made the promise every year. My father was a socialist. He detested the candidates for whom Mr. Klein and Mr. Diener solicited votes. My father worked and voted for people like Jacob Panken, August Claessens, Meyer London, Victor Berger, and Eugene Debs. He did it out of conviction. My mother voted for them, too. Out of loyalty to my father. What upset her may very well have been the knowledge that he was aware of her annual lie.

  I am certain, however, that she refused to discuss it, even with me when I was older and seeking information, because she understood the danger of gossip. Talking about it might have spread the news of her duplicity to the ears of Mr. Klein and Mr. Diener. In their justifiable anger, they might have ceased buying her two votes every year. She would then have had to use money desperately needed for food to pay for equally desperately needed coal. One of the unfailing constants, therefore, in the minuet of negotiations for our winter fuel was the role played in them by my father. As soon as Mr. Klein or Mr. Diener entered our kitchen, my father left. He did not leave in that equipage of the Victorian novelist known as a huff. My father was a quiet man. He left quietly.

  I can still see him on that hot summer Saturday looking up from his copy of the Jewish Daily Forward as the kitchen door opened. Mr. Klein came in, followed by his son Monroe. Monroe always accompanied his father on visits to families that had children. Both parties to the bargaining process must have felt they were indulging in an activity that it was better for the young not to witness. It was Monroe’s job to remove the young witnesses from the scene of the negotiations.

  “Hello, hello, hello,” Mr. Klein said. He always spoke as though he were making carbon copies for his files and the files of the home office. “Could a person come in for a little quiet talk?”

  “You’ll excuse me,” my father said to my mother. “I forgot something to do.”

  He folded his newspaper, tucked it under his arm, and left the house. Mr. Klein looked into the front room, and then into the bedroom off the kitchen.

  “Where’s the other children?” he said.

  My mother explained that my sister had taken her baby brother with her to a Blue Birds for Happiness Club meeting at P.S. 188.

  “So what’s left then,” he said, taking another stab at my hair, “why shouldn’t my Monroe take him to the bios?”

  The “bios,” I figured out years later, must have been an abbreviation for the word “biographs.” On Fourth Street it means the American Movie Theatre on Third Street, between Avenue C and Avenue D. I had been inside only twice in my life, both times as the guest of Mr. Klein and in the company of his son Monroe, on days when the Democratic captain of the Sixth Assembly District had begun his negotiations for my mother’s votes.

  “If he wants to go, why not?” my mother said.

  Mr. Klein handed Monroe two dimes. Monroe took my hand and we left. We walked in silence. Monroe, in the service he rendered his father, was always conscientious, but he did not enter into many conversations with his young charges. Perhaps he had no small talk. Perhaps he preferred his own thoughts. I wouldn’t have blamed him. Although my wife says I have made up for it since, in those days I had very little to say. I wouldn’t have known how to express it at the time, but I see now that I, too, preferred my own thoughts. Some of them still make me wince.

  “Hey, look at that,” Monroe said suddenly.

  He was pointing to the Third Street pickle stand. It was one of my favorite sights. I never tired of looking at it. It consisted of a broad plank, perhaps twelve feet long, set on three wooden horses. On the plank were ranged thirty or forty small wooden buckets full of pickles, spiced tomatoes, fresh black olives, and red and green peppers in various sizes. Some of the buckets were covered with smaller planks on which were arranged pyramids of sliced pickles and tomatoes. From each pyramid, and out of each bucket, a small spatula-shaped piece of wood stuck up into the air with a price lettered on it. For one cent you could buy a slice of pickle, a quarter of a large green tomato, half a red pepper, or a small tomato. Entire pickles started at two cents and, depending on size, went up to a nickel.

  Mr. Meyerson, who owned the pickle stand, kept his planks, horses, and buckets in the cellar under the tenement at the corner of Third Street and Avenue C. Every morning, when the pushcart peddlers started to arrive and set up the vegetable and fruit market that lined both sides of Avenue C, Mr. Meyerson brought out his planks and buckets and set up his pickle stand. To the housewives who came out every weekday morning with their shopping bags, Mr. Meyerson’s pickle stand was more than a place where they chose a few items to add spice to the evening meal they would prepare later in the day for their families. It was also a gathering place for the exchange of gossip and a pause for refreshment. They would
stop, buy a slice of pickle for a penny, and spend a few minutes discussing the weather, impending marriages, recent deaths, and the cost of living. On the Sabbath, of course, the pushcart market was not set up along the curbs of Avenue C. Mr. Meyerson, however, always set up his stand after he came home from synagogue, because on Saturday afternoons a great many young people went to the bios and, on the way, paused to buy a delicacy from Mr. Meyerson’s buckets. My own favorite was the small green tomato, about the size of a golf ball, into which you had to bite with care because it squirted. I did not know which of the delicacies on display was Monroe Klein’s favorite, but I could see that he thought the sight was as beautiful as I did.

  I could see something else, but I did not then know what it was. Monroe was only twelve years old at the time. To me, however, that put him in the same class with grownups, especially since he was tall. I had not yet learned the importance of making a conscious effort to separate one grownup from another. I had learned, however, that all people who were older and taller than myself shared a few basic characteristics. One of these was certainty. They always seemed to know what they wanted or were going to do. I was surprised, therefore, to see the expression on Monroe’s face as he stared at the pickle stand. He seemed to be going through some sort of inner struggle. I did not know then that I was watching something from which I, too, would one day suffer: the crisis of temptation.

  “You want one?” Monroe said finally. I nodded quickly. The marvelous vinegary odor from the buckets was intoxicating. I could hardly speak. “What would you like?” Monroe said. “A penny slice?”

  “No,” I said. “That.”

  I pointed to the mound of small green tomatoes. Monroe took one down, handed it to me, and chose a fat three-cent pickle for himself. He handed Mr. Meyerson one of the two dimes Mr. Klein had given him. Mr. Meyerson counted out the change from the pocket in his burlap apron. I waited until Monroe bit into his pickle before I attacked my tomato. I did it carefully, and managed to catch the delicious squirting juice in my mouth. Monroe then led me up the block to the American Theatre. By the time we reached it, my tomato was gone and Monroe had finished his pickle. He seemed troubled as he stared at the gaudy poster. He pulled a handful of coins from his pocket and stared at them.