“No,” Seb was saying. “An eight is like this. Two small circles. One on top of the other. Watch.”
I had not noticed that he, too, was holding a pencil. After a puzzled moment, I saw why. Sebastian Roon was holding his pencil the way I did, the way most people hold a pencil. Nothing to strike the eye as unusual. My mother was holding her pencil as though it were a sculptor’s chisel poised against the marble, waiting for the hammer blow. In the slanting light from the electric bulb that dangled on a black cord over the kitchen table, I could see beads of sweat on her upper lip. She dug the pencil across the pad awkwardly but with determination, then with a sigh of relief leaned back in her chair. Seb leaned forward. He examined what she had done.
“Jolly good,” he said. “Now let’s try something a bit more sophisticated. Instead of making two separate circles, and setting one on top of the other, let’s do both in one easy sweeping motion.” Slowly but smoothly Seb guided his pencil across the pad. “We give it half the top circle on the left,” he said. “Then we cut across and do half the lower circle on the right. Then we go back to the left, moving the pencil upward to complete the lower circle. And finally we cut across to the right, still moving the pencil, until we complete the top circle. Let’s try that, shall we?”
With the back of her hand my mother wiped the sweat from her upper lip. She looked worried.
“That’s hard,” she said.
“Nonsense,” Sebastian Roon said. “Remember the five and the six? How they frightened you when we first tackled them?”
My mother looked at him the way I remember seeing her look at Mr. Velvelschmidt, our landlord on East Fourth Street, when the son of a bitch used to try to wheedle the rent out of her by making the sort of primitive jokes he obviously used and found effective with other tenants. My mother had never equated herself with other tenants. She hated Mr. Velvelschmidt because he obviously did.
“I was not frightened of the five and the six,” my mother said in that voice that rolled out quietly, on concealed steel tracks. “I am not frightened of anything.”
This was not true. But Sebastian Roon didn’t know that
“Then let’s have a go at the eight,” he said.
My mother took a tighter grip on the pencil, leaned forward, and started shoving. She made it.
“Nu?” she said with a gasp.
Seb leaned forward to examine her handiwork. “Jolly good,” he said. “Absolutely super.”
I cleared my throat. “Before you get started oh the nine,” I said, “will somebody please tell me where I’m sleeping tonight?”
My mother didn’t answer. She was leaning forward again, scowling down at her eight, wiping away the sweat on her upper lip.
“On the floor in the living room,” Seb said without looking up. Under my mother’s eight he was slowly fashioning a nine. “I hope you don’t mind, old boy.”
I did mind. I minded so much that it hurt. What I minded was not the discomfort of the hard floor. I’d just gone through four knishes and a double feature with Hannah Halpern. I could have slept on gravel. I didn’t even mind that neither Seb nor my mother looked up or answered my good night when I left the kitchen. What I minded was his easy triumph after my long failure. I had never been able to teach my mother anything.
Down on East Fourth Street, when I first became aware of her as an individual, I became aware also that she was different from the other immigrant mothers on the block. Those other mothers all went to night classes at P.S. 188. They learned to read and write and speak English. For a long time it did not seem to me to be much of an accomplishment. About the time I turned twelve, however, it occurred to me that I was ashamed of my mother for not being able to do at all what the mothers of Hot Cakes Rabinowitz and George Weitz and Chink Alberg did with ease. One night at supper, driven by curiosity, totally unaware of the necessity for prudence, I asked my mother why she did not join the other mothers of the block in going to night classes at P.S. 188.
“Eat with bread,” my mother said sharply.
To take a forkful of meat, or a spoonful of soup, without accompanying it with a liberal bite of rye bread was, in my mother’s private penal code, at least a misdemeanor and in all probability a felony.
I took a bite of bread and, around it, said: “Chink’s mother goes. George’s mother goes. Hot Cakes’ mother goes. Why don’t you go, Ma?”
My father, at the other side of the table, had a mouthful of bread. It did not prevent him from making a remark that I see now required great courage on his part. He was afraid of my mother.
“If she goes to school at night,” my father said, “it’ll show everybody on Fourth Street she doesn’t know something.”
“You use the mouth to eat,” my mother said. “Not to talk.”
She said it to my father, but I knew she also meant me. I never said another word. Not for several years, anyway.
When I became a freshman at Thomas Jefferson High, however, I came to know boys from all over the city. Many of them had parents who were not immigrants. I suffered a new attack of embarrassment for my mother’s illiteracy. I was the darling of Miss Merle S. Marine, my English teacher. The more she praised me for my work, the more terrified I became that some day she would meet my illiterate mother and realize the crudity of the bolt of cloth from which I had been cut. I decided to teach my mother to read and write and speak English. In secret, of course.
“Nobody will know,” I said to her late one night when I made my proposal. “We’ll do it here in the kitchen, late at night, after Papa goes to bed.”
She looked at me for several long moments. Even today I have the distinct impression that her eyes did not blink. I might have been a heifer whose weight she was trying to guess before making an offer for me in a stockyard.
“Why do you want to do this?” my mother said finally.
I could not, of course, tell her the truth.
