Yellow Silk II

by Lily Pond

  Suddenly someone looked at me and said, “Hey. What a good-looking little Jewish boy.” I smiled then looked at my hands as I always did when attention was paid to me. I became shy and silent, the opposite of my father.

  I was baffled as I watched him now with his customers. Although at home Pa was quiet, often preoccupied and taciturn, in this kitchen, he was gregarious and waggish, a funny man attracting people to him. Maybe I was just a sheenie, but a special case was made for my father. They also thought of him as the wise Jewish philosopher. As Pa drank and nibbled olives and peppers, I saw that they liked and respected him.

  At family gatherings he was also Mister Charm telling jokes, holding forth as an authority on everything from politics to the Torah, quoting chapter and verse from the Old Testament. Well-educated from a mercantile family, as the eldest son he was the favored one sent to the Gymnasia in Warsaw. In his teens he’d already made two transatlantic crossings to New York. In his photos from this period he sported a thin moustache and affected pince-nez glasses. With his sharp, straight nose and square face, he was handsome, even debonair, during these years, despite the fact that he was a “greenhorn,” the popular label for a newly arrived Jewish immigrant.

  When he married my mother, she was considered by his family to be unworthy socially and financially. There was no dowry, and when we three came along, a year and a half apart, he’d begun to change because he didn’t know how to make a living. This family was his burden. As I watched him kibitz with the husbands in Fat Philomena’s kitchen, I knew he felt trapped at home. It was here as the businessman that he was still the show-off and quipster—Pa, the big shot.

  My father’s earliest capitalist venture had been a pushcart from which he and my mother sold dry goods. All the other pushcarts on Delmonico Place sold fruits and vegetables, but in the middle Pa wedged in this pushcart that should have been on Ellery Street, where customers went for their yard goods and bloomers. The financial struggle was endless, and there was eternal talk about money, paying bills, and when would it be different. Pa’s failed capitalistic skirmishes were often followed by short-term runs of employment like at the hat factory during which my mother worked at the pushcart by herself, a little insurance as she never knew when Pa would speak out against the bosses and the job would end. My brother and I would sell Eskimo Pies on summer weekends, shlepping out to Queens Boulevard and selling at traffic lights to autos on their way to Rockaway Beach.

  This time Pa was sure his peddler route was the answer. Couldn’t he undersell any department store, making deliveries? And payment? Here was the big bonus, the testimony to trust for his customers, his good friends. If they couldn’t pay all at once, they could give him money on the installment plan. He trusted them because he knew these poor, honest paisanos. Hadn’t he worked with them, and, as one with them, cursed the bosses—this, notwithstanding his own fantasies of becoming a boss himself. My father was a Royalist.

  Observing him from my new role as assistant peddler, I had vague, troubled feelings. Who was he? I looked closely, visualizing the handsome, slim, debonair young man in the photograph, with the moustache and pince-nez glasses. Was my father still a handsome man? He looked stern and tired to me. I didn’t know if he loved my mother or not. From the time I was five years old and had found a shining penny on the sidewalk outside our house, stepped on it, then pocketed it without anyone knowing, I knew I could watch, and nobody would know I was watching them; I could do things in such a secret way that no one would know. I took to examining people, and I could sense what they were thinking and feeling. But I could not do this with my father.

  When we completed the rounds of deliveries on the first street and began the next, it was lunchtime, time to eat and absorb the many wine tastings that were making me light-headed. At the Vitelloni’s farmhouse, Pa lightened the bundles by unwrapping the largest order. Mrs. Vitelloni had four children, and her newly painted dark green house was larger than others with more farmland around it. All four ran into the house when they saw us, squealing about what my father had brought for them, clothes for the three girls and the one boy, shirts, dresses, smocks, petticoats, nightgowns, bloomers, and union suits.

