A Walker in the City

by Alfred Kazin

  The kitchen gave a special character to our lives; my mother's character. All my memories of that kitchen are dominated by the nearness of my mother sitting all day long at her sewing machine, by the clacking of the treadle against the linoleum floor, by the patient twist of her right shoulder as she automatically pushed at the wheel with one hand or lifted the foot to free the needle where it had got stuck in a thick piece of material. The kitchen was her life. Year by year, as I began to take in her fantastic capacity for labor and her anxious zeal, I realized it was ourselves she kept stitched together. I can never remember a time when she was not working. She worked because the law of her life was work, work and anxiety; she worked because she would have found life meaningless without work. She read almost no English; she could read the Yiddish paper, but never felt she had time to. We were always talking of a time when I would teach her how to read, but somehow there was never time. When I awoke in the morning she was already at her machine, or in the great morning crowd of housewives at the grocery getting fresh rolls for breakfast. When I returned from school she was at her machine, or conferring over McCall's with some neighborhood woman who had come in pointing hopefully to an illustration—"Mrs. Kazin! Mrs. Kazin! Make me a dress like it shows here in the picture!" When my father came home from work she had somehow mysteriously interrupted herself to make supper for us, and the dishes cleared and washed, was back at her machine. When I went to bed at night, often she was still there, pounding away at the treadle, hunched over the wheel, her hands steering a piece of gauze under the needle with a finesse that always contrasted sharply with her swollen hands and broken nails. Her left hand had been pierced through when as a girl she had worked in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the East Side. A needle had gone straight through the palm, severing a large vein. They had sewn it up for her so clumsily that a tuft of flesh always lay folded over the palm.

  The kitchen was the great machine that set our lives running; it whirred down a little only on Saturdays and holy days. From my mother's kitchen I gained my first picture of life as a white, overheated, starkly lit workshop redolent with Jewish cooking, crowded with women in housedresses, strewn with fashion magazines, patterns, dress material, spools of thread—and at whose center, so lashed to her machine that bolts of energy seemed to dance out of her hands and feet as she worked, my mother stamped the treadle hard against the floor, hard, hard, and silently, grimly at war, beat out the first rhythm of the world for me.

  Every sound from the street roared and trembled at our windows—a mother feeding her child on the doorstep, the screech of the trolley cars on Rockaway Avenue, the eternal smash of a handball against the wall of our house, the clatter of "der ltalyéner"'s cart packed with watermelons, the sing-song of the old-clothes men walking Chester Street, the cries "Arbes! Arbes! Kinder! Kinder! Heyse gute arbes!" All day long people streamed into our apartment as a matter of course—"customers," upstairs neighbors, downstairs neighbors, women who would stop in for a half-hour's talk, salesmen, relatives, insurance agents. Usually they came in without ringing the bell—everyone knew my mother was always at home. I would hear the front door opening, the wind whistling through our front hall, and then some familiar face would appear in our kitchen with the same bland, matter-of-fact inquiring look: no need to stand on ceremony: my mother and her kitchen were available to everyone all day long.

  At night the kitchen contracted around the blaze of light on the cloth, the patterns, the ironing board where the iron had burned a black border around the tear in the muslin cover; the finished dresses looked so frilly as they jostled on their wire hangers after all the work my mother had put into them. And then I would get that strangely ominous smell of tension from the dress fabrics and the burn in the cover of the ironing board—as if each piece of cloth and paper crushed with light under the naked bulb might suddenly go up in flames. Whenever I pass some small tailoring shop still lit up at night and see the owner hunched over his steam press; whenever in some poorer neighborhood of the city I see through a window some small crowded kitchen naked under the harsh light glittering in the ceiling, I still smell that fiery breath, that warning of imminent fire. I was always holding my breath. What I must have felt most about ourselves, I see now, was that we ourselves were like kindling—that all the hard-pressed pieces of ourselves and all the hard-used objects in that kitchen were like so many slivers of wood that might go up in flames if we came too near the white-blazing filaments in that naked bulb. Our tension itself was fire, we ourselves were forever burning—to live, to get down the foreboding in our souls, to make good.

  Twice a year, on the anniversaries of her parents' deaths, my mother placed on top of the ice-box an ordinary kitchen glass packed with wax, the yortsayt, and lit the candle in it. Sitting at the kitchen table over my homework, I would look across the threshold to that mourning-glass, and sense that for my mother the distance from our kitchen to der heym, from life to death, was only a flame's length away. Poor as we were, it was not poverty that drove my mother so hard; it was loneliness—some endless bitter brooding over all those left behind, dead or dying or soon to die; a loneliness locked up in her kitchen that dwelt every day on the hazardousness of life and the nearness of death, but still kept struggling in the lock, trying to get us through by endless labor.

  With us, life started up again only on the last shore. There seemed to be no middle ground between despair and the fury of our ambition. Whenever my mother spoke of her hopes for us, it was with such unbelievingness that the likes of us would ever come to anything, such abashed hope and readiness for pain, that I finally came to see in the flame burning on top of the ice-box death itself burning away the bones of poor Jews, burning out in us everything but courage, the blind resolution to live. In the light of that mourning-candle, there were ranged around me how many dead and dying—how many eras of pain, of exile, of dispersion, of cringing before the powers of this world!