“English is fun,” I said. “You’ll enjoy it, Ma.”
“You want me to have fun,” she said.
It was not a question. It was a statement. Laid out on the table like a bet in a crap game. It was up to me to fade it.
“Yes,” I said.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s start.”
I thought it would be best to start with numbers. Two things had left with me the impression that she had a good head for arithmetic. Listening to her talk about the price of vegetables in the Avenue C pushcarts, and watching her make computations of profits during her bootlegging days on East Fourth Street. After a week of late night sessions, I came to the uncomfortable conclusion that I must have been wrong. I managed to get her to pronounce the digits in English, but when I tried to teach her to write them down I failed miserably.
So I decided to abandon writing, for the time being, anyway, and concentrate on speech. She did well with nouns. She learned soon enough that a leffel was a spoon, a tish-toch a tablecloth, a ferd a horse. But connecting these nouns with the simplest verbs resisted her.
I don’t remember how long the struggle went on. But I remember the night I surrendered.
“Let’s stop it,” my mother said in Yiddish. “All I’m doing is make you lose sleep.” Two reactions lived with me for a long time.
One, the tone of her voice when she threw in the towel. I could not escape the feeling that she had thrown it in my face. She did not sound defeated. She sounded triumphant.
As though, in some way I did not grasp, she had beaten me at my own game.
And two, I remember my very real sense of having lost out in a struggle I had wanted desperately to win.
Four years later, lying awake on the floor of our front room in Tiffany Street, listening to the murmur of her voice out in the kitchen with Sebastian Roon, it all came clear in a wave of jealousy so unbearable that it made my mouth feel sour, as though I had been vomiting.
What I had wanted to win was what it had not occurred to me as a boy I had never had. And, until it was too late, had not misse
d: her love.
When I finally got around to the realization that I did miss it, and I made the attempt to win it, that inner core of metal around which she existed had given her the strength to resist the ease and comfort of speaking the language of the country in which she had come to live, and take for herself instead the pleasure of revenge.
She had led me on, as though I were a fisherman who felt he had hooked his game. And then, just as I was about to bring her to the gaff, she had with her own hand cut herself loose.
What she had denied me, she was now giving to Sebastian Roon. I was sure she would be speaking English in a matter of weeks.
My estimate was not too far off the mark.
Two nights later, when I came home from my classes in the evening session at C.C.N.Y., my mother and Seb were seated at the kitchen table with a woman named Mrs. Klockner. She looked not unlike Mrs. Groshartig. I suppose all plump Jewish housewives, wearing flowered gingham housedresses shielded by grease-spattered aprons, look, like all bald-headed men, somewhat alike. Nobody paid any attention to me. I disposed of my briefcase, hung up my coat in the hall, and came back to tackle the glass of milk and the slab of honey cake my mother had set out for me on the drainboard beside the sink.
As I munched and sipped, my mother and Sebastian Roon went through with Mrs. Klockner almost exactly the same performance I had seen them go through two nights earlier with Mrs. Groshartig.
Almost, but not quite. There were a few differences.
While Mrs. Klockner, I soon gathered, also worked at “turning” for Mr. Lebenbaum, she did not live in our building. She lived around the corner, on Fox Street.
Either she was somewhat brighter than Mrs. Groshartig, or my mother had with practice grown more skillful. She and Seb had clearly been interviewing many, perhaps all, of Mr. Lebenbaum’s employees for several days. While I had been downtown on my job with Maurice Saltzman & Company.
In any case, this time Seb did not interfere with helpful suggestions when the going got rough, the way he had done during the interview with Mrs. Groshartig. Seb stayed out of it. Except for his encouraging smile, of course. Short of encasing his handsome head in a pillowcase, it would have been difficult to keep that smile out of even the execution chamber at Sing Sing.
The most interesting difference—for me, at any rate—was the end of the interview. Up to that point, my mother and Mrs. Klockner had talked Yiddish. When my mother reached the penultimate argument about what was wrong with a hard-working woman receiving not a nickel a shtikl but six cents a shtikl, she went on to utter the final words in English: “So what do you say, Mrs. Klockner?”
It was not the sort of English spoken at Jesus College, Cambridge. But it was recognizable on Tiffany Street. Considering that my mother had obviously learned this scrap of English during the past forty-eight hours, hers was a creditable performance. Sebastian Roon was either a superlative teacher, or he was dealing with a brilliant and eager student. I did not doubt which of the two it was.
“Excuse me,” I said while Mrs. Klockner scowled down at her small nickel notebook and tried to think of an answer to my mother’s question. “Would one of you two entrepreneurs mind telling me where I sleep tonight?”
My mother did not take her eyes from Mrs. Klockner’s face. Seb, however, looked up.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “and it has been for some time.”
“Don’t be testy,” Seb said. “We’re getting a large project under way here. Try the spot on which you dossed down last night.”
I went out into the living room. The spot on which I had dossed down last night was now occupied by my mother’s old foot-treadle Singer. On East Fourth Street the sewing machine had stood in a corner of our only bedroom. Here on Tiffany Street, where we had two bedrooms, my mother had stored the Singer in a corner of my bedroom. The fact that it had now been moved into the living room was an event not unlike that of a manager ordering a pitcher into the bull pen. Things were about to happen.