  The examining of the other ordered items completed, Mrs. Vitelloni waved her children out to the backyard to play and asked if we wanted to eat our lunch at the kitchen table. My father told me to unpack our food. Carmella Vitelloni spoke English in a lively, teasing manner as she asked me what I had brought from home to eat. She was plump, with dark thoughtful eyes, a shiny face, and a strong round chin. She smelled of olive oil. She set out plates, a bowl of olives and peppers, and poured three glasses of wine. Handing me a glass half-full, she said, How olda you?”

  I looked at my feet. “Ten and a half.”

  She lifted my chin. “You don’t laugh like you pappa?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was silent.

  She smiled. “You drink. Tell me if you like.”

  I looked at my father. He sighed and drank. I sipped only a little, nodded my head, and unwrapped the sandwiches and spread them on the plates. Pa took the jar of gefilteh fish and the horseradish and presented it to Carmella, saying his wife had made it, it was a present, did she know what it was? She shook her head and became suddenly shy. In the center of the large oilcloth-covered table was a wide-mouthed jar with knives, forks and spoons. My father sat down, took a fork, speared a piece of the fish, dipped it into the horseradish and handed it to her, smiling. Carmella, who was standing in back of him leaned over to take it, pressing her round bosom into his shoulder. It was an embrace. I examined the two of them from hooded eyes. My father gestured for me to eat. I sat at the far end of the table from him and slid my plate close. Mrs. Vitelloni was still standing, munching the fish. Pa and 1 took large bites of the “schmaltz-soaked” chicken sandwiches. Carmella speared another piece of gefilteh fish on her fork, spread the red horseradish all over it, and nibbled in small bites like a lollipop. She wrinkled her nose at the bitterness. She looked at me, and I glanced down as she shifted her eyes to my father who in turn looked at her. We continued chewing. I gulped some wine. It was silent in the kitchen except for the sounds of the eating, and, when I bit into a kosher pickle, it crunched loudly between my teeth and its juice spurted up on my nose and dribbled from my mouth.

  After he finished his sandwich, Pa gestured for me to go outside. I took a pear and stopped near the door to look back. Was there any sign between him and Carmella? Were Pa and Carmella going to go to some hidden place? Did they in the past?

  My father saw my glance, scowled and thrust his hands out, palms up as if to say, “Now what are you standing for? Go outside!” I looked at them a second more and left.

  I knew about sex. Everything. In Brooklyn, you learned everything there was to know about sex when you were five years old. It was all around you, everywhere. The other neighborhood children and I had learned all about it from sneaking up on the roof on hot, sweltering, steaming Brooklyn summer nights. I would watch adolescents coupling on the soft, almost melting tar of that roof. I also knew it was crucial to keep sex a dark secret for always.

  Outside in the Vitelloni backyard they were playing Johnny-on-the-Pony, Ring-a-Leeveyo, and Statues. With Johnny-on-the-Pony, you got hurt if you were the pony and a heavy, fat kid landed on your back. I joined the Statues group. Statues meant you could imitate William S. Hart, the silent movie star who was always fearless and self-sacrificing, with his eyes, steel gray and full of sorrow, looking far away to a distant horizon, while all the time he was being tied and bound by the gang of evil hombres. Harry Houdini scrunched up in an iron box was another of my favorite poses. I also liked Tarzan and Tom Swift.

  During the leader’s commands to change poses, I kept thinking of my father and Carmella Vitelloni. What were they doing? The same as my father and mother did in their bed, next to the storeroom where I slept? Sometimes late at night, I would hear the muffled noises, and squeaking, creaking springs, and I knew it w
as the same as I watched on the roof during summer nights. But doing it in daytime, my father and Carmella? Nah.

  Maybe just muzzling each other, feeling each other up, as my brother and his pals did with “pick-up girls” in the balcony of the Loew’s Pitkin.

  But I knew that there was sex all the time. It was exciting and mysterious. When I was five or six years old, some man did something with me and my sister in the synagogue in front of the Ark. I didn’t remember what he did, only that my mother and several neighbors found us and my mother was wiping my legs and thighs with a towel, and someone else was doing the same with my sister. For months after, I had perceptions of being hot, excited, and aroused by a feverish desire.