  It was always at dusk that my mother's loneliness came home most to me. Painfully alert to every shift in the light at her window, she would suddenly confess her fatigue by removing her pince-nez, and then wearily pushing aside the great mound of fabrics on her machine, would stare at the street as if to warm herself in the last of the sun. "How sad it is!" I once heard her say. "It grips me! It grips me!" Twilight was the bottommost part of the day, the chillest and loneliest time for her. Always so near to her moods, I knew she was fighting some deep inner dread, struggling against the returning tide of darkness along the streets that invariably assailed her heart with the same foreboding—Where? Where now? Where is the day taking us now?

  Yet one good look at the street would revive her. I see her now, perched against the windowsill, with her face against the glass, her eyes almost asleep in enjoyment, just as she starts up with the guilty cry—"What foolishness is this in me!"—and goes to the stove to prepare supper for us: a moment, only a moment, watching the evening crowd of women gathering at the grocery for fresh bread and milk. But between my mother's pent-up face at the window and the winter sun dying in the fabrics—"Alfred, see how beautiful!"—she has drawn for me one single line of sentience.

  The unmarried cousin who boarded with us had English books in her room—the only English books in our house I did not bring into it myself. Half an hour before supper, I liked nothing better than to stray into her room, and sitting on the India print spread of her bed next to the yellow wicker bookstand, look through her books and smell the musky face powder that filled her room. There was no closet: her embroidered Russian blouses and red velvet suits hung behind a curtain, and the lint seemed to float off the velvet and swim in multicolored motes through the air. On the wall over her bed hung a picture of two half-nude lovers fleeing from a storm, and an oval-framed picture of Psyche perched on a rock. On the wicker bookstand, in a star-shaped frame of thick glass, was a photograph of our cousin's brother, missing since the Battle of Tannenberg, in the uniform of a Czarist Army private.

  In that w
icker bookstand, below the blue set of Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish and the scattered volumes of Russian novels, were the books I would never have to drag from the Stone Avenue Library myself—THE WORLD'S GREATEST SELECTED SHORT STORIES; a biography of Alfred E. Smith entitled Up From the City Streets; a Grosset and Dunlap edition of The Sheik; and in English, a volume of stories by Alexander Kuprin. Day after day at five-thirty, half an hour before supper, I would sit myself carefully on the India print, and fondle those books with such rapture that they were actually there, for me to look through whenever I liked, that on some days I could not bear to open them at all, but sat as close to the sun in the windows as I could, breathing the lint in, and the sun still hot on the India spread.

  On the roof just across the street, the older boys now home from work would spring their pigeons from the traps. You could see the feathers glistening faintly in the last light, beating thinly against their sides—they, too, sucking air as the birds leaped up from their wire cages. Then, widening and widening their flight each time they came over our roof again, they went round a sycamore and the spire of the church without stopping. The sun fell straight on the India spread—how the thin prickly material burned in my nostrils—and glowed along the bony gnarled bumps in the legs of the yellow wicker bookstand. Happiness was warmth. Beyond Chester Street, beyond even Rockaway, I could see to where the Italians lived on broken streets that rose up to a hill topped by a church. The church seemed to be thickly surrounded by trees. In his star-shaped glass on the bookstand, that Russian soldier missing since the Battle of Tannenberg looked steadily at me from under his round forage cap. His chest bulged against two rows of gold buttons up and down his black blouse. Where? Where now? Had they put him, too, into a great pit? Suddenly it did not matter. Happiness was the sun on the India spread, the hot languid sands lapping at the tent of the Sheik—"Monseigneur! My desert prince!"—the summer smell of the scum on the East River just off Oliver Street where Alfred E. Smith worked in the Fulton Fish Market. In the Kuprin stories an old man and a boy went wandering up a road in the Crimea. There was dust on the road, dust on the leaves— hoo! hoo! my son! how it is hot! But they were happy. It was summer in the Crimea, and just to walk along with them made me happy. When they got hungry they stopped at a spring, took black bread, salt, and tomatoes out of their knapsacks, and ate. The ripe open tomatoes gushed red from their mouths, the black bread and salt were good, very good, and when they leaned over to drink at the spring, the water was so icy cold it made my teeth ache. I read that story over and over, sometimes skipping pages to get to the part about the bread, the salt, the tomatoes, the icy water. I could taste that bread, that salt, those tomatoes, that icy spring.

  Now the light begins to die. Twilight is also the mind's grazing time. Twilight is the bottom of that arc down which we had fallen the whole long day, but where I now sit at our cousin's window in some strange silence of attention, watching the pigeons go round and round to the leafy smell of soupgreens from the stove. In the cool of that first evening hour, as I sit at the table waiting for supper and my father and the New York World, everything is so rich to overflowing, I hardly know where to begin.