The first thing that happened was negative. When I came out of the front room in the morning, my mother was not at her usual post in front of the gas range, preparing my breakfast. I tiptoed down the hall and put my ear to her bedroom door. I could hear two sounds. One was, of course, my father’s snore. I had been hearing it for years. I had always been impressed by my father’s snore. He did not just rip off the traditional dreary buzz. My father added music.
A moment or two of the low strong buzz. Pause. Slight gasp. Then a tinkly skipping note, as though a small bell had been tapped. Another moment or two of the low strong buzz. Pause. Then a series of rapidly varied tinkles, as though a cat was dancing across a xylophone. The sequence usually continued, with fluty little variations on the basic theme, until my mother’s voice said, “Joe! Turn over!”
She did not say it this morning. She was snoring away herself. Most unmusically, I might add. I could hardly blame her. It had been almost three in the morning when I left my mother and Seb with Mrs. Klockner in the kitchen and I went out into the living room to doss down on the floor beside my mother’s Singer.
I tiptoed back down the hall and put my ear to my bedroom door. I had never before heard a snore with an English accent. At another time I might have found things in it to admire. The clipped terminal point of each sequence, for example. Or the broad university drawl that gave a touch of elegance to the part that with my father was merely a low strong buzz. But this was not my morning for exploring a new art form.
I took a toochiss roll from the paper bag on top of the refrigerator. I cut it open and smeared both halves with butter. I slapped the halves together and left the house, munching my roll all the way to the subway.
Figuratively speaking, I kept munching it all day. At the office. In my C.C.N.Y. classes. On the subway going home. I was thinking, and my thoughts did not please me.
I didn’t really mind what my mother and Seb were doing. What I minded was being excluded. They acted as though I were a piece of furniture. Worse. A piece of furniture about the existence of which they were unaware until they stumbled into it, and then they merely shoved it aside.
It was one thing to have your mother give your bed to a visitor for a single night. But I had now been sleeping on the living room floor for almost a week, while Mr. Roon was corking off his Oxford-accented snore in my bed. It was undignified. I felt I should complain. I felt I should assert myself.
Climbing the stairs to our apartment, the pretense of indignation, on which I had been working all day, fell apart. I didn’t feel I should assert myself. I knew what I felt. An intensification of the old jealousy. For the fact that he was teaching her English. No, for the fact that from him she was willing to learn. I was almost afraid to open the door on another lesson.
When I did open it, what was going on could hardly be described as a lesson.
“You listen to me,” my mother was saying:
My spirits soared. She had said it in Yiddish. Then I saw to whom she had said it, and my spirits changed direction. My mother was speaking to my father.
“Chanah, please,” my father said.
His snoring may have been heavy, but his voice had always been light. Even before the accident that had put him into a wheelchair, he had always sounded like a polite and friendly usher directing you to your seat in the darkness after a performance has begun. Since the accident, my father’s voice had become something that was not quite human. A tiny animal bleat I tried to remember how he had once sounded, but it was difficult because, for years I had rarely heard him speak. Certainly not in my presence. Not anymore, anyway. Because my presence removed itself every morning while he was still in the bedroom, and he was back in his bedroom when I came home at night.
I stared at him as though I had never seen him before. This skinny little man wrapped in the thick khaki Austrian army greatcoat he had brought with him to this country in 1905 and had worn as a bathrobe ever since. This wreck of a human being huddled
in a wheelchair. Was this my father?
I had not seen him for weeks. He did not like people to come into his bedroom. Not even his son. I realized with a sense of shame that this was a matter of relief to me. I did not like to go into his bedroom. It was shocking to see him out here in the kitchen.
“You’ve been hiding in that bedroom long enough,” my mother said. “The time it’s now the right time for you to come out and be a human being again like everybody else. Come on.”
She grabbed the bar at the back of his wheelchair and swung it toward the living room. I came further into the kitchen.
“Ma,” I said. “Can I help?”
“Everybody can help,” my mother said, not to me but to the place from which my voice had come. Then she seemed to become aware of my presence. “Oh, hello, Benny,” she said. “There’s milk and lekach on the sink. Go eat.”
She started to push the wheelchair toward the front room.
“Chanah, please,” my father said again.
“Wait till you see,” my mother said. “You’ll enjoy.”
She shoved the wheelchair into the living room. Munching my honey cake and sipping my milk, I followed. In the doorway I stopped and stared. If I had to doss down tonight on the living room floor, it would take a bit of doing to find an available spot. Something had been added to the Singer.
The round table in the middle of the room, on which we ate our Sabbath meals, had vanished. It was concealed under four long planks that converted the small round mahogany into a large rectangular cutting table. On it, layers of colored silk had been stretched to form a pad that seemed to be about an inch thick.
“I chalked it out for you,” my mother said. “I’ve watched Mr. Lebenbaum do it for over a year. Anything that Litvak can do, Joe Kramer can do. You were the best pocket maker on Allen Street.”
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