  One day during the next year, in the stable across the street, I saw the huge red-haired stable man sitting at the top of the ramp and his pants were open at the crotch and I saw his bush of red hair. I went into the stable and smiled at him and he smiled back and held his arms out, and I slowly sneaked up the ramp, way up to where he was, and nestled against his chest, my body brushing against him. He embraced me and then stood and tossed me up in the air and then held me, his shirt open against his chest with its thick red hair, and I inhaled his sweaty odor. Then he became hot and hard, and I got hard too, and he rubbed me and fondled me and caressed me and kissed me, and it was the most vivid, sentient moment of my life.

  After that I was always looking for older boys and men who might hold me too, knowing it had to be secret, in the dark, and never talked about. I became sly, sneaking under the big feather quilt on the kitchen floor where uncles and cousins slept when they got off the boat from the old country, Russia and Poland, when they were greenhorns and slept on our kitchen floor until they got jobs and went to work and got their own places to stay. Late in the night, I crawled out of my bed and slipped under that big cover; I snuggled up to the big, snoring hairy bodies, and, feeling powerful and hot, rubbed against their bellies and their groins making them hard.

  As I thought about my father and Mrs. Vitelloni, I grew tired of the Statues game. How long did it have to take them, Pa and Carmella?

  Then he was in the doorway, calling me, time to go. Mrs. Vitelloni wasn’t in the kitchen, and we left without saying good-bye to her.

  The bundles were more manageable now, and we proceeded to the other houses on the alley, lightening our load little by little. My father wrote new orders in his copy book with his own special symbols that looked like hieroglyphics—a combination of English and Yiddish. On the second street the same ritual began: “Here comes the sheenies. Here comes the Christkillers.” Why didn’t they use the word “kike?” I heard that a lot in Brooklyn. On this street there was the same good-natured kibitzing, but my father refused drinks, explaining about his ulcer; soon, carrying two gift bottles of wine, we boarded a bus for Lyndhurst and another mud-filled road with only a few small farmhouses, where there was a sense of the same camaraderie. Here, too, husbands joined in the kibitzing and the bargaining of prices. My father drank more wine. By Nutley, I was getting dizzy. Everyone was friendly, but I was growing tired. I had been inside about twenty houses. The routine was now familiar. Where else were we going? How many more places? What other different towns? Did my father have other Carmellas on his route? I was restless, fretful, and Pa was impatient with me. “You got shpilkess in tuchess? Ants in your pants? So next time don’t come. We got West Orange and Newark, then we’ll go home, not before.”

  The MacNeishes lived in a large house in West Orange. Mrs. MacNeish had worked in the hat factory too, and stopped working when she married. She was a large woman, blonde with a freckled, happy face. After looking over the items my father had brought, she gave him another large order and cut some cake. Would we have tea? Her husband wasn’t there, but was due home soon. I liked her and felt warm towards her, and the cake smelled spicy, sweet, and delicious, with white icing and some kind of jam in the center. She wanted to know how old was I, and what grade in school, and what did I want to be when I grew up. My father watched me as I answered her, as though grading me. I knew he was comparing me to my brother. I also realized that he would never give me an “A.” My brother, yes; me, no. Mrs. MacNeish insisted on cutting another slice of cake for my father and me, and I wondered if 1 would be asked to wait in the yard again.

  Pa was writing in his book when the side door to the kitchen opened and Mr. MacNeish came in and greeted his wife, kissing her, and then shook hands with Pa and me. He was a state trooper, a large, lean muscular man with blonde hair and moustache, and in his uniform he looked like a movie star, and, when he smiled at me, I wanted wildly for him to embrace me and to kiss me, to press me against him, against his uniform. He took off his tight jacket and stood at the table. For the rest of the time in that house, I looked everywhere but at officer MacNeish. Then, when I sensed no one was looking at me, I stole glances at him, at his broad ruddy face, his legs in their motorcycle boots, his tight heavy whipcord jodhpurs, and the well-fitted shirt. He was handsomer than the strong man, Mr. Atlas. The MacNeishes didn’t have children, and when they focused their attention on me, I was a model young boy who behaved like a gentleman. When we left, Mrs. MacNeish kissed me on the cheek and told my father to bring me back again. She smelled of oranges. The state trooper came to me, put one hand on my shoulder, and shook my hand. His smell was of smoke and leather and warm skin. I pressed his hand as hard as I could. My heart pounded in my throat. I loved him. I could never tell my father of my love for Mr. MacNeish. I knew that was secret, something hidden. He would never understand, Pa.