  THE BLOCK AND BEYOND

  THE OLD DRUGSTORE on our corner has been replaced by a second-hand furniture store; the old candy store has been replaced by a second-hand furniture store, the old bakery, the old hardware shop, the old "coffee pot" that was once reached over a dirt road. I was there the day they put a pavement in. That "coffee pot" was the first restaurant I ever sat in, trembling—they served ham and bacon there—over a swiss cheese on rye and coffee in a thick mug without a saucer as I watched the truck drivers kidding the heavily lipsticked girl behind the counter. The whole block is now thick with second-hand furniture stores. The fluttering red canvas signs BARGAINS BARGAINS reach up to the first-floor windows. At every step I have to fight maple love seats bulging out of the doors. It looks as if our old life has been turned out into the street, suddenly reminds me of the nude shamed look furniture on the street always had those terrible first winters of the depression, when we stood around each newly evicted family to give them comfort and the young Communists raged up and down the street calling for volunteers to put the furniture back and crying aloud with their fists lifted to the sky. But on the Chester Street side of the house I make out the letters we carefully pasted there in tar sometime in the fall of either 1924 or 1925:

  DAZZY VANCE

  WORLDS GREATEST PICHER

  262 STRIKEOUTS

  BROOKLYN NATIONAL LEAG

  GIANTS STINK ON ICE

  DAZZY DAZZY DAZZY

  The old barbershop is still there. Once it was owned by two brothers, the younger one fat and greasy and with a waxed stiffly pointed mustache of which he was so proud that he put a photograph of himself in the window with the inscription: "MEN! LOOK AT OUR MUSTACHE AND LOOK AT YOURS!" The older one was dry and sad, the "conscientious" partner. The fat brother had an old fiddle he let me play in the shop when business was bad; he would sprawl in the first barber chair languidly admiring himself in the great mirrors, clicking his teeth over the nudes in the Police Gazette, and keep time for me by waving his razor. I never liked him very much; he was what we reproachfully called a "sport," a loud and boastful man; he always smelled of hair lotion. You could see each hair as it ran off the crown of his head so sticky and twisted in lotion that it reflected the light from the bulbs in the ceiling. We were all a little afraid of him. One day he bought a motorcycle on credit, and as he started it from the curb, flew into the window of the delicatessen store. I remember the shiver of the glass as it instantaneously fell out all around him, and as he picked himself up, his face and hands streaming with blood, the sly little smile with which he pointed to the sausages and pickle pots in the street: "Hey you little bastards! Free treat!"

  I see the barbershop through the steam from the hot towel fount. The vapor glistened on the unbelievable breasts of the calendar nudes pasted above the mirrors and on the fat bandaged chin of Peaches Browning every day in the News and on the great colored drawing all over the front page of the Graphic one morning showing Mrs. Ruth Snyder strapped and burning in the electric chair. The smell of hair tonic could never disguise the steaming exhalation of raw female flesh. Everything in that barbershop promised me a first look. On the table, along with the News and the Graphic, College Humor and the Police Gazette, lay several volumes of a pictorial history of the World War. I played the barber's violin for him only because I could then get to sit over those volumes by the hour, lost in the gray photographs and drawings of men going into battle, ruined towns in Serbia, Belgium, and France where one chimney still rose from a house destroyed by shell fire, pictures of the victorious French in 1919 dipping their battle standards in the Rhine. There were two photographs I remember particularly: it was really for them that I went back and back to that barbershop. One showed a group of German officers in full uniform, with all their medals, standing outside a brothel in France with the ladies of the house, who were naked to the waist and wore crosses between their enormous breasts. The officers had their arms comfortably draped over the girls' shoulders, and grinned into the camera. GERMAN KULTUR, ran the caption. HOW THE ENEMY AMUSES ITSELF BEHIND THE LINES. The other photograph showed Kaiser Wilhelm with his retinue, inspecting troops. The Kaiser and the generals were walking on wooden planks; the caption noted that the planks had been laid there to keep the distinguished company from walking in the blood that ran over the field.

  The shoemaker is still there; the old laundry is now a printing shop. Next to it is the twin of our old house, connected with ours below the intervening stores by a long common cellar. As I look at the iron grillwork over the glass door, I think of the dark-faced girl who used to stand on that stoop night after night watching for her Italian boy friend. Her widowed mother, dressed always in black, a fat meek woman with a clubfoot, was so horrified by the affair that she went to the neighbors for help. The quarrels of mother and daughter could be
heard all over the street. "How can you go around with an Italian? How can you think of it? You're unnatural! You're draining the blood straight from my heart!" Night after night she would sit at her window, watching the girl go off with her Italyéner— ominous word that contained all her fear of the Gentiles—and weep. The Italian boy was devoted to the daughter and wanted them to marry. Again and again he tried to persuade the mother, but she would lock the door on him and cry out from behind it in Yiddish: "I have harmed you and your family? I interfere with your customs? Go away and leave us be! Leave us be! A Jewish girl is not for you, Mister! Go away!" In desperation, he offered "to become a Jew." No one had ever heard of such a thing, and the mother was so astonished that she gave her consent to the marriage. The boy was overjoyed—but waited until the last possible moment before the wedding to undergo circumcision, and as he walked tremblingly to the canopy, the blood dripping down his trouser legs, fainted dead away. The block never stopped talking about it.