  In Newark, now early evening, our last stop was an automobile tire and accessories store, the only Jewish family on the route. We pressed a bell and pushed the door open. There were three naked electric bulbs hanging from a high shadowy metal ceiling. Racks on both walls rose up to the ceiling filled with tires. I was in a tunnel of round rubber spheres. The wooden floor was worn, its uneven planks marking years of treads coming and going. Overall was a smell of heavy motor oil and smoke rubber. A loud echoing rasping voice from the rear called out, “It’s you? Come on back here.”

  Mrs. Levy, despite being old, bent, and crippled with arthritis, had a hearty manner, mixed with loud complaints about the lousy world. Her pink wrinkled face was a mass of tics causing her eyes to jump, her mouth to twitch, and her head to bob. Without even bothering to unwrap and examine her purchases, Mrs. Levy launched into an attack on lousy politicians, rotten business, economic disasters everywhere, and children who are no damn good to their parents. No one noticed or included me. I was sleepy and wished we were back at the MacNeishes or at home. As we left, Mrs. Levy finally turned to me. “Be a good boy. You be a help to your father.”

  Once we settled into our train for New York, there was a ten-minute wait before it would leave, and I sat empty-handed thinking of the siddur again. There was going to be a written exam on Monday in my class at Hebrew school where I was one of the top students, smarter even than my brother who was three classes higher up. I looked at the conductor at the doorway. He looked tired and gray and his black jacket was shiny.

  At that moment, a chug-noise grew louder, and a locomotive train huffed and clanged alongside, slowing to a whooshing, team-escaping halt. The dining car was opposite, gleaming, dazzling, bright, and waiting. Would it glide off to some mysterious destination? I pressed against the window and studied in detail the tables set with white starched napery on which was etched a seashell design. There were two different-sized forks on the napkin left of a white china dinner plate. On the right were a knife, a big spoon, and a little spoon. Then a small dish had a small butter knife atop. Stemmed glasses were set out at each of the four settings, and at the head of the table I could make out a slim silver vase with one pink rose in it, and below, a square silver sugar holder with small tongs, and two glass shakers for salt and pepper. White and silver and crystal shined and glistened and shed a white, white halo of brilliance in sharp counterpoint to the glossy ebony-black smiling tall waite
rs looking formal in white starched jackets and black bow ties. I ached to be there, to be with the rich elegant noble people who had just come from night clubs or balls in the big city hotels, who were traveling to a big party far away and dining en route. Soon they would enter the dining car in tuxedos and evening gowns.

  I turned to look at my father—his brown sweater, his sallow face, his tired slumped body, and the newspaper between his knees as he slept deeply. This was the first time we had spent an entire day alone together—just the two of us—the peddlers. I looked at the brown package next to him, two bottles of Italian homemade wine and a rejected order from a disgruntled customer. I knew he would fail again, as if he deliberately set out to live on the wrong side of existence. What were his goals? Did he dream? From today, we’d grow apart and I’d never know. What did I think about him and Carmella? Would he ever tell me not to tell Mamma, that it was a secret between us? I thought about state trooper MacNeish and his big hands clasping mine. I could never tell Pa my secret, which was dark and must remain hidden.

  There in the Newark railroad station, dreams blew like leaves across my inner vision as I sat motionless and counted white and counted silver. Then the slam of the car doors turned me away for a moment, and, as we rolled by the dining car, I held my gaze on the roaring black tunnel speeding by.